by JAMES TARANTO
Monday, July 19, 2004 3:05 P.M. EDT

Fools in Fashion
"Elton John has said stars are scared to speak out against war in Iraq because of 'bullying tactics' used by the US government to hinder free speech," reports the BBC, picking up an interview from Interview, an eponymous New York-based magazine. In reality, of course, the stars won't shut up about their opposition to the war. If this is "censorship," imagine what "free speech" would be like. The rest of us wouldn't be able to get a word in edgewise.

Of course, it turns out there's no substance to John's complaint:

"There was a moment about a year ago when you couldn't say a word about anything in this country for fear of your career being shot down by people saying you are un-American," he told the magazine.

So John is crying "censorship" (the BBC headline appropriately puts the word in scare quotes) because for "a moment about a year ago," there was the possibility that criticism of Iraq's liberation would be met with . . . criticism!

John also pines for the good old days of the 1960s:

"People like Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, The Beatles and Pete Seeger were constantly writing and talking about what was going on.

"That's not happening now. As of this spring, there have been virtually no anti-war concerts--or anti-war songs that catch on, for that matter," he said.

To judge by this list of "Vietnam War era music," though, Elton John was AWOL from that antiwar movement. The list includes two John hits, "Honky Cat" and "Saturday Night's Alright [sic] for Fighting." Here's a sample of the "Honky Cat" lyrics:

They said stay at home boy, you gotta tend the farm
Living in the city boy, is going to break your heart
But how can you stay, when your heart says no
How can you stop when your feet say go

And this is from "Saturday Night's Alright":

Don't give us none of your aggravation
We had it with your discipline
Saturday night's alright for fighting
Get a little action in

Not exactly Speaking Truth to Power, is it? John did record a tune called "Act of War"--in 1985, a decade after Saigon fell to the communists. Oh well, better late than never, right? But it turns out the song is strictly about domestic affairs:

This ain't no battle honey, this ain't no fight
How come you take it so hard when I stay out all night
If I take a drink, is that against the law
And if I have a good time, do you call that an act of war

Apparently "staying out all night" is Elton John's idea of being socially conscious. The man is what we might call a chicken-dove.

Segregation of Church and State
Last Thursday John Kerry spoke to the NAACP and declared: "I will be a President who truly is a uniter, not one who seeks to divide our nation by race, riches or any other label." The next day the Washington Post published a front page story titled "Kerry Keeps His Faith in Reserve; Candidate Usually Talks About Religion Before Black Audiences Only."

According to the Post, "aides said Kerry's resistance to talking about faith and personal beliefs is a relatively common trait among Catholic and Protestant politicians reared in the reserved New England tradition." Fair enough, but why does he cast aside his reserve when talking to black audiences? America's secular left seems to view religion as something disreputable, but somehow excusable in black Americans. Even erstwhile Democratic operative Amy Sullivan, writing in the Democratic Leadership Council's Blueprint magazine, says this attitude is "condescending."

William Jefferson Wilson
Joe Wilson finally surfaced over the weekend, publishing a letter to the editor of the Washington Post and giving Wolf Blitzer, host of CNN's "Late Edition," an "exclusive interview." (The very idea of CNN boasting of an "exclusive interview" with Wilson, until recently the capital's biggest publicity hound since William Ginsburg, is comical.)

In his Post letter, Wilson engages in a series of Bill Clinton-style evasions, which prompted Post ombudsman Michael Getler to pen a rebuttal for yesterday's paper. Most notably for those who've been following the Valerie Plame kerfuffle, Wilson asserts that "the decision to send me to Niger was not made, and could not be made, by Valerie." But no one has ever said Valerie made the decision; the famous Robert Novak column of July 14, 2003, reported only that she suggested sending him.

As we noted Tuesday, last September Wilson was denying that Plame had anything to do with his Niger junket. In his interview with Blitzer, Wilson acknowledges that "my wife served as a conduit." Like Bill Clinton, with his odd definitions of "sexual relations," Wilson is now issuing misleading denials in the hope of diverting attention from the falsehood of his earlier denials. In fairness to Clinton, though, we should point out that he didn't have the gall to title his book "The Politics of Truth."

William Safire and The Weekly Standard have good descriptions of how Wilson's claims vis-à-vis Iraqi pursuit of Nigerois uranium are falling apart as well. The Standard notes that when questioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee on this topic, he acknowledged that a key assertion "may have involved 'a little literary flair.' " Politics of truth indeed.

