Category Archives: Marketplace of ideas

Two birds with one deal?

Being busy with lots of other stuff last year, I never really focused on new Sen. Barack Obama. I did Obama notice sort of peripherally that the Democrats seemed to be really excited about him.

I can sort of see why, after a colleague today shared with me this excerpt from a story in The Washington Post:

Last month, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) offered a proposal to raise
federal fuel-economy standards in cars and trucks by 3 percent a year
in exchange for the federal government picking up the costs of retiree
health care. Detroit automakers say the costs are a crippling burden in
competition with foreign rivals.

Talk about killing two birds — increasing fuel economy and lowering the price of automobiles. Of courses, that assumes that automakers would pass on the savings to us (estimated at $1,500 per vehicle), which I realize is quite an assumption. But it could happen.

I have to say, though, that while solving automakers’ health care cost problem is nice and all, how about the rest of us? I don’t know what the solution is, but I agree with Nicholas Kristof when he writes in a column that will appear on tomorrow’s page that something a tad more comprehensive is called for. (I’ll go back into this in the morning and link to it.)

Sunday, Oct. 2 column

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Issues, and people, are too
complex to describe with labels
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
IF YOU GO to my blog — the address is at the bottom of this column — and click on the “comments” link for any given posting, you’ll find a whole lot of opining going on, but the quality of dialogue often leaves something to be desired. Not always (in fact, many of my electronic correspondents are thoughtful enough to make me regret my own superficiality), but often.
The Internet has done much to facilitate the creation of “communities” of narrow interest, from Monty Python fanatics to shoe fetishists. But it has militated against community in the broader sense. Because you can spend all day talking with people just like you, you tend to be less motivated to understand those who view the world differently. And the more that happens, the more facile our world views become.
It’s not just the Internet. You don’t even want to get me started (again) on the 24-hour cable news channels, with their shouting matches between opposing partisans substituting for meaningful commentary.
Nor are newspapers blameless. We have tended to cover politics as spectacle, as a sport with only two sides to each game — winner and loser, left and right, black and white. That makes issues easy to write about on deadline. But it doesn’t help citizens solve problems.
When issues, and people, are presented as caricatures — that dumb Bush, that flip-flopping Kerry, that skirt-chasing Clinton, that crook Nixon (this is not an entirely new phenomenon) — we can’t truly understand them.
I try to avoid this by interacting personally with newsmakers as much as possible, whether I need something for publication from them at a given moment or not.
But “as much as possible” isn’t always enough. Consequently, I still sometimes make facile assumptions.
Case in point — Perry Bumgarner. Before last week, here’s what I knew about Mr. Bumgarner: He was a founder of We the People of Lexington County, the antitax group. He was running for County Council as a Democrat, after having failed to get elected as a Republican. It seemed highly unlikely that we would be interested in endorsing a person whose only previous interaction with local government was to complain about taxes — especially when he was up against Republican Jim Kinard, a man with practical experience dealing with the day-to-day realities of governing on the Lexington 4 school board.
We had interviewed Mr. Kinard at length back during the Republican primary process (which had led to not one, but two runoffs), so when he came in to see us last week, we had few questions. Besides, he was up against a two-time loser who apparently was only running as a Democrat to avoid having primary competition. This one was going to be easy.
But then Mr. Bumgarner came in, and I had to learn for the thousandth time that you can’t assume such things. There was, as always, more to him than the two-dimensional picture in my mind.
At first, he seemed to fit the caricature. A retired homebuilder, he was dodgy on the subject of impact fees. Asked why he had switched parties, he was startlingly frank: “Because they had three Republicans running, and I didn’t want to get mixed up in that thing.” Yep, a political opportunist who knows nothing about government beyond the fact that he doesn’t like paying for it.
But then we kept talking, and the caricature took on three-dimensional human form. His U.S. Navy tie tack led to questions, and I found he had served with the Marines as a medical corpsman in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, earning a Silver Star and a Purple Heart. (“It was cold,” he said, at the “Frozen Chosin” Reservoir. No kidding.)
He may not have had much to say about impact fees, but he had spent so much time observing county government in recent years that he had something knowledgeable to say about almost everything else. Some of his positions were surprising, coming from an antitax activist. He said he would advocate a half-cent sales tax to support the regional bus system if it would expand into Lexington County beyond its three current routes. Rare is the local politician willing to go out on that limb while seeking office. In fact, rare is the candidate who has thought much about the buses at all. (One GOP primary candidate we spoke to last month didn’t even know there was such a thing as a regional transit authority.)
He even favors letting the school districts retain the authority to tax — which is certainly more than I would allow. (So who’s the anti-tax activist?) But we found agreement on the need to consolidate school districts, and on the lack of accountability of the special purpose districts that run the county’s recreation facilities.
When Mr. Bumgarner left, my colleague Warren Bolton and I looked at each other, and each knew what the other was thinking: There’s more to this guy than we thought.
So we endorsed him, right? No. But we seriously considered it. In the end, we went with Mr. Kinard, for several reasons: his experience as a school trustee, his more specific ideas about what his district and the county needed, his broad community involvement and his relative youth and energy. I gave him points for being willing to face a crowded primary field, rather than taking the easy route. And he knows where he stands on impact fees: He’s for them, as a sensible alternative to higher p
roperty taxes.
But it was no slam-dunk. Politics, and life, get complicated when you take the time to see past initial assumptions.
Maybe I need to get some of those partisans who shoot at each other on my blog together in a room, face-to-face. That could be dangerous, but who knows? We all might learn something.

