Right Wing Nut House

Joe Klein, reporter, author, columnist, and blogger who is currently ensconced at Time Magazine’s blog Swampland, has had a full flowing, Road to Damascus revelation about the left wing blogosphere.

After pondering the matter for however long he has been taking the slings and arrows flung his way by the rabid dog left, it has suddenly dawned on Mr. Klein that these are not very nice people. Nor are they very rational. Nor are they very “liberal” in the classical sense of the word.

Klein’s eyes were opened when he quoted Representative Jane Harmon (former Chairman of the House Intel Committee until Reverend Mother Pelosi saw fit to boot her off in favor of one of her cronies) prior to the Iraq funding vote as saying that she wanted to vote against the bill but felt an obligation to support the troops by giving them the equipment they needed to do their jobs. Harmon, as politicians are wont to do, changed her mind and voted against the bill anyway leaving Klein hanging out to dry and the netnuts went to town on the poor fellow:

The next day, I was blasted by a number of left-wing bloggers: Klein screwed up! I had quoted Harman in the past tense—common usage for politicians who know their words will appear after a vote takes place. That was sloppy and… suspicious! Proof that you just can’t trust the mainstream media. On Eschaton, a blog that specializes in media bashing, I was given the coveted “Wanker of the Day” award. Eventually, Harman got wind of this and called, unbidden, to apologize for misleading me, saying I had quoted her correctly but she had changed her mind to reflect the sentiments of her constituents. I published her statement and still got hammered by bloggers and Swampland commenters for “stalking” Harman into an apology, for not checking her vote in the Congressional Record, for being a “water boy for the right wing” and many other riffs unfit to print.

First of all, if Joe wants the job of carrying water for the right wing, he’s more than welcome to it. Somebody’s got to. Since no one in Congress seems to be stepping up to do it, it may as well be Klein.

But Joe would first have to delve into the world of moonbattery and paranoia. For he has, in fact, discovered the lefty netnuts to be a bunch of unhinged, drooling, raving lunatics:

This is not the first time this kind of free-range lunacy has been visited upon me. Indeed, it happens, oh, once a week to each of us who post on Swampland (Karen Tumulty, Jay Carney and Ana Marie Cox are the others). A reasonable reader might ask, Why are the left-wing bloggers attacking you? Aren’t you pretty tough on the Bush Administration? Didn’t you write a few months ago that George W. Bush would be remembered as one of the worst Presidents in history? And why on earth does any of this matter?

[...]

But the smart stuff is being drowned out by a fierce, bullying, often witless tone of intolerance that has overtaken the left-wing sector of the blogosphere. Anyone who doesn’t move in lockstep with the most extreme voices is savaged and ridiculed—especially people like me who often agree with the liberal position but sometimes disagree and are therefore considered traitorously unreliable.

I was just thinking about this very thing as it relates to the right side of the blogosphere the other day as I was bemoaning my loss of readership over these last few months. While many smaller and mid-sized bloggers have drummed me out of the Conservative Book Club and taken away my key to the executive washroom at Haliburton’s corporate headquarters (a turn of events I regret for the most part since a lot of those people I consider my friends), all of the largest righty blogs still link to this site on occasion and have never attacked me personally for being something of an apostate. This kind of tolerance has always been lacking on the left and bespeaks a mindset exactly described as Klein; if you don’t toe the line, we kick you in the balls.

But before we go patting Joe on the back for having the good sense to recognize the illiberality of liberal blogs, Klein descends into full blown moonbattery himself while ignoring history with a vengeance:

Some of this is understandable: the left-liberals in the blogosphere are merely aping the odious, disdainful—and politically successful—tone that right-wing radio talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh pioneered. They are also justifiably furious at a Bush White House that has specialized in big lies and smear tactics.

And that is precisely the danger here. Fury begets fury. Poison from the right-wing talk shows seeped into the Republican Party’s bloodstream and sent that party off the deep end. Limbaugh’s show—where Dick Cheney frequently expatiates—has become the voice of the Republican establishment. The same could happen to the Democrats. The spitballs aimed at me don’t matter much. The spitballs aimed at Harman, Clinton and Obama are another story. Despite their votes, each of those politicians believes the war must be funded. (Obama even said so in his statement explaining his vote.) Each knows, as Senator Jim Webb has said repeatedly, that we must be more careful getting out of Iraq than we were getting in. But they allowed themselves to be bullied into a more simplistic, more extreme position. Why? Partly because they fear the power of the bloggers to set the debate and raise money against them. They may be right—in the short (primary election) term; Harman faced a challenge from the left in 2006. In the long term, however, kowtowing to extremists is exactly the opposite of what this country is looking for after the lethal radicalism of the Bush Administration.

It’s the right’s fault that lefty bloggers are a bunch of pinch-faced, bile spewing half wits? And they are only aping a “tone” that was pioneered by Rush Limbaugh?

Does Klein actually believe that all this bloody “speaking truth to power” by savaging your opponent in the most vile, personal way imaginable sprang from the microphone of Rush Limbaugh in the 1990’s?

I’m sorry, but that is at best disingenuous and at worst, a calumnious lie. Let me give Mr. Klein a little history lesson to open his eyes a bit.

If modern conservatism has a beginning, it could very well have been the publication of William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale.. Let us examine what some of those polite, tolerant, intellectually honest liberals said about the book at the time:

The book reviewers were absolutely hostile, enraged at what they read.

