Right Wing Nut House

I didn’t think it was possible but I’m beginning to feel sorry for Columbia University President Lee Bollinger. His speech of introduction on Monday for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has created a vicious backlash on the left over his use of some rather colorful metaphors to describe Ahmadinejad’s anti-intellectual, anti-humanist ideas.

A backlash against the president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, who on Monday delivered a harsh rebuke to President Ahmadinejad, is coming from faculty members and students who said he struck an “insulting tone” and that his remarks amounted to “schoolyard taunts.” The fierceness of Mr. Bollinger’s critique bought the Iranian some sympathy on campus that he didn’t deserve, the critics said, and amounted to a squandered opportunity to provide a lesson in diplomacy.

What this is really all about is that the left can’t stand it when one of their own is being praised by the right for doing anything. In their universe, Bollinger could have hung Ahmadinejad in effigy and as long as no one on the right took notice, it would have been perfectly acceptable.

For you see, Bollinger did nothing and said nothing that wasn’t absolutely, 100% true and documented. He threw the tyrant’s words back in his face and challenged him to justify them. He highlighted documented incidents in the Islamic “Republic” of Iran where homosexuals were executed. He quoted Ahmadinejad’s thoughts on the Holocaust and called him a dunce - which describes exactly the intellectual acumen of someone who believes the murder of 6 million Jews “needs further study.”

His manners? I’m not sure here what the left is criticizing. I thought “manners” were superfluous when speaking truth to power. Isn’t that what Bollinger was doing? Who cares about superficialities when the important thing is to be authentically outraged?

And does the supreme irony of criticizing someone for the way they confront the opposition totally escape these clueless buffoons?

It’s odd to invite someone and then deal with the objections to inviting him by insulting him before he gets to talk,” a professor of political science at Columbia, Richard Betts, said during an interview in his office yesterday. “He’s having it both ways in a sense, honoring the principle of free speech by not choosing speakers on the basis of how nice they are, but being sharp to him before he speaks.”

Mr. Betts said a more appropriate introduction would have been to make clear that an invitation to speak at Columbia did not qualify as approval of the content of the speech. He said the message should have been delivered as a “less in-your-face assault.”

Jesus Lord! How many times have we heard the left praising those who get “in the face” of people like George Bush or Rumsefeld or any number of conservative pundits like Ann Coulter or Jonah Goldberg? Stephen Colbert ring a bell? Or war protestors who shout like maniacs wherever Bush shows up to speak? Or on college campuses where conservative pundits are regularly confronted in the most insulting, vulgar manner?

I guess “manners” and avoiding “in your face” confrontations only count when you’re trying to spare the feelings of a terrorist supporting scumbag like Ahmadinejad.

And then there’s this bit of obtuseness that I would guess to be a widely held belief on the left:

The professor of history and Iranian expert who had a role in bringing Mr. Ahmadinejad to campus, Richard Bulliet, said that if Mr. Bollinger led a mission of faculty and students to Iran, which he has expressed interest in doing, he would likely receive a more courteous welcome than was provided to Mr. Ahmadinejad.

Yes, I have no doubt that is true. The Iranians are a polite people and follow all the normal customs of civilized humanity. Except the left largely rejects those customs as either representative of bourgeois thinking or artificial cultural constructs created by white males to oppress freedom loving lefties. Rejecting polite behavior allows one to justify getting up in the middle of someone’s speech and trying to shout them down - a favorite tactic of the left for 40 years.

How about practicing what you preach here, fellows? How about criticizing Code Pink every time the witches interrupt Congressional hearings or speeches from people they disagree with? How about wagging a disapproving finger at Mama Sheehan when she tries to disrupt the State of the Union?

Instead, all we hear is praise for such rude, boorish behavior. “Speaking truth to power” is great - as long as the right people are doing the speaking and the wrong people are in power.

Bollinger has little about which to feel proud. Not because of what he said but because of the moral blinkers he put on in order to accede to Ahmadinejad’s visit in the first place. Academic freedom is a fine and noble concept, one I support wholeheartedly. But judging by the worldwide reaction to Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia, it appears that Bollinger and the University were nothing more than props in the Iranian president’s propaganda performance. He was warned that this would happen and indeed it did.

In that sense, academic freedom is meaningless when it is used in the cause of promoting the agenda of America’s enemies.

UPDATE

Malkin picks up where I left off yesterday with the bedwetting meme by linking to this idiotic post from a lefty who accuses conservatives of destroying the American “character” and wonders if we’ll ever “recover:”

Here’s a big question that I want to start addressing in upcoming posts: what is conservative rule doing to our nation’s soul? How is it rewiring our hearts and minds? What kind of damage are they doing to the American character? And can we ever recover?

So: what is the American character? Hard to say, of course. But I daresay we know it when we see it. Let me put before you an illustrative example: one week in September of 1959, when, much like one week in September of 2007, American soil supported a visit by what many, if not most Americans agreed was the most evil and dangerous man on the planet.

Nikita Khrushchev disembarked from his plane at Andrews Air Force Base to a 21-gun salute and a receiving line of 63 officials and bureaucrats, ending with President Eisenhower. He rode 13 miles with Ike in an open limousine to his guest quarters across from the White House. Then he met for two hours with Ike and his foreign policy team. Then came a white-tie state dinner. (The Soviets then put one on at the embassy for Ike.) He joshed with the CIA chief about pooling their intelligence data, since it probably all came from the same people—then was ushered upstairs to the East Wing for a leisurely gander at the Eisenhowers’ family quarters.

This guy is accusing conservatives of being bedwetters while wringing his hands like an old woman over whether or not we can “recover” from conservatism?

What an idiot.

And I’d like to briefly address this idea that Iran and Ahmadinejad should be seen as no more of a challenge - even less of one - that the old Soviet Union.

It isn’t that the Iranians are suicidal (I am not entirely convinced that they aren’t but I think there are enough rational heads in the Iranian government to prevent anyone from going off the deep end) and it isn’t the fact that we are dealing with mystics and religious fanatics. There were some pretty fanatical communists we had to deal with over the years - including Kruschev himself who firmly believed in the “science” of Marxism which posited the theory that capitalism, like feudalism, was destined to fail and be replaced by Soviet Style “scientific” socialism. It was his religion and he truly believed that he would see this collapse in his lifetime.

Later Soviet leaders were much more cynical about Marxism, having no illusions about its ability to compete with capitalism in any real way. Their concern was simply to maintain their positions of privilege in a rotting system.

But the real danger in trying to deal with Iran lies in the fact that we have literally no common frame of reference when it comes to history, or culture, or a way to view the world. Ahmadinejad made that quite plain in his speech before the UN General Assembly. At least the Soviets and the west had a common history stretching back a thousand years. We had familiar touchstones that allowed a dialogue where both sides were reasonably certain that misunderstandings about intent could be kept to a minimum.

But where do you find commonality with someone who denies something so elemental as the Holocaust ever took place? How do you find reasonable accomodation when the person across the table believes in a history that never happened (or has twisted the facts to the point that history is unrecognizable)? How do you avoid misunderstanding when the very basis of your opponent’s worldview is derived from a 1500 year old holy book?

I suppose (I hope) there are ways to overcome these monumental difficulties but I trust my point is clear; using our relationship with the Soviet Union as a template for dealing with Iran is idiotic. There is no basis in fact to believe that. And using examples of how we dealt with the Soviets to “prove” that conservatives are a bunch of bedwetters is absurd.

Laura Rozen is doing some great work ferreting out the Debat story for Mother Jones. Today, she has some shocking revelations that were originally reported in the French magazine Rue89:

Riché also reported that Debat claimed to have a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne that he did not in fact complete, and that he had exaggerated his CV in other respects—claiming to be an advisor to the French Ministry of Defense on transatlantic issues, for instance, when in fact he had been a lowly desk clerk in the bowels of the ministry for less than a year; claiming to be a visiting professor at Middlebury College, when in fact he had been a visiting instructor for a short winter term at Middlebury, and other such exaggerations. Mother Jones has obtained an annotated CV the French Embassy prepared about Debat—whose claims to be a former government official have apparently long irritated the government in Paris—outlining these and other discrepancies. (ABC believed the annotated CV was prepared by the French embassy, but sources now say it may have been annotated by a Washington-based French academic.)

