Right Wing Nut House

Jill Carroll released a statement through her employer, the Christian Science Monitor, that proves, as Jim Gerghaty says, the efficacy of editors:

During my last night in captivity, my captors forced me to participate in a propaganda video. They told me they would let me go if I cooperated. I was living in a threatening environment, under their control, and wanted to go home alive. I agreed.

Things that I was forced to say while captive are now being taken by some as an accurate reflection of my personal views. They are not. The people who kidnapped me and murdered Alan Enwiya are criminals, at best. They robbed Alan of his life and devastated his family. They put me, my family and my friends–and all those around the world, who have prayed so fervently for my release–through a horrific experience. I was, and remain, deeply angry with the people who did this.

I also gave a TV interview to the Iraqi Islamic Party shortly after my release. The party had promised me the interview would never be aired on television, and broke their word. At any rate, fearing retribution from my captors, I did not speak freely. Out of fear I said I wasn’t threatened. In fact, I was threatened many times.

Also, at least two false statements about me have been widely aired: That I refused to travel and cooperate with the US military and that I refused to discuss my captivity with US officials. Again, neither is true.

(HT: Michelle Malkin)

I will not name names nor link to bloggers who thought the worst of Miss Carroll. They and their readers know who they are and I trust they will be suitably chastised. And if they have an ounce of integrity, they will write a public apology.

But after the sack cloth has been worn and the ashes spread, it might be a good idea to step back and see what the hell is going on here.

The speed and ferocity with which people piled on Miss Carroll for not immediately disavowing her propaganda statement as well as her first statements to the press which seemed to give her brutal captors a pass reminded me of the jaw-dropping way the left pounced on the Administration in the immediate - and by immediate I mean that lefty bloggers were screaming “incompetence” less than 24 hours after hurricane winds had died down in New Orleans - aftermath of Katrina. The point isn’t to bash the left here but to highlight a problem with blogs that seems to be presenting itself with alarming regularity.

In people’s haste to be first, or different, or just plain ornery and contrary (all the better to get links and readers) a culture of “shoot first and ask questions later” has arisen in the blogosphere that quite frankly, is proving every bad thing that the MSM has been saying about blogs from the beginning. Many of us - including myself - have been guilty in the past of hitting that “Publish” button when perhaps it would have been prudent and proper to take a beat or two to think about what we just wrote and the impact it might have beyond the small little world we inhabit in this corner of Blogland.

Scalp hunting has become the national pastime of blogs. Both lefty and righty lodgepoles have some pretty impressive trophies hanging on them; Dan Rather, Mary Mapes (twice), Eason Jordon, Trent Lott, Ben Domenech, to name a few more noteworthy ones.

But is this what we are? Is this what we are becoming? Are we nothing more than a pack of digital yellow journalists writing pixelated scab sheets vying to see who we can lay low next? If this be the way to fame and fortune in the blogosphere, I truly fear that, like television, the last great technological breakthrough that promised to change the world, we will degenerate into a mindless, bottomless pit of muck and mudslinging, dragging down the culture and trivializing even the most important issues.

This is no idle concern that can be dismissed as the nature of the beast or the way of the world. This kind of thing has to be stopped, an admitted impossibility with 29 million blogs out there. Maybe it’s enough that we are aware of it and that people of good faith and good intentions will, in the end, marginalize the muckrakers and come out on top.

Don’t count on it.

Meanwhile, less than 24 hours after being released from a captivity in which she endured unspeakable fear and hardship for 87 long days, Jill Carroll was forced to come out and issue a press release stating the obvious; someone had a gun to her head threatening to kill her if she didn’t say nice things about the brutes who held her captive. The reason she was forced to issue the statement was largely a result of questions raised by the 24 hour news nets about her captivity - questions that originated on blogs. And in the ever more symbiotic relationship between the great, gaping maw that is cable news and the content rich medium of blogs that feeds the beast, questions raised if left unanswered fester like an open wound until an answer is forthcoming.

