Oh Beautiful For Heroes Proved...

John Kerry showing he supports the troops today, just like he did in 1971.



Utterly astounding.

This may have been a typically lame Kerry attempt at humor. It is possible that he was poking fun at the President's poor grades at Yale (which in fact were higher than Kerry's own Yale grades according to the Globe). The source of the video is this California TV news clip. The clip does not provide context.

Hat tip: BOTW Today

UPDATE: MSNBC news has this story:

A source close to Kerry tells NBC News that he was trying to make a "tough and honest joke" about Bush and that in the process he omitted two words which changed the intended meaning. Per the source, Kerry meant to say that he can't "overstress the importance of a great education" and that "if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy... You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq." Kerry mistakenly dropped the "getting us" from his initial remarks.

Would that our junior Senator posessed enough grace, integrity, and courage to simply say this himself in public. But such expectations are too high for Kerry. Instead he maintains a facade of infallibility (much like W's behavior, isn't it?) and just leaks his excuse to a friendly media source through an aide.

Boston Globe Ownership Conspiracy Theory

In the Op Ed page of today's Wall Street Journal, John Ellis writes a column entitled 'Squeeze Play' that ties together the Welch bid for the Globe with the Kennedy-signed letter from local pols to the current owners. Here is the link (subscription required). Moneygraph:

What made the Team Welch bid remarkable was its keen understanding of the auction process and its skillful leveraging of local assets toward shutting down any possibility of same by the Times. The Kennedy letter wasn't meant for Mr. Sulzberger; it was a message to other private equity firms: We have the local pols and labor leaders on our side. The presence of Jack Connors, Boston's leading ad-man, as a partner in the deal was another message to private-equity firms: We have the best-connected guy in the city and he employs a lot of people who decide where to place advertising in local media. The inclusion of Joe O'Donnell, concessionaire and one of Boston's favorite sons, sent another message: We have friends on both sides of the aisle. And, oh, by the way, "Jimmy" Lee of J.P. Morgan Chase is crunching the numbers and will provide Team Welch with all the financing it could ever need. Usually, the more public the process is, the more likely an auction results. But by tilting the mirrors of perception in public, Mr. Welch left other private-equity players with the following choice: Sign on with Team Welch or risk a nasty, local bidding war that will doom the upside in the deal for everyone.

"Verrrry interestink", as Arte Johnson used to say.

Airbrushing John Kerry's History

Boston Globe reporter Rick Klein has a front page story on John Kerry today (so what else is new?). It is reasonable to envision Klein and the Boston Globe copy desk as the drafting section for Kerry’s 2008 campaign rhetoric. For example:

Many Democrats remain angry with Kerry over his failure to more aggressively combat Republican smears in 2004.

“Republican smears”, indeed. Klein is referring to the Swift Boat veterans, of course. The first of their smears was to note the fact that John Kerry had related 2 utterly different stories about his one Christmas in southeast Asia. In speeches on the Senate floor he had claimed to be in Cambodia behind enemy lines (this image was “seared – seared – in my memory”, he said) while in his own book his story was that he spent Christmas in Vietnam. The first “Republican smear” of the Swifties was to ask John Kerry which of his Christmas stories was true? But in today’s Boston Globe recent history is re-written to airbrush away this uncomfortable fact:

[Kerry] said he realizes now that he should have used television advertisements to push back at the Swift boat group, whose claims of Kerry's war-service exaggerations were rebutted by most of those who served alongside him.

Perhaps the reason it took Kerry’s campaign so long to respond was that he had been caught telling two inconsistent stories. It doesn’t take long to put facts on the table. But positioning yourself when you are caught being untruthful requires much more elaborate planning and re-construction. At the time Kerry’s campaign was silent on this question for 2 ½ weeks (so was the Boston Globe. For posts on their coverage at the time see here, here, and here).

Their re-construction of the facts is ongoing. Klein’s story concludes:

“I'm in a fighting mood,” Kerry responded. “We -- together -- lost to two lies: the lie about the war in Iraq, and the lie about me personally. And if you don't think that puts me in a fighting mood, you don't know John Kerry.”

Instead of his lie, Kerry is trying to say that the Christmas in Cambodia story is a lie about him. Here we see a complete inversion of the facts. This inversion is supported rather than questioned by a front page story in the Boston Globe.

