America Held Hostage, Day 10,950

On 4 November 1979, Iranian militants seized the US embassy in Tehran. It took 444 days to secure the release of all 63 American hostages. Eight US servicemen were killed during an abortive rescue attempt on 24 April 1980.

Eighteen years old that autumn, I fully expected to be drafted to fight in Iran. We all did. Instead, US president Jimmy Carter dithered before approving a hasty, ad-hoc raid that ended in disaster. Then he negotiated some more.

Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. His concessions on behalf of the embassy hostages did not save lives.

According to the US State Department, there have been 60,314 terrorist incidents worldwide since 4 November 1979, accounting for 88,439 deaths. Various sources estimate that 198,819 have died in Afghanistan and Iraq since military operations began following the 11 September 2001 terror attacks.

Iran’s current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was involved in planning the 1979 embassy takeover. As Iran’s leader he has publicly threatened to destroy Israel, condemns the United States, and insists that Iran has a right to nuclear technology.

Thirty years later, we are still being held hostage.

A Prayer for Passive Worship

Church is getting out of control.

First off, there’s too much singing and chanting. Way too noisy, especially when you’re nursing a hangover. And the standing and the sitting, the standing and the sitting ... some of us are walking around with knees that have been in action for about a half-century, you know. We don’t need aerobics.

Here’s an innovation introduced since my Cold War childhood. Midway through the service everybody has to get up and walk around and shake hands and repeat “peace be with you” or some other pacifist slogan. Defeatism aside, all that close contact is hardly reassuring during a flu pandemic.

Then you’re expected to march up the aisle, crunch a bland wafer, and wash it down with some watery grape-based beverage. Good thing I usually skip breakfast, because otherwise it might end up in the offering plate.

Sometimes, they even want you to, like, clap and stuff. Seriously.

Please, it’s too much activity for a Sunday morning. Can’t we just relax in the pews, hear some verses, and enjoy a sermon? I mean, we’re all adults. It’s not like preschool, where children need to be entertained. Besides, on the West Coast, during football season services start around kickoff for the early East Coast games.

If God didn’t intend for us to enjoy football, then he wouldn’t have created gambling.

Confessions of a Fact-Checker

There’s a phrase that describes President Obama’s campaign against Fox News: “fucked up.”

The controversy started back in August, when Fox’s Chris Wallace fact checked Department of Veterans Affairs official Tammy Duckworth. The Obama Administration took offense at being challenged and commenced a boycott. Now it’s disputing the network’s credentials, urging other news organizations to ostracize Fox.

It so happens that I started my journalism career as a fact-checker. There was a time when news organizations routinely verified their reporting. Fact-checking is a specialized skill that demands judgment and experience. You’d be surprised how many mistakes even a cursory review will uncover. A good checker is empowered to kill a story if it doesn’t meet the organization’s standards for accuracy. I pissed off plenty of people during my time as a checker. That was part of the job.

Those days are long gone, victim of budget cuts and a general decline in editorial standards. Punditry has eclipsed reporting. Much of this is driven by economics. Opinion pieces require less research and fewer personnel. Fox News is certainly a symptom of what’s wrong with journalism today. There’s far too much Republican bias in the network’s reporting. For that matter, there’s bias everywhere. MSNBC might as well be the official Democrat news agency. Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times can’t be bothered to disguise their sympathies. Even wire services like AP and Reuters have trouble filing neutral reports.

This is no accident. Sensationalism sells. You might disagree with the coverage’s slant, but you’ll pay attention. Yellow journalism is nothing new, nor is checkbook journalism. It wasn’t so long ago that CNN, now the Obama Administration’s gold standard, was derided as a Ted Turner stunt.

Whether you agree or disagree with the media’s editorial policies, journalism cannot be subject to government regulation, official or unofficial. Short of outright sedition, there is no room for compromise when it comes to freedom of expression. A couple hundred years ago a bunch of renegade colonists fought a long war against Great Britain to secure free speech, among other rights. Once again, history eludes Obama.

Fox News and talk radio oppose him, so they must be silenced. Just as Obama doesn’t consider his healthcare penalty to be taxation, his media manipulation doesn’t constitute a First Amendment breach. The ends justify the means, after all. Now that he’s got the power, Obama is going to settle some scores.

Hope? Change? Bullshit.

When you’re a Democrat, reform means revenge.

Reality Glows

Why exactly does Josh Gates need an entourage to follow him around while he peers through a FLIR camera and points at shadows?

That’s pretty much the formula behind any episode of SyFy’s pseudoscience reality show Destination Truth. The only things that really change from week to week are the “multidisciplinary” team’s destinations, a series of remote, exotic locales worldwide.

While the program’s premise is far-fetched, the scenery is usually fairly interesting. Last night’s installment was particularly compelling, set in Chernobyl, of all places -- more specifically, the adjacent town of Prypiat, abandoned since 1986.

Give Gates credit for having the nerve to head into the Exclusion Zone. It’s eerie territory, though visitors aren’t at all uncommon. People have been touring the area for years; access isn’t difficult, nor dangerous. Roughly 3,000 individuals still work there, as a matter of fact. A quarter-century after the reactor accident, radiation levels aren’t considered lethal.

