BY DAN
KENNEDY
Notes and observations on
the press, politics, culture, technology, and more. To sign up for
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an e-mail to Dan Kennedy, click
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For bio, published work, and links to other blogs, visit
www.dankennedy.net.
For information on Dan Kennedy's book, Little People: Learning to
See the World Through My Daughter's Eyes (Rodale, October 2003),
click
here.
Saturday, December 14, 2002
Gellman speaks -- okay,
types. Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman yesterday
conducted an online conversation with readers to discuss his Thursday
bombshell, in which he wrote that terrorists linked to Al Qaeda may
have smuggled nerve gas out of Iraq. (Click here,
here,
and here
for my earlier posts on this.)
The transcript
is worth reading in full, but here is the most salient
exchange:
Fairfax, Va.: How certain
are you that this transfer may have actually occurred? If it did
occur, are any sources discussing specific plots in which the
nerve gas might be used?
Barton Gellman: Many levels of
uncertainty. One, whether the information that the CIA obtained is
true -- it comes mainly from a single, sensitive source that's
seen as credible, but it's not corroborated by another source yet
(that I know of) and errors of interpretation are always possible.
Two, whether those who got the chemical agent are working for al
Qaeda. three, whether they got it out of the country (though age
old smuggling routes are efficient). Four, whether any such
transaction had Saddam's consent. Five, whether I know as much as
(no I don't) what the US government knows, and whether what I do
know is accurate (I have good reason to think so). No simple
answers here, I'm afraid.
Thanks to RB for the
link.
posted at 4:19 PM |
link
Tricky Bernie. They're
right, but they don't know why. The two dailies trot out apologists
for Cardinal Law today -- Eugene
Kennedy in the Globe
and Joe
Fitzgerald in the
Herald -- and they each make the same breathtakingly idiotic
analogy: Someday we'll all appreciate the good that Law did. Just
like we did with ... Richard Nixon!
Neither Kennedy nor Fitzgerald is
obtuse enough to assert that Law hadn't made serious mistakes (as
Nixon might put it, "Mistakes were made"), or that he shouldn't have
resigned. But they each argue that, over time, we'll see that the
good Law accomplished outweighed the bad, just as it did with Nixon.
Kennedy writes of Nixon -- who launched a secret, illegal war in
Cambodia, who facilitated the assassination of Salvador Allende, and
who repeatedly and flagrantly subverted the Constitution -- that he
was "undone by one fatal misjudgment about Watergate." Fitzgerald
notes that a lot of people turned out for Nixon's funeral. Well,
there's nostalgia for Stalin in Russia, too.
This follows on the heels of
the
Reverend Peter Gomes's
truly embarrassing defense of Law in Friday's Globe. Gomes
offered his own analogy: "The news is bad enough, but when columnists
and editorial writers weigh in with their shrill characterizations
and cries for arch-episcopal blood, one cannot help but empathize
just a bit with the Nixon-like figure who is damned at every
turn."
As Hunter
Thompson put it in his
now-classic Nixon obituary, "He was a crook." Whether Law was
actually a crook, or was simply an egregious enabler of child abuse,
remains to be seen. What's certain is that he will mainly be
remembered for the vigorous manner in which he helped pedophile
priests rape kids again and again. That Law had a rational approach
to Cuba policy, or that he reached out to the Jewish community, is
nice but beside the point.
By the way, Dale Stephanos's Law
cartoon in today's Herald is so good that you should go out
and buy a copy just for that.
posted at 9:33 AM |
link
Friday, December 13, 2002
One-day wonder? No real
follow-up today to yesterday's explosive Washington Post story
on allegations that Iraq recently supplied a group linked to Al Qaeda
with nerve gas. The Post itself runs a
dispatch from the Associated Press
in which Saddam Hussein's government issues a ritual
denial.
Reader RB upbraided me last night
for failing to note that the sourcing in the original story was a
tangled mess of anonymity. Fair point, though I believe anyone who
read the story could tell that it was transparently coming from
Bush-administration sources. Protecting sources is unremarkable; the
question is whether reporter Barton Gellman and his editors exercised
due diligence in determining whether those sources were passing along
reliable information, or were simply trying to blow smoke up the
Post's, uh, tailpipe.
