Posted by: ed ||
10/15/2004 23:45 ||
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#1
Pretty good read. Maybe the WSJ is just letting its writers write despite MSM expectations, or maybe they don't want to be locked out in the inevitable GWB term 2, who knows. Good article in anycase - glad they published it.
#2
Thx, ed - an excellent in-depth coverage of the myth. Timelines. That's the back-breaker for the meme-makers and spin artists. Keep an accurate timeline, assigning motives later, when evidence and research like this make matters clear, and you are never played for a sucker, Internationalist / Socialist / Apologist / MSM / Dhimmidick style.
Freedom has, obviously, many enemies.
Vigilance and fortitude, friends. The fate of our Republic is in the hands of a dwindling few with true journalist ethics, a few polticians who "get it" and have the stones to publicly support freedom, and the Pajamahadeen.
#4
Because the WSJ is a business/investment newspaper, the editors understand that wishful thinking is no substitute for facts and analysis. This op/ed is consistent with historical reportage. Remember, they were the ones who printed the letter signed by the eight pro-U.S. European leaders (written by Aznar, signed by Blair, Berlusconi, Vaclav Havel, etc). Check out their editorials at their free site www.opinionjournal.com Daily blog by editor James Taranto is a hoot!
#5
2b: WSJ is one of the few that has actual reporters and still "reports" rather than just prints DNC press releases.
The Wall Street Journal has separate managements for the news and editorial pages. The news pages are as liberal as the New York Times. But the editorial page is solidly conservative. To counter this, the news pages have editorial sections of their own, positioned among the news pages, but clearly marked as editorials. Gerald Seib and John Harwood are some of the liberal editorialists for the news sections.
#7
"Such lapses suggest that the New York Times' reporters lack the requisite linguistic skills or cultural familiarity to report accurately even on a country as generally accessible to Americans as France--a possibility that should give us profound cause to pause concerning the accuracy of their dispatches from more exotic venues. And where real knowledge is lacking, ideological "intuitions" can no doubt be expected to fill the void."
I beleive the NYT was slapped here , very well written!
Posted by: Bill Nelson ||
10/15/2004 11:12 Comments ||
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#8
..an excellent in-depth coverage of the myth.
I didn't buy into that "myth" the first time someone blurted it out. What we need are people we can trust to stand by us, not people that will feel sorry for us.
#9
"It was not the nature of President Bush's policy that provoked the anti-American rage; it was rather the daily dosage of anti-American conditioning in the French and German media that predisposed the more susceptible sections of the public to assume nefarious motives behind a policy whose rationale in light of 12 years of Security Council resolutions on Iraq and in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks was reasonably straightforward and obvious. "
Excuse me for asking. But why has MSNBC's Keith Olbermann started a blog about politics? Almost no one reads them. These opinion-laden, e-journals draw only fleeting notice from Web surfers. But they have captured the interest of thousands of reporters who have written about bloggers and their supposed impact on the Bush-Kerry campaign. Google News, today, returned almost 4,000 citations for a search using "blog" as the keyword. "The audience reach of even the largest of the political blogs is tiny compared to other major political news sources," said Max Kalehoff, a spokesman for HitWise, a Web traffic measurement and analysis company. In a recent week, traffic to WashingtonPost.com was almost 650 percent greater than that of the most popular such blog.
HitWise's rankings of half a dozen blogs tell a very quiet story. The most popular site, DailyKos.com, accounts for .0051 percent of Internet visits each day. (HitWise only reports the percentage of visits to sites/categories versus all Internet visits, or market share, Kalehoff said.) InstaPundit.com was second with .0027 percent. Even the profane and popular Wonkette.com, profiled in The New York Times, Time and the Washington Post, limps in with .0011 percent.
The key to blogs' popularity in the media is not the number of readers, it's their quality. "Their collective influence seems to be because a few (writers) have become political insiders and are successfully reaching other key, intensive niche audiences," Kalehoff said. Guess where this piece came from? Give up? CBSMarkwetWatch. Hahahahahahahahahaha!
#3
Nothing to worry about. Be cool. We're not here.
Posted by: Francis Marion ||
10/15/2004 16:13 Comments ||
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#4
Using this same logic, the influence of Washington, D.C. is inconsequential in the world. It's land mass is tiny, and the few thousands who visit it each day only represent the smallest fraction of the world's population.
