For the last few days, Patrick Frey (Patterico) has been working on a post that pretty conclusively demonstrates that Michael Hiltzik has been using sock puppets – commenting on his own blog, Patrick’s, and several others under more than one pseudonym.

Go read his post, and take a look at the evidence he’s put forth – he is, after all, a prosecutor.

Patrick talked to me when he first starting thinking this through, and one thing we both discussed was “why does this matter?” Other than the obvious – and juvenile – glee in dinging someone who has dinged him, what’s the relevance of this?

Patrick will be making his own case in future posts, I believe, but I want to take a moment and make mine here.

Let me start by talking about pseudonymity.
If Hiltzik were – as a hypothetical – in a recovery program, and someone who posted on a recovery website or discussion board under a pseudonym, to protect his privacy in “the world”, to have connected the pseudonym and the person would be an act of gratuitous cruelty.

But there would be no intersection between his life in the world – as a reporter, columnist of blogger – and the personal world in which he was talking about issues related to his recovery (or sexuality or diet or whatever).

Patterico and I both started out blogging under pseudonyms that we defended – there were very few people who knew that Armed Liberal was Marc Danziger, and at my first blogger events, TG awkwardly introduced herself as “Mrs. Armed Liberal”. We both did it for what we felt were valid reasons, and have both since come out.

But no one has ever wonder what I wrote or where I stand.

Everything I’ve written as a blogger is out there, and there’s a very simple and transparent ability of any reader to look at my words and, if they so choose, form an impression about who I am and what I think.

When Hiltzik (or John Lott, who did the same thing) broke that rule, what he did was to poison the dialog by creating a situation where readers can’t trust writers.

On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog, as they say. But a pseudonym doesn’t have to be obvious. It could be that everything Trent Telenko has written was really written by me – how would that change your perception of his or my honesty and the seriousness with which you’d take my words?

What this enterprise is about, to me is a simple exercise in creating a public dialog about issues that matter.

We have to trust each other to do that.

Michael Hiltzik, like my Journalist In The Hat, doesn’t trust us or the dialog. He’s undermined it.

And, I’ll suggest he’s done so because it has no value to him.

Then I went to Brian’s party, and met a journalist (sadly didn’t get his name or affiliation).

I’ll skip over his arrogance and rudeness; he was in a hostile environment, and maybe he was nervous. But watching the discussion, I realized something that brought the Times issue into clearer perspective for me.

…that while I have (violently at times) disagreed with other bloggers in face to face discussions, I always had the feeling that there was a discussion going on, a dialog in which two people were engaged and trying to understand each other’s points, if for no other reason than to better argue against them. But in dealing with The Journalist In The Hat, no such dialog took place. He had his point to make, and very little that I said (or, to be honest, that others who participated, including Howard Owens, who pointed out that he had worked as a journalist) was heard or responded to. He had his points, and he was going to make them over, and over, until we listened.

UPDATE: Hiltzik replies to Patterico. I didn’t think I was easy to surpise, but I’m gobsmacked.

And as a good counterpoint to Michael Yon’s post, here’s a tragic one from Omar and Mohammed at Iraq the Model – their brother-in-law was just assassinated.

Their reaction: “Kill us, but you won’t enslave us.”

You want to abandon them, and the men and women like them? Not with my support. Not ever.

They write:

The terrorists and criminals are targeting all elements of life and they target anyone who wants to do something good for this country…They think by assassinating one of us they could deter us from going forward but will never succeed, they can delay us for years but we will never go back and abandon our dream.
We have vowed to follow the steps of our true martyrs and we will raise the new generation to continue the march, these children of today are the hope and the future.

Go over and show them some support. And make sure you send a copy to your Congressmember.

Michael Yon writes – far more eloquently and intelligently than I could – the post about Iraq that has been working through my brain for the last three months.

