The blogroll has been updated to include James Wolcott, The Dark Window, The American Street, Rising Hegemon, and
The Poor Man.

Entertainment Weekly (print edition only) finds this gem in Kitty Kelley's Bush book, The Family:

The New Yorker's Brendan Gill, who once visited the family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine ... tried to find something to read late at night. After investigating the entire mansion, he found one book: The Fart Book.

I believe that.

In the post-Reagan world, everything's supposed to be run like a business. The New York Times explains the possible consequences when that includes schools:

... one of the nation's largest charter school operators collapsed, leaving 6,000 students with no school to attend this fall. The businessman who used $100 million in state financing to build an empire of 60 mostly storefront schools had simply abandoned his headquarters as bankruptcy loomed, refusing to take phone calls. That left [Ken] Larson, a school superintendent whose district licensed dozens of the schools, to clean up the mess....

Thousands of parents were forced into a last-minute search for alternate schools, and some are still looking; many teachers remain jobless; and students' academic records are at risk in abandoned school sites across California....

"Until the Charter Academy went into its tailspin, few people predicted that these crashes could be so bloody, but this has been a catastrophe for many people," said Bruce Fuller, a professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley. "The critics of market-oriented reforms warned of risks with the philosophy of let-the-buyer-beware, but in this case, buyers were just totally hung out to dry."...

Then there's this AP story from a couple of days ago:

...Because of a budget crunch, California has suspended a tax credit that reimbursed teachers up to $1,500 for classroom supplies. Meanwhile, a $250 federal tax deduction for teachers that helped defray out-of-pocket spending expired this year....

The California credit was first offered in 2000 as a way to keep teachers from quitting. Teachers with four to 11 years in the profession received $250 to $500. Those more experienced could receive up to $1,500.

The credit was suspended in 2002 as state legislators battled a budget gap. It was resurrected for the 2003-04 tax year, at a cost of $180 million to the state. Last month, legislators suspended the relief until 2007....

Well, that's America. We won't even pay for all our kids' school supplies out of our taxes. In a pinch we won't even reimburse teachers who pick up the tab themselves. We think it's a plot to screw us when someone proposes the level of taxation that would actually fund the schools adequately, or come reasonably close; instead, we want some CEO (the post-Reagan equivalent of a knight on a white horse) to come along and just solve all the problems by waving the free-market magic sword -- we don't even mind throwing tax money at you if you're a CEO -- and we ignore the rather inconvenient fact that CEOs are quite capable of making mistakes, busting budgets, or failing altogether.

But hey, what the hell -- it's just our kids, right?

(AP link via Pandagon.)

Was TV news coverage of Bush and Kerry during and after the Republican convention biased against Kerry? According to the research company Media Tenor International, er, yeah, kinda:





Story here.

Note that Fox's negative coverage of Kerry is staggeringly excessive -- but that Fox's positive Bush coverage is exceeded by the pro-Bush coverage of that Liberal Media mainstay, NBC.

(Link via Media Watch and Cursor's Derelection 2004.)


(Hey, my first illustrated post. About time I figured out how to do that...)

If you haven't seen the story about the Republican who's charged Democrats with assault in three consecutive presidential elections, and whose alleged assailant in at least one incident looks suspiciously like a member of his own family, here it is, from Rising Hegemon.

(The fraud's latest charges are outlined in this Washington Times story.)

You're seeing the exposure of this fraud in blogs, and it originated at the left-lib bulletin board Democratic Underground. But that's as far up the media food chain as it's going to rise. You won't see it on CNN or MSNBC or the major networks. It won't be in your "liberal media" newspaper.

Remember "Axis of Weasels"? It originated at a right-wing humor blog called ScrappleFace, spread to James Taranto's online Wall Street Journal column the next day and made the front page of the New York Post a day later. And then it was off to the races. (And let's not even talk about how fast the critiques of those National Guard memos spread.)

Members of the conservative establishment think online conservative partisans are a resource. Members of the liberal establishment, with a few exceptions, think online liberal partisans are nuts. So e-mail the Rising Hegemon story to friends who don't read blogs. It's the only way they'll ever see it.

(Thanks to Atrios for spotting this.)

****

Meanwhile the Kerry headquarters in Lafayette, Louisiana, has been vandalized again:

Burned campaign signs and apparent pro-President Bush messages scrawled in a tarry black substance greeted volunteers Thursday morning at Lafayette's presidential campaign headquarters for U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass....

Lexi Thompson, state director for the national Democratic Party, said it's the second time the office has been vandalized.

