One of Ours

...There was a time, not too long ago, when Fox News was a joke -- albeit a bad and sick one -- to liberals and TV journalists raised on Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley. But even those who rue the success of Rupert Murdoch's flag-waving cable channel have to admit: The old boy has done it. CNN founder Ted Turner once famously mocked Murdoch, saying he'd squish his cable news rival like a bug. We all know now who has squished whom.

Just check the Nielsens: When the president gave his prime-time press conference last week, 5.2 million viewers watched on Fox News, compared to CNN's 1.7 million and MSNBC's 867,000 viewers. For the year, Fox ranks ninth among all cable networks in primetime, averaging 1.4 million viewers. CNN and MSNBC don't even make the Top 20. In 20th place: The Home and Garden Network...

...As Ailes told the New York Times Sunday Magazine in 2001: "In most news, if you hear a conservative point of view, that's called bias. We believe if you eliminate such a viewpoint, that's bias. If we look conservative, it's because the other guys are so far to the left."...

...whether liberal bias rules TV news is almost beyond the point here. Ailes understood that perception is all that counts. "Somewhere between 65 and 75 percent of the American people believe the media tipped to the left," Ailes said, according to his own research. "Now whether it does or it doesn't, if that's what they believe, that leaves a lot of room as long as you don't tip to the right." Fox, of course, does tilt to the right, as any even casual observer would know. But this ruse of blazing an objective swath through a blindly biased news media is the foundation of Fox's philosophy...

... to its credit, Fox often combines its attitude with good old-fashioned breaking news work -- the kind that made CNN its name during Gulf War I...

...The deeply flawed and controversial 1998 Tailwind report about the U.S. government allegedly authorizing a chemical attack on American defectors in Laos during the Vietnam War -- which CNN retracted -- was a tremendous embarrassment. The incident so disturbed Turner that he said at the time: "If committing suicide would help, I've even given that some consideration." Tailwind also fed conservative anger that the Communist News Network had taken another hit out on the U.S. government. Ted Turner's CNN became one more target for conservative conspiracy theorists looking for a liberal cabal in their remote controls...

...MSNBC sometimes has seemed a continuous loop of soft, pseudo-documentaries like the nostalgic "Time & Again" and Matt Lauer's "Headliners & Legends." As Tom Brokaw's heir-apparent Brian Williams says of the recycled fluff, "If you played the guitar in one 'Partridge Family' episode, there's a half-hour show about you in the MSNBC archives."...

...Those who flocked to Fox after 9/11 were looking for more than just the facts, Collins writes. "If terrorism had made Americans feel wounded, frightened, and confused, Fox helped wash those feelings away, becoming a beacon of moral certainty and defiance ...

...many Americans are looking less for real political debate than validation for their strongly held beliefs. And this isn't just true for conservatives. Liberal publications -- including Salon -- serve as havens for those feeling alienated and angered by the president's policies...

... this quote by Fox News anchor Shepard Smith, responding to critics who said Fox shouldn't say things like "our troops" when referring to U.S. soldiers. "Fuck them. Once we're in this war, it's us against them. And we're going to win."...Smith may as well have been articulating the Fox News creed...

...With nothing new to offer visitors, the European countries decided to stop pretending they were still relevant, and to start celebrating their colorful pasts.

"Our stagnant continent has been a virtual museum for decades," explains an unnamed EU representative...

...Many experts agree that the reason Europe has become an intellectual wasteland is that all of the industrious and motivated European citizens had the good sense to emigrate to the United States over the past 100 to 150 years.

"The cupboard was left bare, so to speak," notes respected historian Dr. Peter Sanvorth. "While the best and brightest of the Old Country found their way to America's shores, left behind were buffoons like Jacques Chirac and madmen like Adolf Hitler.

"It saddens me that the continent that once developed the printing press, experienced the Renaissance, and built beautiful cathedrals and cities has reached this point of intellectual bankruptcy," says Dr. Sanvorth.

"With no new European ideas, inventions or architecture, all that's left is their history..."

Belgium took another step towards becoming a repressive state this week by slapping what amounts to a ban on a popular political party with anti-establishment views.

The anti-immigrant Vlaams Blok (VB) has been subject to tough financial and operating restrictions on the basis that it is "undemocratic and racist."...

...The VB demands the repatriation of immigrants who choose not to assimilate: It also calls for Flemish Belgians - who occupy the prosperous north of the country - to create their own state, separate from the poor French-speaking south.

... the VB is not a tiny fringe party, but one which holds 12% of the seats in Belgium's parliament. It has, he continues, many local councillors and two MEPs, and was expected to do very well in the forthcoming elections...

...EURSOC holds no brief for the Vlaams Blok. However, the ban demonstrates the intolerance and anti-democratic instincts at the heart of one of Europe's model states..."if you do not sign up to certain beliefs then your politics are, by definition, beyond the pale and thus illegitimate."...

"Belgium is in many ways a mini-EU: an artificial state created (much like Europe’s three former such states, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia) as a result of political ideology rather than any sense of national unity, and held together by a political class which is prepared to subvert democracy to achieve its ends. Add to that a judiciary which, far from being independent of the political establishment, is an important part of the problem, and you have a recipe for what took place in Ghent this week: democracy, Belgian-style, in which you may vote only for a party whose views are approved by the elites.

The actions may be specific to Belgium, but the lesson is of wider import. The EU is in the process of becoming just such an artificial state. The fate of the Vlaams Blok shows that worries about the future of democracy are not scare stories. They are real dangers and they are with us today."

...it is striking how resilient this perpetrator-as-victim narrative remains. We still sometimes assume that the people who flew planes into buildings — and those who blew up synagogues in Turkey, trains in Spain, discos in Tel Aviv and schoolchildren this week in Basra — are driven by feelings of weakness, resentment and inferiority. We cling to the egotistical notion that it is our economic and political dominance that drives terrorists insane.

But it could be that whatever causes them to support the ideologies they subscribe to, the one thing that the killers have in common is a feeling of immense superiority. It could be that they want to exterminate us because they regard us as spiritually deformed and unfit to live, at least in their world. After all, it is hard to pull up to a curb, look a group of people in the eye and know that in a few seconds you will shred them to pieces unless you regard other people's deaths as trivialities.

If today's suicide bombers are victims of oppression, then the solution is to lessen our dominance, and so assuage their resentments. But if they are vicious people driven by an insatiable urge to dominate, then our only option is to fight them to the death.

We had better figure out who these bombers really are...

Standing in the courtyard of the golden-domed Shrine of Ali on Friday, staring at 2,500 worshipers seated on rugs, the imam, Sadr al-Din al-Kubanchi, hurled words as sharp as scimitars at the army that had invaded this holy city.

But the soldiers he denounced were not Americans but members of the ragtag Shiite militia known as the Mahdi Army. Dozens of them, bristling with Kalashnikovs and grenade belts, surrounded the shrine even as Mr. Kubanchi spoke...

..."It's not brave to take refuge in the house or the mosque or the markets and use women and children as human shields," Mr. Kubanchi said of the Mahdi Army. "They are people who are trying to cheat you, and they are people from the regime of Saddam Hussein, former intelligence officers. They want to drag you into battle to be destroyed. If that happens, the soldiers will attack Najaf, and our enemies will happily see our blood flow."

The standoff in Najaf has turned into a showdown between the clerics of the city and Mr. Sadr, as the religious and tribal leaders here try to nudge their unwanted neighbor out of town...