DeLay defends
While we’re giving beleaguered conservatives a platform, consider what Tom DeLay told The Hill Newspaper, as in a Breaking News email today:
Asked if he was surprised by Wednesday's indictment, DeLay said he was not; he said Earle [the Texas prosecutor] had been pressured by national Democrats to indict the majority leader in order to oust him from power and make him a focus during next fall's campaign.
"Democrats have been blatant enough to announce this strategy," DeLay said of the minority party's plan to paint Republicans as ethically challenged politicians who populate Washington with friends and cronies who rake in the spoils.
DeLay said Democrats could not beat him at the polls so they turned to the courts instead.
Not fair.
Bennett explains
A little catch-up on the Bennett commentary, from his web site, where he explains: The idea about abortion reducing crime is from Freakonomics, a currently well-selling book. Bennett’s explanation, not an apology, is about “extrapolations,” use of the Socratic method, and “thought experiment” on radio.
No wonder people get excited. The brouhaha is not as bad as the museum pro being fired for using “niggardly,” but it’s close. His being pilloried is gotcha stuff playing on ignorance.
Bill Bennett & White House
Bill Bennett touched the #1 third rail of public discourse with his on-air comment that aborting all black babies would reduce the crime rate, even though the black crime rate is much higher than white crime rate. You just can’t say that, and White House rejected the statement, distancing itself.
You can’t if you’re political, that is. If you are intellectual and cultural and social-commentarial, you can but better know your base, that is, the people who usually like what you say. And the base should be big enough to quell the firestorm of indignation that is sure to follow. No problem for Bennett, whose people appreciate his intellect and trust his good will in the matter.
He said in part:
“ . . . if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose . . . abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down,”
But it’s
"an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky."
What’s more, irrelevant. The caller had asked him to comment on the thesis that crime rate is dropping because of abortions. Bennett was taking off on a wild idea, I’d say, intending to show it up as crude and harsh.
Yes, I defend him. I’m part of his base and recommend him for morning-in-America listening, 560 AM Chicago, 7–10 am. Or go to his web site.
Riding the cycle
Powerline had this yesterday in its “Brownie Kicks Butt” report, which praises Brown for giving it to his interrogators, one of whom, Rep. Wm. Jefferson (D.-La.), “didn't dare stop talking for fear that Brown would have an opportunity to answer his questions,” so ill-informed he was. This final ‘graph notes Bush-admin’s passivity:
No doubt FEMA's performance was imperfect. What else is new? But Michael Brown didn't flood New Orleans. Nor did he fail to order a mandatory evacuation. Nor, when the order was finally given by the appropriate authorities, was he the one who failed to carry it out competently. I thought it was a mistake when President Bush cashiered Brown, and his performance tonight validates that judgment. FEMA's position is eminently defensible. But the Bush administration, historically, has failed to defend itself aggressively, and instead has passively yielded to the news cycle.
Voltaire, atomic squelch, Repplier
MEDIA-SAVVY . . . Voltaire had no use for the press, per Times Lit Supplement, but cultivated reporters, planting stories "shipping up . . . opposition to his detractors," for whom he had no use either. His 1741 play, "Le Fanatisme," however, could not make it past societal censors in our day. A "thinly disguised attack on Christian intolerance," it unfortunately portrayed the prophet Mohammed as a bloodthirsty tyrant, and a performance of it was closed down in Geneva in 1994, lest Muslims take offense.
WHEN A SCOOP LOSES ITS APPEAL, AT LEAST FOR THE TIME BEING . . . U of Chi PR man Morgenstern to Chi Trib science writer Ray Gibbons, early 40s, when G. asked him his reaction to running a story on the atomic bomb work then in progress:
You’d have the scoop of your life, but never another; you would disappear, Morgenstern told him. G. got interested in something else very quickly, saving his scoop for after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not to mention his own life as he knew it. (from Len O’Connor’s memoirs, A Reporter in Sweet Chicago)
CLERGY PRIVILEGE . . . At 26 Rev. Whalley was given a living by a bishop who stipulated that he should not live there, because the climate was bad for his health. Curates lived there and did the work at less compensation. So for 50 years, curates who could not afford good health did the work at that place, while Whalley as rector spent winters in Europe, summers at Mendip Lodge, in beautiful Somerset county, where Coleridge lived 1797-1800, writing "The Ancient Mariner" and the first part of "Christabel."