The first time, about two weeks ago, vandals apparently left broken glass on the pavement in front of the office, egged it and stole campaign signs, she said....

She said this second round of vandalism is more worrisome, because the fire could have seriously damaged the building or spread into the neighborhood....

Nice people.

The people at the Traditional Values Coalition have an important new crusade: policing personal choices that are none of their goddamn business:

Entertainer Wynonna Judd To Sing On Homosexual Cruise

September 16, 2004 – County music legend Wynonna Judd is scheduled to be an entertainer on a female homosexual cruise from January 29-February 2, 2005.

The singer will also be accompanied by lesbian comedians Elvira Kurt, Lisa Koch; and entertainers Zoe Lewis and a duo called Halcyon. Judging from the comedian’s web sites, it is likely that their comedy routines will be filled with obscenities and vulgar sex talk.

Judd should be encouraged to cancel her tour with Olivia, the "lesbian" tourism agency. She has attended Grace Chapel in Leiper's Fork, Tennessee and helped raise funds for the church with a free concert several years ago.

However, her involvement in providing entertainment for female homosexuals should conflict with her professed Christian faith. It is likely that Wynonna Judd has been misled by the mainstream media on the origins of same-sex attractions and the self-destructive results of such attractions.

TAKE ACTION: Contact Wynonna Judd and ask that she cancel her upcoming concert cruise for homosexuals. Urge her to study what the Bible says in both the Old and New Testaments about homosexuality and encourage her to contact Exodus International to learn how faith in Christ has set men and women free from bondage to this life-controlling condition. Be polite!

"Be polite"? I'll tell you people how to "be polite" in this situation -- mind your own damn business.

(Exodus International, if you care, is an organization that promises "freedom from homosexuality" through Godliness. It, er, doesn't always work.)

Kerry's up by 1 in the Harris poll, Kerry and Bush are neck-and-neck in the Pew poll, Bush is up by 1 (likely voters) or 2 (registered voters) in the American Research Group poll ... and (scroll down) Bush is up by 14 in the Gallup poll?

Screwy. But no screwier than 2000, when Gallup had Gore up by 10 on September 20 and Fox had the race dead even a day later. This pattern persisted: On October 26, Reuters/MSNBC had Gore up by 2 and Gallup had Bush up by 13. So take 'em all with a grain of salt.

Sharon Bush, former wife of Neil, has denied confirming for Kitty Kelley a story about her ex-brother-in-law George W. doing coke at Camp David during Poppy Bush's presidency. Sharon repeated her denial to Matt Lauer on the Today show a couple of days ago. In The New York Sun (subscription only), Tina Brown says there's at least one thing Sharon's lying about to protect her former in-laws:

I happen to know that Sharon fibbed frantically when she told Mr. Lauer that, yes, she had once been planning to write a book herself but it was a "self-help" book. Two years ago, I was invited to the apartment of a social grande dame to meet Sharon and offer her publishing advice about a tell-all she wanted to write about her life in the bosom of the Bush family. Sharon was accompanied by her then-PR rep, Lou Colasuonno, who has since flipped sides and confirmed Ms. Kelley's claim that Sharon endorsed the coke story.

The former Mrs. Neil Bush was a sad, lost soul that afternoon, dissolving into hanky-soaking tears as she talked for two hours about the lousy deal the presidential family had offered her in her acrimonious divorce from W's womanizing kid brother.

It wasn't a pretty story and it had the authentic whiff of how power can bully the circle's outcast. She told how her appeals for help to Bar and Poppy had fallen on deaf ears.

In despair, she even pled her case to the Reverend Billy Graham, whom she asked to make a call to Bush 41 on her behalf. But, according, to Sharon, Rev. Graham was too sick to do it. Ultimately, it seems, she lost her nerve about the memoir but was dumb enough to have a four-hour lunch with Killy Kelley.

Now Sharon has the worst of all worlds: no big fat book advance of her own and all the wrath of the Bush family and its many retainers.

I don't know if I believe that Shrub did coke at Camp David. However, I absolutely believe Kitty Kelley's telling the truth about her conversation with Sharon Bush.

JESUS LOVES YOU AND WANTS YOU TO HAVE YOUR RAPIST'S CHILD

Chipping away at Roe ...

...A little-noticed provision cleared the House of Representatives last week that would prohibit local, state or federal authorities from requiring any institution or health care professional to provide abortions, pay for them, or make abortion-related referrals, even in cases of rape or medical emergency.

