Applebaum; the buck stops with BP?

“Never confuse movement with action.” – Ernest Hemmingway

Frau Fraud

Almost every time you read an Applebaum column in the Washington Post, you will be reminded that the author is a conservative. Such clues are necessary because, unlike Charles Krauthammer, you would never know from reading Annie's copy. Applebaum is in danger of giving tokenism and affirmative action a bad name.

Indeed, Ms. Applebaum reads more like E.J. Dionne on a bad hair day. Take her recent contribution, "The oil spill isn't Obama's Katrina,"(Wash Post, 15 June) where she absolves the administration for the accident and its consequences. With such reasoning Ms. Applebaum qualifies for an "s--t (rhymes with twit) happens" tee shirt, or maybe a bumper sticker that reads; THE BUCK STOPS WITH BP.

More than a few facts are ignored or distorted in Ms. Applebaum’s argument. First, the accident wasn’t a spill; it was a blowout (aka leak). Second, Katrina was an "act of God," as lawyers are wont to say, and the blowout was man-made. Thirdly, if you give government, at any level, an excuse to do nothing - it will do nothing. A fourth feature of the problem, overlooked by Applebaum, is that federal restrictions in safe areas have pushed oil seekers to deeper waters where the hazards are greater.

Nonetheless, the Oval Office response to the Gulf disaster from the start was too little and way too late. The initial posture was "not our problem," and a storm of invective was hurled at the most visible industry culprit. In fact, there were several industries and a host of government culprits including the Minerals Management Service (MMS). When the MMS chief, Elizabeth Birnbaum, was fired; the President either did not know, or lied, about the firing to a room full of complicit journalists. If the government could do nothing, why fire the hapless Ms. Birnbaum?

Instead of marshaling every resource, foreign and domestic, to manage the damage, political and Press nitwits insisted on quibbling for two months about estimates of the "flow," as if they didn't know that precise flow could only be known once the flow was captured. Here we have a legitimate Katrina flashback. Remember those early Press casualty estimates; those 10,000 Katrina dead that never materialized?

The disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is a case study of a flawed model of governance. Like all liberal or socialist models, the internal contradictions are insurmountable. On the one hand, the statist argues for more government hands in every detail of life - until government fails; and then he blames everyone except the “managers” feeding at the public trough.

The knee jerk reaction of the Oval Office to the Gulf disaster was to point fingers and look backwards. Somehow, even after years in power, four if you count a Democrat Congress, the previous administration is still blamed for all of our ills. The "blame Bush" irredentism is a creepy echo of Communist era paranoia when totalitarian failures were laid at the feet of Imperialists and counter revolutionaries.

The excuse making of Ms. Applebaum and like minded apologists does nothing but resurrect all the original doubts about a politician who was thought to be a callow amateur; an inexperienced, empty suit with a good rap. The "community organizer" model is one that sees management as a public relations problem; i.e. you manage the crisis by controlling the spin.

The drilling embargo announced shortly after the blowout is illustrative. Before the explosion, the White House was for more drilling, after the accident, a moratorium was announced - natural disaster would now be compounded by economic suicide. Halting new drilling is like shooting the wounded. What's next, grounding every airline after the another crash?

Stephen Chu’s resume is another swirl in the spin cycle. The White House seeks to reassure a skeptical public by mentioning the Energy Secretary’s Nobel Prize at every opportunity. Mentioning Chu’s physics prize does nothing but illuminate his lack of experience as a crisis manager or drilling engineer. Dr. Chu’s prize is about as relevant to the Gulf problem as Mr. Obama’s prize was to world peace. Credentials may be necessary, but they are never sufficient.

Ms. Applebaum, like the White House, seems oblivious to the big picture; that is how to achieve energy independence and minimize risk. There are no risk free solutions and there are no silver bullets either; there are only painful trade offs. Most hobby horse technologies amount to expensive wishful thinking while proven solutions like nuclear power languish because of opposition from the left. The same “progressive” factions that oppose safe shallow water exploration and safe drilling on federal lands are also anti-nuclear.

