Freedom of speeches: the press takes some liberties

The New Neo Posted on by

One major element in my political change process was my loss of faith in the MSM based on something as simple, and easily checkable, as its reporting of the speeches of public figures.

I say “easily checkable,” because, with the advent of the internet, it is. As long as a person is willing to make a small effort and take a little extra time, most MSM reports of what a speaker says can be checked against the actual words he/she did say.

The majority of readers, of course, still don’t do that. But until recently, almost no one did; the effort and resources required, pre-web, were far greater. So it was less apparent then than it is now that the media regularly distorted the words of many public figures (and who knows? Maybe the practice was actually less common back then).

I first learned about the ubiquity of speech misrepresentation in the MSM through my post-9/11 online reading. At the time it shocked me. It no longer does (I’ve come to expect it), although it still angers me.

Now I tend to wonder about its causes: is it a reflection of poor reading comprehension, unconscious distortion, or purposeful and knowing misrepresentation, or some combination/alternation of them all?

Now here’s a review of a book by communications professor Jim A. Kuypers, detailing media bias in reporting Bush’s speeches. It’s entitled Bush’s War: Media Bias and Justifications for War in a Terrorist Age, and presents an apparently nonpartisan and sobering look at just how incredibly distorted and biased the press has been in distorting Bush’s message:

What has essentially happened since 9/11 has been that Bush has repeated the same themes, and framed those themes the same whenever discussing the War on Terror,” said Kuypers, who specializes in political communication and rhetoric. “Immediately following 9/11, the mainstream news media (represented by CBS, ABC, NBC, USA Today, New York Times, and Washington Post) did echo Bush, but within eight weeks it began to intentionally ignore certain information the president was sharing, and instead reframed the president’s themes or intentionally introduced new material to shift the focus.”

This goes beyond reporting alternate points of view. “In short,” Kupyers explained, “if someone were relying only on the mainstream media for information, they would have no idea what the president actually said. It was as if the press were reporting on a different speech.”

That’s a pretty powerful statement.

In my earlier post today, I spoke of the need for leadership. Part of leadership involves rhetoric, and Bush is obviously no Churchill. But could even Churchill get his message across in the face of such a concerted effort by his own press to distort it?

What now?: the necessity of leadership

The New Neo Posted on by

Michael Barone is one who doesn’t see Bush’s promise to persevere in Iraq as a joke and/or a travesty and/or an outrage.

Neither does John McCain, who disagrees with the details of Bush’s policy, but sees “staying the course” with more troops as both morally and tactically necessary, not fewer. When does McCain think we should leave Iraq?:

When I think we’ve exhausted every possibility to do what is necessary to succeed and not until then, because the consequences of failure are catastrophic. . . . We left Vietnam, it was over, we just had to heal the wounds of war. We leave this place, chaos in the region and they’ll follow us home. So there’s a great deal more at stake here in this conflict in my view.

And me? I’ve never written on the issue of more troops or less, because that subject seems to require a specialized sort of knowledge that I don’t have. I simply note that those with that knowledge have always differed widely on the question.

But I will state the following: right from the start, although I wasn’t writing a blog at the time, I was very disturbed by the hands-off attitude of those in charge of the occupation. I say “occupation” because that’s what it always was, or should have been. We defeated Iraq in war–although, granted, it was a short war their armed forces mainly chose not to fight. Afterwards, it was our duty to the Iraqis, as well as in our own interests, to be effective in reconstructing a country that had been shattered–not by our war, but by the preceding decades of horror, murder, and divisive brutality, and by a lack of any recent tradition of democracy or cooperation in that country.

The failure to shoot looters at the outset was a bad sign of an approach that was unrealistic on our part about the possibility of resultant chaos. It’s a bit like the first day of school, when a class takes the measure of a teacher, who has to establish his/her authority at the outset or be forever considered a wimp and possible victim. We didn’t want to be a heavy occupying force, and I understood that, but we had to acknowledge that we were there to control things for a while, and that message was not properly delivered. Another turning point–and a far more important one–was our failure to apply Draconian measures to al Sadr when he was just getting started, as well as our initial stalling in Fallujah and other similar areas of enemy control and influence.

