I could write nothing close to as eloquent as this email I received yesterday. It’s in response to the USC Anti-War Conference I mentioned yesterday in the Dish, whose press release included the following statement: “The Bush administration has cleverly kept the threat of terrorism at such a fever pitch, the public has lost all sense of reality.” My correspondent writes in reply:
I like to adopt a tone of measured restraint when I respond to various bits of writing. It sharpens me up, and makes me ready for a bit of the old argument-argument.
But let me tell you: reality, for me, is stealing a Mango Madness Snapple from the abandoned bodega at the corner of William Street and Pine Street, to clear the concrete and gypsum dust from my throat as I pedal my bicycle through the blizzard remains of 110 stories’ worth of skyscraper, trying to get the hell out of downtown Manhattan.
I refuse to let some bunch of left-coast assholes who weren’t there and don’t still work three blocks from the site tell me that I’ve lost all sense of reality. Do they think that the Jerry Bruckheimer televised version they saw endlessly on cable for a week is all there was? They should try smelling it. They should try showering it off their bodies.
How dare they. How dare they, how dare they, how dare they.
Indeed. How dare they?
THE CASE AGAINST PICKERING: The Senate will start hearings today on one of the few Bush judicial appointees deemed suitable for confirmation by the Democrats. Already, the smear-jobs have been prepared. All I can say is: read the demagoguery of Bob Herbert in today’s New York Times and then read this superb and measured piece by Byron York. York effectively demolishes the case made against Judge Charles W. Pickering Jr. by People for the American Way. In fact, York’s piece does more than that. It’s a body blow against the very integrity of PFAW’s mission and Herbert’s diatribe. Imputing racism to a white man who, in the 1960s, took on the Klan in Mississippi, is now apparently a legitimate tactic for liberal special interest groups and columnists. Take one incident: a law review article Pickering wrote as a student at the age of 21. Here’s Herbert: “Mr. Pickering had a significant effect on his home state’s racist past as early as 1959 when he was a student at the University of Mississippi Law School. He felt it was important to bolster Mississippi’s anti-miscegenation law.” In fact, the law school article took no position on the miscegenation laws; it merely pointed out a technical mistake that made the law unenforceable. In the article Pickering doubted whether such laws would last much longer. Pickering’s only other ruling on inter-racial marriage, according to York, was in 1991 when he ruled that a jury was biased against a mixed-race couple, and ordered a retrial that increased the couple’s damages.
THE RACE CARD: Herbert’s other point is that Pickering lied when he said he’d forgotten about any contacts he might have had with the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a body Herbert describes as a “grotesque, hateful, virulently anti-black organization.” It turns out Pickering did have one conversation in 1972 with a Commission staffer. That conversation was about Klan violence and how to prevent it. Here’s York:
Chet Dillard, the former district attorney of Jones County, has told the Senate Judiciary Committee that Pickering was worried about a labor dispute at a Masonite plant in which “union members who were also members of the KKK shot into and burned homes in the middle of the night and brutally beat up workers….As a state senator representing Jones County, Charles Pickering had every reason to be concerned about further union violence involving the Masonite plant in Jones County.”
Pickering, labeled as a racist in the New York Times, even lost re-election because he stood up to the Klan. Here’s Charles Evers, brother of murdered civil rights leader medger Evers, in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee:
“In 1967, many locally elected prosecutors in Mississippi looked the other way when faced with allegations of violence against African-Americans and those who supported our struggle for equal treatment under the law. Judge Pickering was a locally elected prosecutor who took the stand that year and testified in the criminal trial against the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who was accused of firebombing a civil rights activist. Judge Pickering later lost his bid for reelection because he dared to defy the Klan, but he gained my respect and the respect of many others as a man who stands up for what is right.”
This is the ‘racist past’ of a man Bob Herbert and PFAW delight in smearing. How the civil rights movement has changed.
AXIS OF EVIL WATCH: James Taranto digs up a recent quote from former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani, when that Islamo-fascist was addressing a crowd on Jerusalem Day last December. According to the Jerusalem Post, Rafsanjani
said the establishment of Israel was “the most hideous historic occurrence in history,” and the Islamic world “will vomit her out from its midst,” according to Peres’s letter. Rafsanjani told a crowd at the stadium in Teheran University that the day is approaching in which the Islamic world will possess atomic weapons. “On that day, the strategy of the West will hit a dead end, since a single atomic bomb has the power to completely destroy Israel, while an Israeli counterstrike can only cause partial damage to the Islamic world,” he said.
What’s amazing is not that he said such things – but that this is the first I’ve ever heard of it. The international press is up in arms about president Bush’s robust statement of the obvious – that the regimes in Iran, Iraq and North Korea are evil – but ignores a statement promising the nuclear annihilation of a U.N.-recognized democracy. Figures, doesn’t it?
A DEADLY CONFLAGRATION: The Onion keeps its eye on a more local Indian-Pakistani conflict.
The Dish 