Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has been shot dead, according to Wikipedia, the online, up-to-the-minute encyclopedia. World mourns.

(The report was corrected.)

George W. Bush came to Washington ambitious to fulfill a promise to be “a uniter, not a divider.” He had been successful as Governor of Texas in governing in a relationship of cooperation with legislative democrats, and he believed that he could successfully apply his natural amiability and charm to achieving the same kind of good-natured bipartisanship at the national level. George W. Bush was dead wrong. No one in Washington was open to being charmed. The stakes are looked upon as too high, and its adversarial politics are these days professionally conducted on the basis of calculation, not personalities. His political opponents had never accepted the legitimacy of the Bush electoral victory in 2000, and when he easily turned aside what they had fondly believed would amount to a formidable challenge in 2004, they were even more furious.

Bush’s re-election with increased congressional majorities appeared to represent an historic political watershed. The democrat party was seemingly in complete disarray. The liberal establishment’s traditionally decisive weapon of MSM domination had proved astonishingly ineffective during the 2004 campaign. The MSM wouldn’t cover allegations about John Kerry’s military service and awards, and his veteran opponents just published a book which topped the best seller list for weeks. No one had any problem learning what John Kerry’s fellow sailors thought of him. The left tried to turn the tables by producing a Big Story attacking Bush’s military record, and the Blogosphere brought down Dan Rather and humiliated CBS. It looked as if conservative AM talk radio combined with a newly ascendant Blogosphere, operating as alternative information sources, had arrived as the Republican Party’s fully operational ABM system, able to repel and refute MSM attacks, and able as well to launch devastating counterstrikes.

Then came 2005.

No one on the Right foresaw that what the MSM could not do in the 2004 campaign, they could do given a natural disaster to work with.

No one in the Bush camp recognized the possibility that endless repetition of the claim that “Bush lied” would ever succeed in gaining traction beyond the circles of the leftwing lunatic fringe, and rise in the minds of the general public to the level of accepted fact.

No one in the leadership of the Administration seems to have recognized that the executive branch, from the Intelligence Community and the State Department to the Department of Justice, featured significant numbers of entrenched and disgruntled liberal opponents ready to work systematically to bring down the administration from within.

The Bush Administration has stood there, like the proverbial deer in the headlights, doing nothing to save itself, while its pouting spook opponents from the Intelligence Community have run a disinformation operation that has successfully forced the resignation of the Vice Presidential Chief of Staff, and which promises also to “take out” the president’s chief advisor. While this organized group of administration opponents has successfully managed to criminalize disputes over the interpretation of intelligence by promoting a trivial press leak into a major scandal and full-blown criminal investigation, it has also leaked far more substantive and far more damaging information routinely on a weekly basis without the least sign of any administration response.

Bush is about as unpopular as presidents get right now without being impeached. He has an excellent chance of being accorded a place in the history books in the general vicinity of Warren G. Harding and Richard Nixon. How many more weekly leakfests does this administration think it can sustain?

It doesn’t have to be this way. Get Porter Goss to swear out a complaint of the violation of intelligence statutes. Find the meanest, and sharpest, and most press-hungry Harvard or Yale Law-educated Republican Appeal Court judge you can find, and get somebody actually on your side in the Justice Department (not the guy who appointed Patrick Fitzgerald), to appoint that man the next Special Council, and let slip the dogs of prosecution.

The President can make the news, you know. Instead of waiting for the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or Mr. Zarqawi, to write the weekend’s headlines, why don’t you guys write some yourself? Let’s invade Syria. Just like Iraq’s, the Syrian dictatorship will crumble like a rotten pumpkin with one good kick. There’ll be a lot less insurgency in Iraq, once the Syrian base is out of business. Terrorism all over the Middle East wil be significantly reduced. Maybe Iran will think twice about that nuclear bomb project when they see US tanks rolling through Damascus.

Let’s bomb Al Jazeera. So what if they set up a second operation elsewhere? We do actually have more than two loads of bombs. I bet they run out of broadcasting facilities, before we run out of ordinance.

