Entries Tagged 'political correctness' ↓

The word “Islamophobia” doesn’t appear anywhere in this item from The Politico, but that’s the implicit accusation being leveled against—are you ready?—Mr. Barack “All the World Loves Him” Obama:

Two Muslim women at Barack Obama’s rally in Detroit Monday were barred from sitting behind the podium by campaign volunteers seeking to prevent the women’s headscarves from appearing in photographs or on television with the candidate.

The Obama campaign has apologized to the women. But The Politico notes the problem that I’ve been writing about for a while—Obama’s image as Mr. New Politics is compromised every time someone reveals the machinations behind the creation of that image [e.a.]:

Building a human backdrop to a political candidate, a set of faces to appear on television and in photographs, is always a delicate exercise in demographics and political correctness. … But for Obama, the old-fashioned image-making contrasts with his promise to transcend identity politics, and to embrace all elements of America.

There’s also another little matter [e.a.]:

The incidents in Michigan, which has one of the largest Arab and Muslim populations in the country, also raise an aspect of his campaign that sometimes rubs Muslims the wrong way: The candidate has vigorously denied a false, viral rumor that he himself is Muslim. But the denials seem to some at times to imply that there is something wrong with the faith, though Obama occasionally adds that he means no disrespect to Islam.

If I weren’t so irritated by the selling of the candidate as the Messiah, I’d actually be irritated on his behalf by these … distractions.

update: In a surprising show of liberal piety, Ann Althouse asks [e.a.]:

[I] know, it’s a sensitive question: What sort of people in the background send the wrong subliminal message?

Answer: the gentlemen in this picture, for starters.

The loonies at MSNBC are fantasizing about how to wreak vengeance on the warmongers:

Noting that “prominent Democrats” had ruled out impeachment, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann asked former counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke on his show last night, what “remedy” there could be for the lies and misinformation highlighted in the new Senate Intelligence Committee reports on the Bush administration’s misuse of pre-war Iraq intelligence.

CLARKE: Well, there may be some other kind of remedy. There may be some sort of truth and reconciliation commission process that’s been tried in other countries, South Africa, Salvador and what not, where if you come forward and admit that you were in error or admit that you lied, admit that you did something, then you’re forgiven. Otherwise, you are censured in some way.

Now, I just don’t think we can let these people back into polite society …

Somehow I think we will avoid truth and reconciliation commissions here in the U.S. and A.—or at least so I hope! They’re getting pretty popular up in Canada!

But these revenge fantasies of Richard Clarke’s remind me of something Jared Diamond wrote in the New Yorker recently, in an essay about tribalism [e.a.]:

We regularly ignore the fact that the thirst for vengeance is among the strongest of human emotions. It ranks with love, anger, grief, and fear, about which we talk incessantly. Modern state societies permit and encourage us to express our love, anger, grief, and fear, but not our thirst for vengeance. We grow up being taught that such feelings are primitive, something to be ashamed of and to transcend. …

But, while acting on vengeful feelings clearly needs to be discouraged, acknowledging them should be not merely permitted but encouraged. To a close relative or friend of someone who has been killed or seriously wronged, and to the victims of harm themselves, those feelings are natural and powerful.

So, yes: Feelings of vengeance, like all other feelings, need to be addressed and processed so that people can move beyond them. But truth-and-reconciliaion councils are a vehicle for wallowing in those feelings, not for moving beyond them (just as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s “liberation theology” nurtures the grievances of his congregation and ensures that their racial resentment will live on in future generations).

Well, let’s hope we don’t enter a new era of witch-hunting, which some Dems (the ones who want to “look into” the instances of “racism” and “sexism” in the primary campaign between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama) seem bent on.

On that score, there’s one small encouraging sign buried deep in the biography of a future President Obama. When Barack Obama was practicing what he learned from Saul Alinsky, he reputedly felt uncomfortable with some necessary parts of the process of community organizing.

But, although he was a first-class student of Alinsky’s method, Obama also saw its limits. It appealed to his head but not his heart. For instance, Alinsky relished baiting politicians or low-level bureaucrats into public meetings where they would be humiliated. Obama found these “accountability sessions” unsettling, even cruel. “Oftentimes, these elected officials didn’t have that much more power than the people they represented,” he told me.

At one meeting, where residents of an asbestos-laden housing project confronted their property manager about whether their homes had been tested, Obama suddenly had the urge to warn his target. “I wanted to somehow let Mr. Anderson know that I understood his dilemma,” Obama wrote in Dreams, with the kind of empathy that is the hallmark of his autobiography. He was sometimes more interested in connecting with folks on the South Side than organizing them. He studied the characters he encountered so closely that Kruglik says Obama turned his field reports into short stories about the hopes and struggles of the local pastors and congregants with whom he was trying to commune.

Let’s hope that a President Obama will prove to be a late-stage dissenter from the School of Alinsky.

update: Instalanche!  Thank you, Glenn Reynolds!

Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around. Mostly, I write about media culture (”They call it news. I call it infotainment.”) But even though I’m not a politico, like everyone else during this election season, I find myself writing a lot —way more than I’d like—about politics.

Writing at HuffPo, blogger Dylan Loewe sees reasons for optimism even in the bleak picture portrayed by polls indicating that the divisiveness among Democrats is hurting them politically:

We should be less concerned with what polling tells us about today, and more concerned with what it suggests about tomorrow. Today’s atmospherics might be ripe for McCain, but there is little doubt that voter attitudes will change soon after the nomination fight is over. Come November, Barack Obama will have healed many, if not most of the wounds produced from a bloody primary battle. Sixty percent of voters still believe that Obama can unite the country, a tacit indication that voters still feel capable of coming together again. It is also likely that very few of those who claim they will abandon their party will actually do so; their responses, in many cases, are the product of the anger and frustration that grows out of fighting a long and losing battle. [e.a.]

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds links to a much less sunny post on MyDD—one that warns Dems not to underestimate the power of the Rev. Wright story on Obama’s chances of securing the presidency for the Democrats:

If we choose Obama as our nominee, we are locked-in to this narrative. There is no going back, no bogus NBC polls to save the day. No Anderson Cooper softball interviews or phony charges of racism that will rescue us.

I can’t help but note that these disparate views both come from the left.

The view from the right was established two weeks ago, back on March 20 [e.a.]:

Obama’s much-lauded Tuesday speech, which detailed his relationship with his church and focused on the issue of racial reconciliation, failed to shake the notion that Republicans had been given a rare political gift.

“It was a speech written to mau-mau the New York Times editorial board, the network production people and the media into submission. Beautifully calibrated but deeply dishonest,” said GOP media consultant Rick Wilson, who crafted the 2002 ad tying then-Sen. Max Cleland to Osama bin Laden. “Not good enough.”

