Category Archives: blogging

Under the Radar

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Last week, as the mighty national MSM wagged its finger at Nancy Pelosi over the Murtha-Hoyer flap, another House leadership fight was being ignored. This was the fight between the Right Blogosphere and the Washington Republican establishment.

Oh, it wasn’t much of a fight. Rightie bloggers and other conservative activists put up their fists, and the establishment Republicans ignored them. But it reveals something about where the Right (and the Left) might be going.

Last week House Republicans kept John Boehner (Ohio) and Roy Blunt (Missouri) as their respective Leader and Whip, albeit changing from Majority to Minority in January. This was a rebuff of the bloggers, who championed Mike Pence (Indiana) and John Shadegg (Arizona). (For an explanation of the blogger position, see this article written before the House vote by Dick “The Other Dick” Morris.)

McQ at Q and O wrote,

The Arizona Republic pretty well expressed my feelings with their endorsement of Shadegg (who is, of course, a favorite son):

    We’re going to learn very quickly, likely this week, whether a lick of sense has been pounded into the craniums of congressional Republicans following their midterm disaster last Tuesday….

    …If House Republicans leave either of those gentlemen – Boehner or Blunt – in charge when they vote for new leaders later this week, they will be declaring themselves even more blithering than voters thought. And voters thought Republicans were pretty blithering this election cycle, if you hadn’t noticed.

A lot of times when you hear the coach of a losing team explain how he plans to get his team back on track, he says “we have to get back to basics”. Well that’s precisely what Republicans have to do. And that requires leadership which is actively committed to those basics and steering its members that way.

The results were even more lopsided than in the Hoyer-Burth contest. Boehner bettered Pence 168 to 27, and Blunt beat Shadegg 137 to 57. The Washington Post editorialized,

The results marked a setback for conservative activists who tried to wrest control of the party by arguing that it had lost its ideological moorings and that voters had signaled they wanted Republicans to renew the energetic, activist style that swept them to power in 1994. …

… Rather than retooling political concepts, GOP strategists say, they will focus on strategies that will promote their agenda of making tax cuts permanent, appointing conservatives to the federal bench, and making select spending cuts, while trying to foil many of the Democrats’ domestic proposals, to the extent that the Republicans’ new status allows.

Remember the GOP motto: It’s not what you do, but what you say, that counts.

While researching this development I found this intriguing FAQ by Dean Barnett at Townhall. It begins:

1) How could this have happened? The entire weight and heft of the right-wing blogosphere stood behind a campaign to change the House leadership and nothing happened. Kos holds a putz-fest in Vegas and virtually the complete Democratic establishment comes to kiss his ring. Is the right wing blogosphere only capable of getting congressional types to give us a few minutes of their time on conference calls?

The FAQ answer is “The right wing blogosphere has to deal with the facts. The politicians just aren’t that into us.” But this perception from the Right turns old leftie conventional wisdom on its head — we think they’re marching in lockstep with the GOP while we’re outsiders, crashing the gates of the Dem establishment. So which is it?

I think you can find part of the story in posts by Chris Bowers at MyDD. In fact, the titles of the posts in chronological order tell the story:

September 12, 2004: “Top-Down Right-Wing Blogosphere Growing Powerful.”

January 20, 2005: “Partisan Left-Wing Blogs Growing Far More Influential Than ‘Independent’ Right-Wing Blogs.”

June 12, 2005: “Aristocratic Right Wing Blogosphere Stagnating.”

March 21, 2006: “There Is No Right-Wing Blogosphere Anymore.”

Although the title of that last post may seem a tad premature, the point he makes is about the different natures of the Right and Left Blogosphere and the fact that the two halves of the blogosphere brain are not mirror images of each other.

In a nutshell — in the first post, Chris looked at traffic patterns on both sides of the blogosphere and explained why the Right was better at pushing that “one big story” and getting that story into the headlines than the Left. Back in the glory days of Rathergate, for example, we saw a story travel from an anonymous comment on Free Republic to national media in 12 hours. “The right-wing blogosphere has become integrated into the Mighty Wurlitzer,’ wrote Chris, “while we remain a loose confederation of outrage, analysis and action.”

