From the WSJ Opinion Archives
The Racial Protection Racket
On Monday we
noted Sen. Harry Reid's remarks about Justice Clarence Thomas, who Reid
said is "an embarrassment to the Supreme Court," and hasn't "done
a good job as a Supreme Court justice" because his opinions are "poorly
written." Since the incoming Senate minority leader did not give a single
example of a poorly written Thomas opinion, we surmised that Reid was likely
stereotyping Thomas as unintelligent because he is black.
Our observation has some liberal Democrats on the defensive. MediaMatters.org--David Brock's Web site that bravely exposes conservative bias by conservative commentators--says our comments "follow a pattern among conservatives of attacking Democrats and progressives whenever they criticize minority nominees appointed by President Bush" (though it's hard to see how, given that the current President Bush hasn't appointed Thomas to anything). "Democrats have approved far more conservative minority judicial appointees than they have opposed," MediaMatters insists. Some of their best friends . . .
Josh Marshall says the suggestion of racial bias on Reid's part is among "the most risible accusations of racism." (Yes, this is the same Josh Marshall who thinks it's invidious to point out that Democrats do very badly among nonblack voters.) Marshall adds that in his own opinion Thomas is a "mediocre" justice.
But neither Marshall nor MediaMatters nor any of the readers who've written to take issue with our Reid remarks have offered a single example of a Thomas opinion that is poorly written (in Reid's, or anyone else's, opinion). Since disparaging the intelligence of black people is a familiar racist trope, and since liberal commentators such as Maureen Dowd have so disparaged Thomas in expressly racial terms, we'd have to say the insubstantiality of the objections makes us more confident that we were right about what Reid was up to.
This, along with the racist attacks on Condoleezza Rice we noted last month, got us to thinking about the relationship between the Democratic Party and black Americans. Some have likened it to a plantation, but it seems to us that a better analogy is a protection racket. The deal is that the Dems will protect blacks from racism and blacks will give their political support to Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, John Kerry and the like. But the most blatant racism in America today comes from Democrats and is directed against black politicians and public servants who opt out of this arrangement.
Curiously, the Democratic Party has a similar arrangement with white Southern politicians of a certain age. Former Ku Klux Klan member Robert Byrd gets a pass on his segregationist past and his contemporary racist gaffes, while Zell Miller, after decades as a Democrat in good standing, turned into a segregationist "Dixiecrat" the moment he became a RABIN.*
The passing of the generations has made the party's attitude toward erstwhile segregationists increasingly irrelevant. Perhaps in due course black voters will drift away from the Democrats too; after all, what do they really get for holding their noses and voting for someone like Kerry? If that happens, it will spell disaster for the Democrats, who (as Josh Marshall hates to be reminded) simply cannot win elections without overwhelming black support.
* Republican all but in name, the opposite of a RINO.
Explaining Ohio
A few readers have written to us wondering what the Democrats are up to in Ohio.
As the Associated
Press reported the other day, the party says it plans an "investigation"
of "voting problems" there. Terry McAuliffe, the departing party chairman,
"said it's too early to tell if Republicans were behind any fraud that
may have influenced the outcome in Ohio." Yet "McAuliffe said the
party is not seeking to overturn the result"--an implicit acknowledgment
that Bush won fair and square.
Meanwhile, the Dems have joined the Libertarian and Green parties in calling for a statewide recount in Ohio, even though President Bush's victory there, by a margin of well over 100,000 votes, has been certified.
Some readers have written us asking if there is a possibility that the Democrats actually will manage to steal the election. The answer is no. Yet it's a reasonable enough question, for why else would they be pursuing this seemingly pointless exercise? Our guess is they're doing so with future elections in mind:
- There are a certain number of bitter-enders who are impervious to the reality
that George W. Bush is a legitimate president, and thus will never accept
the result of the election. Democrats likely fear alienating this part of
their base unless they make at least some symbolic effort to "count every
vote."
- By pressing for such things as permissive standards for counting provisional
ballots, Democrats may be hoping to establish precedents they can use in future
elections that actually are close.