Jill Carroll was twice a victim - once of jihadist terrorists who kidnapped her and once of a culture that sought to exploit her tragedy to satisfy personal ambition and ego.

Shame on us all for allowing this to happen.

UPDATE

More Geraghty:

Permit me a Derbian moment of gloom. Carroll issues a coerced statement before she’s released, and some corners of the blogosphere erupt with a torrent of scathing hatred, declaring that Carroll “may as well just come right out and say she was a willing participant”, that she’s a “spoiled brat America-hater” and “she was anti-America when she went over there and I say the kidnapping was a put up deal from the get go.”

This is what we’ve got a blogosphere for? For these kind of (pardon my French) pissing contests? The citizenry around the globe has the greatest mass communications tool in the history of the world, and this is what it’s led to?

My question is what will the blogosphere look like 5 years from now? If things continue the way they are, we’ll be just another cog in the great mass communications bordeom killing machine, titillating and entertaining our readers with our own snarky takes on the dirt dished by the MSM while our blogs are festooned with ads for everything from cold cream to the latest super-absorbent manifestation of Depends.

So much for citizen-journalists…

UPDATE II

Ed Morrissey links here and makes a point that everyone - including me - seems to forget:

Finally, for those who blamed her for being in Iraq in the first place, let me remind you that we have continually harped on the media for being balcony reporters — for not getting outside of the Green Zone and trying to get the true stories of Iraq. Well, that’s what Jill Carroll tried to do, and she got unlucky enough to get kidnapped for her efforts. We need reporters to take those kind of chances, and we should have been more supportive of her all along. Now that she’s home, let’s hope we remember that with the next reporter unfortunate enough to find themselves the victim of violence and not victimize them a second time when they cooperate enough to be set free.

If you haven’t read this gut wrenching column by David Ignatius on how hard it is to cover the situation in Iraq, please do so. It reinforces what Ed was saying.

And Don Surber has chastised me in the comments for not linking to the bloggers who jumped on Jill Carroll so soon after her release.

As I explained to Mr. Surber in an email, I did not link because I did not want to start the petty back-and-forth between bloggers who criticize one another known as a “Blog War.” They’re silly. They’re a waste of time. And I had no intention of getting embroiled in one.

SEE UPDATE BELOW BEFORE READING

After first defending himself at RedState in what I will charitably call a curious fashion, Mr. Domenech has finally come clean and done the right thing:

I want to apologize to National Review Online, my friends and colleagues here at RedState, and to any others that have been affected over the past few days. I also want to apologize to my previous editors and writers whose work I used inappropriately and without attribution. There is no excuse for this - nor is there an excuse for any obfuscation in my earlier statement.

I hope that nothing I’ve done as a teenager or in my professional life will reflect badly on the movement and principles I believe in.

I’m deeply grateful for the love and encouragement of all those around me. And although I may not deserve such support, it makes it that much more humbling at a time like this. I’m a young man, and I hope that in time that I can earn a measure of the respect that you have given me.

I was unaware of Mr. Domenech’s enormous talent as a writer as evidenced in this piece he did for the New York Press:

I walked out of the bright Friday sun and into the Capitol Bldg.’s Document Entrance two hours before the gunman arrived. The back of my collar scratched sweat against my skin, and I loosened my tie in a vain effort to find relief from the sultry July heat. I remember nodding hello to the tall black policeman who was standing at the metal detector in front of the Document Entrance door. I don’t remember if he smiled back. From what friends tell me now, he usually did.

At 3:40 that July afternoon, Russell Weston Jr. stepped into the air conditioning of the Capitol Bldg. through that same door. He took five short steps across the tiles to where the officer on duty, 58-year-old J.J. Chestnut, was writing down directions for a group of tourists who had just finished the official tour. Weston raised his gun with speed and silence and put a .38-caliber bullet through the back of Chestnut’s head.

