Reason Magazine - Staff

Mon enfant, ma mÃ¨re

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:02:00 EDT

Celebrated French writer Michel Houellebecq, author of the terrific novel Elementary Particles, is doubtless accustomed to being scorned by the Paris literati. He is notoriously un-PC, having recently been prosecuted for calling Islam the "stupidest " religion. He is frequently accused of indulging in needless "obscenity" and gratuitous sexism. He was expelled from the leftish literary collective/review Les Perpendiculaires for being irredeemably bourgeois. But now he faces his toughest and most acerbic critic in the 83-year-old French writer Lucie Ceccaldi. So what is Ceccaldi's problem with Houellebecq? Well, for starters, she deems him an "evil, stupid little bastard," a "liar, an imposter, a parasite and above all—above all—a petit arriviste ready to do absolutely anything for money and fame." Of Elementary Particles, Ceccaldi says: "That book is pure pornography, it's repugnant, it's crap. I don't understand its success at all, that just shows the decadance of France." And the rest of his oeuvre: "What's this moronic literature?! Houellebecq is someone who's never done anything, who's never really desired anything, who never wanted to look at others. And that arrogance of taking yourself as superior ... Stupid little bastard. Yes, Houellebecq's a stupid little bastard..." The Guardian has more on the spat.

It should be noted, though, that Ceccaldi is currently promoting her own memoir, titled L'Innocente, and is obviously trying to gin up interest in the book. And perhaps it should also be noted, in the spirit of full disclosure, that Mme. Ceccaldi is M. Houellebecq's mother.

This Just In: Francisco Franco was a Vote-Stealing Scumbag

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Wed, 07 May 2008 17:37:00 EDT

Is there no end to the horrors of the Franco regime? John Labeaume, co-proprietor of the terrific website electiondissection.com, passes along this horrifying tale of fascist vote rigging:

Singer Cliff Richard was robbed of victory in the 1968 Eurovision Song Contest because Spanish dictator Francisco Franco rigged the vote, a documentary to be aired Thursday claims.

Richard's song "Congratulations" was the runaway favourite but was beaten in the contest, held that year in London, by just one point by Spanish contestant Massiel, who sang "La La La".

According to the documentary, music and television executives sent by Franco bought the rights to series that never aired and signed little-known acts in other European nations in return for Eurovision votes.

Spanish public television journalist Jose Maria Inigo told the documentary that the Franco regime "had a great need to win recognition, even if it was only in one area."

Full story.

Sir Cliff performing his classic song "The Young Ones" on (post-Franco) Spanish television.

Mildred Loving, RIP

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Tue, 06 May 2008 14:59:00 EDT

In 1958, Mildred Jeter, a black woman from Virginia, drove 80 miles to Washington, D.C. with her boyfriend Richard Loving, a white man, to get married. In the Commonwealth of Virginia, such a union violated state miscegenation laws. But when the Lovings returned to their home town of Central Point, VA, they were arrested in bed.

By their own widely reported accounts, Mrs. Loving and her husband, Richard, were in bed in their modest house in Central Point in the early morning of July 11, 1958, five weeks after their wedding, when the county sheriff and two deputies, acting on an anonymous tip, burst into their bedroom and shined flashlights in their eyes. A threatening voice demanded, "Who is this woman you're sleeping with?"
Mrs. Loving answered, "I'm his wife."
Mr. Loving pointed to the couple's marriage certificate hung on the bedroom wall. The sheriff responded, "That's no good here."

The Virginia law, which dated back to 1662, was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1967. It was a unanimous decision.

Mildred Loving died yesterday. She was 68.

The Wal-Mart Prescription Drug Benefit

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Mon, 05 May 2008 15:23:00 EDT

I've spent a fair amount of time shilling for Wal-Mart's prescription drug plan on this blog, so don't think for a second that I would miss today's news that the Corporate Monster from Bentonville is greatly expanding the program to include a whole slate of new drugs, including, according to AP, "several women's medications."

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, announced Monday it would expand its discounted prescription drug program to offer 90-day supplies for $10 and add several women's medications at a discount. It also said it would lower the price of more than 1,000 over-the-counter drugs.
The move marks the third phase of a company program that began in 2006 to provide a 30-day supply of generic prescription drugs for $4. The Bentonville-based company said the program has saved customers more than $1 billion.
With the expansion, the company began filling prescriptions Monday for up to 350 generic medications at $10 for a 90-day supply at Wal-Mart, Neighborhood Market and Sam's Club pharmacies in the U.S. Almost all the prescription generics in the company's $4 program were included in the expanded $10 offer, said Wal-Mart senior vice president John Agwunobi.
In addition, the company will add several women's medications to its list of prescriptions available for $9, including drugs to treat breast cancer and hormone deficiency.
For instance, alendronate, the generic version of osteoporosis medication Fosamax, will be added to the list. Company pharmacies will fill 30-day prescriptions of alendronate for $9 and a 90-day supply for $24 at a comparison of $54 and $102, respectively, that women previously paid for the same amounts, the company said.
Tamoxifen, used to treat breast cancer, will be offered for $9 for a 30-day supply, as well as combination estrogen/methyltestosterone tablets, prescribed for menopause and hormone deficiency.
Wal-Mart also will lower the prices of more than 1,000 over-the-counter medications to $4 or less in its pharmacies, company officials said. The company has sold over-the-counter medicines in the past at discounted prices, but revised and expanded its offerings specifically to include commonly used drugs that usually sell for $7 or more, said company spokesman Deisha Galberth.

My previous paeans to the Wal-Mart plan can be read here and here. My pooh-poohing of the "big box panic"—with the requisite Wal-Mart mentions—can be found in this month's Utne Reader.

Is Mrs. Conyers Smarter than an Eighth Grader?

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:22:00 EDT

A few weeks ago, Detroit City Councilwoman Monica Conyers, wife of Congressman and House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI), erupted at Council President Kenneth Cockrel Jr. over some inconsequential, uninteresting slight, calling him "Shrek" and incoherently mumbling about his lack of "respect." David Freddoso links to this Detroit News video in which an unrepentant Mrs. Conyers attempts to justify her disgraceful behavior to a room full of pre-teen girls. Watch as Conyers gets worked—and I mean worked—by a delightful, clever, poised eighth grade girl named Kierra Bell:

The Detroit News has more on the remarkable Ms. Bell.

Boris Takes London?

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Thu, 01 May 2008 18:06:00 EDT

Polls are now closed in London; the city nervously awaits its fate. According to the latest polling data, Boris "Buffoonish Toff" Johnson, the tousle-haired, mumbling conservative candidate, is neck and neck with "Red" Ken Livingstone, the lefty incumbent. (As I pointed out in a previous post, quotable Ken isn't so keen on capitalism, which he says "has killed more people than Hitler.") This YouGov poll predicts a slim margin of victory for Johnson. Other polls put Livingstone ahead by a nose. From the Livingstone-friendly Guardian: "A poll for Ipsos Mori last week put Livingstone 4% ahead and another for MRUK put him 2% in front." Liberal Democrat candidate Brian Paddick, a former Scotland Yard commander famous for pushing through London's eminently sensible marijuana policy, is polling around 12 percent.

For what it's worth, the Tory blog ConservativeHome, run by former Conservative Central Office staffer Tim Montgomerie, is "calling London for Boris." Not much info beneath the banner headline ("Based on a wide range of conversations we've had throughout the day with people in the field and with senior Tory and other insiders..."), though, so skepticism is in order.