So again the nation is in peril because politicians can not overcome ideological or obstructionist partisans. The true villains in the Gulf disaster are vacuums; a want of political leadership and a lack of legislative courage.

Anne Applebaum is correct about one thing; the Gulf oil blowout is not another hurricane; it's much worse by orders of magnitude. The White House and Congress are hurling charges about a "reckless" oil industry in the vain hope that nobody notices the public servants who continue to posture and dither at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

It is more dangerous to work on a drill rig or a deep sea fishing boat than it is to serve in combat. The risks and sacrifices of oil workers are seldom noted by politicians or industry critics. Death by fire is a horrible end.

Until the blowout, BP was one of the most successful companies of modern times. Would that public services of any sort be half as productive or competent. Big enterprises, like BP, create jobs and wealth; big government consumes wealth and often smothers enterprise. It is obscene for any politician to suggest that safety is not a constant concern of those who take the risks as a condition of their employment.

BP has lost half its market value since the accident; were governments to shrink comparably when they fail, taxpayers might be better served. The problem with our notion of “public servants” is that only half of the phrase is true.

Ms. Applebaum's brand of journalistic agnotology recently won a Pulitzer Prize, a tribute which should put to rest any doubts about her politics. Indeed, she and fellow laureate, Janet Cooke, now share the same pedestal and similar fantasies.

_______________________________

This article originally appeared in the 22 June 10 edition of Family Security Matters.

Those Troublesome Jews

Charles Krauthammer
Washington Post

Some truth for a change.

A timely tale (Wash Post, 4 June 10), well told, Charles. Little room for optimism left. I used to think of Israel as the canary in the coal mine, now the metaphor might be changed to sacrificial lamb. Unfortunately, Israel may be the price we pay for our next wake up call. Were I an American Jew, I would be nervous; were I an Israeli, I might think about putting my head between my legs and kissing my ass goodbye. For Israel's enemies, the next three years are the window of opportunity they have been anticipating for last 60 years. The next Holocaust may not be a "final solution," but the next attempt will surely be worse than the last.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/03/AR2010060304287.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Manly Women and Girly Men

“If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her; and if she does not possess them she runs away from herself.” – Nietzsche

Have you noticed how many Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) types are showing up on the editorial pages and network chat shows these days? You can’t miss the girls; Nina Totenberg, Diane Rehm, Gwen Ifill, and Eleanor Clift. (Yes, Eleanor made her bones as a public pundit!) Most of them look, and sound, like refugees from a John Waters makeover in Baltimore - hair helmets and all.

Top dollar female commercial network anchors and correspondents, on the other hand, usually look and squeak like pole dancers (think Kelly or Norah O’Donnell); yet, when the need is for an acid tongue; the public bullpens at CPB or BBC are where the go-to gals hang out.

Katty Kay missed the network glam team by a decade or three, but she kept her stage name anyway. Kay is one of those unique triple-dippers; hands in two public pockets - and one shapely ankle dipped in commerce. She now sits to the left of ABC’s Chris Mathews on Sunday morning - should there be any lingering doubts about Ms. Kay’s politics. Truth is, you can not have a news panel or reality (pardon any redundancy) show in America today unless your team includes at least one bitchy or condescending representative of the British Commonwealth. Take a bow Simon!

Most of the public broadcasting chaps, by the same token, seem to look like Andrea Mitchell or Katie Couric. The look may be pant’s suit ambiguous, thanks to Hilary, but there’s nothing vague about fey politics; all the boys hail from left field.

Even token conservatives like Paul Gigot are well left of center. A token is any nominal conservative who has accepted a Pulitzer or pretends to provide the “balance” on a loaded panel. The men of CPB seem to take their cues from progressive stalwarts like Bill Moyers or Daniel Schorr. Moyers, you may recall, had retired, but CPB brought him back to cover the Obama Awakening.