You can’t go back–you can only go forward. At this point, I’m with Barone in looking at historical examples of war leadership when things looked dismal:

…remember that for Truman on Korea and for Churchill after Dunkirk, no promising military courses were immediately apparent. Truman, after firing Gen. Douglas MacArthur, had forsaken the threat — a nuclear attack — that his successor Dwight Eisenhower deployed to get the communists to agree to a truce.

But Truman’s perseverance despite his 22 percent job approval — much lower than Bush’s — was essential in preserving the independence of South Korea, which now has the world’s 14th-largest economy. Churchill, facing Hitler alone, could promise only “blood, toil, tears and sweat” until his enemies’ mistakes — Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union, the Japanese strike on Pearl Harbor — gave him the allies that made victory possible…

Bush isn’t Churchill in the leadership/rhetoric department, not by a longshot. But then, who is? If we wait around for a Churchill, there’ll be a long wait coming.

Is Bush a Truman? Closer, perhaps–Truman was no orator, and his intelligence wasn’t highly respected. One difference, of course, was that Truman was not operating under the handicap of constant Vietnam comparisons.

Leadership is hard to quantify, difficult to describe. But we know it when we see it. Right now it’s necessary, although Bush, unfortunately, isn’t a natural at conveying it. But in the future, as in the past, actions will speak louder than words–although words are definitely an important part of the way a leader inspires.

Instant historians: an oxymoron?

The New Neo Posted on by

…(or–forgive the pun–perhaps “oxymorons?”)

Historian Vincent J. Cannato has an op-ed in the Washington Post rightly critical of historians’ tendency to make instant judgments of Presidencies, both of Bush and others.

I always thought historians were those who wrote about the past after the passage of a reasonable amount of time, and journalists and pundits were–well, there’s a lot of things I could call them, but we’ll stick with “chroniclers of the present, taking a snapshot in time.” Historians are distinguished by waiting, reflection, research, and analyzing the long-term consequences of actions taken. Not with predicting those consequences, but actually studying them, because they have occurred.

That’s not to say that history is infallible; surely not. I’ve written before about some of the problems inherent in writing history, especially history with an agenda–and everyone’s got an agenda, whether upfront about it or not.

Churchill is an interesting case in point. After the WWI debacle of his Admiralty decisions concerning the Dardanelles and Gallipoli (see this as well), the judgment of history would have been “Stupidity. Failure. Poor judgment.” During the thirties, Churchill was practically a laughingstock in Parliament, a man whose dire warnings about Hitler and Germany were widely considered almost demented and rather pathetic.

Of course, history has vindicated Churchill. Yes, he had flaws, but history calls him “great.” Of course in this, as in many other things, Churchill was both uncommonly prescient and uncommonly articulate; he said, “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”

That’s not the only reason history has been kind to Churchill. But shortly after WWII, when one would have thought he would have been a hero to all, the electorate voted him out of office. The judgments of the present are not the same as the viewpoint of history.

This is what Cannato cautions on Bush. Of course, we all need to make judgments in the present based on incomplete knowledge, and we all lack the ability to foretell the future. But that’s not the same as declaring we already know the judgment of history. Folks such as Michael Lind would do well to heed that caution (hat tip: Done With Mirrors).

Talking with Iran and divorce mediation: the naked emperor (shh, little child!)

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not just that I disagree with the “we need to talk with Iran” folks. It’s that they actually seem demented and deluded. Their suggestion makes no sense–or about as much sense as “talk with Hitler” would have made in the middle of WWII.

Faith in the overwhelming power of talk has gone beyond the bounds of rationality into an irrational and yet strongly-held belief system. I read pundits and watch talking heads nodding in agreement that talking with Iran might just be the ticket, the get-out-of-jail-free (or relatively free) card needed for extricating us from a difficult situation in Iraq. And it seems patently absurd to me, actually laughable–if it didn’t have such potentially enormous consequences.

I usually manage to see some sort of reason in the proposals of the other side, however much I may disagree with them. But this proposal seems so dangerously divorced from reality as to be as absurd as the emperor prancing around nude when he thinks he has a fabulous suit of clothing on, while those on my side seem like the voices of the little child shouting “But wait! He’s naked. Don’t you see it?”

Iran is not only our enemy, it’s our overt and blatant enemy, and has been since 1979. Ever since its revolution, Iran has been boldly proclaiming its aim to destroy us–the Great Satan. We are so unacquainted with evil that, to many, the over-the-top nature of such charges sound almost comical; surely, they can’t be serious (in much the same way, many dismissed Hitler as ridiculous: the strutting, the rhetoric, the silly little mustache).

