Category Archives: Marketplace of ideas

Speaking of Russert, let’s talk media bias

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Russert

This morning I was reminded of the hateful message I got about Tim Russert when I read this piece in the WSJ about how — according to this particular ex-media type who concerns himself with media bias — Mr. Russert was one of the few big-time TV types who shared his concern:

…No, what made Tim Russert different, and better, I think was his willingness to listen to — and take seriously — criticism about his own profession. He was willing, for example, to keep an open mind about a hot-button issue like media bias — an issue that so many of his colleagues dismiss as the delusions of right-wing media haters. (Trust me on this one, I worked at CBS News for 28 years and know Dan Rather personally.)…

Personally, I have to take other people’s word for whether Russert was a good guy or not. When I was introduced to him at the 2004 Republican Convention in New York (by Lindsey Graham, as it happened), I did my best to act like I knew who he was (I looked him up later), just to be polite. Yes, my ignorance of TV news is that complete. I’d heard the name, but that was it. I go to church on Sunday mornings. I will say this about him, though — now that I think about it, he struck me as the kind of guy who wouldn’t have been insulted if he’d known I didn’t know who he was. He didn’t seem like the big-headed type. So that’s something.

But while I don’t have an informed opinion about Mr. Russert’s character, I do have a lot of informed opinions about what is oversimplified as "media bias." Here’s the short version — i’s definitely real, and here’s the form it takes:

Journalists spend their lives in a bubble, largely because of the work they do and the hours they keep. They tend to work with people just like the people they went to journalism school with, and because work doesn’t allow them to go to PTA meetings and otherwise live normal lives around normal people. Take that and combine it with the fact that journalists try to studiously avoid having opinions, and even fool themselves into thinking they are perfectly objective, which causes them to have the most entrenched sort of opinions there are — unexamined ones.

Other people get out of college and hang with all sorts of different people, and form impressions of the world that they are not ashamed to think about in opinionated terms. Journalists pretend to themselves that they are not forming opinions, and therefore their ability to form grownup, evolving opinions about the world gets stunted. So they, and the people around them, go through life with the sort of vaguely liberal inclinations that they bought into as college sophomores.

This phenomenon was touched upon in the WSJ piece:

    Tim understood that without that kind of diversity, journalism would be in trouble. He knew it wasn’t good for journalism or America if almost all the people reporting the news lived and worked in the same bubble.
    "There’s a potential cultural bias. And I think it’s very real and very important to recognize and to deal with," he told me. "Because of backgrounds and training you come to issues with a preconceived notion or a preordained view on subjects like abortion, gun control, campaign finance. I think many journalists growing up in the ’60s and the ’70s have to be very careful about attitudes toward government, attitudes toward the military, attitudes toward authority. It doesn’t mean there’s a rightness or a wrongness. It means you have to constantly check yourself."

Can we drive 55? OK, how about 70?

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We all know how frustrated Energy partisan Samuel Tenenbaum gets about his perfectly sensible suggestion that we save the country and the planet, and save ourselves some bucks, by driving 55 mph. He keeps hoping his moment will arrive — will we get sensible at $5 a gallon? Or will it be $6?

Anyway, I was reminded of all that by this letter this a.m.:

Keeping to speed limit will save on gas

Apparently the high cost of gasoline is not yet a problem for the people of South Carolina.

Every
driver knows that higher speeds reduce fuel efficiency. Yet traffic on
our interstate highways continues to roll about 10 mph over the speed
limit.

STEPHEN D. KIRKLAND

This raises the question: Do you think we can summon the political will in this state to enforce the speed limits we have now? The reason traffic "continues to roll about 10 mph over the speed
limit" is that we all know that the de facto speed limit is 10 mph over — and maybe more like 15.

Maybe we can start the movement here. How about it? Can some of y’all who get SO worked up about illegal immigration "because they’re breaking the law" get worked up by speeding? After all, this isn’t just about not having the right paperwork; speed kills.

If we can tap into an emotional well like that, we can save lives, save money, flip the bird to Chavez and the House of Saud and save the planet. Sounds like a good deal.

What is ‘our community?’

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From time to time, a comment by one of y’all causes me to comment at some length, and I decide to make it a separate post. This is one of those times.

A modest Everyman who calls himself "john" had this to say back on this post:

Well bud, I think the votes are in.  Like I keep telling you, your views do not fit in our community…

First, let me clarify that I think he meant me, not bud. I’m less clear on what he meant by "our community." I think it’s an interesting question to pose to all: What, in the context of these discussions, does "our community" mean?

It’s like with editorials: WE can mean a number of things when we say
WE — it can be the editorial board, or rather the consensus thereof.
It can mean WE South Carolinians, or WE Americans, or WE who hold a
certain truth to be self-evident. When the meaning seems vague, I work with the writer to try to sharpen up what WE mean by the word.

So what does "our community" mean? South Carolinians? Americans? People
living in Zip Code 29201? Is it "our thing" in the Sicilian sense? Are you presuming to speak for the readers of
MY blog? If so, you have to deal with the fact that the READERS of the
blog and the people who regularly comment — perhaps I should have
emphasized REGULARLY there — are almost certainly different groups, in
terms of prevailing views on this and other issues. Of course, there’s no way to
establish whether that’s the case or not (beyond the anecdotal evidence
of all the nice people who say they read my blog but don’t want to
comment because they don’t want to mix it up with you ruffians — the
wimps); it’s just that my experience causes me to doubt that those who push themselves to the fore are representative.

To give you a stark example… back in the fall of 2001, when the
consensus in this country was strongly in favor of toppling the
Taliban, a majority (or a very large percentage, anyway; we didn’t keep
count) of the letters we received for awhile there were AGAINST
military action in Afghanistan. People who were FOR the action — the
overwhelming majority — saw no need to write letters, because there
was no argument to be made. That is, until they saw some of the
anti-war letters we were running. Then they weighed in in response.

