From the WSJ Opinion Archives
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The
Liberal Suicide Pact
It seems we weren't the only one to notice that the New York Times buried news
of a foiled terror plot against John F. Kennedy International Airport on page
37. A pair of Times readers submitted questions about this to Suzanne
Daley, the paper's national editor, who is doing a "Talk to the Newsroom"
question-and-answer series this week. Here is Daley's explanation:
Here's the basic thinking on the J.F.K. story: In the years since 9/11, there have been quite a few interrupted terrorist plots. It now seems possible to exercise some judgment about their gravity. Not all plots are the same. In this case, law enforcement officials said that J.F.K. was never in immediate danger. The plotters had yet to lay out plans. They had no financing. Nor did they have any explosives. It is with all that in mind, that the editors in charge this weekend did not put this story on the front page.
In truth, the decision was widely debated even within this newsroom. At the front page meeting this morning, we took an informal poll and a few editors thought the story should have been more prominently played. Some argued it should have been fronted, regardless of the lameness of the plot, simply because it was what everyone was talking about.
Today, the Times has yet another editorial demanding that enemy combatants be afforded full rights under the U.S. Constitution:
Congress should shut down Guantánamo Bay, as called for in bills sponsored by two California Democrats, Representative Jane Harman in the House and Senator Dianne Feinstein in the Senate. Both lawmakers are intimately familiar with the camp and have concluded it is beyond salvaging.
Their bill would close Gitmo in a year and the detainees would be screened by real courts. Those who are truly illegal combatants would be sent to military or civilian jails in the United States, to be tried under time-tested American rules of justice, or sent to an international tribunal. Some would be returned to their native lands for trial, if warranted. The rest would be set free, as they should have been long ago.
The Guantánamo camp was created on a myth--that the American judicial system could not handle prisoners of "the war against terror."
The attitudes expressed by Daley and the Times editorial board are quite typical of elite liberal thought. They share a premise that the threat of terrorism has been greatly exaggerated. But on closer analysis, there is a contradiction, one that reveals why liberal thinking on terrorism is dangerous not only to American national security but also, in the long run, to liberal ideals.
Every time law-enforcement authorities announce that they have stopped a terror plan, we hear Daley-like pooh-poohing from the left: The plot wasn't really that serious, it was nowhere near being carried out, the suspects were just a bunch of losers, that sort of thing. (The battier Bush-haters add that the announcement is a publicity stunt to stoke public fear or serve some political purpose.)
If this portrait of law-enforcement efforts is true, then the Times's blithe assurance that the criminal-justice system is sufficient for dealing with the terror threat is utterly fatuous, is it not?
Of course, newspaper editorialists don't make policy, so their fatuity is cost-free. But the Times's ideas are well within what passes for the mainstream of the Democratic Party. The Times carries a news story today titled "Democrats Hope to Expand Rights at Guantanamo." They are unlikely to succeed as long as George W. Bush wields the veto pen, but if a Democrat is elected president next year, all bets are off.
John Edwards has endorsed the view, which the Times expressed with those scare quotes above, that the war on terror isn't real. Barack Obama, in a CNN forum the other night, declared, "I believe Guantanamo, the decision to detain people without charges, is unjust"--never mind that under international law, even legitimate prisoners of war may be held without charge for the duration of hostilities.
If the Democrats hold their congressional majorities and one of them becomes president, then, it is quite possible that the Times's view will prevail.
What the Times is proposing is that all terrorists in U.S. custody be freed unless prosecutors can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they have committed a specific crime--and in making their case, prosecutors would be bound by all the restrictions on admissibility of evidence that protect ordinary criminal defendants in the civilian courts.
What if the U.S. adopts such an approach and it turns out to be inimical to national security? What if, that is, President Clinton or President Obama or President Edwards signs the Harmon-Feinstein legislation, Guantanamo is emptied, and a few years later we see another 9/11 or worse?
Would the American people accept the idea that serial mass murder on our own soil is just the price we have to pay to preserve some abstract concept of liberty--that is, that the Constitution is a suicide pact after all? We doubt it.
It is much more likely that the political system would find it impossible to resist public demands for much harsher antiterror measures, probably involving genuine curtailments of civil liberties. There is no reason to think that liberal politicians would resist such demands. After all, Woodrow Wilson restricted free speech during World War I, and Franklin D. Roosevelt interned tens of thousands of American citizens during World War II, cheered on by then-Gov. Earl Warren of California. In both cases the Supreme Court ratified the president's excesses.
