WHAT’S GOING ON WITH ZARQAWI? Austin Bay offers one theory:

Has Zarqawi been wounded or is he dead? Or is he being “withdrawn from the combat zone?” I raise these questions because at this point in time Zarqawi may be more valuable to Al Qaeda as a “mythic warrior” or “ghost.” It’s tough to kill a myth and darned hard to kill a ghost. Here’s the argument: Zarqawi’s damaged goods, physically and politically. From Al Qaeda’s point of view, and possibly Saddam’s henchmen, it’s time to get Z-Man out of Iraq, and then have Al-Jazeera and Newsweek turn him into Robin Hood.

Meanwhile, here’s a report that Zarqawi has been replaced, though it’s not clear what’s really going on.

GWYN PRINS WRITES:

For the first time, fear really stalks the Rue de la Loi in Brussels, headquarters of the European Commission. It is visceral. We know this because of the increasingly hysterical register of the messages in which the commissioners are sending French and Dutch voters preparing (in their referenda on 29 May and 1 June respectively) to vote down the treaty establishing a federal constitution. If you do so, the European Union nomenklatura is saying, you will bring to Europe economic disaster, a return to internecine war or (most tastelessly and least forgivably) another Holocaust. It is ridiculous hyperbole and therefore all the more demanding of explanation. How did it come to this?

Read the whole thing for some suggestions.

HOWARD KURTZ THINKS THAT NEWSWEEK HAS BEEN VINDICATED, but it’s not clear to me why that is:

Just to review: Newsweek made a specific error, saying this would be in a forthcoming military investigative report, and had to apologize and retract. But that never meant there was no Koran desecration–in fact, The Post reported such a charge in 2003 (as did other outlets later), but the charges were always attributed to detainees. Even these documents (which I’ll bet were seen by Isikoff’s source) atrribute the allegations to detainees. But that casts the outraged White House and Pentagon reaction in a slightly different light, doesn’t it?

(Emphasis in original.) If you read the story that Kurtz references, though, it also says that investigators found no basis to the allegations. It seems to me that Newsweek’s report — that government investigation did support the claims — was rather different, and that this constitutes something rather short of vindication.

UPDATE: Joe Gandelman has a survey of the issue, and agrees that this doesn’t get Newsweek off the hook, even though it’s being spun that way.

This report from the New York Times would seem to make that clear:

The accusation that soldiers had put a Koran in a toilet, which has been made by former and current inmates over the past two years, stirred violence this month that killed at least 17 people in Muslim countries after Newsweek magazine reported that a military investigation was expected to confirm that the incident had in fact occurred.

Newsweek retracted the report last week, saying it had relied on an American government official who had incomplete knowledge of the situation.

None of the documents released Wednesday indicate any such confirmation that the incident took place.

(Emph. added). I think that Newsweek’s defenders would be wise not to make too much of this.

MORE: A reader notes a bit of goalpost-moving:

In a recent post, you quoted the NYT as writing this in a report:

“The accusation that soldiers had put a Koran in a toilet, …”

Notice how it is now ‘put a Koran in a toilet’. No longer is the phrasing ‘flush a Koran down the toilet’. A subtle, yet important change. This version is _plausible_. And easier to get someone to substantiate (or at least say “well, I can’t say that it didn’t happen”).

As Martin Peretz said, they’ve circled the wagons on this one.

KURTZ-CORRECTION UPDATE: Howard Kurtz emails:

I absolutely don’t believe Newsweek has been vindicated, and if you got that impression, I must have been unclear. Newsweek made a bad mistake.

Here is what I’m writing for tomorrow:

“I don’t contend that these FBI papers, unearthed in an ACLU lawsuit,
get Newsweek off the hook. But you’d think they would be getting more
attention.

“Let’s parse the wording. Newsweek erred by saying in its ill-fated Periscope item that a forthcoming military investigative report would cite an allegation of the Koran being flushed down a toilet at Guantanamo. That was wrong, and Newsweek’s anonymous source backed off. The FBI documents don’t prove that these Koran incidents took place–indeed, it may be impossible to prove one way or the other.”

I did get that impression, but I’m glad that I was wrong.

Meanwhile, Tom Maguire has a useful roundup of this much-ado-about-not-much story.

MORE: Bill Quick adds some historical perspective that does a better job of explaining why I misunderstood Howard than I did.

MAX BOOT: “At a time when the Army and Marine Corps are struggling to fill their ranks, many conservatives are determined to limit the ability of women and gays to contribute to the war effort. Are they more concerned with winning culture wars at home or winning the war on terrorism abroad?”

JAY ROSEN HAS THREE QUESTONS FOR KEVIN DRUM:

Is the press, properly understood, a political animal?

If so, what kind of politics should it have?

How do we know if the press has got the politics part right?

Jay also asks for opinions from others, including me. I don’t usually blog on request, but this is interesting.

