Right Wing Nut House

Scott Johnson of Powerline has a post on Newsweek’s internal investigation into how Michael Isikoff and John Barry’s story on the copy of a Qur’an being flushed down a toilet - a story that now appears to have no basis in fact - made it into the magazine’s “Periscope” section.

Late last week Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita told NEWSWEEK that its original story was wrong. The brief periscope item (”SouthCom Showdown”) had reported on the expected results of an upcoming U.S. Southern Command investigation into the abuse of prisoners at Gitmo. According to NEWSWEEK, SouthCom investigators found that Gitmo interrogators had flushed a Qur’an down a toilet in an attempt to rattle detainees. While various released detainees have made allegations about Qur’an desecration, the Pentagon has, according to DiRita, found no credible evidence to support them.

How did NEWSWEEK get its facts wrong? And how did the story feed into serious international unrest? While continuing to report events on the ground, NEWSWEEK interviewed government officials, diplomats and its own staffers, and reconstructed this narrative of events:

Scott sums it up nicely:

So Isikoff relied on a telephone call with an anonymous government official paraphrasing a forthcoming report, confirmed by placing a draft of the Periscope item before another anonymous government official. Isikoff never saw the underlying report or even had it read to him.

And this is what passes for “journalism” at Newsweek.

The magazine’s critique, written by Evan Thomas, finds something even more startling:

On Friday night, Pentagon spokesman DiRita called NEWSWEEK to complain about the original periscope item. He said, “We pursue all credible allegations” of prisoner abuse, but insisted that the investigators had found none involving Qur’an desecration. DiRita sent NEWSWEEK a copy of rules issued to the guards (after the incidents mentioned by General Myers) to guarantee respect for Islamic worship. On Saturday, Isikoff spoke to his original source, the senior government official, who said that he clearly recalled reading investigative reports about mishandling the Qur’an, including a toilet incident. But the official, still speaking anonymously, could no longer be sure that these concerns had surfaced in the SouthCom report. Told of what the NEWSWEEK source said, DiRita exploded, “People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said. How could he be credible now?”

This is an everyday occurence in Washington. An “anonymous source” curries favor with the media by exaggerating or even making up out of whole cloth incidents or quotes that reflect badly on someone else. Who knows what this guy’s axe is. The fact that he’s bactracking from his story immediately after the riots indeed raises the question “How could he be credible now?”

Isikoff is an experienced investigative reporter. He made his bones breaking the Lewinsky scandal back in the 1990’s. The life blood of most investigative journalists has now become “anonymous” or “unnamed” sources. Until Watergate, such sources were used sparingly and judiciously by the press for the obvious reason that if someone wasn’t willing to “go on the record” the chances are there were other motives involved for the source talking to the press in the first place. The motives could be personal, sexual, political, or the simple need for attention.

And Evan Thomas does a poor job of trying to explain how this questionable information got into his magazine in the first place. Scott has an observation about that:

Like Lawrence DiRita, I have a question of my own for NEWSWEEK. Is this how an elite newsmagazine confesses error and corrects the record when it makes a big mess?

On a related note, Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs takes issue with our government’s response:

Perhaps even more disgusting than this display of violent irrationality from the RoP (Religion of Peace) is our own government’s rush to appease, even before any facts are discovered. The Newsweek article isn’t the only reason this madness is continuing to spiral out of control; when the US’s first reaction is to apologize and abase ourselves in the face of thuggish Dark Ages behavior, what else should we expect? Weakness invites attack.

I agree wholeheartedly. We should have waited until the Pentagon at least had completed a preliminary investigation (finished Saturday) and then denied the Qur’an incident in the strongest possible language. By leaving the door open to the idea that the incident is true, we’ve allowed our enemies to stir up the Arab street against us. Now we have the prospect of having to deal with things like this:

The clerics in the northeastern province of Badakhshan said they wanted President Bush to handle the matter honestly “and hand the culprits over to an Islamic country for punishment.”

“If that does not happen within three days, we will launch a jihad against America,” said a statement issued by about 300 clerics, referring to Muslim holy war, after meeting in the main mosque in the provincial capital, Faizabad.

(HT: LGF)

I doubt whether this issue is going to go away anytime soon. And just like with Abu Ghraib with everyone who ever set foot in that prison being tortured, every poor little terrorist who found himself incarcerated by the US will weep about the desecration of the Qur’an that the infidel’s forced him to watch.

The hell of it is, the moonbat left will pick up on this and once again make common cause with the enemies of the United States.

UPDATE

As you can imagine, the blogosphere’s big guns have trained their sights on this story and are letting Newsweek and by extension their MSM critics have it right in the chops.

Michelle Malkin does her usual great job of rounding up reaction from blogs both big and small.

The Captain fire’s a well aimed broadside:

Remember this when the Exempt Media gets on its righteous high horse and instructs us on their superior system of checks and balances. Newsweek ran an explosive story based on a single, unnamed source that it knew would cause a huge effect on the Muslim world, at precisely the moment when we need to ensure that people understand that we’re not at war with Islam. It’s just a little late to say, “Oops, we’re sorry.” It’s a little late to unring the bell that Newsweek rang with its false story — it’s too late for the nine people who died because Newsweek couldn’t wait to run its story without checking it properly first.