By overreacting to imagined civil liberties threats today, American liberals may be setting the stage for future overreactions in the other direction. Guantanamo helps keep America free as well as safe.
68-0
Last month we interviewed Israeli opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who
put forward an intriguing idea for dealing with Iran's ambitions of nuclear
genocide: State pension funds, he said, should divest their holdings in companies
that do business with Iran. Read the full
interview for his explanation of why he thinks it would work.
One of the advantages of this approach, he told us, is that it could draw bipartisan support. And in fact it did just that in Califormia, where the state Assembly voted 68-0 to approve an Iran divestment bill sponsored by Assemblyman Joel Anderson:
The funds in questions, known as CalPERS and CalSTRS, manage over $400 billion between them. CalPERS spokesman Clark McKinley said that the version of the bill that passed would likely force the fund to move about $2 billion in assets, at a cost of around $25 million.
The bill still needs Senate approval and the signature of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, with whom Netanyahu spoke just after our interview. Although no one voted against the bill, one lawmaker did not favor it:
The only opposition on the floor came from Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally, D-Los Angeles. Dymally took issue with Anderson's comparison of his bill to the landmark 1986 effort by Representative Maxine Waters [then in the Assembly] to lead divestment from South Africa. Dymally abstained during the vote.
"We're talking about apples and oranges here," Dymally said. "The entire world was against Apartheid, not just a single country."
At least Dymally isn't arguing that apartheid was worse than genocide. Still, his objection is bizarre. If Dymally had been part of one of the first legislative bodies to vote for divestment from apartheid South Africa, would he have abstained on the ground that "the entire world" wasn't on board?
News
by Stereotype
Our item yesterday on an article in Minneapolis's Star Tribune that strained
to draw a link between Brian Skold's suicide-by-cop and Skold's military service
in Iraq brought this comment from reader Bill Macfadyen:
In 1989, I was wire editor at the Santa Barbara News-Press (the current Santa Barbara News-Press is a fertile target for satire, but that's another story), when news broke of a schoolyard shooting in Stockton, Calif. The early Associated Press bulletins called the 26-year-old camouflage-clad gunman, Patrick Purdy, "a Vietnam veteran."
I was one of several editors from around California to call AP to ask how someone in his mid-20s, in 1989, could have served in the Vietnam War. Shortly afterward, a bulletin "write-through" came in, directing editors to disregard earlier stories and drop the "Vietnam veteran" reference. I only wish I had had the good sense to save the bulletins.
What might have contributed to the stereotyping in this case was that, as Time noted, all five of the children Purdy killed were from Southeast Asia. Time also notes that the following words were either carved into the stock of Purdy's gun or written on his jacket: "freedom," "victory," "Hezbollah," "PLO," "Libya" and "death to the Great Satin [sic]."
News
by Stereotype--II
Reader Keith Rayburn spotted this headline in yesterday's Christian Science
Monitor: "China Balks at Emissions Caps." He writes, "My immediate
thought was, How will they blame the Republicans?"
Sure enough, here's the lead sentence: "China echoed the Bush administration's stance on global warming Monday, refusing to set firm caps on its greenhouse-gas emissions and saying that economic growth remained its 'first and overriding priority.' "
Reader Dick Weltz, meanwhile, notes the way four newspapers led a story on a Monday court ruling:
- "Television networks need no longer fear being fined when someone lets
slip a curse word on air. A federal appellate court yesterday found that the
Federal Communications Commission could not take action against broadcasters
for isolated, unscripted curse words. Ruling in favor of Fox, NBC, and CBS,
the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the FCC gave no justifiable explanation
for parting in recent years with a decades-old policy of not seeking enforcement
action against the networks for 'fleeting expletives.' "
- "Broadcasters scored a major victory as an appeals court ruled that
inadvertently airing profanity didn't violate decency standards. The decision
was a strong rebuke of the Federal Communications Commission, which had tried
to institute a no-tolerance policy on the airing of virtually all expletives,
even unscripted profanities during live television and radio broadcasts. And
it is a big win for the four major TV networks and their affiliate stations,
which faced the threat of multimillion-dollar indecency fines if the FCC's
policy had been upheld."
