Summertime and the living is easy, fish are jumping and the blogging is light. If you spent as much time away from the computer as I did this weekend, get caught up with links a la carte.
- Andy McCarthy and Jonah Goldberg are raving about the NY Times Magazine’s cover story on Londonistan, with good reason. It’s long but essential reading. Make time for it.
- Ko$ola broke through into big media with hit pieces by David Brooks in the Times and Jonathan Darman in Newsweek. Writes Darman of the Chairman, “Already, the strain of the spotlight is beginning to show in his growing belligerence and paranoia.” To which Jim Treacher replies (via e-mail), “Growing? Hasn’t he always been like this?” Also, note the update in the Raw Story link wondering who that mysterious nameless blogger is at Little Green Footballs that’s been goofing on Kos. Does anyone know? We should really put a name to Mister X after five years, shouldn’t we? Goldstein adds his own contribution to Ko$ola by reprinting one of Markos’s e-mails from the secret Townhouse mailing list. It’s an obvious fake; all the words are spelled correctly. The Commissar has contributed something, too, and this one isn’t fake. No wonder the nutroots are so hot for Mark Warner lately: he’s got a natal near exact Venus/Saturn in Scorpio conjunction, for god’s sake.
- Michael Ledeen managed to tie the Times’s SWIFT expose together with their disinterest in Iraq WMDs in a shrewd post at the Corner on Friday night. If they’re so leak-happy, wonders Ledeen, how come they won’t use their intel sources to get the rest of the Santorum/Hoekstra document leaked? (Rhetorical question.) Gateway Pundit‘s thinking about those chemical shells, too — specifically about how fifteen-year-old munitions can be degraded to the point of impotence when chemical shells from World War I are still killing people. And Captain Ed wants to know where the biological and chemical weapons came from that the Palestinians are boasting about tonight. Ed says if they have them and use them, it’s game over for Gaza and possibly the West Bank. I think the casualties would have to be awfully high, though, before Israel compromises the fetish it’s made of its moral superiority.
- Remember this guy? After people e-mailed him to tell him that Macbeth is a fraud, he wrote a new post saying that if Macbeth is a poseur, he’s a darned convincing one — and besides, who really blew up the Twin Towers? Another Bush critic, Michiko Kakutani of the Times, kept things in similar perspective in her review of Ron Suskind’s book on U.S. counterterrorism: “Just as disturbing as al Qaeda’s plans and capabilities are the descriptions of the Bush administrations handling of the war on terror and its willful determination to go to war in Iraq.” David Horowitz says this line appears immediately after a description of Al Qaeda’s anthrax program.
- Al Qaeda’s in charge in Mogadishu; the Guardian’s happy that the trains will at last run on time. Jack Murtha, who applauded Clinton’s withdrawal from Somalia in 1993, proves once again how hard it is to oppose the war without backsliding into full-blown socialist moral equivalence by calling the U.S. a greater threat to world peace than Iran or North Korea. And speaking of which, I joked recently that North Korea might be playing chicken with us over their missile launch in part because we’re preoccupied with Iran. Not so funny, as it turns out.
Finally, good-news remainders: tomorrow could be an ugly day for the UN; Hu Jintao’s heckler is getting off with a slap on the wrist; and Russian audiences are in love — again! — with Josef Stalin.
