Deadly Mistake

Newsweek’s erroneous report and apology demonstrates journalistic cluelessness.

Paul Marshall comments on the fabrication of a "news story" by Newsweek which has resulted in the deaths of at least 15 people. It should of course be said that the fact that riots broke out at all shows the schizoid nature of the Arab world. When Palestinians desecrated Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity we did not see wild-eyed Christians rioting in the streets and burning people alive. And I don't recall many Muslims protesting that act of barbarism either. But for Muslims I guess we just expect them to act like out of control primitive savages at the slightest hint of criticism of Islam.

Of course there are people in that part of the world who are capable of acting in a more civilized and modern manner and who do not riot at the drop of a hat. But they are often at the mercy of those who are. And part of our job is to get the more civilized people a chance to control their societies so that they will improve their cultures and bring them into the modern world. And by doing so, help to make our pat of the world safer as well.

Unfortunately all of this is lost on the clueless editors of Newseek, who apparently did not understand just what was going to happen when they published their fake but accurate story. They do not seem to understand that in their rush and lust to damage the Bush administration they would cause the deaths of innocent people around the world and undermine the U.S. fight against Islamic radicalism. I guess they learned nothing from Dan Rather. But then, I don't really think they are on our side anyway.

This weekend, Abdul Fatah Fayeq, the senior judicial figure in Afghanistan’s Badakhshan Province, read out a statement from 300 Muslim clerics stating that President Bush should hand the culprits over to an Islamic country for punishment or else “we will launch a jihad against America.”

Meanwhile, in the face of Pentagon denials, Newsweek has begun backtracking. Newsweek seemed to have had doubts about the report from the beginning, since they ran it not as a straight news story but as a squiblet in the “Periscope” section. Now, in the May 23 issue, editor Mark Whitaker admits that their sourcing was suspect and stated “we regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst.” In the same issue, Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas is more forthright, asking “How did NEWSWEEK get its facts wrong?”

Equally disturbing is the fact that Newsweek reporters seemed to have little idea how explosive such a story would be. While noting that, to Muslims, desecrating the Koran “is especially heinous,” Thomas looks for explanations, including “extremist agitators,” of why protest and rioting spread throughout the world, and maintains that it was at Imram Khan’s press conference that “the spark was apparently lit.” He confesses that after “so many gruesome reports of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, the vehemence of feeling around this case came as something of a surprise.”

What planet do these people live on that they are surprised by something so entirely predictable? Anybody with a little knowledge could have told them it was likely that people would die as a result of the article. Remember Salman Rushdie?

Newsweek's Victims

And in this article, Ben Johnson looks at some of the damage done by the fake but accurate "news story" from Newsweek. It seems that the editors have indeed remained oblivious and are intent on not learning their lesson. Indeed, they seem anxious to repeat their mistake as loudly and as often as possible. I think it is fair to say that from now on, no thinking American will take the word of a Main Stream Media "news organization" on face value. It would be foolish and foolhardy to do so.

As far as I am concerned, any story from The Elite Media Monoculture which is critical of the Bush administration or Republicans in general, or which deals with politics or the war on terrorism, or any other important matter, will be considered a fabrication until proven otherwise. I now will treat all such stories with suspicion as a matter of policy. Conservatives would be wise to consider all outlets of the Main Stream Media as guilty until proven innocent. They have demonstrated, by their actions and their failure to correct them, that they deserve nothing more. After everything we have seen from The New York Times, CBS and now from Newsweek, how can the dinosaur media imagine it has any credibility left?

Arrest Made at Coulter Speech

Here is a fun article from The Daily Texan in which we see more of the childish behavior which has come to characterize The Angry Left. In this episode tantrum throwing students demonstrate just how little they are getting out of their college education by disrupting a speech from Ann Coulter. Apparently listening, thinking and even offering ideas or debate are just too much work. Shouting, stamping one's feet and making lewd gestures is so much easier.

Newspaper Circulation Continues Decline

In this article from The Wall Street Journal we get some hard numbers on the continuing decline of old media, in this case newspaper journalism. I can't help but think that a great deal of this decline is self-inflicted. Yes we are seeing a change due to the advance of technology and the Internet. But the decline of newspapers and the big three TV networks started long before there were any blogs or Fox news. That this article does not mention content is a telling clue. Perhaps Americans would be more willing to pick up a newspaper if they contained a more fair and balanced view of the world instead of the usual liberal hogwash.

An Open Letter

My Fellow Republicans,

In the last election the Republican base came out in record numbers to vote for President Bush and his agenda. And we won a great victory with a clear and decisive mandate. In the process we voters also put more Republicans in both the House and the Senate. But we didn't do this just to keep those seats in congress warm or because we want Republicans to get cushy retirement packages. We voted to help the President achieve his goals and to protect the county from those who would see it destroyed. We voted for the implementation of our ideas and our agenda. We voted for our party because we want action. We voted because we wanted to win. But now it looks as though some Republicans did not get the message that voters sent them. Rather, they seem to be more interested in currying favor with the opposition party and an elite media establishment that holds them, and us, in contempt.

