Writing in the L.A. Times last week, Ronald Radosh said that it’s about time for the left to own up to the fact that the Rosenbergs were guilty as charged and that it’s time for the right to own up to the miscarriage of justice in the case of Ethel.

The left has consistently defended spies such as Hiss, the Rosenbergs and Sobell as victims of contrived frame-ups. Because a demagogue like Sen. Joseph McCarthy cast a wide swath with indiscriminate attacks on genuine liberals as “reds” (and even though McCarthy made some charges that were accurate), the anti anti-communists came to argue that anyone accused by McCarthy or Richard Nixon or J. Edgar Hoover should be assumed to be entirely innocent. People like Hiss (a former State Department official who was accused of spying) cleverly hid their true espionage work by gaining sympathy as just another victim of a smear attack.

But now, with Sobell’s confession of guilt, that worldview has been demolished.

In the 1990s, when it was more than clear that the Rosenbergs had been real Soviet spies — not simply a pair of idealistic left-wingers working innocently for peace with the Russians — one of the Rosenberg’s sons, Michael, expressed the view that the reason his parents stayed firm and did not cooperate with the government was because they wanted to keep the government from creating “a massive spy show trial,” thereby earning “the thanks of generations of resisters to government repression.”

Today, he and his brother Robert run a fund giving grants to the children of those they deem “political prisoners,” such as convicted cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. Ironically, if there was any government that staged show trials for political ends, it was the government for which the Rosenbergs gave up their lives, that of the former Soviet Union.

This week, the Meeropols made it clear to the New York Times that they still believe the information their father passed to the Russians was not terribly significant, that the judge and the prosecutors in their parents’ case were guilty of misconduct, and that neither Julius nor Ethel should have been given the death penalty for their crimes.

On the subject of their mother, the Meeropols have a point. In another development last week, a federal court judge in New York released previously sealed grand jury testimony of key witnesses in the case, including that of Ruth Greenglass, Julius’ sister-in-law. It turns out that a key part of her testimony for the prosecution — that Ethel had typed up notes for her husband to hand to the Soviets — was most likely concocted.

That doesn’t mean that Ethel was innocent — indeed, the preponderance of the evidence suggests she was not. But what is clear is that in seeking to get the defendants to confess to Soviet espionage, the prosecutors overstepped bounds and enhanced testimony to guarantee a conviction. Americans should have no problem acknowledging when such judicial transgressions take place, and in concluding that the execution of Ethel was a miscarriage of justice.

Nevertheless, after Sobell’s confession of guilt, all other conspiracy theories about the Rosenberg case should come to an end. A pillar of the left-wing culture of grievance has been finally shattered. The Rosenbergs were actual and dangerous Soviet spies. It is time the ranks of the left acknowledge that the United States had (and has) real enemies and that finding and prosecuting them is not evidence of repression.

Nothing doing!, say those pillars of the old left E. L. Doctorow and Howard Zinn, who claim that the Rosenbergs’ guilt or innocence doesn’t matter:

“I never was going along saying I know that they were innocent, and I’m not shocked by the fact that they turned out to be spies,” said Howard Zinn, the left-wing history professor. “To me it didn’t matter whether they were guilty or not. The most important thing was they did not get a fair trial in the atmosphere of cold war hysteria.”

E. L. Doctorow, whose novel “The Book of Daniel” was largely sympathetic to the accused couple even as it indicted the larger society, also said that a larger question superseded whether they spied: “It was what happened to them, as if a society turned its magnifying lens on these people until they caught fire and were burned alive.”

This is the kind of thing that gives the left a bad name, of course—first of all with me, and I am, as I never tire of repeating, of the left. But this quote from the same article really takes the cake [e.a.]:

Many who took up the execution of the Rosenbergs as a grievance are reluctant to let go of it. Mr. Sobell, in fact, was rebuffed by his own stepdaughter, Sydney Gurewitz Clemens, an author and teacher. She said his confession “complicated history and the personal histories of the many millions of people, all over the world, who gave time, energy, money and heart to the struggle to support his claims of innocence.”

The truth “complicates history”! Lies are so much better! Especially when they’re about committed leftists.

What moral rot.