How would Jesus vote? Would he vote at all?

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I see my latest posting has, much to my surprise, provoked a theological discussion. OK, I’ll jump in, and regret it later.

I just wish both sides would stop trying to enlist Jesus for their party platforms.

Jesus was pretty much indifferent to government, and for good reason. If he had been walking the Earth as a man today, he might have been more interested in politics than he was. In our representative democracy, we expect government to reflect our values, and then we fight over what those values should be. There is therefore room in the political arena for the kinds of things Jesus spoke of. But as a first-century Jew, the government he knew was about raw, exploitative power (the same thing libertarians think it’s about today, but they’re delusional), and it had no intention of bowing to the values of Judea or any other part of the empire. The Roman system was a plunder economy. There was no chance that any taxes one paid would ever be used to benefit you and your community. Yet despite that, he said go ahead and pay your taxes. He was sort of saying, if that’s Caesar’s trip, go along with it so he’ll leave you alone. But give God his due, which is something else altogether.

As for capitalism — well, I’ve always been struck by the way his parables seemed to uphold capitalist values. And that still challenges me, because he was totally against anyone being acquisitive. If you have two coats, give one away — that doesn’t sound like an affirmation of a consumer society to me. And yet the servant who buried his master’s money to keep it safe was castigated because he didn’t go out and risk it in an effort to make a profit. The servants who played the market were the good guys in the parable, but the one who refused to be a capitalist was the bad guy. (Of course, maybe his master wouldn’t have been so mad at him if he hadn’t indulged in all that Marxist rhetoric, calling the master an exploiter of the workers and such. That was sort of imprudent of him.)

So really, whether you think Jesus would have been for or against an activist government, or pro or con on capitalism, you can find something in the Gospels to support (or undermine) your conclusion. This might make Jesus seem contradictory, to the modern mind. But the thing was (I believe), he just didn’t care about the kinds of things we argue about in the public sphere today. If some Simon Zealot from either end of today’s political spectrum could sit down and try to enlist Him in the cause, I think he’d shrug and change the conversation to what HE deems to be important.

This is why, as a Catholic, I can’t root for either side in the political wars. I don’t think Jesus would, either. He would care about certain issues, standing up for justice and mercy, but he wouldn’t join a side. Both parties hold positions that are inimical to all that Rabbi Jesus taught.

Dare we dream?

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Actually, the item on "Morning Edition" that followed the one referenced in my last posting holds much greater significance, and is worth listening to if only for this: It makes a passing reference to the possibility that Ariel Sharon, under attack from within his own party over the Gaza withdrawal, was thinking about forming a new, centrist party to challenge both Likud and Labour — if Bibi is successful in his attempt to overthrow him. (Which he was not — this time.)

Now set aside for a moment whether including "Sharon" and "centrist" in the same sentence constitutes an oxymoron (I would argue that it does not, given some of his moves lately — if you’ll let me ignore some of his other moves lately). What interested me about that was this:

If the leader of a nation who’s very existence is constantly under threat — a place where differences between parties are about the life or death of the nation, not just abstract ideology — can seriously think about minting a new party that charts a middle way, then why on Earth can’t we do the same here in the States?

Imagine a party in which John McCain, Joe Lieberman, Joe Biden or our own Lindsey Graham might actually have a chance of getting the presidential nomination — or which, in the past, might have nominated a Scoop Jackson or a Howard Baker. Now that would be a party that might cause me to question my universal disdain toward the very idea of parties.

Plays better with others

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By contrast with the release from GOP HQ quoted in my last posting, I’d like to point out how much the governor’s rhetoric has improved in this same area.

