Right Wing Nut House

It’s been a while since I paid any attention to the “catalyst for the anti-war movement,” Cindy Sheehan. This is not because she has dropped below the radar of the mainstream press because she hasn’t. Her recent foray into international politics has guaranteed that her 15 minutes of fame usually vouchsafed by the media will keep being renewed like some horrible sitcom that refuses to die. Her trip to the socialist paradise of Venezuela last month where she played kissy-face with one of the most nauseating leaders on the planet is a case in point.

Hugo Chavez is not only an anti-American Latin lefty thug but also one of the weirdest dictators you’re likely to run into. His weekly four-hour rants are broadcast nationwide. The name of the show “Hello President,” features Chavez reading newspapers and commenting on the issues of the day. One recent show lasted 6 hours. Considering that Americans won’t even watch George Clooney for three hours, it tells you something about this guy’s ego that he actually believes the long-suffering people of Venezuela tune in to watch this comedian do his schtick. At least Cuba’s Fidel Castro has a captive audience during his weekly 3 hour ravings, as the Commandante appears on all broadcast and radio channels at the same time. Chavez has to compete with soccer, Latin music shows, and other more uplifting programs which probably mean that his ratings are as close to zero as can be imagined.

But that didn’t stop our peace mom from appearing with him at something called the “World Social Forum,” an annual gathering of anti-war and anti-globalization activists. During a live “Hello President” insomnia-curing show, Chavez showed why the CIA would be doing the world a huge favor if they deposed this fellow:

Chavez said Sheehan had invited him to join her April protest at Bush’s Crawford, Texas, ranch. Sheehan, whose 24-year-old soldier son Casey was killed in Iraq in 2004, held a vigil outside Bush’s ranch during the president’s vacation in August, attracting some 12,000 peace activists and reinvigorating the national anti-war movement.

“Maybe I’ll put up my tent also,” Chavez said, to applause from an audience invited to his weekly broadcast on the final day of the World Social Forum, an annual gathering of anti-war and anti-globalization activists.

Chavez said his government would help protest the war in Iraq by supporting a drive to gather petitions and delivering them to the U.S. Embassy in Caracas. Chavez, who before the war in Iraq had friendly relations with Saddam Hussein, has been a frequent and strident critic of the war.

First, it is important to note that this story was written by the Associated Press, consistently one of Sheehan’s biggest boosters. The use of the figure “12,000″ protesters at Crawford is laughably over-inflated. Sheehan, by order of the local Sheriff, had about 200 people camping out with her at any one time during her 5 week stay in Crawford, Texas. That, plus the fact that no “event” conjured up by her handlers and PR gurus ever drew more than 2-3,000 people puts the lie to that AP figure. There were never anywhere near 12,000 anti-war activists at any one time within 50 miles of the President’s ranch.

It is just one more example of the media’s desire to portray Sheehan as the head of a massive grass roots movement to end the war. There is plenty of dissatisfaction by both the right and the left with the way that things are going in Iraq. But to date, that unease has not translated into the kind of massive protests seen during the Viet Nam War. But that hasn’t seemed to stop the media - and the AP especially from turning Sheehan into some kind of peace goddess. Check out this AP piece that appeared today and tell me if you don’t get the sense that there’s a halo surrounding Sheehan:

Still liable to tear up when talking about her son, she says her issue is right and wrong, not left and right. She points out that she has criticized Democrats, including Feinstein, for their war stance and has no problem supporting Republicans who oppose the war.

She is co-founder of the nonprofit Gold Star Families for Peace, wrote a book “Not One More Mother’s Child,” and is working on another.

She gets help from groups including CODEPINK, a national woman’s peace group, and Veterans for Peace. Her own operation is small - herself, her sister and someone who helps out from time to time answering e-mail.

First of all, CODEPINK is much, much more than just a “woman’s peace group.” It is one of the more radical anti-globalization, anti-war, and pro-Palestinian groups out there. The fact that there are precious few mentions of the stomach-turning anti-semitism spouted by Sheehan should tell you that for far too long, the press has protected Sheehan by leaving out her incredibly viral anti-Semitic and anti-American rants and, instead concentrated on this poor little suburban mom who only wanted to meet with the President to ask him why her son had to die. That the press would have the effrontery to actually think that anyone older than 5 years of age believed that shows how desperate some in the press are to have the fantasies they write about with regard to an anti-war movement come true.

In the end, there simply is no massive wave of unrest over the war. There isn’t even the beginnings of it. What we have are the very same people who opposed the Iraq war in the first place, making the same arguments and tossing about the same blood libels about the Jews, the “neocons,” big oil, and Bush “cronies.” It’s enough to make one sick except we’ve grown so used to it by now that it has simply faded into the background cacophony of media bile spilled over the President and the war.

Sheehan will continue to be trotted out now and again in the hopes that her presence will add “legitimacy” to the anti-war crowd. But until the American people themselves - who are at best ambivalent at the moment about our continuing presence in Iraq - become convinced that the troops should come home and back that up with the kind of outrage we saw 40 years ago, Sheehan will remain a curiosity, an afterthought created by the media and manipulated by radicals who would like nothing better than to see the United States humiliated and their own radical socialist agenda become the law of the land.

In some ways, I sympathize with the media and their efforts to try and cover the confusing twists, turns, ins and outs of the Iraq War. The political situation especially is so muddled that one literally needs a scorecard to tell who the players are.

The insurgency also has so many elements as to almost defy belief. Then there are the shadowy players - the militias - who at times seem to be playing both sides against the middle. Coalition forces have used some of the militias to help with local security while these same militias have carried out sectarian attacks that have contributed mightily to the instability in the country.

What’s a reporter/network/newspaper to do?

They can start by rolling up their sleeves and getting their hands dirty. By that I mean if reporters are to do their jobs it is absolutely essential that they get beyond the body counts and simplistic summaries of which political parties (or insurgent groups) are doing what to whom and start giving context to what is going on in country. In order to carry out that mission, reporters are going to have to start doing a little of their own work and stop relying on stringers and hangers-on for information that turns out to be little better than rumor.

Never has the failings of the American media in Iraq been more obvious than the recent reporting on sectarian violence - strife that continues at fairly high level despite assurances by officials of the American military and Iraqi government that the situation is much better. But the wild, out of control rumor mongering by the western media during the worst of the violence highlighted the pathetically poor job being done by in-country reporters who evidently fell for al Qaeda in Iraq propaganda in a disinformation operation that was as carefully planned by the terrorists as the bombing of the Golden Shrine in Samarra itself.

Yes we should cut them plenty of slack given the horrible security conditions for Americans outside of the fortified Green Zone. A western face that would show itself at a demonstration or any other gathering of Iraqis belongs to a brave individual indeed. But the point I’m trying to make is that there is good reporting from Iraq - reporting that gives depth and understanding to the problems and personalities at play and goes beyond the gory details of terrorist attacks and body counts that make up so much of the “news” that filters down to the average American. The question is why there isn’t a good deal more of it.

