Earlier, I linked to Peggy Noonan’s farewell to Dan Rather, whom she worked for from 1981-1984. Ms. Noonan is quite forgiving of Dan Rather and cuts him some–make that, a lot–of slack for the political leanings of his journalistic career.

Beldar thinks she is being too kind (emphasis in the original).

Dan Rather and his cohorts didn’t just make a mistake. They didn’t just have a lapse. They didn’t just let their biases color their reporting. They didn’t just make an error in judgment. Instead, they conspired together with should-be felons, with forgers, to pass off as genuine, as truthful “news,” a set of bogus documents that defamed the record and the integrity of the President and in so doing, they fundamentally betrayed the entire reason for their profession’s existence. They actively hid the fact that their own hired experts were telling them before the first broadcast that the documents were fakes. Then they tried to demonize those (including me and my fellow bloggers) who’d helped expose their ploy, and to justify their lies as “fake but accurate.”

Jeff Jacoby thinks that Kofi Annan is just one part of a corrupt whole. And he makes clear something I pointed out yesterday in my post about replacing Annan: until the culture of autocrats and dictators at the U.N. are no longer running the show, no meaningful reform can take place.

Why should anything be different this time? Oil-for-Food may be the greatest international rip-off of modern times, it may have strengthened one of the world’s bloodiest dictators, it may have deprived countless Iraqis of food and medicine, but if history is any guide, the scandal headlines will fade from view long before the secretary general does. By week’s end, in fact, dozens of governments, including all the permanent members of the Security Council save the United States, had publicly rallied to Annan’s support. Scandal or no scandal, he will almost certainly serve out the remaining two years of his term.

Which is just as well. Annan is merely a symptom of the UN’s sickness, not the cause of it. His resignation would do nothing to reform the UN into the engine of peace and liberty its founders envisioned. Better that Annan remain in place as a symbol of UN fecklessness and failure, and a spur to those who can envision something better.

The UN is a corrupt institution, one that long ago squandered whatever moral legitimacy it once had. The UN’s founding documents venerate justice and human rights, but for the past 40 years, the organization has been dominated by a bloc of states – essentially the Afro-Asian Third World – most of whose governments routinely pervert justice and violate human rights.

Inside the United Nations, there is no difference between a dictatorship or a democracy: Each gets exactly one vote in the General Assembly. The reason the UN indulges vicious regimes like those in North Korea, Syria, and Cuba is that they are members in good standing, and most other governments lack the courage to cross them. The UN cannot be fixed unless that changes – and that isn’t going to change.

And I know nothing is the matter with Kansas.

Regardless of Kansas’ economic performance, Mr. Frank’s main thesis–that people who are struggling economically should be voting as liberals, not conservatives–is dubious. As an editorial in the Wichita Eagle observed: “There’s nothing wrong with many Kansans wanting to hold onto a little more of their paychecks … or preferring that when they need help it comes from their family, their church, their community–not an intrusive federal government.” But what’s really astounding is that Mr. Frank, who offers little in the way of economic data, would base his argument on such blatant falsehoods. To Mr. Frank’s liberal prejudices, something may be the matter with Kansas, but it sure isn’t its economy.

Arthur Chrenkoff has posted another installment of good news from Iraq.

It takes a lot to get a man of God annoyed and Louis Sako, the Chaldean Archbishop of Kirkuk, is a very frustrated man these days: “It is not all death and destruction,” says the Archbishop. “Much is positive in Iraq today… Universities are operating, schools are open, people go out onto the streets normally… Where there’s a kidnapping or a homicide the news gets out immediately, and this causes fear among the people… Those who commit such violence are resisting against Iraqis who want to build their country.”

It’s not just the terrorists who, according to His Eminence, are creating problems for Iraq: “[January] will be a starting point for a new Iraq… [Yet] Western newspapers and broadcasters are simply peddling propaganda and misinformation… Iraqis are happy to be having elections and are looking forward to them because they will be useful for national unity… Perhaps not everything will go exactly to plan, but, with time, things will improve. Finally Iraqis will be given the chance to choose. Why is there so much noise and debate coming out from the West when before, under Saddam, there were no free elections, but no one said a thing?”

