Right Wing Nut House

Frank Rich was, at one time, drama critic for the New York Times. Apparently the smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd finally got to the moonbat because the Times editoral staff eventually realized he’d gone ’round the bend and decided to change his assignments - or at least have Mr. Rich ease off on skewering the New York theater community.

The logical place to move someone who’s burned out on watching things like the 25th revival of Oklahoma is…where else? the Op-Ed page. Apparently, Mr. Rich has always wanted to grow up and write about politics and government.

Given that Mr. Rich knows less about politics than he does about the theater, perhaps the Times should have made him their Restaurant Critic. At least then he would have been well-fed and could have saved his readers the unpleasant experience of up-chucking after reading him. After all, how unappetizing can you make a restaurant review? Considerably less nauseating than the gibberish he writes when scribbling earnestly about politics.

One would think that a knowledge of history would be a prerequisite for writing about politics and government - at least in this day and age. The great Time-Life reporter Theodore H. White wrote that the best political writers used to come from the sports pages. Sports writers with their colorful metaphors and a familiarity with making personalities come to life turned out to be perfect political reporters.

Maybe Mr. Rich could have been transferred to the sports page so that he could have gained a little experience before taking the plunge and writing about politics. Alas, I doubt whether the Times had a beat that covered Tiddlywinks. Or Bridge. Or perhaps, “Go Fish.”

From what I can tell of this article written for the Sunday New York Times, Mr. Rich should certainly give up writing about politics and make another career move; this time, he could write fiction. For children. He’d be a perfect modern day “Mother Goose.”

In fact, the only thing missing from his current column is “Once upon a time…”

Mr. Rich’s piece is a fairy tale about both the past and the present. The recent revelation of Deep Throat’s identity is Rich’s hook:

This confusion of Hollywood’s version of history with the genuine article would quickly prove symptomatic of the overall unreality of the Deep Throat coverage. Was Mr. Felt a hero or a villain? Should he “follow the money” into a book deal, and if so, how would a 91-year-old showing signs of dementia either write a book or schmooze about it with Larry King? How did Vanity Fair scoop The Post? How does Robert Redford feel about it all? Such were the questions that killed time for a nation awaiting the much-heralded feature mediathon, the Michael Jackson verdict.

Richard Nixon and Watergate itself, meanwhile, were often reduced to footnotes. Three years ago, on Watergate’s 30th anniversary, an ABC News poll found that two-thirds of Americans couldn’t explain what the scandal was, and no one was racing to enlighten them this time around. Vanity Fair may have taken the trouble to remind us that Watergate was a web of crime yielding the convictions and guilty pleas of more than 30 White House and Nixon campaign officials, but few others did. Watergate has gone back to being the “third-rate burglary” of Nixon administration spin. It is once again being covered up.

First of all, two thirds of America can’t remember what they had for breakfast last week much less what happened 33 years ago. And why don’t the American people “remember?” Could it be that they’re too busy learning about other, more multiculturally acceptable topics than something as mundane as American history? No, of course not.

And who, might I inquire, is “covering up” Watergate today? Could it be Mr. Rich’s own employer, the New York Times? Or perhaps even the biggest media benificiary of the scandal The Washington Post? Didn’t see any replays of folksy Sam Ervin or monotonal John Dean on T.V. either. I guess it was the press that’s covering up Watergate again. For shame!

Then Mr. Rich says something both curious and unintelligible at the same time:

Not without reason. Had the scandal been vividly resuscitated as the long national nightmare it actually was, it would dampen all the Felt fun by casting harsh light on our own present nightmare. “The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before” was how the former Nixon speech writer William Safire put it on this page almost nine months ago. The current administration, a second-term imperial presidency that outstrips Nixon’s in hubris by the day, leads the attack, trying to intimidate and snuff out any Woodwards or Bernsteins that might challenge it, any media proprietor like Katharine Graham or editor like Ben Bradlee who might support them and any anonymous source like Deep Throat who might enable them to find what Carl Bernstein calls “the best obtainable version of the truth.”

How would resucitating the scandal shed light on the Bush Administration or, as Mr. Rich poetically puts it our “own present nightmare?” And who has been “intimidated” or “snuffed out?” (A curious choice of words given Eason Jordan’s nightmarish scenario of the military deliberately targeting jourrnalists).

By implication, Mr. Rich has not been intimidated which, of course, makes him far superior to any other journalist who cowers in the shadows simply regurgitating White House press releases. What’s that you say? Are you trying to tell me that the media is generally opposed to the President and his policies and have exhibited the most unreasoning and harsh criticism ever let loose against a Chief Executive. Nope. Not according to the ex-drama critic.

Mr. Rich then takes a little trip…off the deep end:

This is the kind of lapdog news media the Nixon White House cherished. To foster it, Nixon’s special counsel, Charles W. Colson, embarked on a ruthless program of intimidation that included threatening antitrust action against the networks if they didn’t run pro-Nixon stories. Watergate tapes and memos make Mr. Colson, who boasted of “destroying the old establishment,” sound like the founding father of today’s blogging lynch mobs.

Gosh…maybe I should take down my autographed poster of Chuck Colson in a bathing suit. I wouldn’t want to be too obvious about my allegiance to the “founding father of today’s blogging lynch mob.” And as far as Mr. Rich is concerned…well, there’s never a rope around when you need one.

Now we get to the nub of Mr. Rich’s concerns. Evidently, the MSM doesn’t run full blown biographies of its guests prior to their appearances:

Such is the equivalently supine state of much of the news media today that Mr. Colson was repeatedly trotted out, without irony, to pass moral judgment on Mr. Felt - and not just on Fox News, the cable channel that is actually run by the former Nixon media maven, Roger Ailes. “I want kids to look up to heroes,” Mr. Colson said, oh so sorrowfully, on NBC’s “Today” show, condemning Mr. Felt for dishonoring “the confidence of the president of the United States.” Never mind that Mr. Colson dishonored the law, proposed bombing the Brookings Institution and went to prison for his role in the break-in to steal the psychiatric records of The Times’s Deep Throat on Vietnam, Daniel Ellsberg. The “Today” host, Matt Lauer, didn’t mention any of this - or even that his guest had done jail time. None of the other TV anchors who interviewed Mr. Colson - and he was ubiquitous - ever specified his criminal actions in the Nixon years. Some identified him onscreen only as a “former White House counsel.”

Imagine that! Indentifying a former White House counsel as…as…A former White House counsel! Shocking! And Mr. Colson’s prison term was marked by something else Mr. Lauer never mentioned. A jail cell conversion to evangelical Christianity for which Mr. Colson has been praised from one end of the country to the other. Guess even Mr. Rich forgot that little tidbit. Or that people can change. Why look at Rich himself. From hysterical drama critic to hysterical political commentator. Now there’s a conversion!

And, by the way. “Former Nixon media maven” Roger Ailes was tangentially involved in the 1972 campaign. To call him a “media maven” of Nixon shows poor research on the part of Rich. But then, when you’re Drama Critic of the Times, all you have to read before you write a review is the program.