Never for one moment was I fooled into thinking the antiwar letters represented a majority of Americans, or South Carolinians, or readers of The State.

A blog, which its more or less instantaneous interactivity and
reinforcement (positive and negative), has a tendency to run off in one
direction or another very quickly, with moderate views quickly
intimidated into silence (people of moderate temperament generally have
better things to do with their time, or so they quickly decide — again, the wimps). There are a few brave moderates who hang in there with us, until they
can’t stand it, and go away for awhile. Certain other types are with us
always.

Anyway, I’m getting far afield: Within the context of these discussions, what does "our community" mean?

SCRG’s arch-nemesis

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Have you heard about the group that Bill Cotty is heading up to take on Howard Rich, SCRG et al.?  Somehow, I had not focused on it until I saw this piece in the Spartanburg paper.

It’s called "South Carolinians for Truth and Disclosure." The Spartanburg story left off the "disclosure" part, and yet that seems to be the main point of the exercise. Here’s the group’s raison d’être:

South Carolinians for Truth [hey, they left it off, too!] is a grassroots organization whose
purpose is to advocate for the reform of South Carolina’s current
campaign finance laws. We demand new laws requiring issue advocacy
groups that mention an elected official or candidate by name to follow
the same laws of disclosure that candidates and party organizations are
required to follow.

We are a watchdog group working to set the record straight when organizations misrepresent the truth.

What does that mean? Well, what I think it means is that organizations spending money to influence your vote should tell us where their money comes from. What is the organization most associated with not wanting to tell us where their money comes from? SCRG.

SCRG likes to holler that we’re trying to take away its First Amendment rights when we say it should disclose. This, of course, is a load of horse manure. We think SCRG should disclose, and we also agree with SCRG when it says the S.C. School Boards Association should disclose. Goose, meet gander.

S.C. TAD (I see that our friend Tim wrote about them and referred to them merely as "TAD" on second reference) seems like some good folks, with a good purpose. But I’m not endorsing them, on general principles. I have too much of a sense of irony. When I see a clickable tab on the TAD home page that says "The Truth About Third-Party Groups," I can’t help thinking, Aren’t you a third-party group?

But I don’t mean to play moral relativity games here. Is there a difference? Sure. The "third-party groups" being criticized here are financed by sneaky, out-of-state residents of the ideological fringe who are offended by the very idea of public schools. This newer group consists (as near as I can tell) of South Carolinians who want to maintain and improve public schools (that’s certainly what Bill Cotty has always tried to do), and don’t want them done in by misleading campaigns by outsiders.

So there are third-party groups and third-party groups. I just didn’t want you to think I missed the irony.

Oh, and speaking of our blog friends, several are involved with the items I linked to above. You’ll see Earl Capps is working with Mr. Cotty. And in the Spartanburg story, you’ll see a less-than-complimentary reference to our friend Joshua Gross.

And of course, let’s not forget Ross Shealy, author of the recently-revived (just in time for the primaries) "BBQ and Politics." More about that in a separate post, if I can get to it today…

‘Dear SCRG:’ Herndon explains himself on vouchers

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Now I have received a copy of a response that David Herndon has sent to SCRG’s response to his complaint. If you had trouble following what I just said, go back and read this, then come back here and read the following:

Dear SCRG:

Thank you for you response. Please mark me as "oppose both" on question six.

We do not remember my campaign putting the "x" where we apparently did, but if we did do so it was a mistake.

Truthfully, a campaign assistant answered your questionnaire… and I do not know if it was our mistake or the awkward wording on your part that led us to "x" the wrong box.

Hopefully, I have been very clear about my support for public education, and my opposition to vouchers, from the very beginning. In fact, my strong support for education and my opposition to vouchers was a centerpiece of my campaign long before you sent your questionnaire. (It is also worth noting that part of the reason I am running is to give voters a pro-education alternative to your voucher candidate.)

David Herndon

Interesting exchange in District 79

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Randy Page of SCRG shared with me his response to an e-mail from David Herndon, whom we recently endorsed over Sheri Few for the GOP nomination in House Dist. 79.

First, the letter he says he got from Mr. Herndon:

To: SCRG
From: David Herndon, Republican for House
District 79

Dear sirs,

As you are aware, I am a Republican candidate for the S.C.
House of Representatives. I am writing because I am concerned about your
involvement in not just this race, but many others across the state as
well.

It has been brought to my attention that your
special-interest organization has sent out many mailings in many Legislative
races in South Carolina. Some of these postcards simply promote candidates, but
others are “attack pieces” which aim to discredit Republican office-holders who
support public education.

While state law certainly allows special interest groups to
endorse whomever you wish, these mailings leave many unanswered questions.
First, and most importantly, nowhere in any of these mailings — at least the
ones I am aware of — do you disclose the true motives of your group.

It is my understanding the purpose of your organization is to
advocate private school vouchers. Strangely, neither your advocacy of vouchers
nor your preferred candidates’ support for vouchers is mentioned in any of your
mailings.

As a public school parent, I strongly support public
education, and I believe your private-school voucher scheme would only drain
needed funding away from public school classrooms. However, I view this as an
honest difference of opinion, and I certainly believe it is important for
elected Representatives to find a common ground with those of other viewpoints.
What I do have a problem with is that your organization is not disclosing your
true motives. I feel this amounts to misleading voters.

Last month, I wrote to my opponent, Mrs. Few, to express my
concern about your involvement in this race. My concerns were based on your
previous track record of running negative, deceptive campaigns against
Republican office-holders who support education; your attempts to disguise your
true motives; and published reports that say much, if not a majority, of your
funding comes from out-of-state. (In my opinion, your negative campaign against
Bill Cotty in 2006 was perhaps the most negative our community has ever been
subjected to.)

