The Second Opinion

Economic fear-mongering from the AP?

With the price of oil bouncing ever higher, there are fears that inflation - which created a great deal of misery in the country back in the '70s - is returning.  Perhaps it will.  I can't help but think that some people WANT it to return and not only see signs of it, but TRUMPET them.  Take, for example, this AP story by Martin Crutsinger:

Inflation Soars on Surge in Energy Prices

Scared yet?  Ready to start panic-buying before prices go out of sight?

Inflation at the wholesale level last month soared by the largest amount in more than 15 years, reflecting the surge in energy prices that occurred following the Gulf Coast hurricanes.

The Labor Department reported that wholesale prices jumped 1.9 percent in September, led by surging prices for gasoline, natural gas and home heating oil after the widespread shutdowns of refineries and oil platforms along the Gulf Coast. Food prices, which had been declining, posted the biggest increase in 11 months as the price of eggs shot up by a record amount.

Wow.  An increase of 1.9% is 'soaring' inflation?

The article goes on to quote Allen Greenspan and cite number of economic indicators to show that inflation may be just around the corner.

It may well be.  I don't think that there's any question but that higher fuel prices are going to drive up the price of virtually every other product and service in the country.  The question is whether the price increases will be modest or so sharp as to cause real problems for working Americans.

Color me cynical, but I think we know what the AP wants to see.

Katrina and the media

Rapes.  Murders.  Gang violence.  Cannibalism.

Katrina was a reporter's dream: so many juicy, bloody stories to cover, each more shocking than the last.  Jack the Ripper meets Sodom and Gomorrah amidst the Plagues of Egypt.

Trouble is, most of the stories weren't true.

With so much of what was breathlessly reported from New Orleans now having proved to be wildly exaggerated or flat untrue, what does this mean for all the judgments that have been made in the past several weeks?  FEMA and especially outgoing chief Michael Brown were roasted for their slow and inept response.  The people of New Orleans are regarded in some quarters as a pack of thieving, murderous savages.  Their government, including Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco, are thought to be almost criminally incompetent.  Race relations have been damaged.

Is it time to reevaluate?

Yes.

It's also time to start looking at who was really responsible for the hysteria over Katrina.  It seems to me that the finger points to one guilty party: the BM.  They took every rumor, every hysterical ranting of every nutcase or distraught official and reported it without bothering to check to see if it was true or not.  Mark Steyn has written about this in today's Washington Times:

Dan Rather was on "Larry King" the other night and was asked about the Katrina coverage. Say what you like about Dan, but he knows his meteorological phenomena. I've always thought there was something quintessentially American about Dan's hurricane editions of the CBS news -- not the part of the show where he's reporting on the actual hurricane, but the bit where he says "And today's other headlines," as if it's the most normal thing in the world to be reading "The Dow closed 19 points down today" while wrapped around a lamppost in your sou'wester with a rusting doublewide flying over your shoulder.

Yet Hurricane Dan professed himself delighted with his successors. "They took us there to the hurricane," he told Larry. "They put the facts in front of us and, very important, they sucked up their guts and talked truth to power."

Er, no. The facts they put in front of us were wrong, and they didn't talk truth to power. They talked to goofs in power, like New Orleans' Mayor Ray Nagin and Police Chief Eddie Compass, and uncritically fell for every nutso yarn they were peddled. The media swallowed more bilge than if they'd been lying down with their mouths open as the levee collapsed. Ten thousand dead. Widespread rape and murder. A 7-year-old gang-raped and then throat-slashed. It was great stuff -- and none of it happened. No gang-raped 7-year-olds. None.

Most of the media are still in Dan mode, sucking up their guts and congratulating themselves about what a swell job they did during Katrina. CNN producers were advising their guests to "be angry," and there was so much to get angry about, not least that no matter how angry you got on air Anderson Cooper was always much better at it. And Mayor Nagin as well. To show he was angry, he used a lot of profanity. "That... Superdome," he raged. "Five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."

But nobody got killed by a hooligan in the Superdome. The problem wasn't rape and murder, but the rather more prosaic lack of bathroom facilities. As Ben Stein put it, it was the media that rioted. They grabbed every lurid rumor and took it for a wild joy ride across primetime. There was a real story in there -- big hurricane, people dead -- but it wasn't enough, and certainly not enough for damaging George Bush.

