You will see to your right a widget for the Pajamas Media Presidential Straw Poll. Those of you who have not voted in the poll i this week can click to open the booth there and vote. Those of you who have already voted will see results from this "precinct" first (RogerLSimon.com), then can click to see ALL VOTES coming in from the Pajamas Media portal and elsewhere (eventually).
Would you be kind enough to test this out and let me know in the comments below how it is working for you.
Please make suggestions if you have them. We went to place this widget on as many blogs and websites as possible (it will be fascinating to see how people are voting at various sites). And we would like to get it working as smoothly as possible.
Muchas gracias.
UPDATE: Already we have found a problem with MSIE 7. Working on it. (Firefox, Safari seemingly okay)
In a brilliant article in today's JPost, Caroline Glick reminds an oblivious world that the Palestinian State everyone is clamoring for already exists. It started when Israel pulled out of Gaza. And no sane person would want to live there.
In these braindead partisan times, it's a breath of fresh air when someone actually does something constructive. One of those people who can be relied upon to act that way is James Woolsey, so when I received an email pointing to a new video he was involved with, I clicked over to YouTube immediately, saw it and instantly brought it over to Pajamas Media and to this site. The topic: energy independence for America. We should have had it twenty years go, but better late than... as they say.
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Apropos, I think the Bush administration's greatest failure in the War on Terror and the War in Iraq was not to involve all of us personally, but to make it just a military thing for soldiers and their families - the rest of us should go shop. Why not have enlisted us all in an energy independence campaign after 9-11? He would have had the whole country with him.
Meanwhile, you can read about Set America Free here. I just bought a t-shirt.
UPDATE: I don't know about all this talk about climate Armageddon coming from the UN... but even if they're a quarter or a third right, it's worth paying attention. (Of course we want to hear from scientists, not politicians and bureaucrats.) And all things considered, it's yet another argument for Energy Independence - get the Saudis and the mullahs and save the environment at the same time - a two-fer.
Unlike the gang over at NRO, when I hear a man is building a 28,000 square foot house for himself, I don't say "Good for him." Call me a Puritan, but there are limits to what a man actually needs on Earth.
But I do share their repugnance at John Edwards' monumental hypocrisy. Someone who goes around bloviating about two Americas should at least pay some attention to the appearance of his personal lifestyle, especially when running for President. The energy costs of a 28,000 foot MacMansion alone should give him pause, let alone the aesthetics. And let's not get started about Katrina.
So I have a recommendation for him. He should do what the Hollywood stars do when people start to criticize their private jets and multi-million dollar residences in Malibu, Vail, etc. He should buy a Prius!
The ironically named Right Wing Nut House asks "Where is Everyone?" with regards to yesterday's anti-war demonstration in Washington, saying that he was too young to go in Vietnam days, but wanted to.
Well, I was at those Vietnam demonstrations, several of them, as well as the March for Jobs and Freedom and other civil rights demonstrations. In those days, as RWNH indicates, demonstrating was cool. And it should have been. It was the right thing to do ... sometimes anyway ... at least on the civil rights side.
Now is another matter.
Yesterday's demonstrations were a disaster from the organizing point of view, although the press won't come out and admit it. Hardly anybody showed up. The Washington police no longer give attendance estimates - who can blame them - but from my memory of crowd configurations on the National Mall, this one looked puny indeed in the photos. The NYT said "tens of thousands" converged on the Mall, which is a common press euphemism for ten or twenty thousand. It looked more like the former. But even given the latter, that's an horrendous showing . You could get more people for a Little League game.
Of course the usual suspects were there - Jesse Jackson (what else does he have to do?), Sean Penn and Jane Fonda, making her triumphant return to the protest scene. In some television footage, I heard Fonda telling the crowd we should stay away from Iraq because they were an "older culture we couldn't understand" or some such. The idiocy of those remarks from a "feminist" boggles the mind. But, hey, she wore a nice coat.
So why did nobody show?
