A compendium of random thoughts regarding politics, society, feminism, sex, law, and anything else on my mind. POST YOUR COMMENTS BY CLICKING ON THE TIME INDICATOR BELOW THE POST YOU WISH TO COMMENT ON. RSS FEED AVAILABLE AT http://feeds.feedburner.com/Dilanblogspotcom

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COMING NEXT WEEK, AN ARTICLE BY OLIVER NORTH, DENYING THAT ARMS WERE SOLD TO IRAN IN THE 1980'S:
You know, you would think that National Review would know better than to run an item in its blog, expressing skepticism that Israel could possibly be spying on the US's internal Iran policy debates, written by Michael Ledeen, a pro-Likud neoconservative who reportedly organized back-channel communications between Bush Administration neoconservatives and an infamous shady Iranian arms dealer who played a crucial role in the Iran-Contra scandal. (Nowhere on the National Review site have I found any disclosure of Ledeen's obvious conflict of interest with respect to his post.)

You would especially think that National Review would be cautious about allowing Ledeen to post his thoughts on this issue when Ledeen refused to comment to the Washington Monthly when they reported on Ledeen's activities.

I don't know about you, but to me, a denial that a wrongful act took place, made by someone who is sympathetic to the ideological goals of the suspect, and who organized a blatant attempt to subvert official policy relating to the same subject matter as the suspect's alleged wrongdoing, is not particularly credible as is. But when that person is directly asked to comment to the publication who breaks the story, refuses to do so, and then publishes his denial (i.e., a comment that should have been made to the reporters who broke the story when they asked him to comment) in a sympathetic, ideological publication that will not criticize him or note his obvious conflicts of interest, I don't think it's entitled to any weight at all. In fact, these circumstances make me almost certain that Ledeen is being dishonest and is avoiding commenting in a venue where he might face uncomfortable questions. Shame on National Review for allowing him to get away with this.

posted by Dilan at 1:13 PM

 
NICE DEMONSTRATION OF EXACTLY HOW OUT OF TOUCH THE RIGHT WING IS:
Look at this note by Kathryn Lopez from the "Corner" on National Review's website:

"BARBARA AND JENNA & THE GAY WEDDING [KJL]
"Yesterday it was reported that the Bush twins might be attending an upcoming gay 'wedding.' But before it becomes an urban legend: I am told by White House insiders that they are not attending. The misunderstanding can be chalked up to the young women being polite people."

It says all you need to know about the conservative movement that someone has to go to the trouble of issuing a denial (on background, no less!) to a conservative website that the President's daughters might honor a gay friend by attending the friend's wedding. (Also, note the irony of Lopez implying it was "polite" for the Bush daughters not to explicitly turn down the invitation. If Lopez is really committed to the belief that gay marriage is an abomination, she can't possibly feel that expressing that belief would be "impolite". Come on, Kathryn, if gay marriage has to be opposed to the point of not attending a friend's wedding (an impolite gesture in itself), then not explicitly turning down the invitation would seem to be a terrible compromise of one's principles, wouldn't it?)

And note, again, the use of "scare quotes" around the term "wedding"-- an issue I have commented on before. Apparently if you even use the term "gay marriage" or "gay wedding" without putting a derisive pair of quote marks around it, you are endorsing the gay rights agenda lock, stock, and barrel.

I really don't believe that smart conservatives (and Ms. Lopez is a smart conservative) really believe this trash. (I also don't believe that young conservative commentators believe this trash at all. Most college-educated people under age 40 had openly gay friends in college, and think it's no big deal.) I assume that the folks at National Review (Derbyshire aside) are playing to the bigotry of their supporters. (Lopez may very well believe that homosexuality is a sin-- she is, to my knowledge, a quite devout Catholic-- but that is a very different issue than deriding gays and making snarky and prejudiced remarks about them.)

Or at least I hope that's all they are doing.

posted by Dilan at 8:15 PM

 
LINK TO ERIC MULLER'S POSTS RE: MALKIN ON VOLOKH CONSPIRACY:
With respect to the item directly below this one, here's a link to the comments that Muller posted on the Volokh conspiracy website regarding the Malkin book on Japanese internment:

http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_08_00.shtml#1091762547

Note that you will have to scroll down to read all 10 of his posts.

