From a buddy in California:

Jonah, Couldn't agree with you more regarding your amazement at how people cannot distinguish between editorials and straight journalistic copy. I can't tell you how many times I have heard, "The Times reported" or "According to the Times" and have the reference be straight out of one of the editorials, but quoted as if unbiased fact. It's like saying I read an essay on Plato and the author "thinks" Plato "meant" X or Y without ever quoting Plato. I feel the same way when people say, as they are wont to do, that T.S. Eliot said, "This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper." It is true that he wrote those words IN HIS POEM The Hollow Men. He may well have believed the statement, but it is not something he said in casual conversation nor arguably as part of a debate. (Actually, I don't know if he ever did any of those things, but I do know it is in the poem). Rant aside though, many of the people pointing out media bias make the same mistake. Does Ann Coulter makes sure to leave editorials out of her searches? Otherwise she is showing a bias on editorial pages (which is not insignificant, but a different phenomenon). This is not to say that were it possible on Lexis Nexis to exclude editorial there would be no bias, just that a lot of the bias is expressed on editorial pages. None of which would be a big deal if people would read the editorials as what they are EDITORIALS. Ever your servant,

The AOL news page has linked to yesterday's G-File and for some reason AOL-generated email tends to be a bit more, um, heated. Here's a shockingly typical one from this morning:

Sir, you are an arrogant and obnoxious ass. Could you be any more partisan. You are a disgrace to objective journalists everywhere. Take the republican propoganda machine and shove it where the sun doesn't shine. You are truly either the most ignorant jackass around, or you are a hateful. manipulative piece of crap. Either way, your writing is pure unadulterated GARBAGE. Drop dead.

I'm not going to address many of this guy's finer points, but I am amazed by how many people seem to think that editorial and opinion writers are supposed to be objective. I get this "You're no journalist!" stuff all the time.

Bonnie Rait speaks:

.... "The highpoint would be our European tour, to get out of the US and give Europeans a shot at what the rest of Americans are thinking so they don't think we're just all latched up behind the new world imperialist order."

Raitt laughs but she's serious. We've begun by talking about her saying that politically this was the worst time in America in her lifetime. Given she was there in the civil rights era, the Vietnam protests and the anti-Reagan battles that's some statement. It's not just this administration, she says, but how Americans are perceived abroad which worries her.

"I don't think we've ever been regarded with as little esteem as we are now, and the debacle in Iraq and Afghanistan has hurt our standing, economically as well as politically. Domestically what's happened with medical care, environmental protection, civil rights, privacy, and free speech? I don't think I've ever seen it as threatened as it is now.

"Basically Congress has undone 20 years of environmental protection legislation, just slashed it. It's beyond infuriating for those of us who have been working for human rights and justice, for them to undo all we thought was written into law.

"The thing that makes it especially problematic is that there is no democracy without an informed electorate. But if the right of the political spectrum is controlling the ways people are getting political information - and the computerised election machines are being bought by a company controlled by an out-and-out Republican contributor, so there is no way to get into the software to track whether there is fraud or fooling with election results - you've got serious problems for a democracy. Especially if you are only getting one political viewpoint and everyone else is considered unpatriotic."

An activist and ordinary citizen could feel defeated by this but Raitt is optimistic about the Democrats' chances.

"Don't forget Bush didn't win the election," she laughs. "There are many more people upset about the way things are going than is being reported in the polls. I'm not being simplistic, there are polls and there are polls."

From the BBC:

Al-Jazeera editor leaves for BBC
The Arabic satellite TV channel al-Jazeera says its editor-in-chief has submitted his resignation.

According to an al-Jazeera spokesman, Ibrahim Helal said he had had "a tempting offer" from the BBC.

The charity BBC World Service Trust confirmed that Mr Helal was joining to work on a variety of media training projects over the next two years.

Al-Jazeera has been criticised by the US for airing recorded messages from Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.

Since all of those angry liberals were angry with my name-calling yesterday, I wrote a far more sober article about the Kennedy School for my syndicated column. I think I want to do a longer piece on all of this for NR/O.

Q: Were you both active in Planned Parenthood in Burlington?

Judy: We both worked there, while we were residents, but I wouldn't call it active.

Howard: And no, neither of us ever did an abortion.

Q: Why do you say it that way?

Howard: Because I always get asked that.

Q: Why didn't you perform abortions?

Howard: Because we don't do them. They don't train residents to do that.

Judy: When we were residents, we were working there basically to get GYN experience because you don't generally do it on hospitalized patients. And then you start to have a practice without having a lot of GYN experience.

Q: Do you have a moral opposition to performing the procedure? I mean, you're both physicians, you at some point -

Howard: I think that's a private matter between the physician and the patient. I don't have a moral problem, but neither of us is trained to do abortions. We're both internists. Internists don't do abortions. ... It would be malpractice if we did.

