… offer excellent commentary on current events.” Someone said something like that, I don’t know who. I didn’t make it up; it just seems pertinent in light of the latest minor kerfuffle over Frank Gaffney’s attribution to Abe Lincoln this quotiation in a Washington Times piece this week:

Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged. — President Abraham Lincoln

The only problem, as Editor and Publisher explains, is that Lincoln never said it. It seems that one Brooks Jackson at FactCheck.org tracked it down thus:

… “The conservative author who touched off the misquotation frenzy, J. Michael Waller, concedes that the words are his, not Lincoln’s. Waller says he never meant to put quote marks around them, and blames an editor [at the magazine Insight] for the mistake and the failure to correct it. We also note other serious historical errors in the Waller article containing the bogus quote.”

Yeah, blame it on the editor. That’s right up there with ‘my dog ate it.’ Speaking of bogus quotes, remember this one?

Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.

That was Barbra Streisand slamming GW Bush in September 2002. But, of course, there’s not a scintilla of evidence that Caesar ever said it, nor do the words appear in any of Shakespeare’s plays, to whom the bogus quote is sometimes attributed, presumably from his play, “Julius Caesar.”

Ralph Keyes wrote about misquotations in The Quote Verifier.

Misquotation is at least as common as accurate quotation, and for perfectly good reasons. The primary reason is that when using quotes, the reference we’re most likely to consult is our memory. This is a hazardous form of research. Our memory wants quotations to be better than they usually were, and said by the person we want to have said them.

As Lincoln said, “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

Well, not exactly - only papers made of, well, paper can fold. But it seems that New York Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger told the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years… .” He went on to say that the news outlet will likely move entirely onto the internet. James Joyner has details, including this rejoinder to Pinch’s declaration that the Times’ web site will charge readers to read: “Then the New York Times will exist only as a niche paper. Slate, Salon, and others have tried and failed going the subscription-only route.”

What I’ve not seen anyone point out - a scoop coming here, folks! - is that it simply takes longer to scan and read a newspaper online than on paper. You can flip pages, snapshot headlines printed thereon and quickly read the lead paragraph of a paper edition than you can click and wait for a page to load for an online edition - and then you’re seeing only one story at a time, even if the headlines (and only the headlines) for a section are visible on an index page. I don’t think people will pay to go slower.

Somebody’s got to do it, but the Bush administration is derelict in this duty

The idea is not mine, I have to credit Maj. David High, USMCR, a close friend and an occasional writer here. The media are acting a the Red Cell for the public in thinking about enemy threats of the First Terrorist War. I asked David to write this up but he keeps getting deployed overseas. At the moment he is doing Marine stuff in Germany (of all places).

“Red Cell” was the term given, first, to SEAL Teams who were trained and tasked to simulate the enemy during security exercises, especially to test the security of critical compounds such as submarine bases or nuclear power plants. The term morphed in military usage to refer to plans officers tasked to assess how real-world enemies, real or potential, could exploit our own weaknesses, especially military threats. Naturally, this task required the Red Cell staffs to use a great deal of imagination, to get inside the enemy’s head as best as possible.

Now, military staffs have been doing that for thousands of years. I am sure that the Pharaoh’s armies tried to do the same thing. But the recipients of their assessments, from the Pharaoh until today’s Red Cells, have always been military commanders.

David pointed out in a long conversation last fall that America’s general public has not been informed by Red Cell-type analysis until quite recently. The media, mostly the entertainment media, have become the public’s Red Cell.

Two examples that David mentioned: Fox network’s “24” and CBS’s close relative, “The Unit.” I have never seen an episode of The Unit but pretty devotedly watch 24, despite its numerous technical errors. Some things on “24″ are laughable, for example, Sunday night’s use of a search warrant by the FBI to seize personnel records of an Islamic-American organization. The FBI doesn’t serve a warrant and stand idly by while an IT guy copies the warranted files onto a CD. They just rip out the computers and servers and take them to the FBI crime lab. I can overlook such breaches because the basic premise is so terribly, frighteningly credible: an Islamist terror group brings the war directly to the interior of this country, first with conventional explosives used in suicide and other bombings, and then with at least one WMD.

It is a severe but justified indictment that no one else is preparing the American people for such a potentiality or even admitting that such destruction is what our enemies intend. By “no one else” I mean the Bush administration, whose leader seems content simply to recite platitudes such as, “The challenge playing out across the broader Middle East is … the decisive ideological struggle of our time.” Yeah, that’s a real rally to arms, isn’t it?