Not that the Post was under
any particular obligation to advance the story today. But if there's
no significant follow-up soon, that will speak volumes about the
original report.
posted at 10:13 AM |
link
Zittrain on the Aussie Internet
ruling. Got some excellent e-mail regarding the Australian court
decision ruling that Dow Jones may be sued for libel in Australia for
a piece published by Barron's magazine, which it owns. The
court's ruling, in a nutshell, held that because the piece was
available on the Web, it was "published" in Australia just as surely
as it was published in the United States. Click here
and here
for my earlier posts on the ruling.
The most interesting e-mail comes
from Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain, whom I tweaked
for not reacting with what I believed was the appropriate level of
outrage. Here's his entire e-mail:
I don't see how the court
could have realistically decided otherwise without essentially
immunizing Internet speech from any legal boundary, while keeping
books, magazines, etc., in a separate box. Certainly the U.S. view
of its own jurisdiction is broad: if someone far away does
something to hurt someone here, and there's any indication that
the activity was targeted to the U.S. or even likely to end up
here, that's all it takes. (Just ask Manuel Noriega.) I was
actually impressed with how solicitous the written opinion is
about the burden to someone publishing over the Internet of
knowing and hewing to dozens of countries' respective laws about
speech. A lot of discussion in the opinion distinguishes a
paid-subscription site that actively solicits business around the
world from a site that might simply be up and not targeted
anywhere in particular -- so there's room for the average blogger
to not be hailed into court in Australia for saying the same thing
the Barron's article did.
On the actual merits, I think
this really is a dilemma: like you, I don't want to see the
revolutionary reach of the Internet gummed up by a network of
oft-conflicting laws. But the other side is that it's not fair for
someone injured by a faraway wrongdoer to have to travel to, say,
New Jersey to seek vindication. (At the extreme, one might publish
through Sealand
and then say, since Sealand bans very few things, that there's no
recourse.) One might think that there ought not to be any laws
restricting speech at all (the First Amendment certainly says that
on its face!), but then the issue isn't jurisdiction, but that any
sovereign near or far might complain about speech. The satellite
point is an interesting one -- how terrible if each country (or
individual homeowner...), with respective airspace going straight
up forever, could complain about satellite orbits. But that's too
easy: satellite orbits have no measurable burden on life in the
country they overfly. (Leaving aside spying.) Imagine one simply
wanted to fly planes, or hot air balloons, around the world
without regard for boundaries -- somehow a country demanding
permission for that doesn't seem so archaic. Balloons and planes
can impact the citizens within, giving the country some measure of
moral authority to regulate.
Zimbabwe will do whatever it
does -- restraint by Australia would bring no particular pressure
on that country to refrain from trying impose touch speech laws if
that's what it's inclined to do. It's probably worth noting that
Dow Jones doesn't care one bit what Zimbabwe thinks about its
publishing, since there's no realistic way for that country to
make Dow Jones's life hard. Ultimately what would make an adverse
judgment in Australia have bite is a bank account or other
operation by Dow Jones there -- much more fair game. An attempt to
get U.S. courts to execute an Australian judgment against U.S.
assets would have to pass some form of first amendment scrutiny.
So, so long as one keeps one's arms and legs inside the U.S. car,
judgments other countries make about one's Internet speech don't
matter so much -- at least if they would not pass constitutional
muster here.
