Best of the Web Today - August 18, 2006
By JAMES TARANTO
Best of the Tube Tonight
We're scheduled to appear again tonight on CNN's "Lou Dobbs Tonight" as part of a "political roundtable." The program airs today at 6 p.m. EDT, with a repeat showing at 4 a.m. tomorrow, and we're told we'll be on in the second half-hour.
Hold the Mayo
More details are emerging about the granny who went gaga on a trans-Atlantic flight yesterday. From the Boston Herald:
Described as a "crazy lady" by her own attorney, a Vermont peace activist whose bizarre behavior forced the dramatic landing of a trans-Atlantic plane in Boston Wednesday has serious mental problems and had been vacationing in Pakistan since March.
Wearing a Rolling Stones T-shirt, baggy pants and white socks, a long-haired Catherine C. Mayo, 59, appeared in federal court yesterday on a charge of interfering with a flight crew on United 932 as it flew from London's Heathrow Airport to Washington, D.C. . . .
Her lawyer, Page Kelley, said Mayo has a long history of mental illness. "She has a very serious mental illness. This case is not about terrorism," Kelley said after court. "As you can see, she's very agitated."
Kelley described the plane incident as a "crazy lady with really bad timing."
One obvious question is, what kind of person vacations in Pakistan? Was Mayo drawn there by what Lonely Planet describes as "some of Asia's most mind-blowing landscapes, extraordinary trekking, a multitude of cultures and a long tradition of hospitality"? Perhaps. But an Associated Press report suggests there was another attraction:
Mayo's son, Josh, 31, described his mother as a peace activist and said she had been in Pakistan since March. She has traveled there often since making a pen pal before Sept. 11, 2001. The pen pal hasn't been allowed to visit the United States, he said. . . .
Henry Lefebvre, a neighbor who met Mayo a couple of years ago at a picnic, said she told him she was headed to Pakistan.
"She said she had a boyfriend there," he said.
Probably her lawyer is right, and she is just a nut. But boyfriends can be dangerous. A BBC account from 1986 describes the case of Nizar Hindawi, a Syrian-backed Jordanian national who used his pregnant Irish girlfriend in an attempt to murder some 380 passengers traveling from London to Tel Aviv:
Mr Hindawi attempted to blow up the flight by planting a timer bomb inside his girlfriend's hand luggage. Ann Murphy had been under the impression that he would follow her on a later flight.
The explosives were only discovered when a security official searched the bag thinking it was too heavy. The 3lb of plastic explosives and a detonator concealed in a pocket calculator had made it through two X-ray machines undetected.
Mayo surely would have come in for extra scrutiny if Britain had an Israel-style system of airport security, in which agents ask probing personal questions in an effort to find would be terrorists.
A truly astonishing piece of journalism comes from the Boston Globe, which sympathetically profiles Mayo under the headline "Arrest Follows Years of Outrage":
It was March 2003, the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, and into the office of dumbfounded Pakistani newspaper editor Najam Sethi walked an articulate, fresh-faced Vermont woman, saying she wanted to vent her anger at America in his pages.
Violence-plagued Lahore teemed with anti-American sentiment, yet Catherine C. Mayo seemed to move about with ease, Sethi recalled. And writing for the Daily Times of Pakistan, Mayo told about her 1960s activism. About her love of Cat Stevens and Howard Dean. About the mountains and lakes of her native Vermont. And about her shame and anger at America.
It's reminiscent of the widespread fawning coverage of Cindy Sheehan last year, except that in Mayo's case there is no way to avoid discussing her aberrant behavior, even while presenting "her shame and anger at America" as if that were the way normal people felt.
Can a New York Times editorial describing Mayo as an "irate moderate" be far behind?
Hokey Smoke!
"Sheehan to Join Rocky at Anti-Bush Rally"--headline, Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Aug. 17
Never Trust Anyone Over 30
Sunday's New York Times magazine will feature an analysis by Matt Bai of the Connecticut Senate primary that is a lot savvier than that hilarious Times editorial about "irate moderates." Bai says Ned Lamont ows his victory less to "young, online activists" than to "exasperated and ideologically disappointed baby boomers":
These are the liberals who quietly seethed as Bill Clinton worked with Republicans to reform welfare and pass free-trade agreements. After the ''stolen'' election of 2000 and the subsequent loss of House and Senate seats in 2004, these Democrats felt duped. If triangulation wasn't a winning strategy, they asked, why were they ever asked to tolerate it in the first place? The Web gave them a place to share their frustrations, and Howard Dean gave them an icon.
Iraq has energized these older lapsed liberals; for a generation that got into politics marching against Vietnam, an antiwar movement is comfortable space. But it was the yearning for a more confrontational brand of opposition on all fronts, for something resembling the black-and-white moral choices of the 1960's, that more broadly animated Lamont's insurgency.
