A Deniers Confession

This article on global warming is behind the "subsription" firewall at the Wall Street Journal, so I reprint it in full.

The recent discovery by a retired businessman and climate kibitzer named Stephen McIntyre that 1934 -- and not 1998 or 2006 -- was the hottest year on record in the U.S. could not have been better timed. August is the month when temperatures are high and the news cycle is slow, leading, inevitably, to profound meditations on global warming. Newsweek performed its journalistic duty two weeks ago with an exposé on what it calls the global warming "denial machine." I hereby perform mine with a denier's confession.

I confess: I am prepared to acknowledge that Mr. McIntyre's discovery amounts to what a New York Times reporter calls a "statistically meaningless" rearrangement of data.

But just how "meaningless" would this have seemed had it yielded the opposite result? Had Mr. McIntyre found that a collation error understated recent temperatures by 0.15 degrees Celsius (instead of overstating it by that amount, as he discovered), would the news coverage have differed in tone and approach? When it was reported in January that 2006 was one of the hottest years on record, NASA's James Hansen used the occasion to warn grimly that "2007 is likely to be warmer than 2006." Yet now he says, in connection to the data revision, that "in general I think we want to avoid going into more and more detail about ranking of individual years."

I confess: I am prepared to acknowledge that the world has been and will be getting warmer thanks in some part to an increase in man-made atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. I acknowledge this in the same way I'm confident that the equatorial radius of Saturn is about 60,000 kilometers: not because I've measured it myself, but out of a deep reserve of faith in the methods of the scientific community, above all its reputation for transparency and open-mindedness.

But that faith is tested when leading climate scientists won't share the data they use to estimate temperatures past and present and thus construct all-important trend lines. This was true of climatologist Michael Mann, who refused to disclose the algorithm behind his massively influential "hockey stick" graph, which purported to demonstrate a sharp uptick in global temperatures over the past century. (The accuracy of the graph was seriously discredited by Mr. McIntyre and his colleague Ross McKitrick.) This was true also of Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, who reportedly turned down one request for information with the remark, "Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?"

I confess: I understand that global warming may have negative consequences. Heat waves, droughts and coastal flooding may become more intense. Temperature-sensitive parasites such as malaria could become more widespread. Lakes may be depleted by evaporation. Animal life will suffer.

But as Bjorn Lomborg points out in his sharp, persuasive and aptly titled book "Cool It," a warming climate has advantages, too, and not just trivial ones. Though global warming will cause more heat deaths, it will also mean many fewer cold deaths. Drought may increase in some areas, but warming also means both more rain and longer growing seasons. Temperature changes will harm some wildlife in some places. But many species will benefit from a bit more warmth. Does anyone know for certain that the net human and environmental losses from global warming will exceed overall gains?

I confess: Denial never solves anything. But neither does sensational and deceptive journalism.

Newsweek illustrates this point by its choice of cover art -- a picture of the sun, where the surface temperature hovers around 6,000 degrees Celsius. Given that the consensus scientific estimate for average temperature increases over the next century is a comparatively modest 2.6 degrees, this would seem a rather Murdochian way of convincing readers about the gravity of the climate threat. On the inside pages is a photograph of a polar bear stranded on melting ice. But the caption that the bears are "at risk" belies clear evidence that the bear population has risen five-fold since the 1960s. Another series of photographs, of a huge Antarctic ice shelf that quickly disintegrated in 2002, suggests the imminence of doom. But why not also mention that temperatures at the South Pole have been going down for 50 years?

I confess: It's easy to be indifferent to far-off and diffuse threats. It's hard to work toward solutions the benefits of which will not be felt in our lifetime.

Then again, if Americans are not fully persuaded of the dangers of global warming, as Newsweek laments, don't chalk it up to the pernicious influence of the so-called deniers and their enablers at ExxonMobil and Fox News. Today, global warming is variously suggested as the root cause of terrorism, the conflict in Darfur and the rising incidence of suicides in Italy. Yet the 20th century offers excellent reasons to be suspicious of monocausal explanations for the world's ills, monomaniacs intent on saving us from ourselves, and the long train of experts predicting death by overpopulation, resource depletion, global cooling, nuclear winter and prions. Also, hypocrites. When we are called on to bike to work, permanently abjure air travel, "eat locally" and so on, we expect to be led by example, not by a new nomenklatura.

I confess: Though it may surprise those who use the term "denier" so as to put me on a moral plane with Holocaust deniers, I have children for whom I would not wish an environmental apocalypse.

Yet neither do I wish the civilizational bounties built up over two centuries by an industrial, inventive, adaptive, globalized and energy-hungry society to be squandered chasing comparatively small environmental benefits at gigantic economic costs. One needn't deny global warming as a problem to deny it as the only or greatest problem. The great virtue of Mr. Lomborg's book is its insistence on trying to measure the good done per dollar spent. Do we save a few lives, at huge cost, as a byproduct of curbing global warming? Or do we save many, for less, by acting on problems directly?

