From the WSJ Opinion Archives

by JAMES TARANTO
Friday, October 6, 2006 2:56 P.M. EDT

Making the World a Better Place
A long Washington Post piece on "new media" includes this great tidbit about Bill Clinton:

He said Democrats of his generation tend to be naive about new media realities. There is an expectation among Democrats that establishment old media organizations are de facto allies--and will rebut political accusations and serve as referees on new-media excesses.

"We're all that way, and I think a part of it is we grew up in the '60s and the press led us against the war and the press led us on civil rights and the press led us on Watergate," Clinton said. "Those of us of a certain age grew up with this almost unrealistic set of expectations."

This Clinton is an astute one, isn't he? We've made essentially the same argument many times--including with reference to Clinton's own recent outburst on "Fox News Sunday." The former president, used to sycophantic interviewers like David Remnick and Larry King, was unprepared for a tough question and lashed out, delivering an angry, paranoid rant.

Somehow Clinton understands that "we," his fellow liberals, are fatuous about the media but he fails to grasp that he is.

A Travesty of Lawyering
"Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, a member of Saddam Hussein's defense team, predicted on Thursday that a bloodbath would follow should an Iraqi court trying the former president have him executed," the Associated Press reports:

At a news conference, Clark said he feared that should Saddam and the others be hanged, "catastrophic violence" would follow that would lead to "the end of civilization as we know it in the birthplace of civilization, Mesopotamia. Total, unmitigated chaos."

Saddam's Sunni Muslim tribe of 1.5 million would be enraged over what they would consider the revenge killing of the former president by the Shiite-controlled and U.S.-sponsored government, Clark said.

In other words, Clark is seeking to influence the court for reasons having nothing to do with the evidence or the law: Spare my client, or the streets will run with blood. Shouldn't this be cause to remove him from the case, if not for professional sanctions against him?

Spot the Idiot
Garrison Keillor, writing in the Chicago Tribune, thinks that America is being just beastly to the "poor shnooks" who destroyed the World Trade Center:

The U.S. Senate, in all its splendor and majesty, decided that an "enemy combatant" is any non-citizen whom [sic] the president says is an enemy combatant, including your Korean greengrocer or your Swedish grandmother or your Czech au pair, and can be arrested and held for as long as authorities wish without any right of appeal to a court of law to examine the matter.

In fact, every detainee held by the military goes before a Combatant Status Review Tribunal--an Article 5 hearing in the Geneva Convention's parlance--and under the Military Commissions Act the decisions of these tribunals are subject to judicial review by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Currently, that means every detainee held; Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and the other 13 new arrivals at Guantanamo Bay will receive Article 5 hearings in the next few months. We guess what Keillor is upset about is the CIA's terrorist-interrogation program, whence KSM & Co. came.

But really, it's one thing to argue that due process for KSM is more important than preventing terrorist attacks. By raising the absurd specter of Korean greengrocers and Swedish grandmothers and Czech au pairs being detained as enemy combatants, Keillor shows that he doesn't even take his own argument seriously.

Make Sushi, Not War
"Rice Presses Iraqis to Curb Violence"--headline, Reuters, Oct. 5

A Gay Prankster?
Believe it or not, the Mark Foley scandal has gotten even weirder. From the Drudge Report:

According to two people close to former congressional page Jordan Edmund, the now famous lurid AOL Instant Message exchanges that led to the resignation of Mark Foley were part of an online prank that by mistake got into the hands of enemy political operatives. . . .

According to one Oklahoma source who knows the former page very well, Edmund, a conservative Republican, said he goaded an unwitting Foley to type embarrassing comments that were then shared with a small group of young Hill politicos. The prank went awry when the saved IM sessions got into the hands of political operatives favorable to Democrats.

The primary source, an ally of Edmund, adamantly proclaims that the former page is not a homosexual. The prank scenario was confirmed by a second associate of Edmund. Both are fearful that their political careers will be affected if they are publicly brought into the investigation.

This doesn't exonerate Foley--after all, when men are arrested for soliciting minors on the Internet, their purportedly underage interlocutors are usually FBI agents playing a similar "prank"--but it does cast the whole exchange in a different light. If Drudge's account is accurate, Edmund isn't an innocent victim but a predator in his own right, preying on a lonely and disturbed man.

