I've added a long-overdue sidebar link to the splendid work of London-based Iraqi expatriate Ahmad.

Ramesh Ponnuru is quizzical, though perhaps not enough, about a defense of Newsweek from rightist New York Times columnist David Brooks. Brooks derides military writer Austin Bay's condemnation as "craziness."

Unfortunately, the weakest judgments of the "what" and "why" of Newsweek's infraction have come from otherwise intelligent political and media insiders who are inured or oblivious to leftist prejudice. It isn't so cynical to consider the personal and professional relationships pundits and journalists would damage by calling their colleagues and past or future employers intellectually unfair or dishonest, in spite of overwhelming evidence. Outsiders like Austin Bay have a completely different perspective and nothing to lose with stern condemnations. Yet Bay is no polemicist; the ugly travesty of May 17th's White House press briefing, where reporters demanded the Bush administration apologize for having dared ask a news magazine to deal in fact instead of innuendo, wasn't a parody skit. Brooks should take the opinion of men like Bay more seriously and stop pretending that mainstream newsrooms couldn't possibly be oppugnant to their American benefactors. They may not be "Noam Chomskys with laptops," but just how close have they come?

CANDID CALUMNY: Glenn Reynolds helpfully lists journalists, most of them at least nominally on the left, who can see or are willing to admit what Brooks and others can't.

One month ago Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan offered constructive, even merciful criticism of the Enron-style accounting practices found in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the federal government's artificial lifts for the housing market. Via teleconference from Philadelphia, Greenspan advised Congress on what to do with a pair of state institutions that hid $16 billion of losses. Namely, keep them well away from home-buyers:

"The assets required for Fannie and Freddie to achieve their mission are but a small fraction of the current level of their assets," Greenspan said. Thus if Congress were to limit the two companies' holdings so that they can achieve their mission, a substantial liquidation would be required over time, the Fed chief said. ...Greenspan said the Fed also sees little evidence to support the notion that the availability of fixed-rate mortgages is tied to the size of Fannie's and Freddie's portfolios. He also said it is "difficult to see" how the two companies' portfolios can influence home ownership.

He was likely holding his tongue. What are the home mortgage legacies of Fannie and Freddie worth? Less than their future.

Last night Iraqi blogger Ali Fadhil leveled allegations ranging from incompetence to misrepresentation and fraud against Spirit of America, the American-based charity in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon. I read Ali's weblog and contacted Glenn Reynolds, who responded, saying that he'd investigate. Today, Ali has clarified those charges. While Ali's claims, if accurate, illustrate a failure on the part of Jim Hake and his staff to effectively deploy charitable donations netted by thousands of sympathetic parties, mendacity on the part of Hake et al is not immediately apparent. Philanthropy in operation may be so different from the concept, so foreign to Iraqis that their initial collective response has been awkward and their work inefficient, and Ali may be unfamiliar with the often frustrating experiences and occasionally disappointing results of volunteer work with otherwise good intentions; or Spirit of America could be an organization far better at marketing than it is with managing works projects in a country that is both recovering from decades of modern totalitarianism and sitting at the center of the war on terror. Either way, explanations from Ali's brothers and Jim Hake should be forthcoming.

ONE REPLY: It appears that Jim Hake has responded in Ali's comment thread.

CONCLUDED: Omar and Mohammed answer.

Transforming personalities into Star Wars characters as a roundabout gesture of respect?

It's been done before.

The American economy is neither stagnant nor inflationary; consumer prices are fairly level, pleasant news to hear after this month's uplifting employment report.

Meanwhile, the Nasdaq index regained the level of 2000 from yesterday's steep incline — an event that seems not to have attracted the same media fanfare as when that point was passed in the opposite direction.

Uzbeks are quite literally fighting for their own dignity as men against their tyrannical government, which was sadly granted a place in Freedom House's most recent catalog of the world's most heinous dictatorships. Democrats in Uzbekistan face halting challenges but violent unrest is, after all, a reflection of the regime's unpopularity; and it is generally understood that the Bush administration has been surreptitiously aiding the cause of freedom for some time. Instapundit and Winds of Change have much more.

