Hennessy’s View

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The December 15 Parliamentary election in Iraq was so overwhelmingly successful that it took the New York Times editorial writers two full days to find something nasty to say about it. Not wanting to hold the bad news for the story, the headline writer did his best to explain that the recent election was a non-story, proclaiming:

Iraq Votes for a Third Time

As if Iraq voting is as commonplace as Howard Dean embarrassing himself in public.

The editorial begins with a dire warning:

Iraq’s Election Day was a glorious success. Now on to the hard part.

Were I to research a bit, I bet I’d find that this is the third time NYT has dragged out that sentence after an Iraqi election. It’s their way of saying, “No news is good news.”

Does the Iraqi election, which the paper admits “was an overwhelming and heartening triumph,” vindicate George Bush?

No.

On the contrary, the NYT takes the credit for the success:

This page has consistently stressed the importance of the widest possible Sunni Arab participation in the politics of a new Iraq. Now Sunni voters, keenly feeling the cost of their past election boycotts and less intimidated by insurgent violence, have joined the political process and strengthened their representation in the new Parliament.

The Americans, Brits, Aussies, Italians, Poles, new Europeans, and many Iraqis who died in battle to free that country must, from their places in the great beyond, smile with loving affection upon the heads of grey lady’s editors. For it was the New York Times, not the armies of liberation, which pulled off Thursday’s “overwhelming . . . triumph.”

Perhaps humility caused the Times’s editors to hold this piece a day. They didn’t want to take all the credit. Let that fellow, Bush, enjoy himself before reminding the world that the NYT’s editorial pen is mighter than the commander-in-chief’s terrible swift sword.

UPDATE: I was very busy at work yesterday, so I missed Ed Morrissey’s piece on the NYT’s editorial silence. And a trackback on that brings us to SoCalPundit who tried to find liberal blog commentary on the election. (There is a good comment thread here, too.) The Mudville Gazette has an impressive roundup of blogosphere news on the election. Great weekend reading if all your Christmas shopping is done.

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Readers of this blog know that I hold for Maureen Dowd the sort of contempt one might have for dog feces packed into the tread of a new sneaker. It’s nothing personal, really. It’s the fact that she is unintelligent, smug, and unfunny, possessing the writing skills of a high school diarist.

With dead tree readership down at the NYT, its publisher has turned to demand payment for the privilege of reading Ms. Dowd’s thrice-weekly demonstration of her contemptible ignorance. Same for Paul Krugman’s Economics (101).

Hallelujiah!

For years, the newspaper of wreckard allowed Dowd’s particularly menacing form of mental pornography into our homes in exchange for answers to a few demographics questions. Now, they limit her damage to only those minds already so polluted with intellectual waste they feel compelled to pay money to read Dowd’s insipid columns.

My personal thanks to the NYT publishers for this invaluable gift to the English-speaking world.

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On Monday I blogged about the ABC News poll of Iraqis that surprised the left by its upbeat results. Seventy percent of Iraqis are opimistic and better off than a year ago.

Today, Jason on Countercolumn notices that the media are, once again, surprised–this time because of the success of Iraqi parliamentary elections.

Obviously, the press is reading its own press. We on the right like claim the liberal media intentionally distorts the news to conform to its world view. If the AP, ABC, and NYT really are surprised that things in Iraq are much better than they’ve been reporting, maybe they’re not malicious. Maybe they’re really that stupid.

In the end, does it matter? Bush’s popularity has returned as pollsters stopped seeding questions, and the Iraqis will soon have a freely elected Parliament.

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Interesting story on Foxnews.com.

We all learned in grade school that the “original” Americans were those who came across the Bering Straights about 3,000 years ago. They migrated from present day Alaska to Canada, the US, Central and South America. Then the white man came from Europe, spread disease and pestilence, herded them into corrals known as reservations, raped the women and cattle, killed all the bison, cut down the pristine forests, and placed onerous taxes on all that was left standing. (Of course, we know, now, that only the last of these really happened.)

But if the Fox story is correct, the white man was only following the example set by the traditional American-Indian. 3,000 years before the Siberian Asians crossed into Alaska, this land (that’s your land, my land, etc.) was peopled with folks from Australia or Africa or thereabouts. By the time of Cortez, these Original-Original Americans had been all but wiped out or assimilated into the Siberian-American-Indian encroachers who must have spread disease and pestilence, herded the Original-Originals into corrals known as reservations, raped the women and cattle, killed all the bison, cut down the pristine forests, and placed onerous taxes on all that was left standing.

