Their Own Personal Vietnam - September 22, 2003
Times Watch for September 22, 2003
Their Own Personal Vietnam
More quagmire at the
Times. Fridays editorial, The Terrorism Link That Wasnt, states as fact the
assertion there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and the terrorist
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Then, its yet another
waist-deep jump into the Big Muddy: The Bush administration always bristles
when people attempt to draw any parallels between the quagmire in Vietnam and
the current situation in Iraq. If the president is really intent on not
repeating history, however, he should learn from it. The poison of Vietnam
sprang from a political establishment that was unwilling to level with the
American people about what was happening overseas.
For the rest of the Times editorial on the Iraq
quagmire in the making,
click here.
Editorial
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Saddam Hussein
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Iraq War
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Quagmire
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Terrorism
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Vietnam
Frank
Richs Mel Gibson-Baiting
Intemperate remarks by actor Mel Gibson allows
Times Arts editor Frank Rich to resurrect his charge that Gibsons upcoming
movie on the Passion of Christ could inflame anti-Semitism, and that Gibson
himself is guilty of Jew-baiting.
Richs Sunday column, The
Greatest Story Ever Told,
recycles his August 3
accusations of Gibson. Reacting to harsh comments about Rich from Gibson in
a New Yorker profile of the actor (I want to kill him. I want his intestines on
a stick.I want to kill his dog), Rich claims: My capital crime was to write a
column on this page last month reporting that Mr. Gibson was promoting his
coming film about the crucifixion, The Passion, by baiting Jews. As indeed he
has.
Richs evidence? In
January, the star had gone on The O'Reilly Factor to counter Jewish criticism
of his cinematic account of Jesus's final hours-a provocative opening volley
given that no critic of any faith had yet said anything about his movie (and
wouldn't for another three months). Clearly he was looking for a brawl, and he
hasn't let up since.
Again, Rich is being
willfully misleading. Gibson didnt come out swinging against Judaism. Host
OReilly was the one who brought it up, as shown by this bit from his January
interview with Gibson:
OReilly: Is it going to upset any Jewish people?
Gibson: It may. It's not meant to. I think it's meant to just tell the truth. I
want to be as truthful as possible. But you know, when you look at the reasons
behind why Christ came, why he was crucified, he died for all mankind. He
suffered for all mankind. So that really, anybody who transgresses has to look
at their own part, or look at their own culpability.
For the rest of Frank Richs Gibson-baiting,
click here.
Mel Gibson
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Jesus Christ
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Movies
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Passion of Christ
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Religion
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Frank Rich
Moderate
Dukakis but Staunchly Conservative Bush?
Reporter Robin Toner characterizes Bill Clinton as
centrist, Michael Dukakis as moderate-and George Bush as staunchly
conservative.
In Sundays Week in Review
on Gen. Wesley Clark and the fight for the soul of the Democratic party, Toner
writes: Bill Clinton moved the party to a centrist third way in 1992, but
that happened only after 12 years out of the White House, when Democrats were
really hungry to win.The struggle over the right message, and messenger, has to
be waged anew for the post-Clinton Democratic Party. So far, it is largely
framed by the powerful anger at the Democratic grassroots-over the 2000
election and a president elected without a popular vote majority; over three
years of staunchly conservative policies and a war unpopular with Democratic
voters from the start.Predicting electability, of course, is tricky; sometimes
when Democrats thought they were voting their heads, they were still badly
beaten in the general election. Former Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts
captured the 1988 Democratic nomination as a moderate, nonideological
technocrat-not a man who stirred his party's passions, but one who seemed, to
many Democrats, decent, competent, electable.
For more on the fight for the Democratic party,
click here.
Campaign 2004
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Democrats |
Michael Dukakis
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Labeling Bias |
Robin Toner
Cucumber-Flinging
Monkeys Fight for Fairness
Adam Cohens latest signed editorial, What the
Monkeys Can Teach Humans About Making American Fairer, summarizes a recent
study of the group behavior of capuchin monkeys: Give a capuchin monkey a
cucumber slice, and she will eagerly trade a small pebble for it. But when a
second monkey, in an adjoining cage, receives a more-desirable grape for the
same pebble, it changes everything. The first monkey will then reject her
cucumber, and sometimes throw it out of the cage. Monkeys rarely refuse food,
but in this case they appear to be pursuing an even higher value than eating:
fairness.
