US veteran who killed unarmed Iraqis wins Tea Party support
Murder charges were dropped against Ilario Pantano, who now verges on election victory buoyed by right-wing backing
Share
265
Ed Pilkington in Wilmington, North Carolina
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 26 October 2010 12.18 BST
Article history
Ilario Pantano, who is standing as a Republican candidate in North Carolina's 7th congressional district in the US midterm elections. Photograph: Logan Wallace/AP
The basic facts are undisputed: on 15 April 2004 Ilario Pantano, then a second lieutenant with the US marines, stopped and detained two Iraqi men in a car near Falluja. The Iraqis were unarmed and the car found to be empty of weapons.
Pantano ordered the two men to search the car for a second time and then, with no other US soldiers in view, unloaded a magazine of his M16A4 automatic rifle into them, before reloading and blasting a second magazine at them – some 60 rounds in total.
Over the corpses, he left a placard inscribed with the marine motto: "No better friend, No worse enemy."
Six years later Pantano is on the verge of a stunning electoral victory that could send him to the US Congress in Washington. He is standing as Republican candidate in North Carolina's 7th congressional district, which was last represented by his party in 1871.
With the help of the right-wing Tea Party movement, and with the benefit of his image as a war hero acquired from what happened on that fateful day in 2004, he has raised almost $1m (£630,000) in donations and is now level-pegging with his Democratic opponent, Mike McIntyre.
"We are in complete contention. We are certainly neck-and-neck. And we are feeling terrific," he said at a Tea Party rally outside Wilmington.
Pantano is one of the new breed of hardline Republicans thrown up by the turmoil of the economic meltdown and the ensuing Tea Party explosion. He served in the first Gulf war, then worked for Goldman Sachs before rejoining the marines days after the 9/11 attacks.
A few months after he killed the two unarmed Iraqis, a member of his unit reported him to senior officers and he was charged with premeditated murder. At a pre-trial military hearing, prosecution witnesses testified that the detainees, Hamaady Kareem and Tahah Hanjil, were unthreatening and that their bodies were found in a kneeling position having apparently been shot in the back.
The defence countered that weapons had been found in the house from where the Iraqis were fleeing. The men had turned on Pantano unexpectedly as he was guarding them. He shouted "Stop!" but they didn't respond and he opened fire in self-defence.
Defence lawyers highlighted inconsistencies in the accounts of the prosecution witnesses and portrayed the main witness, who had been demoted by Pantano, as a soldier with an axe to grind. Forensic evidence was said to conflict with the prosecution case.
In the event, all charges against Pantano were dropped on grounds of insufficient evidence. But the officer presiding over the hearing recommended that Pantano be given non-judicial punishment for having displayed "extremely poor judgment", adding that by desecrating the Iraqi's bodies with his placard he had brought disgrace to the armed forces.
Pantano declined to be drawn on the specifics of his case. "I'm running for Congress. I'm not defending myself for something that happened five years ago," he said.
But what about that placard? "I don't need to explain anything to people. If folk are alarmed, well war is alarming. All of my men that are alive are grateful for my service."
Neither Pantano nor McIntyre, who has held the seat for the Democrats for the past 12 years, have raised the shooting incident in their campaigns. The only criticism, paradoxically, has come from the Republican who Pantano beat in the primary election, Will Breazeale.
"I myself was a veteran of Iraq. I've detained Iraqis, and in my view Pantano is no war hero," he said.
Pantano dismissed his criticisms as "an historic case of sour grapes".
But in this district, which has a large military population due to its proximity to Camp Lejeune, the marine base where Pantano's pre-trial hearing took place, most voters know Pantano's story intimately. "He's a war hero," said a top local Republican official who declined to give his name. And the placard? "Doesn't bother me."
Arthur Plante, a veteran of the US coastguard, said: "If I had been in his situation over in Iraq I would have done the same thing." His wife, Cynthia, also a veteran, said: "I would follow Pantano to war any time, any place. He did what had to be done."
Pantano is fighting the election on a national manifesto for change. He wants to cut back on government spending and clamp down on extremist Islam.
He recently spoke at Ground Zero in New York where he opposes plans to build an Islamic cultural centre nearby. "America objects to what's happening there. The folks in this district think it's an abomination," he said.
He has been endorsed by Pamela Geller, one of the leading opponents of the cultural centre who has built bridges between her group Stop Islamisation of America and the British far-right group the English Defence League.
"I don't have any anxieties about Pam Geller," Pantano said. "She is a patriot. I'm thrilled to have her endorsement."
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Friday, October 8, 2010
"Secretariat": A gorgeous, creepy American myth
WEDNESDAY, OCT 6, 2010 20:30 ET
ANDREW O'HEHIR
"Secretariat": A gorgeous, creepy American myth
Diane Lane shines in a Tea Party-flavored, Christian-friendly yarn about one big horse and our nation's past
BY ANDREW O'HEHIR
Diane Lane in "Secretariat"
"Secretariat" is such a gorgeous film, its every shot and every scene so infused with warm golden light, that I began to wonder whether the movie theater were on fire. Or my head. But the welcoming glow that imbues every corner of this nostalgic horse-racing yarn with rich, lambent color comes from within, as if the movie itself is ablaze with its own crazy sense of purpose. (Or as if someone just off-screen were burning a cross on the lawn.) I enjoyed it immensely, flat-footed dialogue and implausible situations and all. Which doesn't stop me from believing that in its totality "Secretariat" is a work of creepy, half-hilarious master-race propaganda almost worthy of Leni Riefenstahl, and all the more effective because it presents as a family-friendly yarn about a nice lady and her horse.
In its own strange way, "Secretariat" is a work of genius. On its lustrous surface, it's an exciting sports movie in a familiar triumph-over-adversity vein, based on the real-life career of 1973 Triple Crown winner Secretariat, probably the greatest racehorse ever, and his owner, Penny Chenery, played by Diane Lane in a resplendent collection of period knitwear and steel-magnolia 'tude. "Secretariat" is self-consciously crafted in the mode of last year's hit "The Blind Side" (which made a zillion bucks and won Sandra Bullock an Oscar), and clearly hopes for similar rewards. Like that film, it uses a "true story" as the foundation for a pop-historical reverie that seems to reference enduring American virtues -- self-reliance, stick-to-it-iveness, etc. -- without encouraging you to think too much about their meaning or context.
Although the troubling racial subtext is more deeply buried here than in "The Blind Side" (where it's more like text, period), "Secretariat" actually goes much further, presenting a honey-dipped fantasy vision of the American past as the Tea Party would like to imagine it, loaded with uplift and glory and scrubbed clean of multiculturalism and social discord. In the world of this movie, strong-willed and independent-minded women like Chenery are ladies first (she's like a classed-up version of Sarah Palin feminism), left-wing activism is an endearing cute phase your kids go through (until they learn the hard truth about inheritance taxes), and all right-thinking Americans are united in their adoration of a Nietzschean Überhorse, a hero so superhuman he isn't human at all.
Now, the fact that director Randall Wallace and screenwriter Mike Rich locate this golden age between 1969 and 1973 might seem at first like a ludicrous joke, if you are old enough (as I am) to halfway remember those years. I'll say that again: The year Secretariat won the Triple Crown was the year the Vietnam War ended and the Watergate hearings began. You could hardly pick a period in post-Civil War American history more plagued by chaos and division and general insanity (well, OK -- you could pick right now). Wallace references that social context in the most glancing and dismissive manner possible -- Penny's eldest daughter is depicted as a teen antiwar activist, in scenes that resemble lost episodes of "The Brady Bunch" -- but our heroine's double life as a Denver housewife and Virginia horse-farm owner proceeds pretty much as if the 1950s had gone on forever. (The words "Vietnam" and "Nixon" are never uttered.)
One shouldn't impute too much diabolical intention to the filmmakers; for all I know, Penny Chenery really did live in an insulated, lily-white bubble of horsey exurban privilege, and took no notice of the country ripping itself apart. But today, in the real world, we find ourselves once again in an enraged and dangerously bifurcated society, and I can't help thinking that "Secretariat" is meant as a comforting allegory, like Glenn Beck's sentimental Christmas yarn: The real America has been here all along, and we can get it back. If we just believe in -- well, in something unspecified but probably pretty scary.
Religion and politics are barely mentioned in the story of Chenery and her amazing horse, but it's clear that "Secretariat" was constructed and marketed with at least one eye on the conservative Christian audiences who embraced "The Blind Side." The film opens with a voice-over passage from the Book of Job and ends with a hymn. Wallace, also the director of "We Were Warriors" and the writer of "Pearl Harbor" and "Braveheart," is one of mainstream Hollywood's few prominent Christians, and has spoken openly about his faith and his desire to make movies that appeal to "people with middle-American values."
Hey, all's fair in art and commerce. Hollywood has finally woken up (a few decades late) to the enormous consumer power of the Christian market, and given all the namby-pamby Tinseltown liberalism right-wingers love to complain about, it's about time. But it's legitimate to wonder exactly what Christian-friendly and "middle-American" inspirational values are being conveyed here, or whether they're just providing cover for some fairly ordinary right-wing ideology and xenophobia. This long-suffering female Job overcomes such tremendous obstacles as having been born white and Southern and possessed of impressive wealth and property, and who then lucks into owning a genetic freak who turned out to be faster and stronger than any racehorse ever foaled. And guess what? She triumphs anyway!
If Americans love to root for the underdog, they may love to root for the favorite disguised as the underdog even more. That's pretty much what happens here, with the blond, privileged Penny Chenery and her superhorse posed as emblems of American ingenuity and power against the villainous, swarthy and vaguely terrorist-flavored Pancho Martin (Nestor Serrano), trainer of Sham, Secretariat's archrival. (Even the horse's name is evil!) The competition between the two horses was real enough; they raced neck-and-neck in the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness. But the depiction of Martin as an evil, chauvinistic braggart is fictional and highly unpleasant -- and it's tough not to notice that he's one of only two nonwhite speaking characters in the film. The other one is Eddie (Nelsan Ellis), an African-American groom who belongs to a far more insidious tradition of movie stereotypes. Eddie dances and sings. He loves Jesus and that big ol' horse. He is loyal and deferential to Miz Penny, and injects soul and spirit into her troubled life. I am so totally not kidding.
To move from content back to form, let me repeat that there's a whole lot to like in "Secretariat." Diane Lane gives a weirdly compelling performance, one of her best. She renders Penny Chenery as an iron-willed superwoman, striking and magisterial but utterly nonsexual, illuminated from within like a medieval saint. She busts down the doors on the boys' club of old-money Kentucky and Virginia racing, outwits the tax authorities and defangs Pancho Martin, in between doing loads of her kids' laundry. It's hard to say who is more indomitable, Penny or the magnificent colt she called Big Red, who capped his Triple Crown with an unbelievable 31-length victory at New York's Belmont Stakes. It's a charismatic, ultra-cornball performance, and right about the time that Rich's screenplay runs out of let's-go-get-'em speeches for Lane to deliver, Wallace and cinematographer Dean Semler step in with wonderfully varied and dazzling approaches to Secretariat's four big races (the Triple Crown plus the earlier Wood Memorial, where he finished fourth).
Despite those thrilling sequences, you don't learn much more about the world of racing in "Secretariat" than you learn about Facebook in "The Social Network" (and a lot of the stuff about racing in this movie is wrong or misleading). (You won't learn anything about anything from John Malkovich's mailed-in performance as eccentric French-Canadian trainer Lucien Laurin.) Big Red himself is a big, handsome MacGuffin, symbolic window dressing for a quasi-inspirational fantasia of American whiteness and power. Horses don't go to the movies, and this movie is about human beings, and our nonsensical but inescapable yearning to find the keys to the future in stupid ideas about a past that never existed.
ANDREW O'HEHIR
"Secretariat": A gorgeous, creepy American myth
Diane Lane shines in a Tea Party-flavored, Christian-friendly yarn about one big horse and our nation's past
BY ANDREW O'HEHIR
Diane Lane in "Secretariat"
"Secretariat" is such a gorgeous film, its every shot and every scene so infused with warm golden light, that I began to wonder whether the movie theater were on fire. Or my head. But the welcoming glow that imbues every corner of this nostalgic horse-racing yarn with rich, lambent color comes from within, as if the movie itself is ablaze with its own crazy sense of purpose. (Or as if someone just off-screen were burning a cross on the lawn.) I enjoyed it immensely, flat-footed dialogue and implausible situations and all. Which doesn't stop me from believing that in its totality "Secretariat" is a work of creepy, half-hilarious master-race propaganda almost worthy of Leni Riefenstahl, and all the more effective because it presents as a family-friendly yarn about a nice lady and her horse.
In its own strange way, "Secretariat" is a work of genius. On its lustrous surface, it's an exciting sports movie in a familiar triumph-over-adversity vein, based on the real-life career of 1973 Triple Crown winner Secretariat, probably the greatest racehorse ever, and his owner, Penny Chenery, played by Diane Lane in a resplendent collection of period knitwear and steel-magnolia 'tude. "Secretariat" is self-consciously crafted in the mode of last year's hit "The Blind Side" (which made a zillion bucks and won Sandra Bullock an Oscar), and clearly hopes for similar rewards. Like that film, it uses a "true story" as the foundation for a pop-historical reverie that seems to reference enduring American virtues -- self-reliance, stick-to-it-iveness, etc. -- without encouraging you to think too much about their meaning or context.
Although the troubling racial subtext is more deeply buried here than in "The Blind Side" (where it's more like text, period), "Secretariat" actually goes much further, presenting a honey-dipped fantasy vision of the American past as the Tea Party would like to imagine it, loaded with uplift and glory and scrubbed clean of multiculturalism and social discord. In the world of this movie, strong-willed and independent-minded women like Chenery are ladies first (she's like a classed-up version of Sarah Palin feminism), left-wing activism is an endearing cute phase your kids go through (until they learn the hard truth about inheritance taxes), and all right-thinking Americans are united in their adoration of a Nietzschean Überhorse, a hero so superhuman he isn't human at all.
Now, the fact that director Randall Wallace and screenwriter Mike Rich locate this golden age between 1969 and 1973 might seem at first like a ludicrous joke, if you are old enough (as I am) to halfway remember those years. I'll say that again: The year Secretariat won the Triple Crown was the year the Vietnam War ended and the Watergate hearings began. You could hardly pick a period in post-Civil War American history more plagued by chaos and division and general insanity (well, OK -- you could pick right now). Wallace references that social context in the most glancing and dismissive manner possible -- Penny's eldest daughter is depicted as a teen antiwar activist, in scenes that resemble lost episodes of "The Brady Bunch" -- but our heroine's double life as a Denver housewife and Virginia horse-farm owner proceeds pretty much as if the 1950s had gone on forever. (The words "Vietnam" and "Nixon" are never uttered.)
One shouldn't impute too much diabolical intention to the filmmakers; for all I know, Penny Chenery really did live in an insulated, lily-white bubble of horsey exurban privilege, and took no notice of the country ripping itself apart. But today, in the real world, we find ourselves once again in an enraged and dangerously bifurcated society, and I can't help thinking that "Secretariat" is meant as a comforting allegory, like Glenn Beck's sentimental Christmas yarn: The real America has been here all along, and we can get it back. If we just believe in -- well, in something unspecified but probably pretty scary.
Religion and politics are barely mentioned in the story of Chenery and her amazing horse, but it's clear that "Secretariat" was constructed and marketed with at least one eye on the conservative Christian audiences who embraced "The Blind Side." The film opens with a voice-over passage from the Book of Job and ends with a hymn. Wallace, also the director of "We Were Warriors" and the writer of "Pearl Harbor" and "Braveheart," is one of mainstream Hollywood's few prominent Christians, and has spoken openly about his faith and his desire to make movies that appeal to "people with middle-American values."
Hey, all's fair in art and commerce. Hollywood has finally woken up (a few decades late) to the enormous consumer power of the Christian market, and given all the namby-pamby Tinseltown liberalism right-wingers love to complain about, it's about time. But it's legitimate to wonder exactly what Christian-friendly and "middle-American" inspirational values are being conveyed here, or whether they're just providing cover for some fairly ordinary right-wing ideology and xenophobia. This long-suffering female Job overcomes such tremendous obstacles as having been born white and Southern and possessed of impressive wealth and property, and who then lucks into owning a genetic freak who turned out to be faster and stronger than any racehorse ever foaled. And guess what? She triumphs anyway!
If Americans love to root for the underdog, they may love to root for the favorite disguised as the underdog even more. That's pretty much what happens here, with the blond, privileged Penny Chenery and her superhorse posed as emblems of American ingenuity and power against the villainous, swarthy and vaguely terrorist-flavored Pancho Martin (Nestor Serrano), trainer of Sham, Secretariat's archrival. (Even the horse's name is evil!) The competition between the two horses was real enough; they raced neck-and-neck in the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness. But the depiction of Martin as an evil, chauvinistic braggart is fictional and highly unpleasant -- and it's tough not to notice that he's one of only two nonwhite speaking characters in the film. The other one is Eddie (Nelsan Ellis), an African-American groom who belongs to a far more insidious tradition of movie stereotypes. Eddie dances and sings. He loves Jesus and that big ol' horse. He is loyal and deferential to Miz Penny, and injects soul and spirit into her troubled life. I am so totally not kidding.
To move from content back to form, let me repeat that there's a whole lot to like in "Secretariat." Diane Lane gives a weirdly compelling performance, one of her best. She renders Penny Chenery as an iron-willed superwoman, striking and magisterial but utterly nonsexual, illuminated from within like a medieval saint. She busts down the doors on the boys' club of old-money Kentucky and Virginia racing, outwits the tax authorities and defangs Pancho Martin, in between doing loads of her kids' laundry. It's hard to say who is more indomitable, Penny or the magnificent colt she called Big Red, who capped his Triple Crown with an unbelievable 31-length victory at New York's Belmont Stakes. It's a charismatic, ultra-cornball performance, and right about the time that Rich's screenplay runs out of let's-go-get-'em speeches for Lane to deliver, Wallace and cinematographer Dean Semler step in with wonderfully varied and dazzling approaches to Secretariat's four big races (the Triple Crown plus the earlier Wood Memorial, where he finished fourth).
Despite those thrilling sequences, you don't learn much more about the world of racing in "Secretariat" than you learn about Facebook in "The Social Network" (and a lot of the stuff about racing in this movie is wrong or misleading). (You won't learn anything about anything from John Malkovich's mailed-in performance as eccentric French-Canadian trainer Lucien Laurin.) Big Red himself is a big, handsome MacGuffin, symbolic window dressing for a quasi-inspirational fantasia of American whiteness and power. Horses don't go to the movies, and this movie is about human beings, and our nonsensical but inescapable yearning to find the keys to the future in stupid ideas about a past that never existed.
Ebert attacks my "Secretariat" review -- it's on!
