Category Archives: Words

‘Hyperbole’ and Iraq

10 Replies

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

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

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

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

Sincerely,
Pat Mohr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for the kind words.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you again for engaging in this dialogue with me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet, it seems, we don’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe somebody should point it out to them.

Write to Mr. Warthen at P.O. Box 1333, Columbia, S.C. 29202, or bwarthen@thestate.com.

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

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

Certainly, you may share it.

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

Some things that I ‘watch with horror’

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First, a warning — I’ve posted some disturbing images at the bottom of this post. They are painful to look at. If you wish to avoid them, do not scroll down!

Following up on my Sunday column, it occurs to me that it might be helpful to elaborate a little more on the proper meaning of "watched with horror." If you’ll recall, the NYT used that phrase to refer to such practices as scanning telecommunications for terrorists without proper authorization, and imprisoning supposed terrorists at Guantanamo.

In the column, I gave examples from history of things that are more properly "watched with horror," if the words are to mean anything — the Holocaust, the firebombing of Dresden, and the like. I included some from recent years — genocide in Darfur and 9/11 — but perhaps not enough. I can make it much more immediate than that.

The terror attacks in Mumbai are certainly something I "watched with horror," both from a personal and geopolitical perspective. Just days before it happened, my Dad had been reminiscing about having Shore Patrol duty in Bombay during his Navy career. That meant digging sailors out of some pretty sleazy dives, but it also meant staying at the Taj Mahal hotel. It was a shock to have that place suddenly in the news, and for something so horrific.

Two weeks ago, my brother was over there on business — and of course, he would have been a target had he been there still. As my father would have been, long before. That was underlined for me in a sidebar piece the WSJ ran Friday, accounting for the employees of various international firms in Mumbai.

Stan Dubinsky from over at USC sent me an e-mail that had been sent out by Hesh Epstein, the Chabad rabbi here in Columbia, about the young Chabad rabbi and his wife killed by the terrorists — presumably for the "crime" of being Jewish. I took a lecture course a couple of years back given by Rabbi Epstein (about Jewish beliefs regarding the Messiah, it was fascinating), and was deeply impressed by his devotion and scholarship. If it had been Hesh over there instead of that young man and his wife… the tragedy would have been far more personal. As it is, it’s bad enough.

Too much personal? Then consider the overall death toll, and the geopolitical implications — India is blaming Pakistan, and both countries have nukes.

I think what got me to thinking about the personal angles was Nicholas Kristof’s column yesterday (beware the image if you follow the link!), which I chose this morning to put on tomorrow’s op-ed page, and which started like this:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Terrorism in this part of the world usually means bombs exploding or hotels burning, as the latest horrific scenes from Mumbai attest. Yet alongside the brutal public terrorism that fills the television screens, there is an equally cruel form of terrorism that gets almost no attention and thrives as a result: flinging acid on a woman’s face to leave her hideously deformed.

Here in Pakistan, I’ve been investigating such acid attacks, which are commonly used to terrorize and subjugate women and girls in a swath of Asia from Afghanistan through Cambodia (men are almost never attacked with acid). Because women usually don’t matter in this part of the world, their attackers are rarely prosecuted and acid sales are usually not controlled. It’s a kind of terrorism that becomes accepted as part of the background noise in the region…

This is something I "watch with horror," without even having to see it. Unfortunately, I DID see it, in a photograph with Kristof’s column online. And it wasn’t the first time I’ve seen such images. I had run across the ones you see below (with their original captions) a week or two ago when I was looking for something to go with a previous Kristof column, and had searched the AP archive for "Pakistan" and "women." The images all moved on the wire earlier this year.

This is the kind of thing that I believe the phrase "watched with horror" should be reserved for. And that’s my point in posting these images. I almost put them in the paper, but I thought Kristof’s column communicated the horror fully enough. As you know, one thing I use the blog for is to post things I don’t put in the paper. Maybe I was wrong to balk at doing that. But as hardened as newspapermen are supposed to be, I hesitate even now to post them here. And yet, these pictures aren’t as bad — that is, the injuries aren’t as recent — as the cases Kristof wrote about.

Kristof and his wife received the Pulitzer for reporting on the democracy movement in China years ago. He deserves another one for telling these women’s stories — as he has done for the powerless (so often women) in Darfur and elsewhere. By horrifying decent people everywhere, he performs a great service.

Acidburns1

Irum Saeed, 30, adjusts her scarf as she poses for a photograph at her office at the Urdu University in Islamabad, Pakistan, Thursday, July 24, 2008. Irum was burnt on her face, back and shoulders with acid thrown in the middle of the street by a boy whom she rejected for marriage 12 years ago. She has undergone plastic surgery 25 times to try to recover from her scars with the help of Depilex-Smileagain Foundation in Lahore. Smileagain is an organization that helps burn victims to reintegrate into society through medical and psychological support, sometimes employing them as beauticians at Depilex beauty centers. Irum is one of the 240 registered victims of Smileagain’s help list in Pakistan. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