As Steyn points out, if the BM got it so wrong on Katrina, how can we trust their reporting on Iraq?  Or, really, on anything else?

NYT cutting personnel

(hat tip: Drudge)

I don't know if you've noticed in your viewing area, but I've been seeing a lot of advertisements lately for subscriptions to the New York Times.  It occured to me that such a heavy advertising campaign might indicate that all is not well at the Grey Lady.  Apparently, I was on to something.  According to WNBC:

The New York Times Co. and two Philadelphia newspapers announced major job cuts Tuesday as the industry grapples with severe financial problems including weak advertising and circulation declines.

The Times said it would cut about 500 jobs, while the Philadelphia papers will eliminate a total of 100 jobs.

The cuts at the Times represent about 4 percent of the company's work force and will be made across the company, including about 45 jobs in the Times newsroom and 35 at The Boston Globe.

The Times also said its third-quarter earnings would come in well below Wall Street forecasts because of sluggish advertising trends and higher-than-expected costs from a previous round of job cuts in May, which resulted in 200 jobs being eliminated. McClatchy Co., a California-based newspaper publisher, also trimmed its earnings forecast Tuesday because of weaker-than-expected advertising.

I expect that the internet cuts into some newspaper business, but I can't help but feel that the Times' troubles are not due merely to a poor business climate.  Rather, I think that Times has done such a thorough job of discrediting itself that only hardcore Times fans (i.e. liberals) bother to take the paper anymore.  The same sort of trend has been evident for some time among the major network news broadcasts and CNN.  More and more people are starting to distrust these traditional news outlets and are expressing their suspicion by cancelling subscriptions or simply tuning out... or going to Fox News or 'conservative' papers like the Washington Times.  In fact, the Washington Times has been something of a newspaper success story.  According to the Washington Times' Donna de Marco (hat tip: Outside the Beltway) on May 18 of this year:

The Washington Times celebrated its 23rd anniversary yesterday with cake and champagne served to its employees at a midafternoon assembly, as its executives announced a substantial gain in audited circulation in the face of a national trend of declining U.S. newspaper numbers. For the six-month period ending March 31, the newspaper's daily circulation from Monday through Friday climbed to 103,017 -- an increase of nearly 3 percent over the similar period last year, according to Fas-Fax, the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) report of publishers' estimates.

...

Many U.S. newspapers, in fact, have struggled in recent years to hold readers. The Washington Post, for example, reported losing 20,682 subscribers, a 2.7 percent decline in its weekday circulation, from 772,553 to 751,871 compared to the first six months of 2004.

In a similar fashion Fox News has consistently been taking viewer 'share' from CNN.

I will not debate whether or not Fox and the Washington Times are 'conservative' or 'middle of the road'.  I know that many libs can't STAND these two news outlets and never miss an opportunity to criticize them.  However, as the saying goes, money talks.  Whatever these news outlets are doing is working for them.

Maybe "Pinch" Sulzberger and Ted Turner needs to borrow a page from their playbook?

Journalistic integrity or censorship at UNC

(hat tip: Litte Green Footballs via Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler)

Last week, a columnist for the University of North Carolina's student newspaper, The Daily Tarheel, was fired.  It's become something of a sensation, and I think it demonstrates the hair-trigger wariness for offense that many people have.

Jillian Bandes, a 20-year old student from Florida, wrote a column on September 13 called "It’s sad, but racial profiling is necessary for our safety".  In it, she opined that:

I want all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport.

I don’t care if they’re being inconvenienced. I don’t care if it seems as though their rights are being violated.

I care about my life. I care about the lives of my family and friends.

And I care about the lives of the Arabs and Arab Americans I’m privileged to know and study with.

Inflammatory stuff; Bandes was fired the next day.  Her editor, Chris Coletta, claims that she wasn't fired because of the content of her column, or even its tone:

Might as well get to the point: I fired Jillian Bandes yesterday.

And not because I thought she was a racist or an idiot. She is, in fact, neither — and even if she were, I wouldn’t have fired her for those reasons.

I fired her because she strung together quotes out of context. She took sources’ words out of context. She misled those sources when she conducted interviews.

