(Note to literalists: the Watched column presently contains only a smattering of 'warblogs' because the facilitator of the template-change--Dr. Menlo--is not very familiar with them, and will be adding more as they are sent to him. Also, this blog may contain areas of allusion, satire, subtext, context and possibly even a dash of the surreal: wannabe lit-crits beware.)
Control
[Watch this space for: Pentagon and Petroleum, The Media is only as Liberal as the Corporations Who Own Them, Wash Down With, and Recalcify]
Mickey Kaus, the "liberal" journalist - not sure which word to put the [sic] after there - just can't let an argument end, especially when he's not advancing same and plainly bringing himself into disrepute. Read his January 6 "In DeLong's Run," and then read Brad DeLong's response to Kaus' "embarrassing" defense of economic adviser Glenn Hubbard. A choice bit:
Kaus: Berkeley Professors do lie. Maybe this professor is lying. How can we tell? We need to be skeptical.DeLong: Fourth edition. Page 661. There are libraries. There is Amazon. There is fact-checking.
Of course, even the worst journalists would submit a piece suggesting dishonesty re: an easily verifiable matter to a perfunctory fact check. That Kaus didn't bother speaks volumes. posted by Grady10:49 PM
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Glenn Harlan Reynolds, faithful to his "instapundit" schtick, relayed news of the weapons find at Charles de Gaulle airport mere hours after the news of the find was reported by the BBC. He headlined his post, "THIS KEEPS HAPPENING," a none too subtle insinuation betrayed by the employ of ellipses and The Professor's determination to report the ethnicity of persons arrested elsewhere for unrelated offenses. He then advised all to "Keep [their] eye on this."
GHR followed his own advice - for all of 28 hours. The next day he told of an "INTERESTING DEVELOPMENT IN PARIS," linking to this BBC follow-up. Allowing himself more than his customary and wearying "indeed," Reynolds, while admitting the situation had acquired some complexity, told readers that the "original story -- that a passerby saw weapons in the trunk -- seemed a bit odd" to him. Of course he failed to register his suspicions at the time. He is, after all, the "instapundit," not the hold-on-let-me-think-about-this-pundit. He wouldn't have let some irksome suspicions intrude upon his determination to fault Islam and its adherents as twisted.
The Professor spent the succeeding days filing from the "NO-SURPRISE-HERE DEPARTMENT," telling us that "Somebody needs to explain to [the assailant of a French Rabbi] that Islam is a religion of peace, and does not countenance such acts." Two days later he issued a "EURO-ISLAMOTERRORISM UPDATE," erring by not calling it Euro-Islamofascistterrorism, as per the killblogger style guide.
Serving as Charles Johnson's tag team partner must be tiring, especially when grappling with global terrorists and their anti-Semitic appeasers on the left. I therefore cannot blame The Professor for his failure of late to keep his eye on the story as he asked us all to. For my part, I remained faithful to Reynolds' call. So too did the BBC. I wonder about the other warbloggers.
Mader Blog, at the time of the first BBC report, was among the most sensible, asking aloud, "What's the story with the Algerians?" The Conjecturer posed a similar question.
The reliably obnoxious Shark Blog wasted next to no time and even less thought denouncing the "Religion-of-peacenik" arrested.
I hope The Greatest [sic] Jeneration was typing with tongue in cheek when she wrote "There may be more to this civilians TIPS program than we're giving it credit for!" I don't think the aptly named Feces Flinging Monkey was. It noted, "Somebody was paying attention, and that person saved hundreds of lives this weekend by having the faith to act upon a single suspicious act [perpetrated by "fuckwits"]. Good show." As GHR would say, "indeed."
As always, Bill Quick, who looks fantastic in white (he thoughtfully removed the hood when posing for this picture), lead the stupidity stakes by a most comfortable margin. He was "Sure Al-Qaeda Is Aware of it." posted by Grady1:54 AM
"The "evil do-ers" seem to be caving. Go W! We watch these powerful looped images. Bombing. Refugee children. Destruction. And yet, we are distracted by the ticker tape at the bottom on the screen. The endless stream of information seems to provide us with a myriad of conversation. "Shit. Harry Potter made $31.3 million in its first day," I marvel, as a Red Cross warehouse is bombed. I sip my Amstel Light. "He looks really handsome in that gray shirt," we all concur. "Ohmigod. They found Walter’s football ring in a couch at Purdue! He must have fucked some sorority chick." We laugh as a small mountain village is bombed and entire families are wiped out. Eventually, we head out and proceed to have a big night where alcohol gives us guilt-free permission to ignore the world. So, why is this?"
