Cheering news (for once) from Harvard’s usually half-witted School of Public Health. According to this report from MSNBC:

“One of the most popular campaigns to curb alcohol use on campus hasn’t reduced student drinking and may actually have increased it, according to a new report from the Harvard School of Public Health’s College Alcohol Study.”

More depressing, however, to read that:

“First-year students at the University of Virginia reduced their alcohol intake from three drinks a week to one.”

Live a little, guys. I know that old Poe was one of your alumni, but there really is no need to be too worried that you will end up the same way as he did.

NFL Fines Lions $200K Over Coach Search 23 minutes ago By MIKE HOUSEHOLDER, Associated Press Writer DETROIT - Detroit Lions president Matt Millen was fined $200,000 by the NFL on Friday for not interviewing any minority candidates before hiring coach Steve Mariucci.

Prince Bandar dismissed the report's assertions about Saudi involvement in the hijackings.

"The idea that the Saudi government funded, organized or even knew about Sept. 11 is malicious and blatantly false," Prince Bandar said. "There is something wrong with the basic logic of those who spread these spurious charges. Al Qaeda is a cult that is seeking to destroy Saudi Arabia as well as the United States. By what logic would we support a cult that is trying to kill us?"

He added: "In a 900-page report, 28 blanked-out pages are being used by some to malign our country and our people. Rumors, innuendos and untruths have become, when it comes to the kingdom, the order of the day."

I subbed-in for Rich. Great crowd, nice folks, good times. I did mention to the audience that I was worried that Rich's eye infection might have something to do with the fact he's been researching a book on Bill Clinton for over a year. "I hope it's not venereal," I might have said.

To go speak to the Young Americans Foundation fest.

From a reader:

Jonah,

I'm a graduate student studying social cognition at a major research university. I'm a Howard Dean liberal, and probably to the left of the Berkeley people who published that study of conservatism. And, I agree with you that the Berkeley study is shameless BS. I recognize that reasonable people can disagree about any political issue, and I would never try to subvert debate by *defining* those who disagree with me as unreasonable.

In the hands of an honest person, meta-analysis can be a tool to iron out the biases inherent to specific studies. One good example is self-esteem. Despite a general bias in our field toward thinking that self-esteem is important, meta-analysis has suggested that self-esteem is not so important (there's a small correlation between happiness and self-esteem, and little else).

The reason that self-esteem is a good candidate for meta-analysis, and conservatism is a bad candidate, is that self-esteem is well-defined and conservatism is (as you discussed in your article) poorly defined *especially when studying 'conservatism' across nations*. In the minds of Jost, Glasser, etc., a conservative is a conservative is a conservative. This fallacy is natural enough. Social psychology speaks of an outgroup homogeneity effect, whereby people think that the members of their own group (the 'ingroup') are different from each other but that people in an outgroup are similar. E.g., 'there is variability among us gentiles, but jews are all the same.' Or, (to salvage some of my liberal pride) Ann Coulter thinking liberals are all the same. The Berekeley researchers certainly understand outgroup homogeneity, but they obviously couldn't transcend it.

[Name withheld]

If you just can't work today but you can't leave the office either. Maybe I am this site is for you.

From a reader:

Dear Jonah,

I just read your piece on NRO about the Stanford-Berkeley study on conservatism, downloaded the document and read the crucial sections quickly. About myself: I am a social-cognition psychologist (academic) doing research on the situational conditions that increase or decrease stereotyping. I should be analyzing some data right now, but instead I'm writing to you.

The Berkeley authors have started from the work of Adorno in the 1950s on authoritarianism. This work has been heavily criticized, as the authors admit on the first page, as being heavily value-laden. Validity is the chief difficulty with value-laden research and it is not an incidental side issue in research. It is the very foundation.

The authors then go on (page 339) to derogate the traditional personality approach to studying this area and suggest that their approach is that of social-cognition. If this were true, it would be noteworthy. Social cognition is a rigorous, experimental area focusing on the link between thought (schemas, memory, emotion, etc.) and behavior. However, the authors do not in fact use these methods! Instead, they have done a meta-analysis (a correlational study) of a whole bunch of data obtained through the use of scales, each of which is of questionable validity. In short, they have used the same weak methods of the personality approach. That they have used weak methods in a highly sophisticated manner only obscures the fundamental issue of validity. A casual inspection of the actual scale items used will quickly reveal the bias that is obvious to conservatives, but is unquestionable truth to liberals...

Carole L. Bandy, Ph.D.
Assoc. Prof. of Psychology
Norwich University

E.J. Dionne is a marvelous guy who writes excellent books, but his newspaper columns often fall short. His column on school vouchers is a case in point. In the Washington Post he writes:

The debate over school vouchers usually brings out the worst in both of our political parties.

This is a long-running theme of Dionne’s. In “Why Americans Hate Politics” Dionne argued, often convincingly, that both major parties offered mostly “false choices” to voters. A pox on both their houses.

But in his column, Dionne offers his own false choices.

Republicans refuse to face the core problem these children confront. The quality of teachers and curriculums is much higher in wealthy suburban public schools than it is in poor, inner-city public schools. In a country where the overwhelming majority of children attend public schools, vouchers do nothing to rectify this injustice…

We need to spend money to upgrade the quality of teaching in our poorest schools and to demand accountability from teachers to make sure the money produces results. If conservatives were willing to invest seriously in our inner-city public schools in exchange for a comprehensive test of vouchers, I'd take the deal. I'm not holding my breath.

This is a false choice. As the Wall Street Journal’s Bill McGurn has demonstrated in his superb columns on choice, the correlation between dollars and educational quality simply doesn’t exist. It’s not to say money can’t be important. Of course it can be. But money is only one part of what matters to a child’s education. Either way, most conservatives would gladly advocate a spike – even a significant spike -- in state funding for education provided the funds were immediately turned over to parents to decide what they want to do with it.

I am speaking literally.

But what I find simply galling is Kusnet's assertion that Irving Kristol's comments about liberals being too soft on communism was "farfetched." Although, not to sound too Clintonian, but since Kusnet says Bill's comments about Gephardt are "just as far farfetched" as his father's comments about 1950s liberals maybe this all depends on the meaning of "farfetched." If Kusnet merely means "fair and reasonable" then maybe this isn't a big deal. But, I assume he's saying that Irving Kristol was wrong to suggest liberals were insufficiently anti-Communist. And if that's the case, Kusnet's higher than a moonbat. Of course, there were good and patriotic liberal anti-Communists in the 1950s (contrary to what some on the Right are saying today), but to suggest Kristol wasn't on to something is simply historical revisionism for the sake of a few cheap partisan points and a few cheap shots about nepotism.

As I mentioned yesterday , Bill Kristol's column in the Washington Post contained an allusion to his father's most famous quote. In response, David Kusnet offers a particularly snide attack on Kristol at the American Prospect's site. He criticizes Kristol for attacking Gephardt and for using his "daddy's" formulation. He writes:

...[T]he younger Kristol's hint that Gephardt is soft on terrorists and rogue states is as farfetched as his father's claim that earlier generations of liberals were soft on communism. After all, Gephardt helped draft the bipartisan congressional resolution authorizing military action in Iraq; he also supported the administration's actions against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Gephardt has paid dearly for this, losing many potential supporters who might have been drawn to his progressive policies on economics, trade and health care but see him as too bound to George W. Bush, not too soft on Saddam Hussein.

