Via Theo.

The Washington Post set some new sort of record for opportunistic associative campaign smear reporting, by proceeding to headline a story informing its readers at length that Rick Perry hunted deer and entertained guests at hunting camps belonging to family and friends located in rural spot, known locally decades ago as “N-word-head.”

Wikipedia identifies the origin of such toponyms and mentions their date of extinction on official US maps.

In several English-speaking countries, Niggerhead or nigger head is a former name for several things thought to resemble a black person (“nigger”)’s head.

The term was once widely used for all sorts of things, including products such as soap and chewing tobacco, but most often for geographic features such as hills and rocks.[citation needed] In the U.S., more than hundred “Niggerheads” and other place names now considered racially offensive were changed in 1962 by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names.

Nor did “N-word-head” survive as the name of the area in which the Perry and Reed families’ hunting camps were sited. At some unknown point in the past, again decades ago, someone unknown removed and painted over the sign once identifying a rural Texas location by that name.

The Post obviously had no reason to believe that either Rick Perry, or any member of his family, had named the area “N-word-head.” The Post had no reason to believe that Rick Perry, or any member of his family, had erected a sign consisting of a rock with the “N-word-head” name painted on it. The Post had no reason to attribute any kind of meaningful responsibility for the existence or use in the distant past of that toponymic expression to Rick Perry at all. But associating a conservative Republican presidential candidate with the N-word, even so tangentially, is a way of flinging a big handful of mud at him, and who knows? Some of it might get into some voters’ heads and actually stick.

As an example of political opposition politics, or of journalism, this kind of thing is about as unethical, low, underhanded, cowardly, and despicable as you can try to get away with. I notice that the reptiles and invertebrates that wrote this contemptible story did not even sign their names to it, and I’m not surprised.
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Herman Cain dramatically diminished my liking and respect for his candidacy yesterday by jumping right in and trying to make hay by using this bilge. Screw him.

My liberal friends are always complaining bitterly about the terrible power of Rupert Murdoch to bend public opinion to his will.

Cornell Law Prof Bill Jacobson recently responded with a simple offer.

How about this. Conservatives take control of CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, WaPo, NYT, AP, Reuters, and so on, and liberals get the Murdoch empire? I’d take that trade in a heartbeat.

Our lords and masters at the Washington Post are in a foul humor today because, once again, the American people has proven itself to be an affront and an embarrassment to its betters.

Bitterly, the Post notes the results of latest Pew Research poll.

The number of Americans who believe—wrongly—that President Obama is a Muslim has increased significantly since his inauguration and now account for nearly 20 percent of the nation’s population.

What is the matter with you people? Don’t you read the Post?

It’s right there, in black and white, right in front of you. Obama is a Muslim is WRONG. And the correct answer is also there.

The number of people who now correctly identify Obama as a Christian has dropped to 34 percent.

After all, Obama has formally identified himself as a Christian, attending for more than 20 years a politically-influential, inner city Black Liberation church, whose congregation whoops and hollers and sings loud hymns in the intervals between delivery of the gospel according to Marx and God-damn-America! sermons by its extravagantly unorthodox cast of clergy. Does attending such a church by an ambitious young community organizer angling for political support for election to minority legislative seats not count as serious evidence of Christian belief?

How can a fifth of the country possibly answer affirmatively to a poll question that asks, Is Barack Obama a Muslim?

Well… it’s not as if Barack Hussein Obama is not an Islamic name or that he does not have a Muslim father and grandfather, which last considerations—in some people’s eyes, Muslims, at least—would automatically make him a Muslim.

When I was a boy, I went to parochial school, was taught religion out of the Baltimore Catechism, and served mass as an altar boy. If someone pointed to those facts as evidence of my having a Roman Catholic identity, despite my adult skepticism, I don’t think I could reasonably claim that he was incorrect.

Barack Obama, at the same period of life, was attending a madrassa, memorizing verses of the Koran, and knocking his forehead on the floor during devotions at a mosque in Indonesia. Even if Obama is as estranged from the religion of his boyhood as I am from mine, it would not be incorrect to identify him as being a Muslim by birth and upbringing.

But Barack Obama’s personal relationship with Islam clearly did not stop when he moved from Indonesia to Hawaii.

Just the other day, an American president celebrated Ramadan in the White House and held an… how do you spell it? “Iftar dinner” in the State Dining Room. How many Iftar dinners does the average Christian American hold?

While American troops are in the field fighting against Islamic fanatics, that president praised Islam and claimed (on heaven only knows what basis) that Islam has “always been part of America” and that Mohammedans (what ones?) had made extraordinary contributions to the United States. It is not typical of American presidents to make a point of celebrating the holidays of foreign adversaries in the White House or to resort to gross flattery and refer to the completely imaginary relevance and contributions of the foe.

Barack Obama, in reality, frequently displays a personal enthusiasm for Islam and Islamic culture. He always speaks of “Pahk-ee-stan,” carefully adopting a native’s pronunciation. He has boasted of a personal interest in Urdu poetry. He proudly demonstrates his familiarity with Islamic practices, customs, and terms, and has been known to incorporate Islamic phrases, greetings, and parting salutations in his public statements. He said “Ramadan Kareem” just the other day.

It is the Washington Post which is silly, naive, and deluded to take a politician’s pro forma practically required public position as probative and factual and to dismiss as irrational the American public’s obvious perception of differences in Barack Obama’s loyalties and identity.

That Pew Poll merely shows that the American people are capable of thinking for themselves, independently of the media establishment which believes itself entitled to define reality any way it likes, and the Washington Post’s petulant response evidences its frustration with its inability to impose its own version of reality.

I’ve just finished Dana Priest and William Arkin’s “Top Secret America,” The Washington Post’s two-year, three-part “investigation” into U.S. classified activities. If one of my graduate students handed this in as a term paper, I’d have a hard time giving it a passing grade. ...

[T]he authors have, at best, a weak thesis. That’s actually giving them the benefit of the doubt, because the series as a whole doesn’t really have a thesis. Instead, it is a series of strung-together facts and assertions. Many of these facts are misleading. For example, the authors point to the fact that large numbers of Americans hold top-secret security clearances, but fail to distinguish between those who are genuinely involved in intelligence work and those who require the clearances for other reasons—such as maintaining classified computer equipment or, for that matter, serving as janitors or food service workers in organizations that do classified work. Similarly, they point to the large number of contractors involved in top-secret work without differentiating those who actually perform analysis and those who develop hardware and software.

Second, the authors fail to provide context. They make much of the fact that the U.S. intelligence community consists of many organizations with overlapping jurisdiction. True enough. But what they fail to point out is that this has been a key design feature of the U.S. intelligence community since its founding in the wake of World War II. The architects of the U.S. intelligence system wanted different eyes to look at the same data from diverse perspectives because they wanted to avoid another surprise attack like Pearl Harbor. ...

