BEST OF THE WEB
BY JAMES TARANTO
Monday, August 16, 2004 4:14 p.m.
What Liberal Media?
From the Philadelphia Inquirer, dateline Athens:
An eager young Greek Olympic volunteer who is ordinarily a college student has been asking American journalists staying at the University of Athens media village for their opinions on President Bush.
His unscientific findings?
"Everybody says they don't like Bush, and they don't vote for him," he said with a somewhat puzzled expression. "So how did he get elected?"
Summer Reruns
We suppose it's just as well that we were on vacation when the John Kerry Vietnam controversy exploded in the blogosphere. We pretty much covered the topic back in April and are happy to have spent the past two weeks bumming around Europe rather than revisiting it. But here's a quick summary, in case you haven't been paying attention:
In a new book called "Unfit for Command," John O'Neill--who famously debated Kerry back in 1971, when the latter was a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War--alleges that Kerry committed atrocities and phonied up the injuries for which he received his Purple Hearts. Meanwhile, a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth--an independent "527" organization like MoveOn.org--produced an anti-Kerry TV ad featuring a series of men who declare, "I served with John Kerry," and make charges similar to O'Neill's.
Lawyers for the Kerry campaign sent a letter to TV stations urging them not to air the ad, claming it was "false" and "libelous." The letter declares: "Not a single one of these men served on either of Senator Kerry's two SWIFT Boats" (emphasis in original). But as Human Events points out, "none of these men claimed to have served on Kerry's SWIFT Boat. They simply said they 'served with John Kerry'--and they did."
The lawyers' letter typifies the response of the Kerry camp to the criticism, which has been to attack the messengers. "The very same communications group, Spaeth Communications, that placed ads against John McCain in 2000 is involved in these vicious attacks against John Kerry," wrote Jim Rassmann, a Vietnam veteran who credits Kerry with saving his life, in The Wall Street Journal (and on this Web site) last week. "Texas Republican donors with close ties to George W. Bush and Karl Rove crafted this 'dishonest and dishonorable' ad."
It's reminiscent of Hillary Clinton's complaints about the "vast right-wing conspiracy" after the Monica Lewinsky allegations surfaced in 1998. And it's probably Kerry's best bet for weathering this storm, whether the allegations against him are true, false or a combination of both. Having staked his entire campaign on his war-hero persona, the last thing he wants to do is spend the last three months before the election debating whether he really was a war hero.
This column has long argued that even if Kerry's Vietnam record is every bit as heroic as he presents it, the notion that this makes him fit to be president is ludicrous. The man spent four months in combat as a junior officer; he's not exactly Eisenhower. Besides, as a certain senator observed 12 years ago, when candidate Bill Clinton was under attack for having avoided the draft:
The race for the White House should be about leadership, and leadership requires that one help heal the wounds of Vietnam, not reopen them; that one help identify the positive things that we learned about ourselves and about our nation, not play to the divisions and differences of that crucible of our generation.
The man who said that, of course, was John Kerry. He would have better served the country--and he might have better served his own campaign--had he followed his advice this year.
John Kerry, Pro-War Radical?
"Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry said [last] Monday that he would have voted to give the president authorization to go to war in Iraq even knowing there were no weapons of mass destruction," the Arizona Republic reports (emphasis ours).
Wow, we agree! As we explained in March 2003, there were plenty of excellent reasons to liberate Iraq; weapons of mass destruction were maybe fourth on our list. We guess we're glad to see Kerry come around to our way of thinking, though he's so fickle--"I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it"--that we doubt he still adheres to his position of a week ago.
The Democratic Closet
"I am a gay American," New Jersey's Gov. James McGreevey proclaimed at a news conference last week. McGreevey said he had cheated on his wife with another man and declared: "I realize the fact of this affair and my own sexuality, if kept secret, leaves me and most importantly, the governor's office, vulnerable to rumors, false allegations and threats of disclosure." Having obviated this danger through his self-disclosure, he was then able to get back to governing the state as usual.
Only he didn't. At the same news conference, he announced his resignation.
What's going on here? McGreevey is, after all, a Democrat, and Democrats think it's no one else's business when a politician cheats on his wife. Remember Bill Clinton? The difference, of course, is that Clinton's affair was with a woman, not a man. So it would appear that the Dems are both pro-adultery and antigay--intolerant as well as immoral.