Change "Corporate News" on the above image stolen from Amir Butler's excellent site to "warbloggers." Next read this piece from the Times, opening as follows:
DONALD RUMSFELD, the US Defence Secretary, has suggested that Washington may present little or no evidence of Iraq's quest for banned weapons even if President Bush decides to go to war.
Watch the killbloggers ape their unelected leaders and give up all attempts at justifying a war. A just war is even further out of the question.
Meanwhile, Glenn Harlan Reynolds comes within centimeters of equating "anti-Americanism" and anti-Semitism. We wonder if that applies retroactively, all the way back to those denouncing the Semitic Monroe Doctrine. posted by Grady10:17 PM
2. Kaus: "Even if interest rates go up a bit, their short-term depressive effect can presumably be countered by the stimulative effect of short-term tax cuts and spending."
2a. The centerpiece of Bush's proposal is a dividend tax cut that is (a) not stimulative and (b) not short-term. You don't have to be Paul Krugman to think this, although it clearly helps to know something about the rudiments of macroeconomics (or English, insofar as "permanent" and "short-term" are antonymous)
From the January 3, 2003, Raines Times (God, that's infectuous):
"We will be facing considerable skepticism on the question of how we can justify confrontation with Saddam when he is letting inspectors into the country, and a diplomatic solution with Kim when he's just thrown them out," one senior diplomat acknowledged today. "And we're working on the answer."
Rod Dreher, nearly as sensitive to immoderate speech and nastiness as warblogger G. Harlan Reynolds, says that the problem with today's newspapers is a general insufficiency of nastiness. He says that "the men and women who run newsrooms are scared to death of offending approved victim groups," by which he of course means Muslims. It seems likely then that Dreher holds multiple subscriptions to the New York Sun, whose newsroom is run by persons suffering from no such fears. posted by Grady6:23 AM
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Wednesday, January 01, 2003
Some of you have noticed and commented on the lack of posts here at Warblogger Watch. The reason is that I have been going through a crisis of late. First, some background.
I was raised as a liberal, my parents were liberals. As a child I idolized my liberal parents, and as I grew and began to develop a political consciouness I naturally gravitated towards liberal ideas. I can recall many a night as a teen staying up late at night in my bedroom, a Che Guevara poster on the wall, reading Chomsky and listening to NPR.
As my life progressed, and despite being mugged by a negro fellow, I still held onto my liberal values and beliefs such as the need for public schools and free health care, pro-choice on the abortion issue and anti-death on the execution issue, for government intervention to buttress the brutal Darwinism of unfettered markets and anti-war, oh so very anti-war.
Any spare moment that could be stolen I was engaged in liberal causes: organizing a labour union for my fellow law school professors, writing letters to the editor of the local newspaper explaining the horrors of animal testing, global climate change, guns, and Nike sweatshops and creating humorous paper-mache effigies of our leaders for anti-IMF/WTO protests.
Life was liberal, and life was good.
Then came 9/11, and more importantly, the blog phenomena.
Previous to 9/11 I surfed the internet, mostly to check out my favorite web pages (Counterpunch, Zmag, the Nation, World Socialist Web Site) and writers (Fisk, Pilger, Cockburn) and was vaguely aware of weblogs; I has stumbled across Glenn and Andrew the odd time, but their right-wing conservative viewpoints and opinions sullied my liberal sensibilities so much I often had to have a stiff drink of drambuie and watch a Michael Moore movie or read a Ted Rall cartoon to settle down. But after 9/11, with the increase of number and influence of the "warblogs", I began to check them out regularly to keep up on the enemy. I was puzzled and disturbed by their strange words and terminology (Fisking, idiotarian and rope-a-dope) and their hatred of all things arab and love of science fiction and each other.
