Hugh Launches Attack On Eason's Fables On CNBC

Hugh Hewitt appeared on Chris Matthews's weekend show this evening, and fortunately loyal CQ reader Vayapaso caught the broadcast. While the transcript hasn't yet been posted, Vayapaso summarized Hugh's appearance:

He was great! When each participant had to give a prediction for next week, Hugh named the Eason Jordan story. He told them the facts; that it is a big story on the Internet and new media; that it broke through with the Washington Times on Friday and will break big time next week msm. Mathews was surprised and made a comment that I could not completely understand but the implication was that Hugh's prediction was the big one of the evening.

The cracks continue to multiply ...

Sunnis Don't Need A Weathervane (Anymore, That Is)

The Sunnis of Iraq, who largely boycotted the elections due to their loss of power after the fall of Saddam, have slowly begun reconciling themselves to the new power structure in Iraq after the elections. Stunned by the enthusiasm for their fellow citizens for democracy and in danger of complete marginalization, Sunni leaders have reached out for the lifeline offered magnanimously by th Kurds and Shi'ites:

In a bid to avoid marginalization, a group of Sunni Arab parties that refused to participate in the election said Saturday they want to take part in the drafting of a permanent constitution — a chief task of the new National Assembly.

"The representatives of these political bodies that did not participate in the elections have decided in principle to take part in the writing of the permanent constitution in a suitable way," a statement from the group said.

The groups were mainly small movements and it was not clear whether they represent a major portion of the Sunni Arab community. The initiative was spearheaded by Sunni elder statesman Adnan Pachachi, who ran for a National Assembly seat.

Pachachi told CNN that he had talked with Shiite and Kurdish leaders about a role for the Sunnis in drafting a new constitution "and they all welcomed this idea."

"So I think this will help to perhaps lessen the tensions and help in satisfying the country to some extent," Pachachi said.

This is a smart move on all sides, and while the AP stays cautious in reporting it, this opening will allow even the more strident anti-Western Sunnis to come into the fold. Pachachi and the Kurds and Shi'ites have offered the Sunni leadership a way to save a little face with their followers, who must have watched their neighbors streaming to the polls on al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya (and maybe the BBC) and wondered why they deliberately removed themselves from such a historic moment.

One could argue that discrediting such leadership entirely might make for better strategy, so that more moderate leadership could come to the fore. However, that process would likely involve a great deal of bloodshed, and the Iraqis know that that could develop quickly into a civil war. Better to make moderates of the current leaders than wait for another war to see what leaders arise.

The Sunnis know now that democracy transforms people, gives them courage and hope, and a pride of legitimacy that dictators and tyranny suppresses. That moment has passed for the Sunnis, and they belatedly have recognized it. Their best hope for the future is to make sure they have a voice in the writing of the constitution rather than give the Shi'ites an excuse to inflict a tyranny upon them.

Anti-Reform Wisconsin Governor Took Large Payments After Health-Care Merger

Democratic Governor Jim Doyle has repeatedly blocked electoral reform in Wisconsin and threatens to do so again if the state legislature passes a requirement for photo IDs at polling stations. Doyle vetoed the measure once before in 2003 and promises the same this year, even after the fiasco in Milwaukee last November in which an inordinate amount of people registered to vote on Election Day (over 30% of all voters).

Now, however, Wisconsin voters may have another kind of reform in mind after the Journal-Sentinel revealed that executives involved in a controversial health-care merger gave Doyle over $28,000 in donations shortly after he allowed the merger to go through. Critics at the time wondered why Doyle didn't ask for common-sense economic concessions -- and now they think they know:

Gov. Jim Doyle received $28,500 in campaign donations late last year, near the time a major insurance company merger was finalized, from the firms' top executives, their spouses and former executives, state records show.

The money came on top of more than $47,000 in contributions top officials of the Wellpoint and Anthem insurance companies have given Doyle since his 2002 run for governor. The figure also includes contributions from executives at Blue Cross & Blue Shield United of Wisconsin, which was acquired by Wellpoint in 2003.

The latest batch of cash for Doyle was given just before and after the huge Wellpoint-Anthem merger was finalized Nov. 30. The Doyle administration has been criticized for allowing the merger without getting monetary concessions from the merged company. The $20 billion merger created the largest health insurer in the United States.

The biggest givers were Wellpoint Chairman Leonard Schaeffer and his wife, Pamela, of Westlake Village, Calif. They gave Doyle a combined $18,500 on Dec. 27. Pamela Schaefer's $10,000 donation - the maximum permitted under Wisconsin law - was her first to Doyle.

Leonard Schaeffer, who earlier had given Doyle $1,500, also hit the maximum with his $8,500 gift. Aside from those donations, the Schaeffers have never given to any Wisconsin state candidates, according to a campaign contribution database dating to 1993 that is maintained by the non-profit Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.

These donations do not appear to have broken any laws, although the timing strongly suggests some sort of payoff. All of the money came in November, an odd time to donate to Doyle, who doesn't run for re-election until 2006. Why would these executives and their families max out their hard-cash donations to Doyle two years before the election? It certainly looks like the timing with which the Schaeffers were concerned have more to do with what Doyle did for them in November 2004 than what Doyle wants to do in November 2006.

Wisconsinites should realize that Jim Doyle doesn't want to solve electoral fraud in their state. It appears that he wants to continue profiting from it, figuratively and literally. Wisconsin voters need to make plain that they will hold legislators responsible for overriding Doyle's veto, especially those in Doyle's own party.

Ossie Davis, RIP

One of the classiest presences on film and stage passed away yesterday. Ossie Davis, husband to Ruby Dee and together two of the most visible campaigners for civil rights during those most turbulent years, died at 87 of natural causes in a Miami hotel room:

Ossie Davis, whose rich baritone and elegant, unshakable bearing made him a giant of the stage, screen and the civil rights movement — often in tandem with his wife, Ruby Dee — has died. He was 87.

Davis was found dead Friday in his hotel room in Miami Beach, Fla., according to officials there. He was making a film, “Retirement,” said Arminda Thomas, who works in his New Rochelle office and confirmed the death.

Miami Beach police spokesman Bobby Hernandez said Davis’ grandson called shortly before 7 a.m. when Davis would not open the door to his room at the Shore Club Hotel. Davis was found dead, apparently of natural causes, Hernandez said.

Davis wrote, acted, directed and produced for the theater and Hollywood. Even light fare such as the comedy “Grumpy Old Men” with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau was somehow enriched by his strong, but gentle presence. Davis and Dee celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in 1998 with the publication of a dual autobiography, “With Ossie & Ruby: In This Life Together.”

Davis appeared in an almost-innumerable list of films, a tribute to a working spirit that kept him going until the very end; Davis was in Miami, working on a new project when he passed away. Davis lent a touch of class to everything he did, including his fight for equal rights. The role for which I'll probably remember him best is a great example of that, as it seems relatively minor in a film few recall. In the vastly-underrated modern fairy tale Joe Versus The Volcano, he played a philosophical limousine driver who takes Tom Hanks in hand and teaches him to define himself, rather than let others do it for him. Davis typically understates the performance and in that brief appearance (along with Hanks' own performance), elevates the film from a silly farce to a thoughtful if uneven essay on the meaning of life and living.

Davis, of course, did much more significant work than JVTV. He did more significant work in the civil-rights movement than he did on screen, for that matter, and that will be his shining legacy. I always thought, though, that the few minutes he spent in that cameo communicated more about truth than some actors give in an entire career. It's that kind of truth that movie fans like myself will miss the most with Ossie Davis gone. Rest in peace, Mr. Davis, and may choirs of angels shepherd you home.

UPDATE: No, apart from Davis' work in the civil-rights movement, I'm not a fan of his politics. I am a fan of his work on screen, though.

Another Crack In The Media Blackout For Eason's Fables

CQ reader Rodger M. tips me to some correspondence that he has had with Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Jack Kelly, one of the few members of the mainstream media who pushes back against these blackouts. Rodger have me a preview of what Jack will have to say:

The scandalous remarks of Eason Jordan, CNN’s top news executive, last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (where Europe’s elite goes once a year to sneer at the United States), and the failure of the major media to report them suggest the distortions are deliberate.

Jordan told a panel that the U.S. military had killed a dozen journalists in Iraq, and that they had been deliberately targeted. When challenged, Jordan could provide no evidence to support the charge, and subsequently lied about having made it, though the record shows he had made a similar charge a few months before, and also earlier had falsely accused the Israeli military of targeting journalists.

Jordan’s slander has created a firestorm in the blogosphere, but has yet to be mentioned in the “mainstream” media. Gee, I wonder why not.

Jack Kelly regularly writes on national-security topics and has a national following. Rodger notes that this still isn't news coverage, but that's how these blackouts disintegrate. First the blogs show that they won't let go, then the commentators catch fire from us, and then the news sections won't have a choice but to cover it.

If Hugh has Chris Wallace and Chris Matthews talking about this after Jack Kelly writes his column, the avalanche will have begun. We need to keep the heat on CNN and Eason Jordan to ensure it.

UPDATE: It's already in today's Toledo Blade. Kelly has more than one bone to pick with his fellows in the media. (hat tip: Capitano)

A Tale Of Two Tales And Many Questions

General James Mattis, commander of Marine expeditions in Iraq, came under domestic fire this week for his blunt and controversial remarks about the joy of war. His intemperate remarks roiled a nation obsessed with political correctness and image projection, even as his men defended his leadership:

"Actually it's quite fun to fight them, you know. It's a hell of a hoot," Mattis said, prompting laughter from some military members in the audience. "It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right up there with you. I like brawling.

"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil," Mattis said. "You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."

I don't think that General Mattis' remarks about the delight he takes in killing the enemy are either particularly helpful or all that damaging. Most of the reports I've read today have only quoted the first paragraph, while the second gives some important missing context. I don't think that Mattis materially damaged our war efforts by playing into a stereotype of American bloodlust that foreigners have of our soldiers, because those who believe that will do so whether a Marine general makes undisciplined remarks or not. The notion that the sky has fallen, as some media pundits declared today, is nothing more than concealed glee at having their own deepest suspicions about the US military supposedly confirmed. More on that in a minute.

Frankly, I don't want my military leadership to get all weepy about killing people who want to kill me. I'd rather they just stay serious about doing unto them before they do unto me. However, generals know that they also perform public service, and making comments like this in a public forum shows some poor judgment and/or rhetorical discipline. I think a personal reprimand with an apology should suffice.

My point in covering this isn't to weigh in on Mattis for what I think amounts to a tempest in a teapot. I'm posting this to note that the news organization covering this story is none other than CNN, which apparently considers an off-hand comment by a Marine general about his job satisfaction to be extremely newsworthy. CNN, you recall, is run by Eason Jordan, and not coincidentally they consider Jordan's comments about how Mattis and the entire US military chain of command target journalists for assassination and torture to have no news value whatsover.

Nor is CNN alone. Look at the news agencies that have covered the Mattis remarks:

MS-NBC

NBC San Diego
San Diego Union-Tribune
CBS
Washington Post
New York Times
Los Angeles Times
Fox News

Now, other than one brief mention on Fox, how many of these same outlets are covering the continuing series of allegations by Eason Jordan that their own employees have been targeted for death or torture by the US military? None. Zero. Nada.

Which of the statements cause the most problems for Americans -- the one that has a Marine general taking great satisfaction in killing the enemy, or the one that has the executive of a major news organization making unsubstantiated and repeated allegations of atrocities by the military against reporters?

Now ask yourself why every major news organization bleated Mattis' statements all over the airwaves, if they truly cared about the reception they would get overseas by the millions Mattis and others like him set free through killing the enemy. Does it make sense that the media would replay the clip over and over again if that was the issue, or does it make more sense that the intemperate remarks gave the MSM an opportunity to damage our military's reputation?

And given that Eason Jordan tried to do much the same thing ... does the difference in coverage make a lot more sense and give an indication of the bias in our mainstream media?

You bet it does. (Inspired by Hugh's post.)

Eason's Fables Comes To Video Near You!

The blog Sisyphean Musings has contacted the head of media for the World Economic Forum at Davos, Mark Adams. Sisyphus got Adams to confirm Forumblog's testimony that videotape was taken of the forum where Eason Jordan spoke, and agree to send a copy to Sisyphus:

First, big kudos to Mr. Adams for the quick response! Please pass the word that I'm working this with him so please do not flood him with requests.

Second, he has confirmed that he has the video. He needs to make a copy. I have asked for it to be mailed to me by Wednesday next week. I'll update this post as more information becomes available.

CNN has until Wednesday at the latest to come clean about Jordan. If they allow the blogosphere to get to the finish line first, they're toast. And not just CNN, either; the major media have all gone AWOL over this story. While the media blackout mostly doesn't surprise me, I must admit to being very disappointed in Howard Kurtz, whose work I respect. I understand that Kurtz has a contract with CNN, but his primary obligation is to the Washington Post, and to his readers and the truth. As the leading media critic in the mainstream media, he should hold them accountable, not help hush things up for CNN and Jordan.

I wanted to write him an open letter asking him why not a single word of the long string of Jordan's allegations has made it into his work. Fortunately, the Sundries Shack has already done so:

Mr. Kurtz,

More than 36 hours ago, CNN executive Eason Jordan apparently accused the US military of purposefully targeting journalists in Iraq and killing at least a dozen. The story was reported firsthand on the forum’s blog, spread widely around the forum’s attendees, and was apparently witnessed in part by at least two US Senators. He presented no evidence that this was true and this is apparently not the first time he’s made similar accusations.

To date, the only major media outlet to report anything on this story has been the Washington Times, in an editorial today (http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20050203-094808-5506r.htm). The story has been covered extensively by the Captain’s Quarters blog (http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/) and by Hugh Hewitt
(http://hughhewitt.com/). They’ve done nothing special to get the information they’ve gotten. They’ve contacted the forum blog author, attempted contact with Mr. Eason or his office, and researched similar statements from Eason that tends to establish his Davos comments as a recurring theme.

But we’ve heard nothing from the major media outlets reporting this as a news story in any way. Why?

There are a considerable number of people who believe that the MSM is consistently biased toward the left. This may or may not be true. But this story, and the mystifying lack of coverage, can only lend greater credence to that belief. After all, it could be immensely harmful to CNN if the American public heard that one of it’s top executives and the man responsible for its news division believes that American soldiers are purposefully killing journalists. It would be doubly harmful if we learned that he said this in front of an international audience and received cheers and accolades from some in the crowd.

What disappoints me the most is your silence. I’m sure you’ve heard about the story - you are far too media-savvy not to. But I’ve read nothing that I can recall from you on it - not even to acknowledge that the story exists. I have read that you may be working on a report on the story, and I very much hope you are, but after 36 hours, I’ve grown skeptical. I’ve come to respect you a great deal since I’ve started reading your media column in the Washington Post and I have always enjoyed “Reliable Sources". Right now, though, it looks like this story is just passing you by, and that you’re letting it go. I’d like to believe that’s not the case.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. You may contact me at any time, should you wish to do so. Have a wonderful evening.

Read Jimmie's entire post at the Shack -- and if Jimmie doesn't mind, I'd love to co-sign this letter.

Note: Keep up with all the links at La Shawn Barber, who's detailing the blogswarm with regular updates.

UPDATE: Since the beginning posts on this subject may soon scroll off into archives, now would be a good time to point out that the CNN category has all of the Eason's Fables posts.

Hugh Hewitt Goes National With Eason's Fables

Hugh Hewitt has a notice on his blog that he will appear on the Chris Matthews show Sunday evening -- and he intends on making Eason's Fables part of the discussion. Be sure to tune in to CNBC at 6:30 PM CT. Hugh also alerts his readers that Chris Wallace at Fox things that Eason's Fables will make an excellent topic for his own Fox show at 4 pm CT Sunday, so tune in there as well. By Monday, the mainstream media may have Eason's Fables forced down their throats.

Janeane Garofalo, Airhead American

Kevin McCullough picks up on something I saw myself in MS-NBC's coverage of the SOTU speech Wednesday night. After Hours with Joe Scarborough had a number of odd commentators invited to debate the meaning of the event. Some were heavyweight political pundits, such as Pat Buchanan, Robert Reich, and Mike Barnicle. Unfortunately, they also invited two -- two -- commentators from Air America, including the seriously deranged Janeane Garofalo.

Garofalo could hardly contain her vitriol, even to the point where Ron Reagan got embarrassed and basically talked over her to keep her from making matters worse. I should have live-blogged it at the time, but I had put the computer away by the time she went to air. In the most intellectually and morally bankrupt display I've yet to see from the Left, Garofalo compared the ink-stained finger salute by new Congresspeople to a Nazi salute:

The inked fingers in the position of them, which is going to be a “Daily Show‘ photo already of them signaling in this manner [imitates Nazi salute as pictured], as if they have solidarity with the Iraqis, who braved physical threats against their lives to vote, as if somehow these inked-fingered Republicans have something to do with that.

Now, I know that this is the same idiot that declared the United States "doomed, doomed!" if we invaded Iraq, and that even pointing out her twaddle gives her more credibility than she deserves. However, it's worth noting that Garofalo intends on continuing the Bushitler/GOP=Nazis meme that the lunatic-fringe Left have been touting for two years now, to their own embarassment.

Quick history for Janeane:

* Nazis didn't allow the vote after they seized power, except for one plebescite after banning all other political parties.

* Nazis committed genocide on their own people (and lots of others, too).

* Nazis used internal security forces to "disappear" (Nacht und Nebel) their political enemies, not place them on a ballot for the masses to consider.

Now, what does that sound like to you? Does that sound like what happened in Iraq on Sunday, or what Janeane and her cohorts tried their best to allow Saddam to continue doing before March 2003? And which political party in the US supported the invasion and the elections?

Sieg Heil, Janeane. Don't forget to goosestep back to your next rally.

Rony Arbovitz Confirms Eason's Fables In Davos

Hugh Hewitt got to Forumblog's Rony Arbovitz before CNN could and publishes Rony's confirmation of exactly what Eason Jordan told the Davos forum. In an e-mail exchange, Arbovitz makes clear that Jordan intended on telling the forum participants that the supposed targeting of reporters by the US military was deliberate and with full knowledge of their identity:

HH: Did Mr. Jordan make his "targeted" remark in response to a comment by Congressman Frank?

RA: I believe that Congressman Frank was dragged into all of this after the fact. Mr. Jordan gave us all a monologue that evolved from his personal experiences in Iraq about this idea of U.S. soldiers targeting U.S. and foreign journalists. I first challenged Mr. Jordan, and then moderator David Gergen (of Harvard's JFK School of Government) brought Frank in as a member of the U.S. government to respond to claims that shocked all of us. I remember Gergen in particular being flabbergasted and disturbed to a very high degree by Mr. Jordan's statements. Congressman Frank told the audience that his briefings indicated that all the journalists killed to date in Iraq were due to "collateral damage". Jordan disagreed, and gave us an example of U.S. soldiers deliberately shelling a hotel in Iraq which was known to all as a haven for journalists covering both sides of the war. Congressman Frank was pretty much a bystander being dragged into all of it.

HH: Can you recall the reaction of the audience to the initial Jordan statement concerning "targeting?"

RA: Some members of the audience were shocked and in disbelief. Others supported Mr. Jordan's statements and seemed visibly impressed that Mr. Jordan had the courage to say such things to a world audience. One thing I will never forget: Arab journalists coming up to Mr. Jordan at the end of the session and praising his sheer bravery for standing up to the U.S. military in such a public way. I will also never forget the absolute look of horror on Professor Gergen's face, the disbelief that the U.S. military would ever do such things. Gergen went on to describe that in his own experience, the U.S. military were always the "good guys", rescuing journalists, never deliberately targeting them for death. Gergen also felt obligated to basically halt the debate at some point because the Pentagon and U.S. military were not represented at the session, and therefore no balanced discussion could be had (Congressman Frank is probably not a good proxy for the Pentagon).

Read the entire interview at Hugh's. CNN and Time Warner need to come clean on Eason's Fables before we completly classify CNN as a publisher of short-form fiction. When will the rest of the mainstream media finally start reporting on this scandal? Where is Howard Kurtz?

More Of Eason's Fables Past

Peter Cook once again finds nuggets in Eason Jordan's past statements about the United States, CNN, and how Jordan has a real problem with misrepresentation. Jordan gave a speech in March 1999 to the Nieman Foundation, ironically titled "No Substitute for First-Rate Journalists." The speech gives quite a revealing look at Jordan's ability to prevaricate at ease to his audiences.