Maybe, deep down or not so deep down, the American public realizes the problems of our time are not remotely like Vietnam and the comparisons to that war being made by these aging protesters (Dick Gregory?) have nothing to do with the world situation and everything to do with them. Whatever one thinks about the War in Iraq, the situation we are in now - the global rise of Islamism, which is quickly overtaking Europe and has, as we all know, reached our own shores in a way Vietnam never did - is a hugely serious phenomenon with drastic consequences for our civilization (although evidently not for Jane Fonda). These jejune protesters have no answer for that, nor do they even mention it. If they did, they wouldn't be protesting and they wouldn't be on TV.
I was pleased to read Google's acknowledgment of culpability for allowing China to censor the Internet giant's search engine. Maybe they were listening to Tom Lantos. The Guardian's report even hints that Google is going to do something about it and insist on no censorship, which would toss an interesting hot potato in China's lap.
How would China react? This is no small question. China, as most of us would agree, is not a communist state in any sense Karl Marx would recognize, but more like a repressive Las Vegas. It frequently behaves schizophrenically, embracing modernity and primitivism at the same time. One example of this schizophrenia are the near simultaneous reports that Harbin scientists have been able to breed a florescent pig while China itself has banned advertising of its own traditional Year of the Pig in order not to offend Muslims.
In some ways frightened, China feels it constantly has to balance between its energy source (the Islamic world) and its market - the West. Added to this are the natural totalitarian tendencies of a post-communist state. What can we do to help? Well, mighty Google can by applying pressure for freedom. As for the rest of us, we might seriously think about a Manhattan Project for alternative energy sources. It worked once.
"The Geffen Contemporary" - Will Hollywood Kill Hill?
Hollywood, ever driven by the chic, is threatening to desert Hillary Clinton for Barack Obama, according to this ABC article. (Actually, I have heard rumors of this for several weeks, including that the instigator of this defection may be someone prominent on the Internet the show biz crowd thinks of as a deep political thinker.)
This is bad news for Hillary, just as it is dimwitted for Hollywood players to jump on such an untested bandwagon. But since the leading motivation of Hollywood political types has always been to be perceived as politically progressive, rather actually to be it, this is par for the course. The idea of someone like David Geffen as a "man of the people" is beyond ludicrous, but there he is scurrying to be first on his (Malibu beachfront) block to be underwriting the seemingly ultra-politically correct Mr. Obama - a man of peace who fully understands, unlike Hillary and her husband, what a reckless endeavor Iraq is and was. Yet in the world of deeper ironies, it would be this same chic Hollywood crowd who would be the first to be beheaded were Islamism to be successful. But in the palm-lined corridors of the Beverly Hills Hotel, where room service is always available, they could never dream such a thing to be possible.
Who was John Kerry crying for on the Senate floor as he announced he will not run for the Presidency? John Edwards said he knew the decision was a difficult one for Kerry "because we know his first instinct is always to respond to any call to serve his country." Oh, pul-leeze. The call to "serve one's country" is one of the great canards of our time. Kerry was crying for one person only - himself. He was crying for the failure of his ambitions. The rest of us are immaterial.
Analyzing the votes in the PJM Presidential Straw Poll
We've had over twelve thousand votes cast in the PJM Straw Poll and the results so far are fascinating to me - although I am not clear what to make of them. Apparently our readers, the ones voting anyway, are not too fond of John McCain who is running a surprisingly low 5.3 percent at this writing. Gingrich is running stronger than I expected and Giuliani is in the lead.
On the Dem side, we have Obama strongly in the lead with Richardson second. I think Richardson's high numbers may be accounted for by his being a favorite of Republicans. We encourage people to vote in both parties. (It could be that some voters are choosing candidates in their "enemy" party they think would be losers for that party.) As for Obama, the poll was linked by the Huffington Post and this may account for his popularity. Hillary is known not be a favorite of Arianna's.
