Archive for June, 2006
25 Jun 2006

Ethics & the New York Times

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The same New York Times, which on Friday overruled the strenuous arguments of officials of the elected government and proceeded to publish detailed information about a vital program monitoring international transfers of currency;

Administration officials, however, asked The New York Times not to publish this article, saying that disclosure of the Swift program could jeopardize its effectiveness. They also enlisted several current and former officials, both Democrat and Republican, to vouch for its value.

Bill Keller, the newspaper’s executive editor, said: “We have listened closely to the administration’s arguments for withholding this information, and given them the most serious and respectful consideration. We remain convinced that the administration’s extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest.”

the same New York Times, which today divulged details of “closely held secret” plans of possible reductions in US forces in Iraq, supplied by “American officials who agreed to discuss the details only on condition of anonymity;”

this same New York Times devoted a front page article in the Week in Review section to a prolonged meditation on the ethics of dining and the fate of the lobster (and a variety of other critters) destined for the dinner table.

Chin-stroking foodie journalist Michael Pollan got himself a Times magazine article, recyclable for his latest book, by purchasing a steer, and following its career on to feed lot and slaughterhouse. Frank Bruni, author of today’s “It Died For Us” lobster article, shares an anecdote of Mr. Pollan’s intended to allow Sunday Times’ readers to chuckle with a sense of superiority,

After the article appeared, Mr. Pollan received appeals from readers willing to pay large sums of money to buy and save the steer. One reader, he recalled, was a Hollywood producer who wanted to let the animal graze on his lawn in Beverly Hills, Calif.

“He kept coming after me,” Mr. Pollan said, describing a crusade that culminated in an offer of a meal at a famous emporium of porterhouses in Brooklyn. “He finally said, ‘I’m coming to New York, we’re going to have dinner at Peter Luger to discuss this.’ I’m like, ‘Excuse me, we’re going to have a steak dinner to discuss the rescue of this steer?’ How disconnected can we be?”

But we are all reading a newspaper guilty of a lot worse than popping a lobster into the cooking pot, or dining on beefsteak.

How disconnected is the Times?

How disconnected are all of us who buy it and read it, as it carries on its vicious partisan campaign against an elected administration, proceeding even to the point of repeatedly compromising National Security and endangering American lives?

25 Jun 2006

Careless Reporting

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Michelle Malkin continues today her excellent series of anti-NY Times posters created by her crack Army of Photoshoppers. Not to be missed.

25 Jun 2006

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

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An alert neighbor snapped a number of photos of a six foot alligator clawing at the front door of Robert & Roslyn Loretta in Hilton Head, South Carolina. He missed the doorbell, but came awfully close.

The Lorettas believed the reptilian visitor was attracted by the smell of barbecuing chicken.

video

24 Jun 2006

Using Language in War

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Some National Defense University scholars believe we ought to be using Islamic terms more carefully in order to avoid inadvertently assisting the enemy by endorsing his own viewpoint and assumptions.

In dealing with Islamic extremists, the West may be giving them the advantage due to cultural ignorance, maintain Dr. Douglas E. Streusand and Army Lt. Col. Harry D. Tunnell IV. The men work at the National Defense University at Fort Lesley J. McNair in Washington, D.C.

The two believe the right words can help fight the global war on terror. “American leaders misuse language to such a degree that they unintentionally wind up promoting the ideology of the groups the United States is fighting,” the men wrote in an article titled “Choosing Words Carefully: Language to Help Fight Islamic Terrorism.”

A case in point is the term “jihadist.” Many leaders use the term jihadist or jihadi as a synonym for Islamic extremist. Jihad has been commonly adapted in English as meaning “holy war.” But to Muslims it means much more. In their article, Steusand and Tunnell said in Arabic – the language of the Koran – jihad “literally means striving and generally occurs as part of the expression ‘jihad fi sabil illah,’ striving in the path of God.”

This is a good thing for all Muslims. “Calling our enemies jihadis and their movement a global jihad thus indicates that we recognize their doctrines and actions as being in the path of God and, for Muslims, legitimate,” they wrote. By countering jihadis, the West and moderate Muslims are enemies of true Islam.

The men asked Muslim scholars what the correct term for Islamic extremists would be and they came up with “hirabah.” This word specifically refers to those engaged in sinful warfare, warfare contrary to Islamic law. “We should describe the Islamic totalitarian movement as the global hirabah, not the global jihad,” they wrote.