Al Gore won an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize for bringing his message to the world—for naught in Britain, where only a minority trust that he (among others) is telling the truth about global warming. Most people believe they’re being misled, and that it’s a tax scheme:

The majority of the British public is still not convinced that climate change is caused by humans - and many others believe scientists are exaggerating the problem, according to an exclusive poll for The Observer.

The results have shocked campaigners who hoped that doubts would have been silenced by a report last year by more than 2,500 scientists for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which found a 90 per cent chance that humans were the main cause of climate change and warned that drastic action was needed to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Bjorn Lomborg took the opportunity to lay blame exactly where it belongs:

Professor Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, said politicians and campaigners were to blame for over-simplifying the problem by only publicising evidence to support the case.

Ya think?

I’m telling ya—influencing people to change their minds isn’t as easy as it appears. And the world ain’t what it used to be. I mean the guy won the Nobel Peace Prize and no one in Britain believes him!

Maybe George Lakoff is right after all, and only propaganda works.

I should probably point out that I wrote more than two years ago about the overhyping  of the urgency of global warming … but did anyone listen to me? Of course not!

You can’t make this stuff up. Really:

Possible Nazi Theme of Grand Prix Boss’s Orgy Draws Calls to Quit

Few scandals in recent years have provoked as much anger and dismay across Europe as the saga of Max Mosley, the overseer of grand prix motor racing who made tabloid news last weekend in a front-page exposé and accompanying Web video showing him in a sadomasochistic orgy with five supposed prostitutes in a London sex “dungeon.”

But beyond the licentiousness of the episode, it was the suggestion of Nazi undertones in the role-playing during the session in a basement in London’s fashionable Chelsea district that led to demands for Mr. Mosley’s resignation as president of the Paris-based Federation Internationale de l’Automobile.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, they say, and they would be right [e.a.]: 

Family history has added to the notoriety: Mr. Mosley, 67, is the younger son of Britain’s 1930s fascist leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, and the society beauty Diana Mitford, whose secret wedding in Berlin in October 1936 was held at the home of the Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels and included Hitler as a guest of honor.

 Naturally, automakers are distancing themselves from this nasty episode and this nasty man. But he isn’t having any of it [e.a.]:

Mr. Mosley, undaunted, tried to turn the tables on BMW and Daimler Benz, which manufactures Mercedes-Benz cars, with a statement that raised the specter of the two companies’ own role during the Nazi era. … His statement held to his insistence that fault lay with the way in which his actions had been reported by The News of The World, and not with the actions themselves.

And the NYT’s John F. Burns ends with the kicker:

If he recognized the irony in the son of the man who led Britain’s “blackshirts” in reproving German companies for their wartime past, Mr. Mosley did not show it.

Perhaps those commentators were right after all when they said that 9/11 signaled the end of irony.

Or perhaps 9/11 will prove to be the beginning of an era when people will once again understand irony, and satire, the weapon of resistance par excellence. One can always hope.

The conventional wisdom of the media elite, crystallized today by David Brooks, says that Hillary Clinton cannot possibly win.

Last week, an important Clinton adviser told Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen (also of Politico) that Clinton had no more than a 10 percent chance of getting the nomination. Now, she’s probably down to a 5 percent chance.

Five percent.

It would be way too tiresome to provide the dozens of links that support Brooks’s point of view. It’s much more interesting to link to the news side of things at the New York Times, where someone is (finally) asking the important question: can a “progressive” win the White House?

Of course the NYT doesn’t frame the question quite like that. Instead, the sly headline writer asks: “Can a Liberal Be a Unifier?”[ e.a.]:

the Obama campaign is challenging the fundamental political premise that has prevailed in Washington for more than a generation: that any majority coalition must be carefully centrist, if not center-right. Bill Clinton ran in 1992 as a candidate willing to break with liberal orthodoxy on many issues, including crime and welfare, and eager to move the party — which had lost five of the six previous presidential elections — to the middle. Mr. Clinton’s New Democrats assumed a certain level of conservatism among voters.

Mr. Obama and his allies are basing his campaign on a different bet: that the right-leaning political landscape Mr. Clinton confronted has changed. Several major Democratic strategists, and outside analysts as well, argue that the country has shifted to the left because of the Iraq war, the economy and seven-plus years of President Bush, and that it has become open to a new progressive majority.