In other words, she conducted journalistic malpractice, and that’s simply not something I, or The Daily Tar Heel, will tolerate.

Specifically, Coletta claims that Bandes interviewed Muslims students and a Muslim professor under the false pretense of doing research for a column about Arab-American relations after 9-11.  Instead, her column wound up being about racial profiling at airports.  Here are the quotes in question:

“(Racial profiling) really doesn’t bother me,” said Sherief Khaki, a first-generation Egyptian-American and representative of the UNC-CH Arabic Club.

“So a couple of hours are wasted. Big deal.”

Said Muhammad Salameh, a junior biology major: “I can accept it, even if I don’t like it. I don’t want to die.”

Professor Nasser Isleem, a man for whom I have complete and utter respect after merely two weeks of sitting in his Arabic 101 class, said, “Let them search.”

“It depends on how I’m stopped, but if it is done in a professional manner … ”

Then he nodded.

“There were Muslims in those buildings, too.”

Coletta does not claim that Bandes falsified the quotes or altered them in any way (a process known among conservatives as "Dowdification" after the foremost practicioner of the art, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times).  Instead, he complains that:

In other words, their quotes were wrong, even if the words were correct. They were used recklessly and thoughtlessly.

My first response to this story was much the same as the Emporer at the Rott:

Truth and freedom of the press be damned.

Members of the Religion of Stoning Innocent Women demanded her head on a platter, and the Dhimmi “Editor” of The Daily Tar Heel promptly let his pants fall around his ankles, asking merely for a reach-around and telling his mooselimb censors where to find the vaseline.

I think many conservatives feel / felt the same way.  We're on a hair-trigger, you see: we EXPECT editors and publishers to deep-six stories and fire reporters critical of sacred cows, and racial profiling of Muslims after 9-11 is about as sacred a cow as you can get this side of India.  The second we knew Bandes was fired, we all 'knew' what had happened: the liberal editor of the liberal student newspaper of the liberal University of North Carolina has knuckled under to pressure from CAIR, Muslim student groups, the ACLU, Cindy Sheehan, and anybody else 'offended' by Bandes' article and gave her the ol' heave-ho.  The fact that Bandes quoted Ann Coulter, a woman that libs LOVE to hate, seems only to have made her that much more of a target of liberal / PC wrath.  As the Emporer wrote, freedom of the press be damned.

As I thought more about the situation, however, I paused.  Did Bandes commit a breach of journalistic ethics?  Did she conduct her interviews under false pretenses?  If so, then she SHOULD have been disciplined, with a reprimand for her editor thrown in for good measure.  Journalistic ethics should not be an oxymoron, and we conservatives ought to be the first to say so and demand high standards (heaven knows we haven't had them for years).

One of the students she quoted, Sherief Khaki, complained that she DID violate journalistic ethics in a letter to the editor:

Last week, I — along with a fellow Arab-American UNC junior, Muhammad Salameh — was interviewed by the columnist, whom we had previously not known. Bandes said she wanted to interview us about being Arab-Americans in the post-9/11 era.

She interviewed each of us for about 15 to 20 minutes as we discussed our feelings about terrorism and 9/11. Toward the end of the interviews, she asked about our opinions on racial profiling in airports. Muhammad and I both agreed that it was not a huge issue and that other, more important concerns should be emphasized in order to eliminate potential terrorism.

We did not agree that we wanted all Arabs to be sexed up or strip-searched in airports. I’m also pretty confident that UNC’s Arabic teacher, Dr. Nasser Isleem, does not agree with that either.

Proof of Bandes' guilt?  Perhaps not.  Khaki DOESN'T say that Bandes put words in his mouth, or that she set him up.  It seems to me that he's parsing his words pretty carefully; Bandes never claimed that HE or any of the other Muslims wanted to be 'sexed-up', but rather that they didn't mind racial profiling.  In effect, he's trying to take her deliberately hyperbolic writing at face value to put words in HER mouth.

The Muslim Student Association in its letter to the editor does much the same:

The image of naked Arabs in a public airport is not only truly horrifying, but it is also reminiscent of the Abu Ghraib photos where Iraqis were also “stripped” down for information about terrorists.

