The Anchoress

Blogfather Ed Morrissey has gone international! That is, his impassioned open letter to the Pope caught the eye of a NY Times reporter in Rome, and he interviewed Ed for this interesting piece. Said Ed:

“It just seemed to me that by apologizing and backing away a little, he was encouraging more of the violence and anger on the streets,” said Edward Morrissey, 43, who this week posted an anguished “open letter” to Benedict on his popular blog, Captain’s Quarters, urging the pope not to apologize further.

“It’s the nature of radicalism that if you give an inch, they will take a mile,” he said in a telephone interview from Minnesota, where he blogs and works as a call center manager. “That’s why I wanted to say: Don’t go any further.”

Kathryn Jean Lopez brings us Benedict’s remarks from yesterday’s weekly audience. He doesn’t apologize. He’s not taking it back. Good. He should stop “clarifying” it, too, since he is being willfully misunderstood, at this point.

I suspect the Day of Rage” will commence tomorrow. Rosh Hashanah begins at sundown, tomorrow, btw. A reader wondered if that was significant? You decide.

There are two great, must-read pieces on the Pope’s words, Muslim Rage and the limits of the “tolerance of the rest of the world. The first is this piece by Brian Mickelthwait, and John Batchelor’s great article in the NY Sun. (H/T on that last to CBS Public Eye’s excellent Vaughn Ververs, whose piece on Bill Maher’s plan to talk religion on the Evening News is good reading, particularly in light of all of this.)

Fausta has some good, thoughtful musings on all this rage, just posted. She’s found some wisdom via Epictetus (Epictetus!) that we may want to bear in mind in the coming days!

On to Hugo Chavez! Realizing his comedy act doesn’t play well outside of the unhallowed halls of the useless, money-sucking United Nations, he is cancelling further mad expositions and going home. There was a very big story here, but the press appears to be downplaying it or, as a pal wrote to me today:

“This is interesting for the print media…The NY TIMES, Wash Post, LA TIMES and NY Post do not have Chavez featured on the front page - at least not online. USA TODAY has it buried at the bottom of the page; its lead ‘WORLD’ story online is about the pope. Only the NY DAILY NEWS has Chavez displayed prominently on the front. Yahoo this morning doesn’t include him in its news summary.

This clown comes to the United Nations, calls the American President a “devil,” (not that the religion-hating folks minded that - the irony!) and the other clowns in the room (whom we fund much-too-much) laugh and applaud, and it’s not a leading story the next day? Well. I guess we can quickly figure out that the “mediating intelligences” who determine what we will and will not see have decided that - for some reason - we’re better off not seeing the behavior of a pack of mad jackals…we might not want to continue funding them, or rushing to their aid when disaster strikes, you know? Or maybe, they figure the American public would look at yesterday’s very telling absurdities and say, “you don’t come to America and say that about her president…” Oh, no, what a freakin’ nightmare! It might even reflect well on Bush in the all-important, holy writ polls!

So, the press is trying to go as quiet as possible on Hugo and the UN gigglers and Ahmadinejad - so beloved of Mike Wallace - didn’t come off too well, either. I said yesterday that a “smart” press “would bury” the Chavez and Ahmadinejad stories…but I never said they “should.” Scrappleface understands.

Even worse, even the “increasingly unpopular war in Iraq” seems to be becoming “increasingly popular”. What a bummer of a week for the press! And by extension for their political party.

Yeah, that’s probably why the press has gone missing on a rather big story. They seem distracted, those “mediating intelligences,” and perhaps that’s why they missed the 35,000 people protesting Ahmadinejad’s visit to the UN, a protest which included speakers such as John Bolton, Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, New York Gov. George Pataki and Alan Dershowitz. That’s a pretty luminous bunch of speakers and a lot of people, but the intelligent ones mediated that we did not need to know about it. Meryl Yourish points out that the only paper to mention this large protest was the NY Sun.

The ummm…approximately 2,000, who showed up to protest President Bush and the Increasingly Popular Iraq War, though, they got plenty of headlines. Note that all of those headlines read “thousands,”of protesters, not “only 2,000.”

As I’ve said before, headlines have a powerful effect on the world. Busy or incurious people rarely read past them. For some, the headline tells them all they will ever know about a thing. And the press knows it.

Surprisingly, The Nation noted the small anti-Bush, anti-War turnout and seemed appropriately bummed-out and impressively introspective.

Meanwhile, you can read about the media-ignored protest against Ahmadinejad here. Pamela has pictures here. Oh, and if you’re interested, I’m not a George Allen fan but the anti-semitism being voiced against him is here. Lovely people, ain’t they, those “peaceful, tolerant folks?”

Slightly o/t, but it’s another idea the press is missing: Theodore Dalrymple’s examination on whether Old Europe is in extremis