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This book review appears in the Ideas section of the print edition of today's N&R.

KINGDOM COMING: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in America. By Michelle Goldberg. Norton. 210 pages. $23.95

The American Taliban is real. It is powerful. And it is probably going to make this country worse before things get better.

That’s the message of Salon.com writer Michelle Goldberg’s important book about “Christian nationalism,” or Christian Reconstructionism — a movement that believes the Constitution and laws of the United States should be replaced with Old Testament law. What does that mean? At least one adherent says in the book that a strict reading of the Second Commandment’s ban on graven images might well mean the end of cinema.

I wish I could tell you Goldberg’s wrong. But I’ve been following the movement since first learning about it while covering religion more than a decade ago, and I know independently that she’s not.

And I wish I could say she’s exaggerating; as she notes, the subject is “hard to discuss without sounding shrill and hyperbolic.” But if anything, she downplays the disturbing ramifications of her own reporting: The movement, to paraphrase the late Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, intends to use the political system to write an American suicide pact.

Christian nationalism resembles past U.S. revivals in emphasizing the literal truth of the Bible. But as Goldberg writes, it extrapolates from that truth a practical political program, and it has hitched that program to the Republican Party, whose upper levels now are replete with movement adherents in and out of government.

In contrast to the Enlightenment, the movement claims “supernatural sanction” for its earthly goals, conflating Scripture and politics. And anyone who doesn’t agree can expect to become, at best, a second-class citizen.

The movement’s steps toward realizing its goals have included:

• Demonizing homosexuality. Goldberg claims that because public racism has become unacceptable, gay men and lesbians have become “the other” against whom Reconstructionists must unite.


• Emphasizing creationism over evolution, to discredit not just evolution but “the very idea that truth can be ascertained without reference to the divine.” That way, even the looniest ideas can be given a patina of respectability if justified in religious terms.


• Seeking to both weaken and delegitimize the judiciary, in some cases by going so far as to call for the assassination of Supreme Court justices with whose rulings they disagree. (U.S. Sen. Jon Cornyn, R-Texas, said at a gathering of Reconstructionists in 2005 that he could understand how Christians could be so angry with courts that they might want to kill a judge.)


• Seeking to ban not only abortion, but also most forms of birth control, ostensibly because they “cause abortion” (they don’t) but actually because Reconstructionists approve of sex, even within marriage, only for procreation.


• Using tax dollars, in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments, to fund “social services” from faith groups that undergo no cost-benefit analysis or oversight.

Religious though it claims to be, Christian nationalism, Goldberg writes, has lied about its actions and intentions and has used illogic or false historical claims to try to defend them. While he was president of the Christian Coalition, Ralph Reed bragged about his movement’s stealth tactics and dishonesty, saying that political opponents would be “in a body bag” before they knew what happened.

The movement even lies about Scripture. One adherent is quoted as saying that Sodom and Gomorrah “were boiled in oil because they were gay.” No, many authorities think that Scripture says the cities were destroyed because their denizens tried to gang-rape angels disguised as human travelers.

And adherents just don’t get that the United States has the world’s most lively and vibrant religious marketplace precisely because there is no state religion here.

Identifying the illogic does no good, Goldberg points out: If any movement belief is objectively discredited, those doing so are dismissed as “biased,” and the paranoia and self-righteousness of the group only grows.

Add to the lying and the illogic a staggering amount of hypocrisy. Just a couple of examples:

• The movement now has adherents in government who are providing its faith-based social programs with billions in tax money, yet many Reconstructionists (and many other conservative Christians) continue to claim that they are being “persecuted.”


• Goldberg shows that the movement, apparently for purely mercenary reasons, has aligned itself with the Rev. Sun-Myung Moon, head of the Unification Church and a convicted felon who has openly called for “theocracy to rule the world” and claims, in direct contradiction to orthodox Christianity, that Jesus “failed” because he never attained worldly power.

Goldberg says the movement must be opposed because it would destroy what is greatest about America. She’s right.

And given the many benefits of the Enlightenment to humanity, any movement that opposes it must be made to meet the highest possible burden of proof of utility and benefit.

But, perhaps because Goldberg describes herself as a secular Jew, she critiques the movement only from a secular, political viewpoint. As an observant, if flawed, Christian, I’m happy to critique it in Christian terms as well:

• Leading Reconstructionist figure R.J. Rushdoony called democracy “the great love of the failures and cowards of life” — precisely the people with whom Jesus spent most of his time.


• Conflating scripture with government is pure political idolatry, a massive violation of the Second Commandment.


• The movement perverts the good news of the Gospels into such notions as preventing girls from being vaccinated against the virus that can cause uterine cancer because it might lead them to think it’s OK to have sex. Its policy proposals would increase human suffering just to make movement adherents feel righteous. Jesus had something to say about that, too, and it wasn’t, “You go!”


• Then there’s all that bearing false witness.

The Christian nationalist movement isn’t just a threat to the United States. It’s also a complete betrayal of almost everything Jesus Christ ever stood for.

But both the Christian nationalists and I know what the solution is. They need to get on their knees. They need to confess. They need to repent. They need to beg Almighty God for forgiveness for their sins and blasphemies. And they need to do it today.

And if the rest of us value our freedoms, we need to be very, very careful whom we vote for.

Staff writer Lex Alexander won the 1997 Wilbur Award for outstanding coverage of religion in American daily newspapers. Contact him at 373-7088 or lalexander@news-record.com.

From our IT folks:

On Oct. 13, we will be eliminating the use of Instant Messenger at the News & Record for security reasons. Unlike our own email, which is protected by anti-virus software, IM is not protected and presents a security risk to our network and data. Other organizations, such as the Norfolk and Roanoke newspapers, have already gone ahead with this security precaution.

I am sorry if this is an inconvenience for you, but growing security concerns demand enhanced security efforts on our part.

I've probably used Instant Messenger more than most staffers, beginning back when I was in features and found it the easiest way to get in touch with some of our freelancers quickly when I was editing their work. But security is security, and we've long known that our systems are a tempting target. So what can ya do?

Your humble correspondent has been tasked with seeking comments from the Triad's congressional delegation today regarding the case of former Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla. I've talked with Howard Coble, gotten a statement from Mel Watt, am expecting a callback soon from Brad Miller and am hoping for a callback from Virginia Foxx.