Unlike typical atomic tourists, Gates and his paranormal posse required full radiation suits, complete with scary-looking Half Life masks and filters. Gates claimed the gear would help them remain in Prypiat longer to investigate reports of spirit activity. Given that this was the case, why was he wearing a dosimeter outside his suit? When the instrument sounded that they’d reached their radiation limit, Gates and his crew departed every bit as soon as they would have without protective clothing.

Next came the FLIR camera, beloved icon of ghost hunters throughout the broadcast spectrum. According to Gates, his FLIR was mysteriously malfunctioning all night long, and picking up inexplicable anomalies. Hardly surprising, considering that infrared cameras monitor heat, which is essentially radiation. No wonder Gates found weird signatures registering on the device.

Finally, the woman on the team who kept saying she was “creeped out” fled from a building screaming. Well, yeah. Things might have appeared less creepy during daytime (when most people report seeing ghosts). Yet Gates insisted on stumbling around a derelict urban nuclear-disaster site wearing big, goofy smocks and oversized boots and full-face helmets, lugging along a metric buttload of cumbersome techno-toys -- in the dark.

Presumably, thermal-imaging footage makes for better reality than natural light.

Three guesses where Gates delivered his evidence for analysis after the investigation. Sorry, but the road to destination truth doesn’t run through Warwick, Rhode Island.

Speed! Money! Death!

Nothing in A. J. Baime’s Go Like Hell will surprise any motorsports fan over the age of 40 (a demographic that I suspect does not include Baime himself). Taken as an introduction to the subject -- Ford’s campaign against Ferrari at Le Mans during the 1960s -- the book is competent enough, both comprehensive and readable.

Knowledgeable enthusiasts will come away with the feeling that they’ve visited a rather garrulous old uncle, happy to have paid their respects and charmed to have heard all the old stories again.

Go Like Hell’s main weakness lies in Baime’s tendency to dwell on the more lurid aspects of motorsports, stating the obvious as though it were a revelation. Racing is expensive? Multinational corporations compete (gasp) internationally? Drivers die in crashes? Do tell. Postwar motorsports’ shocking death toll speaks for itself, although Baime isn’t inclined to let it. As champion driver Dan Gurney once said of the era, “We were all volunteers.”

Readers can excuse a modicum of sensationalism from an author whose resume includes Maxim and Playboy. Less exculpable are Baime’s editors, who should have disciplined his stylistic lapses (Baime displays a distracting reliance on slang idioms), and checked his facts (small errors -- dates, numbers -- vex the book).

Overall, Go Like Hell reads as if it were intended to afford Manhattan sophisticates a glimpse into the proletarian (they sweat!), crude (they swear!), violent (they die!) world of motorsports. Jeff MacGregor accomplished much the same in his recent NASCAR travelogue, Sunday Money, while exhibiting more respect, and more grace

Eight Years to the Day

Not quite a decade has passed since history’s deadliest terrorist attack. Regardless, DDB Brazil has decided that it’s appropriate fodder for some edgy advertising:

The tsunami killed 100 times more people than 9/11. The planet is brutally powerful. Respect it. Preserve it.

Such cynical indecency hardly seems possible. Yet we really shouldn’t expect anything less, now that the Obama Administration has declared the USA isn’t at war with terror.

Colonel Gaddafi certainly appears to have taken us at our word.

Ted Kennedy's Conscience

Mary Jo Kopechne spent two-and-a-half hours struggling for breath in a submerged sedan before she finally drowned during the early hours of July 19, 1969 -- cold, terrified, and alone.

The man behind the wheel fled the scene. Today, Senator Edward Kennedy faced his maker. Throughout the coming week we’re going to be subjected to a torrent of Kennedy hagiography. It doesn’t do me any credit, but I am not mourning his death.

Revered by liberals as “the conscience of the Senate,” Ted Kennedy rarely exhibited a conscience of his own. The senior senator from Massachusetts exploited our political system for personal prestige. He spent his entire life victimizing women, and he ended up killing one of them. His brothers embraced similar sociopathic behavior; his sons, nephews, and grandchildren have extended the Kennedy tradition of prurient misogyny.

Much of the flawed legislation Ted Kennedy supported was designed to keep his party in power by making the poor dependent on big government. Politics aside, the bills he sponsored would surely have come before the Senate without him. Civil rights, immigration, and education were national causes long before the Kennedys latched onto them as a route to power.

Don’t fall for the fable, for the illusion of indispensability. Bootlegger Joe’s clan are thugs -- vicious, privileged gangsters who chew up the powerless and spit out their remains, all the time masquerading as champions of the common people.

Anyone who’s served in Afghanistan or Iraq has already done more for America than Ted Kennedy did during his entire lifetime. Individual Americans do more for this nation every single day simply by acting as responsible, compassionate citizens.

Perhaps we’ve finally purged the Kennedy personality cult from our body politic. We can do better, and we should.