From the WSJ Opinion Archives
Liberals Against Diversity
The New York Times op-ed page is trying to go from bad to diverse. The page
has hired William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, as a weekly columnist,
starting next Monday. The Politico
reports that word of the hiring "caused a frenzy in the liberal blogosphere
Friday night, with threats of canceling subscriptions and claims that the Gray
Lady had been hijacked by neo-cons":
But Times editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal sees things differently.
Rosenthal told Politico shortly after the official announcement Saturday that he fails to understand "this weird fear of opposing views."
"The idea that The New York Times is giving voice to a guy who is a serious, respected conservative intellectual--and somehow that's a bad thing," Rosenthal added. "How intolerant is that?"
It is tempting to make fun of Rosenthal for discovering liberal intolerance at this late date, but we're bigger than that. Instead, we'd like to chew over one particular liberal plaint about Kristol's hiring, from Katha Pollitt of The Nation:
What ever happened to meritocracy? For Kristol to get a Times column--after being fired from Time magazine no less--is as meritocratic as, um, George W. Bush becoming the leader of the free world. A pundit, even a highly ideological one like Kristol, has to be (or seem) right at least some of the time. But what's striking about Kristol is that he's has been wrong about everything! . . . And it's not as if he's a great prose stylist, either. At least David Brooks can occasionally turn a phrase. Kristol just churns out whatever the argument of the moment happens to be, adds jeers, and knocks off for lunch.
What this hire demonstrates is how successfully the right has intimidated the mainstream media. Their constant demonizing of the New York Times as the tool of the liberal elite worked. (Maybe it also demonstrates that the people in charge of the decision aren't so liberal.) I'm sure we'll hear a lot about the need for balance at the paper--funny how the Wall Street Journal doesn't feel the need to have even one resident liberal, but fine, let's have balance. Let's have a true leftist on the oped page--someone as far to the left as Kristol is to the right. Noam Chomsky, anyone? (and why does he seem just totally out of bounds but Kristol does not?) Barbara Ehrenreich? Naomi Klein? Susan Faludi? Gary Younge? me?
So Pollitt's gripe is (in part) that she didn't get the gig! We'll give her points for candor, but doesn't she sound for all the world like one of those dead white males complaining about being passed over in favor of an affirmative-action hire?
Don't get us wrong. We don't mean to suggest that conservatives qua conservatives have civil rights. If the Times had a policy of refusing to hire conservative columnists, we might criticize or mock the paper for it, but we would never argue that the law should compel it to treat right-leaning job applicants equally.
Yet Pollitt's complaint runs directly counter to the standard liberal argument for affirmative action. In his influential split-the-difference opinion in University of California v. Bakke (1978), Justice Lewis Powell opined that racial preferences in college admissions could be justified in the interest of "the attainment of a diverse student body." In Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), a 5-4 Supreme Court majority endorsed Powell's view. Writing for the majority in Grutter, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor noted that corporate America had embraced the diversity rationale:
The [University of Michigan] Law School's claim of a compelling interest is further bolstered by its amici ["friends of the court" who filed briefs in support of the university's position], who point to the educational benefits that flow from student body diversity. In addition to the expert studies and reports entered into evidence at trial, numerous studies show that student body diversity promotes learning outcomes, and "better prepares students for an increasingly diverse workforce and society, and better prepares them as professionals." . . .
These benefits are not theoretical but real, as major American businesses have made clear that the skills needed in today's increasingly global marketplace can only be developed through exposure to widely diverse people, cultures, ideas, and viewpoints.
If we define "affirmative action" broadly as the pursuit of diversity, almost everyone can support it, even those who reject racial preferences as a means to that end. In this sense, then, the Times's hiring of Kristol is an instance of affirmative action that no one should find invidious. He was hired without regard to race or other suspect classifications, evidently because his viewpoint is underrepresented on the Times op-ed page.
Yet Pollitt objects to Kristol's hiring precisely because it promotes diversity. She would rather his slot had gone to her or someone else who would have been the Times's eighth or ninth liberal rather than its second conservative. Look at this column or this online debate, and you'll see that she approves of racial preferences. When it comes to affirmative action, then, she favors questionable means so long as they do not further the worthy end.
