Friday, September 21, 2007

Karl's Weekend Reading

James Taranto discusses the media's coverage of the recent anti-war protest in Washington DC in his Monday Best of the Web post, and includes these thoughts:

The Times gives away the game when it says, in its lead paragraph, that the event "evoked the angry spirit of the Vietnam era protests of more than three decades ago." But that era's protests drew huge numbers of people, many of them young men who didn't want to get drafted and young women who didn't want the supply of men curtailed by the draft.

Many of those baby boomers grew up to be journalists, and many of them wish to keep alive the idea that their motives back then were idealistic rather than selfish. So it's no wonder that the press describes today's Potemkin "antiwar" movement as if it were the real thing.


Many of those boomers also became professors at California State University in Northridge (CSUN), both James' and Karl's alma-mater.


Karl Rove outlines the conservative solution to the so-called health-care crisis in Tuesday's WSJ: "Republicans can win on health care".


Did Israel bomb the s**t out of Syria on September 6? Possibly the greatest story never told... until Bret Stephens reviews the evidence in his Tuesday WSJ editorial: "Osirak II?"

What's beyond question is that something big went down on Sept. 6. Israeli sources had been telling me for months that their air force was intensively war-gaming attack scenarios against Syria; I assumed this was in anticipation of a second round of fighting with Hezbollah. On the morning of the raid, Israeli combat brigades in the northern Golan Heights went on high alert, reinforced by elite Maglan commando units. Most telling has been Israel's blanket censorship of the story--unprecedented in the experience of even the most veteran Israeli reporters--which has also been extended to its ordinarily hypertalkative politicians. In a country of open secrets, this is, for once, a closed one.