Considering the negative reaction to those distant images, are we ready to see them every day at the airport?

Guess they're on a hair-trigger, too.

I have to ask, however, as Bandes did in a letter to the editor of her own, how the students interviewed escaped the conclusion that racial profiling would figure prominently in the column.  First of all, racial profiling is an almost inescapable topic when discussing Muslims in post 9-11 America.  EVERYBODY talks about it.  More importantly, Bandes asked several questions about it herself.  For the students to wax indignant that they were somehow 'sandbagged' seems a bit of a reach.  As Bandes notes:

I was also fired for apparently misleading my sources on what I was writing about. I thought I had made it clear that my article was about both 9/11 and racial profiling when I spoke to each individual.

As I wrote, I focused more on the latter topic. And I regret misleading them, even if I had no intentions of doing so.

But after asking each source several times what he thought of racial profiling, even if I did not explicitly tell them, I would’ve thought that they would understand what a large focus of my article would be about.

Could it be that her sources DID mean exactly what they said, and DID completely understand why she was interviewing them, but succumbed to peer pressure after the fact and repudiated their original statements?  It certainly seems plausible.  She writes that they received DEATH THREATS for their statements.  Just as jounralists can get in trouble by attacking sacred cows, so too can the members of any group if they dare to speak against accepted group orthodoxy.  The MSA seems definitely committed to forming and enforcing that orthodoxy.  It has been described by Front Page magazine's Erick Stakelbeck as:

... a North American base for Saudi-funded Islamic extremism. Created in 1963 (the University of Illinois hosted the first chapter) by the Saudi government, the MSA uses blatant anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli propaganda in its quest to mold Muslims on American college campuses into steadfast supporters of the Islamic terrorist cause.

If Stakelbeck is right, is it unbelievable that the MSA 'persuaded' the students and professor quoted by Bandes to toe the party line?

We will probably never know the truth.  It would be useful for The Daily Tarheel to publish PDF copies of Bandes' notes so that we may see exactly what she wrote; if tapes of the interviews exist, they would also be EXTREMELY helpful.  Unless and until such evidence is presented, it's a question of 'they said / she said', and we have to wonder if The Daily Tarheel is practicing some rare and welcome journalistic standards... or if they knuckled under to PC pressure and fired a columnist for treading on the wrong toes.

BBC's Katrina coverage: Anti-American?

Rupert Murdoch, owner of the hated Fox News Channel, claimed in a speech that Prime Minister Tony Blair complained privately to him that the BBC's coverage of Katrina was "full of hate of America and gloating about our troubles".  The BBC stoutly denies the charge:

... [T]he BBC's world editor Jonathan Baker defended its coverage to Newswatch after similar criticisms from some BBC News viewers and users.

He said most of its output had been "absolutely down-the-line straightforward reportage", but added the president had made himself the "figurehead" of the disaster response.

"If things are not going well, he is there to be criticised, and if they were going much better he would expect to take the credit," he said.

Apparently, however, even Bill Clinton smelled bias:

Mr Clinton said he had seen the report Mr Blair was referring to, and there was "nothing factually inaccurate" in it.

But he said it was designed "almost exclusively" to criticise the Bush administration's response to the crisis.

The Blair government and the BBC aren't exactly close friends; last year, the Hutton Report was sharply critical of the BBC's coverage of the Iraq War and especially its claims that Downing Street "sexed up" pre-war intelligence.  The BBC was also quite biased in its coverage of the Iraq War; sailors about the British carrier HMS Ark Royal actually staged a sort of boycott of the BBC because they felt that the Beeb was placing more trust in Iraqi propaganda than in Coalition reports.

As a post at Partial Transcripts pointed out several weeks ago, it's small wonder that the US is viewed so disfavorably around the world: with major foreign (and American, for that matter) news agencies determined to always show nothing but our feet of clay, how can the average citizen in Paris, Madrid, Rome, Bangkok, Tokyo, or Sydney help but think the US is nothing but bad?