Acidburns2

Shameem Akhter, 18, poses for a photograph at her home in Jhang, Pakistan, Wednesday, July 10, 2008. Three years ago three boys threw acid on her. Shameem has undergone plastic surgery 10 times to try to recover from her scars with the help of Depilex-Smileagain Foundation in Lahore. Smileagain is an organization that helps burn victims to reintegrate into society through medical and psychological support, sometimes employing them as beauticians at Depilex beauty centers. Shameem is one of the 240 registered victims of Smileagain’s help list in Pakistan. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

Acidburns3

Attiya Khalil, 16, poses for a photograph at her home in Lahore, Pakistan, Wednesday, July 9, 2008. Attiya’s face was burnt with acid thrown by relatives of a neighbor boy whom she rejected for marriage around 3 years ago. She has undergone plastic surgery three times to try to recover from her scars with the help of Depilex-Smileagain Foundation in Lahore. Smileagain is an organization that helps burn victims to reintegrate into society through medical and psychological support, sometimes employing them as beauticians at Depilex beauty centers. Attiya is one of the 240 registered victims of Smileagain’s help list in Pakistan. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

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

45 Replies

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

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

    I’ll give you some hints:

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

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

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

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

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

1st black AG (yawn!)? Is anyone still keeping score?

23 Replies

Holdereric

So we’re told Eric Holder would be another historic "first:"

WASHINGTON — Eric Holder, a former No.
2 Justice Department official, has been told that he can become the
nation’s first African-American attorney general, a person with
firsthand knowledge said Tuesday.

While Obama hasn’t formally
tapped Holder, one person with direct knowledge said "it’s his if he
wants it." This individual asked to remain anonymous because of the
sensitivity of the matter.

Beyond being a history-making
appointment, Holder would be faced with some of the nation’s most
divisive legal controversies, including the Bush administration
policies on torture, electronic eavesdropping, the extent of
presidential power and the imprisonment of terror suspects without
charges, trials or the right to challenge their detention….

Which makes me wonder: Now that everyone seems agreed that we just elected our first black president (my quibbles about the terminology aside), just how big a deal is it to have a black AG? Or whatever the job.

And at what point to we stop keeping track? When does it no longer excite comment? Or when does it get to be like baseball stats? I can hear my wife’s cousin Tim McCarver saying, "Joe, this is the first time we’ve seen a mustachioed AG nominee chosen by a left-handed president from Hawaii in the post-election season…"

One war, two wars: But who’s counting?

28 Replies

This morning we ran an editorial calling upon the nation to unite after the election, and quoting something S.C. Supt. of Ed. Jim Rex had said:

“What’s important for our students to know is that after elections, Americans come together,” Dr. Rex wrote. “We have enormous challenges ahead of us — a war on two fronts, an economy in crisis, a broken health care system, and so much more. We cannot stand to be divided one more day. Regardless of who wins, it’s time for us to work together to move this country forward and create a better, more stable America for our children and grandchildren."

Did you catch the little grace note there that made his message truly bipartisan — his reference to "a war on two fronts?" In case you missed it, that is decidedly not the official Democratic Party version.

We were reminded of that last night in Barack Obama’s otherwise gracious, affirming victory speech, in which he sincerely called on the nation to come together, but nevertheless repeated the official Democratic Party version of reality:

we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime – two wars, a planet in peril…

And so we continue with the refusal to acknowledge either a) the global war on terror, or b) that Iraq is part of it. It makes me wonder: When we act against al Qaida in Somalia, or Yemen or Pakistan or Indonesia, are those third and fourth and fifth and sixth wars, etc.?

Sorry to be such a nitpicker. I truly thought Obama’s speech was good, and appreciated its attempts to reach beyond party.

Likewise, I appreciated the graciousness of John McCain’s acceptance speech, even though one could detect partisan difference in that even when he was trying the hardest to reach out:

In a contest as long and difficult as this campaign has been, his success alone commands my respect for his ability and perseverance. But that he managed to do so by inspiring the hopes of so many millions of Americans who had once wrongly believed that they had little at stake or little influence in the election of an American president is something I deeply admire and commend him for achieving.

Did you catch it? Yes, it’s a very Republican thing to say those Americans "WRONGLY  believed that they had little at stake or little influence." Democrats would likely leave out the "wrongly."

Bottom line, I appreciated both speeches, for what they did, and more, for what they meant to do. I can think of no recent election in which both victor and defeated were so gracious at the critical moment.

But I’m an editor; I pick at words. And even while I’m applauding, these little flaws jump out at me. File them under the heading of "how far we have yet to go," even on agreeing about the nature of reality.

South of the Border

14 Replies

Some of y’all really hated it that I mentioned the Colombian Free Trade Agreement in the McCain endorsement — which to me illustrates the no-win situation I saw myself in with all those loyal and devoted Obamaphiles out there. Nice people, many of them, but hard to please if you don’t agree with them.

If I had just cited the usual reasons — being right on Iraq, taking a stand on doing the right thing on immigration, being a war hero, etc. — I would have been castigated for lack of original thought. So I decided to include something you might not have thought of — and something that actually helped confirm my preference for McCain — as a way of broadening the discussion. Perhaps predictably, I got the obvious response from those determined to find fault: Obviously you don’t have any good reasons, since you drag this out of left field.

No win situation.

