Dobson, Dobson Uber Alles....
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Taking back our Culture
Just why is Doctor James Dobson against tolerance?

We're not talking about recruitment here, not promoting anything that is forbidden in the early books of the Bible (although right next to the strictures against gay-ness, we are also commanded by Leviticus 19:19 to stone people to death for planting different crops in the same field - God help all genetic engineers if Dobson decides we've got to stop tolerating that, too, because bug-resistant soybeans and corn and relatively inexpensive, pure, mad cow-free genetically-engineered insulin and Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease-free human growth hormone clearly violate the spirit of that passage).

Tolerance, as I understand the word, simply means not expressing bigotry in word or deed. Why does Dr. Dobson oppose that so much? Is the answer to be found in the Bible... or in another book, something like Mein Kampf?

Christianity has no use for the creation of scapegoats - in which the intent is to take us back beyond Orthodox Judaism in one or two specific areas in order to bless bigotry. Scapegoats are useful, however, if you'd like to get people to stop taking responsibility for their actions and start blaming other people reflexively - in other words, to STOP being Christians.

Once people stop believing in cause and effect - "if our country overspends its income, it will destroy our economy," or "Jesus told us not to judge the people at the margins of our society, but here we are about to hurt some folks that we've been told that we don't have to tolerate - shouldn't we stop that NOW?" - then they can be sold any line of crap. Artificial stupidity reigns.

And when the super-preachers like Dr. Dobson arise with their followers to play power-broker in national elections, compelling Congress to start enacting laws aimed at punishing members of specific minority groups, when they start opposing tolerance for Arab-Americans, Muslims, African-Americans, Hispanics, and Jews (always a favorite with the anti-tolerance crowd), should we be surprised when the America that emerges has more than a little resemblance to Nazi Germany?

The moral is a simple one - unless the Republican Party scrapes James Dobson and the other TV pulpit hate-mongers off of the campaign soon, 2008 will be when Libertarians and others who supported Bush - because he wasn't a nasty little lying demagogue like Kerry - go home... or even go Democrat, if that's what it takes to wake the GOP up. One Big Tent works, One Tiny Teepee doesn't - and 2008 may be when we find that out again.

1992 and 1996 are examples of what happens to a Republican Party that lets people like James Dobson control the party platform. It loses.

In the next election, I'm not going to speak out for the Presidential candidate of a party dominated by people who may decide that Cajuns are the next group our nation shouldn't tolerate. You see, most of us violate Leviticus 11:10 as often as we can by eating crawfish, crabs, shrimp, catfish and other seafood which are not on the Bible's list of approved delicacies (the catfish has no scales, and thus misses being an Biblically authorized seafood by that much, as Maxwell Smart might put it).

Has Christ given us a new dispensation (Hebrews 10:1 - "For the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually make the comers thereunto perfect," Hebrews 10:16 - "This is the Covenant that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord, I will put my laws into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them" ), or is anyone free to reach back into the books of the Old Testament for a hammer to hit people he just doesn't like? And where does the process stop?

Should the Federal Government be in the business of banning pork roast and crawdads from the nation's supermarkets? That would win the Jewish and Muslim votes, for sure, but it might just hurt them in the Deep South, where the Democratic Party would jump on the opportunity to educate the voters on why we don't want to open the door to theocracy - especially theocracy which is opposed to tolerance - in this country. No more "Solid South."

Do racists get to call African-Americans "the sons of Ham" again, going to the Bible to justify that form of prejudice? The use of the Bible to prop up discrimination and prejudice is not just dangerous, it is condemned by God Himself.

Hate by any other name - apparently a name like "Focus on the Family," if the organization has to be pried off the ceiling when someone says "tolerance" a little too loudly - is just as bad as the hate my Dad (in World War II) and one of my sons (in the War Against Terror) went overseas to fight - the hate my son died defending our country from this January.

Using the Holy Bible as a pretext to spread hate around is an especially vile blasphemy, and one that intuitively one feels Christ would have opposed.

Americans shouldn't have to choose between tyranny from Wah'habi fanatic preachers overseas or tyranny from TV preachers here at home. We have other choices, and it behooves the Republican Party to give us one before 2008.

Is There Any Excuse For Michael Moore?

Praising Christopher Hitchens' prose (and his wonderful decision to come in from the Dark Side - better known as the Nation and the other environs of knee-jerk liberalism) doesn't just approach impertinence, it cuts it off going 130 in a turbocharged Porsche on the Santa Monica Freeway. But I have to do it again - I just discovered Hitchens' essay "Unfairenheit 9/11 - the lies of Michael Moore" on Slate.

