Category Archives: Marketplace of ideas

Column on taking sides

Katon Dawson gets it. Why doesn’t everybody?
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
OVER A LATE breakfast at a New York deli in September 2004, S.C. Republican Party Chairman Katon Dawson cheerfully told me this story: Katon_1
Years earlier, as a novice candidate who had been burned once by his own frankness, he started carrying a piece of paper that he would look at whenever he spoke to one of my colleagues. On it he had written some good advice: “Cindi Scoppe is not your friend.”
It did not mean she was his “enemy”; it was just his reminder to be wary because a good reporter isn’t on anybody’s side.
You see, Katon Dawson gets it. Plenty of other people don’t.
I believe that one of my few qualifications for my job is that I am vehemently, stridently, nonpartisan. Mr. Dawson, and his Democratic counterpart Joe Erwin, would say I’m too harsh.
But the problem isn’t just the two major parties, loathsome as they may be. It’s this ubiquitous thing of everything being divided into “sides” — you’ve got to pick, one or the other — to the point that even smart people are unable to frame issues any other way.
Here’s another anecdote, involving the same Ms. Scoppe: A lawmaker told her there was an inconsistency on last Sunday’s editorial page.
The editorial criticized House members for rejecting, on specious grounds, business leaders’ input in the tax reform debate. The column dissected the General Assembly’s rush to override the governor’s veto of an odious bill stripping local governments of the ability to regulate billboards in their communities.
When Cindi told me the lawmaker said the two pieces contradicted each other, I retorted, “Huh?” If anything, they had a consistent theme: the Legislature acting against the public interest.
But the lawmaker saw it this way: The editorial slapped lawmakers for not doing what business wanted them to do, and the column hit them for doing what “business” (the billboard industry) wanted.
I responded, “Say what?”
Cindi said maybe we hadn’t expressed ourselves clearly enough. At this, I got a bit shrill: “How on Earth could we have been expected to anticipate that anybody would read it THAT way?”
And yet, people are always reading what we write that way. The whole world encourages them to perceive every public expression as pro-business or anti-business, or siding with Democrats or Republicans, conservatives or liberals, black people or white people, rich or poor, fat or thin… you get the idea. That’s the trouble. Everybody gets the idea.
This is a profoundly flawed way of looking at the world. If you accept or reject arguments, or even facts, according to whether they help or hurt your side, how can we ever get together and solve anything in a way that serves the common good?
And yes, I know that the news media — especially television, although print is a culprit too — help create and reinforce this dichotomous world view. But that just makes me feel more obligated to use this page to encourage multilateral discussions that help people see things as they are, rather than the way one side or the other wants them to be.
We’re not alone in this. We ran an op-ed piece Thursday from an assistant professor at USC-Aiken who faces the exact same problem every day in the classroom.
Steven Millies wrote about a disturbing Emory University study. When the study’s author “showed negative information to his subjects about a politician they admired, the areas of their brains that control emotion lit up, while their reasoning centers showed no new activity.” Worse, when the subjects rejected information that they did not want to hear, their brains were rewarded in a pattern “similar to what addicts receive when they get their fix.”
The damning conclusion was “that our political opinions are dominated by emotion, and that the reasoning part of our brain is not interested in political information that challenges us. In fact, our brains will work very hard to avoid that information.”
This means Dr. Millies has an uphill fight in trying to teach his students that “In our political choices, we should not settle for the hollow comfort of feeling gratifyingly consistent in our assurance that one party is always right and the other always is wrong.”
The trouble is, according to polls, about two-thirds of the electorate does cling to such assurance. That makes things tough for a fair-minded professor. It also makes it tough to publish a nonpartisan editorial page, and persuade partisans that that is actually what you are doing. No matter what you wrote the day before or the day after, a partisan tends to remember only the last thing you said that ticked him off, and to take that as proof positive that you’re on that other side.
It doesn’t help that so many editorial pages are partisan, even at the best papers. You can almost always predict which “side” The New York Times will be on, and rely upon The Wall Street Journal to take the opposite view.
None of us is immune to wrapping ourselves in comforting notions. Look at me: I didn’t want to hear what Cindi was trying to tell me. But I try to learn. I try to anticipate the way partisans of all sorts will perceive what I’m saying, and to express myself in a way that they see what I mean. But I often fail, and often in ways that surprise me, even after three decades of observing politics.
Now here’s another perception problem to think about: “pro-business” or “anti-business.” Well, all I can say is that I’ll try.
In the meantime, just in case anyone is still unclear: Sometimes business people are right; sometimes they’re wrong; sometimes they’re both. And when we write about them, we’re doing our best to sort all that out.
It’s just like S.C. lawmakers: They don’t always do stupid stuff. It’s merely coincidence that on the two issues we wrote about last Sunday, they did.

You gotta believe

27 Replies

So I see there’s this guy coming to Columbia to talk about how the Church can win back Americans lost in "soulless materialism." That sounds good. Then I see the guy is described as a "priest." But I see that in his picture that he doesn’t look like a priest.

Then I see that the Rev. James Allen is an Episcopalian, and retired at that. Oh. That explains the civvies. Okay. Anyway, maybe this is just my own prejudice as a Roman, but I’d just as soon see the Church wither away as save itself by the means he suggests.

Basically, it’s that same old depressing mantra you hear more and more these days: Here’s his way of putting it: "The emphasis on ‘right believing’ is what divides people, and it is only one theme of the Bible," opines the Rev. James Adams, founder of something called — and this is a heads-up in and of itself — "The Center for Progressive Christianity."

Well, maybe that’s so, if you’re speaking from your Cambridge, Mass., home. But down here among the great unwashed, among folks who’ve actually read the Bible (or, in my case, large swaths of it — remember, I am Catholic), it strikes a very dissonant chord.

Excuse me, but isn’t that what a religion is: A certain set of beliefs? If you don’t subscribe to those beliefs, you don’t subscribe to that religion. It’s a free country, and the door swings both ways. It’s up to you. If your goal is to be a megachurch, then you take the marketing approach and give the "customer" what he wants: Entertainment, gymnasiums, child care, coffee bars and the like.

But if you really want to discern and follow God’s truth, you’re going to have to be a grownup and accept a few "thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots" that you didn’t get to vote on. In other words, you’re going to have to be humble enough to submit to something greater than your own capricious will.

As for the Bible — yeah, there’s some parts in there about parting seas, and massacring one’s enemies, and a Lion’s den, and some songs of praise, and quite a bit of fornication here and there, but the fundamental heart of it is mostly about what we’re supposed to believe and do. In fact, it’s hard to imagine it being the continuing best-seller it is without those parts. Without the morals, it would pretty much be a collection of curious ancient literary antiquities like the Epic of Gilgamesh or some such.

He says that to be more welcoming, the Church needs to be a place of "open, free discussion where nobody has to be made wrong."

Now I find myself wondering: Would no one be wrong? How about somebody who decides that all that "love thy neighbor" and "judge not lest ye be judged" stuff was for the birds, and that it was OK to hit people over the head with a hammer if they didn’t agree? I wouldn’t want to have anything to do with such a Church, and I sort of doubt that Rev. Allen would, either.