Specifically, both the New York Times and Washington Post have had excellent backgrounders on Iraqi militias in the past month (both articles now behind pay archive walls). Both articles played the story fairly straight pointing out that both Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Militia and the much larger and more influential Badr Brigades (which is the armed wing of the major political party in Iraq the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq or SCIRI) have infiltrated the police and the army as well as being virtually independent of any government control. And while they have worked with American forces at times to take out al Qaeda in Iraq cells, these militias remain outside the law for the most part and have been accused (with some evidence) of dispensing a kind of vigilante justice to Sunni Muslims who they believe are part of the insurgency.

Also, CNN recently did a long (7 minute) piece on al-Sadr and his growing influence on the political landscape of Iraq. Sadr has gone from being a thorn in the side of the American military to being a thorn in the side of the government in that his call for an immediate American withdrawal as well as his poorly disguised fealty to Iran flies in the face of the more moderate Shia elements who are trying to form a government with the Kurds and Sunnis.

Then there are the tribal militias who tend to be little better than outlaw gangs. Practicing murder, rape, extortion, and outright thievery, many of these tribal militias carry out revenge killings for money and are considered a big part of the monumental law and order problem in Iraq today. That problem was hugely exacerbated by Saddam Hussein who, in the final days of his regime, flung open the doors of his prisons and let loose an army of common criminals estimated at up to 100,000 murderers, rapists, thieves, and kidnappers. These criminals have formed ill-organized gangs who prey upon Iraqi citizens of all religious stripes and are a security problem on top of the other miseries that the new government must deal with.

StrategyPage:

For the average Iraqi, the biggest complaint is crime. Murder, extortion, robbery, burglary, kidnapping, muggings and carjackings are things that every Iraqi, especially in Baghdad, have to worry about. There are thousands of criminal gangs in Iraq. Some of them are basically enforcers for tribal leadership or the local religious leader. These semi-legitimate gangs get “paid” by whatever they are given, or take, in return for their protective services. This is basically an extortion racket, and the police will often leave these guys alone as long as they don’t get greedy, and more violent.

But the most worrisome gangs are those that kidnap, murder (for hire, or as a side effect of some other crime), rape and barge into, and loot, peoples homes. Many of the violent gangs are very temporary, either because the cops, or local vigilantes catch them, or because members find less stressful, and dangerous, employment.

The most common crime fighting tactic is to put more gunmen on the street, particularly at night. For most of Iraq, the police have brought peace to the streets in daylight. But night is another matter. That’s when more of the criminals are about, and when they are harder to catch. Most police don’t like to operate at night. There are several thousand special police (SWAT and the like) who are trained and equipped to go gangster hunting at night, and some of these are being assigned to that task. But for the moment, the priority is still taking down terrorist gangs.

The ins and outs of the political situation is much easier to report but even here, most reporters simply fall back on tired, shallow analyses that reveal little of the major forces at work to unify the country on one hand and drive the factions apart on the other. For instance, the number one reason that the SCIRI is so dominant is a very simple one; it has been organizing and planning for regime change for nearly 30 years.

The party formed during the 1970’s and organized effectively through their offices in Damascus and Tehran. Then after the fall of Saddam, the SCIRI hit the ground running and were miles ahead of any other political party that had to start almost from scratch, although Ayad Allawi’s secular Iraqi National Accord party had been around since the early 1990’s. The fact is, while there were political organizations involving all the factions, the kind of nuts and bolts organizing done by SCIRI was far beyond the scope of any Kurdish or Sunni group. It goes without saying that this kind of advantage translated into success for the SCIRI at the polls.

Then there is the political tug of war within the umbrella group of Shia parties that is presently trying to form a coalition to run the government. Some Shia factions wish to cut out the Sunnis and Kurds entirely while others wish to include them. The situation is further muddied by the machinations of smaller Shia parties that are jostling for cabinet posts and other means of influence. And there are the Kurds and Sunnis with their own factions, particularly the Sunnis whose umbrella group includes those who are fighting the Americans and the government itself as well as more moderate Sunnis like Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawer who served as interim President following the handover of sovereignty in June, 2004 and currently serves as one of three Vice Presidents.

Clearly, much of this information would be of little interest to the average reader. But that is no excuse for the kind of cynical, lazy, and incomplete reporting done by people whose job is to see that Americans are informed about what is going on in a place where their sons and daughters are helping to rebuild a country at great personal danger and sacrifice to themselves.

As Americans, we should demand that they do a better job.

This is disappointing but not unexpected:

All British and United States troops serving in Iraq will be withdrawn within a year in an effort to bring peace and stability to the country.

The news came as defence chiefs admitted privately that the British troop commitment in Afghanistan may last for up to 10 years.

The planned pull-out from Iraq follows the acceptance by London and Washington that the presence of the coalition, mainly composed of British and US troops, is now seen as the main obstacle to peace.

According to a senior defence source directly involved in planning the withdrawal, Britain is the driving force behind the scheme. The early spring of next year has been identified as the optimum time for the start of the complex and dangerous operation.

The italicized portion of that excerpt is not in quotes which indicates a bit of editorializing by the Telegraph. The only people in the American government who are making that claim are the leakers in the intelligence establishment who have been at war with the Bush Administration since before the liberation of Iraq. Even the recently leaked National Intelligence Estimate from 2003 on Iraq did not claim that the insurgency would be “driven by the occupation” but rather by sectarian and other factors unleashed by the downfall of Saddam.

The idea that Britain is the “driving force” behind this plan is a smokescreen. If true, the idea to float this trial balloon originated in Washington. I just can’t believe that the Brits would even talk to anyone in the press about this without clearing it with the Bush Administration. Junior coalition partners do no drive policy.

The real question we should be asking is has the situation on the ground materially changed in the past few weeks to justify the sudden and complete pullout of coalition forces?

The answer to that depends on who you talk to. American commanders have given the Iraqi security forces middling to high marks for the way they handled the sectarian violence following the destruction of the Shrine in Samarra. Would the 325,000 Iraqis - the projected force structure by the end of this year - be able to manage security for the country without the help of coalition forces by next spring? That seems an open question at the moment. And anyone who thinks they can project the course of political events in Iraq over the next year which would impact the answer to that question dramatically, please give me a call and handle my stock portfolio; someone so good at prognosticating an unknowable future would make me a millionaire in a couple of months.

Also, the idea that we would precipitously withdraw all of our forces willy nilly is a left wing fantasy. As much as liberals would like to re-live their greatest triumph of watching America humiliated a la the last helicopter lifting off the roof of our embassy in Saigon, it ain’t going to happen. There is going to be a residual American presence of perhaps 25,000 men - a tripwire force - to prevent Iran and Syria from getting any grandiose ideas about taking advantage of Iraq’s weakness vis a vis any outside threat. And drawing down to that number will probably be graduated process - unless Democrats seize control of Congress in November in which case look for a repeat of the Democratic Congressional “triumph” of the class of ‘74 (generally considered the most liberal Congress in recent memory) in yanking funding for the war.

