The Boston Herald Pitches a Fit

The Boston Herald reports that "Outrage Builds [at the Boston Herald] over Obama Snub of . . ."

— wait for it —

". . . the Herald." Howie Carr likens the snub, described elsewhere by the Herald as a "freezing out" of "full access" to cover the President's visit to Boston, to inclusion on President Nixon's "Enemies List."

And one sees straightaway why the Obama Administration is disinclined to extend to the Herald the full array of access privileges available to serious journalists.
More...Let's be clear: this isn't a First Amendment issue. Denying "full access" to the President isn't censorship, even if, as it appears, the decision was made at least in part because Obama's aides think the Herald has not treated him "fairly." There is a press pool. It's crowded, there is limited space, and it sits amply within the Administration's discretion to decide how to allocate that space.

Is a review of a paper's previous coverage for "fairness" an appropriate consideration in allocating that space? To be sure, the Administration's decision sounds punitive. White House spokesman Matt Lehrich explained his thinking as follows:

I tend to consider the degree to which papers have demonstrated to covering the White House regularly and fairly in determining local pool reporters. . . . I think (the Romney op-ed) raises a fair question about whether the paper is unbiased in its coverage of the president’s visits.

Now I don't think anyone can deny that Lehrich made a poor tactical decision writing all this down in an email message for the Herald to reprint. And I'll admit, too, that claims of bias are tiresome and we all should be "troubled" whenever a government figure takes action against a reporter based on what he writes. But let's pause to consider what that action was: "freezing out" of "full access" to the President's visit to the Hub. Not exactly jack-booted thugs kicking down a door and shooting up the Herald's printing press. And with a reporter from Human Events currently holding a chair in the White House briefing room, I'm pretty comfortable that the White House isn't excluding contrary viewpoints.

But that said, a decision to deny the Herald "full access" is entirely consistent with an important theme that the President himself continues to articulate: in recent years our politics have deteriorated to the point where they severely inhibit our ability even to identify seriously problems, much less work together to solve them. And the President is not wrong to assign to the media a share of the responsibility for the deterioration of our politics.

One look at Carr's gagged-up slurry of petulant populism (yeah, Howie: it doesn't take a genius to write this way) — which of course wouldn't have been complete without references to the President as "Hussein" and descriptions of Globe reporters as "spayed" and "neutered" — makes it quite clear that the Administration wasn't wrong to conclude that maybe someone other than the Herald deserved one of the coveted "full access" slots.

Carr writes:

The Herald is for people who didn’t move here from New York to look down their noses at everyone who has calluses on their hands, who aren’t consumed by guilt about the trust funds that support them in their leisure.

Yes, fine, Howie. But I think the President's point is that the folks with calluses on their hands are owed something better than what you and your colleagues give them every day. You can have your tantrums, Boston Herald, and you can forgo actual news to devote no fewer than 5 stories and columns in today's paper to your trumped-up incident of press martyrdom and "we speak truth to power" meme. Nobody's going to shut down your press. But we don't have to take you so seriously as to put you on the White House bus. And we don't, either, need to accept your strained Nixon analogies, which would make you who? Woodward and Bernstein?

Please.

Lieberman's Absurd Miranda Workaround

PHUTATORIUS
Here we go again. Another terror arrest, another round of trumped-up hand-wringing from the right about having to "read rights to terrorists." Once again, it seems this "rights = soft on terror" concern is much more theoretical than practical, because the Times Square Rube Goldberg Smoking Car Bomber is talking.

Never mind all that, says Joe Lieberman: we need to strip homegrown terrorists of their citizenship. If we can do that, then we don't have to worry about all these rights, and we can do anything we want to these jerks:
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“I’m now putting together legislation to amend that to [specify that] any individual American citizen who is found to be involved in a foreign terrorist organization, as defined by the Department of State, would be deprived of their citizenship rights,” Lieberman said Tuesday.

This would be a clever answer to the Miranda "problem," if indeed (1) there were a problem, (2) this approach resolved the problem, and (3) it were clever. But Lieberman's whacked-out law doesn't meet any of these three conditions. Here's why:

We don't always know if a person is innocent or guilty.

