The Dish

I could write nothing close to as eloquent as this email I received yesterday. It’s in response to the USC Anti-War Conference I mentioned yesterday in the Dish, whose press release included the following statement: “The Bush administration has cleverly kept the threat of terrorism at such a fever pitch, the public has lost all sense of reality.” My correspondent writes in reply:

I like to adopt a tone of measured restraint when I respond to various bits of writing. It sharpens me up, and makes me ready for a bit of the old argument-argument.
But let me tell you: reality, for me, is stealing a Mango Madness Snapple from the abandoned bodega at the corner of William Street and Pine Street, to clear the concrete and gypsum dust from my throat as I pedal my bicycle through the blizzard remains of 110 stories’ worth of skyscraper, trying to get the hell out of downtown Manhattan.
I refuse to let some bunch of left-coast assholes who weren’t there and don’t still work three blocks from the site tell me that I’ve lost all sense of reality. Do they think that the Jerry Bruckheimer televised version they saw endlessly on cable for a week is all there was? They should try smelling it. They should try showering it off their bodies.
How dare they. How dare they, how dare they, how dare they.

Indeed. How dare they?

THE CASE AGAINST PICKERING: The Senate will start hearings today on one of the few Bush judicial appointees deemed suitable for confirmation by the Democrats. Already, the smear-jobs have been prepared. All I can say is: read the demagoguery of Bob Herbert in today’s New York Times and then read this superb and measured piece by Byron York. York effectively demolishes the case made against Judge Charles W. Pickering Jr. by People for the American Way. In fact, York’s piece does more than that. It’s a body blow against the very integrity of PFAW’s mission and Herbert’s diatribe. Imputing racism to a white man who, in the 1960s, took on the Klan in Mississippi, is now apparently a legitimate tactic for liberal special interest groups and columnists. Take one incident: a law review article Pickering wrote as a student at the age of 21. Here’s Herbert: “Mr. Pickering had a significant effect on his home state’s racist past as early as 1959 when he was a student at the University of Mississippi Law School. He felt it was important to bolster Mississippi’s anti-miscegenation law.” In fact, the law school article took no position on the miscegenation laws; it merely pointed out a technical mistake that made the law unenforceable. In the article Pickering doubted whether such laws would last much longer. Pickering’s only other ruling on inter-racial marriage, according to York, was in 1991 when he ruled that a jury was biased against a mixed-race couple, and ordered a retrial that increased the couple’s damages.

THE RACE CARD: Herbert’s other point is that Pickering lied when he said he’d forgotten about any contacts he might have had with the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a body Herbert describes as a “grotesque, hateful, virulently anti-black organization.” It turns out Pickering did have one conversation in 1972 with a Commission staffer. That conversation was about Klan violence and how to prevent it. Here’s York:

Chet Dillard, the former district attorney of Jones County, has told the Senate Judiciary Committee that Pickering was worried about a labor dispute at a Masonite plant in which “union members who were also members of the KKK shot into and burned homes in the middle of the night and brutally beat up workers….As a state senator representing Jones County, Charles Pickering had every reason to be concerned about further union violence involving the Masonite plant in Jones County.”

Pickering, labeled as a racist in the New York Times, even lost re-election because he stood up to the Klan. Here’s Charles Evers, brother of murdered civil rights leader medger Evers, in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee:

“In 1967, many locally elected prosecutors in Mississippi looked the other way when faced with allegations of violence against African-Americans and those who supported our struggle for equal treatment under the law. Judge Pickering was a locally elected prosecutor who took the stand that year and testified in the criminal trial against the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who was accused of firebombing a civil rights activist. Judge Pickering later lost his bid for reelection because he dared to defy the Klan, but he gained my respect and the respect of many others as a man who stands up for what is right.”

This is the ‘racist past’ of a man Bob Herbert and PFAW delight in smearing. How the civil rights movement has changed.

AXIS OF EVIL WATCH: James Taranto digs up a recent quote from former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani, when that Islamo-fascist was addressing a crowd on Jerusalem Day last December. According to the Jerusalem Post, Rafsanjani

said the establishment of Israel was “the most hideous historic occurrence in history,” and the Islamic world “will vomit her out from its midst,” according to Peres’s letter. Rafsanjani told a crowd at the stadium in Teheran University that the day is approaching in which the Islamic world will possess atomic weapons. “On that day, the strategy of the West will hit a dead end, since a single atomic bomb has the power to completely destroy Israel, while an Israeli counterstrike can only cause partial damage to the Islamic world,” he said.

