Best of the Web Today - February 3, 2006
By JAMES TARANTO
Whitewashing a Black Leader
Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP, spoke Wednesday at North Carolina's Fayetteville State University during an event kicking off Black History Month. News 14 Carolina, a local cable-news network, did a feel-good story about this "civil rights icon" and NAACP recruitment:
Bond said NAACP membership is alive and well. It has nearly 500,000 members. . . .
"I thought that it would be a good opportunity to have a more prominent role in my community," Victoria Ruffin, also a NAACP member, explained.
Bond said it's a positive attitude that lures more young people in. And it's those growing numbers that will help fight future racial discrimination.
The Fayetteville Observer described the speech:
Civil rights activist and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond told a crowd at Fayetteville State University on Wednesday that the fight for equal rights is not over.
"We now find ourselves refighting old battles we thought we had already won," he said. "We have to fight discrimination whenever it raises its ugly head." . . .
Bond spoke for 45 minutes, and his speech was interrupted several times by applause as he jabbed at the Bush administration. Bond's address was part of FSU's Distinguished Speakers Series and helped kick off Black History Month.
"We have a president who talks like a populist and governs for the privileged," Bond said.
A little partisan jab is no big deal, but WorldNetDaily has an account of the speech that conveys quite a different tone:
Civil rights activist and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond delivered a blistering partisan speech at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina last night, equating the Republican Party with the Nazi Party and characterizing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her predecessor, Colin Powell, as "tokens."
"The Republican Party would have the American flag and the swastika flying side by side," he charged.
Calling President Bush a liar, Bond told the audience at the historically black institution that this White House's lies are more serious than the lies of his predecessor's because Clinton's lies didn't kill people. . . .
He referred to former Attorney General John Ashcroft as J. Edgar Ashcroft. He compared Bush's judicial nominees to the Taliban.
Isn't it newsworthy when the leader of a venerable organization like the NAACP engages in such over-the-top, crackpot rhetoric? (Or, if you're an over-the-top crackpot and think Bond was right, isn't it newsworthy that the leader of a venerable organization like the NAACP is telling the truth about the evil Chimpy W. Hitliar?)
Why did the local media ignore Bond's crazy talk? (The speech doesn't seem to have received any national attention outside WND and cable chat shows.) The most likely explanation, it seems to us, is that they recognized the talk as crazy and felt it would be invidious, inflammatory or both to depict a respected black leader as crazy--even though doing so would have been merely a matter of quoting his own words.
What we end up with, then, is a double message, very much like Yasser Arafat* talking peace in English while inciting hatred in Arabic--except that in this case Bond is speaking a language everyone understands, and reporters, whose job is to report the facts, are instead concealing them. Bond's mostly black audience at Fayetteville hears his message of division and resentment, while the broader public is told that he has a "positive attitude" and is engaged in a "fight for equal rights."
And then people scratch their heads and try to figure out why blacks' political attitudes are so different from those of nonblacks.
* The haughty, Fre--oh wait, sorry. Arafat, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, is in stable condition after dying at a Paris hospital.
Some of Her Best Friends . . .
Remember the Christian Peacemaker Teams, the outfit that had four of its members kidnapped in Iraq a while back? Today's Des Moines Register features an op-ed by one Pat Minor, a CPT member, in which she explains why she supports terrorism against Israel. But don't worry, some of her best friends are Jewish:
"What do you think about Hamas' victory?" I asked a co-worker, Sid Oxborough. He shrugged. "Personally, I think it's great. But, it probably won't help their cause." . . .
While I abhor violence of any kind, it is hard to condemn a people who are resisting an oppression that has rendered them silent for more than 50 years. . . .
Sid, who considers himself a diaspora Jew, says, "Obviously, the Israelis are Jews, so they are my people. But, the Palestinians are oppressed, so they're my people more."
This is an example of what Arnold Kling calls "folk Marxism":
Folk Marxism looks at political economy as a struggle pitting the oppressors against the oppressed. Of course, for Marx, the oppressors were the owners of capital and the oppressed were the workers. But folk Marxism is not limited by this economic classification scheme. All sorts of other issues are viewed through the lens of oppressors and oppressed. Folk Marxists see Israelis as oppressors and Palestinians as oppressed. They see white males as oppressors and minorities and females as oppressed. They see corporations as oppressors and individuals as oppressed. They see America as on oppressor and other countries as oppressed.
Folk Marxism leads a Jew to applaud the murderers of Jews, and a Christian to condone violence even while claiming to abhor it. And note what Oxborough said to Minor about the Hamas victory: "Personally, I think it's great. But, it probably won't help their cause." Folk Marxism isn't actually about helping the "oppressed"; it is nothing more than a perverted moral vanity.
'Because I Can't Sing or Dance'
"Sen. Jay Rockefeller on Thursday complained about a "wall the White House has constructed" around its domestic surveillance program and said Democrats will press their attacks on the president's authorization of the program," CNN reports:
An angry Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, signaled at the start of Senate Intelligence Committee hearings with the nation's intelligence chiefs that the Bush administration's rationale for not briefing more members of Congress was "flat-out unacceptable." . . .
Rockefeller, the senior Democrat on the Senate panel, complained of a "wall that the White House has constructed around the NSA's warrantless collection of phone calls and e-mails inside the United States."
He asked: "What is unique about this one particular program among all the other sensitive NSA programs that justifies keeping Congress in the dark?"
Rocky, of course, was among the members of Congress briefed on the program, and it's worth reiterating what Vice President Cheney told us last week:
The lawmakers, Mr. Cheney says, shared the administration's view that secrecy was essential. "Public debate and discussion about the program would have done--in our view and in the view of members of Congress who were consulted--damage to our capabilities in this respect. We'd rather not have this conversation about this program, except for the fact that the New York Times went public with it."
