Best of the Web Today - June 7, 2006
By JAMES TARANTO
Another Angry Left Anticlimax
A Republican won a special election to fill a House seat in a heavily Republican California district yesterday, and the political class is all abuzz. Brian Bilbray, a former congressman, beat Democrat Francine Busby, a former adjunct professor of "women's studies." His current margin is 49.3% to 45.5%, with a count of absentee ballots still pending. The balance of the vote went to an anti-immigration independent and a libertarian. Bilbray fills out the term of ex-Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, who now languishes in prison after pleading guilty on corruption charges.
Democrats are crowing about their loss, the New York Times reports:
"She, against Duke Cunningham, took 36 percent of the vote," said Rahm Emanuel, the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, referring to the last time Ms. Busby won. "This time she was north of 45 percent. They had to spend $5 million and the dominant message of immigration to break our message of change . It tells you how potent that message is. Not every district is going to be on the border of Mexico."
Emanuel might want to brush up on his geography. The 50th Congressional District (PDF) is in northern San Diego county, not on the Mexican border. First Read, NBC News's answer to ABC's The Note, adds:
This morning, Democrats are pointing out that national Republicans were forced to spend millions on this race in a GOP-leaning district, and that Busby outperformed John Kerry (who got 44% in the district in 2004) while Bilbray underperformed Bush. "In an election cycle that is shaping up to be a change vs. the status quo contest, Francine Busby has shown that a strong change message can make even former members of Congress vulnerable in deeply red Republican districts," House Democratic campaign spokeswoman Sarah Feinberg tells First Read.
We also received this bitter email from John "I Have the Hat" Kerry*:
This morning, Republicans are making laughable claims of momentum in the 2006 elections. They poured over $5 million dollars [sic] of national Republican money into a California special election to hold onto a seat that they've held since it was created by the GOP, for the GOP 15 years ago.
And they eked out a victory by 5,000 votes.
Their claims of momentum are as phony as their claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.[**]
In truth, this is a completely unremarkable result. According to the Almanac of American Politics, Al Gore got 43% of the vote in the 50th District in 2000, and John Kerry got 44% in 2004. Busby's total is well within the normal range for a Democrat in a competitive race running in this Republican district.
It's true, as Emanuel says, that Busby fared far less well in 2004, when she challenged Cunningham, who beat her 58% to 36%. But that is a testament to the power of incumbency. Also true, Bilbray's performance--under 50%, as of now, in a district where President Bush got 55% last time around--is unimpressive. But that suggests that he is weak, not that Democrats are strong. The two third-party candidates both ran from the right and surely took few votes from Busby.
We'll soon have a chance to test the Dems' boasts. Bilbray and Busby both won their respective primaries, which means they'll face off again in November for the same seat in the next Congress. How much money and effort are Democrats willing to devote to this rematch?
* At least he served in Vietnam, unlike Francine Busby!
** "The threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real, but as I said, it is not new. It has been with us since the end of that war, and particularly in the last four years we know after Operation Desert Fox failed to force him to reaccept them, that he has continued to build those weapons. He has had a free hand for four years to reconstitute these weapons, allowing the world, during the interval, to lose the focus we had on weapons of mass destruction and the issue of proliferation."--John Kerry, Oct. 9, 2002
The McCloskey Whitewash
Another California election result was even less surprising: Rep. Richard Pombo beat former congressman Paul Norton "Pete" McCloskey Jr. for the Republican nomination to represent District 11, which is mostly in the Central Valley, south of Sacramento and east of the San Francisco Bay Area. Pombo's margin was 62.3% to 32%, with a third candidate picking up 5.7%. The incumbent faces Democrat Jerry McNerny in November. The district is only slightly less Republican than the 50th, so Pombo will be hard to beat.
This race is mostly notable because of the shamefully bad journalism it inspired. As we noted last month, both the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle endorsed McCloskey, whose views place him mostly on the left, but ignored his anti-Semitic history. In a pre-election piece Sunday, noted by blogger Eugene Volokh, the Chronicle did make a nod toward this, but very deceptively:
Fiercely opinionated--his critics brand him anti-Semitic for praising the late Yasser Arafat and calling for a Palestinian homeland since the early 1970s--McCloskey can also gleefully poke fun at himself.
This is like saying, "David Duke's critics brand him a racist for opposing affirmative action"--a partial truth so misleading that it may as well be an outright lie. It makes McCloskey sound reasonable and his critics sound like fanatics.
