The American Rifleman, the NRA‘s traditional monthly magazine, has for many years run a featured called the Armed Citizen as a corrective to the MSM’s deliberate policy of avoiding coverage of the use of armed force by private citizens to stop crime.

It’s easy to see why.

Clayton Cramer catches USA Today inventing a non-existent tackle in a stabbing attack in Memphis halted by an armed citizen with handgun.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

It should hardly be surprising to anyone that, informally and in private, President Bush speaks like anybody else, using colloquial expressions and occasionally colorful language.

A press microphone, earlier today, accidentally caught a private conversation between Bush and Blair, in which the president said, (presumably referring to Kofi Annan and the UN) “what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this sh*t.”

(CNN story & video –If you actually care.)

Well, not since the day our second-grade nun banged her finger, and exclaimed “Darn!,” have I seen such a display of infantile astonishment at the descent of Olympian authority to the level of ordinary humanity.

This unutterably trivial event was dotingly recorded, memorialized, and pondered over from Manhattan to Timbuktoo today, proving once again (in case there was doubt in anybody’s mind) exactly how childish and inane the collective intelligence which identifies and comments on the day’s news events actually is.

Marc Gunther, reviewing Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail in Fortune, deplores “the extinction of mass culture.” Some of us consider it cause for celebration.

Anderson rejoices in the proliferation of niche markets and consumer choice, but Gunther argues that “The advent of 300 channels and the Internet has fragmented audiences – and the explosion of choice has left us poorer.”

I think the explosion of choice has left us poorer in at least two arenas. The first is journalism. (Yes, as a Fortune writer, I’ve got a stake in the health of the mainstream media, which bloggers call the MSM.) The network evening newscasts, big-city newspapers and the national news magazines once had the money, access, skills, commitment and power to deliver lots of original reporting and put important issues on the national agenda. Today, they are all diminished.

To pick a single, timely, example, The Tribune Co. announced just the other day that its newspapers would be closing foreign bureaus in Johannesburg, Moscow, Lebanon and Pakistan. This is happening all over newspaperdom and it happened years ago at the broadcast networks.

Yes, there is more information available to us than ever, but I don’t think we are better informed. Niche media will, inevitably, continue to weaken mass media.

The second arena where we are worse off is politics. This is related to journalism, as the moderate and responsible (okay, bland) voices of the MSM get drowned out by partisan, opinionated cableheads and bloggers.

Yeah, right, I’m really depressed about how responsible (but, unfortunately, lying) voices like Dan Rather’s were drowned out by (fact-checking) Charles Johnson and Powerline.

Baron Bodissey, this week, has a terrific essay identifying the crucial components of Islam’s attack on the West:

Covert funding based on successful long-tern extortion via the manipulation of petroleum prices.

The use of criminals, psychos, and malcontents as cannon fodder.

And so we have what might be called a Demonic Convergence, a confluence of destructive impulses that Islam gathers unto itself. In the terms of Chaos Theory, Islam is a “basin attractor”, an asymptotic solution to all the differential equations of nihilistic human behavior.

Any impulse that longs to destroy Western Civilization — which, for the modern world, means all civilization — will gravitate towards Islam. The criminal gets ideological justification for his behavior, the sadist gets to rape and murder to his heart’s content, and the hippie radical gets to stick it to the Man for all eternity.

This is what we’re up against: the Big Tent of ideological nihilism. The closer any given society gets to the behavioral sink, the more Islamic it tends to become.

And, finally, the habitual treason of the journalistic clerisy of the West, providing the essential Fifth Column.

A must-read article.

Hat-tip to Richard Fernandez.

Frank McCullough, and his listener Frank from Staten Island, think those liberals are going to get us all killed.

The Russian News and Information Agency Novosti reports that Vladimir Putin has put out a hit order on the insurgent killers of the four Russian diplomats slain in Iraq.

President Vladimir Putin Wednesday ordered Russia’s special services to do everything necessary to find and eliminate the killers of four Russian diplomats in Iraq, the Kremlin press service said….

Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the Federal Security Service, told journalists that his service had received the instructions. “We will work to ensure so that not one of the terrorists who committed the crime escapes just punishment,” he said.

It is credibly rumored that when several Russian diplomatic personnel, including the KGB rezident, were kidnaped by Hezbollah in Lebanon back in the 1980s, Russian specialists were dispatched to Beirut, who proceeded to kidnap near relatives of Hezbollah’s leadership. The male apparatus of those captured relations was delivered to Hezbollah bosses, along with a promise that the Russian security forces would be collecting theirs as well, if the Russian diplomats were not released immediately unharmed. The Russians were released.

The effectiveness of Russian measures contrasted with useless American pleas for the release of Beirut CIA station chief William Buckley, whose death by torture was videotaped and tauntingly released to the Press.

