EVENING UPDATE,  MARCH 1,  2008

EXPLOSION

I've been urging readers to watch the Gaza/Israel border carefully. Combat is rapidly escalating.  Rockets are flying into Israel, and are now reaching the city of Ashkelon.  Israelis are retaliating strongly from the air.  The Palestinian casualties are becoming substantial.  The New York Times story is reasonably fair, but seems to play down the Israeli casualties.  Israel's policy, which seems sane under the circumstances, is to strike early enough to prevent large Israeli losses.  I thought the following paragraphs, by the way, give us a vivid and very painful picture of what it's like to live under Hamas control in Gaza, and the price the population is paying:

In Gaza on Friday, Hussein Dardouna, 50, was burying his son, Omar, 14, killed while playing with his friends by an Israeli strike aimed at a rocket-launching team. “I couldn’t identify the body of my son,” he said. “It was very hard until I found the head of my son. I’m against these rockets, but I am afraid. What can I do? If I protest they will hit me, they will kill me.”

Another woman at the funeral said: “Everyone is afraid now. Where is Abu Mazen, where is Haniya?” she asked, referring to Mr. Abbas and the Hamas prime minister of Gaza, Ismail Haniya. “Come and protect us.”

Another woman, fully veiled, and a Hamas supporter, yelled at a reporter for asking such questions. Neither woman would agree to be identified.

That is rule by terror.  Maybe Saint Barack of Chicago should fly over, agree to talk to anyone, including rocket launching teams, and reason together.  Before he goes, someone should remind him that Hamas won't even listen to the president of the Palestinian authority.  And they're "brothers," the way they're all "brothers" over there.

FINALLY, SOME QUESTIONS

I've noted that that British press has done better reporting on Barack Obama than has ours.  There are some hints that American reporters are starting to wake up. A few are even asking questions about their own performance:

On the bus ferrying a group of reporters to an appearance by Senator Barack Obama at Ohio State University on Wednesday, Lee Cowan, the NBC reporter assigned to the campaign, was asked the media question of the week: Had journalists like himself been going easier on Mr. Obama than his opponent for the Democratic nomination, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton?

“I don’t think that it’s kind treatment versus unkind treatment,” Mr. Cowan began, taking issue with the depiction of journalists fawning over Mr. Obama in a “Saturday Night Live” skit last Saturday, a characterization stoked nearly every day since by Mrs. Clinton and her aides.

And yet, Mr. Cowan then described several advantages that he saw Mr. Obama as having over his rival. “He hasn’t been around as long, so there isn’t as much to pick at,” Mr. Cowan said. “He plays everything very cool. He’s not as much of a lightning rod. His personality just doesn’t seem to draw that kind of coverage.”

“Even in the conversations we have as colleagues, there is a sense of trying especially hard not to drink the Kool-Aid,” Mr. Cowan added. “It’s so rapturous, everything around him. All these huge rallies.”

Oh the rapture, the beauty, the elegance.  I love Exalted Leader, don't you? 

And...

In a New York Times/CBS News telephone poll conducted Feb. 20-24 and released Tuesday, nearly half of those respondents who described themselves as voters in Democratic primaries or caucuses said the news media had been “harder” on Mrs. Clinton than other candidates. (Only about 1 in 10 suggested the news media had been harder on Mr. Obama.)

Why did the readers get it so early, and the press is now just catching up?  Hmm.  You don't think reporters are less than godly, do you?  Nah.

AND MORE QUESTIONS

Lynn Sweet, a very tough and fair-minded reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, in Obama's home state, is asking some very pertinent questions about the senator's associations.  There seems a pattern in Mr. Obama's life - linking with some unsavory people, then distancing himself when the subject comes up.  It's fair to ask why this pattern persists:

SAN ANTONIO -- The trial of alleged influence peddler Tony Rezko starts Monday in Chicago, and the Clinton campaign Friday said the number of questions still unanswered about the relationship between Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Rezko are "staggering."

