Why Fox bugs the left.

Peggy Noonan on why the left hates Fox News so excessively:

It is an odd thing about modern liberals that they're made anxious by the unsanctioned. A conservative is more likely to see what's happening as freedom. It isn't that honest and impartial news lost its place of respect, it's that establishment liberalism lost its journalistic monopoly. And it was a monopoly.

They also distrust anything that makes money. NPR isn't really all that free from commercials. It just trades on its image of being "listener supported," an odd distortion of the word "public."

Ms. Noonan goes on to lament the loss of standards as the entertainment side of the media seeks ratings with ever more titillating and sophomoric "product." I'm afraid to say that it has been ever thus. We don't really have a sense of the kind of dreck that previous working classes considered entertainment. What has endured is what the upper middle and upper classes valued. What we have today is smeared across all audiences. We no longer have to buy seats at the Met. The frivolity comes to all of us by TV and Radio for free. The markets that have made our prosperity so widespread have also promoted the lowest forms of culture. C'est la vie.

Does this mean they're losing?

Nobody can accuse the Times of not doing our part.

Well said!

Maybe they've only been printing messages from their subconscious. "Macaca, macaca, macaca! It's got to be racist in SOME language!"

Do the Democrats even have to campaign this year?

Not if Memeorandum.com is an indication. The press is engaging in a campaign of its own to undermine the Bush Administration. Only until you get halfway down the page do you find this reminder of what this election is really about. Republicans, for all their dithering and folly, are still willing to fight the war on terrorism. The Democrats seem only concerned about wallpapering the past to fit their rhetoric. They've been buffaloed once again by their anti-war wing, which seems to include most of the media elite, who have no sense of restraint or even logic for their hatred.

We can fight terrorism or have a responsible, loyal opposition party, but we can't have both. I think that a return to power by Democrats in Congress could be the worst thing to happen to that party.

Not Really News

Joe Lieberman has discovered the independents.

The fastest growing political party in America is no party, which is to say, that the fastest growing group of voters are unaffiliated with either party. That's a market statement on the two major parties.

Wonder why? Could it have something to do with the ferocity of our media since the 1970s? The triumphal press no longer gives anybody a break, which is a mixed blessing. They're far more rough on Republicans, but the Democrats are their own worst enemies.

The evolution of our squeamishness.

I just happened on this Ace of Spades post from 2004, at the time the Abu Ghraib photos came out, with the heading, "Flashback: When Clinton Was President, Torture Was Cool"

It starts with this quote:

Under the control of Richard Clarke, the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) had established a specal bin Laden unit in 1996, and by 1998 had over one hundred case officers and intelligence analysts.

"With the help of the CTC, forty terrorists from the former Yugoslavia were captured and turned over to Arab governments, usually Egypt. Egyptian security is believed to have tortured, tried, and executed many of them. In this way, al Qaeda cells were quickly smashed in Albania, Bosnia, and elsewhere."
-- Losing Bin Laden, by Richard Miniter

There seems to have been a change of attitude at the WaPo between December 2002, when the images of 9/11 were still in our minds, and May 2004, after the commencement of the Democrat primaries and the discovery by Howard Dean that there were lots of donors out there willing to underwrite an angry anti-war movement. Torture was a distasteful but accepted practice in Afghanistan, but, when the Democrats needed an issue for the next election, it became heinous.

Read the whole thing. It's quite instructive, given the indignation being expressed in stentorian tones from the opponents of the Interrogation and Treatment of Illegal Non-combatants bill. I've always thought that no treatment should be used which was likely to elicit a false confession from an innocent person, but where that point lies seems to defend on the individual. In no case, should lasting injury or intense pain be inflicted. If you can scare the guy into spilling his guts, by all means do so, but don't use twisting (literally the root of the word "torture"). Those who now seem to think that American Due Process standards apply throughout the universe, have obviously forgotten or refuse to admit the nature of the threat we face. If a Democrat wins the presidency in 2008, watch for this unpleasant business to disappear from the media once again, like the homeless problem in our cities.