Further down, we hear once more this claim about a new political climate that is favorable to Obama:

[M]any of Mr. Obama’s supporters say he has recognized this new political climate in a way that Mrs. Clinton has not. They say he is ready for a new, self-assured era in which progressives (few have returned to using the word “liberal”) make no apologies about their goals — universal health care, withdrawing troops from Iraq, ending tax breaks for more affluent Americans — and assume that a broad swath of the public shares them.

That’s an interesting assumption, but I fear it’s not rooted in fact. Indeed, the NYT quotes TNR in a most interesting way:

As The New Republic recently put it, “Clintonism is a political strategy that assumes a skeptical public; Obamaism is a way of actualizing a latent ideological majority.”

If skepticism is Clintonian, call me a Clintonite. A latent ideological majority? In what universe?

Currently, despite the party establishment’s wanting to give her (and the centrist voters who are loyal to her) the bum’s rush, she is neck and neck in votes with her messianic Democratic opponent. Call me skepetical, but I say this more or less ensures that in a general election, Obama will be buried in a match-up with McCain. And that when the voting is finally over, the dreamers’ “latent ideological ‘majority’ ” will represent an even smaller but more hysterically vocal minority.

Only by then, they will have (conveniently for their enemies) labeled themselves as a proudly out-of-the-mainstream political party. A neat trick, that.

Ann Althouse analyzes a Rasmussen poll:

Poll results:

“How do you rate Obama’s speech? Excellent, good, fair, or poor?”

30% Excellent
21% Good
26% Fair
21% Poor
1% Not sure

Althouse [e.a.]:

The important break in the numbers is between “excellent” and the rest, and 70% said the speech fell short of “excellent.” This is, I think, disastrous for Obama. …

Asked whether the speech was “racially divisive, unifying, or neither,” only 30% — 30% again — thought the speech was “unifying,” which is what Obama intended it and his entire campaign to be.

Obama’s popularity has been built on unifying us and transcending race. If only 30% of us heard unification in that speech, then the speech and the connection to Wright have been massively destructive to what is the chief substance of his reputation.

 No kidding.

But Althouse gets the last word, because she’s got the best metaphor:

Obama told white people to feel guilty about race just when they’d been so happy thinking that loving him, just him, was the answer to racial problems. When we saw him consorting with someone who seemed to hate us, we needed reassurance that Obama loves us, and loving Obama was enough. But he didn’t say that, and now we’re confused. Our boyfriend was telling us he needs to see other people, and we don’t understand the relationship anymore.

I think we can safely declare that Obama-mania is over.

Christopher Hitchens offers a pretty persuasive explanation of alpha-male Eliot Spitzer’s “puzzling” behavior:

[H]e was a bright dude.

So what in the wide world was Eliot Spitzer thinking?

“Oh, that’s easy,” Christopher Hitchens said from his Washington apartment last week, as word of Spitzer’s morning resignation buzz-sawed through the Beltway.

Hitchens—a former contributor to the Voice—has written the obituaries of more than a few political careers, and he has a theory about the ones with poor coital judgment: They just don’t see illicit sex as an obvious threat to their political survival. In fact, they see it as a primary reason to seek higher office in the first place.

“You wouldn’t be doing any of this if one of the objectives was not to increase the amount of pussy that was available to you. That is what you do,” Hitch says. “You don’t do it to be, ah, the most approval-rated governor of New York, for fuck’s sake.”

Hitchens is a little harsh, but we all know that power goes to your head.
We do know that, don’t we?
Spitzer’s behavior isn’t really “puzzling,” is it?

Hitches, no stranger to powerful men, claims that this is what alpha males say with their alpha-male behavior:

‘I do this to get laid.’

Could be!

Via Ann Althouse, who, having more visitors than I and being more careful of her visitors’ possible sensitivities, provided only the link. Her commenters have some interesting insights, however:

My wife was a lovely young woman with an amazing head of light golden blond hair and an advanced degree in international law from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. She’s been saying what Hitch just wrote here since I met her.