- Ohio's top election official, Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, is a promising young Republican politician--and he is black. For reasons we discussed in the preceding item, Democrats are eager to discredit him; see this vicious Jesse Jackson column for a sample.
There you have it. Kerry isn't going to pull a rabbit out of his hat, and the Democrats aren't crazy (well, except the bitter-enders). They just have smaller things to worry about than the outcome of the election.
And California's Motto Is 'Eureka'
Yesterday's
item on University of California professor George Lakoff, who is advising
Democrats to start using euphemisms and dysphemisms, brought an amusing response
from reader Daniel Foty:
For my entire life, I have been forever and continually amused by how leftists occasionally stumble across some ancient and universal truth which they should have learned but never did--and thus react as if they have made a discovery for the first time. When I was a student back in the 1980s, the faddish leftfolk were always squawking like parrots that nuclear weapons created a new concept, that of a weapon which is most effective by not being used. They never seemed happy when I pointed out that many centuries earlier, Sun Tzu ("Who?") had written that "an army is doing its job most effectively when it does not even have to fight."
Perhaps Prof. Lakoff and his admirers should go read Plutarch, who noted of the Athenians of the sixth century B.C. that they "were in the habit of disguising the unpleasant aspects of things by giving them endearing and charitable names and finding polite equivalents for them. Thus they refer to whores as mistresses, taxes as contributions, garrisons of cities as guards, and the common gaol as the residence. Solon, it appears, became a pioneer of this device, when he referred to his cancelling of all debts as a discharge."
What we really need is a euphemism for reinventing the wheel. Oh wait, we have one: "alternative vehicles."
Man
of Peace?
Yasser Arafat won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, and it appears he has finally
done something to promote peace: He stopped breathing. The Jerusalem Post reports
that Arafat's death "has left most Palestinians optimistic regarding the
future and opposed to the continuation of terror attacks on Israel, according
to a public opinion poll published Wednesday by the Jerusalem Media and Communication
Center":
A majority of 51.8 percent of the Palestinians polled said that they were opposed to "military operations" against Israeli targets and consider them harmful to Palestinian national interests, compared with 26.9% last June. Only 41.1% of the Palestinians believe that terrorist attacks should continue compared with 65.4% last June.
According to the poll, a majority of Palestinians, 59.3%, feel optimistic regarding the future in general, compared with 45.3% last June.
Arafat is in stable condition after dying in a Paris hospital.
The
Whine Spectator
French wine makers have fallen on hard times and are demanding help from the
government, the Associated Press reports from Paris:
Pinched by overproduction, shrinking exports, advertising restrictions, an aggressive campaign against alcohol abuse and changing drinking habits, at least 6,000 growers and winemakers staged spirited demonstrations nationwide Wednesday to press the government for help. . . .
Vintners wearing black armbands marched through Bordeaux, Avignon, Angers, Macon, Nantes, Tours and other cities in key winemaking regions to urge the Agriculture Ministry to help offset their financial losses. . . .
France's wine industry, which employs about 500,000 people, says exports through Aug. 31 dropped by more than 5.5 percent in volume and 9.6 percent in value. Experts say Bordeaux was particularly hard hit, with foreign sales of its signature reds down 25 percent.
Maybe they should urge Jacques Chirac to support America in Iraq, which would doubtless increase consumption of French wine over here.
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
"Newly Homeless Above 5th Ave., Hawks Have Little to Build On"--headline, New York Times, Dec. 9, 2004
Ticket
Taker Shut Out
"Usher Wins 11 Prizes at Billboard Music Awards"--headline, Reuters,
Dec. 9
What
Would Students Do Without Experts?
"Manners Matter, Expert Tells Students"--headline, Dallas Morning
News, Dec. 7
What
Would Helen Thomas Do Without Experts?
"Experts Monitor Crazy Ant Impact"--headline, Australian Broadcast
Corp. Web site, Dec. 9
Great
Moments in Higher Education History
Yesterday we
noted the case of the "Harvard Pep Squad," actually a group of
Yale students who got Harvardians at the Harvard-Yale football game to hold
up papers that spelled "We suck." It turns out this was something
of a copycat prank. Back in 1961, Caltech students tampered with the instructions
for Washington Huskies fans at the Rose Bowl, so that their cards spelled out
"SEIKSUH" ("Huskies" backward) and "CALTECH."
