So are Republicans “Stalinists” or “cowards”? I wish the Gray Lady would make up her mind.

(Further Pinchurian hypocrisy spotted here.)

If you missed it on Sirius-XM’s POTUS channel, catch the podcast version, now online here at PJM:

• Bill Whittle of PJTV.com interviews Charles Stimson, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of defense for Detainee Affairs, now with the Heritage Foundation. They’ll be discussing Attorney General Eric
  Holder’s decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 9/11 suspects in New York City.
• Pajamas Media CEO Roger L. Simon and fellow Motion Picture Academy member Lionel Chetwynd make sense of the byzantine process of how a film gets nominated for an Academy Award.
• Dr. Helen Smith interviews Jessica Custer of the Network of Enlightened Women, on their efforts to bring increased intellectual diversity to America’s universities.
• Glenn Reynolds interviews the members of the Smart Set, on how the Internet is changing how music is distributed and opening new opportunities for entrepreneurial musicians.
• Hosted — with a NyQuil chaser — by the Vodkapundit; produced by your humble narrator.

Tune in here to listen!

Doing the job that the American media can no longer be bothered with, England’s Spectator sums up the president remarkably well:

Related: The president tells the troops, “You guys make a pretty good photo op.” As Tom Blumer writes, “Let’s See How This Obamism Gets Covered.”

The weekend before November’s elections, Frank Rich of the New York Times wrote a curious column titled, “The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York.”

Apparently, in Rich’s mind, because conservatives thought — accurately as it turned out — that Dede Scozzafava, running for Congress in New York’s 23^rd District was a Republican in Name Only, and they preferred a more conservative candidate, that made them…Stalinists!

On the other hand, it was rather refreshing to see a journalist with the New York Times use the word pejoratively. Needless to say, that hasn’t always been the case, as we’ll explore in the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti, including:

• Thomas Friedman’s love for Big Brother in China and Cuba.
• The Time’s necrophilic 1953 obit for Stalin.
• Walter Duranty: ace foreign correspondent.
• A quote from the New Yorker on Pinch, Punch, and “the other guy’s country.”
• And the Time’s first ombudsman on where the Gray Lady sits on the ideological spectrum.

Click below to watch:

Huh — I must have missed him on the National Review Cruise last November. But as Allie Duzett of Accuracy In Media writes, America’s fourth-ranked cable news channel “is now claiming that Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, is a conservative”:

On November 10, 2009, CNN Special Investigations Correspondent Drew Griffin called Hasan “conservative,” and now that talking point is being spewed again on today’s front page online story.  The story, about Hasan’s search for a wife, discusses how two imams told CNN “about [Hasan’s] conservatism.”  The story also mentions Hasan’s “conservative” clothing choices.

However—what exactly about Hasan is conservative?

Fact: Islamofascism is not conservative, in any way.  Hating America is not conservative—conservatives tend to love their country.  Wanting to blow up America is not conservative—again, conservatives tend to love their country.  Hating people for their religion (or lack thereof) is not conservative—conservatives are not the ones trying to remove other people’s religions from the public sphere.

What Hasan did was not conservative.  Murdering men and women in the armed forces is not conservative—conservatives are traditionally the ones most supportive of our men and women in the armed forces.  Murdering fetuses is absolutely not conservative—conservatives tend to oppose abortion, and Hasan murdered a pregnant woman and her unborn child. And of course, wearing traditional clothing—even Islamic clothing—does not make you a conservative.  While I don’t believe the story meant to imply that Hasan’s clothing linked him to a conservative ideology, I believe the writer could have picked a better word for it.  Hasan may have been religious, but religiosity never makes one conservative, even if that person is a traditionalist within the religion.

This is just another case of CNN’s reporters creating a link to conservatism where there really is none.

Meanwhile, as Kathy Shaidle notes, for a “conservative”, Hasan sure knew his leftwing psychobabble.

