Seattle Post-Intelligencer Avoids Becoming Pravda

The ridiculous Seattle PI refuses to run pictures of certain people who take an unnatural interest in how Seattle ferries are run. The reasons run the gamut, but they are all bullshit.

Gerard VanderLeun takes the editor apart.

McCumber is from the Hunter-Thompson-Envy school of journalism and, of course, this is a brain-echo of the Scoop Nisker dictum: "If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own." Alas, McCumber is mired in the Thompson/Nisker/Pacifica/NPR Memorial Tarpits and fails to understand that making news about not liking the news is exactly what is going to happen to him and his ilk in this era. They never thought that not liking the news would come to include newspapers themselves. They thought, for decades, that they were immune. Alas, as we learn in the Holy Book of Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, "Nobody is immune from a bust."

[...]
after showing pictures of bare breasted women and a man running a drill down his nostril, Gerard observes:

Presumably, these citizens of Seattle, having no dignity, have no expectation of privacy. Still, they might be among those who would be very upset should they find themselves on an exploding and sinking ferry in the middle of Puget Sound. But, according to The Decider, "That's not the way a free press works. If everything any government authority handed us was automatically unquestioned "news," we would be a state-run newspaper."

You can file that under the heading "No Sh*t Sherlock?" Or you can look it up in the first year, first semester notebook of the thousands of young people currently dumb enough to be attending the numerous and hapless "Schools of Journalism" busy separating kids from money these days from coast to coast. The Decider's "boogyman warning" about an American newspaper turning into an organ of the state has as much basis in reality as, well, the boogyman. But this dreck is always hauled out whenever a paper fails its readership -- which is why your hear it a lot these days.

[...]

This is what we are seeing more and more of as the aging mavens of the media wander down the narrowing trail to the bone-yard; "The willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information." The P-I "reports" that the FBI is looking for two men, but does not publish the supplied picture of the same two men. Out of a fear for their privacy but out of a greater and utterly paranoid fear that they might be perceived as "a state-run newspaper."

That anyone would mistake the P-I or any other American newspaper as even remotely "a state-run newspaper" shows not only a profound lack of a real frame of reference, but a huffed-up sense of the P-I's own importance and relevance to America today. Does anybody outside of the flatulent bubble of the media's own scent of itself think that the newspapers of America are going to turn into Pravda? Or have they already turned into a Pravda for their own inner world, struggling to sell their justifications and their Deciders' decisions to a world that has little need for them and less care?

I think, regardless of McCumber's puerile justifications -- which would not be out of place in a second rate college's paper -- that it is the latter that is the case.

When you attend various street festivals and other crowd drawing activities in Seattle, you often see the booths of the Seattle P-I and the Seattle Times set up to offer you subscriptions for something equal to twenty-five cents and two Wheaties box-tops. I pass them by since I don't want to be part of a chain of people that stains bleached wood pulp only to return it to the recycling bin.

There are some Seattle mornings -- fewer now -- when you can step out of your house and see that the Seattle P-I or the Seattle Times is so desperate to get your attention, it has thrown a newspaper onto your lawn even thought you never, ever asked for it. I just sigh and shuffle out onto my lawn, pick it up, and then walk to the alley and place it directly into the recycling bin.

I can't recall the last time I actually sat down and read a newspaper. I can't recall the last time, until today, I was actually interested in what the all-too-predictable Seattle newspapers had to say. And now that's over. As the kids would text, Sippican Cottage: I'm Not Interested. Period. "C U Wudn't Want to B U."

When I read these arcane "free press uncorrupted by a fascist state" justifications like this one from The Decider at the P-I, the line that runs through my mind is from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Butch and Sundance are being pursued by the implacable forces that are hunting them unto death and Butch comes up with one of his insights. Sundance just looks at him with a flat look and says, as one might say to The Decider, "You just keep thinkin' Butch. That's what you're good at."

The Asshats at the Seattle PI are good for the blogosphere. Where would we be without complete jerks like these to kick around?

Looking to Daddy for the Answer...and Not Listening. Part 1

There is a consistent theme that runs through many people who oppose America’s actions in the Middle East, now centered on Iraq. It is summarized fairly well in the comments by Warren Small who writes:

For the pragmatist, the ultimate criticism of Bush is not that he never had a good reason to attack Iraq in the first place but that he had no idea what to do with it, or how, once he knocked off its tyrant. "Mission Accomplished", firefight-wise, but what then? "Regime change" to what? We've never been given an understandable goal or path or timetable by which we could measure what the WH means by "we're not losing".

