Category: Old Dish

Clinton’s “leadership”, loyal opposition to Bush’s war, more from multicultural Scandinavia, etc.

First he wears an American flag; now he’s stopped demonizing the pharmaceutical companies. At Davos in New York, the lead singer of U2 said, “I don’t think they (the big pharmaceutical companies) are the bete noir that all my friends think. I think they need to make profits, we need to do research.” Thanks, Bono. Now please tell Ralph Nader.

I can’t put out of my head a piece by Sasha Abramsky in the American Prospect about the actual conditions in many “Super-Max” maximum security prisons, now all the rage around the country. Yes, the inmates are probably dangerous. Yes, they’re in there for mainly unspeakable crimes. But this form of punishment strikes me simply as inhumane. Here’s her description:

The cells are arranged in lines radiating out like spokes from a control hub, so that no prisoner can see another human being–except for those who are double-bunked. Last year, the average population of the Pelican Bay supermax unit was 1,200 inmates, and on average, 288 men shared their tiny space with a “cellie.”… Meals are slid to the inmates through a slot in the steel wall. Some prisoners are kept in isolation even for the one hour per day that they’re allowed out to exercise; all are shackled whenever they are taken out of their cells. And many are forced to live this way for years on end.

It’s no surprise that many mildly depressed inmates become catatonic under such conditions. There seem to be no opportunities for rehabilitation whatsoever, appalling loneliness of a kind that would turn any human into an animal, and conditions far worse than the ones we are imposing on terrorist prisoners of war in Guantanamo Bay. It seems to me that this kind of set-up should be changed for the better. Look, I’m not soft on crime. But I think the way we, as a society, simply abandon many people in prison is a terrible indictment. Perhaps one form of volunteerism that could be encouraged by the new Freedom Corps might be focused on prison inmates. I don’t mean in Supermax jails where such efforts might be fruitless – but in many others, where this vast and growing population, at enormous expense, lies ignored.

JOEL GREENBERG’S AGENDA?: It’s rare to find an editorial in the Jerusalem Post arguing that a New York Times correspondent is furthering a far-left agenda, so it’s worth taking a look at the piece. It concerns a front-page Times report by Joel Greenberg on some soldiers apparently resisting deployment to the West Bank and Gaza in protest of Israeli army policies toward the Palestinians. It was a major piece and may well, in the Post’s eyes, have exaggerated the support for such resisters among the American public. I can’t judge the veracity of the report, but it does seem to me relevant that Greenberg himself was once such an army resister. According to the Post,

An Associated Press article of November 25, 1984, about the refusal of Israeli soldiers to serve in Lebanon stated: “And the worst thing is, we’re still there (in Lebanon),” said Sgt. Joel Greenberg, 28, a Philadelphia-born Israeli who lost his position as squad leader when he refused to go to Lebanon. Like the other conscientious objectors, he isn’t sure he will refuse again.” A news release of the Zionist Organization of America (August 6, 1999) quoted: “Greenberg served a jail term in 1983 for refusing to serve with his army unit in southern Lebanon [Moment, May 1984]”. Greenberg subsequently became a journalist, and was a staff reporter (1986-90) for The Jerusalem Post.

Here’s an interesting question. Should Greenberg have disclosed this history in the piece or should the Times have assigned the story to its other excellent reporter, James Bennet? I’m not sure I know the answer to that, but Greenberg’s past political views – taken to the point of conscientious objection – are certainly useful information to know.

GREAT INSULTS: Here’s a contemporary one, from the invaluable Joseph Epstein, in Commentary last month:

I have never met a reader who has derived pleasure from the novels of Joyce Carol Oates, yet she continues to publish novel after novel, at a rate slightly faster than most office temps can type.