Doug mentions back on this post that The Economist has endorsed Obama. Well, a couple of days ago I was reading something in The Economist that reminded me of why the Colombian FTA is important to me, but also why y’all might have trouble understanding that.

Blame it on my upbringing — or part of it, anyway. I spent two years, four-and-a-half months — easily the longest I lived in one place growing up — living in Guayaquil, Ecuador. From late 1962 through spring 1965. Like Obama in Indonesia, I saw a lot during that time that most nine-to-11 year olds growing up in the States don’t see. For instance, I was not only there during a military coup, but I was in the house at the time during when the plot was being hatched, at least in part. Our landlord was a captain in the Ecuadorean Navy, and my parents had left me at the landlord’s house while they went out one day. While I was there, a man came to visit the captain; they went into a room and closed the door. The next day, the president had been put on a plane to Panama, the man who had come to visit was a member of the new military junta, and our landlord had a big post in the new government. Minister of Agriculture, I think.

My guitar teacher, who had a little shop down by the waterfront where he made his own guitars by hand, was an agent for U.S. Naval Intelligence, I would later learn. And the missionary who preached at the nondenominational English-language services we attended on Sunday was working for the CIA. But not everyone was running things or plotting to run things. I remember the men who squatted in a circle in the dust of the vacant lot near our duplex as they bet on the cockfight in the center of their circle. I remember the smell of REAL poverty, the Third World kind, that arose from the poorest barrios of the city. It was different, very different, from living in this country.

I also remember people who were there working for JFK’s Alliance for Progress program. And ever since I came back in 1965, I’ve been acutely conscious of the fact that most of my fellow Americans just don’t give a damn one way or the other about these countries in their own backyards. JFK was the last.

This cultural indifference is definitely reflected in the mass media. So it is that I have to turn to such publications as The Economist to find out what’s going on in the realm of the Monroe Doctrine. It’s weird. Anyway, I got to thinking about that when I read this piece in The Economist the other day. It was about the irony that folks in Latin America seem to prefer Obama, even though it’s McCain who cares about the region enough to learn about it:

OF THE two candidates in the American presidential election, it is John McCain who knows something about Latin America. Not only was he born in Panama, he also visited Colombia and Mexico in July. He thinks the United States should ratify a free-trade agreement with Colombia and, at least until it became politically toxic, wanted to reform immigration policy. Ask him who the United States’ most important friends around the word are and he pretty quickly mentions Brazil.

And yet if they had a vote, Latin Americans, like Europeans, would cast it for Barack Obama—though without much enthusiasm. Preliminary data from the latest Latinobarómetro poll, taken in 18 countries over the past month and published exclusively by The Economist, show that 29% of respondents think an Obama victory would be better for their country, against only 8% favouring Mr McCain. Perhaps surprisingly, 30% say that it makes no difference who wins, while 31% claim ignorance. Enthusiasm for Mr Obama is particularly high in the Dominican Republic (52%), Costa Rica, Uruguay and Brazil (41%). In Brazil, six candidates in this month’s municipal elections changed their names to include “Barack Obama” in them.

In the third presidential debate, I noticed two things (well, I noticed a lot of things, but two things related to this post): That McCain had cared enough to understand what it meant to support a trade agreement with a key ally in the region — an agreement that could only be good for this country in terms of trade and jobs, and which affirmed a country that had undertaken huge sacrifices to ally itself with U.S. interests. That was the first thing. The second was that Obama seemed not even to have scratched the surface of the issue. His answer was such Big Labor boilerplate, it seemed plain that he had not looked into the issue or thought about it beyond his party’s talking points.

To me, that spoke to things that were true about the two candidates in a broader sense — experience, and the ability to differentiate between our friends in the world and those who wish us, and their own people, ill. I had been deeply impressed by the recent piece Nicholas Kristof — a guy who almost certainly will vote for Obama — had done on this issue, and the degree that Obama’s answer utterly failed to look at the issue as knowledgeably and thoughtfully as Kristof had. And as McCain had.

I sat and talked to Ted Sorensen about Obama as the heir to Camelot, and was deeply impressed. But I’ve gathered since then that aura aside, Obama seems actually less likely to take the kind of interest in Latin America that Kennedy did. McCain is more likely to do so. Ironic, huh?

So to me it was more than, here’s a little esoteric fact I know and you don’t. To me, it mattered. But to me, South America has always mattered.

More movie, fewer grammar

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Yow. I was just flipping channels, and stopped briefly on TNT, just long enough to see this promotional material down in the left-hand corner of the screen:

MORE MOVIE…
LESS COMMERCIALS

Not "fewer" commercials — "less." I’m perfectly serious. The message comes through loud and clear: "More movie… less grammar."

Fortunately, Google tells me I’m not the first to notice this, so the country has not gone completely to pot. Except … what does it say that this has been pointed out, apparently more than once, and nothing’s been done about it? Folks, this is way, WAY worse than "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should."

Broder just won’t go out on a limb

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One of the reasons I had to quit the whole news gig back in the early ’90s and turn to editorializing is that I got sick and tired of all the dodges, all the going out of your way NOT to say what you think. I’d rather just be straight-up with people, and opinion writing and editing lets you do that.

