Drink till you're an optimist again
In the course of bitching about how hard it is to be a blogger-- as opposed to being a coal miner?-- Andrew Sullivan made a rather incredible statement:
But life suffers - along with relationships, being able to drink after 8 pm, exercize and reading for - imagine this - pleasure. At this point, the reason for blogging has gotten a little lost.

He writes this shit when he's sober? Who woulda thunk it?

It was about the time that he wrote that-- not quite two weeks ago, actually-- that Sullivan began to acknowledge the wreckage of our Iraq policy. He didn't, of course, acknowledge how much he himself had defended those policies and the men who sponsored them, but Sullivan will be Sullivan.

I don't argue that Sullivan's sobriety while blogging helped him apprehend the sobering reality of Iraq. For all I know he's always abstained from drink while writing. Nevertheless, a graf he wrote in the empty hours this morning is suggestive:
IN THE EARLY MORNING: I was hoping to write this morning about Iraq but I'm too tired now after talking half the night chez Hitch. I'll check in later today to explain why a) I'm more encouraged than I have been and b) why I'm now persuaded that that wedding party story was and is bullshit.

The man who was so bitterly disappointed by the collapse of his fantasies in Iraq is now more encouraged. And all it took was a night of talking. Talking. Talking with Hitchens all night long.

Any bets on whether he'll be able to post before noon?  ¶ 1:06 AM

  The Neo-Nazi in the Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, first published in France in 1934, was not printed or sold in the United States until almost thirty years later. In the early 1960's when Grove Press finally dared to break the ban and bring out an American edition, many cities took legal action against the publisher and local booksellers that tried to carry the book.

One of those cities was Philadelphia, where an Assistant District Attorney was given the job of keeping Tropic off of the shelves.

To prove that the book was obscene, the young prosecutor would need to convince the court that it lacked redeeming social or artistic value. He needed an expert, an authority on English literature who was willing to say in public, under oath, that Miller's work, one of the great literary sensations of the modern era, made no contribution to literature.

What self-respecting professor could the ADA find?

In tiny LaSalle College, he found just the man: A. J. App.

In her bestseller, Denying the Holocaust, Deborah Lipstadt devoted a full chapter to App:
Austin J. App, a professor of English at the University of Scranton and LaSalle College...played a central role in the development of Holocaust denial, especially in the United States.

App, of German descent, was a staunch defender of all things German. Including Hitler. Before he began advancing the now familiar crank arguments claiming that the Holocaust didn't happen, App had spent considerable time justifying Nazi crimes. For instance, as Lipstadt writes, App argued that the Nazi destruction of Lidice and the murder of its inhabitants was just.
...according to international law the killings were justified because the Germans had executed everybody who aided political murders and American law would have supported such action.

This was the State's expert.

App gave his own account of the obscenity trial in his 1977 autobiography. He leads in with an attack on Allied treatment of Germany after the war, which I include because it captures the flavor of his writing so very well:
Gangsters in a Harlem alley war could not have been nastier. Perhaps it is because Hitler accepted the surrender of the French government in 1940 with such punctilious chivalry that the victors and their columnists hate him so for having thus accentuated his better manners over their own jungle manners!
An attack of a different sort, which hardly bothered me nor harmed me, appeared in the Pennsylvania Magazine in April 1962. It showed itself frustrated by my testimony on January 23, 1962, for the Assistant District Attorney Arlen Specter against Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, a copy of which the District Attorney's Office had sent me. The Pennsylvania Magazine deplored Judge Carrol's ruling against the sale of this litany of four-letter words and action-- sixteen on one page! When on the first day, January 22, I attended the hearing, and saw the defence I looked around to assure myself that I had not by chance walked into Tel Aviv. The publisher Grove Press, the editor, Karl Shapiro (who introduced this manure pile as written by "The Greatest Living Author"), the defence personnel, all were Jewish. Only the author, Henry Miller, was not Jewish; he regrettably, was said to be ethnically German!
Of the two chief experts for the defence one was the director of the Free Library of Philadelphia. It seems this fool-- or degenerate-- had stocked the library system with thirty or more expensive editions of this sewer of a book and now squirmed and sweated trying to read some social value into it. Another was professor Carl Bode of the University of Maryland who raved about the literary and social value of Tropic of Cancer, a book so dirty that for decades even the permissive U.S. prohibited its publication. The following day I testified, gratis of course, and I felt I hacked up the pro-pornographic rationalizations of those two academic pimps for pornography.

