Right Wing Nut House

I love Chris Muir’s laconic take on the days events seen through the eyes of two young, hip couples in his Day by Day cartoons.

But today’s installment may have crossed a line of good taste. I know many of you will disagree with me, but you decide.

Many of you will recall when we conservatives came down hard on Jane Hamsher of Firedog Lake for her photoshopped picture of Joe Lieberman in minstrel make up. It is an unnecessary, hurtful reminder of days past when black people were thought not good enough to share the stage with white people. And to make matters worse, the Minstrel Show itself portrayed blacks in the most nauseatingly, submissive, subservient ways imaginable.

Ever wonder why the black stereotype is so ingrained in American culture? You can thank the wild popularity of the Minstrel shows. For most of the 19th century, these variety shows toured the small towns, big cities, and rural hamlets with whites dressed up in black face and performing song, dance, and skits in a bastardization of how African Americans lived. Watermelon eating, the slow shuffling gait, laziness, the myth that all blacks can dance, and a cloying kind of paternalism that exists down to this day, represented by Hillary Clinton and other liberal Democrats, were staples of Minstrel shows - even later when blacks themselves began to perform in them! Black actors were actually forced to wear black face themselves as part of the “tradition.”

Minstrel shows were often the only “contact” small town and rural white America had with African American culture. The fact that the way that culture was portrayed was so insensitive and depraved is why you rarely see films today that show song and dance numbers with actors in black face. Such numbers were staples of early Hollywood musicals as were rancid portrayals of blacks in general.

One of the more beloved holiday movies of all time, Holiday Inn, which starred Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, with a nice turn by Cesar Romero as Astaire’s conniving agent has not been seen on over the air TV for many years due to a black face number. There is just something so embarrassing about watching white people acting out black stereotypes that one wants to turn away or change the channel. It is a painful reminder of how things used to be in America - a shameful legacy that to this day we are trying to overcome.

Muir makes a living going to the edge. That’s what good cartoonists do. But putting anyone in black face cannot be seen as anything except out of bounds for decent society. We conservatives said as much following Jane Hamsher’s extraordinary Lieberman slur. And we should say the same about Mr. Muir and his idea of humor.

Okay…have at me in the comments.

UPDATE

Just Barking Mad gets it right with regards to Hillary and the Dems attitude toward race:

The question is whether this is the famous Clinton Chameleon ability or the more subtle racism of seeing people, as Muir’s Damon says, as a group and not as individuals. I don’t think that Ms. Clinton is a racist like the Kluxers of old (did someone say Robert Byrd?) but she is the new racist, the kind that sees blocs of voters as targets to be pandered to, instead of individuals. Hence her speaking to an audience like it was full of Aunt Jemimas and Steppin Fetchits.

I don’t want to put words in Mr. JBM’s mouth but it appears that he is justifying Muir’s use of black face to highlight this pandering to the group (and by extension, recognizing stereotypes) by Hillary. (A point made by long time commenter BD in the comments.)

Okay, I’ll buy that. But is there another way - a less hurtful, more sensitive way - it could have been done? My argument is not that Muir’s context was off it is that black face as a negative cultural icon is always wrong - as much as showing a burning cross.

UPDATE II

I have been called a “misogynist” and “sexist” by Jon Swift and TBogg for using the old Saturday Night Live comeback by Dan Akroyd to Jane Curtain during their “Point/Counterpoint” skits where Akroyd (impersonating the old conservative Richmond Times Dispatch columnist James Kirkpatrick whose 60 Minutes segment with liberal columnist Shana Alexander was being parodied) would begin his response to Curtain’s reasoned argument with “Jane, you ignorant slut.”

I don’t know how old either of those two gentlemen are, (although I heard a rumor that TBogg may be up for his learners permit any day now), but I apologize if the cultural reference was a little dated. Of course I don’t know if Hamsher is a slut or not. However, “ignorant” fits her to a tee as most reasonable people would agree.

“If it was good enough for your daddy/granddaddy’s war it’s good enough for yours,” seems to be what the Pentagon is saying with regards to trying to hype the accomplishments of Pat Tillman - whose character assassination by the left continues to this day - and Jessica Lynch, the young woman whose convoy was ambushed resulting in severe injuries and her capture by the Iraqis.

The problem is times have changed and trying to manufacture heroes for public admiration and to build support for military action has long since outlived its usefulness, not to mention that the tactic has fallen victim to an ever more intrusive and curious press whose sympathies cannot be counted on to cover up the truth when what really occurs on the battlefield comes to light.

That last is especially relevant in Tillman’s case where higher ups evidently tried to enlist Tillman’s comrades in a scheme to suppress the truth about his death by friendly fire:

The last soldier to see Army Ranger Pat Tillman alive, Spc. Bryan O’Neal, told lawmakers that he was warned by superiors not to divulge — especially to the Tillman family — that a fellow soldier killed Tillman.

O’Neal particularly wanted to tell fellow soldier Kevin Tillman, who was in the convoy traveling behind his brother at the time of the 2004 incident in Afghanistan.

“I wanted right off the bat to let the family know what had happened, especially Kevin, because I worked with him in a platoon and I knew that he and the family all needed to know what had happened,” O’Neal testified. “I was quite appalled that when I was actually able to speak with Kevin, I was ordered not to tell him.”

Asked who gave him the order, O’Neal replied that it came from his battalion commander, then-Lt. Col. Jeff Bailey.

“He basically just said … ‘Do not let Kevin know, that he’s probably in a bad place knowing his brother’s dead,’ ” O’Neal told House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman. “And he made it known I would get in trouble, sir, if I spoke with Kevin on it being fratricide.”

How Tillman’s commanding officer and higher ups in the Pentagon thought they could keep secret the circumstances surrounding the young man’s death is indicative of a military mindset not attuned to the times we live in. The fact that Pat Tillman was a high profile enlistee and that his death would generate intense scrutiny seems to have escaped the mossbacks and pencil pushers in the Pentagon who only saw propaganda gold when viewing Tillman’s death. A similar denseness captivated the officers and higher ups at the Pentagon when Jessica Lynch was rescued. The young woman was made into a “Little Girl Rambo” according to Ms. Lynch herself:

The former US private Jessica Lynch today condemned what she said were Pentagon efforts to turn her into a “little girl Rambo”, and accused military chiefs of using “elaborate tales” to try to make her into a hero of the Iraq war.

Speaking at a congressional hearing on the use of misleading information, an emotional Ms Lynch described how she suffered horrific injuries when her vehicle was hit by a rocket near the Iraqi town of Nasiriya in March 2003, killing several of her companions.

The Pentagon initially put out the story that Private Lynch - a slight woman who was just 19 at the time - had been wounded by Iraqi gunfire but kept fighting until her ammunition ran out. In fact, her gun had jammed and she did not fire a shot.

Pat Tillman was a hero not because of how he died but because of how he lived, eschewing a huge contract with the Arizona Cardinals of the NFL to enlist following 9/11. And Jessica Lynch’s heroism is the heroism of hundreds of thousands of young Americans who have answered the call to serve a purpose higher than themselves and enlist in the US armed forces. She also endured her injuries and capture with a singular stoicism while remaining true to her fallen friends and comrades in arms.

Isn’t this enough for the myth makers in the Pentagon? The American people today are much more sophisticated and skeptical than their counterparts who manned the homefront during World War II and Korea. Viet Nam saw to that. Aided by a skeptical and at times, openly hostile press, we look upon military pronouncements about the war with a cynicism born of experience and leavened by pundits and talking heads who tear into the information coming from the military using as a baseline the idea that nothing that comes from the Pentagon can be believed.

