Via Pejmanesque, a remark from radical professor of Middle Eastern studies Juan Cole. Regarding last evening's GOP convention speech by Zainab al-Suwaig, an Iraqi woman who supports the overthrow of Saddam and is excited about the potential of her homeland as a free nation, Cole had this to say:

"The Republicans also had an Iraqi woman speak. Apparently they could not find an eloquent Iraqi with good English who still would come and support them. This woman at one point alleged that there have been recent free municipal elections in Iraq. I doubt that very much. Or, if any municipal elections have been held, they wouldn't be considered free or fair if done in the same way in Topeka, Kansas."

I guess it's useless to point out just how outraged the media would be should someone on the right utter such a statement about anyone, anywhere. Not that the disgust wouldn't be justified regardless of the political leanings of the bigot who said such a thing. But the left often drops its guard when the wrong kind of minority speaks up, and Cole has just shown his true colors.

Glenn Reynolds's column at TCS, "Media Meltdown?," is getting a good bit of attention from the blogosphere. Some of his points have been made before, including here and here, but he draws together many strands of the story to present a coherent, and convincing, warning to old media barons.

Anyone who suffered through American cars in the late '70s will love this:

"The biggest problem is that, like most monopolists, they've spent so many years enjoying their position and not worrying about quality that they're left floundering now that competition is exposing their faults. Like the folks at GM who couldn't understand why people were buying Toyotas all of a sudden back in the 1970s, today's Big Media folks are shocked to see ratings and circulation numbers falling while readership for Internet sites skyrockets. And, like the auto executives, they're even starting to mumble about the need for protection.

"But it won't work, of course. And -- much like the release of the Chevrolet Vega, the Ford Fairmont, or the AMC Pacer -- the press's coverage of the 2004 presidential election has revealed an industry in deep trouble."

Via Patterico, Chrenkoff has the ninth installment of his Good News from Iraq. It's a long but worthwhile read, complete with numerous links to sources around the Middle East and at home. Here's one of his opening paragraphs:

"Experts might debate exactly how much water there is in the Iraqi glass, but there is little doubt that - yet again - while the cameras and microphones were pointing towards the carnage, violence and corruption, Iraq has continued its slow and steady march out of its three-decades long nightmare into a much more normal tomorrow. Below are some of the positive developments and good news stories of the past fortnight that for most part received very little media attention. It's a pity because the story of 'Iraq, the phoenix rising from the ashes' is in many ways a lot more interesting, not to say consequential, than the usual steady media diet of 'Iraq, the Wild East.'"

To back this up, he quotes from a recent editorial in the Arab News:

"[L]et us not begrudge Sadr's 15 minutes of fame... Students of journalism, however, know the difference between the events that furnish most of the daily headlines and the undercurrents that shape the broader context of a society's political life. Now what are the undercurrents that, with eyes fixed on the current events, are largely ignored?

"The most important is that post-liberation Iraq, defying great odds, has succeeded in carrying out its political reform agenda on schedule. A governing council was set up at the time promised. It in turn, created a provisional government right on schedule. Next, municipal elections were held in almost all parts of the country. Then followed the drafting of a new democratic and pluralist constitution. Then came the formal end of the occupation and the appointing of a new interim government.

"Earlier this month, the political reconstruction program reached a new high point with the convening of the National Congress."

He closes with this from a young native of Baghdad now at Dartmouth (from the Boston Globe, but the link is now archived):

"Next time you have a drink, make sure you invite Barakat Jassem for a glass of water. Jassem, a native of Baghdad and a one of 18 children, has been until recently working as an English translator for Iraqi TV. Once, when working on a Bette Davis movie, 'The Virgin Queen,' a mistake he made had angered Uday Hussein so much that Jassem was thrown into jail for 30 days. Jassem is now studying at Dartmouth College under the newly reinstated Fulbright program. He has this to say:

"'I see the Americans working hard day and night to establish the basic needs for the Iraqi people... I think people (in America) are divided because it's a war. War is always a bad idea. [But] I want to emphasize this point. For me, it was 100 percent a liberation. There's nothing worse than a dictator.'
It often happens that the people who have been thirsty for a long time can tell you the most about water.'"

Hugh Hewitt talked to some politicos last evening in NYC and reports on some of their thoughts. (Modest observation number 4.) Most interesting to me were their comments (paraphrased by Hewitt) on the new media:

John Podhoretz and David Frum: "New media has won. Old media knows it. And old media are very unhappy."

From Brent Bozell: "Don't underestimate the power of a handful of bloggers, recalling that it was three East Gedrman students who in essence organized the 1989 revolution via a mimeo machine and a battered car."

From Hewitt himself: "The reason the new media is so powerful is that people with opinions no longer need to persuade people to be allowed to persuade people. The gatekeepers are finished."

That last point is crucial and is of course why I'm writing this and why you're reading it. That's not to say that gatekeepers aren't important, per se, but that the gatekeepers of the elite media abused their powers to advance their own agendas rather than engage in consistently rigorous journalism. Like Kerry's implosion over Vietnam, they have only themselves to blame.

At Captain's Quarters, Captain Ed was up early (or late) to record his impressions of the convention's first night. He gives bloggers in attendance a good grade for their perseverance amidst chaos and tight security and wants to know your opinion on how you think bloggers are doing -- so stop by and share your thoughts. I was most taken, however, by his extensive comments on Giuliani's speech. He nails the dangers of appeasement, something I've written about often.

"It's been asked by myself and others what would have happened to Churchill had his advice on Hitler been heeded, even as late as Munich in October 1938? Europe would have gone to war, certainly precipitively in the minds of many. Churchill would have suffered tremendous political damage for his actions. Absent the camps, the Aushcwitzes, the Polands and the Ukraines that followed, the world would have concluded that Churchill was a war monger who loved nothing but battle and the shedding of blood -- a criticism he suffers to this day among a few anyway. And he would have saved tens of millions of people from the death and destruction of Nazi Germany that ensued."

Meanwhile, Power Line has extensive and insightful commentary from the Gardens. For example:

"By far the loudest response McCain got--probably the strongest response anyone got--was when he denounced Michael Moore as 'a disingenuous filmmaker who would have us believe that Saddam’s Iraq was an oasis of peace, when in fact it was a place of indescribable cruelty...' I think the Republicans should do more of this. The problem with Moore isn't that he is fat, crude or unpatriotic, although all of those things are true. His main fault is that he is a liar. He is also the intellectual leader of today's Democratic Party. The Republicans need to do more to hang him around the Democrats' neck, while empasizing his untruthfulness."

And he had this to say about Giuliani, who took it upon himself to make up for big media's silence on 9/11: "Giuliani spent the first part of his speech recalling the events of September 11 and their immediate aftermath. This was important and necessary because of the media embargo on images of the terrorist attacks. Giuliani described watching people jump to their deaths from the upper stories of the World Trade Center and the wall of smoke and dust that rolled down the street when the first tower collapsed. His own leadership, and even heroism, on that day are well known, so the Democrats can't challenge his right to tell those stories. But it is shameful that the media, and in particular the television networks, have adopted a policy of not broadcasting images of September 11, for what appear to be transparently political reasons. So it falls to the Republicans to remind voters what that day was like."

More blog coverage of the convention can be found by following the links on this page.

Could anybody have said it better?

When I opened the New York Times yesterday morning, the article on page A3 caught my eye: "Canada Reinforces Its Disputed Claims in the Arctic." An accompanying photo showed two Canadian soldiers with their Eskimo guide in the far north near the Arctic Circle. Several paragraphs read like something from nineteenth-century British history, including the one I quote below, but with a twist. See if you pick up the hint that things have changed:

"The $4 million exercise is the most prominent sign to date of Canada's intensifying effort to reinforce disputed claims over tens of thousands of miles of Arctic channels and tundra. Once nearly permanently frozen, forbidding and forgotten, the region is today seen by officials from Canada and competing nations as a potential source of both wealth and trouble."

The key words are "once nearly." Read on and you'll find this gem:

"Most important, climate change has begun to make more real the dream of opening a northwest passage that would shorten ship travel between Europe and Asia by thousands of miles, over the decades to come. Canadian policy makers want to reserve the right to regulate and tax such a passage."

Even the Defense Minister can read the meteorological tea leaves: "Defense Minister Bill Graham noted that global warming had created 'new possibilities and new threats' in the Arctic that Canada must adjust to. 'We need more resources up there and we are going to look for ways to deploy them,' he said in an interview. 'The sense is now the time has come.'"

Canada isn't alone. Spurred by the belief that global warming will free up resources and passages in the far north, the Danes have also rediscovered their sense of adventure: "The patrol was Canada's response to an unlikely challenge from Denmark, which in two previous summers had landed marines from ice-cutting frigates on Hans Island, a desolate piece of rock in the Kennedy Channel, between Greenland and Ellesmere Island. The Danes believed that the island and its surrounding waters had enough fishing and gas potential for them to pound Danish flags and plaques into its rocky surface [emphasis added] and stir up a diplomatic incident that is still not settled."

An obvious question is, what if global warming is a myth? What if the variations in weather patterns are so poorly understood (think of the accuracy of your local forecast) that the considerably large group of scientists who don't buy the theory of global warming are correct?

