Vital Perspectives is live-blogging the Israeli incursion into Gaza (assuming that’s happening) to bring back kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit.

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Like this one at Pajamas Media.

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In all the brouhaha over the New York Times’ publishing top secret information on financial surveillance, one thing amuses me in a dark comic way: from my point of view the Big Scoop is one of the great myths of our post-Watergate times. Almost always it is simply handed to you. It takes no guts whatsoever or even, in many cases, much legwork.

That was certainly true in my case. This blog had a small scoop on the UN oil-for-food program. It was the first to announce that lead investigator Robert Parton had withdrawn from the Volcker Commission. How did I get that “scoop”? Someone emailed it to me. Of course, I checked it out. But was it particularly hard work or brave in any way? Don’t be silly. [Well, you did have to get up early for a call from Paris once.-ed. That's true.]

Now my best guess is this new scoop from the NYT arrived in a similar manner, especially since three papers ended up with the story. This means the leaker or leakers simply wanted to make these media conduits for their ideas. Okay. No big deal. This has been SOP for years (although it shouldn’t be). But does this make the publishers, editors and reporters courageous figures suited to be portrayed by Redford and Hoffman in the movies? … Well, I take that back. Maybe it does these days. But it wouldn’t end up an heroic film, even if its authors intended it to be. It would be a morass of moral confusion and self-deception. If it were properly made, however, it would end up something like Evelyn Waugh’s immortal satire Scoop.

So why am I writing all this? Only to point out that people who are publishing this material are driven by a self-aggrandizing myth that is not only outdated – it is wrong.

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al-Sabah is reporting that seven of the Sunni militant groups are talking peace with the Iraqi government. Translation is on Iraq the Model where it is assumed that some of this was worked out before the amnesty plan was made public. Meanwhile, our mainstream media is barely covering this. It’s not even on the front page of Google News at this hour and buried below the fold at the NYT.

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Barone to Times: Drop Dead!

UPDATE: Snow addresses Keller

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Christopher Caldwell’s NYT Magazine cover story of this Sunday – “After Londonistan” – is definitely worth searching out. The writer tells us there are now one million Muslims in London, half of them under twenty-five. Will there “always been an England”? Of one sort or the other, I suppose.

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To be perfectly honest, up to a few months ago I never paid any attention at all to Cong. John Murtha, D-PA. He was just another back-bencher to me, if I even recognized his name, which I doubt. And I assume this was the case for most people. Now he seems to be all over us like the proverbial cheap suit – he just won’t go away. This weekend we find the gentleman opining once again: “American presence in Iraq is more dangerous to world peace than nuclear threats from North Korea or Iran, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said to an audience of more than 200 in North Miami Saturday afternoon.”

Well, okay, John, “it is so, if you think so,” as Pirandello once said [hint to Murtha: that's a deceased Italian playwright]. But reading the Congressman’s latest made me wonder why he would say something so obviously asinine. Does he actually believe it? More likely he has convinced himself of his great profundity because he is getting his fifteen minutes and then some. The minute Murtha starts sounding like a reasonable fellow he will disappear into the anonymity he has always had and so richly deserves. So my suggestion is we start to ignore Mr. Murtha. He will do either of two things: 1. Go away. 2. Become even more outrageous to get our attention and get voted out of office in the process. Failing these, we can always “fix an ass’s head” on him like Lysander (scratch that – Bottom) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As the cliché goes – it’s all good!

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I am afraid the Palestinians have lived so long in a state of rage and paranoia that peace would give them a nervous breakdown. Imagine what would happen in the highly unlikely possibility that their leadership said let’s forget Israel and concentrate on building a successful society of our own. Very few people would know what to do. Their entire culture has been constructed around blaming the other. Witness the pure insanity of yesterday’s incursion north of Gaza. According to Haaretz, Mahmoud Abbas has washed his hands of the whole affair and told the Hamas leadership they will have to deal with their own lunatics who have decided this was the time to kidnap an Israeli soldier (for the sake of what?). The Hamas leaders’ response, according to the same article, is to go into hiding, fearing for their lives (they should). What the Palestinians need more than anything is an influx of about 100,000 psychotherapists. And they better be good ones. [Maybe that's something Europe could donate.-ed. I don't think they could spare them.]

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We are in the era of what we could call the “non-leak leak”. It is a new form of a propaganda in which the obvious is repackaged as a leak in order to influence opinion or bash the opposition. Our major newspapers practice this form with such regularity it is difficult to know whether they are conscious of what they are doing, although that doesn’t matter – the effect is the same.

A recent example of this form is the New York Times “revelation” that the US has been monitoring SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication). Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I assumed that such things were monitored in the post 9-11 era. How else could the financing of terrorism be interdicted? Indeed, it’s quite obvious that Al Qaeda has, literally for years, been making the same assumptions (that we were scrutinizing these transactions) and made adjustments in order to avoid detection. And even given that, now the Counterrorism Blog details the specifics of this same SWIFT monitoring, telling us they have been public since 2002!

So what’s the story here? Exactly none…. Well, not none. The real story is that the NYT has published yet another anonymous leaker to support its narrative. Of course this is not surprising. This contemptible form of journalism has been with us for some time now. All we can do is continue fighting back and do our best not to ape their insidious, reactionary methods.

UPDATE: Patterico has canceled his LAT subsrciption over this brouhaha. [He'll be saving himself a dollar a week?-ed. Is that what you pay for you LAT subscription? Pretty soon they'll be giving them away with with LA Weekly.]

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You know it’s election time when Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif), who is normally fairly level-headed about War on Terror matters, asserted on Fox News today the newly-reported chemical weapons discovered in Iraq were old and therefore no more dangerous than aging items one might find “under the kitchen sink.” Leaving aside whether Harman (a lawyer by training) has any serious background in chemistry and is even remotely qualified to opine on such technical-scientific matters, I would bet my house that if the Congresswoman found any twenty year old sarin under her kitchen sink, she would get the Hell out of the bulding and call the police and anyone else should could think of as quickly as possible. She may be accusing Santorum and Hoekstra of political posturing, but she’s doing some pretty obvious posturing of her own. Let’s hope if she get reelected, she’ll come back to her more rational positions the second week in November.

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