From the WSJ Opinion Archives
Onward
Christian Martyrs
Islamic fanatics aren't the only ones embracing martyrdom. A USA Today report
on the visit of three far-left Democratic congressmen to Baghdad concludes with
this disturbing detail:
The congressmen traveled to Iraq with the Church Council of Greater Seattle. The organization is one of several American groups that have shuttled in and out of Baghdad, arguing that war should be avoided and the U.N. sanctions should be lifted. Twenty Americans plan to arrive in Baghdad by the end of October to stay through the winter, hoping that their presence here might discourage the U.S. military from bombing the capital, said Ramzi Kyzia, an American from Alexandria, Va., who is the spokesman for Voices in the Wilderness, an activist group opposed to Iraqi sanctions.
Kyzia said a Chicago-based group called Christian Peacemaker Teams was also recruiting volunteers to act as human shields in Iraq. The volunteers would place themselves between Iraqi buildings and U.S. forces, he said. "They're trying to recruit old people," Kyzia said, adding: "It's more comfortable to ask someone who's nearing the end of their lives to do this."
Religious fanatics trying to influence U.S. policy? Hey, where's the ACLU when you need it?
You
Don't Say--I
"Saddam Envoy: United States Preparing for War Against Iraq"--headline,
Jerusalem Post Web site, Oct. 2
Progress
in Congress
Lawmakers in Washington appear to be on the verge of approving a resolution
authorizing war in Iraq. "President Bush reached agreement Wednesday with
House leaders on a resolution giving him authority to oust Saddam Hussein,"
the Associated Press reports. The Senate is "still divided," but the
New
York Times notes that Democrats Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Evan Bayh
of Indiana have joined Republicans John McCain of Arizona and John Warner of
Virginia in introducing the House resolution.
Germany
Bends
There's progress on the international front as well. The Times of London reports
that "Germany edged closer to a U-turn on its policy towards Iraq yesterday
by making clear that new evidence of President Saddam Hussein's weapons plans
could dilute its resistance to a war." Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's government
is under pressure from business leaders, who fear a U.S. consumer boycott over
Schroeder's anti-American policies and statements.
In Canada, meanwhile, "the Liberal government has endorsed U.S. and British
demands for military action against Iraq if Saddam Hussein fails to comply with
UN weapons inspections ? and has indicated Canada could provide military support
for such action," the Toronto Globe
and Mail reports.
A
Slippery Argument
The New Republic's Peter Beinart does a nice job debunking the notion that a
prospective war in Iraq is "about oil":
If all the Bush administration wanted from Iraq were those six million daily barrels of crude--if all its talk about nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons was merely a smoke screen--why wouldn't the United States simply lift sanctions? Attacking Saddam, after all, entails huge financial costs, risks American lives, and could prompt civil war in precisely those parts of Iraq where oil companies want to drill. Lifting sanctions would far more easily produce the same result--since it is sanctions that have partially prevented Iraq from importing the equipment that it needs to boost oil production. Saddam has made it clear that he'd love to pump more oil--if the world would let him use the revenue to buy palaces and Scuds. In 1995, for instance, Baghdad announced that if sanctions were lifted it would enter into agreements with foreign oil companies aimed at boosting production to between six and seven million barrels per day--roughly the same amount analysts envision under a post-Saddam regime.
National Review Online's Jonah Goldberg shoots down more antiwar arguments, including "We helped Saddam in the 1980s," "The Arab street will be mad at us," and "We have to solve the Israel-Palestine problem first. His rebuttals are familiar enough, but it's handy to have them all in one place.
What
a Relief
The Arab News reports from Riyadh that "expatriates are not the target
of terrorist attacks, Intelligence Director Prince Nawaf said yesterday."
Nawaf's remarks came "a day after a German died in the latest of a series
of mystery blasts to hit Westerners."
Just
an Oversight
"Israeli Army Marksmen Overlook Arafat Compound," according to a Reuters
headline. That's surprising. The compound is pretty big and would be hard to
overlook, especially for someone with Israeli army training.
Stupidity Watch
"Many more people die from hunger than in Sept. 11," says Charlotte
Bunch, head of Rutgers University's Center for Women's Global Leadership
and a contributor to The
Nation. A report in the Daily Targum, a student newspaper, adds:
Sept. 11 has, in many ways, had a negative impact on women's rights. Although removal of the Taliban has furthered women's rights to some degree, Bunch said, she fears a backlash from the Taliban that would further restrict women's rights.
