Blog break here while the blaster family heads to the beach. Chances of hooking up to the net over the next week or so are kinda slim. Headed to an island, kinda like Instapundit, but, as usual, my approach is not quite so glamourous. Even my thunderstorm only knocked down a branch.

Andrew Sullivan is now writing that he has been quite clear that he's not supporting Bush. So clear that it took a reader to remind him of his position in February. Doesn't explain why he wrote this in March:

National Review's Kathryn Lopez made the following remark before my spring break: "I do wish Sullivan would save time and come out for Kerry now. In just a matter of time he will come up with the rationalizations, but it's taking him painfully long to get on with it. I'm betting all Kerry will have to do is say that he's against terrorism." I'm mystified by this remark. It has always seemed to me that a political writer is not necessarily partisan. Some of us are actually trying to figure out who's the better candidate for the next four years and haven't made our minds up already.

Jonah calling him out has had an effect. Now Sullivan writes openly that he "does not trust" the administration, but does not seem to be writing blatant lies about it - at least today.

That's what Tina Brown says. Meanwhile, over at Instapundit, we find that Hizb'allah and other Arabs like it, too.

Where are the articles and columns asking us to open our eyes and connect the dots?

Turns out that according to the 9/11 Commission, our Air Defense system was ill prepared to defend against multiple airliners being hijacked and used to crash into buildings. Almost as if it weren't even designed for something like that.

Man, we are definitely getting our money's worth out of these guys.

So when does Bill Quick toss W overboard?

Andrew Sullivan has decided that on the issue of being outed as being anti-Bush, he'll just lie about it. Everybody knows and has known of his anti-Bushness for a long time. Well, sure, lots of people - not just me - have been pointing it out for a while. People like Kathryn Jean Lopez at NRO - and as noted by Jonah in his original post - when she did so, he got all huffy about it. If it was clear to everyone and he was so open about it, why did he go to the trouble of denying it KLo?

Caught with his pants down, so to speak. Turns out he flipped on Bush a while back. Jonah's got the scoop.

That was totally unexpected!

PS Can't wait to see what Sullivan says tomorrow.

The new spin on Abu Ghraib:

NABLUS, West Bank -- The accounts of physical abuse of Iraqis by American guards at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad sounded achingly familiar to Anan Labadeh. The casual beatings, the humiliations, the trophy photos taken by both male and female guards were experiences he said he underwent as a Palestinian security detainee at an Israeli military camp in March of last year.

There was, he added, a significant difference: The Israelis have rules, he said, and their techniques for breaking down prisoners are far more sophisticated. "What the Israelis do is much more effective than beatings," he said. "Three days without food and without sleep and you're eager to tell them anything. It just shows us the Americans are amateurs. They should have taken lessons from the Israelis."

That's the problem - we don't have institutionalized mistreatment! Hmmm. Someone's going to have to tell Anne Applebaum and Andrew Sullivan.

The next paragraph, though, has the best part of the article:

Many of the questions raised by the Abu Ghraib scandal, and by the United States's self-declared war on terrorism, are the kinds that Israel has been wrestling with for decades.

Self-declared. That is just precious. Hey, Glenn Frankel, maybe you need to pick up a few archive copies of your newspaper. Or go here, and click on Enter Gallery.

Or click here. Self-declared my ass.

The Bush haters, the major press outlets (those are overlapping sets), and Andrew Sullivan are out there saying, look, let's connect the dots. Over here, you've got the Secretary of Defense signing an order that allows interrogators to keep their subjects awake for a long time, and over here you've got these pictures of Lynndie England pointing at some guys schlong and grinning. Don't you see?!?!? WHAT, ARE YOU BLIND?!?!?!

Case in point, this Anne Applebaum column in the Post today:

Item 2: The "Rumsfeld memo." This document, unearthed by the Wall Street Journal, was written in March 2003 by a Pentagon working group. It declared not only that the American president has the power to evade international law and torture foreign prisoners but that interrogators who follow the president's commands can, in addition, be held immune from prosecution.

Item 3: The Abu Ghraib photographs. Remember what they show: not just torture but guards who appear absolutely certain of their legal and moral right to torture, as well as a large number of unidentified personnel, standing around and watching.

Anne Applebaum can read minds from a picture! Of course, the fact that these things happened late at night/early morning when senior officers were not present shows they were absolutely certain of their legal and moral right, doesn't it?

Sorry, yall, you're going to have make some clearer connections than that. I mean, Rumsfeld turned down a recommendation to shave their beards, so I am thinking that he was probably pretty far back from the "anything goes" line. Unfortunately, like I said, the press no longer plans to spin this, they are simply going to lie.

The economy is indeed doing better. First sign was when they stopped calling it the "Bush economy" and yesterday Rush was pointing out that on CNN, they've discovered the "good economy" as a campaign secret, the Washington Post figured it out, even Andrew Sullivan takes note of a positive for Bush.

Ace of Spades even ran out of cowbells.

Meanwhile, on the bad timing for Kerry angle in the Post article, advantage, me.

UPDATE: By way of history repeating itself, much as we no longer hear about "the Bush economy," Jay Nordlinger writes this in his remembrance of President Reagan:

I am floating back to the world of 1980. As regular readers know, I grew up in a left-wing environment, and Ronald Reagan's name was mud. Actually, it was sometimes "Ray-gun," which was a real thigh-slapper in this era. (So was "Reaganomics" — before the president's economic program took off. Reagan delighted in saying, "You can tell our program is working, because they don't call it 'Reaganomics' anymore!")

