Month: July 2001

“”He is a committed conservative, no question about it, but he’s not a hater,” – Mark “liberal but not a hater” Shields, Washington Post.

THE LEVYS: According to the New York “no unpublished slur” Post, the impetus for the concentration on Gary Condit’s brother, Darrell, has come from Chandra Levy’s family. So now we have a manhunt conducted or orchestrated by people with a vested interest. Ever read “The Scarlet Letter?” Or “The Crucible”? The Levy family’s distress is understandable; their grief and worry terrible. But that’s precisely why their agenda should not be the same as the media’s or the cops’. It’s good sign, though, that the press is now attempting to justify its ransacking the lives of private individuals by citing the wishes of the Levy family. It means the bloodhounds are beginning to worry they have drastically over-played their hand. If I were the Levys, I’d be worried. At some point, this insatiable tiger they are riding will eat them as well. It is already beginning to nibble at the reputation of their missing daughter.

THE EXPENSE OF LANDFILLS: A reader asks: Did it occur to the DC cops that it would have been less expensive to search area landfills if they had started their search ten bleeping weeks ago?

A brave and important column by Bob Herbert today. No, I haven’t finally lost it. He notices an Ohio case in which a man has been sentenced to seven years in prison for writing a private prison journal in which he fantasized about sex with children. No-one’s defending the sentiment in the journal. But Herbert is completely right that any American citizen should be able to write anything he or she wants in a private journal and not have it used to put him in jail. Even Mary Eberstadt might agree with that. Then again, maybe not. One can only hope that Herbert’s new-found vigilance against the thought-police might lead him to worry a tiny bit more about hate crime laws.

POST-MORTEM: The Washington Post is surely right to be deeply proud of the legacy of Katharine Graham. But today’s op-ed roster of mini-eulogies is so, well, Washington. I was especially struck by Barbara Walters’ first paragraph: “Katharine Graham, her daughter, Lally, and a few close friends were at my home for lunch just two weekends ago. It had been a celebratory couple of days for Kay and Lally, whose birthdays were within days of each other. The night before, Lally had thrown a big party, and Kay had risen to toast her daughter with enormous pride. Then her son Steve Graham gave wonderfully insightful and amusing remarks. So I want to talk about Kay as a mother.” But before I do, can I remind you all of my fabulous recent lunch-party? Le tout Washington was there. Everyone was so, well, wonderfully insightful and amusing.

CORRECTIONS: I apologize to Josh Marshall. It seems I was reading a wrong and outdated link to his site. I still can’t figure out exactly how to access the new page – I kept refreshing the old one and it kept giving me the old page. Sorry again. Innocent error. And Josh makes a good point about why he didn’t name the ABC News reporter. He didn’t have an on-the-record source. Tapper has now named her – and criticized the DC cops, which makes him 2 for 0. It’s a particularly devastating detail that the cops haven’t even contacted the reporter, Rebecca Cooper, to ask her about Condit’s state of mind that day. More evidence that the real story here is not Condit’s foolish and selfish defensiveness, but the D.C. Police Department’s staggering incompetence. (By the way, when will the New York Post apologize for printing that Cooper had had an affair with Condit?) Way to go, Jake. I’ve also outraged one reader by getting the date of the L.A. riots wrong. It was 1992, not 1991.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “I am very concerned to see that Salon.com accepts advertising from a Cuban Cigar website, located in Switzerland (link: http://www.cubancigars.com). To my mind, it really puts in doubt their reporting on (1) Cuba (I will have to reevaluate their coverage of the Elian story) and (2) tobacco (perhaps anti-smoking stories are really carefully planted attempts to lure readers away from cigarettes, made in my home state of North Carolina and towards Fidel-friendly cigars).”

The barrel hasn’t been scraped this thoroughly in years. Now Fox News is going after Condit’s other brother – and they do so using the usual trick of cowards and weasels, by asking whether it’s relevant, while retailing every sordid detail they can find. I’m sorry, but this has absolutely no relevance to the disappearance of Levy. It is purely and simply a disgrace. (By the way, Josh Marshall promised on July 14 to answer my question as to why he won’t name the ABC news reporter who interviewed Condit at the time of Levy’s disappearance. Since then, he’s uttered not a word. Even Mickey “no unpublished thought” Kaus has gone uncharacteristically silent. Hmmmm.)