But in many circles, including no doubt the governments of Canada and Denmark, it's at least considered a worthwhile risk to bet on global warming's veracity. Dominic Standish writes at TCS of the ways global warming has become what he calls a "secular faith." In his words, "Many responses to the swarms of locusts and other extreme conditions have been reminiscent of biblical, pre-scientific times. Most media commentators report weather-related events without recourse to the science of climate change. They employ the language of global warming to 'explain' problems in a manner common to pre-modern superstition."

I've written before on the intellectual bankruptcy of the left, something I think we're seeing played out in this year's presidential election. Absent an intellectually coherent guiding philosophy that's open to rigorous debate, positions of any group become solipsistic. The protesters in NYC don't really, I suspect, plan on converting anyone to their cause. And John Kerry seems less interested in answering the charges of the Swift Boat Vets than in silencing them through litigation and threats, just as the campus left has long since become a bastion of pro-censorship rules exercised through speech and conduct codes.

But I still have a question regarding the conflict between our allies in the far north: Were those hammer-wielding Danes wear horned hats?

This nation has a lot to be proud of this week. Don't miss the Virginian-Pilot's front page today.

Israel is done no favors by the likes of mid-level Department of Defense official Larry Franklin, who according to anonymous FBI sources, shared with staffers of AIPAC -- the Israeli lobby in the United States -- a memo with sensitive information about Iran.

If the rumors are true, Franklin needs to be canned, not because what he did was wrong, but because what he did was stupid. There are official diplomatic channels in which intelligence relevant to Israel can be passed along and it's not in a meeting with political action committee with ties to Israel.

Via Instapundit, David Adesnik at Oxblog is all over the real story of the demonstrators in NYC (see my comment # 1 below in today's first post). He has an interesting take on the way journalists covered yesterday's march which is even more damning than what I expected:

"What I can say with a good amount of confidence is that the stories already up in the NYT and WaPo give a very superficial and often misleading impression of what it was what like to be at today's protests."

Then: "The first thing wrong with these stories is their focus on the few inconsequential arrests and mishaps that took place. Many of the journalists I saw just seemed to be waiting for something to go wrong. Because things going wrong is news, whereas the actual ideas and policies favored by the protesters are supposedly boring. . . . At one point, a small commotion broke out when the police escorted a protester away with his arms pinned behind his back. About a dozen officers moved in swiftly to make sure the commotion didn't spread. Then suddenly, dozens and dozens of journalists swarmed toward the knot of police officers like locusts from some biblical plague."

The result among protesters: "If I were a protester, I'd probably feel that the NYT and WaPo did the marchers a disservice by failing to recognize just how orderly and peaceful the protest was and how the organizers successfully defused the most important potential conflict of the day, i.e. the disappointed hope that the protest march would culminate with a massive rally in Central Park."

And yet comment #1 was confirmed (not a difficult call, to be sure): "Now, if I didn't like the protesters, I would tell you that the NYT and WaPo did them a tremendous favor by downplaying the degree to which they represented the leftmost edge of the American political spectrum. I've posted before about what UFPJ stands for, so I won't repeat myself. Suffice it to say that neither the Times nor the Post tells you anything about UFPJ's history or what it stands for."

Misrepresenting the degree of violence in the crowd while whitewashing their ideological radicalism. That's pretty sorry journalism and makes the elite sound like little more than ambulance chasers. "If it bleeds, it leads" seems to apply to the production of news stories well beyond the purview of your local nightly news. Makes you wonder just how much is beyond the purview of the big boys, too.

Steven Taylor at Poliblog wrote an op-ed for yesterday's Mobile Register (registration) reminding us again that Chavez's radicalism may destabilize not only Venezuela but the whole region. Exporting revolution with oil dollars is nothing new -- the Saudis have become adept at it over the years. Doing it through the destruction of a country that formerly served as a model for Latin American democracy, however, is both new and disturbing.

My comments on the recent election, and Jimmy Carter's role in sanctioning Chavez's corruption, may be found here.

Update: Brent thinks I overstated Venezuela's democratic record in the above post, and I'll buy that with the proviso that in pre-Chavez days it was far more of a democracy than it's likely to be under Chavez. Certainly from 1958 onwards the country could have benefited from a thriving entrepreneurial class so that the middle class might have grown considerably, and I didn't mean to imply the existence of an American-style democracy pre-Chavez. As for the election, Rafael Alfonzo of Caracas has a letter to the editor in today's WSJ ($). As a member of the commission that helped negotiate the the election monitoring agreement between the opposition, the Carter Center, and the OAS, he contrasts Jimmy Carter's desire that care and patience be exercised four years ago in Florida with his careless acceptance of the results of Venezuela's election.

The GOP convention this week provides an excellent laboratory in which to examine the role of bloggers and other new media. It's not that earlier conventions weren't covered by talk radio or cable news (in fact, you'll have to turn to FNC, CNN, or C-SPAN for most of the action, including tonight's speeches, since the networks are limiting their coverage). What will be new, of course, is the presence of so many bloggers post-Swift Vets. I think they'll play a significantly greater role in covering the convention and the antics of anti-war mobs than bloggers did in Boston during the Democratic convention for the same reason blogging has taken off in the first place: their adversarial relationship to the mainstream press. Hugh Hewitt and the Captain's Quarters are only two among many superb analysts I'll be reading this week.

Those organs that fawned all over the Kerry camp up in Boston -- the Times, the Post, the Globe, the wire services, the networks -- will no doubt turn a selectively close eye to the GOP in NYC. I say selectively because, for every story they scrutinize, they're bound to ignore others either from ignorance or malice. (John Podhoretz has an insightful column on the old media's blindness to the new players in today's NY Post.) And that's where the bloggers (plus talk radio and cable news) come in. Because many of them share at least some of the President's agenda, they are likely to have plenty of grist for their mills as the week rolls along.

Here are some blog-related developments to look for this week from NYC:

1. The behavior of demonstrators: Will the demonstrators get violent with police and/or destroy property? And will the mainstream press cover it to the same degree as the bloggers might? We know that the old media consistently play down the size of crowds at, say, anti-abortion rallies while playing up opposing events, or that they ignore the wilder elements in gay pride parades while exposing only the unexposed. Those prejudices will be more difficult to get away with this week.

2. Splits among conservatives: Big media always love in-fighting on the right, and not so long ago we had to suffer through the expertise of chameleons like Kevin Phillips and David Gergin to give the "conservative" side of the argument. There was the traditional conservative press, of course, but it was neither instantaneous nor distributed widely enough to counter the defeatist nonsense from the media's favorite spokesmen for what they viewed as the right. Today, the new media can cover those splits more accurately and intelligently. Small fights won't easily be labeled civil wars, and the real splits on the right can be examined with significantly greater knowledge brought to bear on the real causes and effects of such disagreements. (Brent and I commented on one such split here and here.)

3. The tone of the convention. This overlaps some with point #2 above. Many media commentators love to refer to anyone to the right of Michael Bloomberg as "far right," "hard right," or "fundamentalist." Therefore, it follows that just about anyone to Bloomberg's right who delivers a speech will be "divisive," "hate-filled," "intolerant," and "partisan." New media can ensure that the contents of any speech are not drowned out by partisan commentary from self-declared objective reporters. And, for the same reasons they can cover intra-party splits more accurately than most old media folks -- knowledge of the issues -- they'll most likely have a better angle on the overall tone of the affair.

4. Comments from the floor. Dan Rather's comments from the Garden are getting significant attention, but he'll have real competition for breaking real stories once things are under way. Put it this way: If you were a conventioneer on the floor or in a bar, to whom would you feel more comfortable speaking: A network lackey with an axe to grind (the better to chop off your head), or a blogger or talk radio host you trust?

Put on your lab coat and keep tuning in.

Please pardon this aside, but I must make a confession: I made the switch. I bought a Macintosh PowerBook G4 (12" display) last weekend; I love it. If you’re thinking about buying a new computer, I strongly suggest eyeing the new line of Macs. OS X is incredible (and stable), and I can do everything I need without the hassle of crashes or worry of viruses. All this love from someone who has been an anti-Mac troll for years. Kudos to Steve Jobs and his team at Apple for ginning out an excellent product.

Via Pejmanesque, Daniel Drezner quotes from an AP story on Philippine President President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo's ban on allowing Filipinos from going to Iraq to help rebuild it. Her action follows the kidnapping of Filipino Angelo dela Cruz by Iraqi thugs. In exchange for his release, Arroyo agreed to pull Filipino troops from the Coalition ahead of schedule. During a protest demanding the lifting of the travel ban, police used water canon to disperse the crowd and made arrests.

The protesters want to take advantage of relatively lucrative contracts with the U.S. military, which would pay them some $650 per month ($7,800 per year) in a country with a per capita GDP of $4,600. Forty percent of the population lives below the poverty level and over eleven percent is unemployed.

Through her actions, President Arroyo is hampering the ability of workers to escape the dire poverty of their homeland and support their families as best they can. The free movement of people provides for both those needs. Absent that freedom, they are left to the designs of local employers and corrupt government officials. Like all workers, they desire alternatives, and the competition provided by their free movement is needed to help force domestic industry to modernize and improve its treatment of workers.

