...Commie Liberals...

Is that the polar opposite of "Liberatian Fascist"?

"Libertarian fascist" is an oxymoron- such a thing couldn't exist because the real meanings of the words are opposites. It would be like having an "evangelical Christian atheist."

A "commie liberal" makes sense, however. "Liberal" in the modern usage of the term, goes together with "socialist" and "communist." They may mean somewhat different things to different people, but they have a common basis both in philosophical underpinnings [altruism and Marxist economics ("from each according to ability to each according to need")] and in practical policy. In actual practice, "socialism" mostly means simply watered down communism, and "liberalism" means watered down socialism.

I like Animal Farm, too. Even better than 1984

Animal Farm is more universally applicable. It would work the same in a large world power as it would in a cub scout troupe.

Damn, brother, you must have run with a rougher bunch of scouts than I did.

Thank you Al for acknowledging a legend. Anyone know when Upton Sinclair was born?

Thank you Al for acknowledging a legend. Anyone know when Upton Sinclair was born?

""Liberal" in the modern usage of the term, goes together with "socialist" and "communist." They may mean somewhat different things to different people, but they have a common basis both in philosophical underpinnings [altruism and Marxist economics ("from each according to ability to each according to need")] and in practical policy."

Al, I'd like to know. What have you actually read about or pertaining to any of the three terms -- socialism, liberalism, communism -- that wasn't by Ayn Rand?

"I wonder where Orwell would have come down on invading Iraq. Good commie liberals will assume that he'd have been against our invasion of Iraq. Yet this same guy was responsible for the "two bombs" quote. He would certainly have been highly conscious of the particular rhetorical manipulations of all sides,"

"Rhetorical manipulations" like attributing an assumption to an undefined strawman group like "commie liberals" -- yes, that wouldn't have gotten past him.

"careful to distill essential facts while dispensing of the loaded terminology."

Chances are, for example, that he would have noticed the absurdity of the WMD case, or the gaps between reality and 'monger attempts to portray Hussein's Iraq as an incipient Nazi Germany on the verge of plunging the world into total darkness. And, had some enterprising 'monger hit on the idea of calling him a Saddam-lover -- or trying to use one of his own rhetorical flourishes against him by calling him "objectively pro-Saddam" -- he would probably have had a few choice words for them.

Nevertheless, it's possible that Orwell could have been talked into the war by another route -- the "humanitarian" angle which decided so many of the liberal hawks, though it comes with its own problems.

A lot of people forget what an outstanding literary critic G.O. was, too.

While yes, 1984 and Animal Farm and OF COURSE "Politics and the English Language" have been deeply important to me, there are some other things for which I owe Unca George a debt of gratitude:

1. His essay on Charles Dickens, which appears in his "A Collection of Essays" totally changed my mind about C.D., whom I'd avoided since junio high school, when I got a copy of the collected essays in college.

2. It probably would have been ten more years before I would have discovered Henry Miller were it not for "In the Belly of the Whale" in that same collection.

And that's one of W.H. Auden's primary functions for a critic, after all: to help others to discover or rediscover works worthy of their attention that might otherwise have escaped their notice.

If you choose to believe the Democratic mantra that Bush lied about Iraqi WMD to lead us into war against Iraq, feel free to allow your partisanship or gullibility to subsume your powers of discernment. But how about some of the other Democratic rhetorical excesses?

Do they give you the slightest pause, or do you consider gross hyperbole and distortion in furtherance of undermining a commander in chief you dislike a justifiable means to a preferred end?

As we all know, Democrat politicians have been talking about a possible impeachment drive should they gain control of Congress with the 2006 elections.

If Democrats ultimately make headway on impeachment, they have telegraphed that it will be on the grounds that President Bush has usurped constitutional authority and "taken the law into his own hands."

They have been laying the foundation for this since early on in his presidency - sometime after they abandoned the primary theme that he was too stupid to contemplate, much less mastermind a sophisticated scheme to consolidate executive power. Back then, they preferred the template that Bush was an unwitting dupe for the vile, Machiavellian Dick Cheney and subject to the war-whims of Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld and other neoconservative imperialists.

But they eventually figured out that depicting Bush as hopelessly dim would make it tougher to demonize him personally (it's hard to hate a hapless moron). Though they still deride Bush as syntax-challenged, nuance-deprived and a brash Texas cowboy, they now portray him as "dumb like a fox" - a power-mad fox. In no time, Bush went from stupid to stubborn - "a man unwilling to admit his mistakes," "mistake" being defined as any implementation of conservative policy.

They used to say that Condoleezza Rice, just like Cheney, pulled Bush's strings. After all, he couldn't even remember the name of the Pakistani president back then. But at some point, Bush had miraculously transmogrified into a calculating genius who appointed Rice as secretary of state, not because of her brains, but because of her "unquestioning loyalty." In a stunning reversal, she would become his puppet. In the same way, he installed his "yes-man" Alberto Gonzalez as attorney general.

Indeed, when Bush exercised his perfectly legitimate prerogative to fill his cabinet with these like-minded, trustworthy and highly capable individuals, he was ludicrously accused of "restructuring the government" to surround himself with people who wouldn't offer opposing ideas - in furtherance of his dictatorial aims.