Didn’t anybody check this guy out before hiring him?

Evidently, Debat had a big booster at the network. Chief Investigative Reporter Brian Ross passed along some of Debat’s juicier scoops apparently without vetting the information properly. The result was an embarrassing retraction on a story involving the Pakistani military willing to turn the other way regarding the location of Osama Bin Laden as long as he didn’t cause any trouble. And another story involving the claim that “the U.S. government was advising and encouraging an Iranian Baluchi separatist group Jundullah which was carrying out attacks against the Iranian regime” was greeted the following day by a “sharp denunciation” from the Pakistani government.

Who was this guy?

Overall, the picture of Debat that emerges from these interviews is of a smart, ambitious and cunning operator who would claim to be getting text messages from Middle Eastern intelligence operatives while at meetings with Ross and others at ABC, with tips that seemed too good to be true (which some colleagues believe were bogus), yet were used as “exclusives.”

Debat seems to have had a Walter Mitty complex. (Text messages from spies in the middle of production meetings? And that didn’t set off any alarm bells?). But was there something more sinister at work here? Was this part of a Neo-Con plot to take over the news media?

Attywood thinks so:

In the meantime, little attention had been paid to the French journal Politique Internationale — which published Debat’s bogus “interviews” with Barack Obama, as well as Hillary Clinton, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, former Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, and former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

But the French magazine deserves closer scrutiny. In continuing to connect the dots between Debat and the push for a neoconservative agenda that includes ratcheting up war tensions with Iran, it turns out that a prominent member of the neocon movement has served as editor of Politique Internationale for much of this decade.

Iranian-borm Amir Taheri (pictured at top) — who edited a leading Iranian newspaper prior to the 1979 overthrow of the Shah and has since written for a number of western publications, including several owned by conservative press lord Rupert Murdoch — has been a leading voice in Politique Internationale. It’s not clear what his current role is, but in numerous press reports from 2001 through 2006 he was listed as its editor.

To put it mildly, Attywood is barking up the wrong tree.

Taheri may or may not be a “neo-con” - and the way that Attywood and others on the left toss that appellation around makes me think they don’t have a clue regarding who or what a neo-con is - but the idea that Politique Internationale is some French offshoot of The Weekly Standard is loony. This is a French Ministry of Foreign Affairs website describing Politique Internationale:

Over the past 27 years, Politique internationale has become the most influential French-language publication devoted to international politics. It is read by leading decision-makers in the fields of politics, diplomacy, economics, industry and finance on all five continents. Its contributors include heads of state and governments, leaders of political parties and many others who either make the news or decipher it.

Sounds pretty harmless to me. But what about that fellow Taheri? After all, he wrote for Rupert Murdoch owned publications (think Fox News, not tens of thousands of dollars donated to Hillary).

Taheri has also written for Arthur Sulzberger but no one I know has ever accused the former Iranian editor of being a liberal. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and other perfectly legitimate mainstream news organizations as well. After all, he is trying to make a living as a writer and Taheri is not someone in huge demand as far as being sought after by major dailies for op-eds. He must hustle up his own business as any writer would. The fact that his views track closer to the New York Post than the New York Times - even though he has had op-eds appear in both publications - should not be considered sinister or even unusual.

Unless you’re trying to connect non-existent dots to posit a neo-con conspiracy theory.

Taheri is, for better or worse, one of the leading voices in the debate over what to do about Iran. He has made no secret of the fact that he wishes to see regime change in his native country. The left has tried to turn Taheri into something like a “Chalabi II” or another “curveball” without much success.

Attywood points out several stories Taheri has advanced that proved less than accurate, most recently a piece in Canada’s National Post that had conservatives all atwitter about a report from Iran detailing how non-Muslims were forced to wear color coded patches to identify them. The Iranian government denied it. Other Iranian experts expressed grave doubts about it. Taheri stood by the story. The Post issued a retraction.

It appears to me that the story should never have been run, that it wasn’t solid enough. But in Attywood’s own comments on the linked post, someone quite familiar with Iranian persecution of religious minorities speaks out:

Having handled the asylum cases of several Iranians who belong to the Baha’i faith, I have learned a great deal about the persecution religious minorities suffer in that country. So I was extremely interested in this part of your post, and I went to the article you linked.

My clients were granted asylum on the basis of their religion alone, so I think that’s pretty conclusive that whether non-Muslims are forced to wear colored badges or not, they are in grave jeopardy in that country.

Taheri will continue to agitate for the US to overturn the rule of the mullahs. But besides the fact that he was editor of Politique Internationale and Debat contributed to that publication (on an infrequent basis over the years), I don’t get the “neo-con connection” the dots are supposed to link.

That’s because Debat was no neo-con - not by a long shot. As director of the terrorism and national security program at the Nixon Center, it would be a stretch to identify him as anything except a moderately conservative realist on foreign policy. From Sourcewatch:

While genuinely non-partisan, as reflected in the composition of its Board of Directors and Advisory Council, the Center has a philosophy of an enlightened pursuit of national interest. The specific goal of the Center is to explore ways of enhancing American security and prosperity while taking into account the legitimate perspectives of other nations.

The Board of Directors and Advisory Council is very heavy with Kissinger Realpolitik staffers as well as former Reaganauts and Bush #41 refugees. The left’s favorite, Brent Scowcroft, is on the Advisory Council as well as Lee Hamilton, Robert McFarlane, and other critics of the Iraq War (perhaps Julie Eisenhower is a neo-con spy).

The point is simple. There is little or no evidence that Debat is a neo-con so there are no dots to connect him to Taheri. The story raises enough questions about press standards and procedures without Attywood going off on conspiracy tangents.

For those, let’s go back to Rozen who sums up one of the ethical dilemmas for ABC:

One ethical issue raised by ABC’s handling of Debat concerns the investigative unit’s use of paid sources/consultants, who are often put on monthly retainer. But in ABC’s use of Debat as a paid “consultant” who also had for the past year and a half an appointment at the Nixon Center, ABC also frequently had him reporting on its blog, the Blotter, and appearing as a “source” inside others’ stories, blurring the line between source (and a paid one at that, with outside — also paid — affiliations) and a journalist, not clearly identified in the report. ABC also sent Debat frequently abroad, to gather information which he would put on the air and on the investigative unit’s website.

There is some question whether ABC is handling their internal investigation correctly by using the Ross investigative unit to look into their own potential failures. I see the potential for problems but who else could do it? These are people familiar with the stories as well as the sources and methods of how those stories were developed. It would seem that they would be the best qualified to discover anything untoward advanced by Debat in his sourcing of stories or in his reporting.

In the end, despite warning signs that Debat was a poseur of fantastic proportions, several respected media outlets (and probably the Nixon Center as well) were taken in by this fellow hook, line, and sinker. But to posit the notion that Debat was some kind of neo-con who was feeding false information to ABC and others in order to advance some kind of agenda is a big stretch. More likely, Debat is exactly who he says he isn’t; a fakir who suckered people who should have known better.

This story is getting more bizarre as we dig deeper.

A former ABC News consultant on terrorism has been exposed as a gigantic fraud, faking interviews with famous people and having them published in a French news magazine.

Alexis Debat, a former French defense official who has been working as a consultant for ABC News since 9/11, says he hired a freelance journalist to conduct an interview with Barack Obama. When it came out in another French magazine that the Obama camp was denying the interview ever took place, Debat claimed he was “scammed” by the freelancer.

Debat says the freelancer, a Robert Sherman from Lombard, IL was paid $500 to conduct the Obama interview. A local newspaper checked out the address Debat gave for Sherman and found that no such address exists in Lombard, IL.

The French magazine where the fake interview was published, Politique Internationale, has now heard from several other subjects of supposed sit downs with Debat, all of whom claiming they never participated:

Former President Bill Clinton, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan have added their names to the list of people who say they were the subjects of fake interviews published in a French foreign affairs journal under the name of Alexis Debat, a former ABC News consultant.

“This guy is just sick,” said Patrick Wajsman, the editor of the magazine, Politique Internationale, a prestigious publication that has been in business for 29 years. Wajsman said he was removing all articles with Debat’s byline from the magazine’s Web site.