In Mississippi, a bill became law in July that admirers and critics consider the nation's most sweeping "conscience clause." It allows all types of health care workers and facilities to refuse performing virtually any service they object to on moral or religious grounds.

And in states across the country, anti-abortion organizations and a group called Pharmacists for Life are encouraging pharmacists to refuse to distribute emergency contraceptives, which they consider a potential form of abortion....

Karen Brauer, president of Pharmacists for Life, was fired by Kmart in 1996 for refusing to dispense a birth-control drug....

Brauer, who lives in Lawrence, Ind., and works at a drugstore in Ohio, hopes more states will emulate Mississippi, South Dakota and Arkansas by specifying that pharmacists, as well as doctors, have the right to withhold services on moral grounds. She does not believe there should be any obligation to refer rebuffed customers to another pharmacist who would fill their prescription.

"Forced referral is stupid," she said. "If we're not going to kill a human being, we're not going to help the customer go do it somewhere else." ...

--AP

By the way, here's a story from the Web site of Pharmacists for Life about a pharmacist who won't fill prescriptions for birth-control pills.

Where does this end? What if your "conscience" tells you you shouldn't use a defibrillator on a gay person who's having a heart attack ... or on a Muslim, or a Democrat? What's the limit?

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

From AP:

President Hamid Karzai escaped a rocket attack on the U.S. helicopter carrying him to a provincial capital in eastern Afghanistan on Thursday, officials said, in the second apparent attempt to assassinate the U.S.-backed interim leader since he took office in 2001....

The American military said the rocket missed the chopper as it approached a landing zone near Gardez, where Karzai planned to open a school. The helicopter did not touch down and returned the president to Kabul.

No, here's my favorite part, where the spin doctor defines deviancy down:

"The rocket was fired at the helicopter as it was landing, and missed," U.S. military spokesman Maj. Mark McCann said. "The president was not in any imminent danger."

Got that? Having a rocket fired at your helicopter does not constitute "imminent danger." In fact, the danger was so non-"imminent" that he got the hell out of there, just to be sure he wasn't caught in the cross-non-imminence.

New slogan for the Bush campaign: "Karzai, Allawi, Musharraf -- Not Assassinated Yet!"

Interesting results from the Rasmussen poll: Know what Dan Rather's favorable and unfavorable ratings are? 42%-33% -- a 9-point difference in his favor. Know what Bush's favorable and unfavorable ratings are? 53%-46% -- a 7-point difference in his favor. So people who have an opinion like Dan more than they like Shrub. Word to the right-wingers: Don't congratulate yourself on a successful revolution until you've taken at least one city.

******

Meanwhile, Maureen Dowd writes today about the theory that Karl Rove had something to do with those forged Killian documents. Dowd calls the theory "preposterous" and "paranoid" -- but she gives it two thirds of her column, and she never suggests any concrete reason why you shouldn't believe it. So, do you really believe it's preposterous, MoDo?

But I guess now the conventional wisdom is official: Following up on a Newsweek story, The Washington Post and The New York Times have settled on the notion that the documents came from Bill Burkett, a retired Texas National Guard officer and Bush foe who has said (see the Post story) that in 1997 he heard about the destruction of Bush Guard records, and later saw some of the records in the trash. The "smoking gun," according to the Post, is that marks on the document indicate that they were faxed from the only Kinko's near Burkett's home.

But here's what's odd: Newsweek says Mary Mapes, a CBS producer, flew to Texas to interview Burkett. So why didn't he just give her the documents at that time?

You know, anyone can go to Abilene, Texas, walk into the Kinko's, and fax a few forged documents -- it's a free country.

Or did Burkett generate -- or mysteriously receive -- some documents after talking to Mapes? And if he mysteriously received them, who mysteriously gave them to him?

James Moore, coauthor of The Karl Rove book Bush's Brain, doubts that Burkett's the culprit, according to the Post:

Author James Moore, who relied on Burkett as a primary source for a book attacking Bush as having wriggled out of his Guard service, said in an interview yesterday that he did not think Burkett provided the memos to CBS. "His life is complicated enough already, and I don't know why he would make further complications for himself," Moore said.

On the other hand, Burkett's response is limited to this:

Burkett ... did not return telephone calls to his home. His lawyer, David Van Os, issued a statement on Burkett's behalf saying he "no longer trusts any possible outcome of speaking to the press on any issue regarding George W. Bush and does not choose to dignify recent spurious attacks upon his character with any comment."

That doesn't sound like how you'd react if you were being framed.