By the way, one of the funnier Malkin responses to all this is that she operates under publication deadlines and therefore couldn't have been as thorough as Muller wants her to be. (See this link and scroll down to "Part 3".) That's really rich. So it's more important to get the book out before the 2004 election than it is to get your history right? Can Malkin's motives in writing this book be any more transparent (and any more unrelated to any serious scholarly interest in history)?

posted by Dilan at 8:51 PM

 
WELCOME TO THE BIG LEAGUES, MICHELLE:
Michelle Malkin is a conservative author who, like many others, is paid big money by the forces of institutional conservativism (in her case, the right wing Regnery Press) to put out books to serve the interests of the Republican Party. (Her book titles all have the telltale colon in them, e.g., "Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists Criminals & Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores". When I see that colon, I run far away.)

Malkin's specialty is immigration issues. It's easy to be cynical as to why that is-- she's a fairly dark skinned woman of obvious Asian descent; she's thus the perfect person to make arguments that might be argued to be racist, nativist, or anti-immigrant if made by whites. But Malkin, let it be said, is also very smart and productive. She churns out a daily column (which is not easy to do) and is very articulate, and has an ability to process large amounts of information. Unlike many other right wing (and some left wing) popular authors, she has heard of the footnote and the primary source document.

As I noted above, she wrote a book a couple of years back advocating restrictive immigration policies. That's a perfectly good subject for a smart conservative to write about-- there are a thousand different opinions about the effects of immigration on society. A person can take an extreme position-- even a racist one (and Malkin, like many advocates of draconian treatment of foreigners, likes to conflate invading Arab terrorists with "invading" Mexican migrant workers)--- and the position can't be proven false. Immigration policy is, after all, a matter of opinion.

But Ms. Malkin has written a new book, and this one tackles a matter of history, not policy. Obviously the folks at Regnery wanted someone to put out a defense of Bush's anti-terror policies in advance of the 2004 election, so she spent the last year writing "In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror". (There's that colon again.) Her approach is to defend Bush's crackdown on civil liberties by saying that FDR's was even more oppressive, and the historical record vindicates FDR.

Needless to say, Ms. Malkin is swimming upstream here. The verdict of orthodox history is that FDR's actions were a grave and needless infringement on civil liberties, motivated by the worst sorts of racial prejudice. Of course, swimming upstream doesn't by itself make one wrong, but the reaction to Ms. Malkin's work by some professional historians is a nice object lesson in biting off more than one can chew.

Essentially, Ms. Malkin's problem is that she is not a historian, and she wrote her book in a year (working part-time, as she also writes her column AND had a baby this past year), drawing on some primary documents, mostly received from other conservatives who thought internment was not such a bad idea. And she is arguing that all the professional historians who have intensively studied the complexities of the historical record, and who have examined tens of thousands of pages of documents dispersed in archives in Japan, California, Washington D.C. and many other places, are full of it.

I've got to say that this has got to be one of the great examples of a conservative believing a bit too much of the movement's own BS. You see, conservatives like to refer to academics as biased pointy headed geeks who forsake rigorous study in favor of hack scholarship such as postmodernism and relativism. I will not deny, of course, that such hack scholarship exists, but that doesn't mean that any smart conservative with internet access, a Lexis account, and some like-minded friends who have collected a small sample of the primary documents is going to be able to disprove the consensus of professional academic historians. As biased as some academics may very well be, the fact of the matter is that the intensive methodologies of academics who are attempting to publish in professional journals or to produce a scholarly book cannot be duplicated by a smart layperson working part time.

In any event, I invite anyone who wants to see a conservative commentator, in over her head, get thoroughly eviscerated by academics who don't appreciate her efforts to discredit their life's work without paying her dues to click on this link and scroll down to all of the updates (and click on the Volokh Conspiracy links that are included down below the updates on the page as well).

Ms. Malkin has picked a fight she can't win.

posted by Dilan at 8:16 PM

 
THE SWIFT BOAT VETERANS AND THE KERRY-BUSH CAMPAIGN:
I can't remember when I have been more pissed off about a political attack than I was about the new advertisement and forthcoming book from a group calling itself the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth", supposedly a bunch of Vietnam veterans who served with John Kerry and contend that he is lying about his war record.

This is despicable on all sorts of levels-- the media has picked up on the fact that this is being supported sub silentio by the Bush campaign (it was funded by a major Bush contributor and Bush could stop it with one phone call, as Vietnam veteran John McCain has urged Bush to do), and that the people involved didn't really serve with Kerry, and that some of the Swift Boat vets are already retracting their claims.

But I don't think the media coverage has given the full picture of why this is such a base political attack. The fact is, John Kerry spent the Vietnam War taking fire and risking his life on behalf of his country. George W. Bush pulled political strings to get ahead of many other people on a waiting list to join the Texas Air National Guard, avoided going to Vietnam and risking his life, and may have also failed to show up for duty (this last fact has not been definitively proven, but no records establish that he really did show up for several months after he had been transferred to Alabama, and he has avoided definitively saying that he had reported for duty during that period). In fact, George W. Bush was probably a rather irresponsible rich kid, a hard drinker and party animal who didn't get his life together until he turned 40. Kerry was, in contrast, an extremely precocious 26 year old.