Slate's combination comissariat/editorial board slips up every now and then and publishes an essay that wasn't written by a National Lawyers Guild wannabe, which is the only thing separating it from being the Washington State edition of pravda.ru. It was Hitchens' turn sometime last year, when the essay was published, and I'm sorry I missed it then.

But back to Hitchens on Michael Moore's oeuvre: "To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery."

I would have just called Moore a untalented, unoriginal, soul-less political whore, but Hitchens manages to be so much more vivid in his phrasing. He also manages to, in his essay, thoroughly hold Michael Moore up to the unforgiving light of day as the dimwitted hack he is, covering every outrage against the truth, every empty piece of innuendo, and every disservice to his viewers committed in Fahrenheit 9/11.

Michael Moore, by confusing hired murderers with "Iraqi patriots" probably encouraged them to step up their attacks, leading to the death of several American troops, including my son - pushing up the number of Americans who have died in Iraq to which his latest piece of cinematic dung was supposedly dedicated.

Stick your dedication up your fat ass, Moore, and stop encouraging terrorists by calling them patriots.

To remove the chance of future confusion, I have found a good entry on Blackfive on two Iraqi National Guardsmen who gave up their lives in order to engage a car bomb before the suicidal scum driving it got the chance to detonate it in a crowd. THESE guys are Iraqi patriots, along with every voter who braved the very real threat of dying in terrorist violence in order to claim their freedom.

Just to make the distinction clear to those unfamiliar with the concept of patriotism, like Michael Moore and Ted Rall, patriots fight FOR their country, not against it.

The filthy scum who lurk in civilian clothes to commit murders, then slink away to hide behind innocent Iraqis are foreigners, homegrown Wah'habi or other fanatics, and Ba'ath partisans who have deluded themselves that they can restore minority Sunni rule in Iraq. No patriots there.

Patriots make the hard calls and put their lives on the line for good things, like love of country or protecting the weak, not to impose seventh-century political and religious views on people who aren't looking for them.

Again, from Hitchens' essay: "Perhaps vaguely aware that his movie so completely lacks gravitas, Moore concludes with a sonorous reading of some words from George Orwell. The words are taken from 1984 and consist of a third-person analysis of a hypothetical, endless, and contrived war between three superpowers. The clear intention, as clumsily excerpted like this (...) is to suggest that there is no moral distinction between the United States, the Taliban, and the Baath Party and that the war against jihad is about nothing. If Moore had studied a bit more, or at all, he could have read Orwell really saying, and in his own voice, the following:

'The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States ... '

And that's just from Orwell's Notes on Nationalism in May 1945. A short word of advice: In general, it's highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It's also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history."

Hitchens hits the nail straight on the head.

If you scratch a campus 'pacifist' these days (just as it was in the 1970s when I was an undergraduate and exposed to moral equivalence in the service of Communism more than once) you'll find a tangled nest of insufficiently examined premises which support terrorism and terrorists, while opposing the United States and the only working democracy in the Middle East before our invasion of Iraq, Israel. The people who say they believe in moral equivalence do not believe in any such thing - they use "moral equivalence" to try to justify atrocities by men without consciences.

Hitchens, again: "If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture. Rock the vote, indeed."

I was going to title this post "Michael Moore is a Political Whore," but it seems to me that every film reviewer who raved over "Fahrenheit 9/11" is also open to the charge of prostituting his or her profession to praise what has been exposed as a nasty train wreck of a political attack ad masquerading as a documentary.

It's depressing to realize that there are so many people in the business of film criticism whose opinion I used to respect who apparently cannot be trusted when they see an opportunity to advance the political fortunes of another worthless political hack from Massachusetts.

Lynne Stewart: Damned by Her Own Mouth
Mood:  irritated
Topic: No Truce with Terror!


(Quoted from "Lynne Stewart's Campus Tour," Erick Stakelbeck, in Support for Campus Terrorism, D. Horowitz and B. Johnson, eds.)

"I don't have any problem with Mao or Stalin or the Vietnamese leaders or certainly Fidel locking up people they see as dangerous. Because so often, dissidence has been used by the greater powers to undermine a people's revolution." Convicted terrorist stooge Lynne Stewart to Monthly Review's Susie Day in a November 2002 interview....

"I don't believe in anarchist violence but in directed violence," Stewart told the New York Times in 1995. "That would be violence directed at the institutions which perpetuate capitalism, racism, sexism, and at the people who are the appointed guardians of those institutions and accompanied by popular support."