Yesterday, a spokesman for Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., said a supposed interview with Debat, published in the June 2007 edition of Politique Internationale, never occurred and was a fabrication.

And before you start feeling sorry for Politique Internationale, the magazine was contacted in 2005 by the UN Deputy Director for Communications about an interview they were going to run under Debat’s byline with Kofi Annan that never took place, threatening to expose it as a fake if the magazine went with it:

Despite that, Debat continued for the next two years to be cited as the author of interviews with a range of prominent U.S. public officials in Politique Internationale.

The U.N. official said a second supposed interview of Annan by Debat, posted earlier this year by Politique Internationale, was actually portions of a speech the secretary-general had given at Princeton University.

The magazine editor, Wajsman, told ABCNews.com he thought the problem with the Annan interview, one of the first he submitted, was “maybe a technical one” or a misunderstanding.

Wajsman said he had referred the matter to his lawyer for possible action against Debat.

“I was a victim of this man. I had no reason to suspect someone like him could lie,” Wajsman said.

Methinks Mr. Wajsman is an idiot. He had “no reason to suspect” Debat would lie after having done so with one of his first interviews for him? Sorry Mr. Editor, you were too greedy for the good stories, never questioning where they were coming from, and you have now gotten caught with your pantaloons down around your ankles. Take your medicine and resign immediately.

Debat had already been fired by ABC for a little fib he told about his PHD; he apparently never got one. Now in light of these revelations, ABC is scrambling, looking at every story Debat has done in the last 6 years to determine if he was pulling some of the same crap with them. They evidently did a cursory examination after they let him go back in June and found nothing. They now say they are doing another examination to make sure.

Why not do the job right the first time? Perhaps ABC News didn’t want to know if Debat had scammed them. They wouldn’t be the first institutional organization that went through the motions when carrying out an investigation just so that later they could say, “Well, we looked into it at the time and didn’t find anything.” Now that the pressure is on, they apparently are going to do a thorough job of it.

Blogger-Journalist Laura Rozen points up the tightrope that ABC was walking by keeping Debat on as a consultant:

My own feeling as primarily a print world reporter, and this is just one part of the complicated matter, is that it is deeply problematic for a news organization to have a paid source/consultant to sometimes put on the reporter hat and act as the reporter too. (Indeed, I don’t like the idea of paid sources at all, but it seems to be a frequent practice at TV news networks). Seriously, imagine if a New York Times reporter put an ex NSC or CIA operative on the payroll for about $2,000 to $4,000 a month as a source, cited in articles as a source, and then sometimes let him or her report news stories with a byline, without glaringly indicating to readers what was going on. But this is what ABC was doing with Debat. ABC must have known they were stretching the rules on this one. For instance, their consultant Richard Clarke is never presented as the reporter. But ABC changed the rules in the Debat case, presumably because he was bringing them such sexy scoops, that they loved flacking at the time. Now they insist the scoops were solid, but Debat misrepresented his credentials. They’re blameless.

Just a few days ago, Rozen points to this piece in the Times Online where Debat talks about a “3 day blitz” against Iran:

THE Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.

Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus”.

Do we believe that he has inside information about the bombing campaign? Or is he doing one of his Walter Mitty routines?

Debat is one of those figures so beloved of today’s media; a witty, urbane scholar who comes across as authoritative on television. He bridges the gap in knowledge between a reporter and the audience and is used most frequently to fill in the background on personalities and events, usually buttressing the point being made by the reporter and producer of the piece.

Behind the camera, consultants are good for fleshing out details on stories, getting inside information by using their sources in government, and for confirming facts gathered in the course of reporting.

But Rozen is asking should these people be journalists as well? It’s a good question and something of a dilemma. Should a source for news also report it? I’m no journalist but even I can see the potential conflict. And ABC, knowing of his work with Politique Internationale as a by lined reporter, might have asked themselves some tough questions. If they had, they might not be spending the next few days combing over every story Debat ever had a hand in, making sure he did nothing untoward.

Bottom line: Guys like Debat, Jason Blair, Scott Thomas Beauchamp, and Stephen Glass get away with it because the stuff they write or bring in is just too good to be true.

And many times, it is.

Full Disclosure: I am paid by Michelle Malkin.Com to moderate comments.

Some may question my motives in defending Michelle Malkin against her critics who are becoming more vulgar, more unreasoning, and yes, more dangerous as her public profile increases as a result of her continued success on the internet and TV. Believe what you will, I really don’t care. The fact that I work for her website is, to me, completely immaterial to the matter at hand. I don’t need to “suck up” or curry favor. And if you believe anyone connected to MM.Com encouraged or directed me to write this post, I’ve got some great news; I think I saw Elvis last night at the Piggly Wiggly buying some peanut butter and bananas.

If you haven’t been following the shocking story of Geraldo Rivera’s nauseating threat to assault Malkin the next time he saw her, allow me to fill you in. In an interview in the Boston Globe on September 1, Rivera made this jaw dropping statement:

“Michelle Malkin is the most vile, hateful commentator I’ve ever met in my life,” he says. “She actually believes that neighbors should start snitching out neighbors, and we should be deporting people.

“It’s good she’s in D.C. and I’m in New York,” Rivera sneers. “I’d spit on her if I saw her.”

Even the interviewer couldn’t resist the adjective “sneers” when talking about the way in which Rivera delivered his threat to physically assault Malkin. And while I won’t be dealing with the “substance” (more accurately, the vacuousness) of Rivera’s critique of Malkin, I would just like to point out the fact that the law requires deportation of those who are here illegally. As is typical of the open borders crowd, they advocate ignoring the law when it suits their argument. Let an illegal immigrant get into trouble and all they can do is spout chapter and verse of the US Code at you, throwing the law in your face as Rivera wants to spit into Malkin’s. But for anyone who advocates enforcement of the law that runs counter to their beliefs, such trivialities can safely be ignored.

Beyond what Rivera said, is the venue he chose to say it. This was not, as Malkin points out, an accidental aside made by Rivera in an unguarded moment:

Now, can you imagine the uproar if any other female journalist/commentator had been on the receiving end of Geraldo’s rhetorical spittle? This wasn’t an off-the-record comment at a cocktail party or a private remark in a green room. It was on-the-record smear to a Boston Globe reporter.

And the message over the past week has been: This smear/attack/threat is acceptable.

This is what has me worried. And not just for Malkin who, while perfectly capable of taking care of herself, nevertheless brings out the “brother” in me. For I must confess that Malkin’s success in what has overwhelmingly been a male dominated industry - political and social commentary - reminds my very much of the success realized by my older sister who broke through the glass ceiling years ago to become a partner in one of Washington’s most prestigious law firms.

Both Malkin and my sister share many similar traits that endear them to their supporters while sending their opponents over the edge. Both are whip smart, tough, ambitious, not shy about expressing an opinion (even if they know it’s unpopular) and challenge convention at the drop of a hat. Their exterior beauty, which cause many to underestimate them, masks a backbone made of tempered steel. “Feminists” in the real sense of the word, neither one bitches or moans about anything life has dealt them - least of all their gender. They simply go out and achieve, making no apologies and asking for no favors.

If that sounds like an unrealistic portrait think again. There are millions of women like them who share many of those traits to one degree or another. And I’m sure that many of these women have met someone like Geraldo Rivera at one time or another in their career. The “sneer” on Rivera’s lips when threatening Malkin is familiar to many women who meet men threatened by their brains, ambition, and yes, beauty. Rivera does not get as nasty when dealing with males who disagree with him. One could easily conclude that for all his bluster, he is little better than a bully who thinks he can push those weaker than him around when he senses a physical advantage.

If Rivera had said something like that about my sister, he would find seven aging but husky brothers lined up in opposition politely requesting he eat those words by chomping on the newspaper they were printed in. And since we were all of us brought up as gentlemen, we would be more than happy to supply Mr. Rivera with whatever condiments he would need to make his repast as palatable as possible under the circumstances.

But Malkin’s gender only answers part of the question as to why her commentaries draw the over the top, unhinged hate and loathing of so many on the left. Her opinions are no more inflammatory than many seen on the internet. And while she runs one of the largest blogs in the conservative sphere, size alone cannot explain why she regularly receives the nastiest, the most obscene, the most vulgar hate mail imaginable.

