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When the NY Times originally created a position of a Public Editor in order to restore its credibility in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, I noted: “The easy critique of this is that the public editor may be unlikely to be highly critical of the people who sign his checks.”
So it has come to pass.
Today the Public Editor states:
Early this month, though, convinced that my territory includes what doesn’t appear in the paper as well as what does, I began to look into a question arising from the past that weighs heavily on the present: Why had The Times failed to revisit its own coverage of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? To anyone who read the paper between September 2002 and June 2003, the impression that Saddam Hussein possessed, or was acquiring, a frightening arsenal of W.M.D. seemed unmistakable. Except, of course, it appears to have been mistaken.
What a hoot. How can it be mistaken when the U.N. already found them ?
It’s just astonishing how he can claim in print with a straight face that Hussein didn’t possess WMD, when the U.N. itself had documented the existence of those WMD. You can claim we didn’t find them, but you can’t claim Hussein didn’t have them.
This guy’s not biting the hand that pays his bills, that’s for sure.
Well, last night’s event was great fun. Amy Alkon’s live-blogging of the panels is here.
Afterwards Matt and Emmanuelle Welch invited people over for drinks. Andrew Breitbart, Cathy Seipp, Luke Ford, Martin Devon, Moxie, and I, among others, joined the Welch’s. As you can imagine a party among bloggers, the conversation was just non-stop irresistible. It went on until after 4 a.m. Nobody wanted to leave.
Moxie took great pics, and I took a good one of her as well, which may appear on her site.
Update: the pic I snapped of her is up on Moxie’s site.
I’m blogging this from the Mark Goodson Screening Room at AFI, where I’ve arrived early for tonight’s big blogosphere event, “The Inside Story: Hollywood and the Media Deconstructed.” This is going to be very cool. Kevin Drum, Charles Johnson, Mickey Kaus, Roger L. Simon, Matt Welch, and Moxie are all on the panel “The Real Story: L.A. Bloggers Take On Politics and the Media.”
On the way over I was thinking that we could use a slang term for people who are kept in the dark by the media. I think I came up with a good one: “Mushrooms.”
I’ll try using it tonight, and we’ll see if it catches on.
A round-up of a few of the blog posts that I found the most interesting:
A moving story of heroism and courage on the part of our soldiers in Iraq, that saved the life of a Newsweek reporter. Yet Newseek never printed the story about what happened. From BlackFive:
The one part that I left out of this post is that Major Schram’s convoy was followed by a car with a Newsweek reporter in it. Once the action began, the reporter and his driver turned and got the hell out of there. If it wasn’t for Mat’s charge up into the ambushers, they never would have made it out of there alive.
Newsweek never ran a story about my good friend, Mat.
It took a few weeks for me to decide what to do.
I had been reading Stephen Den Beste, Bill Whittle, Frank J.’s IMAO, and Misha for awhile at that point.
I started Blackfive and decided to write about Mat and other Americans like him – people that Newsweek would never tell you about.
And from BlackFive today:
When John Kerry pledges better treatment of veterans, he probably means he won’t make blanket statements accusing them all of war crimes.
Read the whole thing. The whole article is spot-on.
A massive amount of good news from Iraq, from Chrenkoff.
The Democratic party, as seen by a former Democrat. From Everything I Know is Wrong:
I was a Democratic voter for most of my life and I know what they want – but I dont know why they think theyre getting it from Democrats.
... I wanted the same things then, as a Democrat, that I want now as a conservative. I wanted racial equality. I wanted a government that would uphold the Constitution and fight for increased personal freedom. I wanted lower taxes (not no taxes) and greater government efficiency. I wanted a government that would provide a safety net for its citizens, not a hammock. I wanted a government that would stay out of my life as much as possible, and wage war as little as possible, but not flinch when war was necessary. I wanted religious freedom.
...They say they are the party of diversity (by which they mean they will keep the races as far away from partnership with each other as possible, and defend institutional racism under the misleading name of affirmative action). They say they will uphold the Constitution (by which they mean they will enact campaign finance laws to restrict political speech, and will endeavor to undermine the second amendment). They say they want more freedom (by which they mean they want more taxation to pay for a larger government to control you more completely).
...The Democratic Party may still be able to win elections. They may be able to win policy fights. But they have lost the ability to do it simply because it is the right thing to do. They only do it for political leverage. Democrats, the members of the party, not the leadership, need to dump their leaders and build a new party. A party which actually stands for what its members want it to stand for. A party that will fight for right, because it is right, not because it is politically expedient.
