Category: The Dish

I want to thank my guest-bloggers for their industry, energy and diversity of view this past week: Megan, Ross and Reihan. Please visit them at their regular haunts: here and here. The blog will now return to its virtually normal self. These thanks are more than formal. Blogging can become something very much like an addiction, and quitting it – even only for a week – brings that home. There are the withdrawal symptoms – continuing to post a little, twitching involuntarily at the latest gobbet of news, scanning the traffic. Then there’s depression, as the come-down hits, and you find yourself listening to a mentally disturbed mass killer in a hotel room in Chicago at 2.30 am. Then the strange experience of a weekend without a moving deadline, a chance to read the paper just because you feel like it, or take a bike ride, as I did yesterday, just because it was a beautiful early summer day, and the final blossoms in Washington were falling to the ground. This is what not-blogging is like? And now the bafflement at having to have an opinion 200 times a week. I’m sure the synapses will start firing again and I’m relieved to know that if my opinion well runs dry, yours still won’t. Thanks, again, Megan, Reihan and Ross, for the brief glimpse of what life was once like again.

[Megan} Radley Balko has a great column on convictions of the innocent up at Fox News:

It’s likely of no coincidence that the one jurisdiction where blood samples have been preserved is also one that’s finding a shocking number of convictions of innocent people.

If there’s one positive that might come out of the Duke imbroglio, it’s that the unusual demographics of the parties involved and alliances it spawned may mean some much-needed new scrutiny of the criminal justice system, and win welcome new advocates for reform.

Nifong is by no means the only overly aggressive prosecutor in this country. And Durham is by no means the only jurisdiction where the wrong people have been wrongly accused. As Seligmann suggested, the only real difference may have been that the Duke players had the resources to fight back. Many others don’t.

Examples abound.

A 2002 audit of the crime lab in Houston, Texas, found that experts may have given "false and scientifically unsound" testimony in thousands of criminal cases. Subsequent reports showed that crime lab employees often tailored their tests to fit police theories about how a crime was committed. The city is finishing up a $5.5 million review of 2,300 cases, including death penalty cases.

In 2003, Texas Gov. Rick Perry pardoned 35 mostly black residents of Tulia, Texas, who had been prosecuted for drug crimes based on testimony from undercover police officer Tom Coleman. Coleman, once named Texas "Police Officer of the Year," was found to have manufactured evidence from whole cloth.

Just last month in Maryland, self-styled ballistics expert Joe Kopera committed suicide after it was revealed that he lied about his expertise and training. Kopera had testified in hundreds of criminal trials over 40 years, many of which may need to be reopened.

A 2005 audit found critical errors in the sate of Virginia’s crime lab, considered one of the best in the country. The audit found that senior-level experts in the lab were too often persuaded by political pressure to secure convictions. The audit was ordered after the exoneration of Earl Washington Jr., a man who served 17 years on Virginia’s death row.

These are merely examples from the last several years, and they’re by no means comprehensive. Here’s hoping that the most vocal critics of Mike Nifong and the Durham justice system that relentlessly pursued the Duke lacrosse players — many of whom don’t generally speak out on criminal justice issues — will see the case as more than just an example of media bias or reverse discrimination.

It’s merely one very high-profile example of the flaws and inadequacies in our criminal justice system. And it demonstrates why we need strong protections for the accused and transparency, accountability and oversight of the system that accuses them.

The hardest part of all of this is that many of the miscarriages of justice, even many of the abuses, probably aren’t deliberate.   Anyone who’s ever done sales can tell you just how quickly you start believing your own pitch.  And while the pressure to believe that you’ve got the guy is particularly strong in high-profile cases that can turn elections, you have to remember that even in cases where there’s no publicity, police and prosecutors in these cases are dealing with a hideous crime.  That gives them a powerful psychological incentive to believe that you’ve got the guy.  So lab technicians believe their results are stronger than they are, prosecutors resist learning that their case has fallen apart, and police rewrite events in favour of guilt. 

It’s not enough, or even much of a start, to punish the prosecutors who are guilty of abuse.  There also needs to be major systemic change to correct for all sorts of psychological biases on the part of witnesses, police, prosecutors, and victims.  The evidence of innocence that DNA tests have provided should be sparking a revolution in criminal procedure, designed to protect innocents in the majority of cases where there isn’t DNA evidence.  But so far, I don’t think it has.

[Ross] If you watch The Sopranos religiously and don’t read the House Next Door’s Sopranos Mondays – well, you should.

[Reihan] Nicholas Eberstadt has written a wonderful look at America’s demographic exceptionalism.  But I take exception to a very small part of it.

