Month: January 2002

Your take on the Catholic Church’s child-abuse problem, including a priest and a parishioner.

No wonder Rumsfeld is worried. And, once again, the Iranian connection is foremost.

CLASSIC INSULTS: Of course, you can’t beat Shakespeare. Here’s a classic from King Lear:

OSWALD What dost thou know me for?
KENT A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition.

Now tell us what you really think.

BIAS WATCH: Who on earth wrote the headline for this AP story from Atlanta?
Update: they changed it. The original headline was: “Bush gets mixed reception at black school.”

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “No war ought ever to be undertaken but under circumstances which render all intercourse of courtesy between the combatants impossible. It is a bad thing that men should hate each other; but it is far worse that they should contract the habit of cutting one another’s throats without hatred. War is never lenient but where it is wanton; when men are compelled to fight in self-defence, they must hate and avenge: this may be bad; but it is human nature.” – Thomas B. Macaulay, “Milford’s History of Greece” 1824.

Well, it’s not exactly Starsky and Hutch, but Hitchens and I will be on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal tomorrow morning from 8 to 10am ET. God help me. I haven’t got up that early since around 1987.

APOLOGIES: I’m sorry for the lurid blue of the site this afternoon. Following Murphy’s law, I made a small formatting error, and then, before I could fix it, our server did something I don’t understand and I had to wait several hours before it was fixed. Grrr. On a happier note, 20,000 people came to the site yesterday, and made 38,000 visits. Thanks.

I knew David Brooks would like the State of the Union. In my opinion, he is wiping the floor with Joe Klein today in their riveting discussion about the war. Here’s a beaut from the Slate dialogue:

“Another nice thing about the State of the Union speech was the way it contradicted the polls-which indicated that Bush should focus on the economy. But if Bush wasn’t speaking softly and carrying a big stick, he was doing something more appropriate for the moment. He was behaving in a Churchillian manner. He was jolting the country out of a creeping illusion of normalcy. He was giving a blood, sweat, and tears booster shot. He was galvanizing the public because in times of conflict, national morale is the resource the nation must depend on. Actually, by the bloodthirsty standards of most war speeches, I thought his speech was restrained.”

Amen, David. Amen.

Interesting piece by Eric Boehlert in Salon today, arguing that I’m tougher on Paul Krugman than I am on the other Enron pundits because I have an ideological ax to grind. Well, of course, he’s right to some extent. I have long found Paul Krugman an insufferably pompous, shrill, Bush-bashing pseudo-populist and so it was particularly galling to see him neck-deep in corporate cash. But to say I let the others off is a little much. I exposed Bill Kristol’s money. Despite the fact that I work for the same paper and share many of his views, I also laid out in full Irwin Stelzer’s paper trail. Stelzer is also a close friend of Rupert Murdoch who owns the newspaper, the Sunday Times of London, that provides me with my largest source of income. I asked Peggy Noonan – facetiously – whether she had shredded her 1099s. The reason I was fair to Kudlow is because he was extremely forthcoming, honest and open about the whole thing – in extreme contrast to Krugman’s increasingly deranged spin. I helped pioneer the reporting of all this – and it has disproportionately affected the right. I confess to a little ideological schadenfreude with Krugman. But I don’t think it’s fair to say I gave everyone else a pass. How many other right-leaning pundits would finger four conservatives the way I did? I mean, I even beat Conason to the punch.

“War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.” – John Stuart Mill.

I’LL SAY: “Our new report finds that relationship management must evolve – and quickly – if asset managers are to meet the demands of their high net worth clients.” – Arthur Andersen’s home-page.

THE CHURCH AND CHILD-ABUSE: It’s not just Boston. Los Angeles’ Cardinal Mahoney has also been implicated in covering up several huge child-abuse cases involving priests in the past few years. No one ever seems to get punished, even though some of these priests and bishops and cardinals seem to have known about this hideous pedophilia for years, and acquiesced in it. Here’s a passage that haunts from a gripping piece by Steve Lopez in the Los Angeles Times:

“‘After he molested me, he would bless me,’ says the former altar boy, who was an adolescent at the time and now lives in Southern California, having struggled for years with alcohol, drugs, anger and shame. ‘It’s very confusing. I was in the center of my mother’s life, the church, and she thought I was doing constructive things by being with the priest. After we did these things, he’d put his hand on my head and make the sign of the cross.’ The former altar boy said he’d like to write a book, and I asked what exactly it would be about. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘About a happy go-lucky kid that met a priest and learned how to hate himself.'”

It seems to me that those of us in the Church have a real responsibility to ensure that these unspeakable crimes are not only exposed but punished with the full force of the law.

IT’S WORSE IN BRITAIN: Enron Punditgate hasn’t quite hit Britain on the pundit level. (By the way, any bets on whether the New York Times will ever report on this story?) But in some ways, it’s worse in Blighty. The man in charge of the actual Press Complaints Commission – the national press ombudsmen in Britain – has been an Enron director for eight years on a $125,000 annual salary. So even the referee has been bought and paid for over there.

