As I wrote this morning the Eason Jordan matter hasn’t interested me. Until now, that is. Michelle Malkin reports:

David Gergen, who moderated the Davos panel on which CNN exec Eason Jordan appeared, spoke with me by phone this afternoon about the controversy.

First, Gergen confirmed that Eason Jordan did in fact initially assert that journalists in Iraq had been targeted by military “on both sides.” Gergen, who has known Jordan for some 20 years, told me Jordan “realized as soon as the words had left his mouth that he had gone too far” and “walked himself back.” Gergen said as soon as he heard the assertion that journalists had been deliberately targeted, “I was startled. It’s contrary to history, which is so far the other way. Our troops have gone out of their way to protect and rescue journalists.”

Walking himself back is nowhere nearly enough. A quick look at the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists reveals this:

Journalists should:

* Test the accuracy of information from all sources and exercise care to avoid inadvertent error. Deliberate distortion is never permissible.

and

* Admit mistakes and correct them promptly.

Clearly Mr. Jordan had the opportunity to retract his statement clearly and unambiguously. There’s no indication that he’s done it. That gives the appearance of moving this matter from the realm of “inadvertent error” to “deliberate distortion”.

Michelle continues:

Gergen mentioned that Jordan had just returned from Iraq and was “caught up in the tension of what was happening there. It’s a raw, emotional wound for him.”

Not only is that in no way exculpatory it suggests that there may be actual malice involved.

The basic facts of the story have now been confirmed by David Gergen, a Democratic representative (Barney Franks of Massachusetts), and a Democratic Senator (Chris Dodd of Connecticut). Where are the mainstream media on this? Where is the Society of Professional Journalists on this? Be vewy, vewy quiet.

UPDATE: Just to clarify my position, until yesterday’s revelations I thought it was possible that the Eason Jordan story was being blown out of proportion and what was going on was a right-wing bloggers’ feeding frenzy. There is no way that either Chris Dodd or Barney Franks can by any stretch of the imagination be considered right-wing and their comments make it clear that Jordan had stepped beyond the bounds. As the head of one of the major news outlets, Jordan’s statements are now evidence of a serious ethical lapse to advance an ideological position and the failure to take it seriously would itself be an ideological stand at this point.

My local NPR station, WBEZ, has an interesting program on Al-Qaeda on its Worldview program today February 7, 2005 from 1:00pm to 2:00pm CST . The program can be listed to live via streaming audio by clicking on the “Listen Now” button. Tomorrow it will be available in their archives. From the station home page select “Audio Library”, then select “Worldview”, then “February 2005” then the day (the 7^th).

It’s a very quiet day in the blogosphere this morning. I must admit that I’m not too interested in Ward Chruchill, Eason Jordan, or the SuperBowl. But a few things have still caught my eye:

• Michael J. Totten tells all
  about drinking with Christopher Hitchens and the Iraqis. Read this post.
• What is it about the last few weeks? It’s been really hard on bloggers automobiles. First,
  there was Ann Althouse’s traffic accident now Boudicca’s husband’s car has been
  rear-ended at high speed.
• Becker and Posner on Social Security reform.
• Be sure to change your favorites lists and your blogrolls. Joe Gandelman’s superb blog, The Moderate Voice, has moved.

That’s the lot.

I’ve taken a quick glance at a few things today:

• Conflicting opinions from Balkinization and
  A Stitch in Haste
  on Hernandez v. Robles (the recent New York homogamy decision).
• Lawrence Solum of Legal Theory Blog with a fabulous analysis
  of the legal theory of personhood.
• Steven Taylor of PoliBlog is live-blogging the SuperBowl.

They’re worth a lot more than that, actually.

This is Fidelio’s 200^th anniversary year. I’ve heard it said that every really great composer has at least one opera in him (or her). For me Beethoven’s Fidelio is proof positive that that just isn’t so. I am convinced that if it weren’t for the lovely first act overture which is frequently performed in concert and the Beethoven name this opera would have fallen out of the common repertoire long, long ago. So my wife and I approached Lyric’s production of Fidelio with some misgivings.

