by JAMES TARANTO
Wednesday, July 27, 2005 1:00 P.M. EDT

A Lustrous Lustrum
Yes, we're still on vacation (back Monday), but since this column, and this Web site, had its debut on July 28, 2000, we thought this would be a good time to look back on our first five years.

Four years ago today (since our first anniversary fell on a Saturday), we looked back at the launch of OpinionJournal.com and thanked many of the people involved, especially the late Robert Bartley (whose death we noted on Dec. 10, 2003), who conceived the idea of an editorial-page Web site and of this column. This year we look back at the evolution of Best of the Web Today and at some of the events and ideas we've covered over the years. Today we'll review our first 411 days--that is, from launch through Sept. 11, 2001. Tomorrow we'll look at our post-9/11 war coverage, and on Friday we'll cover American politics since Sept. 11.

From 'Editing' to 'Writing'
In 2002, Steven Den Beste described a useful dichotomy of bloggers:

Blogs are as different as the people who write them, but you'll find two fundamental themes, with each blog being somewhere on the axis of how much of each appears. For lack of better terms, I suppose you could refer to them as "editors" and "writers."

One form of blog is the "informal portal." The general idea is to find cool stuff, link to it, and perhaps add a few words describing it. The link is the point; the words are there to encapsulate and sell the link. These people are organizers, searchers, they're the web's editors. They become popular to the extent that their readers like their judgment.

The other theme is writing. The idea is to actually create something new and add it to the collective data stream. There may be a link involved or may not be, but it's the writing which is the point. The subject matter may be critical or trivial; it may be driven by current events or by private experience or by the whim of the blogger. Sometimes a link is relevant; sometimes it inspires the writing. Sometimes no link is needed at all.

Den Beste, who, sad to say, has largely abandoned blogging, was a "writer," penning long essays on politics and military strategy (two of which we reprinted, here and here). Glenn Reynolds of InstaPundit.com is mostly an editor; he often posts dozens of links a day to interesting pieces elsewhere, but keeps his own commentary (at least on InstaPundit) short and sweet. The Web's original editor, though he isn't really a blogger, is Matt Drudge.

This column--we don't call it a "blog" because we post on a daily schedule rather than at will--began as an exercise in editing; it was not an outlet for the bloviations of this site's editor. Indeed, the prelaunch working title for the column was "Reading List," and at first it largely adhered to that vision.

The debut column had six items, some with multiple links. The first two were historical background on Dick Cheney, the newly selected Republican vice presidential nominee: one about a speech he gave at the Cato Institute in 1998 in which he expressed skepticism about the wisdom of unilateral economic sanctions, the other about a novel his wife, Lynne, wrote in 1988 in which she made fun of the vice presidency. The other four were about interesting but little-noted news items.

In the early days, Ira Stoll, formerly of the Forward and now managing editor of the New York Sun, compiled Best of the Web Today and sent it to James Taranto (for clarity, we'll use the third person for a moment), who edited it and posted it on the site. As time went on, Taranto began adding items of his own, often laced with pungent commentary, such as this one, titled "Et Tu, Esquire?," from Oct. 31, 2000:

President Clinton is mighty ticked off at Esquire magazine. Yesterday, you'll recall, we learned that he had given the magazine an embarrassing interview in which he demanded an apology from Republicans for impeaching him. Now he says the magazine betrayed his trust. "I was promised faithfully that that interview would be . . . released after the election," an irritated Clinton said yesterday. But there it was on the Internet, more than a week early. Can you believe it? They lied to him. Just flat-out lied! Is there no honor left in this country?

Mr. President, we can relate. Let us tell you what happened to us a few years ago. We hired a fellow to do an important job, and this guy was charming and gifted, but he had--how do we put this delicately?--a "character problem." Apparently his marriage was on the rocks, and he was always hitting on women at the office, in violation of our sexual-harassment policy. Anyway, to make a long story short, he ended up having an improper relationship with a very young woman on the staff, and when we caught him at it, he looked us in the eye, waved his finger and lied to us. It gets worse. There was also a lawsuit, and he lied in a deposition, and then he lied under oath to a grand jury that was conducting a criminal investigation. That's not only dishonest, it's against the law!

We seriously considered firing him but in the end decided just to let his contract expire. (And get this--now he wants us to give his wife a job!)

