Take Your Pick

Which do you think is a more appropriate reaction by the L.A. Times to Arnold's "girlie men" comment?

This humorless editorial, which makes the argument that the comment is "insulting to all women"?

Or this piece?

Bob Somerby Rips Into Joe Wilson

The title of Somerby's post is: I never claimed to debunk Bush's claim, Wilson says. We warned you about this last year. Great stuff.

Sandy Berger: He's Just Happy to See You

Raise your hand if you stuck classified documents in your pants today.

And the L.A. Times puts this in the "In Brief" section today.

As a reader wrote Glenn Reynolds:

In Brief indeed, though I had always thought it was plural, "briefs."

Rumor Mill

Rumor has it that the opinion section of this coming Sunday's L.A. Times will have a feature on bloggers.

I haven't been contacted by the paper myself. So how do I know?

I have my sources.

Will it be a hit piece on conservative bloggers?

Only time will tell . . .

Terror in the Skies, Part II

That story about the 14 Syrian terrorists (or musicians) is revisited here.

Good News From Iraq

More good news from Iraq.

Tim Rutten Distorts, You Decide

Tim Rutten -- a man so far to the left that he once uttered the phrase "the mythology of liberal Hollywood" without a trace of irony -- is now waging a one-man war on alternatives to the liberal mainstream media.

Two weeks ago, Rutten mocked the Fox News Channel, calling it "the most blatantly biased major American news organization since the era of yellow journalism."

On Saturday, Rutten took some cheap potshots at pro-war bloggers -- including Roger L. Simon, and some unnamed critics of the L.A. Times's woefully deficient coverage of the implosion of Joe Wilson's credibility. (As Rutten no doubt knows, yours truly has been one of the more prominent of these unnamed critics of the Times.) See, some of us had the gall to point out that papers like Rutten's L.A. Times had trumpeted Wilson's allegations on their front pages -- but then remained silent for days after the recent bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report had shattered Wilson's credibility.

How dare we!

In classic L.A. Times style, Rutten commits the exact crimes of which he accuses his opponents: inaccuracy, distortion, and a lack of civility.

More on the "Terror in the Skies" Story and Profiling

I like what Tony R. says in his comments to this post.

Government vs. Common Sense

Relevant to that "Terror in the Skies" story about the 14-man Syrian band with a penchant for using (and taking objects with them to) the airplane lavatory:

If I headed Al Qaeda, I would assign some Arab people to create incidents on airplanes (like this), get tossed off, and file some discrimination suits. Once those suits were settled, and the airlines appropriately cowed, I would be able to send my terrorists onto a plane en masse -- and if anyone tried to search them, I'd instruct them to cry "discrimination!"

But Osama doesn't need to do this, because the government is already doing this work for him. As the New York Times reported in April, since 9/11 our very own U.S. government has filed and settled numerous lawsuits against various airlines for alleged discrimination against "travelers believed to have been of Arab, Middle Eastern or Southeast Asian descent." As part of the settlement, the airlines (including American, United, and Continential) are required "to provide civil rights training over the next two years to its pilots and cabin crew." In Continental's case, the settlement provides that the training "must cost the company no less than $500,000."

The government is no doubt using these suits to enforce its ridiculous policy preventing more than two people of the same ethnic persuasion from being singled out for extra security procedures.

I discussed these lawsuits, and the sensitive topic of rational discrimination, in this post in April.

There's no question about it, folks. Our government is actively working against the use of common sense in combating terrorism.

This lack of common sense is, of course, the ultimate lesson of the 14-man Syrian band story -- whether that article describes a group of Al Qaeda terrorists, or just a bunch of musicians with bladder problems.

Council Winners

The winners of the Watcher's Council's weekly vote for best post of the week have been announced.

Congratulations to Alpha Patriot for the winning Council entry, UN Admits Saddam Had WMD, and James Lileks's The Bleat for an overwhelming victory in the non-Council category with his outstanding entry, Believing In Bush’s Perfidy.

