THIS MODERN WORLD

Opening paragraphs:

LOS ANGELES — An interceptor missile destroyed a mock warhead in space over the Pacific Ocean on Friday, a key test of the U.S. missile defense system that prompted North Korea to accuse America of threatening war.

It was the most realistic test of the systems that would be used against an attack, said Missile Defense Agency spokesman Rick Lehner.

The 54-foot interceptor shot out of an underground silo at Vandenberg Air Force Base on the central California coast at 10:39 a.m., 17 minutes after the mock warhead was launched from Kodiak Island, Alaska, Lehner said.

The interceptor carried a refrigerator-sized “kill vehicle” that locked on to the approaching mock enemy missile and flew into the 4-foot-long warhead at 18,000 mph.

Lehner said both disintegrated more than 100 miles above the Earth and a few hundred miles west of Vandenberg. The interceptor’s flight lasted 13 minutes.

Nineteen paragraphs down:

The launch was postponed from Thursday after fog socked in Kodiak Island. There was also fog over Vandenberg Friday morning but it burned off.

They’ve been pouring billions into this project since before many of you were born. And they’re finally at a point that it might work, as long as it’s a nice sunny day and they have the enemy’s exact missile coordinates in advance.

Via Tbogg.

To properly enjoy a Bill O’Reilly column, you have to imagine it being read in the voice of a cranky old man chastising neighborhood hooligans.

My money says Tina Fey doesn’t know anything about the roots of terrorism or how to prevent the next terror attack. The woman can sneer all day long, but I’ll put her on my TV program in a heartbeat if she wants to prove me wrong.

Neil Young can write all the mediocre music he wants about how evil the Bush administration is, but while he is rockin’ in the free world, I know it wouldn’t be free if Young were in charge.

My pal Jon Stewart and his legion of writers think they’re ultra cool and hip because they embrace every left wing cause that comes down the pike. Yeah, you won an Emmy, Stewart, but the fix was in. The choir to whom you preach dominates the award voting. You Daily Show guys can be funny but how many Americans want you people standing between them and Iran?

Subtext: Where’s my Emmy? I’m the one who’s out here every day standing between you ungrateful little wretches and Iran, and you can’t even give me one little Emmy in return?

But there’s more!

So I say this, Bill Maher. You’re a witty guy, but out of your league on complicated matters like national security. When you can tell me what Ansar al-Islam was doing in Northern Iraq, then I might watch your HBO show.

When George Clooney can explain exactly how the Pakistani secret police broke a captured al-Qaeda big shot who subsequently gave up the London terrorists arrested for planning an attack on American airliners, then I’ll rent “Syriana.”

When the pouty Dixie Chicks, who are having big trouble selling concert tickets this summer, can tell me the origin of the Islamic Brotherhood, then I might go to one of their shows.

But I’m not holding my breath on any of these challenges. As the saying goes: Opinions are like lips, everybody has them. But some opinions, like some lips, are razor thin, and there ain’t enough collagen in the world to help these misguided showbiz people.

Actually, the phrase is “opinions are like assholes.” But I see no need to take that image any further…

… update from a reader:

There’s something really, really funny in the final quote of your post today about O’Reilly.

“When the pouty Dixie Chicks, who are having big trouble selling concert tickets this summer, can tell me the origin of the Islamic Brotherhood, then I might go to one of their shows.”

Here’s the thing: There is no such thing as the “Islamic Brotherhood.”

I assume he was refering to the Muslim Brotherhood, an important Egyptian-based terrorist movement founded in 1928.

A trivial mistake? Not if your column is predicated on the idea that critics you don’t like should shut up because they’re not nuanced enough.

Crooks and Liars has audio up of the bit I mentioned the other day, in which Limbaugh blames liberals for obesity.

Sirota:

So let me get this straight – Joe Lieberman co-authors the resolution that authorized the Iraq War, he spends the next 3 and a half years using Connecticut’s Senate seat as a human shield to defend the White House from those who raise questions about the war, he publicly berates Democrats for criticizing the invasion as more than 2,600 American troops are killed in Iraq, he likens voters who are upset with the war to terrorist sympathizers – and yet, we are all supposed to forget that because 3 weeks ago after losing his primary he finally went on a Sunday talk show and admitted Don Rumsfeld isn’t doing such a great job?

Greenwald has a case study:

When Fox News journalists Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig were being held by Gaza kidnappers, they were used as solemn symbols of our grand struggle against Islamic fascists. But ever since they were released, physically unharmed, they have become, as John Amato documented the other day, the targets of the same sort of hostility and bizarre resentment which was directed at Jill Carroll when she was released. It’s almost as though the fact that they weren’t killed — and then refused to read some fictitious propaganda script about their captivity — instantaneously transformed them from glorious martyrs in the War on Terror to impediments which needed to be neutralized through attacks on their mental health and character.

Yesterday, David Warren, a columnist for Real Clear Politics and The Ottawa Citizen, attacked Centanni and Wiig for being cowards and “men without chests” and said that they illustrate so much of what is wrong with the West and why we are losing to the Islamofascists:

The case of the two Fox News journalists, held hostage in Gaza, is worth dwelling upon. . . .

The degree to which our starch is awash is exhibited in the behaviour of so many of our captives, but especially in these two. They were told to convert to Islam under implicit threat (blindfolded and hand-tied, they could not judge what threat), and agreed to make the propaganda broadcasts to guarantee their own safety. That much we can understand, as conventional cowardice. (Understand; not forgive.) But it is obvious from their later statements that they never thought twice; that they could see nothing wrong in serving the enemy, so long as it meant they’d be safe. . . .

I assume they are not Christians (few journalists are), but had they ever been instructed in that faith, they might have grasped that conversion to Islam means denial of Christ, and that is something many millions of Christians (few of them intellectuals) have refused to do, even at the cost of excruciating deaths . . .

And the two Fox journalists, whom I will not stoop to name, begged for their lives even though, in retrospect, their lives probably weren’t in danger. . . . Men without chests, men without character, men who don’t think twice.

Warren argues that the cowardice of the two Fox journalists in saving their own lives illustrates why we are losing the War of Civilizations — because of what Warren calls the “Chestlessness” of our “men.” As Warren puts it: “That is the substance of most Islamo-fascist propaganda: that the West consists of straw men, of men without chests, of men easily pushed over.” To Warren, the cowardly chestlessness of Western men is why “the West is proving unable to cope with a threat from a fanatical Islamic movement, that it ought to be able to snuff out with fair ease.”

Warren has a biography page on his website. In telling us about himself, Warren complains that “the thumb on (his) right hand still hurts sometimes from when it was broken in a dodgeball game,” tells us that his favorite sport is cricket, talks of his love for Ella Fitzgerald and Jane Austen, touts his devout Catholicism, confesses that he has “been estranged [from his wife of 18 years] for going on four years,” and says he is “fascinated by seeds, small shells, tiny fishes, & insects.”

There’s more.