FRIDAY, OCT 8, 2010 10:58 ET
ANDREW O'HEHIR
Ebert attacks my "Secretariat" review -- it's on!
My response to the critic's takedown of my takedown
BY ANDREW O'HEHIR
Diane Lane in "Secretariat"
I recently published a review of the new Disney film "Secretariat" that took an unorthodox and admittedly inflammatory approach to a would-be inspirational movie about a lady and a racehorse. Nearly all viewers will choose to see or not see the movie based on their level of interest in watching Diane Lane in an awesome array of early-'70s fashions, or watching exciting re-creations of the 1973 Triple Crown races. I accused the film of concealing -- or embodying, that's a better word -- an ideological worldview that is never made explicit but is present in every frame.
I don't claim the review makes its case with perfect clarity, and I didn't expect many people to agree completely. Being forcefully told that you're full of crap goes with the job description, especially in an inherently subjective endeavor like movie criticism. I was gratified that a lot of people read the review, and e-mailed or Tweeted it onward -- and was somewhere between flattered and startled that Roger Ebert posted a lengthy takedown of my review on his Chicago Sun-Times blog. Like almost everyone in this insular field, I venerate Roger as a passionate movie lover, a generous spirit, and an old-school journalist who has made the transition to new media and now pretty much owns the joint.
I thought Roger's response was worth a response of my own, partly because I think he's misreading or misinterpreting me, but mostly because I think the cultural gulf between our understandings of "Secretariat" offers a fascinating opportunity to talk about all kinds of stuff film critics don't generally discuss: the nature and meaning of propaganda, the ideology (or lack thereof) of Hollywood movies, the role of religion in public discourse and maybe the gap between idealism and cynicism when considering movies, or the world. (Actually, activists and commentators on the right are way ahead of us: They talk about this stuff all the time, and have compelled Hollywood to understand that there's enormous demand for a movie like "Secretariat.")
UPDATE: I also posted this to Roger's blog, where he has responded. Scroll to the bottom of the page to read that.
--------------------
Well, gee. Thanks, Roger. (I think.)
I'm not eager to get into a public dispute with you over a Disney movie that you found "straightforward" and "lovingly crafted" and I found weird, fake and inexplicably disturbing, which may be all this boils down to. The world isn't likely to care much, and will render its verdict without our help.
I appreciate that you opened and closed this piece with some kind words, and I have great respect for you as a man and a critic. That said, I think the only place where we agree here is when you say, "O'Hehir's reading [of 'Secretariat'] is wildly eccentric." I'll cop to that happily -- my review of the film was willfully hyperbolic, even outrageous, in hopes of getting people to look at a formulaic Disney sports movie through fresh eyes. I know I don't have to explain the function or uses of hyperbole to you, since it's a technique you often employ (here and elsewhere). My hyperbole in the "Secretariat" review was supposed to be funny, and also to provoke a response. I appear to have succeeded brilliantly with the second part! The results on "funny" are more mixed.
Now, clearly I could have written a more "normal" review, in which I said something like: "Secretariat" was kind of fun to watch, but it bugged me. It presents a prettied-up, phony-baloney vision of America in the early '70s, in a transparent effort to appeal to the "family-values" crowd who ate up "The Blind Side" -- people who want a comforting and unchallenging movie without any sex or swearing. There's nothing wrong with that as a way to make a buck, but this example is ultra-tame, scrubbed clean of any genuine conflict or drama, and I pretty much think it's crap.
Now, I gather you would have disagreed with that, and pretty sharply, but I very much doubt you'd have bothered writing several thousand words ripping me apart. Now perhaps you see the genius of my plan!
Seriously, that is what I think -- and pretty much what I said, albeit in somewhat stronger language. In your haste to take me down, I think you frequently read my gag lines as being deadly serious, mix or conflate different aspects of my argument (e.g., I don't say or think anything about the horse being evil, or representing evil), and confuse events in real life with what we see in the film.
Now then: I do indeed compare "Secretariat" to "master-race propaganda almost worthy of Leni Riefenstahl," a deliberately outrageous claim that, I suspect, pissed you off right at the outset. Let me elaborate a little. In my view, the most effective propaganda movies are not the ones about dudes with guns that espouse militarism, or the Soviet boy-meets-tractor films, or the Nazi cartoons about Jews. Those are too obvious. The most effective kind of propaganda depicts normal life, or rather an idealized vision of normal life, one that (as one of my readers put it) "makes a particular worldview seem natural, right and appealing." Viewed that way, of course, a very large proportion of Hollywood movies could be considered propaganda, which is a subject for another time. (The shoe may fit.)
Of course it's offensive to compare a contemporary filmmaker to Riefenstahl -- although she was unquestionably a great director -- but I never said or suggested that Randall Wallace had consciously or deliberately created a film whose primary purpose was ideological. It's more like the ideology of reassurance and comfort and gorgeous images -- what I refer to as the "fantasia of American whiteness and power," which is, yes, going kind of far -- is so built into this kind of movie you can't get it out. I do, however, see Wallace's desire to appeal to Christian audiences and a never-enumerated set of "middle-American values" as politically coded, at least to some degree. (Or rather, it's coded if you want it to be; of course he's happy with secular left-wing types watching the movie too.)
You believe, or suggest, that I damn the film for not noticing Vietnam or Watergate, but that isn't quite right. As I think I make clear, I was struck by the oddness of the film's idealized, "Ozzie and Harriet" portrait of American life, which feels more like the '50s, being set in one of the most tumultuous periods of American history. That's a suggestive fact, an element of the overall picture, not an indictment. You indulge in some hyperbole of your own in suggesting that I accuse Penny Chenery (the movie character? the real person? I am not sure) of being an evil right-winger, when I never say, and do not know, anything about her politics. Watch out for the "O'Hehirian Riefenstahlian TeaPartyite" clique, though --we're on the rise!
I could go on, and I guess I will just a little: I never say or suggest that anyone considered the Triple Crown victories "as a demonstration of white superiority." (I honestly don't believe you don't get the "Nietzschean Überhorse" joke. Secretariat was a product of eugenics if any living creature ever was.) You suggest that I attack Randall Wallace for his religious faith, but I do not, and you cite nothing to support this. You say that I see "a repository of Christianity (of the wrong sort, presumably)" in the film, when I say clearly that religion plays almost no role in the story. On the other hand, it's simply a fact that Disney is marketing the film to Christian conservatives, and neither of us is required to have an opinion about it. And I'm not sure what you mean when you say you refuse to allow me to define the film as "Tea Party-friendly." Is Sarah Palin not allowed to like it?
On the film's racial issues: You suggest that I am demeaning the real-life Eddie Sweat, Secretariat's groom. I say nothing about Eddie Sweat. I am discussing a fictional character, the only black person ever seen in the film, who is presented as subordinate, unreflective, constantly cheerful and uniquely well equipped to communicate with an animal. Could there be such a person? Of course. But in the context of my perception of the film's total universe, this feels like an unwholesome and old-fashioned stereotype (for which there is a borderline-offensive name I will not use).
Similarly, I have a tough time believing you don't get what I'm trying to say about the Pancho Martin character. Those who reported on the Triple Crown at the time have said that the real Pancho Martin was neither talkative nor boastful, and had no particular adversarial relationship with Penny Chenery. That stuff we saw in the movie did not happen. But the filmmakers have taken the one faintly "ethnic" or non-American character in the movie, and made him thoroughly despicable. What was that? An accident? An aesthetic choice? Or a lazy and coded shortcut?
For me, all in all, "Secretariat" adds up to something that looks pretty but tastes pretty bad, and apparently I expressed that view with a degree of force you found "insane." Frankly, I wish you had avoided those kinds of epithets, and focused more on areas where we may have real differences of philosophical or political or aesthetic opinion and interpretation to discuss. I'm inclined to believe that you understood my argument well enough -- better than you claim to, at least -- but that it pissed you off so much you just didn't want to deal with it. But that's only a theory, and I assure you that my faith in Roger Ebert remains. Generally speaking.
--------------------
UPDATE: Ebert's response, just posted on his Sun-Times blog, is typically concise and gracious, and comes with a zinger or two:
Thanks for responding. I understand your points, and have had similar thoughts of my own about some films. But you're correct: I didn't read it as satire, maybe because I've been softened up by so many similar Armond White reviews that he (apparently) writes seriously.
We can agree perhaps on one thing: Your review helps us define what Rotten Tomatoes considers "positive."
ANDREW O'HEHIR
Ebert attacks my "Secretariat" review -- it's on!
My response to the critic's takedown of my takedown
BY ANDREW O'HEHIR
Diane Lane in "Secretariat"
I recently published a review of the new Disney film "Secretariat" that took an unorthodox and admittedly inflammatory approach to a would-be inspirational movie about a lady and a racehorse. Nearly all viewers will choose to see or not see the movie based on their level of interest in watching Diane Lane in an awesome array of early-'70s fashions, or watching exciting re-creations of the 1973 Triple Crown races. I accused the film of concealing -- or embodying, that's a better word -- an ideological worldview that is never made explicit but is present in every frame.
I don't claim the review makes its case with perfect clarity, and I didn't expect many people to agree completely. Being forcefully told that you're full of crap goes with the job description, especially in an inherently subjective endeavor like movie criticism. I was gratified that a lot of people read the review, and e-mailed or Tweeted it onward -- and was somewhere between flattered and startled that Roger Ebert posted a lengthy takedown of my review on his Chicago Sun-Times blog. Like almost everyone in this insular field, I venerate Roger as a passionate movie lover, a generous spirit, and an old-school journalist who has made the transition to new media and now pretty much owns the joint.
I thought Roger's response was worth a response of my own, partly because I think he's misreading or misinterpreting me, but mostly because I think the cultural gulf between our understandings of "Secretariat" offers a fascinating opportunity to talk about all kinds of stuff film critics don't generally discuss: the nature and meaning of propaganda, the ideology (or lack thereof) of Hollywood movies, the role of religion in public discourse and maybe the gap between idealism and cynicism when considering movies, or the world. (Actually, activists and commentators on the right are way ahead of us: They talk about this stuff all the time, and have compelled Hollywood to understand that there's enormous demand for a movie like "Secretariat.")
UPDATE: I also posted this to Roger's blog, where he has responded. Scroll to the bottom of the page to read that.
--------------------
Well, gee. Thanks, Roger. (I think.)
I'm not eager to get into a public dispute with you over a Disney movie that you found "straightforward" and "lovingly crafted" and I found weird, fake and inexplicably disturbing, which may be all this boils down to. The world isn't likely to care much, and will render its verdict without our help.
I appreciate that you opened and closed this piece with some kind words, and I have great respect for you as a man and a critic. That said, I think the only place where we agree here is when you say, "O'Hehir's reading [of 'Secretariat'] is wildly eccentric." I'll cop to that happily -- my review of the film was willfully hyperbolic, even outrageous, in hopes of getting people to look at a formulaic Disney sports movie through fresh eyes. I know I don't have to explain the function or uses of hyperbole to you, since it's a technique you often employ (here and elsewhere). My hyperbole in the "Secretariat" review was supposed to be funny, and also to provoke a response. I appear to have succeeded brilliantly with the second part! The results on "funny" are more mixed.
Now, clearly I could have written a more "normal" review, in which I said something like: "Secretariat" was kind of fun to watch, but it bugged me. It presents a prettied-up, phony-baloney vision of America in the early '70s, in a transparent effort to appeal to the "family-values" crowd who ate up "The Blind Side" -- people who want a comforting and unchallenging movie without any sex or swearing. There's nothing wrong with that as a way to make a buck, but this example is ultra-tame, scrubbed clean of any genuine conflict or drama, and I pretty much think it's crap.
Now, I gather you would have disagreed with that, and pretty sharply, but I very much doubt you'd have bothered writing several thousand words ripping me apart. Now perhaps you see the genius of my plan!
Seriously, that is what I think -- and pretty much what I said, albeit in somewhat stronger language. In your haste to take me down, I think you frequently read my gag lines as being deadly serious, mix or conflate different aspects of my argument (e.g., I don't say or think anything about the horse being evil, or representing evil), and confuse events in real life with what we see in the film.
Now then: I do indeed compare "Secretariat" to "master-race propaganda almost worthy of Leni Riefenstahl," a deliberately outrageous claim that, I suspect, pissed you off right at the outset. Let me elaborate a little. In my view, the most effective propaganda movies are not the ones about dudes with guns that espouse militarism, or the Soviet boy-meets-tractor films, or the Nazi cartoons about Jews. Those are too obvious. The most effective kind of propaganda depicts normal life, or rather an idealized vision of normal life, one that (as one of my readers put it) "makes a particular worldview seem natural, right and appealing." Viewed that way, of course, a very large proportion of Hollywood movies could be considered propaganda, which is a subject for another time. (The shoe may fit.)
Of course it's offensive to compare a contemporary filmmaker to Riefenstahl -- although she was unquestionably a great director -- but I never said or suggested that Randall Wallace had consciously or deliberately created a film whose primary purpose was ideological. It's more like the ideology of reassurance and comfort and gorgeous images -- what I refer to as the "fantasia of American whiteness and power," which is, yes, going kind of far -- is so built into this kind of movie you can't get it out. I do, however, see Wallace's desire to appeal to Christian audiences and a never-enumerated set of "middle-American values" as politically coded, at least to some degree. (Or rather, it's coded if you want it to be; of course he's happy with secular left-wing types watching the movie too.)
You believe, or suggest, that I damn the film for not noticing Vietnam or Watergate, but that isn't quite right. As I think I make clear, I was struck by the oddness of the film's idealized, "Ozzie and Harriet" portrait of American life, which feels more like the '50s, being set in one of the most tumultuous periods of American history. That's a suggestive fact, an element of the overall picture, not an indictment. You indulge in some hyperbole of your own in suggesting that I accuse Penny Chenery (the movie character? the real person? I am not sure) of being an evil right-winger, when I never say, and do not know, anything about her politics. Watch out for the "O'Hehirian Riefenstahlian TeaPartyite" clique, though --we're on the rise!
I could go on, and I guess I will just a little: I never say or suggest that anyone considered the Triple Crown victories "as a demonstration of white superiority." (I honestly don't believe you don't get the "Nietzschean Überhorse" joke. Secretariat was a product of eugenics if any living creature ever was.) You suggest that I attack Randall Wallace for his religious faith, but I do not, and you cite nothing to support this. You say that I see "a repository of Christianity (of the wrong sort, presumably)" in the film, when I say clearly that religion plays almost no role in the story. On the other hand, it's simply a fact that Disney is marketing the film to Christian conservatives, and neither of us is required to have an opinion about it. And I'm not sure what you mean when you say you refuse to allow me to define the film as "Tea Party-friendly." Is Sarah Palin not allowed to like it?
On the film's racial issues: You suggest that I am demeaning the real-life Eddie Sweat, Secretariat's groom. I say nothing about Eddie Sweat. I am discussing a fictional character, the only black person ever seen in the film, who is presented as subordinate, unreflective, constantly cheerful and uniquely well equipped to communicate with an animal. Could there be such a person? Of course. But in the context of my perception of the film's total universe, this feels like an unwholesome and old-fashioned stereotype (for which there is a borderline-offensive name I will not use).
Similarly, I have a tough time believing you don't get what I'm trying to say about the Pancho Martin character. Those who reported on the Triple Crown at the time have said that the real Pancho Martin was neither talkative nor boastful, and had no particular adversarial relationship with Penny Chenery. That stuff we saw in the movie did not happen. But the filmmakers have taken the one faintly "ethnic" or non-American character in the movie, and made him thoroughly despicable. What was that? An accident? An aesthetic choice? Or a lazy and coded shortcut?
For me, all in all, "Secretariat" adds up to something that looks pretty but tastes pretty bad, and apparently I expressed that view with a degree of force you found "insane." Frankly, I wish you had avoided those kinds of epithets, and focused more on areas where we may have real differences of philosophical or political or aesthetic opinion and interpretation to discuss. I'm inclined to believe that you understood my argument well enough -- better than you claim to, at least -- but that it pissed you off so much you just didn't want to deal with it. But that's only a theory, and I assure you that my faith in Roger Ebert remains. Generally speaking.
--------------------
UPDATE: Ebert's response, just posted on his Sun-Times blog, is typically concise and gracious, and comes with a zinger or two:
Thanks for responding. I understand your points, and have had similar thoughts of my own about some films. But you're correct: I didn't read it as satire, maybe because I've been softened up by so many similar Armond White reviews that he (apparently) writes seriously.
We can agree perhaps on one thing: Your review helps us define what Rotten Tomatoes considers "positive."
Liu Xiaobo Wins Nobel Peace Prize
CHARLES HUTZLER AND KARL RITTER | 10/ 8/10 06:06 PM |
Liu Xiaobo won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize.
Get World Alerts
Email Comments 1,414
BEIJING — China has long wanted a Nobel prize. Now that it has one, its leaders are furious. The Nobel committee awarded its peace prize to imprisoned democracy campaigner Liu Xiaobo on Friday, lending encouragement to China's dissident community and sending a rebuke to the authoritarian government, which sharply condemned the award.
In naming Liu, the Norwegian-based committee honored his more than two decades of advocacy for human rights and peaceful democratic change – from the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989 to a manifesto for political reform that he co-authored in 2008 and which led to his latest jail term.
President Barack Obama, last year's peace prize winner, called for Liu's immediate release.
Anticipating the award, Chinese circumvented Internet controls and called friends overseas to learn the news. Supporters and friends gathered outside Liu's central Beijing apartment, where his wife was kept inside by police. At a park, a civil rights lawyer, a retired official-turned-blogger and a dozen other people cheered and waved placards saying "Long Live Freedom of Speech." The demonstrators were later taken away by police.
A buzz of congratulations coursed through Chinese instant messaging sites before censors scrubbed postings and blocked cell phone text messages that contained the characters for Liu's name. Exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, who won the prize in 1989, joined Obama and other leaders in congratulating Liu.
"Last year, I noted that so many others who have received the award had sacrificed so much more than I," Obama said. "That list now includes Mr. Liu, who has sacrificed his freedom for his beliefs."
The president praised China for its stunning 30 years of transformative economic growth. "But this award reminds us that political reform has not kept pace, and that the basic human rights of every man, woman and child must be respected," Obama said.
Two years into an 11-year jail term for subversion at a prison 300 miles (500 kilometers) from Beijing, the slight, 54-year-old literary critic was unlikely to have found out about the award. Prisoners are restricted to state media, which mostly ignored the news. His overjoyed wife, Liu Xia, said she hoped to give him a hug and tell him if police allow her to travel to the prison on Saturday.
The contretemps points to the sticky predicament the prize poses for the communist leadership. Liu is the first Chinese and first member of the much persecuted group of political activists to be given the peace prize, but he is virtually unknown among ordinary Chinese. The award is likely to carry his name and his call for democracy to a wider audience, especially among young Chinese who are avid Internet and cell phone users but due to censorship know little of the rights camp's past struggles with the government.