And that brings us to the real reason for this trial balloon; the growing prospect that the Democrats will indeed take control of at least the Senate and perhaps the House as well in the upcoming midterm elections. As remote as that prospect seemed as recently as 3 months ago, the fact is that the numbers have been trending Democratic since early last summer. It has not reached the point yet that the big gun prognosticators have upped the number of at risk Republican House seats significantly, but that could change if a rush of Republican retirements - as reported here - come to pass:

“If you look at past experience, it would suggest that you tend not to get a last-minute rush” of retirements, said Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “But I don’t know if that’s going to be the case this time. I think that actually the scandals, the problems, the headaches may cause a number of people two or three months from now to decide that maybe it’s time for a change, maybe they need to spend more time with their families. … I think we could see up to 40.”

Forty open seats with Republicans probably defending the overwhelming majority of them could - could - spell disaster for the party in November.

For the moment (and as long as the redistricting plan in Texas remains in effect) the Republicans would appear to have the strength to be able to hang on to their House majority by the slimmest of margins. But if Texas is forced to alter its district lines, all bets would be off. From a nuts and bolts point of view, losing 4 or 5 seats in any Texas redistricting challenge could tip the balance in favor of the Democrats nationally.

This scenario doesn’t take into account an energized Democratic party and a depressed Republican one. Even in so-called “safe” GOP seats (margin of victory in 2002 at +55%) it doesn’t take a soothsayer to tell you that a switch of as little as 7-8 thousand votes in a few districts that are now considered “safe” could spell the difference in who controls the House in January, 2007.

And that, dear readers, would mean that George W. Bush would face at the very least impeachment proceedings in the Judiciary Committee. A Democratic Congress would have Representative John Conyers as Chairman of that Committee and the frothing-at-the-mouth conspiracy nut already has an impeachment report all written up and ready to present to the Committee. It will probably be the first order of business for that Committee come January.

Which brings us back to Iraq and this trial balloon. There is little doubt that Iraq is currently a drag on GOP electoral fortunes. If the numbers keep getting worse, Bush may feel that he has no choice but to withdraw in order to prevent the catastrophe of having to fight off an impeachment inquiry. And at the moment, there is nothing that energizes the Democratic base more than the delicious prospect of humiliating George Bush and the Republicans by holding impeachment hearings that would destroy the Bush presidency.

There is another, less likely factor driving this trial balloon; the belief that Iran will become such a problem over the next year that we would have little choice but to initiate some kind of large scale military action against the mullahs. If so, re-deploying our forces to facilitate such an attack would make sense. It is extremely doubtful the new Iraqi government would allow any such attack on Iran given their inability to fight off an external threat from such a large army so any military action against the mullahs would have to be launched from somewhere else.

The problem with this scenario is that it is unclear whether any large scale raid to take out Iranian nuclear capability could solve the twin problems of overthrowing the mullahs and destroying the Iranian nuclear program. Only a massive invasion involving hundreds of thousands of troops could accomplish both those goals Thus, it is not likely that any military action involving a significant number of American ground troops is probably in the cards.

I have little doubt that this is a serious proposal and that the Administration will be carefully looking at both reaction from the public and Congressional Republicans to see if such an action would be efficacious in the present circumstances. What worries me is that many Republicans would see such a proposal as a life preserver and grab onto it in hopes that it might save their political hides in November.

Before signing on, I would suggest they and the rest of us wait to hear from our military commanders on the ground in Iraq. From what they’ve said recently, there would be little justification for such a pullout. But given the bleak political realities facing the Administration, they may have little choice but to go along with such a proposal which, in my humble opinion, would betray the sacrifice of the men and women who have fought so long and hard in Iraq as well as the sacrifice of their families.

UPDATE

The US military command in Iraq is specifically denying these reports:

Meanwhile, the U.S. military in Iraq said on Sunday media reports that America and Britain planned to pull all troops out of Iraq by spring 2007 were “completely false,” reiterating that there was no timetable for withdrawal.

Two British newspapers reported on Sunday that the pull-out plan followed an acceptance by the two governments that the presence of foreign troops in Iraq was now an obstacle to securing peace.

But a spokesman for the U.S. military in Iraq reiterated previous statements by U.S. and Iraqi officials that foreign troops would be gradually withdrawn from the country once Iraqi security forces were capable of guaranteeing security.

“This news report on a withdrawal of forces within a set timeframe is completely false,” Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson said of the stories in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Mirror, which quoted unnamed senior defense ministry sources.

(HT: The Next Hurrah)

This is perfectly in keeping with a trial balloon. The military can safely deny such a report.

But watch the first comments on this report from a senior Administration official - Rumsfeld, Hadley, or Rice. Unless there is a categorical denial, this story will get legs over the next few days.

My post last Monday that dealt with exaggerated reporting by the MSM of the Iraq “civil war” turned out to be rather prescient if I do say so myself.

Yesterday, General George Casey, America’s top military commander in Iraq, gave a detailed analysis of what went on during the admittedly serious but hysterically over dramatized violence following the destruction of the golden dome on the Shia shrine in Samarra and came to the conclusion that both in numbers of incidents and severity of the violence, the MSM failed miserably in reporting accurately what was going on:

The top U.S. commander in Iraq yesterday declared an end to a 10-day wave of sectarian violence that killed an estimated 350 civilians, asserting that many reports of violence were “exaggerated.”

“It appears that the crisis has passed,” said Army Gen. George Casey, giving a detailed public report card. “But we all should be clear that Iraqis remain under threat of terrorist attacks by those who will stop at nothing to undermine the formation of this constitutionally elected government. … They tried to have this [be] the straw that broke the camel’s back, and it failed.”

(HT: Powerline)

As I wrote on Monday (my information coming from about a dozen Iraqi bloggers that any reporter could have read if they took the time), Al Qaeda in Iraq made it part of their strategy to have propaganda cadres fan out and spread false stories and rumors about the violence that our MSM, eager to finally have their three year old predictions of civil war in Iraq come true, fell for hook, line, and sinker: Here’s what I wrote about the media’s predictions about civil war on Monday:

The Iraq “civil war” theme almost immediately became media short hand for the failures of the Bush Administration. It has since become a yardstick to measure the incompetence of the authorities to deal with the daunting set of problems facing the country in the aftermath of the war and in trying to build a strong government based on democratic values. But has the expectation of civil war led to reporters in Iraq swallowing disinformation from al Qaeda cells about horrendous death and destruction across the country that simply doesn’t exist?

General Casey:

He also said the number of violent incidents turned out to be lower than press and security forces reported in the immediate aftermath of the bombing of the revered Shi’ite Askariya mosque in Samarra, north of Baghdad. Gen. Casey said that in a reported 30 attacks on mosques, only two were severely damaged. Of eight mosques that were reported damaged, inspections showed only one had damage — a broken window.

“The overall levels of violence did not increase substantially as a result of the bombing,” he said in a statement that seems at odds with the 10 days of television footage and commentary. “It took us a few days to sort our way through what we considered in a lot of cases to be exaggerated reports.”