Accordingly, Stewart held a positive view of the events of 9/11, as recounted by George Packer in the New York Times Magazine: "This warmhearted woman took the slaughter of innocents with a certain cold-bloodedness. The U.S. is constantly at war around the world and shouldn't expect its acts to go unanswered, she says. The Pentagon was "a better target"; the people in the towers "never knew what hit them. They had no idea that they could ever be a target for somebody's wrath, just by virtue of being American. They took it personally. And actually, it wasn't a personal thing."

"As for civilian deaths in general: "I'm pretty inured to the notion that in a war or in an armed struggle, people die. They're in the wrong place, they're in a nightclub in Israel, they're at a stock market in London, they're in the Algerian outback - whatever it is, people die." She mentions Hiroshima and Dresden. "So I have a lot of trouble figuring out why that is wrong, especially when people are sort of placed in a position of having no other way."
_______

Well, isn't that special... Ms. Stewart, who will probably portray herself as a martyr at her sentencing hearing, is on record as being cold-hearted and callous toward the people who have been killed and maimed by her favored brand of violence.

Lynne Stewart needs to serve the full 40 years possible on the counts of which she has been found guilty. That won't bring back any of the people she has helped kill by serving as a conduit for messages from Sheikh Rahkman to his terrorist followers, but it'll make sure the old bat never abuses the court system to do it again.

The Saudi approach to counterterrorism - blame the Jews and Christians
Topic: No Truce with Terror!
The Middle East Media Research Institute is a very useful outfit.

You see, there are two Arab worlds.

The one our televisions and one of our major political parties show us is anguished at the carnage on the West Bank, justifiably angry with Israel and with us for supporting Israel, and would be our friends if we would just give the Palestinians everything they want.

Then there's the Arab world which can be seen if you speak Arabic. That's where the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) comes in. They translate radio and TV broadcasts, newspapers and Web sites that appear in the Arabic language.

This week, a conference on counterterrorism is being held in Saudi Arabia. MEMRI's Rachel Schwartz very graciously permitted me to quote some excerpts from interviews and other broadcasts made during this conference.

From an interview with Saudi cleric Musa Al-Qarni on Iqra TV that aired on February 3, 2005:

"Musa Al-Qarni: The chaos evident today in the human race -- killing, attacks, rape, robbery and so on -- the cause of all this is that the flags of the Jews, the Christians, and other faiths are raised higher than the flag proclaiming, "There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His Messenger."

Let's look at what is written in the Koran. What position should we adopt towards Allah's enemies? Is the position we Muslims have adopted towards Allah's enemies. First, we must accept. There are those who don't want us even to use the term 'Allah's enemies.' They don't want us to say that the Jews and the Christians are Allah's enemies. They don't want us to say that the Jews and Christians are the enemies of the Muslims and Islam.

Interviewer: This was said in the Koran and the Sunna.

Musa Al-Qarni: Since this was said in the Koran, how can it be that among our own tongues, our own sons, our own people, among the Muslims, there are people who deny these things, and deny the enmity between Muslims and non-Muslims? True, Allah's religion is all compassion. But if someone fights Allah's religion, fights those who love Allah, distorts the image of Islam and the Muslims, and makes efforts to weaken Islam.

This isn't just talk; let's take real examples. The Jews who now occupy the Muslims' lands, raping their women, killing their children, and destroying their houses -- are these acts being perpetrated by the Muslims or by the Jews?

Interviewer: By the Jews, the whole world knows that.

Musa Al-Qarni: OK, but now we see that anyone who--| anyone who speaks about the Jews - the term anti-Semitism has become widespread, and people are brought to trial for this. Aren't the Jews trying to make us change the Koranic verses? This verses, from the Book of our Lord, prove them to be sworn enemies and show their vile traits, their despicable defects, what they did to the prophets and their history of scheming, deception, conspiracy and treachery. They are trying to do this.

Interviewer: You cannot blame them for this. It is our fault because we agreed to change the Koran and the Sunna for their sake."

So much for those anguished folks who just want a little justice....

"Musa Al-Qarni: The terrorists are these Jews and Christians, who carry out this policy by force, oppression, and tyranny, using tanks, planes, and all the lethal weapons.

Interviewer: Sister Aisha asked about the claim that Islam spread by the sword. They always say that Islam is spread by the sword. How should we respond to them?

Musa Al-Qarni: I ask how exactly the freedom that America wants is being spread.

Interviewer: Not by the sword, but by missiles, bombs.

Musa Al-Qarni: By missiles, by B-50s, by internationally prohibited bombs, by hundred of thousands of soldiers armed to the teeth --this is how freedom has spread."