I don’t care whether you’re right wing, left wing, or a chicken wing, if you can’t recognize that the boy plays music with words there’s something wrong with you. And this makes his word thefts all the more mystifying. Plagiarism is the crime of hacks, those of little talent and an indolent nature whose imagination and vision are as limited as their intellectual acumen. When someone blessed with such obvious gifts gives in to temptation like Mr. Domenech now admits he did, there must be other reasons than simple laziness.

In the heart of every artist, there is a gnawing sense of inadequacy, a belief that at bottom, they are just not good enough to deserve the plaudits and encomiums they receive from their peers and the public. In one respect, this makes many artists insufferable louts as they seek to cover this inadequacy with bluster and braggadocio. But in a more uplifting aspect of this phenomena, it drives the artist to excel. Writing, being part artistic endeavor and part journeyman’s craft, opens itself to practitioners who exemplify the best of creativity while requiring the attitude of a bricklayer. Carefully laying down ideas in a logical and coherent fashion (if indeed that is the writer’s goal) can be a chore at times and it is this facet of the craft that can be irksome.

That irritation can lead to temptation, a desire to shortcut the process by not re-inventing the wheel. There is also the unwritten rule that a nice turn of the phrase or a play on words can be copied and pasted - a curious form of flattery of which I have been guilty in the past (use the site search here to look for references to “dirty necked galoots” which I first saw used by R. Emmett Tyrell). Put it all together and plagiarism becomes an easy trap to fall into unless one is firmly grounded with a strict moral sense and strong ethical standards.

Jeff Goldstein, who for some reason has recently come under attack by some pretty heavy hitters on the left for…well, being Goldstein, I guess, places the imbroglio in context:

Having met Ben last month, I can report that I found him to be a very bright, very articulate, very glib young man. He is also a very gifted writer. On the charges of plagiarism, I’ll accept Ben’s explanation—whatever it is—because I also found him to be quite a forthright gentleman, which means that I expect he will admit to any wrongdoing.

What is most distasteful about this episode from the perspective of the blogosphere, on the other hand, is the palpable glee with which many on the left set out after Ben and are now luxuriating in his resignation. And, of course, they have taught the WaPo the lesson they wished to teach it: that rightwing commentary will be scrutinized in direct inverse to the acceptance they give to the obvious biases of leftwing media figures.

There has been a concerted effort by the left in the past year to try and knock down the idea that there is a liberal bias in major media. In fact, liberals are attempting to portray the media as nothing more than a mouthpiece for the GOP and conservatives. They believe if they say “Rush Limbaugh” and “Fox News” often enough and loud enough, people will actually start believing that Chris Matthews is a conservative masquerading as former Chief of Staff to Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill or that Katie Couric is a closet Republican.

This from the Reality Based Community.

The furious reaction by left wing blogs to the very idea of a page on the Washington Post website devoted to conservatives represents a recognition by the left that their once total dominance of the flow of information (and hence the power to set the national agenda) is under serious challenge. And as Goldstein points out, the next conservative blogger hired by the Post better have a thick skin:

Because make no mistake: their entire schtick has become political theater—and often of the most hateful variety. In recent months, we’ve seen a ratcheting up of attempts to undermine the credibility of writers who don’t toe the progressive line (for my part, I’ve been called an idiot, a failed academic, a pill-popping hausfrau, untalented, uncreative, pretentious etc., etc.). But of course, it’s the right who engages in the “politics of personal destruction.” That’s just, well, an established given.

Ben Domenech is not Dan Rather; but no matter. The scalp is the thing. And the left has theirs today.