Mark Foley's Resignation

I imagine that Democrats are celebrating this scandal as proof of the Republicans' "culture of corruption," but what does it really prove? That if you're a Republican, you don't get a free grope. You don't even get to express interest in one. Bill Clinton actually engaged in sodomy with one of his interns, and his party paid lip service (no pun intended) to the unacceptability of such behavior, but they closed ranks to make sure he kept his job.

So tell me, which party has a "culture of corruption." Foley knew that when this story got out, he would be toast and so he fell on his sword. Republicans, apparently, still have a sense of shame. ABC has posted the instant messaging dialog on line. It's R rated. What this sorry episode tells me is that dwelling on your fantasies is not as healthy as Dr. Ruth seems to think. As he thinketh in his heart so is he.

Update: Brit Hume made the same points today on Fox News Sunday, and the lefty bloggers are blowing a gasket. After the treatment they've given Bush, they have no claim to civility from the right.

The Race Card

Methinks the WaPo doth protest too much. I guess there's no statute of limitations on using the word "nigger." Nobody, having once used that term, will ever be allowed to deny racism, especially if he runs for office as a Republican. Of course this rule doesn't apply to Democrats.

This is what Isaiah calls "making a man an offender for a word," and it's an example of injustice that the Lord says will be punished. The WaPo may have immaculate skirts, but the rest of us know it's a cheap shot. To his credit, Jim Webb didn't try to take advantage of this, instead noting that there are probably precious few, if any, Southerners who have never uttered that term.

Allen's polls have improved, so it seems that most Virginians aren't buying what the Post is peddling.

Another Hot Potato

Rollcall reports that a House report "Details 485 Contacts Between Abramoff Team and White House Officials." And, of course,

Democrats and Republicans on the committee immediately began to fight over the report's findings, with each side portraying the results in the context of its own political needs.

Apparently, the documents only show Abramoff's side of the story, being based on his billing records. While he offered officials all kinds of favors, there is no evidence that they were accepted.

If these had been contacts between Al Qaed and Saddam's regime in Iraq, you can be sure that there would be no evidence of involvement in their separate operations. I have to wonder how the Republicans got suckered into releasing this a month before the elections.

Hair on Fire

Bruce Ackerman:

Congress may give the president the power to lock up almost anyone he thinks is a terror threat.

How stupid is this? The president already has this power, it's part of the police power exercised by every peace officer in the ocuntry, but of all others the president is least likely to have the power to keep it quiet. There are too many leaks in the agencies that would have to carry out his wishes.

This is part of the meme I've noticed more and more lately, that we're living in some kind of police state. It's childish, of course, but it's being repeated by people like Ackerman, Kerry, Leahy, etc. with such alarmism that you wonder what they've been smoking. There has been no end to campaign season since 2000, but it's getting more hysterical and ridiculous as the election nears.

The time to worry would be when the press and the Democrats have nothing bad to say about the president. Then you'd know they were either all suppressed or complicit in a plot.

May I propose Cockalorum's Law: The number of public claims that the government has become "Orwellian" or "Big Brother," is inversely proportional to the likelihood that such claims have any basis in fact. (If it really was Orwellian, such claims wouldn't be allowed in print.)

This also reminds me of a second theory: The degree to which a party complains that the other party is insufficiently bipartisan, is inversely proportional to the complaining party's ability to obtain votes for its position.

I'm still studying the coincidence of women with webcams in their bedrooms and women who are privacy activists.

Yet another fool who thinks that the courts, not the Commmand-in-Chief, should run this war. I guess these people think that our troops should be required to get a warrant before they fire their weapons.

John Kerry's speech is on Hugh's show now. He's talking about "moral authority" as if we would lose it to the terrorists, if we don't treat them as if they were American citizens.

The Senate has rejected the Specter Amendment which would have given unlawful combatant detainees acces to the U.S. courts. The story seems unaccountably objective and fair for the New York Hearsay. The lede:

The Senate today rejected an amendment to a bill creating a new system for interrogating and trying terror suspects that would have guaranteed such suspects access to the courts to challenge their imprisonment.