Although I am the farthest thing from a Republican—or a conservative—that you can imagine, I agree with Wilson.

The MSM has mostly been beaten into submission (Hillary’s embroideries about being under sniper fire have now been made equivalent, in the Gaffe Wars, of the Rev. Wright’s hihgly inconvenient anti-American rants). The soft-news outlets have been blanketed with cuddly Obama. A Pew survey reassured those who wanted reassuring that Obama had “weathered the Wright storm.”

But Barack Obama’s close 20-year-long involvement with Jeremiah Wright trumps his message of unity. You don’t have to be a Republican or a conservative or a racist or a supporter of Hillary Clinton to see that. You only have to have street smarts and/or independent judgment or an open and curious mind.

Which brings me back to something I’ve written more than once on this blog:

[I]n order to deliver politically correct votes, you need to do a lot more than kneecap people into spouting politically correct attitudes in the public square. You can lead a horse to water, etc.

I am all in favor of common courtesy in the public square. I am by nature a diplomat; I like harmony rather than disharmony. I want everybody to get along so that we can all continue to actualize our hopes and dreams and make the world a better place while we pursue our self-interest (as we are hard-wired to do).

Even a paleo like John Derbyshire, who loathes PC, understands why we have accepted it—and even welcomed it—into our post-materialist Western societies [e.a.]:

On the evidence of my own social contacts, I believe that most people born after 1970 have internalized the PC taboos and comply with them unthinkingly. Such complaints as one still hears come from the over-forties. Even they have a defeatist air. I repeat: PC has won. It is now the cant of our age.

What accounts for this victory? It won’t do to say that PC was imposed on us. We are a free people. We can be persuaded, but not easily browbeaten. If PC is now part of our everyday language, it must be because we wished it so—or at least were insufficiently passionate in wishing it not so.

We accepted PC because it appeals to the feeling, widespread in times of rapid social change, that a new decorum is called for to eliminate previous ugliness, unfairness, or unkindness. Seen from this point of view, PC is not altogether a bad thing. Every human society needs a decorum. Probably every society needs speech taboos. (I note that “taboos” appears on anthropologist Donald E. Brown’s list of “human universals.”) New social circumstances call for an overhaul of the agreed decorum, for a reformation of manners.

Which brings me back around to Obama and his Pastor Problem.

Barack Obama’s speech shifted the spotlight off the troublesome (for him) Rev. Wright and onto America’s racism problem—the source of much “previous ugliness, unfairness [and] unkindness,” to quote Derbyshire. It was a masterly stroke of political prowess on Obama’s part, and he succeeded in mau-mauing most of the media elite with what was in fact an effective speech.

But it was off-topic.

Furthermore, what works on the media elite—namely, mau-mauing— doesn’t necessarily work on the public and thus doesn’t translate into votes.

We’ll all have to wait to find out what happens.

Al Gore will launch a $300 million campaign whose sole purpose is to influence public opinion.

“The whole idea of the campaign is to be inclusive and to be bipartisan and to bring people together to a place where meaningful change can happen,” an organizer said. “It aims to be a game-changer in terms of the politics of climate.”

I wasn’t in fact aware that there is a “politics of climate.” I thought climate is a given. Of nature.  Foolish me!

ABC reports on a new initiative by MoveOn that offers Obama-lovers an opportunity to become famous for 15 seconds:

MoveOn.org, which has endorsed Barack Obama for president, is encouraging citizens to develop 30-second pro-Obama television ads which will be judged by Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Oliver Stone, multiple Grammy-winner John Legend and others.

The ad contest, which organizers are calling “Obama in 30 Seconds,” provides the opportunity for Obama supporters to creatively show what inspires them about the Senator’s candidacy. Contestants will be allowed to submit their ads between March 27th and April 1st.

That’s the part that appeals to contestants self-interest. Here’s the part that solidifies the interests of the sponsors [e.a.]:

“After eight years of President Bush campaigning on fear and war, people are feeling hopeful again. They’re eager to talk about what inspires them about our country — and Senator Obama leading it,” said Eli Pariser, Executive Director of MoveOn.

Yes indeed. All ambitious young people will soon be very eager to prove their loyalty to the Liberal Guilt party.

In case you’re wondering, contest winners will be announced at a most convenient moment:

The winning ad, and ad-maker, will be announced on April 17th–just before Pennsylvania’s April 22nd primary.

MoveOn will then spend an undisclosed amount of money to air the ad on “national television.”

Everyone wants to get in on the action in the new arena of Political Entertainment.

Or, rather, Mark Penn supposedly isn’t allowed to say it:

Penn: Pennsylvania Will Show That Obama “Really Can’t Win The General Election“

Over at TPM, Greg Sargent seems a little taken aback:

This stops about a milllionth of an inch short of an out-and-out declaration that Obama can’t win a general. He seems to be saying that Obama’s expected loss in Pennsylvania, and the scale of it, will show that he can’t win a general election.

This is in keeping with earlier remarks by Hillary and her surrogates to the effect that he has not passed the “commander in chief test” sufficiently to win a general. Ben Smith is right to observer that this is a pretty strong thing to say. And later on the call, the Hillary people backtracked from the remark.

Apart from the fact that it’s Mark Penn saying it, why is this statement controversial? It is obviously what the Clintons believe—and have believed—for a long time. It is (to me, anyway) obviously why they are pushing so damn hard to win every vote then can in this race: because they think Obama cannot win the general. That was the reason for the 3 a.m. ad: it drew a contrast between them on Obama’s biggest weakness (national security), whcih will be a huge (even if subterranean) issue in the general.

I happen to agree that Obama cannot win the general: he is way too vague, for starters. (I’ve been writing about that for at least 3 months.) And when he’s not being vague, on foreign policy he sounds like Mr. Kumbaya. It is therefore beyond obvious that he is too liberal for a nation that is fighting two wars. He is almost entirely focused on the domestic front, where he offers many words about hope and overcoming hardship and transcending partisanship. These campaign promises do not in any way address the issues of working Joes and Janes, who comprise a huge portion of the American electorate. He appeals primarily to elites, and to young people—idealists, every last one of them.

It is possible that if he won the nomination in time to choose a veep like, say John Edwards, he’d have time to get right with the lunch-bucket crowd and might make a more solid candidate. But I think it’s still unlikely.

To me, it seems pretty obvious that Obama is Adlai Stevenson, though with a much more appealing persona and image, and of course with tons and tons of charisma.

But you’re no longer allowed to say that you think it’s obvious he’ll lose in the general, because people will call you a racist (even if, like me, you think that his race has nothing to do with his poor chances).