Girly men were all over the fish wrap last month. First, there was the study suggesting that healthy (as in plump?) women prefer effeminate men. The study was mute on the preferences of skinny sensitive men; but, chubby chasing was not excluded. Christina Romer and Elena Kagan might need Secret Service protection.

The ‘girlie man’ study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, also concluded that countries with “poor hygiene” were more likely to tolerate polygamy. What happens when the natives in Arabia, South Asia, and Utah get this bulletin?

And then we saw Rupert Murdoch outing Arthur Sulzberger, the flamboyant editor of the New York Times, as a “poofter” on the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Can you say Manhattan cat fight? What’s next; limp noodles at fifty paces?

Ever anxious to stay with the big boys, Fred Hiatt, editor at the Washington Post has been featuring the soft side of Agnotology in the wake of the Obamacare vote. Take Matt Miller’s piece, “The Republican Crack Up,” on 31 March. Now if you knew ahead of time that Mathew had a sinecure at a “progressive” think tank (Center for American Progress), a microphone at National Public Radio, and a column at the Post – you probably wouldn’t read the article, because it would be too predictable.

Nonetheless, his argument has four premises; the Republicans “lost big” (sic) on the healthcare issue, the “tax issue” is dead, Mitt Romney will be hoisted on the “Massachusetts” health care petard, and Obamacare brings “security that families crave”. Any, or all of these, sound like they might be White House talking points?

Miller’s soft spin ignores more than a few facts. To date, all the political losses have been Democrat; and a bi-partisan majority has consistently opposed Obamacare and the inevitable higher taxes. And who anointed Mitt Romney as the Republican heir apparent? And who argues that a particular state, especially uber liberal Massachusetts, is representative of America on any issue?

Miller also ignores the risky synergy of debt, deficits, recession, unemployment, “higher taxes,” and all of the uncertainties associated with yet another major federal program. Sanity is now the major domestic concern; “security” left the tent when another entitlements circus came to town. Withal, Miller puts words in the mouths of imaginary enemies and then proceeds to argue with himself as if no one will notice him begging (or buggering) the question.

Such reasoning might be dismissed as the untidy musings of a giddy progressive, but it seems that the author is a Brown University product. Indeed, a few clicks of the browser reveal that Mathew Miller has a web site devoted to himself. Ut ameris, amabilis esto!

Like their role models at BBC, American public radio and television newsrooms have long been an employer of first resort for “progressive” polemicists like Miller. Ironically, their commercial colleagues, already awash in partisan muck, are trying to save themselves by throwing a lifeline to the Left. Featuring more liberals, to save a sinking “mainstream,” is a little like bailing water into the boat.

Maybe it’s something in the water or maybe just a politically correct variant of narcissism, but the Left in America has become loopier and loopier over time. Ambiguity and hysteria appear to emanate from some fundamental confusion. Admission to the progressive club today seems to be predicated on some bizarre affirmative action criteria; a 25% set aside for women who want to be men, a 25 % set aside for men who want to be women and a 50% reserve for those who might not make either team.

……………………………………………………

The author is a recovering urban progressive who left the Bronx at an early age to get a job and become an adult. He also blogs at G. Murphy Donovan

The Internet and the Agora

“The object of reasoning is to find out, from the consideration of what we already know, something else which we do not know.” – Charles Pierce (1870)

The blogosphere seems to be flushing the mainstream downstream. The blowback is venomous, not a pretty sight. Media stars, especially, are fighting a vicious rear guard action against the inevitable. The rise of the Internet and the fall of traditional journalism are giving hyperbole a new lease on life.

First we see Tom Friedman on Meet the Press calling the Internet “an open sewer of disinformation”. Then we hear Eric Schmidt, from the heights of Mountain View, second the motion by calling the Net a “cesspool.” Next, Ellen Goodman, in her swan song, tells us with a straight face that Internet users will lament the loss of “fact checkers” and old school “journalists.”

