Northbound

The WP breaks the big where-did-that-one-come-from out-of-left-field story that no one, ever, could have expected: Democrats turn their back on a major national security committment. (Who could have predicted it?)

It was a solemn pledge, repeated by Democratic leaders and candidates over and over: If elected to the majority in Congress, Democrats would implement all of the recommendations of the bipartisan commission that examined the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

But with control of Congress now secured, Democratic leaders have decided for now against implementing the one measure that would affect them most directly: a wholesale reorganization of Congress to improve oversight and funding of the nation’s intelligence agencies. Instead, Democratic leaders may create a panel to look at the issue and produce recommendations, according to congressional aides and lawmakers.

But plans to raise taxes, those you can count on. Guaranteed.

The NYT celebrates a snuff film for chickens:

The scenes on the killing floor are predictably brutal, though not for all the obvious reasons. Mr. Geyrhalter doesn’t flinch from showing us the panic of the animals as they head toward the killing floor or the barbarism of their deaths. There’s a haunting scene of a woman, seated seemingly alone and cutting the necks of the chickens that survived the initial kill room. Hers is actually an act of mercy. If she does her job properly, the birds will be dead by the time they are cleaned and butchered, which isn’t always the case in industrial slaughterhouses. The image of this woman with these dead creatures and her knife, her apron covered in blood that flows onto the floor where it forms a watery pool, makes any narration superfluous.

I think it makes any movie review superfluous. But that’s just me. I’m just surprised they didn’t start the review by saying, “As Iraq falls further into chaos…”

The BBC waxes poetic on the latest Palestinian tactic:

Schoolgirls chanting their defiance of Israel were among the crowd that gathered to defend the two-storey home in the town of Beit Lahiya.

Along with the girls had come old men, neighbours and militants.

All of them were ready to defy the Israeli air force. They were ready to put themselves in the line of fire.

But they knew too that a similar human shield tactic had worked a few days earlier.

The Israelis had backed off knowing that to strike would cause large numbers of civilian casualties which would, of course, have played very badly in the court of international opinion.

Well, of course. But wait, there’s more!

But for Palestinians the new strategy has benefits way beyond protecting the odd target.

The tactic is symbolically important and a propaganda coup.

From militant leaders to schoolgirls, Palestinians can unite in confronting their enemy and the passive resistance of the human shields will be admired from around the world.

Uh-huh. Yeah. Because that’s a courageous thing to admire. Putting little girls in harm’s way to score propaganda points with the BBC. Courageous. Admirable. And not at all insane in any way, no.

And then…

The boys on the roofs, armed only with Palestinian flags and facing down war planes, are a David and Goliath image for the modern age.

Okay, first thing, David was Jewish. He was. Really. And he just had a sling, which is deadlier than a Palestinian flag, but a lot less deadly than, oh, say, a rocket or a mortar or three pounds of C-4 strapped to a suicide bomber. But other than that, it’s just like David and Goliath. Just like. Exactly.

That’s my response, anyway, to Slate’s headline article of this morning, which features Diane McWhorter calling President Bush a Nazi:

The relevance of Third Reich Germany to today’s America is not that Bush equals Hitler or that the United States government is a death machine. It’s that it provides a rather spectacular example of the insidious process by which decent people come to regard the unthinkable as not only thinkable but doable, justifiable. Of the way freethinkers and speakers become compliant and self-censoring. Of the mechanism by which moral or humanistic categories are converted into bureaucratic ones. And finally, of the willingness with which we hand control over to the state and convince ourselves that we are the masters of our destiny.

You see the slyness in the paragraph. Oh, no, we’re not saying that Bush equals Hitler. No sir. But he does “unthinkable” things in “bureaucratic” ways in order to “hand control over to the state”. Just like Hitler, right? Right?

I won’t bother to go through and catalogue the long list of inapt comparisons that McWhorter presents in her article, and I will do my best to choke down the adjectives I’d like to use to describe her commentary — “deranged” comes to mind. But I will point you to one of her final paragraphs:

So, is there a new, post-election normal? A recent Google search turned up some impressive, learned commentary comparing the Military Commissions Act of 2006 to the Enabling Act of 1933. A reader congratulated one of the legal scholars, human rights lawyer Scott Horton, for daring to defy Godwin’s Law. Perhaps (to switch totalitarian metaphors) we are in the midst of a little intellectual Prague Spring.

Of course, that democratic interlude met a swift and terrible end.

So. We’ve had an election in this country. (Unlike Nazi Germany.) The other party took over. (Unlike Nazi Germany.) Scholars are criticizing the Administration without fear of being sent to a concentration camp. (Unlike Nazi Germany – or Soviet Russia.) Anything in this paragraph would tell you that — despite fevered conjecture and frank slander — the American government under the Bush Administration is not Nazi Germany. Couldn’t be clearer.