Some might argue it is immoral to think this way. Maybe they are the ones living in denial.

"Reporting is Easier When You Don't Worry About the Facts:" Wallace vs. Moyers.

Chris Wallace slams Bill Moyers for misreporting on Karl Rove's Christianity.

Rereading Vietnam

From the Atlantic.com. I doubt if the Virginian Pilot would understand.

In December 1967, a prisoner was dumped in Day's cell on the outskirts of Hanoi, known as the Plantation. This prisoner's legs were atrophied and he weighed under 100 pounds. Day helped scrub his face and nurse him back from the brink of death. The fellow American was Navy Lieutenant Commander John Sidney McCain III of the Panama Canal Zone. As his health improved, McCain's rants against his captors were sometimes as ferocious as Day's. The North Vietnamese tried and failed, through torture, to get McCain to accept a release for their own propaganda purposes: The lieutenant commander was the son of Admiral John McCain Jr., the commander of all American forces in the Pacific. "Character," writes the younger McCain, quoting the 19th century evangelist Dwight Moody, "is what you are in the dark," when nobody's looking and you silently make decisions about how you will act the next day.

In early 1973, during a visit to Hanoi, North Vietnamese officials told Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that they would be willing to free McCain into his custody. Kissinger refused, aware that there were prisoners held longer than McCain, ahead of him in the line for release. McCain suffered awhile longer in confinement, then, once freed, thanked Kissinger for "preserving my honor." The two have been good friends since. McCain blurbs with gusto Bud Day's memoir. The senator writes: "I recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the dimensions of human greatness."
[...]
There is little sense here that the war was lost. While historians cite 1968 as a turning point because of the home front's reaction to the Tet offensive, the My Lai massacre, and the protests at the Democratic party convention in Chicago, on the ground in Vietnam, 1968 marked a different trend: William Westmoreland was replaced by Creighton Abrams, population security rather than enemy body counts became the measure of merit, "clear and hold" territory replaced the dictum of "search and destroy," and building up the South Vietnamese Army became the top priority. "There came a time when the war was won," even if the "fighting wasn't over," writes Lewis Sorley, a West Point graduate and career Army officer, in A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam (1999). By the end of 1972, Sorley goes on, one could travel almost anywhere in South Vietnam in relative security, even as American ground forces were almost gone. Retirees I know in the armed forces affirm how much more benign an environment South Vietnam was during this period than the Iraq of today. Still, as one veteran told me: Everyone has different memories of Vietnam, depending upon where they served, and what time they were there.

Sorley's book was reviewed prominently by the major liberal newspapers and foreign policy journals. They gave it generally respectful write-ups, a sign of a reassessment of Vietnam based less on ideology than on paying more attention to the second half of a war: a period to which, as Sorley notes, Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History (1983) devotes only 103 out of 670 pages, and Neil Sheehan's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Bright Shining Lie (1988) devotes 65 out of 790 pages. Sorley told me he isn't sure what would have happened had Congress not cut off aid to South Vietnam at about the time the ground situation was at its most hopeful. He felt that a respectable case might be made that it would have survived. His book has seen a rise in sales among military officers eager to know how the ground situation in Iraq might be improved to the level it had been in Vietnam, thanks to Gen. Abrams's change of strategy.

A similar thesis emerges in The Battle of An Loc (2005) by retired Army Lt. Col. James H. Willbanks, who describes a 60-day siege in mid-1972, in which heavily outnumbered South Vietnamese troops and their American advisors (including himself) rebuffed several North Vietnamese divisions. This gave Nixon the fig leaf he needed for a final withdrawal. Optimism then might not have been warranted, but it wasn't altogether blind. Lt. Col. Willbanks said he wrote his book, published by Indiana University Press, for the same reason Sorley did: to give more attention to the second half of the war.

By all means, let's not have another debate on Viet Nam, right? The MSM has its story and is sticking to it. [sarcasm]

UPDATE: Victor Davis Hanson in NR Online:

In all the hysteria over the Bush Vietnam evocation, people are losing their sanity. Now those in Vietnam are being dragged out and quoted by the mainstream media to prove Bush’s lunacy. But what are subjects of a police state supposed to say — “I wish our present Communist dictatorship had lost”? Do we think Cubans routinely give widely publicized interviews criticizing their Castroites — and live?

Who is sicker, Vick or PETA?

PETA has its headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia. Ingird Newkirk, its leaders is a morally reprehensible transplanted Englishwoman. This article explains why.

PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) wants the NFL to "add cruelty to animals -- in all its forms -- to its personal conduct policy." What, for PETA, is "cruelty to animals -- in all its forms"? According to its Web site, we should not eat, wear, experiment on, use for entertainment or abuse animals in any way.