Senator Arlen Specter, this is your life!

To be fair, Specter, who is Jewish, probably had no idea of App's views. Lipstadt notes that the professor's own students had no idea of them, and, doubtless, App didn't give Specter a copy of his pamphlet, "The Six Million Swindle."

Specter, now trying to be returned for a sixth term, published an account of his long and controversial career, Passion for the Truth. The Tropic case isn't mentioned. Perhaps it slipped his mind.


  ¶ 9:14 AM

  Today's allegation that American soldiers tortured and humiliated three Iraqi journalists is shocking, even after Abu Ghraib. A vigorous free press is one of America's most valuable traditions, and an export that Iraq needs.

Of course, there are many on the right who would insist that we don't have a vigorous free press, and that the coverage of the war proves this beyond all doubt. At best the press is useless, at worst an enemy. Who needs the press anyway, when you've got the blogosphere?

Scott MacMillan put it quite succinctly:
...somewhere in my heart of hearts I think it speaks badly of the world that anybody would considers these "primary sources." A blog, almost by definition, is a secondary source of information. That story about the nesting dolls on Old Town Square? That's about the closest this blog, or the vast majority of blogs for that matter, are ever going to get to original reporting or "primary source." A-list political bloggers like Josh Marshall and Mickey Kaus occasionally do a bit of reporting on their blogs and break some minor stories, but even then, it's not much.
I hate it when people blog about blogs, so I'm not going to touch that topic again. But needless to say, proper journalism to me means more than just stringing sentences together. It means doing tedious stuff like research and interviews and gathering more information than what your readers know already. (What? You mean I might have to pick up the phone to write this story?)

The Committee to Protect Journalists issued a report this week that documented the increasing hazards of reporting from "the world's worst place to be a journalist":
Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq began in March 2003, twenty-seven journalists have been killed covering the war and its aftermath. Nearly all of those killed in 2003 were foreign correspondents, from the United Kingdom, Spain, Australia, Germany, the United States, and elsewhere. In 2004, however, 12 of the 14 killed to date were Iraqis. Six Iraqi media workers have also been killed.

How many of the civilian war-bloggers have been killed posting about media bias?  ¶ 2:25 PM

  Hunting Giant Squid
I don't have any comments to go along with the story by David Grann in The New Yorker, but if the phrase "hunting giant squid" won't by itself get you to click on the link, there's nothing I can do anyway.  ¶ 1:15 PM

  More on Fallouja: Today, Fallouja is for all intents and purposes a rebel town, complete with banners proclaiming a great victory and insurgents integrated into the new Fallouja Brigade-- the protective force set up with U.S. assistance to keep the peace.

From a piece in today's LA Times. Did the Marines have a choice? To the extent that they did, it wasn't a good one:
With a potential bloodbath looming, Marine leaders adopted a mantra: "We don't want to turn Fallouja into Dresden"

A point made, with force and clarity, by Fred Kaplan when it seemed that we were going to take the city with a bloody assault. I think the Marine commander on the ground did what he had to do. But the residents of Fallouja, as well as the rest of Iraq, have at least some grounds to challenge our presence in their country if all we can produce are some casualties on both sides followed by a quick handover to the people we had been fighting in the name of freedom.

  ¶ 10:42 AM

  Frisco? Co?
What fresh hell is this? It's not a beer...it's a fruit-flavored malt beverage! Plzensky Prazdroj, one of the leading Czech brewers is making a Zima-type "malt beverage." Called "Frisco."