Your opponents are leaking US Intel secrets like a sieve. Leak some yourself. Tell some war stories. Go on television, show pictures, and tell the people how we caught this really bad guy, or that one, up to some serious form of skulduggery.

You’re getting lots of static about the treatment of terrorist captives and lack of terrorist due process. Let’s have some due process. Put on a show trial. Take one or several murderous jihadist fanatics, from whom we’ve gotten every piece of information we can, put them on trial on television, convict them, and then ceremoniously hang them.

You need better news management. Making a case for the war, making a case for the administration’s policies, needs to be a completely different scale of priority. Our adversaries in the Middle East cannot possibly defeat US military forces in the field, but they can defeat us, and bring about our ultimate humiliation and withdrawal, by winning (with the aid of the domestic left) the battle for control of the US public’s perception of reality. The fight for control of domestic American opinion needs to be understood as absolutely vital to the successs of American arms.

And the active, and skilled, conduct of the battle for public opinion is essential for this administration’s place in history, its effectiveness at governing, and –at this point– its very survival.

Dennis the Peasant, while we weren’t looking, produced reams of anti-PJM postings. No, I’m not going to read, or count all of them, but he has come up with a logo which beats PJM’s by wide margins.

———————————————

Steve H. writes (12/12):

I love these guys. They can’t write their way out of a wet Kleenex, so they whore their way to 15,000 measly visits per day, and suddenly they think they know how to dance? Standing up in your high chair may make you feel just as tall as Daddy, but that doesn’t mean it’s so.

and on 12/13:

Wizbang is an undistinguished blog that gets 15000 visits per day, half of which are search engine accidents, which means it’s about as important as one of the bigger condo newsletters. There are high school papers that have readership of the same order of magnitude.

This aroused my curiosity, and I found that his own hit score on 12/15/05, at 9:00 PM PST looked like:

Average Per Day 2,781
Average Visit Length 2:45
Last Hour 229
Today 9,249
This Week 19,467

He gets better on 12/14 with We Will Bury You!, which –for the curious– provides some speculation on the economics of PJM.

Helo at Drumwaster writes:

That has been my biggest gripe about blogs such as Instapundit for quite a while. Glenn Reynolds can browse the various news sites faster than anyone in the world and post a quick link that looks something like “THE PRESIDENT’S APPROVAL RATING is down, but I predicted this in my sleep sixteen months ago to the minute…” and be considered a prophet by the vast majority of the blogosphere. LGF does much of the same, and outside of proving that Dan Rather’s documents were fake, hasn’t been known for much of anything outside of that since that day (with the exception of the failed Pajamas/OSM media venture, but we won’t bring that up). The reason I chose to post about this is because the blogosphere has turned into a K-12 playground; there are the cool kids who get fame and look down on the regular guys who bust their asses, and there are those of us stuck somewhere in the middle who are here to have some fun, yet get jerked around and trashed because we don’t take the “blogging industry” seriously enough for those who want it to be the next MSM.

Wizbang is a great blog with great insight, and they have at least two posts a day that I learn something new from. What keeps them from becoming an Instapundit or a LGF is the fact that they grab snippets of an article and then create their own points and perspective from it. Wizbang editorializes and creates content, versus Instapundit and LGF who merely link like an e-mailed crawler gone haywire. But, the blogs will always be on top because of the fanatical blogging crowd who wake up each morning hoping that their posts will be linked by one of the two.

Does this make them bad? Not at all. The wonderful thing about the blogosphere is the fact that we can do what we want and not be forced to worry about a profit margin or angry advertisers. When the Pajamas/OSM debacle was occurring, I read from one pundit who equivocated it to the bossy girl up the street who wants to become the leader and organizer of the local baseball game, which subsequently took the fun away from the whole process. When people take blogging too seriously, or when the little cliques are created that demonize and demoralize others in the blogosphere by shunning them and trashing them because they’re not the “cool kids,” it ruins exactly what made the blogosphere fun to begin with.

———————————————
Liberal Avenger kisses up to Hog on Ice.