Grownups column

35 Replies

Reprinting lousy drawings
just doesn’t make good sense
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
I WAS SORT of disappointed at Kathleen Parker’s take on the whole Danish cartoon/Islamic riots thing (see facing page) — not because I felt strongly about it one way or the other, but because it seemed so unlike her.
When I received the column from her syndicate, it was only the second expression of that particular sentiment I had seen since this craziness started (I’ve seen others since). The first came Cartoons4 from sometime radio host Michael Graham. That did not surprise me; it was just like him.
But I’ve had the opportunity in the past to speak with Kathleen about the philosophy that underlies her writing. On each occasion, I have appreciated (and identified with) the fact that although she is commonly labeled “conservative,” in fact that she does not think of herself as liberal or conservative, Democratic or Republican. She describes her outlook as simply a matter of “being a grownup.” It’s my belief that her writing is generally consistent with that, which is why I like to read her.
That’s why I was disappointed to see her saying, essentially, that we editors should republish these cartoons because we can, because we are free and (by implication) because “they” don’t want us to. Or, to put it another way, to prove we are not “sensitive.”
That hardly seems like the grown-up response. It’s more like the eternal cry of the adolescent.
I choose not to republish those lousy cartoons. And they are lousy, by the way — typically European, most are by U.S. standards not even fully developed cartoons. They are lame illustrations, the kind a page designer might drop into a page just to break up the gray text.
Robert0212_1 When I run cartoons on this issue, they’re going to be good ones with a point, such as the seven we’ve run in the past week from our own Robert Ariail and others.
While I defend the right of those Danes to publish what they wanted, their decision to undertake the project was childish. Seriously, what grownup goes out of his way to mock anyone’s religion? And what did it accomplish? It put the rest of the West in the position of having to defend an immature editorial decision in the face of the even more infantile reaction of the kinds of lunatics who are all too common in Islamic circles. Personally, I’d rather defend something nobler than that.
I mean, if they wanted to decry the fact that Europeans were wusses about Islamist madness and show they weren’t going to be a part of that, why not criticize Islamist actions, rather than mocking the religion? There’s plenty to say within that arena — things worth saying.
And there would be nothing “fine” about cartoons mocking the Holocaust. As for “Piss Christ” and the like, my own personal reaction is that such “art” provides a good argument for reviving the Inquisition. (Maybe we can manage that now that we papists have taken over the Supreme Court.)
Anyway, I choose not to publish the lousy drawings. I take the grown-up perspective: I am free to publish them, but I’m even freer than that, which means I am free not to publish them. I do not feel Cartoons3_2 constrained by any need to prove I’m man enough to cock a snook at a bunch of pathetic idiots running around screaming in foreign cities. Nor do I feel the need to be “sensitive.” I do feel a need to be pragmatic and strategic, as someone who deeply wants my country to prevail in this war on terror.
That’s why I have written in the past that while people in the United States who loudly protest the war in Iraq have every right to do so, they need to be grown-up enough to recognize the consequences: They encourage terrorists and Baathists in Iraq to keep killing Americans (and Iraqis), because our enemies assume (with reason) that if they inflict just a few more casualties, we will cave. Protesters have the right to express themselves, but in the real world of cause and effect, they are encouraging the enemy.
It’s also why we said the president should have ditched Donald rumsfeld
after Abu Ghraib, even if one can’t draw a direct line of responsibility to him. Only a gesture such as that would have shown the world — and the people of Iraq, our proteges in the project of democracy — how seriously we take these things that happened on his watch. Showing that we stand firmly behind the ideals we espouse is far more important strategically than Rummy keeping his job. In fact, if he were replaced by someone who believed in sending over enough troops to get the job done to start with, we’d probably be better off.
(All of this follows the same reasoning we use when adults tell their teenage daughters not to go out dressed like that. Girls may see doing so as their right, but grownups know that, the world being unfair, exercising that “right” would make them more likely to draw the attention of evil men who would do them harm.)
The unifying principle in all these cases (except the parenthetical)? I want us to win the war.
Am I saying newspapers in the U.S. shouldn’t publish the cartoons because we don’t want to offend a bunch of idiots in the Arab street? No. I’m saying I see no sensible reason to do so.
Not to cast aspersions, but those people over there are nuts. They’ve been nuts for as long as I Cartoons5_1 can remember. One could provide all sorts of excuses for them if one were inclined to be “sensitive” — they are traumatized by alienation, by poverty, by propaganda, by an inferiority complex at their once-proud culture becoming subordinate to the West in so many ways — but hey, nuts is nuts. There’s absolutely no excuse for reacting violently to a few stupid drawings. But republishing them just to show we can is no way to lead them to sanity.
If you actually haven’t seen them, and want to, you can easily find them on the Web. If you do, I predict you’ll be sorry that you wasted the time.

Sell the furniture

3 Replies

I meant to send this out yesterday, but got too busy. Fridays are that way. I seldom get time to read Peggy Noonan’s pieces in the WSJ, but I managed to get a little over halfway with this one on Friday, and then finished it this morning.

I like the way she writes, because it transcends the partisanship, even though her own affiliation is not in doubt. I mean, the Jimmy Carter and Rev. Joseph Lowery comments were one of those things that come up every day which neatly splits the partisan hordes. On this one, Democrats cheer and Republicans fume. They know to do this automatically; they’re preprogrammed. No need for any marching orders to go out. It’s a neat system, because the partisans are able to go about truly believing that they’re thinking for themselves (HAR!).

Ms. Noonan does think for herself, and what is her reaction to the incident? She celebrates it, in a way that most people who are capable of independent thinking can join with her, and be warmed by the spirit that moves her to write these things. Sure, she criticizes and even gets snarky now and then. But there’s a thoughtfulness and a warmth moving through it all that helps you not only forgive, but enjoy those things.

Dig the way she gently criticizes the son of her ex-boss:

People sometimes marvel at the grace of George H.W.
Bush. He is a warm and gracious man, and he’s old enough to appreciate
the humor in everything. He’s old enough to appreciate life.
But it is also true that when you attack him or his son from the left
he doesn’t get mad because in his heart he kinda thinks you’re right.
Attack him from the right; you won’t be overwhelmed by his bonhomie
then.

President Bush was fine, his eloquence of the formal
kind. He needs to find the place between High Rhetoric and off-the-cuff
plainspeak. He always does one or the other. But there’s a place in
between, a place that’s not fancy and not common, that would serve him
well if he could find it.

And the way she both trashes and embraces the Clintons, here:

Bill Clinton was, as always, the master. Say what you will, he is the
only politician in America with the confidence to call Episcopalians
"the frozen chosen" and know everyone will laugh and take no offense.
Amid all the happy bombast he was the one who pointed at the casket and
said, "There’s a woman in there." He talked about Mrs. King in good
strong plain terms. Yes, he caused a quarter-second of awkwardness when
he said of the beautiful Coretta that even at age 75 she still had the
goods, but in moments of exuberance we all forget our own history.

And here:

If you don’t understand that Mrs. Clinton was
rehearsing her 2008 announcement speech, then you are a child and must
go home and have a nice cup of cocoa.

This is what is coming: I have had a blessed life.
And like so many people I could choose, after all these years, a life
of comfort. Watch it from the sidelines, tend to my own concerns, watch
the garden grow. But our nation calls out. And if we are to be
Americans we must meet the call. "Send me."

With Bill nodding beside her, his hands clasped
prayerfully in front of him, nodding and working that jaw muscle he
works when he wants you to notice, for just a second, how hard it is
sometimes for him to contain his admiration.

God I love them.

She groks the fullness of all, and takes it in with a love for life as it is, then shares it with us to help us see it the way she does.

I wish she were syndicated. If she were, I’d sell the office furniture to be able to afford to run her. But she’s not.

OK, my turn on the Folks op-ed

7 Replies

OK, now that the comments on the Will Folks op-ed have reached critical mass of 34 comments and rising (including two from Mr. Folks himself), I will take a few moments to address some of the points raised by readers.

First, though, let me give you a brief summary of my thinking as it went before the piece ran — before the storm, as it were.

When the proof landed on my desk, I saw Will’s mug and thought, "Oh, man — what, again?" Then I remembered the earlier conversation in which it had been mentioned that this piece was in the pipeline. A board member responded by asking, "Is it something we would run if someone else wrote it?" That’s pretty much our standard response whenever the question arises whether we should give this person or that person space on our pages — what if it were from someone else? If the answer is "yes," we generally go with it. The answer was "yes."