Beyond that, Arroyo's cave-in awards the radicals in Iraq who'd like nothing better than to rid the country of "infidels" from outside the area. As Drezner says, this is what happens when you appease terrorists.

As I watch the storm over Kerry's Vietnam record grow, I believe that future historians will mine the historiography of both the mainstream media and the blogosphere in much the way they do manuscript collections, old newspapers, and diaries. Because in addition to the more traditional scholarly and primary source literature that every important election leaves behind, this one will be the first to include blogs.

That will be an immense and important task. No one could have predicted only a couple of years ago that blogs would force the hands of the major media. Rather than killing stories through neglect, the big papers and networks have been embarrassed into covering them, albeit often late and with a sneer. Wilfred McClay was correct when he wrote here this past week that blogs are often parasitic to the mainstream media. That is, few of us possess the resources (or the time) to do the footwork necessary to uncover and interview sources. That said, Hugh Hewitt, Glenn Reynolds, Captain’sQuarters, Powerline, and others did indeed engage in primary source work, and their stories on the Swift Boat Vets – including research into the veracity of the Vets’ claims – have played key roles in both keeping the story alive and in bringing about additional coverage from the big papers. That role, and the roles played by countless smaller blogs, has already had an enormous impact on the coverage of an election still two months away.

In some sense blogs are fulfilling a mission analogous to that held by referees for scholarly journals. Once an article is submitted to such a publication, an editor sends it to other specialists so that its integrity can be verified. In the humanities, the goal isn't to ensure universal agreement with the author's conclusions – that’s not the way such scholarship works. Within the sciences, a key goal is the possibility of replicating the results claimed by the authors. Such a system can help ensure that charlatans are kept out of key journals or presses.

But of course any system is only as good as the people who oversee it, and when those responsible for ensuring that conclusions are supportable through traditional methods of research supplement advocacy for fair-mindedness, a system is seriously weakened. That’s what happened to America’s mainstream media in the post-WWII period: liberal elitism supplanted what was earlier seen as partisan coverage of major events, but it did so under the aegis of objectivity. Of course, similarly slanted coverage posing as enlightened thought occurred in the pre-war period – think of the loathsome and mendacious denial of Stalin’s starvation policy in Ukraine that won the New York Times’s Walter Duranty a Pulitzer – but it wasn’t until after the war that a sufficient number of major dailies, supplemented by the new medium of television, tilted the balance of daily news coverage.

Dave Kopel, writing in today’s Rocky Mountain News, compares the presidential election of 1964 with today’s. Lyndon Johnson lied about his WWII service baldly and repeatedly, and yet, as Kopel argues, journalists gave him a pass. Their willful ignorance had two principal causes: first, any reporter attempting to break the story would have found his story buried. That’s because of the second reason: LBJ was “the darling of the establishment media” in 1964. He carried the mantel of the martyr of Camelot, JFK, and his opponent, Barry Goldwater, was the politician most hated by the left since Joe McCarthy.

Jonathan Last of the Weekly Standard chronicles the blogoshere’s role in the Swift Vets’ story:

“But the big news on August 6 was that Regnery allowed people to download the ‘Christmas in Cambodia’ section of O'Neill's book. While [Keith] Olbermann and others were worrying about mystical jazz, the new media swung into action. Hugh Hewitt, Glenn Reynolds, Powerline, and other bloggers immediately began investigating the book's allegations. The blog JustOneMinute was the first to find the 1986 ‘seared —seared’ speech in which Kerry described his memory of being in Cambodia in December 1968. On August 8, Reynolds took his digital camera to the University of Tennessee law library and photographed the section of the Congressional Record with the Kerry speech, further verifying the chapter’s central claim. That same weekend, Al Hunt talked about the Swift boat ad on CNN's Capital Gang, calling it ‘some of the sleaziest lies I've ever seen in politics.’”

As he goes on to prove, and as close observers know, mainstream news organs finally paid some attention to the story, but most of that coverage was spurred by Kerry’s denunciations of the Swift Vets and did little more than provide an echo chamber for his denials. Yet Last’s principal point, which he shares with bloggers, remains: “[T]he baying of the Times and the rest of the old media is a sign of capitulation. Against their will, the best-funded and most prestigious journalists in America have been forced to cover a story they want no part of – or at the very least, they've been compelled to explain why they aren't covering it.”

Which brings us back to the sources for scholars of this election. If you’re still getting used to footnote citations of web sites, wait until you see them for blogs. Not most blogs, mind you, any more than footnotes include most articles or most books. But certain key blogs that uncovered important information, or whose corroboration of claims gave life to stories whose impact, in retrospect, can fairly be called significant, will make their way into the literature of the period. As will, no doubt, the rise of the blogosphere and other alternative media (talk radio, cable television) and their collective roles in transforming opinion-making in America. We’ve turned a corner, and historians will be looking back to discern how we did it, and what it means.

Patterico has, with the help of Instapundit, forced the hand of the LA Times. As he explains, the Times ran a story charging that no members of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were aboard John Kerry's boat in Vietnam in spite of the fact that Steve Gardner, a member of the group, did indeed serve on Kerry's boat. Despite repeated efforts, the Times continued to ignore their mistake, but today ran a correction (registration).

I wouldn't be surprised if other readers contacted the Times about the error, but there's no question that the attention brought about by Patterico and Glenn Reynolds made a difference. It took the paper seven days to act, and although I appreciate the difficulties involved in making any correction, better fact-checking and less politicking right up front would have made for better journalism and PR. Just a few years ago, ignored letters to the editor would have remained, well, ignored.

Rock stars and professors should stay out of politics, because they usually don't get it, with the exception of hard rocker Alice Cooper of course, who says he was disgusted to learn about plans by Bruce Springsteen, R.E.M., Sheryl Crow and James Taylor to do a series of concerts to promote the Democratic ticket. "If you're listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you're a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we're morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around (with) the Washington Journal."

While Niall Ferguson just might sit around reading the Washington Journal in his office overlooking Harvard Yard, after reading his column Republicans for Kerry, he should probably cancel his subscription and leave the political prognaticating to Alice Cooper or someone else (by the way I'm impressed that Alice Cooper knows of the Washington Journal).

It's Ferguson's premise that conservatives would be better off if George Bush fails to win a second term? Here's why:

"If he secures re-election, President Bush can be relied upon to press on with a foreign policy based on pre-emptive military force, to ignore the impending fiscal crisis (on the Cheney principle that 'Deficits don't matter') and to pursue socially conservative objectives like the constitutional ban on gay marriage. Anyone who thinks this combination will serve to maintain Republican unity is dreaming; it will do the opposite. Meanwhile, the Dems will have another four years to figure out what the Labour Party finally figured out: It's the candidate, stupid. And when the 2008 Republican candidate goes head-to-head with the American Tony Blair, he will get wiped out."

But Ferguson makes his analysis on a set of faulty assumptions. First, he presumes there is waiting in the wings of the Democratic Party an "American Tony Blair," quite a remarkable assumption indeed after witnessing post-9/11 the incredible leadership of the man currently residing at 10 Downing Street. Second, he reveals his poor judgment of skill and character when comparing President Bush to Former Prime Minister John Major -- no doubt a lovely man, but one that who the charisma, political acumen (just think of the Swift Vote Vets ads) and fortitude of the current President. And perhaps most insulting to the soldiers sitting in front of that God-forsaken shrine in Najaf, he forgets that September 11 happened; that we're at war -- a circumstance that John Major chose not to face in his refusal to send troops to Bosnia. No, President Bush would be better compared to another British Prime Minister: Winston Churchill

Per my comments from earlier today on Chavez, Andres Oppenheimer of the Miami Herald, writing for PetroleumWorld.com, puts the consequences of Chavez's rule in perspective:

"If Chávez won, it was thanks to a combination of massive intimidation, unabashed use of state resources for propaganda, and the use of $1.6 billion from the country's oil income for cash subsidies to the poor. Chávez handed out $160 a month in cash to hundreds of thousands of people who for the first time received something concrete from their government."

And: "In addition, intimidation was visible everywhere. The Chávez government in recent months fired thousands of government workers who had signed a 3.4-million signature petition to hold Sunday's referendum. And it installed 12,000 fingerprinting machines in voting places for Sunday's vote, allegedly to keep people from voting twice, but at the same time spreading fears that people's vote would not be secret."

The intimidation and beatings continue: "On Thursday, while touring the downtown Caracas area of El Centro, I saw the whole place covered with pro-Chávez signs but not one single one from the opposition. 'Every time the opposition tries to put up a sign, the chavistas beat them violently,' the opposition mayor of Caracas, Alfredo Peña, told me. 'My own office has been attacked 26 times by armed chavistas on the government payroll.'''

Now that his rule has been sanctioned by Carter and the feckless OAS, Chavez and his supporters feel free to tighten their grip on the rest of society. It's good to remember just how extensive Chavez's power grab already is. Again Oppenheimer: "Chávez already controls Congress, the Supreme Court, the electoral tribunal, the central bank, the armed forces and the PDVSA oil monopoly. Pro-Chávez legislators in Congress have already proposed bills to curtail press freedoms and to dismantle the Caracas police and other local police forces run by opposition mayors. In addition, Chávez has promised to strengthen his Bolivarian Circles, his Cuban-modeled neighborhood watch committees."

