AUSTIN BAY, a columnist well-known to the blogosphere and also an Army reservist, is heading to Iraq and posts a goodbye column noting that “Everyone is Part of the War”:

For a short time, the U.S. Army will make me part of the minute-by-minute, ground-level effort in Iraq. I specify in Iraq, for every American, in some form or fashion, is part of this war. It is sad that some people do not realize that.

America’s wealth makes it easy to create the perception of distance, that “here” and “over there” aren’t intimately linked.

Bay’s column reminds me of what Rudy Giuliani said today to the 9/11 Commission:

Our enemy is not each other, but the terrorists who attacked us….
The blame should be put on one source alone, the terrorists who killed our loved ones.

Read both. And you can see Giuliani’s testimony on C-SPAN.

IT’S THE LAST CALL for the Blogads blog survey. If you take it, please enter “instapundit” in line 22.

MORE WEIRD STUFF IN NORTH KOREA: Very odd.

A JOURNALIST I KNOW emails that the loss of credibility his profession is suffering is “seismic,” and that he’s considering quitting. What’s more, he’s hearing depressed comments from quite a few colleagues.

Another reader — who probably doesn’t want his name used because he works for a major newspaper — emails: “I’ve tuned out the MSM and rely on the ‘Net — bloggers, Lucianne.com, etc. — to keep me informed, which it does quite well. That way I get all the info but don’t have to endure Dan, Tom and Peter, Wolf, etc. I miss nothing that’s happening but I gain all the stories that the mainstream media simply ignore.” If you saw his address line, you’d know how striking a statement this is.

Perhaps, as this bit of graffiti I photographed outside the UT Main Library today suggests (or at least illustrates), the loss of credibility suffered by mainstream journalism is at a tipping point. (Actually, I first saw it on Sunday but — pace Adam Groves — I didn’t have the camera with me then.)

I think the trend is too bad — I’d much rather have trusted and trustworthy mainstream journalism than the reverse — but, frankly, the loss of credibility is well-earned, as pretty much any blog reader knows. But if you’re still wondering, go read Cathy Seipp’s column on John Carroll of the Los Angeles Times, and his comments on journalism. Excerpt: “Every single thing we read in the paper, including hard news, is the product of other people’s opinions about what we should know. Problems happen when those in charge believe in their own objectivity so much they no longer know that one simple fact.”

Read this, too.

UPDATE: Hey, but there’s a positive side. A reader who signs her email “Maggie” sends this:

It’s all YOUR fault. :)

I have been “gainfully” unemployed for the past four years with no results in all of the jobs that I have applied for. And they number in the hundreds.

But next week on Tuesday morning I am going for an interview with the local newspaper to work as a reporter. I think it’s all your fault, because after 9.11 I started reading the news on the internet, and that’s when I discovered you. Since, I have studied your format of writing which is very easy to read. I then decided to try my hand at blogging, which didn’t last too long, but was a good exercise.

When I sent in my resume to the newspaper, I also sent an article I had written and posted to my old blog. And who influenced me? YOU. Thank you, for being online.

The blog giveth, and the blog taketh away.

I LOVE THE INTERNET: An interesting letter from an American soldier, on an Iraqi blog.

A BREAK IN THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL OF POLITICIZATION: Larry Solum has an interesting post on the judicial-selection compromise.

IRAQI EMIGRES ON ABU GHRAIB: This is interesting:

Hadi Kazwini is an Iraqi engineer who moved to Australia in 1997 and lives in Sydney with his wife and three children. He is amazed at the gullibility of those Australians who have taken the Arab response to the photos at face value.

This sort of brutality goes on all the time, it is happening now in jails right through the Middle East, he says. But of course there are no photos. This is selective outrage.

Kazwini believes that the behaviour revealed by the photos is awful and the US soldiers involved should be punished. But he says some of the Iraqi prisoners shown were Saddam’s killers and torturers. They have been responsible for far worse violations of human rights than the Americans.

Where is the outrage about this, he asks. I haven’t seen it referred to in one newspaper.

Kazwini has a different perspective to most of us here in Australia. Seven people he knew disappeared during Saddam’s time, never to be seen again. Some were members of his family. No one knows what happened to them. No bodies were ever found.

Kazwini himself was once arrested for a poem he wrote. He was interned for six days and beaten and humiliated. Men were stripped and forced to crawl before their guards.