A stint in the service of Your Federal Government, including contact with plenty of elected officials, convinced her that politicians and alpha male types in government generally, have a “high sex drive,” as she puts it charitably. Sometimes she isn’t so charitable. In any event, she didn’t lack attention from the high and mighty, although it didn’t seem to have much to do with the quality of her latest legal analysis of issues surrounding hydro power export from Québec.

An old friend from Fletcher is even more bitter about the international diplomats at the U.N. for whom she worked.

One commenter clues me in to news I haven’t been following for 24 hours—and look what happens!

George said…
[Brand-new New York Governor David] Paterson needs to go, too. Multiple affairs, procuring a job for at least one mistress, tape recordings, possible use of state funds…

9:23 AM

Yikes! The Dems’ heads are going to explode after all of this exposure of their peccadilloes.

Idiots in the blogosphere continue to cast doubt on the gravity of the incident in the Strait of Hormuz between American warships and Iranian Revolutionary Guard speedboats.

The latest installment comes from the HuffPo, in which the New York Times is accused of doing a “Judy Miller” on the incident—namely, publishing hysterical propaganda:

 Two days after the blogosphere had largely unravelled the military’s original story and the Navy itself was starting to backtrack, the paper-of-record felt compelled to trumpet the threat on its front page with a piece titled: Iran Encounter Grimly Echoes ‘02 War Game. (Link.) And then yesterday, more than a week-and-a-half later, The Times not only returned to the subject with more saber-rattling, but with a visual display of impressive disproportion.

In an op-ed piece in the Week In Review by one David B. Crist — ID’d as a Marine Corps reservist who served in Iraq in 2003 — the headline touts: Iran’s Small Boats Are a Big Problem. (Link.)

I have yet to see evidence from any of those crying “Gulf of Tonkin” that Iran’s speedboats in the Strait of Hormuz do not present a problem for the United States Navy.

Instead, every attack on this story (and on the Pentagon) carries the insinuation that our military is just too uptight.

Samantha Power, a distinguished and eloquent author and academic and supposedly a close adviser on foreign policy to Barack Obama, suggests that we “rethink” Iran. Perhaps not surprisingly, considering who she is advising (the King of Hope), her expert “advice” is also founded on hope—and nothing but,, as she herself admits in this pathetic, intellectually dishonest, and useless piece in Time magazine [e.a.]:

A new Iran policy should start with the premise that any country behind a problem can also be behind a solution. No aspect of the Iraq quagmire can be resolved without Iranian involvement. Washington has a better chance of modifying Iran’s influence in Iraq–and Afghanistan, the Palestinian territories and Lebanon–than of immediately halting it.

To do so, we need to broaden the range of policy tools we draw upon. That means refraining from redundant reminders that military force is still “on the table,” which only strengthen the hand of hard-line Islamists and nationalists. It means broadening cultural contacts with the Iranian people, bypassing the regime through Voice of America and the Internet. And it means trying high-level political negotiations, something the Bush Administration has so far shunned. Supporters of engagement should not equate dialogue with concessions. We should ask international negotiators to insist–as we did with the Soviet Union during the cold war–that Iran address human-rights issues as well as security concerns. It’s true that earlier attempts at engagement have produced few dividends. But what negotiations can do is diminish perceptions of U.S. arrogance and remind the world of the urgency of getting Iran to cooperate on issues of shared interest, from preventing state failure in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan to caring for Iraqi refugees.

Dear Samantha Power:

Your candidate repeats this cute phrase over and over again on the stump: that it is stupid to keep trying the same things over and over again and to expect a different result.

Let me remind you that

a) successful negotiators (like, for example, John Edwards) never take anything off the table before beginning negotiations.

b) recent cultural exchanges have led to Americans being jailed and then intimidated after their release

c) Iran has a tendency to change “negotiators” just as negotiations begin to get somewhere (i.e., just as Iran is tempted to make some compromises)

d) international “negotiators” are working against the businessmen in their own countries, who are writing contracts with Iran right and left, now that the NIE declared Iran kosher.

e) “diminishing perceptions” of U.S. arrogance, such as for example Bush’s recent Middle East trip, are a PR exercise in futility. Photo ops and talk are cheap. People the world over are not as stupid as you think.

The Iranians don’t want to deal. They want to rule, with an iron “Islamic” fist—over people who are not interested in their manner of governance.

