From the WSJ Opinion Archives
Et
Tu, Newte?
From reading the coverage of a speech Newt Gingrich gave in South Dakota earlier
this week, you might think the former House speaker had joined cower players
John Kerry* and Jack Murtha in calling for a cut-and-run
policy. Here's the Argus Leader of Sioux Falls:
Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House, told students and faculty at the University of South Dakota Monday that the United States should pull out of Iraq and leave a small force there, just as it did post-war in Korea and Germany.
"It was an enormous mistake for us to try to occupy that country after June of 2003," Gingrich said during a question-and-answer session at the school. "We have to pull back, and we have to recognize it."
But Gingrich makes clear on his own Web site, Newt.org, that these comments were taken out of context:
Gingrich's position on Iraq has been consistent and clear:
1. The decision by Paul Bremer to go from a liberation model to an occupation model in June 2003 was a major mistake (Gingrich first said this publicly in December 2003).
2. The United States needs to train the Iraqis as rapidly as possible and "pull back" from the cities to bases and air fields and serve as reinforcers as opposed to occupiers (this position is outlined in today's WSJ as the official policy).
3. The United States is likely to need to keep some forces in Iraq for a very long time (Gingrich has been saying this as far back in 2003).
Newt.org also has an extensive excerpt from the transcript of the question-and-answer session. Here's Gingrich:
Remember, most of the people who die everyday now are Iraqis. So this is not about the Iraqis cutting and running. This is about one group of brave Iraqis who want a democracy versus a much smaller group of vicious thugs who hope that they can kill and murder and terrorize to get back to a dictatorship. And that's what's at stake. And yes it's a hard thing to do, but so was the civil war, so was Washington crossing the Delaware, so was winning the cold war. And we may lose this fight, but if we lose it there will be millions of Iraqis who lose it with us.
Not exactly the Kerry-Murtha position, is it? It's just the latest example of journalists following the Vietnam script, "according to which a war is supposed to become a quagmire, which provokes opposition and leads to American withdrawal." Gingrich offers some strategic criticisms, and the Argus Leader makes him out to be some sort of hippie.
* The second man ever to serve as Michael Dukakis's lieutenant governor, who by the way served in Vietnam and, according to anonymous sources, looks French and has a "haughty air."
Bush
Insulter Dies
"William Sloane Coffin Jr., 81, a Presbyterian clergyman and former Yale
University chaplain whose early activism against the Vietnam War brought him
international notoriety during a lifelong career of civil disobedience, died
April 12 at his home in Strafford, Vt.." reports the Washington Post. A
July
1999 Post article details what might have been the most consequential moment
of Coffin's career:
When George W. Bush arrived in New Haven in the fall of 1964, his father was in the closing days of his first political race. Running against Sen. Ralph Yarborough, a liberal Democrat, he was the beneficiary of the largest Republican turnout in Texas history that November, but it was not enough. Riding the coattails of his fellow Texan, Lyndon B. Johnson, Yarborough defeated his Republican challenger by 300,000 votes.
Not long afterward, Bush decided to look up someone has father had told him he should go see, one of his contemporaries, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, the Yale chaplain later famous for his anti-war activities.
The greeting he received was hardly what he expected. "I knew your father," Bush remembers Coffin saying, "and your father lost to a better man."
Coffin says he has no recollection of his conversation with Bush and says if it happened, he was making a joke. But for Bush it was a jarring signal that Yale was going to be different, a place where he might not effortlessly fit in, where his father's values were not universally admired.
"You talk about a shattering blow," said Barbara Bush in a recent interview. "Not only to George, but shattering to us. And it was a very awful thing for a chaplain to say to a freshman at college, particularly if he might have wanted to have seen him in church. I'm not sure that George W. ever put his foot again [in the school chapel]."
It reminded us of something Justice Sam Alito said during his confirmation hearing a season ago about his experience at Princeton University:
I saw some very smart people and very privileged people behaving irresponsibly. And I couldn't help making a contrast between some of the worst of what I saw on the campus and the good sense and the decency of the people back in my own community.
For that matter, it reminds us of our own experience with smug campus liberals, at a third-tier Western university in the late 1980s. One wonders if it ever dawns on these people what effective recruiters they are for the political right.