Mr. Rich then tries a little drama writing of his own:

In the most recent example, all the president’s men slimed and intimidated Newsweek by accusing it of being an accessory to 17 deaths for its errant Koran story; led by Scott McClellan, they said it was unthinkable that any American guard could be disrespectful of Islam’s holy book. These neo-Colsons easily drowned out Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, both of whom said that the riots that led to the 17 deaths were unrelated to Newsweek. Then came the pièce de résistance of Nixon mimicry: a Pentagon report certifying desecrations of the Koran by American guards was released two weeks after the Newsweek imbroglio, at 7:15 p.m. on a Friday, to assure it would miss the evening newscasts and be buried in the Memorial Day weekend’s little-read papers.

Tom McGuire did my leg work for me here:

Oh, dear - the “neo Colsons” include CNN, which cited the Pentagon assertion before rebutting it; the Washington Post, which implicated Newsweek in their lead paragraph; and the NY Times. Have the neo-Colson’s swept the board? (Read Mr. McGuire’s entire screed. He like, uses facts and things. You know, the kinds of stuff Mr. Rich usually forgets to include in his columns).

And in the most painful passage of his entire review, er column, Mr. Rich tries his durndest to connect you-know-what-with-you-know-who:

THE journalists who do note the resonances of now with then rarely get to connect those dots on the news media’s center stage of television. You are more likely to hear instead of how Watergate inspired too much “gotcha” journalism. That’s a rather absurd premise given that no “gotcha” journalist got the goods on the biggest story of our time: the false intimations of incipient mushroom clouds peddled by American officials to sell a war that now threatens to match the unpopularity and marathon length of Vietnam.

Just a little perspective, please. When every student who ever enrolled in a journalism class since 1974 has daydreamed about being the next Woodward and Bernstein and when both newspapers and TV stations put a more tangible root to the rumor that “Gotcha” journalism was in by creating and funding entire departments of “investigative reporters” I would say that anyone who says Watergate spawned more ambush journalism was pretty much spot on.

Secondly, the “marathon length” of the Viet Nam war was nearly 8 years (combat operations from 1965-72). If the Iraq war is a marathon, let me run in it. Being an old, fat man it’s probably the only marathon that I could finish. How in the wide, wide, world of sports did we get an analogy of the length of the Viet Nam war with Iraq? How does 8 years compare with 2 years? Isn’t 2 years like 4 times shorter than 8 years? I nearly flunked math but even I can tell the difference between 2 years and 8 years.

Perhaps Mr. Rich is thinking in terms of a musical comedy. If that’s the case, we can forgive him. After all, a musical usually only has three acts. And reading Mr. Rich’s column is like sitting through a very bad production of Bertold Brecht’s incomprehensible Three Penny Opera. After “Mack the Knife,” you just want to pick up and go home.

UPDATE

Pat over at Brainsters has some good thoughts:

I looked at Rich’s column as a potential post for Lifelike, but skipped it because it was too predictable. You could read similar stuff over at the Daily Kos diaries any time. The press is in the back pocket of the Republicans, nobody ever asks the president about the Downing Street Memo, they’re all a bunch of neocons (although keeping with the Watergate theme, Rich refers to them as neo-Colsons). Hilariously he accuses the Bush Administration of releasing bad news on the Friday before Memorial Day; Tom checked his calendar and notes that it was the Friday after Memorial Day.

And Eric over at Classical Values tells us bloggers we’ve obviously got some serious work to do:

Much as I hate to admit it, Rich is right. What I want to know is, precisely how did he find out about the “ruthless program of intimidation”? Who leaked? Where the hell did that sneak find out that bloggers have been using the full weight of the federal government to threaten antitrust actions against the major networks? That, of course, is exactly what we do! Like Bush’s hubris, blogger misuse of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division outstrips Nixon’s by the day.

While it’s been tough work destroying the old establishment, by writing such exposes of the blogosphere in such a blatant and challenging way, Frank Rich highlights an embarrassing point: obviously the blogosphere has not been tough enough or thorough enough!

Here are some excellent articles and analysis on a variety of subjects that you may have missed over the last couple of days.

Media on Media:

Brent Bozell talks about the Howard Dean media blackout. Seems our friends in the MSM are doing the Democrats a favor by not reporting on the Screaming Doctor’s more outrageous remarks. And Accuracy in Media (AIM) reports on some issues still left to be resolved with Deep Throat and Mark Felt. A lot of people are noticing that what information Felt had access to at the time and what Wood/Stien reported as coming from Deep Throat doesn’t quite jibe. Was Deep Throat a composite character for one or more other sources in the FBI and executive branch? No one that I’ve seen has tried to pin Bradlee, Woodward, or Bernstien down on that topic.

Time will tell as to whether or not there will be further revelations about Deep Throat. Watch the obituary pages carefully.

Lord Haw-Haw

Here’s the al Jazeera interview with British moonbat MP and Saddam apologist George Galloway courtesy of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). Caution: Will make your blood boil.

Dissident Watch

American Enterprise Institute has a piece on Syrian dissident Aktham Naisse. Inspiring read.

He wrote the Book on Gulags

The Times Online has an interview with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, his first since 2002. At first a liberal hero, Solzhenitsyn fell out of favor with the left when he came out and condemned the west’s passivity in the face of communist brutality. Read what he has to say about a real gulag. (HT: The American Thinker)

When Rimbaud meets Rambo

Is new the new French Prime Minister just a sensitive, misunderstood poet? Or just another anti-American hysteric? (Both, I say.) Via Watching America.

Coyote Ugly

Are coyote’s becoming more aggressive? In my neck of the woods, northern Illinois, they’re beginning to lose their fear of people and are becoming a danger. So far, only dogs and the occasional cat are their victims. But its only a matter of time before a human is injured or killed by these beautiful beasts. Via National Geographic.

The Religion of Peace

Timothy Furnish asks on the pages of History News Network “Does Islam Condone Beheadings?”

Space Defense

Peter Brooks of the Heritage Foundation talks about the militarization of space. Sad, but inevitable. The advantages for the US are just too big to pass up.

Red Stars Rising

FrontPage Mag has a review of a book by Ronald and Allis Radosh on the Hollywood left called Red Star Over Hollywood.

We’ve all heard by now that the Washington Post Watergate source Deep Throat “outed” himself yesterday in the pages of Vanity Fair magazine. What few people have examined yet is the process by which that information eventually came to light and what’s shaping up to be an interesting story on the family of Mark Felt who saw the outing of Deep Throat as a way to fame and riches.

First let me say that I sympathize with Felt’s family in that the medical bills associated with Mr. Felt’s illnesses are probably substantial. And I admire the fact that his daughter opened her home to the former FBI #2 man and evidently took good care of him.

But there are several unanswered questions that the family is going to have to deal with over the next few days and weeks. First and foremost: Was Mark Felt of sound enough mind to make the decision on his own to reveal his identity as Deep Throat?