Watch Ken Livingstone defend his (physical) embrace of radical Egyptian cleric Yusuf Al-Qaradawi below. And by all means continue watching if you want to hear a series of exciting plans for the acquisition of a fleet of "bendy buses" for London:

Update: The Guardian asks representatives of London's easily horrified cognescenti just what would happen if the rakish Mr. Johnson were elected Mayor. Full points to fashion designer Vivenne Westwood who suggests that it might just prove that England is a fascist dictatorship, and that anyone who disagrees with her is, well, not interested in democracy: "Boris as mayor? Unthinkable. It just exposes democracy as a sham, especially if people don't vote for Ken - he's the best thing in politics."

Flight of the Neocons

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:00:00 EDT

They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, by Jacob Heilbrunn, New York: Doubleday, 336 pages, $26

In 1996 Norman Podhoretz, ex-friend of the left and high priest of neoconservatism, wrote an elegiac essay in Commentary about the movement he had helped to found. Neoconservatism was dead, he argued, but not of intellectual exhaustion or mass ideological defection. It was a victim of its own success. What had previously been a movement of political outsiders—former socialists ambling through “the middle of their journey,” in Lionel Trilling’s phrasing—was now well represented in the corridors of power: on Capitol Hill, in influential think tanks, on the Sunday chat show circuit. It was at last time to shed the neo, to announce the movement’s assimilation into the conservative mainstream. What once were ideological heresies had now become widely accepted banalities.

In They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, Jacob Heilbrunn, a senior editor at the conservative journal The National Interest, retraces the history of Podhoretz’s movement through its wilderness years to its open embrace of the Republican Party and, post-Iraq, its ignominious decline. Heilbrunn has roots in the movement himself—indeed, The National Interest was founded as a foreign policy–focused companion to the neocon journal The Public Interest. Heilbrunn’s breezy, crisply written history eschews the rancor of many recent discussions of neoconservatism in favor of a largely dispassionate account, tracing the movement’s development from its beginnings in the far-left milieu of 1930s and ’40s New York to its death, or grievous wounding, in the White House of George W. Bush.

Those introduced to the vagaries of neoconservative theory after 9/11—that is, most ordinary Americans and nearly every European editorial writer—often overlook the fact that Bush hadn’t paid much heed to the neocons prior to September 11, 2001, and that the movement’s prospects early in the new century had been quite grim. Indeed, it appeared to be in its death throes. As the 1980s drew to a close and the Soviet Union’s desiccated empire finally dissolved, neoconservatism lost its unifying enemy. But then the terror attacks on New York and Washington, as the cliché goes, changed everything.

Heilbrunn’s adumbration of neoconservatism’s left-wing provenance makes for compelling reading—and acts as a useful field guide to the current schisms on the right. It is an exaggeration to suggest, as many pundits have, that the neocon is merely a modified Trotskyist, but many of its intellectual architects did begin their careers on the radical left. Elliott Abrams, the Iran-contra veteran who served as special assistant to the president during George W. Bush’s first term, attended the radical Little Red Schoolhouse in New York City as a child and graduated to membership in the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL). The American Enterprise Institute’s Joshua Muravchik was YPSL’s chairman from 1968 to 1973 and later advised Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign on foreign policy issues. Onetime leftists such as Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and countless other “New York intellectuals,” disgusted by the cognoscenti’s ambivalence toward communism, migrated, at varying speeds and to varying degrees, rightward. But not every neocon emerged from the radical left, and not all of them landed in the GOP. Neoconservatism also enchanted disaffected liberals such as longtime New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who never abandoned the Democratic Party (although he did ultimately break with neoconservatism).

Indeed, most early neocons had little interest in changing allegiances from the Democratic Party. “There was, and remains,” Heilbrunn writes, “a kind of aesthetic revulsion to the Republican Party amongst liberal hawks.” The neoconservative hatred of Richard Nixon—his policy of détente was, they argued, suicidal—provided ammunition for their (long since abandoned) contention that America’s best hope for a vigorous foreign policy was the Democrats. They did back Nixon against George McGovern in 1972, but afterward Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Walt Rostow, Daniel Bell, and other liberal hawks took out an ad in The New York Times urging the Democratic Party to return to “the [foreign policy] tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey.”

Heilbrunn quotes the late William F. Buckley, founder of National Review and doyen of the traditional conservatives, on the neocons’ fetishization of the Democratic senator and liberal hawk Henry “Scoop” Jackson. “The neos wanted a Democrat to enshrine,” Buckley said. “They found someone who was pretty much a welfarist but was anti-Soviet.” The latter position was pre-eminent, the former tolerable. Understanding the widely held misperception of the neocon as a sort of ultra-conservative Republican, Heilbrunn asks the reader to “remember that the neoconservatives did not oppose the idea of welfare itself.”

The neoconservative house organ of the 1970s, The Public Interest, was founded in part, Buckley later wrote, because Irving Kristol “had deemed National Review…too right-wing.” In 1976 Kristol denounced the antipoverty programs birthed by LBJ’s Great Society, but he suggested that the money not be taken out of government hands and instead be used to achieve “some form of national health insurance.” As late as 1993, Kristol would advocate a “conservative welfare state” that, for instance, would “leave Social Security alone—except for being a bit more generous, perhaps.” In the 1980s, like most other neocons, Kristol did embrace supply-side economics, then fashionable among Reaganites, although it is unclear how much of the Arthur Laffer gospel he actually believed.

(In the ’90s, he would express regret over his support for the theory that slashing taxes leads to greater revenues.)

All this leftover leftism made for an occasionally awkward integration into the right. The neocons had been focused primarily on the evils of the Soviet empire, having little time for the free market. As Podhoretz noted in his obituary for neoconservatism, “The neoconservatives did not love commerce, or anything else, more than they loathed Communism.” In other words, it was an ideology short on classical liberalism and limited government—both at least theoretically conservative principles—and long on “rollback” and exporting democracy.

A year after Podhoretz’s self-congratulatory trauermarsch, Bill Kristol, son of neocon founding father Irving Kristol and editor of The Weekly Standard, and David Brooks, also of The Weekly Standard, took to the pages of The Washington Post to inaugurate “National Greatness conservatism.” Critics grumbled that it was simply neoconservatism rebranded. Kristol and Brooks called for a muscular foreign policy and argued that the GOP message of limited government fell far short of a coherent governing philosophy; the Republicans, they wrote, must reconcile themselves to a certain amount of government intervention. The liberal columnist E.J. Dionne was ebullient, proclaiming that with the advent of National Greatness conservatism, “The era of bashing government is ending.” (Proving Podhoretz’s point about the mainstreaming of neoconservatism, both Kristol and Brooks have since matriculated to the New York Times opinion page.)

Libertarians and small-government conservatives were appropriately aghast. Former Reason editor Virginia Postrel wrote a scathing response with Washington Post economics columnist James Glassman, dismissing National Greatness as “wistful nationalism in search of a big project.” The duo opined that “the Cold War is over. So what’s a national-greatness government to do? It could go looking for the next war, hope for another Great Depression, or sponsor a trip to Neptune.” National Review’s Jonah Goldberg hissed in May 2001 that the younger Kristol’s project, by then four years old, was “an allegedly ‘conservative’ cause.” Goldberg was still irritated at the tenor of Kristol’s support of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the 2000 presidential primaries. “During the campaign,” he wrote, “Kristol suggested more than once that to be a Bush supporter was tantamount to being a hostage to evil corporations that put profit above patriotism.” (It was a point McCain would revisit during this campaign when he told Mitt Romney that he served in the Navy “out of patriotism, not for profit.”)

To Heilbrunn, the other important characteristic of neoconservatism is its Jewish roots. In a recent Washington Post op-ed piece debunking myths of neoconservatism, Heil-brunn pooh-poohed the commonly held idea that “neocons are Israeli lackeys” as pure “bunk,” noting that, if anything, they are often further to the right than the Likud Party. But in They Knew They Were Right, Heilbrunn says neoconservatism “is as much a reflection of Jewish immigrant social resentments and status anxiety as a legitimate movement of ideas.” This is a debatable point, but one that doesn’t necessarily contradict his dismissal of the oft-cited Likud-Commentary axis.

