Month: June 2004

Something I didn’t know, but should have. One of Jack Ryan’s rivals in the Republican primary was one Andy McKenna Jr. Ryan beat him. Then there’s this: “His father is Andy McKenna Sr., chairman of Schwarz, a minority investor in the Chicago Bears, a former chairman of both the Cubs and White Sox and a former director of Tribune Co., which also owns the Chicago Tribune.” Hmmm. (My italics). Maybe it’s not a huge surprise that the Trib exposed Ryan’s private life and will leave Kerry’s alone.

If Jack Ryan’s sealed divorce papers are legitimate objects for perusal (and you are prepared to force the issue in court), why not Kerry’s? Can’t you just wait for the Chicago Tribune to explain why they won’t pursue the story? Here’s the Trib’s specious justification for their witch-hunt:

This nation has a long tradition of open courts. There’s good reason for that. A court shrouded in secrecy is a court far more at risk to be corrupted or abused, a court that is more likely to favor those who are wealthy, powerful or politically connected.
That is why court files are open, unless a compelling interest tips the balance in favor of secrecy. Juvenile Court records are one common exception. Divorce records are not.
Last week, a California judge ruled that the Ryan divorce files should be unsealed to maintain that principle of openness.
“The public interest is for the fair, efficient and open operation of the court system,” Superior Court Judge Robert Schnider said. “The openness of court files must be maintained so that the public can … be assured that there is no favoritism shown to the rich and the powerful. Protection from embarrassment cannot be a basis for keeping from the public what is put in public courts.”
That standard of openness is all the more crucial when it comes to information regarding candidates for public office.

Now tell me how that doesn’t apply to Kerry. In some ways, the Kerry divorce may have more public ramifications, because Kerry was also granted an annulment, indicating that the marriage, strictly speaking, was never fully valid in the Catholic church. Why? Was this special treatment for a powerful pol? On the Trib’s reasoning, isn’t that worth investigating? On the privacy matter, Kerry’s marriage is also further in the past than Ryan’s. Kerry’s daughters are grown up, while Ryan’s son – forced to endure public airing of his parents’ marital conflicts – is still a kid. (Yes, we know how the Tribune feels about the sensibilities of a young, utterly innocent boy: screw him.) Let me be clear: I think Kerry should be left alone. But the press has absolutely no good reason to do so, now they have trashed any semblance of human privacy that we might still be entitled to. So we will now see the real ethics of the Chicago Tribune: that they are a partisan attack machine, shredding people’s privacy for their own political agenda.

It seems to me that the far left could help win this election for Bush. Here’s the latest obscenity. It was an ad on the back-page of the Nation this week. Do they have no shame? (Hat tip: Petrelis.)

A MARINE VERSUS THE POST: Here’s a military take on the Washington Post’s Iraq reporter, Rajiv Chandrasekeran

Chandrasekeran’s meta-narrative admits of no ambiguity. For him and his reporters, they report in straightforward, declarative sentences, with none of the caveats that Bennett mentions. The Americans are still bumbling, the Iraqis continue to seethe. So it shall be in the Washington Post, until Iraq succeeds and they can no longer deny it, just like journalists were forced to admit reality at the end of the Cold War. Or else their words will have their effect, and Western journalists have to flee the country as it disintegrates. Since I saw Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s integrity up close, I haven’t believed a word he writes, or any story coming out of the bureau he runs. You shouldn’t, either.

The writer is a marine. And he has more to back this up.

RIGHT, LEFT AND IRAQ: The paradoxes continue to mount up. Peter Berkowitz beautifully illustrates them.

POSEUR ALERT: “Admittedly, Midge Decter’s biography of Donald Rumsfeld may stand the test of time as a classic achievement in the literature of coprophagia; the vivid yet bulimically svelte anthology of paranoid slanders Ann Coulter has given us in Treason has added something innovative to that small, delectable canon of hallucinatory works that also includes Céline’s Bagatelles Pour un Massacre and the unjustly anonymous Protocols of the Elders of Zion; and the eloquent-as-a-treacle-tart Christopher Hitchens, in a prodigious outpouring of books and articles, has rendered the mental process by which intellectual prostitutes magically change form in alignment with shifting power formations as legibly as few besides Curzio Malaparte have managed since the fall of Mussolini.” – Gary Indiana, Village Voice.

“Once the courts recognize gay marriage as equal in all ways to heterosexual marriage, then everyone else – including churches – has to recognize gay marriage as equal, too. Any opposition will be deemed hateful by definition, and anyone who opposes gay marriage will be a hatemonger. Given that many religions and denominations teach that homosexuality is a sin, church attendance alone could suggest you’re homophobic. To the extent that one believes or preaches scripture, one is a bigot.
Hence some of the deep concern among legal professionals, as well as theologians. A secular world that ratifies homosexual marriage would provide a legal foundation that would open the floodgates to civil litigation against religious leaders, institutions and worshipers. In such an environment, churches might be sued for declining to provide their sanctuaries for gay marriages, for example. Ministers could be sued for hate speech for giving a sermon on moral behavior. Churches that protest homosexual unions could face revocation of their tax exemption status.” – Kathleen Parker, Townhall.com. Hello? Wouldn’t it be slightly more convincing if she had been able to name a single “legal professional” who believes that marriage rights for gays means the end of religious freedom in America? To take one simple analogy: civil divorce is now endemic. Yet the Catholic church refuses to recognize it. Does that mean that the feds are barring priests from preaching against divorce? Or against legal abortion? This kind of inflammatory rhetoric, scare-mongering and distortion is what happens when you have lost every other argument.