This situation was not helped by Rumsfeld’s rosy scenarios and “the glass is half full” press conferences. It drove many of us who support the war absolutely bonkers to hear the former Defense Secretary or the Vice President (”last throes,” anyone?) give briefings that bore little resemblance to the worsening situation in Baghdad and Anbar province not to mention downplaying the numbers of insurgents, the infiltration of the militias into the police and military, the Interior Ministry death squads and secret torture chambers, and a host of other “glass half empty” benchmarks that, while certainly not good news, would have given the American people a more complete picture of what was going on in Iraq.

The point that propaganda doesn’t work anymore - not in the current atmosphere of press scrutiny and suspicion - seems to be lost on the Pentagon officials who tried to pump up the circumstances surrounding the death of Pat Tillman and rescue of Jessica Lynch. They are living in the past if they believe they can get away with it. And the hell of it is, it besmirches the life and yes, legend of Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch; two Americans who were simply answering the call to serve and fulfilled their obligations with a startling devotion to duty and their country.

I sincerely hope the Pentagon has learned a lesson from this very public and humiliating expose of their PR machinations. Perhaps they could highlight the very real and unbelievable heroism of people like Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael Monsoor who threw himself on a live grenade and died saving his comrades. Or the 19 Navy SEALs and Special Operation Aviation Regiment (SOAR) members who lost their lives on a rescue mission in Afghanistan. Or any of the countless other Americans, living and dead, who have honored the flag, their comrades, and their country by sacrificing so much in the cause of freedom.

UPDATE

Good for Don Surber:

Why did Pentagon officials lie? Their distortions gained so little in the short-term and undercut the war efforts in the long-term. Heads should roll.

Contrast that with the myopia exhibited by Powerline:

There is no question that the initial misreporting of the circumstances of Tillman’s death was stupid and improper. The claim of a government conspiracy to cover up the facts, however, is ludicrous. If you read the fine print in the article linked above, you find that Tillman died on April 22, 2004. His family was told that the cause was friendly fire on May 29, 2004, barely a month later. The same day, the Army publicly announced that friendly fire was the apparent cause.

So once the facts became clear and the matter rose to a level above the commanders in the field, the Army publicized the result of its investigation. For the Democrats and Kevin Tillman to try to make political hay out of this one-month delay, three years after the fact, casts them in a worse light than it does the Army.

Conspiracy? Perhaps too strong a word. But the fact that there is direct testimony from one of Tillman’s comrades that he was told not to divulge the circumstances surrounding Tillman’s death in the immediate aftermath of the incident is telling indeed. And the fact that both Tillman’s commanding officer and higher ups in the chain of command knew right away that Tillman’s death was due to friendly fire calls into question the 5 week delay in giving Tillman’s family the truth.

I don’t care about Kevin Tillman’s politics (which were radicalized by this incident, him being a conservative prior to the death of his brother) but I sure would be angry if I had to wait 5 weeks to find out the truth about my brother’s death.

Harry Reid opened his mouth yesterday and out came the words that Democrats have striven mightily these last months to suppress, biting their tongues until after the election so that the American people would be fooled in thinking that they actually gave a damn about Iraq as anything other than a political weapon to use against their opponents:

The war in Iraq “is lost” and a US troop surge is failing to bring peace to the country, the leader of the Democratic majority in the US Congress, Harry Reid, said Thursday.
“I believe … that this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything, as is shown by the extreme violence in Iraq this week,” Reid told journalists.

Reid said he had delivered the same message to US President George W. Bush on Wednesday, when the US president met with senior lawmakers to discuss how to end a standoff over an emergency war funding bill.

“I know I was the odd guy out at the White House, but I told him at least what he needed to hear … I believe the war at this stage can only be won diplomatically, politically and economically.”

Congress is seeking to tie funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to a timetable to withdraw US troops from Iraq next year, but Bush has vowed to veto any such bill and no breakthrough was reported from the White House talks.

Reid is not an “odd guy out” for the Democratic party. He is the leader in the Senate and speaks for legions of Democratic lawmakers who subsumed their defeatism just long enough during the campaign last fall in order to keep the truth from the American people; that despite their pledge to “change course” in Iraq (and by intimation, bring the war to a successful conclusion), they had no intention of attempting to help the Iraqi government fight off the numerous enemies that seek their destruction but rather hand George Bush and America a humiliating military defeat.

Let me say up front that it is ridiculous for anyone to make a judgement about the success or failure of “the surge” at this point. That’s because 1) all troops earmarked for deployment have not arrived; 2) other factors relating to the new strategy such as the increased number of reconstruction teams have not been realized as yet; and 3) it will be largely up to the Iraqi government and the political steps it takes to confront its shortcomings and reach out to various factions to discern whether or not our military efforts have born fruit.

That last is critical. All our military can do is create the conditions necessary for political reconciliation. Even our battles against the Sadrites and other militias will, in the long run, not be as significant to the success or failure of the mission as what Prime Minister Maliki has begun to do to heal the country.

And the steps he has taken so far have been tiny and mostly ineffective. The best news seems to be coming from Anbar province where cooperation is at an all time high with tribal leaders in fighting al-Qaeda and tamping down the insurgency through reconstruction efforts. I think it can cautiously be said that we are on the right track in that troublesome area and that the future has brightened considerably.

But in other areas, the news is not so good. Maliki has done precious little to reach out to Sunnis and bring them into his government. The endless negotiations going on between leading Sunni politicians and the major Shia political parties to bring about a more representative Iraqi government are beginning to look like a sham. Even the moderate cleric Ayatollah al-Sistani has begun to distance himself from these talks, seeing quite rightly a loss of Shia power at the federal level if they succeed. And the wily parliamentary leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim who heads up the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) continues his stalling tactics on not only government reorganization but on the vital bill that would divvy up oil revenue in the future. That legislation was passed by the cabinet months ago but has yet to see the light of day in the legislature thanks to al-Hakim’s maneuvering.

Despite these problems, there is still time for Maliki to offer bold leadership that will start the Iraqis on the road to political recovery and allow for at least some of our troops to come home - on our own terms. Not terms dictated by the Democrats who have developed an unerring sense of what al-Qaeda and the insurgents in Iraq want them to do by eagerly highlighting the terrorists attempts to undermine confidence in our new strategy via horrendous attacks on civilians.

The enemy knows full well who their allies in this country are and what it takes to get them to spout their talking points for them. In fact, in one of the great historical ironies of all time, the left - who viciously criticized the US government and the military 40 years ago for basing their rosy pronouncements on the war largely as a result of encouraging numbers of enemy dead (body counts) now are using the very same tactic of civilian body counts as a yardstick for determining that the surge is a failure.

This would be despicable enough. But the real immoral cowardice by the Democrats in not calling for a total cutoff of war funds and an immediate withdrawal of troops now that they have come out and said the war is “lost” is unconscionable.

How can you possibly justify continuing to vote for a war that you believe is hopelessly lost? Our young men are dying in numbers not seen since the first weeks of the war and the Democrats are cowering in the corner, afraid of their own political shadow. The only option open to the Democrats if they truly believe the war is “lost” is to scrap the deal on the emergency supplemental and only vote for funds that would withdraw American troops from combat. It is a mystery why they are hesitating in this regard. The most recent Gallup poll shows that nearly 70% of Americans agree with Harry Reid - that the surge is a failure. How much more political cover do you need? When are you people going to grow a set and stand up for your principles rather than try more trickery and back door shenanigans?