The supporters of the bill denounced the final bill for denying these detainees the right of habeus corpus which is a request for a court to rule on the validity of a person's detention.

Hugh Hewitt has replayed Pat Leahy's speech against the final bill, as unfair and a betrayal of American principles. He obviously has no grasp of who our enemies are, and he seems to feel that allowing the Military System of Justice to handle these individuals means that they're being denied human rights. This is a truly bizarre argument. It suggests that without some liberal federal judge to horn in and make a circus of the case, a captured terrorist is being treated unfairly. Do we really want to extend our Constitution that far? If we had a civil society everywhere, with the rule of law and more or less uncorrupt police and American judges from here to Outer Mongolia and back, we might make that argument, but most of the world still suffers under real tyranny, not the pretend kind invoked by Leahy and his fellows keep invoking here. To listen to them, you'd think that Bush had dissolved Congress and the Courts and seized control of the news media. The very fact that people are able to make such charges and have them broadcast is the surest refutation of them. Sometimes I wonder if our very liberties will destroy us. That seems to be the lesson of history.

Earlier Hugh spoke to Mark Steyn who was en route returning home from a visit to Gitmo. He noted that the prisoners were being interrogated in a La-Z-boy recliner (or "comfy chair").

Al Qaeda has lost Iraq

The polls the Democrats don't want us to notice. They should be lauding it, though, because of this:

Iraqi confidence in Iraqi forces (as opposed to militias) is increasing while its confidence in US forces is decreasing. Given US policies there can be little doubt but that US forces have lost significant Shia support and gained some Sunni support. I suspect increasing number of Shia no longer believe that American forces are capable of protecting them and with increased confidence in their government's capabilities no longer fear the consequences of an American withdrawal.

The Sunnis have reason to fear, but that's tough. It's not as if they didn't deserve it.

The Judgment of John McCain

George Will:

It is delicious that McCain-Feingold, the reformers' most recent handiwork, is helping kill taxpayer financing of presidential campaigns. Before McCain-Feingold, limits on contributions of private money -- set in 1974 and not indexed for inflation -- became steadily more restrictive, so candidates accepted public funding. But McCain-Feingold, by doubling the permissible size of campaign contributions, made it easier for candidates to raise sums far larger than taxpayer funding provides.

Candidates are choosing to go without public funding because of the strings attached, if they are able to raise enough in hard money contributions.

Bungling Leakers

After the selective leaking of the NIE was shown to be misrepresentative of the actual tenor of the estimates by the declassification of more sections that showed that it really warned against the Democrats' proposals to cut and run. Now, secure in the knowledge that Bush is not going to declassify more, the Dems are calling on him to declassify the whole thing. Sure, guys. Pull the other one.

But the NIE was released in April, when Zarqawi was still running Al Qaeda's efforts in Iraq. Since then, he has been bagged and the intelligence found in the rubble has been a treasure trove for our side. James Taranto notes this report of a letter from Al Qaeda found in Zarqawis house "complaining that the terrorist organization was losing ground in Iraq and Afghanistan." In other woreds, the Intelligence Estimate might be far different in light of the killing of Zarqawi.

What's with the NIE?

The liberal press and Democrats act like this NIE (from last April, btw) is a smoking gun, despite what it really says, "We've gotta win in Iraq."

I note that a lot of the left are dredging up the NIE from when Bush came in that said Bin Laden was determined to attack us on American soil. Of course, it gave no specifics about what to look for or what he might try. They could have spoken to John O'Neill if the FBI weren't so busy driving him out. It's all so clear 6 years later. Clinton had sufficient warnings but he left it up to his advisors to decide what to do. Before 9/11 the consensus was that we would draw down universal condemnation if we'd gone after the Taliban. That all changed when the WTC was brought down. But now the left is minimizing even that. They are either demanding a bug out or insisting thtat we send in more troops, which was LBJ's solution to problems in Vietnam. Fine, but they still don't how to run a war. They're busy driving everybody with military credibility out of the Democratic Party.