“TREMBLING BEFORE G-D”: I went to see this intense documentary tonight about gay orthodox Jews. I hope it gets wide audiences. In subtle but beautiful ways, it revealed the tenacity of so many gay Orthodox to love their faith and to love themselves. Of course, it resonated with me. The courageous way in which these people endure such pain, such rejection from their families, such unwitting cruelty even from many of the religious people who are trying to understand, is, to me, an inspiration. I understand the reason that some simply feel obliged to choose between God and their inner being and simply leave their faith tradition. But I admire those who refuse to buckle under to this dichotomy, who stay with their faith – and not in some watered-down way, but in a real, living, devoted, passionate way. You can see too – tragically – how these brave souls are not only isolated from their traditional community but also then have to endure hostility, contempt or just indifference from the gay community they try and join. It can be a deeply isolating experience, especially when they believe they are trying to help others, to build bridges, to reform dogmas – and yet some of their own gay brothers and sisters see them as the enemy, a representative of beliefs that have oppressed every homosexual of whatever religion. Some of this hostility, born of pain, is understandable. But it skewers the souls of gay, religious people as much as anyone. The gay movement has come a long, long way toward greater respect for religious people and their faith, but there is still some way to go.

A SAVING REMNANT: This film dramatically shows the experience of living in many worlds, many emotions, at once, and the tenacity it takes to elide or deny none of them. And as I witnessed the joy of these gay Orthodox people and their love of God and then the pain that their world still inflicts upon them, I remembered again those things that I have almost left behind, but can never forget. When you watch a grown woman sob on her partner’s shoulder because her father still cannot treat her fully as his daughter, you remember the reality that still exists out there. You realize again the pain and despair that many young and old gay people are feeling even today, caught between a faith they believe in and a ‘holy’ life they cannot humanly lead, however hard they try. It rips me up, knowing that this is happening now – again and again – to children torn from their families, and to adults removed by their fear and shame from their deepest emotional selves. That is why patience with the pace of acceptance of homosexuality is so hard – because the pain is still so deep and so wide. And the questions and sorrow and self-doubt and lack of self-esteem never fully go away. Each time you encounter yet another condemnation of homosexuality, yet another casual insult to your very emotional integrity, the wounds open again, until you learn to live with them as open wounds, never fully healing, always susceptible to new damage and pain, but manageable like an affliction that can always be hidden but that never goes away. You can be healthy but never completely healed, and you learn somehow to live that way.

TRANSCENDING THE CONTRADICTIONS: How to love one’s faith when it rejects you? That, I believe, is when God comes in and somehow makes it inevitable, when He lifts you up and helps you see things that you didn’t understand before and gives you the task of trying to bear witness to that in your life and your work. That is what this documentary did. It showed how deeply the rejected can still love their faith, how their stigmatization can even intensify that faith, how, paradoxically, they may know God more fully and intensely because of this than many others. This film revealed these dogged people of faith as a saving remnant of our world. It was, if you will pardon the expression, a mitzvah.

My friend Mike Kelly gets it exactly right in the Washington Post today. The archdiocese of Boston has essentially been protecting child-abusers for years among its clergy. Even now, Cardinal Law uses Clintonian wriggling to avoid full repentance and responsibility. It’s outrageous that Church-protected child-abuse has been allowed to go on for so long. Catholic friends of mine tell me they find it hard to go to Mass any more out of shame and anger. The only way out is new leadership at the top. Anything else will seem to perpetuate the cover-up and continue to undermine the Church’s urgent pastoral and spiritual responsibilities.

LEDEEN GETS IT: “This may have been the first time in American history that an intense internal debate over foreign policy was settled in a State of the Union speech. For many months now, the administration has been divided between those who believed we could make a deal with the Iranian regime, and those who insisted that we had to fight the mullahs. That dispute was settled tonight, when the president correctly and forcefully denounced the unelected rulers of Iran who ignore the desires of the Iranian people for freedom. And as between those who have been arguing for a “go slow” approach to Iraq and those who have been insisting that we cannot wait because time then works in favor of our enemies, the president eloquently rejected the go-slowers. And while he was at it (you just gotta love this guy, he really goes for it), he delivered a few zingers to our “timid” allies. I trust the French translation will be accurate.” – Michael Ledeen, National Review Online.

THE REASON FOR 84 PERCENT APPROVAL: Just read this Balz/Woodward account of Bush’s biggest week. It blew me away.

This time a cartoon from the sick mind of Steve Bell in – where else? – the Guardian.

NEIL BUSH AND BILL CLINTON: What on earth are prominent Americans doing buckraking in – of all places – Saudi Arabia? Neil Bush is a disgrace – clearly using his family connections to make a mint off his brother’s education reform bill. Mike Isikoff has the details – it’s truly sickening. And a former president? At this delicate time? What is he thinking?

THE END IS NIGH: Joe Conason agrees with me on Punditgate. He even calls Paul Krugman’s $50K “dismaying.” It would have been nice of him to have credited me with breaking the news of Kristol’s $100K, but, hey, you can’t win ’em all.

