“Al and Tipper Gore, whose playful romance enlivened Washington and the campaign trail for a quarter century, have decided to separate after 40 years of marriage, the couple told friends Tuesday.” [Politico]

We spent a few hours Monday night trying to nail down a few facts — any facts— about Israel’s raid on the “Freedom Flotilla” heading for Gaza.

We gave up.

It’s not just that every fact is disputed — it’s that every fact is part of a larger politically charged narrative, and part of an immediate land rush following the incident. Whoever wins the facts, wins the story.

How bad is it? Well, there are disputed facts about the raid itself. There are disputed facts about Israel’s right to conduct the raid in international waters. There are disputed facts about Israel’s right to blockade Gaza, and disputed facts about Israel’s conduct of that blockade.

Hell, there are even disputed facts about the ships in the flotilla.

We thought we’d spare ourselves a long detour into post-Ottoman Middle East history by focusing on that last fact — the flotilla’s provenance — but even that led us back to Turkey.

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Americans killed in Vietnam: 58,193.

Americans killed in Iraq: 4,400.

Americans killed in Afghanistan: 1,087.

Civilians killed: Let’s not go there.

Substantive achievements: None.

On this day we honor our fallen, who sacrificed their lives to the hubris of the American political class.

iCasualties

Title: “The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America”

Author: Andrew C. McCarthy

Rank: 45

Blurb: “The real threat to the United States is not terrorism. The real threat is Islamism, whose sophisticated forces have collaborated with the American Left not only to undermine U.S. national security but also to shred the fabric of American constitutional democracy — freedom and individual liberty… Andrew C. McCarthy offers a harrowing account of how the global Islamist movement’s jihad involves far more than terrorist attacks, and how it has found the ideal partner in President Barack Obama, whose Islamist sympathies run deep.”

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Dennis Hopper, Hollywood Rebel, Dies at 74 [NYT]

Peggy Noonan, in the course of explaining how a multinational oil company’s inability to safely drill a mile below the sea compares to a U.S. agency’s inability to safely construct levees around a major American city, slipped in a modern masterpiece of genteel racism Friday:

The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen…

And now we have a videotape metaphor for all the public’s fears: that clip we see every day, on every news show, of the well gushing black oil into the Gulf of Mexico and toward our shore. You actually don’t get deadlier as a metaphor for the moment than that, the monster that lives deep beneath the sea.

And you actually don’t write something like that by accident, not when you’re celebrated for your political craftsmanship. It’s too bad we’re so distracted by crude racism these days that we can’t take a moment to appreciate the refined racism of a real pro at work.

He Was Supposed to Be Competent [WSJ]

From 1991, a taste of things to come. We’re not familiar with Australia’s Clarke and Dawe, a sorry situation we plan to rectify immediately.

[via PourMeCoffee]