Read the whole thing.
And to conclude on a lighter note—Tivo Users Watch More Commercials, from Say Anything:
Men’s News Daily – Digital video recorders (DVR) typically are seen as the ultimate threat to TV advertising, giving consumers unsurpassed control over what they choose to watch or not watch on their TV sets, including TV commercials. And while it is true that most DVR subscribers do fast-forward through TV commercials when watching programming in replay mode, new research indicates that the net effect of DVRs actually increases the likelihood that viewers will see a TV commercial not decrease it.
This is great news for the whole TV business, which had been thinking that ad-supported TV will go away as more people use Tivo and other similar devices. There had been a lot of questions about how the networks would be able to stay in business if their whole business model went out the window. So this is good news for those who like to watch TV as well.
Welcome, Carnival of the Vanities readers! This article was honored to be included in the latest Carnival of the Vanities, hosted this week by Read My Lips.
We’ve got to stop wasting the time of our Presidents, and that of the nation, over trivialities.
Nixon was the one who taught us to impeach a President over a relatively minor matter. Everyone’s always said that if he’d just admitted Watergate and apologized for it, that would have been the end of it.
Acting out some tragic character flaw, Nixon burned up decades of goodwill felt by the American people toward the Presidency. He taught us to distrust government. And we’ve been trying to impeach the President, regardless of party, ever since.
The left tried to impeach Reagan over Iran-Contra, and tied up that administration for years. The Iran-Contra affair was far from trivial. But the right was offended. It was unprecedented to use a scandal such as Iran-Contra to attack and distract an administration for years.
In the Clinton era the right responded with an effort to impeach Clinton. Unfortunately it was over something relatively trivial—Monicagate. I was not a fan of Clinton’s, but I wrote to the LA TIMES that we had to leave our Presidents free to govern, and not seek to impeach unless the charge was extremely serious.
Now the left has been having a field day over the Abu-Ghraib story. And lo and behold, it actually seems to have hurt Bush’s approval ratings. Just as Monicagate hurt Clinton. As in the case of Monicagate, a relatively small story has been blown out of proportion.
And a few months ago, the left was talking about impeaching Bush over the argument that he lied when he accused Hussein of having WMD, despite the fact that any number of prominent Democrats had also charged Hussein with having WMD.
Of course I was offended by Clinton’s use of the Oval Office for sex. And I’m offended by the behavior of the soldiers at Abu-Ghraib.
But if we want to continue to have a successful nation, we can’t be tying the hands of our Presidents, by making gigantic stories out of things like these. Monicagate was about sexcapades; Abu-Ghraib is about the actions of a relatively miniscule number of soldiers.
The Abu-Ghraib story has all but run its course; it’s done most of the damage it was going to do. We can take this opportunity to do the country a great deal of good by noting the damage done to Presidents of both parties by blowing such stories out of proportion. Whoever the next President is, whatever his party, he deserves stronger support from the American people, and from politicians on both sides of the aisle.
From Mayor Daley of Chicago:
“The thing I worry about in politics is all of these people hating one another [saying], ‘I hate Kerry’, ‘I hate Bush.’ I wish the former presidents—Carter and Ford and Clinton and Bush—would all get up and tell people, ‘You may support candidates, but don’t hate the other candidate.’
“You see too much hate. And I’ll tell you one thing—hate will turn on people. . . . When hate gets in politics, it’s a very, very dangerous aspect.”
Update 6-4-04: See also my follow-up article, We’re Following Nixon’s Lead (and What to Do About It).
John Podhoretz writes:
The fact is that the news from the battlefield in Iraq these past five or six days has been remarkably good. The forces commanded and directed by the thug-cleric Muqtada al-Sadr are on the run or nearly destroyed in three different cities.
Sadr’s uprising two months ago was the moment at which even passionate supporters of the war and proponents of the success in achieving civil order began to grow terrified that somehow the United States might actually lose in Iraq. So shouldn’t the fact that we’re routing him be grounds for some optimism?
It’s very meaningful that other Shiite clerics in the city of Najaf now feel safe enough to issue what must be judged an astounding denunciation of Sadr in the past few days.
As reported on the brilliant Healing Iraq blog (healingiraq.blogspot.com), Najaf clerics laid the blame for the entry of U.S. forces into that holy city: “It is the movement of Sayyid Muqtada [Sadr] that has encouraged the occupiers to cross the red lines,” the senior clerics in Najaf wrote. “And it is clear that the organization of Sayyid Muqtada – and whoever follows the Sadrist movement – were the first to violate the sanctity of” the city’s holiest shrine.
