Best of the Web Today - January 11, 2005
By JAMES TARANTO
Dems in Bizarro World--I
From USA Today's Jill Lawrence, here is the most laughably partisan piece of reporting we've seen since the election:
Imagine a Democratic presidential candidate and his allies assailing the character of the Republican nominee in ads and speeches every day for eight months.
Having trouble? That's because Democrats generally don't have the stomach or the discipline to do it. Often they don't even effectively fight back when under attack themselves.
But with George W. Bush's second inauguration next week, Democrats are pondering their choices in a Feb. 12 election for party chairman and rethinking what might be called their character problem.
Democrats "as a group are uneasy" about attacking and defending on character, says Harold Ickes, a former Clinton aide who heads the Media Fund, a political ad organization. "But they damn well better get the stomach," he adds, because "we've seen way too many of our candidates taken down on issues of character."
It seems Jill Lawrence was in Bhutan all last year when the Democrats were busy calling President Bush a liar, a moron, a coward, a military deserter, a puppet of Dick Cheney and the Jews, and another Hitler. What are they going to say if they "get the stomach" to wage character attacks--that he's the original Hitler?
This is the sort of thing that drives conservatives crazy, but it actually illustrates why the liberal media are the Republicans' secret weapon. The Democrats are the victim of their own con game. They put out that most outrageous spin, which reporters like Lawrence dutifully regurgitate, and then Dems believe it because, hey, the "objective" media have reported it! It's as if Communist Party functionaries actually believed what was "reported" in the old Pravda.
Dems in Bizarro World--II
Fresh from his re-election victory, Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin "went looking for a warm place to golf" and ended up in an exotic land called Alabama. In case you haven't heard of Alabama, it is one of those "red states" that President Bush carried (by a margin of better than 25%). In an op-ed for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Feingold discusses what he found there.
Well, sort of. He doesn't recount any actual encounters with locals, except for the cashier at the Bates House of Turkey, a restaurant that sells Bush bumper stickers. ("We're Democrats," Mrs. Feingold tells the cashier, who thanks them for "not leaving like some people do when they see those stickers.")
Otherwise, Feingold's report from Alabama consists entirely of generalities. It seems Alabamans are really poor: The senator "heard repeatedly of the difficult struggles that so many working families are enduring in both urban and rural areas." And in considering why the state votes the way it does, Feingold detects what the Ayn Rand Institute calls "the ugly hand of altruism":
I can only be humbled by their sacrifice.
But because I am a lawmaker and a student of history, I also know who has been asking them to give so much.
And I can only wonder how many more generations of central Alabamians will say "yes" when the increasingly powerful Republican Party asks them to be concerned about homosexuality but not about the security of their own health, about abortion but not about the economic futures of their own children.
As my wife and I drove through Greenville that night, I thought how fundamentally unfair this all is in order to support an increasingly radical conservative movement.
Of course it is a familiar Democratic trope that red-state voters are impoverished, bigoted bumpkins who vote against their own economic interests because the GOP fools them into caring about trivial matters like homosexuality and abortion. A best-selling book, "What's the Matter With Kansas?," laid out the case last year.
In truth, the argument is so full of holes that a Green Bay Packers fan could wear it on his head. For one thing, there is at the very least a tension between the stereotype of the GOP as a party of impoverished dupes and the other Democratic stereotype of the GOP as the party of the rich.
It appears that the latter stereotype is closer to the truth. The 2004 exit polls found that John Kerry outpolled President Bush by 63% to 36% among voters making less than $15,000 a year and 57% to 42% among those making $15,000 to $30,000. Among those in the $30,000 to $50,000 range the two candidates ran nearly even (Kerry 50%, Bush 49%), and Bush led 56% to 43% among those making $50,000 a year or more.
So the Democrats actually are the party of the poor. The problem is that there aren't that many poor people in America, or if there are, they tend not to vote. Only 8% of the exit-poll participants were in the under $15,000 group, and only 45% made less than $50,000.
But for the sake of argument, let's assume that the economic portion of Feingold's analysis is correct--that lots of poor people vote against their own economic interests when they cast ballots for Republicans--or at least that he actually believes it. If Democrats care so much about the "downtrodden," and if the GOP is playing on their false consciousness by emphasizing things that don't matter like abortion and homosexuality, why don't the Democrats simply adopt pro-life and antigay positions, so that they can win office on their superior economic programs and actually do something for these fortuneless folks?
The question answers itself, doesn't it? Russ Feingold would never endorse, say, the Human Life Amendment or the Federal Marriage Amendment, because they are against his principles. Indeed, we're guessing he has enough integrity that he'd rather lose an election than change these positions.