Here's more evidence that homophobia rules among the Democrats. In 1996, John Kerry published a piece in The Advocate, a gay magazine, in which he opposed the Defense of Marriage Act and essentially endorsed same-sex marriage:
Echoing the ignorance and bigotry that peppered the discussion of interracial marriage a generation ago, the proponents of DOMA call for a caste system for marriage. I will not be party to that. As Martin Luther King Jr. explained 30 years ago, "Races do not fall in love and get married. Individuals fall in love and get married." This is the essence of the American pursuit of happiness and the core of the struggle for equality. . . .
Antigay forces might have their day with the Defense of Marriage Act, but as my friend Rep. Gerry Studds declared on the floor of the House, "We are going to prevail just as every other component of the civil rights movement in this country has prevailed. There is nothing any of us can do today to stop that. We can embrace it warmly, as some of us do; we can resist it bitterly, as some of us do, but there is no power on earth that can stop it."
Gerry has it right. We will win this fight for civil rights. We will win the fight for equal protection under the law. We will win the right for all Americans to live with whom they love without the fear of discrimination and violence.
But as we noted last month, Kerry sang a different tune--a much more muted one--when he appeared in Boston as his party's nominee for president, homosexual love dared not speak its name. "Let's never misuse for political purposes the most precious document in American history, the Constitution of the United States," he said. That was a reference to the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would forbid same-sex nuptials--but a reference so veiled that only those closest to the issue would have any idea what he was talking about. Dems, it would seem, are happy to accept the votes of gay Americans, campaigning for them openly is too much to expect.
African-American Again
The Washington Post reports that "a group financed by a major Republican contributor" has been running ads "on radio stations with largely black audiences" that denounce the Democratic nominee for marrying a person of pallor. Says the ad's narrator: "His wife says she's an African American. While technically true, I don't believe a white woman, raised in Africa, surrounded by servants, qualifies."
The current popularity of African-American as a synonym for black dates back to 1988. This is an Associated Press dispatch from Dec. 20 of that year:
A group of black leaders, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, says members of their race would prefer to be called African-Americans rather than blacks.
"Just as we were called colored, but were not that, and then Negro, but not that, to be called black is just as baseless," Jackson said at a news conference Monday after a meeting of the black leaders.
"To be called African-Americans has cultural integrity," he said. "It puts us in our proper historical context. Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some land base, some historical cultural base. African-Americans have hit that level of cultural maturity." . . .
"There are Armenian-Americans and Jewish Americans and Arab-Americans and Italian-Americans," Jackson said. "And with a degree of accepted and reasonable pride, they connect their heritage to their mother country and where they are now." . . .
The Rev. Willie Barrow, president of Operation PUSH, said she will start using the term immediately.
"I'm African-American just like the Polish are Polish-American and Italians are Italian-American," she said. "It's something we've all agreed upon and it's just great."
Yet Mrs. Heinz Kerry is certainly African-American in the same sense that a Polish or Italian immigrant is Polish-American or Italian-American.
Another prominent African-American is Barack Obama, the next senator from Illinois. Obama's mother was a white native American, but his father, who abandoned the family when Barack was a child, was a black Kenyan. So it was odd that when Tim Russert interviewed Obama on "Meet the Press" three weeks ago, he asked: "What was it like being someone who was part African-American being raised by white parents?"
Part African-American? Obama is part African, but he's African-American full stop (as the British, though not the British-Americans, say). Likewise, our mother's Swedish heritage makes us Swedish-American although our father isn't even Scandinavian. Russert presumably was trying to be politically correct and meant "part black"--a designation that raises all sorts of other issues (the "one-drop rule" and all that) that are beyond the scope of this item.
Anyway, it strikes us that using African-American as a substitute for black obscures what is unique about the black experience in America. With some exceptions (including Obama), black Americans are the descendants of slaves, not immigrants. Obviously one would rather be an immigrant than a slave, but slavery was a discredit to America, not to the people who were enslaved or their descendants.
Today black Americans are full citizens, but achieving that status required a long, hard struggle to overcome slavery and the discrimination that remained in its wake. This is an epic accomplishment, a heritage of which to be proud.
Boston Comments
Our coverage of the Democratic National Convention brought some interesting comments from readers that arrived too late to be included before we left on vacation. Reader Bob Wolf appreciated our comments on the "antiwar" display of boots representing fallen American soldiers:
I was very happy to see that someone besides me has taken offense at people using the deaths of our servicemen and -women in Iraq to further their own political agendas.