Paul Conrad, who since the death of Herblock is America's most consistently unfunny political cartoonist, had a strip the other day depicting President Bush as a sword-wielding Caesar, accompanied by this quote, which Conrad attributed to William Shakespeare:
Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. . . . And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.
Just one problem: As Snopes.com points out, the quote is phony. Barbra Streisand fell for the same hoax, but at least she's acknowledged her error. Meanwhile, a Reuters photo caption adds a bizarre new error: "Entertainer Barbra Streisand, shown in a file photo, has been caught out by an internet prankster, in quoting what she thought was Shakespeare but turned out to be a reporter called Matt Drudge."
Not
Above the Law
Yale Law School has decided to comply with the law. It's going to "allow
military recruiters to attend a law school career day," the Washington
Post reports, but it also says it will "seek ways to resist Pentagon pressure
for access to such events because the military violates the school's non-discrimination
policy." At issue, of course, is the "don't ask, don't tell"
policy on homosexuals in the military, which originated during the Clinton administration.
Eureka!
Have you ever wondered
why college professors are so much more liberal than the population as a whole?
It's very simple, explains Lawrence Evans in a letter to the Raleigh (N.C.)
News & Observer:
In seeking faculty, universities look for people who can analyze and discuss matters of some complexity, who are unafraid to challenge the wisdom of simple solutions, and who have a sense of social responsibility toward those who cannot buy influence. Such people tend to be put off by a political party dominated by those who believe dogmatically in the infallibility of the marketplace as a solution to all economic problems, or else in the infallibility of scripture as a guide to morality.
In short, universities want people of some depth, subtlety and intelligence. People like that usually vote for the Democrats.
It seems so obvious now!
Passing
the Torch
New Jersey Democrats have settled on a Senate candidate to replace Sen. Bob
Torricelli. Now all they need is a way around the law that binds them to Torricelli,
who won the primary and failed to withdraw ahead of the 51-day deadline for
naming a new candidate. The Dems' savior is 78-year-old former senator Frank
Lautenberg, and the party is asking the New Jersey Supreme Court to bend the
rules so Lautenberg can run. Even if they do so, it's not a given that voters
will eagerly back Lautenberg. New York's WNBC-TV
has an online poll--not the least bit scientific, to be sure--that asks: "Who
should replace Torricelli on the Democratic ticket?" Lautenberg leads the pack
with 5%--but the top answer is "no one" with 89%.
Blogger James Lileks has a witty analysis of the Democrats' antics:
Letting the courts allow a hand-picked candidate who did not run in the primary to replace a primary winner who screwed up his campaign does not strike me as, ahem, genuine democracy. It's playground logic: I call do-overs. Nor would this situation be acceptable and genuine simply because it allowed for a "spirited campaign" to follow. . . . If the government decided to have the most boring candidate shot in the streets so the other candidates could have a spirited campaign about his assassination, I wouldn't see this as an improvement.
And a site called The Internet Party adds another fascinating angle. Under the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law, which doesn't take effect until after next month's election, "issue ads" will be illegal less than 60 days before an election:
If [McCain-Feingold] were in effect today, the New Jersey Sierra Club couldn't inform voters about replacement candidate Frank Lautenberg's environmental platform. The National Taxpayers Union couldn't tell New Jersey voters about Lautenberg's record on tax legislation. And the state chamber of commerce would have to sit in silence about the new candidate's business record.
This means, TIP says, that "if a party is wary of special interests savaging its candidate, they can just send up a decoy. When the 60-day window closes, they'll be free to plug in the real candidate. He or she will then be protected by the advertising ban. Far-fetched? Just look at the maneuvering going on in Trenton today."
Gridiron
Quotas?
Professional sports are one of America's last redoubts of pure meritocracy.
In part this is because minorities have excelled in the most popular sports
out of proportion to their numbers in society at large, and in part it's because
sports depends on objective measures--games won, points scored, hits, yards,
baskets and such.
Now, though, the grievance industry is eyeing the National Football League. "A group headed by high-powered civil rights attorneys Johnnie Cochran and Cyrus Mehri" is threatening to hit the NFL with class-action discrimination lawsuits because of the relative paucity of black coaches. The group has put out a report, titled "Superior Performance, Inferior Opportunities," in which it argues, among other things, for what it calls a "Fair Competition Resolution," which "would reward one or more teams per year with a draft pick for engaging in noteworthy hiring practices that encourage diversity among management decision-makers."
