Here's a bit of, ahem, no spin zone apologism on behalf of Dan Rather:

The ordeal of Dan Rather goes far beyond the man himself. It speaks to the presumption of guilt that now rules the day in America. Because of a ruthless and callow media, no citizen, much less one who achieves fame, is given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to allegations or personal attacks. The smearing of America is in full bloom.


...


That [Kitty Kelly "smear" on George Bush] came on the heels of the Swift Boat Veterans' attacks on John Kerry [related, bio], an ordeal that may have cost him the election. While some of the Vietnam vets had valid points, more than a few of the accusations against Kerry were simply untrue.


Right-wing talk radio, in particular, pounded Kerry and also bludgeoned Dan Rather for his role in another smear incident - the charges against George W. Bush vis-a-vis his National Guard service. Again, Rather was found guilty without a fair hearing. Charges that he intentionally approved bogus documents that made President Bush [related, bio] look bad were leveled and widely believed. It was chilling.

O'Reilly goes on to say he's known Rather for "20 years," and vouches for his integrity.

Well, may be.

But is it just me, or did Bill O'Reilly's jihad against the so-called "smear merchants" seem to begin, coincidentally enough, at about the same time he was being informed of the sexual harassment lawsuit against him?

Several months prior to the infamous loofah dirty talk incidents -- alleged, I suppose I should say-- I noticed that O'Reilly seemed personally invested in the notion that "smear merchants" were peddling "lies" and "slanders" against all the good, unimpeachable folks in the US media. He seemed to be spending an awful lot of time discussing "Stuart Smalley" (his not really cute or funny put-down of Al Franken) and making asinine and self-serving sermons to Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham, branding them "rightwingers" and "smear merchants" who were more interested in sensationalism and partisanship than truth and fairness.

Perhaps I'm just too cynical, but I rather doubt O'Reilly's newfound crusade is entirely principled. I would suggest that he began this campaign against "smear merchants" in order to insulate himself against his own coming scandal, one he knew about but which his audience did not. Now he can claim that he doesn't have to discuss his scandal, because he won't give the "smear merchants" time on his show, and that's a principled position he's strongly believed in for, oh, three or four months or so.

O'Reilly occasionally he does ask tough questions of those who need asking, and he's pretty good about animating America about important issues. I don't get his "Guards on the border" fetish, but I'm thankful for his promotion of the boycott-France movement.

And yeah, it's sorta fun to watch him engage in shameless puffery night after night, opining how this guy and that guy won't talk to them because they're "afraid to take the heat" from no-spin O'Reilly.

But he seems to be tailoring some of his positions to his best personal advantage. I can't take the attacks on Coulter or the defense of Rather, myself.

KerrySpot Agrees: So I'm not the only one.

Posted by: Ace at 08:03 PM | Comments (12)
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It had to happen eventually.

Posted by: Ace at 04:43 PM | Comments (12)
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Keep it up:

The 300 men filling out forms in the offices of an Iranian aid group were offered three choices: Train for suicide attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq, for suicide attacks against Israelis or to assassinate British author Salman Rushdie.

It looked at first glance like a gathering on the fringes of a society divided between moderates who want better relations with the world and hard-line Muslim militants hostile toward the United States and Israel.

But the presence of two key figures — a prominent Iranian lawmaker and a member of the country's elite Revolutionary Guards — lent the meeting more legitimacy and was a clear indication of at least tacit support from some within Iran's government.

Since that inaugural June meeting in a room decorated with photos of Israeli soldiers' funerals, the registration forms for volunteer suicide commandos have appeared on Tehran's streets and university campuses, with no sign Iran's government is trying to stop the shadowy movement.

We have all the justification we need. Now we just need to make the decision.

Thanks to GregS.

Posted by: Ace at 12:03 PM | Comments (6)
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You know the Washington Post didn't want to write this article, but they did:

This election was the first in which exit polls showed equal numbers of self-identified Republicans and Democrats -- both at 37 percent -- erasing what had been a decades-long advantage for Democrats, 4 percent in 2000..... On a percentage basis, he improved on his 2000 performance in 48 states.

Most significantly, in the view of people who suspect realignment, exit polls showed Bush cutting into Democratic advantages with some historically Democratic groups -- especially Hispanics, who gave Bush 42 percent of their votes, compared with 35 percent in 2000. ...

A preeminent scholar of realignment is Walter Dean Burnham at the University of Texas at Austin, the author 33 years ago of "Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics." He was out of the office and did not return messages during the week before Thanksgiving, but he recently told the Weekly Standard magazine that long-term trends favoring Republicans among culturally conservative and hawkish voters came to full flower in 2004, and he predicted, "If Republicans keep playing the religious card along with the terrorism card, this could last a long time."