But then McWhorter out-and-out surmises that the effect of the midterm elections could meet a “swift and terrible end” — implying I-don’t-know-what, the wholesale slaughter of Democratic Congressional representatives at the very least.

I am not saying that McWhorter shouldn’t have written exactly what she has written; it’s a free country. (If she were really serious about her thesis, one expects that she’s gone underground, hiding in someone’s attic, living off stale bread and prunes, which I doubt.) I am not saying that Slate should not have used more discretion in publishing her piece. I am saying that both of them deserve all of the ridicule, scorn and invective that they are going to get as a result. This is an outrageous, insulting, and deeply unfair article, written out of the worst passions of hatred and bile, and McWhorter and Slate should be ashamed for running it.

UPDATE: I get, of course, that this is a trap article. McWhorter is trying to do two things: break what she thinks is a “taboo” regarding calling one’s political opponents Nazis (which isn’t much of a taboo) and get the right-wing blogosphere up in a froth in order to mock their most extreme statements (thereby “proving” her point that people are trying to silence her). Both of these things are traps in their own way. I hope not to fall into either trap, although I am sure that others will, and good luck to them. The article is outrageous, provocative, and deeply unfair, but I have no wish to respond by engaging in personal insult or rancor. I will, however, point out that someone should frame this article and point to it whenever Democrats ask why Republicans aren’t more willing to be bipartisan and centrist and work with Democrats. I mean, you can’t get more extremely partisan than this, can you? (I hope not.)

I am not a huge fan of either the New Yorker or Lou Dobbs, and normally wouldn’t push you to read one or listen to the other, but check out this clip from the former’s profile of the latter:

Dobbs often describes himself as “a kid who grew up poor” in rural Texas. He was the younger of two sons, born in September, 1945, in Childress (pop. 6,000), not far from Amarillo. His father was a partner in a small propane business, and his mother was a bookkeeper.

I don’t know if anyone at New Yorker knows from Texas, but Childress is “not far from Amarillo” the way that New York is “not far” from Allentown, Pennsylvania. Childress is a good two hours from Amarillo, a straight shot down Highway 287, but still a right far piece, as we say in Texas. Of course, Childress is way the hell out on the prairie; the only thing it’s “not far” from would be barbed wire and mesquite trees. Still, one wonders if the famous fact-checkers at the New Yorker looked at a map on this one.

I hate to think I’m the only one who heard this quite this way, but this is from Brent Musburger, covering the USC rout of Notre Dame, not two minutes ago:

The road to Glendale, Arizona is paved with Trojans.

So, Ohio State fans, be sure to watch your step….

UPDATE: I knew I wasn’t the only one to hear this; Jim Caple at ESPN heard it too, and did Brent one better:

We suspect that Brent immediately slapped his forehead and thought, “That didn’t come out right, did it?” It was an inadvertently funny line and the obvious rejoinder was, “You know what, Brent? Since Matt Leinart went from USC to the Arizona Cardinals, that might be literally true.”

The NYT is out ahead of the curve again:

Andrew Fenton of Philadelphia stumped, thrilled and mildly sickened the cocktail wing of the eGullet Society for Culinary Arts and Letters, an online forum, by posting news of a creation he called Weeniecello. The concoction, he said, results from soaking Hebrew National hot dogs in 100-proof vodka for five weeks, yielding an infused vodka with, according to Mr. Fenton, “a fine beefy taste, with a hint of salt and gentle spiciness.”

Anyone familiar with the pure goodness of vodka and the meaty savor of a good Hebrew National dog (toasted bun, with mustard and Heinz India Relish, if you please) would, you would think, be asking the question on all of our minds right at the moment, which is, in God’s name, why?

His inspiration, he said, came at a barbecue, when he realized that the only thing detracting from the experience was that he was continually forced to put his cocktail down in order to eat. “You can see the dilemma,” he wrote.

No. No, I can’t. Meat is meat, liquor is liquor. They’re not meant to be enjoyed as one and the same item. And just because you can have, say, veal in a wine sauce doesn’t mean you should add a sidecar of gravy to your pinot noir. We’re not animals here. The great traditions of Western Civilization must be honored and respected, and one of the many things that means is that you don’t put weenies in your vodka, and (the NYT provides a recipe for this) you don’t put pork rinds in your margarita. Ever. I cannot make this clearer.

The NYT may have found the key to the Biblical tale of Noah’s flood:

On close inspection, the chevron deposits contain deep ocean microfossils that are fused with a medley of metals typically formed by cosmic impacts. And all of them point in the same direction — toward the middle of the Indian Ocean where a newly discovered crater, 18 miles in diameter, lies 12,500 feet below the surface.

