I got a chuckle out of this. I don’t normally cite Drudge, not because he’s not credible–he does as good a job as the NYT, at least lately–but because he doesn’t have permalinks. It’s one of the things that makes him not a true blogger, in my opinion.

Anyway, Donahue has garnered the lowest Nielsen rating possible, a 0.1. If they had negative numbers, he’d be the guy to do it. It’s a great picture, too–his normal (at least these days) crazed deer-in-the-headlights look.

How much longer is MSNBC going to keep this loser on the air? I guess brainless leftist claptrap doesn’t sell that well any more.

[update a couple minutes later]

And in more good news, oxygen.com is gasping for air. Guess Oprah’s not the draw she used to be, either.

Matt Welch asks an interesting question today: Knowing what we now know about Richard Nixon, if it were 1972 again, and you voted for him then, would you still do so?

Speaking as someone who was a year too young to vote at the time, and had a McGovern bumper sticker sealing a tear in the rear window of my MGA, I’d vote for Nixon over McGovern in a heartbeat now. What’s important is not just what we know about Nixon, but what we also know about McGovern and subsequent history, particularly in foreign affairs, which was where the real difference would have been, since in his own words, Nixon was a Keynesian.

I have a couple problems with Matt’s question, though, or at least the motivation for it, which was to justify whether or not to vote for Gray Davis this fall. Nixon was many (bad) things: paranoid, racist, cold, politically chameleonic, indifferent to liberty (including economic freedom), a poor judge of character in his underlings. But he wasn’t corrupt, at least in the same sense as Gray Davis (and Bill Clinton) are. He never, as far as I’m aware, rawly sold policy for money. I don’t think that the comparison is appropriate.

While he should have resigned over Watergate (and should be commended, unlike Clinton, for having the integrity to do so, though he was helped by being a member of a political party with the integrity to demand it), I don’t believe that Watergate was that bad, at least not as bad as Woodward and Bernstein portrayed it. Yes, he had an enemies list, and he sicced the IRS on some of them.

But that’s not why he lost his job. Bill Clinton, after all, did the same thing–it’s just that his sycophants in the press didn’t want to report about it. You have to be of a particularly trusting nature, unfamiliar with his and Hillary’s adventures in Arkansas, to believe that the FBI files deal was just a “bureaucratic snafu.”

It was both hilarious and sad to watch Woodward and Bernstein, particularly the latter, making the talk-show rounds during the impeachment saga, solemnly intoning how unlike Watergate this was. That this was just about sex, and not about abuse of power. They couldn’t let their scandal be eclipsed by this one.

Not about abuse of power? Tell it to Betty Currie, who was called into the White House on a Sunday to have her perjury suborned. Tell it to Kathleen Willey, whose tires were slashed, whose cat was killed, and like Linda Tripp, whose children were threatened, and whose supposedly private personnel records were made public. Tell it to Billy Dale, who was fired, and then arrested, on trumped-up charges, and then acquitted, after having to spend a great deal of his personal wealth on lawyers defending himself, so Hillary could get “her people” into the White House travel office. Tell it to Judicial Watch, whose IRS audit occurred two weeks after a complaining letter went to the White House from a Democrat on the Hill.

It’s been often said that Clinton gave his enemies the opportunity that they were seeking. So did Nixon. What was different was the nature of their enemies. Nixon lost his job because, just as the press adored Clinton, they hated Nixon with a fiery passion. Once they caught him at actual criminality, and (unlike Clinton, he, for whatever reason, didn’t dispose of the evidence), they tore him apart like a shiver of famished sharks.

Which brings us to Mr. Davis. He has become so unloved, that even the mainstream press has overcome their traditional worship of all things Democratic, and even after the (so far) lousy campaign, and the adverse decision in the lawsuit, Bill Simon still has a chance to beat him. It’s not necessary for the press to push his candidacy. All that may be needed is for them to not promote Davis, and to continue to expose his corruption and venality, and that still seems to be happening.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Glenn has turned over another year on the odometer.

The comments are raging in my little spoof on the Iraq war debate, being now well over a hundred. We’ve had one transnationalist troll from Norway, named Canute, who, unlike his wiser namesake, doesn’t realize that he will be unable to hold back the tide of freedom. My old friend Marcus Lindroos, a Finnish space enthusiast, has been weighing in as well, trotting out all the hoary stale shibboleths about the Evil Amerikan Empire.