I decided to create this blog to counteract the hegenomy of pro-war thinking in the blogosphere. There were some epic battles waged and many hours spent reading emails with titles like "fuk you stuped sand nigger lover."
But a month ago something changed. I don't know what caused it. Maybe it was the news that the "hermit kingdom" North Korea was threatening us with nuclear weapons made with plutonium from the nuclear reactor we had sold them. Maybe it was the news that our so-called ally, Saudi Arabian Princess Hafia, gave money to a friend of a friend of a friend of an acquaintance and that money might have made it to Al-Qaeda terrorists. Or maybe it was just the colloidal silver I hae been taking, but I began to question the liberal beliefs that have guided me all these years.
What if US military intervention was not done to secure energy supplies and transfer routes but to overthrow brutal dictators and bring the glorious light of democracy to the oppressed of the world?
What if the Palestinains were not oppressed but instead oppressing the Israelis? Maybe transfer was the only rational option after all, the only way to ensure that the glorious light of Zionism would continue to illuminate the dark barbarian hoards of the middle east.
And yesterday, it finally happened. After a fitful night of thrashing in bed, plauged by horrifying dreams of Bin Laden laughing and cooking up a batch of smallpox, I converted.
"Enough!" I yelled as I leapt out of bed. "Enough of the left with its overt anti-Americanism and covert anti-Semitism! Enough of being Saddam's useful idiot!" Dragging my considerable library of leftie books out to the fire pit behind the house I bought with the money from the "investing" I did in my spare time, I threw them in and lit them on fire, watching with delight as they burned, and ate a slice of pepperoni pizza.
So from now on, warbloggers, I'm on your side. Watch out arab world! Watch out Harold Raines, Ted Rall, Michael Moore, Robert Fisk and Jimmy Carter! Eric A. Blair is back!
And before I leave to join my brother and his Nigerian girlfriend to drink drambuie and discuss the latest Victor David Hanson tome, may you all have a great new year, one filled with prosperity, love and war.
The State Department's Office of International Information Programs has helpfully undertaken an initiative to show the remainder of the world - anti-propaganda laws forbid State from distributing the materials in question domestically - that America is not the bad guy it is often erroneously mistaken for. Writers on America collects passages where noted authors discuss what it is that makes America so damn great. The collected works of A. Sullivan remain available online.
As per his usual, Mickey Kaus can be relied upon to force all manner of ill-fitting square pegs into undersized round holes. Ostensibly writing about Joe Strummer's output, death, and obituaries, Kaus manages to field all his hobby horses save his "End Welfare Now!" steed, his most exercised mount - though in fairness it must be noted that Kaus limited himself to 277 words. Aside from proving his complete ignorance of the milieu from which The Clash emerged and his inability to read a pair of enduring cultural documents ("Safe European Home" and "Rock the casbah"), famed liberal Kaus takes the predictable swing at Howell Raines, editor of a fine paper which ran a Strummer obit that allegedly "diminishe[d] The Clash," by titling his latest "Howell Don't Like It." This prompted the indefatigable Jeff Hauer to ask: "And HOW exactly does "Howell" fit into this picture? Mickey doesn't tell us explicitly because he assumes that his reader is bright enough to understand that those who run newspapers close-edit each sentence in the obit of rock stars."
And people say this present site is predictable. posted by Grady2:26 AM
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Sunday, December 22, 2002
Elie Wiesel, warblogger, writing in the Observer on Sunday, opened his piece by noting, "Since the unanimous resolution of the UN Security Council, the world has lived in anguish, anticipating an event that would profoundly affect the course of affairs in the Middle East" and closed it by quoting "the great French writer André Malraux" as saying "victory belongs to those who make war without loving it."
This report in Glasgow's Sunday Herald problematizes Wiesel's formulation somewhat: of what value is unanimity if most of those achieving it are less than fully informed, and why would an administration Wiesel believes has no love for war do everything in its power to make war as a first resort? posted by Grady11:02 PM
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Tuesday, December 17, 2002
Finally, I will be able to sleep more safely at night, starting in a couple of years. America will be safe from the threat of missile attack! Do you understand what that means? Safe at last! And what makes it even better is that we’ll be safer starting in an election year!