This is a criticism that reminds me of the “Pony Tailed Guy” who, during a debate between Bill Clinton, Ross Perot and George Bush (Sr.) in 1992 in Richmond, VA

I ask the three of you, how can we as symbolically the children of the future president expect the two of you, the three of you to meet our needs?

Like the "pony tailed guy," Warren Small wants the president to treat us as his children and explain it all to him. He pleads that his understanding of our problem and its possible solution is beyond his childlike understanding and wants his “daddy” the President explain it all to him.

Why is it I never had that problem? Why did I never look to some authority figure to explain the situation to me after 9/11? Why did 9/11 explain a lot to me and make me realize – all over again – how fragile civilization is? How a few well motivated people can bring a modern interdependent society to a stop? Perhaps it helps to know that I live in Tidewater, Virginia where summer hurricane season is often accompanied by hours, days or even weeks of power outages when all our shiny toys that cook our food and heat our water and light up our gadgets become useless hunks of metal and glass, and we’re back to candles for light, bathing in cold water or not at all, and cooking over outdoor grills … until the fuel runs out.

Perhaps my understanding of religion made it obvious to me that suicide attacks were neither illogical nor inexplicable. And that led me to the understanding that one of the world’s great religions was breeding a cancer that threatened Western civilization. And the world’s fuel supply was located smack dab in the middle of that cancer. And that meant we had to do something to change that situation, to remove that cancer or we could die. And that Iraq was a good place to start.

But only to start.

To be continued…

Monitoring the Monitor

Victor Davis Hanson:

After reviewing the latest critique of the CIA's failures to foresee the pre-9/11 dangers of radical Islam, and while reading the final sordid details surrounding the Pvt. Beauchamp fables published at The New Republic, and viewing the latest phony wire-photos from Iraq (the poor victimized Iraqi woman holding unfired cartridges as 'proof' of coalition bullets that hit her home), I was wondering who will monitor our self-righteous monitors?

The answer, like it or not, in the post-Plame, post-Scheuer, post-Tenet era is that no one believes much what the CIA says any more about the Middle East; no one believes that a wire-photo from there is genuine or its caption accurate; and no one necessarily believes anything in once respected magazines, whether the Periscope section of Newsweek or anything published in The New Republic. The common gripe is that the administration lied to the public about WMD in Iraq; but what is lost is that once revered institutions proved disingenuous in their accusations and unreliable in their performance.

The Left can shout all they want about "Bush Lied" but in reality, the truth reveals that it's the so-called "guardians" of the truth that lie. And now all their past pronouncements are under a cloud. What lies did Walter Cronkite ("The Most Trusted Man in America?") utter? Lets start with Tet...

Bush Speech to VFW in 2007

Excerpted from The Corner at National Review Online.

Today the violent Islamic extremists who fight us in Iraq are as certain of their cause as the Nazis, Imperial Japanese, and Soviet Communists were of theirs. And they are destined for the same fate. The greatest weapon in the arsenal of democracy is the desire for liberty written into the human heart by our Creator. So long as we remain true to our ideals, we will defeat the extremists in Iraq and help that country’s people stand up a functioning democracy in the heart of the Middle East. When that hard work is done and the critics of today recede from memory, the cause of freedom will be stronger, a vital region will be brighter, and America will be safer.

Surprise: The Police Ammo shortage Has Nothing to do With the War! MSM Lies Again.

We Don't Need An MSM; We Need The Patient Fact-Finding of Bloggers

Crisis! Police forces running out of ammo as production is diverted to Bush's illegal wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Cambodia!!

Well maybe not Cambodia yet. But I'm sure he has plans.

This was the scare story blazed all over the patiently fact-finding MSM today. Including by fair-and-balanced Shep Smith on FoxNews. (Kidding-- the guy's as liberal as the day is long; I have a feeling his contract at FoxNews is running out and he's been debuting for his next job for at least a year now.)

Blogger Confederate Yankee did something apparently the MSM didn't have time to do:

He actually called a spokesman for a major ammunition manufacturer -- a maker of military, civilian, and paramilitary police type ammo -- to find out if the story was true.

You'll never guess what he found out.

From Confederate Yankee who actually went to ammo manufacturers and asked the question:

According to two spokesmen for the world's largest ammunition manufacturer, which runs the military's ammunition manufacturing plant and separately, is a major supplier of law enforcement ammunition, it is a massive and unexpected increase in law enforcement ammunition demand that is causing delays in law enforcement ammunition delays, not the war.

Once again, a media organization with target fixation seems to have widely missed the mark.