“The book is one which has the glow and appeal of a fiery cross on a hillside at night. There will undoubtedly be robed figures who gather to it, but the hoods will not be academic. They will cover the face,” snarled one, ominously comparing it to a work of the Ku Klux Klan. “This fascist thesis,” angrily spluttered another, “…This…pure fascism….What more could Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin ask for…?” Still others piled on. The book was dismissed as a series of “fanatically emotional attacks” that “succeeded in turning the stomachs of its readers.” The author drew howls of outrage, the lesser of which focused on adjectives like “rude” and “obnoxious” before descending into cries of “fascist.”

The name of the book was not Godless. And the author was not Ann Coulter. The book that drew such ferocious attention was God and Man at Yale. The author, a recent Yale graduate, was a precocious William F. Buckley, Jr.

With conservatism consigned to the outer political darkness in the 50’s and the 60’s, liberals felt more than enabled to carry out a slash and burn rhetorical campaign against them. “Nazi” and “Klansmen” were common epithets applied to conservatives - as they are today. Witness the treatment Goldwater received in the 1964 campaign:

For Goldwater, the first modern conservative to win a presidential nomination, the unending torrent of abuse verged on the apoplectic. CBS News solemnly reported the week of his nomination that Goldwater’s first act after the convention would be to travel to Germany for a visit to “Berchtesgaden, once Hitler’s stamping ground.” And what will the conservative Goldwater do once there? “There are signs,” CBS reporter Daniel Schorr said ominously, “that the American and German right wings are joining up…” Got that? Barry Goldwater, said CBS in so many words, was really a Nazi. With a presidential nomination in hand, he was literally heading to Hitler’s home to get the international Nazi movement rolling. The story, from the trip to Germany to the visit to Hitler’s estate was, of course, false from beginning to end.

Equally hysterical was a liberal magazine that published a 64-page “psychological study” of the candidate which began: “Do you think Barry Goldwater is psychologically fit to serve as President of the United States?” You guessed it — after claiming to poll over 12,000 psychiatrists across the country, the answer was no. New York Times columnist C.L. Sulzberger answered the question this way: “The possibility exists that, should he (Goldwater) enter the White House, there might not be a day after tomorrow.” In case voters didn’t get the message, Democratic strategist and LBJ aide Bill Moyers designed the so-called “daisy commercial” that saw a child counting the petals of a flower disappear in the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion.

The Nixonian interlude allowed the left to fully vent their hatred at one conservative who most people think deserved everything he got. But the emergence of Reagan on the national scene gave liberals the screaming meemies. Reagan himself remarked that he discovered once he crossed the Mississippi River, he grew horns and a tail. And the viciously personal and outrageous comments made by his political opponents during his terms in office were unmatched until the Clinton years. Ted Kennedy accused President Reagan of deliberately fostering policies that would starve old people and children. Representative Charles Rangel called him a racist. The vitriolic hate directed against Reagan was met with a shrug, a wink, and usually a devastating put down that always contained a little humor. Hardly the stuff of a right wing attack dog.

For Klein to blame the left’s historic, hate-filled rhetoric on the recent phenomena of talk radio and specifically Limbaugh’s broadly drawn (and at times, over the top) satire is fantastically ridiculous. The world did not begin in the 1990’s with the right’s reaction to the deliberate Clintonian strategy of personally destroying your opponent with outrageous smears and lies. It’s just that the left has now perfected the technique and uses the world of blogs to vastly amplify the tactic so that the target feels beseiged. Witness the most recent kerfluffle over a post at Six Meat Buffet that skewered recently deceased blogger Steve Gilliard.

Forgetting how they reacted every time in the last few years when a person of note on the right passed away, publishing the most outrageously disrespectful, cruel, heartless, drivel imaginable, the netnuts went ballistic I personally found the post in extremely poor taste and borderline racist. But the point wasn’t to skewer Gilliard so much as to show liberal bloggers what incredible hypocrites they truly are.

The fallout from the episode claimed a Tennessee woman - a liberal - who blogged at WKRN. She made the mistake of pasting an excerpt from the Six Meat Buffet piece and not condemning it. For her oversight, she was subjected to a withering blast of stupidity from left wing bloggers and their mouth breathing commenters. She has since quit in disgust.

Klein is already hearing it today for daring to call the liberal blogs what they are; raving lunatics who cannot tolerate an iota of dissent from their worldview. Will Joe Klein do as most other liberals do who find themselves in the crosshairs of lefty blogs and go before them with bended knee and abjectly apologize for his heresy? Or is he enough of an independent thinker to tell them to take a hike?

Should be interesting to watch…

NOTE: The original headline of this post referred to Sullivan working for Time Magazine. Of course, he now works for The Atlantic - something I was aware of but totally forgot when I wrote the post at 3:30 AM this morning.

Gosh. Where are those legions of editors and fact checkers when you need them? (I could have used a few myself judging by the note above, eh? Ed.)

Our own crazy conservative uncle Andrew Sullivan got snookered by a fake web site that reported the “news” that Fox was spinning off their hit TV series 24 into a Saturday morning children’s cartoon that featured Jack Bauer as a young cub scout torturing other kids and “kicking Arab ass.”

Here’s Andrew’s post:

Ann Coulter: set your Tivo. Money quote:

“We spent a lot time doing research on this game,” says Surnow. “Using a sponge, team members must take the water from a filled bucket and squeeze the water from the soaked sponge into an empty bucket. First team to fill the empty bucket wins.” Surnow said he chose the Sponge Bucket Game because it provides opportunities for little Jack to interrogate the little Arabs.

“There’s a great scene before the game starts where little Jack takes an Arab kid named Abdul and sticks his head in the water-filled bucket,” says Surnow. “Jack keeps his head under the water until he drowns. The kid did not give Jack the answers he needed, and for the greater good of the Cub Scouts of America, Jack had to send a strong and clear message.”

