Best of the Web Today - April 5, 2004
By JAMES TARANTO
Soldiers as Victims
Our item Friday on blogger Markos Zuniga's post about the four Blackwater Security Consulting contractors murdered in Fallujah, Iraq, last week--"They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them," Zuniga said--brought this response from reader Josh Waxman:
It would be "fair and balanced" if you also mentioned that Markos explained that the reason he was angry was because the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq got second billing to the deaths of these individuals.
But that might not please your master, would it? It's really nice when facts are things you can use as you wish, and discard when they're inconvenient.
We don't want to get into any trouble, so if you see our master, please don't tell him we published Waxman's letter. Anyway, we're not sure how Zuniga's professed sympathy for soldiers is a mitigating factor. "Screw them," he said of four men who had been lynched. Is such an attitude less despicable because there are other people whose lynching Zuniga would object to?
The distinction between soldiers and civilian contractors seems like mere hairsplitting when you consider that all four of the Fallujah dead were retired U.S. military special forces officers. Reader Ray Gardner puts things in perspective:
Blackwater and security firms like them are a place where former Marines, special forces soldiers and other high-speed types from the U.S. military go upon leaving active duty.
Going back in the Marines myself is just not feasible at my age but I have considered going to work for such a security firm since 9/11. Such employment for me would be the next best thing to going back to active duty.
Others go into such work for a variety of reasons, but one thing is common among them; they are hardworking Americans, mostly military veterans, who have given their lives to defending this country.
To speak out against Blackwater's employees is to speak against veterans one and all. When they were active duty, these guys were the 5% that did all of the dirty work.
Zuniga's rationalization is interesting, though, for what it tells us about the way the left views the U.S. military. Back in the Vietnam era, the antiwar movement vilified American servicemen; as we noted in February, when John Kerry testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, he charged his fellow veterans with all manner of war crimes.
Somewhere along the line, it became politically incorrect on the liberal left (as distinct from the radical left) to disparage members of the military. The operative principle became: We support the troops, though we oppose their mission. Members of the military thereby achieved the status of accredited victims, entitled to liberal "compassion." And in a February interview with CNN's Judy Woodruff, Kerry reinterpreted his 1971 views to absolve soldiers of any guilt: "I was accusing American leaders of abandoning the troops. . . . It's the leaders who are responsible, not the soldiers. . . . I've always fought for the soldiers."
The San Francisco Chronicle has a revealing profile of Susan Galleymore, a 48-year-old Alameda, Calif., antiwar activist whose son, Nick, is an Army Ranger serving in Iraq. Galleymore doesn't approve of Nick's chosen career, and she's written about it:
In one essay, Galleymore asked for others to appreciate that the soldiers are in a dilemma, "caught in a military culture that encourages the numbing of most emotions but anger. Whip up enough anger in young men emotionally isolated, denied friends, family, lovers, even civilians [sic] clothes, physically exhaust them, nourish them inadequately, expose them to extreme temperatures and violent behavior, confine them to base and portray everyone else as murderous and you create impossible stress."
Nick told his mother that wasn't his experience.
Indeed. The idea of soldier-as-victim might have made some sense in 1971, when the draft was on and some soldiers were in Vietnam against their will. But today's military has not a single conscript; everyone fighting in Iraq and elsewhere is a professional who has voluntarily chosen a hazardous line of work. They deserve our gratitude and respect, not our pity.
Subtracting Ads
Zuniga's Daily Kos blog has been running paid advertisements for several Democratic congressional candidates, but most of them are now rushing to pull their ads. Blogger Michael Friedman reports that four of them have done so: Rep. Martin Frost of Texas, Joe Donnelley of Indiana, Jane Mitakides of Ohio and Rep. Joe Hoeffel of Pennsylvania, who is seeking Arlen Specter's Senate seat. A group called Environment 2004 has also yanked its ads.
Still advertising on Kos: the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Minnesota House Democratic Caucus and Draft Kerry Edwards. Blogger Charles Johnson reports Zuniga has picked up a new advertiser: Jeff Seeman, a House candidate in Ohio.
