From the WSJ Opinion Archives

by JAMES TARANTO
Friday, May 19, 2006 3:36 P.M. EDT

Losing the Race
It sounds as though Mayor Ray Nagin isn't expecting to win his re-election runoff. The Washington Times reports:

Nagin says a victory in tomorrow's election will send a message on race that "will echo throughout America."

"This election will say in spite of American prejudice, I was able to attract votes from all races and classes and move forward with the process of healing," said Mr. Nagin, who has hinted that whites locally and nationally are working to unseat him from the post, which blacks have held for nearly 30 years.

Mr. Nagin questions the source of "$6 million" that opponent Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu has raised, hinting at an effort to return the city to the "good-old-boy system," and says Hurricane Katrina exposed the soft underbelly of race and class in America.

Nagin, of course, is black; Landrieu, a fellow Democrat, is a person of pallor. If Landrieu wins, he will be the city's most ashen chief executive since his father, Moon Landrieu, left office in 1978.

We'll admit to only a superficial knowledge of New Orleans politics, formed mostly during and immediately after Hurricane Katrina. But Nagin's 11th-hour racial appeal--really an appeal to white guilt--has a familiar ring, for we remember hearing similar arguments in 1993 on behalf of then-Mayor David Dinkins, New York's first black mayor.

Four years earlier, Dinkins had defeated incumbent Ed Koch in the Democratic primary and Republican Rudy Giuliani in the general election. Koch's last term had seen two ugly racial crimes in mostly white neighborhoods: Howard Beach, Queens; and Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Dinkins ran on a promise to be a "racial healer."

This promise he failed to realize. If anything, race relations got worse, with a racist boycott in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and riots in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Washington Heights, Manhattan. The New York Times, in endorsing Dinkins for re-election, saw this as to the mayor's credit: "Mr. Dinkins's skill in preventing localized racial flare-ups from becoming citywide conflagrations can be demonstrated only by noting that New York did not become Los Angeles."

In truth, by electing and then rejecting Dinkins, New Yorkers sent an excellent "message on race": that they are willing to elect politicians who are black, but unwilling to indulge in guilty condescension, forgiving an officeholder's failures merely because he is black. We trust New Orleans voters likewise will judge Mayor Nagin not on the color of his skin but on the quality of his leadership.

That's a Big Wing!
Earlier this week, the Senate approved an amendment to the immigration bill "to build 370 miles of triple-layered fencing along the Mexican border," reports the Associated Press. The AP quotes one senator who took offense at the defense:

"What we have here has become a symbol for the right wing in American politics," countered Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. He said if the proposal passed, "our relationship with Mexico would come down to a barrier between our two countries."

The vote to build the fence was 83-16. Here is a partial list of senators who voted sí: Joe Biden, Barbara Boxer, Hillary Clinton, Mark Dayton, Tom Harkin, John Kerry*, Pat Leahy, Carl Levin, Barbara Mikulski, Harry Reid, New York's other senator†, Debbie Stabenow and Ron Wyden.

If the right wing gets any more crowded, the whole plane is liable to tip over!

* If only there had been a border fence between Vietnam and Cambodia, he might never have run weapons to the Khmer Rouge!

† A dagger of the mind, a false creation, proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain.

The Canadians Are Coming!
Not all conspiracy theories about the Bush administration emanate from the Angry Left. Check out this piece by Jerome Corsi, co-author of "Unfit for Command," in Human Events:

President Bush is pursuing a globalist agenda to create a North American Union, effectively erasing our borders with both Mexico and Canada. This was the hidden agenda behind the Bush administration's true open borders policy.

Secretly, the Bush administration is pursuing a policy to expand NAFTA to include Canada, setting the stage for North American Union designed to encompass the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. What the Bush administration truly wants is the free, unimpeded movement of people across open borders with Mexico and Canada.

President Bush intends to abrogate U.S. sovereignty to the North American Union, a new economic and political entity which the President is quietly forming, much as the European Union has formed.

