Best of the Web Today - February 6, 2006
By JAMES TARANTO
Whitewashing a Black Leader--II
NAACP chairman Julian Bond and Fayetteville State University are disputing WorldNetDaily's account of Bond's FSU speech last week, which we noted Friday. From an FSU press release:
"I didn't say these things I'm alleged to have said," Bond told FSU. "There is no one in the audience who can say I said them. The reporter from the Fayetteville newspaper did not report I said them. I have denied I said them and refuse to engage in a back and forth about what I did say. This is an irresponsible attack by a right-wing blog--a partisan blog--and these kinds of attacks should be expected and dismissed for what they are."
FSU officials reviewed a tape of Bond's speech to verify the alleged comments. Based on the review, it was determined that nowhere during Bond's speech was reference made to the Nazi Party, nor was the word "token" used.
"We received numerous calls and emails from concerned individuals about Mr. Bond's presentation, so we felt compelled to review the tape in an effort to address their concerns," said Jeffery Womble, director of public relations at Fayetteville State University. "After a close review, we have concluded that the comments attributed to Mr. Bond about the Republican Party, Dr. Rice, and Mr. Colin Powell were not made."
We phoned Mr. Womble this morning, and he told us that FSU disputes the WND account only on these two points. That means the following elements are undisputed:
o "Calling President Bush a liar, Bond told the audience at the historically black institution that this White House's lies are more serious than the lies of his predecessor's because Clinton's lies didn't kill people."
o "He referred to former Attorney General John Ashcroft as J. Edgar Ashcroft."
o "He compared Bush's judicial nominees to the Taliban."
o " 'The Republican Party would have the American flag and the swastika flying side by side,' he charged."
Womble confirmed the accuracy of that last quotation, but said FSU disagrees with WND's interpretation of the remark as "equating the Republican Party with the Nazi Party." Perhaps Bond meant to equate the GOP to Hindus?
On only one point there is a factual difference between WND's and FSU's accounts: Womble told us Bond not only did not call Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice "tokens" but did not say anything disparaging about them. Who's right? We don't know! We asked Womble for a copy of the tape, but he said it is "the property of Mr. Bond," who is not releasing it.
In any case, all of this reinforces the point we made on Friday, which is that the so-called mainstream media were at best negligent in their coverage of the speech. Bond said quite a few partisan and inflammatory things that no one disputes, yet the local media characterized him as having a "positive attitude" and being engaged in a "fight for equal rights." Were it not for WND, we would not know that Bond had anything harsher to say than, "We have a president who talks like a populist and governs for the privileged."
Most telling of all, Bond is expressly citing the local media's silence as if it were exculpatory. In fact, it is incriminating--not of Bond, but of those journalists who respond to his divisive rhetoric with an indulgent wink. If the press won't report what a prominent and respected black leader says to a mostly black audience, how can the public develop informed views on issues of race?
That '70s Show
The New York Times this morning confirms what we've long argued--that it is caught in a time warp:
As the Senate prepares to hold hearings on Monday on domestic eavesdropping [sic] by the National Security Agency, old Washington hands see a striking similarity to a drama that unfolded three decades ago in the capital.
In 1975, a Senate committee led by Senator Frank Church of Idaho revealed that the N.S.A. had intercepted the phone calls and telegrams of Americans. Then, as now, intelligence officials insisted that only international communications of people linked to dangerous activities were the targets, and that the spying was authorized under the president's constitutional powers. Then, as now, some Republicans complained that the government's most sensitive secrets were being splashed on the front pages of newspapers, while Democrats emphasized the danger to civil liberties. . . .
The recent debate about the security agency "does bring back a lot of memories," said Walter F. Mondale, the former vice president, who served on the Church Committee as a Democratic senator from Minnesota. "For those of us who went through it all back then, there's disappointment and even anger that we're back where we started from." . . .
Former Senator Gary W. Hart, a Colorado Democrat who served on the Church Committee, believes views such as Mr. Cheney's have set the clock back 30 years.
"What we're experiencing now, in my judgment, is a repeat of the Nixon years," Mr. Hart said. "Then it was justified by civil unrest and the Vietnam war. Now it's terrorism and the Iraq war."
