The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

FEATURE: McCain Jauntily Raked Again

Posted on | April 27, 2013 | 22 Comments

by Smitty

The bad news is that the Wombat has had an extended stay in a Minnesota. He tries to claim it was something medical, and I guess being buried in anime groupies can have medical implications. Regardless of the actual details, we bid him Godspeed in recovery.

This week’s FMJRA celebrates at least one of your masthead names breaking 20k follows on Twitter. While, on the one hand, this is the least useful accomplishment imaginable, everybody should follow my 20,000th follower:


Oh, and guess who’s still poking along back around 19k?

Again, this milestone is of no specific merit, except as an occasion to heap abuse about Robert Stacy McCain’s head and shoulders.

At any rate, it’s time to quit fannying about and let the good links roll:

‘We Got Him’

The #BlockedByDavidSirota Club: Membership Is Growing Rapidly!

A Picture That Will Warm Your Heart

EVIL SHALL NOT PROSPER

The Blair-Glass ‘Sleeper Cell’ — British Tabloid Fabricates a Phony Scoop

Why Did Fox News and Townhall Scrub the Todd Starnes ‘Saudi National’ Story?

Blame Bush: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Does!

Paul Ryan Intern Adam Savader Arrested

Terrorists Fear Him

VIDEO: Terrorist Floyd Corkins Tells FBI He Used SPLC ‘Hate’ List to Find Target

Why Is This Idiot on National TV?

Army Plans to Cut Eight Brigades by 2017

BREAKING: Cable TV News Airheads Screwed Up a Major Story, Again

Category: FMJRA Award

Where Were You in 2002?

Posted on | April 27, 2013 | 32 Comments

In congratulating the Overlawyered blog on moving under the Cato Institute umbrella, Professor Bainbridge used the phrase “take the Boeing,” which in turn prompted Glenn Reynolds to flashbacks on the origins of that phrase in the misty dawn of the blogospheric age when the commercial value of the medium was scarcely understood. And, of course, the adaptation/imitation of the medium by major commercial operations has limited the readership space of the original blogosphere — i.e., individual online writer/commentators connected in informal networks or communities of sites.

This network/community concept seems to have been lost by (or, more likely, was never known to) newer arrivals in the ‘sphere. The idea that each of us is contributing to a common project is not just some kind of “Stone Soup” idealism, but is in fact the only way to build any genuinely meaningful alternative to that pathetic exercise in groupthink we call the Mainstream Media. Bloggers who don’t help build the alternative can complain about the MSM “borg” all they want; they aren’t really making a difference. There are two ways in which bloggers actually help sabotage the blogosphere:

  • Turn your blog into a series of lectures. “Here, let me tell you How to Save the World, because you pitiful mortals are obviously in need of my Superior Wisdom.” It’s one thing to go off on the occasional rant, but if that’s all your blog is about — sermons and lectures, as if you are the Oracle to whom readers turn in need of your delphic prophecies — then you’re doing the wrong thing. No one wants to read that crap.
  • Never link another blogger. It’s weird that some bloggers would rather link a story in the New York Times or the Washington Post than to link a fellow blogger. Why this is, I don’t know. Sometimes it seems like everybody has the same idea: Grab an MSM headline off Drudge, link it, include a brief blockquote and add some political snark. Not only does this effectively surrender content control to Drudge — so that bloggers are merely replicating the headline selection there — but nobody’s snark ever goes beyond their own readership, because no blogger ever quotes another blogger.

Ace of Spades once did a mini-rant — which I can’t find now — about whether your site is a portal or a destination. That is to say, is the reader coming to your site to find links to interesting material (portal) or strictly to read what you have to say (destination)?

The problem is that if every blogger starts thinking of his own site as a destination, then the site’s value as a portal — directing readers to interesting material elsewhere — is necessarily diminished or eliminated. And if this destination mentality takes hold at all the larger sites, then there will be few opportunities for new bloggers to join the community, and fewer incentives for smaller bloggers to participate in the conversation, because nobody with any significant readership will ever link them. What will eventually happen, in such a scenario, is that the independent blogosphere will wither and die from neglect, and be replaced by a corporate simulacrum.

Which is already happening, to an extent. This was what John Hawkins was talking about two years ago as “The Slow, Painful Coming Death Of The Independent, Conservative Blogosphere” (with sequels here and here). Despite the fact that there have been notable successes in recent years — e.g., William Jacobson’s Legal Insurrection has not only succeeded, but has produced a promising spinoff, College Insurrection — the fact is that the original idea of the blogosphere as an informal network of independent sites is being lost, not because independent bloggers are “taking the Boeing,” but because so many newer arrivals in the ‘sphere never even bothered with the concept of collaboration.