Much of this debate seems frozen
in 1995 or so. The dilemma of Internet jurisdiction goes back that
far, with the underlying Internet technology evolving all the
while. The real advance that will impact this debate is the
ability of the provider of content on the Internet to actually
express a preference for who should be able to see it. If Dow
Jones could check a box that said, "This material not for
consumption in Australia," it'd be a lot harder for them to cry
foul if they left the box unchecked and then had to answer in
Australia for it. I think these checkboxes are in rapid
development -- they're the sort of thing that a three-expert panel
found Yahoo could implement to keep those on French territory
largely away from Yahoo auctions that would be banned in France --
and they suggest a world in which really strict countries end up
shooting themselves in the foot: if Australia wants to have
draconian speech laws, everyone outside will check the "no
Australia" box and citizens there will find a much less
interesting Internet to surf. I find the prospect of a cantonized
Internet horrible, but it may be inevitable, and countries could
find themselves under a natural pressure to harmonize their rules
about speech so as to encourage Internet speakers not to exclude
their citizens from what they have to say. Australia may think
that a given article in Barron's is no good, but they're
not China -- they wouldn't be pleased to see Dow Jones taking its
ball home if it were easy to do. I hate the idea of a "little guy"
Internet speaker being cowed into circulating her stuff only to
her neighbors -- checking most of the boxes -- so as to avoid
faraway lawsuits. But as the architecture of the Internet starts
to more and more track that of the physical world, we need either
to make a compelling case to Australia to simply change its
defamation laws to be a little more lenient, or see that it won't
hesitate much to impose its laws as soon as our bits cross its
borders.
Perhaps the most frightening aspect
of the Australian ruling is that it does make sense. Yes, of
course the Barron's article was "published" in Australia. How
can anyone argue that it would be wrong for the aggrieved party to be
able to sue for libel in Australia? But though not necessarily wrong,
it's still bad. As Zittrain himself notes, what we may be seeing is
the cordoning-off of the Internet, which would be terrible news for
anyone who cares about free speech.
posted at 10:13 AM |
link
Thursday, December 12, 2002
Lott, Republicans, and
African-Americans. The Time.com
story that Drudge
linked to tonight should finish off Trent Lott by no later than
sundown on Friday. Lott, it seems, helped lead an effort to keep
black students out of his fraternity at Ole Miss. Segregation now,
segregation forever! Meanwhile, Lott's friends at the racist Council
of Conservative Citizens have finally updated their website, and
they've got a really spiffy contribution from one Michael
Andrew Grissom, the author
of such tomes as Southern by the Grace of God, The Last
Rebel Yell, and Can the South Survive? Grissom
writes:
Lott may never have meant,
as happily charged in the press, that we would have been better
off with a segregationist President, but I wish he had. It is
true, and it is time someone says so....
Politicians, who make the laws,
have submitted to the black agenda, and we see an increasingly
socialistic government as a result. In other words, give up your
liberties quietly or be prepared to suffer ignominy. There is no
fight left in the white public sector. That is why we saw
immediate disavowals and apologies from Trent Lott.
Thanks for sharing,
Michael.
Meanwhile, I got several e-mails
today from people who thought I was too easy on George W. Bush,
reminding me of Bush's appearance at Bob Jones University during the
2000 presidential campaign, among other things. To which I say,
Come on. I mean, I like to think I'm a fairly unstinting Bush
critic, but I really don't think the man has a racist bone in his
body. And I would believe that even if Colin Powell and Condoleezza
Rice were not among his closest advisers.
But it's true that the Bushes have
a complicated relationship with race. As Franklin
Foer observed two years ago
in the New Republic, the Bush family is forever baffled at
their lack of African-American support, believing they should be
judged by what's in their hearts rather than by the conservative
policies they support, many of which blacks rightly perceive are not
in their interests. Foer writes:
In fact, the Bushes'
problem on race isn't that they're insincere; it's that they're
overly sincere. They're so convinced of their personal decency
that they expect it to trump the deep, long-standing ideological
differences that separate their party from black political
opinion.
Foer's piece mainly traces Jeb
Bush's efforts to do away with affirmative action in Florida. But you
can see George W. in it, too. In many ways, his faith-based
initiative was a way for him to reach to black ministers such as the
Reverend
Eugene Rivers. But, as John
DiIulio wrote in his
astounding letter to Ron
Suskind, Bush ended up letting it fall apart in the name of appeasing
"the most far-right House Republicans."
