Howard Kurtz is a smug little weasel

UPDATES: See end of post

This week on Reliable Sources he devoted nearly the entire program to Don Imus and the fallout. Imagine, the most important media news of the week was a mean remark a DJ made about college athletes.

Since disparaging college athletes is the worst crime in the world, I wonder why Kurtz focused on Imus instead of Nancy Grace? What happened to the Rutgers team was a cake walk compared to what the Duke lacrosse team went through. Nancy Grace was a part of that (KC Johnson lays out her sorry record here.)

I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that Grace works for Time Warner just like Kurtz? It must be much easier to attack someone who works for a competitor.

Kurtz actually interviewed Tony Kornheiser about Imus and radio culture. Somehow he forgot to bring up TK's mocking attacks on innocent twelve year olds.

Oh yeah, Kurtz writes for the Washington Post and Kornheiser once worked there as well.

My bad. I plead guilty to having high expectations for a critic who is just another whore. Maybe we need a word for that. How about this? “Precioused”. As in:

In Durham the lax team got Nifonged, but the media was precioused when they launched a jihad on the word of a lying stripper.

UPDATE: Yeah, he really is a weasel. He offers up this gem in the Washington Post:

The three players were not choir boys -- the team had, after all, invited a pair of strippers to a midnight party -- but they hardly deserved the national scorn of being loudly trumpeted as accused rapists.

Two of the player-- Seligmann and Finnerty had nothing to do with hiring the stripper. All they were guilty of was going to a spring break party. Further, both left early (long before the dancers did). Finally, Seligmann is pretty much a choirboy. He had no arrests, good grades, a solid history of charity work, and character witnesses by the truckload.

Howie Kurtz. Weasel. No doubt about it.

UPDATE 2: Jane Hall and Neal Gabler made the same loathsome argument on Fox News Watch this weekend. I thought the job of media critics was to criticize the media, not offer lame excuses for them.

It is telling that this sort of blame the victim spin was reserved for only the lax players. No one noted this Phil Mushnick observation (made before Imus's remarks) when slobbering over the Rutgers basketball team:

ITEM: The ugliest win in NCAA tournament history?

Among the big stories from the women's side was Rutgers' upset of Duke on Sunday. With a second left and Rutgers up one, Duke's Lindsey Harding missed two free throws.

But the bigger story, one left mostly closeted, was that RU players, lined up in rebounding position, shouted out to one another - but toward Harding - to try to distract Harding as she was shooting those FTs.

Rutgers coach C. Vivian Stringer afterwards said she didn't approve of such conduct. "It's not something I would encourage," she told the Star-Ledger of New Jersey.
Her players, however, perhaps because they were raised on TV and marketing strategies that promoted unsportsmanlike behavior, saw nothing wrong with it. One even called it "normal." Really? When's the next brawl?

But, hey, if fans try to distract the opponents at the foul line, why shouldn't the players, especially those just a few feet from the shooter? Regardless, RU's behavior, Sunday, is not likely to make one of those NCAA image ads.

Nor did anyone raises questions about the maturity of a player who thought she was "scarred for life" by Imus.

Are reporters noting that Gov. Corzine was injured only because he was racing to a photo op with the Rutgers team and Imus? Is he any less of a vicitm because he broke the law and refused to wear a seatbelt?

Of course not. Those points are irrelevant to the main stories. Just as the behavior of some lax players was irrelevant to the main story of a false and malicious persecution of these three players.

Why is that hard for media critics and other pundits to understand?

Is Brian Williams going nuts?

How else to explain this?

You’re going to be up against people who have an opinion, a modem, and a bathrobe,” said Williams. “All of my life, developing credentials to cover my field of work, and now I’m up against a guy named Vinny in an efficiency apartment in the Bronx who hasn’t left the efficiency apartment in two years."

Williams compared this to a New Yorker cartoon featuring two dogs sitting in front of a computer and one says to the other: “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.”

"On the Internet, no one knows if you’ve been to Ramadi or you’ve just been to Brooklyn and just have an opinion about Ramadi," said Williams.

Can he really take himself that seriously? Is he really that pompous?

His credentials, after all, begin with looking good on camera, wearing a suit well, and reading off a teleprompter. The most of the rest of his career is just business travel.

Shorter Brian Williams:

I read words into a camera in Ramadi for a few days, RESPECT MY AUTHORITY.

In the wake of Imus, i have to note that 1. "Vinny in the Bronx" sounds like there could some ethnic humor violations going on here, and 2. Williams was a frequent Imus guest.

Finally, isn't the whole bloggers and bathrobes just so, 2004?

Duke lacrosse: Standing to criticize

Tery Moran is not along in his moronic attempt to trash the lax team for their “unsavory behavior”.

To my mind this is just CYA. The MSM was wrong and they just cannot admit their mistake. They were all set for an auto-de-fe and they still want to preach their sermons.

It is BS and it is shameful and it is pathetic.

I admit I may be wrong. Perhaps, some of these cranks and haters really are concerned about the exploitation of women. If so, show us the evidence of that concern. Point to the news story or article or op-ed that forthrightly condemned strip clubs and the men who go there. Show us the alarm over the excesses of Spring Break and the bad messages in music videos.

That should be easy enough.

The other lame excuse I’ve read is that the pendulum has swung too far, that the exonerated players are being praised too highly.

That’s possible. But that excuse is only credible if it comes from someone who wrote something favorable about the lax team last spring. Surely anyone who is actually concerned about “balance” had no problem condemning the rush to judgment when the players were being ripped to shreds on TV and in the NY Times. I’m positive they wrote something in defense of the kid who sent the email. Right?

They should also be on record opposing the Dianification of the Rutgers basketball team, too.

Anyone who was silent then, but is now worried about “perspective” has no standing to redress the balance. They are cruel, smug, stupid, and vile.

For my money, the press conference had one purpose: to help the falsely accused repair the damage to their reputations. Too much? Only when those reputations are restored. That will not happen until morons like Moran stop spreading lies.

The Wolfowitz mess

Austin Bray has a perceptive post on the subject.

He makes a very good point about the broader issue of GWB and his administration:

Overweaning arrogance and lack of self reflection are weaknesses of the Wolfowitz-Hadley-Libby-Feith crew. As a group they were well-suited for Beltway political wars — the kind of Beltway congressional and executive agency infighting that Rumsfeld (and Cheney, Libby’s boss) thought they would face in their battle for Pentagon reform and reorganization. 9/11 changed the mission. Instead of a figurative battle in the Beltway’s arena, the civilized world faced a long war with barbarism, a long, bloody war that placed a preimum on strategic clarity, personal courage and perseverance, not the contacts on your Rolodex. After 9/11 the entire lot should have been eased out in favor of experienced, genuine war fighters — real war fighters instead of Beltway Clerks.

See also:

GWB and his MBA

I-gasm: MSM finds bliss in their darkest hour

Is it paranoid to think that the reason the media love the Imus story is that it is so much nicer (to them) than the denouement of the Duke lacrosse case?

Hmmm. Let’s see. One story allows talking heads parade their noble moral sensibility in front of the cameras. The other one highlights their intellectual shortcomings and moral corruption. Which one is filling the airwaves?

I’m disgusted at those people who demanded that Imus apologize and who still want him fired. I’m old school. You don’t demand an apology if you are unwilling to accept it.

I hope Imus gets another radio gig. I really want to hear what he has to say about all the erstwhile friends who threw him under the bus when he was no longer useful to them.

Cowardice and moral preening is such an ugly combination.

Duke lacrosse: Odious

Stuart Taylor:

Nobody but cranks and haters will ever be able to hurl those lies at them again.

Count ABC's Terry Moran as one of the cranks and haters.

Terry Moran's blog post is the most odious thing i've seen today. Sanctimonious, hypocritical and flat wrong.

While he whines that the press does not care about black victims in prison, he does not get to the reason: reporters depend on good relations with the cops and DA. The press does not ignore railroading; it is frequently complicit in it.

