Month: October 2002

I think this column may go head to head with Dominick Dunne for sheer name-dropping. But it’s mesmerizing nonetheless. Amazing email sent by Robert Hughes, burly Time art critic, to AOLTimeWarner macher Gerry Levin, quoted by Tina:

How can I convey to you the disgust which your name awakens in me begins Hughes to LevinThe merger with Warner was a catastrophe. But the hitherto unimagined stupidity, the blind arrogance of your deal with Case simply beggars description. How can you face yourself knowing how much history, value and savings you have thrown away on your mad, ignorant attempt to merge with a wretched dial-up ISP? . . . I dot know what advice you have to offer, but I have some for you. Buy some rope, go out the back, find a tree and hang yourself. If you had any honour you would.

Tell us how you really feel, Bob.

Here we go again. We have the plain meaning of the law: “In the event of a vacancy, howsoever caused, among candidates nominated at primaries, which vacancy shall occur not later than the 51st day before the general election.” And we have the desire of one party to get around the plain meaning of the law, by appealing to the Courts. I’m indebted to Jonathan Adler for filling me in on the slender reed whereby New Jersey’s Supreme Court got to put Frank Lautenberg’s name on the ballot. It’s Catania v. Haberle 588 A.2d 374 (1990), where the Court ruled that “providing the public with a choice between candidates is one of the most important objectives of our election laws.” The small print: “[t]he general rule applied to the interpretation of our election laws is that absent some public interest sufficiently strong to permit the conclusion that the Legislature intended strict enforcement, statutes providing requirements for a candidate’s name to appear on the ballot will not be construed so as to deprive the voters of the opportunity to make a choice.” On these grounds, the Court ruled that if voters went into a polling station and found Torricelli’s name still on the ballot, and no other Democrat’s, they would have no reasonable choice. I have two obvious problems with this. The first is the reason for Torricelli’s absence. He didn’t withdraw because he was sick, or because he had a change of heart, or because of family reasons. He withdrew entirely because he couldn’t win. More accurately, he withdrew because his loss would ensure his party might not win. So this absence on the ballot has been deliberately contrived by one of the parties for reasons that are far larger even than New Jersey. By acceding to it, the Court seems to me to have invited any number of possible future abuses by either party: if you’re losing, withdraw and get a new candidate. Imagine if every election cycle, the national parties get to yank one or two candidates from around the country at the last minute if they think it will give them an edge. The result would be many opportunities for chicanery, chaos and confusion.

MAJOR PARTY PRIVILEGE: My second objection is equally obvious: there is still a choice without the Torch. There are other minor party candidates for whom non-Forrester supporters could vote. And there’s a write-in possibility that could be used by the Democrats. The Court ruling seems to me to assume that the only valid choice is between Democrats and Republicans as printed on a ballot, a preposterous idea that insults other parties, other views and the voters’ intelligence. At the same time, I’m not sure it’s wise for the GOP to take this legal battle further. The decay of judicial reasoning that this ruling again shows cannot be rectified by going to the Supreme Court, which has been damaged enough by being dragged into partisan disputes. Forrester should instead make this a part of his election message: an end to the abuse of judicial authority, and the ruthlessness of the Democrats in trying to keep power even if it means bending the law. Besides, the Democrats are already about to pounce on any Supreme Court ruling that might go against them by using it to whip up the hysteria among minorities that they exploited in Florida. I trust the voters of New Jersey to see what the game is here. They should vote for Forrester, if that’s what they want, for the same reason now as before: to punish those who break or twist the law for the pursuit of power. That should be the principled Republican position: take it to the voters. And let the Court’s expansive reasoning discredit itself.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “[M]y disagreement with the peace-at-any-price men, the ultrapacifists, is not in the least because they favor peace. I object to them, first, because they have proved themselves futile and impotent in working for peace, and second, because they commit what is not merely the capital error but the crime against morality of failing to uphold righteousness as the all-important end toward which we should strive … I have as little sympathy for them as they have for the men who deify mere brutal force, who insist that power justifies wrongdoing, and who declare that there is no such thing as international morality. But the ultra-pacifists really play into the hands of these men. To condemn equally might which backs right and might which overthrows right is to render positive service to wrong-doers … To denounce the nation that wages war in self-defense, or from a generous desire to relieve the oppressed, in the same terms in which we denounce war waged in a spirit of greed or wanton folly stands on a par with denouncing equally a murderer and the policeman who, at peril of his life and by force of arms, arrests the murderer. In each case the denunciation denotes not loftiness of soul but weakness both of mind and morals.” – Theodore Roosevelt, anticipating Jim McDermott, from TR’s “America and the World War.” (With thanks to an alert reader.) Maybe Barbra should read the book.