The governor started out, a couple of years back, making the same kinds of misleading statements about public education as Mr. Dawson — saying, essentially, that we weren’t getting any improvement for our investment in public schools, when most of the data indicated otherwise (he was careful to select those very few data that supported his false conclusion). This has been, since the beginning, the standard rhetorical procedure for all those who want to undermine public education — first say that we’re wasting our money on it, then try to get the voters to buy some snake oil instead.

But the governor is no dummy, and ultimately an honest man. (I think the false and misleading things he’s said about the schools arise from his utter ignorance of the world of public education, and his instinctive distrust of that terra incognita.) This shows in the rhetorical about-face I’ve witnessed on his part recently.

Check out, for instance, the governor’s release of the same date as Mr. Dawson’s. Mr. Sanford has now learned to say,

This goes to show that there are a whole lot of teachers, parents and students working very hard to educate our state’s children, and they deserve credit for these improvements.

Mind you, he’s referring to the exact same data that caused Mr. Dawson to say, "Regrettably, this is sad and disappointing day for South Carolina’s students and parents."

Of course, the governor uses his congratulatory statement as a setup for the sales pitch for the snake oil, following those words immediately with:

Unfortunately, incremental change in SAT scores isn’t going to get us where we need to be in terms of competing with other states, let alone in competing with the rest of the world. That’s why this administration will continue pushing for fundamental reforms to the current system that give parents more choices…

Still, Gov. Sanford’s acknowledgment of progress is laudable. And it’s smart, on one level: Most of us love our public schools and are proud of their progress. The governor is trying to sell a political idea, and you don’t get anywhere with most voters by trashing the schools.

But on another level, he’s throwing away an essential tool in his selling process. It’s impossible to sell something as far-out and obviously unworkable as PPIC without getting people so worked up against the current education reform process that they’re unable to think clearly. Don’t expect to see the governor’s allies in this process drop the tactic. The only sector of the electorate in which they have made any progress is among those who have heard the statement, "We keep throwing money at the schools (they love that phrase, "throwing money"), and they just keep getting worse" so many times that they believe this utter canard.

They’re like the poor, programmed souls in Huxley‘s Brave New World:

The students nodded, emphatically agreeing with a statement which upwards of sixty-two thousand repetitions in the dark had made them accept, not merely as true, but as axiomatic, self-evident, utterly indisputable.

Groups such as the Orwellian South Carolinians for Responsible Government and its moneyed out-of-state fellow travelers aren’t going to give up the lies, because they can’t win without them.

But let’s at least appreciate that the governor is learning a little of the truth about the schools, and speaking it. Yes, you can say he’s being the "good cop," but we usual suspects should learn to appreciate any kindnesses we can get. Remember, the bad cops will be back in the interrogation room in force, come January.

What about that speech?

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A regular correspondent name of Phillip observed in a comment on this post (it’s the fourth comment) that "the President’s comments to the UN get my vote for the most encouraging words I’ve heard from his mouth since he took office."

What I’d like to do here is pose this question to Phillip and others: What did you think of his speech last night from Jackson Square?

Of course, I’d like to know anyway, but I will sheepishly admit that I have an additional motive this time for seeking your input: Unbelievably, I forgot about the speech, and therefore missed it — I didn’t get home and start eating dinner until after 9, and started reading a book while I was eating, so it kind of got away from me. Now I’ll have to go back and read it, and watch it via streaming video on C-SPAN or something — which I haven’t had time to do yet, but will get to later.

(This is particularly vexing because this is one of the two things I have a TV for. I don’t watch TV "news," but I do watch speeches and debates and other live, newsmaking events in which I want to pick up on nuances not available from reading the text. And I watch movies. Oh, yeah, I recently picked up a third reason to turn on the boob tube — my wife and I like to watch "House." Now there’s a guy who would make a perfect blogger — rapid-fire, cutting opinions, without the slightest worry about pleasing anybody.)

Anyway, a colleague who is no fan of the president was telling me the speech was a good one. I’m curious what others think. If this is one of those moments when partisans agree on something, I’d like to cherish the moment. If it isn’t — well, there would be nothing new about that, would there?

An op-op-ed from the editor

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Some quick, friendly rebuttals to the Rev. Wiley Cooper’s op-ed piece today:

We don’t just want a "czar" for the city. We want one for the state, too. This isn’t some whim on our part, but something we’ve called for consistently on the state and local levels for years now. We see the weakness of mayors and governors in South Carolina as a key reason why we’re still last where we want to be first, and first where we want to be last.
"Czar?" Give us a break, Wiley! We’re talking about the basic concept of letting the executive run the executive functions of government, and letting the legislative body
(in this case, the Council) set broad policy and pass laws (or ordinances). Call us crazy, but we see no point in electing executives if they don’t have the power to act effectively as executives. And note that last: We would have elections, you know. Unlike with czars, the position would not be hereditary.
The business analogy is completely off (aside from the fact that comparing government to business is one of the greatest fallacies in contemporary political rhetoric). Businesses have clearly defined, separate roles for directors and company officers. And that’s what we want here.
Note that none of the examples cited of cities that function well under a council-manager form are in South Carolina. One of the reasons we need a mayor empowered to run the city is because South Carolina cities face obstacles that communities in North Carolina and other states don’t face — such as weak annexation laws. The de facto city of Columbia is split into about 10 municipalities, two counties, between five and seven school districts (depending on how you define the area). Why? Because it’s hard to redraw city limits out to where the people and the development are going. And when you try, you end up with a feud between warring municipalities (note the spat between Columbia and Irmo over the shoestring annexation of Columbiana). Until we loosen annexation laws, get rid of special purpose districts, and do a number of other things we’ve been calling for for over a decade to throw off the chains that bind local government, we will particularly need strong leadership in the stunted arrondissement that is de jure Columbia. We have enough other handicaps without that one.
The central argument here is a complete non sequitur. I keep hearing this one over and over from defenders of the stagnant status quo: Just because someone is a good visionary leader who has the political skills to get elected doesn’t mean he or she can be an effective, day-to-day administrator. Well, who’s arguing with that? Of course a strong mayor would hire good people to work under him and do the things he can’t do in a 24-hour day — or that he (or she) lacks the skills to do. Call that assistant (or more likely, assistants) a chief of staff, or an operations officer, or even, if you like, "city manager." Just as long as that person answers only to the mayor — and not to a committee of seven — effective, accountable government will be possible.
Democracy is messy, and what I don’t understand is why opponents of this change fear it so. They don’t trust the people to elect a good, honest mayor who is actually empowered to run the city from day to day. They raise the spectre of corrupt political bosses. Yes, democracy demands of the voters a great responsibility to choose someone of ability and integrity. Let’s give them a chance.
Finally, I must note that Rev. Cooper is to be commended for his long-time, passionate dedication to his local neighborhood association. We need more citizens as civic-minded as he. But as we will discuss on Friday’s editorial page, neighborhood associations are among the main interests resisting a common vision for the city being implemented by a strong executive.

Rev. Cooper has his legitimately and sincerely held view of what’s best for the community, and we have ours. We think ours is based in a broader definition of the community, but he honestly disagrees. That’s what we have the op-ed page for.

Welcome, thecolumbiarecord.com bloggers!

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I hereby issue a hearty welcome to a slew of new bloggers, all associated with the newspaper’s new community blog, TheColumbiaRecord.com. I do this with slightly mixed feelings, as this is competition I can ill afford. Some of these people (if not all of them) are already better at this than I am. I hope they will only spur me on to make my blog that much better. Either that, or the pressure will provide that last little straw necessary to make me crack, and you’ll see me running naked through the streets screaming "The Visigoths are coming!" in Esperanto. Which to you will appear normal, but I promise there is a distinction here somewhere.

Anyway, I thought the most neighborly way I could greet these interlopers would be to run Cindi’s column about them, right here on our stage, with handy links.

So here it is:

TheColumbiaRecord.com will change
how you think about bloggers
By CINDI ROSS SCOPPE
Associate Editor
BLOGGERS, like the talking heads on TV “news” channels, tend to be loud-mouthed know-it-alls on the political extremes who delight in their uninformed ignorance and spew disdain upon the rational among us who actually know what they’re talking about.
So what in the world are Democratic Rep. James Smith and Republican Rep. Ted Pitts doing writing a blog together? Not as point-counterpoint crazies, but as friends and colleagues providing an “issues-based political dialogue”?
Well, I can’t say for sure yet; they can’t either: They’ve been brainstorming the idea for the past week, and they’re going to lunch today to sketch out a plan. But I know it’s going to be interesting. It might even help break down some of the partisan barriers that are so poisoning our politics, our government and our society.
This may be a little bolder than the rest of the offerings, but what James and Ted are doing is typical of the approach you’ll find at TheColumbiaRecord.com, which debuts today as the Midlands’ on-line gathering place.
Like James and Ted, the folks who are already blogging are people who know what they’re talking about. And contrary to the other cliche about blogging, most of them have little or nothing to say about politics.
This is no accident. The team at The State who developed TheColumbiaRecord.com set out to create something different from the Wild West of the blogosphere, but also different from the typical newspaper site. We sought out people in our community who are experts in their fields — oftentimes fields that don’t get as much coverage in a newspaper as aficionados seek. We recruited some people you know. But we also realized that our community is full of interesting, intelligent, knowledgeable people whom most of us have never heard of, and so we went looking for them.
The first such person we found (with the help of State food reporter Allison Askins) was cookbook author and culinary instructor Susan Slack, who is now sharing her original recipes and her knowledge to help the rest of us learn to cook like a pro.
I knew Kathy Plowden had the personality to be a great blogger when she told me about how she had transformed herself from “the person who killed artificial plants” into a master gardener.
Arborist Jay Clingman heard about the project through word of mouth and contacted us with a full-blown proposal of how he would guide and moderate a dialogue on “trees and forests, timberland, wildlife preserves, wetlands, urban forests, tree problems and even tree and forest politics”; it was a topic we never would have thought to include on the blog site, but what he’s written so far is fun reading.
Actor/storyteller Darion McCloud, whom State reporter Pat Berman described as “among the most open, enjoyable and quotable people I’ve talked to in the past couple of years,” plans to talk about a bit of everything as he seeks to integrate the arts into modern life.
And the list goes on, from astronomy buff Hap Griffin and ultra-marathoner Ray Krolewicz to Lisa Yanity, a guidance counselor at A.C. Flora High School and Army Reserve captain who’s serving in Afghanistan, and Dr. Leo Walker, who is integrating non-traditional approaches with traditional medicine to help readers achieve “not merely the absence of disease but an optimum state of physical, mental, social and spiritual well-being.”
Of course, you’ll also find politics on TheColumbiaRecord.com, and readers of these pages will find familiar names: Three of the best writers from our old “community columnists” op-ed initiative — political consultant Bob McAlister, systems development specialist Mike Cakora and hydrologist Frank Chapelle — are blogging. (Go to the public square and find out, in his fabulous first posting, how Bob discovered that fellow blogger Brad Warthen isn’t into porn, or what Mike thinks of David Wilkins’ use of the queen’s English. Hint: Mike’s headline is “Did he really say that?”)
The site also includes Columbia City Council members Daniel Rickenmann and Tameika Isaac Devine, the Columbia Urban League’s J.T. McLawhorn and Brandy Pinkston, who runs the state Consumer Affairs Department and is offering tips and answering questions on scams, pitfalls and urban myths. And, as soon as they work out the details, James and Ted.
The blogs are just one part of TheColumbiaRecord.com. There’s also a place for people to send in their news about their schools, churches, neighborhoods, clubs, hobbies — whatever interests them. I think that’s going to create exciting and useful community conversations.
But that’s just what I think. What I know is that the bloggers are great. As we’ve read the early postings, my colleagues at work, and my new blogger friends, have come away time and time again amazed by the great writing and the thoughtfulness of the postings, and by what we’ve learned. It’s changed the way a lot of us think about blogging. I think it will do the same for you.
Ms. Scoppe can be reached at [email protected] or at (803) 771-8571.

