Month: July 2010

Detroit, Michigan, 3.12 pm

You may remember him from …. the definitive list.

I'm devastated by the news. We need Christopher around for a long, long time. I do not know the details and understand his need for privacy. But he seems in good spirits if this classically British understatement is symptomatic of his mood:

"I have been advised by my physician that I must undergo a course of chemotherapy on my esophagus. This advice seems persuasive to me."

May the God he believes poisons everything be with him. And a simple word of encouragement: surviving a potentially fatal disease can be a form of liberation. I look forward to an even more liberated Hitch.

Yesterday I noticed the rather alarming spectacle of a journalist offering $100,000 to procure emails of other journalists on a list-serv in order to expose and embarrass them by publishing comments that they assumed were off-the-record. If private emails are now grist for ideological warfare, it seems to me we are in over-drive in the partisan warfare that gets Breitbart up in the morning.

I seem to have touched a nerve, since Breitbart exploded with a charge of hypocrisy. When you read the charge, it is obviously not hypocrisy (a word that has apparently lost whatever meaning it once had). I have never offered anyone any money to procure and then publish anyone’s private emails, and then gone on to criticize someone else for so doing. Moreover, I have never published a private email that might have come my way that might advance my own political arguments or interests. To give a rather fresh example, I was forwarded a rather staggering private email from an AIPAC official recently that said a huge amount, in my view, about what they’re about. I did not publish it. All reader emails on the Dish, as Breitbart knows, are anonymous, in order to facilitate the widest airing of views. I have never violated that trust, and never will.

Breitbart then pivots – as did Hot Air – to my relentless examination of the lies, deceptions and shenanigans of a farcical vice-presidential candidate who is currently one of a handful of leaders in the radical Poujadist movement that once went by the name of conservative. The first thing to say is that, in my view, a public official who has held public office, who has come close to being vice-president of the US and who is now running for the highest office in the land should be subject to greater press accountability than, say, a blogger for the Washington Post. Call me crazy, but my view is that the fundamental role of the press is to hold those in public office accountable.

Should other institutions also be accountable? Sure – and this blog constantly criticizes the media as well. But the confidential emails between journalists venting and kibbitzing about the issues and their jobs seems to me pretty low down the totem poll of priorities and bordering on malice, blackmail and intimidation. Even if one were to receive such emails unsolicited – as I did that AIPAC email – I would not publish them. But to offer a $100,000 reward for such a thing? No wonder Breitbart is touchy. He has crossed yet another line of dubious ethics, and his only goal, as is evident from his post, is political war against his paranoid notion of a liberal conspiracy.

Now to the emails Breitbart claims I referred to – as evidence of my “hypocrisy.” Hot Air’s “Slublog” provided chapter and verse here, here, here and here. In the first case,

The e-mails were shown to The Washington Post by a former public safety commissioner, Walter Monegan, who was fired by Palin in July. Monegan has given copies of the e-mails to state ethics investigators to support his contention that he was dismissed for failing to fire Trooper Mike Wooten, who at the time was feuding with Palin’s family.

So these emails were directly connected to abuse of power by a governor who is currently the GOP leader. They were part of an ethics investigation – and were already in the public domain. And Palin deliberately used a private email account to keep her use of public office to pursue family vendettas out of the public sphere. It seems to me that commenting on emails that have become part of an ethics investigation of a governor is not the same as offering $100,000 to get some embarrassing off-the-record kibbitzing from a blogger on a list-serv. The second “gotcha” was about emails conducted under state business retrieved from a FOIA request and already in the public domain. Again: no comparison. The third was an email exchange published in the Anchorage Daily News in which the editor was trying to get some minimal documentation for Palin’s fifth pregnancy-to-term. It revealed Palin’s continued refusal to provide any evidence. Again, I broke no news and published nothing that wasn’t already in the public domain. The fourth alleged violation of Palin’s “privacy” is an email she published in full in her own memoir. 

