From the WSJ Opinion Archives

by JAMES TARANTO
Tuesday, May 30, 2006 3:15 P.M. EDT

Questions Raised About Kerry War Record
When John Kerry* ran for president, he offered one compelling qualification for the world's highest office: He was a hero of the Vietnam War. True, America lost that war--but it was in spite of, rather than because of, Kerry's battlefield efforts.

Now, however, the New York Times reports that a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is raising questions about Kerry's war record and leveling "accusations that Mr. Kerry fabricated the military reports that led to his military decorations."

Kerry is taking the charges seriously, the Times reports:

His supporters are compiling a dossier that they say will expose every one of the Swift boat group's charges as a lie and put to rest any question about Mr. Kerry's valor in combat. . . .

Mr. Kerry has signed forms authorizing the Navy to release his record--something he resisted during the campaign--and hired a researcher to comb the naval archives in Washington for records that could pinpoint his whereabouts during dates of the incidents in dispute.

Let's just hope that isn't the same guy who helped O.J. Simpson find the real killer.

Strangely, the Times reports that "people within the Kerry campaign believed that the attacks had cost their candidate the presidency." This is hard to understand, since it would suggest that the questions about Kerry's war record were raised before the 2004 election. If that were true, wouldn't the New York Times have reported on them back then?

* At least he served in Vietnam, unlike Harry Pelosi and Nancy Reid!

Great Orators of the Democratic Party

Run for Your Lives! It's a Landslide!
"Democrats Eye November Landslide" reads the headline of an "analysis" by the Associated Press's Ron Fournier. "Republicans are three steps from a November shellacking," Fournier claims. But it turns out these are pretty big steps, and there are actually four of them:

  • "First step: Voters must focus on the national landscape on Nov. 7 rather than local issues and personalities that usually dominate midterm elections."

  • "Second step: Voters must be so angry at Washington and politics in general that an anti-incumbent, throw-the-bums-out mentality sweeps the nation."

  • "Third step: Americans must view the elections as a referendum on President Bush and the GOP-led Congress, siding with Democrats in a symbolic vote against the Iraq war, rising gas prices, economic insecurity and the nagging sense that the nation is on the wrong track."

  • And the fourth step, which Fournier doesn't assign a number: "Habitually divided Democrats" must "get their acts together."

In other words, all it will take for Democrats to win by a landslide is for everything to happen differently from the way it does in almost all other elections.

Hey, it could happen! And actually Fournier's article includes so many caveats that even if the likely happens in November, he'll be able to deny making a wrong prediction (not that that'll stop us from mocking him).

But here's what interests us: Our theory about the mainstream media is that they are generally biased in favor of liberals and Democrats, but this ends up helping conservatives and Republicans by breeding complacency on the Democratic side. Here's a way of putting our theory to a test:

Can you find a similar article--that is, a news story, not an opinion column, preferably written months before the election--speculating about the possibility of a Republican landslide in 1994, when there actually was one? How about in 1980?

Not Just a River in Egypt
Paul Norton "Pete" McCloskey Jr., a California Republican, served in the House from 1967 through 1983, leaving Congress after an unsuccessful 1982 Senate nomination run. Now he's back, challenging Rep. Richard Pombo, who represents parts of the Central Valley and East Bay, in a GOP primary next week. Pombo is expected to win easily, though some observers say he may be vulnerable to a Democratic challenge in November.

In his time out of office, McCloskey has had some dubious associations, to say the least. As blogger Eugene Volokh notes, in 2000 McCloskey delivered a speech titled "Machinations of the Anti-Defamation League" to the Institute for Historical Review, which according to the ADL was "a leading voice in the international movement to deny the Holocaust and vindicate Hitler and the Nazi regime" before going into "decline for several years."

In his speech, McCloskey said, "Earlier here today I listened to speeches about the courage of men in France, Britain, Germany, and New Zealand who have spoken out against the commonly accepted concept of what occurred during the Second World War in the so-called Holocaust."

He also said, "I don't know whether you're right or wrong about the Holocaust, but anytime a historian takes a position against Israel, that brings down their wrath and concentrated numbers and economic power." The antecedent of "their" is unclear.