Faced with the choice between doing
the right thing and doing the political thing, the Bushes have
invariably chosen the latter. Unfortunately, that hardly makes them
unique.
posted at 10:42 PM |
link
Bush lets Lott have it. And
we didn't even have to wait another day. CNN
quotes the president as
saying, "Recent comments by Senator Lott do not reflect the spirit of
our country. He has apologized and rightly so. Every day that our
nation was segregated was a day our nation was unfaithful to our
founding ideals." Good for Bush. Unfortunately, he did not call on
Lott to resign. We can only hope that Lott has already told Bush that
he's going, thus sparing himself further public
humiliation.
posted at 1:39 PM |
link
More on Saddam and Al Qaeda.
The indefatigable Glenn
Reynolds has found
this
on the links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Guess I'm going to
have to go check out Vanity Fair for this month.
Meanwhile, Barry
Crimmins writes of my item
from this morning on the Washington Post piece: "Dan, I don't
understand.The US is now supposed to bomb the populace of Iraq if
this story is accurate? Why?" My answer: I don't think we need to
bomb Iraqi civilians, and I hope to God that we don't.
Assuming the Post story is
accurate -- and I'm not prepared to assume anything yet -- it's still
hard to imagine that Iraq has any significant war-fighting capability
left after more than a decade of sanctions, no-fly zones, and steady
bombings by the US and Britain.
I have no first-hand understanding
of military matters, but since our armed forces will be fighting in
our name, and since I haven't given up on the idea of democracy quite
yet, I'll risk sounding like a fool. I would hope that if we do any
bombing at all, it will be limited to carefully targeted Iraqi
military facilities. If Saddam has surrounded said facilities with,
say, a ring of nursery schools, then leave 'em alone. We're not
talking about Germany circa 1942 here; we're talking about a
country that couldn't surrender fast enough in 1991, when it was
presumably a lot stronger than it is today.
If we absolutely, positively have
to invade -- if more sanctions and more inspections simply aren't
going to get the job done -- then let's invade by land and hope for a
rapid collapse of the Iraqi army, followed by the fall of Saddam. We
may even be greeted as liberators -- for a day or two. After that it
could get incredibly ugly. But if the Iraqi exile groups can put
their country back together with a minimum of involvement on our
part, that would certainly be the best we could hope for.
But I'm not a pacifist. I'd rather
see the US and its allies take action than let Saddam equip
terrorists with nerve gas that can be set off in cities throughout
Europe and the United States.
This is a terrible moment.
President Bush needs to approach it with humility -- a word he used a
lot when he was running for office, but which we haven't heard much
of since he was installed.
posted at 12:41 PM |
link
Lott's conservative critics
II. Didn't mean to leave the ultraconservative Family Research
Council out of the list of former Trent Lott allies who are appalled
by his racist remarks. Council
president Ken Connor writes:
Sen. Lott has apologized
for his thoughtless remarks, dismissing them as "A poor choice of
words [that] conveyed to some the impression that I
embrace the discarded policies of the past." A poor choice of
words? Discarded policies? This is a quaint and benign way to
describe the insidious evil that was Jim Crow. Now, we do not
believe that Sen. Lott is a racist. But such thoughtless remarks
-- and the senator has an unfortunate history of such gaffes --
simply reinforce the suspicion that conservatives are closet
racists and secret segregationists.
Connor concludes by suggesting that
the Republican Party would be a lot better off if Lott would
resign.
posted at 12:41 PM |
link
Lott's conservative critics.
What Trent Lott and nitwits such as Sean Hannity seem not to realize
is that this isn't partisan, and it's not really about the racist
remarks Lott made at Strom Thurmond's birthday party last week. Many
conservatives have been leading the charge in the effort to drive
Lott out as Senate Republican leader, if not out of the Senate
itself. And the reason is that Lott's praise for Thurmond's 1948
segregationist presidential campaign was reflective of
Lott's
longstanding practice of
seeking friendship and support from the most racist, retrograde
elements of the Republican Party.
