From the WSJ Opinion Archives

by JAMES TARANTO
Friday, October 10, 2003 4:15 P.M. EDT

A Noble Nobel
The announcement each year of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate provides a reminder that it is a moral error to view peace as an end in itself. Sometimes the award goes to dictators or thugs (Le Duc Tho in 1973, Yasser Arafat in 1994) simply for making promises of peace. Last year, when it went to Jimmy Carter, some members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee said they meant it as a rebuke to President Bush's plan for the liberation of Iraq. They found intolerable the prospect of America waging war on Saddam Hussein, even though the alternative was to allow Saddam to continue waging war on his own people and threatening war against his neighbors.

Sometimes, though, the Nobel Peace Prize goes to someone who deserves it--someone who uses nonviolent means in pursuit of worthy ends. Laureates in this class include the Martin Luther King (1964), Andrei Sakharov (1975), Lech Walesa (1983) and the Dalai Lama (1989). Happily, this year's laureate, Iranian human-rights activist Shirin Ebadi, falls into this category.

Ebadi was her country's first female judge, but she was forced to step down after mad mullahs seized power in 1979. "She has since been an activist for democracy and the rights of refugees, women and children," reports the Associated Press. "As an attorney, she represented families of writers and intellectuals killed in 1999 and 2000, and worked to expose conspirators behind an attack by pro-clergy assailants on students at Tehran University in 1999." She spent three weeks behind bars after a 2000 arrest and "was banned from working as lawyer for five years. It was unclear whether the ban was still in effect."

Ebadi's Nobel citation cites her progressive view of Islam:

Ebadi is a conscious Moslem. She sees no conflict between Islam and fundamental human rights. It is important to her that the dialogue between the different cultures and religions of the world should take as its point of departure their shared values. It is a pleasure for the Norwegian Nobel Committee to award the Peace Prize to a woman who is part of the Moslem world, and of whom that world can be proud - along with all who fight for human rights wherever they live.

The citation adds: "During recent decades, democracy and human rights have advanced in various parts of the world. By its awards of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has attempted to speed up this process." By its liberation of Iraq, the U.S. has attempted precisely the same thing. President Bush will never win a Nobel Peace Prize, but it's nice to see the Norwegians joining him on the right side of history.

The Cognitive Elite
It's been nine years since Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein published "The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life," in which they argued that American society has become stratified along lines of intelligence, producing a "cognitive elite" consisting of people with high IQs who enjoy levels of wealth and power far disproportionate to their numbers. (The book was hugely controversial because of its section on the radioactive subject of racial disparities in IQ scores, but the cognitive-elite argument did not depend on the race section.)

The emergence of a cognitive elite may be inevitable in a knowledge-based economy, but it is a development Murray and Herrnstein viewed with considerable concern. What's fascinating is that liberals, who denounced Murray and Herrnstein over the racial aspect of their book, seem to view rule by the cognitive elite as the natural order of things. And of course they think they are the cognitive elite. We saw this in Jonathan Chait's Bush-hating cover story last month in The New Republic (which was, but is no longer, available online), in which Chait opined that the "striving, educated elite" views the president, because of his success despite his "dullness," as "an affront to the values of the liberal meritocracy." (In 1994 TNR devoted an entire issue to a series of essays on "The Bell Curve"; views ranged from harsh criticism to furious denunciation.)

The same phenomenon is evident in the reaction to Arnold Schwarzenegger's election as governor of California. The Oakland Tribune reports that state Sen. John Vasconcellos, a San Jose Democrat, has called the governor-elect "a boob" and is threatening to leave office on the grounds that he's too good for Californians: "If people want this actor to govern . . . they don't need or deserve me."

Sacramento Bee blogger Dan Weintraub has an interview with another Democratic state senator, Sheila Kuehl of Santa Monica, who opines that it's up to the Senate "to save the state." When Weintraub asks "from what?" Kuehl replies: "From ignorance. This guy has no idea how to run a state." She tells Weintraub she may skip the governor's State of the State speech, "because frankly I don't think there is going to be a lot of content that anyone's interested in. What's this guy got to say to us about the state of the state? Nothing."

And it's not just elected officials. The San Francisco Chronicle hits the streets of the Bay Area, where voters favored keeping Gray Davis in office, and manages to find one Sydney Webster of Oakland, a self-described "hair-color diva," who opines that Bay Area residents are simply "smarter" than people elsewhere in the state.

There's no reason to think that liberals actually are smarter than conservatives; there is plenty of brainpower on the political right. And surely Bush's and Schwarzenegger's detractors are mistaken when they characterize them as dull. The president, after all, is a graduate of both Yale and Harvard, and the governor-elect is a self-made immigrant businessman. It is possible for very intelligent people not to be snobs about it, not to adopt the pose of an "intellectual," and that would seem to describe both Bush and Schwarzenegger.