The Bush administration, from the president on down, is unwilling to inform us of the horrifically lethal intentions of al Qaeda and its ideological allies. Apparently, the administration thinks that “nine-eleven” can be recited like a mantra and all Americans will fill in the gaps. This is perhaps one of the most serious errors the president has made so far. I wrote in August 2005 that Bush is failing to keep the public in the loop.

Military theorist Marshal de Saxe observed in 1730, “The courage of the soldiers must be reborn daily. There is nothing that is so variable.” In the same way, a wartime president in a democracy must always remind the people why they fight and expend their blood and treasure. The will and determination of the people to persevere is highly variable.

Right now, “24″ is filling that gap. Victor Davis Hanson gets it, too:

Killer teams that poison the water supply of Los Angeles or blow themselves up in the Mall of America, defy an easy response. Do we hit the Saudis whose charities funded them? The Syrians who gave them the weapons? The Iranians who trained them? Or the Pakistanis who offered them space? All such governments would immediately “deplore” such attacks, offer their condolences, and claim they had no influence over their cheering crowds…

Gerard Vanderleun wrote,

The goals of the Radical Islamic forces arrayed against us are the same as their factotums, the Palestinians, have for Israel. In the jihad against Israel we can see what the Islamic forces have in mind for us: the complete destruction of our systems, the occupation of our land, the usurpation of our government, and the death or conversion of all our citizens. These are the goals of Radical Islam as understood by their fundamentalists and as tolerated by the vast majority of believers. …

Whether the goals of Radical Islam can be achieved is a matter for history to determine. It is the belief that they can be achieved that brings the First Terrorist War upon us.

No way, you say? here is what al Qaeda spokesman Suleiman Abu Gheith said in 2002:

“We have the right to kill 4 million Americans - 2 million of them children - and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands. Furthermore, it is our right to fight them with chemical and biological weapons, so as to afflict them with the fatal maladies that have afflicted the Muslims because of the [Americans’] chemical and biological weapons.”

“America knows only the language of force. … America is kept at bay by blood alone…”

Last November The SF Examiner wondered whether Americans are sleepwalking into a gathering storm, much as the British did in the 1930s. If so, a lot of the blame rests squarely in the Oval Office, whose occupant is permitting it happen. Yet the stakes could not be graver. I wrote last November why I was a single-issue voter, kicking off with David High’s observation, “If we don’t get the war right, the Medicare prescription plan won’t matter, Social Security won’t matter, nothing else will matter.” The threat is real, people, so watch “24″ to see what our enemies want to do. It and like media will tell you; the administration won’t.

An experienced Middle-East reporter of the Albany Times Union offers, ” 15 rules for understanding the Middle East.”

They are all so incisive and read-worthy (and short) that I’ll not bother to excerpt them. But if you wonder what’s going wrong (from our perspective) in Iraq and the ME generally, this is a primero primer.

Hat tip: The Braden Files, the best little-read blog out there (then again, he posts only twice per month or so).

I’m sure you will agree that this little factoid will just be all over the MSM this weekend.

CJR has a short piece on, “Jesus Christ, Cover Star,” and the dueling Jesus mag covers that always come out this time of year.

On U.S. News’ cover, reporter Jay Tolson is “In Search of the Real Jesus” — having apparently lost track of Him sometime after March of 2004 (when Tolson wrote a cover story titled, “The Real Jesus.”)

Heh, as they say.

Consider this report:

Pajamas Media, in the course of a casual conversation with a Marine Corps information officer who tracks the number of embedded reporters in Iraq, learned the real number of embedded reporters covering the Iraq story on September 19, 2006. It was, according to the officer, a fairly typical day. To illustrate his point, he provided Pajamas Media with the illustration he uses to brief with on the state of media embedding in Iraq.

What was that number? Take a guess and then see the truth. No peeking.

If you guessed 9 reporters, you guessed right.

Of the nine, four were from the defense department’s own media operations, Stars and Stripes and Armed Forces Network, and one was from Poland. There was one each from the Charlotte Observer, the BBC, AP and RAI.

Note: this is not the number of reporters in Iraq, it is the number embedded with units carrying out operations. As PJM adds, there were scores of “reporters hunkered down in the hotels and other locations under the rubric “Baghdad News Bureaus.’” But those reporters are not reporting news they personally cover other than inside their own narrow bubble. Strategy Page reports,

Most journalists are in the Green Zone, or some well-guarded hotel. There, they depend on Iraqi stringers to gather information, and take pictures for them. In reality, these reporters could do this from back home, and many more media organizations are doing just that.