Yet after the Times broke the story, Democratic members of Congress changed their tune from the one Mr. Cheney says they had sung in private. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the top Intelligence Committee Democrat, released a handwritten July 2003 letter to Mr. Cheney in which he said he was "writing to reiterate my concern regarding the sensitive intelligence issues we discussed." We asked Mr. Cheney if he remembered Mr. Rockefeller iterating his concern in the first place. "No, I recall the letter just sort of arriving, and it was never followed up on."
Meanwhile Rep. Jane Harman, Mr. Rockefeller's House counterpart, has opined that the administration broke the law by failing to brief every member of the intelligence committees. Says Mr. Cheney, "If we had done that since the beginning of the program back in '01--I ran the numbers yesterday--if we did the full House and Senate committees, as well as the elected leadership, we'd have had to read 70 people into this program" instead of eight or nine. Expecting that many congressmen to keep a secret is a faith-based initiative.
If the vice president's account is accurate, how does one explain Mr. Rockefeller and Ms. Harman's about-face? It may be that their party's base--the Angry Left--is so implacably opposed to the administration and to the war effort that leading Democrats can afford to be responsible about national security only behind closed doors.
This is what it has come to: The Democratic Party, for political reasons, is compelled to defend the "privacy rights" of terrorists.
The Alito Factor
Curt Levey of the Committee for Justice, "which defends and promotes constitutionalist judicial nominees," argues that opposition to Justice Samuel Alito will spell trouble for Democrats:
Faced with the opportunity to prove their independence from ultra-liberal interest groups, Senate Democrats struck out Tuesday when they voted almost unanimously against the confirmation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Come November, Democrats will bear the cost at the polls.
While half of the Democrats in the Senate gave the nod to Chief Justice John Roberts, all but a few decided to vote their party affiliation--and not their conscience--this time around. In a further show of partisanship, Democrats engineered a week-long delay in the Alito vote in violation of a promise and then mounted a last-minute filibuster attempt. All the while, they were following the hard-line script written by the coalition of liberal groups that orchestrated much of the fight in the Senate against the president's judicial nominees. These groups are a powerful part of the Democrats' base, but their out-of-the-mainstream views and hyperbolic claims wound up hindering the effort to stop Alito and will be an albatross on the reelection efforts of Democratic senators from moderate and conservative states.
Our guess is that Alito opposition won't end up costing most Democrats much at the polls. For one thing, the three Democrats up for re-election in November who are from the reddest states (Robert Byrd, Kent Conrad and Ben Nelson) all voted for Alito. While it's true that Democrats, especially Tom Daschle, paid a price in 2004 for Daschle's filibuster strategy, they did so in substantial part because that strategy was successful, leaving them vulnerable to charges of obstructionism.
By contrast, the 40 Democrats who voted against Alito obstructed nothing, and many of them did not decide to vote "no" until it was clear the vote would be meaningless. The inconsequentiality of their vote will limit its political impact.
There are exceptions. Lincoln Chafee, the Rhode Island Republican who voted against Alito, may pay a price in the Republican primary. And some Democrats who voted against John Kerry's** futile filibuster thereby earned the enmity of the Angry Left, which could hurt them in either a primary (by boosting a challenge from the left) or the general election (by demoralizing the base). In this regard, we'd especially watch Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Maria Cantwell of Washington.
** This was the footnote we accidentally began typing earlier.
Headlines We'd Like to See
"Gore Calms Down After Tasting Fame"--headline, Arizona Republic, Feb. 3
Whatever You Do, Don't Tell Anyone!
"Mayor Michael Bloomberg . . . anonymously donated $100 million Thursday to Johns Hopkins University to support stem cell research. . . . A person familiar with his philanthropy confirmed the latest $100 million gift on condition of anonymity, citing Bloomberg's desire for privacy."--Associated Press, Feb. 2
'Do You Solemnly Swear--Ah, Heck, You Know the Drill'
"Black, Decker Receive Elections Board Subpoenas to Testify"--headline, Associated Press, Feb. 2
What Would Small Children Do Without Grand Juries?
"Tasers Not Recommended to Subdue Small Children, Grand Jury Says"--headline, Associated Press, Feb. 2
Thanks, Bill--It's Hard to Jump Right After Surgery
"Bill Lowers Surgery Center Hurdle"--headline, Columbia (Mo.) Daily Tribune, Feb. 2
We Blame the Neocon Cabal
"Don't Blame the Vultures for Devouring What's Dead"--headline, Houston Chronicle, Feb. 3
But Is There Spumoni on Mars?
"Water Ice Detected on Comet's Surface"--headline, Space.com, Feb. 2
Bottom Story of the Day
"Road Salt May Be Sickening Alaska Pigeons"--headline, Associated Press, Feb. 1
Parliament of Whores
"A married couple pleaded no contest to charges they ran a brothel across the street from a Concord [Calif.] police station," the Associated Press reports:
Debra Watts, 52, will serve one year of home detention after pleading to three felony counts of pimping and pandering, prosecutor Jose Marin said Monday. Her husband, Ernest Watts, 63, pleaded to one misdemeanor count of maintaining a house of prostitution, Marin said.
Investigators said the couple ran the brothel for a year in an apartment located a few hundred feet from the Concord police station and used the Internet to solicit clients. . . .
The couple, who lived in Fairfield but recently moved to Las Vegas, will be prohibited from working in any business related to prostitution as part of their probation.
Oh well, so much for their hopes of a career in politics. |
