Times Watch for August 12, 2003
But Is It a Vast Right-Wing Cabal?
Times Magazine writer Matt
Bai again praises a moderate Republican senator fighting extremist and
fringe elements to his right. Fight Club profiles Stephen Moore, former
scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute and now president of Club for Growth,
a group which promotes candidates who promise to lower taxes. The Club is aiming
to dethrone the moderate Sen. Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania. Moore,
the president of a group of zealous economic conservatives known as the Club for
Growth, was talking about Arlen Specter, a giant of the United States Senate and
the only Republican moderate in the Senate leadership.
Bai worships at the feet
of moderate (and liberal) Republicans like Specter and the late Sen. John
Chafee, who he called the soul of the G.O.P.'s moderate faction and a revered
statesman in Washington in the March 23 Magazine.
Bai explains Specter is
running for a fifth term next year in Pennsylvania, but he now finds himself
facing an unexpected, potentially serious primary challenge from the party's
right flank. That challenge, from a brash conservative congressman from
industrial Allentown named Patrick Toomey, is being engineered by the Club for
Growth, whose 10,000 members, most of them gray-suited bankers and businessmen,
seem to be on a mission to banish taxes from the earth.
After noting Moores mixed
relationship with the White House, Bai helpfully compares Republicans to robots
and describes Moores group as radical: This kind of open rebellion is unheard
of in Bush's Washington, where party loyalty gets confused with moral rectitude,
and where Republicans generally speak with a kind of bland, Orwellian unanimity.
The criticism is especially surprising since it comes from activists on the
party's economic fringe, at what looks for all the world like their moment of
triumph, having just won the largest tax break since Reagan.what could the
radical supply-siders possibly have to complain about?"
Then Bai posits, in
unironic language reminiscent of Hillary Clinton, the existence of a right-wing
cabal, declaring: For much of the first two years of the administration, Moore
was part of the right-wing cabal that administration officials would consult on
a regular basis. But Moore proved himself disloyal by publicly criticizing Bush
and opposing some of his appointments.
Bai wraps things up by
terming Moores group extremist: While it's pretty unlikely that the Club for
Growth will be running Republican politics anytime soon, it's not a stretch to
suggest that in 10 years it will be one of several groups, each with its own
extreme agenda, that will dominate the business of campaigns.
For the rest of Matt Bais article on the Stephen
Moore and the Club for Growth,
click here.
Matt Bai
|
Cato Institute |
Club for Growth |
Labeling Bias |
Stephen Moore |
Sen. Arlen Specter |
Supply Side |
Taxes
Randy
Cohens Continuing Class War
Randy Cohen, who writes The Ethicist column for the
Times Sunday magazine, wastes no opportunity to stoke class war. Last year in
the left-wing Nation magazine he
bashed Bill Bennett
in class-war tones: Bennett's heart is with the boss, not the worker
(unless the worker is working himself to death); with the general, not the
troops.
Last Sunday, criticizing a
man who bought three airplane seats so he and his girlfriend could have an empty
seat between them, he wedged in a similar argument: What rankles here is not
your vulgar display of wealth. These days, many people are more apt to envy the
rich than to throw snowballs at their top hats (unfortunately, in my view).Most
of us accept the privileges money can buy (especially if it is we who are
driving the S.U.V.), but we don't like having our noses rubbed in it. So on your
next flight, if your neighbors grow restive, try to direct the mob toward the
first-class cabin. Or the Hamptons. Or the U.S. Senate. Or some other place
where millionaires convene in comfort.
For the rest of Cohens Ethicist column,
click here.
Class Warfare
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Randy Cohen
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Columnists
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Ethicist
The
Times Stands for Common Decency (Part I )
The Times comes out big for common decency Tuesday,
although not in the way a social conservative might define the term. A Public
Lives profile by Robin Finn, Third-Party Organizer Works for Populisms
Future, is yet another example of the Times using the recurring feature as a
way to inject left-wing figures into the news.
Dan Cantor of the
organizer for the New York based Working Families Party: What Mr. Cantor,
executive director of the party, is organizing from this hardscrabble
headquarters in Downtown Brooklyn is a third-party political movement steeped in
populist values and-no joke-common decency. It's ideals-are-us politics. As he
sees it, Working Families is a new take on a New Deal premise: better public
schools, housing and wages.
Finn at least describes
Cantor as a leftover leftist as he basks in her warm praise: Mr. Cantor, the
sharpie, has already figured out that the surest way to prevent a guest from
poking fun at his earnestness is to do it himself. (He mentions, with a
disarming grin, that for him, idealism is a more useful commodity than
cynicism.) Touch: the high ground goes to the guy who reads Primo Levi and
confines spats with his wife to whether television or the automobile is
mankind's most divisive invention. The long winter evenings must just fly at
the Cantor residence.
For the rest of Finns story on Dan Cantor,
click here.
Dan Cantor
|
Robin Finn
|
Public Lives |
Working Families
Party
The
Times Stands for Common Decency (Part II)
In a Tuesday story by Adam Liptak, the Times notes
the importance of standards of decency-as long as theyre used to further
liberal causes like opposing the death penalty. Along with the headline U.S.
Judge Sees Growing Signs That Innocent Are Executed, the article includes this
loaded subhead: Executions versus societys standards of decency.
Its a rather overplayed
story on a decision by Judge Mark L. Wolf of the federal District Court in
Boston. While allowing a capital case to proceed to trial, Wolf also wrote, "The
day may come when a court properly can and should declare the ultimate sanction
to be unconstitutional in all cases." The judge also publicly pondered "how
large a fraction of the executed must be innocent to offend contemporary
standards of decency. That gave the Times headline writers an opportunity to
inject morality into a political debate (a privilege the Times generally denies
to conservatives).
Liptak says the judge
found mounting evidence innocent people were being executed. But he declined to
rule the death penalty unconstitutional. Awfully sporting of the judge not to
overturn the constitution, dont you think?
For the rest of Adam Liptaks death penalty story,
click here.
Constitution
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Crime
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Death Penalty
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Adam Liptak
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Judge Mark Wolf