The Dish

Sadly, it was mobbed. The hall was far too small to accommodate the crowds and many were turned away. I can’t believe NYU doesn’t have a larger hall than one that sits a couple hundred at most. But once it got under way, the event was great. Hitch was splendid – half after-dinner jokester, half passionate moralist. He made one point in particular that resonated. On the way there, we were confronted with protestors with “No War On Iraq” posters. Hitch noticed the Orwellian resonance of this slogan. The slogan, strictly speaking, is a lie, one of many promoted by the anti-war left and right. There is no possibility of a war with “Iraq.” Half the country – inhabited by the Kurds and Shia Muslims is already protected from Saddam’s murderous designs by British and American air-power. The remaining rump is not a country as such; it’s a population terrorized by a police state run by a sadistic maniac. We are not therefore at war with the country or people of Iraq; and by equating Saddam with Iraq, these so-called “peace-protestors” are de facto parties to his vile propaganda, the notion that Iraq is Saddam and Saddam is Iraq. That lie was recently displayed in the humiliating spectacle of grown human beings not simply being required to vote for Saddam, as Hitch observed, but actually to dance in the streets to celebrate him, to humiliate themselves out of terror. This disgusting spectacle wasn’t like “1984.” It was “1984.” And this is what the anti-war movement now finds itself defending. I watched part of the anti-war rally in DC on C-SPAN this weekend. Not a single speaker even addressed the evil in Baghdad. In their attempt to derail any attempt to disarm Saddam, and in their facile equation of Saddam with Iraq, they show the empty, bitter center of their alleged morality. (Check in later today for the first installment of my email chat with Hitch on his new book, “Why Orwell Matters,” on the Book Club page. We both hope you’ll join in as soon as you feel like it.)

MUST-READ: One of the books that first persuaded me I should write a book about the politics of homosexuality was Shelby Steele’s “The Content of Our Character.” He’s written much since, but I don’t think I’ve read anything of his as searingly beautiful and unflinching as his current piece in Harper’s. It’s amazing that it appears in that magazine, which has become a largely unread litany of bitter leftism under Lewis Lapham’s dyspeptic leadership. But Steele’s essay truly is a must-read. Steele shows brilliantly how the goal of black liberation – liberation toward an individuality unsullied by the poison of racism – has transformed itself into a humiliating attachment to black victimization and failure. The piece shocks the reader with its honesty. At one point, fo example, Steele recounts an exchange shown on C-SPAN between a black student and Ward Connerly at a Harvard debate. The student is withering toward Connerly’s anti-race preference message, and he is naturally supported by his peers and the Harvard establishment. This is Steele’s reflection on the young black student, insisting on the permanent oppression of his race:

[C]onsider what this Harvard student is called upon by his racial identity to argue in the year 2002. All that is creative and imaginative in him must be rallied to argue the essential weakness of his own people. Only their weakness justifies the racial preferences they receive decades after any trace of anti-black racism in college admissions. The young man must not show faith in the power of his people to overcome against any odds; he must show faith in their inability to overcome without help. As Mr. Connerly points to far less racism and far more freedom and opportunity for blacks, the young man must find a way, against all the mounting facts, to argue that black Americans cannot compete without preferences. If his own forebears seized freedom in a long and arduous struggle for civil rights, he must argue that his own generation is unable to compete on paper-and-pencil standadized tests.

Steele doesn’t mince words – because he sees how a powerful faction of liberalism, the central meaning of which should be about freedom, has become indistinguishable in some quarters from a reactionary and racist ideology that is the biggest obstacle to the advancement of African-American equality and progress today.

