From the WSJ Opinion Archives
March
of the Ostriches
Dick Morris makes an excellent point about the politics of the war on terror
at the beginning of 2006:
While the critics have a plurality on the question of whether the war in Iraq was a mistake, they're in the minority in complaining about the Bush anti-terror policies at home.
Why do majorities support the Patriot Act and NSA wiretapping but [retrospectively] oppose the war in Iraq? Because the true swing voters in politics today are isolationists, who vote with the left on Iraq and with the right on homeland security.
It is impossible to understand politics today without grasping the essential power of isolationism in our political community. The voters who rate Bush's performance in Iraq negatively or who call for a pullout are not, in the main, dedicated liberals or even Democrats. Rather, they're marching to the beat of a drummer never stilled in our political music--the desire for the rest of the world to go away.
Plainly the "isolationism" to which Morris refers is more attitude than ideology; after all, the liberation of Iraq had something like 70% support at its outset, and true isolationists would be likely to favor an immediate pullout from Iraq, a position that has nowhere near majority support.
But Morris is on to something. It's fair to say that over the past three years the public has become more dovish--that is, resistant to overseas military engagement. But there also is a tendency among some commentators and political activists that goes beyond dovishness and toward ostrichdom.
We noted a week ago that "the implication" of Democratic hand-wringing over civil liberties "is that the threat of terrorism within America is not all that serious and never was--that 9/11, horrific though it was, was a one-off." That implication is now an explication. On "Fox News Sunday" this past weekend (no transcript online), after Charles Krauthammer argued that spying on al Qaeda members had helped forestall another attack after 9/11, Juan Williams replied as follows:
I don't think so, Charles. What you just said, Charles, is premised on the idea that we didn't overestimate the extent of the threat. I think most people thought there would be a subsequent attack. But it's possible now that we've encountered a situation where, one, we don't know what was found in those intercepts. We're not being told what was found in the intercepts.
And so you're saying just as a judgment of faith, because we haven't been attacked, we have to assume that therefore the president and the federal government, given unbounded authority, have saved the day. I think that you're being overly optimistic and I think you're distorting the argument.
It's interesting that Williams considers it "overly optimistic" to think that the threat of terrorism is real. Similar sentiments came from John McLaughlin on "The McLaughlin Group":
The most overrated: The threat of radical Islam. This is directed at Tony Blankley. An infinitesimal fraction of the world's Muslim population is radically militant, and a clear majority of Muslim governments are actively fighting radical Islam. The Islamic threat is real, but it's overrated.
Of course, if the world had a billion Muslims in 2001 (a conservative estimate), the 19 hijackers of 9/11 amounted to 0.0000019% of them. "An infinitesimal fraction" can do a lot of damage.
Related to the terrorism-is-no-big-threat claim is the argument that American lives are less important than the civil liberties of terrorists. Angry Left blogger Markos Moulitsas taunts those who want to prevent another 9/11 as cowards:
When our nation was founded, we had men of real character and courage fighting for their nascent America, one in which liberty and freedom trumped the authorative [sic] tendencies of the monarchy. Patrick Henry gave words to those efforts:
Give me liberty or give me death!
My, how far we have fallen, with an administration that parlays the incessant fear of its supporters into increased authoritativeness to the point where he now resembles the very despot we fought in our war of independence.
And his supporters bellow, as they cower under their beds:
Here's our liberties, just spare us from death!
These blowhards pretend they are macho even as they piddle on themselves in abject terror from every "boo!" that comes out of Osama Bin Laden's mouth.
Andrew Sullivan, whose transformation from überhawk to ostrich we have repeatedly and tiresomely documented, this morning abandoned the dodge on which he had long relied--that any policy violating the "rights" of terrorists is ineffective anyway:
You can say this for the president. The powers he seized after 9/11 have indeed apparently helped neuter al Qaeda as we once knew it. That's a big deal and a big achievement. We haven't been attacked since: another big deal, in my book. But . . .
Fill in the rest with just about any post-2/24 Sullivan post.
Morris is surely right that sentiments like these are unlikely to find resonance in the broader public; and few if any elected officials have endorsed wholesale the idea that terrorism isn't really worth fighting. But, if you'll pardon the mixed metaphor, a significant portion of the Democratic base resides in the left-wing fever swamps. Yesterday YearlyKos, Moulitsas's annual bloggers conference, announced that Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, has agreed to speak at this year's convocation, in June.
"It used to be fashionable to snicker at blogs like Daily Kos, but we're being taken a lot more seriously these days," the YearlyKos press release quotes board member Bill Harnsberger as saying. Indeed, it looks as though the Democrats are destined to be the party of the ostrich--at least so long as terrorists don't manage to strike again on U.S. soil.
Wow,
Those Really Are Smart Bombs!
