Invidious Comparison
By JAMES TARANTO
There seems to be an effort afoot to smear John McCain by likening him to John Kerry, the haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat who by the way served in Vietnam. This is from MSNBC.com's First Read blog:
The comparisons between McCain's '08 bid and Kerry's in '04 have been unmistakable: Both men, early on, were their party's overwhelming favorites to win the nomination; then they encountered trouble and got overshadowed by other candidates; and then--almost out of nowhere--they locked up the nomination. Now, as McCain today embarks on his "Service to America" tour across the country, there's another comparison between the two men: the emphasis of their military experience. . . .
But biography isn't everything: McCain's military service--including his five years as a POW in Vietnam--is without a doubt one of the central narratives of his life and his political career. It is also something that clearly distinguishes him from both Obama and [Mrs.] Clinton. But as Bill Kristol writes in today's New York Times, you can't win presidential on biography alone. "If voters had simply looked at the biographies of the major-party candidates, they would have chosen George H.W. Bush in 1992, Bob Dole in 1996, Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004. Instead, they rejected four veterans who served in wartime (and who also had considerable experience in public life) for Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who had lesser résumés, both civilian and military."
We agree with Kristol: McCain's service in Vietnam is far from sufficient reason to elect him president. But Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean went further, issuing a statement disparaging McCain:
While we honor McCain's military service, the fact is Americans want a real leader who offers real solutions, not a blatant opportunist who doesn't understand the economy and is promising to keep our troops in Iraq for 100 years.
ABC's Jake Tapper notes that Dean sang quite a different tune four years ago:
"The real issue is this," Dean said in March 2004, when endorsing formal rival Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., "Who would you rather have in charge of the defense of the United States of America, a group of people who never served a day overseas in their life, or a guy who served his country honorably and has three Purple Hearts and a Silver Star on the battlefields of Vietnam?"
It almost seems unsporting to call attention to this inconsistency. After all, does anyone think Dean, who himself never joined the service, really believed what he was saying about the importance of military experience back then? Then again, when he and many other Democrats made this argument on Kerry's behalf, they insulted the voters' intelligence. We think they owe the voters an apology.
The description "blatant opportunist" really did fit Kerry in 2004. When he returned from Vietnam, he slandered his fellow veterans as vicious murderers and rapists. Decades later, when he thought it would be to his political advantage, he tried to hype himself as a hero, and then slandered the veterans who called attention to this inconsistency.
By contrast, so far as we know, McCain is uncomplicatedly a war hero, and being a war hero is certainly a point in his favor. Still, we hope he will not follow Kerry's lead and base his whole campaign on his service to the country 40 years ago. We suspect he knows better. And if John McCain opens his convention speech by saluting and saying "reporting for duty," we'll eat our hat.
We have the hat to this day. We have the hat.
Obama's Pre-Kerry-ous Position
We would argue that the 2008 candidate who most resembles John Kerry is Barack Obama. Just as Kerry presented himself as a war hero when the reality turned out to be more, shall we say, nuanced, so Obama's claims of being a unifier and a "postracial" candidate have fallen apart with the revelation that his "spiritual mentor" is an anti-American and antiwhite reactionary.
Someone calling himself "Universal," posting on MyDD.com--an Angry Left site, mind you, not a Republican one--has put together an anti-Obama ad that juxtaposes footage from the attack on the World Trade Center with clips of Jeremiah Wright saying "God damn America," "chickens coming home to roost" and other greatest hits, along with Obama's wife, Michelle, declaring that she has never before been proud of America, and Obama himself announcing his plans to slash defense programs.
The video, too long at almost five minutes, is amateurish but powerful. Again, its author is a Democrat, who means to warn his party of the perils of nominating Obama:
If we choose Obama as our nominee, we are locked-in to this narrative. There is no going back, no bogus NBC polls to save the day. No Anderson Cooper softball interviews or phony charges of racism that will rescue us.
The opponent doesn't care. All the thoughtfulness and restraint of a Democratic adversary will be gone.
We are on the precipice of electoral disaster. It is our party's leaders' RESPONSIBILITY to give us a chance to compete in November.
