Tonight, ABC's evening news led with the story of the theft of nearly 150,000 people's personal information from a ChoicePoint Inc. database. Stories also appeared in the L.A. Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.
Was there any mention, in any of those stories, of ChoicePoint's flawed felon-purge lists, which were used in the 2000 election in Florida?
Nope.
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
A number of bloggers are puzzling over this story, which appeared in a small newspaper in Washington State yesterday:
Five federal government officials, including three from the CIA, have removed several documents from the archival papers of the late Sen. Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson housed at the University of Washington.
Last week the federal document security team spent three days in the special collections division of the UW Suzzallo-Allen library. The officials, which also included people from the Department of Defense and Department of Energy, combed through 1,200 boxes of material using a five-binder index to find the targeted papers.
Carla Rickerson, head of special collections, said the team removed up to 10 documents....
Daria G at the Daily Kos and Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Daily News have various theories, mostly having to do with Jackson's proteges (Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams) or with the possibility that this concerns the case of Larry Franklin, a policy analyst who worked under Feith and Wolfowitz and is under investigation as a possible Israeli spy.
Laura Rozen of War and Piece, by contrast, reproduces an e-mail suggesting that this was a routine bit of mop-up -- "It happens every few years, either with donated papers or depository government documents, that they send something they didn't mean to send and need to take it back."
Well, if it's not just tidying up, I'd guess the officials' visit has something to do with matters discussed by the historian Roger Morris in this 2003 Seattle Post-Intelligencer article:
It was then, 40 years ago, that Jackson began to be linked directly, if furtively, to some of the uglier and little-known origins of the war on Iraq in 2003. Overseeing the CIA's "black budget" for covert operations and interventions from a subcommittee of Armed Services, he was one of a handful of senators who gave a nod to two U.S.-backed coups in Iraq, one in 1963 and again in 1968. Those plots brought Saddam Hussein to power amid bloodbaths in which the CIA, exacting the price for its support, handed Saddam and his Baath Party cohorts lists of supposed anti-U.S. Iraqis to be killed.
The result was the systematic murder of several hundred and as many as several thousand people, in which Saddam himself participated. Whatever the toll, accounts agree that CIA killing lists comprised much of Iraq's young educated elite -- doctors, teachers, technicians, lawyers and other professionals as well as military officers and political figures -- Iraqis who would not be there to oppose Saddam's growing tyranny over ensuing years or to help rebuild or govern Iraq, as the United States now hopes to do, after the current war.
Hmmm -- when is Saddam's trial supposed to start?
Five federal government officials, including three from the CIA, have removed several documents from the archival papers of the late Sen. Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson housed at the University of Washington.
Last week the federal document security team spent three days in the special collections division of the UW Suzzallo-Allen library. The officials, which also included people from the Department of Defense and Department of Energy, combed through 1,200 boxes of material using a five-binder index to find the targeted papers.
Carla Rickerson, head of special collections, said the team removed up to 10 documents....
Daria G at the Daily Kos and Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Daily News have various theories, mostly having to do with Jackson's proteges (Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams) or with the possibility that this concerns the case of Larry Franklin, a policy analyst who worked under Feith and Wolfowitz and is under investigation as a possible Israeli spy.
Laura Rozen of War and Piece, by contrast, reproduces an e-mail suggesting that this was a routine bit of mop-up -- "It happens every few years, either with donated papers or depository government documents, that they send something they didn't mean to send and need to take it back."
Well, if it's not just tidying up, I'd guess the officials' visit has something to do with matters discussed by the historian Roger Morris in this 2003 Seattle Post-Intelligencer article:
It was then, 40 years ago, that Jackson began to be linked directly, if furtively, to some of the uglier and little-known origins of the war on Iraq in 2003. Overseeing the CIA's "black budget" for covert operations and interventions from a subcommittee of Armed Services, he was one of a handful of senators who gave a nod to two U.S.-backed coups in Iraq, one in 1963 and again in 1968. Those plots brought Saddam Hussein to power amid bloodbaths in which the CIA, exacting the price for its support, handed Saddam and his Baath Party cohorts lists of supposed anti-U.S. Iraqis to be killed.
The result was the systematic murder of several hundred and as many as several thousand people, in which Saddam himself participated. Whatever the toll, accounts agree that CIA killing lists comprised much of Iraq's young educated elite -- doctors, teachers, technicians, lawyers and other professionals as well as military officers and political figures -- Iraqis who would not be there to oppose Saddam's growing tyranny over ensuing years or to help rebuild or govern Iraq, as the United States now hopes to do, after the current war.
Hmmm -- when is Saddam's trial supposed to start?
Another scalp:
Embattled PBS Chief Will Step Down in 2006
Pat Mitchell, the Public Broadcasting Service chief under fire for spending public money on a cartoon show that also featured a real-life lesbian couple, will step down when her contract expires in June 2006....
She drew recent criticism from both liberals and conservatives for "Postcards From Buster," in which the title character, an animated bunny named Buster, traveled to Vermont -- a state known for recognizing same-sex civil unions. Though the focus was on farm life and maple sugaring, the episode, entitled "Sugartime," featured an actual lesbian couple.
Newly appointed Education Secretary Margaret Spellings contended that the episode did not fulfill the intent Congress had in mind for programming and said many parents would not want children exposed to such lifestyles....
Judging from this and the Eason Jordan case, I guess it's one strike and you're out -- if you displease the right-wing Politburo you can climb down from a remark, you can rescind a decision, but it doesn't matter. You're already an unperson. You must be eliminated.
Embattled PBS Chief Will Step Down in 2006
Pat Mitchell, the Public Broadcasting Service chief under fire for spending public money on a cartoon show that also featured a real-life lesbian couple, will step down when her contract expires in June 2006....
She drew recent criticism from both liberals and conservatives for "Postcards From Buster," in which the title character, an animated bunny named Buster, traveled to Vermont -- a state known for recognizing same-sex civil unions. Though the focus was on farm life and maple sugaring, the episode, entitled "Sugartime," featured an actual lesbian couple.
Newly appointed Education Secretary Margaret Spellings contended that the episode did not fulfill the intent Congress had in mind for programming and said many parents would not want children exposed to such lifestyles....
Judging from this and the Eason Jordan case, I guess it's one strike and you're out -- if you displease the right-wing Politburo you can climb down from a remark, you can rescind a decision, but it doesn't matter. You're already an unperson. You must be eliminated.
I don't recall being dragged out of my bed by jackbooted centurions from the Ministry of Art and forced to experience the tyranny that is The Gates, but Myron Magnet of the right/libertarian City Journal ("the best magazine in America" --Peggy Noonan) suggests that I was (in an essay called "'The Gates' on the Road to Serfdom"):
For all the cant about the artist as a liberator of the human spirit, there is much in contemporary art and especially architecture that seeks to impose upon individuals the artist's vast ego and confine them within it, so that they cannot escape his will. It is this whiff of totalitarianism that makes Polish intellectuals label such architecture "neo-oppressionism."
Fortunately, in two weeks, when the sensation of "The Gates" has worn off, Christo's work will disappear. If only the same could be said of other neo-oppressionist schemes...
In The New York Sun, Magnet elaborates:
"The fact is, this is not progressive. It is not life-enhancing. It does not speak of the liberty of the individual. Like so much of modern architecture, it speaks of some totalitarian system, be it corporate or state bureaucracy, in the face of which the individual is just a small cog in a great machine. It says, 'By God, you will go where Mr. and Mrs. Christo lead you.'"
