Category Archives: Feedback

The slowdown: What are YOU seeing?

Peggy Noonan had an intriguing column Saturday, about what she was seeing in Manhattan in terms of real, street-level effects of the recession. Here's an excerpt:

    This is New York five months into hard times.
    One senses it, for the first time: a shift in energy. Something new has taken hold, a new air of peace, perhaps, or tentativeness. The old hustle and bustle, the wild and daily assertion of dynamism, is calmed.
    And now Washington becomes the financial capital of the country, of the world. Oh, what a status shift. Oh, what a fact.

Here's what struck me about that: She implies that — because of the stimulus, the TARP, etc. (I guess) – the hustle-and-bustle that's missing from the not-so-mean streets near Central Park has somehow been transferred to Washington.

And yet, weirdly enough, I had been talking to someone else last week who had made a similar observation about a loss of activity in Washington. It was USC President Harris Pastides. When he came to see us with Mayor Bob and the gang last Monday, he had just stepped off the plane coming back from D.C., and his impression was that it felt dead, deserted. Of course, he acknowledged that the contrast was particularly sharp because he had last been there for the Obama inauguration just weeks earlier, but he seemed to be suggesting that he was seeing was a loss of activity from the norm, not just from the inaugural excitement.

(I heard that with particular interest because one thing that had always struck me when I visited D.C. — and mind you, I haven't been there in years and years — was something that my libertarian friends can identify with. I thought, crowded onto a metro platform with well-dressed commuters, or walking past swanky shops, "There's too much money in this town." Of course, part of that is the sheer size of the gummint, a good bit of which should be devolved. But part of it is the amount that the private sector freely spends on lobbying. I have no idea how to separate it out. But I know that in my limited experience, the lobbyists are snappier dressers.)

I haven't been to New York in almost a year, and I last went to D.C. in 1998 (yes, more than a decade). I don't know what impression I'd have if I visited either today (although I'm pretty sure NYC won't be as busy as when I made this video). Come to think of it, I don't know what impression I have of right here in the Midlands. For instance:

About three weeks ago, I went to the Lowe's out on Garners Ferry for the first time since before Christmas. It was late on a Sunday afternoon. And I was shocked, because when I walked in, there were about a dozen or more of those carts you use to stack your lumber on — the kind that when it's busy, you've got to hunt around for — lined up in a neat row in the lumber aisle before me. So there were at least that many carts free, and an employee had had time to gather them and make that neat row. Then after I left and got to thinking about it, I thought I had seen about as many employees as customers.

I've mentioned that several times since then, and sometimes people nod their heads and sometimes they dispute it. For instance, Cindi said she's been to Lowe's (including that particular store) maybe six times in the last few weeks, and it's always been busy.

Then when she said that, I suddenly remembered that I went out to Harbison Saturday, and the traffic was the worst I'd seen in several years. I thought I'd never get there, or get home. And the stores I went into were at LEAST as busy as the norm, if not more so, so I don't think it was just a matter of my having hit the traffic at a bad time.

From where I sit, there's plenty of evidence of our economy tanking in the aggregate, from the state unemployment figures to the horrific effect that reduction in advertising has on newspapers and TV. We can quantify the cuts that have occurred already and are coming in state government, or local school districts. And I know of quite a few specific cases of people close to me — personally and professionally — who have lost their jobs or are facing the high probability of such losses.

But then we still see the anomalous things, such as all that activity out at Harbison. And not just there. Over the weekend I thought, not for the first time, that the Vista is just TOO successful. Yes, I'm being ironic, but it's frustrating when that district has become so popular that you can't park within a block of Starbuck's.

So I'm wondering — what are YOU seeing out there, as a worker, as a businessperson, as a consumer? What's the true picture of what's happening thus far in the Midlands? Maybe we can get a snapshot — or better yet, a panorama — of that right here on the blog. So how about it? What are you seeing?

Well, if you MUST know…

8 Replies

For this post, I should create several new blog categories, such as "Way more than you wanted to know," and "Extreme disclosure" and … oh, I don't know what.

Anyway, some of you asked yesterday where I was ("Where the heck is Brad?" quoth KP). Some of you divined political import in my absence from the blog for a day. Back in the second take of comments on this post — the 41st comment, I believe (16 after you click on "Next") — I answered the question. I'm not going to repeat the explanation, on the grounds that some of you may be possessed of delicate sensibilities. If you're curious enough, you can go look. And after you do, don't ever accuse me of not being in favor of full disclosure.

Perhaps this would be a good time to remind y'all that:

a) I don't actually get paid an additional dime for blogging; and
b) even if I did, I might occasionally get a weekday off, at the very least for medical purposes.

But hey, I appreciate the concern. And everything was fine, by the way.

Obama’s inaugural speech

111 Replies

This morning, I got a phone message from an acquaintance who thought my column today was great, which struck me as a little surprising since I know the caller to be of libertarian persuasion. Especially since it was about Obama's inauguration, and the WSJ reported this morning that — as I read it — his speech today will be of a communitarian bent (yes! thought I). Yes, I know libertarians claim "responsibility" as a theme as well, but they mean something very different from communitarians when they use the word. With Obama, it's more like:

"Given the crisis that we're in and the hardships that so many people
are going through, we can't allow any idle hands," Mr. Obama said,
taking a break from painting a dormitory at Sasha Bruce House, a
shelter for homeless teens. "Everybody's got to be involved.
Everybody's going to have to pitch in, and I think the American people
are ready for that."

As I said, the communitarian sense of responsibility. And to that I say, amen.

Anyway, the speech itself is beginning now, and I thought y'all might want a place to comment on it. So here you go.

Regarding patience (as a virtue)

1 Reply

Among the things in my electronic IN box this morning was this forwarded message:

—–Original Message—–
From: Tom Fillinger
Sent: Sunday, January 11, 2009 6:10 AM
To: StateEditor, Columbia
Cc: Warthen, Brad – External Email; Scoppe, Cindi; Bolton, Warren
Subject: Sweet Irony

RE Fuming With Impatience

Brad Warthen's editorial, 01/11/09, p. D2 – Fuming With Impatience.

Food For Thought, 01/11/09, p. D3 – "Patience is the companion of wisdom" – – St. Augustine.

The reader may draw their own conclusions.

In Grace,

Tom Fillinger, CEO
IgniteUS, Inc.

… to which I replied as follows:

Thanks. So far my
wife, Robert Ariail and you have all pointed this out to me. So you're in good
company.

Editorial on Gamecock ‘gift’

4 Replies

Earlier this week we had an editorial about the USC athletics department’s recent "contribution" of $15 million to the university. An excerpt:

A ‘gift’ that isn’t
a gift, and shouldn’t
be seen as such
PERHAPS YOU shouldn’t look a gift chicken in the beak, but there was something more than a little off-putting about all the self-congratulation and awe that accompanied the USC athletics department’s recent “contribution” of $15 million to the university to help pay for … academics.
This clearly is a large amount of money that has the potential to do a great deal of good at a school that is struggling under state budget cuts and the larger economic crisis. Just as clearly, such a gift is extraordinary and such a gesture, in the words of one USC trustee, “historic and symbolic.”
But there shouldn’t be anything extraordinary — certainly not “historic” — about university money being used to further the core mission of the university. In fact, it should be expected — the sort of thing that deserves commentary only in its absence. As difficult a concept as this seems to be, money generated by the athletics department, or any other part of a university, belongs to the university….

Any thoughts on that?

I bring it up because when we ran the piece, I had expected to hear a good bit of reaction both pro and con, and things have been fairly quiet. So I thought I'd bring it up here, to see what y'all thought about it.

Please bear with me on these TypePad problems

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This is just to let y'all know that I'm working hard to resolve these problems that some of y'all have identified on the blog (plus some I've discovered myself). I'm just not getting very far.

The problems result from recent changes TypePad has made to the blog platform. Among other things, they have arbitrarily decided that:

There will be no more than 50 comments on a post, which explains why some of y'all had so much trouble back on this one. This, of course, is totally unacceptable, since that's the point at which some threads on this blog are just getting warmed up.
A page, including archive pages, will not display more than 99 posts, even if I adjust my preferences to the highest setting. This leads to such absurdities as that fact that if you call up "January 2008" — a month in which I'm guessing (and since I can't pull up the whole month, all I can do is guess) you only get the month from Jan. 31 back to about Jan. 22. The first three weeks of the month — the height of blogging about the presidential primaries in S.C. — are unavailable.

Anyway, just to show you I'm trying, here are my communication threads with TypePad from the last few days:

On Jan 5, 2009 5:54:36 PM, you (Brad) said:

Two problems have cropped up in the comments on my blog in recent days.

First, the names of the commenters are no longer showing up as e-mail or URL links.

Second, quite a few of my readers are complaining that their
comments simply aren't showing up. As one of my regulars described the
problem, "Same for me. I see the comments count increasing on the 'Wall
St./Main Street' topic but don't see anything after your comment on
12/29."

I said I had no idea what was causing the problems, but I would report them…

On Jan 6, 2009 12:18:55 PM, TypePad Customer Support said:

Hi Brad,

Thanks for the note. Can you provide us with a link to a post where
these things are happening on comments? They may be related to current
issues that we are working on, but it is helpful for us to see the
problem in action.

Please let us know if we may be of further assistance.

Thanks,
Melanie

On Jan 6, 2009 12:31:59 PM, you (Brad) said:

Here's one:
http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/2008/12/when-wall-st-woes-hit-main-st.html#comments

Apparently, according to the counter (and this is supported
anecdotally by my readers telling me their comments haven't posted),
there have been 67 comments on that post. But only 25 show when I call
it up.

On Jan 7, 2009 12:12:23 AM, TypePad Customer Support said:

Hi Brad-

All the comments are not displaying due to the missing tags for
comment pagination. With the new platform, the number of comments set
to display on each page is limited to 50. You can change the number of
comments set to display at Weblogs > Configure > Preferences.

Additionally, the templates for your blog will need to be updated with the new tags for pagination:
http://everything.typepad.com/blog/pagination.html

If necessary, we can update your templates with the new tags for you.

The commenter name will only display as a link in the footer if a
website URL is entered in the comment form if you have the
MTCommentAuthorLink tag set to not show the email address:
<$MTCommentAuthorLink show_email="0"$>

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,
Jen

On Jan 8, 2009 11:31:10 AM, you (Brad) said:

Jen, that would be absolutely wonderful if you could do that for me.