Update: Karol Sheinin of the Alaming News blog notes that Wolf Blitzer has also taken to calling Hasan “conservative”:

Wolf Blitzer just described Ft. Hood shooter as “Conservative Muslim Major”. Was he for low taxes? Smaller govt? Tell me more, Wolf.

And of course, CNN is the go-to source for expert opinion regarding conservatism in general. Just ask Anderson Cooper and Rick Sanchez.

Update: Meanwhile, over at MSNBC, it’s “Maddow at Most Orwellian: Murder of Abortion Doctor ‘Terrorism’ — But Not Ft. Hood Massacre by Jihadist.”

At the Corner, John J. Pitney Jr. does the job that AP used to do, before they transferred all of their staff over to research Sarah Palin’s book, and fact checks a slightly hyperbolic claim by the president:

“As America’s first Pacific president,” said President Obama in Tokyo, “I promise you that this Pacific nation will strengthen and sustain our leadership in this vitally important part of the world.”

It is true that the president was born in Hawaii (sorry, birthers), lived from ages six to ten in Indonesia, and attended a Honolulu prep school. But he is not our first Pacific president. Richard Nixon was born in California in 1913, and spent much more of his life in the Pacific region than the current president has. Moreover, while Barack Obama made his career in Chicago and Springfield, Ronald Reagan made his in Los Angeles and Sacramento.

And the incumbent is hardly the first chief executive to have lived in another Pacific Rim country. William Howard Taft was governor-general of the Philippines. Dwight Eisenhower had military postings in the Philippines and the Panama Canal Zone. Herbert Hoover worked as a mining engineer in Australia and China; he even learned to speak Mandarin. Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Bush 41 all served in the Pacific during the Second World War. What they did as adults was perhaps more consequential than what Obama did as a child.

Meanwhile, as far as what Obama is doing for today’s children, Big Hollywood presents:  “The ‘Fourth Graders For Obama’ YouTube Channel.”

Related: And speaking of the Pacific Theater of World War II, as John Hinderaker of Power Line tweets, “Was Truman right to end WWII? Obama can’t say.”

Related: From the Anchoress: “I feel like Brandon deWilde…”

The new show is online:

• Steve’s take on “The Week In Blogs.”
• Glenn Reynolds interviews Fred Smith Jr. of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who cautions the GOP to avoid becoming “Democrat Lite.”
• From PJTV’s “Trifecta”, Steve, PJTV.com’s Bill Whittle and Scott Ott on the fall of the Berlin Wall.
• From PJTV.com’s Veteran’s Day coverage, a short segment recorded on location, during Whittle’s tour of Guantanamo Bay. (And don’t miss Steven Crowder’s report from Gitmo, coming next week. Here’s a sneak peak.)
• An update on the massacre at Fort Hood, hosted by Bill, who interviews Cliff May, President of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Col. Austin Bay (US Army, ret.), co-author of A Quick & Dirty Guide To War.
• From their weekly “Poliwood” series on PJTV.com, Pajamas CEO Roger L. Simon and fellow Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Lionel Chetwynd give their take on Woody Allen’s new film, Whatever Works, and how the Woodman has “evolved” over his decades in show biz.
• Produced by your humble narrator.

Tune in here to listen!

In today’s edition of Best of the Web, James Taranto juxtaposes these two amusing anecdotes:

The author of “Primary Colors” is growing increasingly unhinged, the Washington Post reports:

A debate between Time’s Joe Klein and New Republic’s Jamie Kirchick spilled off the dais Tuesday into a hallway confrontation where Klein called the younger pundit a “dishonest [expletive]” and “[expletiving] propagandist.”

Klein told us Wednesday that he’s not sure he uttered the “propagandist” bit — reported by a few witnesses–but stands by the “dishonest” part.

“Absolutely. He’s a [expletive],” said Klein, 62. “He’s 25 years old, and he’s one of those people who has opinions but no facts or experience.” . . .