(those interested in more about BBC bias should go here)

ABC Surprised that some in New Orleans DON'T blame Bush

LC Scotty tipped me to this story; I found more about it at Atlas Shrugs, includng video:

Not one of the six people interviewed on camera had a bad word for Bush -- despite Reynolds' best efforts. Reynolds goaded: "Was there anything that you found hard to believe that he said, that you thought, well, that's nice rhetoric, but, you know, the proof is in the pudding?" Brenda Marshall answered, "No, I didn't," prompting Reynolds to marvel to anchor Ted Koppel: "Very little skepticism here.”

Reynolds pressed another woman: “Did you feel that the President was sincere tonight?" She affirmed: "Yes, he was." Reynolds soon wondered who they held culpable for the levee breaks. Unlike the national media, London did not blame supposed Bush-mandated budget cuts: "They've been allocated federal funds to fix the levee system, and it never got done. I fault the mayor of our city personally. I really do."

Atlas Shrugs has an excellent summary of the BM's modus operandi:

They politicize a story, inject their bile, report the meme over and over and over again and then take a poll.

The resulting poll results reflect what the American people have been told repeatedly 24/7.

Dead on target.  I'm sure that even if you asked those who firmly believe that the feds were slow - even criminally slow - in their response, they couldn't give objective evidence to support their conclusion.  This has become an 'everybody knows' argument.

How pleasant to see that at least some people from NO haven't bought into it.

Did French journalists fake the video that helped spark the Intifada?

(hat tip: Michelle Malkin)

David Gelernter thinks so.  In his column at Jewish World Review, he writes:

A 55-SECOND video report, produced in 2000 by a French TV station and distributed free of charge around the world, has caused untold injury and grief to Israeli civilians. This month, the French author Nidra Poller analyzes the evidence in Commentary magazine and shows that the video is a fraud — "an almost perfect media crime," the retired French journalist Luc Rosenzweig calls it. That Poller's piece is conclusive is merely my own judgment, of course. But we are all required to make such judgments, in the light of such reports.

...

You may remember the footage: A man and boy crouch in fear. Shots hit a wall far from the pair; a final round of gunfire kicks up a dust cloud that hides father and son, who are "targets of gunfire from Israeli positions," says the voice-over. When the dust clears, the boy is stretched at the man's feet. The voice says that he is dead.

...

But, according to the Commentary article, the video is a fraud. The footage itself is ambiguous, the alleged main event hidden by dust. The voice-over is what makes us understand what we are seeing. It comes from Charles Enderlin, a correspondent at France 2 (and a French Jew who became an Israeli citizen 20 years ago). Enderlin has never claimed to have been anywhere near the scene of the alleged shooting. His Palestinian cameraman told him the story.

Lots of supporting evidence was supposed to back up the cameraman's story — more footage of the supposed father and son pinned by Israeli fire, footage showing the child's death throes. France 2 has since admitted, according to Poller, that no such footage exists.

The voice-over reports that the child is dead, yet the rest of the segment — which wasn't aired but survives — shows the child propping himself on an elbow, shading his eyes with his hands. Poller saw the tape.

A boy named Mohammed Dura did die in a Gaza hospital that fateful Sept. 30. His face doesn't match the face in the video. Presented with these facts, France 2 officials said that "they would look into the matter."

In early 2005, Enderlin published an article in the French newspaper Le Figaro. His report "may have been hasty," he wrote, but was justified because "so many children were being killed." (But the intifada had barely started; "so many children" were not being killed — not yet.)

What did happen? Chances are we will never know for sure. But Poller reports that outtakes she saw show phony battle scenes staged by Palestinians. Painstaking analysis done by students at the Israeli Military Academy found the same actors playing multiple roles: "The injured and dead jump up, dust themselves off, play at offensive combat."

Fake but accurate?  The media here in the United States did something similar with the Rodney King video by selectively editing out the portions that showed him repeatedly getting up and charging the police.  By doing so, they made it appear that he was being savagely beaten for no reason (no, I'm NOT excusing what the police did; I'm simply pointing out what the media did).

As Gelernter says, we will probably never know for sure what really happened.  Even if the video was demonstrated to be a fake, it wouldn't matter: too much blood has been spilled on both sides.  France 2, in the manner typical of media outlets when caught faking the news instead of simply reporting it, will stonewall and hem and haw until people get tired of talking about it.  There's nobody to hold the media accountable for such things; I doubt that faking footage (if that DID happen here) is a crime.