I don't mind Kusnet defending Gephardt. Kusnet's a labor guy and what else would you expect from him in the American Prospect? But then again, I do remember that Harold Meyerson -- the Prospect's Editor-at-Large -- offered a slightly different take on Gephardt's allegedly heroic and principled support of the war. Meyerson wrote in the Washington Post just this week that Gephardt's reasons for supporting the war had less to do with principle than Kusnet would have us believe. Meyerson wrote :

If anyone has personified the failure of the Democratic establishment to provide the party with a distinct profile during the Bush presidency, it's Gephardt. As House Democratic leader, Gephardt clung to Bush's Iraq policy until it all but unraveled over the past month. Gephardt's endorsement last fall of the administration's war resolution effectively derailed a bipartisan effort in the Senate to require the White House to win more international backing.

There was supposedly a method in this madness: By taking the war issue off the table, Gephardt argued, the Democrats could turn the midterm election campaign to questions of domestic policy, presumably their strong suit. We'll never know if this could have worked, because Gephardt and his fellow congressional leaders never developed a domestic message.

To millions of die-hard Democrats, it looked as if their party had sacrificed its principles on the altar of pragmatism and then had nothing pragmatic to offer. Neither conscience nor opportunism was given its due, and the rank-and-file was mightily indignant.

Hmmmm. It seems to me that Kusnet's Golden Boy -- according to Meyerson, not me -- was at least in part willing to send American boys and girls into harm's way in order to advance a narrow political agenda. Perhaps Gephardt is indeed a bit more fickle on issues of war and security than Kusnet would have us believe.

You gotta love the heart of those Cubans trying to flee Castro's thug regime. From the Miami Herald:

Over the past four decades, Cubans desperate to reach the United States have crossed the perilous Florida Straits in just about anything that floats: Surfboards. Inner tubes. Homemade rafts.

But it's hard to top the latest entrant in the maritime scramble: a 1951 Chevy flatbed truck.

The green truck, tires still on, was mounted on a pontoon made of 55-gallon drums. The makeshift vessel even sported a propeller, attached to the truck's drive shaft.

What’s a little less lovely is the U.S. government’s response.

Ingenuity, however, didn't translate to success. The U.S. Coast Guard took the dozen Cubans aboard the truck back to the island last weekend.

I was one of the pilots launched on the night of August 3, 1964 from the USS Ticonderoga (CVA-14) for air support to the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy... We reported upon debriefing that we saw no torpedo boats, but there was a very good reason for that. We had been launched without flares and had no way to provide light on the water.

The night was black with an overcast. We descended to approximately 500', but at night under an overcast and without flares, visibility is zero. A pilot without light can't see one inch beyond his canopy.

We were being vectored by a radar operator. He could see our aircraft, and he could see targets on the water. We were vectored to a surface target, but without flares we could not see it. I know for certain there were targets on the water, but like the WMD in Iraq, we could not visually find them.

Who would send small surface boats with limited range into a US Navy destroyer formation? Only North Vietnam could do that. No one else was within the range of small surface boats. North Vietnam, unless their military commanders were insane, would not send unarmed small boats into a US Navy destroyer formation the night after they had been attacked by torpedo boats.

I don't care what any inquiry reports. I will always know there were small boats on the surface that night, and I will always be convinced they were armed and intended an attack.

What seems to have escaped the skittish senators is that, regardless of what these nominees believe personally, as constitutionalists and strict constructionists they recognize that their role as federal judges is to apply the Constitution and the law as they find it--no matter how contrary it may be to their personal belief system. It is judicial activism, whether on the left or the right, that is cause for concern, and the nominees under suspicion are opposed to it.

Will be a columnist for the New York Times! That's just great news. I am a big fan of David's. It is great, great news and I am very happy for him and the conservative movement that he's on board at the Times. May he prosper and do good and -- dear God -- may he not "grow" too much in that rarefied soil!

It may be important for you to say not to neglect your studies! The lefties act like classes come second. There is the danger of overstating the global significance of little fights that rarely make the papers, when you could be sharpening your saw for truly important battles if you make it to NRO and other outfits so vital on the national scene ...

I saw your bleg on the corner, and a relatively obscure (at least in the minds of many current college students) but very important victory came out of Michigan in the early 1990's. Michigan's speech code was one of the most restrictive in the country. Students could be punished for almost any non-PC speech (of course, PC was in its infancy with DeSouza's book just hitting the racks). The one example I recall was that a student who laughed at a joke about a fellow classmate who stuttered was a "harasser."

Anyway, it really is a victory for conservative activism. Wesley Wynne, who was then a graduate student at Michigan, sued the University, claiming that the speech code violated his first amendment rights. Win was a Teaching Assistant and wanted to cover some sociological studies that could be construed to prove that women were inferior to men in some respects. (he didn't endorse them, but only wanted to discuss their merits).

Long story short, Wynne won and Michigan's speech code was truck down. The ruling started a domino effect, and Universities across the country substantially reworked their speech codes.

Turns out I will be speaking to them after all. Our fearless leader had to cancel at the last minute and so I'm filling-in. Not sure of the time. Have no idea what I'll say. Still, I wonder if Cosmo is responsible somehow for this turn of events.

WFB has some great stuff in his address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 19, 1968: "The sea is the creature which, at the margin, can drown the sailor. But however tempestuous, however arbitrary, however sullen the sea can be- however much like an editor [or America-hating professor]- the sea maintains its basic integrity; and if the sailor observes the rules, if he maintains his guard, if he propitiates the elements, he is permitted to survive and the experience is sublime."

I was cc'd on this letter to Derb who may be too humble to post it himself:

Jonah is indeed correct about the meaning of "Bacon number." I think the Bacon number has to have been derived from the concept of "Erdos number" (http://www.oakland.edu/~grossman/erdoshp.html), which is decades old and quantifies one's collaboration with Prof. Paul Erdos. However exciting your movie career is (and it is, very), some of us are more interested in your Erdos Number.

I would suspect that any person with an Erdos number and a Bacon number each under five might border on the ultimate in coolness.

From a reader:

Mr. Goldberg,

As a recent recipient of a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, things like this idiotic Berkeley study make me absolutely cringe (one would hope that habituation would take effect eventually). I can tell you, having only recently been released from this academic environment, that there are no other quarters in which liberalism is so predominant, and conservatism is indeed viewed as synonymous with "mean-spirited, homophobic, misogynist, hate-mongering troglodyte."

What is especially galling about this is that one could easily argue that through the very fabric of liberalism is woven faulty thinking ("cognitive distortion" to use the jargon), including, but not limited to, what is referred to as "emotional reasoning." This error is marked by a propensity to make decisions based upon one's emotions, rather than logic and reason ("I feel this way, therefore it must be true.") See well-meaning but cripplingly ineffective social programs whose propogation would appear to be justified only by the warm "feelings" it fosters in the hearts of its sponsors.

A second example: "Operant conditioning." This unambiguous concept refers to the mechanism by which desired behaviors are reinforced, while those deemed undesirable are either ignored or punished. I'm not calling for the application of electric shock to anyone's genitals, but how about a reduction in the payment ("reinforcing") of individuals displaying shiftless, slothful behavior (unless that's what we want to see more of...or it makes us feel good about ourselves) or, for that matter, of despotic (Saudi Arabia) or idiotic (most of Europe) regimes who don't exactly have our best interests at heart.

I could go on about "cognitive dissonance" theory and the refusal of some to admit that Clinton ever did anything wrong, or "projection" (a less mainstream term these days) and Terry McAuliffe's recent statement that "this may be the first time in recent history that a president knowingly misled the American people during the State of the Union address," but I'm getting dizzy.

Please know that not all psychologists are pointy-headed liberal academics. I always look forward to your column...keep up the good work.

Another thoughtful reader response on the recall:

MSNBC's Matthews, to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ): "When asked about the killing of Saddam Hussein's sons the other day, Howard Dean, the candidate for president said, quote: 'It's a victory for the Iraqi people but it doesn't have any effect on whether we should or shouldn't have had a war. I think, in general, the ends do not justify the means.' Your thoughts, Senator?"