Possibly related developments:

• House Speaker Dennis Hastert is supposed to be holding a news conference in Illinois as I type. I don't know yet whether he actually is doing so.


• The House Ethics Committee is supposedly holding a news conference at 1:30 p.m. ET.

A number of commenters locally and nationally on various blogs have compared this case in various ways to those of Reps. Gerry Studds and Dan Crane in the early 1980s. TPMMuckraker.com has an instructive look at how the House addressed those cases: with an "independent" and "massive" investigation.

A couple of random, assorted tidbits on the Foley case, including leftovers from my conversations with three of the four members of the Piedmont Triad's Congressional delegation about the Mark Foley scandal (today's story here):

During my telephone conversation with him Thursday, Rep. Howard Coble, the 6th District Republican, called on the National Republican Congressional Committee to return $100,000 it received earlier this summer from former Rep. Foley's political-action committee. The NRCC works to elect Republican candidates to the U.S. House of Representatives. Because Republican control of the House is in jeopardy for the first time since that party took control of the chamber after the 1994 elections, the NRCC understandably wants to raise as much money as possible to help Republican candidates in close races. Foley, prior to news of his scandalous Internet communications, was considered a safe bet for re-election and still has roughly $2.8 million in his PAC.

The NRCC's problem, however, is that news reports indicate that the NRCC's chairman, Rep. Tom Reynolds of New York, had been told months ago about Foley's potentially problematic behavior. He accepted the money anyway -- and also is reported to have been instrumental in talking Foley, who had been thinking about retiring, into running for re-election this year.

No quid pro quo has been proved, Coble said, but "appearance-wise, it does not look good."

Rep. Virginia Foxx, the area's other Republican House member, has no problem with Reynolds' behavior. And she thinks that if at least two newspapers -- the Miami Herald and the St. Petersburg Times -- were onto the story but had chosen not to publish anything at the time the NRCC got Foley's money, she doesn't see why Reynolds should have done anything differently: "There were at least two newspaper outlets and they didn't think it was worth reporting. Then why fault Reynolds for doing what he did? If the news media had thought at the time that it was so inappropriate that something should have been done, then maybe they should have done something."

The St. Petersburg Times' executive editor, however, makes very clear the Times did, indeed, think the story was worth reporting, and the paper reported on it -- that is, reporters gathered what information they could for a story. Here's what happened next, he says:

I led deliberations with our top editors, and we concluded that we did not have enough substantiated information to reach beyond innuendo.

We were unsuccessful in getting members of Congress who were involved in the matter or those who administer the House page corps to acknowledge any problem with Foley's ambiguous e-mail or to suggest that they thought it was worth pursuing.

And we couldn't come up with a strong enough case to explain to a teenager's parents why, over their vehement pleas to drop the matter, we needed to make their son the subject of a story - and the incredible scrutiny that would surely follow.

It added up to this conclusion: To print what we had seemed to be a shortcut to taint a member of Congress without actually having the goods.

Tom Fiedler, executive editor of the Miami Herald, said essentially the same thing to The Associated Press:

"Our decision at the time was ... that because the language was not sexually explicit and was subject to interpretation, from innocuous to 'sick,' as the page characterized it, to be cautious," said Tom Fiedler, executive editor of the Herald. "Given the potentially devastating impact that a false suggestion of pedophilia could have on anyone, not to mention a congressman known to be gay, and lacking any corroborating information, we chose not to do a story."

With all due respect to Congresswoman Foxx, she appears to have misunderstood or misremembered the newspapers' positions.

My story noted that Foxx, as have many other Bush supporters, says she thinks the whole story is a Democratic plot -- the proverbial October surprise in a close, high-stakes national campaign.

Anything's possible, but a number of recent developments are making that scenario less plausible:

• ABC News' Brian Ross, the lead dog in the journalistic pack following this story, has said that to the extent he knew his sources' political affiliations, his sources were Republicans.
• Florida's two biggest newspapers apparently were onto the story almost a year ago. With a single scrap of corroboration, the story might well have broken then, a year before the election.
• Three more former pages have come forward with allegations about Foley, ABC News reported.

Foxx also called in today's story for the FBI to investigate "who had those e-mails and why they chose to release them on Friday," meaning Sept. 29. If it's someone who withheld the e-mails in order to protect Foley, that's one thing. But if it's someone who was a victim of Foley, or someone close to a victim, and that person had held onto the e-mails until last Friday out of fear of retribution, that's another question altogether: Calling for an FBI investigation of that subject now might well discourage others who have relevant information from coming forward.

It's a tricky question, inasmuch as right now we have no way of knowing for sure which category, if either, the source of the e-mails falls into.

UPDATE: It appears House Speaker Hastert has set up a toll-free telephone number and is asking that anyone who might have information on the case call him. Perhaps I'm worrying over nothing here, but doesn't this mean that he might hear from some of the same people the FBI and/or the Ethics Committee need to hear from, before those groups do? And if so, in the case of the FBI, is that even legal?

CBS News recently reported that the FBI had claimed that the copies it got from CREW were "heavily redacted." The network also reported that the FBI claimed that it contacted CREW again, seeking additional information, and that CREW refused to cooperate.

Just one problem, CREW says: The FBI lied to CBS.

On Monday, CREW sent the Justice Department's Inspector General copies of what it says it sent in July: full, unredacted copies of the e-mails. CREW also says that the only phone call it got from the FBI subsequent to July was one confirming the e-mails were from Foley. It says it never received any requests for additional information.

On Thursday, CREW wrote the IG, seeking an investigation into why the FBI had disseminated an apparently false story about CREW.

The Washington Post recently quoted an anonymous FBI official as saying that the FBI had decided earlier that the e-mails "did not rise to the level of criminal activity." Now, if they didn't have all the information they needed, how could they make that determination?

(By the way, CREW's Web site has been swamped today; I just got a page saying that the site was down because its bandwidth limit had been exceeded.)

As it happens, a new poll conducted after the Foley news broke has come out the district of Rep. Tom Reynolds, the NRCC chair, and it shows him trailing his Democratic challenger for the first time in the campaign, 50% to 45% with 5% undecided and a margin of error of 4%.

Now that Mark Foley has resigned his seat, the House Ethics Committee (whose formal name actually is the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct) has no jurisdiction or authority over him. Accordingly, it will not be looking into Foley's behavior, but into the behavior of people still in the House or on its staff who might have known in detail about Foley's behavior and not reported or acted on it.

