Last week I posted on the lead Mitt Romney has established in outreach to new media over the other two top-tier GOP candidates for the presidency, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain.  Today the Boston Globe dutifully reports the story and even mentions the post in which I gave them their lede.

The piece is the first of many from old media on new media's impact on the contest for the GOP nomination in 2008 and is generally well-reported, but four things deserve criticism in the Scot Helman article.

First, only two hyperlinks are included, to the Drudge Report and to John McCain's hired blogging gun, Patrick Hynes' AnkleBitingPundits.  Given that the Globe cites other bloggers, why not make it easy for the readers and provide the links?

Next, as the article notes, Mr. Hynes is a paid consultant to the McCain campaign.  Of course he routinely slams Romney and praises McCain on his blog.  Does the Globe really think this is news, or signifies anything of importance to the reader?

Third, after wrongly reporting a few months ago that I was a Mitt Romney supporter, today's account includes this graph:

Hugh Hewitt, a popular conservative radio host and blogger friendly to Romney, lauded him last week for trying to seize the power of the Internet. Hewitt wrote, "Romney is setting the standard, and this is a crucial precedent for him to set: The GOP must have a standard bearer willing and ready to use the new media environment to push not just his candidacy but the ideas that bind the party together."

Again the Globe is trying to push me into the Romney camp, for reasons I cannot understand.  Imagine my writing that "Scott Helman, a Boston Globe reporter favorable to John Kerry, has written last week that Kerry was well-received at the desk of Syrian dicator Bashir Assad."  My guess is that Helman would object that he was just reporting and that his views on Kerry are irrelevant, and he would be correct.  I am friendly to Romney, but I am also friendly to Mayor Giuliani, Senator Brownback, Newt Gingrich and every other candidate for the presidency on the Republican side, including Senator McCain, except Tom Tancredo, whom I like personally but view as at best a distraction and at worse a party splitting, single issue fanatic.  Helman simply cannot accept that reporters in new media are just like reporters in old media: We have our likes and dislikes, but our reporting and analysis is done in exactly the same way as that  produced by old dying media.  New Media's work product is butressed by a transparency as to our ideological beliefs that old media resists because it would reveal that nearly everyone on the Globe's reporting team is much more than "friendly" to Hillary and Obama, they are smitten by them and desperate to see Democrats back in the White House.

Finally, and this is the most serious criticism, there are these paragraphs:

But if Romney is seeing the promise of the blogosphere, he's also experiencing its perils. A number of bloggers have attacked him for his recent shift to more conservative positions on social issues such as abortion and gay rights. On Friday, for example, a blogger in Washington circulated a Christian Broadcasting Network report that several Romney supporters in Michigan were reconsidering their endorsement.

Romney's rivals are in similar positions, though. McCain has long faced hostility from some conservative bloggers, many of whom also blast the relatively liberal social views of former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who is considered another top-tier presidential prospect.

Where are the specifics?  Which "blogger" circulated the CBN report? Was it by chance Patrick Hynes, which would be a story in itself?  And which "conservative bloggers," exactly, have shown hostility to Senator McCain and why?  Which have blasted Rudy?

Scot Helman is a nice guy and I have enjoyed speaking with him in the course of reseraching my book about Romney and the impact of Romney's Mormon faith on his pesidential bid.   

But Helman, like all other old media reporters, can't seem to get their arms around the new media environment in which specificty and detail matter a great deal.  If the "many bloggers" hostile to Rudy were cited, we could evaluate whether their "hostility" was of much consequence, and from there reason as to whether the conservative bloggers impressed with Rudy far outweigh the unnamed (and perhaps non-existant) blogger(s)' criticisms.

And if Helman had dug around, it would have been interesting to discover if he could have found any well-trafficked conservative blog enthusiastic about Senator McCain's bid.  The major story of early 2008 will be the unexpectedly thin support for Senator McCain among the GOP base, a reality that is hinted at by the very thin support and enthusiasm he generates in the new media. 

Helman missed the lede again.  I can't keep doing all his work for him.

Be the ball, Scot.  Be the ball.

UPDATE: Patrick Hynes posts that he's not running black blog ops for Senator McCain.