In fact, McCloskey's critics made an issue of his having given a speech to the Institute for Historical Review, a Holocaust-denial outfit, in which he referred to the "so-called Holocaust" and said "I don't know whether you're right or wrong about the Holocaust." Also for giving an interview to the Spotlight, published by the anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby, in which he boasted that the Republican Party, unlike the Democrats, "is not in the hands of the Jewish lobby."
McCloskey had no real chance at beating Pombo, and at 78 he is unlikely to run for office again. This is, we think (and hope), our last item on the subject. But we close with a question: Will the Times and the Chronicle be willing to conduct a similar whitewash of a future candidate who has a serious chance of defeating an incumbent they want to beat? We have no confidence that the answer is no.
Whose Stereotype Would That Be?
"Because of his emphasis on compassion, [Sen. Sam] Brownback does not fit the stereotype of the angry Christian conservative."--Washington Post, June 7
'60 Minutes,' 21 Months Later
Poor Mary Mapes. She's the "60 Minutes" producer who came up with the phony "documents" the newsmagazine used in an effort to make some long-forgotten point or another about how President Bush was unpatriotic because he served in the National Guard. And she still insists the documents were real! Here she is, posting yesterday on the Puffington Host:
When our story aired on September 8, 2004, it was savaged in an unprecedented outpouring of political vitriol. The Bush administration was then at the height of its ability to summon a terrifying whirlwind of criticism from right wing bloggers, hate talk radio yackers, FOX News "reporters," conservative columnists, and those hollering people whose heads always appear in little boxes on cable discussion shows. None of these critics cared anything about the facts of the story, only about their politics.
They claimed that CBS used forged documents and they repeated that lie so often that it stuck. The mainstream media picked it up, repeating bloggers' criticisms without making any serious effort to investigate the story. But then that would have required real legwork, something that very few were willing to do on this subject.
As for document analysis, it is a mind-numbing and arcane discipline, an imperfect undertaking reserved for courtroom use, not for headlines or Internet political battles. Document analysis is certainly not meant to be done at 11 o'clock at night by someone with no training or experience sitting in front of a glowing computer nursing a grudge and spoiling for a fight. But that's precisely how the right's attack against Dan Rather and CBS News was launched.
That first anonymous analyst (who turned out to be a Republican activist lawyer) raised questions about the memo using only a single shot of a faxed document digitally transmitted to his computer screen. Those kinds of transmissions radically change the way a document looks. His analysis was worthless.
Oh, those terrifying critics with their glowing computers! But of course there was nothing arcane about this; at least one of the documents was an obvious fake. This image, generated by blogger Charles Johnson, oscillates between the "memo" and an identical one typed on Microsoft Word using the default settings for font, tab stops, etc.:
Mapes is right, of course, that faxing a document changes the way it looks, which is why the "original" is somewhat fuzzy. But faxing does not make a document created on a 1970s typewriter look exactly like a fax of a Microsoft Word document!
Mapes's claims are too much even for many of the Angry Left PuffHo commenters. You have to feel sorry for someone who can't face the obvious truth that she was snookered by a source into believing what she wanted to believe. At what point, though, must we view this self-deception as willful and Mary Mapes as a perpetrator rather than a mere victim of journalistic fraud?
Amendment XXVIII, Episode III: Revenge of the Split
In yet another bit of unsurprising news, the U.S. Senate this morning effectively killed the Marriage Protection Amendment, which would have prevented same-sex marriage and possibly banned marriage-like arrangements nationwide. Technically the Senate did not vote on the amendment but rather on "cloture"--that is, whether to bring the amendment to a vote.
Cloture requires 60 votes but received only 49, all from Republicans except Robert Byrd of West Virginia and Ben Nelson of Nebraska. Forty-eight senators voted against cloture, including all five New England Republicans plus John McCain of Arizona and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.
Here's what confuses us: What's the point in taking a cloture vote on a constitutional amendment? For normal Senate business, an unsuccessful cloture vote--the modern-day meaning of "filibuster"--is a way of thwarting the will of a majority: If 59 senators favor a measure or an appointment, the remaining 41 can block it by refusing to vote for cloture.
