Freedom's Fidelity

Thursday, May 26, 2005

Quality Thoughts

There has been so much quality commentary I've come across lately that I really have nothing to add. Read this Mark Steyn column if you need proof.

Excerpt:

To date, reaction has divided along two lines. Newsweek has been hammered for being so flushed with anti-Bush anti-military fever that they breezily neglected the question of whether their story would generate a huge mound of corpses.

Which is true. On the other hand, there are those who point out it's hardly Newsweek's fault that some goofy foreigners are so bananas they'll riot and kill over one rumor of one disrespectful act to one copy of one book. Christians don't riot over ''Piss Christ'' and other provocations by incontinent ''artists.'' Jews take it in their stride when they're described as ''a virus resembling AIDS,'' which is what Sheikh Ibrahim Mudeiris said a week ago in his sermon on Palestinian state TV, funded by the European Union. Muslims can dish it out big-time, so why can't they take it, even the teensy-weensiest bit?

All of which is also true, but would be a better defense of Newsweek if the media hadn't spent the last 3-1/2 years bending over backwards to be super-sensitive to the, ah, touchiness of the Muslim world -- until the opportunity for a bit of lurid Bush-bashing proved too much to resist. In a way, both the U.S. media and those wacky rioters in the Afghan-Pakistani hinterlands are very similar, two highly parochial and monumentally self-absorbed tribes living in isolation from the rest of the world and prone to fanatical irrational indestructible beliefs -- not least the notion that you can flush a 950-page book down one of Al Gore's eco-crazed federally mandated low-flush toilets, a claim no editorial bigfoot thought to test for himself in Newsweek's executive washroom.

Watching the media circling the wagons around the beleaguered Isikoff this week, Martin Peretz of the New Republic described them as ''a profession that is complacent, self-righteous, and hopelessly in love with itself.'' The media are the message: But, hey, enough about the war, let's talk about me.

Like I said, nothing I can add to that.

If you are unfortunate enough to be stuck in front of a computer and not out grilling with a drink in hand, you should check out this "Just imagine if George Bush had predicted to us on the morning after Sept. 11, 2001 what actually happened." column, where Victor Davis Hanson tells us what his speech might have sounded like.

As for me, it's just about Memorial Weekend, so I'm going to read Chrenkoff's 22nd installment of underreported good news from Iraq, then not work, and spend the next few days kicking off the summer properly while praying that Zarqawi dies.

Sounds like fun eh?

posted by Paul  permalink | |