Call them Pinch Sulzberger Democrats--which helps explain Sulzberger's paper's cheerleading for Lamont. Bai draws a comparison with the late 1970s, when conservative activists gained ground in the Republican Party, helping pave the way for Ronald Reagan. "But there is at least one crucial difference between insurgents of the 1970's and today," he observes. The latter have little to offer but (our words, not Bai's) empty rage:
Lamont's signature proposal as a primary candidate--and the only one anyone cared to hear, really--seemed to be the hard-to-dispute notion that he is not, in fact, Joe Lieberman. He offered platitudes about universal health care and good jobs and about bringing the troops home but nothing that might define him as anything other than what he is: an acceptable alternative.
Lieberman, by the way, has a 56% statewide approval rating among likely voters in that Quinnipiac poll we cited yesterday (by contrast, the president's approval rating is 29%). So it's hard to see how "I'm not Joe Lieberman" is a winning message for Lamont in the general election.
The Associated Press reports that John Edwards* visited New Haven yesterday, where he campaigned for Lamont and urged Lieberman to cut and run:
"My belief is that Senator Lieberman ran as a Democrat in the Democratic primary. The voters spoke and he should honor their decision," Edwards said.
You've gotta love the Democrats' heads-I-win-tails-you-lose approach to democracy. In 2000 they demanded that the votes be recounted as many times as necessary to produce a victory for Al Gore. In 2002 they (along with the New Jersey Supreme Court) insisted that ousting a politically troubled primary candidate in favor of a more electable one served democracy.
But now comes John Edwards claiming that "the voters spoke" and Lieberman "should honor their decision"--even though that would effectively disfranchise the two-thirds of Connecticut voters who are not registered as Democrats.
OLIVER STONE LIED, PEOPLE DIED!!!!
We haven't seen "World Trade Center," Oliver Stone's new 9/11 movie, but we have been following the inevitable political debate it has sparked. The most hilarious contribution so far comes from one Ruth Rosen, who teaches a course at UC Berkeley in "the gendered origins of American social policies." Here's her complaint:
As [the film] ends, a written postscript appears that describes what happened to the buried Port Authority policemen, their families, and the ex-Marine who helped rescue them (whose last line is: "We're going to need some good men out there to revenge this"). We learn that the two men survived an unbearable number of surgeries and are living with their families. Next we read that the ex-Marine re-upped and later did two tours of duty in Iraq. At that moment, I wanted to shout out, "Don't you mean Afghanistan?" Then I imagined the satisfaction Dick Cheney and sore-loser Senator Joseph Lieberman would take in this not-quite-spelled-out linkage of 9/11 and Iraq.
So Rosen is mad that this movie isn't about Iraq's having had nothing to do with 9/11! By this standard, every movie is a bad movie except for "Fahrenheit 9/11."
Digs at Diggs
Yesterday's ruling in ACLU v. NSA (PDF), in which Judge Anna Diggs Taylor declared unconstitutional the government's terrorist surveillance program, has drawn predictable squeals of delight from the likes of the New York Times editorial page:
With a careful, thoroughly grounded opinion, one judge in Michigan has done what 535 members of Congress have so abysmally failed to do. She has reasserted the rule of law over a lawless administration and shown why issues of this kind belong within the constitutional process created more than two centuries ago to handle them.
By contrast, the Washington Post, a serious newspaper, proclaims its sympathy for the plaintiffs but describes the ruling as "neither careful nor scholarly, and . . . hard-hitting only in the sense that a bludgeon is hard-hitting."
Reader Yaki Beja makes a good point:
When you actually look at the ruling, there is very little cause for celebration. The only defense that the government presented in this lawsuit was a motion to dismiss it on the basis of the state secrets evidentiary privilege and on the plaintiffs' lack of standing. The judge dismissed the government's motion with regard to the NSA program, but accepted it motion with regards to the data mining program. The government didn't put up any of its big guns, opting to save its arguments for the higher courts.
It's as if the visiting team walked off the football field, leaving just one 150-pound player to fend off the home team, which of course easily wins the game. And then the home crowd goes wild, cheering and clapping and patting themselves on their shoulders for the spectacular victory. How zany.
Beja also points out that in order to prove that they had standing, the plaintiffs had to admit to having ties with suspected terrorists. To quote from Diggs's ruling (page 17):
Plaintiffs here contend that the TSP has interfered with their ability to carry out their professional responsibilities in a variety of ways, including that the TSP has had a significant impact on their ability to talk with sources, locate witnesses, conduct scholarship, engage in advocacy and communicate with persons who are outside of the United States, including in the Middle East and Asia.
Plaintiffs have submitted several declarations to that effect. For example, scholars and journalists such as plaintiffs Tara McKelvey, Larry Diamond, and Barnett Rubin indicate that they must conduct extensive research in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, and must communicate with individuals abroad whom the United States government believes to be terrorist suspects or to be associated with terrorist organizations.
In addition, attorneys Nancy Hollander, William Swor, Joshua Dratel, Mohammed Abdrabboh, and Nabih Ayad indicate that they must also communicate with individuals abroad whom the United States government believes to be terrorist suspects or to be associated with terrorist organizations, and must discuss confidential information over the phone and email with their international clients.
One wonders if these declarations would be sufficient for the FISA court to grant warrants to tap the plaintiffs' phones.
What Would We Do Without Wiretap Rulings?