My letter still has received no response, so I decided to
contact your organization directly.

I am writing you with this public challenge: In the rest of
your mailings this election cycle, please level with the voters about your true
motive — the privatization of education. The voters deserve honesty. And after
all, your group calls itself “South Carolinians for Responsible Government.” I
would think the hallmark of anyone claiming to advocate “responsible government”
would see the value in being as honest and up front as possible with the
voters.

So what do you say, SCRG? Do the voters not deserve to be
told the truth about your group’s purpose as you fill up their mailboxes with
attack pieces, pictures of pigs and postcards about conservative
judges?

I look forward to your response, and I hope you will answer
this challenge. The voters deserve as much.

Thank you,

David Herndon

Then, Randy’s response:

Dear Mr.
Herndon,

Thank you for your
email.  I appreciate you taking the time to contact South Carolinians for
Responsible Government. 

Through mail, radio and
Internet, we have been very clear about our objectives.  In fact, you can read
about it on our website at http://www.scrgov.org/content.asp?name=Site&catID=8110&parentID=8088
     We have long advocated the need for lower taxes, government restructuring,
conservative judges and for tuition tax credits.

In my view, citizens
don’t need to be wary of a conservative organization that advocates for better
schools, lower taxes and streamlining government, but rather someone, like
yourself, who one day professes a particular set of beliefs, but then decides –
perhaps on the advice of a slick political consultant – that he’s changed his
position.  What else could describe your sudden about face on the issue of
school choice? 

In the survey that you
signed and submitted to us on April 18th, you clearly checked that
you supported both a scholarship granting organization and a voucher system. 
I’m sure this will come as a complete surprise to the editors of The State.
If you don’t remember, I’ve included a copy of it for you – as well as the
members of the media that were copied on this message.

Sincerely,

Randy Page,
President

South Carolinians for
Responsible Government

I guess it’s a good thing that, as I said in my Sunday column, it was her position on the cigarette tax that made me decide against endorsing Sheri Few.

Equal opportunity advertising

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Just a moment ago, I happened to notice an ad at the top of my blog. It may or may not still be there, but I saved the link. It grabbed my attention because it seemed to be attacking the Lieberman Warner Bill. And you know how I like to stick up for Joe. He and I may not agree on everything, but we agree on enough things that when I see somebody attacking him, I tend to go, "Now hold on a minute…"

Add to that the fact that when anybody starts demagoging on energy — whether they’re proposing a gas tax holiday, or tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, or saying Lieberman-Warner "would hurt consumers by driving up energy bills" — I get suspicious.

Turns out the folks buying space above my blog happen to be "AmericasPower.org," which "is sponsored by the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), which is a partnership of the industries involved in producing electricity from coal."

Not that I automatically disagree with the idea of Clean Coal. We’ve got to have some way to produce electricity until we get those new nuclear plants built. (For this reason, I still haven’t decided what I think about that proposed Pee Dee plant that is causing such controversy.) In fact, I didn’t start this post to agree OR disagree with these people. It’s too late in the day to sort all that out.

What this post is about is that at the same time THAT ad was appearing ABOVE my blog, there was another one to the RIGHT from an outfit called "Fight Global Warming," which is affiliated with the Environmental Defense Fund.

The ads that appear on this blog have nothing to do with me. I see them when you see them, and I am not consulted about them. I neither agree nor disagree with the messages they push — that is to say, I’m as likely to disagree with them as agree; they’re appearing here are irrelevant to my own positions.

But I thought it was pretty cool that two seemingly disparate groups were contending for your attention around my blog at the same time. It’s almost as thought the ad folks are contending for the kind of balance we shoot for in our letters and on the op-ed page. I doubt that’s happening — ad folks are pretty much market-driven; they don’t manipulate the world the way we journalists do in our quest to be "fair." But I thought it was kind of cool the way it worked out there for a minute…

Blasts from past come unexpected in this business

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Edge_002

Needless to say, I get a lot of unsolicited, pure junk mail in my line of work. Most of it goes into the round file with hardly a glance. But I guess I was moving slow or even more easily distracted than usual today (and folks, if I weren’t easily distracted, I wouldn’t be doing a blog), but I happened to notice something today that made me say, wait a minute… and actually open one of the pieces of junk.

The junk in question is this slick magazine with a snazzy cover called Edge. or Leader’s Edge (look at the cover and tell me which one it is). It’s a big one, as you can see compared to The Economist above. To the extent that it has registered on my consciousness at all in the past, I’ve just thought it was some generic thing aimed at business execs, a category in which I fit only technically (on account of having the title of V.P.). But today, I noticed there was, shall we say, a theme running through the headlines of the articles teased on the cover:

  • "Committing Insurance Without a License"
  • "Employer plans: best cure for ill health insurance market"
  • "Attacking group benefits — why destroy what works?"

The last one grabbed me, as it seemed to be about health insurance, and seemed to suggest that weEdge_006
currently have a system that works. Those of you who know me know that I strongly disagree.

So I opened the mag, and eventually found the masthead, and sure enough, this is a publication of "The Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers." It’s full of institutional advertising from such luminaries as UnitedHealthcare.

But that’s not the good part, the part that prompted me to write this. The good part is that in the few seconds I spent flipping through this thing, I ran across the name of an old friend, Joel Wood.

I first met Joel when I was a reporter operating out of a bureau in rural West Tennessee back in the 70s. He was a student who wrote for one of the local weeklies. Later, when I was the news editor of The Jackson Sun, he was one of my best reporters. But after the 1982 election, he left the paper to become press secretary to Don Sundquist, who had been elected to Congress over a candidate whose campaign press secretary was another former writer at the paper (whom I later hired back, as it happened). Sundquist later became governor of Tennessee. But before that happened, Joel became a lobbyist for the insurance industry. In one of those startling coincidences that make Washington seem like such a small town, I ran into him years later when I was showing one of my kids around the Capitol.