So PETA's problem is well beyond the sick and cruel murdering of these creatures of which Vick and others are allegedly guilty. Dogfighting for entertainment, or any other use of animals for entertainment, is itself, for PETA, cruelty.

If it's relevant to look for any kind of logic here, why would it be decent entertainment to watch hulks of men ram the daylights out of each other as they move a ball across a field, but cruel to watch dogs fight? Why would the NFL sign on to such a thing?

More specifically, among PETA's prohibitions, is the use of animal skins. The ball, as in football, is an inflated leather object endearingly called the "pigskin."

Why does PETA oppose existing NFL conduct policy, and not football itself?

J.C. Watts, Chuck Colson and others have asked why abuse of dogs is outrageous to so many who see no similar outrage in the 800,000-plus abortions that occur in the United States each year. At the most intuitive level, there is something unsettling about an attitude for which abuse of a dog is intolerable, but women destroying their unborn children with impunity is not a problem.

[...]

Again I wonder. PETA is untroubled by pornography, the unapologetic exploitation and marketing of human flesh, but explains that we should not eat fish because they "are smart, interesting animals with their own unique personalities." The blogger says Jameson is "beautiful, inside and out."

The UFC -- Ultimate Fighting Championship -- where Jameson's boyfriend fights, consists of "mixed martial arts," where fighters do violent battle, for popular entertainment, using the full array of martial-arts forms. The PETA blogger obviously enjoys this sport and calls Ortiz "my favorite UFC fighter."

PETA provides material on its Web site to explain the rationale of the "animal-rights" concept that drives its worldview. "When it comes to pain, love, joy, loneliness, and fear, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy," says PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk.

For more extensive exposition, the site refers to the writings of Princeton philosopher Peter Singer, author of "Animal Liberation."

Now Singer has written on a great deal more than animal rights. He's the author of "Practical Ethics," in which he offers his justifications for euthanasia, abortion and infanticide.

According to Singer, parents should be permitted to kill a baby born with a tragic illness or defect. In "Practical Ethics," he argues that "... the fact that a being is a human being, in the sense of a member of the species Homo sapiens, is not relevant to the wrongness of killing it; it is, rather, characteristics like rationality, autonomy and self-consciousness that make a difference. Infants lack these characteristics. Killing them, therefore, cannot be equated with killing normal human beings, or any other self-conscious beings."

Thus, through a long and twisted road of logic, beginning with one man's own premises about existence, we are led to a conclusion that killing animals is an outrage, but an infant, not.

PETA's logical shortcomings are really a function of it's purposes. These are primarily the financial well being of Ingrid Newkirk and the moral preening of her acolytes.

Oh, by the way, did I mention that PETA kills kittens and puppies? For some reason, it has not found a reason to euthanize Ingird Newkirk.

Y2K glitch kills "Global Warming"; Mosquitos hardest hit

"JohnHuang2" at FreeRepublic blows up the global warming myth with great good humor. Because FreeRepublic is labelled a "hate site" by my corporate masters, I reproduce the essay in full.

Y2K glitch kills "Global Warming"; Mosquitos hardest hit

At this rate, liberals will have to go back to being hysterical about global cooling. According to NASA's new and improved climate history data for the continental U.S., 5 of the 10 warmest years on record happened before World War II. Now the record for hottest babe was 1934, not 1998; the third hottest year was 1921, behind 1998. Four of the Top 10 hottest are from the 1930s. In the last 10 years, only 3 -- '98, '99 and '06 -- made it to the Top 10. It's now pretty clear that NASA's original data was compiled by Scott Thomas Beauchamp.

Under NASA's revised figures, the years 2000, 2002, 2003, and 2004 are further down the list of 'warmest years' than 1900. According to renowned climatologist Al Gore, it should be the other way around. He and his pals had insisted 9 on the top 10 were from the last 12 years -- especially given the massive CO2 emissions during this period from the fleet of jets and gas hogs Gore uses to preach about the evils of jets and gas hogs. In light of the new numbers, Gore's new warning: Sign Kyoto, or the coming years will be hotter than 1934!

NASA's error was detected, not by the rocket scientists at NASA, but by some chap who runs the site climateaudit.com -- Stephen McIntyre. McIntyre discovered a weird jump in the data going from 1999 to 2000. The NASA hotshots refused to hand over the algorithm used to produce graph data, but, no big deal, MyIntyre reverse-engineered it and "the result appeared to be a Y2K bug in the handling of the raw data," (Dailytech.com, 8/9). This is known technically as a programming bug caused by programmers taking a short cut back when the Internet got invented by Al Gore.

