From the WSJ Opinion Archives
'Just
Like in the Days of Vietnam'
As Congress's majority Democrats consider their next moves on Iraq, New York's
senior senator is getting nostalgic, this report from the McClatchy-Tribune
wire suggests:
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said Democrats would be "relentless."
"There will be resolution after resolution, amendment after amendment . . . just like in the days of Vietnam," Schumer said. "The pressure will mount, the president will find he has no strategy, he will have to change his strategy and the vast majority of our troops will be taken out of harm's way and come home."
Why would anyone want to replay "the days of Vietnam"? The outcome of that war was a defeat for America and a humanitarian disaster for the people of South Vietnam and Cambodia.
This column has long argued that antiwar ideologues, a group that includes a significant number of elected Democrats, viewed America's defeat in Vietnam as a victory for them--the enemy of my country is my friend and all that. But Schumer is no antiwar ideologue. He voted for the Iraq war. His eagerness for another Vietnam can be explained only as an act of political opportunism.
Yet here is where the Vietnam analogy really falls apart. It's hard to see any way in which Democrats benefited politically from becoming the anti-Vietnam party. In 1972 their antiwar nominee carried one state. They did well in 1974 and 1976, but more because of Watergate than Vietnam. And after the ineffectual leadership of Jimmy Carter, Democrats were not able to win the White House again until after the Soviet Union had disintegrated.
It is said that generals always fight the last war. Gen. Schumer is trying to fight this war using the same tactics that lost the last war for both the country and his party.
(Hat tip: Mark Coffey.)
Tell
Us How You Really Feel
New York's junior senator also voted for the Iraq war, and the New York Times
reports on the problems this has caused for her:
One of the most important decisions that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton made about her bid for the presidency came late last year when she ended a debate in her camp over whether she should repudiate her 2002 vote authorizing military action in Iraq.
Several advisers, friends and donors said in interviews that they had urged her to call her vote a mistake in order to appease antiwar Democrats, who play a critical role in the nominating process. Yet Mrs. Clinton herself, backed by another faction, never wanted to apologize--even if she viewed the war as a mistake--arguing that an apology would be a gimmick.
In the end, she settled on language that was similar to Senator John Kerry's when he was the Democratic nominee in 2004: that if she had known in 2002 what she knows now about Iraqi weaponry, she would never have voted for the Senate resolution authorizing force.
Yet antiwar anger has festered, and [Saturday] morning Mrs. Clinton rolled out a new response to those demanding contrition: She said she was willing to lose support from voters rather than make an apology she did not believe in.
"If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from," Mrs. Clinton told an audience in Dover, N.H., in a veiled reference to two rivals for the nomination, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.
OK, here are a couple of naive questions: Does Mrs. Clinton sincerely think that voting for the war was the right thing to do? Whether or not apologizing makes political sense, is she sincerely sorry for her vote?
The Times story gives us no clue. It treats Mrs. Clinton's deliberations over whether to apologize with complete cynicism: She decided not to apologize not because she thought no apology was due, but because she, "backed by another faction," thought apologizing "would be a gimmick." When she defied antiwar sentiment in Dover, it wasn't, according to the Times, because she was sticking to an unpopular position on principle; it was just "a new response" that she was "rolling out."
The Times seems to view Mrs. Clinton as a soulless calculatrix, her public persona as pure artifice. And this is a paper that is generally friendly to the Democrats and their front-runner.
Dishonor
Roll
This is a little late, thanks to the long weekend, but we thought we should
note the 17 House Republicans who joined nearly every Democrat in voting for
a nonbinding resolution against the president's new Iraq strategy:
- Mike Castle (Del.)
- Howard Coble (N.C.)
- Tom Davis (Va.)
- John Duncan (Tenn.)
- Phil English (Pa.)
- Wayne Gilchrest (Md.)
- Bob Inglis (S.C.)
- Timothy Johnson (Ill.)
- Walter Jones (N.C.)
- Ric Keller (Fla.)
- Mark Kirk (Ill.)
- Steven LaTourette (Ohio)
- Ron Paul (Texas)
- Tom Petri (Wis.)
- Jim Ramstad (Minn.)
- Fred Upton (Mich.)
- Jim Walsh (N.Y.)