Moxie has nothing interesting to say, but that doesn’t stop her.

———————————————-

John Cole finally gets sick and tired of the relentless (and mostly pointless) bashing.

———————————————–

I have to agree with John here. An awful lot of electrons were spilled to very little substantive, and no positive, purpose this time. I think it is more than a little churlish to abuse Glenn Reynolds and Charles Johnson. I read them daily, as most of us do, for good reason. If the PJM critics could do anything half as well as those two gentlemen, whatever it was, we’d all be reading them too. But this unutterable waste of bandwidth demonstrates why we don’t read some of them at all, and read others infrequently. Trying to report PJM bashing is becoming both overly laborious and a crashing bore. If you can’t feud amusingly, don’t feud, say I. This is it. No more rubbish about PJM will I waste my time on.

————————————————–

As to PJM: well, I wouldn’t give it a Best Site award this year, but Roger Simon borrowed no money from me, and they don’t charge me to click on it, so I am not demanding a refund. It would not surprise me if it got better over time. Suggestion: how about a longer page? There could be more features, more major stories. Maybe throwing more darts per diem would produce more bullseyes.

Powerline’s Scott Johnson remembers Rick Rescorla, a hero in Vietnam and a hero on 9/11.

The Pouting Spooks unleashed today their latest salvo against the Bush Administration. This intelligence leak concerned the National Security Agency, was released via the NY Times, and featured a civil liberties scare story. The leak was carefully timed to compete for attention with headlines of the election in Iraq, and to assist Senate opponents in preventing a vote on the renewal of the Patriot Act.

The Times informed its readers breathlessly that:

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying.

And then went on to source the story:

Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation’s legality and oversight.

Oh sure, they’re so anonymous. The pouting spooks behind this leak, and all the others, are a collection of Intelligence community and State Department doves, operating above-ground as Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS, which ought to be Vipers), mentioned here previously:

Ray McGovern, in a 2004 interview with the leftwing journal Mother Jones, stated that VIPS was organized in January of 2003.

We established our group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, in January of last year. Before that several of us had been writing op-eds, and we had been giving each other sanity checks, because the conclusions we were coming up with were pretty far out — that the President and the Secretary of State were lying through their teeth.

According to McGovern, VIPS, at the time of the interview (March 2004), had 35 members consisting of retired and resigned officials from the FBI, Defense Intelligence, NSA, Army Intelligence, and the State Department, and also boasted of the existence of active members of the intelligence community working with VIPS, but “not as members.”

Earlier Posts

NY Times promises of anonymity have already been demonstrated to be valueless in the face of criminal investigations, specifically as the result of the efforts of the same pouting spooks to criminalize policy differences. It seems inevitable that sooner or later the Administration is going to get tired of passively serving as a punching bag for an endless series orchestrated media attacks, and will decide what’s sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander, and begin prosecuting obvious breaches of federal law. The federal prison system is large enough to accomodate 35+ Vipers.

Liberals are not happy. Hat tip to Preaching Politics.

CNN reports that Zarqawi was in the hands of Iraqi Security Forces last year, who let him go:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — Iraqi security forces caught the most wanted man in the country last year, but released him because they didn’t know who he was, the Iraqi deputy minister of interior said Thursday.

Hussain Kamal confirmed that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — the al Qaeda in Iraq leader who has a $25 million bounty on his head — was in custody at some point last year, but he wouldn’t provide further details.

The 39 colleges of Oxford University are destined to lose their 800 year-old right to select their own students in a plan drafted by a so-called “working party” of sophisters, calculators, and economists appointed by the Labour Party’s collectivizing commissars in a new social engineering outrage aimed at further levelling. The Telegraph musters at least a modestly pejorative headline of protest.

The Times

But even this is insufficient. The Guardian exposes other surviving relicts of elitism:

Oxford University is being accused of snobbery after leaked details of admissions criteria for a post-graduate course revealed that tutors were instructed to give preference to candidates from “prestigious” universities over those from “second-rank” and “weak” ones…

Michael Driscoll, the vice-chancellor of Middlesex University and the chair of the Campaign for Mainstream Universities, representing the new universities, said the guidance was appalling.