Lastly, the Archbishop has this wish for the international bystanders: “Europe is absent, it’s not out there; the United States is on its own… [Europe] must help the Iraqi government to control its borders to prevent the entry of foreign terrorists, [but] also provide economic help to encourage a new form of culture which is open to coexistence, the acceptance of others, respect for the human person and for other cultures… Europe must understand that there is no time to waste on marginal or selfish interests: The entire world needs peace.”

Archbishop Sako’s frustration is increasingly shared by other Iraqis, who can hardly recognize their country from the foreign media coverage. Westerners, too, both military and civilians, upon their return are often finding to their surprise and concern they had lived and worked in a different country to that their loved ones, friends and neighbors back home saw every night on the news. “Our” Iraq is a place of violence, uncertainty, and frustration; “their” Iraq all that, too, but also so much more: work and renewal, hope and enthusiasm, new opportunities and new possibilities.

It never ceases to amaze me that I live in a free society whose journalists, self-styled guardians of truth and freedom, work so hard to support the opponents of freedom in another country. From not reporting the true nature of Saddam’s regime, to misrepresenting the situation in Iraq today, our “journalists” are aiding the enemies of the very freedoms they purport to defend with their “reporting”. I suppose that is one price of freedom, that people will use it for their own ends, even if those ends ultimately undermine their own freedom.

Chrenkoff’s service to the blogosphere of posting good news from both Afghanistan and Iraq is a great aid in helping to paint a truer picture of what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. The part I quoted above is just the beginning. You should read the whole thing.

UPDATE: One more thing caught my eye from the story. Notice the irony:

Among the 156 political parties registered is the Iraqi Pro-Democracy Party, the brainchild of Iraqi bloggers, the Fadhil brothers. Read Ali Fadhil’s wonderful and moving post about a dream finally achieved: “You can’t imagine the thrill and happiness I felt when I held the document that state that the ‘Iraqi pro-democracy party’ is registered and approved as a political entity that has the right to participate in the upcoming elections!… That was not a dream, it’s for real and it didn’t happen in the ‘free and independent’ Iraq at Saddam’s time, it happened 3 days ago in ‘occupied Iraq’.”

Only in “occupied Iraq” can a person freely and openly publish a blog, and register a political party. That such a major accomplishment goes unreported by Western media is lamentable.

Professor Bainbridge links to a humorous piece by Ben Stein, who relates what it’s like to be a Republican in Hollywood:

This is the way it is here. We meet in smoky places. We give the high sign, we nod knowingly. We are like members of the Maquis in Occupied France. Or early Christians emerging from the catacombs in Caligula’s Rome. We are the GOP in Hollywood, and on the West Side of L.A. The culture here is so dominantly left-wing, PC, vegan, hate-America that many of us feel we have to behave as if we were underground.

At a self-help meeting where men and women confess to drug use, betrayals, thefts, homicides with cars, at a break, a woman stealthily came up to me last Saturday and motioned me into a corner outside the room in Malibu. “I want to tell you there are some of us who agree with you. We have to keep it quiet because we want to get our kids into the right schools, but we’re there. We’re there. And there are more of us every day.” Then she scuttled off into the night. Slamming crack can be spoken of with a smile, but not voting GOP. That could be dangerous.

I have some friends who moved out to Los Angeles last summer. One of them grew up in East Tennessee and has struggled with the different attitudes towards Christianity and sometimes just life in general. I can partially relate, as I went through a similar adjustment when I moved to Knoxville, although I think my transition was easier.

Could the days of evening network news broadcasts be numbered? Outside The Beltway points to an article in the Miami Herald which makes a compelling case for the eventual demise of the nightly news.

You don’t need to read tea leaves to see which way things might tip, just numbers. When Dan Rather took over as anchor of CBS Evening News in 1981, 69 percent of the television audience tuned in to the networks’ nightly broadcasts. When he leaves next year, the networks’ share of viewers will be less than 38 percent. The decline gets sharper all the time; for the week of Nov. 15, the network news audience was down 5 percent from last year.

