Best of the Web Today - September 6, 2007
By JAMES TARANTO
A Dagger for the Troops
Don Surber of the Charleston (W.Va.) Daily Mail notes an appalling statement by New York's senior senator, Chuck Schumer, on the Senate floor yesterday:
The violence in Anbar has gone down despite the surge, not because of the surge. The inability of American soldiers to protect these tribes from al Qaeda said to these tribes we have to fight al Qaeda ourselves. It wasn't that the surge brought peace here. It was that the warlords took peace here, created a temporary peace here.
It is certainly true that the sheikhs have been instrumental in the Anbar success, but they didn't do it on their own. As The Wall Street Journal reported last month (link for subscribers, but we excerpted it last month), "The success in Anbar Province, which lies west of Baghdad, hasn't come easily. The key to the U.S. campaign has been recruiting, cultivating, and rewarding tribal leaders."
As Surber notes, Schumer was one of 77 senators who voted to send the troops to Iraq. Now, his quest for partisan advantage, he is falsely portraying them as unable to do anything right. It doesn't make us proud to be a New Yorker.
Spared by the Enemy's Incompetence
Yesterday we noted an Associated Press story on the arrest of three alleged terror plotters in Germany, which contained the following statement:
Germany, which did not send troops to Iraq, has been spared terrorist attacks such as the mass transit bombings in Madrid and London--although its involvement in the attempt to stabilize Afghanistan has led to fears it might be targeted.
Several readers wrote to remind us that if Germany has been "spared," it is only because those who tried to attack a year ago failed. An AP dispatch from Sept. 2, 2006, noted that two suspects were in custody in a botched attack:
The men are suspected of planting crude bombs July 31 on two trains at Cologne station, where they were seen in grainy surveillance camera video pulling wheeled suitcases.
The bombs were found later in the day on regional trains in Koblenz and Dortmund. Authorities have said that the detonators went off but failed to ignite the devices.
Reader Michael Newton makes another good point about the AP passage:
It's even sneakier than you suggest. If Germany is not attacked, it's because they stayed out of Iraq. If they are attacked, it's because they were involved in Afghanistan. Therefore, regardless what happens, the conclusion is the same: Hide under your rock, don't attack the Muslims, and you'll be safe.
But it's worse still. The 2006 AP story says the suspects "were partially motivated by anger over the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad"--not in Germany but in Denmark. So if appeasing Islamist terrorists is possible at all, it requires not only that a country refrain from participating in an "attack" on Muslim countries, but also that everyone else refrain from offending fundamentalist Muslim sensibilities.
Reigning on the Parade
"The audacity of hope" is one of Barack Obama's campaign slogans. On Labor Day, reports the Union Leader of Manchester, N.H., the Obama campaign showed plain audacity at a parade in nearby Milford:
Parade organizers said Barack Obama supporters at times ignored requests from parade workers.
"There's a lot of things they did that they shouldn't have done," said Barbara Parry, president of the Milford VFW ladies auxiliary. "They came with an attitude."
She added that Obama himself was nearly late for the parade.
Bob Philbrick, a member of the VFW men's auxiliary and another organizer, said Obama supporters wanted to slip their candidate into the front or middle of the parade, rather than the end where politicians are supposed to march. They also tried to sneak supporters into the parade through side streets, he said.
"Everybody else followed instructions, except for Obama's people," said Philbrick. Like Parry, he described himself as a registered Republican who is uncommitted to any candidate at this point. Efforts to reach a New Hampshire spokesman for the Obama campaign for comment last night were unsuccessful.
An Obama campaign spokesman said he did not want to engage the VFW on the parade.
In fairness to Obama, the complaint that he was "nearly late" seems specious. Wouldn't that mean he was on time?
We the People
Marty Peretz, titular editor of The New Republic, has some strange praise for Barack Obama. He complains that one of TNR's young writers has put Obama "up for ridicule because the candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination listed the fact that he had been a professor of constitutional law (at the University of Chicago) as a credential for office." He argues that this makes for a contrast with the most recent two presidents:
George Bush knows nothing about the constitution except that he is adept at saying "original intent," which is a cliché but not guidance. At least he is not a lawyer.
But both Bill and Hillary Clinton are, and graduates of Yale Law School, no less. Yale has a magnificent tradition in teaching constitutional law and expanding its perimeters. I don't really know what kind of law Bill practiced, although he was adept at spinning petty law like a top. Hillary practiced penny ante law in Arkansas, although the stakes were usually big money.
Not so Barack Obama. His experience as a constitutional lawyer is a certificate of learning, which would be a real change in the presidency.
However petty Bill Clinton might have been in his own encounter with Article II, Section 4, according to the Arkansas tourism Web site, he did teach constitutional law at the University of Arkansas in the 1970s.
Wannabe Pundits
See if you can guess the source and topic of the article that includes this sarcastic aside:
Don't believe me? OK, Larry Craig is not gay. We're winning in Iraq. Global warming is a hoax. Housing prices are headed up.
