Little Green Footballs publishes latest Adnan Hajj photo from Beirut (sent by reader humblegunner).

Rusty Shackleford debunks another Adnan Hajji modified photo. This plane may have been dropping bombs. The missiles are clearly an addition, but one bomb is too, so (in the end) there’s cause to wonder: were there any real bombs at all?

From Cox & Forkum.

This poor woman laments the destruction of her home in Southern Beirut by Israeli bombing, 22 July 2006. Reuters via Yahoo News.

And then, what do you know?

Here’s the same poor woman reacting to the destruction of her house in the suburbs of Beirut 05 August 2006. AP via Yahoo News.

Isn’t it an amazing coincidence?

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Hat tip to Drinking From Home who provides close-up facial photos, demonstrating the presence of the same mark and the same scar firmly establishing the identity of the woman in both photos as the same, and who observes mildly:

Either this woman is the unluckiest multiple home-owner in Beirut, or something isn’t quite right.

Scott Johnson at Powerline comes through with a link to a gallery of the work of the same photographer.

Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs has another scalp to hang on his barn door, next to Dan Rather’s.

Yesterday, LGF identified Photoshop-manipulated imagery in the Reuters’ photograph of alleged “burning buildings destroyed during an overnight Israeli air raid on Beirut’s suburbs August 5, 2006.”

Charles Johnson is an experienced photographer, and knowledgeable Photoshop user, and was readily able to recognize repetitive smoke patterns produced by application of the Photoshop clone tool.

Reuters has since admitted that LGF was right, and withdrawn the photo. Interestingly, Ynet.news reports that the photographer responsible was also the source of many of the photographs from Qana, also demonstrated by bloggers (specifically by EU Referendum) to have been staged.

Score two major Blogosphere corrections of the MSM falling for Hezbollah propaganda tricks in under a week.

Robert Kagan explains why Joe Lieberman is the last honest democrat, and how he is paying for it.

Twenty-nine Democratic senators voted in the fall of 2002 to authorize the invasion of Iraq. There isn’t enough room on this page to list the Democratic foreign policy experts and former officials, including those from the top ranks of the Clinton administration, who supported the war publicly and privately — some of whom even signed letters calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein. Nor is there any need to list the many liberal, and conservative, columnists on this and other editorial pages around the country who supported the war, or the many prominent journalists who provided the reporting that helped convince so many that the war was necessary.

The question of the day is, what makes Joe Lieberman different? What makes him now anathema to a Democratic Party and to liberal columnists who once supported both him and the war? Why is there now a chance he will lose the Democratic primary in Connecticut after so many years of faithfully serving that state and his own party?..

If Lieberman loses, it will not even be because he supported the war. Almost every leading Democratic politician and foreign policymaker, and many a liberal columnist, supported the war. Nor will he lose because he opposes withdrawing troops from Iraq this year. Most top Democratic policymakers agree that early withdrawal would be a mistake. Nor, finally, is it because he has been too chummy with President Bush. Lieberman has offered his share of criticism of the administration’s handling of the Iraq war and of many other administration policies.

No, Lieberman’s sin is of a different order. Lieberman stands condemned today because he didn’t recant. He didn’t say he was wrong. He didn’t turn on his former allies and condemn them. He didn’t claim to be the victim of a hoax. He didn’t try to pretend that he never supported the war in the first place. He didn’t claim to be led into support for the war by a group of writers and intellectuals whom he can now denounce. He didn’t go through a public show of agonizing and phony soul-baring and apologizing in the hopes of resuscitating his reputation, as have some noted “public intellectuals.”

These have been the chosen tactics of self-preservation ever since events in Iraq started to go badly and the war became unpopular. Prominent intellectuals, both liberal and conservative, have turned on their friends and allies in an effort to avoid opprobrium for a war they publicly supported. Journalists have turned on their fellow journalists in an effort to make them scapegoats for the whole profession. Politicians have twisted themselves into pretzels to explain away their support for the war or, better still, to blame someone else for persuading them to support it.