So I read the piece on the page and agreed with my colleague who had put it there that yes, if this had been from some other similarly situated advocate on that side of the debate, we would have run it. But note that qualification of "similarly situated": It probably NOT have run if it had come in from someone who had never been a player of some kind in the debate. I say that because the arguments were pretty weak, and persuasive only to someone who already believes all this stuff, regardless of evidence to the contrary. Coming from Will Folks, its weakness was interesting in and of itself. Coming from someone unknown to the readers, it would have had little value.

To elaborate on that, some folks have asked why we would "give a platform" to someone who pleaded guilty to criminal domestic violence. Well, we wouldn’t. But we would "give a platform" to someone who is writing on a subject that is important and timely and who:

Was the spokesman, until quite recently, of the current governor.
Demonstrated his temperamental unsuitability for the job a number of
times during the four years he spoke for the governor, but continued to
hold the position until, as I just said, quite recently.
Is still advocating, as hard as he can, policies that are priorities for that governor.
Writes with a tone and style that is much the same as the way he spoke when he was in the governor’s office — lashing out, dismissive toward those who disagree, etc.
Brings to the surface, in a particularly stark manner, something that has been hinted at more subtly up to now — the growing tension between the governor and those who think like him and an increasingly unified business leadership.

My friend Samuel Tenenbaum said "Shame!" over our having run this piece. But I feel no shame. Well, I will admit that one thing about the
decision to run this does nag at my conscience just a bit: the fact that the piece was so
weak in its arguments that it undermined Mr. Folks’ point of view, with which
I disagree. So should I have waited for a stronger piece expressing that
point of view to come in? Well, if I had, I’d still be waiting. It’s not like we had a strong piece and this one, and picked this one. This is what we had.

Another respondent says critics are attacking Mr. Folks, but dodging the substance of what he said. Well, let’s discuss two or three points of that substance:

Will dismisses the financial acumen of some of the heaviest business hitters in South Carolina (or as he puts it, "prominent leaders of the so-called ‘business community’"), and does so in a way that takes for granted that HE and the governor know better than they do what is good for business in South Carolina. He sneers at the "left-leaning S.C. Chamber of Commerce" (note to Hunter Howard — better quit wearing those Che T-shirts around the State House). He calls Darla Moore and Mack Whittle "self-appointed dilettantes." To provide a little perspective, as the governor said to me awhile back about his having hired Will in the first place, "You take someone who was playing bass guitar in a rock ‘n’ roll band and you give him a chance." Yeah, OK, let’s see — to whom would I go for credible financial advice? Darla Moore, or Will Folks? Mack Whittle, or Will Folks? Harris DeLoach, or Will Folks? Don Herriott, or Will Folks? Ooh, that’s a toughie.
While the governor can be said to have more experience in business than his former protege, to suggest that he is someone whose credentials suggest more real-world experience in financial dealings than the people Mr. Folks dismisses is ludicrous. Mr. Sanford’s record in the private sector before he took up politics is by comparison to these people — and this is charitably understating the case — less than impressive.

Actually, I’m going to stop there, and not get into his strong suggestion that ONLY the kind of tax cut the governor wants could possibly help our economy, or his indulgence in yet another gratuitous slap at public schools ("unquestionably the nation’s worst") or his mentioning that "state spending jumping another 9.1 percent" without noting by how much it had been cut in the several preceding years (some agencies, such as the Corrections Department, by more than 20 percent during that period). Basically, I’m tired of typing.

But before I go, let me address a few reader comments specifically:

Scott Barrow says "you’re giving him credibility and helping him restore his bad name by printing his columns." I don’t see how. If anything, I’m hurting the cause he advocates by running a piece from him (I already addressed the fact that my conscience nags at me about that, even though my conscience, yaller dog that it is, doesn’t know what it’s talking about).
Uncle Elmer asks, "Does Mr. Sanford really need cool-headed, articulate friends like this?" Well, no, he doesn’t. In fact, the last time
we ran a piece by Mr. Folks, the governor’s office called to question our having done so.
Honesty says, "The fact that you found the need to edit his previous editorial due to
his apparent dishonesty while deeming him worthy of now being published
as a guest editorialist borders on bizarre." Well, not really. We edit everybody, and a lot of what we edit out are unsupportable statements that are wrongly presented as fact. Sometimes we miss such mistakes and instances of outright attempts to mislead, but we try.
Will Folks himself complained that "Just once… it would be nice to submit an article and actually
have folks debate its merits instead of venting their spleens with all
this anonymous speculation regarding a domestic situation they didn’t
witness and don’t possess the slightest bit of insight into." Well, once again, Will, I tried. I refer you to the above.
Finally, Don Williams raised a broader complaint "about the plethora of conservative local columnists which have been given platform" on our pages. Well, first, I wouldn’t call Will Folks a "conservative." I think that term refers far better to the "left-leaning" Chamber of Commerce than to him. And Mr. Williams lumps him in with Bob McAlister and Mike Cakora as being three who "arrive at the same conclusions time after time." Well, Bob works for those "dilettantes" over at the Palmetto Institute, and is therefore pushing very different views from Mr. Folks on these issues. Mr. McAlister is also a very conservative Southern Baptist, while last I read, Mr. Cakora was an atheist. I have no idea where Mr. Cakora (whom I met once, about six years ago — a fact I thought I’d throw in for Mark Whittington‘s benefit) stands on the tax issue (maybe you can find out on his blog). Beyond that, we usually get complaints about running too many liberals. I don’t know whether we do or not. I particularly don’t know on local columns. Basically, we generally take what we’re sent, and choose between them based on quality and relevance (and whether they’ve been published somewhere else, which is generally a disqualifier). Mr. McAlister sends us far more columns than probably any other local contributor — more than we actually run, I would point out. Joe Darby — who is no one’s definition of a conservative — probably comes in a distant second (we hear from him less since he moved to Charleston). Tom Turnipseed? I would say he submits columns less often that Mr. McAlister, but more often than than Mr. Darby. (Mr. Turnipseed is also regularly published elsewhere). We run letters from him more often, including a short one on Dec. 18.

As for nationally syndicated columnists, here’s a blog by a fairly nonpartisan guy who takes the trouble to rate columnists according to how much they lean either Democratic or Republican. Of the ones on his list we run regularly, he sees five as Dems and only one as GOP. But then, he lists George Will, of all people, as being slightly Democratic, so… Also, he doesn’t include some of our conservative regulars, such as Charles Krauthammer and Cal Thomas. I guess "left" and "right" are pretty much in the eyes of the beholder, which is one reason I hate using the terms.

That’s all I have to say about that. For now.