The Najaf clerics were not only slamming Al Sadr, but were also publicly disagreeing with a statement of Lebanese Hezbollah. From the same Healing Iraq article Podhoretz references:
The Marji’iyah (senior Shia clerics) of the Najaf Hawza gave a joint response to what Hassan Nasrallah, the General Secretary of Lebanese Hezbollah, had said in his Friday sermon with regard to the situation in Najaf and Karbala…
1. It is the movement of Sayyid Muqtada Al-Sadr that is losing legitimacy in the strictest sense…
4. The organization of Sayyid Muqtada is now carrying out intimidation of the general public and arrests of citizens…
5. The firing of shots at the great dome of the shrine of Imam Ali (peace be upon him) [in Najaf], according to some specialists was most likely from the weapons of Sayyid Muqtada’s followers and not from the weapons of others., inasmuch as the time of shooting was the day fighting flared up in the Valley of Peace cemetery, and there wasn’t any fighting from the side of Alnabi street, whereas you claimed in your important sermon that the direction of the shooting was from the side of the Qibla gate [to the shrine], which is the side of Alnabi street.
6. The strike on the home and office of his Excellence Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani happened within the security perimeter whose every span was controlled by the organization of Sayyid Muqtada, and the office of Marji’ Ali [Sistani] was in the immediate proximity to the center of the security perimeter of Sayyid Muqtada’s organization [office], well guarded, and especially so in the vicinity of both of their offices, and so how can it be conceived – and you being an expert in these matters – that this stringent security perimeter was breached by an unknown organization, which carried out a protracted strike on the home of the Sayyid Marji’ [Sistani] and then retreated without the cognizance of the organization of Sayyid Muqtada.
Even we in the blogosphere have been surprised by the amount of bias shown lately by the mainstream media, specifically in the tremendous attention given to the actions of 20 soldiers at Abu-Ghraib, and the near-suppression of all the good news coming from Iraq.
Let me tell you my thoughts on why we have been seeing such near-hysteria from the media lately.
It’s because we’re so close to handing off Iraq to the Iraqi interim government. At that point, a great achievement by President Bush will be undeniable: the creation of a free Iraq. And there will no longer be any claim that the U.S. is bent on imperialism or occupation.
Those who oppose Bush are making a last-ditch effort to prevent his success in this case. But Iraq will be free, and it will be handed back to its own people, next month, on June 30th.
I thought Bush did a great job tonight. He spoke to the Iraqi people as much as he did to Americans. He inspired and led the peoples of both countries. My favorite line: “Iraqis can be certain a free Iraq will always have a friend in the United States of America.”
Some of the most moving passages from a great essay by Bill Whittle (emphasis in original):
Blah, blah…war is lost…blah blah blah… disaster, wreck and ruin…
...Well, we did not level Fallujah, and we did not do it because those bodies on that bridge were bait, pure and simple. We didnt take the bait. Or, I should say, our military didnt take the bait; I took it, hook line and sinker. I wanted to level the goddam city and then walk away and let them kill each other. Now, as Al Sadrs support evaporates; as his militia thugs are being hunted and killed by shadowy Iraqi ghost armies and extremely corporeal Marines; as his fellow Mullahs condemn him; as Iraqi demonstrations against him and all that poison and ruin he represents continue to rise; as his headquarters are destroyed, his most vicious soldiers killed in their own backyards, playing defense in an urban environment by Marines whose skill and tactics stagger credulity for their expertise and success now, we must ask ourselves: did you want to feel good or did you want to win?
...Because we did not take the bait, because we so clearly were not the staggering, drunken, imbecile Giant we are accused of being by our European betters, we denied the Syrians and the Iranians the general, nation-wide uprising they so dearly wanted. Idiots. We vote in November. They played their hand now. Kerry and Bush are in a dead heat after eight weeks of unrelenting catastrophe for Bush. And there is such a thing as catastrophe fatigue.
...Catastrophes are only catastrophes; disasters are only disasters: they are not the end unless we decide they are. And so, let us, right here and now, decide that they are not the end. Because this is something we need to understand, something we need to feel deep in our bones: We are so strong, as a nation, that nothing can stop us when we set our minds to something. Nothing. We can only stop ourselves. All the players know this to be true. Al Sadr knows it. France and Germany know it. The Jihadis know it. The UN knows it. You and I know it.