I think that the press is unavoidably political. What has bothered people (and what gets Kevin heated up about “the right wing press destruction machine”) is that until recently the politics were pretty uniformly left-leaning, to the point that the press became a well-defined political player on its own. Not for nothing does Howard Feinman write about the “Media Party.” Now that’s changing (this is the part that has Kevin heated up) and things that used to go unchallenged and unremarked are now challenged and remarked upon. This makes things seem more politicized, but what’s really changed is that people are talking about the politics, where before they were implicit.

What kind of politics should it have? Non-monolithic, and transparent. If, as First Amendment theory suggests, the marketplace of ideas is a check on the political power of an unelected press, then we need diversity of perspective and a willingness of press organs to criticize each others’ reporting.

How do we know when the press has it right? When we’ve got news organs representing a diversity of perspectives. We’re making progress in that direction, but we’re a long way from getting there.

UPDATE: Ernest Miller: “No one asked me, but I’ll go ahead and give my answers anyway.”

EUGENE VOLOKH WRITES on the political uses of loving one’s country.

GOOD QUESTION: “Is there an Italian law against defaming America?”

I MUST CONFESS that I’ve never thought of George Voinovich as a metrosexual.

KAUS ON COCCOONING:

Who else but reinforcement-craving Democrats would pay $49.95 a year to read Paul Krugman? … The Times, of course, is supposed to be the un-Balkanized, common-ground information outlet, so its shift toward a caterpillar strategy should be the cause of much more respectable hand-wringing than, say, the emergence of ideologically targeted sites like Lucianne.com and RealClearPolitics … Also, Lucianne and RCP actually do a much better job of forcing their readers to confront what they don’t want to see than the Times does.

Indeed.

UPDATE: Related thoughts here:

What’s peculiar about the economics of news-and-views is that, by raising the price, the Times will not merely reduce demand for their product, they’ll reduce its value, because the significance of an op-ed does not come only from the author, but from the audience as well. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech would have been much less interesting if it had been given at some obscure academic conference, rather than on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in front of an audience of hundreds of thousands. Likewise, John Tierney and Paul Krugman will be less interesting when they are no longer writing to the internet masses, to America and the world, but merely to the narrow, unrepresentative subscriber base of the Times.

Indeed.

GREG DJEREJIAN: “I have to say, reading this kind of risible crap gets me in the mood to say let’s all get behind John Bolton, shall we, and send him to USUN soonest. Particularly the comments of the German Ambassador to Washington, Wolfgang Ischinger, so dripping with condescension, disingenuousness and hypocrisy: ‘we tend to think of ourselves as more experienced in the way societies evolve,’ ‘(t)his is very complicated, ‘(c)hanging the way people think often has to do with religious and cultural issues…Americans think, Let’s solve the problem in the next four years!’ I mean, how many silly, tired, protest-placard stereotypes can the good Ambassador mutter on about in one short interview with the New Yorker?”

RICH, BLOGGY GOODNESS: Don’t miss this week’s Carnival of the Vanities.

YOU’D THINK THAT HISTORIANS WOULDN’T RUSH TO JUDGMENT, but on the other hand, post-Bellesiles it’s hard for me to be surprised by anything that they do.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies, on the other hand, seems to be taking a more positive view.

BLOGGER SUCKS: So Ann Althouse has set up a backup blog until it starts working again.

PEOPLE SOMETIMES CALL ME A NEOLIBERTARIAN. I’m not sure what that means, besides an effort to link me with neocons. [You don’t look neo-ish! — Ed.]

But if I were a Neo-Libertarian, then wouldn’t InstaPundit be the “Instapundit for the Neolibertarian Network?” I mean, that only makes sense.

UPDATE:

I left the Libertarian Party in 2004 when presidential candidate Michael Badnarik asked supporters to wear black on the anniversary of 9/11 “to mourn the deaths of the thousands of people who have died as a result of U.S. government policies”.

Libertarians are often idealistic and myopic, ignoring the real world in pursuit of their goals, unable to compromise their principles. A little pragmatism is called for in the real world.

Yes, although I was a card-carrying member of the Libertarian Party in the 1990s, their pathetic response to the 9/11 attacks caused me to lose confidence in the party. And “pathetic” is putting it kindly.

JON HENKE writes that 2006 might be the Democrats’ 1994, as the Republican Congress grows less popular while not accomplishing much.

MICHAEL YOUNG: “Those who accuse the Bush administration of incompetence in the Middle East because of events in Iraq may soon have to temper that with an assessment of its shrewder behavior in Lebanon.” Of course, the latter was made possible by the former.

RON BAILEY REPORTS on the Kansas Intelligent Design hearings:

Who needs to make monkeys out of the Kansas Board of Education when its members are doing such a good job of it themselves? . . .

The anti-evolutionists affect not to know who or what the “intelligent designer” of their theory might be. He, she, it, or they could be little green men or purple space squid or a race of intelligent supercomputers—or maybe, just maybe, an omnipotent God. Who knows? We’re all just innocently asking “scientific” questions here.