VON HOFFMAN AWARD NOMINEE: “An illuminating piece on [Paul] Wolfowitz, ‘The Sunshine Warrior’ by Bill Keller … gave a sympathetic view of [Wolfowitz’s] belief that the assertion of American power can turn Iraq into a democracy and help transform the entire Middle East. I was moved by his optimism, as I read, but I kept thinking of one thing: Vietnam. Here, as in Vietnam, the advocates are sure that American power can prevail – and sure that the result will be a happy one. But here, as in Vietnam, so many things could go wrong. Iraq is a large, modern, heavily urbanized country. If we bomb it apart, are we going to be wise enough to put it back together? Have Mr. Wolfowitz and his fellow sunshine warriors calculated the effects of an American war on feelings among Arabs and other Muslims? What would follow Saddam? The nature of a post-Saddam government in Iraq is a crucial concern for Iran, Turkey, Syria, and others; but the Bush administration has shown no sign of having an answer to that question.” – Anthony Lewis, the current New York Review of Books.

“If all this means what it says – war [with Iraq] – then George Bush is taking his country and the world into a tragedy of appalling dimensions. It would be a war with enormous casualties and with destabilizing effects beyond calculation… Listening to the President talk to the Marines, one might think that a war with Iraq would be quick and easy. Mr. Bush might have been giving a pep talk before a game. But it would almost certainly not be quick or easy. And not beneficently simple in its results. A war with Iraq could devastate a huge area of the Middle East. It could arouse many Arabs, even those critical of Saddam Hussein, against the United States.” – Anthony Lewis, November 23, 1990, The New York Times.

MELISSA RULES: A small but wonderful landmark in last night’s game. I thought Melissa Etheridge’s rendition of the national anthem was superb. I felt proud as a gay man that an open lesbian sang so beautifully and powerfully at the final game of the World Series. A simple, undemonstrative moment of actual integration. May more follow.

EMAIL OF THE DAY:

As a former daily newspaper reporter, I am struck that everything we thought we knew about the Washington “sniper” was wrong:
1. He was not an “angry white male” or “right-wing gun nut.”
2. He was not acting alone.
3. He was not using a “white box truck.”
4. He was not in a “white van with ladder racks on top.”
5. He was not “watching television coverage and reacting to it” since he was living in his car.
6. He was not a “delivery guy familiar with the area who knows all the back alleys and escape routes.”
7. He was not a guy “going to work each day like a normal person” and killing in his “off hours.”
8. His choice of the Washington, D.C., area as his killing ground was not coincidental. He had to cross a continent to get there.

In New York today, I just heard of Senator Wellstone’s death, and that of his wife, daughter and colleagues. I disagreed with a huge amount of what he believed in, but he was one of the most sincere, passionate and genuine people in American politics today. This is terrible news for all of us who value diversity of opinion and liveliness of debate in a democratic society. May he and all who died with him rest in peace.

BELAFONTE, BIGOT: Check out my latest piece in Salon.

SUSPECTED OF TERRORISM: Read this piece from the Bellingham Herald. The dots may be getting connected.

Of course, the first thing to say is that the news yesterday about the capture of the sniper and his accomplice was wonderful. My hometown can breathe a sigh of relief. And our hearts go out to the victims, their families and friends and to those many, many others who have been terrified day in day out. But it also seems to me important to ask the hard questions about what this event meant and means. Reading the newspapers in the early hours, I’m a little stunned. I’m aware that we still don’t know much about the precise motives of the sniper killer and his accomplice. But we do know the following: he was a convert to Islam, he changed his name recently, he harbored “strong anti-American feelings and had publicly praised the terrorist attacks of September 11,” he actively supported the Nation of Islam, and the New Jersey plates for the car were bought on the first anniversary of September 11, immediately after which a bomb scare emptied the DMV building. Call me crazy, but isn’t that a striking series of coincidences? To read the papers this morning is like looking at several massive dots with no-one daring to connect them. So allow me. It seems to me that this guy is clearly a disturbed and dangerous person, period. Perhaps he was simply a bad guy and a criminal. But, as I wrote a while back, the attacks were clearly not the usual pattern of a serial killer or a conventional sniper. Here’s what I posited eleven days ago in the Dish –

“[W]hat the D.C. sniper is now doing is terrorism. I don’t mean he’s a member of any specific group necessarily or even a person who might call himself a terrorist. I mean someone – a criminal – whose goal, whose purpose, is purely terror. I can see no other pattern to the shootings.”

