The Dish

So now we know that the head of al Jazeera was also in Saddam’s pay. Yes, I know the Arab press hardly has the standards of, er, say, the New York Times, but people should stop treating al Jazeera as if it is a credible journalistic source. It’s an adjunct to Islamo-fascism.

David Horowitz, God bless him, takes on the theocrats again. His core point is an obvious but important one: most of the religious right simply see no distinction between religion and politics. Or rather, they see politics primarily as means to promote their religious beliefs. Nothing could be less amenable to the moderation and skepticism at the core of political conservatism. David is particularly powerful when addressing the specious rhetoric of those who argue that homosexuality is a “choice”:

In my view, Knight’s statement is a prejudice dressed up as a moral position. It presumes that homosexuality is a choice, while all evidence points to the contrary. The conversion movements have been miserable failures. They have recruited a highly motivated and extreme minority among homosexuals – people so unhappy with their condition that they are desperate to change it – and the results are pathetic. Only a tiny minority of what is itself a tiny minority of people willing to go through the conversion process achieve a well-adjusted heterosexual result. That is my personal view, but it is irrelevant to the issue at hand. Even if Knight were correct in thinking that homosexuality is a moral choice, and that Christians and Jews have a moral obligation to oppose it, this would not alter the fact that it is inappropriate and self-defeating for philosophical conservatives to make this their political agenda. A mission to rescue homosexuals is a religious mission; it is not an appropriate political cause.

But the reason the far right has had to go back to the notion of homosexuality as a choice is because their arguments – indeed the vast majority of the arguments – against gay civil rights collapse if homosexuality is not, in any meaningful sense, a choice. Once you concede the eternal existence of homosexuals, a political solution would require bringing conservative principles to bear on certain obvious questions: How do we integrate gays better into society? How do we help nurture their relationships? How do we reach out to those gays who agree with conservative principles? These are the questions the far right wants undiscussed. They’re failing to end this discussion or change the subject. And they deserve to fail.

MY PET PEEVE: In a phrase: “carry-on luggage.” My flights to and from Chicago were full. Almost everyone brought on some immense piece of hand-luggage, the kind of hand-luggage that needs wheels to get it onto an airplane. All these people spent an enormous amount of time and effort huffing and puffing to drag these bulky dead-weights into the overhead compartments. During the flight, I observed maybe two people actually open the bins and get something from their bags. The rest just brought them with them – even though they’d already checked bigger luggage. What’s up with this? Maybe people simply don’t trust the airlines with their checked luggage and so pack an entire week’s worth of emergency clothing, laptops, etc just in case. But I think most of it is simply insecurity. People feel naked traveling without some kind of luggage dragging around their feet. They need to get over it. Travel would be so much more pleasant, so much quicker, so less goddamn irritating, and, yes, safer if your average plane traveler checked their real bags and took on only those things they might actually need in flight. But I guess I might as well expect affordable space travel in the next few years. Okay, just venting. Feel better now.

WHAT LIBERAL MEDIA? An interesting exchange on Howie Kurtz’s “Reliable Sources” this past weekend. The discussion was about the liberal-left leanings of most political drama on television. Why isn’t there a conservative version of, say, the “West Wing?” Over to Howie:

KURTZ: One thing these programs have in common, conservatives are practically invisible. President Bartlett in The West Wing is a Democrat. Martin Sheen, in fact, made anti-war ads before the invasion of Iraq. “Mr. Sterling” is a California liberal based loosely on Jerry Brown. Why aren’t there any Republicans?
O’DONNELL: You will never get that TV show. You’ll never, ever get the Republican TV show. the Writers Guild of America, my union, is at a minimum, 99 percent leftist liberal and, like me, socialist. And we don’t know how to write it. We don’t.

Was there some irony there? Sure. But truth as well.

Took a long weekend, as some of you noticed. The Dish will get more steam up as the day progresses and as my hangover recedes. But I’m traveling today too – back again from Chicago, where Memorial Day was spectacularly beautiful. On breaking stories, Mickey Kaus has the latest on the NYT meltdown. The scandal now, apparently, is not that Rick Bragg regularly ripped off stringers for his pieces (with no credit) but that this is NYT policy. Gets better all the time, doesn’t it? But I did get a chance to read John Colapinto’s excellent take on the next generation of college Republicans in Adam Moss’s magazine. Yep, they’re much more comfortable with diversity (including gays) than their predecessors. Their conservatism takes this multicultural reality as a base and builds an intelligent conservatism on top of the new world we live in. I wish the GOP would not have to wait a generation to get this message. But it’s one I’ve been preaching in this space for quite a while. Glad to see the younger generation gets it.