Whatever will the Council of Europe, the New York Times editorial page, and Andrew Sullivan have to say, do you suppose, about the soon-to-occur treatment of the insurgent kidnappers by avenging Russian security forces?

Will accusations of denial of due process and Geneva Convention Rights make the front page of the Post and the Times? Will Seymour Hersch expose Russsian brutality in the New Yorker? Will the lachrymose chorus of blogging bed-wetters spill another few trillion electrons condemning Russian coercive interrogation?

Frankly, I doubt it.

The tempest in a USMC canteen cup whipped up by MSM’s politically-correct thought police over Corporal Belile’s humorous little song is over. Possibly the Marine Corps still has enough good men simply to laugh the idea of charging a Marine corporal serving in a combat theatre in time of war with violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice for writing and performing a song poking fun at the bloodthirsty fanaticism of the enemy.

Or perhaps Michelle Malkin and the rest of the right side of the Blogosphere directed enough effective ridicule at the uniformed, and un-uniformed, forces of compulsory piety to drive them back into their burrows on this one.

At any rate, congratulations and best wishes to Corporal Belile and his band “the Sweater Kittenz.” Let’s hope they get a better name, and go on to successful post-Marine Corps career of offending liberals and insulting CAIR.

Reuters:

The U.S. military will not punish a Marine who performed an obscenity-laced song to a laughing and cheering crowd of fellow troops in Iraq making light of killing Iraqis, the Marine Corps said on Tuesday.

The Marines two weeks ago launched a preliminary inquiry into whether Cpl. Joshua Belile, who returned home from Iraq in March, violated military law or rules in singing the song, a four-minute video of which was posted on the Internet…

“The preliminary inquiry has been concluded. No punitive action will be taken against Corporal Belile. And there will be no further investigation,” said Maj. Shawn Haney, a spokeswoman at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point in North Carolina.

Haney said the inquiry ruled out any violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Another Marine Corps official, who asked not to be named because details of the inquiry are private, said poor taste, poor judgment and poor timing, not to mention offensive lyrics, do not necessarily amount to criminal conduct.

Wikipedia entry

video link here

lyrics

Michelle Malkin has an amusing new video, focussing on those leaking leftwing newspapers, which includes a WWII Private Snafu cartoon, written by Dr. Seuss and featuring the voice of Mel Blanc.

Foreign and domestic news agencies are reporting that the US Marine Corps has charged seven Marines and a Navy sailor with murder over the death of an Iraqi civilian.

BBC News

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Crosspatch (a neighbor here in California) recently commented on the work already done by bloggers to investigate the irresponsible coverage of this matter in the MSM.

I have seen bloggers spending hours of their own time digging, fact checking, comparing, and publishing their findings for peer review and discussion. These are people that have jobs and other things in their lives that place demands on their time and energy but have answered what is apparently to them the call of an important mission, a call of duty.

While professional journalists should be doing the work that is being done by members of the general public in trying to get the story straight, we are already seeing results. Respected media giants such as Time are beginning to back off of some of their initial claims and distance themselves from initial sources.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am simply in awe. This spontaneous and most honest display of devotion by members of our community for our service members in seeing they get a fair shake is enough to make an old grouch misty.

Those troops are at risk every day defending us and it is wonderful to see such an outpouring of support when we have a chance to defend them in return. There are too many people out there doing whatever they can to list because I am afraid of leaving someone out and thereby diminishing their contribution, but they know who they are and honestly, it is events such as this that make me proud to be an American.

This is a real living example of the love and devotion America has for their armed forces members. If someone is going to make accusations that would bring dishonor on the institution of our military, they are going to need to run a gauntlet of ordinary Americans who are going to want to make darned sure they have done their homework first.

Unlike times not so far in the past, we now live in an America that really does support its troops, in both word and deed.

To those of you spending your own time and effort on this issue, I thank you with all my heart.

The battle will continue.

Michael Barone, in the WSJ, reflects on the consequences of the habitual misuse of power of the press to delegitimize elected administrations.

It is hard in retrospect to understand why the left put so much psychic energy into the notion that Mr. Rove would be indicted. He certainly was an important target. No one in American history has been as powerful an aide to a president, both on politics and on public policy, as Karl Rove. Only Robert Kennedy in his brother’s administration and Hamilton Jordan in Jimmy Carter’s come close, and neither was as involved in electoral politics as Mr. Rove has been.

Still, it was clear early on that the likelihood that Mr. Rove violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act was near zero. Under the law, the agent whose name was disclosed would have had to have served overseas within the preceding five years (Valerie Plame, according to her husband’s book, had been stationed in the U.S. since 1997), and Mr. Rove would have had to know that she was undercover (not very likely). The left enjoyed raising an issue on which, for once, it could charge that a Republican administration had undermined national security. But that rang hollow when the left gleefully seized on the New York Times’ disclosure of NSA surveillance of phone calls from suspected al Qaeda operatives abroad to persons in the U.S.

