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Live From Lhasa
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Crayon Physics Deluxe
Chester's Got a Brand-New Bag
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hot document
When Frank Stella Met Benjamin Moore
Obama on Racism, 1990
books
hot document
What Slate's Reading This Month
The Quantico Circuit Caper
chatterbox
jurisprudence
Threading the Race Needle
Putting the Second Amendment Second
Convictions
jurisprudence
A Dandy Day at the Airport
Butt Out
corrections
map the candidates
Corrections
Frontier Mentality
dear prudence
medical examiner
Go Away, Little Girl
Doctors Without Orders
did you see this?
medical examiner
Obama Confronts Racial Divide
For Teeth and for Country
dispatches
moneybox
Vet in a Suit
Bear Run
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Shipping News
The Rise of American Incompetence
election scorecard
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explainer
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Who Took Those Tibet Pictures?
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The AIDS Conspiracy Handbook
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poem
What Is a Mortgage-Backed Security?
"planting daffodils"
explainer
politics
How Realistic Is 10,000 B.C.?
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faith-based
politics
That Curious Idea of Resurrection
Campaign Junkie
faith-based
politics
Happy Crossmas!
Why Did We Get It Wrong?
faith-based
politics
Changing Stations
How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
1/94
politics
supreme court dispatches
How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?
Bearing Arms … Against Bears
politics
television
How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?
If This Jacuzzi Could Talk
politics
the best policy
How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?
… And Baby Makes Two
politics
the book club
The Full Obama
True Enough
politics
the chat room
How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?
Sifting Through Five Years of War
politics
the dismal science
How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?
Going Down Swinging
politics
the green lantern
The Democrats' Pain Threshold
Tank vs. Hybrid
politics
the undercover economist
How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?
Smallpox or Facebook?
politics
today's blogs
How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?
Bin Laden Speaks. Or Does He?
politics
today's blogs
How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?
Iraq Flak
press box
today's blogs
The Fibbing Point
The Speech
recycled
today's blogs
Productivity Madness
Lhasa Trouble
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today's papers
St. Patrick Revealed
Warning: Hard Times Ahead
Science
today's papers
Spinach, Lettuce, and the Limits of Bioterrorism
Long Road Home
slate v
today's papers
Dear Prudence: Snooze Alarm Junkie
Rally 'Round the Fed
slate v
today's papers
Fallout From Obama's Minister
Knocking on Lehman's Door
slate v
today's papers
Bad Movies: Leprechaun Flicks
The Fed Goes Deep
sports nut
today's papers
Dispatch From the NCAA Tournament
Those Poor Superdelegates
sports nut
today's papers
Teams We Hate
Bear Down
sports nut
video
The Lead Is Safe
Wars
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
2/94
war stories
Five Years Gone
ad report card
Chester's Got a Brand-New Bag
When did the Cheetos cheetah become so delightfully creepy?
By Seth Stevenson
Monday, March 17, 2008, at 7:11 AM ET
Personally, I haven't nibbled a Cheeto in years. Though I will
confess that seeing this ad gave me an urge to buy a pack—next
time I'm drunk and in a convenience store. The act would satisfy
a craving more for nostalgia than for corn-based snacks. So
many memories. Hold on, I sense a poem brewing.
The gritty, orange fingertips of youth
pry the Cheeto from the foil bag,
lift it to the light: irradiated twig.
The flavor-burst of supercharged cheese—
startling, salivary.
Lick blameless fingers bare.
The Spot: A woman washing her clothes at a Laundromat has a
spat with a rude lady she encounters. Moments later, the first
woman notices an animated cheetah sitting in the corner of the
room—wearing sunglasses, playing chess. "Felicia," says the
cheetah, "those are her whites in the dryer." He gives a knowing
nod. Felicia grabs a handful of the bright orange Cheetos she's
been munching and furtively smears them into the rude lady's
gleaming white bedsheets. The cheetah disappears. "Join us,"
reads the closing text. "OrangeUnderground.com." (Click here
to watch the ad.)
Robert Riccardi, managing partner at Goodby Silverstein (the ad
agency behind the new campaign), says that Chester's
mischievous new personality stems from the idea that "powering
down" Cheetos as an adult "feels like a nonconformist moment.
You're supposed to be eating arugula dip, but you have a
nonconforming desire." Thus we see Chester (Riccardi says he
exists only in our deep subconscious) encouraging people to
shatter all sorts of adult norms. Ruin that woman's laundry,
shove Cheetos up that snoring man's nostrils, crunch a Cheeto
into your co-worker's laptop keyboard, and so forth.
It's so heartening to see Chester Cheetah stretching himself for a
role after all these years. Though he's long been a towering
figure in the world of snack marketing, up to now Mr. Cheetah
had never displayed an abundance of range. Frankly, I'd begun
harboring doubts he was anything more than a two-dimensional
jester.
I'm certain there have been a few prudish complaints. You pay a
price for edgy. I was assured, however, that Chester never
advocates such mischief when he's talking to the kiddies. These
adult-targeted ads are aired only at night on channels like TBS
and Comedy Central. The spots for kids are shown during the
day on Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network.
Take, for instance, Mr. Cheetah's appearance in a recent Baked
Cheetos television ad, which finds him performing a series of
urban dance moves alongside a troupe of multicultural young
children. The lanky physicality is there as always, and the sole
line of dialogue ("Whoa, cheesy!") is delivered with the familiar,
spirited growl. It's all solidly professional. But having seen this
from Mr. Cheetah so many times before, the impact of this sort
of performance is by now quite muted. How eager Mr. Cheetah
must have been to sink his teeth into fresher, more challenging
material.
There's also a stab at product separation—though the average
viewer might not notice the difference. The nighttime Chester is
hawking classic Cheetos (with all the saturated fat you can
swallow). The daytime Chester is pushing newer, slightly less
unhealthy variations (no doubt to comply with some sort of
regulatory pressure regarding childhood nutrition).
Chester is no longer just an excitable Cheetos fiend. He's
evolved into a complex character, one with mysteriously dark
motives. Why is he prodding us to do ill to our fellow man?
How did he acquire a villainous, mid-Atlantic accent? And when
did he learn to play chess?
The short answer to all these questions: Chester is taking aim at
a new target demographic. The impetus for the "Orange
Underground" campaign was consumer research showing that
it's not just kids who eat Cheetos. According to Cheetos brand
manager Tyler Reeves, a full 60 percent of all Cheetos
consumption is by adults. This apparently came as a surprise
even to Cheetos executives.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
I racked my brain but couldn't think of other spokes-characters
who present different personalities to different demographic
groups. Riccardi reminded me that Tony the Tiger, of Frosted
Flakes fame ("They're grrrrrrrrreat!"), was a bit of a trailblazer in
this regard. Tony was at first strictly for the kids but later began
appearing over grown-ups' shoulders to insist that Frosted Flakes
are "the taste adults have grown to love." Tony never really
changed his stripes, though. He was still the same friendly,
upbeat tiger—just pitching to a different audience. By contrast,
Chester has fully reinvented himself with this creepy,
countercultural zag.
There's also a Web component to this Orange Underground
campaign. (Because there always is.) We're encouraged to
devise our own Cheetos-related pranks, then post the resultant
video evidence to YouTube. It seems this ploy hasn't gotten
much traction and has even met with mild resistance. As one
3/94
food blog writes, "Who in their right mind is actually going to go
out and buy 20 bags of Cheetos to pull pranks with?" Good
point. Given that these things are constructed half of air and half
of cheese dust, the per-weight cost of procuring mass quantities
of Cheetos must be daunting.
Grade: A-. Bizarre, moody spots that make me laugh. I love the
details (the chess clock, the rapturous look on the flight
attendant's face as Chester massages her, "double down"). The
humor isn't really in the notion that a cartoon Cheetah wants us
to act like jackasses. It's more in the atmospherics of the ads—
the lack of music, the sinister tone, and, above all, Chester's
cruel insouciance. Kudos on a successful rebranding of a
character that had seemed destined to fade into cheesy oblivion.
At a time when corporations that sponsor museum shows often
have something to atone for (like big-time art funder Altria,
formerly known as Philip Morris), it's cheering to see this sort of
goofy, literal connection between sponsor and exhibition.
Similar cases include the Metropolitan Museum's 1995 show of
Spanish master Francisco de Goya, funded by Goya Foods, and
last year's Jasper Johns show at the National Gallery of Art,
featuring paintings of targets and sponsored by Target, the store.
books
What Slate's Reading This Month
Book reviews in 300 words or less.
By Michael Agger, Reza Aslan, Tyler Cowen, Daniel Gross,
Christine Kenneally, Jess Row, and June Thomas
Monday, March 17, 2008, at 12:11 PM ET
Advanced Search
Friday, October 19, 2001, at 6:39 PM ET
art
When Frank Stella Met Benjamin Moore
The art you can make with paint from a can.
By Mia Fineman
Wednesday, March 19, 2008, at 1:38 PM ET
Click here to read a slide-show essay about "Color Chart," a
new show at the Museum of Modern Art.
.
.
.
.
sidebar
Return to article
When Frank Stella Met Benjamin Moore
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Fiction
Fanon: A Novel, by John Edgar Wideman. Part wide-ranging
meditation on Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born revolutionary
who studied the psychological effects of racial oppression, part
autobiography, and part artistic credo, Wideman's first novel in a
decade is fierce, elusive, and exhilarating. It's an extended prose
improvisation that blurs the boundary between fiction and
history. Wideman raises the question of whether it's still possible
to achieve the kind of psychic liberation—the birth of the "whole
man"—that Fanon argued must be the final goal of any struggle
against racism. In particular, he measures Fanon's idealism
against the crippling toll that American history has inflicted on
his own family—his brother incarcerated for 30 years, his
wheelchair-bound mother stranded in a ravaged inner-city
neighborhood—and comes away feeling that Fanon's ideals feel
almost as remote today as they did four decades ago. Wideman
is a fascinating and underappreciated writer, and Fanon is, if
anything, overly ambitious; it feels like three books condensed
into one. Readers wanting a stronger narrative thread should
seek out his Philadelphia Fire or The Stories of John Edgar
Wideman, but anyone with even a passing interest in Fanon, or
African-American literature and culture, should seek out this
extraordinary book.—Jess Row
Skim, by Mariko Tamaki (author) and Jillian Tamaki
(illustrator). More a graphic short story than a graphic novel,
Skim offers a glimpse over the shoulder of 16-year-old Kimberly
Keiko Cameron, aka Skim. She has a broken arm, a best friend
she doesn't really trust, a much desired yet confusing romance
with a female teacher, a mother distracted by the breakup of her
marriage, and, soon enough, a broken heart.
4/94
The fake diary is by now a tired cliché of teen novels, but Jillian
Tamaki's artwork elevates the genre from the merely voyeuristic.
We don't just read Skim's diary entries; we see what she erases,
what she lies about, and what she has no words for. The blackand-white art is spare when Skim's life is under control; it's lush
and packed with dense shading as she expands her horizons.
Mariko Tamaki supplies brittle, Juno MacGuff-style repartee,
but she also allows Skim to acknowledge the changes she is
experiencing, even if she doesn't quite understand them: "I think
I'm in love. Being in love is not what I expected."—June
Thomas
Humor
The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes. The McSweeney's
Web site functions like a Chicken Soup for the Liberal-Arts Soul.
Where else can you find a few lunch-hour Kafka jokes and
Faulkner parodies? Fittingly, the McSweeney's Joke Book
assembles the best bookish humor the site has produced so far.
It's humor born out of writing workshops, sleepy afternoon
seminars, caffeine, and stilted ambition. The collection is worth
buying for "Winnie-the-Pooh Is My Coworker" alone. Another
highlight is "Feedback From James Joyce's Submission of
Ulysses to His Creative Writing Workshop," from which I must
quote one line: "Think you accidentally stapled in something
from your playwriting workshop for Ch. 15." The ideal reader of
this book is one with a secret pride over how they "totally own"
the Saturday Times crossword puzzle—or your standard
overeducated worker in search of diversion on a commute to a
job that requires absolutely no understanding of synecdoche.—
Michael Agger
Non-Fiction
A Brief History of Anxiety (Yours and Mine), by Patricia
Pearson. A skilled mix of memoir and research, Pearson's short
collection of essays investigates what it's like to be constantly
choked by lurid internal drama. Despite the subject, Pearson's
writing is often exhilarating ("I felt a certain kind of bra-ha-ha
joy. Like a character in a Stephen King novel who suddenly
laughs hysterically after all of her friends' heads have
exploded"), and it's certainly lighter than her earlier nonfiction
account of female criminals, When She Was Bad. Pearson makes
plenty of intriguing ("parents consistently underestimate the
intensity of their children's fears") and arguable (the modern era
is uniquely overpopulated by twitchy and freaked-out masses)
observations. Her first five essays are particularly finely crafted.
The last four are a little loose. Still, they include an angry and
important cautionary tale detailing the psychological and
physical wreckage that ensues when someone takes, and then
tries to go off, Effexor. If you're anxious all the time and you
think about that anxiety a lot, this collection will provide you
some companionable relief.—Christine Kenneally
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global
Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace At Last, by Bernard
Avishai. Bernard Avishai has long been one of the foremost
interpreters of Israeli society. His 1985 book, The Tragedy of
Zionism, offered a bold new interpretation of the history of
political Zionism and made Avishai both a beloved and loathed
figure in Israel, where he has lived off and on for decades. His
new book, The Hebrew Republic, tackles an even trickier topic:
Israeli identity.
In Israel, there are two categories of personal identity: Israeli
citizenship and Jewish nationality. All occupants of the state are
eligible for citizenship. But because Israel was founded
exclusively as a Jewish country, only a Jew can claim nationality
and all the material benefits—residency rights, tax breaks, and
subsidized mortgages—that come with it. It is this paradox that
Avishai believes puts the lie to Israel's claim to be at once
"Jewish and democratic."
The answer, for Avishai, is to transform Israel from a Jewish
state into what he terms a Hebrew Republic, one in which Israeli
identity is based not on a person's Jewishness but rather on a
shared sense of Hebrew culture that can be adopted by Arab and
Jew alike. This solution is at once pragmatic and troubling.
Avishai admits how hard it may be for Palestinian Israelis to
assimilate into "Hebrew culture." But he also notes, correctly,
that such assimilation is already taking place. In any case,
Avishai is right to conclude that Israel's only chance for a
peaceful future is to re-examine its present concept of
nationality.—Reza Aslan
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our
Decisions, by Dan Ariely. In his debut work of popular
economics, Ariely—a professor at MIT—sets out to show that
irrational behavior is not, well, so crazy after all. At any rate, it
is predictable. We derive greater relief from a $1 aspirin than
from the same drug priced at 10 cents. We also overvalue what
we own, just because it is ours. And we snap up things when
they are offered to us for free, even if we don't value them very
much or if we have to pass up superior opportunities elsewhere.
A behavioral economist at home in both psychology and
economics, Ariely makes an entertaining and convincing case
that a field that has long put rational actors in the foreground
should pay more attention to feelings, expectations, and social
conventions.—Tyler Cowen
The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq
Conflict, by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes. The Three
Trillion Dollar War isn't intended to convince readers of the
folly of the Iraq Project; after all, no price tag, no matter how
high, could persuade the dwindling core of true believers—
schmoes like William Kristol—that the invasion wasn't
5/94
worthwhile. Instead, Stiglitz and Bilmes take the idiocy and
mendacity of the Bush administration as a baseline assumption
and methodically crunch numbers.
immediate "clarification." To elaborate beyond a simple, terse
condemnation of Wright, I'd have said, would only pour gasoline
on the fire. But I'd have been wrong.
Toting up the costs of everything from long-term disability
payments to injured soldiers to interest incurred on the national
debt as a result of Iraq spending, they arrive at a nice round
figure: $3 trillion. Like all such exercises, the book contains a
combination of precision (the lifetime economic value of a
soldier killed in the war is $7.2 million) and guesstimation (they
conclude that the price of oil is $10 per barrel higher than it
should be due to the war). And since big portions of the $3
trillion in costs are spread out over decades, the immediate
macroeconomic impact probably isn't as large as advertised.
The degeneration of the Democratic nomination campaign into
identity politics has had (to borrow a term from civil rights law)
a "disparate impact" on the candidates. It's helped Hillary
Clinton and hurt Obama. For example, on the morning of the
New Hampshire primary, the New York Times published a
remarkably whiny op-ed by Gloria Steinem essentially arguing
that Clinton was more deserving of the presidency than Obama
because (she argued) in American society, women are bigger
victims than blacks. Kathleen Deveny, an assistant manager
editor at Newsweek, later echoed this line. Geraldine Ferraro's
famous gaffe blaming Obama's success on his blackness was in
large part a blunter version of the very same argument (which
may explain why she was so puzzled later that it caused so much
controversy):
Critics can accuse Stiglitz and Bilmes of not trying seriously to
quantify the benefits of the war, which, in theory, would balance
out some of the costs. To which I say: Go for it. Since it's nigh
on impossible to document any economic gains that have
accrued to the United States as a result of the invasion, that
would be a fool's errand. Alas, as this book reminds us, there are
plenty of fools around.—Daniel Gross
chatterbox
Threading the Race Needle
After Obama's speech on race, identity politics may never be the same.
By Timothy Noah
Tuesday, March 18, 2008, at 4:55 PM ET
Is it possible for a single speech to change the rules of political
discourse in America? In my lifetime, that claim has been made
for Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963 and
for Ronald Reagan's "Tear Down This Wall" speech in 1987. We
may yet hear the same claim made for the refreshingly honest
and eloquent speech about race that Barack Obama delivered
this morning in Philadelphia.
It was a speech that, had I been Obama's campaign manager, I
would have advised him not to give, because it gave no quarter
to the realities of identity politics as practiced in American
politics. Obama's task was to distance himself from incendiary
comments uttered by his former preacher the Rev. Jeremiah
Wright without alienating himself from the black community.
My presumption was that it couldn't be done—that the ritualistic
denunciation demanded by the white community would be
inherently offensive to the black community. Better to say as
little as possible and to hope it blows over quickly, which
seemed to work when Obama's wife, Michelle, last month
committed a subtler gaffe ("For the first time in my adult
lifetime, I'm really proud of our country") that required near-
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
"I think what America feels about a woman
becoming president takes a very secondary
place to Obama's campaign—to a kind of
campaign that it would be hard for anyone to
run against," she said. "For one thing, you
have the press, which has been uniquely hard
on her. It's been a very sexist media. Some just
don't like her. The others have gotten caught
up in the Obama campaign.
"If Obama was a white man, he would not be
in this position," she continued. "And if he was
a woman (of any color) he would not be in this
position. He happens to be very lucky to be
who he is. And the country is caught up in the
concept."
Clinton didn't disavow Steinem's op-ed or Deveny's Newsweek
piece, but she had to disavow what Ferraro said, and—when
Ferraro wouldn't apologize for the remark—to remove her from
her finance committee. But despite the embarrassment, it's
unlikely the incident will harm Hillary in the long run. Turnout
for Hillary has been consistently high among white women
because many of them interpret Clinton's various setbacks as
evidence of sexism.
The calculus has been entirely different for Obama, if only
because African-Americans represent 13 percent of the U.S.
population compared with women's 50 percent. From the start,
Obama distanced himself so completely from identity politics
that as recently as October, Clinton led Obama among black
voters 57 percent to 33 percent. That has since changed, partly
because of Bill Clinton's uncharacteristically maladroit
comparison of Obama's support in South Carolina to that of
Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988. This created resentment among
African-Americans that Obama was being marginalized because
6/94
of his race. Obama himself kept above the fray, and it's striking
that in what Slate's John Dickerson has aptly termed the
"Umbrage War" between the Obama and Clinton campaigns, no
Obama partisans were jettisoned for making any strident
declarations of black alienation from white America. Or rather,
none until the Rev. Wright, who, after he was quoted saying "not
God bless America—God damn America!" and "Hillary ain't
never been called a nigger" was compelled to resign from the
campaign's spiritual advisory committee.
Wright's outbursts posed an impossible dilemma for Obama, not
only because he risked having to choose between white support
and black—language deeply offensive to whites being fairly
routine in the sermons of black ministers preaching to black
congregations—but because Wright was a close friend, and
spurning him on a personal level would have made Obama look
opportunistic and phony.
Remarkably, Obama found a way to thread the needle. Wright's
comments, he said in today's speech, "were not only wrong but
divisive," and his church
contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the
fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance,
the struggles and successes, the love and yes,
the bitterness and bias that make up the black
experience in America.
Obama continued,
I can no more disown [Wright] than I can
disown the black community. I can no more
disown him than I can my white
grandmother—a woman who helped raise me,
a woman who sacrificed again and again for
me, a woman who loves me as much as she
loves anything in this world, but a woman who
once confessed her fear of black men who
passed by her on the street, and who on more
than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic
stereotypes that made me cringe. These people
are a part of me. And they are a part of
America, this country that I love.
Wright's mistake, Obama said,
is not that he spoke about racism in our
society. It's that he spoke as if our society was
static; as if no progress has been made; as if
this country—a country that has made it
possible for one of his own members to run for
the highest office in the land and build a
coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian,
rich and poor, young and old—is still
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what
we know—what we have seen—is that
America can change.
This isn't about taking sides, Obama said. (By noting his mixed
parentage, Obama pointed out that he couldn't take sides even if
he wanted to without denying a part of himself.) This is about
recognizing the legitimate grievances of blacks and whites, often
expressed in the language of bigotry and bitterness, and then
moving to address them. It's about not ignoring the ugliness in
American life—when's the last time you heard a politician admit
that ugliness can be found even in American churches?—but
neither is it about defining yourself solely in opposition to that
ugliness. It's about keeping your eye on the ball, staying focused
on what can be achieved, even when the conversation turns to
race, the single most divisive topic in American life. (My
apologies to feminists, but we didn't fight a civil war over the
place of women in American society.) It's about rejecting
identity politics while honoring the nobler aspirations of the
identity politicians. And it's about feeling confident that positive
social change can be achieved, because it's been achieved in this
country in the past. That Obama managed to say all this without
displaying an ounce of false piety, or bitterness, or
sentimentality, or denial, or self-righteousness, makes his speech
a milestone in American political rhetoric.
Convictions
A Dandy Day at the Airport
Why was memoirist Sebastian Horley blocked from entering the United States?
Friday, March 21, 2008, at 9:39 AM ET
corrections
Corrections
Friday, March 21, 2008, at 7:34 AM ET
In a March 18 "Trailhead," Chadwick Matlin misidentified
Barack Obama's former pastor Jeremiah Wright as James
Wright.
In the March 18 "Supreme Court Dispatches," Dahlia Lithwick
misquoted Justice Stephen Breyer as saying there are between
80,000 and 100,000 annual gun deaths in the United States. That
statistic reflects the number of gun-related deaths or injuries.
In the March 17 "Sports Nut," Bill James misstated a possible
heuristic for determining whether a basketball lead is safe.
Rather than "[t]he game is over when the number of points you
are ahead (or behind) is more than 10 times the number of
7/94
seconds left in the game," it should have read "more than onetenth the numbers of seconds."
In the March 12 "Culturebox," Linda Hirshman stated that Silda
Wall Spitzer graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law
School. She did graduate from Harvard's Law School, but not
magna cum laude.
If you believe you have found an inaccuracy in a Slate story,
please send an e-mail to corrections@slate.com, and we will
investigate. General comments should be posted in "The Fray,"
our reader discussion forum.
dear prudence
Go Away, Little Girl
monotonous play of toddlers. But while you may have loved
your father, do you really want to emulate his distant style? You
may be one of those parents who finds that when you can have
real conversations with your daughter or coach her at soccer, you
will feel a true fulfillment and connection with her. But you have
a 2-year-old, and finding a way to enjoy her now will build a
bridge to something better when she's older. My suggestion: Let
her do things she enjoys, while you do things you enjoy. Your
time with her doesn't have to be second-by-second interaction.
You can be one of those parents who sits on the bench around
the sandbox, absorbed in your BlackBerry, occasionally looking
up and making encouraging sounds while she flings her shovel.
Put her in a swing and push her for 10 minutes while you listen
to your iPod. Get a jogging stroller and plop her in it while you
go out for a run. And occasionally focus enough so that when
she puts her arms around you and says, "I love you," it feels like
a life raft, not an anchor.
—Prudie
I dread spending quality time with my toddler. Am I a bad dad?
Thursday, March 20, 2008, at 6:53 AM ET
Get "Dear Prudence" delivered to your inbox each week; click
here to sign up. Please send your questions for publication to
prudence@slate.com. (Questions may be edited.)
Dear Prudie,
I'm in my 30s, and my daughter recently turned 2. I work outside
the home, and my wife stays home with our daughter. As my
daughter has gotten older, I find that spending time with her is
less and less enjoyable. When she was an infant, and I could
cuddle up with her on the couch and read a book or watch
television, things were fine. Now that she's more demanding, I
find it quite frustrating. I feel like my wife pushes us together in
the interests of keeping me involved in her life. I realize that my
wife needs a break when I get home. However, I just spent eight
hours at the office—it's not like I'm on a wonderful vacation all
day. When I was a kid, my dad was involved, but somewhat less
"hands-on" than would be considered the modern ideal. I hate to
say it, but I just don't enjoy Easter egg hunts or playing in the
sand box. It's not that I don't love my daughter. I do! I just feel
like I'm drowning.
—Terrible Twos
Dear Terrible,
You are drowning if at the end of the day your little girl running
to you and saying, "Dada, Dada" fills you with dread. It sounds
as if the only part of fatherhood you've enjoyed so far is the fact
that as long as an infant is not crying, you can pretend she's a
stuffed animal. And, yes, while you aren't on vacation all day,
neither is your wife—you acknowledge that spending time with
a 2-year-old is hard. However, I give you credit for being able to
express what these days is considered inexpressible. Secretly,
there are a lot of parents driven around the bend by the endless,
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Dear Prudence Video: Snooze Alarm Junkie
Dear Prudie,
When I was in my 20s, I was deeply in love with a man who was
in his 50s. After we broke up, we remained in touch as friends,
though I have been happily married with children for over 20
years. He is now elderly and in weakening health but has no
family and not many able-bodied friends. I have always loved
him and enjoyed his company and want to visit him every couple
of weeks to make sure he is getting enough to eat and managing
alone. I am in contact with his relatives in another state, and they
appreciate it if I keep them posted. They can and will travel here
in times of crisis, so this isn't strictly my problem, but I care
enough to want to be involved. The problem is that my husband
feels threatened by my attachment to this man and resents
anything more than an occasional phone call and perhaps lunch
on his birthday. What should I do?
—Still Cares
Dear Still,
I wish your husband could see this situation for what it is: a
wonderful testament to your character and a reassurance that if
he becomes the infirm partner someday, you will lovingly tend
to him. If you have the good marriage that you claim, you need
to air this more thoroughly with your husband. Acknowledge his
discomfort, even tell him that you feel flattered he is concerned
about this man's feelings for you, but make clear that your
husband is the love of your life, and there is nothing going on
that should be of any concern to him. Tell him you know it
doesn't sound like much of an outing, but that you would be
delighted if he would accompany you when you checked in on
your old friend. Reassure him that there is simply no romantic
feeling involved anymore (don't say you still love him—that's
8/94
too provocative), just a sense of loyalty to someone you still care
about who is facing the end alone.
—Prudie
Dear Prudence,
My spouse and I have three small kids. In our part of the
country, this is considered an extremely large family. When we
enter a restaurant, market, city sidewalk, or even an open public
park, perfect strangers are often unable to stifle their denigrating
comments about it. It's not so much the faux-sympathy of "Wow,
you have your hands full" that is bothersome, but rather zingers
like "That's quite a gaggle you have there" or "Look at that
brood." Then there's the occasional suggestion that it's socially
irresponsible, and the world would be better off without some of
us. (I'm not exaggerating.) This is not a matter of taking small
children places where they don't belong or can't behave—it has
less to do with their behavior than their existence. How do I turn
back these interlopers?
—Brooding
Dear Brooding,
A family with three children elicits stunned reactions? What part
of the country do you live in, Tokyo? There, the birthrate has so
bottomed out that clever manufacturers, seeking to fulfill the
longing of desperate old people who know they will never have
grandchildren, are manufacturing talking dolls that the elderly
pretend are alive. Thank you for doing your part to keep us from
facing a future that resembles Children of Men. I do wonder if
you haven't become so sensitized that you are hearing
denigration in remarks ("Look at the brood!") that might just be
acknowledging the cuteness of your kids. In general, I
recommend simply ignoring the ignoramuses who want to pass
judgment on one's children, race, disability, etc. If you want to
say something in response to more ambiguous comments, you
can always smile and say, "Yes, someone's got to pay for our
Social Security." But for people who actually come up to you
and suggest your children shouldn't exist, feel free to step in
front of your kids and tell the idiot, "Please move away from my
family" or, "I have to agree with you. It would be better if some
people had never been born."
—Prudie
Dear Prudence,
I'm going to a bridal shower, and the host wants all the guests to
bring their own self-addressed, stamped envelopes for the bride
to make it easier for her to write thank you notes. I feel even the
busiest bride should be able to take the time to write thank you
notes. I don't want to say anything, but I just want to know if this
is tacky.
—Thanks, But No Thanks
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Dear Thanks,
It's only fair to recognize that manners and mores do change.
Today's brides are so busy planning a military campaign's worth
of parties and celebrations for themselves that expectations by
their guests should be adjusted to acknowledge the stress
orchestrating all this adulation can cause. How thoughtless it
would be to arrive with a self-addressed, stamped envelope into
which you have stuck a blank card. The bride doesn't have time
to fill that out! Instead, be a considerate guest and take a few
extra minutes to write on the card, "Dear Self, Thank me for the
lovely chafing dish. The bride will think of me fondly whenever
she chafes."
—Prudie
did you see this?
Obama Confronts Racial Divide
Wednesday, March 19, 2008, at 6:08 PM ET
dispatches
Vet in a Suit
Testimony from the Iraq Veterans Against the War.
By Anthony Swofford
Monday, March 17, 2008, at 6:36 PM ET
It's been determined that taxi drivers have the most dangerous
job in Iraq, and if the Iraq Veterans Against the War Winter
Soldier event this past weekend had taken place in Baghdad, my
taxi driver might have gotten us both killed. Luckily, it occurred
at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Md. On Friday
morning, as we entered the campus from the Beltway, a dozen or
so protesters held signs denouncing the testifying soldiers:
"WINTER SOLDIER MY ASS," one read. Security was tight.
The Montgomery County sheriff's department operated out of a
mobile unit that looked so innocuous you might have assumed
they were selling corn dogs after a Little League game. But the
paramilitary attire of the nearby riot-ready cops would quickly
disabuse you of that notion. By the campus' entryway stood a
group of IVAW supporters acting as further security. My taxi
driver tried to dodge them but got held up by a burly, middleaged guy. "What is going on?" asked the driver.
What was going on? Approximately 55 former members of the
U.S. military were preparing to testify about the ongoing
military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan—or what the IVAW
consistently refers to as "occupations." No brainchild of the
Pentagon, IVAW modeled its conference after the controversial
1971 Winter Soldier event that vivified (some say fictionalized)
war crimes, human rights abuses, and military waste then
9/94
occurring in Vietnam. The IVAW has three unifying aims:
immediate withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq and
Afghanistan, reparations for the Iraqi people, and consistent and
reliable medical care for all veterans of the war. Over the course
of four days, the conference planned to address the continual
breakdown and failure of military rules of engagement, the longterm societal cost of the war in the form of broken families and
broken minds, the drastic privatization of the war in Iraq, racism
and sexism in the military, and the future of GI resistance. And
with Winter Soldier, the IVAW hoped to gain more media
attention for the anti-war movement.
Entering the hall where the testimony was taking place, you
might have thought you were at a "peace and social justice"
conference at a Pacific Northwest liberal-arts college. Many of
the audience members sported gray ponytails, and some of the
security staff were members of Vietnam Veterans Against the
War. But most of the IVAW soldiers testifying were born after
1982. For them, the Vietnam War brings up images of Pvt. Pyle
from Full Metal Jacket and Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now.
Many participants of Winter Soldier 1971 had worn combat
fatigues, and the event had come together catch-as-catch-can,
with few resources and little polish; but Winter Soldier 2008 felt
like a finely produced corporate workshop. The women I saw
testify were in business attire. And while some of the men were
in faded fatigues and desert boonie caps, hip-slung jeans, and
hoodies, just as many wore suits or sport jackets. These are the
new anti-war vets, and they know how to use image and
technology to their advantage.
Jose Vasquez, IVAW board member and president of the New
York chapter, told me, "I'm interested in professionalizing the
organization." Vasquez served nearly 14 years in the active-duty
Army and the Army reserve, initially as a cavalry scout and later
posting as a training NCO for battle medics. It looked to me as
though he'd left the barracks just hours ago. He made me—a
former Marine—want to shave my unruly beard, tuck in my
shirt, and knock out 20 four-count push-ups for good measure.
Born in the Bronx, Vasquez grew up in California and signed up
for the Army in 1992 at the age of 17. Now pursuing a Ph.D. in
anthropology, he's a soft-spoken man who cared deeply for the
Army and the soldiers he warmly calls "Joes"; he'd planned to
spend 30 years serving his country. After 9/11, he would have
served in Afghanistan with few reservations; but by the time his
unit got the call for Iraq in 2005, he'd been having doubts not
only about the efficacy of the war but about the morality of
serving. As a medic, he patched soldiers' wounds so that they
could head out on another mission and kill again. After "a lot of
soul-searching," Vasquez applied for conscientious-objector
status, and more than a year later he separated from the Army
with an honorable discharge. When he described the day he told
the men he led that he was not going to Iraq with them, Vasquez
sounded remorseful and sad. He misses the Army and his Joes.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Critics will instantly identify any soldier testifying about
immoral behavior on the battlefield as a bad seed. So Vasquez
implemented an exhaustive process to confirm the veracity of
the testimony being offered; his title is "IVAW verification team
leader." Drawing on his background as an anthropologist, he
trained 14 team members, mostly combat vets, in the verification
process. Membership in IVAW was not required in order to offer
testimony. "We were willing at least to take testimony from
anybody, whether or not they were a member. They didn't even
have to agree with our points of unity. If you had a story to tell
about Iraq and you were able to prove your service, then we
would give you a venue to spread that word." All told,
approximately 140 people have come forward to offer testimony.
It wasn't possible to have everyone testify this weekend, but
Vasquez vows that IVAW will give anyone with a story to tell
the venue to do so.
Clifton Hicks, a dead ringer for a young Matt Dillon, served in
the Army as a tank driver and .50-caliber machine gunner from
2003 to 2004. His own testimony—among other things, he
recalled watching a five-building apartment complex full of
civilians being riddled with gunfire from a warplane—troubled
him deeply. When I spoke to him Saturday morning, the totality
of the first day of Winter Soldier was wearing heavily on him.
He told me that for the first time since becoming an anti-war
activist, he felt like quitting. Re-experiencing the destruction of
war and thinking about friends who had died made him feel
again "that I no longer cared about my life. … I felt like the only
way I could make things right is to just strip my clothing and
walk naked back to Florida, you know. … Just pay a penance or
something." A panel on Friday about the rules of engagement,
Hicks said, was "hard-hitting." During it, much of the testimony
was of witness: abuse of Iraqi prisoners and detainees,
indiscriminate firing in urban areas, the quick erosion of the
rules as soon as someone in a unit died. As Hicks told me, "That
[panel] was the personal shit, the upfront shit. I murdered
shitloads of people. Not 'I saw shitloads of people die from a
distance and thought it was funny.' "
Jon Turner, a former Marine and current resident of Burlington,
Vt., looks like he'd be more comfortable playing footbag or
Frisbee than firing a weapon. On Friday afternoon, he'd given
some of the more dramatic testimony. He opened by saying,
"There is a term, 'Once a Marine, always a Marine.' But there is
also a term, 'Eat the apple, F the corps.' " He then ripped off the
ribbons pinned to his shirt, threw them to the ground, and
declared, "I don't work for you no more." He had served two
tours in Iraq with Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion of the 8th
Marines, operating in Ramadi and Fallujah. He then played a
few videos he'd made while in Iraq. The first video he played
was of his executive officer, after having called in a 500-pound
bomb, saying, "I think I just killed half the population of
northern Ramadi. Fuck the red tape."
10/94
Then he played video of a missile attack on a Ministry of Health
building. He spoke about the standard procedure of a "weapon
drop": When mistakes are made, you drop a weapon on the
innocent dead man so it appears he was a combatant. He showed
photos of a man's brain. "This wasn't my kill, it was my
friend's," he stated.
When the next image of a corpse appeared on the big screens in
the hall, he continued, "On April 18, 2006, I had my first
confirmed kill. Ahh. This man was innocent. I don't know his
name. I call him the Fat Man. He was walking back to his house,
and I shot him in front of his friend and father. The first round
didn't kill him after I hit him up here in his neck area. And
afterward he started screaming and looked right into my eyes. So
I looked at my friend who I was on post with and said, 'Well,
can't let that happen.' So I took another shot and took him out." It
took seven members of the Fat Man's family to move his body.
After his first kill, Turner says, "My company commander
personally congratulated me as he did everyone else in our
company. This is the same individual who had stated that
whoever gets their first kill by stabbing them to death will get a
four-day pass when we return from Iraq."
On Saturday, Turner and I sat outside on a bench. Some of his
buddies were playing Frisbee nearby and a mutt dog named
Resistance ran around on the grass, yapping among the former
soldiers. Jon had a number of tattoos, nothing new for a military
guy, but the ones that most interested me were the five small
crosses on his left wrist, for the five KIAs of Kilo Company, and
the Arabic script on his right wrist, which, he claimed, meant
"fuck you." He had this on his right wrist because, as he said
during his testimony, it was his "choking wrist." He left us all to
imagine what that meant.
Jon has shaggy blond hair and a scraggly beard and a comely,
easy smile. In him, I saw the ghost of a young, sweet kid who
had joined the corps because he loved his country and he wanted
to help protect it. And I saw the hardened and haunted young
man who spends a lot of time chasing demons he thought he'd
left in Iraq, among them the Fat Man and a man who had the
unfortunate luck of bicycling by Jon's checkpoint on a day when
Jon simply wanted to kill and the media embed was with another
platoon, so his platoon had free rein.
Jon has PTSD. Jon has quit drinking and smoking. He still dips
tobacco, but that's a minor thing, considering. He doesn't do
therapy—got tired of that—but he talks to his friends from
IVAW, better therapy than anything. He's started making art,
and with a buddy in Burlington he makes combat paper—he
reconstitutes camouflage uniforms Marines have worn in
combat, turning the uniforms into paper that he binds into books.