Anyway, I last ran into Joel three years ago at a Jackson Sun reunion. True to form, he kept doing deals via cell phone while the reunion was going on, as seen in the picture I shot below.

Now that I’ve read his mag, and read in his latest column (the one about destroying "what works," which isn’t on line yet; here’s a previous one) that "I’ve been blessed with terrific health benefits in my 15 years at the council," which he says is a good thing given his lifestyle, which he says consists of "attending political cocktail parties professionally in the selfless service of our member firms," all I can say is…

Joel, it’s not too late. Come home! All is forgiven. And don’t bring the phone this time…
Woodjoel

Are Democrats more sexist? Hillary Clinton seems to think so

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Democrats_feminists3

Normally, I don’t think very hard about things that make little sense, such as the claim by Hillary Clinton that her flagging political fortunes result from "misogyny." Since such claims are not logical, I don’t bother carrying them to their "logical conclusions."

That’s a mistake on my part, because such an exercise can yield interesting results. Check out this very short op-ed piece in the WSJ this morning, headlined, "Nothing but Misogynists."

It starts out by considering some of her statements along the lines of what I quoted earlier in the week:

"I think that both gender and race have been obviously a part of it because of who we are and every poll I’ve seen show more people would be reluctant to vote for a woman to vote for an African American, which rarely gets reported on either…. But it does seem as though the press at least is not as bothered by the incredible vitriol that has been engendered by comments and reactions of people who are nothing but misogynists."

It then considers that at the same time she’s blaming misogyny for her failures in Democratic contests, she asserts — in practically the same breath — that she’s "the strongest candidate against John McCain."

So the op-ed piece arrives, quite logically, at this conclusion:

    This fact (if it be a fact) reveals a hitherto unknown, ugly truth about the Democratic Party. The alleged bastion of modern liberalism, toleration and diversity is full of (to use Mrs. Clinton’s own phrase) "people who are nothing but misogynists." Large numbers of Democratic voters are sexists. Who knew?
    But here’s another revelation. If Mrs. Clinton is correct that she is more likely than Barack Obama to defeat John McCain in November, that implies Republicans and independents are less sexist than Democrats.
    It must be so. If American voters of all parties are as sexist as the Democrats, Mr. Obama would have a better chance than Mrs. Clinton of defeating Mr. McCain. The same misogyny that thwarted her in the Democratic primaries would thwart her in the general election. Only if registered Republicans and independents are more open-minded than registered Democrats – only if people who lean GOP or who have no party affiliation are more willing than Democrats to overlook a candidate’s sex and vote on the issues – could Mrs. Clinton be a stronger candidate…

Who knew, indeed?

Our Joe cup overfloweth

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Y‘all saw where I bragged on Joe for his fine piece in the WSJ the other day. Well, today we have a counterpoint from Joe in that same publication, so our cup overfloweth.

OK, for those of you too lazy to follow links, I’m talking Lieberman and Biden, respectively. Both of them are good guys. We endorsed the first Joe in his presidential bid in 2004, and might well have endorsed the other this time around if he hadn’t dropped out before the S.C. primary (we went with Obama instead, you’ll recall). Both are blessed with essential Joe-ness, as I’ve explained before.

And although these pieces are set against each other, there is much to love in each of them, infused as they are with Joe-ness. In other words, they are written by rational men who are not entirely enslaved by the idiotic partisan extremes of our times. Joe is much more inclined to support his party’s nominee, but that’s because he hasn’t made the radical break that Joe was forced into. But you still don’t find the kind of polarized claptrap that you usually hear from the party faithful on either side.

OK, I’ll start using last names, although it sounds unfriendly…

Here’s one of the best parts of Mr. Biden’s piece. It repeats a point that I’ve praised him for making in the past, which is that President Bush blew a once-in-a-lifetime chance to lead this nation, and the Western alliance, into a far better place than the sad situation that Joe, I mean Tom, Friedman described the other day. Anyway, here’s the Biden excerpt:

    Sen. Lieberman is right: 9/11 was a pivotal moment. History will judge Mr. Bush’s reaction less for the mistakes he made than for the opportunities he squandered.
    The president had a historic opportunity to unite Americans and the world in common cause. Instead – by exploiting the politics of fear, instigating an optional war in Iraq before finishing a necessary war in Afghanistan, and instituting policies on torture, detainees and domestic surveillance that fly in the face of our values and interests – Mr. Bush divided Americans from each other and from the world.

As with Lieberman, though, there are weak spots. In particular, there’s this contradictory passage:

    Terrorism is a means, not an end, and very different groups and countries are using it toward very different goals. Messrs. Bush and McCain lump together, as a single threat, extremist groups and states more at odds with each other than with us: Sunnis and Shiites, Persians and Arabs, Iraq and Iran, al Qaeda and Shiite militias. If they can’t identify the enemy or describe the war we’re fighting, it’s difficult to see how we will win.
    The results speak for themselves.
    On George Bush’s watch, Iran, not freedom, has been on the march: Iran is much closer to the bomb; its influence in Iraq is expanding; its terrorist proxy Hezbollah is ascendant in Lebanon and that country is on the brink of civil war.

The problem is that on the one hand, he feels constrained (since he’s still in the party) to state the party line that terrorism is a means, not an end, or even a coherent enemy — all of which is true, but his litany of all the different contending actors is belied by the truth he later embraces: That through it all, Iran has been on the march, and gaining against us. That would have been an excellent point to make; it’s just too bad he weakened it by making the situation seem less coherent than it is two paragraphs before (this incoherence of the enemy is essential to the modern Democratic ideology that Lieberman abhors — the refusal to clearly see and clearly state the degree to which we face a coherent, albeit complex, enemy).

