People don’t support Barack Obama because they think he’s a good leader. Quite the opposite. They support him because they think he will do what they would do if they were president. Obama supports think they could run the country, and they want Obama to do it by proxy. They really believe that experience is meaningless, that their innate “intelligence” and “insight” is all they need to operate the controls of the world’s largest military and economic power.

You can see this mania play out right here on Instablogs.

Recently one of Instablog’s most mendacious and shameless propagandists, who blogs without doing research or posting links in the manner of a charlatan, wrote a post disingenuously called “The Case Against Barack Obama.” But the only purpose of the post was to summarily ignore all the evidence against Obama and blindly further his cult of personality, under false pretenses.

The next time you’re in the mood to be amused, ask an Obama supporter a simple question: “What would you have to learn about Obama to cause you to stop supporting him?” They’ll give you the same type of gibberish that a Jim Jones supporter would have, right before drinking that fateful Kool Aid. Then it will become crystal clear now much Obama’s minions care about pesky, annoying little things like facts.

So in response I offer the case for Barack Obama.

I recently published a post in which I listed six specific promises Obama had made during his primary election campaign which he then repudiated as soon as he got the nomination, stabbing his liberal supporters in the back. In response, the liberal Daily Kos blog’s publisher has revoked his promise to donate $2,000 to the Obama campaign.

Now the New York Times reports on yet a seventh broken promise by Obama, and he hasn’t even been formally nominated yet. During the primaries Obama promised to quickly end the war in Iraq. Now, he’s going to “refine” his policies and do no such thing.

So it’s perfectly clear that Obama is just another lying politician. It’s just as clear that, by his own terms, there is no reason to vote for him. He’s totally unqualified for office, and his only argument in his own defense has been that he’s not just another lying politician, but represents “change you can believe in.”

However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t vote for him, even if you’re a Republican. There are two excellent reasons to do so.

First, Bill Clinton. Democrats, idiots that they are, were overjoyed when Clinton was elected. But soon, the House of Representatives was back in Republican hands after a 50-year absence. Welfare had been abolished, the budged balanced, NAFTA enacted, capital punishment staunchly supported. These were all Republican pipe dreams. Bill Clinton actually did them. Clinton was then followed by an eight-year Republican presidency with a good portion of time seeing the party in control of Congress.

Second, Jimmy Carter. Just as in 1976, the nation is poised to enter a recession at the end of an eight-year Republican term. Just as in 1976, if Obama takes power he’ll get the blame for it. Just like Carter, he’ll be too soft for American tastes on our enemies, and just like Carter after four years he’ll be decisively repudiated and power turned back to the Republicans. In 1980, that meant 12 years of uninterrupted Republican rule.

The inevitable failure of the Obama presidency, both because of Clintonian betrayal of liberal ideals and Carterian incompetence with the economy and foreign policy, will usher in a whole new era of Republican dominance. His outrageous dishonesty, corruption and lack of principle (blind Clintonian ambition) will alienate his own party, divide it and lay waste to it. Along the way, the loathsome, racist institution of affirmative action will bite the dust.

That’s the case for Barack H. Obama. And for the cherry on top, he’s on a sneaker! What more could you ask?

July 4th is American “Independence Day.” So it’s fitting to use this opportunity to find out a bit more about how Americans think.

It has been observed: “The Battleground Poll is the most unbiased of all polls. It is a collaboration of the Tarrance Group, a Republican polling organization, and Lake Research Partners, a Democrat polling organization. This almost unique effort at having truly fair polls has been around since 1991, and it has proven exceeding accurate in predicting elections.”

The most recent Battleground Poll found that presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain have exactly the same “positive” and “negative” impressions among likely American voters (see pages Q18 and Q19 of the graphic report). They are both rated roughly 55% positive and 40% negative with 5% undecided. Obama’s negative impression has doubled since early 2007, while McCain’s has increased by only 20%.

Another fascinating fact revealed by the poll is that 62% of Americans view themselves as “very” or “somewhat” conservative while only 34% self-identify as “very” or “somewhat” liberal (see page 18 of the text report). That’s right: Nearly twice as many Americans see themselves as being on the conservative side of government issues as see themselves as being on the liberal side.

It’s rather disturbing, then, to see the New York Times report that a majority of American university department professorial positions are staffed by liberals, with “moderates” taking up most of the others and conservatives, other than in business schools, relegated to a tiny oppressed minority.