What we are seeing is a group of Republicans who are helping the opposition party Democrats and the elite media to undermine and derail the President's foreign policy and his domestic agenda. And even some Republicans who are not part of this group seem unwilling or hesitant to act. In the end, it is the will of the American people that Democrats, the elites in academia, the media and some Republicans, are thwarting. This must change.

The President has nominated John Bolton to represent the United States at the U.N. because he is the kind of person who can get the job done and who will look to clean up the corruption that has been so evident there and which threatens U.S. interests as well as those of many other freedom loving peoples around the globe. And that is why the hard left of the Democratic party does not want him in that job. Democrats don't want to clean up the problems at the U.N. They don't want a Bush victory there. They don't want to see U.S. interests advanced at the expense of Kofi Anon and his fellow cleptocrats. And so they oppose the nomination of John Bolton. And that is to be expected from today's Democratic party because they are a party that is out of ideas. They are a party with nothing to offer but opposition for the sake of opposition.

But we expect more from Republicans. We expect them to stand for something other than their own petty interests. We expect them to stand up for principle.

In the Senate the Democrats oppose judicial nominations that would help to bring the courts back to some semblance of reason and sanity from their current activist condition. They oppose these nominations, not on the basis of competence, but on the basis of pure partisan political motive. The Democrats want an activist judiciary because they are unable to get the liberal-leftist agenda passed into law by legislative means. They cannot achieve their goals through congress, because they have steadily lost ground in legislatures throughout the country, including the federal legislature. They are losing elections and thus the power to pass laws they want. But they have a last ditch option; obstructionism. And the media has been cheerleading this effort all the way. In all of the long history of the United States, never has the Senate denied up or down votes for the high level courts on the basis of pure ideology as the Democrats are now doing. Never has the Senate stood in the way of nominees who wish to uphold the original intent of the Constitution as envisioned by the framers. Until now that is.

But we expect more from Republicans. We expect them to stand for something other than their own petty interests. We expect them to stand up for principle.

The Democrats have targeted specific Republican leaders such as Tom Delay. They are doing so because such leaders are motivated and effective in their jobs. But the Democrats do not want effective Republican leaders. The Democrats do not want Republicans to have any legislative victories if they can somehow be blocked. And removing effective leadership is a means to that end. The Democrats will continue to attack any and all Republicans without regard to reason or evidence, as they have amply demonstrated. In the last several years they have fallen to calling the President, a Hitler, a racist, a criminal and a threat to world peace. They throw the same accusations at any conservative or Republican who dares to stand up for the values and ideas we hold dear. But these are the accusations of a hysterical political party on the decline and with no hope of recovery. They are an indication of the Democratic party spiraling into its final and permanent irrelevance. They should be seen for what they are. And Republicans should take this opportunity to act with confidence and fortitude. It is time for Republicans to act like the winners that they are. It is time for Republicans to put the President's agenda into action. It is time to go to war with the obstructionists and defeat them in the congress, and in the court of public opinion, as they were defeated at the ballot box. It is time to take off the gloves. Nothing less is acceptable.

I call on all members of the Republican party base, and all Americans of good faith who value the democratic process, to make their views on this issue known to their representatives as well as to the Republican National Committee. And I call on all of those who want action to withhold financial and other contributions to Republican candidates and the Republican party until such time as action is forthcoming. The time for compromise and negotiation with the hard left Democratic party is over. The time to act is now.

The Bolton Mugging

The nominee dared to push the President's foreign policy.

The Wall Street Journal brings us this editorial in which they take the Republicans to task for failing to advance their agenda even though they won a majority in the last election. And this view is exactly right. Too many Republicans seem to be obsessed with being liked by the very people in the Democratic party and The Elite Media Monoculture who hate them and hold them in contempt. Republicans can win on the merits of their ideas, but only if they have the courage of their convictions and actually stand up for them. Appeasing the schoolyard bully is only a recipe for more abuse. It's time for the Republicans to learn how to fight at home for their agenda just as we fight abroad for the freedom of others.

Paris Hiltonomics

The estate tax made her what she is today.

I'm not a big fan of Paris Hilton, but after reading this article in The Wall Street Journal, I can see that there is a bit of a method to her madness. Simply put, the death tax is a major incentive to spend it while you have it, rather than give 45 percent of it to the government. So party on Paris, party on.

Red Dusk

It's time Hollywood gave up its love affair with communism.

