Monthly Archives: June 2006

Let’s Not Forget About the Other Times

Blog of the Week Patterico’s Pontifications has a transcript of an interview with Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times, in which he lays out the L.A. Times’ rationale for outing the Treasury Department’s international terrorist data collection program. Patterico also deconstructs the paper’s rationale: The bottom line is, of course, that McManus and his colleagues took it upon themselves to decide what classified information the public (and our enemies) »

Bush Blasts New York Times

This morning, President Bush spoke to reporters about the leak of secret information about the tracking of terrorists’ international financial transaction. These are the quotes attributed to President Bush by the Associated Press: The disclosure of this program is disgraceful. For people to leak that program and for a newspaper to publish it does great harm to the United States of America. It makes it harder to win this war »

A word from Lt. Cotton

Lt. Tom Cotton writes this morning from Baghdad with a word for the New York Times: Dear Messrs. Keller, Lichtblau & Risen: Congratulations on disclosing our government’s highly classified anti-terrorist-financing program (June 23). I apologize for not writing sooner. But I am a lieutenant in the United States Army and I spent the last four days patrolling one of the more dangerous areas in Iraq. (Alas, operational security and common »

The Times and the mob

Yesterday the New York Times posted a letter from Times executive editor Bill Keller responding to critics of the Times’s disclosure of the administration’s classified terrorist finance tracking system. Our friend Hugh Hewitt has parsed the letter and writes that “Mr. Keller belives you are easily confused.” Hugh’s gloss on the letter is charitable; based on the letter, he could also have posited that Mr. Keller is stupid. That too »

As American as Michael Moore

This week, the Washington Post’s Sunday Outlook section takes time off from running the self-absorbed ruminations of hard-done-by feminists and turns the floor over what it apparently considers a hard-done-by media outlet, al-Jazeera. The resulting column, by Joanne Levine, the network’s executive producer of programming for the Americas, claims that al-Jazeera is “as American as apple pie.” Extreme Mortman has little difficulty demolishing this valentine to al-Jazeera: Levine writes, “most »

The rush to impose judgment

Fred Barnes takes a look at “the My Lai lie” — that is, the rush by the MSM to portray Haditha as another My Lai massacre before the facts are known. That rush was epitomized, as one would expect, by Chris Matthews in this exchange with Rep. Murtha: “Was this My Lai?” Matthews interjected, referring to the slaughter of more than 300 civilians by American soldiers in Vietnam in 1968. »

England doesn’t get the memo

England coach Swen Goran Erickson must not be a Power Line reader. Despite my demonstration that the way to score goals is to play with two center forwards, Erickson, who had been using two, took a step backwards in today’s match against Ecuador and elected to play Wayne Rooney alone up front. To make matters worse, he apparently told the team to bypass his talented five-man midfield and send high »

Londonistan calling

The New York Times Magazine carries Christopher Caldwell’s intensely reported piece “After Londonistan.” It is long and intricately written; the following paragraphs can stand alone to provide a taste: In January, at his trial for incitement to murder and other charges, the radical cleric Abu Hamza claimed that between 1997 and 2000, members of MI5, the British domestic security service, effectively O.K.’d his frequent incitements to jihad, on one occasion »

Congressman King Says: Throw the Book at ‘Em

Congressman Peter King, Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, called today for criminal prosecution of the New York Times: King, a New York Republican, said he would write Attorney General Alberto Gonzales urging that the country’s chief law enforcer “begin an investigation and prosecution of the New York Times – the reporters, the editors and the publisher.” “We’re at war, and for the Times to release information about secret »

Mad Jack Goes Too Far

Mad Jack Murtha is now on record as saying that the United States is the principal threat to world peace: “Murtha says U.S. poses top threat to world peace”: American presence in Iraq is more dangerous to world peace than nuclear threats from North Korea or Iran, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said to an audience of more than 200 in North Miami Saturday afternoon. Murtha is a disgrace. Will his »

Palestinian Terrorists Claim WMDs

The al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade claimed today that it has developed as many as 20 different forms of biological and chemical weapons which it now intends to use against Israel: In a leaflet distributed in the Gaza Strip, the group, which belongs to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party, said the weapons were the result of an effort that has lasted for three years. The group said its members would »

Terrorists Murder Russian Diplomats

The Iraqi terrorist group that kidnapped four Russian diplomats three weeks ago claimed today to have murdered them. Based on videos posted on a terrorist web site, it appears the claim is true. The photograph below was also posted today; it shows one of the Russian hostages with two of the terrorists. I think it is a huge problem that much of America’s media, academic institutions and political establishment think »

Hugh Hewitt floods the zone, take 2

Newsweek profiles our friend Hugh Hewitt and his latest venture in its story “The right: The next big thing?” Hugh advises that the new Townhall, referred to in the Newsweek story, launches on July 4. »

Unacceptable

In today’s Washington Post, Richard Perle observes that “No U.S. administration since 1979 has had a serious political strategy regarding Iran.” He demonstrates the ineffectuality of our current policy to end Iran’s “unacceptable” acquisition of nuclear weapons: It is not clear whether Bush recognizes the perils of the course he has been persuaded to take. What has been presented to Ahmadinejad as a simple take-it-or-leave-it deal — stop the activities »

Violence In Iraq: A Comparison

This report in today’s Los Angeles Times says that 50,000 Iraqis have been killed since the American-led invasion in March 2003. A large majority of these were murdered by terrorists. The Times trumpets its figure, which it considers conservative, as a rebuke to the Bush administration–the article’s very first sentence notes that its figure is “20,000 higher than previously acknowledged by the Bush administration.” No doubt the Times’ count will »

Two modest proposals

The Media Research Center notes the response of mainstream media news organizations to the unclassified portion of the report revealing that 500 munition shells of mustard and sarin gas had been found in Iraq. John discussed the report in “About those WMDs” and “Rumsfeld confirms WMD finds.” According to the MRC, among the three broadcast network evening news shows, only the NBC Nightly News discussed the report. The MRC also »

Faking it

Yale University Professor Steven Smith has written a new book on the thought of Leo Strauss, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosphy, Judaism. Clifford Orwin reviewed it favorably in the May issue of Commenatary; Orwin’s review isn’t available online, but my friend Bruce Sanborn summarizes it in this post at The Remedy. The virtue of Orwin’s review is that it is based on deep knowledge of the book’s subject. Tomorrow’s New »