“What is implied here is the amazing assumption that society has the right to bargain with the Negro for the freedom which inherently belongs to him. Some of the most vocal liberals believe they have a valid basis for demanding that, in order to gain certain rights, the Negro ought to pay for them out of the funds of patience and passivity which he has stored up for so many years. What these people do not realize is that gradualism and moderation are not the answer to the great moral indictment which, in the revolution of 1963, finally came to stand in the center of our national stage. What they do not realize is that it is no more possible to be half free that it is to be half alive.” – Martin Luther King Jr., “Why We Can’t Wait,” January 1964.
BUSH AND AL QAEDA BEFORE 9/11: A thorough and interesting piece by Bart Gellmann in Sunday’s Washington Post. You can see it as either a more or less continuation of Clinton’s caution – or something much better. You won’t be surprised to see I think the latter. Clearly the Bush administration didn’t do enough in eight months to deter or detect the September 11 outbreak of war. They deserve some of the responsibility for our vulnerability alongside Clinton. But to say the two administrations were interchangeable strikes me as wrong. Here’s an interesting section:
“When the Deputies Committee met April 30, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage declared an important shift in stance by saying the destruction of al Qaeda should be the top American priority in South Asia-higher than slowing the spread of nuclear arms, or preventing another Indo-Pakistan war, or restoring democracy after Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s coup in Pakistan. Only al Qaeda, Armitage said, represented a direct threat to the United States.”
The difference was that the Bushies began to see al Qaeda as a systemic threat requiring a broad strategy for the region. They say Bush himself expressed frustration at inaction. By the summer,
“Tenet dispatched an urgent request on July 3 to 20 foreign intelligence services, asking them to arrest a list of suspected al Qaeda members. Two days later, his Counterterrorism Center called in the FBI, Customs and Coast Guard, as well as immigration and aviation authorities, to say a major attack on U.S. interests appeared to be imminent-likeliest, by now, in Saudi Arabia or Israel, but a target inside the United States could not be excluded.”
The administration ratcheted up its objectives regarding al Qaeda to ‘elimination’ of the organization – far more profound than anything Clinton had done. Further, the Taliban were formally warned that the United States would make no distinction between them and al Qaeda. Options for actual invasion of Afghanistan were on the table by September 4 – if far from being implemented. None of this was enough, of course. But any comparison of this record with Clinton’s eight long years of swatting at flies seems to me to the great advantage of Bush. And I see no reason whatsoever why this record – and his subsequent global success – shouldn’t be a legitimate reason for keeping the guy in office.
SO FAREWELL THEN, TINA BROWN: What is there to learn from the demise of Talk, Tina Brown’s relentlessly bad magazine that was finally put out of its misery last Friday? To begin with, it’s not that Tina B was a bad editor. She’s clearly a superb editor. Yes, the rap on her incessant parties and spin operations and celebrity puff-pieces was all well-deserved. But she also ran some terrific stories at the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, was a line-editor of some skill, a story editor of clear genius, and a buzz-merchant par excellence. She saved the New Yorker as a relevant franchise, although she also effectively destroyed what it was. Her flaw, I think, was that she never grew. What she brought to Vanity Fair in the 1980s was very close to what she brought to the New Yorker in the 1990s and almost indistinguishable from what she did with Talk at the turn of the century. It was the same formula repeated again and again – in different formats. It was a great formula for a while and reached its peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But the mood changed; the zeitgeist altered; the economics of publishing, which she helped skew in the 1980s and 1990s with her pathological profligacy, also shifted. For someone allegedly clued in to the tinniest shifts in the culture, she reacted with numbing obliviousness. September 11 wasn’t therefore just a financial disaster for her; it was a cultural disaster. What seemed merely tired and exhausted in 2001 felt almost offensive and irrelevant in 2002. Like Clinton, Brown will be remembered in the future as an emblem of an era of profound shallowness and great fun. But that era is now over. Here’s a suggestion for Tina: go back to writing, your first love. Publish your diaries. Then get yourself a me-zine. Everyone will read it. And you might even stop losing buckets full of other people’s money.
PUNDITGATE?: The Washington Times is the first newspaper to follow up on the Paul Krugman $50,000 Enron payment. I don’t mean to sound crazed about this. It’s not the worst thing in the world for a columnist to take money from a major corporation just to burnish their image. But it is unethical to write about the Enron scandal without divulging that you were once cashing their checks. (Being on an advisory board need not be a source of payment. Krugman owed it to his readers to tell them that he got a very easy $50,000 from the people he’s now accusing of epitomizing corrupt capitalism.) But the Times has also dug up another nugget. Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard was also on the board. I’m not aware of Kristol disclosing this at any point, or how much money (if any) he received; or whether he intends to give it to a charity for the victims of the company’s shenanigans. And Kristol and Krugman surely aren’t the only ones. Here’s a story for any aggressive media reporter. Exactly how many pundits have been on Enron’s payroll? How many of them have disclosed that fact in their relevant publications? How much was each paid? What did they write about Enron at the time? And how many of them are returning the money to the relevant Enron charities? This strikes me as an important piece of investigation if the punditocracy isn’t going to emerge from this scandal as tarnished as many others.
The Dish 