From the WSJ Opinion Archives
Jayson
Blair Strikes Back
The erstwhile reporter at the center of the New York Times scandal has been
shopping around a book proposal, and Reuters seems surprised he's found no takers.
"Where is the literary feeding frenzy?" asks the wire service. "Publishers
were not exactly falling over themselves on Friday to sign up ex-reporter Jayson
Blair." Reuters throws out some theories to explain the book-biz balkiness--publishers
"might shy away from offending the Times"; no one outside New York
cares about what goes on at the Times.
Unmentioned is the most obvious reason no one wants to publish Blair's book: fear of a libel suit. The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz reports that Blair's book proposal finds him, among other things, "hurling unsubstantiated charges of racism at the paper and promising to reveal the Times's 'darkest secrets,' which he says, without offering evidence, involve drug parties and one editor's affair with an intern." Even under America's defense-friendly libel laws, you'd have to be nuts to publish such allegations by someone who has admitted to repeatedly lying in print. "Reckless disregard" is Jayson Blair's middle name.
Kurtz reports that Blair's working title is "Burning Down My Master's House"--which seems derivative of "Volunteer Slavery," Jill Nelson's petulant 1994 memoir of her days at the Washington Post. Kurtz, who says the proposal "was read to The Washington Post by a source not connected to Blair," reports that "Blair repeatedly accuses the Times of hostility to blacks--though he says being black also helped him--without providing specifics. He writes that he was 'working in a racist environment as a young, black recovering drug addict.' "
Given Blair's record, this stuff has to be taken with a grain of salt. But another Timesman, columnist Bob Herbert, has also been hurling unsubstantiated charges of racism. In a column that we noted last week, Herbert claims that antiblack discrimination is prevalent in the news industry, not excluding the New York Times. We're inclined to think this isn't true (though it probably was 30 years ago, when Herbert was Blair's age). But in a peculiar way, the credibility of Herbert's charge is bound up with the credibility of Blair's. For if indeed racism is common in the newsroom, as Herbert claims, it seems very likely that Blair would have felt its sting during his four years at the Times.
Herbert concludes his column with this advice to black reporters who encounter racism from their managers: "The correct response is to strike back--as hard and as often as it takes." This turns out to be exactly what Blair now claims to have been doing. "The more I got away with, the more I stretched, and it was not simple laziness," Kurtz quotes Blair as saying in his proposal. "Each one I got away with felt like a '[expletive] you' to an institution that I had long ago lost any love for."
Obviously Herbert does not condone the method by which Blair chose to strike back at his putatively racist bosses. But it's worth noting that "strike back" is atrocious advice to give any young professional, of whatever race, on dealing with his employers. And it's worth asking if Herbert's reckless counsel is representative of a broader problem. Are liberal institutions--the media, higher education, the Democratic Party--doing young black Americans a terrible disservice by encouraging them to cultivate a sense of racial grievance and an adversarial attitude that make it harder for them to get along in the work world?
Terrible
Unswift Shields--II
CNN's Mark Shields, who in October cited our
humble column as his "outrage of the week"--but only after inverting
our meaning--is at it again. Here's the jowly journo's "outrage" for
the week just past:
Where is House majority leader Tom DeLay when the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, is under threat from the United States government?
After Tom DeLay announced that the Republican House would allow the federal ban on assault weapons to expire in the United States next year, federal authorities in Baghdad, U.S. authorities, began confiscating automatic weapons from law-abiding Iraqi citizens.
Now, where is the conservative outrage? With Republicans in total control of Washington, can the right to own and operate an AK-47 to hunt down Bambi be abridged that easily?
Shields seems to have borrowed the idea from the left-wing TomPaine.com blog (the item is titled "Semi-Automatic Assumption"). But he repeats TomPaine's mistake, noted by Glenn Reynolds, of failing to distinguish between automatic weapons (which were illegal in the U.S. before the "assault weapon" ban) and semiautomatic ones. Besides, as Reynolds notes, "the Administration is treating Iraq like, well, a conquered nation. It's funny that this is how gun-control folks want to treat America."