Musa Al-Qarni is apparently a little misinformed... the B-50, one of the first planes designed specifically to drop nuclear weapons on long bombruns - in short, to nuke Russia - was phased out of service in the 1950s.

But he's right about the "thousands of soldiers armed to the teeth" part. That is how freedom has spread, throughout history. Apparently he wasn't tuned in when President Bush declared a war on terror.

"Interviewer: And we don't see any freedom. We see nothing but enslavement."

Check in with those Iraqis who your hired murderers are killing for voting, you jerk. They don't think we're enslaving them.

"Musa Al-Qarni: This religion. We must first of all, accept that Allah commanded us to spread this religion worldwide. It should be spread by calling to Allah's religion - using words, friendliness, and good deeds. By letting people hear Allah's words and showing them Allah's true religion. But if there is someone who obstructs this path and wants to prevent religion an light from reaching people, such a person must be fought. This is why Allah said: "Fight them so there is no strife and religion is professed for Allah alone."

I am not one of those who deny this completely and say this religion doesn't use the sword. No. This religion uses the sword when this is necessary. Therefore, wisdom, as the religious scholars say, is to put everything in the right place. If there is need for the sword, then it is wise to use the sword, and if there is need for good deeds and preaching, then it is wise to use them.

We ask Allah to strengthen the mujahideen in Iraq, and and bring them victory over their enemies, the Jews and the Christians. I also want to stress that the Jihad waged by Muslims in Iraq in order to drive out the enemies, from among the Jews and the Christians, who are attacking both land and honor-- this Jihad is legal. It is Jihad for the sake of Allah and in defense of Muslim lands, honor, and sanctities."

Most of the people of Iraq disagree. They defied the murderers paid by people like this fellow, went out bravely and voted. The Iraqi people seem happy with the chance we gave them to pick their own leaders, to vote for someone besides Saddam Hussein.

When my son was alive and soldiering in Iraq, he told me that the vast majority of the Iraqis he spoke with were grateful to us - us Americans - for going over there and giving them a chance to live free. He was frustrated that this story never made the CBS Evening News, or PBS's News Hour, or either the New York or the Los Angeles Times, despite all the cameras and journalists infesting Iraq.

My son felt that what we are doing in Iraq IS working - but that all their work and all the good things the Iraqis were telling him and his buddies, among them the eight other men who died when his Bradley was bombed, were studiously being ignored by the press. He didn't think that was right.

I'm sure that whatever political setup evolves in Iraq will be less than perfect, with plenty of things to criticize. Whoever replaces Dan Rather may have plenty of chances to go over there in a set of khakis from Banana Republic and make grave pronouncements about the mess in Iraq.

229 years ago, we decided to try freedom in America, and we still have a political setup that is less than perfect, with plenty to criticize. It seems to be a problem with democracy - one we can live with.

Happy Birthday (late) to Luke
Topic: Martyred for Freedom
To Armand Luke Frickey
born February 2nd 1984, Houma, Louisiana, USA
died January 6th 2005, Taji, Iraq

Sorry the birthday present's a little late, but late's better than not at all, I hope.

I found a poem from A.E. Housman that I think speaks to the situation of those of us who are left behind, mourning the people who were taken away from us too soon -

"I wish one could know them, I wish there were tokens to tell
The fortunate fellows that now you can never discern;
And then one could talk with them friendly and wish them farewell
And watch them depart on the way that they will not return.

But now you may stare as you like and there's nothing to scan;
And brushing your elbow unguessed at and not to be told
They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man,
The lads that will die in their glory and never be old."

Thoughts about Mr. Squarepants and Dr. Dobson
Topic: Taking back our Culture
Thoughts about Mr. Squarepants and Dr. Dobson:

First, this probably wouldn't have become the press event it has if, at least in the minds of media commentators like Dr. Dobson, there had not been a subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle campaign for the hearts and minds of kids on television and in the movies - especially during "tolerance" campaigns.

If the press is going to criticize James Dobson, it should also take a hard look at some of the dodgy stuff that the "tolerance" lobby is trying to push onto us - which sometimes goes beyond mere tolerance to advocacy.

I don't think I was the only parent in the 1980s who was more than a little suspicious of the confusing messages sent by "PeeWee's Playhouse," to provide one example - long before "little PeeWee" made his debut at that adult theatre.

I also recall episodes of "Misterrogers' Neighborhood" which were a little scary - there was this visit to the Neighborhood by an acrobatic troupe, members of which performed in Y-front briefs, for example, which led me to put Misterrogers off limits to my kids unless my wife or I were available to supervise.