McCloskey subsequently wrote a letter to the IHR's journal, the Journal of Historical Review, in which he distanced himself from Holocaust denial:

I want to make a polite suggestion. So many of my friends and relations personally saw the Nazi death camps during the last days of World War II that I myself am convinced that there was a deliberate policy of extermination of Jews, Poles, gypsies, and homosexuals by the Nazi leadership. Numbers of the specific events can be challenged, but it is my personal view that the IHR would be far more effective if it were to concede that a holocaust did occur and focus on the ADL's distortions of truth.

Now, let us stipulate that the ADL is a perfectly legitimate object for criticism, and the IHR's expression of its views is fully protected by free speech. The same is true of the NAACP and the Ku Klux Klan, respectively, but imagine if a politician gave a speech to the KKK denouncing the NAACP, then offered the Klan a "polite suggestion" that it cut the white-supremacy stuff and focus on what's wrong with the NAACP. Surely such a pol would be drummed out of polite society.

And yet both the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle have endorsed McCloskey in the primary. The Times editorialized in January that a McCloskey victory would be "the best thing that could happen for the district, the state, the nation and possibly the Republican Party." The Chronicle said last week that "McCloskey defines the term 'straight shooter.' . . . Pete McCloskey has the credentials to make the case--and to shake up the status quo in Washington."

Why would these very liberal papers endorse someone who consorts with Holocaust deniers? Because McCloskey is, in general, a man of the left. He not only opposes the liberation of Iraq (the common, perhaps unanimous, view of IHR sympathizers); as the Chronicle notes, he also "spoke out against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and called for President Richard Nixon's impeachment in June 1973."

It seems that for the Times and the Chronicle, there are no enemies on the left--even those who are also on the most virulent fringes of the right.

Zero-Tolerance Watch
"A middle school student was suspended for three days for sharing chewing gum because it contained caffeine," the Associated Press reports from Lower Burrell, Pa.:

The girl, whose name and age were not released, gave another Huston Middle School student Jolt gum. The gum is "a stimulant that has no other redeeming quality," said Amy Palermo, schools superintendent.

Hey, the stuff has caffeine. If that isn't a redeeming quality, we don't know what one is.

Muffins of Mass Destruction
"A high school student accused of delivering marijuana-laced bran muffins to a teacher's lounge said Friday he had no idea his 'senior prank' would become the focus of an FBI terrorism investigation and result in state felony charges carrying up to 20 years in prison," reports the Houston Chronicle.

We left this out of "Zero-Tolerance Watch" because this is a serious crime; and although 20 years in prison is probably excessive, the threat of 20 years in prison doesn't seem out of line. But a "terrorism investigation"? That's right:

On Thursday, Dallas police submitted five cases of assault on a public servant against Walker and Joseph Tellini, 18, after an investigation into the May 16 incident by local authorities and the FBI North Texas Joint Terrorism Task Force.

FBI Special Agent Donna Bennett said the task force became involved because early on it was not known if the incident was more widespread.

"As a terrorist attack, muffins tainted with some kind of chemical could have been distributed to a number of places," she said.

You don't have to be a civil liberties fetishist to think it's crazy for a "terrorism task force" to be involved in something like this, at least once it has become clear it was just high school idiots. Although the idea of muffins as a terror weapon does make it easier to understand why it was so alarming when Saddam Hussein went looking for yellow cake in Africa.

God on a Deadline
A Washington Post magazine article on "global warming" includes this howler:

James Hansen, the prominent NASA scientist, points out that the models don't realistically include ice sheets and the biosphere--all the plants and animals on Earth. The global climate surely has more surprises for us. . . .

Hansen thinks we have less than 10 years to make drastic cuts in greenhouse emissions, lest we reach a "tipping point" at which the climate will be out of our control.

Someone might want to take Hansen aside and explain that the climate has always been out of our control.