But away from the glare of media attention, this pose of scientific objectivity cracks. “ID has theological implications. ID is not strictly Christian, but it is theistic,” admitted board member Martin. The intelligent design proponents in Kansas ask: Why not let children in public schools hear arguments for intelligent design in biology classes? Schools could “teach the controversy.”

Biologists retort by asking, “So it’s OK then for high schools to teach astrology, phrenology, mesmerism, tarot card reading, crystal healing, astral projection and water witching, too?”

Personally, I’m a Tiplerite.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT:

ROME (Reuters) – A judge has ordered best-selling writer and journalist Oriana Fallaci to stand trial in her native Italy on charges she defamed Islam in a recent book.

Fabrizio Quattrochi was unavailable for comment. However, Jeff Goldstein sees this as a “velvet insurgency.”

Basically, where people warn about theocracy in the United States, we’re seeing what amounts to a trial for blasphemy in Italy.

Tom Wolfe once said that Fascism is forever descending on the United States, but that somehow it always lands on Europe. Perhaps the same is true with theocracy?

HERE’S AN INTERESTING PASSAGE from the filibuster-compromise memo:

We believe that, under Article II, Section 2, of the United States Constitution, the word “Advice” speaks to consultation between the Senate and the President with regard to the use of the President’s power to make nominations. We encourage the Executive branch of government to consult with members of the Senate, both Democratic and Republican, prior to submitting a judicial nomination to the Senate for consideration.

I suppose that I should see this as a sort of vindication, since I recommended just that approach in an article entitled Taking Advice Seriously: An Immodest Proposal for Reforming the Confirmation Process, published in the Southern California Law Review some years back, though I suspect that they’re not willing to go quite as far as I suggested..

I guess that makes me a member of the Coalition of the Chillin’.

IN THE MAIL: An advance copy of John Scalzi’s Agent to the Stars. It looks quite good, but it’s not the sequel to Old Man’s War. Scalzi’s just started writing that one.

UPDATE: Reader Randal Carden notes something I had missed: Scalzi has made Agent to the Stars available for free online. Cool.

GATEWAY PUNDIT has more on Uzbekistan. Karimov is cozying up to China, whose leaders are understandably disturbed by the spread of democracy in the region, and untroubled by Karimov’s Tiananmen-like massacre.

PARTY LIKE IT’S 1999: Reader Clark Ghitis sends this from the WSJ (subscription only):

The number of millionaires in the U.S. increased to a record last year, boosted by gains in stocks and global financial markets, according to two new studies.

The number of U.S. households with a net worth of $1 million or more rose 21% in 2004, according to a survey released yesterday by Spectrem Group, a wealth-research firm in Chicago. It is the largest increase since 1998, according to the study, which was based on data from more than 450 qualified respondents. There now are 7.5 million millionaire households in the U.S., breaking the record set in 1999 of 7.1 million. The study excluded the value of primary residences, but included second homes and other real estate.

The InstaPundit household isn’t among those new millionaires, though.

UPDATE: No, sadly, we’re not among those old millionaires, either.

THIS IS COOL:

The American chestnut, prized for its timber and its crop of glossy dark nuts, once dominated Eastern forests from Maine to Georgia. The graceful trees were virtually wiped out by blight starting at the turn of the 20th century.

That loss, Case said, “was the greatest environmental disaster in the Western Hemisphere since the Ice Age.”

Now, after years of breeding, cloning and crossbreeding, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is ready to reintroduce disease-resistant chestnuts to Eastern forests next year.

Maybe we’ll get the elms back, too.

UPDATE: Reader Greg Hlatky sends this link to elm-restoration efforts.

ZARQAWI, AL QAEDA, AND SADDAM: Austin Bay has some observations.

HOWARD FINEMAN SUGGESTS — perhaps a bit hopefully — that the filibuster compromise represents a political turning point:

A generation ago, voters turned against the Democrats for the excesses of their welfare-state, big-government thinking. Washington WASN’T the answer to everything.

But, voters may conclude, the Bible isn’t either. They could turn against the GOP if they think the party is sacrificing the American tradition of pragmatism and respect for scientific progress – on, say, stem-cell research – in favor of religious fundamentalism, however sincere. Take a look at some of the key supporters of stem-cell research: Nancy Reagan, to name one – not to mention corporate executives who don’t want to see research money and energy drift away to other countries. Two religions are in collision, one of them secular and scientific, the other Biblical.

I’ve been warning of this for a while, and I think it bears repeating: Americans, for the most part, don’t share in the reflexive hostility to religion found in the upper reaches of journalism and the academy. On the other hand, Americans don’t like self-righteous busybodies — whether of the PC left or the religious right — telling them how to live, either.

There’s a relatively small group — under 20% of the electorate, I’d guess — that would really like to recast American society under far more religiously determined lines. That’s enough to steer the Republican party to disaster, as a similar group has done for the Democrats, but not enough to win elections much. The Democrats’ problem, of course, is that they’re even more dominated by their fringe than the Republicans, and the fact that the media establishment tends to share those views will make it harder for them to extricate themselves from this fix.