Don't get us wrong, Mr. President. We don't mean to suggest that our little experience with this problem employee was as serious as the perfidy you've suffered at the hands of Esquire magazine. All we're saying is, we feel your pain.

As time went on, the column took on Taranto's voice and became an exercise in "writing" more than "editing"--though there's far more to it than polemics. The column's analysis and argument are the result of applying a skeptical eye to a vast quantity of information; reader Michael Segal calls Best of the Web Today the "blog of record," an appellation we like even though we don't call it a blog.

Since June 2001 it has run under Taranto's byline. Because the column was originally unsigned, it used the editorial we, as in the October 2000 Clinton item, and Taranto--that is, we--decided to continue the tradition. Readers often ask why we use plural pronouns in reference to a single person. The best explanation comes from our colleague Tunku Varadarajan, who observes that we've got "a whole sui generis arch style thing going." And hey, it works for us.

The 2000 Postelection
"Now there's something you don't see every day," we said in opening our column on Nov. 8, 2000, the day after the election. We had arisen at 11 a.m. to work on Wednesday's column, after staying up till 8 a.m. to post late columns from John Fund, Claudia Rosett and Peggy Noonan.

The election was undecided, and would remain so for five more weeks. Al Gore led George W. Bush, 260 electoral votes to 246, with Florida and Oregon undecided. Gore was to carry the Beaver State, which votes by mail and was slow to count, but it didn't matter--the Sunshine State was the decisive one, and Bush had a lead of just under 2,000 votes, enough to force an automatic recount.

That recount cut Bush's lead to less than 1,000 votes, and the Gore camp demanded re-recounts by hand, especially in Democrat-leaning Broward, Dade and Palm Beach counties, which trimmed the margin further. A legal battle ensued between the Florida Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court. On Nov. 21 the Florida court unanimously overturned a lower-court ruling and ordered the resumption of those hand recounts. On Dec. 4 a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court vacated that ruling and ordered the Tallahassee justices to reconsider its ruling.

Then divisions appeared in both courts. On Dec. 9, by a vote of 4-3, the Florida Supreme Court ordered a full statewide re-re-recount. That was a Saturday, prompting an unusual weekend Best of the Web Today. Chief Justice Charles Wells dissented: "I . . . believe that the majority's decision cannot withstand the scrutiny which will certainly immediately follow under the United States Constitution."

He was right. On Dec. 12, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled the Florida court in Bush v. Gore. Seven of the nine justices agreed that the Florida court's ruling was unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause, but two of them wanted to give the Floridians more time to resolve the problem. A five-justice majority, however, held that state law set a Dec. 12 deadline and thus put a stop to the re-re-recounting. Thirty-five days after the election, George W. Bush was officially president-elect.

To this day, you hear Democratic partisans insist that Bush "stole" the election, even though Gore never led in Florida, and subsequent mock recounts conducted by journalistic organizations (including The Wall Street Journal, publisher of this Web site, and the New York Times) found that he would have maintained his lead by any uniform re-re-recounting method. And some of the arguments Gore backers made during the brouhaha were even sillier--among them the one that prompted perhaps our favorite item about the story.

Two writers--Ron Rosenbaum of the New York Observer and Alan Wolfe of Boston College in Salon--described Bush as a "postmodernist," one who disbelieves in objective reality, because his legal team took the position that it was impossible to discern the "intent of the voter" if a ballot was ambiguous because not properly marked. As we wrote:

Bush never argued that all truth is unknowable, merely that a certain type of fact is unknowable--namely, the intent of voters who cast ballots without proper votes for president. Does a "dimpled chad" in a ballot's Gore hole reflect an intention to vote for Gore? Does it reflect an intention not to vote for Gore--an impulse to vote that the voter thought better of and suppressed? Or is it a wholly accidental mark, devoid of meaning? The only way to find out would be to ask each voter who cast such a ballot what he intended. But we have no way of knowing who these voters are, because Americans vote by secret ballot. The truth Gore claimed to be seeking is unknowable because our voting system is designed to make it so. Objective reality survives.

Wolfe went so far as to imply that Bush's "postmodernism" was of a piece with Holocaust denial. The Bush-as-Nazi theme was shocking at the time, but has now become so commonplace on the Angry Left that one can only shrug.