Surprise: The Police

Surprise: The Police

Mark Steyn on the Newark Murders by Illegal Aliens

Excerpt:

America has a high murder rate: Murdering people is definitely one of the jobs Americans can do. But that's what ties young Malvo to Jose Carranza: He's just another killer let loose in this country to kill Americans by the bureaucracy's boundless sensitivity toward the "undocumented." Will the Newark murders change anything? Will there be an Ioefemi Hightower Act of Congress like the Matthew Shepard Act passed by the House of Representatives? No. Three thousand people died Sept. 11, 2001, in an act of murder facilitated by the illegal-immigration support structures in this country, and, if that didn't rouse Americans to action, another trio of victims seems unlikely to tip the scales. As Michelle Malkin documented in her book "Invasion," four of the killers boarded the plane with photo ID obtained through the "undocumented worker" network at the 7-Eleven in Falls Church, Va. That's to say, officialdom's tolerance of the illegal immigration shadow-state enabled 9/11. And what did we do? Not only did we not shut it down, we enshrined the shadow-state's charade as part of the new tough post-slaughter security procedures.

Read the whole thing.

Cluelessly Ironic Blog-Bashing Column of the Week

Ace of Spades eviscerates Michael Skube, a professor of journalism. The MSM and the people who revolve around them are fighting a rearguard battle to regain credibility that they lost due to their own stupidity, lazyness and hubris.

No one -- no one -- ever got into the media to report on local car collisions or new and exciting federal farm subsidies.

What they got into the media to do was to tell people how and what to think, and its that prerogative of the Intellectual Aristocracy, and not the unglamorous business of information collection, collation, and dissemination, that they're crying about losing.

Note that they do not dare actually state their belief that they are specially qualified to do the thinking for the American public. They can't say such a thing. The public would laugh at their presumption -- some idiots went to a one year finishing school (and not a particularly academically demanding one besides) and now they have the special privilege of deciding what the public should think about each and every issue?

So instead they have to make the argument dishonestly -- whining about a job that isn't seriously threatened in order to preserve the job they really fret about losing, but a job which no one ever asked them -- let alone beatified them -- to do. How reporters got conflated with analysts and general-purpose experts without portfolio is anyone's guess. But that conflation having been made (at least in the minds of some, particularly their own), they'll be damned if they're going to give that gig up now.

Reporters seem to think they sell the news at 75 cents a copy -- and they tell us all how to interpret and analyze that news at no additional charge.

They think they're being generous by offering us their scary talents in this regard for free.

[snip]

...they're desperately scrabbling to hold on tight to that bit of undeserved, undue influence by leveraging their entirely-unrelated qualifications to collect and disseminate raw information into a role they actually desire and feel they are worthy of-- a certified, credentialed priesthood of general wisdom, weighing in expertly on matters of politics, scientific and technological ethical dilemmas, foreign policy and of course military strategy, etc. They conceive themselves as Generic Universal Omniscient All-In-One Experts Without Portfolio, a highly-trained Vanguard of Information which is especially well-equipped to tell the public not only what the facts are, but which facts are important and which should be ignored entirely due to their capacity to "mislead" less highly-trained citizens, and what the public should think of such facts and what conclusions they should draw from them.

Josh Marshall points out that Skube apparently did not write the whole article:

Perhaps I'm naive. But it surprises me a great deal that a professor of journalism freely admits that he allows to appear under his own name claims about a publication he concedes he's never read.

Hat tip to Instapundit.

The Politics of Envy

Jonah Goldberg has a great essay on the link between Liberalism and envy.

Envy turned Germany cruel. In Russia, the ideology of envy — socialism — likewise ran amok under the label Bolshevism and threatened to overrun the world. The consequences of envy run even deeper. It will never be known how many millennia man endured in misery and darkness under the moldering blanket of envy. Helmut Schoeck writes in his timeless masterpiece, Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior, that whole societies, hobbled by envy, rejected innovation, and prosperity, preferring the arrested development of all to the advancement of the few.

In primitive societies, “No one dares to show anything that might lead people to think he was better off,” Schoeck observed. “Innovations are unlikely. Agricultural methods remain traditional and primitive, to the detriment of the whole village, because every deviation from previous practice comes up against the limitations set by envy.”

Bigotry has many wellsprings, but it always draws on the groundwater of envy. “How can that (choose your slur) have two horses when I only have one?” the envious man asks. Hence August Bebel’s famous description of anti-Semitism as the “socialism of fools.”

