Category: Leftism – Statism – Democracy

Don’t Le(f)t the Facts Confuse You

Lambert at corrente is still pushing this line:

Cowardly Broadcasting System….

CBS News said yesterday that it had postponed a “60 Minutes” segment that questioned Bush administration rationales for going to war in Iraq….

According to the Newsweek report, the “60 Minutes” segment was to have detailed how the administration relied on false documents when it said Iraq had tried to buy a lightly processed form of uranium, known as yellowcake, from Niger. The administration later acknowledged that the information was incorrect and that the documents were most likely fake….

(via the pretty-cowardly-themselves Times)

WHEN WOULD IT BE MORE APPROPRIATE TO RUN A STORY ABOUT FAKE DOCUMENTS THAT BUSH USED TO JUSTIFY THE WAR THAN BEFORE AN ELECTION IN WHICH BUSH IS RUNNING? HAS THE WHOLE WORLD GONE MAD? WHY DOESN’T CBS JUST SHUT THEIR WHOLE OPERATION DOWN? WTF?

The problem is this (from Clarice Feldman at The American Thinker):

…In his State of the Union speech, the President said these sixteen words:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

The statement was true, and recently a British Commission confirmed that was so. Days afterward, however, the US received forged documents about uranium sales from Africa to Saddam. (Documents, I should add that an Italian inquiry established were forged by a man working for French intelligence – apparently to discredit the good information upon which Bush and Blair had relied, and thereby to embarrass them.)

And was this French farce forgery used for that purpose? Indeed it was. By Joseph A. Wilson (author of Politics of Truth), then an outspoken Kerry supporter and advisor. And where is Wilson today? Well, he has been thoroughly discredited by anyone who actually studied his testimony before the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee. That includes the Committee and the brilliant Christopher Hitchens.

How could CBS have missed that? After all, once the Senate Intel report came out, the Kerry website was scrubbed of the special page devoted to Wilson.

Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post did report that the very media (including, of course, CBS) which had given enormous play to Wilson’s tale had failed to report his denouement. So if all the news Sixty Minutes got was from CBS, maybe they missed it.

Still, how clueless can you be?…

As clueless as a left-wing blog like corrente.

From Smoking to Fast Food

We know that the anti-smoking gig reflects middle-to-upper class disdain for the “sweaty masses.” The anti-fast food crusade is more of the same. Brendan O’Neill at Spiked has the right take on fast-food bashing:

Bashing the McMasses

by Brendan O’Neill

In the docu-blockbuster-cum-human-experiment Super Size Me, released in British cinemas over the weekend, New York filmmaker Morgan Spurlock eats nothing but McDonald’s meals three times a day for a month…[I]n one scene, having spent 22 minutes eating a Super Size Double Quarterpounder Meal, pukes it up out of his car window – all for the apparently worthy cause of showing Americans ‘the real price they are paying for their “addiction” to fast food’….

Sounds radical, right, taking on the Golden Arches of America and charging them with making poor folk sick and miserable by forcefeeding them junk? In fact, Super Size Me, like so many other anti-McDonald’s campaigns, comes with a generous side order of snobbery. Its real target is the people who eat in McDonald’s – the apparently stupid, fat, unthinking masses who scoff Big Macs without even asking to see a nutritional and calorie breakdown first. Spurlock and his ilk might hate McDonald’s, but they seem to loathe the McMasses even more….

On both sides of the Atlantic there’s a large portion of moralising in the panics over obesity, school dinners, junk-food-guzzling and the rest. What is presented as straightforward medical concern for our health and wellbeing is often really a judgement on lifestyle and behaviour – and especially the lifestyle and behaviour of a certain class of people….

[I]n the faux class war between anti-McDonald’s campaigners and the McMasses, I’m on the side of the ‘happy eaters’ every time.

Me, too. When I’m on the road I stop at a McDonald’s only to use the restroom. But that’s only because I prefer other brands of fast food. And I ain’t no iggerant, fat slob neither.

If my allergies could stand the smoke, I’d be back on cigarettes in a flash, even though it would make me look like a redneck — or a movie star.

Speaking of Discrimination…

…a story at The Washington Times says:

Discrimination against white male found

By George Archibald

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

An English professor at the University of North Carolina illegally subjected a student to “intentional discrimination and harassment” because he was “a white, heterosexual Christian male” who expressed disapproval of homosexuality, the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights has ruled.

Professor Elyse Crystall violated student Timothy R. Mertes’ civil rights, the agency said, by improperly accusing him of “hate speech” in an e-mail sent to students after a class discussion in which Mr. Mertes said he was a Christian and felt “disgusted, not threatened” by homosexual behavior.

