Tuesday, September 30, 2003
Just Thinking 09/29/03
My Just Thinking column for this week is "The Physics of the Antichrist, a Theory of Everything, I of VI: The Reality and Necessity of Soul." This is the first essay in a six-part response to Frank Tipler's book, The Physics of Immortality.
Tipler's theory helped me to pull together several disparate ideas that I've been carrying around for years, and when they started to fall together, they did so in what felt like a revelatory way. It may very well be that the ideas are crazy. It may very well be that I've tripped over a heresy or two. Conversely, it may be considered convenient, indeed, that I ultimately conclude that the science that Tipler describes proves Catholicism correct in every measure.
Well, I don't think I'm crazy, and I believe that the truth of Catholicism is what drew me to the faith, even though I couldn't express the reasons at the time. Nonetheless, I would very much welcome feedback, even if adversarial in nature. I would also like to hear of any possibilities that I am, in fact, perpetuating heresies.
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 08:17 PM EST
Dust in the Light Welcomes Rush Limbaugh
It's okay, Rush, you can admit that you're a reader...
Well, maybe he's not, but I wanted to note a bit of Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy effective communication. I've been frustrated that nobody in the major media, particularly among conservatives, has noticed that Joe Wilson used his wife's maiden name in all of his online bios. This is something that bloggers — including me — noticed within a week of Novak's column in July.
So, when I turned on Rush, as per custom, while I made my lunch yesterday and heard him addressing the spin of the WaPo that it was release of the maiden name that made for a controversy, I had to email him. Well, just now, during execution of the same custom, I heard Rush declare the factum to his audience. ("You didn't know that, did you?" he said.)
I've emailed others at the pro-pundit level, so hopefully some fresh air will clean the room of this particular political stink bomb. And hopefully, too, the pros will start to realize that there's a whole intelligence organ at their disposal for the price (if they're inclined to be so generous) of a link and/or reference.
(Note: of course, it's entirely possible that Rush came across this info elsewhere, either by email or through other online channels... but I can fantasize, can't I?)
2 comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:58 PM EST
Monday, September 29, 2003
A Novak Clarification and the Bush Administration's Dream
In case it disappears, here's a significant quotation from Bob Novak that currently appears on Drudge:
Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this. In July I was interviewing a senior administration official on Ambassador Wilson's report when he told me the trip was inspired by his wife, a CIA employee working on weapons of mass destruction. Another senior official told me the same thing. As a professional journalist with 46 years experience in Washington I do not reveal confidential sources. When I called the CIA in July to confirm Mrs. Wilson's involvement in the mission for her husband -- he is a former Clinton administration official -- they asked me not to use her name, but never indicated it would endanger her or anybody else. According to a confidential source at the CIA, Mrs. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operator, and not in charge of undercover operatives...
Looking over all of the background material as well as today's WaPo article, I've noticed a few things. First of all, apart from Novak the only sources suggesting that the White House "leaked" the information (however much they leaked) are Wilson and anonymous "officials." Specifically, note this:
Wilson said that in the week after the Novak column appeared, several journalists told him that the White House was trying to call attention to his wife, apparently hoping to undermine his credibility by implying he had received the Niger assignment only because his wife had suggested the mission and recommended him for the job.
"Each of the reporters quoted the White House official as using some variation on, 'The real story isn't the 16 words. The real story is Wilson and his wife,' " Wilson said. "The time frame led me to deduce that the White House was continuing to try to push this story."
Wilson identified one of the reporters as Andrea Mitchell of NBC News. Mitchell did not respond to requests for comment.
So it's starting to look like the reporters about whom Wilson has been talking for months as proof that the administration was intent on breaking is wife's cover (however much she had a cover) called him a week later. But assuming that the calls to these reporters really happened, were they before or after the Novak column? If after, then they weren't "leaking" anything, but pointing out Novak's piece. If before, then the language is such that no leak was necessary: they merely suggested that Wilson's wife was significant, leaving the reporters to dig up the facts, which ranged from readily available to somewhat secretive. Hardball? Maybe, but not criminal. Depending what Plame actually did/does for the CIA, it might not have even risked lives or even intelligence links.
What makes me think that any administration calls to reporters were subsequent to Novak's piece is that Wilson spoke with Andrea Mitchell (who has conveniently declined to comment) on July 21 (here's a Google cache; here's a reprint if the cache disappears). Wouldn't it have merited mention if Mitchell, herself, had been contacted with the same information as Novak had disclosed a week earlier?
So here's what might just be the administration's fantasy hypothesis: Wilson has been lying and spinning the truth to make it sound as if there's a conspiracy to discredit him, and it turns out that nobody in the administration "leaked" anything that they shouldn't have. We already have seen him back off from the statement that he has "sources" who fingered Karl Rove.
But it gets better.
Note this from the Andrea Mitchell article:
Wilson reached his judgment [about the Niger uranium claim] without ever seeing the forged documents that led to the charge. We showed him the documents for the first time Monday: I asked, "This is the first you are seeing the documents?" Wilson answered, "Yes. This was never a legitimate piece of information."
So here we have a central figure of the 16-words controversy admitting that he hadn't seen the documents that he was supposedly debunking as forgeries. Of course, there's more to the controversy than that, most of it in the Bush administration's favor, but this is enough to offer this "what if": What if Wilson also lied and spun the truth about his report to the CIA about the Niger uranium?
Sure, I'm applying the conjecture with a heavy hand here, but the surprising thing is that it is entirely possible that this could prove to have been the case.
ADDENDUM:
Well, Daniel Drezner confirms at least one of my suspicions: that Mitchell was contacted after the Novak column. It's also interesting to note that major media reportage is gradually sinking into increasingly vague descriptions of the "leakers" (e.g., from "senior administration officials" to "administration officials").No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 08:31 PM EST
Blame the Plame Game
I've laid off the Plame Affair because I haven't seen anything new since I first addressed it, and I think my characterization still stands: "a whole lot of speculation presented as evidence for a lynching."
But a Washington Post article on the subject bothers me because it seems to be setting up a big-time spin. Here are the offending passages:
But the aides said Bush has no plans to ask his staff members whether they played a role in revealing the name of an undercover officer who is married to former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, one of the most visible critics of Bush's handling of intelligence about Iraq. ...
The controversy erupted over the weekend, when administration officials reported that Tenet sent the Justice Department a letter raising questions about whether federal law was broken when the operative, Valerie Plame, was exposed. She was named in a column by Robert D. Novak that ran July 14 in The Post and other newspapers. ...
More specific details about the controversy emerged yesterday. Wilson said in a telephone interview that four reporters from three television networks called him in July and told him that White House officials had contacted them to encourage stories that would include his wife's identity. ...
Novak published her maiden name, Plame, which she had used overseas and has not been using publicly. Intelligence sources said top officials at the agency were very concerned about the disclosure because it could allow foreign intelligence services to track down some of her former contacts and lead to the exposure of agents. ...
Wilson said that in the week after the Novak column appeared, several journalists told him that the White House was trying to call attention to his wife, apparently hoping to undermine his credibility by implying he had received the Niger assignment only because his wife had suggested the mission and recommended him for the job.
The common theme is that the offense is the release of Plame's name. However, as I noted last time, every bio that I found of Wilson on the Internet (example) identifies him as "married to the former Valerie Plame." If Cliff May is correct that Plame's career in the CIA was common "insider" knowledge, the scenario that sparked the controversy begins to take shape. Let's look at the relevant paragraph from the infamous Robert Novak column:
Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. "I will not answer any question about my wife," Wilson told me.
There are two pieces of information that constitute the breach: Plame's occupation and her name. Her name was readily available to anybody smart enough to use Google. Her career is another matter, one that justifies investigation into who moved it beyond "insider" common knowledge. I don't intend to spin for anybody who's broken the law and risked the cover of agents; nothing excuses that. Nonetheless, the question that's bugging me is why the administration's foes are emphasizing the name aspect.
Suppose the two administration officials did no more than say what Novak has attributed to them: "Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report." Where does that fit into the controversy? Cliff May implies that Novak could easily have already known that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, and if necessary, he could have Googled for Wilson's biography and gotten "Valerie Plame." If Novak didn't know that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, perhaps somebody at the Agency told him when he asked why she would have any influence over Wilson's trip. And that raises another question: if the matter was so sensitive, did the CIA ask Novak not to put all the pieces together for the public?