P.C. Consequences?

I'm holding off on commenting extensively on this, until I learn a little more about its veracity. But even if it were a parable, it would be a pretty good one.

UPDATE: The story has been confirmed in part. I will have much more to say about this.

Black Community Leader: Don't Fly Off the Handle and Rush to Judgment Like That Guy Steve Lopez

I saw an amazing quote from a black community leader today, in the latest L.A. Times story about the whacking of a black suspect by an LAPD officer with a flashlight:

Khalid Shah of Stop the Violence Increase the Peace said he believed it was too soon to judge the police investigation or the arrest.

"Of course it may look bad, and it may be bad," said Shah, who is working on an alternative citizen panel organized by L.A. Sentinel newspaper owner Danny Bakewell. "We do the process a disservice by rendering any kind of judgment until we can find out what the facts are."

Khalid Shah needs to have a sit-down with Times columnist Steve Lopez, who recently wrote:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, go ahead and investigate, but I saw what I saw.

. . . .

Although this thing looked bad, Bratton said from 3,000 miles away, "There should be no rush to judgment before the investigations are completed."

Guess what, Chief. My investigation is complete.

Any cop who'd whack a captured suspect 11 times, on live TV no less, is too dumb to keep past lunch.

I also loved this quote from another Lopez column on the same topic:

For all the pressing issues in L.A. — gang warfare, huge dropout rates, a housing crisis, crummy low-paying jobs, and a young man shot dead last week while cleaning up gang graffiti in Boyle Heights — so-called community leaders are worked up about a suspected car thief who ran from police and got cracked with a flashlight.

I guess I shouldn't be so critical. After all, Lopez has a tough job. He gets paid a comfortable salary for writing three columns a week for the Times. It can't be easy making those three columns look like they are worth it.

It's "Annoy the Base" Time Here at Patterico's Pontifications

I don't have a lot to say about it, but I am pleased that the proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage was defeated.

Bob Somerby on Joe Wilson

It is very entertaining to read Bob Somerby, the often insightful and always vitriolic defender of Al Gore, once again hammering Joe Wilson -- this time in a post entertainingly titled Warning to readers! Once again, we roll our eyes at liberal icon Joe Wilson.

Great stuff.

L.A. Times Ends News Blackout on Joe Wilson's Lack of Credibility -- Details on Page A6

After a series of Page One articles trumpeting allegations by Joe Wilson against the Bush Administration (for details see this post), the Los Angeles Times has finally mentioned that the recent Senate Intelligence Committee report concludes that Wilson is a liar. But the story, which took the paper almost a week to run, appears on page A6, and does not cite the most compelling evidence that Wilson lied. (Although there is a front-page story about the Butler report, that story doesn't mention Niger at all.) Incredibly, the Page One space today is reserved for more important stories, like this one about Harrah's buying Caesar's.

The revelations about Wilson come at the tail end of the page A6 story about Iraq efforts to buy Niger uranium, and are inordinately defensive of Wilson:

The Senate committee report questioned Wilson's account on several issues. Wilson has maintained that his wife did not suggest him for the mission to Niger, but the committee found that she did, noting that another CIA official said Plame had "offered up his name."

"That's just false," Wilson said in a telephone interview Wednesday. He said he was preparing a written rebuttal to the Senate report.

A senior intelligence official said the CIA supports Wilson's version: "Her bosses say she did not initiate the idea of her husband going…. They asked her if he'd be willing to go, and she said yes," the official said.

The Senate report also accused Wilson of exaggerating his knowledge of forged documents that purported to be evidence of an Iraqi purchase of uranium. Wilson acknowledged that he might have "misspoken" on that issue.

The committee found that intelligence analysts recalled Wilson's report on his mission to Niger as ambiguous and unimpressive, not as the conclusive refutation he has sometimes described.

Wilson has asserted that his wife was not involved in the decision to send him to Niger.

"Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," Wilson wrote in a memoir published this year. "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip."

The report states that a CIA official told the Senate committee that Plame "offered up" Wilson's name for the Niger trip, then on Feb. 12, 2002, sent a memo to a deputy chief in the CIA's Directorate of Operations saying her husband "has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." The next day, the operations official cabled an overseas officer seeking concurrence with the idea of sending Wilson, the report said.

Not only does the Times play down the extent of the evidence against Wilson, it also stuffs the revelations inside section A. It's inexcusable how long it took the L.A. Times to get around to printing this, and it's unfair to Bush that it's placed on page A6 -- given the front-page prominence of the numerous previous stories on the issue.

What would have been fair? A front-page story saying that, according to the Butler report, the "sixteen words" in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address were "well-founded" -- and adding that, according to the Senate report, numerous claims made by the principal accuser of Bush on that issue, Joseph Wilson, have been refuted by documentary and testimonial evidence.

At best, today's story provides curious Times readers a starting point for their research. It doesn't give them the whole story.

UPDATE: Thanks to Instapundit, Cori Dauber, and Captain Ed for the links. I hope new readers will bookmark the site and return in the future.

Also, this item is cross-posted at "Oh, That Liberal Media", a group blog to which I contribute. I encourage anyone who hasn't visited that site to take a look.

UPDATE x2: For anyone doubting that Wilson made the blanket statements about his wife as detailed in the Washington Post article, here is a link to Chapter 17 of his book, via Lawrence in the comments. A quote highlighted by Lawrence makes it pretty dang clear:

Quite apart from the matter of her employment, the assertion that Valerie had played any substantive role in the decision to ask me to go to Niger was false on the face of it. Anyone who knows anything about the government bureaucracy knows that public servants go to great lengths to avoid nepotism or any appearance of it. Family members are expressly forbidden from accepting employment that places them in any direct professional relationship, even once or twice removed. Absurd as these lengths may seem, a supervisor literally cannot even supervise the supervisor of the supervisor of another family member without high-level approval. Valerie could not have stood in the chain of command had she tried to. Dick Cheney might be able to find a way to appoint one of his daughters to a key decision-making position in the State Department's Middle East Bureau, as he did; but Valerie could not—and would not if she could—have had anything to do with the CIA decision to ask me to travel to Niamey [the location of the U.S. Embassy in Niger].

Hans Blix: I Believed Iraq Had WMD, But I Kept It to Myself

Browsing the Butler report, I ran across this wonderful quote from Hans Blix's book "Disarming Iraq", which is quoted at page 112 of the report:

My gut feelings, which I kept to myself, suggested to me that Iraq still engaged in prohibited activities and retained prohibited items, and that it had the documents to prove it.

[M]y gut feeling was still that Iraq retained weapons of mass destruction.

A cynical person might say: because his first commitment was not to the truth -- it was to the avoidance of war, at all costs. Remember, Hans Blix was the guy who was more worried about the Kyoto protocol then he was about any major military conflict. And Saddam Hussein didn't reject the Kyoto protocol -- George Bush did.

Of course, Hans Blix would say that there simply wasn't enough hard evidence. Which raises the question: isn't Hans Blix the guy who was head of the IAEA for a decade, until 1991 -- and in that capacity decided in that there wasn't enough evidence that Saddam was obtaining a nuclear weapon? And then admitted in 1996 that Saddam had been months away from obtaining a nuclear bomb in 1990?

Why, yes, he was.

So perhaps we can pardon G.W. Bush if his gut feeling also told him that Saddam -- who had every chance to prove he had disposed of WMD, but had resisted all such opportunities -- might still have (or be pursuing) WMD.

The Big Picture

When considering the hullabaloo about the Senate Intelligence Committee Report and the Butler Report, keep your eye on the big picture. This excellent piece should help.

Xrlq on Mark A. York

Xrlq is not impressed with Mark A. York.