So it was with surprise and pleasure that I read another essay on envy by “Gagdad Bob”

As I mentioned a couple of posts back, if your conception of human nature is faulty, then your political philosophy is going to be dysfunctional. One of the reasons leftism is so inherently dysfunctional is that it revolves around the appeasement of perhaps the single most spiritually destructive human emotion of them all, constitutional envy. In the formulation of the brilliant psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, envy is the primary mode of expression of the death instinct. It is present in everyone, but can be exacerbated by early childhood experiences so that later in life it becomes a crippling barrier to psychological health and happiness. For envy prevents one from appreciating what one has. It can only attack the person or system believed to possess what one lacks. In this regard, it is the polar opposite of gratitude, which is one of the prerequisites of human happiness. As a matter of fact, Klein’s most famous book is entitled Envy and Gratitude.

At the heart of leftism is envy. Now, I am not a libertarian. I do not believe we should rid ourselves of all leftist ideas even if we could. But this is not because I believe leftist ideas work. Rather, it is because I believe that the force of envy is so strong in human beings, that the culture must have some means to channel it in an officially sanctioned way, or the society will implode from within. But the question is, how much should we appease envy? Because if you go too far, as they have in Europe, then you will reach that tipping point where the society begins to spiritually rot from within, because envy is an intrinsically sick and unhealthy beast that can never be made healthy.

In America we try to appease envy by tolerating such odious things as trial lawyers, overtaxing the wealthy and productive, racial quotas, and a general relaxing of standards in every arena so that people might feel “special.” The problem is, none of these things work to eliminate envy, for the simple reason that you cannot eliminate envy. The leftist thinks that the solution is to further appease envy, which simply leads to a vicious cycle of more and more envy, until no one is allowed to have any more than anyone else.

Both articles are worth a read because both approach the sin of envy with clarity and wit.

Kerry as a Soviet Dupe?

From Powerline:

Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal published a powerful column by the former Romanian intelligence officer Ion Mihai Pacepa. The subject of Pacepa's column was the destructive effect of the left's intemperate attacks on the president. Buried in Pacepa's column is this intriguing paragraph:

During the Vietnam War we spread vitriolic stories around the world, pretending that America's presidents sent Genghis Khan-style barbarian soldiers to Vietnam who raped at random, taped electrical wires to human genitals, cut off limbs, blew up bodies and razed entire villages. Those weren't facts. They were our tales, but some seven million Americans ended up being convinced their own president, not communism, was the enemy. As Yuri Andropov, who conceived this dezinformatsiya war against the U.S., used to tell me, people are more willing to believe smut than holiness.

The themes identified here by Pacepa were of course products of the "Winter Soldier investigation" in which John Kerry participated. Kerry featured each of the themes identified by Pacepa in his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971. Pacepa's comments warrant attention.

The Genghis Khan reference is seared, seared in my brain as a John Kerry quote from those infamous hearings.

Pacepa's NRO column is more detailed and more devastating, with regard to Kerry, than his WSJ piece. If Pacepa is credible, John Kerry built his political career as a willing dupe of a hostile foreign power, the U.S.S.R. There was a time when such a history--especially an unregretted history--would disqualify a politician from prominence as a national leader; that time is gone, apparently.

From his column (click on the link for the whole thing, it's an eye opener).

As a spy chief and a general in the former Soviet satellite of Romania, I produced the very same vitriol Kerry repeated to the U.S. Congress almost word for word and planted it in leftist movements throughout Europe. KGB chairman Yuri Andropov managed our anti-Vietnam War operation. He often bragged about having damaged the U.S. foreign-policy consensus, poisoned domestic debate in the U.S., and built a credibility gap between America and European public opinion through our disinformation operations. Vietnam was, he once told me, "our most significant success."

The KGB organized a vitriolic conference in Stockholm to condemn America's aggression, on March 8, 1965, as the first American troops arrived in south Vietnam. On Andropov's orders, one of the KGB's paid agents, Romesh Chandra, the chairman of the KGB-financed World Peace Council, created the Stockholm Conference on Vietnam as a permanent international organization to aid or to conduct operations to help Americans dodge the draft or defect, to demoralize its army with anti-American propaganda, to conduct protests, demonstrations, and boycotts, and to sanction anyone connected with the war. It was staffed by Soviet-bloc undercover intelligence officers and received about $15 million annually from the Communist Party's international department — on top of the WPC's $50 million a year, all delivered in laundered cash dollars. Both groups had Soviet-style secretariats to manage their general activities, Soviet-style working committees to conduct their day-to-day operations, and Soviet-style bureaucratic paperwork. The quote from Senator Kerry is unmistakable Soviet-style sloganeering from this period. I believe it is very like a direct quote from one of these organizations' propaganda sheets.