What would be better, I suppose, would be Atlas Smashed the Gates, a work that allowed every (in a Randian sense) radically free individual to destroy or build as many gates, or other monuments (or impediments) to the individual will, as he or she (probably he) could build. Or destroy. Or something like that. In an ongoing creative-destruction sort of way.
Death to all artists with "visions" they brutally and tyrannically seek to impose on the willing and pleased!
Alas, here's the front page of today's New York Times. It's worse than Magnet thought -- even Laura Bush can't escape arrest and forcible Gates reeducation at the hands of the Art Ministry's thugs! (Link will work today only. There's another photo here. Good Lord -- they got NotJenna, too!)
Look, this is an artwork. It's up for two weeks. Citizens didn't pay for it; no one is forced to see it; no one who sees it is forced to like it. It's there for the taking, or avoiding. I think it's endearingly brash and somewhat barmy, in a way that really suits a huge, half-crazy built on ridiculously large ambitions. But maybe I feel this way only because I've come to believe 2+ 2 = 5, and I love Big Brother.
For all the cant about the artist as a liberator of the human spirit, there is much in contemporary art and especially architecture that seeks to impose upon individuals the artist's vast ego and confine them within it, so that they cannot escape his will. It is this whiff of totalitarianism that makes Polish intellectuals label such architecture "neo-oppressionism."
Fortunately, in two weeks, when the sensation of "The Gates" has worn off, Christo's work will disappear. If only the same could be said of other neo-oppressionist schemes...
In The New York Sun, Magnet elaborates:
"The fact is, this is not progressive. It is not life-enhancing. It does not speak of the liberty of the individual. Like so much of modern architecture, it speaks of some totalitarian system, be it corporate or state bureaucracy, in the face of which the individual is just a small cog in a great machine. It says, 'By God, you will go where Mr. and Mrs. Christo lead you.'"
What would be better, I suppose, would be Atlas Smashed the Gates, a work that allowed every (in a Randian sense) radically free individual to destroy or build as many gates, or other monuments (or impediments) to the individual will, as he or she (probably he) could build. Or destroy. Or something like that. In an ongoing creative-destruction sort of way.
Death to all artists with "visions" they brutally and tyrannically seek to impose on the willing and pleased!
Alas, here's the front page of today's New York Times. It's worse than Magnet thought -- even Laura Bush can't escape arrest and forcible Gates reeducation at the hands of the Art Ministry's thugs! (Link will work today only. There's another photo here. Good Lord -- they got NotJenna, too!)
Look, this is an artwork. It's up for two weeks. Citizens didn't pay for it; no one is forced to see it; no one who sees it is forced to like it. It's there for the taking, or avoiding. I think it's endearingly brash and somewhat barmy, in a way that really suits a huge, half-crazy built on ridiculously large ambitions. But maybe I feel this way only because I've come to believe 2+ 2 = 5, and I love Big Brother.
Until I read this, from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, I hadn't really paid attention to the fact that Janice Rogers Brown isn't quite sure the Bill of Rights should apply to the states.
(Remember, Brown's judicial nomination will reportedly be the first test of Senate Republicans' "nuclear option.")
As I've pointed out in the past, this is a line of thinking followed by a number of religious conservatives in defense of the notion that any state can establish a religion if it wants to. As Alan Keyes once said in a speech:
There might be states in which they require a religious test or oath of office. There might be states in which they have established churches, where subventions are given to schools and so forth to teach the Bible. There might be places where you and I might disagree with the religion some folks wanted to put in place over their communities. But guess what the Founders believed? They believed that people in their states and localities had the right to live under institutions they would put together to govern themselves according to their faith....
Is that what Brown believes? This is from a an AP story published when she first appeared before the Judiciary Committee:
In a 1999 speech at Pepperdine University titled "Beyond the Abyss: Restoring Religion on the Public Square," Brown disputed the doctrine of separation of church and state and questioned whether the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, applied to the states....
After the Civil War, the Reconstruction Congress wrote the 14th Amendment, which sponsors said was intended to extend the Bill of Rights to the states....
The amendment set off a century of debate in the Supreme Court on whether states were truly barred from infringing the basic guarantees of the Bill of Rights. Courts in the late 19th century gave deference to states. By the mid-20th century, however, the Supreme Court ruled that the amendment in fact prevented states from violating basic individual rights, such as freedom from unreasonable searches and the rights to free speech and a fair trial.
"The historical evidence supporting what the Supreme Court did here is pretty sketchy," Justice Brown said in her Pepperdine speech. "The argument on the other side is pretty overwhelming" that the 14th Amendment failed to apply the Bill of Rights to the states.
This won't become an issue when her renomination comes up in the Senate -- Brown knows what to say when questioned about it:
Asked by senators Wednesday about that comment, Brown said there was historical evidence pointing in both directions. But she also said she accepted the Supreme Court's view that the Bill of Rights protects all Americans today.
"What the Supreme Court said is what counts. Speeches are an opportunity to think out loud," she said.
But when Governor Roy Moore declares Christianity the state religion of Alabama, at least one federal judge will nod in approval.
(Remember, Brown's judicial nomination will reportedly be the first test of Senate Republicans' "nuclear option.")
As I've pointed out in the past, this is a line of thinking followed by a number of religious conservatives in defense of the notion that any state can establish a religion if it wants to. As Alan Keyes once said in a speech:
There might be states in which they require a religious test or oath of office. There might be states in which they have established churches, where subventions are given to schools and so forth to teach the Bible. There might be places where you and I might disagree with the religion some folks wanted to put in place over their communities. But guess what the Founders believed? They believed that people in their states and localities had the right to live under institutions they would put together to govern themselves according to their faith....
Is that what Brown believes? This is from a an AP story published when she first appeared before the Judiciary Committee:
In a 1999 speech at Pepperdine University titled "Beyond the Abyss: Restoring Religion on the Public Square," Brown disputed the doctrine of separation of church and state and questioned whether the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, applied to the states....
After the Civil War, the Reconstruction Congress wrote the 14th Amendment, which sponsors said was intended to extend the Bill of Rights to the states....
The amendment set off a century of debate in the Supreme Court on whether states were truly barred from infringing the basic guarantees of the Bill of Rights. Courts in the late 19th century gave deference to states. By the mid-20th century, however, the Supreme Court ruled that the amendment in fact prevented states from violating basic individual rights, such as freedom from unreasonable searches and the rights to free speech and a fair trial.
"The historical evidence supporting what the Supreme Court did here is pretty sketchy," Justice Brown said in her Pepperdine speech. "The argument on the other side is pretty overwhelming" that the 14th Amendment failed to apply the Bill of Rights to the states.
This won't become an issue when her renomination comes up in the Senate -- Brown knows what to say when questioned about it:
Asked by senators Wednesday about that comment, Brown said there was historical evidence pointing in both directions. But she also said she accepted the Supreme Court's view that the Bill of Rights protects all Americans today.
"What the Supreme Court said is what counts. Speeches are an opportunity to think out loud," she said.
But when Governor Roy Moore declares Christianity the state religion of Alabama, at least one federal judge will nod in approval.
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
I understand why people would get choked up at that Budweiser commercial with the troops receiving a round of applause at the airport -- hey, it's the troops, who are going through hell; at least it's not Rummy and Condi and Commander Flightsuit -- but this comment at Lucianne.com is creepy:
Ad should run in continuous loop all day
What, on the telescreens? Between Two Minutes Hates and reports on the war in Eastasia?