On Jan 8, 2009 11:46:11 AM, you (Brad) said:

One
more thing. I went to Weblogs > Configure > Preferences, and
found a 50-POST limit, but saw nothing where I could set the number of
comments per post allowed.

FYI, I've had more than 300 comments on a post at times. It would be
better to have no limit at all — I don't want to frustrate my readers
— but if there has to be one, it should probably be 400 or 500.
Certainly not 50.

On Jan 8, 2009 7:32:59 PM, TypePad Customer Support said:

Hi Brad-

At Weblogs > Configure > Feedback, you can change the number
of comments set to display on each page. Right now, we have a limit of
50 comments per page to improve page load times. We are looking into an
option for increasing the number of comments allowed, but we don't have
a timeline for when a higher number of comments per page will be
implemented.

All the templates have been updated with the new tags for
pagination. You can change the settings for the index pages at Weblogs
> Configure > Preferences. More information:
http://kb.typepad.com/id/72/

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,
Jen

On Jan 6, 2009 11:32:06 AM, you (Brad) said:

Long
ago, when I first started my blog (May 2005), I found a good workaround
for the fact that TypePad offers no convenient way to do HTML links or
formatting in comments. I did it by composing it as a new post,
switching to the HTML tab, then copying and pasting it with the coding
into the comment box.

It's very important to me to be able to do this, as my comments
frequently are about offering links in answer to readers' questions.

Anyway, one of several chronic problems I've found with this new
TypePad platform is that this no longer works. For instance, I just
tried to post this comment, with the second, third and fourth
paragraphs indented to indicate that they were quoted material. The
indents did not work when I copied the coded text into the comment.
Here is the coded text:

As for Karen's suggestion that it "Mighta also been good if
someone had gone out and determined whether the place was 103,000,"
someone DID, allegedly. That's one of the many outrageous things about
this story:

For a $350 fee, an appraiser hired by Integrity, Michael T. Asher,
valued the house at $132,000. Mr. Asher says although he didn't
personally believe the house was worth that much, he followed standard
procedures and found like-sized homes nearby that had sold in that
price range in 2006.     "I can't
appraise it for the future," Mr. Asher says. "I appraise it for that
day."     T.J. Heagy, a real-estate
agent later hired to sell the property,
says he can find only one comparable house that sold nearby in 2007,
for $63,000.So much for that check on the system…

And you can read the comment, as published, near the bottom of this post:
http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/2009/01/the-subprime-mess-in-microcosm.html#comments

On Jan 7, 2009 12:15:31 AM, TypePad Customer Support said:

Hi Brad-

Only limited HTML is allowed in comments. It's likely you were using blockquote tags, instead of the indent tags, previously.

For instance to indent a quoted section of text, you would use blockquote tags similar to:

<blockquote>For a $350 fee, an appraiser hired by Integrity,
Michael T. Asher, valued the house at $132,000. Mr. Asher says although
he didn't personally believe the house was worth that much, he followed
standard procedures and found like-sized homes nearby that had sold in
that price range in 2006.     "I
can't appraise it for the future," Mr. Asher says. "I appraise it for
that day."     T.J. Heagy, a
real-estate agent later hired to sell the property, says he can find
only one comparable house that sold nearby in 2007, for
$63,000.So much for that check
on the system…</blockquote>

The p style tag is not supported in the comments field.

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,
Jen

On Jan 8, 2009 11:29:53 AM, you (Brad) said:

So
what you're saying is, I'm going to have to start entering my HTML
coding MANUALLY, because my "compose" page won't code the thing right
any more?

I've got to say that this new platform has way more drawbacks than
it is worth. For three and a half years, I had this great workaround: I
could compose a comment in reply to my readers on the compose form, get
it to looking the way I want it on the Rich Text tab, with links and
indents and bullets, then copy the version with the coding from the
HTML tab over into my comment, and that worked fine.

Now you're saying that won't work any more? Do you have any idea how inconvenient this is?

On Jan 8, 2009 7:34:59 PM, TypePad Customer Support said:

Hi Brad-

Thanks for your feedback. The blockquote tool has been removed from
the new editor, but we are looking into adding it back in the future.
In the meantime, the blockquote tags would need to be manually inserted
into your comments.

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,
Jen

On Jan 8, 2009 11:25:40 AM, you (Brad) said:

Well, this is weird. I was trying to find something I wrote on my blog
last January, so I clicked on my "January 2008" link, and all I got was
what I posted on January 31 and January 30.

WHERE are the other 29 days of posts?

On Jan 8, 2009 11:42:06 AM, you (Brad) said:

An addendum:

I think I found the problem, but it is not fixable at my end.

I went to weblogs/configure/preferences and found that archives were
set to display no more than 10 posts at a time, which of course is
ridiculous. I sometimes post 10 times in a day. In January 2008 — the
month of the S.C. presidential primaries — I'm sure I posted more than
200 times, and probably closer to 300. I can't check now to see,
because THE MAXIMUM SETTING ALLOWED IS 50 POSTS.

Which is also ridiculous. You know what 50 posts gives me? It gives
me from Jan. 31 back to Jan. 22. So I call up the month, and 21 days of
the month don't show.

This is unacceptable, as are many other recent changes to TypePad.

On Jan 8, 2009 7:38:16 PM, TypePad Customer Support said:

Hi Brad-

As mentioned previously, the blog had not been updated with the new
tags for pagination. When I updated the Individual Archives Templates
for comment pagination, I also updated the Main Index, DateBased, and
Category archives with the new tags. At the end of the pages, you will
now see a Next links to go to the next page of posts.

You can increase the number of posts set to display on each index
page to 100 posts by updating the MTEntries tag in the Main Index,
DateBased, and Category templates from:

to:

Please note the maximum number of posts allowed on an index page is 100. If you enter lastn="999", only 100 posts will display.

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,
Jen

On Jan 9, 2009 10:37:39 AM, you (Brad) said:

Jen,

I appreciate that you're trying hard to help me with this.
Unfortunately, there seems to be no way of solving my problem without a
policy change on TypePad's part.

And this really needs to change. It makes no sense to have, for
instance, a link on my blog's main page to "January 2008," when the
reader can only see a third or a fourth of the posts from that month
when he or she calls it up. I can't even see it myself, which is
particularly maddening, since the way I blog, I need to refer back to
what I've written in the past A LOT.

So basically I need to know where to go to lobby for this policy
change. A limit of 99 posts on an archive page, or a limit of 50
comments on a post, absolutely does not meet my needs, or my readers'.

So where do I go to express this?

Thanks again for your help thus far.

— Brad Warthen

Alone

14 Replies

Assuming I set it up right, if you send me an e-mail this week, you'll get this:

Welcome to my
special Christmas week AUTOMATED MESSAGE.

First, I am
alone in the office this week, and spending all of my time editing and preparing
for publication material left behind by my vacationing colleagues. This is like
doing the work of five jugglers simultaneously, so please bear with
me.

If you intend
for your message to be considered for publication as a LETTER TO THE EDITOR,
please resend it to [email protected].

If you are
submitting a potential GUEST COLUMN FOR OUR OP-ED PAGE, please resend it
to Cindi Scoppe at [email protected]. This will
NOT be considered until Ms. Scoppe returns on Dec. 29. All local op-ed
columns for this week have already been selected and
edited.

If you wish
to register a comment that is not for publication in the paper, I urge you to
post it on my blog, http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.

Any messages
requiring a response from me, Brad Warthen: I beg for your patience. I am
extremely unlikely to be able to respond this week. If you MUST have a reply
this week (and we're talking emergency here), leave a phone message at (803)
771-8468, and I will get back to you when I'm able.

— Brad
Warthen

The last couple of weeks of the year have always been a high-wire act, even when we had adequate staffing. It's simply the best time for people to TAKE off, and it's when they WANT to take off, so we try to make that happen as much as possible. But these days, even one person being off one day puts us in emergency mode. This is so far beyond that, it defies description.

Which is my way of saying to YOU, don't look for a lot of blogging from ME this week. The only other person in the editorial offices this week is Randle, who handles letters, and as soon as she has prepared enough letters for publication to get me through the week — sometime Tuesday, we hope — she'll be gone, too.

I'm sort of in Chuck Yeager mode — as I climb into the cockpit alone, my last colleague hands me a sawn-off length of broom handle and says, "Just stick 'is in the handle and WANG it down with yer good arm…"

To which I can only say, "Thanks, Buddy…"

‘Hyperbole’ and Iraq

10 Replies

The last couple of days I’ve broken my rule about not responding substantially to e-mails. In the interests of making the best use of my time for the readers’ benefit, I try to steer people to the blog so that everybody can join in on the conversation. Anyway, when I break my rule I try to do this, which is publish the exchange on the blog. This exchange started, of course, with my Sunday column:

From: Pat Mohr
Sent: Sunday, November 30, 2008 4:34 PM
To: Warthen, Brad – External Email
Subject: hyperbole

Well, Mr. Warthen, isn’t your respect for the language, as the SNL church lady would say, "special?" I guess I’m just another bleeding-heart liberal because I did watch in horror as my country approved torture and suspended habeus corpus for prisoners. And I did watch in horror as people died after Katrina because we had incompetent ideologues in the White House who sat and watched that devastation because they wanted to "reduce the size of government to the point that they could drown it in the bathtub." And I’ve watched in horror as we waged a "war" (otherwise known as an occupation) in which thousands and Americans and even more thousands of Iraqis died because we made a mistake about Saddam’s intentions.

Now if those things don’t fill you with horror, you’re not the man I hoped you were.

Sincerely,
Pat Mohr

On Dec 2, 2008, at 1:54 PM, Warthen, Brad – Internal Email wrote:

The NYT editorial in question wasn’t about the issues you mentioned. That was one of the bizarre things about it. It was about things like unauthorized wiretaps, and the operation of Gitmo. Hardly "horror" stuff.

I know lots of people look upon our involvement in Iraq with "horror." I don’t, but I know other people do. The NYT editorial wasn’t about anything like that.

You want to see what I look upon, with horror, read my blog. http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/2008/12/some-things-tha.html

From: Pat Mohr
Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 2:24 PM
To: Warthen, Brad – Internal Email
Subject: Re: hyperbole
Importance: High

Thank you for responding. I understand what you’re saying about the other issues in the NYT editorial, but I do believe that Gitmo is a horror because of the torture that has been sanctioned there (and in other places because of rendition). If this torture was indeed not just the work of some bad apples, and we have some evidence to say that it wasn’t, then it does qualify as a horror. Like many other Americans, i never thought I’d live to see the day that my country sanctioned torture—not for ANY reason!