Many of neoconservatism’s heaviest hitters are, as is often pointed out, gentiles, and many Jewish intellectuals were, and are, repelled by neoconservatism. Nevertheless, Heilbrunn argues plausibly that the movement was really born “with the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, the 1967 war, and the rise of black anti-Semitism in the United States.” The Six Day War, he writes, “gave the first real impetus to the birth of the modern neoconservative movement.” The idea that the world would sit idle as Jews were again attacked—recall that Washington’s unswerving support for Israel began only after that war—galvanized the neocons. Neither did it go unnoticed that the Soviet Union, one of the first countries to recognize Israel at the United Nations in 1949, was now actively assisting both Arab dictatorships and Palestinian terror groups.

The invocation of the Holocaust would be a frequent refrain—and a point of frequent criticism. Neoconservatives constantly cited the Shoah as a reductio ad Hitlerum debating tactic. In 1976 a neocon lobby, the Committee on the Present Danger, stated that the Soviet arms buildup was “reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s rearmament in the 1930s.” Evoking the mass murder of European Jewry, Norman Podhoretz warned in The New York Times against renewed complacency, “For if for the second time in this century, the world were to stand by while a major Jewish community was being destroyed, it would be hard to evade the suspicion that an irresistible will was at work to wipe every last Jew off the face of the earth, to make this planet entirely Judenrein.” Three decades later, in 2004, the Yale computer scientist David Gelernter hyperbolically announced in The Weekly Standard that “the world’s indifference to Saddam resembles its indifference to Hitler.” Heilbrunn could have also included a more recent reference: Podhoretz’s now-notorious essay arguing the “case for bombing Iran,” published last year in Commentary, which compared Israel’s current situation vis-à-vis Iran to Czechoslovakia’s forced immersion in Hitler’s Reich. In a brief debate with Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria on PBS after the piece was published, Podhoretz invoked Hitler four times.

Heilbrunn demonstrates that for the first generation of neoconservatives, the motive for embracing a hawkish foreign policy was this fear of resurgent Nazism. For the second generation, it was an Israel encircled by hostile neighbors, and a visceral dislike of the New Left, parts of which saw the Jewish state through the prism not of victimology but of colonialism. For the newest generation of neocons it was the mass murder of 9/11 and its attendant effects on the so-called Arab street.

In this latest iteration, Heilbrunn convincingly argues, neoconservatism would destroy itself. The Bush administration, which campaigned in 2000 on a policy of nonintervention abroad, had no intention of embracing the neoconservative outlook until the terror attacks of 2001. Condoleezza Rice, Heilbrunn writes, “hewed to her stated course of leaving nation building to the Democrats.” Some neocons shared this distaste for aggressively exporting democracy. In her famous 1979 essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” which blasted President Carter’s “human rights”–centered foreign policy and argued for toleration of certain America-friendly, anti-communist authoritarian regimes, the neocon heroine Jeane Kirkpatrick argued that “the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances…is belied by an enormous body of evidence based on the experience of dozens of countries which have attempted with more or less (usually less) success to move from autocratic to democratic government.”

Kirkpatrick strongly supported the “rollback” policy Reagan adopted toward the Soviet Union, but she surely would have balked if, instead of merely stunting Soviet imperial advances, the United States attempted to build mini-Americas in every liberated land. “There is no inherent or historical ‘imperative,’ ” Kirkpatrick would write during the Iraq War, “for the U.S. government to seek to achieve any other goal—however great—except as mandated by the Constitution or adopted by the people through elected governments.” There is, after all, a significant difference between assisting in the abrogation of the Soviet empire and a quixotic policy of democratization.

It also worth noting, as Heilbrunn does, that the Reagan nostalgia of many neoconservatives requires a selectively deployed memory and a distorted reading of history. Reaganism held much promise for the neocon movement, though most neocons soon felt betrayed by the president’s nuanced handling of nuclear disarmament. Midge Decter declared herself “disgusted” with the administration’s willingness to sit down with the Soviet Union. Norman Podhortez called Reagan’s refusal to send ground troops into Nicaragua “appeasement” and was enraged by the administration’s “half-hearted” support of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the president’s apparent volte-face on arms control.

Heilbrunn recognizes that, from Nixon to Bush, the neocons actually have angered the right far more than the left. For many libertarians, paleoconservatives, and Reagan Republicans, this is certainly true. The American Conservative, a magazine that Heilbrunn misidentifies as beginning operations in the late 1990s (it was founded in 2002), is a case in point, launched in large part as a reaction against the neocon rebirth. It would have been helpful and interesting had Heilbrunn explored these internecine battles in greater detail.

To Heilbrunn, the legacy of neoconservatism is one of long-term disaster for the Republican Party, an ideological digression that “quite possibly not only destroyed conservatism as a political force for years to come but also created an Iraq syndrome that tarnishes the idea of intervention for several decades.” This sounds right. The surge has undeniably mitigated the violence in Iraq, but it seems likely that—barring a continued military presence in Iraq for “100 years,” as John McCain posited—the neocons’ nation-building project will be a millstone around the movement’s neck. The Iraq fiasco will also obscure the fact that many of their Cold War–era arguments with the left were prescient. They were right about the ineffectiveness of Great Society welfare programs and about the colossal evil of the communist bloc.

But the failures of the neoconservative approach to both foreign and domestic policy are recognized even by consummate neocon David Frum, partial author of the infamous “axis of evil” State of the Union speech. In his recently released book Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, Frum concedes Heilbrunn’s point that a conservative regeneration is needed after the Bush administration’s big spending and disastrous foreign policy. While Frum is upbeat about conservatism’s prospects, Heilbrunn ends They Knew They Were Right on an ominous note: “These reckless minds…aren’t going away. Quite the contrary.”

Perhaps. But unless Iraq becomes an Arab version of Switzerland in the next decade, I wouldn’t bet on it.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor of Reason.

Wright Erratum

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:11:00 EDT

I'm largely uninterested in this never-ending Jeremiah Wright controversy, and I'll leave the debunking of his nutty National Press Club rant to others in the blogosphere. But there is one minor point that deserves a correction. According to Wright, his "congregation stood in solidarity with the peasants in El Salvador and Nicaragua, while our government, through Ollie North and the Iran-Contra scandal, was supporting the Contras, who were killing the peasants and the Miskito Indians in those two countries."

I'm not sure I would be trumpeting my "solidarity" with the foul dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, but I suppose that's a matter of taste. It should be noted, though, that it was the Sandinista government that famously massacred truculent Miskito Indians, who then responded by fighting a prolonged guerilla war against the very government supported by liberation theologists like Wright. In 2007, The Independence Institute's Alvaro Vargas Llosa reminded playwright Harold Pinter of "the 1981 massacre of Miskito Indians on Nicaragua's Atlantic coast" after he praised the Sandinista government in his Nobel speech.

Under the guise of a literacy campaign, the Sandinistas, with the help of their Cuban cadres, tried to indoctrinate the Miskitos with Marxist ideology. But the independent-minded Indians refused to accept Sandinista control. Accusing them of supporting opposition groups based in Honduras, Ortega's men killed as many as 50 Miskitos, imprisoned hundreds, and forcibly relocated many more.