In emphasizing the growth of the intelligence community since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the authors are at the same time accurate and misleading. They accurately note that the size of intelligence agencies grew rapidly after 9/11, but that’s like saying that the scale of U.S. warship construction ballooned in the months after Pearl Harbor. It’s true but misses the larger point. ...

During the 1990s the size of the U.S. intelligence community declined significantly because both the Clinton administration and leaders in Congress believed that we were headed for a more peaceful world. Indeed, the Clinton administration made trimming the size of the intelligence community a priority through its Reinventing Government initiative. Many intelligence analysts took offers of early retirement and became contractors—contractors that the U.S. government hired back after 9/11. A good deal of the post-9/11 intelligence buildup thus involved trying to buy back capacity and capability that had been eliminated during the 1990s.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

The introductory 1:47 video and a lengthy article by Dana Priest and William Arkin take a downright conservative-sounding tone of skepticism of big government, complaining about massive growth, duplication of effort, paralysis and confusion stemming from over-large bureaucracy, and an excessive cult of secrecy leading to a lack of accountability.

After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine. ...

An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances. ...

Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year – a volume so large that many are routinely ignored. ...

The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 21/2 times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001. But the figure doesn’t include many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs.

At least 20 percent of the government organizations that exist to fend off terrorist threats were established or refashioned in the wake of 9/11. Many that existed before the attacks grew to historic proportions as the Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending. ...

Beyond redundancy, secrecy within the intelligence world hampers effectiveness… say defense and intelligence officers. For the Defense Department, the root of this problem goes back to an ultra-secret group of programs for which access is extremely limited and monitored by specially trained security officers.

These are called Special Access Programs – or SAPs – and the Pentagon’s list of code names for them runs 300 pages. The intelligence community has hundreds more of its own, and those hundreds have thousands of sub-programs with their own limits on the number of people authorized to know anything about them. All this means that very few people have a complete sense of what’s going on.

“There’s only one entity in the entire universe that has visibility on all SAPs – that’s God,” said James R. Clapper, undersecretary of defense for intelligence and the Obama administration’s nominee to be the next director of national intelligence.

Such secrecy can undermine the normal chain of command when senior officials use it to cut out rivals or when subordinates are ordered to keep secrets from their commanders.

One military officer involved in one such program said he was ordered to sign a document prohibiting him from disclosing it to his four-star commander, with whom he worked closely every day, because the commander was not authorized to know about it. Another senior defense official recalls the day he tried to find out about a program in his budget, only to be rebuffed by a peer. “What do you mean you can’t tell me? I pay for the program,” he recalled saying in a heated exchange.

These contentions sound reasonable, though the idea of top secret government functions and processes being reformed by even more unaccountable journalists with a record of personal career advancement via damaging leaks of highly classified intelligence operations strikes me as a case of the local foxes putting on efficiency expert Halloween costumes and volunteering to improve operations in the chicken house.

I’m not in the least persuaded that the Post really needed to publish a cool interactive map of government facility and contractor company locations and a searchable database of companies working on top secret contracting assignments. Why do Washington Post readers need such detailed information? Couldn’t foreign intelligence services do their own research?

It is also far from clear to me that Dana Priest and the Washington Post have not knowingly again violated the Espionage Act of 1917 by publishing that map and database. This time, who knows? It is much easier for a leftwing administration to undertake prosecutions of these kinds of offenses. The Obama Administration has already demonstrated more willingness to enforce the law in National Security cases than the Bush Administration ever did. It will be interesting to see how the government reacts.

Will Dana Priest go to jail or will she just collect one more Pulitzer Prize?
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Fox News says the Obama Administration is expecting some absurd spending stories and quotes Intelligence Community sources talking about what a great resource for America’s enemies that Post website is going to be.

The Obama administration is bracing for the first in a series of Washington Post articles said to focus in unprecedented detail on the government’s spending on intelligence contractors.

The intelligence community is warning that the article could blow the cover of contract companies doing top-secret work for the government. At the same time, a senior administration official acknowledged that the kind of wasteful spending expected to be spotlighted in the series is “troubling” and something the administration is trying to address.

“There will be examples of money being wasted in the series that seem egregious and we are just as offended as the readers by those examples,” the official said. The official said some of the information in the story is “explainable,” in that some “redundancy” is necessary in the intelligence community. But the official said the administration has been working to reduce “waste” and that “it’s something we’ve been on top of.”

Other sectors of the administration were on high alert over the piece. A source told Fox News that the series amounts to a “significant targeting document” in that it will apparently bring together unclassified information from the public domain in a single location, making it a one-stop shop for this level of detail. The official said “few intelligence groups have the assets and resources to pool” this kind of information.

This has led to warnings about how the information could be used. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence sent out a memo saying that “foreign intelligence services, terrorist organizations and criminal elements will have potential interest in this kind of information.”

Abigail Thernstrom, nearly two weeks ago in National Review Online, pooh-pooh-ed the scandal of Eric Holder’s Justice Department overruling prosecutors in order to quash the voter intimidation case against Philadelphia Black Panthers, describing it as insignificant by comparison to the (more abstract, and less sexy) issue of the Department of Justice requiring racially gerrymandered election districts.

Forget about the New Black Panther Party case; it is very small potatoes. Perhaps the Panthers should have been prosecuted under section 11 (b) of the Voting Rights Act for their actions of November 2008, but the legal standards that must be met to prove voter intimidation — the charge — are very high.

In the 45 years since the act was passed, there have been a total of three successful prosecutions. The incident involved only two Panthers at a single majority-black precinct in Philadelphia. So far — after months of hearings, testimony and investigation — no one has produced actual evidence that any voters were too scared to cast their ballots. Too much overheated rhetoric filled with insinuations and unsubstantiated charges has been devoted to this case.

Nothing gratifies the left’s commentariat like a conservative come to Lenin, so Thernstrom’s characterization of the Philadelphia Panther affair as small potatoes was shouted from the rooftops.

Ben Smith, at Politico, treated it as headline news.

Adam Serwer, at American Prospect, gloatingly announced that Thernstrom’s comments exploded a conservative conspiracy to bring down Eric Holder and damage Barack Obama.

And Joan Walsh, editor in chief of Salon, was today hastening to admire Adam Serwer’s intelligence in the course of performing damage control. It turns out that the Washington Post, unlike the New York Times, really does have an Ombudsman representing the public’s interest in journalistic evenhandedness and objectivity.

The Philadelphia Panther Polling Place Intimidation story has been receiving coverage from Fox News and developing legs as a story and provoking public interest, causing Post Ombudsman Andrew Alexander to criticize the Post’s delay in covering it.

Walsh lays down the law in response to Alexander:

[I]t really is hard, with limited news room resources, to decide whether and how to cover the insane narrative of rumors, half-truths and lies being peddled by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, not to mention Fox News “reporters” like Megyn Kelly. By covering them (as Salon readers frequently remind us) we risk spreading lies and delusion beyond the right-wing smogosphere. But by ignoring the ones that gain political currency, we risk letting them acquire more influence than they deserve.