In the second post, Chris noted that the righties were still better at getting and keeping the attention of news media than we were. But, under the radar, the Left Blogosphere was busy with other matters:

We raised well over a million dollars for Democratic candidates in the 2004 cycle whereas they did not even come close to 100K. We crushed Roemer’s candidacy for DNC chair and are on the verge of basically selecting the new DNC chair, whereas they said nothing about the RNC chair. We changed a law in Virginia, but I have never heard of them contacting lawmakers. We organized a challenge to the electoral vote certification, but I can’t remember the last time a Republican Senator did something on the urging of the right-wing netroots. We have significantly whipped our own party into line on Social Security, and there is nothing comparable on their side.

In the third post, Chris wrote about the growth of community on the Left Blogosphere and the lack thereof on the Right. On the Left, it’s much easier for new voices to join our discourse and introduce ideas that will be noticed throughout our side of the ‘sphere. The Right Blogosphere, however, is far more hierarchical, with a relatively small pool of über-bloggers dominating rightie web conversation.

And in the fourth and last post, Chris noted that those über-bloggers had mostly been absorbed into the conservative establishment.

Most major right-wing bloggers have now been incorporated into the established news media apparatus. Glenn Reynolds is a columnist for MSNBC. Andrew Sullivan is a columnist for Time. Michelle Malkin is a frequently published columnist in a number of offline outlets. And now, RedState co-founder Ben Ben Domenech has a regular column in the Washington Post.

We all remember that Ben Domenech didn’t last long in the WaPo position, for which he was colossally unsuited. Still, the fact that a 24-year-old pedestrian writer and college dropout was given such a position at all is wonderfully illustrative of how the Right is becoming a tad inbred; for more on this see DHinMI at Kos.

The many ties between conservative institutions (including media, think tanks, and the Republican Party) and the Right Blogosphere were documented by Garance Franke-Ruta in The American Prospect; see “Blogged Down” from the April 2005 issue. Please do take a look at this, because I don’t want to repeat it all here but it makes an important point about how the conservative establishment has been using the Right Blogosphere all along. There is little parallel with the Left Blogosphere. While some of us have received occasional media attention and gigs with campaigns after we got into blogging, only a handful of people on my blogroll had media exposure or establishment connections before blogging. Of course, what little progressive/liberal media-think tank infrastructure exists is no match for the Right’s.

And then go read (or re-read) Peter Daou’s original “Triangle” essay from September 2005. “[B]log power on both the right and left is a function of the relationship of the netroots to the media and the political establishment,” Peter wrote. Bloggers become effective at pushing a story or addressing an issue when blogs, media, and the political establishment form a power triangle and work together to promote that story or address that issue. And, until recently, the Right was a whole lot better at that than we were. Even before the political blogosphere took off, the establishment Right was incorporating the web into the triangle; think Drudge and the blue dress.

Chris continues,

The right wing tends not to build independent online communities, using their existing offline communities to generate web sites that reinforce their politics and their ideology.

Their web presence is nurtured by institutions and is part of the conservative, right-wing media machine. The Drudge Report, for instance, is one of the largest conservative sites and frequently receives its information from Republican operatives.

Most right-wing blogs reiterate talking points that are generated from inside formal conservative institutions; conversations center on feeling victimized for being right-wing, attacking and hating progressives, and attacking and hating the media….

… I feel it has developed to such a degree that the right-wing blogosphere itself has been all but annihilated … there is almost nothing in the way of an independent right-wing blogosphere operating outside of existing, established news media outlets. The days of the rise of Free Republic have long passed.

By “annihilated” Chris isn’t saying there is no Right Blogosphere, he’s saying there is no community of activist rightie bloggers independent from the conservative establishment that can effectively challenge the establishment. And that takes us back to Dean Barnett’s FAQ.

2) But how come the Democrats are so into the blogosphere and the Republicans aren’t? How come we don’t generate fear and respect like the Kosfather?

Because all we do is opine, and often in an annoyingly independent way. While all of us root for the Republican Party, we’re also pretty expressive when members of the party let us down. We might carry a little water, but as a group, I bet the Republican establishment thought of us as more as a pain in the neck than an asset during the last campaign season. I know I won’t be on George Allen’s Christmas card list.

3) And Kos is different?

Yes. Although he rips Democrats when he’s of a mind to do so, he also brings something else to the party. He brings volunteers and money and buzz. Although my modem might well explode as I type these words, Jon Tester would not be a senator starting in January if it weren’t for the Daily Kos. Same for Jim Webb. He never would have made it out of the primary.