McCain replies: "I am astonished. A lot of people have compared me with Governor Dean. I could not disagree with him more to say that the ends doesn't justify the means. The ends were the eradication of two psychotic murdering rapists, and the means were through legitimate use of the American military helped out by some excellent information that they gained. How in the world someone could in any way think this end was not justified by anything which was the removal of two odious characters, frankly, is beyond me. And I think, frankly, Mr. Dean does the nation a great disservice when he doesn't recognize how wonderful an event this is and how important it is to the morale of the troops that these guys are gone. I mean, our troops serving in Iraq."

McCain, on if Dean is catering to the left or "tone deaf": "I don't know which it is, but I think even the far left, people who did not support the war, are glad that these two thugs, these two, you know, adjectives, I don't know enough adjectives that are not four letters, frankly, that describe these two guys. I think even the far left are glad that they're gone. My god, this guy, you know the things he's done. They're well documented. Both of them."

More McCain: "I hope that Mr. Dean will retract that statement and make it very clear that the world, America, and most importantly, the Iraqi people, are far better off with these two guys gone and their father should be next."

I was in an opera (yes, an opera) with Luciano Pavarotti when I was a kid, and since his Bacon Number is 2, I believe that mine is three -- if operas count.

The G-File is up. My apologies for the length and tardiness. I was in rant mode and I had to edit it back to its still unforgiveable length.

Derb -- Maybe this will save you 8 trillion emails, though I doubt it. A Bacon number -- I'm fairly certain -- is the number of degrees it takes to link you to a Kevin Bacon movie. I'm too busy to do it myself, but my guess is someone out there will figure it out for you.

That reminds me, I wrote a syndicated column the other day defending John Ashcroft and expressing sincere bewilderment at the intensity of anti-Ashcroft views. I encouraged readers to send me concrete examples of what he's done wrong as AG. I was astounded by how many people listed his in-office prayer meetings as an example. I'm open to the idea that prayer meetings in government offices might be a bad idea, though I personally don't see anything wrong with it so long as they're handled properly. But even if they're terrible things, what's the linkage to peoples' lives? How does it affect anything? After all, when Bill Clinton was defiling an intern -- and vice versa -- the standard mantra from the left was "Who does it hurt?" Well, if you think consensual sex between an intern and the President doesn't hurt anybody I need to know why you think consensual prayer hurts people.

From a reader:

"Reminds me of the People's Front of Judea and their hatred of being confused with the Judean People's Front."

I wonder how many people noticed Kristol's presumably deliberate allusion to his dad in his op-ed piece. Kristol writes:

"There are plenty of legitimate grounds to criticize the Bush administration's foreign policy. But the American people, whatever their doubts about aspects of Bush's foreign policy, know that Bush is serious about fighting terrorists and terrorist states that mean America harm. About Bush's Democratic critics, they know no such thing.

This tracks perhaps the most controversial thing his father ever wrote -- given the time he wrote it. As a junior editor of Commentary in 1952, Irving Kristol wrote an article for that magazine, "Civil Liberties' 1952: A Study in Confusion." Pere Kristol made this observation -- which has new relevance these days by the way -- about the reigning anti-McCarthy hysteria:

"Perhaps it is a calamitous error to believe that because a vulgar demagogue lashes out at both communism and liberalism as identical, it is necessary to protect communism in order to defend liberalism. This way of putting the matter will surely shock liberals, who are convinced it is only they who truly understand communism and who thoughtfully oppose it. They are nonetheless mistaken, and it is a mistake on which McCarthyism waxes fat. For there is one thing that the American people know about Sen. McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing. And with some justification."

Today a conservative administration is close to asserting that whatever the facts turn out to be regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the enforcement of U.N. resolutions was a sufficient reason for war. If so, war was waged to strengthen the United Nations as author and enforcer of international norms of behavior.

He manages to cram a lot of stuff into a small space, so there's room to quibble at the omissions. But all and all I think he nails it. Republicans are doing great, conservatives are taking a terrible beating. I'd be curious to now what some of the other Cornerites think.

“I wasn't thrilled about serving my country in Vietnam in '68 and '69 but I did it, it was my duty and I am proud I did. I am not thrilled about this (recall), it is not a lot of fun but I do not shirk from the fight.”

Ribbing aside, I am a fan of both organizations, particularly the Foundation folks. But when folks at the Young Americans Foundation get peeved at being called YAF, I really have no sympathy. The two groups have similar missions, similar philosophies, similar fans etc. I know there are plenty of inside baseball differences between the two groups which are very significant to people close to them. But if you were inclined to be upset at being mis-identified as YAF why in the world would you choose the same initials for your group? It's like someone starting a communications company called American Telephone and Text and being furious whenever someone calls it AT&T. Just my two cents.

Kathryn - I am shocked you would take part in the slanderous anti-Cosmo campaign being orchestrated from some dark and gloomy feline HQ. There seems to be an effort to make my dog into the canine Yoko Ono or something. Cosmo is all dog, almost all man (we don't like to discuss that) and definitely no leftwinger. And, for the record, this photo is not of Cosmo. Any attempt to say otherwise is to take part in a campaign to smear his integrity.

Am I crazy or does this article read like an editorial? The AP seems almost disappointed that Uday and Qusay weren't arrested.

Kathryn - One in three also think David Hasselhoff is a rock star. Take it with a grain of salt.

There's been a lot of talk that there was no plan. There was a plan, but as any military officer can tell you, no plan survives first contact with reality. Inevitably, some of our assumptions turned out to be wrong. Fortunately, many things turned out to be much better than our assumptions, in no small measure, I think, because of a brilliant military plan that achieved extraordinary surprise.

There is no humanitarian crisis. There is no refugee crisis. There is no health crisis. There has been minimal damage to -- to infrastructure; minimal war damage, lots of regime damage over decades, but minimal war damage to infrastructure except for telecommunications, which we had to target. There has been no environmental catastrophe, either from oil well fires or from dam breaks. And there has been no need for massive oil field repair.

I think there are plenty to ask, but here's one that's of recent vintage. "During your blowout book tour you spoke many times about your "zone of privacy" and how terrible it was to have that invaded by the prying eyes of the state and the media. You also indicated that you wish to be taken as your own woman, a dedicated and serious politician. And yet, when the Washington Post tried to interview you about the "political aspects" of your book you refused to be interviewed, indicating that you'd be willing to discuss the other, more salacious, aspects of your book. Why is that? If you don't want to be seen as a female victim or an extension of your husband, why would the leader of the policy committee of the Senate Democrats, the Senator who replaced Patrick Moynihan of all people, and a feminist hero be so reluctant to talk about the substance of her book with the political paper of record but still willing to discuss her martyr role and the invasions of her "zone of privacy"?

Dick Gephardt's 16 words, by contrast, change everything. They reflect the considered judgment of a centrist Democratic presidential candidate, one who voted to authorize the war, that his party must stand in fundamental opposition to the Bush foreign policy. They indicate the capture of the Democratic Party by the pace-setter in the presidential race, former Vermont governor Howard Dean.

Uday Hussein, Saddam Hussein's eldest son who has died aged 39, was probably the most hated and feared man in Iraq after the president himself.

He was infamous not only for numerous violent assaults against his kinsmen and political opponents, but also as football's worst loser: he imprisoned and tortured three Iraqi football stars as punishment for their side's defeat in the 2000 Asian Cup.

With the world sweltering through one of the hottest years on record, some icy bastions have been getting frostier in defiance of global warming.

The rare cool spots, from Canada to China, cause headaches for policy makers seeking to impose expensive measures to curb emissions from cars and factories blamed for blanketing the globe and driving up temperatures.