McIntyre swiftly notified the NASA honchos, and NASA swiftly responded scientifically by plugging their ears and singing la, la, la, la, la, la, la. The figures on NASA's Web site eventually got revised but very quietly. The revision was such a blow to global warming, even the press almost noticed it.

Showing they're open to new facts, the warmonutters insist their berserk idea of man-made global warming is still true because (a) Gore did a movie about global warming; (b) the press writes lots of articles every day about global warming; (c) Gore does slideshows about global warming and, anyway, the Gore flick is based on global data, not just U.S. climate data which scientists worldwide use as the basis for their predictions which means liberals will need another handy excuse once the global data gets revised as well because of the U.S. data glitches.

Consider the idiocy of liberals insisting the revision is no big deal: U.S. capitalism is evilly scorching the entire planet, burning up every corner of the Earth -- except for that corner of the Earth where the U.S. is. Or, global warming is happening everywhere except the U.S. -- allegedly the biggest producer of global warming, which makes all the weather gods very angry.

Global warming is a "scientific" theory that isn't scientific and isn't even religious either. Religious folks can roll out more than a smattering of evidence to back their faith, but with the warmonutters, the less evidence for it, the more they believe. There is zero evidence to back man-made global warming. Climate history shows the Earth is cooler now than it was back in the 13th century, during the early life and career of Helen Thomas. Earth was even hotter than that 5,000 years ago -- with polar bears already having a rough go of it from notorious Bronze Age washing machines, SUVs and fat-cat Amorites flying around in jets. If you look at the scientific evidence, "climate change" always happened naturally in the past, so warmonutters conclude "climate change" is man-made. If you whip out a graph plotting temperatures going back to the year 1880, most of that increase of 0.7 of a degree Celsius that liberals get hysterical about happened way before industry really started cranking out the cars and planes, then suddenly the temp line drops once the calender flips to 1940, when the cars and planes really start rolling out, which shows CO2 isn't calling the shots as far as "climate change" goes -- proof CO2 drives all "climate change" if you're a warmonutter.

But hold on, there's more. The beloved "Hockey Stick" Gore uses in his splendidly cheery little movie to show catastrophic, cataclysmic, devastating, ruinous, disastrous, slaughterous global warming ended up getting discredited by the same McIntyre fellow who just busted the NASA bull-hockey stick, so lbbies respond by having famed meteorologist Madonna prancing on stage at Live Earth. Speaking of aging has-beens, a bunch of NOAA's "reliable" temperature measurement stations reliably sit right next to machinery at sewer treatment plants, mega A/C heat exchangers, exhaust fans, trash burn barrels, airport tarmac, jet blast, fireplace chimneys, hot automobile radiators, buildings, dumpsters and inside asphalt parking lots -- which shows global warming is man-made after all!

The theory is so discredited, it gets a load of research dough. Newsweek complains hysterically that a "well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change." Yawn. The "contrarians" who blindly accept the facts have gotten a total of $19 million so far, the warmonutters have raked in over $50 billion. Fog-wise, the "contrarian" heretics got the bigger bang for the buck, and you're not even factoring the 'round-the-clock warmonutter agipoop from Newsweek & Co. into the game.

The lesson in all this is that you can have the research grants, the press, taxpayer-funded universities, a prancing Madonna and Hollywood pimping global warming, but even the best-laid pimping can go awry if facts get in the way. Polls show about half the country thinks the warmonutters have gone bananas. Too alarmist, calm down, scaredy-cat. In Gore's flick, sea levels rising by 20 feet and flooding the costal areas -- this is the "global wetting" phase -- doesn't even rate believable fiction, and fiction is what it is. And how long have we been hearing about the polar bears? Yet the history of climate change shows that climates come, climates go, but the polar bears you always have with you.

And even had the absurd Kyoto treaty got muscled through and it's two ton phone book-sized wish-list of suffocating emissions targets, regulations, national caps, guidelines, rules, curbs and cuts got dumped on every capitalist running-dog "polluter" not exempted under the treaty, for lopping off a sizable chunk of GDP all you get by 2050, Gaia willing, is a temperature reduction of 0.07C. Big deal.

Liberals still got the hots for communism -- the little darlings tried for 70 years to make it work in the Soviet Union. Like global warming theory, the more it failed, the more they believed. So if bringing on the workers' paradise is your bag, global warming/Kyoto is what you glom onto now as your great hobby horse. But if sledgehammers chipping off pieces of the Berlin Wall is how the whole thing eventually came down, Stephen McIntyre just took a big swing at global warming.

Anyway, that's...
My Two Cents...
"JohnHuang2"

The Huffington Post Calls For A Military Coup

Martin Lewis calls on General Peter Pace to replace George Bush.

But don't you dare call them unpatriotic. (Or call it a "coup.")