Oppenheimer thinks the 45% of the population who're vehemently opposed to Chavez, combined with international pressure, may be sufficient to prevent him from closing down the opposition press, which he acknowledges are the "last line of defense against his near-absolute powers." And he thinks that oil prices will fall sooner or later, signaling an end to Chavez's ability to keep the unearned cash flowing to the poor and bringing on their discontent. Given the violence and intimidation already rampant there, however, such predictions seem overly optimistic. Especially with the U.S. State Department firmly behind the Castro-wannabe.

Mary Anastasia O'Grady is proving to be the Dorothy Rabinowitz for Venezuelans. Just as the irrepressible Ms. Rabinowitz wrote exhaustively in the WSJ about the horrendous and illegal jailing by Massachusetts of members of the Amirault family, so Ms. O'Grady keeps coming back to Venezuela's recent election. I think today's Journal column ($), wherein she notes that the EU refused to monitor the election because of Chavez's insistence that they accept significant limits on their monitoring capabilities, is fatal to Carter's reputation, such as it is. When even the EU can't find a reason to support an anti-American leader, you know something's up.

Such as: "Given how Jimmy Carter's presidency turned out, it is not surprising that he is desperate to salvage his legacy as an international election observer. That effort took a turn for the worse this week when verifiable reports emerged conflicting directly with Mr. Carter's rendition of what happened in the Aug. 15 Venezuelan recall referendum. The Carter claims of omniscient oversight aside, testimony from reliable independent sources shows that the process did not meet any impartial standards of fairness. To start with, observer rules were absurd, so much so that although the European Union wanted to play an observer role, it graciously declined in the interest of honesty. 'Unfortunately, it has not been possible to secure with the Venezuelan electoral authorities the conditions to carry out an observation in line with the Union's standard methodology,' the European Commission declared."

This is damning, because it reveals Jimmy's letter to the editor of the Journal to be as vacuous as I charged at the time. He omitted the details either because he's so naive and ignorant that he really doesn't know them, or because they would sink his case that Chavez didn't steal the election.

I don't claim to be either a computer whiz or an elections expert, but anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the modern world should understand that electronic voting machines can be programmed to manipulate results. The only way to ensure fairness is to allow objective monitoring of elections, and a large part of that must include the freedom to inspect the software of those machines. Ms. O'Grady supplies some stats:

"To support his case, Mr. Carter keeps repeating in the press that Súmate had the same "quick count" as he did. This only creates confusion because 'quick count' totals are merely the sum of totals coming from Chávez-controlled voting software. The only way to check the accuracy of the government's claim of "victory" was to count ballots. But as Súmate describes in clear detail, Mr. Chávez blocked that process: 'When the authorities decided against counting the ballots, the CNE agreed to a very limited audit with the other actors of the process, to count the ballots of only 1% of the ballot boxes, in other words, 192 ballot boxes. Only 76 of the 192 ballot boxes were audited, concentrated in 20 of the 336 municipalities around the country. Promoters of 'SI' [Chávez's opposition] were present at only 27 of these audits while international observers were present at only 10 tables. Inexplicably, this did not represent a cause for concern or alarm to the international observers who endorsed the partial results issued by the CNE without that fundamental piece of information.'"

More statistics that reveal at least highly questionable voting patterns can be found at the Salon blog Venezuela. He cites the work of two Venezuelans who are Professors in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Bruno Sanso and Raquel Prado, to show highly irregular patterns from the official voting results as compared with the exit polls that Carter and other Chavez supporters reject.

A Journal editorial yesterday ($) hits State for its absurd, self-defeating response to the bad news: Unquestioned embrace of the hemisphere's newest dictator. "On Monday, a Foggy Bottom spokesman declared that, 'In order to address those charges of election fraud, an audit was conducted. The audit found that -- did not find any basis to call into doubt the results of the elections.'
As 'audits' go, however, this was akin to Arthur Andersen scrubbing Enron. The sample for the audit was selected by the National Electoral Council (CNE), which is controlled by Mr. Chavez, and was too small to be considered statistically reliable."

A message for Venezuelans: Elements of the conservative press here, joined by bloggers and (I assume) some talk radio hosts, are your friends. The State Department, run by pro-status quo lackeys who rarely meet a dictator they don't embrace, former President Carter, who knows a thing or two about hugging thugs, and the mainstream press are happy to see you go under the boot heel of Chavez.

Stay tuned.

As I told a friend the other day, you know you're hooked on blogging when you feel uninformed because you can't get to a pc. And there's no doubt that at those times you're at least less informed than you need be. We hosted family this week, but I'm back at the keyboard.

On Tuesday I posted comments by Wilfred McClay, "The Passing of an Era?" (If you didn't read it, our upsurge in traffic tells me you may like it.) Two sentences of that fine blog stand out. To the question of why so many media elites, among them Chris Matthews and Tom Oliphant, are "reacting with such uncontained fury and condescension," McClay says:

"It’s because the case of Kerry is a proxy for a whole set of assumptions that the boomer elites have made about the world, and managed to install as our conventional wisdom, about the arrogance of American power, the unmitigated evil of Nixon, the goodness and altruism and truthfulness of the antiwar movement (and therefore themselves), and so on. That whole complacent and self-congratulatory narrative---which is, in some sense, encapsulated in Kerry’s famous testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee---is being implicitly challenged now."

He then writes: "It’s all very well to make the 'long march' to control institutions. But what happens when those institutions have lost their commanding authority? What kind of information environment are they, and we, now entering?"

Those are keen observations and crucial questions. What happens when the institutions through which a dominant elite exercises control over much of a society cease to enable the continuation of that control? The boomer elites are faced with a rear-guard action to preserve their status lest they descend into mere remnant status. But that action is bound to be futile if indeed central institutions have been so hollowed out through the perfidy of those same elites that they're significantly weaker than most people imagine.

The institutions in question -- the networks, many big newspapers, news magazines, academe -- have ridden the boomer wave for three and a half decades now. Partly through the spinelessness of the previous generation of academics, absurd and naive ideas were accorded a level of respect they never deserved. The anti-Americanism that passed for high thought in many quarters was never more than bastardized Marxism, but its dominance of university life allowed it to (temporarily) ignore its critics, many of whom moved to think tanks and conservative publications. And blogs.

But the blogosphere, joined by talk radio and the conservative press, is undercutting boomer elites by doing an end run around their declining institutions. It's helping new institutions and new communities to form around ideas, opinions, and shared interests. Big media hate that, since it breaks their comfortable monopoly, but they're powerless to stop it. Ranting is the natural reaction of a child who is denied his wants, since he possesses neither the reasoning power nor the vocabulary to formulate a rational response. We're seeing the rant of media (and academic) elites softened through decades of self-congratulatory success.

I'll have much more to say on the superb article recommended by Wilfred McClay, "Media Matters: A Devil's Bargain," by Frederick Turner. If you enjoy this and similar blogs, you'll find Turner's work well worth the time. But let me end with his concluding sentences:

"As such institutions as coffee-houses, town meetings, old fashioned barber shops, primary caucuses, soap box gatherings, debates, and suchlike fell into disuse, and the networks and newspapers took over, the Public itself began to disappear, to be replaced by a segmented demographic mass swayed by centralized journalistic voices and shaped by polls. What is now happening is that rather swiftly a new Public is forming, self-organizing around Google and link lists and blog chatrooms. And it will demand a new Res Publica."

[Note: Democracy Project received the following poem for submission to our blog. Russ is a Vietnam veteran, in the 101st Airborne Division no less, and obviously has been reading our posts of late regarding media bias in the coverage of the Swift Vote Veterans for Truth. Enjoy and thanks Russ for your submission. Brent Tantillo]

For years we have said as we've watched and read,
That the Media is liberally left leaning.
When news only we sought, what we usually got
Was some coiffed commentator's "true" meaning.
Just seeking the news, we instead got their views
And too much Peter Jennings-like preening.

We are fair they declare and your charge is unfair
Everything we put out is uncanted.
Then they snidely deride any charges they've lied
Though it's clear where their left feet are planted.
They deny overmuch liberal leanings and such
While it's plain they're all Rather slanted.

What they call reporting we see as distorting
So obvious that it does appall us.
But they think we're all sheep, unthinking, asleep,
And care less if their bias does gall us.
As Sunday eves dreadful they feed us a headful
Of that oh so impartial Mike Wallace.

And as for the press, what a self-righteous mess,
Intoning our right to know all.
While the grand New York Times, dismisses and slimes
Those, who for the truth, loudly call.
And the Washington Post sets it columnist host
To impugning these men, one and all.

So election year's here and it's crystalline clear
That John Kerry's the media's hero.
They praise him in war and completely ignore
Those brave men who rate him a zero.
With utter disdain for truth in the main
This Media's fiddling like Nero.

At some future date, when it's far, far too late,
To ever atone for their bias,
Finally faced with their fate that they carry no weight,
All those talking heads will be so pious,
As without any shame they will loudly declaim
How on earth did that phony get by us?