...

Mark Gersh, a leading elections analyst with the Democratic-supporting National Committee for an Effective Congress, said he does not believe a realignment has occurred, but he does fear that the results highlight serious structural problems for Democrats. In addition to the higher number of Republican-leaning states -- a major GOP advantage in the Senate -- the Democrats are getting trounced in the outer suburbs of metropolitan regions. While these areas still produce relatively few votes, they are the fastest-growing areas of the country. A Los Angeles Times analysis found Bush won 97 of the 100 fastest-growing counties.

"If the Democrats don't do well" in places and with groups "that are growing faster than others," said Gersh, "they are going to be in trouble."

Fred Barnes puts it like this: the Republicans have not achieved political dominance as the Democrats enjoyed throughout most of the post-WWII period. But they have achieved "parity-plus" in his term, equal footing plus just a little something extra. And that, in itself, represents a realignment (albeit one that's been coming for a long time).

The Democrats take a lot of solace in the fact that Bush, an incument during wartime, did not score a landslide. Thus, they believe, they're in pretty good shape in 2008.

But that analysis seems strongly at odds with their pre-election beliefs. Before the election, they claimed -- and they honestly believed, I'm sure -- that Bush was the most disasterous president since, well, either Herbert Hoover, Andrew Johnson, or Martin Sheen in The Dead Zone. If President Bush was such a failure in terms of results, and yet he still won a somewhat comfortable popular-vote victory, well then, the public must really appreciate Republican ideas. After all, Bush had few results to show for his first term.

Bush wasn't nearly as "disasterous" a President as the Democrats believed, but, speaking honestly, the facts on the ground were not much in his favor. Yes, there are reasons the economy is still "ooching" along, as President Bush once said; but it is still merely ooching, not growing gangbusters. Iraq is not nearly the fiasco that Howard Wolfson claims, but it hasn't been a real success, either, at least not since April or May of 2003.

And yet-- Bush won.

The Democrats, then, should not be sanguine about almost beating a Republican President with a so-so economy and mixed-to-bad war of his own making.

Al Gore's administration presided over the greatest expansion in history, and could crow about how "peaceful" the world was under his watch. (We know better now, of course.) And yet he lost-- narrowly, yes, but still, he lost.

If the Democrats have to produce a candidate as charismatic and skilled as Bill Clinton, plus a gangbusters economy and no major foreign policy threat known by the public in order to win an election, that means they're not going to win too many elections in the future.

Heck, any party can win with a Bill Clinton presiding over a supercharged economy. Even, say, the Libertarians. But any scenario less advantageous than that seems to produce Democratic losses.

And that's a problem. That's a big problem.

Posted by: Ace at 01:09 AM | Comments (13)
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Post-Modern Clog is there, camera in hand.

Kinda cool. He was one of the first blogs to ever link me. Now he's got a Sully-lanche for his efforts. Good work, Clog.

Posted by: Ace at 04:13 PM | Comments (2)
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They didn't quite manage to win Wisconsin for Bush, but they did a hell of a job getting the word out about John Kerry's penchant for catching like a girl.

And now they're reborn as Football Fans and Beyond.

With pictures like this

they can't fail.

Posted by: Ace at 09:38 AM | Comments (3)
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Not even the New York Times will come to his aid:

...

Now Oliver Stone has Alexander the Great, the Macedonian tyrant who cut a bloody swath through the ancient world to no obvious end other than, if Mr. Stone's big, blowsy movie is to believed, get away from his kvetch of a mother.

...

As the young marauder kills and enslaves peoples from Egypt to India, Mr. Stone repeatedly returns us to Olympias, snakes coiling around her body and chastising her absent son in a bewildering accent, part Yiddishe Mama, part Natasha of "Rocky and Bullwinkle" fame: "You don't write, you don't call, why don't you settle down with a nice Macedonian girl?" or words to that effect. Rarely since Joan Crawford rampaged through the B-movie sunset of her career has a female performer achieved such camp distinction.

...

This is the costliest, most logistically complex feature of the filmmaker's career, and it appears that the effort to wrangle so many beasts, from elephants to movie stars and money men, along with the headaches that come with sweeping period films, got the better of him. Certainly it's brought out the worst in terms of the puerile writing, confused plotting, shockingly off-note performances and storytelling that lacks either of the two necessary ingredients for films of this type, pop or gravitas.

The reviewer whines a bit that Stone doesn't castigate Alexander enough for being a conquistador, so, you know, he's a bit of a horse's ass. But still.

Rotten Tomatoes Update: Only 14% fresh. Sounds like a perfectly vile film.

Posted by: Ace at 09:13 AM | Comments (6)
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Good for him:

Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric is opposing any delay in elections scheduled for Jan. 30, as demanded by other political factions, Iraqi Shiite leaders said Saturday.