"U.S. Bombs Suspected Insurgent Hideout"--headline, Associated Press,
Jan. 3
Catch-and-Release
Terrorism
Remember Rachel Corrie, who died in March 2003 in an accident she caused by
standing in the way of an Israeli bulldozer that was filling in a weapons-smuggling
tunnel in Rafah, Gaza? Her parents, who've taken up her cause, had their own
brush with danger in Rafah this morning, the Associated Press reports:
Five gunmen burst into a house and tried to kidnap Rachel Corrie's parents, Craig and Cindy. The gunmen eventually relented after being told who their targets were.
When we described Rachel Corrie as a "terror advocate," we received lots of e-mails howling in protest. If this description was unfair, can someone please explain why these terrorists "relented after being told who their targets were"?
Crazy
Train
A debate is raging over at MediaMatters.org over an issue of great import: Was
it outrageous that Jon Meacham of Newsweek referred to Sen. Russ Feingold of
Wisconsin as "sane"? What we guess was supposed to be invidious about
this is that he called Feingold "a sane Howard Dean," implying that
the man who brought "YAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!" into the American political
lexicon is less than 100% compos mentis.
Actually, the MediaMatters item itself merely relays this quote without editorializing, so why it's noteworthy is up to the reader to figure out. But if you scroll down to the comments section, you'll find a hilarious exchange of views on the subject. Some samples (quoting verbatim, but omitting some passages):
LEFT045: "A question ... Is this really 'conservative misinformation'?"
DAVE_CHICAGO: "Yes, it is misinforming the public when the managing editor of a major U.S. newsweekly suggests that the head of the Democratic Party is insane."
BRUCE1ACE: "Dave, A serious question. Do you think Meacham REALLY THINKS Howard Dean is insane, or do you think he was using hyperbole? It's a technique in comparison, kind of like Olbermanns 'Worst Person in the World' comments. Exaggerating to make a point."
JOHNSONIUM: "Not the same. 'Worst Person in the World' is a subjective judgement. 'insane' is a clearly defined medical diagnosis and a serious smear. I'll remember your 'argument' when people call Bush a Nazi. After all, do they really mean that Bush is a member of the Nazi party, or is it simply hyperbole?"
DAVE_CHICAGO: "Re: 'Serious question': I don't know what Meacham 'thinks.' The problem is what he said. The 'Dean-is-insane' smear has been part-and-parcel of the right-wing's demonization of Dean ever since the 2004 campaign. Meacham--who holds a very significant managing editor position at an influential newsweekly--furthers this hatchet job along within a serious political analysis context.
We don't want MediaMatters to link to this column, because that always leads to a flurry of obscene and illiterate hate mail. So we'd like to stipulate that we don't think Howard Dean is insane. Not in the clinical sense, anyway.
Inside
the Cocoon
An intriguing press release from the University of Chicago describes a new study
on media bias in the Journal of Political Economy:
Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro show that bias arises from a reasonable, seemingly contradictory impulse: the desire of a media firm to maximize its reputation as a provider of accurate information.
"Suppose, for example, that a newspaper reports that scientists have successfully produced cold fusion. If a consumer believes this to be highly unlikely a priori, she will rationally infer that the paper probably has poor information or exercised poor judgment in interpreting available evidence," explain Gentzkow and Shapiro. "A media firm concerned about its reputation for accuracy will therefore be reluctant to report evidence at odds with the consumer's prior beliefs." . . .
A policy implication of the paper's findings concerns the most effective way to counter what is seen as "anti-American bias in the Arab media, especially Al Jazeera." The authors argue that instead of condemning organizations, trying to directly change the tone of their reports, or forcibly closing offices, a better approach would be to support the growing competitiveness of the Middle Eastern media market.
The conclusion vis-à-vis al-Jazeera sounds right. But another thought occurs to us: To what extent is media bias a function of possibly inaccurate perceptions about who the "consumer" is? That is, if a reporter's friends are almost all affluent, liberal baby boomers, isn't he likely to tailor his news to them rather than to his perhaps more diverse actual audience?
The parochialism of blue-state elites has been a frequent topic of this column, and here's a lovely example, from Radio Iowa:
Drake religion professor Jennifer Harvey recently moved to Iowa from her native New York. "I love many things about Iowa and I chose to stay here after having a chance to go back to New York City, so that says something, but I have been very struck here, especially coming from New York City--how many 'God Bless America,' 'God Bless the troops' . . . images and invocations I hear on a regular basis," Harvey says.
Harvey says there's a strong religious world view in Iowa that's "Christian, primarily," and she says that's very different from the prevailing opinions expressed in New York. Harvey says in New York, there's a strong sense that it's wrong to merge Christianity and politics. "Even in my (Drake) classrooms where students are quite liberally inclined, they are looking for ways to make sense out of their stances or views on the war or same sex marriage through a Christian framework, many times," Harvey says.