We saw it in the lacrosse case. It was true in ritual abuse witch trials. It shows up again and again in the literature of false convictions: lazy reporters let dishonest prosecutors get away with awful things.

And now this reporter wants to bash the lax players for what his professional brethren do?

Moreover, let's remember that the lax team was targeted because they were rich, white, Dukies. That is what gave the story its resonance with journalists. That is why it is was a windfall for Nifong.

Moran's bitterness has nothing to do with the injustice suffered by poor and minority defendants. If he cared about them, he could have used this as one of those "teachable moments" to point to problems and solutions.

No, his vomitous rant is just media CYA. The MSM looks bad. They got conned and they did a terrible job reporting this story. The world knows it. And he is embarrassed. So he takes it out on three young men who do not deserve it.

UPDATE: Ace agrees and he is just on fire.

Imus

I like this analysis. There are parallels with Trent Lott. Where the two affairs diverge is to Imus’s detriment. Lott was only trying to say nice things about an old man who was at death’s door. The slurs on the Rutgers players were mean-spirited and gratuitous.

This is not an isolated incident with Imus and Co. That raises the question of why the media and political elite were so eager to appear on his show for so many years.

Maybe some of them should be asked that question. It might make for interesting reading if their responses today are compared to their statements about Trent Lott.

One thing is for sure, the two controversies show that brazenness pays. Lott and Imus apologized which only increased the demand for more apologies. Al Sharpton never apologizes and now the media treats him as a moral arbiter.

Sharpton’s rise is a sign of our degraded public culture. I do not see the problem as only political; economics also plays a role. Conservative Sean Hannity promotes Sharpton as much as any liberal. Hannity may disagree with Sharpton but he is willing to give him a platform because it makes for “good television.”

Imus used to be edgy. Now he is a bigot. I think that it is easy enough to parse those definitions:

Edgy-- insults people I do not like
Bigot-- insults me or people I do like.

CNN, Fox, and ESPN have devoted truckloads of time to denouncing Imus. It is a two-fer for them. They get to flaunt their moral superiority and tear down a competitive network. Their hypocrisy is just more evidence that brazenness wins.

CNN provides a home for Nancy Grace while Fox is always willing to give Wendy Murphy camera time. In the Duke lacrosse case both women were happy to traffic in rumor, slander, and character assassination. ESPN is the TV home of Selena Roberts , John Saunders, Steven A. Smith, and William Rhoden whose comments on the case were venomous, obtuse, and nearly fact-free.

ESPN also has its own Imus in Tony Kornheiser. One of the running gags on PTI and his radio show is his disdain for the contestants in the National Spelling Bee. He refers to them as “twitching little freaks.” This is mean-spirited and gratuitous and every bit as bad as Imus’s crack about Rutgers. While it lacks the racial element that sends a frisson through the MSM, it has an extra loathsomeness because it is directed at kids who are twelve and thirteen years old.

Imus has been suspended and fired. ESPN is building its brand around Kornheiser. Maybe someone should ask the suits at Bristol about that.

I don’t expect that to happen. The “Imus Scandal” is just an opportunity for a bunch of hacks to preen in front of the cameras. It makes for cheap television and cheaper self-satisfaction.

Tom Wolfe, who really is a prophet for our age:

From the outset the eminence of this new creature, the intellectual, who was to play such a tremendous role in the history of the twentieth century, was inseperable from his necessary indignation. It was his indignation that elevated him to a plateau of moral superiority. Once up there, he was in a position to look down on the rest of humanity. And it did not cost him any effort, intellectual or otherwise. As Marshall McLuhan would put it years later: 'Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.

Duke lacrosse: Kurtz does not spare the media

Media Miscarriage

As long as we're talking about how the Rutgers women were unfairly disparaged as "ho's," consider the nightmare that the three Duke lacrosse players have lived through.

But in all the coverage you read and see about the clearing of these young men, very little of it will be devoted to the media's role in ruining their lives. I didn't hear a single television analyst mention it yesterday, even though two of the players' lawyers took shots at the press.

He's right that the media will absolve itself. They've been using the Emily Litella defense for months.

Here's one thing the media should do. Through out this case some reporters were fed information by the DA's office and the police. It is time to reveal those sources and the lies they told.

This is not a case of anonymous whistle-blowers helping to uncover governmental wrong-doing. The secret leaks were part of a frame-up. By protecting them, the reporters are accessories in a miscarriage of justice.

Time to let the sunshine in. Tell us who lied. Show us how deep the corruption spread in Durham.

Kurtz makes another good point:

By the way, Drudge and other Web sites are running the accuser's name and picture. I'm not sure how I feel about this, since she is now a certified liar who put three innocent men and their families through hell, but it still feels cheesy.

I share his misgivings. I've never liked naming the accuser. Then again, i don't like televised perp walks either so i'm entering a plea of "i think i'm consistent." I don't think cable news can do the same. For months they have run the pictures of the lax players getting out of those police cars in handcuffs. They cannot plead that their delicate sensibilities are offended by the picture on Drudge.

One last thing. It is a good time to remember that Al Sharpton and his rent-a-mob had no problem harrassing the victim in the Central Park Jogger case:

Outside the courthouse, they chanted, “The boyfriend did it! The boyfriend did it!” They denounced the victim as “Whore!” They screamed her name, over and over (because most publications refused to print it, though several black-owned ones did). Sharpton brought Tawana Brawley to the trial one day, to show her, he said, the difference between white justice and black justice. He arranged for her to meet the jogger’s attackers, whom she greeted with comradely warmth. In another of his publicity stunts, he appealed for a psychiatrist to examine the victim. “It doesn’t even have to be a black psychiatrist,” he said, generously. He added: “We’re not endorsing the damage to the girl — if there was this damage.”

Duke lacrosse: Vindication

Total and complete vindication. It took a year but the truth has finally caught up with the lies.

KC Johnson's book is going to make very interesting reading now that the charges have been dropped.

AG Cooper has restored a measure of honor to his state.

Sports: Miscellaneous thoughts in search of a theme


Death came for Grambling’s Eddie Robinson right when the coaching carousel was in full swing for college basketball. Very few of those who praised him noted how different he was from the men they cover today.

It is easy to criticize modern players for their bad discipline and self-centeredness. (I know because I’ve done it on this blog.) Let’s recognize that their college coaches help teach those lessons.

The prevailing ethos among big-time college coaches is take the money and run. Most of those coaches still preach the value of discipline, team play, character, and self-sacrifice. As they do so, the larger message they send is “do as I say, not as I do.” All too many coaches who exhort young players to sacrifice for the team are willing to abandon those players and that team for a chance at a bigger payday.

Many of Robinson’s former players spoke about the big role he played in their lives. The sentiments were identical to those I heard after Woody Hayes passed. Both coaches kept a heavy hand on their players and the players came to love them for it.

A coach can only pull that off if their loyalty to the team and to school are absolute. In the case of Hayes and Robinson it was and it worked. When a modern coach applies the same tactics it is just exploitive and tyrannical.

Ricky Williams was roundly (and rightly) criticized for quitting on the Dolphins and letting down his teammates. Nick Saban quit on the Dolphins and did not receive the same level of criticism. It was, apparently, justified by the big pay check. How is it that we have adopted the ethics of whoredom“I did it for the money”?

In his masterful The Face of Battle, John Keegan reflects on the reasons for the British victory at Waterloo. The crux of the battle was simple enough. Napoleon had to break the British line somewhere and was unable to do so. As Keegan puts it:

The British still stood on the line Wellington had marked out for them, planted by the hold officers had over themselves and so over their men. Honour, in a very peculiar sense, had triumphed.

Eddie Robinson’s achievements had the same source as Wellington’s victory. At Grambling, as at Waterloo, honor and selflessness made everything else possible.

What's so bad about good manners?