Friedman’s attack on the blogosphere fairly drips with irony. His opinion colleague at The New York Times, Maureen Dowd, was cited for plagiarizing from a blogger last May. And now again in February the Times has had to fire a financial reporter, Zachery Kouwe, for lifting copy from The Wall Street Journal.

Truth is not simply what you say; it is also what you don’t say. What Ms. Goodman does not say is that facts are what we choose to believe. Unfortunately, what we believe is not necessarily true. And so it is with Goodman’s facts and analysis.

A list of fact checkers from Ms. Goodman’s world of truth might include; Janet Cooke, Ben Bradlee, Stone Phillips, Jane Pauley, Mike Wallace, Mike Barnicle, Jayson Blair, Howell Raines, Dan Rather, Nina Totenberg, and Doris Kearns Goodwin. Professor Goodwin is included here because she is a high profile triple threat; academic, historian, and Media maven.

These traditional practitioners have one or more of the following in common; fraud, plagiarism, misrepresentation, cover up, or little or no fact checking. These are just the descriptions that might be used in polite conversation.

Yet, those are not all of the facts. Consider also the iconic institutions that employed or continue to employ such poseurs: The Washington Post, NBC, CBS, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, ABC, National Public Radio, and Harvard University.

Cases of journalistic malpractice often have common denominators; tenured activists and like-minded employers. The Washington Post and The New York Times cases are instructive. Their agendas were mirror images.

In September 1980, Janet Cooke created a fiction about a young District of Columbia crack addict. The Post story was nominated by the paper’s editors for a Pulitzer Prize. After the prize was awarded, some real fact checkers couldn’t find the lad in question and the fraud was exposed. When Editor Ben Bradlee tried to return the prize; the Pulitzer Committee demurred at first, confirming that this competition, like the annual Norwegian Nobel peace contest, is a kind of Special Olympics for the politically correct.

The New York Times fraud of 2003 was an eerie parallel to The Washington Post tale more than two decades earlier. Times editor Howell Raines ignored internal complaints about Jayson Blair’s sloppy work and advanced his young black protégé anyway. And, like Janet Cooke, Blair stepped on a land mine covering a story with racial overtones – the Beltway sniper.

Blair’s scam was exposed by a former Times employee and the scandal occasioned an internal review that pretty much concluded that Jayson’s entire tenure under Raines was an extended exercise in misguided affirmative action, if not ethnic immunity. After the Raines era, The New York Times might have changed its motto to; “All the news that fits, we print!”

The real story behind both frauds was the hazards of soft racism. Both reporters were all too willing to spin narratives about African American drug abusers and serial killers that their editors were all too willing to print - facts be damned. This willingness to confirm racial stereotypes by black reporters and white editors is the real tale yet to be told.

The perils of patronizing bias are not limited by race, youth, or sex. Newsroom cougars have been part of the swim to the bottom too. Maureen Dowd, Sally Quinn, and Ellen Goodman could be pinups for journalistic agnotology, other variants of false narrative.

Miss Dowd recently accused a congressman of calling the president a “boy” with no proof other than innuendo. The false narrative here is the belief that those who criticize black politicians are bigots. Ms. Quinn (Ben Bradlee’s wife), along with Jon Meacham, famously hosts an ecumenical web site (On Faith) which features Islamist apologists. The false narrative here is the belief that there are “moderate” or harmless variants of Jihad and Sharia. And lastly there is Ellen Goodman, herself, who in a recent column equated those who question some of the “junk science,” associated with global warming, with “holocaust deniers.” These recent cases illustrate the lack of fair play and racial double think that has come to characterize many traditional newsrooms.

As it is with fact checking, reporting, and analysis; Media dinosaurs are again unwilling or unable to deal with truth. The mainstream monopoly is over. It is no longer possible for a few elites with a narrow ideology to control information or analysis, the building blocks of belief. Hemingway, a journalist by trade, was fond of saying that good writers know what to throw out. The same might be said of good editors.

