Best of the Web Today - August 8, 2005
By JAMES TARANTO
Power to the Lawyers
Is Hillary Clinton as brilliant a politician as she's cracked up to be? Here's a bit of evidence for the negative: "Clinton Says Lawyers Must Make Their Voices Heard in Washington" reads the headline of an Associated Press dispatch about a speech New York's junior senator gave at the American Bar Association convention in Chicago. Lawyers need to speak up more: Now there's a message sure to strike a chord with the public.
One lawyer who seems to be taking Mrs. Clinton's exhortation seriously is Jeanine Pirro, district attorney of Westchester County, who, the New York Times reports, said today that she will seek the Republican nomination to challenge Sen. Clinton next year. Conventional wisdom has it that Clinton is unbeatable, but Pirro--whose attributes, according to the Times, include "tough talk, quick wit, and good looks"--is probably the Republicans' best shot.
The Times notes, though, that Pirro may have a problem: "the shadow that [her] husband, Albert J. Pirro Jr., has cast over her political career for nearly two decades":
Democrats say she is vulnerable to questions of judgment in her relationship with Mr. Pirro, who was convicted of income tax fraud in 2000 and served 11 months in prison.
The last time we saw Mrs. Clinton, she was wearing what did not appear to be a wedding ring. However, rumors persist that she, like Mrs. Pirro, is married--and who knows? Maybe it'll turn out that she is vulnerable to quesitons of judgment in her relationship with Mr. Clinton.
Après Judy Miller le Déluge
You've gotta love this editorial from today's New York Times:
The United States is used to representing the high road when it comes to freedom of the press. If it fails to set the right example, countries with weaker traditions of civic rights are bound to notice. As the New York Times reporter Judith Miller enters her fifth week in jail for refusing to disclose a source, the repercussions are being felt abroad.
Those "repercussions," according to the Times, include actions against journalists in Burundi, Nepal, Serbia and Montenegro (formerly Yugoslavia) and Russia. The Times' conclusion:
By keeping Ms. Miller in jail, the United States is sending a signal to the rest of the world that it is O.K. to go after journalists as long as you invoke national security. That's not a good message to send.
The most obvious objection to this is that it is a classic example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Given the long history of press restrictions under authoritarian regimes, it seems tendentious in the extreme to attribute such restrictions in the past five weeks to the "message" sent by Miller's jailing.
Even more risible is the way the Times ducks responsibility for its reporter's current predicament. Miller would be walking the streets today but for John Ashcroft's decision to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Valerie Plame kerfuffle. As we noted in February, in 2003 the Times' editorialists and op-ed columnists led the charge for the appointment of such a prosecutor to investigate the "leak" and subsequent publication of the information that Joe Wilson's wife, who worked for the CIA, had recommended him for his junket to Niger.
That is, for its own partisan purposes, the Times advocated an aggressive government investigation into how a journalist came to publish accurate information about the government. That's not a good message to send.
'D' Is for Bigotry
Last week we noted that posters on the Angry Left Daily Kos Web site were specuating that John Roberts's 4-year-old son was gay. It turns out other Kos posters are speculating that Roberts himself is gay. Here's the "argument" someone called "ceolaf" makes:
1. He didn't get married until he was 40. That's really late. Now, he's a devout Catholic, so you know he didn't have sex before he got married (at least not heterosexual sex).
2. He married a (female) partner at a major law firm. My wife is on the cusp of partnerhood and I never see her. I don't think that my parents had sex after my dad made partner (don't try to tell me otherwise). You think that they have sex?
3. He has kids, therefore he must have had sex with a woman? Nope. They're adopted.
4. Possibly most damning: He played Peppermint Patty in his school play. That's totally gay. And cross-dressing.
This may be meant in a jocose spirit, and in any case Roberts obviously isn't gay. But it got us to thinking: Liberals and Democrats certainly aren't above gay-baiting. Last year Kedwards crudely attempted to appeal to antigay sentiment by proclaiming that Vice President Cheney has a gay daughter. And as The Weekly Standard's David Skinner notes, innuendoes about David Souter's sexuality flew in 1990, when then-President Bush appointed him to the Supreme Court:
"This is a man who has never been married, never had children," noted one widely quoted observer, a prominent lawyer who, reported R.W. Apple Jr. in the New York Times, "asked not to be identified because he practices from time to time before the Court." . . . This statement was quoted and alluded to so often that Souter soon became pegged as the Curious Bachelor from New England.
