We Always Have Been At War With East Asia Too

(Thanks to Jonathan Davey)

(Link is now fixed.)

At The Movies With Bob Novak

NOVAK: The -- today was the debut of a Ted Turner picture, "Gods and Generals." I saw it. It's an excellent movie, and it really shows that the Southern people were fighting to protect themselves from a Northern invasion.

Is No Facts an honorable member of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, or is he just a camp follower? Don't worry, Novak, your faith and heritage don't disqualify you from membership.

Also check out this quote from Dan Coleman of the SCV: "The difference in the races at that period of time was something that was -- was accepted by all people in this country." Coleman also states that the Confederate flag stands for "freedom and independence."

Anyone who has dealings with or kind words for these twisted bigots or their causes should be voted out of office, boycotted, exposed and shunned.

Here's Sully's nuanced analysis of European public sentiment re: Iraq:

Remember the British Broadcasting Corp.'s old reputation for objectivity and accuracy? It's history....

Indeed, there are times when the BBC makes Fox News look like CNN. Here's one recent quote, worth noting. It's from the BBC's World Affairs Correspondent, David Loyn: "If America was engaged in the rest of the world rather than, frankly, wanting to bomb it and ... take its resources." There you have the British media establishment's true view of the underpinnings of American foreign policy. And people wonder why European public opinion is monolithically anti-anti-Saddam.

Is European public opinion "monolithically anti-anti-Saddam?" Only in fantasyland.

According to a January 2003 EOS Gallup Europe poll of European residents, two-thirds of respondents said Iraq is a threat to world peace. 59 percent of respondents favored European military intervention if weapons of mass destruction were discovered in Iraq. And 56 percent of EU nation citizens surveyed favored military action if it was recommended by the UN Security Council.

Now there's a continent speaking with one mind!

Sully may know his obelisks, but he's not too good on monoliths. Indeed, there are times he makes Fox and Friends look like Mensa.

FBI Detains Paco Rabanne the Jackal

The incident began at Philadelphia International Airport around 12:45 a.m. EST, when the 22-year-old man arrived at a security checkpoint while trying to make a flight to Saudi Arabia after a day of travel problems spawned by a major snowstorm.

The student's visa was fine, the FBI said later. But airport security asked him about a container of liquid in his luggage. While trying to show that the container was a bottle of cologne, the man inadvertently sprayed its aromatic contents on two airport security guards, officials said.

"First he sprayed himself," said FBI special agent Linda Vizi. "It was merely to demonstrate that he had cologne."

But the action prompted airport security to issue a code-red hazardous materials alert, which brought FBI agents, city police officers and hazardous materials specialists from the Philadelphia Fire Department rushing to the site.

Fearing the cologne could be a harmful biological or chemical agent, authorities sent the two guards to a nearby hospital, which quarantined its emergency room for three hours until what hospital officials referred to as "the unknown substance" could be identified as cologne.

Here's the bio-hazard in question, with hints of Canadian fir and orris.

This is not an isolated incident, either. All those right wing pundits -- Noonan, Coulter and the rest -- are getting what they want: the harassment of innocent non-white travelers.

(From Yahoo! News; thanks to Mac Diva.)

Under Ritten: An Act of True Generosity

On the right, says Bob Somerby, "[a]ngry billionaires pay crackpot pundits to spread an array of silly, wild tales." On the left, we have James Capozzola. We certainly got the best of that deal.

Thanks to a generous grant from James and the Rittenhouse Foundation for Wayward Bloggers, Roger Ailes is now banner ad-free. Those who felt the banner ads were the best part of this site must now go elsewhere to find out what their favorite color reveals about their personality or locate old classmates.

My sincere thanks to Jim, and in the words of Kevin Spacey's worst movie ever, I will do my best to Pay It Forward.

James Capozzola, writing in TRR: The Lighter Side of Rittenhouse reminds us of the often-overlooked pleasures of the flesh-and-blood world. (No, not uveitis.) You can "find" almost anything you want online in two seconds, via Google, and communicate with others in ways unimagined 30 years ago. But the web still can't allow you to appreciate a work of art or a performance like you can in person. My immediate community doesn't have resources of the quality that Jim's does, but I'm fortunate to live within a hour (with good traffic) of not only some of the finest cultural ... and natural ... resources in the Western United States. If you don't see anything new here this weekend, you'll know that I've taken Jim's advice.

We Are At War With Eurasia

We Always Have Been At War With Eurasia

Two And Two Make Five

Big Brother Is Watching You

(Special thanks to these fine folks and the makers of Victory Fries for their inspiration. Oh, and this bloke.)