So we have a Muslim convert, sympathetic to the murderers of 9/11, terrorizing the nation’s capital, and coming close to shutting its daily life down. I don’t see that it matters whether he was formally a member of al Qaeda or some other group. In fact, it’s more disturbing if he is not.

THE FRUITS OF RACIAL PROFILING: Now imagine the following scenario. A sniper was terrorizing the capital city. Police came across a white guy in a car whom they suspected. They took his name, but they didn’t arrest him, because they were looking for a black man. The guy subsequently went on to kill several more people. Wouldn’t this be the basis for uproar? Wouldn’t the cops involved be fired? Wouldn’t there be a massive investigation into how such racial profiling could have happened? I would think so. But this may have been exactly what happened in this case! According to the Washington Post yesterday, the cops stopped the Chevy Caprice on October 8. Here’s how the Washington Post describes what happened:

The blue Caprice discovered today was believed to have been approached in Baltimore by police who found Muhammad sleeping on Oct. 8, the day after a 13-year-old boy in Bowie was wounded as the eighth victim of the sniper, the sources said. The car was spotted in a parking lot off 28th Street, near the exit ramp to Interstate 83. Muhammad was allowed to go, although his name was put into an information data bank in Baltimore, the sources said. “Everyone was looking for a white car with white people,” said one high-ranking police source. Muhammad and Malvo are black males.

I’m a little suspicious about the wording here: “… was believed to have been approached …” But I see no refutation of this incident in today’s papers. And then there’s the stunning quote: “Everyone was looking for a white car with white people.” Get that? There’s a word for this: racial profiling. It’s wrong in itself but it’s simply astounding that this profiling by the police was also followed by the deaths of several more people. Why isn’t this a scandal? The only reason the cops – not “everyone,” in the weasel words of the “high-ranking police source” – were looking for a white guy was allegedly because only white guys are serial killers or snipers. First off, this is no excuse for racial profiling. Second, we already knew that this was not a typical serial killer or sniper. Thirdly, in the words of the New York Times,

According to a database compiled by James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University and one of the most widely quoted profilers, 55 percent of sniper killers are white.

In other words, the whole notion of racial profiling in this case was hooey in the first place. Even if he had been a typical sniper killer, there was close to a 50 percent chance of his being non-white. And yet the cops let a man go because of his race.

THE P.C. MEDIA: So the question becomes: why aren’t these obvious questions being raised in the major papers this morning? Part of it is legitimate caution in speculating about things we don’t know fully yet. That’s completely defensible. Part of it may be waiting for the shock to wear off. But, as I’ve shown, everything I’ve written here is from the papers themselves. So they’re not disguising or concealing any facts. I think the first reason for the reticence is an understandable reluctance to draw the link between domestic extreme Islam and terrorism. But this possibility is real; we’ve seen American citizens acting as foot-soldiers for al Qaeda; and we’ve seen them act as sympathizers. It may be grim to contemplate it, but these are times to look reality in the face. And I think the second reason for the reticence is that there’s a double-standard in which racial profiling against whites is fine, but racial profiling against blacks is wrong. In my view, any kind of racial profiling is always wrong. And if the cops had not been making reverse racist assumptions in this case, there’s a chance a few more people would be alive today. That alone should be enough for the people responsible for this profiling to be investigated. But somehow, I think they’ll get away with barely any criticism at all. Relief will dispel responsibility. It shouldn’t.

To Michelle Malkin, who was among the first to raise questions about the assumption that the killer was white. (Via Seth Gitell.)

I have barely offered a word about the Washington sniper story, because I can’t see much to say, except it’s appalling, and I hope they catch this monster soon. If you watch the television, you will have heard all that you need to. And much, much more. But I have to say I disagree with Howard Fineman’s notion that the president has been delinquent in not being more outspoken. One difference bwteen this president and the last is that Bush doesn’t feel the need to be the country’s permanent emotional counselor, or to involve himself in every issue or event. Yesterday he made brief but sensible comments and showed that the feds were doing what they could to help. Beyond that, this is a police job. Period. Then there’s this observation by Fineman:

The macro reason [for Bush’s reticence] I sense from talking with one of the president’s top political aides. Karl Rove & Co. sort of like the way things are going in the congressional races right now: All the Iraq talk has had the effect of fragmenting the electoral season’s thematics, with no single topic around which to unify the opposition to the president. His cautious political advisers don’t want to do anything to change that dynamic. Why risk getting more deeply involved in a case that might still take days, weeks or months to solve?

