“Dear peoples, though I rarely do stuff like this, pestering the masses, this is a topic that is too vital, too central, and too important to our entire planet to ignore or to simply not do something about. Every once in a long while, one nation on our small planet attempts to take a selfish step that goes against the tide of history. That time is now, and that nation is us. I’m asking for your help to stop George W. Bush’s energy plan. His plan will take us back in time to an era when we moved Native Americans from their lands in order to mine the minerals where they lived, a time when people thought that nuclear power was safe, a time when coal powerplants turned America’s skies black as the night.” – Mike D. of the Beastie Boys, taking a stand.
IF YOU’RE A LIBERAL, WE DON’T CARE ABOUT A PRESUMPTION OF INNOCENCE: The Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web Today on Friday rightly highlights the latest twists in a recent non-child-abuse scandal in Wenatchee, Washington. It was in the proud tradition of Dorothy Rabinowitz, who exposed several fallacious pedophile witch-hunts (see the item headlined “The Peter Principle”). So it’s a little jarring to read further down the page in the offensively titled item, “Dispatches from the Porn Belt,” a reprinting of pedophile charges against the liberal comic Paula Poundstone. We have no idea who has made the accusations, we don’t know what Poundstone’s defense might be, we have no idea how legitimate these claims are. Still, the Journal blithely passes them along, and justifies it by tying pedophilia to any state that voted for Gore in the last election. In a word: sickening. And against everything Ms. Rabinowitz won the Pulitzer for.
DOONESBURY CROSSES THE LINE: I remember at the very beginning of the Clinton presidency, we discussed at The New Republic a comic feature along the lines of Doug McGrath’s wonderful “Shrub File.” We were looking for a way to write about the new administration from an insider’s view. One idea was Chelsea’s Diary, a spoof of what the First Daughter saw and believed. We quickly nixed the idea because it was unfair – even in fiction – to drag a young girl into the political cross-hairs. By and large, the media followed suit, admirably leaving Chelsea alone for eight years. (In the end, it was her father who exposed her to intolerable public stress.) Now comes liberal do-gooder Garry Trudeau with a cartoon strip that violates any tattered remnants of the First Family’s privacy. Trudeau is a great cartoonist and often very funny. Which is why it’s sad he sometimes lets his hatred of Republicans get the better of him. Especially to the extent of using a private 18 year-old’s life as fodder for attacking the president.
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