Saying No to a "Top-Down Command and Control" Economy

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:30:00 EDT

I missed Obama's interview with Fox News Sunday's Chris Wallace, but skimming the transcript, this exchange caught my eye. I'm not sure how much confidence I have in Obama's sincerity here—and it‘s certainly a smart thing to emphasize when speaking to a Fox News crowd—but this is an encouraging answer:

WALLACE: Over the years, John McCain has broken with his party and risked his career on a number of issues - campaign finance, immigration reform, banning torture.
As a president, can you name a hot-button issue where you would be willing to buck the Democratic Party line and say, "You know what? Republicans have a better idea here?"
OBAMA: Well, I think there are a whole host of areas where Republicans in some cases may have a better idea.
WALLACE: Such as?
OBAMA: Well, on issues of regulation. I think that back in the '60s and '70s a lot of the way we regulated industry was top-down command and control, we're going to tell businesses exactly how to do things.
And you know, I think that the Republican Party and people who thought about the markets came up with the notion that, "You know what? If you simply set some guidelines, some rules and incentives, for businesses—let them figure out how they're going to, for example, reduce pollution," and a cap and trade system, for example is a smarter way of doing it, controlling pollution, than dictating every single rule that a company has to abide by, which creates a lot of bureaucracy and red tape and oftentimes is less efficient.
I think that on issues of education, I've been very clear about the fact - and sometimes I've gotten in trouble with the teachers' union on this - that we should be experimenting with charter schools. We should be experimenting with different ways of compensating teachers that...

Excepting the cap and trade example, Obama's renunciation of the "top-down command and control" economy is still pretty vague. This could simply mean that he has, say, no interest in returning to pre-1986 Tax Reform Act rates of corporate taxation (which topped out at 46 percent). Regardless, it couldn't possibly be worse than this story on that earmark-loving Senator from Chappaqua, Hillary Clinton. The Hill reports:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) has requested nearly $2.3 billion in federal earmarks for 2009, almost three times the largest amount received by a single senator this year.
The Democratic presidential candidate's staggering request comes at a time when Congress remains engaged in a heated debate over spending federal dollars on parochial projects.
It also has gained traction on the campaign trail. Presumptive GOP nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), a longtime foe of earmarks, has called for eliminating what he dubs "wasteful Washington spending." Democratic front-runner Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) has spurned earmarks, seeking no funds for pet projects in the upcoming fiscal year.
Yet Clinton is continuing to request billions for earmarks, most of which will go to her home state.

Last month, anti-earmark crusader Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) stopped by the Reason DC HQ to talk with reason.tv about Cuba, freedom-and Flake's own failure to live by his self-imposed term limit pledge.

Mahler's Symphony of Stupidity

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:04:00 EDT

Horst Mahler, co-founder of the left-wing terror group Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction), spent ten years in prison for various acts of "revolutionary violence" committed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. (He was defended, incidentally, by former German Prime Minister Gerhard Schroeder and former Interior Minister Otto Schily.) Now a member of the neo-Nazi party NPD, Mahler is heading back to jail—this time for greeting Jewish journalist Michel Friedman, a longtime target of Mahler's anti-Semitic opprobrium, with "Heil Hitler, Herr Friedman!" According to this story in the German tabloid Bild, Mahler was sentenced to ten months in jail today. The DPA has what appears to be the only English-language account of the trial, explaining that Mahler was convicted of "sedition, using gestures of an anti-constitutional organization and criminal insult during the interview at a Munich airport hotel." Sedition? Mahler is a colossal scumbag—an anti-capitalist, anti-American, Holocaust-denying loon—but this is just silly:

Michel Friedman, 52, whose previous posts include deputy chairman of Germany's national Jewish body, justified the abrasive interview last October for a print magazine as his journalistic duty, saying he would never have given Mahler time for a private chat.

Vanity Fair's German edition contends that its publication of the interview in a 10-page spread revealed the absurdity of Holocaust denial. Friedman, who is also a lawyer, filed a police complaint against Mahler after their talk.

Mahler was ejected from the courtroom for misbehaviour after alleging that the Holocaust had not happened. Mahler confirmed saying "Heil Hitler." The judge said she found him incorrigible.
In 2006, he arrived at jail to serve a sentence and did the stiff- armed Heil Hitler salute at the gate. Nazi symbols are illegal in Germany.

He has also been active in and worked as lawyer for the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD). German authorities have confiscated Mahler's passport to stop him attending Holocaust denial events abroad.

Cato's 2008 Milton Friedman Liberty Prize

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:55:00 EDT

Congratulations to this year's Milton Friedman Liberty Prize winner Yon Goicoechea, the brave Venezuelan student leader instrumental in thwarting Hugo Chavez's most recent power grab. The AP has details:

A U.S.-based think tank has awarded a $500,000 prize to the leader of a student protest movement that has posed a potent challenge to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

University student Yon Goicoechea became a household name in Venezuela last year when he led peaceful protests that were widely cited as a key factor in the defeat of sweeping constitutional changes proposed by Chavez.

The Washington-based Cato Institute said it will announce the 23-year-old as winner of the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty on Thursday.
[...]
"He managed to effectively give voice to millions of Venezuelans who believed in democracy, tolerance and modernity, and who felt that they were being left out of politics," said Ian Vasquez, director of the institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.

Goicoechea's $500,000 prize (!) will be awarded next month at a ceremony in Manhattan.

Full details from Cato.org here.

The Killer Elite

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:15:00 EDT

At this point in the news cycle, it is perhaps unnecessary to reprint Sen. Barack Obama's continuously reprinted comments about those bitter, clingy, armed, pious, and disaffected voters of Pennsylvania. But in case your interest in this never-ending race waned upon the exit of Mike Gravel, here is, once again, the Illinois Democrat explaining why the rural poor are supposedly swayed by conservative—rather than liberal—populism: "You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them...And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Now, let's ignore that last bit of hypocrisy—if anyone has fanned the flames of anti-trade sentiment, it's Obama—and say that it's not too difficult to agree with The Economist's characterization of these comments as a bit "snooty." The claim that religious zeal (the Christian fundamentalism is implied) or gun ownership correlates to the number of shuttered Pennsylvania factories is pretty thin gruel. Recognizing this, both Obama's current opponents, Sens. Clinton (D-N.Y.) and McCain (R-Ariz.), pounced, calling the comments "elitist" and accusing their fellow senator of being hopelessly "out of touch" with the real America.

For its part, many in the media—excepting the conservative-leaning Fox News, of course—jumped into the breach to defend their beloved frontrunner. Consider the reaction of the pundits on CNN's The Situation Room, hosted by Wolf Blitzer, to the charge that Obama displayed a hidden contempt for the armed and religious. First, CNN's house windbag Jack Cafferty denied that Obama was trading in elitism. Rather, explained Cafferty, Obama was simply acknowledging that Pennsylvania is the Saudi Arabia of America. "What happens to [unemployed] folks like that in the Middle East, you ask? Well, take a look. They go to places like al Qaeda training camps." Regardless of whether gun ownership and economic desperation are causative, Cafferty (who has his own problems with inflammatory comments) denounced previous American leaders—cough, Bill Clinton, cough—that "shipped the jobs overseas and signed phony trade deals like NAFTA."

U.S. News & World Report Contributing Editor Gloria Borger weighed in with wrist-slap for Obama's "inartful" terminology. "But," she continued, "I think he's expressing a sentiment of mad as hell voters not going to take it anymore that we've seen throughout this election." The McCain and Clinton campaigns, Borger said, were after the same thing, which is to "portray Obama as this sort of effete elitist who doesn't understand the real working class people or Independent voters."

And, finally, CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin sputtered that the whole thing was taken out of context. It was, he proclaimed, a "fake issue. I think [Hillary Clinton] is completely distorting what Obama said. And I think it's just shocking, frankly... I think [Clinton's attack] ad is a disgrace." Toobin declared that by dint of his family background, Obama was incapable of elitism: "Well, I just think it's remarkable that Barack Obama, this guy who grew up in a single family household with no money, who lived in Indonesia, who, you know, was—came from very modest upbringings, somehow he's the elitist." (While certainly not rich, it's worth reminding that Obama, the son of two university-educated parents, attended an "exclusive and prestigious" private school in Hawaii, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School.)