Ouch!

The Anchoress asks an excellent question:

Great job, NEWSWEEK. The new standard in journalism is the “prove the negative” standard? If someone “does not argue” against a story that confirms it is true, and so it’s okay to run with an anonymous story that will undoubtedly ignite something violent and bad? Clearly, Mark Whitaker is trying to claim that reporting these so-called desecrations of the Muslim Holy Book is a matter of ethical journalism. Rules of Ethical journalism has never inspired him to report on the Holy Bible being used for toilet paper, but I digress…

The Jawas have a nice summary.

Sisyphean Musings gets flamed by a Kossak on the subject and gives back generously.

Cross Posted at Blogger News Network

Was this heart tugging story a hoax? (SEE UPDATE BELOW)

Brooke Greenberg weighs 13 pounds and is 27 inches long.

But Brooke is actually 12 years old, reported WBAL-TV in Baltimore.

Brooke doesn’t age. Her syndrome remains undiagnosed and unnamed, and as far as doctors can tell, she is the only one in the world who has it.

“In height, weight, she’s 6 to 12 months,” Pakula said. “If you ask any physician who knows nothing about her, the response is that she is maybe a handicapped 2-year-old.”

When I wrote a post on this story on Friday, there were several dozen links to various TV News websites all carrying exactly the same story. They had all re-broadcast the original WBAL piece and used the same teaser on their websites.

All links to the story have now disappeared. The only links that work are to blogs that posted on the story in the first place.

A Welsh View has a cached copy of the original broadcast of the story. But that’s it. Every newsite that carried a blurb on poor little Brooke has yanked the piece from their websites.

Why?

Yesterday, I sent an email to WBAL in Baltimore asking them if the story was a hoax. I have yet to hear back from them. I’ve gotten about 200 search engine hits all referencing “Brooke Greenberg” so I know that there are a lot of people wondering the same thing.

At the moment, there just aren’t any good answers.

I’m going to stay on top of this all day today. I may even call WBAL and find out what the heck is going on. In the meantime, if you go to WBAL’s website, they have a drop down menu for sending emails. I urge everyone who’s interested to send them an email asking about this story.

If you get any kind of an answer, I’d appreciate it if you shared it with me. Send the info to elvenstar522-at-AOL-dot-com. (Remove hyphens).

Let’s get to the bottom of this.

UPDATE:

A Welsh View has also done an update on the story and with a little digging, found out that the story goes back to at least 2001.

A hoax? Probably not. So why pull the story? Did the parents intervene? Since they cooperated in the making of the story in the first place that seems hard to imagine.

Don’t ya just love mysteries?

UPDATE

I finally received an answer to the email I sent to WBAL in Baltimore asking if the story was a hoax. Here’s their response in its entirety:

Good morning,

Due to certain agreements, we are unable to provide additional information
on this story. It was not a hoax.

“Certain agreements” could mean anything. It could mean that the family didn’t realize the worldwide noteriety that would accompany the story after Drudge linked to the WBAL webstory and requested that it be pulled. Or it could be something contractural having to do with the news service that carried the story on so many websites (57 TV and radio sites by my count).

Regardless, while an insatisfactory answer, the only important thing is that the story is in fact true and not a hoax.

UPDATE II (5/18)

I received an email from WBAL telling me that the story is once again “active.”

No explanation. No rhyme nor reason to it.

Here’s a link to the same story that appeared originally.

It was an innocuous paragraph in an otherwise routine story about investigating abuses at Guantanamo. Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and John Barry reported that interrogators used various means of psychological pressure on detainees, some of them clearly over the line:

Investigators probing interrogation abuses at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay have confirmed some infractions alleged in internal FBI e-mails that surfaced late last year. Among the previously unreported cases, sources tell NEWSWEEK: interrogators, in an attempt to rattle suspects, flushed a Qur’an down a toilet and led a detainee around with a collar and dog leash. An Army spokesman confirms that 10 Gitmo interrogators have already been disciplined for mistreating prisoners, including one woman who took off her top, rubbed her finger through a detainee’s hair and sat on the detainee’s lap. (New details of sexual abuse—including an instance in which a female interrogator allegedly wiped her red-stained hand on a detainee’s face, telling him it was her menstrual blood—are also in a new book to be published this week by a former Gitmo translator.)

What caught the attention of al Jazeera and other Arab media outlets was the flushing of the Qur’an down the toilet. So far, no-one has been able to confirm this story, least of all the Newsweek reporters. But that hasn’t stopped al Jazeera and a host of other anti-American press organs from fanning the flames of hate among muslims all over the world:

The spreading anger comes after a report published by Newsweek magazine said that US interrogators at Guantanamo Bay desecrated copies of the Quran by leaving them in toilet cubicles and stuffing one down a lavatory.