I guess there may be some people in the White House cynical enough to take this view. But Bush’s relative restraint signals to me rather that he has a good sense of the boundaries of his job, respects delegation to others, and doesn’t feel the need to mouth off constantly about something that needs patience and diligence rather than talk. I wish more of the media would follow his example.

SAFIRE GETS IT: “The world must not allow Iraq to gain the level of destructive power that appeasement and misplaced trust permitted North Korea to achieve.” Amen. I’d forgotten the damning Jimmy Carter quote of the time, likening his “breakthrough” with the murderers in Pyongyang as a “miracle.” Here’s what I want to know: why hasn’t anyone in the press asked Carter and Clinton what they now think of their legacy in North Korea? Why are these people never ever called to account?

ANIMAL FARM: I just re-read the Orwell classic on the plane to and from Ohio. I’m prepping for the NYU panel tonight. Two re-inforced impressions, which have certainly occurred to many others before. One key shift toward totalitarianism in the novel comes when the old hymn “Beasts of England” gets replaced by Napoleon (the chief pig and Stalin figure) to a more generic song praising “Animal Farm.” Orwell’s point, I think, is that patriotism is, for all its faults, far more humane and progressive than its opposite. Today’s left would do well to remember that, I think. I was also struck by the sense that the apotheosis of Animal Farm makes it no worse than its human-run neighbors. Orwell’s distrust of capitalism was as intense as his loathing of Stalinism. I think he was wrong there – and guilty of moral equivalence. But I also think that it does no justice to him, as Hitchens argues, to ignore this and co-opt him for the right – even the neo-liberal right of today. Just some random thoughts on the plane. I’ll be talking briefly tonight about how “Homage To Catalonia” was inspiration for my own far less accomplished writing about the AIDS epidemic.

RAINES AWARD NOMINEE: “The conflict in Israel has sparked serious debate and inflamed tension on America’s college campuses, and Harvard University is no exception. Tensions among faculty and students have reached new boiling points since over two hundred professors petitioned to have the university sever its financial ties to Israel. Pro-Israel groups have accused colleagues and schoolmates of anti-Semitism, and many agree that the freedom to speak out at Harvard is in jeopardy. Geneive Abdo reports. (7:19)” – NPR’s online synopsis of a Morning Edition segment.

SOUTH KOREA SHIFTS: More signs that Bush’s approach is gaining favor in the Korean peninsula.

YOUNGER SIBLING ISSUES: Is it blasphemous to find this somewhat amusing?

“But as we barrel down the road to war with Iraq, maybe we ought to quiz our unilateralist president about why it is necessary for us to bomb, invade and occupy Iraq while North Korea gets the striped-pants treatment. Is it because North Korea has a million men under arms? Is it because Kim Jong Il never threatened to kill Bush’s father, or because he has no oil, or is not a Muslim?” – Mary McGrory, Washington Post.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “Keep up the pressure on Paul K. I have known him for more than twenty years and, as I told you in an email sent a year or so ago, once regarded him as a Nobel Prize possibility. Alas, his politics and ego have become truly insufferable. Can you imagine an economist of his gifts falling back on the argument that the increasing relative compensation of CEOs has been a result of a change in the public’s willingness to tolerate inequality in income distribution? If one of his doctoral students tried this, he quick response would be, “well that is an interesting hypothesis, but how do you propose that we might submit it to testing?” Indeed, Paul is smart enough to see the obvious circularity in the whole argument. To wit: since we have more income inequality, it must follow that people are willing to tolerate inequality, and vice versa. As for Krugman’s argument that the increase in CEOs relative “take” results from the fact that they “appoint” board members, all I can say is that having served on boards of public companies for three decades and having looked at board composition from, say, the 1950s, it is demonstrably the case that boards were more “CEO picked” 40 to 50 years ago than they are now. In the “old days,” interlocking directorates and the like were the rule not the exception.”