Still, I continue to have enormous respect for David Broder, even though (or perhaps because) he never fully made the transition. He’s still a newsman to the core.

Take his column that I put on today’s op-ed page. It’s premise is that those pesky Pennsylvanians who went for Hillary just a few months ago are "part of a mass movement to Obama." You see, being at heart a reporter, David Broder does this thing where goes out and talks to regular folks and finds out what they’re thinking. (And being an old-fashioned guy, he thinks of them as "voters" rather than "stakeholders".)

He backs up his premise reasonably well, to the extent that such a haphazard anecdotal approach is helpful. But apparently he doesn’t trust his own observations. Here’s how the piece started:

UPPER DUBLIN, Pa. — Last April, on the eve of the Pennsylvania primary, voters in this Philadelphia suburb were finding plenty of fault with both Barack Obama and John McCain. Many were preparing to — and soon did — vote for Hillary Clinton, helping her to a decisive victory in Pennsylvania.

This week, those voters are part of a mass movement to Obama, driven by much greater familiarity with the Illinois senator’s views, and a pronounced distaste for McCain and running mate Sarah Palin.

The striking shift in Montgomery County, often a bellwether, makes McCain’s task of recapturing Pennsylvania from the Democrats look almost like Mission Impossible…

Say what? "Look almost like…"?!?!? Mr. Broder, either it LOOKS like it or it doesn’t. We fully understand that if you go ahead and say it LOOKS like it to you, that’s your opinion. And you’re entitled to it; you’re the Dean of American political writers. I think you can go ahead and say what you think. If not now, when? You’re retiring at the end of the year. Take the plunge.

If it only "almost" looks like it, why bother us with it? What factor prevents it from looking entirely like it…

Anyway, stuff like this probably doesn’t bother anyone but an editor. I’ll go away now.

The problem with ‘stakeholders’

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No, not you, if that’s what you call yourself. I’ve got nothing against you. I just don’t like the word. Aside from it being bureaucratese, there’s something … presumptuous about it. As though one can accurately identify certain people as "stakeholders" which implies (but does not necessarily mean, I suppose) that some people are not.

I have this thing about the interconnectedness of all things that bridles at the notion that one can readily identify "stakeholders."

Then again, I suppose there’s a small-R republican part of me that objects to the context in which I usually find the term. I believe in representative democracy, not the direct kind. Barack Obama and other community organizer types are probably a lot more comfortable with the word, and with the concept of including all "stakeholders" (which in a community organizer sense I suppose means everybody who shows up at your meeting) in the decision-making process. Me, I’m all for listening to folks, but at some point a decision has to be made by the folks elected to do so. And often, very often, the correct decision is going to anger "stakeholders." And far, far too often, elected officials nowadays lack the cojones to go ahead and make that decision, because they’re so terrified of the "stakeholders."

Take, for instance, the issue of establishing a comprehensive center to deal with homelessness in metro Columbia. The city proper’s government has repeatedly bollixed up efforts to make this happen, out of fear of a certain sort of "stakeholder" — neighboring residents and business people motivated by the NIMBY principle. Here’s the thing about that: This center would be good for the community as a whole, and would in fact pull homeless people OFF the streets in its immediate area and start dealing with their problems. It needs to go SOMEWHERE, and that somewhere needs to be a place that homeless people can get to.

You may recall that several sites have been rejected over the last couple of years, from the State Hospital property on Bull St. (which would have been perfect for the temporary site that was under consideration), to one right down the road from us (which was fine with us at the newspaper, but OTHER "stakeholders" objected, so it fell apart).

In recent days, the group of citizens that has been busting its collective hump to make this thing happen in SPITE of the city has been moving toward establishing the center at the current Salvation Army site on Main St. Some on city council have been pushing a site down by the canal that you and I can’t actually see from the road (at least I haven’t). Maybe that’s a good site, but there are a couple of problems: The first is that the people who’ve actually been WORKING on the issue have a lot invested in the Main St./Elmwood site. The second is that, while the city council folks pushing the canal site say theirs is better because residential neighbors object to the Main/Elmwood one (true), now that word of it has gotten out, neighbors of the canal site are ready to sue as well (specifically, one big neighbor, the Canalside development). So it’s a wash.

The other day I remarked to Warren and Cindi that what’s needed is for the "stakeholders" OTHER than the neighbors need to get their act together and unite behind a site — something that’s supposed to happen in a meeting at 2:30 p.m. today, in fact — and then deal with the objections of neighbors. Because the objection of neighbors is a constant. It’s a wash. You have to deal with it either way. And the fact that some "stakeholders" are always going to be opposed cannot be allowed to prevent anything from happening.

Too many people who say "stakeholders" a lot think everybody has to be happy with a decision. As long as you’re willing to face the fact that some "stakeholders" will be unhappy even when you do the right thing (and some of them especially if you do the right thing), then by all means, go ahead and use the word.

What, you ask, set me off on this topic? Oh, I was cleaning out my e-mail from recent days, and ran across this, which is really unrelated to my rant about the word:

 

FOR
IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Oct. 8, 2008

DHEC announces water stakeholder meetings

COLUMBIA
– As part of an evaluation of the uses and quality of South Carolina’s
freshwater, the
S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control will be holding stakeholders
meetings across the state, the agency announced today.

