JAMES EARL KERRY? What would kind of President would John Kerry make?

UPDATE: I hope a Kerry Presidency wouldn’t be as bad as this account of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Sheesh!

EVAN COYNE MALONEY has thoughts on Abu Ghraib and Nick Berg.

UPDATE: Some very weird stuff about Berg’s associations with, among others, alleged 20th hijacker Moussaoui.

SOUTH KOREAN PRESIDENT ROH’S IMPEACHMENT has been dismissed.

WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER PUT YOUR PICTURE ON THE INTERNET: Hey, didn’t I see this guy in the Boston Globe?

HOW DO WE KNOW THAT THE NICK BERG MURDER VIDEO WAS A MISTAKE FOR AL QAEDA? Because Al Jazeera is now attacking its authenticity. (Yeah, it’s certainly unprecedented!) Who are these unnamed bloggers?

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg has thoughts on the unfolding Berg story.

ANOTHER UPDATE: An amusing Al Jazeera parody here. And reader Edward Lee emails:

Did these people see the same video I saw? Berg is clearly alive when the terrorists shove him to the ground. The reason he doesn’t wriggle in resistance is because he’s completely tied up. They then proceed to saw off his neck, and you can hear him screaming for a good 5-10 seconds. When they hit the jugular, you can see a lot of blood spill out.

Yeah.

A GREAT READER EMAIL over at Andrew Sullivan’s.

TED KENNEDY: The Jeff Goldstein interview.

As reliable as a Boston Globe photo-feature on prisons!

UPDATE: Ouch!

IT’S NOT JUST UNSCAM:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Corrupt use of World Bank funds may exceed $100 billion and while the institution has moved to combat the problem, more must be done, the chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee said on Thursday.

Sen. Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican, charged that “in its starkest terms, corruption has cost the lives of uncounted individuals contending with poverty and disease.” . . .

Jeffrey Winters, an associate professor at Northwestern University, said his research suggested corruption wasted about $100 billion of World Bank funds, and when other multilateral development banks are included, the total rises to about $200 billion.

I hope this story gets the attention it deserves.

UPDATE: Stephen Green makes an important point:

Corrupt Enron went broke, allowing reputable firms to have their markets and workers. That’s how capitalism functions. The World Bank, of course, has no such restraints on its behavior.

Indeed.

YOU KNOW, sometimes I feel like maybe I’m too harsh in my charges of media bias. Then I read accounts like this one from Baghdad, by the Daily Telegraph’s correspondent Toby Harnden:

The other day, while taking a break by the Al-Hamra Hotel pool, fringed with the usual cast of tattooed defence contractors, I was accosted by an American magazine journalist of serious accomplishment and impeccable liberal credentials.

She had been disturbed by my argument that Iraqis were better off than they had been under Saddam and I was now — there was no choice about this — going to have to justify my bizarre and dangerous views. I’ll spare you most of the details because you know the script — no WMD, no ‘imminent threat’ (though the point was to deal with Saddam before such a threat could emerge), a diversion from the hunt for bin Laden, enraging the Arab world. Etcetera.

But then she came to the point. Not only had she ‘known’ the Iraq war would fail but she considered it essential that it did so because this would ensure that the ‘evil’ George W. Bush would no longer be running her country. Her editors back on the East Coast were giggling, she said, over what a disaster Iraq had turned out to be. ‘Lots of us talk about how awful it would be if this worked out.’ Startled by her candour, I asked whether thousands more dead Iraqis would be a good thing.

She nodded and mumbled something about Bush needing to go. By this logic, I ventured, another September 11 on, say, September 11 would be perfect for pushing up John Kerry’s poll numbers. ‘Well, that’s different — that would be Americans,’ she said, haltingly. ‘I guess I’m a bit of an isolationist.’ That’s one way of putting it.

The moral degeneracy of these sentiments didn’t really hit me until later when I dined at the home of Abu Salah, a father of six who took over as the Daily Telegraph’s chief driver in Baghdad when his predecessor was killed a year ago.

Moral degeneracy, indeed. You hate to think that any American journalist could feel this way, but we’ve had other admissions of this sort in the past. To explain things in words of few syllables: It’s wrong to root for your country’s defeat. Especially when that defeat would mean the death of innocents. And surely it’s worse still when it’s merely for domestic political advantage.

Isn’t it?

UPDATE: An antiwar reader writes: “It is not wrong to root for your country’s defeat if your country is evil.”

I wonder how many journalists feel this way? I suspect that, among those who do, it affects the quality and slant of their reporting.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Interocitor denounces the journalistic omerta that keeps these names from being revealed. And another reader points to Anne Garrels’ expression of satisfaction at problems in Iraq.