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough says that “media people are living in fear“ of saying the “wrong” thing [e.a.]:

“There are all these minefields out there for Barack Obama that I think the press has been tiptoeing through,” Scarborough said. He continued, “If you attack Hillary Clinton, we have found, there are organizations out there that will bombard your sponsors, that will call the president of your network and will say, ‘Get that person off the air.’ Media people are living in fear.”

Scarborough challenged both fellow guest Farai Chideya (NPR) and members of the audience who disagreed with him, saying, “Everybody clapping in the audience obviously hasn’t worked at netowkrs during this campaign, where people take them in the back and say, ‘You’ve gotta be very careful now. If you attack Hillary Clinton too much we’re going to be called sexist. And if you attack Barack Obama too much, we’re going to be called racist.’”

I for one am delighted to hear that the architects, gatekeepers, and practitioners of the culture of political correctness tie themselves in knots as they scramble to avoid becoming its next victims. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch!

Regular readers know that I’m not a politico. Nevertheless, I’m ready to make a prediction (of sorts). I get the very strong feeling that America will not go for an unknown quantity come November.

From the heart of DemocratLand, over at TPM Cafe, here’s why:

Clinton deserves a huge amount of credit – especially from the press corps. Tonight should be a wake-up call: We need to take seriously that outside of those cutting very cool YouTube videos and packing unbelievably large rallies, there is a significant silent – at times – majority of working-class whites, Latinos, seniors, and women who like Hillary Clinton, and will vote for her. For Obama, he has upscale whites and African-Americans …

Even more devastatingly accurate is this from Jim Sleeper, also at TPM Cafe:

Obama is in trouble if too many of his famously small $20 and $30 contributions come … mainly from people like the up-and-coming young white writers and journalists with whom I watched one of the recent Democratic debates from the tony (but not too tony) New York neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights.

Every time John Edwards mentioned broken workers in mills he’d known, the young crowd watching the debate hooted derisively, “The mill!, The mill!” Every time Hillary Clinton mentioned her 35 years of experience, they hooted, too.

Yep. The wiseasses at the back of the classroom—or in the leftosphere—will not put Barack Obama in the White House. More to the point, they probably would do nothing to help him realize the Democrats’ supposed dreams [e.a.]:

I fear that too many young whites with bright prospects have no really serious intention of redressing the growing inequities which the neoliberal world that employs them is spawning, not just between themselves and poor blacks on the Southside but, these days, between blacks and blacks, and women and women, let alone between cool young whites like themselves and the declasse, lumpy white and Latino workers all around them.

Not that my young friends defend wholeheartedly the system in which they’re prospering. To their credit, it makes them uncomfortable. But they grasp at mostly symbolic gestures of a politics of moral posturing that relieves racial and class guilt and steadies their moral self-regard with smallish contributions to Obama, an Ivy alum whom they trust to help those people on the Southside without dragging them too deeply into it; without reconfiguring how we charter our corporations and re-construe the private and public investments that employ upscale young whites and well-behaved non-whites; and certainly without redistributing their own bright prospects and future prerogatives and second homes.

This pretty much reflects the conversations I’ve had with my son, who happens to live in Brooklyn. What are you planning to do to help Obama’s agenda after he gets elected? I asked.

He had no answer. It never occurred to him that merely voting for Obama isn’t enough. In this, he’s like most Americans, who are not involved in public service.

I don’t blame my son for casting a symbolic vote. I blame Barack Obama, his campaign strategists, and his supporters—particularly Oprah Winfrey—for suggesting to a gullible public that voting for Obama is enough, an end in itself.

That is a huge load of smelly bullshit, and I know in my gut that in early-21st-century America, with the enormous raft of problems facing us, his campaign will not fly beyond the Precincts of Political Correctness.

He couldn’t even win Massachusetts after the Kennedy Coronation, not to
mention California.

Obama deployed powerhouse friends, including Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. A Sunday Los Angeles rally with Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of President John F. Kennedy, talk show host Oprah Winfrey and Kennedy’s niece, Maria Shriver, added high-profile female counterweight to Clinton.

“If Barack Obama was a state, he’d be California,” said Shriver, wife of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The Kennedys have strong resonance in California.

Really? I have yet to see evidence of that. What I see is a lot of Kennedys who have expended their dwindling-to-nonexistent political capital on a mirage.

An election is for votes.
You can market celebrities to potential voters, but that doesn’t make them behave like consumers.

According to an informal survey by Gawker, the New York Sun turns out to be more politically correct than the New York Times, and the New York Daily News and New York Post turn out to be even more politically correct than the New York Sun. However:

The most politically correct part of the country is also the whitest: Northern California and the Pacific Northwest,

Gawker got into compiling some statistics after reading about the agonizing over language over at the Cleveland Plain-Dealer.

Political correctness (for the purposes of this post, I will define it thus: “You’re not allowed to say that; only I am allowed to say that”) was the left’s gift to America. The left meant well. (I know, because I was on the left—comfortable and at home on the left, that is—at the time.)

Now the left, represented by the Democratic party, is having interesting problems. (I haven’t felt comfortable on the left for a long time, because the left has abandoned liberalism, I believe, but that’s another story for another day.)

My point is this: Two candidates who represent the apotheosis of progressive ideals are vying for the presidency. One is black. The other is a woman. If you’re a sensitive, well-meaning progressive, how do you support one of these candidates without smearing the other and earning yourself the label of “sexist” or “racist”?

To her great credit as a media critic and journalist (and without a lot of pickup by other media writers, except for Mickey Kaus and I’m not sure he counts except in the blogo-universe, where he counts a lot, in my book), my cyber-pal Rachel Sklar of ETPhas been asking this question for a while now (though somewhat less directly than I write about it here).

On January 3, she wrote (re the Obama and Oprah Show):

[F]raming Obama’s support in terms of a wave of hope and optimism and Clinton’s support as inevitability imposed by a suffocating dynasty might have been just a tad unbalanced. It’s funny, even as I write this I feel the need to check and recheck to make sure I don’t somehow say this wrong. Obama is that candidate — the one you are careful writing about. I don’t think it’s just me.

Kaus picked up on it the next day:

Rachel Sklar notes an insufficiently remarked on Obama advantage: (”[E]ven as I write this I feel the need to check and recheck to make sure I don’t somehow say this wrong. Obama is that candidate — the one you are careful writing about. I don’t think it’s just me”) …

Last night, Rachel put up a very long post analyzing the sad but inevitable viral viciousness of the Obama “fairy tale” remark by Bill Clinton (which he ihas been going out of his way to explain)[e.a.]:

Context isn’t just important, it’s everything — especially in these days of insta-pickup by blogs and online news sites, where just a snippet of text is enough to launch a million clicks.