Have they no shame?

The New York Hearsay today has about the most hypcritical editorial I've seen in a long time. Called "The Fine Art of Declassification" it faults Bush for declassifying selected information to support his positions, which begs the question of what he was responding to. The Hearsay itself decided that it had the right to effectively declassify those parts of a classified document furnished by the source of leaks to its reporter, creating a false impression that the NIE supports giving up in Iraq. When Bush declassified other parts of the NIE to correct that impression, the editorial board of the Hearsay cries foul. This is the kind of silliness we've come to expect from Harry Reid. The Hearsay has now thrown off any pretensions of objectivity. It's now the house organ of the Democratic Party, petty, hypocritical and lawless.

Robert Tracinski:

The best thing we can do in this election is to crush the left--because the Democratic Party adds nothing of value to the American political debate.

When the only loyal opposition consists of John McCain and Lindsey Graham, you have to agree with that.

Groupthink in the Media

David Broder writes that the Gang of Fourteen is a good thing and that we need more independence in American politics. I might agree if I thought that all this grandstanding was justified. What it resembles more is a bunch of sanctimony and arrogance. Broder betrays that he's suffering from his own share of belief in the alternate reality being peddled by the liberal media.

It's apparent to me that 5 years of successfully thwarting terrorism has made too many of us complacent to the point of idiocy. Terrorism is still a threat, no matter how well we've done in fighting it. It would still be quite easy for a suicide bomber to blow himself up at almost any mall in the nation. Our childish belief that Bush wants to violate our civil rights, which is becoming widespread thanks to the media's drumming the meme for 5 years without let up.

For example, how many Americans has the NSA eavesdropped on? If you've been calling or receiving calls from Al Qaeda, you may raise your hand. Could this power be used improperly? Yes. Is it? No. All government powers are like that. There isn't the slightest evidence that the president's powers have been used for anything other than to pursue and defeat terrorism, but to listen to the media you'd think he was worse than Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, and Mussolini combined. But it's all pure alarmism and innuendo. The Democrats want and need a scandal comparable to Monica Lewinsky or Watergate, but all they really have is that Bush is sometimes inarticulate. He's accused of authorizing torture, lying to justify war, and so on ad nauseum, but the record is void of any evidence beyond the claims of terrorists and his political appointees. Nevertheless many of these have entered the public consciousness as fact, when they never have been anything more than hyperbole and speculation.

Someday, this will be examined minutely by non-biased historians and they will wonder what kind of groupthink was controlling us. If the Republicans hold Congress this fall, it will not be due to the truth being spread by the media. It's getting to the point where they're all tabloids, except for The National Enquirer.

Situational ethics

A Utahn teenager was recruited into the Army with the help of forgery by the recruiter of his father's signature on a consent form. The kid is happy in the Army, and his dad is proud of him, but he's not to happy with the recruiter.

The New Aldrich Ameses

Maybe the president should declassify the whole CIA and start another agency he can trust. Bureaucrats who consider themselves more entitled than the people we elect to make policy are dangerous. If they disagree to this degree, they should quit and go public in their own names, rather than leaking to the press while they continue to take government pay. At a time when the U.S. is the target of terrorist groups, having so many employees of our prime intelligence agency leaking classified information is indefensible. We need some high profile investigations and prosecutions, even if some reporters and editors go to jail.

Nope. No bias here.

Linda Greenhouse talks about her background. I'd love to see a study of why most reporters got into the biz. Another case of the best and the brightest?

Bloggers Have an Impact

They helped get the Transparency Bill passed. Publishing the information online will be a huge step forward, but it will still be a lot of time and effort to pin down details and tie them to particular politicians. Fortunately, a lot of bloggers are pretty good at that kind of thing.