Mommie
Dearest
The Iowa caucuses aren't till next year, but in this case "next year"
means roughly 72 hours from now. Over the weekend we got to thinking about whom
we'd be rooting for on the Democratic side. For a moment, we were in the uncomfortable
position of leaning toward Hillary Clinton.
Barack Obama seems like an impressive young man, but we can't shake the feeling that he isn't tough-minded enough to be president. For all of Mrs. Clinton's problems, a lack of toughness isn't one of them. What's more, call us cynical, but we've already grown weary of all the hype surrounding Obama--he's some sort of transcendent figure who's going to usher in a new kind of politics, yadda yadda yadda. We're not sure we can take another week of it, never mind 10 months.
But then we read this Boston Globe piece about Mrs. Clinton, who spoke yesterday in Des Moines:
The New York senator also highlighted a chapter in her book, "It Takes a Village," that talks about every child needing a champion. She said most children have someone in that role and she'd like to fulfill it for the whole country.
"I think the American people need a president who is their champion. And I've been running to be that champion--to get up every single day and do all that I can to make sure I provide the tools that every single American is entitled to receive and make the most out of their own lives," Clinton said.
Apparently unaware that every American of voting age is an adult, Mrs. Clinton seeks to infantilize the entire country. True, the sentiment is less horrid by virtue of its likely insincerity, but still, it ought to stand one's hair on end that Mrs. Clinton thought voters would find it appealing.
So whom do we root for? John Edwards? (Kidding!) To paraphrase Henry Kissinger, it's a pity they can't all lose.
Mrs. Gore Had a Point
- "Tipper thinks Hillary's an ambitious, rather uncoordinated, grasping,
difficult woman."--a Vanity Fair article quoted in Human
Events, June 11, 2001
- "Hillary Grasps for Nomination"--headline, Politico, Dec. 29
Hard-Hitting
Journalism
The New York Times investigates the political career of John and Elizabeth Edwards
and produces some shocking revelations:
The campaign is a shared mission. Elizabeth Edwards is her husband's most trusted adviser, his chief provocateur and his most popular surrogate, mobbed at campaign stops by people who admire her struggle against breast cancer and share stories of children lost. She describes the presidency as not just his quest, but hers, too.
Her visibility and their decision to continue with the campaign despite learning in March that her cancer was incurable has put the Edwardses' marriage on display like no other in this presidential race. From afar, Americans have wondered at their bond or questioned their values, cheered them on or condemned them. Some people assumed they were in denial, others accused them of an ambition that knew no bounds.
But to the Edwardses, their decision simply showed a sense of purpose and a lesson learned a decade ago from crushing pain: If you can't control life, you can at least embrace it more urgently.
Now that's what we call speaking truth to power.
Even
Steven?
The Associated Press's Mark Sherman reports on a pending Supreme Court case
in a way that seems to give both sides their due, but in substance does not:
The dispute over Indiana's voter ID law that is headed to the Supreme Court in January is as much a partisan political drama as a legal tussle.
On one side are mainly Republican backers of the law, including the Bush administration, who say state-produced photo identification is a prudent measure intended to cut down on vote fraud. Yet there have been no Indiana prosecutions of in-person voter fraud--the kind the law is supposed to prevent.
On the other side are mainly Democratic opponents who call voter ID a modern-day poll tax that will disproportionately affect poor, minority and elderly voters--who tend to back Democrats. Yet, a federal judge found that opponents of the law were unable to produce evidence of a single, individual Indiana resident who had been barred from voting because of the law.
But look closely at the "yet" sentences that give the arguments against each side, and you'll see that one is much stronger than the other. The plaintiffs' inability to show that the law has prevented anyone from voting seems a persuasive argument against the Democratic position that the ID requirement is "a modern-day poll tax." By contrast, the absence of prosecutions does not actually rebut the Republican contention that the ID requirement "is a prudent measure intended to cut down on vote fraud."
Does Sherman mean there have been no prosecutions since the law went into effect, or ever? If the former, that would seem to be evidence of the law's success in deterring fraudsters from coming to the polls. If the latter, at most it means the law is superfluous--but it could also mean that prosecutors are reluctant to pursue voter-fraud cases, which, as our colleague John Fund has pointed out, tend to alienate half the electorate.