Said Klein: “When I was Kirchick’s age, I was every bit as unnuanced about the war in Vietnam as he is now about this war. He says I patronized him. Guilty as charged!”

For crying out loud, Joe, your “war” with a 25-year-old is hardly the equivalent of Vietnam. The New York Post, meanwhile, reports on a scuffle in uptown Manhattan:

A prominent Columbia architecture professor punched a female university employee in the face at a Harlem bar during a heated argument about race relations, cops said yesterday.

Police busted Lionel McIntyre, 59, for assault yesterday after his bruised victim, Camille Davis, filed charges. . . .

The professor, who is black, had been engaged in a fiery discussion about “white privilege” with Davis, who is white, and another male regular, who is also white, Friday night at 10:30 when fists started flying, patrons said.

In a hilarious example of political correctness, the New York Times reports on the McIntyre-Davis bout omits McIntyre’s race, although it does say he “liked to engage fellow patrons on the subject of race.”

We hear rumors, though, that Klein and McIntyre have been cast in a forthcoming sequel to “Grumpy Old Men.”

At the New Ledger, Benjamin Kerstein asks an increasingly reasonable sounding question regarding the current state of Joe’s acumen.

At Real Clear Politics, Sean Trende writes, “You only get to elect the first black President once, and governing a coalition of suburbanites, poor blacks, and upper class liberals isn’t easy. It is hard to keep that enthusiasm up. And with the Jacksonian wing of the party gone, if that enthusiasm dissipates, or if one of the coalition groups becomes disgruntled and starts to shuffle out the door, the party isn’t left with much”:

The historical base of the Democratic Party for two centuries has long been what Jay Cost and I call Jacksonians: Culturally conservative, hawkish, and populist whites located throughout the South and Border states. They began breaking away from Democrats in the 1950s and 1960s – their reaction to the Party’s embrace of unions, blacks and liberals is a story is so well known there’s no need to rehash it here.

But this group remained at least in play for the Democrats. Clinton inherited a coalition consisting of minorities, liberals, urban voters, and a decent remnant of Jacksonian voters in the Ohio River Valley and the South, who still preferred a moderate-to-conservative Democrat to a Republican. This coalition became a majority coalition when Clinton used a combination of fiscal conservatism and social moderation to bring suburban voters on board. This was a huge innovation for Democrats; suburbs like Nassau County, NY, Orange County, CA and Fairfax County, VA had fueled the rise of the Republican parties in those states. Clinton moved them substantially toward his side. This coalition allowed him to win by eight points in 1996; absent Perot and a last-minute fundraising scandal, he probably would have won by more.

Clinton intuited that suburban voters are, generally speaking, culturally cosmopolitan – they don’t like it when you call someone “macaca,” and aren’t crazy about the religious right. But they’re generally not particularly socially liberal either, and are fans of “law and order.” They like taxes low and appreciate economic growth, but like good schools and a clean environment. Having to balance a bunch of spending priorities with somewhat limited income in their daily lives, balanced budgets are the ultimate “good government” indicator for these voters.

Clinton delivered on all of these issues, keeping tax increases fairly small, and balancing the budget for much of his term. In so doing – and this is very important – he re-branded the Democrats as the party of fiscal responsibility, economic growth, moderate taxes, and smart government.

So much for that last idea, Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit writes:  “Obama’s October Deficit LARGER Than Bush Deficit For ENTIRE YEAR of 2007″:

Meanwhile, Andy McCarthy writes that President Obama is playing to his radical leftwing base, not the center, with his decision to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a New York-based civilian trial:

Today’s announcement that KSM and other top al-Qaeda terrorists will be transferred to Manhattan federal court for civilian trials neatly fits this hidden agenda. Nothing results in more disclosures of government intelligence than civilian trials. They are a banquet of information, not just at the discovery stage but in the trial process itself, where witnesses — intelligence sources — must expose themselves and their secrets.