Here is an essay by Bridget Johnson which is still worth reading if you have not yet read it. The question which she asks is why Hollywood has not made more films dealing with the brutality of communist oppression. The answer is that Hollywood admires communism and thinks communists are fabulous. Never mind that communist regimes around the world have been responsible for at least 100 million deaths. No, they had "good intentions" and so such statistics have no meaning to the Hollywood elites as they chow down on their catered lunches. And we don't need to worry about all of those gulags, work camps and cultural revolutions resulting in mass graves, starvation and torture. Nothing to see here; just move on.

Why the Liberals Can't Keep Air America From Spiraling In

Here is an article by CityJournal author Brian C. Anderson in which he looks at why AirMoonbat has been an utter and total ratings failure.

The left likes to argue that talk radio, and Republicans, have been successful largely because of better marketing. But AirMoonbat has had plenty of positive spin from just about every major source one can think of for the year it has been on, with the most recent example being an HBO documentary.

Ultimately what it really comes down to is proof that this theory, like so many others from the left, has no basis in reality. The fact is that the popularity of the largely conservative new media and the failure of AirMoonbat are both the result of content.

AirMoonbat's anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-individualist, anti-freedom content no longer sells, if it ever did, to the American public. Americans have a choice about which ideas they will support and they have made it. And that is why their ratings are sinking like a stone.

And look at Air America's ratings: They're pitifully weak, even in places where you would think they'd be strong. WLIB, its flagship in New York City, has sunk to 24th in the metro area Arbitron ratings — worse than the all-Caribbean format it replaced, notes the Radio Blogger. In the liberal meccas of San Francisco and Los Angeles, Air America is doing lousier still.

Unable to prosper in the medium, liberals have taken to denouncing talk radio as a threat to democracy. Liberal political columnist Hendrik Hertzberg, writing in the New Yorker, is typically venomous. Conservative talk radio represents "vicious, untreated political sewage" and "niche entertainment for the spiritually unattractive," Hertzberg sneers.

If some liberals had their way, Congress would regulate political talk radio out of existence. Their logic is that scrapping Air America would be no loss if it also meant getting Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Bennett off the air.

To accomplish this, New York Democratic Rep. Maurice D. Hinchey has proposed reviving the Fairness Doctrine to protect "diversity of view," and John Kerry recently sent out some signals that he too thought that might be a good idea.

Under the old Fairness Doctrine, phased out by Ronald Reagan's FCC in the late '80s, any station that broadcast a political opinion had to give equal time to opposing views. A station running, say, Hannity's show, would also have to broadcast a left-wing competitor, even if it had no listeners.

Diversity Mongers Target the Web

Can quotas rule the ultimate meritocracy?

Heather Mac Donald reports that the politically correct crowd is now demanding "diversity" on the web. To be precise, they are engaged in their usual quota scheme in which they count up the number of blacks, Hispanics and other minorities to see if it is the "right" number in the blogging world. The problem is, as usual, that the real world insists on intruding into leftist fantasy land. Due to the poor performance of minority students in liberal dominated public education, most do not graduate with the required reading and writing skills if indeed they graduate at all.

Of course I would bring to their attention the fact that I am of a Hispanic background with college entrance exams in the top 1 percent, but unfortunately for me I am a conservative/libertarian and thus do not count in their arithmetic of representation.

As for minorities, the skills gap in reading and writing means that, at the moment, a lower percentage of blacks and Hispanics possess the verbal acumen to produce a cutting-edge blog. For decades, blacks and Hispanics have scored 200 points below whites on the SATs' verbal section. Black high-school seniors on average read less competently than white 8th graders; Hispanic 12th graders read only slightly better than white 8th graders. And those are just the ones who are graduating. In the Los Angeles school system, which is typical of other large urban districts, 53 percent of black students and 61 percent of Hispanic students drop out before graduating from high school; most of the dropouts exit in the 9th grade. Assuming, generously, that those dropouts have 5th-grade skills, they are unlikely candidates for power blogging.

The Decline of the Liberal Faith

Here is an essay from Tom Bethell which appeared in the dead tree edition of The American Spectator which looks at the decline of liberalism as an intellectual movement. At one time liberals really were "true believers" who thought that society could be transformed through the application of benevolent big government. But for the most part those days are gone and the hard-core left has abandoned the field of ideas.

The Fonda Syndrome

Paul Beston writes in The American Spectator on Jane Fonda's recent non-apology apology. And once again we see that ageing members of the baby-boomer generation were very aptly named as they continue to demonstrate the qualities of adolescence rather than adulthood even into their advanced years.

About the infamous photos, Fonda writes in her book, "I simply wasn't thinking about what I was doing, only about what I was feeling," a neat distillation of the ethos of the 1960s counterculture. It was, she told Stahl, "the largest lapse of judgment that I can even imagine," but not, pointedly, a sin or equivalent moral transgression. Her error, it seems, was merely that she allowed herself to be caught on film.