The star of the “Free Willy,” movies and one-time main attraction at the Oregon Coast Aquarium was returned to the wild years ago. The goal was to reintegrate the orca with a pod of wild killer whales.

But Keiko still swims alone along Norway’s central coast. At least three times a week, he follows his handlers’ boat 10 miles or farther out to sea.

Roger - This is an ongoing gripe of mine as many readers know. I am at a loss to understand why or how it is that corporations are consistently called "right wing." They are 100% useless in the culture war, they only favor free trade when it benefits them otherwise they are perfectly happy to advocate protectionism, subsidies whatever. They fund their enemies -- GreenPeace, NAACP, etc -- and often sell-out their friends. And yet, partly because of the hangover of Marxism which demands that corporations be agents of the Right and reaction, we're supposed to believe that corporations are steadfastly rightwing.

Anyway, I want to write a big piece for the mag some day on this and it also will be a major chapter of my book. So, I'm asking readers to help me with my ongoing file. If you know of any articles, papers, studies, anecdotes, statistics etc which might fit into a discussion of the myth of the rightwing corporation please send them to Gfilecorrections@aol.com.

And for the record, JonahNRO@aol.com is still my main email address but I use the other one because it's much easier organizationally and my JonahNRO account keeps overflowing.

Don't you think this exchange may as well have been an announcement: My wife is running for president in 2008?

1. if Bush loses to a Dem because of unpopularity, she's locked out until 2012, therefore Bush must win so she can run for an open seat in 2008 2. in order for him to win, he must remain popular and thrash his Dem opponent in 2004

Essentially, he almost endorsed GWB for re-election.

Both Gephardt and Kerry have started using the same strategy. They both keep saying in various ways that voters should ask if they feel safer today than they did four years ago. In many respects this is a very unserious question. If you asked voters if they felt safer after Pearl Harbor they'd say no. That hardly means FDR was to blame (though I know some do. I'm talking politics here). Similarly, President Bush can claim credit for discarding the phoney peace of the Clinton years in order to assure long term safety even at the cost of short term instability.

Regardless, this line may sound Reaganesque, but it's actually from the Kennedy playbook. Gephardt and Kerry are trying to sound tougher than Bush in much the same way Kennedy decried the fake "missile gap."

There are some important differences and those differences illuminate why the strategy will fail. First of all, as I mentioned above, there's the bogus nature of the argument itself. Second, Bush is no Eisenhower. He's far more like Kennedy in terms of his muscular liberal internationalism (for want of a better term) than anybody the Democrats have. Third, this strategy is weighted down by cynicism. Kerry and Gephardt both voted to support Bush pretty much every time they had the opportunity. But they never, ever, claimed they were more hawkish than Bush and never attempted to be more assertive than him.

Indeed, if you go by Harold Meyerson's telling in today's Washington Post Gephardt agreed to support the war for narrow partisan reasons. If that's true -- and Meyerson should know -- one might ask why Bush is denounced by folks like Begala, Krugman and McAuliffe as a Hitler-like aggressor who went to war to distract from domestic problems while Gephardt gets a free pass for endorsing a war (and giving it all the bipartisan cover it needed) simply so he could focus on domestic issues.

Seventeen Democratic House members wrote to party chairman Terry McAuliffe asking him only "to add a link to the Democrats for Life of America on the Democratic National Committee website."

The Democratic National Committee has, by actual count, 261 links on its Web site, including ones to such longtime party stalwarts as Easter Seals, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the U.S. Forest Service and the Oneida Indian Organization.

As the pro-life Democratic congressmen wrote in their letter, the DNC's refusal to add a link meant that "members of the Democratic Party who are opposed to abortion and capital punishment are being denied their right to be heard ...."

.McAuliffe wrote to one of the 17, Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Mississippi, on June 24, stating, "I do not think it would be appropriate to use official party resources such as the DNC website on behalf of organizations whose purpose is to reverse the current platform and/or to enact legislation that contradicts that platform."

"Official party resources?" Democrats for Life is not asking for a desk and a phone at party headquarters or even access to the postage meter. All it asks from the Democratic Party (which views "diversity as a source of strength") is to be the 262nd link on its Web site. By the DNC's logic, do the American Association of University Women, The Jerusalem Post and the American Legion -- all of which have their own DNC links -- embrace and endorse every plank in the Democratic platform?

OK. So the Democratic Party is not, as it bills itself, broadminded and tolerant and welcoming of diverse views. But that is far from all. In its uncritical endorsement of unrestricted abortion rights, the Democratic Party brass is out of touch with America.

Estonia held it's annual wife-carrying championships this week. You have to carry your wife across a 250 yard obstacle course. The brilliant part is the prize: Your wife's weight in beer. In other words, if someone has an unfair adavantage due to marrying a tiny woman, you get less beer.

Justice is the one thing you should always find You got to saddle up your boys You got to draw a hard line When the gun smoke settles we'll sing a victory tune We'll all meet back at the local saloon We'll raise up our glasses against evil forces Singing whiskey for my men, beer for my horses

Brady said to Duncan, 'You are under arrest,'
But Duncan took a gun and put a hole in his chest.
Yes, he'd been on the job too long.

RANGEL: I really think that these are two of the rottenest bums that have ever been described to me, but do you know something? We have a law on the books that United States should not be assassinating anybody.

HANNITY: It was no assassination. It was a firefight. It was a war situation, Charlie.

RANGEL: Well, I thought that whether or not it was a war -- we didn't declare war. We had a preemptive strike against Iraq. And a lot of the people who thought that this so-called war would be justified based on the evidence.

All I am saying is -- what you have to understand is that, you know, we tried to assassinate Castro and we paid dearly for it. And when you personalize a war and when you're saying that you're killing someone's kids, then they in turn would think that they kill somebody.

You know, what you do in the heat of battle is one thing. What you do when you target a personality and say he's dead -- I guess the question would be, are you going to sleep any safer tonight knowing that these two bums are dead?

KING: What do you do, Mr. President, with what's put in front of you?

CLINTON: Well, here's what happens: every day the president gets a daily brief from the CIA. And then, if it's some important issue -- and believe me, you know, anything having to do with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons became much more important to everybody in the White House after September the 11 -- then they probably told the president, certainly Condoleezza Rice, that this is what the British intelligence thought. They maybe have a difference of opinion, but on balance, they decided they should leave that line in the speech.

I think the main thing I want to say to you is, people can quarrel with whether we should have more troops in Afghanistan or internationalize Iraq or whatever, but it is incontestable that on the day I left office, there were unaccounted for stocks...

... of biological and chemical weapons. We might have destroyed them in '98. We tried to, but we sure as heck didn't know it because we never got to go back in there….

And what I think -- again, I would say the most important thing is we should focus on what's the best way to build Iraq as a democracy? How is the president going to do that and deal with continuing problems in Afghanistan and North Korea?

We should be pulling for America on this. We should be pulling for the people of Iraq. We can have honest disagreements about where we go from here, and we have space now to discuss that in what I hope will be a nonpartisan and open way. But this State of the Union deal they decided to use the British intelligence. The president said it was British intelligence. Then they said on balance they shouldn't have done it. You know, everybody makes mistakes when they are president. I mean, you can't make as many calls as you have to make without messing up once in awhile. The thing we ought to be focused on is what is the right thing to do now. That's what I think.

KING: President, maybe I can get an area where you may disagree. Do you join, President Clinton, your fellow Democrats, in complaining about the portion of the State of the Union address that dealt with nuclear weaponry in Africa?

CLINTON: Well, I have a little different take on it, I think, than either side.

