Tuesday, September 25, 2007 4:01 P.M. EDT

Today's Video on WSJ.com: Reuben Jeffrey, undersecretary of state for economic affairs, talks trade with the Journal's James Freeman.

Had Mad 'Jad, Not So Bad
Columbia University's president, Lee Bollinger, almost managed to make a laughingstock of himself and his university by inviting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's lunatic titular president, to speak as part of a "world leaders forum." In the face of widespread, justified outrage, Bollinger couldn't back down and disinvite Ahmadinejad without looking weak. So he decided to be rude instead.

Bollinger ripped into Ahmadinejad for his Holocaust denial, human-rights violations, sponsorship of international terrorism and support for America's enemies in Iraq. Then he said:

I close with this comment frankly and in all candor, Mr. President. I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions. But your avoiding them will in itself be meaningful to us. I do expect you to exhibit the fanatical mindset that characterizes so much of what you say and do. . . . Today I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for. I only wish I could do better.

Ahmadinejad responded by chiding Bollinger for being rude:

In Iran, tradition requires that when we demand a person to invite us as a--to be a speaker, we actually respect our students and the professors by allowing them to make their own judgment, and we don't think it's necessary before the speech is even given to come in--with a series of claims and to attempt in a so-called manner to provide vaccination of some sort to our students and our faculty.

It is rather silly of Bollinger to invite Ahmadinejad and then berate him. On the other hand, it would be far sillier to genuflect before this "world leader." So Bollinger was simply making the best of the bad situation he had created for himself.

And to judge by the news coverage, the results were actually better than one might have hoped for. Ahmadinejad succeeded in making a laughingstock of himself, and the reactions reported in the press suggest that, the political biases of the faculty notwithstanding, the kids are all right. From the New York Times:

Students said they found his links between science and religion ridiculous.

"It was utterly disgraceful, and it was an utter waste of time," said Sara Aries, a 21-year-old senior in studying [sic] forensics. "The man did not answer any of the questions that were posed to him."

Nora Ganley-Roper, 21, a physics student, agreed. "For Columbia to stick out its neck, it would have been much more helpful if he answered the questions." . . .

Elie Lehmann, a junior from Boston majoring in religion, said he approved of Mr. Bollinger's remarks. "Many people were upset with President Bollinger's issuing the invitation," he said. "His remarks gained him a lot of respect back."

Amital Isaac, 18, who was wearing an anti-Ahmadinejad T-shirt, said that she was glad to hear from Iran's president and that she thought the speech raised interesting questions.

"He began the speech with religion, and everyone on the lawn was rolling their eyes," she said. "They knew it was propaganda." But, it got people talking, "and that doesn't happen every day."

The Washington Post quotes one old New Yorker who defends the Ahmadinejad appearance on "spot the idiot" grounds:

"Let him speak--let him open his mouth," said Pearl Atkins, 74, a Manhattan resident who lost relatives in the Holocaust. "This is America; people get their say here, not like in Iran. He only makes himself sound more stupid with every word anyway."

The Post's Dana Milbank echoes Atkins:

There were similar protests outside the National Press Building in Washington, where reporters gathered to question Ahmadinejad in a videoconference. "Don't give him any press!" shouted one woman.

But that objection misses a crucial point: Without listening to Ahmadinejad, how can the world appreciate how truly nutty he is?

"In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country," he informed the Columbia audience.

That last comment is especially delightful in light of the prespeech pro-Ahmadinejad commentary from the likes of Sally Kohn and Glenn Greenwald.

The Politico has an interesting report on foreign policy expert Norman Podhoretz's visit a few months back to the White House, where he urged President Bush and his then deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove, to take military action against Iran:

The president listened diligently, Podhoretz said as he recounted the conversation months later, but he "didn't tip his hand."

"I did say to [the president], that people ask: Why are you spending all this time negotiating sanctions? Time is passing. I said, my friend [Robert] Kagan wrote a column [in] which he said you were giving 'futility its chance.' And both he and Karl Rove burst out laughing.

"It struck me," Podhoretz added, "that if they really believed that there was a chance for these negotiations and sanctions to work, they would not have laughed. They would have got their backs up and said, 'No, no, it's not futile, there's a very good chance.' "

By underscoring the essential unreasonableness of the Iranian regime, the Columbia event may help build political support for military action against that regime, should that prove necessary. Bollinger might have performed more of a public service than he realized.

Not That There's Anything Wrong With That!

