HILLARY SUCK-UP WATCH

“One aspect of the Clintons’ very public union is that during Bill Clinton’s presidency, they both seemed devoted to improving American life as much as they could. I think of them as busy, ambitious patriots united by common personal and political goals. It sure doesn’t sound like such a bad marriage to me.” – Stephanie Zacharek, Salon. Readers are hereby invited to send in the most egregiously obsequious reviews and fawning interview questions about HRC’s new book, “Living History.”

BERNARD HENRI-LEVY: One of France’s leading thinkers, Bernard Henri-Levy, has just written a book about the murder of danny Pearl. The invaluable blog, Cinderellabloggerfella, has a translation of an interview BHL gave to the Polish paper, Gazeta Wyborcza. Money quotes:

Q: Why does an intellectual leave his cosy appartment in the Parisian boulevard of Saint-Germain and spend months in obscure nooks and crannies at the end of the world?

BHL: First, to pay homage to Daniel Pearl – a brave journalist and a good man, who did not want to hate, only to understand his persecutors completely. Secondly, by following in his tracks, I understood that it was a matter of waking up the world. A little like those intellectuals who escaped from Germany in the 1930s and tried to warn people of the hell that was brewing for them there. I don’t want to err on the side of exaggeration but what I saw there was terrifying – the threat of the proliferation of nuclear weapons, knowledge how to make them and overwhelming fanaticism and hatred.

BHL gets it. Read the whole thing.

GET OVER IT: “What’s the point in painting Hillary with the same lurid colors that the rabid left applies to Bush? Despite the fixations of the DC-Manhattan media axis, the “blue-red” divide has faded since 9/11. Most people in this country have a mixed view of both W and Hillary: We know the former’s not too swift but trustworthy, if a bit too right-wing, and that the latter’s not too trustworthy but swift, if a bit too left-wing. Most of us would like to see more economic security in our lives (score one for H) but are unwilling to take any risks with our national security (score one for W). If he does nothing to increase employment, protect pensions and provide greater health coverage, Bush will be vulnerable in 2004 to a Truman-JFK Democrat, if such a thing still exists. Likewise, Hillary will be history if she doesn’t mend fences with the military and begin to accomodate the pro-military culture that’s no longer a mainly Southern matter and is now a national phenomenon.” – more defenses of Hillary on the Letters Page.

CLINTON KNEW

One thing the former president understands is power, and he knew full well that the resignation of Howell Raines at the NYT could hurt Democrats. The news might not be spun as ruthlessly as in the past; the campaign against the Bush administration under the guise of news coverage might not be as relentless; and so, apparently, Clinton intervened. This story, Clinton reminds us, wasn’t just about journalism. At a deeper level it was also about politics; and Clinton wanted to protect a huge victory that the left had won with Raines’ advancement. He lost. Journalism won.

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE

“I think this is a deliberate, intentional destruction of the United States of America,” – Bill Moyers on the Bush administration, as quoted in the Nation.

FIRST THE NYT: Now the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. Bloggers subject their state paper to close scrutiny.

THE PRO-EURO NYT: In the middle of a completely competent piece about Britain’s debate over whether to join the euro currency, the NYT’s Alan Cowell writes the following sentence:

Ever since Mr. Blair took office six years ago, he and Mr. Brown have wrestled over the question of Britain joining the euro. It is a step that would at once dilute Britain’s control over its own economy and greatly enhance its political status and influence among the 15-nation European Union.

But there is no firm evidence at all that if Britain were to abandon its own currency and fiscal and monetary sovereignty, it would “greatly enhance its political status and influence among the 15-nation European Union.” That implies that London would somehow supplant or rival the Berlin-Paris axis at the center of the EU project if the pesky pound were just abolished, or that with ten new countries joining the EU, Britain would somehow have more clout than today. I guess it’s arguable, but it’s far from obvious. And once you take that argument away, what have you got? There’s no more reason for Britain to adopt the euro than for Canada to adopt the U.S. dollar. The latter isn’t even on the agenda. Why should the former?

LORD COPPER ON IRAQ

A reader reminds me of the press baron, Lord Copper, in Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop,” still one of the best ever portraits of journalism still around. The Lord, who owns the newspaper, The Beast, instructs his correspondents on his policy toward covering war:

With regard to Policy, I expect you already have your own views. I never hamper my correspondents in any way. What the British public wants first, last and all the time is News. Remember that the Patriots are in the right and are going to win. The Beast stands by them four-square. But they must win quickly. The British public has no interest in a war which drags on indecisively. A few sharp victories, some conspicuous acts of personal bravery on the Patriot side, and a colourful entry into the capital. That is the Beast Policy for the war.