You’d think that in the case of this election, where the race is tight and a nasty rumor or smear can make all the difference, people might want to be a bit careful. Alas, no.

Now Jules Crittenden picks up the theme. Understandably, being on the opposite side of the political spectrum from Rachel (I assume), he’s got a somewhat different take—namely, how “careful” is everyone supposed to be and for how long?

My big question is, does this mean if Obama gets elected no one can ever use the words “fairy tale” again, or any other words that might suggest he doesn’t know what he’s doing or what he’s talking about or that he might be full of it, because that might be perceived as racially insensitive? That’s a pretty serious issue, regardless of Obama’s politics, if political speech is going to be curtailed about something as important as the performance in office of the president of the United States, because someone’s feelings might get hurt. I’m guessing anything remotely resembling any of the delightful remarks about Chimpy’s appearance, intelligence, preparedness for office and performance in the last seven years would pretty much be out.

Here’s the thing. I believe that Barack Obama is not likely to have his actually feelings hurt by “racially insensitive” speech (no more than I would be if I were running for office and encountered “religiously insensitive” speech). Despite the smooth presentation, he is a hard-ass politician who came up through Chicago, which has a history of dirty, vicious politics. Alleged racial insensitivity and gender insensitivity are, in this race, merely cudgels with which to beat political opponents. They’re powerful and loaded cudgels, but they are still only cudgels (and not evidence of real racism and real sexism, which are not about the things you say about people but about the things you do to people who are less powerful than you).

Here’s the other thing: I believe that most normal people get that. Politics is a dirty business. There is no way for your candidate to win unless the other guy or gal loses. And you do whatever it takes for your guy or gal to win—no matter how dirty or hurtful. That’s just the way it is.

Political correctness may become a casualty of this election. Or, at least, one can always hope.

Right, Barack?

As much as I hate polls, I love commonsense observations—like this one from Al Sharpton [e.a.]:

Until recently, Sharpton’s relationship with Obama has been more aloof. Sharpton has also been underwhelmed by Obama’s campaign. “He never came off as a fighter,” he says, a strategy that he thinks has hurt Obama with a key demographic: black women. “Black women like a fighter. Even if you’re fighting a fight that is not my fight, I will believe that you might fight my fight. And to come off as ‘I’m all right with everybody’ doesn’t give people who want a fight a comfort level. I want somebody who’s at least a little upset with somebody, because I’m mad as hell. If you’re not mad, how do I get passionate about you?”

Sharpton thinks Obama should take more cues from his wife, Michelle. He still thinks about the time he bumped into her at a recent Chicago fund-raiser. He claims the conversation went like this.

“How you doing, Mrs. Obama?”

She’s tall, and looked down at him. “I’d do a lot better if we had your endorsement.”

Sharpton tried to play dumb. “What do you mean?”

“We need your endorsement. I’m just telling you straight out: We need your endorsement. What are you going to do?”

Sharpton didn’t know what to say. “I’m like, ‘Uh, well, duh.’ I mean, she was like a sister back in Brownsville, where I grew up!”

It’s not the observation that Sharpton makes that I find particularly interesting (though I do find it interesting—and I think it’s true for white women as much as for black women: in times of trouble, of course we want someone who is going to fight for us). I find it interesting that, while debates rage on about race and IQ and whether you can even mention them in the same breath, Sharpton feels free to throw around general, unquantifiable observations about black women, knowing he’ll never be challenged to back them up with statistics and secure in the knowledge, as this same piece in New York magazine indicates, that for both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, he da man.

“Here, check this out,” he says, resting the cigar with a thud. He fishes in his pants pocket, produces a cell phone, pushes a few buttons, and passes it over for a listen.

The voice sounds familiar. “Hey, Al, this is Hillary Clinton, and…” Is it really her? Yep. …

He wants the phone back. “Here,” he says, making sure to save the message. “Now, check this out.”

Another voice. “Al, this is Barack Obama…” Obama! Seriously? The senator also wants advice about the debate at Howard.

[update: I added a missing link]

There’s a new crop of Iraq movies. Audiences are staying away in droves. Here’s one theory about why:

Despite spend several million dollars on advertising and marketing, ‘Lions for Lambs’ will flop–just like ‘Rendition’ & and ‘Valley of Elah.’

They will flop because the human psyche, especially the American variety, prefers real heroes–like the original hero of the Valley of Elah, a young shepherd named David who killed Goliath then cut off the giant’s head.

In the latest round of war movies the heroes are not the Soldiers and Marines who every day fight and defeat a vicious and barbaric enemy–the heroes are reporters, lawyers and activists.

And since every story requires a villain, the real enemy–Mohammedan Jihadists–are replaced by neo-cons, politicians, Soldiers and Marines.

This substitution of the traditional mono-myth away from a hero who faces physical danger and conquers an enemy is a result of cowardice of the modern story tellers.

What a crock.

The problem with the movies is, first of all, their relentless darkness and pessimism. To go to the movies today is to be assaulted with horror, danger, fear, chaos, and anxiety—and that’s just while you sit through the trailers.

Then there’s the fact that today’s movies offer no redemption. No one who isn’t on antidepressants wants to pay to see the bottomless suffering of human beings again and again. There are only so many gluttons for punishment in the American movie-going audience.

Finally, there’s the empty-headed prattle, devoid of anything approaching a new idea:

But Lions for Lambs is not merely a silly, shallow movie about the war: Its ambitions are broader and more scattered. Not content to stay focused on its central issue, it dabbles and babbles hither and yon, tossing off sophomore term-paper opinions on such topics as Americorps, consumerism, student loans, and corporate ownership of the media.

When Roth complains to her editor that the government hawks are engaged in “Vietnam-era thinking,” it rings truer as a self-critique; she is, after all, the one who keeps bringing up Vietnam and the 1960s. Indeed, if you tug on the emotional threads of the film, they all lead straight back to that crucible of generational consciousness: the fiftysomething journalists worry that they’ve been co-opted by the system that they started out fighting against; the liberal professor is disappointed that his students lack the passion and fervor of his own youth. It’s on this last point that Redford is at his most patronizing. When, repeatedly, the film criticizes today’s kids for being more interested in making money than in making a difference, one is tempted to reply: Yes, Mr. Redford, what a lucky thing it is for all of us that when you were young you eschewed fame and fortune.

Hey, all you politicos: what have you done for the culture lately?

