The professor at Smith, James Miller, I cited earlier today has apparently now been given a reprieve. He writes today:
I’m the professor you mentioned who was denied tenure at Smith College. Smith’s five person Grievance Committee, however, recently unanimously ruled that two members of my department violated my academic freedom during my tenure review. They recommended to Smith’s President that I be reconsidered for tenure and the President accepted this recommendation.
Good news.
“The present euro zone structure is devastating for Germany. Our economy is bleeding. And I am convinced the UK would be crazy to join – you should stay out for as long as I can foresee… Deflation has already arrived, in that our economic dynamism has disappeared. There is no willingness among the private sector to invest, and euro zone rules have cut back public investment to an extent we haven’t seen since the war… [T]he whole system could eventually collapse, given the problems when one central bank has to steer an entire continent of nation-states. Certainly, the more countries that join, the more ungovernable it will become. In that sense, the euro was born to die.” – Wilhelm Nolling, fomer director of the Bundesbank, to Britain’s Channel Four.
“I always thought that Kenny G held the world’s record for longest-sustained musical note but this Reuters item says otherwise. I wonder if the single-sentence rant from Tony Kushner you featured today rant could qualify for some kind of world record, say, longest-sustained paranoid fit or longest-sustained bi-polar rant.” More of the tough crowd’s comments on the Letters Page.
MNOOKIN PUNTS: Newsweek’s Seth Mnookin has been the best reporter on the NYT story for weeks so it was disappointing to read his latest piece which is designed to suck up to his bosses in Manhattan journalism by distancing himself from “right-wing ideologues” who criticized the NYT under Raines. C’mon, Seth. That’s a cheap shot. You made many of the same points as well, as Mickey Kaus points out. Mickey also has the sanest conclusion from the entire episode:
[T]he best we can hope for, I think, is a general toning down of Raines-style activism, even if that’s done in the name of “objectivity” (and therefore has the effect of actually perpetuating the essential “objectivity” fraud). … “Better blatant than latent” is usually a sound rule of thumb. With the NYT, I’ll settle for latent. …
I mean, just look at this piece today on Hillary’s book tour. You’d think there might be one quote from someone skeptical of HRC’s account or simply not an actual paid-up Democratic hack. But nah. Giving the other point of view would simply be appeasing “right-wing ideologues.”
Yep, it’s been six months since our first ever pledge week. We now have over 4,000 supporter-members, whose annual $20 + donations have kept the site afloat, paid our ever-increasing bandwidth costs and other expenses. As members, you also get a weekly email newsletter, the Inside Dish, and coming soon, a feature that will allow members to comment on posts and interact with other members. We’ve had a bumper half-year – from the run-up to the Gulf War, the resignations of Trent Lott and Howell Raines, the monitoring of the BBC, and the airing of many culture war debates. I don’t think there’s much doubt any more that blogs are here to stay and that they’ve helped change the equation in media and political debate. Those of you have been with me these past three years know that this wasn’t a foregone conclusion, which what we’ve achieved together all the more remrakable. Next year, I’m hoping to take this further, blogging directly from the conventions and tackling the election campaign with the speed, chutzpah and orneriness you’ve come to expect. But to do all this, I need your help. This site isn’t free; I haven’t sold it to a bigger media entity; as a professional writer whose time is increasingly taken up with the blog – over 500 emails and up to a dozen posts a day, sometimes seven days a week, around the clock – I need a salary of sorts; and although we’ve done all we can to keep expenses low, we’re still hard-put to make it to the end of the year without your support. If you gave last December, thanks and don’t worry (although if you’d like to chip in more, please do). But if you’re a newer reader, or if you’ve simply put off contributing till now: All we ask is $20 a year if you read this page more than a couple of times a week. If you can give more, please do. If you can’t give anything, then that’s why we will always keep the site free for general access. I could give you a fuller pitch, but if you’re reading this, you know whether you like the site and want to support it (which is certainly not the same thing as agreeing with it all the time). So please take a moment to keep us viable and afloat. We’ll be bugging you all week, then we’ll shut up till December. The details are here. It’s easy, quick and vital for our survival. Please give what you can.