Fallujah, as Bill shows, was an attempt by Al Sadr to rally Iraqis to revolt against the U.S. and the coming Iraqi Democratic goverment. It didn’t work. Instead Iraqis turned on Al Sadr, in vindication of the U.S. and all we and our allies are doing there.
The mainstream media, which advises fear and alarm, in the face of little or no opposition to our army, is guilty of cowardice.
Cowardice: it can be stated that succinctly.
Let’s let the media and the left know, that they are being cowards.
Even Katie Couric admits liberal control of media:
...why isn’t it fair to say that liberals, sort of, are controlling the mainstream media?
The LA TIMES has this on its front page today:
Iraq Setbacks Change Mood in Washington
Lawmakers in both parties as well as some military leaders fear the occupation is heading for failure. Bush stands firm, but U.S. goals may be scaled back.
...Weeks of military and political setbacks have produced a striking change of mood in the capital about the prospects for success in Iraq, where U.S. and allied forces are struggling to establish security to allow a new Iraqi “caretaker government” to begin work June 30.
A series of Senate hearings last week showcased the growing fears of many foreign policy experts a mood some described as “panic.”
Wow—“panic” after “weeks” of “setbacks.” That’s really something. You think we would have beaten Hitler if we panicked after weeks of setbacks? We’d all be speaking German.
Of course there aren’t any setbacks in Iraq. The actions, in Abu-Ghraib, of 20 people (13 thousandths of 1 percent of our military) are meaningless.
There’s a word for panicking in the face of little or no opposition. That word is “cowardice.”
A friend of mine the other day argued that the Palestinian’s needed to have "a fair offer" made to them. I replied that a great offer had been made to them, but Arafat had rejected it. Via David Horowitz’ FrontPageMag :
The Palestinians Were Given A State And The Land Twice – In 1948 And 1999 – And They Rejected Both Twice.
In 1948, the Arabs rejected the gift of a sovereign Palestinian state in favor of a war to destroy Israel, the only non-Arab presence in the Middle East. The new Israeli state occupied less than 1% of all the land in the Middle East, but that was too much for their Muslim neighbors. (Lebanon was also a nonMuslim state and the only other democracy in the Middle East until the Muslim Arabs and the PLO destroyed it.) In 2000, Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians a state and 97% of the land they were demanding (Israel agreed to cede the other 3% from existing Israeli terrority). Arafat rejected the offer and launched the Second Intifada, a terrorist assault on Israeli civilians involving suicide attacks.
The Palestinians had been on the road to prosperity; Arafat’s rejection of the Clinton/Barak offer led to disastrous results for the Palestinians themselves. The following is from an April 22, 2002 LA TIMES commentary by Glenn Yago, director of capital studies for the Milken Institute. Glenn had been on the ground in Israel, working with many others to bring economic prosperity to the Palestinians and to the entire region.
September 2000 was that in-between time after the Camp David process crumbled and before this bloody intifada had erupted. Before Palestinian officials winked, nodded and later gave tacit approval to suicide and murder as a military strategy and before the Israel Defense Forces were obliged to take the law into their own hands.
The economic peace track was still bumping along. Despite political setbacks, the atmosphere was upbeat. J*ordan, the Palestinian Authority and Israel agreed to become a free-trade zone and form a joint tourist marketing program to increase visitors to the region from 3 million to 30 million each year.* Other initiatives were underway to help finance a soon-to-be Palestinian state and encourage cross-border economic development between the Jewish state and its new and old Arab neighbors.
Everyone wanted to help. Palestinians were pitching deals to American and Israeli Jews. The U.S. and Europe were setting up microfinance and capital markets for the Palestinians. The Israeli finance and trade ministries cooperated with U.S. and Palestinian entrepreneurs and industrialists to finance industrial parks for West Bank cities, the same cities that are now burning.
We sat around conference tables in Nablus, Ramallah and Jerusalem. Ideas to lower financing costs to create jobs and build houses for refugees returning to the West Bank and Gaza were flowing with the juices of creative finance: We could use donor money from the U.S. and Israel as a credit enhancement for Palestinian industrial bonds; we would encourage the repatriation of Arab money to buy these new securities and finance jobs to keep Palestinian youth out of mischief. What about creating a water rights market to depoliticize the issue and let the market, not politicians, determine prices for scarce water?