Hey
Hey Ho Ho, Federal Funding's Got to Go
"Four military recruiters hastily fled a job fair Tuesday morning at UC
Santa Cruz after a raucous crowd of student protesters blocked an entrance to
the building where the Army and National Guard had set up information tables,"
the San Francisco Chronicle reports:
Members of Students Against War, who organized the counter-recruiting protest, loudly chanted "Don't come back. Don't come back" as the recruiters left the hilltop campus, escorted by several university police officers.
"The situation had degraded to the point where there was a possibility of injury to either a student or law enforcement officer. We certainly didn't want that to happen,'' said Capt. Will Griffin, one of the Army recruiters. . . .
Universities that receive federal funds are required to allow military recruiters on campus. But campus officials had worried that Tuesday's protest would get out of hand as it had last April, when Students Against War protesters surrounded the table where military personnel sat, and hundreds of other demonstrators engaged in an angry protest outside. Some of the recruiters reported that their tires had been slashed and one employee at the career center was injured.
David Kliger, campus provost and executive vice chancellor, said the school was most concerned Tuesday about safety issues, but also wanted to preserve access to the recruiters for students who wanted to speak with them, while still allowing protesting students their right to free speech.
The Colorado-based Mountain States Legal Foundation is calling on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to invoke the Solomon Amendment and deny federal funding to UC Santa Cruz, which received $80 million of our money from Washington last year.
This sounds reasonable to us. Of course the Students Against War have a perfect right to speak their minds, but that right is not a license to engage in violence and intimidation. The threat of a loss of federal money could be a good spur to university officials to quit tolerating this sort of behavior.
Liberal
Racism Watch
The Seattle Times reports that a racist question appeared on a math test at
Bellevue Community College:
[Student Chelsey] Richardson, 25, said she found the question on a practice test for a math final she was studying for in March. The question read, "Condoleezza holds a watermelon just over the edge of the roof of the 300-foot Federal Building, and tosses it up with a velocity of 20 feet per second." The question went on to ask when the watermelon will hit the ground, based on a formula provided. The question propagates a racial stereotype and denigrates[**] Secretary of State Rice, said [the Rev. Wayne] Perryman [a civil rights activist Richardson contacted]. While Rice's last name wasn't mentioned, the reference was clear, he said.
"How many Condoleezzas spell their name that way and how many Condoleezzas are associated with a federal building? It doesn't take much to connect the dotted lines," he said.
Richardson, along with her friend Ilays Aden, met with the chairman of the math department who agreed to remove the question from the department's files. But the women left feeling the school needed to take a deeper look at how a racist stereotype could be inserted into the curriculum.
Liberals are always telling us that racism is everywhere, "just beneath the surface," and perhaps this reflects a degree of self-knowledge. Many white liberals are astonishingly uninhibited about attacking black conservatives or Republicans on racial grounds, and that is what appears to have happened here. (We don't know for sure, since Bellevue is not revealing the identity of the professor who wrote the question.)
The good news is that the college president, Jean Floten, is taking the complaint seriously. According to the Times, she "apologized Wednesday at an emotional open-campus meeting" and "praised the courage of the students who brought the question to the college's attention."
** A curious choice of words, since denigrate means "to blacken."
Email
Ate My Homework
This wonderfully candid "editor's note" appears in the New York Times'
corrections column today:
A front-page article in some copies on Sunday reported that a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney said he had been authorized to disclose to a reporter that one of the key judgments in a 2002 National Intelligence Estimate was that Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure uranium." The assertion about the aide, I. Lewis Libby Jr., was based on a court filing last Wednesday by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor overseeing the indictment of Mr. Libby in the C.I.A. leak case.
Yesterday, Mr. Fitzgerald filed a letter with the court correcting his original filing to say Mr. Libby had been authorized to disclose "some of the key judgments of the N.I.E., and that the N.I.E. stated that Iraq was vigorously trying to procure uranium." This revised account of his filing undercut a basis of the Times article--that Mr. Libby testified that he had been told to overstate the significance of the intelligence about uranium.
Although Mr. Fitzgerald formally filed his corrective yesterday, accounts of it were provided to some news organizations on Tuesday night, and were the basis for news articles yesterday. The Times did not publish one, as other organizations did, because a telephone message and an e-mail message about the court filing went unnoticed at the newspaper. An article on the filing appears today, on Page A17.
Not surprisingly, the previous article, based on the inaccurate Fitzgerald filing, appeared on A1.
The corrections column also includes this: "A report in the World Briefing column yesterday about a rocket attack in Afghanistan carried an erroneous credit. It was by Carlotta Gall." We don't think the Times actually meant to "credit" its reporter with a rocket attack.