What’s amazing is not that he said such things – but that this is the first I’ve ever heard of it. The international press is up in arms about president Bush’s robust statement of the obvious – that the regimes in Iran, Iraq and North Korea are evil – but ignores a statement promising the nuclear annihilation of a U.N.-recognized democracy. Figures, doesn’t it?

A DEADLY CONFLAGRATION: The Onion keeps its eye on a more local Indian-Pakistani conflict.

Remember them? According to embarrassed liberals like Jacob “I wish Clinton was still president” Weisberg, they don’t exist. Maybe Jake should take a trip to the USC for a conference February 17, organized by Southern Californians for Democratic Action. I heard about it from feisty blogger, Matt Welch. The conference will feature, among others, Robert Reich (would-be Massachusetts governor and close friend of Mickey Kaus), Arianna Huffington, Maxine Waters, Tom Hayden, and Ed Begley Jr. Barbra, Warren and Annette will be at the cocktail party, natch. Here’s an extract from the press release:

This conference will examine how many of our constitutional rights the Bush administration has abolished using the tragedy of 9-11 as an excuse. The Patriot Bill, the anti civil liberties doctrine forced through Congress by John Ashcroft, has ravaged our 1st, 4th, 5th and 6th amendments. Now the question is can we still save what is left of our economy, our environment, our social programs, our arms control agreements, our health care system, our immigration policy, our justice system, in short, our democracy. The Bush administration has used the war on terrorism to ram through its pro-corporate agenda, guaranteeing that the permanent war economy, which has been with us for 50 years, will now be accompanied by permanent war. Speaking for the administration, Cheney said we will be at war for the rest of our lives. Nobody blinked. Suddenly our troops are in the Philippines and Somalia. What’s next; Iraq, Iran, the Sudan? If it’s a third world country it’s apparently up for grabs. Why, with a sinking economy and a determination to maintain a state of war, is Bushs’ [sic] rating so high? The Bush administration has cleverly kept the threat of terrorism at such a fever pitch, the public has lost all sense of reality. Hopefully the Enron debacle will crack open the door to truth, and people will at last see how deep that corruption runs in this administration. This conference is intended to hasten that process.

So constitutional rights haven’t just been curtailed; they’ve been abolished. The criterion for intervention is not state-sponsored terrorism, but just being a Third World country. As Paul “Enron” Krugman has asserted, the war is not actually a war against terrorism, but a war for corporations. And you, dear readers, have “lost all sense of reality.” I wonder if Bob Reich really believes this. Perhaps his opponents in Massachusetts will ask him.

It’s official. At around 11 am this morning, they ran out of any more copies of “Warrior Politics.” We gave them warning, and we prepared, but none of us expected this response. It turns out there really is a market for serious books and serious ideas. All I can say is that for next month, we will know better what to expect and plan accordingly. Meanwhile, they should have more in stock in two or three days – and since you only need to read the first couple of chapters by February 18, there’s still plenty of time to order and follow the discussion in real reading time. Order today and you should get the book in time. They also still have copies of the books on the optional reading list. But the bottom-line, of course, is that I’m amazed and thrilled. This is going to be a trip. See you for the first post February 18. You can join the experiment here.

The lawyers go to work for John Walker.

THANKS, TOM DASCHLE: It seems we have Senate Majority leader Tom Daschle to thank for finally killing off the unnecessary, pork-laden, budget-busting “stimulus package.” Not only will we avoid having to pay for all that pork spending, we may even cut the projected deficit this year to $15 billion from $80 billion. According to the Washington Post, we may even have a surplus in 2004. I have no problem extending unemployment benefits as an interim measure. But we should be relieved that this piece of Keynesian pump-priming never made it out of the Congress. And Bush should be mildly ashamed of himself for his empty posturing on something no sane conservative should have ever supported.

KENNEDY VERSUS “INDIVIDUALISM”: In what was a classic Freudian slip, Ted Kennedy rejoiced in the New England Patriots victory this week with the following statement: ”At a time when our entire country is banding together and facing down individualism, the Patriots set a wonderful example, showing us all what is possible when we work together, believe in each other, and sacrifice for the greater good.” Facing down individualism? Sorry, Ted, we haven’t installed socialism just yet. But keep trying, big guy. Keep trying …

NOAH VERSUS PRIVACY: What’s galling about Tim Noah’s little item on Slate about an email sent to family and friends by Danielle Crittenden is not its smug, schoolboy tone. What’s galling is that Noah doesn’t even seem to think anyone could think the printing of a private correspondence could be regarded as ethically problematic. Crittenden was probably foolish to have divulged anything in an email, especially if it had some juicy political gossip in them. But she is ethically in the right, and Noah in the wrong. If Noah had found a lost private letter, opened it, and divulged its contents in print, he’d be regarded as a cad. If he’d bugged her phone to get the gossip, he could be thrown in jail. But because it’s just an email and can be reproduced at will and sent to an infinite number of people simultaneously, it’s somehow ok. Sorry, I don’t buy the ethical distinction. The fact that a private email might be “newsworthy” is neither here nor there. It’s a private communication between two or more individuals. It is simply wrong to violate that trust. What we’re seeing here is just another sign that any semblance of privacy in our society is being effectively destroyed. This destruction of any private zone helps extinguish freedom of thought, emotional intimacy, and public dignity for everyone. At the same time, it seems impossible to stop it, especially when journalists see any right to privacy automatically trumped by the flimsiest of “newsworthy” excuses.