It’s true that, all along, plenty of rightie bloggers have bucked Washington establishment opinion. Most of them hate President Bush’s immigration plans. Many have complained about Congress’s out-of-control spending. But they’ve done very little [*] counter-organizing or activism. They complain, and the establishment ignores them.

[*] One of the few independent rightie blog initiatives that has generated some heat is the Porkbuster project founded by NZ Bear and Glenn Reynolds.

Leftie bloggers on the other hand, began as outsiders, and we have been fighting our way in. A couple of years ago few in the Democratic Party gave us the time of day. Now we’re a force, although how much of a force is a matter of opinion. But the realization that it’s not wise to ignore the bloggers is slowly dawning in some inside-the-beltway Democratic heads.

Dean Barnett wrote of rightie blogs, “I bet the Republican establishment thought of us as more as a pain in the neck than an asset during the last campaign season.” Possibly less of a pain in the neck than dead weight. The Right Blogosphere did plenty of water-carrying for the GOP in the 2004 campaign. They were practically the right arm of the Swift Boaters, for example. Last month they worked mightily to inflate John Kerry’s flubbed joke into a substantial issue, and certainly they helped make it a bigger deal than it deserved to be. (Too bad for them that John Kerry wasn’t running; he would have lost again.) But they couldn’t sustain a power triangle strong enough to hold back the blue wave. This is not the fault of rightie bloggers alone, of course, but rather is symptomatic of a systemic weakening of the entire Right versus a rising tide of discontent across the land.

On the other hand, until recently most of the Democratic establishment did think we leftie bloggers were a pain in the neck, and some of it still does, and we leftie bloggers regard much of the Democratic establishment in the same light. This is an alliance born more of pragmatism than loyalty, although perhaps we’ll get chummier as we get to know each other.

The Right Blogosphere from the beginning was seamlessly integrated into the establishment Right’s message machine, whether the bloggers realized it or not. As long as rightie bloggers can be counted on to support the message or swift-boat attack du jour, the establishment can tolerate (and ignore) their grumblings about Roy Blunt as majority whip. It’s not their independence from the GOP but their lack thereof that makes them ignorable.

On the other hand, the Left Blogosphere did not sit around and wait for direction from the Dems, but worked independently from the Dems to become activists and organizers and influencers in our own right. The point of this is not to be tools of the Democratic Party, which overall has displeased us mightily in recent years. The point is to make the party a better tool for effecting a progressive agenda. And this is just part of a larger effort to heal America’s sick political culture. This effort has only just begun, and we’ve got a long way to go. But we’ve made a good beginning.

The challenge for us going forward is to work more effectively with the Dems without being absorbed into the existing Democratic Party establishment. The Right Blogosphere faces a different challenge, but that’s something they’ll have to figure out for themselves.

Litle Lulu Lala

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The Right Blogosphere is about to blow a fuse over tonight’s Countdown on MSNBC. A guest of Olbermann’s made a connection between the more, um, rhetorically aggressive righties like Coulter and Malkin and Chad Conrad Castagana, alleged to have sent threatening emails and white powder to various leftie icons (like Olbermann). See David Neiwert for background.

I’m sure someone will post a clip. Too juicy.

Update: See also these fine blogs — Michelle Malkin Is an Idiot; Sadly, No.

Friday Cat Blogging

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Miss Lucy wants you to see that she still has a lovely figure after two mastectomies.

Miss Lucy is on borrowed time, even by cat standards. A few weeks after the second mastectomy last June — thirteen months after the first one — I felt some more lumps near where one of her mammaries used to be. I called the vet and told him I didn’t want to put her through any more treatment. She’d had it with vets and surgery and medicine. I weaned her off the medication she was on and prepared to watch her deteriorate to cancer.

Except that she didn’t. The lump disappeared, and she’s been happy as a clam since. She’s eating well, purrs a lot, and bosses me around vigorously. I think if she makes it through Christmas with no signs of disease I’ll call the vet to tell him she’s not dying after all.

Giant Bloodsucking Worms

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For some reason, today I keep thinking of the X-Files episode in which Mulder says, matter-of-factly, “It looks like I’m gonna have to tell Skinner that his suspect is a giant bloodsucking worm after all.” One of the all-time great moments of television.

Today I’m looking at the Right Blogosphere and thinking, “They really are that stupid, after all.”

The background story, which you’ve probably heard by now, comes out of today’s New York Times. William J. Broad writes that Iraqi documents the U.S. government had posted on the web to keep the wingnuts busy included —

… detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.