'Something
of a Loose Cannon'
Time magazine has a fascinating story about Saddam Hussein's evil spawn, Uday
and Qusay, which opens with this horrifying account:
At his first outing [after an assassination attempt] in 1998, at the posh Jadriyah Equestrian Club, [Uday] used high-powered binoculars to survey the crowd of friends and family from a platform high above the guests. He saw something he liked, recalls his former aide Adib Shabaan, who helped arrange the party. Uday tightened the focus on a pretty 14-year-old girl in a bright yellow dress sitting with her father, a former provincial governor, her mother and her younger brother and sister.
Uday's bodyguards picked up the signal and walked through the darkened room, flicking cigarette lighters as they approached the girl's table. Uday, then 33, flipped on his too, confirming they had identified the right one. When the girl left the table for the powder room, Uday's bodyguards approached her with a choice, says Shabaan, who was Uday's business manager. She could ascend the platform now and congratulate Uday on his recovery, or she could call him on his private phone that night. Flustered, she apologized and said her parents would allow neither. One of the guards replied, "This is the chance of your life" and promised she would receive diamonds and a car. "All you have to do is go up there for 10 minutes," he urged. When she demurred again, the bodyguards pursued Uday's backup plan. They maneuvered the girl in the direction of the parking lot, picked her up and carried her to the backseat of Uday's car, covering her mouth to muffle her screams.
After three days the girl was returned to her home, with a new dress, a new watch and a large sum of cash. Her parents had her tested for rape; the result was positive. According to Shabaan's account, Uday heard she had been tested and sent aides to the clinic, where they warned doctors not to report a rape. Furious, the father demanded to see Saddam himself. Rebuffed, he kept complaining publicly about what Uday had done. After three months, the President's son had had enough. He sent two guards to the man to insist that he drop the matter. Uday had another demand: that the ex-governor bring his daughter and her 12-year-old sister to his next party. "Your daughters will be my girlfriends, or I'll wipe you off the face of the earth." The man complied, surrendering both girls.
The Associated Press describes Uday as "known for being cruel and something of a loose cannon." And Hitler is said to have been a tad overbearing.
None
Too Soon
In the wake of the May 12 terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia, apparently coordinated
by Iran-based al Qaeda leaders, Washington "has suspended once-promising
contacts with Iran and appears ready to embrace an aggressive policy of trying
to destabilize the Iranian government," the Washington Post reports.
Sen. Joe Biden, however, urges the administration to leave the ayatollahs alone: "I'd like to see us finish one job at a time," he tells Tim Russert on "Meet the Press." The continuing crises in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Biden's view, should preclude any action against the mad mullahs who run Iran. This, however, is the same sort of false dichotomy that proponents of regime continuation in Iraq asserted. (To be fair, that group does not include Biden, who voted in favor of the Iraq war resolution.) Iran has been stirring up trouble in both Afghanistan and Iraq, so a revolution in Tehran could only be helpful in stabilizing its neighbors.
Say
What?
"Iran Severs Contact With Iran in Fallout From Saudi Bombing"--headline,
Boston Globe, May 25
Al
Who?
"Syrian President Bashar Assad said in an interview published Sunday that
he doubts the existence of al-Qaida," the Associated Press reports from
Kuwait City, home of the Al-Anba newspaper, which published the interview. "Is
there really an entity called al Qaeda?" Assad is quoted as saying. "Was
it in Afghanistan? Does it exist now?"
So how does batty Bashar explain this January 2002 article from the Knight Ridder News Service?
Syria is cooperating with the Bush administration to fight Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, and it recently provided intelligence that saved the lives of American soldiers, the country's president, Bashar Assad, said.