A guest post from Josh Trevino:

Question: is any major event not fodder for the online left's complaints about the Administration of George W. Bush? They are, to be sure, by and large obsessive cultists in form and effect; but surely reason may kick in at points. One gets the impression of a class of people who wake up, drink their coffee, go to shave, cut themselves, and promptly curse the war in Iraq. The monomania simply does not end -- and the execution of Saddam Hussein is no different. I have already expressed my dislike for executions: but I also retain the bare capacity for rationality that allows me to understand the end of the dictator as a fundamental good.

The leftist "netroots"? Not so much.

A quick survey of what's up front at DailyKos right now -- c.9:30pm PDT -- yields a slew of reader diaries denouncing the execution of Saddam Hussein(!), and/or using it as a jumping-off point to circle against the real enemy. That's George W. Bush, of course. A sampling follows -- and these are the diaries, not the comments:

I want the whole world to be reminded that Saddam's evil excesses were made possible with the aid of BushCo officials.

[P]lease tell me what f------ moral standing does the US (or any other country for that matter) have to go into another country and do what we just did to Saddam? The fact that it is the US - that "shining beacon of freedom" is even worse. What does that say? What message does that send? And who made us World Police anyway? This is a mockery of justice.

Why would I write an obituary for Saddam Hussein? Because he was a human being. He did some horrible things while he was alive, but he was still human. By murdering him we have become no better than he was.

The administration will, in due course, stand to account for a war crime committed in Iraq by executing the Iraqi dictator.

There a lot of great diaries about the execution of Saddam. However, in the few that I've read, little emphasis has been placed on the real reason Saddam had to be executed now, before the New Year ... Politics and the rush to war, this time Iran, compels Bush to execute Saddam now. Bush will squint and glare towards Iran with...Saddam Swinging as Visual Backdrop....

So, overall, did my life change with the execution of Saddam? Only time will tell... if South Park does a really funny episode on it that I can watch on YouTube, I think I can say yes. Otherwise, no. My life is no different in a world without Saddam.

Recall that when the President was still governor of Texas, he never met a death sentence he didn’t like. Uh isn’t that the same sort of justice that cost Saddam his life? ... Saddam’s regime was found guilty of killing 148 Shiite villagers. The purpose of those deaths reportedly was to suppress insurrection ... Now let’s turn our attention to Iraq as it stands today. Most estimates place the number of Iraqi casualties – even those not associated with the military – at somewhere in the neighborhood of 150,000. This number makes Saddam look like a piker.

I write this assuming that the early reports are true, that Saddam Hussein has been hanged by the neck until he was dead, dead, dead. Do you think George Bush even stayed up for this? Heck, he sleeps well as it is, so why would he even bother staying up for the execution of the man responsible for...what was it?

Admittedly, DailyKos is not exactly a known font of patriotic feeling or good sense, and there's a sense that the powers there are vaguely aware of this. (The site's founder and proprietor, false bravado about "vindication" to the contrary, has a permanent redirect in place for the direct link to his infamous "screw them" comment deriding dead Americans in Fallujah -- it's in this diary, and you have to scroll down to find it.) To that end, frontpager mcjoan -- who, full disclosure, I rather like -- restricts herself to a sensible, "Would that this could bring peace to the people of Iraq." A single diary begs the dKos community to cut the apologist crap, to no avail -- as of this writing, his attendant user poll has George W. Bush as "more evil" than Saddam Hussein.

A brief look-through of the other major left-blogs reveals little better. Again, a blow-by-blow listing seems appropriate:

Digby moans that she wonders "what would have happened if the US had behaved like a world leader and sent [Hussein] to be tried in the International Criminal Court instead of having the 'Iraqi government' (which clearly has no real legal system) stage a show trial and now execute him in the middle of a civil war." (Ed. note: What is the rationale under which a thing is legitimate because it is "international"?)

Josh Marshall whines about the gap between official rhetoric and deeds, and pronounces the execution of the dictator to be "a sham, of a piece with the whole corrupt, disastrous sham that the war and occupation have been."

Duncan Black stand-in "Attaturk" declares that the death of Hussein is an example "of what 700,000 lives and half-a-trillion dollars can get you nowadays."

Matthew Yglesias mourns that it's "Sad to see even something as justice for a major-league war criminal rendered tawdry by this administration." He then follows up with an outrageous lie: namely, that Saddam was not tried for the "Anfal Campaign ... in order to spare Donald Rumsfeld embarrassment." As if Donald Rumsfeld was in any way responsible for the genocide of the Kurds; and as if the BBC simply fabricated this timeline of -- Saddam Hussein's trial for the Anfal Campaign!