But, we cannot afford to not take Iran seriously, any more than we could with Hitler. And, although the turmoil in Iraq is multiply-determined, one of the proximate causes is the direct and intentional influence of Iran in that country.

Frank Gaffney says it well in the Daily News:

…the new talk-to-Iran conventional wisdom is irresponsible.

Why? Because Iran is, hands down, the main impediment to freedom and stability in Iraq. Together with its client state, Syria, Iran is directly implicated in murderous attacks on American forces in Iraq. Iran is arming and training Shiite militias. And it’s using violence, intelligence and money to dominate oil-rich southern Iraq.

If we have any hope of turning the tide in Iraq, our strategy must negate those threats. Diplomatic appeasement won’t work. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the mullahs who run the show in Tehran will only be emboldened and intensify their efforts to dominate the region and destroy those who stand in their way.

Instead, it’s time for a concerted effort to isolate, counter and help the Iranian people take down that regime from within.

To do so, we need to adapt theCold War strategy Ronald Reagan used to destroy the Soviet Union. It is an urban legend that Reagan brought down “the Evil Empire” by negotiating with Mikhail Gorbachev.

Nonsense. In fact, Reagan systematically cut off the USSR’s funding, empowered its opponents and thwarted its military programs. Similarly, we should use political, financial and intelligence tools to enable the mullahs’ domestic opponents to undermine their power.

An enemy is an enemy, and pretending it’s not is a self-destructive act. Munich and Chamberlain comparisons are, once again, very apt. Those who say that Iran can’t hurt us because they are militarily weak ignore the fact that they are already hurting us through asymmetrical warfare and propaganda, and that they are pursuing a path that will give them atomic weapons for blackmail or actual use.

I’ve written before about the futility of talking with this particular enemy. But now I’m curious to understand what motivates those who advocate such talk in the face of overwhelming evidence of its futility and its danger. My current hypothesis is that it’s another example of the progress we’ve made in the West (which I wrote about yesterday): our own society has become so relatively peaceful, benign, and cooperative that many have lost sight of the fact that reason is not always possible–and that tyranny and cruelty, and lust for power and control, exist on a scale (in other nations such as Iran) that would make any fears about BushHitler, the Patriot Act, wiretapping, Guantanamo, and all the other myriad charges the Left has against the Bush Administration (trumped up or otherwise) seem like a walk in the proverbial park.

Among other things I’ve done in my life, I was briefly a divorce mediator. It sounded like a great idea, and sometimes it is: get the warring parties to sit down , away from those lawyers who stir things up and often lead to an even more adversarial climate, and have the couple talk it out together. After all, these people are married, and once loved each other, right? Surely they would have the ability to agree to things that, after all, are in their best interests to solve by themselves?

And I quickly learned the first rule of divorce mediation. As far as I know I’m the person who originated it, so I’ll state it here: if divorce mediation works, the couple usually didn’t need a mediator in the first place; they could have done it themselves with only the help of a booklet explaining the laws of their state. Oh, it’s nice to have a little guidance to keep things on track, but it’s not really all that necessary in most cases, and it costs money.

But there are always a number of cases–and the number is not small–where divorce mediation not only does not work, but leads to greater turmoil and/or inequity. If the bitterness is too huge, it affords the couple the opportunity to engage in more and more vicious exchanges to no avail, whereas dealing with lawyers at least gets them out of each others’ faces. And in particular, if there’s a differential of power, or any sort of abusive situation (and sometimes that’s a thing the mediator cannot determine at the outset), mediation can lead to a far less equitable solution, one in which the weaker party gets a manifestly unjust settlement, despite the pretense of biparty acquiescence.

The divorce mediation situation, of course, is hardly analogous to talking with Iran. But it’s an example of the limits of conversation, despite a firm belief in its power. And talking with an enemy such as Iran, where there is no common ground for agreement and no common goals, is far far worse. At stake are not just the assets and children of a married couple–which, of course, are important–but the future of millions of people, of history.

Chamberlain had an excuse, he didn’t have the example of Munich before him. What’s ours?

[ADDENDUM: To those who mentioned the precedent of talking with the USSR, I replied in the comments section, and am reproducing my reply here:

The USSR and the US agreed on some common goals. They didn’t want to blow each other to kingdom come, for starters. The USSR was a secular government (not a religious one) interested in power in this world, not matyrdom in the next. They also cared at least somewhat about the welfare of their people, if only as a demonstration of the superiority of their system.