The rights and protections we extend to criminal suspects and defendants are designed, among other reasons, to ensure that the state doesn't manufacture guilt. Folks in America don't disappear into black holes of detention — without access to attorneys, under conditions that allow law enforcement to extract forced confessions — not because we think criminals deserve kid-glove treatment, but because it would really suck to have that happen to you, if you weren't a criminal.

So let's imagine life in Joe Lieberman's World. You're sitting on a plane, on the tarmac at JFK. You're looking forward to your vacation. Tray tables are up, you've switched off your cell phone, and suddenly federal agents storm into coach and carry you off. They're thinking you tried to blow up a car in Times Square. Well, there's obviously some mistake; a quick call to your attorney will help clear all this up, except someone just declared that you're "involved in a foreign terrorist organization." No lawyer, then. You're back out on the tarmac now, but it's a military transport plane, and you're heading to Bagram, and not Barcelona.

How could this have happened? you ask. Well, it's frighteningly simple. You've been accused of terrorism. Terrorism is an awful, awful crime — so awful, in fact, that just being accused of it is enough to see you stripped you of your citizenship and all the rights that flow from that. Even if the rights bear importantly on the question whether you're a terrorist at all.

Ick. Nice one, Joe.

Of course, that's not the case here at all. Faisal Shahzad has freely confessed his guilt already. We know he tried to kill dozens, if not hundreds of innocent people, over some unspecified grievance that may have something to do with frickin' South Park. So yes, even this purported bleeding-heart liberal correspondent actually would love to see this guy beaten, waterboarded, and humiliated in public (Times Square seems an appropriate forum). And what the heck, when we're done with him, let's strip the guy of his American citizenship. I'm all for that. Screw Faisal Shahzad.

But do we have to strip folks of their citizenship before we know whether they're guilty of terrorism — for the express purpose of facilitating a finding that they're guilty of terrorism? That's the worst kind of legal bootstrapping. It's beneath America. Hell, it's even beneath Glenn Beck. It's just not beneath Senator Lieberman.

Joe, you, too, have the right to remain silent, and we well and truly wish you'd exercise that right a little more often.

Stands for "Big Crock of . . ."

PHUTATORIUS
Bill Hancock took over as Executive Director of the Bowl Championship Series today and immediately proved his aptitude for the job — and his fit in the organization. Hancock took advantage of his first day at work to recite the party line on Why a Football Bowl Series (Division I-A) Playoff Is a Bad Idea. This is, of course, a crucial part of the job — justifying the continued existence of your organization in the face of congressional rumblings and a growing consensus disfavoring its business. I won't take the time (today) to shoot down all of the self-serving arguments Hancock served up, many of which come now with bulletholes already built in, courtesy of the BCS's newest hired PR gun Ari Fleischer. (Need someone to provide a bedraggled and hopeless defense of The Indefensible? Hire a former Bush Administration Press Secretary!)

No: I've only got one bone to pick here. Hancock actually took the position that fans would not turn out at FBS playoff games, arguing from low attendance figures at Football Championship Series (I-AA) playoff games. The FCS, you see, has a four-round 16-team playoff, with high seeds playing home games until the neutral-site championship game late in December. Here's Hancock:

It works at that level, I can't deny it, but if you look attendance for those games, only Montana had decent attendance. Many teams didn't draw as well as they did in the regular season.

There are few things in this world that Little Ol' Me (Little Ol' I?) feel I can predict with absolute certainty. But I would STAKE MY LIFE on the proposition that if an FBS playoff game were played at Ohio Stadium, the Swamp, Beaver Stadium, Tiger Stadium, Darrell Royal Stadium, the L.A. Coliseum, or Rocky Top — just to take a few examples — fans of the pertinent teams would turn off The Biggest Loser, pry themselves off their couches, and come out to watch. COME ON!

Walk the Line

MITHRIDATES
While the usual knee-jerk conservatives spout out their predictable objections, it's worth noting the delicacy of the situation in Iran. While most Americans obviously wants an end to the Ayatollah's theocracy and a peaceful, prosperous, and friendly Iran, the questions is how best to get there.

