IF YOU’VE SPENT THE WEEKEND, you know, “having a life,” and missed it, you may want to scroll down to this 2,261 word post on the “Bush lied about WMD” claim. Then again, now that I’ve told you how long it is, you may not. . . .

And here’s a post with some constructive suggestions (no, really) for the new management at the New York Times.

ANDREA SEE has gone a whole year without smoking. Drop by and congratulate her.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING STORY about a judicial scandal in Mississippi that seems to be getting less attention than I’d have expected, especially in light of the Trent Lott connection.

THE TIMES (London, not New York) is crediting bloggers with the end of Howell’s reign.

UPDATE: David Warren agrees. I think they’re kind of right, and I’m going to talk about the role of the Internet in dissolving the Raines regime from the inside and outside simultaneously, in this week’s TechCentralStation column.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s a link to the Times story that works for me. See if it works for you.

If it doesn’t work, read it here.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s an L.A. Times piece that credits Jim Romenesko more than bloggers. I found the profile of Romenesko, about whom I know relatively little personally, the most interesting part.

Meanwhile several readers note that the (London) Times story credits Lefty bloggers with Trent Lott’s ouster. Well, it was Josh Marshall and Atrios who hit him first, but it’s probably true that it was the attention from non-Lefty bloggers, who didn’t find everything Trent Lott said outrageous on general principles, that really got the story off the ground. As with most Blogospheric successes, it was a collaborative effort.

HOMELAND SECURITY: STILL A JOKE:

Laura Callahan, the deputy CIO of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), was placed on paid administrative leave last week after questions surfaced about her academic qualifications, a DHS spokeswoman confirmed.

The move came after members of Congress contacted department officials demanding answers to questions about her academic background, as well as about the department’s policy on background checks.

On her resume, Callahan, who was appointed to the position on April 1, said she received her academic degrees, including a doctorate in computer information systems, from Hamilton University in Evanston, Wyo.

However, the congressmen, including Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), contend that according to published reports, Hamilton isn’t licensed by that state, nor is the school accredited by the U.S. Department of Education. The congressmen said Hamilton is a “diploma mill.”

Of course, the real question is why she got the job in the first place. Don’t they do background checks? And besides, there’s this:

In March 2000, she was one of two White House officials accused of threatening Northrop Grumman Corp. workers with jail unless they kept quiet about the disappearance of thousands of White House e-mails, according to press reports at the time. Callahan was the White House webmaster under the Clinton administration, and Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman ran the White House computer system at the time.

Maybe they figured that was proof she could keep a secret. . . .

(Via Robi Sen).

UPDATE: Background checks? Hah! Lawrence Haws says that he only needed three minutes with google to discover this “explosive” secret. He’s even got photographic evidence!

Perhaps someone should introduce the Homeland Security folks to Google.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Haws has noticed changes to one of the profiles he found. He suspects Callahan, but a reader emailed me to note that anyone can edit that profile rather easily.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Well, this joke’s on us. Not the phony degree part, but the site that Haws found. Reader elaborates:

Microsoft SQL ships with a demo data base called northwind traders. By default it is installed. It gives a basic idea of table relationships and the data that might be in a live DB. It’s pretty lame actually. It just so happens that there is a Laura Callahan listed as an employee. . . .

Basically, someone wrote a quick table editor for a test and left it visible to the web. I’m a long term DBA who’s been worked with just about every DB platform that’s shipped since 1995. Easy to get fooled by if you’re not familiar with the software. The first clue should have been that the data was editable by anyone on the web. The second clue was the simple (ugly) interface. The third clue should have been the products on the site had nothing to do with parent site.

I won’t box you around much because you were just passing along someone else’s error, but I read your site. And after all, according to some you’re one the 4 most powerful bloggers! ;)

Hmm. Well, if an “ugly” interface is a clue that something’s wrong then there’s a lot of funny business going on. It’s odd that the pictures match, though. But there you are — I don’t promise no mistakes here, just swift corrections.