American politicians often say "God Bless America" at the end of a speech, and Harvey says while that may seem perfectly normal to Midwesterners, it seems odd to people who live on the East Coast.
As State29 notes, "Drake hired her to be a religion professor, but how is the fact that Iowans are mostly Christian and religious in nature somehow a revelation to her?" Well, welcome to New York.
May
We Take Your Ordure?
Yesterday's follow-up on last year's item about coffee harvested from the droppings
of small animals brought an e-mail from our colleague Gordon Crovitz, who notes
that Dave Barry's 1997 column was not the first press account of such mucky
mocha. From the Far Eastern Economic Review, Sept. 7, 1995:
Cut chon coffee comes from beans that have passed through the intestines of the chon, a fox that spends much of its time nosing around coffee bushes.
But the chon, which Peregrine Vietnam Managing Director Nguyen Trung Truc calls "the finest coffee connoisseurs in the world," is not an indiscriminate snacker. It eats only the best of the ripened coffee beans.
Writes Crovitz: "I was editing the Review at that time and distinctly recall questioning the reporter over whether a story as wonderful as fox-drop coffee could possibly be true. It was. I declined to confirm personally whether the coffee is or is not strangely delicious."
An even earlier mention came in a March 1981 National Geographic article. Author Ethel A. Starbird described a visit to a Javanese coffee plantation:
Harvest was in full swing. Flocks of dainty little Javanese women perched in the treetops, picking away and twittering to each other like so many brown birds.
"Another native we have also picks with care," [owner] Doyo [Soeyono Kertosastro] told me over a superb cup of coffee. "The luak, that's a small catlike animal, gorges after dark on the most ripe, the best of our crop. It digests the fruit and expels the beans, which our farm people collect, wash, and roast, a real delicacy.
"Something about the natural fermentation that occurs in the luak's stomach seems to make the difference. For Javanese, this is the best of all coffees--our Kopi luak."
He refilled my cup. "I'd like to try it sometime," I told him more out of politeness than conviction.
"You just did."
The FEER piece had some bad news, though: "Farmers in Dak Lak province say the foxes are becoming rarer--as are their droppings." If they can make coffee from endangered feces, maybe soon they'll make Puerto Rico a steak!
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
"Free Booze Makes Homeless Healthier: Study"--headline, Reuters, Jan. 3, 2006
Horrors!
Can North Dakota Be Far Behind?
"Editorial: An American Right Under Siege; Abortion rights wither in South
Dakota--and where next?"--headline and subheadline, Minneapolis Star Tribune,
Jan. 3
Phoenix
Shot a Man in Reno, Just to Watch Him Die
"Joaquin Follows Cash's Footsteps to Jail"--headline, Seven News (Australia),
Jan. 4
'You
Wash My Hands . . .'
"Poll: Half Believe Congress Is Dirty"--headline, CNN.com, Jan. 3
What
Would Women Who Cut Dietary Fat Do Without Studies?
"Women Who Cut Dietary Fat Lose Weight: Study"--headline, Reuters,
Jan. 3
Thanks
for the Tip!--XXXI
"Health Tip: Keep Copies of Your Medical Records"--headline, HealthDayNews,
Dec. 30
Bottom
Story of the Day
"Lindsay Lohan Suffers Asthma Attack"--headline, InTheNews.co.uk,
Jan. 4
Dangerous
Kicks
Fox News has this shocking tale of depravity:
Parents of 11- to 13-year-old soccer players unwittingly checked their daughters into a hotel hosting a New Year's party for more than 200 swingers who had reserved rooms and the downstairs ballroom, according to the Orlando Sentinel.
The parents said they were stunned by the flamboyant revelers who glided through the glass atrium, often flashing bare buttocks and breasts before the girls--who had traveled from as far away as South Carolina and Clearwater to attend a five-day soccer tournament.
Let this be a lesson: If you have children, keep them far away from soccer.
(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Joseph Wilkinson, Joel Goldberg, Dan O'Shea, Eric Rassbach, Michael Powker, Barak Moore, Jared Silverman, William Katz, C.E. Dobkin, Tim Graham, Monty Krieger, Don Eyres, John Forsberg, Leon Polyakov, Fran McDonald, Mark Murray, Bill King, Dave Tinkle, Brendan Schulman, Chuck Opramolla, Ruth Papazian, Kevin Littleton and William Dooley. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
Today on OpinionJournal:
- Mary O'Grady: Democracy doesn't always produce prosperity. Consider the case of Chile.
- Mark Steyn: The real reason the West is in danger of extinction.
- Alan Pell Crawford: Christine Rosen's complaints about Christian fundamentalism are mainly aesthetic ones.