Here's my current take: somebody from the administration called Novak (and others) to mention the curious datum that Wilson's wife fingered him for the Africa trip, perhaps with some innuendo about who his wife was (although it didn't have to go even that far). Novak called the CIA, and the official there, fearing controversy over the appearance of impropriety, clarified Plame's role in that affair. Over the next couple of weeks, dismissing the importance of Wilson and Plame's relationship (because the result was the 16-words controversy), open enemies of the administration began to make noises about their take on the implications of Novak's piece. Writing just two days after Novak's column appeared, the always reliable David Corn was first to market with accusations of foul play, but note this:
His wife's role--if she had one--has nothing but anecdotal value. And Novak's sources could have mentioned it without providing her name. Instead, they were quite generous.
Of course, Wilson himself was "quite generous" with his wife's name. And Paul Krugman illustrates that the question of who, exactly, "identified [Plame] as a CIA operative" disappeared almost immediately, even though it remained (and remains) a valid question.
I'm willing to wait for more, and I'll condemn anybody who broke the law, especially if it undermined intelligence work. But I still find something fishy in the forward march against the White House. And I still think that if the White House is "attempting various smear campaigns, the administration is doing so in about as bumbling a manner as possible, something that it can ill afford in a nation with a hostile press."
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 01:22 PM EST
Sunday, September 28, 2003
A Correction from One of the Blackballed
Glenn Reynolds notes David Brooks's informing of the New York Times readership that conservatives don't have an easy, welcoming road in the American academy. He's right, of course, but he says something that makes me think that older, established conservative thinkers don't completely understand what their younger counterparts face:
Conservative professors emphasize that most discrimination is not conscious. A person who voted for President Bush may be viewed as an oddity, but the main problem in finding a job is that the sorts of subjects a conservative is likely to investigate — say, diplomatic or military history — do not excite hiring committees. Professors are interested in the subjects they are already pursuing, and in a horrible job market it is easy to toss out applications from people who are doing something different.
The suggestion about subject matter isn't as limited as this suggests. Within the field of literary studies, for example, a conservative might investigate — just to pick a topic out of nowhere — the ways in which racialist/liberal methods of analysis distort such books as Huck Finn and the implications of this error for the larger society. The "subject" is obviously one in which even liberal lit profs are interested, even "excited," so the problem can only be that, holding the opinions that they do, they come to the conclusion that the conservative applicant is not an effective or clear thinker about the topic. Given this assumption, which may very well be subconscious, the more coherent and extensive the conservative's argument, the more the professors must see some indefinable problem in the writer's thinking and method.
Of course, I'm an extreme example because I chose to put my controversial ideas front and center in my application by way of my writing sample. However, given my perspective, I have to tweak Mr. Levy's suggestion here:
And Jacob T. Levy, a libertarian also at Chicago, says some conservatives exaggerate the level of hostility they face. Some politicized humanities departments may be closed to them, he concedes, but professors in other fields are open to argument.
I'll agree that I didn't face "hostility" in the classroom. In fact, the professors generally seemed to enjoy having their intellectual volleys parried. However, as Robert George implies elsewhere in Brooks's piece, the problem is most defined at competitive junctures: admission, job placement, tenure, and so on. Top grad schools in literature accept maybe 20 out of hundreds of applicants, so if admissions boards see particular opinions as indications of incorrect thinking, they'll reject the hopeful student, even if they would be open to argument on a given topic.
ADDENDUM:
There was a whole lot more that I thought of writing in this post, but my mind is heading in too many directions as it is.No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 03:34 PM EST
A Third Way on the FMA
Andrew Sullivan has blogged against the Federal Marriage Amendment again:
My reading is that the FMA would ban all types of domestic partnerships, civil unions, or any arrangements that can strengthen gay relationhips far short of marriage rights - even if they are the democratic consensus of a state, and reached through legislative means. The spin from most of the best FMA advocates (such as Stanley Kurtz) is that it would narrowly affect only court-imposed benefits and if a state wanted to create civil unions through its legislature, fine. Here's the money sentence in the Washington Times op-ed [by Michael J. McManus]:
Most experts believe the amendment would invalidate Vermont and California laws that are virtually equivalent of marriage.
Now remember that California's law is not court-imposed but passed by a duly elected legislature. The point of the FMA is clear: to prevent individual states passing any benefits to gay couples by whatever means. It's time the supporters of the FMA came clean about this.
The piece that Sullivan is missing becomes apparent when one looks at the text of the Vermont civil unions law, particularly this clause:
Parties to a civil union shall have all the same benefits, protections and responsibilities under law, whether they derive from statute, administrative or court rule, policy, common law or any other source of civil law, as are granted to spouses in a marriage.
As McManus points out in the Washington Times, the Vermont law would clearly be contrary to the FMA. However, the relevant factor is the method through which the rights accruing to civil unions are enumerated. This is in complete correlation to what I argued last time Sullivan tried to paint the FMA as undermining the rights of state legislatures and popular referenda:
The range of possible laws and consequent litigation would be as broad as from legislation enacting civil unions that track exactly with marriage all the way to legislation that specifies every contract and capability that would thereafter extend to civil unions. The process of solidifying public policy within this spectrum is exactly the debate and discussion that supporters of the FMA wish to require.
The Vermont law is an example of "legislation enacting civil unions that track exactly with marriage" and would, therefore, be invalidated not because of the specific rights that it grants, but because, using the language of the FMA, it explicitly grants those rights in their capacity as "legal incidents" of marriage. (I assume there is a similar problem with the California law.)
In this context, I'm a little puzzled by Ramesh Ponnuru's response to Sullivan:
A benefit that had previously been reserved to married couples could be legislatively granted more widely--to any two people who share a household, for example. The FMA does, however, bar governmental benefits to unmarried persons premised on a sexual relationship between (or among) them. It would not bar legislatively enacted civil unions that, say, opened various benefits to any two people living together--whether they were two brothers, two guys who sleep together, widows who had set up house, or whatever. It would bar civil unions that were limited to gay couples.
I'm curious from what source or with what logic Ponnuru derives this reading, because the sexual intentions of a couple strike me as one of many arbitrarily important factors that can define a relationship. For example, if a relationship is built on the basis of a business partnership, both partners can sign company checks. However, their spouses could not do so, nor could their brothers. In other words, the business relationship is defined as such, and the shared rights and obligations correspond to that definition. The Vermont civil union law defines civil unions thus:
§ 1202. REQUISITES OF A VALID CIVIL UNION
For a civil union to be established in Vermont, it shall be necessary that the parties to a civil union satisfy all of the following criteria:
(1) Not be a party to another civil union or a marriage.
(2) Be of the same sex and therefore excluded from the marriage laws of this state.
(3) Meet the criteria and obligations set forth in 18 V.S.A. chapter 106.§ 1203. PERSON SHALL NOT ENTER A CIVIL UNION WITH A RELATIVE
(a) A woman shall not enter a civil union with her mother, grandmother, daughter, granddaughter, sister, brother's daughter, sister's daughter, father's sister or mother's sister.
(b) A man shall not enter a civil union with his father, grandfather, son, grandson, brother, brother's son, sister's son, father's brother or mother's brother.
(c) A civil union between persons prohibited from entering a civil union in subsection (a) or (b) of this section is void.I see nothing in the FMA that conflicts with this language because it does not attribute marital rights to the relationship. All it does is define the arrangement that would invoke a newly itemized collection of rights.
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 01:42 PM EST
Saturday, September 27, 2003
Just So's You Know My State of Mind
It never fails: my intellectual life is a pendulum of clarity and confusion. For a couple of weeks, I've felt "on," with holes and connections jumping out at me. Beginning yesterday, my brain has swung, and I've been feeling a bit less self-assured.
Maybe I'm just sleep deprived.
Good night.
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:39 AM EST
What Happens When Marriage Dies...