Be careful what you watch.  Be careful what you believe.

The referenced Commentary article by Nidra Poller is here.

The NYT and the New Orleans levees

Brit Hume of Fox News had some interesting revelations about the New York Times and its attitude toward the New Orleans levees.  Let's see what this prominent lefty mouthpiece has had to say about levees, shall we?

A New York Times editor, oh, by the way, asked, "Why New Orleans’ levees remained so inadequate? Where was Congress before it wandered off to vacation engaged in slashing the budget for correcting some of the gaping holes in the area’s flood protection?"

The answer may be that they were reading old "Times" editorials. In 1993, the Times wrote that Washington should, "resist pressure to spend more on flood-control projects." In 1997, the Times praised moderate Republicans for protecting the environment by blocking flood-control spending.

And in April of this year, the Times ripped a Senate bill that would have injected $17 billion into flood-control measures, including what the Times called a $2.7 billion boondoggle on the Mississippi River, saying that bill was "bad legislation."

The Bursting Point?

David Brooks has written an interesting column for the New York Times.  I say 'interesting' not because I necessarily agree with it, but rather because it throws some light on how people like him think.

On Sept. 11, Rudy Giuliani took control. The government response was quick and decisive. The rich and poor suffered alike. Americans had been hit, but felt united and strong. Public confidence in institutions surged.

Last week in New Orleans, by contrast, nobody took control. Authority was diffuse and action was ineffective. The rich escaped while the poor were abandoned. Leaders spun while looters rampaged. Partisans squabbled while the nation was ashamed.

The first rule of the social fabric - that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled. Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield. No wonder confidence in civic institutions is plummeting.

OK, I question his conclusion that confidence in civic institutions is plummeting.  Does he have data to support this?  My guess is that the crisis of confidence is more or less confined to a couple of groups of people: the poor people stuck in New Orleans who naturally wonder why the government didn't do more to get them out, to take care of them, and who are also wondering what will become of them.  Their houses and jobs are gone.  They must be feeling despair the like of which I pray none of the rest of us ever face in our lives.

The other group having the confidence 'problem' is lefties who hate George Bush and see Katrina as the realization of all their hopes for a disaster that they can wrap around his neck.  They tried and failed to hang 9-11 on him; the really loopy ones believed that he knew it was going to happen and did nothing to stop it, and the REALLY loopy ones think he was actually involved in organizing and planning it.  They've tried to make the Iraq war into a disaster; the president's poll numbers (and lefties live and die by them) have taken a hit, but Americans haven't quite gotten into the full Vietnam mode of holding mass protests on the Mall and throwing dog s*** on our troops.

Now they've got Katrina.  HOORAY!  Why didn't BUSH spend more money on the levees?  Why didn't BUSH have the Army sitting in New Orleans ready to instantly rebuild the city?  Why didn't BUSH give a better speech?  If there is a crisis of confidence in our public institutions, it's media-made. 

Why do I say this?  Look at the Red Cross website and see how much money people are donating to that organization.  Have a look at news broadcasts and see refugees from the Gulf Coast being cared for in cities like Houston.  The National Guard and the regular military are on the scene in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast: people can SEE them working to repair the levees and pull people off of rooftops.

And the key fact to understanding why this is such a huge cultural moment is this: Last week's national humiliation comes at the end of a string of confidence-shaking institutional failures that have cumulatively changed the nation's psyche.

Over the past few years, we have seen intelligence failures in the inability to prevent Sept. 11 and find W.M.D.'s in Iraq. We have seen incompetent postwar planning. We have seen the collapse of Enron and corruption scandals on Wall Street. We have seen scandals at our leading magazines and newspapers, steroids in baseball, the horror of Abu Ghraib.

Public confidence has been shaken too by the steady rain of suicide bombings, the grisly horror of Beslan and the world's inability to do anything about rising oil prices.

Each institutional failure and sign of helplessness is another blow to national morale. The sour mood builds on itself, the outraged and defensive reaction to one event serving as the emotional groundwork for the next.

The scrapbook of history accords but a few pages to each decade, and it is already clear that the pages devoted to this one will be grisly. There will be pictures of bodies falling from the twin towers, beheaded kidnapping victims in Iraq and corpses still floating in the waterways of New Orleans five days after the disaster that caused them.

