From Howard Kurtz's column today on NBC News Division President Steve Capus' response to the obvious:

Capus bristled when conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt said on CNN that "NBC will have blood on its hands the next time someone sends a video to their network of their mayhem."

"We're not above criticism," Capus says, "but let's not take the easy way out and turn to the lowest form of political rhetoric." Still, he understands the public anger, saying: "Sometimes good journalism is bad public relations."

What a candy response from the head of a major news organization to the many and consistent criticisms of their terrible news decision.  The "easy way out?" That's what Capus is doing and has been doing since the day of his and NBC's fateful decision.  I have invited Capus on the program and got no response.  He's no doubt got a stack of interview requests from hundreds of reporters and analysts.  What's he done?  He's gone to Oprah and Howard and has refused to respond to critics of his decision, including families of the victims.  Capus is hiding in the office, giving pathetically self-serving answers to friendly fellow MSMers, and refusing to answer the obvious tough questions  --"Did you consult with one psychiatrist about the effects on other potential rampage killers?"--  because they are unanswerable.

So let's be blunt: Steve Capus is no more qualified to have made the decision about the impact of that video on marginally balanced or already unbalanced psychotics than he is to render judgments on how best to treat cancer.  Read Howard's bio of Capus and you'll be shocked that the MSM equivalent of a senior time-serving East bloc apparatchik is making these calls.  With his background fully fleshed out it isn't surprising that Capus went to the default mode when a hard decision was put before him, and lacked the basic creativity or curiosity to seek informed opinion outside the closed world of the teleprompter readers and ratings jockeys.  It is not the "lowest form of political rhetoric" to make the obvious and indeed irrefutable point that the next time a video from a rampage killer arrives at an MSM office it will have NBC's fingerprints on it.  That's the uncomfortable truth, which hopefully troubles Capus at least as much as the images of the killer troubles the families and friends of the victims.  Capus has little if any conscience, and his "decision-making" indefensible.  All of his friends in the business can take him aside and tell him he did great, "we're reporters after all," but it is a shameful thing he did and will remain so for as long as news is other than a live feed from everywhere of everything.

The lowest form of political rhetoric, btw, would be the appeal to base instinct that results in the imprisonment of, harm to, or even death of others.  But I don't expect Capus to know that he is accusing me of the very thing he and his network did.  That would require learning and judgment, not reflex and bile, and he hasn't got it in him, no matter what the title on his door says.  NBC must be bleeding in its ratings.  Good.  The viewers should also know that Capus has contempt for their reaction to his "news judgment."

It must be “insult your favorite blogger day” in some parts of the country. This angry missive just decorated my Inbox:

There's one thing I have to say you people all have. You're all a**holes. And besides that if you put your actions where your mouth is we might have caught bin Laden and several others. In other words you all have a big mouth and nothing to back it up. You can talk the talk, you just can't walk the walk. And besides that most of you never served a day in the service of our country. But you are the patriots and the brave ones. I'd like to see you in an ally fight some time. You would run like a bunch of p***ies.

RStewart

Well, R, all I can do is thank you for the thoughtful note, and assure you that all of us at Townhall value your mature feedback.

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Every time I write a piece mocking John Edwards, I get a few letters from my liberal readers saying, “Such things are beneath you.” They try to butter me up by saying I’m such a high quality thinker I shouldn’t stoop to such depths. But I’m on to their game. I know they’re just trying to play on my well-known massive ego.

Besides, I’m not above such things. Regrettably, I’ve always been cursed by a fondness for the puerile. On Friday, a dear old friend from childhood and I spoke for the first time in years and the conversation quickly turned to our junior high school antics. We both agreed that our crank calls of the time were seminal comic masterpieces.