Our saddest memory from the 2000 election is Al Gore's concession, undoubtedly the best speech he has ever given or ever will give. The day after the speech, we chided cynics on both right and left who criticized the then-veep:

C'mon, guys, give Gore a break. It's true . . . that the vice president was playing a role in a venerable ritual of American politics. But he played it well, and at a time when a graceful concession has never been more necessary.

What's sad about this is that the gracious and mature Al Gore of the concession hasn't been heard from since. He essentially dropped from public view for a year or so, then re-emerged as a furious far-left fulminator (albeit sometimes an unintentionally humorous one).

One hesitates to engage in armchair psychology, but we can't help suspecting that at some deep level Gore didn't really want to be president. He was, after all, the son of an ambitious senator, whose own presidential hopes were never realized, and perhaps his parents transferred their ambitions onto Al Jr. Gore was elected to Congress at age 29 and to the Senate at 36; he was only 40 when he first ran for president. (Bush is also a political scion but his political efforts were desultory at first and do not seem to have been the result of parental pressure.)

When Gore conceded, he seemed relieved, as if he was finally at peace with himself. Perhaps it was a moment of clarity--clarity that he lost in the ensuing months as people told him he wuz robbed and Bush was ruining the country. The story of Al Gore may come to be remembered as a tragedy of American politics.

Zero-Tolerance Watch
As we were rereading old columns in preparation for this retrospective, we were surprised to discover that the first mention of "zero tolerance" school discipline policies came way back on Oct. 10, 2000:

Zero Tolerance Turns Silly
Students are getting in trouble for packing such potentially lethal weapons as a Tweety Bird wallet (a chain was attached), a rubber band and a toenail clipper. As a Detroit News editorial points out, the policies are the result of the Safe and Drug-Free School Act of 1994, which "required schools to expel students found with a weapon, or lose federal aid." This does not bolster confidence in Washington's ability to improve education. So why, as Chester Finn asks in Commentary, is the presidential election shaping up as "a contest between two different conceptions of education policy, both of which depend on a proactive, big-spending, muscular federal role"?

On Feb. 1, 2001, we cited the story of Christopher Kissinger, then 8, who had been suspended from school for three days for "pointing a breaded chicken finger at a teacher and saying 'Pow, pow, pow.' " Then, on March 22, we noted that a pair of 8-year-olds in Irvington, N.J., had been arrested for "making terrorist threats" with "paper guns." By March 26, a new feature had been born, which the next day we titled "Zero-Tolerance Watch."

Since then, we've done several hundred zero-tolerance items and a pair of 2001 pieces on the subject for The Wall Street Journal: one an overview essay, the other a report on Jason Anagnos, then 10, a New Jersey boy who was convicted and sentenced to probation for making a "fake bomb" with duck sauce.

Out of Zero-Tolerance Watch was born an idea that made Best of the Web Today a better and more sophisticated column. In March 2001, a reader named Rodger Schultz e-mailed us to call our attention to a story about a Maryland elementary school that had banned the game of tag. We credited him at the bottom of the item and invited readers to write us with more zero-tolerance tips.

By the next month, we had expanded our solicitation of tips to include all subjects, and the credit line at the bottom became a fixture of the column. Today we get between 300 and 400 e-mails a day, and reading them is the most labor-intensive part of our job. But it's well worth it, for it enables us to cast a much wider net than we could back when we browsed for material on our own. Best of the Web Today reflects the views of one man, but draws on the information-gathering and analysis of hundreds.

Jeffords Jumps
"OK, we guessed wrong," began our column of May 23, 2001. Two days earlier, we had predicted that Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont would not abandon the Republican Party. We argued that the switch didn't make sense:

[ABC News reports that] "sources close to Jeffords say Democrats have been courting him aggressively and 'talks have intensified in the last two weeks.' " The Washington Times reports they've twice offered him committee chairmanships if he switches.

But a paper from Jeffords's home state, the Rutland Herald, reports a switch is unlikely. We're guessing the Herald is right. The Democratic Party may be more hospitable to Jeffords's liberal views, but if he were going to change parties, this would be the least opportune time to do it. With the Senate evenly divided and sharply polarized, liberal Republicans like Jeffords and conservative Democrats like Georgia's Zell Miller, who sometimes break ranks with their parties, are the most important members. Why would he want to go from being a pivotal maverick to being just another of Tom Daschle's troops?