And I will go look at your blog. One reason is that I’d like to know why you don’t look upon Iraq as a horror. I don’t attribute intent, but I do believe that our government mistakenly believed the boasts of Saddam and ignored/demeaned reports that did not support their preconceptions. Then we refused to wait for the inspectors to go back & look further for WMDs or to go through the UN for assistance, coming up instead with our "coalition of the willing". Meanwhile, Bush and Cheney deliberately conflated 9/11 with Iraq to justify our preemptive invasion. I still see polls that report that something like 40% of evangelicals believe that Iraqis attacked us on 9/11. So I’ll look to see why you don’t believe that the ensuing deaths of thousands was not indeed horrible….

I always read your column because even though I frequently disagree with you, you’re rational and provide reasons for your opinions. This is no small thing in an area of the country infested with ideologues! I’ll always appreciate the work you do!

On Dec 2, 2008, at 3:14 PM, Warthen, Brad – Internal Email wrote:

Thanks for the kind words.

I doubt that I can explain my support for our invasion of Iraq in 2003 to your satisfaction. I can’t explain it to my wife’s satisfaction. I certainly can’t explain it to the satisfaction of people who disagree on my blog.

It has nothing to do with WMD. I realize it did for an awful lot of people, but not for me. So while I saw not finding the WMD (which we all know had been there, because Saddam had used it) as a big setback, it didn’t change anything about why I saw us needing to go in there.

It did have a great deal to do with 9/11, but not in some simplistic way such as you describe, the "hitting back at the people who attacked us" formula. I don’t think in those terms.

Either you look at the situation we had in the world at that time and agree with me, or you don’t. It’s very hard to bridge the gap. I looked at a lot of things, and that’s what it added up to for me. Other people look at the same things and don’t arrive there at all. Part of it is that I am by nature inclined to intervention. I think we were right to intervene in the Balkans, and wrong not to in Rwanda and Darfur. I think we were wrong to leave Somalia in 2003. I believe when you’re the most powerful nation in the world — economically, militarily, just about any other way — you have an obligation to act when people are suffering and being oppressed. Anti-war people think that’s arrogant. I think it’s cold NOT to want to do what we can. And the fact is, if we want to, we can do a great deal.

Here are two of those reasons, which make all the sense in the world to me, but not to antiwar people:
— Until 9/11, the U.S. policy toward the region had been maintaining the status quo. What that had meant was backing current regimes, however horrible — or at least leaving them alone — so as to keep the oil flowing. Don’t rock the boat. The 1991 Gulf War was a perfect example of this old strategy: Saddam had attacked Kuwait and was threatening the much bigger target of Saudi Arabia. We sent an overwhelming force to preserve the status quo ante — pushing Saddam back "where he belonged," and restoring the previous government in Kuwait, and protecting the Saudi regime. We didn’t want to take Baghdad then because that might have created a vacuum into which Iran, and to a lesser extent Syria and Turkey, might flow. That would upset the apple cart, and we didn’t want to do that. (We should have, because at that time we had something we didn’t have 12 years later — overwhelming force, enough to occupy and stabilize Iraq. I understand why we didn’t — but that calculation was based on the old, pre-9/11, policy of preserving the status quo.)
9/11 changed this equation, because it showed us that preserving the status quo — one in which oppressive regimes produced political frustration and encouraged Islamic militantism — was extraordinarily dangerous to us. The 9/11 hijackers were the result of the old policy of supporting the status quo. We needed to begin the process of changing the region, and Iraq was a good place to start. Succeed there (and the problem in Iraq is that so many things were done wrong in the first years that it took far too long to succeed), and you encourage liberalizing, democratizing forces in all middle eastern countries. We saw the beginnings of that in Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Libya — although much of it was set back by the increasing violence that was only quelled after the Surge began at the start of 2007. Much of that good effect has yet to be seen, but that doesn’t mean it can’t still happen.

— Iraq was the place to start because we had every reason to go in and take out the regime there. Saddam had violated terms of the 1991 cease fire for 12 years. He was shooting at our planes enforcing the no-fly zone. In 2002, the UN passed the resolution authorizing force unless Saddam met certain conditions — which he failed to meet. Some significant UN members balked at acting upon the resolution — France, Germany, Russia — but plenty of others, including most European powers, actually joined that "coalition of the willing." And why not? Saddam had spent the last decade and more cementing his reputation as an outlaw regime.

Anyway, that’s PART of my thinking on the subject. It doesn’t make sense to people who agree. It DOES make sense to some who do, such as the New York Times’ Tom Friedman.

Hope that helps, but I won’t be surprised if it doesn’t.

From: Pat Mohr
Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 8:27 PM
To: Warthen, Brad – Internal Email
Subject: Re: hyperbole
Importance: High

Hmm, I’ve gone back and read and re-read your rationales for going into Iraq. I’m still thinking—because you’ve made some good points. I do have to tell you, though, that I’m not anti-war; I just think it should be restricted to defense. However, many of your reasons seem to indicate that you truly believe that you are your brothers’ keeper, and that’s morality I share. I too think we should have gone into Darfur and Rwanda. We do have an obligation to help the oppressed—but not only the oppressed with oil under their land. I just don’t think that Iraq should have been singled out, even in the mideast. What about the outrageous treatment of women in Saudi Arabia for example? And how can we be the world’s policemen? How can we ever fix it all?

Moreover, I think our presumptuous invasion has brought us so much international ill will that it will be years before our reputation is restored. And then there’s the billions and billions of dollars that have been squandered in this war. I wonder if Iraqis think it was worth it because I don’t think most Americans do. And now we’re in greater jeopardy in Afghanistan—and we still haven’t found Osama.

All that said, in the light of your comments, I intend to start reading your blog as I continue to think about my position. I like to think that I’m open-minded enough to change my mind given additional evidence. I wish I could come back in fifty years and see what verdict history renders on this war….

Thank you again for engaging in this dialogue with me.

On Dec 3, 2008, at 10:54 AM, Warthen, Brad – Internal Email wrote:

All I can ask for is to get people to think about the points I make, so I thank you for that.

In answer to one point you made, let me point out that we did not have an acceptable rationale for invading Saudi Arabia. Remember the 12 years of defiance of the ceasefire agreement, and all those UN resolutions that gave us authorization to go into Iraq. We had nothing like that in the case of Saudi Arabia, or Iran or anyone else. Just Iraq.

Also, the reference to oil is a non-sequitur. We kicked Saddam out of Kuwait for oil. The policy of supporting the status quo was about oil. Invading Iraq actually endangered the flow of oil by upsetting the status quo.

You might be interested in a column I wrote before the Iraq invasion, about why we needed to go in:

THE STATE
THE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH ABOUT WHY WE MAY HAVE TO INVADE IRAQ
Published on: 02/02/2003
Section: EDITORIAL
Edition: FINAL
Page: D2
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor

AMERICA SEES ITSELF, quite admirably, as a nation that doesn’t go around starting fights, but is perfectly willing and able to end them once they start.

Because of that, President Bush has a tall hill to climb when it comes to persuading the American people that, after 10 years of keeping Saddam Hussein in his box, we should now go in after him, guns blazing.

In his State of the Union address, the president gave some pretty good reasons why we need to act in Iraq, but were they good enough? I don’t know. Probably not. It’s likely that no one outside of the choir loft was converted by his preaching on the subject. And that’s a problem. Overall, while there have been moments over the last 16 months when he has set out the situation with remarkable clarity, those times have been too few and far between.

He has my sympathy on this count, though: His efforts have been hampered by the fact that the main reason we may need to invade Iraq is one that the president can’t state too clearly without creating more problems internationally than it would solve. At the same time, it’s a reason that seems so obvious that he shouldn’t have to state it. We should all be able to figure it out.

And yet, it seems, we don’t.

I hear people asking why, after all this time, we want to go after Saddam now. He was always a tyrant, so what’s changed? North Korea is probably closer to a nuclear bomb than he is, they say, so why not go after Kim Jong Il first?

We left him in power a decade ago, they ask, so why the change?

The answer to all of the above is: Sept. 11.

Before that, U.S. policy-makers didn’t want to destabilize the status quo in the Mideast. What we learned on Sept. 11 is that the status quo in the region is unacceptable. It must change.

Change has to start somewhere, and Iraq is the best place to insert the lever, for several reasons – geography, culture, demographics, but most of all because Saddam Hussein has given us all the justification we need to go in and take him out: We stopped shooting in 1991 because he agreed to certain terms, and he has repeatedly thumbed his nose at those agreements.

Iraq may not be the best place in the world to try to nurture a liberal democracy, but it’s the best shot we have in the Mideast.

I’m far from the only one saying this. The New York Times’ Tom Friedman, who has more knowledge of the region in his mustache than I’ll ever have, has said it a number of times, most recently just last week:

"What threatens Western societies today are not the deterrables, like Saddam, but the undeterrables – the boys who did 9/11, who hate us more than they love life. It’s these human missiles of mass destruction that could really destroy our open society. . . . If we don’t help transform these Arab states – which are also experiencing population explosions – to create better governance, to build more open and productive economies, to empower their women and to develop responsible news media that won’t blame all their ills on others, we will never begin to see the political, educational and religious reformations they need to shrink their output of undeterrables."

Journalists can say these things, and some do. But if the president does, the Saudis, the Egyptians, the Syrians and just about everybody else in the region will go nuts. In European capitals, and even in certain circles here at home, he will be denounced as the worst sort of imperialist. Osama bin Laden’s followers will seize upon such words as proof that the West has embarked upon another Crusade – not for Christ this time, but for secular Western culture.

None of which changes the fact that the current state of affairs in Arab countries and Iran is a deadly threat to the United States. So we have to do something about it. We’ve seen what doing nothing gets us – Sept. 11. Action is very risky. But we’ve reached the point at which inaction is at least as dangerous.

Should we go in as conquerors, lord it over the people of Iraq and force them to be like us? Absolutely not. It wouldn’t work, anyway. We have to create conditions under which Iraqis – all Iraqis, including women – can choose their own course. We did that in Germany and Japan, and it worked wonderfully (not that Iraq is Germany or Japan, but those are the examples at hand). And no one can say the Germans are under the American thumb.