Likewise, when Bush nominated originalists to the federal bench, liberals deceitfully accused him of "stacking the court," attempting to create the impression that he was doing something improper - like FDR did when he tried to restructure the Court in order to add cronies.

Nor was it any accident the left repeatedly compared Bush to Hitler. It was no accident that they said he acted "unilaterally" against Iraq - when he didn't. It was no accident that they held him up as a dangerous enemy of freedom upon passage of the Patriot Act. It has been with utter delight that they've pointed to the NSA surveillance program as another example of his disrespect for civil liberties. And they savored the opportunity to level the preposterous charge that Bush nominated Sam Alito to the Supreme Court because Alito was sympathetic to Bush's grandiose strategy to wrest power from Congress and the courts.

There has been a method to the liberals' madness in accusing Bush of attempting a "dangerous consolidation of power in the executive branch." It may not have begun as a conspiratorial idea to unseat him, but along the way it has ripened into precisely that. And don't think for a second they won't follow through on their impeachment talk if they regain legislative control.

But in the meantime we should take notice of the recklessness of their rhetoric. Bush takes seriously his duty to protect the country. In pushing the Patriot Act, has his goal been to investigate his political enemies or detect and prevent terrorist attacks? Are there any victims of the Act's enforcement? Does he push the NSA monitoring program - which he genuinely and legitimately believes is legal - to eavesdrop on innocent Americans, or those contacted by suspected or known terrorists - with one of the parties to the communication always being outside the country?

Are the Democrats who complain about these imaginary victims actually championing civil liberties or opportunistically defaming a national security-oriented president? In all their hype about liberties, does this party of "real security" ever weigh the security implications of their posturing?

Democrats like Senators Leahy and Feingold keep warning about a breakdown in our constitutional checks and balances. But the truth is: They still work just fine. What they're really mad about is that they're out of power as a result of democratic elections, and it is they who are seeking to upset the constitutional distribution of power.

The Washington Post runs a deceptive and dishonest report about the evaluation of the Iraqi trailers that had been identified as biological weapons labs prior to the invasion in March 2003. Their front-page story announces breathlessly that the Bush administration ignored the findings of a team of experts who concluded that the trailers could not have acted as portable bioweapons platforms prior to a Bush announcement of exactly the opposite -- but below the fold, they tell a different story.

Let's take a look at the lead first:

On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological laboratories." He declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."
The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.

A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq -- not made public until now -- had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president's statement.


Sounds damning, and if that was the only report on the trailers, it certainly would be. What the Post neglects to mention in its sensationalist zeal is that this was one of several teams that investigated the trailers, and the totality of their evaluations came to a different conclusion that that of the leakers who supplied this story. Skip down to the 12th paragraph, which is when Joby Warrick finally gets around to providing the context:

Intelligence analysts involved in high-level discussions about the trailers noted that the technical team was among several groups that analyzed the suspected mobile labs throughout the spring and summer of 2003. Two teams of military experts who viewed the trailers soon after their discovery concluded that the facilities were weapons labs, a finding that strongly influenced views of intelligence officials in Washington, the analysts said. "It was hotly debated, and there were experts making arguments on both sides," said one former senior official who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.
The Pentagon didn't send one team of experts to review the trailers; they sent three, presumably to get a diverse analysis of the evidence, especially since the pre-war intel on WMD had come up remarkably short. That sounds like a prudent strategy to me, having competing teams research the same equipment and evidence to develop independent analyses to present to the Pentagon. They did so, and two of the three teams provided conclusions that fit the pre-war intel, while one did not.

So where's the issue? It turns out that the minority report was the correct analysis after all, of course, but at the time Bush spoke it was just that -- a minority report. To put it in advertising terms, two out of three inspectors agreed that the trailers were part of Saddam's WMD effort. The Pentagon relied on that majority opinion, as did the administration, and no one can argue that doing so constituted either an intent to deceive or even an unreasonable decision at the time.

No one can argue that, of course, but the Post and the media in general. Instead of simply reporting that the Pentagon didn't have consensus on this issue and that the minority report wound up being the most accurate, Joby Warrick turns the story into a Geraldo Rivera my-life-is-actually-in-danger type of journalism that substitutes cheap sensationalism for accuracy. Prior to informing the readers of the existence of two separate analyses that contradicted the report supplied by the leakers, Warrick enthralls us with a paragraph stating how none of the leakers will identify themselves for fear of retribution and a colorful epithet that the leakers considered the trailers "sand toilet[s]".

I don't know how to break this to Warrick, but all leakers want anonymity to avoid retribution. That's not news, unless you're on your first assignment for a newspaper. And correct me if I'm wrong, but colorful epithets about chemical labs on trailers don't have greater news value than the information that your sources were outnumbered in their analysis (and your big scoop) 2-1.

This is a rather pathetic and transparent example of how the news media stages information so as to be most damaging to an administration they don't like. The downplaying of the full context of this story shows that Warrick and his editors want sensationalism and hyperbole over facts and real reporting. This could have been a story about how even a creative strategy as that used by the Pentagon to review these trailers still wound up producing the wrong analysis. In trying to paint it as an example of administration dishonesty, the Post instead reveals its own.