Well, this kind of rant could go on forever, but you didn’t come here for my delphic prophecies, eh?

 

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! And, in case you didn’t realize it, the Instawife has a new book out entitled, Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream — and Why It Matters, and which you should buy because if it becomes a bestseller, that’s one less spot available for a liberal book on the New York Times bestseller list.

Sometimes, life really is a zero-sum equation . . .

 


Category: Blogging

Still No Confirmation of ‘Sleeper Cell’ Connection in Boston Marathon Bombing

Posted on | April 27, 2013 | 17 Comments

On April 21, Chris Bucktin and Andy Lines wrote a story at the British Mirror tabloid about the Boston bombing investigation:

Boston bombers: FBI hunting
12-strong terrorist “sleeper cell” linked
to brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

The FBI was last night hunting a 12-strong terrorist “sleeper cell” linked to the Boston marathon bomb brothers. . . .
A source close to the investigation said: “We have no doubt the brothers were not acting alone. The devices used to detonate the two bombs were highly sophisticated and not the kind of thing people learn from Google.
“They were too advanced. Someone gave the brothers the skills and it is now our job to find out just who they were. Agents think the sleeper cell has up to a dozen members and has been waiting several years for their day to come.”

I immediately called into question the authenticity of that scoop: How was it that these two British tabloid writers were able to get a “source close to the investigation” to give them this shocking revelation as an exclusive, a scoop that none of the veteran U.S. reporters covering the story were able to match? And, if Bucktin and Lines had such excellent sources, why was the rest of that story composed of stuff that anyone could have compiled from other media sources, including a quote cribbed from the New York Times?

The Mirror‘s “exclusive” got banner headline treatment at the Drudge Report and zoomed to the top of the Memeorandum aggregation. Six days later, there still hasn’t been anything — not one legitimate news article — that has confirmed this “sleeper cell” angle that the Mirror claimed to have gotten from a “source close to the investigation.” In other words, this looks like a case of outright journalistic fraud in the manner of Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass.

Doesn’t anyone else care about this apparent fabrication?

 


Category: Journalism, Terrorism

University Logo as Rorschach Inkblot

Posted on | April 27, 2013 | 41 Comments

Instapundit calls our attention to the case of a feminist student at the University of Connecticut who saw rape in the school’s revamped logo for its Huskies sports program. And to understand just what this reaction means, you really should read the “open letter” that Carolyn Luby wrote to UConn president Susan Herbst:

Dear President Susan Herbst,
I write to you today as a UConn student, but more specifically as a UConn woman and feminist. I want to first express my admiration for you as a woman who has made it in a “man’s” world, who has faced the odds and done the seemingly unthinkable; become the first woman president at UConn over the course of its 130-year history. You serve as a shining example that even the most challenging of ceilings can be broken, and you speak to the considerable strides women have made over the last 50 years in academia and the professional world. One of the most vivid memories I have of my admiration for your accomplishments was when Gloria Steinem gave you a standing ovation for your successes, along with a full auditorium of students and faculty, during her speech at the 40 year anniversary of the UConn Women’s Center this past fall.  It is on behalf of that standing ovation, my feminist foremothers, and the respect that I feel for your success personally that I write this letter of concern and intervention to you today. . . .

This is what we call bad writing. Before we can even begin to engage Carolyn Luby’s argument — such as it is — we must first overcome our revulsion at the ghastly wretchedness of Luby’s prose. And I think that the awfulness of Luby’s writing is more than coincidentally related to the awfulness of her purpose, i.e., to signify feminist solidarity by way of inviting President Herbst to sympathize with Luby’s heinously opportunistic purpose in writing.

Luby wishes to hijack the discussion of the university’s new sports logo in order to humiliate Herbst with a reiteration of criminal accusations made against various UConn athletes. For example, football running back Lyle McCombs was arrested for domestic violence after an argument with his girlfriend, and basketball center Enosch Wolfe was charged with trespassing and other charges — recently dropped — after an incident at a woman’s apartment. Excuse me for inflicting this jargon-laden Carolyn Luby paragraph on readers:

Instead of giving these problematic aspects of male athletic peer culture at UConn a second look or a giving the real face of athletics a true makeover, it appears that the focus of your administration is prioritizing the remodeling of the fictional face of the Husky Logo. Instead of communicating a zero tolerance atmosphere for this kind of behavior, increasing or vocalizing support to violence against women prevention efforts on campus in the face of such events, or increasing support to student run programs that seek to work with athletes on issues of violence as well as academic issues, it would appear that your administration is more interested in fostering consumerism and corporatization than education and community. Another example of this shift in priorities can be seen in the current administrations selection of the new logo — a selection made with no involvement from or consultation with the normal, everyday, non-Olympian student body . . .