But that brings us to a problem. The recalcitrance of the Germans, the French and others undermines the international coalition that would be necessary to nation-building in Iraq. It causes another problem as well:

Maybe we could accomplish our goal without invading Iraq – which of course would be preferable. By merely threatening to do so, we could embolden elements within the country to overthrow him, which might provide us with certain opportunities.

But the irony is that people aren’t going to rise up against Saddam as long as Europeans and so many people in this country fail to support the president’s goal of going after him. As long as they see all this dissension, they’ll likely believe (rightly) that Saddam might just hang on yet again.

If the United Nations, or at least the West, presented a united front, the possibility of Saddam collapsing without our firing a shot would be much greater. But for some reason, too many folks in Europe and in this country don’t see that. Or just don’t want to.

Maybe somebody should point it out to them.

Write to Mr. Warthen at P.O. Box 1333, Columbia, S.C. 29202, or [email protected].

By the way, do you mind if I post our exchange on my blog? Whenever I spend this much time writing about a subject, I try to share it with as wide an audience as possible…

From: Pat Mohr
Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2008 11:06 AM
To: Warthen, Brad – Internal Email
Subject: Re: hyperbole
Importance: High

Certainly, you may share it.

That’s it. Join in, if you got this far…

The failed hyperbole of the past eight years (column version)

45 Replies

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
QUICK, WHO said this?

“Americans have watched in horror as President Bush has trampled on the Bill of Rights and the balance of power.”

I’ll give you some hints:

A. Oliver Stone
B. MoveOn.org
C. An overexcited intern at the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee
D. The New York Times

The answer is “D.” Yes, I’m sorry to say that overwrought purple prose was the lead sentence last week in the lead Sunday editorial of the paper I was so recently congratulating for having the good sense to back the Columbia Free Trade Agreement. (And they made so much sense that day.)
Editorial writers — particularly at one of the best papers in the country — are supposed to use words with care and discrimination. Some say I occasionally fail to do that. For instance, some say I was mean, nasty and ugly to Gov. Mark Sanford in my column last week. Go read the letter to the editor from the governor’s press aide that ran in Wednesday’s paper (as always, you will find links to that, and the NYT piece, and any other linkable item mentioned in this column, in the Web version on my blog — and the address for that is below). An excerpt:

This editorial page was once respected as a voice for good government. Now, thanks to Brad’s childish screeds, fewer and fewer people are reading.

And yet… I challenge you go find anything that I said in that column that comes anywhere near the unsupported, gross hyperbole of “watched in horror” or “trampled on the Bill of Rights.”
So does President W. get all excited and whip off a letter to protest to the NYT? I doubt it. Nah, he just spends the week working with Barack Obama as though he were already in office, as though they were co-presidents — which, by the way, is exactly what he should be doing, in this extraordinary economic crisis. (I wonder: If this period of cooperation between the president and president-to-be does not lead to economic miracles, will someone look back on the interregnum in January and denounce “the failed policies of the past eight weeks?”)
Democrats are thrilled that at long last, Bush will no longer be in office. Me, too. He can’t leave soon enough. But I’m even more thrilled that after January, I won’t have to listen to any more semi-deranged yammering about the guy. You know that I never liked him — he’s the guy who did in my guy (remember John McCain?) in the 2000 S.C. primary. But I have never, ever understood why some hate him so much. The Bush haters can’t simply say, “I disagree with Mr. Bush and here’s why.” They have to go way beyond reason in condemning him absolutely in terms that render him utterly illegitimate.
Get a grip, people. It’ll be over soon.
Oh, and for those of you who will say, “But the Times went on to support its statement” — no, it didn’t. Sorry, folks, but his playing fast and loose with federal law regarding wiretapping, to cite one example given, just doesn’t amount to “trampling on the Bill of Rights.” He should have worked from the start to change the law rather than skirting it (as our own Lindsey Graham and others urged), but he did nothing to instill “horror” in a rational person. You “watch in horror” as a gang of thugs rape and murder an old lady — you merely disagree with something so bloodless as monitoring telecommunications without proper authorization.
Not following me? OK, here are some more things one might “watch with horror:” The My Lai massacre. The butchery in Rwanda in the 1990s. Gang-rape and mutilation of women in Darfur. The Hindenburg disaster. The Twin Towers falling on 9/11. The Japanese reducing Pearl Harbor to a smoking ruin. Men, women and children being herded into the Nazi death camps. The Bataan Death March.
Get the idea? To apply those words, “watched with horror” to, for example, “the unnecessary invasions of privacy embedded in the Patriot Act” (you know, a law passed by Congress, which Congress can change at any time) as the Times did is to suck all of the meaning out of those words. Once you use those words to describe imprisoning terrorists (real or imagined) at Guantanamo (the main sin listed in the editorial), they no longer have force. If you watch that “with horror,” what words do you use to describe the fire-bombing of Dresden?
People should not fling words about so carelessly. As a professional flinger of words, I know.
Now I’ll fling a few more for you Democrats who are watching with horror as I “defend” the outgoing president (when what I’m really doing is defending the language): Folks, settle down. I get it; you don’t like the guy. You like Barack Obama. Well, so do I (he was, after all, my second choice for president). I expect that I, too, will prefer an Obama administration to the past eight years. He’s off to a good start.
But before we say goodbye to this era, let’s resolve in the future to do what Sen. Obama does so well — speak with sanity and moderation, and mean what we say.

Read the Times piece and more at thestate.com/bradsblog/ .

My fan mail from the governor’s office

11 Replies

Just wanted to make sure you didn’t miss the note of appreciation I received from the governor’s office for my Sunday column. It ran as a letter to the editor today:

Warthen column damages credibility
When the facts aren’t on some people’s side, they try and change them to help win an argument. Unfortunately, that’s a model growing in popularity among this paper’s editorial writers.
I’m writing of Brad Warthen’s latest Sunday rant, in which he lashes out at the governor over a recent column he penned for The Wall Street Journal.
Congress is contemplating spending another $150 billion to $300 billion to “bail out” states. Every penny of that money will have to be borrowed, from places such as Social Security, or our grandkids, or such nations as China (to whom we already owe $500 billion). The governor is arguing that enough is enough, and that we have to quit piling on debt, no matter how well-intentioned the spending may be.
You’d know all of this for yourself had Mr. Warthen possessed the courage to print Gov. Sanford’s column alongside his, and let you judge both pieces for yourself. Not doing so is the latest example of a growing lack of credibility on Mr. Warthen’s part, from endorsing one senator despite noting his history of flouting the law, to, on his blog, likening a school choice supporter to bin Laden.
This editorial page was once respected as a voice for good government. Now, thanks to Brad’s childish screeds, fewer and fewer people are reading.

JOEL SAWYER
Communications Director
Office of the Governor
Columbia

Editor’s note: The State published the governor’s column on the Web. To read it and Mr. Warthen’s column again, go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

This letter put me in an awkward spot. It was sent to Cindi, but she’s out this week, so when he got her autoreply to that effect, Joel sent the letter to me. And the problem was that the letter needed editing, and it’s hard to work with the writer of a critical letter when you are the subject of the criticism. As editor, there were a couple of things I needed to accomplish:

I needed to make sure it was factually correct, so that when he criticized me or the paper for doing XYZ, XYZ was actually what we did. As you can tell from our letters on any given day, we thrive on being criticized. But I draw the line at taking criticism for something we did not DO, because that would give the readers an incorrect impression of what we went to all the trouble of putting into the paper to start with. For instance, when a writer says, "You were wrong to claim that Sen. Hiram Blowhard is a horse thief," but we didn’t say Sen. Blowhard is a horse thief, I’m not running it. If I DID run it, readers would naturally assume, "Well, they wouldn’t have run the letter criticizing them for calling him that if they hadn’t called him that." Unfortunately, the thing that Joel was misrepresenting about us was fuzzier than that. He was trying to make readers think that we had somehow done the governor wrong by not running his column in the dead-tree version of the paper. He was saying this despite the fact that he knows our standard is NOT to use that precious space for guest columns that have run elsewhere (every piece we run like that is another piece that was offered exclusively to us that we CAN’T run). The average Joe on the street could have made the mistake of saying what he said in the letter; he knew better. He also knew that we went to the trouble to publish the governor’s piece online (you’ll recall that in the past I’ve made the point here that our online version is the perfect place for columns by gummint officials — who send us a lot of submissions — that don’t meet our standards for the paper), promoting it from the newspaper on the day it ran, and providing a link to it in the footer of my column about it (why? because I wanted people to go back and read it). But Joel insisted upon accusing us of wrongdoing on this point, so I eventually shrugged and let it go — and resolved to state the fact of the matter in a neutrally-worded editor’s note (knowing, of course, that lots of readers will think publishing on the Web is inadequate; but at least this way they had the facts before them). There were other factual points that were easier to resolve — such as his originally having claimed that we acknowledged Jake Knotts was "a criminal" in endorsing him; I persuaded him to change that wording. But the business of how we had handled the governor’s piece was too central to his point.
Then there was the "courage" thing. I never could persuade him that some other word would make more sense to the reader — "courtesy" would have worked; even "decency" would have worked. I mean, what is the reader supposed to think I was afraid of? I wrote a whole column about the governor’s column, told you how to go read the governor’s column, provided links to it, but I was afraid of it? But I guess he thought I was just trying to censor his criticism of me rather than helping it be a more logical letter. So I let that go, too.

Anyway, we spent so many e-mails going back and forth on those points that I never even got around to such minor things as: When you say "the facts aren’t on some people’s side, they try and change them to help win an argument," and you suggest I did that, what do you have in mind? Name one fact I cited that was wrong. But it wasn’t worth it.

"Courage" is a word that is often misapplied to what I do. Truth be told, there are people who read a column such as the one Joel was criticizing and praise me for having the "courage" to write it — but that is utterly ridiculous. "Courage" doesn’t come into it, either way. I mean, what do I have to fear besides dealing with hassles such as that above? But I’ve heard that about columns I’ve written about governors going all the way back to Carroll Campbell. People seem to think I’m tempting the gods or something criticizing these guys. I don’t know.

What I DO know is that if you want to see courage, read Dr. Ray Greenberg’s piece on Sunday. Finally, we have the heads of major agencies having the guts to speak out about how we’ve hocked our future by failing to invest in the critical infrastructure of our society. State agency heads just don’t write columns like that, but he did.