Apparently, when Bob Woodward received word this past weekend that Vanity Fair was going with the story, this was the first question that entered his mind. Woodward had seen Felt in 1999 at which time the family first approached him about writing a book with Felt about the mystery. Questions of Felt’s mental capacity bothered Woodward up until the moment the story broke:

Woodward and others at The Post were caught by surprise. Woodward had known that family members was considering going public; in fact, they had talked repeatedly with Woodward about the possibility of jointly writing a book to reveal the news. An e-mail from Felt’s daughter over the Memorial Day weekend continued to hold out the idea that Woodward and Felt would disclose the secret together.

Throughout those contacts, Woodward was dogged by reservations about Felt’s mental condition, he said yesterday, wondering whether the source was competent to undo the long-standing pledge of anonymity that bound them.

Then there’s the question of conflict of interest on the part of the Felt family attorney John D. O’Connor. Here he was representing the family in negotiations that spanned at least two years with various publishers and media outlets trying to get money for the family in return for the scoop. Then, when O’Connor got a tentative go ahead from Vanity Fair, he was actually writing the article for publication:

Vanity Fair’s story hinted at but did not answer a key journalistic question: Was Felt, who is 91 and in ill health from a stroke, of sound enough mind to have confirmed his identity to O’Connor, or to have told Woodward that their agreement had ended?

The Vanity Fair story muddies the issue somewhat. O’Connor notes in the story that Felt told him, “I’m the guy they called Deep Throat,” but the context is lacking. For one thing, O’Connor played a dual role: He was providing the Felt family with legal advice while also writing a magazine story, which meant that Felt’s revelation may have been information provided under attorney-client privilege and therefore not subject to unilateral disclosure.

What’s more, as O’Connor makes clear in his story, the Felt family was seeking to profit from Felt’s secret identity and therefore had an incentive to pressure a clearly conflicted Felt into going public.

Did Felt’s family see the old man as some kind of gold mine? The evidence so far would seem to indicate that the answer to that question is yes.

The ancillary question is did Mr. Felt understand that and did he approve?

The family was in a unique position, one that most people would envy but few would really understand. Depending on Mr. Felt’s mental capacity, their motivations could be both mercenary and loving at the same time. Why shouldn’t their father/grandfather receive the recognition as Deep Throat while he was still alive? He certainly looks happy enough in the picture above. And while the family received no money for the Vanity Fair piece, look for the “My Story” book coming very soon to your favorite book store and watch for the mini-series next May during network sweeps.

In short, the family is going to make a financial killing.

In a few months, they may wish that they kept their mouths shut. Along with the money will come more attention more quickly than they may be able to handle. That first interview (I predict either Barbara Walters or Larry King) will be one of the most widely viewed TV programs of the year. Total strangers will come out of nowhere and ask for money, for help, for autographs. And privacy will be a distant memory.

Our mass media culture consumes people like Joan Felt and Nick Jones. They’re about to discover what happens when the confluence of celebrity and news hits the purveyors of both; cable news. With an appetite more voracious than a pack of hyenas and the scruples of my pet cat Aramas, the Three Musketeers of media mayhem will flog and flog and flog this story until the scourging scene in Gibson’s Passion of the Christ will look tame by comparison.Come Saturday, when the cable news outlets have their navel-gazing “media on media” shows, watch for the head shaking and finger wagging from the panelists about how we’re overdoing this story, how the media is in another feeding frenzy mode, and how sad all this is for Mr. Felt’s family.

Do you think that will stop the hyenas from feeding?

Kossaks are crowing. The Post is pontificating. And the DU dummkopfs are dripping sarcasm.

Just another day of reporting on the Gulag for the MSM and their dingbat allies on the left:

In the latest disclosure, declassified FBI reports showed that detainees at the U.S. naval prison in Cuba told FBI and military interrogators on a number of occasions as early as April 2002 _ three months after the first prisoners arrived at the makeshift prison _ that guards abused them and desecrated the Quran.

“Their behavior is bad,” one detainee is quoted as saying of his guards during an interrogation by an FBI special agent on July 22, 2002. “About five months ago the guards beat the detainees. They flushed a Quran in the toilet.”

Lawrence Di Rita, chief spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, said Wednesday that U.S. military officials at Guantanamo Bay had recently found a separate record of the same allegation by the same detainee, and he was re-interviewed on May 14. “He did not corroborate his own allegation,” Di Rita said.

I like Bill Ardolino’s take on this:

In Related, Breaking News:

The entire Death Row population at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana testified that “the food is terrible and I’m 110% innocent. I swear. Hey, you wouldn’t happen to have a smoke, would you?”

What’s that you say? How can you make light of these allegations?

Easy. When someone who wants to chop my head off tells me that he’s being abused and put upon by the US military and, after an investigation, the FBI says the guy is lying through his teeth, I tend to believe the people who don’t want to chop my head off.

This rationale seems to escape those who are all to willing to believe murderous thugs trained in the fine art of media manipulation rather than their own government. While I’ve said many times, I have absolutely no doubt that there was desecration of the Koran and that some allegations of physical torture and even death are true, can we please get our facts straight before we, like you know, hand our enemies a propaganda bonanza on a silver platter? Is this really too much to ask?

What’s the real news from the FBI report? Let’s go to a real journalist, Michelle Malkin:

It should be obvious to anyone who so much as glances at the documents being cited that the FBI was reporting the statements of detainees rather than endorsing or validating those allegations. Immediately before describing the Koran-in-the-toilet allegation, the FBI notes the detainee’s statement that “God tells Muslims to do a jihad against non-Muslims.” Does Kos expect us to believe the FBI is endorsing that statement too?

Careful, Michelle. You may not want to know the answer to that.

One detainee who claimed to have been “beaten, spit upon and treated worse than a dog” could not provide a single detail pertaining to mistreatment by U.S. military personnel. Another detainee claimed that guards were physically abusive and told detainees that U.S. soldiers were having sex with the detainees’ mothers. Yet this detainee said he had neither seen any physical abuse nor heard these comments from the guards. Other detainees who complained about abuse of the Koran admitted they had never personally witnessed any such abuse, but one said he had heard that non-Muslim soldiers touched the Koran when searching it for contraband.

This is what passes for front page news at the Washington Post. These are no better than lies, rumors, and exaggerations designed to feed the frenzy of the MSM about the mistreatment of prisoners at Gitmo. Is the FBI report news? Of course it is. The fact that it was obtained via the Freedom of Information Act by the ACLU is also news. After all, anything the ACLU does is news to that segment of the media that believes every iota of information - even false allegations made by terrorists - should be splashed all over the front pages of one of America’s premier dailies.

Can you see the ACLU and the FOIA during World War II? They probably would have been agitating for the release of “Operation Overlord,” the D-Day invasion plans.

I wonder what the ACLU would have said about our plan to shell the bejeebies out of the French villages on the coastline of Normandy?

UPDATE

LawShawn Barber has similar thoughts to what I said here:

Watch and listen today as the libs try to turn this FBI report, which merely repeats Newsweek’s claim, into a “See, it’s true!” moment. Americans may or may not have flushed a Koran, but I’m certainly not taking a detainee’s word for it, especially one who also said this:

“God tells Muslims to do a jihad against non-Muslims.”