Where in this story is all the journalistic skepticism that the Globe so clearly showed to Mitt Romney a few days ago? Or do Boston Globe reporters reserve their skepticism for Republican politicians?

What liberal media?

A Fine Example of Boston Globe Hubris

Here is recent press conference exchange between a Boston Globe reporter and the Governor of the Commonwealth in which the reporter asks a long-winded and antagonistic question to the Governor. When the Governor humorously notes the nature of the question by asking "Do you have point of view on this, or is that a question?", the unelected reporter responds to the elected Governor by humbly claiming "I represent the people."

Typical media hostility and arrogance captured by YouTube.

Hat tip: Romney for President website.

UPDATE: The Globe will publish an AP story about the video below, but the story does not say that the long-winded question was by a Globe reporter. If they are so proud of the questions (and the attitude) then why not name the fellow?

How do you define hubris?

From the recent letter to Pinch Sulzberger supporting the Globe union:

"To Greater Boston and the entire New England region, the Globe is a jewel - one that is critical to our quality of life and to our civic, cultural, educational, government and economic institutions."

The letter must have been drafted by Boston Globe union members, not the pols who signed it. So they wrote like this about their own work and their own work product. Clearly these are not humble folks.

Paid-for Performance

The recent letter of support to the Boston Globe’s unionized reporters signed by a number of Massachusetts politicians is posted here. The signers are listed below, and (what a surprise!) all are Democrats. Why is it that a fair, impartial, and objective news organ like the Globe can only sign up Democrats on a petition like this? Don’t Republicans also want to collect an IOU from the Globe reporters and editors who make daily decisions about the newspaper’s content? (“Sign this, Mitt, and that hit piece on your Mormon friends will never see print!”) Or did Republicans simply refuse to sign this petition? Who knows? The Globe isn’t reporting on this. But now the Globe union boys (and girls) certainly know who their best friends are. However, I’m sure that fact will have zero impact on the Globe’s future coverage of these people. That is unless like the Globe’s owners, these folks want to pay for performance.

Here is the Boston Globe’s list of the ‘socially friendly’*:

US Congress

• Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) United States Senate
• Stephen Lynch (D-MA) U.S. House of Representatives
• Michael Capuano (D-MA) U.S. House of Representatives (who drafted his own letter)

Massachusetts State Senate

• Jarrett T. Barrios (D - Cambridge )
• Jack Hart (D - Boston )
• Robert Havern (D - Arlington)
• Brian A. Joyce (D – Milton)
• Joan M. Menard (D – Somerset)
• Steven A. Tolman (D - Boston)

Massachusetts State House

• Christopher Donelan (D – Orange)
• John D. Keenan (D – Salem)
• James Leary (D – Worcester)
• Charles A. Murphy (D – Burlington)
• Anne Paulsen (D – Belmont)
• Timothy J. Toomey Jr. (D – Cambridge)
• Martin J. Walsh (D – Boston)

Elected City Officials

• John M. Tobin, Boston City Council
• Felix D. Arroyo, Boston City Council
• Chuck Turner, Boston City Council
• Stephen J. Murphy, Boston City Council
• Michael A. Sullivan, Boston City Council
• Joseph A. Curtatone, (Mayor, Somerville, MA)
• Brian Murphy, Cambridge City Council

Organized Labor Leaders

• Robert Haynes, President, Massachusetts AFL-CIO
• Dennis Rivera, President, Service Employees International Union Local 1199
• Rocio Saenz, President, Service Employees International Union Local 615
• Gary Sullivan, President, Utility Workers Union Local 369
• Edward Kelly, President, Boston Firefighters Local 718

Other

• Joseph Kriesberg, President Mass. Assoc. of Community Development Corporations

*In “The Gulag Archipelago”, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn describes the class system within the Soviet labor camps. The persons who were convicted of ideological crimes, called ‘article 58s’ were at the bottom. At the top were a group of expert criminals who somehow ended up in the Gulag. These prisoners were trusted and privileged by the Gulag administrators because they were not ideologically deviant. They were merely cruel, violent, sadistic, and rapacious. They practiced these vices on the other prisoners, particularly the 58s. The Gulag administration referred to them internally as ‘the socially friendly’.