Ad should run in continuous loop all day
What, on the telescreens? Between Two Minutes Hates and reports on the war in Eastasia?
More thoughtful art criticism from the right -- this time it's Andrea Peyser, in yesterday's New York Post:
WAKE me when these hideous things are gone!
It's time to let the truth be known: "The Gates" -- that manically promoted, ludicrously expensive sculpture project now infesting Central Park -- is the artistic equivalent of a yard that's been strewn with stained toilet paper by juvenile delinquents on Halloween.
It is the defacement of beauty, not its creation -- a fraud perpetrated on the people by no-talent hypemasters and their chief cheerleader in City Hall.
Please, make them go away!
Walking into the park yesterday, I was assaulted by thousands of what looked like shower curtains twisting in the wind. I had found "The Gates."
Like a sucker in a game of three-card monte, I'd noticed I was about to be taken for a fool -- and I'd ignored them.
The advance buzz had been all-consuming. "The Gates" was presented as the ticket for our stubborn, precious, maddening city to be elevated into something of a quasi-Eurotrash capital (except where the natives bathe regularly)....
I led you yesterday to Roger Kimball's critique of The Gates; it was equally trenchant and perceptive, but -- perhaps because of limitations of space -- Kimball failed to make this point, which gives Christo and Jeanne-Claude's game away: French people never take showers! Really! And therefore all art by Europeans is a fraud! (Neither Kimball nor Peyser points out that, like Jeanne-Claude, John Kerry speaks French. But maybe Bill O'Reilly will get to that.)
Kimball called The Gates a "scam." Peyser says it's "ludicrously expensive" and compares it to three-card monte. Isn't this odd, given that the Christos take no government or private funding and charge no admission, and given that the Christos run a highly efficient capitalist enterprise that balances its books a hell of a lot better than the Bush administration? You'd think right-wingers would cheer for those reasons alone. Or be pleased that, decades ago, Christo fled the Soviet bloc, and his work is, in part, a reaction to his early years.
No. Their gut reaction is to recoil in disgust because art is so damn arty. Sometimes it's weird, and kooky, and often not classically beautiful! And artists, Lord help us! Duncan Maxwell Anderson took their measure in a column published last summer in the Post:
Some men claim the status of artists simply because they don't know how to change a tire. Men from the arty class can become parasites, making their try for greatness simply by throwing muck at men who are truly great.
The Gates column isn't Peyser's first venture into art criticism. Back in 2002, she joined in an attack on Tumbling Woman, a sculpture by Eric Fischl that was based on images of 9/11 victims plunging to their deaths from the Twin Towers. Where The Gates is charmingly meaningless (and that's meant as a compliment), Tumbling Woman is chilling and powerful. But Peyser was having none of it:
SHAMEFUL ART ATTACK
IS THIS art? Or assault?
...A violently disturbing sculpture popped up last week in the middle of Rock Center's busy underground concourse - right in front of the ice-skating rink. It depicts a naked woman, limbs flailing, face contorted, at the exact moment her head smacks pavement following her leap from the flaming World Trade Center.
The worst part about the piece is that you can't miss it. Even if you try.
Titled "Tumbling Woman," the sculpture is by '80s darling Eric Fischl....
"It's disgusting!" said Ken Fidje, 34....
The sculpture was removed from Rockefeller Center just as Peyser's column hit the newsstands.
That was too much even for the conservative New York Sun:
We're no fans of a lot of what passes for public art around town, but "Tumbling Woman" is no abstract lump of bronze. It is an extraordinary rendering of a woman in one of the most gripping poses we can imagine in art. It captured a moment that will live in the imagination of New York forever, and it deserves a place in the city. Not, as we say, that we lack regard for the Great Peyser. She deserves her own statue, perhaps in that plaza in front of the News Corp. building on Sixth Avenue. Call it "Woman on a High Horse." A good man for the job would be Eric Fischl.
You'd think Peyser would have approved of a work of art that reminded us of the horror wrought by terrorists on 9/11. But terrorists aren't the Right's real enemy -- liberals are. And a time-honored way to attack American liberals is to mock our presumed allies: foreign artists with funny accents.
*****
Roger Kimball got his dander up at some artists back in February 2003 -- Sam Hamill and other poets who had been invited to the White House by Laura Bush and decided to protest the imminent war with Iraq. Skimble posted Kimball's column about the poets on his blog. Kimball actually went light on the philistinism in that column -- but, with the benefit of hindsight, I do enjoy this passage:
[Hamill] is also given to ... exaggeration. He had, he said, just read "a lengthy report" about the president's Iraq war plans. According to Mr. Hamill, they called for "saturation bombing that would be like the firebombing of Dresden or Tokyo, killing countless innocent civilians."
Really? Every report I have seen has dilated on the extraordinary efforts of U.S. military planners to minimize civilian casualties by the use of precision weapons, tactics to isolate Saddam from control of his weapons of mass destruction, and so on.
But somehow the headline "U.S. Strives to Remove Brutal Dictator, Liberate the Iraqi Populace, While Keeping Civilian Casualties and Damage to Infrastructure to a Minimum" doesn't play well to the gallery.
Er, no comment.
****
Today in the New York Post it's John Podhoretz going after The Gates; next, I guess, it will be Cindy Adams and the sports cartoonist. Again, Christo and Jeanne-Claude are "snake-oil salesmen"; again, the easily traversed gates are deemed an exercise in obstruction ("like an endless row of construction cones shutting down two lanes on Interstate 95.") And, of course, cultural fascism is the order of the day:
You weren't going to catch anybody in Central Park making a negative peep about the whole project, lest he or she be considered uncool, uncouth, narrow-minded, philistine, incapable of recognizing innovative art when he saw it.
I guess I just imagined that conversation my wife and I had on Sunday with a New York-dwelling Ivy Leaguer who didn't much like The Gates.
But the second half of Podhoretz's column is where the real nonsense appears:
But there is a wonderfully salutary aspect to "The Gates," and that is how the mobs of people thronging the park seem blissfully unaware that they are walking through reclaimed territory.
From the late 1960s until the late 1980s, Central Park was an object lesson in the decline of New York City. This urban paradise, this wondrous invented playground, had become a sodden, dirty, dangerous place.
The famous moments in Central Park during these decades were all nightmarish descents into menace, lawlessness and death. It was in Central Park that Robert Chambers killed Jennifer Dawn Levin.
It was where dozens of people were harassed and injured after a Diana Ross concert by a gang of monstrous youths who said they were out "wilding." It was where Tricia Meili went jogging one evening and was raped so brutally that she lost half the blood in her body.
In 1970, a movie called "Where's Poppa" captured the feeling in the city perfectly, as a man living on Fifth Avenue would run across the park at night to try to reach his ailing mother on Central Park West, only to be mugged again and again and again.
In the 11 years since Rudy Giuliani was inaugurated as mayor, the most dramatic indication of the change in New York's fortunes is the declining crime and murder rate. But nobody talks about a less quantifiable but equally dramatic decline here -- the decline of menace.
No, that's true. You know why? Because people who live here felt safe in Central Park long before Giuliani.
I can't talk about the early 1970s, when I was growing up in Boston. But the park was certainly a joy, in the daytime at least, as far back as the 1980s.