Our son, Spec. James Wolf, is one the soldiers represented by the 907 pairs of boots. He was killed on Nov. 6, 2003, outside Mosul, Iraq. He was proud to serve his country, his unit and his president. He was home on leave three weeks before he was killed and told us that he believed that it was important for America to be in Iraq. He also told us about all of the rebuilding projects that his unit was doing--houses, schools, roads and other improvements--for the Iraq people. When his leave was up he told me that it was time for him to go back, because as long as he was in the states, someone else had to pull his share of the duty and that wasn't right. He was killed three weeks later by a roadside bomb riding security in a convoy.
I resent people using our son's death to promote their political agendas, ones that he wouldn't agree with. They have no right to use his death for their gain. I also take offense when people talk about President Bush not caring about the military personnel who are in Iraq. My family got the honor of talking to the president at Fort Carson when he came to talk to the families of the fallen soldiers. I shook his hand and looked into his eyes and saw a man of honor and compassion, one who truly cares for the people that put their lives on the line for our freedoms.
I am very proud of our son, of all the military personnel who put their lives on the line for all of us, and of our president. Thank you so much for calling attention to what certain groups are doing to disgrace the memory of our fallen heroes.
On a less serious note, reader Thomas Mayer of Bismarck, N.D., has an explanation for what Sen. Kent Conrad meant when he said, at the bloggers party, "I want to give a shout out to my daughter":
I appreciated the reference to "my" senator, Conrad. I'm not sure where that phrase comes from, but you may not be parsing the sentence right. I think the context is, I'd like to give a shout (greeting) [where?] out (in the audience perhaps) to my daughter. The syntax is like the classic Germans from Russia sentence (there are many of that ethnic background in North Dakota): "Throw the cow over the fence some hay."
And our item on the National Journal comedy show brought some defenses of the unfunny Rep. Linda Sanchez. First there was this, from Bruce Kieloch:
Mr. Taranto's editorial on a comedy event sponsored by the National Journal was incorrect in stating that Rep. Linda Sanchez was, as he put it, "unfunnier" than Roseanne Barr. It seems Mr. Taranto is taking as much license with the truth as he did with the English language (unfunnier?). Sanchez was hilarious. Her subject matter, although intended for an adult audience, was not offensive or "vulgar."
Those of us who enjoyed her performance understood it to be what it was--comedy! She was constantly interrupted by laughter and applause and drew rave reviews from the nationally respected comedian Will Durst, the audience and the media.
Mr. Taranto must be at a loss for sources of amusement now that "The Lawrence Welk Show" is no longer in syndication and Pat Boone is no longer touring. Does he live in New York City? Perhaps he is better suited for Branson, Mo.
Three days later, we got this, from Christine Dorr:
Mr. Taranto's appreciation of humor must be a little underdeveloped if he thought Brad Sherman funny and Linda Sanchez "unfunny" at the National Journal comedy event at the Democratic National Convention. Sherman repeats a played-out John Kerry joke and Taranto reports "big laughs." Utterly ridiculous. Preposterous. Untrue--was he even there? The audience interrupted Sanchez repeatedly with laughter and applause. To say that she was "unfunnier" than Roseanne Barr is not only taking license with the English language, but with the truth.
Where must Mr. Taranto find good humor now that Lawrence Welk and Pat Boone are off the air? I guess there is always the humorous interplay between the hosts of those late-night religious talk shows.
Well, de gustibus non disputandum est, we suppose. Actually, our taste runs more to "South Park," whose hilarity redeems its vulgarity. But the similarities between these two letters (the line about "license with the English language" and the mentions of Welk and Boone) lead us to wonder if they're the product of a mass e-mail campaign. It can't be all that massive, though, since these are the only two we got.