This morning, Globe
columnist Jeff Jacoby, a
stalwart conservative, calls on Lott to resign, calling him "a
witless yahoo who waxes nostalgic for the pre-civil rights South."
WTKK Radio (96.9 FM) talk-show host Jay
Severin, who stands
approximately to the right of Tom DeLay, has been urging Lott to step
down as well. No surprise there: Severin delights in calling
affirmative action a form of "racism," but he also marched for civil
rights in the 1960s.
Another conservative,
the
Wall Street Journal's John
Fund, writes today, "Mr.
Lott's remarks reopen one of the rawest and ugliest moments in
American politics." Fund reports that the four Republican appointees
to the US Civil Rights Commission -- including the extremely
conservative, anti-affirmative-action Abigail Fernstrom -- have
issued a statement saying that Lott's comments "were particularly
shameful coming from a leader of the Republican Party, the party of
Abraham Lincoln, and the party that supported all of these essential
steps forward far more vigorously than the Democratic Party, which at
the time was the home of Congressional southerners committed to white
supremacy." (Question for Thernstrom: the Democrats used to support
slavery, too. Is that still relevant?)
Conservative Andrew
Sullivan has been huge on
this, and has posted more good stuff this morning -- including a shot
at the loathsome Hannity. (Last night, on the Fox News Channel's
Hannity and Colmes, the witless cohost demanded that the black
congressman who'd agreed to come on the show defend the Reverend
Jesse Jackson's statements that he spit into the food of white people
when he was a youth. Say what?) Sullivan writes that Lott
"cannot be Republican Senate Majority Leader any more without
destroying a good deal of what George W. Bush has accomplished" -- a
reference, I suppose, to the president's halting but sincere efforts
to make the Republican Party more inclusive.
Reader LC called my attention to
yet another conservative columnist who is demanding Lott's
resignation, Charles
Krauthammer, who writes in
today's Washington Post:
This is not just the kind
of eruption of moronic bias or racial insensitivity that cost
baseball executive Al Campanis and sports commentator Jimmy the
Greek Snyder their careers. This is something far more important.
This is about getting wrong the most important political
phenomenon in the past half-century of American history: the civil
rights movement. Getting wrong its importance is not an issue of
political correctness. It is evidence of a historical blindness
that is utterly disqualifying for national office.
And on and on it goes, and will go,
until Trent Lott finally goes.
One final point. Hannity-inspired
boneheads who blame Lott's woes on liberals should consider that it's
the Democrats who have the most to gain by his staying on, as
Wayne
Woodlief notes in today's
Boston Herald. You can be sure that President Bush is waiting
for Lott to do the right thing so that he doesn't have to whack him
in public. But Lott's values are not Bush's, and if Lott insists on
staying, he's going to cripple the next two years of Bush's
presidency.
I suspect Lott has maybe one more
day to step down before Karl Rove tells him to expect the president
to mention him in a brief statement on the White House
lawn.
posted at 10:28 AM |
link
The smoking gun? If you
haven't turned on a radio or TV set today, you may not know that
today's Washington Post reports that a terrorist group linked
to Al Qaeda may
have obtained nerve gas from Iraq
and smuggled it out through Turkey in October.
If this proves true, then the
endgame really is at hand. Even most of us who have opposed the Bush
administration's war plans have said that if there were credible
evidence of a threat against us, then we should go in.
But Mr. President, please: we need
proof. Some of us haven't forgotten the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.
Turn the evidence over to the UN Security Council and give it, say,
one week to make its own evaluation. If the council agrees that it's
credible, then I guess it's bombs away. Ugh.
posted at 10:18 AM |
link
Wednesday, December 11, 2002
More on the Aussie court
ruling. The Phoenix's Seth Gitell called my attention to
this
excellent editorial in
today's Wall Street Journal. The Journal, in turn,
reports that Stakhanovite blogger Glenn
Reynolds has been all over
it. Well, not quite; but Reyolds does direct his readers to
an
op-ed piece he wrote for the
Australian, making
the argument that the court's ruling raises concerns similar to those
posed by space travel a half-century ago:
Each nation's territory
thus consisted of a wedge beginning at the Earth's core and
continuing infinitely upward and outward. This posed a number of
absurdities, but the greatest difficulty was to orbiting
spacecraft. Flying over a nation's territory without permission
was illegal, perhaps even an act of war.