That’s a strong “enhanced” message. Just like Mr Tenet says.

The irony in this piece regarding Tenet’s “enhanced message” will probably save Mr. Sullivan total embarrassment as he will more than likely claim he knew it was a joke all along, that you can’t fool him, he’s Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic!

But my friend Taylor Marsh has no such excuse:

But one thing the show never tried to do is appeal to kids, children that is. However, considering Surnow also tried to wingnut the “Daily Show” by offering some lame spin off complete with Rush and Coulter as president and veep, I can’t say I’m shocked that he’d also try to morph “24″ for kids. But the idea is creepy. One can only wonder what torture will look like in the new kids version. Abducting their dogs and holding them for ransom or maybe something worse? Mr. Surnow needs a long vacation.

I would think that Mr. Sullivan owes the lovely Ms. Marsh an apology. After all, if The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan puts it on his blog, it must be true, no?

Except Dean Barnett saw through the gag immediately and also offers some thoughts on why Andrew can hardly claim that he knew he was having his leg pulled all along:

[I]n the sidebar of the piece Andrew links to are stories titled, “BASINGER RELEASES OWN LINE OF ANSWERING MACHINES,” “BEAN FARMERS BURNING HUGH GRANT IN EFFIGY,” and “CARSON DALY’S PAID AUDIENCE DEMANDS WAGE INCREASE.”

Did Andrew really not know this was a joke? Is it possible his intellect and sense of humor have been so thoroughly strangled by his oh-so righteous anger? Judging by his post which is completely irony and humor free, the only possible answer is yes. The alternative is that Andrew Sullivan is suddenly joking about torture. For some reason, that strikes me as unlikely.

I knew it was a gag reading “quotes” from series creator Joel Surnow in the story:

“Just because we’ll show Jack as a little kid, doesn’t mean he’s going to stop kicking the ass of all those Arabs he runs into,” says Surnow. “We’re getting our message across to adults that it takes a lot of torture to get the truth from these terrorists, and we believe that children need to see that as well because they’re growing up in an extremely dangerous world.”

I’ve read many articles quoting Surnow and seen him interviewed a dozen times and never, ever heard him talk like that. In fact, I would say that only someone already disposed to believe responsible conservatives like Surnow are perfectly capable of such obscene bigotry could possibly take something like that seriously.

For those who are already down on the right (Marsh is center left. Andrew is…well, Andrew) perhaps this kind of idiocy rings true because they are eager to suspend belief and think the worst of conservatives. This is a mindset that is able to color and spin what conservatives say and twist context and meaning until what emerges as “analysis” bears little resemblance to the original intent of the speaker. Lambchop is an expert at this kind of context assassination. Using a combination of laughably amateurish armchair psychology and a dead serious manipulation of the English language, commentators on the left routinely attack the right in this dishonest manner.

For Mr. Sullivan and his army of fact checkers and editors, however, another explanation might be in order.

Is Andrew really that stupid?

UPDATE

In all fairness, Sully isn’t the only prominent mainstream media organ to have been fooled by this website. A Baltimore TV station breathlessly reported on the Michael Richards story using info from “Dateline: Hollywood” (second item):

A WJZ staffer ripped the story off the Web — without realizing that the source, DatelineHollywood.com, is a purely satirical site, which invented the completely bogus item as a riff on Richards’s real-life racist outburst at an L.A. comedy club last month.

The producer missed some pretty obvious tipoffs– like the line about Richards pouring Aunt Jemima pancake syrup over Goldberg’s head. Also: The links to other “articles,” including “Britney Spears’ Vagina Asks Press for Privacy” and “Rupert Murdoch Found Dead Next to Bloody Glove.”

Yeah…I’d say that link to Spears should have been a dead giveaway. Everyone knows that Britt’s private parts seek out all the publicity that the MSM will grant.

I read this report from the notoriously anti-War media outlet McClatchy Company three times before I realized that the scare headline - “Training Iraqi troops no longer driving force in U.S. policy” - and false lede had little to do with the guts of the dispatch.

First, the misleading lede to the story:

Military planners have abandoned the idea that standing up Iraqi troops will enable American soldiers to start coming home soon and now believe that U.S. troops will have to defeat the insurgents and secure control of troubled provinces.

Training Iraqi troops, which had been the cornerstone of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy since 2005, has dropped in priority, officials in Baghdad and Washington said.

No change has been announced, and a Pentagon spokesman, Col. Gary Keck, said training Iraqis remains important. “We are just adding another leg to our mission,” Keck said, referring to the greater U.S. role in establishing security that new troops arriving in Iraq will undertake.

But evidence has been building for months that training Iraqi troops is no longer the focus of U.S. policy. Pentagon officials said they know of no new training resources that have been included in U.S. plans to dispatch 28,000 additional troops to Iraq. The officials spoke only on the condition of anonymity because they aren’t authorized to discuss the policy shift publicly. Defense Secretary Robert Gates made no public mention of training Iraqi troops on Thursday during a visit to Iraq.

Have military planners “abandoned” the idea that training Iraqis will allow Americans to come home? This is farther down in the article:

Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, who’s in charge of training Iraqi troops, said in February that he hoped that Iraqi troops would be able to lead by December. “At the tactical level, I do believe by the end of the year, the conditions should be set that they are increasingly taking responsibility for the combat operations,” Dempsey told NBC News.

Maj. Gen. Doug Lute, the director of operations at U.S. Central Command, which oversees military activities in the Middle East, said that during the troop increase, U.S. officers will be trying to determine how ready Iraqi forces are to assume control.