One key difference between 1975 and 2006 seems to have escaped the Times and the Church Committee veterans. Then, the World Trade Center had been in operation for roughly five years; today, it has been a hole in the ground for almost as long. In today's New York Post, Debra Burlingame connects some dots:
A 2004 NBC report graphically illustrated what not having this program cost us 4 1/2 years ago. In 1999, the NSA began monitoring a known al Qaeda "switchboard" in Yemen that relayed calls from Osama bin Laden to operatives all over world. The surveillance picked up the phone number of a "Khalid" in the United States--but the NSA didn't intercept those calls, fearing it would be accused of "domestic spying."
After 9/11, investigators learned that "Khalid" was Khalid al-Mihdhar, then living in San Diego under his own name--one of the hijackers who flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. He made more than a dozen calls to the Yemen house, where his brother-in-law lived.
NBC news called this "one of the missed clues that could have saved 3,000 lives."
It is possible that the efforts of Mondale, Hart, et al., back in 1975 helped make possible the murders of Burlingame's brother, the pilot of Flight 77, and thousands of others. Obviously this wasn't their intent, but there's something awfully grating about their smug self-assurance that they were still right then, even in the wake of 9/11,
Fair-Weather Free-Speech Friends
The Boston Globe wades into the Danish cartoon controversy by urging more sensitivity toward Muslims:
Freedom of expression is not the only value at issue in the conflict provoked by a Danish newspaper's publication of cartoons satirizing Islam's founding prophet, Mohammed. . . .
The original decision of the Danish paper, Jyllands-Posten, to solicit and publish a dozen cartoons of the Muslim prophet was less a blow against censorship than what The Economist called a schoolboy prank. . . .
Publishing the cartoons reflects an obtuse refusal to accept the profound meaning for a billion Muslims of Islam's prohibition against any pictorial representation of the prophet. Depicting Mohammed wearing a turban in the form of a bomb with a sputtering fuse is no less hurtful to most Muslims than Nazi caricatures of Jews or Ku Klux Klan caricatures of blacks are to those victims of intolerance.
Blogger Eugene Volokh wondered if the Globe was equally solicitous of the feelings of Christians offended by various government-sponsored artworks in the U.S. It would appear not. Volokh digs up an editorial from 1999 praising a judge who ordered New York City not to withhold funding for a museum that displayed "a painting of a black Virgin Mary spotted with elephant dung," as well as two editorials from 1990 denouncing then-Sen. Jesse Helms and others who had criticized the National Endowment for the Arts over artworks including Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ."
These earlier editorials, Volokh writes, make "eminently plausible arguments." What they do not do is acknowledge that Christians have any reason to find the depictions of Jesus and Mary "hurtful."
A similar double standard is on display at the Washington Post. Agence France-Presse quotes Fred Hiatt, editor of the Post's editorial page, as saying: "If I were faced with something that I know is gonna be offensive to many of our readers, I would think twice about whether the benefit of publication outweighed the offense it might give."
But here is Hiatt, quoted a day earlier in his own paper about his own cartoon kerfuffle:
Fred Hiatt, The Post's editorial page editor, said he doesn't "censor Tom" and that "a cartoonist works best if he or she doesn't feel there's someone breathing over their shoulder. He's an independent actor, like our columnists." Hiatt said he makes comments on drafts of cartoons but that Toles is free to ignore them.
Asked about Sunday's cartoon, Hiatt said, "While I certainly can understand the strong feelings, I took it to be a cartoon about the state of the Army and not one intended to demean wounded soldiers."
What accounts for the difference? A combination of fear and ideology. Muslim fundamentalists, or at least some of them, express offense by torching embassies and threatening terrorist attacks. By contrast, U.S. military leaders write firm but polite letters to the editor, and Christian fundamentalists ask their elected representatives to stop spending tax money on offensive stuff. (Never believe a liberal when he professes to find Christian fundamentalists "scary.") There is no need to appease an opponent who respects rules of civilized behavior.
There is also an ideological component, which goes back to the essay we noted last week on "folk Marxism," or liberal multiculturalism. This ideology sees the world as a series of class struggles--not between economic classes, as in proper Marxism, but between racial, ethnic, religious, sexual or other identity groups, which are defined as either "oppressors" or "victims."