In an interview at his presidential palace in Damascus, Assad complained that despite the valuable information it had provided to the United States, the Bush administration had not taken its name off the list of countries that America says sponsor terrorism.
Assad declined to provide specifics about the al Qaeda operation or the information that Syria purportedly gave the United States three months ago. But had the operation been successful, Assad said, it would have killed "many American soldiers."
You've
Come a Long Way, Baby
Who says Islam doesn't believe in equality of the sexes? The Jerusalem Post
reports that a leading Muslim scholar, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian
who serves as the dean of Islamic Studies at the University of Qatar, "has
issued a fatwa permitting women to carry out suicide attacks":
"Women's participation in the martyrdom [suicide] operations carried out in Palestine given the status of the land as an occupied territory, in addition to a lot of sacrilegious acts perpetrated by the Jews against the sanctuaries is one of the most praised acts of worship," Qaradawi said. . . .
"This obligation reaches the extent that a woman should go out for jihad even without the permission of her husband, and the son without the consent of his parents," he added.
According to his fatwa, the organizers of the suicide attacks "could benefit from some believing [in] women, as they may do what is impossible for men to do." He said Muslim women are allowed to violate Islamic teachings by traveling unaccompanied by a close male relative and without having to cover their heads for the sake of carrying out an attack.
"Concerning the issue of the hijab [veil], a woman can put on a hat or anything else to cover her hair," Qaradawi ruled. "When necessary, she may even take off her hijab in order to carry out the operation, for she is going to die in the cause of Allah and not to show off her beauty or uncover her hair."
Male suicide bombers are promised eternity in paradise with 72 virgins; the Post article doesn't say what women get.
The
Odd Couple
Yasser Arafat isn't just a terrorist, he's also as obnoxious a roommate as Felix
Unger, the New York Times magazine reports in a profile of Palestinian finance
minister Salam Fayyad:
During the siege [of Arafat's Ramalla headquarters], more than 400 men were sealed into one building. Fayyad shared a small room with Arafat, the interior minister, Hani al-Hassan, and Arafat's top aide, Nabil Aburdeineh. Each man took a corner and slept on a pad. The room had an air-conditioner, which had the double advantage of cooling things off and bringing some fresh air into the fetid atmosphere. But it turns out that Arafat gets cold when he sleeps. He pulls on a cap and burrows under blankets. Each evening, Fayyad and Aburdeineh would blast the air-conditioner, only to wake up sweating in the middle of the night because the Palestinian leader had stealthily retrieved the remote control and shut the air-conditioner off. After a couple of nights, the remote control disappeared, and after ransacking the room the other men concluded Arafat had taken to sleeping with it under his pillow.
Arafat won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.
The BBC's Wishful Thinking
"These may be local elections, but there is widespread anger in Spain at Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar's support for the war in Iraq."--Michael Voss, BBC, May 24
"Spain's ruling conservatives have held their ground in municipal elections--a poll seen as the first test of national sentiment since the government's controversial support for the US-led war on Iraq."--BBC, May 26
'It
Must Be Stopped'
In an interview with the far left radio show "Democracy Now!," New
York Times reporter Chris Hedges has this to say about students who heckled
him when he delivered a viciously anti-American commencement speech at Illinois's
Rockford College:
People chanted the kind of cliches and aphorisms and jingoes [sic] that are handed to you by the state. "God Bless America" or people were chanting "send him to France"--this kind of stuff and that kind of contagion leads ultimately to tyranny, it's very dangerous and it has to be stopped.
Ironically, AlterNet.org headlines the interview "The Silencing of Dissent on Graduation Day." And the students were rude to heckle him, but really, "it has to be stopped"? What does he propose doing, carting them all off to re-education camps? And does he really disapprove of "God Bless America"? Irving Berlin, you fascist!