“On what basis can they be saying that a degree from one institution is worth more than a degree from another?”

Hat tip to Cacciaguida.

It appears that I am not the only reader to reach for the air sickness bag after receiving my dailing helping of Andrew Sullivan‘s limitless supply of sanctimony anent mean tweatment of poor widdle terrorists. Even the easy-going Glenn Reynolds writes:

Andrew Sullivan — pursuant to his apparent brand differentiation strategy, I guess — is bravely standing up to the “NRO-Reynolds chorus,” whatever that means. I don’t think I really agree with Mark Levin, Rich Lowry, et al. on the specific subject at hand, though I confess that I haven’t followed that particular pissing match very closely. However, I do agree with them that Andrew has been consistently, pompously, and annoyingly moralistic and irritatingly unspecific. So if that’s the chorus, well yes — but it’s a song that has a lot of notes, most of them struck by Andrew himself. And I’m irritated with him, not for the reason you might think — because I disagree with Andrew — but more the contrary, because every time I read one of his preening posts, I find my opposition to torture weakening in response, even though I’ve been consistently in opposition to torture since 2001 (and before). God help me if he ever starts blogging in support of nanotechnology and bans on cloning — I’ll probably start looking at Leon Kass more sympathetically. It’s like listening to Robert Bork talk about original understanding jurisprudence.

Israeli Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, former chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Force

asserted that Saddam spirited his chemical weapons out of the country on the eve of the war. “He transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria,” General Yaalon told The New York Sun over dinner in New York on Tuesday night. “No one went to Syria to find it.”

Exactly what we’ve been saying all along.

And some people say there’s nothing good on PJM!

Iowahawk is offering special coverage of the election in Iraq by Special Correspondent Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi:

Yozup, haters? Yeahhh, the Zarkman’s comin’ at ya from B-town, and me and the Q Crew be all up in this bish. Infidel who runs this blog says all y’alls over in Satanland got some big hard-on about this Iraqi election shit, and asked me if I would jack his hit counter with a little local Q Crew flava. Normally Zarkman would tell the tell the punkass bitch to go suck it. But the choads at Pajamas Media are passin’ out the Haterade, so somebody’s gotta give you the Team Z POV.

An announcement is expected later today.

It would be unrealistic for the Bush Administration to continue to try to oppose this unstoppable piece of feel-good legislation.

The United States has an ancient, and very deep, cultural tradition of hypocrisy, dating back to the settlement of Massachusetts Bay by Puritans from England early in the 17th century. This tradition commonly expresses itself in intellectually dishonest, impractical, and counter-productive public policies, which are nonetheless nearly invariably successfuly rammed through by the contemporary elect on the basis of simplistic slogans and a chorus of pieties.

Are we Americans really so humane and idealistic that we would prefer to avoid the coercive interrogation of captured terrorists, even at the potential cost of mass American civilian casualties, even at the cost –perhaps– of our own precious and unique lives? You’ve got to be kidding! Of course, we’re not. We all know perfectly well that we have every intention of being safe and protected by the rough men charged with our defense. But we are a self-indulgent and intellectually dishonest people. We want to have it both ways. We insist on striking public postures demonstrating to the world, and to ourselves, that we are too fine and noble to condone brutality and force, and we still want those entrusted with the responsibility for our defense to break the rules, to sacrifice themselves if necessary, to protect us. Of course we intend to be safe, but we feel a need to indulge in a public ceremony of innocence, to assure ourselves that, come whatever may, our own hands are clean. Feeling better about ourselves for a fleeting instant may have a terrible cost for someone else someday, but what do we care?

————————————-

And 24 hours later, Gregory Djerejian confirms:

No. McCain is right. Torture can never be legally preordained as an acceptable tactic, even against the monsters we face. It must remain a crime to engage in it, without exceptions, and interrogators must be held accountable for their actions. They may, under the totality of the circumstances, be pardoned or otherwise excused when the full facts come to light. But ex post, not ex ante.