I refer to another recent Friedman column, which — thanks to the fact that he isn’t carrying anybody‘s political water — states how all of these superficially disparate issues are connected, to our nation’s great disadvantage (largely due to the Bush failures that Biden refers to):

    The next American president will inherit many foreign policy challenges, but surely one of the biggest will be the cold war. Yes, the next president is going to be a cold-war president — but this cold war is with Iran.
    That is the real umbrella story in the Middle East today — the struggle for influence across the region, with America and its Sunni Arab allies (and Israel) versus Iran, Syria and their non-state allies, Hamas and Hezbollah. As the May 11 editorial in the Iranian daily Kayhan put it, “In the power struggle in the Middle East, there are only two sides: Iran and the U.S.”

Anyway, if the link works for you, I recommend you read this one as well as the last one. Between the two of them, you’ll see an intelligent way to debate foreign policy, as opposed to the idiocy of left and right, Democrat and Republican.

We CAN drive 55

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My best-known Energy Party think-tank fellow called yesterday pretty excited that Tom Friedman had mentioned our 55-mph speed limit plank. The column in question appeared on our op-ed page today. Here’s the passage in question:

It baffles me that President Bush would rather go to Saudi Arabia twice in four months and beg the Saudi king for an oil price break than ask the American people to drive 55 mph, buy more fuel-efficient cars or accept a carbon tax or gasoline tax that might actually help free us from, what he called, our “addiction to oil.”

That was just a portion of the overall message of the column, which is that our nation’s strategic failures — chief among them the failure to adopt a rational energy policy (or any energy policy, really) after 9/11 — have left the nation in a multifaceted bind that is going to be phenomenally difficult, if not impossible, to get out of.

“Call it the triple deficit,” said Mr. Rothkopf. “A fiscal deficit that will soon have us choosing between rationed health care, sufficient education, adequate infrastructure and traditional levels of defense spending, a trade deficit that has us borrowing from our rivals to the point of real vulnerability, and a geopolitical deficit that is a legacy of Iraq, which may result in hesitancy to take strong stands where we must.”

The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging. When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.

The metaphor is inadequate, because one, just one, of those shovels would be energy policy, of which 55 mph would be just one essential facet among many. In fact, that one facet could be a bellwether as to whether we have a chance, even a very slim one, to turn things around. To have any hope, we’re going to have to achieve a phenomenal bipartisan consensus to do everything envisioned in the Energy Party Manifesto. And let me say it one more time: That’s just to have an outside chance.

You don’t want to slow down to 55? Guess what, neither do I. But if we’re not willing to do that, something that is such a minor sacrifice as that, then forget the rest. Our nation is doomed to accelerate into decline.

To hear the voice of one American who is flat ready to do what it takes, listen to the audio  of Samuel Tenenbaum’s phone message.

Now, as Jimmy Malone said to Eliot Ness (in the story, anyway): "What are you prepared to do?" And if your answer is that you are prepared to do that which is convenient, that which pleases you — ideologically, or economically, or in whatever way — I ask, "And then what are you prepared to do?"

Join the movement. Join the Energy Party, before it’s too late for America.

Joe laments loss of the party of FDR, Truman, JFK

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This is why I like Joe Lieberman so much — he’s always writing stuff that sounds like I wrote it myself, always giving me cause to think, Thank God I’m not alone here…

Specifically, he wrote in an op-ed piece in today’s WSJ:

How did the Democratic Party get here? How did the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy drift so far from the foreign policy and national security principles and policies that were at the core of its identity and its purpose?…

This was the Democratic Party that I grew up in – a party that was unhesitatingly and proudly pro-American, a party that was unafraid to make moral judgments about the world beyond our borders. It was a party that understood that either the American people stood united with free nations and freedom fighters against the forces of totalitarianism, or that we would fall divided.

He goes on to lament how this unraveled over Vietnam. He writes wistfully of efforts by such Democrats as himself (remember the Third Way?) to pull the party back from a condition in which it blamed America for all its international troubles, as the party became "prisoner to a foreign policy philosophy that was, in most respects, the antithesis of what Democrats had stood for under Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy."

There are flaws in the piece, admittedly. He uses the inaccurate common terminology, referring to this trend toward self-loathing isolationism as a move "to the left" — when I would assert that it is the rejection of the kind of idealistic, internationalist liberalism of FDR, JFK and the rest. Isolationism is, if nothing else, a manifestation of conservatism — and not the better sort of conservatism, either.

But set that aside. He ends strongly, with a quote from "a great Democratic secretary of state," Dean Acheson (who, perhaps not coincidentally, was from Connecticut):

(N)o people in history have ever survived, who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies.

Let’s talk military buildup

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There are certain things that worry me, and nobody seems to be talking about them. In fact, our public conversations tend to go off in directions entirely opposed to where the discussion should be going. For instance:

  • Children’s brains are essentially formed, in terms of their ability to learn for the rest of their lives, by age 3. What do we do about that? I don’t know, but it’s weird that we can’t even make up our minds to fund 4K for all the kids who could benefit from it.
  • Also on education — we need to bring about serious reforms in public education, from consolidating districts to merit pay to empowering principals. But thanks to our governor and his ilk, we talk about whether we want to support public schools at all.
  • China is growing and modernizing its military at a pace that matches its economic growth. It won’t be all that long before it achieves parity with our own. But instead of talking about matching that R&D, we can’t make up our minds to commit the resources necessary to fight a low-intensity conflict against relatively weak enemies with low-tech weapons.

Anyway, there was an op-ed piece in the WSJ today about the latter worry:

China has a vast internal market newly unified by modern transport and communications; a rapidly flowering technology; an irritable but highly capable workforce that as long as its standard of living improves is unlikely to push the country into paralyzing unrest; and a wider world, now freely accessible, that will buy anything it can make. China is threatened neither by Japan, Russia, India, nor the Western powers, as it was not that long ago. It has an immense talent for the utilization of capital, and in the free market is as agile as a cat.