What accounts for Anglo America’s unexpectedly high and stable propensity to reproduce? Carefully tailored pro-natalist government policies certainly cannot explain it: The United States has none. By the same token, U.S. labor patterns do not seem especially "family-friendly." Americans work longer hours and enjoy less vacation time than any of their European friends across the Atlantic, and none of the economic or policy explanations for the growing fertility gap between U.S. Anglos and west Europeans offers a satisfying explanation.

Eberstadt, of course, knows this subject inside and out, and I’m wary of contradicting him.  But I wonder if "carefully tailored pro-natalist government policies" in Europe (which, by the way, work pretty well) are best understood as a means of compensating not only for the "values gap" but for the fact that the broad structure of our economy is, if you will, objectively pro-natalist. 

Our high-cost metropolitan areas, for example, increasingly resemble metropolitan Europe in terms of fertility rates, etc.  But we also have a vast "hinterland," a relatively low-cost suburban frontier, that is likely to expand at a rapid clip in coming years.  The frontier is built in part of tax subsidies, cheap food, and cheap gas.  As we slowly move away from overgenerous tax subsidies and cheap gas (I’m guessing food will remain cheap), it might make sense to use carefully tailored instruments to mimic the pro-natalist effects of the old regime. 

I’m just sayin’ …

[Reihan] Many years ago, I Googled words and phrases like "conservative," "Christian Democracy," "egalitarianism," and "inequality" in a long string and I stumbled upon ConservativeHome, a website run by Tim Montgomerie.   Montgomerie had been a close advisor to the much-maligned Iain Duncan-Smith, the man who had the unenviable task of leading the Conservative Party after William Hague led them to a crushing defeat.  ConservativeHome was an extraordinary resource, and it was an organized around a basic idea Montgomerie calls the "And theory of conservatism."

‘And theory conservatives’ – or total conservatives – sign up to ‘core vote’ positions on Europe, tax, immigration and crime. To this extent they are traditionalists – but, like other Tory modernisers, they realise that this isn’t enough. They realise that conservatives also need to have answers to inner city decay, environmental deterioration and today’s other problems.  Tender policies provide many voters with the leeway to support tough Tory policies The ‘politics of and’ understands that tender policies don’t require an abandonment of tough policies. Breadth isn’t an alternative to depth – it permits it to happen. For example, a tough policy on immigration is sounder (ethically and electorally) if it is accompanied by a strong commitment to international development. A strong international development agenda (adventurously promoted and not just treated as a one speech, tick box policy) reassures moderate voters who want to know that sealed borders don’t also mean a closed mind to the needs of the world’s poorest people.

If this sounds a bit like "compassionate conservatism," you’re right to see a family resemblance.  The main difference is that Montgomerie and his fellow-travelers have been working furiously to lend policy substance to sentiment.  It helps that David Willetts and Oliver Letwin, key members of the new Tory brain trust, are thinking along similar lines.  Montgomerie is a rare example of an activist who has actually had a meaningful, positive effect on British politics.  Britain’s David Cameron and Sweden’s Fredrik Reinfeldt are, by American standards, highly unusual conservatives.  To put it bluntly, they’re both Bobos par excellence.  And they’re far friendlier to "big government," which is in part a function of the fact that Britain and Sweden both have a far larger public sector workforce.  But both have also embraced the best of social liberalism, namely tolerance and openness, and the best of social conservatism, namely support for flourishing family life.  Both men have a fairly broad understanding of what a flourishing family life would look like, and that’s all to the good.  Both are clearly heirs to the market liberalism of Hayek and Thatcher, and yet they both prefer emphasizing competition over privatization: improving services for everyone by increasing transparency and fairness.  They’re addressing a new political environment that’s quite different from the one that prevailed in the late 1970s, the era that paved the way for the last majority conservative victories. A few weeks back, David Brooks wrote about this new political environment.

Today the big threats to people’s future prospects come from complex, decentralized phenomena: Islamic extremism, failed states, global competition, global warming, nuclear proliferation, a skills-based economy, economic and social segmentation. Normal, nonideological people are less concerned about the threat to their freedom from an overweening state than from the threats posed by these amorphous yet pervasive phenomena. The ”liberty vs. power” paradigm is less germane. It’s been replaced in the public consciousness with a ”security leads to freedom” paradigm. People with a secure base are more free to take risks and explore the possibilities of their world.

Tim Montgomerie is one of the most important thinkers tackling this new environment. I’m not confident that American conservatives will pay much attention to Montgomerie’s work, not yet at least, but I wish they would.  Montgomerie has launched a new blog, Britain and America.  I sense that it will soon become indispensable reading.  I don’t always agree with TM.  For one thing, I actually think British Conservatives would be smart to emphasize their independence from the United States.  But I’ve learned enough to know that he’s always worth reading.

