"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler
by Smitty
Dan Riehl notes of the recent acquisition in Karachi:
I also wish he were being interrogated under the Bush administration, as opposed to the current one.
This blog has obtained some hush-hush footage of the new interrogation methods to be used by the Administration’s elite interrogation outfit, code name: Redwater. In our endless quest to out-grey-lady the New York Times, we cheerfully reveal just what Gadahn can expect:
No, not Pentagon shooter Patrick Bedell — as described by Charles Johnson — I’m talking about that other 9/11 Truther:
Two days before his official trip to Afghanistan, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a “big lie” intended to pave the way for the invasion of a war-torn nation, according to Iranian state media.
Ahmadinejad, known for his harsh rhetoric toward the West and Israel, said the attack on U.S. soil was a “scenario and a sophisticated intelligence measure,” Iran’s state-run Press TV reported Saturday.
The assault was a “big lie intended to serve as a pretext for fighting terrorism and setting the grounds for sending troops to Afghanistan,” Press TV reported Ahmadinejad as saying.
Mahmoud Ahmadenijad, Patrick Bedell, Rosie O’Donnell, Charlie Sheen — all those notorious libertarians!
Probably Belgian, too. IYKWIMAITYD.
ADDENDUM: For the benefit of those who’ve been reading the blog for less than six months, or who didn’t pay close attention to the Great LGF Meltdown of 2009, I will explain the “Belgian” joke and a few other things, as well.
The first clear indication that Little Green Footballs blogger Charles Johnson had slipped a cog was in October 2007, when he attacked Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs and Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch for having attended a “counter-jihad” conference in Brussels, Belgium.
Specifically, Johnson and certain of his pseudonymous commenters charged that various European participants in the Brussels conference were “ultra-nationalist” or “Euro-fascist.” Prominently mentioned in Johnson’s attack was Vlaams Belang (“Flemish Interest”), a Belgian political party that has a history of controversy, opposing the typical European “multicultural” stance toward Islam and immigration (readers of Mark Steyn’s America Alone will nod their heads in recognition).
When Geller and Spencer defended the Brussels conference and protested the guilt-by-association attacks, Johnson’s response was to launch a crusade of defamation against Geller and Spencer. Anyone who sided with Geller and Spencer in this dispute was accused by Johnson of willfully abetting “Euro-fascism.” Conservative columnist Diana West and best-selling author Richard Miniter were among the many people stigmatized by Johnson, as Geller noted.
Keep in mind that, when this dispute began, Little Green Footballs was still one of the most widely read conservative sites, a “must” on any conservative blogroll (including Rush Limbaugh’s site). By declaring Geller and Spencer to be persona non grata and condemning West, Miniter, et al., Johnson was implicitly threatening to eject from the ranks of respectable conservatism any blog that linked either Atlas Shrugs or Jihad Watch. This resulted in a drastic loss of traffic for Geller and Spencer, and damaged their effort to build a trans-Atlantic alliance against what has been variously deemed “Islamicization” or “Dhimmification.”
And all of this, you see, because of the threat allegedly posed by Vlaams Belang, a party that mustered 12% of the vote in Belgium, a peaceful democratic nation geographically smaller than Maryland with a population less than Ohio’s. Consider, then, the extreme disproportion involved in Johnson’s crusade, during which he branded Geller a “Poster Girl for Euro-Fascists.”
Regardless of your opinion of Vlaams Belang — or whether you even have an opinion about them — is this Belgian political party really a threat comparable to al Qaeda? Is Flemish nationalism such a grave danger as to justify the crusade against Geller and Spencer? Or, as seems far more likely, does Johnson have some kind of personality flaw that caused him to go beserk when Geller and Spencer disputed his condemnation of the Brussels conference?
All of which explains why I began invoking “the Flemish Menace” when mocking Johnson’s paranoiac tendencies, his rigid categorical thinking, and his obsessive need to apply pejorative labels to his enemies (real or imaginary). His counter-factual claim that Pentagon shooter Patrick Bedell was an “Anti-government right wing extremist of the Ron Paulian persuasion” is typical of what I call Johnsonoia.
Why not merely ignore Charles Johnson? It’s never safe to turn your back on a rabid dog.
Bloggers aren’t supposed to call attention to their advertisements (i.e., gaming the click-throughs) but the AdSense rotation just featured an ad for a product clever enough to be legitimately newsworthy:
OK, who wants to organize the “Draft Krauthammer Committee”? Even those who don’t agree with Krauthammer must admit he crafts sentences with brutal conciseness:
Late last year, Democrats were marveling at how close they were to historic health-care reform, noting how much agreement had been achieved among so many factions. The only remaining detail was how to pay for it.
Well, yes. That has generally been the problem with democratic governance: cost. The disagreeable absence of a free lunch.
Update: Instalanche!
The New York Times admits to acting as a “fence” for a word thief:
Zachery Kouwe, a Times business reporter for a little over a year, resigned last month after he was accused of plagiarizing from The Wall Street Journal. . . .
Plagiarism is a mortal journalistic sin, and Kouwe’s departure was inevitable from the moment that Robert Thomson, the managing editor of The Journal, sent Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, six examples of language taken verbatim, or nearly so, from a Journal article about continuing legal fallout from Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.
How does this kind of stuff keep happening? Consider the process by which Kouwe was hired:
Mr. Kouwe’s career at The Times began in November 2008. He was one of about a dozen reporters and editors who were hired to enhance the Times business-news verticals (DealBook, Your Money, Technology, etc.). At the time, the hires rankled some staffers, since the paper was in the midst of a hiring freeze and other than acquiring superstars—Peter Baker, for example—editors weren’t hiring anyone for any other section.