Robert Chambers killing Jennifer Levin? That happened sometime between 4:30 A.M. and dawn -- and they went off assuming that nobody would mug them. What's more, it was acquaintance sexual violence, so it's not even relevant to Podhoretz's argument.
Tricia Meili, the Central Park jogger? That attack took place around 10:00 P.M. -- an act of brutality, but remember that dozens of people were jogging, strolling, and bicycling through the park at that hour, persuaded that doing so was reasonably safe. And then recall that Central Park was, in its earliest days, closed at night. Meili regularly jogged there after dark without incident prior to her horrific assault, and she wasn't alone.
Podhoretz mentions the riot after the 1983 Diana Ross concert. He conveniently overlooks a somewhat similar moment in the park:
On June 11, [2000,] roving bands of boys and young men allegedly doused, stripped, and molested more than 50 women in New York's Central Park. The assaults took place during and after the National Puerto Rican Day Parade.
On June 11, 2000, the mayor of New York was Rudolph Giuliani.
WAKE me when these hideous things are gone!
It's time to let the truth be known: "The Gates" -- that manically promoted, ludicrously expensive sculpture project now infesting Central Park -- is the artistic equivalent of a yard that's been strewn with stained toilet paper by juvenile delinquents on Halloween.
It is the defacement of beauty, not its creation -- a fraud perpetrated on the people by no-talent hypemasters and their chief cheerleader in City Hall.
Please, make them go away!
Walking into the park yesterday, I was assaulted by thousands of what looked like shower curtains twisting in the wind. I had found "The Gates."
Like a sucker in a game of three-card monte, I'd noticed I was about to be taken for a fool -- and I'd ignored them.
The advance buzz had been all-consuming. "The Gates" was presented as the ticket for our stubborn, precious, maddening city to be elevated into something of a quasi-Eurotrash capital (except where the natives bathe regularly)....
I led you yesterday to Roger Kimball's critique of The Gates; it was equally trenchant and perceptive, but -- perhaps because of limitations of space -- Kimball failed to make this point, which gives Christo and Jeanne-Claude's game away: French people never take showers! Really! And therefore all art by Europeans is a fraud! (Neither Kimball nor Peyser points out that, like Jeanne-Claude, John Kerry speaks French. But maybe Bill O'Reilly will get to that.)
Kimball called The Gates a "scam." Peyser says it's "ludicrously expensive" and compares it to three-card monte. Isn't this odd, given that the Christos take no government or private funding and charge no admission, and given that the Christos run a highly efficient capitalist enterprise that balances its books a hell of a lot better than the Bush administration? You'd think right-wingers would cheer for those reasons alone. Or be pleased that, decades ago, Christo fled the Soviet bloc, and his work is, in part, a reaction to his early years.
No. Their gut reaction is to recoil in disgust because art is so damn arty. Sometimes it's weird, and kooky, and often not classically beautiful! And artists, Lord help us! Duncan Maxwell Anderson took their measure in a column published last summer in the Post:
Some men claim the status of artists simply because they don't know how to change a tire. Men from the arty class can become parasites, making their try for greatness simply by throwing muck at men who are truly great.
The Gates column isn't Peyser's first venture into art criticism. Back in 2002, she joined in an attack on Tumbling Woman, a sculpture by Eric Fischl that was based on images of 9/11 victims plunging to their deaths from the Twin Towers. Where The Gates is charmingly meaningless (and that's meant as a compliment), Tumbling Woman is chilling and powerful. But Peyser was having none of it:
SHAMEFUL ART ATTACK
IS THIS art? Or assault?
...A violently disturbing sculpture popped up last week in the middle of Rock Center's busy underground concourse - right in front of the ice-skating rink. It depicts a naked woman, limbs flailing, face contorted, at the exact moment her head smacks pavement following her leap from the flaming World Trade Center.
The worst part about the piece is that you can't miss it. Even if you try.
Titled "Tumbling Woman," the sculpture is by '80s darling Eric Fischl....
"It's disgusting!" said Ken Fidje, 34....
The sculpture was removed from Rockefeller Center just as Peyser's column hit the newsstands.
That was too much even for the conservative New York Sun:
We're no fans of a lot of what passes for public art around town, but "Tumbling Woman" is no abstract lump of bronze. It is an extraordinary rendering of a woman in one of the most gripping poses we can imagine in art. It captured a moment that will live in the imagination of New York forever, and it deserves a place in the city. Not, as we say, that we lack regard for the Great Peyser. She deserves her own statue, perhaps in that plaza in front of the News Corp. building on Sixth Avenue. Call it "Woman on a High Horse." A good man for the job would be Eric Fischl.
You'd think Peyser would have approved of a work of art that reminded us of the horror wrought by terrorists on 9/11. But terrorists aren't the Right's real enemy -- liberals are. And a time-honored way to attack American liberals is to mock our presumed allies: foreign artists with funny accents.
*****
Roger Kimball got his dander up at some artists back in February 2003 -- Sam Hamill and other poets who had been invited to the White House by Laura Bush and decided to protest the imminent war with Iraq. Skimble posted Kimball's column about the poets on his blog. Kimball actually went light on the philistinism in that column -- but, with the benefit of hindsight, I do enjoy this passage:
[Hamill] is also given to ... exaggeration. He had, he said, just read "a lengthy report" about the president's Iraq war plans. According to Mr. Hamill, they called for "saturation bombing that would be like the firebombing of Dresden or Tokyo, killing countless innocent civilians."
Really? Every report I have seen has dilated on the extraordinary efforts of U.S. military planners to minimize civilian casualties by the use of precision weapons, tactics to isolate Saddam from control of his weapons of mass destruction, and so on.
But somehow the headline "U.S. Strives to Remove Brutal Dictator, Liberate the Iraqi Populace, While Keeping Civilian Casualties and Damage to Infrastructure to a Minimum" doesn't play well to the gallery.
Er, no comment.
****
Today in the New York Post it's John Podhoretz going after The Gates; next, I guess, it will be Cindy Adams and the sports cartoonist. Again, Christo and Jeanne-Claude are "snake-oil salesmen"; again, the easily traversed gates are deemed an exercise in obstruction ("like an endless row of construction cones shutting down two lanes on Interstate 95.") And, of course, cultural fascism is the order of the day:
You weren't going to catch anybody in Central Park making a negative peep about the whole project, lest he or she be considered uncool, uncouth, narrow-minded, philistine, incapable of recognizing innovative art when he saw it.
I guess I just imagined that conversation my wife and I had on Sunday with a New York-dwelling Ivy Leaguer who didn't much like The Gates.
But the second half of Podhoretz's column is where the real nonsense appears:
But there is a wonderfully salutary aspect to "The Gates," and that is how the mobs of people thronging the park seem blissfully unaware that they are walking through reclaimed territory.
From the late 1960s until the late 1980s, Central Park was an object lesson in the decline of New York City. This urban paradise, this wondrous invented playground, had become a sodden, dirty, dangerous place.
The famous moments in Central Park during these decades were all nightmarish descents into menace, lawlessness and death. It was in Central Park that Robert Chambers killed Jennifer Dawn Levin.
It was where dozens of people were harassed and injured after a Diana Ross concert by a gang of monstrous youths who said they were out "wilding." It was where Tricia Meili went jogging one evening and was raped so brutally that she lost half the blood in her body.