So in his latest
piece, he notes approvingly a paragraph from the Washington Post that says that Rumsfeld says one thing and then another about Abu Ghraib. Sullivan and the Post seem think that a picture of a "hooded" prisoner - which was approved procedure - is what Rumsfeld meant when he said that pictures of Abu Ghraib represent "grievous abuse and cruelty." Please. A hood on your head is torture? But Sully just runs with it. And then he gets downright silly, writing:

Mercifully, some in the military upheld their own honor and disseminated the pictures.

Apparently Sullivan is unaware of how those pictures reached the public eye. The defense lawyers of the soldiers who did it got them to Hackworth whose wife is a consultant for CBS who got the pictures on the air. The soldiers who are in the pictures.

Just holding up their honor.

In Howard Kurtz's latest Media Notes column, he notes that Howard Stern thinks he will make a difference in the election, and he is anti-Bush.

Stern has been on a jihad against Bush due to the recent FCC crackdowns. I've heard his show a couple of times in the past couple of months, and was shocked at how the entirety of his show is an anti-Bush program. No time for talking to naked chicks anymore - just anti-Bush, all the time. Well, sort of. I heard him talking about his long war with the FCC, and he compains a lot about things that hapened in 1994, when Bush of course was a candidate for Governor of Texas. But details, details.

No doubt it is having an effect with his listeners, and Stern does have millions of them. But I suspect that the effect is not so strong as he thinks. Most of his listeners are going to be in large urban areas - the kinds of places that aren't Bush country to begin with.

I am sure that if Bush loses, Stern will take credit for it. But I don't think he'll find a Kerry administration any more hospitable to his brand of radio.

Andrew Sullivan plans to simply lie, too. In his latest about Abu Ghraib, he writes:

This kind of tactic [water-boarding] was designed specifically for a few top al Qaeda captives; but it was apparently transferred to Abu Ghraib as well. That last transition is murky. How did those new relaxed rules get moved from Guanatanamo against high-profile Qaeda terrorists to people dragged in off the street in Baghdad?

Except noone says that water-boarding was going on in Abu Ghraib. So how can he write that this kind of tactic transferred over?

I've written this before, but I think the Guardian article below raises the point again. The press no longer intends to "spin" things against President Bush and the War on Terror. They are simply going to lie about it.

I found this awesome James Lileks quote about strawmen one day:

When your opponent sets up a straw man, set it on fire and kick the cinders around the stage. Don't worry about losing the Strawperson-American community vote.

I have my matches and steel-toed boots on, here. Over at Andrew Sullivan's, he is trying to establish himself as the moral to superior to "most conservatives." Here's what he writes:

Whenever I think I'm going crazy (having qualms about extra-legal torture while most conservatives are fine with it)....

Okay, is there anyone who thinks that most conservatives are fine with "extra-legal torture?" Sure, some are. But so are some liberals. Sullivan creates a false position for "most conservatives," then feels like he is morally superior to the false position that he created.

He follows on by saying he continues to feel morally superior because William F. Buckley writes a column that agrees with him. Which is fine, of course, but it is the first time I've seen something by Buckley that appears to be factually, objectively, wrong. Sullivan quotes Buckley:

If what happened was odious, but what happened did so under the auspices of a well-organized military, then you scratch up against the lessons of Nuremberg, which held superiors responsible for misconduct by subordinates.

I think William F. Buckley got that wrong - the lessons of Nuremburg were that subordinates were not immune because they followed orders of superiors. Read this piece about the "Lessons of Nuremburg," and you see that Jodl is not prosecuted because his subordinates did something, but because he did something that he was ordered to do, even if he was personally opposed. Buckley gets it exactly backward.

And Sullivan is more than happy to use it to prop up the straw man.

Perhaps Victor Davis Hanson is correct - we aren't sane. And the problem isn't Gore and Soros and Kennedy.

The article in the Guardian in the post below turns out to be completely crap. Ace of Spades links a story where the International Red Cross "clarifies" their position on Saddam Hussein. In short, they aren't saying that Hussein must be freed or charged.

Today I was listening to Don Imus on the radio, and while talking to Mike Wallace, he said he had read something in the New York Times, and then said something like "well, who knows what that means anymore."

Reminded of how Mike Wallace and 60 Minutes used to be a feared and respected news insitution. And now they are simply another source of partisan hackery.

The Guardian is lying? Drudge's front page links a story that says the Red Cross says that the US must charge or release Hussein. Dunno how much of the rest of the story is false, but this part certainly is:

Saddam and other senior officials of the old regime are the only Iraqi detainees to have been given PoW status. Hundreds of other Iraqis have been seized since the war often, according to critics, on flimsy suspicion and held for long periods without charge, usually without their families knowing for weeks where they are.

It is categorically untrue that Saddam and other senior officials of the old regime are the only Iraqi detainees to get PoW status. Thousands of Iraqis were detained as POWs. Just read here:

Those now in CENTCOM hands include former deputy prime minister Tarik Aziz, described by Rumsfeld as a Saddam Hussein "confidante;" former chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service's American desk Salim Sa'id Khalaf al-Jumayli; former Iraqi Air Defense Force Commander Mazahim Sa'b Hassan al-Tikriti; former director of Iraq's Military Intelligence Zuhayr Talib Abd al-Sattar al-Naqib; former Iraqi Minister of Trade Muhammad Mahdi al-Sallih; former Deputy Chief of Tribal Affairs Jamal Mustafa Abdallah Sultan al-Tikriti; and Iraq's former ambassador to Tunisia, Farouq Hijazi.

Among POWs , Rumsfeld said more than 1,000 Iraqis who fall into the category of foot soldiers have been released. The secretary said some 100 Iraqi POWs a day are being moved out of various facilities that have held -- at their peak -- 7,000 to 7,500 Iraqi POWs and foreign nationals who were fighting in Iraq as mercenaries.