It depends what the meaning of “sign” is

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I guess my apple is safe–at least for the moment. See this.

Kerry has a strange literalism about him. He said he would sign a Form 180; apparently he did sign a Form 180. But how many of his records were actually released, and whether anyone other than his friends at the Boston Globe will ever see them, is anybody’s guess. What a tiresome man.

Someone asked on another blog, why bother to talk about him any more? An excellent question. My answer is that he came within 60,000 Ohio votes of becoming President, he still seems to have designs on the Presidency and remains in the public spotlight, and he’s a fascinating case–and I mean that in the clinical sense of narcissistic personality disorder.

Dr. Sanity on terrorists and the press

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I think this article by Dr. Sanity is very–sane. She has done some original work here, analyzing the complex interplay between terrorists and the press and comparing it to the suicidal gestures of Borderline patients and the reactions of their enablers in the helping professions.

Terrorists need the press very, very badly; in fact, they could not function without it. Oh, they could kill people, but they couldn’t get the word out properly. Unfortunately, as Dr. Sanity rightly points out, the Munich Olympics massacre taught the Palestinians, and all potential terrorists, the important lesson that terrorism pays. It’s been paying ever since.

Dr. Sanity also offers some excellent suggestions that the press would do well to adopt to end this symbiotic (or perhaps parasitic) relationship. But I wouldn’t advise you to sit on a hot stove till they do.

The MSM and Lincoln

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I’m reading a book I find exceedingly fascinating. It’s called American Brutus, and it’s a fairly new biography of John Wilkes Booth, by Michael W. Kauffman. John Wilkes Booth and Lincoln are two figures about which most of us think we know a lot–all those US History courses we’re required to take do cover the events, after all. But, unless you are a history buff (which I never was, but am beginning to be), I doubt you’re familiar with the details this book describes.

Booth was a figure of huge complexity, one of the most famous actors of his day and part of an acting family as famous as the later Barrymores, as well as a person of great charm and intelligence (not to mention extraordinary handsomeness–see the photo on the cover). I used to think I knew what Booth’s motive was–he was a Southern sympathizer–but that’s an extreme oversimplification. The truth, as usual, is not only more complex, it’s more interesting–and more relevant to our times. But you’ll have to read the book to find that out (no, I don’t get a commission).

Lincoln was a figure who was widely reviled in his time for causing the war, and for policies instituted during it. I’d known that. But the book brings these facts alive by quoting contemporary sources in a way that makes the criticism seem–well, familiar (although the civic turmoil seems to have been even more extreme than at present):

The Civil War was unlike anything known in modern times, and the nation came closer to collapse than most people realize today. Emancipation of slaves, confiscation of property, and the draft often led to deadly clashes between the public and civil authorities. The political storm threatened not only the federal government, but state governments as well…In the middle stood Abraham Lincoln, blamed for the war and fired upon from all sides. It was not just the fringe element who hated the president; judges, senators, editors, and otherwise respectable citizens left no doubt of their contempt for him as well. One senator compared Lincoln to the tyrants of history, saying “They are all buried beneath the wave of oblivion compared to what this man of yesterday, this Abraham Lincoln, that neither you nor I ever heard of four years ago, has chosen to exercise…” To that senator and countless citizens, Abraham Lincoln was the American Caesar, out to establish a new empire from the ashes of a republic.

Thus, the name of the book: American Brutus, which is how Booth saw himself. Some newspapers of the time even called for Lincoln’s assassination, explicitly invoking the Brutus comparison.

The papers of Europe also got into the act of over-the-top criticism of Lincoln. Here’s the London Times, reprinted in an Indianapolis paper of the time:

Mr. Lincoln and his party have been dominant as no set of men ever were before in a land peopled by the English race. They have governed twenty millions of their countrymen with a revolutionary freedom from the trammels of law.

After the assassination, however, some newspapers that had formerly been fiercely anti-Lincoln backtracked and suddenly decided he was a hero after all. Some papers which had been most critical of Lincoln were set on by angry mobs. This was part of a pattern of post-assassination violence in which some who were heard to speak out in favor Booth’s act were lynched. Although there’s no record of the number of such deaths, the author believes it was in the hundreds.

