Best of the Web Today - April 20, 2006
By JAMES TARANTO
There's a What On?
Back in 1995, three newly minted ex-governors--Mario Cuomo of New York, Ann Richards* of Texas and Lowell Weicker of Connecticut--sat for an interview with Todd Purdum of the New York Times. Something Cuomo said stuck with us all these years:
The biggest event in my lifetime was the Second World War and we have never been able to recreate it. Some people say thank God, but there's something we lose by not recreating what happened in the Second World War.
The Second World War was the last time that this country believed in anything profoundly, any great single cause. What was it? They were evil; we were good. That was Tojo, that was that S.O.B. Hitler, that was Mussolini, that bum. They struck at us in the middle of the night, those sneaks. We are good, they are bad. Let's all get together, we said, and we creamed them. We started from way behind. We found strength in this common commitment, this commonality, community, family, the idea of coming together was best served in my lifetime in the Second World War.
You never had a war quite like it.
Talk about making a virtue of necessity! We found this sentiment rather appalling. Cuomo's comment, it seemed to us, went well beyond expressing admiration for the American and Allied war effort. He seemed downright nostalgic for a horrific war that killed upward of 50 million people.
We were reminded of this when we read an essay by Michael Tomasky, editor of The American Prospect, a liberal magazine. Tomasky makes a point we've been arguing for some time: that the Democrats as currently constituted, even if they manage somehow to win an election, cannot become a long-term governing majority. "What the Democrats still don't have," he writes, "is a philosophy, a big idea that unites their proposals and converts them from a hodgepodge of narrow and specific fixes into a vision for society."
Tomasky argues that the Democrats must articulate an idea of the common good, as he said they did from roughly 1933 to 1966:
The New Deal, despite what conservative critics have maintained since the 1930s, did not consist of the state (the government) merely handing out benefices to the nation (the people), turning citizens into dependent wards; it engaged and ennobled people: Social Security and all the jobs programs and rural electrification plans and federal mortgage-insurance programs were examples of the state giving people the tools to improve their own lives while improving the collective life of the country (to say nothing of the way Franklin Roosevelt rallied Americans to common purpose in fighting through the Depression and the war).
Harry Truman turned the idea of common purpose outward to the rest of the world, enacting the Marshall Plan, creating NATO and other regional alliances, exhorting Americans to understand that they belonged to a community larger than even their country. John Kennedy engaged Americans precisely at the level of asking them to sacrifice for a common good, through the things that are obvious to us--the Peace Corps, and of course "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country"--and through things that history's fog has made less obvious (his relentless insistence that victory in the Cold War could be truly achieved only through improvement at home, which would require sacrifice and civic engagement).
Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, until it washed up on the bone-strewn beaches of Vietnam and New Left-driven atomization, fit the paradigm, too. Consider just the first two sentences of Johnson's remarks upon signing the Civil Rights Act: "I am about to sign into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I want to take this occasion to talk to you about what that law means to every American." Not black people. Not Southerners. Not even "our nation." Every American--the words gave citizens agency and a stake in seeing that this unprecedented social experiment would succeed.
So far, so good. We certainly don't agree with every particular of Tomasky's argument (especially his gratuitous swipe at "Wall Street Journal editorialsts"), but he has something important to say to anyone interested in saving liberalism and the Democratic Party from the Angry Left.
He also has an enormous blind spot. Toward the end of the essay, he acknowledges one objection to his argument:
Some will say that asking Americans to look beyond their own self-interest and participate in a common good will fail, either because it failed before (the 1960s) or because such a request can succeed only in rare moments--a time of war or of deep domestic crisis.
He then concedes that "it may be that the times when such appeals can work are comparatively rare in American history," but proceeds to argue that this is quite possibly such a time, the beginning of a deep domestic crisis:
It might just be that the Bush years, these years of civic destruction and counterfeit morality, have provided the Democrats the opening to argue on behalf of civic reconstruction and genuine public morality.
Well, it might, and it might not. But it seems to have escaped Tomasky's notice that this is a time of war. He does acknowledge at one point in the essay that we live in "the post-9-11 world in which free peoples have to unite to fight new threats." But he cannot bring himself to call on his fellow liberals and Democrats to unite behind the war effort.
He says not a word about Afghanistan, and he brings up Iraq only to sneer at "promiscuously ecumenical" Democrats who are "supporting, still, the war in Iraq." He mentions "a comprehensive plan to foster democracy in the Arab world" as part of a laundry list of things that "it isn't enough to stand for."
Though favoring the common good in the abstract, he argues that gathering intelligence on al Qaeda asks civil-liberties fetishists to sacrifice too much:
A too-aggressive common-good framework can discard liberty and rights; after all, [President] Bush uses a conservative kind of common-good rhetoric to defend his spying program (he's protecting us from attack). Democrats have to guard against this; a common good that isn't balanced by concern for liberty can be quasi-authoritarian ("coercive," as the political philosophers call it).