As regards Edwards, how can a political commentator, be he a serious one or not, refrain from mocking this man? He’s a walking, talking, hair-combing parody. His whole shtick is that he’s the humble son of a mill-worker, when in fact he’s neither humble nor the son of a mill-worker. He desperately tries to play like he’s one of us, “us” being the American oppressed who just can’t buy a break. He then goes and builds himself a 28,000 square foot house, gets himself $400 haircuts, and does yoga with hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons. Doing yoga alone would estrange him from the people that he’s trying to con into believing he’s a Joe Six-Pack who just got lucky. But doing yoga with a hip-hop mogul? Words fail me.

Now, let’s be clear – I don’t begrudge him these indulgences, although I do consider a $400 haircut to be a tad on the foppish side and I prefer men who retain their physiques by pumping iron rather than twisting themselves into pretzels in the company of hip-hop moguls. But who am I to point fingers? If I had Edwards funds, I would lavish extraordinary fortunes on my golf game, red wine and prime beef. While I wouldn’t build a 28,000 square foot home, I would construct a home entertainment center that, I promise you, would be nothing short of bitchin’.

Besides, in my defense, with Edwards there’s just so much to mock, he’s an irresistible target. He’s a man who got into politics in 1996 with the specific aim of becoming president. He decided that the time honored Huey Long class warfare path was the best route to take. Now, a man whose mind was flexible enough to do a sort of mental yoga would conclude that running a “war on poverty” in a country with an unemployment rate knocking on the door of 4% was a lousy idea and shift gears. But Edwards keeps plodding ahead.

And then there’s the fact that his notion of modern poverty is so antiquated and outdated. For four years now, he’s been spotting shivering, starving children. But in America, we are fortunately not beset with a plague of hunger. A much bigger problem in our underclass is juvenile obesity. But it would be tough to reconcile that fact with Edwards’ ludicrous narrative of Dickensian poverty gripping the land.

JOHN EDWARDS MAY BE IN MANY WAYS A FINE MAN. He certainly seems like a good husband, and I deeply admire the way he hasn’t tried to make political hay out of his teenage son’s death. If you compare Edwards’ behavior in that regard to the way Al Gore dealt with his sister’s death, there alone is reason to believe that Edwards is the far better of the two men.

One of my thoughtful liberal readers (you may know him as commenter JohnCar), suggested I link to this YouTube where Edwards addresses the far more famous YouTube where he fusses with his hair for two minutes while “I Feel Pretty” plays in the background. Some might find the rebutting YouTube to be sympathetic. I wouldn’t say it hit me that way, but I will say that it was an undeniable tour de force by a talented politician at the top of his game.

So, to return to our original question, why do I make fun of John Edwards? First, because he is a gifted politician who could offer our system a lot more than divisiveness and demagoguery if he so chose. And second, because Candidate John Edwards is an utter and embarrassingly transparent phony. Even Edwards doesn’t believe his own message. If he really thought income disparity was an all-important issue, he would tamp down his own excesses. If he really cared about modern American poverty, he would get to know it and familiarize himself with it, rather than insistently peddle his idiotic Dickensian narrative of starving chimney sweeps and limping Tiny Tims.

So the short answer to why I make fun of John Edwards? Because he can do better. But chooses not to.

Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com

Here are the most recent circulation numbers.  Notable:

Los Angeles Times, 815,723, down 4.2 percent

The Washington Post, 699,130, down 3.5 percent

Chicago Tribune, 566,827, down 2.1 percent

Dallas Morning News, 411,919, down 14.3 percent

Newsday, Long Island, 398,231, down 6.9 percent

Star Tribune of Minneapolis-St. Paul, 345,252, down 4.9 percent

The papers are generally run by the same people who have always run them, and they simply lack the skills sets to adapt to the new media environment.  Even the idea of circulation numbers divorced from online traffic is a telling oversight.

Why not have a counter on the websites of these papers, and separate counters on every story?  From such a database would emerge the key facts of journalism's situation and the stuff of figuring out what journalism needs to provide to survive.  This is not to say that news must be reader-driven, but that readers matter and the deep indifference to them over decades is now manifesting itself. 