Another Reason Not To Go To War

Will WAR IN IRAQ launch an unstoppable chain of events that will lead to ARMAGEDDON?

...

You�ve asked the questions. Now get answers from a respected, authoritative perspective. Subscribe to the Left Behind Prophecy Club.
Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, best-selling authors of the Left Behind series, along with noted Bible historian and end times analyst Mark Hitchcock have teamed up to lead the Left Behind Prophecy Club.

As news breaks and world-changing events unfold, you will be the first to receive in-depth analysis and interpretation from LaHaye and Hitchcock.

Apparently you have to pay $29.99 for the full answer, but the authors will tell you for free that Saddam is "rebuilding Babylon and "[t]his current rebuilding begun by Saddam Hussein and rise of Babylon is a key part of God�s plan for the last days." Further, "After Saddam is removed from power, Western nations will move into Iraq for a 'nation building' effort. This could easily pave the way and for a future western leader to develop the area into what the Bible says it will be in the end times."

The LBPC also will answer such illiterate questions as "Could the Antichrist be alive now? If so, how can he identify so he does not deceive us?"

Undoubtedly, he's French.

The protesters have it wrong: this war campaign does not emanate from oil lust or from colonialist appetite. It emanates primarily from a simplistic rectitude that aspires to uproot evil by force. But the evil of Saddam Hussein's regime, like the evil of Osama bin Laden, is deeply and extensively rooted in vast expanses of poverty, despair and humiliation. Perhaps it is even more deeply rooted in the terrible, raging envy that America has aroused for many years � not only in countries of the third world, but also in the broad boulevards of European society.

If you are envied by all, you should be careful about wielding a big stick. After World War II, the Marshall Plan benefited the United States and world peace more than America's old and new weapons put together. The big stick is necessary, but it is best used to deter or repulse aggression, not to "impose good." And even when the big stick is brandished to defeat aggression, it is crucial that it be brandished by the international community � or at least by a broad alliance of nations. Otherwise, it is liable to redouble the hatred, despair and lust for vengeance that it set out to defeat.-- Amos Oz, Feburary 19, 2003

In today's New York Times, Christopher "Family Guy" Buckley recalls a speech then Vice-President George Herbert Walker Bush gave in London in 1983:

The vice president began to answer, in his usual earnest, thoughtful and patient way. And then he stopped. I saw the air go out of him. He sighed. It was as eloquent and sincere a sigh as I have ever heard from a politician.

"Look, I have kids too," he said. "Don't you think I want to see them grow up?"

At the time of the Vice-President's speech, George W. Bush was 37.

Anyway, let's hope the voters don't turn to David Duke to discuss foreign policy.

The New Republicans

Two conservatives -- Roger Hertog and Michael Steinhardt -- come in to bankroll The New Republic and the mag turns even more conservative than ever. You didn't need the Bible Code to see that one coming. I guess that explains TNR's sponsorship of military-industrial complex schmooza-palooza coincides with the date of the magazine's relaunch.

How far the magazine has fallen since the halcyon years of Fred Barnes, Stephen Glass and Ruth Shalit.

Scripture For Dummies

For centuries, people have considered the Bible a work of moral and spiritual instruction or a work of literature. Turns out it's really giant Word Search puzzle for computers.

In a rather crass and goulish bit of promotion, Viking Press place an ad (not online) in today's New York Times for The Bible Code II which states that the Bible contains hidden messages which "predicted September 11." The cover of the book even contains an illustration which purportedly shows the words "twin" "towers" and "airplane" (singular) spelled out in a grid of Hebrew letters. (Apparently, the Big Guy only bats .500 on events of mass destruction.)

The genius who writes the Bible Code books, Michael Drosnin, wrote the first one in 1998. So why the hell didn't he predict 9/11 when he could have done some good?

If anyone gets an e-mail like this which supposedly came from me, please let me know. I can assure anyone who recieved something like this that it did not come from me.

Glory Holes ... In Berkeley?

Michelle Malkin exposes a scandal in the trucking industry.

Correction and Apologies to Jeff Jacoby, Mickey Kaus, Atrios, Mark Kleiman and My Unnamed Correspondent

As I stated yesterday morning, "If Jacoby is right -- which could be easily documented -- I will be happy to correct any error." And so I do.

Update: I have now seen excerpts of the articles, and they correspond with Mickey Kaus's description of them.

The Talking Dog has been giving out dog names to the blogs on his blogroll, and I got a good one! No shitzu or craphound for this blog. (And I'm the same breed as Eve Tushnet. Who knew?)