It’s also been determined that American journalists are five times more likely to be liberal than conservative.

But given those facts, it’s easy to see how a public hysteria might be whipped up against conservative Americans by liberals, using their power in the media in the classroom, where clearly an affirmative action program is needed to offset a tragic imbalance of diversity and tolerance.

Conservatives should not lose hope that they can win those battles. On July 4, 1776, a ragtag group of American colonists stood up to the world’s only superpower and demanded the right to live in freedom. For the next six years, they risked their lives as one, spilling their blood on battlefield after battlefield, losing over and over again, determined in the words of the license plates on all cars from the State of New Hampshire, whose ratification of the U.S. Constitution made us a country, to “live free or die.”

Those brave men and women set an example for all the world to follow. They showed that no matter how overwhelming the odds might seem, those who are determined to struggle for liberty can carry the day. When the apparently mighty edifice of the USSR toppled and fell, the world was reminded not only of this fact, but also that it takes more than the collapse of dictatorship to earn freedom, it takes a concerted effort of all the nation’s people to preserve what has been won. So far, the people of Russia have proven unwilling to put forth that effort, and the result is that the average Russian man doesn’t live to see his 60th year or earn as much as $5/hour for his labor.

I hope that one day the people of Russia will recognize Thomas Jefferson’s self-evident truths and stand together as one to fight for them, as Americans have been proudly doing for more than two centuries now, under the same constitution and form of government. In that time, the Russian state has collapsed four times. First the monarchy fell, then the democracy founded by Alexander Kerensky, then Soviet dictatorship which replaced that collapsed, and then the democracy founded by Boris Yeltsin that came after it soon gave way to the neo-Soviet dictatorship of Vladimir Putin. After all that dicatorship, Russia doesn’t rank in the top 100 countries of the world for male adult lifespan.

Happy Independence Day!

Marcos Moulitsas
Publisher — The Daily Kos

Dear Marcos,

I read in your ultra left-wing blog The Daily Kos that, even though you bear a hatred for Republicans that borders on pathology, you have still decided to withhold a $2,000 campaign contribution you were planning to make to Barack Obama because you “don’t care for” his recent repudiation of various left-wing promises he made while seeking the Democratic nomination. You say if he’ll change his mind and pledge to keep the promises, you’ll change yours and hand over your cash. You make it appear that you’re a man of principles who’s not afraid to stand up for them.

If you don’t mind my saying so, you’ve left a gaping hole in your analysis of the situation (if you don’t mind my saying so, as you so often do) and I’d like to invite you to fill it.

Suppose, Marcos, that Barack has never had any intention of reneging on any of the promises he made during his primary campaign. Suppose that, like Franklin Roosevelt before him, he has simply decided he needs to lie brazenly to the nation about his intentions upon becoming president. Suppose his plan is to dupe unwary Americans into believing he’ll follow a moderate course (won’t, for instance, as in FDR’s case, try to pack the supreme court, build concentration camps for the Japanese, or try to remain in office by any means for the rest of his life, all while forcing America to become a socialist as possible). Suppose that he intends, upon becoming president, to keep every one of his left-wing promises and plenty more he hasn’t even publicly made yet.

If that happens, Marcos, and he comes to power on totally dishonest false pretenses, what will you do then?

In other words, Marcos, which do you value more: democracy or your agenda? Will you approve the pursuit and enactment of your agenda by anti-democratic means, or if Barack attempts to do so will you oppose him, demanding that the nation first approve such steps openly before they are taken?

This is the acid test of your beliefs, Marcos. Do you place them above democracy? I invite you to clarify this portion of your post so that the record is clear. Will you commit to opposing any major social policy Barack tries to spring on the American people by surprise if he wins?

The nature and extent of Barack Obama’s personal corruption becomes ever clearer as the murky details of his recent purchase of a multi-million-dollar mansion (six bedrooms, four fireplaces, a four-car garage and 5 1/2 baths, a double steam shower, a marble powder room, a wine cellar, a music room, a library, a solarium, beveled glass doors and a granite-floored kitchen) are unraveled. Here’s the story so far.

(1) January 2005. Obama takes his brand new seat in the U.S. Senate.