MORE: Further thoughts on this topic here, in a later post.

MORE ON MILITARY RECRUITING, from Jim Dunnigan:

The U.S. Army, which is taking the bulk of the casualties in Iraq, is still getting more volunteers than it needs. Standards have remained high, but the numbers needed have gone up as well. . . .

There may yet be a decline in volunteers, and the army is paying close attention to recruiting efforts in order to detect any problems early, so they can try and counter them. One thing the army has noted is the increasing number of volunteers who are joining up not for the educational benefits or the money. Now a major incentive is patriotism. Many young Americans believe that Islamic radicals are a real threat to the United States and want to do something about it. But in past wars, this sort of enthusiasm diminished as the war went on. Historically, after three years, the number of volunteers declined dramatically. But in those past wars, mainly the Civil War and World War II, the casualties were high. This is not the case in Iraq, a war with historically very low casualties.

I’m glad to hear that people are watching this closely. Dunnigan notes that we haven’t fought a major war with a volunteer army in over 150 years, so this is very much uncharted territory.

MORE FAKE PHOTOS of prisoner abuse. As I said before, if people keep this up, it’s going to make it less likely that Abu Ghraib will be taken seriously.

ANOTHER SUCCESS FOR AMERICAN DIPLOMACY! No, really:

WASHINGTON, May 13 (Reuters) – Libya, which last year said it would give up weapons of mass destruction, will not trade arms with Iran, North Korea, Syria and other nations that may proliferate such weapons, the United States said on Thursday.

“Libya will not deal in any military goods or services with states which Libya considers to be of serious weapons of mass destruction proliferation concern,” said U.S. Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton, saying he was quoting from a Libyan statement.

Good. Just remember: Trust, but verify.

WHY THE BIG MEDIA CONTINUE TO LOSE THEIR AUDIENCE: Neal Boortz observes:

This morning in most of the newspapers I scanned during my preparation for the show the top story was still the Iraqi prison abuse scandal. Nick Berg had already disappeared from many front pages, but the prison abuse stories remain. May I suggest to you that there is a reason for this? Maybe it’s just this simple: The prison abuse scandal can damage Bush, the Nick Berg story can only help him. Given the choice many editors will chose the stories that serve their cause, getting Bush out of the White House, rather than one that hurts it.

Such cynicism about the media, these days. But he’s right. The Berg video wasn’t shown on TV, and — as Boortz notes — the big media leaders seem almost desperate to keep the story on Abu Ghraib, even to the point of running already discredited fake porn photos purporting to be from Iraq. (And issuing lame and incomplete pseudo-apologies when caught out.)

But on the Internet, where users set the agenda, not Big Media editors and producers, it’s different. As Jeff Quinton notes, Nick Berg is the story that people care about:

Right now the 10 phrases most searched for are:
nick berg video
nick berg
berg beheading
beheading video
nick berg beheading video
nick berg beheading
berg video
berg beheading video
“nick berg”
video nick berg

Likewise, Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News reports that that’s what his readers care about:

Our letters page today is filled with nothing but Berg-related letters, most of them demanding that the DMN show more photos of the Berg execution. Not one of the 87 letters we received on the topic yesterday called for these images not to be printed. My sense is that there’s a big backlash building against the media for flogging the Abu Ghraib photos, but being so delicate with the Berg images. People sense that there’s an agenda afoot here. As somebody, can’t remember who, wrote yesterday, “Why is it that the media can show over and over again pictures that could make Arabs hate Americans, but refuse to show pictures that could make Americans hate Arabs?”

These guys are marginalizing themselves with their agenda-driven coverage. And they’re so out of touch they don’t realize it. As Andrew Sullivan notes:

My gut tells me that the Nick Berg video has had much more psychic impact in this country than the Abu Ghraib horrors. I even notice some small evidence for this. Every political blog site has just seen an exponential jump in traffic – far more than anything that occurred during the Abu Ghraib unfolding. My traffic went through the roof yesterday, and, according to Alexa, so did everyone else’s. People who have tuned the war out suddenly tuned the war in. They get it. Will the mainstream media?

My prediction: Nope, and they’ll continue to lose audience to the Internet.

UPDATE: It’s not just Jeff Quinton. Here’s what Lycos reports as its top requests:

Nick Berg is the new number one search term on the Lycos Search engine over the past 24 hours. The top 10 search requests Web users are specifically searching for regarding Nick Berg are:

1. Nick Berg video
2. Nick Berg Beheading
3. Nick Berg and Iraq
4. Nick Berg Execution
5. Nick Berg Beheading Video
6. Nick Berg Killing
7. Nick Berg murder
8. Nick Berg assassination
9. Nick Berg decapitation video
10. Execution of Nick Berg.