Tom Wolfe, who chronicled Ken Kesey’s riotous, hallucenigenic trip across country in a painted school bus in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test wrote in that American classic “It’s easy to have faith as long as it goes along with what you already know.”

I can’t think of a better explanation for the cognitive dissonance shown by the mainstream press since “Crapperquiddick” hit the fan this past weekend. Because make no mistake: The very same people in the press who took CBS to task last fall for their “fake but accurate” defense of the Bush TANG memos have elevated that apologia so that it’s now considered a legitimate way to report the news.

In editorial after editorial, the press has latched on to the idea that since abuse of prisoners happened in the past at Guantanamo and especially Abu Ghraib, the story of the flushing of a Koran down a toilet sounds true, seems true, and therefore, must be true. Never mind that the only people making these charges are former inmates, their families, and the lawyers representing them. And unless you believe, as the American left so feverishly imagines, that these same inmates were just innocent bystanders swept up in military dragnets and thrown into dungeons like Gitmo, one must be extremely concerned that a line somehow has been crossed.

It’s easy to have faith as long as it goes along with what you already know.

Forget for a moment that the press is more willing to believe the jihadist beheaders, Taliban thugs, and unreconstructed Baathists rather than their own government and military. Forget for a moment that these terrorists are not stupid, that like their bloodthirsty brothers in arms from 40 years ago, the Viet Cong, they know how to push the hot buttons of the American left and their allies in the press. What’s so very striking about this sea change in press standards is that it’s being used to justify the publication of a story that so far has resulted in 17 people losing their lives.

I say so far because as I’ve mentioned previously, I have little doubt that with enough digging, the press will find whatever it is their looking for. And when they do, the piously ignorant peasants who rioted in the streets of Pakistan and Afghanistan last week will pick up where they left off and more hell will break loose. To what end? The explanation given by the press is the eternal “people’s right to know.” A noble sentiment meaningless when placed in the context of covering a war where the United States is fighting for its survival. Terrorists are not just an inconvenience. They are a threat. And if the perfect storm of weapons of mass destruction and fanatical jihadists ever merge, there will be no place in America to hide from the cyclonic blast , least of all the newsrooms and boardrooms of MSM.

What then drives the press to go so far as change reportorial standards when it comes to confirming stories with the potential to harm American interests? Bias is the easy answer. Hugh Hewitt believes that arrogance and hubris - the corruption of power - has blinded reporters to what their real jobs are; to chronicle events in a fair and accurate manner.

Id take that a step farther and say that the press is lost, adrift on an undiscovered ocean where the old certainties and verities of just six months ago no longer apply. They can’t stand the new found scrutiny of the Shadow Media (HT: Ace). They try to cover their uncertainty with bravado and insolence, hoping like a teenaged boy being questioned by his parents why he came home at 2:00 AM to bluff their way through. It won’t work.

If the press thinks this “fake but accurate” paradigm will improve their credibility with the public they’re sadly mistaken. It just becomes that much easier for those of us in the Shadow Media to point out that the Emperor forgot something when he left the palace this morning.

Cross Posted at Blogger News Network

For a little more than a year now, the opponents of the war in Iraq have sought desperately to undermine our efforts there by using the Abu Ghraib prison scandal as a metaphor for the immorality of the conflict in general. Since they couldn’t attack the idea that deposing one of the truly bestial tyrants of the 20th century was the right thing to do, they’ve had to discredit the military and the Administration by attacking the way Americans see themselves and how they want the rest of the world to see us.

They’ve succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.

In the process of trying to discredit the war in the eyes of the American people, the media and their allies on the left have made common cause with some of the most despicable human beings on the planet - Islamic terrorists and their supporters around the world. Make no mistake. The constant barrage by the mainstream press of hair raising stories telling of widespread and systemic torture by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan are being used by people who, as I write this, are using these reports to recruit people into the insurgency to kill American soldiers.

And Newsweek is concerned that they caused a riot? When will they become concerned that there is a direct correlation between printing stories told by terrorists, their lawyers, and family members of terrorists about torture being the rule rather than the exception and getting American soldiers killed?

There’s no getting around this fact. And by taking Newsweek to task for one exaggerated, suspect story we’re all missing the point. Abu Ghraib, like the Watergate mess, has become a catchall phrase, media shorthand for the immorality of our efforts in the War on Terror. There’s been absolutely no effort to put these charges - both real and imagined - into any kind of context. How many stories in the New York times have you seen where an effort has been made to separate legitimate methods of coercive interrogation (so-called “stress techniques) from the gruesome hijinks and fraternity pranks of the apparently ill-disciplined and out of control rabble that ran Abu Ghraib? Even the legitimate complaints of actual, physical torture by the Red Cross are filled with uncertainty and qualifications.

The fact is that both the status of prisoners and the idea that we’re not treating these stateless murderers like we treat muggers or jewel thieves is what’s sticking in the craw of both the press and their leftist apologists. James Bennet inadvertently makes this point in his article in yesterday’s New York Times:

This surge in the killing of civilians reflects how mysterious the long-term strategy remains - and how the rebels’ seeming indifference to the past patterns of insurgency is not necessarily good news for anyone.

It is not surprising that reporters, and evidently American intelligence agents, have had great difficulty penetrating this insurgency. What is surprising is that the fighters have made so little effort to advertise unified goals

In other words, we can’t understand the insurgents because they’re not acting like the Viet Cong. This is nuts. The insurgents are not concerned with anything except making headlines in American newspapers in order to convince the American people that our stated goal of bringing stability to that country is failing. The only possible way they can win is if we leave. And the American press, whether they admit it or not, have become the terrorists willing partner in this endeavor.

Rather than trying to glorify the insurgents (and by extension, terrorists around the world) as “freedom fighters” or “agrarian reformers” as they did 35 years ago in Viet Nam, the press has taken to portraying them as victims of torture somehow worthy of our pity. And because there’s been so little perspective offered, the press has been able to get away with this.

Yes there has been torture. Is it any more widespread than the mistreatment of German or Japanese prisoners in World War II during their interrogations? My guess would be that our enemies back then were treated much more harshly and on a more systematic basis than the stateless beheaders who fall into our hands today. The goals are the same; to get as much information as quickly as possible. And given the success of our efforts at Guantanamo Bay using stress techniques that the media has dubbed “torture,” it seems logical to assume that the comparatively mild measures used by interrogators today compare favorably with the less scientific, more physically abusive techniques carried out during WWII.

The Newsweek imbroglio won’t last long. Already there’s a theme emerging in various press accounts of the magazine’s semi-retraction that while this one story may be false, don’t forget all the incidents that are true:

But while the Pentagon is disputing the Koran incident, U.S. officials have confirmed numerous reports by detainees, especially at Abu Ghraib, about guards attempting to humiliate them with tactics that violate religious taboos of the Muslim faith. A senior Pentagon official has confirmed reports that female interrogators rubbed their bodies against the men, wore skimpy clothes, touched them provocatively and pretended to spread menstrual blood on them. The Newsweek item that triggered the violence also said the forthcoming report would describe “one woman who took off her top, rubbed her finger through a detainee’s hair and sat on the detainee’s lap.”

