From the WSJ Opinion Archives
You
Probably Think This Item Is About You
Harry Pelosi and Nancy Reid "are stepping up their effort to cut into the
public perception that Republicans are stronger on national security,"
reports the Associated Press from Washington:
"We need a new direction on national security, and leaders with policies that are tough and smart. That is what Democrats offer," . . . Reid, D-Nev., said in remarks prepared for delivery Wednesday. . . .
Pelosi, D-Calif., said Democrats were providing a fresh strategy--"one that is strong and smart, which understands the challenges America faces in a post 9/11 world, and one that demonstrates that Democrats are the party of real national security."
But according to the AP, there isn't much substance behind these boasts:
The Democratic statement lacks specific details of a plan to capture [Osama] bin Laden, the al-Qaida chief who has evaded U.S. forces in the more than four years since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But Democrats suggest they will double the number of special forces and add more spies to increase the chances of finding al-Qaida's elusive leader.
Democrats also do not set a deadline for when all of the 132,000 American troops now in Iraq should be withdrawn.
They say: "We will ensure 2006 is a year of significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty, with the Iraqis assuming primary responsibility for security and governing their country and with the responsible redeployment of U.S. forces."
It's hard to argue with these positions: Everyone would like to see Osama bin Laden captured and the U.S. military presence in Iraq reduced, but because these goals depend on as-yet-unknown contingencies, no one can responsibly promise to achieve them by a date certain. The Democratic position on these matters is essentially indistinguishable from the Republican one.
What's telling about the Reid and Pelosi statements, though, is their sheer vanity. They boast about being "tough," "smart" and "strong." When someone tells you how tough, smart and strong he is, do you think, (1) Wow, he's really tough, smart and strong! or (2) If he's so tough, smart and strong, why does he have to keep telling me? Generally speaking, people who brag about their fine qualities come across as somewhat pathetic.
The exception is when the boast is obviously true. When Muhammad Ali said "I am the greatest," it was charming because it was true. By contrast, if President Bush started going around telling everyone how smart he was, it would be embarrassing. Smart he may be, but he doesn't have bragging rights on this particular point. (He might be able to get away with boasting of his toughness, though.)
By bragging about how smart and strong they are, Reid and Pelosi only underscore that their actions show them to be insipid and weak. Their plan for "national security" looks more like an expression of personal insecurity.
Leftist
Questions Liberals' Patriotism
Todd Gitlin, a Columbia professor of journalism and sociology, showed up at
Yale yesterday where he offered some advice to his fellow lefties, the Yale
Daily News reports:
He elaborated on his feeling of frustration concerning what he views as liberals' voluntary estrangement from the rest of the nation, citing their alleged rejection of patriotism as an example of this alienation.
"I think that the upshot is that patriotism is experienced by many people on the left as something of an embarrassment," Gitlin said.
Gitlin said he thinks left-leaning individuals are now rejecting patriotism because they believe it forces them to identify with a larger group of Americans with whom they disagree and contradicts the spirit of cosmopolitanism that they espouse.
"The left sees itself as standing outside a country that does bad," Gitlin said. "However, it is strategically disastrous to take this position as outsiders, since it is a concession to people who are not entitled to be the spokespersons of patriotism. It is a move against public life, public domain, public virtue and public-mindedness."
It strikes us that Gitlin's critique of the left actually goes deeper than he acknowledges. He is not merely criticizing liberals' strategy; he is questioning their patriotism. He is claiming that they do not love their country.
As a man of the left, he frames the argument in strategic terms because he knows liberals want power, and he correctly ascertains that the path to power would be much easier if they were correctly perceived as patriotic. The question is whether such an instrumental approach can produce a sincere patriotism. We don't know the answer, but we're skeptical.
Who's
Spying Now?
Congressional Democrats' domestic spying program suffered a setback in court
yesterday, the Associated Press reports from Washington:
A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that Rep. Jim McDermott violated federal law by turning over an illegally taped telephone call to reporters nearly a decade ago.
In a 2-1 opinion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld a lower court ruling that McDermott violated the rights of House Majority Leader John Boehner, who was heard on the 1996 call involving former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. . . .
McDermott, D-Wash., leaked to The New York Times and other news organizations a tape of a 1996 cell phone call The call included discussion by Gingrich, R-Ga., and other House GOP leaders about a House ethics committee investigation of Gingrich. Boehner, R-Ohio, was a Gingrich lieutenant at the time and is now House majority leader.
A lawyer for McDermott had argued that his actions were allowed under the First Amendment, and said a ruling against him would have "a huge chilling effect" on reporters and newsmakers alike.
Meanwhile, the Washington Times reports that the president's terrorist surveillance program got support from some experts in the field:
A panel of former Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges yesterday told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that President Bush did not act illegally when he created by executive order a wiretapping program conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA).
The five judges testifying before the committee said they could not speak specifically to the NSA listening program without being briefed on it, but that a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act does not override the president's constitutional authority to spy on suspected international agents under executive order.
"If a court refuses a FISA application and there is not sufficient time for the president to go to the court of review, the president can under executive order act unilaterally, which he is doing now," said Judge Allan Kornblum, magistrate judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida and an author of the 1978 FISA Act. "I think that the president would be remiss exercising his constitutional authority by giving all of that power over to a statute."