We were pleasantly surprised. I’ve seen Fidelio performed a number of times by significantly more notable performers than we heard last night—this was by far the best performance of Fidelio I’ve ever seen.

It definitely could have been otherwise. This was a modern-dress production and the costumes and sets were drab and spare (suitable for the prison setting of the opera). The acting (with one exception) was quite naturalistic and I found that the natural stage direction and business relieved the ponderous and overly-didactic quality I’ve found other productions of the opera to have. The exception that I mentioned was Rene Pape, who sang Rocco. His singing was fine but I found his acting rather more stylized than the rest of the cast.

Although there were no real stand-outs among the voices, I found them quite well-balanced and I felt they supported each other quite well. Actually, the ensemble pieces were better than the soli. This was particularly true of Isabel Bayrakdarian who sang Marzelline. Her first act duet with Steve Davislim as Jaquino was quite lovely. Her solo aria that immediately followed was somewhat less so.

Karita Mattila’s performance as Fidelio was authoritative and convincing.

Von Dohnanyi’s conducting was a distinct asset to the performance. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the Lyric Opera orchestra sound better or play with more finesse. Even the brief horn solo (often a rough spot in Lyric performances) from the first act overture was executed flawlessly.

I do have some quibbles with aspects of the production and design. I didn’t care for the Act II, Scene 1 prison set at all. How can anyone make an entrace down a fifteen foot ladder? And, although he was fine vocally, I found Kim Begley’s physical presence as Florestan disconcerting. I’ve never seen a fat, bald, greybeard as Florestan before. What should have been Edmond Dantes was more like Scott Calvin from The Santa Claus. The reunion duet between Leonore and Florestan was odd—a married couple who have been separated for two years proclaiming their joy at being reunited from opposite sides of the stage. Don Fernando looked too much like Lenin. by the second act the chorus had returned to the old low, Lyric standards for blocking, in this case a mob.

But, as I say, those are quibbles. I found the production enjoyable, the music lovely, the voices balanced. One of the highlights of the season so far.

The season so far (best to worst): Das Rheingold, The Cunning Little Vixen—Fidelio (tied), Aida, Don Giovanni, A Wedding.

Robin Burke excerpts a Thomas Paine pamphlet. America’s founding generation was amazing, and this bit of writing from a common man demonstrates that better than anything I can say about them. Go read.

Dave invites me to comment on this Samizdata post and the associated Local6 News article, referring to the monstrous couple who tortured 5 of the 7 children in their care. Antoine Clarke (at Samizdata) has this to say:

There are two benefits of even the most useless schools. Children meet other children their own age, which is useful if one is not intent on becoming a hermit.

Of course there is plenty of unreported abuse that occurs in full view. In some schools abuse is ignored or even inflicted. But most basically of all, a 12 year-old child turning up weighing 35 pounds with burn marks and bruises in rags might be noticed. So having children turn up somewhere where their disappearance or injury will be noticed is a valuable function of schools. Perhaps they need to open twice a month for roll-call and then let them go home?

Oh, where to begin? With the condemnation the acts truly merit, I suppose is the best place. I have nothing but contempt for people who would do this to children, and there are no excuses nor meliorations (the Local6 article brings up a history of abuse on the woman’s part – it’s not an excuse if your life sucked to make sure other people’s lives suck, too). Apparently, they’ve been caught, and they deserve the full protection of the law until (and assuming) they are found guilty, at which point they deserve to die, as far as I’m concerned. As a father of four, I’d be glad to be the one to kill them; and I’d have no moral issues with doing it.

I don’t see any way in which homeschooling (assuming the Dollars were homeschooling, as opposed to not sending their kids to school) is connected to the abuse. That’s somewhat like saying that a person who abused their kids with pliers and pipes and also had a gun in the house abused the kids because they were gun owners. The two issues don’t connect.

I do see that people can use homeschooling as a way to hide kids who are being abused, but even ignoring teachers who abuse students, there are also the cases of severely abused kids who are in school for years without being detected as abused.