The mystery deepens when you consider the fact that there is no blogger - right or left, large or small - who does more to promote worthy causes than Michelle Malkin.

I can attest to this as fact since for the last 3 months, I have been engaged in re-categorizing all 7,400 posts ever written on Malkin’s blog. The breadth of charities, foundations, memorial funds, and special requests for assistance that she has highlighted over the years and asked her 150,000 daily readers to support is absolutely astonishing. Can you imagine Gawker or Kos or any of Malkin’s most vehement tormentors giving that much space over to charity? You can disagree with Malkin on the issues. But you cannot fault her public spiritedness. Wounded soldiers, disaster relief, even individual families who have a loved one with some rare, debilitating health problem have all been featured on her site and her readers pressed into service.

Does that count for anything with Malkin’s uncivil critics? Of course not. And Malkin herself has brought the ugly truth out in the open time and time again as to the true nature of her critics incivility. They don’t try to argue the merits of the issues. They rarely address the specific points of Malkin’s arguments in their critiques. Instead, they routinely use Malkin’s race as a way to personalize their reprehension.

Malkin does not fit into the little political and intellectual boxes the left reserves for each grouping of Americans they see fit to categorize. Their (un)reasoning goes something like this: Asians are minorities. Minorities are oppressed and need the tender ministrations of liberals to save them from white America’s depredations. All real Asians believe everything that liberals believe. If they don’t, they are not “authentic” minorities but rather “sell outs” to white America.

To try and patiently explain to liberals (as I have many times) that believing members of a minority should think a certain way simply because they are a member of that minority group is as racist a point of view as someone who burns a cross on that minority’s front yard does absolutely no good. Their linear thinking on matters of race is as set in stone as their belief in the efficacy of government to solve social problems. And this kind of miasmic thinking about race and politics comes through loud and clear when reading what others write about Malkin and her positions on the issues.

First and foremost is the charge that she is just a tool of others - her husband, the Bush Administration, a secret right wing cabal - and that she has prostituted herself, selling her race to the highest bidder in order to get ahead.

To answer that, I’ll simply direct you to this post of hers that I came across in my re-categorization project. Short version: “This is not a right-wing conspiracy. This is marriage.” I’ll let that stand as the definitive answer to those insulting, outrageously hateful charges.

The second major race-hating meme advanced by Malkin’s critics is the charge that she loathes herself and her race so much that she allows her self-hate to color her politics, advancing ideas like support for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and strict enforcement of laws against illegal immigration.

The left usually isn’t happy unless they get their opponents on the couch so that they can analyze them in their own special way. Witness Glen Greenwald’s “A Tragic Legacy” which has been dubbed “a character study” of George Bush. And John Dean’s “Conservatives Without a Conscience” that purports to show the psychological attraction authoritarianism has for conservatives. This penchant for amateur psychoanalysis manifests itself in Malkin’s case when the left tries to explain how it is possible a member of a minority can possibly disagree with them on any issue of consequence. Since Malkin breaks the mold by being a conservative, she is obviously mentally unbalanced.

I’ll leave it to real mental health professionals to diagnose whatever disorder afflicts people who believe such nonsense.

Finally, there are is the simple vulgarity of the unmasked racists who routinely refer to Malkin as a “wog whore” and much worse. If this kind of true hate speech (not the fake variety the left routinely accuses the right of making) were vigorously denounced by leading bloggers on the left, it would certainly help to mitigate some of the disapprobation I and most conservatives heap upon lefty bloggers on a regular basis. After all, Malkin herself has taken conservatives to task many times for out of bounds behavior. Is it too much to ask that the favor be returned when the ultra-personal slights, insults, and obscenities are tossed her way?

Evidently so. In fact, top liberal bloggers join in the racist name calling with a relish that would be shocking if we weren’t used to it by now. No one on the left calls them out for it. No one on the left calls for a halt to the vulgarities. Instead, they gleefully pile on in an orgy of the most nauseating racism, each trying to top the other in coming up with the most vile racist venom they can scribble.

Somebody, somewhere on the left has to stand up for simple decency. The response to that plea is usually pegged to Malkin’s not mincing words to expose the hypocrisy of liberals. Somehow, Malkin’s derogatory language aimed at the left gives her critics the freedom to riposte with whatever they feel is appropriate - or can get away with.

The idea that if Malkin calls someone a “moonbat” it is fair game to use a derogatory racial slur to describe her is perhaps the most unsettling aspect of this matter. Proportionality doesn’t seem to enter into the discussion. Malkin tosses a knife and the left goes nuclear. Something is wrong with that picture and unless people start to focus on the true nature of this grossly unfair and dangerously incendiary rhetoric, there will be nothing left of American politics except an unlivable wasteland where there is no hope that the two sides can ever unite when this country faces its next crisis.

Keith Olbermann made Malkin his “Worst Person in the World” last night. But it wasn’t for anything Malkin did. Rather, it was so that Olbermann could approvingly quote Geraldo Rivera’s spitting threat to a national audience. To realize that Olberman was, in effect, encouraging an assault on Malkin made me inexpressibly sad. The left is running toward a gasoline dump with a lit match. And nobody on their side seems willing to yell at them to stop.

Global warming skeptics have had it rough recently. I don’t know about you but when Al Gore says that the debate over global warming is closed, we may as well shut down all the laboratories studying the problem and simply give in to the inevitable - that a bunch of Luddites and anti-industrial, anti-capitalist, anti-globalization nitwits should take control of the American economy and bring us into a new age of carbon free living while bringing back the horse and buggy and steam powered locomotives.

But something happened on the way to creating this nirvana, namely Steve McIntyre.

Mr. McIntyre is a saboteur, an apostate, a living, breathing monkey wrench who has thrown himself into the global warming Juggernaut and caused the entire machine to stop dead in its tracks:

Steve McIntyre posted this data from NASA’s newly published data set from Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) These numbers represent deviation from the mean temperature calculated from temperature measurement stations throughout the USA.

According to the new data published by NASA, 1998 is no longer the hottest year ever. 1934 is.

Four of the top 10 years of US CONUS high temperature deviations are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (1998, 2006, 1999). Several years (2000, 2002, 2003, 2004) fell well down the leaderboard, behind even 1900. (World rankings of temperature are calculated separately.)

McIntyre had discovered a slight error in NASA’s temperature calculations - enough to skew the results considerably and throw the global warming worshippers for a loop. In fact, since many advocates treat global warming more as a religion than science, McIntyre’s discovery would be like finding out that Jesus Christ never lived or that Moses never got the Ten Commandments from God.

Now, lest I be accused of denying other evidence for climate change - namely the rise in CO2 and other greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere whose measurements have spiked in the last 100 years and are at levels rarely seen in the last millions of years - I will state flatly that the data Mr. McIntyre has forced NASA to change only alters the debate over how serious the problem is and not whether the problem exists. In short, the alterations in climate data simply proves a point global warming skeptics have been making for more than a decade; that more research is needed before we crash the economies of the industrialized world in order to satisfy those whose agenda is more political than scientific.

Steve McIntyre will go down in history as perhaps the man who saved the global warming debate. By showing the true believers that they can be wrong, he has reminded the scientific community about their obligations to discovering the truth regardless of where it leads. And that goes for skeptics and believers alike.

McIntyre is, judging by his bio, a brilliant mathematician and has authored or co-authored several papers on temperature change. He is a confirmed skeptic about climate models that show a precipitous rise in temperature over the last 1000 years. He was one of the most vocal critics of the so-called “hockey stick” graph that showed a stable temperature record for most of the last 1,000 years until the 20th century which revealed a steep rise in temperatures in North America - a debate that rages in the scientific community to this day.

McIntyre is not employed as a climate scientist nor does he receive any funds for his research. His expertise is in running mineral companies, a job that he thinks has prepared him well for his research into temperature models as he explains in his bio.

In short, he is a citizen-scientist with no ax to grind save seeking the facts and holding scientists to a high and rigorous standard of research. What he has done is nothing less than bringing the debate over global warming back into the realm of science - for the moment anyway.