She has been reminded about the consequences of her actions for 33 years by Vietnam veterans and POWs, and yet her awareness of suffering is still limited to her own, most of it self-inflicted: "I was the only person I could treat badly and consider that morally defensible."

For Fonda, like Bill Clinton and others of their ilk, it's all about the journey that they're on. The wreckage they leave behind is mere collateral damage in their ruinous quest for "meaning."

Air America Hype Versus Reality

Which Side Will Prevail?

I was able to catch the HBO documentary "Left of the Dial" this week and it was just as good as I hoped it would be. The look on their faces, (especially Janeane Garofalo), on election night as it became clear that Kerry and the Democrats had their heads handed to them by the American voters, was just priceless. Randi Rhodes made a comment that people lived in cities because "that's where the food and water is." I was forced to wonder how many farms there are in uppper Manhattan.

All in all a collection of immature and whiny crybabys who are desperately out of touch with the rest of the country and reality. For the sake of comedy fans everywhere, I hope they stay that way.

Oh, and one more thing. Here is an interesting analysis of AirMoonbat's financial and ratings situation courtesy of Brian Maloney, The Radio Equalizer.

Air America now lists 51 mostly tiny affiliates, which is not very impressive after a full year of media attention, industry affection and trade publication hype. Many smaller conservative radio networks can boast twice that number and still not be taken very seriously by radio professionals.

There are dozens of syndicated talk program providers for conservative programming, sports and specialty shows. Many hundreds are available for stations to take and you never read about them in newspapers. Yet lots of them are carried on more stations than Air America.

And it isn't too new to measure, especially not in New York City, where WLIB's just-released numbers show, in the broadest audience measurement of adults 12+, that Air America's flagship station has declined to a tiny 1.1 share of the audience. There's a full year of data to look at now and the picture isn't pretty for lib talk.

Jimmy Carter Who?

The American Spectator's "Prowler" demonstrates yet again just why Little Jimmy Peanut is the most ex of ex-Presidents in America. It seems he threw another of his tantrums when he was not made part of the delegation going to Rome for the funeral of John Paul II. Did he really expect to gain the favor of the White House after all his anti-Bush antics in the last couple of years? And where did he get the idea that kicking a black woman off of the plane in favor of a white Southerner was somehow a good thing?

Adventures in Harvard America

Shawn Macomber has a bit of fun Fisking the "Declaration of Progressive Principles" put together by a group of Harvard leftists.

Confessions of a Military Student

In this article Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr. writes about how a Marxist proffessor at Duke University tried to de-rail his educational career because the general had the temerity to actually like America.

What I Saw at the Meltdown

Paul Beston takes us back to those loopy days of the dot-com craze for a bit of humorous nostalgia.

An Interview With Peter Lance

This is an older article which I have been meaning to get to, but if you have not read it yet you might want to take a look. In this interview by Jamie Glazov, we get a look at the book by Peter Lance, "Cover Up, What the Government is Still Hiding About the War on Terror." In this book Mr. Lance goes into some detail about how the government either ignored or bungled vital evidence concerning Al-Qaeda during the 90's in several crucial investigations. Particularly interesting is his discussion of the details behind the downing of TWA 800.

'We Want God'

When John Paul II went to Poland, communism didn't have a prayer.

In this lengthy article, Peggy Noonan remembers the visit of John Paul II to his native Poland in the days before the fall of communism and the Iron Curtain.

A Party in the Wilderness

Downcast Dems, take heart in the story of Britain's Whigs.

Darrin M. McMahon looks at some of the similarities between the 19th century Whigs and today's Democrats.

Look Back at Anger

Why the "vast left-wing conspiracy" failed to unseat President Bush.

Jacob Laksin looks at the new book by Byron York, "The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy." In this review he covers some of the major points made by Mr. York and suggests that while the book is good reading, it could have had some more humor. And indeed, it is almost always appropriate to laugh at The Angry Left.

Democrats Without a Prayer

At The American Spectator, "The Prowler" takes a look at how the Democrats demonstrated once again just how tone-deaf they are with respect to Red State America. They could have made some pleasant noises about the passing of the Pope this weekend, even if they really didn't mean it. They could have pretended that the Pope was a relative they weren't particularly fond of and just been polite before moving on. But apparently even this modest effort was just too much for them as it would have riled up their Angry Leftist base. Yes, being polite is just so passe you know. So much better to pander to the kook fringe and keep up your anti-Bush boilerplate than acknowledge that a great man has passed.

Utopia Banished

Shawn Macomber reports that the French have given up on their utopian scheme to limit the work week there to 35 hours. In fact, according to this article, the French work even less than that on average. But with deteriorating demographics, a stagnant economy and high unemployment it has at last become clear to at least some French law makers that wishful thinking will not replace the laws of economics.