Thus the English Reformation in the 19th century: Some of what was bad before it survived it. (Agnes Repplier, "The Correspondent," in A Happy Half Century and Other Essays, 1908)
FLOWERS TO SPARE . . . In the same volume, Repplier notes the "wealth of hyperbole" in letters by women of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. "Nothing is told in plain terms. Tropes, metaphors, and similes adorn every page; and the . . . elegance of the language is rivalled by the elusiveness of the idea, which is lost in an eddy of words."
New York Times
Newspaper industry analyst John Morton on cuts at the New York Times and Philadelphia's dailies: "Wall Street appreciates cost-cutting and improving margins and increased profitability. Those are the things that make them dance a jig at night. They put that kind of pressure on publicly owned companies, and newspapers are no more immune to that than anybody else. These cuts and layoffs are known as dancing to Wall Street's tune."
Wall Street, yes. That would be the investors whose hard-earned money pays bills. Who do they think they are? (Link sent by Romenesko of Poynter Inst.)
Free speech screwed
See free speech on the Internet in a (gasp!) campus newspaper. It’s
Jill Bandes in The Daily Tar Heel, where she calls for strip-searching of Arabs at (or near!) airports and quotes several UNC Arab-Americans as agreeing with her. And guess what? She got fired for the column, which you can read about
here. Ain’t it grand?
Help for the largely helpless
For your college student friends and/or children, grandchildren, other descendants including collateral, there’s a web site to help them obtain the other side of the story from what they usually hear from their leftist professors:
http://www.amexp.org/Publications/Archives/PressReleases/pressrelease091305.html. Go for it, friends of education.
Home, James
Where there’s a will, there’s a way for this Dem congressman from New O, Jake Tapper reports for ABC:
Amid the chaos and confusion that engulfed New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck, a congressman used National Guard troops to check on his property and rescue his personal belongings — even while New Orleans residents were trying to get rescued from rooftops, ABC News has learned.
Wuxtry, wuxtry
Chappaquiddick Ted loses marbles.
Kennedy: But don't you really hate women and minorities? I mean, come on, tell the truth. You're under oath, Judge Roberts!
Homeland security revisited
This from Instapundit is worth passing on en masse, as it were, with his links embedded:
MICHAEL BARONE says there's "blame aplenty" and points out people who are at fault, but also cautions:
But we should resist the notion that we can come up with some organizational solution that can prevent every mistake. Today, as we look back on World War II, we tend to think that everything worked smoothly. But that wasn't the case. Rick Atkinson's An Army at Dawn shows that U.S. commanders made many blunders in the 1942-43 North Africa campaign. There were constant complaints about bottlenecks and snafus in defense production, and President Roosevelt changed the organizational chart several times. In 2002, everyone agreed FEMA should be put under Homeland Security; now people say it should be taken out. Fortunately, we don't depend just on government. Millions of citizens have contributed $500 million, thousands are taking Katrina evacuees into their homes and schools and churches, and private companies are hurrying free supplies to those in need. Government will never be perfect, but fortunately America is more than just government.
I pass it on the day after a fevered conversation with an old Jesuit acquaintance who made the comment that none of the items I had just mentioned about New Orleans etc. had he heard of. I tried to tell him how he could learn from blogs, but he remained impervious to the suggestion.
Reynolds opposed formation of the Dept. of Homeland Security as unhelpful magnification. That's in the "all of us" link. It's magnification passed in the Senate 90-9, with one not voting. That's in the "pass rather handily" link. No-votes included Byrd (WV) and Kennedy (MA), both Dems -- they can say they told us so. Yes-votes included Clinton (NY), Daschle (SD), Durbin (IL), Leahy (VT), Reid (NV), and Schumer (NY), all Dems -- they can't but will.