Tim O'Reilly suggests a blogger code of conduct. Frankly, i think all of his suggestions make sense.

I am unmoved by the argument that bloggers or message boards cannot control their commenters or should not be (morally) responsible for what the commenters say. The blogger provides the habitat and they can (should) control it.

A selection of Chesterton

From Heretics:

The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing that is really narrow is the clique....The men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment like that which exists in hell.
=======
Modern man "says he is fleeing from his street because it is dull; he is lying. He is really fleeing from his street because it is a great deal too exciting. It is exciting because it is exacting; it is exacting because it is alive. He can visit Venice because to him the Venetians are only Venetians; the people in his own street are men. He can stare at the Chinese because for him the Chinese are a passive thing to be stared at; he he stares at the old lady in the next garden, she becomes active. he is forced to flee, in short, from the too stimulating society of his equals-- of free men, perverse, personal, deliberately different from himself.
=======
He has to soothe and quiet himself among tigers and vultures, camels and crocodiles. These creatures are indeed very different from himself. But they do not put their shape or colour or custom into a decisive competition with his own. They do not seek to destroy his principles and assert their own; the stranger monsters of the suburban street do seek to do this....The vulture will not roar with laughter because a man does not fly; but the major at No. 9 will roar with laughter because a man does not smoke.
===============
Of course, this shrinking from the brutal vivacity and brutal variety of common men is a perfectly reasonable thing as long as it does not pretend to any point of of superiority. It is when it calls itself aristocracy or aestheticism or a superiority to the bourgeoisie that its inherenct weakness has in justice to be pointed out. Fastidiousness is the most pardonable of of vices; but it is the most unpardonable of virtues. Nietzsche, who represents most prominently this pretentious claim of the fastidious, has a description somewhere-- a very powerful description in a purely literary sense-- of the disgust and disdain which consume him at the sight of the common people with their common faces, common voices, and their common minds. As I have said, this attitude is almost beautiful if we may regard it as pathetic. Nietzsche's aristocracy has about it all the sacredness that belongs to the weak. When he makes us feel that he cannot endure the innumerable faces, the incessant voices, the overpowering omnipresence which belongs to the mob, he will have the sympathy of anybody who has ever been sick on a steamer or tired in a crowded omnibus. Every man has hated mankind when he was less than a man. Every man has had humanity in his eyes like a blinding fog, humanity in his nostrils like a suffocating smell. But when Nietzsche has the incredible lack of humour and lack of imagination to ask us to believe that his aristocracy is an aristocracy of strong muscles or an aristocracy of strong wills, it is necessary to point out the truth. It is an aristocracy of weak nerves.

Crimsonism

Julie Neidlinger has a good analysis of the follies that blue-staters commit when they become sociological tourists out here in the hinterlands.

I've had misgivings about this sort of thing ever since David Brooks wrote his famous piece in The Atlantic. The "reporters" approach us as The Other. They spend only a little time here so their reporting is superficial and they never get beyond the shallow prejudices they brought with them.

In short, they do to their fellow citizens what Edward Said accused Western scholars of doing to Islamic cultures in Orientalism.

The funny thing is, i bet many of the editors who publish this kind of story accept Said's analysis.

In the MSM, this creates all sort of double standards. They will defend the right of Muslim women to wear a veil, but they are suspicious of Christian churches where the women always wear dresses. The Muslim woman chooses her veil, but the Christian woman is forbidden to wear pants.

A mass shooting by a Muslim immigrant is instantly portrayed as the isolated act of a disturbed individual. In no way can Muslim culture be blamed. On the other hand, it is perfectly acceptable to opine about the "gun culture" of a rural area where a white, non-Muslim shoots down innocent people.

Related:

Truly asymmetrical information

Tea parties and the MSM: Bob Dylan nailed it decades ago

I wish i had found this before

Here's an old article from Time that revisits the injustice done to Richard Jewell after the Atlanta Olympic bombing.

This quote does a better job than i did when i tried to bring the Rosenhan experiment into the discussion of criminal investigation:

According to Samuel Gross, a professor of criminal procedure at Michigan Law School, "there's a point at which an open investigation of who committed a crime becomes instead the prosecution of suspect X. If that happens early on in the case, the chances of making a mistake are very great." In the Atlanta bombing, the shift from an open investigation to the prosecution of a particular suspect does seem to have taken place very early, and the result was certainly a mistake.

Here we see the lack of ethics and self-awareness that plague big time reporters. They describe what Jewell went through and then make excuses:

If not despicable then perhaps excessive but also understandable. The Centennial Park bomb came only 10 days after the explosion of TWA Flight 800. Nobody knew whether it marked the beginning of a reign of domestic terror. The FBI was under tremendous pressure to solve the case almost instantaneously so that the Olympic Games' athletes and visitors would not be crippled by fear. But it is common knowledge in law enforcement that "the bigger the case, the lower the standard [of conduct]," says Tierney. "The pressure on the police, on prosecutors is overwhelming."

SO they make excuses for bad police work. The interesting thing (to me) is how they blame the media for it but do not accept or recognize their guilt.

If big stories cause bad police work, and the media makes a story big, then the media fosters bad police work. What are they doing to change this? I think that this question is especially relevant now because the media (especially cable TV) are on a constant search for crime stories that they can turn into programming extravaganzas.

Jack Shafer defends the indefensible

In Defense of the Anna Nicole Feeding Frenzy

i don't deny that there are newsworthy elements to the whole saga. But that is not what cable is doing. They are stretching out the small amount of news to fill hours of primetime. It is cheap filler that completely distorts what is happening in the world. ANS is hardly the most important story in the world, yet that is what cable covers.

See also:

Cable news, vox populi, and professional sleaze

Balkan echoes in Salt Lake City

More Bosnian Lies from Utah

Utah Shootings: Yet Another Case of Sudden Jihad Syndrome, After All

I'm not sure why the authorities treat jihad and mental illness as mutually exclusive. Do they really believe that someone with mental illness would be rejected as a suicide bomber recruit? Seems to me, they would make the BEST recruit: they could be manipulated more easily and they have already crossed a long way to the idea of suicide

Ben Stein is a must read

Terror in Our Midst

On September 11, 2001, about 3,000 fine human beings were killed in New York City, Virginia, and Pennsylvania by Moslem fanatics. So far, there have been no other large-scale attacks by Moslem terrorists on American soil.

However, in the five and a half years since September 11, 2001, there have been roughly 40,000 killings by gangs and gang members in this United States of America, mostly in the African-American and Hispanic sections of large cities. Huge swaths of major American cities, especially my home city of Los Angeles, are "no-go" zones for law-abiding people from outside the neighborhoods and even police go into them reluctantly. The innocent women, children, old folks and non-gansgsta men in the communities are living in a nonstop reign of terror.

I wish someone had the answer to his questions. Maybe if more people dared ask the questions, we could find a solution.

Heather MacDonald: Simply mistaken or just plain evil?

I used to lean toward mistaken. But after reading her latest article i can't rule out evil. It seems to me that she is playing with racism in order to justify police state tactics.

Busy now, but i will write more later.

Popular Mechanics and Rosie O’Donnell

It's sad that they have to rebut irresponsible charges made by an ignorant, unfunny comedienne.

Small movies

Thinking about the previous post. Would Hollywood dare make a movie like that today? Big name stars, no car chases or explosions. Most of the action inside a drab, small room?

OK, i don't see enough movies so i'm sure that there are three hundred indy films a year that are supposed to fill that niche. But how many are left if we exclude gay cowboys eating pudding?

12 Angry Men revisited

The American Thinker has an outstanding consideration of Sidney Lumet’s famous movie. As he says, it is agitprop, but it is also “it's also a terrific film, full ofgreat dialogue, drama, intensity, and superb acting, so tightly produced that there is not a moment or shot wasted.”