• "Let me be clear: I am not gay. I never have been gay. Still, without a shred of truth or evidence to the contrary, the Statesman has engaged in this witch hunt."--Larry Craig, Aug. 28
  
  
• "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country. We don't have that in our country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who's told you that we have it."--Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Sept. 24

Life Imitates Woody Allen

• Boris: "You're a tyrant and a dictator and you start wars." Napoleon: "Why is he reciting my credits?"--dialogue from "Love and Death," 1975
  
  
• " 'Columbia president Lee Bollinger told the Iranian leader he exhibited 'all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator,' to enthusiastic applause from the audience."--CTV.ca, Sept. 24, 2007

The Ethicist
The Long Island, N.Y.-based Hofstra Law School "is pleased to announce its upcoming 2007 Legal Ethics Conference, Lawyering at the Edge: Unpopular Clients, Difficult Cases, Zealous Advocates," according to a press release. Among the participants is one Lynne Stewart, "who has defended many unpopular clients over the years." The list of participants describes Stewart only as a "high profile radical and human rights attorney."

In fact, Stewart was disbarred after being convicted of providing material aid to terrorists. As a Wall Street Journal editorial noted:

[Her crime consisted in] illegally passing messages between her imprisoned client, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, and his followers in Egypt's Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, the terrorist group responsible for killing 62 mostly European and Japanese tourists in Luxor in 1997. Some of those tourists were beheaded; others were disemboweled. The Sheik was also involved in planning terror attacks in New York, for which he is serving a life sentence.

Stewart's own Web site makes clear that she is totally unrepentant. So Hoftstra's law school regards a disbarred criminal as an expert on legal ethics and someone who has been convicted of giving material support to mass murder as a champion of human rights. If we ever have to hire a lawyer, we think we'll steer clear of Hofstra grads.

A Little Surprise
With the demise of TimesSelect, the New York Times reintroduced Bob Herbert to the world last week. Coincident with this, The Washington Monthly published a savage, though ideologically sympathetic, attack on Herbert for being boring and predictable. His column today is mostly boring and predictable, starting with the headline: "The Ugly Side of the G.O.P." (If Herbert wrote that the GOP has a side that isn't ugly, that would be surprising.)

Herbert is mad that Republicans begged off on a Tavis Smiley-hosted debate, which probably was a mistake. He's unhappy that Republicans blocked a bill to give the District of Columbia a voting member of the House, even though this would be unconstitutional. He still holds a grudge against the late Ronald Reagan for giving a campaign speech in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights activists had been murdered. More time has passed since Reagan gave that speech (27 years) than between the murders and the speech (16 years). Isn't it time to move on?

But here's the surprise. Herbert writes:

In 1991, the first President Bush poked a finger in the eye of black America by selecting the egregious Clarence Thomas for the seat on the Supreme Court that had been held by the revered Thurgood Marshall. The fact that there is a rigid quota on the court, permitting one black and one black only to serve at a time, is itself racist.

We totally agree! It would have been much better if Bush had nominated Thomas a year earlier, to fill the seat of Justice William Brennan, a person of pallor. (And as long as we're mooning over what might have been, how about Edith Jones to replace Marshall? Talk about breaking the glass ceiling.) Fortunately, Justice Thomas is only 59. He is likely to be on the court longer than, say, the 87-year-old Justice John Paul Stevens. If Stevens retires or dies, the president could strike a blow for racial justice by nominating a black jurist like Janice Rogers Brown.

In any case, we're delighted that Bob Herbert has renounced "affirmative action" quotas. Maybe he'll come around on some other subjects as well.

Too Much Information--I
The following is from an article by Jennifer Cacicio that actually appeared in Sunday's New York Times. Seriously:

My ex-boyfriend hangs from hooks. They penetrate the skin of his upper back, and he's lifted by a rigging; there he dangles in midair, his skin stretched out like freshly pulled taffy.

I discovered this one night when I was bored and looking up old friends and lovers on MySpace.

Reading on, we learn that her boyfriend has a fetish for something called "suspension" (we'll spare you the links, but there actually are Web sites devoted to this), and also that when she was dating this man, whom she mercifully declines to identify, he knocked her up and she aborted the baby. She concludes with this:

I went back to his MySpace photo, hoping to notice something I hadn't seen before. The picture was the same, of course, but something was different. What he had said to me seven years earlier played over and over in my head: "Maybe if we had a kid, we wouldn't feel so lost anymore."

As I stared at the photograph, I couldn't shake this gut instinct, this oddly comforting feeling, that maybe, when he hangs from hooks, he feels found.

Goodness gracious. It seems some of the editors over at the Times have forgotten that their paper's slogan contains an important qualification. It's "all the news that's fit to print."