Consider the history of another controversial theory; the origins of the universe. For decades, cosmologists believed in the “Steady State Theory” as the best explanation for the creation of the universe. Those who disagreed with it were given short shrift and dismissed as cranks. Then a new theory arose in the 1960’s that challenged the primacy of the Steady State idea of the universe - an elegant mathematical construct we commonly call “The Big Bang” theory. Slowly, instruments became available that were able to supply observational proof for the Big Bang to go along with the complex mathematics until today, few cosmologists subscribe to the Steady State theory - even though it was gospel less than 50 years ago.

The reason cosmologists were able to change their thinking was the compelling nature of the observational data that matched up almost perfectly with the mathematical proofs. Even those scientists who had a heavy intellectual investment in seeing that the Steady State theory remain gospel were forced to alter their own theories in order to acknowledge the facts at hand.

McIntyre’s work will do something similar; it will force those scientists with a vested interest in seeing their theories about global warming validated by their peers to alter their models to reflect the new data. Those scientists who truly seek the facts about global warming will swallow their pride and perhaps come to new conclusions. Those scientists more interested in riding the global warming gravy train will denounce and obfuscate McIntyre’s work, hoping politicians like Al Gore come to their rescue by loudly proclaiming that the debate is still “closed.”

And we, the lay public who know next to nothing about the many scientific disciplines that are engaged in climate study, must ourselves keep a more open mind in order to decide the right course of action for the future. If nothing else, McIntyre has shown once again that scientists are as fallible as the rest of us.

Perhaps the scientists themselves need to be reminded of that from time to time.

Getting caught up in a blog swarm on a particular topic can be hazardous. The very fact that so many are writing about the same thing can generate its own momentum, its own “narrative.” Each succeeding blogger who writes about the subject feels compelled to attach just a little more meaning, a little more importance to the story until the original subject has been blown so far out of proportion that it becomes lost amidst the cacophony of dramatic “revelations” and “gotchya” moments.

It is a phenomena of our media that continues to make us look like a bunch of idiots. Dissecting a topic until the short hairs are showing solves nothing, reveals nothing except our contempt for proportionality and the truth. Is it any wonder real reporters and editors are a little perplexed when they observe something like the outburst that accompanied Jill Carroll’s release from captivity or the huge to do over the Jeff Gannon episode?

Regarding Scott Beauchamp, everyone take a step back, inhale deeply (put the bong DOWN first), and let’s look at what the blogs hath wrought.

Blogs have exposed a military fabulist in Scott Beauchamp. His lies did not contribute to a lessening of war fervor among the American people. George Bush, the Pentagon, the left, and the Iraqi government have all seen to that little detail, thank you. Nor did Beauchamp’s fairy tales embolden al-Qaeda, the insurgents, the Iranian backed militias, or any of the other bloody minded, murderous thugs who are making Iraq a living hell for the people there. And while Beauchamp’s fibbing did not do the reputation of the military any good, Jesse Spielman and his 4 compatriots, the soldiers just convicted of raping and murdering a 14 year old Iraqi girl and her family, harmed that reputation on a scale that poor little Scotty Beauchamp and his stories of dog killing and teasing disfigured women could never approach in a million years.

This is the reality outside of Blogdom. Exposing Beauchamp was a good thing, don’t get me wrong. But holding TNR and their soon to be ex-editor Franklin Foer to account for their laziness, their bias, and their incompetence is enough. That and putting a poultice on the black eye Beauchamp deliberately gave the military is all the victory that blogs can claim in this matter.

Decloaking Beauchamp will not bring us closer to “victory” in Iraq - if such a thing existed outside of the fevered imaginations of an ever dwindling number of conservatives. It will not make up for Abu Ghraib - another story whose perceived importance far, far outweighed any relationship to the reality of what actually happened. It will not induce the American people to change their minds and embrace the war effort. Nor will it shut the left up which, while something devoutly to be desired, is alas an effort doomed to failure.

This medium, we have to keep reminding ourselves, is still fairly new. And as more and more people enter the blog universe - many looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow - it is inevitable that they too, wish to get in on the fun of scalp hunting. One way to climb up the winding stairs to the top of the ziggurat is to outshout your competitors while attaching more importance to a story than it deserves. This will get you traffic, links, and the admiration of your fellow bloggers.

I understand the game. I’ve played it for three years, shamelessly piling on and then shooting off emails to big bloggers hoping they would find my insightful, pithy comments about the swarm du jour good enough to link. There’s nothing inherently dishonest in this method of self-promotion - unless what you write isn’t what you truly feel in which case you won’t last long anyway. But I truly believe now that blogs have to move beyond this phase. To what end, I have no idea. I couldn’t have foreseen where blogs are now 3 years ago when I started so my powers of prognostication when it comes to blogging and internet media are practically nil.

I only know a growing sense of unease elicited by the notion that by overhyping stories like the Beauchamp caper, the credibility of the medium suffers. For that reason alone, it may be time to put down the blood stained hatchets and begin to seriously examine just what we should be doing that will increase our influence rather than make us look like a bunch of one dimensional attack dogs.

I am not one to get my panties in a twist thinking that the world will come to an end if a few of my personal communications are captured in a digital dragnet by some dumb brute of a super computer and then released back into the ether without any human on planet earth laying eyes or ears on what was contained in those messages.

It bothers me that the potential for abuse is there - as it should trouble any conservative worth their salt. But to exaggerate the threat to civil liberties by positing the notion that while my Auntie Midge is giving her famous recipe for fruit cake over the phone or via email to one of my nieces that NSA spies are avidly listening in and faithfully taking notes on exactly how much rum should be added to give her delicacy its enormous heft is silly.

Actually, given the weight of the damn thing, there’s a good chance the NSA would see it as a weapon of mass destruction and “disappear” dear Auntie by renditioning her to some dark hole of a prison in eastern Europe. Not that we do that kind of thing anymore, right?

This is the essence of the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” leaked by the New York Times in December of 2005. Here’s what I wrote about it at the time:

What good comes of insuring our survival at the expense of losing some of our liberty?

If one of our cities was destroyed by a nuclear weapon smuggled into the country by al Qaeda, I daresay the relatives of the dead would answer that question much differently than the arm chair civil libertarians who so blithely condemn the Administration’s actions in the aftermath of 9/11. There are even those who say that there is no choice to make, that our survival as a nation is not at stake at all therefore any argument that includes a loss of privacy rights as a way to head off an al Qaeda attack is setting up a straw man to justify oppression.

I don’t have much sympathy for that argument but I am troubled that our government has skirted so close to the line involving spying on innocent American citizens and may have in fact crossed it. Ultimately, it must come down to a question of responsibility. You and I are not responsible for the safety and security of the United States. The Constitution has vested that awesome responsibility in the office of the President. In the end, where you come down on this controversy depends on how much you trust the occupant of that office not to abuse his authority nor misuse the frightening power our technological prowess has bestowed upon his government to invade our most private and personal spaces.

For if in fact we are in a war for the survival of our republic – and our enemies themselves have made it abundantly clear that this is what the War on Terror is all about – we are in grave danger if we give in to the temptation to turn the issue of liberty versus security into a political club in order to beat one’s political opponent for acting dictatorially or just as bad, unpatriotically. The issue is too important for the kind of lazy generalities being tossed about regarding an absolutist position on civil liberties or aiding and abetting the enemy in a time of war. In the end, we must trust each other or perish.

Those “lazy generalities” have supplanted thoughtful argument as each side in the debate has now established their own narrative about domestic spying by this Administration and will brook no change in the parameters of those narratives to reflect new information or an altered perception of the man in the White House who sits atop the national security ziggurat with the capability to do enormous violence to the very concepts of privacy and liberty.

New information such as this should give everyone pause and cause them to re-evaluate their positions:

The Bush administration’s chief intelligence official said yesterday that President Bush authorized a series of secret surveillance activities under a single executive order in late 2001. The disclosure makes clear that a controversial National Security Agency program was part of a much broader operation than the president previously described.

The disclosure by Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, appears to be the first time that the administration has publicly acknowledged that Bush’s order included undisclosed activities beyond the warrantless surveillance of e-mails and phone calls that Bush confirmed in December 2005.