[T]hese skulls — which date to 7,500 to 11,000 years ago — were not merely anomalies but rather were the majority, supporting the hypothesis that two distinct populations colonized the Americas.

People with skulls resembling Paleo-Indians were present in Asia around 20,000 years ago, and lacking the technology to cross the Pacific Ocean by boat, they probably crossed the land bridge to Alaska several thousand years before the Siberians, said study co-author Mark Hubbe of the Universidade de São Paulo.

Wonder what Ward Churchill has to say about that?

MANUAL TRACKBACK:
Jim Paine referenced this entry but didn’t get a trackback. I apoligize. Please go check out The Pirate Ballerina.

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I’ve always felt that every home should have one–every Christmas Tree should protect one. But I didn’t have one for years.

Now, I have one. I bought it on Sunday, and it’s beautiful, even though it was cheap.

Oh, Pope Benedict agrees with me.

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If Paul Mirecki, the KU Professor who wanted to teach a class that presented Intelligent Design (and anything else vaguely religious) as myth, then withdrew the class when his bigotry against religion came to public attention, then claimed he was beaten by two white men in a pick-up truck over his religious views, has lost another round in his PR battle.

(Hat Tip Michelle Malkin)

Today, KU officials released a statement (thanks to Lawrence Journal-World) that included:

Professor Mirecki resigned as chair at the recommendation of his own peers — his departmental faculty. Professor Mirecki’s course on intelligent design was canceled at his own request. While the university strongly supported both of these actions, the university continues to believe the course has merit and should be taught in the future.

In other words, Mirecki’s boss is calling him a liar.

Mirecki will probably not be fired. And he’s too thick-skulled to resign. I expect he’ll linger on at KU for years, teaching Comparative Religion 101 to inept freshmen taking the class only to get the humanities credit or out of curiosity of the class’s professor who, they recall, had something to do with some scandal back in naught and five.

So much potential wasted.

(Click Here to see all Paul Mirecki entries.)

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Thanks to Katherine Lopez at NRO The Corner, I learned a valuable lesson that all Catholics should heed: The true meaning of Christmas is about increasing the minimum wage.

Let’s hope Ted Kennedy’s theological insights make to the Vatican before the Pope writes his homily for Midnight Mass. We’d hate to mis-catechize the Christian world by talking about Jesus when Christmas is really about hourly wages, health insurance, and campaign contributions from unions.

From the Democrat press release:

Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA), Reps. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and George Miller (D-CA) will stand before the Capitol Christmas Tree on Wednesday to discuss the true meaning of Christmas: hope, generosity, and goodwill toward others. In this spirit, the lawmakers will call on Congress to raise the national minimum wage before leaving for the year. They will release a report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research detailing the difficulty that families living on the minimum wage have in making ends meet.

Hallelujah!

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“We knew,” you’re thinking.

Well, I didn’t. Not until tonight. I just read through half a dozen blogs, scanned or read 20 articles on MyWay.com news, and checked out all of the major network news websites.

I considered writing about the silliness coming from Tookie Williams supporters. None of the stories I read quoted anyone who is unswervingly pro-life. No, the stories quoted people who think murderers are cool, but state laws that punish murderers with a taste of their own medicine are evil. Makes you wonder what these people do for hobbies.

But I don’t want to write about that.

I thought about blogging on the Catholic heresy trial that took place in Los Angeles today. A now former priest was found guilty of heresy and excommunicated. Had I written about this, I’d have pointed that the AP writer made a theological error by claiming the defrocked priest now belongs to a church that considers itself Catholic but “holds more liberal views than the Vatican on divorce, birth control and homosexuality.” In fact, the Catholic church’s views on anything are neither liberal nor conservative. The church holds forth the true Word of God which man is free to accept or reject. This priest rejected it and has been excommunicated.

But I don’t want to write about that.

Of course, the Iraqi elections crossed my mind. How could they not. A country in which 70% of the people appreciate their freedom and are participating in their most important election to date–a final vindication of the war–is a monumental historical event. The liberals, who are mostly anti-American, are up in arms, so to speak, over the success of the war in Iraq. They are scared to death Americans will perceive as signs of victory Saturday’s election and subsequent American troop reductions. Well, Americans will, and Americans will be right. Liberals will be wrong, they’ll react irrationally and sometimes illegally in their typical hissy-fit when things don’t their way.

But I sure don’t feel like writing about that.

My apologies. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll have something to write about.

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