He's writing some poetry. He's trying to make something good
from the waste that was Iraq.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
drink
Shipping News
Will Amazon.com end the war over direct wine deliveries?
By Mike Steinberger
Wednesday, March 19, 2008, at 3:21 PM ET
Two weeks ago, the Financial Times reported that Amazon.com
was gearing up to sell wine. The company had posted an ad for a
senior wine buyer who would be responsible for putting together
a "massive new product selection." For oenophiles, this was
potentially huge, and not just because Amazon would likely be
stocking lots of stellar wines at great prices; the entry of the
Internet retailing colossus into the business seemed just the thing
to finally break the logjam over interstate wine shipping. The
topic of direct shipping is one I've avoided till now because,
frankly, it gives me a worse headache than a hangover. But with
word of Amazon's apparently imminent foray into the world of
cabernets and Syrahs, I decided duty obliged me to try to figure
out what this might portend for the direct-shipping battle. The
experience has left me with a migraine, and now you get to share
my pain.
You might vaguely recall that three years ago, the Supreme
Court issued a landmark decision on interstate shipping, and you
might vaguely recall all your oenophile friends exchanging highfives and guzzling Haut-Brion in celebration. In Granholm vs.
Heald, the court decreed that states could not bar out-of-state
wineries from shipping directly to consumers if in-state wineries
were allowed to do so. The ruling was hailed as a potentially
lethal blow to the grossly inefficient three-tier system by which
wine (and other liquor) is distributed in the United States. The
three-tier distribution system is an outgrowth of the 21st
Amendment, which ended Prohibition. To more effectively
regulate alcohol sales in the wake of the repeal, most states
decided to place an independent intermediary, the wholesaler,
between producers and retailers.
The result was an incoherent patchwork of liquor laws
nationwide, laws that have become comically anachronistic with
the advent of online shopping and ever cheaper, easier shipping.
The Supreme Court seemed to agree: In the Granholm decision,
it ruled that laws in Michigan and New York allowing direct
shipping from in-state wineries but prohibiting it from out-ofstate producers were unfairly disadvantaging the competition
and therefore unconstitutional. The ruling did not, however,
obliges states to make direct-to-consumer shipping legal or
hassle-free.
Three years on, the court's decision has yielded varying degrees
of liberalization in a handful of states, lots of legislative
chicanery, and a distribution system that is possibly even more
11/94
convoluted than before. "People broke out the Champagne a
little early," says R. Corbin Houchins, an antitrust lawyer with a
national practice in licensed beverage distribution. According to
Free the Grapes!, a direct-shipping advocacy group, 35 states
now permit some form of direct-to-consumer shipping from outof-state wineries, up from 25 before Granholm. But the liquor
wholesalers, a deeply entrenched and well-funded lobby, are
waging a furious and fairly successful battle to maintain the
status quo. Several states, notably Ohio, have placed strict caps
on the amount of wine that can be shipped from wineries in
other states, provisions that amount to backdoor discrimination;
ditto the Kansas law, enacted in 2006, permitting direct shipping
but only in cases where the consumer has physically purchased
the wine at the winery. Then there is the retail front: In
Granholm, the court addressed the concerns of wine producers
but said nothing about wine merchants, who are battling even
tougher restrictions. (Just 16 states permit direct-to-consumer
shipping from out-of-state retailers.)
Still with me?
Amid all the legal wrangling, the news that Amazon would be
jumping into the wines business was initially greeted with
delight by oenophiles, who figured it would mean cheaper prices
and lower shipping costs. (As the job ad suggested, the company
would be buying in bulk; presumably, it would be negotiating
discounted prices and passing along the savings to consumers.)
There was an even more tantalizing prospect: It stood to reason
that Amazon, confronting the same regulatory morass as every
other wine merchant, would be wading into the fray over
interstate shipping, a potentially game-breaking development
given the company's heft and clout. Certainly, a giant like
Amazon wouldn't be inclined to simply accommodate itself to
such an illogical and antiquated distribution system.
Or maybe it would. After the FT story broke, British wine
magazine Decanter reported that Amazon would be teaming up
with the largest existing Internet wine retailer, Wine.com. The
companies formed a short-lived partnership in 2005, and at least
according to Decanter, the deal was back on, which came as a
rude shock to wine buffs who had been toasting Amazon just
hours earlier. That is because Wine.com is now the most hated
name in booze. It was recently disclosed that the San Franciscobased firm executed a sting operation in which it posed as a
consumer, had wine illegally shipped to it from wine retailers
around the country, and reported the violations to state
authorities. Wine.com has structured its business to diligently
comply with existing state laws, but judging by the outraged
reaction among wine fans, this was a case of committing harikari with a corkscrew—many people felt betrayed by the
company and vowed to no longer buy from it.
actually confirmed that it is entering the wine business (though
the job ad is still posted). However, fallout from Wine.com's
online vigilantism continues to rain down. The Wine & Spirits
Wholesalers of America recently sent a letter to officials in all
50 states calling attention to the Wine.com sting and
highlighting the "astounding and revealing" reaction of some in
the wine community. It cited an article by New York Times wine
columnist Eric Asimov in which he admitted to having a bottle
illegally shipped to him by a retailer in California. "That a
newspaper of record would publish such comments in the full
light of day, we believe, ought to trouble any regulator,
lawmaker or law enforcement official," the letter intoned. "Lack
of enforcement has clearly allowed this culture of lawlessness to
flourish. ..."
No, asinine laws have allowed it to flourish. Stephen Bainbridge,
a law professor at UCLA who also maintains an excellent wine
blog, is sticking by what he wrote in a column for TCS Daily on
the one-year anniversary of the Granholm decision: "We're no
closer to a true national wine market; instead, both producers
and consumers are still mired in the economic Balkans."
Bainbridge thinks the best hope of fixing the current distribution
system is to challenge it on antitrust grounds. Costco, the
country's largest wine retailer, mounted just such an effort in a
suit it brought against the state of Washington four years ago. It
won a resounding victory in a federal district court in 2006, but
that verdict was overturned in late January by a three-judge
panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. Costco is
appealing to have the case heard by the entire 9 th Circuit, and
there is a chance the matter will end up before the Supreme
Court—eventually. "I am just damn glad I live in California,"
says Bainbridge, noting that his home state has some of the most
progressive shipping laws in the nation.
By now, the same analogy that occurs to me has possibly
occurred to you: The way we transport and deliver booze in this
country is as Byzantine as the process by which we choose
presidents. Earlier this month, the battle over wine and the battle
for the White House even intersected, briefly. At the same time
that Hillary Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson was comparing
Barack Obama to Ken Starr, the Specialty Wine Retailers
Association was circulating a fundraising letter lauding Starr's
leadership in the fight to liberalize interstate shipping laws (you
read right: Ken Starr is trying to make it easier for you to buy
wine, not harder). Personally, I think the current primary system
is no way to choose a president, and the three-tier distribution
system is definitely no way to get a man his grog.
And with that, my first and last article about interstate wine
shipping comes to an end. Thank you for reading, and pass the
Tylenol.
But it turns out the indignation about an Amazon-Wine.com
partnership was unnecessary: Decanter erroneously reported that
the two were pairing up. Nor, two weeks later, has Amazon
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
12/94
.
election scorecard
Trending Wright
Obama fades in Pennsylvania, but the poll was taken during the Wright
imbroglio.
By Mark Blumenthal and Charles Franklin
Thursday, March 20, 2008, at 3:12 PM ET
explainer
Things still look bleak for Obama in Pennsylvania, as a new poll
(PDF) shows him trailing by 16 points. He essentially ties
Clinton among men, trails badly among women, and doesn't
even beat her among college graduates (usually a sweet spot for
Obama). If there's a silver lining, it's that these numbers come
from surveys done during Obama's worst week of press—after
the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons rocketed around the media
but before Obama gave his speech to try to clarify the matter.
But even that silver lining has a cloud hanging over it: Eightyfive percent of Pennsylvanians say they're certain about their
choice.
Posted by Chadwick Matlin, March 20, 3:11 p.m.
Delegates at stake:
Democrats
Republicans
Total delegates:
4,049
Total delegates
needed to win:
2,025
Total delegates:
2,380
Total delegates
needed to win: 1,191
Delegates won by each
candidate:
Obama: 1,611; Clinton:
1,480; Edwards (out): 26
Delegates won by each
candidate:
McCain: 1,325;
Huckabee (out): 267;
Paul: 16
Source: CNN
Source: CNN
Want more Slate election coverage? Check
out Map the Candidates, Political Futures,
Trailhead, XX Factor, and our Campaign
Junkie page!
.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Who Took Those Tibet Pictures?
Can the Chinese government track them down?
By Michelle Tsai
Friday, March 21, 2008, at 7:31 AM ET
The Chinese government has restricted foreign reporters from
entering Tibet, but amateur photos and videos of protesters have
found their way onto YouTube and various media sites outside
the Great Firewall. Is it possible to trace who took those
pictures?
Probably not, unless the owner registered the camera with the
manufacturer. A little detective work can easily pinpoint the
make and model of the camera that took them, but it would be
hard to extract identifying information from the digital images
themselves.
Most JPEG files include pieces of information called metadata
that cover everything from when the photo was taken to how
long the exposure lasted. Manufacturers usually include the
make and model of the camera as part of this information, but it's
easy to delete or falsify these tags by using editing software like
Photoshop. Listing the camera's serial number is less common,
but, when available, this tidbit can be used to track down the
country where the device was sold, or even, if there's a superb
paper trail, the store. When the final Harry Potter novel was
leaked online after a fan photographed every single page last
summer, investigators gathered from the metadata that a Canon
Rebel 350 was used to take the pictures. Some Canon models
also automatically include the camera's serial number in the
metadata, but it's not clear if the culprit was ever caught. Of
course, if you've registered the device with the manufacturer, a
photo's metadata can lead straight to you.
It's harder to generalize about tracing cell-phone pictures, since
manufacturers may choose to include less metadata because of
space considerations. U.S. cellular plans make it a bit easier to
connect phones with their owners, but this is less true in Asia,
where people buy minutes of air time rather than subscription
plans. If, however, the metadata on a photo includes a piece of
information known as the IMEI number, it's theoretically
possible to track down the camera phone while it is turned on,
triangulate the position of the person carrying it to within a mile,
then chase him down.
Even if all the metadata has been erased, you can still uncover
the camera's make and model. To do this, search the JPEG file
13/94
for something called the quantization table. This series of
numbers reflects the way the image has been compressed. Since
manufacturers use different compression methods, a quantization
table can narrow the field to a few camera models. (Something
else that's also embedded into digital files from certain cameras:
a thumbnail of the original photo. Even if you edit out faces
from the photo, a low-resolution copy of the undoctored image
will still be available.)
If you have a lot of digital images (say, 100 photos or five
minutes of video) and a suspected camera on hand, a process
similar to handgun ballistics is an option. To prove that a
particular camera took those photos, you'd need to examine the
"noise" patterns in the pictures. Sensors aren't perfect, so each
pixel of color contains tiny variations—say, random colors when
the whole pixel should be sky blue. If you tease out the noise
from each photo and then average the noise to form a pattern,
you may be able to match them to new photos from the camera.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Donald Allison of Stroz Friedberg, LLC; Hany
Farid of Dartmouth College; and Nasir Memon of Polytechnic
University.
explainer
The AIDS Conspiracy Handbook
Jeremiah Wright's paranoia, in context.
By Juliet Lapidos
Wednesday, March 19, 2008, at 5:51 PM ET
Barack Obama rebuked his former pastor the Rev. Jeremiah
Wright on Tuesday for giving sermons in which he blamed the
government for creating a racist state and "inventing the HIV
virus as a means of genocide against people of color." Wright
isn't the first to say that AIDS originated in the White House.
Others have attributed the epidemic to a laboratory accident,
malnutrition, or even God's divine will. Here's a field guide to
the most prevalent conspiracy theories:
Government Involvement
The belief cited by Wright—that the government invented
HIV—seems to have originated during the early years of the
epidemic. In 1986, crackpot East German biologist Jakob Segal
published "AIDS: USA Home-Made Evil." According to the
pamphlet, scientists at a Fort Detrick, Md., military lab
manufactured the disease by synthesizing HTLV-1 (a retrovirus
that causes T-cell leukemia) with Visna (a sheep virus). The
scientists administered their lethal concoction to prison inmates,
who then introduced the disease into the general population. In
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
case you're wondering, Segal has since been accused of being a
Soviet disinformation agent.
Similarly, the aptly named Boyd E. Graves (who calls himself a
doctor although he has only a law degree) has postulated that
scientists in the employ of the U.S. Special Virus Program
modified Visna to create HIV during the 1970s. The
government, with help from pharmaceutical company Merck,
added the virus to an experimental hepatitis B vaccine, which
was given to gay men and blacks in New York and San
Francisco.
And then there's Gary Glum, author of Full Disclosure, who
fronts the theory that scientists at the Cold Spring Harbor lab in
New York engineered HIV, and that the World Health
Organization spread the virus under cover of the smallpox
eradication program. Glum believes the virus was created to
wipe out, or at least control, the black population. (According to
a study released in 2005 by the Rand Corp., more than onequarter of African-Americans believe the disease was engineered
in a government lab, and 16 percent think it was created to
control the black population.)
Laboratory Accident
Edward Hooper, a British journalist, argued in his 1999 book,
The River, that Dr. Hilary Koprowski of the Wistar Research
Institute unintentionally caused the AIDS epidemic by using
chimp kidneys to produce an oral polio vaccine. The chimps,
says Hooper, were infected with SIV (the simian precursor to
AIDS). Then, via an experimental mass-vaccination program in
the Belgian Congo, SIV made the jump from monkey to man.
Hooper's contaminated polio vaccine thesis sounds less wacky
than most conspiracy theories and has attracted support from a
few notable academics—including late Oxford professor W.D.
Hamilton. But it's definitely wrong. Hooper says Koprowski got
his kidney samples from chimps in the Congo. The problem is
that the SIV strain endemic to chimps from that region is
phylogenetically distinct from HIV. The offending chimps
probably came from Cameroon.
It's Not a Virus
Among the most popular, and pernicious, conspiracy theories is
that AIDS isn't caused by a virus at all. Peter Duesberg, a
biology professor at University of California-Berkeley, has
argued that drugs and promiscuity are the principal causes of the
disease in the United States. He attributes AIDS in Africa to
malnutrition.
South African President Thabo Mbeki has voiced support for the
so-called Duesberg hypothesis, and his health minister,
Mantombazana Tshabalala-Msimang, has recommended treating
AIDS with foodstuffs, like garlic, rather than pharmaceuticals.
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God's Punishment
The Rev. Jerry Falwell famously argued that AIDS is a plague
sent by God to punish homosexuals and American society for
tolerating homosexuality. Jerry Thacker, the publisher of
Today's Christian Teen and other Christian magazines, has also
called AIDS a "gay plague" and referred to homosexuality as
"the death style." In 2003, the Bush administration nominated
Thacker to serve on the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV
and AIDS. He withdrew his name under pressure from gay rights
groups and Democrats.
payments. Even those investors who buy lower-quality
mortgage-backed securities, in the hopes of receiving higher
interest payments, generally fare well in a bull market. But when
the housing market goes south, or if interest rates rise, even the
safest of these investments are in serious jeopardy. Rising
interest rates reduce the value of securities that pay a fixed rate
of interest. When borrowers default on mortgages, the stream of
payments available to holders of mortgage-backed securities
declines. And when a firm has borrowed heavily to finance the
purchase and trading of such securities, it doesn't take much of a
fall in value to trigger serious problems.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Martin Delaney of Project Inform and Michael
Worobey of the University of Arizona.
explainer
What Is a Mortgage-Backed Security?
The financial instrument that destroyed Bear Stearns.
By Chris Wilson
Monday, March 17, 2008, at 7:09 PM ET
The implosion of securities firm Bear Stearns over the weekend
was a painful blow to an already turbulent market. Bear Stearns,
which was founded in 1923 and had survived the Depression and
weathered a dozen recessions, was undone in large part by its
investments in a financial commodity known as "mortgagebacked securities." What are those, exactly?
Mortgage-backed securities resemble bonds, instruments issued
by governments and corporations that promise to pay a fixed
amount of interest for a defined period of time. Mortgagebacked securities are created when a company such as Bear
Stearns buys a bunch of mortgages from a primary lender—that
is, from the company you actually got your mortgage from—and
then uses your monthly payments, and those of thousands of
others, as the revenue stream to pay investors who have bought
chunks of the offering. They allow lenders to sell the mortgages
they make, thus replenishing their coffers and allowing them to
lend again. For their part, buyers of mortgage-backed securities
take security in the knowledge that the value of the bond doesn't
just rest on the creditworthiness of one borrower, but on the
collective creditworthiness of a group of borrowers.
In addition to creating mortgage-backed securities, Wall Street
firms such as Bear Stearns also traded them.
When the housing market is doing well and interest rates are
low, investing in a mortgage-backed security is a fairly safe bet.
So long as homeowners stay current with their payments,
holders of mortgage-backed securities receive a stream of
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
The nationwide mortgage-default crisis has harshly punished
many of the participants in the mortgage-backed-securities
market. As subprime lenders failed, Wall Street firms such as
Bear Stearns, which underwrote the issuance of such securities,
saw their revenues fall. Hedge funds that traded mortgagebacked securities using lots of borrowed money suffered heavy
losses as the value of the bonds fell. Last summer, two Bear
Stearns hedge funds that specialized in mortgage-backed
securities melted down, giving the firm a black eye. In recent
months, as the market for mortgage-backed securities—and for
financial instruments based on them—has seized up, large
investment banks and hedge funds have been forced to write
down the value of the mortgage-backed securities on their
books, taking huge charges against earnings and scaring off
other market participants from trading with them. Bad bets on
mortgage-backed securities have contributed to a crisis in
confidence at many of Wall Street's largest players, including
Bear Stearns. Last week, Bear fell victim to a run on the bank,
which had its origins in the firm's concentration in the mortgagebacked securities market. Rather than file for bankruptcy, Bear
Stearns accepted a takeover bid from JPMorgan Chase for $2 a
share. (A year ago, it traded at $150.) Analysts warn that other
firms that invested so heavily in mortgage-backed securities may
not be far behind.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
explainer
How Realistic Is 10,000 B.C.?
Did woolly mammoths help build the Pyramids?
By Chris Wilson
Monday, March 17, 2008, at 11:26 AM ET
The Warner Bros. cave man saga 10,000 B.C. raked in more than
$35 million on its first weekend. The film tells an action-packed
love story set against a prehistoric backdrop that includes
everything from woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers to
pyramids and written language. Did all of these things exist at
the same time?
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No. The woolly mammoth and the saber-toothed tiger might
have survived as late as 10,000 B.C., although they went extinct
fairly abruptly right around that time, give or take a millennium.
On the geologic timescale, this date marks the end of the
Pleistocene Epoch, which we know colloquially as the Ice Age,
a period of nearly 2 million years that saw the rapid expansion of
Homo sapiens across the planet. Some paleontologists blame
excessive hunting by humans for the extinction of these species,
though the number of mammoth fossils that show evidence of
having been killed by man-made weapons—usually stone
spears—is fairly small. Others suggest that disease or climate
changes wiped them out. Whatever the cause, the mammothhunting hero of 10,000 B.C. is practicing a dying art. Other
predators in the film, such as the giant, flightless, carnivorous
birds, were already extinct by this time, though they were once
thought to have survived up to around the end of the Pleistocene,
most numerously in the Americas.
In the film, the mammoths travel in herds and disperse when the
lead male gets spooked. We don't know much about the behavior
patterns of extinct animals, but experts generally believe that
these movie-star mammoths get it all backward. If you can trust
inferences drawn from elephants (close cousins of the
mammoths), herds would have been led by the oldest female,
and the bulls would have been expelled at puberty. Geologists at
the University of Michigan have pioneered a field of study
known as "tuskology," by which a mammoth's diet and birth
patterns can be determined based on its accumulation of ivory.
According to these measurements, mammoth herds appear to
have expelled males at around the same time that elephants do.
While it's plausible that humans would be hunting mammoths in
10,000 B.C., the film runs awry when it mixes in elements of
more advanced civilization. The pyramidlike monuments,
codified language, and organized society that show up later in
the story wouldn't have been around until about 3,000 B.C., with
the urbanization of the regions surrounding the Euphrates, the
Nile, and the Indus rivers, and possibly the steppes of Russia.
We also know that humans weren't growing their own food in
any organized way until approximately 9,400 B.C. at the very
earliest; the hero of 10,000 B.C. studies a wooden hoe and learns
how to plant seedlings from what appears to be an African tribe.
There is evidence of early stone monuments from around that
time, like a mountain sanctuary in southeastern Turkey called
Göbekli Tepe, dating to approximately 9,000 B.C. But most of
the technology in the movie—particularly the metal tools and
weapons—is way out of place. The movie's title places the
action solidly in the Stone Age; bronze and iron tools don't
appear for several millenniums. Other inventions appearing in
the film, like the sextant, are even further off. The sextant was
not invented until A.D. 1731, though the ancient Egyptians did
have a rudimentary knowledge of astronomy that allowed them
to navigate and align their structures.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Omur Harmansah of Brown University;
William Jankowiak of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Dan
Joyce of the Kenosha Public Museum; and Jeffrey Saunders of
the Illinois State Museum.
faith-based
That Curious Idea of Resurrection
How early Christians grappled to accept the idea that Jesus returned from the
dead.
By Larry Hurtado
Thursday, March 20, 2008, at 6:55 AM ET
Easter Sunday represents the foundational claim of Christian
faith, the highest day of the Christian year as celebration of
Jesus' resurrection. But many Christians are unsure what the
claim that Jesus had been raised to new life after being crucified
actually means—while non-Christians often find the whole idea
of resurrection bemusing and even ridiculous.
These differences over what Jesus' resurrection represents and
discomfort with the whole idea are nothing new, however:
Christians in the first few centuries also had difficulty embracing
the idea of a real, bodily resurrection. Then, as now, resurrection
was not the favored post-death existence—people much
preferred to think that after dying, souls headed to some ethereal
realm of light and tranquillity. During the Roman period, many
regarded the body as a pitiful thing at best and at worst a real
drag upon the soul, even a kind of prison from which the soul
was liberated at death. So, it's not surprising that there were
Christians who simply found bodily resurrection stupid and
repugnant. To make the idea palatable, they instead interpreted
all references to Jesus' resurrection in strictly spiritual terms.
Some thought of Jesus as having shed his earthly body in his
death, assuming a purely spiritual state, and returning to his
original status in the divine realm. In other cases, Jesus' earthly
body and his death were even seen as illusory, the divine Christ
merely appearing to have a normal body (rather like Clark
Kent!).
The idea of a real, personal resurrection—meaning a new bodily
existence of individuals after death, in one way or another—did
not originate with Christianity or with claims about Jesus.
Instead, it seems to be first clearly reflected in Jewish texts dated
to sometime in the second century B.C., such as the biblical
book of Daniel 12:2. At the time, it was a genuinely innovative
idea. (Alan Segal's book Life After Death gives an expansive
discussion of the origins of the idea of resurrection.) Many
peoples of the ancient world hoped for one or another sort of
eternal life, but it was usually thought of as a kind of bodiless
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existence of soul or spirit set in realms of the dead that might or
might not be happy, pleasant places. In still other expectations,
death might bring a merging of individuals with some ocean of
being, like a drop of water falling into the sea.
The ancient Jewish and early Christian idea of personal
resurrection represented a new emphasis on individuals and the
importance of embodied existence beyond the mere survival or
enhancement of the soul, although there was debate about the
precise nature of the post-resurrection body. Some seem to have
supposed it would be a new body of flesh and bones, closely
linked to the corpse in the grave but not liable to decay or death.
Others imagined a body more like that of an angel. But whatever
its precise nature, the hope of resurrection reflected a strongly
holistic view of the person as requiring some sort of body to be
complete. With ancient Jews, early Christians saw resurrection
as an act of God, a divine gift of radically new life, not an
expression of some inherent immortality of the soul. That is, the
dead don't rise by themselves; they are raised by God and will
experience resurrection collectively as one of the events that
comprise God's future redemption of the world and vindication
of the righteous.
In the ancient Judaism of Jesus' time, however, resurrection was
not universally affirmed. Some devout Jews (particularly the
religious party called Sadducees) apparently considered the
whole idea ridiculous, as evidenced by the New Testament,
which gives us some of the most direct references to disputes
among ancient Jews about the matter. In Mark 12:18-27,
Sadducees taunt Jesus with a question about a woman married
several times, asking him whose wife she will be following the
resurrection. Jesus strongly affirms resurrection, but he insists
that those resurrected will not marry and portrays the Sadducees'
question as reflecting a foolish ignorance of God's power.
In the earliest expressions of their faith that we have, Christians
claimed that Jesus' resurrection showed that God singled out
Jesus ahead of the future resurrection of the dead to show him
uniquely worthy to be lord of all the elect. However, the
paradigmatic significance of Jesus' resurrection was also very
important for early Christians.
willing to face martyrdom for their faith and more willing to
make gestures of acquiescence to the Romans—for example, by
offering sacrifices to Roman gods—because they regarded
actions done with their bodies as insignificant so long as in their
hearts they held to their beliefs.
By contrast, Christians who believed in bodily resurrection seem
to have regarded their own mortal coils as the crucial venues in
which they were to live out their devotion to Christ. When these
Christians were arraigned for their faith, they considered it
genuine apostasy to give in to the gestures demanded by the
Roman authorities. For them, inner devotion to Jesus had to be
expressed in an outward faithfulness in their bodies—and they
were ready to face martyrdom for their faith, encouraged by the
prospect of bodily resurrection. Indeed, Christian martyrs are
pictured as engaged in a battle with the Roman authorities (and
the Devil, whom Christians saw as behind Roman malevolence
toward them), with the martyrs' bodies as battlegrounds in which
the integrity of their person and their personal salvation could be
lost or retained.
Historically, then, how Christians have understood Jesus'
"resurrection" says a lot about how they have understood
themselves, whether they have a holistic view of the human
person, whether they see bodily existence as trivial or crucial,
and how they imagine full salvation to be manifested. Does
salvation comprise a deliverance from the body into some sort of
immediate and permanent postmortem bliss (which is actually
much closer to popular Christian piety down the centuries), or
does salvation require a new embodiment of some sort, a more
robust reaffirmation of persons? This sort of question originally
was integral to early Jewish and Christian belief in the
resurrection. In all the varieties of early Christianity, and in all
the various understandings of what his "resurrection" meant,
Jesus was typically the model, the crucial paradigm for
believers, what had happened to him seen as prototypical of
what believers were to hope for themselves.
faith-based
In Christianity's first few centuries, when believers often
suffered severe persecution and even the threat of death, those
who believed in Jesus' bodily resurrection found it particularly
meaningful for their own circumstances. Jesus had been put to
death in grisly fashion, but God had overturned Jesus' execution
and, indeed, had given him a new and glorious body. So, they
believed that they could face their own deaths as well as those of
their loved ones in the firm hope that God would be faithful to
them as well. They thought that they would share the same sort
of immortal reaffirmation of their personal and bodily selves that
Jesus had experienced. Elaine Pagels, a scholar of early
Christianity, has argued that those Christians who regarded the
body as unimportant, perhaps including "Gnostics," were less
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Happy Crossmas!
Why Easter stubbornly resists the commercialism that swallowed Christmas.
By James Martin
Thursday, March 20, 2008, at 6:54 AM ET
Sending out hundreds of Easter cards this year? Attending way
too many Easter parties? Doing some last-minute shopping for
gifts to place under your Easter tree? Getting tired of those
endless Easter-themed specials on television?
I didn't think so.
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Unlike Christmas, whose deeper spiritual meaning has been all
but buried under an annual avalanche of commercialism, Easter
has retained a stubborn hold on its identity as a religious holiday.
This is all the more surprising when you consider what an
opportune time it would be for marketers to convince us to buy
more stuff. Typically arriving around the beginning of spring,
Easter would be the perfect time for department stores to euchre
customers into buying carloads of kids' outdoor toys, warmweather clothes, and summertime sporting equipment. And
while Christmas is forced to contend with Thanksgiving, New
Year's Day, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa, there is little holiday
competition around Easter time. (Passover and Easter, despite
their proximity in the calendar, don't seem to interfere with each
other much.) All in all, the church's most important feast day
comes at a terrific time of year for Madison Avenue.
So what enables Easter to maintain its religious purity and not
devolve into the consumerist nightmare that is Christmas? Well,
for one thing, it's hard to make a palatable consumerist holiday
out of Easter when its back story is, at least in part, so gruesome.
Christmas is cuddly. Easter, despite the bunnies, is not.
To the secular mind, the story of Christmas goes like this: A
young couple named Mary (pretty, pregnant, wearing a flattering
blue gown) and Joseph (a little older, quite handsome, sporting a
well-trimmed beard) journeyed on a trusty donkey all the way to
O Little Town of Bethlehem. Since there was no room at the inn,
the young couple bunked in a cozy stable filled with cuddly farm
animals. There, Away in the Manger, Mary gave birth to Jesus,
her adorable baby boy. Soon after, Angels We Have Heard on
High came to the rustic shepherds to tell them What Child Is
This. And then We Three Kings of Orient Are—or, rather,
showed up.
Despite the awesome theological implications (Christians
believe that the infant lying in the manger is the son of God), the
Christmas story is easily reduced to pablum. How pleasant it is
in mid-December to open a Christmas card with a pretty picture
of Mary and Joseph gazing beatifically at their son, with the
shepherds and the angels beaming in delight. The Christmas
story, with its friendly resonances of marriage, family, babies,
animals, angels, and—thanks to the wise men—gifts, is
eminently marketable to popular culture. It's a Thomas Kinkade
painting come to life.
life preaching a message of love and forgiveness (and, along the
way, healing the sick and raising the dead) is betrayed by one of
his closest friends, turned over to the representatives of a brutal
occupying power, and is tortured, mocked, and executed in the
manner that Rome reserved for the worst of its criminals.
We may even sense resonances with some painful political
issues still before us. Jesus of Nazareth was not only physically
brutalized but also casually humiliated during his torture,
echoing the abuses at Abu Ghraib. In 21st-century Iraq, some
American soldiers posed prisoners with women's underwear on
their heads as a way of scorning their manhood. In first-century
Palestine, some Roman soldiers pressed down a crown of thorns
onto Jesus' head and clothed him in a purple robe to scorn the
kingship his followers claimed for him. After this, Jesus suffered
the most degrading of all Roman deaths: crucifixion. Jesus
remains the world's most famous victim of capital punishment.
To his followers, therefore, his execution was not only tragic and
terrifying but shameful. It is difficult not to wonder what the
Apostles would have thought of a crucifix as a fashion
accessory. Imagine wearing an image of a hooded Abu Ghraib
victim around your neck as holiday bling.
Even the resurrection, the joyful end of the Easter story, resists
domestication as it resists banalization. Unlike Christmas, it also
resists a noncommittal response. Even agnostics and atheists
who don't accept Christ's divinity can accept the general outlines
of the Christmas story with little danger to their worldview. But
Easter demands a response. It's hard for a non-Christian believer
to say, "Yes, I believe that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, died,
was buried, and rose from the dead." That's not something you
can believe without some serious ramifications: If you believe
that Jesus rose from the dead, this has profound implications for
your spiritual and religious life—really, for your whole life. If
you believe the story, then you believe that Jesus is God, or at
least God's son. What he says about the world and the way we
live in that world then has a real claim on you.
Easter is an event that demands a "yes" or a "no." There is no
"whatever."
On the other hand, a card bearing the image of a near-naked man
being stripped, beaten, tortured, and nailed through his hands
and feet onto a wooden crucifix is a markedly less pleasant piece
of mail.
More shocking than the crucifixion is the resurrection. Two
thousand years later, it's still impossible for humanity to grasp
this event fully. Even the Gospel writers found it hard to agree
on what, precisely, happened and differ on something as basic as
what Jesus looked like after the resurrection. (In some Gospel
accounts, Jesus is almost ghostlike; in others, he is clearly a
physical presence.)
The Easter story is relentlessly disconcerting and, in a way, is
the antithesis of the Christmas story. No matter how much you
try to water down its particulars, Easter retains some of the
shock it had for those who first participated in the events during
the first century. The man who spent the final three years of his
That confusion may be one reason why in most "Jesus movies"
the resurrection is largely an afterthought. In Franco Zeffirelli's
1977 miniseries Jesus of Nazareth (an Easter TV favorite), the
resurrection consists of Jesus uttering bland pieties to a dazedlooking group of apostles. In Mel Gibson's 2004 The Passion of
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
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the Christ (admittedly about the crucifixion and death), the
resurrection, something with far more religious import than the
suffering, is reduced to a brief coda. In Gibson's version, Jesus
stands up and marches out of his tomb on Easter morning to the
strains of martial music, as if to say, "I'm back, and I'm going to
kick some Roman butt!"
What does the world do with a person who has been raised from
the dead? Christians have been meditating on that for two
millenniums. But despite the eggs, the baskets, and the bunnies,
one thing we haven't been able to do is to tame that person, tame
his message, and, moreover, tame what happened to him in
Jerusalem all those years ago. That's one reason why you don't
see many Easter cards, Easter gifts, and Easter decorations; why
the stores aren't clogged with shoppers during Lent; and why the
holiday is still, essentially, religious.
faith-based
Changing Stations
What's wrong with tweaking the Good Friday tradition to make room for child
mortality, the environment, and other global problems?
By Andrew Santella
Wednesday, March 19, 2008, at 7:01 AM ET
Lent is a sober season, and no Christian ritual associated with
the 40-day run-up to Easter is more sobering than the Stations of
the Cross. The traditional devotion, often performed on Good
Friday, is a sequence of prayers and meditations that recall
events on Jesus' path to crucifixion and burial. The scenes of
Jesus' final tribulations are heavy with suffering, betrayal, and
torture, but they also communicate the central Christian paradox
of new life through death. "By your holy cross, you have
redeemed the world," worshippers repeat as the service
progresses from station to station.
This year in time for Lent, Episcopal Relief and Development,
the relief agency of the Episcopal Church, began offering a
variation on the Stations of the Cross called the Stations of the
Millennium Development Goals. It features eight stations, one
for each of the global priorities identified by the United Nations
in 2000, from eradicating poverty to promoting gender equality.
Where each of the 14 stations of the traditional Stations of the
Cross represents an event leading up to Jesus' death—"Jesus is
condemned to death" and "Jesus falls the first time," for
example—the alternative version, promoted by Episcopal Relief
and Development, shifts the focus to righting global problems.
At Station 8, "Create a Global Partnership for Development,"
participants are reminded that a "fair trading system, increased
international aid, and debt relief for developing countries will
help us realize" the U.N. goals. An optional activity at Station 7,
"Ensure Environmental Sustainability," asks that "pilgrims
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
calculate their carbon footprint and come up with three strategies
to reduce it."
When word of the new version spread online, the response from
some liturgical traditionalists was harsh. "Raw idolatry," one
commenter wrote on the Anglican blog Stand Firm. "Is there any
way this is not mortal sin?" asked another at the conservative
discussion site Free Republic. "It runs the risk of replacing
Christ with the church, and the activity of Christ with the
activity of the church," Kendall Harmon, canon theologian of the
Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina, was quoted as saying in a
story on the Web site of the magazine Christianity Today. For
these critics, the problem with the alternative set of stations is
that it doesn't talk about the Passion. Instead of Jesus' suffering,
death, and resurrection, they say, the Millennium Development
Goals liturgy focuses on global activism.
No doubt, the Stations of the Millennium Development Goals
depart from old-school worship traditions in some obvious ways.
(A suggested activity for Station 4, on reducing child mortality,
calls for participants to shade in drawings of children's faces,
coloring-book-style.) But what the new liturgy's critics mostly
failed to note was that the Stations of the Cross devotion has
long been a changeable ritual. The number and nature of the
stations has varied over time and across faith traditions. The
devotion is usually associated with Catholicism, but some
liturgically oriented Protestant congregations practice it, too, and
the Anglican Book of Occasional Services features a Stations of
the Cross liturgy. The menu of variations on the basic stations
ritual is remarkably broad: There are children's stations, online
stations, and stations performed on city streets with worshippers
dressed as Jesus and Roman soldiers.
The custom grew out of pilgrimages early Christians made to the
Holy Land to retrace Jesus' path to Calvary. During the 15th
century, to accommodate those who could not travel to
Jerusalem, European artists began creating small shrines
depicting the scenes of Jesus' Passion and placing them along
local procession routes so that pilgrims could stop and pray at
each one. The stations didn't move inside churches until the end
of the 17th century, and it was only in 1731 that Pope Clement
XII set the number of stations at 14. Before then, the number of
events represented by stations varied widely, from as few as
seven or eight to as many as 31. Even after the number of
stations was settled on officially, some worshippers kept a 15 th
station for Jesus' resurrection. In 1991, Pope John Paul II made
his own revision, introducing an alternative version that
eliminates the events not mentioned in Gospel accounts (Jesus'
falls and Veronica's intervention with her veil, for example) and
replaces them with others based on Scripture.
The idea of tying the stations to social activism isn't even all that
novel. Via Crucis re-enactments, like the one by Catholics in
Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood where costumed churchgoers
play the roles of Jesus and other figures in the Passion, include
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stops that call attention to social problems or injustices. One
year, the Chicago procession stopped in front of a neighborhood
tortilleria to pray for employees working in unsanitary
conditions. Online, you can find homegrown Stations of the
Cross devotions that stop to pray at neighborhood sites like
parks or at the scenes of fatal car accidents.
But by taking Jesus' Passion out of play altogether, the
Millennium Development Goals liturgy is a greater departure
than any of these other alternative versions. So, what's the point
of stations without the cross?
The people at Episcopal Relief and Development who
distributed the new liturgy insist that their alternative version
was intended to complement, not replace, the traditional stations.
They say the service would not be a good choice for Good
Friday. And, they add, their cause is a good one: Meeting the
Millennium Development Goals is an institutional priority of the
Episcopal Church.
Certainly some of the criticism of the liturgy can be written off
as more of the usual sniping by liturgical traditionalists at social
activists, part of the ongoing division among Anglicans. And—
also as usual—there was plenty of more-pious-than-thou
posturing on display. One of the perils of defending old-style
"smells and bells" worship is that you may find yourself on the
same team with the kind of blog posters who take it upon
themselves to accuse others of mortal sin.
But even allowing for these stipulations and noting the
worthiness of the Millennium Development Goals themselves,
the liturgy strikes a disconcerting note.