Let’s take stock of where we are at this point. KSM and his confederates wanted to plead guilty and have their martyrs’ execution last December, when they were being handled by military commission. As I said at the time, we could and should have accommodated them. The Obama administration could still accommodate them. After all, the president has not pulled the plug on all military commissions: Holder is going to announce at least one commission trial (for Nashiri, the Cole bomber) today.

Moreover, KSM has no defense. He was under American indictment for terrorism for years before there ever was a 9/11, and he can’t help himself but brag about the atrocities he and his fellow barbarians have carried out.

So: We are now going to have a trial that never had to happen for defendants who have no defense. And when defendants have no defense for their own actions, there is only one thing for their lawyers to do: put the government on trial in hopes of getting the jury (and the media) spun up over government errors, abuses and incompetence. That is what is going to happen in the trial of KSM et al. It will be a soapbox for al-Qaeda’s case against America. Since that will be their “defense,” the defendants will demand every bit of information they can get about interrogations, renditions, secret prisons, undercover operations targeting Muslims and mosques, etc., and — depending on what judge catches the case — they are likely to be given a lot of it. The administration will be able to claim that the judge, not the administration, is responsible for the exposure of our defense secrets. And the circus will be played out for all to see — in the middle of the war. It will provide endless fodder for the transnational Left to press its case that actions taken in America’s defense are violations of international law that must be addressed by foreign courts. And the intelligence bounty will make our enemies more efficient at killing us.

Clinton’s first two years in office were nearly as bad as Obama’s first year has been; it was only the election of a center-right GOP to both houses of Congress that curbed his excesses. But at least he had actual executive experience as governor before winning the White House. Obama has had none, and his lack of experience, and inability to make decisions, is beginning to snowball against him, and badly.

I spoke too soon. What could wrong in Manhattan? Well, guess who’s stopping by Fun City for a trial:  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed:

U.S. prosecutors plan criminal trials for five men accused of orchestrating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, and military tribunals for five others held at the Guantanamo Bay prison.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, self-described mastermind of the attacks, and four others will be tried in New York federal court. Attorney General Eric Holder said Friday he expects to order prosecutors to seek the death penalty in the five cases.

Five other detainees held at the prison, including Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, alleged to have planned the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, will be tried in revamped military commissions, the Justice Department announced.

The prisoners won’t be transferred for weeks because of a law requiring at least 45 days notice to Congress before prisoner transfer from Guantanamo. Once brought to the U.S., the detainees will be held at the federal prison in New York.

Yet another reason why, as we begin to look back at the incredible clusterfarg that’s been 2009, the first year of the real life version of The West Wing has been even more improbable than its Hollywood counterpart, the Baseball Crank writes:

It’s impossible, really, to caricature this White House; even Josiah Bartlett didn’t run through this many liberal stereotypes in his first season. Obama needs new writers. Blow up the World Trade Center and kill 3,000 Americans? Jail! Don’t buy health insurance? Jail! Win the Nobel Prize for doing jack squat. Travel to Copenhagen to beg and grovel unsuccessfully for the Olympics, and pledge to go visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but blow off traveling to Berlin to commemorate the victory of freedom over Communism (then give a tepid speech on the subject that refuses to acknowledge Ronald Reagan). Commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland by unilaterally abandoning missile defense installations in Poland. Insult and disdain one faithful ally after another – Britain, India, Israel, Poland, Colombia, you name it – and cozy up to our enemies, with nothing to show for it – nothing to show for anything he’s done in foreign affairs. All but ignore democratic protests in Iran while supporting an illegal effort by Honduras’ president to stay on beyond the end of his term. Suddenly complain about corruption and electoral fraud in Afghanistan, while seeking the favor of Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadenijad and Vladimir Putin – heck, Obama endorsed half a dozen people in Chicago more corrupt than Hamid Karzai. On and on and on we go, with President Apology constantly straining to run down his country’s record and talk up the propagandized view of history of its enemies. He’s taken more time to “evaluate” General McChrystal’s recommendations about Afghan policy than it took George W. Bush to invade Afghanistan and capture Kabul after September 11. It would be funny if it wasn’t tragically stupid and bound to get people killed. There is no mistake of our past that Obama is unwilling to remake.