In all this a key role was played by the press. Cries went up early for the appointment of a special prosecutor: Patrick Fitzgerald would be another Archibald Cox or Leon Jaworski. Eager to bring down another Republican administration, the editorialists of the New York Times evidently failed to realize that the case could not be pursued without asking reporters to reveal the names of sources who had been promised confidentiality. America’s newsrooms are populated largely by liberals who regard the Vietnam and Watergate stories as the great achievements of their profession. The peak of their ambition is to achieve the fame and wealth of great reporters like David Halberstam and Bob Woodward. But this time it was not Republican administration officials who went to prison. It was Judith Miller, then of the New York Times itself.

Interestingly, Bob Woodward himself contradicted Mr. Fitzgerald’s statement, made the day that he announced the one indictment he has obtained, of former vice presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby, that Mr. Libby was the first to disclose Ms. Plame’s name to a reporter. The press reaction was to turn on Mr. Woodward, who has been covering this administration as a new story rather than as a reprise of Vietnam and Watergate.

Historians may regard it as a curious thing that the left and the press have been so determined to fit current events into templates based on events that occurred 30 to 40 years ago. The people who effectively framed the issues raised by Vietnam and Watergate did something like the opposite; they insisted that Vietnam was not a reprise of World War II or Korea and that Watergate was something different from the operations J. Edgar Hoover conducted for Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy. Journalists in the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s tended to believe they had a duty to buttress Americans’ faith in their leaders and their government. Journalists since Vietnam and Watergate have tended to believe that they have a duty to undermine such faith, especially when the wrong party is in office.

That belief has its perils for journalism, as the Fitzgerald investigation has shown. The peril that the press may find itself in the hot seat, but even more the peril that it will get the story wrong. The visible slavering over the prospect of a Rove indictment is just another item in the list of reasons why the credibility of the “mainstream media” has been plunging. There’s also a peril for the political left. Vietnam and Watergate were arguably triumphs for honest reporting. But they were also defeats for America–and for millions of freedom-loving people in the world. They ushered in an era when the political opposition and much of the press have sought not just to defeat administrations but to delegitimize them. The pursuit of Karl Rove by the left and the press has been just the latest episode in the attempted criminalization of political differences. Is there any hope that it might turn out to be the last?

In our Second (and continuing) Reconstruction Period, few thought crimes are more vigorously prosecuted by the radical mob of the MSM than expressions of sympathy for the Lost Cause of the Southern Confederacy, and public display of the Confederate flag is treated as a major offense.

One might have assumed leftist power was purely terrestrial, but, no! it seems that even commercially-motivated displays of Confederate flags in space by foreigners must be carefully noted and arraigned before the bar of bien pensant opinion.

Russian cosmonaut Salizhan Sharipov may possibly have, with a keen eye on the bottom line, fetched along a 4×6″ Confederate flag with the diabolical intention of selling the well-travelled emblem of Rebellion and Agrarianism on Ebay to some overly affuent and irredentist red state dweller. Thank goodness, the forces of Political Correctness were on top of things to prevent the prospering of such a nefarious scheme.

The seller, one Alex Pachenko, withdrew the controversial symbol from the Ebay auction, claiming that cosmonaut Sharipov denied having anything to do with it, though NBCs photo does suggest otherwise.

Second story.

Bill Sammon, writing in the San Francisco Examiner, notes that the president is getting considerably less than fair reporting from the MSM.

When President Bush nominated Gen. Michael Hayden to run the CIA, the press focused on disapproving Democrats and even some Republicans who were dubious about confirmation.

A month later, when the Senate confirmed Hayden by a 78-15 vote, the story was given much less emphasis in the media, which had moved on to other stories critical of the Bush administration.

Similarly, when Bush nominated one of his aides, Brett Kavanaugh, to the federal judiciary, the press was filled with reports about Democrats threatening a filibuster because Kavanaugh once worked for special prosecutor Kenneth Starr in the case against President Clinton.

Last week, there was much less media coverage of a Rose Garden ceremony in which Bush presided over the swearing-in of Kavanaugh, who had been confirmed by a 57-36 vote.

Bush has quietly been racking up small victories like these that seem at odds with the media’s conventional wisdom of a presidency on the skids.

In addition to success with his nominations, Bush also is presiding over a booming economy and is even scoring some foreign policy advances..

“In today’s political climate, daily headlines and fast-moving events make it easy to lose the forest for the trees,” Bush counselor Dan Bartlett wrote in a memo this week. “But there is a clear tide of positive developments that reflect the president’s ability to get things done.”

“President Bush’s leadership is achieving a steady flow of results that do not always dominate the day’s headlines on their own but that together represent real progress for the American people,” Bartlett said.