Margolies Sees 12 Angry Men as “a precusor and contributor to liberal reforms of court procedure that transformed the justice system in the 1960s and beyond, accompanied by a vast increase in violent crime rates.” What struck me, however, is how the dishonest methods he criticizes in the movie now permeate our criminal justice system and the tabloid media.

For instance, he does not like how Henry Fonda handled the evidence:

Fonda was not saying the boy didn't stab his father, but it's possible he didn't. Fonda was not saying the woman didn't see the boy stab his father, but it's possible she really didn't. Fonda was not saying the old man didn't hear the boy shout "I'll kill you" to his father and then see him running down the stairs, but it's possible he was mistaken or lying. Fonda's juror # 8 no doubt could have said with similar ease, "I'm not saying it wasn't Islamic terrorists who plowed two planes into the WTC, but it's possible." With jurors like Fonda, forget DNA, just open up the prison doors and let everybody out.

There were plenty of echoes of Fonda’s methods in the defense of DA Nifong in the Duke lacrosse case. For months a cadre of ex-prosecutors like Georgia Goslee and Wendy Murphy made the same sort of suggestion as the evidence of innocence piled up.

“It’s possible they wore condoms.”

“It’s possible she was given a date rape drug.”

“It’s possible the cab driver was paid off.”

“It’s possible the lawyers lied in their motions.”

“It’s possible the nurse did not notice her injuries.”

“It’s possible that one of the lax players has flipped and cut a deal.”

“It’s possible the DA has held back his best evidence.”

Yadda yadda yadda.

Nancy Grace and Bill O’Reilly are determined to make us a nation of angry men and women. They paint a picture of America where children are under siege and homicidal predators lurk behind every tree. Judges and lawyers conspire to protect evil-doers while innocent kids suffer.

Grace, of course, boasts of being an ex-prosecutor. BO’R is happy to give a platform to Murphy and Goslee. None of them care that the facts contradict their picture. Would Margolies call what they do agitprop?

OK, Joe Theismann deserved to get fired

How can he put Dallas and Baltimore on this list? Dallas has a great history but the last several years have not been kind.

Baltimore has neither a great history nor an outstanding recent record. One playoff appearance in the last three years. No play-off wins in the period.

New England is clearly number one. Denver and Indy belong on the list. The Steelers have a claim to be number 2 (them or Indy, flip a coin). Then the Eagles or Seatle. I can't think of any other teams that have been consistently good over the last three or five years. Surely that is the mark of a good organization.

Why did Robert Lipsyte become a sportwriter?

It’s a strange career choice for someone with deep-seated issues about athletes.

College basketball coaches tend to be big guys with the confident patter of televangelists; just the kind of mouthy jocks who were allowed to dominate the dorks in high school because their personal goals, winning games to advance their careers, complemented the principal's goal, putting the school on the happy map.

The rest of his article is a screed against college basketball. Good points are mixed with laughable posturing. Logic is in short supply.

Bobby Knight is a “bully” and a “symptom” of the problem in college ball even though “his players actually graduated at far higher rates than the national average for big-time athletes and few of them complained about their treatment.”

Lipsyte tosses the R-word around freely which further illustrates that for many liberals “racism” has become a synonym for “stuff I don’t like.”

Fuzzy features or exposés or straight game detail are okay, but you can't weave the systemic corruption, commercialization, and racism into every story--and yet once you stop the stories aren't true anymore. How many times can you write that 56 percent of varsity basketball players are black compared to 7 percent of the student bodies of the schools they represent? Those numbers are from the last time I wrote it, in the early 1990s. Watching games now, I often see eight black players on the floor being cheered by a sea of white (often painted) faces.

He sees that as evidence of systemic racism. Yet, if white fans demanded white players, that, too, would be racist. Not long ago the sports scribblers were ga-ga over the movie “Glory Road”. The victory of an all black team from a mostly white school was claimed as a great milestone in civil rights. Today, according to Lipsyte, such teams are racist. Like I said, logic is in short supply.

Lipsyte has a good point about the exploitation of athletes but his analysis is colored by a Marxian view of commerce. He acts as though college arenas are filled solely because of the players. He dreams of a time that the Masses rise and get their fair share.

That seemed like an invitation to tell him my longtime Final Four fantasy: Just before the title game, the opposing captains demand $50,000 per player from the TV producer. No cash, no game.

Nice thought. Doubt if it will work. For one thing, most of the players would have to go along. Why would a superstar waste his shot on a national stage for a measly $50,000? He will make many times that when he turns pro. Why would the less talented toss away a shot at glory for $50,000? It’s not a life-changing amount of money.

Lipsyte writes as though college arenas are filled solely because of the players. He completely ignores the relationship between fan interest and institutional loyalties. Cameron Arena is filled because it is Duke basketball not just winning basketball. You could take the top 20 players out of the ACC and have them form the Great Ballers Collective. They could tour the Carolinas and display their awesome talent. They would be lucky to fill high school gyms and clear gas money from the gate. Meanwhile, Duke and North Carolina would still play in front of sold out houses.

He also has a weird grasp of the dynamics on college campuses.

No matter who you think causes the problems here--fans, players, boosters, coaches, presidents, or shoe salespeople -- the only group that could begin to solve them are the faculty of the schools in question, at once victims and accomplices when it comes to sports. They are intimidated by the jock bullies, easily bought off by them, and protective of their own little campus deals--why risk blowing the whistle on the altered or eased grades of athletes when someone could knock off your summer-in-Prague Kafka scam?

(Again with the mean athlete thing, what exactly is his problem?)

Lipsyte worries that student-athletes are not real students. Somehow, he expects that the faculty will want to change that for the benefit of the players. The behavior of the Duke’s Gang of 88 makes me wonder. The lacrosse team was made up of accomplished athletes and good students. Many on the faculty have used Nifong’s frame up as an excuse to de-emphasize athletics at Duke. Their main concern is not with athletes who are poor students; they have a problem with good students who are also good athletes.

I suspect that Lipsyte does, too. All his false piety about the exploitation of big time college sports sounds like a convenient way to get back at the jocks who traumatized him high school.

The New York Times actually gave this guy a sports column. I can only imagine what the water cooler chatter was like when he and Selena Roberts got going.

Important article

Terrorists Targeting Students: The Kids are not alright

Duke lacrosse: Columnist's silence is sickening

John in Carolina looks at Ruth Sheehan and her role in starting this witch hunt.

Sheehan's opportunity

Shoot! They fired the wrong guy

Theismann blindsided by ESPN

The last thing Joe Theismann expected when he showed up for a meeting Friday in New York was that it would be his final one as a "Monday Night Football" analyst.

Why, oh why, did they keep Kornheiser?

A sad commentary on out junk food pop culture

Real genius loses out to celebrities

If John Backus had been a buxom model who married an old guy, or if he had been a cartoon, would you know of him?

Or, put another way, if Anna Nicole Smith had invented the Fortran computer programming language, would her death have been widespread news?

I resisted weighing in after Smith died last month. It seemed pointless to add to the ceaseless coverage of her sad life. But Backus died recently, and I got to thinking why I knew details about Smith but knew little of the computer genius who changed our lives.

Important read

A President All Alone

With nearly two years remaining in his presidency, George W. Bush is alone. In half a century, I have not seen a president so isolated from his own party in Congress -- not Jimmy Carter, not even Richard Nixon as he faced impeachment.

See also:

GWB and his MBA redux

Jim Webb's gun

Hypocrisy is bi-partisan.

No. Not Senator Webb.

Remember how right-wingers excoriated the Gang of 88 and the New York Times for presuming guilt in the Duke lacrosse case? Remember how we criticized the rush to judgement? Remember when we were opposed to scoring political points based on an incomplete investigation?

Yeah. I remember, too. So why can't they?

Newsbusters on Selena Roberts

NY Times Sports Columnist Slurs Innocent Duke Lacrosse Players, Again

Fighting the revisionists: The Swift Boaters

On Reliable Sources this weekend, Jeff Jarvis referred to the Swift Boaters as "obnoxious." It was just an aside and so he did not have to explain what he meant or offer any evidence.