Ah, yes —  “fostering consumerism and corporatization”: President Herbst’s administration is accused of being pro-capitalist.

Reasonable people can have intelligent debates about the influence of big-time college athletics on university life, and about the extent to which the term “student-athlete” is a cruel fiction when applied to those players of limited academic aptitude whose only ambition is making it to the NFL or NBA. We can also reasonably discuss the degree to which coaches and administrators tolerate occasional thuggish behavior by star players as the necessary cost of having successful athletic programs.

Certainly, UConn isn’t the only school dealing with “Jocks Gone Wild” issues, but “these problematic aspects of male athletic peer culture,” as Luby verbosely describes them, aren’t really what her letter is about. Her letter is about signifying, about displaying the ideological banner of radical feminism and humiliating President Herbst for her insufficient loyalty to that banner: Betraying the Sisterhood.

We see this signifying jive most clearly in the decision of Carolyn Luby to close her letter with an ostentatious literary allusion:

In the words of Audre Lorde, “this letter is in repayment.”

Yes, the radical lesbian poet — who died more than 20 years ago and whose relevance to the problems of University of Connecticut athletics is, well, problematic — must be name-checked by Luby as a symbolic appeal to unity among the intended audience within UConn’s department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies:

Carolyn Luby is a Senior at the University of Connecticut. She is double majoring in Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies and Spanish and minoring in Puerto Rican and Latino Studies. She is fluent in Spanish and just returned from a semester abroad in Granada, Spain. In addition to academics Carolyn is also a peer educator for the Violence Against Women Prevention Program . . . She is an active advocate for Women’s Rights and Human Rights and works to promote community involvement and interaction with these issues on both a university level and a national and global level.

This biography of Luby appears at the “Latinas & Media” blog, which is in fact a class project for a course of the same name which is WGSS 3260 in the UConn undergraduate catalog and taught by Cal-Berkeley alumna Diana Rios. What this means is that Carolyn Luby is getting a diploma for ax-grinding — an apostle of angry entitled victimhood, catechized in the gospel of grievance — which is now accorded the status of an academic discipline on many campuses.

Isn’t this a problem that is, in its own way, more pervasive and harmful than occasional outbreaks of thuggery by college athletes?

UPDATE: Linked by Gene Hackett — thanks! — and welcome, Instapundit readers! Y’know, this problem of students getting useless degrees in meaningless subjects while university administrators are mainly concerned with enhancing revenue opportunities — somebody really ought to write a book about that.

 

Category: Education, Feminism, Intellectuals

Army Plans to Cut Eight Brigades by 2017

Posted on | April 26, 2013 | 32 Comments

COLUMBUS, Georgia
At graduation ceremonies for my son’s infantry training unit this morning, the speaker was a retired general who sounded dire warnings about the threats facing the United States. The old man’s speech was sufficiently remarkable as to constitute actual news, so I pulled a scrap of paper out of my pocket and took notes:

“It is absolutely unacceptable for leaders in Washington not to be prepared for the unexpected,” retired Army Lt. Gen. R.L. “Sam” Wetzel said in an address during graduation ceremonies for infantry troops at Fort Benning.
Wetzel, who first saw combat as a company commander in the Korean War, remarked that America’s historic pattern is for military decreases in times of peace, followed by unexpected crises caused by enemy attacks like Pearl Harbor, which plunged the U.S. into  World War II, and the Communist invasion that began the Korean War.
Wetzel, 82, noted the current threat from North Korea — which has developed ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons — and especially the danger of a nuclear-armed Iran. He said the current problem posed by Islamic radicalism can be traced to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution in Iran.
“These radical Islamists are out to destroy our American way of life,” Wetzel said during his speech at the graduation ceremonies at Fort Benning’s National Infantry Museum.