[Reihan]

Yesterday afternoon I saw Mike White‘s Year of the Dog, a movie I’ve been looking forward to for some time now.  I think Mike White is a genius, and both The AV Club, which I generally trust, and Lisa Schwarzbaum were glowing in their praise.  Manohla Dargis loved it too.  But what struck me most as I saw it with one of my best friends, a fellow Mike White fan, is that Year of the Dog could just as easily have been titled, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Embrace Jihad.  During the course of the movie, Peggy, as brilliantly portrayed by the criminally underrated Molly Shannon, slowly becomes … how can I put this? … she slowly becomes a total lunatic who sublimates her basic human desire for companionship into increasingly militant political causes.  It’s by no means clear to me that Peggy’s journey will end where the movie ends, in a bus ride to a peaceful demonstration.  I fear it will end somewhere far more tragic.

Thanks to a fateful encounter with a gentle man, the similarly-excellent Peter Sarsgaard‘s Newt, Peggy directs her grief over the loss of her beloved dog outward, into a rage against animal cruelty, a rage that actually become murderous. I have to wonder: is this all an elaborate prank by Mike White?  I was expecting an intelligent comedy about loneliness, and about how the love of animals can both enrich and warp our lives.  Instead Year of the Dog is a moving, intense, mostly funny but occasionally chilling look at humanity at its worst.  Peggy’s best friend is a deeply clueless woman, unattuned to the awfulness of her philandering lover.  Her brother and sister-in-law are a loathsome, narrow-minded upper-middle-class caricature.  Though very kind during an important (murderous moment), they’re also incapable of reckoning with the intensity of Peggy’s increasingly violent extremism.  That’s why it’s so baffling that reviewers are treating Year of the Dog like the cute character study I imagined it would be.  Nathan Rabin writes,

Like a distaff Marty, Dog indelibly chronicles the emotional thaw of a woman seemingly resigned to living life quietly on the sidelines until fate spurs her into action.

And yet where does Rabin detect an "emotional thaw"?  I could see it in her vulnerability, and her willingness to acknowledge her affection for Newt.  But the surprising twist at the end suggests that she’s forsaken the real love of her family and friends for love of jihad, in the name of animals she’s never met.  I’m a believer in the humane treatment of animals.  This is part of why I increasingly choose to eat Quorn and other meat-substitutes in lieu of the real thing.  I look forward to a time when synthetic meat-substitutes render industrial agriculture a thing of the past.  (Also, as New York recently pointed out, it tastes almost exactly like a Chicken McNugget.  Someone page heaven and tell them I’m already there.)  I buy the idea that our sphere of moral concern has steadily expanded over time, and that it ought to include thinking, feeling non-human animals.  I certainly don’t believe in stabbing people because they may or may not have inadvertently poisoned Pencil with snail-bait. Dargis has a similarly generous take.

In its broad outline, “Year of the Dog” is the story of a woman who goes slightly bonkers and becomes an animal-rights advocate, not because she’s bonkers, but because the love of animals is where she finally finds her peace of mind, sense of self, grace. It’s also about the creation of conscience, about what makes us human and why, a surprisingly little-told story in contemporary American cinema. You can learn a lot from our movies, like how to hold a gun and blow someone’s head off. It’s more unusual to watch a film in which the central struggle is how to be happy and sane. There’s a touch of the saint in Peggy, true, but what makes me love her is that she’s ridiculously, beautifully human.

Holy moly!  Where to begin!  Part of having a conscience is surely recognizing the limits of what we can and should say to small children.  Peggy does indeed go bonkers, and this is a sad and poignant part of the story.  And her animal-rights advocacy becomes a way of avoiding the incredibly hard choices she’d need to make to build a happy and fulfilling (not necessarily "normal") life.  I’ve seen this happen to people I care about, and it’s hard to watch.  It’s surprisingly hard to watch it happen on screen, particularly to characters who are so beautifully drawn.

Peggy is less ridiculously, beautifully human at the end of this movie than ridiculously, tragically alone and ridiculously, tragically crazy.  The truly horrible thing is that there are plenty of people who will prey on her loneliness and use her as a pawn in their larger design.  There’s nothing cute about this movie.  It might be the most important you’ll see this year, and I can assure you that it will be one of the more difficult to watch.

[Reihan] Instead of seeing Rush Hour 3 I’d really much rather see a movie about the intense racialized psychodrama that has been the making of Rush Hour 3.  Way back in 2000, I read a Lynn Hirschberg piece, "How Black Comedy Got The Last Laugh,"  which discussed Chris Tucker at considerable length.  Brett Ratner had some strange things to say about Tucker.

During ”Money Talks,” which was directed by Brett Ratner, the rumors about Tucker began percolating. ”They said he was illiterate,” Ratner recalled recently. ”That he was crazy, and he couldn’t read, and that no one could understand him, but that, in spite of all that, he was going to be the next Eddie Murphy, a huge star.” Ratner laughed. ”Chris can read, but sometimes the references have to be explained to him. Often these scripts are written by white writers, and they’re just too white. In ‘Money Talks,’ Chris had to say, ‘I’m waiting for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.’ He didn’t know that line came from ‘Sunset Boulevard.’ He had never heard of ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ and he didn’t know DeMille was a great director. So he changed the line. He made it his own. And frankly, if Chris doesn’t get that reference, neither will the audience.”