THE SECRET OF ANNIKA’S POPULARITY: Yes, she’s sexy. But the way in which the public rallied behind Annika Sorenstam’s pioneering golf game was surely because of something else: she represented an old, pure form of feminism, a message that has been somewhat lost in the politically correct culture wars of the last decade or so. Sorenstam, after all, was not portraying herself as a victim of male oppression. She’s a fabulously successful sportswoman, a wealthy celebrity, and happily married. She wasn’t asking for special treatment in any way. She played exactly the same course, under exactly the same conditions as her male peers. Despite the fact that women’s courses are generally shorter and less troublesome than men’s, Sorenstam played with the big boys – and beat many of them. And she’s refreshingly free of political posturing. She’s not aiming to be a feminist icon. She’s trying to play golf as best she can against the best competition in the world. She is also not attempting to deny the obvious: that there are significant differences between men and women. The more we learn about the impact of hormones such as testosterone and estrogen and the deeper our understanding of evolutionary psychology, the clearer it is that some differences – in physical strength, subtle mental attributes, emotional temperament – can vary with gender. That’s why we don’t have co-ed sprinting races or expect women to compete with men in the shot-put. But what we have in common as human beings vastly overwhelms what differentiates us as members of one gender or another. Sorenstam is a pioneer in accepting this, and reveling in it. She’s not indistinguishable from the men; but she is competitive with them. She’s different but equal. Americans are far more comfortable with this kind of social message – and for a good reason. It’s about integration, not separatism. It’s about personal achievement, not group grievance. It’s about merit, not complaint. It’s about golf, not politics. Sorenstam cannot be accused of claiming any “special rights.” She’s embracing the old American virtue of doing your best against the best, and not letting anything – gender, race, class, religion, sexual orientation – get in the way. That was once the core, simple, unifying message of the civil rights movement. Odd, isn’t it, that it took a Swedish female golfer to remind us.

POSEUR ALERT I: “This manly exhibition was no accident. The media team that timed Bush’s appearance [on the U.S.S. Lincoln] to catch just the right tone of sunlight must have chosen that uniform and had him try it on. I can’t prove they gave him a sock job, but clearly they thought long and hard about the crotch shot. As students of the cinematic, they would know that the trick is to make the bulge seem natural, so it registers without raising an issue. Tight jeans (a staple of Bush’s dress-down attire) can achieve this look, but nothing works like fighter-pilot drag, with its straps that frame and shape the groin. Most people presume this effect is merely functional. That frees the imagination to work, and work it does, in men and women alike … Say what you will about the male body being objectified. We may expect a dude to display himself like an Abercrombie & Fitch model – but the president? Clearly Bush’s handlers want to leave the impression that he’s not just courageous and competent but hung.” – Richard “proud sissy” Goldstein, Village Voice.

POSEUR ALERT II: “This eulogy owes nothing to artifice or chance. It has ripened inside me since childhood. From the bottom of my pockets, stuck to the back of my smock, hidden in the corner of abacuses, poetry gushed out-…” – Dominique de Villepin, from the preface of his new book, “In Praise Of Those Who Stole The Fire.”

Jack Shafer is shaken out of his counter-intuitive spin-for-Howell mode by the Bragg story. He has the goods on other Bragg misdemeanors. Bragg has a long history of faking by-lines, and ripping off unpaid stringers. It turns out that he merely spent a total of two hours in Apalachicola for that elaborate, evocative, deeply reported story. He never even met any of the people quoted. Why is this any better than Jayson Blair? Bragg is unrepentant. And he gets suspended for two weeks. More evidence of Raines favoritism. This blatant attempt to bury this news, highlight only one story of Bragg’s, and give him such a light punishment could only serve to intensify the anger that many ethical journalists, who aren’t Raines suck-ups at the Times, now feel.

Brilliant news-management from the Times, by having the latest scandal hit the fan during the Memorial Day weekend. But the pattern is identical: a Raines crony (Rick Bragg), pampered and protected by the big guy, cutting corners, passing off others’ work as his own, and getting special treatment. But Raines stays. Eventually, everyone will be held responsible but the man who is ultimately responsible.