USC/Clemson column

57 Replies

Gamecock, Tiger team up against caps
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
WEEK BEFORE last, I ran into USC President Andrew Sorensen as he was on his way to an “unprecedented” meeting with House Speaker Bobby Harrell. They were going to talk budgets.
What was so new about that?
“Carolina and Clemson are talking to him at the same time,” Dr. Sorensen said. “And we’re using the same numbers.” To those who remember the old days of tigers and chickens fighting like… well, like cats and birds, over funding, this was remarkable. Mr. Harrell was so “overwhelmed,” Dr. Bobby_presidents_1 Sorensen later said, he sent for a photographer to record the event.
“Jim and I have become increasingly close in terms of… what we want to do and how we want to do it,” Dr. Sorensen said when he and Clemson President James Barker visited the editorial board last week.
Mr. Barker stressed that this new level of cooperation was “not because of the governor’s ‘tax.’ ”
In his latest executive budget, Gov. Mark Sanford proposed “a one percent reduction for Clemson, USC, and MUSC that will result in savings of $3,232,091 in general funds to encourage such further collaboration.”
“Yes,” said Dr. Sorensen, “he takes away a million from each of us to stimulate us to collaborate…. if you can understand the logic in that, please explain it to me.”
This is not the only area in which the two presidents agreed with each other and disagreed with the governor.
For instance, there is the governor’s proposed cap on tuition increases. Sounds good, doesn’t it? It would help me out, with my fourth child now in college.
And I like the governor’s stated goal, which is to force consolidation and reorganization of the state’s non-system of public higher education.
But are caps a good idea for the state of South Carolina? No, and not just because this isn’t going to convince lawmakers to cut the number of institutions.
Tuition started shooting up when the Legislature decided to cut back on direct funding of colleges, and give middle-class voters scholarship checks paid for by poor folks suckered into playing the lottery.
South Carolina’s public colleges have experienced a larger percentage decrease in state funding than those of any other Southern Regional Education Board state over the last decade — a period in which most SREB states increased funding.
Of the 16 states, only West Virginia funded its colleges at a lower percentage of the regional average last year. South Carolina was at 72.45 percent of that average. North Carolina was at the top end, at 136.95 percent.
Higher state funding means lower tuition. Not coincidentally, Kiplinger’s recently listed UNC-Chapel Hill as the best deal in the country, measured by quality compared to cost. Out of 130 public colleges listed, Clemson was 24th, and USC 31st — in spite of those tuition increases.
Or perhaps because of them. The money to improve academics had to come from somewhere. And since the General Assembly has seen fit to turn the money over to the students, via scholarships, that’s where the institutions have turned for funding.
At USC, said Dr. Sorensen, 96 percent of entering freshmen get “one of the lottery-funded scholarships.” At Clemson, it’s 99 percent. In fact, said Mr. Barker, “At Clemson, not one freshman from South Carolina paid full tuition” this year.
OK, so the heads of the schools don’t want tuition caps. Big surprise. What about the students? I don’t know about all of them, but some student government leaders at USC sent a letter
to the governor last week asking for a meeting “to make you aware of our concerns with these proposals, as we feel they do not completely address the desires of students.”
One of the signers, student body Treasurer Tommy Preston, was diplomatic about the governor’s plan when I asked about it, saying that it was “our opinion that there’s just not enough information” to know, but it seemed the caps “potentially could be harmful in the future.”
Never mind what the treasurer thinks. What does Tommy think?
“Personally,” he said, “I think our state has a bigger problem with higher education funding.”
Smart kid, that Tommy.

About Will Folks…

43 Replies

I just wrote this long piece asking what y’all thought about Will Folks’ op-ed today — not the content, but the fact that we ran it at all. I’ve gotten a lot of flak about that today.

And just as I went to save, TYPEPAD BLEW UP ON ME!!!!

Just as well — I had written down MY thoughts on the question, and it’s probably best to see what y’all think first, and then answer you.

So, what do you think?

A legitimate civil liberties issue?

7 Replies

It’s not often I look at a "civil liberties" issue and see any merit in the libertarian position. To me, the constitution — properly and conservatively understood — does an excellent job of protecting all the personal rights we need, and I tend to be impatient with people who either see a "slippery slope" threat to those freedoms in everything government does, or want to invent entirely new "rights" (as the U.S. Supreme Court did in Griswold and its extension, Roe).

But I have to say that in this case, I can see some legitimate worries. Forcing people who may do a bad thing in the future — but haven’t done a thing yet — to take antipsychotic drugs is disturbing. For those who have trouble getting the link, I’ll explain that the WSJ story is about a "national trend," pushed by a "maverick psychiatrist" named E. Fuller Torrey, to pass laws that force psychotics to take their medicine or have the police come take them away to lock them up in the not-so-funny farm.

The thing is, his main argument is that he believes this helps "prevent crime," and here’s how he has sold the idea:

Dr. Torrey keeps an online database with hundreds of grisly anecdotes about mentally ill people who killed the innocent. They include a jobless drifter who pushed an aspiring screenwriter in front of a subway train and a farmer who shot a 19-year-old receptionist to death. Influenced by such stories, Michigan, New York, Florida and California are among the states that have toughened their mental-health treatment laws since 1998, when Dr. Torrey formed the Treatment Advocacy Center to lobby for forced care.

We have here shades of "Minority Report" and A Clockwork Orange (what with the idea of letting the rozzes lovet a poor bezoomy malchick so some veck can mess with his gulliver rather than letting him make up his rassoodock by his oddy-knocky).

So am I convinced this is a bad idea? No, but I’m willing to concede that I’m not sure either way. Both the libertarian point of view (how can you arrest people who’ve done nothing wrong?) and the societal protection consideration paired with the argument that opponents "want to preserve a person’s right to be psychotic" seem to have merit.

I present this to you folks out there for debate. But first, here are some pros and cons I see. I’ll start with the pros:

People with untreated mental illnesses are one of South Carolina’s great challenges. It’s a huge factor in homelessness, overcrowded jails and hospital emergency rooms, a lack of proper care (since jailers, for instance, know little of looking after the mentally ill), and yes, crime.
Medication has been developed that can effect remarkable results with these brain diseases. But one manifestation of mental illness may be that the patient won’t take his meds on his own. In such a situation, when the choice is between someone wandering the streets out of his head and a functioning member of society, maybe the state should step in to act in loco parentis, so to speak, and require him to do what’s good for him — and what’s good for the others affected and potentially affected by his sickness.
I’ve seen a lot of harm done by overconcern for mental patient’s rights — excessive deinstitutionalization, for one. Why not just act to fix the problem?

And now some cons:

Suppose the police do haul them in. We don’t have the psych wards to put them in. Taken a step further, we could go a long way toward fixing the problem of the mentally ill wandering the streets by simply properly funding both insitutionalized and community-based care.
We don’t really understand the brain, and while there’s a plethora of "miracle drugs" out there, they don’t always have the expected effect. Based on my own experience with anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds, depending upon your dosage and other, metabolic, factors, you can have side effects that make you feel even worse, or create whole new problems. I’ve known too many people have to take one psychiatric drug after another, until their shrink manages to help them by trial and error (or they just quit taking anything, which under the circumstances may not be an irrational reaction).
Whose standards do we use to define "what’s good for him: Big Nurse‘s or R.P McMurphy’s?

OK, what are your thoughts?