Let me state, for the record, that the New Black Panther Party is a despicable, deluded, crackpot fringe group, whose members’ insane anti-white rhetoric sometimes makes me wonder if they’re still on the payroll of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, that 60s-era project in which righty provocateurs infiltrated left-wing groups, including the Black Panthers, and egged on some of the worst violence (not that the old Panthers weren’t capable of violence and thuggishness all on their own, along with the breakfast programs their lefty admirers like to remember).

But the right wing needs the thuggish but miniscule and derided NBBP to matter, and to tie the crazy group to our black president, in order to advance their narrative of lies about Obama’s “racism,” tyranny and illegitimacy to be president. If they can convince enough people that Obama was elected thanks to intimidation by the NBPP, and “voter fraud” by the now-defunct ACORN, they won’t even need the crazy Birthers to prove he’s not legitimately president, even though he won with a bigger mandate than any first-term president since Lyndon Johnson (who of course had become president after the Kennedy assassination.) ...

It’s the job of editors at big papers like the Post to expose those lies, and the movement behind them – not to flagellate themselves for not saying “How high?” when right-wing media watchdogs say “Jump!”

The left’s arguments as to why the Department of Justice blocking prosecution of the Philadelphia Black Panther standing in front of the Fairmont Avenue polling station brandishing a nightstick is a non-story run like this:

J. Christian Adams, the former Justice Department voting rights attorney who resigned and later testified before the the U.S. Commission on Civil Right in connection with Eric Holder’s Justice Department’s handling of the Philadelphia case, is a Republican who was hired by another Republican attorney they dislike.

No one has proven that Eric Holder or Barack Obama personally interfered.

The New Black Panther Party is a small, unrepresentative fringe group that simply does not matter.

No one has produced voters testifying that they were prevented from voting by the Panthers.

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Most Americans do not agree that testimony coming from Republicans, even from conservative Republicans, of bias and improper conduct can be impeached successfully simply by identifying the witness’s politics. An obviously greater number of Americans trust the reliability of Fox News more that they trust other networks, the New York Times or the Washington Post, and more Americans believe that conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh are reasonably fair-minded than would say the same thing of Salon.

The unavailability of evidence of participation of senior officials in a far-from-thoroughly-investigated scandal is not per se exculpatory evidence.

The Fairmont Avenue nightstick-carrying Panther incident is known from a few very short videos which were posted on YouTube. A University of Pennsylvania student tried filming and interviewing the Panthers. He found them hostile and evasive. In the immediate aftermath of that confrontation, he or a Republican poll observer summoned the police. The Panther carrying the nightstick was persuaded by Philadelphia police to leave. His associate produced identification as a poll watcher, and was (despite his paramilitary get up) permitted to remain.

A Fox News reporter, Rick Leventhal, interviewed the Republican poll observer, who told him that the Panthers had tried to intimidate him when he tried to enter. The observer was also subjected to racial remarks. He says that he then phoned the police.

The police intervened after two Panthers, one armed with a nightstick, had been standing in front of the Fairmont Avenue polling place door for about an hour. It’s true that this specific incident involved two people and a fairly limited amount of time. But it was clearly a case of intimidation.

Is the fringiness of the intimidators some kind of legal defence?

What would Ms. Thermstrom, Mr. Serwer, or Ms. Walsh say about two people in paramilitary uniforms, brandishing a club and making hostile racially-charged remarks having probable discouraging impact in detering black or Jewish voters or observers from entering a polling place? Under the proposed insignificance rule, Nazis or Ku Klux Klansmen could police certain polling stations at will, as long as they remained basically few in number and intimidated only a few people. And, of course, if they succeeded in scaring people away from testifying about what had happened, that would be all the better, since it would prove that no one had been intimidated at all.
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Let my readers decide for themselves. Here are the videos.

1:21 University of Pennsylvania student films Panthers at 1221 Fairmount Avenue polling place video

1:00 video Philadelphia police intervene. The Panther with the bill club is ordered to leave. The other Panther is allowed to stay because he is a registered poll watcher!

Departing billy club wielder: “that’s why you’re going to be ruled by a black man.” 0:05 video

4:05 Fox News video from 2008 with Rick Leventhal.

Who was holding that billy club? Samir Shabaz 0:51 video

Addtional evidence of denial of entry and election fraud in Philadelphia appeared in a couple of other videos:

Poll watcher denied entry to polling place on 6125 Market Street. 2:53 video

This black voter in Overbrook Park tells CNN he voted “a coupla times.” 0:41 video

Earlier postings

“Early next week, the Washington Post is expected to publish articles and an interactive website that will likely contain a compendium of government agencies and contractors allegedly conducting Top Secret work.”

The WaPo is expected to start the new leak site and associated coverage on Monday, July 19th.

Doctor Zero, at Hot Air, looked on with interest on the comedy following the Weigel resignation. The leftwing commentariat lamented how unfair Weigel’s ouster really was, remarked enviously what a great job he used to have, and its founder closed down Journolist.

There is little room left for neutrality in American politics these days, Doctor Zero reflects.

Weigel has spent the last few months working as an observer of the conservative movement for the Washington Post, whose readers must wonder about the identity of the vast Tea Party crowds occasionally blocking their view of the IRS building. As it turns out, Weigel really hates the people he’s been covering, and sees himself precisely the way conservatives see most dinosaur-media reporters: as a partisan operative of the Democrat Party. He expressed his hatred, and loyalties, in a series of communications posted to JournoList. These emails became an embarrassing burst of digital flatulence when they were made public. Weigel is out of a job at the Washington Post, and JournoList is gone.

Blogger Ace of Spades wonders why the Post couldn’t find a sympathetic correspondent to cover the “conservative beat,” and answers his own question by pointing out the Post has no interest in publishing material that might lead its readers to begin grooving to that conservative beat. The last thing they want is for their right-wing avatar to come back with a horde of angry natives behind him and lead a successful insurrection.

Here we cross the line between editorial decisions and bias. Why would an unbiased newspaper be afraid to honestly report news that makes one side of a political debate look appealing, instead assigning a reporter to highlight fringe material to cast them in the most negative light possible? Of course, they are biased, but it’s even worse than that. They’re subjective. They pretend to be commentators, but they’re actually players in the game… just like everyone else. Our fates are all controlled by the immense central government worshipped by the Post. They have a vested interest in ensuring its sustained growth, so they can make their fortune writing epic tales of its heroic deeds.

Big Government makes for bad journalism. As I like to point out whenever someone like David Frum gushes over “moderates,” there is no meaningful way to be moderate when a carnivorous super-State is chowing down on huge portions of the private sector, while dismissing bedrock Constitutional rights with an irritated wave of its hand. You either resist the onslaught of the State with all your might, or bear passive witness to its expansion.