In one post, he called Thieu’s South Vietnam a “totalitarian” state. When I corrected him, he asked if that was not synonymous with being a dictatorship. While I don’t even think that Thieu was a dictator, I told him that the short answer to that question was “no.”

It obviously deserves to be expanded upon. In brief, and while there are sometimes gradations, rather than a bright line between them, authoritarian dictators miminally concern themselves with control of people’s lives, usually only to the degree necessary to maintain power, and get what they want. Totalitarians have a much broader, and more frightening agenda–they seek to control every aspect of peoples’ daily lives, down to their very thoughts.

Totalitarian regimes are characterized by total control over the educational system, a state-imposed ideology, and an almost-messianic worship of the leader himself, with dire penalties for anyone who brooks opposition, in word or deed. Thieu (and Pinochet, and other authoritarians) often ruled with an iron fist, and occasionally might have people disposed of, who they viewed as a threat, but that kind of leader is run-of-the-mill, and as old as civilization.

Totalitarianism was a wholly new monstrous invention of the twentieth century, made possible by technology, particularly communications and information technology. Stalin was the prototype. Hitler perfected it.

In contrast, Thieu (and most of the garden-variety thugs who, for instance, ran Central America through the seventies and eighties), was indifferent to what people wore, or who they worshiped, or even what they thought of him, as long as he got his graft, and was in no fear of losing his power.

And what Marcus and others don’t seem to understand is that totalitarianism isn’t dead, though perhaps it could be considered to be the undead–a shadowy zombie of Nazism has taken form in the Muslim world. The Taliban were totalitarians–they told people what to wear, how and who to worship, what music they could hear (generally none), and what to think. They destroyed, quite literally, any references to other religions, even when it was a stone statue, meters high, that had been in place for hundreds of years. To enforce their madness, they punished dissenters with cruel and appalling, and very public tortures and executions, to make an example of them. A regime that would pull the fingernails from a woman simply because they had polish on them is a totalitarian regime.

Saddam Hussein’s Iraq falls in the same category, though it’s a secular form. Mere dictatorships are susceptible to coups. To prevent them, the head of a totalitarian regime instills a high level of fear–anyone who shows the slightest hint of disloyalty is not just prevented from rising to a position from which he could make an attempt at a coup, but murdered, often brutally after torture, along with his wife, children, parents, siblings, anyone who knew him, and the horses or camels they rode in on. The people are simply tools and resources to be used for his own purposes–if he needs guinea pigs to try out the latest Sarin recipe, just toss it on some Kurds to see what happens.

Ultimately, the source of this new and virulent form of Nazism (including the rabid anti-semitism) is the Wahhabi sect of Islam, funded by the oil money of the House of Saud. Through much of the nineties, and until last fall, Afghanistan was effectively a Saudi colony.

And just as ultimately, our war against it will not be over until such funding stops, either voluntarily, or by taking away their oil.

The danger from the Middle East is both less, and greater than that we faced sixty years ago from the totalitarian regimes of Japan and Germany. It’s less, because the countries that are waging an undeclared war on us are industrially backwards, and their conventional military ability is pathetic. It’s greater, because they are occasionally clever about using our own technology and love of liberty against us (as we saw on September 11), and because they inexplicably have the sympathy of many in the west, particularly in Europe, which is going to hinder our ability to deal properly with them, (though it will certainly not prevent it).

For many years, we found it convenient to ignore the trampling of the rights and liberties of the people of the region by the thugs who ran the place, as long as we continued to get affordable oil. We discovered last fall that such neglect is no longer affordable. The next geopolitical challenge is the rise of virulent, totalitarian Islam and Arabism, and if we wish to prevent future recurrences of what happened last September, we will have to meet it, and firmly.

Many congratulations to Chris “Spoons” Kanis, who has apparently found his true love through blogging. May they live happily ever after.

I’ve got to believe, though, given the addictive nature of it, that so far, it’s probably caused a lot more strife and divorces…

Democrats are worried about the rift between Jewish and African-American voters, as represented by this past week’s primaries, as demogogues Cynthia McKinney and Earl Hilliard lost, at least in part due to their ridiculous pro-Palestinian views.

Good. Anything that breaks up the irrational stranglehold of the Democrats on any ethnic categories is a good thing. If only the black vote could become competitive as well.