The hires were encouraged by the business executives at the Times Company since those blogs tend to draw traffic (and compulsive readers) that are an attractive proposition to advertisers right now.
In other words, management was trying to go cheap. Hire a bunch of relative youngsters (Kouwe is 31) at substantial savings in comparison to the salaries of senior reporters and put them into an online format with minimal editorial supervision, yet packaged and sold to readers with the brand-name prestige of the New York Times. Yet another legacy-media strategy doomed to failure.
There are several issues involved here, including the demonstrable fact that people who are too lazy to do the jobs they’re paid to do can’t be counted on to give credit to those whose work they steal.
While I’ve sometimes joked about my own laziness, I’ve never been tempted to plagiarize. If something is so good that it’s worth stealing, just quote it and give credit to the source:
“Heh,” said Professor Glenn Reynolds.
“Hmmmm,” said Allahpundit.
“Pudding,” said Ace of Spades.
And, yeah, I stole that picture of Kouwe from the Observer, which lifted it from the Times. No honor among thieves. Or, as the attorneys say, “Fair use.”
Sue me, you vicious bastards.
It’s a rather idiosyncratic argument that will be of interest mainly to foreign policy junkies, which I’m not. Still, you’ve got to love the money quote:
Frankly, I couldn’t quite imagine any venture requiring trust with Arabs turning out especially well. This is, you will say, my prejudice. But some prejudices are built on real facts, and history generally proves me right. Go ahead, prove me wrong.
I’m not saying I agree with that, you understand, but it’s delightful to see anyone publicly confess to a prejudice, without apology.
You see, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess, that [the English] are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. . . . Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit; and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.
— Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
One of the problems of discourse in the age of political correctness is that everyone is required to pretend that they are completely free of prejudice. The logical obverse is that people think they can win a debate merely by accusing their opponents of prejudice.
Debate over post-9/11 policy was crippled from the outset by these tendencies of our politically correct culture, and even now we cannot discuss the successes and failures of the Bush era without tripping over the PC barbed wire strewn about the rhetorical landscape. No one can say a favorable word about Bush foreign policy without being accused of being that awful thing, a “neocon,” nor can anyone criticize Bush foreign policy without being accused of being that much worse thing, an anti-Semite.
Whenever debate is hemmed in by such strictures, truth is necessarily obscured and unnecessary antagonisms aroused. I am convinced, for example, that we still don’t know the full and accurate history of Communist subversion in the 1940s and ’50s because the backlash against “McCarthyism” discouraged further investigation. To advocate such investigation was to incur the charge of leading a “witch hunt,” of being a paranoid who saw “Reds under the bed.”
Thus, for decades, respectable liberals were required to presume that Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg had been victims of anti-Communist “hysteria.” Then when the Soviet Union collapsed, researchers gained access to KGB files, and we learned that Hiss and Rosenberg were guilty as hell. Yet your child’s high-school history textbook still portrays “McCarthyism” as a greater menace than Communism in post-WWII America.
And I have no doubt that 50 years from now, students will be presented with an even more distorted and oversimplified account of our own age, because political correctness has become so ascendant in elite culture.
by Smitty
Rule 5 Sunday. Last night on Twitter I happened into the #thankaliberal hash tag. And an argument with someone, presumably in CA, that Liberals invented the Internet. Whatevah. I need this post so that ah can get mah head right again.
…each year the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue seems just a (simulated wayward) hair less inspired than its predecessor, and I think it’s just that the young ladies sporting the suits, or semblances thereof, are just freaking bored with the whole concept.
Rule 5 Sunday salutes all. Keep the inbox happy. Peace.
Professor Glenn Reynolds has linked my essay about narcissism, scapegoating and paranoia. Speaking of paranoid narcissists, remember when Charles Johnson called the Pentagon shooter an “anti-government right wing extremist of the Ron Paulian persuasion”?
Wrong again, Chuckles. John Patrick Bedell was a dopehead peacenik loser of the “No Blood for Oil” persuasion who slowly descended into paranoid psychosis:
Bedell . . . had vigorously objected to the government’s role in the 1991 Persian Gulf War since high school, telling relatives that the United States was trying to enrich itself and oil companies, said his brother, 33-year-old Jeffrey Bedell.
But, in about 2002, after the breakup of a long-term relationship with a girlfriend, his skepticism began to turn to deep-rooted suspicion. And soon it became paranoia, his brother said.
Patrick would point skyward, convinced that “they” were watching him. He believed songs he heard on the radio were meant as warnings. . . .
“There were symptoms of a mental disorder, approaching paranoid schizophrenia,” said Jeffrey Bedell, a former California deputy attorney general who is a financial adviser. . . .
Patrick was perpetually in and out of school, enrolling in undergraduate or graduate programs and sometimes auditing courses. Jeffrey could not recall whether he had worked anywhere. . . .
The Bedells pleaded with him to seek medical help, but he refused. “I would have conversations with him, trying to convince him to stop smoking marijuana, that it was making his thinking more disordered, but he was not receptive to that,” Jeffrey said.
The Pentagon shooter was not a “Paulian.” He was also not a Hayekian, an Objectivist, a Rothbardian or any other sort of libertarian. Nor was he a creationist, a Belgian neo-fascist or a “climate-change denier.”
Patrick Bedell was suffering from a mental illness that cannot be blamed on Charles Johnson’s ideological Scapegoat of the Week.
The sycophants at Little Green Footballs are enabling Johnson’s delusions of adequacy. He’s so out of touch with reality, he wouldn’t know the difference between a libertarian and a lamb chop.