The explanation is obvious to some scientists. A large asteroid or comet, the kind that could kill a quarter of the world’s population, smashed into the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago, producing a tsunami at least 600 feet high, about 13 times as big as the one that inundated Indonesia nearly two years ago. The wave carried the huge deposits of sediment to land.

That’s flooding on the Biblical scale, all right. And the timeline would be about right, according to one scientist;

[Bruce Masse, an environmental archaeologist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico] thinks he can say precisely when the comet fell: on the morning of May 10, 2807 B.C.

Dr. Masse analyzed 175 flood myths from around the world, and tried to relate them to known and accurately dated natural events like solar eclipses and volcanic eruptions. Among other evidence, he said, 14 flood myths specifically mention a full solar eclipse, which could have been the one that occurred in May 2807 B.C.

Half the myths talk of a torrential downpour, Dr. Masse said. A third talk of a tsunami. Worldwide they describe hurricane force winds and darkness during the storm. All of these could come from a mega-tsunami.

Of course, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, Dr. Masse said, “and we’re not there yet.”

I am perfectly comfortable with the idea that the stories in Genesis are legendary and mythical in nature (although the stories illustrate important truths and are instrumental in what we know about God). I have no problem with evolution or scientific knowledge about the age of the earth. But if science can prove that there is some degree of truth to the Bible stories — even by accident — then bully for science. However, I am not going to hold my breath for the NYT to do an article that says “religious people aren’t as stupid as we thought they were, maybe”.

To paraphrase Woody Allen, if Philo Farnsworth could look and see what’s happening to his invention, he’d never stop throwing up:

Marketers have become alarmed as consumers increasingly bypass commercials using digital video recorders like TiVo, and spend more time flipping among a wide array of television networks, Internet sites and video games.

This paragraph is a warning. You see, if you have a DVR, and you flip past commercials, what happens next is your fault.

These companies are by no means giving up on traditional advertising — rather, they are simply adding to their marketing strategies. “What we’re trying to do is find new ways to continue to be relevant to teens and to young adults,” said Vic Walia, the senior brand manager for Snickers, a Mars brand that created an online show called “Instant Def” with its agency BBDO New York, part of the Omnicom Group.

The “Instant Def” home page looks like a video game for teenagers. Four hip-hop performers — played by actual hip-hop stars will.i.am, Fergie, Taboo and apl.de.ap — pose in front of a gritty urban scene. A fluorescent Snickers sign blinks atop a tower in the background. A Snickers factory played a vital role in the first episode, when a candy-mix explosion gave the stars superhero powers.

This sounds almost exactly like the “Mattel and Mars Bar Quick-Energy Choc-o-bot Hour” — which was a made-up show on The Simpsons almost ten years ago. Then, you see, it was a joke. Now it isn’t funny.

Anyway, read the whole fetid disgusting thing.

The official Chinese press agency reports that Palestinians miss Yasser Arafat:

Two years after late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s leaving from the world, pictures of him reoccurred in the Gaza streets on Friday, a day before a two-year anniversary for his death on Saturday, showing the Palestinians’ yearning for the late leader.

Abu Ibrahim Salama, a 65-year-old Gazan man, pointed a huge Arafat picture hanging in front of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) building and said, “Where are you? Where are your days? If you were here, our life would be better.”

In the overpopulated poor enclave, Gaza Strip, many Palestinians like Salama still miss their historic and symbolic leader Yasser Arafat and believe that if he was alive, they would not live in such a miserable situation.

I’m sorry, but were you exactly paying attention to what Arafat was doing while he was alive? I mean, seriously?

Ahmed Abu Ghazza, a 29-year-old fan of Arafat, told Xinhua that “When Arafat was alive, we were also under siege and Israeli daily offensives, but our life was going well.”

He attributed it to Arafat’s political skills and tactics, saying that “if he (Arafat) was still alive, Hamas would never win in any legislative elections, because Arafat would never let them win.”

Gee, I wonder how he’d manage that.

Mohamed Ishtayya, a former minister of housing loyal to Arafat told Xinhua that “When I met him for the first time, I really felt so proud, because he gave me the impression that he knows me for a long time.”

He added that “after I worked with him closely, I found that he can name almost everyone he met before even if they had met several years ago.”

Oh, yeah, whats-his-name, Mohammed.

Hey, I got nothing against nostalgia. Nothing at all. And if you asked me, I’d tell you how much better things would be right now if Ronald Reagan were still in charge. But I try to live in the real world, not some airy-fairy fantasy land where Yassir Arafat was a great inspirational leader who made everyone’s lives better.