This is “torture?” If you go by standards set in American prisons I guess you could say yes it is. But by the standards of a war against stateless thugs?

We’ve not seen the last of the Koran incident. Here’s our intrepid reporter Mr. Isikoff:

“Obviously we all feel horrible about what flowed from this, but it’s important to remember there was absolutely no lapse in journalistic standards here,” he said. “We relied on sources we had every reason to trust and gave the Pentagon ample opportunity to comment. . . . We’re going to continue to investigate what remains a very murky situation.”

Not content to leave well enough alone, Mr. Isikoff will not rest until he finds something - anything - that will show how American interrogators show disrespect to Muslims. And if he thinks this last round of riots were bad, just wait until he gets the real story. Or at least one that the Pentagon can’t deny so easily.

Abu Ghraib will continue to haunt our efforts in the War on Terror. The press will see to that. Is there any hope that this could change? Only a similar or, God forbid, more serious attack on American soil would convince the press that this is indeed a war of survival and that by coddling the enemy, they endanger each and every one of us.

UPDATE

I’ve got search engine bots all over my site this morning what with the Newsweek blogswarm and my updated info on Brooke Greenberg. So as a service to all my new visitors and to save you some time in your search for the best commentary on the Newsweek brouhaha, here’s some great links you can click on:

La Shawn Barber has a nice roundup of blogs big and small with her own take:

They’ll get what’s coming to them. The blogosphere has erupted in a righteously indigant swarm (The conservative side, of course. Liberal bloggers are busy defending the rag.), forcing mainstream media to pick up the story. I hope they lose advertisers, readers, and heads over this.

The Captain is incensed (aren’t we all…mostly):

Quite frankly, this is bullshit. They went to the Pentagon with a wild story about flushed Qu’rans and now they’re surprised when no one knew anything about it? Can you imagine what Newsweek would have written and published had the Pentagon told them to keep quiet about it? They would have turned it into another Abu Ghraib, complete with cover-ups and military censorship. It would have resulted in more silly Senate hearings, and even worse publicity than what Newsweek already generated, with more loss of life — and all for a story that sounded patently false from the very beginning.

Michelle Malkin has some thoughts on who Isikoff’s source may be with some links to the milblogs who are speculating about it.

You absolutely must go to Austin Bay’s blog and read his long, powerful diatribe against the press.

Mark Noonan has some words for Newsweek’s editor:

Mr. Whitaker, they weren’t victims of “violence”; they were victims of irresponsible reporting which always presumes the worst about the United States and it’s military forces. You’re correction is nice, but the correction wont carry as far as the initially broadcast lie…for a long time now, American soldiers will be contending with men who’s motivation to fight us stems from your magazine’s irresponsible report.

Wizbang has some contrary thoughts about Newsweek’s liability:

So, bring on the abuse, the sanctions, the penalties for Newsweek. Ban their reporters from covering events. Contact and boycott their advertisers. Pillory them in public. Blame them for the damage to our diplomatic efforts. Mock them. Deride them. Taunt them. Make them stand in the corner at press events while wearing silly hats. Use back issues as toilet paper.

But don’t hold them liable for the deaths. To do that is to excuse the real people to blame — the rioters themselves.

More great commentary at Powerline and good links as usual from Glenn Anderson. And more Instapundit here.

And for a little balance (and because the moonbat linked to a blog that links to me) here’s the one, the only Kos and his “All is well” meme.

Cross Posted at Blogger News Network

Scott Johnson of Powerline has a post on Newsweek’s internal investigation into how Michael Isikoff and John Barry’s story on the copy of a Qur’an being flushed down a toilet - a story that now appears to have no basis in fact - made it into the magazine’s “Periscope” section.

Late last week Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita told NEWSWEEK that its original story was wrong. The brief periscope item (”SouthCom Showdown”) had reported on the expected results of an upcoming U.S. Southern Command investigation into the abuse of prisoners at Gitmo. According to NEWSWEEK, SouthCom investigators found that Gitmo interrogators had flushed a Qur’an down a toilet in an attempt to rattle detainees. While various released detainees have made allegations about Qur’an desecration, the Pentagon has, according to DiRita, found no credible evidence to support them.

How did NEWSWEEK get its facts wrong? And how did the story feed into serious international unrest? While continuing to report events on the ground, NEWSWEEK interviewed government officials, diplomats and its own staffers, and reconstructed this narrative of events:

Scott sums it up nicely:

So Isikoff relied on a telephone call with an anonymous government official paraphrasing a forthcoming report, confirmed by placing a draft of the Periscope item before another anonymous government official. Isikoff never saw the underlying report or even had it read to him.

And this is what passes for “journalism” at Newsweek.

The magazine’s critique, written by Evan Thomas, finds something even more startling:

On Friday night, Pentagon spokesman DiRita called NEWSWEEK to complain about the original periscope item. He said, “We pursue all credible allegations” of prisoner abuse, but insisted that the investigators had found none involving Qur’an desecration. DiRita sent NEWSWEEK a copy of rules issued to the guards (after the incidents mentioned by General Myers) to guarantee respect for Islamic worship. On Saturday, Isikoff spoke to his original source, the senior government official, who said that he clearly recalled reading investigative reports about mishandling the Qur’an, including a toilet incident. But the official, still speaking anonymously, could no longer be sure that these concerns had surfaced in the SouthCom report. Told of what the NEWSWEEK source said, DiRita exploded, “People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said. How could he be credible now?”

This is an everyday occurence in Washington. An “anonymous source” curries favor with the media by exaggerating or even making up out of whole cloth incidents or quotes that reflect badly on someone else. Who knows what this guy’s axe is. The fact that he’s bactracking from his story immediately after the riots indeed raises the question “How could he be credible now?”

Isikoff is an experienced investigative reporter. He made his bones breaking the Lewinsky scandal back in the 1990’s. The life blood of most investigative journalists has now become “anonymous” or “unnamed” sources. Until Watergate, such sources were used sparingly and judiciously by the press for the obvious reason that if someone wasn’t willing to “go on the record” the chances are there were other motives involved for the source talking to the press in the first place. The motives could be personal, sexual, political, or the simple need for attention.

And Evan Thomas does a poor job of trying to explain how this questionable information got into his magazine in the first place. Scott has an observation about that:

Like Lawrence DiRita, I have a question of my own for NEWSWEEK. Is this how an elite newsmagazine confesses error and corrects the record when it makes a big mess?

On a related note, Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs takes issue with our government’s response:

Perhaps even more disgusting than this display of violent irrationality from the RoP (Religion of Peace) is our own government’s rush to appease, even before any facts are discovered. The Newsweek article isn’t the only reason this madness is continuing to spiral out of control; when the US’s first reaction is to apologize and abase ourselves in the face of thuggish Dark Ages behavior, what else should we expect? Weakness invites attack.