If there’s an upside to all this, after months of watching KSM up close, even liberal New Yorkers may be ready to give Dick Cheney a medal.

Ed Morrissey rhetorically asks, “What do we get from having the 9/11 plotters tried in criminal court in New York City?”

Well, we get to have the city painted as a big, bright target for terrorist action during the entirety of the trial.  Thanks to press coverage, which should be an order of magnitude more obsessive than the OJ Simpson trial in LA fourteen years ago, jihadists will come out of the woodwork to make a big international splash, or more likely a boom.  We also give KSM and his cohorts a big, juicy media platform for their bile.  That was one of their motivations for conducting the attack in the first place, and we finally get to deliver it to them.

Read the whole thing.

Update: “Ask yourself this question: suppose that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s trial results in an acquittal or a hung jury. Would the Obama administration really let him go? If so, they are crazy. If not, why are they holding the trial?”

Loop the Obamöbius loop!

“One bright spot, in the Vietnam avoidance agenda. Remember how they accused LBJ of picking targets from the Oval Office? Can’t accuse Obama of that. He’s actively not picking targets from the Oval Office.”

– Jules Crittenden, “Advance To The Rear!”

Related: “I reject your reality, and substitute my own!”

Update (11/13/09): “Ed, Jules, you may not be getting it yet: our whole flipping country Is The Target.”

After today’s KSM in NYC abortion-in-waiting, I’m inclined to believe it.

Jennifer Rubin links to a Washington Post item on the curious lettering found on Major Nidal Hasan’s business cards. You can see one in detail in this photo from yesterday’s Dallas Morning News photo spread on the contents of Hasan’s apartment:

Click photo to enlarge; Jennifer writes:

The Washington Post reports that Major Nadal Hasan’s apartment contained some business cards imprinted as follows:

Behavioral Health — Mental Health — Life Skills

Nidal Hasan, MD, MPH

SoA(SWT)

Psychiatrist

The Post explains: “SoA refers to ’soldier of Allah’ or ’slave of Allah,’ and ‘SWT’ to an Arabic phrase meaning ‘glory to him, the exalted.’” Sometimes there is simply no way to explain away reality.

Indeed; related thoughts on Hasan’s business card from Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs, who has another photo of one of the cards.

Oh, and by the way, the Dallas Morning News also photographed a now-empty blister pack they also found in Hasan’s apartment that previously contained a LaserMax gun-sight:

Montel is ready to party like it’s 1942! “Montel Williams Suggests Ft. Hood Shooting Could Cause Massive Internment, Like Japanese Under FDR.”

Uh-huh. Still though, Time magazine warned us that President Obama was the second coming of FDR…

For those who are wondering why an army base of all places is, effectively, a gun-free zone, the Washington Times notes its origins:

Among President Clinton’s first acts upon taking office in 1993 was to disarm U.S. soldiers on military bases. In March 1993, the Army imposed regulations forbidding military personnel from carrying their personal firearms and making it almost impossible for commanders to issue firearms to soldiers in the U.S. for personal protection. For the most part, only military police regularly carry firearms on base, and their presence is stretched thin by high demand for MPs in war zones.

Because of Mr. Clinton, terrorists would face more return fire if they attacked a Texas Wal-Mart than the gunman faced at Fort Hood, home of the heavily armed and feared 1st Cavalry Division. That’s why a civilian policewoman from off base was the one whose marksmanship ended Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s rampage.

Everyone wants to keep people safe – and no one denies Mr. Clinton’s good intentions. The problem is that law-abiding good citizens, not criminals, are the ones who obey those laws. Bans end up disarming potential victims and not criminals. Rather than making places safe for victims, we unintentionally make them safe for the criminal – or in this case, the terrorist.