Mark Steyn argues that this is a problem for the Democratic presidential nominee:

Some of us are on record as dismissing Wilson in the first bloom of his unmerited celebrity. But John Kerry was taken in--to the point where he signed him up as an adviser and underwrote his Web site. What does that reveal about Mister Nuance and his superb judgment? He claims to be able to rebuild America's relationships with France, and to have excellent buddy-to-buddy relations with French political leaders. Yet anyone who's spent 10 minutes in Europe this last year knows that virtually every government there believes Iraq was trying to get uranium from Africa. Is Kerry so uncurious about America's national security he can't pick up the phone to his Paris pals and get the scoop firsthand? For all his claims to be Monsieur Sophisticate, there's something hicky and parochial in his embrace of an obvious nutcake for passing partisan advantage.

Steyn notes that "Saddam wanted yellowcake for one reason: to strike at his neighbors in the region, and beyond that at Britain, America and his other enemies. In other words, he wanted the uranium in order to kill you." At least when Bill Clinton lied, no one died.

Times to Saddam: We're Sorry
The New York Times editorial board, which strongly favored Saddam Hussein's continued rule in Iraq, now says it didn't favor Saddam strongly enough. On Friday the paper published a navel-gazing editorial saying "we should have been more aggressive" in arguing that Saddam might not have had weapons of mass destruction:

At the time, we believed that Saddam Hussein was hiding large quantities of chemical and biological weapons because we assumed that he would have behaved differently if he wasn't. If there were no weapons, we thought, Iraq would surely have cooperated fully with weapons inspectors to avoid the pain of years under an international embargo and, in the end, a war that it was certain to lose.

That was a reasonable theory, one almost universally accepted in Washington and widely credited by diplomats all around the world. But it was only a theory.

"Congress would never have given President Bush a blank check for military action if it had known that there was no real evidence that Iraq was likely to provide aid to terrorists or was capable of inflicting grave damage on our country or our allies," the Times opines. On weapons of mass destruction, then, the paper's position seems to be that if Saddam had them, he would have been entitled to stay in power so long as he kept them concealed.

As for the assertion that "there was no real evidence that Iraq was likely to provide aid to terrorists," we would draw the attention of Gail Collins and her crew to two reports in their own newspaper:

"Abu Abbas, the Palestinian mastermind of a deadly 1985 cruise ship hijacking in which an American passenger in a wheelchair was shot and thrown into the sea, has died at a prison in Iraq," the Times reported on March 10. "In recent years, Mr. Abbas had lived in Iraq under the protection of Saddam Hussein's government."

And on June 19, the Times reported from Moscow that "President Vladimir V. Putin said Friday that Russia gave intelligence reports to the Bush administration suggesting that Saddam Hussein's government was preparing terrorist attacks in the United States or against American targets overseas."

Has the Jayson Blair scandal so tainted the Times' credibility that the paper's own editorial board doesn't believe what it reads in its news pages?

Deadly U.N. Corruption
"American officials believe that millions of dollars Saddam Hussein skimmed from the scandal-plagued U.N. oil-for-food program are now being used to help fund the bloody rebel campaign against U.S. forces and the new Iraqi government," the New York Post reports:

U.S. intelligence officials and congressional investigators said last night that the "oil-for-insurgency link" has been recently unearthed in the numerous probes now under way into the giant U.N. humanitarian program, in which Saddam is believed to have pocketed $10.1 billion through oil smuggling and kickbacks from suppliers. . . .

The network of bankers, front companies, couriers and money-launderers involved in handling Saddam's oil-for-food kickback schemes still appears to be active, investigators say.

U.S. intelligence officials believe a portion of the funds in these hidden accounts--possibly millions--is now being used to fund the Ba'athist guerrillas responsible for much of the postwar violence against coalition troops, sources said.

We notice John Kerry's latest "Strategy for Success in Iraq" makes no mention of the U.N. Perhaps Kerry is wising up.

Barbara Bush's New Job
"White House Mum on Cabinet Intel Post"--headline, Associated Press, July 19

Life in the Vast Lane
Our item Friday on war profiteering at The Nation, an ostensibly left-wing magazine, prompted reader Jerry Skurnik to write offering two alternative conspiracy theories:

1. Which political candidate is closest in ideology to The Nation? Ralph Nader. He's even written for them. Nader agreed to run to hurt Gore and elect Bush. Karl Rove, that devil, agreed to start a war in order to boost Nader's friends at The Nation.