JOHNSON’S INSULTS: Who can beat Samuel Johnson? A reader sends in the following classics. In reference to a Mrs. Robinson’s essay on Shakespeare:

“Reynolds: ‘I think that essay does her honour.’
Johnson: ‘Yes, Sir, it does her honour, but it would do nobody else honour. I have indeed, not read it all. But when I take up the end of a web, and find it packthread, I do not expect, by looking further, to find embroidery.'”

Then there’s Johnson’s response to someone calling one Thomas Gray “a dull fellow”:

“Boswell: ‘I understand he was reserved, and might appear dull in company; but surely he was not dull in poetry.’
Johnson: ‘Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him GREAT. He was a mechanical poet.'”

Or this, from Johnson’s “Lives of the Poets” on Milton:

“Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and puts down,and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.”

Ouch.

I wrote my post-speech thoughts below. They’re the first items under Tuesday, and filed at 10.35:09 pm Eastern time. That might be a hackathon record.

LETTERS: Cheney’s prerogatives; gay rights a non-issue?; a reader reviews the New York Times.
(With this installment of letters, Reihan Salam will be editing the letters page. I’ll still be reading them and selecting many for posting – just not editing the actual page.)

KURTZ COMES THROUGH: The Washington Post’s media columnist nails it today. It was all in his book, of course, Hot Air, the first book to expose the problem of pundits on corporate budgets. But guess what? That book is out of print, and the pundits’ corporate fees are bigger than ever.

Another indispensable piece from my colleague and friend Gregg Easterbrook at TNR Online. He highlights two competing plans for reducing pollution from some grandfathered pollution plants in the MidWest. Despite the predictable myopic chorus of criticism from the New York Times, the Democrats, and “environmental” groups, Bush has two plans to pick from to further clean up the environment: a bad Cheney plan and a good Whitman plan. Gregg makes a good place for Whitman’s plan and asks, plaintively, why liberals and environmentalists don’t seem to want to support it. In an election year, some Democrats seem to prefer dirtier air and a wedge issue to cleaner air and a more pro-environment Republican party.

THOSE PESKY LABELS: The spin on the College Freshman Survey that I cited on Monday helps reveal how useless many contemporary political labels are. The headline in many stories including this one was “College Freshmen More Liberal, Less Apathetic, poll finds.” But the key signifiers for this were three shifts: “For instance, a record percentage — 57.9 percent — think gay couples should have the legal right to marry. The highest portion in two decades — 32.2 percent — say the death penalty should be abolished. And more than one-third — the highest rate since 1980 — say marijuana should be legalized.” Now those are all positions I hold. So am I a liberal? I think you can make solid conservative arguments for all three. Growing numbers of conservatives support the first, the Pope backs the second and National Review supports the third. Isn’t the real swing toward a more libertarian politics?

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE I: “The Pentagon’s release of deliberately provocative pictures of prisoners at Camp X-Ray on Cuba was meant to conceal [the] failure [of the war in Afghanistan] from the American public, who are being conditioned, along with the rest of us, to accept a permanent war footing similar to the paranoia that sustained and prolonged the Cold War.The threat of “terrorism”, some of it real, most of it invented, is the new Red Scare… There is terrible irony at work here. The humane response of people all over the world to the terrorism of September 11 has long been hijacked by those running a rapacious great power with a history of terrorism second to none. Global supremacy, not the defeat of terrorism, is the goal; only the politically blind believe otherwise.” – John Pilger, The Daily Mirror (London).

PARTNOY’S COMPLAINT: I’m not an expert in this and I’m not sure I understand all of it, but this testimony from Frank Partnoy makes more sense to me than some of the hot air now floating around about Enron. It deals with regulation of derivatives. A reader I trust on these matters brought it to my attention. Here’s the money quote:

“”In a nutshell, it appears that some Enron employees used dummy accounts and rigged valuation methodologies to create false profit and loss entries for the derivatives Enron traded. These false entries were systematic and occurred over several years, beginning as early as 1997. They included not only the more esoteric financial instruments Enron began trading recently – such as fiber-optic bandwidth and weather derivatives – but also Enron’s very profitable trading operations in natural gas derivatives. Enron derivatives traders faced intense pressure to meet quarterly earnings targets imposed directly by management and indirectly by securities analysts who covered Enron. To ensure that Enron met these estimates, some traders apparently hid losses and understated profits. Traders apparently manipulated the reporting of their “real” economic profits and losses in an attempt to fit the “imagined” accounting profits and losses that drove Enron management.”

It’s time to look beyond the name-calling and understand what went wrong here. This Senate testimony helped me.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE II: “The next night I had dinner with this magazines advice columnist, Cynthia O’Neil. She told me of the work of Harvard Psyciatrist, James Gilligan, who argues that a high percentage of violence can be traced to two things: shame and humiliation. This led to a discussion about anti-American Terrorists and the ways in which being humiliated and shamed by poverty, blight, and bombs contributed to Sept. 11th and it’s continuing legacy of violence” – Brendan Lemon, editor of Out magazine.