Similarly, Reynolds notes, holding
the New Jersey-based Barron's to the libel standards of
Australia simply because the Barron's website is available in
Australia means that
internet publishers --
simply by choosing to publish on the internet -- are held to be
subject to the various laws of every nation reached by the
internet, which means, of course, of every nation on earth. The
results are likely to be damaging for the internet, encouraging a
lowest common denominator approach in which internet publishers
strive not to be offensive according to anyone's standards, which
is likely to mean not publishing at all, or publishing only
inoffensive pap.
I've already gotten several e-mails
suggesting that this is no big deal. Folks, this is a big
deal.
posted at 1:26 PM |
link
A terrifying blow to free
speech. Those who think John Ashcroft is the biggest threat to
their free-speech rights are about to get a terrifying awakening. The
High Court of Australia has ruled that a
mining mogul can file a libel suit
against Dow Jones in the Australian court system, even though the
offending article -- in Barron's magazine -- was published in
New Jersey. The rationale: the article was posted on the Web. Thus
the court ruled that the article was "published" in Australia just as
surely as it was in the United States.
And what is the deal with this bit
of nonsense from the usually stalwart Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard
Law School professor who's an outspoken advocate of online freedom?
Zittrain told the AP that the ruling was no big deal, explaining,
"Their words are their product and if they export it internationally
they know how to work the cost of litigation into the sale of their
product." Huh? One of the most important qualities of Internet
journalism is that it gives independent, alternative voices the power
to go up against Big Media. Dow Jones may be able to afford the cost
of defending itself against an Australian libel suit. An independent
operator, on the other hand, is going to have to stay out of
Australia -- or avoid writing anything controversial in the first
place.
As an example of how the Australian
ruling could affect free speech on the Internet, First Amendment
lawyer Floyd Abrams told the Wall Street Journal (also owned
by Dow Jones): "If Dow Jones is subject to a Singapore court ruling
on things communicated from one American to another within the U.S.
because it related to Singapore, then the very availability of the
Internet as a place where people can communicate will be imperiled."
(No link; subscription required.)
David
Schultz, the lawyer who
represented a consortium of media companies that supported Dow
Jones's defense, told the New York Times (a member of that
consortium): "In a nutshell, what the court said was that there is
nothing wrong with an Australian court hauling Dow Jones into
Australia to go to court.... If that becomes the law of the Internet,
the problem isn't that individuals will be suing all over the world
-- though that is a problem. The problem is that rogue
governments like Zimbabwe will pass laws that will effectively shut
down the Internet."
Abrams and Schultz are right. But
by reaching for the extreme examples of anti-speech, authoritarian
regimes, they actually manage to play down the problem. The US has
the freest press in the world, guaranteed by the First Amendment. Our
libel laws are far more favorable to publishers than are libel laws
in democratic countries such as Canada, Britain, Germany, France,
and, of course, Australia -- never mind Singapore and Zimbabwe. And
there's not a damn thing the ACLU can do about it.
The reaction to this dangerous
ruling is just beginning.
posted at 9:39 AM |
link
Tuesday, December 10, 2002
Trent Lott's racist past.
New York Times columnist Paul
Krugman this morning
doesn't hesitate to remind readers that incoming Senate majority
leader Trent Lott -- under
fire for praising the
racist 1948 presidential campaign of Strom Thurmond -- has a, uh,
history with this sort of thing. Krugman notes that, as recently as
the 1990s, Lott, a Republican from Mississippi, was involved with the
Council of Conservative Citizens, a notorious white-supremacist
group.
In fact, the CofCC's
website -- festooned with a
Confederate flag -- was full of praise for Lott even before Lott's
surprising endorsement of segregation (surprising in the sense that
he said it out loud). The site was last updated on Friday, before
Lott's racist words had hit the fan. But there's a big smiling photo
of him, labeled "A LOTT of Courage! Sen. Trent Lott calls for the
Army to PROTECT U.S. Borders against the Illegal Alien Invasion."