It’s magisterial, in the sense of

Of, relating to, or characteristic of a master or teacher; authoritative: a magisterial account of the history of the English language.

and we should be taught by him. Here’s a small sample:

But what I saw (and see) as the biggest threat to the outcome was not the increase in sectarian violence among Iraqis. The biggest threat to this mission, and by extension to the future stability of this region and the long term security of the United States and our allies, is and always has been the inability to see, hear and communicate the truth to the American people and our allies. In the final analysis, it is not going to matter if the French support our mission in Iraq, but once Americans turn away from their soldiers in the field, we’ve lost.

In order to fund my own fact-finding in Iraq and Afghanistan, I asked my attorney last week to look into selling some of my photos. His response, in part, which came to me yesterday:

Sadly, what I am hearing is that the demand for material from both countries is way, way down. The market has dried up and the competition from almost free AP photos and US Army material means most agencies do not want to take on someone whose work is primarily war-related at this time.

We have gotten our troops into combat and now we are ignoring them. It’s little wonder that Americans would be angry at me for calling a civil war a civil war. Most of them have no idea what is going on! But this is not the sole fault of the media: if there were great demand for information from the wars, they would dispatch legions of journalists. It is the people at home who are ignoring our people at war.

I cannot strongly enough encourage you to read his piece.

I’ve had fun reading Michael Hiltzik in the past, mostly because he’s an interesting case of a major newspaper trying on the blog form. He manages, I think to combine the worst of both – the overweening arrogance of the MSM and the casual, fact-challenged style of much blogging. He’s sadly modeling himself on some weird hybrid of TBogg and Atrios, and under the impression that spittle-flecked indignation is what the personal voice of blogging is all about.
Hugh Hewitt has been hammering the Times, and suggesting that their circulation decline (3% year to year) is related to their political leanings (I’m doubtful that this is the whole or even the majority of the reason, but Hugh gets to make his argument).

Hiltzik replies with a typically classless slam at Hugh – suggesting that his blog traffic is down and implying that it’s his conservative stance that’s responsible.

Here’s what Michael says (links in original):

So I think it’s worthwhile to put our results in perspective by asking the question: How is Hugh’s blog doing? Luckily, he has provided us with the answer, thanks to Site Meter, a program he uses to track visits to his website. I’ve been keeping an eye on Hugh’s Site Meter, which appears on his home page, since early February. All I can say to him is: Uh-oh.

Back on February 11, when I began this project, Hewitt’s Site Meter showed there had been 295,874 visits over the previous seven days, for a daily average of 42,268. But by yesterday, April 13, the running seven-day count had declined to 238,782, for a daily average of only 34,112.

That’s a 19.3% decline in Hewitt’s visitor count over a span of only two months. The loss hasn’t been strictly in a straight line, but it has been steady.

Got that? Now click through on the ‘Site Meter’ link in the quote. Go ahead – I’ll wait.

You get the generic Site Meter home page.

Let me introduce Mr. Hiltzik to my little friend, the Internet. One of the things we do, typically, is to link directly to the thing we’re discussing, so that people can look for themselves and validate (or, in this case, invalidate) our claims. Here’s the actual link to Hugh’s Site Meter. Go ahead and click through and let me know if you see a secular decline.

Patterico hammered Hiltzik for misrepresenting the numbers (amplified by Independent Source’s look at Hugh’s Alexa ratings, which go back further than his Sitemeter numbers do.

I want to pile on, and suggest that while I’ve looked at some of Patrick’s more aggressive claims about Hiltzik’s intellectual honesty as a bit over the top, I was wrong – Hiltzik is just plain dishonest.

I can’t imagine another reason why – having look at the actual numbers from Sitemeter for Hugh’s site – he wouldn’t have included the link, except on the assumption that his readers would simply take his word for it.

Here’s an interesting take by Amir Taheri on Iran, based on the folk take of ‘Pear-Shaped Ali’ (which is a better one for all concerned than ‘Mushroom Cloud-Shaped Ali’).