Too Much Information--II
"Local Man to Reproduce, Sell Texaco Fire Hats"--headline, Grand Rapids (Mich.) Press, Sept. 24

Better Stock Up on Band-Aids
"New Xerox Products Promise Deep Cuts"--headline, Associated Press, Sept. 24

Must've Been Scary for the Other Passengers
"Firefighters Practice on Airplane"--headline, Tallahassee (Fla.) Democrat, Sept. 25

World Doesn't End, Etc., Etc.
"Rich Hit as Cost of Lavish Living Soars"--headline, Reuters, Sept. 24

Extinction Doesn't Have to Mean Forever
"New Dinosaurs Species Found in Montana"--headline, Montana State University press release, Sept. 24

His Last Words Were, 'I've Decided to Become a Mime'
"Marcel Marceau Dies at 84"--headline, AllHeadlineNews.com, Sept. 24

News You Can Use

• " 'Mommy Gene' Will Make More Kids, Doc Says"--headline, Internet Broadcasting, Sept. 21
  
  
• "Germs Sent to Space Come Back Meaner, Scientist Reports"--headline, CNN.com, Sept. 25
  
  
• "Chinese Women Want Faces Shaped Like 'Goose Eggs' "--headline, Agence France-Presse, Sept. 25

Bottom Stories of the Day

• "Stoplight at Wal-Mart Upsets Locals"--headline, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Sept. 23
  
  
• "ADA Gives Seal to Wrigley Sugar-Free Gum"--headline, Associated Press , Sept. 25
  
  
• "Watchdog Rebuffs Criticism of Diana Film"--headline, New York Times, Sept. 25
  
  
• "UNHRC to Vote on Anti-Israel Measure"--headline, Jerusalem Post, Sept. 24

Dutch Vanity
The Oregonian reports that a family "has been ordered to turn in the vanity license plates for their cars because the state finds their Dutch name can be interpreted as offensive":

The plates, UDINK1 UDINK2 and UDINK3 are on the vehicles of Mike and Shelly Udink and their son Kalei. . . .

Last summer Kawika Udink's application for Udink4 was rejected, and the state ordered the other three plates returned. . . .

The plates were deemed offensive by a 10-person DMV panel that approves custom, or "vanity" plates, which cost an extra $80. House, who serves on the panel, said the reasons were the sexual references that can be associated with the name, which can be treated as a verb.

"DINK has several derogatory meanings," wrote panel member Yvonne Bell. She said it also can be a racial slur, especially toward Vietnamese.

We've never heard of the word dink, except as an acronym for "dual income no kids," so we looked it up on UrbanDictionary.com. It did list the Vietnamese slur as well as "a polite version" of some impolite anatomical insults. But there was no indication that the word "can be treated as a verb."

We also found this 2000 article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

As King County sheriff's deputies engaged in a standoff with protesters during the World Trade Organization conference last fall, a "handful" of deputies removed or rearranged identifying letters on their riot helmets, according to a draft of a Sheriff's Office report on the handling of the protests. . . .

[Sheriff's spokesman John Urquhart] said deputies, forced to stand for long stretches of time, were just "dinking around" when they switched stick-on letters spelling out their "nicknames." . . .

ACLU spokesman Doug Honig said the office may not have received more complaints because protesters couldn't identify the offending deputies.

And Urquhart's explanation that the deputies were just "dinking around," Honig said, "was hard to believe . . . People shouldn't be fooling around with their identification."

So dink means "to fool"? "Dink me once, shame on you. Dink me twice, shame on me." "You can dink some of the people some of the time, but you can't dink all of the people all of the time." "I'll get on my knees and pray / We don't get dinked again."

Oh well, whatever the word means, one thing is clear: Dinking and driving don't mix.

(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Michael Segal, Naftali Friedman, Dan O'Shea, Bill King, Ethel Fenig, Monty Krieger, John Williamson, Ed Lasky, Robert Paci, Robert Wolf, Jeff Meling, David Gerstman, Dana Muir, Chris Scibelli, Dennis Giangreco, Steve Karass, S. Siegel, Terry Camp, Arnold Nelson, Tim Willis, Mark Kellner, Steven Stratton, Geoff Hazel, Marco Pizer, Steve Prestegard, Pam Hansell, Evan Slatis, Bryan Fischer, Allan Grady, Scott Hill, Brian Rom, Michael Throop and Mark Meyer. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

Today on OpinionJournal:

• Review & Outlook: In defense of the New York Times.
• Bret Stephens: Exactly what would it have accomplished to "engage in a debate" with Hitler?
• Shelby Steele: It was once possible for racism to look like propriety itself. TV cameras in Arkansas changed all that.