I’m no real baseball fan, but that Cubs game was devastating. I used to think the curse was hooey. Now I’m not so sure.
HALEY BARBOUR’S PHOTO-OP: With the nice folks at the Council of Conservative Citizens. Nice to see that, after Trent Lott, the Southern G.O.P. is no longer cavorting with white supremacists, isn’t it? Barbour says he “knows nothing about the Council.” Who does he think he’s kidding?
Don’t miss Jill Stewart’s post-mortem on the Los Angeles Times’ attempt to destroy Arnold Schwarzenegger by any journalistic means necessary. Here are money quotes from someone Stewart calls a “longtime, respected Timesian involved in the Schwarzenegger coverage”:
Toward the end, a kind of hysteria gripped the newsroom. I witnessed a deep-seated, irrational need to get something on this guy [Schwarzenegger]. By Wednesday before it was published, I counted not fewer than 24 reporters dispatched on Arnold, and this entire enterprise was directed by John Carroll himself. Carroll launched the project with the words: ‘I want a full scrub of Arnold.’ This was fully and completely and daily driven by Carroll. He’s as good as his word on being balanced and trying to make this paper more balanced, he really is. But not when it came to Schwarzenegger. Carroll changed completely. It was visceral, and he made it clear he wanted something bad on Schwarzenegger and he didn’t care what it was. The air of unreality among people here was so extreme that when they did the office pool, of something like 113 people who put in a dollar to bet on the outcome of the recall and on who would be chosen governor, only 31 bet ‘yes’ on recall and ‘yes’ Schwarzenegger to win. All you had to do was read a poll to know how wrong that was, but inside this place only about 25 percent of the people could see the recall coming… The mainstream press critics like those published on Romenesko are asleep as to what has happened here. They are defending the L.A. Times in every way. There should be no defense by media critics of what happened here. One woman did not sleep for two nights after a Times reporter showed up at her door, with the thinnest evidence, demanding to know if her child was Arnold’s love child. It never panned out, it was untrue. Why has the L.A. Times become a tabloid, knocking relentlessly on people’s doors for tabloid gossip? And would John Carroll have run a front page Love Child story if it had been true? Could we sink any lower?
It was worse than we thought. Which is a good rule of thumb in liberal media outlets. Recall what we now know about the Raines era at the NYT. Then consider what we don’t know about what’s going on now.
WHAT LIBERAL MEDIA? USA Today says it’s looking for a conservative editorial writer. Here’s what the ad said: “Looking for a conservative who ca (sic) work to achievie (sic) consensus with a diverse editorial board.” Special attention to bad spellers and masochists.
MOORE WATCH: He seems to be leaning toward the notion that 9/11 was a government conspiracy:
MOORE: I’d like to ask the question whether September 11 was a terrorist attack, or was it a military attack? We call it a terrorist attack. We keep calling it a terrorist attack.
But it sure has the markings of a military attack. And I’d like to know whose military was involved in this precision, perfectly planned operation. I’m sorry, but my common sense has never allowed me to believe since that day that you can learn how to fly a plane at 500 miles per hour. And you know, when you go up 500 miles an hour, if you’re off by this much, you’re in the Potomac. You don’t hit a five-store building like that.
What on earth is he getting at?
I’ve been mulling over this question after the Rush Limbaugh pain-killer drug story. The truth about these drugs is not just that they alleviate pain, but that they give you a real high. (That’s why the spin about Rush being somehow different from recreational drug-users strikes me as a little strained.) I was prescribed Vicodin once and experienced some of the high. Apparently, Oxycontin is even more intense. All this leads to a simple question people have so far avoided: was Rush actually high during his broadcasts? Given the enormous amount of drugs in question, given their addictive quality, I’d say that the odds that Limbaugh was high when he was broadcasting are pretty good. Some might argue that you need to have your brain on drugs to say the things Rush said. But I’d argue the opposite. In fact, it might be true that Rush was a better broadcaster because he was high. His particular blend of self-mocking, lacerating, funny and fluent commentary reminds me in a way of people on a kind of high. Or maybe this attitude is actually hard to sustain for so long at such a pitch – and so the drugs helped him endure the slog of daily broadcasting the way drugs can enhance athletes’ performance. Either way, the drugs may well have helped him do his job well. Obviously, he got addicted in a major way – which is the mega-down-side of such meds. And he may have lost his hearing because of enormous abuse of the pills. But it behooves us to notice the upside as well: that these drugs, far from impairing his ability to do great radio, may have helped him. If there were a way for Rush to use the drugs in moderation without getting addicted, why would that be a bad thing? And how would that differ in a deep way from people on anti-depressants who aren’t clinically depressed? Or casual pot-smokers? Or old-time columnists who used to write brilliant columns while under the influence of a triple scotch? (I recall one of my early days on Fleet Street when I asked a brilliant columnist how he could write such stuff after several strong whiskeys in the afternoon. “My dear boy,” he replied, “The real question is how I could write without the whiskey.” Somehow, I get the feeling these permutations won’t be fully developed in our puritan culture. But they should be. There’s a reason Rush enjoyed these rushes. And conservatives benefited.
HOPE IN IRAN: Hoder gets excited about Shirin Ebadi’s return. The photos are here.
Another classic story in which the Beeb goes out of its way not to credit american medicine. They really hate the U.S. over there, don’t they?
NPR CORRECTS: A summary of NPR’s corrections about the Middle East in the past two years finds something remarkable for being unremarkable. All but one correction rebutted a slander against the Jews or the Jewish state. Hmmm.
MY DOG, ADOLF: Weird story about a dog called Adolf who was trained to give the Nazi salute. Ian Buruma told me a story once about an old Jewish lady in Vienna, if I recall rightly, who similarly called her dog Hitler. But she did it for reverse reasons: she got some pleasure from ordering Hitler around for a change. “Come here, Hitler!” “Sit, Hitler!” “Beg, Hitler!” No word on whether she actually grew to love the little Nazi.
More ad hominem insults from the black left.
It seems to me that the anti-Bush crowd has been missing the real story, as usual. Instead of attempting to parse the administration’s arguments before the war, they’d do better to focus on the Pentagon’s massive incompetence after the war. Two things spring to mind: why weren’t forces directed to secure all possible WMD sites immediately? And why were troops not sent to secure Saddam’s conventional weapon sites immediately? The Baathist resistance is now fueled primarily by those weapons. The fate of WMDs is unsure – a critical reason for the war in the first place. Did Rumsfeld even think for a second about these post-war exigencies? Why were these objectives not included in the original war-plan as a whole? I have no idea. The pre-war and the war were executed as well as we could hope for. The immediate post-war was a disaster. Shouldn’t someone take responsibility? It seems to me that since the left is so hopeless at constructing rational criticism, some of us pro-war types need to get mad and ask some tough questions.
Another poll shows a consistent up-tick in Bush’s approval ratings. Gallup thinks that greater optimism on the economy is behind it. Who knows? I think the administration’s spirited defense of its Iraq policy – long, long overdue – might have something to do with it. So you ask yourself: what does the future hold? I’d say the economy is headed for strong growth next year (it should after all the money being thrown at it); and that Iraq in a year’s time will probably look a good deal more successful than it does now. (I could be wrong about that, of course.) Bottom line: Bush looks remarkably strong at this point – certainly stronger than either Reagan or Clinton at the 3 year-mark.
A very helpful discussion from Richard Perle in February of this year. I think it shows how the way in which the anti-war media have been using the term “imminent” is a grotesque over-simplification:
Let me say a word about what you call the new strategy of preemption. There’s nothing new about preemption. If you know that you are about to be attacked, it is certainly sensible if you can act first and avoid that attack to do so. I don’t think anybody would dispute that. So then the question is how imminent must the attack be to justify the preemptive response. Here, we need to think more carefully about the concept of imminence. In 1981, the Israelis, after a long and, I gather, a heated cabinet debate, decided to destroy the reactor that Chirac had sent to Osirak, not because it was about to produce nuclear weapons. It wasn’t. It was about to produce plutonium and it was under IAEA safeguards so the Iraqis would have had to siphon off small, undetectable quantities of plutonium and it would have taken them time to build a nuclear weapon based on what they would get from the Osirak reactor. But, nevertheless, the Israelis decided to strike some years in advance of the production of the nuclear weapon that they were concerned about.
Now, why did they do that? They did it because the Iraqis were about to load fuel into the reactor and once they did so, they would not have had an opportunity to use an air strike without doing a lot of unintended damage around the facility, because radioactive material would have been released into the atmosphere. So from an Israeli point of view, what was imminent and what had to be acted against in a preemptive manner was not the ultimate emergence of the threat but an event that would lead inexorably to the ultimate emergence of the threat. They had to deal with a threshold that once crossed, they would no longer have the military option that could be effective at that moment. If we think of imminence in that sense, if we think of it as the thresholds that once crossed will so worsen our situation that we can’t allow those thresholds to be crossed, then you start looking at how far are they from achieving the means to do the thing that everyone would recognize we were justified in stopping at the moment that action was taken. In the case of Iraq, we’re talking about stopping the further development of nuclear weapons, we’re talking about new systems of delivery for the chemical and biological weapons Saddam already has, including systems with much longer range. What is imminent about Iraq and what may be imminent in some other situations requires you to look back and decide when a threat becomes unmanageable.
So the administration did not regard the Iraqi threat as “imminent” in the usual sense of that word. as the NSC document had it, “As a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats [America’s enemies and their pursuit of WMD] before they are fully formed.” That’s why Kay vindicates the Bushies. That’s why the opponents have to distort history so massively to get the spin they want. (For a full roster of how widely disseminated the lie was, click here. For the new anti-war meme, see this editorial in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Now the spin is that Bush may not have said “imminent threat,” may even have disowned the phrase, but he implied it. Nice try, guys. Hat-tip: blogger Chad.)
Just an observation on the changing attitudes of a certain New York Times columnist. Here she is October 21, 2001:
John McCain called to try to talk me down. I put aside “Scourge,” the book I was reading about smallpox — “It covered the skin with hideous, painful boils, killed a third of its victims, and left the survivors disfigured for life” — and listened.
“There’s nothing wrong with being afraid,” the senator said in that soft, reassuring voice. “Every time I heard the guard’s key chain rattle when he came to my cell at an odd hour, I felt fear, but it didn’t incapacitate me.”
Easy for him to say. He’s a national hero who was tortured in Vietnam. I’m a spoiled yuppie who desperately wants to go back to a time before we’d heard of microns and milling, aerosolization and clumps in the alveoli… I ran into my colleague Judy Miller, a bioterrorism expert, and asked if we should be worried about smallpox, camel pox and mouse pox.
“We should be worried for the next few years,” she said briskly, “and then we’ll be fine.”
The next few years?
And here she is recently, after the despised Bush administration has wacked al Qaeda in Afghanistan and disarmed Saddam of his infrastructure of deadly weapons:
[W]e know now that our first pre-emptive war was launched basically because Iraq had … a vial of Botox? Just about the scariest thing the weapons hunter David Kay could come up with was a vial of live botulinum, hidden in the home of an Iraqi biological weapons scientist. This has very dire implications for Beverly Hills and the East Side of Manhattan, areas awash in vials of Botox, the botulinum toxin that can either be turned into a deadly biological weapon or a pricey wrinkle smoother.
She sure has recovered, hasn’t she? You won’t find a better example of 9/11 amnesia than Ms Dowd, a self-described “spoiled yuppie who desperately wants to go back to a time before we’d heard of microns and milling, aerosolization and clumps in the alveoli.” Didn’t take her long, did it?
The Dish 