John Hinderaker points out that this kind of biased reporting is impossible to counter:

Initial reports of deaths in violence that followed the mosque bombing turned out to be inflated by a factor of four. In this and other respects, reporting on sectarian violence in Iraq resembles the reporting on Hurricane Katrina. No doubt many in the press and on the left are disappointed that al Qaeda’s effort to provoke civil war in Iraq has failed. But, once again, misleading headlines do damage that subsequent corrections can’t repair.

By most credible reports - both from Iraq and the Pentagon - most of the the violence done by sectarian mobs was either non-existent or blown out of proportion. Par for the course when examining how the MSM continues to misinform the public about what is really going on in Iraq and how the Iraqi people are struggling to overcome the numerous problems associated with re-building a nation from scratch.

Thinking about my poor attitude toward the study of history when I was in high school and college and then realizing how much I love the subject today, I marvel at the fact that it was a handful of books on the subject that caused me to change my mind and make the independent study of American history my most consistent avocation during the last 30 years.

Without a doubt, the one historian who opened my mind to the fascinating and sometimes maddening examination of America’s past more than any other was Bruce Catton. His trilogy of the Union’s Army of the Potomac culminating in the 1954 Pulitzer Prize winning A Stillness at Appomattox along with his other great trilogy A Centennial History of the Civil War (called the best short history of the Civil War ever written), displayed not only a careful and considered historian’s eye for important details but a writing style that brought history to life in a way that few historians have been able to do before or since.

One reviewer wrote ” If every historian wrote like Bruce Catton, no one would read fiction” - a sentiment that I agree with wholeheartedly. The man who succeeded him as editor of American Heritage magazine Oliver Jensen wrote of Catton, “There is a near-magic power of imagination in Catton’s work that seemed to project him physically into the battlefields, along the dusty roads and to the campfires of another age.”

And that is what drove my interest in history; this almost surreal ability of some historians to take the reader back in time, to bring to life long dead and forgotten heroes and not only show you how they lived but actually place the reader in the shoes of the giants in order to get a feel for why they made the decisions they did. If nothing else, good history is not the study of when or how or what; the best histories answer the question why and allows the reader then to draw their own conclusions about the characters and their times.

The fact that narrative histories like Catton’s are frowned on by the Academy largely because they are sometimes poorly or incompletely sourced as well as failing to illuminate history in a scholarly manner (most academic historians not favoring such a linear approach to the study of history) does nothing to lessen my enjoyment in reading them. And while I respect the academics for their tireless and learned contributions to our national narrative, I believe that at bottom, there is much to be said for viewing history as a storytelling experience. It makes America’s past seem more accessible, more available to we, the consumers of knowledge.

I’m sure each of us has their favorite historians. There are so many good ones (with both left and right “takes” on America’s past) that any list I attempt to compile here would be incomplete. But for myself, the inheritor of Bruce Catton’s mantle of favorite narrative historian has to go to David Hackett Fischer.

Fischer’s books on early America are brilliantly written labors of love. It is clear that Professor Fischer has a deep and abiding respect for our ancestors whose toil and sacrifice made the United States what it is today. Two of his books had a profound affect on me: Paul Revere’s Ride (1994) and Washington’s Crossing (2004), the latter winning the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for history.

I believe what Bruce Catton was as an historian to the Civil War, Fischer is to early America. With a prose style that is achingly beautiful and a storyteller’s ear for gleaning what would be of most interest to his audience, Fischer has an uncanny ability to draw the reader into the story so that at times, you feel as if you were either a fly on the wall (such as when Washington was holding one of his councils of war with his officers) or, in the case of Revere, riding on the back of his horse as he rode through the night sounding his immortal alarm.

In the March, 2006 on-line edition of The American Enterprise - the monthly publication of The American Enterprise Institute - TAE interviews the historian about a variety of subjects including, how growing up in Baltimore colored his appreciation of history:

A lot of history had happened around Baltimore. I had an aunt who was blind and in her 90s. She told a story to my cousins and my brother and me—it was a big sprawling family—about a July day when from her home on a farm north of Baltimore there was a sound like the wind in the trees. She went outside and there was no wind. She looked up the road and saw a line of wagons as far as she could see. They were the wounded from Gettysburg.

That was told to us when we were very small, and I think that’s the recipe for making a historian. It was the immediacy of those events—the sense that they were happening to us in some way.

Indeed, Catton tells a similar tale of what ignited his passion for history. Being much older (the historian was born in 1899), Catton can recall sitting in front of the general store of his rural Michigan home town and listening to the old veterans of the Civil War talk about their adventures. His quest to tell their story also brings to mind the labors of Stephen Ambrose whose series of books on the men who fought World War II were written with those aging veterans in mind.

Fischer pulls no punches regarding his disdain for some historians on the left who have taken to “moralizing” about America’s past:

I quoted in that book a British historian who said that what British readers want to know about Napoleon is whether he was a good or a bad man. People want that sort of simple answer to a complex question. These people you speak of were very complicated, and we are increasingly getting simple answers to complex judgments of people in the past.

Professor Fischer sees this attitude changing:

Yes, things are changing very rapidly in academe. I think it was partly a generational phenomenon. The generation that came of age in the 1960s is now approaching retirement in the universities, and their children and grandchildren are very different in the way they think about the world. The excesses of these movements always build in their own corrections.

Fischer speaks to the question of the changing nature of how we are looking at America’s founding:

During the 1970s and ’80s, the history sections moved to the back of the bookstore, and other disciplines in the universities cultivated non-historical or even anti-historical ways of thinking: They looked for timeless abstractions in the social sciences, or theoretical models in economics that transcended era and place. Then in the ’90s a sudden change appeared. Econometric history began to flourish. We got new historical movements in literature departments. My colleagues in literature are increasingly writing historically about their subjects. In philosophy, the history of ideas is what’s growing. The most rapidly expanding field in political science is called Politics in History.

I scratch my head about this. Why is it happening? Did people suddenly discover that history was happening to them, via the collapse of the Soviet Union? Or was it a revulsion against those timeless abstractions, those models like Marx and Freud, that didn’t seem to work very well as the world changed? Whatever it was, it’s a thought revolution of profound importance.

Then there’s the special case of the popularity of the Revolution and the early Republic. We’ve been through other periods of popularity of certain fields: World War II in the 1990s and the Civil War in the 1960s. They were driven by anniversaries. The Revolution and early Republic booms are not anniversary-connected.

In the interview, Fischer also reveals several aspects of his personal politics as well as some fascinating thoughts on America today as it relates to America of 300 years ago.

I have yet to read Professor Fischer’s newest effort Liberty and Freedom which deals with those concepts and what they’ve meant to America since her founding. If it is anything like his other works I’ve read, I’m sure to look forward to a few sleepless nights as I take another journey with a master storyteller whose writing whisks us back in time so that we can live the lives of our ancestors and see the world through their eyes.

Even a casual visitor to this site knows how much I love films. While I have an affinity for older films (pre 1960) there is much to be said for movies from every era, every genre.

I’m not much for romantic films although a good mystery/romance like Bogart’s The Big Sleep are among the best films ever made. And I enjoy a good comedy now and again if the script is good and the story interesting. I usually find that the director of a comedy is as important if not more so than the actors. A George Cukor or Ivan Reitman can make me laugh almost anytime.