I wish I'd had room to make that small but important point in today's article.

If, as columnist Robert Novak claims, Rep. Tom Reynolds talked Mark Foley into running for re-election this year despite knowing about possible problems with Foley's behavior, then why did Reynolds do so?

The most obvious answer is that this year, for a change, every seat counts if the GOP wishes to maintain control of the House, and Foley's seat was about as safe as they come: His smallest majority, which came in his first election in 1994, was 58%. Bush carried the district in 2000 and 2004, so there's no particular reason to think some other Republican would have done much worse if Foley had retired.

Rep. Brad Miller wonders whether the real issue wasn't Foley's seat so much as Foley's money. With $2.8 million in the bank and not much need to spend it on himself, Foley could afford to spread the wealth around to candidates in closer races. Doing so would not only help the GOP in close races, it also would mean that other House Republicans would owe Foley for the favor -- a debt that could conceivably be called in, sometime in the future, for support of a bill, support for a leadership position or some other benefit.

"I don't think I'll tell the Republicans what they should do with the NRCC," Miller said in an interview Thursday. "But Foley was a strong fund raiser, and that is valued by party committees in Washington sometimes more than knowledge of issues or ability to compromise or many of the other qualities I thought made the legislature work and would make Congress work, which it doesn't. Instead, the ability to raise money for your party is the most highly valued quality. That's all part and parcel of Congress being far too partisan and far more worried about election sthan getting things done. If it's true they were protecting him, it was to protect that seat, one, and second, to keep him around as a fund-raiser."

AND, IN THE "YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP" DEPARTMENT: House Republicans have subpoeaned three Democrats, none of whom have been reported to have any involvement in the Mark Foley scandal, to appear before the House Ethics Committee. They're Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean, and Rep. Rahm Emanuel, chair of the NRCC's Democratic counterpart, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

In signing the 2007 Homeland Security appropriations bill into law, President Bush issued a, well, curious signing statement:

Bush's signing statement Wednesday challenges several other provisions in the Homeland Security spending bill. Bush, for example, said he'd disregard a requirement that the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency must have at least five years experience and "demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management and homeland security."

His rationale was that it "rules out a large portion of those persons best qualified by experience and knowledge to fill the office."

Two words: Say what?

I've written a story, scheduled for publication Sunday, that examines some of the reasons why it often takes veterans years to obtain disability and pension benefits to which they're entitled. We look at the delays through the eyes of Butch Kirkman of Archdale, who served eight years on active duty with the Air Force and has spent four years, so far, seeking benefits.

Look for it at News-Record.com Sunday morning.

UPDATE: Story here.

Ladies and gentlemen, in the spirit of this weekend's ConvergeSouth (Have I mentioned ConvergeSouth lately? No? Well, look at the top of the page.) ...

He's part truck driver, part poet, part blogger, part ZZ Top frontman and 100% original. Thanks to videographer extraordinaire Tom Lassiter, you can see him, too:

Billy (The Blogging Poet) Jones!

I live here in Greensboro, but various relatives have vacation places and/or live up in the mountains, so I'm passingly familiar with Asheville-area politics. One of the enduring monuments of those politics is 11th District Rep. Charles Taylor, who ended up in today's Wall Street Journal (subscription-only) for all the wrong reasons, most having to do with self-dealing through pork earmarks. TPMMuckraker summarizes:

Rep. Charles Taylor (R-N.C.) has a remarkable talent for steering federal dollars to benefit properties that he owns, The Wall Street Journal reports this morning.

As you read about the millions that Taylor has earmarked for himself ($11.4 million to widen a highway that runs through a resort town where his development companies own thousands of acres, $3.8 million for a park that is "directly in front of the Blue Ridge Savings Bank, flagship of his financial empire"), recall Taylor's dogged opposition to federal money going to a 9/11 memorial. As chairman of the House Interior Appropriations subcommittee, Taylor was for years the sole impediment to releasing the $10 million in federal funds needed to buy the land for a memorial in Shanksville, Pa., where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed.

Taylor's opposition to the effort, The Washington Post explained at the time, "comes down to principle: The federal government is already the largest landowner in the country, and he believes that no additional tax dollars should go to more land buying for this or any other memorial."

When challenged on his earmarks by the Journal, Taylor sounds a different principle:

"The same tax dollars would be spent," [Taylor] said through a spokesman. "The decisions about where and how much would just be left to unelected bureaucrats."

Pork is a bipartisan, and very expensive, problem. (For more info on pork, I cannot recommend highly enough "Adventures in Porkland: How Washington Wastes Your Money and Why They Won't Stop," by Brian Kelly, which although its examples are now somewhat dated, remains an excellent, enraging, amusing primer on the subject.) But getting pork for your district is one thing. Getting pork to enrich your very own interests, however, is something else entirely and about the unloveliest behavior a congresscritter can engage in without the involvement of another person.

Having missed much of last week with strep and a sinus infection, I'm way behind, so let me hit a few high spots quickly:

• ConvergeSouth was a blast. Thanks in particular to Dan Rubin and Wendy Warren from Philly and Doug Fisher from the University of South Carolina for coming and contributing their insights.
• I'm working this week on, in no particular order, a story about falling local incomes, a groundbreaking business story (pun intended), and some more issues related to veterans benefits.
• On Wednesday, I'm also speaking to a media seminar at my alma mater that's led by Larry Jinks, a longtime Knight Ridder hand who sits on the McClatchy board.

That's the news for now. More as developments warrant.

My colleague Joe Killian has an excellent post up at his personal blog on what he calls the "fissure" that leaking of the RMA report on the Greensboro Police Department has created within the Greensboro blogging community.

Journalism - even on a much smaller scale than this - is full of really tough decisions. The options are often lousy. What you think you should do and what you feel you should do aren't always the same thing - and what you can do legally often complicates even the choice between those two. At better papers editors, publishers (and in this case at least) lawyers make these decisions together, and they do it after years in the business making decisions like this, weighing the ethical concerns and seeing the outcome.

Blogging - both because it's a new medium without any real hard and fast ethical rules taken up by many different people with many different motivations and because it is (like politics) a pursuit for which no experience is considered necessary - is bound to bump its head on these things as people use it for journalism. And, because it's a medium that doesn't require collaboration on decisions like this, because it's a medium in which people can do whatever they'd like with information and present it as best suits their views and ends, something this big was bound to cause a fissure in the blogging community.