To use the excuse that the Republicans will “blame” the Democrats for the lost war is unbelievable. If you really believe the war is lost our boys are dying for nothing and you’re concerned with your own political hides? For shame, I say! Besides, that excuse works only if you believe the American people are stupid and will have forgotten the last four years of mistake after mistake made by the Administration in Iraq. This is not likely which means your fear of voter retribution only makes you look more spineless.

There is nothing inherently unpatriotic in believing that we’ve lost in Iraq. But by refusing to act on this belief, the Democrats have revealed themselves to be traitors to their own conscience. For this, I hope there are plenty of primary challenges directed against the jellyfish who refuse to act on their belief that our men are dying for nothing and that it is more important to try and fool the American people than take a stand for what they think is America’s vital interest in leaving Iraq before the job is done.

UPDATE

Michelle Malkin has published a dozen or so emails from the troops who take issue with Senator Reid’s characterization of the war being “lost.”

Dinesh D’Souza asks an interesting question in his AOL Blog relating to the tragedy at Virginia Tech; “Where Is Atheism When Bad Things Happen?”

Notice something interesting about the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings? Atheists are nowhere to be found. Every time there is a public gathering there is talk of God and divine mercy and spiritual healing. Even secular people like the poet Nikki Giovanni use language that is heavily drenched with religious symbolism and meaning.

The atheist writer Richard Dawkins has observed that according to the findings of modern science, the universe has all the properties of a system that is utterly devoid of meaning. The main characteristic of the universe is pitiless indifference. Dawkins further argues that we human beings are simply agglomerations of molecules, assembled into functional units over millennia of natural selection, and as for the soul–well, that’s an illusion!

To no one’s surprise, Dawkins has not been invited to speak to the grieving Virginia Tech community. What this tells me is that if it’s difficult to know where God is when bad things happen, it is even more difficult for atheism to deal with the problem of evil. The reason is that in a purely materialist universe, immaterial things like good and evil and souls simply do not exist. For scientific atheists like Dawkins, Cho’s shooting of all those people can be understood in this way–molecules acting upon molecules.

If this is the best that modern science has to offer us, I think we need something more than modern science.

As an atheist myself, I find Mr. D’Souza’s question laughably simplistic and shockingly uninformed. I daresay that atheists are standing shoulder to shoulder with people of faith this day in condemning the tragedy as well as expressing sorrow and solidarity with the families of the victims. A belief in God is not a prerequisite to being a decent human being nor does empathy for your fellow man depend on having faith in a supernatural power greater than yourself. These things are independent of religion and have much more to do with one’s upbringing and society inculcating values and modes of acceptable behavior above and beyond that which one might learn through participation in organized religion.

I have no argument with people of faith. And I abhor the way in which many atheists belittle those who believe in God or feel themselves somehow superior for their non-belief. In fact, I find as much ignorance about religion emanating from atheists as I see stupidity about the natural world coming from many who believe in God. Atheism is a matter of choice arrived at after a careful, independent examination of the nature of the universe and one’s own conscience. A true atheist acknowledges and accepts the fact that others hold opposing views on how the universe can be explained and that those views should be respected. Anything less only proves how closed one’s mind can get when certitude replaces inquisitiveness and dogma just as rigid as any pronouncements from the Vatican is substituted for open and honest inquiry.

I digress here because it is painfully obvious that D’Souza’s triumphalism regarding people of faith having some kind of superior insight into tragedies like the murders at Virginia Tech is based on a towering ignorance both of atheism and humanity. He uses the words of the positivist Richard Dawkins in an attempt to show that a belief in the randomness of nature is the same as postulating that randomness in human behavior can be explained the same way - killing 32 people can be understood as “molecules acting upon molecules.”

In fact, most atheists believe in causal relationships when trying to fathom how the human animal behaves. This is being born out as every hour since the tragedy, it becomes clearer that Mr. Cho fell through the cracks of a mental health system designed not to protect society but rather enable the legally insane to avoid involuntary incarceration. And despite good faith efforts by some in the Virginia Tech community to get the young man help, the legal roadblocks to protecting ourselves from people like Mr. Cho turned out to be a direct cause of the tragedy.

And to ascribe “evil” intent to someone obviously suffering from a mental disorder is risible. Mr. Cho was a sick young man. He was diagnosed as such. Perhaps Mr. D’Souza should recalibrate his humanity and look more to his belief in a supreme being before labeling someone who by both legal and moral definitions was not responsible for their actions.

It is Mr. D’Souza who is having a hard time defining “evil,” not atheists. Yes, there are some who believe good and evil are relative terms and cannot be applied with any certainty to human behavior. I totally reject that notion. One does not need to believe in God (or the devil for that matter) to recognize the conscienceless barbarity of a Saddam Hussein or Adolf Hitler as true “evil.” Nor does one need to believe in the saints to recognize the innate goodness in people like the late Pope John Paul or even Jesus Christ. The conscience-driven life should be aspired to by all - not just people of faith.

Herein lies another aspect of Mr. D’Souza’s ignorance; the growing scientific evidence that what we term “conscience” is, in fact, an outgrowth of human evolution and our need to live in large groups. It may not be “molecules acting upon molecules” but rather the still mysterious evolution of the human brain and how both genes and learned behavior contribute in some fascinating mix to the development of, for lack of a better terms, our spiritual selves. Can one be a moral individual without a belief in God? Can one act ethically without fear of going to hell if one transgresses the law?

Of course they can. The Ten Commandments are a very good adjunct to common sense behavior if one is to live in a large, diverse society. Don’t kill anyone or steal from them. Keep your hands off their spouse. Always try and tell the truth. Be good to your parents. These things can be ordered as a result of basic human decency - perhaps even instinct if the evolutionary biologists like Dawkins keep digging - and not necessarily because disobeying these strictures could land the transgressor in a very bad place after they die.

Does it matter how one arrives at moral behavior be it through belief in the Commandments or acting out of a sense of obligation to society? Is it important that we all recognize that the true marvel of the human animal is in our capacity to live by “the Golden Rule” and treat others as we would like to be treated regardless of whether that urge is biological or spiritual in nature?

D’Souza would do well to read Thomas Aquinas who not only said “To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible,” but also “Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do.” That last is not dependent on anything except the individual conscience of each and every one of us, informed by both socialization and a desire to live among others of our kind in peace and harmony.

UPDATE

Hilzoy has a much snarkier, more thorough takedown of D’Souza.

There are a thousand important topics in this country that beg for discussion, debate, and consensus - real issues that would improve our security, advance the cause of liberty, promote the economy, and guarantee that the words contained in the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution actually mean something.

The Duke rape case logs in around 975.

I place as much importance on this case as I do the disappearance of a pretty white girl in Mexico or perhaps the latest horror story about a pleasure cruise from hell. A story of local prosecutorial misconduct in a college town just doesn’t deserve the kind of “all in” news coverage on cable nets and the internet that this story received. In fact, if one were to look at the case honestly by stepping back, taking a deep breath, and thinking about it for 10 seconds, one would have to admit to themselves that it is just plain loony that this story got as much play as it did in the first place.