THE CONGO IS ANOTHER HUMAN DISASTER, on a par with Cambodia. The U.N. has been nominally in charge of dealing with things there for several years (there may be a connection here. . . .). But Joe Katzman does an excellent job (in connection with Bruce Rolston — follow the links to multiple posts) of explaining why the U.N. can’t do anything constructive. It also explains why the political costs to the United States of trying to do anything constructive would be excessive — in fact, paralyzingly high, and much worse than Iraq.

The U.N. and the mindset that goes with it, built to prevent genocide, seems in fact to promote genocide and make it hard for anyone to do anything about it.

G. IN BAGHDAD is a new Iraqi blogger. Hey, the number just doubled! I hope we’ll see it double again, very soon.

(Via Jeff Jarvis, who also reports that there are now 70 new newspapers in Baghdad).

SORRY FOR THE LACK OF BLOGGING this morning. It’s been busy around the InstaPundit household. Back later. I’ve updated the WMD post below, though, so keep scrolling.

IT’S BEEN VERY DIFFICULT for me to take the various “where are the weapons of mass destruction — Bush lied!” conspiracy theories seriously. The desperation with which they’re offered is indication enough of their bogosity. But in any event, Robert Kagan points out just how absurd it is to argue that Bush swindled the world into believing in nonexistent weapons:

The absurdity of these accusations is mind-boggling. Start with this: The Iraqi government in the 1990s admitted to U.N. weapons inspectors that it had produced 8,500 liters of anthrax, as well as a few tons of the nerve agent VX. Where are they? U.N. weapons inspectors have been trying to answer that question for a decade. Because Hussein’s regime refused to answer, the logical presumption was that they had to be somewhere still in Iraq.

That, at least, has been the presumption of Hans Blix. Go back and take a look at the report Blix delivered to the U.N. Security Council on Jan. 27. On the question of Iraq’s stocks of anthrax, Blix reported there existed “no convincing evidence” they had ever been destroyed. On the contrary, he said, there was “strong evidence” that Iraq had produced even more anthrax than it had declared “and that at least some of this was retained.” Blix also reported that Iraq possessed 650 kilograms of “bacterial growth media,” enough “to produce . . . 5,000 litres of concentrated anthrax.”

On the question of VX, Blix reported that his inspection team had “information that conflicts” with Iraqi accounts. The Iraqi government claimed that it had produced VX only as part of a pilot program but that the quality was poor and therefore the agent was never “weaponized.” But according to Blix, the inspection team discovered that the Iraqi government had lied. The Iraqi government’s own documents showed that the quality and purity of the VX were better than declared and, according to the inspection team, there were “indications that the agent” had indeed been “weaponized.”

Blix reported as well that 6,500 “chemical bombs” that Iraq admitted producing still remained unaccounted for. Blix’s team calculated the amount of chemical agent in those bombs at 1,000 tons. As Blix reported to the U.N. Security Council, “in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we must assume that these quantities are now unaccounted for.”

Today they are unaccounted for. But the answer to the continuing conundrum is not that Bush and Blair are lying. The weapons were there. Someday we’ll find them, or we’ll find out what happened to them.

Unless, of course, you like your conspiracies to be as broad and all-pervasive as possible.

Well, it’s better than admitting that if you’d had your way, Saddam Hussein would still be shoveling children into mass graves, I suppose. And that’s what this is really all about. Having lost the argument about the war, and having had Saddam’s brutality proven beyond any reasonable doubt, the anti-war folks have to do something to regain the moral high ground — because, to them, the moral high ground is theirs by right, regardless of the nature or consequences of their actions.

But as Kagan notes, if Bush is lying, so are a lot of other people:

One would have to assume as well that the German intelligence service was lying when it reported in 2001 that Hussein was three years away from being able to build three nuclear weapons and that by 2005 Iraq would have a missile with sufficient range to reach Europe.

Maybe French President Jacques Chirac was lying when he declared this past February that there were probably weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that “we have to find and destroy them.”

And then there’s Al Gore, who declared last September, presumably based on what he had learned as vice president, that Hussein had “stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.”