Yes, I sat through it. I was glad to hear the Senator from New York sit down with Baba Wawa for an hour. What struck me most was her absolute belief the she and her husband did nothing – nothing – of any substance to deserve the kind of scrutiny they got in eight years in office. Their only fault was naivete. I guess I’m not surprised by therigidity of her denial and composure. But something in me hoped for a little more – maybe a real reflection on her choices, her decisions, her unelected power, her stonewalling of the press, her enabling of her husband’s adulterous relationship with the truth, and so on. But nope. And then there the sheer fakery of it all. I really wish the real Hillary would simply come out of her shell and be in public what everybody says she is in private: caustic, decisive, aggressive, witty, ambitious, smart. What we saw last night was some saccharine, perfectly-spun middle American home-maker turning literally every question into a perfectly formulated political bromide. Its phoniness made me gag. And at its center is an obvious, big, glaring fib: that she never had an inkling of her husband’s long pattern of sexual abuse and harrassment until the August morning he told her of his latest victim. This stretches credulity beyond even Clintonite limits. And what equally amazes is that her litany of “innocent victims” never seems to include the victims of her husband’s sexual abuse. Perhaps she cannot as a feminist believe what so many women have testified to about her husband, so she simply pretends they don’t exist. They are invisible to her because they have to be. Her husband’s perjury and sexual harrassment don’t appear to have concerned her on moral grounds; and they concern her still only as a function of the obstacles they place in the way of her own political ambitions. That was true then; and her fibs now are yet another arbitrary layer of deception to keep her upward path smooth. My broader take on her book and her role in American politics can be read here.
THE PROOF WILL COME: This Los Angeles Times story seems highly plausible to me. Its argument is that Iraq did indeed once have considerable WMDs, that the inspections regime in the mid 1990s helped minimize it, but that a skeletal operation was kept up so that as soon as sanctions were lifted, a new and lethal program – especially biological – could be quickly brought back online. What the story shows is what we always knew: the issue was always the regime, not the weapons. Without such a regime, such weapons are not a danger; with it, they could be lethal. So the regime had to be eliminated. Maintaining sanctions indefinitely was a cruel and brutal way to keep the country contained, and was always liable to break down. Lifting sanctions would have been tanatamount to giving Saddam a chance to become a nuclear and chemical and biological menace. We pursued the only credible policy with regards to national security after 9/11. The carpers and critics are just revealing their exasperation at being humiliated and defeated – morally, intellectually and politically. Bob Kagan is worth reading on this point as well.
“You have presumably made a study of how important it is for the people — the people and not the oil plutocrats, the people and not the fantasists in right wing think tanks, the people and not the virulent lockstep gasbags of Sunday morning talk shows and editorial pages and all-Nazi all-the-time radio ranting marathons, the thinking people and not the crazy people, the rich and multivarious multicultural people and not the pale pale greyish-white cranky grim greedy people, the secular pluralist people and not the theocrats, the metaphorical imaginative expansive generous sensual rational people and not the sexual hysterics, the misogynists, Muslim and Christian and Jewish fundamentalists, the hard-working people and not the people whose only real exertion ever in their whole parasite lives has been the effort if takes to slash a trillion plus dollars in tax revenue and then stuff it in their already overfull pockets – whatever your degree, you have presumably read history and thought about justice and freedom and the relationship between ideas and action and you know how important it is for the sizable community of decent sane just egalitarian people, comprising many minority communities constituting if not a majority then a plurality, a substantial smart let’s- say-40%- plurality community (more than large enough in a pluralist democracy) (which for the time being the United States still is) if it uses its brains and works together, to wield decisive power, power for enfranchisement and economic as well as racial justice and gender justice and sexual political justice and environmental sanity and in the name of a real globalism, a real internationalism, a real solidarity with all the peoples of the world, to wield power infused with the knowledge that democracy is created not by military machines, not by MOAB bombs and smart bombs but by smart peaceable people, fed people, educated people — democracy is created by making an aggressive determined and longterm effort at eradicating the real axis of evil: poverty, homelessness, no health care.” – Tony Kushner, in one sentence, explaining his political philosophy.
ACADEMIC DIVERSITY: A professor gets denied tenure at Smith College after publishing an anti-p.c. piece in National Review Online. Two members of the tenure committee cited writing that could be construed as conservative in their defense of their no-votes. Some students feel otherwise:
“It’s hard to point to a single professor besides Jim Miller that is an active conservative voice in the economics department,” said Borell. Politics aside, “We think he stands on his own merits,” Kringen said. “He’s just a really excellent teacher. He requires students to think critically.”
But he’s a Republican. And there are some aspects of diversity that simply cannot be countenanced at some universities.