In 1970, a movie called "Where's Poppa" captured the feeling in the city perfectly, as a man living on Fifth Avenue would run across the park at night to try to reach his ailing mother on Central Park West, only to be mugged again and again and again.
In the 11 years since Rudy Giuliani was inaugurated as mayor, the most dramatic indication of the change in New York's fortunes is the declining crime and murder rate. But nobody talks about a less quantifiable but equally dramatic decline here -- the decline of menace.
No, that's true. You know why? Because people who live here felt safe in Central Park long before Giuliani.
I can't talk about the early 1970s, when I was growing up in Boston. But the park was certainly a joy, in the daytime at least, as far back as the 1980s.
Robert Chambers killing Jennifer Levin? That happened sometime between 4:30 A.M. and dawn -- and they went off assuming that nobody would mug them. What's more, it was acquaintance sexual violence, so it's not even relevant to Podhoretz's argument.
Tricia Meili, the Central Park jogger? That attack took place around 10:00 P.M. -- an act of brutality, but remember that dozens of people were jogging, strolling, and bicycling through the park at that hour, persuaded that doing so was reasonably safe. And then recall that Central Park was, in its earliest days, closed at night. Meili regularly jogged there after dark without incident prior to her horrific assault, and she wasn't alone.
Podhoretz mentions the riot after the 1983 Diana Ross concert. He conveniently overlooks a somewhat similar moment in the park:
On June 11, [2000,] roving bands of boys and young men allegedly doused, stripped, and molested more than 50 women in New York's Central Park. The assaults took place during and after the National Puerto Rican Day Parade.
On June 11, 2000, the mayor of New York was Rudolph Giuliani.
Why did we reelect Bush? Oh, yeah -- because he was going to keep us safer:
Budget cuts FDA safety checks
The Food and Drug Administration's proposed budget for next year includes cuts to nearly all its inspection programs, from checks on imported food to reviews of overseas plants that make prescription drugs bound for the USA.
If Congress approves, the number of domestic food safety inspections made next year would fall by 5%, foreign drug plant inspections would drop 5.8% and checks on the nation's blood banks would be cut 4.7%, compared with estimated 2005 inspections....
The proposed cuts come amid criticism the FDA failed to inspect often enough a long-troubled British vaccine plant that the United States had counted on for half of its flu vaccine supply....
--USA Today
Er, isn't this odd, considering that the Bushies are always fretting over the possibility that we could die if we continue importing drugs from that lawless rogue nation Canada, where life is cheap?
Budget cuts FDA safety checks
The Food and Drug Administration's proposed budget for next year includes cuts to nearly all its inspection programs, from checks on imported food to reviews of overseas plants that make prescription drugs bound for the USA.
If Congress approves, the number of domestic food safety inspections made next year would fall by 5%, foreign drug plant inspections would drop 5.8% and checks on the nation's blood banks would be cut 4.7%, compared with estimated 2005 inspections....
The proposed cuts come amid criticism the FDA failed to inspect often enough a long-troubled British vaccine plant that the United States had counted on for half of its flu vaccine supply....
--USA Today
Er, isn't this odd, considering that the Bushies are always fretting over the possibility that we could die if we continue importing drugs from that lawless rogue nation Canada, where life is cheap?
This assassination in Lebanon is actually working out very nicely for the Bush administration, The New York Times notes. The Bushies blame the killing on Syria -- but:
In the view of American analysts, Syria has in turn done the bidding of Iran, using Syrian territory to support Hezbollah, a major presence in Lebanon, and other Islamic groups that have attacked Israel.
The United States has focused mounting attention on Iran in recent weeks, both because of its suspected nuclear arms program and because of its support of groups trying to disrupt a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
A Western diplomat said the United States, in condemning Syria's possible role in the Beirut attack, may also be trying to rebuke Iran, signaling that American tolerance of such behavior was diminishing.
Yes, it's idee fixe time at the White House. All roads lead to Public Enemy #1.
In the view of American analysts, Syria has in turn done the bidding of Iran, using Syrian territory to support Hezbollah, a major presence in Lebanon, and other Islamic groups that have attacked Israel.
The United States has focused mounting attention on Iran in recent weeks, both because of its suspected nuclear arms program and because of its support of groups trying to disrupt a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
A Western diplomat said the United States, in condemning Syria's possible role in the Beirut attack, may also be trying to rebuke Iran, signaling that American tolerance of such behavior was diminishing.
Yes, it's idee fixe time at the White House. All roads lead to Public Enemy #1.
Monday, February 14, 2005
AFP reports:
For the second time in as many months, a test of the Pentagon's missile defense system has ended in fiasco....
The Missile Defense Agency said the failure became apparent when an interceptor that was supposed to shoot down an incoming target missile carrying a mock warhead did not take off from the Ronald Reagan Test Site located on the Marshall Islands in the central Pacific....
Yeah, that would be a tipoff.
For the second time in as many months, a test of the Pentagon's missile defense system has ended in fiasco....
The Missile Defense Agency said the failure became apparent when an interceptor that was supposed to shoot down an incoming target missile carrying a mock warhead did not take off from the Ronald Reagan Test Site located on the Marshall Islands in the central Pacific....
Yeah, that would be a tipoff.
So the Kurds, who won 59% of the vote in oil-rich Kirkuk (even though they represent about a third of the population there, and even though many of the Kurds who voted in Kirkuk don't actually live there), were celebrating last night, according to Reuters:
U.S. soldiers and Iraqi policemen initially tried to dampen the party by confiscating flags and posters and banning celebratory gunfire, but were overwhelmed and had to give up.
"There was so much going on we just couldn't stop them," Smith said. "We just changed plan and decided to keep an eye on them instead to make sure they weren't causing trouble."
AFP notes that others in the region had a reaction that vaguely resembled "celebratory gunfire":
Insurgents blew up an oil pipeline in the northern oil fields of Iraq....
The oil field attack occurred at the North Oil Company's Al-Dibbis oil field near Kirkuk, said Maj Gen Anwar Mohammad Amin....
Hmm, let's see: The Kurds will probably control Kirkuk's oil. The Shiites and Kurds will control Iraq. The insurgents are mostly Sunnis. Could be a problem.
Oh, and the Turkmen in Kirkuk have ties to Turkey, which really doesn't like it when Kurds are feeling their oats.
Gosh, do you think this U.S. officer, quoted by Reuters, might be on to something?
"I think there'll be some ethnic violence here, I really do," said U.S. Captain Mitch Smith, a company commander in the heart of Kirkuk, the most ethnically diverse city in Iraq.
"Before the elections there were concerted attacks on coalition forces and Iraqi security forces but I think the focus may have shifted now," he told Reuters on Monday.
"Rather than targeting us, I expect we might see the various groups in the city fighting among themselves."
U.S. soldiers and Iraqi policemen initially tried to dampen the party by confiscating flags and posters and banning celebratory gunfire, but were overwhelmed and had to give up.
"There was so much going on we just couldn't stop them," Smith said. "We just changed plan and decided to keep an eye on them instead to make sure they weren't causing trouble."
AFP notes that others in the region had a reaction that vaguely resembled "celebratory gunfire":
Insurgents blew up an oil pipeline in the northern oil fields of Iraq....
The oil field attack occurred at the North Oil Company's Al-Dibbis oil field near Kirkuk, said Maj Gen Anwar Mohammad Amin....
Hmm, let's see: The Kurds will probably control Kirkuk's oil. The Shiites and Kurds will control Iraq. The insurgents are mostly Sunnis. Could be a problem.