But to Clarke’s points, there are some problems that I have with them even aside from the homeschooling/torture issue. First, Clarke talks about socialization – meeting kids their own age. Well, why is that purely a government school thing? My kids know several good friends their own age – or within a few years of their own age. My kids also have relationships with several adults, which is something that government schools don’t nurture. In fact, government schools generally segregate to the year, so even having friends a few years apart is not common. When the kids grow up, they’ll meet, work with and live with people of all different ages; how does only knowing people their own age as children prepare them for this?

Second, the idea of schools as society’s guardians of proper child rearing frightens me deeply. I was going to say that teachers are paid to teach, not to tell us how to rear our children, but the truth is that teachers are largely paid to keep kids busy until they’re 18, and hey, some of them learn things. (It’s an essay for another time, so let’s see if I can get back on topic.)

Oh, yes. Education is inherently a very fad-based undertaking. Like any large body of practice in which it’s not possible to tell the results of a new technique in advance, crackpots and quacks flourish. “New math” is not the worst of it; nor is “multicultural math”. There are a lot of ways in which schools actively mitigate against education. Education is hard, and “schooling”, which is really just basic skills training plus warehousing, is much easier. Secondarily, teachers are not trained in how to raise children, just how to deal with them in a classroom. Third, teachers tend to follow a particular political (and often union-oriented) line, which is not necessarily in tune with all – or even most – parents’ ideas of how to raise children. I do not want a group of government bureaucrats to have the power to tell me how to raise my kids.

Homeschooling is no more nor less than a way to educate children. Some homeschoolers produce fantastically well-educated and well-rounded adults at the end of the process, and some make real messes. The same is true of other methods of education or schooling.

The reality of the situation is that government schools do an excellent job of producing a society in which nearly everyone is educated to a minimal level: they can read and understand and follow instructions given to them. The problem is that the government schools have not only raised the lowest rung, they’ve also lowered the rungs above the average. Training mechanics and scientists is beyond the government schools, and so is training leaders and philosophers. Some of those kinds of people will emerge anyway, and so far that’s been enough. But in our case, we want our kids to have a superior education, and the government schools cannot provide that, even in good school districts.

My wife and I have just finished taking down the last of the outside Christmas decorations. It was quite a holiday season and not one I’d gladly repeat. But there’s quite a bit going on in the blogosphere you should know about. Here’s what’s caught my eye this morning:

• A remembrance of German heavyweight fighter Max Schmeling, who died this week, from
  amba of Ambivablog.
• The Diplomad is hanging up his gloves.
  He’s done what he set out to do and is now riding off into the sunset. Who was that masked man?
• From Boing Boing:
  Life-size Candyland game staged by Nebraska college students. What is it they teach in college these days?
• Brad DeLong concludes
  that the CEA is forecasting a stock crash.
• David Kaspar of Davids Medienkritik contrasts post-war German and Iraqi democracy.
• Nelson Ascher of Europundits
  wonders whether the Iraqi terrorists have read Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent.
• Fafnir of Fafblog has
  delivered his State of the Internet address.
• TangoMan of Gene Expressions analyzes the BioPolitics of the blogosphere.
• Elizabeth Anderson of Left2Right
  writes about Social Insurance and Self-Sufficiency.
• David Adesnik of Oxblog quotes FDR’s
  message to Congress on Social Security from 1935. It’s a plan I can agree with completely but I don’t think
  that anyone who wants to abolish the Social Security system in toto can take much heart from. The
  problem is not that the contributions from government are too lavish but that individual savings haven’t
  met the targets FDR describes. And I’d say that the reasons for that include excessive individual taxation
  and stagnant median real incomes.
• It seems to me that the kind of abuse referred to in this post from Samizdata
  is not much of an argument against home schooling. I think I’ll leave it up to Jeff, my associate
  blogger’s, expertise to comment on it.
• The Big Picture
  reminds us that a falling unemployment rate may be a mixed blessing.
• The Curt Jester
  has the perfect solution for Catholics who are just too busy to go to confession: e-Fession.
• There’s a tribute to The Diplomad from Smiley of The Daily Demarche.
• Are the parrots deserting
  the sinking private/personal/whatever accounts proposal?
• A very good post from CaliBlogger
  on the Howard Dean DNC chairmanship.
• The Talking Dog warns about what I agree
  is probably the most serious threat facing the world right now: potential bird flu pandemic.