Politics, academia, and journalism are all troubled by the absence of term limits. Over time, these institutions tend to collect like-minded players where tenure becomes the dominant idiom. Small wonder that the ideological stasis at the networks and in the newsroom has fueled the “thunder on the Right,” enabling the rise of the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Rupert Murdoch. A news consumer hopes to be better informed by the provider. If we are misled or polarized; surely, these are self-inflicted wounds.

Limbaugh and Murdoch have thrived for different reasons. Limbaugh sees himself as a voice for a “silent majority,” an audience patronized or ignored by the mainstream. Unlike his detractors, Limbaugh makes no secret of his agenda and he makes no fatuous claims of impartiality. Murdoch is probably less ideological, but just as savvy. Possibly taking a cue from Limbaugh, Murdoch and his FOX network recognized an underserved audience and exploited the bias of their competitors. There’s money to be made in filling a vacuum – even when it’s something as simple as providing another point of view.

The virtues of the new paradigm are self evident. On the Internet, readers can go to an original content site, an aggregator, or they might create their own site. No one, save endangered pundits, laments the end of network and press monopolies; or the role that tenure, spin, hypocrisy, and bias play at those institutions. The Internet is the best thing to happen to free choice since Erasmus; the best thing to happen to democracy since John Locke; and the best thing to happen to commerce since Adam Smith. The Internet is the new agora, a new market for ideas. The end of the mainstream, the mendacity monopoly, is gospel. Good news indeed!

___________________________

A shorter version of this piece appears in the American Tinker on 27 Feb 10.
The author is also the principal contributor to Anacostia Angst on Blogspot.

Howell Raines; Back from the Boneyard

Seeing Howell Raines, disgraced former editor of the NY Times, preach about honesty in journalism (WashPost Op-Ed, 14 March) is a little like listening to Harry Reid (D-Nevada) trying to sell gambling and prostitution as destination resorts. In 2003, Raines, you may recall, was encouraged to spend more time “fly fishing” after his ace reporter, Jayson Blair, was exposed as a fraud and a cheat. Numerous staffers had raised alarms about Blair’s work, some of it on the DC beltway sniper story, but Raines would hear no criticism about his affirmative action protégé - facts be damned.

The Blair fiasco was a bizarre echo of a similar incident at the Washington Post two decades earlier when a Ben Bradlee protégé cooked the books about a young black heroin addict in the District of Columbia. Bradlee nominated Janet Cooke for a reporting Pulitzer which she won. When Cooke’s fiction was exposed, the reporter and the prize went up in smoke; both consumed by the white heat of truth.

The ugly side of affirmative action was the real story behind both incidents. Two white editors, afflicted by a kind soft bigotry, were reluctant to use the same standards of journalism with minorities and women that are applied to white males. Indeed, in both cases, black reporters were all too eager to manufacture racial stereotypes; and two politically correct editors were all too willing to sacrifice integrity on the altar of ethnic or gender immunity.

Now Raines, dripping with trout stream indignation, laments the standards at FOX and blasts Roger Ailes as a kind of newsroom ogre. The irony, and personal animus, here has a sickly sweet sent of mendacity - leavened with envy. FOX and internet journals are thriving while archaic outlets like the Times and the Post are sinking, stuck in the muck of a tedious patronizing ideology. Raines, like the fictional Colonel Jessep, “can’t stand the truth.”

Traditional journalism is going under because it is still printing a product that fewer and fewer customers want to buy or read. The dinosaurs are walking the plank; an aging species that can not see that adaptation might be as simple as providing another point of view. Mr. Raines, and like minded editors, makes the inevitable, and enviable, success of FOX possible. Rupert Murdoch should send Howell Raines a thank-you note, a copy of Pinocchio, and a box of hand-tied trout flies.