“The e-mail message not only subjected the student to intentional discrimination and harassment, but also discouraged the robust exchange of ideas that is intrinsic to higher education and is at the very heart of the Constitution’s protection of free speech,” Alice B. Wender, the Education Department’s southern regional director of civil rights concluded in a letter to UNC Chancellor James Moeser on Wednesday.

It’s about time.

A Logic Puzzle from the Left

TBogg takes issue with InstaPundit, who characterizes Kerry’s private discussions with the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong in 1971 as secret. First, TBogg quotes InstaPundit:

September 22, 2004

OUCH: “It would be like an American today meeting with the heads of al Qaeda.”

UPDATE: Heck, even Chris Matthews saw this one coming.

ANOTHER UPDATE: But it wasn’t secret — well, it may have been when it happened, but not later.

TBogg next quotes from the WaPo article linked in InstaPundit‘s “Another Update”:

The meeting, however, was not a secret. Kerry, a leading antiwar activist at the time, mentioned it in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April of that year. “I have been to Paris,” he testified. “I have talked with both delegations at the peace talks, that is to say the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and Provisional Revolutionary Government,” the latter a South Vietnamese communist group with ties to the Viet Cong.

TBogg then does a silly riff on what an 11-year old InstaPundit might have been asking his mother about the whereabouts of John Kerry in 1971.

But TBogg fails to get the point, which the WaPo article clearly establishes: Kerry’a private discussions with the North Vietnamese were secret at the time he conducted them. He told Congress about the negotiations after the fact. Not only that, but the discussions may have been illegal. According to the same WaPo article, the Kerry campaign has come close to admitting it:

Kerry’s campaign said earlier this year that he met on the trip with Nguyen Thi Binh, then foreign minister of the PRG and a top negotiator at the talks. Kerry acknowledged in that testimony that even going to the peace talks as a private citizen was at the “borderline” of what was permissible under U.S. law, which forbids citizens from negotiating treaties with foreign governments. But his campaign said he never engaged in negotiations or attended any formal sessions of the talks.

No, he just went to Paris to practice his French.

Tit-for-Tat on the Left

Don’t you love the logic of moments like this:

Johnny: Teacher, Sue’s a big liar. She wasn’t sick yesterday, her Mom took her to the mall.

Sue: Teacher, Johnny’s a big liar, too, he wasn’t sick last week, his Dad took him to a ball game.

Sue is trying to justify her lie by pointing out that Johnny also lies. What we know is that both of them probably have lied.

Well, that’s what we get from lefty blogs that are still trying to minimize the import of Rather’s lies about Bush’s National Guard records. Here’s Gene Lyons, quoted at Eschaton:

I saw pundit Andrew Sullivan on CNN clucking over CBS’ mistakes. In 1994, when Sullivan edited The New Republic, it ran a cover story accusing Bill Clinton of corruptly enriching his wife’s law firm by changing Arkansas usury laws as governor. In fact, the deed was done by public referendum under Clinton’s Republican predecessor.

On Dec. 19, 1995, ABC News’ “Nightline” aired a deceptively edited video clip of a Hillary Clinton press conference about Whitewater. It accused her of lying about the very information electronically deleted from her remarks. No consequences followed.

On May 4, 1996, The New York Times published an article with a deceptive Associated Press byline stating that an FBI agent’s trial testimony described a $50,000 windfall to Whitewater from an illegal loan. As the actual AP article stipulated, the agent gave no such testimony. Many accusatory editorials and columns followed, helping Kenneth Starr to prolong his fruitless investigation of Bill Clinton’s finances for years. The Times has never acknowledged its blunder.

Of course, there’s nothing there about all the misleading if not downright lying things that ABC, NYT, and many other media outlets have published about Republicans and conservatives over the years. Desperation, thy name is “Lefty”.

Isn’t Chicago a "Liberal" Stronghold?

Not according to this story at NYTimes.com:

Chicago Moving to ‘Smart’ Surveillance Cameras

By STEPHEN KINZER
Published: September 21, 2004

CHICAGO, Sept. 20 – A highly advanced system of video surveillance that Chicago officials plan to install by 2006 will make people here some of the most closely observed in the world. Mayor Richard M. Daley [a Democrat] says it will also make them much safer….

Police specialists here can already monitor live footage from about 2,000 surveillance cameras around the city, so the addition of 250 cameras under the mayor’s new plan is not a great jump. The way these cameras will be used, however, is an extraordinary technological leap.

Sophisticated new computer programs will immediately alert the police whenever anyone viewed by any of the cameras placed at buildings and other structures considered terrorist targets wanders aimlessly in circles, lingers outside a public building, pulls a car onto the shoulder of a highway, or leaves a package and walks away from it. Images of those people will be highlighted in color at the city’s central monitoring station, allowing dispatchers to send police officers to the scene immediately….