We were giddy with great notions. We could structure a peace index fund with stocks from Tel Aviv, Amman and Nablus bringing new liquidity into capital-starved markets. We could cross-market the fund for baptisms, Ramadan celebrations and bar mitzvahs. Everyone laughed exuberantly—Christian, Muslim and Jew; American, Palestinian and Israeli. It all seemed so possible.
...Each and every proposal we came up with for economic development for and with the Palestinians was blocked until Israel would comply with Arafat’s political wishes. "Yes," we were told by Palestinian Authority officials, "these are great economic projects and programs, but we can’t move forward until the political final status agreement." Full stop. Time to go home.
There was never a peace dividend for the Palestinian people because their leadership blocked every attempt to earn one. Without a constituency for peace, a constituency for terror quickly formed. Private investment disappeared and donor investment shifted from infrastructure and employment projects to maintaining Arafat’s jet and his crony government. With this intifada, unemployment tripled to 30% of the Palestinian work force and the gross domestic product of Gaza and the West Bank fell by 12%. Arafat made Israelis miserable by making his own people destitute.
Stillborn, the Palestinian economy mirrors the failed regimes of the Middle East. By refusing to help his people, Arafat has bred a jobless young labor force that is bereft of education. The Palestinians missed the opportunity to derive benefits from regional trade or foreign capital flows. Instead, they live in a collapsed economy with sinking per capita incomes. And they hold the rest of us hostage to the highest concentration of terrorist organizations in the world.
Despite our best efforts, the Palestinians today have found no way to build a country or serve a people; only a good way to start Arafat’s war.
I find it encouraging that the Palestinians were willing to embrace prosperity, and had they not been so poorly led, they might already have done so. It suggests that if the Palestinians have different leadership, they might yet do so in the future.
Look at this—a major newspaper that isn’t a mouthpiece for the left. Bill Gertz and his associates at the Washington Times have just found at least one new regular reader, in me.
Most big-media outlets do nothing but spread propaganda for the left. For example, going on and on for weeks about this Abu-Ghraib story, that involved 20 soldiers out of the 150,000 we have deployed, and pretending it’s an indictment of the entire army and of George Bush. Do you know what percent 20 is of 150,000? It’s 0.013%. That’s not 13 percent—it’s 13 thousandths of 1 percent. That’s one in seven thousand five hundred. Extremely rare, in other words. If you can imagine interviewing 7,500 people to find the one you were looking for, you can see how rare that is.
But the left claims the behavior of 13 thousandths of 1 percent of our army, is an indictment of America and George Bush and what we’re doing in Iraq. What a load of malarkey.
Here’s a link to mass quantities of good news from Iraq, to which the media is giving only the most cursory coverage (via Andrew Sullivan ):
HEALTHIER, WEALTHIER AND WISER: ”[M]y salary was about 17 US$ before the war. Shortly after the war it was raised to 120 US$. Three months after that, they made it 150 US$. Two months later it became 200$... [and] from the next month… [it] will be around 300 US$” – read the whole extensive piece on salaries, unemployment, and the standard of living.
...Meanwhile, on the education front, “more than five million Iraqi students are back in school and more than 51 million new Ba’ath-free textbooks are in circulation.” And Iraqi universities are experiencing a brain drain in reverse, as many of the thousands of academics forced into exile under Saddam are coming back to teach the next generation of students.
...And in health, “some 100,000 healthcare professionals working in 240 re-opened hospitals and 1,200 clinics.” The health system has to be rebuilt almost from scratch: ”[it] was ‘already badly run down’ due to previous wars, sanctions, drastically reduced spending – some estimates suggest the Iraqi health budget was cut by 90 per cent during the 1990s – as well as an inequitable health treatment policy.”
And on and on and on. Tons of great, crowd-pleasing, newspaper-selling, feel-good stories, that the media is all but suppressing. It’s like living in a Totalitarian state that spreads disinformation and propaganda 24-7 in order to control a public that has no way of getting the accurate information.
That’s why God invented Weblogs.
Lincoln said you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time—but you can’t fool all the people, all the time.
Lincoln was right, but the left is trying to do it. Almost every newspaper and almost every major network is in on this baloney. They spread propaganda for the Party—the Democratic party—and the only difference between them and the media of dictatorships, is that our media has freely chosen to be lackeys and mouthpieces. Isn’t that interesting? You gotta wonder—why are they doing that? Why do they all toe the party line?
Per Instapundit:
It seems that once the press herd decides on a storyline, the facts don’t matter. So why bother even using reporters?