For instance, here he speaks about CNN's coverage of Iraq as an adamantly independent operation, free of influence by either the Iraqi or US government (emphasis mine):

CNN has had tremendous difficulties with the Iraqi government, a government that's accused me during my own trips to Baghdad of being a CIA station chief for Iraq. I feel lucky to have emerged alive from that. But it's very difficult working from Baghdad. It was during the war, and it continues to be today.

Our view is, first of all, we will not consciously pull punches. If I ever find anybody doing it, then those people will be history at this network, as well as with our Iraq coverage.

At the same time he told this to this gathering of journalists, Jordan by his own admission had already "pulled punches". He wrote four years after giving this speech that he had visited the Baghdad bureau 13 times in the preceding twelve years, and was distressed about the stories they could not report because to do so would lose them access to Iraq. In other words, even while delivering this strongly-worded promise to the journalists gathered at the Nieman foundation, he was selling out to Saddam in order to have the opportunity to tell Saddam's story to the world.

It didn't start in 1999, as we know from one of my earlier posts. Solomonia has an excerpt from a Washington Times account by Peter Collins, a former CNN correspondent, which shows how actively involved Jordan was in this sham reporting in 1993, along with then-CNN president Tom Johnson:

I took part in meetings between the CNN executives and various officials purported to be close to Saddam. We met with his personal translator; with a foreign affairs adviser; with Information Minister Latif Jassim; and with Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz.

In each of these meetings, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Jordan made their pitch: Saddam Hussein would have an hour's time on CNN's worldwide network; there would be no interruptions, no commercials. I was astonished. From both the tone and the content of these conversations, it seemed to me that CNN was virtually groveling for the interview.

The day after one such meeting, I was on the roof of the Ministry of Information, preparing for my first "live shot" on CNN. A producer came up and handed me a sheet of paper with handwritten notes. "Tom Johnson wants you to read this on camera," he said. I glanced at the paper. It was an item-by-item summary of points made by Information Minister Latif Jassim in an interview that morning with Mr. Johnson and Mr. Jordan.

That occurred six years before Jordan pompously declared his intention to fire anyone who "consciously pulled punches". This wasn't pulling punches -- CNN took a dive, and begged Saddam to let them do it.

I especially loved this part:

And if there's any proof that we're compromising our journalistic standards as part of that process, I would love to know about it, because that's totally unacceptable.

Does that not sound exactly like Dan Rather's "I'd love to break that story" denial about using forged documents? It's as if they worked off the same script.

Every time we find a speech by Jordan at some forum or international event, we easily discover more nuggets of an almost antagonistic, pathological falsehood occurring. It's almost as if Jordan dared the world to prove him wrong. Unfortunately for Jordan, these challenges never disappear in the age of the Internet, and now his lies and allegations have come home to roost. Time Warner needs to ask itself if a person of Eason Jordan's dishonesty truly represents the character of their news organization. If he does, then we know how they view their responsibilities to the truth.

Peter had other problems with Jordan's speech, so be sure to read his entire post.

UPDATE: Bill Roggio calls for a blogosphere boycott on CNN links until they come clean on Eason Jordan.

Happy, Happy Birthday Baby ...

Today is the First Mate's birthday, and I thought for a surprise I'd mention it here on the blog. For a combination birthday/anniversary celebration, we're heading out of town for a B&B weekend getaway, a gift to us both from my mother and sister. I will have only limited access to blogging and e-mail, but I thought it might be fun for the FM to hear greetings and comments from you all. If you can't leave comments on this post, e-mail her at this address: marcia - at - captainsquartersblog - dot - com. I'll read aloud to the FM anything that comes to her for her birthday. (Suggestions to dump the computer- and blog-obsessive husband will result in referrals to spammers, so watch out!)

Mitch also has a family birthday today. What a coincidence! Happy birthday to Sam, who assists us during our radio shows by fetching coffee and pop for us during the breaks. Make sure Dad buys you something fun, and not the socks he usually gets...

Eason's Fables Meets Day By Day

... with the usual hilarious result. Be sure to check it out!

Requiring Voter ID Disenfranchises Voters: Wisconsin Dems

The debate on fixing Wisconsin's broken electoral system moved to the state legislature yesterday, where hearings opened on a bill that would require a state or military photo ID to verify identification of voters at polling stations. As expected, the Democrats lined up as many people as possible to whine about the extraordinary burden of carrying identification:

Earlier this week, leaders in the Republican-controlled Legislature revived a bill similar to one vetoed by Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle in 2003 that would have required voters to show a valid photo ID to register and vote. It would alter Wisconsin's historically open elections process, which allows residents to vote by providing their names and addresses to poll workers, and register on election day by presenting proof of residence. ...

Most people would show a driver's license to vote, but a state-issued identification card or military ID would also be accepted. The state would offer free IDs to those who don't have them or can't afford them, under the bill.

The proposed legislation would also eliminate the practice of "vouching," which allows eligible voters to cast a ballot if another person can confirm their identity and address.

So Wisconsin will allow two different kinds of state ID or a military ID card, and will even supply such ID for free? Sounds like a no-brainer to me. Unfortunately, the no-brainers showed up to complain about this perfectly reasonable compromise:

Karla Smith of Madison, who uses a wheelchair, told lawmakers that the measure would disenfranchise disabled people, because they would have trouble lining up transportation to get an ID.

So Karla Smith has no problem lining up transportation to go to the polls on Election Day, but somehow can't seem to make it to the DMV on any other day out of the year? Give me a break. How does she cash checks? She can't do any banking without having some kind of ID. Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and others don't just allow people to withdraw money from accounts by bringing someone in with them to "vouch" for their identity.

But the Democrats didn't stop at exploiting the handicapped by playing on pity. They also pulled out their favorite victims of our runaway capitalist society:

Rep. Joe Parisi (D-Madison), the former Dane County clerk, said getting rid of the vouching system would make it virtually impossible for homeless people to vote.

First off, the homeless have no residence by definition, and so should have no ability to register -- since one has to establish residence in a precinct to be eligible to vote there. Some areas have adopted the rule that homeless people can use city buildings for addresses to register and vote. If they can do that, then why not just allow them to get a photo ID (it's free, remember) using the same address? Because the Democrats know most of them won't bother to do so, and that will hamper the party's ability to round them up by offering them cigarettes on Election Day to vote Democratic.

All in all, the Democrats have performed shamefully by exploiting the people they hold up as victims in order to protect their network of petty electoral frauds. Wisconsin voters should understand that the Democrats now actively work to dilute the votes of bona fide voters by forcing the system to accept anyone who walks up to the polls on the buddy system. They need to express their disgust in the next elections, and hope that the Magic Buses don't throw yet another electoral contest.

Eason's Fables Makes The Washington Times Editorial Page

The Washington Times becomes the first major daily to take Eason Jordan's paranoid rantings to task since the Wall Street Journal initially reported Congressman Barney Frank's challenge to the CNN chief. The Times issues a measured reprimand to Jordan for his predilection for making unsubstantiated allegations about atrocities:

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, during a discussion on media and democracy, Mr. Jordan apparently told the audience that "he knew of 12 journalists who had not only been killed by U.S. troops in Iraq, but they had in fact been targeted," according to a report on the forum's Web site (www.forumblog.org). ...

[I]t's an assertion Mr. Jordan has made before. In November, as reported in the London Guardian, Mr. Jordan said, "The reality is that at least 10 journalists have been killed by the U.S. military, and according to reports I believe to be true journalists have been arrested and tortured by U.S. forces." This is very serious stuff, if true. Yet aside from Mr. Jordan's occasional comments, there's no evidence to support it. Mr. Jordan's almost immediate backpedaling seems to confirm this. In a statement to blogger Carol Platt Liebau, Mr. Jordan said, "To be clear, I do not believe the U.S. military is trying to kill journalists in Iraq. I said so during the forum panel discussion. But, nonetheless, the U.S. military has killed several journalists in Iraq in cases of mistaken identity." He added, "three of my CNN colleagues and many other journalists have been killed on purpose in Iraq." He didn't elaborate by whom.

According to information on CPJ's Web site (www.cpj.org), between 2003 and 2004, 12 journalists were killed as a result of U.S. fire. None was from CNN.

Read the whole thing; the editorial takes a fact-checking approach to Jordan. He left himself open to this by tossing around accusations without any shred of proof, and the Times exploits the opening well. However, I think that the fact-checking strategy doesn't get to the heart of the matter and allows the argument to rest on interpretations of a far-too-lenient interpretation of what Eason Jordan claimed. It's a lawyer's trick -- changing the context of the statement by focusing on alternate definitions of a single word, in this case target. Forumblog and Rebecca MacKinnon both reported that Jordan clearly wanted to communicate to the Davos crowd that American GIs had a plan to take out journalists -- and in fact, he has a pattern of making precisely the same accusation.

The pattern of making unsubstantiated allegations, especially while overseas and out of earshot to almost all of CNN's domestic audience, is the real issue. Eason Jordan lies about our military in order to impress foreigners who are already inclined to believe the worst about us. What does that say about the foreign news services Eason Jordan delivers to them?

Kudos, however, to the Washington Times editorial board. At least they advanced the story to the mainstream press. That's something almost every other news outlet refused to do.

Op-Ed Writers Conference To Promulgate Ethics, Accuracy Standards

Linda Seebach, columnist for the Rocky Mountain News, tips CQ that the National Conference of Editorial Writers has been discussing ethical concerns and accuracy standards in light of some high-profile editorial errors. (I don't know if she reads the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, but this is what Linda and the NCEW has in mind.) The president of the NCEW sent this message out to all of their members and authorized it for publication:

I am pleased to announce that NCEW has set up a task force on syndicates to seek answers to our questions of ethics and corrections. Heading up the panel is Jerry Ausband, retired editorial page editor of Myrtle Beach.

The task force will contact all of the syndicates to go over questions that have been raised on this groupserv and elsewhere. This will allow us to compare how syndicates are set up to deal with issues like those that have come to the forefront this year and also ascertain how we can be effective in correcting factual errors.

Among the questions:

How do you screen columnists and editorial cartoonists?

Do you have an ethics policy?

What policy do you follow if contracted columnists/cartoonists violate standard journalism ethics (regardless of where you have an individual ethics policy)?

Do you have a fact-checking process for columnists? How does it work?

When editorial writers or editors find a factual error in a column or
cartoon, what effective means can be used to communicate that error and have a correction made?

Kay Semion
NCEW President

Congratulations to Kay Semion, Jerry Ausband, and the NCEW for stepping forward and demanding some accountability for accuracy and ethical behavior from op-ed columnists and editorial writers. Once they create their recommendations, the media's customers should demand that all outlets adopt them as policy for their opinion sections, and not just the syndicates, but also for their own in-house editorial boards. Those who fail to publicly adopt such standards should be outed by their readership and the blogs.

Keep an eye out for the NCEW to see the new recommendations, and get ready to demand action.

TNR: Democratic Response To SOTU Bland, Indistinct

Inspired by our interview of Peter Beinart this evening on the Hugh Hewitt show, I decided to take a read through The New Republic to find out what the center-left has to say about the speeches last night by George Bush and the tag-team of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. I expected a defense of the Democratic response similar to that Beinart offerd Mitch and I in our interview -- that the two minority leaders had offered a serviceable if unspectacular counterpoint to Bush's "misleading" rhetoric on just about every topic.

Instead, Michael Crowley writes a significant critique of both Pelosi and Reid along the same lines I wrote last night after their delivery of the Democratic response. Crowley refuses to tow the party line and scolds the Democrats for their vacuous, predictable ambiguity (subscription required):

That congressional Democrats are still struggling to find their voice was plainly evident in last night's Democratic response by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. The Democratic leaders offered neither a clear vision for their party nor particularly effective counterattacks on the president's agenda. Instead, as is the party's wont, they delivered a bland mishmash of familiar, indistinct ideas. Compared to President Bush's symphonic rhetoric about freedom and democracy and the social compact between generations, the Democrats sounded like a high-school marching band.

Take Reid's discussion of domestic policy. ... This is the sort of cluttered checklist you'd expect at a local candidates' forum, not during a prime-time address. Then again, when Reid tried to be more grandiose, the effects were even more distressing. Apparently seeking to harness some of the world-historical majesty of Bush's speech, Reid invoked the post-World War II rebuilding of Europe and proclaimed, "We need ... a Marshall Plan for America." That's not only a kooky formulation--akin to saying we need a foreign policy toward ourselves--it also wrongheadedly implies a zero-sum choice between building democracy abroad and funding domestic priorities.

Crowley found Reid's manner even more off-putting than I did; I actually thought that Reid came across more pleasantly than his predecessor, Tom Daschle, did last year. He chastises Reid for laconically moving through the same tired litany of Democratic generalities, and found Reid's story about a Searchlight boy struck an odd note:

Had he spent less time ticking off issues like education and health care in forgettable fashion Reid might have issued a stinging refutation of the way Bush exaggerates the alleged crisis the system faces. And instead of telling a cornball story about a boy from his hometown with a skateboard, why not share the powerful story of some old lady who depends on Social Security to survive--and then vow into the camera that Democrats will always ensure that Social Security will be there for the seniors of future generations?

I found that story odd, too. Why does a politician who gets his first real shot at a national TV audience try to connect with the nation by telling a story where he's the hero? Does America really need yet another Democratic egotist for a leader, or does Reid think that the Democrats should clone John Kerry?

Crowley considered Pelosi a mild improvement, an analysis with which I thoroughly disagree. He focuses on Pelosi's arguments, which he claims were marginally better and somewhat more specific, but her delivery, like last year, completely overshadowed her rhetoric. Both Crowley and Beinart make a point of noting that following a SOTU speech is impossible to make memorable, but in Pelosi's case, they're sorely mistaken. Her face, last year and this, was a rictus of either terror or Botox, and her words slid out her grimacing mouth as if they were greased. Quite frankly, I became so riveted by the display that her cliches on Iraq, which Crowley duly notes, mattered little to the performance. She could have read the collected works of Edward Bulwer-Lytton and the spectacle would still have had its macabre fascination.

I understand the challenge of following the spectacle of a SOTU speech. What I don't understand is why with orators like Barack Obama in their midst who have proven their ability to connect with American voters, the Democrats insist on standing on tradition and putting these two stiffs on national TV and radio, and then arming them with the most listless recitation of standard Democratic pablum imaginable. If the Democrats intend on capturing the minds and spirit of the American people, they have to do much better than Pelosi, Reid, and the tired old generalities they used last night.

Northern Alliance Radio In For Hugh Hewitt!

The Northern Alliance will sit in for Hugh Hewitt tonight from 5-8 pm CT as Hugh is traveling today. We'll be taking on Peter Beinart in a foreshadowing of the debate next week at our Patriot Forum. Governor Bill Owen of Colorado will also be joining us, as will John Podhoretz of the New York Post, one of our favorite writers in the mainstream media.

Be sure to tune us in, or check in at Hugh's site to listen via web streaming!

Ward Churchill A Phony Native American: AIM

Ward Churchill, whose reference to certain 9/11 victims as "little Eichmans" drew such outrage, may have more to hide than first thought. Churchill has frequently touted his background as a Native American (Cherokee Nation) as his bona fides to teach and speak on Indian issues, among other causes. Now CQ reader Jim Walker notes a press release from the American Indian Movement and signed by well-known activist Dennis Banks that outs Churchill as a fraud:

The American Indian Movement Grand Governing Council representing the National and International leadership of the American Indian Movement once again is vehemently and emphatically repudiating and condemning the outrageous statements made by academic literary and Indian fraud, Ward Churchill in relationship to the 9-11 tragedy in New York City that claimed thousands of innocent people’s lives.

Churchill’s statement that these people deserved what happened to them, and calling them little Eichmanns, comparing them to Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who implemented Adolf Hitler’s plan to exterminate European Jews and others, should be condemned by all.

The sorry part of this is Ward Churchill has fraudulently represented himself as an Indian, and a member of the American Indian Movement, a situation that has lifted him into the position of a lecturer on Indian activism. He has used the American Indian Movement’s chapter in Denver to attack the leadership of the official American Indian Movement with his misinformation and propaganda campaigns.

Ward Churchill has been masquerading as an Indian for years behind his dark glasses and beaded headband. He waves around an honorary membership card that at one time was issued to anyone by the Keetoowah Tribe of Oklahoma. Former President Bill Clinton and many others received these cards, but these cards do not qualify the holder a member of any tribe. He has deceitfully and treacherously fooled innocent and naïve Indian community members in Denver, Colorado, as well as many other people worldwide. Churchill does not represent, nor does he speak on behalf of the American Indian Movement.

This press release is dated January 31, but Technorati only shows a few blogger links. It appears that Ward Churchill may have even more explaining to do in his capacity as a Native American Studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. If he received tenure while fraudulently posing as a real Native American, they have just cause to dismiss him altogether.

Hugh: Media Bias In The Silences

Hugh Hewitt has a new column out for the Weekly Standard on media bias. His thoughts have has special resonance today as we see the major American media outlets put the Cone of Silence over Eason's Fables, which plays a part in Hugh's column. Hugh reminds us that bias not only exists in what's reported, but also in what isn't:

Even though attention will turn today to the president's speech to the exclusion of almost everything else, let me underline two recent media events which deserve more scrutiny than they have thus far received.

The first is the genuinely scandalous assertion by CNN's Eason Jordan, made at the World Economic Forum, that the United States military has targeted and killed a dozen journalists. The account of Jordan's remarks -including his backpedaling and the crowd's reactions--is available at ForumBlog. Thus far no major media outlet has demanded an accounting of Jordan, but the idea that a major figure from American media traffics
in such outlandish and outrageous slanders on the American military deserves attention and criticism, not indifference. It is no wonder that anti-American propaganda gains traction in the world when American news executives set fantasies such as this one in motion.

I'm glad Hugh mentions this, because if I inadvertently underplayed one part of my coverage yesterday on Jordan, it was his propensity to make these statements outside of the United States, and especially in fora that appear ready-made to accept anti-American allegations without substantiation. Why, one might ask, would the executive of an American news organization do this? Mainly because CNN does not compete well within the US any longer, and for good reason, as we now know. They are, however, tremendously influential internationally; they are America's BBC, in more ways than market share. In order to maintain that position, Jordan has to cultivate an image of CNN as a hypercritical gadfly to American policies, especially those of American conservatives.

In other words, Eason Jordan sells out America to boost access for CNN worldwide, and that is a deliberate decision, as his repeated acts show. That should surprise no one who read Jordan's own admission of the exact same thing in covering Saddam's Iraq. Jordan told America that he deliberately suppressed stories of Saddam's atrocities and published stories straight out of Baghdad Bob's propaganda ministry in order to get pictures on TV from Baghdad.

Now, of course, the blogosphere has awoken to Jordan's commercial interests in anti-American rhetoric, and CNN has been unmasked as a shill for leftists. CNN and its parent, Time Warner, has to decide whether they will endorse the Eason Jordan strategy and completely break faith with their American audiences -- and perform a disservice to their global audiences, too -- or dump Jordan and everyone who thinks like him and rebuild credibility back into their organization. It's also up to use to make sure that they have to make that decision, and that we make clear what actions they've taken.

Read all of Hugh's excellent column. Hugh will appear next Thursday at our Patriot Forum here in Minneapolis on February 10th to debate Peter Beinart. It promises to be a grand event, one of the classic debates you'll regret missing. I believe tickets are on sale only until tomorrow, and for $69 you can get a ticket and a copy of Hugh's terrific new book Blog. That's a deal even Eason Jordan can't pass up ... in fact, Eason Jordan needs that deal more than all of us.

Poll Shows Bush Gained Converts With SOTU Speech

A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll shows that President Bush gave one of his most effective speeches last night, picking up converts for his strategies on Social Security and Iraq and wound up with an 86% positive response, his highest in 3 years:

President Bush's State of the Union address raised support for his policies on health care and Social Security among people who watched the speech, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll conducted Wednesday night.

The percentage of respondents who said the president's proposals in those areas will help the country rose 15 points from when the same question was asked of the same people in the two days before the speech.

In the post-speech sample, 70 percent of respondents said Bush's policies on health care were positive, while 66 percent approved of the president's plan for Social Security.

Bush showed almost as much improvement on Iraq, with 78 percent of respondents saying U.S. policy there is heading in the right direction, a 12 percentage point increase over pre-speech polling. Overall, 77 percent of respondents said Bush is taking the country in the right direction after the speech compared to 67 percent beforehand.

The news in the poll will be the double-digit gains Bush made, but the pre-speech numbers were surprisingly substantial. Gallup apparently found that even before the SOTU speech, two-thirds of people now support his policies in Iraq and the same feel our country is heading in the right direction. On the "third rail" of American politics, he even had a majority supporting his reforms for Social Security, a remarkable number that only got better immediately afterwards.