GREAT INSULTS: Here’s a classic from P.G. Wodehouse from his 1936 book, “The Code of the Woosters”:

He was, as I had already been able to perceive, a breath-taking cove. About seven feet in height, and swathed in a plaid ulster which made him look about six feet across, he caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment.

ENRON – THE PATH NOT TAKEN: An interesting British side-note to the various pundits and economists, like Bill Kristol and Paul Krugman, who were paid large amounts to sit on Enron “advisory boards.” Enron seemed to have a similar strategy in Britain and tried to snooker Gavyn Davies, a left-of-center economist, former Goldman Sachs honcho, friend of New Labour’s Gordon Brown and now, thanks to his Blairite friends, chairman of the BBC. Davies was indeed an external adviser to Enron for two years from 1999, but he says he turned down the $50,000 proffered fee. “The advice given was entirely consistent with my position as chief economist at Goldman Sachs and was similar to that which I routinely gave to dozens of other entities, without accepting direct payment,” Davies said. Perhaps there was indirect payment to Goldman Sachs, but the avoidance of a large financial dump into his own personal checkbook shows that some people were tempted like Krugman, Kristol, et al, but not all of them took the bait. Good for Davies.

CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS: Sweden prides itself on being a tolerant multicultural society – as well it should. But the cultures from which it absorbs immigrants are not so tolerant. The country is now in an uproar about yet another “honor killing” of a daughter by a Kurdish father because she chose to marry a man, rather than submit to her father’s diktat. It’s a horrifying tale, and perhaps a useful corrective to my defense of alien cultures yesterday, as long as women have true freedom to choose their own destiny. In this case, Sweden gave the woman the choice, and her own father brutally took it away. A lesson, perhaps, in the limits of cultural assimilation.

CORRECTION: William Allen White was not the editor of the Kansas City Star but the Emporia Gazette.

More evidence that the Times columnist makes it up as he goes along.

EMAIL AVALANCHE:My apologies for not being able to respond personally to the more than 1000 emails I got after the Sully and Hitch show on C-SPAN last Friday. I’ve answered about a third, and read almost all, but simply don’t have the time to answer each one personally. So please take this as a personal thank you to all of you who wrote, especially those who wanted to express support and solidarity for a Catholic with perhaps more than the usual amount of internal conflict. Thanks.

Two new pieces suggest this new form of media is catching on. Here’s Time’s brief synopsis; and here’s Newsday’s more sophisticated take. One sign of our increasing impact is the 840 percent increase in Amazon sales of “Warrior Politics” yesterday and 225 percent increase today. It’s now Number 4.

MORRIS REINFORCES THE NEW CONSENSUS: In a piece today in the Wall Street Journal, Dick Morris doesn’t add that much that is new to the record of Bill Clinton’s foreign policy fecklessness. But he does finger Sandy Berger as the key operator in preventing a serious war on terror in the latter years of the Clinton administration. And he does serve to buttress again the growing sense that the Clinton era, for all its successes, was the end of something rather than the initiation of a new politics. This is what even some liberals are beginning to acknowledge is another part of what might be termed the transformational presidency of George W. Bush. As the contrast between pre-9/11 and post-9/11 culture deepens in the public consciousness, Bill Clinton seems forever a small and mildly regrettable incident from the distant past.

THE NEW ANTI-SEMITISM WATCH: A disturbing report in London’s Telegraph on the rabid, murderous anti-semitism of some British Muslims:

Mr Hamza, the imam of Finsbury Park mosque in north London, has been filmed urging young men to attack non-believers. “Crush his head in your arms, wring his throat, rip his intestines out . . . Forget wasting a bullet on them – cut them in half,” he said… Mr Faisal, a Jamaican-born cleric, preaches across Britain and sells recordings of his inflammatory sermons. In one he tells listeners: “How do you fight the Jews? You kill the Jews.”

Hmmm. Where have we heard statements like that before? (I should add that I’m appalled that in my homeland, such statements, however disgusting, have no First Amendment protection under the law.)