An email provides some balance to my link to Dana Milbank’s Washington Post article yesterday about president Bush’s sloppiness with facts:

Good dish . . . with the notable exception of touting Milbank’s article. Although he accuses the President of lying (6 times by my count), his evidence is less than compelling.
His main thrust, that knowingly false statements were proffered, center on three statements concerning RPVs, Iraqi nuclear capabilities, and union obstructionism over homeland security: “And all three statements were dubious, if not wrong. Further information revealed that the aircraft lack the range to reach the United States; there was no such report by the IAEA; and the customs dispute over the detectors was resolved long ago.
Only an idiot would think an RPV had the range to hit the US mainland–obviously the President referred to US assets in the Persian Gulf region (or terrorist applications assuming other transport); Milbank later quotes the “no such” report by the IAEA–which states that Iraq was 6-24 months away from nukes at the start of the Gulf War (and Bush mangled less than Milbank did); and the union’s silly dispute over radiation detectors was in fact indicative of why the proposed department of homeland security could do without union.
Milbank’s statements are, if anything, more dubious than the President’s. Then he goes on to make some basic logical errors. In the first, he quotes the President’s assertions that a terrorist received medical attention in Iraq, then suggests there is no evidence the government knew about it (a point both unlikely and irrelevant). Then he quotes a statement that Iraq “could” provide terrorists with nukes, and claims it contradicts a CIA report suggesting they “wouldn’t.”
Finally, he closes with a basic error in arithmetic: “Other times, the president’s assertions simply outpace the facts. In New Hampshire earlier this month, he said his education legislation made “the biggest increase in education spending in a long, long time.” “In fact, the 15.8 percent increase in Department of Education discretionary spending for fiscal year 2002 (the figures the White House supplied when asked about Bush’s statement) was below the 18.5 percent increase under Clinton the previous year. . .”
In fact, a 15.8 % increase is “bigger” than a previous year’s 18.5 % increase (115.8 x 118.5 = 137.22; 137.22 – 118.5 = 18.72% ). Dana might wish to define an “increase” as a multiplicative factor, but dictionaries, math books, and common usage all refer to addition.
God knows this isn’t the most eloquent president we’ve ever had, and his tendency to mangle common English makes for some non-sequiturs. But as far as I can tell, the outright prevarication level has dropped precipitously since the last administration. Milbank’s selective quotes make it difficult to determine if there is any justice to his claims, but he has failed abysmally in his attempt to make a cogent case. And if this is the best available argument that Bush is a liar, he must be pretty darn truthful.

A worthwhile amendment, I think. I’m in Indiana today, talking to students. Hope to check in late in the afternoon.

It’s too much to hope for, I know. But I can’t help feeling that this mass amnesty is a truly epochal event. John Burns, living proof that greatness still exists in the New York Times, has been writing riveting accounts of what’s going on. This passage staggered me:

Iraqis said they knew of no previous occasion, in Baghdad, when people had taken to the streets to march on a government building, and then had persisted in protests even after secret police fired automatic rifles into the air, as they did today.

Some who attended a protest at a secret police headquarters on the outskirts of Baghdad on Monday said there were at least 700 people taking part who for some time defied orders that they disperse.
“Where is my son? I demand to know where is my son!” one middle-aged woman in a black cloak cried, as she huddled with a group of women at the head of 150 protesters who staged a noisy rally today outside the Ministry of Information beside the Tigris River in central Baghdad.

Similar cries went up from other women desperate to know what had become of long-lost husbands and sons and brothers, in some cases sisters and daughters, who disappeared into the vast network of prisons and detention centers as long as 20 years ago. The details that stuttered out as the women told their tales were like episodes from the nightmares of Soviet Russia: Men and women, and even teenage children, picked up by anonymous enforcers, usually in unmarked cars, and never heard from again. As officials pushed reporters back, ordered security guards to fire warning shots into the air, and pleaded with the women to still their cries, the women’s accounts of their wrenching doorstep partings, and of the dates198019871991199219971999 rang out like the tolling of a sexton’s bell.