All of which goes to show that the television is not a good babysitter, something parents should already know.

But the alarms among media watchdogs are a little too easy to trip. Remember Jerry Falwell and the Teletubbies? Morality in Media's flap over Mighty Mouse sniffing his "magic flowers" to get super powers (that was supposed to tell kids it's OK to use cocaine)?

I suspect that sometimes you don't get anything you don't bring with you to an analysis of children's television - if you're already convinced that there's a lot of illicit sex and drug abuse in cartoons (and "the Simpsons" and "King of the Hill" are examples of that) then maybe you'll find them if you look hard enough.
__

Dr. James Dobson's protestation that it wasn't Spongebob Squarepants as such, but his appearance on campaign for tolerance of (among other things) other people's gender arrangements was actually MORE troubling than if he'd had a problem with Spongebob's long eyelashes (for example).

Dr. Dobson seems to be confused on an important point - tolerance is not the same thing as advocacy.

Idiots who pride themselves on displays of their bigotry (toward ANY group of people) in public places or even violence toward them are not being "Christian" as I understand the use of the term, and yet Dobson seems to say nothing about THAT behavior.

If, in opposing the tolerance campaign, Dobson is actually seeking to support publicly-expressed bigotry, perhaps he ought to revisit the origins and usage of the term "Christian."

I stand ready to be corrected if someone can offer examples where I am wrong about Dr. Dobson - in fact, I hope I am wrong on that point.

Here's a simple question - what would Jesus do?

The Gospels are full of Jesus not only being tolerant of, but reaching out toward people on the margins of his society - even women who were about to be stoned to death for sexual immorality.

Jesus' outreach didn't mean He accepted or advocated the behavior that got them in trouble, just that he refused to sit on the sidelines while the crowd pretended that they were without sin and started to pronounce judgment - judgment that in the woman's case who was about to be stoned to death would have been final.

I wonder if Jesus would have gotten worked up over cartoon characters being used in tolerance campaigns or if, instead, He might have taken the opportunity to reach out to the organizers of the tolerance campaign to see if, somehow, there might be some way of addressing the concerns of people who have a problem with sex outside of marriage in general - something which needs doing badly.

Looking at the Gospels again, though, we see Jesus talking to Samaritans - scandalous behavior for a Jewish rabbi in 33 AD - and hookers, and Roman tax collectors, and publicans (people who owned bars, essentially), so perhaps He may have been (shudder) "tolerant" Himself.

Maybe Jesus wasn't as concerned as some of His modern-day followers with throwing bricks at people who didn't look like Him or live like Him or pray like Him.

Jesus' parable of the Publican and the Pharisee tells us a lot about what He thought of preachers who are quick to condemn others publicly and loudly (surely the opposite viewpoint of tolerance of others).

The harshest condemnations of behavior like that are not to be found outside of Christianity, but from within it.

The New Marine One - It's a Scandal... How It Was Covered by the Press
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Press Gets Reality Check
NBC's national news show on Saturday, January 29, 2005 featured a piece presented by Raheema Ellis on the Administration's choice of a new Presidential transport helicopter (which is unofficially called "Marine One").

Ellis started off with a hearts-and-flowers introduction in the Connecticut town where Marine Ones have rolled off the assembly line since the Eisenhower administration.

Sikorsky lost the Marines' business for new Presidential transports, and NBC chose to spend most of the Connecticut part of the segment with a middle-aged lady who spent a couple of minutes emoting and otherwise expressing her disbelief, instead of (say) a Marine helicopter pilot with the squadron which flies the President around, or an independent expert on military helicopters who might be able to offer a more meaningful opinion on the White House's choice.

The balance of the segment was spent

- with a brief "good news" spot in the town in New York state where some of the assembly of the new airframe is happening (Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor in a multi-national consortium which will build the new copters)

- and a long string of "some people say" allegations about undue influence from Lockheed Martin's "Texas connection" and Tony Blair (parts of the new copter will be built in Britain - which, considering the number of Lockheed-Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighters that the Royal Air Force and Navy are buying, still leaves us with a large trade surplus - and in Italy, where the Agusta Westland firm has been building Bell military and civilian helicopters under license since the 1960s).

If this mysterious, unexplained "Texas connection" is anything more sinister than the Bell Helicopter (a long-time collaborator and business partner of Agusta Westland which produces many Bell-designed helicopters under license) plants near Fort Worth which will also make parts of the new Marine Ones, NBC didn't mention it.

In fact, Raheema Ellis and NBC never explained what Lockheed-Martin/Agusta Westland/Bell's "Texas connection" was at all, just that some people said there was one.