I'm going to go drink beer now, and try to forget that I ever heard about this.  ¶ 12:19 PM

  Atta/Praha keeps on truckin'
I'm pretty sure that Glenn Reynolds doesn't actually believe that there was a link between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein. He puts a story on it as the third item in a list of "things I'm not writing about."

Surely actual proof of Iraqi government sponsorship of 9/11 would justify, to all but the most ardent pacifist, our invasion of that country. So why isn't Reynolds writing about it?

Reynolds calls the story "further evidence for a Saddam / 9-11 link."
Except for the part about it not being evidence, and there not being any good evidence to actually further, that's accurate.

Instapundit's link is to a story in Front Page Magazine-- the Times is out of it, but Horowitz is the man-- by Laurie Mylroie that touts
Important new information has come from Edward Jay Epstein about Mohammed Atta’s contacts with Iraqi intelligence.

Yep. The calendar. The calendar that supposedly belonged to Iraqi intelligence agent Ahmed al-Ani and that supposedly lists an appointment with a "Hamburg student" who is, presumably, Muhammed Atta.

I've dealt with this before, only a few days ago. To sum up:
Nobody has come forward who claims to have seen the calendar. Not even anonymous sources.
Epstein hasn't seen it. It's not clear from his account that his source has seen it. There's no reason to believe that there is more than one source.
Nobody knows when, even in the most approximate terms, the calendar was lifted from the Iraqi embassy in Prague.

Does the calendar exist? Perhaps. It may even say what Epstein says it does. I have no particular reason to doubt Epstein's honesty or acumen. But there aren't any reasons, fact-based, checkable reasons, to buy what he's selling.

The calendar's existence is only a rumour. It's not too much to say that Epstein's story defines the difference between gossip and journalism.  ¶ 9:34 AM

  This just in: Franco still dead.
Andrew Sullivan continues his running critique of the NY Times, calling them out for "burying the Nick Berg story."

Huh?

Every detail of Berg's story has been diligently reported by the Times, even when the details haven't been new. Today's paper has a story announces the CIA believes that Al-Qaeda terrorist al-Zarqawi himself performed the execution. Since the web site that posted the video of the crime identified al-Zarqawi as the man who beheaded Berg, this is not exactly earth-shaking information, just a confirmation of something we pretty much knew a few days ago.

The editors of the Times "buried" this relatively small story, the only real new news on the case, by giving it four columns on page A-12, accompanied by two photographs. To further deflect attention away from the story, they cleverly placed a refer to it on the front page.

UPDATE: I just noticed that today, Sullivan himself linked to the above story. So, the NY Times can't be trusted to properly report events on a given subject, but, that's where Sullivan goes to for news on that same subject.
I know he's posted two hundred thousand words on his blog and all, but would it kill him to actually read some of them?
Well...   ¶ 8:49 AM

  Elena Lappin
I'm not going to add anything to the condemnations of Lappin's detention and expulsion by Zucker, Lithwick, Steve, and many others. One, those writers have done better than I could have. But, also, there is nothing I can see to argue against.

I'm enough of a Devil's Advocate to entertain even the most far-fetched argument, but I just can't imagine any plausible justification for this policy that goes against every good thing this country says it stands for.

Does anyone have an argument for this idiocy?  ¶ 11:13 AM

  The NY Times front-page, as edited by Andrew Sullivan
Andrew Sullivan, the fucking fool, has taken a number of swipes at the Grey Lady today.. It seems that they can't get anything right.

Sullivan, whose blogging duties are starting to tire him-- imagine if he fact checked those four books worth of posts?-- would do things differently. Let's try to imagine what the front page would be like.

Page A1 headlines:
Harsh CIA Methods In Top Qaeda Interrogations Morally Superior to Beheading the Innocent

Twelve Iraqi Soldiers Under Close American Supervision Are the Spearhead of a New Army in Decisive Victory
Is Final Triumph Near?