What I didn’t realize, until I got back to the motel and did some research, was why General Wetzel was so concerned: The Pentagon is actually proposing the elimination of a brigade the general once commanded. The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer:

A decision is possible this summer on whether the 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division remains at Fort Benning or will be cut to reduce the Army force by 2020. . . .
To save money, eight brigades will be deactivated with two coming from Europe. The other six brigades would be considered from installations across the nation. . . .
At the listening session [Wednesday in Columbus], officials said the cuts are aimed at reducing the force from 562,000 to 490,000 by 2017. . . .
Lt. Col. Brent Selnau, who works at the Pentagon for the Department of the Army, said the driving factor in the cuts was the budget control act of 2011. . . . Officials are left with trying to cut a chunk of about 80,000 soldiers from the force. . . .
Retired Lt. Gen. R.L. “Sam” Wetzel, a veteran of Korea, Vietnam and former commander of Fort Benning, asked the panel of civilian and Army officials to keep the brigade he once commanded in Germany on the post. Going back to conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, Wetzel asked if anyone saw the conflicts coming.
“We must not be unprepared for the next one,” he said. “That is the message I want you to take that back to Washington. I think everybody in this room agrees with me. We’ve got to be thinking about the future.”

How did I miss this news earlier? Army Times, April 7:

The Army plans to cut eight of its 45 active-duty brigade combat teams as it shrinks the force from 562,000 soldiers to 490,000 by fiscal 2017.

There was a Senate hearing this week:

To slash its end strength by 72,000 soldiers, the Army will be forced to discharge up to 29,000 personnel involuntarily, Thomas Lamont, assistant secretary for manpower and reserve affairs, told the Senate Armed Services Personnel Subcommittee Wednesday.
Between 23,000 and 24,000 enlisted personnel would be asked to leave involuntarily, and between 4,000 and 5,000 officers would be forced out, reported CQ Today.

Slashing eight brigades could seriously weaken our national security, and I’m stunned that there has been relatively little discussion about this policy. You can’t make up for the loss of eight active-duty brigades by using National Guard troops. One of the problems exposed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was that repeated long-term deployment of Guard and Reserve units has harmful effects on morale, recruiting and retention. Such a substantial reduction in the active-duty force will likely degrade overall readiness, and make it more difficult to rotate units to overseas assignments, particularly in the case of a major war.

Honestly, when General Wetzel started talking about the threat to “our American way of life,” I thought the old man had slipped a cog. But as soon as I found out about this proposal — shrinking the Army by 72,000 troops, a 13 percent reduction — I realized there was a serious policy argument involved that isn’t getting nearly as much attention as it should. Thank God for notes on scraps of paper.

UPDATE: Possibly related?

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) went after the Obama administration’s handling of the Boston Marathon bombing investigation in a radio interview Thursday — and along the way he claimed that Muslim Brotherhood members are in the administration and influencing its decisions.
“It’s very clear to everybody but this administration that radical Islam is at war against us,” Gohmert told WND Radio. “And I’m hoping either this administration will wake up or a new one will come in at the next election before irreparable damage is done. Because radical Islam is at war with us. Thank God for the moderates who don’t approve of what’s being done. But this administration has so many Muslim Brotherhood members that have influence that they just are making wrong decisions for America.”

Not trying to stoke anyone’s paranoia here, but cutting the Army by eight brigades? Who benefits from that, huh?

 


Category: Military

Why Is This Idiot on National TV?

Posted on | April 26, 2013 | 32 Comments

The enduring mystery of Chris Matthews:

Matthews insisted that he opposes intervention into Syria and said that America spends too much of its energy intervening in Arab nations. . . .
“As long as Syrians are fighting Syrians, that’s better than us fighting Syrians,” Matthews continued. “If we don’t stop killing Arabs on international television one of these days. It’s all we do is kill Arabs on international television.”
“I think that might have something to do with Jihad,” he concluded. “Just guessing.”

 

Category: MSNBC

VIDEO: Terrorist Floyd Corkins Tells FBI He Used SPLC ‘Hate’ List to Find Target

Posted on | April 25, 2013 | 23 Comments

Steven Ertelt at LifeNews reports:

In a chilling new Federal Bureau of Investigation interrogation video just released, Floyd Lee Corkins, who shot up the offices of the Family Research Council, on August 15, 2012, says that he picked his target from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) website.
Corkins pled guilty to three charges, including committing an act of domestic terrorism while armed – the first such charge in Washington, D.C.

Category: Gays, Terrorism

Terrorists Fear Him

Posted on | April 24, 2013 | 48 Comments

Cowards who strike against the innocent to advance ancient hatreds and fanatical agendas have one certain enemy in the world, who will courageously seek them out and destroy the evil doers. Above all, this is the enemy that terrorists fear most . . . Read more

Category: Family, Military
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