The Journal yesterday wondered whether we have another Ceausescu on our hands. Right now, it’s wishful thinking. The deeper point, though, is that once this kind of regime relaxes its grip even slightly, the unraveling could come quickly. Remember the last evil empire? The main fear is that chaos would follow and terrorist elements might loot or use some of the most lethal weapons in Saddam’s arsenal. Which means we must be ready to go in sooner rather than later. But all of this must, broadly speaking, be an encouraging sign. Bush’s hard line is already paying dividends. We can only pray we can disarm Saddam and liberate Iraq without war.

WHEN BUSH COMES TO SHOVE: The Koreans, North and South, understand what the current administration is all about. I loved this quote in the Financial Times:

Paik Jin-hyun, professor of international relations at Seoul National University, said the North was using nuclear weapons to “blackmail” the US into supporting its crumbling economy. “North Korea seems to misunderstand the nature of the Bush administration,” Mr Paik said. “What may have worked with [President Bill] Clinton will not work with [President George W.] Bush. Trying to use nuclear weapons to blackmail this US government. .. is the worst possible tactic.”

Telling, isn’t it? Claudia Rosett sees the bigger picture today as well.

YES, I KNOW: This Dilbert poll of the weaseliest people, institutions, religions, countries, etc. is highly unscientific. But I also thought it was dead on. Enjoy, if you haven’t already.

HE’S BACK: If you live in Montana, and care about fighting back against the kind of sleaze that Max Baucus has engaged in for years, for goodness’ sake, vote for him.

CAMPUS ANTI-SEMITISM WATCH: Please send me pieces in college newspapers equating Israelis with Nazis and the like. Here’s a recent piece in the University of Cincinnati News Record. A sample paragraph:

These inhumane acts of violence are justified as God’s Divine law. Moses received the Ten Commandments to guide the Jews in their new freedom. The first divine commandment is “You shall not kill,” although it has been changed to, “You shall not kill a Jew.”

As I said, keep me posted.

AT LAST, MODERATE MUSLIMS: Good news from Indonesia.

WHAT GAY IS: I tend to concur with this analysis by Julie Burchill, denigrating all those too-easy magazine Most Powerful Men in America lists and the like:

The Power Lists are really gay, but in a bad way. They’re not gay like most of my male friends are, which means they read loads of books, take loads of drugs, make great jokes and have nice boyfriends. No, Power List strivers fit the teen-slang meaning of gay, which is “tragic straight” – that is, they spend more on a suit than a family of four would on a holiday, use moisturiser and carry handbags but still demand the right to call the sexes “equal but different”.

I don’t buy into all of Burchill’s definition of feminism. But I like her celebration of gayness. In fact, it’s one of the first short descriptions of the current gay male world that makes it sound like something you’d want to be a part of.

I caught this via Jay Nordlinger’s always worthwhile column, “Impromptus.” After John McCain’s hilarious dig at Barbra Streisand on SNL last Saturday night, this is another sign that our comedians get it. It’s Letterman’s take on Barbara Walters’ nauseatingly sycophantic interview with the murderous thug and dictator, Fidel Castro:

TOP TEN SIGNS BARBARA WALTERS IS IN LOVE WITH FIDEL CASTRO

10. Her first question: “How’d you get so dreamy?”
9. Squeals like a schoolgirl every time he tortures a dissident.
8. She’s wearing his varsity dictator jacket.
7. Re-named her newsmagazine “Veinte/Veinte.”
6. Told him, “You have led a violent overthrow of my heart.”
5. Has same look Diane Sawyer had when she and Khomeini were dating.
4. Breakfast, lunch and dinner: pulled pork.
3. New sign-off line on “The View”: “Socialism or death”.
2. When asking him about Camp X-Ray, she accidentally called it “Guantana-marry me.”
1. The long, mangy beard hairs on her blouse

Cheered me up, anyway.