Apparently NBC felt left out when Dan Rather and his producer Mary Mapes were bandying innuendo about the President in Texas a few months ago and decided to play a little themselves.

What else didn't NBC tell us?

First, the current Marine One helicopter which Sikorsky builds is a version of their Sea King, a design dating back to the 1960s. The White House and Marines wanting something newer for the 21st century is about as remarkable and sinister as the Air Force's ordering modern jet fighters instead of McDonnell-Douglas F-4 Phantoms or Convair F-106 Delta Darts.

Sikorsky has a newer executive transport, the VH-60, but the Blackhawk UH-60 helicopter on which the VH-60 is based has been plagued by fatal crashes, some of the most recent (during the Iraq war) of which are due to mechanical failures and some of which may be due to operational problems generic to the design. None of these problems make that design attractive as the basis for a Presidential transport.

NBC failed to mention this, which is odd because they and the other networks covered those Blackhawk crashes in detail when Sikorsky was a defense contractor and not a disgruntled former defense contractor... they already had the data in-house and didn't use it.

Then again, that would have been a balanced presentation of the facts.

Let's see if we can guess:

- which state's Congressional delegation (starting with Senator Joe Lieberman, D-Connecticut, who publicly squwaked about the Sikorsky plant in his state losing the Marine One contract despite the fact that the most up-to-date Sikorsky military transport available to the Marines, the Sea Hawk, is built around an airframe which has been implicated in several fatal crashes all over the world due to mechanical or other operational failures);

- whose corporate lobbyists (Sikorsky's, maybe?);

- and which Pentagon insiders (who may have hitched their post-retirement wagons to Sikorsky's star)

might have been spinning conspiracy theories about Sikorsky losing their contract for Raheema Ellis and her team at NBC....

We have to guess if all the information we have to go by is the report on NBC, because Ellis didn't disclose her sources for the dark accusations she floated against the Bush administration.

Those accusations might have looked a lot weaker and less substantial if we knew they were being made by congressional Democrats and officials of the company who lost the contract.

Second, the basic transport version of Lockheed Martin's copter (currently built by the same British-Italian Agusta Westland consortium which will build parts of new Marine Ones) has an excellent safety record, some of which was earned during the recent unpleasantness in the Balkans by NATO military forces.

It's a modern design well adapted to the specific mission of transporting people in comfort, with military performance capabilities - it's faster than the Sea King, most importantly - if needed.

And it hasn't killed anyone. Just on that score, it's understandable how the Lockheed-Agusta Westland-Bell consortium got the contract and Sikorsky didn't.

NBC didn't go into any of that, either. It took me about fifteen-twenty minutes to check these facts on the Web. They weren't hard to find.

The possibility of corruption or patronage in this matter isn't supported by any facts which NBC offered in the report.

That case goes like this:
- the President comes from Texas;
- one of several plants which will build parts for new Marine Ones, and which has been in the business of building military helicopters since the 1950s, is located in Texas (as I understand it, the big plant is going to be in New York state);
- therefore, some collusion must exist between the President and the people who run that plant.

Has Oliver Stone gone to work for NBC while no one was looking?

If Sikorsky had gotten the contract instead in a hypothetical Kerry administration, it could have been argued with equal justice that the award was made as part of a deal with Joe Lieberman and the rest of Connecticut's delegation to Congress to support the Administration during close House and Senate votes.

THAT would have been a sweet deal - it would have firmed up support for Senate Democrats' long filibusters during votes on the appointment of Federal judges, while decreasing the chances of any aisle-crossing on close votes on other issues by the people from Connecticut.

I'd like NBC to say with a straight face that they would have made THAT allegation against a sitting Democratic president.

Big scandal. Good thing we have the mainstream media to sniff stories like this out, huh?

The Market for Truth
Topic: Press Gets Reality Check
FoxNews' Chris Matthews appeared on Hugh Hewitt's show (please click here to be taken to the post in Hugh Hewitt's blog) and discussed, among other things, the fact that Fox had five times the audience of CNN and three times the audience of CNN and MSNBC combined for this year's inauguration coverage. Now, some people might point out that this is a lot like being elected governor of the Moon, but I would dissent from that appraisal.

People who watch events such as the Inaugural Address are arguably people who are interested enough in political news that their choices in where to get it say something important about the quality and reliability of the news outlet they go to.

Again, three times as many of these people went to FoxNews, a news channel that is constantly criticized and even demonized for its supposed conservative bias by the self-assessed "mainstream media" than to CNN or MSNBC (the mainstream media's outlets for "news only" programming) combined.