"Wiretap Ruling Affirms That Presidents Aren't Monarchs"--headline, USA Today, Aug. 18
Was Würden Wir Ohne Deutschland Tun?
"Bombs on Trains May Have Been Terror Plot: Germany"--headline, Reuters, Aug. 18
'First It Was the Jews'
Yesterday we noted that Democrats are campaigning against Wal-Mart. But one Democrat--Andrew Young, a former mayor of Atlanta and President Carter's U.N. ambassador--is campaigning for Wal-Mart. Or he was until yesterday, as the New York Times reports:
Young, who was hired by Wal-Mart to improve its public image, resigned from that post last night after telling an African-American newspaper that Jewish, Arab and Korean shop owners had "ripped off" urban communities for years, "selling us stale bread, and bad meat and wilted vegetables."
In the interview, published yesterday in The Los Angeles Sentinel, a weekly, Mr. Young said that Wal-Mart "should" displace mom-and-pop stores in urban neighborhoods.
"You see those are the people who have been overcharging us," he said of the owners of the small stores, "and they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they've ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it's Arabs."
Come to think of it, maybe this is an anti-Wal-Mart effort. As Wonkette notes:
As a former urban mayor and advocate for the working poor, we're [sic] guessing Young knew exactly what he was doing, and just decided to take Wal-Mart down from the inside--it's just sad that he didn't have time to get to the queers and Mexicans.
Iowa-based State29 notes that among the Wal-Mart foes is Tom Vilsak, governor of the Hawkeye State--even though in 1985, "Vilsack helped push through the Avenue Of The Saints highway solely to help out Wal-Mart's distribution center in Mount Pleasant, where he was Mayor and, later, a state representative."
Reader Brian Gates has a theory about the motives of the anti-Wal-Mart Dems:
Bear in mind that Biden and other Dems see themselves as threatened by this monolith that came out of small-town Arkansas to become a globally-recognized force with close ties to America's strategic rival China, and a reputation for being tough on employees. She also served on Wal-Mart's board for a while.
The Dems are making pseudo-populist arguments that Hillary can't join, and once they've prepped people with the Wal-Mart = Satan idea, they can start reminding everyone of the old Arkansas ties. It will only hurt Hillary with the far-left anticapitalists loons, but that's a majority of the party.
Um, isn't Hillary from New York?
Express Train to Splitsville
The Associated Press has an unusual detail of Sen. Barack Obama's biography:
In his 1995 memoir, "Dreams From My Father," Obama recalled his first trip to Africa, when, in his late 20s, he cried as he sat between the graves of his father and grandfather. Obama hardly knew his father. His parents divorced early in their marriage.
That's very unusual. Although many couples get divorced nowadays, the vast majority do not do so until late in the marriage.
Happy Hunting
"McCain Raises Money for Spears in S.C."--headline, Associated Press, Aug. 17
This Just In
"The U.S. imperialist aggressors bombed Tok Islet and killed civilians on June 9, 1948. Commenting on this, Rodong Sinmun Wednesday observes that this was not bombing perpetrated by mistake as they claimed, but a deliberate and carefully pre-arranged man-killing."--KCNA (North Korea), Aug. 16, 2006
Most of Us Don't Want to Grow It in the First Place
"Iowa City Researchers Trying to 'Re-Grow' Ear Hair"--headline, RadioIowa.com, Aug. 17
They've Got Some Explaining to Do
"Syphilis Outbreak Concerns Officials"--headline, Argus Leader (Sioux Falls, S.D.), Aug. 17
She Should've Just Said No
"Woman Gets Crack at the Job of Her Life"--headline, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Aug. 18
What Would 'Hybrid' Creatures Do Without Experts?
"Expert: 'Hybrid' Creature Is Just a Dog"--headline, Associated Press, Aug. 17
Thanks for the Tip!--XCVI
"Health Tip: Seniors Tend to Bruise Easily"--headline, HealthDay.com, Aug. 18
Bottom Story of the Day
o "Hanover Township Takes Action to Fix Mold Problem in Municipal Building"--headline, Citizens' Voice (Wilkes-Barre, Pa.), Aug. 18
o "Deer Flees City Policeman's Gunfire"--headline, Star Tribune (Minneapolis), Aug. 17
o "US Says It Has No Plans to Invade Cuba"--headline, Agence France-Presse, Aug. 18
o "Gorbachev Praises Bush's Father and Clintons, Scolds McCain"--headline, Bloomberg, Aug. 18
Chunky Surrender Monkey
Ben & Jerry's, leader of the lactose-loving left, has a new flavor: American Pie. That this name has unfortunate associations for teen moviegoers is doubtless an unfortunate coincidence; the "pie" refers to a pie chart representing federal spending.
Actually, it represents only federal "discretionary" spending, of which national defense accounts for only half (which B&J, naturally, regards as a scandalously high number). "Entitlement" spending, which consumes far more, is omitted.
The site includes a video of B&J co-founder Ben Cohen covering himself with thousands of BB pellets that are supposed to represent America's nuclear arsenal. No credit is given to the kids from Whitwell, Tenn., from whom he presumably got the idea. |