NPR's Nina Totenberg, Skinner notes, called Souter "at best, very weird."
The liberal-left engages in other forms of bigotry as well. A Senate Democratic memo revealed that Judiciary Committee Democrats targeted Miguel Estrada's judicial nomination for defeat because "he is Latino." And although Clarence Thomas's opponents avoided directly making an issue of his race during his confirmation hearings, these days he is the frequent target of liberal racism, ranging from relatively subtle (Sen. Harry Reid stereotyping him as unintelligent) to shockingly crude (Emerge magazine caricaturing him as a lawn jockey). And of course as we noted last week, Anita Hill faulted Roberts for being a white man.
Then there's religion. We tuned in to NBC's "Meet the Press" yesterday, and there was Mario Cuomo sounding for all the world like a 19th-century Know Nothing:
The question for Judge Roberts is, "Are you going to impose a religious test on the Constitution? Are you going to say that because the pope says this or the church says that, you will do it no matter what? You will overturn Roe against Wade."
Manuel Miranda lists other Bush-appointed judges, Catholic and Protestant, who've been subject to Democratic inquisitions for allegedly excessive piety. But being impious affords no protection. As we noted in March, Sen. Howell Heflin of Alabama explained in 1987 that he voted against Robert Bork's confirmation in part because he was "disturbed by his [Bork's] refusal to discuss his belief in God--or the lack thereof."
Gays, blacks, Latinos, whites, Catholics, Protestants, (suspected) atheists--come to think of it, liberals have a defense against the charge that they're prejudiced: They hate everyone equally.
The Richard Hand Standard
Our item Friday on the New York Times' "initial inquiries" into the adoption records of Judge John Roberts's two children prompted this response from reader Ted Clayton:
You work yourself into a fine outrage and find the chance to praise the right-wing media over the issue of Judge Roberts' adopted children by suggesting that adopted children are and should be off-limits. How soon you forget.
Clayton then provided a link to a March 2004 op-ed piece from the Boston Globe by Richard Davis, who was John McCain's presidential campaign manager in 2000. During the 2000 election, Davis writes, McCain opponents conducted a smear campaign centering on McCain's adopted daughter:
Anonymous opponents used "push polling" to suggest that McCain's Bangladeshi born daughter was his own, illegitimate black child. . . . The "pollsters" asked McCain supporters if they would be more or less likely to vote for McCain if they knew he had fathered an illegitimate child who was black. In the conservative, race-conscious South, that's not a minor charge. We had no idea who made the phone calls, who paid for them, or how many calls were made. Effective and anonymous: the perfect smear campaign.
Some aspects of this smear were hardly so subtle. Bob Jones University professor Richard Hand sent an e-mail to "fellow South Carolinians" stating that McCain had "chosen to sire children without marriage."
We have to admit, Clayton has a point. So let us be the first to acknolwedge that the New York Times is no worse than those anonymous McCain opponents or Bob Jones University's Richard Hand. Even so, you'd think a great newspaper would hold itself to a higher standard than that.
Apartheid in Virginia
"About 60 faculty members from a Saudi Arabian university are taking courses on Virginia Tech's campus this summer," reports the Roanoke Times. "But the program's setup is a bit different than a typical Tech class":
Men and women from King Abdulaziz University are taking identical faculty development courses at Tech, but meet in gender-specific classes. Tech officials said administrators from the Saudi university separated the sexes to mirror classroom settings at their home institution, which operates separate campuses for men and women.
"This is the way they teach their courses over there, and this is the way they wish their courses to be taught over here," said Tech spokesman Larry Hincker. The university chose to respect the Saudi culture "rather than impress our culture on them," he added.
But not all universities are so solicitous of Muslim sensibilities, as the Washington Times reports:
A state university in New Jersey has reprimanded a student-employee for describing homosexuality as a "perversion" in a private e-mail that he sent a female professor, after she sent him an unsolicited announcement about a university event that promoted lesbian relationships.
But Jihad Daniel, 63, who works for William Paterson University repairing computer hardware and takes graduate-level courses part time, said he was only expressing his Muslim religious beliefs when he responded to professor Arlene Holpp Scala, head of the university's women's studies department.
