When Chandra Levy’s parents first tried to push their missing daughter to the head of the D.C. police’s to-do list, they thought using the media was a good idea. And indeed one of the constant refrains of those who justify the media excess of the last couple of months is that, whatever hideous wreckage it leaves behind in the form of people’s ruined private lives, it’s worth it if the coverage helps find a missing person. Well, guess what? The coverage has actually achieved the reverse. The cops have been deluged with bogus, false, crazy, wacko and misleading tips – and, under media pressure, been forced to check them out. This massive waste of resources – resources that could have been used to investigate an actual crime rather than a speculation about one – has yet to turn up anything useful, so far as we know. This, we are also told by the cops in the Washington Post, is very common in missing person cases. All this is why police investigation should properly be left to law enforcement – not the distressed parents of missing children and desperate editors of tabloids. The way in which personal grief has been allowed to distort and corrupt our criminal justice system is perhaps the enduring lesson of this case. We owe the Levys our sympathy. We do not owe them the abolition of a neutral and independent police force.
BORKING MARRIAGE: There is little to say about Robert Bork’s piece on same-sex marriage today. There is nothing original in it, and I presume the Journal ran it under intense pressure from the theo-conservatives. And there is nothing surprising about it. Since his horrifying treatment at the hands of the cultural left in his Supreme Court nomination hearings, Bork has become a sadly bitter man, who rages against almost anything in the modern world. But there are a couple of sentences worth parsing: “Some proponents of gay marriage, such as Jonathan Rauch, have tried to split cultural conservatives by invoking federalism. Family law, he argues, has always been governed by the states. Though that is not entirely true, it is entirely irrelevant. A constitutional ruling by the Supreme Court in favor of same-sex marriage would itself override federalism.” Note first the sly slur. He asserts that Jon Rauch’s defense of federalism in this matter is tactical, made purely as a means to “split cultural conservatives.” It doesn’t occur to Bork that Rauch may be sincere in this, or if it does occur to him, he’s not gracious enough to admit it. He then goes on to say of Rauch’s point that marriage has always been a state matter, that it “is not entirely true.” So that means it’s almost entirely true? Then Bork says it is irrelevant because the Supreme Court is poised to impose same-sex marriage on the whole country. Huh? We don’t even have same-sex marriage in a single state. We are years and probably decades away from the U.S. Supreme Court intervening in this matter, if it ever does. But this alleged emergency is the reason for this radical amendment? The real reason surely is that a faction on the right wants to shut down this debate before it has really begun because they have been slowly losing the argument – in the press and in the polls, where support for equal marriage rights is growing.
LETTERS: Guns in Seattle; media scolds and religion; etc.
GOVERNMENT KNOWS BEST: David Broder, we are all taught to believe, is the dean of Washington journalism. And so he is. He still reports; he’s never shrill; he’s often very shrewd and on target. But he’s also prone to the notion that besets all those who look down on ideological zeal or hardball. His most recent column bewails the fact that George W. Bush stuck with his tax cut pledge. For Broder, Bush has made it harder for himself to spend more money on important things like a senior prescription drug benefit, or a bigger military. But has it occurred to Broder that Bush believes the tax cut is simply more important than his other objectives? Or that Bush has decided it would be better to return to deficits than to acquiesce in the massive new entitlements Democrats want to spend the surpluses on? Such a thought doesn’t seem to have crossed Broder’s mind. It is a given to many journalists that taxes are good, that government doesn’t need to get any smaller, that all our problems – from senior health-care to energy shortages – can never be simply left alone. Yesterday the Post itself went one better, excoriating Virginia for not having high enough taxes. “Virginia is a wealthy state,” the Post opines, “but much of the wealth is untaxed.” The nerve of it!
ZOE AND JIM: The best thing I could find to read all day (in journalism, that is) is Zoe Heller and Jim Wolcott chatting each other up in Slate. They are so right about the Condit-Levy story. The true joy of this summer (apart from the Elysian weather here on the Cape) has been watching all these anti-Condit pundit-scolds making complete asses of themselves. Wolcott has a beaut of a description of Larry King’s descent into Psychic News Network world: “Night after night, Larry King, looking like a shriveled astronaut strapped by his suspenders into a Mercury 7 module, led a bevy of blond conservative harpies–Hillary haters who had somehow cornered the peroxide market–and a few half-hearted dissenters in a free-association panel discussion of the Condit-Levy case that was a harlequinade of spite, wild speculation, and cheap moralizing, with Condit cast as the wolf, Chandra the naive lamb.” Man, Wolcott can write. And he’s so on target about these creepy Condit-haters trying desperately to relive their Lewinsky glory days. As if adultery were a Democratic monopoly.
The Dish 