My hat's off to Brooks: he managed to connect Abu Ghraib with Katrina.  THAT take some journalistic skill!

I was pleasantly surprised to see that he had the grace to mention that the BM has had it's share of 'scandals'.  Now THERE'S an institution that IS having a documented crisis of confidence.  A large fraction of the American people are becoming increasingly skeptical of what they read in the major newspapers (like the NYT) or see on news programs.

Note to Brooks: Op-eds like this don't do anything to increase public confidence in much of anything.

Oh, and while I'm beating up on the BM, what does he mean "pictures of bodies falling from the twin towers [and] beheaded kidnapping victims in Iraq"?  The BM hardly ever shows pictures of the Twin Towers being hit, and I don't think they've ever shown the video of actual beheadings.  They're protecting our delicate sensibilities, you see, and also doing their bit to make sure that Americans aren't reminded why we're fighting the war there are no anti-Muslim sentiments whipped up in the country.  Pics of Abu Ghraib, on the other hand...

It's already clear this will be known as the grueling decade, the Hobbesian decade. Americans have had to acknowledge dark realities that it is not in our nature to readily acknowledge: the thin veneer of civilization, the elemental violence in human nature, the lurking ferocity of the environment, the limitations on what we can plan and know, the cumbersome reactions of bureaucracies, the uncertain progress good makes over evil.

As a result, it is beginning to feel a bit like the 1970's, another decade in which people lost faith in their institutions and lost a sense of confidence about the future.

"Rats on the West Side, bedbugs uptown/What a mess! This town's in tatters/I've been shattered," Mick Jagger sang in 1978.

Midge Decter woke up the morning after the night of looting during the New York blackout of 1977 feeling as if she had "been given a sudden glimpse into the foundations of one's house and seen, with horror, that it was utterly infested and rotting away."

Um, I think if Americans could survive the Great Depression AND World War II AND the beginning of the Cold War in the span of a bit more than a decade, I think we can survive this.

This interests me very much: "Americans have had to acknowledge dark realities that it is not in our nature to readily acknowledge: the thin veneer of civilization, the elemental violence in human nature, the lurking ferocity of the environment, the limitations on what we can plan and know, the cumbersome reactions of bureaucracies, the uncertain progress good makes over evil."

SOME Americans, notably lefties, have had to do this.  Those of us on the more realistic right already knew about all these things.  This is why we're strongly in favor of a powerful national defense, strict enforcement of laws, capital punishment, etc, and less in favor of dope-smoking-hippie-feel-good liberal policies that seem to be grounded in the belief that if we're only NICE enough, everything will come out right.

Two of the American people's responses to the terrible decade of the 1970s gave the libs a fit: Ronald Reagan and Rudy Guiliani.  Both of them realized that evil (do libs recognize this concept except as it applies to George Bush?) has to be confronted with strength and determination.  So, they both got put down as a pair of neo-fascists, racists, homophobes, and whatever other invective the left could hurl at them.  When George Bush showed strong leadership after 9-11, he was mocked, too.

Americans in 2005 are not quite in that bad a shape, since the fundamental realities of everyday life are good. The economy and the moral culture are strong. But there is a loss of confidence in institutions. In case after case there has been a failure of administration, of sheer competence. Hence, polls show a widespread feeling the country is headed in the wrong direction.

Katrina means that the political culture, already sour and bloody-minded in many quarters, will shift. There will be a reaction. There will be more impatience for something new. There is going to be some sort of big bang as people respond to the cumulative blows of bad events and try to fundamentally change the way things are.

Reaganite conservatism was the response to the pessimism and feebleness of the 1970's. Maybe this time there will be a progressive resurgence. Maybe we are entering an age of hardheaded law and order. (Rudy Giuliani, an unlikely G.O.P. nominee a few months ago, could now win in a walk.) Maybe there will be call for McCainist patriotism and nonpartisan independence. All we can be sure of is that the political culture is about to undergo some big change.

We're not really at a tipping point as much as a bursting point. People are mad as hell, unwilling to take it anymore.