But a constitutional amendment requires a two-thirds vote to pass--an even bigger supermajority than for cloture. So an unsuccessful cloture vote blocks a vote that couldn't possibly be successful anyway. Why not just dispense with cloture and let the amendment fail on a proper vote? It doesn't really shield senators from having to take a position, since most news coverage treats the cloture vote as if it were a vote on the amendment.
Especially puzzling here are the actions of Sen. Specter. As chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Specter joined a 10-8 party-line vote to refer the amendment to the full Senate, even though he said he opposed the amendment. But then he voted against cloture. So he voted for allowing a vote before he voted against it.
Don't Know Much About History
Here's some good news from Iraq, reported by Scientific American:
In the 1990s the Garden of Eden was destroyed. The fertile wetlands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were diked and drained, turning most of 15,000 square kilometers of marsh to desert. By the year 2000, less than 10 percent of that swampland--nearly twice as big as Florida's Everglades--remained. But reflooding of some areas since 2003 has produced what some scientists are calling the "miracle of the Mesopotamian marshes"--a return of plants, aquatic life and even rare birds to their ancestral home.
We read through the piece but we couldn't figure out who diked and drained the fertile wetlands, or what might have happened in 2003 that made their restoration possible. Scientific American ought to look into this; we have a hunch we're missing out on some fascinating history.
Disparate but Not Serious
Our item yesterday on the predominance of immigrants and their children among Boston high school valedictorians prompted this response from blogger John Ray:
I had a look at the list of valedictorains [sic] myself and saw something MUCH more striking than the percentage born overseas: There was not a single WASP among them! With only two or three exceptions, they were all black, Hispanic or Asian. Getting to be a valedictorian might once have had something to do with academic ability but these days it is obviously political correctness that is the key consideration. I have no doubt that various politically correct policies--such as busing--have driven most whites out of the Boston area but not being able to find a single WASP valedictorian seems very suspect.
So if WASPs are underperforming in one particular area, it has to be the result of "political correctness"? This sounds suspiciously similar to the diversity industry's claims that any disparity that disfavors minorities has to be the result of racism.
U.N. Big: America Is Too Tolerant
The New York Times reports that Mark Malloch Brown, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's deputy, is criticizing the U.S.:
In a highly unusual instance of a United Nations official singling out an individual country for criticism, Mr. Malloch Brown said that although the United States was constructively engaged with the United Nations in many areas, the American public was shielded from knowledge of that by Washington's tolerance of what he called "too much unchecked U.N.-bashing and stereotyping."
"Much of the public discourse that reaches the U.S. heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest detractors such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News," he said.
Sorry, Mark, but our government is constitutionally required to tolerate speech, even if you don't like it. Anyway, isn't dissent supposed to be patriotic?
Bad News for Chile First Lady
"Honeymoon May Be Over for Chile President"--headline, Associated Press, June 6
Where's Don Quixote When You Need Him?
"Residents Debate Windmills on Great Lakes"--headline, Associated Press, June 6
It's Bush's Fault!
"Hurricanes Delete Fate From Cup Equation"--headline, USA Today, June 7
What Would Heroin Users Do Without Drug Experts?
"Drug Experts Advise Extra Precautions in Heroin Use"--headline, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 6
Bottom Stories of the Day
o "La Quinta Construction on Hold"--headline, Paris (Texas) News, June 6
o "Supermodel Says She Won't Pose Nude"--headline, Reuters, June 7
o "Estonian PM Sixth Lowest-Paid in the EU"--headline, Baltic News (Riga, Latvia), June 6
A Walk in the Pork
Ed Frank of Americans for Prosperity notes this Associated Press dispatch:
U.S. Rep. Rick Boucher and his longtime girlfriend tied the knot on a bicycle trail. . . . Boucher said he and Amy Hauslohner both enjoy biking, so they decided to get married on a former railroad bridge overlooking Damascus on the Virginia Creeper Trail.
"It's one of our favorite settings," Boucher said Monday from Washington.
How much does the Virginia Democrat like the trial? So much that he spent our tax money on it, as his campaign Web site boasts:
At Rick's urging, the federal government has provided $750,000 to perform repair and upgrade work on the trestles of the Virginia Creeper Trail between the Towns of Abingdon and Damascus. One of Southwest Virginia's most popular tourism assets, the Virginia Creeper Trail is enjoyed by more than 200,000 visitors annually.
Too bad the members of Alaska's congressional delegation are all already married, or they could hold their weddings on the "bridge to nowhere." |
