Almost as soon as the first Israeli missile struck the Gaza Strip, a veteran cheering squad suited up to support the home team. “Israel is so scrupulous about civilian life,” Charles Krauthammer claimed in the Washington Post. Echoing Krauthammer, Alan Dershowitz called the Israeli attack on Gaza, “Perfectly ‘Proportionate.’” And in the New York Times, Israeli historian Benny Morris described his country’s airstrikes as “highly efficient.”

While the cheerleaders testified to the superior moral fiber of their team, the Palestinian civilian death toll mounted. Israeli missiles tore at least fifteen Palestinian police cadets to shreds at a graduation ceremony, blew twelve worshippers to pieces (including six children) while they left evening prayers at a mosque, flattened the elite American International School, killed five sisters while they slept in their beds, and liquidated 9 women and children in order to kill a single Hamas leader. So far, Israeli forces have killed at least 500 Gazans and wounded some two thousand, including hundreds of children. Yesterday, the IDF blanketed parts of Gaza with white phosphorus, a chemical weapon Saddam Hussein once deployed against Kurdish rebels.

“It was Israel at its best,” Yossi Klein Halevi declared in the New Republic.

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2008 went fast, but it was a very good year for the left blogosphere. I made out fairly well myself, according to some of my favorite sites. I finished fourth in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2nd Annual Smackdown Awards and earned Alternet’s fifth most outrageous story of the year. I also finished fifth in Alternet’s top ten hottest videos of 2008 for a collaborative investigative project with filmmaker Michael Wilson about Prop 8. It’s good to be in the middle of the top.

But no blog award meant more to me than being included in Phil Munger’s top five Alaskan muckrakers of 2008. Without Phil and his wife, Judy, my coverage of Sarah Palin would not have been possible. They were more than generous hosts, they were skillful guides to a vast, complex and utterly fascinating local culture that I knew little about before I arrived. Phil’s presentation is below the fold, from his blog, Progressive Alaska: 

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Rick Warren, courtier and culture warrior

Today I discussed Barack Obama’s selection of Rick Warren as his inaugural pastor with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now. Watch or listen to it here or read the transcript, which continues below the fold:

AMY GOODMAN: President-elect Barack Obama, speaking in Chicago last week. 

I’m joined now by Max Blumenthal, Puffin Foundation writing fellow at the Nation Institute. His work has appeared in The Nation, Salon and many other publications, currently writing a book on the US evangelical movement. His latest article, “Rick Warren’s Hypocritical Double Life,” is online at dailybeast.com. Max Blumenthal joins us by DN! video stream. 

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Max. 

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Great to be here. 

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the history of Rick Warren. 

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, the history of Rick Warren is pretty interesting. And you heard some of his views right there. These are views that people have only recently started paying attention to. Prior to this controversy, Rick Warren was, you know, proffered by the media as the voice of the new evangelical movement, which embraces environmentalism and fights poverty and is going to move beyond the old hobgoblins of the Christian right and the old, you know, draconian figures of the Christian right, like James Dobson and Pat Robertson. Rick Warren was supposed to be the pioneer of this new movement. He is the founding pastor of Saddleback Church, a megachurch in Orange County. And he’s the author of The Purpose Driven Life, which is, you know, a sort of subtly Christian, self-help manual that sold 25 million copies. So he has a really broad appeal, and he’s planted churches across the world, especially in Africa. 

And because, you know, the media has expected evangelicals, especially conservative evangelicals, to be draconian and retrograde, you know, they’ve made a hero out of Rick Warren without looking at who he really is and what he really believes. Nicholas Kristof from the New York Times, for example, has called Rick Warren an evangelical liberals can love. You know,Newsweek named Rick Warren one of the fifteen people who make America great. And even The Nation, which I’ve written for, you know, the venerable left-wing magazine, in 2005 published a piece calling Rick Warren America’s pastor. 

You know, he wears a Hawaiian shirt. He looks like a big teddy bear. He doesn’t holler or hector. He speaks in a ponderous tone. And he does seem to genuinely care about the environment and care about poverty. It’s not clear what he’s actually done. 

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In his heart, Paul Weyrich knew he was right

Pioneering conservative activist Paul Weyrich died on December 18 at the age of 66. Though Weyrich was commonly regarded as a behind-the-scenes Beltway operator, he achieved one of his most enduring goals in the backwaters of the South.