That, in turn, leads you to the transcript of a radio interview Lott
recently gave to the Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly in which he
did, indeed, suggest the use of troops to keep illegal immigrants
out, and to a resolution that the council recently passed in support
of Lott.
So what is this racist group with
which Lott is so closely associated? Click on "Editorial," and you'll
find this
essay by someone called
"Beauregarde," titled "Deconstructing Liberals." Every sentence is a
hate-filled gem, but it all comes to a head here:
When liberals extol
tolerance, they do so with haughty distain for anyone who does not
concede to the liberal mantra on the subject. Liberal tolerance is
not a matter balancing opposites without losing the liberal
perspective, but is instead a freeze-out of nonliberal views;
particularly those ideas concerning white racial consciousness.
Due to prevalent liberal attitudes on race, many otherwise
rational white people have a superstitious aversion to racial
self-awareness. Whites, when confronted by racial hostility,
automatically deny being racist. Chief among these superstitions
is the notion that all races are created equal.
The Anti-Defamation
League says of the Council
of Conservative Citizens that its ideology is "Christian Identity,
white supremacy, neo-Nazi, paramilitary," adding:
Advances its ideology by
inflaming fears and resentments, among Southern whites
particularly, with regard to black-on-white crime, non-white
immigration, attacks on the public display of the Confederate
flag, and other issues related to "traditional" Southern
culture.
Now, it's only fair to note that
Lott claims the CofCC's love for him is unrequited. But it's equally
fair to point out that Lott seems not to be telling the truth.
Consider, for example, this, published in the New Republic in
January 1999, when Lott's racist associations briefly became an
issue:
According to a number of
CofCC members, ... Mississippi Senator Trent Lott is a dues-paying
member of the group, which is particularly strong in his home
state.... The Citizens Informer [the CofCC
newsletter] occasionally carries Lott's freely distributed
newspaper column. Moreover, despite Lott's claim that he had "no
firsthand knowledge" of the CofCC, Edsall [Thomas Edsall, of
the Washington Post] reported on December 16 that Lott
addressed the group in 1992, telling the audience members that
they "stand for the right principles and the right philosophy."
And there's this, from CQ
Weekly, published around the same time as the TNR
piece:
No matter how hard Lott
tries to distance himself [from the CofCC], questions
remain because his uncle Arnie Watson, a former Mississippi state
senator and current member of the council's executive board,
remembers Lott being an "honorary member." Watson and others find
it hard to fathom that Lott could be uninformed about a widely
known political group in his own state.
"In Washington, they like to use
the word 'disingenuous,'" said Bill Minor, a political columnist
in Mississippi for 51 years, when asked about Lott's assertion
that he was unaware of the council's beliefs.
"He had good reason to know what
was going on, but if he didn't, he was like the piano player in
the house of ill repute who didn't notice what was going on all
around him."
The big question remains: will
President Bush do the right thing and demand that Trent Lott step
down as the Senate Republican leader before the GOP assumes the
majority next month?
posted at 9:50 AM |
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Bill Bulger: the aftermath.
Two fascinating postscripts on UMass president Bill Bulger's refusal
to testify before a congressional committee investigating the FBI's
corrupt deal with Bulger's gangster brother, James "Whitey"
Bulger.
Herald columnist
Peter
Gelzinis today passes along
some speculation that Bill Bulger's 17-year Senate presidency may
have been jump-started by former FBI agents John Connolly and John
Morris, the duo that served as Whitey Bulger's handlers and
protectors. The question Gelzinis asks: did Connolly and Morris
deliberately target state senators Joe DiCarlo and Ronald MacKenzie
in the MBM scandal of the 1980s in order to grease Bulger's path to
the Senate presidency? To be sure, Gelzinis offers nothing more than
the whispers of an anonymous tipster, but it sounds like a matter
worth investigating.