Will the Demcorats listen? We doubt it. The other day we got an email from a friend of ours, a left-wing intellectual, who professes to believe that "God damn America" is a patriotic sentiment and who argues that criticism of Wright is racist because it doesn't make allowances for the idiom of the black church. Echoing that latter argument, in an interview with the Chicago Tribune, is a respected scholar of religion:
Wright "goes beyond the bounds. That's why it's so hard to translate and why excerpts don't do well," said Rev. Martin Marty, a retired professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School. "In today's world, where you can debate these things instead of blast away like the prophets did, it's sort of an alien language for most people."
It reminds us of that scene in "Airplane!" in which the old lady says, "Oh Stewardess! I speak jive!" But Wright is not speaking a foreign tongue or some impenetrable slang. "God damn America" is plain English. The problem for Obama is that the words of his spiritual mentor are easy, not hard, to understand.
Are his supporters really going to call American voters racist for finding profane verbal assaults on their own country offensive? Good luck trying to win an election that way.
A Case of Mistaken Identity
"One of the things you heard a lot from Obama supporters over the last couple of weeks was the rueful observation that the Jeremiah Wright controversy would at least greatly reduce the whisper-campaign-fed perception that he's a Muslim," writes the delightfully named Ed Kilgore on the blog The Democratic Strategist. Kilgore quotes Pew poll results that suggest it hasn't happened:
There is little evidence that the recent news about Obama's affiliation with the United Church of Christ has dispelled the impression that he is Muslim. While voters who heard "a lot" about Reverend Wright's controversial sermons are more likely than those who have not to correctly identify Obama as a Christian, they are not substantially less likely to still believe that he is Muslim. Nearly one-in-ten (9%) of those who heard a lot about Wright still believe that Obama is Muslim.
To put this in perspective, though, let's look at a column by the New York Times's Nicholas Kristof:
Ten days ago, I noted the reckless assertion of Barack Obama's former pastor that the United States government had deliberately engineered AIDS to kill blacks, but I tried to put it in context by citing a poll showing that 30 percent of African-Americans believe such a plot is at least plausible.
My point was that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is not the far-out fringe figure that many whites assume.
To cite this as an excuse for Wright is laughable. If views like this are prevalent in the black community, surely men like Wright, who use their leadership positions to promulgate them, deserve a large share of the blame.
Somewhat more persuasive, though, is Kristof's effort to diminish the significance of blacks' believing such nonsense by pointing out that substantial numbers of Americans of all races believe other nonsense.
According to Kristof, 36% of all Americans believe "that federal officials assisted in the attacks on the twin towers or knowingly let them happen so that the U.S. could go to war in the Middle East." Between 30% and 40% of Americans believe in flying saucers and in evolution. One in five thinks that "the sun orbits the Earth." (It would be interesting to know how many Americans, not just blacks, believe the AIDS theory.)
By this standard, if 1 in 10 Americans mistakenly think Obama is a Muslim, this is a topic on which people are unusually well-informed.
Moreover, does it really make sense to expect that the revelations about Wright would dispel the notion that Obama is Muslim? Consider what we've learned over the past few weeks about Obama's "spiritual mentor": He has a strong antipathy toward America and Israel. He purveys wild conspiracy theories about the American government. He described the 9/11 attacks as "America's chickens coming home to roost." He has bestowed an award on Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of, uh, Islam, and traveled with Farrakhan to visit Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi. He has given space in his newsletter to Hamas, an Islamist terror group.
True, Wright and Obama believe that Jesus is the Messiah rather than that Muhammad is God's final prophet. But this seems a minor point of doctrine compared with the litany we've just rehearsed. None of the items in that litany are inherent to Islam, of course, but all are consistent with the form of Islam with which America finds itself in conflict--a "perversion of a great religion," as some have said. If 90% of Americans can keep track of which religion is being perverted, that's pretty impressive.
Accountability Journalism
This is the lead paragraph of an Associated Press dispatch on John McCain's campaign:
He robustly backs the unpopular Iraq war. The U.S. economy is in a tailspin under the stewardship of President Bush, a fellow Republican whose favorable ratings with Americans stands at 30% or lower. His stance on some hot-button American issues like immigration rankle his party's conservative base.
Really, "the U.S. economy is in a tailspin"? Is that a fact?
