THE DISSIDENT FROGMAN IS WATCHING THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT, and he’s appalled to hear a French representative advocating the transfer of nuclear weapons to Arab countries. (The link is from 2001. Have they gotten more sensible since then? I doubt it.)

STOCKPILES AND GOALPOSTS: My earlier post on articles about Bush’s failure to find “stockpiles” of WMD led to some emails from readers noting that the Administration did talk about stockpiles before the war. That’s true, and it’s also true that they haven’t found them. But unless you think that the Sarin shell, and the mustard gas find the week before, were both one-offs, I think they indicate the likelihood that such stockpiles did exist before the war, and may well still do so. (Read this post at Blaster’s and scroll up and down from it). It’s that indication that’s the key, and focusing on the failure to find “stockpiles” now is wilfully obtuse.

This post by David Hogberg, which I linked a while back, has more on the goalpost-moving subject.

UPDATE: Reader Daniel Aronstein points out that Security Council Resolution 1441 doesn’t talk about “stockpiles” but about “any” and “all” weapons (and programs and facilities for developing weapons) of mass destruction. Here’s a collection of the various resolutions. It’s worth reminding people — again — that the burden was on Saddam, found by 1441 to be in material breach, to prove his innocence, and that nobody thought he’d met that burden.

More here.

THE INSTA-DAUGHTER learned to ride a two-wheeler without falling down tonight (perhaps she can give Bush and Kerry lessons). That means I missed most of Bush’s speech as I was busy first helping, then applauding, for a couple of hours after dinner. Caught the last few minutes of the speech, and it seemed okay to me. Bush will never win any oratory awards, but he was focused and to the point, and I thought the ending, where he contrasted the terrorists’ vision of a Taliban-like society versus our vision of freedom was good. (Nice touch styling our approach as a way for the Middle East to regain its historical greatness, too.)

Other folks no doubt saw the whole thing. I’ll try to post links to their evaluations later. Meanwhile, LT Smash’s prediction was borne out. (You can read these predictions by Steven Den Beste too, and decide how accurate they were.)

UPDATE: They were live-blogging it at The Corner.

Adam Harris reacts to ABC’s “Breaking News” update, which he regards as rather disingenuous.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Andrew Morton emails:

He seems to be serious about, and investing a lot in the transfer of sovereignty.

Mark my words: the media meme for the next six months will be that the transfer is fraudulent, that the US is still pulling the strings and that the new Iraqi government is an illegitimate puppet.

This will boost the legitimacy of the killers, will produce a worse long-term outcome for the Iraqis and will result in the deaths of coalition servicemembers, contractors and good Iraqis.

I hope this is wrong.

Daniel Drezner’s running an open comment thread.

Here’s a link to the text of Bush’s speech. (Via Powerline).

Rob Bernard has thoughts.

Andrew Sullivan gives the speech a B+ but says Bush seemed “exhausted.” I don’t blame him. I’m tired myself, and I’m not the President.

Victor Davis Hanson gives Bush mixed grades. More comments here, here, and here.

Finally (for this post, at least) Mickey Kaus points to the three most important words in the speech — “no later than.”

TURNED IN MY GRADES and took the day off; went driving in the mountains, then hung around with the Insta-Wife. Back later.

MICHAEL BARONE offers advice to President Bush and observes: “Roosevelt did not have to deal with one problem Bush faces today. And that is that today’s press works to put the worst possible face on the war.”

IT’S A BUSINESS-AND-ECONOMICS BLOGARAMA over at this week’s Carnival of the Capitalists.

EUGENE VOLOKH HAS THOUGHTS on the legal issues involved in the “Washingtonienne” flap.

EDITOR AND PUBLISHER:

Those convinced that liberals make up a disproportionate share of newsroom workers have long relied on Pew Research Center surveys to confirm this view, and they will not be disappointed by the results of Pew’s latest study released today. . . .

At national organizations (which includes print, TV and radio), the numbers break down like this: 34% liberal, 7% conservative. At local outlets: 23% liberal, 12% conservative. At Web sites: 27% call themselves liberals, 13% conservatives.

This contrasts with the self-assessment of the general public: 20% liberal, 33% conservative. . . .

While it’s important to remember that most journalists in this survey continue to call themselves moderate, the ranks of self-described liberals have grown in recent years, according to Pew. For example, since 1995, Pew found at national outlets that the liberal segment has climbed from 22% to 34% while conservatives have only inched up from 5% to 7%.

The survey also notes a dramatic “values gap” on issues like gay marriage and belief in God. But don’t worry: “Of course, no one would ever expect this to impact the way news is covered.”

Though, the war and the Second Amendment aside, my views are probably closer to those of the press than the general public, I have to agree with those who find this troubling. If despite aspirations toward objectivity, reporters’ gender and ethnicity is as influential on the news as newsroom diversity advocates tell us, then surely reporters’ views are even more significant. So where’s the move toward greater diversity there?