Bush back in form

The president, when he's roused, is quite articulate, even eloquent:

The terrorists fight us in Iraq for a reason: They want to try to stop a young democracy from developing, just like they're trying to fight another young democracy in Afghanistan. And they use it as a recruitment tool, because they understand the stakes. They understand what will happen to them when we defeat them in Iraq.

You know, to suggest that if we weren't in Iraq, we would see a rosier scenario with fewer extremists joining the radical movement requires us to ignore 20 years of experience. We weren't in Iraq when we got attacked on September the 11th. We weren't in Iraq, and thousands of fighters were trained in terror camps inside your country, Mr. President. We weren't in Iraq when they first attacked the World Trade Center in 1993.

We weren't in Iraq when they bombed the Cole. We weren't in Iraq when they blew up our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. My judgment is, if we weren't in Iraq, they'd find some other excuse, because they have ambitions. They kill in order to achieve their objectives.

You know, in the past, Osama bin Laden used Somalia as an excuse for people to join his jihadist movement. In the past, they used the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was a convenient way to try to recruit people to their jihadist movement. They've used all kinds of excuses.

An offender for a word

Rich Lowry notes the screwy turn the Allen/Webb campaign has taken over whether Allen, 20 years ago used the term "nigger." (I assume this is the "n-word" they refer to.) Has politics sunk to this?

Isaiah 29:

For the terrible one is brought to nought, and the scorner is consumed, and all that watch for iniquity are cut off:

That make a man an offender for a word, and lay a snare for him that reproveth in the gate, and turn aside the just for a thing of nought.

Therefore thus saith the LORD, who redeemed Abraham, concerning the house of Jacob, Jacob shall not now be ashamed, neither shall his face now wax pale.

What the NIE really says

Ann Althouse quotes it in bold face:

Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.

The leakers didn't mention that finding. It says exactly the opposite of what they want us to believe it says. The jihadists are focused on Iraq, and we must face them there to defeat them.

On Brit Hume's program yesterday, Mara Liasson dismissed Bill Kristol's theory that Clinton's meltdown on Fox News Sunday was deliberate and planned. I don't know whether it was or not, but the facts that two reporters, one at the Washington Post and one at the New York Hearsay filed parallel reports featuring selected leaks from the classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), that both stories featured headlines that spy agency personnel said that the war in Iraq is making terrorism worse, that the stories dovetail so nicely with the Democrats' national campaign--all those suggest coordination between the leakers, the MSM and the Democrats.

The White House has slammed yet another leak of classified information for political purposes. The leaks were carefully selected and are shown to be distortions of the entire NIE.

This IS political, and it's underhanded. If Bush had declassified the NIE, the left would be screaming that he was endangering the national security from political purposes. Why is it any less reprehensible when the Democrats and their friend in the media do the same.

The Democrats are engaging in a deeply dishonest campaign of disinformation, aimed at rewriting history with claims that if Bill Clinton had been in office and had the signals Bush had he would have prevented the 9/11 attacks. The problem with it all is why anybody should care. They had 8 years of repeated and escalating terrorist attacks and never got very serious. Yea, Clinton tried, but it was a half-hearted try, because as Clinton said the Pentagon didn't want to do more. Talk about strong leadership.

As I've said before, the blame for our weak-kneed treatment of the attacks belongs not to Clinton alone but to the entire government. I never heard George Bush blame the Clinton administration for anything. He refused to allow it, even when the press tried to draw Scott McClellan into it. But now the Democrats are accusing him of doing exactly what he has resolutely refused to do. After 9/11 I realized as did many others that trying to find someone to blame was a waste of time and highly distracting. But now, in a reverse form, it's the main strategy of the Democrats

I've got a great slogan for this campaign: "We tried!" Republicans would do well to knock that down quickly and focus not on the past but on the future. The Dems are focusing on the past because they have nothing to offer for the future. They're trying to run Bill Clinton against George Bush, neither of whom will ever run for anything again, in a purely Congressional election!

Our policy in Iraq is succeeding, which is why the violence is at such a peak right now. I think the left senses it, which is why they're so desperate to lie and argue about the past instead of proposing anything for the future.