Another word constantly misused in the West is mujahdeen. Again, in American dictionaries this word refers to a holy warrior – again a good thing. So calling an al Qaeda terrorist a mujahid legitimizes him.

The correct term for these killers is “mufsidun,” Streusand and Tunnell say. This refers to an evil or corrupt person. “There is no moral ambiguity and the specific denotation of corruption carries enormous weight in most of the Islamic world,” they wrote.

People can apply other words instead. “Fitna/fattan: fitna literally means temptation or trial, but has come to refer to discord and strife among Muslims; a fattan is a tempter or subversive,” they wrote. “Applying these terms to our enemies and their works condemns their current activities as divisive and harmful.”

The men also want officials to stop using the term “caliphate” as the goal of al Qaeda and associated groups. The Caliphate came to refer to the successors of the Prophet Mohammed as the political leaders of the Muslim community. “Sunni Muslims traditionally regard the era of the first four caliphs (A.D. 632-661) as an era of just rule,” the men wrote. “Accepting our enemies’ description of their goal as the restoration of a historical caliphate again validates an aspect of their ideology.”

The men point out that an al Qaeda caliphate would not mean the establishment of just rule, but rather a global totalitarian state where women would be treated as chattel, music banned and any kind of difference severely punished. “Anyone who needs a preview of how such a state would act merely has to review the conduct of the Taliban in Afghanistan before Sept. 11, 2001,” they wrote.

The correct term for the al Qaeda goal is global totalitarian state – something no one in the world wants.

Finally, the men urge Westerners to translate Allah into God. Using Allah to refer to God would be like using Jehovah to refer to a Hebrew God. In fact, Muslims, Christians and Jews all worship the God of Abraham. Using different names exaggerates the divisions among the religions, the authors say.

Complete article

24 Jun 2006

Kosola 2: “The Origins of Blogofascism”

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Mr. Siegel’s criticism was, needless to say, not well received, and the moonbats (in their customary fashion) howled abuse and hurled dung.

In today’s continuation of the exchange of fire between New Republic and DailyKos, Lee Siegel attributes the creation of the objectionable aspects of the culture of the left-side blogosphere (the constant usage of obscenity, the readiness to resort to intimidation) to the personality and philosophy of Kos himself:

“Moron”; “Wanker” (a favorite blogofascist insult, maybe because of the similarity between the most strident blogging and masturbating); and “Asshole” have been the three most common polemical gambits. A reactor even had the gall to refer to me as a “conservative.” Another resourceful adversarialist invited me to lick his scrotum. Please send a picture and a short essay describing your favorite hobbies. One madly ambitious blogger, who has been alternately trying to provoke and fawning over TNR writers in an attempt to break down the door–I’m too polite to mention any names–even asked who it was at TNR who gave me “the keys to a blog.”

All these abusive attempts to autocratically or dictatorially control criticism came about because I said that the blogosphere had the quality of fascism, which my dictionary defines as “any tendency toward or actual exercise of severe autocratic or dictatorial control.” The proof, you might say, is in the puddingheads.

I am overwhelmed by the intolerance and rage in the blogosphere. Conscientiously criticize, in the form of a real argument, blogospheric favorites like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and the response isn’t similar criticism, done conscientiously and in the form of an argument, but insults, personal attacks, and even threats. This truly is the stuff of thuggery and fascism.

Two other traits of fascism are its hatred of the processes of politics, and the knockabout origins of its adherents. Communism was hatched by elites. Fascism was born along the drifting paths of rootless men, often ex-soldiers who had fought in the First World War and been demobilized. They turned European politics into a madhouse of deracinated ambition.

In a 2004 article in The San Francisco Chronicle, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga told a reporter that he moved to El Salvador in the late 1970s with his family–one of his parents is Salvadoran–who apparently had financial interests there. The article relates:

“I believe in government. I was in El Salvador in the late ’70s during the civil war and I saw government as a life-and-death situation,” he said. “There was no one to root for. The government was a corrupt plutocracy and the rebels were Maoists. The concept of government is important.”

He remembers bullets flying in the marketplace and watching on television as government soldiers executed guerrillas. He also remembers watching footage of the Solidarity movement in Poland.