The posturing right demands a strong statement from the President affirming our support for the protesters. But to what end? An open declaration of support from the US President plays directly into the hands of the oppressors in Iran. It gives credence to their claims that the protests are orchestrated by their enemies and might help unite much of the country behind the regime. The obviousness of this predicament has not prevented condemnation of the President from some corners, and some conservatives, such as Peggy Noonan and George Will, should be credited for noting the foolishness of such criticism.
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Let's be fair. Not every conservative is as moronic as Jeff Jacoby and some argue reasonably for stronger words or at least acknowledge the potential downside.

We'll just quietly give thanks for a leader who thinks about the best course of action to effect the most favorable outcome and makes the necessary adjustments as circumstances change — unlike, well, you know . . .

What the Iranian people need is to know that the rest of the world supports them. Obama is trying to do this without giving any credence to the regime's claims of foreign interference. It's a delicate line to walk, and we wish the President success. And whether he got to this speech because of Republican criticism or just a reasonable reassessment of changing circumstances, it's still a damn good one. The man can talk, and right now the right words matter.

Top 10 Harvard-Globe Comments

MITHRIDATES
The Internet has changed journalism forever. You heard that first here. One of the great improvements over old-fashioned print media is the comment section at the end of an online article. This is where you learn that — however reasonable you originally thought the article was — it's really just either socialist propaganda from the left-wing media machine or fascist rhetoric from the corporate/Christian right.

Don't be fooled by a seemingly bland article about an apparently apolitical topic . Somewhere there's a communist plot — and our commentators are going to find it for us. Nowhere is this more apparent than in a supposedly left-leaning (left-wing, socialist, COMMUNIST!) paper's article about an allegedly liberal (radical, anti-American, MARXIST!) institution.

So without further ado, here are the top 10 comments from Harvard to Lay off 275 in the Boston Globe:
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1. Ah, the poetic justice is intoxicating. These Universities were the most fervent supporters of President Obama in his run. The Liberal minded Professors slamming any opposition to him on campus. Now, with benefactors getting hammered left and right with taxes, threats to take their wealth, and so forth and so on, they are running for the proverbial hills. Which leaves the previously mentioned Professors scrambling to retain their jobs. I wonder what they think of their CHOSEN ONE now. He conned everyone he came in contact with, and is now dismantling the very same establishment which put him in power. The sweet smell of buyers remorse is in the air. - Posted by Jim

2. See what communists does? It runes the eckonomy by redistributting the wealth. Now those Harvard libruls can feal it.
   We need Free Markets, deregulation on Wall Street and TAX CUTS for the top 5 percent in order to make this economy better for all of us teabaggers.
   Who cares about educashun and evoloution when you don't get a job?? Knot me. - Posted by Jonny Wingnut

3. billions in the bank and laying people off??? Not for profit??? something is not right here? LIke everyone else said, why arent they paying taxes? This state is a JOKE. Why do we still live here?If they only had a BILLION in the bank it shouldn't matter. - Posted by rayhags

4. Harvard can't dip into its endowment to save some of these jobs? Got to build another gigantic building, but let go of all the personnel? I thought communism was all about redistributing wealth to everyone? - Posted by realist

5. Harvard isn't going to hell, it's already there. E-gad what a horrible bunch of people. - Posted by Jack Higgins

6. This is almost entirely fault of former Harvard President Larry Summers.
   I just hope he would not screw our nation/federal government.- Posted by Rudy Biden
   

7. Economic problem precipitated largely by Harvard Alum's and now it comes home to roost. Maybe a revision of the Ethic's Standard and Practice courses would be apropos! - Posted by DanB

8. Sure .... Destroy the economy and lose 275 jobs. Justice??
   What a bunch of elitist clowns at that place...
   They do not get it at all... Answer - Do not respect these low life bone heads. Show them massive disrespect wherever they go. They are the elite gone mad. - Posted by Terry Wise

9. I find it interesting that a large majority of comments on this subject are barely literate. - Posted by Ed

10. Is there a sensible reason why there is a commentary section for articles published in this newspaper? The quality of the reactive screes that people write is an embarrassment. It is a forum for those that need somehow to express their anger at anything that stays still long enough to tag with graffiti.

    It is hardly any better than that.