French
Whines
In an interview with London's Guardian, rocker Neil Young engages in some Hedges-like
liberal illiberalism:
"The US is like a baby with a bomb," he barks, his eyes blazing with the famous stare. "The reaction to France that the administration allowed to happen is so immature. These people have their own opinion--they're French! They're not f---in' Americans, they're French! Vive la difference, hello?"
Uh, Neil, it wasn't the administration that allowed the anti-French reaction to happen. It was the First Amendment. ESPN reports that the French don't seem to have much of a sense of humor:
And after she won the NASDAQ-100 Open in April, Serena Williams--the reigning French Open champion--smiled mischievously, mustered a cartoonish French accent and said, "We want to make clothes. We don't want the war."
The backlash in France was immediate. A number of Paris boutiques removed clothing endorsed by Williams and a French firm canceled plans to design blouses with her.
Now, if the French don't want to do business with Serena, that's their business. But where are all the folks who were wetting their beds a few weeks ago over an "assault on democracy" because some people were boycotting the Dixie Chicks for being anti-American?
The New York Times reports on a street demonstration in Paris:
The scope of the protests [Sunday] surpassed the pension issue, bringing people into the streets with a long list of disparate gripes, not all of which were well articulated. Florence Teyssier, a university student from Rouen, grew flustered when asked what she was protesting, eventually pulling a flier from her knapsack to read several paragraphs about education reform.
"I'm not sure myself, but it's all here," she said, showing a reporter the piece of paper, which decried government plans that would allow universities greater freedom in setting curriculums and let them be more selective in admitting students.
Zee French, zey are so intellectual!
The
Fast Right-Wing Conspiracy
Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, chasing after erstwhile Clinton Treasury
man Roger
Altman, jumps aboard the latest liberal conspiracy bandwagon. Krugman thinks
it's "obvious" that President Bush has been cutting taxes because
he is "deliberately setting the country up for a fiscal crisis in which
popular social programs could be sharply cut." Altman calls it Bush's "underlying
'starve the government' ideology."
Well, heck. We're all in favor of cutting spending on social programs, especially popular ones (shared sacrifice and all that), but we'd have more faith that this is what Republicans plan to do if government spending weren't increasing while they control the White House and both houses of Congress. This "starve the government" stuff seems to be the latest in a series of Democratic delusions: the "stolen election," the "neocon conspiracy," "unilateral war in Iraq," "questioning John Kerry's patriotism," etc. The partisan left puts these crazy ideas forward with such regularity and intensity that it almost seems to arise from a medical condition of some sort.
Which, come to think of it, suggests that maybe starvation is the answer. After all, as Withals (quoted by the incomparable Cecil Adams) wrote in 1574, "Fasting is a great remedie of feuer."
What
Would We Do Without the National Weather Service?
"If you have low clouds and you drive into the mountains, it's like driving
into the clouds."--Josh Korotky of the National Weather Service's Pittsburgh
office, quoted by the Associated Press, May 23
Boy
Is This Guy Easy to Please
"Police Officer Thankful After Being Shot"--headline, Lincoln (Neb.)
Journal Star, May 25
You
Don't Say
"Shuttle Rescue Might or Might Not Have Been Successful"--headline,
Space.com, May 23
Creative
Sentencing
"Retired Pedophile Priest Gets 20 Years in Kentucky"--headline, Houston
Chronicle, May 27
Life Imitates ScrappleFace
"As he leaves the office of chairman of AOL Time Warner, Steve Case said he plans to take a few 'worthless items of sentimental value'--among them a Lucite paperweight from his first Internet convention, and the entire AOL division."--ScrappleFace.com, Jan. 13
"Stephen M. Case, mastermind of America Online's record-breaking acquisition of Time Warner, has begun to talk favorably of undoing the deal by spinning off AOL, according to two senior company officials who have spoken with him."--New York Times, May 27
The Mystery Is Solved!