ROMEO AND ROMEO: Two Kansan teen-age boys consensually fooling around – one 18, one almost fifteen – has resulted in the 18-year-old going to jail for seventeen years. The 18 year-old’s sentence was made harsher by a previous sex-crime record (he would otherwise have been jailed for around four years). But it still seems to me an extraordinarily tough sentence for consensual oral sex. If the 18 year-old’s partner had been female and nearly 15, he would have gotten a maximum sentence a third as long as his current punishment. That’s a result of a sensible “Romeo and Juliet” provision in Kansas law allowing for greater leniency if the two partners are teenagers, and one is under-age. I’m not defending sex with a minor, even if it’s allegedly consensual and with another school-mate. But there is no escaping the fact that this kid is being triply punished not because he had oral sex, but because he had gay oral sex. The state’s defense of its unequal treatment of gay and straight sexual crimes is its own sodomy law, which explicitly allows straight oral sex but makes consensual private gay oral sex a crime. This is called unequal protection for the same crime. If it isn’t unconstitutional, it should be.

KRUGMAN NOW SAYS HE WAS JOKING: The guy can’t stop writing about it (makes two of us, I guess). Now Paul Krugman is saying that his original response to his $50,000 Enron junket was not meant to be taken seriously. It was all a “self-deprecating” joke. Stop it, Paul, you’re killing me. For the record, here are his preliminary remarks: “This was an advisory panel that had no function that I was aware of. My later interpretation is that it was all part of the way they built an image. All in all, I was just another brick in the wall.” Ha ha ha. I’m sure he thought he was being funny. But making light of the fact that he was getting paid a small fortune for a board that had “no function” and that was designed to burnish the image of a criminal racket, is humor that actually makes a point. The point is and was that Krugman sees and saw nothing wrong with feeding at the corporate trough for doing next to nothing. I guess humor is subjective and maybe others find this funny. But even if it was humor, it sure wasn’t self-deprecating. Like everything Krugman writes, it was self-inflating. If he gets any more inflated, one of these days he’s gonna pop.

THOSE COLORS: Every day, I get an email saying that someone can’t read the site clearly because of a) the purple links and b) the white-on-blue type. As to a), we’re working on a quick fix. As to b), you’ll see a little button at the top of the Dish that says “Black and White.” Click on it and you’ll get a more traditional-looking website. You can also get the same effect on other pages by clicking the print button. Thanks for keeping us on our toes.

A recovering pedophile discusses the Church’s scandal.

It was Ronald Reagan’s 91st birthday yesterday. Here’s the column I wrote last year to mark the day.

NPR AND STEVE EMERSON: This Jeff Jacoby column is a must-read on publicly financed media bias.

STONE THE CROWS: The evils of the free market can be found everywhere. Take this report of concern about the preponderance of crows in Minneapolis in the Star-Tribune:

A woman named Lynne said she initially welcomed crows moving into her neighborhood. “I think them to be handsome, forthright, yet mysterious,” she wrote. “They have an arrogance that I really quite like in a bird. . . .But my pleasure in their huge and raucous lobbying of my back yard was disturbed when I read somewhere recently that crows take over a neighborhood from other birds. They are, in the aviary world, like gangsters… Like Capitalists.”

You think they might even vote Republican?

NOAH’S DEFENSE: Tim Noah argues in the Washington Post today that publishing a private email is ok as long as the information is already in the public domain. He claims that David Frum’s alleged authorship of the phrase “axis of evil” had already appeared in Canada’s National Post. But hold on. I thought Tim’s original argument was that he published the email because it was newsworthy. Now he says he published it because it was not newsworthy. That surely makes printing the details of a private email even more gratuitous. I think he probably ran it because it was great gossip and he didn’t really think before he pressed the publish button. Hey, we’re all human. We’ve all done that in this wonderful new tech-world of instant self-publishing. I don’t think Tim is a bad person. I just still don’t think what he did was right.

