Blogoland

Let's just say that I'm glad I'm not a Suns fan.

InstaDude is riled up because:

The damn evil big poopyhead dhmmi media just won't report, er um, won't devote 3,000-words to a rocket hitting an Israeli High School.

Because the damn evil big poopyhead dhimmi employees of the World Bank are, in fact, Jew-haters who actually, truly, believe that Paul Wolfowitz is the devil incarnate.

Hey everyone, great news! Killing those who are unarmed and have effectively surrendered is now super-duper OK!

INFORMATION WARFARE: Turning a battle into a war crime. It helps if the press is complicit.

See, slaughtering unarmed people is now a "battle." Also, peeing on corpses is good.

See also: "Those white flags are no match for our muskets!"

UPDATE: This story, from the NYT, gets at what I think is the ultimate truth of the Haditha story [and which, I guarantee, will not get an InstaLink]: Namely, that in Iraq, the front lines are nowhere and everywhere at the same time. That there are insurgents lurking and hiding in and among families, but also that there are extremely stressed forces who don't know where the fire is coming from. And also, it seems, there are some who simply snap and decide to execute a few people. A hideous situation all around:

Captain Dinsmore, a 21-year veteran testifying by telephone from Iraq, offered a relatively impassioned response. He said the Iraq war rarely provided clear lines between combatants and civilians. The marines in Haditha that day, under small-arms fire in a profoundly hostile Sunni Arab region, could either abide by the laws of war and risk being killed, or could take aggressive steps to protect themselves and their squad members, and risk committing a war crime.

“The reality is then and the reality is now, you let loose marines in a T.I.C. against a hostile situation, taking small-arms fire,” Captain Dinsmore said, referring to “troops in contact,” “they don’t have the training nor do they have the presence of mind to differentiate between civilians and insurgents. It stinks.”

Shorter Prof. Reynolds, Power Line, et al:

Thank God we First Amendment haters have the First Amendment around so we can safely make baseless and scurrilous claims against our political enemies.

A pearl of Hewittian wisdom:

Each year Lileks has been kind enough to spend an afternoon with me, and the crowds that come to say hello to James and snatch a photo or an autograph are large and always the sort of people you want reading your paper --the employed, the dads and moms, the folks who patronize your advertisers.

So listen up, you single, jobless dirtbags. Stop reading the goddam newspaper, it's bringing us all down.

Also, please do read Roy on the matter.

Is Andrew Sullivan being deliberately obtuse?

But one thing we haven't done enough in this war is think through the mind of our enemy.

Really? Because from my corner of the world, that's all our leaders seem to care about -- that al Qaeda and the bad people will be "emboldened" by criticism of the Preznit, or that they'll "laugh at us" for our failure of resolve, or any such other crazy Green Lantern theories of war-fighting. Indeed, seemingly every utterance made by any evildoer is now used as a cudgel (the exception being the latest one) with which to beat political enemies here.

An otherwise interesting NYT article starts with a disastrous error:

Obsessive fans of "The Simpsons" -- and really, is there any other kind? -- may remember an early episode of the show in which the denizens of Springfield brace themselves for the debut of a movie starring the cartoon cat-and-mouse pair Itchy and Scratchy. As the film's premiere draws closer, the hype surrounding it becomes unavoidable, promotions and merchandising spin out of control and rabid moviegoers gather outside theaters in lines that stretch beyond the horizon.

What happened inside those theaters, nobody fully knows. "We never actually showed the Itchy and Scratchy movie," said Al Lean, an executive producer and longtime show runner on "The Simpsons." "We knew that would be the hard part."

Well, as a Simpsons obsessive , I object! Both Itzkoff and Jean are, regrettably, misremembering the ending to that episode. Just watch this clip starting at 4:45, and you'll see a 35-second snippet of the movie, in which Itchy gets his engineer's license so that he properly run over a tied-to-the-tracks Scratchy. After the scene, Homer mutters: "Itchy's a jerk."

P.S. Does it make me a loser that I remember the show better than the "executive producer and longtime show runner"? Yes?

UPDATE: Link added.

La-la-la.

[And, in case there's any misapprehension, Goldberg is an idiot]

Wired is reporting that the Army has adopted new rules for service members who blog -- and they're not good ones. Apparently, the rules stipulate that every post must be cleared by a commander. As one milblogger put it, the effect may well be that CO's will just outright restrict blogging altogether, rather than run the risk of getting reprimanded for a screw-up.

"[M]any commanders will feel like they have no choice but to forbid their soldiers from blogging -- or even using e-mail," said Jeff Nuding, who won the bronze star for his service in Iraq. "If I'm a commander, and think that any slip-up gets me screwed, I'm making it easy: No blogs," added Nuding, writer of the "pro-victory" Dadmanly site. "I think this means the end of my blogging."

The Army should really reconsider this step.

Many are going cuckoo-bananas -- appropriately, I think -- over this quip from the conservative writer Thomas Sowell, who seemingly endorses a military coup against our current leader.

When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can't help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.

Aside from the sheer nuttiness of this sentiment, what's interesting to me is that Sowell, a conservative of the first rank, has come to this conclusion in the midst of a Republican presidency. One wonders what fates Sowell plans to unleash against a Democratic president.

Hugh Hewitt had Michael Isikoff, of Newsweek, on his show recently. Here's a little flavor:

Michael Isikoff: And Hugh, you do agree there was no real evidence of a
connection between Saddam and al Qaeda?

Hugh Hewitt: I don’t. Absolutely not. I know that Zawahiri (sic) was in the country, I know that he is…

MI: When? When was he in the country and where?

HH: We don’t know for sure. He was certainly in Kurdistan.

MI: We don’t know for sure.

HH: He may have been in Baghdad.

MI: In Kurdistan, which was under the control, not under the control of Saddam’s regime.

Exactly. See, for Hugh, there is no truth -- just "spin" on the issues. That he would conjure the Zarqawi gambit as evidence of an al Qaeda-Saddam connection shows the depths he would go to serve his hacksterism. It's silly.

P.S. Obviously, they're talking about Zarqawi, not Zawahiri.

Here's some more picking around the brain of Hugh.

TBogg, last year:

No one is going to get a blogging Pulitzer for being the fastest to post what they just saw and heard on the TV.

And the follow up, today.