The Museum of Hoaxes has details.
Which Came First, the Panther or the Falcon?
Yesterday we
noted a hilarious New York Times correction, which implied that the Falcon
would have been the first African-American comic-book hero even if the Black
Panther, were African-American rather than African. Not so. According to BlackSuperhero.com,
the Black
Panther appeared in Fantastic Four No. 52, in 1966. The
Falcon didn't arrive on the scene until 1969, in Captain America No. 117.
True, the Panther didn't get his own title until 1977, but The Falcon didn't
get one until 1983.
The
Big Chill
A news story that's been making the rounds has it that laptop computers are
dangerous for male fertility, because actually holding a computer on your lap
can change the temperature of the genitals, diminishing sperm production. The
WebMD.com account of this problem caught our attention:
Is the increase enough to impair male fertility? The researchers can't say for sure. However, they note that another study showed that sperm concentration dropped by 40% when median daytime scrotal temperature rose to about 34 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius).
Thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit? If your family jewels were only 2 degrees above freezing, you'd have trouble reproducing too! Obviously the problem here is the metric system, and that explains why Europeans have such low birthrates. The French, who invented the metric system, even have a word that explains why it is a dead end. But then surely you've heard of a cold-de-sac.
Talk
Radio Loses a Voice
Sad news from Boston, where radio host David Brudnoy is about to die. The Boston
Globe reports:
As recently as Monday, Brudnoy was hosting his three-hour show on WBZ-AM. Last Thursday, he was still holding classes at Boston University, where he has taught part time for years and was elevated to a full professorship this year.
But exhausted and in pain, he checked himself into Mass. General on Friday, and a battery of tests revealed that the Merkel cell carcinoma that was in remission for the past year had reappeared in his vital organs, and doctors told him there was little they could do. Facing liver and kidney failure, Brudnoy has told doctors to treat his pain, not his disease.
Brudnoy had been sick on and off with AIDS and cancer since 1994, "often breaking free from the clutches of death to return to the airwaves, to BU, and to his favored Starbucks on Newbury Street in what seemed a matter of weeks." The Globe's description of his on-air style gets it just right:
In an age of radio hosts who try to achieve high ratings by slinging brutal insults against public officials and athletes, Brudnoy has always stood a world apart. A self-described libertarian, he appears as consumed by curiosity as by opinion. He is the rare host who reads the books of his author-guests. And he sheaths his most pointed questions to politicians in politesse.
The WBZ Web site has more on Brudnoy, including an interview with him yesterday conducted by WBZ anchorman Gary LaPierre.
We met Brudnoy twice, both when we were a guest on his show. In 2002 we took a break from a vacation to join him in his Boston studio for an hour to discuss current events, especially the impending liberation of Iraq. One point of disagreement was the French: We maintained they would eventually cave in and go along with America; he was much more skeptical, and of course he turned out to be right.
This past July we stopped by the WBZ booth at the Democratic National Convention and he interviewed us about "Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House." He did not seem well then; his cancer treatment had affected his voice. Brudnoy sometimes did his program from his home, and he invited us there for the next interview. Alas, that interview will not take place.
(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Mary Ann Curtis, Daniel Goldstein, Peter August, Michael Segal, Bill King, Ethel Fenig, Samuel Walker, Steve Schildwachter, Dan O'Shea, C.E. Dobkin, Bryce Elliott, Darin Bartram, Paul Dyck, Bill Briggs, Tom McMahon, Jan Koenig, Peter Trachtenberg, Tim Jones, Chris Sexton, Mark Van Der Molen and Thomas Erb. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
Today on OpinionJournal:
- Review & Outlook: Washington gets another intelligence bureaucracy. Great.
- Peggy Noonan: Four years after leaving the White House, Hillary Clinton plots her return.
- Allen Barra: College football best-player awards? Too many men on the field.
