I think Dana Milbank scores a few decent points against the president in this piece. Nothing terrible, but still sloppy.
SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “We have a major national security problem on our hands. There’s a man — a deceitful man — who has consistently lied to the world, jeopardizing the safety of Americans. As long as he stays in power, we are at a greater risk of terrorist attack. As long as he continues to disregard the truth, spouting lies into the air, this international bully will threaten our safety. This man must be stopped: George Bush.” – from the Daily Pennsylvanian.
A DEFENSE OF GRIDLOCK: I love Jack Shafer when he’s this ornery.
HOW DUMB ARE THE BRITS? They make Mary McGrory look informed. Barely any knows who’s in the cabinet; and only a quarter can recognize Saddam Hussein. A useful antidote to Anglophilia.
RIGHT-WING HOMOPHOBIA WATCH: It especially applies to gay Republicans.
CLINTON’S SHOCK: A cartoon on the North Korea news.
THE ORWELL PANEL: More details: 7 pm this Thursday night at Jurow Hall, Main Building 100 Washington Square East New York University.
A GAY MAN AND HIS CHURCH: An email that says it all:
I must say that I am absolutely horrified by the story from the Sunday Herald. I am a young gay man considering a vocation with the Society of Jesus. Ever since I was 14, I have heard the call of the Lord to his holy priesthood and I have wanted to do nothing more than serve the Church. After puberty and the realization of my sexual orientation, I was deeply depressed and I knew the Church would never accept my as a gay priest. I vowed to hide my sexuality for the rest of my life and I have remained chaste and closeted for all of my 21 years.
Two years ago, I picked up your book “Love Undetectable” and was totally enthralled. Your frankness and honestly about your own struggles with homosexuality and the Church parallel some of my struggles even to today.
After the sex-abuse scandals erupted last year, I was shaken to my core all over again. I just knew there would be a witch-hunt against gay priests and all those horrible experiences I faced at 14 came back to me. I fear what will happen to me now. I am scheduled to begin the application process to the Jesuits next year and I am very scared. What happened to my Church? All I wish to do is serve God and his flock as faithfully as Jesus did and now I am faced with being probed and examined to be “outed” by a hierarchy obsessed with expelling all remnants of homosexuality. I feel so lost and so alienated from the Church in these times. The worst part is the fact that I cannot share my pain with my parish priest or my vocation spiritual director for fear of rejection from the only life I have ever passionately desired.
Ask yourself: how can anyone defend a policy of routine discrimination against men such as these? I am grateful for your many emails about this; and I’ll continue to hope that this horror won’t come to pass.
ANTI-AMERICANISM, CTD: David Frum reports from Britain and finds less of it than you’d think.
KRUGMAN IN HIS OWN WORDS: “Economists also did their bit to legitimize previously unthinkable levels of executive pay. During the 1980’s and 1990’s a torrent of academic papers — popularized in business magazines and incorporated into consultants’ recommendations — argued that Gordon Gekko was right: greed is good; greed works. In order to get the best performance out of executives, these papers argued, it was necessary to align their interests with those of stockholders. And the way to do that was with large grants of stock or stock options.
It’s hard to escape the suspicion that these new intellectual justifications for soaring executive pay were as much effect as cause. I’m not suggesting that management theorists and economists were personally corrupt. It would have been a subtle, unconscious process: the ideas that were taken up by business schools, that led to nice speaking and consulting fees, tended to be the ones that ratified an existing trend, and thereby gave it legitimacy.”
– Paul Krugman, criticizing the subtle, unconscious corruption of academic economists being paid nice speaking and consulting fees, October 20, 2002.
“My critics seem to think that there was something odd about Enron’s willingness to pay a mere college professor that much money. But such sums are not unusual for academic economists whose expertise is relevant to current events… Remember that this was 1999: Asia was in crisis, the world was a mess. And justifiably or not, I was regarded as an authority on that mess. I invented currency crises as an academic field, way back in 1979; anyone who wants a sense of my academic credentials should look at the Handbook of International Economics, vol. 3, and check the index…
I mention all this not as a matter of self-puffery, but to point out that I was not an unknown college professor. On the contrary, I was a hot property, very much in demand as a speaker to business audiences: I was routinely offered as much as $50,000 to speak to investment banks and consulting firms. They thought I might tell them something useful… The point is that the money Enron offered wasn’t out of line with what companies with no interest in influence-buying were offering me. You may think I was overpaid, but the market – not Enron – set those pay rates.”
– Paul Krugman, January 21, defending his getting paid $50,000 for a two-day weekend Enron Advisory Board meeting because the market set the fees.
“More broadly, Sullivan (and Virginia Postrel, who I did read) seem to believe that successful academics are poor mousy types who live in ivory towers, who never receive offers to be paid to talk about what they know. That’s not the way it is. Academic economists who have established international reputations in policy-relevant fields are constantly called by governments and companies, seeking their services – and yes, offering to pay for them. Think about it: how could it be otherwise? …
By 1999, 22 years after I got my Ph.D., having published 15 scholarly monographs and around 150 professional papers, I was certainly in the circle of Those Who Get Money Calls (though I didn’t get there until around 1995). So the Enron offer didn’t come as a surprise, and it certainly didn’t corrupt me – as my articles about them surely prove.
So where are we? Ms. Postrel says that I should have known that something was wrong because I was offered far more than someone in my position should expect; in saying this, she only shows that she doesn’t know anything either about the
modern academic world, or about what corporate consultants are paid. Mr. Sullivan thinks that I misled readers by not reminding them that corporations invariably pay their boards; it would never have occurred to me that people didn’t know that. And he claims that I was an Enron crony. Maybe he should look up “crony” in the dictionary. Doesn’t being a crony mean that you (a) know people well and (b) do them favors? I didn’t, and I didn’t. What’s left here is a crazed determination to find something wrong with my behavior when I did exactly what I was supposed to do. Vast right-wing conspiracy, anyone? Or is it just green-eyed envy?”
– Paul Krugman, lambasting critics of his $50,000 sinecure from Enron’s “advisory board” as being “green-eyed with envy,” January 23, 2002. Unlike some other Enron beneficiaries, Krugman kept his money.
The Dish 