Homelessness Rediscovery Watch
"If George W. Bush becomes president, the armies of the homeless, hundreds of thousands strong, will once again be used to illustrate the opposition's arguments about welfare, the economy, and taxation."--Mark Helprin, Oct. 31, 2000
"J.W. Ballantine, a 77-year-old homeless man, already sleeps most nights in Penn Station and eats many of his meals in neighborhood soup kitchens. But Ballantine's life is about to get much harder now that the Republican National Convention is coming to Madison Square Garden, directly on top of the train station where he usually sleeps. Ballantine, and hundreds of other homeless people like him, will be moved out from Aug. 30 to Sept. 2 so the convention can take place."--Associated Press, Aug. 8, 2004
"Having no home and no money should not exclude someone from voting, according to two national groups that are trying to register thousands of homeless people to vote in the presidential election. 'The message that the poor and homeless are voting is part of a bigger strategy to get the issues of the poor heard,' said Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless."--New York Times, Aug. 15, 2004
'Kerfuffle' Watch
Our efforts to popularize the word kerfuffle continue to bear fruit. While we were away, even the liberal New Republic, in a blog by Ryan Lizza, quoted John Kerry referring to Bush supporters as "goons," then observed: "The Bush campaign is trying to make a kerfuffle over the comment to undercut Kerry's pledge to run a positive campaign."
According to WordCount.org, kerfuffle is the 67,952nd most popular word in the English language. The most popular word is the, another word this column (Best of the Web Today) helped popularize. Of is the second most popular word, and best, Web and today are Nos. 247, 10,182 and 330 respectively. Our given name, James, turns out to be the 1,000th most popular word, but Taranto is only No. 74,131, right between rfsfr and hydrocortisone. We aren't sure what rfsfr means, but RSFSR, an abbreviation for Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, is 31,498th--a full 36,454 places ahead of kerfuffle, over a dozen years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. So perhaps these rankings are a lagging indicator.
Not Too Brite--CLV
"A British man was being treated for shock on Wednesday after he fell from a ladder while pruning trees, accidentally killing his wife with his chainsaw," Reuters reports from London.
Oddly Enough!
(For an explanation of the "Not Too Brite" series, click here.)
Whom Would Charley's Force Surprise Without Experts?
"Increase in Charley's Force Not Surprising"--headline, Associated Press, Aug. 14, 11:30 a.m. EDT
"Charley's Force Took Experts by Surprise"--headline, Associated Press, Aug. 14, 6:41 p.m. EDT
You Don't Say
"Floridians Who Lost Homes to Charley Frustrated"--headline, Reuters, Aug. 16
Other Than That, the Story Was Correct
From the Houston Chronicle's corrections column, Aug. 8:
An article that ran on Page A1 on Saturday misstated information about a Sam Houston State University graduate. Marie Williams did not submit an application to the university while in high school, two of her siblings died in infancy, and her Huntsville home is in a rural area. She never worked more than 10 hours while in high school, and it is unclear how old she was when she picked cotton as a child.
You Can't Hug Your Granny With Nuclear Arms
Reporting on the 59th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun notes: "Over the past year, 5,142 people who suffered from the bombing in Hiroshima have died, bringing the toll to 237,062."
Is it really fair to blame the A-bomb for people dying of old age?
Here's To Your Health
France's wine industry is facing tough competition from vineyards in places like Australia, California, Chile and South Africa. In response, the Washington Times reports, "the French government is considering a plan to reclassify wine as 'nourishment,' a step that would defy medical science but ease advertising restraints and give a boost to producers who are fighting a desperate battle for survival."
If the French were smart, they'd classify wine as a vegetable and serve it in school lunches.
(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to David Crimmins, Scott Freeman, John Bartley, Naftali Friedman, Charles Matthews, Tom Linehan, Allen O'Donnell, Brent Silver, Kevin McGilly, Thomas Conway, Tipton Cole, Jim Russell, Theresa Payton, Barak Moore, Peter Rice, Maria Conlon, Terry Harris, Peter Burke, Michael Segal, David Alston, Brad Westmoreland, John Campbell, Storrs Warinner, Greg Askins, John Lott, Joe Seely, Jeff Dorfman, Scott Jordan, Aaron Ammerman, Jay Richards, Jerry Skurnik, Daniel Sweeney, Bruce Goldman, Michael Nunnelley, Matthew Mulry, Jens Sorensen, Andrei Muresianu, Ray Samori, Bruce Chang, Mark Murray, David Shapero, Thom Wilkerson, Mark Davies, Thomas Crimmins, Knox Hughes and Phil Hord. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
Today on OpinionJournal:
Robert Pollock: Kerry's Cambodia Christmas story falls apart.
John Fund: Why New Jersey is a pit of corruption.
Arthur Chrenkoff: A roundup of the past two weeks' good news from Iraq.
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