Al Gore, the one-time Clinton administration hawk, airbrushed that history from his record. He turned on all those with whom he once agreed about Iraq and about many other foreign policy questions. And for this astonishing reversal he has been applauded by his fellow Democrats and may even get the party’s nomination.

Apparently, amazingly, dispiritingly, it all works. At least in the short run, dishonesty pays. Dissembling pays. Forgetting your past writings and statements pays. Condemning those with whom you once agreed pays. Phony self-flagellation followed by self-righteous self-congratulation pays. The only thing that doesn’t pay is honesty. If Joe Lieberman loses, it will not be because he supported the war or even because he still supports it. It will be because he refused to choose one of the many dishonorable paths open to him to salvage his political career.

He is the last honest man, and he may pay the price for it. At least he will be able to sleep at night. And he can take some solace in knowing that history, at least an honest history, will be kinder to him than was his own party.

But the intellectually and morally dishonest left will also pay a price for driving the last honest, responsible, and patriotic individuals out of the democrat party. They will continue to lose election after election, and their party’s support, and national influence, will continue to dwindle.

Berkeley graduate student Cecilia Lucas was moved by the revolutionary struggle of the Shiite people of Palestine to put pen to paper and produce this poem:

I Don’t Want to Love You, But I Do

You were born out of death to a life in a cage
Where bombs are not the only reason people die
Fed by the violence of hunger and homelessness
Raised by colonialism
Your heart and your will still grew strong

You scare me
Not just because they tell me to be scared
Not just because they repeat, repeat, repeat
The story of 1983
Begging me to understand
Americans are worth more than Lebanese….

And so on.

And the older, and more cynical, Iowahawk was moved to respond.

You were born in the Valley to a life in a suburban cage
Encino, where mean girls and cheerleaders
Drop bombs of hate on the unpopular girls
Shy poetry club chicks like you
With 1480 SATs and early admission to Berkeley
Fed by the violence and lookism of the dance squad
Raised in a four bedroom colonial
They wouldn’t let you wear your Che T-shirt to prom
But your heart and your armpit hair still grew proud and strong

You scare me too
Not just because you have that Code Pink Manson girl freak-vibe
Not just because you repeat, repeat, repeat
All those quotes from your dog-eared volumes of Chomsky
and Zinn
and Edward Said
Begging me to understand
Can’t we just hold each other
Instead of talking, talking, talking
About your Masters thesis?

And so on.

Hat tip to David Ross.

Really cool. 9:32 minutes.

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Hat tip to Seneca the Younger.

Ann Telnaes – SLATE

The Beatles’ Hey, You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away re-done Islamically.

video 2:45 minutes.

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Hat tip to Michelle Malkin.

Producing his Complete George Orwell led Peter Davison to endure seventeen years of labor, seven changes of publisher ownership, and (ultimately) a sextuple heart bypass. The (apparent) completion of this Herculean project in 1998 was received with universal accaim, but Davison did not stop.

His original editor, Tom Rosenthal, recalls:

After my departure Secker & Warburg changed ownership no less than four times, and when the redoubtable Davison turned up with the newly discovered and remarkable material now published as The Lost Orwell he was told that Secker would not be able to publish it because it would not sell enough copies.

David Pryce-Jones positively explodes with indignation.

For many years now, Peter Davison has been the editor of a Collected Orwell, put out by Secker and Warburg. After Volume 20 he thought the series was complete. Then he discovered more material, including letters from Eileen, Orwell’s first wife, and Sonia, as well as some Orwell essays he had overlooked. Most fascinating of all are lists of Communists and fellow travellers whom he knew, and on whom he commented sharply for the benefit of a counter-intelligence department. Here’s a window into the Cold War.

This latest volume was published by the Timewell Press, boutique publishers not long in operation. How had this conceivably come about? I got the Timewell telephone number and the man who answered was Andreas Campomar. He’s now in the position Fred Warburg was in all those years ago, but this time because Secker & Warburg had turned the book down on grounds of cost. They’ve made millions out of Orwell, and they do this?

Reviewers in the London Times and Telegraph found this post-ultimate volume “invaluable” and “fascinating.”