Even if his gains recede as the afterglow of his speech fades, Bush shows an amazing mandate -- and one that the press has apparently failed to report. The election in Iraq opened a lot of eyes around the world to the true nature of the Bush administration, and the scales may have fallen from the eyes of American voters as well. The Democrats had better wake up to the fact of Bush's popularity and support, because if all they can do is catcall during important occasions like high-schoolers, the Party of No will rapidly become the Party No More.

My Rebuttal To Eason Jordan

Dear Mr. Jordan,

While I appreciate your response, I find it singularly inadequate. Just in terms of the one incident in Davos, your characterization of the debate fails to match with the two independent sources we have already seen. The first source, Forumblog, tells us that your forum was videotaped. Where is the transcript? Why don't you simply produce that, or a videotape on CNN, with the portion of your statement? Surely CNN has the resources to track the tape down. The fact that your own news service fails to make that information available causes me to discount your characterization.

Unfortunately, even had I been inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt about Davos, you have a clear pattern of speaking abroad to audiences inclined towards anti-Western sentiment and making unsubstantiated charges against the US and Israel. You also need to explain your statements in the following venues:

November 2004 - You asserted that US military forces illegally detained 10 or more journalists and subjected them to torture. You said that you based this allegation on reports you'd seen which you believe to be true. Why didn't CNN publish these reports? Where are they now? Which journalists were tortured, and by whom? It's been almost four months since you made these charges, Mr. Jordan, and we have seen nothing from CNN.

October 2002 - You claimed that Israeli forces had a policy of targeting journalists, alleging that they had deliberately shot a CNN reporter as a result:

We're not trying to favour one side over the other we're not going to pull any punches in our reporting but the truth hurts sometimes and it hurts both sides but it's a mistake to target the news media. We've had enormous frustrations in having access to occupied areas of the West Bank and Israeli forces on a number of occasions have shot at CNN personnel and in fact did shoot one CNN correspondent, he was badly wounded. The Israelis say they're actually trying to restrict our access to these areas and they say it's too dangerous for you to be there and my response to that is that it wouldn't be nearly as dangerous if you didn't shoot at us when we're clearly labelled as CNN crews and journalists. And so this must stop, this targeting of the news media both literally and figuratively must come to an end immediately.

The only CNN journalist wounded in that region was Ben Wedeman, who got shot when he wandered into a crossfire. Your own producer, Bruce Conover, told CNN that no one could tell who shot him, as the bullets and mortars were flying in from all directions. Again, you provided no specifics, no names, and no substantiation whatsoever for the notion that the IDF deliberately targets journalists. Again, you made these statements in a foreign country where your remarks were likely to get less scrutiny in the US and approbation from the people who dislike America and Americans. And I note, once again, that CNN never reported on any special program to target journalists in combat zones, despite your allegations. We can only conclude from this that your rhetoric was immature, irresponsible, and completely unsubstantiated -- again.

Until you can account for the Davos transcript so that we can all see the context of your remarks and explain your prevarications in the above two egregious examples of slander, then you have no credibility and neither does the news organization which takes its orders from you. Your position as the head of a major news organization and as a journalist requires you to be responsible for your words and actions. You have proven yourself to be inadequate to that task and disrespectful of the truth, and as such, you should resign immediately. As long as you remain in charge of CNN, nothing they report will have any credibility.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

Eason Jordan Responds

Carol Platt Liebau has Eason Jordan's official response, which she got by working through mutual acquaintances. Jordan maintains that he never said that the US deliberately targeted journalists:

"To be clear, I do not believe the U.S. military is trying to kill journalists in Iraq. I said so during the forum panel discussion. But, nonetheless, the U.S. military has killed several journalists in Iraq in cases of mistaken identity. The reason the word "targeted" came up at all is because I was responding to a comment by Congressman Franks, who said he believed the 63 journalists killed in Iraq were the victims of "collateral damage." Since three of my CNN colleagues and many other journalists have been killed on purpose in Iraq, I disputed the "collateral damage" statement, saying, unfortunately, many journalists -- not all -- killed in Iraq were indeed targeted. When someone aims a gun at someone and pulls the trigger and then learns later the person fired at was actually a journalist, an apology is appropriate and is accepted, and I believe those apologies to be genuine. But such a killing is a tragic case of mistaken identity, not a case of "collateral damage." That is the distinction I was trying to make even if I did not make it clearly at the time. Further, I have worked closely with the U.S. military for months in an effort to achieve a mutual goal: keeping journalists in Iraq safe and alive."

I'll post my response separately, but big thanks to Carol Platt Liebau for getting Eason Jordan to finally comment personally and directly.

Addendum: Does anyone else notice that Carol scooped CNN on this development?

Live Blogging The SOTU Speech Tonight

I will be live-blogging the State of the Union speech tonight, on this post. It starts at 8 pm CT, and since I have TiVo, I may use it to scroll back when necessary to capture what was said.

7:59 CT - The escort committees have been selected and have gone off to fetch the President. I'm settling in for the duration. I expect a good speech, but nothing terribly surprising or even particularly memorable. The best parts will have to do with the Iraqi elections, to be sure. Watch for the Ted Kennedy close-up on that one...

8:02 - Don't forget that Hugh Hewitt will appear on Joe Scarborough at 11 pm CT to discuss the SOTU speech. I expect him to bring up Eason's Fables ...

8:09 - We share it with a "free and sovereign Iraq." Nice start.

8:13 - After the reference to Iraq, Bush went directly into domestic issues. Interesting choice. The more visionary parts of his speech will be on foreign affairs, and I wonder if he doesn't want to finish strong instead of start strong like he did the last time out ...

8:17 - After the usual handouts that get the pork rolling, Bush memtions tort reform and health care adjacent. He's just delivered the message to the Democrats -- if you want to talk health care, it comes with tort reform attached. Get used to it or shut up.

8:20 - Four years of debate is enough -- except for Harry Reid, of course ...

8:21 - Social Security: the first shoe to drop. "Do not let anyone mislead you" -- that's a pretty contentious message. I guess Bush still won't back down from a fight. Bush gives a good explanation why Social Security has a problem, using the workers-to-beneficiary ration. The Democrats don't like the numbers Bush uses, and decide to rudely catcall during the speech. That should tell you all you need to know about the immaturity of the opposition...

8:28 - Thanks, Glenn, for the Instapundit link ...

8:29 - "The money in the account is yours, and the government can never take it away." I'm on board.

8:30 - Good for the President -- he pointed out that federal employees already have privatization.

8:31 - He spent ten minutes, by my watch, on Social Security. He spent thirty seconds on the Federal Marriage Amendment. Anyone need an explanation? He's spending more time on the protection of human life. I like that set of priorities.

8:34 - I think that more of the real George Bush comes out in tonight's speech. He seems comfortable, relaxed, and in charge. He's allowed himself to smile in reaction to the crowd. He's not speaking oratorically for the most part; he's speaking as if he was addressing a small gathering. I like this speech more than I thought I would.

8:39 - OK, here's the part I thought would come first -- the war on terror. Bush obviously understands his strength will come from this part of the speech, and decided to hold it off to the end.

8:41 - A good list of positive actions in the war from the Bush administration. The vision of his second term comes out again -- the Force of Human Freedom. Ending tyranny is the ultimate goal.

8:44 - Bush gave a great oration on the different aims of the US and the terrorists. Any moral relativists listening will understand that his words were meant for them.

8:46 - I'm considerably less sanguine about the prospects of peace between Israel and Palestine than the President. I wish Condi Rice the best of luck, because from what I've seen from their election, I don't think Abbas has the juice to cut a deal that will stick.

8:47 - Calling out Syria for its support of terrorism, first on the list of tyrant nations and terror enablers. Iran comes second, and he defers to Europe in taking the lead in disarmament, but he speaks directly to the Iranian people assuring them of our support. I'd say that shows the direction that the second term will take. Allow Europe to handle Iran for now, while we take on Syria directly.

8:50 - A nice moment; several members of Congress held up ink-stained fingers in support of the Iraqi people's bravery in casting their vote. Bush emphatically notes that the Iraqis have "earned the respect of us all," a smackdown to those who claim that the elections were a joke. It wasn't a joke to the people who braved the bombs and bullets to cast their votes.

8:54 - He's really rolling here. He looks passionate and determined while delivering this section of the speech. "Tell America not to abandon us." A good statement on Iraq: "Freedom in Iraq will make America safer for generations to come." He tells Congress that the troops will come home when we achieve the results we set out to get, not on some artificial timetable or based on Harry Reid's exit strategies.

8:58 - Sgt. Bill Norwood's parents get hugs and handshakes, and it's not easy to type through this ...

9:01 - A terrific and inspiring finish to one of George Bush's best policy speeches. It doesn't have the soaring vision of his inaugural, but -- it's not an inauguration, when one expects that. This speech is part road map, part halftime pep speech. He's much improved over last year, and I think he gets better every year he's in office. He may never be considered a great orator (for good reason), but he delivers some of the best political speeches since Reagan.

In this case, he kept the thread of freedom going throughout the entire hour, including the domestic section. Freedom will be his great theme, just as the New Deal was FDR's or the Great Society was LBJ's. W's will be the Force of Human Freedom.

Good speech, probably a great SOTU speech. What were your thoughts?

UPDATE: Ankle-Biting Pundits is (are?) live-blogging the Democratic response. I'll post my thoughts at the end, but I don't plan on live-blogging it, as from what I've heard in the first few minutes from Harry Reid, it sounds like the same generic blather we heard during the presidential campaign. I do note, however, that Reid uses the movie "Groundhog Day" while engaging in the same thing he decries.

UPDATE II: I thought that Reid managed at least to project some warmth, even if he did little but mouth platitudes until the end of his speech. Pelosi was, as always, a disaster. She looks as though she just came from an audition for Scream IV, and she speaks as though she wants to scold a recalcitrant class of third-graders. She spoke with more specifics than Reid, and manages to get almost everything wrong. Worst of all, she calls for a "much smaller" American presence in ten months, meaning she's signed onto the Kennedy bug-out plan.

Tom DeLay had a pretty good analysis. He called them the Party of No -- no ideas, no agenda, nothing but a No for anything the GOP proposes.

Ken Salazar accuses Bush of being "divisive" -- haven't the Democrats figured out that in a free society, people are allowed to disagree? He stabs Reid in the back, however, by telling Fox News that he isn't on board for a filibuster at this point on Social Security, despite Reid's boasting earlier. What a great wrap-up of Reid's leadership skills; he's proven a number of times now that he can't control his caucus. And Salazar's a first-termer!

Another Example Of Eason's Fables

In yet another example of how Eason Jordan tosses around accusations without much supporting evidence -- or any at all -- the Guardian (UK) covering the News Xchange Forum this past November reports on accusations of the torture of journalists by American forces (hat tip - Peter Cook):

Eason Jordan, chief news executive at CNN, said there had been only a "limited amount of progress", despite repeated meetings between news organisations and the US authorities.

"Actions speak louder than words. The reality is that at least 10 journalists have been killed by the US military, and according to reports I believe to be true journalists have been arrested and tortured by US forces," Mr Jordan told an audience of news executives at the News Xchange conference in Portugal.

Once again, we go to CNN's own archives to find any report that mentions Jordan and the torture of reporters by any military whatsoever ... and find nothing. Where are those reports which Eason Jordan believes to be true? Why didn't CNN cover such a blockbuster story? Jordan appears to have a big mouth and a strong desire to tell people stories -- let's call them Eason's Fables -- that get him attention from all the right people.

If you have had enough of Eason Jordan, don't tell CNN. Go to Time Warner and let them know.

UPDATE: Bumping this to the top -- this is a solid corroboration of Jordan's inherent bias and antagonism towards the American military.

UPDATE II: Charles at Little Green Footballs notes that Jordan was not the only CNN exec to make accusations of targeting at this conference:

And please note: *this is not limited to Eason Jordan.* At the same News Xchange conference in Portugal, -another- CNN executive, Chris Cramer, told an audience that journalists were being "deliberately targeted for seeking out the truth."

Good catch -- I missed that one.

CNN Just Discovered Captain's Quarters

Hey, folks, guess what I just received in my e-mail?

Many blogs have taken Mr. Jordan's remarks out of context. Eason Jordan does not believe the U.S. military is trying to kill journalists. Mr. Jordan simply pointed out the facts: While the majority of journalists killed in Iraq have been slain at the hands of insurgents, the Pentagon has also noted that the U.S. military on occasion has killed people who turned out to be journalists. The Pentagon has apologized for those actions.

Mr. Jordan was responding to an assertion by Cong. Frank that all 63 journalist victims had been the result of "collateral damage."

I posted this earlier, as TKS had received it after sending CNN a complaint by e-mail. However, I never did send CNN an e-mail -- and this message was e-mailed to me specifically, with my address in the To: field.

Do you think someone at CNN might be a tad worried?

UPDATE 6:11 PM CT: Still no evidence of any response at CNN's website.

UPDATE II: I'll be on Hugh Hewitt around 6:45 PM CT to discuss the story.

Corroboration For Eason's Fables In Davos

Rebecca MacKinnon, a TV reporter as well as a blogger, somewhat reluctantly confirms the account given in Forumblog about Eason Jordan's remarks in Davos last week (hat tip TKS). MacKinnon writes in her blog, RConversations:

I was in the room and Rony's account is consistent with what I heard. I was also contributing to the Forumblog, but to be honest, Jordan happens to be my former boss who promoted me and defended me in some rather sticky situations after my reporting angered the Chinese government. As CNN's "senior statesman" over the years, Eason has done some things I agreed with and other things I wondered about. But at least when it came to China, he was no apologist and defended my reports on human rights abuses and political dissent.

Actually, I find Ms. MacKinnon's loyalties to both the truth and her former boss admirable. It's obvious that she thought carefully before posting this corroboration of Forumblog's account.

Now CNN has more explaining to do. After sending out that CYA response, the obvious whitewash attempt instead shows the cable network circling the wagons, a la Rather and the gang at Black Rock last September. Eason Jordan wants to bet the future of CNN on outlasting his critics with smokescreens and arguments about context. Obviously, he didn't pay much attention to the Memogate fiasco; I wonder if Time Warner will make the same mistake Viacom did.

NOTE: LaShawn Barber is tracking the blog swarm, with lots of links.

CNN Reporter Targeted By Israelis? Hardly!

In October 2002, Eason Jordan claimed that the Israeli Defensive Forces had shot a CNN reporter as part of a deliberate strategy of targeting journalists covering the war in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (see post below). I did a little searching on Nexis again, confident that had CNN reporters taken fire in the line of duty, CNN would report it. I conducted a search for 'CNN reporter shot' (non-exclusive), and I got only five hits, all of which reported the same incident, which occurred on October 31, 2000.

According to CNN's own coverage of the incident and their own eyewitness to the event, Eason Jordan lied about it during the October 2002 conference:

DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: Violence in the Middle East has been increasing over the past few days. The death toll is rising.

At least, 151 people have been killed in the clashes, and today the CNN family was directly hit. Correspondent Ben Wedeman was shot just hours ago as he was covering the clashes between Palestinians and Israelis.

Ben is being treated at a hospital in Gaza City. His producer, Bruce Conover, joins us by phone now from Shifa (ph) Hospital.

Bruce, thanks for joining us.

BRUCE CONOVER, CNN PRODUCER: Hi, Daryn. Well, Ben's fine. He's conscious. He's making jokes. So we're feeling a lot better about his condition right now.

KAGAN: So he's going to be OK.

CONOVER: He's going to be OK, yes.

KAGAN: Can you tell us what happened?

CONOVER: He -- we had Ben and a cameraman, Dave Albritten (ph), coming in as a new team. They've been here a few times before. But obviously, you need to bring people up to speed on the locations, where these clashes have been taking place.

So we decided to go to a place that is called the Karni Junction. It's basically a commercial trade center across the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip, where literally trucks with Israeli license plates unload into trucks with Palestinian plates so that there are no vehicles crossing the border.

That location was -- became a point of fairly nasty clashes two days ago when there were heavy machine guns in use. The Israeli army said that they were fired upon from Palestinian positions. During the period that we were there, we did not hear any return fire until the very last moment.

But today, it turned violent very quickly. We got there, and literally, a huge firefight broke out. We were -- there were four of us there. We were literally pinned to the ground a minute and a half after getting out of the car. And we were pinned down -- Ben and cameraman Mohammed (ph) were a little bit ahead. They were in a grove of olive trees, and we saw an Israeli tank shelling and moving the shells -- walking the shells toward the olive grove. It became very clear that it was critical that they get out of there. Mohammed yelled to Ben to get out. They were in the process of trying to move when Ben was hit by something. We're still not sure exactly what.

But he was hit. He went down. Mohammed got out of there. Ben was lying on the ground. And in sort of an ironic testimonial to high technology, we, completely pinned down, used our cell phones to call Ben to find out whether he was hit, and in fact, he said, yes, I'm hit, at which point there were several ambulances that were -- had been called by bystanders to the area.

But it was a very nasty firefight, with shelling, probably an exchange of gunfire. It's hard to tell from which side, but there was definitely a lot of stuff coming across. And to make a long story a little bit shorter, it came out of nowhere.

This location, we've been there the day before, absolutely calm, or I should say relatively calm, the normal clashes: Israeli forces using rubber bullets, Palestinians throwing rocks. That's sort of encompassing the norm.

So what happened? CNN's reporter went to an area where clashes were known to occur; a reasonable action for a reporter to take. Usually the clashes didn't amount to anything particularly intense. On this occasion, however, a full-scale battle with real bullets erupted, and Wedeman got caught in the crossfire. No one knows who shot him -- after all, CNN didn't follow up the report according to Nexis -- and his bullet was just as likely to have come from a Palestinian gun as an IDF gun. More to the point, no one "targeted" Wedeman for assassination. Someone may have mistaken him as a combatant, but it's much more likely that he simply got stuck in the wrong place in a battlefield.

With reporting like this coming from the chief of CNN, how can we trust anything his underlings tell us?

UPDATE: Glenn corrected my English in the intro -- and I used to be a technical writer/editor whose job it was to catch that stuff. Dang -- writing on a lunch break will do that to a guy! But if I get to hear from Glenn, it's worth it.

Jordan: Not Just The Americans

Eason Jordan appears to like spreading the slander around when it comes to accusations of assassination attempts by Western military forces. CQ reader and blogger Peter Cook found this forum transcript from News Xchange 2002, where Jordan makes the same accusations -- with the same lack of specifics -- against the Israelis:

NG: Eason, why do you think you've been targeted specifically, I mean there are Israeli bumper stickers that say 'CNN lies', the Israeli communications minister talked about CNN as being 'evil, biased and unbalanced' you'll be familiar with all these quotes?

EJ: Absolutely, well the Israeli government is making a mistake if it considers CNN the enemy, CNN is just trying to tell the story of Israel, the story of Palestinian areas in a straightforward way. We're not trying to favour one side over the other we're not going to pull any punches in our reporting but the truth hurts sometimes and it hurts both sides but it's a mistake to target the news media. We've had enormous frustrations in having access to occupied areas of the West Bank and Israeli forces on a number of occasions have shot at CNN personnel and in fact did shoot one CNN correspondent, he was badly wounded. The Israelis say they're actually trying to restrict our access to these areas and they say it's too dangerous for you to be there and my response to that is that it wouldn't be nearly as dangerous if you didn't shoot at us when we're clearly labelled as CNN crews and journalists. And so this must stop, this targeting of the news media both literally and figuratively must come to an end immediately.

Who got shot? When and where did this happen? Jordan doesn't say. Again, if CNN has evidence that the Israelis target journalists for assassination, why haven't they reported the story? And if they don't have any proof of Jordan's allegations, why does he toss them around so carelessly? Either Jordan is a raging paranoid or has political reasons for his allegations. Given his past, I'd lean more towards the latter.

Having a man at the top of a major news organization engaging in this kind of conduct destroys the credibility of the entire organization. Perhaps we in the blogosphere have been slow to check Eason Jordan, but we're conscious of the problem now and we will continue to push this story as long as the mainstream news media continues to ignore it. If Jordan has proof of these multiple accusations, let's see it. If not, Time Warner should fire him immediately.

UPDATE: CNN has released a statement via e-mail to those who have written in (hat tip: TKS):

Many blogs have taken Mr. Jordan's remarks out of context. Eason Jordan does not believe the U.S. military is trying to kill journalists. Mr. Jordan simply pointed out the facts: While the majority of journalists killed in Iraq have been slain at the hands of insurgents, the Pentagon has also noted that the U.S. military on occasion has killed people who turned out to be journalists. The Pentagon has apologized for those actions.