“‘What’s the difference between a Jew and a canoe? A canoe always tips.’ I wish I’d been there when the second most famous black man on earth delivered this joke at a charity banquet last year.” – Charlotte Raven, Britain’s most rabid anti-American, proving that prejudices tend to go together.

NEXT UP – HAMAS AS THE APOSTLES: “Ahmed Abdel Rahman, one of Mr. Arafat’s close advisers, said, ‘At this moment, Arafat is the Christ of the Palestinian people.'” – New York Times, yesterday.

The following are the only books on Amazon.com to beat our book-club choice for February yesterday evening at 9pm: John Grisham’s latest; a self-help book; a Stephen King TV series tie-in; and “Satisfaction: The Art of the Female Orgasm.” Then comes our little book – jammed with Churchill, Thucydides, Sun-Tzu, Machiavelli and Montesquieu. I think we just single-handedly elevated the culture a little, don’t you, and I’m more than a little stunned. If you want to take part in this Internet experiment of a book club, check out the Book Club page which will tell you all you need to know. I started reading the book today, and will be posting my and then your first impressions February 18. Then the fun begins.

THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE: One Mona Eltahawy writes eloquently this morning in the Washington Post about the real issue behind the veiling of Afghan women. That issue is not the burqa itself, she argues, a piece of clothing that is in many places an integral part of indigenous social customs. The issue is the matter of choice: whether women can freely choose to wear such a piece of clothing or not. Eltahawy is on to something here. I find the burqa repulsive as a symbol of women’s oppression, marginalization and invisibility. But it’s a step too far to believe therefore that every burqa means that. And it further demeans the deeper autonomy of women to assume that some could not make that choice out of their own free will. A freely-chosen faith or custom, however abhorrent to outsiders, is not something good liberals should seek to reform or abolish. What good liberals should seek to abolish is the political tyranny that makes real choice for women such an impossibility in such cultures. That’s why feminists should be behind this war – and the war to liberate Iraq and Iran. Not because women will be freed of burqas, but because people will be freed from the tyranny that makes female dignity and equality impossible.

KRUGMAN UPS THE ANTE: Today’s column from Paul Krugman makes Paul Begala look positively non-partisan. There’s first a strained attempt at the most ambitious-yet Enron analogy. Krugman charges that “on the basis of surplus fantasies, the administration – aided by an audit committee, otherwise known as the U.S. Congress, that failed to exercise due diligence – gave itself a big bonus in the form of a huge tax cut.” Ergo, Congress is Arthur Andersen. Ergo, Bush is Enron. Q.E.D. But wait a minute. For this analogy to even begin to work, wouldn’t the tax cut have to have been applied only to the members of the administration? And wouldn’t the Congress, including many Democrats, have to have been complicit in that? And wouldn’t the tax-payers, like Enron’s shareholders, have been fleeced rather than reimbursed? You have to wonder if Krugman has so bought his own demagoguery that for a split second he almost believed that. Or is he just equating Ken Lay and George W. Bush anyhow, anyway, by any rhetorical means? Then there’s the extraordinary argument that the Bush administration has cynically used the tragedy of September 11 to add to its budget a “one-time charge” – an “accounting trick” worthy of Enron’s crooks. That “one-time charge,” you see, is the new defense budget! It’s a phony new charge, in Krugman’s view, made purely to cook the books to distract attention from Ken Lay-style embezzlement by the president. Think of that for a minute. Krugman is asserting that the Bush administration’s response to the terrorist attacks of last fall was not designed actually to protect us from danger or to defeat a real threat – but in order to preserve their malevolent fiscal agenda, aimed at their own enrichment. Our current war is therefore nothing less than a conscious, cynical attempt by Bush to rob the American tax-payer in order to shovel money at corporate defense contractors and the rich, regardless of the country’s military, fiscal or economic needs. I guess at least we now know what Krugman really thinks. He and Ramsey Clark and Noam Chomsky seem to have a huge amount now in common.

INSULTS, CONTINUED: Churchill has been a favorite of yours, especially the faint damnations of Clement Atlee. With Chamberlain, however, Churchill was just as funny but also deadly. One reader emails to remind me that Churchill once said of his predecessor as prime minister: “He looked at foreign affairs through the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe.” And then he was able to take off the gloves completely, in analyzing Chamberlain’s character: “At the depths of that dusty soul there is nothing but abject surrender.” Brutal. But for sheer malevolent delight, it’s hard to beat Melville on Emerson: “I could readily see in Emerson, notwithstanding his merit, a gaping flaw. It was the insinuation that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions.” And all I can think of is Al Gore.

Number 6!

Our first book of the month is now Number 7 on the Amazon charts. You guys rock my world.