Outsourcing the republic

14 Replies

Outsourcing the deliberative process
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
THE POSITION we take in the above editorial is an uncomfortable one. I say that not because using a “BRAC” approach to consolidate school districts is a bad idea. In fact, it’s a great one. But it shouldn’t be.
Our system of representative democracy is all about the deliberative process: We, the people, elect representatives to go to Congress or the Legislature and study complex issues in detail, debate them, make tough decisions for the sake of the whole nation or state, and then come back and face the voters.
This proposal sidesteps that process: It empowers a separate body — not directly elected — to address a long-neglected statewide problem. The members of that body do all the studying and work out all the details — that is, the actual discernment. Then they hand the whole package to the elected body for a simple “yes” or “no.”
The tragedy is that this is apparently the only way that our small state can do away with the shameful waste of having 85 school districts — some of them incredibly tiny, each with its own separate administration.
Why? Because elected representatives won’t touch it. Why? Because they’re elected.
Anyone with common sense looking objectively at this can see that it would be insane not to consolidate districts. But any representative who advocates shuttering a local district faces the danger
of not getting re-elected.
So we find ourselves in a situation in which the most effective approach is to outsource the deliberative process. And school consolidation isn’t the only tough state issue that our delegates may choose to sub-contract.
S.C. House Speaker Bobby Harrell is proposing the same approach on tax reform. He would have a special panel draw up a list of sales tax exemptions to eliminate. Why? Because elected representatives don’t have the guts to face the narrow constituencies (from auto dealers to newspapers) whose tax breaks such a plan might eliminate.
The truth nowadays is that on some issues, our republic’s deliberative process freezes up and dies like a car engine without a drop of oil in it.
That’s how “BRAC” — for Base Realignment and Closure — entered the language to start with. It was impossible for Congress to achieve savings and efficiencies by closing and consolidating domestic military bases. Why? Because every member of Congress had to have one. Or two, or more.
Instead of an objective comparison of the relative merits of this or that military facility, followed by tough but smart decisions, the only sort of “debate” that occurred before BRAC went like this: “You keep my base open, and I’ll scratch your back, too.”
Our system is dysfunctional — at least on issues that involve sacred cows — not because representatives are out of touch, but because they are never out of touch with home long enough to collaborate seriously with their colleagues for the greater good.
Most advocates of term limits say lawmakers get “corrupted” by Washington or Columbia to the point that they forget the wishes of the folks back home. Hardly.
Syndicated columnist George Will has advocated term limits for the opposite reason. He says the only way lawmakers will stop listening to the folks back home long enough to think is if they cannot run for re-election.
I oppose term limits for various reasons, including the fact that I’d rather have laws made by people with some experience at it. But we’ve got to find some way to make critical decisions that politicians with their eyes on the next election refuse to face.
One good thing about a BRAC is that it can be seen as representative democracy the way it was intended to work: A group is delegated to study the issues with few distractions and deliberate until a rational plan emerges.
This may be the only way our elected representatives ever vote on a proposal that takes the whole state’s interest into account. A plan that makes the tough calls would probably never make it to the floor otherwise.
I like to think our system is timeless. But that reckons without technology: In the days before the 24-hour news cycle, blogs, cell phones and mass e-mails, representatives had a chance to concentrate constructively on issues and make decisions accordingly. The cacophony of modern communications makes that nearly impossible.
Some look at this situation and come up with a whole other way: skirting the republican system entirely. Gov. Mark Sanford would ask voters to curtail the Legislature’s power to appropriate, by setting an arbitrary constitutional limit on spending growth.
His reasoning sounds a bit like ours: The system isn’t working. When I asked how he could advocate undermining “small-R” republican ideals, he said: “You need to be more aware of the political environment that you’re operating in — be less, you know, idealistic, less, uh, you know, high and lofty, and just get down into the gears of how our government system actually works.”
Talk about being disillusioned. Of course, I can identify. But there’s a difference. While the BRAC idea reflects a lack of faith in the Legislature’s deliberative fortitude, it does not abandon faith in deliberation
itself. In fact, it gives the General Assembly a little help in that area.
The contrast between such a careful, studious process of objective decision-making and what the governor is proposing — a quick Election Day show of hands, yes or no, on an unfathomably complex fiscal question — could hardly be greater.
I’m still not thrilled about having to institute a “work-around” to set policy, but comparing a “BRAC” to setting future budgets in a single plebiscite makes me feel a lot better about it.

Hey! Leave those kids alone

10 Replies

The job of editorial page editor — the way I choose to do it, anyway — involves a curious mix of leadership and collaboration.

As I frequently tell readers, our editorial board makes decisions by consensus, meaning that even if not everyone in the room buys into the position completely, it has been shaped to the point that each member can live with having the editorial appear beneath his or her name (which, while editorials are by definition not signed — only columns have bylines — is always up there on the masthead with the rest of our names for all the world to see. For an illustration, zoom in on the upper left-hand corner of this page.)

My colleagues occasionally say I’m not being entirely candid when I say that because we don’t always reach consensus, and sometimes we take a certain position only because I insist , despite the lingering objections of one or more members. True, there are times when I consider it necessary to take a position, and a consensus proves impossible — on some political endorsements, for instance. Unlike other issues, an endorsement picks one candidate or another, yes or no — leaving no room for the compromises that make consensus possible. And I firmly believe that failing to endorse — when one of these people will be elected — is a copout.

My response to this gentle remonstration is that just as often (if not more so), I give in and go along with the consensus. An example is today’s lead editorial. Personally, I’d like to see summer vacation start at Memorial Day and end after Labor Day. I sympathize with those who want their kids to enjoy the same sort of three-month idylls that I remember
from my own youth. And while I’m a big advocate of standards in the schools, I personally fail to understand what is magical about 180 days of instruction. I seem to recall many thousands of hours that I spent in school as being superfluous. I believe what I learned between kindergarten and 12th grade could have been taught in half the time.

But my colleagues pretty much unanimously insist that I’m completely WRONG on this, and since I have to confess that to some extent my position is based in sentimentality rather than evidence and logic (and I tend to treat positions based in "feelings" rather than thought with contempt), I’ve gone along with them.

But I only go along so far, and the copy has to get by me to get on the page. An example — a paragraph in today’s editorial originally read like this:

On a practical level, the bill approved Wednesday by the House Education Committee isn’t quite as bad as some previous attempts to set local school calendars: It allows schools to start back as early as the third Monday of August, rather than holding them to the agrarian, post-Labor Day schedule that the businesses on the beach seem to think will benefit them. But then, if you want to talk practicalities, the whole notion that starting school in August somehow shortens the summer vacation is nutty: An early start means kids get out of school by the end of May instead of mid-June. The actual length of summer vacation is the same no matter when it starts and stops.

I was willing to go along with all but one word of that. I paused in the editing process to send an instant message to the writer:

A couple of points re this…
1. Summer vacation IS shorter than it used to be. Kids didn’t get off in mid-June; they got off around Memorial Day.
2. August is more summery than June. It’s hotter. In June, the ocean water is sometimes still cold. Most of June occurs in the spring. All of August (and most of September) occur during the summer.
I guess what I’m saying here is, I object to "nutty." "Unconvincing," perhaps — at least, to a consensus of our board.

So, being the editor, I changed the word, and the writer did not protest. But she still thinks it’s nutty.

What else did he say?

1 Reply

My first version of today’s column originally started out with a summary of what Gov. Sanford considered to be most important in his State of the State speech. But I took so many words setting up that list, and then had so much trouble deciding where to go after listing those items, that I scrapped it and started over with what you see on today’s page.

Here is that first rough draft/outline, as far as I took it, anyway:

One of the great challenges in making the most of the governor’s annual pre-State of the State briefing luncheon for editorial page editors is that you don’t get a copy of the speech until you get there.

So you find yourself trying to eat, read the speech (which is on your lap with your notebook, there being no room on the table), ask the governor questions about it as you’re reading it, hear other people’s questions, and take notes simultaneously.

(By the way, this is not a complaint aimed at our current governor; it was ever thus. Or at least, ever since I started going to these in 1994.)

So after a lot of scattershot questions based on things haphazardly gleaned from the text on the run last Wednesday, Charleston Post and Courier Editor Barbara Williams had the good sense to make this request: You tell us what you consider to be the main points of your speech, governor.

His answer, as near as I could write down while trying to get some salad into my mouth, was as follows:

Workers compensation

Restructuring

Holding the line on spending, and paying back trust funds.

Leverage private-sector investment in rural South Carolina (broadband access).

Education.

On education, he said he had three main points to stress:

Early childhood.

Charter schools, for the in-between-aged kids.

Tuition caps at the higher-education level.

That’s as far as I got. Anyway, I thought you might find this helpful if you try to wade through the speech itself. Or maybe you won’t. Anyway, there it is.

