The Anchoress

Buster and I rented a 30-year old movie last night, Paddy Chayefsky’s astonishing satire, Network. Buster loved it, completely.

What a script. You have the last remnants of the ruminating “Greatest Generation” being overtaken by their restless, busy children. You have a brittle, obsessed feminist television programmer - a boomer raised on television and unable to think outside the idiot box. (”you ARE television incarnate,” her middle-aged departing lover tells her in a staggeringly insightful speech- and it is not meant to be a compliment). You have a network happy to exploit the ravings of a man having a breakdown for the ratings, and happier, still to turn its Evening News show into a weird amalgam of Jerry Springer, Fox News and the Daily Show. A network happy to give terrorists exposure for ratings. Happy to present a “Mao Zedong Hour” each week (and don’t the Communists in control of it become piggy little Capitalists) for sensationalism and yes, ratings. Happy to be bought out by a conglomerate so vast it is nearly impossible to discover its connections to…Middle Easter Oil-Producing nations. Happy to use the services of terrorists to assassinate a stubborn problem of a man who is pulling them down.

Oh, and the terrorists? The ones the Network likes best are called the Ecumenical Liberation Army. The powers which engage their services for the assassination? They are referred to as “one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.”

Yes, it’s satire. But when you watch Ned Beatty - the affable, seemingly benign corporate head who smiles and recounts his humble days as a salesman - “people say I can sell anything…” it all seems way too familiar - eerily so - and you wonder if Chayefsky had a bit of “Sybil the Soothsayer’s” gift for prophecy. Then you hear him make his speech, and what seems “familiar” becomes recognizable as the sort of simplistic, happy-talk, one-world rhetoric we hear today, by people like Angelina Jolie and Sheryl Crow and other attendees of things like the World Economic Forum in Davos or the Clinton Global Initiative or folks who shill for the UN on any given day. An excerpt:

JENSEN:

JENSEN
Because you’re on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every
night of the week, Monday through Friday.

It’s scathing. It’s brilliant. It’s hilarious. It’s chilling. It’s strikingly contemporary. If you’ve never seen the film, or haven’t watched it in 30 years, do yourself a favor and watch it again and marvel at the linguistics - the bite and snap of intelligent, fierce dialogue written by a man in love with words and supremely gifted at employing them - and at the story, which comments on everything from mob mentalities to the trivialization of life and love for an ignoble cause. The women are braless, the men are wearing wide ties, and no one has a cell phone or a computer at their desk, but the world Chayefsky presents is the one we’re in, today.

Lots of people emailed me about these obnoxious and appalling cartoons depicting Jesus - on the cross - with an erection, and him kissing (presumably Judas) with more erections.

Yes, they are offensive. Yes, the cartoons fill me with revulsion. But Dave Price* at Dean Esmay’s blog has the response, and because I agree with every word of it, I’ll just let him relay it:

“…as a classical liberal, I support their right to do so.

I forgive them.”

God is Just and Merciful - I’ll trust Him to sort it all out. Meanwhile, it is probably good to pray for a soul who can even come up with such ideas in the first place.

*Thanks, Michael for the clarification.

You need a subscription to read the whole thing, but here is the gist of it:

Hillary Rodham Clinton is more popular among voters than plain Hillary Clinton, a CNN/USA Today poll has discovered.

The addition of the senator’s maiden name, which has been the subject of much discussion among voters both married and single, seems to distance her somewhat from her husband President Clinton, the poll finds.

Yeah, CNN/USA Today just felt like spending money on this question, because it’s vital.

Especially when the candidate involved is married to someone who once polled where they should go on vacation. Polling on the name…that’s beautiful. That’s what we want in charge, someone who won’t even tell you a name until it’s been focus-grouped and submitted for popular approval. In a serious and troubling age, we should elect that president. Al Qaeda will love that president.

And why in heaven’s name would anyone want to distance herself from the “most popular president of all time - why he could be elected again in a heartbeat…” seems to me you ‘d want that cache. You’d stick to it like glue.

A fine example of it can be found here:

The Times’s story was about how Ron and his buddy Bill Clinton (whom Page Six — you gotta love ‘em — refers to as the “former horndog-in-chief) first met. The Times said that Burkle’s Los Angeles supermarkets were not torched during the rioting after the Rodney King incident because “Mr. Burkle treated his customers and his employers fairly.” Clinton, touring the destruction, wanted to meet such a swell guy.