Many cities have installed large numbers of surveillance cameras along streets and near important buildings, but as the number of these cameras has grown, it has become impossible to monitor all of them. The software that will be central to Chicago’s surveillance system is designed to direct specialists to screens that show anything unusual happening….

When the system is in place,…video images will be instantly available to dispatchers at the city’s 911 emergency center, which receives about 18,000 calls each day. Dispatchers will be able to tilt or zoom the cameras, some of which magnify images up to 400 times, in order to watch suspicious people and follow them from one camera’s range to another’s.

A spokesman for the Illinois chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, Edwin C. Yohnka, said the new system was “really a huge expansion of the city’s surveillance program.”

“With the aggressive way these types of surveillance equipment are being marketed and implemented,” Mr. Yohnka said, “it really does raise questions about what kind of society do we ultimately want, and how intrusive we want law enforcement officials to be in all of our lives.”…

One community organizer who works in a high-crime neighborhood, Ernest R. Jenkins, chairman of the West Side Association for Community Action, said the 2,000 cameras now in place had reduced crime and were “having an impact, no if’s, and’s or but’s about it.” Nonetheless, Mr. Jenkins said, some people in Chicago believed the city was trying to “infiltrate people’s privacy in the name of terrorist attacks.”

“I just personally think that it’s an invasion of people’s privacy,” Mr. Jenkins said of the new video surveillance project. “A large increase in the utilization of these cameras would oversaturate the market.”

City officials counter that the cameras will monitor only public spaces. Rather than curb the system’s future expansion, they have raised the possibility of placing cameras in commuter and rapid transit cars and on the city’s street-sweeping vehicles.

“We’re not inside your home or your business,” Mayor Daley said. “The city owns the sidewalks. We own the streets and we own the alleys.”

You may have noticed that that the local ACLU outlet seems to be taking it rather calmly. Must be they trust Democrats more than Republicans. Not that they should, they just do.

I’m inclined to give Mayor Daley the benefit of the doubt. Not that I think that his surveillance system will do that much good. It sort of defeats the purpose to publicize it. But as long as it only monitors public places, I’m not going to get all excited about it.

Why Class Warfare Is Bad for Everyone

Let’s say the economy consists of two persons: A, who makes bread, and B, who invents things. A pays B in bread whenever B invents something that A wants.

B’s first invention is the toaster. A likes it a lot, so he and B agree on a price for the toaster: B gets a loaf of bread a week for as long as the toaster works. So far, so good?

Now suppose that B invents TV. A really likes that invention, so he offers to pay B five loaves of bread for every week the TV works. B makes a counter offer of 10 loaves of bread per week. A doesn’t think it’s “fair” to pay that much for TV, so he forces B at gunpoint to accept five loaves a week. (Get the not-so-subtle dig at the coercive power of the state?)

Now B says to himself, “If that’s the way it’s going to be, I’m not going to the trouble of inventing anything else as complex as TV. I’ll stick to simple stuff like toasters.” So B keeps on inventing things, but they’re not things that A would be willing to pay a lot of bread for.

Here’s the quiz: Who’s worse off because the “state” (A’s pistol) intervened on behalf of the laborer (A) who envied the entrepreneur (B) — A or B? Answer: Both are worse off. A doesn’t get to enjoy the things B would have invented if the state hadn’t removed B’s incentive to invent them. And B doesn’t earn as much bread as he could have earned for inventing things that would make A happier.

So, when you think of progressive taxation and other methods of redistributing income, think of A and B and the parable of the loaves.

Kerry Does It Again

Via AP and Yahoo! News:

Kerry Says He Wouldn’t Have Ousted Saddam

By RON FOURNIER, AP Political Writer

NEW YORK – Staking out new ground on Iraq, Sen. John Kerry said Monday he would not have overthrown Saddam Hussein had he been in the White House, and he accused President Bush of “stubborn incompetence,” dishonesty and colossal failures of judgment. Bush said Kerry was flip-flopping.

Less than two years after voting to give Bush authority to invade Iraq, the Democratic candidate said the president had misused that power by rushing to war without the backing of allies, a post-war plan or proper equipment for U.S. troops. “None of which I would have done,” Kerry said….

Flip-flopping is an understatement for what Kerry does. He surrounds an issue and then proceeds to attack it from all sides. You know what happens to a 360-degree firing squad.

The Great Divide Is a Great Thing

The Austin American Statesman, that great proponent of civic morality, has been running an occasional series called “The Great Divide.” It’s about the supposed polarization of American politics and American society. A sample from today’s installment (registration required, not worth the trouble):

In stories published this year, the Statesman has reported that since the late 1970s, Democrats and Republicans have been segregating, as people sift themselves into more politically homogeneous communities.

“We keep all the shrimp away from all the mussels,” Republican strategist Bill Greener says of the nature of American politics. “We keep all the mussels away from the oysters. And we keep all the oysters away from all the lobsters.”