This attitude is becoming the conventional wisdom within the MSM. The Swifties were bad. End of story.

In light of that, this post is a useful refresher.

Swift Boating the Swift Boaters

Anger chic

Good George Will column:

Anger Is All The Rage

HT: Betsy's Page

As usual Tom Wolfe had something interesting to say on the subject:

From the outset the eminence of this new creature, the intellectual, who was to play such a tremendous role in the history of the twentieth century, was inseperable from his necessary indignation. It was his indignation that elevated him to a plateau of moral superiority. Once up there, he was in a position to look down on the rest of humanity. And it did not cost him any effort, intellectual or otherwise. As Marshall McLuhan would put it years later: 'Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.'

That helps to explain why people are willing to rant, but why is there an "appreciative audience" for such displays?

Is it that they make for better television and more quotable punditry? How large is that appreciative audience, anyway? Is this another case where the margins get the attention while the middle is ignored?

More "fake but accurate" journalism

I'm shocked to see that it is from the New York Times. Sara Corbett and Selena Roberts, birds of a feather. Always ready to choose the useful lie over the inconvenient fact.

Say it ain't so!

You mean to tell me that the Chinese character for "crisis" is not written by combining the symbols for "danger" and "opportunity"?

Shoot, i've liked that bit ever since i read it in Kissinger's memoirs. I've even been known to repeat it. Now, i find out that it is just another one of those myths and lies that float around in the culture. I'm going to miss this one.

Duke lacrosse: Bigots with big vocabularies

From the very beginning of the case there were those who tried to use the events in Durham in the same way that racist websites use crimes committed by minorities. Both use sensational headlines to drive home their ideological point.

When neo-nazis use the "Wichita Massacre" to promote their racist views, thinking people recognize their flawed logic. Paula Zahn does not give them a respectful hearing on her show. Yet those who used the lacrosse case to underline the evils of "white skin privilege" and the "misogynistic attitudes of the patriarchy" were sought out as commentators in the early days of the Duke case.

How can the same method be despicable in one case and perfectly respectable in another?

D. W. Griffith's lurid depictions of black rapacity in "Birth of a Nation" is a permanent stain on his reputation as a filmmaker. Wendy Murphy's lurid fictions have not kept her off TV.

At Duke, a criminal investigation became the launching pad for hundreds of sociological animadversions. That was apparently A-OK. The New York Times was happy to let Selena Roberts weigh in. Dahlia Lithwick in Slate fretted that "the Duke lacrosse team's rape scandal cuts too deeply into this country's most tender places: race and class and gender "but she seemed to accept that the punditry on those issues was as valid as the criminal investigation.

Apparently, though, you need a special decoder ring to play the pundit game. Back in 1995 Newt Gingrich tried his hand at extrapolating from specific crimes to sociological generalizations. His musings generated howls of outrage.

At least Gingrich was discussing a real crime and the actual criminals. With the lacrosse case a torrent of words poured forth about the deeper societal meaning of events that never happened. Then, like a snake swallowing its tail, the hoax enablers used these sweeping conclusions about privilege, widespread racism, and endemic sexism to attack those who questioned the hoax.

Andrew Cohen of the Washington Post, for example, dismissed the evidence of innocence last year and maintained that Nifong still had a strong case. Why did anyone think otherwise? They were bigots, of course:

I suspect race and money and access to the media have a lot to do with it. I have often wondered how media coverage might be different -- how the cynical, skeptical skew would turn -- if the alleged victim in the case were white and the alleged defendants black.

Cohen's piece was a prime example of the totalitarian echoes that sounded throughout the commentary on the case. The accused were excoriated for who they were-white, male, privileged. Those who brought up inconvenient facts about DNA or alibis were quickly accused of being rape apologists, paid mouthpieces, or racists.

UPDATE: Selena Roberts just does not know when to fold. She helps make my point with her latest pathetic and hateful column on the Duke case.

There is a tendency to conflate the alleged crime at the Duke lacrosse team kegger on March 13, 2006, with the irrefutable culture of misogyny, racial animus and athlete entitlement that went unrestrained that night.

"Irrefutable"? More like systematically refuted. Each point of her litany grew out of the lurid reports in the early days of the hoax. Subsequent investigations have shown that they were wildly off the mark. Yet, here she is, still trying to sell the same old snake oil.

Hey, i wonder if i can blame her problems with the truth on the "culture of dishonesty" the prevails at the NY Times? Seems to me that there is more evidence of that (Jayson Blair, Walter Duranty) than there is against the lax team.

See also:

From the cone of silence to Emily Litella

That Ace is a really smart guy

Incidentally, it's this habit of Sullivan's -- eternally engaging in a "philosophical inquiry" that seems to be little more than a childish attempt to discover "objective rules" that favor him over his opponents -- that makes his thinking so muddied, and made his book sell so poorly.

And that's the real reason The Corner and, yeah, even Instapundit are so reluctant to toss Andrew Sullivan links. No matter what the ostensible subject, he never seems to be discussing anything except Andrew Sullivan.

RTWT

Here's hoping

If only all American Idol fans would starve themselves to death. The average IQ of the world would go up by at least 25 points.

From Jessica's Well

HT: Scott Chaffin


I've never watched AI, but i am now intrigued by the whole "vote for the worst" effort. I wonder if they can pull it off.

Novak on the Plame hearings


Novak's column on the Plame hearings is outstanding.

Was She Covert?

He raises issues that the White House could have made three years ago:

Waxman and Democratic colleagues did not ask these pertinent questions: Had not Plame been outed years ago by a Soviet agent? Was she not on an administrative, not operational, track at Langley? How could she be covert if, in public view, she drove to work each day at Langley? What about comments to me by then CIA spokesman Bill Harlow that Plame never would be given another foreign assignment? What about testimony to the FBI that her CIA employment was common knowledge in Washington?

But more to the point there is this, which highlights once again, the odd nature of the relationship between this White house and CIA:

Instead of posing such questions, Waxman said flatly that Plame was covert and cited Hayden as proof. Hayden's endorsement of Waxman's statement astounded Republicans whose queries about her had been rebuffed by the agency. That confirmed Republican suspicions that Hayden is too close to Democrats.

For more on that point see:

Do we know there's a war on?

He used to be a Steeler

Now he's part of America's Team

Former Steeler Staat deployed to Iraq

Duke lacrosse: The arrogance of the unaccountable

See Durham in Wonderland and John in Carolina

Thomas Sowell looks at the decline of the talk show

Talk, Talk, Talk

today the listener or viewer is not likely to get much interaction on issues. Instead, there are far more likely to be parallel and prepackaged talking points.

I fear that he is too optimistic on one point:

Usually the best roundtable programs on television are about sports. This is probably because there are no predetermined positions or prepackaged partisan talking points.

Sports talk may not have partisan talking points, but it is filled with mindless soundbites.

And here's a tough question that has never been answered

Why does the Bush Administration do such a lousy job defending itself?

Hitchens on Iraq

He's not afraid of the tough questions.

So, Mr. Hitchens, Weren't You Wrong About Iraq?

Duke lacrosse: That "Blue Wall of Silence"

A great thread underway over at Lie Stoppers. This part is telling:

If you go back and watch Nifong's March 29, 2006 interview (the famous choke hold interview) on the Abrams Report he makes a very revealing comment on Bill Anderson's point. Abrams asks him if the statement by Lax player Zash's attorney is true that he is cooperating with police. Nifong begins by saying yes Zash has talked to police but then goes out of his way to point out that if Zash made an untrue statement to police then "that would not be cooperation". Abrams follows up with the question.."did he make a false statement?"

Nifong's answer... "well if you assert that nothing happened then that would be an untrue statement." He goes on to pompously explain :"it is the position of the State that there was a rape."