To get back to privacy-seeking Burkle, what was most interesting about the Times’s story was the description of Bill and Ron’s current business relationship, which could turn out to be very, very profitable for the former president. Clinton, it’s said, could make “millions of dollars” from Burkle’s investment funds, and for doing relatively little.

There’s nothing wrong with making money for doing little - we’d all like that, and I’m no class warrior - I don’t resent folks getting rich, by legal means. But Dick Morris points out that it doesn’t quite work when your spouse is running for president and you both refuse to release your income taxes.

The Times also reports that Bill stands to clear tens of millions of dollars - with virtually no risk - from his Yucaipa work. Yet Hillary’s Senate financial disclosures for 2003 and 2004 list as Bill’s only Yucaipa income “more than $1,000″ in “guaranteed payments” as a partner in Yucaipa Global Opportunities Fund 1, LLC.

If Hillary’s a presidential candidate, such conflicts of interest are even more relevant.

Yahuh. Imagine how curious the press would be if, say, Rudy Giuliani were running for office and his spouse had an identical deal going. I’m pretty sure they would want some information, don’t you think? They’d probably want to see tax records, contracts, all that stuff, in order to insure that the possible-future president was not going to be politically or strategically encumbered by business associations. I mean…Cheney resigned from Halliburton and sold his interests in the company to avoid being encumbered by business associations. It worked too, right? Because he did so, no one ever accused him of serving those interests. Uh…wait…

Then again, President Clinton never had to release his medical records, either. Some people simply don’t have to release military records, tax records, medical records, anything at all while other folks gotta release it every scrap and file, and then it’s all lies anyway.

Boy, I’ve lived with mendacity. Now why can’t you live with it? You’ve got to live with it. There’s nothin’ to live with but mendacity. Is there?
- Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

UPDATE: If you missed it elsewhere, Dan Riehl’s long exposition on Dana Priest and Mary McCarthy. I read this and think back to Hillary Clinton’s comments on the GOP: “There is cronyism, there is incompetence…”

Here’s something to get your engine started…

CIA officer Mary McCarthy was fired for leaking a possibly trumped-up story about a secret network of CIA-run prisons in Europe. Ms. McCarthy’s pattern of political donations, her Clinton administration White House service, and her extensive network of ties to other important Clintonista figures has set off a blogstorm of data mining and speculation.

There are more questions than answers for the moment, but yellowcake uramium is not only of strategic importance for WMD puposes, it is also a highly profitable commodity traded under UN supervision and restrictions, a set of circumstances known to produce extraordinary opportunities for both profit and corruption, as in Oil-for-Food. These comparatively still waters may run deep. Investigators equipped with both subpoena power and security clearance may be called for.

Read it all. Worlds are turning on 16 words someone didn’t want said. Then check out Dan Riehl who wonders why Dana Priest got a 2005 Pulitzer for information leaked in 2002. In 2002. It’s long and important. Read it all, too.

UPDATE: Check out the update at Michelle Malkin’s - where we discover that the UAW union stipulates that the televisions viewed by union members requires keeping that dial on CNN.

I bet even Paddy Chayefsky could not have imagined a press this deranged.

PLEASE tell me that the WH press corp is not this pathetic - that they are not yet parodies of themselves. IF it is true (I am fiercely hoping it is not), then the WH pressies are devolving into 8 year old brats…and I’m worried that they may continue to devolve until they become infants, then fetuses, then embryoes, then zygots, then simple, unfertilized sperm and egg…

This un-named reporter (if this is true - please say it’s not…even if it IS, please deny it, it’s that pathetic…I WANT to believe that no reporter actually bothered Scott McClellan with a cry of “victimization” and cable-news monopoly via the dreaded Fox News channel. I WANT to believe that the WH press folk are not suggesting that “one channel” is okay, as long as its the “right sort” of channel. I WANT to believe that Scott McClellan did not actually entertain this complaint rather than laugh at it and tell the reporter to grow up.)

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, the conference room, or the senior staff office, the staff office, they’re different TVs, and you can switch to different channels. I’m not sure if some of these in the back are connected to some of the others that are watching right here, right now. It doesn’t look like it to me. I’ve never known anyone that’s raised a complaint about a request from back here to watch a different channel.

Q I used the phone back here.

MR. McCLELLAN: I find this all quite amusing, to tell you the truth. I mean, there are a lot of people on this plane that do watch that channel.