He was 9, and he asked his father what that was all about. His father, a furniture salesman, said, “It’s just politics.”

The future blogger said, “Tell me all about it.”
So he loves government, but hates politics. There’s something chilling about that. I wonder, does Zuniga consider the Solidarity movement disgusting, compromising, venal politics, too? And was there really no one to root for during the Salvadoran civil war? It’s hard to believe the usually inflexibly partisan Zuniga actually said that. The rebels may have been “Maoist”–whatever that meant to them in Central America at the time–but their goal of overthrowing a brutal, rapacious regime might well be something that a passionate political idealist and reformer like Zuniga, looking back at it in 2004, would sympathize with. Or so you would think.

But, then, Zuniga–let’s cut the puerile nicknames of “DailyKos, “Atrios,” “Instapundit” et al., which are one part fantasy of nom de guerres, one part babytalk, and a third thuggish anonymity–believes so deafeningly and inflexibly that it’s hard to tell what he believes at all, expecially if you try to make out his conviction over the noisy bleating of his followers.

He told Deborah Solomon in The New York Times that he joined the army out of high school to build up his self-confidence. Elsewhere, he has spoken of his love of 25-mile marches with a heavy knapsack. After the Army, college and then law school. But he never practiced law, it seems. He drifted to San Francisco and into the high-tech industry, where he designed Websites. Finally, he ended up in politics, again drifting into the Democratic party, supporting first John Edwards, and then Wesley Clark, and then, as a paid consultant, Howard Dean.

It wasn’t long after that when Zuniga began channeling other people’s rage.

24 Jun 2006

Kosola 1: “Fascism With a Microsoft Face”

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Lee Siegel yesterday harshly criticized many left blogs’ more-than-shrill reaction to the New Republic‘s suggestion that left-blog influence may be being traded for cash, and its revelation at the same time of the existence of systematic backroom coordination of news coverage, via “Townhouse,” a secret email list connecting the elite of leftwing blogging.

Siegel was deservedly scathing in his comments about the character and quality of the dialogue found on many of the most influential left-side blogs.

In response to Jason Zengerle’s most recent post on The Plank–“Hope you’re not tired of this Kos stuff”–no, I for one am definitely not tired of Zengerle’s artful and honest exposure of someone who, more and more, seems to represent the purest, most classical strain of hypocrisy. All the MSM has to do is reach out and touch the angriest, most vitriolic blogger, and he or she melts like butter on the beach….

..when bloggers do get the MSM to turn its head their way, the training wheels come off and they usually fall flat on their faces.

It’s a bizarre phenomenon, the blogosphere. It radiates democracy’s dream of full participation but practices democracy’s nightmare of populist crudity, character-assassination, and emotional stupefaction. It’s hard fascism with a Microsoft face. It puts some people, like me, in the equally bizarre position of wanting desperately for Joe Lieberman to lose the Democratic primary to Ned Lamont so that true liberal values might, maybe, possibly prevail, yet at the same time wanting Lamont, the hero of the blogosphere, to lose so that the fascistic forces ranged against Lieberman might be defeated. (Every critical event in democracy is symbolic of the problem with democracy.)

Even beyond the thuggishness, what I despise about so many blogurus, is the frivolity of their “readers.” DailyKos might have hundreds of responses to his posts, but after five or six of them the interminable thread meanders into trivial subjects that have nothing to do with the subject that briefly provoked it. The blogosphere’s lack of concentration is even more dangerous than all its rage. In the Middle East, they struggle with belief. In the United States, we struggle with attention. The blogosphere’s fanaticism is, in many ways, the triumph of a lack of focus.

24 Jun 2006

Why WMD Finds Were Not Publicized

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Jim Dunnigan’s Strategy Page explains why the Defense Department withheld information about WMDs found in Iraq by coalition forces for so long.

June 23, 2006: The revelation that Coalition forces have discovered about 500 shells containing chemical weapons (mostly sarin nerve gas and mustard gas) since 2003, most of which are pre-1991 Gulf War vintage, leads to the question as to why the U.S. waited so long to reveal this. The U.S. government has taken a beating for supposed failures to find weapons of mass destruction in the press, and from political opponents. There have been some discoveries that have made the news, most notably an incident in May, 2004, when terrorists used a 155-millimeter shell loaded with sarin in an IED. The shell detonated, exposing two soldiers to sarin nerve gas (both of whom survived and recovered). It is this attack that provides one explanation as to why many of the finds have been classified.