Here's the Dog's review:

Roger Ailes Over and Out tells us Roger is NOT the one who hangs out with Peggy Noonan. Roger does, however, frequently WRITE to the other Roger Ailes (the one now in charge of Fox News) to lambaste him, of late, for paying a fortune to Iraq for the privilege of covering the story there (without telling the public it is doing so; we don't report, you don't decide, I guess!) Roger is a bomb thrower. He gets to some of the dirtiest crap our government is doing in your name, and tells it like it is, in a nasty, punchy style. The blogroll contains many of the lefty standards, and other resources.

TD Designation: Top Dog

Verisimilitude.

Okay, so I'm feeling generous.

O'Racist Suck-Up Watch

Howie "FOX News Flack" Kurtz is at it again. The self-described media critic writes:

Fox's Bill O'Reilly is taking some heat for referring to Mexican smugglers as "wetbacks." "I was just fumbling around for the word 'coyote,' " O'Reilly says of the offensive term. "It was apparent this was not used in any kind of denigrating form."

But a month before the reference on his cable show, Conservative News Service says, the Allentown, Pa., Morning Call reported that O'Reilly used the word at a Pennsylvania appearance. The event's organizer, Shelley Brown, says she didn't hear it, and O'Reilly calls the charge "insane" -- adding that someone is orchestrating an e-mail campaign to Fox denouncing him. "This is an industry that basically wants to attack people they don't agree with," he says.

Two things immediately leap out from this blurb.

(1) O'Reilly doesn't deny making the statement. He says that charge is "insane," not that it's false. I guess O'Reilly hasn't been able to confirm whether a tape exists of the event. He also says he's being attacked by people who don't agree with him -- namely, people that don't like racists.

(2) Kurtz tries to deflect the blow to O'Racist's reputation by stating that he was referring to smugglers. But the term "wetback" doesn't refer to smugglers, it refers to anyone entering the country through Mexico.

More importantly, why didn't Howie -- who plays a journalist on television -- speak to the reporter in Allentown who wrote the article instead of just running O'Reilly's non-denial. Remember, the article in the local paper was written before O'Reilly repeated the racist slur on FNC. There's no reason for a local reporter to fabricate a quote in a puff piece about a local fundraiser. Moreover, why wouldn't the local organizer attempt to correct the reporter when the article was published, if she didn't hear O'Racist's statement? Wouldn't she want to deny booking a bigot for her big charity event?

I need to amend my question "Why does O'Reilly still have a job?" to "Why do O'Reilly and Kurtz still have jobs?"

Roger's Broadway Follies of 2003

Beginning February 21, the New York City production of Cabaret will star Doogie Howser, M.D., Mr. C and Debbie Gibson as Sally Bowles.

(Sorry guys and gals, no pictures of Debbie.)

If Rod Dreher gets in touch with his "inner Teamster," he'll have to kick his own sorry ass. Teamsters Local 705, in Chicago, which describes itself as the second largest Teamsters local in the Nation, opposes war with Iraq. (.pdf file)

(Thanks to Mark at pineappletown.)

Here's A New Yorker Who's A Patriot And Who Knows What A 2x4 Is

Back on 53rd Street, Dick Reilly rallied his sons for a final walk to the demonstration. A contractor, he was one of seven brothers who served in the military, and he is no pacifist. But this war makes little sense to him.

"Where's the exit strategy?" he asked. "So we go into Iraq and bomb and shoot, and Osama [bin Laden] has more recruits. How does it end?"

(From The Washington Post, via Altercation)

Hell-O-Scam says they'll have the comments problem fixed by Tuesday at the latest... after they've driven away all my loyal fans. Bastards!

And what is it with MSNBC? They still don't have the transcript of last week's Tweezer interview with RuBernard Goldberg online. Was it that embarassing?

Meet Your Liberal Media

The New Republic is a proud co-sponsor of THE HOMELAND & GLOBAL SECURITY SUMMIT to be held on March 3 - 5 in Washington D.C.

"What's the purpose of the Summit?" you ask. Well:

At the Summit, Companies with the most information, the right contacts, and the best promotional visibility will win the most business. The Homeland & Global Security Summit is designed to strategically position you to win the most business.