Dear Fred

Fred Hiatt
Editor
The Washington Post

Dear Fred,

I see that the latest survey of mainstream customers shows another decline in readership. Before the slide becomes terminal, you might want to consider the role that agnotology has come to play in many newsrooms. Take the recent piece by Matt Miller (31 March) in the Post, a transparent series of White House talking points masquerading as analysis. Worst still was the editorial by Jessica Valenti (21 February), an essay that was flawed in fact and logic. Ironically, in the shadow of Janet Cooke, fact checking, especially on the editorial page at the Post has gotten worse, not better. Indeed, Ms Valenti's essay is a classic piece of journalistic agnotology; not merely a wrong-headed opinion, but a swirl of evidence designed to produce a false narrative or perpetuate ignorance. An analysis of Ms. Valenti's nonsense was published in FSM earlier this month. See previous post or:

(http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.5998/pub_detail.asp.)

You can continue to argue, like your two predecessors, that you are victims of internet competition, technology, or shifting reading habits; yet, at some point you have to consider the quality of your product. Quality matters! You also have to ask why other news outlets are flourishing while you continue to wilt. I'm not talking about featuring conservatives like Will or Krauthammer for token balance, but rather an examination of the agenda embedded in the tone, politics, and quality of reporting and analysis. The Post, the NY Times (especially under Hal Raines), and many urban newspapers have regressed from printing the "first draft of history" to publishing agnotology - the last draft of truth. As a practical matter, you might also want to take a business clue from the competition. The best model for the information age is often something as simple as another point of view; and a judicious mix of fact and argument.

Insects in the Dust

“Feministing (the blog) is head and shoulders above any writing on women’s issues in mainstream media.” – Columbia Journalism Review

Once upon a time, American feminists had noble goals; sexual equality, a political franchise, and a host of concerns about the rights of girls and women. Over time, this agenda has been eroded by special pleading and self-indulgent vulgarity. In your face now takes pride of place on the distaff schema. If you think the Vagina Monologues are art, but Hooters needs to fold, you could be an American feminista. And on questions of national security, many progressive women are more naive than their male counterparts, if that’s possible. A co-dependent press often provides a forum for many weak gender arguments.

Take a late February Washington Post column, “For Women in America, Equality is Still an Illusion,” by Jessica Valenti, founder of the blog Feministing. She begins by trivializing epidemic rape in Africa, genital mutilation in Arabia, and female slavery worldwide by suggesting these barbarities are comparable somehow to the plight of women in America:

"… too many of us in the United States ignore the oppression on our doorstep. We're suffering under the mass delusion (sic) that women in America have achieved equality…women are still being raped, trafficked, violated and discriminated against -- not just in the rest of the world, but here in the United States."

A reader hardly has time to ponder the distinction between rape and violation before Valenti stumbles into a thicket of select statistical evidence.

She tells us that “last year the Justice Department reported … 182,000 sexual assaults” in America, but the real number was more like a million “because victims often don’t label their experience as rape (sic).” So we are to believe that the Justice Department is in error by multiples of five due to semantics? (One of the authors of the report cited by Valenti was a woman.) Valenti doesn’t mention that any number between her high and the Justice Department low would still be a fraction of one percent in a population of over 150 million American women. Without context, a number is whatever you want it to be.

Her argument goes on to lament the number of women in Congress (17 %), the number of US counties that do not provide abortion (85 %), and the fiction about women making “76 cents to the man’s dollar.” All of this is characterized as an “epidemic of Sexism.”

Ms. Valenti’s statistics deserve to be refreshed with context: American women are the majority sex, women are the majority of registered voters, and they are also a majority in the professional workforce. They have the numbers, the votes, and the money. More women than men vote by a wide margin. If women do not run for or serve in Congress, who is at fault? If voting patterns prove anything, they prove that Americans do not share Ms. Valenti’s illusion about women as victims.

Speaking of painful issues, abortion may be a (legal) right, but convenience is not. Even abortion advocates argue circumstances should be created to make abortion unnecessary. Convenient clinics don’t qualify as an entitlement or a disincentive.