I agree wholeheartedly. We should have waited until the Pentagon at least had completed a preliminary investigation (finished Saturday) and then denied the Qur’an incident in the strongest possible language. By leaving the door open to the idea that the incident is true, we’ve allowed our enemies to stir up the Arab street against us. Now we have the prospect of having to deal with things like this:

The clerics in the northeastern province of Badakhshan said they wanted President Bush to handle the matter honestly “and hand the culprits over to an Islamic country for punishment.”

“If that does not happen within three days, we will launch a jihad against America,” said a statement issued by about 300 clerics, referring to Muslim holy war, after meeting in the main mosque in the provincial capital, Faizabad.

(HT: LGF)

I doubt whether this issue is going to go away anytime soon. And just like with Abu Ghraib with everyone who ever set foot in that prison being tortured, every poor little terrorist who found himself incarcerated by the US will weep about the desecration of the Qur’an that the infidel’s forced him to watch.

The hell of it is, the moonbat left will pick up on this and once again make common cause with the enemies of the United States.

UPDATE

As you can imagine, the blogosphere’s big guns have trained their sights on this story and are letting Newsweek and by extension their MSM critics have it right in the chops.

Michelle Malkin does her usual great job of rounding up reaction from blogs both big and small.

The Captain fire’s a well aimed broadside:

Remember this when the Exempt Media gets on its righteous high horse and instructs us on their superior system of checks and balances. Newsweek ran an explosive story based on a single, unnamed source that it knew would cause a huge effect on the Muslim world, at precisely the moment when we need to ensure that people understand that we’re not at war with Islam. It’s just a little late to say, “Oops, we’re sorry.” It’s a little late to unring the bell that Newsweek rang with its false story — it’s too late for the nine people who died because Newsweek couldn’t wait to run its story without checking it properly first.

Ouch!

The Anchoress asks an excellent question:

Great job, NEWSWEEK. The new standard in journalism is the “prove the negative” standard? If someone “does not argue” against a story that confirms it is true, and so it’s okay to run with an anonymous story that will undoubtedly ignite something violent and bad? Clearly, Mark Whitaker is trying to claim that reporting these so-called desecrations of the Muslim Holy Book is a matter of ethical journalism. Rules of Ethical journalism has never inspired him to report on the Holy Bible being used for toilet paper, but I digress…

The Jawas have a nice summary.

Sisyphean Musings gets flamed by a Kossak on the subject and gives back generously.

Cross Posted at Blogger News Network

Was this heart tugging story a hoax? (SEE UPDATE BELOW)

Brooke Greenberg weighs 13 pounds and is 27 inches long.

But Brooke is actually 12 years old, reported WBAL-TV in Baltimore.

Brooke doesn’t age. Her syndrome remains undiagnosed and unnamed, and as far as doctors can tell, she is the only one in the world who has it.

“In height, weight, she’s 6 to 12 months,” Pakula said. “If you ask any physician who knows nothing about her, the response is that she is maybe a handicapped 2-year-old.”

When I wrote a post on this story on Friday, there were several dozen links to various TV News websites all carrying exactly the same story. They had all re-broadcast the original WBAL piece and used the same teaser on their websites.

All links to the story have now disappeared. The only links that work are to blogs that posted on the story in the first place.

A Welsh View has a cached copy of the original broadcast of the story. But that’s it. Every newsite that carried a blurb on poor little Brooke has yanked the piece from their websites.

Why?

Yesterday, I sent an email to WBAL in Baltimore asking them if the story was a hoax. I have yet to hear back from them. I’ve gotten about 200 search engine hits all referencing “Brooke Greenberg” so I know that there are a lot of people wondering the same thing.

At the moment, there just aren’t any good answers.

I’m going to stay on top of this all day today. I may even call WBAL and find out what the heck is going on. In the meantime, if you go to WBAL’s website, they have a drop down menu for sending emails. I urge everyone who’s interested to send them an email asking about this story.

If you get any kind of an answer, I’d appreciate it if you shared it with me. Send the info to elvenstar522-at-AOL-dot-com. (Remove hyphens).

Let’s get to the bottom of this.

UPDATE:

A Welsh View has also done an update on the story and with a little digging, found out that the story goes back to at least 2001.

A hoax? Probably not. So why pull the story? Did the parents intervene? Since they cooperated in the making of the story in the first place that seems hard to imagine.

Don’t ya just love mysteries?

UPDATE

I finally received an answer to the email I sent to WBAL in Baltimore asking if the story was a hoax. Here’s their response in its entirety:

Good morning,

Due to certain agreements, we are unable to provide additional information
on this story. It was not a hoax.

“Certain agreements” could mean anything. It could mean that the family didn’t realize the worldwide noteriety that would accompany the story after Drudge linked to the WBAL webstory and requested that it be pulled. Or it could be something contractural having to do with the news service that carried the story on so many websites (57 TV and radio sites by my count).

Regardless, while an insatisfactory answer, the only important thing is that the story is in fact true and not a hoax.

UPDATE II (5/18)

I received an email from WBAL telling me that the story is once again “active.”

No explanation. No rhyme nor reason to it.

Here’s a link to the same story that appeared originally.

It was an innocuous paragraph in an otherwise routine story about investigating abuses at Guantanamo. Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and John Barry reported that interrogators used various means of psychological pressure on detainees, some of them clearly over the line:

Investigators probing interrogation abuses at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay have confirmed some infractions alleged in internal FBI e-mails that surfaced late last year. Among the previously unreported cases, sources tell NEWSWEEK: interrogators, in an attempt to rattle suspects, flushed a Qur’an down a toilet and led a detainee around with a collar and dog leash. An Army spokesman confirms that 10 Gitmo interrogators have already been disciplined for mistreating prisoners, including one woman who took off her top, rubbed her finger through a detainee’s hair and sat on the detainee’s lap. (New details of sexual abuse—including an instance in which a female interrogator allegedly wiped her red-stained hand on a detainee’s face, telling him it was her menstrual blood—are also in a new book to be published this week by a former Gitmo translator.)

What caught the attention of al Jazeera and other Arab media outlets was the flushing of the Qur’an down the toilet. So far, no-one has been able to confirm this story, least of all the Newsweek reporters. But that hasn’t stopped al Jazeera and a host of other anti-American press organs from fanning the flames of hate among muslims all over the world:

The spreading anger comes after a report published by Newsweek magazine said that US interrogators at Guantanamo Bay desecrated copies of the Quran by leaving them in toilet cubicles and stuffing one down a lavatory.

Did the Newsweek story say that interrogators left them in toilet cubicles? No. And there are indications that al Jazeera TV in Afghanistan may be responsible for exaggerating the story:

“After people heard the news that a Quran was set on fire and was thrown in the toilet in Guantanamo by US soldiers they were angered and that sparked the demonstration,” car mechanic Mohammed Nadir, 24, said.

Mr. Nadir got his information from al Jazeera television. And while no transcript is available, one wonders how the idea that the Qur’an was set on fire got into his head. The Newsweek story makes no mention of the Muslim holy book being set on fire. This is pure fiction.