Unlike the U.S., which governs itself almost unconsciously, reactively and primarily for the short term, China has plotted a long course, in which with great deliberation it joins economic growth to military power. Thirty years ago, in what may be called the "gift of the Meiji," Deng Xiaoping transformed the Japanese slogan fukoku kyohei (rich country, strong arms) into China’s 16-Character Policy: "Combine the military and the civil; combine peace and war; give priority to military products; let the civil support the military."

Anyway, discuss amongst yourselves. And if you can, try to get the people running for president to talk about it. We need them to…

Now and Zen

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Yesterday, my wife and I went on a walk with one of our daughters on the Cayce segment of the Riverwalk. As we were heading back toward our car, we heard the Giant Zipper sound of a very large tree starting to fall, accelerating as it tore down through surrounding vegetation, then landing with a muffled Crump!

Curious to see the source, we started back up the trail roughly in the direction of the sound (the foliage was too dense for the direct approach), but we met a man coming from that direction, and he reckoned that the tree was about 100 yards from the path, well out of sight. So we gave up and left.

When led us to an epiphany, one which I must remember to mention to my friend Hal French over at USC:

If a tree makes a sound in the forest but no one sees it, did it really fall?

When you know the answer to that, Grasshopper, it will be time for you to leave the blog…

Mayor Bob is an op-ed machine

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Recently, in a post headlined, "Now I know how Dr. Frankenstein felt," I mentioned that Bob Coble has enthusiastically embraced the new Saturday Opinion Extra venue. And as you probably noticed, we had a piece from Mayor Bob that Saturday.

We had another one from him this past Saturday. And today, I get this message from Cindi:

I see from Mike that Mayor Bob has already submitted TWO op-eds, and it’s barely Monday…

Yikes.

Just pronounce it right: It’s FRAHNK-en-steen.

Must intellectuals use the language properly?

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First, I realize to what extent I’m opening myself to criticism, but then, when did I ever call myself an intellectual, other than ironically? So have at me, for whatever sins against the language you can find on this blog. I know they are many; one thing I had to do in resolving to maintain a blog to begin with was accept the fact that I would have to write and publish more quickly than I could do so without error. So go for it.

On to my subject: I don’t know whether you clicked through this post on Foreign Policy‘s "Public Intellectuals" reader-participation feature. If you did, you might have found the accompanying article by Christopher Hitchens, "The Plight of the Public Intellectual." Do so now, if it’s not too much trouble. It won’t take long. I’m just asking you to take a quick glance at the first paragraph, which goes (for those of you too lazy to click) like this:

Has anyone ever described themselves as an “intellectual,” or given it as the answer to the frequently asked question, “And what do you do?” The very term “public intellectual” sometimes affects me rather like the expression “organic food.” After all, there can’t be any inorganic nourishment, and it’s difficult to conceive of an intellectual, at least since Immanuel Kant, whose specialization was privacy. However, we probably do need a term that expresses a difference between true intellectuals and the rival callings of “opinion maker” or “pundit,” especially as the last two are intimately bound up with the world of television. (I recently rewatched the historic 40-year-old ABC News confrontation between Gore Vidal and the late William F. Buckley at the Chicago Democratic Convention. The astonishing thing was that the network gave these two intellects a full 22 minutes to discuss matters after the news. How far we have fallen from that standard of commentary.)

Actually, you only have to read the first five words:

Has anyone ever described themselves…

… to which I respond, No, I don’t believe anyone ever has.

Do you not find this painfully jarring? You don’t see it? It’s the number disagreement, dammit! It jumps right out and smacks me in the face. I could not make a mistake like that. There are all sorts of mistakes I can make, and not bat an eye or any other part of my anatomy, or yours either. But this one is a mistake that I find it hard to imagine myself making.

Of course, Mr. Hitchens being an intellectual and all, I find myself doubting that it’s a mistake. There is a school of thought out there — one of the more twisted branches of feminism — that hold that it’s better to refer to a person of nonspecific gender as plural rather than commit the unpardonable sin of using the traditional English standard of the inclusive "he" — or rather, in this case, "himself."

So it seems that one of three things seem likely:

  1. It was an honest slip, on Mr. Hitchens’ part as well as at least one (and probably more) editors’. (The fact is that even if one agrees that we should no longer assume the masculine form is inclusive, one can write around the problem without committing the sin of number disagreement.)
  2. It was a positive assertion of a sociopolitical point, and one that I would have thought far too trite for Mr. Hitchens, who — while I may disagree with him on the existence-of-God thing, is a man of discerning and courageous intellect, one who doesn’t tiptoe around words to avoid offending. Doubt me? Read this piece about Iraq, "A War To Be Proud Of."
  3. This disturbing usage has become so ubiquitous that even top intellectuals — and their editors — think nothing of employing it.

Whichever explanation applies, I was surprised to see such an article begin that way.

Dissed by ‘Foreign Policy’

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Foreign Policy magazine is inviting readers to vote for their Top Five Public Intellectuals. Here’s the link. As you can see, there are 100 "intellectuals" listed.

One Hundred. And yet, I didn’t make the list. Tom Friedman — sure, HE made the list. And the Pope, too — and you know, I don’t even like this Pope as much as the last one…

I’m reduced to being like one of those pathetic celebrity freaks at a premiere, standing alongside the red carpet, hoping to see an intellectual I recognize: "Oh, LOOK, there’s Salman Rushdie! I know him — I met him at a reception over at Andrew Sorensen’s place! I had my picture taken with him (and I’m still waiting to get a copy, I might add)!"