Here is how Europe and Canada reacted:

Throughout most of the civilized world, foreign leaders expressed horror at the assassination and sympathy for the nation’s loss. But in Montreal, reactions were mixed. Canadian officials offered condolences, and a great many citizens draped their buildings in mourning. But others celebrated openly, and their revelry caused the U.S. consul to remark that “treason has transformed them to brutes, and seems to have eradicated from their breasts all sense of moral right.” He would have been deeply offended by an editorial in the London Examiner that said, “It must be remembered that atrocious as was Booth’s deed, his ‘sic semper tyrannis’ was literally justified by the facts. The man he killed had murdered the Constitution of the United States, had contradicted and set at naught the principles under which the States came together, had practically denied the competence of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, and overthrown all for which Washington fought and Patrick Henry spoke.”

Plus ca change…

Lightning

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Remember “Operation Lightning” in Iraq? Heard much about it lately?

Well, it’s still going on, but I haven’t been able to find any coverage of these events in the MSM. I guess they’re not important.

Iraq the Model provides the link, and it reminds me how much that blog meant to me in the early days after the Iraq war. I grew to trust the Fadhil brothers (although at the time I only knew their first names) far more than anyone I was reading in the American or European press.

This is what Mohammed at Iraq the Model had to say recently about the course of Operation Lightning:

Operation lightning is showing good results in Baghdad and its suburbs one week after it was launched and I guess that this good effect comes from the high coordination among the different departments of Iraqi security forces as well as the multinational forces.
The last 24 hours or so resulted in arresting some 300 terrorists and suspects in addition to confiscating amounts of weapons and munitions according to local papers and TV….

And later, this interesting remark of his: Generally speaking, Baghdad looks quieter these days .

As far as our press goes, though, Operation Lightening is aptly named–a sudden flash, and then gone. Or, to be literary about it, as Shakespeare’s Juliet said,

…the lightning, which doth cease to be
Ere one can say ‘It lightens.’

If this Iraqization campaign goes well, it could be one of the keys to the success of the entire enterprise in Iraq. Shouldn’t we be hearing more about it either way–success or failure?

Many mock Iraqization, comparing it to the Vietnamization policy of decades ago. But was Vietnamization actually a failure? See this for a thought-provoking reassessment of what Vietnamization was, how it changed over time, and what ultimately may have caused it to fail. I can almost guarantee the information contained therein isn’t anything you read about in the MSM of the time.

Jesse Larner on Moore and Bush

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Clive Davis posts an interview with one Jesse Larner, an interesting fellow who wrote a book criticizing Michael Moore. What’s so interesting about that, you say? Hasn’t that been done quite a few times before? Well, not from the left, which is where Mr. Larner is coming from.

Larner seemed strangely split in the interview, which certainly isn’t surprising. On the one hand, he seems to see Moore clearly enough, and to disagree with Moore’s playing fast and loose with the facts. On the other hand (and perhaps my own bias is showing here), he seems so rabid about Bush that he thinks quoting any actual facts about him to be quite unnecessary. In this passage of Larner’s, for example,

Moore gets the historical and political specifics wrong in many regards, but he is entirely right in his assessment of Bush’s character. I really do see Bush as a creepy, conscienceless, arrogant, narcissistic, strutting little sociopath who believes he was appointed by god to the presidency…

Larner comes perilously close to the old “fake, but accurate” position here. He seems to be saying that Moore is right about Bush because–well, because Larner agrees with Moore that Bush is a creep, so it doesn’t have to be proven, it’s just self-evident. Very strange, this Bush Derangement Syndrome. Bush is many things, and there are certainly valid criticisms that can be made (and are made every day) about him. But surely Larner can do better than these over-the-top ad hominem attacks (although I’m also sure there are some commenters here who will hold the truth of Larner’s remarks to be self-evident).

Larner also seems a bit sloppy about the words “liberal” and “leftist,” sometimes seeming to distinguish them, and sometimes using them somewhat interchangeably. To me, they are two quite different species, although of course there is some crossover and overlap.