If only he owned the New York Times. (His true heir, of course, does own Fox News Channel.)

VINDICATED

The professor at Smith, James Miller, I cited earlier today has apparently now been given a reprieve. He writes today:

I’m the professor you mentioned who was denied tenure at Smith College. Smith’s five person Grievance Committee, however, recently unanimously ruled that two members of my department violated my academic freedom during my tenure review. They recommended to Smith’s President that I be reconsidered for tenure and the President accepted this recommendation.

Good news.

THE EURO VERSUS EUROPE

“The present euro zone structure is devastating for Germany. Our economy is bleeding. And I am convinced the UK would be crazy to join – you should stay out for as long as I can foresee… Deflation has already arrived, in that our economic dynamism has disappeared. There is no willingness among the private sector to invest, and euro zone rules have cut back public investment to an extent we haven’t seen since the war… [T]he whole system could eventually collapse, given the problems when one central bank has to steer an entire continent of nation-states. Certainly, the more countries that join, the more ungovernable it will become. In that sense, the euro was born to die.” – Wilhelm Nolling, fomer director of the Bundesbank, to Britain’s Channel Four.

EMAIL OF THE DAY

“I always thought that Kenny G held the world’s record for longest-sustained musical note but this Reuters item says otherwise. I wonder if the single-sentence rant from Tony Kushner you featured today rant could qualify for some kind of world record, say, longest-sustained paranoid fit or longest-sustained bi-polar rant.” More of the tough crowd’s comments on the Letters Page.

MNOOKIN PUNTS: Newsweek’s Seth Mnookin has been the best reporter on the NYT story for weeks so it was disappointing to read his latest piece which is designed to suck up to his bosses in Manhattan journalism by distancing himself from “right-wing ideologues” who criticized the NYT under Raines. C’mon, Seth. That’s a cheap shot. You made many of the same points as well, as Mickey Kaus points out. Mickey also has the sanest conclusion from the entire episode:

[T]he best we can hope for, I think, is a general toning down of Raines-style activism, even if that’s done in the name of “objectivity” (and therefore has the effect of actually perpetuating the essential “objectivity” fraud). … “Better blatant than latent” is usually a sound rule of thumb. With the NYT, I’ll settle for latent. …

I mean, just look at this piece today on Hillary’s book tour. You’d think there might be one quote from someone skeptical of HRC’s account or simply not an actual paid-up Democratic hack. But nah. Giving the other point of view would simply be appeasing “right-wing ideologues.”

PLEDGE WEEK II

Yep, it’s been six months since our first ever pledge week. We now have over 4,000 supporter-members, whose annual $20 + donations have kept the site afloat, paid our ever-increasing bandwidth costs and other expenses. As members, you also get a weekly email newsletter, the Inside Dish, and coming soon, a feature that will allow members to comment on posts and interact with other members. We’ve had a bumper half-year – from the run-up to the Gulf War, the resignations of Trent Lott and Howell Raines, the monitoring of the BBC, and the airing of many culture war debates. I don’t think there’s much doubt any more that blogs are here to stay and that they’ve helped change the equation in media and political debate. Those of you have been with me these past three years know that this wasn’t a foregone conclusion, which what we’ve achieved together all the more remrakable. Next year, I’m hoping to take this further, blogging directly from the conventions and tackling the election campaign with the speed, chutzpah and orneriness you’ve come to expect. But to do all this, I need your help. This site isn’t free; I haven’t sold it to a bigger media entity; as a professional writer whose time is increasingly taken up with the blog – over 500 emails and up to a dozen posts a day, sometimes seven days a week, around the clock – I need a salary of sorts; and although we’ve done all we can to keep expenses low, we’re still hard-put to make it to the end of the year without your support. If you gave last December, thanks and don’t worry (although if you’d like to chip in more, please do). But if you’re a newer reader, or if you’ve simply put off contributing till now: All we ask is $20 a year if you read this page more than a couple of times a week. If you can give more, please do. If you can’t give anything, then that’s why we will always keep the site free for general access. I could give you a fuller pitch, but if you’re reading this, you know whether you like the site and want to support it (which is certainly not the same thing as agreeing with it all the time). So please take a moment to keep us viable and afloat. We’ll be bugging you all week, then we’ll shut up till December. The details are here. It’s easy, quick and vital for our survival. Please give what you can.