This speaks volumes. First he was not conducting an investigation he was seeking confirmation of his charges. Any statement from anyone to the contrary would be "non cooperative". So the only way in his view a player could be cooperative if he admitted "something happened" even if the player offered to take a lie detector test to establish that nothing happened.

The police and DA were not doing an investigation, they were only looking for evidence to confirm their belief that a rape occurred. (And why were they so certain of that when they had next to no evidence?)

This also sheds a lot of light on why the players "lawyered up." The police were not interested in the truth, so what was the point in talking to them. Moreover, in Nifong's world, telling the truth was dangerously close to obstruction of justice.

Again, the question of competence

Bumbling Into a 'Scandal'

Duke lacrosse: One year into the hoax

KC Johnson is looking at the highlights (i.e. the worst) of the journalism on the case. He has a lot to choose from.

I figure the guy who created Dilbert

has a pretty good BS detecter. So this post is worth reading:

Fossils are Bullshit

OK, that wasn't so bad

Blogroll is screwed up, but i can work on that.

Here goes nothing

More too clever by half

Patterico has been excellent on the firings of the U. S. Attorney's and the press distortions of the matter. He is also willing to call the Admsinistration on their missteps.

The Indefensible Aspects of the U.S. Attorney Firings

Kyle Sampson got burned for the same reason Rove and Libby got burned on Plame/Wilson.

The Kyle Sampson plan to sneak in U.S. Attorneys under a little-known Patriot Act provision had a weaselly appearance to it. It had the immature feel of a little boy saying; “Hey, look! A new bike! Let’s ride it on the freeway!” And I am very upset with his scheming to lie to Congress about it.

It is really hard to defend an administration that plays games like that.

Pro Football Hall of Fame

Cold Hard Football Facts looks at the bias in HoF voting. defensive players do not get a fair break.

One of the deserving players they highlight is Steeler L. C. Greenwood who is very, very deserving.

How's this for irony: in his four SuperBowls, Greenwood lined up opposite three offensive tackles-- Ron Yary, Rayfield Wright, and Jackie Slater. All three of them made it into the Hall. But Greenwood is still waiting even though he dominated Yary in SB IX and beat Wright three times to sack Staubach in SuperBowl X.

I thought the guys at The Economist were supposed to be smart

They have a brief item on the trouble at Starbucks.

Trouble brewing

The Starbucks chairman seems to have a clear idea about the brand and why its position has eroded. Starbucks has always been about more than a cup of expensive coffee. It was a comfortable place to hang out while drinking that coffee.

The Economist mentions that McDonald's coffee won a taste test conducted by Consumer Reports. Big Deal. That does not meant that Mickey D's is a threat to Starbucks because the rest of the package is just not there.

Starbucks has comfortable chairs. McDonald's seating is designed to be uncomfortable so that customers eat fast and leave. Besides, who wants to linger over a cup of coffee surrounded by screaming kids with their Happy Meals and by surly stoner/slackers. (Those are McDonald's core markets.)

The Economist also trots out that favorite of business journalists-- the quotable consultant.

Now both companies are at risk from a growing sense that their products are indeed just commodities, says Robert Passikoff, founder of Brand Keys, a brand consultancy.

Of course he would say that. You could ask him about any one of a thousand companies and he would mention commoditization. That is what he does; his livelihood depends on highlighting those dangers.

Jefferson Street Joe: The creation of a modern myth

As part of their programming for Black History Month, ESPN ran “Third and a Mile” a look at the history of black quarterbacks in the NFL. (It is a tie-in with William C. Rhoden’s book of the same title.) I watched with interest because a portion of the program dealt with Steeler’s quarterback Joe Gilliam.

As expected for a network that should call itself ESPC, racism was the star of the show. It was the easy story: the big bad, prejudiced NFL keeping the poor black man down. In the Gilliam segment, the obsession with race resulted in a disjointed, scattershot narrative that sounded superficial and forced. Sportwriters talked about the racism he faced; teammates, family, and Gilliam himself talked about his personal demons and his struggles with drug addiction.

It is hard to fit Gilliam’s story into any pre-fab template. He was a gifted athlete who squandered those gifts and his opportunities. That is a tragedy but it is a more complex story than a simple fable of white racism and black suffering.

That has not stopped the sportswriters from trying. In “Third and a Mile” a pundit named Brad Pye said that “ “Joe was not strong enough to overcome racism.”

During the Limbaugh/McNabb controversy Lonnie White of the LA Times wrote:

The days when black quarterbacks didn't get opportunities to play because teams felt safer playing white quarterbacks, even if they were overrated, are over.

If today a black quarterback led his team to a 4-1-1 record, there's no way he would be replaced. Yet that's what happened in 1974, when [Joe] Gilliam started for the Pittsburgh Steelers but was benched in favor of Terry Bradshaw.

But that's the way it was back then, when black quarterbacks were judged more by their skin color than their performance on the field.

In the current Wikipedia we read:

He became the Steelers' starting Quarterback in 1974 but lost the job when Terry Bradshaw was chosen to lead the team after the first six games of the season, fueling speculation years later that Gilliam was removed because he was black.

The unforgiving facts tell a much different story. Neither Gilliam nor Bradshaw were good quarterbacks in 1974. Both were long on potential but short on performance. While it is true that Gilliam had a 4-1-1 record that year, Bradshaw was 5-2 and had led the Steelers into the playoffs in the previous two seasons.

It is hard to fault coach Chuck Noll for going with Bradshaw because he did choose a quarterback that went on to win four SuperBowls. Are we to believe that with Gilliam the Steelers would have won five or six?

That is what Rhoden and Co. want us to believe. If Gillaim was better than Bradshaw (four rings) then he was also better than Montana (four rings). Where is the evidence for this greatness? It cannot be found in his on-field performance in the NFL.

Rhoden and ESPN do a lot of stretching, blame-shifting, and gaze-averting to make the story about race. It makes “Third and a Mile” feel more like propaganda than honest history.

See also:

America’s Game

ESPN's Sports Nation: A republic of idiots and stoners

Dr. Helen asks a provocative question

Should Adolescence be Abolished?

We do seem to treat teen-agers and twenty-somethings as irresponsible and hapless which is a break from past experience. The why is the interesting question.

Duke lacrosse: How important is the Gang of 88?

The American Conservative looks at the intellectual foundations of the Gang of 88.

Rotten in Durham
How Duke’s academic mandarins became a lynch mob

They take the same tack as the Weekly Standard in concentrating on the actions of the faculty and administration in the perpetuation of the travesty in Durham.

Duke's Tenured Vigilantes
The scandalous rush to judgment in the lacrosse "rape" case.

I think that putting the Gang of 88 at the front and center of the story creates grave distortions. It is both true and interesting that a bunch of college professors decided to use a criminal case to advance their ideological agenda. KC Johnson is right that by encouraging Nifong they betrayed the ideals of the academy.

It is odd to see vigilantes with tenure; it is not odd at all to see a high-profile case draw vigilantes. At Duke the professors behaved badly but they behaved badly by acting like us.

A point John Grisham makes in his most recent book is directly relevant:

The journey also exposed me to the world of wrongful convictions. Something that I, even as a former lawyer, had never spent much time thinking about. This is not a problem peculiar to Oklahoma, far from it. Wrongful convictions occur every month in every state in this country, and the reasons are all varied and all the same-- bad police work, junk science, faulty eyewitness identifications, bad defense lawyers, lazy prosecutors, arrogant prosecutors.

This is an aspect of the case that many commentators on the right brush aside. Mike Nifong and Durham are not unique in trying to railroad innocent men.

A coterie of commentators have entertained themselves for months over at the News and Observer blog: taunting the paper for its early coverage of the case. In particular, they are rightly critical of the March 25 story that was based on an interview with the accuser. (“Dancer gives details of ordeal”)

It was a bad story, but it was not bad because the N&O made a special effort to get the lax team. It was bad for the same reason most crime reporting is bad: the reporters were trying to grab headlines with a touching story when they were operating with limited knowledge and were dependent on their sources in the police department and the DA’s office.