So in The Situation Room, there was consensus. The story was silly season stuff; a prototypically Clintonian diversion from the substantive issues.

While CNN scoffed at the thought of Obama not understanding the rural, white working-class voter, a number of pro-Obama bloggers and pundits were turning on his accusers. At The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan linked to a column by New Criterion editor Roger Kimball, and directed readers to "check out the photo" of Kimball wearing a bowtie and sporting turtle-shell glasses. What does this elitist buffon know from elitism?

Writing in The New Republic, Jonathan Chait railed at the "hypocrisy" of certain elite media figures, saving special ire for "George F. Will [who] decided to leap to the defense of the proletariat. Yes, that George F. Will."

In case you didn't immediately understand the source of Chait's sarcasm, he clarified that Will is "the fabulously wealthy, bowtie-wearing, pretentious reference-mongering, Anglophilic fop who grew up in a university town as a professor's son, earned two advanced degrees, has a designated table at a French restaurant in Georgetown, and, had he dwelt for any extended time among the working class, would be lucky to escape without his underwear being yanked up over his ears." Oh dear. Rumor has it that, in his Georgetown estate, Will has a shelf devoted to the novels of Evelyn Waugh, that poncy, ascot-wearing Brit (boo!) who wrote florid novels about fox hunting and buggery, which Will reportedly reads while consuming expensive French food!

So here we have a class-war version of the "chickenhawk" charge. Don't advocate for war unless you have served, don't speak for the peasants if you wear a bowtie and recommend Chesterton novels to your (probably foreign) friends. Members of the right-leaning bourgeoisie are incapable of spotting and deploring such condescension directed at those who typically vote for right-leaning candidates.

Chait writes that populist, fist-shaking pundits such as Chris Matthews and Bill O'Reilly, who bully guests and interviewers with references to their "real America," blue-collar credentials, "are multimillionaires who retain only the most remote connection to blue-collar life." This is true enough. But Obama's defenders use the very same line of argumentation in explaining away his "bitter" comments. So when critics such as Toobin tell Wolf Blitzer that Obama "grew up in a single family household with no money," it is perhaps worth mentioning that it should also be tough for Obama to retain his working-class connections—if he ever had any—when he earned $4.2 million in 2007.

Though it likely had little or no effect on yesterday's loss in Pennsylvania—potentially insulted voters were leaning largely toward Hillary Clinton anyway—it is not outrageous to think that Obama's extemporaneous bit of pop sociology was indicative of a generally condescending attitude towards the Other (that was the basic point of Will's column, which found precedent for such feelings in Adlai Stevenson's failed presidential runs in 1952 and 1956). That attitude will surely be revisited in the general election.

The inclusion of guns in Obama's complaint is, I think, especially revealing. A convincing argument can be made that xenophobia is more appealing to the dispossessed and downtrodden—They're taking our jobs! They're invading our country!—and a convincing case can be made that Obama has employed similar, though not explicitly xenophobic, language when railing against NAFTA stealing American jobs. But what does any of this have to do with guns, other than to signify that these are bitter country rubes that, to paraphrase What's the Matter with Kansas author Thomas Frank, foolishly vote against their own interests?

Nevertheless, Jeffrey Toobin told CNN viewers, what Obama said "was factually accurate." But is it? As Syracuse University professor Arthur Brooks wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "It turns out [gun owners] have the same level of formal education as nongun owners, on average. Furthermore, they earn 32% more per year than nonowners. Americans with guns are neither a small nor downtrodden group. Nor are they ‘bitter.' In 2006, 36% of gun owners said they were ‘very happy,' while 9% were ‘not too happy.' Meanwhile, only 30% of people without guns were very happy, and 16% were not too happy."

So Obama's gun analysis was not only incoherent (how does one "explain their frustrations" by shooting skeet, anyway?), but based on lazy presumption and stereotype that's not that backed up by any data. And George Will might well be a fop, but his distillation of Obama's argument strikes me as reasonable: "Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program." In other words, Barack Obama thinks that, whether they know it or not, the gun-toting plebes of America are in desperate need of "change."

Michael Moynihan is an associate editor of reason.

(Potential) Panic in the Streets of Stockholm

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:06:00 EDT

Even by the standards of Swedish nanny statism, this is pretty stunning. A friend passes along this taxpayer funded advertisement that ran in today's edition of the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet—itself partially funded by the state, incidentally, through something called "presstöd" (press support). According to the ad, the state liquor monopoly, Systembolaget, must be saved or there will be pandemonium in the streets; people will die; the state bureaucracy will collapse (hurrah!); your wives, mothers, and sisters will be brutally assaulted. Or something:

A quick-and-dirty translation of the ad:

Why Can't You Guys Buy Wine at the Supermarket?
Imagine that you suddenly get this question from a tourist. Perhaps you know exactly how you should answer. If not, it might be good to know what the results of a recent survey showed: The Swedish alcohol monopoly saves many lives each year. If strong beer (Note: beer with more that 3.5% alchohol per volume), wine and spirits were sold in grocery stores consumption would increase by 30%, researchers believe. And they stress that this is a conservative estimation—the increase could be more. They calculate that there will be approximately 1,600 more deaths each year, 14,000 more assaults and around 16 million more sick days.

So the monopoly makes a huge difference for a lot of Swedes. And because it will only be around as long as people want it to be, we at Systembolaget have to do everything in our power to make sure our customers are satisfied.
This has resulted in our having perhaps the world's largest assortment of strong beer, wine and spirits. (And an assortment one not finds in Stockholm and Gothenburg, but also in Jokkmokk and Töreboda.)

If you want more [pro-monopoly] arguments, visit systembolaget.se.

(Tip: Billy)

"Kill your parents, that's where it's really at!"

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:31:00 EDT

With all this talk of former Weather Underground crackpots Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn (see Steve Chapman's column from earlier today), it's perhaps worth revisiting Tim Noah's terrific thrashing of Ayer's embarrassing memoir/apologia for violent revolution, Fugitive Days. It is also worth mentioning that Noah attacked Ayers in August 2001—a few weeks before 9/11—though he revisited the book a few days after his notoriously ill-timed interview with the New York Times, in which he expressed regret for not having bombed more targets in the United States. Noah confessed that he wasn't "sure he's ever read a memoir quite so self-indulgent and morally clueless as Fugitive Days." He also reminds readers of Ayers' level of political and ideological sophistication:

Ayers omits any discussion of his famous 1970 statement, "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at." He also omits any discussion of his wife Bernardine Dohrn's famous reaction to the Manson killings, as conveyed by journalist Peter Collier: "Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach! Wild!" (In a 1993 Chicago Magazine profile, Dohrn claimed, implausibly, that she'd been trying to convey that "Americans love to read about violence.")

Read the whole thing.

The Right to be a Hate-filled Imbecile

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

There are a number of points on which Ali Eteraz and I agree. Despite my general hostility to organized religion, I too have little patience for Robert Spencer-type arguments that Islam is possessed with a preternatural desire to force unbelievers into a state of "dhimmitude," nor am I terribly concerned that the minarets of "Eurabia" will soon encircle the Islamisized capitals of Western Europe. As I noted in my Reason column, I have little interest—and little academic qualification—in such conversations, and will leave the discussions of Koranic interpretation to theologians and historians. But thankfully, for the sake of Jewcy's readers, there is much on which we disagree. But let me start be reiterating that I too was unimpressed by Wilders film, and his views of Islam still strike me as reductive and, to put it mildly, incomplete.