I'd wanted to comment on this essay by Boston University's Peter Wood more extensively than I've the time or energy for right now. Go read it. It's interesting stuff, offering anthropological arguments against gay marriage, polgamy/polyamory, and, indeed, the further degradation of our traditional views of marriage and sex:
The anthropological evidence is overwhelmingly on the side of those who argue that large social consequences follow from a society's decisions about which sexual practices are legitimate. The rules that govern marriage and sexual relations are, directly and indirectly, the basis of family life and have enormous influence over the formation of good (or bad) character in children. Marriage channels the primary relations between the sexes and the generations, and it is the template for most other relations in society. This is true not just in the United States. It is true everywhere. Alter the rules of marriage, and society will reshape itself around the new situation. But it doesn't necessarily reshape itself in the ways that the reformers hoped.
The sexual privatizers imagine a society in which adults can seek their pleasures without interference and somehow children will get born and properly raised. It is a sheer illusion. A society that doesn't restrict human sexual relations in effective ways is a society that doesn't have much interest in reproducing itself. People left to their own sexual whims will sometimes form stable families, but that is the exception, not the rule. The more we treat sex as merely recreational, the less important we make procreation. De-mystifying procreation—making it just another event that may or may not require heterosexual married parents in a long-term relationship—leads to both low procreation and badly raised children. A society that abandons the effort to restrict and channel human sexual urges into approved forms loses control of the strongest emotional/biological force known to our species and invites a progressive dissolution into unconnected or randomly connected individuals.
This is must-read stuff.
(Note: I've been holding on to this for a few days and have forgotten where I got it from. Apologies to the person to whom I should be giving credit.)
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:35 AM EST
Is the Media Tide Turning
Hey, check this out:
Peter McPherson, the man who headed the U.S. economic reform effort in Iraq, said Friday that he believed the economic situation in Iraq has now stabilized but he conceded that it will be some time before the country can resume significant levels of economic growth. ...
McPherson said the 20-person U.S. economic team had been able to put policies in place to bolster Iraq's currency, get the nations' banks reopened and establish a trade bank to support critically needed imports.
In addition, he said, the U.S. occupation forces are having success in restoring electrical production and oil production has increased to around 1.9 million barrels per day, the highest it has been since before the U.S.-led invasion earlier this year.
Between this and the somewhat tempered news about that Census poverty report, I'm starting to feel a bit like the sun is rising after a long, dark media night. (Hope it's not just a truck coming over the hill.)
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:29 AM EST
Bias Is the Story That They Try to Dig Up
With the "true stories" — which is to say, those presenting hopeful news along with realistic handling of the bad — making their way, inevitable in these days, to the American people, I've noticed the media types starting to make the usual exculpatory noises. "Oh, well it's not bias," they say. "It's just that we, by our nature, tend to seek out the shocking and, yes, often negative stories."
Somewhere or other, I recently heard or read somebody suggesting that what is happening with coverage of Iraq is akin to what one sees in the local newspaper: mostly death and controversy. Give that some thought — not theoretically, but to your own experience. I've been in local and not-so-local papers a handful of times in my life, and I'm neither dead nor the subject of controversy (at least not controversy that I'm important enough to make newsworthy). The truth is that local and not-so-local newspapers are full of good stories of achievements, and many stories that are about controversy present at least one side as doing something good.
No, I'm convinced that there's a bias, whether subconscious or not, that wants the storyline of the current war to be one that conveniently aligns with a political viewpoint. To simplify: if reporters liked the President, The Iraq Story would be one of perseverance in the face of fanaticism, of modernism sparking in the nation despite the hard, sand-streaked wind of the desert. But the storyline that we are getting — that people are saying is to the detriment of the truth — is quite different.
Let's take Iraq out of the question. Some of the statements articles about a Census report that was just released inspire head shakes and perhaps even spit-up beverages. Here's the opening paragraph of the Reuters piece, titled "34.6 Million U.S. People in Poverty in 2002 - Report," that appeared in the Washington Post:
More than 1.7 million people in the United States slid into poverty in 2002 and incomes slipped for the second year in a row, the U.S. government said on Friday in a report sure to provide new ammunition for Democrats trying to unseat President Bush.
Since Reuters doesn't offer any indication about whether the report ought to "provide new ammunition," I think it reasonable to give the newswire a pop quiz: What year is it, today? Why, it's 2003 — almost 2004 — and the economic news has been improving for months. In fact, the only mention in the entire piece about the current state of the economy is in the context of the Bush administration's spin of the report.
Elsewhere in the article, Reuters earns my vote for most biased single word choice:
A sluggish recovery has failed to create new jobs for the 3.3 million private sector employees who have been thrown out of work since Bush took office in January 2001.
Note the imagery — certain to call up images of the administration forcibly ripping people from their desks. Like a secret police tossing people into the street and "throwing" them into jail.
The AP article that appeared in the Providence Journal, although its title, "Poverty Rate Rises for Second Year in Row," leaves out that the "second year" is long over, offered more information, including statements that poverty and unemployment generally continue to worsen in the year after recovery begins. However, it also offered more "explanation" about why the problem is current:
Bill Spriggs, director of research and public policy at the National Urban League, said the numbers were frightening. "This may become one of the worst downturns in income in 30 years," he said. "We see that people are digging themselves deeper into poverty because the economy is not generating jobs."
We are also informed that "the numbers were fodder for President Bush's aides to call for enactment of virtually his entire domestic and economic agenda." And the Democrats are given yet another blind swing for a controversy:
Even before the data was made public, House Democrats charged the Bush administration was trying to hide bad economic news by releasing the numbers on a Friday when people are paying more attention to the upcoming weekend. In previous years, the estimates were released on a Tuesday or Thursday.
"Sounds like they're trying to bury the numbers where people won't find them," said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y. "This is another clear example of political manipulation of data by the Bush administration to avoid the glare of public scrutiny about the country's worsening economy."
At least the report ends with the rebuttal from Census Bureau spokesman Larry Neal that, because these numbers will be "rehashed" for the entire year to come, "The notion that we should, could or would suppress these numbers doesn't pass the laugh test."
All in all, I'm seeing reasons for hope that change is possible, at least for the AP; the news services are businesses, after all. (It seems as if the headline writers will be the last to turn.) But it'll take a long time and much balanced coverage before I'll believe the "media likes bad news" line again. And I've permanently written off Reuters; check out this subsequent headline: "Poverty Up Second Year on Bush's Watch."
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:25 AM EST
Friday, September 26, 2003
I Just Can't Pretend Liberalism
I'm reluctant to admit this, but I sometimes hate being conservative. I hate having to bite my lip in just about every group with which I interact based on non-political interests, listening to the anti-Bush slights and left-wing pieties, stated almost unaware. I hate feeling left out of the forming community of New England bloggers, or (at best) included in discussion as an interloper. I hate that I didn't get into grad school because of what I believe, that the local media ignores me no matter what I do, that I have to find ways to form local friendships almost explicitly in spite of my convictions.
And so sometimes, when I'm tired of living in a shack, when I'm tired of contemplating my debts, when I lose the energy to assert a difference between disliking a social policy and hating a class of people, when I shy away from arranging events and promotions because I realize that nobody would come, when liberal James at Aces Full of Links introduces me to a fantastic beer, I think that perhaps I'll open my mind to hearing their arguments. Take a look. See if maybe I could blend into my overwhelmingly blue state by forcing my writing and conversation into some shade or other of purple.
I can't do it.
It's probably an unfair place to start, but Barbara Streisand's "The Myth of 'Big Government'" online statement points to the reason:
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the agency Bush extolled in the Southeast this week, is designed to help Americans in crises - be they victims of natural disasters, or victims of extreme poverty. Agencies such as FEMA are what make our country able to bounce back from tragedy and unforeseen events, just as schools educate our children, firefighters fight fires, police officers keep our streets orderly, a decent highway system allows us to move freely, national parks maintain our incredible natural resources, our military protects us from outside threats, the Center for Disease Control protects us from epidemics, and Social Security and Medicare programs insure that our seniors aren't thrust into poverty after so many years of hard work. These are just some of the basics of government. These are not entitlement programs. These are not excesses. These are not "special interests." This is what the government is supposed to do for you, the people. ...