While some people bitch (and bitch again) about the “neocon agenda” of the New York Times Book Review under its editor Sam Tanenhaus:

bitchin’:

Before the first shot in the Iraq War was fired, its intellectual supporters–future Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus (then a contributing editor at Vanity Fair), New Republic editor Peter Beinart and literary editor Leon Wieseltier; and writers Paul Berman, Richard Brookhiser, David Brooks, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Ignatieff, Joe Klein, George Packer and Jacob Weisberg–struck pre-emptively at many who foresaw reruns of the Vietnam War’s trumped-up pretexts, overkill and quagmires.

bitchin’ again:

If Tanenhaus “balances” his criticisms of Bush this evening yet again with diversionary attacks on liberals and the left, many in his AEI audience will be desperately grateful. They still seem to think that assailing war critics or proponents of national health care will confirm them as guardians of national greatness. But they are giving the nation away because they cannot reconcile their keening for a sacred, ordered liberty with their obeisance to every whim of capital.

Tanenhaus himself is leading a book club of the erudite over at the NYT blog Reading Room, about the new translation of War and Peace.

It’s marathon season in New York, and I’m delighted to announce that a panel of limber readers (see their bios in the right column) have agreed to join me in going the distance with Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” all 1200-plus pages in the new translation, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which we’ll be reading and discussing during the next four weeks.

Why “War and Peace”? Well, it’s one of the greatest novels ever written — the very greatest, some would say. It is, moreover, almost eerie in its timeliness, with its sweeping detailed narrative of military invasion and occupation (by France of Russia in 1812) set against political and social intrigue in Moscow and St. Petersburg, as experienced by aristocratic families, some of them in decline.

“War and Peace” is not just massive. It is sturdily and delicately structured. The novel divides into four volumes (there is also an epilogue). We’ll cover one volume each week — though the panelists will be encouraged to range freely over the whole of the book, its opulent mix of incidents and characters (who include Napoleon and Czar Alexander) and also to tackle Tolstoy’s profound meditations on history, philosophy, religion and human nature.

Here’s the beginning of Bill Keller’s latest entry:

I reached the final page Tuesday morning on a plane home from Des Moines, after a few days of chasing presidential candidates. Squeezing chapters of Volume IV between campaign events, I found the novel bleeding into my observations of the politicians who would be president. John McCain, with his military breeding and his distaste for sugar-coating unpleasant news, reminded me of a voluble Kutuzov. John Edwards, who has lately amped up his populist fervor (as my colleague Jeff Zeleny recounted in Tuesday’s paper) displays definite Denisov tendencies.

It’s interesting, too, to attend a campaign rally fresh from reading Tolstoy’s disquisition on the impotence of humans before history. A lot of Iowa voters — and certainly all of the candidates — seem convinced that choosing a president is choosing a direction in history, that “genius” moves human life in fathomable ways. I could hear Tolstoy tut-tutting from the press section.

Something’s gonna have to be done about Tina Fey, who was profiled in the NYT about her surprising hit show 30 Rock. She admitted that America’s Mayor is her weakness:

In writing for Liz, Ms. Fey said, she drew somewhat on her own experiences in television. In one episode Liz is called a vulgar name by a subordinate, an incident that Ms. Fey said was based on something that happened to her.

In another episode, in which Liz reflects on things about herself that others wouldn’t know, she says, “There is an 80 percent chance” that she will “tell all my friends I’m voting for Barack Obama, but I will secretly vote for John McCain.”

Ms. Fey, who wrote that line, said it was semi-autobiographical, a way of “admitting I have a lot of liberal feelings, but I also live in New York, and I want to feel safe, and I secretly kind of want Giuliani.”

As I was saying just recently …

The Democrats in general, and MoveOn specifically, seem not to realize that in order to deliver politically correct votes, you need to do a lot more than kneecap people into spouting politically correct attitudes in the public square. You can lead a horse to water, etc.

My point about Rudy Giuliani was that he knows a lot about the kind of public political correctness that elects a “fascist” to a second term in a huge victory in decidedly not-”fascist” New York City.

Anybody paying attention?
Nah, I didn’t think so.

How is it that the extremely busy columnist, author, and television commentator David Brooks

can find the time not only to inject new ideas into the bloodstream of the great national debate (okay: it’s actually the culture war circus) but also to read and coherently critique entire books by his ideological opponents

[H]ey, nobody ever died from contact with pomposity, and Al Gore’s “The Assault on Reason” is well worth reading. It reminds us that whatever the effects of our homogenizing mass culture, it is still possible for exceedingly strange individuals to rise to the top.

Gore is, for example, a radical technological determinist. While most politicians react to people, Gore reacts to machines, and in this book he lays out a theory of history entirely driven by them.

but that a whippersnapper blogger like Matthew Yglesias is too bored *** to engage serious, knowledgeable critics like Noah Pollak on substantive issues

Peretz clearly has the better understanding of Gaza, and the better argument. But he became annoyed, told Yglesias to shove off, and let the ignorant party come away appearing more reasonable. That’s too bad, because Yglesias’ writings on the Middle East, I’m afraid to say, have a distinctively hanging-out-at-the-coffee-shop feel to them. Yglesias believes that “Hamas-Fatah violence is largely the result of deliberate American policy.” If Peretz won’t have a go at this argument, I will.

and entirely dismissive of the ideas (which he won’t even read)+++ of certain public intellectuals in favor of the ideas of other public intellectuals whom he’s more inclined to trust … well, just because (i.e., for unstated reasons)?

I have no real intention of reading a 28,000 word Paul Berman essay on why Tariq Ramadan is bad in The New Republic, so I’ll refrain from commenting on the substance of things. I will note that Ian Buruma’s Iong New York Times Magazine article on Ramadan reached very different conclusions and I’m more likely to take Buruma’s word for it than Berman’s.  

The last time Yglesias chose certain smart people over certain other smart people to take at their word, of course, he ended up supporting the Iraq war. Under the circumstances, I’d be more wary both of trusting my own instincts and of laying out the politically correct stance on issues for others. But then I’m not under 30.

———–

*** and intellectually dishonest: Yglesias pretended that the entire “dust-up,” rather than being a fierce debate about the reason for the horrifically violent fighting between Hamas and Fatah, was a mere ”feud” between him and Marty Peretz and that Jonah Goldberg had “piled on”:

I was going to just ignore New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz’s efforts to bait me, but when Jonah Goldberg piled on it was just too much intellectual firepower to stay out of the fray. Now, seriously, what Brian Beutler said. And what Brian Ulrich said. I’m done with this feud as there’s really no point in arguing with someone who’s proud of his role in bringing Charles Krauthammer into the national conversation.