Newt Gingrich on Islamofascism

When Gingrich came to Norfolk and gave bloggers here a half hour of his time, this is what he spoke about. Yet the jerk from the Virginian Pilot, Richard Quinn, only got the color of his tie right.

Killing fields then and now

The Democrat/Liberal/Media Axis has been comparing Iraq to Viet Nam for years. Making the case that we should not have gotten involved, predicting our defeat and working actively – as they did during the Viet Nam war - to bring that defeat about.

That is what is so curious about the Axis’ reaction to President Bush’s reference to Viet Nam in his speech to the VFW.

For a hard-to-top example of pure unmitigated gall, the editorial in the Virginian Pilot of August 24th is a sterling example.

The president’s decision this week to compare the wars in Iraq and Vietnam isn’t about the lessons of history, or the danger of insurrection and guerilla tactics. It is about feeding red meat to a political base grown anemic on a diet of bad news from the Middle East.
[…]
In other words, the blood of millions of people in southeast Asia belongs to an America unwilling to fight there forever.
[...]
The certainty of reopening old wounds is precisely what the White House wants. At a time when the nation should be focusing on what to do next in Iraq, the administration is hoping Americans can be diverted by another political sleight-of-hand to keep its mistakes from showing.

Don’t be fooled, and don’t be baited. America is too busy fighting in Iraq to be fighting again over Vietnam.

The Pilot Editors and the rest of the Axis seem to believe they have the exclusive right to the Viet Nam narrative and will be damned if they want us interlopers discuss the topic they have stolen as their own. Well, Mr. Editor, it doesn’t work that way anymore since the media monopoly was broken.

You may want to see what your “Born fighting” Senator Webb has to say about how Viet Nam went down:

This Congress was elected in November 1974, only months after Nixon's resignation, and it was dominated by a fresh group of antiwar Democrats. One of the first actions of the new Congress was to vote down a supplemental appropriation for the beleaguered South Vietnamese that would have provided $800 million in military aid, including much-needed ammunition, spare parts and medical supplies.

This vote was a horrendous blow, in both emotional and practical terms, to the country that had trusted American judgment for more than a decade of intense conflict. It was also a clear indication that Washington was abandoning the South Vietnamese even as the North Vietnamese continued to enjoy the support of the Soviet Union, China and other Eastern bloc nations. The vote's impact was hardly lost on North Vietnamese military planners, who began the final offensive only five weeks later, as the South Vietnamese were attempting to adjust their military defenses.

Finally, the aftermath of Saigon's fall is rarely dealt with at all. A gruesome holocaust took place in Cambodia, the likes of which had not been seen since World War II. Two million Vietnamese fled their country — usually by boat — with untold thousands losing their lives in the process. This was the first such diaspora in Vietnam's long and frequently tragic history. Inside Vietnam a million of the South's best young leaders were sent to re-education camps; more than 50,000 perished while imprisoned, and others remained captives for as long as 18 years. An apartheid system was put into place that punished those who had been loyal to the United States, as well as their families, in matters of education, employment and housing. The Soviet Union made Vietnam a client state until its own demise, pumping billions of dollars into the country and keeping extensive naval and air bases at Cam Ranh Bay.

You don’t own the Viet Nam narrative any more, and the bodies of the slain in the aftermath of the debacle your engineered are being exhumed and brought to your doorstep.

Even William Shawcross, who wrote the book “Sideshow” excoriating the US for the Cambodian genocide had second thoughts and admitted:

Those of us who opposed the American war in Indochina should be extremely humble in the face of the appalling aftermath: a form of genocide in Cambodia and horrific tyranny in both Vietnam and Laos. Looking back on my own coverage for The Sunday Times...,I think I concentrated too easily on the corruption and incompetence of the South Vietnamese and their American allies, was too ignorant of the inhuman Hanoi regime, and far too willing to believe that a victory by the Communists would provide a better future. But after the Communist victory came the refugees to Thailand and the floods of boat people desperately seeking to escape the Cambodian killing fields and the Vietnamese gulags. Their eloquent testimony should have put paid to all illusions.

And what was the dominant Axis theme before the horrors began? What were they predicting?

…the barbaric nature of the Communist Khmer Rouge was painted over in soothing tones by much of the American press. The New York Times was the most flagrant offender. In one dispatch, its correspondent Sydney Schanberg described a ranking Khmer Rouge leader as a "French-educated intellectual" who wanted nothing more than "to fight against feudal privileges and social inequities." A bloodbath was unlikely, Schanberg reported: "since all are Cambodians, an accommodation will be found." As the last Americans were withdrawn, another upbeat article by Schanberg appeared under the headline, "Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life." In short order, the Khmer Rouge proceeded to march nearly two million of their fellow Cambodians to their deaths in the killing fields. Also in short order, Schanberg went on to greater glory and a Pulitzer prize.