None of that is true of Iran. There is no common ground for a talk. If by “talk” you mean threats with a big stick to back them up, I’m all for talking. But that’s not what these particular talks would be about. The talks that are proposed right now are to elicit Iran’s cooperation in covering a planned retreat from Iraq, to “stabilize” the country. The only stabilization Iran is interested in there is stabilization under Iran’s thumb, and they will say anything and do anything to get it. Thus talks are inherently duplicitous and counterproductive.]

Hanson puts his finger on it

The New Neo Posted on by

The wonderfully intelligent and clear writer Victor Davis Hanson has another fine piece, entitled “Losing the Enlightenment,” about the decline of will and conviction in the West. I suggest you read the whole thing.

One sentence in particular struck me as a good summation of a phenomenon I’ve noticed before, but haven’t been able to put as succinctly:

…the technological explosion of the last 20 years has made life so long and so good, that many now believe our mastery of nature must extend to human nature as well…

Exactly. It’s a sort of hubris and naivete, as well as a fervent hope, nurtured by the great advances the West has actually been able to make. For the most part our lives are indeed so much less fraught with the hardships of disease, or wrestling with the elements, or dealing with famines and other basic questions of survival, that many have come to think life itself could somehow be made nearly perfect, and that even stress and unpleasantness could be reduced to virtually nothing.

That goes, of course, for messy things such as war, people who hate, those who want to kill and who seem to get a certain amount of joy from doing so. Would that it were possible to off them as easily as we’ve conquered smallpox–not that that was easy, actually, but it was a relative piece of cake compared to changing human nature.

Hanson goes on to write about the savvy of al-Qaeda in taking the moral and spiritual temperature of the West:

By past definitions of relative power, al-Qaeda and its epigones were weak and could not defeat the West militarily. But their genius was knowing of our own self-loathing, of our inability to determine their evil from our good, of our mistaken belief that Islamists were confused about, rather than intent to destroy, the West, and most of all, of our own terror that we might lose, if even for a brief moment, the enjoyment of our good life to defeat the terrorists. In learning what the Islamists are, many of us, and for the first time, are also learning what we are not.

Hanson doesn’t end his essay with pessimism, however. He ends it with the idea that this realization can create the opportunity to remember and regain our strengths. He quotes Churchill’s “These are not dark days: these are great days–the greatest days our country has ever lived.”

I wouldn’t quite say that, although I appreciate Hanson’s optimism. I’ll add to it, though, with another Churchill quote, to wit:

For myself I am an optimist – it does not seem to be much use being anything else.

Now for a little comic relief (?): Michael Richards

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve ignored the idiotic brouhaha over actor Michael Richards’ bigoted outbursts, but this story I just couldn’t ignore.

It turns out that Richards’s publicist said that Richards isn’t anti-Semitic after all–he’s Jewish! Leaving aside the question of whether one can be both Jewish and anti-Semitic (answer: absolutely), it turns out that Richards isn’t even Jewish.

I must confess right now that I thought he was. Not that I really thought about it; but if I had thought about it, I would have thought he was (is that perfectly clear? Good.) His role on “Seinfeld” conveyed that notion, although it’s always difficult (if not impossible) to explain what makes a person seem Jewish and what does not.

Anti-Semites the world over have myriad answers, of course. But we won’t worry about what they think right now. For me, it’s a certain sardonic and sharp sense of humor, usually of urban origin, but mostly a je ne sais quoi. And the perception of Jewishness can often be very, very incorrect, as in the case of Richards, who is most definitely not Jewish, whatever he says. Neither of his parents were, and he has not converted. That’s pretty definitive.

Richards is laying low right now and keeping his mouth shut for a change–an excellent idea, I’d say (although apparently he’s been talking to his psychiatrist–always a dangerous thing).

The paradoxial dangers of “humane war”

The New Neo Posted on by

Varifrank has written about our modern way of warfare and our attempt to wage it with greater respect for human life. Please take a look.

Respect for human life is a good thing, right? I would be the first to say so. War is an affront to that respect because it inevitably involves wholesale killing–not only of the military, but of civilians.