Russ Vaughn
2d Bn, 327th Parachute Infantry Regiment
101st Airborne Division
Vietnam 65-66

The previous post is a superb essay by Wilfred McClay, wherein he argues that the mainstream media, reflective of the unctuous, arrogant boomer generation, is getting its due with the Kerry fiasco. We've commented on this topic here before -- most notably here, here, and here.

Other bloggers are following this story with remarkable vigor. Some of the best commentary I've seen is on The Truth Laid Bear, where you'll find this:

"Another thought from the Dept. of Conspiracies: Ok, now we've all discussed in the past how Bush is extremely good at luring his opponents out onto a limb and then sawing it off. Consider that it is entirely possible that Bush might be able to use this moment to shame the existing 527's into withdrawing, or at least curtailing, their participation in the remainder of the campaign.

"Putting on my tinfoil hat for a moment, could neutralizing 527's have been Bush's plan all along? With SBVT out in front showing what an impact a 527 can have on the campaign, that gave Bush the excuse to come out against all of them --- which he has just done. He and the RNC are now perfectly positioned to keep the pressure on the Democratic 527's to shut the hell up.

Is this the Mother-Of-All-Rope-A-Dopes?"

Perhaps a better formulation of this would hold that the Bush folks, seeing Kerry's campaign supported by 527s to a much greater degree than the GOP and knowing that his reliance on his Vietnam record made him particularly vulnerable to questioning it, has played the situation almost perfectly. Otherwise, you might have to assume that the Bush folks are in contact with Swift Vets, which seems unlikely given Rove's reputation for caution. When your opponent's hanging himself . . .

TLB links to OpenSecrets.org, where you'll find Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has spent $158,750. Compare that to some anti-Bush 527s: Media Fund ($28,127,488), America Coming Together ($26,905,450), and Moveon.org ($9,086,102).

The rich lefties who sought to remove money from politics weren't any more serious about actually doing that than they are about living simply or donating their wealth to the Federal government voluntarily. For a bunch that claims to see money as the root of all evil, it comes in pretty handy to have a big stash around when you need it.

[Note: Democracy Project board member Wilfred McClay has contributed the essay below to our blog and we're most grateful for his participation. A historican of American intellectual history, he is SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanitities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Prof. McClay is also a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a member of the Society of Scholars at the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He's a regular contributor to the Weekly Standard, Commentary, and First Things, among many publications.
Winfield Myers]

"The Passing of an Era?"

I’m hardly the only one to be struck by the vehement, uncontained rage of media figures like Chris Matthews and Tom Oliphant, and the sweeping, completely unearned condescension of the New York Times and Washington Post, directed at the Swift Boat Vets and their gallant campaign against John Kerry’s candidacy. Why such an angry, petulant---but also, be it noted, completely self-righteous---reaction? Why the shift in tone, the loss of control? It seems to me that, aside from the obvious partisan particulars, there are two larger and interlocking reasons for this, and taken together, they suggest why the struggles now underway may have consequences far beyond their immediate content.

First, it seems we are experiencing one of those moments when history shifts its gears, and the accredited elites cannot seem to grasp what is happening, and cling desperately to the pieces of their fraying reputation. It’s a shift that the army of talented bloggers out there, part of one of the most genuinely populist movements ever to arise in modern American politics, has been announcing for a long time---perhaps a little prematurely and self-interestedly, but what they have been predicting is now clearly upon us. The baby-boomer generation’s journalistic and academic elites sought, and gained, control over the nation’s chief organs of knowledge production, accreditation, and communication, with all the enormous power and influence that has entailed. But now the Gramscian monopoly is crumbling, and they cannot see how they are themselves largely to blame for their own discrediting. The moves by Kerry’s campaign to stifle discourse---threaten booksellers, bully publishers, file lawsuits, seek regulatory restraints---are all too indicative of a reflex to control speech, and thereby deprive a democratic society of the oxygen it needs to thrive. Those of us who live and work in universities have been all too familiar with this reflex, which has been more triumphant than not in the academy, to the enduring detriment of academic discourse. But it is much harder to control and stifle journalistic and non-traditional media of expression. The credential-flashing of Mr. Oliphant (who somehow neglected to mention that his daughter is employed by the Kerry campaign, an uncomfortable fact brought out by the bloggers) looks more and more like the flash of an empty suit.

For those who have chafed under the years of this so-called mainstream media’s arrogant domination, this really is a remarkable moment in our nation’s history, in which one feels the atmosphere becoming palpably freer, as the big organs of propaganda show themselves to be permanently weakened. It would be far too much to say that it doesn’t matter anymore what the Times says, or what Time, Newsweek, and the major TV networks do. That’s clearly not so. But they continue to discredit themselves, in ways that are almost beyond repair. If they want to know why Fox News and the blogosphere have been so successful, they need only look (to quote a prominent Democratic politician) deep into the mirror of their own souls. These large media will not go away, and the blogosphere is parasitic upon it in ways that it does not always acknowledge. But the MSM will never again be able to operate without the potent check of the alternative media, a new epicycle of checks-and-balances that reflects the genius, and continuing fertility, of American politics. This is a very, very healthy development for American democracy.

There is a second deeper reason why people like Matthews, Oliphant, et al. are reacting with such uncontained fury and condescension. It’s because the case of Kerry is a proxy for a whole set of assumptions that the boomer elites have made about the world, and managed to install as our conventional wisdom, about the arrogance of American power, the unmitigated evil of Nixon, the goodness and altruism and truthfulness of the antiwar movement (and therefore themselves), and so on. That whole complacent and self-congratulatory narrative---which is, in some sense, encapsulated in Kerry’s famous testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee---is being implicitly challenged now. Bush’s foreign policy challenges it, and if it can be shown that Kerry is a comprehensive liar---and in fact the Cambodia lies alone, which have been admitted to, would surely have been enough to end a Republican candidate’s entire career---it calls into question everything about the great boomer narrative. It threatens their sense of world-historical rectitude, their moral amour-propre. Hence the indignant reactions. They cannot and will not give in gracefully on this; but they don’t know how to fight back effectively. So expect to see the same sneering and dismissive gestures, and expect them to seem increasingly ineffective. It’s all very well to make the “long march” to control institutions. But what happens when those institutions have lost their commanding authority? What kind of information environment are they, and we, now entering?

That is a vast subject for another occasion, but I recommend that readers of this blog take a look at a brilliant exploration of this theme by Frederick Turner at Tech Central Station. This analysis, which deserves to be widely promulgated and discussed, suggests that, as so often happens in history, this great institution (i.e., the mainstream media) may be losing its power because of its own folly.

That was the mantra of the writing center at which I was employed while a grad student. I think the ideal holds true.

A piece in today’s OpinionJournal.com discounts to some degree the essential skill of writing. Although I didn’t attend Harvard, I did get a business degree, and I must say writing is crucial. It’s not an academic skill; it’s a life skill — all students, including business students, should do it well.

I have family visiting and was out of town for a couple of days, so my blogging time is very limited for the moment. But I can't let Jimmy Carter's letter to the editor in today's WSJ pass by without comment. Brother Jimmy is responding to the devastating column by Mary Anastasia O'Grady last week, which I commented on here.

Jimmy's letter amounts to little more than a vague, finger-wagging lecture. He supplies no details and rebuts none of Ms. O'Grady's charges. The man whose Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, resigned rather than approve of military action to free Americans held by Iranian thugs has no recourse beyond a bland recitation of events. If this is how he teaches Sunday school down in Plains, his pupils' most prayerful moments must occur as they stifle their urge to scream (or sleep) as he drones on about good Christian generalities.

But piety is never an adequate substitute for knowledge; far less can sanctimoniousness stand in for virtue. Carter admits that the military had control of the voting machines after the polls closed, but his defense of this brazen act -- that it's always this way down there -- neither dispels suspicions of fraud nor takes into account the often violent, revolution-plagued atmosphere in contemporary Venezuela. Nor does he broach the fact that Chavez's thugs opened fire on unarmed protestors -- something my friend Thor Halvorssen wrote about last week in the WSJ and on which I commented here and here.

Today's Miami Herald runs a column by Carlos Alberto Montaner that again pins the blame on corrupt computer programmers. As Ms. O'Grady argued, it isn't difficult for voting machines to be set to cap the number of anti-Chavez votes:

"There is also a reasonable accusation that the number of 'yes' votes at some polling stations was 'capped' by software tampering. The charge is supported by the discovery, in some locations, of two or three machines recording the exact same number of 'yes' votes and substantially more 'no' votes. The opposition is claiming that it has proof that this occurred at 500 polling stations. Again, if Mr. Carter and the OAS observers had demanded an open auditing process instead of blindly endorsing government claims, cheating would have been uncovered. But Chávez refused open audits and the observers went along with him."

Carlos Alberto Montaner thinks there is a possible solution that takes into account the inability of the Carter Center to back up its claims:

"What to do? In my opinion, the most sensible thing would have been not to make a pronouncement, but rather create an international tribunal of experts to analyze and verify the electoral results. After all, neither the representatives of the Carter Center sent to Venezuela nor the OAS observers have the technical capability to analyze criminal manipulations of computer software."

He concludes: "I began this article conceding that I had erred by believing the electoral predictions in Venezuela. How did I err? I erred by believing that, faced with a huge defeat, Chávez would have to submit to the will of the people. Chávez was not counting on the people for his victory. A handful of crooked computer programmers would suffice. I should have realized this sooner. My regrets."