ADVERTISEMENT
"They are going to want to know who Liu Xiaobo is and why he won this prize. They are going to learn who he is and this way they are going to learn more about freedom, democracy, justice and about the Tiananmen generation," said Ai Weiwei, a prominent artist who has become a fierce champion of human rights.
"It also sends a message to China and the Chinese government, that while the international community recognizes the economic achievements of today's China, it still cannot forget that China is falling behind in terms of some basic values and human principles, such as human rights and freedom of speech."
A Nobel for a Chinese dissident is one prize not wanted by a government usually hungry for international approval. It has launched a deep-pocketed campaign to win science prizes. And the peace prize lands squarely in the middle of a brewing debate among the Chinese leadership and the elite over whether to begin political reforms, and if so, how quickly.
In recent weeks the premier has called for changing the political system to safeguard China's stunning economic achievements while the powerful Politburo member overseeing law enforcement has urged officials to resist "erroneous Western political and legal perspectives."
Chinese Foreign Ministry officials in Beijing and Oslo lodged protests. The agency's spokesman issued a stinging condemnation, branding Liu a criminal, warning Norway that relations would suffer and accusing the Nobel committee of undermining the prize's mission to promote international understanding.
"Liu Xiaobo is a criminal who has been sentenced by Chinese judicial departments for violating Chinese law," spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said in the statement. "The Nobel committee's decision to award such a person the peace prize runs completely counter to the principle of the prize and also desecrates the prize."
Jonas Gahr Stoere, foreign minister of wealthy, oil-rich Norway, said any punishment would backfire. "I think that would be negative for China's reputation in the world, if they chose to do that," Stoere told National Broadcaster NRK.
In announcing the prize in the Norwegian capital Oslo, the Nobel committee issued a challenge to China to live up to responsibilities as the world's second-largest economy and a burgeoning diplomatic and military power.
"China cannot only demand to have political and economic power, without being exposed to the same kind of discussions as other superpowers have been," committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said. He called Liu the "foremost symbol of Chinese human rights activists," adding: "So it was natural to give the prize only to him as a symbol of the whole Chinese society's wish for more democracy."
Liu is the first peace prize winner chosen while still in prison, although several laureates, including Myanmar democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi (1991) and German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky (1935) were in custody. Still others, like Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov (1975) and Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa (1983), were prevented by their governments from going to Norway to accept the prize.
Liu's wife, prevented by police from mixing with the nearly 100 Chinese and foreign reporters outside her apartment, said by phone and messages that the award would give Liu encouragement. She hoped to go to Norway to collect the medal and its prize money of 10 million Swedish kronor (about $1.5 million), if he cannot.
"I think this prize doesn't only belong to Liu Xiaobo one person, but also for all the people in China who advocate democracy, freedom and peace and for all the prisoners of conscience in jail," Liu Xia told Hong Kong's Cable TV.
In a statement issued by the Washington-based group Freedom Now, she thanked former Czech Republic President Vaclav Havel, the Dalai Lama and South African Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu, also a Nobel laureate, for nominating her husband.
Havel, who never won the prize but whose own human rights petition Charter 77 inspired Liu's tract Charter 08 and helped bring about the end of communist rule in then Czechoslovakia, said Liu "is exactly the kind of a committed citizen who deserves such an award."
Liu's Charter 08 called for greater freedoms and for the Communist Party to give way to gradual, democratic change. "The democratization of Chinese politics can be put off no longer," Charter 08 says.
The government arrested Liu hours before the document's release in December 2008. It was the most programmatic in the hundreds of essays Liu wrote. Jailed for two years after the Tiananmen protests – when he helped persuade student protesters to leave the square before a military assault – and again for three years in the 1990s, Liu found a computer and the Internet at home on his release in 1999. "God's present to China," he called the Internet.
Thousands of Chinese – civil rights campaigners, professors and young professionals – signed on to Charter 08, which circulated by e-mail and on overseas Internet sites after being expunged from web pages in China.
The ability of Chinese to surmount censorship barriers using proxy servers and coded language kicked into high gear in the hours just before the Nobel announcement.
Excitement pulsed among students at Beijing Normal University, where Liu earned a degree in the '80s, and at Peking University. They passed word via the popular QQ.com instant messaging site.
When messages with Liu's name became blocked and online searches for him or "Nobel Peace Prize" failed – a usual tactic of censors – people began posting oblique congratulations to an unnamed Chinese for winning a Nobel.
Some curious students also said they did not know why Liu won and, echoing an oft-stated government line, wondered whether it was not a backhanded plot to shame China.
"The impact he has made is not Nobel Prize-level so far," said a Peking University English major, who would only give his English name, Eric Zhang. "People abroad know him better than we do. This is not us choosing him. They chose him, so I'm a bit suspicious. But maybe this is an opportunity to get more freedom so we don't have to go to Twitter to find out about him."
The government blacked out reports on CNN, which can be seen in tourist hotels and places where foreigners work and live, and kept the news off the main nationwide TV newscast. China Central Television-4, which is aimed at Chinese overseas, read the Foreign Ministry statement, providing a back door for Chinese to learn about Liu.
"Millions and millions of ordinary Chinese people, government employees, party cadres, students ... are going to want to know who is Liu Xiaobo and why he was sentenced to prison," said Nicholas Bequelin, Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch. "They are going to discover Charter 08, which will spread uncontrollably."
The decision to jail Liu, he said, "has backfired spectacularly, and at a very critical juncture when China is coming out in the international community. Was jailing Liu worth the price of the current predicament?"
CHARLES HUTZLER AND KARL RITTER | 10/ 8/10 06:06 PM |
Liu Xiaobo won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize.
Get World Alerts
Email Comments 1,414
BEIJING — China has long wanted a Nobel prize. Now that it has one, its leaders are furious. The Nobel committee awarded its peace prize to imprisoned democracy campaigner Liu Xiaobo on Friday, lending encouragement to China's dissident community and sending a rebuke to the authoritarian government, which sharply condemned the award.
In naming Liu, the Norwegian-based committee honored his more than two decades of advocacy for human rights and peaceful democratic change – from the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989 to a manifesto for political reform that he co-authored in 2008 and which led to his latest jail term.
President Barack Obama, last year's peace prize winner, called for Liu's immediate release.
Anticipating the award, Chinese circumvented Internet controls and called friends overseas to learn the news. Supporters and friends gathered outside Liu's central Beijing apartment, where his wife was kept inside by police. At a park, a civil rights lawyer, a retired official-turned-blogger and a dozen other people cheered and waved placards saying "Long Live Freedom of Speech." The demonstrators were later taken away by police.
A buzz of congratulations coursed through Chinese instant messaging sites before censors scrubbed postings and blocked cell phone text messages that contained the characters for Liu's name. Exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, who won the prize in 1989, joined Obama and other leaders in congratulating Liu.
"Last year, I noted that so many others who have received the award had sacrificed so much more than I," Obama said. "That list now includes Mr. Liu, who has sacrificed his freedom for his beliefs."
The president praised China for its stunning 30 years of transformative economic growth. "But this award reminds us that political reform has not kept pace, and that the basic human rights of every man, woman and child must be respected," Obama said.
Two years into an 11-year jail term for subversion at a prison 300 miles (500 kilometers) from Beijing, the slight, 54-year-old literary critic was unlikely to have found out about the award. Prisoners are restricted to state media, which mostly ignored the news. His overjoyed wife, Liu Xia, said she hoped to give him a hug and tell him if police allow her to travel to the prison on Saturday.
The contretemps points to the sticky predicament the prize poses for the communist leadership. Liu is the first Chinese and first member of the much persecuted group of political activists to be given the peace prize, but he is virtually unknown among ordinary Chinese. The award is likely to carry his name and his call for democracy to a wider audience, especially among young Chinese who are avid Internet and cell phone users but due to censorship know little of the rights camp's past struggles with the government.
ADVERTISEMENT
"They are going to want to know who Liu Xiaobo is and why he won this prize. They are going to learn who he is and this way they are going to learn more about freedom, democracy, justice and about the Tiananmen generation," said Ai Weiwei, a prominent artist who has become a fierce champion of human rights.
"It also sends a message to China and the Chinese government, that while the international community recognizes the economic achievements of today's China, it still cannot forget that China is falling behind in terms of some basic values and human principles, such as human rights and freedom of speech."
A Nobel for a Chinese dissident is one prize not wanted by a government usually hungry for international approval. It has launched a deep-pocketed campaign to win science prizes. And the peace prize lands squarely in the middle of a brewing debate among the Chinese leadership and the elite over whether to begin political reforms, and if so, how quickly.
In recent weeks the premier has called for changing the political system to safeguard China's stunning economic achievements while the powerful Politburo member overseeing law enforcement has urged officials to resist "erroneous Western political and legal perspectives."
Chinese Foreign Ministry officials in Beijing and Oslo lodged protests. The agency's spokesman issued a stinging condemnation, branding Liu a criminal, warning Norway that relations would suffer and accusing the Nobel committee of undermining the prize's mission to promote international understanding.
"Liu Xiaobo is a criminal who has been sentenced by Chinese judicial departments for violating Chinese law," spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said in the statement. "The Nobel committee's decision to award such a person the peace prize runs completely counter to the principle of the prize and also desecrates the prize."
Jonas Gahr Stoere, foreign minister of wealthy, oil-rich Norway, said any punishment would backfire. "I think that would be negative for China's reputation in the world, if they chose to do that," Stoere told National Broadcaster NRK.
In announcing the prize in the Norwegian capital Oslo, the Nobel committee issued a challenge to China to live up to responsibilities as the world's second-largest economy and a burgeoning diplomatic and military power.
"China cannot only demand to have political and economic power, without being exposed to the same kind of discussions as other superpowers have been," committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said. He called Liu the "foremost symbol of Chinese human rights activists," adding: "So it was natural to give the prize only to him as a symbol of the whole Chinese society's wish for more democracy."
Liu is the first peace prize winner chosen while still in prison, although several laureates, including Myanmar democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi (1991) and German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky (1935) were in custody. Still others, like Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov (1975) and Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa (1983), were prevented by their governments from going to Norway to accept the prize.
Liu's wife, prevented by police from mixing with the nearly 100 Chinese and foreign reporters outside her apartment, said by phone and messages that the award would give Liu encouragement. She hoped to go to Norway to collect the medal and its prize money of 10 million Swedish kronor (about $1.5 million), if he cannot.
"I think this prize doesn't only belong to Liu Xiaobo one person, but also for all the people in China who advocate democracy, freedom and peace and for all the prisoners of conscience in jail," Liu Xia told Hong Kong's Cable TV.
In a statement issued by the Washington-based group Freedom Now, she thanked former Czech Republic President Vaclav Havel, the Dalai Lama and South African Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu, also a Nobel laureate, for nominating her husband.
Havel, who never won the prize but whose own human rights petition Charter 77 inspired Liu's tract Charter 08 and helped bring about the end of communist rule in then Czechoslovakia, said Liu "is exactly the kind of a committed citizen who deserves such an award."
Liu's Charter 08 called for greater freedoms and for the Communist Party to give way to gradual, democratic change. "The democratization of Chinese politics can be put off no longer," Charter 08 says.
The government arrested Liu hours before the document's release in December 2008. It was the most programmatic in the hundreds of essays Liu wrote. Jailed for two years after the Tiananmen protests – when he helped persuade student protesters to leave the square before a military assault – and again for three years in the 1990s, Liu found a computer and the Internet at home on his release in 1999. "God's present to China," he called the Internet.
Thousands of Chinese – civil rights campaigners, professors and young professionals – signed on to Charter 08, which circulated by e-mail and on overseas Internet sites after being expunged from web pages in China.
The ability of Chinese to surmount censorship barriers using proxy servers and coded language kicked into high gear in the hours just before the Nobel announcement.
Excitement pulsed among students at Beijing Normal University, where Liu earned a degree in the '80s, and at Peking University. They passed word via the popular QQ.com instant messaging site.
When messages with Liu's name became blocked and online searches for him or "Nobel Peace Prize" failed – a usual tactic of censors – people began posting oblique congratulations to an unnamed Chinese for winning a Nobel.
Some curious students also said they did not know why Liu won and, echoing an oft-stated government line, wondered whether it was not a backhanded plot to shame China.
"The impact he has made is not Nobel Prize-level so far," said a Peking University English major, who would only give his English name, Eric Zhang. "People abroad know him better than we do. This is not us choosing him. They chose him, so I'm a bit suspicious. But maybe this is an opportunity to get more freedom so we don't have to go to Twitter to find out about him."
The government blacked out reports on CNN, which can be seen in tourist hotels and places where foreigners work and live, and kept the news off the main nationwide TV newscast. China Central Television-4, which is aimed at Chinese overseas, read the Foreign Ministry statement, providing a back door for Chinese to learn about Liu.
"Millions and millions of ordinary Chinese people, government employees, party cadres, students ... are going to want to know who is Liu Xiaobo and why he was sentenced to prison," said Nicholas Bequelin, Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch. "They are going to discover Charter 08, which will spread uncontrollably."
The decision to jail Liu, he said, "has backfired spectacularly, and at a very critical juncture when China is coming out in the international community. Was jailing Liu worth the price of the current predicament?"
Friday, September 10, 2010
intolerance at the religious level, media
Yesterday afternoon, the leader of a microscopic cult of idiots who announced plans to stage an "international" day of Quran burning in Gainesville, Florida held a press conference, for a rapt media which decided that his moronic plans were the single most important thing going on in America. At that press conference, in front of "9/11 Truther" signs, this cult leader lied to everyone who was watching, telling them that he was going to call off his 9/11 book burning festival because he had successfully reached a deal with the people behind the Park51 community center in Lower Manhattan, in which they would move their facility away from the site of the World Trade Center.
Not a word of this was true, but it was amazing, all the same -- at one fell swoop, we had finally knit up the strands of a season of irrationality into one big, shiny, synergized knot. This was supposed to be the end of Recovery Summer? More like Relapse Summer.
The story of how one lone idiot, pimping an 18th-century brand of community terrorism, held the media hostage and forced some of this nation's most powerful people to their knees to fitfully beg an end to his wackdoodlery is an extraordinary one. It's a modern media retelling of Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying", in which a gang of Islamaphobes, cast in the role of Addie Bundren, bamboozle the media into carrying their coffin full of malevolence on a journey of pure debasement. Let's begin at the beginning.
Earlier this year, an organization called the Cordoba Initiative were granted permission by the appropriate authorities in New York City to turn an old Burlington Coat Factory at 51 Park Place in lower Manhattan into a community center. The organization was headed by an Imam named Feisal Abdul Rauf, who has made it his life's work to stand against radical cults like al Qaeda and teach young Muslims that America is a place where one can freely worship at the appointed times and then join other faith communities in America in the task of building a great nation. The proposed community center was to include a basketball court and space for different religious communities in New York City to have interfaith relations. It was also going to have a place for Muslims to pray, if they liked.
The news didn't sit well with many people in New York, most notably people who didn't live in Manhattan. This is because they were told by a gaggle of dumb Islamophobes that what was planned was a "Ground Zero mosque." Of course, the planned community center was not, strictly speaking, a "mosque." And it was most definitely not "at Ground Zero." "Ground Zero" is the site of an interminable municipal construction project. There are no plans to build a mosque there. "Ground Zero" is also not the name of a recognized New York City neighborhood, like DUMBO or Murray Hill. But, here's the thing: even if it was, the battle to stop the "Ground Zero mosque" was already lost, because there already is a mosque in that neighborhood.
This logic failed to sink in, because very few people outside of me and the good people over at Wonkette made any attempt to bring these facts to light. But it might not have mattered, because the fertile field of opposition to the Park51 community center was the raw wound of the September 11th attacks. Obviously, many people are still feeling the loss of that day. And that loss breeds many emotions, among them sadness and anger. And people definitely do have the right to express their sadness and their anger. But what people don't have the right to expect is that the government will intervene to remedy claims that have no basis in law.
As soon as the media saw themselves a shiny shiny shining thing shining shinily in New York City, they pounced! How perfect! Something for us to talk about during the slow-news summer! I mean, we could talk about the nation's unemployment crisis, but that would mean we'd have to talk to poor, jobless people, and there's no currency in having access to a bunch of poors. Right away, they accepted the premise that this was a "Ground Zero mosque," when it wasn't. And so, by the power vested in the media, things that weren't in fact true were accorded the privilege of being "one side of a great debate" and "an interesting point of view."
ADVERTISEMENT
Charlie Brooker, calling out the media for this bullshit, states what should have happened at this very moment:
New York being a densely populated city, there are lots of other buildings and businesses within two blocks of Ground Zero, including a McDonald's and a Burger King, neither of which has yet been accused of serving milkshakes and fries on hallowed ground. Regardless, for the opponents of Cordoba House, two blocks is too close, period. Frustratingly, they haven't produced a map pinpointing precisely how close is OK.
That's literally all I'd ask them in an interview. I'd stand there pointing at a map of the city. Would it be offensive here? What about here? Or how about way over there? And when they finally picked a suitable spot, I'd ask them to draw it on the map, sketching out roughly how big it should be, and how many windows it's allowed to have. Then I'd hand them a colour swatch and ask them to decide on a colour for the lobby carpet. And the conversation would continue in this vein until everyone in the room was in tears. Myself included.
That hasn't happened. Instead, 70% of Americans are opposed to the "Ground Zero mosque", doubtless in many cases because they've been led to believe it literally is a mosque at Ground Zero. And if not...well, it must be something significant. Otherwise why would all these pundits be so angry about it? And why would anyone in the media listen to them with a straight face?
And because the media couldn't do their job, a group of hack politicians, like Rick Lazio and Newt Gingrich, desperate to get a little famewhore attention for their quixotic political career goals, saw an opportunity to horn in on the "discussion." They started telling all the sad and angry people that they actually did have the right to expect someone to provide a remedy to their claims. Their case was primarily based on the idea that nobody has the rights of religious freedom, no one has property rights and that the government has the right -- nay, the duty! -- to intrude.
Right away, they should have been entirely ridiculed, because the people pimping this bilge were primarily right-wing types who would ordinarily say that church and state should not be separated, that property rights are sacrosanct, and that government should be small and unobtrusive. Someone really should have said to Newt Gingrich, "Is this seriously the stand you want to take? Because if it is, we shall never allow you to claim to be a supporter of small government or a 'Constitutional constructionist' ever again. And if you try to assert that claim, we will drop on you like a ton of bricks. We will cause you real, public pain."
But of course, that's not what happened. The media has too much invested in flattering people like Newt Gingrich, and whoever writes Sarah Palin's tweets. And so, these inherent contradictions simply became "one side of a great debate" and "an interesting point of view."