ANTI-WAR BIGOTRY WATCH: “What is ‘self-evidently bizarre,’ however, is that Sullivan seems to be publicly losing his mind. It happens to a lot of people with AIDS. Dementia sets in, eventually, and, no matter how many drug cocktails they take, in the end virtually all succumb to mania and mental deterioration.” – gay Buchananite polemicist Justin Raimondo, Anti-War.com, setting a new level of discourse for the anti-war movement.

KRUGMAN IN HIS OWN WORDS: “While hired guns do not flourish at Harvard or the University of Chicago, however, in Washington they roam in packs.
Portrait of a hired gun: He or she is usually a mediocre economist — someone whose work, if it didn’t have an ideological edge, might have been published but wouldn’t have had many readers. He has, however, found a receptive audience for work that does have an ideological edge. In particular, he has learned that pretty good jobs in think tanks, or on the staffs of magazines with a distinct political agenda, are available for people who know enough economics to produce plausible-sounding arguments on behalf of the party line. Ask him whether he is a political hack and he will deny it; he probably does not admit it to himself. But somehow everything he says or writes serves the interests of his backers.
Most of these hired guns work on behalf of right-wing causes: it’s a funny thing, but organizations that promote the interests of rich people seem to be better financed than those that don’t. Still, the left has enough resources to front a quorum of its own hacks. And anyway, love of money is only the root of some evil. Love of the limelight, love of the feeling of being part of a Movement, even love of the idea of oneself as a bold rebel against the Evil Empire can be equally corrupting of one’s intellectual integrity.
How can you tell the hacks from the serious analysts? One answer is to do a little homework. Hack jobs often involve surprisingly raw, transparent misrepresentations of fact: in these days of search engines and online databases you don’t need a staff of research assistants to catch ’em with their hands in the cookie jar. But there is another telltale clue: if a person, or especially an organization, always sings the same tune, watch out.” – Paul Krugman, two years ago.

I think Dana Milbank scores a few decent points against the president in this piece. Nothing terrible, but still sloppy.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “We have a major national security problem on our hands. There’s a man — a deceitful man — who has consistently lied to the world, jeopardizing the safety of Americans. As long as he stays in power, we are at a greater risk of terrorist attack. As long as he continues to disregard the truth, spouting lies into the air, this international bully will threaten our safety. This man must be stopped: George Bush.” – from the Daily Pennsylvanian.

A DEFENSE OF GRIDLOCK: I love Jack Shafer when he’s this ornery.

HOW DUMB ARE THE BRITS? They make Mary McGrory look informed. Barely any knows who’s in the cabinet; and only a quarter can recognize Saddam Hussein. A useful antidote to Anglophilia.

RIGHT-WING HOMOPHOBIA WATCH: It especially applies to gay Republicans.

CLINTON’S SHOCK: A cartoon on the North Korea news.

THE ORWELL PANEL: More details: 7 pm this Thursday night at Jurow Hall, Main Building 100 Washington Square East New York University.

A GAY MAN AND HIS CHURCH: An email that says it all:

I must say that I am absolutely horrified by the story from the Sunday Herald. I am a young gay man considering a vocation with the Society of Jesus. Ever since I was 14, I have heard the call of the Lord to his holy priesthood and I have wanted to do nothing more than serve the Church. After puberty and the realization of my sexual orientation, I was deeply depressed and I knew the Church would never accept my as a gay priest. I vowed to hide my sexuality for the rest of my life and I have remained chaste and closeted for all of my 21 years.

Two years ago, I picked up your book “Love Undetectable” and was totally enthralled. Your frankness and honestly about your own struggles with homosexuality and the Church parallel some of my struggles even to today.

After the sex-abuse scandals erupted last year, I was shaken to my core all over again. I just knew there would be a witch-hunt against gay priests and all those horrible experiences I faced at 14 came back to me. I fear what will happen to me now. I am scheduled to begin the application process to the Jesuits next year and I am very scared. What happened to my Church? All I wish to do is serve God and his flock as faithfully as Jesus did and now I am faced with being probed and examined to be “outed” by a hierarchy obsessed with expelling all remnants of homosexuality. I feel so lost and so alienated from the Church in these times. The worst part is the fact that I cannot share my pain with my parish priest or my vocation spiritual director for fear of rejection from the only life I have ever passionately desired.