The issue here is not uranium enrichment but the finding of a way for the Islamic Republic to walk out of a high-risk confrontation with the United Nations without losing face.

On that score, Ahmadinejad should get high marks. But he may owe all that to the Tehrani folk tale we mentioned above. That tale is woven around its hero Ali Golabi (Pear-shaped Ali) who is a small chap with big ambitions.

The bigger chaps in the neighborhood dismiss him as a midget, bully him whenever they can, and never offer him a seat at the table in the teahouse which is their haunt. So what does Ali Golabi do? He goes around waving a big knife, making a big noise, breaking a window here and there, and, occasionally, even strangling a street cat to show his strength. His agitations annoy the big chaps who want to sip their tea, puff their hookahs and play a game of backgammon in peace.

Nevertheless, Ali knows where and when to stop. As soon as the big chaps come out of the teahouse to confront him, he declares that he has already done whatever he had wanted to do and is now ready not to do it again. This helps ease the tension and gets Ali off the hook- until the next showdown.

So, if our analysis is right the next step for the Islamic Republic would be to announce that, having done what it wanted to do, it has now decided to stop doing it for a while as a gesture of goodwill.

Tehran has less than two weeks to do that before the 28 April deadline set by the United Nations Security Council.

I may be wrong but I think that the Ahmadinejad announcement provides the first opportunity to stop the crisis from spiraling out of control. The Iranian climb-down, if it has not already happened by the time this column is published, is sure to come soon.

Interesting, and hopeful if true.

But not a long-term solution.

There’s a lot of discussion about nuclear weapons timelines in Iran, and I thought it’d be interesting to lay out the most-comparible timeline to nuclear capability, that of Pakistan. This can hopefully serve as a factual anchor for our future discussions.

Obviously, Iran – assuming they got full cooperation from Pakistan’s experts – could move faster. The interesting question is “how much faster?” given the technical issues involved in implementing both enrichment and weapons production.

I’ve based the timeline below on two sources: William Langweische’s article on AQ Khan in the Atlantic, and the Nuclear Weapons Archive, a very useful site founded by Gary An, a student, and now operated by Carey Sublette.

Here’s Pakistan’s timeline (I’ve bolded the date that marks where in the process Iran is generally believed to be today):

1972 – PM Zulfikar Ali Bhutto starts Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program
1974 – India detonates it’s first nuclear weapon; AQ Khan, working in the Netherlands, meets Bhutto and begins assembling data on enrichment technology
1975 – AQ Khan moves from the Netherlands to Pakistan
1976 – AQ Khan founds Engineering Research Laboratories to build an enrichment facility
1978 – prototype and first enrichment
1981/2 – first weapons-grade uranium
1983 – ‘inert test’ of bomb design
1984 – production levels of 90% enriched uranium
1985/6 – weapons produced

So for Pakistan, it seems that it took 7 or 8 years to go from first enrichment to reasonably reliable – and hence usable – weapons, with few measurable waypoints along the way (I’m presuming that we are likely to have means sensitive enough to detect an inert test – which is a test of a weapon with unenriched uranium to make sure that the mechanics work).

Then the interesting questions become: “How far is Iran really down the road today?” and “How much faster than Pakistan can they get to the end?”

There are a few interesting things about getting older, along with the depressing ones: women in their twenties are now potential babysitters rather than potential dates (I passed that threshold a long time ago); having lunch with the widow of a friend; learning that another good friend has died – and you didn’t hear for nearly a year, which reminds you of what a bad job you’re doing as a friend.

And then you get a mailer, and discover that a high school friend is running for Congress. Holy Crap, we’re old enough to be Members of Congress?

So Marcy Winograd sent me a mailer – not because of any long-standing relationship, but because I’m in the district she just moved into to run against incumbent Jane Harman.
Now I have had a tetchy attitude toward Congressmember Harman since before she ran for the first time – we met at one of her exploratory coffees, and I thought her an unprepared, establishment apparachnik.