Did the Newsweek story say that interrogators left them in toilet cubicles? No. And there are indications that al Jazeera TV in Afghanistan may be responsible for exaggerating the story:

“After people heard the news that a Quran was set on fire and was thrown in the toilet in Guantanamo by US soldiers they were angered and that sparked the demonstration,” car mechanic Mohammed Nadir, 24, said.

Mr. Nadir got his information from al Jazeera television. And while no transcript is available, one wonders how the idea that the Qur’an was set on fire got into his head. The Newsweek story makes no mention of the Muslim holy book being set on fire. This is pure fiction.

Also, the most widely read English language newspaper in the world, The International Herald-Tribune ran with an exaggerated version of the story:

The protests, as before, were over reports in Newsweek on May 9 that U.S. interrogators at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, placed the Koran on toilets and in one case flushed a Koran down the toilet in order to “rattle” prisoners, a reported act that has angered Afghans more than any other action by American or other foreign troops in Afghanistan in the last three and a half years.

No where in the Newsweek story does it say that interrogators “placed the Koran on toilets.” When even a respected news organ like the Herald Tribune exaggerates a story, one has to wonder at the motives of those responsible.

The protests in Afghanistan began in Jalalabad, a hotbed of anti-American and anti-Western sentiment. They have since pretty much spread across the entire Muslim world:

In three Pakistan cities, Peshawar, Quetta and Multan, hundreds of protesters led largely by religious parties burned American flags and chanted anti-American slogans after Friday Prayer. The protests were peaceful, though, thanks in large part to the large numbers of police officers deployed outside mosques and official buildings.

Hundreds of people gathered peacefully outside a mosque in Jakarta on Friday while a statement was read condemning the United States for the reported abuses. In Gaza, about 1,500 members of the radical Islamic group Hamas marched through the Jabaliya refugee camp as outrage spread over the reports, including a brief item in Newsweek, that interrogators at Guantánamo Bay had flushed a Koran down the toilet in an effort to upset detainees.

Protesters carrying the green banners of Islam and Hamas shouted, “Protect our holy book!” Some burned American and Israeli flags. Anti-American protests are rare among militant Palestinians, who decry American support for Israel but emphasize that their struggle is with Israel, not the United States.

Arab editorial writers have not been shy in expressing their feelings. The United Emerites’ Kahleej Times believes there’s a broader, underlying cause of the unrest in Afghanistan:

This alienation of the majority, the Pashtuns, is at the heart of Afghan unrest. As long as the majority of the Afghan population is kept out of the political process, Afghanistan will continue to remain unstable. The violent demonstrations Wednesday, though stemming from injured religious sensitivities, are an expression of an alienated and suppressed people. The Karzai government and the U.S. would do well to heed the warning signs if they don’t want Afghanistan to go the way of Iraq. At the same time, strong action must be taken against those who perpetrated such outrage against the Holy Book.

And events in that country are starting to move faster than the authorities can handle. President Karzai has admitted his forces cannot handle the demonstrations:

The protesters slammed police for resorting to shooting their weapons and causing bloodshed. “We were staging a peaceful demonstration but police started firing at us without any provocation,” Mohammad Mohsin charged.

Students from three different universities coalesced in Kabul, where law-enforcement personnel had already taken stringent security measures, and marched calmly to Karta-e-Sakhi Square shouting anti-U.S. slogans all along the way.

They demanded that the Karzai government prevent U.S. forces from frisking and arresting Afghans and that it drop plans for a long-term American military presence in Afghanistan.

An editorial in the Arab News is incendiary in its language:

If the report of desecration is true, it will be another example of how ignorant and insensitive the US, particularly the US military, remains to other cultures and what those cultures hold most dear. Coming after Abu Ghraib, after all the stories of humiliation suffered by Muslims arriving at American airports and of attacks on Muslims in the US, and given the general hostility toward Muslims in the US and the anti-Muslim mood in certain sections of the US media, nothing could have been more guaranteed to stir Muslim anger across the world. Washington constantly proclaims that attacks on Muslims will not be tolerated and that the war on terrorism is not a war on Islam. Evidently, the American institutions are not listening; they are not interested in the feelings and beliefs of anyone other than themselves. It is crass insensitivity. It is also appalling stupidity. The US government has spent hundred of millions of dollars trying to improve its image with Muslims worldwide; a story like this undoes all that work at a stroke. It is also disastrous diplomacy. Washington presumably wants to retain its friends in the Muslim world; something like this actively undermines that friendship

Clearly, there has been some exaggeration to this story by those who seek any opportunity to rally ordinary Arabs to their twin causes of anti-semitism and anti-Americanism. I certainly hope either Newsweek or the Pentagon will be able to confirm or deny this story and soon.

If not, expect much more in the way of protests as pro-jihad forces seek to regain ground they’ve lost since the successful elections in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

UPDATE

It looks like the exaggerated story involving US troops placing the Qur’an on top of toilets in addition to flushing them down the commode, could be the work of our old friends at Reuters.

For a while, I was worried that perhaps the print version of Newsweek carried a little different story. Then I saw this from Roger Simon: in which he links to the very same on-line Newsweek story that I did.