So what are we to make of Sherman's presenting these two arguments as if they were equally persuasive? Maybe pro-Democratic bias leads him to present the Democrats' poor argument as if it were as persuasive as the Republicans' better one. Or maybe pro-Republican bias leads him to offer a poor argument on behalf of the Democrats. The next paragraph argues for the former interpretation:
The Supreme Court, which famously split 5-4 in the case that sealed the 2000 presidential election for George Bush, will take up the Indiana law on January 9, just as the 2008 presidential primaries are getting under way.
The connection between Bush v. Gore and the Indiana case is . . . what exactly? Or did he just throw that in to prompt a Pavlovian response from Dems?
NOW or Never--II
On Friday we
noted that the National Organization for Women had responded to the assassination
of Benazir Bhutto by ignoring it completely. But it's not that NOW doesn't remember
the dead. A reader calls our attention to a statement on the organization's
Web site titled "NOW Mourns Loss of Feminist Leader Judith Meuli."
We hadn't heard of her, but it turns out she created "a line of feminist
jewelry" and also donated a bundle to NOW:
Judith Meuli, 69, died at her home in California after a long battle against cancer. Meuli, a woman of many talents, edited the National NOW publication "Do it NOW" for many years with her partner Toni Carabillo (who died in 1997), was president of Los Angeles NOW, created with Carabillo a line of feminist jewelry that raised money for NOW and the Equal Rights Amendment campaign, and co-authored with Carabillo and June Bundy Csida "The Feminist Chronicles," a detailed history of the modern women's movement.
Several readers also called our attention to a LifeNews.com remembrance of Bhutto:
Bhutto was a member of an international pro-life women's movement that understood abortion causes medical, mental health and other problems for women.
When Bhutto was the prime minister of Pakistan, she helped lead a delegation to the 1994 Cairo population conference that confronted abortion advocates looking to make abortion an international right.
"I dream . . . of a world where we can commit our social resources to the development of human life and not to its destruction," she told the United Nations panel at the time.
No wonder NOW isn't interested in Bhutto. A real feminist is one who is interested in feminine things like jewelry and abortion.
Homer nods: In a Friday item, we neglected to correct Hillary Clinton's statement that Bhutto's father "was also assassinated." In fact, after being ousted in a 1977 military coup, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was tried on charges of ordering a political foe's assassination, convicted and hanged. Although there are good reasons to doubt the fairness of the process, it is a stretch to call Bhutto's execution an "assassination."
Wannabe
Pundits
Guess the topic of this column by John Romano of the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times:
Think about the last political cycle. One presidential candidate had done everything in his power to avoid military service in a devastating war. Another candidate served in the jungles of Southeast Asia and won medals of valor. Yet the first candidate reinvents himself as the tough guy, and makes the war hero look like a sissy.
That's how you win a fight.
If you guessed retired New York Yankees pitcher Roger Clemens and the Major League Baseball steroid scandal, you must've peeked.
Jay Mariotti, a Chicago Sun-Times sportswriter, has a column on the Chicago Bears' two-game win streak that closed a 7-9 season:
There is only one problem with all this Lovie love. [That's a reference to Bears coach Lovie Smith.]
The performances came in garbage time. They meant absolutely nothing, like Mike Huckabee winning in Iowa.
But this analogy is backward. Iowa is the first contest in the season, not the last. A Huckabee victory there (assuming he fails to catch on elsewhere, à la Dick Gephardt in 1988 or Tom Harkin in 1992) would be the comparable to the San Francisco 49ers' two-game winning streak that opened a 5-11 season.
Dispatch
From the Porn Belt
A policeman in Shelby County, Tenn. (Gore by 14.4%), was in the wrong place
at the right time, the Memphis Commercial Appeal reports:
A man who was shot by an off-duty sheriff's deputy while attempting to rob an adult bookstore in East Memphis Saturday may be linked to other recent robberies, authorities say. . . .
The man approached the clerk and indicated that he was going to rob the store, said Memphis Police Inspector D.W. Boyd.
That's when Gary Gadd, 44, an off-duty Shelby County sheriff's deputy who was shopping in the store, identified himself to the suspect. . . .
Gadd did not violate any department policies by shopping at the bookstore, [sheriff's spokesman Steve] Shular said.
"He's of age and chose to come here to shop," he said.
Maybe so, but something tells us he's going to have a long week at work.
