MAX BOOT:

Hosni Mubarak must think that George W. Bush is a chump. The Egyptian pharaoh apparently realizes that the U.S. president is serious about spreading freedom and democracy to the Middle East, but he still thinks he can get away with cosmetic changes that do nothing to seriously change the ugly nature of his regime.

Read the whole thing.

BLAME THE CRAZY MUSLIMS: This seems to be the rapidly-gelling defense of Newsweek.

That’s certainly the tack that David Brooks is taking in today’s New York Times (though if he thinks only right-wing bloggers see the press as anti-military, perhaps he should call up Terry Moran). Brooks writes:

The people who seized upon this item, like the radical clerics in Afghanistan, are cynical in the way they manipulate episodes like this to whip up hatred and so magnify their own standing.

At the same time, they believe everything that could be alleged about America – and more. They’ve spent so many years inhabiting a delusional mental landscape filled with conspiracy theories and paranoia that you could drill deep into their minds without ever touching reality.

Finally, they are strategically ruthless. Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker, who has spent years reporting on extremists, says they use manufactured spasms of hatred to desensitize their followers. After followers spend a few years living through rabid riots and vicious sermons, killing an American or a Jew or even a fellow Muslim seems no more consequential than killing a mosquito. That’s how suicide bombers are made.

The rioters are the real enemy, not Newsweek and not the American soldiers serving as prison guards. Just to restore some proper perspective, let me quote a snippet from a sermon delivered by Sheik Ibrahim Mudeiris, which ran last weekend on the Palestinian Authority’s official TV station:

“The day will come when we will rule America. The day will come when we will rule Britain and the entire world – except for the Jews. The Jews will not enjoy a life of tranquillity under our rule because they are treacherous by nature, as they have been throughout history. The day will come when everything will be relieved of the Jews – even the stones and trees which were harmed by them. Listen to the Prophet Muhammad, who tells you about the evil end that awaits Jews. The stones and trees will want the Muslims to finish off every Jew.”

These are the extremists, the real enemy. Let’s keep our eye on the ball.

True enough — and as Christopher Hitchens and Austin Bay have been saying, media outlets like the Times have been failing to point this out in the past.

It may have taken a journalistic scandal to unclog the pipes, but it’s nice to see people finally noticing this, and holding the “Arab” (or at least Muslim) “street” to account as moral agents. That hardly excuses Newsweek’s journalistic failings, though. (And I suspect that if a falsehood by Rush Limbaugh had led to a race riot, people wouldn’t be taking this tack.) Still, with David Brooks, Jeff Jacoby and Tom Friedman all on the same page here, perhaps the press will begin to recognize that this isn’t Vietnam redux, but an entirely different sort of war. One in which, I should note, the enemy counts on journalists to be sloppy, biased, and willing to excuse or ignore Islamist extremism in the service of domestic politics.

UPDATE: Brian Dunn emails that he predicted this. Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis comments on Brooks:

Whining media bashers? How about dissatisifed media consumers? How about disappointed fellow journalists? How about unhappy fellow Americans?

Brooks is right to say that it’s silly and offensive to bash Newsweek and not bash the fanatical murderers who used this report as an excuse to kill.

But I think he’s wrong not to bash Nesweek himself, not to also criticize the magazine for making such an irresponsible error.

Brooks spends a paragraph saying that he used to work at Newsweek and he likes those guys and doesn’t believe they’re commies and that’s very nice.

But by not criticizing the report, the net message of this otherwise spot-on column is that press people defend press people, that we circle our wagons around our screw-ups, that we stick together first. Especially today, with the press’ trust in tatters, that is the wrong message.

There’s certainly a lot of wagon-circling going on.

Related thoughts, here.

MORE: Tom Maguire notes cognitive dissonance and historical revisionism on this subject over the past week.

MUCH MORE ON EVENTS IN UZBEKISTAN, over at Registan.

BILL WHITTLE has posted a new essay. Here’s the link to part one.

UNSCAM UPDATE: Another oil-for-food exclusive over at Roger Simon’s. Roger: “I will post any response from Mr. Volcker as soon as I learn of it.”

THERE’S NOT MUCH INFORMATION on Ron Bailey’s new book, but the article I linked below says it’s coming out next month. It certainly sounds interesting, and timely.

ASPARAGIRL: “I didn’t intend to become a roof-skulking lease-breaking veggie-pusher, really.”

HAS NATIONAL REVIEW FLIP-FLOPPED ON FILIBUSTERS?

ELECTIONS IN ETHIOPIA: Will Franklin has a roundup.

UPDATE: Ethiopia-bog Ethiopundit — which I just found out about — has been covering these for a while. Just keep scrolling. The verdict is unfavorable.

UZBEKISTAN UPDATE: Publius has more thoughts on the massacre, and an observation: “When, inevitably, Uzbekistan comes to reform, the people are going to remember who their friends were when they lived under a government they hated.”

And Gateway Pundit has another big roundup with links, photos, and video.

MEDIA BIAS AS MARKET SEGMENTATION: Virginia Postrel has some thoughts.

TIMING is everything.

TERRY OGLESBY IS FOOD-COURT FASHIONBLOGGING: “But there are some folks, folks who think they are REALLY out there pushing the outside of the envelope, and, well, to paraphrase Inigo Montoya: ‘You keep wearing those clothes. I do not think they look the way you think they look.’”

On the other hand, the news is not all dark and gloomy: “The return of sartorial standards among the young American men it makes the Manolo most happy.”