The New York Post went up 7.6 percent.  It is possible to increase print circulation, and it is very easy to develop new products online, but the folks running the papers are not the ones to do it.

Yesterday I suggested that John McCain went on Fox News Sunday and fired serial bulls-eyes at both feet. I stand by that commentary.

McCain defended the salubrious effects of the McCain/Feingold abomination, and then added that the issue doesn’t really matter since no one really cares about free speech outside the Beltway. (I’m paraphrasing, of course.) He also strangely suggested that we close Gitmo and transfer the detainees to Leavenworth, apparently because the Kansas climate will do them good. Chris Wallace’s questioning forced him to implausibly maintain that although he was one of three Republicans who voted against the Bush tax cuts, he would resolutely defend them once in the Oval Office.

But his real misstep was on the matter of torture.  Senator McCain addresses this particular topic from a unique vantage-point. Although I’m always wary of the Absolute Moral Authority™ argument, on this subject Senator McCain comes pretty darn close to having just that. But he’s still not right.

BEFORE GETTING TO TORTURE, ALLOW ME TO MAKE a quick digression into abortion. I’m pro-life. I strongly feel that every abortion is the taking of an innocent life. But please note what I didn’t call it – murder.

Murder requires what those in the law refer to as a specific mens rea. That little Latin phrase in this context means you need a precise and knowing intent to kill someone in order to qualify as a murderer. The typical mother who has an abortion and the doctor who provides it have no such intent. They don’t feel they’re taking a life. I feel they’re wrong, and most of the readers of this site probably feel they’re wrong. But because they lack that specific and knowing intent, they’re not murderers.

What drives me crazy about the abortion debate, specifically on our side, is our stridency. There’s little attempt to understand the other side, and little effort to comprehend why a mother-to-be might desperately want an abortion. One of the reasons we toss around terms like “murder” is because they’ll end conversations, not begin them.

Anyone who’s pro-life ought to at least recognize the pain that an unwanted pregnancy can bring to a particular mother. For instance, imagine a woman who has her one-year old child die and then finds herself in an unplanned pregnancy. Assume for the sake of argument that the thought of having another child at such a time is unbearably painful for her. If she wants to have an abortion, I would consider it the wrong thing to do. But you’d have to have a heart of stone not to sympathize with her. Or to call her a murderer.

THE TORTURE DEBATE brings out a similar absolutism from torture opponents. They tend to casually assume that people who support “coercive interrogation techniques” do so because they’re congenital sadists who have just been waiting for this moment in history so they could begin water-boarding Muslims with impunity.

That’s not the case. The people who support coercive interrogation techniques, and I am one of them, do so sadly. Unfortunately, given the nature of the war we’re in, certain moral compromises are a necessity. Using coercive interrogation techniques is one of them.

What’s most infuriating about the anti-torture people is their tacit assumption that you can fight a war without making moral compromises. War is all about moral compromise. It’s not in the normal order of things to kill others. The very aim of war is to do just that. In World War II, we did terrible things like the fire-bombing of Dresden, the massive bombing of Tokyo, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While all these actions were terrible, they were also necessary. And justifiable.

Yesterday on Fox News Sunday, McCain stated that we can reclaim the moral high ground in this war if we close the Gitmo detention center and cease our use of coercive interrogation techniques. This comment makes the ludicrous assumption that we’ve lost the moral high ground because of these things.

The logic here would be akin to saying America lost the moral high ground after bombing the civilian center of Tokyo in World War II. While that bombing cost America any claim to moral perfection, no one was making any such claims in the first place. America still held the moral high ground because it wasn’t us that wanted to establish a global totalitarian dictatorship and exterminate inferior races. Similarly, just because our current struggle causes us to engage in ugly tactics doesn’t mean that we don’t have the moral high ground. It’s not us calling for the annihilation of those who practice a different religion than we do.