“We are looking for indicators where we can assess the extent to which we are fighting alongside Iraqi security forces, not as a replacement to them,” he said. Those signs will include “things like the number of U.S.-only missions, the number of combined U.S.-Iraqi missions, the number where Iraqis are in the lead, the number of Joint Security Stations set up,” he said.

That’s a far cry from the optimistic assessments U.S. commanders offered throughout 2006 about the impact of training Iraqis.

Does it sound like we are abandoning any training programs? Do you read anything in what those commanders are saying that justify the lede ” U.S. troops will have to defeat the insurgents and secure control of troubled provinces…?”

There has been no change in policy with regards to training Iraqi troops. But there has been a shift in focus:

Casey’s “mandate was transition. General Petraeus’ mandate is security. It is a change based on conditions. Certain conditions have to be met for the transition to be successful. Security is part of that. And General Petraeus recognizes that,” said Brig. Gen. Dana Pittard, commander of the Iraq Assistance Group in charge of supporting trained Iraqi forces.

“I think it is too much to expect that we were going to start from scratch … in an environment that featured a rising sectarian struggle and lack of progress with the government,” said a senior Pentagon official. “The conditions had sufficiently changed that the Abizaid/Casey approach alone wasn’t going to be sufficient.”

Hence, the need for the surge. And as far as this being “a far cry from the optimistic assessments U.S. commanders offered throughout 2006 about the impact of training Iraqis” that may be true to a point. But those “optimistic assessments” were always tempered with statements that much would depend on the situation on the ground - something our intrepid McClatchy reporter fails to note.

Then there are questions about the reporter’s sources. What makes me suspect that these sources are not being entirely forthcoming is that such a monumental change in policy initiated by the Pentagon would be extremely hard to keep secret which means that at the very least, Gates should have mentioned it by now.

Besides, reading the fourth graf carefully, one sees that the headline may, in fact, be very misleading. The source reveals that “Pentagon officials said they know of no new training resources that have been included in U.S. plans to dispatch 28,000 additional troops to Iraq.” It doesn’t say those training resources will be abandoned or even reduced. It makes one wonder why the reporter went with that lede in the first place, doesn’t it?

Much more likely is that the leaker(s) have an ax to grind (probably Abizaid loyalists) and that they’re simply throwing the worst possible light on things to stir the pot.

From the guts of this article, we can deduce the following:

1. We are not abandoning the training of the Iraqi army in any way, shape or form.

2. There is no evidence that the Iraqis are going to sit on the sidelines while we fight the insurgency as the reporter intimates in the first graf.

3. We are making progress in training the Iraqi troops at a tactical level and that the takeover of many combat operations by them by December is still on track.

4. McClatchy is a biased news source.

That last should be obvious to anyone with an ounce of discernment. This article is a textbook example of bias and should be widely criticized for its patently false and gimmicky headline and lede.

An attack at Virginia Tech University has killed at least 32 students including the gunman who apparently took his own life.

Rather than deal with the details at this point, I’d simply urge you to visit Hot Air, Michelle’s site, or PJ Media. Allah will have the latest video (as well as updates from various sources) and Michelle, if she follows form, will have MSM-blog react. PJ Media will also round up blog and press reaction.

I first heard about this story after I awoke from a nap around noon central time. The shock I felt upon hearing the number of dead (22 at the time) has been matched only 2 or three times in my life. The death of John Lennon and 9/11 are the only other times I can recall where my mind was unable to grasp the enormity of what had happened. At times like that, you tend to focus on the strangest things. I tried to recall what the school colors of VTU were and what their mascot looked like - anything but deal with the reality that now 32 sets of parents are going to receive the worst call of their lives telling them that their flesh and blood has been senselessly and brutally gunned down while living and learning in a protected enclave that is supposed to keep the outside world at bay.

Even at this early stage where details are sketchy and rumors are rampant, it appears that the gunman engaged in two separate shootings about 2 hours apart. Experts on CNN have speculated that if the murderer was after a specific target and missed them at the dorm, he would have known the target’s schedule and showed up later where he knew he/she would be in class. At the moment, it has been confirmed that the doors to the classroom building were chained shut - a clear indication that the shooter was out to make a name for himself and was determined to make as many of his classmates feel his pain as he had rounds for his guns.

In a perfect world, gun control laws would have kept the weapons out of the shooter’s hands. Also in a perfect world, one of his potential victims would have been armed and cut short his quest for glory. Despite the fact we don’t live in a perfect world and there’s no sign of one emerging any time soon, we can count on the idiots in Congress and the media to start the political posturing, dying to make speeches and write columns telling us about how wrong the opposition is and how this shooting proves this or that about America, or Americans with guns, or violence in America, or how our schools are screwed up, or even blame the victims for not dodging the bullet that killed them.

What this shooting proves is that there are many who will use horrible tragedy to make political hay. And once - just once - I’d like to see those people taken down as severely as the disturbed young man whose random rampage of sick violence snuffed out many a promising life and brought unspeakable tragedy into so many American homes this day.

Yesterday, my brother really stepped in it by penning perhaps the most lopsidedly unpopular post in the history of blogdom. Technorati lists 78 blog posts and counting this morning on Terry’s article, all of them - both left and right - highly opposed. Some conservatives are approaching apoplexy. For a pretty reasoned takedown of what Terry wrote, you can’t do better than J-Pods at The Corner. And my friend Tom Lifson at The American Thinker also offers a rational rebuttal to Terry’s words.