Of these, only two, Duncan and Paul, voted against the war in 2002. Two House Democrats, Jim Marshall of Georgia and Gene Taylor of Mississippi, voted against last week's resolution.
Over in the Senate, meanwhile, Republicans blocked consideration of a similar resolution, with Democrats mustering only 56 votes for "cloture" (60 are required). Forty-nine Democrats voted for cloture (including independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont but not Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who voted against it; South Dakota's Tim Johnson was out sick). They were joined by the following seven Republicans:
- Norm Coleman (Minn.)
- Susan Collins (Maine)
- Chuck Hagel (Neb.)
- Gordon Smith (Ore.)
- Olympia Snowe (Maine)
- Arlen Specter (Pa.)
- John Warner (Va.)
Five of these seven--all but Snowe and Specter--are up for re-election in 2008, and they seem to be scrambling to get on the side of public opinion. This didn't work out so well for Max Cleland, who voted for the then-popular war on the eve of the 2002 election, lost his bid for re-election anyway, and subsequently turned into a bitter critic of the war (and of much else).
Black
Enough? White Enough?
In the Washington Post, journalist Marjorie Valbrun takes on the question of
whether Barack Obama is "black enough":
The discourse, occurring mostly among black people, has been dominated by questions about Obama's being biracial, his immigrant father and his suitability as a presidential candidate, given that his life story doesn't parallel that of most blacks born in the United States. Some have implied that only a black candidate whose ancestors were slaves here or who have themselves experienced the trauma of this country's racial history can truly understand what it means to be black in America and represent the political interests of black Americans.
This is a narrow-minded and divisive notion. At a time when blacks living in this country, whether by birth or by choice, should be harnessing their collective political clout to empower all black people, we're wasting time debating which of us are truly black.
It's hard to disagree. But Valbrun, a Haitian-American immigrant who is black, doesn't go far enough. Obama is running for president, and the president's job is not to represent "the interests of black Americans" but of Americans. If an "authentically black" politician is one who sees himself as representing his race rather than the country as a whole, it may be that no black Democrat can be elected president, because anyone with broad enough appeal to win a general election doesn't appeal narrowly enough to blacks to win the nomination.
Meanwhile, ABC News's Terry Moran, on his "Pushback" blog, offers a facetious take on the whole question:
I'd like to flip the question about Obama in a way, just to see what we might come up with here. So, instead of asking, "Is Obama black enough?" how about asking, "Is Rudolph Giuliani white enough?"
Huh?
Well, just as "blackness" is an identity we invent and impose on each other (a "socially constructed concept," as they say), so is "whiteness." And "whiteness"--or the "lack" of it--might also have important political ramifications. . . .
So what does this have to do with Giuliani? He's a white guy, right? Well, yes and no. Who counts as white in America has been a fluid concept in our history, and Italians have only recently--and perhaps incompletely in some quarters--been admitted to the racial club.
It was just 85 years ago, in 1922, in the fascinating case of Rollins v. Alabama, that a black man named Jim Rollins was tried and convicted for "miscegenation"--the crime of having sex with a white woman. On appeal, Rollins' conviction was overturned because the woman in question, Ms. [sic] Edith LaBue, was a Sicilian immigrant, a fact that the court held could "in no sense be taken as conclusive that she was therefore a white woman." . . .
Italians--like Irish, Jews, Poles, Greeks and now Hispanics and others--have struggled in our history to achieve "whiteness." It's not a given--not a fixed characteristic. It's always been a designation granted to a group by the dominant culture.
Moran has a point inasmuch as white Americans (or at least those in the Deep South) were highly race-conscious, and invidiously so, back in 1922. But the very absurdity of the notion that Giuliani may not be "white enough" in 2007 shows how things have changed since then. Today only an eccentric racist would take seriously the question of whether someone is "white enough."
Our view is that the civil rights triumphs of the 1950s and '60s all but destroyed "whiteness" as a "socially constructed concept" in America. Moran's suggestion that "whiteness" is something one can "achieve" is not only quaint but distasteful. Today's "dominant culture" does not embody white supremacy, and indeed actively combats it.
This is, of course, liberating for black Americans, who were the chief victims of an oppressive and unjust system. But it is also liberating for whites, whose identity as American is largely uncomplicated by any burden of racial loyalty or "authenticity." That blacks do not have this same freedom from race-consciousness is a tragedy of post-civil-rights America.