Boston Globe Feels the Pinch

The barbarians are at the gate and the Boston Globe may soon be on the block. Today’s front page reports:

Two of Boston's best-known businessmen -- retired General Electric Co. chief executive Jack Welch and adman Jack Connors -- are quietly exploring the possibility of making an offer to buy The Boston Globe from The New York Times Co…the executives are working with the investment bank JPMorgan Chase & Co. to analyze a potential deal. They say JPMorgan has valued the Globe at $550 million to $600 million, well below the $1.1 billion the Times Co. paid in 1993.

The story contains several howlers, as is often the case when the Globe reports on itself. First this one:

It is unclear whether the Boston group is willing to sign a formal pledge not to interfere in the editorial process, as the new buyers in Philadelphia did. The pledge was an attempt to preserve the traditional boundaries meant to prevent business considerations from influencing news coverage.

Sure. It makes perfect sense for those businessmen-investors to pay $500 million for a company while at the same time they pledge not to alter its product or business processes, thus subsidizing the continuance of Globe’s arrogant corporate culture. If they were that foolish, they would never have become wealthy. If these insufferably arrogant newspaper people want to live in an ivory tower that never changes, they should simply join some bureau of the Federal government!

Here is another paragraph that leaves much unsaid:

Welch and Connors first discussed the possibility of buying the Globe at a lunch about six weeks ago at Boston's Four Seasons Hotel. Also at the lunch was former Boston Globe and Boston Herald columnist Mike Barnicle, who was forced out of the Globe in 1998 over charges, which he denied, that he had fabricated a column. Barnicle, friends with both men, now does a radio talk show on WTKK-FM, and worked as a consultant last year with a group that sought unsuccessfully to buy the Boston Herald.

It it delicious to imagine the distress that Barnicle’s presence at such an early discussion might cause among the self-righteous folks on Morrissey Boulevard.

Here is a paragraph that indicates newsroom bootlicking of the potential new owners (already!):

Welch and Connors are no strangers to the media business. GE, which Welch ran for two decades, owns NBC-TV. Welch's wife, Suzy Wetlaufer, is a former editor of the Harvard Business Review and was a reporter for the Associated Press. Connors has been one of the top forces in Boston advertising for decades, and Hill Holliday currently handles the Globe advertising account.

This is true, but one could also say that the current Mrs Welch (the 3^rd), though no stranger to the media business, is a reporter who became most intimately familiar with one of her subjects, even though it probably caused her to lose her journalistic dispassion. Some puns about “penetrating journalism” would be most appropriate here, but why get the new boss’s wife furious before they even take over? So much for the “the traditional boundaries meant to prevent business considerations from influencing news coverage”, invoked just a few paragraphs above! It appears that the potential new owners are being treated with kid gloves already.

Now for the piece de resistance! Mrs Welch III is not the first journalist to go down for a source. Globe reporters have experience in this area, too. A related story buried on page C3 carries the headline that the NY 'Times Co. defends moves at the Globe to state politicians'. The Times’ defense is in response to a letter to NY Times Chairman Pinch Sulzberger signed by 20 Massachusetts politicians in support of the reporter’s union at the Boston Globe. The letter urged Pinchie-poo to stop the cost-cutting layoffs at the Globe. Of course this story is public only because it was published by the Boston Herald (see here and Howie Carr here). An earlier Globe story (which reported on the Herald story) said:

The question of whether a newsroom union can seek the help of politicians without compromising members' independence was raised on a popular media web site by Mitchell Zuckoff, a Boston University journalism professor and former Globe reporter. In a posting on Romenesko , a blog hosted by the Poynter Institute, a non profit journalism education organization, Zuckoff wrote that unions soliciting help from politicians "was a textbook case of seeking favors from sources and subjects."

Indeed. The union seeking favors from politicians, by the way, includes all the Globe staff reporters and columnists. Of the 20 politicians signing the letter, only Ted Kennedy has been identified. I wonder how many of the other 19 signers are Republicans?

Small Minds at Work

Today’s Boston Globe lead editorial announces the startling revelation that the Christian Gospels are the source of our notion of the separation between Church and State:

WHEN JESUS, as quoted in Matthew's Gospel, said, “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's,” he was stressing the need to separate the civil and religious realms -- a message that has resounded across the centuries, and that churches and political leaders often have been tempted to ignore. The Mormon church and Mitt Romney should make sure that the church stays out of his nascent presidential campaign.

How amazing that through so many centuries Christian scripture scholars never seemed to develop the concept of separation of Church and State, when it was really the Messiah who originated it! Much thanks to the devout scripture scholars at the Globe for pointing out what so many missed for centuries.