But I love action films. And sci-fi as long as it has decent FX. But any horror film made after Alfred Hitchcock died is a waste of time as far as I’m concerned (with 3 or 4 notable exceptions). In short, I would rather watch a movie than almost anything else. Exceptions to the rule include the White Sox and My Beloved Bears. Beyond that, I have yet to see a complete episode of Seinfeld, or Friends, or Everyone Loves Raymond or any other sit-com since M*A*S*H* went off the air. And the number of dramatic series I’ve watched could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

The point is Zsu-Zsu and I are getting antsy. It is becoming harder and harder to find a recently released movie to watch that we haven’t seen already. In desperation, we hit the video store the other night and rented 5 films; only one of them a new release (The Legend of Zorro) and the other four movies from the 1970’s-90’s. With the Comcast On Demand option (and the Digital Platinum package that gives us 50+ movie channels) we have rarely had to go to Blockbuster for movies to satisfy us both. In fact, since we get almost all non-new release movies for free, we rarely need to shell out extra money to feed our addiction.

And that’s what has me worried. In the last two years, we have been to the video store a total of 4 times. In addition, I found it much too easy to count up the number of films we were willing to shell out $3.99 to watch on a pay-per-view basis instead of waiting until it came to one of our subscription movie channels. There were exactly 7 films since April of 2004 that we’ve paid to see outside of our subscribed movie networks.

The problem is that I can remember in years past renting 7 new releases in a month. It is not a stretch to say that something has happened in Hollywood that has affected both the quality and quantity of films. Forget the dearth of family films or Hollywood’s left wing slant. The sad fact is that the product that Hollywood is putting on the street just plain sucks. And the reason has less to do with money and more to do with a lack of dedication to the art of moviemaking.

Films are different than any other art form because making them is an artistic “process” rather than a singular burst of creative energy. There are so many layers of production on a Hollywood movie as to almost defy belief. It takes literally thousands of talented people to take the raw film and turn it into the polished, finished product we see in theaters or on DVD. There are several different edits that must be performed. There’s sound of course and music but there are other aspects of sound production not readily recognizable that fill in the background of the film and in many ways give it extra richness and heft.

Even the simplest films have FX of some kind today. And then there’s continuity edits to make sure there are no jarring anomalies that take us out of the world created by the film makers. And then there’s all the pre-production work such as script writing (which has always resembled mud wrestling as the director, producer, and writer clash on what works and what doesn’t), production designers, lighting, props, set construction, and on and on.

This army has always been a part of moviemaking. But the process itself was usually controlled by someone with either the good sense to get out of a talented director’s way or someone who really knew the artistic side of moviemaking. This was the producer, someone who had a finger in all the production pies and who was intimately familiar with the project and the director’s overall vision of what the finished product would look like.

The problem today is that Hollywood in many respects is a victim of its own success. The public demand for bigger, better, faster translates into ruinously expensive projects that cost more than the gross domestic products of some countries. No studio is going to give that kind of money to anyone without having a hand in the production. This is why so many “blockbusters” turn out instead to be simply “busters.” The interference of studio bean counters in the creative process has ruined the big budget film (Spielberg and LOTR director Peter Jackson are big enough they can make their own turkeys with very little help).

But what about the smaller films?

First, there aren’t as many of them. And even “small” films can cost around $80 million dollars to make and promote. For example, the comedy Cheaper By the Dozen released in late 2003 cost $70 million dollars to produce and promote. While it was a hit, making $190 million at the box office, the fact is most films of that size are flops, grossing less than $50 million.

And when we talk about losing twenty or thirty million dollars, we’re not talking about government money. Twenty million means almost as much to a studio as it does to you and me.

It isn’t just fewer movies coming out. It’s the kind of movies that are produced today. Have you noticed how many movies are sequels, or remakes of successful films in the past? And can you believe all the movies they’ve been making out of comic book characters and old TV shows?

Films are no longer as much a creative endeavor as they are a way to separate you from your money in return for 2 hours of boredom killing. Guess who gets the raw end of that deal. While we make fun of a movie like Brokeback Mountain there are people like me who can’t wait to see it for the simple reason that it’s different! The formulaic way in which Hollywood approaches movie making today is so tiresome that they are losing avid film buffs like me who refuse to spend money on either horrid remakes of good films or movies about TV shows that I never watched when they were on in the first place.

The anti-Americanism of an Oliver Stone or a Sean Penn also makes it difficult for people to connect with films. Clooney’s Syriana may very well be a good film despite it’s anti-Bush take. But Americans generally are so sick of the left’s attempt to smear our motives and efforts that getting past the blatantly anti-government tone in these films becomes impossible. It’s not that Hollywood generally hates America so much as it hates the movie-going public. It’s arrogance and snobbishness about middle America and its values and beliefs is on display in so many movies that people would rather stay at home and watch re-runs of apolitical sit coms than spend $6 being preached to about how stupid they are.

I will not be watching the Oscars this year. I have no desire to watch people congratulating themselves for ruining an industry that used to be known as “The Dream Factory.”

Now, it’s just a factory. And the products it’s turning out are unsafe, smelly, and bad for your health.

One of my favorite movies is The Caine Mutiny which stars Humphrey Bogart as the Captain of a World War II destroyer whose maniacal obsession with Navy regulations as well as a strange, disquieting habit of rolling three ball bearings around and around in his hand whenever he was under pressure earned Bogey an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor (losing that year to Brando’s On the Waterfront).

The film is well worth seeing if only to enjoy Fred McMurray’s performance as the spineless heel who first advocates mutiny against the tyrannical Captain Queeg but in the end, fails to back up the mutineers at the trial. And the hugely underrated Jose Ferrer (see his Cyrano de Bergerac for proof) as the defense attorney, whose cross examination of the Captain is at once both devastating and sad, also makes viewing the film a must see.

A major point in the film that reveals Captain Queeg’s mental imbalance occurs when he begins a ship-wide search for some strawberries that have gone “missing.” Queeg is reliving what he considers one of his career highlights when, as a junior officer, he led a successful search for some missing cheese. The hunt for the strawberries takes on a surreal quality as the ship is turned upside down in an effort to find the fruit that, we are eventually told, was eaten by two mess mates who are terrified of Queeg’s wrath.

Queeg never finds the strawberries. But reading the reports in the MSM over the last two days about the “new” information contained in the Katrina tapes, I am happy to say that the media has taken up Captain Queeg’s quest and has indeed, solved the mystery of the missing strawberries; they were in the White House all along:

Three days after Hurricane Katrina wiped out most of New Orleans, President Bush appeared on television and said, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” His staff has spent the past six months trying to take back, modify or explain away those 10 words.

The release of a pre-storm video showing officials warning Bush during a conference call that the hurricane approaching the Gulf Coast posed a dire threat to the city and its levees has revived a dispute the White House had hoped to put behind it: Was the president misinformed, misspoken or misleading?