Q: Would you do them if you'd had the training?

Howard: I've learned long ago not to answer hypothetical questions like that. Both of us chose internal medicine, so we never had to make that choice. I firmly believe in the right to choose. This is a private matter between a doctor and a patient. It's none of the government's business.

No doctor is going to do an abortion on a live fetus. That doesn't happen. Doctors don't do that. If they do, they'll get their license pulled, as well they should.

Now here's a sobering email from a reader:

Jonah,

I love your writing, but the complaints from social conservatives about NRO are really complaints about you. I love your free style, but you regularly make references to your lifestyle that are not very morally pure (women's prison movies, drinking liquor, etc). Also your language, while not usually often actually cursing, cuts as close to the line as you can.

My impression is that your lifestyle and my lifestyle differ. If social conservatives are defined as evangelicals and those who are comfortable with evangelicals, then you aren't social conservative. I love your writing, but I would never let you spend unsupervised time alone with my children. There's no telling what you would teach them.

I should say that the same thing applies to my other favorite writer, Derbyshire.

My response: That's all fair, if a bit depressing. I would object only to three points. First, that I'm uncomfortable with evangelicals. I simply don't think this is true. If by uncomfortable you mean a personal dislike, a sense of unease or bigotry against them or any other personal or political bias of consequence, I think that's unfair. If you mean that the average evangelical might have different tastes or attitudes than my own, fair enough. But that's true of the average Jew too.

Second, jokes about women's prison movies do not reflect my actual lifestyle too much. No hellcats have been shived in a shower around here for quite some time.

Third, I am an outstanding, hilarious and age-appropriately so, babysitter. And I would think most people understand that even I don't make jokes about hooker and cocaine parties around the kids.

The reason I am a regular reader of NRO *and* now a subscriber to NRO Digital is precisely because at NRO more diversity of thought and argument is presented on your website than any other political website I know, far more than any liberal website I've found.

If I had to pin myself on a line, I'd probably put myself down as something of a moderate, just to left of center. But the Clinton Years ruined my faith in my tendency to give the benefit of the doubt to the left, the bad behavior of Gore & Co. during the 2000 elections sealed it. The fact that conservative web sites such as yours allow actual arguments to take place, instead of just preaching to the choir, has me seriously considering voting Republican in 2004.

If you think you guys should apologize to your more conservative readers for all this, well, that's up to you, but be careful what you wish for.

As Andrew Sullivan has been noting, Josh Marshall has been rushing to make everything Wesley Clark does seem reasonable. I think that's too bad, because Marshall's made a name for himself as a relatively intellectually honest broker. It seems to me that Marshall's confusion stems from the fact that just because you can make something crazy sound sane, doesn't mean it is in fact sane. Rationalizations do not make everything rational. Marshall's current spin challenge is that Clark's been saying things which were clearly intended to mean something very different than the reasonable gloss Marshall keeps putting on it. The other day Marshall explained what Clark really means when he says Bush "never intended" to catch Osama. Clark's referring to the White House's strategic decision to shift resources to Iraq, Marshall insists. Okay. But on the stump, that's simply not how Clark wants to be heard. Why say, for example, that if Newsweek can find Osama Bin Laden the administration could too if it wanted? Marshall surely knows that Clark is trying to out-Dean Howard Dean by holding a massive fire-sale on his own credibility.

As for this newly revealed Clark testimony which Marshall dismisses as "Drudgitprop," Marshall again tries quite hard to make it seem like there's no inconsistency with Clark's past statements. Everything's all so reasonable, Marshall insists. But that's simply bogus. This week Clark suggested that Congress should start an investigation to see if Bush should be impeached for the "crime" of going to war. Howard Dean or Dennis Kucinich get to say something like that. Wesley Clark doesn't.

Even if Clark's 2002 testimony means exactly what Marshall says it means (it doesn't), there's no way you could conclude that it was given by a man who thinks Bush should be impeached if he follows Richard Perle's advice. Clark may, as Marshall points out, have some differences with the administration, but they were obviously minor in the scheme of things. If conservatives had said in response to Clark's 2002 testimony, "See! Clark thinks Bush should be impeached if we go to war with Iraq!" Marshall would surely have said conservatives are fools. But now Marshall would have us believe that there's nothing inconsistent between the old (pro-Bush) Clark and the new say-anything Clark. Indeed, if Marshall believes that Clark would have dismissed the first Gulf War as nothing more than a "war for oil" before Clark started running for office, I think he's hitting the Cool Aid a bit too hard.

The same certainly holds for Howard Dean too. But we've heard all that before.