These days Kazwini uses e-mail and the internet to communicate daily with people in Iraq. He is amazed at the persistent claims in the media here that most Iraqis have responded to the photos by turning on the American occupation.

The main concern of the people he talks to is that the photos, and the beaten-up outrage from the rest of the Arab world, might encourage America to leave.

Read the whole thing.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES is up. Don’t miss it.

HERE’S MORE ON THE VACCINE / AUTISM ISSUE:

An examination of scientific studies worldwide has found no convincing evidence that vaccines cause autism, according to a committee of experts appointed by the Institute of Medicine.

In particular, no link was found between autism and the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine or vaccines that contain a mercury preservative called thimerosal. The committee released its eighth and final report yesterday in Washington. . . .

As for the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, 14 epidemiological studies have shown no evidence of a link. The committee dismissed two studies that did show a link as flawed. The committee examined a number of possible biological mechanisms to explain how vaccines might cause autism, but said that all were theoretical and that there was not sufficient proof.

Fewer children today receive vaccines that contain mercury, Mr. Blaxill of SafeMinds said, so if the mercury hypothesis holds true, rates of autism should fall in the next couple of years. The number of cases in California, where autistic children are carefully tracked, declined slightly in the last six months, he said, but it is too soon to know if the drop is a trend.

Stay tuned, though the case for a connection is looking pretty weak.

THIS IS INTERESTING:

MADRID, May 19 (Reuters) – A Spanish judge accused three Algerians on Wednesday of belonging to al Qaeda and forming part of a network that recruited Islamists across Europe to go to Iraq and fight the U.S.-led occupation.

High Court Judge Baltasar Garzon said the mobilising of insurgents was directed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose group has claimed responsibility for the beheading of a U.S. hostage and the assassination of the head of the Iraqi Governing Council. . . .

Garzon said the Spanish al Qaeda cell included Heidi Ben Youssef Boudhiba, who is in jail in Britain. He said Boudhiba formed part of a network that was attempting to attack London with the deadly toxin ricin in January 2003. Garzon has asked British authorities to hand him over.

Garzon also linked Boudhiba to members of the cell based in Hamburg which supplied three of the suicide pilots for September 11. He said Boudhiba and another cell member left the port city and flew to Istanbul eight days before the attacks.

Not entirely a surprise. Note the Algerian connection, which keeps coming up.

MICKEY KAUS offers “an example of why it’s so difficult for a blogger, or any other ordinary citizen in the U.S., to figure out how things are going in Iraq even with the aid of the Internet.”

He’s absolutely right, and his point extends to the entire war. It’s hard and — as various bizarre news stories seem to indicate — we’re in a situation where it’s likely that lots of stuff is going on beneath the surface that we don’t and can’t know about. Add to that the tendency of the media reporting from Iraq to focus on superficially bad news, at the expense of both good news and non-superficial bad news, and it’s really hard to tell what’s going on.

As I mentioned in an earlier post on this topic, the temptation is to apply Kentucky windage and assume that things are better than the reports make them sound. And that may be true, but we can’t know that. (On terrorism, for example, the media in the 1990s stressed the threat of domestic terrorism from “angry white men,” while largely missing the growth of Al Qaeda. So things were better than they sounded where domestic terrorism was concerned — but worse somewhere else, and an important problem didn’t get enough attention until it was too late.)

I think, though, that it’s a mistake to assume that “how things are going” means much right now. People want a narrative line: “we’re winning,” or “we’re losing,” when things are up in the air. My own sense, drawing on admittedly inadequate data, is that things are, in fact, going better than the day-to-day drumbeat of negativity makes them sound. But that could certainly be wrong. And those narrative lines are imposed later, in retrospect — at the moment, we need to be dealing with the problems in front of us.

Is the Administration screwing things up in Iraq? Maybe. Is it because they’re too harsh, as the left says? Or too soft, as the right says? (Does the fact that they’re getting criticized from both sides make them, Goldilocks-like, just right? If only it were that simple.) I find this as frustrating as Mickey does, but we can only work with what we’ve got.

What’s most bothersome to me is that the anti-Bush stance adopted by most media organizations makes their reporting less useful to those of us who are trying to figure out what’s going on, and makes the Administration, and its supporters, tend to tune it all out, possibly causing them to miss important information. I don’t know what to do about it, except to try to point out the stuff that it seems they’re missing.