National Review's Andrew McCarthy makes an end-run around the right's general position on Newsweek:

Here's an actual newsflash — and one, yet again, that should be news to no one: The reason for the carnage here was, and is, militant Islam. Nothing more.

Newsweek merely gave the crazies their excuse du jour. But they didn't need a report of Koran desecration to fly jumbo jets into skyscrapers, to blow up embassies, or to behead hostages taken for the great sin of being Americans or Jews. They didn't need a report of Koran desecration to take to the streets and blame the United States while enthusiastically taking innocent lives. This is what they do.

His is good counterpoint about the nature of authoritarians, though with two potential problems.

First, a comparison between the First World and the Third World isn't so apt; even if it were, one could look at questionably motivated localized hysteria in America like the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

Second, and much more importantly, General Richard Myers clearly stated that Jalalabad riots were "not necessarily" caused by a near-instantaneous dissemination of and public reaction to the Newsweek falsehood. This is a remark from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; neither anonymous nor unfounded, given the general's plenary access to information. We see from press pool photographs that protesters, probably rioters, too, were causing disruption or mayhem because of a tale from Newsweek; accepting that, we base all conclusions on the assumption that market squares went ablaze over a dunked religious book terrorists don't even follow. But what if that weren't exactly the case? What if the same beliefs that put Newsweek on the side of captured Taliban poisoned reports from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Indonesia? Why would that be so difficult when reporters routinely place their own assertions, like the "raising questions" catchphrase, into news articles from politics to economics to foreign affairs? In fact, a media mischaracterization of the riots would bring culpability right back to where McCarthy is pulling it from: relativist Westerners' irrational hostility to their own liberal society. We shouldn't hold up one falsehood while standing before the backdrop of another.

Better to be obscure in victory than conspicuous in failure.

John Hopkins professor and geopolitical progressive Fouad Ajami wrote masterfully in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Tony at Across the Bay helpfully reprinted the opinion piece in its entirity. If there is moral confusion in the West about the war on terror, Ajami writes, there is startled hope and excitement in the Near East and broader Third World — quite simply because over there liberty is an aspiration, not a convention to flippantly deconstruct:

"George W. Bush has unleashed a tsunami on this region," a shrewd Kuwaiti merchant who knows the way of his world said to me. The man had no patience with the standard refrain that Arab reform had to come from within, that a foreign power cannot alter the age-old ways of the Arabs. "Everything here — the borders of these states, the oil explorations that remade the life of this world, the political outcomes that favored the elites now in the saddle — came from the outside. This moment of possibility for the Arabs is no exception."

The article is a sharp abstract of the revolution today: silent, gentle majorities work under the illumination of reason, merit and trust while tiny authoritarian minorities wield fear and violence, the only instruments both understood and preferred.

On our side of the world, disagreement on policy and strategy, contrary to accusations from the left, occurs daily on the right; though all seriously competing propositions are founded in a mutual understanding of good and evil intentions, free and oppressed, and directed towards a shared definition of victory that entails the end of dictatorship. From afar, it all may look the same. But opposing the diplomatic and military confrontation of tyranny outright or condemning it as the arbitrary domination of another — the very abomination this war has demonstrably weakened in several countries — is a telling mischaracterization of the free world's twin desires to protect and empower common men. It is an abdication of discernment, responsibility and, at a point, sanity. What has made debate so frustrating in the last half-century — tragically, the modern embrace of liberty brought with it the temptation of relativist abandon — is that the parties most opposed to one another can no longer agree on basic facts or principles, and that the relativists enjoy cultural standing and a certain credibility. You can't prove green is really green, can you? they jeer. Discouragingly, a lot of time is wasted reestablishing for them what should be obvious. But they concede something when they bristle at aphorisms from the reverent. So for Ajami's work, we recognize what is good; and for those who would out and scoff at the man's recounting, what is nonsense.