But I speculate. The truth is I'm not sure what's going on. I do know that some of the campaigns are watching the poll. I also suspect we will have some profound swings in the weeks to come. (It's a weekly poll.) These swings may even be early harbingers of swings in the wider public. It will be interesting to see.
We inadvertently left off Ron Paul from our Republican candidate list and will add him next week - Fred Thompson also, whose name has been bandied about. We didn't think it fair to either of them to add them midweek. We'll also be keeping an eye out for third party candidates as they surface.
UPDATE: Ed Morrissey has persuaded me that a Bill Richardson candidacy could be formidable. Perhaps his numbers are no accident.
Sometimes you realize the Academy is actually comprised of film professionals
Despite the views of many "cinema pundits," they did not give key Best Picture or Best Director nominations to the overlong and poorly written Dreamgirls.
That said, this Academy voter's best movies of the year - The Lives of Others and Borat - were not nominated in that category. [Do you ever vote for anything that gets nominated?-ed. Can't remember.] In the Best Picture category I will have to vote for this film.
UPDATE - DEPT. OF PHONY CONTROVERSIES: AP Entertainment Writer Jake Coyle questions the adapted screenplay nomination for Borat because of its heavy use of improv: "What in the name of Kazakhstan is going on here?"
Sacha Cohen explains near the bottom of the article (from a Writers Guild question-and-answer session): "We'd sit around the writers' room and imagine the scene. What do we want it to look like?" He added, "Looking at the script and the finished film, they're remarkably the same."
At least as much, I would imagine, as most movies.
Is this, as Muslim spokesmen have charged, media sensationalism? Have their remarks been taken out of context? It's hard to imagine what context could possibly render them benign. Like CNN's "The War Within," the BBC's "Undercover Mosque" is in some ways most remarkable not for what is said, but for what is shown: The growing number of neighborhoods, towns, and cities where veiled women and bearded men proliferate while the pale British faces of yore recede. Neither program touches on one great irony: Having largely turned their backs on Christianity and embraced secularism, the British (like most Europeans) must now grapple with another, far more fierce religious ideology, and this time someone else's - on their own land.
I have watched some of "Undercover Mosque" on YouTube and, despite knowing exactly what to expect, found it blood-curdling. I have not seen "The War Within" because I understand it features Christiane Amanpour. Perhaps in another world, Allah permitting.
What does it mean? I don't know. We all know the criticisms of Internet polls (skewed audiences, technical manipulation, etc.). We're trying to fight that, at least somewhat. But what interests me is the possibility that, by breaking this into weekly polls, we may be able to track trends in the electorate. Obama's up this week, makes a gaffe, down next week. So it goes.
I also enjoy, in a macabre way, the idea that people are encouraged to vote in both parties. Some folks will brake out in hives over that. But speaking as one who has voted for candidates in both parties on the real election day, I can promise you - it doesn't hurt. And the ability to judge a person on his or her merits, not political party, is empowering.
If you haven't voted yet, go here. And then come back and do it again next week.
I finally caught up with the Academy DVD of this movie too late to vote for it. [You shouldn't admit that in public.-ed.] Not sure I would have anyway, but Miss Potter - a Beatrix Potter biopic replete with animated bunnies - is quite charming, not the least for its gorgeous Lake Country scenery. It also reminds you what a genius Potter was. Renee Zellweger does a good job in the title role - she's getting quite expert at playing Brits. Worth renting.
Obama Fever has obviously scared Hillary into the race early - and we are off on an excruciatingly long and expensive (the first billion dollar election) presidential campaign.
Is this all bad?
I don't think so. As I wrote earlier, the modern presidency has turned into a pressure cooker almost beyond belief. The person who accedes to that semi-throne (heaven help him or her) had better be able to take it. Whoever they are, if they make it through two terms, the electorate is more than likely to be disgusted with them. A fair number were disgusted with Clinton, an even greater number with Bush. Some of this has to do with their policies and proclivities, but just as much may have to do with familiarity breeding the proverbial contempt.