And from there, some idiot news producer said, "Hey, I bet we can shoehorn this into our election narrative somehow!" And so the Park51 community center became an election issue. Imagine that, in a world with a nine year-long, going nowhere war and a massive unemployment crisis! Imagine how many times you would have to hit yourself in the head with a ball peen hammer before you would ask a politician from California how they stood on a local zoning issue in Manhattan.
But ask they did, all the way to the White House. And that's when Democrats like Harry Reid stepped forward to publicly cover themselves in cowardice. This turned the frenzy up several notches for the media, because suddenly, they had obtained a very precious thing -- the right to say "both sides do this." The matter had become a folie a deux -- a madness made for two! -- but the media focused all their attention on the "two" and none on the "madness."
And in that climate, a pastor named Terry Jones saw an opportunity to make himself famous. Jones heads up a heretofore unknown and uncared-about gang of Florida morons known as the Dove Outreach Church -- minor bit players in the field of antagonizing American Muslims. This idiot announced that he was going to burn some Qurans on September 11th, and was anyone interested in giving this nonsense a whole lot of media attention?
And boy howdy, lots of people took him up on the offer! And you know why they did that? Because of the shame. Because deep down, your media all-stars knew that they had aided and abetted something that closely resembled an intellectual atrocity, and now it was time to atone by finding the lowest-hanging fruit available and make themselves feel better by beating on them repeatedly for being assholes -- something they should have already been doing for months!
And this gave an opportunity for some of those who had opposed the Park51 community center -- who deserved the treatment being meted out to Terry Jones -- to do the same. They joined their friends in the media in this demonstration of game-show absolution, saying, "This level of bigotry is unacceptable! It's so declasse in comparison to our own bigotry, which is a refined, 'Sunday Afternoon On The Island Of La Grande Jatte' form of despicableness."
A few people, like John Boehner and whoever writes Sarah Palin's tweets went so far as to say, "See, this is exactly the same thing we were decrying with the Ground Zero mosque." Except it wasn't, because the Ground Zero mosque was a thing they had made up!
None of this bothered Terry Jones at all! Why should it? In the long history of fringe religious figures saying and doing stupid things, it is exceedingly rare for the media to provide much attention to them. Pat Robertson has been telling America that gay people cause hurricanes for years, and it never amounts to much in the way of coverage beyond a periodic reminder that Pat Robertson is a complete fool. Terry Jones, however, had been given something very precious: he was now "one side of a great debate" who possessed "an interesting point of view."
And the media worked very hard to push the case that Jones was part of a debate. Now, Quran burning was an election-year issue, for which every candidate had to answer. And they even went so far as to ask Jones repeatedly, "What if President Obama told you not to do this? What if former President George W. Bush told you not to do this?" They were literally brokering negotiations between an idiot cult leader and some of the most powerful and important people in the world!
By now, things were terribly out of control. President Obama had to publicly state that Quran burning is a stupid thing to do. Imagine how out of touch you have to be that you need to go all the way to the White House to find that answer! Other important people were compelled to interject at this point. General David Petraeus had to come forward and state the plainly obvious: that all the public attention being given to this Quran burning would undermine the ability of U.S. forces to conduct their counterinsurgency operations, which depend heavily on winning the "hearts and minds" of Afghans. I think a lot of people read this as Petraeus speaking out against the attention-seeker, Terry Jones. But I think he was speaking more directly to the attention-givers. And everything that Justin Elliot reports here, I believe, lends credence to my contention.
Eventually, Robert Gates -- the Secretary of Defense, who is running two wars! -- had to call Jones up and try to convince him not to do this. "Which is crazy," says Alex Pareene, accurately, because when, exactly, did the Pentagon start negotiating with two-bit terrorists?
All of this finally culminated with yesterday's press conference, where Terry Jones lied and said that the Park51 community center was going to move, thanks to him. You see where this is headed now, don't you? Now the people behind Park51 are on the hook for stopping this Quran burning, and all of the negative external impact it may have. Now, all of the refined hate-merchants from early in the story can say that if the "Ground Zero mosque" isn't moved, immediately, American troops could die!
To go back to Charlie Brooker, let's remember that after sizing up the incompetence that pervaded the Park51 coverage, he warned that the "media" should just "give up" before they "[made] things worse." Pretty prophetic, isn't it? They got played, and played badly, by a dude with 14th-century religious beliefs, 19th-century facial hair and ultra-modern media savvy. Terry Jones has essentially blackmailed some of the most important people in America, with the assistance of the media.
Let's remember that all of this paralysis was caused by 50 people who wanted to burn a book that's available for free, on the Internet!
There were many, many moments where someone could have simply said, "No, we should really not be doing this. These Islamophobes are objectively wrong, objectively stupid, objectively contradictory, objectively harmful, and by God, as someone with a functioning brain and a devotion to the pursuit of reason above all else, I am going to stand here and say no to all of this." But as it turns out, it wasn't until yesterday afternoon that someone finally had the guts to say maybe we cannot really believe a word this man is saying.
Well, they should have thought of that before they decided to point a bunch of teevee cameras at him, I guess.
Not a word of this was true, but it was amazing, all the same -- at one fell swoop, we had finally knit up the strands of a season of irrationality into one big, shiny, synergized knot. This was supposed to be the end of Recovery Summer? More like Relapse Summer.
The story of how one lone idiot, pimping an 18th-century brand of community terrorism, held the media hostage and forced some of this nation's most powerful people to their knees to fitfully beg an end to his wackdoodlery is an extraordinary one. It's a modern media retelling of Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying", in which a gang of Islamaphobes, cast in the role of Addie Bundren, bamboozle the media into carrying their coffin full of malevolence on a journey of pure debasement. Let's begin at the beginning.
Earlier this year, an organization called the Cordoba Initiative were granted permission by the appropriate authorities in New York City to turn an old Burlington Coat Factory at 51 Park Place in lower Manhattan into a community center. The organization was headed by an Imam named Feisal Abdul Rauf, who has made it his life's work to stand against radical cults like al Qaeda and teach young Muslims that America is a place where one can freely worship at the appointed times and then join other faith communities in America in the task of building a great nation. The proposed community center was to include a basketball court and space for different religious communities in New York City to have interfaith relations. It was also going to have a place for Muslims to pray, if they liked.
The news didn't sit well with many people in New York, most notably people who didn't live in Manhattan. This is because they were told by a gaggle of dumb Islamophobes that what was planned was a "Ground Zero mosque." Of course, the planned community center was not, strictly speaking, a "mosque." And it was most definitely not "at Ground Zero." "Ground Zero" is the site of an interminable municipal construction project. There are no plans to build a mosque there. "Ground Zero" is also not the name of a recognized New York City neighborhood, like DUMBO or Murray Hill. But, here's the thing: even if it was, the battle to stop the "Ground Zero mosque" was already lost, because there already is a mosque in that neighborhood.
This logic failed to sink in, because very few people outside of me and the good people over at Wonkette made any attempt to bring these facts to light. But it might not have mattered, because the fertile field of opposition to the Park51 community center was the raw wound of the September 11th attacks. Obviously, many people are still feeling the loss of that day. And that loss breeds many emotions, among them sadness and anger. And people definitely do have the right to express their sadness and their anger. But what people don't have the right to expect is that the government will intervene to remedy claims that have no basis in law.
As soon as the media saw themselves a shiny shiny shining thing shining shinily in New York City, they pounced! How perfect! Something for us to talk about during the slow-news summer! I mean, we could talk about the nation's unemployment crisis, but that would mean we'd have to talk to poor, jobless people, and there's no currency in having access to a bunch of poors. Right away, they accepted the premise that this was a "Ground Zero mosque," when it wasn't. And so, by the power vested in the media, things that weren't in fact true were accorded the privilege of being "one side of a great debate" and "an interesting point of view."
ADVERTISEMENT
Charlie Brooker, calling out the media for this bullshit, states what should have happened at this very moment:
New York being a densely populated city, there are lots of other buildings and businesses within two blocks of Ground Zero, including a McDonald's and a Burger King, neither of which has yet been accused of serving milkshakes and fries on hallowed ground. Regardless, for the opponents of Cordoba House, two blocks is too close, period. Frustratingly, they haven't produced a map pinpointing precisely how close is OK.
That's literally all I'd ask them in an interview. I'd stand there pointing at a map of the city. Would it be offensive here? What about here? Or how about way over there? And when they finally picked a suitable spot, I'd ask them to draw it on the map, sketching out roughly how big it should be, and how many windows it's allowed to have. Then I'd hand them a colour swatch and ask them to decide on a colour for the lobby carpet. And the conversation would continue in this vein until everyone in the room was in tears. Myself included.
That hasn't happened. Instead, 70% of Americans are opposed to the "Ground Zero mosque", doubtless in many cases because they've been led to believe it literally is a mosque at Ground Zero. And if not...well, it must be something significant. Otherwise why would all these pundits be so angry about it? And why would anyone in the media listen to them with a straight face?
And because the media couldn't do their job, a group of hack politicians, like Rick Lazio and Newt Gingrich, desperate to get a little famewhore attention for their quixotic political career goals, saw an opportunity to horn in on the "discussion." They started telling all the sad and angry people that they actually did have the right to expect someone to provide a remedy to their claims. Their case was primarily based on the idea that nobody has the rights of religious freedom, no one has property rights and that the government has the right -- nay, the duty! -- to intrude.
Right away, they should have been entirely ridiculed, because the people pimping this bilge were primarily right-wing types who would ordinarily say that church and state should not be separated, that property rights are sacrosanct, and that government should be small and unobtrusive. Someone really should have said to Newt Gingrich, "Is this seriously the stand you want to take? Because if it is, we shall never allow you to claim to be a supporter of small government or a 'Constitutional constructionist' ever again. And if you try to assert that claim, we will drop on you like a ton of bricks. We will cause you real, public pain."
But of course, that's not what happened. The media has too much invested in flattering people like Newt Gingrich, and whoever writes Sarah Palin's tweets. And so, these inherent contradictions simply became "one side of a great debate" and "an interesting point of view."
And from there, some idiot news producer said, "Hey, I bet we can shoehorn this into our election narrative somehow!" And so the Park51 community center became an election issue. Imagine that, in a world with a nine year-long, going nowhere war and a massive unemployment crisis! Imagine how many times you would have to hit yourself in the head with a ball peen hammer before you would ask a politician from California how they stood on a local zoning issue in Manhattan.
But ask they did, all the way to the White House. And that's when Democrats like Harry Reid stepped forward to publicly cover themselves in cowardice. This turned the frenzy up several notches for the media, because suddenly, they had obtained a very precious thing -- the right to say "both sides do this." The matter had become a folie a deux -- a madness made for two! -- but the media focused all their attention on the "two" and none on the "madness."
And in that climate, a pastor named Terry Jones saw an opportunity to make himself famous. Jones heads up a heretofore unknown and uncared-about gang of Florida morons known as the Dove Outreach Church -- minor bit players in the field of antagonizing American Muslims. This idiot announced that he was going to burn some Qurans on September 11th, and was anyone interested in giving this nonsense a whole lot of media attention?
And boy howdy, lots of people took him up on the offer! And you know why they did that? Because of the shame. Because deep down, your media all-stars knew that they had aided and abetted something that closely resembled an intellectual atrocity, and now it was time to atone by finding the lowest-hanging fruit available and make themselves feel better by beating on them repeatedly for being assholes -- something they should have already been doing for months!
And this gave an opportunity for some of those who had opposed the Park51 community center -- who deserved the treatment being meted out to Terry Jones -- to do the same. They joined their friends in the media in this demonstration of game-show absolution, saying, "This level of bigotry is unacceptable! It's so declasse in comparison to our own bigotry, which is a refined, 'Sunday Afternoon On The Island Of La Grande Jatte' form of despicableness."
A few people, like John Boehner and whoever writes Sarah Palin's tweets went so far as to say, "See, this is exactly the same thing we were decrying with the Ground Zero mosque." Except it wasn't, because the Ground Zero mosque was a thing they had made up!
None of this bothered Terry Jones at all! Why should it? In the long history of fringe religious figures saying and doing stupid things, it is exceedingly rare for the media to provide much attention to them. Pat Robertson has been telling America that gay people cause hurricanes for years, and it never amounts to much in the way of coverage beyond a periodic reminder that Pat Robertson is a complete fool. Terry Jones, however, had been given something very precious: he was now "one side of a great debate" who possessed "an interesting point of view."
And the media worked very hard to push the case that Jones was part of a debate. Now, Quran burning was an election-year issue, for which every candidate had to answer. And they even went so far as to ask Jones repeatedly, "What if President Obama told you not to do this? What if former President George W. Bush told you not to do this?" They were literally brokering negotiations between an idiot cult leader and some of the most powerful and important people in the world!
By now, things were terribly out of control. President Obama had to publicly state that Quran burning is a stupid thing to do. Imagine how out of touch you have to be that you need to go all the way to the White House to find that answer! Other important people were compelled to interject at this point. General David Petraeus had to come forward and state the plainly obvious: that all the public attention being given to this Quran burning would undermine the ability of U.S. forces to conduct their counterinsurgency operations, which depend heavily on winning the "hearts and minds" of Afghans. I think a lot of people read this as Petraeus speaking out against the attention-seeker, Terry Jones. But I think he was speaking more directly to the attention-givers. And everything that Justin Elliot reports here, I believe, lends credence to my contention.
Eventually, Robert Gates -- the Secretary of Defense, who is running two wars! -- had to call Jones up and try to convince him not to do this. "Which is crazy," says Alex Pareene, accurately, because when, exactly, did the Pentagon start negotiating with two-bit terrorists?
All of this finally culminated with yesterday's press conference, where Terry Jones lied and said that the Park51 community center was going to move, thanks to him. You see where this is headed now, don't you? Now the people behind Park51 are on the hook for stopping this Quran burning, and all of the negative external impact it may have. Now, all of the refined hate-merchants from early in the story can say that if the "Ground Zero mosque" isn't moved, immediately, American troops could die!
To go back to Charlie Brooker, let's remember that after sizing up the incompetence that pervaded the Park51 coverage, he warned that the "media" should just "give up" before they "[made] things worse." Pretty prophetic, isn't it? They got played, and played badly, by a dude with 14th-century religious beliefs, 19th-century facial hair and ultra-modern media savvy. Terry Jones has essentially blackmailed some of the most important people in America, with the assistance of the media.
Let's remember that all of this paralysis was caused by 50 people who wanted to burn a book that's available for free, on the Internet!
There were many, many moments where someone could have simply said, "No, we should really not be doing this. These Islamophobes are objectively wrong, objectively stupid, objectively contradictory, objectively harmful, and by God, as someone with a functioning brain and a devotion to the pursuit of reason above all else, I am going to stand here and say no to all of this." But as it turns out, it wasn't until yesterday afternoon that someone finally had the guts to say maybe we cannot really believe a word this man is saying.
Well, they should have thought of that before they decided to point a bunch of teevee cameras at him, I guess.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
America Goes Dark
America Goes Dark
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 8, 2010
The lights are going out all over America — literally. Colorado Springs has made headlines with its desperate attempt to save money by turning off a third of its streetlights, but similar things are either happening or being contemplated across the nation, from Philadelphia to Fresno.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Paul Krugman
article.
Meanwhile, a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself: in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.
And a nation that once prized education — that was among the first to provide basic schooling to all its children — is now cutting back. Teachers are being laid off; programs are being canceled; in Hawaii, the school year itself is being drastically shortened. And all signs point to even more cuts ahead.
We’re told that we have no choice, that basic government functions — essential services that have been provided for generations — are no longer affordable. And it’s true that state and local governments, hit hard by the recession, are cash-strapped. But they wouldn’t be quite as cash-strapped if their politicians were willing to consider at least some tax increases.
And the federal government, which can sell inflation-protected long-term bonds at an interest rate of only 1.04 percent, isn’t cash-strapped at all. It could and should be offering aid to local governments, to protect the future of our infrastructure and our children.
But Washington is providing only a trickle of help, and even that grudgingly. We must place priority on reducing the deficit, say Republicans and “centrist” Democrats. And then, virtually in the next breath, they declare that we must preserve tax cuts for the very affluent, at a budget cost of $700 billion over the next decade.
In effect, a large part of our political class is showing its priorities: given the choice between asking the richest 2 percent or so of Americans to go back to paying the tax rates they paid during the Clinton-era boom, or allowing the nation’s foundations to crumble — literally in the case of roads, figuratively in the case of education — they’re choosing the latter.
It’s a disastrous choice in both the short run and the long run.
In the short run, those state and local cutbacks are a major drag on the economy, perpetuating devastatingly high unemployment.
It’s crucial to keep state and local government in mind when you hear people ranting about runaway government spending under President Obama. Yes, the federal government is spending more, although not as much as you might think. But state and local governments are cutting back. And if you add them together, it turns out that the only big spending increases have been in safety-net programs like unemployment insurance, which have soared in cost thanks to the severity of the slump.
That is, for all the talk of a failed stimulus, if you look at government spending as a whole you see hardly any stimulus at all. And with federal spending now trailing off, while big state and local cutbacks continue, we’re going into reverse.
But isn’t keeping taxes for the affluent low also a form of stimulus? Not so you’d notice. When we save a schoolteacher’s job, that unambiguously aids employment; when we give millionaires more money instead, there’s a good chance that most of that money will just sit idle.
And what about the economy’s future? Everything we know about economic growth says that a well-educated population and high-quality infrastructure are crucial. Emerging nations are making huge efforts to upgrade their roads, their ports and their schools. Yet in America we’re going backward.
How did we get to this point? It’s the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can’t do anything right.
The antigovernment campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we’re seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.
So the end result of the long campaign against government is that we’ve taken a disastrously wrong turn. America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on August 9, 2010,
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 8, 2010
The lights are going out all over America — literally. Colorado Springs has made headlines with its desperate attempt to save money by turning off a third of its streetlights, but similar things are either happening or being contemplated across the nation, from Philadelphia to Fresno.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Paul Krugman
article.
Meanwhile, a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself: in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.
And a nation that once prized education — that was among the first to provide basic schooling to all its children — is now cutting back. Teachers are being laid off; programs are being canceled; in Hawaii, the school year itself is being drastically shortened. And all signs point to even more cuts ahead.
We’re told that we have no choice, that basic government functions — essential services that have been provided for generations — are no longer affordable. And it’s true that state and local governments, hit hard by the recession, are cash-strapped. But they wouldn’t be quite as cash-strapped if their politicians were willing to consider at least some tax increases.
And the federal government, which can sell inflation-protected long-term bonds at an interest rate of only 1.04 percent, isn’t cash-strapped at all. It could and should be offering aid to local governments, to protect the future of our infrastructure and our children.