The bodies of the text
This from Scrappleface — News Fairly Unbalanced. We report. You decipher — is certainly worthy of consideration by all fairly intelligent human beings:
CNN Petitions to Dig Up Hastily-Buried Flood Victims
by Scott Ott
(2005-09-10) -- The Cable News Network (CNN), fresh from a legal triumph allowing it to televise the recovery of dead flood victims, today asked a federal judge to allow it to dig up and videotape any bodies buried in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
"While we were petitioning the court to cover the recovery of corpses, some victims were hastily buried," said an unnamed CNN spokesman. "Our viewers have a right to see the decaying flesh of each and every citizen who perished from lack of federal government assistance. That's why the First Amendment exists."
The network source said news anchors will issue the following warning before each 'CNN Cadaver Closeup' segment:
"Caution: the following report includes disgustingly graphic depictions of rotting human flesh. If you can possibly look away from your TV set, do so now...especially if you have any relatives in the South that you haven't heard from since Hurricane Katrina hit."
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To market, to market
TIA Daily has the right idea, drawing on two National Review Online piecesa:
While Congress plans to throw billions . . . at the rebuilding of Louisiana and Mississippi, the most effective thing . . . would be much cheaper: cut taxes and suspend regulations--allowing greater freedom to the private initiative of the businesses and entrepreneurs who will actually rebuild the area's economy.
National Review “dares to suggest that self-interest might be a legitimate motive and that rebuilding requires the production of wealth, not its sacrifice.”
It adds the suspending of federal regulations.
How much more quickly would businesses rebuild, if they had to worry about a hundred thousand fewer pages of environment regulations, for example? This is an opportunity to show that the unfettered action of producers is the real "safety net" that helps us recover from disaster.
As they said in the (mostly imagined) 60s barricades, “Right on!”
Shaw, Trevelyan, Hawthorne and friends
LITERARY DIFFERENCES . . . George Bernard Shaw’s contemporary John Drinkwater wrote verse plays about Lincoln, Cromwell, and others that S. considered unworthy of their subjects. He wrote his own about Joan of Arc "to save her from Drinkwater," per John Gross in his "literary tour" through The Oxford dictionary of National Biography in Times Literary Supplement (TLS) 12/17/04.
Lewis Namier, owing fellow historian GM Trevelyan for an early review that launched his career, repaid him by refusing ever to review any of his books.
Namier emphasized "microscopic analysis of events and institutions, particularly Parliament, so as to reveal the entire motivation of the individuals involved in them," says the web site "Blupete."
Trevelyan, for his part, "believed that history should be written as literature, that is, to be read."
A REAL YANKEE DOODLE . . . George M. Cohan falsely claimed a July 4 birth date, but Nathaniel Hawthorne did so honestly, and without building a career on it. He did add the "w" to his name, however.
Oak Park’s Hawthorne School was unfortunately renamed – to honor a black scientist, emphasis on black. The man deserved to be honored, but not at Hawthorne’s expense. He is Percy Julian, of whom a splendid bigger-than-life bust rests in Scoville Park.
Hawthorne’s father, a sea captain, died of yellow fever in Surinam when Nathaniel was 4.
Nathaniel wrote a campaign bio of and for his friend Franklin Pierce, U.S. president, 18??-??, and edited or ghost-wrote a book on the naval adventures of another friend, like Pierce from his happy Bowdoin College days, Horatio Bridge.
Asked by Commodore Matthew Perry to write up his opening of Japan to the world in 18??, he excused himself and suggested Herman Melville, disreputable author of a novel about the South Seas, Typee. Hawthorne, consul in Liverpool at the time, thanks to a Pierce-administration appointment, was not disreputable. Melville, as we surely recall, later wrote Moby Dick.
Hawthorne advised writing of an experience right away, before the "impression of novelty has worn off," lest you decide "the peculiarities that attracted you are not worth recording." Rather, they are what make "the most vivid impression on the reader." Consider "nothing too trifling . . . so it be in the smallest degree characteristic." You will be surprised, he said, to find how important they become.
Hear, hear.