When the ultra-conservative (and often excellent) newspaper, The Washington Times, doesn’t support a constitutional amendment to impose one marriage model on every state, then you know it’s a stretch. Kudos for the Times for standing up for conservatism. Too bad National Review let anti-gay hysteria stain its reputation.

You thought the media blood-lust was abating? Now it’s Gary Condit’s brother’s turn to be roasted on an open press fire – this time by the Associated Press. Will it help find Levy? Who cares?

GO MICKEY: Valuable deconstruction of the New York Times’ military ballot non-story by Mickey “Hanging Chad” Kaus.

NATIONAL REVIEW GETS BLUDGEONED BY READERS: Take a look at these letters and see if, like me, you think National Review’s hysterical support for an unprecedented anti-federalist Constitutional Amendment on marriage holds up under fire. I hope they don’t mind my saying so, but the editors’ response is lame. Presumably aware that this proposal trashes any semblance of states’ rights, the editors and my friend Stanley Kurtz make the point that the Amendment is designed to avoid such a national solution imposed by one state’s judges. To quote Kurtz, “Precisely because of the “full faith and credit clause,” there has to be national agreement on the basic definition of marriage. Otherwise, a single state court can impose a radically new definition upon the entire country – a possibility that never even occurred to the framers.” That sentence is simply wrong. Some same-sex marriage proponents at one point hoped it might be true but it clearly isn’t. (And, for the record, if it were true, I would oppose it for exactly the same reasons I oppose an Amendment that would impose one federal rule for marriage on every state and state constitution.) The full faith and credit clause has always been interpreted to mean that legal “judgments,” i.e. documents ruled legal in a court, like ownership of property and so on, must be portable from state to state. But a marriage has never been deemed a “judgment” of this kind. That’s why when northern states allowed miscegenation, they didn’t automatically mandate legal mixed-race marriages across the South. Today, one state’s same-sex marriage would also not be automatically endorsed by every other state. It would be decided on a case by case basis, and all the constitutional and legal history suggests that, in most cases, such marriages are not portable. To read more about this, check out the Constitutional Law section in my anthology, Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con.” I wish the editors of National Review had. There is simply no basis for their hysteria on this – let alone a basis for violating conservatism’s traditional distrust of federal solutions to state problems.

Some statistics on the D.C. Police Force’s record in solving crimes. In 1999, according to a superb investigation by the Washington Post (which proved an exception to the usual rule in criticizing a mainly black police force two years ago), nearly two-thirds of murders remained unsolved after a year. Bottom-line: if you want to murder someone, you are twice as likely to get away with it in D.C. as you are likely to get caught. I quote from the Post: “A year-long Washington Post investigation has found fundamental flaws in D.C. homicide cases: poor supervision of detectives scattered in districts across the city, hundreds of missing and incomplete case files, and dozens of cases closed without arrests under unclear circumstances. The disarray has persisted despite repeated promises of fixes, a precipitously dropping homicide rate and the arrival two years ago of a police chief brought in to reform a troubled department.” And missing person cases are some of the hardest to solve of all. So be prepared for this trauma never to find a resolution. Can Fox News keep riding Chandra’s presumably dead body through 2002?