"Stakeholders
will have an opportunity to share their thoughts on freshwater quality
standards, classifications, and uses, as they relate to recreation," said David
Wilson, chief of DHEC’s Bureau of Water. "We’ll be sharing information and also
will be available to answer questions and concerns….

I’m guessing that since this was a public announcement, "stakeholder" means anybody who shows up, although maybe I’m misunderstanding. Used to be we were "citizens," or "the public." But now we’re "stakeholders," and are we any better off for it? I don’t think so.

The opus is done; you’ll see it Sunday

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Well, I just finished writing what I consider to be my most provocative column of this long presidential election. At least, it’s the most provocative to me. You have to consider that I didn’t expect the John Edwards column to cause such a fuss. So maybe this one will be a dud; I don’t know.

But I do know it’s longer than any other column that I can ever remember publishing in the paper — twice as long as usual. It will jump from the Sunday editorial page to the op-ed page. But then, I’ve thought about it a lot longer than I do most columns — months, in fact. That’s something it does have in common with the Edwards piece, although this one is much more complicated. Even at this length, it requires the reader to understand more than I have space to say. And maybe, because of that, it will be unintelligible. But a lot of my columns attempt to say more than I can denote in a limited space. This one just has more than usual to say.

Anyway, I look forward to your reactions to it. I think.

Obama and the ‘bitter’ remark

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Cindi got on my case this morning, accusing me of being "obsessive" because I warned her and Warren that I might not have my "Barack Like Me" column ready for Sunday because I’ve got another 150 pages to read in his book, and I don’t want to rush this one. (What that means is that I’ll probably write something else, something less complex, for Sunday.)

Cindi’s worried because there’s only two Sundays left before we have tentatively planned to do our presidential endorsement, and I had planned sort of similar columns on both Obama and McCain. My response: We don’t have to run them on Sundays. Yeah, it’s a lame comeback, but it’s all I had.

Both columns would be reflections on the candidates’ formative experiences. I also want to read McCain’s book about his background. But I don’t know if I need to read all of that one, mainly because what I know about McCain’s background is so familiar. Another Navy brat. I even met his father once at Pearl Harbor (he threw me off the tennis courts there near the O Club), during the time McCain was a POW. Maybe I’ll find out different when I start reading, but I doubt I’ll find many surprises.

But with Obama, I feel like there’s so much to learn, so much to figure out. And he and I are alike in that respect, because he was motivated to write about his struggles to figure himself out. And I keep thinking that if I don’t read the whole book, I’ll miss something that is key, and get the whole thing wrong. So I’m still reading, at my own snail’s pace.

Of course, there is so much in the book that I’ll never have room to reflect in one column, even a longer column than usual. So let me share one thing I’ve noticed: You know that comment Obama made about white working-class types being "bitter" and clinging to their guns and religion, the one that got him into so much trouble with voters in Pennsylvania? (OK, I went and looked it up for you: "So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.")

Well, the Deer-Hunter demographic need not have been so offended. Obama talks that way about everybody. I know I have a tendency to be insensitive because I try to analyze people and issues dispassionately, and don’t give nearly as much thought to how my words make people feel as I should. (Sorry about the "Deer-Hunter" thing; I meant it in a good way.) But Obama makes me look like Mr. Touchy-Feely. It’s that "professor" thing. And I’m not saying it’s a bad thing; maybe it’s the key to his unflappability, which is important in a leader, and which has helped him get this far.

But sometimes, reading his book, I just have to go, "Whoa" as he coolly dissects another person or set of people. The cadences and concepts expressed are eerily like the "bitter" comment. For instance:

  • About his maternal grandparents, who raised him: "Their principal excitement now came from new drapes or a stand-alone freezer. It was as if they had bypassed the satisfactions that should come with the middle years, the convergence of maturity with time left, energy with means, a recognition of accomplishment that frees the spirit. At some point in my absence, they had decided to cut their losses and settle for hanging on. They saw no more destinations to hope for."
  • About black Americans in a white man’s world: "Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat."
  • About dwellers of poor, black parts of Chicago: "For a people already stripped of their history, a people often ill-equipped to retrieve that history in any form other than what fluttered across the television screen…"
  • About a waiter he encountered in Kenya: "He can’t escape the grip of his memories. And so he straddles two worlds, uncertain in each, always off balance, playing whichever game staves off the bottomless poverty, careful to let his anger vent itself only on those in the same condition."

He has an unnerving lack of inhibition about putting himself in other people’s heads and then presuming to explain them in uncompromising terms. And while there is a certain caring, something related to pity, in all such passages, it’s hard to imagine the objects of such analysis being happy to be thus characterized. Sort of like being taken up into the spaceship and probed — it’s not a process likely to enhance your dignity.

So, like I said, the Pennsylvanian bowlers and Yuengling drinkers shouldn’t feel special. Obama talks like that a lot.

Anyway, back to reading. Obama is in Kenya now…

What’s so hard about speaking English?

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Joe, you just said "different than" three times in about 30 seconds. It’s "different FROM" — what’s so hard about that? "Than" expresses a comparison of DEGREE, a quantitative difference. When you’re trying to express a qualitative difference, it’s "different from."