By 2000, about half of the nation’s voters lived in counties where one party or another won the presidential election by 20 percentage points or more. Churches have become among the country’s most politically homogeneous institutions. And Congress has grown more partisan and uncompromising than at any time since World War II.

People are less likely to live and vote among those with different political leanings, and the nation’s politics have grown bitter as a result. “Things get ugly when you have this kind of divergence,” California Institute of Technology political scientist Jonathan Katz says. “Each side thinks the other is wrong.”

Of course “each side thinks the other is wrong,” as the idiot from CalTech so pompously observes. (He probably analyzed a lot of data for a lot of years to figure that out.) It’s always been that way and always will be that way. That’s why the nation’s politics are so “ugly” and “bitter”. Actually they’re no more ugly and bitter than they’ve ever been, we’re just more aware of the ugliness and bitterness because (1) there are more screaming heads on TV and the internet than there used to be and (2) Democrats no longer rule the roost as they used to, which has caused them to scream louder than ever.

All this business with screaming heads just confirms one fact of life: Face-to-face political argument seldom ever changes a person’s mind, it usually hardens it.

So why should people with opposing views live near each other if they’re going to wind up fighting about politics? How many family dinners have been ruined by Uncle Joe called his nephew Fred a pinko, commie, hippie freeloader or a right-wing, fascist, capitalist exploiter of the working classes? Now, if you don’t like your family’s politics you move to where your family ain’t — and to where your can enjoy a peaceful meal with like-minded friends, chuckling over the idiocy of John Kerry or George Bush, as you prefer, without an Uncle Joe to spoil the fun.

More Suppression of Dissent

We expect CBS to be a bit touchy about criticism of Dan Rather. Apparently the touchiness is rolling downhill to CBS affiliates, according to this AP story:

Host Says Rather Criticism Got Him Fired

Sat Sep 18, 9:33 PM ET

By PEGGY ANDERSEN, Associated Press Writer

SEATTLE – A radio talk-show host said Saturday he has been fired for criticizing CBS newsman Dan Rather’s handling of challenges to the authenticity of memos about President Bush (news – web sites)’s National Guard service.

“On the talk show that I host, or hosted, I said I felt Rather should either retire or be forced out over this,” said Brian Maloney, whose weekly “The Brian Maloney Show” aired for three years on KIRO-AM Radio, a CBS affiliate here.

Maloney says he made that statement on his Sept. 12 program. He was fired Friday, he said.

“What they have expressed is essentially that my show went in a direction they’re not comfortable with,” Maloney said….

Only in John Ashcroft’s America.

P.S. I posted this immediately after I read the AP story and before I saw InstaPundit‘s almost-identical post.

Time to Regulate the Blogosphere?

That thought must have crossed the minds of some highly placed Democrat sympathizers in the “mainstream” media when the blogosphere started shredding the threadbare remnants of Dan Rather’s reputation for honest reporting. But the blogosphere is protected by the First Amendment, isn’t it?

There’s stark evidence that the blogosphere can be regulated, if the feds want to do it. Look at the airwaves, which the feds seized long ago, and which the feds censor by intimidation. Look at the ever-tightening federal control of political speech, which has brought us to McCain-Feingold. It’s all in the name of protecting us, of course.

Here’s how the blogosphere might come under the “protection” of a regulatory body: Major blogging service providers (Blogspot, TypePad, etc.) and major internet service providers (SBC, AT&T, etc.) become the targets of a class-action lawsuit brought by the “victims” of a blogospheric assault — a group of persons more savory than Bill Burkett (suspected author of the forged National Guard documents used by Rather). The targets cut a deal with the FCC — protection in return for regulation. The FCC justifies the regulation of content on the same grounds that it justifies the regulation of the content of radio and TV transmissions — the transmissions are a “commodity” in interstate commerce, not “speech”. The FCC then begins monitoring blogospheric emissions (random monitoring would be sufficiently chilling) and entertaining complaints from offended readers of blogs (lefties who don’t like what righties write, and vice versa). You can guess the rest.

Of course, it might not happen with Congress and the White House in Republican hands. But look at who was in charge when McCain-Feingold became law.

Favorite Posts: Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech

Moral Relativism, or Something Like It

REVISED AND RE-DATED

Eugene Volokh writes about “Moral Relativism“:

Conservatives often accuse liberals of “moral relativism.” Now I surely disagree with most liberals on many specific moral issues. But I’m puzzled about exactly what the commonly heard charge of moral relativism in general, as opposed to a charge of moral error on a particular issue, means.

I take it that it can’t be that liberals don’t believe in moral principles. They surely do: Most liberals, for instance, believe that race discrimination is wrong [not true, because they support discrimination in the form of aggressive “affirmative action”: ED], rape is wrong, murder is wrong [not true, because they support abortion — see next item: ED], legal interference with a woman’s right to get an abortion (at least until a certain gestational age) is wrong, and so on….