Finally, we get to Bill Clinton. In a speech delivered at the Pentagon in February 1998, Clinton described what he called Iraq’s “offensive biological warfare capability, notably 5,000 gallons of botulinum, which causes botulism; 2,000 gallons of anthrax; 25 biological-filled Scud warheads; and 157 aerial bombs.” Clinton accurately reported the view of U.N. weapons inspectors at the time “that Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions, a small force of Scud-type missiles, and the capacity to restart quickly its production program and build many, many more weapons.”

People are changing their tune now — but it’s about ass-covering, and nothing more.

UPDATE: Read this Mark Steyn column too:

If I understand correctly, the British, having won the war, are now demanding a recount. Across the length and breadth of the realm, the people are as one: now that the war’s out of the way we can go back to bitching and whining that Blair hasn’t made the case for it.

This is all very odd. In Kirkuk the other day, they found another mass grave, this time with the bodies of 200 children who had been buried alive. Yawn. Doesn’t count. Wake me if they find a toxic warhead among the teeny skulls. The naysayers were wrong on so much – millions of refugees, Vietnam quagmire, Stalingrad, etc – you can’t blame them for clinging to the one little straw that hasn’t shrivelled up and slipped between their fingers: Come on, Tony, where’s the WMD?

Or as Iain Duncan Smith put it in the House of Commons: “The truth is nobody believes a word you say now.” Well, I do. Because what Mr Blair said is not only in line with what American officials told me, it is in line with what Continental officials told me – as recently as two weeks ago, when a big-time Euro paused midway through his harangue about the illegality of the war to assure me that “of course” Saddam had been up to WMD monkey business.

That’s why, if you notice, the axis of weasels (France, Germany, Russia) and its short-pants league (Belgium, Luxembourg, Canada), while undoubtedly enjoying Mr Blair’s discomfort, have nevertheless declined to join in the show-us-the-sarin taunts. They know what their intelligence services say (assuming, for the purposes of argument, Luxembourg has an intelligence service), and it’s the same as the British and Americans.

You might also want to read Colin Powell’s speech to the UN, which makes clear what the war was about, and that exposes the “it was all about WMD being about to be used” spin that we’re hearing now. Excerpt:

I asked for this session today for two purposes. First, to support the core assessments made by Dr. Blix and Dr. ElBaradei. As Dr. Blix reported to this Council on January 27, “Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament which was demanded of it.” . . .

My colleagues, Operative Paragraph 4 of UN Resolution 1441, which we lingered over so long last fall, clearly states that false statements and omissions in the declaration and a failure by Iraq at any time to comply with and cooperate fully in the implementation of this resolution shall constitute — the facts speak for themselves — shall constitute a further material breach of its obligation.

We wrote it this way to give Iraq an early test, to give Iraq an early test. Would they give an honest declaration and would they, early on, indicate a willingness to cooperate with the inspectors? It was designed to be an early test. They failed that test.

By this standard, the standard of this Operative Paragraph, I believe that Iraq is now in further material breach of its obligations. I believe this conclusion is irrefutable and undeniable.

Iraq has now placed itself in danger of the serious consequences called for in UN Resolution 1441.

Iraq was required by the U.N. resolutions in force to prove its innocence, something that it did not do. This, in my opinion, is irrelevant. The UN is a body of no moral or — really — legal standing in such matters. But if you’re going to play that game, then it’s important to recognize that the question isn’t whether we find WMD. It was whether Saddam produced adequate evidence that they were destroyed. As Steyn notes:

The moment [Blair] prevailed upon Bush to go the extra mile with the UN, it was inevitable that there would be a fair amount of what I believe the British call “total bollocks”. That is, by definition, the official language of multilateralism, and one reason why I have little time for it. For 18 months, my position on Iraq was consistent: I was in favour of whacking Saddam because the price of leaving him non-whacked was too high for America’s broader interests. But once you get into auditioning justifications in front of a panel comprising France, China and Guinea, you’re in for quite a tap dance. In the end, Britain officially went to war on a technicality, and given that that technicality – Saddam’s technical non-compliance with Resolution 1441 – still holds, the WMD song and dance is irrelevant, both de facto and de jure. And as politics, two months after victory, it’s pathetically immature.