We also have to understand the connection between taxes and spending. It is our taxes that pay for these services, so Bush's two big tax cuts for the wealthy will, eventually, result in a cut in the services that all Americans depend on everyday, unless the tax cuts are repealed. So far, Bush has been more or less coasting on a policy of tax cuts and spending increases, such as the additional $87 billion he now is asking Americans to shoulder for Iraq. Meanwhile, he has cut spending for state-administered programs - plunging state governments into crisis, and has created unfunded mandates with catchy titles, such as the No Child Left Behind Act. Bush is dangerously betting against the future... turning an enormous surplus into an enormous deficit that future generations will have to grapple with. Eventually, we will be forced to have a national discussion about either repealing the cuts or asking the question: What everyday government spending programs are we really ready to do without?
How does one even begin to fairly and amicably address such mind-numbing asininity? The government is good — necessary, even — for emergencies and self defense, and this means it must be good for everything, even services at which it has proven inefficient in the U.S. and elsewhere? There is no distance, for Ms. Streisand, between believing that the government should offer some services and should offer all services. I couldn't help laughing at the way that she added Social Security and Medicare to that list; if I were parodying such people I couldn't have done so more effectively. And for whom are untouchable national parks protecting natural resources (e.g., oil, coal, timber, fur)? (Of course, by "natural resources" Ms. B.S. doesn't mean to imply utility, but scenery.)
Moving on to "the point," Babs doesn't even deign to address the suggestion that — historically — cut taxes lead to increased revenue. I'll agree with her that the spending increases are out of control, but then I wonder how that point can be made if we're seeing Big Government as a myth. I also wonder if I'm the only one who remembers that "deficit for future generations" from a little over a decade ago — you know, back before an economic boom erased that deficit with which my great grandchildren were supposedly saddled.
Apparently, also, part of what the federal government "is supposed to do" is to run the state governments, because Bush's tax cuts, not profligate spending throughout the '90s, are responsible for "plunging state governments into crisis." And then I recalled that this sounded familiar. Oh yeah. The aforementioned liberal James recently linked to a map of the "red states" showing that 22 of the 29 states that went to Mr. Bush in the 2000 election receive more from the federal government than they contribute (the map doesn't bother showing the same for Gore). So, here we have the President responsible for a state-level fiscal crisis because he's giving them too much money... huh?
It hardly matters, in this strange leftward world, that the legislature has control of the purse strings and that the Democrat to Republican ratio of the Senators among the top 10 "taker" states is 12 to 8. How could such a thing be relevant when the title of the post in which James introduced that map is "Conservatives Against Bush" and begins thus: "Say it with me now: Bush is only conservative when it comes to his use of honest communication." (That's sarcasm) Am I to believe that James, self avowed fan of Michael Moore and credulous quoter of Al Franken, would prefer that the President were more conservative?
Sorry. I don't believe such things. It's all too clear that it is only an unreasoned political calculus that has Barbara Streisand criticizing Big Government educational programs. As comfortable as I might find it to switch teams, I would have no lip left for all the biting.
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 02:22 PM EST
By Way of Explanation
In the interest of fair dealing, I wanted to mention something that I posted yesterday and then took down after a few hours. It was an essay in response to Maureen Mullarkey's latest Notes & Commentary piece, and the reason I took it down was that I used racial issues as an example, and I don't think I wrote it unambiguously enough that it wouldn't be treated as more than an example.
What I hadn't made sufficiently explicit was that it actually is a major theme in literary and artistic studies to create all sorts of racial subtext where there is none and then apply the racism to whoever is politically convenient. Without the time or, really, interest in reworking that essay to be absolutely clear, while preserving as much of the emotional impact as possible, I thought it best just to remove the thing from the blog.
So, if you caught the essay yesterday, now you know where it went.
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:57 AM EST
The Redwood Review Fiction of the Week
The Redwood Review fiction piece of the week is "Granda," by Christine L. Mullen.
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:51 AM EST
Thursday, September 25, 2003
Two War on Terrorism Must-Reads
The predictable response, and one that I've received, from the anti-war, anti-Bush crowd to statements from Democrat congressman from Georgia Jim Marshall that things in Iraq aren't as bad as they are being made to seem is to point to Marshall's Vietnam comparison. Well, in an interview with Brit Hume, Marshall modifies that somewhat, limiting the comparison simply to the similarity that they are both guerrilla-type wars that domestic public opinion can affect.
I don't imagine that this applies to many people who read this blog regularly, but if you are among the naysayers, I think you should give some real hard, soul-searching thought to what Marshall says here:
Well, it is a guerrilla war. And if we don't appear to have resolve, then Iraqis are going to be a lot less likely to cooperate with us, a lot less likely to be willingly in the Army and willingly out there, going after the guerrillas.
We can't force freedom on the Iraqis. The Iraqis have to take it for themselves. They can distinguish one from another. We can't do that. We can't read the street signs. We don't know the language. They do. They can go in there and deal with this guerrilla situation.
It's not like Vietnam. In Vietnam, you had the Chinese and Russians...
The ability to call on our leaders to explain their actions is absolutely crucial to our nation. However, in a situation such as that which we currently face in Iraq, it isn't "chilling dissent" to suggest that we really can transform morbid perception of loss into an actual loss. Some people seem to have difficulty with this, but we really do have to trust our leaders to some extent, and all of the carping, while emotionally satisfying in its way, can and does have an effect.
And for those who need reasons to switch from unanswerable skepticism of our President toward some acceptance of what we face, check out — bookmark — Richard Miniter's compilation of some of the evidence of cooperation between Iraq and al Qaeda. There are those out there who would refuse to accept any evidence, right down to signed confessions delivered with a treasure map to an underground stadium full of WMDs. ("How convenient," they would say.)
For those who feel themselves drifting: remember, first, what the evidence and history actually are and, second, the possible outcome of a change of direction in our national policy.
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:09 PM EST
The Downside of Productivity
I'm pretty wiped out. I don't know what it is, really, but the hours are just drifting by, and I'm not sure where they're going or what I've accomplished during them.
In part, it's that I've been working more. To an extent, it's also that a few big moments and events have passed this week and last, and I haven't seen any results sufficient to give me a feeling of progress.
I could really use a break — whether of the vacation sort or of the opportunity sort. In the meantime, blogging will continue about as usual. However, I apologize if you've been coming 'round only to find no additions.
Here are two things that I've been meaning to pass along, but for which I don't have anything specific and original to say:
Jay Nordlinger's latest Impromptus.
Michelle Malkin notes some institutional pedophilia... in the movie industry, giving a model of how the ideas of truly sick people become translated into mainstream culture.
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 09:45 PM EST
Studio Matters Notes & Commentary: Making Art and Faking It
Maureen Mullarkey's latest Notes & Commentary piece is "Making Art and Faking It."
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:40 PM EST
The Redwood Review Nonfiction of the Week
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:12 AM EST
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
One-Sided Zero Tolerance for Intelligence Failure
This hasn't yet become a big deal, so I don't want to act as if it has, but considering war critics' zero-tolerance for pre-war intelligence mistakes from the Bush administration — whereby it is almost irrelevant that nobody really questioned whether Hussein had WMDs — this is worthy of note:
A key claim that undermined the case for war against Saddam Hussein was dropped from the Government's Iraq dossier at the last minute after the intervention of Tony Blair's chief of staff.
John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, today admitted that he had made the crucial change on the "prompting" of Jonathan Powell, the Prime Minister's most senior aide.
The claim, that Iraq was more likely to use chemical and biological weapons defensively rather than offensively, was cut out of the dossier the day before it was sent to the printers, the Hutton Inquiry heard.
Put aside the fact that this "key claim" was mentioned once on page 19 of the dossier. The fact of the matter is that the claim proved incorrect: Saddam didn't use WMDs defensively (perhaps because they were all hidden or dispersed).
Of course, deception is wrong even if it turns out to have had post facto justification. However, this ought to work both ways so that (possibly) being wrong isn't presented, post facto, as deception.
(For the record, the above doesn't sound like deception to me. Assertions notwithstanding, this wasn't a "key claim that undermined the case for war," and therefore removing it doesn't rise above the level of a judgment call — one that turned out to have been correct.)
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 09:58 PM EST
The Redwood Review Poem of the Week
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:47 AM EST
Songs You Should Know 09/23/03
The Timshel Music Song You Should Know this week is "Do You Believe?" by me.