Mr. Jordan was responding to an assertion by Cong. Frank that all 63 journalist victims had been the result of "collateral damage."

First off, it's interesting to note that CNN responded to blogs here, not just readers or viewers. But it hardly answers the question of what actually was said. It sounds like Jordan disagreed with the notion that all 63 journalists were killed as a result of collateral damage. So what did Jordan claim as the cause?

Better yet, why did Eason Jordan accuse the Israelis of the exact same thing -- targeted assassinations -- without providing any specifics or evidence? This release means nothing except a quick attempt to avoid a blogswarm. Nice try, but no cigar, pals.

More Background On Jordan's Folly

I've done more Nexis searching myself and found more background on Eason Jordan and the journalist-targeting issue. To say that this may be Jordan's favorite talking point is an understatement; I'm beginning to believe that no one has written a major article on the subject without his input. This article comes from the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, published on March 1, 2004 as a straight news item as compared to his Media Notes column. Under the headline "For Reporters in Iraq, Security Gets Personal," Kurtz reported:

There is a long tradition in the news business that journalists, like Red Cross workers, should be seen as unaligned observers with no weapons or agenda. That tradition is being sorely tested, journalists say, in Iraq, where insurgents routinely *target* Americans in shootings and bombings in an effort to undermine the occupying force. ...

Safety is a constant topic of discussion. Several news organizations
have asked the U.S. civilian authority for copies of the daily security updates provided to Western contractors, but the request has not been granted. Others have tried putting curtains in the back of their cars to hide the identities of those inside.

"It's a very dangerous place," said Eason Jordan, CNN executive vice president. "It's more dangerous for people who appear to be Westerners and most dangerous for television people, because they cannot operate in as low a profile way as print journalists."

Interestingly, another source tells Kurtz that all this targeting over which Jordan frets may be self-inflicted:

Ann Cooper, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said the hiring of armed guards can "jeopardize the perception" of journalists as "neutral observers." At a conference in Budapest last fall, she said, European journalists, who generally avoid guns, accused American news organizations of endangering them all by employing armed security in Iraq.

"It's a very hot issue right now," Cooper said. "If you hire armed
guards and they get into a gun battle and kill some civilians, how is
that going to feel? Is that justifiable? The fundamental question is: Is it simply too dangerous for our journalists to continue being there?"

Openly carrying weapons in a battle zone does tend to attract the notice of all sides in a war and could explain some of the phenomena of which Jordan complains. I think if I went to Iraq to get into the field for some reporting, I wouldn't mind having a couple of heavily-armed bestest buddies alongside me, plus a flak jacket or two. But again, that's part of the nature of modern warfare. For better or worse, wars are not fought by two armies marching across a plain at each other and forming squares, like in the days of Napoleon. Especially in this war, combatants dress in mufti, which results in non-combatant casualties -- another reason not to afford unlawful combatants the Geneva POW conventions.

I'll have more in a few minutes about another group that Jordan has accused of targeting journalists.

Targeting A Consistent Theme For Eason Jordan

CQ reader and new blogger The Baron spent a few shillings out of his own pocket for a Nexis article on Eason Jordan research, and as we dig more and more into Jordan's public record, the more we find that Jordan seems obsessed with journalist-targeting. The Baron finds an article from USA Today by Marilyn Greene that ran on page 3 of their 10/5/93 edition. Greene wrote about the lack of reporters in strife-torn Mogadishu, and interviewed Jordan as well as the Toronto Star's Paul Watson. Watson accuses US troops of shooting at him, while Jordan excuses the lack of CNN correspondents in the region to journalist-targeting by combatants:

When U.S. troops landed in Somalia, they were met on the beach by a horde of TV cameras and reporters. When U.S. helicopters were downed Sunday in Somalia, not a single U.S. reporter was in Mogadishu to record the event.

In the 10 months between the arrival and the latest bloodshed, every U.S. media outlet - even ever-present CNN - has pulled out of Mogadishu.

Why? The biggest reason: Reporters and camera crews became targets of
Somalis' outrage about the hunt for warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid.

Five journalists have been killed and dozens wounded.

"I can't count the number of times I've been shot at by both Somalis and U.S. troops," says Paul Watson, correspondent for the Toronto Star, from south Mogadishu. He took dramatic photographs of Somalis dragging the body of a U.S. soldier along Mogadishu's streets. ...

In contrast, CNN has 60 people covering this week's fighting in Moscow.

"It's dangerous, but there's a big difference," Jordan says. "In Somalia, journalists are targeted. Anything that happens in Moscow is incidental."

Note that Jordan doesn't specifically mention who he thinks does the targeting, but that statement along with Watson's quote leaves the impression that Jordan thinks that all sides target journalists. That may be more Greene's fault than Jordan's, of course; she doesn't appear to have asked Jordan to elaborate on Watson's allegations. Nor does Watson specifically allege that US troops targeted him as a journalist, or even aimed at him specifically at all.

However, when covering a war, bullets fly all over the place. No one would expect differently, and indeed Jordan continued to have dozens of reporters in the field in Moscow while the shooting went on. The act of pulling reporters out shows that Jordan believed them to have become targets. By whom? Jordan doesn't say, but based on his comments in Davos, you have to wonder if he hadn't meant to accuse the Americans as well as the Somalis all along.

Eason Jordan Should Know Better

CQ reader John J. passes along two interesting reports about Eason Jordan's personal connection to a journalist that actually was targeted and assassinated in the Middle East. The London Telegraph did a human-interest profile on the widow of Danny Pearl, whose capture and beheading by Islamists in Pakistan first showed the world the bigotry, inhumanity, and bloodthirsty nature of the Islamofascist thugs arrayed against the West. The Telegraph updated its readers on the renaissance of Marianne Pearl in October 2004:

It was an extraordinary way to lose a husband - butchered in Pakistan by kidnappers who revelled in their own inhumanity, who filmed their deeds in order to heighten the shock to Western sensibilities. But Mariane is an extraordinary woman. Instead of curling into a shell, as she is convinced Daniel's assassins hoped she would, she has turned her life into a straightforward declaration of intent: "Terrorists may have destroyed my husband, but they will not have the satisfaction of destroying me." ...

She is 37, but looks younger. As part of not allowing herself to be crushed, she refused to play the quietly grieving widow. After a series of e-mail exchanges and a meeting in Paris, she fell in love again, with Eason Jordan, a CNN executive [emphasis mine -- CE].

That report confirms a New York Daily News blurb about the pair published six months earlier. For a man who's dating the widow of a truly targeted and assassinated reporter, Jordan's latest accusations appear even more morally bankrupt than before. Jordan's allegations that the US military targets and assassinated journalists amount to little more than an "everyone is doing it" sort of moral equivalency, the kind Danny Pearl death demonstrates beyond all doubt is false. It diminishes the death of Pearl by Jordan's claims purportedly showing that it was nothing out of the ordinary. Marianne Pearl can obviously fend for herself, but Jordan's comments look like an extraordinary betrayal of her dead husband's legacy, and a diminishment of her gutsy determination to enjoy life despite the singular brutality of Pearl's death.

Eason Jordan seems to be, in the parlance of older times, a creep.

Michigan Democrats Resist Audit

The Michigan state chair of the Democratic Party called demands from the DNC for an audit of campaign funds a political tactic designed to "tarnish" one of Howard Dean's main opponents in the race for the DNC chair. Mark Brewer refused to conduct an audit on the $8 million in question:

The DNC has demanded an audit of the state party's books because its donors want to know where the money went. The request has been turned down, with Michigan Democratic Chairman Mark Brewer arguing that an audit is unnecessary.

"We don't see a need for it. But we're happy to answer any questions that they may have," Brewer said. "There was nothing wrong that was done. That's why there was no need for an audit."

Brewer said the complaints against him are really an attempt to tarnish the Michigan director of the Kerry-Edwards campaign, Donnie Fowler, in his campaign for DNC chairman.

"It's my belief that this is nothing more than a smear against Donnie Fowler, and the only reason this is being raised is because he's become a candidate for DNC chair," Brewer said. "If this was such an important issue, why did we not hear about it for over two and a half months, until Donnie becomes a serious candidate for DNC chair?"

While Brewer probably has analyzed the demands correctly, he doesn't have much standing to refuse an audit. In the first place, a post-election audit sounds like a good idea anyway, something each state should do on its own just to verify its assets and liabilities and to ensure that money didn't walk away. Additionally, reports of irregularities popped up in Michigan during the campaign, if not in the funding, then in the performance of the Michigan campaign. It eked out a narrow victory for Kerry where the party felt he should have cake-walked, especially given the large union and Arab populations in the state.

On the other hand, the Democrats have to ask themselves if they want to alienate the Michigan voters this badly and baldly. The Democrats can hardly afford this kind of internecine warfare after losing three election cycles in a row and finding themselves shut out of power entirely for at least the next two years. Making their own people out to be crooks simply to get Howard Dean elected as DNC chair redefines the term "self-defeating" and takes it to a new level.

Up to this election, Michigan had been a power base for Democrats. If the DNC plans to continue the implication that their state organization there is under the control of crooks, they'd better be proven right, or they will find no one at home in 2006. They have to defend Debbie Stabenow's Senate seat, which has appeared safe until the DNC went to war with their Michigan subsidiary. Is Howard Dean worth this kind of effort and damage?

Sunnis: Do-Over!

The Sunnis in Iraq still appear to suffer from an electoral hangover. Earlier today, Sunni clerics declared that Sunni underrepresentation in Iraq's historic election -- which they psrtly caused by calling for the Sunni boycott -- renders the resultant government merely temporary. They demand that the new parliament assume only limited powers and schedule new elections immediately:

In its first statement since the balloting, the Association of Muslim Scholars said the balloting lacked legitimacy because of low Sunni participation. The Association called months ago on Sunnis to shun the polls because of the presence of U.S. and other foreign troops. ...

In its statement, the Association said the election "lacks legitimacy because a large portion of these people who represent many spectra have boycotted it." As a result, the Association said the new leadership lacked a mandate to draft a new constitution and should be considered a temporary administration.

"We make it clear to the United Nations and the international community that they should not get involved in granting this election legitimacy because such a move will open the gates of evil," the statement said.

"We are going to respect the choice of those who voted and we will consider the new government — if all the parties participating in the political process agree on it — as a transitional government with limited powers."

What's the Iraqi word for chutzpah? I understand that the Iraqis are new to elections, but in a free society, choosing not to vote has consequences. As we say here in America, if you don't vote, you can't complain about the results. The Sunnis chose not to come to the polls, and while plenty of complaints have come in about a shortage of balloting materials in some polling stations, the true situation was that Sunnis largely chose not to participate.

All governments in a free and democratic society are temporary at any rate, and ideally they hold limited power. However, the new leadership in Iraq cannot afford to think of itself as yet another caretaker government for any length of time. The Iraqis endorsed them in the millions and they need to serve the entire country in establishing security and work on solving their own infrastructure problems. What the Sunni clerics prescribe is a plan for another year of dithering, which will only allow the country's problems to fester and create more hostility and resentment. That will push more people to radicalize instead of casting their lot in with the government chosen by the people.

The Sunnis missed the bus this time around, and the reaction from the clerics sounds more like a way to keep from experiencing the wrath of their followers for pushing some incredibly stupid advice than any kind of prescient warning. The Sunnis themselves should remain patient. The leaders elected by those who did vote promise to involve them despite of their boycott, and if the system works as designed, the bus will come around again on schedule.

When Whiny Wannabes Attack!

The Washington Times carries a story today that simply is too weird to pass without notice. A part owner and "aspiring pop star" in a minor-league (ABA) basketball team from Nashville ran onto the court in the middle of a game last Saturday and ordered the head coach to bench their star player. When the coach refused, she fired her before being carried off the floor in hysterical rage:

The victim was 23-year-old Ashley McElhiney, coach of the minor league American Basketball Association club and the first woman to coach a professional men's basketball team. The owner was Sally Anthony, an aspiring pop star who once gave fans at a Rhythm game free copies of her new album. On Saturday, she gave them something else, storming onto the court in the middle of the game to order the coach to bench a new player, Matt Freije. McElhiney refused. Mrs. Anthony shouted profanities at the coach, then fired her in front of her shocked players. Security guards restrained Mrs. Anthony and escorted her from the building after the game.

The team has since apologized to McElhiney, the team, and its fans, but have not yet addressed McElhiney's status with the team. She has coached the team to a 17-7 record and has been selected as one of the coaches at the All-Star game, a status that the league announced yesterday would be unaffected by any action taken by the Nashville Rhythm. As if proving what an idiot Anthony was, McElhiney's team roared back from an 18-point deficit at the time of her outburst to beat the visiting team.

That wasn't the end of Anthony's wild ride, however. After hanging around long enough to fire McElhiney again in the locker room, she went home and wound up in the hospital under murky circumstances:

A woman describing herself as Mrs. Anthony's sister-in-law called paramedics to Mrs. Anthony's home early Sunday morning, saying she feared Mrs. Anthony had overdosed on Xanax, a drug used to treat anxiety. Mrs. Anthony was taken to Vanderbilt Medical Center and released Monday. Mrs. Anthony told the Tennessean newspaper on Sunday that she tripped on some stairs, hit her head and woke up in "the psych ward." The same day she told the City Paper in Nashville that she had been bitten by a dog. Her mother later told the Tennessean on Monday that Mrs. Anthony was hospitalized because of a bad back.

Wow -- how often does one overdose on Xanax, fall down the stairs, get bitten by a dog, and throw their back out on one night? That's some karmic reaction going on there! My guess from Anthony's earlier outburst is that the first explanation is probably the best.

The ABA has noted one positive development from the idiocy of Sally Anthony, wannabe pop star and wannabe George Steinbrenner. After seeing the threshold of intelligence and class for ABA franchise ownership, the league has received over a thousand applications for prospective owners for their planned expansion. No word has come from the ABA if that includes Leona Helmsley.

Milwaukee Had 17 Precincts With 100+ More Votes Than Voters

Greg Borowski reports in today's Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that an analysis of voting records done by the newspaper reveals that seventeen precincts in the city showed at least 100 more votes than the number of registered voters, even counting the already-problematic same-day registrants. Four precincts, or wards, had more than 500 extra votes:

Record-keeping surrounding the Nov. 2 presidential election in Milwaukee is so flawed that in 17 wards there were at least 100 more votes recorded than people listed by the city as voting there.

In two wards, one on the south side and one on the north side, the gap is more than 500, with fewer than half the votes cast in each ward accounted for in the city's computer system, a Journal Sentinel review has found.

Such gaps were present at different levels in nearly all of the city wards and could hamper the investigation launched last week by federal and local authorities into possible voter fraud by giving an incomplete or inaccurate picture of who actually voted.

They also raise questions about the level of oversight of how the city records who voted in each ward - an important safeguard that, properly done, can be used to spot double voting and other problems.

And unless the gaps can be fully resolved, they leave room for critics to allege that ballot boxes were stuffed in the city, which went heavily to Democrat John Kerry over President Bush in a state with one of the closest margins in the country.

Milwaukee has 312 voting wards, and the MSJ checked the records to see if it could find a pattern of abuse. It didn't find a geographic pattern, although Sean Hackbarth at The American Mind seems to note a couple of interesting items when he checks his map:

From looking at the Journal Sentinel's map of the really messed up wards we see them scattered across the city. The only real concentration was in the far north side, wards 258, 259, and 260. Combined those three wards had 490 more ballots cast than voters listed as voting. Such a concentration could mean a concerted fraud effort was happening in that area. Three wards that also caught my eye: Ward 312 at Marquette University, Ward 39 at UW-Milwaukee, and Ward 44 near UWM. Wards where university students votes makes me suspicious because in 2000 Marquette University students bragged about voting more than once. One of the admitted polling places was Marquette Alumni Memorial Union, Ward 312. These are wards investigators should look at first.

Most of the problem appears to have been a highly careless election staff that didn't bother to scan the election logs, or failed to include them altogether. This is the important safeguard that the MSJ reports was ignored altogether, and it bolsters the notion that systemic fraud may be a secondary explanation, behind incompetence. It resulted in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unrecorded votes as well; Borowski and the MSJ staff found 593 in one ward alone. Lisa Artison could not comment on this development as she was out of the office yesterday, but that's still not good news for her or the bureaucracy she leads.

So now on top of an outrageously high number of same-day registrants (30% of Milwaukee's total for the second presidential election in a row), we have a casual and haphazard counting and verification process to add to a casual and haphazard registration process. The bill attempting to mitigate the latter faces stiff Democratic opposition, and the Democrats have their usual ally in camp for the battle:

On Tuesday, Rick Graber, head of the state Republican Party, challenged his Democratic counterpart to appear at a hearing on the matter Thursday so together they can condemn "the fact that potentially thousands of voters across Wisconsin had their legally cast ballot disenfranchised by fraud and abuse."

Linda Honold, state Democratic Party chair, said she was unsure if she would attend the meeting but added that if she did go, she would do so to oppose the bill.

"If I'm there, I'm not going to be arguing what he wants me to argue," she said.

Others, including the head of the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin and the group Wisconsin Citizen Action, condemned the voter ID proposal.

The Democrats appear united in trying to protect their power base and the easily-manipulated system which keeps them in statewide office. The ACLU can be relied upon to oppose any kind of ID scheme, no matter how reasonable, especially when it favors the Democrats. Perhaps the ACLU could explain why presenting a valid ID on Election Day make voting "harder" for qualified voters, since most people drive to the polls and should have it on them anyway. Those who do not drive can inexpensively get a state photo ID that works just as well and remains valid just as long, and if they write checks in most places, already need. The only people who find it "harder" to vote when ID is required are the people who don't belong in the polling station in the first place.

It appears that Milwaukee's fiasco has many dimensions to it, and both fraud and incompetence remain as root causes. The independent investigation into the city's practices promises to cause an uproar when completed. Stay tuned.

Eason Jordan: An Echo In 2002?

CQ reader and commenter Fluff 'n Stuff did a little research on the Eason Jordan accusations of deliberate assassinations of journalists by the American military, and he found this interview of Jordan by Transnational Broadcast Studies in the spring of 2002. TBS is a publication of the American University in Cairo, where Jordan talked about the difficulties of covering the news around the world and being a global broadcaster instead of an American news service.

The last question that TBS Managing Editor Sarah Sullivan asks Jordan about the technical difficulties of covering the war in Southwest Asia, but Jordan drifts off into strangely familiar territory (emphasis mine):

Sullivan: Your coverage in Afghanistan, it's been reported, has been one of the most expensive and resource-intensive operations CNN has ever undertaken. Can you describe who you have there now, what kind of technologies are being used, and how you're even getting equipment in?

Jordan: We have a large team in Afghanistan as well as in Pakistan, and we've bolstered the size of our Islamabad bureau in recent weeks. We probably have 30 to 40 people in those countries combined, and we'll be there for a long time to come. It's been enormously expensive, but again as with the Middle East, the biggest concern we have is just keeping our people alive. We've seen eight journalists killed in Afghanistan and then obviously the Danny Pearl situation was so tragic. Money is inconsequential in relative terms when we're talking about people's lives. We'll be there for the long term with all the people we need to provide the very best coverage possible. The communications are very expensive, the satellite phones and satellite links. The transportation is very expensive, and the security is very expensive—we have more bodyguards on the ground in Afghanistan than we do journalists.

We're working two very, very big stories right now that have a couple of things in common. One is they're enormously costly, but more importantly or more worrying is that they're both exceptionally dangerous, because we've seen something in both places that I thank God happens very rarely, and that is that in both places journalists are not only being killed but they're being targeted. There are combatants in both of these conflicts who are trying to kill journalists, and that is unusual and a very nightmarish situation.

At the time, I would have taken that quote to mean that Islamists had targeted journalists, like Danny Pearl. Now, in the new context, it sounds like Jordan meant something else entirely. Did he think he had a story about Americans targeting journalists back then? Did he try passing off that rumor to the Egyptian university? Or are both incidents of Geraldo-style "My life is actually in danger" romanticism about the life of the journalist? The theme seems to run in almost every interview and column with which Eason participates.

Eason Jordan sounds a bit paranoid, but I doubt he's prepared for the attacks he'll receive over the next few days over his Davos remarks.

UPDATE: In this interview from April 2004, ironically including the estimable John Burns, Jordan gets more specific about the terrorists doing the targeting:

TERENCE SMITH: Eason Jordan, of course it's more difficult for television. You've got to get a camera to these sites. You're more conspicuous by your presence. How are you working it out?