Tomasky's essay never uses the word patriotism--a curious omission, since Democrats have been very concerned in recent years with the perception that they lack patriotism, a perception that a compelling vision of the common good would go a long way toward dispelling. The problem, as we argued in 2004, is that this runs up against one of the powerful interest groups that make up the Democratic Party:
Why do Democrats feel so vulnerable on the issue of patriotism? This question takes us back to the 1960s and, yes, Vietnam. That war, which a Democratic president escalated, split the party, costing it the presidency in 1968. By 1972 the countercultural left was firmly established as a part of the Democratic coalition--and it remains so. A significant and vocal minority of the party, that is, believes that America is imperialistic, racist, militaristic, oppressive, etc. These views aren't necessarily unpatriotic; it is possible to love one's country and also be a harsh critic of it. But if dissent can be patriotic, assent is far less complicatedly so.
That's especially true during wartime, when domestic disunity can aid the enemy.
The idea that "politics ends at the water's edge"--that whatever political differences exist between Americans, it is important for the nation to present its enemies and allies with a united front--largely prevailed in both parties from 1941 until 1968, when it was shattered by intraparty Democratic dissent over Vietnam. Today every prospective Democratic presidential candidate except Hillary Clinton is going out of his way to pander to the Daily Kos crowd--a group that views anti-American crackpot Cindy Sheehan as a heroine, and patriotic fellow Democrat Joe Lieberman as a traitor.
Howard Dean's collapse in 2004 showed that the countercultural left is a small minority even within the Democratic Party. But it is a minority that has an outsized influence in pulling the party to the left on foreign policy. This is what the party has to contend with if it hopes to persuade Americans that it has the common good at heart.
* Richards had just lost her re-election bid to an up-and-coming politician whose father she once said was "born with a silver foot in his mouth."
One Cheer for Sean Wilentz
Our item yesterday on Princeton historian Sean Wilentz's partisan screed in Rolling Stone prompted a reader to send us an Oct. 8, 2001, article from the Daily Princetonian, a student newspaper, about an campus rally against terrorism where Wilentz spoke:
Citing the personal histories of the Sept. 11 hijackers, history professor and American studies program director Sean Wilentz said terrorism is caused by "money, education and privilege."
"To say that poverty explains terror is to slander those caught in poverty who choose to lead worthy lives," he said. "[Terrorists] are not the oppressed, but they are parasites on oppression."
The real cause of the Sept. 11 attacks is "the malignant and murderous philosophy of the perpetrators and their leaders," Wilentz said. "To the terrorists, America's crime--its real crime--is to be America."
Wilentz called for the defeat of America's attackers. "Our opponents must be crushed, if not eliminated--for evil will never be eliminated--then soundly defeated, he said."
We'll admit to a little Cuomo-like nostalgia on reading this.
FrontPageMag.com, meanwhile, has an interesting interview with Travis Rowley, a graduate of Brown University who has a new book out called "Out of Ivy: How a Liberal Ivy Created a Committed Conservative." Rowley describes a pre-9/11 episode that helped shape his view of the campus left:
The incident that triggered my involvement in campus controversies was the 2000 presidential election. Some Brown students, including members of the Brown Democrats and the International Socialist Organization, traveled down to President Bush's Inauguration to protest his controversial victory. When they returned to Providence they were bragging about giving President Bush the middle finger as he walked by them.
The entire campus seemed to think of them as heroes returning from some sort of glorious charge against evil. But again, I saw it in reverse. So I wrote an opinion piece for the Brown Daily Herald that condemned the protest, and very simply observed the indecency of flicking off the President of the United States. The reaction to my column was unbelievable. I received harassing phone calls, and was repeatedly called a racist, a sexist, and a homophobe--for saying that you shouldn't give the President the finger!
As it turned out, this over-reaction to what I saw as an opinion grounded in decency and common sense was typical liberal temperament.
This happened as President Bush was taking office, so it's clear the Angry Left is not a product of the liberation of Iraq or any other Bush policies. Sept. 11 might have muted it, but it was bound to reassert itself sooner or later.
When 'Dignity' Means Murder
"Saying that dignity was more important than aid in dollars, Palestinian Premier Ismail Haniyeh insisted yesterday that his Hamas-led government would not renounce violence despite mounting Western pressure over its failure to condemn a Tel Aviv bombing," the Arab News reports from Gaza City. The article contains this lovely detail:
Israel laid the blame fully on Hamas, even though the attack was claimed by its smaller rival Islamic Jihad, and revoked the residency cards of three Hamas MPs living in occupied East Jerusalem among other measures.
The Hamas MPs plan to appeal to Israel's Supreme Court against Israel's decision to revoke their residency rights, the Palestinian justice minister said yesterday.
Hamas recognizes the authority of the Israeli Supreme Court? Does this mean it recognizes Israel?
Air Arabia's Jewish Spokesman
"An Arab airline has hijacked the look of the cartoon kids from television's 'South Park' to market its flights throughout the Middle East," reports WorldNetDaily.com:
Air Arabia, a discount carrier based in the United Arab Emirates, features on its website the images of animated children who bear a striking resemblance to characters such as Stan, Kyle and Eric from the Comedy Central hit.
Sure enough, the resemblance to the "South Park" kids is uncanny, though two of the three Air Arabia kids are mustachioed; all have skin in various shades of orange; and instead of the winter caps the "South Park" boys wear, they don a kaffiyeh, a turban and a fez.