At this moment in American history, there is no functional difference between a genuine “centrist” and Dave Weigel’s right-wing “ratf**kers.” If you think you should be allowed to keep your own medical insurance, and see your own doctor, you’re taking an extreme partisan stance. If you don’t think the government should be able to revoke the First Amendment or due process rights of private corporations at its convenience, you are a declared enemy of the State.

Read the whole thing.

Unnecessary bureaucracy has a venomous effect on the national security establishment, whether it’s infantry or intelligence. The director of national intelligence, which has ballooned to a 1500-man supporting office, was a top down solution to a bottom up problem.

Admiral Blair was a casualty of Intelligence Community turf wars. Closing the DNI office would reduce unnecessary conflicts and duplication of effort. It’s too logical a course of action to be given serious consideration most likely though.
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Bruce Fleming says that standards at US service academies have been lowered for affirmative action and to allow academy teams to compete in the NCAA top divisions. He thinks standards should be restored or all the service academies closed down.
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Robin Hanson observes a unidirectional dynamic at work in progressive statism.

[I]n any area where we let humans do things, every once in a while there will be a big screwup; that is the sort of creatures humans are. And if you won’t decrease regulation without a screwup but will increase it with a screwup, then you have a regulation ratchet: it only moves one way. So if you don’t think a long period without a big disaster calls for weaker regulations, but you do think a particular big disaster calls for stronger regulation, well then you might as well just strengthen regulations lots more right now, even without a disaster. Because that is where your regulation ratchet is heading.

What if you can’t imagine ever wanting to weaken a regulation, just because it was strong and you’d gone a long time without a big disaster? Well then you apparently want the maximum possible regulation, which is probably to just basically outlaw that activity. And if that doesn’t seem like the right level of regulation to you, well then maybe you should reconsider your ratchety regulation intuitions.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.
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Ann Althouse chides the Washington Post: If you’re going to criticize the new social studies curriculum adopted by the Texas Board of Education, you’d better quote it or link it, not paraphrase it inaccurately.

I was wondering myself though what went down, and today I finally found an explanation by Andrew Alexander. It wasn’t personal, it wasn’t political, it was just about the money.

(B)ased on my discussions with others at The Post, as well as Froomkin, here’s my take.

First, it’s not about ideology. My original Omblog post quoted Hiatt as saying Froomkin’s “political orientation was not a factor in our decision.” In my discussions with Froomkin, he has not cited ideology as the primary reason. And several veteran Post reporters have dismissed that as the cause. In an online chat this week, Post Pulitzer-winning columnist Gene Weingarten, who expressed “respect” for Froomkin and regret that White House Watch was ending, said: “I don’t know why Froomkin’s column was dropped, but I can tell you that the diabolical conspiracy talk is nuts. Froomkin wasn’t dropped because he is too liberal; things just don’t work that way at the Post.” It’s also worth noting that The Post hired Ezra Klein, a liberal political blogger, within the past several months.

Second, reduced traffic played a big role. White House Watch had substantial traffic during the Bush administration, but it declined noticeably when President Obama took office. The Post will not disclose precise numbers. Froomkin acknowledges the drop but told me much of it can be blamed on a change in format and poor promotion. He said that shifting White House Watch from a column to a blog when Obama took office was disruptive to his audience and “dramatically reduced the number of page views per reader.” He also said poor promotion, especially through links from the home page, had caused traffic to dip. “I felt that with adequate promotion, page views would have been much higher,” he said.

Third, money was a factor. The Post is losing money. The Washington Post Co.’s newspaper division, which is dominated by The Post, reported a first-quarter operating loss of nearly $54 million. Every aspect of The Post’s print and online operation is being scrutinized for cost-cutting. Thus, when editors detected the drop-off in Froomkin’s traffic and looked at what he is being paid (a former Post Web site editor puts it “in the $90,000-to-$100,000” range), he became vulnerable.

Finally, there was disagreement over changing the direction of White House Watch. Some reporters and editors at The Post view Froomkin as a superb, hard-working “aggregator” whose blog needed more original reporting. Weingarten, without expressing his own judgment, alluded to this in his chat: “I can tell you that there has been some disagreement about Froomkin’s column over the years between the paper-paper and dotcom; the issue, I think, was whether he was as informed and qualified to opine as people who had been actively covering the White House for years.” Froomkin said his editors were urging changes in White House Watch, and he acknowledged
disagreement over content. For example, he was urged not to do media criticism. “I had always considered media criticism a big part of the column, as a lot of what I do is read and comment about what others have written about the White House,” he said.

In the end, Froomkin said that he was told in a recent meeting with his editors that his blog “wasn’t working anymore.”

“They wanted me to do it differently,” he said. But “the public response suggests that the readers were quite happy with it the way it was.”

And that, I think, succinctly captures the issue from both sides. The Post, needing to cut costs, sees a blog that has lost traffic and believes its author is unwilling to adjust to boost his audience. Froomkin acknowledges a traffic decline, but insists he maintains a robust audience and cites the large and loud reaction to his dismissal as evidence.

It raises several questions. Would Froomkin have been willing to work for less? (He did not answer the question when I posed it, and Post editors won’t say whether they offered.)

Like many others, I’ve been saying this for years. So I’m surprised to be surprised. But the journalistic establishment in Washington, whether it’s the Post or the Politico or much of the rest of the journalistic apparatus in the city, is essentially Republican in character—not necessarily in terms of individual voting habits, though you’d be surprised, but in fundamental outlook about whose opinions matter and how government functions, which is what really counts. And you can see that resurfacing with increasing clarity just in that last week.

Personally, I think the Washington Post would need to be blowing up US troops with IEDs to be more any more anti-Bush Administration than it is. I’d be curious to see Josh Marshall try expanding and justifying this curious claim to victimhood.

According to the Times, all this stems from criticism by that office of the CIA’s performance pre-9/11, and from “aggressive investigations” of “detention and interrogation programs and other matters.”

But, as MacRanger points out, it was Inspector General John L. Helgerson who personally recruited the same Mary O. McCarthy who was fired in April of 2006 for leaking information on covert counter-terrorism operations to Washington Post reporter Dana Priest.

AJStrata thinks the Times is spinning, and agrees that this story is really about CIA internal efforts finally to do something about the partisan leaks of highly classified national security information to the press by adversaries of the Administration within the agency.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we aren’t beginning to see some reciprocity, in the form of the Agency actually doing something about the most outrageous leaks, in return for the Bush Administration’s surrender, its abandonment of efforts to reform the Agency, and the reinstatement of Stephen R. Kappes and Michael Sulick.

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company’s Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group’s communications network. ...

(Rita) Katz (the firm’s founder) said she decided to offer an advance copy of the bin Laden video to the White House without charge so officials there could prepare for its eventual release.

She spoke first with White House counsel Fred F. Fielding, whom she had previously met, and then with Joel Bagnal, deputy assistant to the president for homeland security. Both expressed interest in obtaining a copy, and Bagnal suggested that she send a copy to Michael Leiter, who holds the No. 2 job at the National Counterterrorism Center.