Amazing! All these reporters had to do was google-up “Newsweek Koran flush” and they would have found the original article immediately.

UPDATE II

Did Reuters get the part about placing the Qur’an on toilets from AP? Here’s the original AP story (HT: Little Green Footballs)

The source of anger was a brief report in the May 9 edition of Newsweek that interrogators at Guantanamo placed Qurans on toilets to rattle suspects, and in at least one case “flushed a holy book down the toilet.”

As we’ve pointed out in the past, the AP is no more a reliable barometer of what’s happening in the middle east than Reuters. This would tend to prove that assumption.

Cross Posted at Blogger News Network

If this little girl lived in Holland or had parents who didn’t care, she would have been euthanized long ago:

Imagine being frozen in time as a baby forever. It sounds impossible, but it describes Brooke Greenberg.

The Baltimore-area girl may look like a baby, but she’s nearly a teenager. In most respects, Brooke looks and acts like your average 6-month-old baby — she weighs 13 pounds and she is 27 inches long.

But Brooke is actually 12 years old, reported WBAL-TV in Baltimore.

As far as scientists and doctors can determine, Brooke is the only human being on the planet who has this as yet unnamed condition. And it hasn’t been any picnic for her parents. She’s had numerous health problems:

Her body may not be aging, but Brooke’s health is deteriorating. She is fed through a tube, and she’s had strokes, seizures, ulcers, severe respiratory problems and a tumor the size of a lemon.

The four times Brooke has come dangerously close to death, she bounced back and no one knows why.

Pakula points out that the girl has a strong sense of self and of sibling rivalry. Brooke has no language skills, but she does have enough motor skills to pull herself up in her crib or scoot across the kitchen floor.

Somebody please get me the address of this Dr. Pakula. After listening to medical “experts” for months tell us that human beings like little Brooke should be taken out with the trash, it’s so refreshing to find a Doctor who has this kind of an attitude:

Pakula said Brooke has thrived because of the support of her parents and three sisters.

“When one sees how much she has accomplished, it’s a wonderful reminder that even for someone who’s limited, it’s a wonderful world out there,” Pakula said

The point that little Brooke makes by being alive is very simple; being alive is better than the alternative. It sounds like an old joke but given the choice, also a truism. This little girl has battled odds greater than she should and has come up fighting each and every time. It doesn’t matter that she can’t understand what’s wrong with her. To come back from death like that takes a will - a free will - where a human makes a choice to live or die. If Brooke was one whit less feisty, one iota less determined to live, she would have passed on. But whatever spirit animates her, it’s not ready to go anywhere yet.

In Holland, the doctors would have shaken their heads, said to themselves what a terrible shame it was, and then tried to talk the parents into euthanizing the child. And I’m sure the temptation for some parents must be tremendous. But in the end, it appears that familial love won the day and little Brooke is still fighting.

Just a nice, uplifting story to start your weekend with.

NOTE: The link above to the Pittsburg TV station that carried the story no longer is valid. I got the link via Drudge so I’m assuming they didn’t want to pay the bandwidth costs.

UPDATE

My Wide Awakes bud Raven, who blogs at And Rightly So, weighs in by giving the benefit of her many years of experience of working with severely handicapped children:

This is typical with kids with developmental disabilties. They are often tiny and do not look their age. They hate it I work with several kids who are under 50lbs. but older than 16. One of my favorite “little guys” hates it when I call him that…he is 12 and weighs 40 lbs. Most of these kids have severe medical needs… not just g tubes, but PIC and Central Lines, IV, vac pumps and hemo pumps…chest drainage systems to keep their lungs clear; kids with intra-cranial shunts with tubes popping out to keep their skulls from expanding…. I work with the most profoundly disabled kids…very few of them have active trachs or use vents for breathing (that is usually for the brain injured kids and young adults). But they require body splints made of hard plastic just to keep them upright…because they have no ribs or only half a spine. It’s very sad in some respects-to watch these kids get by. But they are the happiest beings on planet. They really are.

This little girl is fortunate to have an actively involved family. Many are not involved and only wish to be called upon the death of their child.

Cross Posted at Blogger News Network

Senate Democractic leader Harry Reid doesn’t look much like a Senator. He looks more like a small town accountant or shopkeeper which, judging from these remarks he made last night about one of the stalled judicial nominees, he may have been better suited for than lawmaker:

“Henry Saad would have been filibustered anyway,” Mr. Reid said on the floor yesterday, about the Michigan Appeals Court judge who is nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit.

“All you need to do is have a member go upstairs and look at his confidential report from the FBI, and I think we would all agree that there is a problem there,” Mr. Reid continued.

Republican staff members and supporters of Mr. Bush’s nominees were outraged.

“Can you think of a better way to trash someone’s reputation?” Sean Rushton of the conservative Committee for Justice asked after seeing a transcript of the remarks. “Say that there is bad stuff from an FBI investigation in a file somewhere and leave that hanging. This is character assassination of the lowest order and completely improper.”

