I see Glenn Reynolds [1] celebrating Instapundit’s [2] 25th Anniversary. I celebrate with him, in a couple different frameworks.
First because while being just about as old, Glenn’s well -connected efforts have in the end been massively more successful in terms of reader draw over the years than my own BitsBlog, but I also celebrate with him because quite frankly, his success has been an inspiration to me and my efforts at BitsBlog over the years since and have led me to writing here at PJ Media.
The name of BitsBlog was because “Bithead” was the non de plume I was using on many of the web sites at the time and that because it was who I was. I was working at a multi-national Bank which shall remain nameless herein, supporting around 400 desktops and the many servers attached to them. Does anyone remember Netware? How about NT Server? The desktops were all PC-DOS and Windows 3.11, on a token Ring Network, on IBM Model 77s. (486/33’s maxing out on a megabyte of RAM. Pretty standard stuff for banks of the day, but certainly looked on as stone knives and bear skins today. I was there for the Y2K scare, when we ended up replacing the 77’s with somewhat newer P-II equipped units that maxed out at about 2MB or so.
IBM swore the newer models would survive New Year’s eve, 1999. Thankfully they did. I worked there for a total of 10 years. It was in this environment that BitsBlog was born.
You see, while BitsBlog started on September 12, 2001, a date I’m sure you will recognize the importance of, Glenn had been on the ‘net in one form or another for a fair amount of time before that.
At the time of the 9/11 attacks, Glenn was working with Blogger, and I had been wrting long form op-eds on my own channels, including USENET, and the old BBS networks, FIDO and Gtnet. Also at the time I was hip deep in running the Free File Farm, which was one of the largest Commodore BBS’s in the country.
Once I had absored all of what I had seen the day before, I sat down at my job’s desk in downtown Rochester and wrote what became the very first post at BitsBlog [3], comprised of my thoughts from watching everything that was going on around the country. I decided that day that I was going to follow in Glenn’s footsteps and jump onto Blogger, myself. Not because I wanted to be making it a money making project but because I felt I needed an outlet.
See, that first post, was written not with the intent of posting it to a blog, but because writing it was an outlet for what I felt. At the time I’d already been compiling columns that few saw, but I kept wrting.
I said at the time on the day following the attacks:
It is recorded in our history books that when he looked down at the ship full of smiling, victorious faces… faces of his flyers, just having returned from Pearl Harbor, Japanese fleet Admiral Yamamoto was quiet, pensive, even apprehensive. He later wrote in his private diary,
“I fear all I have done is awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.”
As this column is written, it is the second night after the dastardly attacks on the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, and the Pentagon. In that amount of time, I have heard, on the news channels, and on the internet, a phase batted about several times, in various refinements, when discussing these attacks: “Like Pearl Harbor”
Don’t start on me about the Yamamoto quote being inaccurate. I didn’t have the research infrastructure we all do now, back then.
I went on to quote an earlier bit of writing. In that earlier column, I wrote of my worry that our influence on the world stage had suffered seriously, under the weight of Bill Clinton’s international bumbling. Well, Bumbling isn’t the right word. Bullying, is perhaps more accurate, yet still not spot-on. I felt then and still do, that 9/11 was as much the fault of Bill Clinton as anything.
I said, in that earlier column from February of 2001, repeated in Bit’sBlogs first posting:
“From Oslo to Camp David, Clinton has pushed Israel to the bargaining table, and pressured her to give up vital strategic and cultural assets she has no business giving away, if survival is at all on her agenda. Ehud Barak, by his giving into Bill Clinton (who, along with his staff including Jim Carville, did much to put Barak into office), has done little more than demonstrate just how empty the Palestinians’ peace talk really is, and how desperate Clinton was to be seen as a good President, his crimes against his oaths not withstanding. Consider….
At Clinton’s insistence, Barak offered Arafat the keys to the kingdom; just about all of the West Bank and Gaza, plus East Jerusalem and even Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount. How do the peace loving Palestinians respond? Yasser Arafat turned it all down, and gave us another few nights of headlines, filled with kids in the street throwing stones, and being shot, occasionally. He also sent his armed forces, (You recall, they’re supposed to be policemen?) to fire at the Israelis, apparently hoping for an excuse to tell the rest of the world how Israel is a war-mongering nation.