+++ at least not all the way through: Yglesias later tackled the Berman piece, in a manner of speaking. He used his second post to attack Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

The NYT’s Alessandra Stanley is concerned about the incorrect characterization of women in the upcoming spinoff of Grey’s Anatomy [e.a.]:

On “Grey’s Anatomy” at least two female characters, Christina (Sandra Oh) and Dr. Bailey (Chandra Wilson) have confidence, big egos and an ability to keep their sorrows to themselves most of the time. The female leads on the new series are fragile and pitiable, and it’s a worrisome imbalance. The HBO series “Sex and the City” made light of female insecurity and let its flighty heroines come out ahead. Here even the most successful women are left behind in life.

Then Stanley steps back to second-guess her own silly critique of fiction:

It wouldn’t matter, since the show is admittedly over-the-top escapist fantasy for women,

And then she steps forward once again to pass judgment:

except that it is troubling that even in escapist fantasies, today’s heroines have to be weak, needy and oversexed to be liked by women and desired by men.

Memo to dramatists: plausibility and heightened tension are no no longer your first concerns. Make sure your women behave correctly.

… for making me feel less alone with my dark thoughts, and for always coming to the defense of freedom of speech.

This time the subject is Ayaan Hirsi Ali (whom I have written about here, here, here, here, and here), and her betrayal by people who should know better.

Hirsi Ali is no fundamentalist, Hitchens writes:

Garton Ash and Buruma would once have made short work of any apologist who accused the critics of the U.S.S.R. or the People’s Republic of China of “heating up the Cold War” if they made any points about human rights. Why, then, do they grant an exception to Islam, which is simultaneously the ideology of insurgent violence and of certain inflexible dictatorships? Is it because Islam is a “faith”? Or is it because it is the faith—in Europe at least—of some ethnic minorities? In neither case would any special protection from criticism be justified. Faith makes huge claims, including huge claims to temporal authority over the citizen, which therefore cannot be exempt from scrutiny. And within these “minorities,” there are other minorities who want to escape from the control of their ghetto leaders. (This was also the position of the Dutch Jews in the time of Spinoza.) This is a very complex question, which will require a lot of ingenuity in its handling. The pathetic oversimplification, which describes skepticism, agnosticism, and atheism as equally “fundamentalist,” is of no help here. [e.a.]

That bolded sentence points to the greatest injustice in Buruma’s and Garton Ash’s position: they allow Islamist thugs, theocrats, and hard-liners living in the West (with protection from our laws, because we don’t want to intrude on their “customs,” because we’re so damn polite and sensitive) to dominate, by terror and intimidation, Muslims who fled their homelands to escape precisely that kind of persecution. For me this is (for now) merely a somewhat abstract Orwellian nightmare as I contemplate this callous and stupid betrayal by people who, as I said, should know better.

However, for those Muslims living in Europe who wish to become—and to be considered—Europeans first and Muslims second, Buruma and Garton Ash’s intellectual position creates a Kafkaesque situation. They escaped horrors at home only to be confronted with the same horrors now here in the West … from which there is no escape. Ever. The hatch of freedom (the freedom for them to be 100% secular, like many Europeans, for example) is being closed. Voluntarily. By people who profited from those freedoms their entire lives, who continue to profit from them, but who deem them too dangerous to be placed in the care of the newly Enlightened.

Hitchens concludes:

But who dares to say [that First Amendment "absolutism" is] the same as the belief that criticism of religion should be censored or the belief that faith should be imposed? To flirt with this equivalence is to give in to the demagogues and to hear, underneath their yells of triumph, the dismal moan of the trahison des clercs and [Auden's] “enlightenment driven away.” Perhaps, though, if I said that my principles were a matter of unalterable divine revelation and that I was prepared to use random violence in order to get “respect” for them, I could hope for a more sympathetic audience from some of our intellectuals.

Or can you?

Howard Kurtz sets up his Reliable Sources segment by calling Ann Coulter a “bomb-thrower” and then CNN gets in on the action by playing—without bleeping***—Ann Coulter’s lame joke (aka a PC Probe Attack (TM)) about the “faggot” John Edwards.

KURTZ: Let me turn now to Ann Coulter. She is the noted lawyer, author and bomb-thrower. She threw another bomb, I guess on Friday. She appeared at the CPAC Conference. That’s the Conservative Political Action Committee Conference, an annual event in Washington.

And we have some tape we’re going to roll. This is what she had to say about John Edwards.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANN COULTER, COMMENTATOR: I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word “faggot”. So…

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: Now, here’s my question, Gene Robinson. She said this in front of an audience, there were a lot of reporters there.

The first day, nothing in “The New York Times,” nothing on CNN, one reference in “The Washington Post” that didn’t use the “F” word, which I’m not going to repeat here. The “L.A. Times” did report what she had said and used the word that she had used, the anti-gay slur that she had used. But only after a lot of politicians, mostly Democrats, started beating up on Ann Coulter did the rest of us decide, well, maybe this was a story.

What do you make of that?

There follows an interesting exchange, in which Kurtz’s entire panel seems to agree that … it’s better left alone–that there’s no percentage in giving Coulter any more publicity than she has already gotten with her schtick.

Which is pretty remarkable. And the significance of this surely extends beyond what we can or cannot say on television to what we can and cannot say in polite society and in the workplace and in our pop culture and in our political discourse and in our streets. Which is kinda mind-blowing.

Not that I advocating name-calling. I have said more than once that I think it’s an incredibly destructive behavior. I do believe in free speech, however. And I believe that the restraint of free speech that is known as political correctness [and which manifests itself as taboos against language (such as New York City's recent "ban" on the word nigger) or as smear campaigns against individuals for unfortunate (and usually out of context) utterances] is a foul and harmful enterprise.

Repression always causes resistance, and witch-hunts, once begun, are hard to contain. Once upon a time, liberals used to know that. Then … well, I’ll be damned if I know what exactly happened. And I’m not much interested in pointing fingers. I am, however, interested in addressing the problems and challenges that face us as we try to live peacefully among one another in an increasingly partisan society and a chaotic-seeming outside world.

Kurtz’s panelist Blanquita Cullum offered the most interesting perspective:

CULLUM: Well, you know, first of all, [Coulter is] a takeoff on Traficant, who insulted the Congress and called them prostitutes, and he said he was sorry that he called the Congress prostitutes, he didn’t want to hurt their feelings, the prostitutes.But the thing of it is, look, where do we have the outrageous meter? Where does — where does the press really come in?

Is it with John Edwards who had the bloggers that called the right wing “Christofascists”? I mean, is it when we have Farrakhan who calls the pope “a cracker”?

I mean, where is the — where is the outrageous meter? OK?

KURTZ: Well, where does this fall? Answer your own question. Where does this fall on the outrageous?