WATCHING HILLARY

Yes, I sat through it. I was glad to hear the Senator from New York sit down with Baba Wawa for an hour. What struck me most was her absolute belief the she and her husband did nothing – nothing – of any substance to deserve the kind of scrutiny they got in eight years in office. Their only fault was naivete. I guess I’m not surprised by therigidity of her denial and composure. But something in me hoped for a little more – maybe a real reflection on her choices, her decisions, her unelected power, her stonewalling of the press, her enabling of her husband’s adulterous relationship with the truth, and so on. But nope. And then there the sheer fakery of it all. I really wish the real Hillary would simply come out of her shell and be in public what everybody says she is in private: caustic, decisive, aggressive, witty, ambitious, smart. What we saw last night was some saccharine, perfectly-spun middle American home-maker turning literally every question into a perfectly formulated political bromide. Its phoniness made me gag. And at its center is an obvious, big, glaring fib: that she never had an inkling of her husband’s long pattern of sexual abuse and harrassment until the August morning he told her of his latest victim. This stretches credulity beyond even Clintonite limits. And what equally amazes is that her litany of “innocent victims” never seems to include the victims of her husband’s sexual abuse. Perhaps she cannot as a feminist believe what so many women have testified to about her husband, so she simply pretends they don’t exist. They are invisible to her because they have to be. Her husband’s perjury and sexual harrassment don’t appear to have concerned her on moral grounds; and they concern her still only as a function of the obstacles they place in the way of her own political ambitions. That was true then; and her fibs now are yet another arbitrary layer of deception to keep her upward path smooth. My broader take on her book and her role in American politics can be read here.

THE PROOF WILL COME: This Los Angeles Times story seems highly plausible to me. Its argument is that Iraq did indeed once have considerable WMDs, that the inspections regime in the mid 1990s helped minimize it, but that a skeletal operation was kept up so that as soon as sanctions were lifted, a new and lethal program – especially biological – could be quickly brought back online. What the story shows is what we always knew: the issue was always the regime, not the weapons. Without such a regime, such weapons are not a danger; with it, they could be lethal. So the regime had to be eliminated. Maintaining sanctions indefinitely was a cruel and brutal way to keep the country contained, and was always liable to break down. Lifting sanctions would have been tanatamount to giving Saddam a chance to become a nuclear and chemical and biological menace. We pursued the only credible policy with regards to national security after 9/11. The carpers and critics are just revealing their exasperation at being humiliated and defeated – morally, intellectually and politically. Bob Kagan is worth reading on this point as well.

POSEUR ALERT

“You have presumably made a study of how important it is for the people — the people and not the oil plutocrats, the people and not the fantasists in right wing think tanks, the people and not the virulent lockstep gasbags of Sunday morning talk shows and editorial pages and all-Nazi all-the-time radio ranting marathons, the thinking people and not the crazy people, the rich and multivarious multicultural people and not the pale pale greyish-white cranky grim greedy people, the secular pluralist people and not the theocrats, the metaphorical imaginative expansive generous sensual rational people and not the sexual hysterics, the misogynists, Muslim and Christian and Jewish fundamentalists, the hard-working people and not the people whose only real exertion ever in their whole parasite lives has been the effort if takes to slash a trillion plus dollars in tax revenue and then stuff it in their already overfull pockets – whatever your degree, you have presumably read history and thought about justice and freedom and the relationship between ideas and action and you know how important it is for the sizable community of decent sane just egalitarian people, comprising many minority communities constituting if not a majority then a plurality, a substantial smart let’s- say-40%- plurality community (more than large enough in a pluralist democracy) (which for the time being the United States still is) if it uses its brains and works together, to wield decisive power, power for enfranchisement and economic as well as racial justice and gender justice and sexual political justice and environmental sanity and in the name of a real globalism, a real internationalism, a real solidarity with all the peoples of the world, to wield power infused with the knowledge that democracy is created not by military machines, not by MOAB bombs and smart bombs but by smart peaceable people, fed people, educated people — democracy is created by making an aggressive determined and longterm effort at eradicating the real axis of evil: poverty, homelessness, no health care.” – Tony Kushner, in one sentence, explaining his political philosophy.

ACADEMIC DIVERSITY: A professor gets denied tenure at Smith College after publishing an anti-p.c. piece in National Review Online. Two members of the tenure committee cited writing that could be construed as conservative in their defense of their no-votes. Some students feel otherwise:

“It’s hard to point to a single professor besides Jim Miller that is an active conservative voice in the economics department,” said Borell. Politics aside, “We think he stands on his own merits,” Kringen said. “He’s just a really excellent teacher. He requires students to think critically.”

But he’s a Republican. And there are some aspects of diversity that simply cannot be countenanced at some universities.