DARFUR UPDATE: Arthur Chrenkoff comments on goings-on, and is unimpressed with the diplomatic community’s efforts so far.

FIRST IT WAS QUESTIONS ABOUT KOJO ANNAN AND OIL-FOR-FO0D. And now there’s this:

Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, son of the late French president, has been arrested as part of an investigation into alleged money-laundering and arms-trafficking in Africa.

Miterrand’s behavior has been the subject of rumors among Africa hands for years. I hope that some people are looking into this.

UPDATE: More thoughts here.

JOSH CHAFETZ says that the Kerry Campaign is sending out an “incredibly dishonest” email. “I’m not sure whether this is malice or incompetence on the part of the Kerry Campaign — and I suspect the answer is incompetence — but it doesn’t bode well for them either way.”

UPDATE: A couple of readers think that the real unfairness is in the Bush campaign’s use of a couple of fringe elements to suggest that the Democratic mainstream is comparing Bush to Hitler. The trouble with this argument, though, is that the Democratic mainstream is making such comparisons. Just ask Al Gore, or Guido Calabresi. . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Jared Walczak emails:

You wrote that some of your readers objected to the Bush campaign’s association of liberal fringe elements with the Kerry campaign re the Hitler ads. However, as an email from the Bush campaign today notes, there is a connection: Zack Exley, the man behind MoveOn.org, is now employed by the Kerry campaign as the director of internet operations.

Good point. Meanwhile reader Richard McEnroe emails:

Actually, doesn’t Kerry still have a link to DU on his campaign homepage? How long do we have to maintain the polite fiction that the Democratic Fringe is not driving party policy when MacAuliffe and Pelosi show up for the premier of F911? :-\

There’s a link on the blog page. I don’t know how much you ought to make of that. I certainly link to people with whom I disagree in my blogroll. But does Kerry? It doesn’t look like it, which suggests that the folks he links aren’t just there as a resource or a guide to various opinions, but are sites he endorses.

It’s certainly true that the ideas of the lunatic fringe have been showing up in the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Personally, I think this is a mistake in terms of the campaign — and that it will seriously bite them on the ass if Kerry should get elected.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here. And I’m told that the Bush people have updated their ad with more context, but I haven’t seen it yet. And don’t miss this response from the Bush blog: “Why has John Kerry not denounced billionaire and Democrat Party donor George Soros for comparing the Bush Administration to Nazis?”

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Just watched it. It’s even more damning, and the Democratic complaints will just ensure that everyone watches it. Rope-a-dope?

MORE: A reader reminds me of this from January: “SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTER CRITICIZES MOVEON.ORG FOR POSTING AD COMPARING BUSH TO HITLER:”

“Politics and preparing for a presidential election is one thing, but comparing the Bush Administration’s fight against Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein with the policies of Adolf Hitler is shameful, beyond the pale and has no place in the legitimate discourse of American politics,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, the Center’s founder and dean. “Adolf Hitler was responsible for the greatest crime in the history of mankind – the Holocaust. To compare Hitler to an American President is not only ludicrous, but defames the Holocaust,” he added.

“This ad is not about Democrats or Republicans – it is about lies and a distortion of history,” he said. “Move On.org has a responsibility to publicly repudiate such lies as do all political leaders,” he concluded.

This would seem to reflect poorly on the Kerry campaign’s hiring decisions.

STILL MORE: Jay Reding: “It’s incredibly effective, which is why the Kerry team is already complaining about it. . . . I hope the Bush team makes a national air buy with this ad.”

Tim Graham: “The chairman of the DNC is happily mugging at Moore’s DC premiere and applauding his movie as a campaign tool. Kerry has hired people away from MoveOn.org for his campaign. He has distanced himself from neither group, nor from Gore’s MoveOn-sponsored ‘digital brownshirt’ ravings. Meanwhile, Democrats quickly tied Bush I to his base of Buchanan and Robertson, who they thought were wild-eyed ideologues of hate. In every cycle, the media highlight the conservative base of the GOP and how the nominee will suffer from the ‘hard right’ associations. Now, Kerry and Terry have to embrace every Moore fan and MoveOn bake-saler to keep some Naderites in their camp, and it’s not fair to point out the ‘hard left’ base?”

INTERESTING NEWS FROM VIETNAM: Interesting, but somehow not surprising.

SPENT MOST OF THE NIGHT at the Secret City Film Festival, where the Insta-Wife showed a recut version of her film Six, with some additional footage of interviews with the murderers and people who knew them. It was nice to see it on a big screen, in a big theater.

There seemed to be quite a few other excellent offerings. I really liked Hell’s Highway, a documentary on the origins of those garish driver’s-ed scare’em safety films. (You can see a trailer here. It’ll be showing in New York and elsewhere starting next week.) I would have liked to see Martian in Motion, the Leo Szilard documentary, and Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea, but babysitting issues intervened.