The average age of viewers who remain – over 56, according to Nielsen Media Research – suggests that ratings will continue to decline as the audience literally dies out. And even before that, advertisers – who seek viewers in the 18-to-49 age bracket – will flee.

Personally, neither my wife nor I watch the network evening news broadcasts. If I am going to watch the news on television, I usually watch the FOX News Channel, but even that is a rare occasion. My parents and in-laws do watch the nightly news, which fits in with the part of the article I quoted above. Most of the time I get my news via the internet. I read the RSS/ATOM feeds of the big newspapers and follow links to other news stories on the blogs I read.

My wife and I were recently wondering why FOX didn’t have a nightly news broadcast on its local affiliates. I guess the executives at FOX can see the writing on the wall and have chosen not to waste the effort.

Opinion Journal has an editorial detailing the trouble with TennCare, Tennessee’s version of state assisted health care, and Governor Bredesen’s efforts to reform it. One issue with the editorial though, it claims Tennessee passed TennCare, which sounds like a legislative act. TennCare, as I understand it, was created by an act of the state’s Executive branch, the Governor’s office, which is why Bredesen can use the threat of pulling the plug as a bludgeon against the Tennessee Justice Center.

Bill Hobbs is a great source for more information on Tenncare and the efforts to reform it. Recently, he remarked on Bredesen’s triangulation of the public education lobby, a traditional liberal special interest group, against TennCare and its advocates. The public education lobby is eyeing the money that it could gain should TennCare be reformed or eliminated. This was a shrewd move on the part of Bredesen, which even if it doesn’t help to promote reform of TennCare, should help insulate him from any political repercussions related to reverting the state’s health care system to Medicaid.

HobbsOnline also has a post on the reaction of The Tennessean to the education lobby’s support for TennCare reform. Let me put it succinctly, if The Tennessean is against it, them I’m for it.

As long as we are giving Kofi the boot, why not introduce a new U.N. Logo.

Mark Steyn understands why the Democrats don’t get religion:

And frankly the Democrats never do well when they try to square contemporary liberal pieties with religion. For one thing, they recoil from the very word “religion.” Al Gore prefers to say, “Well, in my faith tradition …” As a rule, folks with a faith tradition tend not to call it such. At Friday prayers in Mecca, the A-list imams don’t say, “Well, in my faith tradition we believe in killing all the infidels.”

(From Tim Blair)

In case the current round of scandals at the United Nations forces Kofi Annan out as U.N. Secretary General, Glenn Reynolds wants to name former Czech president Vaclav Havel as Kofi’s successor.

I’d give Havel the nod. He has a clear vision of reform for the U.N. and he is an advocate of democracies spreading democracy.

The fall of communism was an opportunity to create more-effective global political institutions based on democratic principles – institutions that could stop what appears to be the self-destructive tendency of our industrial world. If we do not want to be overrun by anonymous forces, then the principles of freedom, equality and solidarity – the foundation of stability in Western democracies – must start working globally.

But, above all, it is necessary that we not lose faith in the meaning of alternative centers of thought and civic action. Let’s not allow ourselves to be manipulated into believing that attempts to change the established order and objective laws do not make sense. Let’s try to build a global civil society that insist that politics is not just a technology of power, but must have a moral dimension.

At the same time, politicians in democratic countries need to think seriously about reforms of international institutions to make them capable of real global governance. We could start, for example, with the United Nations, which, in its current form, is a relic of the situation shortly after World War II. It does not reflect the influence of some new regional powers, while immorally equating countries whose representatives are democratically elected and those whose representatives speak only for themselves or their juntas, at best.

Unfortunately, his reformist nature and advocacy of democracy are his biggist drawback for getting the position. I don’t think, realistically, that he has a chance. Too many of those who profited from the oil-for-food scandal would see his tenure as a call for reform. Not the kind of thing a self-interested autocrat wants to see.

But Captain Ed has picked his own candidate.