"Hundreds of Brains Missing"--headline, Aftenposten (Norway), May 19
"Wine Tasting Takes Brains, Italian Study Finds"--headline, Reuters, May 27
Don't
Know Much About History
USA Today's DeWayne Wickham is, by his own description, "giddy." He
means it in the sense of "euphoric," but "dizzy" or "silly"
is more like it. What's got him excited is a new CNN/USA
Today/Gallup poll that finds, in Wickham's words, that "Bill Clinton
now ranks as this nation's third best chief executive."
Actually, this isn't what the poll shows. Rather, it shows that Clinton ranks third--in a tie with George W. Bush--among presidents most often cited when people were asked who was "the greatest" president in American history. In first place is Lincoln, with 15%, followed by JFK with 13%, then Clinton and Bush at 11%.
Now pardon us, but only an idiot could possibly say that Bill Clinton was America's greatest president. One could defend the idea that he was a good president, a very good president, the best recent president, a better president than Bush, etc. But the greatest president? Greater than Washington, Lincoln or FDR? Get real.
This is not a partisan point. Even if you think President Bush has the potential for greatness, it makes equally little sense to describe him as the greatest president in history. For crying out loud, the man still has 5 1/2 years left to serve. It's much too early to give him anything but the most preliminary of assessments.
The only thing this survey shows--as we noted the last time Gallup issued such a survey--is that a great many Americans are woefully ignorant of history. A majority of those polled, 51%, picked JFK or a subsequent president. The first 34 presidents combined got 42% or slightly less. (Six percent had no opinion and 1% said "none.")
Compare this with surveys of historians by The Wall Street Journal and Federalist Society, C-Span and Siena College. The top two positions in all of these surveys belong to Washington, Lincoln or FDR, the three presidents ranked as "great" in the WSJ/Federalist survey. (Siena deviates in that Teddy Roosevelt edges out Washington for third place.) In the Gallup poll, however, the three great presidents receive only 31% altogether.
The WSJ/Federalist survey selected historians to mirror the political composition of the country as a whole, rather than of the community of historians. Among recent (post-1960) presidents, only one, Reagan, ranks as "near great," and two more, LBJ and JFK, rank as "above average." (The survey was conducted in 2000, so George W. Bush obviously was not included.) The Gallup poll, then, is largely a measure of contemporary political passions, with 41% of Republicans choosing either Reagan or Bush fils, and 46% of Democrats picking either JFK or Clinton.
Democrats turn out to be somewhat more ignorant than Republicans or independents. Only 26% of Dems, vs. 32% of Republicans and 35% of independents, chose one of the three "great" presidents as the greatest. (Including the "near-greats" would skew the results in favor of Republicans, since Reagan is in that category.) Clinton is named "greatest" by far more young and uneducated poll subjects, while older and better-educated ones are vastly more apt to name Lincoln or FDR.
Clinton's 11% is up from 5% in the 2000 survey, which Wickham erroneously says was "two years ago." If these poll results are representative, 6% of Americans have in the past three years come around to the view that Bill Clinton was the greatest president in American history. Wickham calls this evidence that "the passage of time . . . puts some things into proper perspective." We'd call it reason to despair of the quality of American education.
(Elizabeth Crowley helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to John Lott, Charis Warchal, Barak Moore, Judie Amsel, Raghu Desikan, Robert LeChevalier, Michael Segal, Natalie Cohen, Steve Kirstein, Yitzchak Dorfman, Mikael Nussdorf, Evan Wagshul, Reuven Weiser, Mara Gold, Gordon Kaplan, Elizabeth Herman, Monty Krieger, C.E. Dobkin, S.E. Brenner, Mark Morgan, William Katz, Rosanne Klass, Ricahrd French, Steven Platzer, Lawrence Henry, Chris Hayes, Rick Drake, Alfred Pettinger, James Ogletree, Aaron Rosenbaum, Buddy Smith, Michael Ryan and Brian Pleshek. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
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- Steven Lagerfeld: Who's more clueless, college students or their professors?
