I know, I know. It's usually bad form to respond to people's sigs. But I couldn't resist. :-)

Update: This thread is kind of fun, too, at least as an exposure of what anti-religious bigotry usually looks like these days.

Well, some amount of buzz has surrounded Brian Anderson's recent piece on South Park Republicans and the state of the culture wars in City Journal (also reprinted in the Wall Street Journal).

Anderson writes:

"The left's near monopoly over the institutions of opinion and information -- which long allowed liberal opinion makers to sweep aside ideas and beliefs they disagreed with, as if they were beneath argument -- is skidding to a startlingly swift halt. The transformation has gone far beyond the rise of conservative talk radio, which, ever since Rush Limbaugh's debut 15 years ago, has chipped away at the power of the New York Times, the networks and the rest of the elite media to set the terms of the nation's political and cultural debate. Almost overnight, three huge changes in communications have injected conservative ideas right into the heart of that debate. Though commentators have noted each of these changes separately, they haven't sufficiently grasped how, taken together, they add up to a revolution. No longer can the left keep conservative views out of the mainstream or dismiss them with bromide instead of argument. Everything has changed."

This is certainly true, as far as it goes. A lot of the energy and enthusiasm in our culture is indeed starting to lean in the right (and Right) direction these days. But Jonah Goldberg over at National Review warns against being too triumphalist, as these small steps in the right direction are still dwarfed by the old elite culture with it's ingrained biases (CBS News, the least well-off of the broadcast news outfits, still has more viewers than all of cable news put together, for example). He writes:

"Think about it: If we'd really won a culture war -- with all of the aggrandizement of territory implied by such a term -- wouldn't our troops be raising our flags in a few more enemy forts? Sure, we've mounted a few heads on a few pikes. But Phil Donahue did most of his damage 20 years ago. By the time he suited up for MSNBC, he was less a formidable culture warrior and more like one of those WWI veterans who sits outside the VFW talking about putting the kibosh on the Kaiser. And, sure, David Brooks now writes for the New York Times, and hooray for that. But he's still the "house goy" over there, ideologically speaking. Meanwhile, I don't see Harvard, Yale, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Hollywood, the Episcopal Church, or the Courts, getting demonstrably more conservative.

Which brings me back to Harrington's pie. If conservatives have such a lock on the culture these days, as Al Gore, Al Franken, and others keep insisting, why don't we just switch sides? The Left can have Fox News, the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, the lavish offices of National Review and The Weekly Standard, as well as Sean Hannity's and Rush Limbaugh's airtime. The gangs at the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation will clear out their desks, give John Podesta the code to the Xerox machine, and tell Eric Alterman where in the neighborhood to buy the best gyros.

In return, we'd like the keys to the executive bathrooms at ABC, CBS and NBC, please. We'd like the cast of Fox and Friends to take over The Today Show's studios ("and tell Couric to take her Cabbage Patch dolls with her!"). We want Ramesh Ponnuru as the editor of the New York Times and Rich Lowry can have his choice between Time and Newsweek. Matt Labash will get Esquire and let's set up Rick Brookhiser at Rolling Stone (that way they won't have to change their drug coverage). Andrew Sullivan can have The New York Times Magazine. Robert Bork will be the dean of the Yale Law School and the faculty of Hillsdale and Harvard will simply switch places. Cornell West will be airbrushed out of The Matrix and Harvey Mansfield will take his place (though convincing him say anything other than "you call that a haircut?" will be hard). NRO will get the bazillions of dollars spent by the editors of Salon and Slate, and those guys can start paying their authors with chickens and irregular tube socks made in Albania.

In other words, talk to me about how we've won the culture war when Dinesh D'Souza wins a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" and Maya Angelou has to blog about it because no one at the New York Times will run her pieces.

I guess I fall somewhere in between. It's not time to declare victory -- a lot of progress would have to be made before the `culture' as laid out by media and other elites is anything but to the left of the mainstream here in America, but I'm happy with where the momentum is right now. What do y'all think?

(PS: I'm back. Or at least I intend to be, albeit perhaps with a slightly slower posting rate than in the past. So if you've seen me post recently, here's your confirmation, and if you haven't, well maybe you're finding out here.)

This accepted story of mine (that makes two for eight) generated some interesting discussion, most of it on topic. Of course, any discussion of the CIA brings out the black-helicopter types as well.