BEGALA APOLOGIZES: Paul Begala has now changed his views on Paul Krugman. Last Friday, he said on Crossfire, when challenged about Krugman’s citation of an alleged email from Army secretary Thomas White: “Well, you ask me to judge the credibility between Paul Krugman, a professor of economics at Princeton and a distinguished columnist for “The New York Times,” and Thomas White, an executive for disgraced Enron, I know who I’m going with.” Last night, Begala changed his tune: “I’m very sorry if I cited something that turns out to be factually false.” So Salon has come clean – honorably. Even Paul Begala has come clean. But Krugman is still silent. Notice that what matters here is not whether the email is genuine. I have no idea. What matters is whether a responsible journalist can know or can ever have known whether it’s genuine. Paul Krugman didn’t know. He published anyway – a column that was far less measured, careful and circumspect than Salon’s. He called Thomas White an “evildoer” on those grounds. I think that merits unimpeachable evidence, don’t you?

PAGING DR FREUD: “When the Prime Minister spoke yesterday I thought to myself, “I hope I’ll be able to give a speech like that when I grow up” – Bill Clinton, at the Labour Party Conference yesterday.

MUST-READ: I think Mark Steyn has really surpassed himself this time:

The Administration doesn’t need to “politicize” the war. They’re for it. So are the American people. The Democrats have had since the liberation of Kabul 10 months ago to work out a viable position. Instead, they seem to have run the various options past the focus-groups, identified the half-dozen least popular, and plumped for all of them.

Check it out.

The Torricelli bait-and-switch with Lautenberg is almost a leitmotif of the current Democratic Party. So what if we fully backed a guy we knew was a crook when we thought he could win? Now he can’t win! So …. The same heads-we-win tails-you-lose posture is evident on the budget (“the tax cut is the problem – but we won’t reverse it, in case the voters punish us”) and the war (“we’re against it in reality, but we’re for it formally, in case the voters punish us”). But tonight I heard the first enunciation of what’s in store if and when war erupts in Iraq. Any terrorist attack now or soon – by Saddam, his proxies or his allies – will be blamed by some Democrats on Bush. See, they’ll say. His war-talk provoked this. But if no attack happens in the next few months, they will use that in turn to argue that war is unnecessary, that Saddam is no real threat, and so on. Similarly, if the war goes well, they are busy setting things up so that they can claim they were in favor of it. But if it goes badly, or casualties mount, they will milk it for all it’s worth politically. On almost every issue, they’re doing all they can to ensure they can’t lose. The only thing they haven’t done is stand up for any principle, contribute much that’s constructive to the national dialogue, or show even a rote display of leadership or credibility. The fact that they behave this way at a time of war sickens. But, alas, it no longer surprises.

PLAYING THE RACE CARD AGAIN: Another sign of how low some current Democrats can sink. Here’s a sentence that just evoked a gag from yours truly, in a bed and breakfast in the dark night of Michigan:

But Mr. McGreevey and Democrats argue that the issue is a simple matter of giving voters the chance to choose.

Isn’t that exactly what Torricelli and the Democrats are trying to deny voters? It’s clearly a new line because Daschle reiterated it again today:

Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., said that by objecting to Torricelli’s request, Republicans were “denying the people of New Jersey a choice” in the election.

But the point is subtler, you see. If Daschle and McGreevey and Lautenberg can make this race about preventing voters from “having a choice,” and if they resurrect the same slogans they exploited in Florida, then they have a chance to increase the black vote, which was extremely ambivalent about Torricelli, and essential to winning. So watch the rhetoric. If they can’t break the law, they’re going to claim it’s a violation of civil rights. You just watch. And take some dramamine.

KRUGMAN WATCH: Salon had a pretty devastating but honest correction yesterday. They have removed a story written by one Jason Leopold about Enron and Army secretary Thomas White. A key passage from the correction:

We took this unusual step because we have come to the conclusion that we can no longer stand by the story in its entirety. Though we have corroborated most of the reporting in the article, some unanswered questions remain. Specifically, we have been unable to independently confirm the authenticity of an e-mail from former Enron executive and current Army Secretary Thomas White that was quoted in the article.

Hmmmm. That rings a bell. Could that be the same email that Paul “Enron Advisory Board” Krugman used in a recent column excoriating White? The same email that was exposed last Friday on Crossfire by Robert Novak? Here’s Krugman’s lead paragraph of September 17:

In February 2001 Enron presented an imposing facade, but insiders knew better: they were desperately struggling to keep their Ponzi scheme going. When one top executive learned of millions in further losses, his e-mailed response summed up the whole strategy: “Close a bigger deal. Hide the loss before the 1Q.” The strategy worked. Enron collapsed, but not before insiders made off with nearly $1 billion. The sender of that blunt e-mail sold $12 million in stocks just before they became worthless. And now he’s secretary of the Army.