Also, the most widely read English language newspaper in the world, The International Herald-Tribune ran with an exaggerated version of the story:

The protests, as before, were over reports in Newsweek on May 9 that U.S. interrogators at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, placed the Koran on toilets and in one case flushed a Koran down the toilet in order to “rattle” prisoners, a reported act that has angered Afghans more than any other action by American or other foreign troops in Afghanistan in the last three and a half years.

No where in the Newsweek story does it say that interrogators “placed the Koran on toilets.” When even a respected news organ like the Herald Tribune exaggerates a story, one has to wonder at the motives of those responsible.

The protests in Afghanistan began in Jalalabad, a hotbed of anti-American and anti-Western sentiment. They have since pretty much spread across the entire Muslim world:

In three Pakistan cities, Peshawar, Quetta and Multan, hundreds of protesters led largely by religious parties burned American flags and chanted anti-American slogans after Friday Prayer. The protests were peaceful, though, thanks in large part to the large numbers of police officers deployed outside mosques and official buildings.

Hundreds of people gathered peacefully outside a mosque in Jakarta on Friday while a statement was read condemning the United States for the reported abuses. In Gaza, about 1,500 members of the radical Islamic group Hamas marched through the Jabaliya refugee camp as outrage spread over the reports, including a brief item in Newsweek, that interrogators at Guantánamo Bay had flushed a Koran down the toilet in an effort to upset detainees.

Protesters carrying the green banners of Islam and Hamas shouted, “Protect our holy book!” Some burned American and Israeli flags. Anti-American protests are rare among militant Palestinians, who decry American support for Israel but emphasize that their struggle is with Israel, not the United States.

Arab editorial writers have not been shy in expressing their feelings. The United Emerites’ Kahleej Times believes there’s a broader, underlying cause of the unrest in Afghanistan:

This alienation of the majority, the Pashtuns, is at the heart of Afghan unrest. As long as the majority of the Afghan population is kept out of the political process, Afghanistan will continue to remain unstable. The violent demonstrations Wednesday, though stemming from injured religious sensitivities, are an expression of an alienated and suppressed people. The Karzai government and the U.S. would do well to heed the warning signs if they don’t want Afghanistan to go the way of Iraq. At the same time, strong action must be taken against those who perpetrated such outrage against the Holy Book.

And events in that country are starting to move faster than the authorities can handle. President Karzai has admitted his forces cannot handle the demonstrations:

The protesters slammed police for resorting to shooting their weapons and causing bloodshed. “We were staging a peaceful demonstration but police started firing at us without any provocation,” Mohammad Mohsin charged.

Students from three different universities coalesced in Kabul, where law-enforcement personnel had already taken stringent security measures, and marched calmly to Karta-e-Sakhi Square shouting anti-U.S. slogans all along the way.

They demanded that the Karzai government prevent U.S. forces from frisking and arresting Afghans and that it drop plans for a long-term American military presence in Afghanistan.

An editorial in the Arab News is incendiary in its language:

If the report of desecration is true, it will be another example of how ignorant and insensitive the US, particularly the US military, remains to other cultures and what those cultures hold most dear. Coming after Abu Ghraib, after all the stories of humiliation suffered by Muslims arriving at American airports and of attacks on Muslims in the US, and given the general hostility toward Muslims in the US and the anti-Muslim mood in certain sections of the US media, nothing could have been more guaranteed to stir Muslim anger across the world. Washington constantly proclaims that attacks on Muslims will not be tolerated and that the war on terrorism is not a war on Islam. Evidently, the American institutions are not listening; they are not interested in the feelings and beliefs of anyone other than themselves. It is crass insensitivity. It is also appalling stupidity. The US government has spent hundred of millions of dollars trying to improve its image with Muslims worldwide; a story like this undoes all that work at a stroke. It is also disastrous diplomacy. Washington presumably wants to retain its friends in the Muslim world; something like this actively undermines that friendship

Clearly, there has been some exaggeration to this story by those who seek any opportunity to rally ordinary Arabs to their twin causes of anti-semitism and anti-Americanism. I certainly hope either Newsweek or the Pentagon will be able to confirm or deny this story and soon.

If not, expect much more in the way of protests as pro-jihad forces seek to regain ground they’ve lost since the successful elections in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

UPDATE

It looks like the exaggerated story involving US troops placing the Qur’an on top of toilets in addition to flushing them down the commode, could be the work of our old friends at Reuters.

For a while, I was worried that perhaps the print version of Newsweek carried a little different story. Then I saw this from Roger Simon: in which he links to the very same on-line Newsweek story that I did.

Amazing! All these reporters had to do was google-up “Newsweek Koran flush” and they would have found the original article immediately.

UPDATE II

Did Reuters get the part about placing the Qur’an on toilets from AP? Here’s the original AP story (HT: Little Green Footballs)

The source of anger was a brief report in the May 9 edition of Newsweek that interrogators at Guantanamo placed Qurans on toilets to rattle suspects, and in at least one case “flushed a holy book down the toilet.”

As we’ve pointed out in the past, the AP is no more a reliable barometer of what’s happening in the middle east than Reuters. This would tend to prove that assumption.

Cross Posted at Blogger News Network

In some ways, Pat Buchanan is big media’s favorite conservative. He’s brash. He speaks his mind. And he has an awful tendency to put his foot in his mouth thus totally discrediting conservative positions.

In short, big media gets to kill two birds with one stone; they get an entertaining talking head as well as a ready made Bogey man to represent eeeevil conservatives.

A few years back, Pat made a rather innocuous point about the difference between Hitler’s death camps like Auschwitz and concentration camps like Mauthausen that landed him in hot water with the liberal media and branded him as a “holocaust denier.” The point being that inhabitants of concentration camps had a chance at survival in that they were more likely to be worked to death rather than executed outright. This is true as far as it goes, although in the closing days of the war, Himmler had a list with 10,000 high profile names of inmates at concentration camps who he ordered executed before the fall of the Third Reich. Thankfully, the Americans were advancing so quickly in the closing days of the war that many on the list survived simply because there was no time to execute them.

Now Mr. Buchanan has taken on the legacy of Yalta, where Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill ostensibly divided the European continent between the Soviets and the West thus betraying our war aims of freeing all of Europe from oppression. It’s times like this that Buchanan betrays himself for what he is; a mossback conservative, a throw back to the 1950’s paranoids who opposed the formation of the United Nations, our joining NATO, and any other idea that did not conform to the “fortress America” position on foreign policy. This isolationist strain of conservatism in the Republican party is often referred to as the “Robert Taft wing” of the party.

Taft was a Senator from Ohio, son of President William Howard Taft whose name was magic for a generation of Republicans who opposed the New Deal and foreign entanglements of any kind. It was a quaint kind of republicanism that supported the concept of isolationism because America was too good, too pure to sully its hands by mixing it up with peoples in foreign lands. Contrast that with today’s old/new left’s isolationism that seeks to withdraw from the world because America is too evil to engage the rest of the planet and must beg forgiveness for all of our sins, bother real and imagined.