#5
650 %. That means the Washington Post, one of the Nations most important papers,with a staff of reporters and editors and photographers, etc, and over 100 years of history gets only 6 and a half times as much traffic as a Daily Kos. That my friends, is amazing news. Flabbergasting. How do you suppose Kos or Instapundit compares to a lesser paper? Or more relevantly to an opinon magazine, like Harpers, the New Republic or National Review? As for the tiny percentages of overall hits, well who cares? Most hits are to Yahoo, Amazon, local business, porn sites, etc. Whats relevant is blogs compared to news and political opinions hits overall - and im sure that looks much more impressive.
Note "Their collective influence seems to be because a few (writers) have become political insiders and are successfully reaching other key, intensive niche audiences"
But isnt that what mags like Harpers, the Nation, TNR, NRO, TAP, American Spect, Atlantic Monthly, Washington Monthy and Weekly Standard have always done? Does the above guy really mean to suggest that the masses watching the headlines on CBS or ABC over dinner is more important than the debates among the opinion mags? Is he ignorant, for example, of the way the networks have historically followed the news lead of the NYT, despite its having a tiny audience relative to the networks? And of the influence of the opinion mags on the NYT and WaPo? Within that large world, blogs are already important - they find stuff that sympathetic people in MSM can use.
Putting Words in the President's Mouth
Sixteen obvious points that George W. Bush should make during the Wednesday night debate.
(1) My opponent, Massachusetts senator John Kerry--or, as I like to think of him, Teddy Kennedy with a designated driver . . .
(2) There are two organizations pushing for change in November--al Qaeda and the Democratic party. And they both have the same message: "We're going to fix you, America." On the whole, the terrorists have a more straightforward plan for fixing things. They're going to blow themselves up. Although, come to think of it, Howard Dean did that.
(3) Senator Kerry, what do you mean my administration "lost" 1.6 million jobs? Did Dick Cheney accidentally leave 1.6 million jobs in the Senate men's room or something? Did you find them? Have you got 1.6 million jobs that you're hiding, Senator Kerry? And if you're elected, are you going to give them back?
(4) Speaking of jobs, Senator, how come every illegal immigrant who wades the Rio is able to find one in about 10 minutes? Meanwhile, your Democratic core constituency has been unemployed for years. Are your supporters lazy, Senator Kerry? Or are they stupid? Back when Clinton was president, did your supporters think they got their jobs at Burger King because Bill was sleeping with the cow?
Americans are presented with a choice in this election rare in our history. This is not 1952, when Democrats and Republicans did not differ too much on the need to stay in Korea, or even 1968 when Humphrey and Nixon alike did not wish to withdraw unilaterally from Vietnam. It is more like 1972 or 1980, when a naïve McGovern/Dukakis worldview was sharply at odds with the Nixon/Reagan tragic acknowledgement of the need to confront Soviet-inspired Communism. Is it to be more aid, talk, indictments, and summits — or a tough war to kill the terrorists and change the conditions that created them?
#5
Best essay I have read in a long time. Straightforward, cut through the BS, explanation of why attempted roadblocks, distractions, and sleight-of-hand won't be able to stop us.
Posted by: ed ||
10/15/2004 19:45 Comments ||
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#6
The phrase, for the wordy types and pedants (such as myself), actually was:
"Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam"
which means:
"And therefore, I conclude that Carthage must be destroyed"
'It's a different kind of war,' says Kerry. 'You have to understand it's not the sands of Iwo Jima.' That's true. But Kerry's mistake is in assuming that because it's not Iwo Jima, it's somehow less of a war. Until recently we thought of 'asymmetrical warfare' as something the natives did with machetes against the colonialist occupier. But in fact the roles have been reversed. These days, your average Western power — Germany, Canada, Belgium — is utterly incapable of projecting conventional military might to, say, Saudi Arabia or the Pakistani tribal lands. But a dozen young Saudi or Pakistani males with a little cash, some debit cards and the right phone numbers in their address books can project themselves to Frankfurt, Ottawa or Antwerp very easily and to devastating effect. That's the lesson of 9/11.
Posted by: 2b ||
10/15/2004 6:32:54 AM ||
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These days the most devastating profiles of John Kerry are the puff pieces. Take, for example, last weekendâs New York Times magazine, in which Matt Bai attempted to argue that the Nuancy Boy is a kind of strategic genius who was on to this whole terror thing a decade before anybody else. That line of argument gets a little tiring, so midway through Mr Bai included this relaxing interlude:
A row of Evian water bottles had been thoughtfully placed on a nearby table. Kerry frowned.