So someone like Obama, an unknown only a few months ago, ought to be forced through more than a few hoops. And so should Hillary, even though we have seen her ability to stand by her man to a degree it is almost hard to fathom. A steel magnolia indeed, even if not strictly fro the South.
But, it strikes me some of this Long March may be shortened by some interesting news from California. Our legislature, with Arnold's clear backing, is threatening to move the California Primary up to Feb 2008. Theoretically, that allows the victor in the most populous state to administer an early knockout blow to his or her opposition - or at least wound them substantially. Then the campaign simply limps forward for six dull months to the convention. This California turn of events strikes me as good news for Giuliani who should be popular here. I'm not as sure on the Democratic side, but I would imagine Hillary is happy, although I have heard on the grapevine that significant Hollywood figures (David Geffen) are falling for Obama.
Of note too is that Hillary announced her exploratory committee on her website. The battle of '08 will obviously be fought to a greater degree than ever online.
One of my favorite bloggers, Dean Barnett, links to a Fox News Poll this morning saying over one-third of our country either doesn't want the new Bush policy in Iraq to succeed or doesn't know if they do. Dean thinks these stats mean the sky is falling.
I'm not so sure. Actually I thought it would be worse. But I also think that Dean may be misinterpreting the poll . I'm no polling expert - and I'm not even sure polling experts are polling experts - but I think most of those people were just registering their strong disapproval of the war and general Bush hatred. If you sat down with them, they would acknowledge it's better for the US to win. Now, of course, there are the members of the Sheehanese Liberation Front and their ilk. But I refuse to believe they represent a third of the country - or even close.
MORE: But speaking of "Which Side Are You On?"... Over on The Daily Gut is this interesting post about the recent pronouncements of Robert Redford at the opening of the Sundance Film Festival. It seems "Ordinary" (Redford's nickname used by those of us, including yours truly, who taught at the Sundance Institute) proclaimed he he had been Bush's ally after 9-11 (only to feel betrayed by the President, of course). The blogger at the Gut says that Redford was, to put it mildly, fibbing.
The beta version of the Pajamas Media Presidential Straw Poll is open at our clandestine site. (wink, wink).
Have a look and vote. I'd also be interested in your feedback here. Many features are going to be added to this. It's a weekly poll that is based on the premise that many will be changing their votes as events go forward. I voted this week. Who knows how I'll vote next week? And, yes, I voted in both parties. We encourage everyone to do that. Consider it therapy. Or an experiment in democracy. Anyway, it's just for practice. Your real vote isn't for a long time yet.
I like Mary Katherine Ham as a writer and a person, but that didn't stop me from rolling my eyes when I saw this video in which she ascribed the Republican "thumping" in the last election to fiscal policy.
It's the war, stupid! (No, Mary, I don't think you're stupid in the slightest bit. Just parodying the old line here).
The reason the Republicans lost the election was Iraq - pure and simple. The war has not been going well and the Democrats and their media allies were able to exploit that to the hilt. Bush - whatever his pluses and minuses - has rarely been a terrific defender of his war policy, so that simply exacerbated the situation.
As for fiscal policy, whatever their complaints with a free-spending Bush administration, I can't believe in the end very many Republicans switched over to the Democratic side (of all people) because of it.
Until the War on Terror is over (and that doesn't seem like soon) it will dominate our thoughts and our votes far more than anything. The rest will be a sideshow. And it should be.
I have to agree with David Corn that Barack Obama's announcement of the formation of a presidential exploratory committee is pretty much of a snore. The Candidate seems already positioned to play a role in his own version of the 1972 Robert Redford film. He feels packaged from the start in this short video that ventures hardly a centimeter from the usual pieties about the need to come together, etc.
Of course in this world of focus group politics, that's probably all we can expect from people who intend to win. It makes you yearn for the fringe candidates like Kucinich and Tancredo. At least they stand for something, not that I care much for either of them.