J-Pod and Tom are in a distinct minority. Out of the thousands of comments at Terry’s site, there may be 50 that attempt to respond in a reasonable manner. The rest should be studied by some college kid majoring in Deviant Psychology. What possesses 5,000 people to use exactly the same joke - the play on words with our last name from Moran to “Moron” - and actually delude themselves into thinking they are being both original and funny? It is beyond my understanding. The slackjawed yawpers, the drooling moutbreathers, the half wits, dim wits, pea wits, and twits - all seem to think that someone perusing the comments will come across the 3,217 use of that play on words, slap their palm to their forehead and say “AH! NOW I GET IT!” and then laugh like a banshee.

Pathetic.

Perhaps down the road, when some of the sting from the poisoned barbs let loose by the more than 6,000 commenters at his site goes away, I’ll have something suitably snarky and ironic to say to Terry. Perhaps I’ll bake him a congratulatory cake or something.

But today I feel compelled to rise from my sickbed and stand with him. Not in defense of what he wrote but in solidarity with his right to say it. For you see, in all the words written against him, no one has said the simple truth that you can say something with which every one else on the planet disagrees. But as long as you don’t employ hate speech or bigoted language to get your point across, you should be reasonably safe in saying it.

Calls for Terry’s resignation are laughable - and risible. Have we really gotten to a point in our national life where if your write or say something people disagree with that you can be canned for it? That’s outrageous. And extraordinarily dangerous. It is an open invitation for organized pressure groups to lower the bar even further so that intolerance of opposing viewpoints would mushroom into open warfare and the scalp hunt would be on. Civil discourse - already frayed around the edges and stretched to the breaking point - would become impossible. Pundits, talk show hosts, public figures from a wide swath of society would all be on pins and needles, not daring to utter anything colorful or controversial for fear that some special pleader group could twist what was said and turn it into a media controversy that would cost them their jobs. The dead hand of conformity would descend on our national conversation, making it about as interesting as watching jello harden.

No, I won’t defend what Terry said. But when all hands are raised against him, I think it important that he know that his family will stand with him. And I will say this; whatever his reasoning in writing that post, it came from someone with a good and true heart. And I would grant him more intellectual honesty in his little finger than is present in the many thousands of his critics combined. This has come through in his reporting time and time again and has earned him the respect of his colleagues and the admiration of many, many Americans - including this one.

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…

In the past, I have voiced my support for the Public Broadcasting System and its continued funding from taxpayers because I believe that there are dozens of excellent productions that otherwise would not be broadcast even in this age of cable and satellite saturation. Science, nature, drama, and music shows of a consistently high quality has been the hallmark of PBS since its inception and most if not all of those productions would never see air time without taxpayers footing the bill.

And while cable outlets like Bravo, Ovation, Discovery Channels, and The History Channel now offer similar programming options to the consumer, the fact is the PBS productions have over the years proved to be a cut or two above the best that those channels have to offer. With several outstanding exceptions, there simply isn’t enough original programming on those outlets. (A current exception is The Discovery Channel’s “Planet Earth” which should surely be considered among the best nature series ever photographed.)

Can any science program shown on cable outlets compare with the consistently high standards of excellence exhibited by PBS’s Nova? Or productions of opera and symphony from Live at the Met? There is no doubt cable channels have their moments. But PBS has offered extremely high quality arts and science entertainment since its birth. And I have been more than willing to support their efforts in this regard in the past and will continue to do so in the future.

Where PBS fails miserably is in airing shows with political content. This includes many productions that purport to be “history” as well as shows that examine issues facing the country today. And while there is excellence exhibited in these areas as well - The American Experience comes to mind as a show of quality and intelligence - most, if not all political programming on the network is of such an obvious bias that for conservatives, it becomes nearly unwatchable.

Therefore, it was not surprising to read about the problems a producer of a documentary has had with PBS affiliate WETA of Washington D.C. in getting his piece about moderate Muslims being reviled and threatened by extremists on the air. For the politically correct, multicultural warriors at WETA, terms like “Islamafascist” and “terrorist” are considered “unfair.”

The question is…unfair to whom?

The producer of a tax-financed documentary on Islamic extremism claims his film has been dropped for political reasons from a television series that airs next week on more than 300 PBS stations nationwide.

Key portions of the documentary focus on Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser of Phoenix and his American Islamic Forum for Democracy, a non-profit organization of Muslim Americans who advocate patriotism, constitutional democracy and a separation of church and state.

Martyn Burke says that the Public Broadcasting Service and project managers at station WETA in Washington, D.C., excluded his documentary, Islam vs. Islamists, from the series America at a Crossroads after he refused to fire two co-producers affiliated with a conservative think tank.

“I was ordered to fire my two partners (who brought me into this project) on political grounds,” Burke said in a complaint letter to PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supplied funds for the films.

Burke wrote that his documentary depicts the plight of moderate Muslims who are silenced by Islamic extremists, adding, “Now it appears to be PBS and CPB who are silencing them.”

First, it should be said that the series America at the Crossroads looks like a typically earnest PBS effort to educate the public. The problem can be seen in these actions taken by project overseers to blatantly interfere in the production and their attempt to change the intent and point of view of the show’s producer:

Before filming began last year, Burke says, (WETA’s exec. producer Jeff)Bieber asked him, “Don’t you check into the politics of the people you work with?”

Bieber said PBS was concerned that the Center for Security Policy is an advocacy group, so its leaders could not produce an objective picture. Because of that, he suggested that Gaffney be demoted to adviser.

Burke, who did not honor the recommendation, says that funding was delayed and WETA began to interfere with his film until it was “expelled” from Crossroads.