It’s sad. So then I pore over the list, looking for the biases of the compilers. Hmmm. I see four guys who are mainly known for being famous atheists, so is that … no, there are several religious types other than the Pope. Wait, what’s this — how can you have a "Muslim Televangelist," since "evangelist" refers to a proclaimer of the Gospel? No way. They could have put me in that guy’s place…

Oh, well. At least I can pick my own Top Five. Here they are, in alphabetical order, with the rather thin rationales for each:

  1. Pope Benedict XVI — As I said, no John Paul the Great, but a smart guy, whatever you think of him. And he has one of the world’s bulliest pulpits. I figure if you’re looking for public intellectuals, we’re talking potential for influence, right?
  2. Umberto Eco — Did you read The Name of the Rose? I did, and was impressed. (Not so much by Foucault’s Pendulum, though.)
  3. Tom Friedman — Hey, I had to give a nod to somebody in the trade. And he has potential to have more public influence (and for the good, I’d say) than almost anyone else on the list.
  4. Vaclav Havel — Based on the cool factor. Both a playwright and a paradigm-busting political leader.
  5. David Petraeus — There is no more practical or unforgiving testing ground for an idea than the battlefield. By applying his ideas, he turned around both facts on the ground and the political momentum in this country. No mean feat.

I almost put Robert Putnam on there, just to get somebody with communitarian cred. But you can’t have everything in a Top Five list. In fact, if you don’t shoot from the hip, you can’t get your list done. Reflect too much and it doesn’t work.

And believe you me, the most famous names of the moment are likely to dominate here — unless the Foreign Policy readers ALL go esoteric, just to prove how smart they are, which is a distinct possibility.

But this list was compiled with an eye to celebrity, and provocation, for that matter. For instance, I find Robert Samuelson more intellectually impressive than Paul Krugman, but Krugman made the list (provocation) and Samuelson didn’t. And I’ve had the privilege of engaging in long conversations with both Al Gore and Lindsey Graham, and guess what — while Al’s no slouch, Lindsey’s smarter. But with his Nobel and his Oscar, of course he was chosen (also, in defense, he’s WAY more influential, thanks to that celebrity).

Have I ticked off enough people yet? I’m sure I have. OK, smart guy — who’s in YOUR Top Five?

The Energy Party Manifesto: Feb. 4, 2007

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Since, I’m on my Energy Party kick again, it occurs to me to provide you with something never previously published on the blog: My original Energy Party column from the paper. Since it was based on a blog post to start with, I didn’t post it here. Consequently, when I do my obligatory "Energy Party" link, it’s always to the incomplete, rough draft version of the party manifesto.

So, if only to give myself something more complete to link to in the future, is the full column version, published in The State on Feb. 4, 2007. Here’s a PDF of the original page, and here’s the column itself:

THE STATE
JOIN MY PARTY, AND YOUR WILDEST DREAMS WILL COME TRUE. REALLY.
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
EVERYBODY talks about the weather, which is as boring and pointless as the cliche suggests. So let’s do something about it.
    And while we’re at it, let’s win the war on terror, undermine tyrants around the globe, repair our trade imbalance, make our air more breathable, drastically reduce highway deaths and just generally make the whole world a safer, cleaner place.
    It’ll be easy, once we make up our minds to do it. But first, you Democrats and Republicans must throw off the ideological chains that bind you, and we independents must get off the sidelines and into the game.
    In other words, join my new party. No, not the Unparty I’ve written about in the past. You might say that one lacked focus.
    This one will be the Energy Party. Or the "Responsible Party," "Pragmatic Party" or "Grownup Party." Any will do as far as I’m concerned, but for the sake of convenience, I’m going with "Energy" for now.
    Like weather, everybody talks about Energy, but nobody proposes a comprehensive, hardnosed plan to git ‘er done. So let’s change that, go all the way, get real, make like we actually know there’s a war going on. Do the stuff that neither the GOP nor the Dems would ever do.
    I’ve made a start on the plan (and mind, I’m not speaking for the editorial board here). Join me, and we’ll refine it as we go along:
— * Jack up CAFE standards. No messing around with Detroit on this one. It’s possible to make cars that go 50 miles to the gallon. OK, so maybe your family won’t fit in a Prius. Let’s play nice and compromise: Set a fleet average of 40 mph within five years.
— * Raise the price of gasoline permanently to $4. When the price of gas is $2, slap on a $2 tax. When demand slacks off and forces the price down to $1.50, jack the tax up to $2.50. If somebody nukes some oil fields we depend upon, raising the price to $3, the tax drops to $1. Sure, you’ll be paying more, but only as long as you keep consuming as much of it as you have been. Which you won’t. Or if you do, we’ll go to $5.
— * You say the poor will have trouble with the tax? So will I. Good thing we’re going to have public transportation for a change (including my favorite, light rail). That’s one thing we’ll spend that new tax money on.
— * Another is a Manhattan project (or Apollo Project, or insert your favorite 20th century Herculean national initiative name) to develop clean, alternative energy. South Carolina can do hydrogen, Iowa can do bio, and the politicians who will freak out about all this can supply the wind power.
— * Reduce speed limits everywhere to no more than 55 mph. (This must be credited to Samuel Tenenbaum, who bends my ear about it almost daily. He apparently does the same to every presidential wannabe who calls his house looking for him or Inez, bless him.) This will drastically reduce our transportation-related fuel consumption, and have the happy side benefit of saving thousands of lives on our highways. And yes, you can drive 55.
— * Enforce the blasted speed limits. If states say they can’t (and right now, given our shortage of troopers, South Carolina can’t), give them the resources out of the gas tax money. No excuses.
— * Build nuclear power plants as fast as we can (safely, of course). It makes me tired to hear people who are stuck in the 1970s talk about all the dangerous waste from nuke plants. Nuclear waste is compact and containable. Coal waste (just to cite one "safe" alternative) disperses into the atmosphere, contaminates all our lungs and melts the polar ice caps. Yeah, I know; it would be keen if everyone went back to the land and stopped using electricity, but give it up — it ain’t happening.
— * Either ban SUVs for everyone who can’t demonstrate a life-ordeath need to drive one, or tax them at 100 percent of the sales price and throw that into the winthe- war kitty.
— * If we don’t ban SUVs outright, aside from taxing them, launch a huge propaganda campaign along the lines of "Loose Lips Sink Ships." Say, "Hummers are Osama’s Panzer Corps." (OK, hot shot, come to my blog and post your own slogan.) Make wasting fuel the next smoking or DUI — absolutely socially unacceptable.
— * Because it will be a few years before we can be completely free of petrol, drill the ever-lovin’ slush out of the ANWR, explore for oil off Myrtle Beach, and build refinery capacity. But to keep us focused, limit all of these activities to no more than 20 years. Put the limit into the Constitution.
    You get the idea. Respect no one’s sacred cows, left or right. Yeah, I know some of this is, um, provocative. But that’s what we need. We have to wake up, go allout to win the war and, in the long run, save the Earth. Pretty soon, tyrants from Tehran to Moscow to Caracas will be tumbling down without our saying so much as "boo" to them, and global warming will slow within our lifetimes.
    Then, once we’ve done all that, we can start insisting upon some common sense on entitlements, and health care. Whatever works, whatever is practical, whatever solves our problems — no matter whose ox gets gored, or how hard you think it is to do what needs doing. Stop whining and grow up. Leave the ideologues in the dust, while we solve the problems.
    How’s that sound? Can any of y’all get behind that? Let me know, because we need to get going on this stuff.

