Our friends at the Media Research Center have issued their annual Notable Quotables awards for 2004. (The MRC deserves its own award for sifting through all the detritus just to give us the worst of the worst in a year’s worth of reporting.) In the end, the Quote of the Year goes to CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather, who had this to say on March 31, when four American contractors were slaughtered in Falluja:

“What drives American civilians to risk death in Iraq? In this economy it may be, for some, the only job they can find.”

My review of Alice Munro’s new collection of short stories is posted at the Washington Times. Could make a lovely Xmas gift actually. The book, not the review. Runaway

I touted the first issue of this corporate newsletter parody a couple weeks ago. Since then, the editor’s been contacted by the Wall Street Journal, wanting to know who’s doing the scribbling. The editor, it turns out, is a friend of mine, but I gather he’s being coy about his identity, so for now it’s safe with me. Anyway here’s a clip from the second issue.

Headline: Engagement Used as Excuse to Announce New Job in Alumni Magazine

New York – Penn alumnus Ryan Hathaway (W ’01) used his recent engagement to Karen Anson (C’00, L’03) as his excuse to detail his many job successes in the Penn alumni magazine The Pennsylvania Gazette, Hathaway reported Monday.

“I’ve been dying to let everyone I didn’t know at Penn that I’ve recently moved to an elite long-short hedge fund after two successful years as an analyst in JB Morgan’s number one ranked M&A group,” Hathaway stated. “Thank God Karen said yes to my proposal, because the last thing I’d want to do is look obnoxious by just sending in my accomplishments and nothing else to go with it.”

Hathaway and Anson have yet to set a date for their wedding because Hathaway needs to get a “better sense” of how long it is going to take to become partner at his fund. “I would really like to tie our wedding day announcement ot a big promotion,” Hathaway noted. “If it take three years to make partner, then Karen will just have to wait three years to get married.”

In case you’d like to subscribe, it’s being offered free. Drop my anonymous friend an email at thebullpenreport[at]yahoo.com. Warning: The Bullpen ocasionally indulges in crude humor, but nothing beyond the pale of, say, Victorino Matus.

Here’s Tom Shales to tell us about the stepping down of Bill Moyers, fighter for truth and dignity and righteousness. Make that self-righteousness. Shales is a lovely writer and a sharp, sharp observer of television talent. Too bad about his soupy politics.

WashPost

Courtesy of Newsweek, here’s a site that’s worth checking out. Send a soldier a letter or a care package, and let them know how grateful you are for their sacrifice and heroism.

Rachel DiCarlo has an excellent piece about Maryland governor Bob Ehrlich’s feud with the Baltimore Sun. Piqued at stories in the Sun, the Ehrlich administration has banned all state officials in the executive branch from speaking with two Sun writers. Read the entire piece to get the particulars.

Ehrlich’s actions may not be the most arrogant and offensive dictums ever issued by a politician, but I can’t come up with anything worse off the top of my head. Being a governor and complaining about bad press is like being a moviestar and complaining about autograph seekers: If you can’t handle it like a grownup, you’re in the wrong line of work.

You may already be tired of the Kaus-Sullivan spat, but I’m not! Kaus keeps swinging and brings up Sullivan’s infamous “power-glutes” post.

You know Mickey, if you don’t want to get your hands dirty, you could always email those things to Galley Slaves as a Sullivan Award nominee.

There are few American writers who understand modern Europe as well as Christopher Caldwell. His reporting on France’s Islamist problem is nearly definitive (if you haven’t read it, begin here and here).

Now Caldwell has turned his attention to the Netherlands, with similarly penetrating results. His piece, “Holland Daze,” is not to be missed.

Caldwell writes:

But with the killing of van Gogh, the Dutch immigration crisis–which, as elsewhere in Europe, is a polite way of saying its Islam crisis–has moved to a higher pitch than in any other country in the West. . . . the Dutch public is being presented with an interpretation of their crisis that other publics in Europe are not. Namely, the view that the problem is not “radicalism” or “marginalization” or “fundamentalism” but Islam–that Islam and democracy don’t coexist well.”

Evaluating Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the woman who is next on the list of Theo van Gogh’s killers, he notes, “she is aware that her outsider status makes her a natural leader for a society that fears it will die if it does not change, but would rather die than be accused of racism, gay-bashing, or Islamophobia.”

And what Hirsi Ali is doing is this:

Hirsi Ali appears to many Muslims as the country’s premier moral monster, and to many Dutch people as something like Joan of Arc. It is her position on women’s issues that is potentially most explosive. Many European countries, notably France, are trying to recast arguments about the wearing of the Muslim headscarf as a matter of women’s rights, as if that will somehow mollify fundamentalists by moving the discussion from a religious plane to a political one.

What we have here is an interesting dichotomy: Much of Europe refuses to confront the military threat of radical Islamists. The United States is happy, if not eager, to wage this war.

But you will find no one in America–not a single leader of any note–who is willing to confront the cultural threats of Islamists. Even America’s quick-trigger cowboy president refuses to direct anything but kindness towards Islam. To George W. Bush and everyone else in the States, Islam is “peace.” Those bad men who praise Allah and cut the heads off of infidels? They don’t practice “the real Islam.”

Yet Europe is fast awakening to the challenges presented by radical Islam, and seems able to confront it in ways which would make even the most hawkish Americans uncomfortable. Consider this: In the Netherlands–land of gay marriage, euthanasia, and legal pot–Geert Wilders, a politician whose platform is constructed almost exclusively for dealing with the wages of Islam, has a political movement poised to capture almost a fifth of the seats in parliament. In America, Wilders would be dismissed as a xenophobic crank.

Europe will likely continue to harden in this culture war. France and Germany do not have glorious track records when it comes to absorbing the foreign. And while American military might will continue to oppose the military threat of Islamist terrorism, European chauvinism may stiffen to confront the cultural perils of Islamism in ways which would be impossible in the United States.

It is not clear which front in this war is more important.