I repeat, accounts of Iraq’s nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

Skip over to National Review Online, where Jim Geraghty writes,

I’m sorry, did the New York Times just put on the front page that IRAQ HAD A NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM AND WAS PLOTTING TO BUILD AN ATOMIC BOMB?

What? Wait a minute. The entire mantra of the war critics has been “no WMDs, no WMDs, no threat, no threat”, for the past three years solid. Now we’re being told that the Bush administration erred by making public information that could help any nation build an atomic bomb.

Let’s go back and clarify: IRAQ HAD NUCLEAR WEAPONS PLANS SO ADVANCED AND DETAILED THAT ANY COUNTRY COULD HAVE USED THEM.

I think the Times editors are counting on this being spun as a “Boy, did Bush screw up” meme; the problem is, to do it, they have to knock down the “there was no threat in Iraq” meme, once and for all. Because obviously, Saddam could have sold this information to anybody, any other state, or any well-funded terrorist group that had publicly pledged to kill millions of Americans and had expressed interest in nuclear arms. You know, like, oh… al-Qaeda.

The New York Times just tore the heart out of the antiwar argument, and they are apparently completely oblivous to it.

There are times when I almost wish I were a rightie. If you are a rightie, you can be don’t know shit from shinola stupid, and get paid for it. Must be nice. (See also “Cry, the Beloved Stupid Country” at A Tiny Revolution.)

That Iraq knew how to make nuclear bombs isn’t exactly a surprise. Through the magic of the Internets and the Google, we can find detailed information on Iraq’s nuclear weapons program before the 1991 Gulf war. We can learn that Iraq had a lot of uranium, and that in 1989 Iraq began construction on the mass production of centrifuges and a pilot-scale cascade hall at Al Furat. We can learn that Iraq “planned to divert highly enriched uranium, that was subjected to Agency safeguards, at Tuwaitha under a ‘crash programme’ to use the material in the production of a nuclear weapon,” says the IAEA. And on the same page we learn that

  • Iraq’s primary focus was a basic implosion fission design, fuelled by HEU
  • Using open-source literature and theoretical studies, ran various computer codes through Iraq’s mainframe computer to adapt the codes and develop the physical constants for a nuclear weapon development programme
  • Was aware of more advanced weapon design concepts
  • Invested significant efforts to understand the various options for neutron initiators

This is not news. This is stuff the IAEA had up on the web, in English, before the 2003 invasion. I know this because I found it way back then.

However, if you don’t have stuff to make a bomb with — you know, like uranium and hundreds of centrifuges — the plans are not all that effective. You could wad them up and toss crumpled paper balls at people, but that’s about it. And on the same page (scroll down to the chart at the bottom) we can learn that Iraq’s nuclear program stuff was destroyed, either by the 1991 Gulf war or by the IAEA.

Thus, information about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program before 1991 is not relevant to a decision to invade Iraq in 2003, unless you have new information that they’d rebuilt their centrifuges and cascade hall and such, and the IAEA was very certain they had not done this. Remember, inspectors were re-admitted into Iraq more than four months before the invasion, and they had found what was left of Iraq’s nuclear bomb-making facilities exactly as it had been left in 1998. You can find the IAEA’s press releases and reports on Iraq’s nuclear facilities from September 2002 to July 2003 here.

Once again, I am dumbfounded — which is what happens when you have found stuff that’s dumb — at how little the righties understand the history of Iraq’s WMDs and by their utter inability to comprehend linear time. (See also, from the Maha archives, “Jeez, Righties Are So Gullible.”)

Today, some of them seem to think that Saddam could have just snapped his fingers and had an advanced nuclear weapons program cranked up in no time. No, dears. We’re talking about a nation with only some centrifuge fragments buried in some guy’s flower garden. It would have taken them years to get back to where they were in 1991, especially after the inspectors were readmitted.

Broad of the Times says it was the IAEA that noticed the Iraqi plans on the web and asked that it be taken off.

Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, fearing that the information could help states like Iran develop nuclear arms, had privately protested last week to the American ambassador to the agency, according to European diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. One diplomat said the agency’s technical experts “were shocked” at the public disclosures.

Early this morning, a spokesman for Gregory L. Schulte, the American ambassador, denied that anyone from the agency had approached Mr. Schulte about the Web site.