Around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, Katz sent both Leiter and Fielding an e-mail with a link to a private SITE Web page containing the video and an English transcript. “Please understand the necessity for secrecy,” Katz wrote in her e-mail. “We ask you not to distribute . . . [as] it could harm our investigations.”

Fielding replied with an e-mail expressing gratitude to Katz. “It is you who deserves the thanks,” he wrote, according to a copy of the message. There was no record of a response from Leiter or the national intelligence director’s office.

Exactly what happened next is unclear. But within minutes of Katz’s e-mail to the White House, government-registered computers began downloading the video from SITE’s server, according to a log of file transfers. The records show dozens of downloads over the next three hours from computers with addresses registered to defense and intelligence agencies.

By midafternoon, several television news networks reported obtaining copies of the transcript. A copy posted around 3 p.m. on Fox News’s Web site referred to SITE and included page markers identical to those used by the group. “This confirms that the U.S. government was responsible for the leak of this document,” Katz wrote in an e-mail to Leiter at 5 p.m.

Al-Qaeda supporters, now alerted to the intrusion into their secret network, put up new obstacles that prevented SITE from gaining the kind of access it had obtained in the past, according to Katz.

So Ms. Katz called up the White House, and passed along to three officials, two of whom she’d never even met, a web-link to the video in question. Having thus shared a piece of information obviously picked up via the Internet to strangers, Mirabile dictu! one or another of those strangers shared it some more.

How difficult it is for anyone possessing the appropriate linguistic skills to penetrate Islamic extremist sites seems uncertain. Obviously those sites exist with the intention of reaching audiences of persons not intimately connected in a single terrorist cell. Their proprietors are likely also to feel that the language barrier alone is adequate to provide protection against ordinary outsider readers. At most, one would expect some very modest sort of password protection, probably using a trivial and obvious Islamist expression like Allah Akhbar.

Access via that kind of password to some semi-public web-site is not exactly the same thing as possession of atomic secrets.

Someone like Ms. Katz, working in the Intelligence business, ought to be familiar with the old maxim: “A secret that is known by three full soon will not a secret be.”

At least 25 of the 200 newspapers carrying Berkeley Breathed’s comic strip Opus, including the Washington Post, the comic strip’s own syndicator (!), refused to carry the last two weekly episodes.

Editor&Publisher reports that the Post’s Sales Manager explained that “some client papers hesitated to run a sex joke and others won’t publish any Muslim-related humor.”

But, as the Chicago Tribune makes clear, it doesn’t seem likely that mere mild sexual innuendo caused panicky editors at 25 newspapers to shun the last two episodes.

Some newspaper editors think cartoonist Berkeley Breathed might have crossed a line when he incorporated sexual innuendo into an “Opus” comic strip about a character’s conversion to radical Islam. But it’s not the first strip by the artist to poke fun at religion.

The cartoon ran in the Tribune, but not in The Washington Post, the strip’s home newspaper, or in a couple dozen other papers that pick up “Opus.”

Editors at the Washington Post reportedly showed the strips to Muslim employees, who disapproved of the depiction of the Lola Granola character dressed in traditional Muslim garb, declaring conservative Islamic views and making a sexual innuendo.

But the same care apparently was not taken with any of the previous irreverent cartoons that referenced Lola’s spiritual quest, which included introducing the Amish to nude yoga. The punch line of an Aug. 19 “Opus” poked fun at the late Rev. Jerry Falwell.

The Weekly Standard wonders:

Why would editors have felt constrained to solicit the views of Muslim staffers?

Were all the Baptists in the Post newsroom consulted about the Jerry Falwell joke? Is “Doonesbury” shown in advance to all the Republicans in the Post newsroom?

6:32 MSNBC video

Islamic-themed comic strips:

26 Aug 07

2 Sep 07

Jerry Falwell-themed comic strip:

19 Aug 07

The same Washington Post which was not afraid to publish leaks disclosing secret National Security operations in time of war behaves like this over… cartoons!

Democrats are investigating furiously, the Post reports, to see if they can find the slightest pretext for finger-pointing and scandal-mongering. Get ready for the 601st democrat investigation of the Bush Administration. “Round up the usual suspects!” Henry Waxman has probably already ordered his minions.

Other presidents have been crushed by the pressure. Lyndon B. Johnson was tormented by Vietnam War protesters outside his window shouting, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” Nixon swam in self-pity during Watergate, talking to paintings and once asking Henry Kissinger to pray with him. Bill Clinton fumed against enemies and nursed deep grievances during his impeachment battle. ...

Kissinger, who advises Bush, said the president has never asked him to kneel down with him in the Oval Office. “I find him serene,” Kissinger said. “I know President Johnson was railing against his fate. That’s not the case with Bush. He feels he’s doing what he needs to do, and he seems to me at peace with himself.”

Bush has virtually given up on winning converts while in office and instead is counting on vindication after he is dead. “He almost has . . . a sense of fatalism,” said Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), who recently spent a day traveling with Bush. “All he can do is do his best, and 100 years from now people will decide if he was right or wrong. It doesn’t seem to be a false, macho pride or living in your own world. I find him to be amazingly calm.” ...

Horne, the British historian, found himself with Bush on another occasion after Kissinger gave the president “A Savage War of Peace,” Horne’s book on the French defeat in Algeria in the mid-20th century. Bush invited Horne to visit. They talked about the parallels and differences between Algeria and Iraq as Bush sought insight he could apply to his own situation.

Horne said he is not a Bush supporter but was nonetheless struck by the president’s tranquility. “He was very friendly, very relaxed,” Horne said. “My God, he looked well. He looked like he came off a cruise in the Caribbean. He looked like he hadn’t a care in the world. It was amazing.”

The defeat will not even have taken place in Iraq or the Middle East.

Our defeat will have occurred right here at home in the United States, and the adversary responsible will not be al Qaeda, Iraqi insurgents, or foreign jihadists fighting in Iraq.

When US defeat occurs, that defeat will be at the hands of the Mainstream Media.

One of its members, Tom Ricks, the Washington Post’s (ironical choice of) military correspondent, finds the same point being made in an unspecified recent issue of Armor magazine by Captain William Ault.

Ricks raises his pinky finger delicately in the air, sips his tea, and sneers at the very idea.

Captain Ault wrote:

The media assists insurgent forces by continually maintaining pressure on the supporting government and military establishment. . . . This battlefield is not new. It has gained popularity because it has continually worked against stronger forces. The eventual withdrawal of forces from Vietnam, Beirut, Somalia, and a host of other locations was from an active public opposition, not a decisive military defeat. Erosion of public support through a constant bombardment of media outlets that portray negativity induces a type of mass hysteria in the population that eventually leads to the vocal, and sometimes violent, opposition to the military forces being deployed.