Those who wish to understand the context of and the ambiguities this gospel story (rather than simply use it as a cudgel against their political opponents) can see a brief and excellent explanation here.

Yet the Globe editorial writers dig deeper still:

The First Amendment, with its injunction that Congress shall make no law restricting religion, carries an implied corollary that churches should not meddle in politics.

Thus a Globe editorial does violence to both the Scriptures and the Constitution in only its first 3 paragraphs. One could call this “the liberal mind at work”, but that would be unfair to liberals. This editorial is the product of small minds at work.

Globe Headline is an Appeal to Religious Prejudice

In 1956 – exactly 50 years ago – if a newspaper in someplace like Mississippi wanted to attack a budding presidential candidate from Massachusetts by appealing purely to religious prejudice, then the newspaper would have run a headline reading “Kennedy camp consulted with Catholic leaders”. That would have been enough to make the point that Catholics couldn’t be trusted with the presidency because everybody knew that Catholics really took their orders from the hierarchy in Rome.

How sad that 50 years later the Boston Globe uses so similar a headline – nothing but an updated version of that same appeal to religious prejudice – to attack another presidential candidate who also happens to be the governor of the Commonwealth.

In my view this headline, the article under it, and the motivation for creating it, are as utterly vile as any 1950s-era prejudice that candidate John F. Kennedy faced.

The staff at the Boston Globe have learned little from our own local history. They should be ashamed of this headline and this article.

News Not Fit to Print (in The Globe)

If you want the lowdown on the Globe, then read the Boston Herald or the Wall Street Journal. Today’s Herald has a story about a proposed contract being rejected by Globe staffers, and the Journal has a story (subscription required) detailing the Globe circulation and ad revenue declines. Snippets from the WSJ story:

When the New York Times Co. bought the Boston Globe in 1993 for $1.1 billion, the family-run New York newspaper said it was betting heavily on the future of the highly educated, affluent Boston market.

But now that brainy, well-heeled populace turns out to be on the leading edge of a digital migration that is pummeling the Boston Globe so badly that it is on track for its first unprofitable year in its recent history, according to people familiar with the company's finances…

The Boston Globe's woes have been dragging down its parent company's performance this year -- and it's likely to get worse when New York Times Co. reports earnings today. The Times has already disclosed that its New England division's ad revenues -- the bulk of which is the Boston Globe -- dropped by 11.7% in July and 15.7% in August, after already sliding 10.4% in the second quarter and 7.2% in the first quarter…

The declines are unprecedented at the Globe, which like most major metro newspapers has been facing declining circulation for years but had managed to keep ad revenues somewhat steady through increasing ad rates. Since the Times acquisition, the Globe's Sunday circulation has fallen 25% to about 600,000 from 811,000, while the industry's Sunday circulation has fallen 12% during the same time period.

Politics Trumps Law, Especially on Beacon Hill

One of Boston’s two major newspapers has run the story that Deval Patrick’s brother-in-law is required to register in Massachusetts as a convicted sex offender, but has not registered. Surprise! The paper that ran this story was not the Boston Globe, which will not sink to this level of political demagoguery (against Democrats, that is. Note today’s page 1 above-the-fold placement of a story about Mitt Romney’s campaign coordinating its planning efforts with – horrors! – Mormon organizations).

In a column entitled 'Politics Trumps Law', Joan Vennochi, assuming that the leak to that other paper was coordinated by the Healy campaign asks rhetorically:

Do we really want a governor who hails from an administration capable of trampling the law?

Joan’s logic is fine, but her assumption of a calculated dirty trick is unproven.

However the Democratic-dominated Massachusetts legislature has proven its willingness to trample not only law but the Constitutional processes of the Commonwealth. Why? To enhance the probablility of their own re-election this November, which would be threatened by a Constitutionally required vote on the gay marriage voter initiative. Through the intrigue of the Democratic legislators, voters will have to wait until after the November elections to see whether this flouting of the Constitution will continue.

So explain again, Joan, which party shows greater respect for the law?

Richard Landes at TNR

Boston Blogger-Professor Richard Landes has a new article posted at the New Republic Online. It is a superb summary of the history, impact, and current state of the Al Durah affair. A must read.

UPDATE: Richard Landes writes "You could mention that we've spoken repeatedly with the Boston Globe about covering this and they always had an excuse."