(2) February 2005. Obama gets a loan to buy a $2 million house in a deluxe Chicago suburb from Northern Trust bank. Although the average interest rate is 6% Obama somehow gets a rate of just 5.6%. Although the usual maximum amount for a loan is $650,000 Obama somehow gets $1.3 million.

(3) June 2005. The wife of Obama’s fundraising guru Tony Rezko (who has now been “convicted of 16 counts in an influence-peddling scheme that reached the highest levels of Illinois state government”) purchases a vacant lot adjoining the Obama target property from the same current owner for the full asking price, $625,000.

(4) Suddenly, the owner of the home becomes willing to sell it to Obama for just $1.6 million or a whopping $300,000 less than the asking price. The closing occurs on the same day that Rezko’s wife closes her deal.

(5) January 2006. Rezko’s wife sells 1,500 square feet worth of the property she bought to Obama for $100,000.

(6) February 2007. Rezko’s wife sells the rest of her vacant lot to a developer for $575,000 and nets a $50,000 profit.

So Obama managed to get a massive, unprecedented sweetheart deal both in terms of the price he paid and the financing he obtained, and he got it not only by trading on his new influence as a U.S. Senator but by utilizing the corrupt services of his now-convicted henchman to pull the strings. If any discount on Obama’s home was appropriate, then a discount on the vacant lot was also appropriate. Did Rezkos’s wife pay the full price to compensate the owner for giving Obama a sweetheart price? Did Obama improperly use his influence to win a sweetheart loan, perhaps in exchange for promises of legislative help for his banker? Current ethics laws don’t require senators to declare their home finance deals, but some senators have called for a reform of this provision. Obama hasn’t. Why not?

These are the questions to be answered as a grand jury begins its investigation of official corruption in Illinois following the Rezko conviction. Will the trail they follow lead to Obama’s doorstep?

Change you can believe in?

Sources: Washington Post, Chicago Tribune.

One of the best sources of information about Russia’s troubles with its breakaway provinces of Chechnya and Igushetia is the Prague Watchdog website. You know they’re doing their job because they routinely come under cyber attack from Kremlin-friendly terrorists, and the website often crashes. Cyber warfare is another arrow in the Kremlin’s malignant quiver of dictatorship that it hasn’t hesitated to deploy at will, most infamously against the nation of Estonia when they dared to move a monument to Russian soldiers installed by Soviet imperialists.

Two recent articles from PW are cases in point.

First, in regard to Chechnya, PW reports:

The Chechen underground, it seems, has got its second wind. The beginning of the spring and summer campaign has been marked by several high-profile attacks. However, in the absence of any plausible statistics it is rather difficult to judge to what extent the current activity of the saboteurs is unique. Does it exceed the figures for the same period last year, or the year before? While it would obviously be wrong to jump to conclusions, the frequency and scale of operations during the past month are none the less unprecedented. The Alkhazurovo raid in May, the similar attacks in Benoy, the shelling of a convoy near the village of Chishki, the shooting-up of an armoured personnel carrier near Bamut: such is the list – doubtless an incomplete one – of sabotage actions by the Chechen underground.

I routinely report instances of separatist violence in Chechnya on my blog La Russophobe, and I have pointed out how utterly insane it is for Russia to be allowed to hold the 2014 Olympic games in nearby Chechnya. This is quite simply an open invitation to terrorism on a massive scale that Russia can do nothing to prevent. In fact, there’s a huge question as to whether Russia can even manage to build the facilities it needs to actually host the athletic contests, much less to provide security.

But this has no effect on the Kremlin’s propaganda machine, which continues to insist it has solved the Chechnya problem. The Kremlin has liquidated all opposition parties in Russia and destroyed the independent media. All national TV stations are state-owned and dispense no criticism of the Kremlin — contrast this with the relentless bashing George Bush gets over Iraq.

Then PW came with a second item, this time about Ingushetia, ominously warning:

For the sake of dramatic effect it could be said, as some experts have done, that Ingushetia is now on the brink, and that on the other side lie open disobedience and disloyalty to the federal centre, armed struggle running parallel with civic protests which are assuming an increasingly ambitious and large-scale form, Salafism, Wahhabism, and so on. All of these factors are already present, and the dynamic they create as they grow is an explosive one. Yet it is premature to draw the conclusion that events in Ingushetia will inevitably follow the Chechen pattern.

