JAMES LILEKS is Fisking Colleen Rowley.

DEPARTMENT OF SELF-PARODY: Ed Asner, defending Stalin as “hugely misunderstood.”

Actually, Stalin is hugely misunderstood — by those who think of him as being in some way progressive, or admirable.

MORE EVIDENCE THAT THE FRENCH ARE STARTING TO CATCH ON:

Having recently emerged battered from national education strikes and months of street demonstrations over reduced retirement benefits, Jacques Chirac’s administration is looking on with dismay at media encouragement for right-wing intellectual claims that France is now the weak man of Europe, mired in hypocrisy nationally and internationally, indifferent to popular needs such as care of the aged, and shaken by the aftershocks of vain defiance of the US-led war in Iraq. In short, that France is going down the pan.

Recognizing the problem is the first step.

TERRY TEACHOUT misses middlebrow culture.

What do we have now? Unibrow culture? I think it’s more multibrow culture. . . .