The Trouble With Newsmen (Newspeople?)

One of the pleasures of blogging is getting reader response. My last effort dealt with the impact of the college educated on Hollywood (not good), and I was struck by the comment of a Mr. Al Sparks, who wrote, "I've read about the 'too many college graduates' (TMCG) problem in reference to journalism also. As late as the 1940s, most journalists were NOT college grads. Today, of course, most are, and are also out of touch with their audience."

Ah, Mr. Sparks, how right you are. Things have indeed changed.

Consider this statement:

"It is also true that The New York Times is not a crusading newspaper. It is impressed with the responsibility of what it prints. It is conservative and independent, and so far as possible -- consistent with honest journalism -- attempts to aid and support those who are charged with the responsibility of government. There are many newspapers conducted along different lines, some of them vicious, ill-natured, and destructive of character and reputation, and for mere purposes of sensation they frequently terrorize well qualified and well meaning men to the point where they are discouraged from accepting invitations to give their ability, genius, and experience to the administration of public affairs."

Those words were in a letter written in 1931 by Adolph Ochs, the publisher of The New York Times.

Can you imagine any publisher writing that today? Can you imagine a publisher who believes it's his duty to "aid and support those who are charged with the responsibility of government"? That publisher would be labeled "unsophisticated," blind to the "adversarial relationship," indifferent to the need to "speak truth to power." And, God knows, the man certainly doesn't want to "make a difference."

I was on The Times during the Vietnam War. I recall once going down to the newsroom, on the 3rd floor, to suggest a story on some problems at a military hospital. I was properly irate, as only someone with a fresh diploma could be. But Robert Alden, a legendary Times reporter, sat me down and quickly tempered my righteousness, recounting the history of military medicine, and the lives it had saved. He asked that I consider that background when suggesting my story. Can you imagine that today?

There have been many changes in journalism since World War II, but the most striking has come in the resumé of the journalist. Of course, there have always been college graduates in journalism. Even Ernie Pyle, the everyman reporter of World War II, had studied at Indiana. But what we've had in the last 50 years is a deluge of college graduates. They have brought some improvements. But they've also brought into journalism the culture, attitudes, and arrogance of the academic world.

I don't suggest that all was sublime before the sheepskins arrived. For every great paper of the past, there were twenty we'd like to forget. For every grand statement of Adolph Ochs, there were spectacles like a news photographer, in 1928, strapping a camera to his ankle and sneaking it into Sing Sing so readers of the New York Daily News could see Ruth Snyder
electrocuted on the front page.

But there have been, especially since the sixties, disturbing trends in journalism. Just as Hollywood, in its hiring practices, has replaced talent with education, journalism is in danger of replacing experience with report cards. Journalism is not a profession. There is no specific body of knowledge required, and there is no licensing. What is needed is a sharp set of skills, high powers of observation, and a humility about how much we can understand quickly, and these come only from experience. But when you've gone through Yale or Stanford, when you've been told how smart you are, when you got 700s on your SATs, you start to believe what mom has whispered in your ear. You start to think that you "know." It's a kind of self-inflicted grade inflation. I'm bright, therefore I'm right.

The impact of this attitude has been profound. As reader Sparks said, there has been a separation between journalism and its audience, and I believe it derives directly from the separation between our universities and the nation. College graduates, especially from supposedly elite schools, see themselves as a class apart. They are encouraged to do so, especially by the sixties crowd that still patrols the hallowed halls. (Well, let's not say "patrols." It's so Marine-ish, my dears. )

I recall editing a story about the Soviet Union for The New York Times Magazine. It was written by a Canadian professor. I made my notes on his first draft, then waited for his second, which came in due course. As I read it, though, I realized something odd had happened. The professor had changed all his conclusions, making them more pro-Soviet. I called him, not hiding my annoyance. How, I asked, could a scholar flip all his opinions between the first and the second draft? His reply was direct. "You don't understand," he said, "peer pressure in universities."

It was an admission that's stayed with me my entire career. "Peer pressure in universities." It not only affects what goes on inside those institutions, it has an impact on alumni. It helps shape our lives, our world view. We feel it every time we go to the mailbox and find a copy of our alumni magazine. There are certain ideas we're simply expected to embrace, an outlook that, we're told, defines us and our crowd. It twists how today's journalists see their country and the world.

In the years since 9/11 we've become accustomed to the torrent of abuse directed at the president, and the country, from inside many of our institutions of occasionally higher learning. Even more insidious is that notion of separateness. "We're the good people," they seem to be saying. "We're not part of you. We're separate, and you're not equal."