Robert Farley at least has the good sense to recognize that Saddam Hussein was, you know, bad, but tries to save his netroots cred with a lengthy disclaimer: "I don't think his ouster was worth the bones of a single Prussian Grenadier, I'm sure that his execution will have no effect on the course of events in Iraq, I wish that his trial had been conducted according to international standard, and I don't believe in the death penalty."

As it happens, I actually agree with Farley, to varying degrees, on all those points -- but what a pity this is the price for maintaining good standing with the "netroots" crowd. A man can't say it's good to see the tyrant gone, and be done with it.

But then, they don't think the real tyrant is the man who hung today. That is their peculiar madness: an inability to see a fundamental good done without the reflexive, "Yes, but...." They think it a function of their power of perspicacity, but it is nothing more than the very thing that drove the dead man himself: the marriage of persistent paranoia, and enduring hate.

Chalk one up for the good guys. Saddam Hussein met his end last night, proving the cliché “better late than never” has its times and places.

In the annals of history, such moments of poetic justice are rare. For every Mussolini who winds up on a meat-hook, there are probably a dozen Stalins, Arafats and Castros who get to die without having to reckon with the horrors they created.

There is one reason why Saddam Hussein’s life got the ending it deserved twelve hours ago: The righteous force of the United States of America.

PRESIDENT BUSH GETS A LOT OF criticism for his handling of Iraq and the larger war on terror. Much of it is deserved. The rules of engagement and the ultimate end-game in Iraq have never been clearly articulated. The occupation has been a mess, not because the nature of the mission has been poorly defined, but rather because it’s been barely defined at all. The policies dealing with Iran specifically and the wider war against Radical Islam in general have been mushy to date and again poorly articulated.

But President Bush has his strengths. The weak-kneed among us, like the NewYork Times editorial board and the president’s father, never knew what to do with Saddam Hussein. George W. Bush did – kill him. At his best, Bush shows a focus and a harshness that scares the stuffing out of the rest of the world.

Our enemies were watching last night. I bet Bashir Assad was picturing his neck in that noose, knowing full well that George W. Bush’s ire would be something that John Kerry, Arlen Specter and any other sympathetic Senatorial dhimmis would be unable to save him from. Kim Jong Il and a host of loonies in Iran probably took notice as well. For them, the sad fact is that they remain alive only at the pleasure of George W. Bush. I doubt that thought gives them much comfort.

I’VE NEVER OFFERED THE FOLLOWING SPECULATION in print, primarily because I didn’t want to jinx things. But I think the main reason we haven’t had a repeat of 9/11 or something worse in over five years is because George W. Bush scares the s**t out of his enemies. When domestic liberal whine, “He scaaaares me,” they really mean it. The world’s bad people feel the same way. The American reprisals to a terror attack that took place under George W. Bush’s watch would likely be swift, brutal and disproportionate.

Our enemies may be crazy, but they’re not stupid. I bet the next 9/11, which will probably be magnitudes worse than the previous 9/11, will wait until George W. Bush is gone from office. Our enemies see the rest of our leadership class as anxious to curry favor with those who threaten our destruction. And while the road-to-Damascus Senators are the worst offenders, practically our entire “elite” structure is suspect. The Baker Group was bi-partisan. The media? Don’t even get me started. If our enemies were to conclude that a major attack on U.S. soil would cause many of our political factions to sue for peace, they would be wrong. But they wouldn’t be unreasonable.

Bush’s successor will be tested. That’s almost a certainty. And while Bush’s communications skills and policies have too often been wanting, the country may someday pine once again for a President who was feared.

Compiments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com

From SteynOnline:

And to have convicted, sentenced and executed the dictator is a signal accomplishment for the new Iraq. When I was in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, shortly after the war, a young boy showed me his schoolbook. It was like my textbooks at his age - full of doodles and squiggles and amusing additions to the illustrations. With one exception: the many pages bearing pictures of Saddam were in pristine condition. Even a bored schoolboy doesn't get so careless that he forgets where not to draw the line. When the cowardly thug emerged from his hole, it was a rare moment: in the fetid stability of the Middle East, how often do you get to see a big-time dictator looking like some boxcar hobo and meekly submitting to a lice inspection by an American soldier?...