So you can practically feel the irritation in the voiice of Bill Gertz, this courageous reporter, who writes the obvious in the Washington Times:
A roadside bomb found in Baghdad contained a deadly nerve agent, the second time in 10 days, that U.S. forces have found weapons of mass destruction hidden since the fall of Saddam Hussein, U.S. officials said yesterday.
The second time in 10 days. If we had just a few more courageous reporters like those at The Washington Times, such as Bill Gertz, it would be hard for the left to keep spreading their propaganda and fooling so many of the loyal Americans who have been members of the Democratic party for decades, and who just want what’s good for this country.
The NY Post Online Edition has this today.
NEW ‘9/11’ FLICK HAS FAR ‘MOORE’ FIZZLE THAN SIZZLE
bq. By LOU LUMENICK
May 18, 2004— CANNES, France – President Bush need not lose any sleep over Michael Moore’s much-hyped “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which turns out to be a wet firecracker.
...”You will see things you haven’t seen before and learn things you have not learned before,” he vowed on Sunday.
Well, maybe if you spent the last three years hiding in a cave in Afghanistan.
...Mostly Moore dusts off a litany of old accusations against the president – whom he portrays as both a buffoon and a world-class conspirator – and lands few solid blows as he takes on targets like the Patriot Act and supposed war profiteering by the politically connected Halliburton Corp.
The sheer scope of the material he’s trying to cover in a two-hour documentary – the Sept. 11 attacks rate maybe five minutes – leads to incredibly superficial and misleading treatment at times.
As a critic who awarded Moore’s Oscar-winning “Bowling for Columbine” four stars, I was particularly disappointed with “Fahrenheit 9/11.”
The left is trying to test Lincoln’s dictum that you can’t fool all the people, all the time. And my money’s on Lincoln.
Update, 5-23-04:
From Fred Barnes at The Weekly Standard:
A FEW YEARS AGO Michael Moore, who’s now promoting an anti-President Bush movie entitled Fahrenheit 9/11, announced he’d gotten the goods on me, indeed hung me out to dry on my own words. It was in his first bestselling book, Stupid White Men. Moore wrote he’d once been “forced” to listen to my comments on a TV chat show, The McLaughlin Group. I had whined “on and on about the sorry state of American education,” Moore said, and wound up by bellowing: “These kids don’t even know what The Iliad and The Odyssey are!”
Moore’s interest was piqued, so the next day he said he called me. “Fred,” he quoted himself as saying, “tell me what The Iliad and The Odyssey are.” I started “hemming and hawing,” Moore wrote. And then I said, according to Moore: “Well, they’re . . . uh . . . you know . . . uh . . . okay, fine, you got me—I don’t know what they’re about. Happy now?” He’d smoked me out as a fraud, or maybe worse.
The only problem is none of this is true. It never happened. Moore is a liar. He made it up. It’s a fabrication on two levels. One, I’ve never met Moore or even talked to him on the phone. And, two, I read both The Iliad and The Odyssey in my first year at the University of Virginia. Just for the record, I’d learned what they were about even before college. Like everyone else my age, I got my classical education from the big screen. I saw the Iliad movie called Helen of Troy and while I forget the name of the Odyssey film, I think it starred Kirk Douglas as Odysseus.
And from Junkyard Blog:
So we live in a world that chooses to honor liars and frauds. Michael Moore, Oscar winner a year ago for making a “documentary” full of half-truths, exaggerations and outright lies, this weekend won top honors (and I use that term very loosely) at the Cannes film festival for another “documentary” full of half-truths, exaggerations and outright lies.
Queried about the falsehoods in his films, Moore offers a knowing wink and says “How can satire be inaccurate?” The question is, how can inaccurate satire win best documentary awards?
The sad fact is that there was some documentary producer who last year deserved the Oscar, but Michael Moore stole it from him. This year some deserving filmmaker should have won Cannes, but Michael Moore lied his way into that award too.
The sadder fact is that Moore is both the Leni Reifenstahl and Joseph Goebbels of this war: He is using his skills as a filmmaker to create nothing less than enemy propaganda, and the enemy he aids is ideologically a twin of Goebbels’ and Reifenstahl’s boss—anti-Semitic, brutal, a cult both of personality and radical supremacist creed. Yet another sad fact is that Reifenstahl’s Nazi flick Triumph of the Will also won top honors at a French film festival, in 1937. Does the European elite ever learn?