August 31 column, w/ links

1 Reply

Snippets from a conversation:
Bill Gates, innovation and leadership
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
JOHN WARNER responded to my Sunday column about Inez Tenenbaum’s decision not to seek a third term as education superintendent by quoting Bill Gates.
Specifically, he quoted from a speech the Microsoft honcho delivered to the National Education Summit on High Schools a while back. Everybody’s talking about it. In fact, Mrs. Tenenbaum was talking about it during our interview last week, holding up Mr. Gates’ efforts as an example of someone doing what she hopes to do once she’s left office — pushing for reform from the private sector. Here’s part of what Mr. Warner cited in comments on my blog:
“America’s high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded — though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean that our high schools — even when they’re working exactly as designed — cannot teach our kids what they need to know today…. This isn’t an accident or a flaw in the system; it is the system.”
I’m afraid my gut response was rather dismissive, along these lines: Yes, everyone’s heard or read what Bill Gates said about our secondary schools system. What I haven’t heard is an understandable explanation of what he would replace it with.
To be fair to Mr. Gates, I went back to read the full speech. (Which you can also do by following the link from my blog.)
I found that while much of what he said was interesting and wise, little of it struck me as new. I was pleased to see that he is as interested in equality of opportunity as we are on this editorial board:
“In district after district, wealthy white kids are taught Algebra II while low-income minority kids are taught to balance a check book!” he said. “The first group goes on to college and careers; the second group will struggle to make a living wage…. (E)ither we think they can’t learn, or we think they’re not worth teaching. The first argument is factually wrong; the second is morally wrong.”
I could also write that — along with what he sees as standing in the way of a solution: “The key problem is political will” (as in, the lack thereof).
His prescription for what should be done sounds much like the central idea behind No Child Left Behind on the federal level, and a number of initiatives — such as more rigorous requirements for graduation — that have been in place in South Carolina since the turn of the century.
“The idea behind the new design is that all students can do rigorous work, and — for their sake and ours — they have to,” he said, adding that the aim should be “to prepare every student for college.”
Then, he spelled out the active ingredients of his prescription: “If we can focus on these three steps — high standards for all; public data on our progress; turning around failing schools — we will go a long way toward ensuring that all students have a chance to make the most of their lives.”
Those are the same principles we’ve already put into action through the Education Accountability Act. It is laudable that Mr. Gates is putting considerable amounts of his own money where his mouth is, transforming hundreds of high schools across the country.
But there’s only so much he can do, even with his resources. Turning around the dropout rate (which Mr. Gates correctly sees as a national epidemic, not just a South Carolina problem) and taking the next steps in making sure all kids are prepared for productive lives will take leadership in the political sphere.
Mr. Warner bemoaned that “Today we’re making incremental improvements, and that is good but not sufficient to make the progress we need. There is no way an educational Bill Gates could emerge because there is no vehicle for them to pursue truly innovative ideas.”
John, I wrote back, the entrepreneurial culture you envision is politically impossible. You know why? Because politicians and their constituents, being extremely jealous of every tax dollar, absolutely refuse to trust educators. Therefore we get rigid standards, tests, measurements and controls that force everyone to follow certain patterns. (I once wrote a whole column on the lack of trust as being the root of all evil in our society. I’ll put that on my blog, too.)
Everything I’ve seen in my career about the politics of public education indicates that the state will never hire teachers, give them resources and say, “Go to town; be creative!”
Mr. Warner agreed:
“Brad, I have been talking to people about this for a long time too. I absolutely agree with you (about the lack of trust).
“There is the trust factor you mentioned, not trusting educators. There is a lack of trust of parents to make the right decisions. There is also a serious lack of trust among minorities, especially older minorities, who have historical experience that honed their instincts to be wary. There (is) a large segment of people who are cynical in general and don’t trust anyone else, especially those in government. Some of our leading politicians in the state have made an art form out of tapping into this latent cynicism.
“In a flat world, only innovation can keep us globally competitive. Public education needs to be a part of that culture. Somehow, we need to find a leader in this state who can empower people to begin to create a culture of innovation.
“Dick Riley brought enlightened leadership to public education 25 years ago. And Carroll Campbell brought it to economic development 15 years ago. Without the next strong leader, it will be difficult for us to make significant progress.”
What can I say to that, except that he’s absolutely right. This is why I hate to see a leader such as Mrs. Tenenbaum leave the public sphere, and why I worry about who will lead us to the next steps in the reform that is so essential to our state’s future.

Physicianow, heal thyself

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I was completely stunned when a regular correspondent shared this with me via e-mail. I could only respond thus:

What a presumptuous pile of pontification! How dare he presume to know the soul of another this way, and to pass judgment on it based upon such guesses? Does he think his literary license gives him the right to write omnisciently about real people the way he does fictional characters? Well, it doesn’t.

I’ve got major problems with this president, including many decisions he’s made (or not made) with regard to this crucial war. I often wonder whether I want us to succeed in Iraq more than George W. Bush does, and some days I’m quite sure I do.

But as healthy as my editorialist’s ego is, I would NEVER have the gargantuan gall to write something like this about another human being. I suppose one has to be a lionized author, sitting in the Hamptons contemplating in awe one’s own greatness, to produce rhetorical excess this extreme. Alas, we lesser lights must content ourselves with more humble assertions.

You know, he just plain looks a lot more intellectual than I do. Maybe if I grew back the beard, I could be more pompous, too. Not that I’d try to compete in HIS league.

The debate continues…

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Wow. I was so overwhelmed and lulled into a placid state by the kind comments in response to my Sunday column that I didn’t notice until just now that this debate was still going on (and this one, too, in a related vein).

Rather than continue to jump in with my answers and asides in the comments stream, I’m going to respond to a couple of my correspondents with this new posting — largely because I still haven’t mastered a way to insert links, much less files, conveniently into the comments format. I continue to admire those savvy folk who have figured it out.

Anyway, Portia said I had explained my lack of military service — one of the great regrets, or perhaps I should say gripes (since it wasn’t my choice), of my life — in a recent column, but she couldn’t get to it to provide a link. I’ve mentioned it more than once, but I have a feeling that this is the one to which she refers. If not, I’ll go back and look for another one.

Also, the link that Mike C provided was interesting, and I recommend it (although I got lost in exactly what the late William Jennings Bryan Dorn‘s namesake was urging Woodrow Wilson to do; I really need to bone up on that period). But I bring it up here because its title, and this passage …

The profound interpretation recognizes that if there is an invasion the decision for it and for its sweeping historical consequences will be in the hands of one man, The President of the United States, and that he – and he alone – must take complete moral responsibility for this massive intervention in the fate of our species. And this fact is conveyed in the title of Mr. Hammerschlag’s article: it will forever be Bush’s War, no matter what the outcome.