First of all, the White House said -- Mr. Fleischer said -- that on balance they probably shouldn't have put that comment in the speech. What happened, often happens. There was a disagreement between British intelligence and American intelligence. The president said it was British intelligence that said it. And then they said, well, maybe they shouldn't have put it in.

Let me tell you what I know. When I left office, there was a substantial amount of biological and chemical material unaccounted for. That is, at the end of the first Gulf War, we knew what he had. We knew what was destroyed in all the inspection processes and that was a lot. And then we bombed with the British for four days in 1998. We might have gotten it all; we might have gotten half of it; we might have gotten none of it. But we didn't know. So I thought it was prudent for the president to go to the U.N. and for the U.N. to say you got to let these inspectors in, and this time if you don't cooperate the penalty could be regime change, not just continued sanctions.

I mean, we're all more sensitive to any possible stocks of chemical and biological weapons. So there's a difference between British -- British intelligence still maintains that they think the nuclear story was true. I don't know what was true, what was false. I thought the White House did the right thing in just saying, Well, we probably shouldn't have said that. And I think we ought to focus on where we are and what the right thing to do for Iraq is now. That's what I think.

...I'm running for president because I believe George Bush has left us less safe and less secure than we were four years ago. I'm calling for new national leadership because the Bush-Cheney bravado has left us isolated in the world — fracturing 50 years of alliances, calling into question our credibility, squandering the global goodwill that was showered on us after 9/11.

I'm seeking the presidency because foreign policy isn't a John Wayne movie, where we catch the bad guys, hoist a few cold ones and then everything fades to black.

Diplomacy matters. Burden-sharing matters. Follow-through matters. And yes, sustaining the peace is harder, more complex and often costlier than winning the war itself. No matter the surge of momentary machismo — as gratifying as it may be for some — it's short-sighted and wrong to simply go it alone....

If you're thinking of songs appropriate for the loss of the Hussein brothers, what about AC/DC's Highway to Hell?

I know if I were in Dan Rather's shoes, I'd take the occasion of Q and U's death to pay some homage to MOTORHEAD!!!!

Pushing up the ante, I know you've got to see me,
Read 'em and weep, the dead man's hand again,
I see it in your eyes, take one look and die,
The only thing you see, you know it's gonna be,
The Ace Of Spades!
The Ace Of Spades!

A chef at Baghdad's exclusive Hunting Club recalls a wedding party that Uday crashed in the late 1990s. After Uday left the hall, the bride, a beautiful woman from a prominent family, went missing. "The bodyguards closed all the doors, didn't let anybody out," the chef remembers. "Women were yelling and crying, 'What happened to her?'" The groom knew. "He took a pistol and shot himself," says the chef, placing his forefinger under his chin.

Last October another bride, 18, was dragged, resisting, into a guardhouse on one of Uday's properties, according to a maid who worked there. The maid says she saw a guard rip off the woman's white wedding dress and lock her, crying, in a bathroom. After Uday arrived, the maid heard screaming. Later she was called to clean up. The body of the woman was carried out in a military blanket, she said. There were acid burns on her left shoulder and the left side of her face. The maid found bloodstains on Uday's mattress and clumps of black hair and peeled flesh in the bedroom. A guard told her, "Don't say anything about what you see, or you and your family will be finished."

And another one gone And another one gone Another one bites the dust...

Marcy-- "Do you have any batteries?" [ Peggy nods sadly ]

apparently going off in Baghdad. So either the Hussein kids are really dead or the interim government finally started playing re-runs of "Alice" on Iraqi TV.

If you see any clips of Shiites singing "There's a new girl in town, and she's looking good!" then we know that we haven't caught Uday and Qusay yet.

The top of the Eiffel Tower is on fire.

From "Lost in Space" must be added to any list of greatest TV villains.

It'd be great if we finally offed the Hussein boys. And I don't mind at all that they're dead, though watching them do the perp walk would be fun. But it will be a shame if their bodies are so badly burned we can't show the corpses on Iraqi TV (which sounds like a possibility). One of the reasons it's so important we catch or kill the Husseins is to prove that they're not coming back. If their bodies are so badly burned so as to be unrecognizable, people will just have to take America's word. That's certainly good enough for me, but I don't know if it'd be good enough for the conspiracy-obsessed and America-distrusting people of the Middle East.

Thanks Rod.

Mr. Dreher – in his unilateral quest for hegemony and empire – is currently Cornerizing the nascent Dallas Morning News blog. Here is his first entry from this morning (emphasis mine):

I received an e-mail overnight from a reader attacking me for something one of my colleagues blogged. The reader appears to be under the misapprehension that the entries on this blog represent the collective opinion of the editorial board. Not true! The opinions expressed here are solely the responsibility of the person who attaches his or her name to them. The official position of the Dallas Morning News on any given issue will still, as ever, be found on the editorial page of DMNODT (Dallas Morning News On Dead Tree).

Yes, Newman from Seinfeld was a great villain. But I was adding to Andrew's list not trying to displace it.

Andrew - That is an excellent list. Here are some additions/quibbles. First of all, Gary from Gary's Old Town Tavern was the greatest villain on Cheers (though early Harry Anderson was outstanding as well). The Mayor from Buffy the Vampire Slayer may have been the most clever TV villain of the 1990s. The one-eyebrowed-baby from the Simpsons and of course Mr. Burns must be considered. Mel Profit (played by Kevin Spacey) from "Wiseguy" was outstanding. I must also confess that the Sleestack from "Land of the Lost" kind of scared me. And Col. Klink from Hogan's Heroes definitely deserves an honorable mention.

Ramesh - Tocquevillean orgy doesn't ring a bell, but I know I've used several of the following phrases at one point or another:

Straussian kegger.
Nockian nookie.
Buckleyite Bacchanalia.
Hayekian Ho-down.
Kickin' it Austrian School.
Far rightwingding.
Oakeshottfest.

Costas: "What are your best and worst qualities as a politician?" Clinton: "Probably my worst quality is that I get very passionate about what I think is right..."

On Sunday, reports quoted US government officials as saying that elevated levels of krypton-85 had been discovered in the air above the North Korean border. This is a gas with a half-life of 10.7 years that is created along with plutonium by the fission of uranium fuel in a reactor. The fuel is reprocessed to separate out the plutonium by dissolving it in acid, but this also releases the krypton-85.

Here’s an interesting piece from the Financial Times (of all places) on the EU’s draft ‘constitution:’

“The members of the convention perhaps believed that by including a charter of fundamental rights they would guarantee individual freedoms. What they have overlooked is that the economic freedom of the individual is as powerful a barrier as any against undue political interference. The draft constitution fails to mention private property, freedom of contract, free enterprise, workable competition or free trade in its opening definition of the EU's objectives. Although these guarantees are variously mentioned in different parts of the text (even Mr Giscard d'Estaing understands that they bring prosperity), they are not given their rightful place as essential elements of individual liberty.

Instead, the text sets out the EU's central objectives as, among other things, "a Europe of sustainable development based on balanced economic growth; a social market economy, highly competitive and aiming at full employment and social progress; and with a high level of protection and improvement of the quality of the environment". This is politically correct to a fault. Fashionable concepts, contradictory aims and pious hopes cannot hide a misunderstanding of what full economic freedom can do for society.”

Read the whole thing.

Carney writes that “opposition to the Iraq war or support of trade tariffs shouldn’t precipitate excommunication from the Right.” Fine. I know of nobody who argues otherwise. Carney has characterized David Frum’s recent NR article as an attack on “conservatives who have not adequately displayed their enthusiasm for the direction our nation’s foreign policy is going.” This is too insipid to deserve a response. Carney also says that it is sad that “a handful of conservative writers. . . have called those who criticize the neocons anti-semitic.” This is rather worse than insipid.