A few threads in particular from this story show two of the left's key characteristics:

• An ability to forget recent history -- it wasn't really a surprise to see the Iraqi information minister deny all fourteen of the illegal ballistic missiles Iraq fired into Kuwait during the war, but it's a little odd to see that some on /. are still denying them.
• A firm belief that anything one doesn't like in the world must be America's fault -- the continuing attempts by the left to blame the US for Pinochet's rise to power gets punctured in this thread. In on the mix, we get a good look at who Salvador Allende really was, and, tangentially, a look at Marc Herold's absurdly inflated casualty numbers.

Apparently, a shaky grasp on grammar doesn't hurt either, as this post and response amusingly demonstrates.

So check out this guy.

His thesis seems to be that if a employee in a local Republican party branch office in California turns out to have been a Chinese agent, this somehow not only reflects badly on the Bush administration (which is investigating the case vigorously), but makes Clinton's receipt of Chinese funding during his campaign, and the subsequent shutting down of the investigation into Wen Ho Lee `okay'.

And to top it off, he goes on to accuse anyone who disagrees with this position as `partisan'.

Check out the thread if you want a few belly laughs, or if you want to see the DNC's talking points in action...

And this note goes out to all of you here in the West who opposed the liberation of Iraq, a liberation now gleefully celebrated by the Iraqis themselves.

Now that it has come out that Labor back-bencher George Galloway took millions of dollars from Mr. Hussein's government for his opposition to the war (a story well covered by GMontag in my absence), that Iraqi intelligence bought gold jewelry for Scott Ritter's wife, in addition to funding his forays into film-making, and that the French and German government were explicitly rewarded with contracts by the Iraqi government for their opposition:

Do you feel ripped off that you were willing to provide these services to Mr. Hussein for free?

Maybe just a little?

Just asking...

In a number of threads at the beginning of the recent war in Iraq, I challenged those who were forecasting tremendous amounts of gloom and doom in the current war to a gentleman's bet: if the Iraqi regime had fallen in five week's time, I won the bet. If not, they won, and I would freely admit so in this journal.

Well, guess who won? :-)

melonman, your time ran out on May first.

tres, your time ran out on May 5.

Y'all are welcome to come by any time and acknowledge your loss...

But GMontag may enjoy this one, so I'll link to it anyway... :-)

Yes, yes, I know, I know. I will accept no blame for a few misfires in the satirist's understanding of Hitchens' position. The truth is that he's probably farther right than the author realizes, and farther left than you'd like him to be, GMontag...

The image is worth it in either case...

The thread that grew out of my response to this post are somewhat interesting, touching on the moral and international-law justifications for war in Iraq, and delving into some of the left's newer black-helicopter theories, especially those surrounding Hugo Chavez, Venezuala's tinpot strongman (who is a thug, a murderer and a torturer of a type depressingly familiar in South American politics.

In another thread, we hear more about Noam Chomsky, kook and supporter of holocaust denial, a topic this journal has touched on before.

Finally, For those of you who followed the link from Twirlip's journal and actually slogged through this thread, please accept my apologies. It's long, it's repetitive, and the truly unforgivable point, it's interminably boring.

As OpinionJournal points out this morning:

"Everyone is converging on the scenario of one side controlling the countryside and the other controlling the cities, until finally the cities start falling one by one. It sounds a lot like Vietnam to me, except that Saddam will not fare as well as Gerald Ford."

So let's see: we own the night, we own the countryside, and we come and go as we please, while Mr. Hussein thinks he's safe as long as he holds the cities? Maybe this is indeed `another Vietnam'... ;-)

For some reason, the left seems to think that questioning the link between al Qaeda and Iraq is a good debate strategy. While the necessity of acting against Iraq in no way depends on such a linkage (an Iraqi nuke could as easily be smuggled by Iraqi intelligence as by al Qaeda), it's important to note that they're wrong on the merits on this one, too.

Blogger Alex Knapp has put up an extensive rundown on the known links between al Qaeda and Iraq with extensive links to a wide range of media sources. Of particular interest is this piece from the New Yorker, which goes over much of the evidence in detail.

There once was a thug named Saddam
Who killed his own folks with aplomb
'til we spied on his meeting
and gave him a beating
with a stealth-dropped 2000-lb. bomb.

