That’s the only way to describe the coverage of the story of the kid who was indicted yesterday for conspiring to assassinate the president as part of an Al Qaeda plot. When I heard about this on the radio in the car, a big part of the story was apparently that he was a valedictorian of a Virginia high school. I guess that this was supposed to indicate some kind of disconnect; how could such a seemingly all-American boy do such a thing?

Well, as Paul Harvey says, here’s the rest of the story. The “high school” was a Saudi-funded madrassa. (Do such institutions even have valedictorians, in the sense that we would recognize them?)

Why wasn’t this part reported? Fear of CAIR?

[Via LGF]

[Update at 9:33 AM EST]

Ed Morrissey has more.

Dan Darling has some disturbing news from the Middle East, that could amount to a casus belli with Baby Assad’s regime:

To bring it down to the bottom line, this means that a Palestinian terrorist group that is trained, harbored, and financed by Bashar al-Assad’s regime is complicit in the deaths of US and Iraqi soldiers. If this can be confirmed, it would seem to indicate that Syrian involvement in the assassination of Rafik Hariri would be the least of al-Assad’s (or Khaddam, if we want to be more up-front about these things) problems.

What’s more disturbing, as he points out, is that it’s not being covered in the media here.

In some ways, this is like the Eason Jordan affair. This is either true, or not. If true, it’s a huge story that the media should be digging into. If false, then it’s a huge story that they should be debunking. Either way, they remain asleep at the switch.

[Update at 9:20 AM EST]

Jim Robbins says that Assad is a uniter, not a divider. Not that that’s a good thing, in his case. At least not for him…

[Another update, at 10 AM EST]

From this article by David Ignatius in today’s WaPo:

The leader of this Lebanese intifada is Walid Jumblatt, the patriarch of the Druze Muslim community and, until recently, a man who accommodated Syria’s occupation. But something snapped for Jumblatt last year, when the Syrians overruled the Lebanese constitution and forced the reelection of their front man in Lebanon, President Emile Lahoud. The old slogans about Arab nationalism turned to ashes in Jumblatt’s mouth, and he and Hariri openly began to defy Damascus…

…”It’s strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq,” explains Jumblatt. “I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world.” Jumblatt says this spark of democratic revolt is spreading. “The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it.”

This from a man who has long expressed anti-American sentiments.

[Via Jim Garaghty]

[One more at 3:30 PM]

The Syrian plot continues to thicken:

Iraqi state television aired a video Wednesday showing what the U.S.-funded channel said was the confession of a captured Syrian officer who said he trained Iraqi insurgents to behead people and build car bombs to attack American and Iraqi troops.

The video also showed an Iraqi who said the insurgents practiced beheading animals to train for decapitating hostages.

If true, why is this not a clear act of war against both Iraq and the coalition?

Pat Oliphant has a cartoon that shows angry bloggers, with battle axes and other midieval weapons, storming the castle gates.

So, even the old war horse of a political cartoonist is becoming blog savvy, eh?

Well, not exactly. If he were really familiar with the blogosphere, he’d be aware of this Cox and Forkum cartoon from early last week (which is much better, and heavily linked by bloggers). And rather than being embarrassed by his slow response, hopefully he’d have come up with something more original.

At Business Week. Steven Baker doesn’t fear The Blog:

…with all their clout and reach, bloggers alone can’t bring down their enemies. In the end, it’s up to society’s traditional powers — the corporate boards, politicians, CEOs — to rule on these matters. Do they fire an executive for uttering one foolish sentence, ax a reporter for a wrongheaded story, exile a university president for offensive remarks? If the bloggers appear to be censorious, it’s only because the rest of society plays along.

In truth, blogging represents an explosion of free speech. While blogs certainly empower lynch mobs, they can also lead to long and open conversations, virtual town meetings. These are the greatest antidote to censorship and secrecy. The Jordan case gave birth to loads of such discussions.

Like many, he does get one thing wrong, though:

He resigned on Feb. 13 after conservative bloggers feasted on a controversial statement he made in late January at the annual World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, about the U.S. military. His allegation — that coalition soldiers in Iraq mistook journalists for enemies and killed them — brought down a storm of criticism on him and his network.

No, that wasn’t his allegation, at least not initially, if numerous accounts are correct. His allegation was that journalists were targeted by coalition soldiers (and that word includes identification). He then attempted to walk it back to them being hit by mistake.

