On August 16, 2005, introducing a new a new blog, “It Shines for All,” Gawker described its sponsor, the New York Sun, thus:

that preferred small-circulation newspaper of New York’s wealthy right-wing Zionists

That was a relatively good-humored if pointed description. Today, Gawker goes nuclear, referring to the Sun as

a Zionist daily rag.

What gives with using “Zionist” as an adjective and a slur?

On the 50th 59th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, one Israeli has some novel advice for the Palestinians: Let them beat their Qassams into computers.

Knesset Speaker and Acting President Dalia Itzik called Thursday on Israel’s enemies to abandon the path of violence and seek the well being of their own societies.“Our advice to you is replace your Katyushas and Qassams with computers and loving education, the smile of a boy that has a future, and neighborliness,” Itzik said. …

“We hear the sharpening of swords and voices of war from near and afar. In distant Iran, in nearby Syria, in the Palestinian Authority at out doorstep, there still reside fiery zealots of hate-ridden leaders that believe in their ability to harm the state of Israel,” Itzik said in her speech, adding that “the citizens of Iran, Syria and the Palestinian Authority should think twice about why they are so thirsty for battles and blood.“Isn’t the blood that you have already spilled enough?” she asked.

Good question. I’m sure it won’t be welcome from the Zionist enemy.

Oh well.

Well, not really. But last Friday there was a helpful timeline from FishbowlNY, indicating that the virus was released and then roundly condemned within 16 hours:

Wednesday 6:00PM EST: NBC Nightly News went on the air with the video “manifesto.”

…

Thursday 10:48AM EST: ABC says “once that first news cycle has passed, the repetition of it is little more than pornography.”  

Thursday 12:28PM EST: Fox News decides to stop showing the video.

Most amusing is when CNN’s Jon “Danger, Will Robinson!” Klein bails with a cease-and desist memo:

Friday: Subject line of CNN chief Jon Klein’s memo to staff:

 

Subject: Cho video and gun pictures–NO MORE USEAGE!!!

Here’s the rest of Klein’s memo, from Gawker:

* No more use of the Cho videotape on our air.

* No more use of pictures of Cho with guns.

Media Operations is in the process of killing out of the system all vo’s and sots with still pictures of Cho holding guns plus all video of him talking.

The John King package, First Killing Why?, and the Sean Callebs pkg. Cho the Early Years have been updated using appropriate video. All packages are being updated on a per request basis.

The library will be archiving the original versions of the packages, but these can only be run per approval from Standards and Practices.

Howard Kurtz interviewed NBC’s Steve Capus on Reliable Sources, and he said something true but trite:

CAPUS: Sometimes good journalism is bad public relations.

He’s right, but that’s not the case here. This wasn’t journalism. It was unrestrained tabloid sensationalism scripted by a madman and broadcast by NBC to, among others, grannies in nursing homes.

That’s why it was a PR disaster—and worse: yet another body blow to the credibility (what’s left of it) of television “news.”

Everybody’s doing it. I’m not really interested in playing, but what the hell.

I think Cho was a certifiable crazy who was allowed to roam loose in a society that is loath to stigmatize the mentally ill and that has no policy for helping them or for keeping the rest of us safe from their erratic, or much worse, behavior. A law that allows a crazy person to buy a gun without the gun-shop owner being aware of the mental-health problem of the potential buyer is definitely a problem. At the same time, I have seen many, many guns for sale in rural flea markets in which there is no need to show a license before the transaction is made, so I know that gun laws do nothing to prevent people from obtaining guns.

Also: I wonder about the value of the tradeoff. We may have stopped stigmatizing the mentally ill (I don’t think so, but that was the idea of emptying out psychiatric hospitals and ensuring mental patients’ rights to privacy), but by failing to guide and manage the mentally ill, we seem to facilitate their out-of-control behavior, at a big cost to society at large. That someone as troubled as Cho was allowed to live among the other students at Virginia Tech—that professors who complained about him were rebuffed by administrators, who were afraid to get involved for fear of being sued—is a massive, unaddressed problem.

That’s rather a lot to say for someone who claimed to have nothing to say on the subject. Oh well.

Here’s a round-up of more outraged thinking on the subject:

At Pajamas Media, Oleg Atbashian asks:

Good question! Then he goes and writes an extremely tendentious piece about the mindless blame-rich-white-privileged-America-first drivel that’s spewed out by idiots and partisans on the left. [Not helpful at all. --ed.]

Adam Gopnik, writing in the New Yorker, writes the representative pious liberal’s plea—how long must we wait?—for gun control. [Spare me. --ed.]

That great forensic psychiatrist and bazillion-selling crime fiction novelist Jonathan Kellerman says, Forget about gun control and start locking up the crazies! They shouldn’t be walking the streets! If they’re crazy, we should say so and keep them from hurting the rest of us. [He's got a point---a minor one. --ed.]

Last—in a category all her own—is Katty Kay a BBC “presenter” and a caricature of a journalist, who was a guest on the Chris Matthews show yesterday.

Unfortunately, the transcript isn’t available yet, so I’ll have to paraphrase. After she (and the rest of the panel) endorsed NBC’s airing and releasing to other outlets Cho’s “manifesto,”—a position I continue to disagree with,*** despite the compelling points that Jeff Jarvis made on his site and on Reliable Sources yesterday—Kay took it one step further.