UPDATE: Reader Mike Gordon emails:

One point that can’t be overstressed is that the Pew findings are based on self-assessment. I worked in the newsroom at three large newspapers for 22 years, and many of the journalists who rate themselves as politically moderate are well to the left of center, especially on social issues. They are moderate by newsroom standards, not by the general public’s standards.

Perhaps the most pervasive way in which journalists are different from normal people is that journalists live in a world dominated by government, and they reflexively see government action as the default way to approach any problem. Journalists’ world is dominated by government because it’s so easy to cover: Public agencies’ meetings take place on a regular schedule and, with rare exceptions, have to admit journalists. As a result, participants in the meetings play to the press, inside and outside the meeting room, and the result is the elaborate dance of symbolic actions – gaffes, denials, sham indignation, press conferences, inquests and endless process – that dominates our news pages and means next to nothing in the long run.

Journalists tend to give private enterprise short shrift because it’s harder to cover: The meetings are private, aren’t announced in advance, and reporters aren’t invited. Unlike politicians, most businesspeople aren’t required to interact with the press, and many avoid doing so when possible – the downside is usually greater than the upside. As a result, journalists are generally reduced to covering what businesspeople do more than what they say. This is more work, so less of it gets done.

It’s no accident that for the most part, the news is dominated by people whose value is largely driven by how much publicity they receive: politicians, athletes and entertainers. The people who actually make the world work – people in private industry, rank-and-file government employees and conscientious parents – are largely invisible in the news, except when they’re unlucky enough to make one of the rare mistakes that reporters manage to find out about.

Interesting.

I’VE GOT A CHAPTER in this book on Presidential leadership, published by the Wall Street Journal press, which also features chapters from lots of eminent and knowledgeable people.

VIRGINIA POSTREL has a column on gay marriage in The Boston Globe.

THE SIMPSONS’ SEASON FINALE was a sort of tribute to the blogosphere, Steven Jens reports. (Spoiler alert).

WHEN NPR HAS GUYS LIKE JEFF JARVIS SHOUTING AT THE RADIO it’s a pretty good sign that the “public” isn’t behind public radio anymore.

MARK STEYN WEIGHS IN IN IRAQI ELECTIONS:

There are some 8,000 towns and villages in the country. How many do you hear about on the news? For a week, it’s all Fallujah all the time. Then it’s Najaf, and nada for anywhere else. Currently, 90 percent of Iraqi coverage is about one lousy building: Abu Ghraib. So what’s going on in the other 7,997 dots on the map? In the Shia province of Dhi Qar, a couple hundred miles southeast of Baghdad, 16 of the biggest 20 cities plus many smaller towns will have elected councils by June. These were the first free elections in Dhi Qar’s history and ”in almost every case, secular independents and representatives of nonreligious parties did better than the Islamists.” That assessment is from the anti-war anti-Bush anti-Blair Euro-lefties at the Guardian, by the way.

That policy of ad hoc, incremental, rolling devolution needs to be accelerated. Towns and provinces should have as much sovereignty as they can handle, on the obvious principle that the constituent parts of ramshackle federations rarely progress at the same pace. In the former Yugoslavia, Slovenia is now an advanced Western economy, Kosovo is a U.N. slum housing project. If one were to cast the situation in rough British terms, the Kurdish areas are broadly analogous to Scotland, Dhi Qar and other Shia provinces are Wales, and the Sunni Triangle is Northern Ireland.

Even in the Sunni Triangle, remove Fallujah and the remaining 95 percent is relatively calm. And, while Fallujah hasn’t been removed, it has been more or less quarantined. There have been fewer lethal attacks in Baghdad in recent weeks in part because many of the perpetrators were Fallujah residents who used to drive up to the capital for a little light RPG work in the evening. Now they’re pinned down in their hometown.

We need more of that. The best bulwark against tyranny is a population that knows the benefits of freedom, as the Iraqi Kurds do. Don’t make the mistake of turning Iraq into a dysfunctional American public school, where the smart guys get held down to the low standards of the misfits and in the end they all get the same social promotion anyway. Let’s get on with giving the Kurdish and Shia areas elected governors and practical sovereignty, province by province.

Read the whole thing.

MY COUNTRY, RIGHT OR WRONG? Cathy Young more or less takes me to task in this Boston Globe piece. While agreeing that some members of the press’s “obscene gloating” over U.S. problems in Iraq is “repugnant,” she quotes me from this post: “It’s wrong to root for your country’s defeat.”

To be fair, she more or less includes the entire quote, which reads:

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.

But, she asks: “Yet what if your country, or your government, is engaged in a war that is unjust and immoral?”

(Note that she explicitly says she doesn’t think that’s the case with the current war: “it is an indisputable fact that, for good or bad reasons, we went to war against a brutal, sadistic regime in Iraq — a regime that was the worst enemy of its own people.”)