Sounds to Times Watch more
like a petulant six-year old whining that her brother got more ice cream than
she did for dessert. Nevertheless, lets see where Cohens heading with his, um,
interesting analogy: But in a week when fairness was so evidently on the
ropes-from the World Trade Organization meeting in Cancn, which poor nations
walked out of in frustration, to the latest issue of Forbes, reporting that the
richest 400 Americans are worth $955 billion-the capuchin monkeys offered a
glimmer of hope from the primate gene pool. The study's implication that we are,
to some extent, hard-wired for fairness speaks with special force to the legal
system. American law has undergone a transformation in recent years, led by
conservative Supreme Court justices and scholars, away from a focus on broad
principles of fairness and toward a willingness to subject people to treatment
that might be unjust, on the grounds that it is legal. The monkey study
suggests, however, that fairness might be more than a currently unfashionable
legal concept. It may be integral to who we are.
Cohen ends up where he
usually does, criticizing the strict and conservative Supreme Court: Today,
in law's eternal battle between strictly applied rules and broader principles of
fairness, the pendulum is rapidly swinging back toward strict rules.In death
penalty cases, criminal appeals, discrimination suits, the conservative majority
regularly shows an indifference to the sort of fairness claims that would have
prevailed in the 1960's.
But Cohen concludes
theres hope for primates after all: But the capuchin monkey study suggests
that fairness is at least part of the mix of traits that go with being
human-and that over time, higher notions of justice that look beyond mechanical
application of rigid rules may have a fighting chance. In Stanley Kubrick's
2001: A Space Odyssey, an ape-man throws a bone he has just used as a weapon
into the air and it is transformed into a spaceship. The discovery of weapons
was certainly, as the movie indicates, one of our key evolutionary moments. But
the capuchin monkey study is a welcome reminder that the first time an ape-man
angrily picked up his food allotment and threw it into the air because it was
unjust was no less pivotal to the emergence of what it means to be human.
Cohen sees this as
primates innate understanding of the nobility of socialism. It sounds to Times
Watch more like the less noble but all-too-human traits, envy and spite.
For the rest of Adam Cohen on capuchin monkeys and
the Supreme Court,
click here.
Capuchin Monkeys
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Adam Cohen
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Editorials
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Constitution
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Science
An
Anti-Wolfowitz Whopper
Wolfowitz in the lions den: Reporter Eric Schmitt
covers a talk by deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the liberals favorite
neocon imperialist, at Manhattans New School University.
Schmitts dispatch,
headlined Wolfowitz Stands Fast Amid the Antiwarriors, includes this whopper:
Iraq did have contacts with Al Qaeda, Mr. Wolfowitz insisted, momentarily
silencing the audience with an accusation even President Bush now says is
unsubstantiated. He added, We don't know how clear they were.
But as both
Gregory Djerejian and
Andrew Sullivan point out, Bush only said Saddam didnt have links to 9-11.
Bush didnt say Hussein had no links to al-Qaeda itself.
In fact,
Bush himself last week said, There's no question Saddam Hussein had al
Qaeda ties. (Mondays
Wall Street Journal has other helpful reminders of the Hussein-al Qaeda
link.)
The Times piles on
Wolfowitz in an accompanying photograph showing Wolfowitz and his interviewer on
the lighted stage, and a heckler in the audience holding up a sign which is
unreadable in the dark. But not to worry; the caption helpfully notes: The
silhouette is of a heckler with a sign, which read, On Trial! Not on Stage!
For the rest of Schmitts story on Wolfowitzs in
Manhattan,
click here.
Al Qaeda |
George W. Bush
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Corrections
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Saddam Hussein
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Iraq War |
Eric Schmitt
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Paul Wolfowitz