The presidential season is beginning very early (we'll be sticking our stake in the ground at Pajamas next week) and I'm not sure it's entirely a bad thing to run these candidates through a lengthy wringer. What we may have learned in recent years is that a person's character is more important than his or her supposed positions on the issues. They change anyway. Whoever wins the presidency in '08 is going to be under tremendous pressure from day one. Like it or not, believe it or not, he or she will be a wartime president to one degree or another, probably to a large degree. They can debate the minimum wage or health care until their blue in the face or blue in the cross [Yuck, yuck, yuck.-ed.] but the moment they get their hand off that Bible, Koran, Bhagavad Gita or collected works of Robert Ingersoll, they are going to have to deal with Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Somalia, the Philippines, Thailand and on and on. The world is going to be in nuclear-armed ferment for years to come. The next president better be tested.
Virgina Postrel has a post about travel today, a subject which has been on my mind of late. Virginia is commenting on an article by a jaded reporter in The Guardian about travel having lost its allure in era when you can toodle over to Bruges from London for a quick over night.
I don't think I'm anywhere near as jaded at The Guardian writer--hard to do that--but I have to admit travel has lost a tad of its glamor for me. And for most of my life travel was my drug of choice. I was always running off somewhere, having journeyed as far as Siberia and Manchuria. Now I'm not so quick to go, although work has taken me back and forth between the two US coasts with some frequency. Part of this, of course, is the general unpleasantness of airports. But there's more. Europe, where I once spent so much time, seems hostile territory to me. I don't want to spend my time explaining to Euros that I think US foreign policy is not quite as crazy as they do. Like most people, I don't particularly enjoy being regarded as a villain - or as being allied with one. Back in the Vietnam era it was more fun. We were all brothers in protest.
Going to Asia is easier and it is no accident we chose Japan for vacation a year and a half ago. I'd go back in a heartbeat. Okay, two heartbeats. I'd want to make sure I got a prescription for Ambien. My other travel negative is the most important of all - jetlag.
Now that Kofi's out of office, there's finally been an indictment in NY and, no surprise, it's Benon Sevan, who is holing up on Cyprus where he is nearly certain to avoid extradition. Oh, well... Claudia Rosett, of course, has more - and, I'm told, will be following up as events break. [Someone should send her to Cyprus to track the varmint down.-ed. Who would that be? Not sayin'.]
UPDATE: Sorry about the bad link above - now fixed. Meanwhile, Claudia has tried to contact Sevan on Cyprus with predictable results.
I read with amusement that Schwarzenegger will hobble out on his recently broken leg to present the Best Picture-Drama Award at tonight's Golden Globes. What fun! I enjoy watching the Golden Globes because of their high trash value. They are so basically absurd that they underline what nonsense all awards ceremonies are - from the Nobel on down. Just sit back and giggle. (And multi-task so you don't feel like you're wasting too much time.)
As for the nominees in Arnold's "all-important" category, I have written elsewhere my opinions of The Queen (which I liked) and Babel (which I loathed). But, hey, those are only opinions. Everyone's got one, as the saying goes. What's interesting about reviewing movies is that, if you are honest, you have to admit that you can almost never change someone's opinion of a film. We all have our own visceral experience of a movie when we see it. No matter what someone says before or after or how "knowledgeable" that person may be, you still have your experience. That's what you felt. The rest, as they say, is commentary -- or even less.
My analysis of An Inconvenient Truth is over at Pajamas Media. What I neglected to say is that the documentary had a kind of reverse English on me. Because it was pompous Al, I wanted to disagree with him on the facts. Had it been a scientist, I might have felt differently. This film is about Al as Savior of the Earth, therefore repellent.
Also, have a look at Pieter Dorsman's update on the Canadian political scene. Interesting.