The reality is that, as long as he was alive, there was always the possibility that he would return. When a dictator has exercised the total control over his subjects that Saddam did, his hold on them can only end with his death.

Last week the Washington Examiner's Mark Tapscott wrote about the first of what will be many pushes over the next two years to hobble free speech via regulations of various sorts.  "[F]or the first time in American history," Tapscott observed of the expected legislation, "potentially millions of concerned citizens involved in grassroots lobbying and representing viewpoints from across the entire political spectrum would have to register with Congress in order to exercise their First Amendment rights."

Tapscott has now posted links to the first response from the anti-First Amendment "Public Citizen" which is providing the political muscle behind the proposed muzzle, and a reply from the Free Speech Coaltion.

Check back to Tapscott's blog regularly in the months ahead, and be prepared to join in the effort to kill any bill that ignores the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

It would have had a decent chance of success here:

A U.S. judge on Friday refused to stop Saddam's execution, rejecting a last-minute court challenge.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said U.S. courts do not have jurisdiction to interfere in another country's judicial process. The ruling can be appealed, but it was issued within an hour of the time Iraqi officials said they expected the execution to be carried out.

To have passed by the chance to get the matter on appeal in front of Judge Stephen Reinhardt was a major oversight on the part of Hussein's legal team.

UPDATE: Ed Driscoll has a fine round-up of related links.

That's the word on Fox, from Al Arabiyah, one of the witnesses to the execution.

The preparation:

The official witnesses to Saddam Hussein's impending execution gathered Friday in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone in final preparation for his hanging, as state television broadcast footage of his regime's atrocities.

With U.S. forces on high alert for a surge in violence, the Iraqi government readied all the necessary documents, including a "red card" _ an execution order introduced during Saddam's dictatorship. As his time waned, Saddam received two of his half brothers in his cell Thursday and was said to have given them his personal belongings and a copy of his will.

Two Arab news services are now reporting it, and the Hot Air boys are monitoring Al Jazeera for any footage.

BBC:

Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has been executed by hanging at an unspecified location, reports say.

Iraqi TV said the execution took place just before 0600 local time (0300GMT). It was witnessed by a doctor, lawyer and officials. It was also filmed.

US troops and Iraqi security forces are on high alert for any violent backlash.

Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death by an Iraqi court on 5 November after a year-long trial over the 1982 killings of 148 Shias in the town Dujail.

A guest post from Josh Trevino:

I am against the death penalty. The only left-wing advocacy event I have ever attended, in fact, was a 2001 anti-death penalty rally in Greenwich Village featuring Sister Helen Prejean. In this, I depart from my fellow-travelers in conservatism, the great majority of whom are very much in favor of the lawful killing of the murderous and the depraved in society. It is difficult to gainsay them in this: the people whom they wish to kill are, in theory, the right people to kill. Opposition to their position has a regrettable tendency to transform into a defense of the indefensible. Witness, for example, the ridiculous fetishization of the late Stanley "Tookie" Williams -- a disgusting charlatan who emerged from a life of killing and mayhem to a transformation into a jailhouse saint. In opposing the right of the state to execute, one must avoid the temptation to assume that the objects of one's defense are good. They are generally not. (An exception here are the uncounted numbers of erroneously-convicted -- and erroneously-executed -- whose existence is a major factor in my unwillingness to credit the state with this power.) They are by and large the worst among us, whose bestial crimes and inhuman horrors transgress our moral bounds, even in an age where those bounds are indistinct and increasingly stretched.

It is easy for the opponent of the death penalty to rationalize the sparing of the "ordinary" criminal. The sociopath who kills a stranger is, for all the profundity of his act, nonetheless a localized evil. Endless incarceration removes him and the macro-scale reverberations of his crime from the lives and, presumably, the memories of the law-abiding citizenry. Obviously those who loved the victim may feel differently: I do not minimize their suffering here, but I do note that it is uniquely theirs, and as such not necessarily a concern of the polity at large. In America, our criminal law as inherited from England -- and specifically embodied in the concept of the "King's peace" -- is not meant to provide direct recompense to a victim, or an indirect victim, by means of the suffering of the criminal. Those victims must draw whatever solace they may from the state's punishment, as inflicted on the state's behalf. Pace Michael Dukakis, would I feel differently if, say, my wife were subjected to outrage and death? Of course: that is the human condition, and that is why we disallow direct personal vengeance in favor of a system of law. Thus, though it is easy to defend a policy of life in peacetime, if done without acknowledgment of, and compassion for, the anguish of those hurt by the criminal, it is reduced to mere moral posturing: an exercise in self-righteousness done not for the sake of justice, but for the sake of oneself. That is the calculation, attendant to the fate of the "ordinary" criminal.