In fact, I would say that this story says a helluva lot more about what’s wrong with the news business, blogs, and people in general than it says about any overarching issues relating to the justice system, treatment of rape victims (real or otherwise), feminism, the objectification of women in a sports dominated culture, privilege and the law, and all the other sickeningly portentous “issues” that were supposedly raised by this case.

Yes, Mr. Nifong should go to jail. As should the accuser whose lies have made it more difficult for victims of rape to seek and receive justice. But Nifong is just a local pol who saw an opportunity for a high profile case to swing an election his way. If you don’t think this doesn’t happen all over America then you aren’t reading your local papers very often. Certainly there are few prosecutors who go to the extraordinary lengths that Mr. Nifong did in manufacturing a case. But he by no means is alone in seeking to use the justice system to advance a political career.

As for the rest of the story, we have college boys behaving badly - drinking and partying while paying $800 to an outcall service to have strippers come and perform. The fact that they were athletes on the not-so-famous Duke Lacross team shouldn’t have mattered. They could just have easily belonged to the astronomy club. And even if their behavior has now been shown not to have crossed the line of legality, does anyone really want to defend them as they leeringly cheered these women on, grasping, groping, even grabbing the strippers who from what I’ve read, had some moments of genuine fear for their safety? I’ve been to one or two parties like that and I can assure you that such displays do not do the male animal credit.

And before we start bemoaning the fate of the accused whose lives have now been “ruined,” let’s wait for the six figure offers to tell their story on film, in books, and on television. How far behind can a Barbara Walters Special be or appearances on Larry King Live? And does anyone want to take a stab at what the final settlement offer will be from the state, county, city, and individual officials - all of whom will be sued for a variety of reasons and where such an open and shut case will make these boys (who admittedly went through a year of hell) rich beyond avarice.

God help them if they’re brave enough to go on O’Reilly.

Bad prosecutor, bad boys, a lying rape victim - it just doesn’t add up to a story of national import. Ah! But beyond the story itself is the fact that the case presented an absolute golden opportunity for every Tom, Dick, and Mary of a special pleader to shove their face in front of a TV camera and scream for 15 minutes about issues with only the most tangential relevance to the case at hand.

Mind boggling to say the least. First up and most vociferous were the racialists who never miss an opportunity to obscure the facts in order to advance their hackneyed agenda. Here, as with the second most vocal outriders who latched on to the case for their own selfish ends - the feminists - the facts of the case didn’t matter as much as the power of the symbols involved; a black woman whose veracity was questioned by the “white power structure” and whose ordeal was being made worse by misogynistic white males. The racialists and the feminists should be given credit for total consistency. Even when evidenced emerged clearing the young men, they stuck to their guns and said the guilt or innocence of the boys didn’t matter, that the real issues were the ones they raised in the first place.

Beyond the race and gender harpies, there were the class warriors who pointed to the “privileged” nature of Duke as a private institution and, along with the “College Sports Culture Breeds Animals” advocates, joined hands in skewering Duke athletics in general as well as the entire college administration who reacted with such extraordinary weakness and groveling that a retrospective look at their performance should get the lot of them fired.

Of course, none of this would have been possible without the relentless eye of the media; setting up shop in Durham for the duration, devoting hours and hours of coverage to timelines, leaks from defense lawyers, leaks from the prosecutor, and the contentious panel discussions about all the issues raised above and then some - a cacophony of noise, rumor, gossip, and speculation that made this story into the sickening display of media overkill that it eventually became.

The media navel gazing has already begun. Everything I’ve said above and more will be dutifully noted in columns and solemnly discussed on the media shows over the weekend. There will be angst-ridden pleas from media critics to stop the madness, that ‘we’re better than this - or at least we should be.” There will be editorials summing up for us what it all means and we’ll be hearing phrases like “rush to judgement” and “feeding frenzy” and “the media is to blame for this entire episode.” (Well, perhaps not that last one, but it fits, doesn’t it?)

Blogs like this one will waste a thousand or so words wondering why other blogs wasted so many words on a non story and others will take me to task for criticizing those who wasted the words in the first place.

And in the end, it will all be meaningless drivel. Take a good look, people. This is America at the beginning of the 21st century. A culture coarsened by a media - concentrated in fewer and fewer hands now - whose relentless drive for profit has created conditions where news isn’t what is happening everyday that impacts people’s lives but rather events or “stories” that can be told like a soap opera with good guys, bad guys, plot twists, and a commercial every 7 minutes. This is what we, the people, have wrought largely as a result of our complacency in the face aggressive corporate takeovers of one media outlet after another.

Fox News Group not only has TV stations but also newspapers around the world and a huge movie studio (not to mention radio stations, magazines, and internet portals). The same goes for every other international conglomerate who owns huge chunks of the media world. Perhaps a half dozen companies control almost all of the media content we are exposed to from sun up to sun down. And in a corporate culture that places a premium on how many eyeballs are glued to a particular station rather than the accuracy or viability of the news being reported, it becomes paramount for news to entertain first, then inform.

I can guarantee that within a month, the media will find the next story that they can serialize like a daytime drama. They will have learned nothing from the Duke rape case despite their caterwauling about lowered standards and the nature of the news biz.

It makes one wonder why I or anyone else should even bother.

UPDATE

I’ve already had to delete a half dozen comments for vulgarity and insulting language. Let’s keep it clean, please.

Also, this is not my brother’s blog. If you wish to comment on his post, please go to his site. Any comment not germane to this post will be deleted.

UPDATE II

Just a random observation about human beings…

If 5,000 people use the appellation “Moron” as a play on words regarding the last name “Moran” to describe me or my brother, do they ALL think they’re being funny? Do they believe they are being original in their humor - even when 4,999 commenters prior to their comment registering used the exact same play on words?

Fascinating…

“Oh, George. I wish I had kissed the Sonuvabitch.”
(Patton reflecting on the consequences of striking a soldier suffering from PTSD.)

There is little doubt that Don Imus deserves to be fired. The problem is he has deserved it for going on 25 years. A major contributor to the toxicity of our culture, Imus has frolicked in the sewer of American entertainment, making a living being pointlessly hurtful and hateful to every ethnic and racial group in America. His targets in the past have included the Jews, Hispanics, Italians, Arabs, Catholics, evangelical Christians, and Muslims, to name a few. And he has gotten away with it because people recognize that he is doing it for purposes of “entertainment.”

Playing to stereotypes is a dangerous game and Imus (and his chief enabler and cheerleader, producer Bernard McGuirk), skirt the edge of outright hate speech constantly, settling for drawing broad analogies and using code words that allow their slack jawed fans to create their own punchlines. This gimmicky approach to practicing bigotry without actually crossing the line earned the radio host a huge following during the crucial morning drive time in most major markets and a sizable audience on television via MSNBC.

Now having finally crossed the Rubicon of racist caricature, it appears he is about ready to lose it all:

NBC News dropped Don Imus yesterday, canceling his talk show on its MSNBC cable news channel a week after he made a racially disparaging remark about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team.

The move came after several days of widening calls for Mr. Imus to lose his show both on MSNBC, which simulcasts the “Imus in the Morning” show, and CBS Radio, which originates the show.

CBS Radio, which is the main employer of Mr. Imus, said in a statement last night that it would stick by the two-week suspension of the show that it and NBC News announced earlier; the suspension begins Monday.

But CBS said it would, in the interim, “continue to speak with all concerned parties and monitor the situation closely.”