The depth of Ingushetia’s loyalty to the federal centre, something for which the republic has always been famed, is rather difficult to measure. But neither the Ossetian-Ingush conflict, during which Moscow, in the opinion of the Ingush, provided exclusive and disproportionate armed support to the Ossetian side, nor the Chechen wars, which passed like a fiery, inhuman mangle across the territory of fraternal Chechnya, were able to shake the foundations of the Ingush people’s civic identity. Most Ingush continued to see themselves as citizens of Russia and did not even think about the possibility of living a separate existence, despite the fact that the Chechens had been trying to draw Ingushetia into its separatist project ever since the days of Dudayev.

Today the situation has radically changed. Magomed Yevloyev, owner of the “Ingushetiya.ru” website, says: “In Karabulak there is an old man who keeps a watchful eye on people’s moods – especially the moods of the young. On public transport and in the streets he listens carefully to what people are saying. He recently told me: ‘We’ve lost Ingushetia. Young Ingush have a very narrow field of ideas. On the buses and minibuses the only conversations you hear are about guerrillas, emirs, the Emirate, where road-mines were laid, where federal troops came under fire, where police were killed. The armed underground is an example to be emulated, and armed struggle is now seen not merely as something normal, but as a necessity. To die in battle means to fulfil the lofty destiny of a man, a warrior and a Muslim.’”

If you read the entirety of the two reports, you can’t escape the conclusion that the situation in these breakaway provinces is not only not solved but about to explode. Combine that with the powder keg atmosphere Russia has insanely created in Georgia, where is it giving direct military aid to that country’s breakaway province of Abkhazia, and you have a truly toxic scenario. If Russia can aid Georgian rebels, why can’t radical Islamacists aid their comrades in Chechnya and Ingushetia? Russia has lost any moral authority it might have had, and is losing the battle on the ground as well. It has been condemned by virtually every major human rights organization on the planet for its barbaric atrocities against the civilian population in Chechnya, and it has been convicted of state-sponsored murder in the European Court for Human Rights.

But the people of Russia remain blithely ignorant and apathetic, just as was the case in Soviet times.

First, Russia’s top-ranked female tennis player, Maria Sharapova (pictured,left), was blown off the court in easy straight sets in her second match at The Championships in Wimbledon by a player who had never before won a match at the tournament, was unseeded and was not ranked in the world’s top 150 players. The loss came just hours after Sharapova learned that Russia had refused her request to carry the national flag at the Beijing Olympiad opening ceremonies. The request was inexplicable coming from a person who has in the United States since she was a child, learned her game there and never spends any time in her so-called “homeland.” It was one of the most disgraceful exits from the tournament by a player who had previously won it in history, and it’s not the first time Sharapova has embarrassed herself this way at the All England Club.

But Sharapova at least did better than Russia’s top-ranked male player, the infamous Nikolai Davydenko (embroiled in a match-fixing scandal), who also crashed and burned spectacularly at Wimbledon. He lost his opening match in easy straight sets to an unseeded German not ranked in the world’s top 100.

Then to make the nightmare complete, Russia’s national football team (albeit coached by a Dutchman) lost its second match of the Euro tournament to Spain even worse than it had the first encounter the week before, which had been an outright massacre. This time Russia didn’t manage to score a single goal. It was outscored by the Spanish by a devastatingly decisive margin of 7-1 over the course of the two matches.

Russia had adopted its usual strategy for motivating its football side to victory. Faced with a declining population (which is expected to halve over the course of the next century) the Putin government’s only response was to bribe parents to have more kids. In a similar manner, a Russian oligarch promised to give the football side unlimited access to expensive prostitutes if only they would eke out a win.

After beating the tiny countries of Sweden, Greece and Netherlands to earn a semi-final bid, the arrogance was flying fast and furious in Russia, as only Russians can manufacture it. Russians swarmed the streets of Moscow declaring themselves “champions” and Russian Midfielder Konstantin Zyryanov stated: “We have beaten two very strong teams, I think this improves our chances. I want to play Spain [in the semifinal]. We made lots of mistakes against Spain [in the group match] and now we have fixed them very quickly.” Ouch. Be careful what you wish for there, Konstantin.