“I just sent the following short letter to the New York Times in response to their request from readers for other “defects” in past articles. However this particular case gets resolved in the course of their investigation, the matter I describe is a serious indictment of what passes for reporting at the Times these days, and for that reason, I thought you might want to share it with your readers:

In an Editorial Observer column by Times reporter Adam Cohen entitled “Why the Supreme Court Needs to Visit Cass High School,” (March 31, 2003), Cohen reports under a Detroit byline on his recent visit to Detroit’s Cass Technical, an inner-city, virtually all-black high school in Detroit. Describing Cass as a “wreck, with dingy classrooms, ancient lab equipment, broken hallway clocks” Cohen cites Cass as the embodiment of his premise that schools with large minority enrollments tend to be seriously underfunded, and that as a general rule, the higher the percentage of black students, on average, the worse facilities a school has.
As someone who travels regularly in this part of Detroit, I don’t dispute the description, or even the premise, generally speaking, but I was nevertheless struck by a glaring omission in this article – the fact that a new Cass is under construction adjacent to the current Cass building. What’s more, after a few minutes of research on Nexis, I learned that the new facility is budgeted for $114.5 million. To put things in perspective, only two other high schools in the entire United States have ever been built in the $100-million range. The new building is a six-story, air-conditioned glassy building that is laboratory-intensive, with music, art and dance studios. How, I wondered, could Cohen have missed the gigantic construction site right next door to the school that he visited, or the sign prominently announcing that the building under construction is the new Cass Tech? In fact, much of the new building is already standing. How could the prospective move not have come up in conversations with administrators that Cohen supposedly interviewed?
At the time, I chalked the omission up to liberal bias, and penned a letter to the Times mocking Cohen under the heading “Why New York Times Reporter Adam Cohen Needs to Visit the New Cass High School.” In light of recent events, I wonder whether there is another explanation. I don’t suppose it is possible, is it, that Mr. Cohen never visited the Cass school in Detroit? It seems worth investigating, doesn’t it? The only other explanations I can think of are (a) incredibly slopply reporting, or (b) blatant bias. Which is it?

Of course, it could also be both.

EMAIL OF THE DAY II: “The news about Rick Bragg doesn’t surprise me. In Feb. of 2001, Bragg wrote a story after Dale Earnhardt had been killed at Daytona. It was written as if he had been in a Wal-Mart in Mooresville, NC, at the moment the news of Earnhardt’s death was learned by the shoppers. He described the sorrow of the locals and their specific reactions. At the time, I asked myself what-the chances were that Bragg happened to be in a Wal-Mar in Mooresville, NC, at the very moment people learned that Dale Earnhardt had died.-Not very great. In fact, more like nil. But that’s how the story was written. And it wasn’t written as if recounting the story from the memory of others. It-was a “first hand” account.-As an editor myself, I wondered why the NYT editors would not question this. Now I know.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

Hey, I made the cut as a member of the VRWC. Eat your heart out, Jonah!

If you were Howell Raines and knew that another incident of one of your cronies’ fabricating by-lines or inventing color or falsely appropriating other people’s reporting would lead to your demise, what would your stategy be? It would be to delay any announcement of the errors, to parse them out slowly so as to minimize their impact, and release the first item on the Friday before Memorial Day. Sure enough, the first news of any Blair-like errors can be found in today’s New York Times:

An article last June 15 described the lives and attitudes of oystermen on the Florida Gulf Coast who faced threats to their livelihood from overuse of water farther north. It carried the byline of Rick Bragg, and the dateline indicated that the reporting was done in Apalachicola. In response to a reader’s recent letter questioning where the reporting took place, The Times has reviewed the article. It found that while Mr. Bragg indeed visited Apalachicola briefly and wrote the article, the interviewing and reporting on the scene were done by a freelance journalist, J. Wes Yoder. The article should have carried Mr. Yoder’s byline with Mr. Bragg’s.

How brief was Mr Bragg’s visit to Apalachicola? Did he make it out of the airport? Did he stay the night? The New York Daily News has some background on Bragg’s very close relationship with Raines. Somehow, I don’t think this is the first item we will read about Bragg. But its timing suggests how hardball Raines is going to play. Will Bragg face any consequences for what seems like clear deception? I guess we know the answer to that, don’t we? But this item opens the sluice-gates for other papers to report on Bragg. Tick, tock.

Spinsanity picks up on this blog’s early criticism of Maureen Dowd’s deceptive attempt to say that president Bush declared that al Qaeda was “not a problem any more.” He never said that. But Bill Press, Paul Begala, and other liberals on CNN repeated the canard. The New York Times has not run a correction. Dowd has not run a correction in her column either. Even after Jayson Blair, they’re shameless. I’d say the real test of whether Raines is serious about improving the quality of the Times is whether the paper corrects Dowd’s lie. We’re still waiting.