That’s the thing. In many ways the media handled this story like they do most crime stories. The shaky logic, the reliance on rumors, and the lachrymose posturing about the suffering of the victim is nothing new to anyone who has ever watched Nancy Grace. The lax players were denied the presumption of innocence by the media, but hey, that is the way of the tabloid media. Innocent until proven guilty makes for bad television and boring news copy.

See also:

Atticus Finch doesn't work here

A crime the press doesn't care about

The Libby case

One thing puzzles me about the White House’s handling of the whole Wilson imbroglio: Why did they choose to fight such a sneaky, shadow war against Wilson when they could have presented a powerful rebuttal in public?

Why were Rove, Fleischer, and Libby leaking and gossiping with Judith Miller, Matt Cooper, et. al. when they could have gone on the record and said:

The sixteen words were and remain accurate. British intelligence stands by their report and the Butler Commission supports their position.

VP Cheney did not send Joe Wilson to Niger nor did he receive a report from Mr. Wilson on his investigation.

Had they taken the high road, we could have had an honest public debate on pre-war intelligence. Instead, we have had this distraction of an investigation clouding the issue for over three years.

From outside the Beltway, it appears that Rove and Libby helped their enemies because they were too clever by half. I cannot work up a lot of outrage on their behalf because their cleverness hurt the country.

The jury found that Libby lied to investigators and grand jurors. How can anyone excuse that and then support Bill Clinton’s impeachment? Since I believe that Clinton deserved to be impeached and that Martha Stewart deserved her jail sentence, I have to accept that Libby deserves punishment as well.

Beldar has several good posts on the subject that I find persuasive.

Joseph Bottum has a poignant portrait of Libby before he went into the White House.

As hard as Bottum tries, I still find it hard to like or respect Libby. Beyond his missteps with Wilson, there is also the fact that he pocketed huge fees working for Marc Rich during the 1990s and called to congratulate the traitor when Clinton pardoned him.

I hate this time of year

I don't follow basketball in any form. So the 24/7 obsession with the NCAA tournament is lost on me. Not much going on in football. Baseball won't be interesting for two and a half months.

Good news about the news audience

Forget the tabloid stuff; substance sells

Hard news and in-depth journalism on public TV and radio and in print are successfully drawing audiences while cable news audiences shrink.

So why do all four cable networks chase the shrinking tabloid audience?

Michael Barone on Berger and Libby

Berger & Libby: A Tale of Two Crimes

Peter Lance and Triple Cross

I found this old blog post by Peter Lance that covers much of the material he discussed on CSPAN.

Al Qaeda and The Mob: How the FBI Blew It on 9/11

I am even more interested in reading his new book now. When I first heard of his findings I speculated that Ali Mohamed could be a key link for the ABLE DANGER network analysis. But now it is clear that he is also Kryptonite to almost every organization involved. A senior FBI agent vouched for him to get Mohamed out of RCMP custody. The DOJ (especially Patrick Fiztgerald) let him roam free for months which allowed Mohamed to go to Africa and recon the Kenyan embassy for bin Laden. The Army let him into the Special Forces where he obtained classified information for the al Qaeda cell that plotted the first WTC attack and the Day of Terror bombings. It is easy to see why no one wanted to connect any dots that included Ali Mohamed.

Lance has another explosive revelation.

in July of 2001, Khalid al-Midhar and Salem al-Hazmi got their fake I.D.'s delivered to them in a mailbox at the identical location the FBI had been onto in the decade since El Sayyid Nosair had killed Meier Kahane. The man who supplied those fake ID's that allowed al-Midhar and al-Hazmi to board A.A. Flight #77 that hit the Pentagon, was none other than Mohammed El-Attriss the co-incorporator of Sphinx with Waleed al-Noor - whom Patrick Fitzgerald had put on the unindicted co-conspirators list along with bin Laden and Ali Mohamed in 1995.

Al-Midhar was one of the 9/11 hijackers who attended the terror meeting in Malaysia and then slipped into the this country. The FBI blamed CIA for not informing them of the meeting or his presence here. That is a valid complaint, but it also ignores an FBI/DOJ failure.

A 9/11 hijacker met up with an unindicted co-conspirator from the 1994 Day of Terror plot and then slipped away unnoticed. Seven years after the DOJ and FBI supposedly smashed the New York cell, their compatriots were still in a position to aid al-Qaeda. How was that possible?

An outstanding defense of religious conservatives

By Steven M. Warshawsky who describes himself thusly:

I am Jewish. I am not religious. While I hesitate to call myself an atheist, due to the philosophical impossibility of "knowing" that there is no God, I certainly am agnostic. Perhaps more importantly, religious ritual plays no role in my life. I certainly am more of a non-believer than John Derbyshire who is one of the "skeptical" conservatives identified by Orlet as suffering the "enmity" of the theocons. Indeed, if one were to evaluate my "lifestyle" (non-religious, married to a doctor, no children, living in New York City), one likely would conclude that I should side with the atheists in this debate. I don't.

Atheists, Conservatives, and Christianity

Duke lacrosse: Another ethically challenged legal expert

Lie Stoppers has an eye-opening post on Sports Illustrated's Lester Munson.

Why does that SI rely on an attorney who was forced to surrender his law licence after being disciplined by his state's Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission? Surely there are competent lawyers out there who are willing to research the cases they opine on and who professional behavior is not scandalous.

What am i saying? CNN still has Nancy Grace on its roster. In the MSM, ethics do not matter.

"Scott Peterson in a Space Suit"

Good column by Glenn Sacks on the Lisa Nowak (AKA Fatal Attraction in Depends).

A successful married man with young children at home pursues a romantic liaison with a co-worker. When the co-worker doesn’t sufficiently reciprocate his affections, he stalks her boyfriend for two months, and devises a plan to kill him. He collects weapons, disguises himself, packs up some garbage bags to dispose of the body, and drives 900 miles to attack his rival. He launches the assault but the boyfriend manages to escape and notify the police, and the man is arrested and charged with attempted murder.

Would CBS commentator Harry Smith express sympathy for this “poor” fellow for “falling in love” and then “crash-landing”? Would Fox News commentator Steve Doocy opine that “love makes you do weird things,” and claim that prosecutors were being too hard on him?

I noted the same double standard last year with the handling of Mary Winkler:

The tabloid media (both online and cable) are handling the murder of Matthew Winkler much differently than the murders of Laci Peterson or Rachel Entwistle.

When the wife was the victim they said:

"What a sociopathic brute to kill a delicate, innocent flower like Laci."

But now, when the wife is the killer, they keep trying to frame the story as:

"What did that brute do to make that delicate innocent flower kill him?"

TV shrinks assured us that Scott Peterson wore a mask of normality but was evil underneath. Now they are warming up to explain that Mary Winkler was forced to wear a mask of normality and that is why her killing was not evil.

Russia and the West

A sobering look at attitudes in Russia.

Russia's deep animosity

The Russian people don't like the West and don't want to be like us. This alienation could cause significant problems for us in the future and represents a foreign policy blunder of epic proportions. Yet, it rarely draws any attention in the press or in Congress.

Pfaff focuses his critique on the recent actions that have strained ralations. He could have added many more items so that his list streches back all the way to the early 1990s.

I cannot work up much outrage at Russian attitudes. It is easy to see why they think that "modernization" and "Westernization" are synonyms for corruption and exploitation. After all, under Yeltsin, they saw their country looted under the banner of modernization. When the corpse was picked clean, many of the biggest looters went into comfortable exile in the West.

These David Warsh articles make for interesting reading on that score.

In Which, At Last, We Meet, Perhaps, Andrei Shleifer's Evil Twin

Gangsta-nomics

Our adventures in the Balkans and elsewhere have also increased their distrust.

Balkan echoes

GWB and his MBA redux


Jack Kelly at Irish Pennants writes:

George W. Bush is the first president to have a master's degree in business administration. Let's hope he's the last.