Labor
vs. McKinney
"The top police union official in the U.S. was in Washington [yesterday],
discussing possible legal action with the police officer who was involved in
a run-in with Rep. Cynthia McKinney," reports Atlanta's WSB-TV:
"We're going to make sure the officer won't be harassed. We want the officer to be able talk to experts, who can look at his legal recourses, if he needed to," says Chuck Canterbury, national president of the Fraternal Order of Police.
The F.O.P. has more than 320,000 members.
Union officials are also looking into the run-in between one of the congresswoman's employees and Channel 2 Action News reporter Scott MacFarlane.
The union says he should be prosecuted for impersonating a police officer.
There's a bit of a man-bites-dog aspect to a public-sector union taking on an ultraliberal Democratic congressman, but as we noted last week, the House runs the Capitol Police--which means that whereas McKinney has posed as a victim of police brutality, it is more accurate to say the officer was a victim of thuggish management.
When
Every Problem Looks Like a Nail
"Rep. Patrick Kennedy received stitches Wednesday after being hit with
a hammer head during an economic development meeting," the Associated Press
reports from Pawtucket, R.I. No, this didn't involve Tom DeLay but an actual
hammer:
Kennedy met with a Wisconsin entrepreneur interested in relocating to Rhode Island. Matt Kriesel produces Impact Gel, a shock-absorbing material used sports-shoe inserts, tennis rackets and horse saddles.
Kriesel was hitting some gel with a hammer to demonstrate how it reduces vibration when the hammer's head flew off and hit Kennedy in the mouth.
It sounds as though Kennedy will be OK, though he did need six stitches in his lower lip.
Something
Similar Happened to Patrick Kennedy
"Boy Scouts Face Split"--headline, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin (Ontario,
Calif.), April 13
'Io
Non So Ben Ridir Com' I' V'intrai'
"Investigator: Dante's Fire Accidental"--headline, Spartanburg (S.C.)
Herald-Journal, April 13
'Not
Bad for a Guy Who Hasn't Had a Beer in 20 Years'
"Bush impresses Brewers with demeanor, competitiveness"--subheadline,
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, April 11
Why
It Takes So Long to Get a Letter Typed at the Vatican
"Pope No Longer Racing Secretary"--headline, Daily Racing Form, April 12
Next
They'll Want to Make Puerto Rico a Steak
"Geologists Find Ancient Worm Feces"--headline, Associated Press,
April 12
Who
Built a Jail Up There?
"Boulder Woman Jailed Over Garage Door"--headline, KMGH-TV Web site
(Denver), April 13
What
Did He Get Mrs. Shuttle?
"NASA Employees Mark Shuttle Anniversary"--headline, Associated Press,
April 12
Thanks
for the Tip!--LXV
"Health Tip: Prevent Food-Borne Illnesses"--headline, HealthDayNews,
April 12
Bottom
Story of the Day
"Sheehan Returns to Protest Near Bush Ranch"--headline, Associated
Press, April 12
Ransom
Held
"Running through the University of Georgia campus as a ninja can elicit
a prompt response from authorities, a UGA sophomore learned," the Associated
Press reports from Athens, Ga.:
Federal Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearm agents, on campus for a community training project, detained Jeremiah Ransom of Macon Tuesday as a "suspicious individual" when they spotted a masked figure darting near the Georgia Center.
Ransom told The Red & Black student newspaper that he had left a Wesley Foundation pirate vs. ninja event when he was snared by agents with guns drawn.
We guess the pirates won!
(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Michael Segal, Ethel Fenig, Ed Lasky, Ike Andrews, Mark Schulze, Tom Linehan, Allen O'Donnell, Rod Pennington, Bob O'Hara, Thomas Dillon, Greg Gagne, John Sanders, Lindsay Osbon, Thomas Binder, Lore Goldberg, Clyde Middleton, John Forsberg, Nathan James, Dan Fenton, Levy Jonasson, Alan Utter, Dan O'Shea, John Neal, Matt Bradley, Ruth Papazian and Alfred Nugent. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
Today on OpinionJournal:
- Review & Outlook: Rep. Jerry Lewis and the emerging Republican minority.
- Peggy Noonan: Having an open heart doesn't mean supporting open borders.
- John Fund: Voter fraud in Pennsylvania? Gov. Rendell isn't worried.
- Naomi Riley: A visit to a South Carolina plantation.