Among Burke’s examples of tampering:

• A WETA manager pressed to eliminate a key perspective of the film: The claim that Muslim radicals are pushing to establish “parallel societies” in America and Europe governed by Shariah law rather than sectarian courts.

• After grants were issued, Crossroads managers commissioned a new film that overlapped with Islam vs. Islamists and competed for the same interview subjects.

• WETA appointed an advisory board that includes Aminah Beverly McCloud, director of World Islamic Studies at DePaul University. In an “unparalleled breach of ethics,” Burke says, McCloud took rough-cut segments of the film and showed them to Nation of Islam officials, who are a subject of the documentary. They threatened to sue.

“This utterly undermines any journalistic independence,” Burke wrote in an e-mail to WETA officials.

Beyond the question of whether it is appropriate to penalize a documentarian for the politics of his producers, one might ask why it matters in this case. The left wing bias of many PBS producers has never been a problem for WETA in the past - including William Cran who wrote and directed the premier segment for the series Jihad: The Men and Ideas Behind Al Qaeda as well as participating in numerous other projects for Frontline and other PBS specials.

Cran’s documentary on Christianity done for Frontline - From Jesus to Christ, the First Christians - outraged conservative Christians not only for its content but because he used liberal theologians as his only commentators. Similarly, Cran gathered as many critics of the oil industry as was possible back in the early 90’s and made Extreme Oil, a three part hit piece so one sided in its content that most oil industry groups refused to participate.

In fairness, Cran has also made several first class documentaries including one on Aids and an entertaining and fascinating look at the English language in America. But regardless of his talent, would Mr. Beiber question Cran’s politics in the making of his Jihad piece? Evidently not.

And an executive producer trying to alter content - especially content central to the thesis of the documentary? In a word, outrageous. It is apparent that Beiber and his friends at WETA don’t read the newspaper very often. If he had, he would have discovered that Muslim extremists in Europe have been trying for years to do exactly as Burke is trying to show; establish a “separateness” from European society (sometimes with the active encouragement of European governments) in order to live under Shariah law rather than the law of the land they live in. Numerous examples abound that evidence this fact. Trying to silence this point of view is inexplicable and indefensible.

Beiber’s criticism that the documentary is “unfair” can mean only one thing; the piece is unfair to Muslim extremists. Another documentary in the series, also on moderates in Islam apparently takes care of that. Here’s a blurb from the press release touting the show “Faith Without Fear:”

But is debate possible in Islam? That question brings Manji to Spain, where different religions, cultures and ideas flourished under Muslim civilization. It happened because of “ijtihad,” Islam’s own tradition of independent thinking. She shows the art, architecture and achievements that Muslims could once claim. In so doing, Manji finally encounters the Islam that she can love. Far from being a relic of the past, ijtihad is key to curbing atrocities committed today in the name of Islam. Manji introduces us to two Spanish Muslims who represent the humanity that ijtihad can restore to Islam, and the cruelty that Muslims will suffer at the hands of other Muslims if ijithad remains buried.

Throughout this high-stakes journey, Manji challenges herself to change. Wondering if her heart is blocked to the beauty of Islam, she invites one of her fiercest Muslim critics to break bread — and what she takes away aren’t crumbs. Yet Manji’s greatest epiphany comes from her pious mother. They don’t see eye to eye. But her mom’s dignified response in a moment of humiliation teaches Manji that Muslims can, in fact, have faith without fear. Islam allows it, if only Muslims will too.

One would think that a series that purports to show our country at “a crossroads” would want an unvarnished, PC-free perspective of exactly who the enemy is and what their intentions toward us (and anyone who opposes them) might be. Instead, in the interest of “fairness,” we are treated to the milquetoast perspective that gives equal weight and consideration to a point of view very much at odds with our values. This is not a question of fairness as much as it is a point of view that is lost due to the stifling conformity of a liberal world view that holds sway at PBS and its dominant affiliates.

This is where public TV fails the public; their rank bias stifles opposing viewpoints. They do it in the name of “fairness” or their version of “accuracy.” But it is obvious that the dead hand of conformity overlays so much of their political programming that any point of view that deviates from established liberal norms has enormous problems in making it past the gatekeepers at the “Big Three” who produce almost all public TV political content; WNET, WETA, and WGBH Boston.

This bias was fully on display in 1999 when it was discovered that those three stations along with dozens of others routinely swapped mailing lists with the Democratic National Committee. (Some PBS outlets also swapped lists with the GOP). It wasn’t so much the shocking ethical lapse on the part of the various stations that made this such a revealing episode but rather the open acknowledgement that the stations were much more likely to mine donors to public television from a list of liberal contributors. If that doesn’t show an awareness of bias on the part of PBS affiliates, nothing does.

In a futile attempt to change this culture at PBS, President Bush nominated Kenneth Tomlinson for Chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the entity that is responsible for PBS who immediately sought to broaden the base of PA programming at the network by bringing shows with a more diverse perspective. The outrage from liberal board members as well as liberal activists who see PBS as their own private media preserve was immediate and vicious. And they went absolutely ballistic when Tomlinson wanted to force PBS to live up to its charter by holding off the signing of the annual contract between CPB and PBS until the stations promised to live up to the “objectivity and balance” language in the PBS charter. Until that time, PBS stations only had to promise to employ “journalistic standards” to PA programming.

You can see where liberals would be outraged.

In the end, Tomlinson was outgunned and outvoted. Eventually, he was forced out for misusing his email account for personal business. But it is illustrative of the liberal mindset that permeates the CPB and PBS from top to bottom.