Let’s return for a moment to Robert Novak’s charge that David Frum may have joined the White House to serve Israeli interests. Never mind that he went there as an economic speechwriter. Nobody would ever make that charge about Mike Gerson, even though he has been responsible for more of Bush’s rhetoric regarding the Middle East than Frum. The difference is that Gerson is an evangelical rather than a Jew. Carney has written delicately that “the unfortunate charge of dual-loyalty implicit or explicit in some of Novak’s and Buchanan’s writings” is “poisonous to debate.” Yes it is, and in some cases that poison has a name.

Timothy Carney, who works for Robert Novak, has written an article arguing that neoconservatives do indeed continue to exist as a distinct political faction. He offers three examples of neocons. William Kristol is more tolerant of big government than most conservatives. Max Boot is less opposed to cloning, abortion, and the welfare state than most conservatives. Charles Krauthammer doesn’t look all that fondly on Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign. Carney concludes that “to argue that this collection of men—who subscribe to principles and policies mostly foreign to the right—are not a distinct sect of conservatism with a clearly different philosophy is hocus-pocus.”

But Carney hasn’t even identified a movement of three. On abortion and cloning, for example, this trio has three positions. Boot is untroubled by either (although he almost never writes on the subjects), Krauthammer wants to restrict cloning but not abortion, and Kristol is for outlawing both. Where’s the distinct philosophy?

If Carney wants to use the term “neoconservative” to refer to people who share Kristol’s view of “national greatness”—assuming someone can figure out what that view is—I suppose that’s his right. But then he’s referring to about five people.

Dear Mrs. Konig,

Minivans are painfully dorky cars to all of us guys, much more so than Star Trek is. I'm attempting to think of a female equivalent of dorkiness: ordinary guys look at guys who drive minivans the way ordinary women look at women who use lipstick for eyeshadow.

Best, Mike

P.S.--Feel free to post my thoughts in the corner.

I've hit a nerve with the Minivan men and the women who love them. So far, the argument from readers -- and Tim & Susan -- seems to be that men who knock minivans are implicitly knocking marriage. This seems to be as silly as saying that women who knock minivans are in reality slighting motherhood. After all, moms who drive minivans usually do so to drop of their kids at soccer practice etc.

Sorry, I don't buy it. I love my family and I'm happy to be married. But, yes I think minivans are uncool. They might not be emasculating in the sense that being a good father and husband is the best definition of being a man, but I'm sorry I just don't want a minivan for the same reason I wouldn't want to paint my car pink with fluffy bunnies on it -- even if that would make my daughter happy. This isn't to say I will never, ever, own a minivan but the needle on the uncoolness to necessity ratio-meter is still pointing deep into uncool territory. And frankly, I think those who are trying to shame me into a minivan are playing the masculinity-questioning game in reverse. And I'm not falling for it.

From a reader:

When I broached the possibility of buying a minivan, my 15-year-old son exclaimed, "What?!? A minivan??!! Why don't we all just have "dork" tattooed on our foreheads and save $25,000"?

Thanks so much for the guidance. I'm still wading through it all. But some results/conclusions are emerging. First, many people have very strong opinions about Fords -- pro and con. Second, I was very smart to ask you folks for advice on cars. Third, the Honda Pilot and Subaru Forrester are emerging as favorites given my criteria. I will keep you informed.

Um, unless it's moved, Rye Playland remains squarely in New York, specifically, Rye, NY (hence the name). Then again, perhaps he has it planned all along - "I could've sworn it was Connecticut. Ah well, maybe we'll find it tomorrow".

A few things on the consumer front. The missus and I are thinking about buying a new car, probably an SUV or conceivably a station wagon. Minivans are out of the question. Any guidance on what the safest (baby on board, 'nuf said) and best value in this department would be welcome. I'd love the Volvo, Acura or Lexus SUVs but price is an object (that was a veiled hint to you NRO-reading car executives, by the way).

Second, as of August 1, AOL is discontinuing its "Mobile Communicator" -- what it calls it's fairly dinky blackberry. So I need to get a new blackberry type device, but I understand that AOL only really works with T-Mobile Sidekick which I also hear isn't very good. Any suggestions on this front, other than "get rid of AOL" -- would be welcome as well.

Please send suggestions to -- and only to -- GFilecorrections@aol.com (there's no room at my normal address). Thanks.

Much of the discussion of “historical accuracy” misses the point. As Mel Gibson has pointed out in numerous interviews, he believes (rightly in my opinion) that no Hollywood treatment of the crucifixion has have come close to accurately portraying how brutal it was.

His goal is to simply to show how awfully Jesus suffered for the sins of the world. To appreciate the horror of Jesus’ death, conservative Christians look not only to the Gospels but also the Old Testament messianic prophecies in the Psalms and Isaiah.

When Gibson says he is striving for historical accuracy, this, above all is what he means.

Jonah,

I know you've probably received a million emails on this, but please bear with me.

Just a few comments on the supposed contradictions (I simply read your post and haven't done any real looking up), but the differences can be attributed to differences of perspective for the various gospel authors. Two witnesses don't have to give the exact same testimony to be telling the same story.

As far as I can tell from reading, John doesn't even mention the seder, so I don't know how it can be said that Jesus was dead before it.

Regarding the number & times of the trials, the answer is simple. There were two trials. One farcical trial by the high priest late at night immediately followed by a Roman trial before Pilate early in the morning the next day. From a witnesses perspective, they could be stated as one trial that took all night (they went right from one to the next), two separate trials (since their were two different courts). To a person observing, it would seem to have been one long night. But to the educated Luke (who being a doctor would be used to exquisite attention to detail) he new the second trial took place early in the morning (he may not have even been present at the first trial - or simply not referred to it).

Lastly regarding the method of Jesus death, He was crucified, because that is how it was prophesied that the Christ would die. Repeatedly throughout the gospels, the Jewish leaders sought to kill him secretly but were restrained (by God) since (according to Jesus Himself) His time had not yet come.

The story makes perfect sense if you accept it as written by the same God of the old testament and read it as the fulfillment of OT prophecy.

Dear Jonah: You surely have better Bible scholars than I in your readership, but here's an unoffended, reasonably well-informed, middle-of-the-road Christian take on the excerpts from Fredriksen's article.

1. She's right that Greek would have been much more widely used than Latin, though for all we know Pilate was a monoglot Latin chauvinist.

2. There are differences in the Gospel accounts. Some people have devoted immense amounts of efforts to reconciling them. Most have more or less shrugged them off as not central.

3. Anne Catherine Emmerich didn't become a saint because of her deep sense of ecumenism, and apparently Gibson relied on her writing at some stage in the composition of the script. Fredriksen's group tried to weed this influence out, and it's not clear whether it persists in the final version.

4. Fredriksen's dating of the Gospels is in the mainstream, though some think that Mark was written earlier and many think a now-lost source for Matthew and Luke was written earlier.

5. Fredriksen's apparently central claim that Rome must have wanted Jesus dead is really speculative. Sure, it's possible, but it's no more likely and probably less than the other hypotheses she rejects on very, very slight grounds.

6. It is occasionally claimed -- it's not clear from your excerpts if Fredriksen makes this claim -- that, for political reasons, the authors of the Gospels deliberatatly shifted the blame from Romans to Jews. People who say this don't seem to have the faintest suspicion that they are vulnerable to the same charge in reverse. At any rate, (1) no one now feels any ecumenical pressure to minimize the responsibility of the Romans, and (2) it takes some chutzpah to say, twenty centuries after the fact, that we can now figure out the politics better and more honestly than the writers of the time, some of whom may have been eye-witnesses.