The college class of 1942 was the first to graduate following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. A young man named Charles Pearson received his degree that spring from Dartmouth, and served as the class valedictorian. In his address he said, "Do not feel sorry for us. We are not sorry for ourselves. Today we are happy. We have a duty to perform and we are proud
to perform it."

Charles Pearson never returned from the Pacific. But his words set the tone for a generation of students, and their teachers, who knew the meaning of obligation. The young generation of journalists coming out of college today too often hears very different words, with very different ideas of what obligation is about. And they see the example of Harvard, which ousted a president, Larry Summers, who attended each commissioning ceremony for Harvard students who chose to enter military service. They replaced Summers temporarily with one former Harvard president, and permanently with the first woman to hold the post. Neither, it seems, could find the time to attend this year's commissioning. Well, people have such important things to do.

A message is sent, and young journalists have heard too many messages like that for the last generation, and we will pay a bitter price.

Which is why:

US public sees news media as biased, inaccurate, uncaring: poll

Click on the link for the full story in Breibart.

Liberal Eugenics

Johann Hari takes some particularly nasty swipes of Christians in his defense of eugenics policies that many people find morally troubling.

The criticisms that I have even less time for come, predictably, from the Vatican and other centres of organised superstition. Interestingly, Jews, Muslims and followers of Eastern religions are much less hostile to human biotechnology - the problem here is primarily with the Christians. They argue that at the moment of conception, an invisible supernatural agent ('God') implants an invisible substance ('a soul') into a cluster of cells smaller than a speck of dust, and from that moment on the cells are a person with inalienable rights. To perform tests on them is morally equivalent to performing tests on an adult human. Stem-cell research is Mengelian. Discarded embryos have been murdered.

To a materialist who rejects supernatural explanations for the world, this of course seems absurd. We believe humans develop slowly and in stages, and that they have far greater rights once they become self-aware and capable of feeling pain - at around twelve weeks after conception - than when they are insentient blobs. The brilliant science writer Ronald Bailey has picked numerous holes in the Vatican position. Using their logic, if there was a fire in an embryo lab and you had a choice between saving a petri dish of ten near-invisible embryos or Steven Hawking, you would snatch the petri dish and run. And there's a bigger hole. Eight in every ten embryos are flushed out in women's menstrual flows, so why aren't the Catholics trying to prevent this global holocaust of human beings? Why aren't they trying to collect and implant them? The answer is obvious - even they cannot take the Pope's position seriously. If we followed his dictates and refused to develop cures that can treat millions because of these supernatural beliefs, we would actually create the "culture of death" that the Pope crows about.

Ramesh Ponnuru takes him to task in National Review.

Hari does not waste a lot of time insisting that good eugenics isn't really eugenics at all. But I don't think he makes a very good case.

Some of these criticisms are simply based on misconceptions. Some people believe human clones will be carbon-copies of their originals, or " robots" and "automatons". Scaremongers like Francis Fukuyama have even conjured hilarious visions of "armies of cloned Hitlers".

It would be nice to see a citation here. I haven't seen anything by Fukuyama that matches that description.

The criticisms that I have even less time for come, predictably, from the Vatican and other centres of organised superstition. Interestingly, Jews, Muslims and followers of Eastern religions are much less hostile to human biotechnology - the problem here is primarily with the Christians. They argue that at the moment of conception, an invisible supernatural agent ('God') implants an invisible substance ('a soul') into a cluster of cells smaller than a speck of dust, and from that moment on the cells are a person with inalienable rights.

I can't say that I particularly care what Hari does or does not "have time for," being wholly uninterested in his psychology. But for a guy who throws around the word "superstition" Hari, as we will see, does not have a firm grasp on logic or facts. For one: The Vatican does not argue against the intentional destruction of embryos on the basis of any teaching about ensoulment.

To a materialist who rejects supernatural explanations for the world, this of course seems absurd. We believe humans develop slowly and in stages, and that they have far greater rights once they become self-aware and capable of feeling pain - at around twelve weeks after conception - than when they are insentient blobs.

Really? All materialists believe these things? Has Hari founded a church?

The brilliant science writer Ronald Bailey has picked numerous holes in the Vatican position. Using their logic, if there was a fire in an embryo lab and you had a choice between saving a petri dish of ten near-invisible embryos or Steven Hawking, you would snatch the petri dish and run. And there's a bigger hole. Eight in every ten embryos are flushed out in women's menstrual flows, so why aren't the Catholics trying to prevent this global holocaust of human beings? Why aren't they trying to collect and implant them? The answer is obvious - even they cannot take the Pope's position seriously.