The reference to "political operatives favorable to Democrats," along with a curiously prescient March 2005 blog post by left-wing gay activist Michael Rogers, suggests that there might be some political predation going on here too (hat tip: Steve Gilbert):

blogACTIVE.com has confirmed with three separate sources that, in fact, US Rep. Mark Foley is a gay man. Foley has voted to support discrimination against gay men and lesbians on more than one occasion.

In addition to the hypocrisy of Foley's vote for the Defense of Marriage Act, Foley also refuses to acknowledge the role his being in the closet played in his lack of support for his run for the US Senate. Equating being gay with some disgusting secret, Foley said it was "repulsive" to talk about sexual oritentation [sic].

A source has confirmed with blogACTIVE.com that Foley lives a practically an [sic] out life at his Florida residence, often seen entertaining gay men, some of whom the source described as "close to underage." . . .

I've thought hard about what kind of TAKE ACTION would work, but there is really is none right now. Everyone already knows Foley's a self hating closet case. When we get closer to the mid-term elections, I am sure more will surface.

Imagine if Republican activists had gotten wind of Jim McGreevey's homosexuality before he announced it, and had threatened to "out" him in order to hurt Democrats. One suspects the likes of Rogers would have viewed such Republicans as antigay bigots, or at least as panderers to bigotry. But how is what Rogers was proposing to do--expose a gay member of the opposite party in order to hurt that party--any different? (There is nothing in Rogers's blog entry to suggest he was aware of Foley's penchant for congressional pages or anyone who actually was underage.)

Rogers would presumably say that Foley was fair game because he supported policies Rogers thinks are antigay, such as the Defense of Marriage Act. In other words, antigay means are acceptable in the pursuit of pro-gay ends. This is a paradox of identity politics: Politics very often ends up trumping identity.

Partisan Ethics
In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, ethics professor Kirk Hanson and journalist turned "consultant" Jerry Ceppos weigh in on "the ethics of leaking." Some leaks are good, they say, while others are bad. Here is what they have to say about major politics-related leaks:

  • "If the leak serves the purely political or self-interest of the leaker, for example Richard Armitage's outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame, then it is wrong."

  • "If the leak reveals a government action that is illegal or behavior that harms individuals significantly--as in the Foley case--then it can be more easily ethically justified."

  • "In the case of the National Intelligence Estimate, we learned that people in government concluded that the war in Iraq might stoke terrorism. While unsurprising, this conclusion seems important information for Americans, even if it also served political ends."

It's amazing how whenever you read an article like this, it also turns out that leaks that are thought to benefit Republicans are bad, while ones that are thought to benefit Democrats are good. Could it be that some people use "ethics" to cloak a partisan agenda? Would that be ethical?

Homer Nods
Rep. John Shimkus is from Illinois, not Missouri as we said in an item yesterday (since corrected). His district does border the Show-Me State, however, so would have been accurate to describe him as a resident of the greater Missouri area.

One Man's Monster . . .
More great journalism from Reuters, this time in an Oslo dispatch:

Scientists have found a fossil of a "Monster" fish-like reptile in a 150 million-year-old Jurassic graveyard on an Arctic island off Norway. . . .

Such pliosaurs are known from remains in countries including Britain and Argentina but no complete skeleton has been found, he said. The skull of the pliosaur--perhaps a distant relative to Scotland's mythical Loch Ness monster--was among the biggest on record.

So let's see: Reuters, which is so skeptical it won't call Osama bin Laden a terrorist, is willing to state that an actual fossil is "perhaps a distant relative" to a mythical monster!

Adopt a Fetus?
From the Nashville City Paper:

Questions about whether parental rights are fundamental in Tennessee were at the heart of an 8-year-old custody case that was argued before the state Supreme Court Wednesday.

The Court--including new Justice Gary Wade and retired but not-yet-replaced Justice Adolpho A. Birch--heard oral arguments in the case of Baker v. He. The case is a Memphis custody dispute that has garnered national media attention.

Jerry and Louise Baker, a Memphis couple, have been raising the child of Jack and Casey He, Chinese immigrants, since shortly before the girl's birth.

This is where we usually do our fetus-vs.-baby shtick, but if that's what you're looking for, you should go back to our Sept. 28 item. What we're wondering here is, how in the heck could the Bakers have been "raising" the Hes' child since before her birth?