Clinton campaign communications director Howard Wolfson said Obama and his team have ducked "legitimate questions" about Rezko, who faces federal corruption charges most centrally involved with Gov. Blagojevich's administration. Rezko's wife bought a lot next to the Obamas' new home on the same day and later sold them a slice of her land -- the opening chapter in this saga. Rezko also has been a fund-raiser for Obama.

And later...

Obama has never agreed to an interview about Rezko with the reporters from the Chicago papers who know the story the best, and it has not been for lack of trying. My Sun-Times colleagues who are investigating Rezko have pressed for a chance to talk to Obama about Rezko.

At issue is trying to put together the whole story about Obama and Rezko -- all of which speaks to Obama's judgment, his main selling point as he seeks the presidency and seems positioned to win the Democratic nomination.

Read that last paragraph again.  It's devastating.  Obama is selling judgment - based primarily on the fact that he opposed the Iraq war while an Illinois legislator - but that's one "judgment" in a long list. 

This can get caustic.  Goody, goody.

HOW MANY AIR WINGS DOES "HOPE" HAVE?

Meanwhile, another Sun-Times writer, Steve Huntley, takes on the Obama "you gotta have hope" crusade, pointing out that hope doesn't make a foreign policy.  Will the public catch on?  Will they look at the new eruption in the Middle East and say, "You know, if only we had the audacity of hope"?  I have to believe the voting public is smarter than that.  Huntley:

So what is Obama's Iraq strategy? It seems to be that he knows al-Qaida is in Iraq but he's going to pull out anyway. But if al-Qaida establishes a base in Iraq, he will go back in. Does that sound confused to you? Me, too.

His policy, in a nutshell, seems to be this: Pull troops out of Iraq and hope for the best. And anyway, the real issue is what cowboy Bush and McCain did five years ago.

Given the nation's weariness with the war, that message has proved to be appealing to Democratic primary voters. They want no truck with the grim realism of McCain's position that Iraq is part of the wider struggle against Islamist jihadism and will require a long-term U.S. commitment. Arguing over what happened in 2003 is a way to avoid facing today's realities, McCain reasonably argues.

Hope also figures in Obama's willingness, as president, to meet, without preconditions, America's adversaries like Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. French President Nicolas Sarkozy recently said he wouldn't "shake hands with people who refuse to recognize Israel." He didn't mention names but he meant the Iranian president.

Obama's position is cheered by his enthusiasts. They see his embrace of yes-we-can-talk diplomacy as a refreshing about-face from Bush's bellicosity. Hillary Clinton is the voice of realism this time. But her efforts to paint Obama's position as a naive one for a president in a dangerous world apparently aren't swaying many Democrats.

Very well said.

AH YES, I REMEMBER IT WELL

The National Journal, which does some very fine reporting, has an intriguing piece by William Powers analyzing the Obama hysteria, and attributing at least part of it to a strange nostalgia:

Some say that the media have fallen hard for Barack Obama. Others note that journalists once carried a torch for John McCain and may well do so again. Watch the coverage closely, however, and it turns out that the most powerful media bias in this campaign is not for a person but for a decade.

The 1960s are alive all over again in the Baby Boomer-run media, as reporters and pundits try to make sense of this political moment by returning repeatedly to a moment four decades old. The'60s fetish has been with us for a long time and was a motif of the 2004 presidential campaign. But it's back now in a new and more powerful way, thanks in part to the rise of Obama.

President Bush, John Kerry, Al Gore, and the Clintons all came of age in the Day-Glo decade, but Obama was just a child during those years. Still, because he reminds the '60s generation of their youth, and overtly plays to those memories in his speeches, Obama has become a kind of ideal embodiment of the era, a blank slate onto which news outlets can project all of the glory and horror of that long-ago time.