Uh-huh. Excuses like needing to devote the precious space on page 1 to a big picture of Bubba hugging Deval Patrick?

Transparency? Not at the Boston Globe!

NY Times "A" Share Price vs. S&P 500 Index - 2 year Trend

A letter writer who should be a blogger writes in today’s Boston Globe:

I FIND it hard to believe that Globe editors decided not to pursue the story of Deval Patrick's brother-in-law , who reportedly had pleaded guilty to raping his wife while they were separated ("Patrick, Healey spar over report on kin," City & Region, Oct. 14).

Sure, the crime itself has no bearing on Patrick's qualifications as a gubernatorial candidate, but the ramifications do.

While Patrick decries the current sex-offenders' registration system as lax and calls for reform, he finds no issue with his brother-in-law's failure to register as a sex offender for the past nine years.

And the Globe finds this news irrelevant to its campaign coverage?

I'm not surprised. I can only imagine what would have been written had this been Kerry Healey's family.

KAREN LONG
Concord

Note that the lady’s main point in writing the letter is that she distrusts the Globe’s professed ‘objectivity’ in the matter of the Massachusetts gubernatorial campaign. Who in their right mind does not?

While the NY Times corporation’s stock erodes in value (see above) the Globe and other NYT organs maintain a quite unconvincing façade of objectivity while promoting what many readers see as a relentless barrage of liberal propaganda. Is there a better way to operate? Jeff Jarvis at Buzz Machine posts about a recent weekend of newspaper navel-gazing at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center. Writing about the Guardian he notes:

Each year for the last three, the Guardian has issued a “social, ethical, and environmental audit” of itself, publishing it online and in print and hiring an independent auditor to check them on it. It is an impressive document that sets context by explaining the mission of the Scott Trust that owns the paper and by reviewing the changes in the business in the last year, trying to open the door on debates within the institution…

Jeff blogged the weekend meeting and quotes the editor of the Guardian:

“Newspaper people are talking more about rights and less about transparency and responsibility. But the explosion of the web has changed all that, allowed readers to challenge us… or to bypass us altogether…. It boils down to the word we have been using a lot this weekend: trust. We should think rather more about trust than we used to.”

So how much does a reader trust a newspaper that claims to be objective yet keeps even its own style guide unpublished while the corporate parent maintains 2 classes of stock – a situation that empowers the family owners but disarms other shareholders?

Look again at that chart. I submit that readers and shareholders alike are voting with their feet.

Come to Bubba, Deval!

Bubba feels your pain.

What Is Ailing the GOP?

Kimberly Strassel of the WSJ Editorial Board writes a truly insightful analysis of the sources of the problems faced by the Republican party this November. In “A Tale of Two GOPs” she notes the reasons for the contrast between the health of the party in Florida and its malady in Ohio. It’s a must-read. Snippets:

That this election is a referendum on the entire Republican philosophy is the standard line so far this year. Democrats from Nancy Pelosi to Chuck Schumer argue that voters who vote blue are sending a message that they are tired of Republicans' "extreme" views on national security, taxes or social policy.

Quite the opposite, really. If voters are unhappy with Republicans, it's because the party hasn't lived up to its own principles. In the Capitol, in Ohio, and in plenty of places between and beyond, the party that promised to reform government has become the party of government…

A few Supreme Court appointments and tax cuts aside, Republicans have largely abandoned the reform agenda that swept them to power in 1994. Their zeal has instead been directed at retaining power, which explains the earmarking epidemic and the Abramoff corruption that followed. Reform of Medicare and Social Security, the death tax, immigration, health care--all fell off the map.

Democrats would certainly call this agenda extreme, but it was never the existence of the platform that angered voters. It was Republicans' failure to act on it.

A Memorable Headline: 'President Charged with Rape'

Buried in today’s Boston Globe is this tiny story; ‘President may face rape, fraud charges’. The story concerns the President of Israel, where the presidency is a ceremonial office.

No doubt all those in Congress who are now in such a lather over the salacious behavior of a Republican Congressman toward male pages would be far more outraged if the US president was accused of rape, right?

Wait a minute! Didn’t that actually happen in 1999? Funny, I don’t remember the House Democratic Caucus being all up in arms over it then. Go figure.

Stop Using That F-word About John Kerry!