'An
Imprecise Concept'
From a New York Times story by Neal A. Lewis on the Scooter Libby trial:
Prosecutors have built a detailed case to support their charges, presenting several plausible witnesses whose testimony conflicts with Mr. Libby's sworn statements. Still, the prosecution has the burden of convincing the jurors of Mr. Libby's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, an imprecise concept that makes the outcome of most complicated criminal trials unpredictable.
This is the first time we can remember the Times disdaining the principle of reasonable doubt as "an imprecise concept." Is it a coincidence that the paper does so in the course of describing a political show trial of a Republican ex-official?
Reuters doesn't seem to get it either:
A former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney will have a last chance to convince a jury he is not guilty of perjury on Tuesday as a trial that has exposed the inner workings of the White House draws to a close.
Libby doesn't actually have to convince the jury he's not guilty, only that there's reasonable doubt about his guilt. But then in Reuterville, all concepts are imprecise.
Keep
Your Powder Damp
The Los Angeles Times warns Sen. Hillary Clinton that as the presidential campaign
proceeds she's likely to be "swift-boated" by Republican opponents.
Yeah, ho hum, but we enjoyed this quote:
[Mrs.] Clinton's allies criticize [John] Kerry's response to the 2004 Swift-boat ads as inconsistent and slow. And though Kerry used surrogates to repeatedly counter the attacks, he didn't personally respond until the ads had sown deep doubts among voters.
"She's going to face the same choices," warned one former Kerry aide. "It's not just how fast you respond, it's choosing the right time to unload your big guns."
Some Kerry observers wonder if they were ever loaded to begin with.
Great Orators of the Democratic Party
- "One man with courage makes a majority."--attributed to Andrew
Jackson
- "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."--Franklin
D. Roosevelt
- "The buck stops here."--Harry
S. Truman
- "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your
country."--John
F. Kennedy
- "If we cannot protect the nation's supply of peanut butter, one must ask how prepared we are for a terrorist attack on our nation's food supply."--Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan
Condition:
Awesome!
From Havana, the Associated Press brings us the latest on communist dictator
Fidel Castro's condition:
Fidel Castro's niece said Sunday he was recovering well from surgery and would likely be "very active" again in Cuba's government.
"Fidel is stupendous," said Mariela Castro Espin, daughter of acting President Raul Castro, who took over in July after his older brother underwent surgery.
Stupendous? Heck, we'll bet his condition is out of this world!
Penne
for Your Thoughts?
Consider the human brain. Surely it is nature's greatest wonder: a piece of
meat that weighs but a few pounds but is capable of amazing feats. Its workings
are largely a mystery, impossible to describe without resort to crude analogies--likening
it, say, to a computer.
We got a kick of this analogy, offered by Patricia J. Bauer of Duke University and reported by the Associated Press:
Noting that children, like adults, forget, she compared the brains of infants and adults to colanders used to drain food. The adult colander has small holes, for draining something like orzo or rice, while the infant colander has larger holes, such as for draining large penne pasta, but allowing more information to flow out.
We hope Prof. Bauer has us over to dinner sometime; we'll bet she can really cook.
'Liddy
and I Loved Those Sweet Melons'
"Dole Recalls Cantaloupes"--headline, Associated Press, Feb. 16
Someone's
Journals Are Very Erotic
"Study Links Multiple Births to Diary Product Consumption"--headline,
MSNBC.com/WBAL-TV (Baltimore), Feb. 19
He
Claims He Only Groped Them, a Little
"Man Accused of Groping Girl, 4 Others in New York Stores, Lots"--headline,
FoxNews.com, Feb. 19
Did
the Other Teen Hit the Hospital?
"Ohio Teen Shoots Another at Hospital"--headline, Associated Press,
Feb. 19
They
Could Die Even if It Never Does
"Thousands Could Die if a Giant Tornado Ever Hits Houston"--headline,
Houston Chronicle, Feb. 20
Who
Knew Bears Lived That Long?
"88-Year-Old Bears Weight of Light Rail"--headline, Arizona Republic,
Feb. 15
Life Imitates the Onion
- "First Date in Six Months to Be Last Date in Six Years"--headline,
Onion,
April 27, 2005
- "Reporter Wants More After First Date"--headline, Desert Sun (Palm Springs, Calif.), Feb. 19, 2007
News You Can Use
- "Lying to Doctor Can Mean Health Risks"--headline, Associated
Press, Feb. 16
- "Finding Toilet at Mardi Gras a Challenge"--headline, Associated Press, Feb. 16
Bottom Stories of the Day
- "N.D. to Attempt Snow Angels Record Again"--headline, Forum
(Fargo, N.D.), Feb. 15
- "SW Flight Lands Safely, Takes Off Again"--headline, Albuquerque
Journal Web site, Feb. 16
- "Minor Sledding Injury at Fort Harrison"--headline, Indianapolis
Star, Feb. 18
- "Canadian Wines Slowly, Steadily Improving"--headline, Centre
Daily Times (State College, Pa.), Feb. 18
- "Polls Show Connecticut Cold to Dodd Presidential Candidacy"--headline,
Hartford
Courant, Feb. 19
- "Update: Loud Noises Explained"--headline, Cincinnati Enquirer, Feb. 16
Bottom
Bottom Story of the Day
" 'Late Late Show' Doesn't Mock Spears"--headline, Associated
Press, Feb. 20
How
to Speak Australian
Remember Doug Bandow? He's the libertarian writer who lost his gig at the Cato
Institute and his syndicated column in late 2005, when it was revealed that
he had taken payments from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff for writing columns
favorable to Abramoff clients. (See BusinessWeek
for the background.) In a January 2006 Los
Angeles Times op-ed, Bandow apologized for his ethical lapses and concluded:
Now I'll take my (well-earned) licks and try to regain my credibility and the trust of my readers, editors and friends. I have to hope that my offerings are judged on the quality of the arguments, not on a misguided but limited relationship with a particular lobbyist.
So, how's his credibility? Not so hot, according to Australian blogger Tim Blair, who notes a pair of Bandow articles about Australia and Iraq, published five days apart. First, from the Web site of The American Spectator last Wednesday:
How very nice. Australia wants America to stick around in Iraq. . . .
To its credit, Australia has provided some troops in Iraq--but not many. As Sen. Obama archly observed: "[Prime Minister John] Howard has deployed 1400 [men], so if he is [ready] to fight the good fight in Iraq, I would suggest that he calls up another 20,000 Australians and sends them to Iraq" . . .
Allies can be useful, but only if they are willing to back up shared interests with manpower, money, and other resources. Advice is cheap, especially when it is Americans who are doing the dying.
Compare and contrast with this op-ed from yesterday's Australian:
Australians apparently are growing uneasy with the Prime Minister's embrace of a US administration that has been thoroughly discredited at home. . . . By refusing to send more troops, Canberra could begin to reassert Australia's interest.
Indeed, instead of adding to its current garrison, Australia should begin withdrawing its troops, while advising Washington to do the same.
So he tells Americans that Australians are shirkers, then turns around and tells Australians that they aren't shirking enough!
It's a bit reminiscent of Yasser Arafat talking peace in English while promising in Arabic to drive Israel into the sea. Only contrary to those Foster's ads, Australians actually speak the same language we do. So maybe it's more like John Edwards telling an Israeli audience (in English) that "all options are on the table" to prevent Iran from getting nukes, than backtracking when a left-wing interviewer starts asking questions.
Such behavior is at least explicable from politicians, for whom telling different groups what they want to hear can be expedient in gaining or holding power. But the only power Bandow has is the power to persuade, which is in no way enhanced by such antics.
(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to John Williamson, Brent Silver, Evan Slatis, Jack Archer, Daniel Simon, Chuck Mathys, Ken McKenna, Ann Book, Alan Utter, Edward Cooney, Alan Kudravy, David Goldfarb, Charlie Gaylord, Joseph Burns, Walter Gordon, Andy Hefty, Dagny Billings, John Greene, Howard Franck, Michael Newton, John Sanders, Gary Petersen, Mark Finkelstein, Vern Beachy, Brad Erman, Dave Reedy, Steve Biddle, Nadine Ernst, Brian Azman, John Neal and Jim Stebbins. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
Today on OpinionJournal:
- Review & Outlook: How the EU subsidizes trade with Iran.
- Brendan Miniter: The Iraq war is unpopular, but embracing defeat may prove politically disastrous for Democrats.
- Phil Gramm: Why I'll be voting for John McCain.