The demands that Mr. Imus’s show be canceled have grown in intensity every day since last Wednesday when he made the comments, in which he labeled the women “nappy-headed hos.”

The gutless wonders at CBS who have their finger in the wind seeing if the controversy will die down over the next two weeks are a perfect example of why Imus was allowed to get away with his hate shtick. The fact is, he is wildly popular and makes money for those who employ him. On that basis alone, he has been given a pass that politicians, athletes, actors, musicians, and other public figures never seem to get when it comes to inappropriate speech. And here is where the market forces that drive the entertainment industry actually work to bring the culture down to the level of the gutter. We are told that sex, violence, perversion, and the general coarseness of our popular culture is the result of our own choices, that if people wanted more elevating fare they would demand it.

This may be true to a large extent. But it is also true that even with a veritable cornucopia of choices available on television, the internet, the movie theater, and radio, along with satellite outlets such as DVD’s, CD’s, and gaming, the ever shrinking number of corporations who control all of this media fail to offer much in the way of alternatives. The odd family show on television or small number of G-rated movies released every year reveal the fact that our media gatekeepers simply don’t try very hard.

In a perfect world, edifying and uplifting fare would if not dominate all aspects of our culture, they would certainly compete equally for dollars and viewership. Not living in a perfect world instead gives us Howard Stern who at first, tried to “out-Imus” Imus until he settled into his own brand of sexually charged, off the wall rantings against gays and racial minorities. The fact that he is now on a pay service doesn’t minimize his impact on a specific segment of the population - 18 to 25 year old males. Stern’s objectification of the female body, his leering references to lesbianism, and his ignorant political diatribes are gobbled up by the most impressionable of audiences. His estimated 5 million listeners on Sirius radio pay for the privilege of listening to this weirdo - a sure sign either in the efficacy of capitalism or that civilization is coming to an end.

Beyond the hate and the prurience, there is a general coarseness to our culture that leaves those who consume its fruits at times feeling unclean. I enjoy movies with lots of explosions and death as much as anyone. But there are times that I come away feeling as if I had wallowed in a pool of blood, so ultra violent and utterly devoid of social value much of this fare offers. The Kill Bill films are a good example. Hugely entertaining because they tell an interesting story populated with interesting characters, the gore and casual attitude toward spilling blood nevertheless made it much the guilty pleasure.

To be a critic and a lover of popular culture is not so much a dichotomy as it is a realistic response to the world in which we live. But the Imus’s of this world are different. Quentin Tarrantino may have made the Bill movies for the same reason Imus seeks to shock and titillate his audiences - for the dollars. But Tarrantino’s is a stylized violence - an artistic artifact that reveals a larger truth than the simple sum of the film’s parts. For Imus, he shocks simply because he is able to. This truly places him in a cultural gutter along with rape pornographers, some rap artists, , and others who seek to manipulate the emotions of their audience in order to elicit a base emotional.

Imus should have been fired long ago. Perhaps the action taken by MSNBC will dampen the enthusiasm of the “shock jocks” who seek to skirt the edge of propriety all in the name of listeners and ad revenue.

But I wouldn’t count on it.

Word that the Attorney General of the United States has been fibbing about his involvement in the firing of the 8 US Attorneys has, for some reason, shocked absolutely no one.

Maybe we should take that as a sign that this incompetent boob should have been fired a week ago:

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales met with senior aides on Nov. 27 to review a plan to fire a group of U.S. attorneys, according to documents released last night, a disclosure that contradicts Gonzales’s previous statement that he was not involved in “any discussions” about the dismissals.

Justice Department officials also announced last night that the department’s inspector general and its Office of Professional Responsibility have launched a joint investigation into the firings, including an examination of whether any of the removals were improper and whether any Justice officials misled Congress about them.

The hour-long November meeting in the attorney general’s conference room included Gonzales, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty and four other senior Justice officials, including the Gonzales aide who coordinated the firings, then-Chief of Staff D. Kyle Sampson, records show.

Ed Morrissey points us to this blurb by Jonah Goldberg at the Corner that pretty much sums up the situation:

Okay, he may simply have been deeply, deeply, confused, out of touch and unprepared to give a press conference which was supposed to put an end to the “scandal” and instead poured gasoline on it at a time when his boss, the President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief, had vastly more important things to deal with. Maybe, just maybe, a good “CEO” would have asked his staff, “Hey, before I unequivocally tell the world I was out of the loop, let’s double check and make sure I wasn’t in the loop. Okay?”

I will brook no excuses by commenters that Gonzalez “misspoke,” or “forgot,” or “got a note from his mother” that gave him permission to lie, or other excuses from the ever dwindling number of Bush diehards who visit this site . He is the frickin’ Attorney General of the United States fer crissakes! If there is anybody in government who needs to tell the truth, it is the guy responsible for enforcing the laws of land.

When I wrote last week that this was a non scandal, I was absolutely correct. The problem was that I didn’t bank on the Attorney General turning this into a full fledged Washington feeding frenzy by thinking he could get away with telling the press, the American people, and Congress one thing while knowing full well the truth lay exactly in the opposite direction.

Now firing the bastard won’t do anything to slake the thirst of the scandal mongers for blood. All it will do is make Bush look even weaker when he has to throw his AG to the dogs after promising to stand by him. And with a couple of Congressional Committees using electron microscopes to go over the documentation here, you can be sure they’ll find something else newsworthy every single day that will embarrass the Administration and make them look even worse - if that’s possible.

Word that the IG will be looking into this is actually the best news to come out of the entire affair. I’m sure he’ll raise questions about the propriety of the firings but I sincerely doubt he’ll find anything actionable. That won’t stop Congressional Democrats from going after Miers and Rove -a constitutional battle royale that’s shaping up to be the political entertainment of the spring.

I’m 100% with Patterico here:

These attorneys’ attitudes towards their clients can be summed up as follows: I’d like to defend you, but you’re making it very difficult for me.

But they’re making it really, really hard for me to do so.

Damn near impossible now. This news today has even had them surrendering the high ground on the issue of executive privilege. Not that Rove or Miers has much to worry about. The netnuts are in their anti-Rovian dream state again, believing like Dorothy that if they click their heels together three times wearing the magic shoes and wish hard enough, Evil Karl will exit the White House in chains. This, too, will make for some great springtime entertainment. Nothing like watching the left have their heads explode when once again, Evil Karl escapes their clutches.

The wild eyed, drooling left has become infected. So has the button down National media. The wonks, the pundits, the mavericks, the sycophants, the toadies, the entire panoply of players, movers and shakers in Washington, D.C. have all been bitten by the scandal bug. And their reaction is shaking the foundations of the Bush presidency.

“Purgegate” - or whatever inane nomenclature with the suffix “gate” is being used these days - has, in the last 24 hours, gone from a scandal focusing on the botched firing of 8 US Attorneys, incoherently defended by the Attorney General and poorly explained by the White House to the juiciest and most dangerous dust up that the Bush Administration has yet faced.

Already it appears that Attorney General Gonzalez is, if not on his way out the door, then certainly is being handed his hat. His extraordinarily incompetent press conference - 9 minutes of stumbling, bumbling, confused and contradictory statements about who did what and when - should have been immediately followed by someone in the White House coming out and clarifying what the incoherent Gonzalez couldn’t make clear; that removing appointees who serve at the pleasure of the President for a variety of reasons is nothing for official Washington to get its panties in a twist about.