The top American civilian official in Iraq, John D. Negroponte, lent his forceful support, saying elections will be held in January, adding, "we want to do everything possible to create the conditions so that everyone who is eligible to vote in this country will be able to do so."

The office of the Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, made its position clear in telephone conversations on Friday with Sunni Muslim leaders who are agitating for a six-month postponement of the elections, one of the Shiite leaders said.

Over the last week, a movement largely spearheaded by Sunnis to delay the elections has gathered huge momentum. On Friday, 17 political groups, most dominated by Sunnis but also including two Kurdish groups, endorsed a statement calling on the Iraqi Electoral Commission to put off the Jan. 30 voting because of the violence that afflicts much of the country.

I wonder how much of this agitation for a delay is actually due to fears about security, and how much is due to some parties' thinking they're not well-positioned to win in January, and thus would rather have another six months to politick.

Posted by: Ace at 09:02 AM | Add Comment
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You can specify all the checks and balances you like, but utlimately it's only a respect for tradition -- and a regard for the judgment of history -- that preserves a democracy:

Ukraine's Parliament, meeting in special session, voted Saturday to declare last Sunday's presidential runoff invalid, but failed to set a date for a new election, as the country's opposition leader and diplomats in Europe have demanded.

Outside Parliament, tens of thousands of supporters of Viktor A. Yushchenko, the challenger, who has claimed the government stole his rightful victory, cheered and jeered as the debate inside unfolded, broadcast on large television screens set up on the streets.

As the Parliament voted on each of several resolutions, the crowd roared, chanting "Yushchenko is our president!" or "Kuchma out!"

...

The fight over the election - over the country's very future - is now moving on several fronts, each utterly unpredictable six days after the runoff. It has been only 13 years since Ukraine became independent in the breakup of the Soviet Union; its democratic traditions are still being formed, and its branches of power are youthful and largely untested.

On the streets of Kiev and other cities, antigovernment protests continued and appeared to grow.

On the legal front, the Supreme Court is to hear Mr. Yushchenko's complaints of electoral fraud on Monday.

Meanwhile, the Kerry campaign is quietly working to challenge the results of our presidential election, despite the absence of any credible evidence of fraud or erroneous counting.

This is a dangerous game.

If the Democrats want to clean up the election process, they're the only ones holding it up. They are the ones who scream at the idea of voter ID cards; they're the ones who insist that even asking a "voter" for a driver's ID or utility bill constitutes some sort of "chilling" effect on recently-minted citizens.

This is ludicrous. Those who go through our naturalization process are the most aware of their rights as Americans. They spend years studying civics as adults, and know American government better than natural-born citizens. After years of waiting, they are finally told in a big ceremony that they are now US citizens, full-fledged Americans, and of course they are entitled to vote.

Genuine US citizens know they can vote. And merely asking for an ID isn't going to send them running from the polls.

The current situation is intolerable. There is too much bad faith in politics, and neither party trusts the other.

But the Democrats are playing a double-game. On the one hand, they suspect electoral fraud whenever they lose. On the other hand, they rely on those extra several hundred thousand illegal votes they know they're going to receive every election -- and please, don't tell me this is about principle; you can tell who's benefiting from the illegal vote by who wants to crack down on it and who wants to perpetuate it -- and thus will not agree to anything resembling electoral reform.

We did not come by our democracy easily, and we could lose it in a few bad months. Bush won handily this time around; but what if he had not? What if he had only squeaked by in a few key states? Would we have rioting as they do in the Ukraine?

And, for that matter, what if Kerry had just barely won, in a few states known for having high numbers of illegal votes?

This system has to be cleaned up. Democrats have to stop weighing the political advantages that inure to them from illegal votes and instead consider the effect on our democracy if this madness continues. Partisanship breeds high passion, and high passions can only be cooled and kept peaceful if all parties have a reasonable degree of confidence that the results that come in on election day are valid and honest.

And Keith Olbermann should be ashamed of himself. Desperate for ratings and driven by liberal-left lunacy, he's trumpeting easily-debunked conspiracies about the "stolen" election of 2004. Does he actually want blood in the streets in 2008? Or even 2006?

Update: Power Line blog reports that the corruption of the ruling Yanukovych regime is obvious and noxious even to a bond-trader in New York.

That's the same guy. There's some suspicion that opposition leader Yuschenko has been poisoned, and looking at the before and after, I can't say it's a ridiculous idea.

Posted by: Ace at 08:59 AM | Comments (9)
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First the Chilean security service, now this. Can't the man just let the occasional scrape pass without diving in?

Posted by: Ace at 10:19 PM | Comments (3)
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