I like President Bush, and I support most of what he’s trying to do. But I'm amazed, astonished and appalled by the stumbling, bumbling way he often goes about it. The friends as well as the critics of this administration have reason to wonder whether these guys can organize a two car funeral.

RTWT.

Last year i wrote this about Bush and his training at the HBS:

The last couple of years of any administration are difficult. The habits of mind that GWB formed at HBS might make his especially difficult.

This is one of those times i wish i had been wrong.

See also:

The Bush-Rumsfeld legacy

Triple Cross, ABLE DANGER, and the FBI

CSPAN carried a two hour talk by Peter Lance on Sunday. It was a whirlwind tour of the material covered in his new book Triple Cross. He made an interesting point about the failure of the FBI to connect the dots before 9/11 and the problems with the implementation of the Virtual Case File (VCF) system. (Discussed here and here.) He believes that the Bureau has too many people who have too many secrets and that makes the bureaucracy unwilling to get behind any initiative that promotes sharing information with other agencies or even with other offices within the Bureau.

He may be on to something. As noted here, the FBI has engaged in cover-ups from its earliest days.


Lance emphasized that he is not positing any sort of Oliver Stone-style secret government. Rather, the FBI, like most organizations, tries to hide its mistakes and other embarrassing failures.

Some of this is inherent in any intelligence bureaucracy. Sources will contradict each other. If A is telling the truth, then B is either mistaken or lying. Not surprisingly, those officers who built their careers on their work with B will do their best to discredit A.

Of course, if A is lying, then those intransigent, careerist, naysayers become astute analysts while A’s defenders have some explaining to do…

I wonder if this happened with ABLE DANGER? Did that group’s work undercut some high profile operation? Or did it reveal some important terrorists who had been overlooked by the FBI and DOJ?

I haven’t read Lance’s latest book yet. I thought he did an impressive amount of digging in the first two, but sometimes pushed his data too hard and reached tenuous conclusions. He documented plenty of missteps by the FBI, DOJ, and NYPD, but he never produced the smoking gun that would have allowed the FBI to arrest Atta. Failing that, the mistakes are important, but not that important.

(I discussed Lance’s handling of the Phoenix memo here)

On the other hand, Ali Mohammed is a pretty big dot and his handling by the DOJ and FBI may have denied us valuable intelligence in the years before 9/11. Moreover, it is quite possible that some of those who handled him are less than eager to see the story come out.

"Recuerden el Alamo!"

From Randy Roberts and James S. Olson, A Line in the Sand: The Alamo in Blood and Memory

After lunch a bright red Lincoln Navigator pulled up to Crockett Street and out jumped a Hispanic mother with three girls, ranging in age from eight to twelve. Her husband parked the car in a nearby lot and returned bearing a video camera. The three daughters, dressed in matching white pullovers and Gap skirts, were striking. Their father, a CPA with a Wharton degree, posed his family in front of the limestone walls of the chapel and triggered the camera. They waved on cue but smiled spontaneously, obviously delighted to be where they were. He then told them briefly about the Alamo, delivering the Daughters' version of the battle, and he let his girls know that it stood for courage and integrity, virtues they needed to cultivate in their own lives.

At that point, the Anglo graduate student arrived at the chapel door. He asked, "Why are you even here today? Don't you know what this place stands for? It represents the rape and destruction of your people." Looking just the least bit annoyed, the Hispanic man politely replied, "We're not so bad off, you know." The Anglo student was persistent. "You don't understand, you just don't understand," he continued. "You shouldn't be teaching your kids this stuff." The CPA stopped short. "Escucheme, bolillo [Listen to me, white bread]," he said sharply. "If Santa Anna would have won the war, this whole city would be a shithole just like Reynosa. Soy tejano [I'm a Texan]. Mind your own goddamned business. It's my Alamo too."

Neocon echo chamber

In 2000 the Weekly Standard flacked for John McCain. Now it looks like they've dropped him and moved on to Giuliani.

Let's Make a Deal
Social conservatives, Rudy Giuliani, and the end of the litmus test.

The author thinks that we will see big changes in 2008:

Next year may see the party of the Sunbelt and Reagan, based in the South and in Protestant churches, nominate its first presidential candidate who is Catholic, urban, and ethnic--and socially liberal on a cluster of issues that set him at odds with the party's base. As a result, it may also see the end of the social issues litmus test in the Republican party, done in not by the party's left wing, which is shrunken and powerless, but by a fairly large cadre of social conservatives convinced that, in a time of national peril, the test is a luxury they cannot afford.

Who knows, she could be right. OTOH, she relies heavily on neocon pundits like Frum, Goldberg, and Podhoretz to make her case. And they, after all, are not really representativie of the Southern, Protestant element that she is trying to describe.

The Coulter Mess

They say it better than i can:

Ace: Thanks, Ann!

Bryan Preston: The problem with Ann

Michelle Malkin: The CPAC I saw

Absolute metrocon

From one of the weeines in the Corner:

Part of what happened in that election [1994], as Democrats of the day could tell you, was a reaction to the Clinton administration's fairly modest attempts at gun control

"Fairly modest"-- that's a nice description to use when one is discussing constitutional rights. I wonder how long before someone (JPod maybe) describes a gun control proposal as "fairly modest and somewhat reasonable"?

Joey Porter

Ron Cook of the Post-Gazette gives number 55 a nice send-off:

Porter a terrific teammate

I hope JP gets a nice payday from some NFC team.

Trust Stephen Hunter

to cut to the heart of the matter:

'Zodiac': A Sideways Look At the Pursuit of a Killer

"Zodiac" gets in trouble even before the title -- on its poster! It stumbles, though it tells the truth, with a marketing slogan that reads "There's More Than One Way to Lose Your Life to a Killer."

Actually, there's not. The only way that counts and the only way that's interesting is the old way, which is getting killed by the killer. Everything else is bull and spare change.

And that's exactly the problem with this movie: It's not about a killer, or his victims, or the manhunt, or the cops. They're all in it, of course, more or less. But it's about a writer. It's about a young man named Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), who becomes so obsessed with it he gives up career and family time to pursue endless arcana. For his effort, he's rewarded with a -- nervous breakdown? A descent into hell? A face-to-face with pure evil itself? Er, no. His reward is a couple of bestsellers and a new life as a successful and widely admired crime writer, plus the movie deal that resulted in this very film. A new way to "lose your life to a killer"? It sounds more like a shattering thriller about a good career move!

Duke lacrosse: Jack Ford is an idiot

But he does show that not all the blond airheads on that channel are female.

Speaking at Duke a few weeks ago, I was reminded just how divided the people in that area are over the case...and how important balanced media coverage (often notably absent on both sides in this case) is. I've said this before: we don't know exactly what happened that night -- only a few people do -- but we need to refrain from passing judgment, in either direction, until we learn the facts, not just opinions.

I'm not sure why he is telling us that we should "refrain from passing judgement." That is advice better given to his colleague Nancy Grace.

His pathetic attempt at blogging did have one good side effect. It prompted a poster over at Lie Stoppers to ask:

Does being on television make a lawyer stupid or do only stupid lawyers want to be on television? .

The season just isn't going to be the same

Steelers cut Joey Porter

The Steelers today released linebacker Joey Porter, their best overall defensive player in the 21st century whose play helped win them a Super Bowl 13 months ago.

I understand the realities of the salary cap, but i'm going to miss seeing him in black and gold.

Slublog on Bob Woodward

Washed-Up Hack Urges Media "Aggression"

Woodward and Bernstein's stories on Watergate are terrible reporting, full of thin or anonymous sourcing. There's a clear connection between W&B's reporting and the neo-muckraking journalism of today. W&B made it easy for anyone who wants to dish dirt on a political figure to do so, as long as they hide behind titles like "a senior administration official," or "someone close to the intelligence community."

RTWT