Using the lunatic, scripted rantings and ravings of this sick guy at face value (let me underscore this point: she accepted the word of a paranoid schizophrenic as the basis for the “truth” about him and his actions) and proceeded to critique American society, so full of bullies, dontcha know, from a class struggle point of view. Did I mention that Ms. Kay is British? (A weak week ago, she was even more unbearable and overbearing on a different subject; Matthews’s site sucks, though, so I can’t even copy and paste from it—lucky you.)

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*** To clarify: Since NBC has numerous media platforms on which it can release its “content,” I think it would have shown good editorial judgment to talk liberally about the “manifesto” on air, perhaps show pictures in which Cho is not pointing a gun at viewers, and make it available for viewing on the Web. But then I’m just a viewer (though not anymore!)

Michael Cader at PublishersLunch and -Marketplace ($$) says:

Papers all over are more interested in books that aren’t out yet than ones that are in the stores.

Maybe people are buzzing about the forthcoming books because they’re overflowing with potential for juicy controversy (scroll down for the ultimate celeb-scandal juiciness, courtesy of the queen,Tina Brown). For example, here’s a guy who will probably be crucified, metaphorically speaking of course, as a self-hating Jew, novelist Michael Chabon:

“The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” depicts Jews as constantly in conflict with one another, and its villains are a ruthless, ultra-Orthodox sect that resembles the Lubavitchers, reports The Post’s Kyle Smith.

Chabon, who is Jewish, depicts some of his Jewish characters as willing to do anything, including massacring other Jews, in the cause of Zionism.

I haven’t read Chabon’s book, so I can’t to speak to the specifics, but allow me to preempt the expected attacks on him with the obvious argument: Chabon is a novelist, he lives in a free country, and everyone on earth should be allowed the freedom of his or her imagination and/or thoughts (though whether or not you can get a publisher to release them—or whether or not your government allows you the freedom of speech to express your thoughts—is a different matter entirely. Even in those countries where we are fortunate to have freedom of speech, we are not free of the consequences of our free speech: disapproval, verbal attacks, social marginalization, inability to find a publisher or other distributor, being blacklisted or blackballed, or, possibly, worse.).

Also, for those of you who were born yesterday: Philip Roth, who famously had an ambivalent relationship with his Jewish roots, and with American Jews, survived paroxysms of rage and fear and anxiety from some fellow American Jews after he published the 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint (a deeply unflattering portrait of Jews—of one particular Jewish family, that is—and a novel that, perhaps not coincidentally, catapulted Roth into the national consciousness and onto the bestseller list for the first time. Controversy can do that for you. I take it that’s not news to you, gentle reader).

Now for the forthcoming scandal you will be drooling over—I promise:

The most savage attack on Diana EVER

When Tina Brown wrote her devastating critique of the marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Diana in the American society magazine Vanity Fair in October 1985, it caused a furore on both sides of the Atlantic.

Twenty-two years later, Tina Brown will make a comeback with the next most savage attack on Diana:

Now, however, just four months before the tenth anniversary of Diana’s death, Tina Brown has revisited the marriage in a new book, The Diana Chronicles, which presents a more balanced but, if anything, even bleaker portrait of the marriage and its main players.

Via ETP, hard evidence that politics is just that—the greatest show on earth. And proof that at a certain level inside the Beltway, after dark, all of those harsh words rendered in print and harsher judgments barked into microphones are left behind. Because at that level they’re civilized people, you see. (Eric Alterman thinks otherwise—he thinks New York is more forgiving after dark than Washington—as he mentions in this fascinating episode of bloggingheads.tv, about which more another time.)

The photo below, featuring Paul Wolfowitz and Arianna Huffington, *** was taken this past Saturday night at a reception before the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. To read the press last week and over the weekend, you’d think that Paul Wolfowitz is fighting for his very life as the long knives at the World Bank slash him and his girlfriend.

[[ Indeed, he may not survive this attempted takedown. I don't feel particularly sorry for him. I am spitting mad on behalf of his girlfriend, however. And if any case ever cried out for attention from feminists, this is it: an accomplished woman is forced to leave her job, where she's up for a promotion, because her boyfriend, who has nothing at all to do with her work, is appointed the head of the institution she works for. But you would have to put aside other political considerations ("Are you now or have you ever been a Neocon?"---addresssed by Garance Franke-Ruta in that same episode of bloggingheads.tv) in order to come to that conclusion, and I don't see too many people other than sturdy Christopher Hitchens, that noted woman-hater, making this obvious case and standing up yet again for intellectual honesty and a measure of justice. ]]

But back to my point. Here Paul Wolfowitz is smiling warmly at Arianna Huffington, who wrote a blog post just last week titled “Are Gonzales and Wolfowitz the Next to Swim with the Fishes?”

Arianna with Paul Wolfowitz and AOL founder James Kinsey

Left or right, progressive or conservative, Republican or Democrat, hawk or dove—these folks are all the same. Moreover, they are (as is said about the rich) not like you and me. They’re insiders. Their game is about getting there and staying there.

Remember that the next time you feel their intimate presence and read their words via this great new democratic forum, the blogosphere. Not everyone here is created equal. They are not like you and me.
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*** She’s so tall! (Jane Fonda is no shrimp, but look at the height difference!)

HuffPo founder Arianna Huffington with actress, activist and radio host Jane Fonda