And from Senator Webb's own website:

"Vietnam should teach us an important lesson. Hanoi [is creating] a collectivist society . . . likely to produce greater welfare and security for its people than any local alternative ever offered, at a cost in freedom that affects a small elite." -- Stanley Hoffman
The New Republic
May 3, 1975



"The greatest gift our country can give the Cambodian people is not guns but peace. And the best way to accomplish that goal is by ending military aid now." -- Rep. Chris Dodd (D., Conn.)
Congressional Record
March 12, 1975

"It is ironic that we are here at a time just before Vietnam is about to be liberated." -- Producer Bert Schneider
Academy Awards
April 8, 1975

If I were an editor of the Virginian Pilot or any other member of the Axis, I would quickly shut up about Viet Nam. You no longer have the monopoly power to dominate the way people are allowed to think about that horrific war and it’s even more horrific aftermath. The news is no longer pre-digested and delivered by the ABC/CBS/NBC members of the Axis. And you are making yourself look stupid by pretending that your recollections of your part in this crime were anything but ignoble.

Bush speech to VFW

Dean Barnett comments:

How dare he! In his speech to the VFW the other day, George W. Bush had the audacity to compare the current struggle to the Vietnam War. What was he thinking? Doesn’t he know that the left has the exclusive franchise on Vietnam analogies? The President may well be hearing from the Democratic Party’s attorneys in the coming days.
[...]
The most serious consequence of the American left’s Vietnam-era behavior was the death and destruction it caused for our allies. However aging leftists and their spiritual descendants try to spin it, images of Vietnamese boat people, the fall of Saigon and the Cambodian killing fields indelibly mar the image of the American political factions that enabled those tragedies. So here we stand today, over thirty years later, with the American left still madly grinding away trying to airbrush the consequences of its Vietnam-era behavior from the national memory the way Stalin’s apparatchiks airbrushed Trotsky from the Soviet history books.

THE PRESIDENT DEFINITELY HIT A NERVE. Today, the Boston Globe and the New York Times both editorialized on what they consider the true record of Vietnam. The Globe took its unique version of amoral cowardice out for a spin, writing, “It would have been better to surrender South Vietnam to the North Vietnamese communists in the early 1960s than to engage them in a struggle that cost 58,000 American and millions of Vietnamese lives before it ended in 1975 with the same result: victory for Hanoi and the suppression of non-communist opposition in the south.”

That’s a classic strawman argument. There was another choice that the Globe doesn’t deem fit to mention – we could have stayed the course in Vietnam until the South had become sustainable, just as we had done in South Korea a couple of decades earlier.

[…]

The true error of Vietnam wasn’t the decision to stand up and fight evil. The real sin was abandoning our allies to certain death in 1973. If you go back to the Globe’s editorial, you’ll notice that the deaths of tens of thousands of people and the imprisonment of an entire society are blithely written off with the glib one-word summation “suppression.” Perhaps the Boat People or the prisoners of the re-education camps could come up with a more descriptive term.

The Politics of God

As the Western world becomes increasingly secular, there is a popular misconception that religion is unnecessary to a good society. In fact, many atheistic intellectuals would argue that religion, specifically Christianity (which is their historical birthright) has been an evil influence in history, citing the Crusades, various religious wars and the Inquisition.

Unfortunately, their belief system is insupportable. Modern society is still infused with Christian dos and don’ts and is mere generations away from a time when the value of religious faith was a universal assumption; an axiom built into popular understanding of the structure of a moral and just society.

The village atheist may reject God and the entire pantheon of biblical characters who inform the lives of ordinary people, but he cannot escape the effects of these beliefs in the real world.

There have been, to be sure, experiments in creating societies that were officially atheist; the Soviet Union and Communist China come to mind, but these are not the sort of examples that atheists wish to emulate in detail. The results were not good.

Wretchard of the Belmont club explores this issue in a very readable and learned essay. The analysis is based on an article in the NY Times Magazine by Mark Lilla, professor of the humanities at Columbia University.

Excerpt:

At first humanity's traditional habituation to God provided assurance that man would never be left wholly alone with his inner temptations. Some guideposts would surely remain. "Religion is simply too entwined with our moral experience ever to be disentangled from it, and morality is inseparable from politics." But that underrated the ambition of the ideologues. Once God had left the room the stakes went too high: and God's vacant throne glittered irresistibly before them. The natural impulse of demagogues was not, as Rousseau might have thought, to retain God as an absent, but beneficent Constitutional Monarch in whose extended absence Parliament ruled. For ambitious men the goal was to supplant the Creator altogether the better to rule on earth as gods.