(HT: Captains Quarters)

This isn’t McCarthyism; it’s a Stalinist purge.

Back in the 1930’s, Stalin and his minions destroyed the Red Army by bringing charges against ideologically suspect officers. They did this by using hearsay and character assassination while not producing any documents that the defendent could question in an attempt to clear himself. As a result, tens of thousands of Red Army officers were slaughtered - officers Stalin could have used a few short years later when Hitler attacked.

Forget the gross violation of Senate rules that prevent Senators from revealing anything about the contents of an FBI file. Simple common decency would preclude all but the most virulently partisan to reveal their contents. The Captain correctly points out what’s contained in those raw files:

FBI clearance files contain raw data from every interview the agency conducts with people known to the person applying for the clearance. Anything said goes into the file. The FBI does not filter the information, and will usually investigate criminal activity suggested by the interview only if they find anything substantial. What this means, especially in political appointments, is that a fair amount of gossipy but usually exaggerated or false information gets entered into the file and later mentioned in the file’s summary.

This is one move by Reid that even the MSM can’t ignore. Here are some other gems by Reid that somehow never quite landed him in hot water with the press (or his own party for that matter):

1. Called President Bush a “loser” while the President was out of the country then apologized, and then withdrew the apology.

2. Said of Janice Rogers Brown, another Circuit Court nominee: “She Is A Woman Who Wants To Take Us Back To The Civil War days.”

3. Said of Justice Clarence Thomas: “I think that he has been an embarrassment to the Supreme Court. I think that his opinions are poorly written. I don’t… I just don’t think that he’s done a good job as a Supreme Court justice.”

4. Called the President a “liar”

5. Said of Alan Greenspan: “I Think [Alan Greenspan's] One Of The Biggest Political Hacks We Have In Washington.”

I’d say that Senator Reid is an embarrassment to the Democratic party except there’s no way you can embarass people who have no shame in the first place. If I were Senator Frist I’d introduce a motion of censure against the Senator from Nevada.

I doubt whether it would phase that gentleman in the least. Because, like the man he’s imitating, the Senator from Wisconsin who long ago lent his name to the most odious of practices in democratic governance, he fails to “get it.”

Where’s Joe Welch when you need him?

Welch: Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator.

Welch: I’ll say it hurts!

UPDATE

Ace says it’s time to go nuclear:

Reid can’t be held legally accountable for any of this, as the Constitution immunizes Congressmen from legal consequences from any statement made in Congress. But I’d sure like someone to bait Reid into repeating his remarks outside of Congress.

It’s time to go nuclear. I know nothing about Saad, and of course I know even less about what dirt the FBI may have dug up on him, but it is clear that the Democrats have made the judiciary their last redoubt. It’s well past time to drain that swamp.

Yup.

And Michelle Malkin does her usual great job of rounding up media and blog reaction to “Dirty Harry” Reid’s diarrhea of the mouth.”

Cross Posted at Blogger News Network

The Watchers Council vote was close this week. In fact, three articles, including my take on the President’s speech in Riga, tied for first place. The Watcher hisself had to break the tie with his rarely used voting privilege and in the end, I won out over the other two posts.

This post by Dymphna of Gates of Vienna on Political Correctness run amok got my primary vote this week:

The malignant organism that rips the social fabric of American life, leveling differences while it pretends to celebrate them, PC everywhere insinuates itself into the crevices, using a cover of well-meaning to create vacuous, bizzare realities like “zero-tolerance” and unattended college sports programs for women (while men’s programs are eliminated).

Pornography is our constitutional right but we shouldn’t be looking at images of the Twin Towers falling.

And Dr. Sanity got my secondary vote this week for the funny and touching story of her young daughter’s early fascination with Darth Vader. This is what happened when she invited a Vader look alike to her daughter’s 5th Birthday party:

For her 5th birthday, my husband and I arranged a special surprise visit from a Darth Vader impersonator (very realistic, with light saber and ominous breathing) who arrived in the middle of her birthday party to surprise her. There were about 10 other kids at the party. Unfortunately, it was a total and complete disaster–an event that she will likely mention in any future psychotherapy as being one of the more traumatic ones in her life. Kids started screaming and crying and running away in terror. The adults watched in horror at the sudden conversion of a happy birthday party into a frenzy of frightened and hysterical 5 year olds.

Sobbing, and gasping for breath as I held her shaking little body that day and tried to explain that it was only someone pretending to be the Sith Lord; she told me that she thought that our imitation Darth Vader had been real and that he had come to her party to kill her and all her friends.

“But I thought you liked him!” I wailed (definitely no “mother of the year” award for me).

“Mommy, I like him in my imagination. Not for real.”

All the Council posts can be found here as well as other great posts from around the Sphere. This week’s non-Council winner is “Jihad Begot the Crusades; Part 1″ from the American Thinker.

Main Entry: [1]mav·er·ick
Pronunciation: ‘mav-rik, ‘ma-v&-
Function: noun
Etymology: Samuel A. Maverick †1870 American pioneer who did not brand his calves
Date: 1867
1 : an unbranded range animal; especially : a motherless calf
2 : an independent individual who does not go along with a group or party

Poor George Voinovich.