What Russians should have done after making the semis was to say to themselves: “Gee, we don’t have a very good team yet we’ve done pretty well by hiring ourselves a foreign coach who’s dramatically changed the way we play. If we go on this way, we might be able to coach ourselves one day, and maybe even win this tournament.” Instead, Russians gave vent to a level of hubris (and, indeed, outright xenophobia) that can only flow from the sure and certain knowledge, deep inside, that you’re nowhere close to being good enough and don’t want to put forth the effort to become so.

Russian pundit Alexei Bayer has an excellent piece in the latest issue of the Moscow Times highlighting what Russia could have learned, but refuses to, from Euro 2008. Instead, Russia continues madly down the path of xenophobia and arrogance that has led to so much failure in the past.

Maria Sharapova is surely one of the most grotesquely overrated figures in professional sports. Take a look at her, at right, talking to the press after being summarily ejected from the French Open tournament just a few weeks ago, again by a much lower-ranked player, or at the top of this page, in both instances stripped of the power of makeup and air-brushing. Then ask yourself how well-deserved her vixen reputation is. Reflect on her record. She won the Wimbledon title a few years ago, and how did she do it? She was being routed by American Lindsey Davenport in a semi-final match when suddenly, miraculously, it started to rain and the match was stopped. When it resumed later, Davenport had lost her concentration (she would soon retire from the sport) and Sharapova claimed “victory.” What can you say about a player who spends all her time in one country then wants to carry another’s flag in the Olympics?

Sharapova is Russia in microcosm. The country seems to prefer to imagine it is winning rather than do the hard work of actually winning. Sharapova is as much an American as as Russian, probably much more so, and the coach of Russia’s football team is Dutch. Sharapova trades on air-brushed beauty rather than hard work and improvement, but that won’t sustain the sport of women’s tennis. No Russian woman who lives in Russia has ever held the number one ranking or won a grand slam title by beating a non-Russian in the finals, and no Russian woman has ever won any tournament while ranked number one. Yet, some people talk about “dominance” by Russian women in the sport. Instead of seeing a basis for hard work and improvement, Russians see only a reason to sit on laurels that don’t even really exist.

It’s the same in politics. Russians allow their dictator, Vladimir Putin, to claim credit for economic gains that have nothing to do with his polices and everything to do with the accident or rising oil prices. Instead of investing Russia’s oil windfall in building a better society, Russians allow Putin to spend it on whipping up a new cold war with the United States and seeking to reaquire imperial control over places like Ukraine and Georgia, control which was lost because the USSR behaved in an equally self-destructive manner.

That’s why I was disturbed to see a post by Eugene Ivanov (I’ve previously pointed out other flaws in Mr. Ivanov’s work) accuse Oleg Kozlovsky of being a “petty criminal.” Outrageously, Mr. Ivanov did not name a single “petty crime” of which Mr. Kozlovsky had been convicted other than civil disobedience of the same kind Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King went to prison for. It’s libelous to accuse someone of being a “petty criminal” without evidence. We could be sued for that if it’s not true. Mr. Ivanov needs to substantiate his claim with clear documentary evidence or retract it and apologize.

Mr. Kozlovsky is, for Mr. Ivanov’s information, a candidate for a PhD in political science at a prestigious Russian university (the Higher School of Economics), having just obtained his master’s degree in that subject after writing a thesis in democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe.

Mr. Ivanov then goes on to state that a column authored by Kozlovsky in the Washington Post was not written by Kozlovsky at all, but by unidentified ghost writers working for the Post. He offers not one single shred of evidence of any kind to back up this claim, and it’s a lie. I’ve personally contacted both Mr. Kozlovsky and the editors at the Post and obtained the Russian original and the English translation Kozlovsky submitted to the Post. Again, accusing a world-renown newspaper like the Post of professional fraud without evidence is libelous, and we could be sued by the Post and shut down because of this lie. Again, Mr. Ivanov needs to substantiate his claim with clear documentary evidence or retract it and apologize.

Mr. Ivanov’s post is full of other wild falsehoods. He states in response to a story about a car accident told by a Post columnist named Julia Latynina:

Everyone who has visited Moscow at least once over the past few years knows that the city is a brutal traffic nightmare. And Ms. Latynina wants us to believe that during evening commute hours, a car travels through downtown Moscow at 90 miles an hour?