If the United States were to have announced WMD finds right away, it could have told terrorists (including those from al-Qaeda) where to look to locate chemical weapons. This would have placed troops at risk — for a marginal gain in public relations. A successful al-Qaeda chemical attack would have been a huge boost for their propaganda efforts as well, enabling them to get recruits and support (many people want to back a winner), and it would have caused a decline in American morale in Iraq and on the home front.

The other problem is that immediate disclosure could have exposed informants. Protecting informants who provide the location of caches is vital. Not only do dead informants tell no tales, their deaths silence other potential informants — because they want to keep on living. A lack of informants leads to a lack of human intelligence, and the troops don’t like being sent out on missions while short on intelligence — it’s easy to get killed.

24 Jun 2006

Careful! The New York Times May Be Listening

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Michelle Malkin suggested that some WWII posters were in need of updating, and her Photoshop-armed readers have responded with a nice collection of very apt images.

24 Jun 2006

Indict the Times

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Clarice Feldman thinks the Attorney-General should also be targeting the Times. Right now.

§798. Disclosure of Classified Information.

(a) Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates, furnishes, transmits, or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes, or uses in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States or for the benefit of any foreign government to the detriment of the United States any classified information—

(1) concerning the nature, preparation, or use of any code, cipher, or cryptographic system of the United States or any foreign government; or

(2) concerning the design, construction, use, maintenance, or repair of any device, apparatus, or appliance used or prepared or planned for use by the United States or any foreign government for cryptographic or communication intelligence purposes; or

(3) concerning the communication intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign government; or

(4) obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of any foreign government, knowing the same to have been obtained by such processes—Shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

(b) As used in this subsection (a) of this section—

The term “classified information” means information which, at the time of a violation of this section, is, for reasons of national security, specifically designated by a United States Government Agency for limited or restricted dissemination or distribution;

Section 798 continues:

The term “communication intelligence” means all procedures and methods used in the interception of communications and the obtaining of information from such communications by other than the intended recipients;

The term “unauthorized person” means any person who, or agency which, is not authorized to receive information of the categories set forth in subsection (a) of this section, by the President, or by the head of a department or agency of the United States Government which is expressly designated by the President to engage in communication intelligence activities for the United States.

And so does William Lalor.

24 Jun 2006

Prime Target

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Rick Ballard thinks Al Qaeda has overlooked one of America’s most important symbolic targets.

23 Jun 2006

Go Ahead, Do it, Take Them Down

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This week has been a very interesting week for me. And I know I have sort of arrived in a scary way, because now I’m not being attacked for what I’ve said and done. People are making stuff up about me now. They’re inventing things. And so I know now I’m on a different plane.

But this is the world we live in. There are people who have a vested interest in the status quo. There are people who don’t want to see things change because they’re not used to things changing. They know the world. It’s comfortable. It’s cozy. If they read the media, the media’s not going to tell them what we’re all about. Howard Dean thought we were all young. I’m not sure where he got that, because he should have known better. Hillary Clinton came up and she quoted the netroots based on something a conservative said. They need to live it for themselves. They need to become part of it, because this is an integral part of American politics now, and that’s not going to change.

And the beauty of it is at the end of the day, they can take me down. They can take Jerome Armstrong down. They can take down Atrios. They can take down any of the so-called leaders in the movement and it doesn’t matter, because this is not a leaderless movement. I used to say this was a leaderless movement, and I was wrong. It’s not a leaderless movement; it’s a everybody-who’s-part-of-it-is-a-leader. And so you can take any single individual down, and it will continue to live on.

video

23 Jun 2006

This Should Have Happened Long Ago

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Norm Mineta is resigning as Secretary of Transportation July 17th. Good! But not soon enough.

Under Mineta, the irrational prejudice against Americans defending themselves on air flights continued, and politically-correct safety measures reached levels previously unsurpassed. White-haired grannies were scrupulously searched in order to avoid ethnic profiling.

The Mineta regime’s rent-a-cop insanity reached its ultimate expression in 2002, when in Phoenix, 87-year-old WWII-hero and former governor of South Dakota Joe Foss was detained and had his Medal of Honor confiscated.

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