… reminded me of an older column of mine (and here’s where I really had to go to a posting rather than a comment, since I had to attach a Word file, that piece no longer being online).

Oh, and in answer to "Amos Nunoy‘s" last question, namely, "Did you know it wasn’t about mass weapons the whole time? You didn’t say," I most certainly did NOT write "Hey, there’s no WMD." Why? Because I thought, like everyone else, that Saddam had at least one variety of WMD (he had used it in the past, after all), and was working feverishly to develop others. In fact, we mentioned it editorially among the reasons to invade at the time — partly because that cause was more important to others on our editorial board than it was to me, but also because it WAS part of the argument. It just wasn’t what was important to me, and would not have been reason enough alone to justify invasion in MY mind. You can tell this by what I did stress at the time, such as (at least in passing) in the column linked in the paragraph above. Or, more to the point, this one. In fact, the latter is worth quoting here, in case you have trouble calling up that old file:

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

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

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

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

That was written, by the way, the month before the 2003 invasion. You’ll notice, "Amos," that while I didn’t specifically mention WMD (because, once again, I thought that threat, while insufficient, was real) I DID say that the president, for Realpolitik reasons, wasn’t frankly stating exactly WHY we had to go into Iraq — or at least, wasn’t stressing it enough to suit me. That’s why that column was headlined, "The uncomfortable truth about why we may have to invade Iraq." I thought it was important to state those reasons more prominently beforehand, so I did.

Ideas for change

Actions have consequences

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I actually started writing this item on June 6 and set it aside, but the subject of my column today reminds me to finish and post it — that, and the fact that I keep getting more feedback from readers along the lines of that which prompted these thoughts to begin with.

On June 5, I posted an item about a dilemma we had over whether to publish a certain cartoon by Robert Ariail. In reaction to that, Phyllis Overstreet filed the following comment:

Frankly, I find this one much less offensive than the one in today’s (6/5/05)paper. Maybe Mr. Arial needs to be reminded that there is such an animal as patriotic dissent in this country.

She was referring to this cartoon, which makes the point that the Iraq insurgents could find Gitmo_4 no greater friend in their cause than American opponents of the war. It was a provocative cartoon, and it succeeded in provoking a number of readers to respond passionately. Ms. Overstreet’s reaction was among the more restrained. For instance, Happy Dawg followed up her comment with the following: "I agree with Phyllis. Arial lost me when he started smoking wingnut crazy weed. Note to Arial: point your toe when goose stepping."

But let’s go back to what Ms. Overstreet said. There is, indeed, such a thing as "patriotic dissent in this country." In fact, if we don’t have it in this country, it’s doubtful you would find it anywhere else. One of our goals in Iraq is to help the people of that country build a system in which they can disagree — peacefully — with their government without fear.

If you oppose the war in Iraq, you have every right to say so. But here’s the rub: The fact that you have the right to do it doesn’t negate the fact that your vocal opposition does indeed give encouragement to the enemy. This puts sincere opponents of the war who also sincerely care about U.S. troops over there in a bit of a moral dilemma. There wouldn’t be much point for insurgents in continuing to kill Americans in Iraq unless they knew each act of terrorism would get big play in U.S. media, and would thereby further weaken the American public’s will.

The sincere protester doesn’t want to help the insurgents. (At least, most don’t. There are some — the sort of folks who would wear Che T-shirts, I suppose — who have such a muddled notion of whom we’re fighting that they confuse the Baathist thugs and foreign fanatics with some sort of popular movement to throw out the "American imperialists.") I know that. Robert Ariail knows that. That’s why, in his cartoon, the protester is looking extremely uncomfortable at being embraced by the insurgent. But no matter how unwilling an ally the protester is, he is still an ally of the terrorist. It’s a matter of having converging goals: Both would like the United States to get out of Iraq. Therefore, no matter how much they may detest each other, if the cause of one is advanced, so is the cause of the other.

There’s nothing anyone can do to change this dynamic. It’s simply the way the world works. Sometimes doing something you have every right to do — something that your conscience tells you you must do — can lead to evil results. These realities have to be weighed carefully in deciding whether to exercise that right.

I’m sorry if pointing this out causes distress to good people. But the point is to provoke thought, which can often lead to discomfort. You may or may not end up agreeing, but the process of having one’s assumptions challenged is ultimately a salutary one.