EASON JORDAN: Well, we do what we can to minimize our exposure, but we do think it's important to get out there, and so we just send the smallest number of people possible out on stories, on assignments. We try to do it in a very intelligent way, taking advice from security experts who carry guns to protect us into the field.

But I do have to take issue with John's point in the beginning. He believes that journalists are not targeted. I do believe that journalists are targeted. There are very specific examples of that. And then beyond what's actually happened on the ground, you have Osama bin Laden in his most recent statement saying that he intends to target big media institutions because he views them as evil propagandists for the U.S. government. And so we take all these threats -- and there are real examples we can cite very specifically -- we take them very specifically and we do consider ourselves targeted.

John Burns downplayed the notion that journalists were specifically targeted as opposed to Westerners in general in the red zones of Iraq. However, Jordan insisted that reporters and their support staff had been specifically targeted for assassination by terrorists. He made no mention of the American military targeting journalists, and that was just eight months ago.

So what has happened in eight months that convinced Jordan of US military assassinations? Jordan needs to give us some answers.

UPDATE II: For a look into Eason Jordan's admitted sins involving coddling Saddam, the blog Solomonia has this excerpt from an April 2003 Washington Times piece by Peter Collins. Collins worked briefly at CNN in 1993, only briefly because he saw Eason Jordan in action. Here's what Collins saw when working from Baghdad:

CNN had made its reputation during the war with its exclusive reports from Baghdad. Shortly after my arrival, I was surprised to see CNN President Tom Johnson and Eason Jordan, then chief of international news gathering, stride into the al-Rasheed Hotel in Baghdad. They were there to help CNN bid for an exclusive interview with Saddam Hussein, timed to coincide with the coming inauguration of President Clinton.

I took part in meetings between the CNN executives and various officials purported to be close to Saddam. We met with his personal translator; with a foreign affairs adviser; with Information Minister Latif Jassim; and with Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz.

In each of these meetings, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Jordan made their pitch: Saddam Hussein would have an hour's time on CNN's worldwide network; there would be no interruptions, no commercials. I was astonished. From both the tone and the content of these conversations, it seemed to me that CNN was virtually groveling for the interview.

The day after one such meeting, I was on the roof of the Ministry of Information, preparing for my first "live shot" on CNN. A producer came up and handed me a sheet of paper with handwritten notes. "Tom Johnson wants you to read this on camera," he said. I glanced at the paper. It was an item-by-item summary of points made by Information Minister Latif Jassim in an interview that morning with Mr. Johnson and Mr. Jordan.

The list was so long that there was no time during the live shot to provide context. I read the information minister's points verbatim. Moments later, I was downstairs in the newsroom on the first floor of the Information Ministry. Mr. Johnson approached, having seen my performance on a TV monitor. "You were a bit flat there, Peter," he said. Again, I was astonished. The president of CNN was telling me I seemed less-than-enthusiastic reading Saddam Hussein's propaganda.

After this experience, Collins decided that CNN didn't fit his idea of journalism and chose to work elsewhere. I'd say he made a good decision.

Kuwait Kills AQ Operatives As Terror Focus Shifts Off Saudis

Kuwait killed five al-Qaeda operatives and captured three more, including the cell leader, as AQ has shifted its focus from Saudi Arabia to the American ally in the Persian Gulf. The AQ cell had targeted American homes in the kingdom for destruction:

Kuwait passed emergency anti-terrorism laws yesterday that granted police wider search powers after foiling a plot to bomb an American residential complex and breaking up an al-Qa'eda cell. ...

Security forces said the group were part of a 24-member cell that had been virtually eliminated in four gun battles in the last month. Eight terrorists had been killed and 14 captured. Two were still on the run.

Police discovered plans to bomb the Alia-Ghalia apartment complex, also known as Fintas Towers, twin high-rise buildings overlooking the sea south of the capital.

Apparently, AQ has found the going a bit too tough in Saudi Arabia these days. Either the Saudi security forces' get-tough policy really works, or the Saudis might have bought them off, although that seems very unlikely to me. (If they did, AQ leadership certainly blew their investment in this cell.) That alone qualifies as a victory, driving AQ from the holy land that they originally formed to protect from American infidels.

Choosing Kuwait as its next target shouldn't surprise anyone. Kuwait has stood outside of mainstream Arab opinion by allying with their American and British liberators, a position that guaranteed a feud with Islamists. However, AQ does not appear to have been terribly successful in establishing its cell, at least in this case, which points to a lack of effective leadership.

If Kuwait successfully defends itself from AQ infiltration, the next targets might be Qatar, which hosted the command center for the Iraq invasion, or possibly Bahrain. The aim for al-Qaeda now appears to frighten the Gulf states from engaging with the United States, a much smaller scale of targets for the group that targeted the US itself in such a spectacular and brutal manner. If the choice of victims says anything about the bully, it seems like AQ has degraded dramatically in the past three years.

Did Eason Jordan Accuse US Military Of Assassinating Journalists?

Forumblog, the blog dedicated to covering the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, reported last Friday that CNN chief Eason Jordan accused the US military of targeting journalists for assassination, and succeeding in twelve cases (via Hugh Hewitt):

During one of the discussions about the number of journalists killed in the Iraq War, Eason Jordan asserted that he knew of 12 journalists who had not only been killed by US troops in Iraq, but they had in fact been targeted. He repeated the assertion a few times, which seemed to win favor in parts of the audience (the anti-US crowd) and cause great strain on others.

Due to the nature of the forum, I was able to directly challenge Eason, asking if he had any objective and clear evidence to backup these claims, because if what he said was true, it would make Abu Ghraib look like a walk in the park. David Gergen was also clearly disturbed and shocked by the allegation that the U.S. would target journalists, foreign or U.S. He had always seen the U.S. military as the providers of safety and rescue for all reporters.

Eason seemed to backpedal quickly, but his initial statements were backed by other members of the audience (one in particular who represented a worldwide journalist group). The ensuing debate was (for lack of better words) a real "sh--storm". What intensified the problem was the fact that the session was a public forum being taped on camera, in front of an international crowd. The other looming shadow on what was going on was the presence of a U.S. Congressman and a U.S. Senator in the middle of some very serious accusations about the U.S. military.

To be fair (and balanced), Eason did backpedal and make a number of statements claiming that he really did not know if what he said was true, and that he did not himself believe it.

To be fair, I can't find anything on this other than the Forumblog source. A Google on Eason Jordan Davos journalist doesn't immediately produce anything on topic other than references back to Forumblog. I have no reason not to trust Forumblog, but I also don't know much about Forumblog. One link does confirm Jordan's participation in the conference, but it's just a roster.

If true, this boggles the mind. Eason Jordan, who represents a news agency, gets up in the middle of an economic forum and claims that America's military has a policy of assassinating journalists -- and then backs off by saying that he's just passing on rumor? Bloggers wouldn't do that, let alone reputable journalists. And if Jordan said this, then why hasn't CNN reported on it? A search of the CNN site for military target journalist reporter returns nothing germane to Jordan's accusations. The second link takes the reader to the death of three reporters in Baghdad during the battle in April 2003. Jordan's own network has not a single mention of this stunning news.

Jordan has admitted to a skewed sense of journalistic ethics in the past. In a shocking column he wrote for the New York Times in April 2003, Jordan admitted that he had spiked news stories that reflected badly on Saddam Hussein to maintain CNN's favor with the genocidal maniac:

Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders. Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard — awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff. ...

A 31-year-old Kuwaiti woman, Asrar Qabandi, was captured by Iraqi secret police occupying her country in 1990 for "crimes," one of which included speaking with CNN on the phone. They beat her daily for two months, forcing her father to watch. In January 1991, on the eve of the American-led offensive, they smashed her skull and tore her body apart limb by limb. A plastic bag containing her body parts was left on the doorstep of her family's home.

I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam Hussein's regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment. At last, these stories can be told freely.

The question must be asked of Eason Jordan, especially in light of last week's events in Davos, as to his true motivations of his oddball sense of ethics. He refuses to report real stories of atrocities when they involve genocidal tyrants that just happen to oppose the United States -- but has no problem passing along rumors of atrocities that slander the American military. Does the protection of innocent life really lie at the heart of Jordan's calculations, or is it something more sinister and political? From where I sit, it looks like Jordan has a lot more interest in damaging American security interests than in reporting truth to the world.

Memogate pales in comparison to this. Memogate could be explained as an out-of-control producer working in a biased environment that allowed her to run wild, although I think it was much more than that. In this case, Jordan runs the news division. If he's passing rumors off as truth, especially in an international forum such as Davos where the damage to US prestige could be fatal to our troops in the field, it could be the worst scandal for American journalism in long memory. It could destroy CNN as a news organization almost overnight.

Jordan needs to come clean about his statements in Davos, and David Gergen should either confirm Jordan's accusations or clear the record. If indeed Forumblog reported this honestly, then Jordan needs to either produce the evidence for such charges or resign in disgrace, with his last action an apology to the US military aired in CNN's prime-time news show. If not, CNN's entire news organization loses all credibility as long as he remains in it.

UPDATE: GayPatriot actually covered this yesterday and lists OpinionJournal's Political Diary (subscription required) as a confirming source:

I'm no fan of openly gay Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Barney Frank, but when at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he did something which surprised -- and pleased me. And I've got to give him credit for questioning a ludicrous claim made by a CNN Executive.

According to Friday's Wall Street Journal Political Diary (available by subscription), Eason Jordan, Chief News Executive at CNN, implied that the American military was deliberately killing journalists in Iraq. He even "offered the story of an Al-Jazeera journalist who had been 'tortured for weeks' at Abu Ghraib, made to eat his shoes, and called "Al Jazeera boy" by his American captors."

And then, this liberal Democrat pressed Mr. Jordan to be more specific, putting the CNN Executive on the spot. The newsman rambled on a bit and mumbled some sort of response about how "'There are people who believe there are people in the military who have it out' for journalists." He could provide no evidence to buttress his claims, then "offered another anecdote: A reporter who'd been standing in a long line to get through a checkpoint at Baghdad's Green Zone had been turned back by the GI on duty. Apparently the soldier had been displeased with the reporter's dispatches, and sent him to the back of the line."

I think we can start thinking about dropping all the "ifs", and start demanding some answers from CNN. If Jordan has evidence of this military practice, why hasn't CNN reported it? And if he has no evidence, why would the chief of a worldwide news agency spread unsubstantiated rumors? What else has CNN reported that is similarly sourced, and what else has CNN suppressed with solid sourcing?

The first symptoms of the cancer may have appeared at CBS, but obviously the malignancy runs much deeper and wider than that.

Dems: We Weren't Obstructionist Enough

Fresh off of their reaction to the historic Iraqi elections as a defeat which required an immediate retreat, the leadership of the Democratic Party further cemented its separation from political reality by declaring today that they failed to obstruct enough judicial nominees in the last session of Congress:

Senate Democrats are "not going to cut and run" from a battle over President Bush's judicial nominations, the party's leader vowed Tuesday, adding that some Democrats regret not having blocked even more appointments.

"If they bring back the same judges we're going to do the same thing," Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said of the administration. Democrats blocked votes on 10 of Bush's first-term appointments to the courts and confirmed more than 200.

Republicans have threatened to change long-standing Senate rules to strip Democrats of their ability to block votes, but Reid sounded a note of defiance. "Well, let them do it," he said.

Well, at least we finally found one battle from which they refuse to "cut and run". Unfortunately for the Democrats, it's their Little Bighorn, which Tom Daschle discovered a bit too late last year. Reid may find himself confident of holding a filibuster, but Reid doesn't have to worry about getting re-elected in 2006. Senators like Kent Conrad, Mark Dayton (who has his own problems), and other red-staters can't afford to pull a Daschle in this session. Already some Democrats want to put some distance between themselves and Reid, Kennedy, Boxer, & Co. I doubt that they'll want to extend the lease on the GOP's main campaign issue in the Senate races of 2004.

As part of the joint interview, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi sounded off on social-security reform. She attempted to use the new Democratic strategy of values focus to slam the proposed changes towards limited privatization:

Reid said not a single Democratic member of the Senate favors using payroll taxes to create personal accounts. And Pelosi said any Social Security legislation "shouldn't begin by slashing benefits." Bush administration officials have said the president may recommend reducing the benefits guaranteed future retirees as part of his plan.

Pelosi said that Bush's plan envisioned taking an "unconscionable, obscene, immoral amount of money to privatize" Social Security.

Let's be clear about this. The money that funds Social Security doesn't grow on a tree somewhere off the Potomac River. That money gets confiscated by the government and redistributed at whim. Bush proposes to allow the taxpayers from whose pockets the money comes some limited choice about how to invest it in order to create better return for their money. Perhaps one could call that misguided or inefficient, but how exactly does allowing a taxpayer to control their own property equate to immorality or obscenity? Does Nancy Pelosi consider property rights unconscionable? Do the Democrats really want to run on a platform of eliminating property rights in 2006?

I truly thought that after losing three straight national election cycles, the Democrats would learn from their mistakes, grow up, and marginalize the fringe. From what they've done so far, they not only have failed to learn a single lesson from their defeats, their current leadership appears to want nothing less than the utter destruction of the Democratic Party.

Happy Blogiversary, INDC Journal!

Bill Ardolino at INDC Journal celebrates his first blogiversary today by sharing a slideshow of images from his creative and intrepid reporting. Be sure to drive his bandwidth costs out of sight by checking it out -- and drop one of the blogosphere's best a congrats on this special day.

Bill Clinton To Head UN Tsunami Relief

Here's a report that will likely have everyone buzzing shortly:

Secretary-General Kofi Annan has selected former U.S. President Bill Clinton to be the U.N. point man for tsunami relief and reconstruction, a well-informed U.N. diplomat said Tuesday.

U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard refused to confirm the appointment but said "a statement will be released on the subject by my office in the next few hours."

Why do I hear the theme from "Jaws" in my mind, all of a sudden?

How fortunate for Hillary Clinton that her husband will have such a high-profile position over the next couple of years. It will give her endless opportunities to be seen in his shadow, smiling and nodding but unable to get a word in edgewise against the Great Oxygen Remover. On the other hand, pushing him to the opposite side of the globe may give Hillary the opportunity to work alone for a while, building her move to the center for her re-election campaign in 2006 and the presidential campaign two years afterwards. In either case, it means that Bill will once again be given a pulpit from which to pontificate on American foreign policy.

I'm curious about one thing, though. Doesn't Annan care about the connections that Bill Clinton had to Marc Rich, who appears to be at the center of the Oil-For-Food corruption scandal? It looks like Annan still hasn't learned a damned thing about accountability from UNSCAM.

Strib Still Not Quite Getting It

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune finally reacted to the Iraqi election on its editorial page, and to my surprise, with amazing reasonableness -- at least for the Strib. While they decline to discuss why they waited a full day to react, they didn't make the same mistake that the New York Times made in scoffing with faint praise at the historic nature of the event. The Strib, however, still sticks to its guns (so to speak) in refusing to understand why American security depended on this outcome:

It was easy to find naysayers who viewed Sunday's Iraqi election darkly. Do not count us among them. Yes, there were suicide bombers, mortar shells and other violence. But they simply made the act of voting all the more poignant. By their courageous votes, a majority of Iraqi citizens sent a blistering message to the insurgents and terrorists: We don't want you; we don't want your violence; we want peace, and we want democracy.

President Bush had good reason to celebrate the election as a success, because it was, for Iraq and for the United States. The Iraqi election coordinators, with powerful help from American forces, put together a good, fair and apparently transparent election under difficult circumstances.

That lead makes for a good start, but one which the editorial board squanders, although in far less hyperbolic tones than normally employed when discussing the foreign policy of the Bush administration:

But pause, please, to consider also the cost. While the Iraqi people seized the day, it was a day achieved through the blood sacrifices of many young Americans. We still don't find that bargain justified. American troops should be called to lay their lives on the line for the defense of their nation, not to bring democracy to anyone. Iraq should not have been invaded.

Bear in mind that this point of view came belatedly to the Star Tribune board. James Lileks pointed this out in his Bleat over a year ago, when he reminded the Strib of their support for "punishing attacks" on Saddam:

Let’s go back to the editorial page the day after the 1998 bombing. Lead edit. Title: “BOMBING SADDAM. Reason is clear; let attack be sustained.” The writer lays out the case: Saddam has not complied with his obligations; he threw away the last chance that President Clinton gave him in November; Tony Blair agrees. Said the editorial: “Neither will the attack be credible if it is limited to a few cruise missiles lobbed at Iraq. This must be the sustained, punishing effort that Clinton has promised.”

The end result of which was five more years of Saddam’s rule. Interesting choice of words, that: “Punishing.” Saddam must be punished, then left in power. He must be hit with a credible attack, then left in power. The punishing, credible attack that leaves him in power must be sustained. And so forth.

I’ve read enough editorials from various papers from this period to reinforce something I’ve long suspected: the reason many editorialists hate this war is because they don’t feel it’s theirs.

American security, as we all saw on 9/11, cannot be defended at our shoreline. If we wait until the terrorists come here and then employ our armed forces in defense, it will come far too late. We need to not only track down the terrorists themselves, but we need to actively transform the environments which breed terrorism. That won't happen by appeasing the tyrants that oppress people into desperation, but by liberating the oppressed and allowing them to control their own destinies.

Why start with Saddam? people ask now. Well, we didn't; we started off with Afghanistan. If people forget that fact, small wonder -- the media hardly reports on Afghanistan any more. Why? Because they have transformed themselves into a nascent democracy, and that has been so successful that American media outlets found themselves bored, and sent their reporters elsewhere.

Saddam went next because a state of war already existed between Iraq and the West. His refusal to comply with the terms of his cease-fire agreements and sixteen UNSC resolutions meant we had to commit large numbers of troops in the immediate region to pressure him into supposedly staying "in his box". We found out only after the invasion that UNSC members like Germany, Syria, France, and Russia continued to supply Iraq with weapons up to at least 2002, in defiance of the sanctions that formed the "box". Only after we captured Baghdad did we find out the extent of Saddam's skim from the UN Oil-For-Food program, most of which went into the weapons he bought from the so-called allies of the West.

Of all the nations in the area that produces Islamofascist terrorism, Saddam's Iraq presented the most pressing military threat to our forces, and his attacks on our no-fly enforcement flights were deliberate provocations, practically daring us to remove him. Geographically, it also provided a transit corridor between Iran and Syria for terrorists to move around Southwest Asia, a corridor that no longer exists. Saddam also boasted of supporting terrorists such as Abu Nidal and the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. His genocides against the Kurds and the Shi'a were well documented.

In fact, it's hard to understand why Saddam would not have been first, except for the Taliban's obstinacy in protecting Osama bin Laden. Iraq's twelve-year quagmire was not going to improve by ignoring it for another twelve years, and our options in the end were exactly what it had been all along: either invade and remove Saddam, surrender and withdraw, or continue the illusion of "the box" while our erstwhile allies continued to sell us out.

Against that backdrop, which the Strib manages now to avoid completely, and considering the forward strategy of engagement for terrorists and the transformation of the oppressive environments that encourage them, an invasion of Iraq should be seen as precisely the kind of action that protects America in the long term. The Strib may not like the notion of a forward strategy, but I'd bet most people would prefer to transform the region with democracy instead of fending off attacks at the Atlantic shoreline. In asymmetrical warfare, it's almost impossible to do with a zero-failure rate, and when missing 1% means thousands or millions of American civilians die a horrible death, that option sounds quite unpalatable.

Now, when Arabs in Southwest Asia see Iraqis celebrating their ability to choose their own leaders on al-Jazeera or al-Arabiya, they will wonder why their own governments do not allow it. When Syrians see polling stations in Damascus for Iraqi expatriates to cast their ballots, they wonder why they cannot vote in their own country for their own leaders. The Saudis will note that their northern neighbors have more ability and enthusiasm for open debate about the future of their country, while the Saudis themselves see endless lines of princes autocratically decreeing almost every aspect of their lives. Iranian activists will take energy from the spectacular success of the elections and renew their demands for real reform. And all of this political pressure will eventually transform what has been a benighted backwater into an energetic and dynamic open political society.

I mourn the loss of fourteen hundred of America's best young men and women just the same as the Strib. I know that they died for a just and noble cause, even as I wish that it had not been necessary. Until we defeat Islamofascist terrorists, the best we can do is to remove their bases of support and the cesspools that breed them. And that is why Saddam had to go, why we had to do it, and why Sunday's elections were such a major victory for Bush and the war on terror.

