Month: June 2010

Jonah Goldberg has a strange defense of Glenn Beck against Matt Continetti (because Beck liked his book, one imagines). Friedersdorf interjects:

What Mr. Continetti "seems" to be doing, Mr. Goldberg writes (italics indicate weasel words), isn't "incorrect" or "poorly argued" or "confused" — it would be perfectly fair, if wrongheaded, if Mr. Goldberg used those words — what he seems to be doing is "an odd thing for a conservative writer, particularly one at the Standard, to do." It is never a good sign when an argument moves from "you're wrong for these reasons" to "I will now use an intellectual shortcut, demonstrating that your argument is wrong by insinuating that it is not conservative."

Continetti defends himself:

While Beck is introducing many excellent authors to his radio and television audiences, he is also introducing crank conspiracy theorists such as Carroll Quigley and Cleon Skousen.

Goldberg concedes that Beck has a “conspiratorial streak,” but then says that I “might overstate my case.” I’m sorry, I don’t. Take, for example, Beck’s June 22 television show. His guest was Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, who has written a new book on the Weimar banker Sigmund Warburg. "His family is conspiracy central, right?" Beck asked Ferguson, and then referred, once again, to Quigley’s 1966 Tragedy and Hope.

Tragedy and Hope, as I write in my piece, is the bible of conspiracy theorists. Why? Because in it Quigley, a Georgetown professor for many years and a man of the left, “admitted” that most of world history since the early twentieth century has been the design of secret societies.

"When my son Hunter asked me why it was okay for Bristol Palin to have a baby before she was married, I told him that God has special rules for special people.  God knew that Bristol could become very rich from having a baby, so He granted her a pregnancy.  Since she is the daughter of Sarah Palin, and the name Bristol Palin can be rearranged to spell “Orbit Plans” she is pretty much an angel, at least by the official bible definition.  And that pretty much makes her son like a Jesus, technically speaking.  This is just more proof that the blessed Palin family has wonderful and holy plans for true Americans.  After explaining this to my son, he told me that he wanted to be sex-educated at a public school so that he could have a Jesus baby too.  I smacked him in the mouth and told him that sex education is only for liberals and atheists. As good Christians, we should be ashamed of sexuality and our bodies, unless you are chosen by God, like Bristol Palin," – tinfoiler.

After backing Sodano and protesting the Belgian attempts to get data on child-rape cases, the Pope now installs as his number three a cardinal who opposes abortion in cases of rape.

Yglesias has a staggering little chart today on our looming fiscal crisis. Money quote:

See that line where the debt:GDP ratio is stable? That’s what happens under current law. If congress changes nothing, or the president vetoes everything, then this is what happens. No apocalypse. But nobody believes that’s going to happen. Nobody believes the Bush tax cuts will fully expire. Nobody expects the AMT phase-in to happen. Nobody expects physicians’ Medicare reimbursement rates to be held in check. And though I think he’s mistaken about this, Doug Elmendorf is skeptical that some cost-saving elements of the Affordable Care Act will ever be implemented. That’s the “alternative fiscal scenario” in which the debt level skyrockets.

Ezra adds his two cents here.

Hanoi, Vietnam, 8.15 am

Many of us have long been worried about the attempt by scientists to prevent homosexuality – or any variation in gender behavior – in utero. Well: the future is now:

Pediatric endocrinologist Maria New—of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Florida International University—isn't just trying to prevent lesbianism by treating pregnant women with an experimental hormone. She's also trying to prevent the births of girls who display an "abnormal" disinterest in babies, don't want to play with girls' toys or become mothers, and whose "career preferences" are deemed to "masculine."

Preventing women from choosing careers over babies is also part of the attempt to affect Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia in utero:

And it isn’t just that many women with CAH have a lower interest, compared to other women, in having sex with men. In another paper entitled “What Causes Low Rates of Child-Bearing in Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia?” Meyer-Bahlburg writes that “CAH women as a group have a lower interest than controls in getting married and performing the traditional child-care/housewife role. As children, they show an unusually low interest in engaging in maternal play with baby dolls, and their interest in caring for infants, the frequency of daydreams or fantasies of pregnancy and motherhood, or the expressed wish of experiencing pregnancy and having children of their own appear to be relatively low in all age groups.”