Slavery's
Final Months
An item Thursday cited Rep. Ron Paul's speech recognizing Juneteenth--the anniversary
of June 19, 1865, when the slaves of Galveston, Texas, learned of emancipation.
"The slaves of Galveston were the last group of slaves to learn of the
end of slavery," Paul said. "Thus, Juneteenth represents the end of
slavery in America."
Well, not quite. The Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves only in states "the people whereof shall then [as of Jan. 1, 1863] be in rebellion against the United States." It did not cover the Union's five slave states: Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri and West Virginia. The last three had all abolished slavery by Juneteenth, but Delaware and Kentucky had not, which means slavery survived in those two states until December 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified.
We
Blame Global Warming
"Norwegian Cruise Ship Hits Iceberg in Antarctic"--headline, Associated
Press, Dec. 29
Now
That's What We Call Tort Reform
"Lawsuit Filed in Fort Ann Fatal"--headline, Times Union (Albany,
N.Y.), Dec. 28
'It Was
Tasty but Not Very Filling'
"Grizzlies: Mole Recalled"--headline, Salt Lake Tribune, Dec. 28
Duck,
It's a Balm!
"Al Quaida Balmed in Bhutto's Death"--headline, Denver Post, Dec. 28
Dumbo's
Ancestor Found
"Baby Mammoth Flies In for Study"--headline, Press Association (Britain),
Dec. 30
That's
Easier Said Than Done
"Parents Told to Abort Baby Call Disabled Son Gift"--headline, FoxNews.com,
Dec. 28
Help
Wanted
"Montgomery Co. Police Seek Police Impersonators"--headline, WJZ-TV
Web site (Baltimore), Dec. 30
Breaking
News From 1906
"Pasteurization Working at Mass. Dairy"--headline, Associated Press,
Dec. 29
News
You Can Use
"Don't Drink, Drive on New Year's Eve"--headline, Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
Dec. 31
Bottom Stories of the Day
- "Woman Loses Ring in Fudge, Gets It Back"--headline, Associated
Press, Dec. 29
- "Woman Doesn't Want Dog in Bathroom During Couple's Shower"--headline,
Associated
Press, Dec. 28
- "Edwards to Run More Ads"--headline, New
York Times Web site, Dec. 31
- "Canada Wins Spengler Cup"--headline, CBC.ca, Dec. 31
Phony
Data
The Associated Press reports from New York on a tragic misunderstanding:
A Trekkie who paid $6,000 for a poker visor supposedly worn by the android Data on the television show "Star Trek: The Next Generation" claims in a lawsuit against Christie's auction house that the prop is a fake.
Ted Moustakis, of Towaco, N.J., said he began to doubt the authenticity of the visor and other items he purchased at an auction of CBS Paramount props in 2006 after he brought it to a convention in August to have the actor who played Data, Brent Spiner, autograph it. . . .
Moustakis, who became a "Star Trek" fan at age 7, said he was humiliated.
"I thought this was a great piece of memorabilia to have, and I was so proud to get it," he said.
Ted, much as we hate to break it to you, not only is the visor not real, but the entire "Star Trek" universe is a hoax. In reality, it is impossible to go faster than the speed of light, there are no "starships" or "galactic federations," and Data isn't even a real person (or whatever it is he's supposed to be). Those pointy ears may look real, but we're afraid they're a product of the Paramount makeup department.
(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Dagny Billings, John Nernoff, Mordecai Bobrowsky, Ted Laetsch, John Williamson, Jason Norris, Tom Faranda, Robert Bleakney, Matthew Cook, Kevin McCarthy, Michael Segal, Fred Waterer, Daniel Coyne, Paul Zieke, Kelly Azar, Peter Farnham, Tom Clark, Wayne Gardner, Scott Davis, Jim Snave, Allen Brooks, Wally Taylor, William Golden, Lee Stokes, Glen Leinbach, John Hutsebaut, John Farris, Michael Justice, Mark Johnston, Kevin Bloom, Daniel Foty and Graham Storey. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
Today on OpinionJournal:
- Amity Shlaes: The candidates keep touting Depression-style public works programs. Why?
- John Fund: The Iowa caucuses are anything but a Norman Rockwell exercise in small-town democracy.
- The Journal Editorial Report: A transcript of the weekend's program on FOX News Channel.
