I am up on Bainbridge Island, some of you may have guessed from the less frequent blogging. (I shall return to LaLa on Wednesday night.) But flying up here early Sunday morning I had a few moments to indulge in a ritual that in days of yore was as much a part of my Sunday mornings as brushing my teeth – reading the New York Times. Yes, for some reason (ancestor worship? maybe I’m a secret Shintoist?) I still subscribe to the Sunday edition. So I did what I used to do, stripping the paper down to the sections I like (book review, magazine, news of the week, travel) and stuffing them in my overnight bag for the plane. Actually I was looking for an excuse to procrastinate from writing my book during the two and half hours from LAX to SeaTac.

Well,the procrastination didn’t work. After about fifteen minutes of skimming (mostly in the travel section) I chucked the whole thing out and got to my writing. Much better in the long run, of course, and definitely a sign that I should save the twenty-two bucks a month or whatever it is I am being billed for this drivel. That’s enough a year to buy an iPod. [You already have an iPod-ed. Okay, something, else. One half a Laker seat.]

Anyway, apparently I missed something “brilliant” from that day’s NYT in my rush to get to more serious work – some party line (Zabar’s zeitgeist) bloviation about Basra from James Ganz- their Baghdad bureau chief- who evidently thinks there’s something amazing about Iraqis drinking Scotch. He apparently didn’t read his own paper on April 2, 2003:

NAJAF, Iraq, April 2 – In the giddy spirit of the day, nothing could quite top the wish list bellowed out by one man in the throng of people greeting American troops from the 101st Airborne Division who marched into town today.

Around him, the crowd roared its approval.

But not the NYT. As the years wear on, their voice becomes increasingly reactionary, their profound wish for our failure greater, almost as if as the paper goes down, it wants to take us with it.

Newsweek, however, appears to be just going down by itself.

I had to smile when reading how the liberal blogosphere–convoking in Philly at Eschacon ‘08 under the aegis of, one assumes, the mighty Eschaton–have got their knickers in the proverbial twist at the namby-pamby way the media treats McCain (except when they don’t). The libobloggers aren’t going to put up with this nonsense. They’re going after… wait for this… Chris Matthews who apparently likes McCain “as a person.” That’s better than a lot of Republicans. Of course, there are few the right despises more these days than Matthews. Meanwhile, I wonder what the Eschaton crowd would think of Hillary consorting with Richard Mellon Scaife, who seems to be playing namby-pamby with Clinton. My poor head is spinning here. I can’t keep up with all this. I think I’m going to go call Woody Allen and see if he remembers my mantra.

It would normally be good news for conspiracy theorists that Oliver Stone is working on a George W. Bush biopic to appear before Bush leaves office (don’t hold your breath). But unfortunately the JFK director doesn’t seem to be swinging for his usual fences here, no Johnson behind the Kennedy assassination whispers or anything close: “Stone has said that the film, which will focus on the life and presidency of Bush, won’t be an anti-Bush polemic, but, as he told Daily Variety, ‘a fair, true portrait of the man. How did Bush go from being an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world?’”

How disappointing. Well, at least he’s calling Bush an “alcoholic bum” – not very PC, but we’ll let that go. It has some attitude of a Twelve Step sort. Look, we should admire Oliver for getting financing for his convoluted political biopics (Nixon?). He’s kind of a business genius.

It wasn’t long ago (yesterday) that Michael Bloomberg was being hyped as the answer to Obama’s Jewish problem, but I think the problem goes a lot deeper than floating the self-promoting NY Mayor for a running mate. It now seems Obama’s church has been sending out the most old-fashioned anti-Semitic canards in their newsletter, including the nonsense we have been hearing for years about Israel being an “apartheid state” (shades of the Durban conference). And this was published by the church in June 2007, doubtlessly arriving Chez Obama in the midst of his campaign. (Do his children read the newsletter?) Barack didn’t say anything about it until now. Of course you could just call this all “free speech,” but if such racist bilge came out of any organization I was a member of, I’d be resigning post haste… and this man is running for POTUS.

Just one more point: one of the anti-Semitic screeds in question – with quotations around the ’state’ of Israel – was published over six years after the Taba Conference when a Palestinian state was offered to Arafat by the Israelis and, as we all know, the deceased caudillo walked out for fear he might actually have to govern a country. He launched Intifada II instead. If I were Obama I’d be mighty embarrassed by the rubbish his church is publishing. And now with the current minister accusing Wright’s critics of a “lynching” for expressing their natural indignation toward the retired pastor’s appalling statements, I would be wondering whether my church was indeed “liberal” in any definable sense of the word or simply reactionary.

… is up on YouTube (with the usual comment zoo). I think it’s quite well done, though of course I am not the audience. The voice over sounds like Kelsey Grammer to me, who has been one of the major Hollywood figures on the right for some time. (Amusing that he made his rather large mark playing a shrink.)

Annie Jacobsen’s excellent article about the new religious segregation at the Harvard gym on PJM today raises a lot of interesting questions, but she missed what may be the most important one: Are they smoking Alaweed? [Bad pun. Seven demerits.-ed]

By now I imagine most readers of this site have seen Fitna – Dutch PM’s Geert Wilders’ controversial take on Islam and the Koran. If not, it’s here. I gather several million people have looked at it by now and it’s going viral.

I have watched it twice, once in Dutch (which I of course do not speak) and once in English. I found it better than I expected it to be, an effective fifteen minutes of propaganda. I don’t mean the pejoratively. Fifteen minutes on a subject as vast and complicated as the Koran could only be propaganda. But I found it powerful. Of course the statistics on the growth of Islam in Europe are alone enough to generate a strong reaction, even if you already know them, as most of us do.

I could say you heard it here first, but that would be self-inflating on the level of, well, Al himself, but Joe Klein is creating more Gore buzz in Time today. Of course Klein’s equivocating. That’s his job. As is calling McCain a “flagrantly flawed” candidate. (Compared to Hillary and Obama?) Nevertheless, Gore is beginning to look more and more like a potential Democratic nominee. Another month or so they may be begging for him to run.

I know – if you’re like me you’d rather be “Top Chef.” But just suppose, arguendo, you’d want to be a “genocide scholar.” Who would be your guru, your role model in this day and age? Eli Weisel perhaps… or Simon Wiesenthal? Not in the Minnesota State University System. So who is it? Answer here.

[Shouldn't there be a class action suit around this? Taxpayers are paying for this crap.-ed. I'm no lawyer, but the guys at the link are.]

As you can read on PJ, I was over at the Bonaventure today, checking out McCain’s big foreign policy speech (nothing too new there). Had to get up way early in the morning to get downtown, so excuse any inaccuracies. I know, I know, I’m not as old as McCain, so I shouldn’t complain. Speaking of which, the guy is something of a wonder. Full of energy at whatever Methusalah-like age he is. Isn’t 70 the new 28? He did seem a little tired reading his prepared text, however, but sprang to life… as I indicated in my piece… during the Q&A.

We’re doing a video in and around this event and Cong. Brad Sherman’s counter speech. Bill Bradley and I will be interviewing Sherman. It will be interesting to see how he differentiates himself from McCain. Let’s hope it’s not just talking points…. zzzz…

UPDATE: Although a link on Drudge claims the pastor flap has not hurt Obama, that is only true versus Hillary. Versus McCain, Obama continues to fall. Rasmussen daily tracking now shows McCain up by ten over Obama for the first time.