Liberals, conservatives, and libertarians…agree, for instance, that killing is generally bad, but the definition of when killing is evil and when it’s permissible (or even laudable) necessarily has to be pretty nuanced, so that it properly treats killing in self-defense, killing in war, and the like. In fact, some liberals of the pacifist stripe may employ a more nearly absolute prohibition on killing (at least of born humans) than conservatives do — in my view, that’s their moral error, but it’s not an error of moral relativism….[Yes it is, because it implies that aggressors are morally equal to those who would defend themselves against aggression: ED]

So is there anything to this charge about liberals being “moral relativists,” or at least being so materially more often than conservatives? (I’m not asking whether isolated liberals have at times made truly moral relativist arguments, whatever they may be, but rather whether liberals generally are more likely to endorse such views.)…

Yes, there is something to the charge.

Consider the usual liberal clamor to understand why “they” attacked us on 9/11 and why “they” hate us. I know there’s something to be said for understanding your enemy, in order to defeat him, but that’s not how it’s meant. Those who cry out for “understanding” mean (and sometimes baldly state) that it’s America’s fault when we are attacked and hated. That view emanates from the same, fairly large, body of liberals who see Palestinian terrorists as morally superior to Israel.

The same brand of moral relativism elevates the U.N. — which is dominated by corrupt, racist nations — to the status of a moral arbiter, imbued with the wisdom to dictate American foreign and defense policy. And guess which camp loves the U.N. — conservative or liberal?

In sum, there’s a form of reverse cultural-centrism common among liberals who reflexively believe in the moral inferiority of America. It’s moral relativism in the extreme: Not only are we not better than other countries and cultures — we’re worse, we are “corrupt” Americans. So “corrupt” that a liberal extremist like Michael Moore is free to spout venom about his native land, venom that large audiences of extreme and not-so-extreme liberals pay to hear and applaud.

If that isn’t moral relativism, I don’t know what is.

Wisdom for America-Haters — Foreign and Domestic

Fareed Zakaria — Newsweek columnist and editor of Newsweek International — writes about “Hating America” in Foreign Policy:

On September 12, 2001, Jean-Marie Colombani, the editor of Le Monde, famously wrote, “Today we are all Americans.” Three years on, it seems that we are all anti-Americans. Hostility to the United States is deeper and broader than at any point in the last 50 years….

[A]nti-Americanism fills the void left by defunct belief systems. It has become a powerful trend in international politics today -— and perhaps the most dangerous. U.S. hegemony has its problems, but a world that reacts instinctively against the United States will be less peaceful, less cooperative, less prosperous, less open, and less stable.

The wave of anti-Americanism is, of course, partly a product of the current Bush administration’s policies and, as important, its style….

By crudely asserting U.S. power and disregarding international institutions and alliances, the Bush administration has pulled the curtain on decades of diplomacy and revealed that the United States’ constraints are self-imposed: America can, in fact, go it alone. Not surprisingly, the rest of the world resents this imbalance and searches for ways to place obstacles in America’s way….

There is always a market for an ideology of discontent -— it allows those outside the mainstream to relate to the world. These beliefs usually form in reaction to the world’s dominant reality. So the rise of capitalism and democracy over the last 200 years produced ideologies of opposition from the left (communism, socialism) and from the right (hypernationalism, fascism). Today, the dominant reality in the world is the power of the United States, currently being wielded in a particularly aggressive manner. Anti-Americanism is becoming the way people think about the world and position themselves within it….

Much has been written about what the United States can do to help arrest and reverse these trends. But it is worth putting the shoe on the other foot for a moment. Imagine a world without the United States as the global leader. Even short of the imaginative and intelligent scenario of chaos that British historian Niall Ferguson outlined in this magazine (see “A World Without Power,” July/August 2004), it would certainly look grim. There are many issues on which the United States is the crucial organizer of collective goods. Someone has to be concerned about terrorism and nuclear and biological proliferation. Other countries might bristle at certain U.S. policies, but would someone else really be willing to bully, threaten, cajole, and bribe countries such as Libya to renounce terror and dismantle their WMD programs? On terror, trade, AIDs, nuclear proliferation, U.N. reform, and foreign aid, U.S. leadership is indispensable.

The temptation to go its own way will be greatest for Europe, the only other player with the resources and tradition to play a global role. But if Europe defines its role as being different from the United States -— kinder, gentler, whatever —- will that really produce a more stable world? U.S. and European goals on most issues are quite similar. Both want a peaceful world free from terror, with open trade, growing freedom, and civilized codes of conduct. A Europe that charts its own course just to mark its differences from the United States threatens to fracture global efforts—whether on trade, proliferation, or the Middle East. Europe is too disunited to achieve its goals without the United States; it can only ensure that America’s plans don’t succeed. The result will be a world that muddles along, with the constant danger that unattended problems will flare up disastrously. Instead of win-win, it will be lose-lose -— for Europe, for the United States, and for the world.