In a letter to Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), McConnell wrote that the executive order following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks included “a number of . . . intelligence activities” and that a name routinely used by the administration — the Terrorist Surveillance Program — applied only to “one particular aspect of these activities, and nothing more.”

We’ve had other aspects to the overall surveillance program released in dribs and drabs over the past 2 years. Data mining and getting the cooperation of Telecom companies to monitor the “switching stations” where a lot of overseas phone traffic is channeled are evidently two of the elements that make up the “broader operations” connected to the TSP.

What else? Just what is the NSA up to?

There is no agency of the federal government with the potential to do more mischief to our liberty and privacy than the National Security Agency. Anyone who has read William Bamford’s The Puzzle Palace - which described NSA spying on Americans in the 60’s - should think long and hard about the monumental leaps in technology since that time which allow for even more intrusive and thorough efforts to invade our “private space” than ever before.

At the same time, reforms at the NSA have made it less likely that these abuses will take place. Procedures not even thought of back in the 60’s that relate to the way data is handled are supposed to protect American citizens from the kind of snooping done by the agency in the past.

But the reforms will not stop an aggressive executive if he is hell bent on pushing the outside of the envelope of constitutionality and legality by using the capabilities of the NSA to spy on Americans. All we can do is trust that oversight by the intelligence committees in Congress will prevent the President from crossing the line.

At this point, I am unsure if that oversight has been effective. Nor am I convinced that the Administration has been forthright with the intel committees (or the so called “Group of 8″ made up the chair and vice chair of each committee plus the leaders of the House and Senate from both parties) in their description of all of the activities associated with the TSP.

I am fully cognizant of the fact that these intelligence activities represent the most closely held secrets of our government. And despite those on the left who dismiss the idea of giving the enemy an advantage by leaking the existence of these programs and their inner workings, I believe that al-Qaeda has benefited from the leaks which have revealed enough that they may be able to circumvent at least some of our efforts to keep track of them and discover their plans. (The idea that al-Qaeda already knew we’d try to keep track of them is true. What’s silly is the notion that they had much of a clue as to how we’d do it.) For this reason, the irresponsibility of the New York Times and other publications that continue to leak classified information should be condemned.

What all of this back and forth comes down to is the same thing it came down to 20 months ago when the existence of the TSP was leaked by the Times; how much do you trust the man in the White House to protect our civil liberties while carrying out domestic surveillance activities with the potential for harm?

I must admit to being a lot less sanguine today about the desire of those who wield such enormous power to view the balancing act between liberty and security with the seriousness that the rest of us do.

If you haven’t heard about it, a free speech controversy is about ready to erupt that is going to make the Mohamed cartoon imbroglio look like a walk around the Ka’aba.

A 23 year old and Ukranian immigrant, Stanislav Shmulevich of Brooklyn, has been charged with two felony counts for throwing a Koran into a toilet on two separate occasions. The incidents occurred last year when Shmulevich was a senior at Pace University in New York. He left school a couple of credits short of graduating and now works for an international banking firm in New York city.

There are a couple of aspects to this matter that need clarification before a definitive judgment can be made about Shmulevich’s actions. First, what was his intent? If it was to show his disgust for the Islamic faith and knowingly hurt Muslims by tossing what they see as the word of God into a toilet, he should definitely be criticized as an ignorant lout.

But a felon? And this is where the second missing piece of information that will allow us to judge the situation rationally comes into play; just what is it the prosecutor hopes to accomplish?

Ignoramus or not, the fellow was making a statement expressing his beliefs. And Michelle Malkin (in what is sure to be the most controversial post of the day) asks the right question. Using some powerful visual examples, she wonders “Which of these is a crime in America?”

A) Submerging a crucifix in a jar of urine.
B) Burning the American flag.
C) Putting a Koran in a toilet.

And yes, she has a picture of a Koran in a toilet.

Michelle will no doubt be vilified by the usual suspects who will almost certainly miss her larger point for posting such a disturbing image. Malkin haters don’t do nuance nor do they grant Michelle the same luxury of being a controversialist as they do their own rabble rousers on the left.

The crucifix in urine is but one example of the outrageous anti-Christian “art” that has been shown over the last decade or so. What was the “intent” of the artist in creating such a display? Nothing less than to knowingly inflict emotional pain on those who believe in Christ as God. Artistic expression is rightly protected under the first amendment. But if we are going to use the standard of a Koran in the toilet provoking the exact same reaction among Muslims as the crucifix in urine did to Christians, why does one form of expression get a pass and the other doesn’t?

Isn’t this what the first amendment was created to protect? It doesn’t matter that your idea of free speech is different than mine. The first amendment guarantee is that all speech (with very limited exceptions) - yours, mine, and Mr. Shmulevich - is protected regardless of its affect on others.

Or it was anyway. Now we have “hate crime” statutes where we ask prosecutors, judges, and juries to play at being psychic in order to reach into the mind of defendants and glean their “intent” in committing an act.

If that act is to do violence against someone for their race, creed, religious beliefs, or sexual orientation, the defendant is judged more harshly and receives a longer prison term for what was in his mind at the time he committed the crime. This may be an efficacious rationale for protecting the lives and health of minorities through deterrence although I have yet to see any statistics that would lead me to believe this is so. What disgusts me is the shameless pandering by politicians in passing hate crime legislation in the first place. Posturing to win votes by playing to the interests of special pleaders is not a good way to make law under any circumstances.

And Mr. Shmulevich’s case is a perfect example. Using hate crime legislation to deal with violence against another for who they are is one thing. But using the statute to prosecute people who offend someone’s beliefs? This is an entirely different kettle of fish for which we are about to have a much needed and long overdue debate.

Does one have a right not to be offended in America? Or are only certain groups granted that right? If I write “Muslim go home” on a bathroom wall at a Christan church, can I be tried for a hate crime? Or, if a Muslim spits on a bible and burns it, is he subject to the exact same standard of justice if it was a Christian doing the same thing?

Instead of over generalizing, let’s look at this specific case involving Mr. Shmulevich. He’s a devout Jew who actually defended the Koran when the first instance of its desecration came to light 10 months ago:

The suspect’s roommate in Gravesend, Brooklyn, said she was stunned by the charges.

“It’s impossible. He was defending the Koran,” said Ola Petrovich, 24, an online saleswoman. “We had that conversation. He said, ‘Don’t criticize the Koran if you haven’t read it.’

“Why would he do something so stupid?”

[snip]

“He read the Koran,” she continued. “He was telling me, ‘You should read it.’ He’s Jewish, but he’s theologically sound. Both his parents are ballistic over this.”

The Korans Mr. Shmulevich threw in the toilet were school property taken from a “meditation room” on campus. Now I’m not a lawyer and will make no attempt to analyze the legal issues regarding this case. But Allah has the language of the statutes under which Mr. Shmulevich is being charged with a hate crime and to these layman’s eyes, it is perplexing to me why the prosecutor would be charging Mr. Shmulevich under either of these statutes. Instead, it appears to be a case where the prosecutor files more serious charges in hopes the defendant will plead to lesser ones.

Charge him with stealing the Korans, yes. Perhaps even charge him with a misdemeanor for vandalizing school property. But charging the man with two felony counts under dubious circumstances smacks of prosecutorial overkill.

Beyond the legal troubles of Mr. Shmulevich, there is the issue of double standards in the equal application of the law. Evidently, the law views artistic expression in a different light than other free speech issues. A crucifix in urine and putting a Koran in the toilet being done for the exact same reasons are evidently seen as separate matters all because the individual who placed the crucifix in urine says he is an artist and actually received grant money for the piece from the National Endowment for the Arts. In this case, “intent” becomes meaningless because the artist - Andres Serrano - is protected by virtue of tradition and law regarding art and the necessarily broad definition of it.

There is a strong sense among conservatives that this double standard is patently and grossly unfair. How can you protect one form of speech and prosecute another when the intent is similar? So far, there has been no case that I know of where a Muslim or anyone else has been prosecuted for desecrating the bible in this country although this fellow appears to have equalled Mr. Shmulevich’s act. I’m sure “Vile Blasphemer” would argue that he’s either engaging in satire or other forms of free expression that would protect him from the zealous prosecutor who is currently after Mr. Shmulevich. But does it really matter that much if Shmulevich was deadly serious in his protest? Suppose his defense is he was just trying to be funny? Are we to believe that this should be a mitigating factor when determining if a hate crime has been committed?