MR. McCLELLAN: First time you brought it to my attention. I’ll go see what we can do on it.

* * * * *

MR. McCLELLAN: We just called up. They’re going to be changing it, at your all’s request, to the channel that you requested, which is CNN — from the press corps.

Q Thanks, Scott.

I hope that “Thanks, Scott” was said with a sheepish face.

Please…please tell me this is some joke, because the appropriate answer by an adult dealing with this sort of perpetual adolescent would be a smile and a friendly, “you’re not seriously calling yourself a victim, are you, because that would just be too pathetic…” which would allow the child - sensing his silliness - to smile back and save face, saying, “of course it was a joke…” and the subject would quickly be changed

Please tell me that Tony Snow will do the right thing from this point on and gently mock these people back into some semblance of quasi-adult sanity.

This is not the first time McClellen made an incredible question credible by not laughing at it. When does he officially leave?

UPDATE: It’s True! Unbelievable! (Rightwing.com notes that Hotline left off that last bit. I’m sure the folks who think this reporter did not engage in childish behavior are sensitive to the fact that this exchange demonstrates the very mindset the reporter felt “victimized” by: that one network might be “preferred” and “acceptable” over another or that it is reasonable to act like a child because something on the television doesn’t conform to your world-view. I wonder if he objected to always watching CNN while traveling with the Clinton administration. I’d bet the house that he didn’t.)

Moderate Voice asks: Do VandeHei’s bosses realize that while he’s being paid to cover the news he’s fighting over who controls the White House remote? Or is controlling White House TV viewing habits a new part of print media beat reporting? Gandelman also directs you to check out the comments section at Hotline, which is…pretty amazing.

Weirdly, the press seems to like this story. They seem to think VanderHei comes off well. Trust me, he doesn’t. Lorie Byrd recounts Claire Shipman’s weird remarks on the story. Have they all lost their minds?

Nose on your face and more clever…and real…satire.

Related: (Sort of) - One of my doc’s office always, always has the waiting room tv set for ABC (WHY do we need televisions blaring at us everywhere we go, anyway?) So, I suppose I should whine and carry on because now I’ll be forced to listen to this woman while I wait? I mean, it’s the doctor’s office, and his tv, but I don’t like The View, and dammit, I’ll be a VICTIM, here. It will have to be changed.

With not one but two deadlines bearing down on me, the light blogging is necessary. It’s refreshing, too. Needing to train my attention elsewhere, I haven’t been reading much news or many blogs; I’m discovering that my own ideological fixations are ratcheted up when I am consuming enormous amounts of data and opinion, and I suppose that is not an unusual experience for anyone. Reading less, opining less, I find myself settling back into a more moderate sort of reasoning, rather like a feather which has been caught in a whirlwind and is finally able to float to the ground. Doubtless, like a feather, I’ll be careening again when my Irish storms blow, but for now, I’m disinclined to the rant.

Chesterton wrote of the man riding the back of a beast so enormous he knew not what it was - seeing only his portion of it, he set his perspectives by it. Sometimes, when we are riding the beast of our ideologies, we do the same. A week or so ago I posted this piece and moved on. Re-reading it now, I think I might have edited out some of my more florid prose, although the gist of the thing - that there is within the Fourth Estate and some parts of the left a too-ready embrasure of mendacity when it suits the cause - is being more than borne out by the “insta-spin” we’ve watched the press and the left provide to the firing of Mary McCarthy and the strange case being made for the leaking of national secrets in a time of war. You can check out AJ or Mac or Tom Maguire and just keep scrolling down to see the daily updates of excuses, parsed words willfully unconnected dots (which are conspicuous in their absence) to which we are being subjected. Not telling the the whole story (or the mediating intelligences discerning for us what we “need” to know) is as good as lying.

Be that as it may, while I stand by my point as valid (I certainly offered enough examples) in re-reading the piece I was unhappy with my own rhetorical excesses. I could just hear my center-left l’il bro Thom saying, “that sort of writing didn’t serve you well back when you were a leftist, either.” He’d be right, too. It might serve others well, but when I look back on that sort of sword-brandishing prose, I feel like I have been too-long on the back of that too-large beast, and perspective is thus weakened.

I’m thinking about all of this now because of this typically thoughtful piece by Dick Meyer at CBS, in which he explores the parental “we-know-what-is-best-for-you” instincts of both the right and the left.