Which brings us to a double standard on the left so unfair, so obvious that one can easily question the personal integrity of people who perpetrate it, as Goldstein does here:

[T]hose on the left who have been braying all day over Ben’s downfall have two choices, as I see it: they can continue to gloat and carry around his scalp as a trophy to their own viciousness (they went after him for a host of other things, from his schooling to his family to his supposed “racism” before they got around to the plagiarism charge)—showing themselves to be the very fetishists of schadenfreude I accused them of being; or they can now explain to us why they don’t hold their own to the same ethical standards. Ben has owned up to his mistakes. He has, as I anticipated he would, taken that most difficult first step to rehabilitating his credibility. Now it’s time for other folks to do the same: Molly Ivins; Larry Tribe; Stephen Ambrose; Dan Rather; Jason Leopold; Joe Biden; Micah Wright; Ward Churchill; Eason Jordan; CNN’s agreement with Saddam’s Iraq; Joe Wilson; Steve Erlanger—we’re looking at you.

Surely, our principled guardians of publishing ethics could use their newfound momentum to prompt similarly intensive investigations into the ethical lapses of those mentioned above, yes? Or is it only conservatives who are to be publicly pilloried by the reality based community.

You know—because of the nuance.

Ever so slowly, the attack memes carefully knitted together by the left over the past 3 long years to form a devastating narrative that puts the President in the most evil, unflattering light are unravelling before our eyes. The Saddam documents promise to do what thousands of right wing bloggers could never do; change the tone and tenor of the debate over the Iraq War (and thus the President) by giving the lie to all of the myths, half-truths, exaggerations, and outright falsehoods perpetrated by hateful, spiteful, jealous liberals whose irritation at losing elections has reached the point that they will do anything and say anything, even to the point of bringing shame and humiliation to the United States, in order to achieve power.

Yes, they brought down a conservative blogger. But later this summer, as the revelations continue about not only Saddam but the conspiracy involving our erstwhile allies against our efforts at both the UN and on the battlefield in Iraq becomes more generally known, the decision by Democrats and the netroots to make the election about George W. Bush could very well seem in retrospect to be a blunder of monumental proportions.

UPDATE

My jaw is on the floor and I am royally pissed off.

After Anne informed me in the comments that the piece I linked to from the New York Press above was actually cribbed from an article from the Washington Post I initiated a search of lefty blogs and sure enough, Domenech had copied almost word for word a piece that appeared in the Post on July 26, 1998 on page one!

It appears that my praise for Mr. Domenech was given for a piece in which he had lifted large segments of someone else’s beautiful work and claimed it as his own.

I apologize to my readers for 1)implying that Ben Domenech has any proven talent, and 2) misleading them about the author of the piece I linked above.

Domenech has come far and fast in life. It is apparent that he took many shortcuts to reach the height from which he has now fallen. It is also apparent from reading RedState and Jeff Goldstein that he has many friends who care about him and will stand by him in his hour of trial. This is a good thing because judging by the sheer volume of work in which he has shamelessly stolen others ideas and words, he will never write professionally again. And anyone who would hire him as a writer is a fool.

BTW - as of 7:00 PM Central on Saturday night, the list of plagiarized cites at Daily Kos are 7 pages long in MS Word.

This just in from Post.Blog, Jim Brady’s site:

In the past 24 hours, we learned of allegations that Ben Domenech plagiarized material that appeared under his byline in various publications prior to washingtonpost.com contracting with him to write a blog that launched Tuesday.

An investigation into these allegations was ongoing, and in the interim, Domenech has resigned, effective immediately.

When we hired Domenech, we were not aware of any allegations that he had plagiarized any of his past writings. In any cases where allegations such as these are made, we will continue to investigate those charges thoroughly in order to maintain our journalistic integrity.

Brady tips his cap to lefty bloggers:

We appreciate the speed and thoroughness with which our readers and media outlets surfaced these allegations. Despite the turn this has taken, we believe this event, among other things, testifies to the positive and powerful role that the Internet can play in the the practice of journalism.

We also remain committed to representing a broad spectrum of ideas and ideologies in our Opinions area.

I certainly hope that last is true. More than most media outlets - including all the biggies - WaPo has made a concerted effort to integrate their news coverage with the new media on the web. I applaud their efforts to make conservatives “feel at home” at a news source that in the past has shown open hostility to conservative ideas and personalities.