I could write nothing close to as eloquent as this email I received yesterday. It’s in response to the USC Anti-War Conference I mentioned yesterday in the Dish, whose press release included the following statement: “The Bush administration has cleverly kept the threat of terrorism at such a fever pitch, the public has lost all sense of reality.” My correspondent writes in reply:

I like to adopt a tone of measured restraint when I respond to various bits of writing. It sharpens me up, and makes me ready for a bit of the old argument-argument.
But let me tell you: reality, for me, is stealing a Mango Madness Snapple from the abandoned bodega at the corner of William Street and Pine Street, to clear the concrete and gypsum dust from my throat as I pedal my bicycle through the blizzard remains of 110 stories’ worth of skyscraper, trying to get the hell out of downtown Manhattan.
I refuse to let some bunch of left-coast assholes who weren’t there and don’t still work three blocks from the site tell me that I’ve lost all sense of reality. Do they think that the Jerry Bruckheimer televised version they saw endlessly on cable for a week is all there was? They should try smelling it. They should try showering it off their bodies.
How dare they. How dare they, how dare they, how dare they.

Indeed. How dare they?

THE CASE AGAINST PICKERING: The Senate will start hearings today on one of the few Bush judicial appointees deemed suitable for confirmation by the Democrats. Already, the smear-jobs have been prepared. All I can say is: read the demagoguery of Bob Herbert in today’s New York Times and then read this superb and measured piece by Byron York. York effectively demolishes the case made against Judge Charles W. Pickering Jr. by People for the American Way. In fact, York’s piece does more than that. It’s a body blow against the very integrity of PFAW’s mission and Herbert’s diatribe. Imputing racism to a white man who, in the 1960s, took on the Klan in Mississippi, is now apparently a legitimate tactic for liberal special interest groups and columnists. Take one incident: a law review article Pickering wrote as a student at the age of 21. Here’s Herbert: “Mr. Pickering had a significant effect on his home state’s racist past as early as 1959 when he was a student at the University of Mississippi Law School. He felt it was important to bolster Mississippi’s anti-miscegenation law.” In fact, the law school article took no position on the miscegenation laws; it merely pointed out a technical mistake that made the law unenforceable. In the article Pickering doubted whether such laws would last much longer. Pickering’s only other ruling on inter-racial marriage, according to York, was in 1991 when he ruled that a jury was biased against a mixed-race couple, and ordered a retrial that increased the couple’s damages.

THE RACE CARD: Herbert’s other point is that Pickering lied when he said he’d forgotten about any contacts he might have had with the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a body Herbert describes as a “grotesque, hateful, virulently anti-black organization.” It turns out Pickering did have one conversation in 1972 with a Commission staffer. That conversation was about Klan violence and how to prevent it. Here’s York:

Chet Dillard, the former district attorney of Jones County, has told the Senate Judiciary Committee that Pickering was worried about a labor dispute at a Masonite plant in which “union members who were also members of the KKK shot into and burned homes in the middle of the night and brutally beat up workers….As a state senator representing Jones County, Charles Pickering had every reason to be concerned about further union violence involving the Masonite plant in Jones County.”

Pickering, labeled as a racist in the New York Times, even lost re-election because he stood up to the Klan. Here’s Charles Evers, brother of murdered civil rights leader medger Evers, in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee:

“In 1967, many locally elected prosecutors in Mississippi looked the other way when faced with allegations of violence against African-Americans and those who supported our struggle for equal treatment under the law. Judge Pickering was a locally elected prosecutor who took the stand that year and testified in the criminal trial against the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who was accused of firebombing a civil rights activist. Judge Pickering later lost his bid for reelection because he dared to defy the Klan, but he gained my respect and the respect of many others as a man who stands up for what is right.”

This is the ‘racist past’ of a man Bob Herbert and PFAW delight in smearing. How the civil rights movement has changed.

AXIS OF EVIL WATCH: James Taranto digs up a recent quote from former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani, when that Islamo-fascist was addressing a crowd on Jerusalem Day last December. According to the Jerusalem Post, Rafsanjani

said the establishment of Israel was “the most hideous historic occurrence in history,” and the Islamic world “will vomit her out from its midst,” according to Peres’s letter. Rafsanjani told a crowd at the stadium in Teheran University that the day is approaching in which the Islamic world will possess atomic weapons. “On that day, the strategy of the West will hit a dead end, since a single atomic bomb has the power to completely destroy Israel, while an Israeli counterstrike can only cause partial damage to the Islamic world,” he said.