And Sarah — what’s so blasted hard about the word, "nuclear?" Have you been studying at the W. school of elocution?

‘Bailout’ vs. ‘rescue’

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This is weird. I knew I liked the way both Obama and McCain think in a lot of ways — that’s why we endorsed both of them in January. But I didn’t know I was synched with them to this degree…

I wrote, for tomorrow’s paper, an editorial on the House’s appalling failure on Monday. As I did so, I made a conscious decision to refer to the rejected plan as a "rescue," not a "bailout." I hadn’t done that before. It’s just that in the process of thinking through what ought to happen, it occurred to me that whatever the Congress eventually passes, it’s no good if it’s just a "bailout;" it needs to be a rescue.

After I was done with the piece, I checked the wires to see what the presidential candidates had said since earlier this morning. Way down in the AP roundup story, I found this quote:

"The first thing I would do is say, ‘Let’s not call it a bailout. Let’s call it a rescue," McCain told CNN. He said "Americans are frightened right now" and political leaders must give them an immediate solution and a longer-term approach to the problem.

Then I saw this separate story:

RENO, Nev. (AP) — Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Tuesday called for Americans to get behind attempts to salvage a $700 billion rescue plan for the financial sector, saying that if Wall Street fails ordinary people will also be hurt.

"This is no longer just a Wall Street crisis. It’s an American crisis, and it’s the American economy that needs this rescue plan," Obama told about 12,000 people at a rally at the University of Nevada at Reno.

Obama said Congress should put aside politics — he didn’t mention GOP rival John McCain by name during his remarks — and should act on the legislation quickly.

"To the Democrats and Republicans who opposed this plan yesterday, I say: Step up to the plate and do what’s right for this country," he said. "And to all Americans, I say this: If I am president of the United States, this rescue plan will not be the end of what we do to strengthen this economy. It will only be the beginning."

You’ll notice that not just Obama, but the AP, was using the new official word.

So it looks like everybody got the memo. Except there was no memo. This is the kind of thing that makes disaffected people think the media — and political leaders, who after all communicate through the media — are conspiring. But it just happens.

The gonads of the economy

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Did that headline grab you? Thought it might. It was suggested by some of the language I’ve read in the last day or two as writers struggle to explain just why Wall Street’s investment banks are so critically important that the SecTreas says we have to ditch capitalism in favor of a $700 billion gummint bailout.

George Will, in today’s column, calls financial services " the commanding heights of America’s economy." OK, maybe so.

But I had to object to the main leader in The Economist this week, which proclaimed that "Finance is the brain of the economy." It goes on to explain that "For all its excesses, it allocates resources to where they are productive better than any central planner ever could."

OK, but brain? I don’t picture it as being that high in our anatomy. It’s more like the gonads, driving us on with a remorseless libidinal beat, like Snoop Dogg in "Old School" chanting "make money-money, make money-money-MONEY…"

King Harvest (Has Surely Come)

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Over the weekend, going through some of the stuff my daughter brought when she moved home from Pennsylvania, my wife found a travel case full of CDs I’d about given up on. Some of them were favorites — albums I had bought on vinyl in my youth, such as Steve Miller’s "Your Saving Grace" and The Band’s "The Band."

I put The Band’s master opus into the player in my truck yesterday, and it transported me back. I love those indescribable autumnal tones and word imagery. Over the weekend, we had watched the odd, uneven "I’m Not There," and the scenes with Richard Gere wandering through the faux old-timey (vaguely western, vaguely country) landscape and town were obviously an attempt to evoke that very same feeling, especially the parts around the bandstand. Far less successful, of course.

But you know how it is when you read or see or listen to something from your youth, and you see a flaw you didn’t see back then, and you’re sorry you noticed it? An extreme example of this was the time about 20 years ago when "The Dirty Dozen" came on television, and I said to my in-laws, "Oh, let’s watch this; this is good," and then minute after awful minute dragged by until I felt constrained to apologize for it? When I had seen it at 14, it had been good; I assure you.

This was more subtle. I’m listening to "King Harvest (Will Surely Come)," which makes the October wind blow like no other, and I’m suddenly struck by the incongruity of these two lines:

I will hear ev’ry word the boss may say,
For he’s the one who hands me down my pay.

Which makes perfect sense on one level — the words being spoken by a failed farmer who wants to make a go of his new job. But, with its suggestion that the worker’s position and future are dependent upon doing the will of the boss, it’s wholly inconsistent with the repeated theme that he is now "a union man now, all the way."

This later passage is more consistent with that attitude:

Then there comes a man with a paper and a pen
Tellin’ us our hard times are about to end.
And then, if they don’t give us what we like
He said, "Men, that’s when you gotta go on strike."

But wait — maybe the "boss" is the union boss, not management. That way it works. I feel better now. (Come to think of it, I believe that’s the way I sort of unconsciously understood it years ago.)

In any case, I still love the song, and the whole album. I stopped it in the middle of the second play this morning, and put in the Steve Miller, to keep myself from getting tired of it. (It’s much better than the Steve Miller, but perhaps that’s an unfair comparison — especially since I haven’t heard the much stronger second side yet.)

