'The Open Mouth of a Snake Filled with Poison'

Altercation

Time's most liberal columnist thinks it might be a pretty good idea to nuke Iran.  Of course he knows more about it than you do and you're an idiot and an Anti-American if you disagree.  (Was he booked on ABC's "This Week" as the liberal?)  Never mind that the war plan, here, looks to be a recipe for disaster that will undoubtedly inspire massive acts of terrorist retaliation against the United States, here.  Why do Richard Clarke and Steven Simon hate America?

The State Department thinks we talk too loud.  Well maybe, but how about don't invade other countries, torture their people, lie about it to everyone, and then screw up everything anyway.  That might help too.

The New York Times edit board publishes a good editorial.  (For a bad editorial, go here.)  Have you noticed that the Washington Post is now replicating the worst aspect of the Wall Street Journal?  Its editorial page, driven by right-wing ideology, is ignoring or purposely contradicting facts printed in its news pages.  Read all about it here and here.  Congrats to Gellman/Linzer for their great reporting.  (And by the way, isn't it funny that Howie Kurtz says it doesn't interest him at all that the Post edit page contradicts the facts on the news page?  Isn't he admitting that he can't cover his own paper?  And if he can't cover his own paper, why is he covering his own network, CNN?  Which kinds of conflicts-of-interest are "good conflicts of interests," as the Post edit board might put it?)

Finally, on the journalistic ethics beat, isn't it about time we put a moratorium on the practice of journalism by telepathy?  Read this paragraph in TNR by Noam Scheiber, here.

It's fitting that the idea animating Dean's tenure at the DNC is a big one.  Dean, after all, effectively sacrificed his future presidential ambitions to pursue his current job.  The only reason he would do such a thing is that he considers the DNC post more important than even the presidency.

Well, actually, bub, I can think of quite a few more reasons he would "do such a thing."  Maybe, for instance, he thinks he can win one and not the other, which turns out to be true, since he did win one and not the other.  Then again, maybe Dean thinks he is personally better suited to one, rather than the other.  Maybe he prefers not to give up his personal privacy to the extent a president would have to.  Maybe he feels like he's a young man and can run again later.  Maybe, maybe, maybe all kinds of things.  Scheiber builds much of his piece around this bit of dime-store psychoanalysis and it has absolutely no basis in reporting or any other form of evidence, though it does nicely illustrate the contempt that the smart journalistic establishment regularly demonstrates for Dean.  If Scheiber had been writing something decent about Dean, one imagines his editors would have ask a few tough questions.

Hey look:  "The intense opposition to Bush is larger than any faced by Clinton.  For all the polarization the 42nd president inspired, Clinton's strong disapproval never got above 37 percent in Post-ABC polls during his presidency."  Here.  Is he the worst president in a hundred years?  Damn straight he is.  More, I'd say.

Quote of the Day:  "Woman's sexual organ is like the open mouth of a snake filled with poison."  --Rev. Sun Myung Moon, whose pastors, under George W. Bush's Healthy Marriage Initiative and abstinence-only grants, have won nearly $1 million in public funding.  Read the rest of this.  It's wild.

Contempt for books in the news business builds:  Do a search here or even one here and you won't find the word "book."

And finally, a massive Maazel Tov to the smart folks at the Jewish Theological Seminary for having the creativity and smarts to pick my old professor at Stanford, Arnie Eisen, to be the new Chancellor.  I've never met a scholar of Judaism whose arguments I found more compelling than Arnie and he's a great guy, too.  Brave of him, too, to take this position on gay marriage coming in...