Although we don't countenance the disparagement of lesbians, it does seem to us that calling a spammer a pervert is fair comment.
The Other 296,834,334 Have No Opinion
"48 Think Bush Is Honest, Poll Says"--headline, Associated Press, Aug. 6
What Makes Him Think Any Other Race Will Take Him?
"Candidate Exits Race After Racist Writings"--headline, Associated Press, Aug. 5
Guess We Can Quit Checking the Himalayas
"Giant Waves Found in the Earth's Oceans"--headline, Associated Press, Aug. 4
"Closure, WW II Sub Found Under the Sea"--headline, Chicago Tribune, Aug. 8
This Just In
"Internet Scammers Keep Working in Nigeria"--headline, Associated Press, Aug. 7
What?
"Men Have Trouble Hearing Women, Say Experts"--headline, Independent (South Africa), Aug. 7
A Beauty Pageant for Extremists?
"Israelis Miss Extremist Warning Signs"--headline, Associated Press, Aug. 5
Uh-Oh, We're Losing the Space Race
"1st Solar System Assembly Plant to Be Built in Uganda"--headline, Xinhua (Red China), Aug. 7
Wow, You Really Can Dig That Far!
"Miners Trapped in China"--headline, Edmonton (Alberta) Sun, Aug. 8
Fortunately, He Couldn't Hit the Broad Side of a Barn
"Photographer Shot at Britney Spears' Home"--headline, Associated Press, Aug. 7
Degrees of Difficulty
We heard from several readers who said we made a slight mistake in our item Friday about American liberals not moving to Canada. As Chuck Morris explains:
Ouch! I'm afraid you made a rather basic factual error in your explanation of why the expected high temperature in Toronto for that day was indicated as 28 on the Globe and Mail Web site, while Weather.com indicated the high would be 82. The explanation given was that "Canada is on the metric system, in which temperatures are read backwards," and while that may seem to be true, we learned otherwise in elementary school.
As is the case with most countries which have adopted the metric system, Canada uses the Celsius scale for temperatures, rather than the Fahrenheit scale used in the U.S. To convert a temperature from Fahrenheit to Celsius, you subtract 32 from it and multiply the result by 5/9. A temperature of 82 Fahrenheit thus translates to 27.7 Celsius, or 28 after rounding, and the fact that this is 82 backwards is purely coincidental.
Which just goes to show, the metric system is designed to be as complicated as possible.
Where's Paul Tsongas When You Need Him?
The Washington Post offers another argument against pandas:
The giant panda is the rock star of the captive-animal world, the biggest draw there is, and only four U.S. zoos have them, including Washington's National Zoo. But officials at the animal parks say they spend millions of dollars more than they take in on the rare bear, whose appeal has not boosted visitor numbers and souvenir sales as much as hoped. . . .
The expense of keeping pandas is high: $1 million a year to China to borrow the animals, extensive outlays for research required by the federal import permit, construction expenses for lavish new exhibits and spending on basic care.
The four zoos, Washington, Atlanta, Memphis and San Diego, collectively spent $33 million more on pandas from 2000 to 2003 than they received in revenue from exhibiting them, according to figures compiled by Zoo Atlanta chief executive Dennis W. Kelly. Corporate and individual donations reduced the loss to $4 million, he said.
The New York Times' John Tierney has joined our antipanda crusade:
The polar bear has become the new poster animal for environmentalists, and I can understand why. When it comes to "charismatic megafauna"--the term used by marketing experts at conservation groups--the bear is a giant improvement over the giant panda.
The rotund panda may be cuddlier, but it is really more of a poster animal for gluttony and sloth. In the wild, it eats 12 hours a day and spends the rest of the time sleeping or hiding. In captivity, it can barely stir itself even to mate--Mei Xiang had to be artificially inseminated to produce her new cub at the National Zoo.
Yes, Mei Xiang can draw crowds to the zoo, but does her lolling inspire much zeal for preserving the species? The message she sends is, "I don't care, so why should you?"
How things might have been different if Paul Tsongas had won the White House! The former Massachusetts senator, who died in 1997, ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992 and was the only presidential candidate ever to run on an antipanda platform. (With his New England accent, it sounded like he was saying "pander bears.") Alas, Tsongas lost to Bill Clinton, who like the panda turned out to be a symbol of gluttony and nonprocreative sexual gratification. |