None of this is really news. And really, none of it should determine who should win the election. I don't support Bush for President, but I do admire that he turned his life around. I think that is one of his best personal qualities. But in order to accept the narrative that he turned his life around, we must also accept that before he did, things weren't pretty. And they weren't. Whatever Bush was doing during the Vietnam War, he wasn't a responsible adult back then. Kerry, on the other hand, was one. And that doesn't mean that Kerry is a better man now; it only means that he was a better man back then.

Nonetheless, Kerry is running on this issue, and Bush's political strategists are scared to their bones about it, because it's impossible to run their normal cheap political attacks against the patriotism of liberals when you are running against a war hero.

So that is the context for George W. Bush's contributors and the right wing media bringing us the Swift Boat vets. And you can tell the political nature of the thing by what the vets say. Let's be clear-- I could totally see Kerry overstating his wounds to get out of Vietnam early, or overstating his war heroism to get elected. I could see that both because he's a politician and because of what we have learned about John Kerry in this campaign.

But that's not what the swift boat vets say, and the reason is obvious-- a John Kerry who may have overstated his military record is still a John Kerry who went to Vietnam and risked his life while Bush didn't. In other words, it wouldn't neutralize Kerry's advantage on the issue, which was the point of this attack.

So what the vets had to do was actually turn Kerry into a coward and a criminal. Thus, they claim that he got his Silver Star for shooting an unarmed Vietnamese teenager in the back. And they claim he inflicted a wound on himself to get a third Purple Heart to get out of the war. And they claim that the man who claims that Kerry saved his life by pulling him out of the water under enemy fire-- an incident that caused Kerry to be decorated with a Bronze Star-- is a liar, and that in fact there was no enemy fire.

You can just see how unbelievable this all is. It would mean that the US Military knowingly and repeatedly decorated a coward and war criminal, and allowed a person to get out of Vietnam by means of a self-inflicted wound, and that further we should believe these fellow servicemembers who never formally protested or complained about the medals when they were awarded but only spoke up when Bush campaign contributors came calling.

So you have a facially unbelievable story, paid for by known Bush supporters, and with an obvious "too good to be true" element to it, i.e., a carefully written narrative that negates each and every element of the claimed war heroism of Kerry, and specifically goes farther than simply criticizing Kerry for being a lousy soldier, instead making him out to be even worse than those who didn't serve in Vietnam. I am sorry, but there is no way in hell that the things the Swift Boat vets allege really happened.

One more thing needs to be said about this attack. While the Swift Boat vets were in Vietnam, the radio talk show hosts and Fox News commentators who are carrying the ball for them were not there, for the most part. And, of course, Bush, the intended beneficiary of the attack, also was not in Vietnam. War service is not pretty. Horrible things happen. Civilians get shot. Young men (and now women) are afraid and sometimes do stupid, even atrocious things. If we are going to honor those who serve our country (and we should), we also cannot turn around and nitpick at every single thing that happens while they are under fire. It is not as though John Kerry ran the Abu Graib prison. I guess the short way of saying this is, I really don't care, in the larger sense, whether the bullets were really flying when Kerry pulled Jim Rassman out of the water or not. I don't care whether the wounds that gave rise to Kerry's Purple Hearts came from a Vietnamese gun or from friendly fire, and I don't even care that they were superficial wounds treated with Band-Aids.

If you go back and question everything that a veteran ever did in the war, and end up elevating the record of someone who never served (and thus cannot be subjected to the same scrutiny), you are no longer honoring veterans-- you are in fact trashing them. Because we ask young people to do awful things on our behalf in war. In the Vietnam War, we did not ask folks in the Texas Air National Guard to do these things. (In a cruel irony, George W. Bush now asks those in the National Guard to die in the line of fire, the very thing he avoided by joining the Guard during the Vietnam War.) The fact that a 26 year old John Kerry did those things, for us, does not make him a worse person than George W. Bush. And it is completely dispicable that anyone would suggest that it does, and try to take down Senator Kerry's honorable service to his country by claiming that he is worse than a draft dodger.

posted by Dilan at 9:19 PM

 
SLATE LINKED TO ME!:
Kevin Arnovitz's excellent Fraywatch (http://www.slate.com/id/2104671/) linked to this blog and gave us a plug. That's reason enough for me to put up some new posts. I really need to pay more attention to this, because people are paying attention to me. I promise I will.

posted by Dilan at 9:16 PM