    I think that this newspaper should rethink the premise on which researched news articles are plastered with these random splatters of anger. - Posted by David
    

Ah, the delightful bashing of: one of the best of our world-leading institutions of higher education; a great contributor to the advancement of science; a source of pride for the U.S. and the state of Massachusetts; one of the state's top employers; one of the top attracters of talent from around the world to the United States; a leader in providing affordable debt-free education to top students; and a contributor to the education of the general public through its Extension School . . . thank God for the Internet!

Idiot Watch: Mary Ann Glendon

PHUTATORIUS

With his commencement speech at Notre Dame yesterday, President Obama will — we hope — have put an end to these many weeks of absurd posturing by Catholic conservatives over Obama's record on "life issues." The "pro-life" lobby has poured it on with such relish and gusto, you'd have thought the President was Justice Blackmun himself (or Jane Roe) — when in point of fact, he's endeavored to stake out the middle ground on life issues, to the extent there is any to be found.

One aspect of the tomfoolery around South Bend way that struck a chord with me is Harvard Law School professor Mary Ann Glendon's refusal to accept Notre Dame's prestigious Laetare Medal this year — because she couldn't bring herself to share the stage with Barack Obama, Baby-Killer.

Mary Ann Glendon is an Idiot, and I'm taking the liberty of capitalizing the I.

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For full disclosure's sake I should note, before I continue, that I had Professor Glendon for Property in my first year of law school, and she gave me a B. I wasn't thrilled with the grade, but it never detracted from my abiding affinity and respect for her, which I would consider to be the same measure of affinity and respect I would have for any of my law-school professor, before they went and did something backward, absurd, and unqualifiedly stupid. So please don't believe this post marks an attempt to avenge, eight years later, that uninspiring grade — any of you who have talked foreign policy knows that I believe in a proportional response to aggression, such that I would never respond to that B with the F I'm giving Glendon today.

On to the Idiocy now. The open letter Professor Glendon wrote to Notre Dame refusing her Medal last month described President Obama as "a prominent and uncompromising opponent of the Church's position on issues involving fundamental principles of justice." The letter doesn't supply any of the details to support this indictment of the President. As I can think of no other respect in which anyone can remotely characterize him as the war-criminal dictator described in the letter, I can only assume Glendon is talking about "life issues." President Obama is a well-known advocate of a woman's right to choose, and he supports capital punishment as well. These positions contradict teachings of the Catholic Church, and it's these issues that tend to incite activists — although, one would hope, not a law professor — to the sort of inflammatory rhetoric we see here.

Let's study that rhetoric. Prominent? Barack Obama has never tried to highlight or exploit either of these issues politically. For the most part, he's entirely ducked acting on or discussing them. Nothing in Obama's candidacy or Presidency to date describes a man committed to promoting abortion or fast-tracking executions. Uncompromising? This is an outright laugher. Obama's expressed position on abortion is that he thinks the ideological logjam can and should be broken by taking policy steps to reduce the number of abortions. And yes, Obama opened up federal funding to stem-cell research, but it's likely quite a large number of lives will be saved, as a result of that decision. For that matter, Obama recognizes the importance of interposing "strict guidelines" to govern this field of study.

One wonders what the word "compromise" means, to someone like Mary Ann Glendon. As I remember the word, a compromise calls for concessions from both sides, and that's exactly what Obama has sought to accomplish on these most divisive issues. He's hardly a hard-headed ideologue on these points, and while I understand the urgent absolutism that might make anti-abortion advocates inclined not to give an inch on the question of the lives of the unborn, it's a bit of a logical stretch to describe Obama's position as uncompromising, simply because he doesn't endorse their view.

It's worth revisiting, too, the point Mithridates made in an earlier roundup: that Barack Obama stood alone among the handful of serious aspirants for the Presidency in his opposition to the Iraq War. Lives were lost as a result of that decision — a decision that the Church opposed — but apparently no credit is due to Obama for this, as he is not completely in lock-step with Glendon and the bishops on the other "life" issues. The Church is at least consistent in its life doctrine, even if so many of its conservative adherents would gladly hang, shock, waterboard, and bomb their fellow man, if it could translate to a marginal increase in their own "security."