Join the party at my — I mean, our– Web Headquarters:  http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.

Tom Friedman’s back, and he’s going to bat for the Energy Party!

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Tom Friedman is finally back after a four-month, book-writing sabbatical. The NYT said he’d be back in April, and he just barely made it! (Now I can stop fielding those phone calls from readers wanting to know what happened to him. Here’s a recording of one of those. )

And he’s coming out swinging… and best of all, he’s coming out swinging on behalf of the Energy Party (whether he knows it or not). His first column is headlined, "Dumb as We Wanna Be," and you’ll see it on our op-ed page tomorrow. An excerpt:

    It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.
    When the summer is over, we will have increased our debt to China, increased our transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit…

Go get ’em, Tom! That’s a very fine leadoff hit. Coming up to bat next, on the same op-ed page, will be Robert Samuelson, and he’ll bring Friedman around to score. His piece, succinctly headlined "Start Drilling," is the rhetorical equivalent of a hard line drive down the opposite-field line:

    What to do about oil? First it went from $60 to $80 a barrel, then from $80 to $100 and now to $120. Perhaps we can persuade OPEC to raise production, as some senators suggest; but this seems unlikely. The truth is that we’re almost powerless to influence today’s prices. We are because we didn’t take sensible actions 10 or 20 years ago. If we persist, we will be even worse off in a decade or two. The first thing to do: Start drilling.
    It may surprise Americans to discover that the United States is the third-largest oil producer, behind Saudi Arabia and Russia. We could be producing more, but Congress has put large areas of potential supply off-limits. These include the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and parts of Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. By government estimates, these areas may contain 25 billion to 30 billion barrels of oil (against about 30 billion barrels of proven U.S. reserves today) and 80 trillion cubic feet or more of natural gas (compared with about 200 tcf of proven reserves)….

Not start drilling as a substitute for conservation or the search for new fuels (as the ideologues of the right would have it, and the ideologues of the left deplore), but in addition to. Like I said, this is straight out of the Energy Party playbook (yeah, I know this started as a baseball metaphor, not football, but bear with me).

To reduce dependence on tyrannical foreign sources, to help out Mother Nature, to keep our economy healthy, to stoke innovation, to win the War on Terror, and make us healthier, wealthier and wiser, we should adopt the entire Energy Party platform. We should, among other things I’m forgetting at the moment:

  • Increase CAFE standards further — much further.
  • Raise the tax on gasoline, NOT reduce it, so that we’ll suppress demand, which will reduce upward pressure on prices, and we’ll be paying the higher amounts to ourselves rather than America-haters in Russia, Iran, Venezuela and yes, Saudi Arabia.
  • Use the proceeds for a Manhattan Project or Apollo Project (or whatever
    else kind of project we choose, as long as we understand that it’s the
    moral equivalent of war) to develop new technologies — hydrogen, solar, wind, geothermal, what have you — and shifting the mass of the resources to the most promising ones as they emerge.
  • Reduce highway speed limits to 55 mph, to conserve fuel and save lives (OK, Samuel? I mentioned it.) And oh, yeah — enforce the speed limits. The fines will pay for the additional cops.
  • Drill in ANWR, off the coasts, and anywhere else we can do so in reasonable safety. (Yes, we can.)
  • Increase the availability of mass transit (and if you can swing it, I’d appreciate some light rail; I love the stuff).
  • Fine, jail or ostracize anyone who drives an SUV without a compelling reason to do so. Possible propaganda poster: ""Hummers are Osama’s Panzer Corps."

And so forth and so on.

My point is, no more fooling around. It’s way past time to get serious about this stuff, and stop playing little pandering games. Let’s show a little hustle out there. And no dumb mistakes running the bases out there, fellas…

P.S. — The name of the book Mr. Friedman’s been writing, which will come out in August, is Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution — and How It Can Renew America. So yeah, he’s got an economic stake in these concepts. Well, more power to him. There’s money to be made in doing the smart thing, and to the extent he can persuade us to move in that direction, he deserves to get his taste.Just to help him out, here’s video of him talking about these ideas. Here’s a link to his recent magazine piece on the subject.