Buchanan’s reading of Yalta and the consequences of that momentous conference is laughable. He takes President Bush’s speech in Riga this past week where the President condemned Soviet occupation of the Baltic states totally out of context:

If Yalta was a betrayal of small nations as immoral as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, why do we venerate Churchill and FDR? At Yalta, this pair secretly ceded those small nations to Stalin, co-signing a cynical “Declaration on Liberated Europe” that was a monstrous lie.

As FDR and Churchill consigned these peoples to a Stalinist hell run by a monster they alternately and affectionately called “Uncle Joe” and “Old Bear,” why are they not in the history books alongside Neville Chamberlain, who sold out the Czechs at Munich by handing the Sudetenland over to Germany? At least the Sudeten Germans wanted to be with Germany. No Christian peoples of Europe ever embraced their Soviet captors or Stalinist quislings.

First of all, the President didn’t call Yalta “immoral” he called Soviet occupation of eastern Europe immoral. The President criticized Yalta as Roosevelt’s contemporaries criticized it: it was at best an expediency, a recognition that there was no way to get Soviet troops to go home once the war was over.

Secondly, where in the wide, wide, world of sports did Buchanan ever get the idea that the Sudeten Germans “wanted to be with Germany?” This was Nazi propaganda that Buchanan has evidently swallowed whole. The problem was that the Sudetenland was composed not only of Germans but of Czechs, Slovenes, Moravians, with a smattering of other minorities and that even a majority of Sudeten Germans had no desire to join the Reich. Hitler’s propaganda machine spun bloodcurdling tales of atrocities committed against the German minority that even Chamberlain took as gospel and which the master appeaser partially used as an excuse to cave in to Hitler’s demands.

Buchanan should know better.

Mr. Buchanan then posits the notion that because the peoples of eastern Europe traded one dictatorship under Hitler for another under Stalin that the west in fact lost World War II:

Other questions arise. If Britain endured six years of war and hundreds of thousands of dead in a war she declared to defend Polish freedom, and Polish freedom was lost to communism, how can we say Britain won the war?

If the West went to war to stop Hitler from dominating Eastern and Central Europe, and Eastern and Central Europe ended up under a tyranny even more odious, as Bush implies, did Western Civilization win the war?

At bottom, World War II was a war of survival. That was the war aim for all western powers; to survive as sovereign, independent nations. Anything else was gravy. France and Britain’s guarantee of Polish sovereignty was a recognition that their own survival was at stake not necessarily an end in and of itself. The mutual defense pact France had with Poland was meant as a deterrent to German aggression. In the end, neither France nor England was able to send one single soldier to defend Poland against the German attack. And for Buchanan to say that Polish “freedom” was “lost to communism” is just plain wrong. Pre World War II Poland was a military dictatorship as harsh as any government imposed on the Poles following the war by Stalin. The fact that the west restored Polish sovereignty only to be thwarted by Stalin’s designs does not negate the accomplishment of the allies’ defeat of the German empire.

Finally, Buchanan asks if the war was worth the sacrifice in blood and treasure and then really jumps the shark when he says the German people didn’t deserve to be liberated because “they voted Hitler in:”

When one considers the losses suffered by Britain and France – hundreds of thousands dead, destitution, bankruptcy, the end of the empires – was World War II worth it, considering that Poland and all the other nations east of the Elbe were lost anyway?

If the objective of the West was the destruction of Nazi Germany, it was a “smashing” success. But why destroy Hitler? If to liberate Germans, it was not worth it. After all, the Germans voted Hitler in

.

The entire thrust of the first statement presupposes that France and England had a choice about going to war against Hitler. This is nuts. Buchanan has said in the past that the United States had no need to fight Hitler because, after all, Hitler never attacked us. All one can say about these statements is that they’re extraordinarily short sighted and myopic. There wasn’t a thinking person alive in the west during the summer of 1939 who didn’t realize that Hitler was not going to stop, that an attack on Poland was a prelude to an attack on Germany’s arch rival France (at which point one assumes Buchanan would grant the French permission to defend themselves) and that Britain, in order to protect itself, would surely come to the aid of the French. In short, despite desperate efforts to avoid it, those last weeks of August in 1939 pointed toward a general European war. France and Britain assumed Russia would join them in the fight against Hitler but ended up underestimating the cynicism of Hitler and the greed of Stalin.

As for Hitler being “voted in” by the German people, perhaps Mr. Buchanan should stop surfing neo-Nazi web sites and read a history book or two. Hitler lost the Presidential election in 1932 by a wide margin to incumbent President Hindenburg. Only by shady maneuvering with other conservative and nationalistic parties was Hitler able to be named Chancellor, an unelected position appointed by the President. Hitler then used the fire at the Reichstag building to declare a state of emergency and using the full power of the state, conducted a referendum on his decision that passed overwhelmingly.

Saying that the German people supported Hitler is one thing. That came later, after he threw off the shackles of Versailles, reoccupied the Rhineland, and the Anschluss with Austria. But to say that Hitler was voted into office is just plain wrong.

Once again with this article Buchanan proves that his brand of conservatism does not reflect the thinking of either a majority of Americans or conservatives in general. And his constant problems with foot in mouth disease is an embarrassment both to himself and the conservative movement.

UPDATE

Ace quotes WF Buckley who says Buchanan is an anti-semite:

As William F. Buckley concluded in a long essay on Pat way back in the late eighties (I think), Buchanan takes a number of positions, each of which seems defensible on its face, and yet, taking them all together, the cumulative impression is that he just hates Jews.

Pat is a traditional Catholic and I know is galled that people think him anti-semitic. I think part of the ruckus over Pat is that he grates on some people and therefore it’s easy to take what he says out of context. The quote on concentration camps is one example that comes to mind. In that case, Buchanan was making the same point made by many scholars of the holocaust - that Nazi’s intentionally inflated the numbers of dead in concentration camps to please Himmler. Why that was taken to mean that Pat was a holocaust denier I have no idea.

Then there’s Pat’s distress over “Zionism” and how our foreign policy is tilted toward Israel in the middle east. Pat thinks it’s not in the national interest to always support Israel. Many times, Pat uses the rhetoric and even the very words of Israel’s mortal enemies to criticize the Jewish nation.

While Pat tries to draw a distinction between Jews and Zionism, there are so few Jews today who do not support the idea of a Jewish homeland that it seems to me foolish to try and seperate the two.

And that may be Pat’s biggest problem: He’s just a fool.

AND STEPHEN GREEN IS BACK! HE IS! HE TRULY IS!

No one does a full frontal fisking like the Drunkmeister himself who after a short blogging hiatus is back at it with a vengance. READ THE WHOLE THING.

UPDATE II

John Hawkins defends Buchanan not for what he said but for what people are calling him; a Nazi apologist and anti-semite:

However, to call him a “Nazi Apologist” or “anti-Semite” because he believes the US should have stayed out of WW2 is ridiculous since Buchanan is just being consistent. He’s a Paleocon, he’s an isolationist, and as an isolationist, he’s just being consistent when he says we should have stayed out of WW2.

Cross Posted at Blogger News Network