It seems to me we have not thought through all the ramifications of hate crime legislation of this type. When we skirt this close to punishing people for expressing their most passionately held beliefs - even if those beliefs offend - everyone loses a little freedom. Perhaps the statutes are drawn too broadly. In any event, an act such as that carried out by Stanislav Shmulevich must be seen in the same context we would view anyone exercising their rights granted under the first amendment. To do less, weakens the first amendment and consequently, our most cherished and fundamental freedoms.

A faithful liberal reader of this site sent me an email asking me to do a post on the charges of perjury being leveled against the Attorney General of the United States. He was extremely worried about the implications such charges had for the country:

As a citizen, the implications of the alleged behavior terrify me. Most Conservatives I personally know don’t defend Mr. Gonzales, but they essentially get off the topic as quickly as possible.

To me, “Rightwing” always had a connotation of Rebellion against Government. If anybody was going to use a shotgun to tell a government official to get off their property, it sure as hell wasn’t a liberal. The very likely extension of the perjury (if true), would have unbelievably damning implications for the W Bush Administration — the type of implications that I would have assumed would have “Rightwing” conservatives stocking up on ammo.

Excellent insight - save the shotgun toting conservative telling the “government” to get off his land. As a metaphor for conservatives wishing to have government take a back seat in people’s lives, it’s fine. However, I’m not sure even a liberal wouldn’t stand up to the government if they felt their private property was threatened.

“Mike” is correct about the right’s relationship with Gonzalez. As with just about anything regarding the Bush Administration these days, he is very difficult to defend. And I don’t think it’s necessarily because of what he’s done as a member of the Administration. One problem is that he may be the most incoherent public official I’ve ever heard. His testimony before Congress on just about anything reveals a man who can’t seem to finish a thought before moving on to the next one. This causes all sorts of problems. It is amazing how many times he is asked to clarify or repeat something simply because it is so difficult to follow his meandering, disjointed responses.

Incoherence is not a criminal offense. Neither is incompetence. But the way the firing of 8 US Attorneys was handled does not reflect well on Gonzalez and his management style. Allowing so much leeway to subordinates in such an important matter and then not being aware of what they were doing (if you believe that) bespeaks a boss without much of a clue as to what was going on in his own office.

The fact is, the Administration has sought to politicize the Department of Justice as they have tried to stamp politics on most every other aspect of government. Of course, few President’s politicized their Justice Department more than Clinton. And given the angry, partisan mood in Congress, this may be the wave of the future for Presidents; taking what used to be a semi-independent cabinet department and turning it in to an adjunct to the White House. In fact, since the Carter Administration, DOJ has progressively become less and less independent with the Clinton Administration going over the top in making Justice just another federal agency.

Anyone remember Johnnie Chung, Charlie Trie and the slew of illegal fundraising cases that the Clinton Justice Department, according to an Inspector General’s audit did not handle correctly? Ties to Chinese intelligence, money laundering at a Buddhist Temple, Commerce Department waivers in exchange for cash - all of these cases were either not pursued or followed up. Clearly, Democrats have extremely short memories about politicizing DOJ actions in the wake of Clinton Administration’s outrageous fundraising activities.

But that’s in the past. What we have today is an Attorney General who can’t seem to explain to Congress the various intelligence activities being carried out by the NSA to catch terrorists before they can strike here in the US. Part of that is certainly the fact that much of it is classified (something the AG offered to clarify in closed session - Democrats refused, wanting their circus to be televised). But beyond that, Gonzalez can’t seem to summon the coherence to differentiate between the already acknowledged “Terrorist Surveillance Program” and “other intelligence activities” being carried out by NSA.

Here is the basis for what the Democrats are calling perjury. They point to Gonzalez testimony in May on the visit to John Ashcroft’s hospital bed to re-authorize the terrorist surveillance program. The story was told by James Comey who, due to Ashcroft’s illness, was Acting AG at the time. He refused to sign off on what appeared to be a routine re-authorization of the program. And other top DOJ officials and career DOJ attorneys threatened to resign if it was given the go ahead without modifying some of its technical aspects.

Ashcroft preferred allowing his deputy Comey to do his duty because he was in no shape physically (as the left likes to paint the picture, Ashcroft was being browbeaten into approving something while on his deathbed). As Comey testified, he and Ashcroft had decided the morning the AG went into the hospital not to re-authorize the program. Not being aware of this, the White House’s Andy Card and Gonzalez went to the hospital hoping the AG would over ride what they thought was Comey’s decision.

Be that as it may, Gonzalez testified in May that what was being sought from the AG was a re-authorization of the already revealed NSA program and that there was no dispute over that “program” (the word “program” is important as we shall soon see), that the dispute was over another related classified program. Gonzalez exact words:

“[t]here has not been any serious disagreement about the program that the president has confirmed. There have been disagreements about other matters regarding operations, which I cannot get into.”

It turns out today, that the “other matters” involved in the NSA Terrorist Surveillance Program related to a massive, legal, data mining operation:

A fierce dispute within the Bush administration in early 2004 over a National Security Agency warrantless surveillance program was related to concerns about the NSA’s searches of huge computer databases, the New York Times reported today.

The agency’s data mining was also linked to a dramatic chain of events in March 2004, including threats of resignation from senior Justice Department officials and an unusual nighttime visit by White House aides to the hospital bedside of then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, the Times reported, citing current and former officials briefed on the program.

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, one of the aides who went to the hospital, was questioned closely about that episode during a contentious Senate hearing on Tuesday. Gonzales characterized the internal debate as centering on “other intelligence activities” than the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program, whose existence President Bush confirmed in December 2005.

Data mining is not illegal as long as the identity of the person whose records are being mined is not captured or revealed - we think. I use that caveat because no one knows exactly how the NSA data mining operation - carried out as a part of the NSA Terrorist Surveillance Program - actually worked. The speculation on why DOJ attorneys balked at re-authorization of the program at that time centers around the idea that although the data mining was legal, what the NSA wanted to do with the results may have crossed the line of legality.

So is the data mining operation a different “program?” If so, that would seem to put Gonzalez in the clear as far as perjury charges are concerned:

The report of a data mining component to the dispute suggests that Gonzales’s testimony could be correct. A group of Senate Democrats, including two who have been privy to classified briefings about the NSA program, called last week for a special prosecutor to consider perjury charges against Gonzales.

The report also provides further evidence that the NSA surveillance operation was far more extensive than has been acknowledged by the Bush administration, which has consistently sought to describe the program in narrow terms and to emphasize that the effort was legal.

Again, this goes back to Mr. Gonzalez incoherence in trying to differentiate between the NSA efforts at terrorist surveillance (where one party in the communication was overseas and the other here in America) and the massive collection of data which all took place in the US with the cooperation of phone giants like AT&T and Sprint. They allowed NSA to tap into their “switching stations” in order to feed the monster computers who were chewing on trillions of bits of information in order to discern patterns of communication that could have led to a terrorist cell in this country.

But if the data mining were a part of the NSA Terrorist Surveillance Program, how can they be two separate programs?

I think the most logical explanation is that they were separately reauthorized by DOJ, although probably at the same time. Separate paperwork could mean a separate program to many bureaucrats even though on the surface, it would appear to a lay person that both were part of the same program.

Another logical but unprovable explanation is that the technical aspects of the data mining operation were handled by a different entity than NSA. ABLE DANGER’s data mining was done in Florida out of the headquarters for Special Operations. Whether such a distinction would legally constitute a separate “program,” I haven’t a clue.

Marty Lederman has another explanation:

There was some sort of data mining program going on. Probably not of content, almost certainly not content reviewed by humans. That is to say, it involved computers searching through “meta-data” related to calls and e-mails, looking for certain patterns that might suggest connections to Al Qaeda or to suspicious activity that might be terrorism-related. (I have my theories as to what the programs might have been looking for, but don’t want to get into such speculation in this forum. And in any case, my theories are probably way off.)