UPDATE: Some readers are unfamiliar with the term “Kentucky windage.” In this context it means putting your finger in the air, making a guess, and aiming left or right to correct for the presumed breeze on the way to the target.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Hey, maybe someone should ask Iraqis how it’s going!

OVERMATCHING THE GODS: My TechCentralStation column is up.

WILLIAM SAFIRE says that the Sarin story has been soft-pedaled by the media. So does this coverage survey from The Fourth Rail.

I could put this down to caution, except that — as we’ve seen — they’re quick enough to pick up unconfirmed stories that suit their preferred storyline.

More on this phenomenon here.

UPDATE: Here, too.

RAND SIMBERG HAS THOUGHTS on NASA, the Hubble telescope, and a policy disconnect.

UNSCAM UPDATE: The New York Post is unhappy with Paul Bremer’s foot-dragging:

Members of the governing council suspect that Bremer’s motive is to protect the U.N. from adverse publicity in the run-up to the June 30 “handover of sovereignty.”

Of course, it’s no secret that powerful elements in the State Department have actively opposed efforts to investigate the U.N. Oil for Food scandal.

And it may be that the Bush administration itself wants to go easy on the U.N., and Secretary General Kofi Annan, now that it is seeking to have the U.N. help shape a new Iraqi government.

But it is a terrible mistake for America to thwart the Oil for Food investigation for any reason — let alone to preserve the U.N.’s ragged credibility.

Never mind that Kofi & Co. appear (to put it charitably) to have permitted one of the most breathtaking embezzlements in the annals of crime.

The fact is that the United Nations is viewed widely in Iraq as a principal Saddam-enabler — if not a collaborator in his crimes — and is despised for it.

I agree. It’s possible, as Thomas Lifson writes, that there’s more to this story. But if the Bush Administration is quashing this investigation in an effort to get UN support, I predict that they’ll wind up being snookered.

UPDATE: But stuff is leaking out. Claudia Rosett has lots of interesting information on oil-for-food misconduct from internal U.N. audits. Kojo Annan’s company Cotecna figures prominently.

ANDREA SEE encounters Xiamen’s unfavorable business climate. Sheesh.

JUSTIN KATZ is getting ahead of a story via Google. He emails that “Jimmy Massey” started showing up in his search term referrals, so he looked the guy up and found a veteran who’s “slandering the troops” in John Kerry (1971 version) style. He’s got a long post on what he found.

MICHAEL GRAHAM calls Tom Toles’ cartoon in today’s Washington Post “disgusting and outrageous.”

UPDATE: Meanwhile here’s Neal Boortz on the media:

It’s already started: the media is rooting for us to lose the war on terror. Today, The Washington Post has declared that there is a “fear of failure growing.” Once again, the doom and gloom media has declared the war lost. The terrorists must be thrilled. The whole terrorist game plan in the Middle East and in Iraq is based on creating an atmosphere of fear, gloom and doom in the American citizenry. It seems as if some of these media outlets actually have signed on to help the Islamo-fascists achieve that very goal. We have 150,000 troops deployed, the country of Iraq remains under our control, and casualties for the whole war are under a thousand. If we hold on to our resolve this situation is winnable. That, however, wouldn’t be good for the left and for those who want America to follow instead of to lead.

Downplay the good, hammer the bad. Run the Abu Ghraib story on the front page for three weeks. Bury the Nick Berg story after one day. Ignore the Sarin and mustard gas finds. If the story will help Bush, bury it. If it will hurt Bush, run it day after day.

Is this kind of perception, already widespread, going to be good for the press?

THIS HUGE AND LINK-RICH ROUNDUP OF GOOD NEWS FROM IRAQ is a must-read.

You’ve also got to wonder (as Andrew Sullivan does) why the Bush Administration is doing such a bad job at getting its message out that it has to rely on Australian bloggers to pick up its slack.

UPDATE: Reader Michael McFatter thinks this is all part of the Bush PR plan:

I really think this is the administration letting the press hang themselves. Think about it. How do you feel about the NYT today relative to four years ago? The New Yorker? CNN? Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and Ted Koppel? Is your opinion worse or the same? Mine’s worse and I never trusted those sources in the first place. In fact, I didn’t think that my opinion could be worse four years ago.