[…]

A Europe shattered and disillusioned by the Great War turned again to religion; but not to the Christianity they had recently rejected; but instead to the new European world-faiths of the 20th century. Nazism and Communism were the proudest creations of post-Christian Europe. They were faiths whose missionaries would proselytize everywhere and make converts as far afield as Vietnam and China. Faiths under whose banners structures greater than cathedrals would be filled with chanting adherents; faiths whose patriarchs greater than Popes would rule; pitiless religions where not thousands, but hundreds of millions would be burned at the proverbial stake. The shadows of Hobbes' candle had taken form and their names, bright with blood, were written across the pages of the Second World and Cold Wars. In the end, Europe emerged exhausted from the carnage wrought by her intellectual products; faithless, and incredulous to see Islam glaring at it from the Other Shore; full of the very certitudes they had recently forsaken. Lilla says Westerners do not understand Muslims; but only because they have forgotten what it is like to be them: to slay or be slain for one's belief. Lilla does not guess whether Islam will itself undergo its own version of a Great Separation. The question for him is where a faithless West, needing a reason to exist, must go from here:

What is troubling is that a growing faithlessness in the West is now facing a fanatical faithfulness in the form of militant Islam. And the question is whether a society that has no basic religious belief system will be submerged by one that does. Like the Dutch Bishop who proposed that Christians should begin referring to God as “Allah.” After all, if you believe all religion is fantasy, what does it matter if you pretend to believe in other people’s fantasies if the alterative is death?

National Intelligence Estimate - Iraq

You can find a long excerpt of the NIE on NR's Corner.

I am really not interested although others seem to have a need to dissect it and use it for their own purposes.

The fact is that I have no faith at all in the ability of the Intelligence Community to provide useful analysis or guidance.

They failed to detect the 9/11 attack.

They wrote off Anbar province a year ago. Now it's a success story.

Their analysis has obviously been no help in providing us guidance in the war after 4 years.

The CIA appears to be institutionally opposed to the Bush administration and invested in failure in Iraq.

Sorry folks, your product is worthless and not worth reading. Events on the ground are the only thing that counts. Your guesses and mine, along with a couple of bucks will get you a coffee at Starbucks.

Robert Spencer Defends Himself Against John Derbyshire

John Derbyshire and Robert Spencer have engaged in a polite debate about the differences between Islam and Christianity and dangers to civilization.

having read both essays, (and acknowledging that I am a Christian) I believe that Robert Spencer has the much better argument.

Go HERE for Derbyshire.

Spencer begins:

John Derbyshire seems to think that since, in his view, Islam and Christianity are equally preposterous, they are equally likely to incite violence: “Mohammed’s flying through the air to Jerusalem on a white steed is no more preposterous than the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception; and so, God’s instructions to us through Mohammed are no more or less likely to make us better or worse than his instructions through Christ.”

Huh? “And so”? One thing is unbelievable, and so is another, and therefore they’re of equal moral value? Come now. I myself find National Socialism no more preposterous than Shakerism – does that mean that National Socialism is no more or less likely to make us better or worse than Shakerism? Does Derbyshire really want to get behind the idea that if something doesn’t ring true to him, it is therefore benign, or at least no more or less benign than some other farrago? I don’t think he does, even as he calls the whole exercise “infantile,” since he also says that he finds my “brief against Islam” to be “persuasive.”

Read both essays and decide for yourself.

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."

The Media "Fact Checking" Myth

There is a myth that the MSM has "fact checkers" to insure the accuracy of the facts presented in the stories that they print. Well, the Scott Beauchamp stories in the New Republic have demonstrated in glowing terms, the famous "fact checking" that the media claim to do it so much eyewash.

Here's another great example: is George Bush a Viet Nam veteran? We would say "no" because he never served in Viet Nam although he was in the National Guard during that war. So why does the Washington Post call Markos "Kos" Moulitsas Zuniga a "Persian Gulf War Veteran" even though he never set foot in the Middle East?

And lest you ask, who the hell is "Kos?" He is currently the kingmaker on the Left who every Democrat candidate for President is paying homage to.

MORE on the Beauchamp/TNR fiasco from OPFOR:

An investigation of the allegations was conducted by the military and
found the allegations were false. In addition, members of Thomas'
platoon and company were all interviewed and no one could substantiate
his claims.

The rest of will or won't happen is to be handled internally within the
unit and are not discussed publicly.

Best,

Steve

Steven A. Boylan
Colonel, US Army
MNF-I CG, PAO

And the Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb:

The editors of the New Republic have responded here. Three points:

(1) They neglected to report that the Army has concluded its investigation and found Beauchamp's stories to be false. As Major Lamb, the very officer they quote, has said in an authorized statement: "An investigation has been completed and the allegations made by PVT Beauchamp were found to be false. His platoon and company were interviewed and no one could substantiate the claims."

(2) Does the failure of the New Republic to report the Army's conclusions mean that the editors believe the Army investigators are wrong about Beauchamp?