That said, all this incident has done is further erode confidence in the press. Already ranked by the American people at the bottom of the list for trustworthiness (right there with the Congress) and suffering from a concentration of power at both the local and national levels, the media is in real danger of trailing off into irrelevancy. And that would be a disaster for our democracy.

This article originally appears in The American Thinker

It appeared to be the beginning of something new and exciting for the mainstream press. The Washington Post hires a conservative blogger ostensibly to give the view from the right on issues covered by the paper’s news department. The Post has proven itself innovative in other ways when it comes to the use of the web having recently included a Technorati listing of blogs covering specific articles. It has also increased its on-line content to include other blogs on culture and politics as well as extensive internet live chats with personalities from media, politics, and entertainment.

In fact, it was Dan Froomkin’s political blog White House Briefing that had conservatives calling for a blog to reflect the views of the right at the Post. The laughable bias of Mr. Froomkin contributed in no small way to the eventual decision by Executive Editor Jim Brady to hire Ben Domenech, founder of the blog RedState and at the tender age of 24, a seasoned political operative having worked at the White House and on Capitol Hill as a speech writer.

No sooner had Mr. Domenech gotten his feet wet than the attacks by the netnuts began. Apparently believing that the Washington Post was their exclusive preserve, a place where they hunt down and destroy conservatives not where they give them jobs, lefties went ballistic. The first attacks were for some pretty stupid things Domenech had said blogging at RedState as “Augustine” such as calling Coretta Scott King a communist the day after she died (for which he apologized) and making an ignorant remark about lower crime rates the result of a high number of abortions among blacks (although he didn’t put it quite as matter of factly as I just did). He tried to explain away the remark by claiming he was only quoting pro-life Pastor Neuhaus who was disgusted with using such “evidence” to support abortion. A pretty lame explanation but understandable if not acceptable.

There is not a blogger on this planet who has not written something and then regretted hitting the “publish” button. The immediacy and speed with which blogs cover and comment on issues sometimes leads to writing stupid, emotional posts full of ad-hominem attacks and vituperative digressions from the facts. I’d hate to think what someone doing a hit piece on me would find when I was venting against the latest outrage from the MSM or some idiot lefty.

So Domenech can be excused - barely - for what he has written in haste or otherwise on his blog. Chalk it up to the nature of the beast and forgive him for writing without thinking.

But what simply cannot be tolerated in any venue where the written word is revered and opinions respected is plagiarism. And according to material dug up by several lefty bloggers, the shocking fact is that Domenech is a word stealer of epic proportions, someone who has lifted entire articles from other sources and claimed the words and ideas as his own.

The issue of why the Washington Post couldn’t have found this out before hiring Mr. Domenech is another question entirely and will not be dealt with here. Suffice it to say that this incident along with recent stupidities at the New York Times regarding a fake hurricane victim and a bogus Abu Ghraib poster boy shows how lazy the media has gotten about fact checking.

Writing, being a combination of art and craft, is an extraordinarily personal way to express oneself. So when a plagiarizer lifts entire paragraphs containing ideas that are not his own, he in effect, takes a little of the writer along with the words. It is a personal affront to the originator of those ideas as well as being acts of selfishness and dishonesty.

The plagiarism of Mr. Domenech cannot be chalked up to youthful indiscretion nor to some kind of unconscious parroting of something he read before putting words to paper. The examples unearthed so far - and bloggers are finding more examples almost by the hour - are so clearly copied verbatim from other sources as to constitute an unusually good case for plagiarism against Mr. Domenech. Most plagiarizers will subtly change the wording of what they intend to copy so as to disguise their crime. Mr. Domenech didn’t even take the time and effort to do that. Here is just one example, a review of the film Final Fantasy that appeared in the National Review Online:

Ben Domenech in National Review Online in July of 2001:

“Translucent and glowing, they ooze up from the ground and float through solid walls, wriggling countless tentacles and snapping their jaws. They’re known as the Phantoms, alien thingies that, for three decades, have been sucking the life out of the earthlings of “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.” Swollen nightmares from a petri dish, they’re the kind of grotesque whatsits horror writer H.P. Lovecraft would have kept as pets in his basement.”