GEPHARDT OR EDWARDS?: Dan Drezner weighs them up.

JACKASS BEAT FAHRENHEIT: Yep, the movie with all those hot young straight dudes shoving toy cars up their posteriors actually beat out Michael Moore at the box office. F9/11 wasn’t the biggest grossing documentary. Jackass was. It was non-fiction, and about as informative as Mr Moore. And a lot more to look at.

An interesting analysis of how often various Supreme Court Justices vote one another. Scalia and Thomas are way down the rankings. Isn’t there hint of racism in some liberals’ contention that Thomas cannot think for himself? (Hat tip: Volokh.)

MORE ON MOORE: An “exploitation-movie-maker”? Jon Haber explains.

OKAY, OKAY: I was a little dismissive of Senator Clinton’s enthusiasm for raising taxes. Obviously, some taxes are necessary. But I’d cut spending before I touched any tax increases. Why cannot Hillary end agricultural subsidies, abolish corporate tax shelters, or means-test social security and Medicare? That would be for the common good. But it’s easier to raise taxes. Her invocation of her agenda with the “common good” is also part of what galls me. But, hey. I was a bit off the cuff. She does that to me. I’m trying to control it, but it’s hard.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “I have been silently lurking on your blog since its early inception, thanks for that. But I was very moved by your last comments on the little harbor.
As a young boy, 40 years ago, we always spent a few weeks down the road in Eastham (old Cape), and every year when the rain day came we would head off to PTown for the penny candy, the Army Navy store, walking the pier and other tourist stuff. Typically our grandparents were in charge of bringing us there until they grew too old for 3 little boys, then our parents started accompanying us.
A very clear memory were the young townie boys who would climb the wooden pilings on the main pier and cajole tourists into throwing coins into the water so they could dive down to get them. The water was that clear! My brothers and I would wrap small flat stones in shiny gum wrappers and toss them in to fool the other boys.
And PTown taught me something about my grand-dad. Born and raised on the streets of Southie, WWI Marine, staunch union man who worked the presses for the Post and Globe well into his seventies. He would bring us to PTown with its latent wildness and a sea of people unlike anything we could witness in the suburbs, and would never say a thing. Like it was just another day.
Many years later as a young adult I was walking mainstreet with my brothers again and stumbled onto my grandparents sitting on a bench watching the world go by, we did not even know they were on the Cape. The town was much more open at this point, my grand-dad a very old man. But he would smile and tip his hat to every lady and transvestite that walked by. Just another day.
God I loved that man.” – More feedback on the Letters Page.

… in the New York Times. So here it is, from the indispensable Iraqi blogger, Omar:

The hall was busy and everyone was chatting and laughing loud. They had Al-Jazeera on (something I never managed to convince them to stop doing). Then suddenly Mr. Bremer appeared on TV reading his last speech before he left Iraq. I approached the TV to listen carefully to the speech, as I expected it to be difficult in the midst of all that noise. To my surprise everyone stopped what they were doing and started watching as attentively as I was.
The speech was impressive and you could hear the sound of a needle if one had dropped it at that time. The most sensational moment was the end of the speech when Mr. Bremer used a famous Arab emotional poem. The poem was for a famous Arab poet who said it while leaving Baghdad. Al-Jazeera had put an interpreter who tried to translate even the Arabic poem which Mr. Bremer was telling in a fair Arabic! “Let this damned interpreter shut up. We want to hear what the man is saying.” One of my colloquies shouted. The scene was very touching that the guy sitting next to me (who used to sympathize with Muqtada) said “He’s going to make me cry!”
Then he finished his speech by saying in Arabic, “A’ash Al-Iraq, A’ash Al-Iraq, A’ash Al-Iraq”! (Long live Iraq, Long live Iraq, long live Iraq).
I was deeply moved by this great man’s words but I couldn’t prevent myself from watching the effect of his words on my friends who some of them were anti-Americans and some were skeptic, although some of them have always shared my optimism. I found that they were touched even more deeply than I was. I turned to one friend who was a committed She’at and who distrusted America all the way. He looked as if he was bewitched, and I asked him, “So, what do you think of this man? Do you still consider him an invader?” My friend smiled, still touched and said, “Absolutely not! He brought tears to my eyes. God bless him.”
Another friend approached me. This one was not religious but he was one of the conspiracy theory believers. He put his hands on my shoulders and said smiling, “I must admit that I’m beginning to believe in what you’ve been telling us for months and I’m beginning to have faith in America. I never thought that they will hand us sovereignty in time. These people have shown that they keep their promises.”

Now let’s keep our deeper promise and stand by the Iraqi people as they struggle against Jihadism toward freedom.

Many left-liberal movie critics loved Moore’s movie for the very reasons they despised Gibson’s. I despised both – for the same reasons. (Hat tip: Taranto.)

“We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.” The “we”, of course, are the Clintons. They know far better than you do how you should spend your money. Because they are morally better people than you are.

A delicious exchange of views.

“An account in the Soccer Report column on June 22 about Ethan Zohn, a former player in Zimbabwe who won $1 million on the CBS reality show “Survivor: Africa” in 2002 and has capitalized on his moment of fame by starting an international nonprofit AIDS awareness foundation on the continent, misstated a word in a comment he made. Mr. Zohn said, ‘We can make value judgments all we want, but through some cultural differences it has been all right for men in Africa to have multiple sex partners’ – not ‘all right for me.'” – New York Times today.