This data-mining indicated that it might be valuable to do more targeted searches of particular communications “pipelines” (John Yoo’s phrase), looking for more specific information. But that’s where FISA came in. In order to target a particular U.S. person, or to wiretap a particular “facility,” FISA requires that the NSA demonstrate to the FISA court probable cause to believe (i) that the target of the electronic surveillance is a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power, and (ii) that each of the facilities or places at which the electronic surveillance is directed is being used, or is about to be used, by a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power. 50 U.S.C. 1805(a)(3).

Perhaps, as John Yoo suggests in his book, FISA would have prohibited following up on the leads revealed by the data mining with more targeted wiretaps of suspicious “channels” or “pipelines,” “because we would have no specific al Qaeda suspects, and thus no probable cause.”

Besides all of this, Tom McGuire points out that it would be virtually impossible to make any perjury charges against Gonzalez stick for the simple reason that to do so would expose massive amounts of classified details about our intelligence gather efforts:

Let me ask an obvious question that seems to have eluded some of our Senators and is not broached by the Times - how in the world is a perjury prosecution going to proceed without a massive declassification of these classified and presumably ongoing programs? Will the jury and the public see what Sen. Feingold saw?

The greymail issue was reported by the Times in the context of the Libby trial, so let’s use their definition (if not their spelling):

Graymail is the practice of discouraging a prosecution from proceeding by contending that a defendant may need to disclose classified or sensitive information as part of a full defense. Such an approach can force the government to choose between dropping the prosecution or allowing the information to be disclosed at a trial.

In the Libby case the classified issues were somewhat tangential to the question of whether Libby lied about his interaction with various reporters, but in the Gonzales situation, I can’t imagine how a jury could rule on whether this reasonably be characterized as more than one program without a fair amount of information about the underlying activities.

God knows what a determined Democratic Congress would be willing to do in order to get Gonzalez. But I think McGuire has a good point; the downside in revealing classified data would probably prevent even the Democrats from trying to make the case.

Josh Marshall is unconvinced and believes there’s much more lurking beneath the surface that the White House is desperate to cover up:

As you can see, we now have the first hint of what was at the center of the Ashcroft hospital room showdown. According to the New York Times, what the White House calls the ‘terrorist surveillance [i.e., warrantless wiretap] program’ originally included some sort of largescale data mining.

I don’t doubt that this is true as far as it goes. But this must only scratch the surface because, frankly, at least as presented, this just doesn’t account for the depth of the controversy or the fact that so many law-and-order DOJ types were willing to resign over what was happening. Something’s missing.

Marshall is speculating based on his take of the Bush Administration’s past “illegal” activities (quotes are necessary because no one has proven anything the Bushies done is “illegal”). But to be honest, how such speculation can be considered valid when there is so much we don’t know about the warrantless surveillance and why those same attorneys who were willing to resign over these “other matters” relating to the NSA Terrorist Surveillance Program had no problem with Ashcroft re-authorizing the program 20 times previously. Marshall is right. Something doesn’t fit. But whether it involves a “cover up” of other, more intrusive or illegal intelligence programs or a simple desire to hold close the most important secrets vital to our national security cannot be said with anything approaching certainty or even intelligently be guessed at.

Gonzalez should have been allowed to resign months ago over the US Attorney firings. Not because of anything illegal he did but because of the incompetent way it was handled. But Bush stuck with him and now must weather another storm of controversy that weakens him politically (if he could get any weaker). Some might admire the President’s steadfastness (I call it stubbornness) in standing behind his Attorney General. But there must come a point when doing so harms the office of the President as well as the country. That time has long passed. It’s time for Gonzo to go.

I was pleased to see that someone decided to spend the time and energy to scientifically debunk the politically motivated statistical study on deaths in Iraq since the invasion published by the Lancet just days before the 2004 election.

First of all, it is important that these charlatans be exposed for the scientific hacks they are. Dr. Les Brown, an epidemiologist, headed the 2004 study which estimated 100,000 or more excess Iraqis had died as a result of our invasion and occupation. What should have been the tip off to the study’s uselessness was the contention that “most of the excess deaths” were the result of violence and that “80% of those deaths were the result of air strikes.”

Unless the US was carrying on a massive bombing campaign that killed tens of thousands of civilians without the media, the UN, the Iraqis themselves, or anyone else knowing anything about it, that statement was either a laughable corruption of statistics or a bald faced lie.

And given this thorough destruction of the study by David Kane, Institute Fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, the latter explanation may be the most logical.

Much of the math here is mind-numbingly complicated, but Kane’s bottom line is simple: the Lancet authors “cannot reject the null hypothesis that mortality in Iraq is unchanged.” Translation: according to Kane, the confidence interval for the Lancet authors’ main finding is wrong. Had the authors calculated the confidence interval correctly, Kane asserts that they would have failed to identify a statistically significant increase in risk of death in Iraq, let alone the widely-reported 98,000 excess civilian deaths.

An interesting side note: as Kane observes in his paper, the Lancet authors “refuse to provide anyone with the underlying data (or even a precise description of the actual methodology).” The researchers did release some high-level summary data in highly aggregated form (see here), but they released neither the detailed interviewee-level data nor the programming code that would be necessary to replicate their results.

Failing to provide the detailed interviewee-level data and the programming code so that colleagues could duplicate their results thus validating the study is a clear indication that Brown and his crew could have cared less if the study was accurate or even scientifically useful. It is an open question whether they knew the study was flawed which would make their sin a mortal one for a scientist, a transgression that would get you fired from any respectable scientific institution in the world and leave your career in tatters.

The study was a political statement - propaganda in service to people that Brown, whose work was most praiseworthy in Rwanda, should have recognized as kin to the genocidal maniacs who hacked 800,000 tribesmen to death in the 1990’s. The beheaders and mass murderers that we are fighting in Iraq were aided by this study. And Brown and his team should be abjectly ashamed of themselves for knowingly giving them assistance and comfort.

This ethical transgression by Brown should finish his career. Instead, don’t be surprised if he gets the Nobel Peace Prize.

And what of the Lancet? Publishing the study 5 days before the presidential election and then claiming that the publication date was only a coincidence exposes them as frauds and liars. One of the oldest and most respected medical journals on the planet was put in service of a partisan political agenda and in a most cowardly manner, denied it’s motives were anything except pure as the driven snow.

Outrageous.

As we have seen with the Bush Administration, politically motivated science put in service to a specific agenda is extraordinarily damaging. For the Bushies, who have no respect for science in my opinion and see it as a tool to be used to advance their political agenda, everything from the public health to climate change was affected by their cooking the books. But Brown and The Lancet went the Bush Administration one better; they put themselves and their scientific expertise at the disposal of the enemies of civilization. They allowed their animus toward the war, or Bush, or the United States to blind them to the fact that by hurting America’s cause they were helping those who, if given the chance, would just as soon put a bullet in their brains as give them the time of day. It makes no sense.

In the end, this is an esoteric argument. Tens of thousands of Iraqis are dead, most of them innocent women and children. And while it’s true that insurgents and terrorists use civilians as human shields, it is also true that no study, no argument can be made to really defend or obscure the fact that for many Iraqis, this war has been a personal tragedy beyond their ability to bear. Loved ones who have died in crossfire or because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time when a car bomb went off, or simply because a mistake was made by American forces are lost forever. They cannot be brought back by bogus studies or “supporting the troops” or “winning through to victory” or political posturing here at home. Dead is dead. And we don’t need cooked statistics published by ethically challenged journals to tell us of the immense pain and human toll our war of choice is costing the Iraqi people.

Iraq is an open wound, bleeding as a result of our ministrations. Even though the surge is showing some signs of success in some areas - less so in others, the political differences that divide the country are a chasm that no one seems willing or able to bridge. Until the Iraqis decide they wish to live together in peace, the body count will continue to rise. The only question is will more die if we leave than if we stay.

And no one knows the answer - no one has any answers that would allow us the luxury of a quick exit.

UPDATE

Vindication for Shannon Love of Chicago Boyz whose series of posts on the study back in 2004 I relied on for my own piece questioning the study.

Kane shows that if the Falluja cluster is included in the statistical calculations, the confidence interval dips below zero, which is a big no-no. Since the study’s raw data remain a closely guarded secret, Kane cannot be absolutely certain that the inclusion of the Falluja cluster renders the study mathematically invalid…

Ah, vindication is sweet.