What’s amazing is not that he said such things – but that this is the first I’ve ever heard of it. The international press is up in arms about president Bush’s robust statement of the obvious – that the regimes in Iran, Iraq and North Korea are evil – but ignores a statement promising the nuclear annihilation of a U.N.-recognized democracy. Figures, doesn’t it?

A DEADLY CONFLAGRATION: The Onion keeps its eye on a more local Indian-Pakistani conflict.

Remember them? According to embarrassed liberals like Jacob “I wish Clinton was still president” Weisberg, they don’t exist. Maybe Jake should take a trip to the USC for a conference February 17, organized by Southern Californians for Democratic Action. I heard about it from feisty blogger, Matt Welch. The conference will feature, among others, Robert Reich (would-be Massachusetts governor and close friend of Mickey Kaus), Arianna Huffington, Maxine Waters, Tom Hayden, and Ed Begley Jr. Barbra, Warren and Annette will be at the cocktail party, natch. Here’s an extract from the press release:

This conference will examine how many of our constitutional rights the Bush administration has abolished using the tragedy of 9-11 as an excuse. The Patriot Bill, the anti civil liberties doctrine forced through Congress by John Ashcroft, has ravaged our 1st, 4th, 5th and 6th amendments. Now the question is can we still save what is left of our economy, our environment, our social programs, our arms control agreements, our health care system, our immigration policy, our justice system, in short, our democracy. The Bush administration has used the war on terrorism to ram through its pro-corporate agenda, guaranteeing that the permanent war economy, which has been with us for 50 years, will now be accompanied by permanent war. Speaking for the administration, Cheney said we will be at war for the rest of our lives. Nobody blinked. Suddenly our troops are in the Philippines and Somalia. What’s next; Iraq, Iran, the Sudan? If it’s a third world country it’s apparently up for grabs. Why, with a sinking economy and a determination to maintain a state of war, is Bushs’ [sic] rating so high? The Bush administration has cleverly kept the threat of terrorism at such a fever pitch, the public has lost all sense of reality. Hopefully the Enron debacle will crack open the door to truth, and people will at last see how deep that corruption runs in this administration. This conference is intended to hasten that process.

So constitutional rights haven’t just been curtailed; they’ve been abolished. The criterion for intervention is not state-sponsored terrorism, but just being a Third World country. As Paul “Enron” Krugman has asserted, the war is not actually a war against terrorism, but a war for corporations. And you, dear readers, have “lost all sense of reality.” I wonder if Bob Reich really believes this. Perhaps his opponents in Massachusetts will ask him.

It’s official. At around 11 am this morning, they ran out of any more copies of “Warrior Politics.” We gave them warning, and we prepared, but none of us expected this response. It turns out there really is a market for serious books and serious ideas. All I can say is that for next month, we will know better what to expect and plan accordingly. Meanwhile, they should have more in stock in two or three days – and since you only need to read the first couple of chapters by February 18, there’s still plenty of time to order and follow the discussion in real reading time. Order today and you should get the book in time. They also still have copies of the books on the optional reading list. But the bottom-line, of course, is that I’m amazed and thrilled. This is going to be a trip. See you for the first post February 18. You can join the experiment here.

The lawyers go to work for John Walker.

THANKS, TOM DASCHLE: It seems we have Senate Majority leader Tom Daschle to thank for finally killing off the unnecessary, pork-laden, budget-busting “stimulus package.” Not only will we avoid having to pay for all that pork spending, we may even cut the projected deficit this year to $15 billion from $80 billion. According to the Washington Post, we may even have a surplus in 2004. I have no problem extending unemployment benefits as an interim measure. But we should be relieved that this piece of Keynesian pump-priming never made it out of the Congress. And Bush should be mildly ashamed of himself for his empty posturing on something no sane conservative should have ever supported.