The video leaves little doubt that key people in government did anticipate that the levees might not hold. To critics, especially Democrats but even some Republicans, it reinforces the conclusion that the government at its highest levels failed to respond aggressively enough to the danger bearing down on New Orleans. To Bush aides, the seeming conflict between Bush’s public statements and the private deliberations captured on tape reflects little more than an inartful statement opponents are exploiting for political purposes.

The metaphor of the missing strawberries is apt for more than just the obvious reason that this is the biggest non-story of the year to date. As I mentioned yesterday, both the substance and thrust of these pre-Katrina meetings had been widely disseminated months ago. The real Queeg-like comparison is a raging triumphalism regarding what the left sees as another chance to accomplish what the first go around with the strawberries/federal Katrina response failed to do; outrage the American public.

Ginning up public disgust with the Bush Administration has been a hard slog for the media. They have evinced so much desperation in trying to manipulate public perceptions of the President they have gone so far as to try and make an impeachable offense out of giving a Republican shill, who masqueraded as a gay prostitute by night, press room credentials so that he could toss softball questions at Press Secretary McClellan. The Gannon-Guckert “scandal” showed how far the left was willing to go to find those elusive strawberries.

Other strawberry hunting excursions included the Downing Street memos (no missing fruit in England), Bush “lied” about WMD (strawberries don’t grow in the desert), we could have prevented the attacks on 9/11 (New York strawberries are too expensive), and we “outsourced” the capture of Osama (no good trying to compare strawberries with blueberries). There have been a half a dozen more efforts to pin the theft of the strawberries on Bush, each one more laughable than the next. In the end, the public has been troubled by Bush but have yet to abandon him entirely. Recent polls have been all over the lot (thanks to some incredibly strange methodology) which usually reveals a volatility in public perceptions which go up and down according to the news of the day.

This is why the Katrina response has been resurrected at this time. Apparently, most of the tapes now being shown were in the film vaults of the news nets all along. Howard Kurtz:

In fact, we’ve already had transcripts of the meeting, so all this did was provide television with some much-needed pictures. (In fact, all the networks had the FEMA video in their archives but didn’t realize the news value.)

NBC’s Lisa Myers yesterday obtained a videotape of another meeting in which Brownie–who’s been blaming just about everything on the White House and Chertoff–said Bush was “really engaged” and “asking a lot of good questions.” On that tape, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco reports that the New Orleans levees had not been breached.

If the nets had the FEMA video all along, why make a big issue of it now? Sometimes you have to trod over old ground when searching for missing strawberries lest they escape down the rabbit hole.

That triumphalism mentioned above finds no better voice than in the impeachment rants of leftist dreamers. This comment was left on my Katrina post yesterday:

On and on goes the great liar, not to be confused with the great communicator, daily deceiving the lemmings in the republican party who are in for a very rude awakening this November. He will thankfully be removed from office next year along with the other members of the cabal of evil. Oh what a glorious day that will be.

Sounds like Captain Queeg is alive and well.

An abbreviated Carnival this week thanks to my laziness and and general blog ennui which has gotten in the way of promoting the event properly. For that, I apologize to my regular submitters. Also, it would probably help if I got back to a set day for the Carnival and then stick to it. However, this would necessitate a level of ambition and energy that, at the moment, is lacking. In short, I’ve developed a simple formula for my life as it is right now; if it gets in the way of nappy time, faggettabouit!

Since I’ve already nominated myself once for Cluebat of the Week, doing so again would prove the old adage “trying too hard for a laugh” although goodness knows I deserve it. And surprisingly, the list of usual cluebats who could be counted on for some total outrageousness were busy doing other things this week. This proves that the Hall of Famers now have to work extra hard to get noticed by our sharp-eyed cadre of bloggers who scour the internet to bring you the best of the worst in clueless behavior.

While we generally frown on group awards for the Carnival, this week we’ll make an exception in awarding the coveted Cluebat of the Week to the Mainstream Press. Glenn Reyonolds wrote today “Katrina taught the media that if they all swarmed Bush at once they could do harm even if — as turned out to be the case — much of what they reported was outright false.” Truer words have rarely been uttered by the Blogfadda. It’s the worst I’ve seen since Nixon. Within the past week, we’ve seen the MSM wrap up their coverage of one of the biggest non-events in American history with the story of Dick Cheney’s hunting accident trailing off into nothingness (a sure sign there was nothing there in the first place.) No grand wrap ups. No penetrating think pieces on “What it all Means.” The press simply stopped, almost as if on cue, in covering a story they couldn’t get enough of for two weeks.

Then there was the Iraq Civil War that wasn’t. Clearly there was serious sectarian violence following the destruction of the Samarra Shrine. But the breathless reporting from the media - very little of it first hand and, as I pointed out here, some of it surely driven by al Qaeda in Iraq propaganda cadres fanning out and spreading rumors - was so over the top as to approach the comedic. On the very day that most of the authorities in Iraq declared the worst of the violence over and lifted the curfew, a New York Times editorial warned of the probability of civil war between Sunni and Shia Muslims. There appeared to be a concerted effort to make the event Bush’s “Tet Offensive” which refers to the slaughter of Viet Cong irregulars during the 1968 Vietnamese New Year attacks on every province in the South. The American army dealt the Cong a blow from which it never recovered but the media twisted it into a defeat. It appeared something similar was happening with the destruction of the Shrine.

Then, if you woke up and looked at what the number one story in the MSM was today you could be forgiven if you believed you had fallen asleep last September and failed to arise until this morning because the story was exactly the same. Bush was briefed about the severity of Katrina prior to landfall. We knew this. The response by the federal government was slow and ineffective. We knew this. Bush was told the levees would probably be overtopped causing massive flooding. We knew this. Bush said on September 1, two days after the hurricane, that no one expected the levees to be breached. We knew this. There is a difference between “overtopping” and “breaching” a levee. We knew this.

The only “news” about every single aspect of this story is that it was caught on tape. That, plus the media obviously didn’t think the American people were sufficiently outraged at the time they first reported all of this. So by treating this as positively new information, the media believes they can get additional mileage out of the destruction of a major American city by an Act of God. As I said today, no word on similar briefings given even earlier to the disaster tag team of Blanco-Nagin by the same Director of the National Hurricane Center, Dr. Mayfield who begged them to evacuate New Orleans on Saturday.

With Bush’s poll numbers plummeting - even among Republicans - it is pretty clear that the media smells blood in the water and will, from here until the mid terms, make it their personal quest to see that Democrats take over the Congress so that the expected impeachment hearings against the President can start almost immediately.

For this surreal kind of cluelessness, the MSM is the winner of the Carnival’s Cluebat of the Week. Check out the rest of the entries for our usual jaw dropping idiocy brought to you by some of the best and brightest on the web. Ladies and Gentlemen: Start your Clicking!

“Stupidity is without anxiety.”
(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

Yo Johann! Does that mean all those Hollywood liberals aren’t sweating the Oscars?
(Me)

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Fausta has the latest from Hugo Chavez who is so clueless that if he didn’t exist as the perfect Castro clone, someone would have to invent him. Check out the formerly bad hair one’s new digs - looks very nice and not a split end to be found.