And then there is Saddam Hussein.

The terrors of the dictator need no in-depth recapitulation here. Saddam Hussein killed strangers, friends, and family throughout his bloody career. He was a bloodthirsty paranoiac in the Stalinist mold, and in his prime, he held sway over millions -- and slew a few hundred thousand of them. Unlike our hypothetical "ordinary" criminal, he was no localized evil. He was, rather, a grand evil on the world-historical scale -- a menace-in-being akin to a Hitler, a Stalin, or a Napoleon, and separated from their immensity only by the fortune of the comparatively pitiful nation into which he was born. And he is about to die.

It must be admitted that the killing of Saddam Huseein is a confounding event for an opponent of the death penalty like me. The ranks of those wholly meriting the final moments of agony, the fear of eternal horror, and the dread of God's justice are -- with respect to my Calvinist friends! -- small, but he is assuredly among them. There can be no sympathy for him as he struggles his last at the end of a rope: indeed, he will even then be in sublime comfort set against the twisting agony of the Kurdish children he gassed. There can be no regret for his lost potential, as he fully expressed it in his creation of a hideous police-state that consumed its children and ravaged its land. Nor can be sorrow for his circumstance, as he was master of his fate in his long decades of absolute power -- the only free man in Iraq -- and used his freedom to choose death and misery in full. The thing that will be done to him -- his execution -- is intrinsically wrong. But the things that he will feel as a result, in those final moments and beyond, will be right. Most victims of the gallows may be said to earn their fates: Saddam Hussein may be said to have chosen it.

The expectations and hopes that the likes of the old dictator would spend his life descending into madness in a dank cell were never realistic. Iraqi society is, to be charitable, primitive in many respects; and the idea that law and justice are not functions of personal vengeance finds small purchase there. In that light, we may regret that the state we created there is executing its criminals: but we may also be grateful that in this case, it was done with the veneer of legality -- for form may become substance in time -- and that it was done to the most deserving of men. For our own sakes, we hope for a merciful God, who will forgive even the worst among us. For Saddam Hussein's sake, we hope for a just God, whose face he never sees, obscured as it is by the visages of his countless victims.

Will Durant died 25 years ago this past November, but in 2002 a collection of some of his essays and speeches was published, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time.  I purchased the audio from iTunes yesterday --it is a fine reading by John Little-- and have been struck again by how accomplished a historian and superb a writer Durant was.  The above line is how Durant caps a brief review of the turbulent lives of the musical geniuses of the nineteenth century, in particular Tchaikovsky, and is just one of dozens and dozens of phrases that Durant sprinkles in these wonderful essays.

One reviewer provided this summary of the book:

The six chapter headings give you an overview:

1. A Shameless Worship of Heroes. Durant says "The real history of man is not in prices and wages, nor in elections and battles, nor in the tenor of the common man; it is the lasting contributions made by geniuses to the sum of human civilization and culture." Durant then introduces us to these people.

2. The Ten "Greatest" Thinkers. From Confucius to Charles Darwin, Durant describes the accomplishments of the ten individuals who have had "the greatest influence on the lives and minds of men."

3. The Ten "Greatest" Poets. Okay, you guessed William Shakespeare. But you may benefit from increasing your familiarity with the other nine writers "who, beyond all others, have brought us that strange mixture of music, emotion, imagery and thought, which is poetry."

4. The One Hundred "Best" Books For an Education. "Let me have seven hours a week," Durant says, "and I will make a scholar and a philosopher out of you; in four years you shall be as well educated as any new-fledged Doctor of Philosophy in the land." His list of the 100 most important books ever written is the course syllabus.

5. The Ten "Peaks" of Human Progress. This will refresh your memory of the real sweep of human history. From the mastery of fire, to the conquest of the animals, to the industrial revolution, Durant describes step by step the road we took "from the savage to the scientist."

6. Twelve Vital Dates in World History. We all know in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue, but do you draw a blank about 4241 B.C.? How about A.D. 1294? The American Revolution, the Civil War and the two World Wars didn't even make the top 12 dates. Provocative reading, to say the least.