But this is what Ms. Latynina wrote:

On a rainy September evening a week after Natalia Trufanova fell under the wheel of justice, I witnessed an accident on Moscow’s government thoroughfare — the famous Kutuzovsky Prospect. A silver Lexus, traveling at what looked to be about 90 miles an hour, flew out of the far left lane and crossed four lanes of oncoming traffic, crashing into several cars. As I drove past the scene of the accident, the wind blew bits of crushed metal, pieces of cloth and broken glass along the asphalt; bodies still sat in some of the cars. Within the hour, I learned that the driver of the Lexus was a 27-year-old woman with no known occupation; with her in the car was a deputy minister of economic development.

There is nothing in Latynina’s account about “evening commute.” It looks like Mr. Ivanov simply made up this fact for his own convenience. For all Mr. Ivanov knows, the accident occurred at midnight. Mr. Ivanov does not link to or even mention any other account of the accident to establish what time it actually did occur, yet he dares to accuse the editors of one of the world’s most respected newspapers of incompetence in printing this account.

Latynina is a highly respected journalist in Russia who hosts a program on the well-known Echo of Moscow radio station, writes a column in the well regarded Moscow Times newspaper, and is viewed by many as the successor to murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya. She has many enemies in the halls of power in Moscow because she routinely attacks them in her work. Mr. Ivanov, you will note, tells you none of that.

Mr. Ivanov’s point is apparently that he doesn’t believe the accident occurred, or if it did it wasn’t serious, or if it was it didn’t involve Kremlin-connected bigwigs who got off with no punishment because of pulled strings. All of that is totally bogus. The accident happened, it was very serious, and no punishment was handed out to the obviously reckless driver because a Kremlin-connected bigshot was in the car. But you’d never know that from reading Mr. Ivanov’s “analysis.”

The falsehoods from Mr. Ivanov’s shameful smear job against Latynina are relentless, just like Soviet propaganda always used to be. He claims that the accident Latynina describes could not have involved a deputy economics minister as Latynina reported. But in fact, she did not say it did. All Latynina wrote was that she had been told that it did by someone who was on the scene. She did not say she confirmed it. The Kremlin-friendly Russia Blog, certainly not one to invent smears against the Kremlin, confirms that it did involve someone with high-level Kremlin connections:

Another notable incident recently took place in Moscow involving a driver who was high on drugs. On the rainy night of September 14, 2007, a female driving with the headlights off lost control of her Lexus, destroying five cars, injuring four people and killing three more. The driver happened to be a friend of the assistant to the former Russian Economics and Trade Minister German Gref, who was not asked to join back the ministry earlier this week after he had been laid off with the rest of the government by President Putin two weeks ago. A relative of another recently fired minister, Zurabov, struck a pregnant woman with his car. Later driver was found not guilty due to her “mental condition”.

This confirms the accident occurred just as Latynina says it did. The point Latynina was making was that the driver was not charged with any crime despite the mayhem because of the involvement of Kremlin-friendly forces, and Mr. Ivanov doesn’t even try to dispute that, nor is there the slightest hint of his doing any research to flesh out the details before launching his outrageous accusations. Latynina was attempting to describe the nature of corruption in Russia, and nothing Mr. Ivanov says changes usefulness of her example in that regard.

Apparently, Mr. Ivanov thinks that if he finds any type of mistake, maybe even a typo, then the entire account is to be dismissed as a total fraud. Do we hold ourselves to that standard here on Instablogs? Could anyone publish under those standards? Do we lose all credibility if we report that an eyewitness told us someone was a “deputy minister” when in fact he was a friend of a deputy minister? If so, we’ve just been destroyed by Ivanov’s misstatement about the time when the accident occurred!

It’s a classic propaganda ploy of the old USSR, where Mr. Ivanov was educated, to attack minor points in a text at the level of minute detail and then combine that smear the author personally when the main thesis is too rock-solid to question, and hope the mud will stick. Latynina never said she knew who was in the car, she only said it was powerful person whose presence got the reckless driver off without charges, and that she was told by a source it was as deputy minister. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with what she wrote, though to be absolutely punctilious (a standard Mr. Ivanvov himself certainly doesn’t follow) she might have researched what her friend said to confirm exactly who was in the car. But Mr. Ivanov hasn’t done that either, he’s only guessing.