Michael Portillo is now out of the running for leader of the Conservative Party. He came third in the latest ballot of Tory MPs – leaving big-government Europhile Ken Clarke and hardline rightist Iain Duncan Smith as the two candidates to face the Tory activist electorate. The final result won’t emerge till September 12. Portillo lost because, in the final analysis, his social liberalism was too much for the party to stomach. Homophobia thrived. Duncan Smith’s supporters argued that Tories wanted a “family man” and a “normal” person to head the party. The Daily Telegraph described Portillo as “actorly.” Portillo’s open-minded stand on marijuana legalization and same-sex marriage was used against him. So now the Tories have a choice between one man – Duncan Smith – who makes William Hague look charismatic and liberal, and Ken Clarke – an avuncular, reassuring figure who is an enthusiast for British membership of the euro, the one issue on which the Tories still have an advantage over Labour. The fact that Clarke won over the more conservative-leaning parliamentary party shows that the Tories, as ever, don’t give a damn what they really stand for if they can get elected. But Clarke’s emergence could either be an amazingly counter-intuitive way to get the party’s European divisions behind it – or, in the nightmare scenario, split the party and destroy it for a generation. Much now depends on how Clarke handles this amazing victory. But William Hague is looking better with each passing day.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “Couldn’t agree with you more on your comments regarding the Times being on the “razor’s edge of credibility.” I would label myself as a fiscally conservative, culturally moderate, Southern White Male. I’m comforted and encouraged by what seems to me to be George W. Bush’s over-arching decency, and shudder deeply at the thought of Al Gore in the White House.
I’ve lived in Westchester, New York for the last 5 years, and have subscribed to the NYT for that entire time; it has always seemed an “important” paper to me, perhaps THE important US paper–and, even when I disagreed with it, I at least felt challenged by the thought and hard work that had obviously gone into the editorial product. I’ve tried to never be a knee-jerk conservative, I don’t mind having my beliefs challenged, and I always felt I could at least count on the Times for a well-done, coherent and . . . responsible statement of its beliefs and positions.
Not anymore. The current editorial page seems mindless, knee-jerk (Bush “bad,” anti-Bush “good), and frankly contortionist in its efforts to slant everything . . . EVERYTHING . . . against Bush and all Republicans. And, more than ever, this slant has moved full-scale into its reporting. It’s no longer even camouflaged. It’s sad . . . but will almost certainly mean good things for other honest, balanced voices, as interested citizens like me look for meaningful, useful content and comment about the things that interest us.”

Of course she is. You thought that only Gary Condit’s privacy was going to appease the press-wolves? According to Josh Marshall in Salon, Lisa DePaulo, a talented muck-raker, is working on a story for Talk magazine, Tina Brown’s latest (and awful) vehicle. Now Levy’s sex life will be fodder – and if she had an active one, look out for the Kudlows to trash her as well. Better still for the press: If she’s dead, she can’t sue!

THE HIDDEN LAW: Excellent piece, as usual, by Jonah Goldberg – even though he calls me “daffy” – in National Review Online. The critical issue for Jonah seems to be that violation of privacy is legit in matters of adulterous affairs, if the news happens to come out incidentally and inexorably in the course of some other run of events – e.g. your lover goes missing, your girlfriend gets pregnant and has a baby, your S&M game goes wrong and someone gets a black eye or something worse. Once that has happened, and the intern is out of the bag, or sling, or whatever, it is the duty of one and all to condemn the offender in order to uphold social mores. Okay, Jonah. I’m with you so far (except I seem to recall a Gospel passage about casting the first stone, and so on, but never mind). I can almost see why, in the Condit case, the revelation of his adultery with Chandra Levy is not an invasion of privacy per se, because it is pertinent to her whereabouts (although quite how, exactly, I’m not so sure). So I’m not a privacy absolutist, as Jonah says. What concerns me is how this revelation can then be leveraged by the press – in aid of social mores and, er, sales – to go on a fishing expedition about everything else in Condit’s life. This is the same evil as that perpetrated by sexual harassment law. If a single case of such behavior is alleged in court, then every other possible detail of someone’s private life is fair game for legal and media discovery. We soon launch something close to an inquisition into the most intimate matters. This is not merely unseemly. It is dangerous. Even sleazeballs deserve a zone of privacy. And without some kind of durable public-private distinction, even for cads, liberal democracy becomes increasingly untenable.

STEM CELLS: I’ve just finished a first draft of my TRB this week on stem cell human embryo research. Thanks for all your input. I realize, having thought pretty hard about this, that I have few doubts that all such research is morally unconscionable. Don’t write me though until you’ve read the piece. Please. But one point I couldn’t cram into the 1200 words I’m allowed is the following. I believe as a matter of simple logic – not merely religious faith – that the only non-arbitrary moment at which a human being becomes a human being is at the moment of conception. That’s why I cannot ultimately support experimenting on such human beings. But how then do I justify my middle-of-the-road stance on abortion, which is to keep it legal in the first trimester? The answer, I guess, is my political and moral respect for a woman’s dominion over her own body. A woman’s right to determine her own body’s fate is a bulwark of her freedom from coercive state power – and that freedom seems to me only outweighed by the obvious humanity of an unborn child after the first trimester. I know that’s an arbitrary stage of fetal development as well. But it’s as good as any basis I can think of for a compromise. I know this isn’t a perfect solution, but using the power of government to control a woman’s body in the early stages of pregnancy when good people sincerely differ about the moral status of a fetus is anathema to me. But in the stem cell issue, that question never really arises. These embryos are in no-one’s body. Their right to exist doesn’t have to be balanced by the countervailing right of the mother to be left alone. That’s why I think we’re right to be tougher on abusing extremely young humans in the laboratory than in the womb. At least that’s where my thinking is at right now.