And of course, the governor came down on him over it. Oh, he did it politely. His response (which Joel sent me in the same e-mail with his letter, and which I ran the same day as his letter, which makes his complaint about our not running the governor’s last column seem even more off-point — but I digress) was of course more polite than Joel’s. It’s too important to the governor to be seen as above the fray to write anything like what Joel did. At the same time, a public university president who dares to write anything like that motivated the governor to take him down a notch personally. Other uppity agency heads will take note. (The governor can’t do anything to Dr. Greenberg or to most agency heads, but that’s not the point — most of them don’t want to get into a spitting match with the gov; better to lay low.)

A couple of quick points about the gov’s piece about Dr. Greenberg (aside from the fact that his overall point was to defend the bankrupt notion of arbitrary spending caps):

His utterly laughable attempt to be condescending to the MUSC president: "I certainly don’t begrudge him that view. Like any agency head, his
role is solely to look out for his corner of state government and the
tax dollars that are coming his way. On the other hand, we in the
governor’s office have a very different role in looking after the
entire state." Go back and read the piece by Dr. Greenberg, who runs an institution of higher learning that employs 11,000. Look at the concerns that the doctor expresses, and compare them to the narrow ideological points espoused by the governor, and judge which of them you believe is really thinking about the good of "the entire state."
Second, the governor cites his favorite misleading statistic. The original text of his piece said, "Government in South Carolina costs about 140 percent of the national average, largely due to an unaccountable and inefficient structure." That is not true. I was able to make it technically (although still very misleadingly) true by the insertion of a single word: "State government in South Carolina costs about 140 percent of the national average, largely due to an unaccountable and inefficient structure." What’s the diff? State government in SC costs more per capita than state government in other states because of our almost unique system of the state performing lots of functions that local governments perform in other states — such as road maintenance, and owning and operating school buses. If you look at government overall, adding in our pathetically anemic local governments, we actually spend less than other states do on state and local government — or at worst, around the average (there are different ways to calculate it; some ways we’re right at the average, some ways we’re well below). A very important distinction, but don’t expect to hear this governor acknowledging it; the fiction that we — the state that won’t maintain its roads or guard its prisons or support its colleges nearly as adequately as other states do — spend too much on government is what he’s all about. Anyway, keep these two facts in mind, as Cindi explained in a recent column: We pay less per capita in state and local taxes than most of the country, and we pay less as a percentage of our income than most of the country.

One last note, and this is one I DO deserve to be kicked for. The governor misspelled Dr. Ray’s name throughout his piece, and I’m just noticing it. Yes, it was the governor’s mistake, but I’m the one who had it last, so it’s my fault for not catching it.

Whither the blog?

58 Replies

Seems like this comment I put on this comment string is worth a separate post, since I’m looking for feedback:

Above we have 32 comments. Seventeen of them are by or about Lee
Muller (10 by him, including the first and the last; seven about him.)

That means the majority of comments are not about the subject at
hand. The subject at hand, of course, is my effort to elevate public
discourse above the level of polarization and pointless shouting.

I’d like to thank Harry, Karen, Phillip, Bart and, eventually bud
(once he decided not to "harp on the past") for engaging the topic
positively, and Randy and David for at least engaging the topic.

Anyone have any suggestions as to what do do with the fact that most
of the string was occupied with polarizing distractions? This is a
serious question, because now that the election is over I’m evaluating
how much energy to put into the blog, given that we are so short-handed
and I’m so harried these days.

When I started this blog, I had a staff of six full-time people
(including four associate editors) and one part-timer to write for,
edit and produce the editorial pages. And even then it was extremely
difficult to squeeze out the time from a 24-hour day to blog. Now I
have three full-timers (down to two associate editors) and one
part-timer in the editorial department. Finding time for the blog long
ago reached the point where most people would say "impossible."

My Sunday column spoke directly to why I do this blog. It’s about
carving out a place that is an alternative to most of the hyperpartisan
blogosphere, which reflects the style of nondiscourse framed by the
parties, the advocacy groups and the shouting-head television "news." A
place where people can interact constructively, and even listen to each
other.

I deeply appreciate those of you who try to have a constructive
conversation in spite of all the shouters in the room. Unfortunately,
there are many, many people of good will who simply won’t try that hard.

Anyway, anybody have any constructive suggestions for going forward?

Of course, the very first comment I get it likely to be from Lee. But after that, I’d very much appreciate some relevant feedback from the rest of you.

You, too, can use irony — no experience required

39 Replies

Wow. As cool as Barack Obama is — and he IS cool, all the time — some of his supporters are VERY emotional.

Two of them — Jennifer and Pam — got so worked up by my very mild use of irony on this previous post (referring to their guy as "The One") that they mistook me for a Republican. To wit:

I don’t understand why Republicans continue to call Senator Obama
"The One" – none of his supporters has ever used that term. Why do you
rely on mocking the man and spreading lies about him? Is it maybe
because you are obviously wrong on the issues? Crawl back into your
caves, please, and let us get to work cleaning up another one of your
messes.

Posted by: Jennifer Mullen | Oct 29, 2008 9:13:15 PM

_____________________________________

When a party has no good ideas or solutions you slander your
opponent. Just like Brad , you know " the one " comment. The consistent
theme from the RNC and the McCain campaign is fear and hate . And ,
this paper’s editorial board enforces that theme. Sad to think that
some in this state are unable to look to the future .

Posted by: pam,greenwood | Oct 30, 2008 9:58:27 AM

Talk about letting emotion override the higher faculties…

p.m., thanks for pointing out the painfully obvious:

Jennifer, Oprah Winfrey introduced Obama as "The One" years ago. I
have seen the videotape. If you would Google it, you could probably
find it….

Posted by: p.m. | Oct 29, 2008 10:43:00 PM

Yes, I got the thing about "The One" from that font of Republican bile, Oprah… We "Republicans" always go to her for our marching orders, talking points, swastika armbands, etc.

Folks, where are we when we can’t even use the smallest bits of irony in our public discourse without somebody getting all offended?

Come on, folks — Phillip gets it. He’s for Obama, and he can josh about the cheesiness:

Naturally, my biggest complaint was the syrupy Saving-Private-Ryan-ish background music.

Posted by: Phillip | Oct 30, 2008 4:40:54 AM

And I didn’t even notice the music — leave it to Phillip; he’s our music guy. I just noticed the cheesy set, which someone was careful to make ALMOST exactly like the Oval Office, but enough unlike it to allow for plausible deniability. I mean, LOOK at it, people. Now that’s artistry.

Folks, cheesy is cheesy. Joe the Plumber — cheesy. Pandering with a gas tax cut — cheesy. Picking Sarah Palin — cheesy (although, to quote from the movie Phillip cites, I find myself "strangely attracted…"). Maverick this, maverick that — cheesy.

Now, you Obama supporters — make some ironic comments about your guy. Come on, you can do it. Look, this guy’s going to be the president, and I just won’t be able to stand four years of y’all being so deadly earnest. Loosen up.

You just can’t please some people

41 Replies

You know all the grief we’re catching from the Obamaphiles. Now this e-mail:

Dear Brad,

Please write an editorial ASAP, listing your facts that prove your assertion that Obama is smarter (such as his grades, etc) than Palin even though Palin is much more qualified, more experienced, more smarter and more capable than the scripted, Hitler and Chavez like, Obama.

If the editorial appears during the weekday, please E-mail a copy because this month we have dropped the daily delivery because my wife and I was continually to be very upset with liberal slant of the McClatchy papers.

Sheesh. Tell you what, my friend — buy the danged paper and watch for it, OK?

What do you say to somebody who needs me to prove Barack Obama is brighter than Sarah Palin, then expects me to give him a heads-up when I do so because he won’t buy the paper, and for the most bogus of reasons? I mean, really — what do you say?

As long as I’ve got out my foolishness-bashing club, and since this guy irrelevantly brought up the name of the corporation that owns this newspaper, I should say something about this comment on a previous post and others I’ve seen like it:

Just imagine what would happen if The State(less) endorsed Obama
instead of McSame: huge loss of advertising money, huge cancellation of
subscriptions. Just the way it is. For shame, but money before civics
is the way of capitalism. (duh, last 30 years of deregulation…)

You want to know what a presidential endorsement based on the newspaper’s business considerations would look like? Like nothing. As I’ve told y’all before, the only time Tony Ridder ever tried to influence Knight-Ridder editorial pages was back in January 2005, when he tried to persuade us NOT to endorse in presidential elections. On one level, his position was defensible (from my point of view), in that he believes local and state endorsements to be of much greater value. But it was also based in the fact that as a business entity, presidential endorsements can’t help you, and can only hurt. Note the high number of people whose very first response to a presidential endorsement — either way — is to say they’re canceling their subscription, or WOULD have canceled it had we gone the other way.

People read presidential endorsements NOT to help themselves decide. They’re already inundated in information about the candidates. They read them to decide what they think of the newspaper, and whether they’ll attach importance to all of the endorsements we do on the candidates they DON’T know so much about. As a businessman, Tony Ridder didn’t like that kind of exposure. He’s not alone in that.

More feedback on McCain endorsement

24 Replies

Just in case you didn’t get enough with the comments on this post or this one or this one or this one, here are a few that I’ve received via e-mail. I didn’t keep the attributions because some of these people probably wouldn’t mind and some would, but I don’t have time now to sort them out:

Hi,

Your recent Sunday column concerning John McCain neglects to mention that John McCain has lied about his military record on several occasions. I was eleven years old and watched the U.S.S. Forrestal as it arrived at Subic Bay in the Philippines — minus John McCain. The writer of this article has performed a valuable public service, while you and the rest of the McCain worshippers continue to go AWOL.

_________________________________________

His pick of Sarah Palin–that kind of blows the doors off the "experience"
argument.

You also failed to mention that he graduated 4th from the bottom of his
class at Annapolis, which makes him dumber than George Bush, who you also
endorsed, twice.

Do you suppose he’s also dumber than Mark Sanford, who you also endorsed?

Why don’t you just say, "At The State, we endorse dumbasses, and McCain’s
pick of Palin as well as his graduating 4th from the bottom of his class at
Annapolis leaves him as the only candidate that we can endorse."

You did good back in the poker machine days, and I still like reading your
stuff some times–some great sentences you can come up with at times–in
fact, i’d even say kind of incredible, and i even quote the stuff from time
to time, giving you the attribution, of course. The problem is you have
quite a few loose screws that find expression in the endorsement of
candidates who have trashed this state and this country. yes, you have a
track record.