Satan's
Teens
Students at California's San Mateo High School have formed a club called the
Satanic Thought Society. "Co-president of the club James Doolittle admits
he originally started the club with his friend Matt Heeney to 'rile things up
a bit,' " the San Mateo County Times reports. "But now that the
two juniors have studied the teachings of Anton LaVey, founder of the Church
of Satan, they say Satanism helps people to express themselves."
This news no doubt cheered the lord of the underworld, who suffered a setback in August when the Devils Lake, N.D., school board voted unanimously to drop the Satans as a mascot for the local high school. "It's hard to stand up and cheer for the Satans," Kellie Karlstad, a mother of three and the junior varsity girls basketball coach, told the Associated Press. "It's not an appropriate name for children."
Whois Peter Brimelow?
On his VDare.com Web site, nativist author Peter Brimelow has posted a response
to our brief
item last week in which we noted that Brimelow had accused us, in an article
in Pat Buchanan's new magazine, The American Conservative, of being responsible
for a series of murders. (The killer was an immigrant; we favor immigration.
Ipso facto.) "Taranto feels no need to refute, much less explain, my point,"
Brimelow writes. Indeed so. It would be absurd to engage in a debate over whether
a policy disagreement with Brimelow really is tantamount to murder.
On one point, however, we must set the record straight. Brimelow complains that we decided to "link to VDARE.COM's webhost, apparently because (very much to my surprise) it had posted my address and phone number." He implies that our aim was to encourage readers to harass Brimelow and his family. (He does not claim they have actually suffered any such harassment.)
Here's the real story: We linked to VDare.com's entry in the Whois database, a registry that lists the owners of U.S. domain names (ones ending with .com, .org, etc.). We did so in order to establish that it actually is Brimelow's site, since we were criticizing him in connection with something someone else had written that appeared there. VDare.com itself is somewhat coy about who is responsible for it, with this page describing the site as a "coalition" and an "editorial collective" but not identifying anyone as the editor or owner.
It appears Brimelow was unaware of the Whois database, which has been part of the Internet for many years, and that he was, quite understandably, unpleasantly surprised to learn that it contained personal information. In any case, he solved the problem before issuing his latest j'accuse. His address and phone number no longer appear in VDare's Whois entry, to which we link once again with our conscience clear.
You
Don't Say--II
"Alcohol Dependence May Hurt College Performance"--headline, Reuters,
Sept. 27
The
Case Against Self-Esteem
Self-esteem isn't all it's cracked up to be, according to a report in the New
York Times that looks at recent social-science research:
In an extensive review of studies, . . . Dr. Nicholas Emler, a social psychologist at the London School of Economics, found no clear link between low self-esteem and delinquency, violence against others, teenage smoking, drug use or racism, though a poor self-image was one of several factors contributing to self-destructive behaviors like suicide, eating disorders and teenage pregnancy.
High self-esteem, on the other hand, was positively correlated with racist attitudes, drunken driving and other risky behaviors, Dr. Emler found in his 2001 review. Though academic success or failure had some effect on self-esteem, students with high self-esteem were likely to explain away their failures with excuses, while those with low self-esteem discounted their successes as flukes.
Ananova.com reports on the case of two men and a woman who were arrested after allegedly having an orgy on a Long Island Rail Road train. Their lawyer, Ananova reports, "says they were helping road safety." The lawyer adds that his clients, in Ananova's words, "should be praised for taking the train instead of driving while drunk." Sounds like these folks have stratospheric self-esteem.
(Elizabeth Crowley helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Katrina Gilliam, Gadi Niram, Jerome Marcus, S.E. Brenner, Raghu Desikan, Richard Haisley, Mara Gold, Marie Bourgeois, Michael Botwin, Glenn Patterson, Tom Elia, Gregg Butler, Bruce Campbell, Rachel Lange, Boaz Bezborodko, Douglas Welsh, Elliot Ganz, Krista McGruder, Brian Sloane, Rich Nolan, Damian Bennett, Michael Morley, Kim Gigstead, Daniel Goldstein, Donald Walker, C.E. Dobkin, Michael Segal and Rick Schwalbach. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
Today on OpinionJournal:
- Michael Barone: What drove Robert Torricelli? Money, money, money.
- Claudia Rosett: Enron-style accounting at the U.N. Oil-for-Food Program.
- Pete du Pont: Defense isn't the only kind of security that matters this November.