The Kerry for President blog is also dissociating itself from Zuniga:
In light of the unacceptable statement about the death of Americans made by Daily Kos, we have removed the link to this blog from our website. As John Kerry said in a statement earlier this week, "My deepest sympathies are with the families of those lost today. Americans know that all who serve in Iraq--soldier and civilian alike--do so in an effort to build a better future for Iraqis. These horrific attacks remind us of the viciousness of the enemies of Iraq's future. United in sadness, we are also united in our resolve that these enemies will not prevail."
Charles Johnson notes that Zuniga isn't exactly a Kerry fan, pointing to this Dec. 15 Kos post about a poll showing Howard Dean leading Kerry in New Hampshire, 42% to 19%:
As for Kerry, screw him. His new slash-and-burn tactics are not only harmful to the party, but they're not helping his popularity in the least.
"Screw him" turns out to be a Zuniga catch phrase; in addition to Kerry and the lynched veterans, he's applied it to Joe Lieberman, Ralph Nader and Tom Daschle.
Vote for Kerry--He's Not Responsible!
Here's a blast from the past: "Jesse Jackson said yesterday that the United Nations should consider sanctioning the United States for its decision to 'murder all these people on faulty information' by waging war in Iraq," the Boston Herald reports (presumably the reporter means "imposing sanctions on," not "sanctioning"):
Speaking in Boston on the eve of the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, Jackson said the word "murder" was appropriate--if inflammatory. . . .
Even if no sanctions are imposed, Jackson said, the United States should "apologize" to the survivors of Americans and Iraqis who have been killed in the conflict. At home, he said, Congress should hold hearings to determine whether President Bush committed an impeachable offense in making his case for war.
If Jackson apologized to the millions of Iraqis whose loved ones Saddam Hussein murdered, the Herald isn't saying. The best part of this story, though, is the get-out-of-jail-free card Jackson hands John Kerry: "Senators should not be held responsible because their vote authorizing war in Iraq merely gave the Bush administration the ability to pursue military action, Jackson said. 'Congress gave him the option. It was his judgment.' "
Fighting Back
An arrest warrant is out for Muqtada al-Sadr, an anti-American Shiite cleric, after pro-Sadr snipers in Baghdad killed eight U.S. servicemen and a Salvadoran soldier over the weekend, the Associated Press reports. "Meanwhile, U.S. troops on Monday sealed off the city of Fallujah west of Baghdad, where some 1,200 Marines and two battalions of Iraqi security forces were poised to launch an operation aimed at pacifying the city, one of the most violent places in the Sunni Triangle."
The latest battles in Iraq will no doubt have the crybabies crying "quagmire," but no one ever said war was easy.
Kerry's Second Vietnam
"Boston's Democratic Convention a Quagmire"--headline, Associated Press, April 4
There Goes the Neighborhood
The suspected ringleader of the March 11 Madrid bombings and four of his cohorts blew themselves up Saturday when police surrounded the apartment building where they were living, the Associated Press reports. Police found 22 pounds of dynamite and 200 detonators in the apartment that matched the devices used on 3/11. "They were going to keep on attacking because some of the explosives were prepared, packed and connected to detonators," Interior Minister Angel Acebes said.
Here's a photo of the explosion; CNN notes that "neighbors said the suspects had moved into the building after the train bombings." Spanish landlords may become increasingly reluctant to rent apartments to groups of Arab men.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, Spain elected a Socialist government that promised to withdraw troops from Iraq. But if Spanish voters think this will appease the terrorists, they may be in for a shock. The AP reports that ABC, a Madrid newspaper, received a fax today "from the same group that had claimed responsibility for the March 11 bombings. This time, it warned it would turn Spain 'into an inferno' unless the country halted its support for the United States" and withdrew from Afghanistan as well as Iraq.
The Obsession That Wasn't
"President George Bush first asked Tony Blair to support the removal of Saddam Hussein from power at a private White House dinner nine days after the terror attacks of 11 September, 2001," London's Guardian reports:
According to Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British Ambassador to Washington, who was at the dinner when Blair became the first foreign leader to visit America after 11 September, Blair told Bush he should not get distracted from the war on terror's initial goal--dealing with the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Bush, claims Meyer, replied by saying: "I agree with you, Tony. We must deal with this first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq." Regime change was already US policy. . . .