White subsequently wrote to the New York Times claiming that he had no memory of such an email. Salon now supports White, and acknowledges that its freelance source also seems to have plagiarized a large chunk of the story from the Financial Times. Krugman graciously acknowledged that Leopold was his source for his smearing of White as well:

Jason Leopold, a reporter writing a book about California’s crisis, has acquired Enron documents that show Mr. White fully aware of what his division was up to. Mr. Leopold reported his findings in the online magazine Salon, and has graciously shared his evidence with me. It’s quite damning.

Not quite as damning as Salon’s apology, White’s denial and Krugman’s continuing silence.

UPDATE: Leopold responds on the Letters Page.

A READER WRITES: Another mini-classic:

If Pres. Bush delivered the kind of rhetorical mess that Mr. Torricelli did yesterday, the press would be all over him. Did you catch this beauty?: “I fought for everything I believed in, with all the fiber in my body.” I don’t know about you, but I love that – sounds like an ad for Metamucil.

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “It is quite another [thing] to take on the infinitely more daunting challenge of saying warm and fuzzy things about a globally recognized lout – a through and through despicable human being about whom any effort at thoughtful compliment must strike the ear as either jarringly insincere (to the point of satire), or as some Koreshian echo of delusion. Such a man now takes his ease in the Oval Office or may be found squinting into the middle distance on his dude ranch, in the favored home state where so many of his domestic victims met their untimely end. Hitchens – much in the style of OJ’s defense team apparently figures – ‘if I can get THIS creep off the hook, my rhetorical skills are truly unlimited!” That he fails prodigiously at the task of absolving our vermin-in-chief, is hardly a surprise (though something of a disappointment to us – his once-devoted fans). Even the best high jumper can not leap over a building – let alone the moon, (a more appropriate metaphor in this case).” – Richard Harth, predictably sticking the leftist boot into Christopher Hitchens, at the venomous website, CounterPunch.

SELF-ESTEEM HOOEY: Interesting piece by Erica Goode in the Times yesterday on the waning fortunes of the concept of “self-esteem.” It does not appear, it seems, as if low self-esteem is a primary cause for anti-social behavior or failure in life in general. In fact, many criminals seem to have quite healthy self-esteem; and narcissism – excessive self-love combined with a sense of one’s own superiority – is a far bigger culprit for poor social conduct than its opposite. I’m glad the tide seems to be belatedly turning on this. Friends who teach undergraduates these days are constantly complaining that the problems of their students come not from low self-esteem, but from the reverse. The students object to any grades that seem beneath them; they fail to see why they need to work harder; when they don’t do well, their first recourse is to blame the teacher, not seek
the reasons in their own work. I also get tired of hearing that, for example, gay men’s willingness to have condom-free sex or multiple sex partners is also a function of “low self-esteem.” Is it not more credible that such behavior is due to the fact that sex without condoms or with more people is actually more pleasurable than the alternative? In fact, I think the crutch of “low self-esteem” may be the latest analytic tool to infantilize people and groups of people, by denying them full self-determination. It empowers the care-givers and social engineers, and disempowers those deemed to be low in self-love.

HOW SICK IS KING FAHD? “Ledeen claims that Fahd suffers from a “debilitating disease” and “suffered a stroke,” implying that he’s incapacitated. Newspapers routinely describe him as “ailing”. I was travelling through Turkey last spring and during part of my tour I shared a bus with a young Canadian woman who was King Fahd’s personal physical therapist. She regaled us with fascinating stories about life with him, but she also says, “He’s not sick. He’s fine. He’s just old. He does his exercises with me every morning.” And she would know.” – the debate continues in the Book Club.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “Every human calamity is different, so there is no point in trying to look for equivalence between one and the other. But it is certainly true that one universal truth about the Holocaust is not only that it should never again happen to Jews, but that as a cruel and tragic collective punishment, it should not happen to any people at all. But if there is no point in looking for equivalence, there is a value in seeing analogies and perhaps hidden similarities, even as we preserve a sense of proportion. Quite apart from his actual history of mistakes and misrule, Yasser Arafat is now being made to feel like a hunted Jew by the state of the Jews. There is no gainsaying the fact that the greatest irony of his siege by the Israeli army in his ruined Ramallah compound, is that his ordeal has been planned and carried out by a psychopathic leader who claims to represent the Jewish people. I do not want to press the analogy too far, but it is true to say that Palestinians under Israeli occupation today are as powerless as Jews were in the 1940s.” – Edward Said, once again comparing Israelis to Nazis.

There were 99 uses of the word “I” in Torricelli’s farewell speech. 99.

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.