âCan we get any of my water?â he asked Stephanie Cutter, his communications director, who dutifully scurried from the room. I asked Kerry, out of sheer curiosity, what he didnât like about Evian.
âI hate that stuff,â Kerry explained to me. âThey pack it full of minerals.â
âWhat kind of water do you drink?â I asked, trying to make conversation.
âPlain old American water,â he said.
âYou mean tap water?â
âNo,â Kerry replied deliberately. He seemed now to sense some kind of trap. I was left to imagine what was going through his head. If I admit that I drink bottled water, then he might say Iâm out of touch with ordinary voters. But doesnât demanding my own brand of water seem even more aristocratic? Then again, Evian is French â important to stay away from anything even remotely French.
âThere are all kinds of waters,â he said finally. Pause. âSaratoga Spring.â This seemed to have exhausted his list. âSometimes I drink tap water,â he added.
In the debates, itâs easier. He and John Edwards know they have to sound tough, so their writers generally provide them with a line pledging to âhunt down and kill the terroristsâ. But itâs exhausting having to remember when to spit out the tough talk and not to get caught in some fake-o water-gate controversy, and so your concentration wanders and you get relaxed and then you say things like this:
âWe have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but theyâre a nuisance. As a former law-enforcement person, I know weâre never going to end prostitution. Weâre never going to end illegal gambling. But weâre going to reduce it, organised crime, to a level where it isnât on the rise.â
So the Senator has now made what was hitherto just a cheap crack from his opponents into formal policy: the Democrats are the September 10 party.
The âIâll hunt down and kill Americaâs enemiesâ line was written for him and planted on his lips. The âItâs just a nuisance like prostitutionâ line is his, and how he really thinks of the issue. What an odd analogy. Your average jihadist wonât take kindly to having his martyrdom operation compared with the decadent infidelsâ sex industry, but the rest of us shouldnât be that happy about it either. Kerry is correct in the sense that even if you dispatched every constable in the land to crack down on prostitution, thereâd still be some pox-ridden whore somewhere giving someone a ride for ten bucks. But, on the other hand, applying the Kerry prostitute approach to terrorists would seem to leave rather a lot of them in place. In Boston, where he served as a âlaw-enforcement personâ, the Yellow Pages are full of lavish display ads for âescort servicesâ. The other day, the Boston Phoenix did a lame hit piece on me, in which, if you could stay awake through the wet cement of the guyâs prose, the main beef was that I was not a ârespectable commentatorâ like David Brooks of the New York Times. âRespectabilityâ seems a weird obsession for a fellow who writes for an âalternativeâ newspaper funded by ads for transsexual hookers whose particular charms are spelled out at length, so to speak. In other words, while you can make an argument for a âmanagerialâ approach to terrorism, the analogy with prostitution sounds more like an undeclared surrender. This is aside from the basic defect of the argument: if some gal in your apartment building is working as a prostitute, thatâs a nuisance â condoms in the elevator, dodgy johns in the lobby; if Islamists seize the schoolhouse and kill your kids, even if it only happens once every couple of years, ânuisanceâ doesnât quite cover it.
So the choice of analogy is revealing and, as Kerry says, weâve been here before. Every so often, back in the Nineties, al-Qaâeda blew up some military housing, a ship, a couple of embassies, etc., and the Clinton team shrugged it off as a nuisance. No matter how flamboyantly Osama bin Laden sashayed down the sidewalk in his fishnets and miniskirt he couldnât catch the Administrationâs eye. In 2000, after 17 sailors were killed on the USS Cole, the defense secretary Bill Cohen said the attack âwas not sufficiently provocativeâ to warrant a response.
So Osama tried again, on September 11 2001. And this time, like the ads in the Boston Phoenix, he was very provocative. And thatâs the point: even if you take the Kerry doctrine as seriously as the New York Times does, the nuance of nuisance depends largely on the terrorists. When all they could do was kill a few dozen here, a few hundred there, they were a ânuisanceâ to Clinton, Cohen, Kerry and co; when they came up with a plan that killed thousands, they became something more than a nuisance. But that change in status was determined largely by them. They might go back to being a mere nuisance for 2005, just blowing up a US consulate hither and yon in places no one much cares about. But in 2006 they might loose a dirty bomb in Chicago and upgrade to über-nuisance again. The Kerry doctrine leaves it in their hands. And, in this kind of war, if youâre not on the offensive, youâre losing.