Ask yourself: how can anyone defend a policy of routine discrimination against men such as these? I am grateful for your many emails about this; and I’ll continue to hope that this horror won’t come to pass.

ANTI-AMERICANISM, CTD: David Frum reports from Britain and finds less of it than you’d think.

KRUGMAN IN HIS OWN WORDS: “Economists also did their bit to legitimize previously unthinkable levels of executive pay. During the 1980’s and 1990’s a torrent of academic papers — popularized in business magazines and incorporated into consultants’ recommendations — argued that Gordon Gekko was right: greed is good; greed works. In order to get the best performance out of executives, these papers argued, it was necessary to align their interests with those of stockholders. And the way to do that was with large grants of stock or stock options.

It’s hard to escape the suspicion that these new intellectual justifications for soaring executive pay were as much effect as cause. I’m not suggesting that management theorists and economists were personally corrupt. It would have been a subtle, unconscious process: the ideas that were taken up by business schools, that led to nice speaking and consulting fees, tended to be the ones that ratified an existing trend, and thereby gave it legitimacy.”
– Paul Krugman, criticizing the subtle, unconscious corruption of academic economists being paid nice speaking and consulting fees, October 20, 2002.

“My critics seem to think that there was something odd about Enron’s willingness to pay a mere college professor that much money. But such sums are not unusual for academic economists whose expertise is relevant to current events… Remember that this was 1999: Asia was in crisis, the world was a mess. And justifiably or not, I was regarded as an authority on that mess. I invented currency crises as an academic field, way back in 1979; anyone who wants a sense of my academic credentials should look at the Handbook of International Economics, vol. 3, and check the index…

I mention all this not as a matter of self-puffery, but to point out that I was not an unknown college professor. On the contrary, I was a hot property, very much in demand as a speaker to business audiences: I was routinely offered as much as $50,000 to speak to investment banks and consulting firms. They thought I might tell them something useful… The point is that the money Enron offered wasn’t out of line with what companies with no interest in influence-buying were offering me. You may think I was overpaid, but the market – not Enron – set those pay rates.”
– Paul Krugman, January 21, defending his getting paid $50,000 for a two-day weekend Enron Advisory Board meeting because the market set the fees.

“More broadly, Sullivan (and Virginia Postrel, who I did read) seem to believe that successful academics are poor mousy types who live in ivory towers, who never receive offers to be paid to talk about what they know. That’s not the way it is. Academic economists who have established international reputations in policy-relevant fields are constantly called by governments and companies, seeking their services – and yes, offering to pay for them. Think about it: how could it be otherwise? …

By 1999, 22 years after I got my Ph.D., having published 15 scholarly monographs and around 150 professional papers, I was certainly in the circle of Those Who Get Money Calls (though I didn’t get there until around 1995). So the Enron offer didn’t come as a surprise, and it certainly didn’t corrupt me – as my articles about them surely prove.

So where are we? Ms. Postrel says that I should have known that something was wrong because I was offered far more than someone in my position should expect; in saying this, she only shows that she doesn’t know anything either about the
modern academic world, or about what corporate consultants are paid. Mr. Sullivan thinks that I misled readers by not reminding them that corporations invariably pay their boards; it would never have occurred to me that people didn’t know that. And he claims that I was an Enron crony. Maybe he should look up “crony” in the dictionary. Doesn’t being a crony mean that you (a) know people well and (b) do them favors? I didn’t, and I didn’t. What’s left here is a crazed determination to find something wrong with my behavior when I did exactly what I was supposed to do. Vast right-wing conspiracy, anyone? Or is it just green-eyed envy?”
– Paul Krugman, lambasting critics of his $50,000 sinecure from Enron’s “advisory board” as being “green-eyed with envy,” January 23, 2002. Unlike some other Enron beneficiaries, Krugman kept his money.