It’s bad enough that the “Republican” Senator from Ohio is going to have the entire right side of the blogosphere picking on him for the next few days in response to his rather curious position(s) on the Bolton nomination. But what I really pity him for is that the mainstream media has now branded him a maverick - a “kiss of death” moniker that scuttles political ambition and assures anonymity to its bearer.

As Mr. Voinovich’s refusal to support Mr. Bolton’s nomination demonstrates, “the vanishing center”-as another centrist Republican, Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, often says - can still play a powerful role. There are just four core centrists in the Senate, Mr. Chafee, Ms. Collins, Ms. Snowe and Mr. Specter. They are joined from time to time by mavericks like Senators John McCain of Arizona, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Mr. Voinovich.

(HT: Michelle Malkin)

The use of maverick to describe a politician has different meanings to different people. As Michelle Malkin points out, the mainstream media has one definition which is meant to contrast the political positions of other Republicans:

All I know is mainstream conservatives (known in MSM terminology as right-wing radicals or extremist Republicans) are calling Sen. Voinovich a lot of names these days.

But “maverick” isn’t one of them.

Tee-hee.

But when the MSM calls a Democrat a “maverick”…well, that’s a horse of a different color:

The fire still burns within maverick Congressman Bernie Sanders even after 14 years representing Vermont in the U.S. House. His fight for the little guy continues with as much fervor as the day in 1981 when he upset the order and became Burlington’s first socialist mayor.

Gosh…Maybe if we’re lucky they’ll catch Bernie walking on water.

To be a Republican maverick is sort of like being cured of leprosy; you’re accepted in polite society but not invited to the real trendy cocktail parties on the upper west side.

So Voinovich in what can only be considered a fit of pique, lambasted UN Ambassador-designate John Bolton for not being diplomatic enough:

“This is not behavior that should be endorsed as the face of the United States to the world community at the United Nations,” Voinovich said. “It is my opinion that John Bolton is the poster child of what someone in the diplomatic corps should not be.”

Forget for a moment that poster children are used to represent something positive hence this dunce of a Senator uses an entirely inappropriate metaphor. What’s really striking about this statement is that “the face” of John Bolton has been revealed not by the record, but by office gossip, sly inuendo, and the character assassins on lefty websites.

In short Senator Clueless has based his decision to oppose the President on opposition smear tactics.

Being a maverick has its perks. You get flattering references on the front page of the New York Times. The networks will call you whenever they need a Republican face that disagrees with the President. And lefty websites quit calling you a “Rovian automaton” and a “repugnut.”

The downside is that you’re revealed to be a shallow panderer. And I doubt whether the President is going to ask you to fly with him on Air Force One the next time he goes to Ohio. But when it’s all said and done, you end up getting the best of it.

After all, it takes a village to raise a motherless calf. You can always appear in a Hillary ‘08 commercial.

Say goodbye to Superhawk.

For more than 3 years I’ve been posting as Superhawk, a rightwing fanatic whose bilious rants have given more than one moonbat the knipshits.

When I first began to use Superhawk, it was to maintain a certain degree of anonymity, a safe and comfortable refuge from the rhetorical blasts of critics of all stripes. Then when I started this site last September, I used the nickname to establish a seperate identity. Having a semi-famous brother who works in the media, I simply thought it best that I be known in my own right - albeit a silly nickname - rather than being identified as so-and-so’s brother.

Now that I’ve been published a few places (see my article in The American Thinker tomorrow) I’ve decided to drop the nickname and “out” myself. From here on in, “Superhawk” is retired.

One more note…blood is thicker than water, politics, and friendship. You got a problem with my brother, write ABC…don’t bring it to the House.

Here are some quick hits from some of my favorite bloggers.

Pat over at Brainsters Blog is posting a great idea - something I think every blogger should do once and a while; he writes about “Where I Stand.”

I knew there was a reason I like Pat’s site so much; he and I agree on a lot of things. And I think that every so often a blogger should make some simple declarative statements on where they stand on the issues of the day.

Well done, Pat!

This is Thursday which means it’s “Stop the ACLU” blogburst day. Cao is all over voting rights and how the ACLU is working to give convicted felons the right to vote in states where that right currently does not exist:

The 14th Amendment permits states to deny the vote “for participation in rebellion, or other crime.” In 32 states convicted felons have the “privilege” to vote. Only 13 states now forbid convicted felons from voting, with just nine of these imposing lifetime bans. Two states, Vermont and Maine, even allow felons currently doing time to vote like any other citizen. The fact is that it isn’t about the felon’s “rights”. What it comes down to is states rights.

Spot on. And if you haven’t already, stop by Jay’s blog and sign up for the blogburst.

Romeocat at Cathouse Chat is wishing the state of Israel a happy birthday:

I am ashamed to say that I did not realize that today is Israel’s “Fourth of July.” Thanks to Larry, I have a link to Not a Fish - Hag Same’ach! We’re 57 years old. who celebrates the event with cats!