The gap between public opinion and Washington reality has rarely been wider than on the issue of the Iraq war. A clear national mandate is being blocked—for now—by constraints that make sense only in the short-term calculus of politics in this capital city.

The public verdict on the war is plain. Large majorities have come to believe that it was a mistake to go in, and equally large majorities want to begin the process of getting out. That is what the polls say; it is what the mail to Capitol Hill says; and it is what voters signaled when they put the Democrats back into control of Congress in November. ...

The question that naturally arises is why the strongly expressed judgment of the people—responding to news of increasing American casualties in a seemingly intractable sectarian conflict—cannot be translated into action in Washington. ...

One way or another, public opinion ultimately will be heeded on the war in Iraq. It is hard to imagine the Republicans going into the presidential election of 2008 with 150,000 American troops still taking heavy casualties in Iraq.

It’s true that the democrats won control of Congress last November, but many other issues and factors besides the war, and a number of Republican scandals, undoubtedly also played a role in that election’s results. The democrats gained a very narrow Congressional majority, and can hardly be described as possessing a mandate to do anything other than avoid taking bribes and molesting pages.

Which mandate alone should represent a more than adequate challenge, requiring all the moral resolve and political will the democrat party can possibly muster, if not more.

One hears the claim a lot these days that public opinion thinks this, and public opinion demands that, as if opinion polls conducted by news organizations represented some sort of meaningful, objective, binding, and official process. This sort of claim represents the grossest sort of attempt by journalists to usurp political authority.

The poll Mr. Broder cites in his own editorial was conducted by two notoriously biased news organizations, the Washington Post and ABC News. And its results are based on the responses of a mere 1082 adults, including an intentional “oversample of African-Americans.”

Opinion polls of 1000 or so of the people willing to talk to pollsters on the phone prove basically nothing. Opinion polls are typically artfully crafted. The questions they contain steer answers in the direction their creators desire.

That WaPo/ABC poll, which Broder cited, asked:

Do you think (the United States should keep its military forces in Iraq until civil order is restored there, even if that means continued U.S. military casualties); OR, do you think (the United States should withdraw its military forces from Iraq in order to avoid further U.S. military casualties, even if that means civil order is not restored there)?

But if I asked instead:

Do you think (the United States should abandon the civilian population of Iraq to Islamic Fundamentalism and sectarian violence, if that means destroying our future credibility in the eyes of both our friends and our adversaries abroad): OR, do you think (the United States should keep its word and implant stable and democratic government in Iraq, even at the cost of US military casualties)?

the poll results would be quite different.

Mr. Broder’s polls never can produce anything resembling a mandate. They only represent propaganda, typically created by dishonest and dishonorable advocates.

The only opinion polls which count occur officially and in November. The last election was inconclusive, as are the war’s current results.

Members of the left and its allies in the punditocracy looking for a mandate for surrender, withdrawal, and defeat need to look for it in the results of the 2008 election, and stop claiming that they already possess it.

Today’s Washington Post profiles the Conservative blogosphere’s female answer to George Patton, our own lovely and talented Michelle Malkin, offering this (overly mild) representative quotation:

The donkey party,” she wrote last fall, “is led by thumb-sucking demagogues in prominent positions who equate Bush with Hitler and Jim Crow, call him a liar in front of high school students and the world, fantasize about impeachment and fetishize the human rights of terrorists who want to kill me. Put simply: There are no grown-ups in the Democrat Party.”

Read the whole thing.

Never Yet Melted, 10 Nov 2005:

1) The M-16 rifle : Thumbs down. Chronic jamming problems with the talcum powder like sand over there. The sand is everywhere. Jordan says you feel filthy 2 minutes after coming out of the shower. The M-4 carbine version is more popular because it’s lighter and shorter, but it has jamming problems also. They like the ability to mount the various optical gunsights and weapons lights on the Picatinny rails, but the weapon itself is not great in a desert environment. They all hate the 5.56mm (.223) round. Poor penetration on the cinderblock structure common over there and even torso hits cant be reliably counted on to put the enemy down. Fun fact: Random autopsies on dead insurgents shows a high level of opiate use.

2) The M243 SAW (squad assault weapon): .223 cal. Drum fed light machine gun. Big thumbs down. Universally considered a piece of shit. Chronic jamming problems, most of which require partial disassembly. (that’s fun in the middle of a firefight)....

Read the whole thing.
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Washington Post, (Opinion Section: Tom Ricks’s Inbox by Tom Ricks, “Military Correspondent”) 4 Feb 2007:

1) The M-16 rifle: Thumbs down. Chronic jamming problems with the talcum powder-like sand over there. The M-4 carbine version is more popular because it’s lighter and shorter, but it has jamming problems also. Marines like the ability to mount the various optical gunsights and weapons lights on the picattiny rails, but the weapon itself is not great in a desert environment. They all hate the 5.56mm (.223) round because of its poor penetration on the cinderblock structures common over there. Even torso hits can’t be reliably counted on to put the enemy down.

2) The M243 SAW (squad assault weapon), .223 cal. Drum-fed light machine gun: Big thumbs down. Universally considered a piece of junk. Chronic jamming problems, most of which require partial disassembly (not fun in the middle of a firefight).

Read the whole thing.
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Hey! It only took the Washington Post’s anti-Iraq war “Military Correspondent” a week short of 14 months to catch up in coverage with this blog.

Too bad Mr. Military Correspondent lacked the space to reproduce the entire Net-circulated report-from-the-front, and it’s really a pity that his ideological bias caused him deliberately to delete information derogatory to the adversaries of US forces.

Of course, that’s the Paleomedia in action for you, pompous and slow, biased and deceptive.

President Bush and all of us who grew up in the shadows of World War II remember Winston Churchill—his grit, his daring, his resolve. I remember listening to his speeches on a vinyl album in the pre-iPod era. Two years ago I spoke about Iraq at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., where Churchill had drawn a line between freedom and fear in his “iron curtain” speech. In preparation, I reread some of the many words from various addresses that made him famous. Something in one passage caught my eye. When Churchill urged, “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty, never give in,” he added: “except to convictions of honour and good sense.”

This is a time for such convictions.

Kerry (or the flunky assigned to draft this pathetic screed for him) evidently thinks his own (and his party’s) pettiness and cowardice can be effectively transmuted into their opposites by mere verbal association with Churchill’s courage and strength. He’s wrong.

The most ludicrous cases can be found in the Eastern United States, where handfuls of ordinary people claiming minute traces of Indian blood from centuries-ago-vanished tribes, vanquished in wars of the 17th century, are now vigorously lobbying for recognition as “tribes.”