But more important — to my mind, anyway — than Professor Glendon's obvious posturing, willful inconsistency, and unsupported (and unsupportable) rhetoric is the fact that Mary Ann Glendon should know that the first and most important mission of a university, Catholic or not, is to foster and promote a free exchange of ideas. Putting aside the sheer absurdity of her attempt to cast the President as a willful and determined challenger to Church orthodoxy on issues that have to this point all but escaped his Administration's notice — particularly as he is as close to a moderate on these issues as there can be — it's supremely irksome that a law professor (a law professor!) should turn on Notre Dame for inviting Obama to speak. If differences of opinion cannot be tolerated at a university, then where?

Glendon finesses this issue just a little by writing that the University's intention to confer an honorary degree on President Obama contravened the request of U.S. bishops that Catholic institutions "should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles." Glendon writes that this request "in no way seeks to control or interfere with an institution's freedom to invite or engage in serious debate with whomever it wishes," and she is sorely troubled that a "Catholic university should disrespect it." It logically follows from this passage that Glendon would have accepted her Medal, had the University only invited the President to speak and stopped short of awarding him the honorary degree. But really, though: would Glendon have abandoned her very public, self-serving gesture of sacrifice, if only Notre Dame had withheld a degree from the President?

I doubt it. Mary Ann Glendon is a bright woman, so bright that she knows to seek nuance when it might serve her, and to abandon it in favor of blithely cast generalizations when it doesn't. The ostensible addressee of her open letter, Father Jenkins, the President of Notre Dame, surely saw through the manipulative and self-serving representations she made in her letter, just as I did. But of course we know that the letter wasn't really meant for Father Jenkins: it was directed to the frothing horde of Obama-haters — the kind, just like her, who will happily exaggerate his differences with the Church, overlook the many areas in which his views are consonant with official Church doctrine, and judge him so harshly, four months into his Presidency, that they can't even stomach the notion of appearing on a stage with him. This was never about religion; it was about politics. And in either case, a distinguished scholar like Mary Ann Glendon should be able to tolerate the presence of — and indeed the grant of honors to — a man who disagrees with some of her deeply-held opinions. That goes double when that man is your President.

You ought to be better than this, Professor Glendon.

America's Spiritual Heritage Week

PHUTATORIUS
WHEREAS, notwithstanding any of the foregoing, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution strictly provides: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,"

let's not have a Congressional resolution announcing a yearly "America's Spiritual Heritage Week."

Forbes Tops List of Worst Lists

MITHRIDATES
Isn't it fun to rank things? Look, I like my lists as much as the next guy (on the list) and I don't ask much: only that the people making the list are not completely and irretrievably mentally deficient like the sponge-for-brains editors at Forbes.
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Portland, ME recently topped the magazine's list of Most Livable Cities. This is almost plausible. It's a nice place. I might even live there. And I can't say enough about the great state of Maine. And the New Englander in me loves to see his native land come out on top. But let's move on down the list a bit more to see — there it is at number 9 — Worcester, MA!

That's it. Throw the list in the trash. Right now. Worcester, MA — the Youngstown, OH of New England — shouldn't be in the top 50 in its own state. Not by any reasonable measure by reasonable people. Even worse now that Moses has been toppled in a fit of rage.

But let's be a bit more objective just for kicks. Here are two impossibly stupid things the Forbes folks did:

• They looked only at Metropolitan Statistical Areas with over 500,000 people. This might be a sensible thing to do. What makes it completely insensible is to then look at the metrics for tiny towns within those MSAs and apply the tiny town metric to the whole area. Not following me? Here's an example:
  
  Portland, ME has about 64,000 people living in it. They claim the Portland metro area ranks high on five key metrics and then write about the "513,000 residents living the good life in the Portland metropolitan area". OK, so we must be talking about MSAs and not tiny towns within the MSAs, right?
  
  Peabody, MA — a harmless, but mediocre tiny town just outside of Boston that by some miracle of pseudo-science is #14 on any list — is indeed in an MSA over 500,000 people. You may have heard of it. It's called BOSTON.
  
  Look, Boston has its charms, but it's way too expensive ever to make it onto one of these "livable" lists. So these imbeciles at Forbes must be looking at metrics for just the town of Peabody, in which case they're inconsistent buffoons; OR they're looking at the whole MSA, their list is dumber than I imagined, and they badly mispelled (sorry) Boston.
  