Steve Murray (Cox News):

“Translucent and glowing, they ooze up from the ground and float through solid walls, splaying their tentacles and snapping their jaws, dripping a discomfiting acidic ooze. They’re known as the Phantoms, otherworldly beings who, for three decades, have been literally sucking the life out of the earthlings of the human.”

There is beauty in the imagery evoked by Mr. Murray’s description - a juxtapostion of words that are pleasing when listened to by our inner voice as well as exciting to our imagination when conjuring up a picture drawn with such clarity.

For Mr. Domenech to steal those words and ideas is like slapping Mr. Murray in the face and laughing at the same time. For at bottom, the plagiarizer fully realizes what he is doing and thinks he is being clever by getting away with it. This is not a case where some graduate assistant helping with research on a book for some famous academic lifts entire passages from someone else’s thesis or an obscure article in an scholarly journal as has happened in recent years with several historians. This is a case where Mr. Domenech was using the platform provided by NRO to advance his own career and pad his credentials, the result being he was shortly thereafter hired by the White House as a speech writer.

Dan Reihl is a conservative blogger who gives voice to sentiments that should be echoed by conservative writers across the country:

No one with a healthy respect for original ideas, or the written words of others could do what it seems Domenech has done. If he’s guilty, his judgment displays a profound lack of moral and ethical grounding. Ambition is no excuse for theft. And that’s precisely what plagiarism is.

I’m assuming the WaPo will act, if it hasn’t already. If guilty, allowing him to continue representing the Right would be terribly wrong.

If we conservatives have any claims to promoting honesty and decency, there will be more calls on the right for Mr. Domenech to do the honorable thing and save himself and his employer the embarrassment of being fired by resigning immediately. Little can be gained from his continuing to blog at the Washington Post as I for one never plan on linking to anything he writes and would hope that other conservatives would join me in such a boycott.

Ben Domenech is not the kind of writer we want representing the conservative viewpoint at the Washington Post or anywhere else. With so many eloquent and able conservative writers, I’m sure the Post will have no problem finding someone else to take over a blog that should be espousing honesty and decency as the principles by which we on the right live by.

Anything short of that just won’t do.

UPDATE

The Political Pit Bull has the best round-up - right or left - of the plagiarism issue. Patterico has some more thoughts here including a personal experience he had with a plagiarizer.

I can’t help but thinking that with these and other conservative bloggers already weighing in on this matter -coming out four square against Domenech’s plagiarism - it would be an interesting thought experiment to think of what kind of reaction lefty bloggers would have if one of their own was accused of something similar. Given the left’s penchant to close ranks for the likes of Joe Wilson (a proven liar) and Bill Clinton, I daresay that there would be nary a peep from the netnuts if the shoe were on the other foot in this case.

John Cole defends Mr. Domenech from the charges of racism (because he called a black person a communist?) as well as other blathering charges from the left. In a comment in the same post, Cole gives his views on the plagiarism issue.

UPDATE II

Michelle Malkin, for whom Mr. Domenech was an editor on her last book, weighs in:

As someone who has worked in daily journalism for 14 years, I have a lot of experience related to this horrible situation: I’ve had my work plagiarized by shameless word and idea thiefs many times over the years. I’ve also been baselessly accused of plagiarism by some of the same leftists now attacking Ben.

The bottom line is: I know it when I see it. And, painfully, Domenech’s detractors, are right. He should own up to it and step down. Then, the Left should cease its sick gloating and leave him and his family alone.

And James Joyner has a thoughtful defense of Domenech here:

I am not ready to toss Domenech under the proverbial bus or call for his firing at the moment. There may, indeed, be perfectly reasonable explanations for these charges. But while Erickson is probably right that “Facts have never been debate winners among the haters,” they should damned well be debate winners among the rest of us. Let alone, I should add, the side that so loudly heralds traditional virtues like honor.