And then there’s the persistent intellectual incoherence of the anti-torture voices. They can’t decide whether they’re against torture because it doesn’t work or whether they oppose it solely on moral grounds. This confusion belies their own sense of their argument’s weaknesses. If you add up the consensus of informed opinions, torture sometimes gets you some really useful and actionable information, and sometimes gets you utter rubbish. Torture opponents know this, which is why they cherry-pick experts who argue that torture never works. Because if a consensus formed that torture produced any good information, and the media acknowledged that consensus, torture opponents know their position would become politically untenable.

The great silent majority of America feels that all methods should be used to extract relevant information from the homicidal maniacs who want to murder our innocents. If a terrorist catastrophe occurred and all possible means of preventing it hadn’t been completely explored, the public would be outraged. And justifiably so. What’s more, those individuals responsible for failing to exploit all possible options for avoiding the disaster would earn for themselves a measure of culpability.

The anti-torture argument sits on a fragile branch of moral vanity. The torture opponents’ entire premise rests on the erroneous notion that one can successfully wage war without cruelty and savagery. I wish they were right. But they’re not.

Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com

If I was Garrison Keillor, I'd stop writing about politics until Lileks retired, as Lileks really is funny and really does understand the world.

I'm betting it was the Giant Ukelele that silenced the room at the Saint Paul Hotel, btw.  I used to be invited to those gatherings, but since Jay Larson arranged for my lifetime ban from the Minnesota State Fair, I haven't been to a gathering of the Valli Basement Boys.

Speaking of funny people and liberals, though I am not completely sure, I suspect Bill Bryson of being a man of the left, but as I told an audience at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books yesterday, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is one of the very few laugh out loud books out there, and for me it is the only book that has obliged me to laugh and laugh while running and listening to it on an iPod, which occasions distinct looks of concern from passerbys.  Do yourself a favor and read or listen to it, especially if you are from the midwest and most especially if you are born anywhere near 1951 or Des Moines.

The New York Times profilies Senator Obama's religious beliefs, and in doing so lays out an upbringing  that includes many firsts for a major presidential candidate: 

The grandparents who helped raise Mr. Obama were nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists. His mother was an anthropologist who collected religious texts the way others picked up tribal masks, teaching her children the inspirational power of the common narratives and heroes.

His mother’s tutelage took place mostly in Indonesia, in the household of Mr. Obama’s stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, a nominal Muslim who hung prayer beads over his bed but enjoyed bacon, which Islam forbids.

“My whole family was Muslim, and most of the people I knew were Muslim,” said Maya Soetoro-Ng, Mr. Obama’s younger half sister. But Mr. Obama attended a Catholic school and then a Muslim public school where the religious education was cursory. When he was 10, he returned to his birthplace of Hawaii to live with his grandparents and attended a preparatory school with a Christian affiliation but little religious instruction.

Years later, Mr. Obama met his father’s family, a mix of Muslim and Christian Kenyans. Sarah Hussein Obama, who is his stepgrandmother but whom Mr. Obama calls his grandmother, still rises at 5 a.m. to pray before tending to her crops and the three orphans she has taken in.

“I am a strong believer of the Islamic faith,” Ms. Obama, 85, said in a recent interview in Kenya.

Senator Obama became a Christian as an adult:

Mr. Wright preached black liberation theology, which interprets the Bible as the story of the struggles of black people, whom by virtue of their oppression are better able to understand Scripture than those who have suffered less. That message can sound different to white audiences, said Dwight Hopkins, a professor at University of Chicago Divinity School and a Trinity member. “Some white people hear it as racism in reverse,” Dr. Hopkins said, while blacks hear, “Yes, we are somebody, we’re also made in God’s image.”

It was a 1988 sermon called “The Audacity to Hope” that turned Mr. Obama, in his late 20s, from spiritual outsider to enthusiastic churchgoer. Mr. Wright in the sermon jumped from 19th-century art to his own youthful brushes with crime and Islam to illustrate faith’s power to inspire underdogs. Mr. Obama was seeing the same thing in public housing projects where poor residents sustained themselves through sheer belief.