These aren't serious arguments. The "Vatican's position" implies neither of Hari's supposed conclusions. First, let's match his hypothetical fire with another one. You can save either a cancer scientist or a pedophile in a burning building—which do you choose? The answer isn't important to the embryo controversy, because it does not establish a right to kill either one of them. Second, the bit about natural embryonic death treats the intentional causing of death with the failure to take some (probably impossible) steps to prevent death. It's like saying that ninety-year-olds can be intentionally killed since they die all the time.

[Liberal eugenics] has nothing to do with the evil of Nazi eugenics, which was imposed by the state and concerned not with producing healthier babies but with deranged race-theories. No, this new brand is voluntarily entered into by parents, and it is motivated by love, not hate.

Hari is wrong again here. Nazi infanticide was not always imposed by the state on parents, especially in the beginning, and compassionate and humanitarian motives were cited in its support.

Those who want to stop these natural, beautiful acts of love should be shunned and shamed.

I think I can handle being shunned by Johann Hari; how about you?

And later finds that Hari makes up some of his own "facts" (he lies).

Johann Hari wrote (see below), "Scaremongers like Francis Fukuyama have even conjured hilarious visions of 'armies of cloned Hitlers'."

Being skeptical, I emailed Fukuyama, who writes back: "No, I never said anything remotely like this. Have no idea where people get this stuff from."

When Hidden Experts Are Found

I can't let this go. The New Republic/Beachamp story is fascinating to me.

Exactly one week ago today on August 2nd, the editors of the magazine The New Republic posted A Statement on Scott Thomas Beauchamp, in which they claimed:

All of Beauchamp's essays were fact-checked before publication. We checked the plausibility of details with experts, contacted a corroborating witness, and pressed the author for further details. But publishing a first-person essay from a war zone requires a measure of faith in the writer. Given what we knew of Beauchamp, personally and professionally, we credited his report. After questions were raised about the veracity of his essay, TNR extensively re-reported Beauchamp's account.
In this process, TNR contacted dozens of people. Editors and staffers spoke numerous times with Beauchamp. We also spoke with current and former soldiers, forensic experts, and other journalists who have covered the war extensively. And we sought assistance from Army Public Affairs officers. Most important, we spoke with five other members of Beauchamp's company, and all corroborated Beauchamp's anecdotes, which they witnessed or, in the case of one solider, heard about contemporaneously. (All of the soldiers we interviewed who had first-hand knowledge of the episodes requested anonymity.)

What is most interesting about the The New Republic's statement is that while they state they spoke to "dozens of people" in fact-checking their stories, they refused to cite the names of their experts, or explain their qualifications—those qualities that make them experts.

The reasoning behind that purposeful obfuscation is becoming ever more clear with each passing day.

In addition to avoiding the statements made by Army PAOs that Beauchamp's claims were "false" in their totality, and that one claim in particular was the stuff of "urban myth or legend," it appears that one of the experts cited by The New Republic's editors was not fully appraised of what TNR was trying to justify in one claim in particular.

Read the rest.

Michelle Malkin makes THE point:

Winter Soldier Syndrome will only be cured when the costs of slandering the troops outweigh the benefits. Exposing Scott Thomas Beauchamp and his brethren matters because the truth matters. The honor of the military matters. The credibility of the media matters.

UPDATE: readers suek points to an atricle in the American Thinker that lists a a few of the examples of lies and plagiarism that the MSM have committed.

Yet Another False Media-Reported Massacre In Iraq

On Sunday, Reuters reported that the scene of a large massacre had been discovered near Baquba:

BAGHDAD, Aug 5 (Reuters) - Iraqi police said on Sunday they had found 60 decomposed bodies dumped in thick grass in Baquba, north of Baghdad.
There was no indication of how the 60 people had been killed, police said. Baquba is the capital of volatile Diyala province, where thousands of extra U.S. and Iraqi soldiers have been sent to stem growing violence.

Why did the police have such a hard time providing an indication of how the 60 people had been killed? Probably because there were no bodies to examine.

Via email from Major Rob Parke, U.S. Army:

Bob,
This story is false. We have had coalition soldiers looking for the last two days at the locations that IPs reported these bodies. We've asked all the locals in the area and they have no idea what we are talking about. We've gone to areas that might be close, gone to suspicious locations, all turned up nothing.
Most of the news stories all say the report stated decomposing bodies which would indicate if it was true, it happened before we arrived. Considering we discovered an Al Qaeda Jail, courthouse, and torture house in western Baqubah, it wouldn't surprise me if there were 60 bodies buried out there somewhere. Bottom line is we have done some extensive looking and found nothing.