The wife of one of the soldiers shot at Fort Hood understands all too well. In an interview on CNN Monday night, Anchor John Roberts asked Mandy Foster how she felt about her husband’s upcoming deployment to Afghanistan. Ms. Foster responded: “At least he’s safe there and he can fire back, right?”

Mayor Daley could not be reached for comment.

Jonah Goldberg spots this story in the Washington Post:

The Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people last week at Fort Hood, Tex., did not formally seek to leave the military as a conscientious objector or for any other reason, an Army official said, despite claims by one of his relatives that he had done so.

It is unclear whether Maj. Nidal M. Hasan made informal efforts to leave through contacts with his immediate superiors, and if so how his chain of command at lower levels might have responded to such efforts.

But any formal request by Hasan to separate early would have been submitted to the Department of the Army, according to the official, who saw Hasan’s file before it was recently sealed by Army investigators. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case publicly.

In 2007, addressing other physicians at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Hasan said that to avoid “adverse events” the military should allow Muslim soldiers to be released as conscientious objectors instead of fighting in wars against other Muslims. At the time of the shooting, Hasan was about to be deployed to Afghanistan, officials have said.

Even if Hasan had sought to quit the Army over his opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as his aunt has said he did, the Army almost certainly would have denied any such request, senior Army officials said. Hasan had a continuing obligation because the Army had provided him with medical training.

Still though, never forget, as ABC breathlessly claims, “Plight of Muslim Soldiers Toughest Since Japanese-Americans in WWII.”

While the legacy media continues to pussyfoot around Malik Hasan’s action’s, Austin Bay doesn’t mince words: “One word aptly describes Ft. Hood mass murderer Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan: traitor”:

Traitor is a tough word. It doesn’t smudge and squish. “Traitor” draws a hard line, one that sharply divides essential life-determining values and marks a defining personal choice between the profound and the profane.

There is no question that the accusation of treason, like accusations involving its kin terms sedition and betrayal, has been grossly abused.

Self-styled mainstream journalists with no regard for the awful moral weight and terrible consequences of the actual act of sedition heedlessly employ the accusation as a word weapon to thwart discomfiting political criticism. For example, Time Magazine’s Joe Klein wrote this past Oct. 23 that “some of” what Fox News presents (”peddles” was Klein’s verb) “borders on sedition.”

Klein’s rash innuendo (so indicative of people who live in a relatively safe world protected by cops and soldiers) is lightweight prostitution compared to the thoroughly dirty work of the hard left propagandists at MoveOn.org, who all but called Gen. David Petraeus a traitor.

I am referring to the infamous ad of Sept. 10, 2007, titled “GENERAL PETRAEUS OR GENERAL BETRAY US?” For $65,000 (a discount rate), The New York Times obliged MoveOn’s smear in cold type. To be a traitor was to disagree with MoveOn.org over not simply how to fight to win the war in Iraq but to fight it at all.

MoveOn whined that it was exercising freedom of speech, but that corrupt outfit was operating in the grand tradition of Sen. Joe McCarthy, architect of the 1950s Senate “McCarthy Hearings,” which investigated alleged communist infiltration of American institutions. Tail Gunner Joe practiced destructive public smearing (cloaked in the name of patriotism) to advance his own personal power.

We now call this vicious excess McCarthyism. President Dwight Eisenhower hammered McCarthy when the senator alleged the military was filled with traitors. Ike exercised more than the power of the presidency, he had the moral authority of a bona fide war hero.

Indeed, accusations of treason and sedition by irreparably bad actors like McCarthy and MoveOn have grotesquely scarred the terms.

With Hasan, however, we move well beyond accusation. Hasan committed an act of treason. Count the bodies, dead and wounded, for they are harsh facts, and they are the consequences.