Powers is correct.  His being correct makes the moment that much more frightening.  One of the things we associate with the sixties generation, and we are right to do so, is a kind of simplistic immaturity.  Our culture, which had been heavily populated with great movies and popular songs written by real composers and lyricists, slid rapidly downhill.  Our universities, always vulnerable, became centers of politically correct anti-intellectualism.  Our politics, especially as symbolized by the so-called "anti-war" movement (which it wasn't) became juvenile.  The generation that had fought the depression, World War II, and made us strong for the Cold War, started losing its grip to its overly pampered children.

All right, those are generalizations.  I concede it.  But they are sufficiently true to give us pause about trusting a journalistic class influenced by, even controlled by, that decade.

GHOST OF THE SIXTIES

This is a perfect chance to refer you to an excellent piece by Lee Cary in The American Thinker.  He goes back to the original sin, Walter Cronkite's famous (or infamous) report from Vietnam in 1968 that influenced American opinion on the war, and may have influenced the presidential election that year.  To Cary, Cronkite's report, and the journalistic events surrounding it, began the long decline of media credibility.  This is a perfect companion to the National Journal piece mentioned above:

Walter Cronkite’s remarks at the end of his February 27, 1968 evening news broadcast, four decades ago today, were a watershed in the history of the MSM’s credibility.

Unless you’re at least 55 years old, you probably don’t remember that CBS broadcast 40 years ago. The most trusted man in America had recently returned from Vietnam where he hosted a documentary on the VC/NVA TET (New Year) offensive that began January 31, 1968. Back in NYC, he closed his program that night by introducing “an analysis that must be speculative, personal, [and] subjective.” Among his comments were these:

Who won and who lost in the great Tet offensive against the cities? I’m not sure. The Vietcong did not win by a knockout, but neither did we. The referees of history may make it a draw.

It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.

But later...

At the time, Cronkite’s pronouncement added credibility and importance to all the network anchors. His was a stunning exercise of media power. But, in the perspective of history, the outcome of his pronouncement is not universally recognized as having been positive. He overtly and figuratively stepped out from behind the microphone to add his personal commentary to the news. We had not seen this before. By doing so, Cronkite issued an implicit license to his journalistic colleagues to interject personal opinions into their factual reporting of the news. The difference is that Cronkite clearly labeled it as personal opinion, while many MSM news personalities today weave their opinions into reporting. His sentiment registered with many, perhaps most, of his viewers that night. He changed opinions by offering his own. But in hindsight, his analysis was wrong – dead wrong for some.

Say it loud, say it clear.  It's about time.  The reporting of the Tet offensive was one of the greatest journalistic scandals in American history.  It is now 40 years later.  To the best of my knowledge, not a single news organization has ever apologized.

IT'S WALKING LIKE A DUCK

Finally, there's a big story out of Las Vegas.  The deadly poison, ricin, has been found in a hotel room.  Now, that's pretty serious stuff, but the cops are playing it down.  No link to terrorism, they say.  Nothing to see here, folks.  Just move along.  But here's a story that kind of makes you wonder:

The room belonged to a man, Roger Von Bergendorff, who had been admitted to the hospital on Feb. 14 with breathing problems. Von Bergendorff is now in critical condition and police sources say he has slipped into a coma. Police say they don't think foul play is involved, however they are still investigating why the man had ricin in his room.

Police say they were summoned to his room on Feb. 26, 2008 after apartment management called them to remove some firearms. The managers were going forward with eviction proceedings when they found guns and an anarchist-type textbook.

When police arrived, they noted the ricin section of the textbook was highlighted.

Now wait a second.  As the philosopher George Gobel used to say, wait a gosh-darned second.  The cops come to the room.  There are guns.  There's an anarchist-type textbook.  The part about ricin was highlighted.

No terrorist connection?  Not even a weeny bit?  Not even a suspicion?  Maybe a little thought?  Something?  Huh?

Stay tuned on this one.  The story may change, and it will be change we can believe in.

And I'll be back tomorrow.

Posted on March 1, 2008.