Some liberals also tend to overestimate their own intelligence. Consider this post from the Angry Left Web site DemocraticUnderground.com:

I would dare to assume that most of us here are in the upper 1%-20% of the population intelligence-wise. We must come to the realization that the majority of the population is in the lower 80% to 99% percent of the bell-curve. WE are not the norm. The Republicans understand that the average American is not very bright. They cater and pander to the masses. The Democratic Party tries to appeal to the population about "issues" that these people just don't understand.

If it comes as a revelation to the Democratic Undergrounders that 20% is less than a majority, they're not exactly rocket scientists, are they?

'We Can Return a Little Meaning to Those Words'
The Austin American-Statesman features an op-ed by Sgt. Nathan Todd, an Army reservist who served in the Balkans:

After I returned from Bosnia, I visited the "museum" at Dachau. I saw the rebuilt barracks and new barbed wire, the meticulously restored crematoria and killing grounds. I knelt there in a field that had been used to dump the ashes of the victims of the Holocaust, and lit a candle for the souls who suffered there. I cried and prayed there, remembering what had been done, and thought upon the words "never again." Somehow the thought of it made me cry more, because I couldn't stop thinking about how long it took us to decide to stop the madness in Bosnia. How no one even tried to stop the killings in Cambodia, Kurdish Iraq and the Sudan. How we walked away from Somalia after the tragic sacrifice of American soldiers fighting to build a better world. It occurred to me how much we have forgotten and how empty those brave words had become.

We cannot save the world by ourselves. We cannot stop all the genocides and massacres. We cannot make sure that "never again" becomes a fulfilled promise rather than a hope. But we can return a little meaning to those words, stop some killings and end some suffering. I hope we do, and I would be proud to serve again in Iraq to do so.

This ought to be required reading for those who, for political or ideological purposes, seek to disparage America's moral triumph in liberating Iraq.

Maybe Life Doesn't Imitate the Onion
"The collective sense of outrage, helplessness, and desperation felt by Americans is beyond comprehension. And it will be years before the full ramifications of the events of Sept. 11 become clear. But one thing is clear: No Austrian bodybuilder, gripping Uzis and striding shirtless through the debris, will save us and make it all better. Shocked and speechless, we are all still waiting for the end credits to roll. They aren't going to."--the Onion, Sept. 26, 2001

Yawn, a Debate
Yeah, we sat through last night's Democratic debate, but somehow all the excitement is gone now that Bob Graham has dropped out of the race. Watching Graham was like watching a high-wire act; despite his perfectly balanced persona, you knew that at any minute he could stumble into saying something totally insane.

Still, there were some highlights. John Kerry, the haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat, who by the way served in Vietnam, managed to cite his Vietnam service in the course of a rare quintuple pander (to two ethnic groups and three states):

Can I say that when I was serving in Vietnam on a small boat, the one thing I learned was nobody asked you where you came from. Nobody worried about your background. You fought together, you lived together and you bled together.

And I came back here to a country where I saw a whole bunch of people who'd served in Vietnam discriminated against, a lot of them from Arizona, a lot of them from New Mexico, Southern California, because Latinos and African-Americans I saw were drafted and on the front lines in far greater numbers than my friends from Yale or other people.

Way to go, Senator. Dick Gephardt, meanwhile, seemed to be losing his mind. Here's what he had to say about Iraq:

[The president] keeps saying we've got 30 countries helping us. Yes, Togo sent one soldier. That isn't what we need. We need France, Germany, Russia. There's only three countries in the world that can give us both the financial and the military help that we need.

Only three countries? That's rather insulting to Britain and Australia, is it not?

National Review's Byron York nicely sums up another Gephardt blooper. A woman in the audience who owns a restaurant asked what Gephardt would do to ease the tax burden on small businesses. Gephardt replied that he would raise their taxes by repealing all the Bush tax cuts, then promised that his health-care plan would cover 60% of the cost of providing insurance to her employees. "The problem was, almost anybody watching could guess that Bobby C's Lounge and Grille, like many small businesses, probably didn't have a full-scale employee health-care plan," York writes. "Even John Kerry could figure that one out." Ouch!

Wesley Clark provided more evidence that he's not ready for prime time. The Washington Post describes how he responded when opponents faulted him for flip-flopping on Iraq:

Said Clark: "I think it's really embarrassing that a group of candidates up here are working on changing the leadership in this country and can't get their own story straight." He noted that his position has been "very, very clear" throughout the debate over going to war.

"I would never have voted for war," he said. "The war was an unnecessary war, it was an elective war, and it's been a huge strategic mistake for this country."

But Clark was attacked because on the day after he announced his candidacy he told reporters that he "probably" would have voted for the resolution. The next day, he reversed himself and said he would not have supported it.