Especially laughable is the specter of "a policy to expand NAFTA to include Canada." Canada was a founding member of Nafta, which in turn was an outgrowth of the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement.

Rep. King Responds
Yesterday's item on Iraq death statistics brought this response from Rep. Steve King (R., Iowa), whose figures we were disputing:

It is safer to be a civilian resident in Iraq than in some U.S. cities and other countries.

This was the point of my speech in the House of Representatives on May 11. That point was picked up and run by a columnist of another newspaper. OpinionJournal editor James Taranto then wrote a piece, which sought to prove my theory wrong. Mr. Taranto wrote my tactic was "Pollyannaish" to counter the liberal propaganda about the War on Terror; nevertheless, whether you use Mr. Taranto's equations or mine, the argument is solid. It is safer to be a civilian resident in Iraq than a civilian resident in some U.S. cities and other countries.

When my facts and intentions are misconstrued, I feel it is my duty to correct the record.

First, my intentions of the speech were clear--I was comparing violent civilian deaths in Iraq with violent civilian deaths in some U.S. cities: "How does that compare then being an average civilian Iraqi compared to other places in the world where a civilian has a risk of dying a violent death on any given day?"

Because Iraq civilian death rates are not tracked by an official source, the best sources we have for research, www.icasualties.org, relies on a count of individual news articles involving civilian deaths in Iraq. These sources are used by our own government researchers, and they are careful to take into account human error in their calculations, which could involve double-counting. The writer and I accessed the Web site and its most up-to-date calculations on different days. The precise number through April 30, 2006, rises slightly from 27.51 to 27.75 per 100,000. However, the death rate we both came up with for civilian deaths, were in the same general range.

My statistics from around the U.S. and world did include policemen, but thankfully the number of police officers killed in the line of duty is very small and does not exaggerate the original death rates. The proportion of law enforcement in civilian homicides, for example, in Washington, D.C., is 4%, or in Atlanta, 1%.

Mr. Taranto insists the Iraq civilian death rate should account for police and military deaths. I disagree. Mixing law enforcement and military death rates would make the civilian death rate illegitimate, because the numbers we look to for comparison with other countries, only count civilian deaths. Police and military personnel in Iraq are conducting wartime operations, and should therefore be counted as military deaths.

The writer wrote an article to rebut my numbers, without providing readers with a number he believes would be accurate. Even with exaggerated logic, the violent civilian death rates of some U.S. cities and some countries are still higher than Iraq.

If we agree to the same end: the liberal media is spinning the War on Terror, because they want us to lose, why should we be arguing with each other over the better way to argue?

Meanwhile, several readers objected to our characterization of the liberal media's approach to Iraq as "misleadingly Cassandrian." Cassandra, they note, had the gift of prophecy; her problem was that she was cursed by Apollo so that no one believed her predictions. Well, c'mon, we did say "misleadingly." And surely the liberal media think they have the gift of prophecy.

We Don't Need No Stinking Badges
"Human rights groups are raising alarms over a new law passed by the Iranian parliament that would require the country's Jews and Christians to wear coloured badges to identify them and other religious minorities as non-Muslims," reports Canada's National Post:

"This is reminiscent of the Holocaust," said Rabbi Marvin Hier, the dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. "Iran is moving closer and closer to the ideology of the Nazis." . . .

Iran's roughly 25,000 Jews would have to sew a yellow strip of cloth on the front of their clothes, while Christians would wear red badges and Zoroastrians would be forced to wear blue cloth.

But Montreal's CINW-AM suggests the story is either false or old:

Independent reporter Meir Javedanfar, an Israeli Middle East expert who was born and raised in Tehran, says the report is false.

"It's absolutely factually incorrect," he told The New 940 Montreal. "Nowhere in the law is there any talk of Jews and Christians having to wear different colours. I've checked it with sources both inside Iran and outside."

"The Iranian people would never stand for it. The Iranian government wouldn't be stupid enough to do it."

Political commentator and 940 Montreal host Beryl Waysman says the report is true, that the law was passed two years ago.