7. Ultimately, to any orthodox Christian, it's neither the Jews nor the Romans nor Caiaphas nor Judas nor any other person or group that's responsible for the Crucifixion -- it's all of us, it's the sinfulness of man. At the Catholic Passion liturgy every year, there's a dramatic reading of one of Gospel accounts, and the congregation plays the part of the mob, crying "Crucify him!" It's supposed to sting.

In other words, there's no need to deny or twist the Gospels to exculpate the Jews and promote inter-faith harmony. What's needed is for Christians to understand their religion a little better.

The Washington Post has a great piece on how dogs have highly evolved abilities to communicate with humans non-verbally ("Duh," quoth Cosmo.) I've seen stuff on this before, but it's a nice update to the growing body of literature that demonstrates dogs are our wingmen on this mortal coil. As for the non-verbal communication, I find this particularly interesting because I've been experimenting with this and Cosmo for a while. Since we've had the baby, we do a lot of walking around the neighborhood with the stroller. This has required me to give Coz a lot more commands in terms of crossing streets, avoiding other dogs, where not to leave his calling cards etc. What's interesting is that I've found that I can use hand signals and snaps often more effectively than voice commands. Part of this obviously has to do with the fact that Cosmo is a frick'n genius. We've never really spent any time teaching him anything because he always picks it up so quickly. He stops at every crosswalk and won't even chase his tennis balls across the street without approval. But part of it has to do with the fact that dogs are genetically attuned to travelling alongside humans.

Anyway, as you know, I can talk a lot more and with more confidence about dogs than I can about the New Testament. But I'll stop for now.

Howard Kurtz has a great piece following up on the bizarre denials from ABC's David Westin that television news doesn't rip-off print news. Having worked in a variety of capacities in the television and print worlds, all I can say is this denial is a joke. Seriously, the idea that television producers "independently" fact-check stuff they see in newspapers and come up with story ideas solely on their own is laughable. Of course, it does happen from time to time. But Westin makes it sound like this is industry practice rather than the exception which proves the rule. At best, television news producers are like bloggers without websites. They scoop up what they find elsewhere in the media and work with it. Sure, some do some bloggers do independent reporting, but you'd hardly say that's the rule.

Just for the record, I did say I am a neophyte and "ignorant" to these debates over the Gospels. All I ask is if you're profoundly offended take it up with Ms. Fredriksen and the New Republic. I can already tell from a handful of emails I've gotten before 7:00 AM, that some folks really want to pick a fight on this one. That's fine, but I'm not the opponent. At best, I'm just the fight promoter. Perhaps someone else has strong feelings on this one and can take over the discussion in the Corner.

I've gotten several emails like this:

Shame on you Jonah. As someone who is well-aquainted with the maleability of facts, especially in the hands of liberal authors, you ought not to be uncritically repeating claims like those of Ms Fredriksen. The differences in the gospels have been the subject of debate for millenia, and there have been few conservative Chrisian scholars who felt the differences are irreconcilable. Just because Ms Fredriksen doesn't give the other side of the story doesn't mean there isn't another side. I'll leave it to your more knowledgeable readers to acquaint you with the other side (as I'm sure they will, in great detail), but I want to point out that you should have immediately seen something strange in her claim about Rome wanting Jesus dead. Crucifiction was used as the common form of execution in the Roman empire, not only for rebels, but also for deserters, murderers, escaped slaves, and thieves. The claim that the crucification indicated an interest from the imperial capital is laughable. This was the first century you know, the fastest form of communication was the trireme, which is just a really big rowboat with a pathetically inadequate sail. Governers in outlying regions couldn't pop off a quick email to Rome to get their opinion on every paltry execution.

And this one:

Subject: There aren't any inconsistencies I know of in the New Testament

You've already admitted your ignorance, so just play smart and leave the subject alone.

A friend

K-Lo - Does late night Corner posting absolve us of our Monday morning Corner obligations?

I mean no disrespect by posting all of this stuff. I truly have no idea if the inconsistencies mentioned below are a sore point, controversial or simply ho-hum among Christians of one denomination or another. I read the New Testament once in high school for a class on the bible and I've looked at specific passages from time to time for one reason or another -- especially when I produced a documentary on Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. But, generally speaking, my ignorance level is high and well-cultivated.

And here's an excerpt from her discussion on the problem of using the Gospels as a historical source:

We already knew that Gibson's efforts to be "as truthful as possible" (his own words in the Times) would be frustrated by the best sources that he had to draw on, namely, the Gospels themselves. Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, whose texts were composed in Greek between 70 C.E. and 100 C.E., differ significantly on matters of fact. In Mark, Jesus's last meal is a Passover seder; in John, Jesus is dead before the seder begins. Mark and Matthew feature two night "trials" before a full Jewish court, and a dramatic charge of "blasphemy" from the high priest. Luke has only a single trial, early in the morning, and no high priest. John lacks this Jewish trial scene entirely. The release of Barabbas is a "Roman custom" in Mark, a "Jewish custom" in John. Between the four evangelists, Jesus speaks three different last lines from the cross. And the resurrection stories vary even more.

The evangelists wrote some forty to seventy years after Jesus's execution. Their literary problems are compounded by historical ones: it is difficult to reconstruct, from their stories, why Jesus was crucified at all. If the priests in Jerusalem had wanted him dead, Jesus could have been privately murdered or killed offstage. If the priests had wanted him killed but were constrained from arranging this themselves, they could have asked Pilate to do the job. If the Roman prefect had simply been doing a favor for the priests, he could easily have arranged Jesus's death by any of the considerable means at his disposal (assassination, murder in prison, and so on).

The fact that Jesus was publicly executed by the method of crucifixion can only mean that Rome wanted him dead: Rome alone had the sovereign authority to crucify. Moreover, the point of a public execution, as opposed to a private murder, was to communicate a message. Crucifixion itself implies that Pilate was concerned about sedition. Jesus's death on the cross was Pilate's way of telling Jerusalem's Jews, who had gathered in the holy city for the paschal holiday, to desist from any thought of rebellion.

Here's what Fredriksen says about the use of Latin at the time (I pulled it from Nexis):

And while Aramaic was indeed the daily language of ancient Jews in Galilee and Judea, Latin would scarcely have figured at all. When the Jewish high priest and the Roman prefect spoke to each other, they would have used Greek, which was the English of antiquity. And Pilate's troops, employees of Rome, were not "Romans." They were Greek-speaking local gentiles on the imperial payroll. Gibson's pious evocations of historicity rang more than a little hollow. How much homework had he actually done?

Drudge is reporting about a controversy over the political cartoon linked to a little earlier in The Corner depicting the assasination of George W. Bush. The image is derived from the famous Eddie Adams photo of an execution during the Vietnam war. I think it's a stupid cartoon of dubious meaning, probably intended to show the "courage" of the cartoonist more than anything else. Getting all worked up about it would only encourage such buffoonery in the future.

But what really offends me is the continuing liberal faith in the original picture as a powerful moral statement. As I wrote about about a long time ago, Adams wishes he never took the picture because it distorted more than it revealed and the executioner was a decent man who was probably more in the right than the wrong.

I haven't followed much of the controversy or the hype about Mel Gibson's new film on the Passion. What I've seen has basically been on the Corner or over at Andrew Sullivan's site. But today I read a piece by Paula Fredriksen in the latest issue of the New Republic. It's not on the web (yet?). I found it to be an astounding -- if sometimes clunky -- read. Some of it I'm sure is old news to folks who know their New Testament well or to people who've followed the whole Jews-as-Christ-Killers "issue." But that ain't me.

I also didn't know that Gibson's father is a real hardcore guy who doesn't merely reject Vatican II (not that a big deal among many of the Catholics I know) but he thinks Vatican II was the result of a conspiracy between Jews and Freemasons. And -- oh yeah -- he thinks the Holocaust never happened.