Faith-Based Hate From Howard Dean

I missed this yesterday, but Myopic Zeal points out a revealing New York Daily News item about Howard Dean and his quest to lead the Democrats for the next four years. Dean rallied his supporters by engaging in his famously moderate rhetoric:

"I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for, but I admire their discipline and their organization," the failed presidential hopeful told the crowd at the Roosevelt Hotel, where he and six other candidates spoke at the final DNC forum before the Feb. 12 vote for chairman.

But Dean said the Democrats should not change their beliefs to be "Republican lite."

"We can talk about our faith, but we cannot change our faith," he said, echoing themes he sounded in his presidential bid. "We need to be people of conviction."

Oh my. Does the DNC want the Democrats to become the Party of Hate? And just what kind of faith does Howard Dean have that requires him to "hate" Republicans? I have no problem with opposition; that's the basis of free speech and democracy, after all. But to have someone who wants to claim the leadership post of one of the two major political parties tell the nation that he hates a plurality of Americans would disqualify a Republican candidate immediately. Apparently, over at the DNC, that's their primary prerequisite.

Dean and his followers demonstrate the illness that has infected the American Left since the 1960s. They don't just oppose -- they hate. They hate Republicans, they hate suburbia, they hate just about everything America has done. They also hate it when people point out this rather obvious fact, claiming that their critics engage in censorship and McCarthyism. However, it's pretty damned difficult to maintain that facade when Dean gets up on a stump and says, "I hate Republicans and everything they stand for."

Will the Democrats elect Dean chair of the DNC? Are they prepared to endorse his platform of hate? If they do, they just confirm that the party has completely lost its mind, and the leadership has consigned themselves to a generation of diminishing minorities. They may as well change the name to the Whigs, as Howard Dean and the neo-Stalinists at International ANSWER will drive them to the same fate.

Iraqi President: American Withdrawal "Nonsense"

In a slap at the Democratic leadership that has screeched about "exit strategies" after Sunday's historic victory for democracy, the Iraqi president proclaimed talk of withdrawing American troops "nonsense" and a recipe for disaster in the region:

Iraq's interim president said Tuesday it would be "complete nonsense" to ask U.S. and other foreign troops to leave Iraq at this point but some of the 170,000 soldiers could be leaving Iraq by the end of the year.

Ghazi al-Yawer, who had been a strong critic of some aspects of the U.S. military operation in Iraq, said foreign troops should leave only after Iraq's security forces are built up, the security situation has improved and some pockets of terrorists are eliminated.

"It's only complete nonsense to ask the troops to leave in this chaos and this vacuum of power," al-Yawer told reporters.

Perhaps Democrats like Ted Kennedy, Harry Reid, Mark Dayton, and Lynn Woolsey, who took the opportunity to rail about the bad effect American servicemen and servicewomen had on the situation in Iraq, should have talked to the leaders their before opining on the situation. The Iraqis don't like having to rely on foreign troops for their security, it is true, but they also recognize the necessity of it for the short run. Al-Yawer and other politicians also resist the notion of a timetable for an American retreat that will tell terrorists how long to hold out.

Actually, al-Yawer has sharply criticized the American presence in the past, far more than prime minister Ayad Allawi has been willing to do, which makes this statement of common sense somewhat surprising. Al-Yawer even referred to this in his statement, when he spoke of the mistakes made by the Coalition forces in Iraq over the past two years:

He acknowledged that the U.S.-led invasion and the collapse of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship had caused problems in the country.

"Yes, the foreign forces are part of the problem and right now we are trying to have them as part of the solution," al-Yawer said. "Well, getting rid of Saddam is one of the best achievements that the foreign troops had done because we needed this solution.

"But then there were a few mistakes during the war. If you do not work, you don't make mistakes. But if you work, you make mistakes. ... I think all in all it was positive, the contribution of the foreign forces in Iraq," al-Yawer said. "It was worth it."

Statements like these from the people that know demonstrate the lack of insight from which the Democratic leadership suffers, as well as their knee-jerk reaction towards blaming America first. Some have questioned the notion that Ted Kennedy, Mark Dayton, Barbara Boxer, Lynn Woolsey, and others represent the true Democratic leadership, but I didn't see Hillary Clinton on the TV on Sunday making the talk-show circuit. Why not? Because she's smart enough to keep quiet with her new-found centrism; she can't afford to alienate the International ANSWER crowd that fuels the Left by acknowledging democracy's huge victory in Iraq. That would cripple her in the next presidential election primary cycle, even if it would boost her in the general election.

So the leaders that the Democrats choose to make these public statements certainly appear to be leading the party. Harry Reid, after all, is the Senate Minority Leader, and he released his upcoming speech calling for an American withdrawal from Iraq, couched as an "exit strategy" and a firm timetable, instead of waiting until Iraq's security forces can handle the job on their own. Even in the words of an Iraqi leader who has criticized our presence there, the Democrats are spewing nonsense. Too bad they can't recognize it themselves.

Sunnis: What, You Guys Were Serious?

The Washington Times reports this morning that the heavy turnout for the Iraq elections not only surprised those in the West who thought that the threat of violence would suppress the vote, but shocked the Sunnis, who counted on it:

Sunni Arabs yesterday appeared shocked by the large turnout of Shi'ites and Kurds in Sunday's elections, with some anxiously looking for ways to bolster their representation in the new government that will emerge from them. But many Shi'ites, triumphant after voting in high numbers in spite of terrorist threats, had a simple message for the Sunnis who stayed home: Tough luck. Yazin al-Jabouri, a spokesman for the Sunni-led Homeland Party, said many people in Sunni parts of the country hadn't voted because the electoral commission had not sent enough ballot boxes and forms. "They didn't think people were going to vote," he said, adding that he had sent a letter to the commission urging an extension in the balloting.

The jubilant Iraqis have little patience for those former Sunni masters who profited in the oppression of the Shiites and Kurds outside the Sunni Triangle. As far as they're concerned, the Sunnis made their choice on Election Day, and that choice was to boycott and give comfort and aid to those who tried to disrupt the elections through violence. The purple-finger brigade made their lack of sympathy clear:

"We carried our father three hours to get him to the polls," said Muthana Jaffar al-Tamimi, 30, a grocery store clerk and art school graduate in Baghdad's middle-class Shi'ite neighborhood of Karada. The Sunni Arabs "could have made the process successful themselves," he said. "They could have gotten involved, but they didn't. We decided our destiny. They decided theirs." He added, "It's their problem."

The American diplomat who briefed the reporters told them that the Sunnis still operated under the old paradigm of negotiating at gunpoint. They want power delivered to them by violence, not votes, and they failed to understand the depth of Iraqi desire to rid the country of that kind of thinking. Now they want a seat at the table despite their huge political miscalculation.

They will likely get it, at least in some form, although they will have to wait until the next general election to get seats in the new parliament. The great task for this session will be to produce a new constitution and the new executives, both of which will need Sunni involvement for the best chance of success. Look to the elected Iraqis to do some outreach to the Sunni community -- a last-chance kind of offer, probably -- but tie it to better cooperation with stamping out the last of the foreign terrorists and the Saddamite holdouts. Even the Sunnis apparently see which way the wind blows in Iraq these days.

Another Who Could Use Prayer

Hugh Hewitt just interviewed a 6-year-old girl who has a new website, Megan's Home. Megan has a rare autoimmune disease known as Microscopic Polyangiitis (MPA). The disease has seriously damaged her kidneys, and she will need a transplant soon. She's quite a little artist, and her dad has put plenty of her drawings of flowers on the website, along with an explanation of her disease and Megan's prognosis.

You all were so kind with your prayers and thoughts for the First Mate, and the strength we took from that was tremendous. I'd feel remiss if I didn't ask you to visit Megan's website and sign her guestbook, drop her an e-mail, say a prayer, or all three.

Educational Death Penalty For Supporting Corporal Punishment?

CQ reader Dave Mendoza points me to an article that appeared in last week's Daily Orange, the campus newspaper of Syracuse University, regarding the expulsion of Scott McConnell from nearby LeMoyne College. McConnell, a graduate student in education, does not fit LeMoyne's atmosphere of political correctness. He believes in corporal punishment and rejects the focus on multiculturalism in the classroom:

While students are guaranteed the freedom of speech, LeMoyne College's recent actions against a student have raised questions of whether or not academic papers are the place to exercise this right.

LeMoyne College expelled Scott McConnell, a student from its Masters of Education program, for writing a paper in which he advocated the use of corporal punishment in schools, he said.

The paper, written for a class on classroom management, originally earned McConnell an A-. However, when he attempted to enroll in classes for the spring semester, he found he couldn't.

It wasn't just corporate punishment that got McConnell banished from LeMoyne, ironically a Catholic college that proclaims its commitment to "the Jesuit tradition" -- one that most Catholic-school kids would remember as not particularly shy about the paddle across the rear or rulers across the knuckles. (I went to public school, but in an era where both remedies remained available to teachers and administrators.) The Syracuse Post-Standard reported in an earlier story that McConnell's viewpoint on multiculturalism offended the enlightened souls at LeMoyne:

Dr. Cathy Leogrande, director of the Graduate Education Program, told McConnell in the letter that she had reviewed his grades and talked to his professors.

"I have grave concerns regarding the mismatch between your personal beliefs regarding teaching and learning and the Le Moyne College program goals," leading to the decision not to admit him, Leogrande wrote. ...

He said he's also been trying to find out what Leogrande meant by "mismatch." College administrators have told him, he said, that it stems from the four-page "Classroom Management Plan" he submitted Nov. 2 for his Planning, Assessing and Managing Inclusive Classrooms class.

In the opening paragraph of his essay, McConnell wrote: "I do not feel that multicultural education has a philosophical place or standing in an American classroom, especially one that I will teach. I also feel that corporal punishment has a place in the classroom and should be implemented when needed." He got an A for the course.

I do not know Scott McConnell, so I cannot peer into his soul to see why he objects to multicultural education. Perhaps McConnell was expressing latent racism. A better explanation, however, is that he sees the American classroom as a place for classic learning instead of social engineering, and that multiculturalism amounts to little more than political indoctrination, no matter how benign one considers it. A belief in corporal punishment also hardly qualifies one for public shunning. The notion may not enjoy massive popularity, but it isn't a fringe belief either.

Besides, the Jesuits have engaged in bitter irony in their treatment of McConnell. LeMoyne intends on protecting multiculturalism in the classroom -- by ensuring that everyone who enrolls at their college thinks exactly like they do. The administration shows its opposition to corporal punishment by giving any student espousing it the academic death penalty. The intellectual posturing and moral hypocrisy in these actions and positions truly dizzies the bystander.

Some still scoff when conservatives refer to the overwhelming liberal and leftist bias at universities and colleges in the US. This shows that far from striving to provide students the ability to debate and discuss all points of view, colleges and their administrations have developed a thought police of almost Orwellian proportions to defend their last bastion of Utopian thought. Academia provides no freedom of speech or conscience, and LeMoyne and the Jesuits have clearly communicated that in order to stay enrolled, students must never speak their minds. What a sad and sorry state for LeMoyne, its students, its alumni -- and for the students their graduates go on to teach in our classrooms.

So Many Names, So Little Capacity For Thought

I have received e-mail today asking why I'm not making a bigger deal of this portion of the Meet the Press transcript from yesterday, in which John Kerry appears to accuse American intelligence service of running weapons to the Communists during Viet Nam:

MR. RUSSERT: And you have a hat that the CIA agent gave you?

SEN. KERRY: I still have the hat that he gave me, and I hope the guy would come out of the woodwork and say, "I'm the guy who went up with John Kerry. We delivered weapons to the Khmer Rouge on the coastline of Cambodia [emphasis mine]." We went out of Ha Tien, which is right in Vietnam. We went north up into the border. And I have some photographs of that, and that's what we did. So, you know, the two were jumbled together, but we were on the Cambodian border on Christmas Eve, absolutely.

The Khmer Rouge, of course, were the Cambodian Communist rebels that wound up sacking the country after we bailed out of Southeast Asia. Why Kerry would think that we ran weapons to the Communists in Cambodia while battling them in Viet Nam is beyond me. It's apparent that he's making this story up as he goes along. Every time he's asked about Christmas in Cambodia, he changes the story. This time, he came up with a name that fits with the subject matter, but he's so clueless that he either didn't know or couldn't remember exactly what the Khmer Rouge were.

It's yet another marker of the dishonesty we've come to expect from the junior senator from Massachusetts. He won't sign the Form 180, either, even with his promise to do so in the same interview. His prevarication has become pathological.

Burns Provides Balance On Pages Of NYT

Despite my dislike for the New Yorks Times' editorial policies and the way it appears to infect its news reporting, one of the bright spots of the mainstream news media is John Burns, the veteran Times correspondent for the Middle East. His work cannot usually be characterized as biased, and he regularly provides balanced coverage.

His report today on the Iraqi election is no exception. Burns notes that while the Iraqis still remain skeptical about American motives, they clearly delighted in the ability to select their own leadership, and that the religious differences that has frightened the Left into hysteria is overblown:

Nobody among the hundreds of voters thronging one Baghdad polling station on Sunday could remember anything remotely like it, not even those old enough to have taken part in Iraq's last partly free elections more than 50 years ago, before the assassination of King Faisal II began a spiraling descent into tyranny.

The scene was suffused with the sense of civic spirit that has seemed, so often in America's 22 months here, like a missing link in the plan to build democracy in Iraq. Gone, for this day at least, was the suspicion that 24 years of bludgeoning under Saddam Hussein had bred a disabling passivity among the country's 28 million people, an unwillingness, among many, to become committed partners in fashioning their own freedoms.

At the Darari primary school, east of the Tigris River in central Baghdad, the courtyard teemed with people of all ages, and of all ethnic and religious groups, doing what American military commanders here have urged for so long: standing up for themselves, and laying down a marker, with their votes, that signaled they could not be intimidated into surrendering their rights by the insurgents who have terrorized the country with guns and bombs and butchers' knives.

Burns also relates a story that shows the Arabic predilection for conspiracy theories remains strong:

Nor, it seemed clear, could Americans assume that elections made possible by United States military power would reverse, except briefly, the hostility toward their country. Many voters said they would not have been there choosing new leaders if the United States had not led the invasion that rid them of Mr. Hussein. But as often as not, the words seemed reluctant, as if crediting Americans for anything was a step too far.

One man, Ahmed Dujaily, 80, a London-trained engineer who was agriculture minister under King Faisal II, put it politely. "We thank the Americans for destroying the regime of Saddam," he said. "But often, they were not careful for the people; they did many wrong things. Now, we know what they are looking for. They are looking for oil, and military bases, and domination of the new regime. They will have their military headquarters for the region in Iraq, and when they will leave, nobody knows."

Of course, Dujaily has plenty of company for his paranoia. Lynn Woolsey, supposedly a rational representative of American politics, said much the same thing on MS-NBC yesterday, claiming that the American military were in Iraq to generate profits for Halliburton. In fact, her fellow party members appeared all over the television talk shows yesterday urging Bush to abandon Iraq as soon as the transports could fly. Small wonder Dujaily thinks the way he does; al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya probably have news hours built for American defeatism on display.

Burns doesn't rise to the bait, however, reporting that Baghdad had never seemed more relaxed to veteran travelers in the region, both for the residents and the American soldiers which helped secure the city:

American soldiers on checkpoint duty hundreds of yards back from the Darari school showed what a morale boost the elections had been for them as they relaxed in the sunshine beside their Humvees and Bradley fighting vehicles, with lowered weapons and ready smiles for the voters passing by. There had been no day like it since the first American units arrived to the cheers of crowds and the tossing of flowers in April 2003, and that lasted barely 24 hours, as unchallenged looting began to devastate the city.

Foreigners who have been visiting Iraq for 15 years and knew the tension that crackled under Mr. Hussein could remember no other day when the city, in wide areas, seemed so much at ease.

The sound of distant bombs, mortars and rifle fire punctuated the day, and televisions quickly spread the message that there were at least 28 new Iraqi victims of the insurgent violence in Baghdad. Overhead, American attack helicopters bristling with missiles were never far away.

But much of the larger part of the tableau, to those who have lived in a city paralyzed by the war, was the fact that great streams of people flowed down avenues and side streets emptied of traffic where, for months, the watchword has been haste and vigilance about the risks of sudden death.

Most Western coverage missed this perspective on Baghdad, even though milbloggers like Beef Always Wins had the photographic evidence to prove it. John Burns, as always, proves himself an invaluable resource for those who want to stay truly informed on Middle East events. Be sure to keep up with his reports while the New York Times still employs him.

If you want to know more about Burns, read this post (I don't think the original article is still available) and see how he was the first reporter to unveil Moqtada al-Sadr as an inept clown. It provided welcome contrast to the MSM screeching that anointed Sadr as the brains behind the coming Shi'ite revolution in Iraq.

UPDATE: Actually, the original article is still live on the system.

Inside Black Rock: A Look At The Memogate Fiasco From Within

New York Magazine has a fascinating look at the Memogate fiasco from people on the inside at CBS News. David Blum reports from CBS sources about the inside manuevering that led to the dismissal of four underlings while Andrew Heyward managed to hold onto his job, and sheds a bit more light on the involvement of Dan Rather before and after the story aired:

[After her dismissal, Betsy] West went back to her Upper West Side apartment after her session with Heyward. But [Josh] Howard chose instead to dodge the traffic on West 57th Street and return to the nondescript office building across the street that has housed 60 Minutes since the seventies. At 10:30 a.m., once the public announcement had been made, Howard addressed the 60 Minutes Wednesday staff outside his ninth-floor office. Heyward agreed to cross West 57th Street himself to join Howard; and so, after Howard’s brief, poignant farewell, greeted by tears and an ovation from the crowd of producers and assistants, Heyward stepped forward.

“I’m here to put a human face on today’s sad events,” the CBS News president said solemnly.

“Then why didn’t you get a human being to come over here and do it?” one producer was heard to mutter. Many in the room felt Heyward’s words rang particularly hollow, given that he had not demonstrated any particular humanity by sacrificing the careers of his trusted lieutenants and friends, while managing to preserve his own. When Heyward stopped speaking, he was met with stony silence.

The sour mood at Black Rock doesn't stop at the door of the division president, either. Employees see Les Moonves as someone more interested in the bottom line than in the welfare of the division. Heyward kept costs in line, and so Moonves spared him, allowing Heyward to sacrifice his friends instead. Even outside of Black Rock, that has been widely acknowledged as a cowardly move:

Moonves calculated that by removing four top journalists from their jobs at CBS News, he’d be perceived as a decisive executive unafraid to punish those who jeopardized the news division’s reputation. In the short run, his strategy worked; front-page stories around the country proclaimed that CBS News had cleaned up its mess. But in the weeks that followed, it has become clear that Moonves failed to comprehend or address the more subtle truths revealed in the investigation. He neglected to consider that Betsy West, Heyward’s deputy for seven years, would never do anything not mandated by her boss—and that most of their daily contact was verbal, not through e-mail, rendering Heyward’s written posture of outrage relatively meaningless. He failed to credit Josh Howard’s gutsy e-mail proposing a public admission of a possible mistake less than 48 hours after the story aired.

Dan Rather remains a polarizing figure in the halls at CBS, too. The full Thornburgh-Boccardi report damned Rather in its details, showing that he had much more involvement in producing, and later protecting, the story. Even if Moonves could keep that from the civilians in the audience with a bit of post-panel spin, the veterans of broadcast news know differently after reading the report:

Some at CBS remain particularly upset by Rather’s conduct, both before and after the story aired. The anchorman lent his enormous credibility to the story, and seemed to have pushed his normally sharp reportorial instincts aside to get it on the air. The vague public statement from Rather that followed the commission’s findings failed to contain any apology, and he has continued to defend the piece despite ample reason to doubt it.

Much has been made of Rather’s failure to see the piece before it aired, but that fact isn’t very meaningful; he’d read multiple drafts of the script for the story (written by producer Mapes), done most of the interviews, and had a thorough knowledge of the story’s content and point of view. He was hardly the uninformed mouthpiece portrayed in the media.

Rather knew full well the story’s implications for the presidential election then only two months away. The anchorman’s experience at going after sitting presidents is well known, as is his dogged pursuit of tough assignments. But Rather’s reputation as a Bush hater, true or not, has allowed journalists to wonder whether Rather helped rush the story on the air partly for political reasons. “Elections have consequences,” the anchorman had been heard to mutter around the CBS News hallways last year, an apparent reference to his feelings about the crucial importance of replacing Bush this past November.