Do yourself or a friend a favor (or a college student tempted to blow their gift of four years on pop culture courses) and buy the audio book.  You will be amazed at how quickly three hours can fly by.

Jesse Jackson, the New York Times...

Iraq the Model is on the ground and liveblogging.

Update: CNN is reporting Saddam will be dead by 10 p.m.

This is an incredible post by John Hinderaker, demonstrating on a small subject the incredible persuasive power of distributed media combining with expertise --in this case an accomplished litigator's patient and careful examination of the facts underlying a dispute.

Yesterday The Belmont Club wrote at length on the new media's potential to impact the course of the war, and John's post --completely unconnected to the subject of the war-- illustrates the incredible potential of the new technology to investigate and persuade about matters in dispute.  Politicians have already figured out the transforming nature of the new media, and hopefully the Pentagon will as well.

Joseph Rago asserted that "[t]he blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think,"and that. "[j]ournalism requires journalists."

In fact, "journalists" are being exposed as slow to the story, often confused by complexity, and wholly unprepared to present difficult fact patterns even as their old media employers are cosntrained by space and the cost of paper, ink and pension plans from presenting the stories they do uncover.  John's post --again, a small story, but thoroughly investigated-- underscores the revolution we are watching, even as Wretchard's post explores just how crucial that revolution is.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune declined in value by more than 50% in eight years.  The market does not lie. Horse drawn carriages did not immediately vanish when the first automobiles appeared, but the smart money fled their manufacturers soon thereafter.  In another eight years, will the new owners be able to give the Strib away? 

UPDATE: From a Shrinkwrapped post from last year, updated with a couple of inserts from the good doctor:

"The MSM has developed a growing "Credibility Gap". Once upon a time, they could get away with it because there was no one to fact-check them and challenge their constructions. They still act as if nothing has changed. Those who forget their history tend to repeat it; this time the MSM will take the role of LBJ, Richard Nixon, and General Westmoreland. In case they don't remember, a reminder: once you have lost your credibility, it is almost impossible to regain it. LBJ and Nixon never did; it has taken the military almost 30 years to recapture the trust of the country (crucially not including the MSM and despite their best efforts to abu Graib and Guantanamo us to death.) [Of course, the military never lost the trust of a large percentage of the population and their will always be a hard core group of anti-military who will never trust them; the "movable" middle certainly has returned to honoring our military since Ronald Reagan was President and started the process.]

The MSM is the equivalent of the Soviet Red Army fighting in Afghanistan. They have powerful weapons but are poorly maneuverable; they are safe in their forts and rarely venture out into the real world. Their funding is slowly being pinched off and they have few new weapons in the pipeline [and recent events showing the accelerating decline in their readership and ad revenues substantiate this point.] They are constrained in their tactics by their narrow ideology and long ago lost the flexibility necessary to successfully defeat an insurgency. They face an army of bloggers which is armed with little more than digital cameras and laptops, but is incredibly mobile, has its agents literally everywhere people live and are able to leverage the truth to take down the Red Colossus. The bloggers range from left to right, but the best share the conviction that people deserve and need to know what is going on in the world; they announce their point of view and assume their audience is smart enough to know the difference between news and opinion. They do not "demand" trust based on their authoritative credentials but they build trust by telling people what they believe, correcting errors inside the decision cycle of the MSM, and linking to the stories they are covering whenever possible. Furthermore, the blogosphere finds and links the first person stories of those who are there, whenever available. These trends will only accelerate when digital video is more widespread; this is the future of news.

The MSM as presently constituted is already extinct but it may take a few years before they realize it."

If you’re in the mood for a classic example of where the mush-minded left stands these days, be sure to check out today’s New York Times editorial that laments the imminent neck-stretching of Saddam Hussein. Risibly titled “The Rush to Hang Saddam Hussein,” the piece bears eloquent testimony to how certain elements of the left reflexively side with America’s malefactors, even when common sense, decency and logic dictates otherwise.

The Times’ reluctance to pull the hangman’s switch is truly puzzling. The editorial itself concedes that there was never any doubt regarding his guilt:

The public record is bulging with the lengthy litany of his vile and unforgivable atrocities: genocidal assaults against the Kurds; aggressive wars against Iran and Kuwait; use of internationally banned weapons like nerve gas; systematic torture of countless thousands of political prisoners.