I think a lot of local bloggers who got involved with the RMA report really got their first taste this weekend of how excruciating some of these decisions can be. I've never argued that journalism is rocket science, but I've also been struck by the number of people who seem to think that pro journalists do without a second thought the kinds of things we often actually sit up nights over. Sometimes there are no good choices, and if we sometimes seem excessively prone to defend a bad choice, it's usually only because all the other choices are much, much worse. Being in that situation is not a good feeling; it makes even some longtime pro journalists literally sick. I think some local folks got their first taste of that feeling during the past few days. I hope -- and please understand I'm saying this without spite or schadenfreude -- they found the experience educational.

I refuse to second-guess any local blogger's decision on how he or she has handled, or declined to handle, the RMA report. (For the record, I have not been involved in the N&R's coverage of the report, nor, at this point, have I read any of the report.) But I want to highlight one of Joe's points: Blogging as a medium doesn't require collaboration; a blogger with information can act unilaterally. Bob Steele, an ethicist at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in Florida, wrote a column years ago called Ask These 10 Questions to Make Good Ethical Decisions. At least three of those 10 questions imply that making the best decision on an ethical conundrum simply cannot be done unilaterally:

5. How can I include other people, with different perspectives and diverse ideas, in the decision-making process?

6. Who are the stakeholders -- those affected by my decision? What are their motivations? Which are legitimate? ...

10. Can I clearly and fully justify my thinking and my decision? To my colleagues? To the stakeholders? To the public?

(I also highly recommend Steele's "Guiding Principles for Journalists." As I've often said, anyone can function as a journalist; Steele's work describes how some of the best journalists function.)

I hope and trust that all those who have had a role in the past few days in deciding whether or not to disseminate the RMA report will review Steele's work now, if they have not already -- not only to see whether there was anything they could or should have done differently but also so they'll be better able to grapple with the ethical issues the next time something like this happens.

Because, as surely as I'm sitting here typing and you're sitting there reading, there will be a next time.

You might have noticed that the hamster in the exercise wheel who powers our Web site has stopped running our main site, News-Record.com, is down at the moment.

I will refrain from unnecessary snark in pointing out that we're heading into, quite likely, one of the Triad's busiest news days of the year, what with the president's visit and all.

Our tech folks currently are involved in ... well, intense discussions with our vendors, inasmuch as this has been a recurring problem.

More news as it becomes available.

Sigh.

That's the word from Action Greensboro: a ceremony from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at which there'll be free hotdogs, among other things.

I'd've posted a story on our Web site, but the hamster negotiations mentioned below remain ongoing. I'll get something up when things are fixed, and there'll probably be something in Wednesday's print edition.

Doug Fisher, the University of South Carolina journalism professor who enlivened several discussion sessions at ConvergeSouth this past weekend, has posted his thoughts on the event:

What ensued was a robust discussion about why the News & Record, arguably one of the new-media leaders in the country, especially in opening its online site to the community, still does not have comments on stories. Editorial page editor Allen Johnson noted that comments are on letters to the editor and launched into a litany of the problems the newspaper has with even that, let alone expanding it (a list I suspect could be duplicated at most any paper in the country):

* Not enough time or bodies to moderate them all. Some letters to the editor get 100 or more responses. There's no way to deal with that kind of volume on stories.
* The newspaper's software, a proprietary system, does not have the tools to do it. (For instance, even the inability to have a "report inappropriate content" button.) Lex Alexander of the N&R noted that it takes six to seven years "between the time we dip our toe in the water and tools become available."
* Reporters are talking about it in the newsroom but it "seizes us up" (that last from Joe Killian, one of the N&R's more tech-savvy reporters). There's the time to respond, etc.

The response from those there, who represented a large swath of the blogging community in Greensboro: Let us help you. We'll help police the site and turn in the trolls and flamers, if you let us. We'll help you try to work around your software, if you'll let us (after all, the software brain trust in Greensboro is pretty deep). We think you are important -- so important that we'd like to be involved in how one of the main information organs in our community grows and adapts. We don't particularly want you to die, but if you don't listen to us, we'll move on.

First Observation: If you listen really closely, you'll hear a lot of that. Newspapers have a wonderful opportunity. Their communities realize the challenges they face. They want to help. But this is a limited-time offer. We're squandering it by treating readers as some kind of product to be "captured" and even, it seems in some cases, almost as the enemy, ready to jump ship. If we can get over the psychological barriers and learn to work with our audience as partners, the possibilities are tremendous.

Second Observation: What we heard from Robinson and Johnson reinforces the notion that newspapers remain mired in their legacy as manufacturing operations in a world where news is now a service, not a product. Heck, it's reflected in the language we use. Even at ConvergeSouth, we were talking about newsPAPERS instead of talking about newsROOMS. Mere semantic difference? No, a critical orientation. (Emphasis in original)

I heard the same thing Doug did on Saturday, and the first thing I need to say is: We hear you. We hear you, Doug, and we hear you, Citizen Will and others who spoke Saturday of strengthening the bonds between the N&R and the community.
We understand the value of what we are being offered, we understand that the offer is for a limited time only, and we're going to take you up on it.

I spoke today about how to do so with John Robinson, with News & Record Interactive head Kathy Lambeth, and with a number of other key people who work for one or the other.

Long story short, in January we plan to hold a meeting here at the paper of key N&R news and technology staffers and anyone in the community interested in working with us to address some of these specific technological problems.

We'd do it sooner, but because we want this meeting to lead directly to action, we're first getting our ducks in a row for 2007 budgetwise (departmental budget hearings are going on as I type) and in terms of technological problems and priorities.

At the meeting, we'll go down that list item by item and see whether anyone in the community has the ability and willingness to help us tackle each one. Responsibilities will be assigned, target dates set for completion, and then the meeting will break up and we'll get to work.

We haven't set a firm date for the meeting yet, but in the meantime, if you think you might be interested in coming, please e-mail me. In addition, if you have specific suggestions for technological improvements to the site, please include them, and I'll see that they get to the people who are preparing our priority list for such improvements. (I've begun my own list, based in significant part on some things suggested at ConvergeSouth.)

