Wasn’t it perfect that Senator Bob Torricelli recently invoked Bill Clinton as a model of tenacity before he resigned yesterday? Like Clinton, Torricelli still refuses to acknowledge that he did things that were simply wrong, period. His farewell speech was nauseatingly full of self-congratulation, martyrdom, spin and absurdity:
“It is the most painful thing I have done in my life,” Torricelli said [about his withdrawal from the race]. In what he called “a strange irony of life,” he acknowledged that the Democratic majority in the Senate was in peril in part because his once-comfortable lead over little-known Republican challenger Doug Forrester has evaporated. Mentioning only in passing that his own “mistakes” caused his support to plummet, Torricelli then laid blame on the larger society. “When did we become such an unforgiving people?” he asked. “How did we become a society where a person can build credibility their entire life and have it questioned by someone who has none?”
Get that? It’s our fault, not his. He was in the Senate for power; and he left for the same reason – not because he believed he had disgraced himself, but because his “mistakes” might mean the end of power for his Democratic buddies in the Senate. Classic Clinton: no responsibility assumed or taken, power maximized at all costs. Remember, as blogger John Cole did today, that Torricelli’s Democratic friends in high places also did all they could recently to overlook the actual ethics involved. Only last week, Senate Majority leader, Tom Daschle, according to the New York Times,
urged New Jerseyans today to look beyond Mr. Torricelli’s ethical problems,… because he said the stakes of the election were so steep. “What America looks like in the years ahead will depend on the battles we fight right there on the Senate floor,” Mr. Daschle said. “And we have never had a race in which there was more at stake than what is happening right now.”
Above all, Torricelli’s exit unfairly denies the voters a chance to punish him. Such votes are a critical part of the political system. They help cleanse the electoral palate, they allow the body politic to make a formal statement about what matters, and they drive the point home by humiliating the ethically challenged. Torricelli’s final, cynical move is of a piece with his entire career. It’s a scam and a duck. This time, surely New Jersey’s courts shouldn’t let him get away with it.
THE BRILLIANCE OF AL GORE: A defense of the speech – and much, much more on the Letters Page.
TWO STORIES: I’m reeling from two stories sent to me recently by a reader in Jerusalem. The first is a wonderful human interest tale about the classic Jewish mother. Her son, Ari, was fighting in Nablus in the army, was stranded and told her on the phone that he and his fellow soldiers were hungry:
She asked what she could do, but her son said there was nothing to do. “I had one more question: How many are you? He said 35, and with that I hung up.” Off she went walking down Rehov Ahuza, the main drag in Ra’anana, wondering what to do. Suddenly she came upon Kippa Aduma, the shwarma hangout she knows Ari loves. “I went to the manager of the store, Roni, and said, ‘My son is in Nablus. He’s stuck in some hellhole with no fridge, and he’s hungry.’ He interrupted my sentence and asked the same question I did: ‘How many are there?’ I told him 35, and he said, ‘What time do you need it?'”
She then went through several shops and markets in town until she had assembled a mighty feast for 35 soldiers and somehow managed to get it delivered. The impact was not inconsiderable:
“An hour later I got a phone call from Ari, with peals of laughter and screaming in the background. Not only was he king of the day, but I have 34 new boyfriends,” she laughed. “Soldiers were grabbing the phone saying, ‘Geveret Weiss, at lo yada’at ma at aseet lanu’ (Mrs. Weiss, you have no idea what you have done for us).” For Ari, it was all about the pride of a proud son.
A touching story no? Here’s the ending.
A READER WRITES: Better than I could put it:
According to today’s New York Times, “Democratic congressmen who are visiting Iraq this week stirred up anger among some Republicans when they questioned the reasons President Bush has used to justify possible military action against Iraq.” Some Republicans??? I’m a Democrat, I live in McDermott’s district, and I’m outraged!
THAT BAD TIMES LINK: Funny how that page I linked to on the New York Times forum on Maureen Dowd mysteriously disappeared shortly after I put it up. But I think it’s reappeared now here. I’ve no idea why. It doesn’t look like my mistake. Anyway, in case it gets lost again, here’s the passage I was referring to:
wharrison2 – 06:12pm Sep 27, 2002 EST (# 30450 of 30463) kate_nyt 9/27/02 5:48pm Kate I, for one, don’t hate the Times but do not have a lot of respect for Howell as an editor of the “news” sections of the paper. I have a friend here in town, Phil Clapp, who runs the leftwing National Environmental Trust. He’s socially quite friendly with both Howell and Sulzberger, Jr. He told me straight from his own lips that both of them confirmed to him at a luncheon that under Howell’s leadership they intended to use the news sections to attack the Bush administration. Howell didn’t see any problem with this as part of deciding what’s “news” is editorial judgments on what pieces to run and how to couch them. Now that’s just the plain unvarnished truth whether The American Prospect wants to admit it or not. The Washington Times is an unvarnished paper of the right that doesn’t mince words in advertising its partisanship. Almost all of the British and European press is run that way too. I see nothing wrong with the Times representing liberal thinking in this country as well but just be honest enough about it to admit it.
Now why would anyone remove that from the Times’ site?
IN TRANSIT: In New York City tonight. My first trip out of Ptown since July – and my first Number 2 meal in a while. Heaven. Off to Alma College in Michigan today to talk about Catholicism’s crisis. I’ll do what I can to keep things posted on a timely basis today and tomorrow. But it’s difficult on a plane.
The Dish 