You’ll remember that last March, John Negroponte, Director of National Intelligence, posted a bunch of random documents captured in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. These were hyped as possibly being the mother lode of proof that Saddam Hussein either had WMDs or was in cahoots with al Qaeda. Righties seized upon these and eagerly began to “interpret” them, often to hilarious results. So far little in them has been news, except to righties.

Via Oliver Willis, an NPR interview of Michael Scheuer from April on the document dump.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, clearly, somebody feels it’s in America’s interest. This has been a Republican-pushed release. Would there be some potential benefit for the Republicans?

MICHAEL SCHEUER: Oh, I think clearly there is, and we’ve already seen their mouthpiece, The Weekly Standard, has already run a couple of articles saying that this proves Saddam did X or did Y, without any [LAUGHING] real knowledge of how the new documents fit into the context of everything else we know. It’s just plain amateurishness — or they know what’s in these documents and they figure it can help them by releasing it.

Today Thomas Friedman — not the sharpest tack in the box, himself — complained that Bushies think voters are stupid.

They think they can take a mangled quip about President Bush and Iraq by John Kerry — a man who is not even running for office but who, unlike Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, never ran away from combat service — and get you to vote against all Democrats in this election.

Every time you hear Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney lash out against Mr. Kerry, I hope you will say to yourself, “They must think I’m stupid.” Because they surely do.

Ah, Mr. Friedman — look at Bush’s base. They really are that stupid, after all.

Commentary from Smart People:

Christy Hardin Smith, “NUKE-u-lar MOH-rons.”

Scott Lemieux , “Charles Johnson, Genius”

Michael Bérubé, “ABF Friday: Special Election Edition!”

Steve Gilliard, ” Taking the pinheads bowling”

Digby, “Secretary of Hack“

Flies in the Soup

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Blog P.I. provides an in-depth analysis of the new “Hotsoup” political site. Verdict: It ain’t so hot.

I concur with the analysis, and add —

I’ve been messing around on Internet discussion forums for more than a dozen years. I go back to pre-Web forums like the original CompuServe and Prodigy, and the inglorious Usenet. And I’ve participated in all kinds of web forums. And I’ve run this blog for a while. I’m an old hand at Internet debate, in other words. But I’ll be damned if I can figure out how the Hotsoup “discussion loops” are supposed to work. I can’t find threads, just disjointed comments that don’t seem to attach to anything else. Very weird.

In any event, the site’s a crashing bore.

Why I’m Not Famous

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I’m no good at self-promotion. Truly, I am. I always feel as if I’m missing out on opportunities somewhere just because I have no clue how the self-promotion thing is done.

Anyway, the article linked shows us why politics talk shows are so stupid. You don’t have to know squat to be a pundit; you just have to be a camera hog willing to say anything to cause a stir.

Update: Speaking of punditry — this is the funniest damn thing I’ve seen in, like, forever. Hat tip to Crooks & Liars.

Numbers That Go Crunch

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Daniel Davies, better known to bloggers as Daniel of Crooked Timber, explains the Johns Hopkins/Lancet study on deaths in Iraq.

First, don’t concentrate on the number 600,000 (or 655,000, depending on where you read). This is a point estimate of the number of excess Iraqi deaths – it’s basically equal to the change in the death rate since the invasion, multiplied by the population of Iraq, multiplied by three-and-a-quarter years. Point estimates are almost never the important results of statistical studies and I wish the statistics profession would stop printing them as headlines.

The question that this study was set up to answer was: as a result of the invasion, have things got better or worse in Iraq? And if they have got worse, have they got a little bit worse or a lot worse. Point estimates are only interesting in so far as they demonstrate or dramatise the answer to this question.

The results speak for themselves. There was a sample of 12,801 individuals in 1,849 households, in 47 geographical locations. That is a big sample, not a small one. The opinion polls from Mori and such which measure political support use a sample size of about 2,000 individuals, and they have a margin of error of +/- 3%. If Margaret Beckett looks at the Labour party’s rating in the polls, she presumably considers this to be reasonably reliable, so she should not contribute to public ignorance by allowing her department to disparage “small samples extrapolated to the whole country”. The Iraq Body Count website and the Iraqi government statistics are not better measures than the survey results, because one of the things we know about war zones is that casualties are under-reported, usually by a factor of more than five.

And the results were shocking. In the 18 months before the invasion, the sample reported 82 deaths, two of them from violence. In the 39 months since the invasion, the sample households had seen 547 deaths, 300 of them from violence. The death rate expressed as deaths per 1,000 per year had gone up from 5.5 to 13.3.