When all else fails, as all else plainly has, the rightist crazies simply assert that questioning Palin’s bizarre account of her fifth child is “ransacking” her privacy. Really? As I said the other day,

If she had had a child under odd circumstances and insisted that it was private and kept the child away from cameras and ensured that he had all the care and privacy that such a child obviously needs, no one, including me, would have inquired further. But when you advance a political campaign using a child, it is imperative that the media investigate and probe the story.

Palin held her new-born infant up at the RNC Convention like some scene from the Lion King; she told the crazy story of her wild ride to the Anchorage Daily News long before she was picked by a Google search to be the back up for the leader of the free world. She has written a book full of extremely private details – the nature of her contractions, for example – and made a fortune off it. She is the one who first mentioned “amniotic fluid leaking” and “water-breaking”, not me. She has made speech after speech citing her infant son – just as her teenage daughter has been pushed into every public arena imaginable. There is nothing private about Palin’s story about her child with Down Syndrome. Nothing. To examine the details of a story already told in such detail in the public sphere as a core campaign platform is violating no one’s privacy. It is asking relevant questions of a narrative plainly and publicly provided by Palin herself. I have used no facts except those already in the public domain. I have learned a lot from of-the-record chats and none of it – none – has appeared in this blog.

So there is neither a shred of hypocrisy nor an iota of inconsistency in my record on this. But for Breitbart, merely asking questions of farcical public figures like Palin is out of bounds, while offering money to publish private emails from journalists he wants fired is fine and dandy. Yes, he’s that dedicated to the cause. Even a libertarian like Weigel loses his job for insufficient private conformity to the madness that is now the American “right.” And yes, Breitbart appears to have no ethics that might compete with the advancement of the war he feels he must wage. Maybe he is simply embarrassed to defend a farce like Palin, since he is an intelligent man and having to defend the delusions and derangement of the Tea Party might test anyone’s nerves. But really, he should calm down before he launches fact-free tirades like his most recent one.

Oh, and by the way, that “no-man’s land” in which many former members of the center right now find themselves: it’s called independent judgment and sanity. You may indeed disagree. But to me, what matters is not how big my “tribe” is, or who is on my “side” or any of the other sad things that Breitbart cares about. It is about integrity and honesty. One day, Breitbart might see that there are other values in this world apart from power and money and resentment and rage.

A reader writes:

Did you really just argue that raising marginal tax rates by 12.4% on anyone making over $106,800 is merely "the closing of a silly loophole"?  Wow.  I'm all for closing tax loopholes, but across-the-board marginal rate increases are only loophole-closers in a world where you assume all money belongs to the government. 

This type of revenue raiser has serious detrimental consequences for labor supply and therefore for economic growth.  And you also call it "basically a big new tax on the rich."  You live in a high cost-of-living area.  Someone earning $156,800 would have a tax increase of $6,200 under this proposal.  If that person supports a family of four in the DC metro area on that salary, are they rich?  Certainly not.  Would a $6,200 tax increase on that person make it materially more difficult to support a family of four in the DC metro area?  Certainly yes.  It's hard to understand how someone who still claims the mantle of "conservative" could so cavalierly insist on adopting such a proposal.  And from past writings, it seems you also want to raise that person's marginal income tax rate from 25% to 28%.  Do you ever stop to think through the cumulative consequences of some of the left-wing policy proposals you endorse?

You could solve the Social Security problem by raising the retirement age, adopting progressive price indexing, and changing the measure of inflation used to calculate COLAs.  Three spending-side changes and no tax increases.  By the way, John Boehner endorsed those ideas yesterday and I didn't notice you giving him any credit for Republicans finally offering up real entitlement reforms.  Why the silence?

I didn't see it till this morning and my post defending him is here.

Garrett Epps is covering the Kagan hearings. From yesterday's summary:

Charles Grassley (R-IA) asked, "Do you believe that marriage is a question reserved for the states to decide?" This question, Kagan pointed out, was the subject of a high-profile suit now in the courts, making comment improper. Then Grassley asked whether she considered a 1970 case on the issue, Baker v. Nelson "settled law."