“Thanks for pointing out the profile of Julia Kristeva in the NYT. I spent a while in grad school studying French philosophers and psychoanalysts, as well as other figures (mis-)appropriated by the academic left like Arendt and Freud. What the American university (and the British, too, if my experience at Sussex can be generalized) has done to their work has been grossly unfair. Some examples: Arendt is among the most pointed critics of communism and boldest theoretician of freedom (and constantly critical of feminism and identity politics in their ’60s guise). Freud was deeply attached to conservative, bourgeois values and affirms exactly the sort of thesis you suggest in your piece about rioting and the gratification of human urges. Derrida has spent much of the last decade taking religion much more seriously than it will ever be taken in the NYT (a theological debate I saw between him and the Catholic theologian Jean-Luc Marion was breathtaking). And Lacan famously said of the rioters in Paris ’68, “All they want is a new master.” The left, of course, benefits from its blindness to that which doesn’t fit neatly into its world-view, but the right shoots itself in the foot by holding up these figures as straw men for what’s wrong with the American university. In fact, there is enough in these figures to create a dynamic, intellectual base to the right if it’d stop badmouthing and start reading.”

A New York Post story today reveals that Gary Condit went regularly to a spa in Washington D.C., where he used an alias to protect his privacy. Ha! We now know the alias and the spa. That’ll teach him to have a private life. The story also tells us – completely gratuitously – that Condit’s first wife was pregnant when they were married. Thanks for letting us know. All of this is completely relevant to Chandra Levy’s disappearance, right? Of course not. With each passing day, this “no unpublished thought” story has a mob-like feel to it. I think it may be shaping up to be a classic contemporary case of media degeneracy. Accordingly, I’m working on an essay detailing these abuses of privacy. If you find any other aspects of Condit’s life that can have no conceivable relevance to Levy’s disappearance, and which have appeared in any media above the level of the National Enquirer, please send them in. It’s time to fight back.

CATCH 22: And yes, I know I just retailed the very same privacy-violating stories, violating Condit’s privacy even further. But that’s the catch, isn’t it? Privacy violators can normally expect to remain free from criticism because those who feel most appalled by their tactics cannot respond without fanning the flames. That’s why there is something truly sadistic and cowardly about this kind of journalism. (And having experienced something even more unjustified than what has happened to Condit, I cannot help but react viscerally. In some ways, I wish more journalists could have experienced what I did – it might make them less blithe in their incursions into people’s privacy.) Condit cannot and should not respond to every crazy accusation now leveled against him. But his silence only attracts more bullies. Yes, I know he erred gravely in not being forthcoming immediately to the police. That’s a very serious matter. But so far, that’s his only proven lapse. By all means, criticize him for it. Even call for him to resign, as The New Republic. and its new found allies, Bob Barr and Trent Lott, have. The rest is mere gossip. Focus on the real story. And leave the rest of the man’s life alone.

THE REAL CHANDRA LEVY STORY: Of course, the one story the liberal press won’t touch is the D.C. Police Department. (They won’t touch it because the force is mainly black and you’re not allowed to criticize mainly black institutions.) As soon as this event occurred in D.C. it became a pretty sure bet that this disappearance would never be solved. Why would it? When was the last time a tough murder case was solved in D.C.? The DCPD’s success rate at resolving murders is about as good as the English at winning Wimbledon. There are 140 other missing persons in D.C. this year – and none will be found. The only reason they are going through the motions this time is because this is a national story, Levy is white, a Congressman is involved. If none of those applies, D.C. is a pretty good place to kill someone and get away with it. My bet is that we will never know the answer. And that no-one in the major media will cast a spotlight on the shambles that is the D.C. Police Department.