But Washington is providing only a trickle of help, and even that grudgingly. We must place priority on reducing the deficit, say Republicans and “centrist” Democrats. And then, virtually in the next breath, they declare that we must preserve tax cuts for the very affluent, at a budget cost of $700 billion over the next decade.
In effect, a large part of our political class is showing its priorities: given the choice between asking the richest 2 percent or so of Americans to go back to paying the tax rates they paid during the Clinton-era boom, or allowing the nation’s foundations to crumble — literally in the case of roads, figuratively in the case of education — they’re choosing the latter.
It’s a disastrous choice in both the short run and the long run.
In the short run, those state and local cutbacks are a major drag on the economy, perpetuating devastatingly high unemployment.
It’s crucial to keep state and local government in mind when you hear people ranting about runaway government spending under President Obama. Yes, the federal government is spending more, although not as much as you might think. But state and local governments are cutting back. And if you add them together, it turns out that the only big spending increases have been in safety-net programs like unemployment insurance, which have soared in cost thanks to the severity of the slump.
That is, for all the talk of a failed stimulus, if you look at government spending as a whole you see hardly any stimulus at all. And with federal spending now trailing off, while big state and local cutbacks continue, we’re going into reverse.
But isn’t keeping taxes for the affluent low also a form of stimulus? Not so you’d notice. When we save a schoolteacher’s job, that unambiguously aids employment; when we give millionaires more money instead, there’s a good chance that most of that money will just sit idle.
And what about the economy’s future? Everything we know about economic growth says that a well-educated population and high-quality infrastructure are crucial. Emerging nations are making huge efforts to upgrade their roads, their ports and their schools. Yet in America we’re going backward.
How did we get to this point? It’s the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can’t do anything right.
The antigovernment campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we’re seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.
So the end result of the long campaign against government is that we’ve taken a disastrously wrong turn. America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on August 9, 2010,
Friday, August 6, 2010
protect choice, cause your'e going to have to make them
Supreme 'Double Rainbow': Two Marriage Equality Rulings Head Toward High Court
Posted: 08- 6-10 02:32 PM
Email Comments 536
With U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker's decision to overturn California's ban on same-sex marriages, we now have two landmark marriage equality cases wending their way forward through the legal process, with the Supreme Court looming as their potential final destination.
The first is the aforementioned Prop 8 decision. The second is last month's ruling by U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro, who ruled that the federal ban on same-sex marriage, more commonly known as the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), was unconstitutional. Taken at first blush, this combination of midsummer rulings seem to represent a wave of support for same-sex marriage. But on closer inspection, it would seem that not all marriage equality cases are created equal.
In deciding Perry v. Schwarzenegger, Judge Walker seemed to anticipate that his decision had a date with the Supreme Court, and so he went out of his way to set the stage for the occasion. Over at Slate, Dahlia Lithwick contends that Walker more or less hardwired his ruling directly to the legal amygdala of the very Supreme Court Justice who would represent the swing vote in the case:
Judge Vaughn R. Walker is not Anthony Kennedy. But when the chips are down, he certainly knows how to write like him. I count--in his opinion today--seven citations to Justice Kennedy's 1996 opinion in Romer v. Evans (striking down an anti-gay Colorado ballot initiative) and eight citations to his 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas (striking down Texas' gay-sodomy law). In a stunning decision this afternoon, finding California's Proposition 8 ballot initiative banning gay marriage unconstitutional, Walker trod heavily on the path Kennedy has blazed on gay rights: "[I]t would demean a married couple were it to be said marriage is simply about the right to have sexual intercourse," quotes Walker. "'[M]oral disapproval, without any other asserted state interest,' has never been a rational basis for legislation," cites Walker. "Animus towards gays and lesbians or simply a belief that a relationship between a man and a woman is inherently better than a relationship between two men or two women, this belief is not a proper basis on which to legislate," Walker notes, with a jerk of the thumb at Kennedy.
Lithwick's not alone in her view that this case has been nicely set up for Kennedy to hit home. Writing on these pages, UCLA law professor Adam Winkler notes that the "two major decisions" pertaining to gay rights handed down by the Supreme Court in the past 15 years both "came out strongly in favor of gay rights -- and both were written by Justice Kennedy."
In one of those decisions, Lawrence v. Texas, which held that bans on consensual sexual activity among same-sex partners were unconstitutional, Kennedy wrote that "our laws and tradition afford constitutional protection to personal decisions relating to marriage" and other "family relationships." "These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by" the Constitution. "Persons in a homosexual relationship may seek autonomy for these purposes," Kennedy wrote, "just as heterosexual persons do."
These words suggest Justice Kennedy believes that gays and lesbians should have the same rights and privileges as heterosexuals. Of course, no right that heterosexuals enjoy is denied more often to gays and lesbians than marriage.
Justice Kennedy is also known to be the Supreme Court Justice most likely to vote in favor of expansive interpretations of individual rights. He's a libertarian, which means he almost always sides with the individual against the government.
Beyond the legal, Nate Silver notes that like just about anyone who has spent a long period of time plying his trade in the upper echelons of government, Justice Kennedy is probably ridiculously obsessed with his legacy:
Although I'm not qualified to analyze the merits of Perry v. Schwarzenneger from a legal positivist point of view, I will deign to take a crack at it from a legal realist frame. It seems to me that most of the "intangibles" bear upon Justice Kennedy in ways that favor his finding Constitutional protection for same-sex marriage. For one thing, he'll be 75 or 76 by the time the SCOTUS hears this case, and will probably be thinking about his legacy. Given that, in 50 years' time, American society will almost certainly regard the plaintiff's position (the Constitution does not permit discrimination in marriage on the basis of sexual orientation) as the right one, that legacy would be better served by casting the decisive vote in favor of the plaintiffs.
Story continues below
So, the typical human tendency to pursue vanity in immortality is something same-sex marriage proponents could end up successfully exploiting.
On the other hand, we have Judge Tauro's DOMA decision heading in the same direction. If Judge Walker's ruling anticipated a future showdown, Tauro's decision borrowed heavily from the zeitgeist. As Andrew Koppelman points out over at the Los Angeles Times, Tauro's "ruling relied on two arguments." One was that DOMA violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. But the other argument was that the "the law interfered with the rights of states guaranteed in the 10th Amendment." The latter stance is the more problematic.
As anyone who's been following the political undercurrent knows, the past two years have witnessed the rise of a phenomennon known as Tentherism. Commonly enunciated by the denizens of the Tea Party movement, Tenthers hold to an extreme interpretation of the Tenth Amendment in the belief that the Federal government have such a limited authority to rule over the states "that virtually everything the federal government does is unconstitutional." Like, say, the Federal highway system.
Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin sees, in Tauro's decision, a winking commentary on this movement:
To be sure, there is something delightfully playful and perverse about the two opinions when you read them. Judge Tauro uses the Tenth Amendment-- much beloved by conservatives-- to strike down another law much beloved by conservatives--DOMA. There is a kind of clever, "gotcha" element to this logic. It is as if he's saying: "You want the Tenth Amendment? I'll give you the Tenth Amendment!" But in the long run, this sort of argument, clever as it is, is not going to work. Much as I applaud the cleverness-- which is certain to twist both liberal and conservative commentators in knots-- I do not support the logic.
Basically, the idea here is that this DOMA decision is a poke in the eye of Tenthers, who would likely be none too pleased that their pet cause has paved the way for same-sex marriage. If we were making a movie, this would be a fiendish twist. But in the real world, who knows? The Tenthers may accept a ruling that enables same-sex marriage as a loss-leader to their larger agenda, which is to undo Obama administration achievements, like health care reform. And that's why Balkin's larger point here is for marriage equality proponents to "be careful what you wish for."
Perhaps more importantly, [Tauro's] Tenth Amendment arguments prove entirely too much. As much as liberals might applaud the result, they should be aware that the logic of his arguments, taken seriously, would undermine the constitutionality of wide swaths of federal regulatory programs and seriously constrict federal regulatory power.
And that would have some seriously far-reaching ripples:
The arguments of Judge Tauro's two opinions are at war with each other. He wants to say that marriage is a distinctly state law function with which the federal government may not interfere. But the federal government has been involved in the regulation of family life and family formation since at least Reconstruction, and especially so since the New Deal. Much of the modern welfare state and tax code defines families, regulates family formation and gives incentives (some good and some bad) with respect to marriages and families. Indeed, social conservatives have often argued for using the federal government's taxing and spending powers to create certain types of incentives for family formation and to benefit certain types of family structures; so too have liberals.
In both opinions, Judge Tauro takes us through a list of federal programs for which same sex couples are denied benefits. But he does not see that even as he does so, he is also reciting the history of federal involvement in family formation and family structure. His Tenth Amendment argument therefore collapses of its own weight. If the federal government cannot interfere with state prerogatives in these areas, why was it able to pass all of these statutes, which clearly affect how state family law operates in practice and clearly give incentives that could further, undermine, or even in some cases preempt state policies?
As nifty as it might be to watch the Tenthers hoisted with their own petard, Balkin lays out the many reasons that the Obama administration would be obligated to defend the DOMA in this case. Not that they'll look forward to doing so: when it comes to bad political "optics" nothing is going to give progressives -- at least the ones lacking the keen sense necessary to divine the larger threat to a progressive federal agenda -- greater fits than watching the Obama administration go to the wall in the defense of the Defense Of Marriage Act.
Anyone who really wants to get into the business of predicting how the Supreme Court will rule on any given case may as well take up the study of divination. Still, it seems to me that if you're a fan of marriage equality, you'd best pin your hopes to Judge Walker's Prop 8 ruling.
[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]
Posted: 08- 6-10 02:32 PM
Email Comments 536
With U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker's decision to overturn California's ban on same-sex marriages, we now have two landmark marriage equality cases wending their way forward through the legal process, with the Supreme Court looming as their potential final destination.
The first is the aforementioned Prop 8 decision. The second is last month's ruling by U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro, who ruled that the federal ban on same-sex marriage, more commonly known as the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), was unconstitutional. Taken at first blush, this combination of midsummer rulings seem to represent a wave of support for same-sex marriage. But on closer inspection, it would seem that not all marriage equality cases are created equal.
In deciding Perry v. Schwarzenegger, Judge Walker seemed to anticipate that his decision had a date with the Supreme Court, and so he went out of his way to set the stage for the occasion. Over at Slate, Dahlia Lithwick contends that Walker more or less hardwired his ruling directly to the legal amygdala of the very Supreme Court Justice who would represent the swing vote in the case:
Judge Vaughn R. Walker is not Anthony Kennedy. But when the chips are down, he certainly knows how to write like him. I count--in his opinion today--seven citations to Justice Kennedy's 1996 opinion in Romer v. Evans (striking down an anti-gay Colorado ballot initiative) and eight citations to his 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas (striking down Texas' gay-sodomy law). In a stunning decision this afternoon, finding California's Proposition 8 ballot initiative banning gay marriage unconstitutional, Walker trod heavily on the path Kennedy has blazed on gay rights: "[I]t would demean a married couple were it to be said marriage is simply about the right to have sexual intercourse," quotes Walker. "'[M]oral disapproval, without any other asserted state interest,' has never been a rational basis for legislation," cites Walker. "Animus towards gays and lesbians or simply a belief that a relationship between a man and a woman is inherently better than a relationship between two men or two women, this belief is not a proper basis on which to legislate," Walker notes, with a jerk of the thumb at Kennedy.
Lithwick's not alone in her view that this case has been nicely set up for Kennedy to hit home. Writing on these pages, UCLA law professor Adam Winkler notes that the "two major decisions" pertaining to gay rights handed down by the Supreme Court in the past 15 years both "came out strongly in favor of gay rights -- and both were written by Justice Kennedy."
In one of those decisions, Lawrence v. Texas, which held that bans on consensual sexual activity among same-sex partners were unconstitutional, Kennedy wrote that "our laws and tradition afford constitutional protection to personal decisions relating to marriage" and other "family relationships." "These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by" the Constitution. "Persons in a homosexual relationship may seek autonomy for these purposes," Kennedy wrote, "just as heterosexual persons do."
These words suggest Justice Kennedy believes that gays and lesbians should have the same rights and privileges as heterosexuals. Of course, no right that heterosexuals enjoy is denied more often to gays and lesbians than marriage.
Justice Kennedy is also known to be the Supreme Court Justice most likely to vote in favor of expansive interpretations of individual rights. He's a libertarian, which means he almost always sides with the individual against the government.
Beyond the legal, Nate Silver notes that like just about anyone who has spent a long period of time plying his trade in the upper echelons of government, Justice Kennedy is probably ridiculously obsessed with his legacy:
Although I'm not qualified to analyze the merits of Perry v. Schwarzenneger from a legal positivist point of view, I will deign to take a crack at it from a legal realist frame. It seems to me that most of the "intangibles" bear upon Justice Kennedy in ways that favor his finding Constitutional protection for same-sex marriage. For one thing, he'll be 75 or 76 by the time the SCOTUS hears this case, and will probably be thinking about his legacy. Given that, in 50 years' time, American society will almost certainly regard the plaintiff's position (the Constitution does not permit discrimination in marriage on the basis of sexual orientation) as the right one, that legacy would be better served by casting the decisive vote in favor of the plaintiffs.
Story continues below
So, the typical human tendency to pursue vanity in immortality is something same-sex marriage proponents could end up successfully exploiting.
On the other hand, we have Judge Tauro's DOMA decision heading in the same direction. If Judge Walker's ruling anticipated a future showdown, Tauro's decision borrowed heavily from the zeitgeist. As Andrew Koppelman points out over at the Los Angeles Times, Tauro's "ruling relied on two arguments." One was that DOMA violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. But the other argument was that the "the law interfered with the rights of states guaranteed in the 10th Amendment." The latter stance is the more problematic.
As anyone who's been following the political undercurrent knows, the past two years have witnessed the rise of a phenomennon known as Tentherism. Commonly enunciated by the denizens of the Tea Party movement, Tenthers hold to an extreme interpretation of the Tenth Amendment in the belief that the Federal government have such a limited authority to rule over the states "that virtually everything the federal government does is unconstitutional." Like, say, the Federal highway system.
Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin sees, in Tauro's decision, a winking commentary on this movement:
To be sure, there is something delightfully playful and perverse about the two opinions when you read them. Judge Tauro uses the Tenth Amendment-- much beloved by conservatives-- to strike down another law much beloved by conservatives--DOMA. There is a kind of clever, "gotcha" element to this logic. It is as if he's saying: "You want the Tenth Amendment? I'll give you the Tenth Amendment!" But in the long run, this sort of argument, clever as it is, is not going to work. Much as I applaud the cleverness-- which is certain to twist both liberal and conservative commentators in knots-- I do not support the logic.
Basically, the idea here is that this DOMA decision is a poke in the eye of Tenthers, who would likely be none too pleased that their pet cause has paved the way for same-sex marriage. If we were making a movie, this would be a fiendish twist. But in the real world, who knows? The Tenthers may accept a ruling that enables same-sex marriage as a loss-leader to their larger agenda, which is to undo Obama administration achievements, like health care reform. And that's why Balkin's larger point here is for marriage equality proponents to "be careful what you wish for."
Perhaps more importantly, [Tauro's] Tenth Amendment arguments prove entirely too much. As much as liberals might applaud the result, they should be aware that the logic of his arguments, taken seriously, would undermine the constitutionality of wide swaths of federal regulatory programs and seriously constrict federal regulatory power.
And that would have some seriously far-reaching ripples:
The arguments of Judge Tauro's two opinions are at war with each other. He wants to say that marriage is a distinctly state law function with which the federal government may not interfere. But the federal government has been involved in the regulation of family life and family formation since at least Reconstruction, and especially so since the New Deal. Much of the modern welfare state and tax code defines families, regulates family formation and gives incentives (some good and some bad) with respect to marriages and families. Indeed, social conservatives have often argued for using the federal government's taxing and spending powers to create certain types of incentives for family formation and to benefit certain types of family structures; so too have liberals.
In both opinions, Judge Tauro takes us through a list of federal programs for which same sex couples are denied benefits. But he does not see that even as he does so, he is also reciting the history of federal involvement in family formation and family structure. His Tenth Amendment argument therefore collapses of its own weight. If the federal government cannot interfere with state prerogatives in these areas, why was it able to pass all of these statutes, which clearly affect how state family law operates in practice and clearly give incentives that could further, undermine, or even in some cases preempt state policies?
As nifty as it might be to watch the Tenthers hoisted with their own petard, Balkin lays out the many reasons that the Obama administration would be obligated to defend the DOMA in this case. Not that they'll look forward to doing so: when it comes to bad political "optics" nothing is going to give progressives -- at least the ones lacking the keen sense necessary to divine the larger threat to a progressive federal agenda -- greater fits than watching the Obama administration go to the wall in the defense of the Defense Of Marriage Act.
Anyone who really wants to get into the business of predicting how the Supreme Court will rule on any given case may as well take up the study of divination. Still, it seems to me that if you're a fan of marriage equality, you'd best pin your hopes to Judge Walker's Prop 8 ruling.
[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]
you can learn or die tryin
Christopher Hitchens On Cancer: I'm 'Realistic' About Odds Of Survival, Pray For Me If You Want (VIDEO)
First Posted: 08- 6-10 09:28 AM | Updated: 08- 6-10 11:35 AM
Christopher Hitchens appeared on "Anderson Cooper 360" Thursday in his first TV appearance since his diagnosis with esophageal cancer.
Hitchens, whose father died at 79 of the same disease, said that even he has wondered, "Why me?"
"You can't avoid the question however stoic you are, you can only bat it away as a silly one," he said. "Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime. I've came by this particular tumor honestly. If you smoke, which I did for many years very heavily with occasional interruption, and if you use alcohol, you make yourself a candidate for it in your sixties."
"You said you burned the candle at both ends," Cooper said.
"And it gave a lovely light," Hitchens responded.
"Do you think part of that way you lived is responsible for this?"
"It would be very idle to deny it, and I might as well say to anyone watching, if you can hold it down on the smokes and the cocktails you may be well advised to do so," Hitchens said.
As for his odds of survival, Hitchens says he is "realistic" about his chances given his diagnosis:
"I'm not resigned, but I'm realistic too. The statistics in my case are very poor. Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long. And the other wager is, the part of the wager, it's a certainty you'll have a terrible time and you may wish you were dying because it's an awful process. That you can't escape, you're going to get that no matter what. Then the torture may or may not be worth it or it will be torture by execution."
Hitchens, an outspoken atheist, says he appreciates the prayer groups sprouting up in his honor but he "shall not be taking part in that."
Story continues below
"That's all meaningless to me," he told Cooper. "I don't think souls or bodies can be changed by incantation. Or anything else by the way...[but] I say if it makes you feel better then you have my blessing."
WATCH:
First Posted: 08- 6-10 09:28 AM | Updated: 08- 6-10 11:35 AM
Christopher Hitchens appeared on "Anderson Cooper 360" Thursday in his first TV appearance since his diagnosis with esophageal cancer.