You can practically see him drooling over the prospect of 'progressive resurgence' (read: more liberal democrats running the government).  Strange sort of wish: if this time in our history is 'Hobbesian', then why in the world should we elect and appoint leaders from a group that has a demonstrated inability to deal with such hard realities?  Again, Brooks is engaging in wishful thinking and simultaneously demonstrating what Katrina REALLY means to liberals: PEOPLE ARE SUFFERING!  HOORAY!  MAYBE THEY'LL ELECT US!

I don't think people are 'mad as hell'.  Oh, then again, maybe they are, but not necessarily for the reasons that Brooks thinks (hopes) that they are.  Those of us on the right are angry because:

1.  We aren't kicking the hell out of terrorists the way we want.  I'm talking about Iran and Syria.  Why is Assad still in power, and why are the Iranians being allowed to build a Bomb unmolested?

2.  Why are our borders not being controlled?

3.  How could the local and state authorities in New Orleans and Louisiana have been so bloody stupid?  And how dare they try to shift the blame for their incompetence to the federal government?

4.  How is it that the minority party in Congress seems to be calling the shots?

5.  Why is Teddy Kennedy not in jail?

Yeah, I guess Brooks actually IS right: I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore.

The Lesson of Tokyo Bay

This op-ed appeared in today's New York Post:

Sixty years ago today, Gen. Douglas MacArthur accepted Japan's surrender on the quarterdeck of USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

World War II was over.

As America marks this anniversary, it again finds itself engaged in a conflict not of its asking, but nonetheless of crucial importance to its peace and security.

"Once again war came to our shores with a surprise attack that killed thousands in cold blood. Once again, we face determined enemies who follow a ruthless ideology that despises everything America stands for," President Bush said on Tuesday. "And once again, we will not rest until victory is America's and our freedom is secure."

The history books are filled to overflowing with debate on whether World War II was properly fought — strategically and tactically — but today there is no doubt whatsoever that it had to be fought.

Unfortunately, while the long-term Islamofascist threat to America is no less deadly than that posed by Axis expansionism, there is no national consensus on the need to win this time, too.

Part of the cause is the media.

If, for example, America's blundering North Africa campaign — a traumatic learning experience for U.S. arms — had been covered with the same gleeful malevolence that marks much of today's Iraq coverage, the country would have had no stomach for D-Day or for the blood-drenched Central Pacific campaign that defeated Japan.(1)

And another part is the simple fact that terrorism — even state-sponsored terrorism — is fundamentally different than conventional warfare. Sometimes it's hard to identify the bad guys.

But, six decades ago, Americans of all political persuasions stood behind their troops and their policymakers. Today, malcontents bent on scoring political points attack not only the president, but work actively to undermine those doing the fighting.

Luckily, America has a president who understands, as he put it Tuesday, that "the most powerful weapon in the arsenal of democracy is the spirit of liberty." It is that spirit, taking hold in Iraq — where elections have been held and a constitution is being hashed out — that will ultimately bring freedom to that tortured nation.

Even then, for America anyway, the war won't be over. There perhaps will never be a V-T — Victory over Terrorism — Day.

That doesn't make the war itself optional.

(1) Historical note by docjim505: Anybody who has seen the movie "Patton" will recall the opening scene where General Omar Bradley (Karl Malden) and his staff view the battlefield at the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia.  The series of battles fought in that area from January 30 - February 25, 1943 was the first major engagement between the US Army and the German army.  According to Army historian Martin Blumenthal in America's First Battles, 1776 - 1965, pg 261:

About 30,000 Americans engaged in the Kasserine fighting under II Corps, and probably 300 were killed, almost 3,000 wounded, nearly 3,000 missing . It would take 7,000 replacements to bring the units to authorized strengths . The 34th Division under the French XIX Corps at Sbiba sustained approximately 50 men killed, 200 wounded, and 250 missing . II Corps lost 183 tanks, 104 half-tracks, 208 artillery pieces, and 512 trucks and jeeps, plus large amounts of supplies-more than the combined stocks in American depots in Algeria and Morocco . The series of operations known as the Battle of Kasserine Pass - from the start at Faid through Sidi bou Zid and Sbeitla to the final act at the Kasserine defile - was a disaster for the U .S . Army.