Thursday, September 16, 2004

More links

Attention: Spengler is in the building. If you haven't read the pseudonymous Asia Times columnist before, you're in for a treat.

Investor's Business Daily's Ed Carson supplies perhaps the best piece yet on bloggers and the larger implications of the blogosphere.

Columnist
Bruce Bartlett admits he is "fascinated" by the scandal: "This 'we-know-the truth-and-we-are-never-wrong' attitude is in the process of destroying CBS News, once the very best in the business."

Title of a Wall Street Journal editorial: "A Media Watershed: Dan Rather and the end of the liberal monopoly."

Understated syndicated columnist
Ann Coulter is surprisingly sympathetic to Dan Rather. Or perhaps not: "In Dan Rather's defense, it must be confessed, he is simply a newsreader. Now that Walter Cronkite is retired, Rather is TV's real-life Ted Baxter without Baxter's quiet dignity."

Minneapolis columnist and prominent blogger
James Lileks is astonished by CBS's newest defense: "the whole 'fake but accurate' line shows how tone-deaf these people are; it’s like saying a body in a pine box is 'dead but lifelike.'"

"Kamikaze" John Kerry provides real entertainment value. Just ask New York Post columnist
Deborah Orin: "Bizarrely, John Kerry is now clutching onto the document-challenged Dan Rather like a drowning man grabbing onto a sinking ship."

Blogging satirist David Burge, aka "
IOWAHAWK," supplies a hilarious allegorical (OED: "of or belonging to allegory"; which is a "description of a subject under the guise of some other subject of aptly suggestive resemblance") take on Dan ("Beep! Beep!") Rather's cartoonish hijinks. Strongly recommended.

The usually reliably-liberal Washington Post columnist
Richard Cohen is appalled by the hate-Bush lunacy which has taken over his Democratic party; now he's not red or blue--but purple. No doubt if he wrote for the Los Angeles Times he'd be Mellow Yellow. That's right, slick.

John Kerry's suddenly veered way left, and Democratic pros (who actually hope to win this election, rather than make a point) are appalled. Chicago Sun-Times political columnist
Robert Novak explains.

Washington Post columnist
George F. Will provides an instructive if not particularly entertaining analysis of John Kerry's problems.

So you think you're clever? Pretending to be "undecided." Well, Seinfeld co-creator
Larry David is on to you, pal.

This one's very interesting: a Borders employees'
website suggests tactics for store clerks who don't want customers to buy John O'Neil's SwiftVets book Unfit for Command. On Wednesday morning, at 10:15am Pacific time, Charles Johnson (Little Green Footballs) cached the posting while warning that "I’ve made a copy of this discussion, because I fully expect it to disappear soon." Which it did. Here's a sample tactic: "Just 'carelessly' 'hide the boxes, 'accidentally' drop them off pallets, 'forget' to stock the ones you have, and then suggest a nice Al Franken or Michael Moore book as a substitute." Lovely.

UK columnist
Melanie Phillips, reportedly one of Prince Charles's favorites, felt a sense of relief when she visited the US. It left her the moment she returned home to London. Why? In New York, "that well-known British lumbar exercise, the Jewish cringe, is nowhere to be seen."