In other words, when Feingold writes disparagingly of Alabama voters' concern about homosexuality and abortion, it isn't because he regards these as trivial matters. Rather, it is because he does not respect the views of those who disagree. The Journal Sentinel speculates that Feingold's Alabama trip may presage a 2008 presidential run. Given his condescending attitude toward red-state voters, Republicans can only hope so.
9/11 Denial
"Is it conceivable that Al Qaeda, as defined by President Bush as the center of a vast and well-organized international terrorist conspiracy, does not exist?" asks loopy Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer. We thought that question was answered on Sept. 11, 2001, but then there are still people who deny the Holocaust too.
Still, how does such a lunatic piece get published in a semirespectable paper like the Los Angeles Times? Well, consider that Scheer's editor is Michael Kinsley, who in a November 2003 Slate piece demanded to know why President Bush had changed his mind about "nation building":
One simple test of a change of mind is whether it is acknowledged and explained. In his eloquent speech this month, Bush made a gutsy reference to "sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East." This was taken as a near-explicit criticism of his own father, among others. But there is every reason to suppose that our current Bush also supported this approach for most of those 60 years, including his entire adult life until a few months ago when Iraq started going bad. What caused the scales to fall from his eyes?
Kinsley must have been in Bhutan with Jill Lawrence when the World Trade Center fell. Surely, though, somebody told him what had happened on Sept. 11--but we suppose he must've found it just too hard to believe. Not like monkeyfishing.
Terror = Peace?
Check out this passage from a USA Today piece on President Bush's response to Mahmoud Abbas's election victory:
Bush congratulated Abbas in a 10-minute telephone call. White House spokeman Scott McClellan said Bush said he envisioned "a day when he and president-elect Abbas and Israel's leaders could stand together and say, 'We have peace.' "
But Bush said nothing to indicate he was relenting in the demand he had made of Abbas' late predecessor: Stop terror attacks against Israel.
What's with that "but" in the second paragraph? Does USA Today think that terror attacks against Israel are compatible with "peace"?
Oh, and Homer nods: Fatah was founded not in 1965, as we said in an item yesterday, but in the late 1950s (various sources say either 1957, 1958 or 1959).
The Other 1% Are Complete Rubbish
The Washington Post's report on the investigation of CBS's fabricated-documents scandal includes this quote from CEO Leslie Moonves: "Ninety-nine percent of the stories we do are accurate and solid." Which we suppose would be an acceptable standard if the network told us in advance which 1 in 100 story was made up.
Meanwhile, disgraced former producer Mary Mapes (link in PDF) has weighed in with a statement in which she stands by the phony documents:
Much has been made about the fact that these documents are photocopies and therefore cannot be trusted, but decades of investigative reporting have relied on just such copies of memos, documents and notes. In vetting these documents, we did not have ink to analyze, original signatures to compare, or paper to date. We did have context and corroboration and believed, as many journalists have before and after our story, that authenticity is not limited to original documents. Photocopies are often a basis for verified stories. . . .
It is noteworthy the panel did not conclude that these documents are false. Indeed, in the end, all that the panel did conclude was that there were many red flags that counseled against going to air quickly.
Lucy Ramirez could not be reached for comment.
Senator No, No--and No?
President Bush has nominated Michael Chertoff, a judge on the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, to be secretary of homeland security. Here's a prediction: Sen. Hillary Clinton will vote against him. As we noted in May 2001 and June 2003, Mrs. Clinton cast the only "no" vote when Chertoff was nominated to the Justice Department and the appeals court, respectively. Chertoff is a former counsel to the Senate Whitewater Committee, and, as we've said repeatedly, Hillary's repeated votes against him are the lamest acts of political payback we've ever heard of.
Dowdifying the Constitution
It turns out the Anti-Defamation League's Abe Foxman isn't the only one to dowdify the First Amendment. This is from the American Civil Liberties Union's Web page on free speech (ellipsis in original):
It is probably no accident that freedom of speech is the first freedom mentioned in the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." The Constitution's framers believed that freedom of inquiry and liberty of expression were the hallmarks of a democratic society.
Not to slight the importance of free speech, which we happily exercise every day, but the ACLU has edited out freedom of religion, which comes ahead of speech.
Homelessness Rediscovery Watch
"If George W. Bush becomes president, the armies of the homeless, hundreds of thousands strong, will once again be used to illustrate the opposition's arguments about welfare, the economy, and taxation."--Mark Helprin, Oct. 31, 2000
"Many see the United States as the richest society in the world--a land of wealth and opportunity. But it also has a large and growing problem of homelessness. It is estimated that about 1% of the population experiences homelessness in any given year."--BBC Web site, Jan. 11, 2005
What Would Male and Female Strangers Do Without Psychologists at Harvard?
"Psychologists at Harvard found that they could increase the attraction between male and female strangers simply by encouraging them to play footsie as part of a lab experiment."--New York Times, Jan. 11 |