Read the rest of this column at Jewcy.com

Wasserman on 'Libertarian' Fidel Castro

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:35:00 EDT

It is a constant source of wonderment that seemingly intelligent people persist in mythologizing Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Here is former Los Angeles Times book review editor Steve Wasserman reviewing Castro's autobiography for Truthdig, the left-wing news portal founded by Robert Scheer, and slobbering all over a man of "extraordinary eloquence [and] strength of character." A few samples:

"His triumph: standing up for the right of small states to resist the bullying and domination of large powers. He was not willing to submit to the dictates of Washington, nor was he always a reliable cat's paw for Moscow. One has only to examine the roots of Castro's Africa policies, which antedated his coziness with the Soviets and were carried out independently of Soviet desires throughout much of the 1960s, to know that he very often refused to kowtow to Kremlin orthodoxy."

Utterly ridiculous. To resist the demands of his Soviet patrons is rather different than taking an independent line that conforms with Soviet foreign policy goals. Castro's imperial adventure in Angola, which Wasserman cites, was indeed his own initiative, but one, as Cambridge historian Christopher Andrews notes, that "was enthusiastically encouraged by Moscow." After Cuba decided to bring troops to Angola—troop and matériel transport was arranged by the Soviets, incidentally—the Russian-Cuban military and espionage collaboration continued throughout the conflict and spread into the war in Ethiopia. This hardly qualifies as "resist[ing] the bullying and domination" of a large power.

"...Castro disavowed terrorism as a tactic of revolutionary war. He was not a nihilist, and he deliberately eschewed, indeed, condemned, terrorism for its disregard of human life. In a letter during the fight against Batista rebuking his brother Raul for his reckless kidnapping of a group of U.S. citizens (subsequently released unharmed) Castro said: "It is essential to declare categorically that we do not utilize the system of hostages, however justified our indignation may be against the political attitudes of any government."...In a radio speech to Batista's soldiers, Castro called on them to surrender, pledging that "[n]o prisoner will be interrogated, mistreated, or humiliated in word or deed, and all will receive the generous and humane treatment military prisoners have always received from us." By most accounts, Castro's practice-during the guerrilla war at least-was as good as his promise."

Note the qualifier—"in the guerrilla war at least." Wasserman also says that "it is unlikely that, after Castro's demise, unmarked mass graves will be found filled with the remains of opponents who had been made to disappear. Cuba is not Chile under Pinochet or Argentina under the generals." It is not Chile under Pinochet—it is, and was, much worse. It is important to remind the credulous diggers of truth that immediately following the fall of Havana, the new regime quickly set forth a policy of revolutionary terror. It is estimated that 600 people were executed for connections, however dubious, to the Batista regime. None were afforded fair trials. As French historian Pascal Fontaine points out, at La Loma de los Coches prison alone "more than 1,000 'counterrevolutionaries' were shot in the years between the triumph of 1959 and the final liquidation of the Escambray protest movement." Fontaine also notes that "During the repressions of the 1960s, between 7,000 and 10,000 people were killed and 30,000 people imprisoned for political reasons." Even ignoring the executions and arrests in the following 25 years, Castro's murderous record far outstrips the number executed and "disappeared" by the Pinochet dictatorship.

It is typical of Castrophilic commenters to become moral scolds when describing Batista's Havana as a den of inequity; prostitution, gambling, mobsters. And it was Castro who cleaned up the slum of Batista's Cuba, Wasserman says: "By the 1950s, in Havana, according to Louis A. Perez Jr.'s indispensable "On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture," almost 12,000 women could be found working as prostitutes." Soviet-style communism to the rescue! (Incidentally, Perez's book puts the tally at 11,500 prostitutes, but Wasserman, of course, rounds up.) Later, Wasserman notes that "the Cuban economy is, again, dependent on sugar, tobacco and tourism (particularly sex tourism)." If he were to connect the dots, perhaps Wasserman would see that, since 1959 and especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the number of women working as prostitutes has increased in Cuba.

Even when nominally criticizing Castro, Wasserman's analysis is baffling: "As for Castro, all things must pass. His early ideals of libertarian socialism are nowhere in evidence."

Sure, we can quibble and debate all manner of theories of Cuban communism, but I think it's safe to say that Fidel Castro in no way qualifies as libertarian.

Mugabe: Innocent is Guilty!

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:53:00 EDT

Hopes for an uncomplicated transition of power from Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF to the opposition MDC have been, despite earlier reports to the contrary, almost entirely dashed in Zimbabwe. According to this report in The New York Times, the High Court in Harare ruled that election returns, which independent monitors say would demonstrate that Mugabe was soundly defeated, will not be released any time soon. A planned work stoppage to protest the decision fizzled yesterday, though many of those who "incited" workers to strike were arrested.

Only in Zimbabwe—where the brutal leader of the so-called War Veterans is called Hitler Hunzvi—could one read the following paragraph from yesterday's Times and not bat an eye:

Like the opposition, the groups say evidence is proliferating that the government is seeking to intimidate its opponents and carry out what amounts to a coup.
Political rallies have been banned. Foreign journalists have been arrested and detained. [Opposition leader Morgan] Tsvangirai's lawyer, Innocent Chagonda, has been arrested.

The Capo di Tutti Capi Returns

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:53:00 EDT

According to the Italian media's notoriously unreliable exit-poll data, Silvio Berlusconi and the center-right "Freedom Coalition" he heads is set to again take the reigns of power, with a projected majority of seats in the chamber of deputies and the senate, and Berlusconi becoming prime minister for the third time. The Times of London has the details, and, for good measure, includes a photo of the leather-faced former PM giving his best Don Fanucci-cum-Mussolini wave to supporters of his People of Freedom Party. According to Italian media reports, the coalition defeated a left-center bloc led by the former Mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni, a former communist party member who was heartily (and bizarrely) endorsed by George Clooney.

For my money, The Economist has done the best job over the years of exposing the buffoonish Berlusconi as corrupt in both business and politics (charges which led the former PM to sue the magazine in Italian court). As expected, they are again throwing darts, reminding us of his more recent gaffes:

Most of Mr Berlusconi's jests have been either silly (the claim that he spoke Latin well enough to have lunch with Julius Caesar) or sexist in a way that did not seem to damage him (his view that right-wing women were better-looking than lefties). But on April 8th, a more sinister side re-emerged when Mr Berlusconi said that state prosecutors, like those who have been chasing him through the courts since the early 1990s, should undergo periodic mental-health checks. His main rival, Walter Veltroni of the centre-left Democratic Party, demanded an assurance of Mr Berlusconi's loyalty to state institutions.

Social Cons in the Classroom

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:37:00 EDT

A school textbook authored by conservative academics James Wilson and John Dilulio is under fire from students, scientists and legal scholars for its biased presentation of issues like school prayer, gay marriage, and climate change. The Associated Press has details:

[Critics] say "American Government" by conservatives James Wilson and John Dilulio presents a skewed view of topics from global warming to separation of church and state. The publisher now says it will review the book, as will the College Board, which oversees college-level Advanced Placement courses used in high schools.

The Wilson and Dilulio text on global warming:

The edition of the textbook published in 2005, which is in high school classrooms now, states that "science doesn't know whether we are experiencing a dangerous level of global warming or how bad the greenhouse effect is, if it exists at all."
A newer edition published late last year was changed to say, "Science doesn't know how bad the greenhouse effect is."

On the Texas Supreme court decision that overturned a ban on sodomy:

The authors wrote that the Supreme Court decision had a "benefit" and a "cost." The benefit, it said, was to strike down a rarely enforced law that could probably not be passed today, while the cost was to "create the possibility that the court, and not Congress or state legislatures, might decide whether same-sex marriages were legal."