Those who bet their own real money in the Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM) show Clark making gains that are at least as significant as Kerry. Dean's stock is nosediving, as is Gephardt (who is advertising like crazy in my state [Mich]). IEM has upgraded its graphs to Flash versions, as well.

I think Ramesh should be commended for penning such a thoughtful response to so many complaints, especially so late in the day.

As close readers of this space have no doubt noticed recently, I tend to get agitated by some of the prevailing criticisms of NRO from folks on the Right -- because I often know they are not based in fact: NR's fictional "support" for gay marriage, its "surrender" on immigration, etc.

One comment I hear often from serious-minded people on the Right is that one source of this (mis)perception is the broad disconnect between NR and NRO. So what, they ask, if print NR has run so many anti-gay marriage pieces? NRO seems to take a different position and so many people read only NRO.

I've thought about this a lot for a long time and we should probably have a longer conversation about it later, internally and externally. But let me just make two points on this here.

First of all, from its outset -- and I should know because I was there -- NRO has never, ever, taken an editorial line different from the magazine. In fact, we really don't run editorials at all. That was the deal when I was first asked to build the thing. Any comment on this site which isn't clearly identified as an editorial from the editors is simply the view of the author.

Now of course there are larger editorial reasons why a contrary esssay might appear on our site. And, yes, it's reasonable to assume there's some kind of "endorsement" of that view. But that endorsement is not necessarily agreement on the substance. Rather, as Ramesh suggested, its presence on NRO reflects the editors' belief that the argument made therein is worth hearing, particularly by conservatives. From the begining, we always thought that NRO could afford to be more diverse in its content if for not other reason than there's an unlimited supply of space and a daily quota to fill. Also, the nature of the web and the nature of our readers are such, that we always felt it was an important message to send that not all conservatives think alike. Since Kathryn has taken over the reigns of the site, I think she has done a superb job at maintaining that mission while improving the quality of the material we run. I know that she personally doesn't always agree with everything she publishes, including my own columns just as I often disagree with things said here and in the magazine.

Second, I sometimes suspect that one of the reasons so many people "to our right" attack NR/NRO for its alleged weakness stems from the fact they are misled by the atmosphere on NRO. From the get-go, we thought it was important to have fun around here. We make jokes. We discuss pop culture. We write about what interests us. We reveal that we are humans, not the mean-spirited monks conservatives are so often caricatured as. This, too, stems from a number of editorial choices we made from the outset. But I think some decent and sincere people on the Right misunderstand the jocularity around here for a lack of sincerity. That's simply unfair and inaccurate.

But when you add these -- and a few other -- factors together, one can see how the perception that we are a bunch of glib, worldly, libertarian go-along/get-along Republicans starts to spread. On the substance, I think this perception is debunked very easily. But I'm not sure what we can do about the perception.

"The more I see of this man, the more I see of this leader, my respect and my support just continues to grow," Miller said to cheers, whistles and applause. "I can guarantee you I will not be the only Democrat working for his election."

A few hours ago, I glanced at a few websites that criticized NR from a traditionalist perspective. David Mills thought it wrong of us to run an article by Deroy Murdock that made what one might call the Britney Spears argument for gay marriage (heteros have trashed the institution, you social conservatives don’t object to it, why object to same-sex commitment?) Joe Carter criticized us for running that article, another by Catherine Seipp that argued that Playboy wasn’t so bad and noted that the author freelances for Penthouse, and a third by Jennifer Nicholson Graham that (in Carter’s view) “denigrated charitable giving.”

I disagreed with these guys, but it was nice to hear attacks on the magazine from that direction rather than the usual fare (attacks on us from liberals and libertarians for our socially conservative views). Anyway, a few hours later, as I was about to log off and go to bed, I figured I would check in on Mark Shea’s blog—he’s usually right, and always (I thought) worth reading.

At the top of his blog, I found more criticism of NR. To summarize the complaints: 1) NR has defined some people out of respectable, mainstream conservatism for their foreign-policy views and for (sometimes weak allegations of) anti-Semitism and racism, but never for lack of moral conservatism. Shea brings up David Frum’s anti-paleocon article here. 2) We run articles supporting abortion, pornography, etc., but never anything against the Iraq war or for higher taxes. 3) We don’t think moral/family issues really matter much. 4) We are willing “to overlook--with a few half-hearted bleats to the contrary--the ever more egregious things that Andrew Sullivan writes to undermine the traditional family. After all, he's all for bombing Baghdad and cutting taxes.” The best Shea can say for our moral conservatism is that it's better than nothing.

NR has from its earliest days reflected both traditionalist and libertarian impulses, seeking sometimes to reconcile and sometimes to balance them. People who are more purely libertarian or traditionalist will always find things about the magazine that bother them, or find its philosophy inadequate. That’s fine (or at least an argument for another day).