All you gotta do is rag, Mama, rag, Mama, rag…

Community organizers strike back

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I‘m beginning to suspect that community organizers are organized on a level somewhat larger than the "community."

The first letter on tomorrow’s editorial page sticking up for community organizers as a breed. Last week, within a day after Sarah Palin’s remark about their ilk vis-a-vis being a mayor, I got TWO e-mails sticking up for community organizers. Then, when I got home Friday, there was a panel discussion on PBS, and the person speaking when I walked into the room was defending community organizers.

The two e-mail releases came in within two hours of each other on Thursday. Here’s the first one:

Leading National Organization Responds To Attacks On Community Organizing Statement from the Center for Community Change
Washington, dc- Recently, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and several commentators and surrogates surrounding the presidential contest have attacked and misrepresented community organizing.  The following is a statement from Deepak Bhargava, Executive Director of the Center for Community Change, a 40-year-old national organization that builds the field of community organizing with hundreds of local organizations nationwide:

“When Sarah Palin demeaned community organizing, she didn’t attack another candidate.  She attacked an American tradition — one that has helped everyday Americans engage with the political process and make a difference in their lives and the lives of their neighbors. 

"All across the country, in every state and every community, there are community organizers helping people find shared solutions to the shared problems they face.  The candidates for President and Vice President should be working to solve our shared problems, too, rather than attack others who are trying to do the same.

"From winning living wages to expanding affordable housing to improving the quality of public schools to getting health coverage for the poor and elderly, community organizers have made and will continue to make our communities and our country better for all of us.

"The values that community organizers and grassroots leaders represent are not Washington values or Wall Street values but American values–that we care for each other and look out for each other and know we’re all interconnected and have a valuable role to play in making our country work for all of us.  Candidates should be courting these Community Values, not condemning them.”

Since 1968, the Center for Community Change has strengthened the leadership, voice and power of low-income communities nationwide to confront the vital issues of today and build the social movements of tomorrow.  The Center leads the Campaign for Community Values, a national movement of more than 300 grassroots, community-led organizations mobilizing voters in this election and beyond to demand policy changes that reflect our nation’s founding principles of shared responsibility, inclusion and interconnectedness. 
                  ###

Here’s the second one:

America is Built on the Contributions of Community Organizers
Statement of Wade Henderson, President and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights

“The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights is a coalition of nearly 200 organizations, much of whose work is done through community organizers. These advocates have provided the leverage for Americans to organize themselves into unions, get the five-day work week, voting rights for every citizen, paid maternity leave and the curb cuts used by people with disabilities and young mothers with strollers.

We’re a nonpartisan coalition but we do take exception when anyone disparages the vast contributions of community organizers to American society.

The United States has had a long and proud history of contributions made by community organizers, from Benjamin Franklin who organized the first volunteer fire department in this country to Clara Barton, who organized assistance for soldiers during the Civil War, to Martin Luther King, Jr., who helped our great nation correct a historic wrong. Over the years, many more community organizers have brought changes to American society that benefit all of us.

Nothing is done in a vacuum.  Someone has to organize it to get it done.  That is the simple and great role of a community organizer.”

               # # #

The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR) is the nation’s oldest, largest, and most diverse civil and human rights coalition. For more information on LCCR and its nearly 200 member organizations, visit www.civilrights.org.

So, however you define "community," one can’t say that these folks aren’t organized.

Peggy gets in some good ones

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First, a confession — I’m backdating this. I meant to post it on Saturday, but ran into technical difficulties, and when I was finally back to where I could do something, the Biden stuff was a higher priority. But I just saw yesterday’s WSJ on the table, and it reminded me that I wanted to call attention to Peggy Noonan’s piece yesterday.

The thrust of it was why McCain had suddenly pulled even with, or ahead of, Obama in polls. She posited that it was because the American people had just started paying attention, and what they saw was:

The Rick Warren debate mattered. Why? It took place at exactly the moment America was starting to pay attention. This is what it looked like by the end of the night: Mr. McCain, normal. Mr. Obama, not normal….

She, like some others, thought Obama really backed himself into a corner on abortion, to wit:

As to the question when human life begins, the answer to which is above Mr. Obama’s pay grade, oh, let’s go on a little tear. You know why they call it birth control? Because it’s meant to stop a birth from happening nine months later. We know when life begins. Everyone who ever bought a pack of condoms knows when life begins.

To put it another way, with conception something begins. What do you think it is? A car? A 1948 Buick?

Then there was her little shot at W. As a former speechwriter for his Dad, she’s always been sort of amiably disapproving toward the current POTUS:

(The number of men who’ve made it to the top of the GOP who don’t particularly like making speeches, both Bushes and Mr. McCain, is astonishing, and at odds with the presumed requirements of the media age. The first Bush saw speeches as show biz, part of the weary requirement of leadership, and the second’s approach reflects a sense that words, though interesting, were not his friend.)

Her way of doing that provokes a thought: Don’t you think the Bush-haters would get a lot farther if they could tamp down the virulence enough to be able to criticize the kinder, gentler way she does?

But while the piece had some good bits, I had to disagree with her conclusion, which was that McCain should make the one-term pledge:

A move that would help him win doubtful voters, win disaffected Democrats, allow some Republicans to not have to get drunk to vote for him, and that could possibly yield real results for his country. This seems to me such a potentially electrifying idea that he’d likely walk out of his convention as the future president.