That’s the lot.

From A Daily Briefing on Iran:

16 trucks carrying weapons and large sums of money from Iran were discovered over the past few days en route to Iraq, according to an Iraqi Defence Ministry source.

Speaking to the Iraqi daily Al-Mashreq, the source said that the weapons included rifles, mortar rounds, and explosives. He said that those arrested admitted to being agents of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), and said that lodging had been provided for them in Samara, Balad, Najaf, and Latifiyeh.

The individuals revealed that they work working on behalf of the MOIS in conjunction with Iran’s Fajr Forces. During interrogation the Iranian agents also revealed the names of a number of Fajr commanders and MOIS agents whom they worked for.

That forms a pretty good companion piece with this item from last month.  Remember Seymour Hersh’s article? Here’s a refresher from the CBC:

NEW YORK – American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh says U.S. commandos have been inside Iran for at least six months looking for evidence to support an attack.

Hersh, who exposed the extent of prisoner abuse at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison, makes the allegations in Monday’s edition of the New Yorker magazine. He says the special forces are looking for potential air strike targets, including nuclear sites and missile installations.

[…]

Speaking on CNN’s Late Edition on Sunday, Hersh said the Bush administration has “extensive” plans for an attack on Iran. The forces are hunting for evidence of weapons in order to avoid what happened in Iraq, he says.

If both of these articles are true, that suggests that a low level of war already exists between the United States and Iran.  Consequently, it may be less relevant to wonder whether we will go to war with Iran than to ask whether the current state of hostilities will escalate.

There’s another excellent post on A Daily Briefing on Iran that suggests that the Bush Administration’s next strategem in dealing with Iran should be pressing human rights concerns with the international community. I certainly think that would be appropriate and long past due: I think that we should have announced a U. S. policy of regime change in Iran five years ago for just this reason. But any notion that the EU will place meaningful economic sanctions on Iran are fanciful in my opinion.

The EU has the same problem in negotiating with Iran that we have in negotiating with China. A strong negotiating position requires that you be willing to withhold something that your trading partner actually wants. In the case of our negotations with China, we won’t withhold trade. The Chinese are confident we won’t withhold trade (and their hand gets stronger with every Treasury Bond they hold). And as long as that’s true we can’t make much headway in negotiating with them in other areas that are interesting to us including human rights, nuclear proliferation, and their support for the North Korean regime.

Similarly the EU (along with China and Japan) won’t stop buying Iranian oil. And the mullahs know that. And as long as that’s true no negotiations with the mullahs will make much headway on human rights, their nuclear development projects, or their aid for terrorists (inside Iraq and elsewhere).

Still, I think that an actual hot war with Iran would be imprudent and that there are actions short of an actual shootin’ war that I would hope are being discussed at least privately.

As a brief aside I don’t believe in private diplomacy. I believe that it strengthens the positions of elites in countries engaging in it. And, as both a good democrat and a good republican (note the lower case), I oppose such strengthening. Do we really need to strengthen the positions of the State Department here or the mullahs in Iran or the Central Committee in China? Additionally, just as centralized control of the economy conceals market information from the commissars that they need to manage the economy efficiently, private diplomacy conceals information about the true state of foreign affairs that the electorate needs to make prudent judgments in voting. But back to the matter at hand.

One such contingency is blockade. It is absolutely within our power to blockade Iran. And it wouldn’t take resources away from Iraq that are needed to keep the situation there under control. It would make the EU, China, and Japan very, very unhappy. The Russians would be publicly highly critical but privately rubbing their hands with glee: it would put them in the catbird seat as an oil-selling power.

But those considerations shouldn’t distract us from the critical question: can we live with a nuclear-armed mullahocracy in Iran?