(3) We have full confidence in our reporting that Pvt Beauchamp recanted under oath in the course of the investigation. Is the New Republic claiming that Pvt Beauchamp made no such admission to Army investigators? Is Beauchamp?

From the Columbia Tribune:

The U.S. Army is disputing all of the claims made by former University of Missouri-Columbia student Scott Beauchamp in essays for The New Republic about his experiences in the Iraq war, according to the results of the military’s internal investigation.

"The allegations were found to be false," Major Steven F. Lamb, deputy Public Affairs Officer for Multi National Division-Baghdad, said in an e-mail to the Tribune. "His platoon and company were interviewed and no one could substantiate the claims he made."

Ace of Spades reveals the title of Beauchamp's new book: "Me Kill Pretty One Day." [Sarcasm]

And the fabulous Jeff Goldstein chimes in: The semiotics of Beauchamp, cont

Beauchamp Recants

Well, that didn't take long. For the back-story, click on my prior post. It now appears that:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned from a military source close to the investigation that Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp--author of the much-disputed "Shock Troops" article in the New Republic's July 23 issue as well as two previous "Baghdad Diarist" columns--signed a sworn statement admitting that all three articles he published in the New Republic were exaggerations and falsehoods--fabrications containing only "a smidgen of truth," in the words of our source.

Separately, we received this statement from Major Steven F. Lamb, the deputy Public Affairs Officer for Multi National Division-Baghdad:

An investigation has been completed and the allegations made by PVT Beauchamp were found to be false. His platoon and company were interviewed and no one could substantiate the claims.

According to the military source, Beauchamp's recantation was volunteered on the first day of the military's investigation. So as Beauchamp was in Iraq signing an affidavit denying the truth of his stories, the New Republic was publishing a statement from him on its website on July 26, in which Beauchamp said, "I'm willing to stand by the entirety of my articles for the New Republic using my real name."

It will be interesting to see what The New Republic's next move will be.

MORE: From Mark Steyn:

Kathryn, if that Weekly Standard story is correct, it moves Private Beauchamp into full-blown Stephen Glass territory. In essence, they made the same mistakes all over again - falling for pat cinematic vividness, pseudo-novelistic dialogue, all designed to confirm prejudices so ingrained the editors didn't even recognize they were being pandered to.

UPDATE: The Washington Post now covers the story.

Army investigators have concluded that the private whose dispatches for the New Republic accused his fellow soldiers of petty cruelties in Iraq was not telling the truth.

The finding, disclosed yesterday, came days after the Washington-based magazine announced that it had corroborated the claims of the private, Scott Thomas Beauchamp, except for one significant error.


"An investigation has been completed and the allegations made by Pvt. Beauchamp were found to be false," an Army statement said. "His platoon and company were interviewed and no one could substantiate the claims."

The New Republic's Scott Thomas Beauchamp

A phrase that the “old media” made famous is that it’s not the crime that creates the biggest problem, it’s the cover-up. That’s the situation that The New Republic seems to find itself in as it tries to deal with the tales told by a private who set out to smear our soldiers in Iraq.

Confederate Yankee has gone to the source and ... it appears that TNR's "fact checkers" are not up to the job.

For a summary of the sordid tale go to Michelle Malkin who, as usual, has a wealth of detail and a great roundup of what the bloggers are saying about this issue.

Jeff Goldstein does a hilarious takeoff on the story: If instead of an anti-war soldier, Scott Beauchamp were a combat-coarsened Keebler Elf and Beauchamp follow-up: on narrative reinforcement and the trope of “significance”

What I am continually grateful for is the fact that we now have a check on the media. There is an ancient saying by Juvenal that has always been true: “quis custodiet ipsos custodies” or “Who will guard the guards?”

Newspapers have long maintained the position of guardians of the people from government wrongdoing. But who has been watching the newspapers (and magazines, TV and radio) and checking to see if they are the purveyors of “truth” instead of the inventors of lies?

I am currently reading “The Reagan Diaries” edited by Douglas Brinkley. In his diary, Reagan recounts the fact that the events that he participated in were lied about and distorted by an antagonistic media. Today, there is a “feel-good” aura about the Reagan Presidency and few in the media will have the courage to disparage this good man, especially as he is largely responsible for the defeat of the Soviet Union. But during his presidency, Reagan was reviled and disparaged as an evil, senile old fool.

What is truly amazing is that, despite the ability of the Internet to fact-check the output of the media, the dinosaurs that inhabit those fever swamps still don’t realize that their ability to blatantly lie and create their own “reality” is fast coming to an end.

Who will guard the guards? It looks like we have a whole world of people who are willing and able to fulfill that chore.

Boy, Mother & Jellyfish at Monterey Aquarium

I have been on travel for the last 10 days. This picture taken at the Monterey Aquarium showing a boy, his mother and a jellyfish was nice.