Ordinarily I would agree with Mr. Joyner. However, the examples of Mr. Domenech’s plagiarism ferreted out so far are so egregious, so obvious that the only possible “reasonable explanation” is that either Mr. Domenech’s work is being copied by people like P.J. O’Rourke or Mr. Domenech has been caught red-handed.

Want to have some fun?

What’s the quickest way to get a Frenchman stuttering mad? Tell him that French “values and its global vision” will be broadcast around the world in English:

France’s television dream of mounting a challenge to CNN and the British Broadcasting Corp. has suffered an embarrassing setback after reports that the new channel would broadcast most of its output in English.

Starved of realistic funding for a 24-hour news station, CII is scheduled to go on-air in December for transmission initially to Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Its annual budget, met by the French taxpayer, will be $88 million, about an eighth of CNN’s.

President Jacques Chirac promised a “CNN a la francaise” in the 2002 election campaign and is committed to a station that will “spread the values of France and its global vision throughout the world.”

It was always known that part of the channel’s output would be in English and Arabic, but champions of the French language were appalled at suggestions that its output in French be less than four hours a day.

The reaction among the Guardians of All Things French has been predictable. Back in 1994, the Assemblée Générale passed the Loi Toubon (named after the Cultural Minister at the time Jacques Toubon) that actually banned the use of about 3500 mostly English words that had seeped into general usage. Called “Franglish” by the cultural overseers, the law actually called for fines or prison terms if one were to use foreign words in business or government communications, in broadcasting, and in advertising if “suitable equivalents” existed in French. To make sure that suitable equivalents in fact existed, a committee was formed to come up with French alternatives.

Thus, Ford Motor Company found itself in the ridiculous position of having to remove the term “air bags” from its advertisements and substitute instead, the culturally mandated “coussins gonflables de protectio.”

It is in broadcasting that the law is most draconian. French must be used exclusively in all forms audio or visual broadcasting, with the exception of movies shown in their original language with sub-titles. And God help you if you try to start a business and have any of the banned words in the name of your new company. No person or society, the bill says, can set up a company in France that contains a foreign word or expression, unless they can prove that there is no way of expressing the concept in French.

They are serious about enforcement, too. Police and other agents of the state are authorized to raid business premises and seize offending texts, and the bill threatens heavy fines and imprisonment for anyone attempting to impede these officers in their duty.

With so many being so hostile to English, one can imagine the reaction on the part of the purists to this assault on French sensibilities not to mention their high falutin pretensions about anyone on the planet caring very much about French “values” and their “global vision.” After all, nearly all countries know how to surrender and act like insufferable fools:

Marc Favre d’Echallens of the Association for the Defense of the French Language expressed outrage that a station designed to give a “French vision” of world affairs would contain so little in French.

“After celebrating Trafalgar with the English and making light of our own great victory of Austerlitz, it probably follows that a publicly funded French television channel should end up broadcasting in English,” he said.

“If all we get is a poor man’s version of what is already available, what is the point of doing it at all?”

What does it say about a country that would celebrate their “great victory” at Austerlitz, a battle that brought the Austrians to their knees in slavish homage to one of the greatest tyrants in history, Napoleon Bonaparte?

If French nationalists have to go back in time to 1806 to find justification for their continuing delusions about global leadership, we shouldn’t be holding out much hope that the government will come to its senses about the danger it’s in with regard to radical Islam anytime soon. That’s bad news for the French and for Europe as a whole. After all, if the people who invented “western values” in the first place are more concerned about a “threat” to the purity of their language than the real threat of Islamic radicalism and aren’t willing to defend those values now, who will?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

StrategyPage:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(HT: Powerline)

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

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

General Casey:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what about the smaller films?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sounds like Captain Queeg is alive and well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New York Times adds:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE

Interesting information from the Times article:

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE II

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

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

Saturday, September 03, 2005

And Bush had no idea it would get this bad

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