- "If President Bush and Vice President Cheney can blurt out vulgar language,
then the government cannot punish broadcast television stations for broadcasting
the same words in similarly fleeting contexts. That, in essence, was the decision
on Monday, when a federal appeals panel struck down the government policy
that allows stations and networks to be fined if they broadcast shows containing
obscene language."
- "A federal appeals court tossed out an indecency ruling against Rupert Murdoch's Fox television network yesterday and broadly questioned whether the Federal Communications Commission has the right to police the airwaves for offensive language. In a 2 to 1 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in New York ruled that the FCC went too far in issuing a 2006 decision against Fox Broadcasting for separate incidents in 2002 and 2003 after singer Cher and celebrity Nicole Richie each uttered an expletive on live television."
With apologies to "Sesame Street," one of these things is not like the others; one of these things just doesn't belong. Did you guess which thing was not like the others? Did you guess which thing just doesn't belong? If you guessed this one is not like the others, then you're absolutely right! The four excerpts come, respectively, from the New York Sun, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Washington Post.
The Times's description of the ruling, FCC v. NBC (warning: contains language unsuitable for a family newspaper or its Web site), is inaccurate. Judge Rosemary Pooler does quote unprintable utterances by Bush and Cheney. But she does not argue that the words are permissible to broadcast because they have used them. Rather, she cites Bush's and Cheney's quotes as examples to bolster the networks' claim that the words in question can be used in ways that "no reasonable person would believe referenced 'sexual or excretory organs or activities.' "
The
Force Women to Work Act
Cait Murphy of Fortune magazine has an interesting article faulting Sen. Barack
Obama for co-sponsoring the Fair Pay Act (the main sponsor is Iowa's Tom Harkin):
It's baaaack!! Yes, "comparable worth," which faded out around the same time the Bay City Rollers were disbanding, is making a comeback, under the euphemism "pay equity." . . . The Act notes the existence of wage differentials between men and women.
This is true; according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2005 female full-time wage and salary workers made 81% of what men did. . . . What is more dubious, though, is the assumption that is the heart of the Fair Pay Act: that discrimination is the reason for all or most of the difference. And the act's remedies are absurdly misguided, injecting the federal government into the most routine pay decisions. . . .
June O'Neill, a certifiably female economist who served as director of the Congressional Budget Office under President Clinton, wrote a peer-reviewed paper for the American Economic Review (May 2003), trying to account for the pay gap. What she found was that women are much more likely over the course of their lives to cut back their hours or quit work altogether than men. That matters, because even though the BLS was comparing full-time workers, if you go part-time or take years out of the labor force, that has an effect on earnings down the line, due to loss of seniority or missed promotions.
Inasmuch as "pay inequity" is a consequence of women making different career choices from men, it obviously is not unjust. But what is less often noted is that it is good for women. Generally speaking, if a woman is able to quit her job to raise her children, it is because her husband makes enough money to support the entire family.
If the federal government intervenes in the labor market so that men's income declines, fewer husbands will have sufficient earning power for their wives to make this choice. That wouldn't be good for women, only for ideologues who insist that a woman's place is in the office.
Commie
Zombie Recites Viet Stats!
"A healthier looking Fidel Castro appeared on Cuban television Tuesday,
speaking slowly and focusing on past memories rather than his recovery and future
in his first lengthy appearance since he fell ill and gave up power last summer,"
the Associated Press reports from Havana:
Castro was wearing a red-white and blue tracksuit affixed with a Cuban flag. He often shook his arm and extended a finger for emphasis as he spoke about his past visits to Vietnam and recalled a weekend meeting with the chief of that country's Communist Party, Nong Duc Manh.
"How hot it was," said Castro, recalling his 1973 visit to Vietnam when the U.S. was still backing the south in a war there that the communist north eventually won. "It was like you jumped in a pool with clothes on," he said of the humidity, which can also be brutal in Havana.
After a few minutes, Castro began reading a tedious string of statistics about the number of teachers and other basic services in Vietnam from a notebook in his lap.
Not bad for someone who's still dead.
We
Have a Winner
We thought we were joking yesterday when we asked the following "trivia
question":
Who was the last U.S. president committed to a wrenching, if sometimes incoherent, process of conscience and judgment?