Fred Fry gives us an interesting lesson in port etiquette, pointing out it is impolite to diss the UAE while we have the Saudis guest hosting ports out west. My beef over this always had much less to do with security and much more to do with the pinheads in the White House who dumped this on the party, the Congress, and the American people causing needless damage to their political street cred.

Our favorite hippie chick Peace Moonbeam had an interesting dinner date with Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro. I don’t want to give anything away but what happened after the lights went out was reminiscent of some scenes from Brokeback Mountain. Read it all for some out loud laughs.

On a much more serious note, Cao of Cao’s Blog is one of the only people on the web who covered the Afghan prison riots. Cluelessness abounds here from the Afghan authorities all the way to the US State Department. This is the first installment. Here’s the second update. And here’s the an interview with American patriot Jack Idema being held in the prison and under constant threat of death.

The Finnish Canadian blogger at Sixteen Volts has a fascinating post looking at past newstories to glean perspective on the present.

Jack Cluth has a picture of the world’s fattest cat and it’s clueless slave who apparently doesn’t realize that the obese feline will probably die before its time.

The much more svelte and smarter cat Ferdy sends us this piece about my home state governor whose name no one can pronounce and whose ideas about how to create jobs no one can fathom.

The lovely Pamela takes us to the surreal Islamic paradise of Iran where executions are carried out by the fine art of hanging.

Kender is rappin’ some ‘toons and jivin’ the MSM for their cowardly lion act regarding the publishing of the Mohamed-ahmed-ding-dongs.

Beth takes apart another blogger who shall remain nameless since she apparently has the litigation bug if you cross her. Well…Beth crosses her. And slices her. And dices her. And puts her in a blender and makes a Pina Colada out of her. Classic takedown of the clueless.

Josh Cohen has been eating at Taco Bell for ten years (and he’s still alive?). The kind of cluelessness he found at the drive through should make all of us check our orders before we drive away.

Adam wonders what the Democrats are complaining about in the statehouse in Idaho. They whine about being “bullied” by Republicans - who control a whopping 80% of the seats. Maybe they should be complaining about being too closely identified with Hillary Clinton.

Those Pixie-like Pachyderms from Elephants in Academia are tiptoeing through Kofi Anans disastrous Sudan leadership that has failed miserably in the Security Council. Get. A. Clue.

DL at Bacon Bits has an eyebrow raiser about the effect of trees on the environment and how that seems to have thrown a monkey wrench into the plans of the eco-theists (tree huggers).

Pat Curley, who has been all over the comparison between donations made to Republicans and Democrats to sleazeball Abramoff (to the point that he got a nice mention in NRO) has some more Democratic cluelessness on the issue.

Orac has the jaw dropper of the day: FLASH! From Iran, we get the news that the lovable cartoon characters of Tom and Jerry are not the innocent, fun loving cat and mouse we’ve always been led to believe. Instead, they are a dark, menacing plot of the Joooos.

Mark Coffey does an admirable job taking down one of the “rising stars of the lefty blogosphere” (Hotline Blogometer) Glenn Greenwald’s whose shallow, incoherent screeds against Bush and the Republicans have become easy targets of late.

Bill Teach has more on the ports imbroglio with “Republicans Gone Wild.” There may be nothing more nauseating than clueless politicians pontificating on stuff they know absolutely nothing about.

What’s going on in Canada? If you ask Wonder Woman, not much that is good. She points us to this frightening story of someone being denied medical care in Quebec because they couldn’t speak French.

This was to be expected:

Some of the most notable missions on NASA’s scientific agenda would be postponed indefinitely or canceled under the agency’s new budget, despite its administrator’s vow to Congress six months ago that not “one thin dime” would be taken from space science to pay for President Bush’s plan to send astronauts to the Moon and Mars.

The cuts come to $3 billion over the next five years, even as NASA’s overall spending grows by 3.2 percent this year, to $16.8 billion. They come against a backdrop of criticism over efforts by White House appointees to mute public statements by NASA’s climate scientists.

Among the casualties of the budget cuts are attempts to look for habitable planets and perhaps life elsewhere in the galaxy, an investigation of the dark energy that seems to be ripping the universe apart, bringing a sample of Mars back home to Earth, and exploring for life under the ice of Jupiter’s moon Europa — as well as numerous smaller programs and individual research projects that astronomers say are the wellsprings of new science and new scientists.

Ever since the Bush Administration charged the space agency with getting back to the moon by 2020, scientists have been waiting for the other budget shoe to drop. While going to the moon and establishing some kind of permanent presence there is a noble goal, if we’re not willing to fund other, equally ambitious unmanned projects, NASA’s reason for being in existence in the first place evaporates.

It used to be that major breakthroughs in science could be accomplished by the lone researcher, plodding away for years in his basement lab using makeshift tools with only his brain and the powers of reason that God gave him as his guide. His “funding” would come from rich friends or perhaps the researcher himself was independently wealthy.

Even the spectacular breakthroughs in uncovering the secrets of the atom by Ernest Rutherford at the beginning of the 20th century were accomplished in an old, drafty manor house in the English countryside with most of his funds coming from private donors and grants from the Royal Society. Rutherford’s secret weapon was the cadre of some of the most brilliant young scientific minds in history who helped him build the first complete atomic model but whose methods of experimentation were remarkably simply and inexpensive.

No more. Today, in order to unlock the secrets of the universe - both the very large and very small - governments must contribute billions of dollars to fund the enormous projects that drive scientific inquiry. The $12 billion dollar fusion reactor called Iter which could produce the long-sought clean energy created by atomic fusion is funded by a consortium of a dozen countries. And the cost of the Webb Space Telescope (replacing the Hubble) has already almost doubled from its original estimate of $2.8 billion to its current bloat of $4.5 billion. Private industry couldn’t possibly come up with this kind of money nor would they want to. These kinds of projects are pure science with little or no immediate commercial value. Only governments can lay out these kind of expenditures.

But by funding the $104 billion dollar Return to the Moon program, NASA is finding that the high profile mission is sucking up precious funds, causing the cancellation or delay of some of the most exciting and worthwhile exploration programs on the boards. The James Webb Space Telescope that would have to be delayed if we go ahead with the moon mission (and necessitate another Shuttle repair mission to the Hubble costing $300 million or more), is being designed to blot out the light from stars with planets circling them so that we would actually be able to see if the extrasolar bodies were capable of sustaining life. And the mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa may have been the most ambitious and interesting space effort in history.

Plans called for an unmanned probe to land on Europa’s surface where many scientists are convinced a vast ocean lies underneath a 1-2 mile icecap. The probe would have released a heat generating, sensor-filled wire extension which could have melted through the ice and explored the ocean underneath to search for possible signs of life.

Other delayed or cancelled missions include a Mars Sampling mission and a cancellation of a plethora of smaller missions that come under the rubric of “The Explorer” program:

Much of the concern among scientists is for the fate of smaller projects like the low-budget spacecraft called Explorers. Designed to provide relatively cheap and fast access to space, they are usually developed and managed by university groups. Dr. Lamb referred to them as “the crown jewels in NASA’s science program.”