“Pathetically immature?” It’s worse than that, actually, but that will do. As Dean Esmay notes:

Now the spin is that we had an “intelligence failure?” It was the UN that said Saddam wasn’t cooperating, and the UN that said Saddam probably still had Weapons of Mass Destruction. . . .

The responsibility for proving that there were or were not Weapons of Mass Destruction fell to the United Nations and Saddam Hussein. They failed to prove his innocence. We had our reasons, some of which we gave the UN and some of which we didn’t.

Arguments finished, allies secured, we then went and freed the Iraqi people from a monster.

That’s what happened. It’s what the history books will record. I just wonder where some of you were during that whole thing. I really do.

Indeed. Probably here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Howard Owens has an excellent roundup of arguments on the WMD topic. It’s far more balanced than my coverage above, and more in line with what I planned to write before I got terminally irritated with the nasty emails I’ve gotten on the subject. That’s either because Howard doesn’t get those emails, or because he’s a better man than I am. Or both. Anyway, read it. Read this, too, and follow the links.

STILL MORE:

I don’t have complete research facilities here in the Kuwaiti desert (nor unlimited Google time), but I’m pretty sure that the original reasons for the French and British Armies to fight in WWII was because of entanglements in treaties that required declarations of war for infractions. The reasons the US entered WWII were many and varied, but I would not be out of line to say they included the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Anglophilism (is that a word?), and fear of a resurgent Germany. At the time we joined in, there were many patriotic Americans who believed that Europe was only getting itself into another one of it’s wars, for which it had a long inglorious history, and that the US had no reason to choose sides. Given what we knew at the time, they had every reason to believe they were right. I am pretty sure that there were only a few people, if any at all, who said that Hitler represented an evil that should be destroyed.

Now, in retrospect, the clearest most recognized reason for celebrating the Allied victory over Nazi Germany was because, in fact, Hitler was evil and he was bringing his nation to ruin because of his psychotic, unrestrained capacity to inflict harm on Germans and people of other nations. ALL of the original reasons for defeating Nazi Germany, ALL of the reasons that people understood at the beginning of the war, ALL of the reasons that the soldiers who fought the war knew of as they boarded the transports to cross the English Channel, or as they lay shivering in their foxhole in the cold Ardennes winter night, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE REASONS, pales in comparison to what we now accept as the real reason we should celebrate that great victory. Our world is better because Hitler is dead, the evil he was, is gone.

Now we, as a nation, are faced with the same dilemma. Will the Second Gulf War be viewed as an unnecessary conquest of a benign nation, as some of the pro-Saddam morons would have us believe? I say that one only needs to look into a mass grave, filled with the bones of children scattered among dolls and toys, to know that this war was necessary. Time will show that we did the right thing, and those who opposed it, fervently, completely and eternally, were wrong.

We may never find WMDs in Iraq, and I don’t give a shit if we ever do. My world, my children’s world, my grandchildren’s world (when it comes) will be better because we fought this fight and won.

I will never change my mind on this, I have seen the graves.

Major Diggs Cleveland
US Army
Camp Doha, Kuwait

Indeed. Read this, too. As Dean Esmay says in another post (not the one linked above), “There are good questions to be raised by this affair, but they can’t be asked until the ‘Bush lied’ people get over themselves.”

Yes. In a way, of course, the “Bush lied” stuff serves the Administration’s interests, by muddying the waters so that less dramatic, but more pointed, questions are hard to ask. It’s Karl Rove’s useful idiots, all over again.

Also, check out this cartoon.

MANDY GRUNWALD ASKS WHY THE PRESS DEALS SO BADLY WITH THE PRESS. The answer: they’re used to judging without being judged:

I think the experience may be particularly difficult for journalists who tend to have a sense of righteousness that often comes without self-awareness. The truth is that journalists are used to judging others and not being judged.