Hitchens, whose father died at 79 of the same disease, said that even he has wondered, "Why me?"
"You can't avoid the question however stoic you are, you can only bat it away as a silly one," he said. "Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime. I've came by this particular tumor honestly. If you smoke, which I did for many years very heavily with occasional interruption, and if you use alcohol, you make yourself a candidate for it in your sixties."
"You said you burned the candle at both ends," Cooper said.
"And it gave a lovely light," Hitchens responded.
"Do you think part of that way you lived is responsible for this?"
"It would be very idle to deny it, and I might as well say to anyone watching, if you can hold it down on the smokes and the cocktails you may be well advised to do so," Hitchens said.
As for his odds of survival, Hitchens says he is "realistic" about his chances given his diagnosis:
"I'm not resigned, but I'm realistic too. The statistics in my case are very poor. Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long. And the other wager is, the part of the wager, it's a certainty you'll have a terrible time and you may wish you were dying because it's an awful process. That you can't escape, you're going to get that no matter what. Then the torture may or may not be worth it or it will be torture by execution."
Hitchens, an outspoken atheist, says he appreciates the prayer groups sprouting up in his honor but he "shall not be taking part in that."
Story continues below
"That's all meaningless to me," he told Cooper. "I don't think souls or bodies can be changed by incantation. Or anything else by the way...[but] I say if it makes you feel better then you have my blessing."
WATCH:
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
"something in China is seriously askew"...
Man kills 3 children, 1 teacher in latest in series of Chinese school attacks
By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, August 4, 2010; 9:46 AM
BEIJING -- A knife-wielding man rampaged through a kindergarten in the eastern city of Zibo on Tuesday, killing three children and a teacher, and wounding a dozen others in the latest in a string of a strikingly similar attacks that have left about 20 people dead, parents on edge and the country grappling for answers.
The seemingly random attacks have raised questions about the state of mental health treatment in China, and the dislocation caused by two decades of explosive economic growth and dynamic change that has left many bypassed on society's margins.
The latest attack -- the sixth since March -- followed the now-familiar pattern; the assailant, identified as a man in his 20s, had no immediately known connection to the kindergarten. He apparently mingled with parents waiting to pick up their children about 4 p.m. before he began slashing victims with a two-foot-long knife.
Some reports said the man fled the scene but later turned himself in to police. In a brief dispatch, Xinhua, the official state news agency, identified the attacker as Fang Jiantang, 26. A local lawyer who lives in Zibo, in Shangdong province, said the man was unemployed and lived about 100 yards from where the attack occurred.
According to Zibo residents reached by telephone, the attack occurred at the Boshan District Experimental Kindergarten in the Golden Phoenix Compound, a facility for government workers. A teacher at a nearby kindergarten said the school that was attacked had 40 to 50 students attending, most of them the children of local civil service workers.
Immediately after the attack, the government, in a stated effort to head off copycat attacks, imposed a news blackout, with few details filtering out through media sources. The local police, government offices and the hospital in Zibo all refused to give any details.
News of the Tuesday attack only came out Wednesday, nearly 24 hours after the fact. Chinese media Web sites during the day carried prominently displayed stories about a workplace shooting in Connecticut that left nine people dead, but not a word on the latest kindergarten attack here in China.
Even residents of Zibo said they had difficulty finding out what happened. "News about the kindergarten is blocked," said a teacher from a nearby kindergarten. "Last night, the local news didn't cover the accident. This morning, the head of our kindergarten had a meeting in the city to discuss enhanced security. But no other news was released.
"I would be lying if I said I'm not panicked," she said. "I worry a lot in my heart. But we have two full-time security guards and two part-time security guards. Besides that, our kindergarten has already installed advanced alarming system and cameras. We have three locked gates to cross to enter our kindergarten."
The director of the nearby Golden Key Kindergarten, in the same district as the school that was attacked, said, "The tragedy happened so suddenly. Parents are scared. More than 100 kids in our kindergarten didn't come today. Their parents dare not to put their kids in kindergarten now."
A local primary school in Zibo posted a notice Wednesday saying all parents had to come into the classroom to pick up their children, according to a local hairdresser whose child attends the school.
Kindergartens and primary schools across China have become heavily fortified with cameras and extra security guards since the string of attacks began March 23, when 42-year-old Zheng Minsheng, a former community doctor, burst into a primary school and stabbed eight children to death with a knife as they were lining up outside before the start of classes.Zheng was executed by firing squad a month later -- and on the day of his execution, another school assailant, Chen Kangbing, a mentally ill 33-year-old man, wounded 18 children in a primary school in Leizhou, in Guangdong province, in what authorities called a copycat crime.
Three other school attacks came in rapid succession. On April 28, an angry, unemployed 47-year-old man burst into a nursery school in Jiangsu province and slashed 28 children. On April 30, a village farmer armed with a hammer attacked and injured five children in Weifang, also in Shandong province, before setting himself on fire. And on May 12, a 48-year-old man in Shaanxi province angry over a property dispute killed seven children and two adults in a kindergarten.
The school attacks have become an embarrassment for China's ruling Communist Party, led by President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, who have made "social harmony" and stability the catchphrase of their tenure.
Hu and Wen have guided China through expansive economic growth, and placed China on the global stage with large-scale events like the 2008 Olympics and this year's World Expo in Shanghai. But the ongoing spate of apparently random school killings has shown that despite the progress, something in China is seriously askew.
Some experts have blamed the mental health system, which is still rudimentary here. China lacks trained psychiatrists, psychologists and mental hospitals, and mental illness carries a social stigma. Most people with mental illness simply go untreated.
Others said the killings pointed to a problem of people feeling resentment toward society, because of perceived economic unfairness or the pressure of authoritarian control, and they are responding by lashing out, often at innocent victims.
Ma Ai, a professor of criminal psychology at the China University of Politics and Law, called these attacks, and other random incidents against adults that go largely unnoticed, "the inevitable result of rapid social change in China."
"It's a matter of how to express their dissatisfaction," Ma said. "It's easier to draw attention by attacking kids."
"In the past 30 years of opening and reform, China attached more importance to economic development and ignored fairness in society," Ma said. "When people feel they are treated unfairly, they fight for themselves, no matter in which way."
Ma also said that in recent years, the government has become more heavy-handed in maintaining "stability" and security, and violence can be a backlash. "The authorities took simple measures to keep the stability, like suppressing people," he said. "But in terms of social psychology, when people feel pressure, they will push back against the pressure being imposed on them."
Researchers Zhang Jie and Liu Liu in Beijing contributed to this report.
By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, August 4, 2010; 9:46 AM
BEIJING -- A knife-wielding man rampaged through a kindergarten in the eastern city of Zibo on Tuesday, killing three children and a teacher, and wounding a dozen others in the latest in a string of a strikingly similar attacks that have left about 20 people dead, parents on edge and the country grappling for answers.
The seemingly random attacks have raised questions about the state of mental health treatment in China, and the dislocation caused by two decades of explosive economic growth and dynamic change that has left many bypassed on society's margins.
The latest attack -- the sixth since March -- followed the now-familiar pattern; the assailant, identified as a man in his 20s, had no immediately known connection to the kindergarten. He apparently mingled with parents waiting to pick up their children about 4 p.m. before he began slashing victims with a two-foot-long knife.
Some reports said the man fled the scene but later turned himself in to police. In a brief dispatch, Xinhua, the official state news agency, identified the attacker as Fang Jiantang, 26. A local lawyer who lives in Zibo, in Shangdong province, said the man was unemployed and lived about 100 yards from where the attack occurred.
According to Zibo residents reached by telephone, the attack occurred at the Boshan District Experimental Kindergarten in the Golden Phoenix Compound, a facility for government workers. A teacher at a nearby kindergarten said the school that was attacked had 40 to 50 students attending, most of them the children of local civil service workers.
Immediately after the attack, the government, in a stated effort to head off copycat attacks, imposed a news blackout, with few details filtering out through media sources. The local police, government offices and the hospital in Zibo all refused to give any details.
News of the Tuesday attack only came out Wednesday, nearly 24 hours after the fact. Chinese media Web sites during the day carried prominently displayed stories about a workplace shooting in Connecticut that left nine people dead, but not a word on the latest kindergarten attack here in China.
Even residents of Zibo said they had difficulty finding out what happened. "News about the kindergarten is blocked," said a teacher from a nearby kindergarten. "Last night, the local news didn't cover the accident. This morning, the head of our kindergarten had a meeting in the city to discuss enhanced security. But no other news was released.
"I would be lying if I said I'm not panicked," she said. "I worry a lot in my heart. But we have two full-time security guards and two part-time security guards. Besides that, our kindergarten has already installed advanced alarming system and cameras. We have three locked gates to cross to enter our kindergarten."
The director of the nearby Golden Key Kindergarten, in the same district as the school that was attacked, said, "The tragedy happened so suddenly. Parents are scared. More than 100 kids in our kindergarten didn't come today. Their parents dare not to put their kids in kindergarten now."
A local primary school in Zibo posted a notice Wednesday saying all parents had to come into the classroom to pick up their children, according to a local hairdresser whose child attends the school.
Kindergartens and primary schools across China have become heavily fortified with cameras and extra security guards since the string of attacks began March 23, when 42-year-old Zheng Minsheng, a former community doctor, burst into a primary school and stabbed eight children to death with a knife as they were lining up outside before the start of classes.Zheng was executed by firing squad a month later -- and on the day of his execution, another school assailant, Chen Kangbing, a mentally ill 33-year-old man, wounded 18 children in a primary school in Leizhou, in Guangdong province, in what authorities called a copycat crime.
Three other school attacks came in rapid succession. On April 28, an angry, unemployed 47-year-old man burst into a nursery school in Jiangsu province and slashed 28 children. On April 30, a village farmer armed with a hammer attacked and injured five children in Weifang, also in Shandong province, before setting himself on fire. And on May 12, a 48-year-old man in Shaanxi province angry over a property dispute killed seven children and two adults in a kindergarten.
The school attacks have become an embarrassment for China's ruling Communist Party, led by President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, who have made "social harmony" and stability the catchphrase of their tenure.
Hu and Wen have guided China through expansive economic growth, and placed China on the global stage with large-scale events like the 2008 Olympics and this year's World Expo in Shanghai. But the ongoing spate of apparently random school killings has shown that despite the progress, something in China is seriously askew.
Some experts have blamed the mental health system, which is still rudimentary here. China lacks trained psychiatrists, psychologists and mental hospitals, and mental illness carries a social stigma. Most people with mental illness simply go untreated.
Others said the killings pointed to a problem of people feeling resentment toward society, because of perceived economic unfairness or the pressure of authoritarian control, and they are responding by lashing out, often at innocent victims.
Ma Ai, a professor of criminal psychology at the China University of Politics and Law, called these attacks, and other random incidents against adults that go largely unnoticed, "the inevitable result of rapid social change in China."
"It's a matter of how to express their dissatisfaction," Ma said. "It's easier to draw attention by attacking kids."
"In the past 30 years of opening and reform, China attached more importance to economic development and ignored fairness in society," Ma said. "When people feel they are treated unfairly, they fight for themselves, no matter in which way."
Ma also said that in recent years, the government has become more heavy-handed in maintaining "stability" and security, and violence can be a backlash. "The authorities took simple measures to keep the stability, like suppressing people," he said. "But in terms of social psychology, when people feel pressure, they will push back against the pressure being imposed on them."
Researchers Zhang Jie and Liu Liu in Beijing contributed to this report.
wow people will lie
Jeff Greene, Florida Senate Candidate, Is The Latest And Greatest Entry In 2010's Yacht Follies (VIDEO)
During this time of widespread financial misery, one would hope that the election season would yield a crop of politicians capable of relating to the struggles of ordinary people.
Unfortunately, this year we've seen instead the rise of the yacht-owning buffoon candidates, so America is probably doomed.
The big yacht-politics story of the week comes from Florida, where Jeff Greene -- the titanically wealthy housing-market shorting tycoon running for the Democratic nomination for Senate -- has come under fire for rolling down to Cuba in his 145-foot yacht, Summerwind, on a jaunt that left the decks of said vessel "caked" in "vomit." Greene has changed his story about that trip several times:
So, first Greene wasn't on the yacht when it went to Cuba. Then he was on the yacht, but it was part of a Jewish mission to visit synagogues. Then it was the yacht docking in Cuba because of an emergency related to hydraulics, during which time he took advantage of the aforementioned Jewish mission. And finally, a deckhand on the vessel, Billy Blackwell, says the trip was a party jaunt to Cuba, during which Greene and his squeeze went shopping in Cuba.
The Greene campaign denies all of that, of course. But this flap has tied them up in knots. To wit:
Greene spokesman Luis Vizcaino said Tuesday that the real estate mogul's 145-foot yacht Summerwind docked for two days in Havana's Hemingway Marina in 2007 while awaiting repairs. In Sunday's debate against Democratic rival Kendrick Meek, Greene said he went to Cuba on a Jewish mission.
"During the debate Jeff misspoke," Vizcaino said after receiving media inquiries about the trip. "What he meant to say was that in 2007, he went on the boat from Honduras to the Bahamas, and en route the boat had a hydraulic problem...The captain said we could wait for the part at Hemingway Marina."
Yes: Greene "misspoke," in that an entirely different sentence, containing entirely different facts, related to an entirely different account, failed to emerge from Greene's mouth at the moment that air vibrated his vocal chords and his lips, teeth, tongue, and palate formed words.
Story continues below
As noted in the above clip, WPLG News found a reluctant-to-speak Blackwell. The St. Petersburg Times, however, had better luck:
Adam Lambert worked as captain of Greene's 145-foot yacht, Summerwind, earlier this year.
"He has total disregard for anybody else,'' chuckled Lambert, who said he was Greene's 20th and 22nd Summerwind captain (No. 21 quit after a few hours with Greene).
"I don't think I ever once had an actual conversation with him. It was always, 'I should just get rid of you, what f------ good are you? You're just a f------ boat driver. You're the third-highest paid employee in my corporation and I should just get rid of you,' '' Lambert, 43, recalled by phone from a yacht in Croatia. "It didn't bother me. I just felt sorry for the man. He doesn't seem very happy."
Harlan Hoffman, 37, was in a Fort Lauderdale yachting apparel store in 2007 when he saw a help wanted ad for Summerwind.
"There were two people from Australia there who said, 'Oh, good luck with that one. . . . We're still waiting to get paid by Summerwind.' I should have listened," Hoffman said.
The deckhand was shocked while buffing Greene's yacht and wound up hospitalized.
A boat's owner is supposed to take care of on-the-job medical costs, but Hoffman said Greene -- whom he never met -- told the insurance company he had never heard of Hoffman and that he didn't work on Summerwind. It took eight months and legal action that included affidavits from other crew members vouching for Hoffman and trashing Greene to get his bills paid.
"This guy Jeff Greene threw tons of money into new diving gear, but the crew's basic equipment -- food and supplies -- he didn't want to spend any money on. Summerwind has a terrible reputation,'' Hoffman said. "Mr. Greene's yacht is known to be a party yacht. When it went to Cuba, everybody talked about the vomit caked all over the sides from all the partying going on."
This isn't the first time the Summerwind has made the news. Back in July, it came to light that the Summerwind had "severely tore up a coral reef system off the coast of Belize during an ocean voyage five years ago". Greene apparently faces fines totaling $1.87 million if he ever returns to Belize.
Greene has emerged as the international waters all-star in the 2010 campaign season, but he's hardly alone in the field of ostentatious yacht owners. Back in March, the Stamford Advocate, in sizing up the way Connecticut's political future seemed to be in the hands of the super-rich, said that in order to "appreciate the influx of wealth in the top political races in Connecticut, you have to go nautical".
At first, you might be impressed with Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Dannel Malloy's 28-foot powerboat or with Republican Senate candidate Rob Simmons's J-22 sailboat.
But they're humble dinghies next to the 47-foot "Sexy Bitch," the sports yacht that Republican Linda McMahon's husband docks in Boca Raton, Fla. They'd be swamped in the wake from "Odalisque," Republican Tom Foley's 100-foot ship flagged under the Republic of Marshall Islands and hailing from the port of Bikini. (Odalisque, if you must know, comes from the Turkish for a slave in a harem.)
Apparently, in Connecticut, the wealthier you get, the more demeaning to women your boats become!
The topic of yachts also briefly flared up in the California Senate race:
Sen. Barbara Boxer has fired a shot across the bow of Carly Fiorina - in the hopes that her Republican rival's ownership of a pair of yachts might sink her with voters.
Boxer has taken to comparing her years of "public service" to Fiorina's choice "to become a CEO, lay off 30,000 workers, ship jobs overseas (and) have two yachts."
Fiorina's 70-foot Alchemy V, a 2001 Dyna Craft valued for tax purposes at just over $1 million, is moored in Sausalito.
Her 56-foot Sea Ray yacht, the 3-year-old Alchemy VI, is docked on the Potomac in Washington, D.C. - not far from the Georgetown condo that Fiorina and her husband own.
I don't know about you but if I'd known years ago that damaging Hewlett-Packard's brand was that lucrative, I would have made a whole different series of life choices.
But 2010's season of yacht-see hasn't just stung candidates for office. Massachusetts Senator John Kerry came under fire after it was revealed that by berthing his family's $7 million yacht in Rhode Island, instead of his home state of Massachusetts, he was sparing himself the indignity of having to pay $500,000 in taxes. The report managed to cast Kerry in a bad light, and likely had the unintended consequence of alerting hundreds of yacht owners to the fact that Rhode Island known as "a nautical tax haven."
Anyway, these are among the people whom America is counting on to solve the unemployment crisis and mitigate widespread structural income inequities, so good luck with that.
During this time of widespread financial misery, one would hope that the election season would yield a crop of politicians capable of relating to the struggles of ordinary people.
Unfortunately, this year we've seen instead the rise of the yacht-owning buffoon candidates, so America is probably doomed.
The big yacht-politics story of the week comes from Florida, where Jeff Greene -- the titanically wealthy housing-market shorting tycoon running for the Democratic nomination for Senate -- has come under fire for rolling down to Cuba in his 145-foot yacht, Summerwind, on a jaunt that left the decks of said vessel "caked" in "vomit." Greene has changed his story about that trip several times:
So, first Greene wasn't on the yacht when it went to Cuba. Then he was on the yacht, but it was part of a Jewish mission to visit synagogues. Then it was the yacht docking in Cuba because of an emergency related to hydraulics, during which time he took advantage of the aforementioned Jewish mission. And finally, a deckhand on the vessel, Billy Blackwell, says the trip was a party jaunt to Cuba, during which Greene and his squeeze went shopping in Cuba.