2. Bush is really a lefty. That's why he's spending money like a drunken sailor, not really doing anything to limit abortions, and sending American troops to liberate women and minorities. The Nation knows it helps Bush and themselves when they attack him.

When Hillary Clinton famously warned of a "vast right-wing conspiracy," she had only the vaguest idea of just how vast it really is--and how many wings it has.

'Girlie Men' or Just Crybabies?
We never much cared for those "Pumping Up With Hans and Franz" skits on "Saturday Night Live," in which Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon played a pair of boastful but simple-minded bodybuilders with Germanic accents. But we're having second thoughts now that California's Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, borrowing a line from "Pumping Up," has called Democratic legislators who refuse to go along with spending cuts "girlie men."

OK, so Schwarzenegger's comment wasn't terribly witty--but the reaction from self-serious Dems has us laughing out loud. From the Associated Press:

State Sen. Sheila Kuehl said the governor had resorted to "blatant homophobia."

"It uses an image that is associated with gay men in an insulting way, and it was supposed to be an insult. That's very troubling that he would use such a homophobic way of trying to put down legislative leadership," said Kuehl, one of five members of the Legislature's five-member Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Caucus. . . .

Assemblyman Mark Leno, a San Francisco Democrat who is chairman of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Caucus, said he was glad Schwarzenegger didn't repeat the "girlie men" remark Sunday, saying it was "as misogynist as it is anti-gay."

"To disparage a group of law abiding tax paying citizens is just wrong," Leno said.

Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, a Democrat, said that while he wasn't upset by the remark, his 13-year-old daughter was.

"She's a young girl who knows the governor and really likes him a lot and didn't find the term to be a positive term, and finds it to be derogatory," Nunez said. "It was no question a very, very insensitive comment to make. I personally am not intimidated or threatened by it, but I think it really is beneath Gov. Schwarzenegger."

An earlier version of the AP dispatch also includes this quote from Kuehl: "It's ironic that the governor would try to find a metaphor for weakness when his real problem is that we're being too strong."

Boy, where to begin? Well, for one thing, Kuehl seems to think that what makes a legislator "strong" is his inability to resist the temptation to spend every last taxpayer dollar. Nunez's implicit claim not to be a "girlie man" is undercut by his hiding behind the skirts of a 13-year-old girl while claiming he is "not intimidated."

And what's the deal with the "five-member Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Caucus"? If it's got one lesbian, one gay, one bisexual and one transgender, that's only four members. If the fifth member belongs to one of the four groups, his group is oppressing the others!

Just a Band?
Blogger Donald Sensing is skeptical of Annie Jacobsen's story, which we noted Friday, about an apparent terrorist "dry run" on a Detroit-to-Los Angeles flight:

One of the things I learned in the years I have spent in law enforcement at both the federal and local level is that witnesses of traumatic events relate few details. When people are frightened or otherwise psychologically shocked, their minds don't record movies, but snapshots, and not many of them, either.

Annie's story has a wealth of detail, so much that I find myself disbelieving that she could have been as afraid as she says she was. Since she nowhere indicates that she took contemporaneous notes, I have to conclude her story was written from memory, and written at a minimum many hours after the flight landed.

"I don't think Annie's article is a hoax," Sensing writes. "But by no means is it an unbiased, dispassionate, objective account of the flight. Annie was convinced from before takeoff until after landing that her life was in potential peril, and this template [i.e., post-Sept. 11 assumptions about the dangers of terrorism] filtered every event."

Sensing notes that a spokesman for the Federal Air Marshals Service told blogress Michelle Malkin that the 14 Syrian passengers turned out to be a "musical band." A later Sensing post identifies the band as Kulna Sawa, which has a Web site, though it's a GeoCities page with limited bandwidth.

Litigious Libyans
"Libya's foreign minister has threatened to sue U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell for calling Moammar Gadhafi's regime 'totalitarian,' " the Associated Press reports from Tripoli:

"The Minister Colin Powell humiliated the people of Libya and therefore ... we will file a lawsuit against him," [Abdel-Rahman] Shalqam was quoted as saying. "What he said is considered blasphemous and defamatory against Libyans."

He did not say where or how any such suit would be pursued.

Meanwhile, a Reuters story on prostitution in Cuba includes the following sentence: "Cuba's government, born of a revolution against a corrupt U.S.-backed dictatorship that allowed Mafia-run gaming and prostitution to thrive in Havana in the 1950's, strongly denies tolerating sex tourism."

Nowhere does the dispatch mention that Cuba's current "government" is a totalitarian dictatorship. Maybe the Reutervillians are afraid Fidel Castro will sue them in a Libyan court.