Oh, and the Turkmen in Kirkuk have ties to Turkey, which really doesn't like it when Kurds are feeling their oats.
Gosh, do you think this U.S. officer, quoted by Reuters, might be on to something?
"I think there'll be some ethnic violence here, I really do," said U.S. Captain Mitch Smith, a company commander in the heart of Kirkuk, the most ethnically diverse city in Iraq.
"Before the elections there were concerted attacks on coalition forces and Iraqi security forces but I think the focus may have shifted now," he told Reuters on Monday.
"Rather than targeting us, I expect we might see the various groups in the city fighting among themselves."
Yeah, yeah, yeah -- I said a couple of days ago that we on the left all had fun watching Jeff Gannon fall, and then we moved on. But that wasn't true for the folks at AMERICAblog. They kept digging and found graphic and all-but-incontrovertible proof that Gannon has been a prostitute.
Sorry -- this is the administration that's still firing Arab linguists merely for being gay, and that wants to enshrine a national ban on gay marriage in the Constitution. So yes, this is worth pointing out.
Sorry -- this is the administration that's still firing Arab linguists merely for being gay, and that wants to enshrine a national ban on gay marriage in the Constitution. So yes, this is worth pointing out.
Apart from his repulsive habit of publishing Charles (Bell Curve) Murray, can someone please explain to me why David Shipley regularly wastes so many column inches in the New York Times op-ed page on fluff like this?
Nice enough photos, but, er, this is an op-ed page. In the print edition, the photos takes up nearly a third of the page. Does no one on the planet have anything more substantive to offer that could fill those 38 column inches?
Nice enough photos, but, er, this is an op-ed page. In the print edition, the photos takes up nearly a third of the page. Does no one on the planet have anything more substantive to offer that could fill those 38 column inches?
Romance is in the air today across the land. But in Washington, the buzz continues about "The Kiss." No, not Gustav Klimt's famous painting. It's the big fat one an exuberant President Bush planted on Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman's right cheek as he waded through the Capitol crowd after the State of the Union a couple of weeks ago.
... There's been K Street chatter, our colleague Jeffrey H. Birnbaum tells us, that Lieberman could be on an administration list to replace Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in the next year or so.
That would be convenient for Lieberman, whose term is up in 2006, and could give Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell (R) an opportunity to appoint a Republican to the seat for at least a few months before the election, inching the GOP closer to a filibuster-proof Senate.
Or maybe it's just love?
--Washington Post
In Luke 22, Judas kisses Jesus and Jesus is arrested. I wonder if Bush, who prides himself on being a loyal follower of the Guy Upstairs, had this in mind when he kissed Lieberman. The two stories aren't quite analogous, of course -- Judas betrayed the man he kissed, while the man Bush kissed is teaming up with Bush to betray his own party -- but I suspect Bush isn't enough of an actual scholar of the Bible (or logical thinker) to grasp that.
... There's been K Street chatter, our colleague Jeffrey H. Birnbaum tells us, that Lieberman could be on an administration list to replace Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in the next year or so.
That would be convenient for Lieberman, whose term is up in 2006, and could give Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell (R) an opportunity to appoint a Republican to the seat for at least a few months before the election, inching the GOP closer to a filibuster-proof Senate.
Or maybe it's just love?
--Washington Post
In Luke 22, Judas kisses Jesus and Jesus is arrested. I wonder if Bush, who prides himself on being a loyal follower of the Guy Upstairs, had this in mind when he kissed Lieberman. The two stories aren't quite analogous, of course -- Judas betrayed the man he kissed, while the man Bush kissed is teaming up with Bush to betray his own party -- but I suspect Bush isn't enough of an actual scholar of the Bible (or logical thinker) to grasp that.
Sunday, February 13, 2005
I was in Central Park today to see The Gates. It's charming; it created a near-giddiness in the crowd. I really want to see it again tomorrow when it's raining.
But over on the right, a cane is being shook in a white-knuckled fist and a voice is croaking, "Get off my lawn!!"
Andy Warhol once remarked that 'art is what you can get away with'. And how. Just ask Christo, the Bulgarian-born entrepreneur who wraps things in cloth, calls it Art and sits back while the money pours into his bank account....
His latest wheeze is 'The Gates' in Central Park, New York.... This visual litter will inconvenience visitors to the park from 12 February to 27 February, when the whole shebang will be rolled up and put into storage somewhere....In the meantime, Christo is drawing furiously, churning out the drawings, the largest of which are fetching $600,000....
This isn't a Rotarian boor, Dennis Prager one of the Limbaughs. This is one of the Right's intellectuals: Roger (Tenured Radicals) Kimball. And that's his critique of the art: It inconveniences Joe Average Man! (It doesn't, actually -- the gates of The Gates are wide and inviting, the saffron curtains billowing overhead; on a sunny Sunday in New York, if you truly want inconvenience, just walk, well, anywhere, and fall in behind a slow-creeping pedestrian gabbing on a cellphone, or try to get past a wall of tourists walking four abreast.) And ... and ... really rich people pay a lot of money to the artists! (Poor dears. Won't somebody save them from themselves, before they spend themselves down to their last hundred or two hundred million?)
This is my favorite Kimball line:
Why should the city let an individual capitalise on public property, possibly compromising the local bird life and foliage, in order to enhance his own notoriety and balance sheet?
Um ... local bird life? Does Kimball mean pigeons? Is he concerned that The Gates is going to harm pigeons?
Would that it were so.
But over on the right, a cane is being shook in a white-knuckled fist and a voice is croaking, "Get off my lawn!!"
Andy Warhol once remarked that 'art is what you can get away with'. And how. Just ask Christo, the Bulgarian-born entrepreneur who wraps things in cloth, calls it Art and sits back while the money pours into his bank account....
His latest wheeze is 'The Gates' in Central Park, New York.... This visual litter will inconvenience visitors to the park from 12 February to 27 February, when the whole shebang will be rolled up and put into storage somewhere....In the meantime, Christo is drawing furiously, churning out the drawings, the largest of which are fetching $600,000....
This isn't a Rotarian boor, Dennis Prager one of the Limbaughs. This is one of the Right's intellectuals: Roger (Tenured Radicals) Kimball. And that's his critique of the art: It inconveniences Joe Average Man! (It doesn't, actually -- the gates of The Gates are wide and inviting, the saffron curtains billowing overhead; on a sunny Sunday in New York, if you truly want inconvenience, just walk, well, anywhere, and fall in behind a slow-creeping pedestrian gabbing on a cellphone, or try to get past a wall of tourists walking four abreast.) And ... and ... really rich people pay a lot of money to the artists! (Poor dears. Won't somebody save them from themselves, before they spend themselves down to their last hundred or two hundred million?)
This is my favorite Kimball line:
Why should the city let an individual capitalise on public property, possibly compromising the local bird life and foliage, in order to enhance his own notoriety and balance sheet?
Um ... local bird life? Does Kimball mean pigeons? Is he concerned that The Gates is going to harm pigeons?
Would that it were so.
HOW HIGH IS DOWN?
CNN is reporting a 72% turnout. [Later: Some readers think that will turn out to be high, with the final number more like 60%. Still a lot, in the face of widespread death threats....]