Obviously, this is not a huge concession on our part, and I don't want to make it sound that way. It's just the opposite, in fact: We'd be nuts not to accept your offer of help. In an e-mail to me earlier today, JR acknowledged that we "stalled" this year in developing the site, emphasized that we must regain momentum in '07, and said this approach fits well with the plans of both the News and the Interactive departments to do so.

I look forward to it.

I was a bit surprised to open my News & Record Ideas section yesterday morning and see that freelance columnist Charles Davenport was accusing me of making stuff up. (The N&R doesn't generally post freelancers' columns, but you can read this one on Davenport's site.)

The full column has a host of problems, but to save time I'll address only the part where Davenport lies about my work (specifically, my review of Michelle Goldberg's book "Kingdom Coming"). Fortunately for those of us who are busy, he wastes no time, offering up this opening paragraph:

A recent spate of articles in these pages is a collective cry of "Wolf!" over the specter of a lamb. The reviewers and reporters in question -- their judgment evidently impaired by ideology -- desire that the rest of us furrow our brows, wring our hands and dialogue feverishly about a new menace rising in our midst: the evangelical Christian.

For those of you who are less attuned to Western culture than my 5-year-old son, the fable of the boy who cried "Wolf!" is about a kid who lied. Whether he did so to amuse himself or because he was just practicing or because he was lonely and wanted a little company isn't exactly clear. But he definitely lied.

Now, unless I'm mistaken, there are only two possible interpretations of what Davenport has written. Either he didn't understand that "crying wolf" means lying, or he has accused me of lying. For the record, he's wrong either way.

UPDATE (10/24): Davenport's response arrives. It says:

Mr. Alexander,

It takes a very active imagination to conclude, based on my opening
paragraph, that I accused you of lying. In common usage, "crying wolf"
simply means creating undue alarm and hysteria--which is precisely what your review did. "Crying wolf" is a vernacular expression that I'm quite sure most N&R readers understood.

Although I believe you misrepresented Christian conservatives, I did not accuse you of lying. Therefore, no apology is forthcoming.

Cordially,

Charles

Let's unpack that, shall we?

It takes a very active imagination to conclude, based on my opening paragraph, that I accused you of lying. (That paragraph is reproduced higher up in this post for those of you following alone at home.)

He falsely accuses me of crying wolf -- more on the "falsely" in a moment. He implies, although in fairness he does not explicitly claim, that crying wolf and lying are different. He claims, on the basis of exactly zero evidence and without any sort of explanation, that my ideology has impaired my judgment. (He never actually says what he thinks that ideology is, either.) And, finally, he claims that I have cast "the evangelical Christian" as a "new menace," rather than a specific subset of evangelical Christians -- whom I clearly identify in the review as adhering to a specific and identifiable piece of ideology with respect to the U.S. Constitution. (More on this last point in a moment, as well.)

In common usage, "crying wolf" simply means creating undue alarm and hysteria -- which is precisely what your review did. "Crying wolf" is a vernacular expression that I'm quite sure most N&R readers understood.

Indeed, "crying wolf" is understood as raising unnecessary alarm, and I'm quite sure that most N&R readers understood it in that way. But it is also properly understood as lying to do so. Follow the links to the various versions of the fable in my original post; you'll see that point made repeatedly. The only variation is the reason for the lie.

I'm quite sure most N&R readers understood that, too. (Indeed, in the comments to this post, Jim Wilson, who agrees with me about nothing and believes I'm an arrogant ass besides, grants me this point.)

I would also invite Davenport to point to any examples of "alarm" or "hysteria," due or undue, that my review "created."

Although I believe you misrepresented Christian conservatives, I did not accuse you of lying.

The fact that you believe I misrepresented "Christian conservatives" does not make it true. As my review clearly shows, and as I demonstrated above, I did no such thing. I didn't "misrepresent Christian conservatives," I accurately represented a particular subset of them (and more on THAT, as well, in just a bit). Perhaps that's what's really bothering Davenport. I don't know.

Therefore, no apology is forthcoming.

Translation: "Even though, if one examines the evidence in the light most favorable to me, I have been caught misunderstanding and thus misusing an expression in a way that unfairly casts Alexander's work in a bad light, I'm not going to apologize."

Thus, on the basis of the available evidence we may logically conclude 1) that I have correctly interpreted Davenport's writing; 2) that I'm not imagining squat; and 3) that Davenport, in defending the indefensible, goes so far as to repeat one of his original mischaracterizations of my work.

It is a particularly noxious type of mischaracterization known as the straw-man argument. In a straw-man argument, Person A accuses Person B of saying something B never actually said, then criticizes him for it. In this particular case, among other problems, Davenport accused me of inaccurately describing all evangelical Christians, when, as noted above, I accurately described a specific subset of evangelical Christians.

This type of argument is bad enough when it's inadvertent. But it's particularly noxious when it's intentional because of the contempt it shows for both the person with whom one is arguing and any audience to the argument: It is saying, in effect, I'm going to lie about what this guy said because I think both he and the audience are too stupid to catch me. I think Davenport's use of the technique is intentional, inasmuch as even when called out on it, he refuses to disavow, let alone apologize for, his use of it.

Of course, I could be wrong.

Now, then, to elaborate just a bit on the points I raised above.

Spagnola denies that the problems identified, and documented, in the book exist. He's factually, objectively wrong (but would that wishing made it so). Having followed the trend myself for a decade or so, having read almost all her publicly available original sources myself and having independent knowledge of some of the events described in the book, I am confident that the individual events recorded in the book happened pretty much as Goldberg describes them.

Does that prove that she is correct in her conclusions? I believe that it does, and here's why.

Like Gaul, all journalism can be divided into three parts: event stories; pattern stories, which examine connections between events; and system stories, which examine conditions that give rise to patterns. Into each reporter's life a few event stories must fall, some of them quite entertaining, inspiring, enlightening, enriching and/or important. But for most of the past quarter-century, pattern stories and system stories are where I've eaten, professionally speaking. I am logical and analytical by nature, and that's the approach I've taken to much of my journalism, whether it involved crunching numbers from government databases or discerning patterns among otherwise-apparently-unrelated traffic accidents.

And, although pattern and system stories tend to carry a higher degree of difficulty than event stories, I'm good at them. I'm occasionally wrong, but not often and not by much. I wouldn't have lasted this long in this business had it been otherwise.

On the basis, then, of my independent knowledge and research regarding much of what Goldberg writes about, and on the basis of my confidence in my analytical abilities, I have concluded that Goldberg has, if anything, understated the threat posted by the trend about which she writes.