In my opinion, here are the money grafs:

“It puts black voters in a bind because you could end up with some people in the Congress who are black but who don’t represent the broad mainstream views of the black community,” says Ronald Walters, director of the African American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland, College Park.

And there is another major difference in how black and Jewish members view the involvement of pro-Israel groups in the two primary battles.

“The black community sees this as a racial issue,” Wynn said. “The white Jewish community sees it as an ideological, foreign-policy issue.”

The black mainstream views favor terrorism?

Is there any issue that the black community doesn’t see as a racial issue? If so, they have a long way to go to political maturity.

The Ombudsgod and James Lileks seem to be arguing past one another, at least as I read it. The Ombudsgod is concerned about government censorship via the FCC in the “Opie and Anthony” situation, in which the two “shock jocks” ran a contest to get a couple to engage in conjugal relations on the air during Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

From Lileks’ bleat today:

By bringing pressure on the FCC to both fine and revoke the broadcast license of WNEW FM, they have succeeded in forcing the radio station to eliminate a popular syndicated afternoon show. Two DJs, Opie and Anthony, have been fired, and the General Manager, Ken Stevens, and Program Director, Jeremy Coleman, have been suspended. This censorship will have a chilling effect on other broadcasters who may wish to broadcast controversial material.

Good.

Good. Maybe the next time some promotions director floats the idea of sponsoring a fellatio contest in a day-care center, he?ll be met with hard looks instead of high-fives. This stuff is ?controversial,? sure – but only by the most banal definition. Sawing off a puppy?s legs on the air is controversial. Stuffing a midget up Anne Sprinkle and having him broadcast from her oft-examined cervix is controversial. It?s also sick. It?s tiresome. It?s the work of people so jaded they think that intellectual bravery is defined not by the traditions you honor, but the ones you debase.

Now, my reading of it is that Lileks is saying “good” to the fact that they got fired–not the fact that it occurred due to FCC pressure. I suspect that the Ombudsgod’s interpretation is that he is cheering the FCC intervention itself.

I’d like to agree with both of them (assuming that my interpretations are correct). I’m glad they were fired–I do think that it’s a good thing. I’m simultaneously troubled that their behavior in itself wasn’t sufficient cause to fire them, and that it had to take the threat from a government agency (that shouldn’t be in charge of granting or revoking licenses in the first place–they should simply enforce the rights of the current owners of the spectrum). I would have greatly preferred that public pressure, and loss of advertisers, were sufficient to see that this kind of mindless audio excrement was taken off the air, or not appearing in the first place.

But despite the troubling First-Amendment issues (which are really caused by the charter of the FCC in general–not this particular case), it may have a salutory effect on the airwaves, at least for a little while. I don’t think that the nation’s intellectual or cultural discourse will be in any way impoverished by these clowns’ absence from them.

Apparently, Mugabe isn’t content to merely starve his political opponents.

It makes it increasingly difficult to take the drug warriors seriously when they pull crap like this.

The survey, by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, said drug-related emergency room visits rose 6 percent in 2001 over the previous year, to 638,484.

The number of times marijuana was mentioned as a drug patients used rose 15 percent, the study said, greater than the increase in cocaine use, which rose 10 percent, and heroin and methamphetamine, which were unchanged.

Note that it doesn’t say that marijuana caused the emergency-room visit–just that it was “mentioned as a drug patients used.” Had they been asked, even greater numbers might have offered up milk as a “food patients used.” Since there’s zero reason to equate correlation with causation, Fearless Leader is either being idiotic, or disingenuous when he says:

“Marijuana-related medical emergencies are increasing at an alarming rate, exceeding even those for heroin,” White House Drug Czar John Walters said in a prepared statement. “This report helps dispel the pervasive myth that marijuana is harmless.

Note also that he misleads by citing a rate, rather than any absolute problem. If the number of instances of something go from one to three in a year (in a population of hundreds of millions of people), one can honestly, and disingenuously say that the rate is “skyrocketing,” because it’s tripled.

This one has to have good people like Iain Murray torn. Which to defend, the War On (Some) Drugs, or valid and non-deceptive use of statistics? Can’t have ’em both in this case.

Palestinian children (no doubt at the instigation of the homicidal psychopathic monsters who run the place) are marching in the streets of Gaza, calling on Saddam to attack Israel.

Hey, works for me. It would be one quick way to end the debate.