KENNEDY VERSUS “INDIVIDUALISM”: In what was a classic Freudian slip, Ted Kennedy rejoiced in the New England Patriots victory this week with the following statement: ”At a time when our entire country is banding together and facing down individualism, the Patriots set a wonderful example, showing us all what is possible when we work together, believe in each other, and sacrifice for the greater good.” Facing down individualism? Sorry, Ted, we haven’t installed socialism just yet. But keep trying, big guy. Keep trying …

NOAH VERSUS PRIVACY: What’s galling about Tim Noah’s little item on Slate about an email sent to family and friends by Danielle Crittenden is not its smug, schoolboy tone. What’s galling is that Noah doesn’t even seem to think anyone could think the printing of a private correspondence could be regarded as ethically problematic. Crittenden was probably foolish to have divulged anything in an email, especially if it had some juicy political gossip in them. But she is ethically in the right, and Noah in the wrong. If Noah had found a lost private letter, opened it, and divulged its contents in print, he’d be regarded as a cad. If he’d bugged her phone to get the gossip, he could be thrown in jail. But because it’s just an email and can be reproduced at will and sent to an infinite number of people simultaneously, it’s somehow ok. Sorry, I don’t buy the ethical distinction. The fact that a private email might be “newsworthy” is neither here nor there. It’s a private communication between two or more individuals. It is simply wrong to violate that trust. What we’re seeing here is just another sign that any semblance of privacy in our society is being effectively destroyed. This destruction of any private zone helps extinguish freedom of thought, emotional intimacy, and public dignity for everyone. At the same time, it seems impossible to stop it, especially when journalists see any right to privacy automatically trumped by the flimsiest of “newsworthy” excuses.

GREAT INSULTS: Here’s a classic from P.G. Wodehouse from his 1936 book, “The Code of the Woosters”:

He was, as I had already been able to perceive, a breath-taking cove. About seven feet in height, and swathed in a plaid ulster which made him look about six feet across, he caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment.

ENRON – THE PATH NOT TAKEN: An interesting British side-note to the various pundits and economists, like Bill Kristol and Paul Krugman, who were paid large amounts to sit on Enron “advisory boards.” Enron seemed to have a similar strategy in Britain and tried to snooker Gavyn Davies, a left-of-center economist, former Goldman Sachs honcho, friend of New Labour’s Gordon Brown and now, thanks to his Blairite friends, chairman of the BBC. Davies was indeed an external adviser to Enron for two years from 1999, but he says he turned down the $50,000 proffered fee. “The advice given was entirely consistent with my position as chief economist at Goldman Sachs and was similar to that which I routinely gave to dozens of other entities, without accepting direct payment,” Davies said. Perhaps there was indirect payment to Goldman Sachs, but the avoidance of a large financial dump into his own personal checkbook shows that some people were tempted like Krugman, Kristol, et al, but not all of them took the bait. Good for Davies.

CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS: Sweden prides itself on being a tolerant multicultural society – as well it should. But the cultures from which it absorbs immigrants are not so tolerant. The country is now in an uproar about yet another “honor killing” of a daughter by a Kurdish father because she chose to marry a man, rather than submit to her father’s diktat. It’s a horrifying tale, and perhaps a useful corrective to my defense of alien cultures yesterday, as long as women have true freedom to choose their own destiny. In this case, Sweden gave the woman the choice, and her own father brutally took it away. A lesson, perhaps, in the limits of cultural assimilation.

CORRECTION: William Allen White was not the editor of the Kansas City Star but the Emporia Gazette.

More evidence that the Times columnist makes it up as he goes along.

EMAIL AVALANCHE:My apologies for not being able to respond personally to the more than 1000 emails I got after the Sully and Hitch show on C-SPAN last Friday. I’ve answered about a third, and read almost all, but simply don’t have the time to answer each one personally. So please take this as a personal thank you to all of you who wrote, especially those who wanted to express support and solidarity for a Catholic with perhaps more than the usual amount of internal conflict. Thanks.