"Do You Believe?" Justin Katz, Pop/Rock
Stream (HiFi)Download
from Singing my song to painted wallsNo Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:41 AM EST
Just Thinking 09/22/03
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:44 AM EST
Tuesday, September 23, 2003
Teddy and Patrick, Like Father Like Son... In Some Ways
WPRO 630 afternoon talk host Dan Yorke was livid today over some comments that Congressman Patrick Kennedy made to Yorke's morning colleague, Ron St. Pierre. It seems that one of Rhode Island's voices in the federal government believes that President Bush "doctored" evidence about Saddam Hussein and ought to be investigated (click here for mp3 audio):
WPRO's Ron St. Pierre: Now, do you agree with your father? He's been very critical over the past week or so of the President. He said that there appears to be absolutely no postwar plan in Iraq.
Congressman Patrick Kennedy: Well, I think my father and I have analyzed the case for war and come to different conclusions. I think that while the President did seem to doctor the evidence — and I think that's worthy of an investigation — I think that the overwhelming evidence was that we knew that Saddam had some weapons of mass destruction, even Hans Blix had acknowledged that. Whether he destroyed them or not is another question. I think part of the intelligence failure that my father did acknowledge was the fact that, where are they? And why don't we know where they are? I mean, we were quicker to secure a contract with Halliburton before we were able to secure these weapons of mass destruction.
St. Pierre: No, we haven't turned up any weapons of mass destruction. Flat out, let me just ask you: Do you think the American people were lied to?
Kennedy: I think America — it depends [laughs] on how much of a lie — what kind of lie you're talking about. Certainly there are white lies and then there are outright lies. Clearly there was an effort to, I think, bolster and manipulate — clearly manipulate — the evidence to bolster their case. Overall, however, I would say that, obviously, post-9/11, it's better off not to be in a world where Saddam Hussein is ruling a country, and it's better that we have addressed this issue. I mean Hans Blix, as I said, underscored the fact that we knew he had weapons of mass destruction, and at what point did he destroy them. And if he had destroyed them, why did he play such a cat and mouse game with our inspectors over so many years?
...
The President's prepared to take on the whole financial burden of postwar Iraq while not sharing that with the international community. I think today he really needs to check his arrogance at the door and ask the international community to play a role in the humanitarian/political reconstruction of Iraq.
Presumably, the congressman has some evidence to support his allegations. Otherwise, I'll expect him to retract his statement, preferably with a humble apology to our "arrogant" President. Also presumably, the Rhode Island media will be all over this, particularly considering that the state doesn't have any alternative news outlets to speak of.
On second thought, Kennedy's a member of the federal government and regularly receives better than 80% of his campaign cash from out of state sources. So, the national alternative media would be justified in demanding evidence or a retraction.
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:13 PM EST
Today's Time Wasters
I'm swamped, today, but if you've got some spare time, you might enjoy these cute Flash games, Cat Bowling and LepreKong.
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:45 AM EST
The Unsurprising and the Bizarre
I don't find it surprising that STDs are on the rise in the United Kingdom. These are the perfectly foreseeable fruits of the combination of eroticized and accelerated sex education and an ever-decreasing age of acceptability and accessibility for birth control and abortion that I've been noting here and there for longer than I've been blogging. However, this ending paragraph (from the first link) caught my attention because it looks a little as if somebody, somewhere, might be trying to pry an opening through which the real causes of the problem may slip in order to avoid detection:
Mr Parkianthan said that five years ago 20,000 people attended his clinic suffering from sexually transmitted infections but last year this figure doubled.
He revealed one new pattern to emerge among teenagers - some as young as 12 - is that of "sex texters", who use their mobile phones to call up partners to arrange casual encounters.
Yeah. It's the method the kiddies use to arrange the rendezvous that's the culprit, not that which fosters the intention in the first place.
But then my jaw dropped when I turned to the Providence Journal and saw this report about a registered Rhode Island sex offender's accosting a 14-year-old girl:
The girl was walking on a wooded path near Narragansett High School when Eugene C. Texter, a registered sex offender, allegedly grabbed her from behind and sprayed her with a "noxious substance," the police said.
Bizarre.
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:39 AM EST
Monday, September 22, 2003
A Lie or "Pre-emptive"? Make Up Your Minds.
In a post that he was kind enough to update to mention my blog post on the broader topic, Bill Hobbs makes a great point about whether President Bush ever linked Hussein directly to September 11:
It is weird to see the same Democrats and media who criticized the policy of pre-emption now try to imply that Bush had in the past said there was direct involvement of Saddam in the 9/11 attack. Weird, because if Bush had claimed Saddam was involved in 9/11, the war wouldn't have been pre-emptive.
Remember all those complaints that the administration's argument for war wouldn't "sit still" and changed from day to day? Well, I'd say the shoe is on the other foot... with one crucial difference: the administration's argument never did actually change, it was just multifaceted.
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 02:02 PM EST
Southern Politicians These Days
Steve at Absit Invidia juxtaposes two quotations:
"All the sniping we've been hearing on TV about the president and how he's handling the situation ... plays into the hands of the enemy."
-- Rep. Ed Schrock (R-Virginia)
"I tolerate with the utmost latitude the right of others to differ from me in opinion without imputing to them criminality."
--Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, 1804
I'd love to know what the ellipsis cut out, but Reuters offers very little more by way of context for the Schrock quotation:
Rep. Ed Schrock of Virginia charged that "all the sniping we've been hearing on TV about the president and how he's handling the situation ... plays into the hands of the enemy."
He said the nine Democrats running for president were "trying to make this look like the worst thing that's ever happened. Frankly this administration has done a magnificent job and more people need to come out and say that."
Steve opines that Schrock "didn't get [Jefferson's] memo." Somebody less inclined to find fault with supporters of the President, the war, and the U.S.'s subsequent efforts in Iraq might suggest that perhaps the congressman wasn't "imputing... criminality" and/or believes that the bounds of "utmost latitude" have nearly been reached.
Whatever the case, it looks as if some Southern Democrats haven't gotten the memo either. For example, upon returning from a trip to Iraq to assess the situation for himself, Georgia Congressman Jim Marshall wrote:
On Sept. 14, I flew from Baghdad to Kuwait with Sgt. Trevor A. Blumberg from Dearborn, Mich. He was in a body bag. He'd been ambushed and killed that afternoon. Sitting in the cargo bay of a C 130E, I found myself wondering whether the news media were somehow complicit in his death.
Huh. Maybe Schrock isn't just a budding fascist.
(Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for noting the must-read essay from Marshall.)
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 01:46 PM EST
Swallow That Milk First
This thread of Photoshopped parodies of the cover of Al Franken's book had me laughing myself to tears. This one is my favorite.
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 01:16 PM EST
The Irony Is Lost on Dems
While I'm on the topic of political persons whom I dislike, I thought I'd mention the Providence Journal's report about Hillary Clinton's attendance at a fundraiser for Providence Mayor David Cicilline. Apparently, Senator Clinton thinks that the central reason to support the mayor of Rhode Island's capital city is that President Bush is evil.
"This the first generation of American leadership that is on a course to leave our country worse off than when they found it and that is absolutely unforgivable," said the wife of a President who left the nation with an economy that was beginning to tank and a world full of frothing Islamic radicals with the wherewithal to carry out an attack that made Pearl Harbor look like the bombing of the USS Cole.
Aside from rewriting history, Hillary spent the evening mingling, patting children on the head, and signing copies of a ghost-writing team's book about her. Meanwhile, outside, members of the Providence firefighters' union protested their treatment at the mayor's hands.
Curiouser and curiouser.
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 01:14 PM EST
Ensuring That I'm Never Blogrolled by New England Bloggers
I've noticed that my little blog is conspicuously absent from New England's blogrolls. Let's see if I can keep the record going by expressing my belief that anybody who supports Howard Dean is living in a dangerous fantasy world.
A while ago, when Dean was just beginning to be mentioned in the same sentence as the word "president," Oliver Willis directed my attention (either on his blog or in a comment box somewhere... I don't remember) to a C-SPAN video of a Dean speech. I tried to watch it; I really did. But within the first few paragraphs, Dean hadn't managed to piece together a single straightforward, undistorted (or "undeceptive") sentence.