If it is true, it goes to prove Karl Marx's observation that history repeats, first as tragedy, then as Farsi.

The Churchillian New York Times
Our item Wednesday on scandal-plagued America-hating professor Ward Churchill prompted this perceptive response from reader Nikhil Padhye:

Your story on Ward Churchill passing off his work as someone else's in order to cite that work later as an independent source reminds me of another story from your column a few days ago. Isn't this much like the New York Times editorial on NSA surveillance that cited a USA Today story that was a rehash of the Times' original scoop?

Granted, the editors of the Times cited an article that was genuinely published by another source, unlike in the case of Churchill. Still, the decision to cite a competitor's story instead of their own original findings was motivated by the same desire as Churchill's: to enhance the credibility of their point of view by citing other independent sources that really are not independent.

On a related note, check out this passage from a Reuters dispatch on CIA Director-designate Michael Hayden's confirmation hearing:

Hayden had been expected to face questions at a Senate Intelligence Committee confirmation hearing about his role as architect of Bush's domestic spying program, which the administration has defended as legal and necessary to protect citizens after the September 11 attacks.

No scare quotes around domestic spying. Reuters, which refuses to call the Sept. 11 attacks terrorism, nonetheless presents administration critics' tendentious and emotive characterization of the program as if it were a simple matter of fact.

Zero-Tolerance Watch
"Parents and at least one school board member said they believe an elementary school in Pennsylvania overreacted when it suspended 14 students earlier this month for mixing sugar and Kool-Aid crystals and calling it 'Happy Crack,' " reports Internet Broadcasting Systems. School officials say the kids were suspended from Shenandoah Elementary for "imitating drug activity."

In Honeoye, N.Y., meanwhile, kindergartner Seth Hall, 6, was suspended for three days for possessing a pair of hammers, Rochester's WHAM-TV reports. Bob Schofield, superintendent of the Honeoye School District, rescinded the suspension after a day, when he learned that Seth had brought the hammers to school at his teacher's request. The teacher got off with a "reprimand."

Then there's this, from the Rocky Mountain News:

A game of tag at a middle school in Golden [Colo.] has police investigating a 14-year-old boy for unlawful sexual contact.

The game played at Bell Middle School is called "boob tag," and kids choose who's "it" by touching a breast.

"This is not appropriate, but it's a game of consent," said Lynn Sharpe, the mother of the suspect, Cole Sharpe. . . .

A group of friends that included Cole, another boy and seven girls have been playing "boob tag" during lunch breaks since December, Lynn Sharpe said.

The girls often called themselves "The Bisexuals," Cole said.

No, we do not approve of "boob tag." But if school officials have to call in the cops to deal with a situation like this, they've completely lost control.

So That's What He Was Doing in Paris
"Kerry's Little Devils Impress Reds Scout"--headline, Kingdom (Killarney, Ireland), May 18

Except That They Have a Different Word for Everything
"U.S. Would Talk With N. Korea"--headline, United Press International, May 18

The NBA Was Never Like This
"Jordan Plays Hardball With Hamas"--headline, Associated Press, May 19

Let This Be a Lesson
"Baltimore City police arrested a Virginia couple over the weekend after they asked an officer for directions," reports WBAL-TV:

Joshua Kelly and Llara Brook, of Chantilly, Va., got lost leaving an Orioles game on Saturday. Collins reported a city officer arrested them for trespassing on a public street while they were asking for directions.

"In jail for eight hours--sleeping on a concrete floor next to a toilet," Kelly said.

"It was a nightmare," Brook said. "I was in there thinking I was just dreaming and waiting to wake up."

Ladies, do you understand now why we never ask for directions?