Nothing new about using local stringers in dangerous areas. It’s common sense, given that the bad guys are in the habit of kidnapping, or just killing, foreign reporters. The problem is, the pool of available Iraqi talent is mostly Sunni Arab. Many of these folks side with the bad guys. And all Iraqi journalists, especially those working for foreigners, are subject to intimidation, or bribery. While some of the foreign reporters may be aware of all this, some aren’t, and many of the rest don’t care. The truth won’t set them free, but supplying stories their editors are looking for, will.

Those cowardly, profit-motivated reporters and news organizations are just screwing the troops, right?

Well, not so fast.

You might think it’s easy to gain permission to embed with a combat unit. After all, as Strategy Page also notes, “U.S. troops continue to be mystified at the odd reporting coming out of Iraq. What the troops witnessed is not what reporters are sending back.” So common sense would say that the military would embed as many reporters as it can and plead with news organizations to send more.

But there is, as Paul Harvey likes to say, “the rest of the story.” Here is San Antonio Express’s reporter Sig Christenson, with lengthy embedding experience since OIF began in 2003. He spent the invasion embedded with 78 other reporters in the 3d Mechanized Infantry Division. Did you get that? There were 79 reporters embedded with that single division for the invasion. Now there are nine in all Iraq.

Sig returned not long ago from another embed tour, the most recent of five altogether. Sig blogs for the SA Express and writes,

So how did we go from 79 reporters with the 3rd ID, one of them ABC’s Ted Koppel, to 11 with 147,000 American troops in all of Iraq? You can start with the fact that editors are damned nervous about sending their reporters into Baghdad. This is the town where, morning after morning during our recent reporting tour there, bombs went off by the hour. One day last month the first bomb detonated at 6 a.m. When the third one rocked the town at 8 a.m., I got up from bed in disgust. You don’t need an alarm clock in Baghdad, thanks to insurgents who kill everybody who gets in their way in the name of Allah on the hour and half-hour. Sad and weird, but true, I am sorry to report.

Okay, it’s dangerous to embed, let us grant that, and no reporters or any other civilians have a special obligation to risk death or injury as part of their job. Nor should we discount that assignment editors are understandably reluctant to send one of their reporters to a war zone, volunteers. Those are the facts and the public’s bona fide need to know what is happening doesn’t obviate them.

But that’s not the whole story. DOD’s public affairs office still treats embedding as an ad hoc arrangement.

Almost four years after the Pentagon unveiled the embedding program, there is no clear-cut way to cover the troops in Iraq. I’m an expert on this after having set up embeds for myself and, last year, for photographer Nicole Fruge and reporter Jesse Bogan. There is no simple, one-step process.

You have to send e-mails to the Combined Press Information Center in Baghdad. You have to e-mail local commanders with units you wish to embed with, and they have to accept you. You have to e-mail the Air Force to set up the flights. At some point, you deal directly with someone from the Air Mobility Command, which flies cargo and people into and out of Iraq. This time I also had to e-mail the Air Force Theater Hospital in Balad and Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany so we could do the reporting on a series about military medicine. If I do an embed next year, I’ll have to start with a new set of public affairs officers because all the old ones have left Iraq.

I’ll also have to get a new CPIC identification card. Been there, done that.

Sig writes a lot more about this issue. Having been an Army public affairs officer at the Pentagon for three years, I can tell you that until the top military and civilian bosses there make facilitating embeds a priority for PAOs and commanders, nothing will be done to change the stifling bureacracy that Sig explains. For DOD, that means Donald Rumsfeld will have to be the engine of change (fat chance). In World War II commanders weren’t asked whether they wopuld accept a reporter, they were told. Yes, I know the media were different then - no one could seriously ask which side the Associated Press was on, for example, and there was wartime censorship of news reports. But the mechanism of embedding was well established and smooth. And that’s what’s broken now.

Sig is doing something, though. He is a founder of Military Reporters & Editors, which,

… will host an Embedded Reporting Summit at the close of its 5th annual conference, to run Oct. 26-28 in Chicago. Military officers and war correspondents will pore over the issues and see how things can be fixed. MRE will later issue a report calling for a series of changes in the way embedding is handled by the Pentagon. We’ll do that because we believe the media and military have good reason to improve the system, that modifications would benefit everyone concerned.

Read Sig’s blog, it’s well worth the time. Page on down and read his interview on the scene with soldiers of Iraqi army unit.