• At this point do we even need to mention that even a imbecilic chimpanzee would know that income growth over the past five years does not measure how affordable a place is compared with its cost-of-living, as Forbes suggests in commenting that "residents can afford the relatively high cost of living because of a 6.3% income growth rate over the past five years?"
  

Still think it's one big MENSA meeting over there in the Forbes editorial room? These cretins put Baltimore, MD as the #8 most livable city in the US. My God, how far we've fallen, if that's true. In the real world, Baltimore slugs it out with Green Bay and Detroit for worst places in North America. Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, Chicago is somehow the 3rd most miserable city in the US!

But I guess in the end it's all good. Darwin's always at work. If you believe the nonsense these fools are selling you, pack up your Chi-town bags and head for BeMore. Both cities just just raised their average IQ. But otherwise cancel your subscription and use your dollars to save some other magazine that might be worth the ink.

Bachmann-Geithner Overdrive

PHUTATORIUS
If you aren't closely following Michelle Bachmann's political career, you're missing great comedy. (Think Sarah Palin, crossed with Glenn Close from Fatal Attraction.) Ms. Bachmann (R-MN), seen here in "Hiya Sailor" mode with President Bush, and here calling for an inquiry into anti-American sentiment in the United States Congress, proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution yesterday. That amendment provides:
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The President may not enter into a treaty or other international agreement that would provide for the United States to adopt as legal tender in the United States a currency issued by an entity other than the United States.

This in response to testimony over the past few days from Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who apparently did not react emphatically enough to the suggestion of a Chinese treasury official that the international community adopt a global "supercurrency" for reserves. Bachmann doesn't think Geithner gives a damn about a Greenback Dollar, so she proposes that we amend the Constitution to calm her nerves.

(You see, as we've noted before, the Framers of the Constitution, in their considerable wisdom, withheld from the House of Representatives any role in negotiating (the Executive's job) or ratifying (the Senate's) treaties. So this was Bachmann's only angle: the "nuclear option," to be sure, but the circumstances clearly call for it. By tomorrow we all could be speaking Chinese.)

Putting aside the question whether we should treat our currency as a point of cultural pride alongside, say, fried chicken, a man on the moon, or the cure for polio — all right, all right: I didn't really put that question aside — is the dollar really in such great immediate danger? The answer is no. And that makes Bachmann either completely off her rocker in her assessment of the situation or cynically determined to misassess the situation to Americans with her treatment of it. I.e., either she's really stupid, or she's evil and manipulative and thinks we're all really stupid.

Do I have to choose?

Oh, and see also George Packer's recent commentary in The New Yorker about paranoia and populism in politics. On point, and good stuff.

Cantor Calls the Stem-Cell Funding Reversal a "Distraction"

PHUTATORIUS
Earlier today House minority whip Eric Cantor described President Obama's expected reversal of the ban on federal funding for stem-cell research as a "distraction." Cantor's words:

Why are we going and distracting ourselves from the economy? This is job No. 1. Let's focus on what needs to be done.

Where to start here? Surely we should expect House members to say stupid things, House whips to say stupider things, minority whips to exceed even that level of stupid, and Republican minority whips to plumb the very depths of stupidity. But still — wow.
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Let's put aside the fact that scientific research is an issue that goes to the very core of this nation's long-term competitiveness (big shout-out to M'dates on this point), and that embryonic stem-cell research harbors the kind of promise that can give birth to an entire industry. Think dot-com boom, Cantor, except with diseases cured and lives saved. This does have to do with the economy, Congressman. One thing Obama has on your feeble congressional mind is the ability to recognize the interconnectedness of issues, to see opportunities for synergy, and to act on multiple fronts simultaneously.

Is Cantor really faulting President Obama for giving attention to issues other than the economic crisis? It's called multitasking, Cantor, and even Congress does it. How else do the folks on Capitol Hill manage to enact multi-billion dollar economic stimulus bills and pass the Civil War Battlefield Act and consider resolutions honoring Sam Bradford for winning the Heisman Trophy? Those last two bits are classic cases of eyes-off-the-prize, Congressman, and it was your party's reps that sponsored them. It seems a bit unfair to begrudge President Obama a moment or two to sign an executive order that will actually confer benefits on the American people.