It's from Dana Blankenhorn and Paula Rooney's Open Source blog on ZDNet--a technical site. The topic is the effort "to make Microsoft's OOXML, or Open XML, an international standard."
The Green Bomb
Bad news for actor Leonardo DiCaprio, as FoxNews.com's Roger Friedman reports:
His environmental documentary, "The 11th Hour," has been a total bust at the box office. After 18 days in release, the film has grossed only $417,913 from ticket sales. The 90-minute snore-fest is playing on 111 screens this week, but that number is likely to be reduced this Friday. The film will be sent to DVD heaven after that.
By comparison, Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim's similar but far more engaging "An Inconvenient Truth" had already made $3.5 million by its 18th day of release.
I hesitated to say before "11th Hour" actually opened how mind-numbingly dull it was for fear that I would ruin it for those interested in the subject of global warming. But at Cannes, when the film by Nadia Conners and Leila Conners Petersen was shown to journalists, nearly the entire room fell asleep.
But this is good news for the environment. Just think of all the carbon dioxide people aren't emitting by driving to the theater to see it! "An Inconvenient Truth" has a much bigger carbon footprint. Friedman guesses that this is DiCaprio's "last foray into the documentary world." Maybe there is hope for the planet.
'You Mean You Have to Push the Button More Than Once?'
"EU Questions Google Customers Over DoubleClick"--headline, Reuters, Sept. 6
News You Can Use
o "Scary Movies Cause Kids' Nightmares, Says Survey"--headline, Daily Telegraph (Sydney, Australia), Sept. 6
o "Mosquitoes Want Your Blood"--headline, (Madison) Wisconsin State Journal, Sept. 6
o "Two Republican Presidential Candidacies Offered New, Revived Life"--headline, FoxNews.com, Sept. 6
Bottom Stories of the Day
o "Belgium Building Zero-Emission Antarctic Station"--headline, Reuters, Sept. 5
o "Civil Rights Group Faults How Police Are Policed"--headline, New York Times, Sept. 6
o "Europeans Oppose Attack on Iran, Tire of Afghan War, Poll Says"--headline, Bloomberg, Sept. 6
o "Canada Continues Its Dominance"*--headline, Globe and Mail (Toronto), Sept. 6
* Of "junior hockey"!
Academentia Watch
Last week we noted a bizarre op-ed piece from Kathy Rudy, a professor of "women's studies" at Duke, who described herself as a supporter of animal rights but proceeded to defend erstwhile NFL player Michael Vick's involvement in illegal dogfighting on the ground that he is black.
Many readers wrote to ask us or to tell us that Rudy was one of the infamous "Duke 88," a group of Duke faculty members who signed an ad that listed quotes, purporting to come from Duke students, about the rape allegation against lacrosse players, which turned out to be a hoax. The original ad seems to have disappeared form the Web, but a copy is here.
What's more, according to this page, Rudy was not among the 89 Duke faculty members (which included some who had been among the 88 and some who hadn't) who signed a "clarifying statement" which said the ad had not been intended to prejudge the rape case--not a terribly believable assertion, but at least an implicit acknowledgment of error.
Blogger KC Johnson--co-author of "Until Proven Innocent," which is reviewed today by Abigail Thernstrom and is available from the OpinionJournal bookstore--has more background on Rudy, a tenured associate professor:
Upon first coming to Durham, Rudy recalled that she "moved quickly into the lesbian community because there was a growing sentiment in feminist discourse that lesbianism was the most legitimate way to act out our politics." Within this "progressive" neighborhood in west Durham, "Many of us thought that by avoiding men and building a parallel, alternative culture, we were changing the world . . . I managed to live most of my daily life avoiding men all together, and spent most of my social time reading, dreaming, planning, talking, and writing about the beauty of a world run only by women, . . . free of [men's] patronizing dominance." Rudy and her fellow radical feminists oriented their activities around "the ideas that women were superior and that a new world could be built on that superiority."
But problems soon emerged.
Durham's radical feminists were white and middle-class, but Rudy's social group had two "Black women." The duo "began to use race as a category of political analysis, when they declared that they--as Black lesbian women--were more oppressed than the rest of us." The two women exposed an uncomfortable truth: "If one identity-based oppression was bad, two or three or more was worse."
Their action, Rudy reminisced, challenged the founding principle of radical lesbians in Durham and elsewhere: "That we--as women--were oppressed, so much so that identification as the oppressor then seemed impossible. For us at that point, the equation was simple; men dominated and oppressed women . . . Complexifying this equation to include race meant identifying ourselves as white oppressors; it meant, therefore that our politics were now less absolute, we ourselves less pure." This development produced uncomfortable questions, such as "Could we stand to see ourselves as oppressors and still exist in such an ideologically pure community? Could we purge ourselves of racism by loving Black women but not Black men?"
They say America has the world's finest system of higher education. If that is true, there are scores of other systems--perhaps as many as 200--that are worse than the one that produced Kathy Rudy. This is going to give us nightmares for a long time.
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