But the columnist raises an interesting thesis: that the days of privacy are ending. To whatever degree that’s true, if it means that the powerful will no longer be able to get away with slander and bias, it’s hard to see how that’s a bad thing.

As he notes, Jordan losing his job wasn’t a blow to free speech–it was a victory for it. The First Amendment never meant anything more than that the government can’t censor you, or pass laws against the dissemination of ideas (though the current government doesn’t seem to think that the First Amendment applies to election campaigns any more). It was never meant as a shield against potential consequences of speech.

You know, it used to be easy to write satire of (literally) sophomoric columns in college newspapers, by writing something like “Top Ten Reasons America Sucks.”

Sadly, they’ve raised the bar, and taken away such an easy theme.

Next thing you know, you won’t be able to spoof the lefty professoriate by calling innocent people who died in the World Trade Center things like “little Eichmanns.”

He has a couple about the Eason Jordan “kerfuffle:”

Overlooking the larger scene, Michael Barone of US News writes: “The focus of hatred in the right blogosphere is not Kerry or the Democrats but what these bloggers call Mainstream Media, or MSM. They argue, correctly in my view, that the New York Times, CBS News, and others distorted the news in an attempt to defeat Bush in 2004.”

Barone, a friend to the right blogosphere, is correct– and he’s being candid. The focus of hatred in the right blogosphere is the Mainstream Media. (For the Left it’s Bush, he says.) I want to know what the right blogosphere says back. Not to me, although that’s fine too, but to Michael Barone. Is he right?

I don’t know how to answer that question (though I agree with his diagnosis of the MSM from the perspective of the “right blogosphere”), because it’s a complex one (in the literal sense of the phrase). I don’t consider myself part of the “right blogosphere.” I doubt if Glenn Reynolds does either. Until we get past this simplistic need to label, I’m not sure that we’ll make much progress in having a dialogue (which leads to his next question):

In an effort to go dialogic, I asked Will Collier of Vodka Pundit (who got into it with Steve Lovelady of CJR Daily) a question that I hope is both pointed and open ended: Is the point to have a dialogue with the MSM or help cause its destruction? (Or is there a third and fourth alternative we should be discussing?) This is something the blogging world should take a moment for and reflect upon.

There’s at least a third (and probably a fourth and fifth, and…). The points are to get the MSM to 1) recognize that it has a problem with political bias; 2) to recognize that this bias tilts politically to whatever is meant by the “left” to those who accuse some of the blogosphere of being on the “right;” and 3) to come up with some means of addressing this issue, and some means of bringing accountability to those who spin the news in a certain direction while expressing outrage that their coverage is characterized as anything other than “objective.”

Howzat for an alternative, Mr. Rosen?

He has a couple about the Eason Jordan “kerfuffle:”

Overlooking the larger scene, Michael Barone of US News writes: “The focus of hatred in the right blogosphere is not Kerry or the Democrats but what these bloggers call Mainstream Media, or MSM. They argue, correctly in my view, that the New York Times, CBS News, and others distorted the news in an attempt to defeat Bush in 2004.”

Barone, a friend to the right blogosphere, is correct– and he’s being candid. The focus of hatred in the right blogosphere is the Mainstream Media. (For the Left it’s Bush, he says.) I want to know what the right blogosphere says back. Not to me, although that’s fine too, but to Michael Barone. Is he right?

I don’t know how to answer that question (though I agree with his diagnosis of the MSM from the perspective of the “right blogosphere”), because it’s a complex one (in the literal sense of the phrase). I don’t consider myself part of the “right blogosphere.” I doubt if Glenn Reynolds does either. Until we get past this simplistic need to label, I’m not sure that we’ll make much progress in having a dialogue (which leads to his next question):

In an effort to go dialogic, I asked Will Collier of Vodka Pundit (who got into it with Steve Lovelady of CJR Daily) a question that I hope is both pointed and open ended: Is the point to have a dialogue with the MSM or help cause its destruction? (Or is there a third and fourth alternative we should be discussing?) This is something the blogging world should take a moment for and reflect upon.

There’s at least a third (and probably a fourth and fifth, and…). The points are to get the MSM to 1) recognize that it has a problem with political bias; 2) to recognize that this bias tilts politically to whatever is meant by the “left” to those who accuse some of the blogosphere of being on the “right;” and 3) to come up with some means of addressing this issue, and some means of bringing accountability to those who spin the news in a certain direction while expressing outrage that their coverage is characterized as anything other than “objective.”