My hunch is that Democrats will capture House and Senate seats but not the House or Senate. And if they do, the victory will be fleeting and they will do poorly in 2008.

That’s a hunch, no more, and I admit it. But I felt it as a certainty when I read a column by The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne this week. Dionne was arguing with a fellow liberal who wrote what the Democrats need to do is destroy today’s “radical individualism” and replace it with “a politics of a “common good.” That’s fine, Dionne said, but we need to hear “more about self-interest, rightly understood.”

That phrase made me cringe. It still does.

“Self-interest, rightly understood” is a fancy-pants way of saying, “I know what is in your interest better than you do.” It is, in my view, a politically stupid and morally diseased position. Democrats, by temperament, are slightly more susceptible to it than Republicans.

Meyer suggests - rightly - that both right and left have their agendas, that the left is more inclined to concern itself with “what you eat or drink,” while the right is more inclined to hammer you for having or not having faith, etc. He, unsurprisingly, makes the left’s goals sound slightly more noble than the right’s but that is a picayune observation I must make only to needle him a bit. His main point is sound: both sides would, if they could, over-parent their fellow Americans. I agree that the right, which is more concerned with preserving individual liberties, is less-inclined to the totalitarian nanny-statism the left loves. But we’ve got a few folks on our side who wouldn’t mind snapping the whip and getting the trains to run on time, so to speak, if they could. It’s unavoidable.

But what I have learned, in these past few days as I have cut down on my news/blog reading, is that when we insist on politicizing everything, subjecting everything to pass under the lens of our particular ideologies, we tend to suck the joy, and the vibrancy, out of what we are experiencing. We become prune-faced Jane Hathaways, concerned with how things measure up on the charts of our political orthodoxies - that all the rules are being covered - and as we do so, well, we become as joyless and frustrated as that rigid character.

I’m not talking about the sort of “we know better” chiding of Hillary Clinton, which is only a tiresome idea. I’m talking about the sort of ideological fidelity that panics a parent into stomping on the innocent patriotism of a 6-year old, or which has so narrowed the heart that - after an unprecedented attack up on her city - a mother finally concedes that her daughter may own an American flag but only if she buys it with her own money. Talk about sucking out joy or vibrancy…sometimes, it might be better to simply allow our kids their happiness, unimpeded, if only for a short while. Rest assured, there will be other chances to “set them right.” And in politics, sometimes maybe it’s best not to jerk the knee.

I’m not suggesting that only leftists dash the innocences of their children. I’ve seen pro-life parents subject their little ones to viewing pictures of shredded fetuses, convinced that their 6 year-old needs to witness such carnage for the cause. I’ve overheard a conservative friend denounce Rudy Giuliani for being “multi-divorced,” while curiously finding no need to tell her daughter that Newt Gingrich is also “multi-divorced” or that he told one wife he was leaving her as she was being treated for cancer.

My DH and I have mostly allowed our kids to be who they were. In the beginning, trying to parent perfectly, I allowed “no guns or implements of war” in Elder Son’s toybox. He, being the dreamer, designed and made weapons out of his Legos and other toys. By age three, he had an entire arsenal of his own design - and this in a house where not a single gun or sword existed. Rather than freak-out I bowed to the fact that weapons exist in the world and he eventually got real toy guns, which came along with some lectures about the distinction between “play” violence and “real” violence. But to be honest, I didn’t lecture too hard because I remembered playing “army” as a kid - gathered with my friends, we would run through the woods playing war games, shooting each other from trees, sniping from hillsides - and neither I nor my childhood pals have become fiends.

Would I have preferred him to dislike guns as I did? Sure. But just as my politics have changed over the last 22 years, I trusted that he, too, would have all sorts of ideas and opinions as he moved through life. All these years later, Elder Son still plays war games on his college campus (excuse me, Zombie-kill games) and he modifies the nerf-weaponry and creates “bop” swords for the Kendo fantasies on the great lawn, but he is as placid a fellow as you could hope to meet. There is no neurosis or guilt abounding within his gameplay. His instincts lay less in violence than in volunteering for EMS training. He made it to right reason (which is more important and less insideous, I think, than “self-interest, rightly understood”) without the daily harangue on my part, on what I then looked-at as the evils of guns and war.

Parenting is a tricky business. You want to instill your children with what you believe to be “right values” but - if you are a good parent - you also want them to be able to find those values on their own, without your constant vigilance (or your constant hammering), because you will not forever be here. There’s a time and a place for instilling our kids with our values, but also a time to simply leave a child free to his or her own musings and convictions. A kid is a kid; his convictions will change and grow, if you allow them to.