In “Dreams From My Father,” Mr. Obama described his teary-eyed reaction to the minister’s words. “Inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones,” Mr. Obama wrote. “Those stories — of survival, and freedom, and hope — became our story, my story.”

Mr. Obama was baptized that year, and joining Trinity helped him “embrace the African-American community in a way that was whole and profound,” said Ms. Soetoro, his half sister.

It also helped give him spiritual bona fides and a new assurance. Services at Trinity were a weekly master class in how to move an audience. When Mr. Obama arrived at Harvard Law School later that year, where he fortified himself with recordings of Mr. Wright’s sermons, he was delivering stirring speeches as a student leader in the classic oratorical style of the black church.

Powerline's Scott Johnson's point us to Efraim Inbar's assessment in the Middle East Quarterly.  It begins:

Israel's leadership was ill-prepared for the summer 2006 war against Hezbollah. Israeli politicians and planners displayed strategic blindness. While denying the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) victory, they squandered an opportunity to destroy the bulk of Hezbollah's military presence in southern Lebanon, settle regional scores, enhance Israel's deterrence, and strengthen Jerusalem's alliance with Washington.

What, exactly, is James saying:

I did the Hewitt show, guided the dog around the perimeter of his urine- delineated world, read more Steyn, and presided over the first dawn-to-dusk non-stop run of the water feature.

I made a perhaps indiscrete but wholly factual announcment a few years ago that James collected Hummels --including exotic Hummels-- and this is what I get for it? (There are 20 pages of Google listings for "Lileks and Hummels" btw.)

James and many other Bee Gees devotees are occasionally surly, but not to this extent. It must be the weather in Minnesota.

Bill  Kristol has the goods on the erstwhile CIA bust:

According to Michiko Kakutani's review in Saturday's Times,

On the day after 9/11, he [Tenet] adds, he ran into Richard Perle, a leading neoconservative and the head of the Defense Policy Board, coming out of the White House. He says Mr. Perle turned to him and said: "Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility."

Here's the problem: Richard Perle was in France on that day, unable to fly back after September 11. In fact Perle did not return to the United State until September

15. Did Tenet perhaps merely get the date of this encounter wrong? Well, the quote Tenet ascribes to Perle hinges on the encounter taking place September 12: "Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday." And Perle in any case categorically denies to THE WEEKLY STANDARD ever having said any such thing to Tenet, while coming out of the White House or anywhere else.

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This prize was not lightly given, not on a day when John McCain repeatedly took direct aim at both feet during his Fox News Sunday appearance. More on that tomorrow. And as an aside, why do the candidates keep making these appearances with their wives? McCain’s wife seems like a perfectly lovely woman, as does Rudy’s and Mitt’s and Fred’s, but why should we care? I hereby issue an urgent ACTION ALERT demanding that this strange new practice ceased immediately. But enough of that - our winning quote of the day comes from a NYT Magazine interview with hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons:

Are there any presidential candidates who inspire you? I talk to John Edwards more than I talk to anyone. He has said more things about the conditions we need to think about. He went to yoga with me. He did the whole class, an hour and a half. He sweated like crazy. He’s in good shape, but it was hard on him.

Once again, I must put a call out to photo-shoppers who aspire for a fleeting moment of fame. You know what you have to do. One action photo of John Edwards doing yoga, please. I eagerly await your submissions.

Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com.

The best off-season day for a Browns fan since Kosar joined.  The best OT in the draft and a franchise QB from Ohio.

On ESPN Radio just prior to the deal with Dallas, one analyst was speculating that Quinn would fall to the Ravens, and I was contemplating watching Quinn beat the Browns twice a year for the next decade and a half.  Instead he will wear the orange and brown.  An excellent day indeed.