But arranging a date between Saddam and justice, according to the Times’ tortured logic, wasn’t what really mattered. “What really mattered,” argued the Times, “was whether an Iraq freed from his death grip could hold him accountable in a way that nurtured hope for a better future.”

You have to wonder, do these guys really believe this crap?

THE POINT IN KILLING SADDAM HUSSEIN is to make one of history’s monsters accountable for his depredations. Justice is impossible; taking Saddam’s life can’t possibly balance the ledger for the hundreds of thousands of people that he killed. But killing Saddam is the closest that civilization can come to justice.

The Grey Lady has become so morally muddled that she can’t see this. Instead of expressing satisfaction that the bitter chapter of Saddam Hussein’s life will finally (and belatedly) come to a close, the Times laments the “rush” to execute him and whines that it’s all happening too fast.

Huh? Saddam has been on trial for God-knows how many months now, even though there was never a shred of doubt regarding his guilt. What’s more, Saddam’s qualifications for the hangman’s noose, if one believes that such a penalty can ever be appropriate, had been firmly established years before he sat in the dock hearing the details of his horrors.

What’s especially odd about the Times’ editorial is that it doesn’t take issue with Saddam getting the death penalty. The Grey Lady’s only beef is the alleged haste with which the penalty is being meted out.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO BELIEVE that the Times’ editorialists are this obtuse. I’m sorry – while I have an appropriate and indeed awed respect for their determined imbecility, I can’t believe that they really think that this is all happening too fast. After all, there had to be a day of decision and a day of action. By any reasonable accounting, the appropriate moment for both such days is long overdue.

The Timesmen make their agenda clear in the editorial’s final paragraph:

Toppling Saddam Hussein did not automatically create a new and better Iraq. Executing him won’t either.

So true. Executing Saddam also won’t “automatically create” a solvent Social Security System or a perpetual motion machine. So why bother?

The truth is this: If anything might create the appearance that the Bush administration actually accomplished something, the Times opposes it. Regardless of whether it’s just, right or fair.

How pathetic. And how sadly unsurprising.

Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com.

I have said little on air and written less here about Michael Nifong.  I have hesitated to take up the subject because it is difficult for me to conceive of anyone willing to embark on such a course as Nifong has chosen.  The dangers posed by a corrupt prosecutor are profound, and not just to his immediate victims, in this case, the undergraduates who he has allowed to be smeared and dragged through this disfiguring process. "Egregious prosecutorial misconduct" is how my friend Scott Johnson of Powerline has termed it, but it has now gone far beyond that.

Nifong has now entered a terrain where very few have gone since the days of blatant criminality on the part of government under Jim Crow:  He is a poster boy for corruption and self-serving, lawless ambition.  The governor of North Carolina, the president of Duke. the Dean of its Law School and the law school's faculty,, every decent human being around that campus and that state, and certainly  the ABA and not just its North Carolina division should demand not only the dismissal of the charges against the students, but the expulsion of Nifong from his office and the thorough investigation of his abuse of power.  Nifong's blatant disregard of his obligations has indicted not the students but the idea of the rule of law, and the damage he has wrecked has spread far beyond the students and is spreading further with every day that passes.

Someone did a stupid and vulgar thing in inviting a stripper to the house that night, and the accuser seems to have had a sad and hard life.

But the culprit in the affair is Nifong, and it is he who should be made an example of so that prosecutors across the country get a message that they are servants of the law, not its masters.

If anyone has done an in-depth investigation into Nifong's background, I'd appreciate a link.  Somewhere along the line he went very, very bad, and I would like to be able to explain to my law students how that happened as a warning to them about ambition grown very crooked.

UPDATE: HamNation has much more on the Nifong story.

Join me for an exciting tour of Durham, highlighting Mike Nifong's prosecutorial misconduct in the Duke Lacrosse case.

Thanks to the Ham family for filming, producing, editing, and starring in this episode of HamNation. Mom was producer, Dad was directing, editing, and on music, and I recruited the bros to play lacrosse in the background for realism.

It's Total HamNation! Hope you enjoy.

I also wrote a column today on Five Good Things You Probably Never Knew About Duke Lacrosse. For instance, guess the team's graduation success rate.

100 percent. Read more about the Blue Devils who aren't nearly as devilish as the media has made them out to be.