But this White House has been in denial since the election about the changed atmosphere in the capitol. Every single statement uttered by an Administration official is going under the microscope whether they like it or not. And those statements will be twisted, pulled, stretched, spindled and mutilated until the absolute worst possible light can be cast upon them. This is what Republicans did for 6 years during the Clinton Administration and it should have come as no surprise to the witless wonders in the White House that the Democrats would employ similar tactics.

Too late. It has now become impossible to inject any sanity into the rush to manufacture this crisis into something it clearly isn’t; a purge of US Attorneys to prevent the investigation of Republicans. What Democrats believed was the clearest case of such malfeasance - the removal of San Diego USA Carol Lam who was investigating Duke Cunningham and the whole rotten CIA-DoD bribery scandal - has now been shown to be much ado about nothing.

It seems that Ms. Lam was targeted for removal (according to the emails released in the last 48 hours) long before she went after Duke Cunningham!

Patterico has a timeline that shows how truly paranoid the scandal mongers are in this case:

Here is the timeline of events:

March 2, 2005: Kyle Sampson informs White House Counsel Harriet Miers that Lam is being targeted for possible dismissal. Sampson attaches a list of U.S. Attorneys, dated February 24, 2005. The names of those targeted for dismissal are stricken out. Lam’s name was stricken out, meaning she had been targeted for possible dismissal as of March 2, 2005. You can view Sampson’s March 2, 2005 e-mail at this link.

June 12, 2005 (three months later): Marcus Stern of the San Diego Union-Tribune breaks the news of the Randy Cunningham scandal: “A defense contractor with ties to Rep. Randy ‘Duke’ Cunningham took a $700,000 loss on the purchase of the congressman’s Del Mar house while the congressman, a member of the influential defense appropriations subcommittee, was supporting the contractor’s efforts to get tens of millions of dollars in contracts from the Pentagon.” View the story at this link.

Carol Lam was on a list of targeted prosecutors three months before the Randy “Duke” Cunningham scandal ever broke.

And make no mistake: Lam did not investigate Cunningham before Marcus Stern’s article was published. To the contrary, Stern’s article was the only reason Cunningham was prosecuted. One of the lead prosecutors confirmed this in a 2006 interview with the American Journalism Review:

As I said, it’s too late - too late for the facts to catch up with the hysteria. The New York Times is pooh-poohing the idea that some of the USA’s were fired for not aggressively going after voting fraud cases. To the Times, voter fraud is just not important enough an issue to remove a US Attorney:

In its fumbling attempts to explain the purge of United States attorneys, the Bush administration has argued that the fired prosecutors were not aggressive enough about addressing voter fraud. It is a phony argument; there is no evidence that any of them ignored real instances of voter fraud. But more than that, it is a window on what may be a major reason for some of the firings.

In partisan Republican circles, the pursuit of voter fraud is code for suppressing the votes of minorities and poor people. By resisting pressure to crack down on “fraud,” the fired United States attorneys actually appear to have been standing up for the integrity of the election system.

I guess thousands of fake voter registration forms submitted by the highly partisan ACORN as well as other frauds perpetrated by the usual suspects at the AFL-CIO, Moveon, and other liberal advocacy groups should be allowed into the system - at least according to the Times. We wouldn’t want to disturb the moronic notion that partisan Republicans use “code” to differentiate between real people and sock puppets who would be capable of voting 5, 10, or 20 times at different polling stations. Democrats never perpetrate these kinds of frauds - just ask the dead people in any Chicago cemetery and they’ll swear on their graves that such shenanigans never take place.

It is this kind of rank paranoia that is driving this scandal. There is not one scintilla of evidence that these firings were carried out for any other reason than those stated in the emails. Carol Lam was extremely lax in prosecuting immigration scofflaws - this in one of the largest entry points for illegals coming into the United States! Why is this not a legitimate reason for kicking her incompetent ass out of office - especially since the Duke Cunningham case wasn’t even on the horizon yet?

A case can be made that the firings done under the auspices of the Patriot Act is a stupid and careless use of that power. But it is not illegal. And perhaps the Democrats (and Republicans) can look at not only that amendment, but others as well where the potential for abuse by the Executive branch is outweighed by any gain we might achieve in countering terrorism. This can be done legislatively and doesn’t need to be tossed about as an example of some deep, dark, conspiracy by the Bushies to destroy the Constitution. That also, is rank paranoia - something we’ve grown tired of over the years coming as it does from the same sources time and time again.

And this latest “revelation” regarding Karl Rove’s role in the scandal is perhaps the most hysterical of all. The netnuts all but have Rove once again frog marched out of the White House and into the pen. But for what?

A sample of what Rove is accused of:

Rove “inquired” about firing US Attorneys…

Rove “raised the idea” of firing Attorneys…

Rove “asked” the Justice Department about firing all 93 prosecutors…

Rove didn’t “approve” or “direct” or “order” anyone to fire anybody. To say otherwise (or intimate it) is a lie.

And when did The Dark Lord make these inquiries? A month ago? Two months?

Why no! It was in January, 2005 which, on most earth calendars, is about 2 months after the 2004 election. Jeralyn Merritt of Talk Left explains why this is perfectly legitimate:

The travesty of the current U.S. Attorney firing scandal is not that U.S. Attorneys are being replaced. That is expected after an election, such as the one in 2004. It’s that it’s happening in 2007.

The Administration should have decided in 2004, following Bush’s re-election, which U.S. Attorneys it wanted to replace. In 2005, all U.S. Attorneys were subject to replacement. In fact, all of them are expected to submit their letters of resignation and either be retained or have their resignation letters accepted.

Paul Mirengoff sums up succinctly:

ABC News reports that about-to-be-released emails show that the “idea of firing all 93 U.S. attorneys was raised by White House adviser Karl Rove in early January 2005, indicating Rove was more involved in the plan than the White House previously acknowledged.” Notice how, within a single sentence, an “idea” that apparently never got off the ground becomes a “plan.”

Whatever its source, we know that the idea of firing all 93 U.S. attorneys was rejected, and that only eight were let go. Thus, assuming that Rove did raise the idea of a mass firing, it’s not clear why this would (in ABC’s breathless phrase) “put Rove at the epicenter of the imbroglio.” Presumably, “the imbroglio” pertains to what the administration did, not to a course of action it rejected.

UPDATE: You can read the Rove-related emails (none of which was written by Rove) by following a link from the ABC News story. To summarize briefly, they show that Rove asked an aide how the Justice Department planned to proceed with the U.S. attorneys. He mentioned various possibilities, including replacing them all, without making a recommendation or commenting on their merits. The aide raised the matter with Kyle Sampson, Alberto Gonzales’ aide. Sampson said that he would like to replace 15 to 20 percent of them — “the underperforming ones.” In the end, they replaced fewer than 10 percent.

If its a scandal you want to make of this issue, concentrate on the political pressure placed on the New Mexico USA Yglesias by Senator Domenici and others. And the aforementioned use of the Patriot Act to circumvent the advise and consent role of the Senate (pro-forma though it is in the case of approving USA’s). These actions are bad enough and should be investigated with the appropriate Congressional committees using the power of subpoena to find out exactly what happened and then recommend steps to make sure it doesn’t occur again.

But the rest of this hysterical posturing and hyperbolic feeding frenzy is all for show. And yes, I blame the White House and the Justice Department for going about their business as if Republicans still were in the majority and no one would question any action they took or any confused and muddled explanation they make to justify it.