I’m not a “my country, right or wrong,” guy. But I do think that if patriotism means anything it means giving one’s own country the benefit of the doubt — of which, in the case of this war, there’s not really much need for — and that the people I was discussing in that post are doing quite the opposite and adopting a “my country — of course it’s wrong” attitude. To root for your own country’s defeat is to separate yourself from its polity, to declare it not worth saving or preserving, to declare the lives of its soldiers less important than your own principles. It’s not always wrong, but it’s a very a drastic step, as drastic as deciding to mount a revolution, really, and yet it’s often taken by superficial people for superficial — and, as in this case, tawdry and self-serving — reasons.

If Bush really were Hitler, it would be different. A Nazi America wouldn’t be worth saving, and its polity would be worth separating oneself from. But we’re so far from that situation, as Young herself notes, that such discussions are entirely academic, and those who are rooting against America in Iraq have hardly demonstrated the moral courage and personal sacrifice that such a serious step demands, if it is to be taken seriously. If Bush is really Hitler, is filing slanted copy a sufficient response? But the real problem isn’t that Bush is Hitler — just that he’s a Republican, which puts a very different face on things. I don’t think that Young is one of those Libertarians who denounces the very concept of patriotism, but (though I could have been clearer in my post, I guess, but this seemed painfully obvious to me) I think that she should have thought this column through a bit more.

UPDATE: Reader Peter Bocking emails:

Rooting for the other side is also tacitly saying that the person next to you is your enemy and a legitimate target. The Bush/Hitler comparison would be hilarious if it were not so insultingly ugly.These people can only say this precisely because Bush is not Hitler; their ignorance ensures that if history does repeat itself they won’t recognise it.

I don’t really think they want the terrorists to win the war. But they don’t take the consequences of their winning in Iraq seriously, compared to their desire to get rid of Bush.

MOVING THE GOALPOSTS: Reader T.J. Lynn notes this passage from an article in the New York Times: “No stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction have been found since the invasion.”

(Emphasis added.) So that’s the new standard, I guess — and a tacit admission that WMD have been found. But unless Bush can produce “stockpiles” now, it’ll have all been a lie, you see. . . .

UPDATE: More here.

READER MIKE BRANOM writes with a question about something I said in this post:

And here’s a question: Freedom of the press, as it exists today (and didn’t exist, really, until the 1960s) is unlikely to survive if a majority — or even a large and angry minority — of Americans comes to conclude that the press is untrustworthy and unpatriotic. How far are we from that point?

He says it “sounds dangerous.” Well, it is. I’d planned to write a longer essay on this, but since plans like that often fail to bear fruit, here’s the short version.

Press freedom as we know it today is a rather recent innovation. The First Amendment didn’t really do much work until just before World War Two. In World War One, people were convicted of sedition for publishing things that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow today. Libel suits were easier, and in general the press enjoyed much less of a special status. (For a good history, especially of the World War One and Civil War eras, read this article by Geoffrey Stone).

And it wasn’t really until the 1960s and 1970s, after cases like Brandenburg v. Ohio, and the Pentagon Papers case, that what we think of as press freedom today came into existence.

So the question is, is that a coincidence — did the United States just happen to make progress in free expression over that period — or is that expansion of press freedom tied to the fact that regard for the press, and in particular its fairness and objectivity, was (rightly or wrongly) at unusually high levels by historical standards during those decades?

And, either way, what happens if the public comes to regard the press as untrustworthy and un-American? Will the First Amendment continue to be regarded expansively? Maybe. Maybe not. And if you look at the various journalistic scandals, from Jayson Blair to fake Iraq photos, and at polls like these, coupled with others showing decreased respect for journalists, and reduced viewership and readership for major media outlets, the risk seems genuine.

Press freedom is in the Constitution, but so are a lot of rights that don’t get nearly as much actual protection out in the world. Members of the press have often warned business people that malfeasance and self-serving behavior puts capitalism at risk. Malfeasance and self-serving behavior by the press puts free expression at risk, too.

UPDATE: Chicago Report, responding to this post, suggests that growing ideological diversity in the media may be an answer to this concern. Maybe (though we’ve got some distance to go on that front). But I’m not so sure. The media were far more diverse, and openly partisan, a hundred years ago, and press freedom was less revered. I don’t know that there’s a connection, but to the extent that people think of newspapers and TV news as being more like unpaid political advertising than like journalism, it’s hard for me to see that outcome producing more respect for press freedom.

If anything saves free expression, I think it will be the expansion of personal publishing (blogs, web video, etc.) over the next few years, which may lead a lot of people to think of the press as “us” rather than “them.” That, of course, will lead to more diversity, too. And, I suppose, it’s another reason why the establishment press should embrace the media explosion.

THE FOLKS AT CRUSHKERRY.COM offer a memo to Karl Rove.