And on school prayer:

LaClair also was concerned about the textbook's treatment of U.S. Supreme Court decisions regarding prayer in school. The book shows a picture of kids praying in front of a Virginia high school and states, "The Supreme Court will not let this happen inside a public school." Blake said the photo was cut out of the most recent edition.
The textbook goes on to state that the court has ruled as "unconstitutional every effort to have any form of prayer in public schools, even if it is nonsectarian, voluntary or limited to reading a passage of the Bible."
Those examples are not correct, says Charles Haynes, a religious liberties expert at the First Amendment Center in Washington.
"Students can pray inside a public school in many different ways," Haynes said, adding they can pray alone or in groups before lunch or in religious clubs, for example.

Same As It Ever Was

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

On March 28, the United Nations Human Rights Council elected, by unanimous vote, a special rapporteur on the "situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967." The nominee, Richard Falk, a veteran political activist and emeritus professor of law at Princeton University, was opposed by Israel for, among other statements, equating the situation in the Palestinian territories with the Nazi Holocaust. According to a spokesman for Israeli's foreign ministry, Falk will not be allowed through passport control in Tel Aviv.

"This is a very outrageous statement to us and a personal insult to every Israeli," said spokesman Arye Mekel. "How could he then come up with an objective conclusion about what Israel does or doesn't do in Gaza?"

To the Israelis, Falk's appointment is but another indication that the Human Rights Council (UN-HRC), which replaced the corrupt United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) in 2006, amounts to little more than a new acronym obscuring old anti-Israel bias. When the UNCHR was disbanded, The New York Times called the organization a "disgrace," conceding that, on this one point, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton was undeniably "right." In assembling the replacement body, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the new council would provide the "United Nations the chance—a much-needed chance—to make a new beginning in its work for human rights around the world." The UN-HRC, he claimed, "will breathe new life into all our work for human rights."

So has the UN-HRC purged itself of its political biases? Has it, at long last, expelled human rights violators from its ranks? Writing in the International Herald Tribune, Human Rights Watch's Peggy Hicks surveyed the recent record of the revamped council with dismay: "In its first year, the council shied away from taking action on most human rights crises, dropped its scrutiny of Iran and Uzbekistan, and managed to condemn Israel's human rights record without addressing violations by Hezbollah and Palestinian armed groups."

The nomination of Richard Falk is further evidence of UN backsliding in its commitment to fairly scrutinizing human rights. Not only has Falk served in a similar role in the past—he was on a 2001 special panel investigating Israeli human rights violations, suggesting that UN-HRC is recruiting from the old UNCHR pool—but his record is considerably worse than the recent news reports would suggest.

For instance, in 1979, not long after the inauguration of Iran's totalitarian and theocratic "revolution," Falk, then chairman of something called U.S. Citizens Concerned about Freedom in Iran, was granted space on The New York Times opinion page to shill for the incoming government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. A month prior, Falk had flown to Paris with his comrade Ramsey Clark, the former U.S. attorney general and inveterate friend of dictators, to discuss "social justice" (Clark's phrase) with the then-exiled religious leader. Upon returning, Clark told The Washington Post that he was "deeply impressed by the nature and depth and purpose of the movement in Iran that has established the opportunity for a new freedom."

By the time Falk published his impressions of the Paris pilgrimage, the Ayatollah's gang of fundamentalist squadristi—officially known as "secret revolutionary tribunals"—was already meting out executions with little concern for due process. Nevertheless, in his Times opinion piece, Falk upbraided President Jimmy Carter for "associating [Khomeini] with religious fanaticism," and declared that "the depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary, and the bearer of crude religious prejudices seems certainly and happily false." Indeed, "his entourage of close advisers is uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals."

This was too much for the Times' preeminent liberal columnist, Anthony Lewis, who ripped Falk's column as "outstandingly silly." It was clear to those not blinded by ideology, Lewis wrote, that the "Ayatollah has set out, without equivocation or disguise, to turn the clock back and give Iran a theocratic regime." With hindsight, it is perhaps tempting to see Lewis's column as prescient, and Falk as merely a naïve, anti-Shah activist duped by the regime's unsophisticated propaganda apparatus. But as contemporaneous news accounts make clear, the theocratic and dictatorial character of the Khomeini clique was widely acknowledged by Middle East observers well before the hostage crisis.

Falk's conception of human rights—remember, this is what he is tasked to monitor for the UN—is also colored by his warm feelings toward Tehran. Ann Elizabeth Mayer, an associate professor of legal studies at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics, noted in 2000 that "The international law scholar Richard Falk, who sympathizes with the Islamic Republic and who opines that ‘Islam' is entitled to have its own 'civilizational approach' to human rights, embodies the tendency to imagine that Iranians need more Islamic culture, not the human rights protections valued by people in the West."

But this is small beer compared to Falk's latest intellectual pursuit. In 2004, Falk wrote the introduction to The New Pearl Harbor by David Ray Griffin, a book arguing that the American government was behind the attacks of September 11, 2001. Of the vast trove of 9/11 "truth" material available in print and online, it was Griffin, Falk wrote in his foreword, who "has had the patience, the fortitude, the courage, and the intelligence to put the pieces together in a single coherent account." For Griffin's latest book, Debunking the 9/11 Debunkers, Falk provided a dust jacket endorsement: "David Ray Griffin has established himself—alongside Seymour Hersh—as America's number one bearer of unpleasant, yet necessary, public truths."

As media coverage of Falk's nomination has metastasized, it has unfortunately obscured news of UN-HRC's nomination of the Swiss socialist Jean Ziegler to the UN Human Rights Council Advisory Committee. A brief recapitulation of Ziegler's qualifications: In 1996, he defended Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy not only on free speech grounds—an admirable position, after all—but further celebrated his supposed scholarship. "All your work as a writer and philosopher," Ziegler wrote, "attests to the rigor of your analysis and the unwavering honesty of your intentions. It makes you one of the leading thinkers of our time." He lauded the Zimbabwean tyrant Robert Mugabe, a leader who "has history and morality with him." He offered his "total support for the Cuban revolution." He recently told a Lebanese newspaper the he "refuse[d] to describe Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. It is a national movement of resistance."

Then there's Ziegler's friendship with Libyan dictator Moammar Kaddafi. In 1989, according to a report in Neue Zurcher Zeitung (one that confirms research done by UN Watch), Ziegler helped establish the Kaddafi Prize for Human Rights. In 2002, Ziegler himself received the prize, which he shared with, among others, Roger Garaudy. Previous recipients include Fidel Castro, Louis Farrakhan, and Hugo Chavez.

Outside Turtle Bay, it is obvious that those who believe the 9/11 attacks were a government sponsored "false flag" operation and who believe in the moral probity of Kaddafi bequeathing cash prizes to serial human rights abusers have no business adjudicating human rights violations at the United Nations. In 2006, the current administration was widely criticized for opposing the establishment of the UN-HRC; the United States was the only industrialized country, besides Israel, to oppose its creation. In light of the appointment of Richard Falk and Jean Ziegler, it is similarly obvious that this was the correct decision.

While it is gratifying that the commission that long provided political cover for vile and undemocratic regimes such as Cuba, Zimbabwe, and Libya was publicly disgraced and dismantled, it is a disheartening, though utterly predictable, that its replacement is following in its footsteps.

Michael C. Moynihan is a reason associate editor.

The Bourgeois Formalism of Lenny and Carl

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 14:40:00 EDT

Despite plummeting popularity and increasing social unrest at home, Hugo Chavez has decided it's a perfect time to nationalize both Venezuela's cement and steel industries. On Wednesday, the Chavez government announced that it would takeover steelmaker Ternium Sidor, "sending the Argentine-controlled company's shares tumbling." Following news of Venezuela's planned takeover of Mexican cement company Cemex, Peter Hakim, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, made a trenchant point: "They are doing such a terrible job managing the nation's most important company, [state oil company] PDVSA, that it's hard to imagine they're really going to have the skill, the manpower and the knowledge to do much with [cement] companies. This is rather a cockeyed economic proposition."

