MAN OF THE YEAR?

So Time Magazine chooses one political blog for a "50 Coolest Websites" feature, and which one is it? Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo. They're more correct than not in writing that he "doesn't rant, he reasons, and he often supports his arguments with source material." But so what? Instapundit is a much cooler site, in part because there's more to look at; Reynolds posts much more often than once or twice a day. I hate to admit it, but Wonkette is much cooler than Marshall.

Come to think of it, I don't even think Marshall is the best blogger out there doing liberal news analysis. If Kaus is too neolib to count, then for my money I'll read Marc Cooper's blog before Marshall's. And I do.

Marshall tends to be dry (way uncool), pretty strident (that just smacks of effort, man) and rarely states any opinion that deviates the slightest from liberal orthodoxy (so September 10). He may be smart, but he's nothing if not boring. That is to say, death of the cool.

P.S. Yes, I know Time has gone P.C. and now anoints a "Person of the Year." Weak, but still not quite as weak as the annual ritual itself has become. More on that in about six months.

DOUBLE-TAKE

When I saw this teaser

KERRY APPEALS TO BLACKS AND HISPANICS

on the front page of the Washington Post website this morning, I thought: "He does? That's strange, I thought'd been hearing all spring how the Kerry campaign has had a notoriously difficult time with minority outreach -- blacks especially." So then I clicked through to find the actual headline:

KERRY MAKES AN APPEAL TO BLACKS AND HISPANICS

Aha! Now that one can't be misinterpreted (unless maybe your name is Jacob Weisberg). And the story most certainly does not say what it looked like at first.

P.S. If you've been to Drudge today, you've likely seen his 72-point headline screaming:

VICE PRESIDENT HILLARY; SPECULATION INTENSIFIES IN WASHINGTON

My first thought was: "Give me a break." After reading the actual item, my next thought was: "Give me a break. I can't believe Matt Drudge is trying to turn a conversation he had with Dick Morris -- it's almost painfully obvious he's the "top Washington insider" quoted (notice it's not a "top Kerry insider") -- into some kind of DC hysteria."

MATTHEWS HEADLINES KERRY CONCERT

For more information, visit dnc.org.

is the last line of an e-mail from Rolling Stone this morning, advertising an upcoming Dave Matthews Band concert on behalf of John Kerry. The title of this post is the subject line of same. If there's anything I like less than the Dave Matthews Band, it's Rolling Stone's assumption that because I want to know what's happening with popular music, I must be a Democrat.

SALETAN FOLLOW-UP

Referring to the immediately preceding post, I have to note that I'm fast losing the respect I once had for William Saletan. (Jacob Weisberg I've never liked.) This was partly due to Saletan comparing favorably with the even more blindly partisan Tim Noah, and certainly in part due to Saletan's writing during the Democratic primaries, when he was critical of the Democrats then running. I even liked his "Kerryism" feature when it debuted, although Spinsanity has since shown it to be just as misleading as Weisberg's "Bushisms."

Consider his article last week, on the Jack Ryan no-sex sex scandal: Saletan asked why Republicans were sticking up for him though he'd apparently lied to his inner circle (a lá Clinton) about the content of the divorce records. Saletan quoted an impressive list of Republicans giving Ryan the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately for Saletan, those statements were for public consumption only. Two days later, Ryan was forced from the race, having lost the support of state and national Republicans. (Even Noah's "Kurd Sellout Watch" usually has a longer shelf life.) Surely Saletan knows the first instinct of political allies is to stick up for one other. The second instinct is to tear each other apart. Methinks Saletan just wanted to bash Republicans over the head with hypocrisy over Bill Clinton. The difference is Democrats never made Clinton throw in the towel.

P.S. Speaking of Spinsanity, they weighed in on the surging Hitler controversy (also covered below) yesterday and are disgusted with both sides. I may not agree entirely, but at least I can respect that.

"KERRY = HITLER"?
             or
A CANARD IS BORN

Two years ago Georgia Democrat Max Cleland lost a close Senate race to Republican Saxby Chambliss. Sensing Cleland's vulnerability, Democrats cried foul over a Chambliss TV ad that featured Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein: By linking Cleland to these tyrants the Republicans were questioning his patriotism, they said. Georgia Republicans replied: Nonsense, Cleland bowed to union interests and voted against a perfectly reasonable Homeland Security bill needed to protect Americans from the likes of those madmen.

After Cleland lost, he became something of a martyr to national Democrats. Having lost three limbs in Vietnam he was already better suited to play the role of a wronged patriot than possibly any other Democrat in the country. Cleland is all but John Kerry's mascot, as Michael Crowley wrote in Slate this spring, not because of his skill or heroism but because he was the victim of a devastating war and, let's not forget, shameless Republican attacks.

Or so the line goes. Whether Cleland's patriotism was questioned at all is subject to interpretation. For the record, Crowley doesn't think so: The ad "questioned his political courage and judgment." While the facts about the ad are indisputable, the use of Osama and Saddam were controversial enough that Democrats could make the larger claim about the ad's intent, however erroneous. And they could claim so without proof because how does one prove such things? Just because they thought so, that made it "true for them," as the old relativist formulation goes.

The myth was established, and it remains very much in use to this day. Now, watch carefully in coming months, because the same thing is happening again:

If Fahrenheit 9/11 wasn't enough of a party-identification test, now there's another controversial movie out there that may be much shorter and less expensive to take in, but seems to be just as divisive. It's a new web video, released last Friday by the Bush campaign, which calls attention to something they call John Kerry's "coalition of the wild-eyed." It features the likes of Michael Moore and Al Gore, both red-faced and full of sound and fury, both bashing President Bush. It also includes a few shots from two controversial DIY anti-Bush ads that were posted to the MoveOn.org web site in January. They juxtapose George Bush with Adolf Hitler and draw captioned analogies between their war policies.

(You should really see it for yourself. Click here, go to "Latest Videos" and click on "Watch" -- it should have the words: "This is not a time for pessimism and rage" superimposed over a picture of Kerry.)

If you think it's fair of the Bush campaign to bring up how Democrats have attacked them with Nazi imagery, then you'll think the ad is fair. If you don't think they should be throwing even this image back at their opponents, then you won't. I can respect both opinions, but one argument I can't respect is one claiming the Bush campaign is now trying to equate John Kerry's Democrats with Adolf Hitler's Nazis.

Believe it or not, Jacob Weisberg and William Saletan said exactly that yesterday at Slate. Saletan went first:

The Bush campaign, outraged by the mixture of Nazi images with images of an American politician, has decided that the best response to this offense is to repeat it. The Bush video ... [features] a parade of angry speakers: Al Gore, Hitler, Howard Dean, Michael Moore, Dick Gephardt, Hitler, Gore, and Kerry. Is Bush suggesting that Hitler fits in with this group? Don't be silly, Jake.

As Saletan sees it, here are the Republicans calling the Democrats Nazis-by-association. But in order to do so, he accuses the Bush administration of -- get this -- running the ad as it is:

How does the Bush camp identify the Hitler footage? "Sponsored by Moveon.Org" says a label on the first Hitler clip, evidently put there by the miscreants who submitted the ad.

Yes, it was. For clarity, so is the second:

"Images from Moveon.Org ad" says the Bush campaign's label on the second Hitler clip. The only organization that doesn't identify the clips as a "Moveon.org ad" is MoveOn.org, which denounced the ad and never "sponsored" it.

Saletan would be well-advised to remember, as this old Drudge item makes clear, the furor preceded MoveOn.org's removal of the ad from its site. Had it not been brought to their attention, who knows how long it would have lasted. And are they not responsible for what's put on their website?

Also courtesy Matt Drudge, there's this report from a January 12 MoveOn.org fundraiser where the comedian Margaret Cho said all kinds of cheerful things, including this comment on the then-fresh Hitler ad controversy: "I mean, George Bush is not Hitler. He would be if he fucking applied himself." Har har har.

Back to the aricle, Weisberg totally agreed with his colleague:

On the pretext of protesting a comparison of George W. Bush and Adolf Hitler, the president's re-election campaign has made an ad that implicitly compares John Kerry to Hitler. To be sure, it's disgusting, for all the reasons you say. ... What exactly does the Bush-Cheney campaign think that these Democrats have in common with Hitler? Basically, it's that they're too darned excited about politics. They yell. They criticize harshly. They use bad language. The message here, to the extent there is one, is: "Don't be like Hitler -- chill out!"

Whatever. This is willful ignorance on the part of two otherwise intelligent, if obviously not always fair, observers. Neither Saletan nor Weisberg could have failed to notice that the ad's footage comprises images of or by Democrats that are over-the-top attacks on the Bush administration. In fact, that's exactly what the disclaimer says at the outset. On this point, silence from both writers.

Weisberg also makes a weird claim that the ad includes

John Kerry using the phrase "kick your ass" (which is bleeped out, possibly in an effort to imply he said something worse).

You've seen the ad now, right? Is it conceivable he's saying anything but "ass"? The word is bleeped out because the Bush campaign is aiming to keep its website as family-friendly as possible. Weisberg knows this. He might well have just mocked the Bush campaign as prudes -- but instead he chose to suggest something both more damning and less believable.

Right here and now we're watching a myth form, one very much like that oft-recalled canard about Republicans questioning Max Cleland's patriotism. Neither actually happened but the emotions surrounding the imagery in each -- Hitler on one hand, Osama on the other -- are confusing enough that the charge will stick, unless it's called out right now. That's what I'm doing.

Now that these two influential liberal journalists are claiming that Republicans have called Democrats Nazis, others are sure to start repeating that charge in the coming months. The next time a left-wing group compares Bush or the GOP to the Third Reich -- and by the time you read this surely will have happened a dozen times on the Democratic Underground boards -- they will point to this ad in much the same way.

By carefully misinterpreting the advertisement's meaning, Weisberg and Saletan are creating a whole new rallying cry for the Democratic Party. Just watch.

P.S. As an academic exercise, I ran searches at both Google and Nexis to see what Weisberg and Saletan said about the MoveOn Hitler ads at the time. It turns out they said the exact same thing: nothing. Also, the pair were mildly critical of a recent round of Kerry ads, but of course in a way making it clear they wished Kerry was doing better. When it comes to Bush, they're hoping he does worse.

P.P.S. Thankfully, not everyone thinks this way. I'm clearly one. Glenn Reynolds first picked up on this late Friday night, and he cites plenty of other thoughtful bloggers who came to different conclusions.

P.P.P.S. By the way, isn't the Weisberg-Saletan "Damned Spot" feature rather dull? Saletan and Weisberg rarely disagree on much. It's sort of like a left-wing version of "The Beltway Boys," except even more ideologically homogenous. At least the conservative Barnes and moderate Kondracke can find more to argue about.

P.P.P.P.S. What I really should do is read Slate less often. But then, from my required daily stop at Kausfiles it's just a short click over to the main page. And other recurring features -- "Moneybox" and "Culturebox", not to mention Hitchens' "Fighting Words" -- are rarely so infuriating. But once I'm there, curiosity gets the better of me.

"HOLLYWOOD" KERRY

Though Fahrenheit 9/11 was still being edited long after John Kerry locked up the Democratic nomination for president, Moore is silent on the candidate and, one shouldn't forget, his vote to give President Bush authority to invade Iraq. No matter, filmmaker George Butler -- the man who made Pumping Iron -- is hard at work on a documentary ... er, feature-length commercial touting he greatness of his friend the senator from Massachusetts:

Working outside the campaign but in sync with its image makers, Mr. Butler is instead making a $1.3 million, 90-minute documentary about Mr. Kerry's life, which he is racing to finish for theatrical release in September. ... Chris Hegedus, who with D. A. Pennebaker made "The War Room," the celebrated documentary on the 1992 presidential campaign, described [a clip from the film] as "very beautiful and very moving." But she also said, "it was kind of like an ad for John Kerry."

With all the talk right now of the FEC restricting advertising for Fahrenheit 9/11 later this summer (as per McCain-Feingold) one could hardly imagine trailers for Butler's movie would be allowed on the airwaves. (Yes, of course I still think McCain-Feingold was one of the worst laws passed in recent years -- and I still haven't forgotten who signed it, Mr. President -- but the law should be enforced as long as it remains on the books.) Despite the boon to Kerry's chances Butler's film might seem to be, the New York Times' Jodi Wilgoren (in the first link above) offers a few reasons why it may not work out so well:

Even Democrats, while desperate for anything that helps humanize their candidate, are worried that the biopic could backfire by further focusing on Mr. Kerry's controversial comments about Vietnam atrocities — or by a limp box-office performance just when the candidate most needs to look popular.

Then there's also the theory -- which surely contains some truth but I don't know that I completely buy -- that the more exposure Kerry gets, the worse off he is. I don't know about that, but I do know that while I had to at least see Fahrenheit 9/11, I won't be seeing the George Butler film. After all, I think I've been seeing it every fifteen minutes on CNN for the past two months as it is.

WOW

As I said at the start of this month when Paul Bremer started granting authority to the new Iraqi leadership: That was fast. I woke up before dawn this morning (as I do every weekday) and flipped on the TV. Immediately I knew something was awry. The MSNBC anchor was speaking in an uncertain, hurried tone. My first thought was that something very bad had happened. 9/11-bad lurked in my head, but really I was thinking Allawi-assassinated-bad. Imagine my relief a moment later to see the chyron -- Allawi and the Bush administration had thrown everyone for a loop and held a simple ceremony bestowing official authority on the new government early. It almost resembled a courthouse marriage, not exactly a shotgun wedding but certainly a furtive, unromantic one.

It won't make the print edition until tomorrow, but the Post has extensive coverage already. Perhaps somewhat coincidentally, there was an op-ed by Allawi in the Post yesterday. Also worth reading: news from late last week that the new government has the substantial if not overwhelming confidence of the Iraqi population (the CPA and Baghdad University mostly agree. And as of this afternoon, the United Nations welcomed Iraq back into the community of nations. Even if it's largely symbolic, this is a big day, and it's been a long time coming. I hope even this war's opponents can see that.

IF IT'S NOT EASY, THAT'S THEIR OWN FAULT

Seriously, the Greens are so weird:

Claude Vander Veen [is a] local bicycle enthusiast and a man for all seasons. Vander Veen's helmet is not that spiffy aerodynamic kind, but a solid metal contraption taped up with a string of red lights reminiscent of Marvin the Martian. His gloves are big, thick, orange things, more like oven mitts. In general he prefers coveralls like the kind airline mechanics wear in the dead of winter when working for long hours in open hangars.

And self-defeating:

To be called on, people do not raise hands but twinkle their fingers. One woman requests to go beyond the agreed-upon minute. "Can we get consensus for one more minute?" someone asks. "A second?" "Any objections for another minute?" By that point three minutes have gone by. There are lots of "points of clarification for the minutes."

If not altogether self-abegnating:

What counts is the tribe and all its intricate unspoken rules: ... Men should cede the microphone to women whenever possible. Women should cede it to lesbians. Lesbians to women from Third World countries, etc.

Not to mention disturbing:

Women who are not Palestinian dress like Palestinians down to the head scarves, known as "solidarity kaffiyehs." Head scarves used to symbolize female oppression but no longer do -- chiefly, it seems, because Laura Bush said the women in Afghanistan were oppressed and we had to liberate them, and everything Laura Bush says is wrong.

Hats off to Hannah Rosin for this appropriately creeped-out travelogue.

THOUGHTS UPON HAVING SEEN FAHRENHEIT 9/11

I must be a masochist. Why else would I go see this vehemently anti-Bush, anti-war, anti-Republican movie? The house was packed -- and the Georgetown Loews was showing it on at least three screens -- and it was full of tsk-tsk-ing, sighing, clapping, "oh my God"-ing liberals. Including one who kept kicking the back of my seat. Did he know I was a conservative? I mean, I was wearing a Ween shirt and an Oregon hat -- could there be any better disguise?

Anyway, I had a few thoughts exiting the theater. Actually, a lot of thoughts. Here are a few:

• Moore's very first distortion in the film is the insinuation that George Bush is president because Fox News called Florida for him after first giving it to Gore. No mention that all of the news organization were relying upon the same VNS information, which showed exactly that, but Fox happened to run with it first. Moore then claims all vote-counting scenarios would have made Gore the winner. Not true. In the months afterward, every national news organization in the country descended upon Florida to conduct their own counts. The result? Just as the original count: well within the margin of error. One widely-reported account showed that under Gore's preferred rules, Bush would have won, and under Bush's rules, Gore would have won. As I said, the election was a tie. This pretty much set the bar for the level of discourse in the rest of the movie. Like all propaganda, it refuses to acknowledge that the opposition has any arguments at all and plows ahead with righteous zeal.


• The next willful representation, or one of the next, was the assertion that Gore in his role as Senate President had to suppress a rebellion from the Congressional Black Caucus that sought to challenge the results of the election. Even though the long-established rules were not on their side; Gore could only send them back to their seats in that joint session. And had the election been thrown to the House -- which would have been the constitutional answer to this tie, until Gore decided to start suing -- Bush would have won handily, given that the House was and is solidly Republican.


• So Bush's buddy from the National Guard is James Bath, who was a business associate of Salem bin Laden. This wasn't news -- Salon had an article about it a good while back, and no follow-up has ever alleged anything sinister about it. Nor does Moore. Was Salem of like mind as Osama? If so, the movie doesn't say so. (Surely not -- Salem was a billionaire playboy who loved the comforts of being a rich, rich man in the United States.) Bath and Dubya did business, but were Salem and Dubya ever in business? He doesn't say. And even so, what of it?


• If I was a member of the bin Laden family, I'd sue. They'e a large, wealthy family, and like any family -- let alone an exceptionally large and international clan -- they have their black sheep. Craig Unger, the author Moore relies on to demonstrate that Osama is still on some terms with the family says a couple of the bin Ladens went to a wedding for Osama's son. And even though Moore doesn't mention it, prior to 9/11 Osama did communicate with his mother every so often. But so far as we can tell, that's the extent of it. As Hitchens points out, the bin Ladens were interviewed and their departure was cleared by Moore's hero, Richard Clarke. Clarke says it was the right thing to do and he'd do it again. Yet this is still cited as one of the movie's great revelations. Also: the comparisons to Bush and bin Laden are gratuitous and ad hominem. Zzzzz.


• Hey, there's where I work! That's the front door to my office building! And there's my friend (possibly the only other Republican in the movie theater with me today) standing in the lefthand corner of the screen! This was the highlight of the film.


• The movie is often dull and plodding -- the recruiter scene just goes on and on and on -- which is a bit of a surprise, coming from Michael Moore. Say what you will about his integrity -- I have and am and will -- he does know how to make a movie entertaining. (And I'd predicted that it would be at least fun to watch.) But as even Blog concedes, this one "lacks the cheeky, gadfly humor of Moore's other work." I'm sure one could say this is due to the gravity of his material. But then it's not like he shies away from cheap shots guaranteed to induce sniggers from his left-wing audience.


• Case in point: Ashcroft singing. It didn't make any sense, except that it's amusing to see government officials sing. Well, he's not a bad singer. And he was a member of the now-disbanded Singing Senators, to which former Republican Sen. Jim Jeffords once belonged. So, whatever. But Moore makes fun of Ashcroft for losing his reelection bid to the late Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan in 2000. First, it's incredibly disrespectful to the Carnahan family to claim Ashcroft couldn't even beat a "dead man." (I'm almost surprised Moore didn't try to connect this to Salem bin Laden's crash, or the one that killed the once-most-liberal member of the Senate, Paul Wellstone (who was, by the way, one of those hated senators who wouldn't sign the CBC's Gore-quashed motions to ... er, argue about the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore. Maybe on the DVD.) Second, that race was incredibly close until Carnahan's tragic plane crash. Once he died, he obviously won the sympathy vote. That says little about Ashcroft and quite a bit about Missourians' respect for Carnahan and their sympathy for his family.


• Flint, Michigan. Always with the Flint, Michigan. Isn't it about time to raze the town and start anew somewhere else? Moore should be angry at Bush for not putting the city on wheels like they did Springfield in that one Simpsons episode and move it down the road. But don't move it to Detroit -- that'd hardly do any good -- move it down to Toledo, or maybe across state lines, to Fort Wayne or even Chicago. In the meantime, I'm tired of Flint ... at least as long as Moore refuses to bring back the rabbit lady.


• My exasperation with Michael Moore for protesting the movie's R-rating (and his chief representative on this point, Mario Cuomo) is greater for having now seen it. The second half of the film is full of horrifying images of the dead and maimed. This is okay for thirteen-year-olds? And I was wrong about "motherfucker" -- it's used at least three time, not once like I had read. Like the MPAA standards or not, two uses of the unmodified curse alone is an automatic "R."


• I've already torn into Moore for misrepresenting Rep. Mark Kennedy, and there it is again. Moore approaches him, tells him he's encouraging congressional relatives to enlist in the military, and Kennedy cranes his neck in an awkward manner. Cut. What I didn't mention in my last post was that on the same web page where Michael Moore reprints their full conversation, he castigates Kennedy for not actually following up on his putative interest in distributing those recruiting pamphlets to Congress. But then there's this scene in the movie where Moore supposedly reads the entire Patriot Act to Congress from an ice cream truck outside the Capitol. Does anyone really think Moore read that whole bill?


• I feel awful for that woman who lost her son in Iraq. The scene where she reads the last letter from her son is heart-wrenching. And so is her visit to Washington, in Lafayette Park on the north end of the White House. (By the way, I've met that anti-nuke woman camped out across the street from the White House -- she's been there since the early 1980s, and she's annoying, and -- surprise! -- she's crazy. In this scene, she's just distracting. If anything, she ruins what is otherwise a powerful scene.) But it wouldn't have been hard to find people who've lost loved ones in Iraq that do support the war. ("And for what?" several people in the movie ask. Well, for a lot, even without WMD. But damned if Michael Moore cares to even engage the argument.) I'm sure Moore interviewed them and left them on the cutting room floor. (That old woman in the nursing home bitching about Halliburton shouldn't have made it out of the first edit.) As I said before, this is propaganda. And Michael Moore wouldn't let dissenting points of view get in the way of a good lie.

Well, that's all I really have to say for now. I've said my piece. If challenged, I'm prepared to go to the mat once again. But until then, I won't revisit the merits (mostly demerits) of this movie. It's manipulative, it's boring, it's dishonest, and it's bad. Period.

HELLO KETTLE? THIS IS POT

Guess what? This blog occasionally dabbles in original reporting. And this is such an occasion.

Last Sunday on This Week with George Stephanopolous, Michael Moore accused Rep. Mark Kennedy (R-MN) of lying. About what?

The trailer of Moore's film includes a scene with Moore accosting Kennedy and asking and saying: "I'm trying to get members of congress to get their kids to enlist in the army and go over to Iraq." Neither the trailer nor the movie includes Kennedy's response, which was in part: "I have a nephew on his way to Afghanistan." Just a teensy little discrepancy, huh?

Understandably upset about being made to look the clueless, chickenhawk, privileged politician, Kennedy complained to the press about it, leading Moore's spokesperson to claim: " No statements by Rep. Kennedy are in the film. There was no editing of his remarks." Well, sure. If you don't count the editing out of his remarks to be editing. Very Clintonian.

Stephanopolous brought the matter up in his interview with Moore, where it took a different turn:

STEPHANOPOULOS: One of those members of Congress who appears in your trailer, Mark Kennedy, said you left out what he told you, which is that he has two nephews serving in the military, one in Afghanistan and he went on to say, that Michael Moore doesn't always give the whole truth. He is a master of the misleading.

MOORE: Well, at the time when we interviewed him, he didn't have any family members in Afghanistan. And when he saw the trailer for this movie he issued a report to the press saying that he said that he had a kid in ...

STEPHANOPOULOS: He said he told you he had two nephews.

MOORE: Said he had a nephew, yeah, he had two nephew, one, no, he didn't and we released the transcript and we put it on our website. ... Any time a guy like this comes along and says I told him I had two nephews and one was going to Iraq and one was going to Afghanistan, he's lying. And I've got the raw footage and the transcript to prove it. So anytime these Republicans come at me like this, this is exactly what they're gonna get. And people can go to my website and read the transcript and read the truth. What he just said there, what you just quoted is not true.

"Well, at the time when we interviewed him" is another bit of ridiculous neo-Clinton "definition of 'is'" dissembling. Kennedy's nephew being in Afghanistan versus scheduled to depart for Afghanistan is in this context a distinction without a difference. But I digress.

Want to see that transcript Michael Moore trumpets as evidence that Mark Kennedy is a liar? Here's the relevant part:

KENNEDY How are you doing?

MOORE: I'm trying to get members of congress to get their kids to enlist in the army and go over to Iraq. Is there any way you could help me with that?

KENNEDY: How would I help you?

MOORE: Pass it out to other members of congress.

KENNEDY: I'd be happy to. Especially those who voted for the war. I have a nephew on his way to Afghanistan.

So Michael Moore called Mark Kennedy a liar over whether there was one nephew or two? You got it. It doesn't change the fact that Kennedy indeed has a loved one fighting abroad, but to Moore this somehow defeats his opponent's argument. And that's classic Moore. As Fahrenheit 9/11-sympathetic Slate reviewer David Edelstein concedes, Moore "ascribes only the most venal motives to the other side." There is no room for an innocent mistake. Rep. Kennedy stood up to defend himself and his family; Moore responded by declaring him a liar and part of the so-called right-wing attack machine. How noble.

But whose mistake was it? Isn't Michael Moore essentially right, even if he is an ass? 1) Not Kennedy's, and 2) No.

First of all, as Stephanopolous noted in an addendum to the interview, Kennedy does indeed have two nephews serving, though both are in Afghanistan, not Iraq. Of course, Kennedy clearly mentioned only one nephew to Moore. So where did Stephanopolous find this second nephew?

Right here, in a June 4 Minneapolis Star-Tribune article:

"I was walking back to my office after casting a vote, and all of a sudden some oversized guy puts a mike in my face and a camera in my face," said the Minnesota Republican. "He starts asking if I can help him recruit more people from families of members of Congress to participate in the war on terror."

Kennedy said he told Moore that he has two nephews in the military, one who has just been deployed in the Army National Guard.

I called up Rep. Kennedy's office and asked his press secretary about the discrepancy. She told me it was a simple error on the part of the reporter. Kennedy never told the reporter he'd informed Moore of two nephews. I tried to double-check this with the reporter in question, Kevin Diaz. Unfortunately, he simply didn't remember the details any longer. Diaz got it right in a more recent story this week. Who knows exactly what happened. But regardless of where the error lies, this one actually is teensy. At least it was for several weeks, until it got blown up on national television last Sunday morning.

Could Stephanopolous mistake have been avoided? Absolutely. Kennedy and his spokesperson had already appeared on MSNBC more than once -- including Scarborough Country -- and in several news stories -- including The Hill -- all of which reported, accurately, that Kennedy had told Moore of one nephew "on his way" to Afghanistan. (I talked briefly with Stephanopolous' assistant, but as of this weekend he hadn't followed up on my inquiry about their sourcing.) Why Stephanopolous ignored the majority of reports to rely on this one article or, you know, the actual transcript is beyond me.

Maybe his producers only looked at one news story. Or maybe they were trying to provoke a response. After all, the rest of the interview was reasonably tough.

Kennedy's office never asked for a correction from the Star Tribune; it sounded to me as if they just wanted the story to go away, and I don't blame them. But as it stands, Moore has branded him a rabid partisan and a liar. Hello, kettle? This is pot. Let me tell you something.

THE STRAIGHT DOPE

Or close enough. What follows is the text from NBC's Lisa Meyers' NBC Nightly News segment on Fahrenheit 9/11, thanks to the diligent transcribers at National Journal's Hotline:

NBC's Myers examined the claims in Moore's film: "Among the many controversies surrounding this film is that it is billed as a documentary. We consulted various dictionaries and all defined a documentary as 'factual and objective.' So we decided to look into whether and where director Michael Moore takes liberty with the facts."
      Myers: "Though fervently anti-Bush, the film purports to be truthful."
      Myers: "Clearly the unflattering video of the president and other administration officials throughout the film is authentic. [clip of Bush: 'Now watch this drive.'] ... You can't make this stuff up."
      Myers: "But the film is heavy on conspiracy theories. On some key facts, experts say Moore simply gets the facts wrong or weaves them in such a way to leave the viewers with an inaccurate impression. First the Bush family and the Saudis. The film notes that former President George H.W. Bush was an adviser to the Caryle Group, whose investors prior to 9/11 included the bin Laden [family]. It also claims close ties between the Bushes and the Saudi royal family. Fine so far. But then the film suggests quote 'when the Bush family wakes up in the morning, they might be thinking about what's best for the Saudis instead of what's best for you.'"
      Ex-counterterrorism official Roger Cressy: "Where the film does a disservice is implying that the personal relationship between the Bush family and the Saudis somehow is driving foreign policy. ... To say that somehow personal and financial profit of the Bush family is at the heart of it is simply wrong and unfair."
      Myers: "Next, Saudi flights out of the U.S. after 9/11. Moore suggests because of the Bush close relationship with Saudis, 142 Saudis and 24 members of the bin Laden family were allowed to leave the U.S. after 9/11 without being properly vetted. In fact, ... Richard Clarke, now one of the president's most outspoken critics, says he approved the Saudi flights and would do it again."
      Myers: "The president's reaction on 9/11: The film notes that after Bush's chief of staff informed him that America is under attack, the president stayed in this Florida classroom [footage of Bush in FL on 9/11] for seven more minutes reading the book 'My Pet Goat' to children. The film says: 'Not knowing what to do, with no one telling him what to do, Mr. Bush just sat there.' The president told the 9/11 Commission he was trying to project calm in a moment of crisis."
      A clip of 9/11 Commiss. Vice Chair Lee Hamilton: "I think he made the right decision in remaining calm in not rushing out of the classroom."
      Myers: "The war in Afghanistan: the film suggests the president's invasion of Afghanistan was quote 'really about something else' -- helping the oil companies build a pipeline through the region. Those involved in White House deliberations call that pure fiction."
      Cressy: "We went to war in Afghanistan for the simple reason that it was al Qaeda's principle sanctuary. The objective was to eliminate the al Qaeda presence and to overthrow the Taliban. ... To say that we went in there for oil interests is simply crazy."
      Myers: "The war in Iraq: the film makes a powerful statement against the war with graphic depiction of the human toll. Moore ridicules the so-called coalition of the willing supporting the U.S. in Iraq, noting it includes ... Costa Rica and Iceland, which don't even have armies. He does not mention Great Britain, Italy and Poland, who have sent troops. The film paints a bucolic portrait of Iraq under Saddam before the war, showing children playing in the streets. There is nothing about Saddam's torture chambers, his gassing of the Kurds or Iraqis whose hands were amputated. However the film does talk of all the Iraqi civilians killed and maimed by American troops."
      Myers: "Moore says he hopes this film influences the November election but the White House is basically ignoring it. ... In most minds it would not meet the standards expected of a documentary. It's satire"

I'm a little bit surprised -- but certainly pleased -- to see an eminently mainstream news organization take apart Michael Moore's lies so handily. Any questions?

F9/11, PART I

I have yet to see Fahrenheit 9/11. I will see it soon -- this weekend or early this next week. But Blog has. And if anybody is receptive to arguments against the Bush administration and its handling of the war against terrorism, it is Blog. But here's what he had to say (via e-mail; I haven't exactly cleared this for publication) about the movie, which he saw last night:

I was at a sold-out midnight screening of Fahrenheit 911 last night. People were sitting on the floor. During the previews, the manager wandered in and said the air conditioning was broken. By the time the credits rolled, it was over 90 in there. At one point, the man in front of me started screaming at the screen. The movie is like Orwell's "2 Minutes of Hate" for liberals. A strange scene indeed.

As for the movie itself, it was pretty disappointing. There's nothing new in there and Moore plays it safe the whole way. I'd dare call it toothless.

From what I've read, he's right -- nothing new. If you think the U.S. government attacked Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 not because of the 9/11 attacks but rather because U.S. corporations wanted to build a (still unbuilt) oil pipeline across Afghanistan, then this is the film for you. But even if you are sympathetic to some of its claims, you may be disappointed as well. The New Yorker's David Denby" tries to be as positive as he can, but still for the sake of intellectual honesty he calls out Michael Moore for producing a slipshod propaganda piece with little relation to the facts.

If left-wingers are criticizing the veracity of this film, then it cannot be very persuasive.

UPDATE: Okay, so I was wrong: Blog still thinks Fahrenheit 9/11 is an honest film. But for how long?

THE BARBARIAN

It would be a stretch to call the Republicans the "cool" party (see immediate past post) but it's no stretch at all to call Arnold Schwarzenegger the coolest -- and arguably the best -- governor in the country. The New York Times' Charlie LeDuff has some great anecdotes from his latest interview with the Governator:

Asked to describe his governing philosophy seven months after toppling Gray Davis in California's recall election, he said, "Crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their women." He stopped himself. "Wait a minute, that's Conan," he said. "I stepped out of character here for a second."

Heh. But if Schwarzenegger has any failing, it's that he doesn't think enough about himself and his accomplishments:

Flashing a jade ring as he talked, he ruminated on his introduction to government, in the 15-by-15-foot courtyard tent where he does much of his private business. It is decorated with rattan chairs, orchids, a humidor, a mirror, floor fan and books written by Mr. Schwarzenegger.

Never mind, I take that back.

WHAT IS HIP? NOT THIS

In the 2003 book "Dispatches from the Culture Wars," record producer Danny Goldberg exhorted his fellow Democrats to get their "teen spirit" back, to take youth culture and music seriously as a step toward once again being the "cool" party. But I think Goldberg would have been mortified had he witnessed this scene from John Kerry's visit to an SEIU convention in San Francisco:

At the union convention, Mr. Kerry was welcomed with a modified version of a rap song, "Who let the jobs out? Bush, Bush, Bush, Bush" ...

[Pause to let eyes roll to a stop.] I'm not even sure I understand this. Let the jobs out? By "out" they can't mean outsourcing; SEIU represents the service industry, which hasn't felt the impact of outsourcing that, say, manufacturing has. Taken at face value, it sounds to me like Bush has let the jobs out of some imaginary pen and into the system, where SEIU members can get them. (And in at least some places, like the swing state of Pennsylvania, that seems to be precisely the case in the last few months.) But if confusion is the worst take from the above anecdote, the SEIU and Kerry -- and Democrats at large -- will be lucky.

HOMER NODS

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal is traveling to promote his book rating the presidents so instead of his regular "Best of the Web" column, there is instead an essay from the book. And it's about Bill Clinton. It's a flawed essay, I'm afraid I find a couple of logical leaps too far and a handful of stylistic missteps -- the author is British; some but not all of these may be usage discrepancies I'm not aware of. But even so, shouldn't an American book for an American audience at least be written in an American style? I digress -- that mar it beyond recommendation to all. If you want a non-definitive, unmistakably conservative take on the man, then by all means, click through. But there are a few gems, including this, from the end:

I last saw Clinton near my own house in the celebrated Notting Hill district of London in 2002. He decided to do a walkabout, and plunged into the crowd, an activity he enormously and palpably enjoyed, and which delighted everybody. No one ever matched him as a simple campaigner. It was the thing he did best -- perhaps the only thing he did well. It might be said, indeed, that he never did anything else.

In Notting Hill he was not running for office. The locals were not his voters. But he behaved as if they were and they loved it. The old con master was in his element. He found himself in a pub and ordered drinks all round. All cheered. The news spread to the vast crowd outside, and it cheered too. Adrenaline racing, fists thumping chests, hugging and handshaking, wisecracking and slogan swapping, Clinton worked that crowd for twenty minutes, leaving it hoarse and exhausted, delighted and deeply impressed when he swept off in his limo. The only unhappy man was the bartender, who was never paid for ol' Bill's round.

Zing! And how very Clinton. At least the U.S. embassy eventuallypaid the tab.

I should say that the other two essays I've read from this book -- Chris Buckley on James Buchanan (rated worst) and Peggy Noonan on John F. Kennedy (so-so) are both excellent, particularly Noonan's Kennedy. Knowing how good some of these essays are, I'm a bit surprised that the Wall Street Journal -- Taranto and his co-editor -- dropped the ball on the one essay they surely knew could be the most easily dismissed of the bunch. And it will be.

THIS POST IS RATED R

Why is Michael Moore so concerned about the R-rating for Fahrenheit 9/11? Doesn't he know teenagers can't vote? Oh wait, I forgot. Teens spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year. Does this make Michael Moore greedy? Maybe not -- he surely wants as many people to see his message as possible -- but if you did think so, it wouldn't be much different than Moore pointing out Bush's business partners profited from 9/11 (because -- shocker! -- they have investments in the defense industry).

Anyway, based on the merits, I can't see why Moore ever thought his movie was deserving of a PG-13. The CBS News article linked at the top of this post mentions this:

The images include an Iraqi man tossing a dead baby into a truckload of bodies, Iraqis burned by napalm and a public beheading in Saudi Arabia.

I haven't been thirteen years old in more than a decade, and I'm not sure this footage is suitable even for me. I assume Moore objects to the MPAA's assessment because his movie is "important." Yeah, well Schindler's List was important too, and I don't remember Steven Spielberg challenging that movie's R rating.

Besides, the language in Fahrenheit 9/11 alone is enough to guarantee an R Rating. Apparently the film includes footage of a soldier quoting lyrics from the Bloodhound Gang's (catchy but dumb) "Fire Water Burn." I assume that would be: "We don't need no water let the motherfucker burn."

Now, you can get away with one instance of the word "fuck" and keep a PG-13 (see: Zsa Zsa Gabor's cameo in The Naked Gun). But two instances is an automatic R. The word "motherfucker" is considered much worse than simple use of the f-word, which is often used as a intensifier with no sexual implications (see: Bono's "fucking brilliant" acceptance speech). Surely it counts as at least two.

In all, it strikes me as just more evidence that Michael Moore doesn't think the rules apply to him.

BEFORE YOU REMOVE THAT MOTE...

The Cannes jury claims they gave Michael Moore its Palme d'Or for "aesthetic" considerations, and if the overall film is as skillfully-edited or soundtracked (you can't really call the use of rock music as "scored") then I'm not sure that's mistaken. Of course, if the jury was handing out prizes for intellectual honesty, Moore would have come away empty-handed. Christopher Hitchens' truly excellent takedown of Moore and his movie demonstrates this well. (Nobody can eviscerate a leftist blowhard than a non-blowhard former leftist -- "recovered Trotskyist," Hitch calls himself in his latest Vanity Fair column -- who knows exactly the motives and thinking of such a buffoon.) But there's one dishonest clip from the trailer he didn't mention -- so I will.

The trailer includes footage of President Bush at a fundraiser where he says:

This is an impressive crowd to have … and the have-mores.

and

Some people call you the elite ... I call you my base.

Coming after title cards that read:

If you think the government is secretive...

and

If you think the corporations are greedy...

and

You haven't seen anything yet.

Moore clearly intends this to be interpreted ominously. But it's patently obvious even from the trailer that Bush is making a self-deprecating joke. Does Michael Moore believe that the president is disallowed from joking about his alleged weaknesses? After Bill Clinton was acquitted of impeachment, he joked about it. At the 2000 Correspondents Dinner, he mocked the press over a now-forgotten kerfuffle, saying: "Don't you newspeople ever learn? It isn't the mistake that kills you -- it's the coverup." Was Moore similarly offended by this?

And the last time I checked, John Kerry's (and Clinton's) top contributors included that dreaded "top one percent" of earners. I would be very surprised indeed if neither Democrat has ever made such a joke about themselves. Would Moore?

Besides, Moore himself revels in sarcastic humor. (He even directed it at himself a little bit toward the start of Roger & Me, but that was a long time ago.) Editing Bush into a montage to make him look like a callous fat cat is more than dishonest -- because it's so transparently an innocuous joke, its inclusion is just stupid. I guess that makes Michael Moore a Stupid White Man.

BLUSTERING RANT ALERT!!!

My absolute top seven favorite words to see on the Drudge Report:

AL GORE TO ACCUSE BUSH ADMINISTRATION OF ...

In this case, deliberately misleading the public about Iraq war intelligence. (Didn't he already do that?) Gore's speech is tomorrow here in DC. I'm giddy already.

P.S. While we're on the subject of conspiracy theorists, here's a conspiratorial thought of my own: Do you think Gore's timing has anything to do with an attempt to piggyback on attention being paid to Clinton's book and, say, get a bit of non-cable TV news coverage this time? Nah...

PROTESTING TOO MUCH

What does New York Times reporter Elizabeth Bumiller do when she accompanies the president on a trip and there's nothing really to complain about? Tap into the spirit of Jayson Blair and complain about something imaginary, of course! At least that's what I assume based on the coverage -- hers and others' -- from Bush's visit to Ohio yesterday. Let's start with her lead:

CINCINNATI, June 21 - President Bush spent a speedy two and a half hours here on Monday collecting $2.5 million for the Republican Party and promoting a "healthy marriage" initiative much favored by his conservative supporters.

On his fifth trip this year to the politically crucial state of Ohio, the president spent an hour at the Alcohol and Drug Addiction Services Center listening to how Darla and Larry Groves, a low-income couple, turned their lives around after they had lost their jobs. ... The couple said they obtained help through an agency called ACT, for Accountability and Credibility Together, which was born out of the welfare bill. As a result, Mr. Groves said, he has a full-time job as a certified nursing assistant and Ms. Groves is to graduate next month from a nurse-training program.

So far so good, right? But boring. Such trips, I'm sure, usually are. So here's where she decides to feign incredulity:

But neither the Groveses nor Mr. Bush directly addressed the subject for the day, strengthening marriage, or whether ACT had helped keep the Groveses together. Nor did the Groveses address whether the Bush "healthy marriage" initiative would help people like themselves.

Let's assume I'm wrong, and that she does believe the event didn't address the issues it was convened to addres. But if that's true, then why wasn't she paying attention? Because it seems Jim Bebbington with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was:

Larry and Darla Groves ... told how they received parenting and job training advice when the family was put into crisis in 2002 after Darla lost her job with a medical provider. They praised the agency that helped them with budgeting and steered Darla into a new career.

So was the AP's Pete Yost:

"I think one of the smartest things we can do is to encourage families" by spending money on grants to states, faith-based organizations and community-based groups that "teach people what it means to be in a successful marriage," Bush told supporters at an alcohol and drug addiction services center.

If she was paying attention, then the only other possibility is that she's channeling her former colleague Blair. What exactly does Elizabeth Bumiller mean by "directly addressing the subject of strengthening marriage"? Perhaps she was expecting that Bush would administer marriage counseling right there on the stage. Or since this was Cincinnati, where Jerry Springer was once mayor, she might have been hoping for an expletive-filled shouting match with Bush rushing in to hold them apart. If so, I can understand her disappointed tone.

Stranger still is Bumiller's complaint that the Groveses didn't "address whether the Bush 'healthy marriage' initiative would help people like themselves." Give these people a break! I bet they're nervous as hell to be sitting next to the commander-in-chief in front of 500 people in the first place. Not to mention, they're there to talk about a difficult period in their lives. I think the Groveses can be excused for failing to deliver a rousing stump speech. What does Bumiller want out of them -- an explanation of Bush administration's pre-war intelligence?

Besides, if she's still confused about this ACT program, maybe she should do what all good reporters do: go to Google. This fairly useful page comes up immediately.

Honestly, if anybody knows what she's griping about, drop me a line below.

P.S. Dana Milbank, the Washington Post's most anti-Bush reporter, dealt with the boredom of the trip by writing on another topic entirely. With the same dateline, Milbank managed to turn out a straightforward, snarkless report that's arguably even pro-Bush. And I'm sure he hated writing it.

CATCH THE FEVER!

Here are some interesting facts about Ryan Adam Lipner of Ft. Lauderdale, FL:

• He "is a cocky high school dropout barely out of his teens."
• "He is 20, lives in an apartment with his father and works out of a closet-sized office in a rundown strip mall."
• "He has a well-documented obsession with opening Hallmark gift card stores without the company's permission."
• "He runs red lights, curses like a sailor and wrestles a cocktail of mental problems, for which he takes medication."
• He has "filed so many lawsuits (158 in one month) that a federal judge has limited his right to sue."
• He "wants to be president of the United States," and "plans to challenge the Constitution, which states among other requirements that a president must be at least 35 years old."
• He says running for president "also helps get him dates," adding: "Girls love this."
• He says: "I really believe America is going to get Ryan Lipner fever."

The St. Pete Times has more on Lipner and a handful of other Floridians of questionable sanity who are seeking the presidency, including a 45-year-old woman whose campaign slogan is: "I'm the Proof Your Vote Doesn't Count." It sure doesn't if you decide to vote for one of these people.

YOU MAY NOW START CALLING HIM SEN. BARACK OBAMA...

...right about now.

P.S. Booya! Not that anyone cares, but I totally beat Drudge to this. And it's a sex scandal! All thanks to my ex-roommate ... uh, I mean anonymous source in Illinois Democratic politics.

UPDATE: Less than five minutes later, Drudge has the exact same link up on his site. Coincidence? Nope -- I sent him the link via IM. Still, would it have killed him to say "thanks"?

FLIP FLOPS

Democrats and Republicans have both flip-flopped on issues over the years, and I here have an example of each. The first is so good I'm just cutting and pasting it directly from Taranto's Best of the Web:

JFK, Then and Now

"Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country." --John F. Kennedy, 1961

"In a Kerry Administration, if you believe in yourself enough to work hard and do what's right, your country will invest in you." --John F. Kerry, 2004

Heh. This reminds me of a Jeff Jacoby column in the Boston Globe earlier this month, which argued that Bush's view of American exceptionalism is closer to JFK than, er, JFK's:

For which presidential candidate will James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, and Lawrence Eagleburger -- the foreign policy barons of the first Bush administration -- vote in November: For the one who shares their Kissingerian approach to foreign affairs, in which order and stability are more important goals than democracy and human rights? Or for George W. Bush?

As I said: Heh.

BLAME AMERICA

Stephen Harper, leader of the newly consolidated Conservative Party in Canada (and the former employer of a friend of mine), just might win the election next Monday, which means the Canadian left is doing what it does best -- playing the "America card":

The American flag was waving and George W Bush was confidently strutting across the TV screen in military fatigues. You might think this television ad was for the U.S. president's campaign for re-election, but it's actually a Canadian ad that began running last week for the left-wing New Democratic Party.

The voiceover accused the two front-runners in Canada's upcoming national election of being "too close" to George W. Bush and sacrificing Canadian "independence."

Canadians go to the polls June 28 and, as the race gets closer and gets nastier (by Canadian standards), the charge of being too close to President Bush is being flung about with startling regularity. Liberal Party Prime Minister Paul Martin accuses his main competitor, Stephen Harper of the Conservative Party, of being an "American in Canadian clothing." The head of the NDP, Jack Layton, accuses them both of wanting to "make Canada into the 51st state." ...

During the debate among the four leading candidates for prime minister, almost a third of the time was spent arguing about how the candidates would relate to the United States. Mr. Harper was the subject of much of the vitriol, but Mr. Martin also came in for attacks. NDP leader Layton was criticized for being "anti-American," a far less serious charge.

Remember that Martin was the deputy of egregiously anti-American former PM Jean Chretien, and that Martin declined to attend the state funeral for Ronald Reagan recently. And yet he's too pro-American? Also, since when is "conservative" a synonym for "American"? I have plenty of liberal friends who would take umbrage at that assumption.

Just more evidence, as if we needed any more, how insecure our friends in the Great White North are about their own national identity.

LEWINSKY AND OSAMA

I usually stay away from suggestions that Bill Clinton should be held responsible for failing to deal with al Qaeda properly or recognizing the extent of the terrorist threat during his administration because the second Bush administration underestimated it just the same.

But this weekend on Meet the Press highly unofficial Clinton biographer Joe Klein, who was one of a few reporters to sit down with Clinton this past week for an untelevised interview, said something quite startling:

KLEIN: One of the ... things that Clinton told us was that he would have fired Louis Freeh as FBI director if it hadn't been for the media and for the fact that we would have associated that firing with the investigation of the Lewinsky scandal. Now, that is incredibly damning because from what I can understand, the FBI was entirely incompetent, not doing anything in terms of counterterrorism over those years. And so in some ways, you could say that we might have had a better shot at rolling up those al-Qaeda cells if Bill Clinton had been free to fire Freeh.

Wow. I guess this isn't especially different from the charge that Clinton's Lewinsky troubles denied him the standing to launch the kind of coordinated boots-on-the-ground type operation that was launched after 9/11, but here you have Bill Clinton basically admitting as much. Interesting.

Wasn't I just ragging on Klein like, a week ago? Yes, but this time Klein's on his own turf.

WHY I CAN CALL HIM "HITCH"

I said it would be here, but I lied. It's over at the Washington Canard instead. So sue me.

GIVE ME HYSTERIA OR GIVE ME A RECORD DEAL

Isn't Jello Biafra tired of being wrong? In 1979 they released their first single, "California Über Alles," a punk song that sure rocks when played loud, but whose attack on then-California Governor Jerry Brown (now mayor of Oakland and possibly soon Attorney General) made little sense:

I am Governor Jerry Brown
My aura smiles
And never frowns
Soon I will be president

Carter power will soon go away
I will be Fuhrer one day
I will command all of you
Your kids will meditate in school
Jerry Brown? The man named Governor Moonbeam for being a left-wing fruitcake? Whatever. Brown was never president, though he made a fair stab at it in 1992. Okay, so Biafra was right about Carter. And when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, Biafra became so terrified that he lost the ability to compose new music (not that he wrote much of it anyway -- hence the lawsuit he eventually lost against the other band members) and released the virtually identical "We've Got A Bigger Problem Now," with these lyrics replacing those above:

I am Emperor Ronald Reagan
Born again with fascist cravings
Still, you made me president

Human rights will soon go 'way
I am now your Shah today
Now I command all of you
Now you're going to pray in school
I'll make sure they're Christian too
Yeah, whatever. And the predictions just grew more dire as the song went on:

Welcome to 1984
Are you ready for the third world war?!?
You too will meet the secret police
They'll draft you and they'll jail your niece
Needless to say, I don't remember any of that happening -- although I was just a young 'un back in those days. Maybe if I had a niece then she would have been incarcerated. But it's impossible to say for sure. (Hey, at least that line makes more sense than the original one about the "suede denim secret police" coming for "your uncool niece."

Jello hasn't mellowed much since, nor has he found a grip on reality. Flash forward almost twenty years to 1998, when Biafra rolled into Eugene, Oregon on a spoken word tour, denouncing Al Gore and calling for a maximum wage. Nobody was left-wing enough to make him happy. And so it seemed that he wasn't left-wing enough for anybody either, because about halfway through, a couple of unruly anarchist youths rushed the stage shouting: "You sold out, Jello! You sold out!!" Security soon pushed them out the door, Jello made fun of them, and then returned to calling Bill Clinton a racist. Whatever.

If Jello thought living in the United States was like a holiday in Cambodia way back when, today he must think it's like tax day in Myanmar.

P.S. Don't get me wrong here, the Dead Kennedys really did rock. I still listen to "Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death" and I blast it loud. I just feel sorry for anybody who takes any of it even halfway seriously.

REMEMBERING HOWARD DEAN

Dean, we hardly knew ye. Oh, he's not dead -- I just miss having him around, that's all. It was nice that he showed up in the news again recently after claiming he never screamed on stage the night he lost Iowa. If you say so! Fueling my rather accelerated Dean nostalgia is Atlantic senior editor Josh Green's amusing retelling of a TV spot GOP adman John Brabender had prepared in anticipation of Dean's nomination:

It begins with a shot of blue sky and pristine alps. "Howard Dean was granted a deferment from the military after showing up at a recruitment office with an x-ray indicating he had a bad back," the voice-of-God narrator says. Suddenly a skier shoots off a snowy precipice and slaloms expertly down the mountain. "That very same year, Dean went on to ski eighty times -- eighty -- helping him to become an expert skier and the perfect commander in chief ... if we ever go to war against Switzerland."

Zing! I actually managed to get my hands on a Windows media file of the ad, and Green certainly does it justice. So now you know why I'm wistful, thinking of what might have been...

GOOD NEWS IS NO NEWS

A person who disagrees with the contention that some elite opinion makers are irrationally pessimistic, even masochistic, about the war in Iraq should take a gander at an occasional column by Slate's Tim Noah called "Kurd Sellout Watch." From March of last year to this month, Noah has written some thirty installments, all numbered by the days since the inaugural "How Screwed Are The Kurds?" If you can't tell by these titles, it is all but an article of faith to Noah that the United States is ready to sacrifice the achievements made by Kurds in northern Iraq over the last decade for the sake of the Sunnis and Shiites they are now trying to form a somewhat-federal government with.

That the Kurds still have control over their own areas and that violence there is far less frequent than in the Sunni Triangle should expose Noah as having cried wolf -- and crying it still -- but the implications are worse than that.

The first is that if something does go seriously wrong, like that apocryphal shepherd youth, Noah is in no position to alert others. We've simply heard this tune so many times before without a real crisis coming to ahead. Indeed there have been crises of varying degree have cropped up before being averted over the past year -- but I daresay Noah has had a negligible impact upon said aversion. His most recent installment fretted in dire terms that the Kurds were days away from abandoning the new government ... only to add a skeptically-worded update the very next day announcing that a deal had been struck. These developments were almost certainly taking place as Noah was declaring they couldn't happen.

Another reason it's hard to take him seriously is that Noah is, and I say this with all due respect, a resident of suburban Washington who does not seem to travel much. If (fellow Washingtonian) Christopher Hitchens, who has been to Iraq before and after the war and knows many Kurdish leaders personally, wrote that the Kurds were in danger of being sold out, then I'd listen. I'm not sure what expertise Noah has besides a subscription to the Washington Post.

Worse, it's clear that he reads the news very selectively, ignoring every bit of good news (unless it inconveniently contradicts his warnings, that is) and focusing on the bad. After all, his column is called "Kurd Sellout Watch" -- one certainly can't allow for mission creep. How else to explain why his ignoring of a Friday report in the Washington Post about Paul Wolfowitz's hands-on work with Kurdish leaders to maintain their autonomy.

And while I'm about as sympathetic to the Kurds as one can be -- you have to admire how they gave up terrorism, established an inclusive society and formed a decent quasi-country under protection of the former no-fly zones -- they are no longer victims as Noah would describe them. In fact, as they begin to assert that autonomy, many Kuds are heading south and forcing some Iraqi Arabs into refugee camps. Considering the Kurds' greater wealth and education than the Sunnis they are displacing, it sounds to me like gentrification of the worst kind. So let's not pretend the Kurds are helpless victims in all of this.

One reason why I think this matters is that Noah is undeniably readable, and I'd wager a casually interested observer would read Noah more than they'd read the A-section of the major dailies. But Noah seems to care less about the plight of Kurdistan than about having a uniquely pessimistic take on Iraq. There's been plenty of good news from Kurdistan in the year since the war began, but if you want to read about it, don't go looking to Tim Noah.

I'm not sure if I buy the "no news is good news" saying in most circumstances, but for Noah and other liberal commentators on the reconstruction of Iraq, good news is certainly no news at all.

PAUL JOHNSON

Well, I had a series of posts lined up for this afternoon, but I have to say I don't feel like it at the moment. News of the murder of Paul Johnson, an American in Saudi Arabia, reduce my thoughts on Jello Biafra's stubbornness, anti-gunners' condescension, Slate's obtuseness and encounters with Christopher Hitchens to lesser trifles than they were before. I'll hold them for now. But check in during the weekend -- I'll be posting those items as well as others.

UPDATE: As I type this, CNN has broken in to announce the Zarqawi-esque terrorist assumed to be Johnson's killer, has been killed. I'll be damned. Maybe this shows that when Saudi Arabia is motivated, they can be effective. After all, both the Islamic form of Wahhabism and many of the actual terrorists hail from the country. Who would know that better than them? I'm afraid now that this is done they'll pat themselves on the back and go back to blaming the Zionists.

I ♥ VACLAV HAVEL

Truly a man after my own heart:

Now is the time for the democratic countries of the world -- the European Union, the United States, Japan, South Korea -- to take a common position. They must make it clear that they will not offer concessions to a totalitarian dictator. They must state that respect for basic human rights is an integral part of any future discussions with Pyongyang. Decisiveness, perseverance and negotiations from a position of strength are the only things that Kim Jong Il and those like him understand.

One thing I've wondered about -- do Havel and Lou Reed still get along? Havel strongly supported Bush on Iraq. Reed -- and I'm just going on his profession and residence here -- surely was not.

P.S. I also ♥ Bernie Kerik.

WHAT'S FOUL IS FOUL

I don't know if you've seen the footage of the twenty- or thirty-something asshole who

jumped over a row of seats and pinned a 4-year-old boy against the seats with his legs while diving to get [a foul ball at a Rangers-Cardinals game on Sunday]. To no avail, fans started chanting "Give him the ball! Give him the ball!"

Boy, I sure did. As I've already noted, what an asshole! It's been all over not just ESPN and the sports pages but all the local and national news broadcasts, to boot. Anyway, today it turns out that said asshole has decided to give him the ball anyway. And now I'm seeing headlines like "Foul play made fair." And I can't quote from memory any of the MSNBC or Fox News broadcasts I saw this morning, but they were much the same.

To which I say: Hello! This is days after players in the game gave the kid their own baseball bats and amidst a baseball fan-done-wrong media frenzy we haven't seen since Steve Bartman. Does anybody think this asshole -- Matt Starr is his name -- is doing it out of the good of his own heart? One would think not. He's doing it because he can't go out in public without being treated as a pariah (as he should be). So why the rush to forgive? What's done is done.

P.S. Too bad "Pardon The Interruption" is pre-empted for the rest of the week for the U.S. Open. Wilbon and Kornheiser would agree with me.

P.P.S. Considering the media's appalling eagerness to let the guy off the hook this easy, maybe this is an example of liberal bias? Maybe.

P.P.P.S. And what's a grown man doing running like a madman after a foul ball? As a sports fan I'll grant that Barry Bonds' historic 73rd home run ball (which was not without controversy, either) is worth looking like a fool over. But not this.

P.P.P.P.S.Hell, Bartman comes out of this smelling like roses -- after all, he wasn't trying to be an asshole.

P.P.P.P.P.S. Believe it or not, this not my first baseball-related post.

P.P.P.P.P.P.S. One more P.S., for good measure. I think this might be a record.

MORE UNFORTUNATE PARALLELS

Here's the lead from David Von Drehle's profile from today's Post about what a "hands-on leader" Osama bin Laden is:

When the senior al Qaeda planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks wanted to drop a hijacker from the plot because he was ignoring his training, the boss overruled him. ... And when other al Qaeda leaders expressed eleventh-hour reservations about striking the United States using passenger jets as missiles, the boss -- Osama bin Laden -- bulled through the opposition and gave the fateful green light.

So bin Laden is decisive, interested in the details of the campaign, and is willing to stay the course in spite of dissension in the ranks. How long until the Angry Left uses this to compare Bush to bin Laden? I'm not listening to Air America at the moment, but I would imagine I'm already late to the party.

P.S. Yes, I'm aware that technically I am the one making this comparison. I guess it's just not my day.

PREPAID JIHAD?

Found this on the Washington Post's World page a couple days ago:

73¢ / min to Guantanamo
Call from the USA to Guantanamo Bay with Quality Prepaid Calling Cards
www.STSprepaid.com

Why would you want to call Guantanamo Bay? Friends and family members of naval officers stationed there, sure. But couldn't they have chosen tp mention a military base that didn't have, you know, Taliban fighters and al-Qaeda suspects? (May I suggest Fort Hood?) I went to the website, where calling rates for the U.S. to sixteen countries are listed on the main page. Among those countries: Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippinnes and Syria, all of which are known hotbeds Islamist terrorism. Hmmm.

P.S. Yes, I am well aware that Guanatamo prisoners do not have phone privileges. But why ruin a perfectly good post by mentioning it? Well, too late now.

FROM DUSK TILL DAWN

It's too hot to sleep out here -- 75 degrees with 94% humidity at 1:30 a.m. And I have to be at work in a few hours. *Sigh*

So anyway, the eternally atoning David Brock was on the moderately amusing O'Franken Factor yesterday morning, and it's replaying now. I don't listen often; just when I need to be lulled to sleep. Here's what I've noticed:

1. The parody intro music, "We Will Brock You," includes a line saying Brock took money from Scaife, but had a change of heart and how is back on the side of the human race. It's supposed to rhyme, I think.


2. Within thirty seconds Brock has mispronounced Goebbels as "Gobles." Franken politely corrects him.


3. Brock plays an audio clip of Bill O'Reilly saying liberal columnists are adhering to the inamous Goebbels "big lie" theory. Well, Goebbels was the one who said this. Anyway, Franken -- or maybe it's co-host, Katherine Lanpher -- immediately refers to Republicans as Nazis. Besides, Air America regularly runs skits calling Republicans Nazis and making fun of their physical characteristics.


4. They then play another clip with O'Reilly possibly mispronouncing Riefenstahl as Viefenstahl, refering to Michael Moore this way. They immediately make fun of him for doing so. (This quote I found less defensible -- other than both being filmmakers, it's a complete non sequitur. Also, it made less sense.)

*Sigh* I wish I could sleep.

FRANK RICH IMITATES ARMED PROPHET

According to Drudge, the weekend column by New York Times columnist Frank Rich will say:

During the Reagan show the O.J. Simpson impact was sometimes literally acted out: the gratuitously attenuated aerial shots of the hearse streaking on California freeways to Simi Valley carried an eerie visual echo of the Bronco chase.

Gee, that sounds familiar. We already know this blog is a favorite of Scarborough Country ... could it be a favorite of Frank Rich as well?

LONG LONG AGO, IN A GALAXY FAR FAR AWAY...

Well, "long ago" for a 24-year-old, and "far away" meaning on the West coast. Back then and there I was a young writer moving from anarcho-capitalism (it was a brief stage) to a more conservative libertarianism. One summer I discovered "The Goldberg File" by one Jonah Goldberg, and that's how I came to be reading NRO in the first place. It was full of humorous asides, witty insults and, believe it or not, sound arguments (believe it).

At the time he was the twentysomething online editor living in a DC apartment. But in the space of a few years he got married, bought a house, had a daughter, landed a syndicated column and a CNN gig, moved to editor-at-large and started writing a book. This meant his non-blog contributions to the site were drastically curtailed, and by this year the "G-File" itself had disappeared altogether. I tried to make do with Jay Nordlinger's "Impromptus," which is almost as breezy as Goldberg's columns, but considerably more uptight -- Goldberg's cultural point of reference is "Animal House"; Nordlinger's is opera.

Well, what do you know? Today there's a brand new "G-File" column, and it's all there: a "Stripes" reference, a self-deprecating joke about his weight, a plethora of tangents, and even a snide comment from his putatively animate couch (glad to see it survived the move). Well, almost all -- his dog Cosmo isn't mentioned, nor does he ask NR editor Rich Lowry for a raise. But Goldberg promises the "G-File" will keep coming all summer long. I'm glad to have it back, at least for awhile.

P.S. The demise of Goldberg's column was but one reason why I don't read the site as often as I once did. Another is that I pretty much already agree with a lot of what's there. Case in point: the shocking revelation that New York Times editors didn't like Ronald Reagan. I already know this; reading it is a waste of my time.

LIBERAL MEDIA ATROCITIES?

Today the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto highlights a Deborah Orin op-ed about attending a screening of Saddam's torture videos at the American Enterprise Institute. It was so awful she checked out of the room for the duration of the screening (only a few minutes) and those who did stay were sorry they did. Really, who wants to see a tongue cut out with a razor blade? (I mean outside of a horror flick.) I'm sure I wouldn't have stayed -- to this day I haven't seen the Daniel Pearl or Nick Berg murder videos, even though I know exactly where they are.

Anyway, there is an argument here. I start by quoting Taranto quoting Orin:

As Orin notes, this "raises a very complex problem in the War on Terror. It's worse than creating moral equivalence between Saddam's tortures and prisoner abuse by U.S. troops. It's that we do far more to highlight our own wrongdoings precisely because they are less appalling."

Part of the problem may be that the press hasn't quite figured out how to deal with such "asymmetric propaganda," as Orin calls it. Yet it doesn't seem that it would be that hard to provide context--to make sure that every story about American abuses at Abu Ghraib also included graphic descriptions of what went on there before Iraq's liberation.

Why does the press harp on American abuses and ignore Saddam's? Orin quotes AEI's Michael Ledeen as saying it's because most journalists "want Bush to lose." Reporters, of course, are at pains to maintain an air of fairness, but surveys have demonstrated that most lean to the left.

I certainly agree there is a problem here, and I think Orin nails exactly why it's so frustrating. I don't know what to do about this, except continuing to roll back the Islamofascists and their allies.

While I'm as alert as anybody to left-wing bias in the news, I have to disagree with them about the media bias. The double standard exists not because the media is liberal, but because more is expected of the United States than was of Saddam's regime. Saddam Hussein was (and though confined, still is) a monster. We are capable of monstrous acts, but it's not a given that we'll do horrible things. To put it in media terms: Saddam torturing Iraqis is dog bites man; the United States torturing Iraqis is man bites dog.

Perhaps some reporting is influenced by their liberal masochism, but it cannot all be. (Taranto is on firmer ground when he cites mentions of Abu Ghraib in articles unrelated to Iraq.) If anything, this is local bias -- what those close to us do matters much more to us than what others do. Of course in this case, it sure is self-defeating. The media report our atrocities because they are concerned about our image -- but news like that only makes us look worse.

I am certainly glad that conservatives are reminding us of Saddam's atrocities, but should we want to compare ourselves to brutal tyrants? The right's apparent argument -- what we did was bad, but what Saddam did was worse -- doesn't make it any better. In a small way, it makes us look worse as well.

P.S. Speaking of the liberal media, this is a great new blog. The name is even better.

P.P.S. Speaking of atrocities, this is very, very disturbing. I hope Hitchens is wrong, but I doubt it. If anybody is in a position to be told of such things, it's him.

WAITING FOR REAGAN

On Thursday afternoon I decided to take up my place in line on the Mall outside the U.S. Capitol and wait (and wait and wait and wait) for as long as I had to until it was my turn to file past Ronald Reagan inside the Capitol rotunda.

Fearing ten-hour lines, I had planned to bring a book with me. Hearing just before I left that lines were closer to four or five hours, I decided to bring along the latest Atlantic Monthly, each issue of which basically is a book, and the latest issue of the Oregon Commentator, each issue diligently mailed to yours truly by the current editors.

I didn't know which Metro stop was closest to the start of the line, so I guessed and hopped off at Capitol South. Bad choice. As it was I had to walk at least ten blocks, thanks in part to the obnoxious but necessary barriers obstructing access to the east end of the Mall, but also to the fact that Capitol South was nowhere near the line. (Smithsonian would have been much better.)

Also notable, the reader boards inside the Metro scrolled a message that began: "In Remembrance" and (paraphrased) went: "In honor former President Ronald Reagan, the Metrorail will close at the regular time of midnight tonight," followed by info on the late-night Metrobus running between the Capitol and someplace in DC nowhere near me. So, in remembrance of the former president, the Metro will close at the normal time? How generous!

On the Mall it was not obvious where you had to go to get in line. Oh, the line itself was easy enough to see, but twice as I was approaching it I was stopped by Mall police and told I was heading in the wrong direction. Eventually I saw the entrance: five officers standing next to a handwritten "Enter" sign.

So I got in line. And waited. And waited. The organization here was much better, but obvious. Still a couple hundred yards from the Capitol itself, metal barricades directed the line back and forth for fifty yards (at least) in columns or rows five deep. I looked ahead five "lines" ahead. Lucky bastards. Lucky bastards who had been there for hours ahead of me, though. After that fifth column (no pun intended, not that it would make any sense anyway) the line broke away past the reflecting pool (not the long one by the Lincoln Memorial, thankfully) and through the tree-lined area leading up to the Capitol itself. Far off in the distance, I could see people way up on the Capitol steps, minutes from getting in. I tried to put them out of my mind.

Despite being dressed in a long-sleeve collared shirt and slacks, it wasn't all that hot, I thought -- but soon enough, the line took me out of the shade and into the sun's glare. Weather forecasts had predicted T-storms for the day, so a lot of people had brought umbrellas. Now those umbrellas were being used for shelter from the sun. Old men (excuse me, members of the Greatest Generation) sat on fold out chairs. Tank tops were rolled up to reveal (mostly pleasant) midsections. Good thing the Red Cross was there to hand out Wal-Mart brand water, "Sam's Choice," that was also ubiquitous at the WWII dedication a couple weeks past. (The label boasts of the water's being "enhanced by adding essential minerals for an even more satisfying and refreshing pure taste." Yeah, right. (The copy is exact because the bottle I got two weeks ago is still sitting in my refidgerator. It's that good.)) My first bottle was cold, but subsequent bottles hadn't the benefit of sitting in a bucket of ice. I don't see why not. They'd had the foresight to buy what looked like acres of water, but not acres of buckets and ice to cool them. Seriously, I've never seen more bottled water in one place. Wal-Mart surely made a killing. How very American; Reagan would have approved.

And of course this was all about Reagan, the leader of the free world who changed both his country and the world and also loved jellybeans (licorice especially). Further up along the line handmade tributes to the former president had been placed here and there -- snippets of his speeches, brush-painted thanks to the man for his accomplishments, flowers and more flowers and yet more flowers. Outside the line a woman was taking pictures, and somebody asked if she was from the media. Actually, she said, she was Ronald Reagan's nurse at George Washington University hospital in 1981 after that jerk shot Reagan. The pictures were just for her scrapbook.

Departing from the snaking rows and approaching the tree-lined area, security demanded, one by one, that we reveal our cell phones. Mine had a camera, and so I had to check it in. I deposited it into a brown paper bag, filled out a little form (that amusingly enough asked for our phone numbers) and hoped it would meet me on the way out.

In all I spent over four hours in line. Which means I could probably rattle off an endless string of anecdotes about the scene. But I'll save you; this is longer than I intended as it is. Eventually, after explaining to a group of tourists that the statue atop the Capitol dome is a Roman guard (what am I, a tour guide?) and offering a few more factoids about the place (sans pedestal the Statue of Liberty could fit inside the Rotunda, FYI) I got inside. Just before entering, I looked back down the hill at the line and thought: suckers.

Once in the building, (non-Roman) guards asked that we doff our hats and file into two separate lines, right and left. Without thinking, I moved to the left -- Reagan would not have approved -- and walked up the stairs into the Rotunda. But as it was, the two lines made two passes past the casket, which meant for most of the first pass I went past the man moving left to right. Ronald Reagan most definitely would have approved of that.

Also, there was a section for the press, and it included at least a dozen press photographers. So what did they want my cell phone for? A sign saying "no photos" would have sufficed. This was, as I mentioned, a very solemn occasion. Surely even the tank top-clad tourists would have behaved.

And the moment itself was unique. Appropriately solemn and almost silent, this was altogether different than the time I first visited a tourist-overrun Rotunda last September. On my way out the door I made several "last" glances at the casket, until finally making a final last glance and walking out. It didn't look any different than it did (for hours, endless hours) on C-SPAN, but I was glad I'd done it.

On the way out I went back to reading Mark Bowden's endless article about Al Sharpton (and his treachery) in the Atlantic. I followed the girls in front of me through a lobby, down some stairs, around a corner, past Orrin Hatch and his entourage and eventually ... into the basement? Here I was by the private Capitol subways, where a line of staffers waiting to get in stretched off into the distance in the large hallway. Obviously I had taken a wrong turn. The girls, I realized quite quickly, were Hill staffers. I should have paid more attention. My first thought was: I'm dressed exactly like a staffer! This is my chance to ride the Hill's secret subway! I'll ride it to the Hart/Dirksen and take the non-secret subway back home! My second thought was: I want my phone back.

So I went up to an officer and asked the way out. Rather than being given directions, I was told to wait for an escort. Another officer arrived, and led me toward the exit. I asked how long the staffers had to wait in line. He asked: How long did you wait? About four hours. He replied: "They're waiting about two." (This had been reported on Wonkette at the time, but I didn't see it until today. I read that often.)

I exited the building on the under-construction East face and headed in the direction he told me would take me down to the proper exit. But within a minute I was stopped by yet another Mall policeman, who told me this was an off-limits area. Which way did I have to go? Way back in the opposite direction, around the barriers and down Constitution. Only then could I cross back and get to the approved exit. This was at least four times the distance. Here I'd already spent five hours from leaving my front door to exiting the Capitol.

But I had no choice, so that I did, and retrieved my contraband picture-taking phone. While there I took a few moments to sign one of a dozen (filled) condolence books. What do you say to a deceased man of "the ages," in a few lines of a book that no one will read? Addressing my comments to the man himself, I told him he was the first president of my childhood, that I didn't know much about him then but had learned a lot in subsequent years, and that I was thankful for all that he did. And that I hoped there were licorice jellybeans in heaven.

From there, I picked up one final bottle of overrated water and walked up Pennsylvania to the Archives-Navy Memorial metro stop, and hopped the regular subway home.