It is not clear at this point if Burke’s documentary will ever be shown on PBS. There has been so much double-talk from the network about this project that it’s anyone’s guess whether the American people will ever have a chance to see the truth about radical Islam and the Muslim moderates who bravely speak out against them. But if PBS were smart, they’d find room to show this documentary, if only to try and dispell the notion that they are nothing more than liberal hacks who can’t stand airing opposing viewpoints.

For that reason alone, Islam vs. Islamists will be must see TV if it ever airs.

UPDATE

Hugh Hewitt highlights the censorship angle:

This is the real deal: state suppression of ideas with which the authorities disagree on ideological/political grounds. Where’s the ACLU? Where’s the left? Where’s the Bush Adminstration?

I don’t know if the film is any good, but I strongly suspect that the government censors are forcing it down the memory hole because it is powerful and persuasive, not the opposite.

I’m late to this story on Michael Ware, the CNN reporter who supposedly “heckled” Senators McCain and Graham in Baghdad during their press conference. The Powerline boys have been all over the story, including an interview with Soledad O’Brien where Ware denies the story.

Ware was reported to have laughed and mocked comments being made by Graham and McCain while the press conference was underway. In the O’Brien interview, he denies heckling anyone and, given my understanding of the word, I would be forced to agree with him if all he did was act like an ass, laughing and carrying on during the presser. If he had shouted out from the audience and interrupted the press conference, that would have been considered “heckling.” So it appears that Drudge doesn’t know what the word means - not surprising since it isn’t the first time his headlines have failed to jive with the story being reported.

Ware claims he never got to ask a question and, in fact, just as he raised his hand to do so, the press conference ended. Since Ware knows the tape of the presser is going to be shown and scrutinized, one would have to say at this point that he is telling the truth - at least the truth as he perceives it to be.

But I also believe that the story itself is true; that Ware - an irreverent sort of fellow who tries to project the hard-bitten, world-weary, cynical war reporter image - no doubt laughed and mocked the politicians who were trying to put the best face on what is still a very dicey situation in Baghdad. NBC aired a report that McCain’s claims of being able to walk freely through a Baghdad market - about 3 minutes across the Tigris river from the Green Zone - were something less than honest. He was surrounded by 100 American soldiers and screened by 3 Blackhawk helicopters and 2 Apache gunships. The left and the press is having a field day with this info, never mentioning the fact that John McCain is a serious candidate for President of the United States and that this kind of security is not only necessary but expected.

Beyond that, it’s foolish of McCain or the military to make any sweeping generalizations about the security situation in Baghdad based on westerners being able to walk around without worry or even playing the body count game and pointing to reduced civilian deaths. If this is how we are going to judge the surge, the terrorists and insurgents will make absolutely dead sure that we will fail. They will do this by setting off the biggest bombs in the most crowded areas guaranteeing that even though the number of attacks will go way down, the body count won’t.

And it doesn’t matter if General Petreaus or John McCain or any westerner can saunter around in a market without getting killed. What matters is faith. What matters is whether the surge along with political initiatives by Prime Minister Maliki will begin restoring the people’s faith in the government. Iraq is a mess not just because of the insurgency or the terrorists. There is a sectarian war underway that has smashed the body politic in Iraq, making people who lived side by side in neighborly friendship for decades to look at each other with hate. What the surge is doing is giving the government the breathing room to show that it can work for all Iraqis and that each and every citizen has a stake in Iraq’s future.

There are tiny indications that this, in fact, is occurring. The market where McCain (and Iraqis) are able to walk around for a few minutes without getting blown up is a sign of that restoration of faith. So are the previously shuttered businesses cautiously opening up. So is the trickle of Iraqis moving back into houses where just a few months ago they had fled for their lives in terror from sectarian gangs. There are nearly 750,000 of these internal refugees - a monumental problem that won’t be solved anytime soon. But the government is addressing it. They are giving each of these refugees a $2,000 stipend if they wish to move back in to their houses - looted and gutted some of them. As for houses that are occupied by squatters, they are also offering the squatters funds to move back to their own abode.

In a very real way, Senator McCain was correct when he said that the American people are not getting the full story of what is happening since the surge began in Iraq. But it’s not information about reduced attacks on civilians or fewer sectarian murders that is the real story - although we shouldn’t dismiss them entirely. The real story is what is happening below the surface among the people; a slow, painful, tentative walkback from the abyss of civil war and sectarian conflict. Our military cannot affect this aspect of the struggle directly. But their efforts are having an affect, that much is clear.

And thinking about all this got me to thinking about Michael Ware and his behavior at that presser. Now I know what you’re saying. “Don’t think, Ricky it will only make your head explode. You’re going to overthink this Ware deal and get everyone upset with you.”

If you’re thinking that, you’re probably correct. But I was thinking that Ware has been in Iraq off and on for years, reporting on the absolute worst of it. The death and destruction that one car bomb can generate scars some people for life. Ware has seen dozens of these attacks - the dead and dying, the body parts of children, the screams of anguish from the bereaved and screams of pain from the horribly wounded.

And, by his own admission, he drinks. He drinks to forget. He drinks to anesthetize himself. He drinks out of boredom, or of bravado, or just to drink. Perhaps he was drunk at the press conference. More likely, he is simply weary of seeing politicians - both pro and anti war - who spend their days in safety sitting in Washington D.C., coming to Iraq and making grand pronouncements about “the way things really are.” He may agree with the anti-war position but I’ll bet he holds those Democratic politicians in equal contempt.

No doubt he wears his bias as a badge of honor. But his towering cynicism is actually a defense mechanism that protects him from having to feel for the tens of thousands of innocents who have been slaughtered in this conflict. Perhaps he feels morally superior to the rest of us. But there is little doubt the war has affected his judgement and made him useless as an objective observer.