Then there's this, from a dispatch by the AP's Adam Geller titled "Where Should Conversation on Race Start?":
We live by a Constitution that began, "We the People," but declared black slaves worth only three-fifths as much as whites.
Not only is this editorializing, it is historically obtuse. The Constitution's three-fifths provision, which applied to the decennial census, was not an evaluation of the "worth" of enslaved blacks. It was a compromise between representatives of slave states, who wanted to count slaves as full persons, and those from free states, who didn't want to count slaves at all.
This obviously was not because slavers had a greater appreciation for the humanity of slaves. It was because they wanted to increase their representation in Congress by using slaves to inflate their states' official populations. Had they prevailed, it would have been even harder than it was to abolish slavery.
Preaching to the Unconverted
The Washington Post reports on a peril facing elderly Americans:
In February, traditional analog [television] broadcasts will be shut off so the airwaves can be used for wireless phone services. And the transition to digital-only television--the biggest change for the industry since color TV--could leave some people in the dark. . . .
Many of the older TVs belong to seniors and low-income individuals--populations that are typically harder to reach to educate about technical change. Yet these groups are also the people who most rely on their TVs for critical information such as news reports and public-service alerts. In nursing homes and retirement communities, where many sets need antennas to pick up signals, TVs could flicker out. . . .
Navigating these complexities hits the elderly harder because they're least likely to own a digital TV, according to recent surveys by Centris and Consumers Union. They also have less access to the Internet, which is a major source of information about the transition, said Joel Kelsey, policy analyst for Consumers Union.
Here's a crazy idea: Why not educate people about the change using television rather than the Internet?
Since She Can't Be a Father, This Is True by Definition
"Chelsea Says Hillary Would Be a 'Better' President Than Father"--headline, Breitbart.tv, March 28
Didn't She Die in 1950?
"Second Female Senator Endorses Obama"--headline, Associated Press, March 31
Comfort Food
"Israel Tells Rice Will Ease Some West Bank Restrictions"--headline, Reuters, March 30
At Least It's Not a Kangaroo Court
"Turkey Court Considers Ruling Party Ban"--headline, Associated Press, March 31
Help Wanted
"Sahuarita Cops Seeking Man Posing as a Police Officer"--headline, Arizona Daily Star (Tucson), March 29
Breaking News From 1860
"Abraham Lincoln Wins Title"--headline, Times Union (Albany, N.Y.), March 31
News You Can Use
• "Your Delegate May Not Be Registered to Vote"--headline, Seattle Weekly, March 26
• " 'If You're Wearing Lingerie That Makes You Feel Glamorous, You're Halfway There to Turning Heads' "--headline, Liverpool (England) Echo, March 29
• "Mobiles More Dangerous Than Fags"--headline, ZeeNews.com (India), March 30
Bottom Stories of the Day
• "Houston Expected to Avoid Severe Weather Today"--headline, Houston Chronicle, March 31
• "NewsTalk 1160 to Relaunch as NewsTalk 1160"--headline, Atlanta Business Chronicle, March 31
• "Seagull Returns to Duluth Looking for Doughnut"--headline, WCCO-TV Web site (Minneapolis), March 28
• "Swan Reunited With Beloved Paddleboat"--headline, Associated Press, March 28
• "Clinton, Obama Supporters Wrangle Over Delegates"--headline, Los Angeles Times, March 30
Isn't It Romantic?
Mathematician David Gale is dead at 86, the New York Times reports:
He was widely recognized for work on the so-called stable marriage algorithm, a concept he developed in the 1960s with the economist and mathematician Lloyd S. Shapley.
The problem begins with the assumption that equal numbers of men and women are in search of potential partners. Is it possible to pair the individuals in such a way that all achieve a satisfactory match? The solution developed by Dr. Shapley and Dr. Gale was to have each participant rank the members of the other sex in terms of desirability. The researchers then developed an algorithm that directed each participant to his or her next choice of partner, if rejected by the first or second choices.
The result was that everyone would be matched in a "stable" pairing, a term meant to suggest that no two members of the opposite sex would rather marry each other than the ultimate partner provided by the algorithm.
The Times also reports that "Dr. Gale's marriage to Julie Skeby ended in divorce in 1974" and that "he is survived by his companion, Sandra M. Gilbert," whom he apparently never wed.
Apparently there were a few bugs in the program. |