With Clark's campaign cracking up, DraftClark.com has transformed itself from a grass-roots movement for the general into a bulletin board for complaints about him. The latest entry begins: "The joint campaign appearances have not been Clark's strongest forum."

Death Penalty Day
One of the few serious "hate crimes" to occur in the aftermath of Sept. 11 was the murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh, in Mesa, Ariz. Yesterday a jury sentenced the killer, Frank Roque, to death for his crime. "The jury brought justice back to our family," Lakhwinder Singh Sodhi, the victim's brother, tells Reuters. "They brought the truth in front of the whole world and showed that we are all Americans."

United Press International notes that today is "World Day Against the Death Penalty," on which "the European Union will use the occasion to stress its outright opposition to the death penalty and urge countries that still believe in capital punishment to abolish what it considers a medieval practice."

Homer Nods
In an item yesterday (since corrected), we misstated Cpl. Lee Strange's military unit. The article we were quoting described him as being with the "1st Battalion, 4th Marine infantry," which we compressed into the "First Infantry," which of course is actually an Army unit. A Marine spokesman tells us the correct description is the First Battalion of the Fourth Regiment.

Blogger Ed Cone reports that in another item, we misinterpreted a statement in an article in The Hill newspaper that Howard Dean is "paying 'bloggers' or professional Internet surfers to keep the enthusiasm up on his website":

I also asked Alex Bolton, the staff writer at The Hill who wrote the article, if he meant to imply that any blogger other than those appearing on the Dean campaign weblog is getting paid by the campaign. "No," said Bolton. "I meant people contributing to Dean's own site."

A Palestinian Plaything
This paragraph appears at the bottom of an Associated Press dispatch about Palestinian Authority politics:

In the West Bank town of Nablus on Thursday, one person was killed in an explosion in the courtyard of the hospital. Palestinian security sources said the man apparently was playing with an anti-tank missile when it exploded.

Playing with an antitank missile? Wow, what fun!

Our Friends The New Republic
"The New Republic magazine is coming under attack for co-sponsoring a recent forum with Saudi Arabia and allegedly agreeing to the kingdom's demand that it withdraw its invitation to a leading critic of Riyadh," reports the Forward, a New York-based Jewish weekly. "Author Stephen Schwartz told the Forward that he was removed from the panel at the behest of Saudi Arabia, which co-sponsored the October 2 panel discussion on the kingdom's political future and has advertised in the magazine."

Dueling Studies
We heard from Peter Arcidiacono, one of the co-authors of the study titled "The Black Quarterback Effect," which we cited in yesterday's item about Rush Limbaugh. Arcidiacono tells us we overstated the case when we said the study had been "suppressed" by being removed from co-author Jacob Vigdor's Web page. According to Arcidiacono, Nielsen Media Research, whose data were used in the study, required the authors to sign a contract in which they promised not to post the study on the Web, but they are seeking to publish it in an academic forum. Arcidiacono says he will e-mail a copy of the study, retitled "Do People Value Racial Diversity? Evidence From Nielsen Ratings," to anyone who asks; more information is available on his Web page.

The Miami Herald reports on another study that suggests, in the Herald's words, that "Rush Limbaugh is full of hot air." David Niven of Florida Atlantic University says he surveyed 10,000 articles in 25 newspapers and "found that the seven black National Football League starting quarterbacks who played enough during the 2002 season to be rated were criticized in 12.1 percent of the stories written about them and praised in 9.2 percent of the stories." White quarterbacks, in contrast, were criticized in 11.7% of the stories and praised in 9.1%, "not a statistically significant difference."

Who Knew?
"Study: Broken Heart May Cause Brain Distress"--headline, FoxNews.com, Oct. 9

What Would We Do Without Experts?
"Experts Question Theory That Tiger Trying to Help"--headline, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Oct. 9

Not Too Brite--CXVI
"A Scottish man obsessed with vampires has been jailed for life after killing his best friend, drinking his blood and eating part of his skull," Reuters reports from London.

Oddly Enough!

She Has Plenty to Be Modest About
"Near-Nude Britney Shuns Sexy Image"--headline, Associated Press, Oct. 9

So Does He
Miami police nabbed alleged bank robber Daniel Gallagher on Wednesday because his feet were sore. After his second robbery of the day, cops say, Gallagher "plopped down on a grassy swale--within sight of a police officer quizzing a witness." Back at the station, according to a police spokesman, Gallagher told officers why he did it: "I'm ugly and I smell bad, so I can't get a job. I gotta get money somehow."

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Today on OpinionJournal:

  • Review & Outlook: Will France scrap the 35-hour workweek?
  • Daniel Henninger: Schwarzenegger proves yesterday's conservative is today's moderate.
  • Political Diary: California's budget terminator; the Democrats debate again; Gray Davis still has the veto; what next for Rep. Issa?

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