In recent years, one such mission, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, produced exquisite baby pictures of the Big Bang, while another, the Swift satellite, has help solve the a 30-year-old mystery, linking distant explosions called gamma-ray bursts to the formation of black holes.

Explorers, Dr. Lamb said, are where graduate students and young professors get their first taste of space science. Until recently about one mission was launched per year, but under the new plan, there will be none at all from 2009 to 2012. In a letter to Dr. Cleave last fall, 16 present and former Explorer scientists said, “Such a lengthy suspension would be a devastating blow to the program and the science community.”

Where do you suppose our scientific leaders are going to come from in the future? Not from the Explorer program.

One would think that NASA would get input from those most affected by these cuts before announcing them. Guess again:

Dr. Griffin and his colleagues, the scientists agree, haves tough choices to make, but the so far, the space scientists complain, the choices have been made in a vacuum, without input from the community most affected, namely them. Last year NASA dismantled a longstanding network of scientific advisory committees, and while a new network of committees is in the works, it is not yet in place.

As a result, Dr. Beichman said, “Scientists feel very much left out of this process. You could have involved the community and said “here’s what we have to do.”

He added, “In the end, even scientists can be responsible.”

If scientists can be responsible, why not the bureaucratic Scrooges at NASA?

There have been some pretty puzzling efforts to skewer the President over the last few years by the media and the left but this most recent campaign using videotape of pre-Katrina discussions (the substance if which has been widely disseminated by both the media and the left previously) is a real head scratcher.

Have they forgotten that they already used the transcripts and reports of other, similar meetings to bash the President once already for exactly the same thing?

No fair getting another bite at the rotten apple. Except, in the surreal world of hate inhabited by both the media and the left, the “news” is whatever they say it is - even if Administration discussions about Katrina preparedness have already been analyzed by dozens of bloggers and newspapers.

If this is so, why try the same thing again? The answer is simple; in their initial haste to make a political issue of the Katrina response, the media and their allies on the left forgot the number one rule of attack journalism; make sure that you can dominate the coverage.

And since their first go-around in September occurred when dead bodies were still floating in the floodwaters and tens of thousands of people were still in need of assistance, the attention of the American people was insufficiently focused on who the left was instructing them to blame.

The pre-Katrina briefing of the President by Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, was revealed within days of the disaster by Mayfield himself. I wonder why Mayfield’s calls to the homes of the Mayor of New Orleans and the Governor of Louisiana on Saturday night - two days before the hurricane made landfall - begging them to evacuate the city of New Orleans has somehow not made it into all of these stories today?

I noticed that Mayor Nagin found the video “troubling.” He would. Running for re-election, it is probably best that people not be reminded of his briefings by Director Mayfield prior to the hurricane. Nor should they be reminded of his hesitancy in ordering a mandatory evacuation due to concerns that the city would be sued by hotels and restaurants if the hurricane wasn’t as serious as Director Mayfield had already told him it would be.

But let’s leave the disaster tag team of Blanco-Nagin out of this. What does the Washington Post have to say about this “news:”

Congressional investigators previously released transcripts of the daily meetings, and their substance and other warnings of the danger to New Orleans have been widely reported.

The fresh footage, however, was prominently aired on evening television news broadcasts and threatened to renew public scrutiny of the Bush administration, which issued a report last week containing 125 recommendations to improve U.S. disaster readiness but little focus on the action of senior presidential aides.

White House spokesman Trent Duffy said yesterday the footage showed that Bush was heavily engaged while leaving “battlefield” decisions to his commanders.

“The president had multiple conversations, phone calls and briefings both big and small throughout this process, and his whole priority was making sure that the federal assets were brought to bear to help the people of New Orleans,” Duffy said.

The New York Times adds:

The transcript offers new details but does not significantly alter the picture as it has been put together by investigators as to how officials prepared for the hurricane and responded in the first critical days.

The transcript also shows that on that day the same federal and state officials who would soon be trading recriminations were broad in praising one another’s performance.

“Threatened to renew public scrutiny” is, of course, exactly the point of this entire pointless exercise. Besides, everyone knows a picture is worth a thousand words which makes the video something the public can focus on - unlike in the immediate aftermath of the disaster when people’s attention was on the plight of their fellow citizens.

One other curious note about the video. It actually destroys one of the left’s favorite myths about the lead up to the hurricane; that the President was disengaged and more interested in lounging about his ranch on vacation than in helping the people of New Orleans. It shows Bush assuring the governments of New Orleans and Louisiana that the feds would do whatever they could to help:

“I want to assure the folks at the state level that we are fully prepared to not only help you during the storm, but we will move in whatever resources and assets we have at our disposal after the storm,” Bush said, gesturing with both hands for emphasis on the digital recording. Neither Bush nor Hagin asked questions, however.

The fact that there were millions of tons of FEMA supplies in a vast semi-circle surrounding the city by Tuesday afternoon, less than 24 hours after the hurricane had passed the city shows at the very least that the President was making those remarks in good faith. But the additional fact that horse show impresario Brown and Blanco-Nagin failed to work together - with the somnolent Brown inescapably derelict in urging the feds to take charge - negated anything the President was saying 24 hours prior to the hurricane making landfall.

This is the biggest non-story of the year so far. And given the penchant of the left for repeating news, what do you suppose the next repeat headline will be; “No WMD Found in Iraq?” Or how about “Bush Lied, People Died?”

UPDATE

Interesting information from the Times article:

In the videoconference held at noon on Monday, Aug. 29, Michael D. Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, reported that he had spoken with President Bush twice in the morning and that the president was asking about reports that the levees had been breached.

But asked about the levees by Joe Hagin, the White House deputy chief of staff, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana said, “We have not breached the levee at this point in time.” She said “that could change” and noted that the floodwaters in some areas in and around New Orleans were 8 to 10 feet deep. Later that night, FEMA notified the White House that the levees had been breached.

The NOTP reports that the first levee breach occurred at around 11:00 AM at 17th and Canal Streets:

A large section of the vital 17th Street Canal levee, where it connects to the brand new “hurricane proof” Old Hammond Highway bridge, gave way late Monday morning in Bucktown after Katrina’s fiercest winds were well north. The breach sent a churning sea of water from Lake Pontchartrain coursing across Lakeview and into Mid-City, Carrollton, Gentilly, City Park and neighborhoods farther south and east.

Horse Show Promoter Brown did not reach the city until around noon so the report direct from the horse’s ass (Blanco) that no levees had been breached is an interesting footnote to an otherwise redundant story.

UPDATE II

John Aravosis has a breathless screed today entitled “New Video Shows Bush was warned levees could breach BEFORE Katrina…”

Only problem is John already reported this story once. Maybe he should read his own blog once and a while…

Saturday, September 03, 2005

And Bush had no idea it would get this bad

Four days before Bush canceled his galavanting vacation, this hit the Weather Service wires Sunday at 5pm Eastern (you can see another version of this release here, it’s just as bad if not worse, compares Katrina to Camille, and this is from Sunday MORNING!):