Harman then abandoned her seat for an ill-considered and somewhat inept run at the Governorship, retired for several years, and then came back to California with the support of the national party and bigfooted several good local Democrats to take the seat back.

So I didn’t start this dance as a Friend of Jane.

And Marcy, when I knew her in high school and intermittently afterwards, was smart, engaged, someone who cared about the world – a good person to sit and talk issues and life with.

So I read the mailer, visit her website, and take a look. And sigh.

Because what’s there is pretty much a straight-ahead Kossak platform.

When we talk about security, we must talk about jobs for all, health care for all, and a foreign policy that embraces diplomacy and builds trust among nations, a foreign policy that chooses war as a very last resort – if ever – and a foreign policy that forever renounces the use of nuclear weapons- because to use those weapons is to ensure our own annihilation.

Marcy is our coast’s Net Lamont. She’s a manifestation of the single-issue orthodoxy that the ‘suicidal lemming’ wing of the Party wants to try and enforce. According to MyDD and Kos and Josh Marshall, you can’t be pro-war and be a Democrat.

And that’s wrong, on just so many levels.

First, and foremost, on the issues. I’ve blogged the kind of foreign policy I think is the intermediate state of this kind of isolationism:

In essence, it’d be a position that said “we’re washing our hands of you”, bulked up border and internal security, and made it a point never to drive through ‘those neighborhoods’ without locking the doors, and never, under any circumstances, to stop there. It solves that whole messy “war” thing, and makes sure that no one says bad things about us in our hearing. We’d be clean-handed liberals, and feel secure.

But I don’t think we’d be secure, or really have clean hands. It’s a nice thing to talk about in the Palisades (or actually, Marina del Rey), or in Georgetown. But the reality of governing America in the 21st Century takes more than this.

Harman has actually been damn sensible about security issues, walking a line in trying to stand for her Party while first of all doing the right thing – as she sees it – to defend America.

I do like Marcy more, but I think she’s flat wrong on the issues, and so I just went over and donated $100.00 to Jane, and encourage you all to go over and give her a few bucks.

I’m trying to do something on the internal struggle within the Democratic Party as an institutional struggle as much as one about issues or worldview; this campaign reflects that more than a little, I think.

Norm Geras – who I’m happy to have drunk a Tsing-Tao or two alongside – has something on his site I hope you’ll all read. It’s a manifesto for a Left that makes sense.

A. Preamble

We are democrats and progressives. We propose here a fresh political alignment. Many of us belong to the Left, but the principles that we set out are not exclusive. We reach out, rather, beyond the socialist Left towards egalitarian liberals and others of unambiguous democratic commitment. Indeed, the reconfiguration of progressive opinion that we aim for involves drawing a line between the forces of the Left that remain true to its authentic values, and currents that have lately shown themselves rather too flexible about these values. It involves making common cause with genuine democrats, whether socialist or not.

1) For democracy.

We are committed to democratic norms, procedures and structures — freedom of opinion and assembly, free elections, the separation of legislative, executive and judicial powers, and the separation of state and religion. We value the traditions and institutions, the legacy of good governance, of those countries in which liberal, pluralist democracies have taken hold.

2) No apology for tyranny.

We decline to make excuses for, to indulgently “understand”, reactionary regimes and movements for which democracy is a hated enemy — regimes that oppress their own peoples and movements that aspire to do so. We draw a firm line between ourselves and those left-liberal voices today quick to offer an apologetic explanation for such political forces.

There’s more, read the whole thing.

The New Statesman has an article about how this document came to be.