"Why go to the Summit?" you ask. Well:

The Summit will provide you with the right contacts: Meet decision-makers from:

The White House
Department of Homeland Security
Department of Defense
Transportation Security Administration, Coast Guard, and airport authorities
HHS, FDA, and CDC
Members of Congress and Congressional budget and appropriations staff
Governors, Mayors, and state and local officials coordinating homeland security
First Responders
Top executives from America�s major companies providing homeland security solutions and applications
Officials and executives from allied countries around the world

"Oh, really. And who else?" you ask. Well, how about:

Top executives participated from such major companies as ArmorGroup, Avaya, BAE SYSTEMS, Barringer Detection & Protection Systems, Boeing, Booz Allen Hamilton, CACI, DynCorp, Eastman Kodak, General Dynamics, Harris, Hitachi, Honeywell, IBM, Iridium Satellites, Deloitte Consulting, KPMG, Israel Aircraft Industries, Loral Skynet, L-3, Lockheed Martin, Motorola, Parsons, Raytheon, SAIC, Sony, 3M, Textron, and many other firms. Plus all these patriotic folk.

"Will anyone there be questioning the need for a huge Homeland Security bureaucracy? Or the acts already taken by the Defense Department and the Justice Department in the name of Homeland Security? Or the possible conflicts between the interests of Homeland Security contractors and the rights and needs of the American public, and the great potential for corruption in the contracting process?" you ask.

What are you, some kind of a wiseass?

No Higher Honor

Steve Dunleavy shows his contempt for the anti-war demonstrators:

This claque of peaceniks should look before they bleat and realize what signals they're sending to America's enemies and its so-called "allies." Saddam does not see the weasels practicing democracy. He sees the protests as proof of the weakness of America's leaders.

Well done!

Enemies, A Love Story

Saddam first used chemical weapons, in particular mustard gas, in 1983, in his war against Iran. By October of that year, according to recently declassified documents, the United States knew he was using them "almost daily." But the Reagan administration wasn't bothered. To the contrary, that December it sent Middle East envoy Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad. According to the book Spider's Web: The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq, by Financial Times reporter Alan Friedman, Rumsfeld presented a letter from Reagan that proposed restoring diplomatic relations and offered U.S. military and economic assistance. When Iran launched a new offensive in February 1984, Saddam added tabun, a lethal nerve gas, to his chemical repertoire. In the spring of 1984, Rumsfeld returned for another visit. By November, the United States and Iraq had restored diplomatic relations.

It gets worse. Records from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a 1994 Senate Banking Committee investigation show that during Reagan's presidency, the United States sold Iraq anthrax, bubonic plague, and botulinum toxin, all supposedly for medical research. In 1988, the Commerce Department approved Dow Chemical's sale of $1.5 million worth of pesticides to Baghdad, even though many in the administration suspected Saddam would use them for chemical warfare. Over congressional opposition, the Reagan administration sold Iraq twin-engine Bell "Huey" helicopters, which appear to have been used in Saddam's chemical attacks on the Kurds.

.... As Samantha Power points out in A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, the Bush administration in 1989 refused to join twelve other democracies in calling for a special U.N. investigation of human rights in Iraq. In 1990, Bush's Commerce Department even considered selling Baghdad large numbers of "skull furnaces," valuable to Iraq's nuclear program. At the last minute, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait scuttled the deal.

Thanks, Rummy. Any more of your messes that we can clean up for you?

The ultra-butch yet Christ-like Rod Dreher was spoilin' for a fight this past weekend.

"I also saw a woman carrying a poster that had an image of President Bush with a Hitler mustache drawn on.

"I nearly lost it over that. What kind of decent person would have anything to do with a movement that likened the president of the United States to a genocidal mass murderer?

"Just to see them walking the street is to put oneself in touch with one's inner Teamster."

Apologies

Update: Just fix the damn thing already, Haloscan, I hate fucking around with the template!

Jacoby and Liars, Part II

Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, winner of the not-much-coveted Breindel "Wingnut With The Golden Arm" award, wrote the following about Democratic Senator John Kerry last week:

Yet there is no sign that Kerry or his staff ever alerted the Globe when it mistakenly labeled him Irish, sometimes in front-page stories he couldn't possibly have missed.

The meaning of this sentence is clear: The Boston Globe incorrectly stated that Kerry was Irish in multiple "stories" on the front page, as well as in a story or stories that didn't make the front page. It turns out that Jacoby is wrong -- that he's no more accurate when he's reporting the facts than he is when he's passing off junk e-mails as his own work.

A reader of this blog sent me the following e-mail:

I entered "John Kerry" and Irish [in a Lexis-Nexis search of the Globe], receiving 93 results. Most of the articles were from the chattier, snippets portions of the paper. Most of the hits on Irish were descriptions of other politicians. The 92nd article on the list, from 7/10/1989 (Metro Region pg 1, Renee Loth), titled "Delicate Balance of the Ticket a Tricky Matter for Democrats" - is the only one to identify him as Irish and had the following passage:

Since issues have little relevance to the near-vestigial office of lieutenant governor, ethnic, gender and regional loyalties often come into play.