You can disagree with my review of Goldberg's book all you like. It's still a free country. But if you're going to expect me to take your criticsm seriously, you are obliged to consider the same data she did and then explain exactly how my analysis is flawed or create your own analysis that is demonstrably superior. Simply crying "undue hysteria" don't feed the bulldog. Claiming that you don't have to read the book to "know" that it is hysterical is laughable. And if my saying so leads you to think me arrogant and one of the worst parts of the N&R, to paraphrase Spagnola, I can live with that.

I take being correct seriously, and if I really am wrong, I welcome correction. I realize that some commenters doubt this, but it's true.
But if you're going to come onto the pages of my newspaper or my blog and call me wrong, and be personally insulting while doing so, then, as the kids say, you had better come correct or you can expect pushback, to put it politely.

One final point: Commenter Jim Wilson claims that the problems in the book differ, in degree and in kind, from the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. In degree, at least to this point, that's absolutely true, and thank God for it. But in kind? I'm with Goldberg on that question, so I'll give her the last word on it. From the book's afterword, titled "Solidarity":

One way to understand the hatreds tearing up the world today is as a war between East and West, Christianity and Dar El Islam. But the schema ignores the civil wars within both houses, and the alliances across spiritual and geographic lines. At a time when religious extremists seem everywhere ascendant, I see a different struggle, one between modernity, humanism, reason, and progress on one hand, and fundamentalism, tribalism, Puritanism and obscurantism on the other. Liberals the world over are fighting religious tyranny.

In the summer of 2005, I interviewed Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian graphic novelist whose books, Persepolis and Persepolis 2, chronicle her childhood during the revolution that instituted religious rule. Part of a cosmopolitan, politically engaged family, Satrapi captures their terrified disbelief as theocrats obsessed with sex and death took over Iran. I thought secularists in America might be feeling some faint shadow of that same horror, but I was reluctant to make comparisons between Iran's despotic mullahs and our Christian nationalists, because I didn't want to trivialize her country's exponentially greater suffering. Satrapi had no such qualms. "They are the same!" she said over the phone from Paris, before spontaneously launching into a plea for solidarity among all enemies of dundamentalism. "The secular people, we have no country. We the people -- all the secular people who are looking for freedom -- we have to keep together. We are international as they" -- the zealots of all religions -- "are international."

Indeed they are. The alliance between Christian Zionists and the most fanatical Israeli settlers is well-known. Less remarked upon is the way American evangelicals have made common cause at the United Nations against international accords protecting women's and children's rights. Under [President George W.] Bush, U.S. delegations to United Nations conferences mimic the lineup at the Reclaiming America for Christ conference: the group sent to a 2002 U.N. summit on children included Concerned Women for America's Janice Crouse; Paul Bonicelli, dean of academic affairs at Patrick Henry College; and John Klink, a former advisor to the Vatican. They worked with delegates from authoritarian Islam countries to scuttle a reference to "reproductive health services" in the declaration that came out of the meeting. In a story headlined, "Islamic Bloc, Christian Right Team Up to Lobby U.N.," The Washington Post wrote of U.S. and Iranian officials huddled together during coffee breaks, presumably plotting strategy. (In 2005, Bonicelli was appointed to oversee the U.S. Agency for Internatinoal Development's democracy and government programs.)

According to the Post, partnering with conservative Muslims "provided the administration an opportunity to demonstrate that it shares many cultural values with Islam." It quoted an American official noting, "We have tried to point out there are some areas of agreement between [us] and a lot of Islamic countries on these social issues."

* * *

The things so many Islamic fundamentalists hate about the West -- its sexual openness, its art, the possibilities it offers for escaping the bonds of family and religion, for inventing one's own life -- are what the Christian nationalists hate as well. And so, in a final grotesque irony, we come full circle and see defenders of American chauvinism speaking the language of anti-American radicals. At another U.N. meeting, this one in March 2005, Janice Crouse made the connection pointedly.

Held to review the progress made since the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, the gathering offered another opportunity for the administration to pack its delegation with people like Christian radio broadcaster Janet Parshall (who, incidentally, was the narrator of David Balsiger's fawning documentary, George W. Bush: Faith in the White House). Crouse wasn't an official part of the team this time, but toward the end of hte conference, she gave a talk at the United Nations nongovernmental organization building about how feminism and "sexual liberation" have been an "unmitigated disaster" for women. ...

The blatancy of her appeal to patriarchy surprised me, because in speaking to American audiences Christian nationalists usually imitate the language of female empowerment. What shocked me, though, were Crouse's comments during the Q&A following her performance. A Turkish woman in a head scarf stood up and declared that American culture and communism are "the same," because both are colonialist forces that assault traditional norms. And amazingly, Janice Crouse agreed.

"I think you're very much on target when you say that modern-day feminism is colonialism in disguise," she said. "I get very short-tempered with American feminists today, because I see much of what they emphasize as importing decadent Western culture into third world nations." Frantz Fanon -- or Osama bin Laden -- couldn't have said it better. The crowd applauded.

This is what we are up against. Christian nationalists worship a nostalgic vision of America, but they despise the country that actually exists -- its looseness, its decadence, its maddening lack of absolutes.

Writing just after September 11, Salman Rushdie eviscerated those on the left who rationalized the terrorist attacks as a regrettable explosion of understandable third world rage: "The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings," he wrote. "Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multiparty political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex." Christian nationalists have no problem with beardlessness, but except for that, Rushdie could have been describing them.

It makes no sense to fight religious authoritarianism abroad while letting it take over at home. The grinding, brutal war between modern and medieval values has spread chaos, fear, and misery across our poor planet. Far worse than the conflicts we're experiencing today, however, would be a world torn between competing fundamentalisms. Our side, America's side, must be the side of freedom and Enlightenment, of liberation from stale constricting dogmas. It must be the side that elevates reason above the commands of holy books and human solidarity above religious supremacism. Otherwise, God help us all.

• Libel is libel, irrespective of whether it appears in a newspaper or on the Web.
• Unflattering but factually accurate reporting about someone is not libel, despite what the people on this jury think.

