Month: August 2010

A reader writes:

Years ago, I took great pleasure in reading your takedown of Ben Sherwood in Spy. I had a special reason for doing so. He and I were among the dozen or so candidates at the California state Rhodes Scholarship semi-finalist competition hosted at Cal Tech in late ‘85.

I can’t say that you get to know people particularly well in what was then a two-day event, but I and others knew him well enough to realize he was an ass – not just in his choice of words but in the way he delivered them, as though making a great pronouncement. (As the event concluded and we were the last ones out the door: “We arrive together and we leave together!”) When the chair, announcing the winners, read out “Harvard did very well indeed this year with Bonnie St. John and Ben Sherwood,” our mood was less one of jealousy than annoyance. If I was going to lose my one shot at Oxford (no, my family could not just pay for me to go on my own), I would have preferred to lose to someone interesting.

At the same time, your post bothered me, particularly your regret that you "failed to stop his relentless career." Isn’t there a statute of limitations on the glee we feel over how annoying or calculating other people can be?

I haven’t seen any accusations that the guy cheated, so he at least took the time to go to Harvard, get As, work his way through Oxford, and hold a series of demanding jobs in media at which, to all appearances, he’s been reliable. Does it really matter whether he had it all handed to him or not before the age of 18? He is not a self-made man in any way, but he at least made solid use of the advantages he had. How many equally pampered children have done so? Part of me believes that, had I possessed even 1/10 of his advantages, I would have made more of them than he did. But that’s non-falsifiable. What’s verifiable is that he wrote a book that someone liked enough to publish and make into a movie. Isn’t that something of value in its own right? At this point, does it really matter who his family was?

I fear that, in the attempt to make sure that those who drip with privilege aren’t rewarded for their privilege alone, we go too far and choose on principle to refuse to acknowledge them at all.

I was being facetious. The man is and was unstoppable – and his many achievements speak for themselves. I was just throwing a few spitballs into the wind. A few came back and hit me in the eye.

Jim Harper gives an example of how "different segments of our own society — intelligence officials, senators, a major newspaper, and a national security reporter at that newspaper — combined to maintain public fears" about a terrorist attack that never happened.

Some welcome hints of a rethink are peaking above the surface. Gene Healy writes:

Our interminable war on terror sometimes seems designed to justify every bad thing libertarians have ever said about government. For example, it’s uncontested that the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques came from a training program adopted after Chinese communists tortured U.S. soldiers captured in Korea.

Morality aside, it’s almost impossible to imagine a dumber basis for fighting terror than adopting communist tactics designed to elicit false confessions. … Unless it’s the Hayekian nightmare of spending a trillion dollars and more than 5,000 American lives trying to create law-governed liberal democracies via military fiat.

Yet, it’s usually liberals who report these tales of federal idiocy, and conservatives who resent them for it. “The Washington Post finds waste-in government!” Mona Charen snarks about “Top Secret America.” “They seem much less curious” about waste and abuse elsewhere in government. A fair point, but one that cuts both ways.

Public-choice economist and Nobel laureate James Buchanan called his approach “politics without romance.” Liberals romanticize government in every area other than law enforcement and defense, to which they apply a healthy skepticism. Conservatives suffer a mirror-image version of that myopia. They’re incurable romantics when it comes to generals, policemen or spies.

But it’s a romance we can no longer literally afford.

The Associated Press reports:

Politicians' tweets and status updates should be held to the same standards as paid advertising that voters see on television, hear on radio or find in their mailboxes, California's campaign watchdog agency says in a report being released Monday.

The Fair Political Practices Commission is considering how to regulate new forms of political activity such as appeals on a voter's Facebook page or in a text message.

Paul Sherman reacts:

To bureaucrats like those at the FPPC, the Federal Election Commission or their analogues, there seems to be no need to show any evidence that Twitter, Facebook or text messages actually pose any threat to the public. It is enough that these new forms of low-cost media aren’t currently regulated, but could be. Their primary concern, apparently, is that the regulation of political speech be as comprehensive as possible.

Here’s an alternative recommendation for the FPPC: Leave the Internet alone. What you will undoubtedly find is that California voters—and, indeed, Americans generally—don’t need you to protect them from political speech. To the contrary, the First Amendment reflects a profound commitment to the idea that you are the very last people we should trust to control the content of our political debate.

Andrew Exum contests parallels between the IDF and the US military:

If anything, the adoption of population-centric counterinsurgency by the U.S. military has caused U.S. military officers and analysts to cast new doubts on the efficacy of Israeli strategies and tactics in the Palestinian Territories. (And in southern Lebanon, as my buddy Dan Helmer points out.) I looked through Dr. Khalili's extensive endnotes and didn't see the U.S. military's counterinsurgency manual referenced once. Maybe that's because you can't look at the way the United States wages counterinsurgency warfare and the way Israel occupies the Palestinian Territories and determine shared paternity. The tactical and operational preferences of the two armies are just too different, and I suspect the political aims of the combatants — the Israelis wish to stay; the Americans wish to train up local forces and leave — determine some of that.

E.D. Kain's two cents on Anne Rice leaving Christianity:

Certainly Christians can be terrible Christians. Certainly I disagree with much of what is said and done in the name of Christianity. Certainly I get a knot in my stomach every time the Catholic hierarchy bungles yet another sexual abuse crisis, and the more revelations of how un-Christian so many priests and pastors and others have been while peddling the words of Christianity the more angry and saddened I become over the whole state of affairs. But then I go to mass and everything is different. There are no politics. There is no divisive language, no hell and brimstone, none of this. There is the message of love and redemption and community and charity that drew me back to Christianity in the first place.

It seems to me Rice isn’t doing this in the name of Christ at all. It seems she’s given up on Him altogether. And if that’s the case, then why dress it up in the language of politics? Why kick sand in the eyes of all those Christians who are pro-science, pro-gay rights, pro-feminism, pro birth-control?

This must rank among the weirdest articles ever published by a major American magazine.

Steven Greenhut objects to a Sacramento Bee series that examines crime in California's state park system:

Despite the hysteria, there's no reason to avoid state parks or in any way be alarmed. The series doesn't document a crime wave so much as it details how the Nanny State criminalizes even the most modest rule-breaking. We don't see a rash of violence or assaults, but the increased willingness of law enforcement to treat smoking, drinking, rafting without life preservers, noise-making and trespassing as crimes, rather than as the normal aberrations found at parks since time immemorial.

In November, Californians will vote on whether to add an $18 surcharge to the vehicle registration fee in order to fund the state park system.

A history of the heroic men who have worn them. Money quote:

"This, then, is the mark of man, the beard…It is therefore unholy to desecrate the symbol of manhood, hairiness." — St. Clement of Alexandria, 271 A.D.