The most spectacular confidence job occurred in Connecticut, in reference to the Pequots, the local tribe defeated in a war they started with English colonists in the 1630s. Surviving Pequots were absorbed centuries ago into the emancipated African-American population of layabouts, laborers, and local drunks. The Colony of Connecticut settled Pequot land claims in the 18th century conceding to some Pequots a small reservation of 989 swampy and remote acres. That reservation was reduced by land sales to 213 acres by the mid-19th century. By the 20th century, one elderly woman (possibly very remotely connected to Rhode Island’s one-time Narragansett tribe) resided in a humble, ordinary house on the so-called Indian reservation.

Then along came the rise of leftism in the ‘60s, and with it activist lawyers like Tom Tureen. In 1973, Tureen persuaded Skip Hayworth, the woman’s grandson, an itinerant welder, to move onto the “reservation,” and lay claim to an additional 800 acres of neighboring suburban houses on the basis of Indian Nonintercourse Act of 1790 which required that every sale of tribal land be approved by federal treaty.

A lot of Connecticut suburbanites found their homes’ titles clouded, and howled for government intervention. The Great White Father in Washington should have declared war on Connecticut’s insurgent wannabe redskins, and sent some cavalry to drive them off the reservation, back to the ordinary suburbs where they belonged, but instead Congress hurriedly surrendered in 1983 to the imaginary Pequots. Without bothering even to verify genealogical claims, Congress granted tribal recognition and a nine hundred thousand dollar settlement.

The “Pequots”’ lawyers then demanded tribal exemptions from state regulatory oversight, which included gambling exemptions. And, voilá , in 1992 Foxwood Casino opened, growing in a few years to a facility featuring 24 restaurants, three hotels, 17 shops, a golf course, a state-of-the-art Pequot museum, and producing profits of more than $1 billion per year.

This same kind of nonsense is spreading to Virginia, and the Washington Post is lending a helping hand. Today, we are bringing back to life the dead Mattaponi Indian language.

Just wait until the activist leftwing lawyers show up, and start lodging land claims against suburban residents of a couple of dozen counties lying between Hampton Roads and the Potomac in search of a deal for compensation and gambling rights.
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Ever wonder about Native American Indians history? It is a fascinating and multi-faceted story unable to be told in one sitting. Some of the beautiful things they made include American Indian jewelry and tools.

The Wall Street Journal this morning argued that he ought to release the whole thing (with some reactions).

In the meantime, (the non-Pouting) Spook86 offers some details from the report contradicting the Sunday paper’s spin.

The quotes printed below—taken directly from the document and provided to this blogger—provide “the other side” of the estimate, and its more balanced assessment of where we stand in the War on Terror (comments in italics are mine).

In one of its early paragraphs, the estimate notes progress in the struggle against terrorism, stating the U.S.-led efforts have “seriously damaged Al Qaida leadership and disrupted its operations.” Didn’t see that in the NYT article.

Or how about this statement, which—in part—reflects the impact of increased pressure on the terrorists: “A large body of reporting indicates that people identifying themselves as jihadists is increasing…however, they are largely decentralized, lack a coherent strategy and are becoming more diffuse.” Hmm…doesn’t sound much like Al Qaida’s pre-9-11 game plan.

The report also notes the importance of the War in Iraq as a make or break point for the terrorists: “Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves to have failed, we judge that fewer will carry on the fight.” It’s called a ripple effect.

More support for the defeating the enemy on his home turf: “Threats to the U.S. are intrinsically linked to U.S. success or failure in Iraq.” President Bush and senior administration officials have made this argument many times—and it’s been consistently dismissed by the “experts” at the WaPo and Times.

And, some indication that the “growing” jihad may be pursuing the wrong course: “There is evidence that violent tactics are backfiring…their greatest vulnerability is that their ultimate political solution (shar’a law) is unpopular with the vast majority of Muslims.” Seems to contradict MSM accounts of a jihadist tsunami with ever-increasing support in the global Islamic community..

The estimate also affirms the wisdom of sowing democracy in the Middle East: “Progress toward pluralism and more responsive political systems in the Muslim world will eliminate many of the grievances jihadists exploit.” As I recall, this the core of our strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Quite a contrast to the “doom and gloom” scenario painted by the Times and the Post.

Mr. Armitage was one of the Bush administration officials who supported the invasion of Iraq only reluctantly. He was a political rival of the White House and Pentagon officials who championed the war and whom Mr. Wilson accused of twisting intelligence about Iraq and then plotting to destroy him. Unaware that Ms. Plame’s identity was classified information, Mr. Armitage reportedly passed it along to columnist Robert D. Novak “in an offhand manner, virtually as gossip,” according to a story this week by the Post’s R. Jeffrey Smith, who quoted a former colleague of Mr. Armitage.

It follows that one of the most sensational charges leveled against the Bush White House—that it orchestrated the leak of Ms. Plame’s identity to ruin her career and thus punish Mr. Wilson—is untrue. The partisan clamor that followed the raising of that allegation by Mr. Wilson in the summer of 2003 led to the appointment of a special prosecutor, a costly and prolonged investigation, and the indictment of Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, on charges of perjury. All of that might have been avoided had Mr. Armitage’s identity been known three years ago.

And the Post identifies the real culprit:

it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming—falsely, as it turned out—that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush’s closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It’s unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.

The Washington Post has joined the United States Senate in identifying former Ambassador Joseph Wilson as a liar.

The three most prosperous large counties in the United States are in the Washington suburbs, according to census figures released yesterday, which show that the region has the second-highest income and the least poverty of any major metropolitan area in the country.

Rapidly growing Loudoun County has emerged as the wealthiest jurisdiction in the nation, with its households last year having a median income of more than $98,000. It is followed by Fairfax and Howard counties, with Montgomery County not far behind.

That accumulation of suburban wealth, local economists said, is a side effect of the enormous flow of federal money into the region through contracts for defense and homeland security work in the five years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, coming after the local technology boom of the 1990s. “When you put that together . . . you have a recipe for heightened prosperity,” said Anirban Basu, an economist at a Baltimore consulting firm.

The result is that the Washington area’s households rank second in income only to those in San Jose, eclipsing such well-heeled places as San Francisco and the bedroom suburbs of New York.

We came very close to moving to Loudoun County recently.

Dionne is not entirely wrong, of course. He notes correctly that George W. Bush never was a real conservative in the Goldwater, Reagan, or Gingrich sense. But, personally, I wouldn’t waste my time constructing elaborate theories about Hamiltonian “big-government conservatism,” or using “government as a means to achieve conservative ends.” It’s really much simpler than that. George W. Bush is simply an old-fashioned garden variety practical politician (what we used to call an Eisenhower Republican), bringing to his Presidency his family’s traditional flexibility in governing, flavored with just enough red-state populism and Republican impulses to secure the GOP base’s support.

The American left has remained mobilized and afflicted with a paranoid sense of wrong ever since their favorite son’s sexual scandals metastasized into perjury and impeachment. Disappointment with the outcome of the 2000 election and US military actions following 9/11 have continued to keep the left as angry and active as a nest of red ants thoroughly poked with a stick. The larger part of George W. Bush’s perceived conservatism really amounts to mere reciprocated animosity.