Of course that should have been a signal to about anyone with a brain that he didn’t give a damn about peace. All he and his followers are interested in is the destruction of Israel. It should have also been a signal that Clinton’s attempt at a legacy backfired, big time, and more, that it didn’t have a chance to start with…. something that Clinton should have known, did he have any understanding of the situation at all. You will recall, perhaps that back in 1992, Clinton more or less bragged he had no understanding of matters of foreign policy. This was never quite so clear as during this monstrosity Mr. Clinton unleashed on the world.
For Israel’s part, all of this has been laid at the feet of Ehud Barak, perhaps unfairly. No, I don’t think he was the man for the job, and clearly was only in the PM’s position because Clinton’s people worked so hard to get him there, apparently hoping to set up Clinton’s brokering a of peace deal. Easy to do when you have the PM of Israel owing you his election. But Barak apparently was under pressures he had no control of, having nothing to do with politics at home, or the Palestinians… both of which were quite out of his control to begin with, in any event.. He was concerned with Israel continuing to get support from the US. In this concern, he saw Israel as being on the controlled end of the puppet’s string… and knowing that if he did not capitulate to Clinton’s demands, that vital US support would wither as quickly as Benjamin Netenyau’s prime ministership did, when it became clear he wasn’t going to buckle to Clinton’s concession demands.
And Barak wasn’t alone, nor was the left in Israel, in this perception of US control versus Israel’s survival. Yitzhak Rabin, hardly a liberal even by American standards and certainly not under Bill Clinton’s extortion based control to the extent that Barak was, saw the same problems. His longtime friends, according reports I’ve seen, us he was deeply troubled over the prospect of losing US support… and therefore bought into the ‘land for peace’ deals being brokered by the liberals in the US. This was something I predicted he wouldn’t have done.
Israeli voters, seeing this happening, and clearly annoyed with the US control over Israel’s dealings with the Palestinians, trounced Barak in the polls. Unless one considers this anger, the election of Ariel Sharon, his replacement, is hard to fathom, since he has never been overly popular, as best I can tell. But perhaps the people of Israel are finally figuring out what the real story is.. that in truth, there is no dealing with the Palestinians, and Arifat.
One hopes that they’ve not been too late in coming to this conclusion. If they are, world war seems fairly certain to me… possibly nuclear in nature.
Others learned the lessons, painful as they tended to be. Chaimberlin’s England, for example,along with the remainder of the free world, learned about appeasement of a mortal enemy the hard way. The American left, apparently not having leaned the lesson taught by the infamous socialist, Hitler, was taught the lesson again, by another band of socialists, as Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan 40 or so years later.
I was convinced at the time that 9/11 was the price for Bill Clinton’s presidency. Remember the perspective:
Clinton was giving the Palestinians exacly what they wanted, following the 1993 attack on the world trade center. Legitimacy, to use as a tool against us. Ironic; he’s supposed to be representing US. And to boot, Clinton was ripping Israel apart for them. Even before 9/11 I had written several times that Clinton’s sole purpose here was to save his legacy. But how to achieve his goal? By bowing to Arab terrorists, and bullying Israel into giving in. So, while that’s going on, everything is sweetness and light. America decides to elect George W Bush, who will (rightly) support Israel, and guess who isn’t happy? And since Clinton also decimated our military, you ability to mount a credible defense is so laughable as to encourage attack…
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
And, splat.
So, the combo of the 9/11 attacks, and Glenn’s efforts, along with places like The Captain’s Quarters, Q&O OTB, and many more whose names escape me at the moment, prompted me to start BitsBlog as an outlet for what I was writing and feeling at the time.
I owe Glenn a debt for this because without his efforts I never would have taken up my keyboard and started doing longer form opinion pieces.
Speaking of owing a debt, I am also profoundly in debt to Art Smith, who from the time I moved off of Blogger, has supported BitsBlog by means of his own ISP and his involvement with WordPress. That’s well over a decade.
So we celebrate with you, Glenn. I’ll bet you never knew your were at least partially responsible for starting me on this jouney. I’m quite sure I’m not alone in this.