On a Saturday last May, right after the general election, 20 or so similarly minded people met in a pub in London. We had no specific agenda, merely a desire to talk about where things were politically. Those present were all of the left: some bloggers or running other websites, their readers, a few with labour movement connections, one or two students. Many of us were supporters of the military intervention in Iraq, and those who weren’t – who had indeed opposed it – none the less found themselves increasingly out of tune with the dominant anti-war discourse. They were at odds, too, with how it related to other prominent issues – terrorism and the fight against it, US foreign policy, the record of the Blair government, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, more generally, attitudes to democratic values.

I’m sorry I missed it…must have been quite a “do”.

Norm interviewed me a long time ago, he asked:

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to disseminate?

And I answered:

The opposite of romantic self-annihilation, and when I can convince you to figure out what that is, we’ll all be better off.

Well, we’re headed that way.

And I’ll enthusiastically sign up to walk there alongside him.

So I’ve been working on the media piece – about the role of media in creating and nurturing national mood – and, of course it’s impossible (for me, anyway) to digest what I’m seeing down into a blog post because it’s a woolly topic and one where I keep picking up threads – Homer! – Habermas! – and following them out to distraction.

Which means I’ve been reading a lot. I’ve looked and looked for the pithy quote that sums my position, or even a book to point you to. And to be honest, haven’t found it.

The closest things I’ve found have been in Clausewitz and in Thucydides, about which more later.
I’ve talked in the past about ‘wicked‘ problems – problems that are not readily reducible to formulas, which cannot be ‘rationalized’ in the traditional sense (although recent advanced in agent-based modelling are actually beginning to put a net over them) and which we have to conceive of in different ways than the formal, rational, deterministic ones we use in discussion, planning, and often in politics.

The result of living outside those rational models (which we do, whether we admit it or not) is that we spend a lot of time not knowing how we’re doing.

Prince Hal stated it best:

KING HENRY V

I tell thee truly, herald,
I know not if the day be ours or no;
For yet a many of your horsemen peer
And gallop o’er the field.

MONTJOY

The day is yours.

KING HENRY V

Praised be God, and not our strength, for it!
What is this castle call’d that stands hard by?

MONTJOY

They call it Agincourt.

When you don’t know if you are winning or losing, when the decision is outside rational calculation, how do you decide what to do? Combat is obviously the extreme case, but it serves as an example of anything that must be done that is difficult and where the outcomes are unknowable. You act on faith, and prejudice, and to a lesser extent, on fear.

You have faith in yourself and those with whom you are struggling. You are prejudiced, because you believe that your succeeding – Henry and the English winning at Agincourt – is better than your failing. And you are afraid, both of the real losses that will come if you lose, but of the loss of reputation, of esteem, of the regard of trust of your fellows. back to Henry:

And gentlemen in England now a-bed shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their manhood’s cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

In early warfare (and in modern as well) one of the roles of the leader is to inspire the troops with speech before the battle. Thucydides is full of these speeches:

Remembering this, the old must equal their ancient exploits, and the young, the sons of the heroes of that time, must endeavour not to disgrace their native valour; and trusting in the help of the god whose temple has been sacrilegiously fortified, and in the victims which in our sacrifices have proved propitious, we must march against the enemy, and teach him that he must go and get what he wants by attacking someone who will not resist him, but that men whose glory it is to be always ready to give battle for the liberty of their own country, and never unjustly to enslave that of others, will not let him go without a struggle.

These speeches amplify the faith, prejudice, and fear of those who listen to them. Is that a reprehensible thing? To us, those three words are themselves pejorative.

The arguments that support them we call propaganda, which is itself a significantly pejorative term today.

But should it be? And if it is, what does that mean in terms of how we function as a society?

The LA Times today had an article about the new film on Flight 93, which cast a fascinating light on the issue. The article, “Is America ready for movies about 9/11?” talks about films as propaganda:

While some might think Hollywood is moving too quickly, history suggests otherwise. Within five months of the Pearl Harbor attack, Republic Pictures had cranked out “Remember Pearl Harbor,” the first in a series of Hollywood films that sought to depict the war and rally the American spirit.