Baker v. Nelson was an early case claiming that banning same-sex marriage violated the Constitution. The Minnesota Supreme Court held it did not, and they appealed to the Supreme Court, which dismissed their appeal in one sentence for "want of a substantial federal question." Kagan (and I, in the background) brightened at yet another nerd opportunity. "The view that most people hold I think is that (such a summary dismissal) is entitled to some precedential weight but not to the weight that would be given to a fully argued fully briefed case," she began, clearly ready for a long talk. Enough of that. "I'm disappointed that you didn't use the world 'settled law,'" Grassley said, and moved on.

Bucking the majority opinion, Adam Serwer writes that "Elena Kagan's confirmation hearing has been the most substantive and interesting since the Clinton administration":

Kagan's revealed a great deal about her legal philosophy by rejecting obtuse textualism, acknowledging that there are times when judges should privilege intent over the actual principle outlined in the Constitution, and arguing that while the Constitution does not change, the circumstances under which we interpret it do. This clearly places Kagan on the liberal side of legal philosophy, and while she can't indicate how she'd rule on important cases, there's no question that for the first time since Roberts, a nominee has meaningfully challenged the prevailing conservative philosophy of judging.

Free Exchange objects to soaking the rich. "Soaking the rich" means not allowing us a total exemption from social security payments after a certain amount of income. I don't like it either – and Drum makes a good case for incrementalism, both politically and fiscally. But the more we discuss these options, the better. And on that matter, a word of praise for John Boehner who has finally managed to propose something that might actually help the country's perilous finances:

Boehner also called for means-testing Social Security so that retirees with “substantial non-Social Security income” don’t get payments. This should be popular with upper-middle-class Republican voters, whose great complaint has always been that the government insists on giving them too much money.

Why does Collins mock a Republican the minute he gets serious about fiscal responsibility?

Nick Kristof observes ethnic cleansing and collective punishment first-hand:

On one side of a barbed-wire fence here in the southern Hebron hills is the Bedouin village of Umm al-Kheir, where Palestinians live in ramshackle tents and huts. They aren’t allowed to connect to the electrical grid, and Israel won’t permit them to build homes, barns for their animals or even toilets. When the villagers build permanent structures, the Israeli authorities come and demolish them, according to villagers and Israeli human rights organizations.

On the other side of the barbed wire is the Jewish settlement of Karmel, a lovely green oasis that looks like an American suburb. It has lush gardens, kids riding bikes and air-conditioned homes. It also has a gleaming, electrified poultry barn that it runs as a business. Elad Orian, an Israeli human rights activist, nodded toward the poultry barn and noted: “Those chickens get more electricity and water than all the Palestinians around here.”

These Palestinian Arabs were subject to constant harassment and violence from the Jewish settlers nearby. Kristof adds every caveat – about security, about double-standards, etc. But I fail to see how this kind of governing system, brutally punishing people for being the wrong ethnicity and religion and using the apparatus of the state to impoverish and marginalize them, is somehow in a different moral zone than apartheid. Could a reader mount a case for a clear difference? I think even parts of Soweto were allowed to access the national grid.

And how is the US supposed to engage the moderate Muslim world to help defuse Islamism and Jihadism, if we are also partly financing this kind of brutal sectarian and ethnic discrimination against Muslims?

(Photo: A Palestinian from Arab al-Hazaleen (south Hebron) fights 14 February 2007 with Israeli border police as an army bulldozer demolishes Beduin mud houses beside the Israeli settlement of Karmel. By Hazem Bader/AFP/Getty Images.)

From a speech delivered at the International Bowl Expo in Las Vegas yesterday:

Palin recalled her youth when her father set pins in Idaho. "My Dad was on a Thursday night bowling league," she said. "He bonded with his buddies. I have memories of that point of my life which mean very, very much to me."

A press release confirms that account:

Professing a personal appreciation for the bowling industry, Palin also noted that, during his high school years, her father Chuck Heath Sr. worked as a pin boy and that she herself has fond childhood memories of watching him play in this Thursday night bowling league.

Palin was three months old when she left Idaho. Maybe there's some explanation for this that I don't know of yet. But the truth is: Palin constantly makes stuff up to appeal to whatever audience she is in front of.

(Photo: Ethan Miller/Getty.)