Stop selling false hope. You are not doing your candidate—or our country—any favors.

Timothy Garton Ash tries to talk sense to Europeans (and other biens pensants) [e.a.]

Europe is slouching towards another foreign policy disaster on the scale of Iraq. This disaster is called Iran. It comes in two variants. Variant one is that the US bombs Iran before George Bush leaves the White House in January 2009. Variant two is that Iran acquires a nuclear bomb. Most Europeans are hyper-alert to the first danger and blind to the second. We should be acting now, urgently and decisively, to fend off both. Instead, we are sleepwalking to a cliff’s edge.

I don’t need to spell out the manifold perils of military action nor, I hope, to emphasise that no moral equivalence between Tehran and Washington is implied. But why don’t we also grasp the other danger? A quarter of a century ago millions of people flooded through the streets of Bonn, London and Rome to protest against the deployment of American nuclear missiles - and even against civilian nuclear power. (”Atomkraft? Nein, Danke.”) Now a fissiparous, unstable and increasingly militarised Islamic regime, whose president has called for Israel to be removed from the map, is deliberately proceeding towards the threshold where it could, if it chose, swiftly take the last step to having a nuclear weapon. Among the probable consequences would be a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, with Sunni Muslim powers such as Saudi Arabia deciding they need their own.

Where are the German, British or Italian intellectuals and peace activists raising the alarm about this? Where have all the demos gone?

Gone to pacifism, every one. When will they ever learn?

Absolutely nothing new. Google News at 8:30 a.m.:

BBC correspondent Alan Johnston is ‘OK’
Gulf News, United Arab Emirates - 23 hours ago
Gaza City: The British Broadcasting Corporation said Monday it has received assurances that correspondent Alan Johnston, kidnapped in the Gaza Strip a week …
Kidnapped BBC journalist’s father pleads for his release Belfast Telegraph
In Gaza, BBC correspondent still missing after a week Nieuwsbank (abonnement)
Pressure grows to free Johnston Guardian Unlimited
Gulf News - Aljazeera.net

And it works.

Having seen just one promotional-stunt clip on the Daily Show, “Unsigned” at Eat the Press was completely won over by the nascent, devilishly clever PR campaign from Al Jazeera English that is obviously designed to win over just his/her type: the young and the hip. (Is it possible that they’re this easy to manipulate? Yes—but only until the next PRopaganda (TM) stunt that convinces them otherwise.)

What an inspired, genius move on the part of the underexposed and under-carried Al Jazeera English network: Offer yourself up with abandon to “The Daily Show” for a long, meaty, hilarious, humanizing clip. …

The segment drove home the point that Al Jazeera is actually serious about serious news, with a pared-down no-nonsense style heavy on actual news content while at the same time humanizing the network by highlighting its employees, and the mission, which has not been overly popular, to say the least

then we get to the fair-and-balanced part of the report:

(and, in fairness, Al Jazeera is sort of associated with videos from terrorists who take credit for atrocities and shout about the glories of holy slaughter of American infidels, which sort of works against domestic viewer goodwill)

Yes, well, there is that … but never mind:

Anchors Dave Marash and Ghida Fakhry are particularly excellent sports. It’s a brilliant, hilarious segment, and is probably the best commercial Al Jazeera could have in this country. An amazing PR coup.

Being fair and balanced and print-oriented myself, I offer this perspective for your consideration—parts of an interview in the Swiss weekly Weltwoche with Al Jazeera’s editor-in-chief, Ahmed Sheikh [emphasis added]

How do you see the future of this region in which news of wars, dictators and poverty predominates?

The future here looks very bleak. …

At whom are you angry?

It’s not only the lack of democracy in the region that makes me worried. I don’t understand why we don’t develop as quickly and dynamically as the rest of the world. We have to face the challenge and say: enough is enough! …

In many Arab states, the middle class is disappearing. The rich get richer and the poor get still poorer. Look at the schools in Jordan, Egypt or Morocco: You have up to 70 youngsters crammed together in a single classroom. How can a teacher do his job in such circumstances? The public hospitals are also in a hopeless condition. These are just examples. They show how hopeless the situation is for us in the Middle East.

Who is responsible for the situation?