Fortunately, I’m not going to be able to rub it in your face a few years
from now when you’re writing about what an idiot McCain is, that you
endorsed him (like I have done with Bush and Sanford) because McCain is not
going to win. Hopefully, you’ll never endorse another winner. For the good
of this country, let’s hope not.

_________________________________________

Brad

You are a barrel of laughs. It is truly funny how you are trying to convince yourself and others that you are open minded and not a closed minded, dyed in the wool, Republican. The Republicans could literally run this country into the ground and you would still endorse a Republican. (Oh, I guess that has already happened.)

The rationale for your endorsement was pitiful. It wouldn’t get a B from a friendly 10th grade Social Studies teacher. I can imagine the red pencil comment "To endorse McCain because he supported the Surge is not a very deep analysis of the Iraq situation."

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Mr Warthen,
I’m sitting here typing, deleting & retyping all the reasons why I find it incredulous that you’ve endorsed McCain for president.
I finally realized that I need not struggle to put it into words – Warren Bolton has already done that, very succinctly.
I will just say that I am extremely disappointed in your decision. And the reasons given to support it do not resonate with me.
Your, in my opinion, fool hearty endorsement is one that will remain in the back of my mind & forever color my perceptions of future positions presented by The State.

__________________________________________

Mr. Warthen,

I am an Obama supporter and I was disappointed that The State endorsed Sen. McCain. We are all entitled to our opinions, however, and I attempt to be open to views that are different from mine. I must say, though, that your written justification for the endorsement of Sen. McCain in this morning’s edition was as weak as water.
Thank goodness for Mr. Bolton’s very thoughtful editorial this morning, it was proof to me that there continue to be people on your staff that reason and think independently. That piece and my husband’s insistence on reading every comic strip everyday is the only reason that I did not cancel my subscription to your paper on the spot.

_______________________________________________

After reading your editorial and the editorial page this morning, I called your paper and terminated my subscription, even though I have been a subscriber since I moved to South Carolina in 1977. Through the years, I have agreed and disagreed with your editorials, but I have never considered the disagreements as serious as I do today. I cannot disagree more with your conclusion that John McCain is better qualified. I can’t believe that you truly see John McCain as "exhibiting fierce integrity, principled independence and awe-inspiring courage as he has put his country first."

I have seen nothing but a self-centered, spoiled man who is very angry and who has over and over put himself first. For you to say that choosing Palin is not a factor for making a decision astounds me since it is such a clear example of McCain’s lack of judgement. I thank Kathleen Parker for giving me the first reasonable explanation of why McCain made such a choice.

I know that one subscriber will not break your newspaper, I just wish I could get everyone in the state who is supporting Senator Obama to also cancel their subscriptions and then maybe you would wake up!

____________________________________________

To quote John McEnroe “are you serious!!!” I guess I really shouldn’t be that surprised.

Even though, like John McCain’s support of 90% of George Bush’s policies, I generally agree with The State’s editorial positions and the issues so eloquently addressed by Cindi and Warren and Brad (heck I even got the paper’s endorsement when I ran for Columbia City Council in 2000); I must say I was very disappointed at the endorsement of John McCain.

I realize we all see the world and life through our own “lenses,” but, come on, you folks have blindfolds, or at best blinders, on for this one. I do compliment you on putting the best possible spin on your choice by limiting your reasons and the issues discussed. Especially interesting was your total avoidance of other issues like temperament, and judgment in the choice of Sarah Palin. Guess you don’t see any concerns/negatives in a McCain administration. I could go on. You and most informed citizens/voters know the litany on both sides.

I can’t cancel my subscription over something like this. I am grateful to even get The State delivered out at Lake Wateree. I did have to express my disappointment. You coulda/shoulda picked the best candidate, and likely winner, as have over 200 other publications, four times the number who agree with you/The State.

I’ll still respect you after the election.

__________________________________________

To: StateEditor, Columbia
Subject: to Mr. Warthen

Dear Mr. Warthen:

I am disappointed in your endorsement of Sen. McCain. Not surprised, as you observed. Rather, I am dismayed at the rationale you used in choosing an endorsement for our next president. In a state thirsty for demonstrable fruits of education, we need leaders (including newspaper editors) who apply sound reasoning in decisions. Most of your reasons were poorly grounded – most notably, that the economic crisis and vice presidential selections are irrelevant to your endorsement. Many of us could not disagree more.

A sound economy is one essential key to our collective future. Each political party has a long record of economic policy – these candidates represent those parties ( I remind you that Sen. McCain may have resisted some foolish decisions by his party but he is not an Independent), so the positions on the economic condition are not a wash. Can you give us a deeper foundation for this opinion?

And as Gen. Powell recently observed, THE job of the vice president is to stand ready to be president. Our American tradition is to have two candidates running rather than a solo presidential candidate so the people can choose who the v.p. will be. Using your logic, we should just elect a president and let that person choose a successor after the election. Essentially you have endorsed Gov. Palin to be our executive, commander-in-chief, and strategist in leading us out of this economic crisis. You owe us an explanation for why you support putting our future in her hands.

_______________________________________________

To: StateEditor, Columbia
Subject: The State’s Endorsement

I was so disappointed when I read the headline that you are endorsing McCain/Palin in the Presidential race. I thought after your endorsement published in January of Obama, you were on the right track to unification for the state of South Carolina. My husband and I have been very involved with this election process and have done much research and study in making our decision for our Presidential Vote. I would think that with the resources afforded to a large newspaper, you would have come tot the same conclusion that we did. Obama is our choice, no question. We have struggled with job loss, student loans for our children in college and our sons service in the military. McCain will only continue the policies that have made living and working for middle class American families so difficult these past few years.
Your opinion in January about Obama was spot on:

"Sen. Obama’s campaign is an argument for a more unifying style of leadership," the endorsement continued. "In a time of great partisanship, he is careful to talk about winning over independents and even Republicans. He is harsh on the failures of the current administration – and most of that critique well-deserved. But he doesn’t use his considerable rhetorical gifts to demonize Republicans. He’s not neglecting his core values; he defends his progressive vision with vigorous integrity. But for him, American unity – transcending party – is a core value in itself.": The State, January22, 2008

We are so disappointed in your change of heart, and in our service with home delivery over the past year, that we will be canceling our subscription.

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To: StateEditor, Columbia
Subject: (no subject)

Good morning to you Mr. Warthen-

Not knowing how to work this "blog" thing, I have to e-mail you my thoughts after reading the McCain endorsement which was no surprise at all. What else could you people do in a state like
South Carolina? Your paper, which from what I hear , is losing subscribers due to over-emphasis on sports, particularly football, diminishing Book Review section, less arts, less and less in-depth coverage of national and international news (no wonder people don’t know about the Colombian Free Trade Agreement) loss of the Saturday Editorial Page and having to go to the internet to finish many stories. Can you imagine the loss of subscribers you would suffer if you endorsed Obama? Yes, you did once but not for the finish.

You state in your personal remarks that people know your mind so well. I disagree. You always seem to be self-searching, trying to put across that you are neither this or that, so how can anyone know you when you don’t yet seem to know yourself?

As for knowing McCain, the remarks in the endorsement and yours show that you only know the surface of the man and haven’t really studied him in depth. His recent acceptance of some of the most vile ads against Obama and his shameless pilfering of Obama’s campaign slogan of Change and many of Obama’s ideas show this as a man who stops at nothing to get what he wants. During rallies when folks said ugly things about Obama, he made a half-hearted attempt to stop it but later defended his audiences (note that when he tried to stop it, he was booed or given very sparce applause). He and Palin unleashed some very, very frightening elements during their campaign and this is not the kind of man who should be a leader of all the people. He has always been a panderer and will always be. He also has a nasty streak that is also frightening. Even your favorite columnist, Charles Krathammer, a former psychiatrist or something of the sort, while bashing Obama last week, stated that McCain launched a volcanic missive to Obama when he did not go along with some proposal of McCain’s. Krathammer should have spent a little more time analyzing McCain.

His military career and his time as a POW was not the glorious, self-giving time that has become an urban legend of sorts. There are many places one can go to find out who this little man really is – and I just don’t mean little in stature. He is a bellicose, uneven tempered man with a lot that he is still trying to prove and we are in danger of being his proving grounds.

Further, I would like to see a little more balance on the Editorial Page with your syndicated columnists. It is discouraging to open the paper and see either Krathammer, Will, Parker. Once in a while we get Freidman and when it snows in July, Dowd. Broder is even a change. Surely there could be a better mix and your letters more balanced.

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Morning,
I just called and canceled my annual subscription(paid in advance) to The State Newspaper after 17 years and 8 months. You ask Why? Let me start by paraphrasing W.C. Fields When the world ends I want to be in SC. He was asked WHY? Because they are Fifty (50) years behind.
I do not take issue with The State/Brad’s endorsing Sen John McCain. This was expected. What I take issue is with the reasons and lack thereof.
1 "Surge" The war did not start with a "surge" The war started before the surge and Sen Barack Obama stated before the war and before the surge started that we SHOULD NOT GO TO WAR. The "surge works" not in isolation. We are paying many $$$$$$$$$, Have you heard about the "Awakening" No one on itself would be success. Please tell me now who had the better judgment and foresight from the start? Sen McCain or Sen Obama?

2. You have lost sight of what the rest of America is mainly concerned about THE ECONOMY THE ECONOMY THE ECONOMY. "Iran to North Korea"? Who cares RIGHT NOW? What most people care about is feeding their families, I guess we do not have to, My household income is over $250,000.00 per year.

3. "Columbia Free Trade Agreement"? Take a poll of your readers and I bet my re-subscription that no more than 10% knows what you are talking about. Is this the new way of not saying "BLACK"? You yourself had to ask your own guestion "WHY so many words about the CFTA. Trying to justified putting the square peg in the round hole.

4. "Judicial appointment"? If you believe what both men said about litmus test, I have a bridge to nowhere I can sell you for the price of your subscription.

5 "immigration reform" how many times did he flip flop on this issue. What about voting against a MLK holiday? You have the audacity to mentioned Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid BUT totally ignore Sen McCain’s first decision Gov. Sarah Palin Oh so now you are worried about the majority in Congress? What happen to the last six years?

6. Is Country first involve KEATING FIVE, wrecking three planes, jumped out of one that was destroyed, shot down at 3,000 feet when he should have been flying at 4,000 – 10,000 feet?