Differing 180 degrees is
Globe columnist Tom
Oliphant, who blasts the
congressional investigation as an exercise in buffoonish
grandstanding. Oliphant can't help himself -- he goes way too far,
all but nominating Bill Bulger for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Nevertheless, he's dead right in denouncing Watermelon Man Dan
Burton's performance as a "farce" and a "sham."
posted at 9:50 AM |
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Monday, December 09, 2002
Trent Lott's racist
outburst. I'm only beginning to catch up on incoming Senate
majority leader Trent Lott's shocking statements of last Thursday in
which he slobbered over that ancient segregationist Strom Thurmond
and waxed nostalgic over the good ol' days of good ol' boys, separate
rest rooms for them coloreds, and crosses burning in the
night.
At a 100th-birthday party for
Thurmond, Lott
lauded the Methuselah-like bigot's
1948 campaign for president:
I want to say this about
my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him.
We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our
lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these
years, either.
As commentators from conservative
Andrew
Sullivan to liberal
Joe
Conason have noted, Lott's
got to go. Conason thinks there's no chance that George W. Bush will
speak up for decency, and he's probably right -- but this would be a
perfect opportunity for the president to put a little distance
between himself and the more retrograde elements of his party on
Capitol Hill.
Anyway, Sullivan's been all over
this. And Conason expresses the appropriate outrage that the
so-called liberal media have gutlessly given Lott a pass on this
not-uncharacteristic outburst.
posted at 4:48 PM |
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Another take on James Foley.
Hub Blogger Jay Fitzgerald considers himself a personal friend and
(former?) admirer of Catholic priest James Foley, whose horrendous
but by-now-unsurprising misdeeds (affairs with married women; two
children by a woman who died of a drug overdose, possibly because he
failed to call 911 quickly enough) were revealed last
week.
I wouldn't cut Foley one millimeter
of slack. But Fitzgerald's
post is fascinating for its
insight into how complicated these people really are. I don't doubt
for a moment that Foley has done a lot of good in his life. But,
unfortunately, he has to come to terms with the awful truth: his
entire career will be judged by his misdeeds, at least in this
life. And, worse for him, it should be.
posted at 10:05 AM |
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Stop this cardinal from taking
flight. Maybe state attorney general Tom Reilly doesn't want to
tip his hand just yet. But he'd better act quickly, given that
Cardinal Bernard Law has both the means and the motive to become a
fugitive from justice.
Means: both the Globe
and the Herald
report this morning that Law slipped out of the country once again
last week, allowing his handlers to lie about his schedule, so that
he could seek advice in Rome. Motive: elected officials have been
understandably reluctant to suggest that Law could face criminal
charges. But his failure to report the involvement of a priest, James
Foley, with a
woman who died of a drug overdose
would certainly strike many observers as the sort of thing that could
land the globe-trotting cardinal in very serious legal trouble. It's
unlikely that the thought hasn't occurred to Law, too.
At the very least, Reilly should
seek to have Law designated as a material witness who cannot leave
the state without the permission of the attorney general's office.
Not only would that have the practical effect of preventing this
loathsome cleric from going on the lam, but it would also have the
symbolic effect of publicly underscoring precisely how contemptible
-- and possibly criminal -- Law's conduct has been.
posted at 9:34 AM |
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You mean Brian Williams left
MSNBC? Here's how little attention anyone is paying to MSNBC
these days. The New York Times today has the latest in what
seems like an endless string of articles on the woes of
the
cratering all-news cable network.
And the print edition of the story includes a photo of Brian
Williams. The cutline: "Brian Williams, left, is the network's
anchor."
Well, uh, no, he's not. Williams,
now the official heir apparent to NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw,
fled
to sister station CNBC in
July. No one watches him there, either, but at least he's able to
avoid the stench of high-profile failure that has become to pervade
MSNBC, whose latest bright idea is ... Jesse Ventura!
John
Ellis had the definitive take
on the Ventura-to-MSNBC idiocy way back on November 13.
posted at 9:33 AM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