Kerry up by 1%? That's what the Harris Poll says. And this poll showed Bush with a 10-point lead in June, so it's not one that habitually leans left.

Did you know that the National Catholic Register runs a regular comic strip about a talking fetus?

"Umbert the Unborn" has been a regular feature in NCR since last year. Here's a sample cartoon; here's another one. Here's the Web site (or, rather, "womb-site" -- it's "still under construction" -- like Umbert, I guess! -- but you can use it to buy the book, A Womb with a View).

Yikes....

100,000 Iraqi insurgents?

Jeffrey White, a former senior Defense Intelligence Agency analyst ... who's now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said his conservative estimate is that there are some 100,000 Iraqis involved in the Sunni insurgency, including fighters, messengers and people who provide logistical, housing and other assistance.

That's from a Knight Ridder story.

Gosh, was it only a month ago that The New York Times said the number of Iraqi insurgents was 20,000?

(KR link via Laura Rozen.)

The New York Times says there's an unusually high interest in this election among young people. What the Times doesn't mention is that Kerry's winning that youth vote. In Newsweek's most recent poll, Bush led Kerry overall 49%-43% in a three-way race -- but Kerry led 46%-43% among 18-29-year-olds. And Nader gets 7%, so the anti-Bush vote is a clear majority.

Major-party presidential campaigns rarely fight for the youth vote, but this would be a good year for Kerry to buck the conventional wisdom.

So yesterday I was flipping through a copy of a newly published novel -- Slick by Daniel Price. It's about an ethically challenged publicist who devises a scheme to help a rapper named Jeremy (aka Hunta) who's about to be publicly accused of sexual assault. The ruse is: the publicist will produce another accuser who will go public first with charges that she was sexually assaulted by Hunta -- and then that accuser will be discredited.

Do you understand why I'm bringing this up here?

Early on, I said I didn't think the Killian memos about George Bush's National Guard service were genuine -- and I also said that if they were fakes, I suspected Karl Rove might have had them created and planted in order to poison the evidence trail.

Now here's a novel with a plot that hinges on a scheme to clear a man who's under suspicion by faking an accusation in the expectation that the fake will be discredited.

I haven't actually read Slick, but here's some of the dialogue in which the publicist explains the scheme to the rapper and some of his associates:

"You want to save Jeremy from one slanderous charge by hitting him with another."

..."No," I assured him. "I want to save him from one slanderous charge by missing him with another. That's the key difference....

"There were a lot of other women at that Christmas party," I continued. "If we get just one of them to beat Lisa to the press with the exact same charge and the exact same story, down to the minute, then Lisa will be jammed forever. She'll be nullified. What's she going to say? 'No, Hunta didn't sexually abuse that woman that night. He was too busy sexually abusing me'? Nobody would take her seriously. She'd be a copycat. A shameless opportunist. She’d barely get a mention....

"... as far as the press is concerned, it's not who’s right, it's who's first. If we get there first, our woman will be the tent pole. She'll be the one the reporters rally around. And once she goes down, everyone goes down with her. It's like fruit from a poisonous tree. That's why it's really important that we work fast and get our decoy out there first."...

Simba remained firmly rooted in skepticism....

"I don't understand," she said. "You're going to have one of these dancing skanks come forward, frame Jeremy, and then what? Admit it was all a lie?"

"Yes, but not hers. That's the best part. She'll tell the world she was offered a lot of money by some unnamed source, some shadow conspirator with an anti-rap objective. The press will eat it up. They'll do a total 180 and go after all the people who were going after Hunta. How's that for payback?"

I turned to Hunta.... "Not only will this silence Lisa, not only will this turn you from monster to martyr, but this'll weatherproof you against all future accusations. For the rest of your life, you'll have the benefit of the doubt. You'll have precedent."

The tent pole. That's what the discredited Killian documents have become in this National Guard story, right?

Maybe it's rash to say that something like this did happen in the case of the Killian documents. But obviously I'm not the only person who can imagine a scheme of this kind.

*****

UPDATE: You may want to don an extra layer of tinfoil before reading this, but Mike Burke of Democracy Now points out (at BuzzFlash) something curious about another story that failed to tarnish Bush:

Remember the allegations that Bush was arrested in 1972 on drug possession charges, specifically cocaine? Today it is basically a non-story. But it is worth looking back at why.

In 1999, St. Martin's Press published a critical biography of Bush titled "Fortunate Son". The book quoted an unnamed "high-ranking advisor to Bush," who revealed Bush's 1972 drug bust. The source told author J.H. Hatfield, Bush "was ordered by a Texas judge to perform community service in exchange for expunging his record showing illicit drug use."