“The nation was totally mobilized for war,” said Robert Sklar, a cinema studies professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, who watched from the roof of his apartment building as the twin towers fell. “There was an Office of War Information that had some direct control over Hollywood, and there was the Army Signal Corps producing documentaries. People like Frank Capra and John Ford and John Huston went into the military and made films.”

Some films were overt propaganda; others were more subtle.

“There was a string back then about the bombing of Pearl Harbor and kind of holy crusade that came after that,” said Richard Jewell, a professor in USC’s School of Cinema-Television. “There were a lot of movies made during that time period that dealt with events in the war that weren’t that great for the U.S. but that were used for propaganda to show how brave our people were even when they lost battles, like Bataan and Wake Island.”

Only after the war was over did movies take a less one-dimensional view.

More nuanced movies began coming out shortly after the war’s end, such as “The Best Years of Our Lives” in 1946, about soldiers trying to resume their prewar existences, up through “The Men” in 1950, about wounded soldiers trying to recover physically and emotionally in a veterans’ hospital.

“Relatively soon after World War II, we were able to show the soldiers in a much more complex light as opposed to having them be unambiguously heroic,” Rodman said. “We could show the cost of the war on our soldiers, which is something we could not have done during the war.”

The Korean War similarly gave rise to “The Steel Helmet” in 1951, a grunt’s view of the war zone, but “MASH” didn’t materialize until 1970 — and though set in a Korean War mobile medical unit, the movie was generally viewed as a Vietnam allegory. A year after the 1975 fall of Saigon, more direct treatments came out, such as “Taxi Driver” in 1976, which helped establish the now-familiar character of the troubled Vietnam veteran; “The Deer Hunter” and “Coming Home” in 1978, followed by “Apocalypse Now” in 1979.

Between Korea and Vietnam, the role of the filmmaker moved from the propagandist to the critic, and our national hero moved from John Wayne to Travis Bickle.

The problem, of course, is that without the self-confidence of faith – and yes, without prejudice and fear – it’s probably very hard to fight a war. To many, that’s a feature, not a bug, I get it. But…

…let’s put war aside for a moment and ask ourselves how it is that we can function as a society without a certain kind of faith (I’m not suggesting religious faith, but rather the kind of faith that Schaar talks about:

“To be a patriot is to have a patrimony; or, perhaps more accurately, the patriot is one who is grateful for a legacy and recognizes that the legacy makes him a debtor. There is a whole way of being in the world, captured best by the word reverence, which defines life by its debts; one is what one owes, what one acknowledges as a rightful debt or obligation. The patriot moves within that mentality. The gift of land, people, language, gods memories, and customs, which is the patrimony of the patriot, defines what he or she is. Patrimony is mixed with person; the two are barely separable. The very tone and rhythm of a life, the shapes of perception, the texture of its homes and fears come from membership in a territorially rooted group. The conscious patriot is one who feels deeply indebted for these gifts, grateful to the people and places through which they come, and determined to defend the legacy against enemies and pass it unspoiled to those who will come after.

But such primary experiences are nearly inaccessible to us. We are not taught to define our lives by our debts and legacies, but by our rights and opportunities. Robert Frost’s stark line, “This land was ours, before we were the land’s.” condenses the whole story of American patriotism. We do not and cannot love the land the way the Greek and Navaho loved theirs. The graves of some of our ancestors are here, to be sure, but most of us would be hard pressed to find them: name and locate the graves of your great-grandparents.”

“But if instinctive patriotism and the patriotism of the city cannot be ours, what can be? Is there a type of patriotism peculiarly American: if so, is it anything more than patriotism’s violent relative nationalism?