In 1971, before the Roe v. Wade decision riveted America, the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. Connally to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools in 1971. At about the same time, the Internal Revenue Service moved to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, which forbade interracial dating (blacks were denied entry until 1971.) The decisions infuriated a popular evangelical pastor from Lynchburg, Virginia named Jerry Falwell. “In some states it’s easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school,” Falwell complained.

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Inaugural pastor Rick Warren is officially not gay

Why couldn’t Barack Obama have at least selected Rich Cizik to deliver his inaugural prayer? Cizik was just drummed out as the head of the National Association of Evangelicals for revealing that, like Obama, he supports civil union (James Dobson had tried to oust Cizik over his environmentalism, but nailed him on the gay issue instead). But as I wrote at The Daily Beast, the man Obama did select to give the benediction, Rick Warren, had this to say a week before election day:

“Here’s an interesting thing: there are about 2% of Americans [who] are homosexual, gay, lesbian people. We should not let two percent of the population determine—to change a definition of marriage that has been supported by every single culture and every single religion for 5,000 years. This is not even just a Christian issue, it is a humanitarian and human issue, that God created marriage for the purpose of family, love and procreation. I urge you to support Proposition 8 and to pass that on.”

Nixon "evil genius" Chuck Colson is rewarded with the prestigious Citizens' Medal. But has his life truly been redeemed, or simply reframed?

The Republican campaign of 2008 will be remembered, among other things, for the accusation that Barack Obama was “palling around with terrorists,” namely former Weather Underground leader William Ayers. But visions of domestic terrorism don’t seem to bother the Republicans now. On December 10, President George W. Bush bestowed the prestigious Citizens Medal on Charles Colson, who plotted various acts of domestic terrorism in the Nixon White House. To paraphrase an old saying, one man’s terrorist is apparently another man’s medal-winner.

In Bush’s final days, perhaps few other gestures could capture the arc of the Republican era. Colson is a representative figure, once Richard Nixon’s special counsel and chief dirty trickster turned into born-again missionary for the religious right and mentor to Bush and his acolytes—including his former chief speechwriter Michael Gerson. By honoring him, Bush exalts the whole legacy.

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Keith Olbermann, with a rapid fire synopsis of my Daily Beast story on the anti-Semitic origins of O’Reilly’s War on Christmas hysteria (go to 1:48):

Steve Sailer likes Jews who write Christmas ditties

One of the most confounding characteristics of open anti-Semites is their tendency to deny harboring any malice towards Jews after being confronted with their own anti-Semitic statements. At the 2006 American Renaissance conference, after David Duke delivered a conspiratorial disquisition in the hallway to me about the “Jewish Supremacists,” I asked him if all Jews were involved in an insidious plot to exploit the world. He stated, “Oh no, not all Jews are supremacists. There are good Jews.” Holocaust revisionist David Irving said the same sort of thing to me when I interviewed him, recommending to me the work of Norman Finkelstein, who I doubt would have appreciated this endorsement. And then there was the weird spectacle of Louis Farrakhan, denouncer of the “synagogues of Satan” and one-time mentor to beerhall demagogue Khalid Muhammad, playing a symphony by Mendelson.

In responding to my recent piece on the War on Christmas, Steve Sailer took issue with how my treatment of his theory of Jewish “de-assimilation.” I reported that Sailer had argued matter-of-factly that, “American Jews, those exemplars of successful assimilation now seem to be de-assimilating emotionally, becoming increasingly resentful, at this late date, of their fellow Americans for celebrating Christmas.” My mere quoting of this line was enough to arouse his anger and defensiveness. In his blogged response, Sailer claimed his column was devoted to “praising the large Jewish contribution to the great American Christmas songbook.” Right! Like Duke, Irving, and Farrakhan, Sailer is embarrassed by the depth of his resentment for Jews, and retreats when confronted with it. 

The commenters on Sailer’s blog made no attempts to hide their true feelings, however. The id of Sailer lies below the fold.

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Peter Brimelow praises my latest piece of “ethnic paranoia” as “a relatively good account of VDARE.COM’s role in exposing the War Against Christmas,” adds a few annotations, then asks for money. It is a pleasure to help the poor and needy white nationalists this holiday…I mean, Christmas season.