In other words, she’s saying, it would be a great gimmick for winning the election. She said his political ambition prevents him from making the pledge. But wouldn’t the ultimate evidence of political ambition, of desire to win this election at all costs, be pulling just such a stunt as she suggests?

Why isn’t it the Peking Olympics?

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Being pretty sure that I’ve had this explained to me before, and I just forgot the explanation, I’ll ask again: How come we say "Beijing" instead of "Peking" now?

Here’s the thing that puzzles me about this: It was supposed to be a phonic representation of the way the Chinese name sounds. So how could the West have been so wildly wrong about the way the name of that place was said for so long? "Peking" doesn’t really sound anything like "Beijing," or at least not enough so that if someone said "Beijing," we would make the mistake of writing it phonetically with a "P" and a "K."

And if his name was Mao Zedong, why did we hear Mao Tse-tung for all those years?

My theory is that one version of Chinese somehow won out politically over another. Like Mandarin over Cantonese or some thousand other variations, because I know there’s a bewildering array of them. Another theory is that the Chinese are just messing with the heads of us foreign devils, and maybe at the height of the Olympics, while they have the attention they’ve been craving, they’ll suddenly announce that the city’s name is pronounced "Vei-ling" or something, just to see if we’ll start calling it that. Then they’ll laugh their heads off.

But I suppose that’s just the paranoia of the Westerner who never truly understands the East, try as he might.

But what do we CALL the building?

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Today’s paper reported that the tallest building in South Carolina — you know, the one across GervaisAtt
Street from the State House — is to have yet another new owner.

Fine. But what I want to know is what to call it, preferably something less cumbersome than "the tallest building in South Carolina — you know, the one across Gervais Street from the State House."

I have in the past called it "the AT&T building," because that’s what it was known as first, near as I can recall. But it hasn’t really been that for a lot of years. Officially, it’s been the "Capitol Center" — but how many people who have occasion to refer to it actually call it that. And it’s so generic-sounding, not many are likely to remember it. The new owner is the Boston-based Intercontinental Real Estate Corp., which doesn’t suggest anything catchy.

Here’s an idea: You remember my column about the political etymology of "good ol’ boy." If you recall, I traced its use in S.C. to the 1986 gubernatorial campaign. Here’s something I wrote then in an addendum to that column about a conversation I had with Bob McAlister, who was in the middle of all that:

In fact, he believes (immodestly) that a TV commercial he produced,
entitled "Good Old Boys," was what won the election for Campbell. The
thrust of it was to drive home the cozy relationship between the
developers of what then was called the AT&T building on the site of
the old Wade Hampton Hotel (neither Bob nor I could remember what it’s
called now; it’s had several aliases). The clincher was a picture he
had taken of a banner in front of the building itself supporting
Democratic nominee Mike Daniel.

So how about, "Good Old Boy Tower?" OK, I just said it was an idea, not that it was a good one.

Can you do better? It’s the tallest building in the state, folks; that makes it a landmark. We ought to have something memorable to call it.

I’m not alone in seeing Bistromathic principles at work in modern finance

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Did you think I was being a tad hyperbolic (just to throw another mathematical concept at you) when I cited Bistromathics in explaining my confusion over the nation’s economic problems?

Well, I had to laugh just now reading tomorrow’s op-ed page, which contains this Paul Krugman column.

Paul Krugman is, according to his billing, an actual economist. Most of his columns might read as though they were written by a summer intern at the National Democratic Party — he is my nominee for Most Partisan Writer Currently Published in Major Newspapers. In fact, I had to double-check to make sure this column was actually written by Paul Krugman, since it did not blame anything whatsoever on George W. Bush. But it actually is a Krugman column. And he actually is an economist.

Anyway, the part of his column that grabbed me was this part:

    The most important of these privileges is implicit: it’s the belief
of investors that if Fannie and Freddie are threatened with failure,
the federal government will come to their rescue.

    This implicit
guarantee means that profits are privatized but losses are socialized.
If Fannie and Freddie do well, their stockholders reap the benefits,
but if things go badly, Washington picks up the tab. Heads they win,
tails we lose.

    Such one-way bets can encourage the taking of bad
risks, because the downside is someone else’s problem. The classic
example of how this can happen is the savings-and-loan crisis of the
1980s: S.& L. owners offered high interest rates to attract lots of
federally insured deposits, then essentially gambled with the money.
When many of their bets went bad, the feds ended up holding the bag.
The eventual cleanup cost taxpayers more than $100 billion.

Did you get that? "Someone else’s problem…" As you and I and Zaphod and Ford all know, there is a concept involved in the understanding of Bistromathics called "recipriversexclusons," and recipriversexclusons are essential in the generation of an SEP field, or "Somebody Else’s Problem" field. What’s that? Must I explain everything? Oh, all right:

"An SEP is something we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t
let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem…. The
brain just edits it out, it’s like a blind spot. If you look at it
directly you won’t see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your
only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye."

So there you have it. And if you can’t see what I’m saying, just blame it on the recipriversexclusons.