At the Democratic state convention in 1982, for example, delegates pledged to John Kerry, a candidate that year for lieutenant governor, threw their support to Murphy, Lois Pines, Sam Rotondi and Louis Nickinello on second and subsequent ballots in order to ensure there would be two Italians and two women as candidates for lieutenant governor on the ballot in September. Kerry, the lone Irish male, won the primary.

Given the degree to which "raised Irish Catholic" seemed to attach to so many other politicians, I found it very interesting that in the past 14 years Kerry was only identified as Irish once. Of course the whole mess is motivated by a disturbing anti-semitism and personal dislike for Kerry, but it wouldn't have surprised me if people genuinely thought the guy was Irish. The fact that the Globe has not identified Kerry as Irish since 1989 is pretty strong evidence that being Irish is not an element of the guy's public persona.

There you have it. According to Lexis, in the past 13 and a half years, only one Boston Globe article identified Kerry as Irish. It wasn't done on the paper's front page, either once or multiple times, as Jacoby claims.

Jacoby owes not only Kerry but also the editors of his paper an apology. So does Mickey Kaus, friend to plagiarists everywhere, who reprinted Jacoby's drivel as fact (see Feb. 10).

Update (2/17): Over at Eschaton, Boston blogger Jeff T has searched the archives at the Boston Public Library found additional articles in which the Boston Globe identified Kerry as Irish. Searching the Globe's archives online only turned up one of the three new articles, the one from October 1996. There are many reasons the online archive wouldn't be complete, including the fact that articles by free-lancers aren't available because of copyright issues. I don't know if the same is true with Lexis-Nexis.

Jeff T. points out that none of the articles he found were on the front page of the Globe, though Jacoby claimed multiple front page references ("front-page stories") to the Kerry-Irish connection. And the last of the three articles is quoting someone as saying that Kerry is half-Irish, which isn't the same as paper saying it (unless it's a columnist quoting herself, which would count, in my opinion). So Jacoby still has it wrong, although less wrong than before.

Correction and Update (2/18): Please see above.

Laura Goes Off Message

First Lady Laura Bush, who is rarely outspoken in her public remarks, said yesterday she thinks "constant news alerts" on TV about terror "are frightening people."

"It's a little bit like crying wolf," she said in Manhattan. "You know, it hasn't happened yet."

Psst, Laura... That's what your husband wants, to frighten people into supporting his war and distract voters from thinking about the failing economy. It wasn't the TV news channels that issued an Orange Alert, Pickles.

But it's good to see the first confirmed sighting of a crying Wolf.

Atrios points out that Mary Rosh is a Freeper. Meanwhile, a transvestite (and alleged courtesan) shows up at Rim Job's pro-war rally in Fresno. Surely a coincidence.

The Seipp article itself is intellectually dishonest in the extreme. I am second to no one in my belief that Mo Do is an overrated, substance-free hack with nothing to say. But wingnut Seipp finds fault not with Mo Do's defects as a writer, but rather with her current choice of her targets: Dubya, Rummy and the unelected Administration. All of the Dowd critics that Seipp quotes are faux-libertarians or racist conservative assholes, like Lucianne Goldberg. Seipp mentions Dowd's now decade-long Clinton bashing only in passing, and praises that aspect of career (and her example is from when Mo Do was a reporter, not an op-ed columnist). Seipp doesn't even mention Dowd's campaign of lies against Al Gore, or her bashing of other Dems.

And Seipp ends her piece about Dowd's superficiality with a very substantive critique of Dowd's "patronizing" wardrobe.

It's telling that Seipp didn't write this piece three or more years ago, when she undoubtedly savored Mo Do's attacks on the then-President and Vice President. Ultimately, Seipp's tirade isn't about Dowd's incompetence as an editorialist, but rather a Mo Do-style rant designed to advance the fraudulent argument that Mo Do is some sort of liberal.

Ten Thou -- That's A Lot of Smack

Talk about a sham "award." You have to pay 25 bucks to enter this excellence-in-journalism contest, presided over by a "confidential panel of judges." New York's A.G. should look into this.

That's Gotta Hurt

There were nuns. Toddlers. Women barristers. The Eton George Orwell Society. Archaeologists Against War. Walthamstow Catholic Church, the Swaffham Women's Choir and Notts County Supporters Say Make Love Not War (And a Home Win against Bristol would be Nice). They won 2-0, by the way. One group of SWP stalwarts were joined, for the first march in any of their histories, by their mothers. There were country folk and lecturers, dentists and poulterers, a hairdresser from Cardiff and a poet from Cheltenham. -- Euan Ferguson, The Observer