While all of that is interesting it still amounts to guilt-by-association and there's no evidence that Mel shares his dad's views.

Still, the New Republic piece suggests Gibson does have a lot to answer for. He claims time and again that he's simply sticking to the "historical record." Frederiksen offers some interesting stuff I didn't know about how mixed the historical record really is. There are major -- and often irreconcilable -- differences among the various versions of Jesus' death in the Gospels. More important, Gibson relies on the writings of Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich as a "historical" source. But Emmerich, born in 1774, was one of several Nuns who claimed to see visions of the Passion. To use her visions -- not her "research" mind you, but her visions -- as a historical source isn't any more legitimate than using Elijah Muhammed's visions for a film about Mohammed's life.

Among the long list of apparent errors in Gibson's script -- according to Fredriksen -- is his much-hyped use of apparently authentic Latin, when Greek would have been the language of choice. She also has a fascinating discussion of how crucifixion was employed solely by the Romans and there is little reason to believe that if "the Jews" wanted Jesus dead that he would have been crucified.

For the record, Ms. Fredriksen was a member of a group of sholars who were shown a copy of the script. She's identified as "the Aurelio Professor of Scripture at Boston University and the author of Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews (Vintage), a historical study of the last twelve hours of Jesus's life." There's a lot of tick-tock about how she got the scrip and how Gibson's lawyers threatened sue and so on too. Anyway, if it's up on the web I'll let you know.

Here’s yet another piece on the food wars – this time from the New York Times. It’s not just Americans, apparently, who are fat. For example, according to the writer of the article, 70 percent of adult Greeks are overweight (doubtless someone somewhere will soon explain that McDonalds is to blame for all those podgy Pericles). The EU is planning on reacting with, you guessed it, more regulation, but, as is pointed out in the article, this presents food companies with a problem. “The message to consume less is hardly a capitalist notion. Food companies grow by selling to more people or convincing existing customers to eat more.” Really? Once again, we see the passive consumer of contemporary liberal mythology, docile, easily duped and quickly manipulated. The notion that the food companies might flourish by reacting to consumer demand does not seem to have occurred to the Times.

The proposed EU regulations are, as one would expect from anything that emanates from that corrupt and malevolent organization, both useless and hostile to the interests of the consumer. If Brussels wants to stop companies saying that foods high in salt, sugar and fat can also be good for you, that is, I suppose, vaguely understandable, if misleading. To go on to make it illegal to fortify such foods with vitamins and minerals is wrong, arrogant and destructive.

For arrogance, of course, the ‘World Health’ organization always takes some beating and, true to form, one Amalia Waxman, the project director of its ‘food initiative’ is claiming that self-regulation is less effective “than what she calls co-regulation, in which all stakeholders, including corporations, consumer groups [ notice the focus on consumer ‘groups’ rather than actual consumers] and governments, work together to ensure that minimum standards are met.”

’Stakeholders?’ The only person who has a stake in my plate (and, preferably a steak on my plate) is me.

Ms Waxman can take a hike – the exercise may do her some good.

In challenging the United States over Iraq, Chirac surely knew that he stood little chance of persuading President Bush to change course. Yet here was a means of demonstrating to the world that, whatever its faults as an engine of economic progress, the Romano-European state nevertheless embodies a higher type of civilization than that of the Anglo-Americans. It was an inspired exercise in salesmanship. Intellectuals of various stripes rallied to Chirac's standard and argued that Romano-Europe — the same civilization that gave the world absolutism, Bonapartism, socialism, National Socialism, fascism, and Francoism — is somehow morally superior to the coarser civilization of the "Anglosphere." As long as men like President Chirac can persuade the chattering classes that in defending Romano-European traditions they are resisting a shallow American materialism, they will find useful support in their effort to prevent would-be Mrs. Thatchers from rising up to take them down.

There’s always something a little disconcerting about a fanatic, but even by the loopy standards of the far left, Rutgers student Charlotte Kates takes some beating. According to a recent profile in the New York Times, her favorite book is by Lenin, a ‘writer’ so turgid that he could only be a Communist propagandist (oh, wait a moment, he was). Her dorm room décor includes a picture of a murderer (not Lenin, but, inevitably, Che Guevara) and publicity for the 'Heroic Red Women Fighters of Peru', an offshoot, I suspect, of that Peruvian death cult known as the Shining Path. Good for Rutgers for not objecting, however. Free expression is important and I just know the university would be just as relaxed about a display of Fascist propaganda or, say, a photo of Ernst Rohm.

So, how sinister is she? Read the following sentence and judge for yourself:

“She has a weakness for Dr. Pepper. "

And before you write - that is the Times’ spelling of the evil nectar. I know that there’s no period after the ‘Dr’.

In a moment of madness so inspired that only bureaucrats could dream it up, San Francisco is going to require fortune-tellers to pay a fee ($357), post a rate schedule, get fingerprinted and offer customers a receipt for their services.

The Supervisor responsible, Mr. Aaron Peskin, describes this measure as “consumer fraud protection.” Really? Is Peskin trying to claim that some fortune-tellers are not frauds?

One other aspect of this saga to savor – the manipulation of PC sensitivities by certain members of the “Romany community,” which, the writer of this piece somewhat primly notes, “some [the boors!] refer to as Gypsies.” One Gypsy has even gone so far as to say that passing the proposed legislation “will be just like what Hitler did to us.”

What a load of (crystal) balls.

Via blogger Amy Phillips.

More signs of hope in Iran? Snooker (pool, sort of) clubs are opening again in Iran. Needless to say, women are barred from joining most of the clubs or from playing at the same time as men. One of the players explains:

“The posture women take up in the game is deemed sexual, and thus are forbidden to play with us.”

Just another reminder that the mullahs are quite insane.

The absurdities that surround the food wars grow ever more grotesque. It’s well known by now that one of the complaints of the calorie cops is that ‘single portion’ servings are too large. Now here are details of a different grumble. Cut through all the nonsense, and it boils down to two things – servings are, well, too small and consumers are too dumb to read.

This controversy is not going away any time soon, and nor is the fatal conceit at its core: people are stupid, and governments are smart.

Susan, I just read your blog on the Corner and want to give you some perspective. I am a Director of a small rural HMO, not for profit, in the San Luis Valley of Colorado. We serve commercial insurance and Medicare members. Our 6 county service area is home to 47,000 people, 52% Hispanic, and includes 3 of the 4 poorest counties in Colorado. We have the highest rates of COPD [chronic obstructive pulmanary disease] and diabetes in the state. Centura Health Systems, (owned by CHI, Catholic Health Initiatives), despite their web site claims and mission values, will not even meet with us to contract with their hospitals. Centura says we are too small to contract with. We are the only insurance provider in the area. Our rates are consistently 10-15% below the out of area competition. So because they control much of the hospital access, they bill full charges and if our members go, we have to pay, while BC/BS who doesn't even cover our area gets a blanket 30% cut in charges in every Centura facility. If we had the BC/BS rates, we could lower premiums even further and cover additional people. Currently, we cover most of the working adults in the valley but they cannot afford the premiums for their spouse and children. We could do so much more, but Centura/CHI is more concerned with the cost of doing business with a "small player". This is probably the exception to their practice nationwide but is the antitheses of their stated values and mission. I certainly believe in a free market but deplore some getting a free ride in the press when, in my opinion, it is not deserved.

Regards, Richard Bowles San Luis Valley HMO

Virginia Kelley knew precisely what the story was going to say ten days before it was published. I know that because I told her. I reached her by phone and not only told her all the details of Bill Blythe's life and prior marriages, but in the story I QUOTED HER AT LENGTH REACTING TO THIS INFORMATION.