CULLUM: Free speech. OK? And I would say…

KURTZ: But she’s entitled to say whatever she wants. But should we cover it?

CULLUM: I think you should cover it. I think you should cover John Edwards’ bloggers. I think that the conscience of America is really now almost phony, though, because in some ways, if you go to the blogs and you look at the blogs, they’re a lot rougher and a lot meaner than anything that Ann Coulter would say. But it still goes back to free speech.

I’m sure you’ll all agree. Lots of food for thought here, too. One way or another, we’re having a national “conversation” about what is acceptable and what is not. Welcome to the first cultural revolution of the 21st century.

———-*** I’ll be curious to see who watches Kurtz the Media Watcher.

update: I added the CNN link

Gerard Baker thinks he sees a time (when America won’t have George W. Bush to kick around anymore) that the opinion elites and Democrats will wish he were still around:

 It’s been a great ride for the past six years, hasn’t it? George Bush and Dick Cheney and all those pantomime villains that succour him — the gay-bashing foot soldiers of the religious Right, the forktailed neoconservatives with their devotion to Israel, the dark titans of American corporate boardrooms spewing their carbon emissions above the pristine European skies. Having those guys around for so long provided a comfortable substitute for thinking hard about global challenges, a kind of intellectual escapism.

When one group of Muslims explodes bombs underneath the school buses of another group of Muslims in Baghdad or cuts the heads off humanitarian workers in Anbar, blame George Bush. When Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, denounces an imbalanced world and growls about the unpleasantness of democracy in eastern Europe, blame George Bush. When the Earth’s atmosphere gets a little more clogged with the output of power plants in China, India and elsewhere, blame George Bush.

Some day soon, though, this escapism will run into the dead end of reality. In fact, the most compelling case for the American people to elect a Democrat as president next year is that, in the US, leadership in a time of war requires the inclusion of both political parties, and in the rest of the world, people will have to start thinking about what is really the cause of all our woes. [e.a.]

Oh yeah? Andrew Sullivan is already pointing his finger. Admiringly, he quotes a Euro-blogger who knows how things went down: We [in the West] are to blame for the mess we made after 9/11. Sullivan admires the guy for writing about the fact that he was ”complicit.” In our [the West's] ”mistakes.”

This argument—the notion that 9/11 arrived on a blank slate and it is our reaction to 9/11 that has caused all our problems— (which Tony Blair has called a “mad anti-Americanism” and which he has warned against as a fatal inversion of Western liberalism) will become very popular, I’m sure.

The culture wars will continue…until they are drowned out by the shooting wars. Which, I’m afraid, will come.

I’m not part of the gun culture and I don’t know anything about it (although I do have a home in a corner of rural Red America where there is a gun culture—the local gunshop is called Big Toys for Boys—and many of the local men hunt: for food. The venison from one deer can go a long way to feeding a family).
Knowing nothing about them but their name, I have to say that “assault rifles” sound like overkill to me (no pun intended) when it comes to hunting. (I repeat: that’s how the term sounds. Hunting isn’t about “assaulting” animals. It’s about killing them.)

Now a once popular big-time outdoorsman/writer has been purged—overnight—for suggesting that assault rifles are “terrorist” weapons.

Modern hunters rarely become more famous than Jim Zumbo. A mustachioed, barrel-chested outdoors entrepreneur who lives in a log cabin near Yellowstone National Park, he has spent much of his life writing for prominent outdoors magazines, delivering lectures across the country and starring in cable TV shows about big-game hunting in the West.

Zumbo’s fame, however, has turned to black-bordered infamy within America’s gun culture — and his multimedia success has come undone. It all happened in the past week, after he publicly criticized the use of military-style assault rifles by hunters, especially those gunning for prairie dogs.

“Excuse me, maybe I’m a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity,” Zumbo wrote in his blog on the Outdoor Life Web site. The Feb. 16 posting has since been taken down. “As hunters, we don’t need to be lumped into the group of people who terrorize the world with them. . . . I’ll go so far as to call them ‘terrorist’ rifles.”

The reaction — from tens of thousands of owners of assault rifles across the country, from media and manufacturers rooted in the gun business, and from the National Rifle Association — has been swift, severe and unforgiving. Despite a profuse public apology and a vow to go hunting soon with an assault weapon, Zumbo’s career appears to be over.

His top-rated weekly TV program on the Outdoor Channel, his longtime career with Outdoor Life magazine and his corporate ties to the biggest names in gunmaking, including Remington Arms Co., have been terminated or are on the ropes.

Now, someone tell me how powerful and influential the nefarious Israel Lobby is. I dare ya.

After Michael Richards had made the rounds saying he was sorry for his racist outburst, David Letterman once joked in his monologue: “And apologizing tonight, we have …”

He was definitely onto on to something. Today, Adam Nagourney writes in the New York Times:

The day ended, appropriately enough for the way politics is practiced now, with Mr. Biden explaining himself to Jon Stewart on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.”

Not exactly the consciousness-raising truth-and-reconciliation process that TAPPED’s Garance Franke-Ruta had in mind, eh?

Just the other day, in reference to John Kerry paying his respects to Iran’s Khatami at Davos, I was saying that

what is “acceptable” in political discourse changes faster than you can say “homophobe” (or “Islamophobe” or “anti-Semite“). And that what is “acceptable” behavior from the domestic political opposition changes faster than you can say “visiting Assad in Syria” or “paying respect to Iran’s Supreme Shithead ….”

That got no further play in the media—I guess no one cares, because Kerry is out of the presidential race. (Well, someone cares about cares about Kerry, but my post on that will have to wait for another day.)

However—you knew there was a however, right?—Joe Biden is in hot water (considered all but dead one day after announcing that he’s running for president) for making this remark about Barack Obama:

“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

This is a major event in the leftosphere, and cool-as-a-cucumber Garance Franke-Ruta at TAPPED helpfully explains how we’re going to have to start policing our language now that we’ve got a black man and a woman running for president:

[N]ow that we have the first credible African-American and female presidential candidates in American history running, I think we’re going to learn that many of the common formulations we use to talk about ourselves and our politics can sound tin-eared at best — and downright offensive, at worst — when discussing African-American or female subjects.

And why should we watch our mouths? Because too many cooks spoil the broth. Or something. (I know it has something to do with hot liquid refreshment):

The issue isn’t just Biden being an insensitive boob, but rather that commonly used words and phrases activate different frames — remember that whole discussion? — in different contexts, and that women and African-Americans live in a verbally constraining soup of negative frames.

Forget what Biden said. He’s an idiot.