PJM's Washington Editor Rich Miniter and I drove out to Ritz Carlton Pasadena yesterday to an event staged by PBS to promote their forthcoming series "America at a Crossroads." In their words:
"America at a Crossroads" is a series of documentaries that explores the challenges confronting the world post-9/11, including the war on terrorism; the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan; the experience of American troops; the struggle for balance within the Muslim world; and perspectives on America's role globally. The series is scheduled to launch on Sunday, April 15 and will run through Friday, April 20, 9 - 11 p.m. (ET).
The series will be hosted by Robert MacNeil who was there at the Ritz Carlton showing short clips with two subjects of the 20 or so documentaries - Richard Perle and Irshad Manji. This is fairly revolutionary stuff for conventionally liberal PBS and there were a number of PBS affiliate representatives in the audience who seemed to be troubled or confused to be in the presence of "Prince of Darkness" Perle.
Now Richard P. is a friend of Miniter's and, more recently, mine and I can assure you that whatever you think of his political views his "Darkness" reputation is somewhere south of silly. He's something of a bon vivant. But never mind. People persist in their prejudices and we don't want to disabuse them of them.
I am looking forward to these documentaries on which PBS has lavished a surprising amount of dollars. (They photographed Perle everywhere from Kabul to his adolescent bailiwick at Hollywood High,) Manji proved to be an interesting character, a spike-haired "out" lesbian Muslim, quite personable when we chatted with her afterwards. Pajamas Media is going to do a video interview with her shortly.
And speaking of documentaries, I finally got a chance to view my Academy screener of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. I've written some "inconvenient truths" of my own in response that will appear on Pajamas tomorrow morning. [I hope they weren't colored by the fact that it was 28 degrees in Los Angeles this morning.-ed. Not at all. I take the long view.]
What interests me in the strange case of Mike Nifong - the DA in the Duke Lacrosse Team alleged rape case (very alleged at this point) - is why a reasonably intelligent person, as I assume him to be, would come to make such a long and ultimately self-destructive fool of himself. He is now apparently and at long last trying to beat a retreat through a recusal.
Much of the talk I have read centers on the DA's election needs - and no doubt this factors in. But his behavior, evidently hiding exculpatory DNA evidence from the defense, seems so neurotic it makes you think there were deeper and more complex forces at work. Nifong also appears to be one of those given to the simplistic view that minority members are always right when confronting the scions of the evil majority. Or, more precisely, perhaps he was relying on that concept as zeitgeist for which he received great support from the Duke faculty that made similar assumptions- a kind of cultural relativist justice in which the same laws should not apply to the disadvantaged. Of course at base this is racist - but not in the way Mr. Nifong thinks. Quite the reverse. This is yet another example of one of the hallmarks of our era - bourgeois liberalism become ultra-reactionary in its actions. Nifong's big mistake is that he took that zeitgeist a few steps too far. He should have known better.
Who wants to grow up to be President? I remember kids used to want that when I was running around grammar school in the Fifities. But now?
I was wondering about that when I watched Bush gives his speech last night. I knew pretty much what he was going to say in advance, so I concentrated mostly on Bush the Man.... the new creases on his face... the croaking voice... the sadness in his eyes. Who could want this job? I thought then of the latest group of aspirants. What kind of a person is Hillary Clinton that she could have gone through what she did in public and still want to be President? Most of us would run for the hills, never wanting to be seen in public again. But perhaps becoming President is the only justification in the end for what she did go through, for enduring that humiliation.
Being President of the United States has become such an important job on a global scale that it takes an almost superhuman being to do it. Yet such a being does not exist. I have an idea.... God for President! [I thought you were an agnostic.-ed. Still....]
It just occurred to me that Buddy Holly, who brought us that song, died in that horrible accidental plane crash with the Big Bopper and Richie Valens much in the way Mary Jo Kopechne's young life was cut short while that other Teddy - the one who always seems to be with us - survived and survived and survived.