Generally speaking, multiculturalists consider Christians to be an oppressor class, while Muslims are a victim class. A victim class's grievances must be taken seriously and can even trump free expression, while the same is never true of an oppressor class's. (The multicultural worldview sees Jews as an intermediate class--victims of Christians, oppressors of Muslims--which is why liberals can be outraged by anti-Semitic imagery in "The Passion of the Christ" but unperturbed by terrorism against Israelis.)
In this regard, Hiatt's staunch defense of the Toles cartoon, which offended members of the military, is particularly telling. As we've noted, those on the antiwar left often talk of soldiers as if they were a victim class. We haven't heard any of them, however, side with the soldiers who find the Toles cartoon offensive. This suggests that the soldiers-as-victims trope is purely cynical.
Not Exactly an Auspicious Start
"Arabic-language media have an unprecedented chance to take over as the world's premier news source because trust in their US counterparts plummeted following their 'shameful coverage' of the war in Iraq, a conference heard today."--Guardian (London), Feb. 2
"Two Jordanian newspaper editors who published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad have been arrested."--BBC Web site, Feb. 4
Fancy Meeting You Here
Iraqi state television reports that Iraqi police have arrested Mohammed Rabei, described by the Associated Press as "the fourth-ranking figure in al-Qaeda in Iraq."
Or, as the Democrats call it, al Qaeda Which Has Nothing to Do With Iraq in Iraq Which Has Nothing to Do With al Qaeda.
Keystone Kapitol
Last week the Capitol Police booted Democrat Cindy Sheehan and Republican Beverly Young from the House chamber for showing up to the State of the Union Address clad in T-shirts--an action that, while aesthetically incontestable, appears to have had no legal basis. Time reports on yet another cap-cop foul-up:
The man, who did not want his identity revealed after the disturbing incident, was a personal guest of Florida Democrat Alcee Hastings. He is a prominent businessman from Broward County, Florida who works with the Department of Defense-and has a security clearance. After sitting in the gallery for the entire speech, he was surrounded by about ten law enforcement officers as he exited the chamber and whisked away to a room in the Capitol.
For close to an hour the man, who was born in India but is an American citizen, was questioned by the Police, who thought he resembled someone on a Secret Service photo watch list, according to Capitol Police Chief Terrance Gainer. Eventually, the police realized it was a case of mistaken identity and let him go. Gainer has assured Hastings that the Capitol Police, Secret Service and FBI will investigate why the man was detained for so long, and try to "sharpen our procedures." But the man was "very, very scared" by the incident, says Fred Turner, a spokesperson for Hastings. On Tuesday night, he told the congressman that the experience was "maybe just the price of being brown in America," Turner says.
"He shouldn't have gone through the ringer as long as he did," Gainer says. "He did get caught up in the morass of Secret Service FBI, Capitol Police. Everybody was trying to figure out whether he was a threat. And he absolutely, unequivocally clearly was not." Gainer apologized to the man afterwards, only one of the many apologies he has had to make this week.
Remember, the Capitol Police reports directly to Congress. Maybe lawmakers ought to leave law enforcement to the executive branch.
World's Most Useless Law
"An attack by a neo-Nazi teenager, accused of shooting two people and bludgeoning a third with a hatchet in a Massachusetts gay bar before fleeing, has stunned gays in the region and sparked fears he could strike again," Reuters reported Friday from New Bedford, Mass.:
Rep. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, called on Washington to pass a bill that would extend the federal law on hate crimes to cover offenses targeting people because of sexual orientation.
Massachusetts has hate crime laws that cover sexual orientation but 29 states do not.
"This tragic incident underlines the problem of anti-gay violence in this country," Frank, who is gay and whose district includes New Bedford, said in a statement. "I will continue to press for amendments to existing federal hate crimes laws to cover this sort of horrible crime."
So let's see if we have this str--uh, right. Notwithstanding Massachusetts' law against antigay "hate crimes," this guy, Jacob Robida, went on a rampage in a gay bar there. Are we supposed to believe he would have been deterred if only there had been a federal law?
The Reuters dispatch further notes that "Robida faces about a dozen charges, including three counts of attempted murder for the attack that left three men seriously injured." It's not clear if this includes state hate-crime charges, but it's hard to see why it would have been so important to add federal charges to the list.