Since then, I haven't paid much attention to the candidate. I would prefer that otherwise likable, intelligent people hop out of the runaway ski-lift to insanity that the ex-Vermont governor represents, but I'm not convinced that he or his following are worth devoting too much thought to.
However, I thought it worthwhile to bring Dean up to pass along a marvelous line from John Pitney in a piece about Dean's anti-fundamentalist bigotry: "Dean rallies are whiter than the Stockholm chapter of the Barry Manilow Fan Club."
And Pitney ain't talking snow.
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 01:02 PM EST
Sunday, September 21, 2003
Not Connecting on Israel/Palestine
I devoted a fair bit of time, this past week, to researching and discussing the Israeli-Palestinian situation in various places. Frankly, I'm burned out on it. For one thing, I can't get anybody to tell me specifically how they view the Israeli settlements within historical context and to lay out for me what is so horrible about them. This is one of those topics about which I'm very willing to carry the discussion all the way through with people with whom I disagree. It also happens to be a topic into which people are apparently reluctant to dig sufficiently far to risk undermining their equivalence of the sides.
But, if you're interested, I've commented extensively to this post at Absit Invidia, and less extensively to this one by Mark Shea. My statements in the latter case were made in partial response to an opinion piece by Knesset member Avraham Burg, who raises an interesting point about the apparent impossibility of Israel's remaining both democratic and explicitly Jewish.
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 03:45 PM EST
Interview with God
Feeling a little down... or even just uninspired? Well, Lane Core has directed his readers' attention to a must-see Flash movie, "The Interview with God."
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 03:31 PM EST
While I'm on Education
John Hawkins completely undermines the argument for shoveling more money into the educational system of the United States as it is currently constituted.
In a nutshell, America spends more money per student than any nation on earth, yet we are at the top of the global list for neither teachers' salaries nor test scores.
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 03:29 PM EST
Speaking of Racialist Censorship
Here's a jaw-nearly-dropped assertion.
Erin O'Connor relates the tale of a college student newspaper that used the word "scalps" in a sports headline. The predictable campus American Indian outrage boiled over, and the editors submitted themselves to the obligatory self-mortification at the alter of political correctness, and now everybody can move on, feeling as if they've participated in campus radicalism.
The episode is remarkable for one thing, however, and that is a comment from the paper's faculty advisor, Morris Brown:
Brown cited his status as the only black professor on campus as reason for the club members to believe his apology.
"If I were white, yeah, you could be skeptical, but as a black man and a brother, I know how you feel," Brown said. "If I were Caucasian, I wouldn't expect you to listen."
As O'Connor says, "Professor Brown has just taught everyone who works at the paper, and everyone who attends the school, that not only are white people inherently racially insensitive, but that they are also inherently insincere."
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 03:25 PM EST
It's All You Political Types Who're to Blame
Providence Journal education writer Julia Steiny comments today on the hollow, uninspiring nature of the texts that are currently being used to teach American children English. On the whole, Steiny's column is worth reading, and she's certainly touching on an important topic. Why should children ever pick up the habit of reading if they're never allowed to read anything moving? I remember being profoundly disturbed by Of Mice and Men when I read that in my youth, but the experience solidified my belief that there was something to this words on paper thing.
However, Steiny shoves in one bit of political equivalence that jarred against the rest of the piece:
Ravitch explains, ". . . the content of today's textbooks and tests reflect a remarkable convergence of the interest of feminists and multiculturalists on one side and the religious Right on the other. No words or illustrations may be used that might offend the former groups, and no topics can be introduced that might offend those on the other side of the ideological divide. The Left gets censorship of language usage and pictures, and the Right gets censorship of topics."
Saying so will surely open me up to accusations that I believe my side to be without blame, but I just don't see the truth in Ravitch's accusations when it comes to the Right. Specifically, every single example offered in Steiny's piece is Left- or secularist-driven: feminism, anti-racism, cutting references to God, "white boys [being] portrayed as weak and dependent."
Of course, censorship from the right is one of those "common knowledge" cultural clichés, but in our times, it hardly holds. In fact, even what was once true in the cliché — I'm thinking of the speech given by Amy Madigan's character in the movie Field of Dreams in favor of controversial school readings — tends to skip over legitimate points in order to present backwards censorship. A Clockwork Orange, for example, would clearly be inappropriate for ten year olds even if the language were at their level.
Most of the "censorship from the Right" these days comes from objections to the selectively applied censorship from the Left. Material that moves students or encourages passionate debate is critical to their education. However, when the material becomes indoctrination and the "debate" merely the inculcation of liberal dogma, I'd suggest that the religious Right's objections actually align with educational interests.
What is unfortunate is that, rather than allow the teaching of Christian literature (for example), the educational establishment opts to cut all texts that might highlight the double standard.
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 03:15 PM EST
Good Signs in Iraq
Well, I'll wait to hear more along these lines before I lower my skepticism, but it's great if true:
SADDAM Hussein has been in secret negotiations with US forces in Iraq for the past nine days, we can reveal.
The Iraqi dictator is demanding safe passage to the former Soviet republic of Belarus. In exchange, he has vowed to provide information on weapons of mass destruction and disclose bank accounts where he siphoned off tens of millions of dollars in plundered cash.
The reconstruction effort could use the additional funds, to be sure, and tips on WMDs would be welcome. I wonder if the full-speed-backwards tone of the Western media around WMDs helped lead Saddam to believe evidence of them to be a marketable promise.
Of those media "reports," I particularly like the idiotic headline of an MSNBC/AP piece: "U.S. team finds no smallpox in Iraq." How does one "find no"? Maybe by finding evidence that there is no smallpox, but I don't think "not finding evidence of smallpox" is quite the same as "finding no smallpox." As habitual, the reporter places all of the information that might help to define this distinction toward the end:
Those involved described missed opportunities caused by bureaucratic obstacles hampering the search effort.
In several instances, the team couldn't follow up tips because of transportation problems. The violence plaguing Iraq means such teams can operate only under military guidelines and travel only with military escort. So their mobility is dictated by the military's schedule and availability to move from them from one location to another.
Some Iraqi scientists interviewed clearly had the know-how and expertise to produce smallpox, honed through years of work with similar viruses.
But none of the Iraqi scientists — many questioned at their offices at Iraqi universities — said they had done work on smallpox or other viruses that could be used in biological weapons programs.
U.N. inspectors suspected Iraq could have been working on smallpox or already had it. There was an outbreak of smallpox in the country in 1972, and Iraq admitted it had been producing the vaccine into the 1980s.
"From the onset the evidence was strictly circumstantial," said Jonathan Tucker, a former U.N. inspector and the author of a recent book on smallpox. "There was a lot of smoke but not much fire there."
Tests on Iraqi soldiers captured during the 1991 Gulf War found that some had been vaccinated for smallpox.
And Iraq admitted to U.N. inspectors in the 1990s that its biological weapons scientists worked with camelpox, a close relative of the smallpox virus. Working with camelpox would give Iraq a way to perfect techniques for making smallpox without endangering the researchers.
It seems a bit premature to place smallpox firmly in the "no" pile. Former weapons inspector chief Richard Butler would probably agree:
"Don't believe those who say they aren't there just because we haven't found them. Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction," Butler told the crowd. "Iraq certainly did have weapons of mass destruction. Trust me. I held some in my own hands."
But then, considering the lack of coverage of Butler's suggestion, I'd say he's beat Saddam to discovering just how unmarketable suggestions that there might actually be WMDs to find are in the West.
2 comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 02:50 PM EST
That Lie About Our Misleading President
I'd offer a link, but I really shouldn't have to: you've seen all of the hints and allegations in the mainstream media — sometimes utilizing the weasely "some critics charge" trick — that the Bush administration somehow subliminally inserted the idea that Saddam Hussein was "personally involved" in September 11 into the public's belief system. Whispers among liberal pundits and online commentators have begun to call it The Big Lie. "Oh, yes," they say, "technically Bush has never declared a direct link, but how do you explain that 69% of the American people believe one to exist if not by the administration's rhetoric?"