Hatfield later revealed that his source was none other than Karl Rove. That might seem ridiculous, considering Rove's lifelong loyalty to the Bushes and the fact that he now has an office adjacent to Bush's in the White House. But leaking the story to Hatfield essentially discredited the story and sent it into the annals of conspiracy theory. Soon after the book was published and just as St. Martin's was preparing a high profile launching of the book, the "Dallas Morning News" ran a story revealing that Hatfield was a felon who had served time in jail. In response, St. Martin's pulled the book.

"When the media stumbled upon a story regarding George W. Bush's 1972 cocaine possession arrest, Rove had to find a way to kill the story. He did so by destroying the messenger," says Sander Hicks, the former publisher of Soft Skull, which re-published "Fortunate Son." "They knew the stories of Dubya's cocaine and drink busts would come out, so they made certain that it would come out of the mouth of a guy they could smear," said journalist Greg Palast, who wrote the forward to the final edition of the book.

Interesting.

Now, needless to say, there's a difference between poisoning a story by handing it off to a journalist with a dubious reputation and poisoning a story by handing a reputable journalistic outfit a dubious piece of evidence. But it's a variation on the same theme.

I don't know if Hatfield was even telling the truth about Rove. But this certainly piques my interest.

I find this a bit troubling:

On the third anniversary of the terrorist attacks that claimed over 3,000 innocent lives, 80% of Americans agree that the attacks changed America forever. However, they are divided as to whether those changes have been for better or worse.

A Rasmussen Reports survey found that 37% say the nation has changed for the better while 43% say it has changed for the worse. Only 7% say the nation was not changed by the events of that horrible day.

These numbers are similar to the assessment given a year ago when 38% say better and 47% worse.

I suppose there are several rational explanations for the fact that more than a third of Americans think America is better since 9/11 -- people hear the question and think, "Yes, we're certainly better off than we were that day," or think 9/11 has made the country pull together in a good way, or think it's made us get serious about threats we were overlooking.

But I worry that some of the positive results have to do with a feeling that 9/11 was an inherently good thing.

Surely some people believe it was what a wicked nation deserved. And since we know that a fair number of people believe God intervened to make Bush president in 2000 ("During those 30 days that we had to wait to see who our next President was going to be, there was a battle royal going on in the heavenlies.... I believe in my heart that God allowed George W. Bush to become our 43rd President to not only be the political leader of the United States, but as a man that openly professed to being a follower of Jesus Christ, to be used by God to exercise spiritual leadership in key areas to turn our nation back to God"), you'd imagine these some of these people also believe 9/11 was God's way of getting St. George's holy light out from under the bushel.

Then there are the people I really worry about, the ones who, even though they'd never admit it, like the fear and anxiety and sense of danger of the post-9/11 era.

I alluded to this just after Rudy Giuliani's convention speech, then noticed that the headline in the next day's New York Post was IT'S 9/11, which even more than at the time seems almost like a triumphant declaration. A couple of days later, Paul Krugman quoted the Chris Hedges book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning in relation to the Bush campaign:

War, Mr. Hedges says, plays to some fundamental urges. "Lurking beneath the surface of every society, including ours," he says, "is the passionate yearning for a nationalist cause that exalts us, the kind that war alone is able to deliver." When war psychology takes hold, the public believes, temporarily, in a "mythic reality" in which our nation is purely good, our enemies are purely evil, and anyone who isn't our ally is our enemy.

This state of mind works greatly to the benefit of those in power.

Maybe Kerry couldn't beat Bush even with the perfect campaign. Maybe too many voters are perversely pleased that we can't go back to September 10.

I'm with Paul Krugman 100%:

U.S. news organizations are under constant pressure to report good news from Iraq. In fact, as a Newsweek headline puts it, "It's worse than you think." Attacks on coalition forces are intensifying and getting more effective; no-go zones, which the military prefers to call "insurgent enclaves," are spreading - even in Baghdad. We're losing ground.

And the losses aren't only in Iraq. Al Qaeda has regrouped. The invasion of Iraq, intended to demonstrate American power, has done just the opposite: nasty regimes around the world feel empowered now that our forces are bogged down. When a Times reporter asked Mr. Bush about North Korea's ongoing nuclear program, "he opened his palms and shrugged."

Yet many voters still believe that Mr. Bush is doing a good job protecting America.