But Sharon Neufeld wrote us with an answer, and then so did some half dozen other readers: Jimmy Carter!
Seems right to us. Though unlike Chuck Hagel, Carter doesn't evince a "long-delayed desire to make sense of his own life and his country's past," and while he's received a good deal of obloquy, our sense is that it's still short of "his fair share."
'Baby,
You've Got Something I Want, and It Isn't a Ballot'
"Clinton Courting Non-Voting Women"--headline, McClatchy-Tribune Information
Services, June 5
Breaking
News From 3300 B.C.
"Prehistoric Iceman 'Otzi' Died From Arrow Wound"--headline, Reuters,
June 6
Breaking
News From 2006
"Ginsburg Only Woman on High Court"--headline, Associated Press, June 4
Did
CNN Commission the Study?
"Fox Attack Response Studied"--headline, Richmond Times-Dispatch,
June 6
You
Have No Chance to Survive Make Your Time
"Bush, Cheney Express Support for Sentences White House Aid"--headline,
Voice of America Web Site, June 6
No
Blood for Oil!
"Red Cross Offering Gas for Blood"--headline, Associated Press, June 6
Vertical
Integration
"Dope Grower Agrees to Deal"--headline, Rutland (Vt.) Herald, June 6
Good
News for the Plowshare Cartel
"Court Convicts Schofield Man in Sword Beating"--headline, Wausau
(Wis.) Daily Herald, June 6
Things
Really Got Out of Hand
"Penalty Phase Arguments End in Slaying of Policeman"--headline, Contra
Costa (Calif.) Times, June 5
The
Cops Couldn't Afford Bloodhounds
"Calif. Woman Found With 120 Pet Rats"--headline, Associated Press,
June 6
Hey,
Clam Up!
"Heavy Rains Force Shellfish Closures"--headline, Newsday (Long Island,
N.Y.), June 5
Wouldn't
It Be Easier to Use Kleenex?
"Scientists Move Closer to Turning Skin Cells Into Tissues"--headline,
New York Times, June 6
Why
Fire Someone Batting .358?
"Feds Appeal Posada's Dismissal"--headline, Associated Press, June 5
News
You Can Use
"Animal Experts: Stay Calm Around Coyotes"--headline, Examiner (San
Francisco), June 6
Bottom Stories of the Day
- "California Town Launches Goose-Egg Oiling Campaign"--headline,
AllHeadlineNews.com,
June 5
- "Speaker Won't Meet Auto CEOs"--headline, Detroit
News, June 6
- "Winnie Mandela Refused Canadian Visa"--headline, Toronto Star, June 5
Be
Careful What You Wish For
"A young clerk with no knowledge of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown
allowed a tribute to victims slip into the classified ads page of a newspaper
in southwest China," Reuters reports:
The tiny ad in the lower right corner of page 14 of the Chengdu Evening News on Monday night, read: "Paying tribute to the strong(-willed) mothers of June 4 victims." . . .
A man gave the advertisement to the clerk, who had recently graduated and worked for an advertising company responsible for receiving content for the ads section, [Hong Kong's South China Morning] Post reported.
"She called the man back two days later to check what June 4 meant and the man said it was (a date on which) a mining disaster took place," the Post quoted a source at the paper as saying. . . .
References to the massacre are barred in state media, the Internet and printed works, meaning many of China's younger generation are ignorant of the events.
Sounds as if the censors were too effective for their own good.
(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Michael Segal, Ethel Fenig, Burt Rublin, Marc Young, Ed Lasky, Ron Wright, David Jurewicz, Mark Van Der Molen, Fred LaSor, Carl Stritter, Mark Wilson, Keith Kemper, Scott Wright, Jerry Rhoden, Nick Marble, Keith Cummings, Naftali Friedman, Richard Blum, Doug Babbitt, Dave Heneghan, Tameka Gravesande, Steven James, Abe Beyda, Frank Varnavas, Mark Finkelstein, Roger Denk, John Williamson, C.E. Dobkin, Paul Dyck and Michael Siegel. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
Today on OpinionJournal:
- Review & Outlook: An independent newspaper: The Bancrofts and a century of "free people and free markets."
- Holman Jenkins: We'll take the Washington Post, please.
- Eugne Volokh (from The Volokh Conspiracy): Is anti-Semitism good for the Jews? Yes, but only when expressed in moderation.