Finally, the wage disparity complaint is another social vampire; this issue simply will not die. Feminists like Valenti seldom note that wage bias is impossible in the military, in education, or in government at any level where salary is tied to grade and tenure, not genitals. Female demographics among minorities also undermine the wage disparity canard; black women, for example, are better educated and better paid than black men by a wide margin. For the rare case (8,000 per year in a population of 79 million working women) of sex based wage bias in the private sector, the legal remedies are abundant and well used.

Ms. Valenti also fails to recognize that “progressive” politicians are often the worst offenders in wage disparity disputes. The Obama political campaign, for example, on average paid women staffers 20% less than men.

The most annoying assumption imbedded in Valenti’s whining is one that suggests that, if some select set of gender demographics were more equitable, somehow the world becomes, ipso facto, a better place. No evidence supports this fable.

Kabul fell (September 1996) to theocrats a few months before Madeline Albright’s watch began. Every girl’s school in Afghanistan was subsequently closed while America was absorbed by President Bill Clinton’s exploitation of a junior female intern and his subsequent impeachment. At the time, neither Albright nor Clinton’s wife made much of the personal abuse of women at the White House, or state sponsored abuse abroad. Indeed, the priapic President’s behavior exposed feminism on the Left for what it is; a highly selective concern, more about extreme party politics than exploitation or abuse of power.

Indeed, there is no evidence, with Miss Albright as Secretary of State or now with Mrs. Clinton that “equality” or woman’s rights have any priority in foreign policy. Misogyny, polygamy, consanguinity, slavery, child marriage, punitive gang rapes, public floggings, honor killings, stoning, and genital mutilation continue unabated in the Arab and Muslim worlds (1.6 billion citizens). In Egypt alone, the most populous Arab nation, World Health Organization figures establish that as many as 40 million women (95.8%) have been victimized by partial or full circumcision. Now that’s a troubling statistic!

Meanwhile back at Ms. Valenti’s blog, beyond regular features such as Friday Feminist F--k You, one might read an elaborate defense of a Pakistani jihadist, aka Lady al Qaeda, Aafia Siddiqui, a former graduate student at MIT and Brandeis University. After going underground for five years Ms. Siddiqui was captured in Afghanistan where she tried to shoot a US military officer. In July of 2008, Siddiqui was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to prison. The 1 March post in Feministing ended with the following tribute: “The veiled terrorist; now how sexy is that?”

Uninformed apologists for Pakistani or Afghan theocrats might want to check in with Christina Lamb, a journalist who covered Afghanistan during the last reign of terror. Talking to a teen in a soccer stadium, she recorded this grim picture of Taliban diversions:

"I‘ve seen more than a hundred (executions). I used to come because it was entertainment….The best time was during Ramadan because then there would be at least a hanging or amputation a day, sometimes three or four….we would buy pistachios or oranges.

The person could be shot, hanged or sacrificed….you know, like sheep. Their hands would be tied and they would be laid on a block then their chest split open with a long knife and their guts spilled out.

Women were tied to goalposts and shot down, or if they had committed adultery, they would be stoned….I saw some homosexuals have their hands and feet tied and a wall collapsed on top of them. That was interesting….

They (the Taliban) made the family (of the victims) come and watch and collect the dead bodies."

The stadium where this “entertainment” took place was completed in 1996 with the help of American taxpayers – at the midpoint of the Clinton administration.

Lamb recorded these Jihadist atrocities in the Sewing Circles of Herat (pp. 246-249), a classic chronicle of the plight of women under Islamic radicals. One of her correspondents was a young Afghan girl who was forced to wear the burkha and prohibited from teaching. In a smuggled letter to Christina Lamb, she likened the status of women under Islamic religious law to “insects in the dust.”

Now how sexy is that?

....................

This essay first appeared in Family Security Matters on 16 April 10.