And then there’s that “Bush stole the election” meme, stated, once again, without offering proof. Now, at the time of that election, I was still a total liberal Democrat, voted for Gore and didn’t like Bush at all (not at all). I was very upset by the election’s outcome–but I never for a moment saw Bush as stealing the election.

You can disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision (which I did at the time), but you cannot deny that Bush went through the legal process. If the Democrats must criticize, why don’t they just say the legal process failed? Or that they don’t agree with the electoral college system, because it can have the effect of someone losing the popular vote but winning the election, as happened in 2000? (Although I noticed that it didn’t seem many of them would have been the least bit perturbed had that very thing happened in 2004, with a far greater gap in the popular vote, as long as Kerry had won).

Certainly there are points one could fairly criticize in the 2000 election. But, “stole?” To use a word like that and not justify it is merely inflammatory rhetoric, exactly what Larner says he’s against. The truth is that the 2000 election was a statistical dead heat, in Florida and as a whole, and I cannot understand this continual cry of “theft” from otherwise intelligent people. And, for what it’s worth, I thought so even when I was a Democrat.

Here’s to you, Anna Maria Louisa Italiano Brooks (aka Anne Bancroft)

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This news is a shock–Anne Bancroft is dead at age 73. I realize now that in the list of my ten favorite movie stars, she should have had a place.

But maybe I forgot to list her because she wasn’t so much a movie star as an actress. One of the highlights of my childhood was being taken to the original Broadway production of “The Miracle Worker” and seeing Bancroft and Patty Duke go at it on stage. If you’ve only seen the movie, which is powerful enough, you can’t even begin to imagine the fury and the sense of true danger they portrayed when seen live. How they did it night after night without breaking every bone in their bodies is a mystery.

And then, of course, there’s her Mrs. Robinson. What would “The Graduate” have been without her? She was a beautiful, sophisticated, bitter burnt-out case. Who could forget those two delicious moments: Bancroft inhaling, then holding cigarette smoke in her mouth through Dustin Hoffman’s awkward kiss and then exhaling afterwards; Bancroft watching Hoffman ineffectually trying to get service in the hotel bar and then taking charge herself, not even having to raise that amazing low and throaty voice of hers to get a waiter to instantaneously materialize at their table.

When I saw the movie as a college student, I thought Mrs. Robinson was funny. Seeing it again thirty years later, I knew she was tragic.

I have a confession to make: I was in a movie with Ms. Bancroft. Yes, back in my ballet dancer/teacher days, I was hired to do what’s known as a “silent bit,” which is only one small step above being an extra. In the 1977 movie “The Turning Point,” I got paid a hundred dollars for a day of work, which seemed a princely sum to me at the time. It was hard work, too—we dancers had to suit up in various leotards and leg warmers, trying to look scruffy and yet glamorous at the same time.

We stood around on a cold stage for most of an entire day, waiting, for what I’m not quite sure. We weren’t privy to the dialogue or the plot, we just knew it was a scene that was supposed to be a rehearsal, and the stars were there. I seem to recall that Anne Bancroft was present, although I’m sorry to say I don’t exactly remember. Undoubtedly, though, Mikhail Barishnikov was, because I remember being astonished when for a moment I found myself next to him and saw that, despite his wiry frame and majestic presence, he stood ever-so-slightly smaller than my own 5′ 4″.

Once in a while we were told to dance a little combination of steps they had set for us. Every now and then, while we waited and waited and waited, our muscles growing ever colder and colder, people armed with spray bottles would come by and spritz us with water to give the appearance that we were sweating heavily. I was in the back of the stage, so far away from the camera that, try as I might when I studied the scene much later on videotape, I could not find myself. The scene itself, product of a full day, passed in less than a minute and was quite inconsequential.

In that movie, Bancroft played an aging ballet dancer who had sacrificed marriage and family to her career, and was now faced with the emptiness of retirement. I’m happy to report that life did not imitate art in Bancroft’s case. Her long marriage to Mel Brooks (something I never quite understood, not that it makes any difference), which produced a son Max, was reportedly that rarest of Hollywood commodities, a happy one.