The Greene campaign denies all of that, of course. But this flap has tied them up in knots. To wit:
Greene spokesman Luis Vizcaino said Tuesday that the real estate mogul's 145-foot yacht Summerwind docked for two days in Havana's Hemingway Marina in 2007 while awaiting repairs. In Sunday's debate against Democratic rival Kendrick Meek, Greene said he went to Cuba on a Jewish mission.
"During the debate Jeff misspoke," Vizcaino said after receiving media inquiries about the trip. "What he meant to say was that in 2007, he went on the boat from Honduras to the Bahamas, and en route the boat had a hydraulic problem...The captain said we could wait for the part at Hemingway Marina."
Yes: Greene "misspoke," in that an entirely different sentence, containing entirely different facts, related to an entirely different account, failed to emerge from Greene's mouth at the moment that air vibrated his vocal chords and his lips, teeth, tongue, and palate formed words.
Story continues below
As noted in the above clip, WPLG News found a reluctant-to-speak Blackwell. The St. Petersburg Times, however, had better luck:
Adam Lambert worked as captain of Greene's 145-foot yacht, Summerwind, earlier this year.
"He has total disregard for anybody else,'' chuckled Lambert, who said he was Greene's 20th and 22nd Summerwind captain (No. 21 quit after a few hours with Greene).
"I don't think I ever once had an actual conversation with him. It was always, 'I should just get rid of you, what f------ good are you? You're just a f------ boat driver. You're the third-highest paid employee in my corporation and I should just get rid of you,' '' Lambert, 43, recalled by phone from a yacht in Croatia. "It didn't bother me. I just felt sorry for the man. He doesn't seem very happy."
Harlan Hoffman, 37, was in a Fort Lauderdale yachting apparel store in 2007 when he saw a help wanted ad for Summerwind.
"There were two people from Australia there who said, 'Oh, good luck with that one. . . . We're still waiting to get paid by Summerwind.' I should have listened," Hoffman said.
The deckhand was shocked while buffing Greene's yacht and wound up hospitalized.
A boat's owner is supposed to take care of on-the-job medical costs, but Hoffman said Greene -- whom he never met -- told the insurance company he had never heard of Hoffman and that he didn't work on Summerwind. It took eight months and legal action that included affidavits from other crew members vouching for Hoffman and trashing Greene to get his bills paid.
"This guy Jeff Greene threw tons of money into new diving gear, but the crew's basic equipment -- food and supplies -- he didn't want to spend any money on. Summerwind has a terrible reputation,'' Hoffman said. "Mr. Greene's yacht is known to be a party yacht. When it went to Cuba, everybody talked about the vomit caked all over the sides from all the partying going on."
This isn't the first time the Summerwind has made the news. Back in July, it came to light that the Summerwind had "severely tore up a coral reef system off the coast of Belize during an ocean voyage five years ago". Greene apparently faces fines totaling $1.87 million if he ever returns to Belize.
Greene has emerged as the international waters all-star in the 2010 campaign season, but he's hardly alone in the field of ostentatious yacht owners. Back in March, the Stamford Advocate, in sizing up the way Connecticut's political future seemed to be in the hands of the super-rich, said that in order to "appreciate the influx of wealth in the top political races in Connecticut, you have to go nautical".
At first, you might be impressed with Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Dannel Malloy's 28-foot powerboat or with Republican Senate candidate Rob Simmons's J-22 sailboat.
But they're humble dinghies next to the 47-foot "Sexy Bitch," the sports yacht that Republican Linda McMahon's husband docks in Boca Raton, Fla. They'd be swamped in the wake from "Odalisque," Republican Tom Foley's 100-foot ship flagged under the Republic of Marshall Islands and hailing from the port of Bikini. (Odalisque, if you must know, comes from the Turkish for a slave in a harem.)
Apparently, in Connecticut, the wealthier you get, the more demeaning to women your boats become!
The topic of yachts also briefly flared up in the California Senate race:
Sen. Barbara Boxer has fired a shot across the bow of Carly Fiorina - in the hopes that her Republican rival's ownership of a pair of yachts might sink her with voters.
Boxer has taken to comparing her years of "public service" to Fiorina's choice "to become a CEO, lay off 30,000 workers, ship jobs overseas (and) have two yachts."
Fiorina's 70-foot Alchemy V, a 2001 Dyna Craft valued for tax purposes at just over $1 million, is moored in Sausalito.
Her 56-foot Sea Ray yacht, the 3-year-old Alchemy VI, is docked on the Potomac in Washington, D.C. - not far from the Georgetown condo that Fiorina and her husband own.
I don't know about you but if I'd known years ago that damaging Hewlett-Packard's brand was that lucrative, I would have made a whole different series of life choices.
But 2010's season of yacht-see hasn't just stung candidates for office. Massachusetts Senator John Kerry came under fire after it was revealed that by berthing his family's $7 million yacht in Rhode Island, instead of his home state of Massachusetts, he was sparing himself the indignity of having to pay $500,000 in taxes. The report managed to cast Kerry in a bad light, and likely had the unintended consequence of alerting hundreds of yacht owners to the fact that Rhode Island known as "a nautical tax haven."
Anyway, these are among the people whom America is counting on to solve the unemployment crisis and mitigate widespread structural income inequities, so good luck with that.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Kiss this war goodbye
Kiss This War Goodbye
By FRANK RICH
Published: July 31, 2010
IT was on a Sunday morning, June 13, 1971, that The Times published its first installment of the Pentagon Papers. Few readers may have been more excited than a circle of aspiring undergraduate journalists who’d worked at The Harvard Crimson. Though the identity of The Times’s source wouldn’t eke out for several days, we knew the whistle-blower had to be Daniel Ellsberg, an intense research fellow at M.I.T. and former Robert McNamara acolyte who’d become an antiwar activist around Boston. We recognized the papers’ contents, as reported in The Times, because we’d heard the war stories from the loquacious Ellsberg himself.
But if we were titillated that Sunday, it wasn’t immediately clear that this internal government history of the war had mass appeal. Tricia Nixon’s wedding in the White House Rose Garden on Saturday received equal play with the Pentagon Papers on The Times’s front page. On “Face the Nation” the guest was the secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, yet the subject of the papers didn’t even come up.
That false calm vanished overnight once Richard Nixon, erupting in characteristic rage and paranoia, directed his attorney general, John Mitchell, to enjoin The Times from publishing any sequels. The high-stakes legal drama riveted the nation for two weeks, culminating in a landmark 6-to-3 Supreme Court decision in favor of The Times and the First Amendment. Ellsberg and The Times were canonized. I sold my first magazine article, an Ellsberg profile, to Esquire, and, for better or worse, cast my lot with journalism. That my various phone conversations with Ellsberg prompted ham-fisted F.B.I. agents to visit me and my parents only added to the allure.
I mention my personal history to try to inject a little reality into the garbling of Vietnam-era history that has accompanied the WikiLeaks release of the Afghanistan war logs. Last week the left and right reached a rare consensus. The war logs are no Pentagon Papers. They are historic documents describing events largely predating the current administration. They contain no news. They will not change the course of the war.
About the only prominent figures who found serious parallels between then and now were Ellsberg and the WikiLeaks impresario, Julian Assange. They are hardly disinterested observers, but they’re on the mark — in large part because the impact of the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War (as opposed to their impact on the press) was far less momentous than last week’s chatter would suggest. No, the logs won’t change the course of our very long war in Afghanistan, but neither did the Pentagon Papers alter the course of Vietnam. What Ellsberg’s leak did do was ratify the downward trend-line of the war’s narrative. The WikiLeaks legacy may echo that. We may look back at the war logs as a herald of the end of America’s engagement in Afghanistan just as the Pentagon Papers are now a milestone in our slo-mo exit from Vietnam.
What was often forgotten last week is that the Pentagon Papers had no game-changing news about that war either and also described events predating the then-current president. By June 1971, the Tet offensive and Walter Cronkite’s famous on-air editorial were more than three years in the past. The David Halberstam article that inspired “The Best and the Brightest” had already appeared in Harper’s. Lt. William Calley had been found guilty in the My Lai massacre exposed by Seymour Hersh in 1969. Just weeks before the Pentagon Papers surfaced, the Vietnam veteran John Kerry electrified the country by asking a Senate committee, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” Most Americans had long been telling pollsters the war was a mistake. By the time the Pentagon Papers surfaced, a plurality also disapproved of how Vietnam was handled by Nixon, who had arrived in office promising to end the war.
The papers’ punch was in the many inside details they added to the war’s chronicle over four previous administrations and, especially, in their shocking and irrefutable evidence that Nixon’s immediate predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, had systematically lied to the country about his intentions and the war’s progress. Though Nixon was another liar, none of this incriminated him. His anger about the leak would nonetheless drive him to create a clandestine “plumbers” unit whose criminality (including a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist) would lead to Watergate. Had Nixon not so violently overreacted that June — egged on by Henry Kissinger and fueled by his loathing of The Times and the antiwar movement — the story might have ebbed. Yes, the Pentagon Papers were labeled “top secret” — as opposed to the Afghanistan war logs’ “secret” status — but, as Richard Reeves writes in his book “President Nixon,” some 700,000 people in and out of government had clearance to read “top secret” documents. Compelling as the papers were, they were hardly nuclear code.
The public’s reaction to the Afghanistan war logs has largely been a shrug — and not just because they shared their Times front page with an article about Chelsea Clinton’s wedding. President Obama is, to put it mildly, no Nixon, and his no-drama reaction to the leaks robbed their publication of the constitutional cliffhanger of their historical antecedent. Another factor in the logs’ shortfall as public spectacle is the fractionalization of the news media, to the point where even a stunt packaged as “news” can trump journalistic enterprise. (Witness how the bogus Shirley Sherrod video upstaged The Washington Post’s blockbuster investigation of the American intelligence bureaucracy two weeks ago.) The logs also suffer stylistically: they’re often impenetrable dispatches from the ground, in contrast to the Pentagon Papers’ anonymously and lucidly team-written epic of policy-making on high.
Yet the national yawn that largely greeted the war logs is most of all an indicator of the country’s verdict on the Afghan war itself, now that it’s nine years on and has reached its highest monthly casualty rate for American troops. Many Americans at home have lost faith and checked out. The war places way down the list of pressing issues in every poll. Nearly two-thirds of those asked recently by CBS News think it’s going badly; the latest Post-ABC News survey finds support of Obama’s handling of Afghanistan at a low (45 percent), with only 43 percent deeming the war worth fighting.
Perhaps more telling than either these polls or the defection of liberal House Democrats from last week’s war appropriations bill are the signs of wobbling conservative support. The gung-ho neocon axis was predictably belligerent in denouncing WikiLeaks. But the G.O.P. chairman Michael Steele’s recent “gaffe” — his since-retracted observation that “a land war in Afghanistan” is doomed — is no anomaly in a fractured party where the antiwar Ron Paul may have as much currency as the knee-jerk hawk John McCain. On the night of the logs’ release, Fox News even refrained from its patented shtick of shouting “Treason!” at the “mainstream media.” Instead, the go-to Times-basher Bernie Goldberg could be found on “The O’Reilly Factor” telling Laura Ingraham, a guest host, that the war “has not been going well” and is a dubious exercise in “nation-building.”
Obama was right to say that the leaked documents “don’t reveal any issues that haven’t already informed our public debate in Afghanistan,” but that doesn’t mean the debate was resolved in favor of his policy. Americans know that our counterinsurgency partner, Hamid Karzai, is untrustworthy. They know that the terrorists out to attack us are more likely to be found in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia than Afghanistan. And they are starting to focus on the morbid reality, highlighted in the logs, of the de facto money-laundering scheme that siphons American taxpayers’ money through the Pakistan government to the Taliban, who then disperse it to kill Americans.
Most Americans knew or guessed the crux of the Pentagon Papers, too. A full year earlier the Senate had repealed the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution; no one needed a “top secret” smoking gun by 1971 to know that L.B.J. had lied about the Tonkin incident. The papers didn’t change administration war policy because we were already pulling out of Vietnam, however truculently and lethally (the Christmas 1972 bombing campaign, most notoriously). In 1971, the American troop level was some 213,000, down from a peak of 537,000 in 1968. By 1973 we were essentially done.
Unlike Nixon, Obama is still adding troops to his unpopular war. But history is not on his side either in Afghanistan or at home. The latest Gallup poll found that 58 percent of the country favors his announced timeline, with its promise to start withdrawing troops in mid-2011. It’s hard to imagine what could change that equation now.
Certainly not Pakistan. As the president conducts his scheduled reappraisal of his war policy this December, a re-examination of 1971 might lead him to question his own certitude of what he is fond of calling “the long view.” The Times won a Pulitzer Prize for its 1971 Pentagon Papers coup. But another of the Pulitzers that year went to the columnist Jack Anderson, who also earned Nixon’s ire by mining other leaks to expose the White House’s tilt to Pakistan in the Indo-Pakistani War. The one thing no one imagined back then was that four decades later it would be South Asia, not Southeast Asia, that would still be beckoning America into a quagmire.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on August 1, 2010, on page
By FRANK RICH
Published: July 31, 2010
IT was on a Sunday morning, June 13, 1971, that The Times published its first installment of the Pentagon Papers. Few readers may have been more excited than a circle of aspiring undergraduate journalists who’d worked at The Harvard Crimson. Though the identity of The Times’s source wouldn’t eke out for several days, we knew the whistle-blower had to be Daniel Ellsberg, an intense research fellow at M.I.T. and former Robert McNamara acolyte who’d become an antiwar activist around Boston. We recognized the papers’ contents, as reported in The Times, because we’d heard the war stories from the loquacious Ellsberg himself.
But if we were titillated that Sunday, it wasn’t immediately clear that this internal government history of the war had mass appeal. Tricia Nixon’s wedding in the White House Rose Garden on Saturday received equal play with the Pentagon Papers on The Times’s front page. On “Face the Nation” the guest was the secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, yet the subject of the papers didn’t even come up.
That false calm vanished overnight once Richard Nixon, erupting in characteristic rage and paranoia, directed his attorney general, John Mitchell, to enjoin The Times from publishing any sequels. The high-stakes legal drama riveted the nation for two weeks, culminating in a landmark 6-to-3 Supreme Court decision in favor of The Times and the First Amendment. Ellsberg and The Times were canonized. I sold my first magazine article, an Ellsberg profile, to Esquire, and, for better or worse, cast my lot with journalism. That my various phone conversations with Ellsberg prompted ham-fisted F.B.I. agents to visit me and my parents only added to the allure.
I mention my personal history to try to inject a little reality into the garbling of Vietnam-era history that has accompanied the WikiLeaks release of the Afghanistan war logs. Last week the left and right reached a rare consensus. The war logs are no Pentagon Papers. They are historic documents describing events largely predating the current administration. They contain no news. They will not change the course of the war.
About the only prominent figures who found serious parallels between then and now were Ellsberg and the WikiLeaks impresario, Julian Assange. They are hardly disinterested observers, but they’re on the mark — in large part because the impact of the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War (as opposed to their impact on the press) was far less momentous than last week’s chatter would suggest. No, the logs won’t change the course of our very long war in Afghanistan, but neither did the Pentagon Papers alter the course of Vietnam. What Ellsberg’s leak did do was ratify the downward trend-line of the war’s narrative. The WikiLeaks legacy may echo that. We may look back at the war logs as a herald of the end of America’s engagement in Afghanistan just as the Pentagon Papers are now a milestone in our slo-mo exit from Vietnam.
What was often forgotten last week is that the Pentagon Papers had no game-changing news about that war either and also described events predating the then-current president. By June 1971, the Tet offensive and Walter Cronkite’s famous on-air editorial were more than three years in the past. The David Halberstam article that inspired “The Best and the Brightest” had already appeared in Harper’s. Lt. William Calley had been found guilty in the My Lai massacre exposed by Seymour Hersh in 1969. Just weeks before the Pentagon Papers surfaced, the Vietnam veteran John Kerry electrified the country by asking a Senate committee, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” Most Americans had long been telling pollsters the war was a mistake. By the time the Pentagon Papers surfaced, a plurality also disapproved of how Vietnam was handled by Nixon, who had arrived in office promising to end the war.
The papers’ punch was in the many inside details they added to the war’s chronicle over four previous administrations and, especially, in their shocking and irrefutable evidence that Nixon’s immediate predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, had systematically lied to the country about his intentions and the war’s progress. Though Nixon was another liar, none of this incriminated him. His anger about the leak would nonetheless drive him to create a clandestine “plumbers” unit whose criminality (including a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist) would lead to Watergate. Had Nixon not so violently overreacted that June — egged on by Henry Kissinger and fueled by his loathing of The Times and the antiwar movement — the story might have ebbed. Yes, the Pentagon Papers were labeled “top secret” — as opposed to the Afghanistan war logs’ “secret” status — but, as Richard Reeves writes in his book “President Nixon,” some 700,000 people in and out of government had clearance to read “top secret” documents. Compelling as the papers were, they were hardly nuclear code.
The public’s reaction to the Afghanistan war logs has largely been a shrug — and not just because they shared their Times front page with an article about Chelsea Clinton’s wedding. President Obama is, to put it mildly, no Nixon, and his no-drama reaction to the leaks robbed their publication of the constitutional cliffhanger of their historical antecedent. Another factor in the logs’ shortfall as public spectacle is the fractionalization of the news media, to the point where even a stunt packaged as “news” can trump journalistic enterprise. (Witness how the bogus Shirley Sherrod video upstaged The Washington Post’s blockbuster investigation of the American intelligence bureaucracy two weeks ago.) The logs also suffer stylistically: they’re often impenetrable dispatches from the ground, in contrast to the Pentagon Papers’ anonymously and lucidly team-written epic of policy-making on high.
Yet the national yawn that largely greeted the war logs is most of all an indicator of the country’s verdict on the Afghan war itself, now that it’s nine years on and has reached its highest monthly casualty rate for American troops. Many Americans at home have lost faith and checked out. The war places way down the list of pressing issues in every poll. Nearly two-thirds of those asked recently by CBS News think it’s going badly; the latest Post-ABC News survey finds support of Obama’s handling of Afghanistan at a low (45 percent), with only 43 percent deeming the war worth fighting.
Perhaps more telling than either these polls or the defection of liberal House Democrats from last week’s war appropriations bill are the signs of wobbling conservative support. The gung-ho neocon axis was predictably belligerent in denouncing WikiLeaks. But the G.O.P. chairman Michael Steele’s recent “gaffe” — his since-retracted observation that “a land war in Afghanistan” is doomed — is no anomaly in a fractured party where the antiwar Ron Paul may have as much currency as the knee-jerk hawk John McCain. On the night of the logs’ release, Fox News even refrained from its patented shtick of shouting “Treason!” at the “mainstream media.” Instead, the go-to Times-basher Bernie Goldberg could be found on “The O’Reilly Factor” telling Laura Ingraham, a guest host, that the war “has not been going well” and is a dubious exercise in “nation-building.”