If Senator John Kerry really has advisers telling him not to attack Mr. Bush on national security, he should dump them. When Dick Cheney is saying vote Bush or die, responding with speeches about jobs and health care doesn't cut it.

Mr. Kerry should counterattack by saying that Mr. Bush is endangering the nation by subordinating national security to politics.

Hell yes. No more timidity.

Here's the ad I want to see: Rapid-fire images of the quagmire -- car-bomb blasts, burning Humvees, the hooded prisoner on the box -- intercut with all the bullshit lines we've heard for two years -- "Bring 'em on," "We know where the weapons are" -- BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM, faster and faster and faster. Then stop and fade to: FOUR MORE YEARS?

You probably aren't aware of this if you don't lurk at right-wing Web sites, but the questioning of those National Guard documents doesn't just make conservatives think they've caught Dan Rather and CBS with egg on their faces -- it makes them think they are on the verge of destroying the entire established media universe.

It doesn't matter to these people that Jayson Blair didn't destroy The New York Times, or that Stephen Glass didn't destroy The New Republic. Hell, it doesn't even matter to them that the Clinton mulatto-baby story didn't seem to put a dent in Matt Drudge, as they of all people should know. Like their god George Bush on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln declaring "Mission Accomplished," these people are premature self-congratulators, and they have a laughably overcaffeinated sense of their own importance.

Here's Tony Blankley in The Washington Times:

"The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur." That observation by the British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead came to mind this past week as I watched Dan Rather struggle violently like a proud old marlin caught on a hook by the young Internet fishermen....

This week it is Dan Rather and CBS News, through their failed effort to prove the legitimacy of their forged Bush National Guard documents, who are being revealed as hapless, helpless victims of an anarchic, swarming, overwhelming Internet blog technology. Soon, other great news institutions inevitably will be revealed for their inadequate capacity to fully report the news.

As in all revolutions, first, the old order must be destroyed, then we will learn both the strengths and the shortcomings of the new order. We got a glimpse of the Internet blogger's strength this past week.

Here's Limbaugh:

This 50 or 75 years from now will be looked at by nonpartisan, noninvolved, people not even born yet historians, who will write about this is something seminal, as something monumental and momentous in the changing political makeup of this country. This is a time that's going to be looked back on, when a press revolution was completed, when the old media giants fell, when a monopoly was emphatically shattered, and when the new media solidified its right place as one of the great and good forces in American society which I firmly believe that we are, ladies and gentlemen.

And here's Jonah Goldberg in National Review Online, comparing this incident to -- no, I'm not making this up -- the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand:

Dan Rather didn't think he was going to blow himself up. He believed he was invulnerable. He was the equivalent of some powdered-wigged fool who believed that Austria would come out on the other side of a short battle with its reputation enhanced. Instead, it revealed that CBS News is really the Sick Man of Big Media. I have no desire to go trolling around inside Dan Rather's brain. We all know from Star Trek that a mind-meld with such an alien psyche could leave me permanently damaged. But it's clear that Dan Rather doesn't understand what's going on any more than those poor last dinosaurs understood why the tasty green fronds became so hard to find when it got cloudy. As an icon of the old world of big media, his self-inflicted extinction will surely be recognized as the end of not merely Dan Rather, but the age of Dan Rathers.

Would it be unfair to point out that Blankley appears regularly on "old-media" political talk shows, that Limbaugh used to draw a paycheck for football commentary from ABC, and that Goldberg happily pinch-hit for Ann Coulter when USA Today wanted a conservative take on the Democratic convention? No, it would not. Nor would it be unfair to point out that every blogger these writers praise would take old-media money in a heartbeat.

And would it be unfair to say that that Goldberg's paragraph, with its jarring Star Trek analogy, is the worst paragraph ever written about the media? Well, yes, it would be unfair -- because Goldberg's lead paragraph is, in fact, the worst paragraph ever written about the media:
 
I love the CBS News forged-document story. To paraphrase the abominable snowman from the Bugs Bunny cartoons, I want to hug it and squeeze it and name it George. Okay, I don't want to name it George, but you get my drift. If this story were hot fudge, I would smear it all over my body and then roll around in nougat.

Merciful mother of God. Yes, he actually wrote that, and yes, William F. Buckley, or his heirs and assigns, actually paid him to write it.

And yes, the link on the words "abominable snowman" -- a Looney Tunes sound clip -- is in the original.

These are your revolutionaries.

Bill Maher on Larry King Live last night:

KING: ...You don't think Iraq is becoming Vietnam, do you?

MAHER: No. In Vietnam, George Bush had an exit strategy.