The Sour Grapes Round-up

As usual, President Bush is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. The left and the press are pulling their collective hairs out today because of the president’s surprise trip to Iraq, and the news that Karl Rove will not be indicted.

That screech you hear is a whole bunch of people going off the rails as they try to spin a moving train.

Interestingly, DNC Chair Howard Dean is carrying on that Rove leaked a non-covert CIA operative’s name in a time of war and saying this is a bad thing, but I don’t recall him being too upset when Mary McCarthy leaked classified info “in time of war,” do you? Funny how sometimes that matters, and sometimes it doesn’t.

There are great pieces everywhere, so I’ll just be your roundup girl, today.

You have to start with the Pajamas Media Link-fest put together by PJM’s Seattle and Barcelone editors. Good stuff from the left and the right and a great comprehensive overview of what is going on in the ‘sphere today.

Take a look at DJ Drummond’s look at CBS’s dubious poll of today. Yesterday DJ mentioned that polls were becoming scarce. Apparently the press just needed time to make the right one.

Ed Morrissey notes that the WaPo seems blue over the president’s trip, and writes: This war has afforded the American media with a number of opportunities to demonstrate their firm conviction that they are an objective system designed to discover and report the truth. Instead, they have repeatedly shown in ways small and large that they allow their personal biases to flow into their news reporting, underscoring the widespread knowledge that they ceased being objective decades ago.

As usual Ed says it first and best. He also notes that Rove’s clearing sets him up to help in the mid-term elections.

Somehow I think just typing that line made some leftist’s head explode. Sorry. I’m not out to hurt anyone! :-) The Blue Crab does seem to think, though, that an able prosecutor should be able to get a grand jury indictment on anyone if he has credible stuff to present to it. Ouch. That sounds like common sense, doesn’t it? Byron York has more, and Decision ’08 has reactions from the left. Another Rovian Conspiracy takes the Rove-haters through their five stages of grief. Flopping Aces cannot stop himself from peering over the fence at some of the mourners.

Oh, and speaking of reactions from the left, Hugh Hewitt notes that some hope President Bush is killed while he is in Iraq.

Meanwhile, Scientists are making hamburger out of Al Gore’s assertions on Global Warming and Mary Katharine Ham is making hamburger out of Time magazine’s Haditha story. Malkin notes that Al Jazeera is still pimping the story using discredited photos and that yet another member of the press has decided that marines are guilty until proved innocent. The whole story does appear to be unraveling.

Unrelated-yet-interesting, CBS begins a serial report on GenTech, or how wired our teens are and what it is doing to them.

“It was an addiction,” Rae’s mother Karen says, referring to her daughter’s frequent need to be online during her middle-school years. Karen says Rae could not get her homework done because she was always online. “One time she spent the night with a friend whose father had computers networked in his house and they spent the evening in separate rooms on IM,” Karen says.

Are the kids alright?

Ali looks at the Koran verses which are said to describe Jews as pigs and apes.

Then, far more astoundingly, I noticed that the sequence starting at 2:47 actually opened with the incredible assertion:

“O children of Israel! Remember those blessings of Mine with which I graced you, and how I favoured you above all other people.”

Pardon? This seemed to me like the clearest case of the Quran picking favorites, and the presence of verses that spoke favorably of Jews and Christians at the opening of the passage soothed me somewhat further. It more firmly established the conversational nature of the discussion in the Quran. I also recalled the hadith of the Prophet which stated that of all the Prophets, Moses was God’s favorite.

An interesting read.

The man who cracked the genome says he’s found God.

For Collins, unravelling the human genome did not create a conflict in his mind. Instead, it allowed him to “glimpse at the workings of God”.

“When you make a breakthrough it is a moment of scientific exhilaration because you have been on this search and seem to have found it,” he said. “But it is also a moment where I at least feel closeness to the creator in the sense of having now perceived something that no human knew before but God knew all along.

“When you have for the first time in front of you this 3.1 billion-letter instruction book that conveys all kinds of information and all kinds of mystery about humankind, you can’t survey that going through page after page without a sense of awe. I can’t help but look at those pages and have a vague sense that this is giving me a glimpse of God’s mind.”

Yes…the left is just having a bad day, no matter how you look at it. Ah, well…chins up, folks. Tomorrow you will regroup, a spin will be spun, a story will be framed and you’ll feel better.