This is the second large-scale massacre reported in major wire services in less than six weeks that seem utterly without merit; both Reuters and the Associated Press were duped by insurgents posing as police officers who claimed 20 beheaded bodies were discovered near Um Al-Abeed on June 28.

That was also false.

[hat tip Instapundit]

The AP Eviscerates The New Republic Over the Beachamp Affair.

NEW YORK -- A magazine gets a hot story straight from a soldier in Iraq and publishes his writing, complete with gory details, under a pseudonym. The stories are chilling: An Iraqi boy befriends American troops and later has his tongue cut out by insurgents. Soldiers mock a disfigured woman sitting near them in a dining hall. As a diversion, soldiers run over dogs with armored personnel carriers. Compelling stuff, and, according to the Army, not true.

[snip]

Paul McLeary, a staff writer for Columbia Journalism Review who has written about the matter, said The New Republic failed to do some basic journalistic legwork, such as calling the public affairs officer for Beauchamp's unit.

"There is a degree of trust and faith editors have to put in their writers," McLeary said. "If you're on a tight deadline, you have to go as far as you can. The New Republic definitely didn't go as far as it could in terms of checking out its stories."

This isn't the first time New Republic's credibility has been called into question.

In 1998, the magazine fired Stephen Glass after reports surfaced that he had enhanced a story about computer hackers. Editors at the magazine researched his work and said they found fabrications in 27 of the 41 articles he had written for the publication over three years.

Ann Coulter on The New Republic and Beachamp

Excerpt:

The New Republic has gone mad. Perhaps the magazine brought its former employee, fantasist Steven Glass, out of retirement. It's long past time for The New Republic to file for intellectual Chapter 7. Arthur Andersen was implicated in fewer frauds.

Michelle Malkin on Why Beachamp Matters

The tale of Army Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp, the discredited "Baghdad Diarist" for the discredited New Republic magazine, is an old tale:

Self-aggrandizing soldier recounts war atrocities. Media outlets disseminate soldier's tales uncritically. Military folks smell a rat and poke holes in tales too good (or rather, bad) to be true. Soldier's ideological sponsors blame the messengers for exposing anti-war fraud.

Beauchamp belongs in the same ward as John F. Kerry, the original infectious agent of the toxic American disease known as Winter Soldier Syndrome. The ward is filling up.
[snip]
Ever since John Kerry sat in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and accused American soldiers of wantonly razing villages "in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan," the Left has embraced a small cadre of self-loathing soldiers and soldier wannabes willing to sell their deadened souls for the anti-war cause. Think Jimmy Massey, the unhinged Marine who falsely accused his unit of engaging in mass genocide against Iraqis. Think Jesse MacBeth and Micah Wright, anti-war Army Rangers who weren't Army Rangers.

Winter Soldier Syndrome will only be cured when the costs of slandering the troops outweigh the benefits. Exposing Scott Thomas Beauchamp and his brethren matters because the truth matters. The honor of the military matters. The credibility of the media matters. Think it doesn't make a difference? Imagine where Sen. John Kerry would be now if the Internet had been around in 1971.

Vets for Freedom Get Loud

This is not your Viet Nam vet.

I have said before: these men are different. They are better educated. They are older. They are volunteers. Many are part-time soldiers from the National Guard who have regular jobs and are already part of their community. They will not accept being the object of scorn and ridicule. They will not stand by while the MSM and the Democrats in congress lie about them and what they have accomplished.

They will fight here as they fought over there. The Left is not going to have the battleground to themselves this time. And they are going to be surprised.

Democrat Slogans

Public opinion is starting to turn in favor of the surge, and that could be horrible news for Democrats. If Americans think victory is possible, why would they support those who favor defeat?

What Democrats need are slogans to sell defeat to the public. Here are some of my ideas:

"Wave your white flag high and proud."

"The quickest way to end a war is to surrender."

"Defeat would be a feat."

"If you think surrender will end our nation, you forget that France has surrendered many times and it's still around... mostly."

"If something is hard, give up."

"We demand another Vietnam."

"Losing is good for our character."

"Genocide helps fight global warming."

"Losing a war doesn't have to make us sad. We can all celebrate the other side's win."

"America must be humiliated! (and don't question our patriotism)"

"It's not that we want America to lose; it's just that America winning is less important than Bush losing."