--Instapundit, 1/30/05
And read this post on turnout by Roger Simon: "Before the spin doctors get a hold of the 'how big was the turnout' question in Iraq (60%? 70%?) and use that to denigrate this great step forward that has just taken place, let's remind ourselves that turnout in recent US Presidential elections is barely over 50% of eligible voters and that in the nascent days of our democracy, 1824, it was 26.9%."
--Instapundit, a later post on 1/30/05
The election commission said overall turnout was 8.55 million votes, which was about 58 percent of the 14.66 million registered voters. That was a little less than the 60 percent that election officials had predicted soon after the election took place.
--Washington Post today
Turnout was also somewhat higher than previously estimated.
--Instapundit today
CNN is reporting a 72% turnout. [Later: Some readers think that will turn out to be high, with the final number more like 60%. Still a lot, in the face of widespread death threats....]
--Instapundit, 1/30/05
And read this post on turnout by Roger Simon: "Before the spin doctors get a hold of the 'how big was the turnout' question in Iraq (60%? 70%?) and use that to denigrate this great step forward that has just taken place, let's remind ourselves that turnout in recent US Presidential elections is barely over 50% of eligible voters and that in the nascent days of our democracy, 1824, it was 26.9%."
--Instapundit, a later post on 1/30/05
The election commission said overall turnout was 8.55 million votes, which was about 58 percent of the 14.66 million registered voters. That was a little less than the 60 percent that election officials had predicted soon after the election took place.
--Washington Post today
Turnout was also somewhat higher than previously estimated.
--Instapundit today
In The New York Times, David Cay Johnston notes that we've already taken the first step down the slippery slope that leads to the end of progressive taxation: The richest Americans no longer pay the highest federal tax rates.
When both income and payroll levies like those for Social Security are counted, Americans making as little as $100,000 paid a larger share of their income in taxes in 2002 than those making more than $10 million. Those with incomes of $100,000 to $200,000 paid 20.6 percent of their income in these taxes, compared with 20.1 percent for those in the $10-million-and-up group, the Tax Policy Center computer model calculated.
You'll hear something different from conservatives -- but they're counting only federal income taxes. Payroll taxes (for Social Security and Medicare) are federal taxes, too, and if you're a middle-class wage earner, you pay them on every dime you earn, while every dime over $90,000 is exempt from the SS tax, which means high earners get a big break.
And meanwhile, as Edward Andrews notes in the Times, there's a push to combine "tax reform" -- which, for conservatives, means a regressive consumption tax, or an approximation of one -- with Social Security "reform."
..."We can deal with Social Security and taxes simultaneously," said Representative Bill Thomas, Republican of California and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, in a speech last month. "Sometimes, the more you include in a piece of legislation, the easier it is to pass."...
In recent weeks, numerous Republican lawmakers and Mr. Breaux [John Breaux, co-chair of Bush's tax advisory panel] have echoed Mr. Thomas's call to broaden the Social Security debate and link it with tax reform.
"Why don't we look at the whole picture of how we fund entitlement programs?" Mr. Breaux said of Mr. Thomas's idea. "I think he's raised very worthwhile questions."
As Andrews notes,
Both a flat tax and a consumption tax would probably shift more of the tax burden from high-income households to middle- and lower-income taxpayers.
If Thomas and Breaux get their way, kiss progressivity goodbye.
Of course, I'm not sure what's really going on -- maybe this call for even more radical change all at once is a trick to make Bush's SS reform seem like the sensible middle ground. (Something like that happened in 2001, when a few members of Congress demanded bigger tax cuts than Bush was asking for.)
Or maybe these guys are serious. Maybe when Thomas says, "Sometimes, the more you include in a piece of legislation, the easier it is to pass," what he means is "If we make this really, really confusing we might be able to pull the wool over the eyes of the public and get it all passed."
When both income and payroll levies like those for Social Security are counted, Americans making as little as $100,000 paid a larger share of their income in taxes in 2002 than those making more than $10 million. Those with incomes of $100,000 to $200,000 paid 20.6 percent of their income in these taxes, compared with 20.1 percent for those in the $10-million-and-up group, the Tax Policy Center computer model calculated.
You'll hear something different from conservatives -- but they're counting only federal income taxes. Payroll taxes (for Social Security and Medicare) are federal taxes, too, and if you're a middle-class wage earner, you pay them on every dime you earn, while every dime over $90,000 is exempt from the SS tax, which means high earners get a big break.
And meanwhile, as Edward Andrews notes in the Times, there's a push to combine "tax reform" -- which, for conservatives, means a regressive consumption tax, or an approximation of one -- with Social Security "reform."
..."We can deal with Social Security and taxes simultaneously," said Representative Bill Thomas, Republican of California and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, in a speech last month. "Sometimes, the more you include in a piece of legislation, the easier it is to pass."...
In recent weeks, numerous Republican lawmakers and Mr. Breaux [John Breaux, co-chair of Bush's tax advisory panel] have echoed Mr. Thomas's call to broaden the Social Security debate and link it with tax reform.
"Why don't we look at the whole picture of how we fund entitlement programs?" Mr. Breaux said of Mr. Thomas's idea. "I think he's raised very worthwhile questions."
As Andrews notes,
Both a flat tax and a consumption tax would probably shift more of the tax burden from high-income households to middle- and lower-income taxpayers.
If Thomas and Breaux get their way, kiss progressivity goodbye.
Of course, I'm not sure what's really going on -- maybe this call for even more radical change all at once is a trick to make Bush's SS reform seem like the sensible middle ground. (Something like that happened in 2001, when a few members of Congress demanded bigger tax cuts than Bush was asking for.)
Or maybe these guys are serious. Maybe when Thomas says, "Sometimes, the more you include in a piece of legislation, the easier it is to pass," what he means is "If we make this really, really confusing we might be able to pull the wool over the eyes of the public and get it all passed."
Saturday, February 12, 2005
Conservatives like to say that the left has its priorities treasonously skewed -- that we hate George W. Bush (or, say, John Ashcroft) more than we hate terrorists.
Well, Eason Jordan has quit his job at CNN, and after observing the near-monomania of the conservative commentariat on the subject of this man -- day after day after day after day -- I think it's clearer than ever that the people at whom such a charge should be leveled are on the right.
Right-wingers simply hate liberals, and people they believe are liberals (the entire mainstream media, for example), more than they hate bin Laden and Zawahiri and Zarqawi. We are the real enemy.
Conservatives don't care that the masterminds of 9/11 are still at large, as is the anthrax killer -- they've begun taking down the real menaces to society, John Kerry and Tom Daschle and Dan Rather and Eason Jordan. They're working on Ward Churchill.
Oh, sure, conservatives cheered when Saddam was found in that spider hole, but that wasn't about Saddam -- that was about Bush. The point of the Iraq war was to give one of their own a big flag for America to rally around, as a means of vanquishing the Democratic Party in 2004. (Just debating the authorization of the war had done the trick in '02.) Why do you think conservatives didn't care that the pursuit of bin Laden was all but abandoned in favor of war against Saddam? Because the real result they wanted wasn't justice for the victims of the Towers, but exaltation for the guy who stood on their mass grave with a bullhorn on 9/14. And if the leaders of al-Qaeda are captured now, for conservatives the point will be that it happened on a right-winger's watch.
Back in 1999, the New York Post asked readers to choose the most evil person of the millennium. Bill Clinton came in second, ahead of Stalin, Pol Pot, and Josef Megele; Hillary Clinton came in sixth.