Part of the problem is the suggested activities, some of which
smack of grade-school art assignments. (Finger paints?) Then
there's the language, which too often slides into the bland
agreeability of the corporate mission statement. ("Clean water,
sanitation, and development can work together to save lives and
create productive, thriving societies and safeguard our planet.")
The value of liturgy lies in its ability to unite people around
powerful ritual moments. But the Stations of the Millennium
Development Goals appropriate the form of the old-school
Stations of the Cross service without retaining the sense of
sacred mystery that makes it so powerful. That's no sin—but it is
a bit of a shame.
foreigners
Live From Lhasa
Shaky cell-phone videos from Tibet foretell doom for the Chinese empire.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
By Anne Applebaum
Monday, March 17, 2008, at 8:05 PM ET
Cell-phone photographs and videos from Tibet, blurry and
amateur, are circulating on the Internet. Some show clouds of
tear gas; others burning buildings and shops; still others purplerobed monks, riot police, and confusion. Watching them, it is
impossible not to remember the cell-phone videos and
photographs sent out from burning Rangoon only six months
ago. Last year Burma, this year Tibet. Next year, will YouTube
feature shops burning in Xinjiang, home of China's Uighur
minority? Or riot police rounding up refugees along the ChineseNorth Korean border?
That covert cell phones have become the most important means
of transmitting news from certain parts of East Asia is no
accident. Lhasa, Rangoon, Xinjiang, and North Korea: All of
these places are, directly or indirectly, dominated by the same
media-shy, publicity-sensitive Chinese regime. Though we don't
usually think of it this way, China is, in fact, a vast,
anachronistic, territorial empire, within which one dominant
ethnic group, the Han Chinese, rules over a host of reluctant
"captive nations." To keep the peace, the Chinese use methods
not so different from those once used by Austro-Hungary or
czarist Russia: political manipulation, secret police repression,
and military force.
But, then, modern China bears many surprising resemblances to
the empires of the past in other ways, too. Like its Soviet
imperial predecessor, for example, China encompasses both an
"inner" empire, of which Tibet and Xinjiang are the most
prominent components, and an "outer" empire, consisting most
notably of its Burmese and North Korean clients. Like its French
and British predecessors, the Chinese empire must wrestle
constantly with nations whose languages, religions, and customs
differ sharply from its own and whose behavior is, therefore,
unpredictable. And like all its predecessors, the Chinese imperial
class cares deeply about the pacification of the imperial
periphery, more so than one might think.
For proof that this is so, look no further than the biography of
Hu Jintao, the current Chinese president—and also the former
Communist Party boss of Tibet. In 1988 and 1989, at the time of
the last major riots, Hu was responsible both for the brutal
repression of dissident Tibetan monks and dissidents and for
what the Dalai Lama has subsequently called China's policy of
"cultural genocide": the importation of thousands of ethnic Han
Chinese into Tibet's cities in order to dilute and eventually
outbreed the ethnic Tibetan population.
Clearly, the repression of Tibet matters enormously to the
members of China's ruling clique, or they would not have
promoted Hu, its mastermind, so far. The pacification of Tibet
must also be considered a major political and propaganda
20/94
success, or it would not have been copied by the Chinese-backed
Burmese regime last year and repeated by the Chinese
themselves in Tibet last week. Tibet is to China what Algeria
once was to France, what India once was to imperial Britain,
what Poland was to czarist Russia: the most unreliable, the most
intransigent, and at the same time the most symbolically
significant province of the empire.
indistinguishable from a blockbuster sci-fi movie. The game has
subtle lighting and shadow effects, water that ripples and
splashes properly, concrete walls that crack and crumble to
reveal the underlying rebar. To top it all off, the guy leading the
demo had his character pump bullets into an enormous cube of
meat, which was authentically elastic and viscous in response to
the fusillade.
Keep that in mind, over the next few days and months, as China
tries once again to belittle Tibet, to explain away a nationalist
uprising as a bit of vandalism. The last week's riots began as a
religious protest: Tibet's monks were demonstrating against laws
that, among other things, require them to renounce the dalai
lama. The monks' marches then escalated into generalized,
unplanned, anti-Chinese violence, culminating in attacks on Han
Chinese shops and businesses, among them—as you can see on
the cell-phone videos—the Lhasa branch of the Bank of China.
Despite that absurd graphical overkill, or maybe because of it,
Gears of War II wasn't the talk of the show. Most of the chatter
was about a game called Crayon Physics Deluxe, which didn't
get a glitzy demo on a huge video screen in front of an audience
of thousands. Why all the love for a game that looks a bit like
something your third-grader might ask you to stick up on the
fridge? Watch the embedded video below, and you'll understand.
However the official version evolves, in other words, make no
mistake about it: This was not merely vandalism, it could not
have been solely organized by outsiders, it was not only about
the Olympics, and it was not the work of a tiny minority. It was
a significant political event, proof that the Tibetans still identify
themselves as Tibetan, not Chinese. As such, it must have
significant reverberations in Beijing. The war in Algeria brought
down the French Fourth Republic. The dissident movements on
its periphery helped weaken the Soviet Union. Right now, I'd
wager that Hu Jintao's Tibet policy is causing a lot of
consternation among his colleagues.
Crayon Physics Deluxe lets you draw objects on the screen by
clicking and dragging your mouse, or by drawing with the stylus
of a tablet PC, as in this video. The objects you scrawl become
part of the game world. The goal is to create objects that propel a
crudely drawn ball toward a crudely drawn star. There is no
single correct way to scoot that ball around; the fun is in
exploring the options. Within seconds of hitting start, you're
furiously scribbling blocks and ramps and wedges and seesaws,
whatever it takes to reach the goal. Some players may get
sidetracked creating hilariously inefficient Rube Goldberg
devices. Others will forget the objectives altogether and just
draw. (If you want to try it yourself, you can download a simpler
demo version of the game here.)
And if they aren't worried, they should be. After all, the history
of the last two centuries is filled with tales of strong, stable
empires brought down by their subjects, undermined by their
client states, overwhelmed by the national aspirations of small,
subordinate countries. Why should the 21st century be any
different? Watching the tear gas roll over the streets of Lhasa
yesterday on a blurry, cell-phone video, I couldn't help but
wonder when—maybe not in this decade, this generation, or
even this century—Tibet and its monks will have their revenge.
gaming
Crayon Physics Deluxe
An ingenious video game that looks like it was designed by a third-grader.
By Chris Baker
Wednesday, March 19, 2008, at 7:00 AM ET
The annual Game Developers Conference is a chance for all the
major players in the video-game industry to show off their
flashiest new titles. Attendees at February's meeting, for
instance, were treated to a sneak peek of the upcoming Gears of
War II, a richly detailed sci-fi action game that appears
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Pretty awesome, huh?
This unassuming drawing game didn't get the same huge demo
treatment as Gears of War II. Crayon Physics Deluxe was part of
the Independent Games Festival that's connected to the Game
Developers Conference. The Independent Games Festival has
been part of the conference for a decade, but there was a general
sense this year that the little guys had finally outclassed the big
boys. Fast Internet-connection speeds make it easy for anyone to
offer the game for download, and there's a huge built-in online
audience for simple, time-wasting "casual games." There are
millions of gamers out there who don't want a big, polished
game that comes in a box. They want something they can launch
this second and play while killing time on a conference call. All
the big game publishers are getting wise to this market—
Electronic Arts just announced an EA Casual Games Division
late last year. But the best casual games on display at the
conference were still made by tiny teams with no corporate
backing, rebellious garage coders who prefer to term their work
"indie," like indie rock or indie film.
Gears of War II will take several years, hundreds of people, and
tens of millions of dollars to create. Crayon Physics Deluxe was
made by Petri Purho, a 24-year-old student at Helsinki
Polytechnic. He makes games at the rate of about one a month
21/94
and offers them as free, PC-only downloads on his personal site.
Purho says his hobby was inspired by the Experimental
Gameplay Project, the equivalent of Dogme 95 for indie game
makers. The tenets of EGP are:



Each game must be made in less than seven days.
Each game must be made by exactly one person.
Each game must be based around a common theme, i.e.,
"gravity," "vegetation," "swarms," etc.
The notion of a single theme is important. Most major games
these days are fixated on building entire worlds. The developers
kill themselves to make realistic-looking humans, a realisticlooking environment, realistic physics, etc. The constraints of
EGP, however, liberate indie game makers to focus on making a
single facet of their game as unique and original as possible.
"And if the game turns out be complete crap, I have only wasted
a week," Purho writes on his site.
Some of his rapidly prototyped games are … well, complete
crap. Daydreaming in the Oval Office casts you as a cartoony
George W. Bush gathering bits of "imaginary pieces of evidence
about the Iraq's weapons of mass destruction" while
simultaneously trying to keep a globe aloft like a beach ball at a
rock concert. The political commentary is a bit trite, and the
game isn't much fun to play. Purho himself concedes that this
particular game is "as incompetent as its main character."
But many of his experiments are wickedly funny and original.
There are many games based on the exploits of Indiana Jones,
but Purho's version is the only one that tells the story from the
boulder's point of view, letting players control the rampaging
sphere and smoosh wave after wave of attacking archeologists.
Another game, Grammar Nazi, is a literate twist on shooters like
Space Invaders. Players fire upward at swarms of enemies, but
the ammo in Purho's version is the letters you type on the
keyboard, and the longer the words you spell, the more damage
they do. (Tapping out indie has some impact. Autodidact causes
a massive explosion.) Purho made it in a single day.
The original version of Crayon Physics was the Finnish student's
10th rapid-prototype project. It was inspired by the descriptions
he'd heard of the classic children's book Harold and the Purple
Crayon. Purho coded it in five days and posted it on his site in
June 2007. The game won instant acclaim, inspiring him to
release a level editor a few weeks later so others could create
their own layouts and obstacles. The game proved such a success
that Purho chose to violate his one-week rule to create Crayon
Physics Deluxe. The months of extra time that went into this
fleshed-out version make for a more polished experience, with
better re-creations of the player's scrawlings. In the original
version, your drawings were automatically squared off; the new
version maintains the cruddy imperfections of your line art.
Purho plans to charge $20 for the deluxe version once he
finishes.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Despite his obvious talent, Purho isn't sure he wants to go into
the industry after he gets his computer-science degree. "It's more
about writing documents than it is about designing games," he
says. "And I really hate writing documents."
Purho will probably have a better chance of moving the industry
forward if he keeps flying solo. As the titles on display at this
year's Independent Games Festival proved, some of the most
innovative products in the gaming world are coming from oneman outfits. Take Audiosurf, made by another game-a-week
geek, Dylan Fitterer (with help from his wife, Elizabeth). The
game is based on a simple, ingenious concept: transform your
favorite music into a game. Audiosurf takes any music file from
your computer and turns it into a level. While listening to the
track, you steer a little rocket car back and forth to collect the
beats as they whiz past and avoid others. It's the perfect way to
kill five minutes, and it's currently one of the best-selling titles
on the Steam downloadable-games service, where it competes
with photorealistic shooters in the same vein as Gears of War II.
While Audiosurf had its partisans, the Seamus McNally Grand
Prize—the indie-game equivalent of the Academy Award for
best picture—went to Crayon Physics Deluxe. (Disclosure: I was
one of more than 40 judges who voted on the entries.) The
crowd whooped and roared as Purho took the stage. His
acceptance speech was as clever and succinct as his game. He
held up a piece of paper with a crayon scribble. It had two
simple words: "F--k Yeah."
hollywoodland
The Real Pellicano Story
The private eye intimidated alleged rape victims on behalf of a client.
By Kim Masters
Friday, March 21, 2008, at 12:03 PM ET
Sordid details: As expected, Paramount chief Brad Grey's
testimony at the Pellicano trial was not too sexy. Garry
Shandling may have gotten people's hopes up with his
complaints about Grey's behavior as his manager, but no one in
this case has a stake in pursuing that angle. The question was
whether Grey knew of Pellicano's alleged wrongdoing, and
Grey, naturally, said he did not.
So it's hardly surprising that Shandling—a professional, after
all—turned out to be more entertaining than Grey. For those
looking for a big takedown of Hollywood power, it's long been
clear that the trial seems unlikely to pay off. But the fact that
Pellicano's big-name clients appear to have skated doesn't mean
that the allegations in this case aren't sensational. They could
hardly be more so.
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If the government's got its facts right (and Pellicano, acting as
his own counsel, isn't mounting a serious defense so far), then
the worst is true: Justice in this country can be bought pretty
easily, if not cheaply.
The case has elicited testimony that Pellicano convinced cops
and phone company employees to snoop through data that
should have had vigilant protection. He perverted the system,
and not just to benefit rich clients who wanted to shake off
unwanted spouses or thwart opponents in business deals. He is
accused of having successfully intimidated a number of alleged
rape victims to prevent their testifying against a client. Got that?
He helped an alleged serial rapist get off the hook.
And he got away with it all for years.
For a long time, Pellicano's tough-guy talk seemed to put him on
the verge of self-parody: the hard-boiled gumshoe playing the
private-dick role in the manner that people in Hollywood would
expect. And in many cases, his alleged victims were hard to
pity—like producer Bo Zenga, who had to take the Fifth more
than 100 times when he was deposed in a lawsuit that he had
initiated. (Zenga has also declared himself an award-winning
screenwriter when all he had "won" was a contest that he'd made
up himself.)
Then there was Lisa Bonder, who tried to shake down Kirk
Kerkorian for $320,000 a month after gaming a DNA test to
trick him into supporting a child who wasn't his. It was hard to
feel bad when Pellicano exposed that type of behavior.
But even if all of Pellicano's victims had put themselves in
harm's way, what he appears to have done goes far beyond their
concerns. Every day of testimony sharpens the focus on
allegations that should scare everyone—even folks who have
never gotten closer to Hollywood than the multiplex. (link)
March 17, 2008
Oink: The trial of private detective to the stars Anthony
Pellicano perked up a bit last Thursday with Garry Shandling
swearing under oath that his former manager Brad Grey was, in
essence, a pig.
Shandling already said that in a lawsuit filed in 1998, in which
he complained that Grey overdid it by cutting himself in as a
producer of Shandling's television show, taking ownership of
half the show, and giving himself commissions on Shandling's
work as a writer and actor. Whether this meets the legal
definition of piggishness is unclear since the suit was settled. So
Shandling never testified about his grievances until now. And, of
course, Grey at this point is running Paramount, so Shandling's
grievances have a fresh resonance.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Grey felt moved to issue a statement that he was "extremely
saddened" by Shandling's allegations and said that he
remembered the facts differently, though he offered no specifics.
Once Shandling sued, he said, he was forced to hire Bert Fields.
So his (very profitable) "friendship" with Shandling was
"overtaken by a legal process that was directed by lawyers."
Translation: Bert Fields hired Pellicano—not me—and who
knew about any wiretapping?
All the big-name players who were Pellicano fans—Brad Grey,
Michael Ovitz—have declared themselves to be shocked at
allegations that Pellicano had a ring of on-the-take cops and
phone-company employees to assist him in eavesdropping and
perpetrating other schemes on their behalf. The Los Angeles
Times has quoted Ovitz's attorney as stating that "neither Mr.
Ovitz nor [his company] authorized or had any knowledge" of
snooping or other activities performed with Ovitz's interests in
mind.
The Pellicano trial prompted a producer we know to reminisce
about the days when Ovitz was the most powerful man in
Hollywood. "Remember how Ovitz always used to ask if you
were on a hard line when you talked to him on the phone?" he
asked. "And we all thought he was being paranoid!"
But now, it seems just possible that Ovitz suspected something.
For us, the trial brings back a memory from the days in the mid'90s when Hollywoodland was toiling on a book (Hit & Run:
How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in
Hollywood, with partner Nancy Griffin). We knew about
Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss and her links to various film
executives in our book. But none of this was public yet—no one
had ever heard of Heidi Fleiss—and we were trying to figure out
how to get these interesting facts on the record.
At one point, Hollywoodland asked one of the major players
whose named has arisen in the Pellicano case if he knew of
Fleiss, watching carefully what his face revealed. (If the
conversation had been on the record, we'd tell you who it was.)
He said he'd never heard of her, but he gave us some advice: If
we wanted to learn more, he said, look at the phone records.
We were confused. We did not have subpoena power. How
could we get phone records? "There are ways," he assured us
with a knowing smile.
This makes it hard to believe that all the Pellicano clients were
as ignorant of his activities as they claim. But apparently
evidence is lacking. Eliot Spitzer may have been nailed with
lightning speed thanks to wiretapped conversations. But Ovitz,
Grey, and Fields were apparently innocent dupes—and are
presumably extremely saddened to learn of any acts of thuggery
perpetrated on their behalf. (link)
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March 14, 2008
It's Fun To Have Fun: Your Hollywoodland correspondent
attended the glamorous premiere of Horton Hears a Who! last
Saturday and was present when protesters started yelling shortly
after Horton uttered his famous motto: "A person's a person, no
matter how small."
We could not understand what was being shouted and thought
perhaps that Seth Rogen or one of the other many vocal talents
in the film was expressing love for Dr. Seuss' elephant and his
signature line. But as you may have read elsewhere, antiabortion activists had infiltrated the theater. Afterward, they
handed out fliers designed to look like tickets.
allowed Hollywood to inflict the previous movie versions of her
husband's work on the born. (link)
Correction, March 19, 2008: The item on the Pellicano trial
originally included a photo of John Connolly, who's actually a
reporter who investigated Pellicano. The image has been
removed.
hot document
Obama on Racism, 1990
None of this sat well with Audrey Geisel, widow of Dr. Seuss
(Theodor Geisel), who attended the screening. So did Karl
ZoBell, the lawyer who represents her and who has represented
the interests of Dr. Seuss for some 40 years. In an interview with
NPR, he said he couldn't make out the yelling and thought
maybe "some nut" was in the theater. Later, he asked the
protesters what group they represented, and none would answer.
Their silence didn't seem like an accident to him, which makes
sense, because ZoBell has not been bashful about sending ceaseand-desist letters to those who appropriate Dr. Seuss' material
for their own purposes. And many do. (According to ZoBell,
politicians love to sling the term Grinch at their rivals.)
ZoBell says it would be nice if these people came up with their
own material. But if they don't go too far—by copping the
illustrations, for example—they can use a line like "A person's a
person, no matter how small," even if it wouldn't have pleased
Dr. Seuss. And it wouldn't have. The Geisels were opposed to
using the Dr. Seuss books for any political agenda.
Some anti-abortion Web sites claim that Audrey is a supporter of
Planned Parenthood. ZoBell says he's never discussed the issue
of abortion with her and can't confirm that.
It seems that Horton will inspire more anti-abortion activity in
cities around the country. A Colorado group gathering signatures
for a ballot initiative that would define life as beginning at
conception will show up at theaters in Denver when the movie
opens. Its members will wear T-shirts emblazoned with Horton's
immortal words and try to get more signatures for their petition.
They don't plan to disrupt the movie (which seems reasonable,
since Colorado probably won't accept signatures from 6-yearolds).
Executives at Fox say the studio is ignoring these plans. As for
Audrey Geisel, it's not that we lack sympathy. But perhaps this
wrath on behalf of the unborn is ironic punishment for having
When will black and white law students enjoy the same right to be
"mediocre"?
By Bonnie Goldstein
Wednesday, March 19, 2008, at 12:46 PM ET
From: Bonnie Goldstein
Posted Wednesday, March 19, 2008, at 12:46 PM ET
Voters and the press are praising Barack Obama's March 18
speech about race. The Democratic Party front-runner had been
reluctant to tackle the controversial topic head-on in his
campaign. Back in the summer of 1990, however, a much
younger Obama was interviewed for a feature in the Chicago
Reporter about the lag in minority hiring by top Chicago law
firms. Then in the top quarter of his Harvard Law class, slated to
lead the prestigious Harvard Law Review, and a summer
associate at Hopkins & Sutter, he told journalist David
Rubenstein, "I certainly wouldn't have a hard time finding a job
in Chicago." It was different for less-credentialed minority
students, Obama said. He noted that "a lot of minorities go to
state schools due to financial constraints" and wondered aloud
when young minority attorneys would have the same right to be
"mediocre" that their white counterparts had (see below).
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indicate whether you wish to remain anonymous.
.
hot document
The Quantico Circuit Caper
A techie discovers just how open to surveillance telecom records are.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
24/94
By Bonnie Goldstein
Tuesday, March 18, 2008, at 9:03 AM ET
From: Bonnie Goldstein
Posted Tuesday, March 18, 2008, at 9:03 AM ET
Telecommunications companies gather and log vast quantities of
private information about, and generated by, 400 million
customers. This information is typically withheld from third
parties by internal security firewalls and by federal privacy laws.
Until recently, U.S. spy agencies were expressly forbidden by
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to wiretap phone and
e-mail communications inside the United States, but in 2002,
President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to flout
FISA and intercept billions of private Internet and telephone
records. After press disclosures about the domestic spying,
Congress updated the FISA law (now the Protect America Act)
to permit some previously banned surveillance, provided the
intelligence agency in question receives a court-approved
warrant. U.S. telecommunications companies must cooperate.
Those same companies are defendants in numerous lawsuits
brought by privacy advocates against the earlier, warrantless
assistance. The corporations have asked Congress for retroactive
immunity. Even if the privacy advocates succeed, however, there
may not remain much record of precisely what the
telecommunications firms passed on to the government. This
difficulty has focused attention on an affidavit (see below and
the following six pages) by "certified ethical hacker" Babak
Pasdar, circulated around Capitol Hill earlier this month. It
describes how Pasdar, CEO of Bat Blue Corporation, stumbled
across an unmonitored and unlimited third-party access feed to
the entire network of an unnamed major wireless
telecommunications carrier (psst: If you're a Verizon customer,
pay attention), while working on an emergency "migration" of
systems timed to a 2003 Christmas-season product launch
(below). The telecom company's people told Pasdar, who they'd
brought in for the project, that the unusual backdoor conduit was
called the "Quantico Circuit" and "should not be firewalled"
(Pages 3-4). Pasdar was concerned that the channel, code named
for the FBI academy in Northern Virginia, was an open door to
his client's "core network," giving unrestricted access to the
cellular phone company's "billing system, text messaging [and]
fraud detection" systems (Page 5). The conduit made it possible,
for example, "to tap into any conversation on any mobile phone
supported by the carrier at any point" (Page 6).
To Pasdar's mind, "Having a third party with completely open
access to their network core" seemed "against organizational
policy" (Page 3). He urged his client counterparts to at least log
"the source, destination and type" of unfettered data flowing out
of their DS3 circuit. His corporate contacts demurred and called
in the director of security, who, "wagging his finger in my face,"
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
informed Pasdar he was "treading above my pay grade." Pasdar,
a 19-year veteran of internet security protocols, was told to move
on and "forget the circuit" or the telecom company would "get
someone who would" (Page 4).
Last week, the House voted 214-195 to deny corporate immunity
in the FISA reauthorization bill but the president promised to
veto any bill that withholds immunity.
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indicate whether you wish to remain anonymous.
Posted Tuesday, March 18, 2008, at 9:03 AM ET
Posted Tuesday, March 18, 2008, at 9:03 AM ET
Posted Tuesday, March 18, 2008, at 9:03 AM ET
Posted Tuesday, March 18, 2008, at 9:03 AM ET
25/94
Posted Tuesday, March 18, 2008, at 9:03 AM ET
Posted Tuesday, March 18, 2008, at 9:03 AM ET
jurisprudence
Putting the Second Amendment Second
Reframing the constitutional debate over gun control.
By Akhil Reed Amar
Monday, March 17, 2008, at 3:25 PM ET
The language of the Second Amendment has been the obsessive
focus of just about everyone interested in District of Columbia v.
Heller, the D.C. gun-ownership case to be argued before the
Supreme Court on Tuesday. That amendment is indeed
important and much misunderstood. But Heller's facts, which
involve the possession of a gun inside the home for self-defense,
lie rather far from the Second Amendment's core concerns, as
originally understood by the Founding Fathers. To think straight
about gun control and the Constitution, we need to move past the
Second Amendment and pay more heed to the Ninth and 14 th
Amendments.
Let's begin here: Suppose, for argument's sake, that we concede
that everything gun-control advocates say about the Second
Amendment is right. Suppose that the amendment focused solely
on arms-bearing in military contexts, and that it said absolutely
nothing about an individual's right to have a gun while sleeping
in his own home or hunting in his own private Idaho. Would this
concession mean that no individual constitutional right exists
today?
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Hardly. According to the Ninth Amendment: "The enumeration
in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to
deny or disparage other rights retained by the people." In other
words, there may well be constitutional rights that are not
explicitly set forth in the Second Amendment (or in any other
amendment or constitutional clause, for that matter). In
identifying these unenumerated "rights retained by the people,"
the key is that a judge should not decide what he or she
personally thinks would be a proper set of rights. Instead, the
judge should ask which rights have been recognized by the
American people themselves—for example, in state constitutions
and state bills of rights and civil rights laws. Americans have
also established, merely by living our lives freely across the
country and over the centuries, certain customary rights that
governments have generally respected. Many of our most basic
rights are simply facts of life, the residue of a virtually
unchallenged pattern and practice on the ground in domains
where citizens act freely and governments lie low.
Consider, for example, the famous 1965 privacy case Griswold
v. Connecticut. The state of Connecticut purported to criminalize
the use of contraception, even by married couples, prompting the
Supreme Court to strike down this extraordinarily intrusive state
law as unconstitutional. Writing for the majority, Justice
William Douglas claimed that a general right of privacy could be
found in between the lines of the Bill of Rights. But Douglas did
a poor job of proving his case. It's hard not to smirk when the
First Amendment is used to protect the erotic urges of a man and
a woman seeking to "assemble" on a bed. Writing separately in
Griswold, the second Justice John Harlan, widely admired for
his judicial care and craftsmanship, offered a more modest and
less strained rationale: "Conclusive, in my view, is the utter
novelty of [Connecticut's] enactment. Although the Federal
Government and many States have at one time or another had on
their books statutes forbidding the distribution of contraceptives,
none, so far as I can find, has made the use of contraceptives a
crime." Thus, the basic practice of the American people rendered
Connecticut's oddball law presumptively unconstitutional. It is
also highly noteworthy that today around a dozen state
constitutions and countless statutes speak explicitly of a right to
privacy—a right nowhere explicitly mentioned in the federal
Constitution.
Now take Harlan's sensible approach to the unenumerated right
of privacy and apply it to Dick Anthony Heller's claim that he
has a right to have a gun in his D.C. home for self-defense.
When we look at the actual pattern of lived rights in America—
what the people have, in fact, done—we find lots of regulations
of guns, but few outright prohibitions of guns in homes as
sweeping as the D.C. ordinance. We also find a right to keep
guns affirmed in a great many modern state constitutions,
several of which use the phrase "bear arms" in ways that clearly
go beyond the military context. Unlike founding-era documents,
modern state constitutions routinely affirm a constitutional right
to "bear arms" for hunting, recreation, and/or self-defense.
26/94
In addition to the Ninth Amendment, we should also view the
right to bear arms through the lens of the 14 th Amendment's
command that "No state shall make or enforce any law which
shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the
United States." Though this particular sentence applies only to
the states, other language in the 14th Amendment affirms that the
federal government, too, has a parallel obligation to respect the
fundamental rights of citizens.
But the 14th Amendment did not specifically enumerate these
sacred privileges and immunities. Instead, like the Ninth, the 14 th
invited interpreters to pay close attention to fundamental rights
that Americans had affirmed through their lived experience—in
state bills of rights and in other canonical texts such as the
Declaration of Independence and landmark civil rights
legislation. And when it came to guns, a companion statute to
the 14th Amendment, enacted by Congress in 1866, declared that
"laws … concerning personal liberty [and] personal security …
including the constitutional right to bear arms, shall be secured
to and enjoyed by all the citizens." Here, in sharp contrast to
founding-era legal texts, the "bear arms" phrase was decisively
severed from the military context. Women as well as men could
claim a "personal" right to protect their "personal liberty" and
"personal security" in their homes. The Reconstruction-era
Congress clearly understood that Southern blacks might need
guns in their homes to protect themselves from private violence
in places where they could not rely on local constables to keep
their neighborhoods safe. When guns were outlawed, only
outlaw Klansmen would have guns, to paraphrase a modern
NRA slogan. In this critical chapter in the history of American
liberty, we find additional evidence of an individual right to have
a gun in one's home, regardless of the original meaning of the
Second Amendment.
There are at least three advantages in shifting 21st-century guncontrol discourse in this direction. First, a Ninth-and-14th
Amendment framework is more modest. Unusually draconian
gun laws can be struck down simply because they lie outside the
lived pattern of the American experience, while more
mainstream gun laws can be upheld precisely because they have
proved acceptable to the people in many places. If our nation's
capital wants to argue that specially strict gun rules should apply
there because the city faces unique risks, no rigid textual
language prevents judges from considering such pragmatic
claims in the course of interpreting the boundaries of actual
American practice. By contrast, if the Second Amendment's
language really did guarantee a right to guns in homes, by what
authority could judges allow for a different approach in D.C.?
And then, if one has a Second Amendment right to a pistol or
shotgun at home, why not a machine gun? Given that the Second
Amendment's core right is military, it would seem odd that
military arms would be easier to ban than other weapons.
only rights that have long been part of the American tradition but
also rights that have emerged in actual modern practice and in
state constitutional clauses of relatively recent vintage that are
relatively easy to amend. The 14th directs our attention to the
still-relevant problems of race and police protection or the
absence thereof. By contrast, the Second Amendment harkens
back to a lost 18th-century America, where citizens regularly
mustered for militia service on the town square and where the
federal army was rightly suspect. This is not our world.
Finally, a focus on the Ninth and 14th Amendments is simply
more honest. The open-ended language of the Ninth and 14th
Amendments really did aim to invite Americans to ponder state
constitutional provisions that declare rights, and these provisions
really do focus on individual self-defense. The framers of the
14th Amendment really did focus intently on self-defense in the
home. The framers of the Second did not.
sidebar
Return to article
Putting the Second Amendment Second
The Second Amendment reads, "A well regulated militia, being
necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to
keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." At the founding, the
core connotation of the phrase "bear arms" was military. Soldiers
and militiamen "bore arms," whereas hunters or homeowners
simply carried guns, firearms, or weapons. Almost every
founding-era state constitution that featured the phrase "bear
arms" was referring to soldiers and militiamen and not to private
gun use by an individual in a home or on a hunt. The central
image was of Minutemen bearing guns, not Daniel Boone
gunning bears.
The word militia in the amendment's opening clause confirms
this military thrust, as does the counterbalancing word, people,
in the closing clause. At the founding, these two paired words
were roughly synonymous. In a sound republic, the militia was
composed of the people—the voters. As a rule, those who bore
arms in defense of the state should vote and those who voted
should bear arms. So, too, voters should generally serve on
juries. Militias, grand juries, and trial juries were all close
cousins.
Second, the Ninth and 14th Amendments are more modern and
democratically responsive. The Ninth invites us to consider not
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
27/94
jurisprudence
Butt Out
A big gun case as a natural experiment in judicial restraint.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Monday, March 17, 2008, at 2:21 PM ET
This week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in an
important gun-control case for the first time in 69 years. And
almost lost amid all the polemical screeching on both sides about
the contours of the constitutional "right to bear arms" lies the
fact that the high court is about step into a cultural conflict for
the first time in 69 years.
Think about it: abortion, homosexuality, affirmative action,
separation of church and state, the death penalty. The court has
gleefully waded into almost every hot-button social issue
dividing this country for decades. Both conservatives and some
very smart liberals have taken the position that in doing so, the
high court has unerringly messed things up. Justice Antonin
Scalia contends that the court should not conduct itself like an
unelected superlegislature. It's not for the court to invent new
rights; it's for the people: "You think the death penalty is a good
idea? Persuade your fellow citizens to adopt it. You want a right
to abortion? Persuade your fellow citizens and enact it."
Meanwhile, at the center-left, thinkers like the University of
Chicago's Cass Sunstein agree that judicial "minimalism" or
restraint is far preferable to solving sprawling social problems
with judicially imposed moral judgments. Some of the country's
pre-eminent liberal scholars now go further and contend that had
matters as important as abortion and segregation been left up to
the democratically elected branches, we would not still be
feeling a Warren Court backlash today.
With District of Columbia v. Heller, these bipartisan critics may
have fished their wish. The case tests the constitutionality of
D.C.'s sweeping gun ban, which prohibits handgun possession at
home unless guns were registered before 1976 and requires that
the rifles and shotguns permitted must be kept unloaded and
either disassembled or bound by a trigger lock. Last year, by a 21 vote, a federal appeals court struck down this ban on the theory
that the Second Amendment confers upon "the people" an
individual right to bear arms, rather than a collective right to arm
its militias.
The most dramatic aspect of Heller—and trust me, the drama
abounds—may well be that the last time the Supreme Court
issued a major proclamation on the right to bear arms, the year
was 1939, and criminals sported fedoras and drove Packards.
That makes this case a perfect natural experiment in what
happens when the Supreme Court butts out.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
All right, then. What happens when the Supreme Court hangs
back for decades and quietly allows the political processes to
resolve explosive and contentious issues? The vacuum is not
necessarily filled by temperate legislative debate. On the gun
front, when the courts hung back, the special interest groups
rushed in.
The Supreme Court determined in 1939, in United States v.
Miller, that an individual right to a gun had no "reasonable
relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated
militia," and thus the Second Amendment did not confer
individual rights to gun ownership. The court followed with
seven decades of constitutional radio silence on the subject,
either reaffirming Miller in a whisper or declining to hear new
cases. So much radio silence created an assumption that the
debate was over: There was simply no individual right protected
by the Second Amendment. This led former Solicitor General
Erwin Griswold to insist: "[T]hat the Second Amendment poses
no barrier to strong gun laws is perhaps the most well-settled
proposition in American Constitutional law." Time and again the
lower federal courts of appeals followed the Miller line until it
appeared the question was settled there, as well.
While the courts kept quiet, an extremely well-funded and
powerful lobby group, the National Rifle Association, forcefully
and effectively pushed the claim that the Second Amendment
confers an individual right to bear arms. The NRA is 4 millionplus members strong and has handed out $15.3 million to
candidates (most of them Republican) since 1980. It's credited
by some with the 2000 defeat of Al Gore in rural states. But the
NRA's political and financial clout pales next to its influence on
our constitutional consciousness: National polls consistently
show that in the wake of decades of legal scholarship, lobbying
efforts, and an unparalleled public education campaign, about 75
percent of Americans believe the Constitution affords a personal
right to own guns, even though a slight majority of Americans
favor gun control of some sort. That means that over 70 years,
public opinion has more or less flipped Miller on its head. It's
romantic, really. Most of us longing for the legal reality we
already had.
For many decades, this strange disconnect between the public
understanding of the Second Amendment and the courts'
interpretation simmered silently. In 1991, former Chief Justice
Warren Burger even described the "individual rights" view of
the Second Amendment as "one of the greatest pieces of fraud—
I repeat the word 'fraud'—on the American public by special
interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime." But the
courts, including the Supreme Court, just stayed out of the
conflict. Until last year, when the Court of Appeals for the
District of Columbia circuit struck down the D.C. gun ban on the
theory that the NRA is right, and the Second Amendment does
protect an individual right to bear arms.
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Perhaps it's actually better for these complicated social questions
to be decided by special interest groups than in the courts. But
one other group of unsung heroes also led the charge against
Miller: liberal legal academics. According to Robert Spitzer, a
political scientist at State University of New York-Cortland and
author of The Politics of Gun Control, the very failure of the
Supreme Court to revisit the fight over the Second Amendment
for all those decades created "the allegation of some legal
pathology; that the court was avoiding it or embarrassed by it."
This sense of intellectual embarrassment prompted one
important liberal thinker, professor Sanford Levinson of the
University of Texas, to pen a 1989 law review article in favor of
a "strong reading" for the individual rights theory of the Second
Amendment. Harvard Law School's Laurence Tribe and other
prominent liberals followed.
Many of these scholars were less interested in forcing major
changes to modern gun-control policy than in insider
constitutional housekeeping. (They insist you can't be for strong
individual rights under the Constitution and treat the Second
Amendment like elevator music.) But the intellectual shift by the
liberal academy helped motivate Dr. Robert Levy, a senior
fellow at the Cato Institute and the engine behind the Heller
lawsuit. Lately, some of those liberal thinkers have even been
inching away from the political implications of their
constitutional thought experiments.
So long-overdue is Supreme Court scrutiny in Heller that the
Bush administration has now staked out one position, while Dick
Cheney has staked out another. This has resulted in big fun for
court watchers and less fun for the folks arguing against the D.C.
gun ban this week. But another interesting question lurks under
the showdown on gun rights: whether, in the absence of bold
judicial pronouncements, large constitutional matters are truly
better thrashed out by well-funded interest groups and wellmeaning academics.
A version of this piece appeared in Newsweek magazine.
pledged-delegate lead. Oregon's 52 delegates are assigned via
primary, but Obama is still favored to win the state by a large
margin. This is the first time a presidential candidate has been to
Oregon since Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards spoke to the
state's AFL-CIO chapter in October.
Clinton, meanwhile, does not have any public events scheduled
for Friday.
We've updated Map the Candidates' look to offer you even more
information than we used to. Click here to explore the country's
political landscape, and be sure to tap into the candidates' and
states' statistics pages by clicking the popout symbols next to
their names.
Map the Candidates uses the candidates' public schedules to
keep track of their comings and goings. A quick primer on your
new election toolbox:
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Do you want to know who spent the most time in Iowa
or New Hampshire last month? Play with the timeline
sliders above the map to customize the amount of time
displayed.
Care most about who visited your home state? Then
zoom in on it or type a location into the "geosearch"
box below the map.
Choose which candidates you want to follow with the
check boxes on to the right of the map. If you only
want to see the front-runners, then uncheck all of the
fringe candidates. Voilà! You're left with the cream of
the crop's travels.
Follow the campaign trail virtually with MTC's news
feed. Every day YouTube video and articles from local
papers will give you a glimpse of what stump speeches
really look and sound like. Just click the arrow next to
the headline to get started.
Take a closer look at candidates by clicking on their
names to the right of the map. You'll get the lowdown
on their travels, media coverage, and policy positions.
Click here to start using Map the Candidates.
map the candidates
Frontier Mentality
Obama sees the Pacific for the first time since Washington's caucus.
By E.J. Kalafarski and Chadwick Matlin
Thursday, March 20, 2008, at 3:37 PM ET
medical examiner
Doctors Without Orders
The mystery of patients who fail to follow prescriptions.