Family of Al-Qaeda Victim Deluded in Their Grief

General Took Guantanamo Rules, On a Different Moral Plane than Al-Qaeda's, To Iraq For Handling of Prisoners

Most of the front page would be devoted to a still of Nick Berg's severed head, with the caption, "Why we are in Iraq."  ¶ 10:40 AM

  Was Fallujah a precedent?
Bloomberg reports:
The U.S. is trying to quell a Shiite Muslim cleric's uprising in southern Iraq by recruiting some of his militia to help create a security force, according to General Martin Dempsey, a top U.S. military commander in the region.
``If the militia dissolves tomorrow what I've got is 600 unemployed young men on my hands; some of those are probably decent, who have been led astray,'' said Dempsey at a press briefing televised from Baghdad.

Quick thoughts:
If it works, it works.
Weren't these guys the true face of Islamic fundamentalism, the jihadists who needed to be killed, according to a lot of right-wingers?
Disbanding Iraq's army seems dumber every day. Thanks Rummy!  ¶ 11:32 AM

  The Baltimore Film Festival was this past weekend. I was going to post something about it, but Jesse Walker saved me the trouble, and made me sort of glad that I couldn't make it to the sole showing of "Archangel."  ¶ 11:10 AM

  Radio Prague celebrates the 30th birthday of the other thing that the Russians did for the Czechs: Prague's Metro.
It didn't quite make up for the fucking invasion, but nice to have.
(via the Monitor)  ¶ 9:50 AM

  Rat fishing
Matt Welch has a rat problem. Or he thinks he does. Perhaps in Southern California it qualifies, but in Baltimore his situation would not be worth bringing up, save perhaps for the amazing detail that his neighbor's cats were able to kill one. In Baltimore, cats rarely try, taking the not unreasonable view that it's a mistake to hunt something bigger and meaner than you are.

I recall how my late cat, a large beast with a nasty disposition and a highly developed sense of territoriality, reacted to a rat in the alley behind the house. It was broad daylight, and the rat was difficult to miss as it wandered through the alley with an arrogant air. I looked to my cat, outside sunning herself, to see what she'd do.

After a moment of what cat lovers insist is thought, she got up, licked one paw a few times in a studied show of casualness, and strolled back inside with a nothing-to-see-here attitude. Perhaps she thought it was a good time to look for mice.

Baltimore, the City That Should Kill All the Rats, as Joe MacLeod put it, used to have a rat fishing tournament. Details are hazy (isn't it astonishing how tough it can be to find out things about the recent past that preceded the internet revolution?) but it seems that a group of regulars in a now shuttered bar in East Baltimore decided to see if it would be possible to catch rats in the alley behind the bar with fishing equipment. (Though some claim that it was a tradition that went back to the 1930's.)

It evolved into an annual tournament that was as much a sly protest at the city's decay as it was a sporting event-- what the Czechs call a "happening." The idea was to use a baited hook to catch the rat, which would then be reeled in and dispatched with a baseball bat. Good times, 'no?

Ratkill.com has a post from a Baltimoron that gives some more details:
the last one that i know of was in '94. it got bigger than the bar owners could deal with. tv satellite trucks, cops directing traffic, peta protesters, it was a mess. they even had a tv crew from australia.

The bar, the Yellow Rose, is gone now. It's not improbable that the government of Baltimore, a city that guards its reputation far better than it actually protects its living standards, might have caused a few problems-- an occasional weekly inspection from the liquor board, say-- that contributed to the demise of the bar that gave us so much publicity.

The event lives on in local legend. A local filmaker produced a short called The Tournament on the subject, though I gather that the fishing was staged for the film.

So, anyway, don't tell me about rats in Cali. I live in Baltimore, where we know from rats. Jesse Walker, a fellow resident of the Maryland Free State, wrote in the comments to Welch's post:
What beast bites off rat-heads?
Why, a bigger rat, of course! Watch out

Yeah. That's Baltimore, hon'.  ¶ 8:04 AM