After firing the obligatory anti-Bush missiles, Zakaria settles down to the task at hand. First, he notes that anti-Americanism has a natural market among the discontented. That’s certainly true in the U.S. as well as overseas. Discontented left-wingers in this country are about as anti-American as they come.

Then he observes two central truths that foreign and domestic anti-Americans ignore at their peril: The world would be a much worse place if America weren’t the hyperpower. And if Europeans, acting out of envious anti-Americanism, succeed in blocking America’s efforts to make the world a better place, the world will become a worse place — and Europe will suffer for it.

Amen to all that.

Isn’t That What I Said?

I love it when esteemed institutions endorse my ideas (even if they don’t know me from nobody). Adam Begley, writing in the latest issue of the New York Observer, reviews In the Shadow of No Towers, by Art Spiegelman:

Mr. Spiegelman’s new book…is…about surviving…9/11 -— but it fails to tell a story: not a whole one, anyway, and certainly not a coherent one. Michiko Kakutani, in her New York Times review, seems ready to forgive the disjunctions and amputations on the grounds that Mr. Spiegelman has at least “suggest[ed] one aesthetic approach for grappling with the enormity of 9/11.” She believes that with “[i]ts frantic, collage like juxtaposition of styles; its repudiation of traditional narrative; its noisy mix of images and words; its trippy combination of reportage, fantasy and paranoia,” In the Shadow of No Towers somehow captures the essence of that terrible morning when the terrorists struck.

I wish I could agree. Mr. Spiegelman dazzles with his artistry: He flashes his wit; he shows off his remarkable flair for design. But he never hooks his reader….He gives us only the very personal and the bitingly political (furious and by now familiar attacks on “the Bush cabal”)….

Mr. Spiegelman becomes some of the comic-strip characters—Happy Hooligan, for instance (with a dangling cigarette, naturally)—but though he morphs a half-dozen times, he’s always center stage, parading his panic, his paranoia, his politics. Self-aware in the extreme, he comes close to acknowledging that the trauma he needs to survive is his own tortured psyche….

If the 10 strips show us a self-absorbed man shocked into a more perfect self-absorption, the preface is just plain irritatingly egocentric….From the first sentence (“I tend to be easily unhinged”) to the last (“I still believe the world is ending, but I concede that it seems to be ending more slowly than I once thought … so I figured I’d make a book”), the preface echoes with the clamor of the first-person singular.

The headline sums it up: “Image of Twin Towers Ablaze Haunts Narcissistic Cartoonist.” Actually, I summed it up in a post way back on August 6, when I wrote this about a NYT interview of Spiegelman at the time of the publication of his atrocity:

He doesn’t talk about the innocents who were slaughtered on September 11, 2001. He doesn’t talk about the cretins who flew the planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, or about Osama bin Laden, or about terrorism in general. It’s all about him. It’s all about his hatred of the war in Iraq. But he’s going to make some money off September 11, by selling copies of his thing to like-minded Manhattan jerks.

Validated by the Wall Street Journal

REVISED AND RE-DATED

A few days ago, in this post, I wrote:

The real problem with Democrats is that they think they’re still supposed to be in the White House and in charge of Congress….

[I]t seems that Democrats are suffering from a bizarre form of near-term memory loss. They remember 1933-1969, when they held the White House for all but Ike’s two terms. (And what kind of Republican was Ike, anyway?) They mistakenly thought their White House hegemony had been restored with Clinton’s ascendancy, but Clinton was really an accidental president. Democrats vividly remember having controlled both houses of Congress for most of the 62 years from 1933 to 1995, and they keep deluding themselves that they will retake Congress in the “next” election….

Today’s OpinionJournal carries an article by Brendan Miniter, “D Is for Descendancy,” with the subhead, “The Democrats are no longer the majority party. Is this the year they’ll finally admit it?” As Miniter puts it:

Democrats still seem to believe they can win back the White House without making any significant modification to their party’s policies — that they are the natural majority party just waiting to be given back control.

They’re wrong, but they don’t want to admit it. That’s why — as I said in my earlier post — they cry ” ‘nasty’ and ‘unfair’ whenever they lose to Republicans. It’s childish behavior. Get over it!”

Intellectuals, Academia, and the "Common" Person

Terry Eagleton, writing at New Statesman, reviews Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? by Frank Furedi. Eagleton’s review is rife with trenchant observations. Here’s a sampling:

…We inherit the idea of the intellectual from the 18th-century Enlightenment, which valued truth, universality and objectivity – all highly suspect notions in a postmodern age. As Furedi points out, these ideas used to be savaged by the political right, as they undercut appeals to prejudice, hierarchy and custom. Nowadays, in a choice historical irony, they are under assault from the cultural left.