Meanwhile, as far as the MSM, “They hear what they want to hear”, Tim Blair notes, citing two examples of the MSM twisting quotes to help push the Narrative.

Dubbing Al Gore “The Thinking Man’s Thinking Man”, Newsweek has yet another of its unintentionally ironic headlines.  (At least we think the irony is unintentional, although Conquest’s Third Law is always a potential factor.)

And while we won’t say a word about the inherent sexism in the headline coming from such an archliberal publication, at Newsbusters, Tim Graham writes:

Permit a late word or two on Newsweek’s thoroughly in-the-tank cover story for Al Gore. Sharon Begley oozed about Gore’s favorite quote in his book – but never seems to note that Gore’s “philosopher” expert is a Marxist. It comes near the very end of the piece:

His favorite quote in [his new book] Our Choice is from the philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903–1969): “The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power … has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.”

Adorno, and his colleagues in what is called the “Frankfurt School,” are Marxists. Al Gore and his liberal admirers in the press (see this Seattle Times dispatch) aspire to make it through Adorno’s impenetrable prose. British journalist Alastair McKay brightly reported that in Scotland in 2006, Gore lauded the entire school of Marxists:

“After World War Two there were a group of very thoughtful, humane, decent philosophers – Germans – who were so horrified, humiliated, shamed by what had happened in Germany that they became what is known as the Frankfurt School – Jurgen Habermas is probably the best known.

They devoted themselves over decades to exploring the question: what in the hell happened? And one of them, a philosopher named Theodore Adorno – conducted a philosophical autopsy of the Weimar and the emergence of the Third Reich. And he identified the first significant symptom of their descent into hell. He said this: ‘All questions of fact became questions of power’.

Gore’s entire construction of the global-warming debate is between reason (that’s the we’re-almost-roasted-marshmallows doom) and unreason, superstition, and capitalist propaganda (that’s conservatives). We face a “democracy crisis” because people have failed so far to bow to his genius. After a windy account of how the Enlightenment and the printing press allowed a new “rule of reason,” Gore launched into an attack on television for ruining democracy:

“The information ecology defined by the printing press was displaced 40 ears ago in my country by the television, and it’s now so dominant that the average American watches television for four hours and 39 minutes a day. It has a quasi-hypnotic effect [It certainly did on Al -- he launched his own little-watched TV channel in 2005 -- Ed], and the internet’s a great source of hope and it replicates that meritocracy of ideas but it does not have that hypnotic effect that television has.

“I see the internet as a source of hope. To use the Star Wars analogy, the rebellion is alive and well on the internet on some far galaxy, connected to ours, and it is growing, and I do believe that it is changing the operation of our political dialogue, democratising it, opening it up, so that questions of fact become questions of truth instead of power, so that there’s not censorship of global warming studies.”

Notice how Gore is always making conservatives into the unspeakable evil in his analogies: the Nazis, in the Frankfurt School analogy, and Darth Vader’s forces in the Star Wars analogy. Press him, and he denies the analogy is exact; but that’s how he wants his liberal allies to feel about themselves, that they are the anti-Nazi Skywalkers in this perilous ecological era, fighting “the Assault on Reason.”

Apropos of nothing, I wonder if Gore, who spent time in South Vietnam as a young U.S. Army journalist realizes that he’s rooting for George Lucas’s sci-fi stand-ins for the NVA?

And the Frankfurt School? Why does that name ring a bell? Oh yeah…

(If you’re pressed for time, scroll about six minutes into their appearance in Bill Whittle’s must-watch video from late August.)

Update: Thomas Sowell recently wrote, “ My first column, more than 30 years ago, was titled ‘The Profits of Doom.’ Recent news stories about the millions of dollars that Al Gore has made out of his ‘global warming’ hysteria suggest that some things haven’t changed much in three decades.” Meanwhile, George Will wonders if there now exists a “Bad Climate for Global Worriers.”