The Times reports the Democrats' second offer was the chairmanship of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee--which he already holds. At best this would be a lateral move, but if Jeffords switches parties and the Republicans retake the Senate--either in 2002 or sooner, through the death or resignation of one of the 27 Democrats from states with a GOP governor--suddenly he'd be in the minority party. And he couldn't very well switch back.

Our prediction was wrong, but our analysis was right. On Nov. 6, 2002, the day after the Republicans retook the Senate, we declared Jeffords "America's biggest loser." This April Jeffords announced he will not seek re-election. As we wrote in 2002, "we hope Jeffords at least enjoyed his 15 minutes of fame."

Monkeyfishing
In June 2001 we read a Slate article in which one Jay Forman described a "monkeyfishing" excursion off the coast of Florida:

Fruits were the bait of choice. . . . Once the bait was on the hook, I watched as the monkeyfisherman cast it onto the island, then waited. Not for long. The monkeys swarmed round the treat, and when the fisherman felt a strong tug he jerked the pole. I knew he had hooked one by the shriek it made--a primal yowl that set my hair on end. The monkey came flying from the trees, a juicy apple stapled to its palm.

He didn't actually land the monkey on the boat, since having a pissed-off, screeching monkey on the end of a hook running around a small skiff trying to bite you is the stuff of nightmares. He practiced a form of "catch and release." Monkeys can't really swim, but the water round the island was shallow. The line was cut and the monkey floundered back to await medical testing.

We didn't believe it, even though the article included a link to an old CNN story that confirmed there was, implausibly enough, a Florida key where a pharmaceutical company raised wild monkeys for use in medical experiments. We actually weren't sure if it was a hoax or just a joke, but since there was nothing to tip us off to the latter, we assumed hoax. And we had a little fun at the expense of Slate's founder and then-editor:

Michael Kinsley, editor of Slate, is a very clever fellow, but he's always struck us as somewhat unworldly. You know what we mean--the sort of guy who has a lot of book learning but is short on street smarts. Well, it appears he has fallen for an obvious hoax. . . . Jay Forman does seem to have made a monkey out of Mike Kinsley.

Forman wrote to us, other bloggers investigated this and other Forman tales, and Kinsley declared Slate was standing by Forman's stories. We stood by our skepticism, and ultimately we were vindicated. On June 25, the New York Times published the results of a thorough investigation that debunked the monkey tale. Kinsley issued a retraction of sorts: "Slate . . . now acknowledges that it published falsehoods and we apologize to our readers." But he insisted:

The Slate article described a "monkeyfishing" excursion in the Florida Keys. This involved taking a boat to an island occupied by monkeys and casting for them like fish, using fruit for bait. Despite suggestions by others that the entire episode was fiction, this excursion did take place.

"So there you have Kinsley's defense," we wrote: "The monkeyfishing story was true, except the part about monkeyfishing!" Notably missing from Kinsley's e-mea culpa was any acknowledgment that we had gotten it right, or even that we had called attention to the hoax at all. That seemed rather ungracious to us at the time, but hey, Mike, we forgive you. We did take the opportunity to gloat in a June 27 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.

September 11, 2001
Readers sometimes ask us if we ever run short of material. The answer may sound pat, but it's true: It happened once. We came home on a Monday night after a day at the office and an evening at one of those Internet parties (ah, the good old days!), and found there were very few e-mails in our inbox, and hardly any that pointed us to interesting stories.

With the Giants-Broncos game on in the background, we started browsing Lucianne.com and came up with roughly a dozen plausible things to write about, though nothing that really thrilled us. They're still in our notes; one of them reads (quoting verbatim), "only 1 in 5 canadians wans to be annexed by u.s."; alas, that link no longer works. We went to bed not really knowing what we'd write about the next day.

In the morning, we woke up. It was Sept. 11, 2001.

Our normal routine on a Tuesday is to awaken at 9 a.m. to WCBS, a news station, on our clock radio. We listen to the CBS news on the hour and the 9:08 weather report, then arise, get ready for work, and commute to our office downtown for the weekly meeting of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.

On this day, there was no news on the hour. Instead, a WCBS anchorman was on the phone with someone, asking, "When did the plane hit the World Trade Center?" Something was happening, though the significance took a while to register. We got up and turned on NY1, the local cable news channel, for the latest on what we thought was a New York story.