It's a conspiracy, I tell ya!

OPEC, that is. It's going to drop oil production to keep prices from falling further.

Another good reason to put a tariff on imported oil.

Failure to Assimilate

When Abu Izzadeen, the firebrand Islamist militant, berated John Reid last week for "daring" to visit a Muslim area, the Home Secretary bridled, as did many others, at his suggestion that part of London was off limits for a British minister of the Crown.

There was nowhere in this country from which anyone should be excluded, Mr Reid said; nowhere that could be called exclusively Muslim.

How long before the Brits, French, et al. have to launch a reconquest of Europe?

Self-parodists and the People who Love Them

Can this be for real?

Keith [Olberman] pulled no punches and launched another smack down on Bush and FOX News... And finally tonight, a Special Comment about President Clinton's interview. The headlines about them are, of course, entirely wrong.

The lefty blogs are, of course, entirely out of touch. Does anybody ever check Olberman's ratings? He'd probably do better if he were on Pay for View.

Out of the woodwork

Gary Hart, who first rose to fame when he worked for George McGovern, and was a likely presidential candidate until he tempted his luck with Donna Rice, launches a little preemptory strike of his own against his paranoid fantasy that Bush is about to go to war on Iran. Funny how all these Democrats of the past are popping up like Banquo's ghost to remind people of why they voted for Republicans in the first place.

Didn't Hollywood Liberals Create "Wag the Dog?"

Andrew McCarthy remembers the cruise missile strikes in 1998 much the same as I do, but he wrote a piece for The Weekly Standard arguing not that Clinton was engaging in a "wag the dog" ploy, but rather

to complain that the Clinton administration was not doing enough to defend the retaliatory attack, and — far from asserting that Clinton was "too obsessed" with bin Laden — to argue the problem was that Clinton was not doing enough about Islamic terrorism.

But at least he tried!

Why do we have to suffer this jackass popping up upstage everything else whenever he feels left out? I hope Fox News never invites him on again, but if they really want to damage the Democrats, they probably will.

Good suggestion

Mario Loyola has a recommendation for all the journalistic ethicists out there:

When the New York Times publishes information that appears to have been illegally leaked, it should explain how it came across the information. At the very least, it should leave no doubts whether (a) classified information was in fact leaked, (b) classified information was leaked on background with due authorization, or (c) the reporter was only fed unclassified portions of the report. To say that it interviewed a whole bunch of people who spoke on condition of anonymity because "they were discussing a classified intelligence document" on its face suggests the commission of felony, without explaining anything important about why those people were in fact speaking on condition of anonymity.

I agree, but if it did that what would its reports have to report?

At the very least, until they start doing this, they should quit pretending to be professionals and pontificating on other people's ethics.

Football and Politics

George H. W. Bush flipped the coin before the Saints-Hawks game tonight. Chris Berman reported that when it went against the Saints he said "At least, I tried." Big laugh. I suspect that Berman was making that up, but I hope Clinton knows that everybody is laughing at him over his tantrum on Fox News.

Call it the "New York Hearsay"

It's hardly The Times anymore. More like 20 year old allegations about George Allen. I'm sure a lot of Americans of African Ancestry will get upset over this, but not if they're fair minded at all.

I'm not all that impressed by George Allen, but such cynical smearing of people is more like a tabloid that "the newspaper of record."

The Angry Ex-president

Clinton's meltdown is still being discussed in the blogosphere. For me, it was just more proof that Bill is a chameleon, he takes on the color of his party's background. These days, they're angry, so what is he? He responds to the political climate like a weather vane. What better way to rouse his supporters than to denounce Fox News Channel?

And rouse them he did even if Ariana is still bitter over his efforts to be non-controverial since leaving office. His blow up didn't really settle anything, but it showed that he is "fighting back," which is the prescription of the day. There's something about campaign season that gets his juices flowing, but is a reprise of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" a wise choice, and do the Democrats really need the country to be reminded of his 8 years of dithering about Al Qaeda?