RON BAILEY spends a day at the Brain Spa:

Chatterjee cited an interesting poll in which people were asked whether they would give a safe drug to a child that would enhance his or her ability to learn to play the piano if they had the opportunity. Half of the respondents said absolutely not. They regarded learning the piano through persistent practice as character building and using pills as a cheat. However, the other half had no problem at all with giving kids a piano pill. What sets the stage for social and political conflict over enhancement technologies is that people on both sides in the poll were completely convinced that their view would be shared by everybody.

Chatterjee ended by joking that if his next NIH grant got turned down, he might “stop what I’m doing and open up a brain spa.” Whether or not he decides to hang out a shingle, he predicted, “There will be a brain spa opening close to you in the near future.”

I think they’ll do good business.

LARRY KUDLOW says we’re blundering on China: “The only thing more dangerous than forcing China off the dollar standard is the protectionist idea being advanced by Senators Smoot Schumer and Hawley Graham.”

PHOTO-COLTBLOGGING over at Red Georgia Clay: This is timely stuff. One of my sister’s horses is about to foal, and she’s been nervous all day.

HUGH HEWITT interviewed Terry Moran regarding the back-and-forth at yesterday’s White House Press Briefing. The transcript is here.

UPDATE: Reader Dart Montgomery thinks that this is the Moran money quote:

It comes from, I think, a huge gulf of misunderstanding, for which I lay plenty of blame on the media itself. There is, Hugh, I agree with you, a deep anti-military bias in the media. One that begins from the premise that the military must be lying, and that American projection of power around the world must be wrong. I think that that is a hangover from Vietnam, and I think it’s very dangerous.

Indeed.

MICHAEL TOTTEN says the Cedar Revolution is coming to Syria.

BLOGGER NICK GENES was on the Alitalia flight that was diverted yesterday for antiterrorism reasons. He reports what it was like, and has some questions and complaints for the authorities.

ARE WE LIKELY TO SEE “dirty tricks” aimed at the blogosphere? I explore the possibility over at GlennReynolds.com, and draw some lessons from history.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, a Brit who has not gone soft in the war on terror, wonders why the New York Times is reluctant to call terrorists terrorists?

The Bin Ladenists did have a sort of “governing program,” expressed in part by their Taliban allies and patrons. This in turn reflected a “unified ideology.” It can be quite easily summarized: the return of the Ottoman Empire under a caliphate and a return to the desert religious purity of the seventh century (not quite the same things, but that’s not our fault). In the meantime, anyway, war to the end against Jews, Hindus, Christians, unbelievers, and Shiites. None of the “experts” quoted in the article appeared to have remembered these essentials of the al-Qaida program, but had they done so, they might not be so astounded at the promiscuous way in which the Iraqi gangsters pump out toxic anti-Semitism, slaughter Nepalese and other Asian guest-workers on video and gloat over the death of Hindus, burn out and blow up the Iraqi Christian minority, kidnap any Westerner who catches their eye, and regularly inflict massacres and bombings on Shiite mosques, funerals, and assemblies. . . .

The Bin Laden and Zarqawi organizations, and their co-thinkers in other countries, have gone to great pains to announce, on several occasions, that they will win because they love death, while their enemies are so soft and degenerate that they prefer life. Are we supposed to think that they were just boasting when they said this? Their actions demonstrate it every day, and there are burned-out school buses and clinics and hospitals to prove it, as well as mosques (the incineration of which one might think to be a better subject for Islamic protest than a possibly desecrated Quran, in a prison where every inmate is automatically issued with one.)

You’d think so, wouldn’t you?

UPDATE: Reader Barry Dauphin emails:

Yes, Hitchens actually takes bin Laden and Zarqawi seriously. He might revile them but he shows them enough respect to listen to their words. Anyone who reads the bin Laden fatwas knows what he’s up to; it’s all there. Either the NYT and others haven’t really read them or they think “he can’t be serious.” And today Krugman is bloviating that the war in Iraq is Vietnam redux and is making us weaker day by day. And the NYT actually wants people to pay for that crap?

There’s a subscriber born every minute.

75 DEGREES SOUTH is a pretty cool blog from Antarctica. Where things are always pretty cool.

JUST IN TIME FOR HURRICANE SEASON: It’s a new weather-blog called Storm Track, by Jordan Golson.

TV VIA THE INTERNET: It looks like it’s finally coming true.

ANDREW SULLIVAN writes that he didn’t mean to claim that wrapping someone in an Israeli flag was torture, even though he listed it with other things that he clearly did regard as torture, and drew no distinction. He asks me to correct the record; I wish instead that he would try writing on (and thinking about) this subject with the clarity and seriousness of which he has shown himself capable in the past. All evidence suggests, however, that I am likely to be disappointed.

UPDATE: Reader Christopher Levenick notes that in an earlier post, Andrew specificially included wrapping in an Israeli flag under the heading ANTI-ISLAMIC TORTURE. If Andrew doesn’t regard flag-wrapping as torture, then pehaps he should refrain from this sort of thing in the future. I’ve suggested in the past that Sullivan would be more persuasive in a cause with which I actually agree (I’ve long been anti-torture, after all) if he displayed more rigor and didn’t turn the volume to “11.” That remains true. I’m not interested in an inter-blog pissing match; I tend to take a blog-and-let-blog approach to these sorts of things. But I think that Andrew’s take on these issues hasn’t accomplished what he hopes to accomplish, and I don’t think that it will do so in the future if his approach remains the same.