No commies here

25 Replies

Mark Sanford is not a communist Sanford_state_2
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
‘I DON’T want people to lose sight of who they’re talking to, and I sound like a half communist by the time I’ve laid out all these different options,” said Gov. Mark Sanford at a pre-speech briefing on his State of the State address Wednesday.
“… which I’m obviously not,” he added with an easy laugh, the same laugh he uses when he calls me a “socialist,” which he does with some frequency.
I should add some context.
First, the governor isn’t any kind of communist — half, quarter or full. Nor am I a socialist; he just says that because he’s such a thoroughgoing libertarian, and I’m not. I’m sort of in the middle on the whole small-government-versus-big-government thing. Government should be as big or small as we the people, acting through our elected representatives, decide it should be, and whether taxes rise or fall should depend upon the situation.
The governor was mock-concerned about being perceived as a demi-Marxist because in his speech, he was actually taking a more pragmatic view of the whole tax-and-spend thing. While insisting that if lawmakers swap a sales tax increase for a property tax reduction it must be revenue-neutral or even an overall decrease, he went on to speak about the need to consider other aspects of our overall tax system. In other words, he was to an extent embracing our position that tax reform must be comprehensive.
He spoke positively of impact fees to transfer the cost of growth to new development, and proposed to “take the opportunity to look at (sales tax) exemptions that are not serving their purpose.”
Mr. Sanford tiptoed repeatedly around the question of whether he considers property tax relief — which conventional wisdom holds is Job One in this election year — really needs to happen in 2006.
His fancy footwork on that went over the heads of many legislators — the first time they interrupted him with applause for a policy statement was on page 21 of a 24-page speech, when he said, “We think this can be the year of property tax relief….”
The solons clapped like crazy, and I had to wonder why.
Can be? Not will be? What did he mean by that? Back at that luncheon briefing with editorial page editors, Charleston Post and Courier Editor Barbara Williams tried for several minutes to pin him down on that. Finally, with a somewhat exasperated tone, she said: “Are you pushing for it this year? This is what I’m asking. Are you going to be one of those who says we’ve got to absolutely do something this year?”
“Do you see that written in here?” the governor asked.
“No,” she said.
After a grunt that sort of sounds like “Yeah” on my recording, he concluded, “But that’s as much as I’m going to say.”
But even though he refuses to declare himself clearly as part of this headlong rush to placate angry homeowners before November, the governor need not fear that anyone will erect a bust of him alongside Lenin’s (assuming anyone still has a bust of Lenin).
Never mind that he has stopped saying overtly dismissive things about public education. Nor should you attach much importance to the fact that he keeps saying things like, “This is not about some philosophical jihad that says government is bad and the private sector is good.”
Make no mistake: Mark Sanford is still a libertarian to his core. It’s hard-wired into his reflexive responses, even while he’s trying to reach out to folks to the “left” of him by repeatedly citing Thomas Friedman.
Check out the one most radical proposal in his speech.
This is a man who ran for office on a plan to restructure South Carolina’s government so that each branch can exercise its separate, enumerated powers, with proper checks and balances. So you’d think he’d understand the way the system should work.
And yet, he proposes to undermine the central deliberative principle underlying the republican form of government devised by our nation’s Founders. He would do this by asking voters to approve a change in the state constitution that would set a specific formula for future spending growth, regardless of what future needs might be.
Does that sound good to you? Well, fortunately, George Washington and James Madison and Ben Franklin and Alexander Hamilton et al. realized that you couldn’t conduct the complex business of running a government — even one firmly rooted in the consent of the governed — through simple, up-or-down plebiscites. They knew that we would need to delegate the business of deciding what needed to be done through government, how much it would cost, and how to pay for it. And that if we didn’t like the decisions delegates made, we could elect somebody else.
If you ask most people, without context, whether they want to limit government spending — yes or no, no in-between — they will of course say “yes.” If you ask me that, I’ll say yes, and mean it.
But if you ask me whether I think this state is adequately meeting its duty to, for instance, keep our highways safe, I’ll say “no.” And if you ask me whether insufficient funds might be a factor in that failure, I’ll say “yes.” And if you ask me whether I have the slightest idea what percentage of our state economy the General Assembly would need to devote to that purpose to get the job done in future years, I’d have to say, “Of course not.”
And yet that is the kind of arbitrary judgment that the governor would have us make this fall — and lock into our constitution — with his proposed “Taxpayer Empowerment Amendment” plebiscite.
So never fear: Mark Sanford is still Mark Sanford, and he’s certainly no commie.
If Mark Sanford were not still the supply-side, privatizing, anti-tax, anti-spending guy we’ve all come to know over the past four years, I’d be disappointed in him. I’ve always res
pected his honesty and consistency. And those are definitely still intact.

Lake rising column

14 Replies

First, take action to make
the whole lake rise
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
POLITICAL NOSTRUMS often become obnoxious with excessive application. Some simply start out that way.
For me, one that has always fit in the latter category is “A rising tide lifts all boats.”
I’ve never denied that there’s truth in it. At least, I intuit that there’s truth in it. I’m no economist, but it’s always made sense that if you pump more wealth into a reasonably fair and open economic system, many people’s boats — if not most people’s — should float somewhat higher. Not all boats, of course, what with the poor always being with us, but there was logic in the saying.
I still didn’t like it. It was too devil-may-care: Don’t worry about whether everybody’s boat is seaworthy; just don’t impede the tide, and assume everything will be copacetic. It’s like something one would say over drinks at the 19th hole, followed by: “I’m fine. Aren’t you fine? Well, then everybody must be fine.”
Oh, and don’t give me a bunch of guff about “class warfare.” I enjoy a round of golf as much as the next man. That doesn’t mean I have to adopt an air of insouciance toward society’s have-nots. So the “rising tide” metaphor always left me a little cold.
At least, it did until last week, when I heard it put another way: “The whole lake has got to rise for my boat to rise.” That implies a sense of responsibility for raising the water.
Harris DeLoach — chairman, president and chief executive officer of Sonoco Products — said that Wednesday, when he and other state business leaders presented their “Competitiveness Agenda” for the 2006 legislative session, which starts Tuesday.
This is an agenda with considerable juice behind it, since it is being promoted in common by the state Chamber of Commerce, the Palmetto Institute, the S.C. Council on Competitiveness and the Palmetto Business Forum.
The groups banded together last year to push successfully for tort reform, retirement system restructuring, a measure to encourage high school students to choose “career clusters” that help them see the point of staying in school, and “innovation centers” to connect university-based research to the marketplace.
They had less success advocating adequate funding for highways and health care, but overall, the stratagem showed what could happen when state business leaders combine their clout and let lawmakers know they’re truly serious about some issues.
“This time last year, I’ll admit I was a little apprehensive,” said Chamber President Hunter Howard, who has carried water for his organization in the State House lobby for many a session. But once he tried a “whole new approach… going after the Legislature with really a stick kind of approach — but in a nice way,” he was pleased with the results.
There will no doubt be those who detect an odor of self-interest whenever business people push for anything. And there’s truth in that, too. Mr. DeLoach does want his boat to rise, after all. But the encouraging thing is that he and the others leading this coalition understand that for that to happen, the water has to rise for everyone. Rather than simply saying “I’ve got mine” and being satisfied, they are pursuing policies that — whether you think they’re smartly crafted or not — acknowledge the truth that we’re all in this together: If the least of these in South Carolina are left back, so are we all.
Take tax reform, for instance. As my colleague Cindi Scoppe noted in a recent column, the business sector is determined not to be outsqueaked by homeowners to the extent that businesses bear a disproportionate share of the tax burden.
But there’s good in that. Lawmakers are coming back to town this week all in a sweat to get angry residential property taxpayers off their backs, which creates the danger of overreacting yet again with little regard for the stability, fairness and efficacy of the overall tax system.
Basically, the business honchos are saying what this editorial board has said for years — that however much emotion swirls around property taxes or some other outrage of the moment, the goal should be “comprehensive tax system reform.”
Of course, the biz types have a few things on their wish list that most of us would never think to ask for, such as workers’ compensation “reform.” (I put that in quotes because I haven’t decided whether it’s reform or not.)
But I’m still struck by the extent to which these business leaders seem more interested than many of our politicians in doing, as Mr. DeLoach put it, “what’s good for the whole state,” seeing that as the way to benefit them all.
Those who reflexively distrust the private sector see it as wanting nothing more from government than to cut its taxes and leave it alone. But too many aspects of this agenda give the lie to that.
In fact, “We’re referred to as the group that wants to raise taxes,” said Carolina First Bank CEO Mack Whittle. “Well, we’re the businesses that pay the taxes” (about 43 percent of the total, asserts the Palmetto Institute’s Jim Fields). “We have to look at the road system; we have to look at education. And if it does take more revenue, then so be it.”
So it is that you see the business community leading the charge for kindergarten for all 4-year-olds who need it.
It is, in large part, the kind of agenda that reflects what real pro-business conservatives — the kind who have a proven ability to meet a payroll, and a realistic grasp of what it would take to provide better paychecks for all South Carolinians — see as the state’s real needs.
What they come up with differs necessarily from what professional “conservatives” who are all theory and no practice tend to advocate. You know, the Grover Norquists, and those w
ho would play along with them.
Am I endorsing this whole agenda? Of course not. I haven’t begun to make up my mind about significant portions of it. Others I know I’m against. For instance, while I welcome these groups to the comprehensive tax reform cause, my colleagues and I staunchly oppose some of the particulars they advocate under that umbrella — such as imposing spending caps on local government. And we disagree with their position on the powers of the Ports Authority.
But I do like the stated attitude that underlies much of this approach. Like Mr. DeLoach, I want to see the whole lake rise.