Perhaps it's been a hypnotic suggestion conveyed in W.'s slight lisp. MSNBC, under the heading "DID BUSH ENCOURAGE MISCONCEPTION?," offers a more deceptively plausible explanation:
Bush's opponents say he encouraged this misconception by linking al Qaeda to Hussein in almost every speech on Iraq. Indeed, administration officials began to hint about a Sept. 11-Hussein link began soon after the attacks. In late 2001, Vice President Cheney said it was "pretty well confirmed" that attack mastermind Mohamed Atta met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official.
I want to make sure that we all understand the proposed scenario in all its sublety: the American people were predisposed, based on history and a need for a "bad guy," to see Hussein's hand in the attack; by hinting with abandon at links between Hussein and al Qaeda, the administration encouraged the misconception that Hussein was linked to September 11.
Well, responses to a couple of posts in which John Cole took a look at some of what is being cited as "Bush's lies" broke my lethargy and inspired me to take a few minutes to find the actual Washington Post poll data. All I was looking for was a little wiggle room with the question's language and options. On this count, I did not come up empty handed: 37% of that 69% thought the 9-11 link only "somewhat likely," and the next choice down is "not very likely." I'd guess that an option somewhere between the two (perhaps "possibly") would have bled a portion of the "likely" votes.
But that wasn't all I found. The WaPo is good enough to supply data for this question dating back to September 13, 2001:
Y'know, it's a strange pathology that afflicts Bush Haters: they apparently believe that the President is so clever that he's manipulating people to believe lies, but that he's so inept that he somehow manages to make them believe the lies even less than they previously had. Or does that just indicate that he's even more clever... so much so, in fact, that he realized beforehand that the press would conveniently overlook the trend that 69% actually represents.
In a September 13, 2003, opinion column in the Washington Post titled "Sacrilegious Spinning," Ellen Goodman writes, "The emotional link -- bad guys do bad things, Saddam is bad, 9/11 is bad -- has become a successful political link." She subsequently asks:
When does the small, repeated exploitation of this belief become the big lie?
I'm wondering something similar myself.
24 comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:29 AM EST
Saturday, September 20, 2003
As the Left Sinks Toward the Fetal Position
Can you imagine the uproar if a Rutgers student did this to a comparable Arab leader?
Abe Greenhouse, a University College student, accosted Sharansky on Thursday night as he was about to address a crowd of about 500 people on "a Jewish perspective of the road to peace."
As Sharansky approached the podium at Scott Hall, Greenhouse threw a cream pie directly in his face. Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident, serves as Israel's minister for Jerusalem and diaspora affairs.
It certainly wouldn't be the minor story that this local NBC report represents. Of course, Sharansky has multiple strikes against him in the eyes of the Left, being a Soviet dissident in addition to an Israeli cabinet member directly involved with the processes of Zionism.
The impotence and immaturity of those who oppose him contrasts severely with the sense of humor and poise his heroism has engendered:
After cleaning up, Sharansky returned a few moments later and gave his speech, remarking that New Jersey possesses a warm community that "cooks very good cakes."
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 08:55 AM EST
Friday, September 19, 2003
You Got Your Science in My Religion!
Mark Shea summarizes his view of intelligent design's significance in a world of evolutionary science:
Intelligent Design is a pin aimed at that ideological balloon. It doesn't claim to account for human or biological origins. What it does is point out the difficulties in the naturalist dogma that insists "Nature is all there is. Intelligence is a product of, rather than the antecedent to, nature." It is, as I said yesterday, a sort of scientific version of Statler and Waldorf, sitting in the balcony and heckling Naturalism's confident proclamations that "the Cosmos is all there is or ever was or ever will be" and its assertions that "biology is the study of complex systems that look designed, but really are the product of purposeless processes." In that role as Heckler and Elucidator of Inconvenient Facts, it provides an invaluable service to ordinary people who are often intimidated by naturalists into swallowing philosophical bullshit masquerading as "SCIENCE".
Mark offers a few "at the same time" statements of balance, but the above is what made me think of the Antichristic consequence that I'm still picking up as I (slowly) work my way through Frank Tipler's The Physics of Immortality. As I'll be exploring in writing when I've finished the book, I'm willing to accept Tipler's science without technical objection (mostly because I've not the background to do otherwise). However, he misses something significant, something spiritual, within his assumptions, and it is that basic something that makes the difference between Omega Point = God and Omega Point = Satan.
(As a coincidence of the order in which I've posted these things, it occurs to me that Bat Yeor is describing a sort of Antichrist, as well. Evil will seek any opening, I suppose.)
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:57 PM EST
Dhimmi Your Nation
It isn't the sort of thing about which one can make short-yet-astute observations, but Bat Yeor's latest on NRO is an interesting read:
Palestinist theology shores up the Euro-Arab policy of Christian-Muslim and European-Arab fusion: the modern state of Israel — considered a temporary accident of history — is bypassed and Europe's Christian origins are anchored in an Islamic-Christian Palestine. Having fulfilled its historical role of uniting the two enemies — Christianity and Islam — opposed to its very existence, Israel can now disappear, sealing the fusion between Europe and the Arabs. The unifying role devolves on Islamic-Christian Palestine; the reconciliation of Islam and Christianity can finally be consummated on the ashes of Israel and its negation. This is why the European Union — and especially France — designates Israeli "injustice" and "occupation" as the unique sources of conflict between Europe and the Arab/Muslim world, and the cause of international, anti-Western Islamist terrorism.
Incidentally, I've noticed that Israel is popping up in conversation around the Internet for no apparently unified reason. Wonder what's going on...
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:47 PM EST
No Consequences... Except for un-PC Conservatism
I've intended to note John Derbyshire's meditation on the Age of No Consequences through which we're living. It's a flowing, somewhat artistic piece, so no part lends itself to quoting, but the whole is relatively short and certainly worth reading.
However, having waited a day to post on it, I am able to stir in some controversy with the link. In his piece, Derb writes:
At the time of the robbery, Ms. Boudin had been a fugitive for several years, since her known involvement in a 1970 terrorist bomb-making operation in New York City. She occupied herself in jail by getting a master's degree in adult education, assisting other inmates to get degrees, and ministering to inmates with AIDS (a fashionable venereal disease).
This morning, Mark Shea noted Andrew Sullivan's objection:
This "fashionable venereal disease" is killing millions across the planet - young, old, men, women, children. In prisons, it's often a result of rape, and a growing crisis that needs to be addressed out of simple compassion. It can be transmitted by non-sexual means. To trivialize the suffering of people with such a disease by calling it "fashionable" is to spit in the face of the sick - yes, the sick. There are plenty of reasons to dislike what Kathy Boudin has done in the past. But that she is now helping some of the most marginalized and needy people in our society is surely a good thing, and something no sane or right-minded person would seek to belittle. Some of the editors at [National Review] call themselves Christians. Yet they gladly publish a smug, sickening bigot like this. This isn't funny. It isn't even pertinent to any broader point. It's despicable.
Mark responds:
What Derbyshire did not was not mock the sick. He mocked the pieties of gay sanctimony which tend to decree AIDS victims automatic saints merely for contracting a highly avoidable disease. And, of course, he mocked ridiculous over-budgeting of money and societial angst for this disease that affects a much smaller proportion of the population than, say cardio-vascular illness but happens to effect the people who manufacture pop culture and media-received wisdom.
And here was my comment:
I think I might have some sympathy for anger at the phrase "fashionable disease" if Andy S. hadn't written the following during the whole bug-chaser debacle:
I've been HIV-positive for ten years now, and my immune system is healthier now than when I got infected. I look better than I did when I was negative, have experienced deep spiritual and emotional growth as a result of my HIV experience, and live every day now with a vigor and gratitude I never felt before. I'm just one of thousands of productive, healthy people with HIV who are daily - albeit unconsciously - transmitting the message that an HIV diagnosis is no calamity.
But there goes Derbyshire, "trivializ[ing] the suffering of people with such a disease by calling it 'fashionable.'"
Derb might've done well to withhold that parenthetical. Sullivan makes a good point about the types of people with AIDS in prison and in countries where it is still not manageable, but Boudin's new career won't be devoted to them. "Developing programs for HIV-positive women" sounds like a cushy job to me...