And Brett Ratner is Tucker’s friend?  This isn’t exactly flattering.  People get pistol-whipped for saying less.  While reading Entertainment Weekly‘s Summer Movie Preview of RH3, I came upon the following.

The last time the director brought Tucker and Chan together as bumbling, backflipping buddy cops Lee and Carter was six years ago. Rush Hour 2, like the first, was a rollicking success, hauling in nearly $350 million worldwide. Box office bonanza aside, it started to look like Rush Hour 3 would not happen. Someone was dragging his feet. ”Chris isn’t in a rush,” chuckles Ratner. ”So, Jackie goes off and does his movies. I go off and do X-Men 3. [Chris] hasn’t worked in five years.” Whispers circulated that Tucker, who earned a staggering $20 million for Rush Hour 2, was holding out for more money this time around — which he denies.

Tucker has a quite different interpretation.

”It wasn’t me,” insists the comedian. ”It was finding the script. [New Line was] saying, ‘We’ll get you a script. Just sign on.’ I usually don’t do that. That was the big holdup. I need to see a script.” Nevertheless, Tucker eventually relented, and a script was written that involved Lee and Carter trailing a list of Chinese gangsters through Paris.

It seems they finally agreed upon a script with all the gravity and seriousness we’ve come to expect from the Rush Hour series.  The most interesting leg of the triad, in my view, is of course Jackie Chan.

Speaking of landmarks, Chan, who earned less up front than Tucker for his chopsocky contributions to Rush Hour 2, will be getting a healthy portion of Rush Hour 3’s distribution rights in China. ”I like to bet,” says Chan. ”Maybe, at the end, I’ll [make more] than Chris.”

Maybe indeed.   

[Ross] Via The Plank, the latest Rasmussen poll has Obama tied with Hillary nationwide. And this related survey, I think, is telling:

Thirty-three percent (33%) of Likely Voters say they’d definitely vote for Illinois Senator Barack Obama (D). That’s the highest total received by any of ten leading Presidential hopefuls included in the poll. Thirty-three percent (33%) also say they’d definitely vote against Obama giving him a net differential of zero (33% definitely for minus 33% definitely against equals net differential of 0). All other candidates have a net differential in negative territory meaning more people are set to definitely vote against them rather than for them. Other polling during the past month found Obama’s favorability ratings have increased to the highest level of any 2008 candidate.

In a way, it’s the opposite of Dean-versus-Kerry in 2004 – this time around, it’s the outsider candidate, Obama, who looks like a better bet for the general election, and the insider, Hillary, who looks like more of a gamble. That landscape may shift as Obama becomes better known and his rivals start going after into him, but if it lasts till primary season, it’s a dynamic that could play a powerful role in tipping undecided, victory-hungry Dems into the Illinois Senator’s column.

[Ross] By coincidence, I finally got around to seeing The Lives of Others – which was as good as advertised – the day before Boris Yeltsin died, and it’s hard not to let the movie’s vision of pre-1989 East Germany edge into your thoughts while reading his obituaries. The story of Russia since Communism fell has been a deeply unhappy one, and Yeltsin has to shoulder a great deal of the blame; still, he was one of the men who ushered the Soviet bloc peacefully off history’s stage, and for that "peacefully," in particular, we all owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude. Communism would have fallen eventually without Boris Yeltsin, but the grinding everyday evils that The Lives of Others summons up could have ended with a Ragnarok rather than a whimper. Yeltsin bequeathed us Putin, but he helped spare us something infinitely worse.

Rod Dreher flags a moving anecdote from the Times obit:

During a visit to the United States in 1989, he became more convinced than ever that Russia had been ruinously damaged by the centralized, state-run economic system where people stood in long lines to buy the most basic needs of life and more often than not found the shelves bare.

He was overwhelmed by what he saw at a Houston supermarket, by the kaleidoscopic variety of meats and vegetables available to ordinary Americans.

Leon Aron quoting a Yeltsin associate, wrote in his biography, “Yeltsin, A Revolutionary Life” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000): “For a long time, on the plane to Miami, he sat motionless, his head in his hands. ‘What have they done to our poor people?’ he said after a long silence.”

I was nine years old when the Berlin Wall came down, and eleven when Yeltsin rode the tank, and in both cases I was simply too young to appreciate the magnitude of what was happening. I wish I had been older.

[Ross] How do you solve a problem like demographic decline? If you’re Europe, one obvious solution would be to stop letting the healthiest generation of seniors in human history take early retirement. (hat tip: Stanley Kurtz)