Barack Obama will spend the day in Oregon tomorrow—his first
visit to the West Coast since campaigning in Washington state
and California in early February. Obama's dominant victory in
Washington on Feb. 9 (he won with 68 percent of the vote)
helped launch a streak of 10 straight victories that solidified his
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
By Jessica Wapner
Friday, March 21, 2008, at 10:21 AM ET
Earlier this month, scientists at Georgia Tech announced their
invention of a necklace that records the date and time at which a
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person swallows his prescription medicine. The device (which
looks more like a dog collar than jewelry) responds to a tiny
magnet in the pill as it travels down the esophagus. Other
recently developed similar technologies include a drug-filled
prosthetic tooth that slowly drips medicine into the mouth and a
pill bottle that sends a wireless message to your pharmacist
every time it's opened.
nonadherence at AlignMap.com, explains that no matter how
long they've been practicing, doctors tend to drastically
overestimate their patients' likelihood of sticking to regimens.
It's the medical version of the Lake Wobegon syndrome: Doctors
consider their own patients to be above average. One study
asked physicians to predict adherence only among patients they
knew well, and the doctors still grossly overestimated.
Are we so bad at taking medicine that we need false teeth to do
it for us and pill bottles that tattle on us when we don't? It would
seem so. About 50 percent of patients fail to correctly follow
prescriptions: We forget to take pills, we alter doses, we take
breaks. Nonadherence—the medical term for neglecting to abide
by a doctor's orders—is rampant, resulting in up to one-quarter
of all hospital and nursing home admissions. It's also expensive.
The problem persists despite monumental efforts to prevent it.
Why? For one thing, it's impossible to predict which patients are
likely to deviate from their orders. And while the problem seems
like it should have a simple solution, it doesn't. Nonadherence, it
turns out, is one more reason to heed the call for better American
health care.
Patients who don't follow doctors' orders defy prediction because
as a group, they lack defining characteristics. Intelligence, age,
gender, and economic background all have no bearing. Even
doctors are a mixed bag. In a study of medical students who
were prescribed a regimen of Tic Tacs, fewer than half followed
instructions fully, even though they knew it was candy and that
the exercise was specifically designed to teach them about this
issue. Basically, decades of research to identify measures of
nonadherence have yielded just one fact: There are no solid
measures.
Blowing off a doctor's instructions might seem like the act of a
basically healthy person. Who hasn't neglected to take that last
antibiotic or exercised less than the doctor said to? But treatment
drop-off rates are high among the seriously ill, too. About half
the people who undergo kidney transplants do not adequately
adhere to the regimen necessary to thwart rejection of their new
organ. A 1970s study found that 43 percent of glaucoma patients
refused to take the doctor-ordered measures necessary to prevent
blindness, even when that refusal had already led to blindness in
one eye.
Cost of medication is an obvious consideration. A recent study
in Health Affairs reported that 29 percent of patients with
chronic kidney failure in the United States did not purchase
needed drugs because they were too expensive. It's
understandable: Their co-pay of $114 for a month of medication
was the highest of all 12 countries included in the analysis. By
contrast, British patients, who had the lowest out-of-pocket
costs, were the best at sticking with treatment.
But cost wasn't the only factor that determined whether patients
took their medicine. Swedish patients also had high monthly copays, but they were great at following their prescriptions. And
good adherence among Japanese patients was only partially
explained by low costs. The authors of the Health Affairs study
wondered about the influence of cultural factors but also pointed
to the health system structure: Since Japanese doctors earn
income by selling medicine directly to patients, they have an
incentive to make sure prescriptions get filled.
In the United States, where doctors don't play that middleman
role, they have a devil of a time predicting which patients are
likely to deviate. Psychiatrist Allan Showalter, who writes about
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Clearly, some medical disobedience is no different from any
other deviant behavior, like speeding or jaywalking. Sometimes
the treatment being prescribed is just too much. Few diabetics
follow the complete roster of lifestyle recommendations, mainly
because doing so is extremely difficult. Other times, patients
decide that because of side effects, a treatment just isn't worth
it—many patients with life-threatening diseases would rather
live better than live longer. But these explanations only account
for a small percentage of nonadherents. Why aren't the rest of us
better at following doctors' orders?
As it turns out, there is one predictive factor: experience with the
health care system. A study of 186 doctors and their patients
with diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension found that
whether patients got their questions answered correlated strongly
with whether they would stick with treatment. Other factors that
mattered included the doctor's level of job satisfaction, how
many patients he or she sees per week, and whether patients
scheduled a follow-up appointment. As health care consultant
Kip Piper explains, the average doctor's visit clocks in at less
than 20 minutes, leaving little time for discussion. And when
patients do ask questions, they are usually interrupted within 18
seconds. With little explanation, tricky regimens may not be
followed correctly, or a person may take a break from a drug,
not understanding the importance of completing the regimen.
Many times, patients simply don't understand the doctor's orders.
Requiring patients to use mail-order companies to order some
drugs, as health insurers are increasingly doing, will probably
make matters worse.
The legion of gadgets helps some patients but doesn't make a big
enough dent because the contraptions don't address these
underlying issues. Concierge medicine is a more successful fix:
For an annual fee, doctors promise to limit the number of
patients they treat and provide a higher level of care. But, while
effective, this approach is inherently limited. The fee of up to
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$1,500 is prohibitive for many people, and in any case, there
aren't that many VIP doctors out there. Adherence, then, is
unlikely to improve much unless something changes
dramatically in the health care system. Or else, we need to invent
a drug for nonadherence. If only anyone would take it.
medical examiner
For Teeth and for Country
John Adams' misplaced celebration of America's dental achievements.
By Kent Sepkowitz
Monday, March 17, 2008, at 2:36 PM ET
In John Adams, HBO's seven-part miniseries about America's
second president, the producers have rendered each scene with
as much historical accuracy as time and money will allow. The
cottages have small windows and low chimneys; the lamps and
fires glow with era-appropriate candlepower; the horses bear the
saddles of the period; the food looks as scary as 18th-century
farm vittles should; and the costumes are American Girl-worthy.
Everywhere you look, it's award-winning verisimilitude. Except
for one wee oversight.
Teeth. All of the actors have glorious 21st-century show-biz
teeth.
This problem, of course, is a familiar one: All of Hollywood has
significant unresolved dental issues. Famous actors are eager to
embrace all manner of abuse. They gain weight, they lose
weight, they smoke cigarettes, they sport awful hairdos or shave
their heads. And yet on TV and in the movies, an actor must
never be asked to traverse the Dental Curtain: The pearly whites
must never be scuffed or dented. Hollywood's systematic denial
of dental reality is an example of its elevation of glamour over
truth, thrill over drab.
Perhaps, though, something more is at play in John Adams.
Maybe the faux dental presentation is a deliberate extension of
the patriotism implicit in the miniseries. In the 21 st century, even
as the United States' status as a world power is wobbling and our
cultural and moral authority erodes, we can still be proud of our
dental heritage. Our teeth stand tall compared with those of our
friends in the European Union (and Asia and South America and
everywhere that is heartlessly crushing our dollar). Our molars
are better than their molars.
The anachronism of the John Adams dentistry, however, is
particularly striking because the miniseries features prominently
the beloved and edentulous father of our country. The actor who
plays George Washington, David Morse, is fitted handsomely
with replica uniform, balding pate, faint (Scottish?) accent,
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
appropriately soaring height—and standard-issue blinding
California chompers. Yet George Washington's bad teeth are
almost as legendary as his Delaware crossing. You can see the
consequences on the dollar bill in your wallet, courtesy of
Gilbert Stuart's portrait. Look closely at Washington's jowls.
Keep in mind that he was a tall, gangly guy, not a pudge—yet
these are the cheeks you'd expect on Babe Ruth or Jackie
Gleason. A comparison of the dollar-bill image with the original
Stuart portrait shows an even more swollen and dentally
discomfited first president.
Washington's cheeks are swollen because, due to his rotten teeth,
he developed the predictable lymph-node swelling that occurs in
response to any chronic infection. This gives him that unsettling
chipmunk look. (Physician disclaimer: Mine is a Sen. Frist-style
eyeball diagnosis—I personally never have examined Mr.
Washington.) Washington's teeth reportedly began to fall out
when he was a young man. By the time he finished his
presidency, he had only one remaining. The rumor that his
replacement teeth were wooden, by the way, is false. Rather, the
First Dentures were made of "hippopotamus and elephant ivory,
held together with gold springs. The hippo ivory was used for
the plate, into which real human teeth and also bits of horses and
donkeys teeth were inserted." (The intrepid can visit a part of his
dentures.)
In the centuries since, American dentists have taken us far from
those bad old days. Their European counterparts have not been
as stalwart. Those suave Europeans just don't get it. Teeth, after
all, are more than a cosmetic attribute—they are essential to
human nutrition. What is the difference between a Green Bay
Packers lineman and a fleet-footed wing on an EU soccer field? I
mean, besides the steroids and the personal trainers and weightgain shakes? Teeth. Our guys can chew anything. Teeth are what
give us American muscles, if not American muscle.
Consider this: During World War I and World War II, bad teeth
were among the most common reasons for exclusion from the
U.S. military. According to one study, about 15 percent of men
seeking to enlist were turned away for dental reasons. The
military viewed good teeth as such a necessity that enlistees
were required to have 12 opposable teeth arranged as follows: "a
minimum of 3 serviceable natural masticating teeth above the
gum and 3 below opposing; and 3 serviceable natural incisors
above and 3 below opposing. Therefore the minimum
requirements consist of 6 masticating teeth and of 6 incisor
teeth." Our boys needed to chew, to eat, in order to stay alive.
Soon after the end of World War II, the country's public-health
experts persuaded most states to adopt routine fluoridation of
water, an intervention that resulted in a 68 percent reduction in
cavities and other types of decay. This achievement is so highly
regarded that, in 1999, when the CDC listed the 10 greatest
public-health achievements of the 20th century, fluoridation of
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water was right up there with standard favorites like vaccination
and seatbelts.
It's inexplicable that the heroes of this great American triumph—
the dentists—remain consigned to the sidelines and punch lines
of history. Perhaps we have forgotten our snaggletoothed past
because we're too busy seething at that dentist who gave us a
lousy filling or painful implant. And perhaps the effort expended
to pump up one dull overlooked hero, John Adams, so exhausted
the show's producers that they can be forgiven their failure to
promote another dull virtue: the value of dentists, flossing, and
brushing after meals.
themselves, this week's bailout was the least disastrous possible
outcome. If Bear had been left alone to collapse under the
weight of its own problems, the broader effects would have been
devastating (or, considering today's carnage, more devastating).
The alternative would have been to let Bear slide into a Chapter
11 bankruptcy, which would have happened quickly. Among
other things, Moody's, S&P, and Fitch all downgraded Bear on
Friday, potentially forcing the firm to put up additional collateral
to meet the requirements of a credit-default swap triggered by
the downgrades—collateral it didn't have. Bear notionally holds
$13 trillion in derivatives contracts, and even if credit-default
swaps were only a small fraction of that, any sort of credit event
would have been catastrophic for both Bear and its buyers, the
latter of whom would find themselves holding guarantees from a
firm that was not in a position to guarantee anything.
moneybox
Bear Run
Why the Fed had to bail out Bear Stearns.
By Elizabeth Spiers
Tuesday, March 18, 2008, at 10:30 AM ET
It took only a week. Last Monday, when rumors began to
circulate that Bear Stearns was having liquidity problems, Bear
Executive Committee Chairman Ace Greenberg and CEO Alan
Schwartz assured investors that the rumors were, in Greenberg's
words, "ridiculous," that the storied brokerage house had a
strong balance sheet, and that its liquidity situation was fine.
Schwartz maintained as much through Wednesday, despite
mounting concerns and downgrades by analysts, pointing out
that Bear had $17 billion on its balance sheet. Between
Wednesday and Friday morning, full-fledged panic ensued, and
Bear's counterparties—its clients and lenders—began
withdrawing their cash from the firm, a textbook run on the
bank, creating a liquidity crisis where there had arguably been
none.
Now Bear is being bailed out by the Fed via JPMorgan Chase,
which is buying the troubled firm for $2 a share. And as one
might expect, the finger-pointing and recriminations have
already begun. Bear Chairman Jimmy Cayne was at a bridge
tournament in Detroit while the Fed was arranging the bailout
package, which didn't help the perception that management
wasn't paying enough attention to looming catastrophes. The Fed
itself is dodging criticism from people who worry that its
willingness to play lender of last resort to the embattled
brokerage will cause similar institutions to expect that their
worst mistakes can be fixed with a Fed bailout.
These are not irrelevant concerns, but regardless of whether
Jimmy was playing bridge while Bear burned or whether the Fed
is going to find itself perpetually crowbarring financial
institutions out of the corners into which they've wedged
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Bear's client assets would also have been frozen in the event of a
bankruptcy, crippling not just the brokerage but many of the
hedge funds that have collateral at the firm. (Fear of this
happening is part of reason that the run on the bank—or run on
the brokerage, rather—happened in the first place.) Taxpayers
would have ended up footing the bill for assets that were
federally insured, effectively a different kind of bailout.
And the psychological repercussions of a Bear bankruptcy
would have been even more devastating than the financial ones.
Bear Stearns may not technically be a bank, but it's a market
leader in prime brokerage and clearing, which means that it's
providing trading and back-end services to many other Wall
Street financial institutions. Over time, the smaller players in
these areas would pick up Bear's business, but the firm occupies
enough of the market that the vacuum it left wouldn't be filled
quickly or easily. In what has been an era of mega-mergers in
the financial-services sector, it's inconceivable that any single
large player could disappear overnight without sending ripples—
or, more accurately, small tsunamis—through the entire
industry, particularly when confidence levels are so shaky.
Even with the bailout, we're seeing a shadow of the disaster that
might have been. Asian markets were down this morning,
despite the calming of last week's worst-case fears that a Bear
collapse would wreak havoc on the yen trading. And perhaps
most tellingly, Lehman Brothers, which has a somewhat similar
profile to that of Bear, was down about 20 percent in trading
Monday on fears that its clients may do the same thing Bear's
did, leaving it in a similar position. Lehman Brothers' preemptive acquisition of a $2 billion break-glass-in-case-ofemergency credit line does not seem to have reduced the
market's fearful comparisons.
Panic spreads quickly, and it's not hard to imagine a scenario in
which clients get uncomfortable with minor exposure to credit
markets and run for their lives simply because their brokerage
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house looks vaguely like Bear. Unfortunately, it's not clear that
the Fed can handle many more bailouts of this size.
moneybox
The Rise of American Incompetence
We used to be the world's most skillful entrepreneurs and managers. Now
we're laughingstocks. What happened?
By Daniel Gross
Saturday, March 15, 2008, at 7:12 AM ET
The dollar plunged to new lows against foreign currencies this
week. There are plenty of reasons for its plunge, but at the most
basic level, the dollar's weakness reflects the world's collective,
two-thumbs-down verdict about the ability of the United
States—businesses, individuals, the government, the Federal
Reserve—to manage the global financial system and the world's
largest economy. Countries that outsourced their monetary
policy by pegging domestic currencies to the dollar are having
second thoughts. Kuwait last year detached the dinar from the
dollar, and Qatar government officials last week said they were
considering doing the same with their currency. International
financiers are unnerved by the toxic combination of "misplaced
assumptions about housing, a lack of necessary regulation and
irresponsible use of debt with sophisticated financial
instruments," said Ashraf Laidi, currency strategist at CMC
Markets.
Dissing American financial management is an affront to national
pride tantamount to standing in Rome and asking, loudly, if
Italians are able to make pasta. The United States invented the
concept and practice of running large, complex systems. Along
with baseball and deep-frying, management is one of our great
national pastimes. The world's first MBAs were awarded by
pioneering yuppie factories such as the Wharton School at the
University of Pennsylvania. (Wharton's founding in 1881 was
quickly followed by the world's first time-share summer houses
in the Hamptons.) Henry Ford's revolutionary assembly line was
the gold standard in global manufacturing for decades.
Contemporary American institutions stand for excellence in
managing everything from supply chains (Wal-Mart) to delivery
services (Federal Express and UPS).
Americans' ability to manage complex systems has been the
ultimate competitive advantage. It has allowed the United States
to enjoy high growth and low inflation—a record we haven't
hesitated to lord over our foreign friends. The shelves in the
business section of a bookstore in a mall in Johannesburg, South
Africa, are stocked with the same volumes you'll find in a
Barnes & Noble in Pittsburgh, Pa.: memoirs by cornfed paragons
of capitalism like Jack Welch, wealth-building advice from
American money managers, large tomes on how Andrew
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller built global businesses from
scratch.
But now, thanks to widespread incompetence, American
management is on its way to becoming an international
laughingstock. Faith in American financial sobriety has been
widely undermined by the subprime mess. The very mention of
the strong-dollar policy now elicits raucous bouts of kneeslapping in even the most sober Swiss banks. (How do you say
schadenfreude in German?) Earlier this month, as oil hovered
near $100 a barrel, President Bush complained to OPEC about
high oil prices. OPEC President Chakib Khelil responded acidly
that crude's remarkable run had nothing to do with the reluctance
of Persian Gulf nations to pump oil, and everything to do with
the "mismanagement of the U.S. economy." Since Bush's plea,
oil has gushed to $110 per barrel. (How do you say
schadenfreude in Arabic?)
Americans abroad are constantly taunted by perceived failings of
American management. America's aviation system is now the
butt of jokes because 9-year-olds have become accustomed to
removing their Heelys before boarding a plane. As my family
and I passed through the snaking security line in Cancún,
Mexico's airport last month, we were harangued by a security
guard who encouraged tourists to sing along with him: "Please.
Do not. Remove. Your shoes."
The concern extends beyond airlines to America's industrial
complex. Doubtful of the ability of provincial American
executives, with their limited language skills, to negotiate
today's global business environment, the boards of massive U.S.
firms like Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, Alcoa, and insurer AIG have
hired foreign-born CEOs. Carl Icahn, the 1980s corporate raider,
has reinvented himself as a borscht-belt comedian/activist
investor, who delights conferences and reporters with jokes at
CEOs' expense. On a recent 60 Minutes, Icahn complained to
Lesley Stahl about the incompetence of American management.
"I see our country going off a cliff, and I feel bad about it."
Icahn is moping all the way to the bank. The market's
recognition of management failures gives him the opportunities
to acquire companies on the cheap. But those of us who aren't
billionaire corporate raiders—which is to say pretty much all of
us—must manage through this management crisis on our own.
movies
Drillbit Taylor
Owen Wilson, Judd Apatow, and Seth Rogen team up for some nonfun.
By Dana Stevens
Thursday, March 20, 2008, at 6:08 PM ET
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In Drillbit Taylor (Paramount Pictures), produced by Judd
Apatow, co-written by Seth Rogen and Kristofor Brown, and
starring Owen Wilson, the career trajectories of three comic
talents converge to dispiriting effect. It's Apatow's fourth project
in the madly prolific year since his megahit Knocked Up,
Rogen's second outing as a writer since the critically wellreceived Superbad, and the last movie Owen Wilson made
before his suicide attempt. I'm not suggesting that there was a
connection between those two events for Wilson, but if you were
already considering ending it all, having the Drillbit Taylor
script by your bedside wouldn't help.
The setup—three nerdy high-school freshmen hire a homeless
man to protect them against a school bully—sounds unpromising
but not hopeless. It's the slipshod and joyless execution that
makes the whole affair so grim. Rogen is like a high-school
English student trying to get away with plagiarizing his own
book report. The central trio is directly cribbed from Superbad,
released only seven months ago. Wade (Nate Hartley) is the
Michael Cera, the shy, skinny kid with a painful crush on an outof-his-league girl. Ryan (Troy Gentile) is the Jonah Hill, the fat
loudmouth. And Emmit (David Dorfman) is the Christopher
Mintz-Plasse, the guy so desperately geeky that even the dork set
shuns him. Tortured by a sadistic upperclassman, Filkins (Alex
Frost), the three decide to pool their allowances and hire a
bodyguard.
After one of those loony-job-interview montages that (along
with makeover montages and getting-in-shape montages) must
be produced in bulk and stocked in studio warehouses, the boys
choose Bob "Drillbit" Taylor (Wilson), an AWOL Army vet
who passes himself off as a black-ops expert. He pretends to
train the boys in martial arts and mind control, all the while
scheming with his homeless buddies to rob the boys' homes and
pawn their parents' stuff.
I could go on to detail the process by which Drillbit infiltrates
the school posing as a substitute teacher, romances a fellow
faculty member (Leslie Mann), and comes to realize that he
needs the boys as much as they need him. But let me just freeze
the frame for a second: Homeless Army vet, living alone in tent,
conspires to deceive and steal from children. This is a comedy?
It's not that a would-be funny movie—even one aimed at
preteens, as this is—shouldn't be allowed to deal in unsavory
characters or depressing social realities. But Drillbit Taylor
seems oblivious to the fact that homelessness is depressing or
burglary unsavory. Drillbit's marginalized social status—he
grabs unclaimed food off cafe tables and leaves a smell behind
wherever he goes—passes for a character quirk. Even after the
kids learn their mentor is homeless, they seem unconcerned with
finding out how and why he gets by. They just keep showing up
at his tent in the woods for more judo lessons.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
This obliviousness is an ongoing problem in Apatow's films,
which invite the criticism by presenting themselves as moral
fables: The seriousness of his characters' mistakes often seems to
exceed the penance they pay. In other words, they get off the
hook too easy. Remember the scene in Superbad where MintzPlasse's character, McLovin, shot at a flaming police car with the
two rogue cops who had just totaled it? There was something so
disturbing and frightening about that moment, an all-out
fulfillment of a teenage boy's fantasy of lawless destruction, that
I thought the movie might take an unexpectedly dark turn.
Instead, it soon became clear that McLovin's adventure was
exactly what he perceived it to be: a really rad night on the town.
Here, both Drillbit's crimes (lying, theft) and the boys'
(indifference to their friend's living conditions) are absolved too
quickly in an implausible and fraudulent happy ending.
Though I didn't love Superbad (except for the brilliant Michael
Cera), its profane put-downs sound like Noel Coward next to the
lame sallies offered in Drillbit. Rogen can be an ingenious writer
of individual lines, but he has yet to develop a sense of story
structure. Drillbit Taylor is slackly paced and rife with
questionable logic. (What's the older bully doing in a freshman
English class?) As for Owen Wilson, I'm not going to be too
hard on him for dusting off his golden-boy shtick yet again for
this limp frolic. Last year, I wrote a piece musing on the Wilson
brothers' midcareer slump. Learning a few months later of
Owen's troubles, I regretted having added to the pile. But
reading a summary of Owen's next project, Marley & Me (an
adaptation of the best-selling book about a "couple that adopts a
dog to give parenthood a trial run, then finds the mischievous
pooch more than they bargained for"), makes me want to mail
him a copy of Siddhartha and send him on a vision quest. Did
this smart, handsome, talented man really go to hell and back
just to make a romantic comedy with a dog?
movies
Truly, Madly, Sadly
Anthony Minghella's best movie was his first one.
By Dana Stevens
Wednesday, March 19, 2008, at 1:15 PM ET
Anthony Minghella, the British director and screenwriter who
died of a brain hemorrhage yesterday at the age of 54, will
probably be remembered for his 1996 film, The English Patient,
which won nine Academy Awards, including best director and
best picture. At the time, that sweep was seen as heralding a new
age of recognition for smaller, independent films at the Oscars—
a theory that held water about as long as Titanic, which came
along to claim the top honors the very next year.
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But even if The English Patient didn't single-handedly end the
reign of the award-grabbing blockbuster, it does look, in
retrospect, like a turning point for international-prestige cinema.
Like the next two films Minghella would write and direct, The
Talented Mr. Ripley and Cold Mountain, it was a glossy, hightoned literary adaptation with a handsome international cast,
intelligent without being inaccessible, middlebrow without being
dumb. Minghella was sometimes compared to David Lean, the
British director of epics like Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor
Zhivago. He specialized in lush, sweeping historical dramas that
you could feel good about taking your grandmother to see on
Christmas Day, even if their subject matter (the memories of a
Nazi collaborator, the machinations of a murderous identity
thief) could be forbiddingly dark.
Because he died with decades of work still ahead of him, we'll
never know whether Minghella would have made another movie
with the lasting power of his first one, Truly, Madly, Deeply, a
1990 made-for-television comedy that was successful enough to
gain a big-screen release and a BAFTA for Best Original
Screenplay. The story of a grief-stricken pianist (Juliet
Stevenson) whose cellist lover (Alan Rickman) comes back from
the dead to hang around the house they once shared, Truly,
Madly, Deeply is on my semisecret list of all-time favorite
movies. Semisecret because I don't know that I could entirely
defend the choice: It's not as if the film is formally innovative or
visually impressive or thematically original. It's just so damn
wonderful.
The ghost who comes back to help his or her loved ones mourn
is a familiar figure, from Hamlet to Ghost (also released in 1990)
to such recent grotesqueries as P.S. I Love You. But Truly,
Madly, Deeply manages to make that familiarity feel less like a
cliché than a profoundly resonant archetype. The scene in which
Rickman's character, Jamie, first appears to Nina (Stevenson) is
an example of how Minghella tweaks a formula to evoke the
agony of real grief. As the bereft Nina sits playing the piano, the
camera revolves to reveal the blurred outline of Jamie sitting
behind her, accompanying her on his cello. At first we take this
as a familiar bit of cinematic syntax: Jamie isn't really there,
we're just seeing a symbol of Nina's memory of him. Any minute
now, she'll snap her head around and see only an empty chair.
Instead, Jamie puts down his cello and moves out of the frame
himself, confirming the viewer's assumption: His presence was
just a figment of her imagination. The camera then pans a little
to left to reveal the unambiguously real Jamie, and we realize at
the same moment Nina does that the man she buried months ago
is standing in her living room. What follows is a reunion scene
that, even in this decontextualized and blurry clip, should reduce
anyone who's ever loved and lost—or even just loved—to a
quivering jelly.
Minghella started his career as a stage director, and his touch
with actors is palpable in every scene of Truly, Madly, Deeply.
Rickman and Stevenson, both extraordinary performers, are
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
given the freedom to improvise in scenes like this one, in which
she dances around the living room as they belt out a decidedly
amateur version of "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore." The
result is an on-screen romance of unusual texture and intimacy.
By the time Jamie is ready to rejoin the world of the shades, you
sense the true magnitude of what both he and Nina have lost
(and if you're me, you've also developed a debilitating, lifelong
crush on Alan Rickman).
Over the years, I've discovered that there's a kind of secret cult
for Truly, Madly, Deeply. People who have no clue who
Anthony Minghella is can passionately quote great chunks of
dialogue from this film. The movie's potent appeal isn't
surprising; how many psychologically accurate portraits of grief
also hold up as romantic comedies that are both funny and madly
romantic? I've recommended Truly, Madly, Deeply to friends
mourning their own losses as a kind of homeopathic remedy.
And I have one friend who watched it with his ailing wife only
weeks before she died, both of them laughing and crying as they
wondered what kind of ghost she would be.
The British film industry is still stunned by the unexpected and
early death of Anthony Minghella, who was an important figure
there; he held the title of commander of the British Empire and
was, until recently, the chairman of the British Film Institute.
Minghella also leaves behind a wife and two children. (His 22year-old son, Max Minghella, has acted in several films,
including Syriana and Art School Confidential.) It might make
Minghella happy to know that those still figuring out how to
mourn him can turn to his own best movie for advice.
other magazines
The Women's (Stalled) Movement
Portfolio on how female workers are losing ground.
By Morgan Smith
Tuesday, March 18, 2008, at 2:46 PM ET
Portfolio, April 2008
The cover story claims women's advances in the workplace have
stalled. Despite improvement in the 1980s in the gap between
men and women's pay, "gains since then have been partly erased
by a drop every few years." For instance, female lawyers'
salaries are dropping in relation to their male counterparts': In
2006, they made 70.5 percent of what male lawyers make,
compared with 77.5 in 2005. Determining the reason for the
slowdown is "tricky"—some sources believe the current
obstacles are "more subtle and therefore harder to overcome"
and that the "popular perception is that women have made it, so
there's nothing to discuss." … A piece investigates allegations
that art dealer Larry Salander could be behind one of the "most
massive art frauds in history," in which more than $100 million
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worth of loans, art, and investments has gone missing. The
emergent scandal partly reflects the changing nature of the art
world, which is now dominated by investors not interested in
connoisseurship, who "simply [buy] art … in vogue and likely to
turn a profit."
The New Yorker, March 24
A disturbing piece profiles Sabrina Harman, who took the nowiconic photograph of the wired, hooded detainee standing on a
box at Abu Ghraib. Harman, an Army M.P. stationed there, says
many of her colleagues there photographed prisoners and
corpses. According to the piece, that the M.P.s took photographs
demonstrated "that they never fully accepted what was
happening as normal, and that they assumed they had nothing to
hide." Harman wrote home, "[I]ts awful and you know how
fucked I am in the head. Both sides of me think it wrong. I
thought I could handle anything. I was wrong." … After the
latest spate of memoirist scandals, an essay investigates the
parallel between fiction and history writing in the 18 th century. It
observes, "Historians and novelists are kin … but they're more
like brothers who throw food at each other than like sisters who
borrow each other's clothes."
Weekly Standard, March 24
Barack Obama is this week's cover boy, with an article that
parses the origins and meanings of the eloquent candidate's
favorite expressions. The piece objects to "the creepy kind of
solipsism and the air of self-congratulation that clings to his
campaign." In addition to the Deval Patrick fracas of a few news
cycles ago, there's another appropriated bit of rhetoric: "We are
the ones we have been waiting for." It's the title of an Alice
Walker book of essays; she got it from a June Jordan poem. …
While weighing in on the Spitzer scandal, a commentary
concludes with this zinger: "Some of his old supporters on the
left, wallowing in their glorious hopes for him, are calling
Spitzer's fall a tragedy. They are wrong. Tragedy requires an
initial nobility of purpose."
New York, March 24
An article in the inevitable Spitzer cover package shares the
reactions of the former governor's staff and friends to the news
that he visited prostitutes. One friend comments: "It was very
funny, reading the affidavit from the woman. Client 9 was
clearly Eliot. It was very much him, his personality: the
micromanagement of what train she takes! The language! It was
just spot-on." … Another piece revels in the connection between
the former governor and Jason Itzler, the self-dubbed "King of
All Pimps." Itzler served two and a half years in prison, in part
because of Spitzer's anti-prostitution crusades—but Itzler claims
he "discovered" Ashley Alexandra Dupré and launched her in
the business. … Ariel Levy probes Silda Spitzer's decision to
attend the press conference and notes that "she will not have the
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
consolation of her own career as she comes to terms with the
man she gave it up for."
Newsweek, March 24
The cover package on Iraq surveys the country on the five-year
anniversary of the invasion. A piece reflects on the challenges of
the new kind of warfare, advocated by Gen. Petraeus, which
requires soldiers to "reach out and ally themselves with men who
have tried and often succeeded in killing their own" and "to learn
to operate amid moral ambiguity, to acknowledge the legitimate
aspirations of their enemies." … Another article looks at the
competing philosophies on how the military should prepare for
future conflicts. It notes that the armed forces must "be able to
fight 'big wars' against rising powers like China" but also "small,
asymmetrical conflicts against determined partisans with wicked
low-tech weapons like IEDs." … A piece investigates the plight
of Asian workers in Malaysia, where factory owners are allowed
by law to mistreat employees from abroad. Workers lured with
false promises pay thousands to "brokers" to place them in
Malaysian firms, where their employers keep their passports and
threaten them with canings and deportation if they report the
difficult conditions.
poem
"planting daffodils"
By Charlotte Boulay
Tuesday, March 18, 2008, at 7:35 AM ET
Listen to Charlotte Boulay read .
*******The Friar tells her, drink this
potion and for a time you will be
as dead.***What? she says,
*Are you kidding? Only the earth
knows that faith. But this love is of the earth,
so when she sleeps, it's in darkness,
******a round weight curled in a papery shroud.
This fall, digging little graves, I can smell
******winter approaching like the war
that already rages, not with drumbeats and shots
but more ominously silent, a great lack
of lucidity and grace.****Too soon,
*******deaths have begun:
fruit clipped by frost, a bird limp
by the mailbox in the morning, the flaming
*leaves—don't be distracted; we're blighting
landscapes one by one.
*******It's hard to believe
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that everything resurrects itself in time
***some things with more reliability than others.
So is a rooted bulb a record
of a promise kept through winter. This is the truth we only half
believe:**that each hoary, twinned sprout becomes,
in the moment before she sees him,
*Juliet, waking to a clasp of arms,
*******yellow trumpets crying.
politics
Slate's Delegate Calculator


With revotes unlikely in Michigan and Florida, Hillary Clinton's hope is fading.
By Chadwick Matlin and Chris Wilson
Friday, March 21, 2008, at 10:17 AM ET
The signs coming out of Florida and Michigan are dire for
Hillary Clinton. Neither state, it now appears, is going to hold a
revote, which means the delegations probably will not be seated
at the convention unless Obama is well ahead in delegates. Their
exclusion from the convention also keeps the total delegates
available below 4,050, which means Hillary has less wiggle
room to chip away at Obama's lead.
As of now, she would need to win each remaining state by 28
points to catch Obama in pledged delegates. That's a Herculean
task, and even an average margin of victory of 14 points is
difficult because of Obama's strengths in North Carolina,
Oregon, Montana, and South Dakota. The light at the end of the
tunnel has disappeared from Hillary's already-bleak path to
pledged delegate supremacy.
But Clinton isn't careening off the rails yet. She's still convinced
she can sway enough superdelegates to make up her pledged
delegate margin of defeat. That's also doubtful considering
Obama will hold leads in the number of states won, the pledged
delegate tallies, and—most likely—the popular vote. If you're a
die-hard Clintonista and don't believe us, play with the new and
improved Delegate Calculator below to see for yourself.
Methodology


The current number of pledged delegates comes from
NBC News' tally.
We estimate the number of delegates based on the
overall state vote, even though delegates are awarded
by congressional district as well. We felt comfortable
making this approximation because in the primaries
through Mississippi, there was only a 2.9 percent
deviation between the percentage of the overall vote
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

and the percentage of delegates awarded in primaries.
The proportion of delegates awarded by congressional
district, therefore, does not differ greatly from the
statewide breakdown.
The calculator now includes options to enable Florida
and Michigan. When you check the boxes next to either
or both states, you'll notice that the overall number of
delegates needed for the nomination changes. With
Florida and/or Michigan involved, there are more total
delegates to go around, so the number needed for a
majority rises. Our calculator assumes that the DNC
will allow both states to retain their entire pledged
delegation, and not punish the states by halving their
delegate totals like the RNC did.
The calculator does not incorporate superdelegates into
its calculations. Superdelegates are unpledged and
uncommitted and therefore can change their
endorsements and convention votes at any time. As a
result, we've simply noted at the bottom of the
calculator how many superdelegates the leading
candidate needs to win the nomination in a given
scenario.
All of the calculator's formulas and data come from
Jason Furman, the director of the Hamilton Project at
the Brookings Institution.
politics
Campaign Junkie
The election trail starts here.
Friday, March 21, 2008, at 10:16 AM ET
politics
Why Did We Get It Wrong?
Five years on, "liberal hawks" consider their support for the Iraq war.
Thursday, March 20, 2008, at 6:57 AM ET
To mark the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Slate has
asked a number of writers who originally supported the war to
answer the question, "Why did we get it wrong?" We have
invited contributions from the best-known "liberal hawks," many
of whom participated in two previous Slate debates about the
war, the first before it began in fall of 2002, the second in early
2004.
"How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? Wrong question. How did Mary
McGrory and Barack Obama get Iraq right?" by Timothy Noah.
Posted March 20, 2008.
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"How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I didn't realize how incompetent
the Bush administration could be," by Jeffrey Goldberg. Posted
March 19, 2008.
"How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? Rather than bore you with the
answer, here are lessons from the experience," by William
Saletan. Posted March 19, 2008.
"How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I'm proud of my service there, but
now it's time for us to leave," by Phillip Carter. Posted March
18, 2008.
"How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I forgot that security must come
first if democracy is to come later," by Josef Joffe. Posted March
18, 2008.
"How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I thought we had a chance to
stabilize an unstable region, and—I admit it—I wanted to strike
back," by Richard Cohen. Posted March 18, 2008.
"How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I trusted Colin Powell and his
circumstantial evidence—for a little while," by Fred Kaplan.
Posted March 17, 2008.
"How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I underestimated the selfcenteredness and sectarianism of the ruling elite and the social
impact of 30 years of extreme dictatorship," by Kanan Makiya.
Posted March 17, 2008. (Kanan Makiya chatted online with
readers about this article; read the transcript.)
"How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I didn't," by Christopher Hitchens.
Posted March 17, 2008.
politics
How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?
Wrong question. How did Mary McGrory and Barack Obama get Iraq right?
By Timothy Noah
Thursday, March 20, 2008, at 6:55 AM ET
How did I get Iraq wrong?
I was a Johnny-come-lately to supporting the Iraq war,
persuaded in the eleventh hour by Colin Powell's famous speech
to the United Nations laying out the "evidence" that Saddam
Hussein had stockpiled chemical and biological weapons in
violation of U.N. Resolution 687. (Then, as now, I eschewed the
misleading propaganda term weapons of mass destruction.) In
fact, we all learned later, Saddam hadn't stockpiled these
weapons. What can I say? Powell was duped, I was duped, and
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
other, more seasoned journalists (including the late Mary
McGrory, who wrote one of her last columns about the speech)
were duped, too. My column "Chatterbox Goes to War" is
painful to read five years later, and not only because it contains
the fatuous pronouncement, "No honest person can dispute, after
reviewing Powell's satellite photos and telephone intercepts, that
Iraq still has" chemical and biological weapons. The painful
truth is that even if those words had been true, they wouldn't
have constituted an airtight case for invading Iraq.
Far less forgivable, in retrospect, than my smug certainty that
Iraq possessed dangerous weapons was my reasoning that this
offense left us no alternative to war. We had to invade, I wrote,
"because the Bush administration and the United Nations threw
down the gauntlet." Had the Bush administration kept secret the
"evidence" that Iraq had ignored our warning, I argued, it would
have been preferable to resolve the matter diplomatically. But
since the "evidence" was now common knowledge, the United
States was obliged to bear arms in defense of its own credibility.
In essence, I concluded that the Bush administration had
compelled me to support the invasion by maneuvering my
country into what felt like an untenable position. What I've
learned, and will try to remember from now on, is that defending
your country's credibility is never sufficient reason to fight a
war.