Fascinating insights into the present day Iraq, from the Iraqi blogger IraqTheModel :
Some of the readers may remember me saying something about my uncle. Before the war he was in the same job and he was paid about 15 thousands Iraqi Dinars that was equal to about 7 US$ a month. ...The last time we visited him, I had to hold my tears when I entered his house. There was virtually no furniture there, no chairs, no TV no tables, as they had sold them all, but what shocked me more is that there were no inside doors. He had to sell those too. I mean his house was literally bare. His kids were ashamed of showing because they had nothing proper to wear. It was amazing how he kept honest and didn’t accept bribery from his rich students’ families.
Back to where I started, I asked my uncle: “How much do they pay you now? I’ve heard you got a raise” He answered “Yes I did, I get paid 550 thousands Dinars now” (that’s about 400$ a month). “And what about aunt?” I asked, meaning his wife “She gets 450 thousands, as she has less years of service”. I said “Good for you! What does it look like now, your life?” He said, “Uncle, (the word serves both sides) it’s unbelievable. I’ve refurnished my house fully and I’m looking for a car, but I’m not in a hurry as I can’t drive now and I want it for Ibrahim (his son) as soon as he can get a driving license”.
...My young cousin is a religious Sunni who goes to the mosque and listens to the cleric there every Friday and believes whatever he says, as he’s still young. My uncle always teased his son about this but never prohibited him from doing that. We were talking about different stuff; the kids’ needs, clerics, Americans and the increase in the average income of most Iraqis. My uncle has a somewhat unusual sense of humor that doesn’t fit quite well in his somewhat religious family. He winked at me and turned to his son and asked him *“What do you think of the Americans?” His son answered, “They are occupiers”*. “So you think we should fight them?” his father asked. Ibrahim said “No, but I don’t like them”. My uncle said, pretending to change the subject *“Do you like your new computer that no one shares with you?” “Yes of course dad”*. “Ok, are you satisfied with the satellite dish receiver we have or do you need a better one?” “This one is fine but I heard there’s a better one that gets more channels” “ok I’ll get you that next week”. Then he said, “Is there anything else you’d like to have son?” “No dad I have all that I need”. *“Ok but how about a car?” Ibrahim was astounded and said “Really? a..a CAR.. for me!?”*. “Of course for you! I’m too old to drive now and my eyes are not that well and you are the older son. So whom else would it be for!?” “Oh, dad that will be great! When will that happen?” “Just finish your exams and you’ll have it”. “I will dad”. *“Are you happy now son?” “Yes dad, sure I am!” “Then why do you hate the Americans you son of a b—-h!? I couldn’t get you a bicycle a year ago, I could hardly feed you and your brothers and sisters.* You didn’t know what an apple or a banana tasted like, I couldn’t buy you a damned Pepsi bottle except in occasions, and now you can have all that you wish, and a car of your own! Who do you think made that possible!?” My cousin’s face turned red and didn’t answer as we laughed and I said “What do you think Ibrahim?” He said, “Well it’s true but it’s our money. They are not giving us a charity” and I said “Of course it’s our money, so let’s forget the Billions of dollars they are giving to rebuild Iraq and the efforts they are making to cut down our debts and lets talk about our money. Why didn’t your father, I, my brothers and all the Iraqis have anything worth mentioning before the Americans came?” He said, “Because Saddam used it to buy weapons and build palaces”. “There you have it Ibrahim, but Americans are not touching our money. Can you tell me who’s better; the ‘occupiers’ who are helping us or the ‘patriot’ who did all that you know to us?”
Nick Berg’s father forgives Al Qaeda, but lashes out at Bush:
“My son died for the sins of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. This administration did this,” Berg said in an interview with radio station KYW-AM.
In the interview from outside his home in West Chester, Pennsylvania, a seething Michael Berg also said his 26-year-old son, a civilian contractor, probably would have felt positive, even about his executioners, until the last minute.
“I am sure that he only saw the good in his captors until the last second of his life,” Berg said. “They did not know what they were doing. They killed their best friend.”
I was sad to read this. A gang of terrorists kills his own son, and he expresses sympathy for them: “They did not know what they were doing. They killed their best friend.” If Berg senior wants to turn the other cheek, and not give himself over to rage, that may be healthy for him, and good-hearted. That may be a way for him to not be overwhelmed by this.
Given that Nick Berg was, in the words of his father, the “best friend” of Al Qaeda, and only wanted to do good for them, we are witnessing yet another indication that there is no opportunity to make the terrorists into our friends. They are not our friends; they don’t seek our friendship; they don’t even seek peace and prosperity for themselves and their loved ones. What they seek is to do as their culture teaches and celebrate death, by killing non-Muslims, specifically Americans.
