MICKEY KAUS has a shocking tale of the Winona Ryder jury selection.

CRANKY PROFESSOR MICHAEL TINKLER is disgusted with this Washington Post article on angry young white males, which he suspects was assigned back when the editors of the Post thought that was the profile of the D.C. sniper. Excerpt:

And where does Ms. Stepp find the nerve to quote some professor of workforce education at Penn State “No one’s interested in the Bubbas”? Public voices, people, public voices. If you’ve got a P.C. monitor about referring to the Tyrones and Julios, apply it to the Bubbas, too.

Gosh, newspaper P.C. language is selective and sloppy. No wonder icy loners shoot suburban persons of color. Oh, wait! That’s not what happened!

Scroll down for Tinkler’s take on the Bellesiles report, too:

Folks, this is as damning as one group of humanists can be. . . .

Anyone (like several of my friends) who thinks that ‘gun nuts’ brought Michael Bellesiles down should have to read this. Michael Bellesiles brought himself down. He did sloppy work (at the most charitable) and has been caught.

These professor-bloggers sure are smart. . . .

BELLESILES UPDATE: The Bellesiles story is on the front page of the Chronicle of Higher Education’s website, though you’ll need a subscription to read it. I don’t subscribe to the Chronicle online, and the story’s not on NEXIS yet, so I can only report that they’re covering the story prominently — though that in itself is news.

UPDATE: This link to the Chronicle story seems to work. The story is mildly favorable to Bellesiles, in that it closes with a quote from the Nation‘s Bellesiles defense of last week.

Bellesiles is certainly playing the martyr — this story from the Washington Times quotes him as saying: “I believe that if we begin investigating every scholar who challenges received truth, it will not be long before no challenging scholarly books are published.” While it’s easy to understand why Bellesiles might choose to make such a claim, absurd as it is, I’m surprised that his remaining defenders are echoing it. Surely the claim that anyone who dares challenge the NRA will be crushed is a claim that is unlikely to promote more scholarship along the lines they find congenial. I conclude that either (1) they’re too foolish to think this through; or (2) they don’t intend such claims to be taken seriously. Or perhaps a bit of both.

JACQUES CHIRAC: THREAT TO WORLD ORDER, according to Tim Hames in The Times:

The evidence that rogue governments can inflict so much more chaos than rogue gunmen or groups does not seem to be concentrating minds much at the United Nations. . . .

It is has been widely claimed that Mr Putin will, after the horrors of Moscow, feel compelled to co-operate with the Americans over Saddam. This is to assume that the Russians are the real problem at the United Nations. They are not. Mr Putin has legitimate commercial and strategic interests in the region and is entitled to drive a hard bargain with Washington. That is what he is doing and it is not resented. The grotesque recent grandstanding by Jacques Chirac is an entirely different matter.

It is he who in the next few days will make or break a meaningful international stance against a menace far more awesome than snipers or Chechens. It is why, ironically, despite the bloodshed elsewhere, it is the President of France who is today the most serious obstacle to world order.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

JAMES MORROW wonders if the failure of the “angry white man” scenario where the sniper is concerned will cause the FBI to revisit its Anthrax theory. This Washington Post story casts more doubt on that always-dubious conception of the crime. Sounds like another case (see below) of saying “we’re looking for a white truck.”

TIDBITS: This story has a couple of interesting items:

Remarkably, law-enforcement sources tell NEWSWEEK, some investigators continued to cling to the belief that the sniper or snipers were driving a white van or truck. Like the talking heads on TV, they had convinced themselves that the snipers must be white men driving a white truck. They had trouble accepting that they should have been looking for two black men driving a blue car. They were fixated on cars fleeing the scene. It does not seem to have really occurred to them that the shooters would hang around—as they almost surely did. As it turned out, a witness had reported seeing a Caprice driving slowly with its lights off near the scene of the Oct. 3 shooting in northeast D.C. But in the dark, the witness remembered the car’s color as burgundy, not blue, and the lead was lost in the chatter over white vehicles. A witness outside the Fredericksburg, Va., Michaels craft store, scene of a shooting on Oct. 4, reported a “dark-colored vehicle with New Jersey tags” leaving the scene. A woman calling the tip line on Oct. 7 said she had spotted a black man crouching beneath the dashboard in a dark Chevy Caprice. The woman was struck by the intensity of the man’s stare. The agent on the tip line brushed her off. “We’re looking for a white truck,” she said.

(Emphasis added). And it turns out that Muhammad seems to have attacked the U.S. Army in wartime:

His sergeant, however, says he was “trouble from day one. You’d give him an order and you’d get a certain glare,” retired Sgt. Kip Berentson told NEWSWEEK. “He loved being in charge and he had a warped sense of humor.” Williams’s unit was sent to Operation Desert Storm to clear mines and bulldoze holes in enemy lines. A few nights before the invasion of Iraq, Sergeant Berentson awoke in the early hours to find his tent, with 16 sleeping men inside, on fire. Someone had tossed in a thermite grenade. Berentson, who was fed up with Williams’s insubordination, immediately suspected Williams and told the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division. Berentson says he last saw Williams being led away in handcuffs. Williams’s military records make no mention of the incident; indeed, they suggest Williams had a distinguished gulf-war stint. But Berentson always kept Williams’s name and dog-tag number in his wallet. He says he was not surprised to see Williams’s face on television.

Hmm. Thanks to reader Chris Regan for spotting these items. Meanwhile, Robin Goodfellow writes that people misconceive Al Qaeda, but that Muhammad’s actions are consistent with its actual organization: basically, more like a grant-making institution than a centralized hierarchy. And another reader says that Muhammad reminds him of someone else who seemed like a well-traveled ne’er-do-well: Richard Reid.

We’ll see. It appears that the definition of “terrorism” favored by many in the government is a narrow one, requiring a decoder ring and an autographed picture of Osama bin Laden. The model here may be more akin to that in Bruce Sterling’s novel Distraction, where ideology and propaganda were used to direct whatever susceptible individuals were available toward a chosen target.