How Can We Be Sure?
"A Warmer World May, or May Not, Be Wetter"--headline, USA Today, May 30

Al Gore Must Be Itching to Run for President
"Study: Global Warming Boosts Poison Ivy"--headline, Associated Press, May 29

Solomonic Justice
"Enron Verdict Divides Former Employees"--headline, Associated Press, May 26

A Good Time to Start a Slush Fund
"Dollar Falls Amid Speculation of Snow Replacement"--headline, MarketWatch.com, May 30

What Would Friends Do Without Software?
"Software to Look for Experts Among Your Friends"--headline, New York Times, May 29

What Would We Do Without 'Eggsperts'?
"Chicken and Egg Debate Unscrambled: Egg came first, 'eggsperts' agree"--headline and subheadline, CNN.com, May 26

This Is Boring! Give Us Some New Poll Results!
"Poll: Americans Like Instant Gratification"--headline, Associated Press, May 28

Big Deal, Even Pluto Is in the Top 10
"Venus Plots Path Back Into Top 10"--headline, Reuters, May 29

Bill Reid Pends No More
"Reid Accepted Free Boxing Tickets While a Related Bill Was Pending"--headline, Associated Press, May 30

Bottom Stories of the Day

  • "Northland Divers Crack Underwater Ironing Record"--headline, Northern Advocate (Whangarei, New Zealand), May 23

  • "Mayor Boughton Will Be Here at 11 a.m."--headline, News-Times (Danbury, Conn.), May 27

  • "Record Salmon Catch Still Stands After 21 Years"--headline, Anchorage Daily News, May 28

Math Murder
As regular readers of this column know, we especially enjoy making fun of libertarians. Of course, some people who call themselves "libertarians" are just normal folks who don't fit the "conservative" or "liberal" label because they're on one side on economic issues and the other on social ones. But a true libertarian ideologue is marvelously kooky: relentlessly logical in the service of utter insanity, sort of a cross between Mr. Spock and John Hinckley.

Consider this essay by Tim Kern, on the Web site of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, about the Transportation Security Administration. He begins with the assumption that the TSA's security measures cost every air traveler an hour on average (emphasis his):

Let's do a little math.

There were 738 million enplanements (670 million domestic and 68 million international flights by US carriers) in the United States last year, and nearly 70% of those being leisure (voluntary, as opposed to business or bereavement) travel. If the TSA wastes just 1 hour per person per flight, that's 738 million hours. There are 8,766 hours in an average year (365 times 24, plus 6 for leap-year accrual). If a newborn is expected to live another 75 years, we may assume that an "average" airline passenger is 37.5 years old, and has 37.5 years left to live. We can also assume that a typical business traveler, being older than the average traveler, has 25 years left to live.

Turn the crank, and you can calculate the silent carnage.

Those 738 million hours lost are equivalent to the remaining lives of some 2,582 people! Each year, the TSA's one-hour delay, all by itself, kills the equivalent of over 80% of the 9-11 victims. Put another way, roughly every year and a half, the TSA "kills" more travelers than the four flights and all the ground victims of September 11, 2001.

Of course, you may disagree with my numbers. That's allowed; use your own. The argument is robust enough to withstand a lot of fiddling.

There are a few problems here. First, although the TSA is new, airport security is not. Thus, Kern's calculations should use the marginal "cost"--the difference in the average duration of pre-9/11 and post-9/11 security.

Second, your mileage may vary, but in our experience the total amount of time it takes to go through airport security is well under an hour, except when there is a long line (which happens maybe 15% to 20% of the time).

Most important, the whole exercise is nonsensical because there is a qualitative difference between waiting and being dead. If there were not, a sentence of life in prison would be indistinguishable from the death penalty. And by Kern's logic, think of how many "people" commit "suicide" each day just by going to Disneyland!

(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Ruth Papazian, Daniel Simon, Charlie Gaylord, Ed Lasky, Monty Kriger, Greg Askins, Bill Walker, Evan Slatis, Charles Matthews, Dan O'Shea, C.E. Dobkin, Michael Segal, Robert Paci, Michael Sheehan, Joe Mandarino, Fred Holmes, Robin Boult, Mark Murray, Tom Dziubek, Randall Creamer, Steve Karass, Stewart Levine, Craig Ray, Zabelle Huss, David Weaver, Brendan Schulman, Christopher Fountain, Jeffrey Tschida, Lewis Sckolnick, Kyle Kyllan, Michael Zwick, Ethel Fenig, Bill Schweber, Casey McEnelly, Jamie Extract, Dennis Powell, Mark Johnston and Leonora LaMantia. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

Today on OpinionJournal:

  • Review & Outlook: The Justice Department went overboard in raiding Rep. Jefferson's office.
  • John Fund: One GOP congressman may lose his seat for his pro-immigration views, while another offers a compromise.
  • Toby Young: David Goodwillie was too successful to make it as a writer. Or maybe he just didn't write that well.

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