The netnuts will flog this story for all it’s worth, driving the mainstream press to cover every revelation - trivial or important - as if the fate of the Republic were at stake. Too bad they can’t get as exercised about the jihadis and terrorists out there. Now that would be newsworthy.

Pete Rose finally comes clean.

Want a sure fire way to start an argument? Ask any baseball fan if Pete Rose should be in the Hall of Fame.

The answer will reveal a schism that has split baseball for nearly 20 years. Did Pete Rose bet on baseball? Did he bet on his own team, the Cincinnati Reds? Should he be eligible for baseball’s greatest honor? Where you stand on those questions places you on one side or the other of baseball’s great divide - a question of belief in heroes and a recognition (cynical or otherwise) of their follies and foibles.

The first of those questions was answered in Rose’s 2005 autobiography My Prison Without Bars where he finally admitted to betting on baseball after denying it for 16 years. Rose admitted he bet on baseball games not involving the team he was managing at the time, the Cincinnati Reds. What made the admission so self serving was that excerpts from the book were released on the same day that Paul Molitor and Dennis Eckersley were named to the Hall of Fame.

Rose had in the previous months made an application for re-instatement to the game from Commissioner Bud Selig after telling him in November, 2004 that he had in fact bet on baseball and it was widely speculated that Selig would relent and allow the most prolific hitter of all time back into the game and thus make him eligible for the Hall.

But Selig never even responded to Rose’s petition. And now, two years later in an interview on ESPN radio, Rose has finally revealed what Major League Baseball and most fans have known for nearly two decades; that despite his numerous and vociferous denials, Pete Rose as manager of the Cincinnati Reds placed illegal bets on his own team:

“I bet on my team every night,” said Rose, 65. “I didn’t bet on my team four nights a week … I bet on my team to win every night because I love my team, I believe in my team.

“I did everything in my power every night to win that game.”

In truth, the question of Rose’s guilt has never been in doubt. The evidence against him was overwhelming: Betting slips in his handwriting, testimony from bookies, and 113 witnesses tell the sad story of a man deep into an addiction to gambling. But Rose was adamant. As late as 1999, Rose was casting aspersions on the individual who compiled the report for Major League Baseball, John Dowd, and denying that he had a gambling problem at all.

He had his defenders down through the years. People like Hall of Fame team mates Joe Morgan and Johnny Bench, as well as the great Phillies 3rd baseman Mike Schmidt. And Cincinnati fans have almost universally given him their continued love and support. And there has been a large, vocal segment of the sporting press who insist that even if Rose did bet on his own team, his sins are no greater than most other Hall of Famers who have been revealed by historical research to have less than stellar characters.

The question of whether the outcome of a game would have been affected if Rose had bet on his own team is a tricky one.

While no one has ever documented Rose ever bet against the Reds—which he has denied consistently—or manipulated the outcome of any games, it long has been speculated he managed games differently when he was betting on the Reds to win. He might exhaust his bullpen trying to win them while trusting a failing starter a little longer when he didn’t have a bet down, for instance.

Indeed, in a 162 game season, managerial decisions are sometimes made taking into consideration the schedule, the opponent, who the likely starting pitchers for the opposition will be for the remainder of a series, and a whole host of factors that make the winning or losing of one game somewhat less important than it would ordinarily be.

As an example, suppose a manager is looking at a stretch of 9 games in 9 days. In the early part of that stretch, he might be less willing to go to the bullpen and yank a starter who is having difficulty so that his bullpen will stay fresh down the road.

But suppose you have a large bet on the outcome of that game? Playing that game as if it were the 7th game of the World Series and using up your bullpen so as not to lose the bet is, in a very real way, as dishonest as betting against your team in the first place. Either way, you are not managing to win in order to advance the fortunes of your team but rather to simply make good on your bet. It goes to the heart of the integrity of the game and cannot be excused nor countenanced.

Also, although it has never been proven, Jim Dowd told the New York Post that he believes it very possible Rose did bet against the Reds on occasion:

In an earlier interview with the New York Post, Dowd said his research showed Rose did not bet on the Reds whenever two pitchers (one of whom was Mario Soto) started. Dowd said that “sent a message through the gambling community that the Reds can’t win.”

Dowd also told the Post his investigation was “close” to showing Rose bet against the Reds. The report says “no evidence was discovered that Rose bet against the Cincinnati Reds,” but Dowd told the Post he might have been able to prove that if he had not faced time constraints.

Dowd later backtracked on those comments.

“I was never able to tie it down,” Dowd told the Associated Press. “It was unreliable, and that’s why I didn’t include it in the report.

Why that issue should be resurrected goes directly to the credibility of Pete Rose who for 18 years denied he bet on his own team and who vilified those who said he did. In short, Rose cannot be trusted. No one believes him anymore.

One of this country’s finest writers, James Reston, showed in Collision at Home Plate that Rose was a brutish lout - a swaggering, gum chewing, loudmouthed, arrogant SOB who thought his personality and personae were larger than the game itself. He was opposed by the Commissioner of Baseball, the diminutive (and just as arrogant) but refined and cultured former President of Yale University Bart Giamatti who Reston shows was so shaken by the Rose ordeal that he died of a massive heart attack 8 days after banning him from baseball forever. Of that confrontation, Reston wrote “The Rose case elevated (Giamatti) to heroic stature in America. By banishing a sport hero, he became a moral hero to the nation.”

And Rose? Here we are 18 years later and one can only speculate about the reason he has decided to finally come clean. At age 65, he may feel that his opportunities to put on a uniform and manage or coach a team are waning and that a full confession may finally melt the heart of Bud Selig, giving him a final chance to share in the glory of the game. And re-instatement will also make him eligible for the Hall of Fame.

But I think something more calculating is at work here. By resurrecting the scandal at the same time that Barry Bonds, the steroid tainted slugger, goes for baseballs most hallowed of all hallowed records - the career home run mark - Rose’s transgressions can be seen in a little different context. Perhaps betting on baseball doesn’t look so bad when one considers that Bonds, poster boy for an era in professional baseball that has called into question the integrity of records as a result of performance enhancing substances, will have questions swirling about him as he assaults Hank Aaron’s record of 754 career home runs.

In fact, I’d be willing to bet on it.

When the Democrats were campaigning last fall, they promised that if they took over the Congress that there would be numerous changes in the way that things got done in the nation’s capitol.

Judging by what’s been happening these first months of Democratic rule, I think congratulations are in order. We have left the incompetent and corrupt Republican leadership behind and placed in their stead the cowardly, the manipulative, the sneaky, and the screeching hysterics of the netroots and their allies on the far left who are whipping the cowed Democratic leadership toward the edge of the cliff.

On Iraq, the confusion and indecision of the leadership has led them to offer up a plan that few completely understand and that no one can coherently explain. And to make matters worse, the situation on the ground in that bloody country is slowly but noticeably changing for the better. At this point, the Democrats are in a race not with the Republicans or the White House but with al-Qaeda and the insurgents in Iraq. Can the Democrats surrender the US armed forces on the field of battle before al-Qaeda and the insurgents are beaten down in Baghdad and defeated in Anbar?

Inquiring minds want to know. And for the sporting public, there’s some serious side action on exactly when the Democrats will declare that it was actually their policy recommendations that contributed to what ever nominal turnaround in Iraq can be “benchmarked.” Right now, the odds are 4-1 that by the 4th of July, the Democrats will simultaneously be crowing about an improvement in the fortunes of war as a result of their brilliant strategy while pandering to the netroots by calling for a timetable for withdrawal.