The history of warfare is of one horrific mess of slaughter and destruction. In ancient times whole cities were routinely razed, their inhabitants slain or sold into slavery. Those traditional Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse–Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death–rode together for a reason, because the deliberate killing of warfare was often accompanied by disease and starvation.

The First World War represented a new crescendo in terms of military casualties (take a look; it makes shocking reading even now). World War I could aptly be described as a carnage that destroyed a large percentage of the best and brightest of a whole generation of Western Europe, and all for a cause that remained murky. That war, in particular, represented a turning point in the whole idea of war as a glorious endeavor, and replaced it with the notion of war as a dreadful and in many cases pointless slaughter.

This new idea, of course, did not stop the world from entering into an even worse conflagration in just a few years. I say “worse” because of sheer numbers and scope, as well as the much higher number of deaths within the civilian population. During World War I most civilian deaths had been at the hands of the ancillary Horseman of Pestilance: specifically, influenza. During World War II most civilian deaths were from the widescale aerial bombardment of cities.

Pacifists like to say that war has never solved anything. But that is most manifestly untrue. Certain things have indeed been solved by war, such as the ambitions of Adolf Hitler, and/or the ownership of certain territory.

It depends, of course, on one’s definition of the word “solved.” Human nature is such that the lion permanently bedding down with the lamb seems highly unlikely. Conflicts continue and almost certainly always will. New tyrants rise up–and, strangely enough, those tyrants tend to resist efforts at talk and/or reason and/or compromise. The call of power and violence always beckons.

But we have become reluctant to respond by killing on the scale of previous wars. That seems a good thing, an example of progress in the way people look at each other–not as cannon fodder, but as fellow human beings. At the same time (and this is no coincidence) we have been able to develop weapons so smart that we can come much closer than ever before to realizing our humane goal of reducing casualties, especially civilian ones.

It’s a one-sided development, however, and therein lies the rub. The enemy doesn’t seem to share it; and, although they also don’t yet share our possession of nuclear weapons, they are determined to acquire them and no doubt they will do so in fairly short order.

What’s more, the enemy has learned how to use our reluctance to harm civilians to their advantage, by the use of human shields and the purposeful targeting of civilians on both sides. This enemy doesn’t just not care how many of us they kill; they are positively delighted to do so, and revel in it; and they are not at all reluctant to kill a goodly number of their own civilians, either directly, or by letting us do them the favor as they carefully position those civilians in harm’s way.

Good intentions are something, but they are not everything. As the proverb says, they often have a tendency to backfire and lead to their opposite. The enemy doesn’t see our kindly attitude as an example of what nice guys we are; they see it as a weakness to be exploited. And exploit it they do.

So we are left with a dilemma. Our kindness will probably lead to widespread killing–if not now, then later; if not by us, then by others. So many make the argument that if we are to wage war, it must be waged with greater vigor and ruthlessness than we seem able to muster lately.

Varifrank points to how the Allies in World War II managed to “persuade” European civilians to cooperate and turn in insurgents hiding in their midst: by artillery barrage of the town itself. He also points out that our failure to do this sort of thing in the current situation of assymtrical warfare with the present enemy leaves civilians open to the tender mercies of those enemies. And that unfortunately, is no mercy at all.

If you haven’t yet read Meade’s essay on the Jacksonian tradition, please do. The Jacksonian strain in American culture is not eager to go to war. But it argues that if one does do so, it can’t be done with halfway measures. And this is not because Jacksonians are especially bloodthirsty. Rather, they believe that, in the end, a polite and respectful war leads to more bloodshed, and fails to resolve even the limited number of problems that wars can resolve.

This doesn’t mean that every war requires the no-holds barred use of every weapon in our arsenal. But the Gulf War is an excellent modern-day example. Our failure to topple Saddam did no favor to anyone, and some of the distrust sown in the civilian population of Iraq for our reneging on promises bore fruit in their reluctance to trust us in this later, and linked, war.

The official combat phase of the present Iraq war was so quick and inflicted so few casulaties on us that people often fail to realize that one of the reasons for this was not just our superior firepower, but the fact that the enemy had learned that conventional war was not the best way to engage us. So it laid low and made plans for an “insurgency” that would have absolutely no mercy on the civilian population. This would not only have the effect of terrorizing that unforunate group, but of sapping American will, already considered weak.