The New York Times, of course, has been crusading against the program. But in a December 2000 editorial it argued that because McDermott himself did not make the recording of the GOP phone conversation, he should be off the hook:
[Boehner's] suit seeks damages from Mr. McDermott for his disclosure of a tape he received from a Florida couple in which former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was heard discussing his ethics case. The Times published transcripts of those conversations.
The correct way to combat illegal interception of private conversation is to prosecute the people who actually do it, and to hasten the development of technology to make interceptions more difficult. It is not to trample on the rights of the press and ordinary citizens to disclose the content of information they received legally. The Supreme Court needs to affirm that.
It would seem the Times is more troubled by the U.S. government spying on foreign enemies than by Democrats spying on their domestic opponents.
No
Terror but 9/11?
In an article on the Web site of Foreign Policy magazine, Joseph Cirincione
of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace makes this rather astonishing
statement:
The unfolding administration strategy appears to be an effort to repeat its successful campaign for the Iraq war. It is now trying to link Iran to the 9/11 attacks by repeatedly claiming that Iran is the main state sponsor of terrorism in the world (though this suggestion is highly questionable).
Cirincione does not back up his parenthetical remark that "this suggestion is highly questionable." But questionable or not, how does the claim that "Iran is the main state sponsor of terrorism" amount to an effort "to link Iran to the 9/11 attacks"?
We guess the "link" is this: 9/11 awoke Americans to the danger of terrorism more generally, and thus any discussion of terrorism amounts to an appeal to post-9/11 vigilance. Although Cirincione does not develop the point, he seems to view this heightened concern about terrorism as an overreaction, and thus he sees talk of terrorism outside the context of al Qaeda as an inappropriate invocation of 9/11, if only an implicit one.
This way of thinking would seem to lead to the conclusion that non-al Qaeda terrorism is actually less worthy of concern now than it was pre-9/11. That would be a perverse way of looking at things.
Hostage
in the Closet
It turns out that Jim Loney, a Canadian who was one of the three Christian Peacemaker
Teams hostages freed last week by coalition troops in Iraq, is gay and has a
relationship with a "fellow Christian activist" named Dan Hunt. Not
that there's anything wrong with that, but how come we didn't find this out
until after he was sprung? Because, according to Toronto's Globe and Mail, his
CPT colleagues feared that "his Iraqi kidnappers would harm him if they
knew he was involved in a long-standing relationship with another man."
As Canadian columnist Charles Adler notes, this undermines any claim that the CPT folks are naive idealists:
It's clear from here that Jim Loney is only selectively naive. He could not afford to talk about his partner while in captivity and didn't.
Homosexuality in Saddam Hussein's Iraq was punishable by death. Amnesty International says the current status of gay and lesbian rights is unclear. But here are few things that are crystal clear.
1) Jim Loney only feels free to speak his mind about his sexual orientation in a country with a government that protects gay rights.
2) Christian Peacemakers claim to have gone to Iraq to prevent the coalition forces from carrying out their mission.
3) Had the the Peacemakers succeeded in keeping Saddam Hussein in power, a homosexual in Iraq would have zero hope for having an openly gay life. We know from Loney's statement made here in Canada that even he knows that the threat to gays wasn't coming from Western Imperialism.
Loney would no doubt say he was following the biblical admonition to love your enemies. But would it kill him to show a little consideration to his friends?
Who
Knew He Played Golf?
"High Court Takes Up Case of bin Laden's Driver"--headline, Baltimore
Sun, March 28
That's
Some Brilliant Detective Work
"Texas Police Look in Bars for Signs of Drunkenness"--headline, Washington
Times, March 29
Bottom
Story of the Day
"Law Professor Bans Laptops in Class"--headline, Associated Press,
March 29
Why
Men Don't Understand Women
Guys, if the woman in your life complains that you don't listen to her, check
out this report from Netscape Men's:
When men and women speak, the human brain processes the sounds of those voices differently, Britain's Mirror and Agence France Presse report of a new study from the U.K.'s University of Sheffield. While most of us actually hear female voices more clearly, men's brains hear women's voices first as music. But it's not music. It's someone giving them a honey-do list. So the brain goes into overdrive trying to analyze what is being said.
Bottom line: Men have to work harder deciphering what women are saying because they use the auditory part of the brain that processes music, not human voices. Men's brains are not designed to listen to women's voices.
"Of course I wasn't listening to you, sweetheart. Your voice is music to my ears." It's so crazy, it just might work.
(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Geoff Alfsen, Thomas Dillon, Michael Segal, John Williamson, Steve Bartin, Tomas Nally, Dan O'Shea, Rod Pennington, Tim Curlee, Ethel Fenig, John Lord, Daniel Goldstein, Morris Gavant, B. Burns, Jerry Rhoden, Jack Archer and Mike Glasgow. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
Today on OpinionJournal:
- Review & Outlook: New Jersey's new governor promised to cut taxes and is already proposing to raise them.
- Ralph Bennett (from the Ameican Security Council): The story of Paul Smith, the Iraq War's only Medal of Honor recipient so far.
- Amir Taheri: Mideast dictators try to "wait Bush out." They may be miscalculating.