But I would remind these guys that National Review editorializes consistently and runs articles regularly against gay marriage, abortion, cloning, euthanasia, illegitimacy, divorce, day care, and gender integration in the military. Do social conservatives control so many editorial offices that it is wise of them to attack those allies they have? Is there, for that matter, any national publication of comparable circulation and prominence that has taken these positions? That has argued for the Federal Marriage Amendment as often? On cloning, the Standard might tie with us, but I doubt it.

I think these critiques get a few things wrong factually. There have been articles on NRO and in NR against the war or skeptical about it, although these have admittedly been few. See, for example, anything by Andy Bacevich or Adam Garfinkle. To my knowledge, NR has never read Ann Coulter out of respectable conservatism; we merely stopped running her column after a public dispute about our editorial practices. The idea that Andrew Sullivan is “all for” cutting taxes is news to me—last I read, he was for hiking estate taxes massively. I criticized him for it. NR’s editorials have criticized him a fair bit—and I don’t think he regards that criticism as half-hearted. He also regularly criticizes our editorial line as far right, theocratic, etc. (I will admit that when Sullivan goes seriously wrong, as he did when discussing the Catholic church and slavery, my view is that the appropriate response is to offer a substantive critique rather than to discuss his anatomy as Shea does.) David Frum’s famous/infamous article did not, in fact, read Buchanan and the like out of mainstream conservatism merely for opposing the Iraq war.

But leaving those things aside, there is no denying that the critics have a real difference of opinion with the magazine. That difference concerns the magazine’s editorial line less than its editorial policy. Should we refuse to publish articles that dissent from aspects of social conservatism? I don’t think that is a question that conservative principles can by themselves answer.

Nor can I say I have any great answer to the question. In general, I would say that we should not devote scarce space to articles that make arguments against our own positions positions when those arguments are made well and often elsewhere. For that reason, I probably wouldn’t have run that particular column of Murdock’s (unless we have some agreement to run all his columns). Arguments against tax cuts are not in short supply, either. I’d say the same about arguments for “abortion rights,” and can recall only one recent instance where we’ve run something on the other side—as an aside to an article. An argument that the partial-birth abortion ban violates conservatives’ federalist principles, on the other hand, would be worth running (and worth refuting, as I have attempted to do).

I think there has been, on the part of the critics, a failure of perspective. As for Shea’s claim that NR adheres to a “Mammon First/Family Second” conservatism, or his rather breast-beating declaration that he will stick with “the Faith” rather than with “conservative ideology,” I think that sort of thing should be beneath him.

Since I'm almost alone in here:

I am amazed at such rambling. There is no logic whatever employed in your tirade. Do you actually get paid for producing this drivel. Your defense of this President and his motives is a joke. Why don’t you engage someone with a clear view of what’s going on, perhaps someone who can read, in order to become enlightened. Obviously if you won’t even acknowledge that

George Bush is arrogant, you are exceptionally dimwitted to start. Casting aspersions on Ted Kennedy doesn’t make you seem any brighter.

From a reader:

Jonah,

I want you to know you are ruining a perfectly good googlewhack. (For those
in the dark, a googlewhack is a Google search that returns one, and only one, result).

Right now "feckless crapweasel" is a googlewhack, appearing only in an archived Corner where you refer to Stephen Glass as one.

But now that Paul O'Neill is also one, I fear that this googlewhack is not long for this world.

I am curious how you feel about having cornered the worldwide marked on feckless crapweasels.

For reasons having entirely to do with sloth, I am remaining agnostic on the issue of Sweden's economic well-being until I look it up myself. But I've gotten quite a few emails like this:

Dear Jonah:

Please don't accept TAPped's defense of Sweden at face value. The comparisons
of Sweden's standard of living which show it to be lower than Mississippi are
NOT based on net income after taxes, as TAPPed claims, but rather, on BEFORE-TAX GROSS INCOME.

This means that the comparison to Mississippi does indeed take into consideration government spending on social programs, which naturally come from taxes. If you don't believe me, look back at paragraph 6 in the Instapundit
post you linked to yesterday: http://www.instapundit.com/archives/003594.php

If you don't trust income figures, then look at GDP per capita, which is how
most economists do apples-to-oranges comparisons of relative purchasing power. This includes government productivity. According to the CIA World Factbook Sweden's stands at $26,000, while the U.S.'s is $36,300.

What has many Swedes worried is the long-term drag on their economy of their
high tax rates, a phenomenom that ought to be familiar to a supply-sider. This
is illustrated by the lower trajectory of their income growth over the past decade vs. the U.S., which over time has meant a relative decline in the Swedish standard of living.

Keep on keepin' on,