A Good Reason to Get Drunk Daily
"Fraternity/Sorority Members Who Get Drunk Weekly at Higher Risk of Injuries and Sexual Victimization"--headline, press release, Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, May 18

Life Imitates the Onion--I

"Study: Alligators Dangerous No Matter How Drunk You Are"--headline, Onion, May 10

"If You're THAT Drunk, Then Don't Steal a Car!"--headline, Reuters, May 17

Life Imitates the Onion--II

"Immigration Officials Beef Up U.S.-Mexican Border With Pure Beef"--headline, Onion, Nov. 12, 1996

"Bush Beefs Up Border Guard"--headline, London (Ontario) Free Press, May 16, 2006

Got Milk? You're Under Arrest.
"China Bans Breast-Enlarging Liquid"--headline, Associated Press, May 18

Measles, a Racist Plot!

"World Cup Fans Warned of Measles Risk"--headline, Australian Broadcast Corp., May 19

"Black and Asian Fans Told to Ignore World Cup Warnings"--headline, Guardian (London), May 19

World Ends, Etc., Etc.
"Strikes by Indian Doctors Enter Day 6; Poor Suffer Worst"--headline, Associated Press, May 19

Everyone's a Critic
"Boise County Men Critical After Shooting Each Other"--headline, Idaho Statesman, May 18

Wow, That Was an Effort, Man
"Historic Smoke-Free Ontario Act Is a Joint Effort"--headline, press release, Ontario Ministry of Health, May 18

Bottom Stories of the Day

Beyond the Pale
In an item yesterday, we quoted Michael McGowan of the National Organization for Albinism and Hypopigmentation, who was objecting the "The Da Vinci Code" because it has an albino villain. "The problem is there has been no balance," McGowan said. "There are no realistic, sympathetic or heroic characters with albinism that you can find in movies or popular culture."

Several of our readers pointed out that he was wrong. They direct us to "Powder," a 1995 film in which, according to the Internet Movie Database, "a young bald albino boy with unique powers shakes up the rural community he lives in." This IMDB plot summary makes clear the boy is sympathetic and heroic, though perhaps not realistic:

Harassed by classmates who won't accept his shocking appearance, a shy young man known as "Powder" struggles to fit in. But the cruel taunts stop when Powder displays a mysterious power that allows him to do incredible things. This phenomenon changes the lives of all those around him in ways they never could have imagined.

Not only did "Powder" escape McGowan's notice; the picture doesn't even show up on Skinema.com's "comprehensive list of movie characters with albinism."

How could they have omitted this movie? Well, according to McGowan's Web site, "many people with albinism are considered legally blind." So maybe they didn't see it.

(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Mark Van Der Molen, Charlie Gaylord, Robert Stead, Doug Levene, Jim Orheim, Grant Dorfman, Jon Terry, Joel Engel, Mike Lutz, Gavin Longmuir, Sean Dougherty, Paul Clark, Michael Haran, Thomas Whitten, Charlie Banks, Jerome Marcus, Nancy Zimmerman, Ethel Fenig, Ruth Papazian, Christian Peck, Fred Siesel, Ron Wright, Michael Segal, David Hyman, Naftali Friedman, Ron Ackert, Craig Iskowitz, Ed Lasky, Naomi Iaulus, Ed Diaz, Joel Goldberg, Paul Dyck, Yehuda Hilewitz, Michael Zukerman, Tomas Nally, Mark Kleiwer, Steve Karass, Patrick Acer, Steve Bartin, Dale Terry, Phil Hord, Don Hubschman, Moshe Bell, Robert Paci, Steve Ginnings, Charles Aker, Monty Krieger, Aaron Ammerman, Daniel Goldstein, Curt Strubhar, Chuck Ogden, Jim Miller, Bryan Fischer, Steve Belford, Ron Finch, Jerry Rhoden, Thomas Nowinski, Bob McMillan, Eric Winter, Matt Wingard, Curtis Lahr, Ted Krug, Brian Kuhn, Stacy Costello and Michael Lynch. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

Today on OpinionJournal:

  • Roger Scruton: A utilitarian who became a liberal--but never understood the limits of reason.
  • Daniel Henninger: "The Da Vinci Code" shows that conspiracy theories have no limits.
  • The Journal Editorial Report: Tune in this weekend for an interview with Judith Miller and a discussion of Libya and the new CIA head.

And on the Taste page:

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