The video showing the beheading of U.S. captive Nick Berg, combined with the multitude of search activity for the War in Iraq and searches for the Iraqi prisoners of war, is generating 12 times more searches than the #2 search term, Paris Hilton.

I don’t think Google releases this sort of information. Am I wrong?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Steve Verdon has more, and Ann Haight notes that she spotted the fake porn photos as fakes on May 2d.

Meanwhile, Rod Dreher emails to make clear that the Dallas Morning News did run the Berg picture. (I knew that, and I didn’t mean the DMN when I said “these guys,” though I can see how that could have been confusing. Sorry!) And he adds:

I pointed out to Keven Ann Willey, the DMN’s editorial page
editor, that I initially got the idea for this editorial from doing my usual
bedtime run through the blogosphere, and seeing what a huge issue this Berg
video vs. Abu Ghraib photos was becoming. We’ve been talking for some time
about how editorial pages have got to make much more use of the blogosphere.
Kev gets it, she really gets it, and readers of our editorial pages will
continue to see big strides in making ourselves more exciting and relevant
to our readership. I’m the editor of Points, a new Sunday opinion and
commentary section that we’ll be launching in July. I’m going to run an
old-media section that will be well-informed by the edgy debates and the
lively style of the blogosphere. I firmly believe that editorial pages have
got to understand that by far the most interesting debates and commentary
are occurring not on the nation’s editorial pages, which are filled with
material written by middle-aged, middle-class professionals who live in
Washington, New York, Chicago and L.A., but on blogs, with their spectacular
diversity and intelligence. We’ve got to figure out a way to tap into that
in a serious and sustained way.

So some Big Media folks get it. And, finally, Google does track search requests, but only once a week and the last one, on May 10, missed the Berg story.

Nick Berg’s topping the Yahoo! search charts, too.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis has more on this:

The people have news judgment. And it beats the judgment of many an editor.

Yes. More here and here.

MORE: Reader Greg Taggart emails:

I just listened to the CBS news on the local CBS radio affiliate. Amazing. Here, is an accurate but abbreviated form is CBS’s report: Item one: Rumsfeld in Iraq-because of the “growing” outrage over the prison photos. Item two: Kerry called and spoke with Berg’s family. Item two: Berg’s family is blaming “the Bush administration” for his death. I’m not making this up. CBS managed to place everything at the feet of George Bush. They even turned Nick Berg’s death into an opportunity to make Kerry look good and a reason to bash Bush. Simply amazing.

I teach writing and critical analysis. One of the first things I teach is that writing is an intentional act. Words don’t just happen. Neither do news reports.

Nope.

STILL MORE: Several readers email that this will get a lot of attention now that Nick Berg’s father is blaming President Bush. But Justin Katz was all over that story yesterday.

IS THERE A PRISON STORY COVERUP UNDERWAY? The Mudville Gazette has questions.

SOME THOUGHTS on South Korea’s impeachment imbroglio, and today’s ruling by the Constitutional Court. More background here.

BILL HOBBS has an interesting blog news roundup.

LEE HARRIS and Fouad Ajami both think that the Bush Administration is blowing the war of ideas.

I think they’re largely right, and I think that the war of ideas hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention, though I also think that actions are far more important — and, ultimately, more persuasive — than words.

JEFF JARVIS has some observations on Air America, and concludes: “I doubt that Air America will last to the election.”

It seems to me that they’ve dropped the ball here.

REPORTERS ARE BIG ON ASKING OTHER PEOPLE FOR APOLOGIES, but this rather lame effort from the Globe is typical of what happens when they screw up royally:

Editor’s Note: A photograph on Page B2 yesterday did not meet Globe standards for publication. The photo portrayed Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner and activist Sadiki Kambon displaying graphic photographs that they claimed showed US soldiers raping Iraqi women. Although the photograph was reduced in size between editions to obscure visibility of the images on display, at no time did the photograph meet Globe standards. Images contained in the photograph were overly graphic, and the purported abuse portrayed had not been authenticated. The Globe apologizes for publishing the photo.

Note that it doesn’t say, anywhere, that the images were actually fraudulent, though they were. Is this an adequate apology for running explicitly pornographic images that were falsely labeled as representing atrocities by American troops? Especially after news reports that such photos were being circulated had appeared in a number of British and American media outlets?

UPDATE: Reader Chris Regan emails:

So when the three Globe editors realized they made a huge mistake they kept running the photo with the porn “slightly” more obscured? Weird. Are they that personally invested in the photo?