Abraham Lincoln, the supreme authority on this subject, thought there was a patriotism unique to America. Americans, a motley gathering of various races and cultures, were bonded together not by blood or religion, not by tradition or territory, not by the calls and traditions of a city, but by a political idea. We are a nation formed by a covenant, by dedication to a set of principles, and by an exchange of promises to uphold and advance certain commitments among ourselves and throughout the world. Those principles and commitments are the core of American identity, the soul of the body politic. They make the American nation unique, and uniquely valuable among and to the other nations. But the other side of this conception contains a warning very like the warnings spoken by the prophets to Israel: if we fail in our promises to each other, and lose the principles of the covenant, then we lose everything, for they are we.”

Schaar’s claim is made against the kind of reflexive and abstract cosmopolitanism that Chris Bertram talks about today:

I recently wrote a review of a couple of books on global justice, one of which expended a great deal of effort in explaining how a liberal cosmopolitanism could be consistently combined with a reasonable patriotism. For some reason, the concern to combine these positions seems to especially concern liberal Americans who want be good patriots and think of themselves as endorsing universal values at one and the same time. Well I guess I agree about this far: that, within the limits justice allows, one both may feel an affection for one’s country and compatriots and promote the good of that nation and community, just as one can legitimately promote the good of one’s family and friends within the bounds set by justice.

To Bertram, patriotism is a kind of affection; like the affection one might have for a sports team or a television show (yes, I’m being a bit dismissive, but affection is itself a dismissive term). Schaar (and I) would disagree.

To Bertram and others, the intention is to reclaim the sphere of the political from the sphere of belief; to create an abstract, Rawlsian, rules-based justice and then expect that the result will be something other than the Panopticon.

I’ll switch to a scene from Yankee Doodle Dandy (released in 1942):

President: I’m sorry I missed the opening of your show.
George: Maybe it was just as well.
President: Don’t worry about it. We understand each other perfectly…The Herald Tribune says that you make a better president in I’d Rather Be Right than I am.
George: Don’t forget, that’s a Republican newspaper.
President: I can remember you and your family very well – the Four Cohans.
George: Do you really, Mr. President? That was a long time ago.
President: Yes, it was while I was attending school near Boston.
George: (smiling to himself) I was a pretty cocky kid in those days – a pretty cocky kid. A regular Yankee Doodle Dandy, always carrying a flag in a parade or following one.
President: I hope you haven’t outgrown the habit.
George: Not a chance.
President: Well that’s one thing I’ve always admired about you Irish-Americans. You carry your love of country like a flag, right out in the open. It’s a great quality.
George: I inherited that – I got that from my father. He ran away to the Civil War when he was thirteen – the proudest kid in the whole state of Massachusetts.
President: So you’ve spent your life telling the other forty-seven states what a great country it is.
George: Well, I never thought of it just that way before, but I guess that’s about the size of it. And I lost no time either. It started with a very funny incident about sixty years ago…

So here’s the question. Could we have won World War II without George M. Cohan, Frank Capra, and Michael Curtiz? Without Rick’s Cafe Americain? How would history have been different if M.A.S.H had been released in 1952?

Via this comment from David Blue (who I’m glad to see has stuck around), I’m sent over to Michael Yon’s, which I’m remiss for not following more closely.

Go read this whole piece, and get reminded why he is, in fact, a hella journalist. But here’s something he tossed off that we all need to think about:

bq. Every country practices censorship, in one form or the other. Just this week, Thailand is having a Texas-cage match over censorship, accuracy in reporting, and alleged slanderous swipes at the King. Last week, in America, a radio producer for a large syndicated program in the United States called me requesting that I go on the show, a show that has hosted me many times and where I’ve been referred to as, “Our man in Iraq.” But when I said Iraq is in a civil war, that same producer slammed down the phone and, in so doing, demonstrated how much he reveres truth.

There’s a lot to unpack in that, and in the rest of his post.

I’m working on it…and you should too. And no, if the reality is that Iraq is moving toward a civil war, it doesn’t mean we come home or laager up. We’re in until we win – or until someone gets elected who’s willing to settle for less. in which case it’s going to be a very, very bad decade.