At birth, Elder Son was sweet-natured, agreeable and dreamy but required his “space.” Buster was assertive and impatient, gregarious but with well-defined boundaries. That this still describes both of them accurately convinces me that we are, in the end, the people God meant us to be - though certainly shaped by how we were parented. I believe that America is a blessed place, meant to be the model of individual liberty it mostly has been, but it too is shaped by the parenting of our politics.

Good parenting leaves room for a child’s individual reasoning, and good governance should leave room for individuality, for the reaching of personal potentialities, inventiveness, assertiveness and dreaminess, too. And innocent joy. We political junkies, we whose filtration systems narrowly direct everything leftward-or-rightward, forget that at our children’s peril. Our nation’s too.

UPDATE: Shrinkwrapped has a typically well thought-out and instructive commentary on Meyer’s column:

This is an extremely important distinction. I suspect the vast majority of Americans are classical liberals, who do not see human beings as perfectible and do not support using government power to coerce “perfect” behavior. I suspect this is, in fact, a more important distinction for American voters than traditional Left versus Right; for the last 30 years, the Left has been much more associated with “Positive” liberty than the Right, and as with all politic parties that gain power for a long period of time, they took things too far. The Left was officially repudiated in the 1994 election but the unelected Left (especially in Academia, Media, and Hollywood) have been fighting to regain power since. When the Right overstepped its bounds, it was slapped down, but the long term trend back toward more traditional American “Negative” liberty continues.

Additionally, those who take positions that derive from notions of “Positive” liberty tend to accept the ethos that “the end justifies the means” and this is always dangerous.

Read the whole thing.

Related: (Perhaps I should open a Dick Meyer category…)
Wealth Porn and Cognitive Dissonance at the Grey Lady
Dick Meyer Finally Says It
Paranoia Ascending
Meyer and the Futility of Political Debate

Check out the video; this kid, Elliott Yamin, can sing!

He may not win - okay, he’s not photogenic - but he needs a recording contract, he was on fire tonight.

Chris Daughtry sang his song like a man who knew what he was singing about - unlike most of the others. The video is here. He clearly benefited from the advice he was given by Bocelli and Foster.

The rest? Myeh. Paris sounded like Miss Gladys Knight (I love!) but still…kinda myeh. Katharine was gorgeous and so-so, Taylor was shower-singing and Kellie was shudder-inducing.

I know Taylor and Kellie have huge - and to me, inexplicable - fan bases; but as Buster said tonight, if tomorrow we learn that Kellie is “safe” and Elliott is in “danger” yet again, then what’s the point of even watching? If the thing is a singing contest and not a popularity contest, then Kellie needs to be gone, right away. Please.

And maybe I’d like Taylor better if just once he got thrown into the bottom three, where he surely belongs this week.

I can’t believe I am hooked on this stupid show. Ah, well…

Ann Althouse - as usual - has her excellent and fun recap. She too thinks Chris was the only one who seemed to know he was singing a love song.

Related:
Daughtry, Sutherland, Bryn, I’m an Idolator
Shame, Praise, American Idols, Undercutting Greatness
Dang, Chris Daughtry is good
Elliott Yamin Moody’s Mood for Love

Love this excerpted chat from Gerald - a Q&A between young people and the pope (and how I like that Benedict spends so much time talking one-on-one with his flock - he is a good teacher!):

Holy Father, my name is Anna. I am 19 years old… One of the problems we are constantly facing is how to approach emotional issues. We frequently find it difficult to love. Yes, difficult: Because it is easy to confuse love with selfishness, especially today when most of the media almost imposes on us an individualistic, secularized vision of sexuality in which everything seems licit and everything is permitted in the name of freedom and individual conscience. The family based on marriage now seems little more than a Church invention, not to speak of premarital relations, whose prohibition appears, even to many of us believers, difficult to understand or anachronistic. Knowing well that so many of us are striving to live our emotional life responsibly, could you explain to us what the Word of God has to tell us about this? Thank you.

Benedict XVI: This is a vast question and it would certainly be impossible to answer it in a few minutes, but I will try to say something.

Anna herself has already given us some of the answers. She said that today love is often wrongly interpreted because it is presented as a selfish experience, whereas it is actually an abandonment of self, and thus becomes a self-discovery.