But wait: Isn't the kid in the kaffiyeh Kyle? And isn't Kyle Jewish in real life?
Whatever Happened to Baby Plame?
Columnist Robert Novak, whose July 2003 column prompted the Valerie Plame kerfuffle, spoke out about it yesterday at a forum sponsored by his flagship paper, the Chicago Sun-Times, the paper reports today:
Novak also claimed that investigators know who leaked [sic] the information, although he did not say how they know.
"The question is, does [special prosecutor Patrick] Fitzgerald know who the source was?" Novak asked. "Of course. He's known for years who the first source is. If he knows the source, why didn't he indict him? Because no crime was committed."
Indeed, Fitzgerald has refused even to reveal to lawyers for Scooter Libby--indicted nor for "leaking" but for perjury--whether Plame was a covert agent. How come all the Angry Leftoids who trumped up the kerfuffle aren't demanding the prosecution, or even the identification, of the first source?
The New Math
"New York City will offer housing subsidies of up to $14,600 to entice new math, science and special education teachers to work in the city's most challenging schools, in one of the most aggressive housing incentive programs in the nation to address a chronic shortage of qualified educators in these specialties."--New York Times, April 19
And if You Had to Go Through Those Crazy Confirmation Hearings, So Would You!
"Supreme Court Considers Insanity Standard"--headline, New York Times, April 19
It's Almost Down to 100%
"U.S. Records Drastic Decline in Death Rate"--headline, Associated Press, April 19
Thought That Last One Was a Joke, Didn't You?
"Americans Are Suddenly Dying Less Often, Data Suggest"--headline, Star-Ledger (Newark, N.J.), April 20
Her Husband Predeceased Her by at Least 5,000 Years
"Kennewick Woman Found Alive in California Landfill"--headline, Associated Press, April 19
So They Gave Up and Rented a U-Haul
"Julia Roberts Fails to Move Broadway Critics"--headline, Reuters, April 20
Don't Go Out in Foul Weather in the Altogether
"When Storms Arise, Get Wise, Experts Say"--headline, Des Moines Register, April 20
Thanks for the Tip!--LXIX
"Health Tip: Prevent Heartburn"--headline, HealthDayNews, April 20
Bottom Story of the Day
"New York Times Web Site Down for About Four Hours"--headline, Associated Press, April 19
You Know the Drill
The other day we read a USA Today article about CEOs who believe you can judge a person's character by the way he treats waiters. The story included a link to a site called WaiterRant.net, a blog by an anonymous waiter in an unnamed Northern Italian restaurant in New York. His amusing accounts of the foibles of restaurant-goers quickly had us hooked, and we've been reading his old posts. Our favorite is a tale of serving a family of four in April 2005:
The father's a no nonsense military looking kind of guy. Seated across from him in the usual soccer mom getup is his wife. Next to her, facing me, a mass of black curls and inexpertly applied makeup, is her teenage daughter. She smiles at me toothily.
The other daughter sits facing away from me--face obscured by a hanging mane of heavy black hair. Her bejeweled fingers tap impatiently on the table top. Probably embarrassed to be seen eating out with her parents.
"Can I get anyone something to drink?" I ask cheerfully.
The man and his wife order some red wine.
"I'll have a coke," the first daughter says looking up and down. . . .
"And what will you have miss?" I ask the other daughter.
The daughter looks up at me from under her hair. Suddenly and I notice "she" has a beard.
"I'm not a girl," the newly revealed young man sniffs defensively. . . .
"I'm very sorry sir. I need to get a new pair of glasses," I say trying to cover my surprise.
"He said you were a girllll!" the sister taunts.
"Shut up idiot," the brother shoots back.
"Enough" the father cuts in, "Tell the man what you want to drink."
"I'll have a Coke," the young man mutters sullenly.
Tip in the toilet I go and fetch their drinks.
They order quickly and are soon tucking into their entrées. While they're eating the son gets up to go to the bathroom. As he approaches me I can feel the hatred coming off of him like heat off a radiator.
"I'm not a girl," he hisses looking me in the eye.
"No kidding," I deadpan. . . .
Saying nothing he shuffles past me. I can't help but notice he's headed for the wrong bathroom.
"Sir, that's the ladies room."
"I knew that," he says rapidly changing course.
"Just checking," I chuckle.
The family finishes their meal. They take a pass on dessert. Dad asks for the check.
"Sorry for the mix up," I say handing him the bill. . . .
Check paid the family gets up and heads for the door. I warily look inside the checkbook.
Dad left me a $100 tip.
I run up to the front to thank the man for his generosity.
"That waiter's a jerk," I overhear the son saying as he heads out the door.
"It was an honest mistake. Get a haircut!" the father calls out after him.
Catching up to the father I extend my hand.
"Thank you sir!" I say.
With a firm grip he replies, "No. Thank YOU."
"Not a problem," I grin.
"Goddamn hippie," the father mutters walking out onto the street.
I stand in the doorway a hundred dollars richer.
That was the most profitable faux pas I ever committed.
Good thing Cartman wasn't around. |