Relative family values

40 Replies

Paul DeMarco, a potential charter member of the Unparty from Marion County, had the following to say in response to this post:

I do agree that more fairly allocating funds to poor districts like ours will help…

But there is no amount of money that can repair the disintegration
of the family. Many students in our district enter K-4 or K-5 already
so far behind they will never catch up and the most important single
factor holding them back is lack of a stable two parent family. If a
child spends his pre-school years in a single parent home he has been
handicapped in a way that is very difficult to overcome. My hat goes
off to the single parents who are doing their best to make it work but
we all know that two parents paddling in the same direction will take a
child farther than one.

This issue (the disintegration of the family, particularly in the black community) seems to be the elephant in the living room….

Why are we not focused on this issue? Is is something that people feel
is inevitable or simply too overwhelming to address comprehensively?

Later, Dave wrote:

Paul, You hit the nail right on the head but you will never see the
State publish (in print) what you just wrote. We all know that one of
the reasons, if not the main reason, that this problem cannot be solved
is that if someone acknowledges the true problem, then you will be
attacked by the race-baiters. As a result, we as a society peck away at
symptoms of the problem, while politely ignoring the cultural
dysfunction inherent in many black families. Keep in mind there is a
major political party, called Democrats, who give lip service to fixing
the problem, but in reality it is in the Democrats interest to have a
huge voting block living on the welfare plantation….

Paul, demonstrating the sort of lively debate we’d be likely to have at Unparty meetings, came back with:

Brad,

How do you respond to Dave’s complaint that the State is too timid
about identifying single-parent families as a major source of society’s
woes.
Also, it seems to me that on this and other issues our focus should be
on trying to come up with viable solutions/interventions rather than
simply debating.

After all that — and partly because that thread is scattered through a 36-comment conversation among multiple parties, meaning that lots of folks might miss it — I thought I’d respond in a separate post, as follows:

Paul,

The issue isn’t whether The State is "too timid;" it’s whether there’s a public policy issue to be addressed. In the conventional sense, there’s not. But once you start talking about the state getting into pre-K development, you are into unconventional territory. So let’s explore it.

Up to now, our concern has been what to do with the reality that faces our public schools: There are children out there with only one or no parents — or parents who don’t give a damn about them or their education — and what are we going to do about those kids? We can rant all we want about how that shouldn’t happen, but it does, and it’s not the kids’ fault. So we end up about where Judge Cooper did — we need to do something to help those kids whose parents have failed them. It’s the well-established principle of the state acting in loco parentis under extreme circumstances.

But if you’re talking about acting to prevent such situations from arising, you’re getting into areas that give the civil libertarians fits (which, come to think of it, might be enough reason to go there in and of itself). Are we going to license reproduction … outlaw bastardy … make the term "illegitimate" true to its Latin root, as in "not lawful?" What would be the penalties for the inevitable breaches? And what would you do with the children who are the products of such illegal activity? Actually, that brings us back to where we already are…

Personally, I’m for going the non-governmental route and simply resurrecting shame as a salutary force in our society. I’ve been for that for a long time. My being for it, though, hasn’t done much to stem the tidal wave of shamelessness I see washing all around me.

Maybe we should make shame a plank in the Unparty platform. What do you think?

Another ‘Talk amongst yourselves’ post

26 Replies

Sorry about the no-posts-in-three-days thing. So where have I been? Probably the same place you’ve been, judging by the paucity of recent comments: busy. Too busy to stop and comment on anything, more than what we’re putting in the paper.

But in case you do have time on your hands, and I just haven’t given you anything decent to chew on, let’s try the Linda Richman "talk amongst yourselves" thing again..

A former colleague shared this with me via e-mail this week. The headline on it was, "Media Bias Is Real, Finds UCLA Political Scientist." Well, no big news flash there. What was interesting was how the bias found by the researcher manifested itself. Some will be surprised by the prof’s findings (and some will no doubt question his methodology). Here’s a sample of some of the interesting bits:

While
the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper’s
news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge
Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public
television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream
media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left….

Only
Fox News’ "Special Report With Brit Hume" and The
Washington Times scored right of the average

U.S.

voter.

The
most centrist outlet proved to be the "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer." CNN’s "NewsNight
With Aaron Brown" and ABC’s "Good Morning America" were
a close second and third.

Anyway, if you want to read more, follow the link. That’s what it’s there for.

Sorry for the inconvenience

The groundswell continues

19 Replies

The massive groundswell of grass-roots support for my idea for an anti-party party continues to grow at an unstoppable pace, as indisputably evidenced by this single, one-line comment placed on a recent post by GS Gantt:

What happened to the "UNparty"?

The Unparty has given its vast staff and assorted, irregular hangers-on time off for the holidays — specifically, for Advent and, starting Dec. 25, Christmas. (No, Virginia, the Christmas season has not yet begun. If you doubt me, check a liturgical calendar.)

We will leave it to other parties to disturb the atmosphere of contemplative anticipation that should characterize this season with their charges, countercharges, offensive comments and abject apologies. We will resume our frantic schedule of not issuing statements, not holding conventions and not raising money sometime after Jan. 6.

In praise of an honest man

62 Replies

It was really refreshing to read Ted Rall’s latest piece. Here’s an anti-war man of the old school, one who doesn’t mess about with half-measures. Disagree vehemently with his perspective if you will (and I’ll be with you on that) but you’ve got to admire his honesty.

He starts off by expressing his contempt for the inconsistency he sees around him:

"Support the Troops, Oppose Their Actions," reads the oxymoronic headline of an April 2005 essay at antiwar.com.

But he’s just warming up. He goes on to slice and dice the very "support the troops but oppose the war" position that I have objected to in this space — only from the opposite direction. While I support the troops and their mission, I have to appreciate Mr. Rall‘s consistency in opposing both:

If we are, as Jean-Paul Sartre posited, defined by our actions, most of
the blame for the murder of more than 100,000 Iraqis belongs to our top
government officials. But Bush’s armchair warriors couldn’t have
invaded Iraq without a compliant and complicit United States
military–one that, it should be noted, is all volunteer. These
individuals, who enjoy free will, fire the guns and drop the bombs. If
personal responsibility is to have any meaning, the men and women of
our armed forces have to be held individually accountable for the
carnage.

Oh, and by the way, he doesn’t stop at condemning soldiers who have done things that most of us would censure, such as the abuses at Abu Ghraib. He goes far beyond that:

Even if U.S. forces were not violating the rules of war in
Iraq–torturing, maiming and murdering POWs, robbing and subjecting
civilians to collective punishment, dropping white phosphorus and
depleted uranium bombs on civilian targets–the war itself, based on
false pretenses and opposed by the United Nations, would remain a gross
violation of American and international law.

