From Hugh Hewitt’s Radio Blogger:

And so when I’m attacked, I’ll tell you what I do. I always reply, if it’s a slanderous allegation of that sort, impugning professionalism. And I don’t just reply, I reply again and again. I hit back. I mean, people are sorry if they do that kind of thing. …

CH: It’s a blog war. Well, some of your listeners may know of Professor Cole of the University of Michigan. He is acclaimed, at least by himself, expert on matters Shiia, particularly, and he also says he’s fluent in Arabic, Persian and Urdu. And for all I know, he is. But he’s 10th rate, and he’s a sordid apologist for Islamist terrorism, and for Islamist terrorist regimes. And I’ve been on his case for a while. But he recently wrote in a blog conversation group he takes part in, that Ahmadinejead had never said that about wiping Israel off the face of the Earth, and neither had his role model, Ayatollah Khomeini. They’d never said it. It was a sort of slander. So I thought well, this isn’t going to take me very long. And I have a lot of Iranian friends who, alas for them, can’t live in their own country anymore, because of the hideous tyranny there, and who hate people who make excuses for their regime, as they should. And with their help, I was able to show very easily what I had long known, that Khomeini’s statement that Israel must be completely destroyed has been a canonical statement in Iran for a long time. Ahmadinejead was only repeating it. He probably was a bit surprised at how much attention it got, given how commonplace the thought is to him. But that it is nothing but a lie to say that this is not a statement from the Iranian theocrats, and it also suggests very strongly, which is the fun bit, that Professor Juan Cole does not know what he is talking about, in any language.

hat tip: InstaPundit

I’ve set up with my new host. This will be my home. (I’ll maintain the other site as a backup.)

I’m still tinkering with the theme. I like to tinker. I hope it will make your reading and navigating experience more pleasant.
Blogging taboo broken:

I’ve migrated all content-based (as opposed to housekeeping-info) posts over here: I want to have a full archive, and I don’t know any other way to do it. Sorry for the double-posting. I also took the time to fix some typos. Some of the links may not point to the right place, but at least the entries are in chronological order.

Back to full-time infotainment coverage by the weekend. Thanks for your patience.

Let’s play a game.

Guess who said this?

In the 1992 campaign against Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush mocked Gore as “ozone man” and claimed, “This guy is so far out in the environmental extreme we’ll be up to our necks in owls and outta work for every American.” In the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush cracked that Gore “likes electric cars. He just doesn’t like making electricity.” The younger Bush, a classic schoolyard bully with a contempt for intellect, demanded that Gore “explain what he meant by some of the things” in his 1992 book, “Earth in the Balance”—and then unashamedly admitted that he had never read it. A book that the President did eventually read and endorse is a pulp science-fiction novel: “State of Fear,” by Michael Crichton. Bush was so excited by the story, which pictures global warming as a hoax perpetrated by power-mad environmentalists, that he invited the author to the Oval Office. In “Rebel-in-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush,” Fred Barnes, the Fox News commentator, reveals that the President and Crichton “talked for an hour and were in near-total agreement.” The visit, Barnes adds, “was not made public for fear of outraging environmentalists all the more.”

As President, Bush has made fantasy a guide to policy. He has scorned the Kyoto agreement on global warming (a pact that Gore helped broker as Vice-President); he has neutered the Environmental Protection Agency; he has failed to act decisively on America’s fuel-efficiency standards even as the European Union, Japan, and China have tightened theirs. He has filled his Administration with people like Philip A. Cooney, who, in 2001, left the American Petroleum Institute, the umbrella lobby for the oil industry, to become chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, where he repeatedly edited government documents so as to question the link between fuel emissions and climate change. In 2005, when Cooney left the White House (this time for a job with ExxonMobil), Dana Perino, a White House spokesperson, told the Times, “Phil Cooney did a great job.” A heckuva job, one might say.

Maureen Dowd? Frank Rich? Bob Herbert?

Nope.

David Remnick. Editor of the New Yorker.

That is just plain sad.

So claims the hysterical Juan Cole, who is also trying to advance the notion that the sinister threats emanating from Farceur-in-Chief Ahmadinejad of Iran are just business as usual and not to be taken seriously.

Anyway… Hitchens attacked Cole’s pretensions and his apologist stance, Cole retaliated by calling Hitchens a drunk, Sullivan came to Hitchens’s defense and demolished Cole’s argument:

Ahmadinejad is clearly referring to the “occupation” of the entire land of Israel, not just the West Bank, Gaza or parts or the whole of Jerusalem. He sees it as stretching back 50 years (before Israel controlled all of Jerusalem). He utterly rejects the withdrawal from Gaza or the West Bank as sufficient. And he wants the country wiped off the map - and even erased from the historical record. Cole’s rhetorical sleight of hand strikes me as deliberate deception, an attempt to deny the existence of a real genocidal evil in the world that Cole himself knows exists. Why? You decide. But Cole has exposed himself more brutally than Hitch ever could.

The end.

Until the next chapter.

A war of words has broken out in the blogosphere over anti-Americanism.

Despite myself, I got roped into it over at Clive Davis’s blog, and at TigerHawk’s. Roger Simon has weighed in, as have his readers. The conversation isn’t very elevated. In fact, it’s downright depressing.

pride:

Oh, and one more thing: stop talking as if Americans are more virtuous than Europeans

more pride:

We saved them from Hitler. We kept them from suffering the fate of eastern europe. We financed the rebuilding of their countries that were crushed after WWII. We travel there and spend our money while they look down on us and raise their nose. When they travel to the states we treat them like guests while they continue to lecture us.

prejudice:

Obviously, you’re listening to the same siren song as the haters. In your heart of hearts you imagine it would be very comfortable to join them. To cover your ass, you wring your hands, exclaim that you’ve almost given up hope, and blame the victims. You’re not fooling anyone except yourself. You can either keep up the good fight, or you can join the enemy. If you want to be a coward and a traitor to the truth, go ahead. Just don’t try to rationalize it to us, or pretend that you are anything but what you are. We can see right through you.

Ugh.

sense (Jeff Jarvis):

Fair warning that I’m having too much fun reading London’s newspapers again. Funny how I find so much more worth the link and ink.

nonsense (Arianna Huffington):

CBS’ update of the [Anna Nicole] Smith story was given [a] minute and fifty-eight seconds of precious air time — two seconds more than last time — while its coverage of Iraq lasted two minutes and ten seconds. … All in all, not a bad report. But given the comparative importance of the stories, doesn’t the Bomb vs Bombshells balance (2:10 to 1:58) still seem seriously out of whack?

The 22-minute nightly network TV “news” broadcasts are now largely irrelevant. They have lost their influence. No, I don’t have figures to back it up. (TVNewser provides daily numbers for those of you who like that sort of thing and Journalim.org offers a treasure trove of data.)

Jeff Jarvis is interested in fixing the news. (Entertaining the audience is a good idea, as he knows.) Arianna is interested in pandering to her base. (If you’ve only got 22 minutes out of 24 hours, you cannot even pretend to be giving The News. You can pretend that your reports make a difference. Sometimes they do. If enough other outlets pick it up.)
Here’s a thought Arianna should consider:

[Jack] Shafer’s answer… is refreshingly blunt. “Journalists are not in the democracy racket,” he wrote to Lovelady. “They’re not in the game of empowering the populace. They are not social engineers. They need not think out the first, second, and third possible repercussion of most stories they write.”