And speaking of blasts from the past, now Teddy the K. is reminding us--ad tedium, ad nauseum-that we are back in Vietnam again, that Iraq is Bush's Vietnam, etc., etc. Ad nauseum is particularly apt because it was the unholy alliance of the Kennedys and Diem that brought us into the Vietnam War in the first place. But I don't want to go there. The lack of similarity between the Vietnam War and the war against Islamofascism should be so apparent to anyone with even the slightest knowledge of history (or even common sense) that I don't want to insult the intelligence of the readers of this blog by detailing it. But what continues to amaze is the psychology behind this persistent Vietnam fixation. Is everyone still trying to be cool? We're all aging, but enough already. Go put a down payment on an iPhone or something. The word Vietnam should be banned from our political discourse. It's getting as tired as Mr. Blackwell's "Ten Worst Dressed List" - and it's almost as old.
CORRECTION: It's older. The Battle of Dien Bien Phu was 1954. Mr. Blackwell began his list in 1960.
I know I am. I am in serious lust. This looks like the cool gizmo of all time. Being a boy-who-wants-his-toys, I have been following Glenn's reports from CES. But it seems as if Jobs has scooped everybody once again. If he stays out of jail, Apple, Inc. seems set for another huge run.
I'm agnostic about whether Iran's Supreme Leader Ayotallah Khamenei is alive and healthy, dead or sick (tending toward the latter)? But I'd certainly believe he is among the living if he was holding up a copy of the headline from today's Sports Illustrated in one of those photos - Hail to the Zen Master!/Jackson earns No. 900; Mavs' win streak ends at 13.
The rap on Kobe Bryant has always been that he doesn't know how to share the ball. But after four games in which he averaged 45 points a game, last night against Denver he scored 8 points while dishing out 10 assists. The Lakers, now fully Kobe's team, won in a walk. The following from the LAT's coverage says it all:
"Kobe facilitated a lot of things tonight," Jackson said. "I know there's some people out there that really wanted him to score ... but he did the right thing in the type of game that was being played. I think he felt very comfortable with that too."
Indeed.
"It felt great," Bryant said. "Fantastic. I said I needed a night off. You guys are working me too hard -- double overtime, triple overtime, overtime.
"In all seriousness, I'd much rather have this type of game, everybody just playing, having fun. It was the most fun we've had all year."
We don't know as yet how many more troops Bush wants to send to Iraq, but we do know that Harry and Nancy don't want him to send any. Although I believe their thinking on this matter is motivated almost entirely by politics, we have to take seriously the obvious: the situation in Iraq is grave and that doing too little may be worse than doing nothing. Bush has the habit of doing too little. If he is going to add to our commitment in the region, he had better do it with sufficient troop power to win. And that may be a greater number than is currently being bandied about. Whatever it is, it has to be enough to put a scare in Iran and Syria and let them know we intend to succeed. At this moment, they see an America in disarray and ambivalent, to say the least. Turning this around will demand leadership qualities on Bush's part he has yet to display. He has to confront not only the Reids and Pelosis, but an opposition media and a skeptical public - a tall order indeed. The one thing he has going for him is that he has nothing to lose. He is a lame duck with atrocious poll numbers. We will see now if he will get off the mat like Rocky did this year and make a comeback. It's going to be interesting to watch as sport - and a lot more.
UPDATE: Melanie Phillips underscores that the war in Iraq is against Iran.
You gotta love those Associated Press headline writers. I clicked on Throngs Protest Saddam Hanging in Jordan with trepidation to discover this "throng" consisted of 3000 people in Amman, a city of 2.125 million. Not exactly a huge turnout. But better than Lebanon where five hundred people protested the slaying ... oops, execution.... of Saddam. But to the AP, these are "throngs". To me they are about two minutes of traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway. What is interesting about the "throng" in Amman is they were shouting "Death to America and Iran." Now there's a combo.