So, you’re wondering, is he saying that soldiers and marines and sailors who just go to Iraq are war criminals? Well, I refer you to his next paragraph:

Soldiers,
they say, must obey orders. However, "just following orders" wasn’t an
acceptable excuse at the Nuremberg trials, where the charges included
waging a war of aggression. Do our government’s poorly paid contract
killers deserve our "support" for blindly following orders?

How bracing it is to read such rhetoric! None of that namby-pamby "support the troops by bringing them home" pablum for our Ted! The men and women who willingly bear untold sacrifices on our behalf are "contract killers" to him. No doubt where he stands.

Enter his world for a moment. It is a world in which the commander-in-chief is "an unelected imposter," and in which:

Every
order to deploy a soldier, aviator or sailor to fight in Iraq is by
definition an unlawful order, one that he or she is legally and morally
bound to refuse.

So what’s a soldier to do? Well, Mr. Rall’s got it all figured out:

The
military used to be an honorable calling. Not under Bush. Ethical
Americans considering a military career should seek a civilian job
until a lawful, elected government has been restored in Washington and
we have withdrawn our forces from occupied Afghanistan and Iraq. Those
who are already enlisted should refuse to reenlist. Soldiers trapped by
"stop loss" orders should apply for conscientious objector status
(which is difficult to obtain) or refuse deployment based on the
unlawful order principle. And if all else fails, there’s always
desertion.

OK, so there are a couple of places where he slips into the ambivalence that has characterized the current anti-war movement — such as when he says "The military used to be an honorable calling." (That assertion begs for elaboration, of course. When was it honorable, by Mr. Rall’s standards? Until January 2001? For about four years in the early 1940s? Up until 1783?) And there’s a confusing bit toward the end where he seems to hold up actions by the anti-war folks during Vietnam to "support the troops" as somehow backing his position.

But for the most part, he resolutely refuses to wimp out. He recovers quickly at the end, with a breezy, "OK, lefties? You can drop the ‘support the troops’ shtick now." You’ve got to give him that.

At this point, I should say that I’m sure there are thousands upon thousands of people who are honestly sincere in saying they "support the troops but oppose the war." But then, I’ve noticed time and again in my 52 years that the human brain has an almost limitless capacity for rationalization. That’s what enables people to say, "I’m not pro-abortion; I’m pro-choice," or "I’m not a racist, but…."

But set that aside. I’m sure there are many people who love the troops and hate the war and are not rationalizing, but are sincere about it from the bottom of their souls, both consciously and unconsciously.

I have to wonder, though: How many others out there, deep down, really and truly despise the troops themselves for fighting and dying (and killing) for us? Well, we seem to be at one and counting.

Dale, don’t give up on us!

37 Replies

I just posted a reply to a comment on my Sunday column, and what I had to say was important enough that I thought I’d also publish it as a separate post. Hmm. That sounded pompous. What I mean is, it’s important in terms of explaining what this blog is all about (or what I would like for it to be about) that I thought I should make the statement a little more prominently.

The comment was from a blog newcomer called "Dale" who chimed in after a series of, shall we say, overheated remarks from some of my regulars. Here is his comment, in its entirety:

Mr. Warthen:

Good column today, much livelier than usual. In our house we agree
with your conclusion that we have to stay and finish in Iraq. Thanks
for cluing us in on Joe Lieberman’s remarks.

A few other thoughts:
This is my first blog visit. Based on the posts before me I’d say
you’re going above and beyond putting up with the stuff people say. If
blogs are limited to ranters, I doubt I’ll pick up the habit.

How come Congressman Murtha’s Iraq remarks got intense coverage and Senator Lieberman’s did not?

I’m a subscriber to the Economist too and agree that they do a good
job providing news. They’re pretty liberal but even so I think they do
a better job than the American media by presenting more facts and
also by providing both sides of partisan issues. Why do I learn more
about current US news by reading the Economist than I do by reading The
State or watching CNN?

Thanks again.

And here is what I had to say to him in reply:

Dale, please don’t be put off by the other comments — at least, not to the point of giving up on blogs. We need more comments from people who are put off by extreme partisanship and personal attacks. If that description fits, that means we need YOU.

I’m trying to create a space here where people with various opinions can interact in a civil manner. But I also let anybody have their say (I haven’t used my ability to delete comments once since starting the blog in May — except for cases when the same comment is published twice, because of a glitch in the software). But it is my hope that people who are open-minded, reasonable and respectful of others will ultimately flock to this space in sufficient numbers that they will help distinguish this blog from the all-too-many partisan screamfests out there.

In fact, in case you haven’t read them, here are a couple of my recent attempts to tilt at the madly spinning windmills of partisanship. If you agree with what I’m saying there, and you agree with Joe Lieberman, you might want to give this blog a chance for a while before giving up.

As for your question, "How come Congressman Murtha’s Iraq remarks got intense coverage and Senator Lieberman’s did not?"… well, that was one of the oversights by the media that my column was meant to address, to the extremely limited ability I have to address it. The only defensible answer to the question was that Mr. Murtha was rather dramatically changing his point of view, and Mr. Lieberman was not — thereby making the Murtha comments more newsworthy, according to the basic standards of news judgment. But his comments weren’t nearly as important as the play they got, or the reactions from other politicians, or the reactions to the reactions, or any of that other destructive nonsense that happens in the echo chamber inside the Beltway.

One more thing: Your assessment that The Economist is "pretty liberal" is spot-on, although possibly not in the way that you meant it. The Economist refers to itself as "a liberal newspaper." That is to say, it is "liberal" in the classic sense of the term. It is very libertarian, particularly in the economic sense — very free-market-oriented, opposed to the welfare states of Europe, etc. Of course, over here, people tend to call that "conservative," even though it’s technically wrong to do so. (And even in explaining itself, the publication occasionally uses the modern, popular sense of the term, as illustrated in the above-referenced link.) Therefore, Steve Aiken has a point when he disagrees with your characterization — although I have to differ with him when he seems (at least by implication, although I may be misreading him) to equate calling that publication "liberal" with calling people with whom one disagrees "retarded."

Of course, I now welcome responses to my response.

Saying it right out loud

1 Reply

I had to cut a lot of stuff out of my Sunday column to get it to fit into the paper — about 10 inches worth. About par for the course, really.

But I thought I’d share with you one little parenthetical that I trimmed, because it raises a point about the difference between the press in this country and over in Britain. I had originally stuck this in right after noting that the cover of The Economist last week was emblazoned with the words, "Why America must stay" — which was also the headline of the main editorial in that edition:

(The Economist doesn’t muck about when it has something to say, the way newspapers on this side of the pond do. Its cover is always about its top editorial — or “leader,” to use the Brit jargon.)

I’m not necessarily advocating we do that sort of thing over here, mind. But I do like the frankness of it, and I found the point interesting enough to raise, for those of you not already familiar with this practice. The "leaders," by the way, all appear right up front — before you get to the news content.

One other point: Before you say, "But The Economist isn’t a newspaper; it’s a magazine," I should tell you that, all appearances to the contrary, that publication calls itself a "newspaper." And it’s an awfully good one, too, even if it does only publish once a week.

bradwarthen.com

All The News That Gives You Fits

Category Archives: Marketplace of ideas

Column on taking sides

You gotta believe

Grownups column

Sell the furniture

OK, my turn on the Folks op-ed

USC/Clemson column

About Will Folks…

A legitimate civil liberties issue?

Outsourcing the republic

Hey! Leave those kids alone

What else did he say?

No commies here

Lake rising column

Relative family values

Another ‘Talk amongst yourselves’ post

Sorry for the inconvenience

The groundswell continues

In praise of an honest man

Dale, don’t give up on us!

Saying it right out loud