Details of this extraordinary conversation will be published this week in a 25,000-word article on the path to war with Iraq in the May issue of the American magazine Vanity Fair. It provides new corroboration of the claims made last month in a book by Bush's former counter-terrorism chief, Richard Clarke, that Bush was "obsessed" with Iraq as his principal target after 9/11.
Is this tendentious or what? How exactly is the president's statement that Afghanistan has to come first evidence that he was "obsessed" with Iraq?
Word Up
In a letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, Anna Garlund of San Francisco proves that you don't need to have sound political views in order to have good taste in vocabulary:
I always try to read George F. Will's columns. It isn't easy, and it can't be easy for him to defend every action or nonaction of this administration. However, in his April 1 column, "Clarke won't change the war," which was a serious attack on Richard Clarke, he stated "during the Clarke kerfuffle. . . ."
His use of the word "kerfuffle" was titillating. So I'll continue to read him, not for his point of view, with which I disagree, but for his occasional "kerfuffle."
Meanwhile, it turns out that the Absolute Fonts Archive has a typeface called Kerfuffle; here's a sample:
The Dean Scream
These days John Dean is best known as a slip of the tongue; on several occasions, politicians introducing Howard Dean have mistakenly called him "John." But Dean was notorious back in the day, serving four months in prison for obstruction of justice in the Watergate scandal.
Now How--sorry, John Dean has a book coming out in which he accuses the Bush administration of corruption. London's Daily Telegraph has this hilarious quote from an interview with Dean:
"Bush and [Vice-President Richard] Cheney are a throwback to the Nixon time," Mr Dean, 65, told The Telegraph last night. "All government business is filtered through a political process at this White House, which is the most secretive ever to run the United States.
"This is not in the public's interest. It's in the White House's interest, and the interest of Bush's re-election. The White House is being run like a private business, with the difference that it is not accountable to the shareholders--in this case the voters."
Let's see if we have this straight. Dean accuses Bush of acting in ways designed to assure his re-election, then in the very next breath complains that the administration "is not accountable to . . . the voters." By what means, other than re-electing him or not, does Dean propose voters could hold Bush accountable?
Labor Secretary Carl Sagan
John Kerry isn't impressed with the March job-creation numbers. In a statement Friday, he declared the month's 308,000 new jobs inadequate: "I've proposed a strategy that that [sic] revitalizes our manufacturing sector and puts us on track to create 10 million new jobs in the next four years."
Ten million new jobs? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are only 8.4 million unemployed people in America. As long as Kerry is promising to create more jobs than there are people to take them, why doesn't he go all the way and promise "billions and billions"?
Dodd-ering Old Byrd
Robert Byrd of West Virginia was elected to the Senate in 1958, making him the longest-serving member of that body. On Thursday he cast his 17,000th roll-call vote, against a "motion to invoke cloture on the committee substitute to H.R. 4." (In English, he voted against welfare reform.) Byrd's Senate Web site features a press release on this exciting milestone, which includes comments from congressional colleagues. Here's Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, whose father, Sen. Thomas Dodd, also served with Byrd:
It has often been said that the man and the moment come together. I do not think it is an exaggeration at all to say to my friend from West Virginia that he would have been a great Senator at any moment. Some were right for the time. Robert C. Byrd, in my view, would have been right at any time. . . . He would have been right during the great conflict of civil war in this Nation. . . . I cannot think of a single moment in this Nation's 220-plus year history where he would not have been a valuable asset to this country. Certainly today that is not any less true.
Given that Byrd is a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, blogger Gary Farber writes, "this is Trent Lott all over again." Back in December 2002, CNN reported that Dodd had weighed in on Lott's objectionable comments about Sen. Strom Thurmond:
"If Tom Daschle or another Democratic leader were to have made similar statements, the reaction would have been very swift," Dodd said. "I don't think several hours would have gone by without there being an almost unanimous call for the leader to step aside."