"Q: Because there's one thing we need to make clear. When you say tomorrow is the moment of truth, does that mean tomorrow is the last day that the resolution can be voted up or down, and at the end of the day tomorrow, one way or another the diplomatic window has closed?

PRESIDENT BUSH: That's what I'm saying."

Let's hope that this really will be Mr. Hussein's last `last chance'.

A fair percentage of the discussion attached to this story is interesting.

The nutjobs who think our democratically elected and constitutionally constrained system is more dangerous than islamofascist terrorism are out in full force, but I don't think they hold up their end very well.

In particular, the ignorance of the existing body of precedent is notable in those who wish to claim that trying war criminals in military jurisdiction is something new (see this older journal entry for details).

The staff of The Federalist Digest have put together a petition, entitled In Our Name: A Statement of Justice , whose text reads as follows:

"To be prepared for war, is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace." --George Washington ... "National defense is one of the cardinal duties of a statesman." --John Adams ... "Whatever enables us to go to war, secures our peace." --Thomas Jefferson

I believe that it is the just right -- and sovereign duty -- of the United States to prosecute terrorist aggressors and their state sponsors around the world. I believe that Patriot Americans should register support for our Commander-in-Chief and our military forces standing in harm's way in defense of our liberty. While military action must, necessarily, be a last resort, I support preemptive war when faced with a clear and present danger to the security of our country, our heritage of liberty, our communities, our families and our posterity. In the case of Iraq, I recognize that this is not a new war -- it is the prosecution of a dangerous but necessary war front in our nation's ongoing offensive against terrorist aggressors and their state sponsors around the world. I support our President and armed forces in their effort to enforce "regime change" in Iraq, to eliminate the serious threat posed by Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, and to liberate the Iraqi people. I reject the rhetoric of anti-American celebrity, academic and political opportunists, whose real objective is to tear down all that is good and right with America.

Let it be said that, when our President and Congress declared war on terrorism in defense of our nation, American Patriots responded with overwhelming support.

Go sign it!

Well, we keep hearing that the US is in a `rush to war' in Iraq. In fact, we've been hearing that now for over six months, which sort of puts the lie to the whole idea:

"The Rush to War"
-- headline, The Nation, Aug. 7, 2002

"Secretary of State Colin L. Powell ... and his advisers have decided that they should focus international discussion on how Iraq would be governed after Mr. Hussein--not only in an effort to assure a democracy but as a way to outflank administration hawks and slow the rush to war."
-- New York Times, Aug. 16, 2002

"Christian Leaders Urge U.S. to 'Stop Rush to War' With Iraq"
--headline, United Methodist Church press release, Aug. 30, 2002

(of course, as Aquinas, Augustine and Niebuhr wrote, standing by and letting others suffer injustice when you have the power to prevent their pain is a basic failure of the Christian virtue of Caritas (charity), so I'm not sure which `Christian' leaders these were...)

"A Reckless Rush to War"
--headline, editorial, The American Prospect, Sept. 25, 2002

"We have not been told why ... we must rush to war rather than pursuing other options."
--Rep. Barbara Lee (D., Calif.), Sept. 30, 2002

"We are rushing into war without fully discussing why."
--Sen. Robert Byrd (D., W.Va.), Oct. 3, 2002

Senator Byrd, mind you, is a former Grand Kleagle of the KKK, an organization not known for calm, measured discussion.

But perhaps we should give Mr. Hussein one `last' chance, eh? Err, um, one more `last' chance:

Hussein will be given 'a last chance to comply before he gets clobbered,' The New York Times on Monday quoted an unidentified U.S. official as saying."
--CNN.com, Jan. 27, 1998

"Annan Admits Iraq Trip Could Be Last Chance for Peace"
--CNN.com, Feb. 18, 1998

"Clinton: Iraq Has Abused Its Last Chance"
--CNN.com, Dec. 16, 1998

"The White House suggested Wednesday that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has missed his 'last chance' to disarm."
--CNN.com, Dec. 18, 2002

"Future European Union members endorsed a joint declaration Tuesday warning Saddam Hussein he has one last chance to disarm."
--Associated Press, Feb. 18, 2003

(headlines noted in the Wall Street Journal's `Best of the Web' on Opinionjournal.com on January 28 and today)