And as for you personally, Congressman, what were you doing fiddling around in Iraq last month while Wall Street was burning? Where are your priorities?

Maybe we should cut Cantor a break: stem-cell research is a lousy issue for Republicans. They've fought valiantly into the teeth of public opinion on this issue for eight years now, and with Monday's announcement they'll finally have lost the battle. You can see why the guy would want to change the subject, right? Uh, no. No break for you, Cantor. Your President butchered policy on so many issues for eight years. The fact that he managed to squeeze in a crippling once-in-three-generations economic crisis at the end doesn't mean his successor can't address any of the Bush Administration's myriad other failures. Nice try, but no.

No Fair!

PHUTATORIUS
This was a right-wing talking point for a while — usually served up in tandem with union card-check: Obama's going to bring back the Fairness Doctrine, a policy that once called for the FCC to enforce viewpoint neutrality on the broadcast bands. He's a tyrant who doesn't believe in free speech!
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And of course he isn't going to do that. The Senate voted 87-11 today to prohibit the FCC from reviving the fairness doctrine. The 11 dissenters are named in Politico; they're Democrats, so everyone can go ahead and talk about how awful it would be if Democrats were running Congress.

This after Obama said last June that he opposed the Fairness Doctrine, and a spokesperson recently confirmed the Administration's position to Fox News. Obama's position never changed in the interim — but then again, whispered the Forces for Truth, Justice, and the American Airwave, you never know what a politician REALLY thinks.

Obama's position means that the FCC won't require broadcasters to extend corrective airtime to politicians when radio nut jobs make shit up about them to scare people. That's the right answer, as a policy matter. But that doesn't mean certain of us at FO can't say to the nut jobs (and at least one of our other writers), Duh — that's what we've been telling you.

Idiot Watch: Jeff Jacoby

MITHRIDATES (with PHUTATORIUS)
Today Feigned Outrage launches "Idiot Watch," this blog's effort to expose the Web's most illogical and nonsensical commentators, argument by inane argument. Yeah, so we're a little behind on this. And there's only three of us signed on to beat back the blithering hordes of pundit orcs out there. But we do what we can to bring the world out of darkness. We'll try to be as fair as we can and attack both sides — Idiocy is not the sole domain of any one party or ideology — but I'm a natural-born lefty, so forgive me if I start with the prototypical knee-jerk conservative with a brain of mush. It's not that his positions are never right — sometimes he stumbles upon a Half Truth or two — but the process by which he seeks half-truths (usually by hacking Whole Truths to bits) is wont to leave Reason, Virtue, and Fairmindedness bleeding in the streets as "collateral damage."

Today's polemic about Obama's efforts to woo the Muslim world is not his dumbest, but if I had to wait for Jeff Jacoby to hit rock-bottom, we might be here for a while. This one is timely, it's modestly on-point, and it's classic Jacoby in that it combines his signature double standard-mongering with failures of basic logical reasoning. In short, it'll do, Pig:
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Carter's failure to understand the threat posed by the Soviet Empire had costly consequences for America and the world. Will that pattern now be repeated with Barack Obama and the threat from radical Islam?

We'll resist the temptation to engage Jacoby on his conclusory assessment of Carter's foreign policy. It's a bit galling that Jacoby so casually spins off these damning premises, but we're not necessarily inclined to defend Carter's administration here, when there are bigger fish to fry. For starters, the two enemies here differ so radically in their natures, methods, and agendas that it's ludicrous to compare them. Jeff might have a point, if Obama had ever said he thought Bin Laden and Khamenei were committed to peace. Second, to analogize direct diplomacy with Brezhnev and Castro to trying to reduce the hatred of Muslims for the US is asinine. It helped bring down Communism was that the people in those countries found our way of life more appealing and they finally revolted against an awful ideology — this is partly what Obama is selling to the Muslim world.

But running through [President Obama's] words [on Al-Arabiya] is a disconcerting theme: that US-Muslim tensions are a recent phenomenon brought on largely by American provincialism, heavy-handedness, and disrespect.

Well, this isn't illogical on Jacoby's part, it's just false. Obama has never said recent tensions are largely America's fault. What he's said is that the policies of the last seven years haven't helped, and it might be worthwhile to change course to reverse this downhill trend.