When politicians or corporate executives have their integrity questioned, they often bristle. Journalists never understand this. They think it is arrogance or ignorance. But when the reputation of a news organization is at stake, the defensiveness is usually even greater. . . .

And unlike people in most other public companies these days — companies that have had to become increasingly adept at dealing with the public, their stockholders and the press — journalists and media companies remain quite insulated. There is more reporting about the media than ever before, but still, the average newspaper editor is less likely to face press scrutiny than the average CEO.

Yes. And this is what the bloggers keep pointing out, and what the pro-journos keep misunderstanding.

THIS IS TRUE:

One of the . . . keys to Reynolds’ success is the large number of folks who send him links from around the globe at all hours; basically, Instapundit is a group blog with a strong editor.

I never quite thought of it that way, but it makes sense.

HUNDREDS OF PRICELESS ARTIFACTS LOST, due to the ineptitude or indifference of the authorities. In Toronto.

MORE EVIDENCE that neither the EU, nor those who are pushing it, can be trusted:

Gisela Stuart, a Labour MP, reacted with fury to efforts by Valery Giscard d’Estaing, who heads the drafting team, to sneak through new clauses that would change the character of the European Union.

“These issues had never been discussed before by the praesidium, and there was no justification for adding them now,” she said. “I told them this was getting silly, I had a plane to catch, and I wasn’t even going talk about them.”

The offending clauses were a back-door move to allow future treaty changes to be made without requiring ratification by national parliaments.

But of course.

HERE’S A REPORT ON THE MARS ROVERS — and here’s another.

ROBERT PRATHER points to more bias at The New York Times.

THERE WAS AN ANTI-WARBUSH RALLY in Atlanta. Michael Demmons has pictures.

Isn’t it a bit late for those “Hands off Iraq!” signs?

UPDATE: Kathy Kinsley emails:

In regards to: “Isn’t it a bit late for those ‘Hands off Iraq!’ signs?”

Nope. If they can get us to leave too soon, Iraq might well end up as another basket case like Somalia, a religious tyranny like Iran or having a civil war.

If that happens, of course, it will be all America’s fault for going in there in the first place. It would actually be our fault for leaving too soon — but that would never be mentioned.

(Yes, I’m cynical, why do you ask?)

Oh, I wasn’t asking. . . .

JEFF JARVIS echoes a call from Brian Linse for constructive debate about improving the media in the wake of the New York Times scandals.

I guess I’d take Brian’s call for reasoned, constructive debate more seriously if the post below it didn’t describe NRO this way: “Can anyone argue that this pathetic site is now anything more than a convenient meeting place for neocon circle jerks where K-Lo usually has the biggest dick?” It’s kind of hard to ride the civil-and-constructive high horse when you say things like that. . ..

But, actually, I do have some constructive suggestions for the Times and other Big Media. Here they are:

1. Diversity: By which I mean real diversity in the kinds of people it hires — not the faux-diversity that the Times practices. Where are the Ken Laynes, the Mark Steyns, etc. at the Times? The Times has been an intellectual and political monoculture for a long time, and that makes it hard for it to engage in the kind of critical evaluation of its own coverage that’s necessary if it wants to be a real national paper, rather than a northeastern city paper with national aspirations.

2. Accountability: Follow up on stories. Do an after-action interview with sources and subjects. Accept feedback. And make sure that corrections all appear on the Web versions of the stories where the errors occurred. (And keep those archives open!) Get an outside ombudsman. Give him/her power to really do things — including investigate reporting practices — not just an occasional column for airing lame non-apologies, which is all you get from most ombudsfolks. I’ll bet I know someone who can provide more advice on how to do this.

3. Feedback: Get RSS feeds from a bunch of blogs. Filter them to highlight references to stories in the Times. Hire somebody smart to read those posts about Times stories, and give him/her the power to recommend followups, corrections, etc. (This is a trivial effort, technically, and I’m sure Dave Winer or somebody would be happy to help). Make the corrections, etc., credit the blogs that spotted the problems, thus encouraging more scrutiny and — in essence — enlisting a free army of fact-checkers. (Did you hear that, Pinch? “Free!”)