I don't often make predictions, by the way, but I'll make one in this case: The verdict will be overturned in its entirety on appeal, the entire judgment thrown out. The jury admits that the reporting was accurate; all else is sound and fury, signifying nothing even though it was extremely embarrassing (and no doubt terrifying) to the plaintiff. I haven't read the entire case file, but on the basis of this news article it looks as if the judge should have swatted this claim out of the park on summary judgment.

(Also, to gauge the jury's intellectual candlepower, note that although jurors concede that the plaintiff's name was on the jail log AND that the jail log was a public record, they couldn't agree on the invasion-of-privacy issue. In other words, at least one person thought that publication of the guy's name under those circumstances constituted a valid tort claim. Jayhawk, please.)

In the United States we do not, except in cases of national security, punish people for the publication of true but unflattering material. For those of you new to the country, that's one of the many things that lead us to think of ourselves as the good guys.

I'm all about the help, so here's some useful advice for those of you responsible for bringing outside experts in to train people in your company:

Do not puncture the outside expert. Otherwise, he might be reluctant to return.

Just thought you should know.

Offered without comment:

Vice President Dick Cheney, deviating from previous practice, admits that the U.S. waterboards prisoners, adding, "It's a no-brainer for me."

(The following column appeared in the Oct. 29, 2006, Ideas section of the News & Record)

In early September, News & Record reporter Lex Alexander, who has written articles about problems veterans face when filing benefits claims, sent 57 basic questions about the claims process to the Department of Veterans Affairs. The VA has failed to respond to Alexander’s questions. These questions, all of which are posted in the archives section of Alexander’s Weblog (http://blog.news-record.com/staff/lexblog/), address the composition of VA rating boards and the adjudication process as well as of the Board of Veterans Appeals.

Because of the VA’s lack of response, I have decided to help veterans by explaining the appeals process and the problems veterans face with it.

I was a senior appellate attorney and associate special assistant in the appellate litigation staff group of the VA General Counsel’s Office from 1990 to 1995. I also worked for 11 years thereafter litigating issues against the VA in the Everett & Everett law firm in Durham.

This experience has helped me develop a keen knowledge of the inner workings of the VA, especially from the regional level up to and including the Board of Veterans Appeals.

The $10 limit

Because of a $10 limitation on attorneys’ fees for helping with veterans’ initial claims — a limitation that dates back to the Civil War! — veterans usually can’t obtain legal counsel initially. For example, for nearly two years I was the only attorney registered with the N.C. Bar Association’s Lawyer Referral Service to handle initial veterans claims. I did so primarily as a public service and because I had acquired unique experience with veterans claims while I served in Washington in the VA’s general counsel office.

Veterans need the support of permanent legal representation at the initial claims adjudication level. That attorneys can only receive compensation after the VA has rendered a final Board of Veterans Appeals decision creates a vast void. There is great need for immediate long-term assistance for veterans through a permanent veterans law clinic, such as the one that will open at the N.C. Central School of Law in January 2007.

Veterans’ problems are further increased because oftentimes denials by the Board of Veterans Appeals are based on a defect made because the claim was not initially processed by an attorney. Thus, frequently the rights of veterans are lost because no legal assistance was available at the beginning of the claims adjudication process.

The average time for an initial claim for compensation and pension to be processed and a final Board of Veterans Appeals decision rendered is four to seven years. Oftentimes an elderly veteran will die before his/her claim has been fully adjudicated. VA rating boards are slow and lackadaisical in processing claims for benefits because of heavy caseloads caused by inadequate staffing, poor supervision and inexperience among rating board members. Oftentimes rating board employees are hired right of high school. Many have little or no college and little or no medico-legal, military or pertinent work experience.

Adversarial climate

Normally claims are handled by rating boards made up of one or two VA employees, and a great number of these claims are handled by junior level employees who are evaluated with an emphasis on productivity and quantity of decisions produced, rather than quality. Often, haste causes crucial items in the veteran’s claims folder — items that would favor granting a claim — to be overlooked. Furthermore, the VA’s statutorily mandated affirmative duty to assist the veteran in developing his claim is often overlooked.

All of this makes for a veterans claims adjudication process that is bogged down and adversarial.

Regional rating boards are to review the evidence contained in the veteran’s file, assist the veteran in developing his/her claim and to render a decision. Under law, rating boards must give veterans the benefit of the doubt when deciding whether current disabilities are connected to injuries and incidents that occurred during military service.

But many decisions do not apply the benefit of the doubt standard or, if it is applied, it is done in an inappropriate fashion. The VA will fail to fully develop the medical evidence and will instead base its decision on medical evidence in the record favorable toward a denial. Sometimes the VA rating board will fail to assist the veteran in obtaining appropriate medical records and military records (many of which are stored in Greenbelt, Md.), buddy statements, unit reports and any other information that might assist the veteran in developing his/her claim.

The VA rating boards also often fail to examine the veteran’s claims folder for claims not raised by the veteran but which exist and must be evaluated by the VA rating boards in light of evidence already of record. The VA also must inform the veteran of what information is necessary to make his claim for benefits sufficient.

I have noticed that treating physician statements are not given the weight and authority they should be given; instead, the VA will rely on VA physicians and doctors under contract with the VA (claiming that they are “independent medical advisors”). These VA physicians and doctors under contract oftentimes examine the veteran in a cursory manner, sometimes within a matter of minutes, and thereafter render an allegedly “independent medical opinion” stating that the veteran’s current disabilities are not related to injuries sustained in service. Sometimes the VA physicians who are under contract are not certified by the American Board of Medical Specialists in the areas for which the veteran claims disability.

When a VA examination is cursory, lasts only minutes and is done by a physician not ABMS board certified in the area for which the veteran claims disability, it is virtually impossible for that examination to fairly serve as a basis to deny the veteran his claim. Such “independent VA examinations” represent both factual and legal error and are an injustice to the veteran. In many instances, the VA rating board will offer no explanation for why it ignored the veteran’s physician’s opinion supporting the grant of the veteran’s claim and only considered the negative “independent medical opinion” of the VA physician.

Appeal process

Veterans dissatisfied with the regional VA rating decision can file a substantive appeal with the Board of Veterans Appeals in Washington. Veterans who appeal must file a Notice of Disagreement with their regional office within one year of the VA rating decision along with a VA Form 9.