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most important reasons why these crises and problems continue to simmer. The day when Israel was founded created the basis for our problems. The West should finally come to understand this. Everything would be much calmer if the Palestinians were given their rights.

Do you mean to say that if Israel did not exist, there would suddenly be democracy in Egypt, that the schools in Morocco would be better, that the public clinics in Jordan would function better?

I think so.

Can you please explain to me what the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has to do with these problems?

The Palestinian cause is central for Arab thinking.

In the end, is it a matter of feelings of self-esteem?

Exactly. It’s because we always lose to Israel. It gnaws at the people in the Middle East that such a small country as Israel, with only about 7 million inhabitants, can defeat the Arab nation with its 350 million. That hurts our collective ego. The Palestinian problem is in the genes of every Arab. The West’s problem is that it does not understand this.

If Al Jazeera English becomes wildly popular with America’s target demographic, it won’t be only a PR coup; it will be the most successful propaganda campaign to date of the Long War.

During the Hezbollah-vs.-Israel war, I was surprised to discover that Israelis were required to have bomb shelters in their homes. Now I’m suitably alarmed but not surprised to read that wealthy Israelis are going all-out in their preparations for a nuclear attack by Iran:

AMID mounting fears that Iran is planning to obliterate their country, wealthy Israelis are shelling out on underground nuclear shelters in the gardens of their luxury homes.

The shelters, which cost at least £60,000 for a bargain-basement version, are built to withstand radioactive fallout, have fortified walls and doors and generate their own electricity and decontaminated air.

Predictably, the Goldbergs are trying to outdo the Finkelsteins:

“The shelter looks like a regular flat,” [Goldberg aka Rakib] said. “It is 2,000 square feet, with a living room, two bedrooms, kitchen, self-powered electricity.”

Rakib’s post-nuclear pad, which can accommodate more than 25 people for two weeks, cost about £250,000.

…

Leading the stampede to the nuclear bunker is [Finkelstein aka] Shari Arison, the country’s wealthiest woman, estimated to be worth about £2.7 billion. The Israeli media have reported that she has already made preparations for Armageddon by building two sophisticated underground structures. One is at her home in Tel Aviv, the other in the garden of her holiday villa in Bnei Zion village.

Meanwhile, the Israeli government’s got some ’splainin’ to do:

Seeking to allay public fears, the government insists that the population has little to fear. “We are aware of all these panicky people building atomic shelters. They’re wasting their money,” said a security source.

“Israel will not allow Iran to build an atomic bomb, and even if it did, the Iranians know very well that we’ll bomb them back to the Stone Age before they’ve launched a single missile.”

Oh, but I forgot. There’s nothing to worry about, according to Matthew Yglesias, who spends a lot of time writing about national-security policy, he says, “frequently criticizing the hawkish urge to blend disparate problems together into a unified ‘Islamofascist’ menace.”

So he ought to know: we’ve got nothing to worry about from Iran. Why, it’s not even a totalitarian state:

The Iranian regime, objectionable though it may be, is a run-of-the-mill authoritarian oligarchy with competing centers of power and some space for civil society.

Yes. And Ahmadinejad is just another “Muslim Behaving Badly.”

Tsk-tsk.

I used to watch Nightline every night back in the good old America Held Hostage days and beyond, when Ted Koppel appeared to be a sophisticated analyst of politics and policy and opened a window into the world inside the Beltway. Now I wonder what has happened to him.

In today’s New York Times ($$), he chides Ahmadinejad for “tweaking” the West (Mr. Koppel’s parents were Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany) and then goes on to make the following suggestion for how we should deal with Iran:

If Iran is bound and determined to have nuclear weapons, let it. The elimination of American opposition on this issue would open the way to genuine normalization between our two nations. It might even convince the Iranians that their country can flourish without nuclear weapons.

But this should also be made clear to Tehran: If a dirty bomb explodes in Milwaukee, or some other nuclear device detonates in Baltimore or Wichita, if Israel or Egypt or Saudi Arabia should fall victim to a nuclear “accident,” Iran should understand that the United States government will not search around for the perpetrator. The return address will be predetermined, and it will be somewhere in Iran.

What a clever notion! We should cede first strike capability to Iran, and if they hit us, well then we’ll just hit them back. Pure genius.