Mark Steyn reports on Ted Turner's latest pronouncement:

He's now weighed in on the ayatollahs, and his line's pretty straightforward: Why shouldn't Iran have nukes?

"They're a sovereign state," he said. "We have 28,000. Why can't they have 10? We don't say anything about Israel -- they've got 100 of them approximately -- or India or Pakistan or Russia. And really, nobody should have them. They aren't usable by any sane person."

The key to that is the meaning of the word "sane," of course, but it's typical of the fairness fetish afflicting so many in this country. It's why when we get on an elevator with someone creepy, we fear to let our nervousness show.

The liberal impulse to excuse our enemies because we aren't perfect seems to have become so ingrained in our ideas of socially acceptable behavior that we automatically disapprove of calling evil what it is. There's a little gasp in the modern mind when Bush calls someone evil, even though he's talking about people who plot to murder young men and women along with however many Jews or Americans they can take with them. To claim that deposing or opposing groups like that and the governments that sponsor them is unjustified is an indicator of an almost total lack of seriousness, especially when combined with irrational hatred of those who take arms against evil. While we've been enjoying life, distracted by the titillation and debauchery of our popular media, the leadership of the world has been drifting into this morass of moral equivalence.

The people who obsess over Bush seeking to create a theocracy in the U.S., seemed to scarcely notice Ahmadinejad's little prayer at the end of his speech to the U.N. which signaled his fervent wish for a worldwide theocracy, or better yet, a worldwide holocaust of infidels to bring about his version of the second coming. Despite the many examples in history of the folly of taking madmen at their word, the left is intent on pursuing that elusive butterfly of socialism, from which heading off the next world conflagration is just an annoying distraction.

We made a huge mistake in creating the United Nations. They aren't united, and some aren't really nations, having been cobbled together by European colonialists. I was taught in grade school via My Weekly Reader that the U.N. was going to be just like the U.S. but worldwide. I haven't taken that seriously since 6th grade.

My thoughts exactly

Paul Mirengoff and John Hinderaker take down the reports in the WaPo and Times with similar headlines about "spy agencies" saying that the Iraq war is hurting our fight against terrorism. The reports discuss the National Intelligence Estimate, a classified document, but make their own conclusions, or rather state leaked conclusions from partisan sources in the CIA and FBI. At least that's what I thought, and so do Mirengoff and Hinderaker.

Leaking to the media in Washington has become so pervasive that it hardly constitutes "whistleblowing" anymore. Nobody seems to care that it's illegal and harmful to the mission of the agencies involved. It's more of a indicator, like opinion polls, but representative only of the level of rebellion in the bureaucracy. It's unprofessional and insubordinate. If I were an editor, I think I'd be worried about the credibility of people who violate the rules of their agencies to dish with reporters. Even more, I'd be worried about the news becoming little more than a place for disgruntled employees to vent.

The election isn't until November,

and the media are already attacking the results. I voted this year on a Diebold machine and found it quite simple. If people can't figure out how they work, they can't read or they're senile. All you have to do is touch the screen. That's got to be easier than using the Butterfly Ballot.

Clinton's Pique

More on Clinton's egotism. But lefty bloggers are only attacking Fox News Channel for calling his performance "crased."

He would get more mileage if he apologized for his and his administration's failures regarding Al Qaeda than getting irritable about it. He comes off as a self-pitying narcissist with his little outburst.

We were failed by our government, over which he presided for 8 years. You can't excuse that by saying that you tried several times. It seems quite unlikely that merely killing or arresting bin Laden would have stopped these attacks. If he doesn't get that, he shouldn't be bringing up the subject. Bin Laden's training camps have been shut down, and 80% of Al Qaeda has been captured or killed. He never understood that this was going to take more than criminal prosecutions and going after one man. Neither has the Democrat Party.

Our fearless media

Apparently, they're more courageous mouthing off to Tony Snow, than in covering the war. Of course, there are more living in hotels and reporting everything second hand.