Howzat for an alternative, Mr. Rosen?

He has a couple about the Eason Jordan “kerfuffle:”

Overlooking the larger scene, Michael Barone of US News writes: “The focus of hatred in the right blogosphere is not Kerry or the Democrats but what these bloggers call Mainstream Media, or MSM. They argue, correctly in my view, that the New York Times, CBS News, and others distorted the news in an attempt to defeat Bush in 2004.”

Barone, a friend to the right blogosphere, is correct– and he’s being candid. The focus of hatred in the right blogosphere is the Mainstream Media. (For the Left it’s Bush, he says.) I want to know what the right blogosphere says back. Not to me, although that’s fine too, but to Michael Barone. Is he right?

I don’t know how to answer that question (though I agree with his diagnosis of the MSM from the perspective of the “right blogosphere”), because it’s a complex one (in the literal sense of the phrase). I don’t consider myself part of the “right blogosphere.” I doubt if Glenn Reynolds does either. Until we get past this simplistic need to label, I’m not sure that we’ll make much progress in having a dialogue (which leads to his next question):

In an effort to go dialogic, I asked Will Collier of Vodka Pundit (who got into it with Steve Lovelady of CJR Daily) a question that I hope is both pointed and open ended: Is the point to have a dialogue with the MSM or help cause its destruction? (Or is there a third and fourth alternative we should be discussing?) This is something the blogging world should take a moment for and reflect upon.

There’s at least a third (and probably a fourth and fifth, and…). The points are to get the MSM to 1) recognize that it has a problem with political bias; 2) to recognize that this bias tilts politically to whatever is meant by the “left” to those who accuse some of the blogosphere of being on the “right;” and 3) to come up with some means of addressing this issue, and some means of bringing accountability to those who spin the news in a certain direction while expressing outrage that their coverage is characterized as anything other than “objective.”

Howzat for an alternative, Mr. Rosen?

Where’s the video tape?

That was the question emanating from the blogosphere all last week. As many have pointed out, while we’ll take scalps occasionally, the Eason Jordan affair wasn’t about taking scalps (though I plead guilty to calling for his head if the tape showed the allegations to be true). It was about honesty and accountability.

Somehow, now that the chum of Jordan has been thrown to the sharks of the web, there may be a hope among many that the calls for the release of the tape, or a transcript (which may be much less damaging, for reasons I’ll explain in a minute) will die down.

Many are noting that if the tape exonerated, or mitigated Jordan’s alleged comments, it would have appeared by now. That’s true, but it misses a big part of the story. I don’t think that this was just about the MSM protecting one of their own. I think that it may be about protecting itself, or at least many members of it.

I have to wonder if that tape would show (and perhaps more starkly and much more graphically than a black and white transcript) not just Jordan’s words, but the approving reception of them by his Davos cohorts? The nods of recognition, the lack of any challenge, perhaps even murmurs of appreciation, until Rony Abovitz and Barney Frank spoke up. Gergen may have appeared concerned, and eventually changed the subject, but how long did it go on, and who was cheering Eason on? Was Iowahawk closer to reality than we thought? Who else will this tape embarrass (or should embarrass), and reflect poorly on?

Somehow, I suspect that if we were to see that video, it would provide much more than a brief glimpse into the soul of Eason Jordan. It might reveal the depths of the anti-military (and anti-American, or at least anti-Bush) sentiment in his colleagues as well, in an unguarded moment when they forgot that others were watching. And perhaps it’s their hope that by sacrificing Jordan, the rest of them can continue, incognito and unharried, in their undeclared war against the hyperpower.

Whether my speculation is correct or not, I don’t think that we should take Jordan’s resignation as a victory–it’s perhaps a distraction, and we should continue to demand the tape.

[Update at 2:30 PM EST]

A commenter claims that the remarks were off the record. How strange, then, to have an official videotape of a meeting that was supposed to be “off the record.”

[Another update a couple minutes later]

Bill Roggio has similar thoughts.

Ramesh Ponnuru is reporting that Eason Jordan just resigned.

I guess that some folks really didn’t want that videotape to get out, to protect the CNN brand. I wonder if Jonathan Klein is getting himself fitted for some pajamas?

Note the timing also. Late Friday aftenoon, so everyone will have forgotten about it by Monday.

Does that trick still work in the era of the blogosphere?