That puts Mr. Montaner ahead of Carter, who never met a dictator he didn't trust.

Sunday’s Houston Chronicle delivers a surprisingly unbiased article on the ten-year anniversary of the GOP’s Contract with America, a brilliant strategic stroke by then-GOP leader Newt Gingrich.

I was fortunate recently to pick a paperback copy of the Contract, which I enjoyed reading immensely. It hearkens back to Barry Goldwater in many ways, and I appreciate its simple beauty.

But the Chronicle points to a sad truth: the GOP has moved away from the conservative principles it embraced in 1994. Republicans control the world, and I’m not sure that’s necessarily a good thing (not always, at least).

Pat Buchanan in his new book points to the left-leaning paunch that has grown from the GOP’s spendthrift nature of late. Are we “libertarians who find a home in the Republican party” in danger of losing that home? Frankly, I little care to squat elsewhere, but President George W. Bush is my man.

Let’s just hope he’s reading up on Jesse Helms for post-Nov. 2 inspiration.

My friend Thor Halvorssen emailed from Venezuela to say that his mother, about whom he wrote in the WSJ last week (I commented here) to say that she is improving, but there's a chance that she will be crippled for life. Hopefully, she'll make a full recovery and will be up and around in a few months. Please keep her in your thoughts and prayers.

He says that the situation in Venezuela has "gone from bad to worse. Beyond the betrayal by Carter (he really seems completely uninterested in knowing more about the existing situation, but rather just wants the opposition to shut
up and let Chavez get on with taking control of what remains of the country so he can consolidate his 'Bolivarian Revolution') there are many new developments that make it apparent that we were all victims of a sophisticated electronic swindle. This is not surprising. For Chavez eight more years of government would mean U.S. $1 trillion in revenues. In a lawless country this is a hefty reward for the victor. More so if he can perpetuate himself
in power. He has stated repeatedly that he does not intend to
give up power until 2021."

This is a dire situation in a country whose location and oil resources make it vital to America's future. We shouldn't let it slip off the front pages, or we'll all pay for it down the road. As for Jimmy Carter -- I don't have the time to comment now, but I have plenty more to say.

The Venezuelan blogger I mention in the update below is in fact called The Devil's Excrement (Satan's Poop is the copyright name). He has extensive commentary on the voting machine controversy and his blog is well worth reading.

Satan's Excrement is explained at the top of the blog: "A famous Venezuelan referred to oil as the devil's excrement. For countries, easy wealth appears indeed to be the sure path to failure. Venezuela might be a clear example of that." Fareed Zakaria would agree.

Daniel Henninger poses a poignant and altogether salient question in his column on today’s OpinionJournal.com: How many Olympians are free to compete today thanks to American interventionism?

Henninger points to an American ideal of doing what’s right — albeit not necessarily “neoconservatism” — that the United States will spread democracy when and where it can. And so it has in many, many places:

It baffles me still that critics of President Bush and his liberation of Iraq remain steadfast in their hatred. Can they not see the good that comes from freeing people from the heel of tyranny? Someday soon, I hope, for the truth will set them free.

And the truth is that the people of Iraq, Croatia, Afghanistan and so many other countries are free because of American courage to do the right thing when fate put freedom on the line.

As a resident of Northern Virginia, who hesitantly crosses over the Potomac each morning to work in downtown DC, I couldn't agree more with Win's Sins of Omission I blog earlier today, as evidenced by the fact that the Washington Post barely covered the Unfit for Command story until it ran this refutation of it on yesterday's front page and then again today with this story, also on the front page, claiming that the group of Swift Boat Veterans is "a front for Bush."

First off, whether the group is a front for Bush or not, the Democrats started this mudfight with Terry McAuliffe calling Bush "AWOL" when he served in the Air National Guard. Kerry said "Bring it On" and his fellow Swifties did and now Kerry doesn't like it.

Having been in close contact with the Bush Campaign in 2000, I can assure you there is absolutely no coordination between the Swift Boat Veterans and the Campaign because Karl Rove will make sure of it. A close friend once formed an ethnic group supporting Bush and made the mistake of contacting Rove in an e-mail to tell him about it. Within the hour a Bush-Cheney attorney was on the phone demanding the group be dissolved, the website shut down, and the friend was personally castigated for his stupidity. That's how tight a ship and how serious the Bush-Cheney team takes the campaign finance laws regarding coordination. Maybe Kerry-Edwards handles its relations with MoveOn.Org differently?

In the previous post I address the return of open partisanship among the media elite and use the ongoing Christmas-in-Cambodia story as an example. The same partisanship is on display in the coverage of Sunday's election in Venezuela, which I commented on here and here. The WSJ's news and editorial pages are almost alone in entertaining the possibility that Chavez has stolen the election. The New York Times, in an "analysis" remarkable for its contentiousness even by their own standards, blames Chavez's hostility to America (and, I might add, democrats) on American hostility to his regime. Their take is summed up in the article's title: "The Chavez Victory: A Blow to the Bush Administration."

The Journal's news room ($) is considerably fairer, although you have to keep reading to get to the more skeptical lines:

"[O]ne Carter official acknowledged that their initial monitoring of Sunday's vote left some questions unanswered. Venezuelan election officials had agreed with the opposition to audit 1% of the 19,200 voting machines -- or 192 machines. The Carter Center was supposed to audit five machines, and the OAS another eight, of that number, according to officials from the Carter Center. On the night of the vote, however, the Carter Center and OAS audited only one machine each -- in part because voting didn't end until early Monday and workers from both organizations were exhausted. They say, however, that results from both audits matched the electronic record.

"The wider audit also had problems. Just 84 of a planned 192 audits were carried out, according to the National Electoral Council. The government says opposition members were present at 64 of those, but opposition officials say they witnessed just 27 audits. Furthermore, some of the government's audits weren't carried out properly, officials from the Carter Center say. For instance, officials counted the total number of ballots, but not how many were 'yes' votes and how many were 'no' votes. Despite the problems, both former President Jimmy Carter and OAS Secretary General Cesar Gaviria publicly endorsed the results at a news conference midday Monday, based mostly on a so-called quick count of computerized results from the stations -- something that wouldn't have detected manipulation of the electronic vote count."

Well, that's a bit of a problem, no?

The Journal's Mary Anastasia O'Grady ($) jumps all over this mess in her weekly Americas column. Noting the yawning gaps of such non-monitoring efforts, she writes:

"On Monday, the Carter Center along with the head of the monumentally meaningless Organization of American States, Cesar Gaviria, endorsed Chávez's claims of victory in the Venezuelan recall referendum, rather too hastily it now seems. The problem was that the 'observers' hadn't actually observed the election results. Messrs. Carter and Gaviria were only allowed to make a 'quick count,' that is look at the tally sheets spat out by a sample of voting machines. They were not allowed to check this against ballots the machines issued to voters as confirmation that their votes were properly registered. If there was fraud, as many Venezuelans now suspect, it could have been discovered if the ballots didn't match the computer tallies. The tallies alone were meaningless. The problem was clear by Tuesday but it didn't stop the State Department spokesman Adam Ereli from chiming in. 'The people of Venezuela have spoken,' he proclaimed."

And John Lott of AEI told her that "You can easily write a program that tells the voting machine to record something different in its memory than what it prints out on the receipt that is to be dropped in the ballot box."

Ms. O'Grady is right to take the administration to task for its cave-in to forces at State, the OAS, and within the pro-status-quo academic community. "But Americans have a right to expect a sterner approach from the administration of George W. Bush. State's endorsement of this referendum without a fair audit is a sorry betrayal of not only the Venezuelan people but American ideals. It is tantamount to yielding to terrorism. Observing Washington's supine reaction, Chávez will not hesitate to escalate his efforts to restore authoritarianism on the South American continent."

Pejmanesque is following this story; no update yet on the condition of Thor Halvorssen's mother.

Update: Via Swanky Conservative, a Venezuelan blogger at Salon with the bizarre name Satan's Poop has photos of the shooting that killed one woman and wounded Thor's mother. He also helps explain the seemingly unlikely "coincidence" that in about 500 cases, according to the WSJ($), "votes to oust Mr. Chavez tabulated by one voting machine matched the result in a nearby voting machine."

I've long known that media partisanship expresses itself not merely by what's reported, but by what is omitted. That's true of the ongoing story of Kerry's Christmas-in-Cambodia, which has been ignored by the Washington Post and New York Times but covered by the conservative press, talk radio, and the blogosphere. Willful ignorance has always been practiced by the elite media, but it's more obvious now thanks to the new sources noted above, and because it's more brazenly partisan than it's been in many decades. The era of supposed objectivity among big media journalists isn't just coming to a close, it has ended. We entered a new era of an openly partisan media some time back -- it's just that many of the bigger players have yet to admit it.

I don't see this return to partisanship as a bad thing. In fact, it's the norm in modern journalism, by which I mean the newspaper business as it developed from the nineteenth-century onward. What it really signals, though, is the end to liberalism's hegemony in the news business (which I commented on here and here. Talk radio alone indicates this, and the preponderance of conservatives on the airways demonstrates not conspiracy by right-wingers, but the lack of market demand for a liberal alternative.