Okay, that’s a start anyway, and with no genital references. I’m sure that other people can do better.

UPDATE: Jonathan Swerdloff emails:

Your RSS feed idea is a good one. A correlate idea would be opening their articles for trackback pings. When an article gets commented on by a blogger, he or she can ping the site, and the ombudsman can check the ping. I’m a little surprised that no major media outlets have taken advantage of trackback – it’s a good way to drive traffic. Bloggers ping because they want the link back, and the Times wants the links for “eyeballs” to increase ad revenue. It’s a win win.

Yep. And this is so easy, so simple, and so likely to be effective that I’m amazed at how unlikely the Times is to actually do it.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jim Lindgren emails:

The reason that the NY Times won’t decide to allow routine comments to articles on its sites is a version of the same reason that you don’t have comments turned on at Instapundit.

The Times reasonably fears that, while some good would come of it, the time spent on wasted leads and pointless controversies could be better spent on other stories. Even in the midst of a campaign of supposed correction, the Times initially ignored a reader’s complaint about Dowd’s intentionally misleading quotation of George Bush. It took the blogs to bring it to the Times’ attention. I think appointing someone to monitor blogs for disclosures of bias or errors is a good idea because (somewhat ironically) the “unedited” blogs actually collectively perform some of the sifting duties of a good editor. Open comment pages do not.

That’s true — though trackback isn’t exactly the same as open comments. But it might become unmanageable where the Times is concerned, I suppose. God knows that when I open comments here it tends to. The RSS-monitoring idea would be easy, though.

STILL MORE: Reader Lewis Wagner has an excellent suggestion:

I think you missed an important point … references. It should be a requirement that the online versions of all reports link to source material.

For example, if there is a report on a speech, it should be a requirement that the speech be linked, even if this means that the news outlet types up the
speech and puts it on a local page. No link to source material should mean that neither the online nor paper version of a story should be published at all. The
same should hold for discussions of scientific articles or policy papers. This should be as basic a requirement as spell checking.

Good point. While there are times when that wouldn’t be feasible, it’s a good general rule.

DANIEL DREZNER CALLS FOR the “international community” to take action against the “Axis of Autocrats.” Unfortunately, there’s rather a lot of overlap. . . .

I’VE DONE SOME BLOGROLL MAINTENANCE, updating links to blogs that have moved, removing links to blogs that have died, etc. If you notice anything I’ve missed, let me know.

I WONDER IF THIS IS A SIGN that Burma’s thugocracy is getting nervous?

One of Burma’s most powerful leaders blamed Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League of Democracy for violence last week in which at least four people were killed, a sign that the military regime may not be willing to release the Nobel laureate from detention.

The comments by military intelligence chief Khin Nyunt are the first by a senior member of the junta on the May 30 violence.

“The recent course of confrontation taken by the NLD led to creating the untoward incidents, causing a great loss to the state,” Mr Nyunt was quoted as saying in a speech to officials at an airport opening ceremony on Friday.

“Corrupt practices and the organisational work of the NLD instigated by foreign nations will not benefit the country.”

That they’re admitting this is, I suspect, a sign that there’s a lot more of this going on than we’re hearing about. That they’re trying to blame it on Aung San Suu Kyi suggests that they’re feeling heat about her disappearance.

THE GUARDIAN EXPLAINS ITSELF on the Wolfowitz matter, which it calls a “nasty slip.”

I have to say that although the Guardian’s publication of that story — and of the erroneous Jack Straw story the same week — demonstrated a certain over-eagerness to believe the worst about people it doesn’t like on the basis of extremely weak evidence, its response has been very admirable.

UPDATE: Roger Simon says I’m too kind to The Guardian.