May God bless His people, His chosen nation, and may He protect and cherish them and return to them their Messiah.

Sweet sentiments from a sweet lady!

Then there’s Van Helsing and Moonbattery. I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t get my moonbat fix from Van everyday. And he’s got a real doozy today about a “performance artist:”

This particular piece of performance, or rather “non-performance” art actually preceded Ichiuji climbing up on her stage. It began gradually, with her abstaining from various indulgences like coffee, soda, etc., gradually working her way up through television and newspapers to a self-imposed ban on pretty much everything but pretentiousness, including speech, food, and shelter.

Hysterical!

Beth is blogbitching. Your assignment is to go over immediately and cheer her up.

Basil at Basil’s Blog is blogging blog improvements (say that fast 3 times). Seriously, he’s got a great idea for some additions to your site.

Finally, make sure you visit TJ’s NIF (News-Interesting-Funny) for the best news links. And for you bloggers out there, NIF is the best site to visit when you find yourself suffering from writers block. If you can’t find something to blog about at NIF you don’t have writers block, you’re brain dead.

In some ways, Pat Buchanan is big media’s favorite conservative. He’s brash. He speaks his mind. And he has an awful tendency to put his foot in his mouth thus totally discrediting conservative positions.

In short, big media gets to kill two birds with one stone; they get an entertaining talking head as well as a ready made Bogey man to represent eeeevil conservatives.

A few years back, Pat made a rather innocuous point about the difference between Hitler’s death camps like Auschwitz and concentration camps like Mauthausen that landed him in hot water with the liberal media and branded him as a “holocaust denier.” The point being that inhabitants of concentration camps had a chance at survival in that they were more likely to be worked to death rather than executed outright. This is true as far as it goes, although in the closing days of the war, Himmler had a list with 10,000 high profile names of inmates at concentration camps who he ordered executed before the fall of the Third Reich. Thankfully, the Americans were advancing so quickly in the closing days of the war that many on the list survived simply because there was no time to execute them.

Now Mr. Buchanan has taken on the legacy of Yalta, where Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill ostensibly divided the European continent between the Soviets and the West thus betraying our war aims of freeing all of Europe from oppression. It’s times like this that Buchanan betrays himself for what he is; a mossback conservative, a throw back to the 1950’s paranoids who opposed the formation of the United Nations, our joining NATO, and any other idea that did not conform to the “fortress America” position on foreign policy. This isolationist strain of conservatism in the Republican party is often referred to as the “Robert Taft wing” of the party.

Taft was a Senator from Ohio, son of President William Howard Taft whose name was magic for a generation of Republicans who opposed the New Deal and foreign entanglements of any kind. It was a quaint kind of republicanism that supported the concept of isolationism because America was too good, too pure to sully its hands by mixing it up with peoples in foreign lands. Contrast that with today’s old/new left’s isolationism that seeks to withdraw from the world because America is too evil to engage the rest of the planet and must beg forgiveness for all of our sins, bother real and imagined.

Buchanan’s reading of Yalta and the consequences of that momentous conference is laughable. He takes President Bush’s speech in Riga this past week where the President condemned Soviet occupation of the Baltic states totally out of context:

If Yalta was a betrayal of small nations as immoral as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, why do we venerate Churchill and FDR? At Yalta, this pair secretly ceded those small nations to Stalin, co-signing a cynical “Declaration on Liberated Europe” that was a monstrous lie.

As FDR and Churchill consigned these peoples to a Stalinist hell run by a monster they alternately and affectionately called “Uncle Joe” and “Old Bear,” why are they not in the history books alongside Neville Chamberlain, who sold out the Czechs at Munich by handing the Sudetenland over to Germany? At least the Sudeten Germans wanted to be with Germany. No Christian peoples of Europe ever embraced their Soviet captors or Stalinist quislings.

First of all, the President didn’t call Yalta “immoral” he called Soviet occupation of eastern Europe immoral. The President criticized Yalta as Roosevelt’s contemporaries criticized it: it was at best an expediency, a recognition that there was no way to get Soviet troops to go home once the war was over.

Secondly, where in the wide, wide, world of sports did Buchanan ever get the idea that the Sudeten Germans “wanted to be with Germany?” This was Nazi propaganda that Buchanan has evidently swallowed whole. The problem was that the Sudetenland was composed not only of Germans but of Czechs, Slovenes, Moravians, with a smattering of other minorities and that even a majority of Sudeten Germans had no desire to join the Reich. Hitler’s propaganda machine spun bloodcurdling tales of atrocities committed against the German minority that even Chamberlain took as gospel and which the master appeaser partially used as an excuse to cave in to Hitler’s demands.

Buchanan should know better.

Mr. Buchanan then posits the notion that because the peoples of eastern Europe traded one dictatorship under Hitler for another under Stalin that the west in fact lost World War II:

Other questions arise. If Britain endured six years of war and hundreds of thousands of dead in a war she declared to defend Polish freedom, and Polish freedom was lost to communism, how can we say Britain won the war?