Odd Years
From KCNA, the North Korean "news" agency:

A seminar on the undying feats of the peerlessly great men was held by the Party for Peace and Unity of Russia and a lecture and a film show by the Pakistan Socialist Party on September 22 and 26 on the occasion of the 61st anniversary of the Workers' Party of Korea and the 80th anniversary of the Down-with-Imperialism Union. Sazhi Umalatova, chairperson of the Russian party, in a report at the seminar said that the WPK is led by Kim Jong Il, reliable successor to the revolutionary cause started by President Kim Il Sung. . . .

Mohammad Aslam Malik, secretary general of the Pakistan Trade Union Federation, in a lecture titled "60 odd years of leadership over people" said that the more than 60 year-long history of the WPK proves that the leadership of the party, indeed, provides a sure guarantee for the victory of the human cause of independence, the socialist cause.

Sixty "odd years": hard to argue with that.

No Wimp for the Mush
"Mush Welcomed Back With Blasts and Rockets"--headline, Blogger News Network, Oct. 5

Didn't Pennsylvania Already Recognize Israel?
"Abbas Tells US PA Will Recognize Israel, Says Opposite on PA TV"--headline, Arutz Sheva, Oct. 6

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

"Philly to Send Homeless Elephants to Baltimore"--headline, WBAL-AM Web site (Baltimore), Oct. 6

Why Do You Think They Call It 'Dope'?
"Good news for aging hippies: smoking pot may stave off Alzheimer's disease," Reuters reports:

New research shows that the active ingredient in marijuana may prevent the progression of the disease by preserving levels of an important neurotransmitter that allows the brain to function.

ScrappleFace.com has a slightly different take:

"The dope smoking Alzheimer's patient still suffers from memory loss, impaired decision-making, and diminished language and movement skills," according to one unnamed scientist, "but it's no longer a terrible disease that's causing the symptoms, so you don't have that stigma of being a victim."

"Dude, I just had a senior moment!"

World Ends, Elderly Hardest Hit
"Over 70 Dead or Missing in Vietnam After Typhoon"--headline, Agence France-Presse, Oct. 6

Better Than Being Under 20 Feet of Water
"Survey: New Orleans Under 190,000 People"--headline, Associated Press, Oct. 5

'No, Deer, I'm Not Going to Kiss You Tonight'
"Mad Deer Disease May Spread With Saliva"--headline, Associated Press, Oct. 5

Everyone's a Critic
"Man Still Critical After Getting Stuck in Tub of Dough"--headline, KGW-TV Web site (Portland, Ore.), Oct. 6

They May Have to Break a Few Legs
"EEOC Moves to Stem Decline in Disabled Workforce"--headline, Washington Post, Oct. 6

News You Can Use

  • "Court Says Nude Dancing, Booze Don't Mix"--headline, Chicago Tribune, Oct. 6

  • "Crocs Can Pose a Danger on Escalators"--headline, ABCNews.com, Oct. 5

  • "Be Advised, Hemorrhoid Cream Not for the Face"--headline, MSNBC.com, Oct. 5

Bottom Stories of the Day

Blame Jeanne Storm
Who's to blame for the massacre at the Amish school? Jeanne M. Storm of Chester, Vt.--or so says Jeanne M. Storm of Chester, Vt., in a letter to the editor of the New York Times (last item):

Somehow I feel responsible, as a member of the larger American society, for these deaths. It was my America that somehow contributed to the creation of this killer.

Why so many school killings? Has the general climate of approval of sexual stimulation, torture, dishonesty in government and business, the atmosphere of "anything goes" resulted in this horror?

There is not much I can do, but I have written the commissioner of the Pennsylvania State Police expressing my sympathy with all who have suffered in Nickel Mines and sent a small check for him to distribute in any way he sees fit to alleviate the pain in his community.

This is a great idea. In fact, let's blame everything on Jeanne Storm! Trouble in Iraq? We don't see Jeanne Storm signing up to fight over there. The Mark Foley scandal? Product of the larger American society of which Jeanne Storm is a crucial part. Hurricane Katrina? Hey, her name is Storm!

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Today on OpinionJournal:

And on the Taste page:

  • Review & Outlook: When science and politics become worlds in collision.
  • Naomi Riley: Why is high school the new college?
  • Meghan Gurdon: A classic series of children's books transport grown men and women back to their youth.
  • Elisabeth Eaves: Sufis come from every sect of Islam--some are even radicals.

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