JUST SAW JEFF JARVIS on Aaron Brown. Jeff was excellent, and CNN credited him as “Jeff Jarvis, Buzzmachine.com,” which was cool.

UPDATE: Here’s a transcript, and here’s a post from Jeff.

I just wonder whether a film that made similar accusations against a Democratic President would get such a respectful reception from mainstream media. Well, no I don’t.

ANN ALTHOUSE:

Quite aside from the general inadvisability of calling your political opponents fascists, you’d think that if Al Gore wanted to call someone a fascist, the last synonym he’d pick from the thesaurus would be “brownshirt,” considering that he was famous for literally wearing a brown shirt. I’m just distracted into thinking about that whole Naomi Wolf/alpha male business again. He’s lost control of his imagery in more ways than one.

Indeed.

DANIEL DREZNER has thoughts on Allawi and Iraq that are worth reading.

WHAT HATH AL GORE WROUGHT? I’m guessing this.

ERNEST MILLER FISKS A STATUTE: In this case, Orrin Hatch’s dumb INDUCE Act. It’s a must-read.

And Hatch should be ashamed to be shilling for Hollywood and the music industry. Why aren’t the social conservatives all over him for this?

BIGWIG MAKES THE CASE FOR KERRY: I wish I believed this, as it would make me more comfortable with the election. At any rate, it’s certainly a stronger pro-Kerry case than Al Gore’s making.

TRANSHUMANISTS VS. BIOCONSERVATIVES: Interesting item over at Beliefnet.

MY TECHCENTRALSTATION INTERVIEW with aging-treatment researcher Aubrey de Grey generated some comments. There’s a roundup here.

SOME PEOPLE WILL SAY THIS IS SELF-INTERESTED:

GREENWOOD VILLAGE, Colo. — Colorado Republican Senate hopeful Pete Coors yesterday criticized the legal drinking age, chiding the federal government for coercing states into raising the age limit from 18 to 21.

“We got along fine for years with the 18-year-old drinking age,” the former CEO of the Coors Brewing Co. told an audience of about 200 people at a candidates’ debate here. “We’re criminalizing our young people.”

But I’m not a brewing magnate, and I agree! As I’ve written elsewhere, the increase in the drinking age — which Liddy Dole, to her shame, boasts of “spearheading” — was a dumb and unfair idea. If Republicans are serious about federalism, as Dole certainly isn’t, they’ll work to repeal it. Congratulations to Coors for raising the subject.

UPDATE: More thoughts here.

ANDREW MCCARTHY IS TAKING THE NEW YORK TIMES TO TASK for hypocrisy and dishonesty on Iraq/Al Qaeda connections: “Most pathetic of all in today’s article is the Times‘s self-serving rationale for withholding critical information while it was accusing the president of misleading the country. . . . No one is more aware than the ‘newspaper of record’ that if the American people become convinced Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were in cahoots, the national perception of the necessity for this war will drastically change, and the president’s reelection will be a virtual lock. That’s what this is about. And who knows what else the Times is not telling us?”

UPDATE: Reader Jonathan Miller seems to think this is unfair, because of the Times’ separation between News and Editorial.

If the Bush Administration said something stupid because of managerial separations, would the Times cut it similar slack?

AL GORE, THEN AND NOW: Timothy Perry notes some contradictions between his “Bush lied!” stance today and what he said in the past. And here’s audio of Gore claiming an Iraqi terror connection and WMD back in 1992. Sounds genuine to me, and I’m told that Fox ran video along these lines yesterday, though I didn’t see it.

UPDATE: More on Gore from John Tabin, here:

Indeed, the Clinton administration’s experiences with Saddam’s penchant for terrorism go all the way back to Clinton’s first term, when it was confirmed that the Iraqi Intelligence Service had attempted an assassination of former President George H.W. Bush. Clinton ordered a missile strike on the IIS headquarters in June, 1993, in retaliation.

“The suffering inside Iraq can come to an end when Saddam Hussein’s regime is replaced,” said a top Clinton administration official at the time. “And I hope — and most of the world community hopes — that this regime based on terrorism and atrocities against his own people will be replaced. Over time, we hope to achieve that result.”

The official? Al Gore.

Read the whole thing.

JEFF JARVIS will be on CNN tonight, talking about Michael Moore.

QUERY: IS THE STEPFORD WIVES just another example of bigotry against robosexuals?

I wonder what Dannii Minogue thinks.

THE “WRONG” BLACKS AT HARVARD: Interesting thoughts here and here.