I'd much rather, dear reader, that you read my columns prior to
"Chatterbox Goes to War," in which I knocked down various
arguments proffered by the hawks. (See, for example, this
column, and this one, and this one, and this one, and this one.)
These have worn much better. A larger question, though: Why
should you waste your time, at this late date, ingesting the
opinions of people who were wrong about Iraq? Wouldn't you
benefit more from considering the views of people who were
right? Five years after this terrible war began, it remains true
that respectable mainstream discussion about its lessons is nearly
exclusively confined to people who supported the war, even
though that same mainstream acknowledges, for the most part,
that the war was a mistake. That's true of Slate's symposium, and
it was true of a similar symposium that appeared March 16 on
the New York Times' op-ed pages. The people who opposed U.S.
entry into the Iraq war, it would appear, are insufficiently
"serious" to explain why they were right.
Fortunately, this Lewis Carroll logic hasn't prevailed where it
matters most: in the race for the Democratic nomination. The
front-runner, Barack Obama, is winning primary votes partly on
the strength of his having opposed the Iraq invasion. Another
person who ultimately proved right on Iraq is Mary McGrory.
Yes, she got conned along with the rest of us about Saddam's
purported stockpile, but if you read her follow-up columns,
you'll realize that she never took the next step and declared
herself in favor of war. In her Feb. 13 column, she wrote:
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[E]veryone needs a respite from the encircling apprehension and
dread. Beginning with the president, all should take a deep
breath and reassess. Colin Powell is working overtime to close
the loop on Iraq's ties to al Qaeda. In his masterly U.N. speech
he made the case against Saddam Hussein, but not the case for
war. He needs a rest. The orange alert has worn everybody out.
McGrory repeated this sentiment in her March 6 column,
addressed to readers who'd misconstrued her Powell column. A
couple of weeks later, McGrory suffered a stroke, and 13 months
later she died. But she leaves behind a lovely anthology, edited
by her friend Phil Gailey. It can be read more profitably than this
pile of tired mea culpas.
politics
How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?
I didn't realize how incompetent the Bush administration could be.
By Jeffrey Goldberg
Wednesday, March 19, 2008, at 2:48 PM ET
How did I get Iraq wrong?
Well, for one thing, I trusted the Germans. Those who know me
will find this statement somewhat ironic, but there it is.
I trusted one German in particular. His name was August
Hanning. In the run-up to the war, he was the chief of the BND,
the German foreign-intelligence agency. I met him shortly
before the war at the new chancellery building opposite the
Reichstag in Berlin. He was spectrally thin and exceedingly
sober. His briefcase was the size of a microwave oven. I pictured
many consequential documents sequestered inside.
Despite his cautious nature, Hanning neither hemmed nor hawed
when I raised the subject of Saddam's nuclear program: "It is our
estimate that Iraq will have an atomic bomb in three years," he
said, on the record and for attribution.
Apart from Kenneth Pollack's book The Threatening Storm,
nothing did more to convince me of the national-security
necessity of the Iraq war than Hanning's statement. The BND
had apparently developed a good deal of information about what
was happening inside Iraq, in part because German companies,
especially those that manufactured so-called dual-use products—
ones that had both civilian and military applications—did
disproportionate business in Baghdad. And Hanning seemed
particularly credible to me because his analysis so obviously cut
against the desires of his bosses. Then-Chancellor Gerhard
Schröder was vociferously opposed to armed intervention in
Iraq. Hanning, in other words, was behaving in precisely the
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
manner in which intelligence analysts should behave. He laid out
the truth as he saw it, taking no notice of the personal
consequences. To Schröder's credit, Hanning was allowed to
share his intelligence with the CIA, and by doing so he helped
buttress the Anglo-American case for war.
He was, of course, wrong. Did this make him a liar? No. It made
him an intelligence official. Did this make Gerhard Schröder
smart? No. It made him lucky. August Hanning was a smart,
honest man who made a mistake.
If one of my mistakes was to trust men like August Hanning,
another larger mistake was to put my trust in the Bush
administration, not so much on matters of intelligence—faulty
intelligence was a near-universal phenomenon—but on matters
of basic competence. I will admit to a prejudice here: I
believed—note the tense, please—that Republicans were by
nature ruthless, unsentimental, efficient, and, most of all,
preoccupied with winning. It simply never occurred to me that
Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney would allow themselves to
lose a war. Which is what they have very nearly done.
The scales fell from my eyes gradually. There was one moment,
though—well after the replacement of Saddam's evil regime by
the chaos of the Bush regime—that I recall as the end of this
particular illusion. I was interviewing Paul Wolfowitz, who was
then the deputy secretary of defense, at the New School in New
York, as part of the New Yorker Festival in the fall of 2003. The
audience was excessively unruly; various protesters were ejected
from the hall, some after shouting "Sieg Heil" at Wolfowitz. One
of these self-marginalizing protesters actually did a running
goose step down the aisle until he was tackled by police officers.
It felt, at certain moments, as if we had become trapped in a
guerrilla theater production of The Producers.
This is all by way of explaining that, considering his audience,
Wolfowitz did a credible job of keeping his head. But he did not
instill a feeling that the administration had a plan in place to
manage the Middle East. The key moment came when I asked
Wolfowitz whether it was possible that newly democratized
Arab countries could wind up voting Islamists into power.
Wolfowitz responded, "Look, 50 percent of the Arab world are
women. Most of those women do not want to live in a theocratic
state. The other 50 percent are men. I know a lot of them. I don't
think they want to live in a theocratic state."
Shit, I thought.
What the world is confronting five years after the invasion—the
mess that Gen. David Petraeus is attempting to clean up today—
was almost entirely preventable. It's not only my encounters,
inside Iraq and outside, with senior figures of the Bush
administration that have convinced me of this; the investigations
conducted by George Packer, Tom Ricks, Bob Woodward, and
Michael Gordon, among others, have unearthed thousands—
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literally thousands—of mistakes made by this administration,
most of which were avoidable.
Which makes the last five years a tragic waste. I wanted very
much for the liberation of Iraq to succeed, for many reasons. I
wasn't sure there was an alternative to Saddam's removal, in part
because the sanctions regime was collapsing. I believed that
Saddam's nuclear ambitions posed an almost immediate threat to
national security. I believed that Saddam was a supporter of
terrorism. The report on Saddam's terrorist ties released last
week by the Joint Forces Command confirms this (not that you
would know it from the scant press coverage of the study). The
study, citing captured Iraqi documents, indicates that Saddam's
regime supported various jihadist groups, including Ayman alZawahiri's, and including Kurdish Islamist groups, about whom I
have reported. But read the study for yourself; it's actually quite
an achievement of translation and analysis.
Mainly, I believed in the human-rights case for armed
intervention. I had spent a good deal of time with Saddam's
victims before the war—the Kurds especially—and I had been
radicalized by what I learned about the crimes committed against
them. I have always sympathized with John Burns' position: He
argued, at the outset of the war, that Saddam's regime of torture,
rape, and genocide gave cause enough for intervention, without
confusing the case with arguments about weapons of mass
destruction and terrorism.
My Atlantic colleague Andrew Sullivan and I have argued over
the notion that travel can actually narrow the mind. I believe in
reporting, but I also believe that I was somewhat blinded by my
rage at the genocide Saddam perpetrated against Kurdistan. It is
difficult to stay neutral on the question of intervention after
visiting the survivors of Halabja, Goktapa, and other towns and
villages that had been attacked with chemical weapons by
Saddam's air force.
This is why I find it impossible to denounce a war that led to the
removal of a genocidal dictator. To borrow from Samantha
Power, the phrase "never again" has in recent years come to
mean "Never again will we allow the Germans to kill the Jews in
the 1940s." The Holocaust proved that the world is a brutal place
for small peoples, and it defines for me the nonnegotiable
requirements of a moral civilization: to be absolutely intolerant
of dictators who have committed documented genocides. The
tragedy of this war—one of its tragedies—is that its immorally
incompetent execution has, for the foreseeable future,
undermined this idea. I believe, for instance, that Darfur
demands our armed intervention, but we are now paralyzed
because of the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq
occupation.
A long time ago, I was certain that the Iraq invasion would be
seen as a moral victory. Most Americans quite obviously do not
see it this way. But on my last trip to Iraq, four months ago, I
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
learned that many of Saddam's victims continue to see the
invasion as a triumph of justice. The Kurds, who make up nearly
20 percent of Iraq, remain, by and large, quite pleased with the
Anglo-American invasion, which removed from their collective
neck a regime that did an excellent job over the years of
murdering them. This must count for something, and I'm hopeful
that one day, when President Bush is gone and the Kurds are
free, it will.
politics
How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?
Rather than bore you with the answer, here are lessons from the experience.
By William Saletan
Wednesday, March 19, 2008, at 2:05 PM ET
You're not my shrink, so I see no reason to bore you with the
story of how yet another sorry pundit came to endorse, and later
regret, the invasion of Iraq. Instead, I'll try to draw some lessons
from the experience. I particularly want to talk to those of you
who, like me, would like to understand the errors of this war
without renouncing the use of force altogether. "I don't oppose
all wars," Barack Obama declared six years ago. "What I am
opposed to is a dumb war." Let's try to flesh out that distinction.
1. Question authority. That's what the Quakers taught me in
college. But you don't have to be a pacifist to see how it applies
to Iraq. The U.S. government deceived itself and us about the
evidence of WMD. I'm a bit too young, or just too poorly read in
history, to have absorbed Vietnam's lessons about trusting your
government. So I learned it the hard way. I hope my kids don't
have to go through another dumb war to get the same lesson.
2. Suspicion can become gullibility. I'm all for suspicion,
particularly in foreign relations. The world is full of bad people,
and bad people are more likely to claw their way to power in
other countries than good people are. But past a certain point,
suspicion can make you credulous. This is what happened to
Dick Cheney. He was so suspicious of Saddam that he bought—
and spread—rumors, lies, and exaggerations about Iraqi WMD.
Worse, he failed to recognize his credulity, since he thought he
was being suspicious. The next time somebody feeds you rumors
in the name of vigilance, remember this.
3. Beware mission creep. Originally, I endorsed the use of force
to put teeth in U.N. weapons inspections. I figured that the best
long-term hope for a peaceful world was an enforceable
international system to police WMD. Saddam was jerking
around the inspectors. He had to be punished, or the system,
such as it was, would collapse. That rationale remains valid even
if the scofflaw turns out not to have WMD. But if that was the
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rationale for going in, why disband the Iraqi army? Remaking
Iraq was more than the offense justified and more than we could
handle. Bush's dad had it right in the Gulf War: Right the wrong,
punish the offense, and stop.
4. See new evil. It's easy to hate the tyrant who's thumbing his
nose at you. It's harder to see the possibility or likelihood of a
worse alternative behind him. I never really thought through the
chain of events that would fill the power vacuum created by
Saddam's ouster. Neither did Bush. We ended up with
insurgency, chaos, and the arrival of "al-Qaida in Iraq," which
John McCain now cites as a threat so grave we have to keep
scores of thousands of U.S. troops in the country. Before you
take out somebody bad, make sure the result won't be worse.
requires, because we wasted our resources in Iraq. Americans,
having been suckered in Iraq, won't accept evidence of Iran's
nuclear program. Countries that might have supported us in a
strike on Iran won't do so now, since we led them astray. Our
coffers have been emptied to pay for the Iraq occupation. Our
troops are physically and spiritually exhausted. In the name of
strength, Bush has made us weak.
I wish I'd absorbed these lessons before the war. The best I can
do now is remember them before the next one.
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5. Human nature at home is human nature abroad.
Conservatives have long preached the dangers of dependency.
The more government props up and regulates people, the less
they learn to support and regulate themselves. Experience tells
me that this principle is true. The problem is that conservatives
forgot it at the water's edge. They propped up Iraqi society and
government. Each time the Iraqis failed to meet scheduled
requirements to regulate and support themselves, Bush made
excuses and said they needed more American help. The party of
welfare reform should look back in amazement and shame at this
policy.
6. Judge the warrior. For two years, I had a running debate
with my friend David Corn about the war. From our respective
seats on the TV show Eye on Washington, he criticized the war
while I defended it. We agreed that Bush was a fool. He argued
that this flaw was decisive: I had to decide whether to support
Bush's war, not the war as I might have preferred it. I replied that
liberals shouldn't oppose the war just because Bush was running
it. Eventually, I realized that the idea of nonpartisanship meant
little next to the lethal reality of incompetence. Corn was right:
You have to decide whether you trust the administration, not just
the idea of the war. Other Republican administrations have
passed that test. Not this one.
7. Know your limits. During Kosovo, I defended NATO's
decision to bomb from the air instead of sending ground troops.
"By depriving Serbia of the ability to kill allied soldiers, NATO
leaders demoralized Serb commanders who had counted on body
bags to demoralize citizens in the West," I wrote. "By taking into
account the limits of its own will—the will to endure pain—
NATO broke Serbia's." In Iraq, I ignored that lesson. So did
Bush. He inserted U.S. ground troops and left them there,
inviting a parade of body bags that demoralized our nation.
8. Consider the opportunity cost. The problem with dumb war
isn't that it's war. The problem is that it costs you the military,
economic, and political resources to fight a smart war.
Everything Bush wrongly attributed to Iraq turns out to be true
of Iran. But we can't confront Iran with the force it probably
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?
I'm proud of my service there, but now it's time for us to leave.
By Phillip Carter
Tuesday, March 18, 2008, at 6:40 PM ET
In 2002, I believed the intelligence painting Iraq as an imminent
threat and supported our invasion. In 2003 and 2004, I worried
about the growing insurgency and grew dismayed at our
counterproductive tactics and strategy, but I still felt the war was
a worthy cause.
In 2005, I volunteered to deploy to Iraq as an Army captain—
partly because of an implicit threat of involuntary recall, partly
because I felt a call to duty, and partly because I felt guilty for
not serving when so many of my friends and former comradesin-arms had done so (often multiple times). I went to Iraq in
October 2005 and served a year there as an adviser to the Iraqi
police in Baqubah, the provincial capital of Iraq's volatile Diyala
province. I remain proud of what we accomplished. In our little
corner of the war, I think we made a difference by training the
police, equipping them, mentoring their leaders, and doing what
we could to promote the rule of law. Small victories, to be sure,
but enough to make us feel our sacrifices had been for something
meaningful.
But I came home in September 2006 frustrated with the strategic
direction of the war and alienated from the country that sent me
there. I saw our failures to secure the country and build a new
Iraq as proof of the limits of military power—and a sign that
America was not omnipotent. Over a beer near Times Square in
October 2006, I told George Packer (who had been embedded
with my adviser team earlier that year in Baqubah) that I thought
the war was now "unwinnable"—and that we must implement an
adviser-centric strategy. I felt then, and feel today, that
America's strategic interests require it to leave Iraq and that the
best way to responsibly withdraw was to increasingly put Iraqis
in charge of their own counterinsurgency campaign, with U.S.
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forces nearby to keep a lid on ethno-sectarian violence and
continue the fight against al-Qaida in Mesopotamia.
A month later, I received news that soured my feelings toward
Iraq and the war there even more. To help my team advise the
police and navigate Iraq's legal system, I had enlisted Dr. Thaer
Kudier al-Qasi, a former Iraqi law professor who spoke five
languages and seemed to know every lawyer in Diyala. Thaer
took good care of me, teaching me what he could about Iraq,
even helping me learn a little Arabic. He believed in our cause,
too, and he wanted to build a better Iraq for his three sons. But
like many Iraqis, Thaer was fatalistic about his life and country.
He smoked compulsively, disdained wearing body armor, and
spoke publicly about his work helping U.S. forces. He told me
frequently that he was just acting out a play that had already
been written. In November 2006, he was kidnapped while
walking in Baqubah's central market, presumably by al-Qaida
insurgents. Neither the Americans nor his family heard from him
again.
I was crushed when I received news of Thaer's death in an email. I felt guilty for not doing more to protect him, guilty for
allowing Thaer to do so much public work for the rule of law
(many U.S. translators wear masks) because that work had made
him a target, guilty for not doing more to make Iraq safe, guilty
for not winning the war (whatever that means). Thaer's death
came to define the war for me. For months afterward, when I
looked at Iraq, I saw only death and suffering.
Now, five years into the war, I remain torn between my initial
support for the invasion, my frustrating experience as an Army
officer on the ground, and my skepticism that we can build a
viable Iraq. Security has improved, although it's not clear who or
what deserves credit. The current reduction in violence has made
the prospect of a stable Iraq seem possible, if not necessarily
probable, because of the Iraqi government's continuing
intransigence. But even if we had the patience and will to stay in
Iraq for a generation (and I doubt we have either), I think the
time has come to leave. The challenge will be to withdraw more
responsibly than we went in.
politics
The Full Obama
Barack Obama's sweeping speech on race.
By John Dickerson
Tuesday, March 18, 2008, at 3:16 PM ET
Can you give a State of the Union address before you're
president? Barack Obama talked about race in America for 45
minutes in a nearly 5,000-word speech. That was longer than
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
some of the annual presidential addresses, and though, yes, those
speeches tend to cover more topics, this one felt like it addressed
the actual state of our union more than those dreary January list
readings presidents are obligated to perform.
The speech was deeply personal. Barack Obama is America. He
contains multitudes. He started with the contradiction in the
Constitution that celebrated freedom but allowed slavery and
continued embracing and exploring contradictions throughout—
from his own complex heritage to the complex makeup of the
black church to the white immigrant experience. All of this was
in the service of addressing the contradiction that threatens to
derail his campaign: how he can embrace his former pastor and
denounce him at the same time.
Can Obama's speech of so many words blot out the YouTube
videos of his former pastor Jeremiah Wright saying "God damn
America"? It probably can't as a blunt political matter. Obama
didn't answer Wright's rebuke with an equally hot riposte. The
speech failed to address head-on Wright's damning of America
or any of his other remarks about 9/11 or AIDS. Obama asked
for points for political courage for not abandoning Wright, and
he should get them. Abandonment would have been more
expedient. White blue-collar men in Pennsylvania would have
applauded shoving Wright over, and his rock-solid black
supporters probably would have understood. But Obama's
courage didn't extend to directly taking on the words that have
caused such controversy.
Instead, Obama was cool and reasoned. At times he sounded like
he was giving a graduate lecture in need of editing both for
length and tone. He didn't need to refer to Geraldine Ferraro
twice. His speech was flying at 30,000 feet, and the dip to the
crass political level didn't feel right. It also seemed like a cheap
attempt to loop Wright and Ferraro with the same lasso,
suggesting a moral equivalence between a former
congresswoman's stupid remarks and the stone-cold preaching of
hate. Obama should have known that's how it would sound. For
a candidate who promises to reach across the aisle, Obama also
probably didn't help himself with Republicans by arguing that
Ronald Reagan profited from the white anger equivalent to the
black anger that gave rise to Wright's remarks.
Still, if you're a Democrat, I imagine Obama's speech probably
made you feel like you wanted him to be the one you cheer on
the convention stage in Denver. Hillary Clinton has been
claiming that his candidacy amounts to "just words"—and
making a pretty good case for it. Today was a speech, too, of
course, but it also showed the power of language to move people
to common understanding and to persuade, a key presidential
trait. It touched on a highly sensitive subject with art and skill
and called listeners to the same kind of collective action that
Obama has successfully sold all throughout the campaign. Even
if you didn't buy everything he said, you might be impressed
with a person who can take on such a subject so quickly with
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such scope. Obama managed to chart the topography of the
black church and failures within the African-American
community as well as put his finger on the elements of anger
that exist in the white community. Remember also that he did all
of this while in the middle of a sleep-stealing, gut-punching
presidential campaign, which is like writing the speech while
riding backward on a flaming unicycle.
Obama made several deft pivots in the speech, first seeking to
put Wright's remarks in context of the black experience without
excusing them and then pinpointing the sense of permanent
grievance that will always hold those with Wright's views back.
It was an attempt to go beyond simply condemning him but to
understand and learn from his paralysis. He then sought to do the
same for white anger about African-Americans. It was bold and
risky in a way that Obama often claims for his candidacy but
rarely achieves, and we got a glimpse of how his attempt to
bring people together works in practice rather than merely
having to take on faith his assertion that he can do so.
He closed his remarks just as expertly with a moving story about
a volunteer's selflessness—first in dealing with her cancerstricken mother and then by devoting her life to helping others—
that will likely make "I'm here because of Ashley" a rallying cry
for his campaign. I found myself wanting to find Ashley and
thank her.
needed way about his own falling short of his standards. It was
another contradiction.
politics
How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?
I forgot that security must come first if democracy is to come later.
By Josef Joffe
Tuesday, March 18, 2008, at 12:02 PM ET
"Why did we get it wrong?" is a loaded, indeed, leading
question—one that would not have been quite as loaded and
leading in 2004-06 as it is today. Those were the darkest days in
the life of post-Saddam Iraq, and they delivered the gravest
indictment against the Bush administration.
One year after George W. Bush's "mission accomplished"
speech, U.S. monthly casualties had doubled. By the end of
2006, daily attacks by insurgents and terrorists had quintupled.
Monthly multiple-fatality bombings had leapt tenfold from the
end of 2003 to the end of 2006. It was a perfect horror story—
and one that seemed to demonstrate in the bloodiest manner the
folly of Bush's war.
The penultimate clever pivot was maybe too clever, though. In
his speech, Obama decried the YouTube era of politics that
reduces everyone to small, grainy clips endlessly replayed on
cable news. But if it wasn't for the replaying of Wright's remarks
on YouTube, Obama wouldn't have been forced to give the
speech on race in the first place. (He ducked a question about
Wright during one of the last debates.) And yet if he's claiming
the speech as a great act of political courage, then why did he
need YouTube to bring it about? This is making a virtue out of
necessity, I suppose, but it also seems like he's claiming too
much credit for himself.
Meanwhile, of course, and especially in the wake of the surge,
these numbers have gone down just as dramatically. Briefly,
there are three explanations.
We have a choice, Obama said, about the kind of politics we
practice. How we behave next will be a test of whether we will
accept a "politics that breeds division and conflict and cynicism"
or demand something new. That's what he's been preaching all
along, so when he warned against continuing to fixate on
Wright's remarks and slicing and dicing exit polls for racial data,
it seemed like he was calling voters, the press, and his opponents
to join him up on the high road he's been riding for a year. But in
his list of bad political behavior, he included pouncing "on some
gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the
race card." It was his campaign that raced to the airwaves to
jump on a Drudge Report item about a supposed Clinton staffer
supposedly passing around a picture of Obama. And it was his
staffers who made the most of Geraldine Ferraro's remarks.
Obama didn't come out and say that, though, and so in a speech
with lots of first pronouns, he missed a chance to talk in a
The second factor is the new politics. That shift is perhaps even
more profound. Briefly, the United States did the only right
thing in a civil-war setting: It began to protect and deter both
sides instead of acting, as post-2003, as the handmaiden of Shiite
power while de-Baathifying and "de-Sunnifying" the country.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
One is Gen. David Petraeus, who boldly changed tactics from
hunkering down, plus occasional sallies, to sustained offensive
operations. "Clear and hold" seems to be working quite well,
extending the space in which coalition and Iraqi forces have
dislodged the opposition while assuring security for the
population. Moreover, the surge signaled that the United States
was here to stay—a power factor to be reckoned with.
Faced with the loss of their age-old supremacy (and their
livelihood), why wouldn't the Sunnis and Baathists have fought
as desperately as they did? And have done so even in cahoots
with al-Qaida, et al.? In the last two years, the United States has
acted in a more evenhanded way. Essentially, it dispatched two
messages. To the Sunnis: You are not alone. To the Shiites: Do
not exploit your numerical superiority for wholesale expulsion
and slaughter.
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Add to this political shift the reintegration of Baathists, who
were ruthlessly purged by the American viceroy, L. Paul
Bremer. They were handed pensions and jobs and were reinvited
into the armed forces. The flow of oil money to the Sunni
provinces turned the disenfranchised into stakeholders. Thus,
physical reassurance went hand-in-glove with promises of a
decent economic future.
So in the business of regime transformation, "Look before you
leap" translates into: "Democracy may be good; strategic
stability is better." It advises future American leaders to worry
about power first and about goodness as a byproduct. This is the
counsel not of cynicism but of wisdom. If Germany and Japan
have anything to teach, it is that security (within and without)
must come first if democracy is to come later.
Finally, there is the isolation of al-Qaida and other foreign
terrorists. This is not an American achievement but the result of
untold brutality and bloodshed on the part of those who would
turn Iraq into a global battlefield against the "Great Satan."
Instead, they ended up not expelling the United States but
terrorizing and alienating the locals. This was not the way to win
the hearts and minds of those Iraqis who were supposed to
deliver shelter, bases, and support.
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So in the fifth year of the war, the tide began to turn, albeit for
reasons that are not exactly fortuitous. Maybe, five years from
now, we will be able to look back and point to Iraq as the first
successful counterinsurgency war since the British bested the
Malay rebels in the 1950s (though after 12 long years).
Still, "Where did we get it wrong?" remains a valid and
compelling question. Though as a realist, I felt queasy about the
"democratic peace theory" behind the war ("only despots make
war, while democracies are inherently pacific"), I hesitantly
thought, Why not? Maybe the fall of this horrifying regime
would serve as an example to all the other despotisms in the
neighborhood.
Alas, democracy in one country is not the antidote to the
enormous political pathologies of the Middle East, nor should
anybody have expected such a miraculous transformation. Even
less so, given the cavalier approach of the Bushies and their
Pollyanna-ish belief in the ease of regime transformation: We'll
topple Saddam, hand over power to a friendly like Ahmad
Chalabi, and leave. This is not how West Germany and Japan,
where U.S. troops are present to this day, were democratized.
The lesson is stark: If you don't will the means, don't will the
end. To this Kantianism, let us add pure homily: Look before
you leap. The tragedy of American power in the Middle East, the
most critical arena of world politics, is that the United States
ended up working as the handmaiden of Iranian ambitions.
By destroying Saddam's armies, the United States flattened the
strongest bulwark against Iranian expansion. By empowering the
Shiites, it opened the way to an ideological alliance between
Najaf and Qum, the two centers of the faith on either side of the
Iraq-Iran border. And by entangling itself in an open-ended war
in Iraq, the United States squandered precisely those military
assets that would have kept Iran in awe. Would the Ahmadinejad
regime grasp so boldly for nuclear weapons if U.S. power and
credibility were still intact?
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?
I thought we had a chance to stabilize an unstable region, and—I admit it—I
wanted to strike back.
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, March 18, 2008, at 7:47 AM ET
Anthrax. Remember anthrax? It seems no one does anymore—at
least it's never mentioned. But right after the terrorist attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001, letters laced with anthrax were received at the
New York Post and Tom Brokaw's office at NBC. In the
following days, more anthrax-contaminated letters were received
by other news organizations—CBS News and, presumably,
ABC, where traces of anthrax were found in the newsroom.
Weirdly, even the Sun, a supermarket tabloid, also got a letter,
and a photo editor, Bob Stevens, was fatally infected. Other
letters were sent to Sen. Tom Daschle's Capitol Hill office, and
in Washington, D.C., a postal worker, Thomas L. Morris Jr.,
died. There was ample reason to be afraid.
The attacks were not entirely unexpected. I had been told soon
after Sept. 11 to secure Cipro, the antidote to anthrax. The tip
had come in a roundabout way from a high government official,
and I immediately acted on it. I was carrying Cipro way before
most people had ever heard of it.
For this and other reasons, the anthrax letters appeared linked to
the awful events of Sept. 11. It all seemed one and the same.
Already, my impulse had been to strike back, an overwhelming
urge that had, in fact, taken me by surprise on Sept. 11 itself
when the first of the Twin Towers had collapsed. I was
downtown, rushing toward the World Trade Center, when I
heard the building go, a deep, guttural rumble that preceded that
hideous tsunami of paper, building material, and, of course,
pulverized bodies. From nowhere, I heard someone inside my
head say, "We'll get you, you bastards"—and it was me. I took
myself totally by surprise.
In the following days, as the horror started to be airbrushed—no
more bodies plummeting to the sidewalk—the anthrax letters
started to come, some to people I knew. And I thought, No, I'm
not going to sit here passively and wait for it to happen. I
wanted to go to "them," whoever "they" were, grab them by the
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neck, and get them before they could get us. One of "them" was
Saddam Hussein. He had messed around with anthrax; he had
twice started wars in the region (Iran and Kuwait); he had
massacred the Kurds and the Shiites; used chemical weapons (no
doubt about that); had had a nuclear weapons program (also no
doubt about that); and was violating U.N. resolution after
resolution (absolutely no doubt about that, either). Saddam was a
sociopath, a uniformed button man, Luca Brasi of Arabia. He
was a nasty little fascist, and he needed to be dealt with.
That, more or less, is how I made my decision to support the war
in Iraq. It did not take me all that long, however, to have second
thoughts—and I expressed them in my column. It was clear that
Saddam was unconnected to Osama Bin Laden, that Iraqi
intelligence had not met with Mohammed Atta in Prague, and
that while Iraq once had a nuclear weapons program, it no longer
did. That left chemical and biological weapons, and neither
represented much of a threat. Gas had been around since Ypres
(1915), and biological devices were impractical as weapons of
mass destruction, although they remained profoundly scary. So,
the only justification left was, really, what the neocons had
started with: a war to reorder the Middle East. This had a certain
appeal, since the region was unstable, undemocratic, repressive,
and downright dangerous. Can it be a coincidence that so many
of the so-called liberal hawks had spent time in the region?
When it came to getting it right on Iraq, ignorance may indeed
have been bliss.
One final argument appealed to me. It was quite clear that, over
time, Saddam would slip the noose of U.N. sanctions, the United
States would tire of its campaign to enforce the no-fly zone, the
Europeans—so worldly, so repellently even-handed about Israel,
so appalled by Saddam's excesses, and, finally, so full of shit—
would do business with the regime, and Saddam would be free
to use his oil wealth for weapons and war. If something were not
done when it seemed that something could be done, then nothing
would ever be done—until it was too late.
These, then, were my reasons for war—a war, I argued, that
need not be imminent and need not be fought virtually alone. I
was becoming a lousy, broken-winged hawk, and I certainly
would have lost my other wing entirely had I known that the war
would not be brief (as promised) but would grind on for more
than five years, producing an appalling carnage, a collapse of
U.S. prestige, and a boon to Iran. I was not only unprepared for
the revelation that Iraq had no WMD whatsoever, but—even
more stunning—that such seasoned hands as Dick Cheney,
Donald Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell, to name just three veterans
of past presidencies, would prove so cosmically incompetent.
I was also intent on rectifying a previous mistake. I had been
wrong about Bosnia, and I had, in a way that no swift-fingered
blogger could ever understand, anguished over Srebrenica and a
return to Europe of horrors long thought gone. I had been to
Bosnia and seen in its twisting, darkly forested mountain roads a
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
kind of Balkan Ho Chi Min Trail—impossible terrain that the
locals could use to stop an army. Stay out, I cautioned.
I had learned the wrong lesson from that war, and I also learned
a wrong lesson from the first Gulf War, which I had supported.
Predictions of a quagmire had not materialized, and neither had
predictions that the vaunted Arab street—what we now might
call terrorism—would erupt and friendly regimes would topple.
The lesson now was that force could actually work and save
lives.
I had been to Iraq, but I didn't know what I didn't know. One of
those things, certainly, is how little we understood the society—
an ignorance so profound I don't think 100,000 more troops
would have made a difference. We, journalists and government
alike, listened to the wrong people and came away smug in
ignorance—no one smugger than Rummy. Even with the
evidence before his eyes, he saw a nation that was not there.
I was miserably wrong in my judgment and somewhat
emotional, and whenever my resolve weakened, as it did over
time, I steadied myself by downing belts of inane criticism from
the likes of Michael Moore or "realists" like Brent Scowcroft,
who had presided over the slaughter of the Shiites. I favored the
war not for oil or empire (what silliness!) or Israel but for all the
reasons that made me regret Bosnia, Rwanda, and every other
time when innocents were being killed and nothing was done to
stop it. I owe it to Tony Judt for giving me the French exStalinist Pierre Courtade, who, wrongheaded though he might
have been, neatly sums it all up for me: "You and your kind
were wrong to be right; we were right to be wrong."
politics
The Democrats' Pain Threshold
How much danger is the party really in?
By John Dickerson
Monday, March 17, 2008, at 8:21 PM ET
As a doctor, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard
Dean probably has some familiarity with patients obsessed with
their health. That's a good thing, since he now heads a party that
is likewise obsessed. As the presidential-nominating fight
intensifies and shows no sign of ending, voters and party elites
are increasingly worried that the party might not survive the
enduring contest. Mario Cuomo said a close race could be
"ruinous"; House Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer warned of a
major fissure; and Donna Brazile asked, in Time magazine,
"Who opened up the gates of hell?"
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Both Obama and Clinton have developed durable and loyal
constituencies. Clinton has secured less-affluent voters and
white women, and Obama has built support from liberals,
younger voters, and African-Americans. Because the loyalties
map along gender and racial lines, the potential for volatility
increases, as supporters interpret an attack on the candidate as an
attack on themselves. At times, you can sort Obama and Clinton
supporters by their grievances—those who were offended when
Obama said Clinton was "likable enough" or others who took
umbrage when Bill Clinton compared Obama to Jesse Jackson.
The candidates occasionally promise to play nice, or they speak
to each other cordially on the Senate floor. Or they praise each
other at the end of debates. But shortly after each peace dance,
the war drums start again. Advisers on a seemingly constant
round of conference calls raise questions about the rival
candidate's honesty, judgment, and temperament. Even if the
candidates don't take it personally, their supporters do. The
question that now attends each new feint and jab is this: What is
the pain threshold for the two constituencies? How much
bickering and fighting can each withstand before hard feelings
lock in and supporters decide that no matter how many calls for
unity they may hear, they will stay home on Election Day if their
guy or gal loses—or perhaps even support John McCain.
Beyond the daily slights, the Democratic Party seems to have
been tricked by Karl Rove or Rumpelstiltskin into designing a
delegate-selection process that offers a range of opportunities for
Clinton and Obama supporters to feel shortchanged and cheated.
The unresolved question of whether to hold do-over elections in
Michigan and Florida is one front on which supporters can feel
they are somehow getting shortchanged, but that's only an
appetizer course for the big meal of woe that activists might
have to eat over the role of superdelegates at the party
convention in Denver.
The proper role of superdelegates is so undefined that either side
could feel entitled to moral outrage, though Obama clearly has
the advantage in this argument and is trying to exploit it. If
superdelegates back Clinton and reverse the will of the pledged
delegates who have supported Obama, his voters say they will
revolt. "It will be an explosion," agrees John Edwards' strategist,
Joe Trippi. Particularly angry will be the first-time voters Obama
has brought into the world of national politics with a promise of
openness and transparency.
Obama supporters are using this threat of an explosion as
leverage with the superdelegates, who have the power to avert
the nightmare scenario—or give birth to it. "If the superdelegates
intervene and get in the way and say, 'Oh no, we are going to
determine what's best,' there will be chaos at the convention,"
said Obama supporter and Richmond, Va., Mayor Douglas
Wilder, who raised the specter of the 1968 convention riots. "If
you think 1968 was bad, you watch 2008. It will be worse."
When fear of chaos hasn't worked, threats of specific retaliation
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
have been issued. On Meet the Press, Obama supporter Bill
Bradley said superdelegates who hold public office will face
primary challenges the next time around if they don't follow the
expressed will of their constituents.
To balance out the pitch, Obama will use the threat of a party
crackup in a softer way, using the recent rounds of shoving
between the campaigns as a frame for a speech in which he will
pitch himself as a conciliator. He will not only be promising
Democrats that he has a way to rescue the party from eating
itself, but he will try to reinvigorate the power of his rhetoric.
Clinton has effectively used Obama's talent for oratory against
him in recent weeks, claiming he promises little more than "just
words." But in Philadelphia on Tuesday, Obama will try to show
how he can effectively address a seemingly intractable problem
using the very rhetoric that Clinton has criticized.
The Obama camp is hoping for one of two outcomes: Either the
nearly 300 remaining uncommitted superdelegates will get
spooked and flood to him, putting him over the top for the
nomination; or, in a more cinematic move, a handful of
superdelegates already pledged to Clinton will defect, go to her,
and ask that she stop her campaign to avoid a fight.
Obama benefits from the prospect of chaos, but that's not to
suggest that his nomination would be pain-free. Clinton's
relentless argument that Obama is not ready to be commander in
chief may have opened a door for her supporters to back
McCain. In a recent Pew Research poll, 25 percent of Hillary's
supporters said they would consider voting for McCain, whereas
only 10 percent of Obama's supporters said they would consider
doing so. Now, this plays in her favor as a competing argument
she can make to the supers.
Many of Clinton's supporters, particularly women, also warn that
they feel Obama has benefited from a free ride in the press and
has taken advantage of barely veiled sexism. Clinton tellingly
referred supporters to the analysis of ABC's Cokie Roberts, who
said this of the reaction some women have to Obama: "Here is
this woman, she's worked hard, she's done it all the way you're
supposed to do it, and then this cute young man comes in and
says a bunch of sweet, you know, nothings, and pushes you out
of the way. And a lot of women are looking at that and saying,
'There goes my life.' "
There have been hard-fought Democratic primaries before, and
delegates have always found a way to pick a nominee. But that
person hasn't always gone on to win. In 1968, 1980, and 1984,
Democrats fought among themselves and lost to the Republicans
in the general election. So, what are this year's party handwringers to do? There aren't any easy solutions. Solving the
delegate puzzle is in the hands of the risk-averse superdelegates,
and lowering the temperature of the daily tit for tat is in the
hands of sleep-deprived aides. Perhaps Howard Dean's best
move would be to prescribe everyone a sedative.
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politics
How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?
I trusted Colin Powell and his circumstantial evidence—for a little while.
By Fred Kaplan
Monday, March 17, 2008, at 4:27 PM ET
It may be that I don't belong in this forum. I supported the Iraq
war for a mere few weeks, from Colin Powell's Feb. 5 briefing to
the U.N. Security Council until roughly the end of that month—
still well before the invasion began—as Powell's case showed its
seams, as the coalition for war unraveled, and, most of all, as the
Bush administration revealed itself to be (as I put it in a column
on March 5, 2003) "in no shape—diplomatically, politically, or
intellectually to wage [this war] or at least to settle its
aftermath."
For me, the tipping point came on March 3, with a New York
Times Magazine story by George Packer, reporting on a meeting
a couple of months earlier between Bush and three Iraqi exiles
(including Kanan Makiya). The exiles warned the president that,
after Saddam was toppled, the American-led coalition would
need to take great care to contain age-old Sunni-Shiite tensions
that were sure to flare up once again. Bush seemed puzzled; it
was clear that he didn't know what the exiles were talking about.