In the age of Sontag, Said, Williams and Chomsky, whole sectors of the left behave as though these men and women were no longer possible. Soon, no doubt, they will take to imitating the nervous tic by which the right ritually inserts the expression “so-called” before the word “intellectual”. Right-wingers do this because they imagine that “intellectual” means “frightfully clever”, a compliment they are naturally reluctant to pay to their opponents. In fact, there are dim-witted intellectuals just as there are incompetent chefs. The word “intellectual” is a job description, not a commendation….

[A] snap definition of an intellectual would be “more or less the opposite of an academic”….Literary academics are more likely than insurance brokers to be left-wingers….

University academics are discouraged from fostering adversarial debate, in case it should hurt someone’s feelings….In what one American sociologist has termed the McDonaldisation of the universities, students are redefined as consumers of services rather than junior partners in a public service….

[T]he politics of inclusion…in [Furedi’s] view belittles the capacities of the very people it purports to serve. It implies in its pessimistic way that excellence and popular participation are bound to be opposites….[H]e rejects cultural pessimism, decries the idea of a golden age, and applauds the advances that contemporary culture has made. It is just that he objects to slighting people’s potential for self-transformation under cover of flattering their current identities.

Here’s What a Real Nazi Does

For the benefit of those who glibly call Bush a Nazi, here’s what a real Nazi does:

Hitler Signs an Order Authorizing Involuntary Euthanasia in Germany, October 1939

Germany had been the site of an increasing number of measures taken in the name of “racial purity” since the Nazis assumed power in 1933, including forced sterilization of those with physical and/or mental handicaps, and the murder of infants with similar handicaps (in both cases, the primary targets were not Jews, but so-called “Aryans,” or non-Jewish Germans). Now in 1939, under the cover of war, the program was to be expanded to include murdering handicapped adults. Since Hitler would issue no law legalizing such forced “euthanasia,” and since physicians would hesitate or refuse to take part in the killing unless they had written protection from later prosecution, Hitler was persuaded to sign this document on his personal stationery (German-language version also available) instructing his assistants Philipp Bouhler and Dr. Karl Brandt to initiate the program. The document was signed in October 1939, but backdated to 1 September, the date of the beginning of World War II. For further information, see Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 67.

ADOLF HITLER

Berlin, 1 September 1939

Reichsleiter Bouhler and
Dr. med. Brandt

are instructed to broaden the powers of physicians designated by name, who will decide whether those who have – as far as can be humanly determined – incurable illnesses can, after the most careful evaluation, be granted a mercy death.

/signed/ Adolf Hitler

That’s Nazism for you.

(Thanks to my son for the link.)

Message to Democrats: Get Over It

Democrats keep saying things like this: “Republicans are nasty.” “Republicans don’t fight fair.” Well, there’s plenty of that going around in all political camps. The real problem with Democrats is that they think they’re still supposed to be in the White House and in charge of Congress.

Well, the fact is that we’re in a Republican era that began as long ago as 1968, when Nixon beat Humphrey, even though Wallace took a lot of votes that probably would have gone to Nixon. (Don’t start on that racist crap, again, there’s a lot more to the South than race — and always has been.) Republicans have held the White House ever since, except for Carter’s term, which he owed to Nixon’s disgrace, and Clinton’s two terms, which he owed to Perot’s candidacy. Moreover, Republicans began to claw their way back into congressional power in the 1980s, when they held the Senate for several years. They regained full control of Congress in the election of 1994 — ten whole years ago.

So, it seems that Democrats are suffering from a bizarre form of near-term memory loss. They remember 1933-1969, when they held the White House for all but Ike’s two terms. (And what kind of Republican was Ike, anyway?) They mistakenly thought their White House hegemony had been restored with Clinton’s ascendancy, but Clinton was really an accidental president. Democrats vividly remember having controlled both houses of Congress for most of the 62 years from 1933 to 1995, and they keep deluding themselves that they will retake Congress in the “next” election.

Now Democrats are clinging to their old memories and crying “nasty” and “unfair” whenever they lose to Republicans. It’s childish behavior. Get over it!

The Politics of Gun Control in Action

Reuters — yes, Reuters — tells us:

More Smoke Than Fire as U.S. Assault Gun Ban Ends
By Michael Conlon

CHICAGO (Reuters) – A 10-year-old ban on assault weapons expired across the United States on Monday with a political firefight but no apparent rush to rearm by gun fanciers….[Fancy that! I’ll bet he thought every “gun fancier” would buy a dozen semi-automatic rifles and start shooting people from tall buildings.]

In Tennessee, at Nashville’s Gun City USA, firearms instructor Robert Schlafly said there had been no upsurge in orders or interest, adding it may be too early to tell what will happen.