INSTAPUNDIT’S PARIS CORRESPONDENT CLAIRE BERLINSKI sends this report:

For the past few days, helicopters have been circling noisily above the center of Paris. No one I speak to knows why — there are dark murmurings that something, somewhere has been tipped to explode, or that the water supply is scheduled to be poisoned, but no one knows for sure. The choppers are making a huge racket outside my window and driving me nuts. But that’s not the big story, at least not yet. The story, which isn’t getting much attention outside of France, is that the trade unions’ protests over the government’s pension reform scheme have become outrageously violent, and France is in chaos.

The scale of the lawlessness and thuggery would generate endless anguished editorials in the English-language press if France were Iraq, and if somehow the United States could be blamed for it. The demonstrators have barricaded roads and railway tracks, ransacked and occupied administrative buildings, set fires, reversed over one another with their cars, sealed off city centers, emptied garbage onto the streets and rendered public transportation throughout the country unusable. Air traffic has been brought to a halt. Demonstrators cut off power lines at the Gare de Lyon. Tourists have been stranded everywhere. The national railway company, the SNCF, has lost $140 million in six days.

This is not a loss the shaky French economy can tolerate. And why? Because the government has proposed to increase the number of years public sector employees must work to receive full retirement benefits, from 37.5 years to 40 years — a move that would bring them in line with the private sector. Are these reforms necessary? You bet. Will France go broke if they’re not implemented? Without a doubt — retirees will account for a third of the French population by 2040, and the best projections suggest that if the reforms aren’t implemented, France will be running a 50 billion Euro annual deficit by 2020. Have the reforms been proposed by a democratically-elected government? Indeed. Are they supported by the public at large? Yes. Pretty much everyone, save the demonstrators themselves, acknowledges that pension reform is necessary.

What’s interesting, sociologically, is that the account given by the demonstrators of their behavior simply doesn’t correspond to reality: There is no objective grievance commensurate with the scale of the violence. An especially interesting fact is that the violence has been whistled up and spearheaded by the transport workers, who are for the most part unreconstructed communists, and who would not be affected by the proposed reforms. Given that the ideology championed by the leaders of these protests has been, over and over again, completely discredited, how should we account for their influence? The only conclusion I can draw from this is that a segment of French society can be easily inspired to smash things for the fun of it. I wonder why.

France, even more than the rest of Europe, is suffering from a serious political illness. These are the symptoms. Meanwhile you can show your appreciation for this firsthand reporting by ordering Claire’s book, Loose Lips, which is doing pretty darned well on Amazon considering it won’t actually come out until next week.

UPDATE: Claire fact-checks her own ass:

I just re-read my own words, and realized one line is slightly misleading. The SNCF has lost $140 million in six days, but these have not been consecutive days. Rather, the loss has occurred in six separate days of striking since March 18. This is a small point, but but with all you bloggers fact-checking our hapless journalistic asses, one can’t be too careful. God, I long for the good old days when I could just commit any old shit to print.

Not as much as some other people do, I’ll bet.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Sylvain Galineau adds this point:

At this opportune point, I have to ask my American friends who were shocked by France’s behavior and foreign policy regarding Iraq : what in the name of all that’s Holy were you expecting ? They can’t even deal with trade union blackmail and political street terrorism, and you want them to fight al-Qaeda or Saddam Hussein ? Hello !?!McFly ? Anybody home?

There’s more on trade unions and violence. He adds:

But when the French wake up -and they sometimes do, as odd as it might sound these days – Bastilles are stormed in a hurry and long-established vested interests are soon parted from their pretty powdered heads.

I am not holding my breath. But nobody will see it coming.

It’s always been a mystery to me why the French put up with that sort of thing. But then, it’s obvious that we see the world differently on many levels.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Read this, too.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Den Beste has more news from France. And here’s a roundup of press coverage, such as it is. Den Beste wonders if this hasn’t been downplayed because of Poland’s vote on joining the EU this weekend.

A SMALL PLANE HAS CRASHED INTO AN APARTMENT BUILDING in Los Angeles, killing two people and injuring seven as of the latest report. No obvious terror connection.

This story from Los Angeles, on the other hand. . . .

CHIEF WIGGLES’ BLOG reprints an email from an Iraqi doctor.

WE’RE ALL WRONG: Howell Raines did not resign.