Thatâs what John Kerry means when he says âwe have to get back to the place we wereâ â back to the Nineties. Memâries light the corners of his mind, misty watercolour memâries of the way we were, but the reason theyâre misty watercolours is that we didnât see clearly what was going on. It wasnât just the nuisance of the biennial embassy bombing, it was the terrorist annexation of flop states and the thousands upon thousands of young Muslim men graduating from al-Qaâedaâs training camps and then heading off wherever the jihad calls. The British Muslim discovered among the Beslan gang, for example: if you downgrade the war to a ânuisanceâ, is that the sort of cross-border trend youâre likely to spot?
âItâs a different kind of war,â says Kerry. âYou have to understand itâs not the sands of Iwo Jima.â Thatâs true. But Kerryâs mistake is in assuming that because itâs not Iwo Jima, itâs somehow less of a war. Until recently we thought of âasymmetrical warfareâ as something the natives did with machetes against the colonialist occupier. But in fact the roles have been reversed. These days, your average Western power â Germany, Canada, Belgium â is utterly incapable of projecting conventional military might to, say, Saudi Arabia or the Pakistani tribal lands. But a dozen young Saudi or Pakistani males with a little cash, some debit cards and the right phone numbers in their address books can project themselves to Frankfurt, Ottawa or Antwerp very easily and to devastating effect. Thatâs the lesson of 9/11.
So, for all that Bush is accused of being âstubbornâ, itâs Kerry who refuses to change. He is, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer in their endorsement of the Senator this week, âalert to fresh global challenges, yet rooted in the approaches that made the 1990s so productiveâ. Well, theyâre half right. Heâs certainly rooted in the approaches of the Nineties, so rooted that he canât pull himself up and move on, despite the fact that last weekâs report of the Iraq Survey Group completely demolishes every prop of the Kerry world-view. When a man keeps telling you it doesnât count unless the French and the UN are on board, heâs either a fool or a liar â because no serious person can spend 15 minutes on this issue without understanding that the French state at every level, and quasi-state pillars such as TotalFinaElf, were to all intents and purposes Saddamâs concubines, and that the UN Oil-for-Fraud programme had been transformed into the regimeâs most reliable Weapon of Mass Destruction.
The attempt to talk the Senator up into a foreign-policy genius is sounding ever more loopy. âHe was getting it,â says Richard Clarke, the embittered Clinton-Bush terrorism âczarâ who now supports Kerry. âAnd the âitâ here was that there was a new non-state-actor threat, and that non-state-actor threat was a blended threat that didnât fit neatly into the box of organised criminal, or neatly into the box of terrorism.â
Yes, but what does that mean? Even if he does get the âitâ that nobody else is getting, what difference does it make if he doesnât do anything about it? The âblended threatâ may not fit neatly into the box, but Kerry fits in there perfectly neatly â the box of complacent assumptions about the Security Council, the EU, the G8 â and heâs so snug he has no intention of climbing out.
It seems to me that John Edwards has the right idea. In the gym of Newton High School in Iowa this week, he skipped the dreary Kerry-as-foreign-policy-genius pitch and cut straight to the Second Coming. âWe will stop juvenile diabetes, Parkinsonâs, Alzheimerâs and other debilitating diseases,â he assured the crowd and, warming to his theme, turned to the death last weekend of Christopher (Superman) Reeve. âWhen John Kerry is president, people like Chris Reeve are going to get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.â Read his lips: No new crutches. Now thatâs a campaign promise. President Kerry may be paralysed by nuance, but no one else will be. The healing balm of the Massachusetts Messiah will bring the crippled and stricken to their feet, which is more than Kerryâs speeches ever do. Just because he canât choose his water doesnât mean he canât walk on it.
In its own way, this is easier to swallow than the Richard Clarke line. The notion that he can perform miracles on the wheelchair-bound requires no more of a suspension of disbelief than that he can turn back the clock to September 10.
This has been a very dispiriting election, mainly because one party simply refuses to make any intelligent contribution to the debate. John Howardâs splendid victory down under came about at least in part because of the laziness of the Left â Mark Lathamâs Labor party offered a new face with not a single new idea. In the US, the Democrats have gone one further â peddling an old face with old ideas on the theory that Americans are worn out by the wild ride of the Bush years and really do long to âget back to where they wereâ, back to September 10, to the summer of shark attacks and missing Congressional interns. But all that going back to September 10 means is that youâll have to learn the lessons of the morning after all over again: I do believe that if clueless, complacent Kerry won, more Americans â and Britons and Canadians and Australians and Europeans â will die in terrorist ânuisancesâ.
But he wonât win. Because enough Americans understand that going back to where we were means a return to polite fictions and dangerous illusions. You canât put that world back together.