He also suspects that if, say, a right-wing evangelical group had been peddling mislabeled porn in a press conference it would get more attention, and skepticism, from the press. Could be.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Interesting tidbit — I wrote about this over at my MSNBC site and the editors removed the link to the Globe picture because of MSNBC’s policy against linking to pornography.

I have to say that I’m surprised that the usual journalistic-ethics folks aren’t making much of this lapse of standards. Kurtz doesn’t even mention it in his “media notes” today. But Dan Kennedy has more, and notes that bloggers spotted these photos as bogus long before the Globe published them. He also addresses the Globe’s very weak correction:

Also, in my quick update this morning, I neglected to note that the Globe failed to include some pretty vital information in its “Editor’s Note” today – or, for that matter, anywhere else in the paper: the fact that these photos had been exposed as fakes quite a bit before Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner and local activist Sadiki Kambon unveiled them at a news conference on Tuesday.

You’d have to buy the Boston Herald, he observes, to find out the full story. Ouch!

MORE: Several readers say they’ve gotten this email back from the Globe in response to complaints:

The Globe is aware it made a serious error, and the paper apologized in an Editor’s Note published today, Thursday, on Page A2. The error happened in part because of a miscommunication between photo desk staffers, and in part because the usual “checks and balances” system of review did not work as it should have. An upcoming ombudsman column, probably to run Monday, will provide more details on how this particular lapse in judgment and procedures occurred.

Probably Monday. Not as fast as they expected an explanation and apology from Bush, but better than nothing.

KERRY ONLY ONE POINT AHEAD OF BUSH IN CALIFORNIA? If California is in play, Kerry’s in big trouble.

(Via Roger Simon, who has more — and here, via Roger’s comment section, is an analysis arguing that anti-Bush pile-ons by the media are the reason. Maybe so, or maybe Kerry’s just a weak candidate with a badly run campaign. Or maybe both.)

UPDATE: Jeff Jacoby writes on the pictures we see and the pictures we don’t.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Capt. Ed thinks it’s the Arnold effect.

And reader Sam Michael has advice for Bush: “He should stay out of California and let Arnold do the talking for him there.”

BELMONT CLUB, whose track record has been better than most on this subject, surveys what’s going on in Iraq:

This was not supposed to happen. April was supposed to mark the death rattle of the American occupation in Iraq. It was never meant to lead to joint Marine-Iraqi patrols in Fallujah or Iraqi commandos hunting down Moqtada Al-Sadr in Najaf. Yet the change did not proceed from “more American boots on the ground” nor from the provision of additional guards for the Baghdadi antiquities or an influx of NGOs. Still less was it the consequence of a grant of legitimacy from the United Nations or the messianic arrival of French troops. In fact it coincided with the departure of the Spanish contingent from Iraq. The change sprang from the correct application of the original strategy: building a democratic and free Iraq by recognizing the leadership which arose from the circumstances. It arose not from an imposed set of politically correct commissars in Baghdad but in complementing indigenous efforts with American strengths.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Read this column by Austin Bay, too.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails:

It is ironic that Bush is accused by the left of oversimplifying matters and while Kerry claims to be more “nuanced.” In fact, what is beginning to emerge into public view is an Iraq strategy that is working and which is working only because it is extremely nuanced.

Perhaps he’s been misunderestimated.

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER, unofficial diplomat?

WOW: Over 200,000 pageviews yesterday. Where did they come from?

HUGH HEWITT is taking Patrick Leahy to task for yesterday’s grandstanding.

THE BOSTON GLOBE REPORTS that returning Spanish troops are unhappy with Zapatero:

“We should have stayed and finished our mission,” said Jose Francisco Casteneda, 29, who was among four sergeants who gathered at a local restaurant Thursday — sharing newly developed snapshots of their time in Iraq. Each image rekindled all of the intensity and emotion of what they saw during their mission. . .

The TV footage of the ceremony shows Zapatero flashing a broad smile that political cartoonists love to lampoon. The soldiers said they couldn’t hide their disappointment that the prime minister did not directly address them and left it to Defense Minister Jose Bono.

“A lot of us were wondering, ‘Who is this parade for anyway?’ ” Collado asked. . . .

Torvisco, who suffered shrapnel wounds, said it was difficult for him to discuss his service.

“The great majority do not understand what we were doing there or what we went through,” Torvisco said. “I think it was worth it to bring peace to a country at war, as we had helped to do in Kosovo and Afghanistan. But I also know that I won’t be able to convince a lot of people in this country of that.”

That’s too bad.