Blogworthies LXXVII

Because The Blog from the Core simply can't cover everything.

Noteworthy entries @ NewsBusters, Democracy Project, The Cranky Professor, Mere Comments, Debbie Schlussel, Midwest Conservative Journal, Wittingshire, JustOneMinute, neo-neocon, Hoystory.com, Southern Appeal, The Dilbert Blog, IowaHawk, JustOneMinute, Mere Comments (again), and Mirror of Justice.

Media Ignore Congressman Murtha's Long History Of Opposition to the Iraq War @ NewsBusters:

As reported by the Media Research Center’s Brent Baker, the network evening news broadcasts tonight all lead with Congressman John Murtha’s (D-Penn.) call for the removal of American troops from Iraq. Yet, they seemed disinterested in focusing much attention on Rep. Murtha's “denouncement” of the Iraq war more than a year ago. (Please see a May 10, 2004 CNN story stating, “Rep. John Murtha, D-Pennsylvania, in a news conference with Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, D-California, said the problems in Iraq are due to a ‘lack of planning’ by Pentagon chiefs and ‘the direction has got be changed or it is unwinnable.’") Maybe most important, the networks totally ignored the fact that Rep. Murtha has been expressing disgust with the Bush administration’s prosecution of this war since six months after it started....

Perspiration is the best remedy for exasperation @ Democracy Project:

Perspiration is the best remedy for exasperation.

Since yesterday [Tue. Nov. 15], I’ve been feeling exasperated at the Senate vote on Iraq.

On its face, just words, there’s little out of line to Congressional prerogatives in co-governance. It requires quarterly reports on progress in the Iraq war. Instead of the Democrat preferred wording for “a campaign plan with estimated dates for the phased redeployment of the United States Armed Forces from Iraq,” defeated by 58-40, the Senate found 79-19 consensus to require quarterly reports and a schedule for reaching full Iraqi sovereignty.

On the domestic and world stage, however, these are words that make no war fighting sense, embolden our and the Iraqi peoples’ adversaries, and only provide fig-leaf political cover to both Democrats who are anti-war, waffling, or intimidated by their Party’s leftist base, and timidly self-preoccupied Republicans – the majority on both sides of the aisle. On the other hand, the nineteen Senators voting against the consensus represent the harder-line ones: six Democrats committed to cut-and-run (Kennedy, Kerry, Leahy, Harkin, Conrad and Byrd), and thirteen Republicans (including McCain, who hasn’t wavered on seeing the ultimate stakes)....

Images of the Prophet Muhammad — a Zombie Error @ The Cranky Professor:

So — are images of the Prophet Muhammad illicit in Islam? From what some people do and say you might think so.

Not so fast. This is a classic zombie error — a commonplace belief that will. not. die!...

Master and Servant @ Mere Comments:

In J. M. Barrie’s play The Admirable Crichton, an aristocratic English family is marooned by shipwreck. Crichton, its able and intelligent butler, to serve and preserve his vain and helpless employers, finds it necessary to become their absolute master. Here one sees the servant, who has become competent through the labors of servitude, becoming — in a state Barrie presents as more natural than that of civilized but artificial English society — master of the master who has been made helpless and incompetent through the conventions of a life in which he has become dependent upon his servants....

Christians, Minutemen — Bad; Detroit — Good: What You Can & Can't Say in America @ Debbie Schlussel:

TV teaches you a lot about what you can and can't say in America, these days.

On Wednesday Night's NBC line-up, Christians were portrayed as violent fanatics who try to blow up a Detroit mosque. The Minutemen, citizens who patrol our borders, are portrayed as cold-blooded murderers.

But the only ones who are apologizing are the billionaire Maloof brothers who own the NBA's Sacramento Kings, for daring to show the real Detroit. Jimmy Kimmel had to apologize, too, for making fun of Detroit on his ABC late-night show.

What's wrong with this picture?...

Laodiceans @ Midwest Conservative Journal:

Desmond Tutu, South Africa's former Anglican primate, occupies a unique position in the liberal Anglican world. For years, Tutu was the public face of the struggle against apartheid in the West and he never lacked a Western forum any time he wanted one. Because he was an African from an oppressive country and because only one sin concerned him, the secular western media in Europe and America bestowed "living saint" status on him meaning that every word that came out of his mouth was extremely important.

Partially as a result of the identification of the western Anglican churches with him and his cause and partially because he is an intellectual lightweight, Tutu began to champion western liberal causes after apartheid was overthrown. He became a kind of secular liberal house chaplain, providing a "Christian" imprimatur for whatever the cause happened to be. Get Desmond Tutu on your side and you're no longer a socialist trying to destroy Western civilization; you're a "Christian" pursuing "justice." ....

The Language Barrier @ Wittingshire:

Our nine-year-old was having trouble with his math. "I don't know what I did wrong," he said. "The question is: What month comes eight months after September? That's easy, but the answer book keeps saying I'm wrong." ....

"Will Mr. Fitzgerald Now Say He Was Wrong?" @ JustOneMinute:

Bob Woodward tosses a spanner into the Plame leak chronology developed by Special Counsel Fitzgerald:

Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward testified under oath Monday in the CIA leak case that a senior administration official told him about CIA operative Valerie Plame and her position at the agency nearly a month before her identity was disclosed.

In a more than two-hour deposition, Woodward told Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald that the official casually told him in mid-June 2003 that Plame worked as a CIA analyst on weapons of mass destruction, and that he did not believe the information to be classified or sensitive, according to a statement Woodward released yesterday.

As noted by Libby's counsel, that does not jibe well with the assertion made by Mr. Fitzgerald at his press conference that "In fact, Mr. Libby was the first official known to have told a reporter when he talked to Judith Miller in June of 2003 about Valerie Wilson." ....

About that word "Islamofascism" @ neo-neocon:

Don Surber has pointed out that recently — first on October 6, and then again yesterday — Bush has begun to use the word "Islamofascism" in his speeches to name the enemy.

I have a bit of history with that word myself, and so I have some advice for him.

I was reminded of this by accident the other day when I was looking in my old e-mail files and came across something I'd sent to a friend way back in the spring of '04. It was written during a time when I'd just "outed" myself at a party where a group had been speaking in glowing terms of none other than Michael Moore and "Fahrenheit 9/11."

After I had piped up and let them know I didn't consider MM and his movie to be the repository of truth, a stunned and shocked silence ensued, and then a variety of reactions followed. Some people were angry and argumentative, some quiet. But one or two of my friends came up to me afterwards and said they wouldn't mind if I e-mailed them some more information, and maybe some links....

Rewriting history @ Hoystory.com:

The New York Times editorial page (unsurprisingly) goes to bat for revisionist Democrats with this silliness in today's paper.

The Times charges, that President Bush is the one rewriting history, not their Democrat allies.

Mr. Bush says everyone had the same intelligence he had — Mr. Clinton and his advisers, foreign governments, and members of Congress — and that all of them reached the same conclusions. The only part that is true is that Mr. Bush was working off the same intelligence Mr. Clinton had. But that is scary, not reassuring. The reports about Saddam Hussein's weapons were old, some more than 10 years old. Nothing was fresher than about five years, except reports that later proved to be fanciful.

There's something here the Times editiorialists are willfully glossing over. Can you spot it? The intelligence was old, except for the stuff that wasn't. They had new intelligence but it was "fanciful" — I'd say it was wrong. But the question is: "Why was all of the new intelligence wrong?" Could it be because Saddam Hussein wasn't abiding by the cease-fire that left him in power after the 1991 Gulf War? Hussein was committed to revealing all of his chemical, nuclear and biological programs to the U.N. — and he wasn't doing it. We shouldn't have had to count on faulty intelligence — Hussein was bound by the cease-fire to reveal everything, and he didn't....

Hollywood shows off its bottomless supply of stupid @ Southern Appeal:

Seems that some writers and actors in Hollywood don't like the trend toward more and more product placement in TV shows and movies....

Intelligent Design, Part 1 @ The Dilbert Blog:

To me, the most fascinating aspect of the debate over Darwinism versus Intelligent Design is that neither side understands the other side's argument. Better yet, no one seems to understand their own side's argument. But that doesn't stop anyone from having a passionate opinion.

I've been doing lots of reading on the subject, trying to gather comic fodder. I fully expected to validate my preconceived notion that the Darwinists had a mountain of credible evidence and the Intelligent Design folks were creationist kooks disguising themselves as scientists. That's the way the media paints it. I had no reason to believe otherwise. The truth is a lot more interesting. Allow me to set you straight. (Note: I'm not a believer in Intelligent Design, Creationism, Darwinism, free will, non-monetary compensation, or anything else I can't eat if I try hard enough.)

First of all, you'd be hard pressed to find a useful debate about Darwinism and Intelligent Design, of the sort that you could use to form your own opinion. I can't find one, and I've looked. What you have instead is each side misrepresenting the other's position and then making a good argument for why the misrepresentation is wrong. (If you don't believe me, just watch the comments I get to this post.) ....

Les Risiblès @ IowaHawk:

Excerpts from my failed musical....

Harry Reid, Ironist @ JustOneMinute (quoted ellipsis in original)):

George Bush came out swinging yesterday against the politicians who have made "false charges" and "baseless attacks" about the use of pre-war intelligence.

Harry Reid, politician and ironist, responded:

"Attacking those patriotic Americans who have raised serious questions about the case the Bush administration made to take our country to war does not provide us a plan for success that will bring our troops home..."

Left unexplained — how the Democrats unrelenting focus on the use of pre-war intelligence is going to substitute for a plan to resolve the situation in Iraq. Was it really only two weeks ago that Harry Reid forced the Senate into a closed session to discuss that?

Perhaps Sen. Reid was simply intending to commemorate the second anniversary of the leak of the strategy memo explaining how the Democrats could politicize the Senate Intelligence Committee hearings for maximum benefit....

Courting Divorce @ Mere Comments:

In his great wedding poem Epithalamion, Edmund Spenser summons the whole cosmos to the church to be witnesses at the long-awaited moment when he and his bride shall "knit the knot that ever shall remain." Or he does so for sixteen and a half out of 24 stanzas; then — at sunset, at exactly the point in the seventeenth hour when the sun sets at the latitude of the village in Ireland where the wedding takes place — he sends them home. Naturally, he and Elizabeth have better things to do than talk with friends! But even at that, they aren't entirely alone: the moon peeps in through the window, and Spenser invokes (as a literary device) various gods and goddesses to look with favor upon them, that their "timely seed" may bring forth a blessed progeny, "of Heavenly saints for to increase the count."

We have gotten lately the strange idea that marriage is a private party, with friends and relatives invited, no doubt, according to the wishes of bride and groom. It requires a lot of backtracking through muddy assumptions to recover the old truth. In marriage, and I am not speaking merely of Christian marriage, people celebrate the renewal of the race — the generation to come, springing from the love of the young people before us, themselves the result of the marriages of the elder parents looking on, and of the immemorial dead. The marriage means that life continues; and that terrible chasm between two sorts of human beings who need one another very much and so seldom understand why, that chasm between man and woman, once again is bridged. The wound is healed, or at least soothed. It is a living and speaking image of social and cosmic harmony....

Life After Roe v. Wade: The Good That Would Flow From Overruling By Itself @ Mirror of Justice:

.... I want to emphasize what tremendous good would be accomplished by the removal of Roe v. Wade as a constitutional precedent, that is, what good would be realized directly from the overturning of that pernicious decision, whatever else might follow in terms of concrete legislative responses.

First, the removal of Roe v. Wade would remove the misguided but nonetheless persistent and widely-accepted argument that nearly-unrestricted access to abortion must be a good thing because it is, after all, a constitutional right. By transforming abortion from a controversial and complex moral and political question into a constitutional entitlement, Roe v. Wade bestowed upon abortion the status (in the minds of many) of a positive good. It withdrew from the supporters of liberal abortion laws the obligation to frame an ethical justification, beyond absolute claims of personal control and an extremely isolated view of individual autonomy. As a constitutional right, and a fundamental right at that, abortion was inherently justified. Once Roe were removed as a precedent, those who advocate an abortion license could no longer simply cite the Supreme Court's ruling and regard that reference as obviating any need to discuss the morality of abortion or to consider the societal impact of hundreds of thousands of abortions performed annually....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 11/19/05 07:36:35 AM
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