CNN should recall Mr. Ware and never send him back. He has done an impossible job in an impossible place for far too long. It’s time to bring Michael Ware home.

UPDATE

Allah points to a Raw Story piece with the video from the presser that seems to confirm Ware’s denial.

And the video doesn’t show Ware laughing and mocking McCain and Graham either. Despite this, Paul at Powerline calls Ware an “advocate” and that he should be withdrawn by CNN immediately.

Ware’s hyperbole - normally part of his schtick along with his heavy Australian accent - seems to me to be getting worse. You have to admire the guy’s dedication to get the story. But I still think he’s been there too long and that his cynicism is interfering with his reporting.

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.

Saw this in the Daily Star of Lebanon - a somewhat pro-western (but by no means pro-Bush) publication. The writer asks the question: “Are things coming together for George W. Bush in Iraq?”

One key factor is that, for the first time since the United States and Britain invaded Iraq, Arab Sunni leaders are backing a US military plan for that country. These Sunni leaders live in abject fear of the geopolitical earthquake that any disintegration of political authority in Baghdad would bring. They believe that all-out civil war would invariably follow - a war that would not respect international borders.

Of course, America has been encouraging Sunni leaders in this belief. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s recent tour of Middle East capitals helped spread the word to Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states that any US failure and sudden withdrawal would be certain to destabilize them. Given the fragile grip that these leaders have over their societies, America’s warnings have been taken to heart.

But the truly curious factor that might bring success to Bush is that those who have opposed or resented America’s presence in Iraq, such as the Iranian-backed Shiite parties, now also appear to want Bush’s new strategy to succeed. They are for it because they believe it will defang Moqtada al-Sadr, the rogue Shiite cleric whose power has mushroomed over the past three years - to the point that he now dominates much of Baghdad and holds the allegiance of countless angry young Shiite men.

This makes the Administration resistance to a regional conference on Iraq all the more troubling. I actually thought the conference idea was one of the only real positive proposals put forth by the Baker Commission. It seems to me that other players in the region who would be directly affected by the kind of pullout envisioned by the Democrats are eager to explore ways to tamp down the violence and help make the Iraqi state viable.

This must hold true especially for Syria and Jordan who are being drowned by a human tidal wave of Sunni refugees from Iraq - more than 2.3 million so far. This doesn’t include the more than half a million displaced Sunnis inside Iraq already - a number that Maliki absolutely must bring down dramatically if our surge policy is to succeed.

But what about the Shias?

Of course, attacking Sadr’s Mehdi Army in the name of fighting militia death squads has the potential to draw American military forces into a level of urban warfare unseen since the Falluja assaults of 2004 and 2005. Sadr is seen as the protector of the Shiites of Iraq and has an estimated 60,000 fighters in his militia. But he is deeply mistrusted by other Shiite leaders, who fear that they may one day have to take him on by themselves. Better to let the Americans do it, though of course these Shiite leaders prefer a slow strangulation of Sadr to a direct and bloody assault.

But make no mistake: How Sadr is handled is the big test of Bush’s new strategy. Should the US choose to face him and his forces head on, they risk alienating Iraq’s Shiites, adding fuel to the anti-occupation resistance and thus probably dooming Bush to failure.

Of course, we’ve been trying to bring Sadr’s bully boys out into the open for a couple of years. It makes killing them easier as we proved in Najaf and Fallujah Sadr City. And both al-Sistani (who can’t stand the upstart Sadr) as well as al-Hakim (leader of the SCIRI) would love to have us de-horn al-Sadr if only because it would leave them a clear field for supremacy among the Shias.

All depends on how willing the firebrand cleric is in seeking a truly political solution to Iraq’s domestic troubles. Even al-Sadr himself may be secretly urging the Americans on so that the more radical (and disobedient) members of his army will disappear. If that happens, it is possible that Sadr will back Maliki’s reconciliation plan with the Sunnis. This presumes facts not in evidence - that Sadr truly wants to work within the political framework of the Constitution in order to wield power and influence. But at the same time, Sadr has also proved himself quite the practical thug in the past in that he came off the streets in the first place to participate in the elections. Perhaps Sadr will see the writing on the wall and rather than risk all by fighting the Americans, he will slip into his Iraqi statesman costume and cooperate with Maliki.

But Sadr is only one of the pieces of the puzzle. The other is in Anbar. And here this Arab observer thinks that we’ve finally hit upon the right strategy:

The “surge” also opens, perhaps for the first time, a serious possibility of pouring water on the insurgent fires in Anbar Province, the heartland of the Sunni insurgency. The US has achieved relative successes in the province through alliances with Sunni tribes. The hope is that such realistic and pragmatic accommodations will be extended to Iraqis who are fighting under the banner of a nationalist and anti-occupation agenda.

So some of the stars have come into alignment for Bush. But to keep them there in the long term, the Iraqi government will need to amend the constitution in a way that appeases the Sunni community. Reassuring Iraq’s Sunnis that they have a place in the new Iraq will also reassure neighboring Sunni governments, which have mostly turned a blind eye to the support for the insurgency that has come from their lands.

We’re still waiting on Maliki to show some leadership on political issues like reconciliation, oil revenue sharing (which is currently in limbo after Sunnis balked at the deal), amnesty, power sharing, and federalism agreements with the Kurds and Sunnis. Embroiled as he is now in these rape allegations, it remains to be seen if all the good work our people do in tamping down most of the violence will bear fruit at the Iraqi conference table when the factions get together to hammer out accommodations they can all live in peace with.