She also said that a consumer culture falsifies our life with a relativism that seems to grant us everything, but in fact completely drains us.

So let us listen to the word of God in this regard. Anna rightly wanted to know what the word of God says. For me it is a beautiful thing to observe that already in the first pages of sacred Scripture, subsequent to the story of man’s creation, we immediately find the definition of love and marriage.

The sacred author tells us: “A man will leave his father and mother and will cleave to his wife, and they will become one flesh,” one life (cf. Genesis 2:24-25). We are at the beginning and we are already given a prophecy of what marriage is; and this definition also remains identical in the New Testament.

Marriage is this following of the other in love, thus becoming one existence, one flesh, therefore inseparable; a new life that is born from this communion of love that unites and thus also creates the future.

Medieval theologians, interpreting this affirmation which is found at the beginning of sacred Scripture, said that marriage is the first of the seven sacraments to have been instituted by God already at the moment of creation, in paradise, at the beginning of history and before any human history.

It is a sacrament of the Creator of the universe; hence, it is engraved in the human being himself, who is oriented to this journey on which man leaves his parents and is united to a woman in order to form only one flesh, so that the two may be a single existence.

Thus, the sacrament of marriage is not an invention of the Church; it is really “con-created” with man as such, as a fruit of the dynamism of love in which the man and the woman find themselves and thus also find the Creator who called them to love.

It is true that man fell and was expelled from paradise, or, in other words, more modern words, it is true that all cultures are polluted by the sin, the errors of human beings in their history, and that the initial plan engraved in our nature is thereby clouded. Indeed, in human cultures we find this clouding of God’s original plan.

At the same time, however, if we look at cultures, the whole cultural history of humanity, we note that man was never able to forget completely this plan that exists in the depths of his being. He has always known, in a certain sense, that other forms of relationships between a man and a woman do not truly correspond with the original design for his being.

And thus, in cultures, especially in the great cultures, we see again and again how they are oriented to this reality: monogamy, the man and the woman becoming one flesh.

This is how a new generation can grow in fidelity, how a cultural tradition can endure, renew itself in continuity and make authentic progress.

The Lord, who spoke of this in the language of the prophets of Israel, said referring to Moses, who tolerated divorce: Moses permitted you to divorce “because of the hardness of your hearts.” After sin, the heart became “hard,” but this was not what the Creator had intended, and the prophets, with increasing clarity, insisted on this original plan.

To renew man, the Lord — alluding to these prophetic voices which always guided Israel towards the clarity of monogamy — recognized with Ezekiel that, to live this vocation, we need a new heart; instead of a heart of stone — as Ezekiel said — we need a heart of flesh, a heart that is truly human.

The Lord gives us a new heart and we must live with this new heart, using the appropriate therapies to ensure that it is really “our own.” In this way we live with all that the Creator has given us and this creates a truly happy life.

You’ll really want to read it all, and check out the link for the other Q&A’s.

Related:
Awwww
Pastoral Benedict
The pope needs to lighten up!
Why Benedict became a priest
Popes as Parents
Benedict is homey
The Eucharist and its meaning for the Jews
Pope-bashing in my email

AJ Strata has the latest spin on the McCarthy leak story. He’s quizzical about the game being played and notes that the Democrats - at least the Clintonian hoarde - seem highly spooked.

Maguire notes how quickly facts change at the NY Times, where someone goes from being an “friend of McCarthy’s and former advisor to Mr. Kerry’s campaign in 2004,” to merely being “a former colleague” of McCarthy’s, while another McCarthy, Andrew, notes:

“There is no mention by the Post — none — that Mary McCarthy is a big Kerry campaign and Democratic Party contributor.

“How can the WPost justify reporting one friend’s mere impression that McCarthy is not biased and that it is very difficult even for those who know her well to understand why she would leak sensitive information, and yet not report the objective fact that — after a meteoric professional rise in intelligence circles during a Democratic administration — McCarthy, while a government official on a government salary, gave at least $7,700 of her own money in a single year to Democratic political campaigns?”

The Flying Lumberyard notes McCarthy’s Berger connection and writes: It’s a pretty sad day when former Clinton administration officials apparently need to be strip searched for stolen documents before leaving Washington’s National Archive.

Slightly O/T, but really good, is Shrinkwrapped’s discourse on the meaning of “left and right,”, distinctions which none of us “love” to make, but which seem unavoidable these days. It’s a very clarifying piece.