(There were two types of Iraqi Arabs? Wouldn't Saddam's ouster
uncork the geyser of freedom and democracy?)
War, as Clausewitz wrote, is politics by other means. That is, a
war is not won until its political objectives have been secured. It
seemed clear, with Packer's article, that Bush—and, as we now
know, many of his top aides—had no idea what securing those
objectives, and thus winning the war, would entail. It's not that
we lacked an "exit strategy" (an overrated concept); it's that,
beyond the battlefield phase, we lacked a war strategy or any
kind of strategy at all.
The lack of broad political acumen, which made success seem
unlikely, was apparent in the failure to sell the case for invasion
to even a two-thirds majority of the U.N. Security Council (the
share needed to pass a resolution in the absence of a veto). If
Bush & Co. were having such a hard time managing relations
with the long-established governments of not just France and
Russia but Germany, Chile, and Canada, how were they going to
deal with the exotic sectarian factions inside Iraq—especially
when the president didn't know they existed? A multilateral
consensus is not always a prerequisite to military action. But if
the point of a war is not to protect our vital national interests but
rather to enforce international law (in this case, security council
resolutions), the war is almost sure to go badly without the
enforcing entity's support.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
But enough of how I was right. Where did I go wrong in those
first few weeks when I was in favor of war? First, I put too much
trust in circumstantial evidence. I was particularly struck by the
tape-recording of an intelligence intercept that Powell played—a
phone conversation in which one Iraqi Republican Guard officer
tells another to clean out a site before the inspectors get there.
What else could this mean but that Saddam had a covert
chemical-weapons stockpile and that he was deliberately
misleading the U.N. team? Well, it turned out (as U.S.
interrogators discovered after the war) that the Iraqi officers
wanted to make sure that no traces were left of chemical
weapons that had been stored in that site back before the 1991
war. They were, ironically, taking pains to stay in compliance
with U.N. resolutions demanding disarmament.
There is, of course, only so much that citizens without security
clearances can know about intelligence data. So, another mistake
I made was to put too much trust in those who presented the
circumstantial evidence—mainly Colin Powell (who later
regretted his role and denounced the officials who hoodwinked
him) and certain members of Congress (who were entrusted with
the full National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq but read only its
executive summary, which omitted all the fine points and
footnotes, which we now know revealed much dissent over the
NIE's conclusions).
I must confess, I was also bent out of shape by my anger at the
French and the Russians. Particularly galling was French
Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin's pronouncement that
he would veto any resolution calling for war as its enforcement
clause. From that point on, it seemed, Saddam knew that he
could keep thumbing his nose at the United Nations with no
penalty. There was no longer any hope that a shrewd mix of
sticks and carrots might produce a diplomatic settlement.
But of course, Saddam wasn't thumbing his nose at U.N.
demands to disarm; he had no arms to dismantle. And, as we
now know, Bush was already hellbent on going to war. All sides
in this debate were using the Security Council's deliberations as
a ploy in their respective charades. Many Bush officials were
relieved when the French exposed their pretense first.
Meanwhile, Saddam abetted his own destruction by pretending
that he might have weapons of mass destruction; even many of
his own officers believed he did. He played this game of
calculated ambiguity in order to appear more powerful to his
subjects and neighbors—and, in his mind, to deter a U.S.
invasion. Nikita Khrushchev played the same game in the late
1950s when he fibbed that Russia was churning out ICBMs like
sausages, in part to deter a U.S. first strike, which he saw as a
real danger. Both tricks backfired: President John F. Kennedy
ordered his own crash ICBM program; Bush invaded Iraq. There
is also a lesson here for our adversaries: Don't try to manipulate
an American president's perceptions; your cultural understanding
of us is at least as shallow as our cultural understanding of you.
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politics
How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?
I underestimated the self-centeredness and sectarianism of the ruling elite
and the social impact of 30 years of extreme dictatorship.
By Kanan Makiya
Monday, March 17, 2008, at 2:53 PM ET
I know that I got many things wrong in the run-up to the 2003
war, but, in spite of everything, I still do not know how to regret
wanting to knock down the walls of the great concentration
camp that was Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The nature of political
action is that its consequences are unknowable. That is the
source of the wonder, beauty, and ugliness that politics can bring
into the world. Should I have let that unknowability determine
the morality of the case for the overthrow of the regime in Iraq?
Would we have had a moral war in 2003 if there had arisen an
Iraqi version of Nelson Mandela, and are we now saddled with
an immoral one because he did not appear? I cannot think like
that. Perhaps it is incumbent upon those who now regret
supporting regime change back in 2003 to tell us what the
alternative moral course of action was. Was it to wait and watch
until the time bomb that was Saddam Hussein's Iraq blew up in
everyone's faces?
True, I underestimated the self-centeredness and sectarianism of
the Iraqi ruling elite put in power by U.S. military action in
2003. I knew them well, after all. And I underestimated the
extent to which Iraqi state institutions had already been
dismantled by U.N. sanctions, which changed a totalitarian
regime into a criminal regime during the 1990s, long before
anyone thought of unseating Saddam Hussein by force. Nor did I
ever imagine that the conversion of the Iraqi army into a civil
reconstruction force—which is what I and others called for in
the run-up to 2003—would be translated into Paul Bremer's
order for the overnight firing, without pension, of half a million
or so men. Certainly, I never imagined the breathtaking
incompetence of the American occupation. Then again, I
supported de-Bathification, comparing it all too glibly in
interviews to de-Nazification. I did so naively, not allowing
myself to think that it would be practiced by my fellow Iraqis as
de-Sunnification and that the committee in charge of it would
behave like an Iraqi version of McCarthy's committee on unAmerican activities.
But my biggest political sin is that in spite of nearly a quarter of
a century of writing about the abuses of the Baath Party, I, and
more generally the whole community of Iraqi exiles, grossly
underestimated the consequences on a society of 30 years of
extreme dictatorship. Iraqis were, it is true, liberated by the U.S.
action in 2003; they were not defeated as the German and
Japanese peoples had been in 1945. A regime was removed and
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
a people liberated overnight, but it was a people that did not
understand what had happened to it or why. Iraqis emerged into
the light of day in a daze, having been in a prison or a giant
concentration camp, cut off from the rest of the world to a
degree that is difficult to imagine if you have not lived among
them.
All of a sudden this raw, profoundly abused population,
traumatized by decades of war, repression, uprisings, and brutal
campaigns of social extermination, was handed the opportunity
to build a nation from scratch. True, they were adept at learning
the most arresting symbols of their re-entry into the world—the
mobile phone and the satellite dish, for example. But it proved
infinitely harder to get rid of the mistrust, fear, and
unwillingness to take initiative or responsibility that was
ingrained into a people by a whole way of survival in policestate conditions. No one made allowances for the deleterious
consequences of all this on reconstruction, identity-formation,
and nation-building. Is that an argument for, or against, regime
change in 2003?
politics
How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?
I didn't.
By Christopher Hitchens
Monday, March 17, 2008, at 4:29 PM ET
An "anniversary" of a "war" is in many ways the least useful
occasion on which to take stock of something like the AngloAmerican intervention in Iraq, if only because any such formal
observance involves the assumption that a) this is, in fact, a war
and b) it is by that definition an exception from the rest of our
engagement with that country and that region. I am one of those
who, for example, believes that the global conflict that began in
August 1914 did not conclusively end, despite a series of "fragile
truces," until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the
Soviet Union. This is not at all to redefine warfare and still less
to contextualize it out of existence. But when I wrote the essays
that go to make up A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation
of Iraq, I was expressing an impatience with those who thought
that hostilities had not really "begun" until George W. Bush gave
a certain order in the spring of 2003.
Anyone with even a glancing acquaintance with Iraq would have
to know that a heavy U.S. involvement in the affairs of that
country began no later than 1968, with the role played by the
CIA in the coup that ultimately brought Saddam Hussein's wing
of the Baath Party to power. Not much more than a decade later,
we come across persuasive evidence that the United States at the
very least acquiesced in the Iraqi invasion of Iran, a decision that
helped inflict moral and material damage of an order to dwarf
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anything that has occurred in either country recently. In between,
we might note minor episodes such as Henry Kissinger's faux
support to Kurdish revolutionaries, encouraging them to believe
in American support and then abandoning and betraying them in
the most brutal and cynical fashion.
If you can bear to keep watching this flickering newsreel, it will
take you all the way up to the moment when Saddam Hussein,
too, switches sides and courts Washington, being most in favor
in our nation's capital at the precise moment when he is engaged
in a campaign of extermination in the northern provinces and
retaining this same favor until the very moment when he decides
to "engulf" his small Kuwaiti neighbor. In every decision taken
subsequent to that, from the decision to recover Kuwait and the
decision to leave Saddam in power to the decisions to impose
international sanctions on Iraq and the decision to pass the Iraq
Liberation Act of 1998, stating that long-term coexistence with
Saddam's regime was neither possible nor desirable, there was a
really quite high level of public participation in our foreign
policy. We were never, if we are honest with ourselves, "lied
into war." We became steadily more aware that the option was
continued collusion with Saddam Hussein or a decision to have
done with him. The president's speech to the United Nations on
Sept. 12, 2002, laying out the considered case that it was time to
face the Iraqi tyrant, too, with this choice, was easily the best
speech of his two-term tenure and by far the most
misunderstood.
That speech is widely and wrongly believed to have focused on
only two aspects of the problem, namely the refusal of Saddam's
regime to come into compliance on the resolutions concerning
weapons of mass destruction and the involvement of the
Baathists with a whole nexus of nihilist and Islamist terror
groups. Baghdad's outrageous flouting of the resolutions on
compliance (if not necessarily the maintenance of blatant, as
opposed to latent, WMD capacity) remains a huge and easily
demonstrable breach of international law. The role of Baathist
Iraq in forwarding and aiding the merchants of suicide terror
actually proves to be deeper and worse, on the latest professional
estimate, than most people had ever believed or than the Bush
administration had ever suggested.
This is all overshadowed by the unarguable hash that was made
of the intervention itself. But I would nonetheless maintain that
this incompetence doesn't condemn the enterprise wholesale. A
much-wanted war criminal was put on public trial. The Kurdish
and Shiite majority was rescued from the ever-present threat of a
renewed genocide. A huge, hideous military and party apparatus,
directed at internal repression and external aggression was
(perhaps overhastily) dismantled. The largest wetlands in the
region, habitat of the historic Marsh Arabs, have been largely
recuperated. Huge fresh oilfields have been found, including in
formerly oil free Sunni provinces, and some important initial
investment in them made. Elections have been held, and the
outline of a federal system has been proposed as the only
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
alternative to a) a sectarian despotism and b) a sectarian partition
and fragmentation. Not unimportantly, a battlefield defeat has
been inflicted on al-Qaida and its surrogates, who (not without
some Baathist collaboration) had hoped to constitute the
successor regime in a failed state and an imploded society.
Further afield, a perfectly defensible case can be made that the
Syrian Baathists would not have evacuated Lebanon, nor would
the Qaddafi gang have turned over Libya's (much higher than
anticipated) stock of WMD if not for the ripple effect of the
removal of the region's keystone dictatorship.
None of these positive developments took place without a good
deal of bungling and cruelty and unintended consequences of
their own. I don't know of a satisfactory way of evaluating one
against the other any more than I quite know how to balance the
disgrace of Abu Ghraib, say, against the digging up of Saddam's
immense network of mass graves. There is, however, one
position that nobody can honestly hold but that many people try
their best to hold. And that is what I call the Bishop Berkeley
theory of Iraq, whereby if a country collapses and succumbs to
trauma, and it's not our immediate fault or direct responsibility,
then it doesn't count, and we are not involved. Nonetheless, the
very thing that most repels people when they contemplate Iraq,
which is the chaos and misery and fragmentation (and the
deliberate intensification and augmentation of all this by the
jihadists), invites the inescapable question: What would postSaddam Iraq have looked like without a coalition presence?
The past years have seen us both shamed and threatened by the
implications of the Berkeleyan attitude, from Burma to Rwanda
to Darfur. Had we decided to attempt the right thing in those
cases (you will notice that I say "attempt" rather than "do,"
which cannot be known in advance), we could as glibly have
been accused of embarking on "a war of choice." But the thing
to remember about Iraq is that all or most choice had already
been forfeited. We were already deeply involved in the life-anddeath struggle of that country, and March 2003 happens to mark
the only time that we ever decided to intervene, after a protracted
and open public debate, on the right side and for the right
reasons. This must, and still does, count for something.
press box
The Fibbing Point
Separating bunk from fact in Malcolm Gladwell's performance at a New York
storytelling forum.
By Jack Shafer
Wednesday, March 19, 2008, at 6:06 PM ET
The journalism of New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell
has attracted millions of readers. His first book, The Tipping
Point, has been on the New York Times paperback nonfiction
49/94
best-seller list for 186 weeks and his second, Blink, for 49
weeks. Live audiences delight in his work, too. In late 2005, he
won giggles and horselaughs from the crowd at The Moth, a
New York storytellers' forum, recounting his comic adventures
as a rookie newspaper reporter at the Washington Post.
Public radio's This American Life heard a recording of the
Gladwell talk and approached him for permission to air it. After
slight editing for broadcast, the talk ran on the show last month
(podcast here; unexpurgated version streamed here). At its
conclusion, This American Life host Ira Glass identifies The
Moth as a place where "people come to tell both true stories and
occasional tall tales."
Which is Gladwell telling?
Though he plays his material for laughs, Gladwell encourages
listeners to believe him by filling the talk with verisimilitudebuilding detail. Not once does he interrupt himself to say, You
shouldn't really be taking this seriously. Instead, at one point he
urges listeners to "look it up" in the Post archives if they doubt
one of his newspaper exploits.
But the talk isn't verifiable. It's mostly bunk.
When I interviewed him, Gladwell protested that nobody who
knows anything about The Moth would ever take literally a story
told there.
"No one fact checks Moth stories, or expects them to stand up to
skeptical scrutiny," he e-mails. His story, while based on real
events, "is not supposed to be 'true,' in the sense that a story in
the New York Times is supposed to be 'true.' " He continues, "It's
a yarn. In this case, it's an elaborate joke: it's a send-up of the
seriousness with which journalists take themselves."
If it's an elaborate joke, no writer appears to get it. In 2005, the
New York Post's "Page Six" took his Moth presentation at face
value, as did Chris Wilson, the author of a 2006 Washingtonian
profile of Gladwell, who wasn't discouraged by Gladwell to
think otherwise.
If the monologue had remained an insider thing, heard mostly by
Moth habitués, one could sympathize with Gladwell's position.
Nobody but a prig would wag his finger at Gladwell for telling
stories wherever he can muster an audience. But by moving his
tale from The Moth's clubby confines to the radio show's
national audience of 1.7 million, the broadcast on This American
Life changed the equation. The blog Jossip accepted the radio
riff as nonfiction and published an item titled "Malcolm
Gladwell Laughs at Journalism: The Joke Is on Us." Gawker
bought the story, too, as did a dozen bloggers and commenters.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Since cock-and-bull about how he behaved at the Washington
Post is being taken seriously, worming its way into the record, a
detailed debunking is called for if only to explain that
newspapers don't tolerate shenanigans like this. So, allow me to
volunteer to be the literal-minded plodder who charts the many
things in Gladwell's talk that never happened or never happened
the way he describes them.
The embellishments begin at the top of his monologue when
Gladwell calls his Post gig his "first real job" and confides, "I
still don't know really how I got hired because I didn't have any
newspaper experience. I hadn't even worked for my high-school
newspaper."
This is a complete pose. The Post has long hired writers with no
daily experience, including Sally Quinn, Nicholas Lemann,
Sidney Blumenthal, Marjorie Williams, Steve Coll, Katherine
Boo, and many others.
Upon joining the Post in the summer of 1987, Gladwell had as
much experience as many daily rookies at the Post. While still
an undergraduate, he completed a journalism internship in
Washington, D.C. In 1984, he became an assistant managing
editor at the American Spectator, where he also wrote, and after
a stopover at a think tank went to Insight magazine as a reporter.
While there, he covered business and also freelanced for the New
Republic. The bosses at the American Spectator (Wlady
Pleszczynski) and Insight (John Podhoretz) remember Gladwell
as a talented writer and thinker.
That Gladwell got a Post slot comes as no surprise to me or
anybody else who knew him. Then why then does he cast
himself as such a greenhorn and portray his hiring as a mystery?
My guess is that he knows it's much funnier for a naïf—rather
than a sharpie—to run amok inside an august institution, which
is what he proceeds to describe in the rest of his talk.
Gladwell claims at The Moth that publication of his first Post
piece, an earnings story about a company named Maryland
Biosciences, caused total mayhem at the paper.
"Unfortunately, I wrote that the firm lost $5 million in the
previous quarter, and they, in fact, had made $5 million in the
previous quarter," he says. This error caused the company's
stock to drop 10 points, Gladwell says, and prompted the
company's CEO to call Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee and
"chew him out." The paper placed Gladwell on probation, too,
he says.
A reportorial screw-up that moved a stock 10 points surely
would have made news, yet I can find no record of the incident
in the Washington Post, Nexis, or elsewhere. I can't even find a
trace of "Maryland Biosciences." Ben Bradlee could not recall
the incident Gladwell describes when interviewed, nor could
50/94
Frank Swoboda, who ran the Post business section at the time.
Swoboda says he would remember if Gladwell had been put on
probation, which he doesn't.
Like some of the tall tales in Gladwell's talk, this anecdote
contains a sliver of truth. Gladwell mistakenly reported in an
Aug. 25, 1987, Post story—not his first—that ERC International
lost $3.8 million the previous year when it had actually made
$337,000. A correction followed in the next day's paper. (ERCI
was a Fairfax, Va., firm that did defense and energy work.)
If Gladwell's high jinks ended here, who would make a fuss? But
from his apocryphal kernel, Gladwell grows an "epiphany" about
journalism, one that kept him in the profession. He states:
I realized, first of all, that I had made up this
story, right, but I had gotten it into the paper,
and no one had stopped me. And secondly,
secondly I had moved the stock 10 points. It
was a kind of Jayson Blair moment. And all of
a sudden there is a little glimmer, and I can
begin to see that there is some hope in this
profession and this thing that didn't make
sense to me is now kind of making sense.
Gladwell doesn't explain the exact nature of his epiphany, or of
his Jayson Blair moment, but it appears to be something about it
being OK to play games with news stories, which he claims to
have done in his next Post anecdote. He says that after being
transferred to the Post health and science beat, he wrote that
Sydney, Australia, was under consideration as a host for the next
international AIDS convention—even though it wasn't.
Remember, making up something like this is grounds for
dismissal at most publications.
Why did he pick Sydney? Gladwell considered the conference
assignment "a week's paid vacation," and he preferred Sydney
over the genuine contending cities because he had never visited
it.
So, I'm writing up the story, and I thought,
would anyone mind? So I just said, "NIH
officials said they were considering Rome,
Vancouver, Amsterdam, and Sydney."
Indeed, Nexis confirms that Gladwell included Sydney as a
contender in his Aug. 17, 1991, Post piece about the upcoming
conference. (His Post article actually names London, Madrid,
and Montreal as the other contenders—which they were. The
1992 conference ultimately went to Amsterdam.)
At least two publications mentioned Sydney as a possible AIDS
conference site before Gladwell did. The June 29, 1991, edition
of the Economist reported that a "convention centre has been
booked in Sydney as an alternative" for the 1992 AIDS
conference, and a Sept. 28, 1990, Science story cited an
authority who called both London and Sydney possible venues.
After the Post published his Sydney story, Gladwell says the
news wires "picked up the story and called the Sydney tourist
bureau" to assess the city's interest in hosting the event, and "the
Miami Herald picked up the story and called the NIH." If the
Herald and the wires ever reported anything about Sydney's
"prospects," Nexis can't retrieve it. I asked a Herald employee to
check the paper's internal database for such a story, on the
chance that Nexis missed it. He came up empty-handed.
Gladwell glories in his Sydney "prank," telling the audience:
And I, kind of, I can't tell you how much, sort
of, how exhilarated this makes me. And I have
a sense of real power for the first time.
He flexes his newly acquired power by challenging Post
colleague William Booth, also a science and health reporter, to a
journalistic duel. The object is to determine who can insert the
phrase "raises new and troubling questions" in his stories the
most often over a month. Gladwell strikes first in the "contest,"
but it's then "back and forth" like "a horse race" until he leads
10-9. On the last day, Booth wins the game with a "twofer," as
the phrase appears in both his piece and its headline.
"I feel like I've been kicked in the stomach; it's devastating,"
Gladwell says.
But no Gladwell-Booth "contest" ever took place, according to
Booth.
"What I remember is that we joked in the science pod about such
a contest but there was no formal contest. That is my memory.
Malcolm may recall the early 1990s differently," Booth responds
to a query.
This much is true: In May and June of 1989, Gladwell wrote
four bylined stories in the Post containing variations on the
phrase "raises troubling issues." Booth never penned any
variation on the phrase in the Post until years later, and the
phrase has never appeared in a Booth headline.
Gladwell's account of the "troubling questions" duel has grown
in the telling. In a 1996 Slate "Diary," Gladwell claims that such
a duel with an unnamed reporter ran a week. "I think I scored a
four," he writes.
Was Sydney a product of Gladwell's devilish imagination, as he
claims, or a real contender? Gladwell wouldn't say when I asked.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
51/94
After his "defeat" at the hands of Booth, Gladwell says he
challenged his friend to a "championship round" in which they
battled to insert the phrase "perverse and often baffling" into
their stories.
Chris Wilson, author of the December 2006 Washingtonian
profile of Gladwell and now an editorial assistant at Slate,
listened to the original Moth talk for his piece. In it, he writes
that Gladwell's "friends' recollections" and the talk "paint a
picture of a reporter who bent the rules and occasionally snapped
them in half." Gladwell made no effort to either discourage or
encourage the inclusion of the "perverse and often baffling"
anecdote in the profile, Wilson says.
Back to the Moth talk:
Billy [Booth] did a piece on mollusks once, in
which he wrote, he tried to claim that mollusks
represented a perverse and often baffling
something. And the copy desk took out
"often," arguing, I think correctly, that
mollusks were either baffling or they weren't.
No variation of the phrase "perverse and often baffling" can be
found in any Post story by Booth, according to Nexis. In the
Moth talk, Gladwell says he won this championship round on
Sept. 21, 1992. "You can look it up, right on the front page," he
says, where he claims to have written:
Washington D.C. has more gastroenterologists
per capita than any other city in the country,
but in a reflection of the perverse and often
baffling economics of the health care
profession, it simultaneously has the highest
doctor's fees in the country.
Well, sorta. Gladwell wrote a Page One story about the District's
"doctor glut," but it ran on July 8, 1989, not Sept. 21, 1992. The
slightly different phrase "often perverse and baffling economics"
appears in the 1989 story, but 1,200 words away from the gag
line "gastroenterologist." (Gladwell tells a version of this in his
Slate "Diary," too.)
After Gladwell "wins" the contest, he says that "Billy is
devastated. I am triumphant." And another sort of epiphany
occurs. Gladwell says:
All those doubts about journalism melt away,
and I say, "This thing called newspaper
writing, I can do it."
This American Life host Ira Glass gives no indication that any
part of Gladwell's performance is fictional when he breaks in to
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
end the Gladwell segment. Instead, he encourages young
listeners not to follow Gladwell's example.
"By the way, if there is any ambiguity in here at all, young
journalists, please note, putting false information into the
newspaper is wrong," Glass says.
Gladwell distances himself from the decision to air the story on
This American Life, saying it wasn't his idea, and adds that they
promised to run a disclaimer.
"This American Life told me that they would run a disclaimer at
the end of my story, telling listeners not to treat what I said as
gospel. I'm not sure I'm responsible for people whose literal
mindedness overrides both disclaimers and fairly obvious
adventures in tall-tale-telling," he e-mails.
Ira Glass of This American Life says via e-mail that the show
agreed to include a comment at the end—about The Moth being
a place where "people come to tell both true stories and
occasional tall tales"—to indicate that the talk "contained
elements of exaggeration or untruth."
As disclaimers go, Glass' is weak, something he acknowledges.
"It seemed best for the story if this were kept a little vague,"
writes Glass. "I thought it would be lousy and undermining and
killjoyish if—at the end of a story—a radio host came on and
said 'that wasn't true.' Seemed nicer and more artful to simply
raise the possibility that it might or might not be true. I figured:
the audience is smart. A little goes a long way."
Gladwell's spiel works not because the stories are particularly
funny but because of his reputation as a reliable, meticulous
journalist. Puncture the illusion that he's telling the truth, and the
laughs leak into the ether.
A storyteller can't have it both ways, instructing listeners to
"look it up" while stretching the yarn beyond the breaking point
or claiming that smuggling the "baffling" phrase into Post copy
became "literally" an "obsession." Gladwell's method, and his
decision to let This American Life air his tale, raises … well,
new and troubling questions about his attitude toward his
audience.
Gladwell isn't having any of it.
"My story was true in spirit," he e-mails. "The details were
happily and gleefully and deliberately exaggerated and
embellished and made up by me—and I am quite sure that not a
single person in the audience the night I told it thought
otherwise. Anyone who would fact check a tall tale like that
either has no sense of humor or is on crack."
52/94
On March 13, after I interviewed him, Gladwell had second
thoughts about his Moth talk, qualifying it on his blog with these
words:
There is a disclaimer at the end of the This
American Life broadcast, to the effect that the
Moth is a place where "people come to tell
both true stories and occasional tall tales." As I
think should be obvious if you listen to it, my
story definitely belongs to the "tall tale"
category. I hope you enjoy it. But please do so
with a rather large grain of salt.
The list of daily newspaper rookies at the Post goes on and on.
There's David Segal, N.C. Aizenman, Alona Wartofsky,
Benjamin Wittes, Charles Paul Freund, John Ed Bradley, Hanna
Rosin, Nicole Arthur, Colbert King, Annys Shin, Rachel
Beckman, Natalie Hopkinson, Warren Bass, Elissa Silverman,
Garance Franke-Ruta, and Autumn Brewington, just for starters.
recycled
Productivity Madness
What's that crazy stat about the NCAA Tournament and distracted workers?
******
Disclosure: Chris Wilson now works at Slate, but he did not
bring this story to my attention. A Slate reader did. Send
comments to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted
by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum, in a future article,
or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent
disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)
Track my errors: Here's a hand-built RSS feed that will ring
every time Slate runs a "Press Box" correction. For e-mail
notification of errors in this specific column, type the word
baffling in the subject head of an e-mail message and send it to
slate.pressbox@gmail.com.
sidebar
Return to article
Radio listeners who took the talk as nonfiction include the
bloggers at Flutterbyblue, Frogsonthemoon, A List of Things
Thrown Five Minutes Ago, Stuff I Think, jeffmilner.com,
Excess Opinion, La Dolce Vita, and Siphoning Off a Few
Thoughts; and commenters Sunshine Jim, Glinda, and David
Rollins. "Tends to confirm the origins of Gladwell's too-glib-byhalf writing: contempt for the reader," wrote a Gawker
commenter.
sidebar
Return to article
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
By Jack Shafer
Thursday, March 20, 2008, at 1:47 PM ET
The NCAA Tournament is under way, and it's reportedly luring
diligent workers away from their desks to manage office pools
and watch their favorite teams—to the great detriment of the
U.S. economy. In a 2006 "Press Box," reprinted below, Jack
Shafer revealed that speculation about how much the
productivity of the U.S. economy suffers during March Madness
amounts to nothing more than fuzzy math and hype. Also, in a
2006 "Dismal Science," Jeff Merron explained how those
workplace-interruptions calculations are taken out of context.
If you believe what you read in the press, fan devotion to March
Madness could cost employers $3.8 billion or more in lost
productivity as workers slip away to check NCAA Tournament
scores, participate in office pools, read stories about the contests,
or avail themselves to CBS' free streaming videocasts of the
games on their office computers.
Such prominent news sources as the Arkansas DemocratGazette, the Daily Press of Newport News, Va., Florida Today,
the Kansas City Star, MarketWatch, the Milwaukee Journal
Sentinel, the Denver Post, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the
Orlando Sentinel, The CBS Evening News, the Washington Post,
the Miami Herald, the San Jose Mercury News, the Baltimore
Sun, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the New York Times, and
the Boston Globe publicized the $3.8 billion estimate contained
in a Feb. 28 press release by consultant John A. Challenger,
CEO of Challenger, Gray, & Christmas.
Challenger's quotable release made immediate news in the
March 1 Boston Globe under the headline "Workers Take Break
for NCAA Tournament." Other media outlets followed the
Globe's lead, churning out headlines such as "During NCAA
Tourney, Bet on a Loss in Productivity"; "Chore a Bore, What's
the Score?"; "Will Tourney Hurt Businesses? You Bet"; "March
Madness Fouls Out With Bosses"; " 'Madness' Dunks
Productivity"; and "NCAA Cuts Into Workers' Output."
53/94
According to Challenger, businesses would feel the first hit of
March Madness on March 13, after the selection committee
announced the qualifying teams and workers organized office
pools.
Challenger arrived at his $3.8 billion estimate based on an
average wage of $18 an hour and 58 million college basketball
fans spending 13.5 minutes online each of the 16 business days
from March 13 through April 3, the day of the championship
game. He also allowed that his figure might be conservative!
"The cost may end up being much higher, since it will now be
possible to watch entire games on the Internet," he stated in the
release.
But as Jeff Merron argued in Slate last week, lost productivity
estimates are almost always bogus, especially when they come
from attention-seeking professionals who are in the business of
increasing productivity. Challenger, Gray, & Christmas helps
companies "manage" plant closings, among other things.
I'm happy to report that Challenger's estimate is as looseygoosey as they come. For one thing, he misjudges the size of the
dedicated college hoops audience. In 2005, for instance, the
NCAA championship game drew 23.1 million households,
according to Nielsen. The year before, only 16.6 million
households tuned in to the championship game, which indicates
that many so-called fans have only a casual interest in the
tournament. Many are happy to tune out the tournament's biggest
game if it's a blowout, or if the matchup doesn't interest them.
Also, many nonfans and casual fans who participate in office
pools experience reduced interest in the tournament as it
proceeds and the teams they bet on get knocked out.
In concocting his lost-productivity estimate, Challenger doesn't
acknowledge that "wasted time" is built into every workday.
Workers routinely shop during office hours, take extended
coffee breaks, talk to friends on the phone, enjoy long lunches,
or gossip around the water cooler. It's likely that NCAA tourney
fans merely reallocate to the games the time they ordinarily
waste elsewhere. Likewise, many office workers who don't
complete their tasks by the end of the day stay late or take work
home. If fans who screw off at work ultimately do their work at
home, the alleged "loss" to productivity would be a wash.
Last, the fear that millions of workers will waste time watching
the games live for hours at the office is groundless. More than
two-thirds of the games are played on weeknights or weekends,
when very few employees are stuck behind their work terminals.
Besides, the CBS system can only accommodate 200,000
computers at a time, as the Daily Press noted in its story. My
unsolicited advice to my press colleagues is to beware of grand
estimates such as Challenger's, and to anxious supervisors, I
counsel you to worry less about how your employees waste time
and more about how much they screw off.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Addendum, March 21, 9:30 a.m.: Carl Bialik, "The Numbers
Guy" columnist at the Wall Street Journal, beat me to the
Challenger story earlier this month, nailing the consultant.
Bialik's 2005 column ridiculed the "consultant" for estimating
the productivity loss from the 2005 NCAA tournament at $889
million. A $3 billion increase in one year? Get out of here!
Bialik also whacked Challenger for his 2005 estimate that Super
Bowl water-cooler talk would cost $1.06 billion. While we're
giving out credit, let's also salute Hannah Clark of Forbes, who
took Challenger down earlier this month.
Addendum, March 22, 11:30 a.m.: Salon's King Kaufman blew
the whistle on Challenger last year and again this year. Josh
Hendrickson got a piece of the action, too.
******
When the Western Michigan University Broncos get knocked
out of the tournament—which usually comes in December—I
lose all interest in the NCAA. Share your hoop dreams and
nightmares and screwing-off-while-at-work techniques via email: slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by
name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
recycled
St. Patrick Revealed
The man behind the green beer and the myth.
By David Plotz
Monday, March 17, 2008, at 7:10 AM ET
Today, revelers will drink green beer (and eat corned beef) in
celebration of the man who, according to David Plotz, "didn't
rid the land of snakes, didn't compare the Trinity to the
shamrock, and wasn't even Irish." In a 2000 piece reprinted
below, Plotz stripped the myth away from St. Patrick, evaluating
the many different popular incarnations that have arisen in the
years since his birth.
Today we raise a glass of warm green beer to a fine fellow, the
Irishman who didn't rid the land of snakes, didn't compare the
Trinity to the shamrock, and wasn't even Irish. St. Patrick, who
died 1,507, 1,539, or 1,540 years ago today—depending on
which unreliable source you want to believe—has been adorned
with centuries of Irish blarney. Innumerable folk tales recount
how he faced down kings, negotiated with God, tricked and
slaughtered Ireland's reptiles.
The facts about St. Patrick are few. Most derive from the two
documents he probably wrote, the autobiographical Confession
54/94
and the indignant Letter to a slave-taking marauder named
Coroticus. Patrick was born in Britain, probably in Wales,
around 385 A.D. His father was a Roman official. When Patrick
was 16, seafaring raiders captured him, carried him to Ireland,
and sold him into slavery. The Christian Patrick spent six lonely
years herding sheep and, according to him, praying 100 times a
day. In a dream, God told him to escape. He returned home,
where he had another vision in which the Irish people begged
him to return and minister to them: "We ask thee, boy, come and
walk among us once more," he recalls in the Confession. He
studied for the priesthood in France, then made his way back to
Ireland.
He spent his last 30 years there, baptizing pagans, ordaining
priests, and founding churches and monasteries. His persuasive
powers must have been astounding: Ireland fully converted to
Christianity within 200 years and was the only country in
Europe to Christianize peacefully. Patrick's Christian conversion
ended slavery, human sacrifice, and most intertribal warfare in
Ireland. (He did not banish the snakes: Ireland never had any.
Scholars now consider snakes a metaphor for the serpent of
paganism. Nor did he invent the Shamrock Trinity. That was an
18th-century fabrication.)
According to Thomas Cahill, author of How the Irish Saved
Civilization, Paddy's influence extended far beyond his adopted
land. Cahill's book, which could just as well be titled How St.
Patrick Saved Civilization, contends that Patrick's conversion of
Ireland allowed Western learning to survive the Dark Ages.
Ireland pacified and churchified as the rest of Europe crumbled.
Patrick's monasteries copied and preserved classical texts. Later,
Irish monks returned this knowledge to Europe by establishing
monasteries in England, Germany, France, Switzerland, and
Italy.
The Irish have celebrated their patron saint with a quiet religious
holiday for centuries, perhaps more than 1,000 years. It took the
United States to turn St. Patrick's Day into a boozy spectacle.
Irish immigrants first celebrated it in Boston in 1737 and first
paraded in New York in 1762. By the late 19 th century, the St.
Patrick's Day parade had become a way for Irish-Americans to
flaunt their numerical and political might. It retains this role
today.
The scarcity of facts about St. Patrick's life has made him a
dress-up doll: Anyone can create his own St. Patrick. Ireland's
Catholics and Protestants, who have long feuded over him, each
have built a St. Patrick in their own image. Catholics cherish
Paddy as the father of Catholic Ireland. They say that Patrick
was consecrated as a bishop and that the pope himself sent him
to convert the heathen Irish. (Evidence is sketchy about both the
bishop and pope claims.) One of the most popular Irish Catholic
stories holds that Patrick bargained with God and got the Big
Fella to promise that Ireland would remain Catholic and free.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Ireland's Protestant minority, by contrast, denies that Patrick was
a bishop or that he was sent by Rome. They depict him as antiRoman Catholic and credit him with inventing a distinctly Celtic
church, with its own homegrown symbols and practices. He is an
Irish hero, not a Catholic one.
Outside Ireland, too, Patrick has been freely reinterpreted.
Evangelical Protestants claim him as one of their own. After all,
he read his Bible, and his faith came to him in visions. Biblical
inspiration and personal revelation are Protestant hallmarks.
Utah newspapers emphasize that Patrick was a missionary sent
overseas to convert the ungodly, an image that resonates in
Mormon country. New Age Christians revere Patrick as a virtual
patron saint. Patrick co-opted Druid symbols in order to
undermine the rival religion, fusing nature and magic with
Christian practice. The Irish placed a sun at the center of their
cross. "St. Patrick's Breastplate," Patrick's famous prayer (which
he certainly did not write) invokes the power of the sun, moon,
rocks, and wind, as well as God. (This is what is called "Erin go
hoo-ha.")
Patrick has even been enlisted in the gay rights cause. For a
decade, gay and lesbian Irish-Americans have sought permission
to march in New York's St. Patrick's Day Parade, and for a
decade they have lost in court. Cahill, among others, has allied
Patrick with gays and lesbians. Cahill's Patrick is a muscular
progressive. He was a proto-feminist who valued women in an
age when the church ignored them. He always sided with the
downtrodden and the excluded, whether they were slaves or the
pagan Irish. If Patrick were around today, Cahill says, he would
join the gay marchers.
Now television has invented yet another Patrick. Last night, Fox
Family Channel aired its made-for-TV movie St. Patrick. Fox's
Patrick is mostly drawn from the historical record, but the
producers added one new storyline. The English parent church
demands that Patrick collect its church taxes in Ireland. Patrick
rebels and risks excommunication by the British bishop. The
fearless colonist leads a tax revolt against the villainous English.
We Americans, like everyone else, think St. Patrick is one of us.
Science
Spinach, Lettuce, and the Limits of
Bioterrorism
A comforting look back at the major E. coli outbreaks of 2006.
By Carl Zimmer
Wednesday, March 19, 2008, at 12:07 PM ET
An outbreak of E. coli isn't usually the stuff of feel-good stories.
Feel-bad is more like it—or even feel-organ-failure. But recent
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E. coli outbreaks can offer us a bit of solace. We live in the
anxious age of synthetic biology, when scientists can reconstruct
entire genomes from raw chemicals, and when we all fret that
someone is going to use this new technology to create a monster
bug and unleash a man-made plague. According to one
government report, "The effects of some of these engineered
biological agents could be worse than any disease known to
man." But a close look at recent outbreaks of E. coli—and a
closer look at the bacteria themselves—may help us to put aside
our fears for the moment. Engineering plagues is harder than it
looks.