Thanks for all your emails on tax cuts and deficits. To make myself clearer: I’m all in favor of tax cuts. I think Americans are over-taxed; I believe that individuals can make far smarter decisions about where the country’s wealth should be spent than government usually does; I’m particularly persuaded that tax rates in particular should encourage work not redistribution. Where I differ from others is in their belief that deficits don’t matter; that government debt is no problem; and that drastically increasing that debt just before the entitlement crunch hits is good politics or economics. I think we need to decrease spending while we decrease taxes. At the very least, I think we should hold a line on spending while we decrease taxes. What I cannot support is vastly increasing spending while you cut taxes. Call me crazy, but I regard this as a question of responsibility. We have a responsibility not to leave the next generation in a huge hole of our making. At this point, it’s clear that the Republican party, at all levels, is simply fiscally irresponsible. This is true at the federal level, where Republicans have out-spent Democrats; and at a state level, as this USA Today synopsis spells out:

State legislatures controlled by Republicans increased spending an average of 6.54% per year from 1997 to 2002, compared with 6.17% for legislatures run by Democrats… Republicans cut taxes an average of 1.08% annually from 1997 to 2002 when they controlled both the legislature and governor’s office. Democrats cut taxes 0.59% annually when they were in charge of state government.

(My thanks to Hoosier Review.) So I was wrong yesterday. The Democrats aren’t worse. They’re actually better at controlling spending than today’s Republicans. True fiscal conservatives might want to rethink their long-standing preference for Republicans.

CUT SPENDING FIRST: The arguments against this are as follows. The only way to control spending is to cut taxes first, by starving the government of resources. One email spelled it out pretty clearly:

I’ve said this to you on more than one occasion – there is a singularly good reason for MASSIVE deficits… GW’s real job, like Reagan before him, is to ensure that all the money is spent, that when a Dem takes office, 33 percent or more is paying off debt.-This is called preemptive handcuffs. It isn’t my idea. It is David Stockman’s.-No money to spend when Dems are in office. You are being childish. The only rationale for fiscal responsibility NOW is if you want there to be $ for Dems to spend later. Stop being NAxcfVE. No one admits this – like many things I’ve been a party to – it isn’t a philosophy it is a strategy. Going deeper: The international markets understand this. “Oh, a deficit? That means nothing because they are spending the next Dem’s $.” This is really an analysis of why lib policy is doomed to failure. It can’t work, because it is soooooooooooo easy for Reps to undermine. That’s the real Keynes. Think!

Give the guy points for candor. But the result of this repetitive, partisan strategy is surely an increasing level of government debt, which doesn’t only restrict future spending, but restricts future tax cuts. I hate to bring up the national interest here, as opposed to cheap partisan advantage. The other point, of course, is that it isn’t the Democrats’ future spedning we have to worry about. It’s the Republicans’!

THE DEFLATION THREAT: One other reason for blowing a hole in the budget might be deflation. If that really is a threat, then maybe soaring spending and tax cuts are a useful temporary measure. If the GOP made this Keynesian argument, they’d be a little more convincing. But if that is indeed the idea, why not pursue Warren Buffett’s idea of a holiday in the payroll tax? Yes, this would only intensify social security’s future problems, but according to today’s Republicans, there’s nothing to worry about on that score anyway. Another answer might be the war on terror. Maybe we do need to go into deeper debt to forestall a future attack that could indeed cripple the economy. Again, I’d be open to persuasion on that as well. But we don’t even hear that. We simply hear the old argument that reducing taxes increases government revenue more than the tax-cuts themselves cost. Sorry. I’m not buying it. Look, I hope I’m wrong. I hope that the cheaper dollar, tax cuts and low interest rates will lead to a recovery that will bring revenues flooding into the Treasury. But count me as an Eisenhower Republican skeptic. And until the GOP actually proves it has the ability to restrain spending, I certainly don’t begrudge anyone for voting Democratic in order to keep the government within its limits.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE: Anatole Kaletsky sees recovery ahead, and views our current malaise as a repeat of 1991- 1992:

It is widely believed, for example, that there is something unusual – even unprecedented – about the American economy’s slowness to respond to low interest rates in the present cycle. This is simply false. In the three years from 1990 to 1992, the Fed cut interest rates by 6.75 percentage points and the economy grew by a total of 5.2 per cent. In the three years from 2001 to 2003, growth will total 5.3 per cent, according to the latest OECD forecast, even though interest rates gave been cut by only 5.25 percentage points.

Put that down to productivity gains, I guess.