For her part, Ms. Overstreet understands that. After posting her initial comment, she came back later to say,

I’d like to add that I think Robert is a great editorial cartoonist and that even though I didn’t care for his 6/5 cartoon, I was glad you ran it. He does exactly what he is supposed to do, and he does it eloquently and elegantly, with just enough wiseacre to make it entertaining …

I would say the same about her criticism of the cartoon. I appreciate her posting it. That’s what the editorial page, and this blog, are all about — people of differing views coming together to try to understand each other a little better.

For the other side…

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Charles Krauthammer’s piece on our op-ed page today feels so much like a direct counterpoint to Tom Friedman’s piece earlier in the week that I thought I’d provide you with this link to help you compare them to one another.
I always enjoy Mr. Krauthammer’s columns, and usually agree with them. But this time, he’s wrong. The detention facility at Gitmo represents a serious strategic liability to the United States in the war on terror. It’s not just the latest thing about the Koran. Like Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo has become a symbol that stands for American hypocrisy. It doesn’t matter whether that perception is accurate. We cannot afford to keep operating such a symbol when we are fighting for liberal democracy, and most of the world believes we practice the opposite at that place.
Mr. Friedman wrote from the perspective of one who, like me, believed in this war from the beginning, and wants us to win it. That’s more important than standing on our pride, and essentially saying, "Well, since WE know we didn’t do anything wrong, let’s just tell everybody who says otherwise to take a flying leap." Even if it’s all unfounded, those who are propagating this image are winning the PR battle. So let’s try something else. Let’s be pragmatic. Let’s WIN.

Deep Threat

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To hear some of our anti-war friends tell it — and I do mean friends (Michael Berg, on the left in the picture below demonstrating in New York last summer, is a nice guy; so are most anti-war folks I know) — you have to turn to foreign media to get the straight dope on what the United States is up to in the world, because the corporate shills in the American media just parrot the administration line. (And of course, that’s one of the places where their argument goes about Negative00124a1_1 180 degrees from what I have observed.)
Well, this may not be quite the sort of thing they have in mind, but I thought it ironic that the day Michael’s letter appeared, two other things happened — we learned who Deep Throat was, and I received a release from the Middle East Media Research Institute TV Monitor Project relating a scoop from Iranian television telling us what Watergate was really all about — something that, indeed, I had not read in the American press.
You can see the report on the group’s Web site. But for those of us deficient in Farsi (or lacking the right plug-in on our browsers), the release including this excerpt from the Iranian reporter’s narration:

Today, it has become clear that Nixon’s dispute with Israel and the Zionist lobby was among the main causes for his downfall. In fact, the reporters who exposed the Watergate affair and blew it out of proportion were Zionists, recruited to the ranks of the Zionist lobby. By using the media as its tool, Zionism tried to get one of its main opponents out of the way.

As evidence of the fact that President Nixon was one righteous dude, this excerpt from his memoir is quoted:

One of the main problems I had to face was narrow
mindedness and pro-Israel views.

And also:

In the 25 years since the end of World War II, these views spread and grew stronger to the point that many people consider refraining from supporting Israel to be antisemitism. I tried to make them understand that this is not true, but did not succeed.

So you can see, of course, why the great international Jewish conspiracy had to get rid of him, right?

This kind of anti-Semitic nonsense, intended to whip up those already inclined toward killing Israelis and Americans at every opportunity, is based in a world view that is our greatest enemy in the War on Terror — a term I am comfortable using, unlike my anti-war friends, without ironic quotation marks.
The kind of attitudes that can turn any news story into an opportunity to further engender hatred against Jews and their friends, is a real threat to the United States, and to the West, and to all the values that those of us who believe in liberal democracy hold dear.
And it’s worth fighting against — with our own ideas mostly (which is why the real-life abuses at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo are extremely harmful to the war effort), but also, when those attitudes are advanced by brutal tyrants, with our military.

Left, right, left, right

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One of our letter-writers today asks, "How can a group of people be so ‘pro-life’ when it comes to the unborn and so ‘pro-death’ where our young soldiers are concerned?"

Let’s set aside the hyperbole and zero in on the assumption that most people across the political spectrum share — the assumption that opposition to abortion is a "conservative" position, and so is support of the war in Iraq, while all "liberals" will take the opposite views on both issues.

One reason I reject current notions of "left" and "right" is that I think we’ve got it all bollixed up. To me, opposition to abortion is the ultimate bleeding-heart liberal position, and so is support for using our military power to deliver other peoples from tyranny. (It’s precisely what Wilson, Roosevelt and Kennedy would have done.) Those happen to be two liberal positions I agree with, while I simultaneously hold many conservative views (true conservative views, not the things we call by that name these days).

Help me understand why most folks get it backwards. Or why I do.

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