Bloggers who're following the Cambodia story closely include Instapundit, Patterico (via Instapundit), Hugh Hewit, and the Captain's Quarters.

All of these souces attack the front-page hit-piece by the Times this morning that attempts to destroy the credibility of the swiftboat veterans who've questioned Kerry's credibility. I'd say that the Texan who supported the swifties' efforts got his money's worth, especially compared to the lack of effectiveness of George Soros's millions to support Kerry.

Not the soaring oil prices aren't cause for concern, but I've often wondered when reporters would bother to report those prices in constant dollars. (I often have similar thoughts when the Dow rises or falls and it's reported as a "record" yet no adjustment is made for the DIA over time.)

Stephen Bainbridge has raised the same issue and comments:

"After you adjust for inflation, today's oil prices are roughly $10 per barrel below the pre-Gulf War high back in 1990. So lighten up and go for a drive." To boot, CNN (to which he links) reports that, in 2004 dollars, oil prices in the 1980s would be about $80 per barrel.

As Bainbridge says, he understands that reporters like to sensationalize the news, but a bit more accuracy would be welcome. As would, I might add, the opening of more American territory for oil exploration.

That line in an op-ed by Thor Halvorssen in today's WSJ (free) leaped off the page. I've known Thor for years and was glad to see his name under the title "The Price of Dissent in Venezuela" when I opened the Journal early this morning. I didn't pay much attention to the picture of the lady at the center of the story and began reading about a peaceful protest that was broken up by gunfire from pro-Chavez thugs. Then I read the sentence, "Hilda Mendoza Denham, a British subject visiting Caracas for her mother's 80th birthday, was shot at close range with hollow-point bullets from a high-caliber pistol. She now lies sedated in a hospital bed after a long and complicated operation. She is my mother."

I thought I recognized the name, and I knew his mother (whom I've met) lived in London. Then I read that awful line. It's a horrible tale, and it is being repeated across Venezuela as Hugo Chavez consolidates his rule after throwing the recall referendum to his favor this past Sunday. Thor watched the shooting on television, as he was preparing a complaint "regarding the fact that I had been mysteriously erased from the voter rolls and was prevented from casting a vote on Sunday." He says he watched events unfold with "indescribable agony."

Thor also says that some of the shooters were "wearing red T-shirts with the insignia of the government-funded 'Bolivarian Circle,'" and his claim is backed up by the photo in this story (in Spanish, which I found via Jefferson Morely's piece in the Wash Post). Stromata Blog is also following the situation there.

He goes on to report that the companies hired to supply the voting machines and software are tainted by Chavez's scheming:

"Many in the opposition are baffled by the inverse relationship between the projected numbers and those reported by the Chávez regime. One possible clue to this remarkable phenomenon lies with the companies hired to supply the voting machines and the software. Smartmatic Corp., a Florida company that has never before supplied election machinery, is owned by two Venezuelans. The software came from Bizta Software, owned by the same two people. The Miami Herald recently revealed that the Chávez regime spent $200,000 last year to purchase 28% of Bizta and put a government official and longtime Chávez ally on the board. After the story broke, Bizta bought back the government-held shares and the official resigned from the board. But not until after the two companies were granted a significant part of the $91 million contract for the referendum. Executives at both Smartmatic and Bizta have denied any political allegiance to the Chávez regime and have issued public statements saying the contract was awarded purely on the merits."

The news section of today's WSJ ($) also reports on this matter, but doesn't take it too seriously. I'll take Thor's word on this one, but credit the reporters at the Journal for reporting on the conflict: The NYT omits that element of the story altogether.

About Jimmy Carter, about whom I commented yesterday, Thor has this to say:

"Later that morning the most important observer, former President Jimmy Carter, declared that he was shown the computer tally by government supporters and that everything seemed in order. Mr. Carter then left Venezuela, and the opposition groups that had put their faith in him to facilitate a peaceful resolution to the crisis. Mr. Carter, who was vociferous and insistent about patience, transparency and hand-tallies during the Florida recount, left Venezuela to attend Mrs. Carter's birthday party."

Our prayers are with Thor's mother and the rest of his family.

Update: James Taranto of Best of the Web Today has some choice words for Gail Collins, editorial page editor of the Times, and Jimmy Carter.

Via Professor Bainbridge (who includes a good quotation), a new study is out from the London School of Economics that argues that fundamental freedoms, such as property rights, along with religiosity, reduces a populace's support for revolution. The article is available from the Social Science Research Network's Electronic Library. The study's authors are Robert MacCulloch of Princeton and Silvia Pezzini of the University of London.

I haven't read the piece, but there's little surprise in its findings (which are nonetheless most welcome). Is it a stretch to move from support for revolution to support for terrorism or at least sympathy with terrorists? That's a complex question. On the one hand, the terrorists of 9/11 were mostly college-educated and middle or upper-middle class. That said, most came from Saudi Arabia, where an oppressive and corrupt regime combines its own rules with radical Wahabi Islam -- not a likely environment to inculcate respect for anyone's rights or the cultivation of the virtues necessary for freedom to thrive.

Additionally, what are the shared traits of revolution and terrorism? It depends on their targets, surely; revolutionaries might be virtuous (the Founders) or cold blooded killers (Bolsheviks). But terrorists are never, pace Reuters, freedom fighters or remotely virtuous because by definition their purpose is to take innocent lives and cause terror. Still, most recent revolutionaries take Lenin and/or Mao as their model, and one has to think that radicalism's failure to win over majorities in prosperous countries has more than a little to do with the points made in the new study.

Those of us who favor granting basic rights to the Muslim inhabitants of the Middle East may have found some statistical support to bolster our policy-oriented and moral arguments.

Our cerebral vice president gets it right here: "America has been in too many wars for any of our wishes, but not a one of them was won by being sensitive. A sensitive war will not destroy the evil men who killed 3,000 Americans. ... The men who beheaded Daniel Pearl and Paul Johnson will not be impressed by our sensitivity."

Various news outlets report the jailing of Alex Ho, a pro-democracy activist in Hong Kong and a candidate of the Democratic Party there. He was picked up on the mainland, charged with soliciting prostitution, and sentenced to six months in prison without a trial or access to a lawyer or family member. That time will conveniently remove him from Hong Kong during the September 12 elections.

Today's NYT, which refers to him simply as Alex Ho, says that he initially refused to sign a confession that said he'd hired a prostitute, but did so after being assured that "he would be released on Monday if he signed, and when threatened with prosecution for rape if he did not sign."

Aaccording to the LA times (registration), which provides more complete coverage, Mr. Ho was framed and, according to his wife, beaten and denied food and water until he confessed. The Daily Telegraph is more to the point: "He said he was asleep in his hotel when police burst in. While they beat him up in the bathroom they produced a prostitute, took photographs and video film and put condoms and women's underwear on the bed."

Two theories are put forth in the LA Times to explain his detention. The first, that he's being removed from contention in next month's elections in order to weaken the pro-democracy forces, seems self-evidently true. To boot, it isn't contradicted by the second theory, which holds that Mr. Ho is a pawn in a mainland power struggle between the more reactionary forces of former President Jiang Zemin, who still exercises substantial power, and the more reform-minded allies of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao.

This heavy-handed approach to would-be reformers occurs regularly in both Hong Kong and in mainland China. I've commented before on the plight of Dr. Jiang Yanyong, who was arrested after blowing the whistle on the cover-up of the SARS epidemic and calling for Beijing to apologize for the Tiananmen Square massacre. I've also written often about Hong Kong's democrats, who are regulary bullied by Beijing's henchmen.

China clearly has no intention of allowing democrats to gain power in Hong Kong, much less on the mainland, but their ham-fisted approach may backfire again. Let's hope so.

With Hugo Chavez's claim to victory backed up by Jimmy Carter, and his corrupt and increasingly dictatorial regime supported by his ideological comrade Fidel Castro, Venezuela is sinking into a totalitarian mire. Worse, it threatens to take much of the region with it.

While the election and the opposition's skepticism of the results is getting a fair amount of coverage in newspapers, the blogosphere is unusually quiet. Partly that's a result of the ongoing coverage of Kerry's Cambodia story, which the major papers are either ignoring or just beginning to cover.

The most notable exception here is David Adesnick at Oxblog (via Pejmanesque), who closes his commentary by noting that, contrary to the claims of the Washington Post's reporter, "Rather than a revolution of the poor, Chavez is demonstrating the poverty of his so-called revolution."

Yesterday's WSJ ($) ran an editorial that summed up the gloomy forecast for democrats in South America:

"Sunday's vote is a metaphor for the sorry state of Venezuela's "democracy." Mr. Chavez controls the military, the Supreme Court, the Congress, the National Electoral Council (CNE), the state-owned oil monopoly and the intelligence services. There is no balance of power, no transparency, and Venezuela is fast becoming an authoritarian state.

"Equally worrying is that when the oil-rich Mr. Chavez claimed victory, he claimed it for all of the Americas, reinforcing his commitment to spread revolution on the continent. With Fidel Castro as his closest ally, Mr. Chavez is a dangerous presence in the region. . . .