The Board of Veterans Appeals is divided into four decision teams divided up by geography. Each team is comprised of at least two veterans law judges, staff attorneys and clerical staff. The BVA consists of 14 veterans law judges (including two chief veterans law judges) and at least 55-60 staff attorneys, some of whom have 20-25 years of legal experience. Each veterans law judge is assigned four or five staff attorneys who have varying degrees of experience. The duty of a staff attorney is to review the claim and draft a decision for a veterans law judge to proof and sign.

The Board of Veterans Appeals reviews the rating decision rendered at the regional office level looking for errors in fact or law. Because it is not a finder of fact, the board must rely on the record established at the rating board level. Thus, frequently the rights of veterans are lost because no legal assistance was available initially.
The Board of Veterans Appeals allowance rate between FY 1982 and FY 1991 ranged between 12.8 and 14.4 percent. That rate rose with judicial review to 20.8 percent in 2005. The remand rate back to the VA regional office is much higher. It was as high as 48.8 percent after passage of the Veterans Claims Assistance act of 2000, which broadened the VA’s affirmative duty to assist the veteran in the development of his claim. But remanding back to the VA regional office causes even more delay. In most instances the whole process will be delayed for months, if not years, if such an event occurs.

If after filing an appeal with the Board of Veterans Appeals, the veteran or his lay advocate submits a newly discovered material piece of evidence, the veteran will lose any back benefits he might have received had the claim been adjudicated in his favor solely on the basis of evidence presented when the initial claim was filed. Of course, had the $10 limitation fee not essentially barred the veteran from obtaining legal assistance in preparing the initial claim, key material that weighed in the veteran’s favor probably would have been presented initially.

Indeed, veterans are at a distinct disadvantage until after a final decision is rendered by the Board of Veterans Appeals. It is only after that time that they can hire an attorney for a reasonable fee.

It is my hope that the student involvement in a permanent veterans law clinic will help veterans seeking legal assistance with their claims.

Craig M. Kabatchnick is an attorney who lives in Greensboro. Reach him at (336) 456-3751 or (919) 382-2800.

UPDATE: I've sent another e-mail to the VA spokesman with whom I've been dealing. It linked to this piece as well as to our Oct. 8 article on veteran Butch Kabatchnick which raises many of these issues. And it reminded him of his promise, on behalf of the department, to answer these questions for the public.

We'll see what happens next.

UPDATE (Oct. 31): VA spokesman Marcus Wilson called earlier this afternoon to say that, yes indeed, those answers are still being worked on and are definitely coming. He says he has called around to the various people to whom he had to refer the questions and reminded them that we're still waiting for answers.

A few weeks ago some commenters took issue with my review of Michelle Goldberg's book "Kingdom Coming," about the rise of Christian nationalism in America. In particular, they contested the notions that such nationalists 1) were all that numerous and 2) had any real power. For those interested in learning more about the subject, award-winning historian Garry Wills writes about it for the New York Review of Books.

That'd be U.S. newspaper circulation:

NEW YORK -- Daily circulation fell 2.8 percent at U.S. newspapers in the six-month period ending in September, an industry group reported Monday, the latest sign of struggle as newspapers try to hold on to paying readers.

Sunday circulation fell 3.4 percent in the same period, according to the Newspaper Association of America's calculations of data supplied by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

The latest decline is in line with a long-term trend of falling circulation as newspapers battle with ever-increasing demands on readers' time as well as rapid changes in reading and advertising habits due to the growth of Internet use.

... New York's two fiercely competitive tabloids were the only papers in the top 20 to win circulation gains in the period. ...

Separately, the Newspaper Association of America also reported that, according to its analysis of online traffic data from Nielsen/NetRatings, nearly 57 million people visited newspaper Web sites in the third quarter, up 24 percent from the same period a year ago. That figure made up 37 percent of all Internet users.

This news comes as a number of us here review this blog post at Online Spin from Dave Morgan, chairman of Tacoda. He says, basically, that the battle is on, right now, for the local advertising dollar between local news organizations and giants such as Google and Yahoo ... and that about 95% of that market remains, for the moment, in play. His suggestions for how newspapers should respond:

• Expect ongoing 5% year-over-year drops in print revenue and ongoing 25% year-over-year increases in online revenue ... and allocate resources accordingly. Now.

(He seems to see little value in bringing print people over to online, which may be overkill (even Rob Curley started in print), but his point is that print is a drag on online at this point, culturally and perhaps also financially.)

• Make newspapers "the place where everything local is posted, shared, discussed, criticized, or mashed up." We're working on that, albeit at -- for me, at least -- a frustratingly slow pace.
• Make your site one-stop shopping for everything in your area, so as to be more attractive to advertisers. That doesn't mean you produce all the content, but it does mean you aggregate and link out like crazy: "Someone needs to aggregate every site and every page and every blog with any local connection onto local ad networks to create the kind of massive scale that advertisers want. This is already done on the national level; it should be done at the local level."

I'm not involved much with the business side of things, but I choose to be encouarged by the fact that this piece was sent to me by Kathy Lambeth, who oversees News & Record Interactive and is involved with the business side.

Now, I don't know whether these suggestions are too little, too much or just right. But they sound right, inasmuch as they 1) align generally with what our readers (particularly the more tech-savvy among them) have been asking us to do and 2) align with our own plotting and planning over the past couple of years. That doesn't mean he's right and it doesn't mean we're right, but it is an encouraging data point.

No kidding. ABC News political director Mark Halperin, who -- coincidentally, I'm sure -- has a book to flog, tells idiot talk-radio host (but I repeat myself) Hugh Hewitt that we in the media hate the military:

HH: And these liberals…you know, Terry Moran on this program said ... Terry Moran on this program from ABC, your colleague ...

MH: Right.

HH: ... said that the media hates the military, has a deep suspicion of it. Do you agree with that?

MH: I totally agree. It’s one of the huge biases, along with gays, guns, abortion, and many other things.

Which, I guess, explains why I've spent so much time over the past two months on issues related to this.

And this guy is responsible for political coverage of one of the largest, wealthiest, most powerful mainstream-media news outlets in the world. The. Mind. Reels.

You could say a lot of things about mainstream journalists' relationship to the military ... like, say, that as is true of most Americans younger than about 45, most journalists have never served. You could say they frequently misunderstand the military. But "hate"? Uh, no, Mark, and the next time you decide to anoint yourself to speak on behalf of the mainstream media, please let me know in advance so that I can get a notarized disclaimer to the effect that anything you say may well not even reside in the same dimension as what I actually think, mmkay?