When I read Mr. Ivanov’s words, I hear the Kremlin talking. I hear it trying to stamp out the very last voices of independent journalism in Russia so that it can proceed with dictatorship unfettered. I hear the echoes of the Cold War. Mr. Ivanov did not write a balanced criticism of the Latynina and Kozlovsky articles, pointing out both strengths and weaknesses. Instead, he launched a vicious personal attack, even accusing Kozlovsky of being a “petty criminal” without even naming his crime — just what they tried in the old Soviet days.

We bloggers lose credibility when we make false charges against the world’s leading media. They’re just waiting for gross errors like this on our part in order to dismiss us. We must call on Mr. Ivanov to prove his allegations with clear evidence or retract them and apologize. Otherwise, we can’t expect to be taken seriously by the world community we seek to serve.

For years now, the New York Times has been losing readers, laying off staff, cutting content, watching its stock price plummet and drowning in a sea of red ink. Even before the Jayson Blair scandal, when one of its reporters was discovered to have simply invented a series of “news” stories that the paper had printed, including on the front page, the Times had developed a reputation for dispensing crude left-wing propaganda rather than an honest account of the day’s events. Even it’s own ombudsman, appointed in the wake of the Blair scandal, admitted it had a left-wing agenda.

But that agenda has never been so nakedly and repugnantly displayed as it was in a June 27th op-ed article called “Your Brain Lies to You” by Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton, and Sandra Aamodt, a former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience.

Let’s start with the outrageous title of the article. According to Merriam Webster, the word “lie” means “to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive.” This is not what the article is about. The brain doesn’t intend to deceive you, according to the authors, it does so by accident. Somebody slapped this headline on the article in a pathetic attempt to sell newsprint, a good indicia of the paper’s current state of desperation.

Now you might have thought that Mr. Wang and Ms. Aamodt were going to tell you something scientific and edifying about the brain, but if you thought that you’d be mistaken. Instead, it’s clear that the authors — and the paper’s editors — had a crass political agenda which they sought to hide behind the guise of science. Check out these two statements from the article:

(1)Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, one poll has found. Thus it seems slightly less egregious that, according to another poll, 10 percent of us think that Senator Barack Obama, a Christian, is instead a Muslim. The Obama campaign has created a Web site to dispel misinformation. But this effort may be more difficult than it seems, thanks to the quirky way in which our brains store memories — and mislead us along the way.In its concerted effort to “stop the smears,” the Obama campaign may want to keep this in mind. Rather than emphasize that Mr. Obama is not a Muslim, for instance, it may be more effective to stress that he embraced Christianity as a young man.

(2) With time, this misremembering only gets worse. A false statement from a noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage to longer-term cortical storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and its implications gain strength. This could explain why, during the 2004 presidential campaign, it took some weeks for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against Senator John Kerry to have an effect on his standing in the polls.

Think you’ll find some examples of how the brain “misremembers” smears about Republicans launched at them by Democrats? Think again. The article devotes 100% of its textual references to alleged smears by Republicans against Democrats, as if the opposite situation was not one worth considering.

The Democratic Party, whose candidates the Times endorses like clockwork, haven’t reelected a president with a majority of the popular vote since World War II, while the Republicans have done it four different times. The leftists explanation is that the country is full of idiots easily duped by Republican smear campaigns, and the Times is repeating that explanation like a mantra rather than telling us the actual news. It’s childish, like a sports coach blaming his team’s loss on stupid referees. And both are shocked, shocked to find that they keep losing!

This is the attitude the paper’s editors transmitted to Jayson Blair, a young reporter who wanted to make his mark. This is why he felt it was OK to make up stories, as long as his motive in doing so was a good one. This is why the paper is losing credibility by the second, and dragging down the entire dead-tree news industry right along with it.

It’s simply breathtaking that an article so outrageous skewed and misleading could make it into the pages of the nation’s so-called “paper of record.”

Thank goodness for the blogosphere!

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer has a devastating piece this week exposing the torrent of lies issuing recently from the mouth of Barack Obama:

(1) Obama said during the primary season that he would vote to block blanket immunity for telecommunications companies in connection with post-Sept. 11 eavesdropping. Now that he got the nomination, he’s announced he’ll vote in favor of immunity.

(2) During the primaries, Obama said he would insist on renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement to stop Mexico and Canada from abusing the system to harm the American economy. Now victorious, he supports the existing agreement.

(3) While seeking left-wing votes for the nomination, he said he would meet with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions. The nomination sewn up, he no longer has any such intention.