Obama was right to say that the leaked documents “don’t reveal any issues that haven’t already informed our public debate in Afghanistan,” but that doesn’t mean the debate was resolved in favor of his policy. Americans know that our counterinsurgency partner, Hamid Karzai, is untrustworthy. They know that the terrorists out to attack us are more likely to be found in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia than Afghanistan. And they are starting to focus on the morbid reality, highlighted in the logs, of the de facto money-laundering scheme that siphons American taxpayers’ money through the Pakistan government to the Taliban, who then disperse it to kill Americans.
Most Americans knew or guessed the crux of the Pentagon Papers, too. A full year earlier the Senate had repealed the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution; no one needed a “top secret” smoking gun by 1971 to know that L.B.J. had lied about the Tonkin incident. The papers didn’t change administration war policy because we were already pulling out of Vietnam, however truculently and lethally (the Christmas 1972 bombing campaign, most notoriously). In 1971, the American troop level was some 213,000, down from a peak of 537,000 in 1968. By 1973 we were essentially done.
Unlike Nixon, Obama is still adding troops to his unpopular war. But history is not on his side either in Afghanistan or at home. The latest Gallup poll found that 58 percent of the country favors his announced timeline, with its promise to start withdrawing troops in mid-2011. It’s hard to imagine what could change that equation now.
Certainly not Pakistan. As the president conducts his scheduled reappraisal of his war policy this December, a re-examination of 1971 might lead him to question his own certitude of what he is fond of calling “the long view.” The Times won a Pulitzer Prize for its 1971 Pentagon Papers coup. But another of the Pulitzers that year went to the columnist Jack Anderson, who also earned Nixon’s ire by mining other leaks to expose the White House’s tilt to Pakistan in the Indo-Pakistani War. The one thing no one imagined back then was that four decades later it would be South Asia, not Southeast Asia, that would still be beckoning America into a quagmire.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on August 1, 2010, on page
Sunday, July 25, 2010
dont criticize us Jews, or you must hate our religion,
Don’t Boycott Israel
The very idea is repellent.
Jack Guez / AFP-Getty Images
If you follow the news closely enough, you might have caught a small item recently noting that Meg Ryan had canceled a scheduled appearance at a film festival in Jerusalem to protest Israeli policy. This was significant not because anyone should care what the nose-crinkling movie star thinks about the Mideast but precisely because no one does. Ryan, a conventional Hollywood Democrat, is a barometer of celebrity politics. Her sort of sheeplike, liberal opinion once reflexively favored Israel. Now it’s dabbling in the repellent idea of shunning the entire country.
Support for the Israeli cultural boycott has been growing in surprising places lately. After the Gaza flotilla incident in June, rock bands including the Pixies canceled performances at a music festival in Tel Aviv. Elvis Costello announced in May that he was canceling two upcoming performances to protest the treatment of Palestinians. Unlike Ryan, Costello is a thoughtful person whose views are worthy of respect. So why, exactly, do I think he’s wrong, too? Why is a private embargo—which includes an academic boycott and the push for divestment on the anti-apartheid model—an unacceptable way for outsiders to protest Israeli treatment of Palestinians?
One argument is that academic boycotts are intrinsically unacceptable because they violate the principles of free expression and the universality of science and learning. A parallel objection applies to cultural boycotts, which directly target the most forward-thinking members of a society. In the case of Israel, shunning writers like Amos Oz and David Grossman, who serve as national consciences, seems not only intrinsically vile but actively counterproductive. On the other hand, it would be hard to justify a blanket rule that cultural and academic sectors are always off-limits. In authoritarian societies, cultural institutions do tend to become ideological proxies—think of the National Ballet in Cuba, or the East German gymnastics team.
An even weaker case against the cultural boycott is that it’s unlikely to work. While it’s certainly true that cultural sanctions on their own are more inconvenience than lethal weapon, they can have a real impact. In South Africa, cultural and, in particular, sports sanctions—banning the country from the Olympics and from international cricket and rugby competitions—were an effective form of pressure. When it comes to Israel, it’s hard to predict what effect cultural and academic isolation might have. Some Israelis take international rejection as an affirmation, concluding that amid a sea of hostility their only recourse is self-sufficiency. On the other hand, opponents of the Netanyahu government cite global opprobrium as an argument for a different political course.
Perhaps boycotts should be off-limits as a tactic against democratic societies, where other means of peaceful protest exist. But here, too, it’s hard to come up with a blanket rule. The immediate resort to sanctions when an elected government—say, Arizona’s—does something objectionable seems extreme and disproportionate. Yet an elected democracy like the Milosevic regime in Serbia can oppress ethnic minorities or commit genocide as well as an unelected one. And, indeed, one could argue that only in a democracy are the people truly responsible for the actions of their government.
The stronger case against a cultural boycott of Israel is based on consistency, proportionality, and history. That supporters of this boycott seldom focus on China or Syria or Zimbabwe—or other genuinely illegitimate regimes that systematically violate human rights—underscores their bad faith. Boycotters are not trying to send the specific message, “We object to your settlement policy in the West Bank.” What they’re saying is, “We consider your country so intrinsically reprehensible that we are going to treat all of your citizens as pariahs.” Like the older Arab economic boycott of Israel, which dates back to the 1940s, the cultural boycott is a weapon designed not to bring peace but to undermine the country.
Because Israel is a refuge for Jews persecuted everywhere else, this kind of existential challenge is hard to disassociate from anti-Semitism—even if Ryan and Costello intend nothing of the kind. When people are trying to murder you because of your religion, it is difficult to credit the bona fides of those who merely want to shun you because of your government.
Facebook Tweet Digg print email comments Your Email
Their Email
Cancel Email Sent Unable to Send Email Invalid Email Address Next: Afghanistan Wants to See the Money »
More on Newsweek
The New 'Mad Men' Likes It Rough 10 Ways Facebook Can Ruin Your Life $13/Month Car Insurance?
Insurance deal just passed now allows you to get car insurance for $13
CarInsuranceFinder.orgThree-bureau credit monitoring
Monitor your credit and get 3 credit scores Free!
Equifax.comHillsboro: Mom turns $97 into $6,012
Sounds Impossible? That’s what we thought until we heard her…
news10reports.com
Use my avatar from...
No avatar
My computer
My Facebook Profile
My Google Profile
My Twitter Account
My FriendFeed Account
My Yahoo! Account
Gravatar email
Login
Login with:
My Facebook Profile
My Google Profile
My Twitter Account
My FriendFeed Account
My Yahoo! Account
My Blogger Account
My JS-Kit Account
My Haloscan Account
My OpenID
Login required, click here to begin
Share
Share with:
This Page
My Facebook Friends
My Google Friends
My Twitter Followers
My FriendFeed Followers
My Yahoo! Friends
This Page
Follow
Leave a comment@Controls
Comments 451 ItemsAdmin
Log In
Follow
Moderation
General Settings
Admin Notices
– Ira
Is Jacob Weisberg the voice of Newsweek? We know Jacob Weisberg is a pro-Israel reporter and has always been. We never heard him defending Palestinian people against Israel's oppression. Where is he when innocent Palestinians are killed by Israel army? If Newsweek stands by his reporter then I don't have other choice than canceling my Newsweek Subscription.
Today, 11:24:38 PM– Flag – Like – Reply – Delete – Edit – Moderate kittycat
I see Newsweek/Weisberg still have not corrected their flawed story. Oh well, I'll just repeat what I said before untill they do rectify.
FYI Newsweek people: Meg Ryan never accepted an invitation to attend the Jerusalem Film Festival. So claiming she cancelled her appearance is nonsense. It seems mr Weisberg never bothered to fact-check his story.
Fortunatly, his collegue from the Jewish Journal DID check the story and guess what: it was false. You can read about it here: http://www.jewishjournal.com/rob_eshman/article/agent_questions_20100720/
Turns out some 'official' working for the film festival made false claims about both Meg Ryan and Dustin Hoffman.
So what boycot, mister Weisberg? Why the uncalled for and childish name-calling? Do you have a problem with women in general?
Today, 10:13:58 PM– Flag – Like – Reply – Delete – Edit – Moderate ex mea sententia
"Because Israel is a refuge for Jews persecuted everywhere else, this kind of existential challenge is hard to disassociate from anti-Semitism—even if Ryan and Costello intend nothing of the kind. When people are trying to murder you because of your religion, it is difficult to credit the bona fides of those who merely want to shun you because of your government."
Nice use of the Al Sharpton defense. I guess Israel is free to do what it pleases because if I dare criticize its actions, I might risk appearing as an anti-Semitic Jew hater. Mr. Weisberg you're a smart man and you know better. I suggest (although you probably are not reading this and I am wasting my time) that next time you do not rely on such a crutch. As you would say, "the very idea is repellent."
The argument that because these people don't boycott China, Zimbabwe, or Syria, they should not boycott Israel is interesting. It is often proudly proclaimed that Israel is the only democracy and free and open society in the middle east. Yet it is to be held to the same low standard as China, a communist country, Zimbabwe, or Syria?
As Peter Beinart would say, you check your liberal ideology at Zionism's door.
Today, 10:10:07 PM– Flag – Like – Reply – Delete – Edit – Moderate Paul
The idea that the majority cannot oppress a minority just because the government is democratic is frankly stupid. Were a democratic nation today to allow slavery, any sort of boycott, political pressure, or other non-violent means of underscoring our disapproval would be absolutely justified.
Argue such ideas on the merits of the need for change. It is stupid to claim that the idea of a boycott is a bad idea solely because a nation is democratic.
Today, 9:33:52 PM– Flag – Like – Reply – Delete – Edit – Moderate Jim
When will we Americans realize the heavy price we paid for our support of Israel? Al Qaida attacked us on 9/11 primarily because of our support of Israel. You don't have to take my word. Just listed to the many tapes released by Bin Laden himself. After 9/11, jewish journalists like Jeff Goldberg, Charles Krauthammer, Safire, Bill Kristol, and other jews engaged in a non-stop propaganda that the Arabs hate us because of our freedom. These Jewish journalists conspired with Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Wolfowitz and other members of the Jewish Lobby to force America to go to war against Iraq, a country which posed no threat to America. The jews were pushing for the Iraq war for the sole benefit of Israel, which resulted in the death of more than 4000 troops. Now the same gang is pushing us to attack Iran, again for the sole benefit of Israel. When are we Americans going to stand up and say NO!
Today, 9:23:08 PM– Flag – Like – Reply – Delete – Edit – Moderate
More
The very idea is repellent.
Jack Guez / AFP-Getty Images
If you follow the news closely enough, you might have caught a small item recently noting that Meg Ryan had canceled a scheduled appearance at a film festival in Jerusalem to protest Israeli policy. This was significant not because anyone should care what the nose-crinkling movie star thinks about the Mideast but precisely because no one does. Ryan, a conventional Hollywood Democrat, is a barometer of celebrity politics. Her sort of sheeplike, liberal opinion once reflexively favored Israel. Now it’s dabbling in the repellent idea of shunning the entire country.
Support for the Israeli cultural boycott has been growing in surprising places lately. After the Gaza flotilla incident in June, rock bands including the Pixies canceled performances at a music festival in Tel Aviv. Elvis Costello announced in May that he was canceling two upcoming performances to protest the treatment of Palestinians. Unlike Ryan, Costello is a thoughtful person whose views are worthy of respect. So why, exactly, do I think he’s wrong, too? Why is a private embargo—which includes an academic boycott and the push for divestment on the anti-apartheid model—an unacceptable way for outsiders to protest Israeli treatment of Palestinians?
One argument is that academic boycotts are intrinsically unacceptable because they violate the principles of free expression and the universality of science and learning. A parallel objection applies to cultural boycotts, which directly target the most forward-thinking members of a society. In the case of Israel, shunning writers like Amos Oz and David Grossman, who serve as national consciences, seems not only intrinsically vile but actively counterproductive. On the other hand, it would be hard to justify a blanket rule that cultural and academic sectors are always off-limits. In authoritarian societies, cultural institutions do tend to become ideological proxies—think of the National Ballet in Cuba, or the East German gymnastics team.
An even weaker case against the cultural boycott is that it’s unlikely to work. While it’s certainly true that cultural sanctions on their own are more inconvenience than lethal weapon, they can have a real impact. In South Africa, cultural and, in particular, sports sanctions—banning the country from the Olympics and from international cricket and rugby competitions—were an effective form of pressure. When it comes to Israel, it’s hard to predict what effect cultural and academic isolation might have. Some Israelis take international rejection as an affirmation, concluding that amid a sea of hostility their only recourse is self-sufficiency. On the other hand, opponents of the Netanyahu government cite global opprobrium as an argument for a different political course.
Perhaps boycotts should be off-limits as a tactic against democratic societies, where other means of peaceful protest exist. But here, too, it’s hard to come up with a blanket rule. The immediate resort to sanctions when an elected government—say, Arizona’s—does something objectionable seems extreme and disproportionate. Yet an elected democracy like the Milosevic regime in Serbia can oppress ethnic minorities or commit genocide as well as an unelected one. And, indeed, one could argue that only in a democracy are the people truly responsible for the actions of their government.
The stronger case against a cultural boycott of Israel is based on consistency, proportionality, and history. That supporters of this boycott seldom focus on China or Syria or Zimbabwe—or other genuinely illegitimate regimes that systematically violate human rights—underscores their bad faith. Boycotters are not trying to send the specific message, “We object to your settlement policy in the West Bank.” What they’re saying is, “We consider your country so intrinsically reprehensible that we are going to treat all of your citizens as pariahs.” Like the older Arab economic boycott of Israel, which dates back to the 1940s, the cultural boycott is a weapon designed not to bring peace but to undermine the country.
Because Israel is a refuge for Jews persecuted everywhere else, this kind of existential challenge is hard to disassociate from anti-Semitism—even if Ryan and Costello intend nothing of the kind. When people are trying to murder you because of your religion, it is difficult to credit the bona fides of those who merely want to shun you because of your government.
Facebook Tweet Digg print email comments Your Email
Their Email
Cancel Email Sent Unable to Send Email Invalid Email Address Next: Afghanistan Wants to See the Money »
More on Newsweek
The New 'Mad Men' Likes It Rough 10 Ways Facebook Can Ruin Your Life $13/Month Car Insurance?
Insurance deal just passed now allows you to get car insurance for $13
CarInsuranceFinder.orgThree-bureau credit monitoring
Monitor your credit and get 3 credit scores Free!
Equifax.comHillsboro: Mom turns $97 into $6,012
Sounds Impossible? That’s what we thought until we heard her…
news10reports.com
Use my avatar from...
No avatar
My computer
My Facebook Profile
My Google Profile
My Twitter Account
My FriendFeed Account
My Yahoo! Account
Gravatar email
Login
Login with:
My Facebook Profile
My Google Profile
My Twitter Account
My FriendFeed Account
My Yahoo! Account
My Blogger Account
My JS-Kit Account
My Haloscan Account
My OpenID
Login required, click here to begin
Share
Share with:
This Page
My Facebook Friends
My Google Friends
My Twitter Followers
My FriendFeed Followers
My Yahoo! Friends
This Page
Follow
Leave a comment@Controls
Comments 451 ItemsAdmin
Log In
Follow
Moderation
General Settings
Admin Notices
– Ira
Is Jacob Weisberg the voice of Newsweek? We know Jacob Weisberg is a pro-Israel reporter and has always been. We never heard him defending Palestinian people against Israel's oppression. Where is he when innocent Palestinians are killed by Israel army? If Newsweek stands by his reporter then I don't have other choice than canceling my Newsweek Subscription.
Today, 11:24:38 PM– Flag – Like – Reply – Delete – Edit – Moderate kittycat
I see Newsweek/Weisberg still have not corrected their flawed story. Oh well, I'll just repeat what I said before untill they do rectify.
FYI Newsweek people: Meg Ryan never accepted an invitation to attend the Jerusalem Film Festival. So claiming she cancelled her appearance is nonsense. It seems mr Weisberg never bothered to fact-check his story.
Fortunatly, his collegue from the Jewish Journal DID check the story and guess what: it was false. You can read about it here: http://www.jewishjournal.com/rob_eshman/article/agent_questions_20100720/
Turns out some 'official' working for the film festival made false claims about both Meg Ryan and Dustin Hoffman.
So what boycot, mister Weisberg? Why the uncalled for and childish name-calling? Do you have a problem with women in general?
Today, 10:13:58 PM– Flag – Like – Reply – Delete – Edit – Moderate ex mea sententia
"Because Israel is a refuge for Jews persecuted everywhere else, this kind of existential challenge is hard to disassociate from anti-Semitism—even if Ryan and Costello intend nothing of the kind. When people are trying to murder you because of your religion, it is difficult to credit the bona fides of those who merely want to shun you because of your government."
Nice use of the Al Sharpton defense. I guess Israel is free to do what it pleases because if I dare criticize its actions, I might risk appearing as an anti-Semitic Jew hater. Mr. Weisberg you're a smart man and you know better. I suggest (although you probably are not reading this and I am wasting my time) that next time you do not rely on such a crutch. As you would say, "the very idea is repellent."
The argument that because these people don't boycott China, Zimbabwe, or Syria, they should not boycott Israel is interesting. It is often proudly proclaimed that Israel is the only democracy and free and open society in the middle east. Yet it is to be held to the same low standard as China, a communist country, Zimbabwe, or Syria?
As Peter Beinart would say, you check your liberal ideology at Zionism's door.
Today, 10:10:07 PM– Flag – Like – Reply – Delete – Edit – Moderate Paul
The idea that the majority cannot oppress a minority just because the government is democratic is frankly stupid. Were a democratic nation today to allow slavery, any sort of boycott, political pressure, or other non-violent means of underscoring our disapproval would be absolutely justified.
Argue such ideas on the merits of the need for change. It is stupid to claim that the idea of a boycott is a bad idea solely because a nation is democratic.
Today, 9:33:52 PM– Flag – Like – Reply – Delete – Edit – Moderate Jim
When will we Americans realize the heavy price we paid for our support of Israel? Al Qaida attacked us on 9/11 primarily because of our support of Israel. You don't have to take my word. Just listed to the many tapes released by Bin Laden himself. After 9/11, jewish journalists like Jeff Goldberg, Charles Krauthammer, Safire, Bill Kristol, and other jews engaged in a non-stop propaganda that the Arabs hate us because of our freedom. These Jewish journalists conspired with Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Wolfowitz and other members of the Jewish Lobby to force America to go to war against Iraq, a country which posed no threat to America. The jews were pushing for the Iraq war for the sole benefit of Israel, which resulted in the death of more than 4000 troops. Now the same gang is pushing us to attack Iran, again for the sole benefit of Israel. When are we Americans going to stand up and say NO!
Today, 9:23:08 PM– Flag – Like – Reply – Delete – Edit – Moderate
More
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
