Things aren’t so hot in Dixie Chicks Land. Their album is doing well, but their new fans aren’t interested in going to see the gals live. And of course they alienated their old fans by calling them rednecks and implying they weren’t cool enough.

Lest anyone think this has something to do with the gals dissing Bush back in 2003, think again:

Other country superstars have criticized Mr. Bush in stronger language and faced little if any backlash. In a March interview with ABC Radio, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill blasted the administration’s efforts to clean up after Hurricane Katrina as “embarrassing” and “humiliating.” Mr. McGraw singled out the president for criticism. Nonetheless, the married couple is enjoying tremendous sales on its current “Soul2Soul II” tour, which is in contention to be the top grossing tour of the year.

The Mesopotamian is in touch with his feelings about Zarqawi:

An arch zombie has been blown to smithereens. You know, I am the sort of guy who gets distressed at the sight of blood and cannot bear the sight of even a dead animal, believe it or not. But you know, I was shocked at my own feelings of pleasure on beholding the photo of the dead face of Zarqawi. I would never have thought that possible. I have never felt this way my whole life. Yet the atrocities and outrages that these pseudo humans, these misanthropes, have perpetrated have engendered such anger, such sorrow, such rage that not even the most peaceful of souls can control their hatred of these criminals. My only regret was that the death was fast and sudden, and I felt pain that the true martyr of our country our beloved Ussama Al-Jadaan could not witness this day which he had predicted and played a big role in bringing about.

Juan Cole is not in touch with his feelings about Zarqawi and Iraq:

There is no evidence of operational links between his Salafi Jihadis in Iraq and the real al-Qaeda; it was just a sort of branding that suited everyone, including the US. Official US spokesmen have all along over-estimated his importance. Leaders are significant and not always easily replaced. But Zarqawi has in my view has been less important than local Iraqi leaders and groups. I don’t expect the guerrilla war to subside any time soon.

There may after all be something to the jihadi seamlessness I mentioned skeptically the other day—the notion that various strains of Islamist jihadis are coalescing around one another.

Austin Bay links to a post from Iraq the Model:

Hamas’s reaction to the death of Zarqawi caused the contempt of so many Iraqis. The printed and watched Iraqi media lashed out vigorously on Hamas, politicians and ordinary people on the streets are just equally angered by some Arabic official and media reactions which spoke of the criminal as if he were a hero.

It is totally unimaginable why someone would describe the head chopping, children murdering terrorist as a hero. It’s disgusting and infuriating beyond words.

So not only is Hamas not distancing itself from Osama bin Laden’s and Ayman al-Zawahiri’s meddling in Palestinian affairs, but Hamas is actively linking itself with the depraved savagery of Zarqawi.
Looks to me like Hamas is not ready for prime time.

Also, I wonder how all this is going down in Amman.

Sara Nelson, editor in chief of the trade magazine Publishers Weekly, addresses the moral dilemma of those booksellers who may hate the message of Ann Coulter’s book. She feels their pain:

Are some of the people involved in Team Coulter—editors, publicists, salespeople—disgusted by some of the things she is saying? You bet.

And then Nelson steps into the no-man’s-land of the benighted:

Are we all nonetheless obliged to defend her right to say them? Maybe.

One of her readers responds:

Does she (Coutler) have the right to say what she does. You say “maybe”. WHAT? Look, she’s pushing a political agenda, not advocating fire bombing elementary schools. If you support the 1st Ammendment, you must logically support HER right to say what she says, even as you dislike or despise it.

Nelson closes her piece by reminding publishers that they have a responsibility for what they’re putting out there:

In the business of shaping and selling ideas, we bear some responsibility for the ideas we choose to disseminate, and the people we choose to disseminate them. So if we have to do what’s best for business, so be it. But I have to hope that at least while we’re doing it, we all wrestle with these questions, and even lose just a little bit of sleep over what and who we’re putting out there.

I guess she forgot about Messages to the World, by Osama bin Laden, about whom an Observer (UK) reviewer wrote:

For bin Laden is a charismatic man of action, an eloquent preacher, a teacher of literature and a resilient, cunning, wonderfully briefed politician.

Another one of Ms. Nelson’s readers adds a shrewd observation:

coulter may be offensive, but so may be michael moore, who sold plenty of books and got plenty of press. do the ideas we shape and sell and disseminate have only to be liberal in order to be useful, or even tasteful? it seems that in order to get anyone in the media to take notice, authors must make a lot of ugly noise, liberal or otherwise. it is all business after all, isn’t it. [emphasis added]

Ms. Nelson doesn’t seem to want to get that. It’s too distasteful. David Carr gets it, though. And I alluded to it here.

I mentioned the other day that when I had a letter published by the New York Times a while back, they deleted a couple of words.

Just to clarify: the words they excised were “terrorist masterminds.”

I was published but censored.

Thus did I become a participant, rather than merely a lurker, in the blogosphere.