Just as a number on a chart, a mortality rate of 13.3 is not self-evidently absurd. A great many third-world nations have mortality rates at least that high, if not higher. (You can find a handy-dandy table of world demographics in this PDF file. I believe Mozambique wins the mortality prize at 20 deaths per 1,000.)

Talk of confidence intervals becomes frankly irrelevant at this point. If you want to pick a figure for the precise number of excess deaths, then (1.33% – 0.55%) x 26,000,000 x 3.25 = 659,000 is as good as any, multiplying out the difference between the death rates by the population of Iraq and the time since the invasion. But we’re interested in the qualitative conclusion here.

That qualitative conclusion is this: things have got worse, and they have got a lot worse, not a little bit worse. Whatever detailed criticisms one might make of the methodology of the study (and I have searched assiduously for the last two years, with the assistance of a lot of partisans of the Iraq war who have tried to pick holes in the study, and not found any), the numbers are too big. If you go out and ask 12,000 people whether a family member has died and get reports of 300 deaths from violence, then that is not consistent with there being only 60,000 deaths from violence in a country of 26 million. It is not even nearly consistent.

Most of the criticism coming from the Right Blogosphere amounts to “I don’t believe it,” albeit expressed in more colorful language and accompanied by ad hominem attacks on the researchers. And all of the criticisms of the study that I’ve seen pick apart the point estimate number but do not seriously address the methodology or the increase in mortality rate.

Some of the comparisons are downright weird. For example, some guy quoted on Instapundit said “It is a larger number than were killed in Germany during five years (and 955,044 tons) of WWII bombing.” I assume that’s true, but that’s not an honest comparison. An honest comparison would compare pre-war mortality rates to mortality rates of German citizens during World War II — deaths from everything, including mumps, traffic accidents, and the Holocaust — and extrapolate from that the number of people who would not have died had the mortality rate not risen.

The “WWII bombing” comparison just tells me that whoever came up with it does not grasp what the Johns Hopkins/Lancet study even is about, never mind understand the methodology. Yet he declares himself an expert and says it’s wrong.

Daniel Davies continues,

A particularly disgusting theme of some right-wing American critics of the study as been to impugn it by talking about it being “conveniently” released before the November congressional elections. As if a war that doubled the death rate in Iraq was not the sort of thing that ought to be a political issue. Nobody is doing anything about this disaster, and nobody will do until people start suffering some kind of consequences for their actions (for example, no British politician, soldier or spy has lost his job over the handling of the Iraq war and no senior member of the Bush administration either).

There has to be some accountability here. It is not good enough for the pro-intervention community to shrug their shoulders and say that the fatalities caused by the insurgents are not our fault and not part of the moral calculus. I would surely like to see the insurgents in the ICC on war crimes charges, but the Nuremberg convention was also correct to say that aggression was “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”. The people who started this war of aggression need to face up to the fact, and that is a political issue.


Richard Horton writes in The Guardian:

Not only do we have a better understanding of the toll our invasion has had on the country; we also understand better just how those deaths have come about. Before the invasion only a tiny proportion of deaths were due to violence. But since the invasion over half of all deaths have been due to violent causes. It is our occupation and our continued presence in Iraq that is fuelling this violence. Claims that the terrorist threat was always there are simply disproved by these findings.

The nature of these causes has changed too. Early on in the post-invasion period deaths were made worse by aerial bombing. But now gunshot wounds and car bombs are having a far greater effect. Far from our presence in Iraq stabilising the chaos or alleviating the rate at which casualties are mounting, we seem to be making the situation worse. In each year since the invasion, the mortality rates due to violence have increased.


In each year since the invasion, the mortality rates due to violence have increased. That’s the important point, and that’s what the Bush Administration and its rightie supporters need to explain. And answer for.

New York News

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I check the blog aggregating site Memeorandum at least once a day, because it tells me at-a-glance what most people are blogging about. And as many have noticed, righties and lefties tend to comment on different stories.

Most of the time, the reason for this is obvious. “Our” side chases stories that make “them” look bad; “they” go after stories that make “us” look bad. The occasional “hooray for us” swarm is usually followed closely by a posse of “so what?” posts.

But what about this: Yesterday most of the Right Blogosphere reported frantically on the plane accident in Manhattan that killed a New York Yankees pitcher. Several righties “live blogged” what they saw on television. The Left mostly left it alone, except to comment on what the righties were up to.