ZARQAWI’S OATH: The Belmont Club observes:

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s oath to fight “until Islamic rule is back on earth” — besides being historically wrong, as it never was — and his vow to kill the Shi’ite President of the interim Iraqi government, can be more accurately understood as a desire to fight for leadership of the Sunni triangle. The control of Iraq has slipped forever beyond his grasp. Iraqi blogger Hammorabi’s breakdown of the the foreign fighters killed in one US strike on Fallujah underscores the point.

Read the whole thing, and especially the concluding paragraph.

JAMES LILEKS ON AL GORE:

Today Al Gore upped the ante. He coined a new term for the Internet critics of his positions: digital brownshirts. Yes, yes, it’s over the top. But it’s not the sentiment that raises eyebrows, it’s the position of the person who’s saying it. We don’t expect presidential candidates past or present to indulge in Usenet flame-war lingo. We don’t expect serious party elders to call the other side Nazis, and for good reason: it’s obscene. The brownshirts were evil. The brownshirts kicked the Jews in the streets and made the little kids put their hands on their heads as they stumbled off to the trains. The brownshirts were not interested in refuting arguments. They were interested in killing the people who dared argue at all.

At some point, I fear, the political discourse of 2004 is going to seem horribly irrelevant and misplaced in the face of some loud new wretched horror; it will seem as oddly disconnected from reality as the Condit / Killer-Shark news reports of August 2001. An indolent luxury.

Gore, of course, is an embarrassment to his party. But some regard him as a useful embarrassment. However, he would be well advised to read these comments by Ann Althouse, on a different case of Nazi-mongering:

I think that style of argument (like the Moore style of documentary) appeals to people who are already committed to your side and makes other people not want to listen to you at all. People interested in rational arguments will choose not to engage with you, which you might wrongly read as agreement, leading you to become complacent about the correctness and persuasiveness of your beliefs. But you miss the opportunity to persuade people who don’t already agree and you lose touch with how they think about things. You may wind up thinking that people who don’t agree with you must be ignorant or ill-willed. Now you’re in the end stage where you’re calling people stupid and fascist.

Al’s there. What I think is interesting is that if you call actual fascist dictators like Saddam Hussein fascist, you’re regarded as over-the-top by some of the same people who don’t mind using such terms to describe their own fellow citizens who simply disagree with them.

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg notes an additional irony.

GERMAN MEDIA: Hey, the holocaust wasn’t all that bad! Look what the Americans did in Abu Ghraib!

This self-serving historical revisionism pretty much explains the German position on the war. Note to Germans: You’re not fooling anyone but yourselves. And Michael Moore. And Al Gore. And maybe Guido Calabresi.

In other words, the people who want to be fooled. . . .

BOOK PROMOTION BY TV JOURNALISTS? It’s getting out of hand, writes AP television writer Lynne Elber.

JUDGE GUIDO CALABRESI HAS APOLOGIZED for his outburst:

A Manhattan federal appeals judge who compared President Bush with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini at a lawyers’ conference last week apologized yesterday for his breach of judicial manners.

In a letter to colleagues, Judge Guido Calabresi wrote that he understood his remarks could too easily be taken as partisan – a big no-no for a sitting judge.

Indeed. I’m glad to see this.

UPDATE: Here’s more from The New York Times:

Judge Calabresi said that in his off-the-cuff remarks he was trying to make “a rather complicated academic argument,” but he understood that they had been taken as an attack on President Bush. In a letter that contained no less than four apologies, he said he was “truly sorry” for “any embarrassment” he might have caused the appeals court. He did not, however, renounce the views he expressed.

Read the whole thing.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here:

Critics of Judge Calabresi’s comments said yesterday they welcomed the judge’s concession that his remarks were inappropriate.

“It’s good he recognizes that,” said a professor and legal ethics specialist at George Mason University, Ronald Rotunda. But the professor said the apology does not erase concerns about Judge Calabresi’s impartiality.

“One wonders whether anybody with a case of political significance could get a fair shake from Calabresi,” Mr. Rotunda said.

Howard Bashman has a roundup of reactions.

SOMEBODY TELL AL GORE: The New York Times reports an Iraqi document — one that it obtained several weeks ago, but that the 9/11 Commission seems somehow to have overlooked — outlining collaboration between Saddam and Osama back in the 1990s. This is, of course, consistent with these media reports of such contacts from 1999.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey says that the Times was hypocritical to demand apologies from the White House when it was sitting on evidence that undermined its position:

So the Times has had in its possession a document that details contacts and collaboration which it determined that the government found authentic, and still editorialized about the purported dishonesty of Bush and Cheney? Obviously, someone’s being dishonest, but more and more it looks like the supposed defenders of truth at the Gray Lady.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: More, including a timeline, here.