Homelessness Rediscovery Watch

"If George W. Bush becomes president, the armies of the homeless, hundreds of thousands strong, will once again be used to illustrate the opposition's arguments about welfare, the economy, and taxation."--Mark Helprin, Oct. 31, 2000

"Homeless Struggle On as City Prepares for the Super Bowl"--headline, Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville), July 19

"City Is Gambling on an Old Program to Cure Homelessness"--headline, New York Times, July 19

"Homeless Growth Predicted Due to Housing Voucher Cuts"--headline, Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch, July 19

"Homeless Tent Camp in Bothell Gets Mixed Reviews"--headline, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 19

They Call This Fair and Balanced?
"Sly Fox Caught Stealing Kan. Newspapers"--headline, Associated Press, July 15

You Don't Say
"Prison Would Give Stewart New Lifestyle"--headline, Associated Press, July 17

What Would We Do Without Experts?
"Adopting a Wild Animal as a Pet? Bad Idea, Experts Agree"--headline, St. Cloud (Minn.) Times, July 19

What Would Children Do Without Experts?
"Experts Say Prepare Children for School"--headline, Florida Today, July 17

Courting the Court
Sandu Gurguiatu "took his company to court four years ago for what he said was unfair dismissal," the Associated Press reports from Bucharest. "But after setting eyes on Judge Elena Lala, he sued his employers and others dozens of times--just to see her":

"I fell madly in love with her and when I found out she was married, I didn't know how I would manage to see her," he told the daily Libertatea on Thursday. "The only way was to see her in the courtroom, so I looked in the law book and came up with all kinds of excuses."

This adds a whole new meaning to court of appeals.

Not Too Brite--CLIII
"A 70-year-old Italian died on Saturday when a World War One bomb, part of his collection of military memorabilia, exploded while he was showing it to a friend in his garden," Reuters reports from Venice.

Oddly Enough!

(For an explanation of the "Not Too Brite" series, click here.)

A Whale of a Problem
Obesity is a big problem, we tellya. A big problem.

(How big is it?)

It's so big, it has smaller big problems in orbit around it!

Agence France-Presse reports that obesity in the U.S. is an "epidemic." It's "endemic" in Bulgaria (Sofia News Agency) and "pandemic" in Jamaica, where it's known as "globesity" (Jamaica Observer).

How does this sickness spread? Through television (London Daily Telegraph) and tap water (Sunday Mercury, Birmingham, England). Apparently not, however, through food. Britain's Press Association reports Tony Blair's government may fight childhood obesity by encouraging kids to eat more:

The free school lunch scheme should be extended to include breakfast and more pupils should be offered free fruit to combat "a mass outbreak of obesity," the Government was urged today.

You know, we're feeling lazy today. We don't want to work; we'd rather just plop down on the couch and "recline there, watching TV, . . . with, say, a bag of Doritos or a large pizza" (Washington Post magazine).

Well, boy do we feel empowered. Now that obesity is a disease, we don't have to work. All we have to do is call in fat!

(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Doug Carlson, George Brown, Rosanne Klass, Allen O'Donnell, Ethel Fenig, Michael Williamson, Terry Young, David Anderson, Erik Moy, Kevin Schmidt, Jay Brinker, Chris Repetto, Ed Lasky, J.M. Braun, Yehuda Hilewitz, Tom Neven, Mary Kay Smedstad, Samuel Walker, David Shapero, Jason McClain, Paul Dyck, Henry Hanks, Rosslyn Smith, C.E. Dobkin, Joseph Carragher, Barak Moore, David Beebe, Paul Siebenshuh, Steve Ginnings, Jim Fraivillig, Michael Holman, Aaron Ammerman, John Willard, Thomas Mayer, Sol Cranfill, Michael Zukerman, John Williamson, Cliff Thier, S.E. Brenner, Richard Miniter, Jim Downs, Michael Nunnelley, Andy Hefty, Ray Samori, E.B.S. Hirsch, Donald Bosch, David Gail, Dennis Powell, John Sinnott, Don Williams, Edward Himmelfarb, Robert Sherrod, Mark Schulze, Brendan Loy, Jennifer Ray and Steve Lewis. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

Today on OpinionJournal:

• Garry Kasparov: Chess didn't make Bobby Fischer cheer 9/11.
• Arthur Cherenkoff: A roundup of the past two weeks' good news in Iraq.
• Andrew and Judith Kleinfeld: Go ahead, call us cowboys.