Two emails from two sides:
Concerning “partial birth abortion,” I agree with the late Senator Pat Moynihan that this is nothing but infanticide. -The fiction being floated that this is done “for the health of the mother” is simply a lie. -I am a physician (full disclosure: -I am not an obstetrician), so I do know something about this. -To perform this procedure, the baby has to to be turned in the uterus from the normal head-first position into a buttocks-first (breech) position which is MORE DANGEROUS FOR THE MOTHER. -What we have here is bunch of “physicians” who concocted this procedure as a way to perform infanticide and get away with it. -The AMA and the American College of Obstetrics have both said that there is no MEDICAL reason for performing this procedure. -Quite frankly, I do not know how the people who do this stuff can live with themselves. I am in the pro-life camp, but one can be pro-choice and yet be against this barbaric fraud. -Several pro-choice people, to their credit, have been intellectually and morally honest enough to speak out against “partial birth abortion.”
Then there’s this:
Let me tell you a little story about a very common birth defect. Like a Downs Syndrome fetus it occurs when there are three chromosomes. In this case the fetus has three of the thirteenth chromosomes, Trisomy 13. The fetus develops massive multiple organ failures. Sometimes the organs develop outside the body cavity. In many cases the fetus will demise in utero and spontaneously abort. Other times the fetus is carried full term, delivered and dies on the mother’s stomach. Ever see a heart pumping outside of the chest cavity, Andrew?
Until you have sat in hospital room with a mother as she is told that she is carrying a Trisomy 13 fetus, that has no chance of surviving outside the womb. And that she will have to continue to carry that fetus for three more months because the legal date of termination of the pregnancy has passed, you have no right to call late term abortions infanticide.
I reprint. You decide. Or something like that.
The Guardian has its own version of the Raines problem. What liberal media?
There’s a touching and good piece in defense of Strauss by his daughter in the NYT today. (Thanks, David Shipley, for bringing some real divsersity to the op-ed page again.) But a deeper account has been penned by Bret Stephens, the brilliant young editor of the Jerusalem Post. Like Bret, I too learned a huge amount from teachers who had imbibed Strauss’ respect for classical thought and profound understanding of the weaknesses and foibles of modernity. I learned above all not to attach to some kind of doctrine, to question everything while not succumbing to complete skepticism, to think outside of the chattering box of contemporaneity. The attempt of some who haven’t even read Strauss (let alone read him as carefully as he deserves) to smear his legacy and denigrate those who learned from him is a pathetic display of paranoia and ignorance. No wonder it goes down so well among some on the academic left. Paranoia and ignorance are their strong suits.
After the debacle of calling Rick Santorum an “inclusive man” while Santorum supports the imprisonment of gay men in relationships, we now have attorney-general John Ashcroft banning a six-year-old tradition of a gay pride day at the Justice Department. No, this isn’t the biggest deal imaginable. It’s just a clear and petty attempt to inform gay civil servants that they are second class citizens and second class employees. I guess given Ashcroft’s own views on a whole range of matters, we should be grateful that only the homos have borne the brunt of his intolerance so far. But it’s another sign that the administration cannot hope to reach out to gay voters at the same time as appeasing those who want to see gays back in the prisons, bathhouses and closets where they once belonged. You cannot hope to reach out to the sane and compassionate middle of America, while cozying up to religious fanatics at the same time. Unless the Bush administration does something to suggest that it tangibly welcomes gay citizens into its big tent, then it will deserve to lose many of the votes it won last time around. Certainly the administration has now done a lot to give a direct one-word message to its gay supporters: suckers.
THE NYT AND EUROPE: Take a look at this editorial this morning calling for Britain to join the euro currency. Read closely and see if you can find any actual argument for the move. Would it help Britain’s economy? Would it benefit the United States? Would it be good for the world trading system? Not a word. There’s just an assumption that Britain’s loss of sovereignty and its own currency is an obviously good thing. The best you get is this: “Mr. Blair needs to start backing business leaders’ arguments that adopting the currency would be a net economic positive. One reason the negative consequences of staying out have not been all that apparent is that Mr. Blair has done a good job of keeping markets convinced that it is only a matter of time.” But the business community in Britain is deeply divided over the euro, and in recent months there has been a sharp swing of business opinion against it. Since the euro was adopted, Britain has fast out-paced the rest of Europe in growth and employment, while the European Central Bank’s euro-induced high interest rates have pushed the Continent into recession.The intellectual laziness and sheer ignorance at the NYT continues, with or without Raines. And their dumb-as-a-post piety hasn’t waned an iota either. (My own take on the new European “constitution” is now posted at The New Republic Online.)
The Dish 