John Kerry is speaking at a Democratic Party function in New Hampshire this evening, prompting the Globe to carry its second story in as many days about Kerry’s 2008 presidential campaign (the prospect of which brings joy to the hearts of Republicans everywhere). But don’t call Kerry a flip-flopper! Instead, the Globe reports:

But Kerry's supporters countered that the senator has worked hard to reposition himself after the 2004 election, taking a strong stance in favor of troop withdrawals from Iraq.

There you have it! John Kerry is not a flip-flopper.

He is a ‘serial repositioner’.

Soulmates With Tehran

Today’s Boston Globe carries an AP story about the reaction of the Iranian government to North Korea’s nuclear test:

Iran also stood apart yesterday from the widespread international condemnation of North Korea.

Government spokesman Gholam Hossein Elham told reporters that Iran opposed “any use of weapons of mass destruction, especially nuclear weapons.” But he did not criticize North Korea and instead faulted the United States for the test.

“The root cause of this should be sought in the policy, behavior and method adopted by the rulers of the United States,” Elham said.

This is exactly the stand taken yesterday by the Globe editorial page. Strange bedfellows? Not really. Both share as a core value deep animosity to George W. Bush.

Pyongyang’s Bomb? It’s All Bush’s Fault

A typical Globe Editorial today entitled “The North Korean test” astoundingly spends not a single word criticizing Kim Jong Il or the hellish parody of a nation state that is his Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Rather, all the Globe’s editorial ink is spent criticizing the Bush administration (surprise!) for its unwillingness to negotiate bilaterally with the DPRK regime. A quote:

“Acting on the unrealistic assumption that he need not and should not stoop to bargaining with ‘evil’ regimes such as those in Pyongyang and Tehran, Bush has allowed hard-liners in his administration repeatedly to prevent or sabotage genuine negotiations with the North.”

Two points worth noting here. First the quotes around the word evil. I guess it’s all relative, in the Globe’s view. Yet if there is a single regime today that epitomizes that word, then Kim Jong Il’s is it. No quotes are necessary. They only reflect poorly on the writer.

Second, it’s worth noting that the previous administration tried "genuine negotiations" with the DPRK, and even signed an agreement with them, which was ignored by one party and came to naught. No mention of that here. Is that also Bush’s fault?

The Globe editorialist have a knack for blaming the victim in some cases, most notably when they tongue-lashed Putin for the terrorist slaughter of schoolchildren at Beslan. And of course as Harvey Mansifeld says, there is no point in talking to someone who is only going to slit your throat. But the cozy liberals in the Globe Op Ed world apparently believe that no such people exist.

There are thousands of slave laborers today (and millions of the dead) in North Korea who cannot inform them otherwise because their voices and stories cannot penetrate the obtuseness of the fantasy world cloistered on Morrissey Boulevard.

Deval Patrick's Clintonian Apology

According to the Globe headline writer, ‘Patrick apologizes for disclosure missteps’. Did he? The quote given is:

“I apologize to anyone who feels we didn't come forward with all the facts,” Patrick said at a campaign event in Worcester.

How’s that again? He apologizes for our bad feelings rather than for his own act of deception?

How perfectly Clintonian!

Marty Peretz of TNR Levels The Sunday Globe

I am out of town and out of circulation right now, but a big league Globe Fisker is taking his turn. Sol called my attention to Mary Peretz's superb demolition of a column in last Sunday's Globe Ideas section. It's a must-read for Globe sufferers.

Idomeneo: Where is the Liberal Outrage?

There is hardly a mention in the news today of the Berlin Opera company’s capitulation to radical Islamism. Today’s Globe has a lame column by BC professor Martha Bayles that draws an analogy to the Danish cartoon controversy and criticizes artists for taking too much liberty.

Funny, I don’t recall hearing academics criticizing the artist who created ‘Piss Christ’. I wonder why?

Technorati shows (above) the brief surge and now near silence on this subject in the blogosphere. So where is all the outrage, especially on the left? Where are the cries of ‘censorship!’ one might expect from the defenders of artistic freedom? Do you suppose the incident would have disappeared so quickly if the company had cancelled its show out of deference to the local Catholic bishop? What causes the difference, then? Dhimmitude is the difference. As Harvey Mansfield wrote in the Globe recently, “it's easier to complain to someone who listens to you and doesn't immediately proceed to slit your throat”.

I’m surprised to find such a shallow commitment to artistic freedom.