In addition, this strengthens the party and his political base as they feel they are being attacked ( and they are in ways they never realized they were) and it will inspire them to move to defend themselves. It also gives the enemy ( a hostile press ) an inaccurate sense of the political groundwar. This is about lowering expectations and it is a theme in the Bush presidency. Watch things get worse and worse until just after the Dems convention when suddenly “from out of nowhere” Bush will rise again. There will be publicity victories in the meantime, but they will not outnumber “defeats” until it is politically necessary. You don’t want to use all your best material too early. He has done this a thousand times and the press falls for it every time. And more importantly, so does John Kerry.

If this is the strategy, and it works, then Karl Rove is really, really smart. Is he that smart?

MORE: Reader Douglas McRae thinks Karl Rove is really smart:

Every morning the clock radio wakes me up to Prison Abuse 24/7 (NPR). This morning I realized the major reoccurring theme is that the prisoners were made to wear women’s underwear or go naked. I suspect that the American Public now has the image of Iraqi thugs in pink thongs firmly imbedded in their minds and the rest of the story (if there is any) is unheard. Besides, most Americans say to themselves, if the Iraqis can’t take that, they are really wusses. This will be noted as another Big Media overhype failure. They will be wondering, again, why they can’t get traction against Bush.

We’ll see.

STILL MORE: Reader Herbert Jacobi thinks it’s all part of the plan, too:

I can’t help wonder if Bush, et al., is silent because he knows that the media will bury everything he says in the back pages. There is a large and well organized group in this country that want Iraq and, in general, the War on Terror to fail. And another group that would like it to seem to fail, at least until Kerry is elected (Re your post from The Daily Telegraph’s Toby Harnden on May 12). So why make a lot of speeches now when the press will bury it? If he then makes the same arguments later during the campaign the charge will be: “He’s already said that.” So the media won¹t have to cover it as much, if at all. There is also the boredom factor. If he keeps saying the same (even good) arguments over and over again now people will become bored by November, if not earlier.

Better to wait until the real campaign for the election starts and people take notice. And because of the election the media will have to pay attention. There is also the chance that there will be more good news on the WMD as well as on other fronts.

The counter argument (shades of John Kerry!) is that if he waits to long it will be to late and people will have already made up their minds no matter what he says or how well he says it. But when I look at the press coverage, especially from media outlets such as the NYT it seems to me a worthwhile gamble.

Or they could just be blowing the whole thing. I hope not.

As I say, we’ll see. But Bush-fan John Podhoretz doesn’t think that they’re hitting the right note.

IRAQ SARIN UPDATE: Blaster’s Blog has an interesting observation — apparently, it can’t be an old shell, as some are claiming. And scroll down for lots of other interesting stuff that deserves more attention.

REALCLEARPOLITICS is running a pledge drive this week. If you’re not a regular there, you should check them out.

JEFF JARVIS calls the 9/11 commission’s latest “scandalous.” And he accuses John Lehman of grandstanding.

I stopped taking them seriously a while ago, but this doesn’t help. It’s obvious that the Commission members aren’t capable of sufficient self-restraint to avoid playing to the cameras. This either should have been done without publicity, or with a different commission. Or both.

IS REALITY TAKING HOLD?

PARIS — The French government Monday described the 35-hour working week as a financial disaster that was costing the state billions of dollars and promised to reform the system despite fierce union opposition.

The finance minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, said that the 35-hour week had burdened the state with additional social charges and that it had demoralized millions of workers.

It’ll be interesting to see if they can pull off the change.

MORE THOUGHTS on the Zarqawi letter. It does seem clear that our opponents are desperate to prevent the emergence of a free and self-governing Iraq.

HITCHENS ON HERSH: Worth reading. Meanwhile reader Doug Jordan is angry at The New Yorker:

Cancelled it tonight. After subscribing for most of the last 20 years, and with two years to run. Hendrik Hertzberg is too heavy a price to pay on a weekly basis.

And I will not support a magazine that takes glee in blowing that which, by its own account, has a been successful US black program. That is, assuming that the piece is true.

To echo your theme: whose side are they on?

Whatever side will hurt Bush, apparently.

Meanwhile, this piece on Hersh’s track record points out that he’s been wrong — and always in a way that was damaging to America — before. Remember the “faltering ground campaign against Saddam Hussein” (March 31, 2003). Or the similar report on how we were losing in Afghanistan, just before we won in Afghanistan?