Missing is any sense that the United States has long been the target of jihadist fanatics who enjoy widespread support in the Muslim world.

Jeff, the man is trying to win over moderate Muslims around the world. It would be idiotic, as a matter of strategy, to come out guns blazing and blame the entire Muslim world for jihadist attacks (whether they receive widespread support or not). And for that matter, as a matter of principle it's distasteful to tar every religion's adherents with the dirty brush of its most radical, fundamentalist adherents.

Respect? Not even the Islamist atrocities of 9/11 provoked American leaders to treat Islam with disdain. "We respect your faith," George W. Bush earnestly told the world's Muslims on Sept. 20, 2001. "Its teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah."

We remember this quote, we applauded it at the time, and we'll even accept that it was "earnestly" given. But its not unreasonable to judge a man by his actions, rather than his words — and by how he treats people, rather than religious abstractions. One unjustified invasion later, with the naked human pyramids and flushed Korans behind us, we think it's fair to conclude that though President Bush retained nothing but "respect" for Islam, he hasn't necessarily done right by a lot of its students.

Even more troubling is Obama's cluelessness about US-Muslim history.

"The same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago - there's no reason why we can't restore that," he said on Al-Arabiya. Well, let's see. Twenty years ago, American hostages were being tortured by their Hezbollah captors in Beirut and hundreds of grief-stricken families were in mourning for their loved ones, murdered by Libyan terrorists as they flew home for Christmas on Pan Am Flight 103. Thirty years ago, the Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in Iran, proclaimed America "the Great Satan," and inspired his acolytes to storm the US embassy and hold scores of Americans hostage. Meanwhile, Islamist mobs were destroying US embassies in Pakistan and Libya, and staging anti-American riots in other countries.

Here's where Jacoby goes completely off the rails. Yes, Muslims, some of them leaders of their countries, did bad things twenty or thirty years ago. He's using this as a proxy for the relations between American and the Muslim world. But Jeff, let's apply your logic to the Christian world. Once more round the bend, then: Christians have done some terrible things to Muslims in the post-Cold War era, most notably Serbs in Bosnia and Russians in Chechnya. America has stood firmly against the Christian side in these cases. Would it be fair to associate the U.S., and all the other identifiably "Christian" nations in the West, with these atrocities? Of course not. So let's not apply such facile reasoning to the Muslim world.

The fact is that we did have much better relations with the Muslim world twenty and thirty (even ten) years ago. The Arab world especially had a very favorable opinion of the US. This has plummeted over the past eight years. This is no judgment on the policy of the past eight years, it's simply a statement of fact. By denying this with the above smokescreen, Jacoby is either being remarkably dumb or intentionally disingenuous.

Radical Islam's hatred of the United States is not a recent phenomenon, it has nothing to do with "respect," and it isn't going to be extinguished by sweet words — not even those of so sweet a speaker as our new president.

Radical Islam's hatred is not new. This is true, but irrelevant to Obama's efforts. Obama is not trying to win over Bin Laden and Khamenei. He's trying move the opinion of the rest of the Muslim world away from radical Islam and back towards the US; just as the Cold War was won, in part, by winning over the people in Eastern Bloc countries, even as their leaders clung self-interestedly to an adversarial orthodoxy. Does Jacoby not understand the distinction, or does he mean to mislead the reader. Oh, and Jeff — he's our President. With a capital P. Cope with that.

Sooner or later, Obama must confront an implacable reality: The global jihad, like the Cold War, will end only when our enemies lose their will to fight — or when we do.

Exactly. And that's why Obama said in his inaugural speech, "We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you." Who knows if he means it, but he at least, unlike Jacoby, he understands the difference between the radicals we must defeat and the rest of the Muslim world we want to win over. There is a short-term and and a long-term battle to be fought here. In the short term, we have to thwart, preempt, and eliminate the radicalized terror networks. In the long term, we have to destroy the root causes of Islamic terror. These two ends are not incompatible, and you'd have to be an Idiot to think otherwise.

Is Obama's policy the right one? Was Bush all wrong? Another topic for another day. But let's try to get to the answer reasonably and tune out the imbeciles. Jacoby is way too dumb to have a column. Way too dumb.