"As I look out at the political landscape now, I find plenty of slogans on the Republican side, but not very many ideas. And indeed, if you raise specific ideas and solutions, as I tried to do on health care with Ron Wyden, you are attacked with the same vigor as we've seen in American politics all the way back to the arguments over slavery and polygamy. You are attacked as being a wimp, insufficiently pure, and unreliable … The pendulum will swing. And we will take control of the House — I think that's going to happen — and frankly, with the death of Robert C. Byrd there's a chance we will take control of the Senate as well. At which point, it's 'thank you for the slogans' and 'thank you for the election.' But in the immortal words of Robert Redford in the movie, The Candidate, 'What do we do now?'" – Utah senator Bob Bennett.

Sounds like Frum, doesn't he? So is Bob Bennett now a liberal?

This blog, along with others, compiled some anecdotes and research to show how the New York Times had always called "waterboarding" torture – until the Bush-Cheney administration came along. Instead of challenging this government lie, the NYT simply echoed it, with Bill Keller taking instructions from John Yoo on a key, legally salient etymology. Now, we have the first truly comprehensive study of how Bill Keller, and the editors of most newspapers, along with NPR, simply rolled over and became mouthpieces for war criminals, rather than telling the unvarnished truth to their readers and listeners in plain English:

Examining the four newspapers with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding. From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27).

By contrast, from 2002‐2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture.

In addition, the newspapers are much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator. In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or implied it was torture while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States was responsible. The Los Angeles Times characterized the practice as torture in 91.3% of articles (21 of 23) when another country was the violator, but in only 11.4% of articles (9 of 79) when the United States was the perpetrator.

So the NYT went from calling waterboarding torture 81.5 percent of the time to calling it such 1.4 percent of the time. Had the technique changed? No. Only the government implementing torture and committing war crimes changed. If the US does it, it's not torture.

The editors who insisted on these changes remain liars and cowards and a disgrace to journalism and a free society. They should quit for this kind of open deception and craven cowardice in putting power before truth. They remind you that if you really want to understand what is going on in the world, the New York Times will only publish what the government deems is fit to print – even in its choice of words. 

(Photo: Waterboard displayed at Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Prisoners' legs were shackled to the bar on the right, their wrists were restrained to the brackets on the left, and water was poured over their face, using blue watering can, to drown them.)

He puts it much better than I can in a March column I missed:

I don’t think of myself as having gone squishy. I think of myself as having grown sober. And my conservative critics? On them, I think the most apt verdict was delivered by Niccolo Macchiavelli, 500 years ago: “This is the tragedy of man. Circumstances change, and he does not.”

Read the whole thing. He has not changed his core principles or beliefs and they remain, as mine do, well within the boundaries of what we might call the conservative disposition. But his critical move is to believe that political ideology should react to changing circumstances, not become ossified and abstract. And so the catastrophic market failure of the 2008 requires rethinking the rules for the market; the mounting evidence of the relationship between carbon use and climate change needs to be tackled, not ignored or simply dismissed; and the Burkean evolution of a society not obviously careening off the rails is something to be respected and engaged, not attacked and ignored. This is also a brilliant summation of where the right went wrong on social issues:

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, we’d been fighting to protect the common-sense instincts of ordinary people from elite interference. Now, in the Terri Schiavo euthanasia case, with stem cell research, on gay rights issues, it was we who had become the interfering elite, against a society that was reaching its own new equilibrium.

I have had many differences with David but I agree with him that conservatism in the end must be about governing the world as it is – not venting against a world that will not change. I don't think David has fully absorbed the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, but we can agree to disagree. But that he is now banished from the "conservative" tribe says far, far more about the degeneracy of the right than the alleged fickleness of the dissenters.

(Photo: Frazer Harrison/Getty.)