If the West went to war to stop Hitler from dominating Eastern and Central Europe, and Eastern and Central Europe ended up under a tyranny even more odious, as Bush implies, did Western Civilization win the war?

At bottom, World War II was a war of survival. That was the war aim for all western powers; to survive as sovereign, independent nations. Anything else was gravy. France and Britain’s guarantee of Polish sovereignty was a recognition that their own survival was at stake not necessarily an end in and of itself. The mutual defense pact France had with Poland was meant as a deterrent to German aggression. In the end, neither France nor England was able to send one single soldier to defend Poland against the German attack. And for Buchanan to say that Polish “freedom” was “lost to communism” is just plain wrong. Pre World War II Poland was a military dictatorship as harsh as any government imposed on the Poles following the war by Stalin. The fact that the west restored Polish sovereignty only to be thwarted by Stalin’s designs does not negate the accomplishment of the allies’ defeat of the German empire.

Finally, Buchanan asks if the war was worth the sacrifice in blood and treasure and then really jumps the shark when he says the German people didn’t deserve to be liberated because “they voted Hitler in:”

When one considers the losses suffered by Britain and France – hundreds of thousands dead, destitution, bankruptcy, the end of the empires – was World War II worth it, considering that Poland and all the other nations east of the Elbe were lost anyway?

If the objective of the West was the destruction of Nazi Germany, it was a “smashing” success. But why destroy Hitler? If to liberate Germans, it was not worth it. After all, the Germans voted Hitler in

.

The entire thrust of the first statement presupposes that France and England had a choice about going to war against Hitler. This is nuts. Buchanan has said in the past that the United States had no need to fight Hitler because, after all, Hitler never attacked us. All one can say about these statements is that they’re extraordinarily short sighted and myopic. There wasn’t a thinking person alive in the west during the summer of 1939 who didn’t realize that Hitler was not going to stop, that an attack on Poland was a prelude to an attack on Germany’s arch rival France (at which point one assumes Buchanan would grant the French permission to defend themselves) and that Britain, in order to protect itself, would surely come to the aid of the French. In short, despite desperate efforts to avoid it, those last weeks of August in 1939 pointed toward a general European war. France and Britain assumed Russia would join them in the fight against Hitler but ended up underestimating the cynicism of Hitler and the greed of Stalin.

As for Hitler being “voted in” by the German people, perhaps Mr. Buchanan should stop surfing neo-Nazi web sites and read a history book or two. Hitler lost the Presidential election in 1932 by a wide margin to incumbent President Hindenburg. Only by shady maneuvering with other conservative and nationalistic parties was Hitler able to be named Chancellor, an unelected position appointed by the President. Hitler then used the fire at the Reichstag building to declare a state of emergency and using the full power of the state, conducted a referendum on his decision that passed overwhelmingly.

Saying that the German people supported Hitler is one thing. That came later, after he threw off the shackles of Versailles, reoccupied the Rhineland, and the Anschluss with Austria. But to say that Hitler was voted into office is just plain wrong.

Once again with this article Buchanan proves that his brand of conservatism does not reflect the thinking of either a majority of Americans or conservatives in general. And his constant problems with foot in mouth disease is an embarrassment both to himself and the conservative movement.

UPDATE

Ace quotes WF Buckley who says Buchanan is an anti-semite:

As William F. Buckley concluded in a long essay on Pat way back in the late eighties (I think), Buchanan takes a number of positions, each of which seems defensible on its face, and yet, taking them all together, the cumulative impression is that he just hates Jews.

Pat is a traditional Catholic and I know is galled that people think him anti-semitic. I think part of the ruckus over Pat is that he grates on some people and therefore it’s easy to take what he says out of context. The quote on concentration camps is one example that comes to mind. In that case, Buchanan was making the same point made by many scholars of the holocaust - that Nazi’s intentionally inflated the numbers of dead in concentration camps to please Himmler. Why that was taken to mean that Pat was a holocaust denier I have no idea.

Then there’s Pat’s distress over “Zionism” and how our foreign policy is tilted toward Israel in the middle east. Pat thinks it’s not in the national interest to always support Israel. Many times, Pat uses the rhetoric and even the very words of Israel’s mortal enemies to criticize the Jewish nation.

While Pat tries to draw a distinction between Jews and Zionism, there are so few Jews today who do not support the idea of a Jewish homeland that it seems to me foolish to try and seperate the two.

And that may be Pat’s biggest problem: He’s just a fool.

AND STEPHEN GREEN IS BACK! HE IS! HE TRULY IS!

No one does a full frontal fisking like the Drunkmeister himself who after a short blogging hiatus is back at it with a vengance. READ THE WHOLE THING.

UPDATE II

John Hawkins defends Buchanan not for what he said but for what people are calling him; a Nazi apologist and anti-semite:

However, to call him a “Nazi Apologist” or “anti-Semite” because he believes the US should have stayed out of WW2 is ridiculous since Buchanan is just being consistent. He’s a Paleocon, he’s an isolationist, and as an isolationist, he’s just being consistent when he says we should have stayed out of WW2.

Cross Posted at Blogger News Network