I didn’t blog about it because I do political and social commentary here, and there was neither a political nor social angle to the accident. It was off topic, as far as I was concerned. I probably would have blogged about it had I been an eyewitness, but I wasn’t. I don’t know anything more than what was reported on television yesterday.

Tom Tomorrow snarked at the righties: “No one is going to get a blogging Pulitzer for being the fastest to post what they just saw and heard on the TV.” Allahpundit responded,

True, but no one’s going to win a blog Pulitzer anyway. And it does come in handy for the 90% of the readership that are at work and looking for information.

But why was this “information” so vital that people couldn’t wait to hear about until they got home? A political development likely to impact the elections or the government or otherwise have widespread consequences is one thing. But a small plane accident? I could sorta kinda see commenting on the accident before it was determined it was an accident and not terrorism, but a number of righties continued to treat it as a Big National Bleeping Deal story long after they knew it was an accident.

For that matter, I was surprised Chris Matthews spent the entire hour of the 5:00 Hardball on the plane accident. New York local news was all over it, which is understandable, as the accident was a big local story. And since a nationally known sports figure died, it was worth some time on national news. But an entire hour of Hardball? Of course, cable news is not exactly famous for perspective, given the absurd amount of attention given to John Karr a few weeks ago.

But it gets worse — apparently, for some reason, the accident was a global story. Tim Footman in the UK comments:

A small aircraft has crashed into a building in Manhattan. Obviously, we are gripped by the news: the attacks five years ago are still seared in our minds, and the memory is made more grim by the knowledge that the whole thing was a beginning, not an end. The outside chance that such an event might be repeated grabs the attention of media providers around the globe.

But soon, it becomes clear that, although the precise details are yet to emerge, it wasn’t a terrorist attack. There’s added flavour from the fact that one of the men on the aeroplane was a baseball player with the New York Yankees, but that’s as far as the story looks likely to run: a tragedy for the people directly involved and their friends and families; a shock for local residents. Please move along, there’s nothing to see here.

Except, apparently, there is. I quite understand why the initial reports flashed around the planet – no editor would want to miss the possibility of 9/11 redux. But when we realised that it was a false alarm, surely it became little more than a footnote.

Not according to the BBC website, which was still making it their lead story, hours after it became clear that Osama was nowhere in sight. Ditto the Daily Telegraph site. The Guardian, Times and Independent kept it as second or third lead. Further afield, the story led on the sites of Le Monde, La Repubblica, Süddeutsche-Zeitung, El País, the Times of India, Yomiuri Shimbun and many more.

Mr. Footman speculates that the story got international attention because it happened in New York.

It seems that we’ve exchanged the Little Englander insularity of the men in dicky-bows for a weird loss of perspective, in which the lives and deaths of Americans take precedence over all else. It’s a sort of vicarious insularity, something akin to the morbid fascination some people feel for the celebrities in Heat magazine, to the exclusion of news that may actually affect their own lives. Just as medieval scholars created maps that placed Jerusalem at the centre, the world’s media has made Manhattan the capital of the planet.

Maybe, but that doesn’t explain rightie bloggers, who tend to think of New York City as an alien corruption defacing the edge of the beloved Homeland. Maybe, deep down inside, they hope one plane crash in Manhattan is the beginning of a trend. Otherwise — WTF?

Lunacy: Theirs and Ours

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Someone in the Middle East got hold of a photo of the Manhattan Apple Store entrance, while it was under construction, and concluded the building is a deliberate insult to Islam because (while under construction) it resembled the Ka’ba. Note that the structure doesn’t resemble the Ka’ba at all with the shrouding off.

This is a pretty good example of some flaming idiot grasping any excuse to whip up hysteria. The crew at Little Green Footballs (to which I do not link) is having a high time making fun of the hysterics (i.e., “what doesn’t offend these dickheads?!?! geez”).

Righties aren’t that crazy … oh, wait …

Here’s Michelle Malkin whipping up hysteria over the Flight 93 Memorial because she thinks the memorial is an Islamic crescent. Here’s the Flopping Ace whipping up hysteria over the Arizona 9/11 memorial because he thinks the memorial is an Islamic crescent. (He has political issues with the memorial as well, since it doesn’t reflect rightie historical revisionism.)

Here’s the Liberal Avenger on wingnut hysteria over the Flight 93 memorial. A fun read.

Our loonies and their loonies look more and more like mirror images of each other every day.