#7
We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but theyâre a nuisance. As a former law-enforcement person, I know weâre never going to end prostitution. Weâre never going to end illegal gambling. But weâre going to reduce it, organised crime, to a level where it isnât on the rise.â .....snip... But, on the other hand, applying the Kerry prostitute approach to terrorists would seem to leave rather a lot of them in place. In Boston, where he served as a âlaw-enforcement personâ, the Yellow Pages are full of lavish display ads for âescort servicesâ. The other day, the Boston Phoenix did a lame hit piece on me, ....the main beef was that I was not a ârespectable commentatorâ like David Brooks of the New York Times. âRespectabilityâ seems a weird obsession for a fellow who writes for an âalternativeâ newspaper funded by ads for transsexual hookers whose particular charms are spelled out at length, so to speak. In other words, while you can make an argument for a âmanagerialâ approach to terrorism, the analogy with prostitution sounds more like an undeclared surrender.
#8
Terrorism is a nuisance? Maybe for the French. Sure it exciting for Jacques to watch the falling WTC and dead American bodies the first time. But after the 18th destroyed skyscraper and 100th blown up airliner, it becomes such a nuisance. Kerry is a dangerous Assbite.
Posted by: ed ||
10/15/2004 18:41 Comments ||
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Samuel P Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations, the thesis of which states that global politics has entered a new phase and that conflict in this new phase will center on clashes between civilizations, has been the subject of much discussion and debate. Yet there is a general misconception when people read Huntington, especially when they read him at the surface, that he is talking about "civilization". He is not. A deeper reading quickly reveals that Huntington is in fact talking about culture - and not all "culture" per se, but one part of culture, "religion".
This is principally a reply to Andrew Young's article The Clash of Civilizations and American Intervention in the Middle East (LewRockwell.com, October 14), but it is also addressed to others who continue to misinterpret Huntington, whose thesis, Young argues, relates directly to Western relations with Islamic civilization in the Middle East.
IT REMAINS TRUE that people beset by an unhealthy thirst for politics tend to see politics everywhere. This monomania was most recently on display with the left's embrace of Roland Emmerich's fine disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow because they thought it was an assault on George W. Bush.
Brace yourself for more silliness. Today Matt Stone and Trey Parker's Team America: World Police debuts. Sean Penn has already taken to the ramparts, fuming at the movie's depiction of him and lamenting its right-wing message which will "encourage irresponsibility that will ultimately lead to the disembowelment, mutilation, exploitation, and death of innocent people throughout the world." Further out on the left, the Daily Kos is similarly disturbed by Team America: "The apparent goal of the movie was to make it a satirical jab at every facet of the 'war on terror.' Problem is, I think our side got the worst of it."
Posted by: tipper ||
10/15/2004 11:14:10 AM ||
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#1
...As much as I hate to admit this, I will probably go see TA this weeekend - give Stone and Parker this, they have skewered both sides equally.
BTW - I saw one ep of 'That's My Bush' - I laughed so hard I cried.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
10/15/2004 11:50 Comments ||
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#3
As a side note, Sean Pennâs next film is The Assassination of Richard Nixon. He plays a common man who is driven to assassination by the presidentâs political corruption.
Until someone steals his guns out of the trunk of his car. Then he's just shit outta luck. The End.
#4
What has Messrs. Penn and Kos so hot is that Hollywood actors are portrayed as self-important, callow, anti-American jerks.
And this is inaccurate . . . how?
Posted by: Mike ||
10/15/2004 13:21 Comments ||
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#5
"In no particular order: Hans Blix is fed to sharks, the city of Cairo is destroyed, Helen Hunt is cut in half with a samurai sword, and certain of the puppets engage in various acts of sexual depredation."
Michael Moore is blown to bits as well, and not by Monica Lewinsky. (I get the warm fuzzies just thinking about all this.)
#6
f*ck it bro's I'm seeing this thing. I liked "that's my bush" as well. Bush backing independent I think the Parker/Stone are pretty damn funny. Their skits of satan & saddam being homo lovers in hell makes me lmao.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Samuel P Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations, the thesis of which states that global politics has entered a new phase and that conflict in this new phase will center on clashes between civilizations, has been the subject of much discussion and debate. Yet there is a general misconception when people read Huntington, especially when they read him at the surface, that he is talking about "civilization". He is not. A deeper reading quickly reveals that Huntington is in fact talking about culture - and not all "culture" per se, but one part of culture, "religion".