The reason I suggested that Derb could have withdrawn the parenthetical was that he makes the same point adequately subsequently, and with mitigating context:
Ms. Boudin won't be working the produce aisle at Safeway like your average parolee. She has a very nice desk job lined up at St. Luke's Hospital in New York City, "developing programs for HIV-positive women." What her salary will be, and why women suffering from less-chic diseases — multiple sclerosis, say, or cancer of the spine — are not to be favored with the attentions of this saintly woman and her "programs," I have not been able to discover.
Since reading of the controversy, I've noticed that we in the National Review Online audience haven't heard from Derbyshire since that column went up, and I find myself hoping that he won't go the way of Ann Coulter. But if he were to do so, wouldn't it be somehow fitting, sadly so, that through a column about consequence-free culture, Derb would have illustrated one of the few remaining behaviors that has consequences?
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:04 PM EST
The Counter-Offensive
Well, here comes the conservative counter offensive in response to media, liberal, and Democrat efforts to discredit the President and the war in Iraq. Our platform isn't as broad, to be sure, but we have the advantage of being right.
Cheif Wiggles reports from Iraq:
I recall as a boy on a scout camping trip coming upon a herd of sheep. Thinking it would be fun, we started pushing them in one direction and then another, just by running around screaming from side to side. At one point, without knowing it, we spooked them directly into a wooded fence. One sheep after another attempted to run through the fence, hitting their head on the wooden slats, until the entire herd had banged their head into the fence.
At times reading the news I feel like one of those sheep, being forced or influenced to see the path ahead the way the media might desire me to. I for one refuse to take part in this media frenzy, based on nothing but negative perceptions, at times contrived facts, purposely selected to sway or influence my mind or view of our path. I do not need a steady diet of sensationalism, now gorged by the media's constant flow of such. Enough already.
He relates some anecdotes from his experience in the recovering nation that are well worth reading even apart from his condemnation of the media.
U.S. Congressman from Arizona J. D. Hayworth addresses the ever-changing rationales of Bush Haters who seek to "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory simply because they want George W. Bush to fail, which coincidently won't happen unless America also fails":
... there was never a single reason cited by the president to act against Saddam, but several, including human rights, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, regime change, and democratization. Still, the New York Times continues to distort the truth, and in the process contradicts itself.
On September 15, the paper wrote that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were "the main rationale cited for war earlier this year." But earlier this year, just before the war started, the very same New York Times wrote that, "Many liberals have criticized the president's ever-changing rationales for war.…" What both have in common, of course, is that they are negative about the president.
Meanwhile, James Robbins compiles some evidence of the nigh incontrovertible "cooperative relationship — that is, a strategic alliance —" between Iraq and al Qaeda, cementing the war's relationship to the larger War on Terror:
As I have noted before, Saddam Hussein had means, motive, and opportunity to be involved with global terrorism, and al Qaeda in particular. Much remains to be revealed, and one hopes the administration is compiling a dossier to make the case in detail and beyond doubt. The president has stated that there is no question these ties existed, and it is frustrating that something unquestionable keeps being questioned so persistently.
I've wondered out loud before, and I'm sure I'll do it again: will anything ever be enough for people who are determined to see the war in Iraq as immoral and unjustified?
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 02:42 PM EST
The Redwood Review Fiction of the Week
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 09:50 AM EST
Thursday, September 18, 2003
Layer upon Layer of Lies
I'd say the Washington Post was more than a little strong in its language when it declared today that President Bush "disavow[ed] a link [between Hussein and September 11] that had been hinted at previously by his administration." One might go so far as to call it disingenuous. Here's the full paragraph from the actual transcript:
We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11th. What the Vice President said was, is that he has been involved with al Qaeda. And al Zarqawi, al Qaeda operative, was in Baghdad. He's the guy that ordered the killing of a U.S. diplomat. He's a man who is still running loose, involved with the poisons network, involved with Ansar al-Islam. There's no question that Saddam Hussein had al Qaeda ties.
The Post did note that last line later in the piece, but by separating "no evidence" from "no question," writer Dana Milbank is perpetuating this bizarre parsing of language to suggest that the administration has "hinted at" a September 11 connection, but that insisting that Hussein has had ties with the perpetrators of that attack for a decade carries no "hint" at all. The next step in this little twist of reality is to suggest that, because there's no evidence that Hussein helped out with September 11, the war in Iraq can't properly be called part of the War on Terrorism.
That's nonsense, but it's the sort of dissembling nonsense that certain segments of society have become well practiced at passing off as legitimate thought. As it happens, the very same article offers another piece of Lying Liars Initiative that has gone on to the next level of deception, the mischaracterizing paraphrase:
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Wednesday said he had no reason to believe that Hussein had a hand in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Unless Rumsfeld made remarks that I haven't seen, Milbank's statement is not true. How could people who can parse "hints" from "ties" from "links" not distinguish between having "no reason to believe that Hussein had a hand in" the attacks and having "not seen any indication that would lead me to believe that I could say that" Hussein "was involved in the September 11 attacks"? The administration has consistently asserted links between Iraq and al Qaeda, referring to cooperation between key figures from each. On top of the evidence that Iraq trained terrorists to hijack planes, it seems likely that the only "evidence" that's missing is a direct and specific instance of cooperation having to do explicitly with the Sept. 11 attack. As Lileks points out (in his inimitable fashion), with reference to a Weekly Standard must-read, the link is about as clear as is reasonable to expect in these shady matters.
That there was direct involvement is certainly a possibility. But — and this is to be stressed — there doesn't have to be for the link between Iraq and al Qaeda to have justified the regime change.
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 05:34 PM EST
Left, Liberal, and Liar All Start with the Letter "L"
In the comments section of a post by John Cole of Balloon Juice that mentions the education of David Corn, Gary Farber comments thus:
Yes, quite true. No ethics, no morals, no brains. That's one half of the country for you. Fortunately, the other half is moral, just, and wise. Thank goodness for the good guys! Down with the stupid bad guys!
Let me state, outright, that it is absolutely correct that stupidity, avarice, dishonesty, and any other politico-philosophical sin that might come to mind is not the exclusive property of any political party or ideology. But it is a question, isn't it, whether at a given time in history a particular group dominates the market, so to speak?
To get right to the point, my experience is — and many of those items about which I write confirm — that the liberal, Left, Democrat side is currently that particular group. However, modern America is structured such that saying so doesn't require a belief that there is something about people who are liberal that makes them "the bad guys." The impulse to take shortcuts to reach self-interested goals is in each one of us, and organized groups of people seem particularly susceptible to the inclination's pull. However, in our modern society, those social and cultural institutions that are meant to keep this tendency in check have, themselves, been appropriated into the liberal movement.
With an overwhelmingly liberal arts & entertainment establishment, particular philosophies, policies, religions, occupations, or even ethnic qualities become associated with good and evil along political lines. With the information media partial to one side of the perennial public debate, that side will not be forced to curb its excesses, while the other will have to learn to tiptoe through and around issues masterfully. Perhaps the educational establishment, higher education especially, is the most dangerous in its tilt; it is here that society settles on appropriate worldviews based on abstract principles, where the rest of society will look for ultimate secular authority to justify or censure their desires.
Of course, much (most) of society sees "secular" as the more significant adjective, but the reason that academic political bias is so dangerous is that relatively recent trends in thinking have seized on "ultimate," both to dismiss its possibility and to grant it to intellectual elites. Deriding ultimate Truth, these intellectuals have declared Power to be the unseen force acting within society and insisted that its use be guided by abstract theory.
If Power is all that matters, if there is no objective Truth, and if the highest goal is to ensure that Power is held by those with the most reverence for theoretical truth, then deception to secure power for one's own "good guys" can only be seen as righteous. Thus, the height of philosophy on the liberal end of society simultaneously devalues truth by making it relative and elevates dishonesty in the name of a cause to the level of virtue.
To be sure, neither conservatism nor religion is absolute proof against temptation. In the sense that there is no "pure" versus "impure," there is no "good guy" versus "bad guy." However, that doesn't mean that it is incorrect to state, at any given point in history, that one side is more apt to deceive. And at this given point in history, not only are there fewer obstacles to the failing among liberals, but liberalism (broadly speaking) has become entangled with a worldview that goes so far as to encourage it.
No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 02:11 PM EST
The Redwood Review Nonfiction of the Week