Dodd isn't part of the Democratic leadership, so he has nothing to step aside from--but still, an apology might be in order.
You've Lost That Loving Feeling
The Boston Globe's Derrick Z. Jackson, last seen crying over Saddam Hussein's capture, thinks the traditional definition of marriage is akin to racism. In making the argument, he retells the story of Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down laws against interracial marriage:
That hate was alive in 1958 when Mildred and Richard Loving, a black woman and a white man, faced police officers who burst into their house in the middle of the night in a small town in Virginia. "What are you doing in bed with this lady?" Sheriff R. Garnett Brooks asked Richard Loving, as recounted in a 1992 New York Times feature. The husband pointed to their marriage certificate on the wall. Brooks said, "That's no good here." The Lovings were jailed for five days. They then faced County Judge Leon Bazile, who berated them by saying: "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay, and red, and he placed them on separate continents, and but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriages." Bazile gave the Lovings the choice of spending a year in prison or going into exile from Virginia for 25 years.
The Lovings moved temporarily to Washington, D.C., and launched a legal challenge that resulted in the 1967 Supreme Court decision ruling Virginia's ban unconstitutional. Like a lot of ordinary people who are thrown into extraordinary circumstances, Loving said she fought the case because "it was thrown in my lap. What choice did I have? We weren't bothering anyone."
But the story actually undermines the comparison Jackson is trying to make. As a result of last year's Lawrence v. Texas decision striking down sodomy laws, gay couples in America have been in no danger of having cops burst into their homes to police their love lives. Even pre-Lawrence, the threat was mostly theoretical. The cops who arrested John Lawrence didn't come looking for sodomy; they were responding to a report of a "weapons disturbance" when they found Lawrence and another man "engaging in a sexual act."
We don't approve of the law under which Lawrence was arrested, which in any case the Supreme Court has consigned to history. Nor, however, do we approve of Derrick Jackson's hysterically overwrought comparison.
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Giving Us Grief
Several readers complained that we asked what one called "a thoughtless and cruel question" in Friday's item on euphemistic language and abortion. We had noticed that some abortion doctors defend partial-birth abortions because they "give couples an intact fetus to grieve over." Our question: "Do people really grieve over a 'fetus'?"
We guess our meaning wasn't entirely clear, so here's a clarification: We know people grieve over stillbirths, miscarriages and even abortions. What we tried to indicate with the scare quotes around fetus is that the people who grieve such a loss likely think of themselves as having lost a baby or a child, not a "fetus," and that the politically correct language the news media have adopted in the abortion debate flies in the face of common sense and experience.
Reader Richard Leed puts it eloquently: "Grief occurs somewhere between conception and birth, somewhere between fetus and child, somewhere between acceptable contraception and infanticide, somewhere between potential love and deep love. Now that the issue has been so heavily politicized, we will never agree on where that is. That's the real tragedy."
You Don't Say
"Cubs Storybook Season Is Upon Us . . . or Not"--headline, Chicago Tribune, April 3
This Just In
"TV Linked to Kids' Attention Problems"--headline, Associated Press, April 5
That's Gotta Hurt
"Guatemala to Cut Its Army in Half"--headline, Associated Press, April 1
Zero-Tolerance Watch
A nine-year-old boy in Ansonia, Conn., has been suspended from school for three days over a game of tag, the Associated Press reports. The unnamed boy's father, Jason Pardy, "says his son, a third-grader, was playing tag with a girl last Friday when he accidentally grazed her buttocks with his hand while tagging her. The girl later told teachers the boy had grabbed her backside."
Meanwhile, an AP dispatch from Westminster, Calif., reports that the local school board in that Orange County city "is risking the loss of millions of dollars in state aid for refusing to update its anti-discrimination policy to protect transgender pupils":
Westminster is the only one of California's 1,425 school districts to refuse to endorse a 1999 state law that gives boys who consider themselves girls and girls who regard themselves as boys the right to pursue discrimination complaints.
Maybe the Pardy boy should just say he considers himself a girl and sue the Ansonia schools for discrimination. |