One fascinating, largely overlooked paragraph in the commission’s report strongly supports the theory that Rather actively pushed the story through without adequate concern for its factual basis. While Rather told the commission that he warned Heyward of the story’s “radioactive” nature, Heyward denied to the commission that Rather ever said such a thing. Indeed, Heyward—once Rather’s executive producer at the Evening News—told the panel that when he warned Rather, the weekend before the story aired, to make certain the documents were real, Rather replied simply: “Of course.” In a later conversation, Heyward recalled Rather’s saying he did not want to “lose the exclusive.” Heyward recalled getting the impression from Rather that they were trying to beat another news outlet to the “scoop.”

Another juicy tidbit came out of Blum's reporting. Despite having only two members on the panel, CBS insiders say that Thornburgh and Boccardi both skipped hearing testimony from CBS staffers asked to provide information for the investigation:

The commission itself has also come under attack, largely by supporters of those punished after its findings were released. None of those involved in the CBS panel—retired Associated Press executive Louis Boccardi, former U.S. attorney general Richard Thornburgh, and lawyers from the firm of Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham—had any direct experience with investigative journalism. The commission’s interviews were conducted on the nineteenth floor of “Black Rock,” the CBS corporate headquarters on West 52nd Street, a short walk from the supersize office of Leslie Moonves. No tape recordings were made. The two commissioners and lawyers scribbled handwritten notes on the proceedings—when they were in the room, that is. At various times, either Boccardi or Thornburgh were said to be absent from interviews with witnesses. It seemed to the panel’s critics an oddly casual approach for a commission with a mandate to investigate unscrupulous journalistic practices.

This may explain why the panel seemed so reluctant to make the judgments supposedly asked of it by CBS News. They took no recordings, relied on handwritten notes, and forced people to talk to them while being just steps away from Les Moonves' office. Thornburgh and Boccardi didn't even bother to attend all of these sessions themselves. How many did they actually attend? Whose testimony did they miss? It seems strange that the only two investigators would simply skip out on the investigation -- unless its outcome had already been established.

The more of the details we learn of the Memogate story and the CBS investigation, the shabbier it looks. I don't think that Heyward's resignation is enough anymore. It's time for Sumner Redstone to call Moonves and inform him that the responsibility for this fiasco has been elevated, and that he can pick up Andrew Heyward on his way out the door. (via RatherBiased)

The Tale Of Two Times

Two of the more aggressively anti-Bush newspapers had repeatedly question the timetable for the Iraqi elections in its editorials over the past few weeks. Now that the elections have been proven a spectacular success, I thought a visit to the editorial pages of New York's and Los Angeles' leading papers would be revealing.

The LAT appears more ready to concede that the elections were a resounding success and give credit for Bush's tenacity for holding to the promised schedule for voting:

It takes courage to vote with the sound of mortars and gunfire still ringing and memories of terrorist beheadings still fresh. Whatever the final tally of the turnout Sunday in Iraq, the willingness of millions to defy suicide bombers and killers who threatened havoc at the polls provided some unequivocal good news. Not least, the world could honestly see American troops making it possible for a long-oppressed people to choose their destiny. ...

Turnout appeared low, as expected, in Sunni areas, higher in Shiite and Kurdish strongholds. Insurgents managed to kill more than 40 people, despite traffic bans. President Bush said last week, "I urge people to defy these terrorists." Many did so, leading Bush to proclaim Iraq committed to democracy. He was somewhat ahead of events, for commitment will require forming a government that continues to advance peace and stability. But the Bush administration was proved right in sticking to its election timetable.

All in all, the Los Angeles Times provided a reasoned, balanced, and fair look at the election and its meaning, although I think it missed the truly historic and strategic nature of the event. Acknowledging that Iraqi self-determination is good does not take much risk in an editorial, after all. However, they still manage to outdo their East Coast counterparts:

This page has not hesitated to criticize the Bush administration over its policies in Iraq, and we continue to have grave doubts about the overall direction of American strategy there. Yet today, along with other Americans, whether supporters or critics of the war, we rejoice in a heartening advance by the Iraqi people. For now at least, the multiple political failures that marked the run-up to the voting stand eclipsed by a remarkably successful election day.

But once the votes are fully counted and the new governing and constitution-writing bodies begin their work, those errors, particularly the needless estrangement of mainstream Sunni Arabs and their political leaders, must be urgently addressed. In the longer run, this election can only be counted as a success if it helps lead to a unified Iraq that avoids civil war and attracts a broad enough range of Iraqis to defend itself against its enemies without requiring long-term and substantial American military help.

That day has now become easier to envision. But it still appears very far off. It's impossible to say, in the glow of election day, how many of the millions of Iraqis who voted did so in hopes that they were making the first step toward a Shiite theocracy. Many - though certainly not all - Shiite leaders have said repeatedly that that they want to work toward an inclusive secular state in which all groups have a stake. What happens next will depend to a considerable extent on the wisdom and restraint the largely Shiite victors show in reaching out to Sunnis who have felt unfairly marginalized.

The Gray Lady cannot bring herself to utter the three most obvious words taken from yesterday's news: Bush was right. Not only that, but we get more defeatism in the midst of victory with the NYT fretting about whether voters wanted to use democracy to create a theocracy, and how the Sunni feel "unfairly" marginalized by a voluntary boycott.

I have to admit, though, that the New York Times at least managed to outdo the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Despite its overheated and incoherent rhetoric on all things Bush, utter silence has fallen over the Strib's opinion page today. The editorial board of the state's leading newspaper has absolutely nothing to say about the remarkable victory of democracy over fear in Iraq yesterday, or the liberation of millions of people from former tyranny and the present threat of Islamofascist oppression. Not one word. Cowards.

OK, OK, Now We'll Help You

The Europeans have decided that Iraq might just like the idea of democracy after all, and have now pledged to support Iraq in its efforts to build the pillars of a representative government:

European Union foreign affairs chief Javier Solana said Monday the Iraqi authorities can count on the support of the 25-nation EU after this weekend's elections highlighted the willingness to move toward a democratic Iraq.

The Iraqi people "are going to find the support of the European Union — no doubt about that — in order to see this process move on in the right direction," Solana said in an interview with The Associated Press. ...

The EU's head office said on Friday that it wants to funnel $260 million more in aid to Iraq this year to help with the country's reconstruction and increasing democracy.

Europe's support will receive a gracious response from the Iraqis, I'm sure, but the timing and the depth leave something to be desired. The EU couldn't be bothered to lend much of a hand during the difficult months between the handover of sovereignty and the elections; in fact, a number of European heads of state spent their time demanding a delay in the elections. Now that they have been proven wrong, the EU wants to send $260 million as conscience money to pitch in. Wow.

On top of that, Solana continues the passive-aggressive whining that the Left started yesterday about the supposed absence of Sunni voting, claiming that it "marred" the election. The notion that a self-imposed boycott by a political minority that used to wield power over an oppressed majority somehow undermines an election result comes as news to me. It's would be equivalent to saying that a boycott of Afrikaaners in South Africa's first free elections rendered them null and void. Or perhaps memories don't reach back that far:

White conservatives stepped up their demands for a separate, whites-only homeland--dispelling any illusions of support for their Freedom Alliance partners. The government of Ciskei, a homeland where the ANC's popularity exceeded that of the appointed president, broke away from its alliance partners and declared its intention to permit homeland residents to vote. The government in Bophuthatswana--another Freedom Alliance partner facing strong popular opposition--sought armed support from the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Resistance Movement (Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging--AWB), prompting the SADF to intervene and to remove Bophuthatswana President Lucas Mangope from office. With the Freedom Alliance severely weakened, PAC President Clarence Makwetu--another election holdout--announced that group's suspension of its armed struggle, thus opening the way for election participation by its members.

Violence continued, mostly between supporters of the IFP and the ANC, and the TEC authorized rapid training for a 10,000-member national peacekeeping force--an effort that eventually failed. ... The country appeared poised to launch into violence-wracked balloting, when de Klerk imposed a state of emergency in Natal and KwaZulu on March 31, 1994, deploying 3,000 SADF troops to allow residents of the area to defy the IFP election boycott and to go to the polls.

When the elections finally took place on schedule, beginning on April 26, 1994, the government and the ANC had several thousand security forces, with varying degrees of training and authority, in place to prevent serious outbreaks of violence. Remarkably, the violence subsided. A few "exceptional" votes were cast by voters who were disabled or were living outside South Africa on April 26. During the next two days, more than 22 million voters stood in line for hours at some 9,000 polling places to exercise their newly won right to vote. Balloting was extended through April 29. There was no voter registration list, so IEC officials marked voters' fingers with indelible ink to prevent fraud.

The next time the Left tells you that a lack of participation by a significant minority group renders an election invalid, or that the threat of violence undermines its results despite the obvious bravery of the electorate, ask them when they will call for the dissolution of the free South African government.

Dayton's Numbers Sink Rapidly

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune notes that approval ratings for both Minnesota senators has dropped over the past year. Both Norm Coleman and Mark Dayton have dropped below the 50% mark in the latest Minnesota Poll. But while the former attracts about the same level of support as President Bush received in the last election, Brave Sir Dayton has seen his popularity crash 15 points, winding up far below John Kerry's final numbers:

Dayton, a Democrat who's up for reelection next year, took the heaviest blow: His approval rating declined by 15 points in a year, from 58 percent to 43 percent. The approval rating for Coleman, who just began his third year in office, fell by 7 points, from 54 to 47 percent.

Dayton's job approval decreased among all categories of Minnesotans, grouped by age, education, income, party and ideology, with the largest drop among men -- down 27 points -- and 18-24 year olds -- down 31 points.

Coleman's biggest declines came among 25-34 year olds -- down by 19 points -- and those living in the seven-county metropolitan region -- down by 13 points.

Coleman's numbers come as no surprise to anyone. Norm Coleman served as Bush's most public point man in Minnesota, campaigning hard to push Minnesota into the red column. When one campaigns like that in such a tight and polarized race, it will affect the numbers of even the most popular politician. Coleman has four years to recover, and now that the presidential race is over, I suspect it will take just a few months.

For Dayton, however, the precipitous decline comes after the senior Senator finally made his way into the national spotlight -- and Minnesotans stopped seeing him as a cypher and started considering the embarrassment he caused. He may have thought that he demonstrated leadership with his ridiculous bug-out from DC, but even he sees that beating a very brave retreat has cost him, as well as his vituperative comments towards Condoleezza Rice during the confirmation debate:

"It's been a very politically controversial year," Dayton said. "I made controversial decisions in terms of closing my office to protect my staff and even challenging the confirmation of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. ... I would believe that they are part of the explanation, but I can't know for sure." ...

In interviews after the poll was conducted, some of the respondents made reference to Dayton's criticism of Rice.

"I don't think that was right," said Cornet, who normally votes Democratic.

Clarence Sutton, 84, a Republican from Gaylord, called Dayton "a disgrace to the state of Minnesota" and said that his attack on Rice was "rotten representation for the state of Minnesota."

The key for Dayton is the erosion among Democrats. That's a gap he can make up in the next election cycle, but it's possible that if he continues to embarrass Minnesota DFLers, he may find himself in the middle of an expensive primary challenge by party members who want a more stable person representing their interests. Right now it's uncertain whether Dayton can afford to run for re-election; if he has to fight the primary as well, he'll almost certainly go under. And with an anemic 43% approval rating, the DFL money won't exactly fly into his campaign coffers.

Another key for the numbers is the poll methodology. The Minnesota Poll contacted 832 adults -- not likely voters, or even exclusively registered voters. This has always produced skewed results in the past, but they skew in favor of the Democrats. (Remember that the M-Poll had Kerry up by eight points in the last week of the campaign; he won by 2.5%.) That makes the news doubly worse for Dayton. He lost 15 points in a poll which should favor him, a chilling prospect for his political future.

Dayton has not yet confirmed that he's running for re-election. If he continues to embarrass Minnesotans like he has over the past year, the DFL may take that decision out of his hands.

Note To Democrats: You Should Have Said This

In the aftermath of the historic Iraqi election, the Democrats had the opportunity to get aboard the democracy bandwagon, or at least have the sense not to get run over by it. However, their leadership felt that a far better strategy for today was to denigrate the accomplishment of the brave Iraqis who defied terrorists to cast their votes in their first free elections in fifty years and demand a withdrawal.

They would have been better off to follow the example of the European leaders whose approval they seem to crave so much. The BBC reports that those politicians have a much better sense of tone in handling the American victory:

World leaders have praised the conduct of Iraq's first multi-party elections for more than 50 years. ...

French President Jacques Chirac described them as a "great success for the international community", while a spokesman for German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said the high turnout showed Iraqis wanted to take their future into their own hands.

Mr Annan, meanwhile, said the Iraqis had shown courage.

""The Iraqis who turned out today are courageous, they know that they are voting for the future of their country," he said.

"We must encourage them and support them to take control of their destiny."

How hard is that? Moderate Democrats must be puzzled and at least somewhat concerned that their leadership has allowed itself to become so infected with Bush hatred that they can no longer recognize opportunities to build trust with the American electorate on national security. The automatic gainsay of anything accomplished by the Bush administration has almost completely destroyed their credibility -- and the measured and intelligent reactions of Chirac, Schroeder, and Annan shows how badly the Democrats screwed up today.

All Democrats Can Talk About Is Running Away

I had no idea how influential our Democratic Senator from Minnesota, Brave Sir Mark Dayton, had become on his party's leadership. On a day when the force of American power and will allowed a long-oppressed people to defy Islamofascists and choose their own representative government, Democrats could only discuss bugging out. That continued with prepared remarks by Senate minority leader Harry Reid (D-NV), who demanded a timetable for retreat on the occasion of our tremendous victory:

In a pre-State of the Union challenge to President Bush, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid intends to call Monday for the administration to outline an exit strategy for Iraq. ...

"The president needs to spell out a real and understandable plan for the unfinished work ahead: defeat the growing insurgency, rebuild Iraq, increase political participation by all parties, especially moderates, and increase international involvement," Reid will say, according to his prepared remarks.

"Most of all we need an exit strategy so we know what victory is and how we can get there; so that we know what we need to do and so that we know when the job is done."

I don't know why the Democrats have become so enamored of so-called "exit strategies"; they didn't need one for the Balkans, where mismanagement has kept Kosovo stagnant for almost six years now. Exit strategies go by another name in military circles: retreat. The only exit strategy acceptable to a nation at war is victory, and after today's win over the Islamofascists, the insistence on retreat from leading Democrats such as Ted Kennedy and Harry Reid reveals them as defeatists and petty ankle-biters.

Their timing could hardly be worse. It's as if the entire party decided to follow Howard Dean's example of claiming that Saddam's capture was essentially meaningless in December 2003. Being cautious is one thing, but this coordinated theme from Democrats looks less like caution and much more like a lack of intestinal fortitude.

Perhaps I am a bit too credulous when it comes to estimating the intelligence of the Democratic leadership, but I can't believe that they thought it smart to come out and play the dog in the manger on such a historic event. They should have just acknowledged the good fortune of the Iraqis and let the day go by without much more comment than that. Instead, they've once again proven that they cannot be trusted with national-security concerns or war leadership. In fact, they cannot even be trusted to operate in their own interest. The party leadership of Boxer, Kennedy, and Reid promises to transform the Democrats into the Whigs of the 21st century.

Reuters Playing Headline Games Again

In an attempt to underscore the notion that violence wrecked the Iraqi elections -- which anyone watching the live coverage and aware of the high turnout knows is false -- Reuters uses the following headline to characterize the historic developments:

Violence-Weary Iraqis Await Poll Results

How do they support the headline in the story? They show these examples of "violence-weary" first-time voters:

Up to 8 million Iraqis, some ululating with joy, others hiding their faces in fear, cast ballots across the country on Sunday as guerrilla attacks proved less ferocious than anticipated in the face of a massive security crackdown. ...

Samir Hassan, 32, who lost his leg in a car bomb blast last year, said as he waited to vote in Baghdad: "I would have crawled here if I had to. I don't want terrorists to kill other Iraqis like they tried to kill me." ...

Voters created an almost festive atmosphere in Shi'ite areas and the northern regions where Kurds, who make up nearly a fifth of Iraqis, are looking to the vote to enshrine their autonomous rule. ...

By the end of the day in Baghdad, voters were rushing to get to polling stations before they closed, including some old women helped along by young boys.

Not one single mention of violence weariness appears in the Reuters report. The reporters who contributed to the article played it straight. They wanted to report the story as it happened. However, the editors at Reuters apparently want to send a different message to its readers.

Small wonder that the British news service has acquired the nickname "al-Reuters". It earns it every day.

Turnout Numbers Settle In At 60%

The London Telegraph reports in its morning edition that the estimated turnout in the Iraqi election has settled to 60% as more data has come in from the polling. The number is still spectacular, considering that it equals our best election turnout over the past 40 years while under the threat of murder and terror:

On foot, on crutches and in wheelchairs Iraqis defied the death threats of extremists and voted in their millions yesterday in their country's first free election in half a century.

After decades of oppression under Saddam Hussein, three major wars and almost two years of occupation, chaos and insurgency, the people turned their election day into a festival of democracy.

Election officials estimated that about 60 per cent of eligible voters cast their ballots despite a wave of suicide bombings, mortar and gun attacks.

The turnout was highest in Shia and Kurdish regions, but even towns in the "Sunni Triangle", where insurgency has been at its most intense, reported enthusiastic voting.

For those of us who have followed the story closely all day, the Telegraph report contains little else we haven't already heard. However, it is the first of the dailies to file their Monday reports on the election. It will be interesting to see how each newspaper decides to approach the historic elections ...

Idiots On Parade

Part of the amusement of watching the coverage of the historic Iraqi elections comes from seeing certain Democrats making asses of themselves on national TV. I'm watching MS-NBC, where former Undersecretary of Defense Jed Babbin just dismantled Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) on a military pull-out from Iraq. Babbin couldn't contain himself when Woolsey tried using a page from the Left's new post-election playbook:

WOOLSEY: ... We also would like to see, ah, the United States military take a step back and the multinational, ah, humanitarian groups step forward so we can help the Iraqis now with their, ah, rebuilding their infrastructure, rebuilding their economy, and helping take the military presence, ah, to help them instead to train their, ah, their security.

HOST: Congresswoman, are you calling for an immediate phased withdrawal along the lines of what Senator Kennedy suggested last week?

W: Well, I'm calling for immediate planning for withdrawal, ah, by pulling, ah, the Iraqis, ah, their neighbors, ah, the Arab nations together with the United Nations and the United States and talk about how we're going to do this, and, ah, ah, how -- how best to do it immediately.

H: If I could just follow up, Jed, on that line about political pressure, there really hasn't been -- apart from some members of Congress, Senator Kennedy to be sure -- there really hasn't been a lot of political or popular pressure to start a withdrawal. So that really gives the president some breathing room with his policy, don't you think?

BABBIN: Oh, it sure does. The President has it right, and with all due respect, Congresswoman, you have it so vastly, vastly wrong, it's hard to even begin to describe. People have been asking, the President has been asking the international community to come in and help in Iraq for almost two years now. The fact is that no matter how much wishful thinking we have, they're not going to come! We can go to the UN until the cows come home, and these people are not going to send in humanitarian relief, they're not going to send in engineers, they're not going to pay for things. These people have abandoned democracy, and to say that we're going to have some sort of miraculous recovery at the United Nations or that the eunuchs of Old Europe will come riding to our rescue is simply disingenuous.

W: Well, I disagree with you. Actually, I believe that if we, ah, remove our military presence, and are there as members of a multinational, um, peacekeeping organization, then the other countries will come forward. Actually, I heard an interview with a leader in France saying that's exactly what they would be pleased to do.

B: If I could jump back in there for a minute, you're saying that Iraq's neighbors are going to come in and help? Syria and Iran, which are backing the insurgency? I mean, you can't seriously suggest that the neighboring nations are going to come to the aid of Iraq when they're doing everything they can in desperation to try to prevent democracy!

W: Part of that, I believe, has a lot to do with our military presence, the United States looking like occupiers. Now that this election is behind us, we should help the Iraqi people put their government together for the Iraqi people. But that means we don't put together the infrastructure through US corporations so that Halliburton makes all the profit and the benefit instead of the Iraqi people.

Lynn Woolsey represents the Sixth Congressional District in California, encompassing the Santa Rosa area. She continued to embarrass herself and her district in the Crossfire-type program, obviously outmatched in this battle of wits. In fact, if it hadn't been for Ron Reagan giving her a half-hearted boost at the end, I think she would have completely melted down. I don't know why my native state continues to send the products of its educational system to Congress, but the entertainment value is tremendous.