In the long run, he predicted the end of the ban will drive down prices since new inventories will appear on the market.

“To me the ban was just a way for (former President Bill) Clinton to get more votes,” Schlafly said. “It’s all politics. It didn’t hurt the firearms industry but people were mad.”…[Darn tootin’. They thought there was a Second Amendment lying around here somewhere.]

In Washington, Democratic presidential challenger John Kerry accused President Bush of choosing “powerful and well-connected friends” [like the average citizen?] over police officers and families by secretly backing the gun lobby in its opposition to a renewal of the law.

Now, he said, “when a killer walks into a gun shop, when a terrorist goes to a gun show somewhere in America, when they want to purchase an AK-47 [still illegal, try again: ED] or some other military assault weapon, they’re going to hear one word: ‘sure.”‘ [And when a homeowner who wants to defend himself from criminals and terrorists goes to a gun show or gun store somewhere in America, he’s going to hear one word: “Sold.”]

Bush spokesman Scott McClellan called Kerry’s remarks “another false attack” and said the best way to stop gun violence is to vigorously prosecute gun crime. [How true! A law has yet to deter a weapon.]

A Bit of Sense and a Lot of Nonsense from Austin

Here’s economist James K. Galbraith — who professes at The University of Texas at Austin — writing in today’s Austin American-Statesman about his profession:

…Economics suffers today from high formalism, rigid orthodoxy and tribal exclusiveness in professional journals; real-world scholarship is not prized and not easily published. But fortunately, with the Internet the costs of publication are falling. New journals are springing up that can peer-review effectively at low cost, and this will one day cause the breakdown of our ossified system.

In a world of virtual journals and electronic working papers, scholarly engagement has a better chance. Let’s hope that quality will still be distinguishable from junk…

Oops — can’t trust the uninitiated to sort it out for themselves, can we? Well economists can’t agree about much, so why does it matter what the uninitiated make of what economists write? Back to Galbraith:

Finally, for the engaged scholar, there is always the tricky issue of the role of values and politics. Some scholarship is intrinsically apolitical, but social scholarship can’t be. The policies I support grow from my ethical and political beliefs, to which my expertise (such as it is) merely adds an element of engineering.

In other words, he doesn’t know how to separate scholarship from values. Hmmm…

And yet, of course, a professor is not a missionary. A profound obligation is to respect the ideas and views of students who come in with different values.

My approach to that is to declare my own politics frankly — I’m a liberal Keynesian Democrat, in case you didn’t know.

Why is it necessary to declare one’s politics frankly, in the classroom, and how is doing it consistent with what he says next?

But I try to preserve my classroom as a space for respectful discourse with all points of view.

And, sometimes, you pull it off.

Some years ago, a student wrote these words on my confidential end-of-semester evaluation: “It pains me to say this, but you are the best professor I’ve had here — even though you are a communist.”…

Yeah, sometimes his non-liberal, non-Keynesian, non-Democrat students aren’t cowed by his frankly declared politics. How often? Once? At least that student saw him for what he is. (No, I’m not calling Galbraith names. He’s a liberal, so he mustn’t mind being called a communist; he’s open-minded.)

Now for Galbraith’s op-ed page companion, the re-doubtable Molly Ivins — an Austin-based, syndicated columnist (as the American-Statesman likes to remind us) — whose “good old gal” shtick has become more of a shrill whine. Molly is inveighing against the “old boy” network of rich Texans that undoubtedly arranged for GWB to do his Vietnam time in the Texas Air National Guard. Here’s the (unintentionally) funny part:

Listen, my children, and you shall hear: There was then no nasty partisan politics in Texas except inside the Democratic Party. The Republicans were upper-class establishment types, and the tradition of Texas Republicans and Texas Democrats working and playing well together continued, actually, until the Republicans took over, when it ended with a bang.

What Ivins is trying to imply is that a bunch of rich Republicans invaded Texas, took it over, and started playing nasty. What happened, of course, was that a lot of Texas Democrats got sick and tired of the national party’s positions on issues (abortion, defense, welfare, government in general) and became Republicans. And so it went — in Texas as across most of the South. Then, new voters followed mostly in their parents’ footsteps and allied with the Republican Party. Their numbers have been reinforced by a steady in-migration of disenfranchised Republicans and Reagan Democrats who have fled the “liberal” North for the warmth and more companionable politics of the South. An invasion? No, just a good, old-fashioned combination of political conversion and American mobility. The upshot of which has been to make Texas a solidly Republican State.

Ivins, of course, is sick — just sick — because all those converts and new Texas voters have lined up with the “upper-class establishment types” instead of flocking to her Willie Nelson worldview. And when the Republican majority insists on acting like a majority, that’s “playing nasty” in Ivins’s view. Talk about sore losers.