“D.C.-area sniper John Allen Muhammad executed”, AP reports:

The mastermind of the 2002 sniper attacks that killed 10 in the Washington, D.C., region has been executed.

A prison spokesman says John Allen Muhammad died by injection at 9:11 p.m. Tuesday at Greensville Correctional Center.

And of course, much like the monolith in 2001, the origin and purpose of Muhammad’s attacks is still a total mystery — at least to the MSM.

Jonah Goldberg writes, “After the September 11 attacks, we had the 9/11 Commission and countless knock-off studies, committees, investigations, hearings, journalistic exposés, and outings of fact-finders. The lesson from all of them was that in order to make sure ‘this never happens again,’ we must get better at connecting the dots.”

Until we all go back to sleep, and resume the mindset of better screwed than rude:

“As a senior-year psychiatric resident at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Maj. Nidal M. Hasan was supposed to make a presentation on a medical topic of his choosing as a culminating exercise of the residency program,” reports the Washington Post.

Hasan went a different way. He opted to give a bizarre PowerPoint presentation in which he defended suicide bombing, explaining that non-believers should be beheaded, be burned alive, and have boiling oil poured down their throats (presumably not in that order). He argued that all Muslims should be discharged from the military.

One slide concluded: “We love death more then [sic] you love life!”

According to the Post, the medical staff in attendance was deeply disturbed by the incident. But there’s apparently no record of anyone’s reporting it to authorities. That would be insensitive and discriminatory.

The following year, intelligence officials discovered that Hasan had been sending e-mails to Anwar al-Aulaqi, a prominent American-born radical cleric now based in Yemen with ties to al-Qaeda.

The FBI concluded it was no big deal and dropped the matter. “Investigators,” reports the Post, “said Hasan’s e-mails were consistent with the topic of his academic research and involved some social chatter and religious discourse.”

Ah yes, his “academic research,” which was laid out so rigorously in his PowerPoint presentation.

Hasan also reportedly expressed joy over the murder of an Army recruiter in Arkansas. His views were not a secret to his colleagues, nor apparently to his patients, whom he tried to proselytize.

Maybe the e-mails seemed innocuous enough. Maybe.

But you know, I’ve been interviewed by the FBI a few times as part of routine background checks for friends and colleagues seeking government jobs. The G-Men ask all sorts of probing questions. If a friend of mine supported suicide bombings and attacks on American soil, I think it would have come up.

When my wife was up for a job at the Justice Department, her background-checker grilled her relentlessly over the fact she once had a reduction in her rent by $100 a month. It was as if this proved she had a gambling problem, or credit issues, or was a sleeper agent for the Bulgarian KGB or something.

Apparently, the FBI’s investigation of Hasan was not that thorough. When the FBI “investigated,” it seems they went looking for a reason not to investigate — and they found it.

No dots there. Johnell Bryants everywhere.

If Bryant’s name understandably doesn’t ring a bell, click over to the beginning of Jonah’s essay; and check out this Mark Steyn column from 2005 referencing her role in, as he put it, “the defining encounter of the age.”

Related: Patrick Poole explains, “Why There Will Be More Military Base Shootings”:

I was giving a briefing on Islamic radicalization and current domestic terror threats at a military conference earlier this year when I was approached afterward by an Army colonel who asked exactly what could be done to counter such threats. He was taken aback when I replied, “The military can’t and won’t do what it needs to about jihadism, and we are going to see body bags coming out of our recruiting centers and military bases for the foreseeable future.”

Read the whole thing.

Iowahawk has a superb mock headline roundup of how the legacy media is (depending upon your point of view) either covering Nidal Hasan, or would prefer to be covering him.

Update: Whoops — I missed this line in Iowahwk’s spot-on parody of Time magazine: “Hasan was a psychiatrist whom the Army desperately needed to help tend to the mental wounds of two wars.”

Sorry, my bad; that’s from the real Time magazine. But we knew that already, right?

Update: “Yes, it is Onion day in America, as the absurdities pile up.”