A camera was trained on the twin towers, one of which was emitting plumes of smoke. Then, there was some sort of flash from the other tower; it had been hit too. Word came in about the Pentagon, and the plane in Pennsylvania. There were rumors of more planes missing, of car bombs outside the State Department. America was under attack.

The Wall Street Journal's offices are in the World Financial Center, catercorner to the World Trade Center site. Obviously we wouldn't be going into the office that day. Instead, we sat at home, gathering information and preparing a column, which we published at 1:11 p.m., less than 4 1/2 hours after the first plane hit.

Some of our colleagues had gone to the office early, and they sent firsthand accounts by e-mail, some of which turned into op-eds the next day. Jason Riley, now our office mate, described his escape from Manhattan to his home in Brooklyn. Mary O'Grady also told of her evacuation and flight to Brooklyn. Dan Henninger, who made it to the WFC but not to the office, told in his impromptu first Wonder Land column of watching both planes hit and both towers collapse. His column was part of the package that won the Journal the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting. Reader Janice Lyons of Charlotte, N.C., wrote in response to Dan's column:

This is the most haunting piece I have ever read.

To explain what has happened here I have referred friends from all over the world to your column. It is not about who did it, or what we should do. It is about you, and a love affair with New York; the love affair of literally millions of people, New Yorkers or not, with what has become one of the most wonderful cities in the world.

The beauty which evil dissembled on a clear early fall day in New York is now even more clearly etched on my mind because of your piece.

And I want to tell you that even though they will be stained from now on, there will be more beauty and more clear fall days.

And I want to thank you.

The Wall Street Journal was able to publish a paper on Sept. 12 thanks to the extraordinary efforts of its staff. On the editorial page, three senior employees--Paul Gigot, who formally became editorial page editor on Sept. 17, chief editorial writer Bill McGurn and editorial technology director Ken De Witt--made their way to the Dow Jones offices in South Brunswick, N.J. Some half dozen writers and editors who live in Brooklyn assembled at the home of Bob Bartley. Others checked in from home by e-mail.

Making things more complicated, the Journal had on Sept. 9 switched over to a new version of Hermes, the software we use to produce the newspaper. Everyone was to be issued a new laptop, but the software on our old computers no longer worked. The process of distributing the new laptops had only begun, and as luck would have it we were the only editorial page staffer with a fully upgraded laptop on Sept. 11.

This meant that, while some two dozen writers and editors contributed in one way or another to the Sept. 12 editorial and op-ed pages, the actual production was left to four of us--our colleagues in New Jersey and this columnist. Our own small part in history was that we wrote all the headlines. The one we wrote for Dan's column still gives us chills: "I Saw It All. Then I Saw Nothing."

It would be almost a year before we returned to the World Financial Center. For a month or so, the editorial page was produced from South Brunswick, an hour's train ride from New York; we worked at home the whole time, though we wish we'd made it in at least once to partake of the wartime esprit de corps.

In October we got a temporary office on Seventh Avenue, in New York's garment district, previously the home of Work.com, a Dow Jones joint venture that had shut down some months prior. It was a stereotypical dot-com workplace: There were no private offices, just a big open space; and a common area that had a picnic table and a sandwich board advertising some brand of beer. It reminded us of the sites of various parties we'd attended during the Silicon Alley heyday; our first impulse upon arriving at work was always to look for the bar.

Finally, in August 2002, the editorial page returned to the renovated and cleaned-up World Financial Center. We were on vacation; our first day in the new old office was Sept. 3, the day after Labor Day. We wrote that day:

Today we are back at the WFC. Our new office in our old building looks down on a 16-acre pit several stories deep. During our first stint in this place--from May 1996 to September 2001--we would occasionally look over at the World Trade Center and try to imagine what it was like when a bomb went off there in February 1993. Now we look at the enormous hole in the ground and try to remember what it was like a year ago, when two homely yet majestic buildings still stood on the site.

Then, to put things in perspective, we look at a map of the Muslim world and imagine what it will be like when the dictators are gone and the countries they now rule have joined the civilized world. If this strikes you as fancifully optimistic, look at a map of Germany, Italy, Japan or even Russia and remember what those countries used to be like.

We're still in the same office, still overlooking Ground Zero. And from time to time we still look out our window for a reminder of why America is fighting--and why we are writing.