(4) Filled with primary fervor, he said he could “no more disown Jeremiah Wright than his own grandmother.” A few months later, he disowned him.

(5) Obama pledged unconditionally that he would accept public financing during the general election while he was talking to left-wing voters who despise the “fat cats.” Now that he’s been anointed, he’s rejected public funding.

(6) An editorial in the Post adds yet another: Obama promised during the primary season to participate in a series of inclusive town-hall meetings with his opponent John McCain. McCain is still ready to do it, but now as the front runner Obama is backing out like a cowardly and very common politician. Change you can believe in?

As Krauthammer puts it: “By the time he’s finished, Obama will have made the Clintons look scrupulous.”

And, just like the Clintons, he’ll have the Congress and the Oval Office promptly back in Republican hands for an extended period, after enacting their agenda in a manner perhaps more effective than they ever could have dreamed.

Beating down the audience is what the crudest entertainments try to do, and in this respect, and in every other, “Wanted” is nothing new.

Those are the words of New York Times film critic A. O. Scott, reviewing the new major motion picture Wanted starring Angelina Jolie and directed by Timur Bekmambetov, whom Scott describes as “a Russian filmmaker who has earned a cult following with his razzly-dazzly thrillers Day Watch and Night Watch.

While it’s very unlikely that any Slavic Russian would acknowledge a person with Central Asian name like “Bekmambetov” as being “Russian” in any sense that means anything (not to long ago, Russians were rounding up people with last names like that and ejecting them from the country as spies in the latest round of ethnic cleansing), the irony of Bekmambetov is really quite extreme. Let’s reflect upon a little, shall we?

But before we do, a word about Ms. Jolie. Here we have an actress who, in her private life, pretends to be all about world peace and uplifting the condition of the world’s hapless minions. And yet, what kind of movies does she make? Empty-headed shoot-em-up bloodbaths that make light of violence and have nothing to say about anything, that’s what. Wow, what a fraud.

And she’s in good company where this “Russian” filmmaker is concerned. Anyone who knows a thing about Russian people knows how heartily they love to claim cultural superiority, to look down their noses at Hollywood movies as being devoid of emotional sensitivity or intellectual substance. And yet, if you read Scott’s review you find that not only is Mr. Bekmambetov doing exactly that, he’s not even being original about it. Check out this damning passage:

What does turn up looks familiar — the slowed bullets, the air that ripples like water, an underground group, here called the Fraternity — especially if you’ve seen “The Matrix.” Although Mr. Bekmambetov and his team take plenty of cues from that film, they have tried to distinguish their dystopian nightmare by borrowing from even farther afield. To that end the Fraternity practices its murderous skills on pig carcasses (much as Daniel Day-Lewis does in “Gangs of New York”) while bunkered in a sprawling factory (that looks like Hogwarts). I’m pretty sure I saw the fabulous recovery room — a concrete spa filled with sunken tubs and lighted candles where Fraternity members go for restorative soaks after a hard day of carnage — in a layout in Vogue.

So Bekmambetov is not only copying America at the superficial level, he’s copying it right down to the roots, and not even doing it all that well. Scott says the movie boils down to “a grindingly repetitive rotation of bang-bang, boom-boom, knuckle sandwiches and exploding heads.” His conclusion: “Things happen in Wanted, but no one cares. You could call that nihilism, but even nihilism requires commitment of a kind and this, by contrast, is a movie built on indifference.”

To me, that sounds just like Russia itself, in microcosm. Things are happening (the population is shrinking, art is being stifled, journalism censored, politics castrated) but nobody cares. Instead of bringing a new sensibility to cinematic art when given its chance, Russia’s contribution is to further deaden it, almost as if simply for the fun of it. Russia these days it seems has nothing to offer the world by cynicism and nihilism — or in fact, perhaps they don’t even have the energy and perseverance to raise themselves to that level.

Have a proud KGB spy as president? Why not! Start up the cold war by buzzing American with nuclear bombers and providing weapons to rogue leaders in Iran and Venezuela? Hell yeah, let’s give it a go! We’ve already got the world’s largest supply of territory? So there’s nothing for it but to grab some more — let’s take the Arctic!

It’s as if, some time ago, the whole nation resolved to launch itself upon a massive suicide pact, thumbing its nose at a world that somehow never managed to offer the recognition and worship it craved.

Now that would make quite a movie — if anyone would believe it.