Speaking of that weakness, one would do well to ponder this statement by Joseph Stalin, made to Zhou Enlai in 1952 and quoted in the book Vietnam the Necessary War by Michael Lind (an author who, by the way, defies attempts at right-left categorization):

No, Americans don’t know how to fight. After the Korean War, in particular, they have lost the capability to wage a large-scale war…They are fighting little Korea, and already people are weeping in the USA. What will happen if they start a large scale war? Then, perhaps, everyone will weep.

And so it still plays out. Whether the Jacksonian impulse will reassert itself in American life–what it might require to get to that point, what form the response will take, and how many will weep as a result–is anybody’s guess. It won’t be pretty–but then, war never is, despite our best efforts to make it so.

Chaos, tyranny, and fledgling democracies in the Middle East

The New Neo Posted on by

Listening to part of President Bush’s press conference in Estonia (see the middle section of the linked article for a small discussion), two things struck me.

The first was the support Bush still gets from a country such as Estonia, so recently emerged from its own long nightmare of Soviet domination, and undergoing the struggles all such nations experience in trying to implement the goal of becoming a democratic and functioning nation. Estonians and other post-Soviet Eastern Europeans understand the hardships involved better than most nations on earth do; certainly better than we in the United States.

The second was that Bush is not abandoning the Iraqis to the tender mercies of realpolitik–at least rhetorically speaking, at least not yet.

As I wrote not too long ago [I’m in a hurry so will supply the links later]–in dysfunctional nations, there are mostly two choices: chaos or tyranny. If the tyranny is neither too tyrannical nor too dangerous to the rest of the world, tyranny may sometimes be the best of a bad business. The Shah’s Iran is a good example of that; it was replaced with a far worse tyranny.

As Bush pointed out in his press conference, not only Iraq but Lebanon is undergoing a chaotic passage right now. Both nations are struggling democracies attempting to resist both tyranny and chaos. Of course it’s hard, slow, and exceedingly difficult going.

The forces of evil (yes, I will most definitely use that word) are determined to sow chaos in both countries, and in any country in the area that tries to wrest itself from the grip of tyranny. Those pernicious forces know that chaos suits their purposes–not only tempermentally, because they love its nihilistic violence, but strategically as well, because it frightens the populations of the countries involved into desiring the strong hand of a strong leader to make a semblance of order out of the chaos.

Another strategic aim of these forces (which hasn’t been reached so far in the case of Iraq, but might be close to being reached) is to frighten and exhaust the US into abandoning the nation in question to either its chaos or its tyrant (who cares which? then the news will go off our front pages)–or, as the lamentable Jonathan Chait suggested recently in the LA Times, to restore an especially vicious tyrant (none other than Saddam Hussein himself) to power, in order to control the chaos. The truth is that in a place such as Iraq, the chaos was always underneath the surface, waiting to erupt.

And no matter what we do and which we choose: the support of a tyrant, or the attempt to pass through the chaos towards a better government for that country– the chaos and/or the tyranny inherent in such places can always be blamed on the US. And we can run from that chaos, crying that it’s too much for us.

I don’t blame the US for either the tyranny or the chaos. I do blame us, however, for not committing fully to doing whatever needed to be done to subdue the chaos when it first erupted, and for not being ready enough for it. Looters should have been shot at the outset. Al Sadr should have been defanged before his movement had time to grow.

I understand why it wasn’t done; we didn’t want to seem to be a heavy-handed occupying force. But we were an occupying force, occupying a nation that had been defeated in war. We used to know how to do this sort of thing; the aftermath of World War II and the occupation of Germany and Japan are excellent examples. But we no longer seem to have the belief that such a thing is possible. And that belief is key. Without it, we will abandon these countries to their Hobson’s choice of chaos or tyranny.

It’s all French to me: the Luré§at trial on a technicality?

The New Neo Posted on by

This is quite unofficial, but I got an email about the verdict in the Luré§at trial. It was in French, so I used Babelfish to decipher it; therefore the following information is extremely preliminary and rather suspect. However, from what I could discern, it appears he may have gotten off on a technicality that doesn’t go to any of the important issues in the trial.

When I wrote this piece about the trial, I mentioned, “one of [Luré§at’s] defenses appeared to be that he hadn’t actually written the words in question on his website; someone else had.”

And that appears to be the point on which he may have been successful. More later, as I learn it.

[See this and this for additional information about the trial and the more substantive issues it presented. The third trial, that of Gouze, is due to start right about this time.]