One of the minor indications of the dopiness of the Cindy Sheehan anti-war crowd is that they are, shall we say, artistically-challenged. The level of anti-war music coming out of the current protest is somewhere south of pathetic. So they are left with some old songs from my generation. But it's hard to sing "And it's one, two, three, four... what're we fighting for?" about Al Qaeda and its Shia clones in Tehran, not to mention the Baathist thugs. (Er, maybe we're fighting for Western Civ). Even Lennon's "Imagine" leaves some strange contradictions. Imagine "no religion too" in our multi-cultural world. That steps on so many people's toes. Isn't Sharia equal to democracy to the cultural relativist? Let's not bother ourselves with how women and homosexual are treated in this sadistic doctrine. It's all equal, isn't it?... er, isn't it?
So no music.
I was reminded of that while watching the video of Sheehan & Co. suddenly turning on the Democrats. (It's over on Pajamas.) I almost expected them to break out in a chorus of "Hey, hey, LBJ... How many kids did you..." Well, you know the rest. Everything old is new again. I hope this keeps up because it will be amusing to watch the hypocritical Dems squirm.
Giuliani Campaign Strategy Stolen (aka The Big Leak)
One of the great non-events of today was the leaking of the presidential campaign strategy of Rudolph Giuliani, evidently by one of his adversaries. As is often the case with this kind of thing, however, there appears to be, in Gertrude's immortal words, "no there there." This supposedly salacious document, the part available at this moment anyway, imparts such startling information as the Giuliani people intend to raise a lot of money from rich people. As that other great wag, Moon Unit Zappa, once said "Gag me with a spoon!" Other information that is supposed to be a revelation is that some of his people are worried that his divorces will come back to haunt him. In other words, this Great Book seems to be a recitation of the obvious, just as, I would be willing to bet, 99% of other campaign strategy books.
May the "circle jerk" be unbroken, by and by, Lord, by and by
Excuse the outré reference. I just downloaded the Statler Brothers version of this song for my iPod and had been planning on adding the Carter Family's, so the lyrics were on my mind when I read Thomas Lifson's story this morning at American Thinker. Thomas wrote about the latest editorial gaffe at The New York Times, perhaps over-heatedly comparing it to Rathergate.
But never mind. It's bad enough without the R-word. Some "reporter" (ooo... scare quotes!) for their Magazine named Jack Hitt, in a wildly over-zealous pro-choice article, completely misstated some key facts in a story on the criminalization of abortion in El Salvador. As PJM Barcelona editor José Guardia put it: "The main character was a woman who the Gray Lady said was in prison for an abortion, but was there for killing her newborn baby. The paper had defended the article without bothering to check the readily available court documents."
Now that was back in April '06. The Times itself finally fully acknowledged this tawdry business in what appears to be a thorough and honest piece of reporting by its public editor Byron Calame yesterday. Not exactly blog speed, is it? [Isn't it interesting how embarrassing stories suddenly appear on December 31?-ed. You're not talking about John Conyers, are you?]
Which brings me back to "circle jerks." Some of you may recall that my amigo the NYT's executive editor Bill Keller - in what I assume was an intemperate moment - once called the blogs CJs. I suggested at the time that there might be a bit of projection in this. That suggestion appears ratified and then some by yesterday's belated disclosure.
But are blogs any better, you might ask? No, in a lot of ways. To begin with, we don't have the facilities of the NYT - yet. But that will come in time. Organizations like Pajamas Media and, yes, the Huff Post are just the very early fledgling forms of an emerging new media. The trick is to make that media an improvement on the past (other than in the obvious area of speed). Not an easy thing. Interactivity helps, but that too is filled with obvious traps. In any case, it's going to be an interesting year at Pajamas Media. We are going to welcome, indeed need, your input.
As for the "circle jerk" reference, we all know what that is about. Money, honey. The NYTimes are a-changin' and the ghost of Milton Friedman is floating above our heads. All of ours.
UPDATE: Shrinkwrapped continues the discussion (on the couch?).
January 31, 2007
I have to agree with 
Now that Kofi's out of office, there's finally been an indictment in NY and, no surprise, it's