Both decisions will surely have a negative economic impact on Venezuela's already shaky economy, but it cannot possibly match the damage to public morale of this decision. The Times of London reports:

Luxurious chest hair and little red trunks versus doughnuts and "D'oh!". In the battle of the US television heavyweights, The Hoff has vanquished Homer.

Or at least in Venezuela, where The Simpsons has been ordered from television schedules by President Hugo Chavez after being deemed unsuitable for children. Controversial enough, but in an even more curious move its 11am timeslot has been handed to Baywatch, the show that launched a thousand adolescent dreams.

David Hasselhoff and his aerodynamic life-saving cohorts began their slow-motion jog across the nation's screens on Friday morning, after a ruling that The Simpsons was in danger of breaching the Law of Social Responsibility in Radio and Television.

The National Telecommunications Commission said the show pushed "messages that go against the whole education of boys, girls and adolescents". So far the regulatory agency, which reports to the government, has failed to explain why the cartoon family from Springfield poses more of a threat to the minds of Venezuelan children than a lifeguard falling out of her swimsuit.

(Hat tip: Bruce)

Red-Headed Stranger, "The Body" See Controlled Demolition

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 12:48:00 EDT

Everyone's favorite weed-smoking, tax-cheating troubadour, Mr. Willie Nelson, has joined the ranks of the 9/11 "truthers." On Amy Goodman's Democracy Now radio program, Pancho the Lefty dropped some science on how buildings collapse: "I think 85 or 90 percent of the people in this country say, "What?" I mean, a plane hit this building, and it fell kind of like that. And another plane hit that building, and it fell kind of like that. About the same time it fell, this one fell the same way. It looked like an implosion somewhere, you know? And then, all of a sudden, the third building fell, and no plane hit it."

Former Minnesota governor Jesse "The Body" Ventura recently appeared on The Alex Jones Show to offers his own, Loose Change-inspired theories of how buildings collapse and at what temperature jet fuel burns. The crack(pot) reporters at Prison Planet have the story:

"Two planes struck two buildings....but how is it that a third building fell 5 hours later? How could this building just implode into its own footprint 5 hours later - that's my first question - the 9/11 Commission didn't even devote one page to that in their big volume of investigation. How could those buildings fall at the speed of gravity - if you put a stopwatch on them both of those World Trade Center buildings were on the ground in ten seconds - how can that be?"
[...]
Having undergone Basic Underwater Demolition Seal training, Ventura is speaking from an experienced standpoint and he unequivocally stated that he thought the buildings were deliberately imploded.

"Upon looking at the film in super-slow motion and the way the buildings fell and comparing that to the way that they do like a controlled demolition of a hotel in Las Vegas, they both fell identical."

Martyrdom in the UK

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 14:18:00 EDT

Leading the news in the U.K., the trial of eight would-be terrorists is now underway in London. According to the prosecution, the plotters planned to simultaneously bomb seven transatlantic flights and, according to material seized from one of the suspect's computers, attack "one of the largest gas stations in the UK, oil refineries, the National Grid, and power stations including nuclear power stations." The Telegraph has the details. According to a wiretap transcript read to the jury, the bombers contemplated bringing their wives and babies along on their "martyrdom operation":

When one of the men, Abdulla Ali, was asked "how long 'til the event?" he replied: "A couple of weeks."

Another, Umar Islam, added: "This is really going to happen, isn't it?", the court heard.
The discussion is then said to have turned to whether the men should take their wives and children on the alleged suicide missions.
Umar Islam was asked whether his wife might consider going with him on the "operation". He allegedly said: "I think if I was to say to her that this was a significant operation she might even find it in herself to do that."

Ali asks: "What about the babies?... Maybe she taken them with her?" Islam replies: "Maybe, you know what I mean. She'd like to do it though."

The prosecution also has in its possession a series of "suicide videos," in which the would-be bombers rant about soap operas and soccer:

Excerpts from six "chilling" alleged suicide videos were played to a jury, in which the defendants said they would "scatter body parts" over the streets in revenge for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.Wearing headscarves and posing in front of black flags with white Arabic writing, the defendants were filmed saying they would unleash "volcanoes of anger and revenge" and "rain terror and destruction" down on "non-believers".

They said the deaths of "so-called innocents" were justified because British taxpayers, who funded the Army, did not care about the fate of Muslims, as they were more interested in drinking, watching EastEnders and "complaining about the World Cup". The court has already been told that up to 18 suicide bombers were allegedly to be used to simultaneously bring down seven or more flights bound for the US and Canada from Heathrow Airport.

The Guardian's coverage here. The Times' coverage here. The incomparable little Englanders at the Daily Mail chime in here.

Update: The Mail adds this bit of detail from today's testimony: "[The prosecution] revealed that the fanatics hoped to hoodwink airport security officers by putting pornographic magazines and condoms in their hand luggage to indicate that they could not be Muslim zealots, the court was told."

Rape Me

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 13:37:00 EDT

When the two remaining members of Nirvana attempted to cobble together a box set featuring some of the band's unreleased material, singer Kurt Cobain's widow, Courtney Love, sued, claiming they were simply interested in making a few "quick bucks" off of their former band. All those interested in the Nirvana legacy—record companies, former band members, "the worst of them"—were "feed[ing] on the dead man." A few years later, Love would release Cobain's dairies and journals as a coffee table book, over the protests of his former band mates. And now, the final indignity, again courtesy of Ms. Love: portions of Cobain's diaries are to be printed on a special run of hipster sneakers. According to this article in Ad Age, Love has signed off on Kurt Cobain-branded Converse All-Stars and Jack Purcells.

A 2002 piece from rock critic Jim DeRogatis on the battle over Nirvana's fortune.

Boris Johnson: Off the Booze and Anti-Bag

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 16:50:00 EDT

The New York Times profiles London mayoral candidate, television personality, and Tory polymath Boris Johnson (full, ultra-posh name: Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson). According to recent polling data, Johnson has taken the lead against the Labour incumbent, "Red" Ken Livingstone. The hard-left Livingstone—according to whom "capitalism has killed more people than Hitler" and the I.R.A. were "freedom fighters"—called the YouGov poll "totally implausible."

Some Boris bons mots from The Times:

He sampled an oyster. "Oysters for everyone!" he boomed expansively. "I promise to oysterize all of south London!" Searching for money to buy a magazine, Mr. Johnson excavated from his pocket some coins and a grubby piece of cheese. Asked what he could offer as mayor, he reeled off, "Optimism, energy, dynamism and creative ideas!"
[...]
"If you look at our agenda, I don't think you could contest the seriousness of the job or what we are trying to accomplish," Mr. Johnson said at the market, sampling a piece of sausage from a vendor. The vendor told him she was homesick for Poland. "Oh, dear," he said.
[...]
Caught cheating on his wife in 2004, Mr. Johnson tried to weasel out of it by calling the accusation "balderdash" and "ludicrous conjecture."
After it became clear that he was lying, he was dismissed from his position as the Conservative arts spokesman. "My friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities," he said. "And indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters."
[...]
Buying a meat pie, he was asked whether he wanted it wrapped in a bag. "Yes, some kind of bag!" he responded, before remembering the party line, that plastic bags are bad for the environment. "No, we're antibag," he said. "We're going to hold it."

He glanced at his entourage, already laden with various Boris-accrued items, and edited himself again. "We're going to find a team of porters to hold it."
His aides kept a close eye on him. "Boris is off drink until the election is over," said one, cutting off a vendor who tried to give Mr. Johnson a cup of alcohol-laced cider.

BoJo's greatest YouTube hits can be viewed here. Below, Johnson's classic hard tackle of former German soccer star Maurizio Gaudino during a London charity match for the Bobby Moore Fund: