Why Are They Saying Those Things?

by hilzoy

As you might have read elsewhere, large chunks of the right-wing blogosphere have decided to go after Graeme Frost, the kid who gave the Democrats’ response to Bush’s radio address a week and a half ago. Frost was in a car accident, and S-CHIP, the children’s health insurance program Bush just vetoed, paid for his medical care. First, a Freeper decided to “investigate” the Frosts’ financial situation, via Google. Then the results of his “investigation” were linked all over the right-wing blogs. Michelle Malkin decided to do an on-site investigation of the Frost home and business. As John Cole wrote:

“Maybe she can get some of her flunkies at Hot Air to sit with binoculars and see what they have for dinner. Better not be government cheese, or the SH!T is going to hit the fan.”

(OK, he didn’t use an exclamation point.)

I find the idea of Michelle Malkin poking around people’s homes trying to find out whether they are really as poor as they claim to be as creepy as everyone else. So rather than belabor that point, I’ll make another:

If, for some reason, it occurs to you to fact-check a story like this, please, please, please try to exercise some modicum of intelligence. And if you read someone else’s investigation, please, please, please ask yourself whether there are any obvious problems with it before plastering it all over cyberspace. It’s one thing to investigate the claims made by a kid on the radio privately, and then go public if you find some actual problems. It’s quite another to go after a kid (or anyone else) with allegations whose problems are so obvious that you’d really have to wonder about anyone who didn’t spot them.

The first point made by icwhatudo, the Freeper who did the original Googling, is this:

“Graeme Frost, who gave the democrat rebuttal to George Bush’s reasons for vetoing the SCHIP Bill, is a middle school student at the exclusive $20,000 per year Park School in Baltimore, MD. (…) His sister Gemma, also severely injured in the accident, attended the same school prior to the accident meaning the family was able to come up with nearly $40,000 per year for tuition for these 2 grade schoolers.”

This fact was picked up by all sorts of bloggers, many of whom ask “why a “working family” in need of government-subsidized health care can afford to send two children to a $20,000-a-year-private school” (to cite Michelle Malkin’s version.)

Heavens: who could spot a problem with this? Here is an analogous question, just in case some of you are feeling a little slow:

“John Edwards claims to be the son of a mill worker. But somehow his allegedly impoverished parents were able to find the money to send him to Clemson University, which now costs out-of-state residents all of $22,300 in tuition and fees! Even accounting for inflation, it must have cost a decent chunk of change when John Edwards went there. I wonder how his poor mill-worker Dad managed?”

If you guessed “financial aid”, you win a lifetime subscription to Obsidian Wings! Apparently, most right-wing bloggers are unfamiliar with the concept of “scholarships”, by which private educational institutions defray the cost of tuition for their poorer students. But it’s hard to see how icwhatudo, or any of the bloggers who bothered to click his/her links before linking to his/her post, could have missed this fact, since (as Thers at Whiskey Fire notes) s/he links to this page at the Park School’s website, which is conveniently titled “Cost & Financial Assistance”. You don’t even have to scroll down to find this information:

“Park enrolls students based on their talents and capabilities. Families who are unable to meet the full cost of tuition may apply for the Financial Assistance Program, which supplements tuition payments. Financial assistance does not need to be repaid.

In 2007, 18% of Park students in grades 1-12 received over $2 million in financial assistance that ranged from $1,000 per year to full tuition. Tuition remission for children of our faculty brings that total to 25% of the student body.

Because each family’s situation is unique, it is impossible to predict the amount of funding awarded based solely on income. For example, the number of children attending tuition-charging institutions is an important factor. As a guide, families with incomes up to $160,000 received financial assistance during this past school year.”

It certainly sounds as though a family like the Frosts, who make $45,000 a year, might have gotten some of that financial aid. And, in fact, they did: ThinkProgress reports that the family pays only $500 a year in tuition.

Moving right along:

Read more

by hilzoy

Just to add to Publius’ last post: to judge by the reviews of his book, and by the passages quoted in them, Norman Podhoretz is certifiably crazy. From the Peter Beinart’s NYT review:

“What really interests Podhoretz, who now advises Rudolph Giuliani, isn’t the Islamic world; it’s the home front. The news media, he explains, are in favor of “an American defeat in Iraq.” So are the former national security advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft. Why do these ostensibly patriotic Americans want to see their nation humiliated and its troops killed? Because it will help their careers. Many “Realists … along with most liberal internationalists,” he writes, “were rooting for an American defeat as the only way to save their worldview from winding up on the ash heap of history.” And thus, Podhoretz lays the foundation for claiming — if America loses in Iraq — that we were stabbed in the back. Which, as Theodore Draper noted 25 years ago in a review of Podhoretz’s book “Why We Were in Vietnam,” is exactly what he did the last time America lost a major war.”

To suggest that Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski want America to be defeated in Iraq is calumny. Moreover, it’s insane on its face. Besides all the obvious reasons, consider that Scowcroft and Brzezinski are supposed to want America to be defeated in order to help their careers. But Scowcroft is 82 years old, and Brzezinski is 79. While I wish them long life and good health, they’d have to be idiots to bank on having extensive future careers, and neither Scowcroft nor Brzezinski is an idiot.

Moving right along, here’s a passage from a review by Ian Buruma in the New York Review of Books:

“It would be absurd to claim that those who doubt the efficacy of the Bush Doctrine fail to recognize the horrors of Saddam Hussein’s regime, or the desire among Arabs and Muslims, no less than other people, to live prosperous lives free of tyranny. Equally nonsensical is the notion that only the supporters of Bush’s war are serious about fighting Islamist terrorism. Or that anyone who sees merit in attempts by some European Muslims to reconcile their religious orthodoxy with Western democracy is a dupe who defends extremism, or a coward who has been intimidated by acts of terror. Yet these claims are being made in World War IV, as well as other places.

Here is how Podhoretz describes Bush’s critics:

…They seem to take it for granted that Arabs and/or Muslims are so different from most of their fellow human beings that they actually like being pushed around and repressed and beaten and killed by thugs, whether dressed in military uniforms or wearing clerical garb. For our part, we wonder whether Muslims really do prefer being poor and hungry and ill housed to enjoying the comforts and conveniences that we in the West take so totally for granted….”

Gosh: I think that? Who knew? Not me. It would be interesting to see exactly who Podhoretz could cite as thinking that Muslims do “like being pushed around and repressed and beaten and killed by thugs.” Personally, I’m not aware of anyone. Likewise, I do not minimize the awfulness of Saddam’s regime, and so on and so forth. If Podhoretz suggests otherwise, that’s probably because he would rather debate caricatures than actual human beings. Either that, or he has no more imagination than a limpet. And that’s probably deeply unfair to limpets.

But wait! There’s more! Buruma again:

“Podhoretz is convinced that the savage murders and daily atrocities in Iraq are actually “a tribute to the enormous strides that had been made in democratizing and unifying the country under a workable federal system.” He wonders why men in the “so-called ‘insurgency'” would be shedding so much blood if they didn’t think the US mission in Iraq was working.”

Wow. Just wow. That defies comment.

I’ve been saving the worst for last. Buruma yet again:

“He describes the dispute between opponents of Bush’s war and its defenders as “no less bloody than the one being fought by our troops in the Middle East,” indeed as “nothing less than a kind of civil war.” I myself was opposed to the war, and do not always hold tender feelings for my intellectual opponents, but I hardly think of our differences as comparable to the burning of Atlanta or the battle of Fallujah. By the same token, Bush critics in academe are called “guerrillas-with-tenure,” which seems a grandiose description of what are on the whole rather harmless professors.”

Beinart adds more in the same vein:

“Critics of the Iraq war represent a “domestic insurgency” with a “life-and-death stake” in America’s defeat. And their dispute with the president’s supporters represents “a war of ideas on the home front.””

Um: no. Leaving aside the fact that I do not favor an American defeat at all (though I do favor admitting one once it occurs), I do not have a life or death stake in any outcome of the Iraq war, any more than Podhoretz does. Nor am I a guerilla of any kind, though I do have tenure. And if he seriously thinks that the disputes between supporters and opponents of the war is “no less bloody than the one being fought by our troops in the Middle East”, then he is — how to put this diplomatically? — completely and totally insane.

This is serious. According to the Washington Post (which puts these figures at the bottom of Iraq stories like this one), 3,748 American troops have been killed in Iraq, and 27,767 have been injured. 298 Allied troops have been killed, as have 159 civilian contractors. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died, God alone knows how many have been injured, and millions have been driven from their homes. Soldiers and civilians in Iraq face death every day. Meanwhile, I am sitting on my bed with my computer in my lap, in my nice safe house in a nice safe neighborhood, listening to Purcell. There is a striking absence of mortars and gunfire, just as, tomorrow, there will be no IEDs on my route to work.

The very idea of saying that any dispute I am currently engaged in is “no less bloody than the one being fought by our troops in the Middle East” is obscene, and anyone who says this sort of thing should never be taken seriously again. Ever.

But of course we have to take him seriously, because he is one of Rudy Giuliani’s main foreign policy advisors. Think about it. Giuliani actually chose this lunatic to advise him. As Publius said, be very, very afraid.

PS: I’ve put some You-Tube clips on Giuliani’s 9/11 record below the fold. They’re worth watching.

Read more

by hilzoy

This is a post I’ve considered writing a couple of times in the past. I’ve always refrained, because it will take me into a territory that either is, or is too close for comfort to, contempt, and because it sounds too much like crowing about the fact that I was right on Iraq. I don’t think it is, really: it’s about a particular set of reasons for being wrong, and about what it means that people who were wrong for those reasons are respected public intellectuals. Still: the fact that I’m writing it now may reflect the fact that I’m exhausted. But what the heck:

There is, by now, a whole genre of mea culpas written by people who support Iraq. Some are more thoughtful than others. But some are, to me, frankly puzzling. Because what the writer uses to explain his mistake is not some simple factual error, but a whole cast of mind that I would have thought would be even more embarrassing than getting even a large policy question badly wrong.

It’s important to note, here, that I’m talking not about ordinary citizens, but about people who are paid for their opinions about political questions. (I’m also talking only about people I believe to be sincere — the Bill Kristols of the world offer no mea culpas because they have no sense of shame.) Ordinary citizens have a real responsibility to try to get things right, and I do not want to minimize that responsibility. But there are real limits on the expertise that we can expect ordinary citizens to develop about things like the likely effects of an invasion of Iraq, its history and political culture, and so forth. One way in which we try to compensate for these limits is to have people who are paid to think about, and to publish, their opinions on questions of policy and politics. These people’s responsibility for understanding the issues they write about is much, much greater than ordinary citizens’, just as doctors have a much greater responsibility to keep up with the medical literature than I do. A doctor is the expert I go to see when I need medical advice, and I go to see a doctor precisely because I can expect him or her to know a lot more than I do. People who are paid for their opinions on questions like the advisability of invading Iraq have a similar obligation. And that’s what makes the particular subset of mea culpas I’m talking about so perplexing.

As a sort of warm-up exercise, consider Rod Dreher’s account of the changes the war in Iraq caused in his political views:

Read more

by hilzoy

This has been a particularly loopy day for the media. I learned, to my amazement, that Hillary Clinton has breasts the Washington Post has the journalistic standards of a dung beetle:

“There was cleavage on display Wednesday afternoon on C-SPAN2. It belonged to Sen. Hillary Clinton.

She was talking on the Senate floor about the burdensome cost of higher education. She was wearing a rose-colored blazer over a black top. The neckline sat low on her chest and had a subtle V-shape. The cleavage registered after only a quick glance. No scrunch-faced scrutiny was necessary. There wasn’t an unseemly amount of cleavage showing, but there it was. Undeniable. (…)

The cleavage, however, is an exceptional kind of flourish. After all, it’s not a matter of what she’s wearing but rather what’s being revealed. It’s tempting to say that the cleavage stirs the same kind of discomfort that might be churned up after spotting Rudy Giuliani with his shirt unbuttoned just a smidge too far. No one wants to see that. But really, it was more like catching a man with his fly unzipped. Just look away!”

So, O wise reporter, when your inner daemon wisely told you to look away, why didn’t you? Inquiring minds are much more curious about that than they are about the fact that, you know, sometimes women’s shirts show their cleavage, unless, of course, they show up for Senate debates in a chador, or perhaps clad from head to toe in chain mail. Given the wandering eyes and misfiring neurons of Post reporters, that might not be such a bad idea.

I’m curious, though: when are we going to see this kind of stories about men? I can see it now:

“There were testicles on display in the Senate office building today.

John McCain looked relaxed in his cream-colored linen summer suit as he outlined his new proposal for K-12 education. But there, unmistakably visible beneath his crisp tailored trousers, were the telltale bumps.”

Or perhaps:

“Presidential candidates normally take care with their underwear. Get it right and the pride of a candidate’s manhood will remain neatly centered, visible, if at all, as a discreet, masculine bulge; get it wrong and his manly appointments will fall into one of his pants legs, giving him a peculiar, lopsided appearance.

Somebody get the word to Mitt Romney.”

I can hardly wait, she lied.

Then there’s the AP story on Barack Obama…

Read more

by hilzoy

Two years ago, a reporter on Lou Dobbs’ show said this:

“ROMANS: It’s interesting, because the woman in our piece told us that there were about 900 cases of leprosy for 40 years. There have been 7,000 in the past three years. Leprosy in this country.

DOBBS: Incredible. Christine Romans, thank you. “

Ten days ago, this figure was challenged by Leslie Stahl on Sixty Minutes:

“60 Minutes checked that and found a report issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, saying that 7,000 is the number of leprosy cases over the last 30 years, not the past three. The report also says that nobody knows how many of those cases involve illegal immigrants.

“We went to try and check that number, 7,000. We can’t…,” Stahl says.

“Well, I can tell you this. If we reported it, it’s a fact,” Dobbs replies.

“You can’t tell me that. You did report it,” Stahl says.

“I just did,” Dobbs says.

“How can you guarantee that to me?” Stahl asks.

Says Dobbs, “Because I’m the managing editor. And that’s the way we do business. We don’t make up numbers, Lesley.””

As you can see, Lou Dobbs defended the number. He did so again the next day on his own show:

“And there was a question about some of your comments, Christine. Following one of your reports, I told Leslie Stahl, we don’t make up numbers, and I will tell everybody here again tonight, I stand 100 percent behind what you said.

ROMANS: That’s right, Lou. We don’t make up numbers here. This is what we reported.”

No one is accusing Lou Dobbs and his reporters of “making up numbers”. People are accusing them of reporting things that are false, and that can be seen to be false given any minimal attempt to discover the facts. Below the fold, I’ll try to explain what happened.

The reason I bother is that this is a case that illustrates, in miniature, the reason I think there’s a serious problem with the media. This isn’t Fox, or Rush Limbaugh, or some other group from whom no one expects better. This is CNN. And the only way I can see that they could have reported their story as they did in the first place was simply not to have bothered to check the facts. Having been called on this, they did not retract or clarify their original story, or provide what Anderson Cooper calls “the Raw Data.” Lou Dobbs and his reporter just insist that they are right, and Dobbs seems to think that an appeal to his own authority is all that’s needed.

Most people don’t have the time to track down leprosy figures. They assume that the basic factual claims they hear on the news are, broadly speaking, accurate. And they should be able to assume this: after all, that’s why we have news organizations. In this particular case, the actual figures are easy to find. The person Lou Dobbs euphemistically refers to as a “reporter” just didn’t bother.

Read more

by hilzoy

For some reason — don’t ask — I was looking at Rush Limbaugh’s web site, and I saw this headline: “Can Any Good Come from V Tech Horror?” followed by this blurb: “Maybe, just maybe, we’ll face the hatred for American traditions and capitalism infesting our campuses.” No, I thought. No, no, no. So I clicked the link. The transcript I found quoted at length from an article called “Was Cho Taught To Hate”, by one James Lewis, published in the American Thinker (sic):

“Still, I wonder — was Cho taught to hate? Whatever he learned in his classes — did it enable him to rage at his host country, to hate the students he envied so murderously? Was he subtly encouraged to aggrandize himself by destroying others? Was his pathology enabled by the PC university? Or to ask the question differently — was Cho ever taught to respect others, to admire the good things about his host country, and to discipline himself to build a positive life?

And that answer is readily available on the websites of Cho’s English Department at Virginia Tech. This is a wonder world of PC weirdness. English studies at VT are a post-modern Disney World in which nihilism, moral and sexual boundary breaking, and fantasies of Marxist revolutionary violence are celebrated. They show up in a lot of faculty writing. Not by all the faculty, but probably by more than half.

Just check out their websites. (…)

The question I have is: Are university faculty doing their jobs? At one time college teachers were understood to have a parental role. Take a look at the hiring and promotion criteria for English at VT, and you see what their current values are. Acting in loco parentis, with the care, protectiveness, and alertness for trouble among young people is the last thing on their minds. They are there to do “research,” to act like fake revolutionaries, and to stir up young people to go out and revolt against society. Well, somebody just did.

I’m sorry but VT English doesn’t look like a place that gives lost and angry adolescents the essential boundaries for civilized behavior. In fact, in this perversely disorienting PoMo world, the very words “civilized behavior” are ridiculed — at least until somebody starts to shoot students, and then it’s too late. A young culture-shocked adolescent can expect no firm guidance here. But we know that already.”

This is beyond despicable. Members of the Virginia Tech English Department seem to me to have tried hard to get Cho help. Prof. Roy, in particular, called the police, notified the administration, and repeatedly urged Cho himself to get counseling. If I were looking to cast blame for the acts of a deeply disturbed killer, which I’m not, they would not be very high on my list.

This would be so whether or not Lewis’ description of the English Department were accurate. But if blogging has taught me anything, it’s that whenever people run this sort of hit piece on academia, it’s always worth checking out the actual department they’re supposedly describing.

Read more

by hilzoy

Since, as I’m sure you will all be astonished to learn, I am not one of Don Imus’ regular listeners, I didn’t hear about his unbelievably offensive remarks until today. For those of you who are even more out of it than I am, here they are, in all their glory:

“IMUS: That’s some rough girls from Rutgers. Man, they got tattoos and —

McGUIRK: Some hard-core hos.

IMUS: That’s some nappy-headed hos there. I’m gonna tell you that now, man, that’s some — woo. And the girls from Tennessee, they all look cute, you know, so, like — kinda like — I don’t know.

McGUIRK: A Spike Lee thing.

IMUS: Yeah.

McGUIRK: The Jigaboos vs. the Wannabes — that movie that he had.”

I wasn’t going to write about this — I mean, honestly, what is there to say? — until I started reading various responses. For starters, there’s this, from Howard Fineman, Newsweek’s chief political correspondent:

“You know, the form of humor that you do here is risky, and sometimes it runs off the rails. Most of the people who listen to this show get the joke most of the time, and sometimes, you know, as David Carr said in The New York Times this morning, sometimes you go over the line so far you can’t even see the line. And that’s what happened in this case.”

Curiously, Tom Oliphant used the same metaphor to describe Imus’ remarks:

“But even I could see the beginning of what appeared to me to be a riff. And the train went off the tracks, which, you know, can happen to anybody. And, of course, what counts when the train goes off the tracks is what you then do.”

The train went off the track? I don’t think so. Consider what happens when an actual train derails. There you are, driving it. You approach a curve. Gauging the right speed to take it at is always a bit tricky. This time, you get it wrong, and — oh my God — the train goes off the tracks.

Is this in any way analogous to Imus’ comments? No. For one thing, he is not piloting a difficult piece of heavy machinery. He is piloting his mouth, which, as an adult, he is expected to be in full control of. For another, there is no perfectly good conversational curve that, if misjudged, might lead normal, decent people to go off the rails in this way. It’s not as though decent people might start out discussing real estate or the weather, get things slightly wrong, and suddenly, to their horror, find themselves describing hard-working and successful female basketball players as ‘nappy-headed hos’. That just doesn’t happen.

I mean: can any of you imagine some situation in which you could find yourself using the phrase ‘nappy-headed hos’? I tried, and the closest I got was imagining that I was participating in some free lice-checking program for prostitutes. Having once had to comb all the nits out of my own hair, I can imagine that the kinkiness of someone’s hair might suddenly become a lot more salient than it normally is. But even then I don’t think I’d use the term ‘hos’, or even ‘whores’. And, needless to say, Imus wasn’t in any such situation. He was not doing their hair. And they were not prostitutes. They were members of a basketball team who had made the NCAA title game for the first time ever, and who had done precisely nothing to bring this on, other than being black and female. Which, apparently, is enough to make the train that is Don Imus derail. And that, of course is the problem.

Here’s an excerpt from their coach’s statement:

“Throughout the year, these gifted young ladies set an example for the nation that through hard work and perseverance, you can accomplish anything if you believe. Without a doubt, this past season was my most rewarding in 36 years of coaching. This young team fought through immeasurable odds to reach the highest pinnacle and play for the school’s first national championship in a major sport.

To serve as a joke of Mr. Imus in such an insensitive manner creates a wedge and makes light of the efforts of these classy individuals, both as women and as women of color.”

It was probably one of the biggest days of their lives, and he dragged them through the dirt. Thanks to Don Imus, most people will remember this team not as the team that took Rutgers to the championship, but as the team Don Imus called nappy-headed hos.

That’s a terrible thing to do. It has nothing in common with a train going off the tracks. Nothing except the damage.

Don Imus deserves to be fired. He probably should have been fired quite a while ago — say, when he called Gwen Ifill a “cleaning lady”. But he should be fired now. Because some things are just not OK.

***

A few more notes:

Read more

by hilzoy

Michelle Malkin has a manifesto …

Read more