In 2006, a pair of major E. coli outbreaks swept across the
country. One was carried on spinach, the other on lettuce. The
spinach outbreak caused 204 illnesses and three deaths. The
lettuce outbreak made 71 people sick. In both outbreaks, many
people had to be rushed to the hospital. Some got away with just
bloody diarrhea. In other cases, the bacteria released toxins into
the bloodstream that caused kidneys and other organs to shut
down.
The same strain was behind both cases as well as most other
recent outbreaks of E. coli. It's known as E. coli O157:H7,
named for some of the molecules on its surface. It emerged in
the 1980s as a nasty pathogen found mostly in tainted hamburger
meat. It lives comfortably (and harmlessly) in cows and other
mammals, but if it gets into a human host, it sometimes wreaks
havoc. When animals shed the bacteria in their manure, the
pathogen can make its way onto crops, and in recent years it has
contaminated not just hamburger meat, spinach, and lettuce but
apples and bean sprouts. In addition to the occasional major
outbreak, it causes a steady stream of illnesses—about 75,000 a
year in the United States—that attract less attention.
Scientists noticed that the most recent outbreaks were
particularly brutal. The bug from 2006 sent three to four times
more people than expected to the hospital. Typically, only 4
percent of people who get infected with E. coli O157:H7 suffer
the worst form of the disease, in which toxins are released into
the bloodstream. As many as 15 percent did in 2006.
This worrisome trend led a team of scientists based at Michigan
State University to take a look at the DNA of the bacteria. The
researchers compared bacteria from recent outbreaks with
hundreds of others samples and published the results last
Monday. The scientists drew an evolutionary tree based on the
differences in the bacteria's genes. One branch of the tree—the
one that caused the spinach and lettuce outbreaks in 2006—is
significantly more likely to make people sick than the others.
And they found that this lineage has been exploding in recent
years. In 2002, it accounted for 10 percent of the E. coli cases
recorded in Michigan. In 2006, it accounted for 46 percent.
To figure out what makes this new strain so vicious, the
scientists selected a microbe from the 2006 spinach outbreak and
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
sequenced its entire genome. They discovered that it is not a
minor variation on the basic E. coli O157:H7 plan. It is a major
overhaul. Hundreds of its genes can't be found in other strains. It
has lost hundreds of others. And many of the genes it shares with
its close relatives have mutated.
The scientists concluded that at some point in the not-too-distant
past, this strain of E. coli O157:H7 evolved rapidly into a far
meaner pathogen than its ancestors. Natural selection altered its
genes quickly, thanks to the ability bacteria have to reproduce in
as little time as 20 minutes. Speeding up their evolution even
further was their ability to take in DNA from other microbes,
even from species that are only distantly related. The genomes of
bacteria are being continually rejiggered into new combinations
of genes. Some bacteria become better at capturing sunlight,
others at resisting antibiotics. And, in the case of the spinach
strain of E. coli O157:H7, the introduction of viral DNA has
made them far nastier.
It is chilling to think just how quickly a new, more dangerous
form of E. coli has emerged—and it's tempting to think that its
quick arrival bodes ill for synthetic biology. After all, if it just
takes a few years for a dangerous strain to evolve in the wild,
just think how easy it will be for people to build them in the lab.
In fact, the spinach outbreak teaches a very different lesson. The
Michigan State scientists have no idea what is making the new
strain so mean. It's a straightforward task to identify the
hundreds of new genes in its genome, but the researchers can't
say precisely what all those new genes are doing. The same goes
for the hundreds of missing genes as well as for the other genes
tweaked and fine-tuned by natural selection.
This sort of ignorance is par for the course in the world of
microbes. And if a new strain of an intensely studied species is
so mysterious, it's hard to believe that bioterrorists could just
type out a new plague on their keyboards. Our deep ignorance
also raises some doubts about how far synthetic biologists can
go with the good applications of the science. In the most
ambitious projects, scientists have inserted only a few genes.
They've had some spectacular successes, such as making E. coli
produce jet fuel and precursors to malaria medicine. But the
notion that we might add hundreds of genes to bacteria to do
something useful, like turn microbes into solar power generators,
may be hubris for a long time to come.
Inventors don't always design their inventions from scratch,
though. Perhaps someone could create a new pathogen simply
by mimicking nature: combining different sets of genes,
mutating a few of them, and using trial and error to find ones
that worked? Probably not. Nature's lab bench is colossal.
Millions of cattle and other animals are carrying around E. coli
O157:H7, and an incalculable number of viruses are invading
them, trying out new combinations. Many of those combinations
turn out to be failures, but natural selection can give rise to a few
56/94
spectacular successes. Even if a government built a giant lab just
for the purpose of stumbling across a new pathogen, it might
take centuries or millenniums to hit on something like the
spinach strain.
But this ignorance is not cause for much comfort. Even if we
don't need to worry about synthetic bacteria just yet, we do need
to worry about new pathogens evolving right in our own
backyard (or, rather, our own feedlots and factory farms). As
things stand, we become vaguely aware of these bacteria only
once they've been sickening and killing for years. One way to
speed up the search for nature's new bioweapons would be to set
up a monitoring network. If public-health workers were
equipped with cheap, fast testing devices, E. coli and other
microbes might not be able to surprise us so often in the future.
And if some evil genius does someday figure out how to unleash
a bioweapon, we will have had an excellent rehearsal.
slate v
Dear Prudence: Snooze Alarm Junkie
Thursday, March 20, 2008, at 4:18 PM ET
slate v
Fallout From Obama's Minister
A daily video from Slate V.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008, at 4:14 PM ET
slate v
Bad Movies: Leprechaun Flicks
A daily video from Slate V.
Monday, March 17, 2008, at 11:36 AM ET
sports nut
Dispatch From the NCAA Tournament
Behind the Belmont bench for (almost) the greatest upset in the history of
March Madness.
By Josh Levin
Friday, March 21, 2008, at 11:22 AM ET
WASHINGTON, D.C.—National bonding is rare in American
sports. We break into groups to root for our favorite pro and
college teams, and this factional fandom means our games are
zero-sum—when my guys win, somebody else's guys lose. But
the NCAA Tournament is different. When an underdog gets a
late lead, CBS zooms in and we all hope for a Miracle on
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Hardwood. On Thursday night, the nation (OK, minus a few
Duke fans) prayed for the Belmont Bruins. Or, as they'll forever
be known, that 15 seed that almost beat Duke.
In the Verizon Center, the crowd smells Blue Devil blood. With
two minutes to go in Thursday's opening-round game, Belmont's
Justin Hare gets fouled and the Bruins have a chance to take the
lead. As Hare walks slowly across half-court, flexing his wrist to
tune up for the free-throw line, my view from press row is
obscured by the Belmont benchwarmers, all standing and
flapping their arms up and down to incite the crowd. The team's
scrawny student manager looks like a strong candidate for
spontaneous human combustion. He pumps his right fist and
raises his arms above his head like Rocky, claiming victory with
two minutes to go. Hare makes both free throws. Belmont's up
70-69. Fans in Arizona red and West Virginia yellow, finding
common cause, writhe together in ecstasy. We are one nation
under a "Duck Fuke" sign.
The crowd has been on tenterhooks for a half hour now. During
an earlier TV timeout, the Duke cheerleaders were booed
mercilessly for doing nothing more than bouncing happily onto
the court to shake their pom-poms. A sign that the crowd is in
the Bruins' favor: There are three Belmont cheerleaders in the
stands. I walk over and ask why they're not out with their seven
female colleagues, and they tell me there's a little-known NCAA
rule capping the number of spirit squad members who can be on
the court at once. As Belmont takes the lead, the auxiliary
cheerers bounce up and down like their on-court sisters but don't
have room to do the splits.
The clock ticks down. Belmont has the ball up one with 40, 30,
20 seconds to go. With 17 seconds left, Bruins guard Alex
Renfroe loses control in the lane and fires a wild shot off the
backboard. Duke's Gerald Henderson rebounds and strides the
length of the floor; nobody from Belmont steps in his path as he
coasts to the basket and drops the ball in the net. Duke by one.
Belmont's Hare misses an off-balance leaner, but the Bruins
come away with the ball. Timeout. Belmont has the ball under
Duke's basket with four ticks on the clock and a chance to win.
In a post-game interview, Belmont coach Rick Byrd says he's
envisioned calling this play his whole life. Every kid who grew
up playing basketball has imagined taking, and making, this
shot. Four seconds to beat Duke, four seconds for the greatest
upset in NCAA Tournament history. In these backyard fairy
tales, everything happens like it happened for Bryce Drew and
Valparaiso, not how it happened for Belmont's Renfroe. Belmont
called for Triangle, a play in which Renfroe lobs the ball to the
front of the rim, where the team's best leaper, Shane Dansby,
would be waiting for a dunk or tap-in. But Dansby got bumped
as he rolled to the basket, screwing up the timing and leaving
Renfroe's pass to float aimlessly. The ball eventually landed in
the hands of Duke's DeMarcus Nelson. Then a foul, a missed
57/94
free throw, a Belmont half-court heave off the left side of the
rim. Ballgame.
In the background, you can hear the roar from the West
Virginia-Arizona game. The winner will play Duke, but it
coulda, woulda, shoulda been Belmont.
After the game, Renfroe takes the blame, casting himself as
Chris Webber in reverse. "It was supposed to be a lob, but it was
a bad read by me and a bad pass. I should have called a timeout,"
he says. "I wasn't thinking."
sports nut
It wasn't Renfroe's fault. First, he was Belmont's best player all
night, scoring a team-high 15 points and constantly cutting up
Duke's lead-footed perimeter defenders with drives to the basket.
Second, Triangle probably wasn't the right play; Belmont hadn't
run any lobs all game long but did have five players on the floor
capable of hitting a spot-up jumper. On the podium at the postgame press conference, Byrd absolves Renfroe of any fault.
("Thanks, coach," Renfroe says. The coach's jokey rejoinder:
"We'll talk about your defense later.") It was a dumb play-call,
Byrd says, and besides, Belmont had a bunch of other missed
opportunities. Justin Hare, for one, missed a shot that would've
put the Bruins up by three with just over a minute to go. "If we'd
scored earlier, if I had run a better out-of-bounds play, if Justin's
shot had gone in," Byrd lamented, "we probably wouldn't have
played any better, but we'd be still celebrating out there and the
world would be talking about us."
After the NCAA's official interview session, I walk with Byrd in
the hallway to the locker room to get in a few more questions.
The long-time Belmont coach, a folksy 54-year-old in a maroon
sweater-vest, confesses that he heard the roar of the crowd but
says he never got nervous. "There are a lot of games I don't have
any fun coaching," he says. He talks about the pressures that
Duke must face, how they're expected to win every game, before
making his way back to his own experience: "It was the most fun
game I ever coached in."
As his wife and daughter stand and wait, and a woman walks
past to tell the coach the team bus is about to pull away, Byrd
keeps talking. When Justin Hare shot the ball in the lane with a
minute to go, Byrd says, he's not sure the Duke defender was in
"legal position"—not that he's saying there should've been a foul
called. He continues, saying he told Mike Krzyzewski how he's
trying to turn Belmont into "a mini-version of Duke."
I get the feeling that I'm hearing the first run-through of a story
that Rick Byrd will be telling for the rest of his life. Belmont's
one-point loss is just 10 minutes old, and it already sounds like
he's on his front porch, 20 years later, talking about the one that
got away. As the coach spins his yarn, guard Andy Wicke, who
made a late three-pointer to get the Bruins within one, walks past
in his warm-ups and tells his coach his plans for the evening:
"Yes sir, I'm going to go with my parents." Then comes Alex
Renfroe, walking with his head down and a plastic-covered
dinner plate in his hand. He gets a consoling hug from the
coach's wife and continues down the hall. He's in more of a
hurry than Byrd is to leave the building, to get on the team bus.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Teams We Hate
Duke, USC, Cornell, and eight more odious schools in this year's NCAA
Tournament.
By Tommy Craggs, Bryan Curtis, Mike DeBonis, Sam Eifling,
Josh Levin, Chris Park, John Swansburg, and Robert Weintraub
Wednesday, March 19, 2008, at 7:10 AM ET
As every college hoops fan knows, the one shining moment of
the NCAA Tournament isn't when your favorite team wins. It's
when Duke loses. Or perhaps you get your jollies from rooting
against some team besides Duke. Well, probably not. But just in
case, here's Sports Nut's annual roundup of the evil, repugnant,
detestable teams that make March Madness such a joy
Duke University, Atlantic Coast Conference, No. 2 in West
Region
If history is our guide, 64 teams in the 2008 NCAA Tournament
believe the fans, critics, and concessionaires aren't giving them
enough respect. There's one team, though, that thinks the exact
opposite. In recent years, coach Mike Krzyzewski, guard-poet
J.J. Redick, and forward-faux businessman Christian Laettner
have confessed to reporters the terrible burden that the Blue
Devils must bear: Duke always gets the other team's best shot.
Complaining that you get too much respect, that the NCAA's
junior associates have the gall to try to beat you, is the
quintessence of Duke basketball. I believe psychologists refer to
this as narcissistic personality disorder.
Sure, every team and every hoops fan wants to see Coach
Leadership and Ethics bite it. But that's not because Duke is on
top of the basketball world—George Mason has reached as
many Final Fours over the last six years. No, America's hatred of
Duke grows ever-stronger because the program derives so much
of its ample self-regard from being hated. It's a vicious cycle of
annoyance: J.J. Redick says then-pre-frosh Greg Paulus will be
"hated as much as me," an arrogant prediction that makes both
Redick and Paulus instantly more loathsome. The most
frustrating thing about hating Duke, then, is knowing the
program would wither and die if you could just stop paying
attention. After all, Duke doesn't play on national television 800
times a year because people want to see Greg Paulus win.—Josh
Levin
Baylor University, Big 12 Conference, No. 11 in West Region
58/94
Hate is not a word I would use to describe Baylor, the red-brick
university conveniently located mere yards from Interstate 35 in
Waco, Texas. As any Big 12 alum will tell you, playing the
Bears, who hadn't made the NCAA Tournament in 20 years,
inspires a different emotion: fear. Fear of losing to a massively
inferior opponent, fear of bowing before the runt of the
conference. This season, after Texas A&M dropped a fiveovertime game to the Bears, the Aggies were serenaded with
chants of "worse than Bay-lor!" by opposing fans. The joke was
that such a fate was unimaginable.
The Bears' list of vanquished opponents is impressive: Notre
Dame, Winthrop, Kansas State, A&M, and, nearly, Washington
State. They have a lively squad coached by Scott Drew and
powered by guard Curtis Jerrells, who scored 36 points in the
A&M game. The rise of the Bears threatens to upset the delicate
fabric of Texas sports. Can a 14,000-student Baptist school that
until recently "discouraged" dancing on campus really be in the,
um, Big Dance? Can Baylor's success wipe away the memories
of the sordid murder scandal of 2003? Will all of us Texans have
to look at one another and say, "We are worse than Baylor?" The
mind reels.—Bryan Curtis
University of Wisconsin, Big Ten Conference, No. 3 in
Midwest Region
Everyone bags on Big Ten football, and appropriately so, but the
Midwestern brand of pigskin is easy on the eyes compared with
Big Ten hoops: a raft of mediocre teams, plenty of flowrestricting physicality, and, all-too-often, Brent Musberger,
looking live from Champaign or Iowa City. The most painful
Big Ten team to endure is the Badgers, a team that combines
brutishness and blandness into an unwatchable goulash.
I blame Bo Ryan, the coach who has created a top program in
Madison by installing all manner of defensive tactics while
forgetting the game is supposed to be entertainment. To use a
soccer analogy, the Badgers always appear to be playing for a
draw but manage to get enough muscled-in offensive rebounds
from the likes of Brian Butch to get past the league's weak
competition. Wisconsin will muck along in the tournament until
it runs into a team that knows how to execute a crossover
dribble. Until then, I'll be singing my own version of the
Badgers' fight song every time they clog up my TV: "Off,
Wisconsin!"—Robert Weintraub
Cornell University, Ivy League, No. 14 in South Region
I wasn't sure I hated Cornell at first. The team broke Penn and
Princeton's 19-year stranglehold on the NCAA Tournament.
That's refreshing. Upon closer examination, however, several
hate-stoking facts came to light:

The team nickname is Big Red. Do you have that
annoying jingle in your head yet? How about now?
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC




Three of the university's colleges receive significant
state funding. As a New York taxpayer, I am thus
subsidizing a sure loser. I wouldn't mind ponying up for
a contender, but having drawn Stanford in the first
round, Cornell can't even claim academic superiority.
The worst hardship the Big Red has overcome this
season: prolonged exposure to the team bus. Last week,
the AP noted that "[t]he road to the NCAA tournament
is especially difficult for Cornell" because players have
to "endure long bus trips." Just imagine: Some players
had to listen to their iPods for as many as four
consecutive hours.
When discussing the team in print or conversation, it
appears mandatory to mention that sophomore guard
Ryan Wittman is the son of Randy Whitman. Which
raises an inevitable question: Who is Randy Wittman?
Not a single player on the Cornell roster is enrolled at
the university's storied school of hotel administration.
It's bad enough that a team that lost to Bucknell is in the
dance. But you're telling me that none of these guys are
availing themselves of H ADM 437: Anheuser Busch
Seminar in Quality Brewing and Fine Beer? Come on,
Jeff Foote, you could have been the world's first 7-foot
bellhop!—John Swansburg
Western Kentucky University, Sun Belt Conference, No. 12
in West Region
Cornell isn't the only Big Red in this year's tournament. That's
also the name of the most soulless mascot in all of sports, a sort
of backwoods cousin to Grimace who devours children on behalf
of the Western Kentucky Hilltoppers. Others are perhaps uglier;
some are racially gauche. But Big Red? Not to go all Thorstein
Veblen here, but Big Red—the "All-American mascot," as the
school would have it—is nothing but a great big goggle-eyed
tribute to consumerism.
Consider: Big Red was born in 1979, the brainchild of one Ralph
Carey, a public-relations student at Western Kentucky and future
ad executive who, according to one account, fashioned his
mascot after various Hanna-Barbera characters. (Hanna-Barbera,
it bears noting, was a low-rent, corner-cutting cartoon
production company that never drew a tree it didn't repurpose.)
The result was the sort of anodyne red blob that might've been
fished out of a Sesame Street dumpster and run through three
focus groups. So bereft is Big Red of any defining characteristic
that an Italian media company, owned by Silvio Berlusconi,
could steal it wholesale, essentially admit as much, and still beat
back the copyright suit.
Big Red is now a tireless shill. He is a fixture on ESPN
commercials and makes about 225 public appearances a year.
Cough up $50 an hour, and he'll devour your children on their
birthdays. Carey once said that the mascot represented "the
spirit, the energy of a sporting event." Well, that and Nike,
59/94
whose shoes Big Red has worn faithfully since 1979. AllAmerican, indeed.—Tommy Craggs
University of Texas, Big 12 Conference, No. 2 in South
Region
"We're scheduled to come play Arkansas next year, and if the
fans don't treat us well, we're not going to come," Texas coach
Rick Barnes proclaimed to the local media as his team prepared
to play its first-round NCAA Tournament game in North Little
Rock, Ark. "We've got enough money here we can buy our way
out of it. So, they'd better be good to us."
This weekend, I'm counting on my fellow Arkansas fans to tell
Barnes where he can stick his gigantic sack of money. How nice
of the Texas coach to remind civilization, and a new generation
of Hog supporters, how good it feels to hate on the 'Horns. It felt
good to stomp No. 1 Texas 42-11 in Fayetteville in 1981, it felt
good to ditch the old Southwest Conference for the SEC ("Let
Texas play with themselves," it was said at the time), and it felt
good to eat a publicly roasted steer before each year's Texas
game. Of course, that fanfare applied only to football, which in
Texas (and Arkansas) remains king. The fact that Barnes is
brandishing the cash earned by the Texas football team is
downright adorable. Unlike his basketball program, the
Longhorns' football program, at least, has managed to buy itself
a title.—Sam Eifling
West Virginia University, Big East Conference, No. 7 in
West Region
Some great collegiate cheers give even nonpartisans
goosebumps. Rock Chalk, Jayhawk. The UCLA eight-clap.
Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer. But "Let's Goooooo!
Mountaineers!" is not one of them. Especially when it comes
from a visiting crowd of ill-tempered, well-liquored Larry the
Cable Guy aficionados. Some background: On Feb. 12, 2006,
West Virginia rolled into D.C.'s Verizon Center. My Hoyas had
beaten Duke. They'd beaten Notre Dame. They'd beaten Pitt.
And then they got Pittsnogled. The most annoying 6-foot-11
player in Big East history scored 15 in the second half, and
victory in hand, the cheer rolled sickeningly through the arena.
At least under coach John Beilein, you had to admire the
Mountaineers' scrappy personnel and his embrace of the same 13-1 zone I ran in 6th-grade CYO ball. But now that the 'Eers
have hired Bob Huggins, slime bucket of slime buckets, they're
about two classes of juco recruits away from obliterating any
lingering shreds of self-respect. As for Kevin Pittsnogle, I've
made my peace. As a lesser-known cheer goes: That's all right,
that's OK, we'll get your wedding pictures someday.—Mike
DeBonis
University of Arizona, Pacific-10 Conference, No. 10 in West
Region
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Arizona will play in its 24th straight NCAA tournament this
week, the longest active streak. That's one too many. In the last
three weeks, the Wildcats are winless against everyone but
Oregon State, a historically awful bunch of losers that hasn't put
up a fight since challenging the Washington Huskies to a duel in
a hotel parking lot.
But nothing about the anemic Wildcats, not even the team's
(non)graduation rate, reeks as much as the behavior of Lute
Olson, Arizona's longtime coach. Olson bailed on the team for
"personal" reasons right before the season, then had the gall to
haunt the program all year like an overzealous ombudsman.
When he later invented new "personal" reasons, even devoted
locals had to wonder why state taxpayers were footing the bill
for the absent coach's $750,000 salary. If that weren't enough,
the Silver Fox erased this bizarre story's only silver lining by
announcing last week that he's returning to coach next season.
I'm guessing that beleaguered interim coach Kevin O'Neill made
like Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt, when he rolls over in bed,
glares at his wife, and asks, "Who is this old woman living in my
house?" She dies shortly thereafter. Let's hope Arizona exits just
as gracefully this weekend.—Chris Park
University of Georgia, Southeastern Conference, No. 14 in
West Region
It's tough enough to deal with UGA's obnoxious, thin-skinned
fans during football season. Now, thanks to a miracle run to the
SEC Tournament title, the Athens contingent has something else
to crow endlessly about. Because a tornado rendered downtown
Atlanta unfit for frivolity, the Dawgs did the deed in the home
gym of its arch-enemy, Georgia Tech. Suffice it to say, Hotlanta
will never hear the end of it.
Georgia fans are so self-righteous, they probably believe the
twister (which I heard but didn't see, if you're curious) was sent
by the Lord hisself to facilitate the unlikely championship. I
prefer to blame Tennessee and Vanderbilt, the conference's two
best teams, for gazing toward the bigger tournament that starts
this week, thus helping a team that won four conference games
all season win four in three days and the SEC's automatic
tourney bid.
I'd have liked the Bulldogs' chances if the NCAAs had started
Monday. Georgia is like the kid who gets on an ungodly hot
streak and makes 30 straight free throws before mom makes him
come home. When he heads back out after dinner, the magic is
gone, and it's brick after brick after brick. By Thursday
afternoon, when the Bulldogs take on Xavier, reality will have
set in. That'll shut up those Georgia fans—at least until next
month's spring football game.—Robert Weintraub
American University, Patriot League, No. 15 in East Region
At opposite ends of the 20th century, bookending those happy
60/94
days when the school acted as a supposed front for the CIA,
American University found itself thoroughly beset by noxious
gasbags. I refer, in the first instance, to the containers of
Lewisite and mustard gas buried at the fringe of campus after
World War I. On the tail end, I refer, of course, to John
Feinstein.
There are many fine reasons to root for American, out of the
Patriot League, not least because this will be the program's first
appearance in the NCAA Tournament. But I can't, in good
conscience, cheer for any team that inspires Feinstein, America's
Favorite Sportswriter™, to inflict his prose on the reading
public, especially the sort found in The Last Amateurs,
Feinstein's 5,897th book. The book is nominally an account of
the Patriot League's 1999-2000 basketball season; the real
subject, however, is Feinstein himself, who is sad that he can
longer watch major college basketball—with its "win-at-all costs
mentality" and "pampered players"—and pretend he's 8 years
old.
Now, it is not American's fault that Feinstein fashioned the
school and its fellow conference members into some ridiculous
last redoubt of athletic purity, full of intelligent young men
playing for "glory and honor" (as opposed to the kids in
Conference USA, who, as we all know, play for hookers and
cocaine). But the die has been cast. American University:
Basketball that's good for you. Cheering for the Eagles now is
like cheering for Brussels sprouts and condoms.—Tommy
Craggs
University of Southern California, Pacific-10 Conference,
No. 6 in Midwest Region
There was a time when I hated Tim Floyd for mere
incompetence—when Chicago Bulls GM Jerry Krause plucked
him from Ames, Iowa, to rebuild a soon-to-be Jordan-andPippenless franchise. After compiling a 90-231 NBA record,
Floyd returned to college, where his loathsomeness sprouts from
seamier endeavors. While USC's mysterious acquisition of prep
star O.J. Mayo generated some under-the-breath muttering, I'm
willing to believe Floyd's not-really-believable story: that Mayo
essentially turned up on his doorstep, having recruited himself.
But forget about O.J. Mayo—there's a much more important
recruiting scandal going on at USC. The Trojans have spent one
of next year's scholarships on Romeo Miller, a mediocre 5-foot10 point guard better known as wee rapper Lil' Romeo. "The
more buzz you can create, the more news stories you can create,
the better served you are as a program," Floyd told the Wall
Street Journal, explaining why he recruited Master P's hoopsimpaired kid. USC and Tim Floyd must be stopped now, before
they destroy college basketball for good. Your 2012 NCAA title
game: Jonathan Lipnicki and USC vs. Stanford's superstar guard
Miley Cyrus.—Mike DeBonis
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
sports nut
The Lead Is Safe
How to tell when a college basketball game is out of reach.
By Bill James
Monday, March 17, 2008, at 7:11 AM ET
Question: How do you know when the contest is not officially
"over," but the outcome is no longer in doubt?
Answer: How would I know? I was a Huckabee guy.
With apologies to the Sage of St. Louis, there comes a time
when it ain't over, but ... it's over. There comes a time in a
relationship when a woman will still answer your phone calls,
but you're wasting your money buying flowers; you know what
I'm saying? There comes a moment during a job interview when
you're still talking, but you might as well take off your shoes.
There is a time in an illness when you're not dead yet, but you
might as well stop taking that nasty medicine.
There is a line there somewhere, and how do you know when the
line is crossed that separates hope from fantasy? If we're talking
politics, romance, job interviews, or medicine, I don't know.
When it comes to college basketball, I've got a theory.
This thing has a 40-year history, actually. I've been attending
basketball games at Allen Field House in Lawrence, Kan. (home
of the Jayhawks), since 1967. The Jayhawks usually win by 15
or 20 points, and sometime in about 1968 I started wondering
whether there wasn't some way to decide when the game was no
longer in doubt. I began to experiment with heuristic inventions
to try to find the moment at which the line was crossed. A
heuristic could be loosely defined as a mathematical rule that
works even though no licensed mathematician would be caught
dead associating with it.
Let's see ... what about: The game is over when
the number of points you are ahead (or behind) is
more than one-tenth the number of seconds left in
the game?*
Nah, that doesn't work. If you're 30 points behind, the game is
over much more than five minutes out (300 seconds); if you're
two points behind, the game is not over when there are 20
seconds left. The rule doesn't work on either end.
Eventually I found a rule that did work at that time, but at that
time there was no 3-point shot in basketball. When they added
the 3-point line, I had to recalibrate my system.
61/94
OK, I've stalled as long as I can. You ready?





Take the number of points one team is ahead.
Subtract three.
Add a half-point if the team that is ahead has the ball,
and subtract a half-point if the other team has the ball.
(Numbers less than zero become zero.)
Square that.
If the result is greater than the number of seconds left in
the game, the lead is safe.
(If you don't have a calculator handy, use the tool below to do
the calculations for you.)
If you've got a 10-point lead and the ball with 10 minutes left, is
that a safe lead?
Of course not; teams come back from a 10-point deficit all the
time. A 10-point lead, plus the ball, gives you a 7.5-point safety
margin. It's safe for 56.25 seconds—56, rounded down. With
600 seconds to play, a 10-point lead (with the ball) is 9 percent
safe. That doesn't mean a team with a 10-point lead and the ball
with 10 minutes to go has only a 9 percent chance of winning.
Rather, it means they're 9 percent of the way to having a
completely insurmountable advantage.
An 11-point lead with nine minutes to play—we'll let you keep
the ball. That's an 8.5-point safety margin with 540 seconds to
play; it's 13 percent safe (72.25 divided by 540).
A 12-point lead with eight minutes to play ... that's a 9.5 point
margin. It's 19 percent safe (90.25 divided by 480).
A 13-point lead with seven minutes to play ... 26 percent safe.
A 16-point lead with four minutes to play ... 76 percent safe,
assuming the team with the lead also has the ball. It's really
unusual for a team to come from 16 back with four to play and
win, but it does happen. I would guess it happens twice a year
somewhere in the world of college basketball.
A 17-point lead with three minutes to play ... bingo. That's a safe
lead. Seventeen points with three minutes to play is a safe lead
whether you have the ball or not, actually; a 17-point lead with
the ball is safe at 3:30; a 17-point lead without the ball is safe at
3:02.
Once a lead is safe, it's permanently safe, even if the score
tightens up. You're down 17 with three to play; you can make a
little run, maybe cut it to 8 with 1:41 to play. The lead, if it was
once safe, remains safe. The theory of a safe lead is that to
overcome it requires a series of events so improbable as to be
essentially impossible. If the "dead" team pulls back over the
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
safety line, that just means that they got some part of the
impossible sequence—not that they have a meaningful chance to
run the whole thing.
Why calculate when the lead is safe? The real answer is
"because I like to." I like to feel that I understand little things
about sports. I like to feel that I can see the difference between a
safe lead and a live contest for the same reason that I like to feel
that I can recognize a zone defense and recognize a pick-androll.
But if that answer doesn't work for you ... you pay a price in
sports for anything you believe that is not true. The fact is that
everybody around a college basketball game—the coaches, the
announcers, even the referees at a lower level—calculates when
the game is really over. They calculate it with intuition and
guesswork. When the lead is judged to be safe, the coaches
empty the bench. When the lead is judged to be safe, the
announcers start re-ranking the top 25 and talking about the
upcoming games or the next-round matchups. When the lead is
safe, the Jayhawk fans start doing the slow, spooky Rock Chalk
chant. I love that.
If a coach misjudges the moment at which the lead is safe, he
can empty the bench too early and get himself into trouble. I've
never actually seen a coach lose a game that way, but I certainly
have seen coaches misjudge when the lead is safe, empty the
bench too early, and get hit by a haymaker. More commonly,
because coaches are afraid that that might happen, they continue
to compete after the game is beyond any reasonable possibility
of a reversal. That has consequences, too. You can get a player
hurt playing for nothing. You can miss the opportunity to get a
little bit of rest for players who are tired at the end of the season
but have a game on Saturday. You can miss the opportunity to
get that 12th man his 20 seconds in an NCAA tournament
game—and if there's no value in that, then why do they do it?
And I think we've all seen games in which the announcers
misjudged the moment when the lead was safe and started
talking about the consequences of an outcome that was never to
be. Probably announcers don't enjoy doing that.
I have never personally seen a game in which a team lost after
having a safe lead. In February 1994, LSU led Kentucky by 31
with 15:30 left to play, only to see Kentucky rally for a 99-95
victory. That was impressive, but a 31-point lead without the
ball is safe for 12:36. The lead was 81 percent safe. And then
this year, LSU blew a 15-point lead to Villanova with 2:59 to
go—which, again, is close but no kewpie doll. With 179 seconds
to play you need a 13.5-point margin, which means a 16-point
lead with the ball or 17 without. The curse of Dale Brown.
Actually, I would guess Dale was cursing up a storm when that
happened.
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My editor, doing his due diligence, found one game in which a
team lost after holding a safe lead. On March 2, 1974, North
Carolina trailed Duke, 86-78, with 17 seconds to play—a safe
lead for Duke. Duke had repeated misadventures in in-bounding
the basketball and wound up losing the game in overtime. That
was before the human typo was hired to coach Duke, but ... does
anybody know where I could get a tape of that game?
My little formula, over the course of 40 years, has wormed its
way into our family's college basketball experience. Early on in
every game, usually once in the first half when the score is about
23-21 and again midway through the second half, I will observe
soberly, in my best faux-expert voice, that "the lead is not safe,"
and my wife will look at me not only as if I were an idiot, but as
if for some reason she is surprised by this. In the closing minutes
of a tense game, it gets serious: "Is that it? Is the lead safe yet,
Dad? How much more?" They are waiting to exhale, waiting to
unbundle their nerves. They know that every time the clock
stops, when I should be scoping out the cheerleaders, I am
recalculating the lead in the back of my head. I've been doing it
so long, I can do both at the same time.
I hope you get something out of it.
And if you do, tell Ralph Nader. It's over, man. Go home.
Correction, March 17, 2008: This piece originally misstated a
possible heuristic for determining whether a basketball lead is
safe. Rather than "[t]he game is over when the number of points
you are ahead (or behind) is more than 10 times the number of
seconds left in the game," it should have read "more than onetenth the numbers of seconds." (Return to the corrected
sentence.)
supreme court dispatches
Bearing Arms … Against Bears
Justice Kennedy thinks D.C. residents need protection—from grizzlies.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Tuesday, March 18, 2008, at 7:31 PM ET
With all due respect to those who complain that the justices on
the Supreme Court are too secretive, and for those who wish,
perhaps, that David Souter was more like David "West Side
Days Inn" Paterson, oral argument today in District of Columbia
v. Heller offers up a bounty of alarming personal revelations.
The least of which is that judges are completely political. But
who knew that a case testing the scope of the Second
Amendment's "right to bear arms" would smoke out a secret side
of Justice Anthony Kennedy? A side so intensely protective of
his right to self-defense that he makes—as I count—four
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
separate references to some mythical "remote settler" who—at
the time of the framing of the Constitution—would have needed
a gun to "defend himself and his family against hostile Indian
tribes and outlaws, wolves and bears, and grizzlies."
Who could have known that growing up in the wilds of
Sacramento, Calif., fostered in Kennedy such romantic nostalgia
for the good old days of grizzly hunting?
Kennedy is of course the court's consummate romantic, but there
is little romance to be found in parsing Ye Olde Constitution.
That is what today is about, however. That and the abandonment
of every principle of strict construction, federalism, and judicial
modesty in which the Roberts Court ever purported to believe.
Give or take some commas, the Second Amendment provides
that: "a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of
a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall
not be infringed." The constitutional question is whether that
first clause limits the right to bear arms to a citizen militia, or
whether the militia language represents a bit of constitutional
phlegm standing between you and your full-throated right to
bear arms. The courts have tended to go for the former approach,
but, then, they have also neglected this whole issue for decades.
Last year, the court of appeals for the District of Columbia used
the individual-rights rationale to strike down D.C.'s gun law—
which all but bans handguns and requires permitted firearms to
be stored unloaded and trigger-locked.
There is a second question the court must face—about which
standard it might use to evaluate gun laws—but that is a
pragmatic question that might get in the way of all this romantic
close-reading of 18th-century text, so the justices largely avoid it.
Arguing in favor of the District of Columbia today is former
acting solicitor general (and Slate contributor) Walter Dellinger,
and when he gets personal, it's to tell the justices where he goes
to buy a trigger lock (17th Street Hardware) and how long it
takes him to remove it—say, in the event of an attack by a
grizzly bear (three seconds).
Dellinger opens by whooshing us back in time to the framers,
who, he says, used the words "bear arms" to mean "rendering a
military service." Chief Justice John Roberts immediately asks
why the framers wrote "the right of the people" if they merely
meant "the right of the militia." Justice Kennedy spoils any
suspense by telling Dellinger, in the form of a question, that he
has no problem "de-linking" the two clauses to read the first as
"reaffirming" the right to a militia and the second as enshrining a
right to bear arms. Justice Antonin Scalia does Kennedy one
better and contends that the two phrases "go together
beautifully." That's five votes to create a fundamental right to
bear arms, only eight minutes into the argument.
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Dellinger warns that for the court to view the Second
Amendment as conferring "a fundamental liberty interest"—
unmoored from the militia rationale—risks undermining state
and local government regulations on guns. When Kennedy goes
even further back in time to the English bill of rights in 1689,
Scalia starts fretting about the Scottish highlanders and Roman
Catholics, for whom he worries in the manner of Kennedy and
the grizzly bears.
law—Roberts indicates that he, for one, has no interest in
articulating an intricate constitutional standard—be it strict
scrutiny, intermediate scrutiny, or otherwise. He pooh-poohs the
various tests floated in the amicus briefs for evaluating gun laws.
Roberts describes the "compelling interest," "significant
interest," and "narrowly tailored" tests that have subsidized
orthodontia for the children of many law professors over the
years as First Amendment "baggage."
Dellinger attempts to shift from arguing about the romantic
nature of the right to bear arms to the reasonableness of the D.C.
gun regulations, but the chief justice is quick to cut him off:
"What is reasonable about a total ban on possession?"
Clement finds himself in the strange position of telling the court
that if they protect gun rights as they are poised to do, they may
have to strike down the federal machine-gun ban. Scalia can't
seem to figure out what he's so worried about.
Dellinger replies that the handgun ban is only on "one kind of
weapon that's considered especially dangerous," to which
Roberts retorts, "So if you have a law that prohibits the
possession of books, it's all right to ban newspapers?" Dellinger
replies that the rifles and shotguns permitted under the D.C. ban
are sufficient to carry out the purposes of the gun owner. He
adds that the rationale used by the D.C. appeals court would
make it harder for "machine guns or armor-piercing bullets" to
be regulated.
Alan Gura represents D.C. gun owners, and a lot of folks had
doubts about him, given that today was his first appearance at
the high court. I see no evidence of wobbliness beyond the fact
that just 12 seconds into his presentation, Scalia barks, "Talk a
little slower; I'm not following you."