"Mr. Chavez has already made it clear that it is his way or the highway for Venezuelans. . . . In recent years Mr. Chavez has praised Middle Eastern terrorism as heroic and lobbed rhetorical grenades at George W. Bush. On his own continent he has given Columbian guerrillas sanctuary inside Venezuelan territory."

Today's news is no better. The AP reports: "Strengthened by his victory in a recall referendum, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez set his sights Tuesday on centralizing power, including exerting control over the courts, local police and the nation's broadcast stations."

It adds: "Congress, which is controlled by Chavez supporters, recently approved a measure allowing that body to remove and appoint judges to the Supreme Court. One Supreme Court justice has already been ousted for allegedly falsifying his resume, a charge he denied. The government is also seeking to exert control over TV and radio stations, many of which are deeply critical of Chavez and carry one-sided news reports against him [emphasis added]. The government plans to submit a bill to Congress that would allow the government to ban programming it sees as slanderous or an incitement to violence and to punish violators. The government is also studying the possibility of unifying municipal and state police forces into a national police force, wresting control from mayors and governors, many of whom are Chavez opponents."

Juan Pablo Toro, the AP reporter, may not approve of what he and Chavez supporters call "one-sided coverage" when it's critical of Chavez and his henchmen, but I'll bet we won't read such criticism once the coverage is one-sided in its coverage of Venezuelan democrats, which it will be soon if the regime gets its way with the proposed "reforms."

The WSJ today ($) reports that Chavez has imported 17,000 Cuban "doctors, dentists, therapists and sports trainers" to the barrios. After noting the popularity of such moves among the poor, it reveals some of the results of Chavez's efforts to purchase the electorate at the expense of the country's infrastructure and future:

"It has been less effective in providing jobs and easing poverty: In the past five years, extreme poverty has nearly doubled in Venezuela to 40% of the population, according to a recent study by the Social and Economic Research Institute of the Andres Bello Catholic University. Unemployment is 15%.

"In a country where government largess is as common as beauty queens, Mr. Chavez's approach is nothing new. Throughout Venezuela's recent history, political leaders have handed out oil wealth liberally. Citizens enjoy gasoline that currently costs about 20 cents a gallon, and price and currency controls help keep the cost of key goods down. But the country long has delayed changes to its economy that might make it more competitive and create jobs."

Which brings us to Brother Jimmy Carter, who is telling Venezuelan democrats to drop dead: "There is no evidence of fraud, and any allegations of fraud are completely unwarranted." Given Chavez's overt seizure of the judiciary, military, media, and other vital elements of civil society, how Sunday's election could be billed as fair and open is a mystery. Then again, Carter has rarely seen a dictator he didn't embrace. From Leonid Brezhnev to Hafez al Assad to Yasser Arafat (Carter's fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner) to Chavez, the list of men Carter has trusted is a rogue's gallery of our era's worst violators of human rights. No reputable scholar would place Carter anywhere near the top of a list of America's best presidents, so here's a suggestion for making him number one: In a ranking of the worst former leaders of any country, Jimmy gets my vote for first place.

The mainstream media is paying more attention to the Kerry Cambodia story. Several bloggers are following developments closely: Hugh Hewitt, Prestopundit, and Instapundit are doing the most consistent job of any I've seen. Still no mention in the New York Times or Washington Post. Perhaps their reporters are all on vacation this month.

The "times" in the title means our day -- the temporal world in which we live -- and not the newspaper on the famous New York City square. Among the many subjects set in clearer relief since 9/11 is Europe and its place in the democratic world. I commented earlier about old Europe's pathologies, most importantly the anti-Americanism rampant among its elite and that group's commonalities with America's own left-leaning elites in Washington, New York, and Hollywood. Together they represent a new form of the reactionary formerly associated with the far right but today most common among leftists.

A couple of recent stories – the new European Commission and America’s decision to bring some troops home from Germany – bring into clearer focus some historical shifts of power within Europe and the U.S. that are occurring before our eyes but aren’t visible to every observer. As is always the case with such developments, elites are split into warring camps identifiable by the policies they advocate and the worldviews they embrace. Just as during the Cold War many intellectuals became Soviet apologists as much from spite toward America as from love of the USSR (there were notable exceptions), today the American intellectual left has its own European favorites. And just as, in retrospect, we know that yesterday’s left embraced the day before yesterday’s ideas, so today their cultural heirs – leaders in Hollywood, academe, and the Democratic Party – are engaged in a love-fest with history’s losers. Then again, that’s what reactionaries do.

Who are these losers? Let’s begin with France and Germany, the anchors of post-war Europe. There was every reason to celebrate and support the Franco-German alliance formed in the aftermath of WWII. Their bloody war-mongering in the preceding 100 years culminated in the destruction of the European order. A world once ruled from the Continent began its slow climb to a newly constituted world in the aftermath of Empire, sometimes building upon sturdy legacies (as in India), at other times falling into torpor (Algeria, much of sub-Saharan Africa). The bi-polar world of the Cold War was, emotionally at least, centered in Europe and its competing alliances for good reasons. East and West, or what seemed that at the time, stared one another down through gun sites; free peoples juxtaposed to enslaved nations set a dramatic stage against which conflicts the world over were set.

American policy makers shaped our response to crises against this backdrop. The principal surface conflicts revolved around how best to deal with a world in which every move by each Superpower was calculated to aid one bloc while harming the other. But on a deeper level, as the eulogies for Ronald Reagan reminded us, the real conflict was between those who saw Communism for what it was – an unmitigated evil – and those whose vision was more myopic or, as we say today, nuanced. Reagan the reactionary turned out to be a visionary, while his backward-looking opponents already had one foot on the dust heap of history. The then-dominant camp, which distrusted American power almost as much as it ignored Soviet adventurism, included members of both Houses of Congress, the intellectual establishment, major publishing houses, newspapers and television news, and most of the diplomatic corps. Détente, SALT, and ABM were their terms; defeat, retreat, and decline were their results.

Looking back, we now know that post-Reagan came to mean post-Cold War, but not everyone learned the lessons that new historical juxtaposition should have taught us. (Not even some former members of Reagan’s administration learned these lessons, as I argue here and here.) Not only does appeasement never work (whether the year is 1939 or 2004 – that is one of the constants of history that observers in every age miss), but the ground over which those struggles were fought has also shifted in importance. France and Germany, strong nations and advanced democracies that they are, no longer form either the key team within Europe or a strategic alliance literally between competing blocs. They’ve been usurped both by their own relative decline to other powers in Asia, by the decline in importance of their territory, and by the expansion of the EU eastward.

Mark Steyn has a superb piece that draws on Jim McGreevey's statement that his "unique truth" is that he's a "gay American." I wonder how many "unique truths" are created by focus groups? Yesterday's NYT, in a long chronological report of his downfall, says that the latter phrase "was developed by the group [Human Rights Campaign] and was a poll-tested phrase used to reframe the debate about gay causes from one about sexual liberation to one about civil rights."

Steyn argues that McGreevey has taken a page from the Clinton playbook -- recall Bill and Hillary's confessional hour with "60 Minutes" when he put forth the idea that he had girlfriends in every state because he was "flawed" and that, golly, that's just how he is. And now, Steyn says, we're getting the same kind of line about John Kerry's Cambodia story.

Kerry's "unique truth" is that his epiphany, which supposedly came to him in Cambodia on Christmas Eve, 1968, was a lie. As I argued yesterday, we're not supposed to read too much into this, since the elite media has mostly cold-shouldered not the Senator but his critics and their story. (That's changing to some degree, as Prestopundit's ongoing log of such stories shows. Hat tip, Instapundit.)

Steyn's best paragraph: "A handful of Mr. Kerry's 'band of brothers' are traveling around with his campaign. Most of the rest, including a majority of his fellow Swift boat commanders and 254 Swiftees from Mr. Kerry's Coastal Squadron One, oppose his candidacy. That is an amazing ratio and, if snot-nosed American media grandees don't think there's a story there, maybe they ought to consider another line of work. To put in terms they can understand, imagine if Dick Cheney campaigned for the presidency on the basis of his time at Halliburton, and a majority of the Halliburton board and 80 percent of the stockholders declared him unfit for office. More to the point, on the Swiftvets' first major allegation — Christmas in Cambodia — the Kerry campaign has caved."

As this story unfolds, I'll be searching my soul for my "unique truth." If I find it, I'll let you know.

Jim McGreevey's ugly saga is the subject of several insightful pieces this morning. The WSJ's leader ($) argues for a speedy election to replace him rather than the absurd November 15 date the state Democratic machine set in order to ensure the accession of Senate President Richard Codey while giving Jon Corzine time to arrange his own campaign for '05. John Fund pens a particularly insightful piece on corruption in the Garden State, where the main crop -- politicians on the take -- suffers from systemic root rot.

As the Journal's editorial says, "But the ultimate political casualties of the Democrats' tactics are the people of New Jersey. It's hard to see how voters, who recently learned that al Qaeda terrorists were eyeing targets within the state, are best served by being shut out of the process for choosing the immediate successor of their Governor, whose alleged lover and homeland security adviser, Golan Cipel, quit amid questions about his qualifications for the position."

John Fund, however, has strong words for those same voters:

"How did the nation's ninth-largest state compile such a recor