7. "Why didn’t ( I prefer "did not") mention Sarah Palin"? You are still trying those pegs. How could you consider one without the other ? All thing been equal Sen McCain should die before Sen Obama. Are you telling me that is the former is elected president and dies 4 months in his term Gov. Palin is suited to run the country and the world for the next 3 years and 8 months? What are you drinking? I do not want even a tea spoon of that, and if you are sneaking some in your paper I do not want to touch same again.

8. "We could go on and on, and we will" I will not. If I want to read you paper I can go to Refdesk like I do every day. Where I read at least 3-5 national, and 3-5 international newspaper seven day per week.

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To: StateEditor, Columbia
Subject: McCain endorsement

I gave all my information upfront because I mean this when I say the editorial board has two straight-up wimps, Brad Warthen and Cindi Scoppe. How can you not know who to endorse at this point in time? I realize Ms Scoppe has the right to make her decision anytime she feels like but as educated and bright as Ms Scoppe is, it just seems like she’s afraid to endorse Obama in South Carolina and I say the same thing about Warthen. Please, the reason people assumed the editorial board would endorse McCain is because they knew you would come up with some wimpy reason to endorse the republican candidate. I do believe that the publisher and owner of the state is not a wimp and I feel like Warren Bolton is not a wimp and the reason I feel that way about those two is that they’re consistent, especially Bolton but endorsing John McCain in South Carolina is not progressive and saying you’re not sure as an educated person when the election is less than 10 days away is not courageous and it’s patronizing to your readers because both candidates have had websites up and running with information on their plans. My issue is not that the State endorses a republican candidate but that they put their circulation ahead of any real effort to change the country or be progressive and after reading Warthen’s commentary over the past year I don’t think he’s very progressive when it comes to race at all. You see when it’s time to do something courageous don’t complain all year long then do the opposite or say I don’t know.

_______________________________________________

I am so very glad that McCain has been endorsed. I supported him in 2000. I feel his loyalty and dedication to the welfare of the United States is far above his opponent. McCain actually cares about this great country and what he can do to protect it. Obama is more concerned over his "Kingship" of the country.

He is the most arrogant and elitist person who has ever ran for president. He refuses to answer the "tough" questions and has ran a most negative and dishonest political race. He is guilty of what he accuses his opponent of. I feel so much better knowing that The State Paper and you have endorsed the best candidate we have. Bless You.

So there you have it.

I haven’t had time to respond to more than one or two of these folks, and need to turn to putting out tomorrow’s page now. But at least I could give their views a wider airing by posting them here.

Commenting on the endorsement

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Before I turn my attention completely to writing for Sunday’s paper, I’ll respond briefly to some of the comments offered this morning with regard to our McCain endorsement. I’ll start with something Phillip said (actually, his was the last comment when I started this response; several others have come in since then, but I’ll have to read them later):

P.S. Since Editor and Publisher’s latest count has not included the State, the State now becomes the 50th newspaper in the US to endorse McCain. 127 have endorsed Obama. In 2004 the count was virtually even between Kerry and Bush, and now nearly 30 papers that endorsed Bush in 2004 have endorsed Obama, whereas only a handful that endorsed Kerry 2004 have endorsed McCain. Again, more evidence that Obama’s appeal is broader across party and ideological lines and holds the greater promise of bipartisan leadership and unity.

Posted by: Phillip | Oct 24, 2008 9:10:17 AM

I should have added "the State’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge that reality notwithstanding" to that last sentence.

Posted by: Phillip | Oct 24, 2008 9:12:46 AM

Phillip, I don’t understand why you would say that last part. Scroll to the lower part of this original post. The "reality" you say we "stubbornly refuse to acknowledge" is something I have cited over and over. It’s THE biggest reason why we strongly preferred Obama over Hillary Clinton. It’s what we mean in the endorsement you read today when we say, "Barack Obama is an inspiring and even transformational figure." What did you think that referred to?

And yes, I’m perfectly aware that most newspapers are endorsing Obama. In the rough draft of the editorial (before I cut it down to fit the space awaiting it on the Sunday page), I wrote "Like the many newspapers that have endorsed him, we, too, find him to be an inspiring…" But that was one of the more superfluous lines among the many that had to go in cutting out four inches from the piece. What other newspapers are doing is neither here nor there.

I do find it amusing that someone commenting on the previous post thinks it would have been more "courageous" to endorse Obama. Hardly. Going along with the crowd, particularly when they’re lining up behind someone you like very much, and who you fully believe is going to WIN, is the path of least resistance. Just think of all the very nice people, people whom I would love to please, who would be singing our praises now, while a few trolls under the bridge mutter inaudibly about how they knew we were "socialists" all along, and what do you expect from the "liberal media." We’d be praised for being "bold," for making an "historic break with the past," etc. Never mind that there would be nothing bold about it; it would just feel that way to a lot of people.

Add to this the fact that I gave up something very tangible and palpable, to me. Ever since I became editorial page editor in 1997, I have longed for the day that I could break the pattern of endorsing Republicans for president, if only because in some people’s minds, that makes us a "Republican newspaper," and I find it deeply distasteful to be called such names. Yes, I have been able to comfort myself by pointing to the substantial, documented falsehood of the label — most notably the fact that if you consider all of our endorsements (and we spend vastly more of our time on state and local races than we do on the presidential), more than half of them are for Democrats. But people attach an inordinate amount of importance to the presidential endorsement — so many people don’t pay attention to anything else — and there we have been trapped. We like SOUTH CAROLINA Democrats, not the national kind. People like John Kerry and even Al Gore, in running for national office, define themselves in ways that put them far to the left of the consensus of our editorial board, which is generally reflective of the political center in our state. (Ironically, in Gore’s case, he had earlier been a far more centrist politician, to the point that I enthusiastically supported an endorsement of him when he ran for the Senate in Tennessee.)

But Obama presented the chance I had awaited for so long. Here was a Democrat we could happily endorse, something we unquestionable would have done had he been up against Mitt Romney, or Rudy Giuliani, or Mike Huckabee — and certainly if he’d been facing the current president (something he likes to pretend he’s doing as we speak).

But he was up against the one Republican who happens to be the national political figure I respect and admire most, and have wanted to see in the White House for at least a decade. So his timing couldn’t have been worse.

Now, as to those of you who find it unthinkable that we didn’t write about the current economic situation, or that we DID spend a long paragraph on the Colombian Free Trade agreement, let me see if I can help you understand: First, I don’t give either candidate a leg up on the economic crisis. I haven’t been impressed that either of them has a better idea than I do of what to do going forward. Both of them backed the $700 billion rescue plan, and while I think they were right to do so, I just haven’t seen much to jump up and down about either way on this. Frankly, I worry that neither of them is up to the challenge, but that worry is poorly defined in my own mind. While economic policy was discussed in our board debate of this endorsement, it did not occur in a way that caused us to coalesce around a position. In other words, I could have spent precious words on the economy, but it would have been a digression from the points that actually contributed to our endorsement, and everyone would have found it unhelpful. Yes, I understand that people who favor Obama are somewhat more eager to discuss the economy than those of us who end up where I do on the question. Democrats love talking about the economy. And they will. But we endorsed McCain neither because of nor in spite of the candidates’ positions on the economy.

On the contrary, the Colombian Free Trade Agreement — which required a certain number of words even to explain to the reader, since it’s gained so little attention — had the virtue of being a sort of microcosmic way of explaining the sort of differences between the candidates that DID contribute to our endorsement. We were able to tell readers something they didn’t know, to examine the contrast between the candidates in terms of a subject that hasn’t been done to death. And for me, the moment when that came up in the third debate was a critical moment, a sort of epiphany, one in which my preference for McCain over Obama was clarified. As an explanation of an important difference between the candidate, one that bears upon their governing philosophies with regard to the global economy and their relative devotion to party orthodoxies, the portion of the editorial dealing with Colombian trade was far more explanatory than spending a comparable number of words rehashing the economic crisis, only to say in the end that on that issue, for us, it’s a wash.

If you haven’t figured this out about me and my leadership of the editorial board, let me state it overtly now: I see little point in telling you things you already know. To the extent that I am able, I wish to ADD to the conversation, not parrot what others are saying. Hence this countercultural blog, in which I fight against the tide of the Blogosphere as a place where polar opposites shout at each other. Similarly, my exploration of Colombian trade as opposed to platitudes on the economy sought to explore uncovered ground, to give people something additional to think about.

As for whether I should have cut something out of the editorial to make room for a digression about Sarah Palin (the omission of which Phillip found to be "astonishing" and "shoddy journalism") — well, I can perfectly understand why someone who thinks we should have endorsed Obama would want to bring that up. But since Sarah Palin did NOT contribute to the decision to endorse McCain, it’s hard for me to see why I would bring that up, explore the problems that she brings to the ticket, and then explain why we would endorse McCain anyway for those of you who don’t get it (and even after doing that at the expense of not giving you the reasons why we did endorse McCain, those of you who disagree would remain unsatisfied). Besides, it would have been a departure to say we’re endorsing someone because of, or in spite of, the vice presidential pick. I can’t think of when we’ve done that before (if you can, please point it out). Sarah Palin looms very large in the minds of two sets of people — the conservative Republican base that loves her, and the people who despise her and see her as sufficient reason NOT to vote for McCain. We are in neither category.

And by "we," I mean the official position that we ended up with as a board. As I write this, Warren Bolton is working (at my behest) on his column for Sunday expressing his dissenting opinion. He may explore the economy or go into the failings of Sarah Palin at length. I don’t know. But a column saying we SHOULD have endorsed Obama seems to me like a better part of the overall package in which to explore those avenues. The endorsement of McCain explores one part of the overall subject. Warren’s column explores another. My column — which I need to go write — will explore yet another.

In the end, the overall goal is to provoke thought — hopefully, thoughts you might not otherwise have had — among our readers regarding the presidential election. That’s what we strive for.

Why Ayers should be persona non grata

58 Replies

Phillip, whom I respect as a constructive and thoughtful contributor to this blog, raises the issue of academic freedom in connection with Bill Ayers and USC:

Like it or not, for many years now Ayers has been recognized as an
authority in the field of public education, and his academic standing
as professor at the University of Chicago attests to that. That’s the
reality as it exists today. If USC is to be a place where academic
freedom exists, where students are able to be exposed to a wide variety
of competing ideas, the School of Education would be remiss in not at
least including Ayers’ writings as part of their curriculum. You can
see from the website I cited that the conflicting issues raised by
Ayers’ presence or the study of his work were indeed freely "ayred."
(sorry, couldn’t resist that one.)