The Village Voice gets it right, and so does Amnesty

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Amnesty International, the organization to which I belonged for 20 years (but no longer do), still does some good work. As some commenters here have pointed out, AI has reported on bad conditions in prisons in Castro’s Cuba–not quite a “Gulag,” of course, but still, it noticed.

That’s more than the NY Times has done. Nat Hentoff points this out in the Village Voice, of all places. He reports on some strange doings in Cuba lately, and not just at Guantanamo. There are indications that perhaps the purple finger revolution has even started to reach that beautiful and beleaguered island so close to our shores.

The MSM gets a twofer

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In my previous post on the Koran/urine-splashing incident, I spent some time wondering why this story got so much coverage.

Some things were fairly obvious: yes, the MSM seems determined to report anything that might reflect badly on Bush and his policies; and yes, Guantanamo is certainly one of those policies. And yes indeed, the MSM would like to see a Democrat in the White House in 2008. But the story seemed so unimportant (accidental urine-splashing by one guard?), and its potential to harm the US so clear, that it was hard to see why the MSM felt they simply had to cover this one–and heavily, at that.

So in that post I asked a rather rhetorical, angry question: why is the press so determined to make the task of protecting ourselves as hard as possible? I’m not so cynical about the press that I think that actually was their goal in publishing this story; instead, it was more in the nature of an unintended side effect. I think their real goal is something quite different.

Anti-Bush and pro-Democratic sentiment is certainly a motivator, but there’s another thing driving many journalists who pressed this story: their own self-interest. In other words, their careers. In this they are no different than most human beings, of course–looking out for number one is a time-honored activity.

So, how does the Koran/urine story advance the careers of journalists, or enhance the MSM? Well, remember the earlier Newsweek Koran-flushing story (it wasn’t so very long ago, but it seems like aeons, doesn’t it)? That story was attacked, particularly by bloggers. This was both unnerving and embarrassing to the MSM, which has gotten rather tired of blogs now that the novelty has worn off. In fact, after an initial flirtation with blogs, the MSM response to the blogosphere turned condescending (“guys in pajamas”) or even downright hostile. Blogs are no joke anymore–first Dan Rather and then Eason Jordan went down, now Newsweek and Isikoff were threatened. Who’s next?

For me, the sign that things were getting serious was when the ordinarily even-handed David Brooks wrote a poorly-reasoned apologia for the Koran/flushing story. It seemed to me that the MSM was circling the wagons, leaping to the defense of fellow journalists under attack.

Afterwards, when the odd symmetry of the Koran/urine-splashing incident turned up in a report (Koran down the toilet on purpose, Koran urinated on by accident–what’s the difference among friends?), the MSM found its chance to publicize it and get a twofer. They were able to present a story that was both anti-Bush and, even more importantly this time, pro-MSM. The message was “see, Newsweek wasn’t so wrong after all–even the military itself says this one is true, and it’s almost the same thing.”

This dog isn’t shaggy (neither are the horses)

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I’m a sucker for dog stories, and this one is epic. There are so many heroes here, I don’t know where to begin–Dawn Montiel and her son, the victim’s little sister, the staff at the school. But all the medals really belong to Maya, the black Lab.

Please read the article, or you won’t have a clue what I’m talking about. I had a lot of questions when I read it, most of them unanswerable ones about animal and human behavior. One more easily answered question of mine (or so I thought) seemed simple: was this actually a pit bull? Pit bulls are ordinarily not large dogs, but India’s reported size–120 pounds–is gargantuan.

From this website, which gives information about American pit bulls (APBTs), came:

The APBT ranges in size from 22 pounds to 110 pounds (rare), with the most common being between 35 – 55 pounds (16-25 kg.), in fact the original APBT’s were between 20 – 40 pounds (9-18 kg.) and were bred small for their main purpose, fighting.

Other pit bulls breeds are the Staffordshire Bull Terrier (40 pounds max) and the American Staffordshire Terrier (between 57 and 67 pounds, which seems curiously exact to me for a range).