In any case, barring the existence of hell, Robida won't face any changes. The Associated Press reports he died yesterday after a shootout with police, in which he also murdered an officer and a passenger in his car. He met his end in Arkansas--which, according to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (PDF), is one of only four states with no hate-crime laws whatever.
Not Guilty by Reason of W.
WCMH-TV in Columbus, Ohio, reports that a pair of masked gunmen tied up and robbed 57-year-old Nalita Hall in suburban Westerville:
Police said the two men argued about whether to drive Hall to an ATM. One of the men said, "This is all George W. Bush's fault. He screwed up the economy. We just need gas money for the car," according to the police report.
The suspect headed east at high speed, according to this Associated Press headline: "Bush Crash Injures Three Dozen in N.J."
It Would Seem Not
"The White House is being way too quiet today, and the silence is eerie. . . . Security preparations for this Super Bowl are getting a lot less media coverage than the last 3 did. Which leads me to ask: is Karl Rove planning a terrorist attack during the Super Bowl, in order to set the stage for building towards war with Iran over the coming year?"--Bob Fertik, Democrats.com, Feb. 3
A Is A in Yuma Dogcatcher Contest
"7 + 4 = 11 in Run for Scottsdale Council"--headline, Arizona Republic, Feb. 3
Thanks for the Tip!--XLIII
"Health Tip: Protect Your Eyes From the Sun"--headline, HealthDayNews, Feb. 6
'No Way Dude, I Saw It First!'
"Alaskans Battle Over Invasive Weed"--headline, Associated Press, Feb. 3
Bottom Story of the Day
"Karaoke Is Helping Save Private Social Club From Extinction in Manchester"--headline, Union Leader (Manchester, N.H.), Feb. 6
Crazy Little Thing Called Love
This letter to the editor from Meghann McCluskey appeared Friday in the University of New Hampshire's student newspaper:
I take issue with the dating advice column printed in last Friday's edition of The New Hampshire. This article, published by "Dr. Durham," offers readers "15 ways to get yourself noticed by the opposite sex." The column's title, "Dear Dr. Durham," suggests some sort of professional, medical opinion relegating the singular and implicitly "normative" sexual preference of our student body. The article's presentation, one column for "girls" and one for "guys," separated by a vertical black line, reflects the social myth that there are only two gender categories and, subsequently, only two rigid forms of gender expression. Readers need only to turn to the Arts Section in last Friday's paper to be reminded of the fallacy of the "girl/guy" binary: a thoughtful, well-written review of Duncan Tucker's new film "TransAmerica" highlights the social exclusion that results from reliance on the extreme gender stereotypes referenced in "Dr. Durham's" advice column.
"Dr. Durham's" article not only erroneously assumes a link between anatomical sex, gender expression and sexuality, but it also prescribes a specific brand of heterosexuality that diminishes individual identities with sweeping generalizations. Claims such as "every girl will notice" or "a guy likes it when you call him cute" serve as a means of totalizing and ultimately homogenizing gendered experiences. Instead of being represented as the diverse student body we are, a group made up of exciting variations in histories, sexualities, gender expressions, nationalities and ethnicities, we are lumped together as one mass of sameness that pathetically posits physical appearance at the forefront of human interaction. "Dr. Durham's" concluding suggestion, that girls should simply "be [themselves]," hardly seems possible given the limited options of "acceptable" behavior presented.
While I understand this article was likely meant as a novelty, I only ask that, in the future, the editors of TNH take into consideration the wide spectrum of diversity that comprises our community before offering us any more advice.
It turns out that back in October 2004, according to the Portsmouth Herald, McCluskey helped lay the groundwork that allowed John Kerry* to carry the Granite State:
McCluskey and senior Jessica Fish, who heads the student organization Students Advocating Gender Equality, led about 20 people from the crowd to the Durham town office, where at least one of the students registered to vote. . . .
During the march, students carried Kerry signs and chanted, "What do we want? John Kerry! When do we want it? Now!"
With Valentine's Day coming up, we were inspired to write a little poem in honor of Miss McCluskey:
Roses are red
Violets are blue
Gendered experiences are totalized and ultimately homogenized
And so are you
Hey, whaddya want, flowers?
* The haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat, who by the way is lumped together as one mass of sameness that pathetically posits physical appearance at the forefront of human interaction. |