Anyway, as someone who has a strong record of supporting public
education in this state, it would seem that you would want our USC
students to have the widest knowledge possible in that field, as they
grapple with the challenges they will face in that terrain.

It’s not up to USC to make political/law enforcement judgments above
and beyond what our courts and domestic institutions have arrived at.
The University’s only role is to judge the academic worth of what a
scholar has to offer. There are no outstanding criminal charges against
Ayers; beyond that, if he is good enough to be a tenured professor at U
of C, you can (to borrow another 60’s phrase) bet your sweet bippy that
he’s good enough to give a visiting lecture or two at USC. In those
situations, if a student wants to walk out, or picket, that is also
absolutely appropriate and their right to do so.

Here’s the thing about that: William Ayers has placed himself beyond such bourgeois considerations. Academic piety is insufficient to excuse the man who, in an interview published in The New York Times on Sept. 11, 2001 (yes, that date is correct), said "’I don’t regret setting bombs. ‘I feel we didn’t do enough.” In the same interview, he said he did not recall having said in 1970, explaining the Weatherman philosophy, "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the
revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at." But he acknowledged, "it’s been quoted so many times I’m beginning to think I did.” He further explained that ”It was a joke about the distribution of wealth.”

In my book, that makes him persona non grata. The private sector can do what it will, but NO taxpayer-supported institution should employ him for any reason, even temporarily, even in an arms-length relationship. It should be the duty of a public institution to divest itself of any such involvement, however tenuous.

I marvel at the uncanny insight of our readers

4 Replies

Bailout

… or one of them, anyway. Just now, I was kidding Robert Ariail about this letter in today’s paper:

Ariail’s work deserves a Pulitzer Prize
In case it comes up, I nominate Robert Ariail for a Pulitzer Prize. His pen is multidirectional: It cuts up and down as well as sideways. A case in point is his masterpiece Tuesday regarding the bailout fiasco in Washington.

Brad Warthen also deserves some sort of special credit for whatever role he plays in victim selection.

BOB A. McILWAIN
Columbia

Here’s what’s funny about that if you’re me: Robert’s been having a bad week, by his reckoning. Robert’s problem is that his "bad weeks" are largely in his head. He’s unhappy with his ideas, so he thinks he’s not doing well. Artists. On Monday, it was going so badly that even after our page was long done and in the proofing stage — past mid-afternoon — he hadn’t even started on a cartoon, although he had several sketches he was unhappy with.

He was on the verge of saying he just wouldn’t have a cartoon for the next day (something that almost never happens) when I started in on him, telling him he was dogging it, he could do it, it was all in his head, and a bunch of other halftime exhortations. I told him this particular idea that he had sketched was just what was needed, as it touched on the debate AND the news of Monday. So he finished it.

And this reader not only thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, but sensed somehow that I had something to do with it. I’m loving it.

Anybody ELSE want to be on a debate panel?

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Passing through the newsroom this morning, I checked with Leroy to see what kind of response he’s gotten on the reader panel for the presidential debates.

He says he’s gotten eight applications from among the fine, upstanding citizens who frequent this blog, and 15 from the general public, via a notice they put in the paper Sunday.

One problem — so far, the respondents are heavily supportive of Obama, so he’s in the hunt for balance. Need more McCainiacs and independents.

That would describe some of y’all. So hurry up and sign up to be considered — the first debate’s Friday night.

To help you remember, here’s Leroy’s original message:

Colleagues,

The government team is assembling a panel of voters in our community
to watch the presidential and vice presidential debates with us and,
afterward, serve as a focus group on how the debaters fared during a
roundtable discussion we’ll have here at the newspaper. We will feature
this panel on thestate.com and include it in our debate coverage.

Know somebody who’s mad for McCain, crazy for Palin, in love with
Obama and rooting for Biden? Know somebody who is undecided? Please,
send them my way. Especially the undecideds.

We, of course, want diversity — men, women, young, old, political,
apolitical, Democrat, Republican, independent, black, white, brown,
etc. Keep that in mind as you think of folks who might be interested.

Anticipating a fun experience. Please let anyone who is interested
know we would like for them to sit on the panel for all four debates.

Thanks for your help

Write to him at [email protected].

FYI, if there are enough folks from the blog, I might even show up to say hey.

Just in case you think all the shouting happens here in the Blogosphere…

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My colleague who processes incoming letters regularly forwards copies of those that are specifically responding to a personal column. I’ve been copied several of those today from my Sunday column. Here are my two favorites so far. They illustrate the point that those of us who edit editorial pages had been dealing with the "blogosphere" for years before the word was coined.

By the way, I have no idea whether either of these will be among the few chosen to be published. I’m satisfied to see them (or not) when they show up (or don’t) on the page.

Anyway, first I get BAM from the left:

In "Worrying about what happens if Obama loses" (Sunday September 14), if Brad Warthen doesn’t consider Barack Obama to be a black man, then what does he consider him to be? Nevermind the angst over a polarized country, Mr. Warthen has more important worries such as how he can educate himself on issues of racism. Surely, anyone who has spent five minutes seriously considering racism on a real level would instantly know that the Rev. Joe Darby is dead on with his assessment of white middle America. Not so? Try imagining Sarah Palin’s life superimposed on the Obama family and see if the same sympathy and understanding resonates.
It would seem that Mr. Warthen doesn’t consider Obama black because he obviously doesn’t see black: par for the course in South Carolina. And like so many typical South Carolinians, if you don’t see race, then you certainly don’t have to deal with the issue in any meaningful way.

Then I get BAM-BAM from the right:

Mr. Darby is about as racial as you can get. I have read his diatribes promoted as Guest Columns. In many ways he reminds me of Mr. Limbaugh, except at the opposite viewpoint. Unfortunately to the Liberal Media, such as NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN and "The State", a comment can only be considered racial if the person making it is not of the Black Community.
In my letter to the Editor of August 28, 2008, which was censured and intentionally not put into print, I had predicted that the Liberal Media and the Black Community want to get Mr. Obama elected, not because he is qualified but to make history as the first Black to win the Presidency. I had also forecasted that the race card would be played by them to make people of all other races and creeds guilty if they did not vote him in. Mr. Darby considers the Presidency for Mr. Obama, as an Entitlement.
I also find it mind boggling that Mr. Warthen wears blinders when he harps about Ms. Palin’s lack of experience. While I agree that Ms. Palin does not have enough experience, she at least has 1 1/2 years of it as the Governor of Alaska and she is running for Vice President. Mr. Obama is running for the Office of the President and he has zilch "NADA" experience of any kind.
It has not dawned on Mr. Warthen that a larger majority of the people in this State are either Independent or Conservative in their views and The State’s Editorial Group is out of place. Maybe this is why The State continues to and will lose readership. I predict that "The State" will pick Mr. Obama as their choice in November.

I’m always intrigued by the letter writers who see a huge, PERSONAL slight in their letters not being among the ones chosen for the paper, as though we run ALL of them, except the few that we choose not to run, just to be mean. For the record — I just went and asked — we run about half of the letters submitted.

I also enjoyed that one because of the endorsement prediction. So THERE, those of you who accuse us of having decided already for McCain…. Also, when did I "harp on" Sarah Palin’s lack of experience?

The first letter I liked because this reader just can’t wait for that promised column about how I don’t consider Obama to be a black man. Those of you who read the blog of course have read about this upcoming column before, back on this post:

Talk about what the election of Barack Obama as a black man means misses the point, since — as a lot of black folks asserted last year leading up to the primaries — Obama simply is not a "black man" in the sense that the phrase has meaning in American history, sociology and politics. I’ve got a column I’m planning on writing about that, after I read his autobiography on the subject. It will be headlined "Barack Like Me," and it will be rooted in the experiences he and I share spending part of our formative years in Hawaii (where race simply did not mean what it means here) and outside the United States — both in the Third World, in fact. None of these experiences are common to the sort of guy we describe when we say "black American." I hope to write that one before the summer is over.

Obviously, I didn’t get it done before the summer is over. There have been two holdups:

I haven’t had time to read that book yet, and I expect reading it will make the column better.
I have thought about the blasted column so much, and have so many points I want to make in it, that I dread the hard work of having to cram it all into 25 inches. That happens some times with columns that I keep MEANING to write — they get delayed further by my having thought too much about them. (Although the two columns are not at all alike, I had the same problem with the John Edwards column that caused such a stir — I had promised it for months, and just kept putting it off.)

Maybe I should just skip reading the book (which may complicate the writing further) and write it this week or next.

Oh, one other thing about that first letter: Someone else — I think it was in another letter we ran, or maybe somebody else — raised that "imagine if Sarah Palin were black" thing, with the assumption that she’d be perceived differently. (At least, I THINK that’s what was meant by "superimposed on the Obama family;" maybe it meant something else.) I thought the same thing then that I think reading this now: How do you figure?

There’s life, and then there’s life

23 Replies

Oh, boy, the animal lovers are out again, and that always spells trouble. Check this letter on the Monday page:

Hunting suggests Palin is not pro-life
The photo in your Monday issue of Sarah Palin and her daughter posing proudly with the caribou that Palin has just shot to death is graphic proof that Palin is not, as she claims and as she is often labeled, “pro-life.” “Anti-abortion” or “pro-human-fetus” maybe, but certainly not “pro-life.”

Sigh.

No, hunting is not proof that anyone is not "pro-life," in the sense that word is used in American politics — not unless the person in question is hunting humans.

A caribou is not the moral equivalent of a human being. The difference isn’t even quantitative; it’s qualitative.

Now if Sarah Palin favors capital punishment — and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she does — THAT would indicate a failure to be pro-life.

Do ya see the difference? Are ya following me here?

This is not to defend hunting, by the way. I’ve never been able to square it in my mind. Killing an animal to avoid starvation, fine. But for sport, no. That, however, is a qualitatively different thing from killing humans.

We have here a hierarchy of moral considerations:

The lightest consideration is that if you want to say one shouldn’t hunt from helicopters, fine — it’s not sporting.
At a higher moral level, one should not hunt for sport alone anyway.
On the highest, a caribou still does not have the moral claim on us that a human does. Not the same at all.

bradwarthen.com

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