That looks to me like a shift in the market for truth. In an open and free market, people go where they can get what they want and need - this is part of how the "hidden hand of the market" works.

If Mr. Matthews' figures are correct, the free market for news as news (as distinguished from news as an add-on to mostly entertainment programming) is shifting toward FoxNews despite an ongoing and long-time smear campaign against that network in the so-called mainstream media.

My opinion? If the mainstream media ignore this development, it's at their own peril.

The post on Mr. Hewitt's blog I linked to (please click here to be taken to the post in Hugh Hewitt's blog) was mainly about CBS' president Leslie Moonves's announcement that "We might have to blow everything up, not an evolution, but a revolution... " and what that might mean for CBS's news division.

I have to agree with Hugh Hewitt and Chris Wallace that Mr. Moonves's announcement probably doesn't portend a shift toward professionalism for the CBS Evening News and their other news products, but something less desirable - perhaps a format change which doesn't involve any fundamental shift toward introducing journalistic ethics - objectivity or avoidance of political partisanship - into what CBS does.

To quote Wallace (from the post on Hugh Hewitt's blog):

"So I don't mind the idea of the revolution, the thing that bothers me is that what he seems to be talking about, and you know it is all just speculation at this point, but what he does seem to be talking about is dumbing down the evening news, and that does bother me.

You know, when he starts talking about having multiple anchors, and the success of The Early Show --which is doing better, it is the CBS morning show, but it certainly is no great evidence of tremendous journalism, or talks about Jon Stewart, whom I admire tremendously, but the idea of putting him on a half hour or nightly news cast --you know, I think what they might want to think about instead is the idea that liberal bias and this kind of group think that you see in the broad mainstream media, maybe if they followed some of Fox's ideas and tried to do a more fair and balanced kind of approach, maybe they'd get an audience that way, but, you know, I don't think you should sacrifice standards, sacrifice the seriousness of what you are trying to do, unless they are planning to go to an hour and I assure you with all their concerns about money, they aren't doing that."

Considering that even Fox's own local broadcast affiliates don't run with FoxNews's more serious content except on Sunday mornings, I can't see CBS or the other big broadcast networks or their affiliates making a shift toward serious - as in committed toward balanced, objective and fair - news reporting. That would have the big commercial TV networks making an ideological 180-degree turn (well, in ABC's case, maybe only a 130-degree turn) in both the content and the presentation of their news programming.

(While a move of that nature is exceedingly unlikely - where do you scare up a whole news department's worth of unbiased reporters, anchor people, producers and writers on short notice, even were you inclined to do so? - it would be a staggeringly gutsy move and might do serious ratings damage both to the local Fox affiliates and to the big commerical news outfits who were still selling more of the same liberal news and analysis. It would be a staggering gamble - but if it paid off at all, it would give the major television news network making the gamble huge winnings in the ratings game.

In the long run, the need to sell such a drastic departure from the norm to stockholders will probably conserve the status quo among the big commercial television news organizations.)

Even PBS News shies away from objectivity in their news reporting, which tells us that the problem isn't money as much as it is politics, because PBS' decisions are not, generally speaking, market-driven. PBS gets money the old-fashioned way - by wheedling, begging and panhandling for it, and getting Uncle Sam to reach into our pockets for some of it.

Big Oil and the other large major institutional sponsors of public broadcasting buy respectability by funding PBS, which is then guided in choosing its programs by a Byzantine process in which the public has only a glancing and impermanent place, judging by the network's content.

I can't imagine the same public that re-elected George W. Bush voluntarily spending money to keep NOW with Bill Moyers on the air, or even authorizing the massive tax exemptions which allow charitable foundations to fund programs such as NOW - which function as hour-long political attack ads favoring the political left, when they aren't coddling the Castro admirer who presently runs Venezuela and stays in office by committing political murders on election day. I can't even imagine who, apart from the same people who prop up the Daily Kos and Moyers himself, even watches NOW. Could that show's ratings have less relevance to its continued presence in the PBS lineup?

No, "public television" didn't get its name from the transparent environment in which its programming decisions are made. The average taxpayer knows a lot less about how sausage is made than about how PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting choose and fund the programs that appear on local public television stations, and that's how the suits in PBS and CPB like it.

Most of the decision makers in the "mainstream media" are politically liberal. This is apparent from the decisions that are made and implemented - when risks are taken in a mainstream media news organization, it's almost always to present a left-of-center viewpoint, almost never to present a viewpoint at variance with the political biases of the people who sign off on corporate decisions.