Dionne is not inaccurate in describing this Congress.

The most obvious, outrageous and unprincipled spasm occurred last night when the Senate voted on a bill that would have simultaneously raised the minimum wage and slashed taxes on inherited wealth.

Rarely has our system produced a more naked exercise in opportunism than this measure. Most conservatives oppose the minimum wage on principle as a form of government meddling in the marketplace. But moderate Republicans in jeopardy this fall desperately wanted an increase in the minimum wage.

The Republican Senatorial majority unfortunately includes a number of liberal Republican-in-name-only senators, and has been effectively paralysed by joys-of-incumbency induced timidity and the democrats’ willingness to abuse the filibuster.

Dionne contends that the repeal of the death tax failed “because there is nothing close to a conservative majority in the United States.” Rubbish! There certainly is a majority in this country in favor of not taxing away a family’s assets simply because someone has died.

Poll after poll proves it.

a 1999 poll by Worthlin Worldwide found 70 percent of voters favoring a phase-out of the estate tax.—A 2000 poll by the Pew Research Center found 71 percent of voters supporting elimination of the inheritance tax.—A 2001 CBS News/New York Times poll also found 71 percent of people opposing imposition of an estate tax at death.

Dionne would like to believe that libertarian versus traditionalist divisions are in the process of splitting the right on issues like immigration and stem cell research. Sorry, Mr. Dionne. It’s true that I disagree strongly with Michelle Malkin and Victor Davis Hanson about immigration, but our differences do not materially diminish my admiration and respect for those two traditionalists, nor are they likely to persuade Michelle, Victor, or myself to start voting for democrats. I don’t have a problem with stem cell research myself (being irreligious), but I believe President Bush was quite right to veto spending the tax dollars of religious people funding things they find morally repugnant. Let’s just finance this kind of research privately. There’s no shortage of rich atheists or leftists.

Dionne is off-base looking for a conservative split over religious issues these days. I’ve had plenty of differences within the Conservative Movement with religious traditionalists in days gone by, but there is no particular Religious Right agenda we libertarians have a major problem with today. I do have problems with organs of the left, like the ACLU, waging intolerant campaigns to eradicate any form of private religious expression in the public space, eliminating religious symbols, or persecuting the Boy Scouts for political incorrectness. In short, I expect most of us making up what Dionne calls the “big-business right and culturally optimistic conservatives” are likely to continue to vote with the ordinary hometown Americans rather than with the coastal community of fashion indefinitely on into the misty future.

He’s right in saying this Congress is a disaster, and many of its members deserve to be defeated. I’ve said the same thing repeatedly myself. But what will lose in November will not be conservative principles, but the exact opposite. The losers will be the unprincipled, the compromisers and trimmers, and the opportunists.

The Conservative Movement, Mr. Dionne, has experienced setbacks and electoral defeats before. Those of us who lived through the Goldwater campaign of 1964 are not especially perturbed by the prospect of this coming November. We will be back.
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Hat tip to Steve Wagenseil.

The lady claims to have “recreated” the offending post here, on a newer public blog.
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From my perspective, it would be agreeable to think that hard-as-nails Intel community contractor supervisers compete to see how many bounces they can get tossing out onto the parking lot each and every employee venturing to post liberal bromides on-line, but who are we kidding? Real government officials these days go a lot farther than editorializing. Some disclose highly classified national security programs for publication, while others conduct major disinformation operations intended to bring down an elected administration, all without meaningful consequence.

How likely is it that anyone would treat the sentimental vaporings of this dim middle-aged female as grounds for anything more than a dismissive snort?
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Nonetheless, Dana Priest’s little story is getting its share of play:

Laura Rosen

NY Times

Wonkette

By now Americans know the litany: The nation is engaged in a difficult and costly war in Iraq; Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon; gas prices are high; the costs of reconstructing the Gulf Coast region are huge; illegal immigration is a major problem—and more.

These issues are real and pressing. But they aren’t the whole story—and they ought not color the lens through which we see all other events. We hear a great deal about the problems we face. We hear hardly anything about the encouraging developments. Off-key as it may sound in the current environment, a strong case can be made that in a number of areas there are positive trends and considerable progress. Perhaps the place to begin is with an empirical assessment of where we are.

Saudi Arabia’s public schools have long been cited for demonizing the West as well as Christians, Jews and other “unbelievers.” But after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001—in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis—that was all supposed to change.

A 2004 Saudi royal study group recognized the need for reform after finding that the kingdom’s religious studies curriculum “encourages violence toward others, and misguides the pupils into believing that in order to safeguard their own religion, they must violently repress and even physically eliminate the ‘other.’ ” Since then, the Saudi government has claimed repeatedly that it has revised its educational texts.

Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, has worked aggressively to spread this message. “The kingdom has reviewed all of its education practices and materials, and has removed any element that is inconsistent with the needs of a modern education,” he said on a recent speaking tour to several U.S. cities. “Not only have we eliminated what might be perceived as intolerance from old textbooks that were in our system, we have implemented a comprehensive internal revision and modernization plan.” The Saudi government even took out a full-page ad in the New Republic last December to tout its success at “having modernized our school curricula to better prepare our children for the challenges of tomorrow.”

The Post found among other examples of expressions of tolerance:

“Some of the people of the Sabbath were punished by being turned into apes and swine. Some of them were made to worship the devil, and not God, through consecration, sacrifice, prayer, appeals for help, and other types of worship. Some of the Jews worship the devil. Likewise, some members of this nation worship the devil, and not God.”
“The clash between this [Muslim] community (umma) and the Jews and Christians has endured, and it will continue as long as God wills.”

“It is part of God’s wisdom that the struggle between the Muslim and the Jews should continue until the hour [of judgment].”

“The greeting ‘Peace be upon you’ is specifically for believers. It cannot be said to others.”

“Do not yield to them [Christians and Jews] on a narrow road out of honor and respect.”

“Jihad in the path of God—which consists of battling against unbelief, oppression, injustice, and those who perpetrate it—is the summit of Islam. This religion arose through jihad and through jihad was its banner raised high. It is one of the noblest acts, which brings one closer to God, and one of the most magnificent acts of obedience to God.”

And the Post notes the significance of the content of Saudi texts:

The Saudi public school system totals 25,000 schools, educating about 5 million students. In addition, Saudi Arabia runs academies in 19 world capitals, including one outside Washington in Fairfax County, that use some of these same religious texts. Saudi Arabia also distributes its religion texts worldwide to numerous Islamic schools and madrassas that it does not directly operate. Undeterred by Wahhabism’s historically fringe status, Saudi Arabia is trying to assert itself as the world’s authoritative voice on Islam—a sort of “Vatican” for Islam, as several Saudi officials have stated—and these textbooks are integral to this effort. As the report of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks observed, “Even in affluent countries, Saudi-funded Wahhabi schools are often the only Islamic schools” available.