What is Franke-Ruta’s excuse for sounding like, you know, Ari Fleischer trying to intimidate Bill Maher on September 26, 2001?

Well, she doesn’t see it that way. She thinks a healthy national debate over “negative frames” will emerge.

This is going to seriously damage some public figures, such as Biden. But, overall, I think that it will be a healthy process for American society to undergo, and that we are going to learn an unusual amount about ourselves, as well as about the candidates seeking to lead us.

Hahahahahaha! Excuse me while I go count the days until I can start collecting Social Security. In the words of the immortal Maurice Chevalier (update: not to mention Lerner and Loewe!):

“I’m Glad I’m Not Young Anymore”

Andrew Sullivan links to a devastating column by Nick Cohen. It’s devastating for those like me and Cohen, who are infuriated by the deranged detachment of our fellows on the liberal left, and devastatingly on-target about my liberal-left cohort, which has abdicated moral responsibility and taken on the ill-fitting cloak of moral purity in the wake of 9/11 rather than face the realities that challenge its 30+-year-old worldview:

Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam which stands for everything the liberal left is against come from the liberal left? Why will students hear a leftish postmodern theorist defend the exploitation of women in traditional cultures but not a crusty conservative don? After the American and British wars in Bosnia and Kosovo against Slobodan Milosevic’s ethnic cleansers, why were men and women of the left denying the existence of Serb concentration camps? As important, why did a European Union that daily announces its commitment to the liberal principles of human rights and international law do nothing as crimes against humanity took place just over its borders? …

Why is the world upside down?

Of course Cohen has some answers:

My parents joined the Communist Party, but left it in their twenties. My father encouraged me to read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s exposés of the Soviet Union and argue about them at the dinner table. He knew how bad the left could get, but this knowledge did not stop him from remaining very left-wing. He would never have entertained the notion that communism was as bad as fascism. In this, he was typical. Anti-communism was never accepted as the moral equivalent of anti-fascism, not only by my parents but also by the overwhelming majority of liberal-minded people. The left was still morally superior. Even when millions were murdered and tens of millions were enslaved and humiliated, the ‘root cause’ of crimes beyond the human imagination was the perversion of noble socialist ideals.

Every now and again, someone asks why the double standard persists to this day. The philosophical answer is that communism did not feel as bad as fascism because in theory, if not in practice, communism was an ideology that offered universal emancipation, while only a German could benefit from Hitler’s Nazism and only an Italian could prosper under Mussolini’s fascism. I’m more impressed by the matter-of-fact consideration that fascist forces took over or menaced Western countries in the Thirties and Forties, and although there was a communist menace in the Cold War, the Cold War never turned hot and Western Europe and North America never experienced the totalitarianism of the left.

Indeed. Never having experienced totalitarianism of the left, my cohort is unable—or unwilling—to take the leap of imagination necessary to confront the fact that totalitarianism, whether from the right, the left, or the fanatically “religious,” is a scourge on humanity.

The good fight today is against the forces of darkness that seek to deprive individuals across the globe of their excruciatingly hard-won political and personal freedoms—supposedly in the name of Allah but actually for bloody revenge and in quest of raw power.

I am a child of the dark forces of the 20th century. Rocked in the kindly bosom of America, I was able to rise above and to soar through my American dreams along with my cohort. But I can never forget where I came from.

You might call me your guilty conscience.

On the other hand, you might call me the unexploded ordnance of the 20th century.

We’re here. We won’t shut up. Get used to it.

America has been unalterably morally stained by the war in Iraq, says Andrew Sullivan:

to my mind, by far the deepest damage has been to the idea of America, to the decency of America, and its reputation for responsibility in world affairs. From authorizing torture to the acquiescence in mass murder, this president has stained the honor of this country and the West.

I have a question for the insufferable moralist Andrew Sullivan:

What arrows will be left in your quiver when the United States really goes to war?

Occasionally my local paper, the New York Times, lets down its PC guard and tells it like it is, as in this story in the Sunday paper about the aftermath of the terrible, misbegotten shooting of Sean Bell, gunned down in error by five New York City policemen.

Diane Cardwell frames her piece around the good all-around relationship between bazillionaire New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and the Queens neighborhood’s black community:

Since the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black man in southeast Queens last weekend, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has been able to cool tempers by tapping into an abundant reservoir of black political supporters, many from the area where the chaotic event occurred.

That support is a product of Mr. Bloomberg’s careful cultivation of voters and politicians in the middle-class black neighborhoods of southeast Queens, which swung to the Republican mayor in the 2005 election, helping grant him a huge margin of victory.

This lovefest is in pointed contrast to Rudy Giuliani’s famously tense relationship with every interest group in the city, Cardwell underscores, but she isn’t shy about listing other reasons for the bonhomie:

Mr. Bloomberg has shown a willingness to repay that support, for instance by breaking with his party to raise money for the State Senate campaign of Malcolm A. Smith, who has emerged as one of the important leaders working with City Hall in dealing with the Bell shooting. …

In addition, it does not hurt matters that Mr. Bloomberg spreads some of his wealth around the community. Last year, three Jamaica-based organizations — one that helps small businesses, an arts and education center and a social service group for the elderly received donations from him.

So far so good. But you knew that it’s not all champagne and roses, right? So—predictably, there are those hotheads who want Bloomberg to fire the police commissioner, who threaten street protests and congressional hearings. Then there’s Al “Jack-in-the-Box” Sharpton, a one-man PC Probe Attack (TM) machine:

The Rev. Al Sharpton, for example, is organizing a meeting of black and Latino elected officials, clergy members and labor leaders on Tuesday to discuss their next moves, hinting at some sort of mass civil action just as the city gears up for the holidays. He already called in national leaders like the Rev. Jesse Jackson and corralled a group of lawyers to represent witnesses to the shooting, which occurred on the day Mr. Bell was to be married. …
Mr. Sharpton, a veteran of other police-conduct controversies, has again acted as a point person, taking the lead in putting a focus on the case’s potential civil rights aspects.

That’s the end of the honest reporting in the piece—the part where she says Sharpton is a bloodhound for “potential” civil rights cases. Cardwell undermines her own argument at the end:

Once labeled a race-baiting firebrand, Mr. Sharpton is now considered to be closer to the center of the broader leadership group.

At the private meeting with Mr. Bloomberg, for example, Mr. Sharpton did not second Mr. Barron’s call for Police Commissioner Kelly’s resignation, telling Mr. Kelly that he supported him.

This is the mainstream position of the “broader leadership group” representing New York City’s black community?

Call me crazy, but trolling for potential civil rights violations is still race-baiting. It may be dressed up in a (to some) more respectable package, but it still fuels the fires of racial disharmony.