Nick Berg, their friend, went to them with good thoughts and good wishes, and they killed him.
I guess Berg senior’s statement is the kind of lashing out anyone might do if they are overcome with grief. But in the end it’s not good for him to do so at those who are truly his friends.
Update 5-13-04: Ranting Profs posts:
This is a bereaved father raging at whoever he can think to rage at, and they’re giving him the mike and so he’s taking it, but nothing he’s saying is relevant to his son’s death (since we’ve already established that since the kid turned down opportunities to go home, who had him in custody isn’t relevant). So what this amounts to is the fact that they’re using him. As long as he keeps raging, and raging against the administration, they’ll keep putting what he has to say on the air and in the news.
Part of being a blogger is, you say things that you at least haven’t heard anyone else say, and in a few days, you notice other people saying the same thing. It gives you a good feeling of being on the same wavelength as others who are looking into the same subjects, of being one of many people who made a similar observation at the same time.
For example, from my April 29th post:
...we’re really blessed in this country to have the Judeo-Christian tradition of wanting to love each other and help each other have better lives and to enjoy life and be good to each other. As opposed to the tradition of some Islamo-fascist localities where they do the reverse sending their own children off to be blown up.
Later I put that in the upper-left hand corner of the front page here. Since then I’ve been thinking that that’s what this is all about—about our tradition, which celebrates love and caring, versus a subset of another culture, which celebrates the reverse.
And they do celebrate it. They pass out candies, which they revoltingly call sweets, when they kill civilians; they send their children off to be blown up; they say you get virgins in heaven when you kill civilians; and on and on and on. We’re all hoping that that’s just a small subset of Islam, and judging from many of the Iraqi bloggers, there’s reason to hope that it is. But the tradition of love in some Muslim nations surely needs some shoring up.
Anyway, to get back to my point about being on the same wavelength as others, tonight I was reading Command Post, where Alan juxtaposes the love and caring shown by a good American, Susan Tom, with the evil shown by the Islamofascists who so self-revealingly murdered Nick Berg:
Well, I’ve decided what to make of it all, and what I’m going to make is some good. Susan Tom is a hero one of millions waking each day with a commitment to make the lives of others better through love. Hers is an example to which humanity should aspire. So my response to the murder of Nick Berg and the inhumanity it represents is to use it as motivation to give to Susan Tom and the humanity she represents.
...For the next three days, between the time stamp of this post and Midnight EDT Friday night, Michele and I will contribute all donations made to The Command Post PayPal account (the button’s below this post and also over in the right-hand column) to the Tom Family Education Trust.
...How do you win the war of Good and Evil? You fight Evil, and you strengthen the Good. And it’s something we should always do: as we move to eradicate Evil, we should also move to strengthen the Good.
It’s not exactly what I said, but it’s not far off either. So first of all, go to Command Post and contribute. I’m in for $10.
And to conclude, it seems to me that this is what the war is all about. Our culture of love and caring, versus a culture that celebrates the reverse and wants to destroy us. We’re not fighting just for ourselves; we’re fighting the good fight for the whole world.
To help you and inspire you, here are the words of Army Spc. Joe Roche, who is on the ground in Iraq fighting Muqtada Al-Sadr _(via Everything I Know is Wrong ):_
I ask that the American people be brave. Don’t fall for the spin by the weak and timid amongst you that are portraying this battle as a disaster. Such people are always looking for our failure to justify and rescue their constant pessimism. They are raising false flags of defeat in the press and media. It just isn’t true.
Update 5-13-04:
Strengthen The Good Update
My God. We’re a third of the way there. Between my post of last night and now, Command Post readers have raised over $3,400 for the Tom Family Education Trust. Thank you to those who have given from the heart so far (many of you giving $50 or even $100), and thanks to the bloggers who have linked to the original post (and in particular, Glenn, who sent an Instalanche our way earlier today).
Update 5-14-04:
Strengthen The Good Update
We did it. Sometime early last night we broke through $10,000, and the contributions keep coming it. We’re now at $11,338 and building
Update 5-15-04:
Strengthen The Good Update
The final total: $14,777.16, and my wife and I kicked in the difference to make it an even $15,000.
...I was on the phone with Susan when we announced it in the chat room, and she had the kids with her they were all thrilled. As I heard Hannah say in the background: That’s a lot of money! That’s right, Hannah, and we hope it helps you get a wonderful education.