Here’s all you ever wanted to know about pit bulls and more.

My guess is that India (thankfully now deceased, although Rasputin-like in his ability to survive the various attempts to kill him), the 120-pound pit bull in the Chicago story, was a cross with some other breed, most likely a Mastiff:

A grown [Mastiff] male often weighs about 200 lbs. / 90 kilos. It is not unusual for a male to weigh even more. About 220 lbs. / 100 kilos isn’t all that rare. The size varies quite a bit within the breed, though. If your Mastiff ends up weighing “just” 155 lbs. / 70 kilos, most people will still talk about your friend as if he was an average sized pony.

An average-sized pony? Well, actually, yes, if it’s a Shetland pony (although it’s hard to find weights for these)–or, even better, a miniature horse, which commonly weighs between 150 and 200 pounds.

This is one of the benefits of blogging, following a train of thought and finding (and then sharing) information about mindbogglingly bizarre but potentially fascinating things. The world of miniature horses is certainly one of those things, at least to my way of thinking–just look at those pictures! Cute, or grotesque, or some strange combination of the two?

But this is the most flabbergasting find of all. It is not a spoof site, it is not the Onion; this is for real. And, after a bit of reflection–why ever not?

MSM as Impressionist art: the vote in south Lebanon

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The subject? Today’s elections in south Lebanon.

The assignment? Compare and contrast:

Here’s exhibit A, an article submitted by Reuters, via Yahoo News.

Here’s exhibit B, an article submitted by IC Publications (I’d never heard of them before, but they describe themselves on their web page as the leading publisher for Africa and the Middle East).

If you care to read further, you could substitute for the Reuters story this, by CBS news, or even this NY Times story, marginally better at explaining the background to the situation, but still woefully inadequate compared to Exhibit B, the IC Publications story.

Exhibit A was the article that came up on my home page Yahoo News (maybe I should think about changing that home page already!) when I turned on my computer screen. It describes the Hezbollah victory in southern Lebanon. Actually, I wish I had a screen-shot of the original headline, because it changed while I was writing this commentary. The original, to the best of my recollection–the one that caught my eye–read something like “Pro-Syria candidates win in Lebanon.” Since I know the basics of the Lebanese situation but few of the details, my reaction was, “What’s up with that?” The story, unfortunately, fails to explain or to give any context that would help the reader understand what’s going on. It manages to present a few details–anti-Bush portraits, for example–but the only explanatory background it gives about why this particular vote happened in this particular area is the phrase, “the largely Shiite Muslim south.”

Exhibit B, the IC Publications story, gives background that helps the reader understand the particularities of the situation in southern Lebanon–its polling and demographic history–that make the vote comprehensible, and it manages to do this without being noticeably longer than the other article. Even the NY Times, which used to be famous for giving just this sort of explanatory background, is marginally better than Reuters but still woefully inadequate. Portions of the Times article could even be construed as being slightly Hezbollah-friendly, at least the quotes the Times chooses to include. See this, for example:

Hezbollah has sacrificed its incorruptible image and focus on service for political expediency and single-minded defense of its arms, said Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a professor at the Lebanese American University…Shiites are not appropriately represented in Parliament, receive far less development money in their neighborhoods and have generally been isolated from politics. Given the latest political turbulence, they have been especially isolated, she said.

The quote seems to indicate that service to the people used to be the primary aim of Hezbollah, and its terrorist activities against Israel just a sideline for political and propaganda purposes, rather than the other way around. And those poor, poor Shiites–but nothing about the Christian and Sunni Moslem disenfranchment mentioned in the IC article.

Without the internet, the average person couldn’t have done this sort of comparison-shopping. Even with the internet, it takes a lot of time and effort. I’ve become a regular newshound, but even I only do a search such as this when an article raises some sort of “What’s up with that?” red flag, as this one did for me.

MSM reporting has become a sort of Impressionist art–sketchy, light-dappled, not strictly realistic. Don’t get me wrong, I like the Impressionists–but as art, not journalism.