That wasn't done as a joke. There may have been some glee among the Free Republic members who stuffed the ballot box, but the opinions expressed were sincere. (One Freeper wrote: "There is space at the bottom for 3 write-ins. Bill & Hillary each got a vote...the 3rd was Charles Schumer. Although, I should have put Senator Boxer or Feinstein.")
This is the Right's real war. If that poll were being conducted today, I wonder where Eason Jordan and Dan Rather would rank.
****
(Note: Yes, we on the left had some fun for a couple of days with the pseudonymous superpatriotic rent boy Jeff Gannon. But one or two lefty blogs went all Gannon, all the time. The rest of us cheered, but quickly moved on.)
****
(Oh, and what's the Latin sentence at the top of the page of Hugh Hewitt's blog? It's "Potestas Democraticorum delenda est!" -- "The power of Democrats must be destroyed." I rest my case.)
Well, Eason Jordan has quit his job at CNN, and after observing the near-monomania of the conservative commentariat on the subject of this man -- day after day after day after day -- I think it's clearer than ever that the people at whom such a charge should be leveled are on the right.
Right-wingers simply hate liberals, and people they believe are liberals (the entire mainstream media, for example), more than they hate bin Laden and Zawahiri and Zarqawi. We are the real enemy.
Conservatives don't care that the masterminds of 9/11 are still at large, as is the anthrax killer -- they've begun taking down the real menaces to society, John Kerry and Tom Daschle and Dan Rather and Eason Jordan. They're working on Ward Churchill.
Oh, sure, conservatives cheered when Saddam was found in that spider hole, but that wasn't about Saddam -- that was about Bush. The point of the Iraq war was to give one of their own a big flag for America to rally around, as a means of vanquishing the Democratic Party in 2004. (Just debating the authorization of the war had done the trick in '02.) Why do you think conservatives didn't care that the pursuit of bin Laden was all but abandoned in favor of war against Saddam? Because the real result they wanted wasn't justice for the victims of the Towers, but exaltation for the guy who stood on their mass grave with a bullhorn on 9/14. And if the leaders of al-Qaeda are captured now, for conservatives the point will be that it happened on a right-winger's watch.
Back in 1999, the New York Post asked readers to choose the most evil person of the millennium. Bill Clinton came in second, ahead of Stalin, Pol Pot, and Josef Megele; Hillary Clinton came in sixth.
That wasn't done as a joke. There may have been some glee among the Free Republic members who stuffed the ballot box, but the opinions expressed were sincere. (One Freeper wrote: "There is space at the bottom for 3 write-ins. Bill & Hillary each got a vote...the 3rd was Charles Schumer. Although, I should have put Senator Boxer or Feinstein.")
This is the Right's real war. If that poll were being conducted today, I wonder where Eason Jordan and Dan Rather would rank.
****
(Note: Yes, we on the left had some fun for a couple of days with the pseudonymous superpatriotic rent boy Jeff Gannon. But one or two lefty blogs went all Gannon, all the time. The rest of us cheered, but quickly moved on.)
****
(Oh, and what's the Latin sentence at the top of the page of Hugh Hewitt's blog? It's "Potestas Democraticorum delenda est!" -- "The power of Democrats must be destroyed." I rest my case.)
Friday, February 11, 2005
Added to the blogroll, in some cases very belatedly, are AMERICAblog, Bill's Big Diamond Blog, Crooked Timber, Scoobie Davis, Hard Attack News, Malvolio, The Raw Story, Remain Calm, The Sideshow, Think Progress, and Wampum. Also, I've updated the links for Alas, a Blog and INTL News, as well as for Ann Coulter's original New York Observer interview and John Scalzi's "I Hate Your Politics" column.
OH, WE'RE SORRY. WE FORGOT THAT WE'RE SUPPOSED TO FOLLOW THE MARQUIS OF QUEENSBURY RULES WHILE YOU GET TO KICK US IN THE NUTS
Congressman: Democrat Leadership Threatening 'Retribution' for Dems Who Cooperate with White House
Rep. Paul Ryan (R.-Wis.) was asked at a CATO conference in Washington yesterday whether he had persuaded any Democrats to back his plan to rescue Social Security from its financial troubles. Under his legislation (HR 4851), no new taxes would be needed to pay for "transition costs," participation in the new system would be voluntary and individuals would be allowed to divert a portion of their payroll tax into a mutual fund....
"We were in planning stages [with friendly Democrats]," said Ryan. But each essentially told him: "I like what you're doing. I like this bill. I think it's the right way to go. But my party leadership will break my back. The retribution that they are promising us is as great as I have ever seen. We can't do it."...
--Allan Ryskind in Human Events Online
No matter how many times they lose, they still want to define "bipartisanship" as "doing what the Democrats want."
--right-wing blogger C. D. Harris
Apparently, bipartisanship is not a two-way street.
--right-wing blogger Betsy Newmark
*****
...Bob Dole, after having told me earlier that we would work out a compromise on the issue, announced that he would block any health-care legislation and make my program a major issue in the November congressional elections. A few days later, Newt Gingrich was quoted as saying the Republican strategy was to make health-care reform unpassable by voting against improving amendments. He was as good as his word. On June 30, [1994,] the House Ways and Means Committee voted out a universal coverage bill without a single Republican vote.
The Republican leaders had received a memorandum from William Kristol, former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, urging them to kill health-care reform. Kristol said the Republicans couldn't afford to allow anything to pass; a success on health care would present a "serious political threat to the Republican Party," while its demise would be a "monumental setback for the President." At the end of May, at a Memorial Day retreat, the Republican congressional leaders decided to adopt Kristol's position.
--Bill Clinton, My Life, p. 601
Congressman: Democrat Leadership Threatening 'Retribution' for Dems Who Cooperate with White House
Rep. Paul Ryan (R.-Wis.) was asked at a CATO conference in Washington yesterday whether he had persuaded any Democrats to back his plan to rescue Social Security from its financial troubles. Under his legislation (HR 4851), no new taxes would be needed to pay for "transition costs," participation in the new system would be voluntary and individuals would be allowed to divert a portion of their payroll tax into a mutual fund....
"We were in planning stages [with friendly Democrats]," said Ryan. But each essentially told him: "I like what you're doing. I like this bill. I think it's the right way to go. But my party leadership will break my back. The retribution that they are promising us is as great as I have ever seen. We can't do it."...
--Allan Ryskind in Human Events Online
No matter how many times they lose, they still want to define "bipartisanship" as "doing what the Democrats want."
--right-wing blogger C. D. Harris
Apparently, bipartisanship is not a two-way street.
--right-wing blogger Betsy Newmark
*****
...Bob Dole, after having told me earlier that we would work out a compromise on the issue, announced that he would block any health-care legislation and make my program a major issue in the November congressional elections. A few days later, Newt Gingrich was quoted as saying the Republican strategy was to make health-care reform unpassable by voting against improving amendments. He was as good as his word. On June 30, [1994,] the House Ways and Means Committee voted out a universal coverage bill without a single Republican vote.
The Republican leaders had received a memorandum from William Kristol, former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, urging them to kill health-care reform. Kristol said the Republicans couldn't afford to allow anything to pass; a success on health care would present a "serious political threat to the Republican Party," while its demise would be a "monumental setback for the President." At the end of May, at a Memorial Day retreat, the Republican congressional leaders decided to adopt Kristol's position.
--Bill Clinton, My Life, p. 601
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