UPDATE: I hope that MS-NBC puts a transcript of this show on its website. Jeralyn Merritt says twice that the casting of ballots doesn't make for legitimate government. Classic comedy from the Left! I can't wait for 2006.

Kojo Brokered Oil For UNSCAM After All

Amid the cheering of the Iraqis over their first taste of true freedom, the Times of London reports that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's sone Kojo had more involvement in brokering oil for the corrupt program that stole their money than first revealed:

THE son of the United Nations secretary-general has admitted he was involved in negotiations to sell millions of barrels of Iraqi oil under the auspices of Saddam Hussein.

Kojo Annan has told a close friend he became involved in negotiations to sell 2m barrels of Iraqi oil to a Moroccan company in 2001. He is understood to be co-operating with UN investigators probing the discredited oil for food programme.

The alleged admission will increase pressure on Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, who is already facing calls for his resignation over the management of the humanitarian programme. ...

Potentially more serious is his connections with Hani Yamani, the son of Sheikh Yamani, the wealthy former Saudi oil minister who set up Opec. Kojo acted as a director for Hani Yamani’s company and was a close business associate. The pair represented the coming together of two of the world’s most influential families.

In 2001 Yamani lined up a deal to sell about $60m worth of Iraqi oil to a Moroccan company. The Sunday Times has statements from two close business associates of Yamani who claim that Kojo was involved in the deal.

Why did Yamani include Kojo in the deal? Could Yamani have wanted to curry favor with the UN Secretary-General? Yamani, who helped create OPEC and who still remains an influential Saudi sheikh, had good reason to grease the wheels for UN political credits. They wanted the OFF program to remain in place and fought hard to keep the Iraqi invasion from happening.

Kojo apparently is cooperating with investigators. It will be interesting to see how much.

A Peek Inside The Head Of A Moral Coward

On the day that Iraqis celebrate the end of decades of brutal oppression, one man managed to sound a sour note. Ramsey Clark does his cover version of the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy For The Devil" in the op-ed pages of the Houston Chronicle (via Michelle Malkin):

The United States, and the Bush administration in particular, engineered the demonization of Saddam, and it has a clear political interest in his conviction.

How hard is it to demonize someone who murdered hundreds of thousands of his own population? Does Clark really think that "demonization" is necessary for a man who gassed Kurdish women and children to death as a test of his WMD arsenal?

Obviously, a fair trial of Saddam will be difficult to ensure — and critically important to the future of democracy in Iraq. This trial will write history, affect the course of violence around the world and have an impact on hopes for reconciliation within Iraq.

This is one of the most tiresome memes floating around the blogosphere. Iraqi democracy most certainly does not hinge on a fair civil trial for Saddam. In fact, he and the Iraqis probably would have been better off had he faced an American military tribunal. Iraqi democracy hinges on the free elections that Clark ignored today, and that his newest client denied Iraqis for decades.

Saddam has been held illegally for more than a year without once meeting a family member, friend or lawyer of his choice.

No, he hasn't. He's been treated as a POW despite being captured out of uniform, and then handed over to the Iraqi interim government, who understandably wants him held without bail. What's so unusual about that? We hold alleged murderers without bail all the time, and people who judges determine to be flight risks as well. Saddam qualifies under both categories, especially with the billions of dollars he stole from Iraqis.

Although the world has seen him time and again on television — disheveled, apparently disoriented with someone prying deep into his mouth and later alone before some unseen judge — he has been cut off from all communications with the outside world and surrounded by the same U.S. military that mistreated prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

Clark goes out of his way to insult the American military with this careless accusation. The people who mistreated prisoners at Abu Ghraib are now in prison, having been court-martialed for their actions. But in Clark's vision, the American soldiers are all just as guilty simply for wearing the same American uniform. The guards at Guantanmo Bay still serve there since no one has ever proven a single case of mistreatment there, and at any rate, Saddam's not at Guantanamo.

International law requires that every criminal court be competent, independent and impartial. The Iraqi Special Tribunal lacks all of these essential qualities. It was illegitimate in its conception — the creation of an illegal occupying power that demonized Saddam Hussein and destroyed the government it now intends to condemn by law.

Now that the Iraqis have elected a new government, the Special Tribunal can either be dissolved or affirmed by the new parliament -- and probably that will be a high priority for the legislators. The Nuremberg tribunals were also the creation of occupying powers (and by the way, Ramsey, the UN approved the Coalition's occupation prior to the capture of Saddam Hussein).

Clark then complains about how Saddam has been treated in his detention:

Among the earliest photographs it released is one showing Saddam sitting submissively on the floor of an empty room with Ahmad Chalabi, the principal U.S. surrogate at that moment, looming over him and a picture of Bush looking down from an otherwise bare wall.

Perhaps Clark would prefer that his client be offered the same hospitality that he offered captives in his own prisons. Would Clark be all right with Saddam being physically tortured, having his hands amputated with an axe, or having his tongue cut out with a knife? I know Clark feels that looking at pictures of George Bush amounts to intolerable cruelty, but Clark's complaint is ghoulish compared to how Saddam dealt with his own people.

Clark wants Americans to congratulate him for providing a principled defense of an accused criminal in the best traditions of American jurisprudence. In fact, this essay only proves that Clark wants to extend his usual apologetics for genocidal socialist dictators by insulting American troops and the society that upholds the values he merely mouths. If I could possibly hold Ramsey Clark in more contempt than previous, that day would be today.

Chris Muir Says It All

Day By Day:

If you're not reading Chris every day, you're missing out the most intelligent political satire.

John Kerry's Tone Deafness Continues

It's beginning to be apparent that John Kerry plans to follow the bitter-loser strategy that unhinged Al Gore after the 2000 election. In his appearance on Meet the Press this morning, Kerry did everything but actually pour ice water on the set to douse the enthusiasm for the tremendous success of the Iraqi election:

SEN. KERRY: ... it is significant that there is a vote in Iraq. But no one in the United States or in the world-- and I'm confident of what the world response will be. No one in the United States should try to overhype this election. This election is a sort of demarcation point, and what really counts now is the effort to have a legitimate political reconciliation, and it's going to take a massive diplomatic effort and a much more significant outreach to the international community than this administration has been willing to engage in. Absent that, we will not be successful in Iraq.

MR. RUSSERT: Do you believe this election will be seen by the world community as legitimate?

SEN. KERRY: A kind of legitimacy--I mean, it's hard to say that something is legitimate when a whole portion of the country can't vote and doesn't vote.

Well, Senator, seventy-two percent did vote. Questioning the legitimacy of an election in which three-quarters of the eligible voters participated just sounds like sour grapes, a refusal to acknowledge that Bush may have been right all along, while Kerry's murky suggestions of the presidential campaign to slow down would have been disastrous. Typical.

Here's another example:

MR. RUSSERT: Do you believe that Iraq is less a terrorist threat to the United States now than it was two years ago?

SEN. KERRY: No, it's more. And, in fact, I believe the world is less safe today than it was two and a half years ago.

Kerry doesn't think that deposing Saddam and transforming Gaddafi made the world any safer? Now we have a new democracy of 26 million people who just resoundinly rejected terrorism in the heart of Arabian Islam, and Kerry thinks that makes the world more dangerous? It's statements like this that makes everyone understand what an inept politician Kerry truly is, and why he lost the election. Even Kerry couldn't maintain that facade in the face of Russert's' pointed question:

MR. RUSSERT: Is the United States safer with the newly elected Iraqi government than we would have been with Saddam Hussein?

SEN. KERRY: Sure. And I'm glad Saddam Hussein is gone, and I've said that a hundred times. But we've missed opportunity after opportunity along the way, Tim, to really make America safe and to bring the world to the cause.

I turned it off shortly after that. If he gives up his Senate seat -- officially, that is -- perhaps he has a career waiting for him in comedy.

Seeing Is Believing

I wrote earlier about watching how the Iraqis openly defied the terrorists by walking so casually and forcefully to the polls inspired me. Rich at the excellent milblog Beef Always Wins had a chance to take some pictures while circling Baghdad in his helicopter, and he tells me that those prove the point. Here's one that I've hosted, but I encourage you to check out the rest at Rich's:

Take a look at Kevin McCullough's montages of Iraqi and expatriate voting, too. Very moving.

UPDATE: You should definitely read this Radioblogger entry about Iraqis voting in Lake Forest, CA, at the old El Toro MCAS. Hugh Hewitt broadcast live there on Friday and Duane has some terrific pictures posted, along with some great stories.

Gray Lady Acknowledges Victory

The New York Times gives an unequivocal look at the astounding victory for democracy won by the defiant Iraqi people and steadfast Coalition partners. Dexter Filkens filed a surprisingly blunt assessment of the complete defeat of terrorism and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in attempting to drag the Iraqis into a second darkness:

After a slow start, voters turned out in very large numbers in Baghdad today, packing polling places and creating a party atmosphere in the streets as Iraqis here and nationwide turned out to cast ballots in the country's first free elections in more than 50 years. ...

The voting in Baghdad streets of Baghdad were closed to traffic, but full of children playing soccer, and men and women walking, some carrying babies. Everyone, it seemed, was going to vote. They dropped their ballots into boxes even as continuous mortar shells started exploding at about noon.

Thirty-six civilians and three police officers died in mortar attacks and suicide bombings around the country, the Interior Minister reported. Twenty-two of the deaths occurred in Baghdad, Reuters reported, where mortar attacks took three lives and 19 people were killed by suicide bombers. At least 29 were wounded in the attacks in the capital, Reuters said.

But it the insurgents wanted to stop people in Baghdad from voting, they failed. If they wanted to cause chaos, they failed. The voters were completely defiant, and there was a feeling that the people of Baghdad, showing a new, positive attitude, had turned a corner.

No one was claiming that the insurgency was over or that the deadly attacks would end. But the atmosphere in this usually grim capital, a city at war and an ethnic microcosm of the country, had changed, with people dressed in their finest clothes to go to the polls in what was generally a convivial mood.

After months of editorializing about the folly of imposing democracy at gunpoint and calling for delaying elections in favor of reaching out towards the so-called insurgents, the New York Times finally gets it right today. I'm glad to see it, but let's also remember that had we listened to the Gray Lady initially, these people would still be suffering under the oppression of Saddam Hussein, or if we had listened later, we would have abandoned them to the bloodthirsty lunatics.

One wonders if Pinch Sulzberger and his associate ever tire of being wrong. Today's report by Filkins might well provide evidence that they occasionally do.

Turnout Numbers By Region

Fox News reports on the Iraqi voter turnout by region, using figures from the Iraqi election commission. I've frozen the graphic on my TiVo to make sure I get this right:

Nationwide: 72%
Baghdad: 80%
South: 92%
Najaf: 80%
Karbala: 90%

Hell, you can't find numbers like that in America -- except in certain precincts in King County, WA and Milwaukee.

Even Reuters Acknowledges Victory

Reuters appears to have outperformed the BBC in reporting the historical turnout in Iraq's first multiparty elections in over fifty years. Luke Baker writes about the "festive voting" and the enthusiasm of Iraqis for democracy:

Some came on crutches, others walked for miles then struggled to read the ballot, but across Iraq, millions turned out to vote Sunday, defying insurgents who threatened a bloodbath.

Suicide bombs and mortars killed at least 27 people, but voters still came out in force for the first multi-party poll in 50 years. In some places they cheered with joy at their first chance to cast a free vote, in others they shared chocolates.

Even in Falluja, the Sunni city west of Baghdad that was a militant stronghold until a U.S. assault in November, a steady stream of people turned out, confounding expectations. Lines of veiled women clutching their papers waited to vote.

"We want to be like other Iraqis, we don't want to always be in opposition," said Ahmed Jassim, smiling after he voted.

In Baquba, a rebellious city northeast of Baghdad, spirited crowds clapped and cheered at one voting station. In Mosul, scene of some of the worst insurgent attacks in recent months, U.S. and local officials said turnout was surprisingly high.

Earlier, the BBC crowed over the low turnout in Fallujah, giving that fact the lead in its initial reports on the election. That turned out to have all the accuracy of an 11 AM VNS exit poll; the Fallujans just needed a bit more time to feel safe enough to cast their ballots.

In Baghdad, where Western news agencies widely predicted a low turnout, the city celebrated its freedom from oppression:

A small group cheered in Baghdad as Sharif Ali bin al-Hussein, a descendant of Iraq's last king, went to the polls. Ali leads a constitutional monarchy slate in the election.

Western Baghdad polling stations were busy, with long queues of voters. Most went about the process routinely, filling in their ballots and leaving quickly without much emotion.

Others brought chocolates for those waiting in line, and shared festive juice drinks inside the voting station.

Samir Hassan, 32, who lost his leg in a car bomb blast in October, was determined to vote. "I would have crawled here if I had to. I don't want terrorists to kill other Iraqis like they tried to kill me. Today I am voting for peace," he said, leaning on his metal crutches, determination in his reddened eyes. ...

Baghdad's mayor was overcome with emotion by the turnout of voters at City Hall, where he said thousands were celebrating.

"I cannot describe what I am seeing. It is incredible. This is a vote for the future, for the children, for the rule of law, for humanity, for love," Alaa al-Tamimi told Reuters.

What's most striking to me is the video of the people coming to the polling stations, something I noticed last night but didn't write down. If you watch them walking to the polling stations, they aren't running or walking under cover, even though some appeared available. They're walking at a normal pace, out in the middle of the street, accompanied by their children. I'm sure they had some trepidation about voting, but they refused to be terrorized by the bloodthirsty lunatics that mesmerize the Western media. They walked tall, smiling for the cameras and waving Iraqi flags, as they defied the nihilists.

No one can now doubt that the Iraqis wanted to be freed of Saddam's grip, and that regardless of the various arguments about the origins of the war, our effort to spread democracy has succeeded. The massive turnout shows that Arabs want freedom and self-determination, not a Saddam-like strongman ruling through oppression.

I'd ask the Estriches and Kennedys today if after seeing this, they still think our liberation of Iraq was a mistake. Do we prefer this, or do we prefer the continuance of the rape rooms, the cut-out tongues, and the genocides of Saddam Hussein?

The Seventy-Two Percent Solution

"Election is what I am need!"

An election is what Iraq needed, as the country's election commission estimates that 72% of eligible voters stormed the polls in today's elections, with the figure approaching 90% in areas such as Basra. Here's what the BBC says, and check out how they buried the lead:

Suicide attacks and explosions have killed 22 people - mainly in Baghdad - as voters take part in Iraq's first multi-party elections for 50 years.

Correspondents said there were crowds and smiles in the south and north as voters made their choices for a 275-member national assembly.

But few voters turned out in Sunni areas around the capital, reports said.

Iraq's electoral commission says up to 72% of voters cast ballots but the UN offered a more cautious assessment.

Before discussing the remarkable turnout in the face of widely-reported terrorist warnings of bloodbaths, the BBC discusses each and every attack on polling place. Understandably, the BBC needs to inform its readership of the attacks, but focusing on that instead of the victory of the Iraqi people shows a twisted sense of priorities. It's as if the Beeb reported D-Day by talking about how the Americans got chewed up on Omaha Beach while waiting until halwfway through the article to note that they achieved their objectives.

John Simpson returns to the turnout later, again invoking the UN:

Despite the attacks in Baghdad, voting at polling stations in the country's mostly Shia Muslim south and Kurdish north was said to be brisk.

Iraq's electoral commission held a news conference 90 minutes before polls closed to say turnout was estimated at 72%, with 90% or more in some Shia areas.

But electoral official Adil al-Lami did not say how these figures had been reached.

Earlier, the top UN electoral adviser Carlos Valenzuela offered a much more cautious assessment, saying turnout appeared to be high in many areas, but that it was too early to know for sure.

Well, perhaps they're performing an ancient ritual known as counting. Besides, the UN has less than 100 people in Iraq to facilitate these elections, so it's small wonder that they have no clue on election data. That never gets a mention by Simpson in this report. This is not Simpson's first questionable reporting from a war zone; in 1999, the London Times complained of Simpson's anti-Western bias in his Serbian reports.

I wonder if it even crosses Simpson's mind that the terrorists can count on his myopia like clockwork, or if it bothers him if it does.

The 21K Walk To Freedom

Thousands of people are now walking a 13-mile stretch between Abu Ghraib and Gazaliyah to cast votes in the elections, military sources tell Fox News. The mass march has been caught by unmanned drones, and Fox says they will soon have pictures of the subtle demonstration of the Iraqi desire for liberty.

More as it develops. Fox also reports long lines in most polling stations, with some even calling for more ballot materials as they run out of ballots faster than they anticipated.

BBC Reports High Turnout Except In Former Terror Strongholds

The BBC now reports that turnout for the Iraqi elections has been surprisingly high, except in the Sunni cities that once hosted Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's terrorist network:

Voting officially started at 0700 local time (0400 GMT), though some polling stations opened even earlier.

The BBC's Ben Brown in Basra says electoral officials have been surprised by the high turnout there, and some polling stations had to open early.

But correspondents in central Sunni cities, such as Falluja, Samarra and Ramadi, have seen virtually no voting activity.

The BBC never even mentions that these three cities had to be cleared of terrorists with major military actions in the past three months, and that they have always been considered too sympathetic to Zarqawi to cooperate with the elections. We know, however, that Baghdad has seen significant turnout despite a number of suicide bombers on the west side of town. Fox News reports at 2:01 CT (11 am Baghdad) that they have counted seven or eight attacks; significant, but far below what was expected.

Right now, the turnout in other areas appears to be spectacular. The residents of the three towns mentioned by the BBC will wind up marginalizing themselves. They stuck with the wrong horse today.

Susan Estrich Is An Idiot

I had transcribed Susan Estrich's first appearance on Fox News for a lengthy post as to her inappropriate and stupid partisanship in what looks more and more like an Iraqi triumph. Unfortunately, my computer unexpectedly shut down in the middle of the post, and I didn't save any of it.

Grrr. I had no idea that my computer had a BS threshold.

Hopefully, I can grab a transcript later, but trust me -- when she started griping about how American soldiers weren't allowed inside Iraqi polling stations, I wanted to scream. Last week, all we heard from Joe Biden and the NY Times was how the Iraqis only had 4,000 trained security troops. Now Estrich complains that they're too good.

Fox must employ her and Jesse Jackson just to validate their "fair and balanced" tagline. Hopefully they find better talent, and soon.

More Details On Election Attacks

The AP has updated its earlier story to provide more details on the election-day attacks on Iraqi polling stations:

The suicide attack in western Baghdad claimed the life of one policeman and wounded several other people, while mortar attacks in Khan al-Mahawil, 40 miles south of Baghdad, killed another policeman at a polling station.

Witnesses said three other people were wounded when a rocket or mortar landed near a polling station in Sadr City, the heart of Baghdad's Shiite Muslim community.

Heavy explosions and dozens of mortar attacks broke out across Baghdad, and in several other cities, including Baquoba, Basra and Mosul.

Two mortars hit near the Ministry of Interior on the city's eastern edge, one witness said. And there were exchanges of gunfire in the New Baghdad area in the eastern part of the city. Explosions also were heard in Baquoba northeast of Baghdad, and in the southern city of Basra, the country's second-largest.

Quite a list of attacks -- and yet from what we can see on television, the Iraqis haven't been intimidated into silence. The terrorists aren't finished yet, but they will run out of gas soon, and the Iraqis will win this battle over the terrorists.

Mosul Elections Build A Crowd

Fox News now reports that Mosul voters have gotten over their initial trepidation and have built to a crowd at the polling station they are televising through a videophone. Fox also reports a few mortar attacks that hasn't seemed to dampen the enthusiasm. The polling station in Mosul bustled with activity behind the reporter (didn't catch his name), who reports that after the Iraqi soldiers broke the ice by casting their own votes, the neighborhoods have begun to join them.

I don't know why, but the wire services have been rather quiet so far. Or perhaps I do know why.

"Election Is What I Am Need"

Geraldo Rivera has been reporting from an undisclosed town that has a mixed Shi'a-Sunni population, and now he's saying that the polling station is "packed" with men and women. He's talking about how the scene -- which I'm watching as he speaks on video -- inspires him, taking Jesse Jackson's civil-rights reference and putting in proper context. Geraldo is interviewing an Iraqi voter, who told him:

"I am very happy, because I am not afraid of terrorists. ... I'm not afraid, because election is what I am need."

Geraldo's emotions have overcome him, and he's not alone.

UPDATE: Better video now (12:24 AM CT), and you can see the crowd of smiling Iraqi voters, not minding the cameras one bit. If they're afraid, you sure as hell can't see it in their delighted faces. One man even gave the cameras two thumbs up.