But Iraq has now been gratefully taken off the front burner because the Democrats have been handed a gift by the Justice Department and the White House that will temporarily make people forget their nauseating grovelling before the Mighty Kos and the loons at Moveon.Org and transfer their attention to the Democratic Party’s new industrial strategy for our country.

It doesn’t involve making cars or fashioning steel or even reviving the horse and buggy industry that many of the left’s more radical Luddites would prefer given their belief that automobiles are the spawn of Satan and are the major cause of global warming . . . or is it global cooling? So hard to keep track of the concerns of weeping celebrities and hysterical greenies these days.

Instead, this new industrial policy will concentrate on the manufacture of scandals. The benefits of this policy are immediately apparent; workers’ wages and benefits aren’t important nor does the federal government have to give tax breaks or tax incentives in order for the policy to be successful. All that’s necessary is to strike the right tone of outrage - the more over the top the better - so that a the scandal mongering press will pick up on the drama and add their own outrage quotient to the mess. (A convenient loss of memory is also a requirement but since we’ve forgotten what the Clinton Administration did when they fired every single US attorney in order to get just one of them off the back of a powerful Congressman, we can’t make it part of the overall policy, can we?)

Add an incoherent Attorney General and a clueless assistant, throw in Harriet Meyers and Karl Rove and what you have is a perfect storm that combines political interference in the offices of US attorneys (a time honored custom that for anyone to express outrage at finding can rightly be accused of indulging in the height of political hypocrisy) with the incompetence of Alberto Gonzalez, Harriet Meyers and a White House that can’t seem to stop shooting itself in the foot - or other, more vital areas of the body.

The more I read about this “scandal” the more I’m amazed at two things; 1) a White House in denial that they can continue to carry on business as usual, acting as if no one is going to question everything they do and portray it in the worst possible light; and 2) a Democratic party whose fall campaign was bereft of ideas and whose stewardship of Congress so far has been defined by a comedy of starts and stops on Iraq policy now ginning up fake outrage over the non issue of firing people who serve at the pleasure of the President.

It might feel good to wail and weep over interference by politicians in the offices of US attorneys but I challenge anyone to say that this is not a custom practiced by Republicans and Democrats - Congress and White House - from the beginning.

Bobby Kennedy routinely intervened in the cases of federal prosecutors - calling them, cajoling them to prosecute voting rights violations among others. Was it “interference” in a good cause that made Kennedy’s actions legitimate?

And, of course, even though we are supposed to have forgotten the matter, Bill Clinton fired every single US Attorney in March of 1993. As the New York Times explained at the time, it was done largely to get rid of a particularly troublesome prosecutor who was going after Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski:

Attorney General Janet Reno today demanded the prompt resignation of all United States Attorneys, leading the Federal prosecutor in the District of Columbia to suggest that the order could be tied to his long-running investigation of Representative Dan Rostenkowski, a crucial ally of President Clinton.

Jay B. Stephens, the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, who is a Bush Administration holdover, said he had advised the Justice Department that he was within 30 days of making a “critical decision” in the Rostenkowski case when Ms. Reno directed him and other United States Attorneys to submit their resignations, effective in a matter of days.

While prosecutors are routinely replaced after a change in Administration, Ms. Reno’s order accelerated what had been expected to be a leisurely changeover.

(HT and Kudos to Macranger)

But this case is different. And the reason is simple; George W. Bush is President. Once that reason is invoked, history can be ignored, precedent disregarded, custom overlooked, and the truth slighted.

Was it wrong for Senator Domenici to try and interfere in the duties of the US Attorney? Of course. But the dripping hypocrisy of the Democrats in making it appear that what Domenici did or the purge itself planned by Harriet Meyers at the White House and Kyle Sampson at Justice was some kind of heinous crime, unprecedented in the annals of American jurisprudence is plain poppycock.

Expect more “revelations” as this scandal unfolds. I notice we are already “Fitzgeralding” the scandal by moving on to secondary issues not related to the original “crime.” Already, Gonzalez is being taken to task for having some of his statements contradicted by a slew of emails released that purport to show his Chief of Staff Sampson heavily engaged in the purge from the beginning despite Gonzalez incoherent denials. And no doubt other discrepancies will show up - or will be manufactured. All the better to drag out the shelf life of the scandal and give it as much play as possible.

Well, at least you can say it’s making us forget that the Democrats can’t get their act together when it comes to what they want to do about Iraq. Thank God for small favors…

UPDATE

Definition of “Perspective” by Orrin Kerr:

I haven’t written about the U.S. Attorney’s story because I’m having a hard time figuring out just how big a deal it is. Parts of it are obviously very troubling: I was very disturbed to learn of the Domenici calls, for example. More broadly, I have longrunning objections to the extent to which DOJ is under White House control, objections that this story helps bring to the fore (although my objections are based on my views of sound policy, not on law).

So in the end I don’t quite know where I come out based on what we know. Without knowing where I come out, I don’t feel I have much helpful to add. I realize that this may mean I am missing a big story. Perhaps this will prove to be a simply huge scandal, and in time it will seem odd that we weren’t all blogging about it. But I don’t know what I’m supposed to do when I read a story and I’m not sure what to make of it.

Thank you and (to coin a phrase) “Good night and good luck.”

UPDATE II

Patterico, a prosecutor himself, takes apart the case fairly rationally.

And I should add that you will forgive me if I find it laughable that the newest talking point coming from the left is that Bush fired political appointees midway through his term rather than in the immediate aftermath of his innauguration. “Bush fired more prosecutors in one day than had been fired in the last 25 years midterm,” is the refrain coming from many sources today.

The reason this is a no-no is because it relates to the appearance of impropriety. Clinton firing 70 prosecutors in order to purge one or two troublesome appointees who were going after Democrats is perfectly acceptable because the veneer of legitimacy was maintained! The fiction that there was no politics involved could be advanced with a straight face. Since Clinton took that action at the start of his term, he was only doing what other Presidents had done previously and not trying to squash the investigation of a powerful Democrat vital to the Administration’s legislative agenda.

Enter George Bush and suddenly, the veneer is gone, the appearance of impropriety is resurrected and voila! Instant scandal and more evidence that Bush threatens the foundation of the American Republic.

This really is getting sickening. It’s not even a question of double standards any longer. It is simply “The Bush Standard.” George Bush wakes up in the morning and his very existence is a threat to women, children and dogs not to mention the American Constitution and the rule of law. Ghengis Khan didn’t even get this kind of press. It is silly and destructive. And to my mind, allows legitimate and measured critiques of the Bush Administration to get lumped in with these hysterically ginned up controversies so that some Republicans can simply dismiss any criticism of Bush as deranged mouthings of the insanely partisan.

As for specific issues like the firing of Carol Lam supposedly because her investigation was getting to close to Republican Jerry Lewis, I would simply point out that Clinton’s firing of the prosecutor investigating Rostenkowski did not prevent that crooked Congressman from getting convicted and sentenced to jail by the fired prosecutor’s successor.

So get off your fake moral high horses and stop pretending that you are shocked, simply shocked that politics is played with US Attorneys’ offices. If we had heard similar outrage about political interference in federal cases in the decade preceding Bush, you would be on much firmer ground to criticize what is happening now. As it is, all I see are a bunch of hypocrites taking political advantage of the stupidity and incompetence of the White House and Gonzalez.