Dan Rather and Mary Mapes being allowed to cooperate with Democratic Party activists by their bosses at CBS News in the matter of the forged Texas Air National Guard memos is only the most recent example of this. CBS News's highly misleading and selective editing of interviews with Army officers for their documentaries on the Vietnam War is still a by-word for politically-biased and unethical news coverage.

When Big Journalism colors outside the lines, it's almost always off to the left of the page.

ABC's John Stossel is alone among journalists for the Big Three networks in presenting truly objective or occassionally and slightly right of center content in prime time. The fact that he's been allowed to do it for years points to ABC's recognition that people want to hear and see what Mr. Stossel has to say.

Leslie Moonves needs to channelsurf a little and pay attention to what works for other people before declaring a revolution. He might have a better idea of who to put up against the wall afterwards.

Thanks, everybody
Mood:  sad
Topic: Martyred for Freedom

Just over two weeks ago, my son died with eight other soldiers when their Bradley fighting vehicle drove over a large land mine, which threw their vehicle into the air and onto its back.

I will pass over describing what happened after that except to say that the Bradley burned down and its hatches jammed, trapping everyone inside. Everyone died. Luke had a closed casket funeral.

A few years ago, I witlessly used a circular saw to cut tree branches for firewood and lost a finger - the bones of that finger and the finger next to it were shredded. I have to say that apart from embarrassment at having maimed myself for no good reason, I didn't feel a thing until I had been in the hospital emergency room for fifteen minutes.

That merciful numbness of shock is sort of what I've been feeling these two weeks - and is wearing off. I lost one of my sons, one of the people I loved with my whole heart, and it hurts worse than when I began to feel those shredded fingers.

I want to thank everyone who reached out and are still reaching out to my wife and me and Luke's widow in our time of pain. You know who you are, and we might not have gotten through losing Luke without you.

Senators Landrieu and Vitter of Louisiana, where Luke lived and in whose National Guard he served when he died, and Senators Allard and Salazar of Colorado, my chosen home, have all very solicitously asked if there was anything they could do for my wife and me.

Yes, there is something.

Please don't throw my son's sacrifice and the sacrifices of well over a thousand other Americans who died in Iraq away.

Please don't succumb to the urge to retreat from Iraq before it is a working, stable democracy, and before it is strong enough not to collapse as Afghanistan did, becoming a base of operations for terror.

Don't slink away from our obligation to destroy the cancer of terror and expanding tyranny, the way a previous Congress did in Vietnam.

Don't throw what my son died for away. Please.

Armand Luke Frickey, February 2nd, 1984 - January 6th, 2005
Mood:  sad
Topic: Martyred for Freedom
On January 6th, 2004 nine soldiers gave their lives in order to uphold freedom and destroy those who would impose tyranny over us all.

One of those was my son, Armand Luke Frickey. He was worth knowing, and I'd like to help you all know him at least a little bit.

Luke, as we in his family called him, was big in just about every sense of the word. He was generous to a fault. At six feet, four inches tall, he towered over most of us at family gatherings. His shoes would have come in handy during the recent Asian tsunami as emergency watercraft.

He had a wacky sense of humor - Dave Chapelle, that sort of thing - which his laid-back exterior tended to hide. Some of the other scoutmasters at our old troop in Indiana called me today just to reminisce and to tell me how Luke had contributed to the life of the troop - Luke's recipe for trail jambalaya is still very much in use there, and the other guys chipped in one day and got Luke a language patch for his uniform - for Klingon - in a salute to his trekkiness and his willingness to be goofy at a moment's notice in a good cause.

When we asked Luke what he wanted us to send him in his next parcel, he asked for pencils and paper for the local schoolchildren, who have none right now. We had just filled a couple of boxes of school supplies and were ready to mail them off to our son when a captain and a sergeant from Fort Carson (here in Colorado) came to tell us our son had died. We gave those boxes to the Army's representatives so that Iraqi school children could have them as our son would have wanted.

I am certain our son's wish was that, in the event of his death, that his widow would be well-treated and allowed to grieve for him in a dignified manner. Contrary to misinformation in newspapers and other news outlets, Luke planned his funeral arrangements with our daughter-in-law. Shortly after Luke's death, we ourselves misspoke on this point to the Denver media, for which we have since apologized to our daughter-in-law.

I ask that everyone respect Luke's wishes - please let his beloved wife take leave of Luke in peace and let her plan his funeral and interment with the Army's help, without further invasion of her privacy of any sort from anyone.

Anything else would be an insult to my son's memory and would betray a complete lack of respect for him and a total disregard for what he would have wanted.