ADDENDUM: If you’re interested in reading clear and explanatory information about, and analysis of, the Lebanese elections, see this–from a blog, of course. It seems like the closest thing we’re going to get to that elusive commodity, “truth.”

On the accidental Koran urine-splashing

The New Neo Posted on by

Cannibalizing from my own comments again, from Roger’s:

As I went to my computer today, and my home page came up (Yahoo news), and I saw that the lead story (AP, naturally) was headlined, “U.S.: Gitmo Quran Was Splashed With Urine,” I felt (and still feel) the strangest combination of weariness and anger.

I have become convinced that these stories will continue until the MSM gets what it wants. What it wants seems to be the election of Democrats. What it may get instead is the undermining of Western civilization and the tradition of the Enlightenment, I kid you not.

Sorry to be so gloomy, but this story crossed some line I didn’t even know existed, with its absurd and self-destructive digging up and flaunting and trumpeting of anything–anything–that could get the US, Bush, and the military in trouble. Next it will be dust: “two US military personnel let dust blow on the Koran at Gitmo,” and thoughtcrime, “Five Guantanamo guards lusted in their hearts about defecating on the Koran.” Lost in the whole thing (of course!) is the fact that these prisoners are given Korans in the first place.

The Islamofascists can cut back on their budget for propaganda. The US press is doing the job far better than they ever could.

I’ll calm down soon, I imagine, and this will join the long list of similar incidents that I hope, in the end, will not matter. But why is the press so determined to make the task of protecting ourselves as hard as possible?

I’m still reading Radical Son, and have gotten to the part dealing with how the press and the left protected the thuggier elements of the Black Panthers back in the Seventies. Remember radical chic? There does seem to be a consistent and time-honored concern on the part of the press and the left, dedicated to the protection of terrorists, nihilists, or anyone “underprivileged” or of the third-world who advocates violence–protection from any hint of offense or mistreatment even of the mildest (and most accidental!) sort.

The Brothers Hitchens: Dostoevsky lite

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I didn’t know that Christopher Hitchens even had a brother—he hardly seems like a person who has relatives at all, but rather to have sprung, full-grown, from the head of some fairly malicious Zeus . But he does have a family, and it turns out that his brother Peter is a journalist of some fame, also. Peter Hitchens writes a column for the British newspaper the Daily Mail.

But the Brothers Hitchens have had some disagreements, to put it mildly. Until recently, they hadn’t spoken to each other in four years, supposedly on account of a joke told by Peter about Christopher, to which the latter took offense because he felt it made him sound like a Stalin sympathizer.

Peter Hitchens is a socialist turned Tory, while Christopher, of course, is a socialist turned hawk. Peter seems to have become far more conservative than his brother Christopher, and he “turned” earlier, too. Here is Peter’s blog and photo.

Since Peter seems to have been prescient enough to disapprove of the Rabin-Arafat handshake back when it happened, my guess is that he would fall into the category of paleo-neocon, whereas Christopher, if he’s a neocon at all (and my guess is that he would deny it vociferously) would definitely be a neo-neocon (see this article for a rather lengthy discussion—in David Horowitz’s FrontPage, of course!—of whether Hitchens could be considered a neocon).

And, get this—Peter’s at work on a semi-autobiographical book called “How to Change Your Mind.” Hmmm. I guess it’s another one I have to read when it comes out.

Here’s my favorite exchange from their interview, the one in which the brothers finally talk to each other after their four-year relationship hiatus. It’s not surprising that, when that “dialogue” finally happens, it’s not exactly warm and fuzzy, and it occurs in public. Towards the end of this epic get-together, the moderator/interviewer asks them whether they are friends. Both, characteristically, give answers that are witty and acerbic—although, as often may be the case, I suspect—it’s Christopher who seems to get the better of his brother:

Moderator (Ian Katz, of The Guardian): Are you two friends?

Peter: No. There was an old joke in East Germany that went, “Are the Russians our friends or our brothers?” And the answer is, “They must be our brothers because you can choose your friends.”

Christopher: The great thing about family life is that it introduces you to people you’d otherwise never meet.

Good line for a family therapist, I think.