Scalia disagrees emphatically. He says the D.C. court defined
arms to include "the kind of weapon that was common for the
people to have. I don't know that a lot of people have machine
guns or armor-piercing bullets." Dellinger contends that
handguns can be more dangerous than other guns. They can be
"taken into schools, into buses, into government office
buildings." Samuel Alito and Dellinger then tussle over whether
there is a self-defense exception to the D.C. law, and, as has
happened rather frequently on Roberts' watch, Dellinger is given
extra time to finish his argument. Dellinger asks the court to
avoid turning every phrase of the Second Amendment into a
"libertarian right." A well-regulated militia isn't about everyone
owning a gun willy-nilly. The Constitution does not create some
kind of sacred, fundamental right to guns. If there's a right here
at all, he says, it's at the "penumbra of the periphery" of the
Constitution: in a shack behind the river where the other
unenumerated rights huddle.
Paul Clement has 15 minutes to represent the part of the Bush
administration that isn't insane, and he is saved from careerwrecking ideological moderation by the justices' obsessive focus
on the part of his case in which he agrees with gun owners. Like
them, he argues for an "individual right" that has no relation to
service in the militia. After justices David Souter, John Paul
Stevens, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg preclude him from talking for
a very long time, he is forced to assure them that if they would
just let him finish a sentence, he'd get to the part of his argument
where he agrees with them.
When Clement is finally permitted to explain why he rejects
"strict scrutiny"—the most exacting standard for evaluating a
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Breyer, turning from the poetry of constitutional language to the
reality of the D.C. gun ban, cites the 80,000-100,000 people
"killed or wounded" as a result of guns in America each year,
asking why the ban on handguns isn't a reasonable regulation.*
Gura says the military claims that citizens who have gun training
are better soldiers. Breyer asks whether that fact makes it
unreasonable for a city with a high crime rate to ban handguns.
Scalia tells Gura: "You want to say yes." Gura says yes.
Ginsburg asks whether "the people," at the time the Second
Amendment was drafted, meant "males between the ages of 17
and 45," and Kennedy invokes, for the third time today, his
settler-in-the-wilderness rationale for the Second Amendment.
Gura concedes that the government can certainly ban machine
guns or plastic handguns intended to get through a metal
detector and leaves open the question of whether state
universities can ban guns in dorm rooms, thus ensuring that he's
off Dick Cheney's Christmas card list forever.
Roberts reveals an 11th-hour fondness for trigger locks, out of
fear that "the children will get up and grab the firearm and use it
for some purpose" beyond fighting off government tyranny. Or
bears. This leads Justice Breyer to get off his best shot of the
day, when he asks whether Gura really wants "thousands of
judges all over the United States," as opposed to legislatures,
deciding fact-based trigger-lock questions. Responding, Gura
intones—in the spirit of Roe v. Wade—that "when a fundamental
right is at stake, there is a role for judicial review."
Souter asks whether the court might look to "current crime
statistics" to decide the case. And Scalia says that doing so
would be "all the more reason to allow a homeowner to have a
handgun." Someone hisses. And when Gura says that the court
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should be taking normative questions out of the hands of
legislature, the transition to Upside-Down World is complete.
This question is too complicated for anything but the policy
judgments of the court? It's as if he's channeling the whole
Warren Court at once.
Dellinger offers up a rebuttal that's all triple Lutzes and camel
spins. (There are really only a handful of people who can get
away with telling justices, "It took me three seconds [to remove
a trigger lock]. I'm not kidding!") Dellinger refocuses the court
on its alleged priorities by reminding them that this is a case
about "local legislation." He reminds Kennedy that he of all
people would hate a "national government that sets a single
standard for rural and urban areas, for East and West, North and
South," and that the right to own guns causes "disputes among
experts" such that the courts should hang back and allow the
local legislatures to thrash it out.
I sometimes fall for the old line that there's no such thing as
politics at the high court; there are merely different
interpretational tools. Not today. Today we have four liberals
rediscovering the beauty of local government and judicial
restraint and five conservatives poised to identify a fundamental
personal right that will have judges mucking about in gun cases
for years to come. After all these years of deep conservative
suspicion of turning over policy matters to the courts, the
Roberts Court has fallen in love with a new constitutional right.
And while they don't seem much concerned about how the
judges will manage it, they've just about ensured that judges
around the country will soon be ruling in gun cases the way they
used to rule on speeding tickets.
Correction, March 19, 2008: The original piece referred to
80,000 to 100,000 gun deaths each year in America. (Return to
the corrected sentence.)
television
If This Jacuzzi Could Talk
The X Effect takes the dating show to new lows.
By Troy Patterson
Wednesday, March 19, 2008, at 6:30 PM ET
First came Next, the MTV dating show most notable for the
great care participants take in crafting casually cruel brushoff
lines. Then followed Parental Control, the MTV dating show on
which adults set up their children on rendezvous with
prospective new paramours and trade insults with their current
ones. And then MTV Exposed spurted onto the air, a lively little
number featuring daters secretly monitored by lie detectors.
Taking cues from each of these uplifting programs—and also
from Fantasy Island, Brian De Palma films, and police
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
stakeouts—The X Effect marks a logical step downward. This
one combines a dating show and a divorce complaint.
We're watching people watch their romantic partners rekindle
things with old flames. Consider the case of Flavia and Ryan.
They used to go out. Now Flavia is seeing Patrick, and Ryan has
pledged parts of body and soul to Steff. Some pretense—a
pretense both unstated and, the show being blatantly half-phony,
doubtlessly thinner than Flavia's blouse—brings each couple to a
resort hotel in Miami. Patrick and Steff are soon herded into an
SUV, and Flavia and Ryan—the exes, referred to here as "the
X's"—are instructed that they'll be spending the weekend
together. They see their current lovers ferried away. The vehicle
drives around the block, and the producers install Patrick and
Steff—"the O's," as if love were a battlefield, and they were on
defense—in a bungalow offering the comforts of an unmarked
surveillance truck, plus continental breakfast and, for down-time
amusement, a Jenga set.
A person named Natalia functions as a hostess, a concierge, a
dungeon mistress. She hands Patrick and Steff a guide that
explains the spy game they've been drafted into. The O's always
read this aloud—a welcome contribution to atmosphere and also
handy proof that they are literate. Technology introduced at the
outset of each episode includes a "touch sensor" (a vaguely tikiinspired lamp that glows red whenever the skin of the X's meets
as they exchange friendly hugs or desperate embraces or 100proof body shots) and a "transaction log" (which tracks the
purchase of Long Island iced teas).
The weekend unfolds at precisely the same pace in each episode.
The form is rigid. The rules governing the composition of a
villanelle are comparatively lax. After the O's have fretted about
the red light for a little while, Natalia troops back in—only the
faintest hint of sadism in her service-industry smile at this
point—to tell them that they must send the X's on an activity.
The choice is always between some pastime so wholesome as to
constitute a weak punch line (croquet, chess, badminton) and
something explicitly skanky (the "sexy swimsuit photo shoot,"
the chocolate spa). Of course, only the salacious option offers
the chance for further eavesdropping. Of course, the O's always
indulge the opportunity. Similarly, they never decline Natalia's
offer to send their lovers further treats, such as a make-yourown-s'mores kit with a listening device in the mini-grill.
Matters escalate. The X's fall—but, more frequently, leap—into
old habits. The O's grow tormented, with the boys tending to
adopt slouching postures in their misery—deep, disconsolate
slumps, spines parallel to the floor—and the girls preferring to
curl up into the most adorable little fetal balls. The O's make
statements to the camera: "I thought they were gonna have a
good weekend together as friends, but the licking was uncalledfor." In due course, the X's receive a complimentary upgrade to a
sprawling suite—Villa de los Amantes, it is called—and the O's
learn about a new feature of their in-room entertainment. Natalia
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shows them how to access a TV channel displaying the layout of
Villa de los Amantes, with a pink X and blue X onscreen to
represent their significant others and their positions in the room.
"Or," she adds, taunting now, "you can turn off the TV if you
don't want to watch." With numbing predictability, the pink X
and blue X make straight for the shower. The touch sensor goes
twirling across the room. The Jenga tower tumbles with a clatter.
marriage certificate is the first document in a paper trail that will
end with a divorce decree. This doesn't mean my correspondents
conclude that men and women shouldn't form unions and even
live together, just that it may be wiser not to make your love life
official. "Legal ties are supposed to make it somehow legit?
With the divorce rate as high as it is, a live-in girlfriend is just as
good," wrote one.
Episodes end with confrontations, ultimata, decisions. The sound
editors do sterling work with face-slapping, not only enhancing
the noise of aggrieved palm on stubbly cheek but also
introducing the whoosh of the wind-up. The show otherwise has
a flat affect. It's as jaded as a private detective. It's not here to
shock you. Shows like The X Effect don't lead the culture; they
follow it, discovering, in this case, a new mutation of the soap
opera and its themes— jealousy, betrayal, trust, lust, Jacuzzis.
You can turn off the TV if you don't want to watch.
Readers also like to rebuke me for my preference that two decent
people who are committed to each other and find themselves
procreating without intending to should provide the stability of
marriage for their child. "Having a child will be stressful and life
altering enough. Parents need to work on their relationship on
their time schedule." "I feel that a baby is its own blessing. Have
that blessing before you get married." "How dare you imply that
an unexpected pregnancy should lead to marriage? You are
simply out of touch with modern culture."
the best policy
… And Baby Makes Two
Forget Juno. Out-of-wedlocks births are a national catastrophe.
By Emily Yoffe
Thursday, March 20, 2008, at 6:57 AM ET
That may be. But it also means that modern culture is out of
touch with the needs of children. Some researchers identify outof-wedlock births as the chief cause for the increasing
stratification and inequality of American life, the first step that
casts children into an ever more rigid caste system. Studies have
found that children born to single mothers are vastly more likely
to be poor, have behavioral and psychological problems, drop
out of high school, and themselves go on to have out-of-wedlock
children.
We still think of the archetypal unwed mother as a Jamie Lynn
Spears—a dopey teenager who dropped her panties and got in
over her head. A generation and more ago, that's who most
unwed mothers were. But according to the most recent statistics
from the Centers for Disease Control, teenagers account for only
23 percent of current out-of-wedlock births. That means the vast
majority of unwed mothers are old enough to know what they're
doing: Unwed births are surging among women ages 25 to 29.
For 10 years, the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study at
Princeton University has followed the families of 5,000 children,
three-quarters born to unwed parents. According to the research,
most of these parents, both women and men, said they wanted to
get married—and to each other. But they somehow feel this
mutual decision is beyond their power to make. And by not
making it, the forces of inertia start pulling them apart. Five
years after their children's births, only 16 percent of the couples
had married, and 60 percent had split.
In the last 50 years, there has been an extraordinary decoupling
of marriage and procreation. In 1960 about 5 percent of births
were to unwed mothers; that figure is now a record high of
nearly 40 percent. Out-of-wedlock births used to be such a
source of shame that families tried to hide them: Singer Bobby
Darin was born to a teen mother and raised to believe she was
his sister. But now out-of-wedlock births are greeted with a
shrug. Some say they're an understandable response to economic
realities. Others say they're a liberating change from the
shotgun-wedding ethic that shackled two unsuitable people
together for life.
Among the most poignant letters I get are those from young
women wondering whether they will ever convince the father of
their children finally to marry them. "My boyfriend and I have a
4-year-old son. We've broken up but realized that we truly are
meant for one another. My father was diagnosed with stage four
cancer last year, and I've made it known to my boyfriend how
important it is for me to have my father with me when I get
married. When I bring up marriage to my boyfriend his reply is
we will get married, I promise, but he has not asked me."
As Slate's advice columnist, Dear Prudence, I get constant
reports from the people who are creating the statistics. When I
extol the importance of marriage in the advice column, my inbox
fills with e-mails from readers who don't see marriage as the
passage from single life to a life of commitment. To them, the
That out-of-wedlock births are a problem for society does get
some political attention—the kind of attention that shows there's
not a good plan for what to do about them. Mitt Romney
mentioned the statistics in his presidential withdrawal speech.
He cites declining religious observance, easily available
pornography, and the possibility of gay marriage as the causes—
a platform that seems unlikely to reverse the birth trends. Barack
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
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Obama, who grew up without a father, believes that a central
reason for the ever-increasing rates is the difficult economic
circumstances of the working class. In one speech on fatherhood,
he talked about the need for government programs to help men
become more of a presence in their children's lives and
admonished fathers to take their duties seriously. But he didn't
mention that one key to effective fatherhood is first becoming a
husband.
Economists believe humans act rationally (a somewhat irrational
belief, if you ask me), so some conclude that all this out-ofwedlock childbearing is a logical response to market forces, not
the result of something as amorphous as "culture." Since many
working-class men do not offer the financial stability they used
to provide, women see little incentive to marry them. As Obama
said, "[M]any black men simply cannot afford to raise a family."
(The out-of-wedlock birthrate among black Americans is close
to 70 percent.) I'm trying to follow the logic here. I can
understand that a woman looking to get married may decide that
a man is such a poor economic prospect that he's not husband
material (even if a husband with a low income is better than no
husband and no income). But how then is that same man, or a
string of them, worthy of fathering her children?
Scholar Kay Hymowitz, author of Marriage and Caste in
America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age,
turns the argument around and says it's not that harsh economic
conditions lead to women having children without fathers, but
that the decision to have children without fathers leads to harsh,
and self-perpetuating, economic conditions. She explains that
having the belief that a solid marriage is central to one's life—
that it precedes starting a family—encourages woman and men
to make important choices based on self-discipline and
deliberation. This is a formula "needed for upward mobility,
qualities all the more important in a tough new knowledge
economy."
I get letters all the time that describe the turbulence that results
from deciding marriage is archaic. Sometimes the writers start
with a conflicted sense of hope. "My ex is rather immature and
irresponsible. I had a recent fling with him that resulted in
pregnancy. I am overjoyed with the impending arrival of my
baby, but I fear that no one else in my life will feel the same
way." This is followed by more conflicted and less hopeful
letters when the kids are small. "My boyfriend and I have a child
who is almost 2. He also has a daughter and I have two other
children. We bought a home together, but a week before we
were about to move in, he left me. Now it's four months later,
and he's bought me an engagement ring, but I found out he had a
girlfriend during the time we were split." "I have two children
with my ex-boyfriend. We broke up because last year a paternity
test he was ordered to have came back positive. Even though we
are not together, I still want my kids to have a father in their life.
I also know he is ignoring his new son because he wants nothing
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
to do with the mom, but that little boy also deserves to have a
male figure who cares."
Having unmarried parents can be devastating for children who
start out with no cushion in life. In 1999 congressional
testimony, Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution said that
the increase in single-parent families—mostly due to unwed
motherhood in the past few decades—"can account for virtually
all of the increase in child poverty since 1970." A recent study
found that the stress of early childhood poverty can literally
damage developing brains.
Hymowitz points out that all classes of Americans once
followed the same life script of marriage before children. When
divorce rates started soaring in the 1970s, everyone was fleeing
their marriages. But then the classes started diverging. The
Economist cites statistics that show among college-educated
women married between 1990 and 1994, only 16.5 percent were
divorced 10 years later. Among those with a high-school
education or less who married in those same years, about 40
percent were divorced after a decade.
And to avoid the trauma of divorce, those with less education
began forgoing marriage altogether. Better-educated women,
who once upon a time were at a disadvantage in finding a mate,
"are now more likely to marry than their non-college peers,"
according to the National Marriage Project at Rutgers
University. It turns out that outside Hollywood, there aren't too
many Murphy Browns—successful, educated women who
choose to have children alone. The Murphy Browns actually get
married: Only 4 percent of college graduates have children out
of wedlock.
It's important to offer some caveats. I am not—the researchers
are not—advising marriage at all costs. "Dear Prudence" letter
writers should not marry the jerks whom they had drunken
procreative sex with and hope never to see again. Nor do I
recommend entering into a union with a clearly unstable,
unsuitable partner. A survey by the Center for Law and Social
Policy on the benefits for children of having married parents did
come to the anodyne conclusion that "high conflict" marriages
can be as bad for children as having never-married parents. I
know. My parents had a "high conflict," violent marriage; I don't
recommend it for anyone. Also, growing up in ideal
circumstances is no guarantee that one's life will be a happy
success, just as growing up in difficult ones does not doom one
to be a troubled failure. (See Barack Obama.)
But perhaps in our desire not to make moral judgments about
personal choices, young women wholly unprepared to be
mothers are not getting the message that there are dire
consequences of having (unprotected) sex with guys too lame to
be fathers. There is a scene in the teen pregnancy movie Juno in
which the title character, a 16-year-old who has decided not to
abort her unplanned baby but to give it up for adoption, is having
67/94
an ultrasound. The technician, thinking she has on the examining
table another knocked-up teenager planning to raise her child,
makes disparaging remarks about children born into those
circumstances. We are supposed to loathe this character and
cheer when Juno's stepmother puts her in her place. But I found
myself sympathetic to the technician. Why is it verboten to
express the truth that growing up with a lonely, overwhelmed
mother and a missing father is a recipe for childhood pain?
Now, it seems to me that there are two ways to set about
determining whether this interpretation is, in fact, true. The first
is the media-theory approach, which is to analyze the "particular
way that information now moves," thanks to the Web and other
modern media forms, and to try to gauge whether there is indeed
something structural to these new forms that amplifies
deception. The other approach is to look at the problem from a
sociological point of view: Is there a general increase in
falsehood, or blindly partisan interpretations of the world, that
we can see around us, compared with what we saw 20 or 50
years ago?
the book club
Let me try my hand quickly at both, and perhaps we can get into
more detail in the next round. In terms of the flow of
information, there is no question that the Internet has made it
vastly easier to share complete fabrications—delusional theories,
libelous accusations, Photoshopped fantasies—with other human
beings. (Just think about the spam!) That we agree on. But I
think it is equally true that the rise of the Internet has made it
vastly easier to share useful, factual information with other
human beings. Because the media landscape is so much more
interconnected—thanks largely to the innovation of hypertext
(and to Google)—it has also never been easier to fact-check a
given piece of information. We had plenty of urban myths
during my childhood in the 1970s and early 1980s, but we didn't
have Snopes.com to debunk them.
True Enough
Ban DDT, let the terrorists win.
By Steven Johnson and Farhad Manjoo
Wednesday, March 19, 2008, at 12:04 PM ET
From: Farhad Manjoo
To: Steven Johnson
Subject: More Fiction, but More Facts, Too
Posted Tuesday, March 18, 2008, at 7:41 AM ET
Farhad—
Before I go into debate mode here, I wanted to start by saying
how much I've enjoyed reading True Enough. You have literally
dozens of stories in the book that you've told wonderfully, but
you've also managed to connect them to illuminating research in
psychology and sociology: the whole history of the "Swift Boat"
campaign, the 2004 Ohio election-fraud meme, 9/11 conspiracy
theorists. It's an entertaining and important mix of media theory,
cultural criticism, and science journalism.
Of course, one of the central themes of True Enough is that we
live in excessively partisan times, and in that spirit, I'm now
going to shift gears and explain why your argument is hopelessly
wrong.
I'm kidding, but I think we do disagree on a couple of key points.
I find myself agreeing thoroughly with your assessment of the
forces at work in each of your anecdotes. What I have trouble
with is the global conclusions you draw. You describe your
thesis near the beginning: "The limitless choice we now enjoy
over the information we get about our world has loosened our
grip on what is—and isn't—true." At the end you phrase it this
way: "The particular way in which information now moves
through society—on currents of loosely linked online groups and
niche media outfits, pushed along by experts and journalists of
dubious character, and bolstered by documents that are no longer
considered proof of realty—amplifies deception."
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Saying that the Web amplifies deception is, to me, a bit like
saying that New York is more dangerous than Baltimore because
it has more murders. Yes, in absolute numbers, there are more
untruths on the Web than we had in the heyday of print or mass
media, but there are also more truths out there. We've seen that
big, decentralized systems like open-source software and
Wikipedia aren't perfect, but over time they do trend toward
more accuracy and stability. I think that will increasingly be the
case as more and more of our news migrates to the Web.
That's why I think it's important to note that many of your key
examples are dependent on old-style, top-down media
distribution. You talk about the American public's continuing
belief in a connection between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein; the
Swift Boat Veteran ads that distorted the truth of Kerry's record;
Lou Dobbs ranting on CNN. These are all distortions that speak
to the power of the old mass-media model or the even older
political model of the executive branch. (I think it's telling that
you only spent a page or two on the successful fact-checking of
the forged CBS draft-dodging memos.) As you say in the book,
the Swift Boat meme didn't take off until the group started
running television ads. Americans don't connect Saddam to 9/11
because of distributed online niche groups; they make that
connection because the vice president of the United States
repeatedly went on television to keep the connection alive.
That's as old-school as it gets.
68/94
This leads to the sociological question. One way to think about it
is to look at conspiracy theories, which play a prominent role in
True Enough. If your premise were right, the new media
landscape would have made our culture more amenable to these
theories than ever. I don't exactly know how to go about proving
this, but I think there's a very strong argument that the country is
significantly less conspiratorially minded than it was in the late
1960s and 1970s. Think of the litany from that period: JFK,
Castro, faked moon landings, "Paul Is Dead," Roswell. (For
what it's worth, the conspiracy page at Wikipedia is dominated
by these outdated theories, but perhaps that itself is a
conspiracy.) Yes, we have the 9/11 "truth movement" theories,
but we also have a number of dogs that didn't bark. Think about
the anthrax attacks of 2001—a major act of terrorism against
prominent people that has not been solved, and yet there are
almost no well-known crank theories about that in circulation. If
that had happened in the 1970s, Oliver Stone would be making a
movie about it right about now.
And then there is the premise that we live in increasingly
partisan political times, where our worldviews have diverged so
much that we can't agree on basic truths. This is, of course,
conventional wisdom—people make offhand references to our
partisan political culture all the time—but I think it is a bizarre
form of political amnesia. Think back again to the 1950s, '60s,
and '70s. Yes, we have Fox News, but we no longer have lynch
mobs. We no longer have people getting fire-hosed by the
authorities because they want to ride in the front of the bus or
war protesters killed on their campuses. We no longer have
radical political groups with significant followings arguing for
violent revolution; we haven't had a politically motivated
assassination attempt in decades. We have broad public
consensus on the role of women and minorities in government
and the workforce. We no longer have major political figures
denouncing the Communists lurking among us. Yes, the right
hates the Clintons, and the left hates Bush, but the left hated
Nixon just as much, and some of them hated LBJ for good
measure. There is far more consensus in the country's political
values than there was 30 years ago. We agree on much more
than we did back then.
I admit that one thing has changed: Our political culture looks
more partisan on television than it did back then, in the sense
that Bill O'Reilly is more partisan in style and substance than,
say, Cronkite was. But as you know better than anyone, Farhad,
just because it's on television, it doesn't mean it's true.
Steven
Posted Tuesday, March 18, 2008, at 2:53 PM ET
Steven,
As a longtime fan of your work, I'm tickled by your kind words,
and I'm honored to have the chance to debate True Enough with
you here. That said, let's get ready to rumble.
You do a nice job summarizing my ideas, but I want to point out
that True Enough isn't about the Internet alone. I've got to say
this in order to squash the charge—which you don't make, but
which I fear others might—that I'm some kind of Luddite. I've
spent a career writing for the Web, I get most of my news online,
and I consider Boing Boing a national treasure.
So my beef is not with the Internet, exactly, but with the entire
modern infosphere: blogs, cable news, talk radio, YouTube,
podcasts, on-demand book publishing, etc. In the era of mass
media—the 60-year span, give or take, between the advent of
television and the advent of the Web—we got all our news from
a handful of major sources. Now we get our news from all sides,
from amateurs and professionals who span Chris Anderson's
famously long tail of niche outlets.
I think you and I agree that this shift will profoundly alter
society, and that some changes will be for the good and some
will be for the bad. Where we disagree is the bottom line: When
it comes to that grand, gauzy thing called Truth, I think niche
media will do more harm than good, at least for the foreseeable
future.
You're right, the Internet is a boon for fact-checking. But how
useful is fact-checking if the facts and the lies shuttle about in
entirely separate cultural universes?
In the book, I spend much time on Leon Festinger's theory of
"selective exposure"—the idea that in order to avoid cognitive
dissonance, we all seek out information that jibes with our
beliefs and avoid information that conflicts with them. While the
theory is controversial, there's ample evidence that selective
exposure plays a role in how people parse the news today.
Survey data show that folks on the right and folks on the left
now swim in very different news pools. Right-wing blogs link to
righty sites, while left-wing blogs link to lefty sites. For
example, see Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance's study (PDF) or
consider this experiment by Shanto Iyengar and Richard Morin:
If you slap the Fox News logo on a generic news story—even a
travel or sports story, something completely nonpolitical—
Republicans' interest in it shoots up, while Democrats' interest
plummets. People now choose their news—and thus their
facts—through a partisan lens.
From: Farhad Manjoo
To: Steven Johnson
Subject: Boing Boing Is a National Treasure
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
69/94
Yes, the Swift Boat campaign exploded when it hit TV, but I
wouldn't say it depended on "old-style top-down media
distribution." The TV we're talking about is cable news,
especially Fox: the very definition of a niche partisan outlet.
(Fox's biggest show, The O'Reilly Factor, attracts about 4
million viewers a night; that's big for cable, but it's not the
mainstream.)
The Swift Boaters initially tried to go the old-media way. In
May 2004, they held a press conference at the National Press
Club to announce that John Kerry had lied about his time in
Vietnam. Reporters from every old-media shop in town showed
up, but most dismissed the group. Bereft, the vets went to the
Web and talk radio, where they found an audience that lapped up
their claims. It was only by winning some fame in these media
that the vets garnered a few big donors and, eventually, interest
from cable TV. Broadcast news networks, the Associated Press,
and national newspapers came to the story much later on. And
their role was salutary—online, in print, and on TV, the oldmedia outlets fact-checked the Swift Boaters very well,
debunking most of their claims. But did the facts hurt the story?
Not really.
On 9/11 and Saddam: Would Dick Cheney have been able to
convince the nation of that connection without a partisan press
apparatus—Limbaugh, Drudge, O'Reilly, the Freepers—at his
back? We can't know, of course. I think it's telling, though, that a
large percentage of Americans continued believing the lie long
after even Cheney and the rest of the administration disavowed
it. To me, this suggests that the story was propelled by forces far
stronger than the vice president. It persisted—and persists—
thanks to niche partisan outlets and despite the facts of the
matter being available to all online.
Of course, you're right that society has found a consensus on
many of the most dogged issues of our past. But True Enough
doesn't argue that we are markedly more partisan today than we
once were. Rather, I'm saying that our partisanship is of a
different character. The big historical controversies you mention
involved questions of political values—for example, what
should be the proper role of women and minorities in society?
Disagreement over an issue like global warming, though, doesn't
concern values. It's a difference over facts: If you believe the
science on global warming, you think we should do something
about it. But if you're among the 20 percent to 40 percent of
Americans who subscribe to different facts on the question, you
don't. And on many big issues—the war, terrorism, several areas
of science, even the state of the economy—Americans today not
only hold different opinions from one another; they hold
different facts.
As for conspiracy theories, I can assure you that an alleged
governmental role in 9/11 isn't the only thing keeping paranoid
Americans up at night. Have you heard Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s
theory on vaccines and autism (championed now by John
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
McCain)? Or Kennedy's theories on the stolen election of 2004?
What about the NAFTA superhighway? Or HIV denialists?
Really, I could go on.
—Farhad
From: Steven Johnson
To: Farhad Manjoo
Subject: Dittoheads vs. Polymaths
Posted Wednesday, March 19, 2008, at 7:03 AM ET
Farhad,
To ensure that you and I don't end up swimming in different
pools, let me try to spell out quickly where we agree. First, the
modern infosphere is dramatically more diverse in the number
and range of perspectives now available. (Taking your cue, I'm
referring to the whole panoply here: the Web, cable, talk radio,
and so on.) Second, ordinary people have far more control over
the perspectives they are exposed to, thanks both to the diversity
of media platforms and to the long tail of viewpoints they
support. Third, that infosphere is now far more densely
interconnected—on the Web, of course, but also on cable. (Bill
O'Reilly is just a couple of clicks on the remote away from Keith
Olbermann, after all.)
I agree completely that you can use these three developments to
build an ideological cocoon for yourself if you so choose. But
you can also use them to expose yourself to an incredible range
of ideas and perspectives—to challenge your assumptions, factcheck arguments, understand where your opponents are coming
from, and stitch together your own informed worldview out of
those multiple realities. I realize that description sounds
ridiculously high-minded. (Even the most urbane Web polymath
goes for a little partisan red meat every now and then.) But let's
think of it, for our purposes, as the caricature on the other side of
the spectrum, the opposite of the dittohead who doesn't believe
anything unless he hears it straight from Rush's mouth.
What we're trying to figure out is which pole has a stronger
magnetic force in this new world: the dittohead or the polymath.
In such a connected environment, truth should be able to spread
more quickly through the system, assuming people have an
interest in truth. But if people are more driven by selective
exposure—finding online information that confirms what they
already believe—then the system will let them keep truth at bay,
assuming their beliefs are untrue. (By the way, I loved the
sections of your book on the science of selective exposure.)
70/94
You invoke the 20 percent to 40 percent of Americans who don't
believe the science of global warming as evidence that the forces
of selective exposure are stronger than those of truth-seeking.
But the percentage of Americans who have both heard of and
believe in human-caused climate change has been growing
steadily for the last 15 years. Many more Americans now pursue
green lifestyles—in their choice of cars, in the products they
buy, and in the food they eat. So there's no question the science
is making progress and winning converts at a steady rate. But
just like the political struggles that dominated the '50s and '60s—
which were about facts as much as values, contrary to what you
claim—the conversion process takes time. It's frustrating that the
change can't happen overnight, but no more frustrating than it
was listening to bigots invoking the pseudosciences of sexism or
racism in the '60s.
space that connects the pools—has become an even more
popular place to be.
Steven
From: Farhad Manjoo
To: Steven Johnson
Subject: Ban DDT, Let the Terrorists Win
Posted Wednesday, March 19, 2008, at 12:04 PM ET
Steven,
I suppose the great, untestable question on global warming is
this: If we could rewind the clock and somehow build an
international scientific consensus about global warming in, say,
1950, would the American public have embraced the reality of
the threat and the need for change more quickly? We'll never
know, of course. It would be interesting to compare the spread of
information in the post-Silent Spring era, to see whether the
environmental science of that period reached a broad public
consensus faster than global-warming science has in recent
years. If you—or any of Slate's readers—know of studies along
those lines, I'd love to hear about them.
But we do have one clear social experiment that we can look at
on the dittohead-vs.-polymath question. If you and I had been
having this debate back in 1990, right as the new infosphere was
coming into being—talk radio ascendant, online communities
starting to take shape—presumably your prediction would have
been that the forces of selective exposure in this new world
would drive people into those different pools of information,
confirming and amplifying their existing beliefs, strengthening
their alliances to their initial tribe, and growing further away
from those with different perspectives. My prediction, on the
other hand, would have been that the connective, diversifying
properties of this new world would express themselves in the
opposite direction: people breaking free from the party lines and
creating more eclectic political worldviews, stitched together
from the diverse experiences that they can now encounter on the
screen.
What actually happened during that period? Through all the
swings back and forth between the two parties, the single most
pronounced trend since the early '90s is the steady rise of
Americans who consider themselves independent voters,
unaligned with either party. (They have tripled in size during
that period, by some measures.) Yes, the new information
paradigm has been a boon to people who believe only what
O'Reilly (or Michael Moore) has to say. But all those
independents make me think that the common ground—the
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
For two people in a debate over cultural rifts, you and I sure are
agreeing on a great deal. I suppose that's one positive sign.
That's why I hate to turn this, now, into the most tedious sort of
fight—one about interpreting voter stats. There's voluminous
poli-sci research on the recent rise of independent voters, and the
picture isn't as clear-cut as you say. Yes, the share of Americans
who identify as independents has grown over the past couple of
decades. At the same time, though, the meaning of independence
has shifted: Most unaligned voters now exhibit strong, pseudopermanent preferences—in surveys as well as in voting
behavior—for one party or another. The number of what you
might call "pure" independents—voters who pick candidates
without regard to party and ideology—has been steadily
declining.
And don't overlook all the other signs of growing political
polarization. Americans who do identify with parties are now
much less willing than in the past to vote across party lines. In
the 1970s, liberals frequently voted (PDF) for Republicans and
conservatives for Democrats. We don't see that sort of behavior
anymore. Congress has also grown steadily more partisan; partyline votes on all but the most inconsequential of issues are now
the norm. Just look at what's happened to John McCain in the
last 10 years—he was against Bush's tax cuts before he was for
them, which pretty much says it all, no?
Can we blame the new infosphere for this new partisanship? It
certainly doesn't deserve all the blame. Gerrymandering,
lobbying, campaign-finance rules, 9/11, and Tom DeLay, among
other things, have also likely contributed to polarization. The
rise of voters who call themselves "independent"
notwithstanding, we've seen few signs, since 1990, of people
reaching for common ground.
I agree with you on global warming. Though a large number of
Americans still dismisses the science, it does look like facts
about climate change are slowly washing over the culture. But
71/94
let's not forget your question: Would the public of the 1950s—
the mass-media public—have accepted the facts sooner than the
public of the 2000s, the niche-media public? The question, as
you say, is untestable.
But on Rachel Carson: Silent Spring was first serialized in The
New Yorker in the summer of 1962, and it came out as a book
that September. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club title, and
quickly hit the New York Times best-seller list. In 1963, CBS
Reports, a 60 Minutes-type show, broadcast an hourlong report
on Carson's thesis that the pesticide DDT was causing ecological
damage. This was back when one-third of the nation watched
CBS—we're talking American Idol-type ratings.
The chemical industry mounted a huge counterattack in the
media. Carson was called a "hysterical woman," assailed as an
alarmist, and accused of overlooking all the benefits of DDT.
The charges didn't stick. John F. Kennedy's science advisory
panel looked into Silent Spring's thesis and supported its claims.
The industry largely backed down, and within a few years the
government began to regulate DDT. In 1972—10 years after
Silent Spring's publication, under a Republican administration—
the pesticide was banned for use in the United States.
Just 10 years! Can you imagine the fate that would await Silent
Spring if it were serialized in The New Yorker today? You can
guess it would get some play: NPR and the big newspapers
would go after the story; sites like TreeHugger and Grist and
maybe Slate and Salon would discuss it; perhaps the network
news would interview Carson; and maybe cable news would get
to it, too.
But picture the fun Fox News and right-wing blogs would have
with it. Carson had researched DDT's effects on the environment
for years, but the science was not airtight; there was, as in any
emerging field of study, legitimate disagreement among experts
over the scope of the problem and the remedy. Today, the right
would surely distort that disagreement.
In True Enough, I describe the scourge of dubious "expertise"
we now see in the media—people of questionable credentials
(sometimes with undisclosed financial interests) who are called
on by TV producers to discuss matters about which they've got
no special knowledge. I'll hazard that such experts would flood
the zone to fight Carson today, just as they do on global
warming. The anti-environmentalists would produce pseudoscientific research of their own showing how DDT harms only
terrorists, and in fact helps bald eagles live longer, happier lives.
This stuff, then, would get passed around the right, attaining a
measure of respect and becoming a kind of parallel truth. How
long till Glenn Beck begins comparing Carson to Hitler?
All speculation, of course. But that seems to me a pretty good
template for how objective facts are churned out through the
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
news these days. If Silent Spring were published today, would it
lead to a ban of DDT? Maybe. But not fast enough, I worry.
I'd been looking forward to this debate, Steven; it's been fun. I
probably haven't changed your mind about the Internet's role in
society—and you haven't changed mine—but here's hoping that
a civil chat between rivals serves as a model for others online.
Farhad
the chat room
Sifting Through Five Years of War
Kanan Makiya takes readers' questions about Iraq.
Thursday, March 20, 2008, at 3:20 PM ET
Writer and Iraq Memory Foundation Director Kanan Makiya
was online at Washingtonpost.com on Thursday, March 13, to
chat with readers about Slate's series of articles by "liberal
hawks" reflecting on why their initial support of the Iraq war
was wrong. Read Makiya's piece here.
Kanan Makiya: Hello. This is Kanan. I have just joined.
_______________________
Peaks Island, Maine: Do you believe that the Sunni militias
fostered by the U.S. will, in the long term, enhance stability or
undermine it?
Kanan Makiya: I think this is still an open question. We don't
know. What we do know is that the Iraqi government is at the
moment blocking their entry into the police and army and treats
them in an overly suspicious manner. That does not bode well
for the future
_______________________
Antwerp, Belgium: Mr. Makiya, I find your take on the
consequences of 30 years of living under a dictatorship very
interesting. No doubt any society would need time and careful
management to overcome that. I apologize if I come off
sounding anti-American, but I can't help but wonder that the
total failure (for four years essentially) of the American/U.K.
forces to provide basic security in Iraq—border control comes to
mind—allowed groups like al-Qaeda to come in and put a
crowbar into existing fissures like the Sunni/Shiite divide. I
mean, the divisions were there, but there was nobody there to
keep these fissures from becoming wider and deeper and
deadlier, resulting in an almost civil war.
72/94
I just heard some American on BBC World arguing that most of
the casualties among civilians (nobody even knows how many)
were caused by terrorist and sectarian attacks. Probably, but by
allowing the situation to deteriorate, I believe the U.S.
administration should shoulder at least part of the blame. To
summarize, "shock and awe" was the start of the war, but I
continually have been "shocked and awed" by the plain
incompetence and the intellectual dishonesty that this U.S.
administration has shown in regard of the consequences of this
invasion of Iraq.
Kanan Makiya: The failure to control Iraq's borders on day one
after regime change was a strategic blunder of incalculable
consequences. It all goes back to inadequate troop levels not to
knock Saddam out, but to maintain the peace after his
overthrow. The problem of the borders incidentally pertains not
only to Qaeda but to Iranian intelligence and Revolutionary
Guard member for whom access into Iraq is until today a very
easy thing
_______________________
Fairfax, Va.: How much should the media be held accountable
for its role in obscuring the truth about Iraq from the American
people?
Kanan Makiya: I am not sure I would hold the media
responsible for telling lies about Iraq. Perhaps much earlier,
before August 1990, it should have done more to inform
Americans on the atrocities being perpetrated in Iraq.
_______________________
dva: I'm struck by Makiya's last paragraph, which talks about
the unreadiness of the Iraqis to deal with the world after
liberation. (Or "liberation.") I've spent my life studying the
former Soviet Union and the past twenty years working there,
including substantial time as a USAID contractor. His
description of the Iraqi people precisely fits the populations of
every post-Soviet state I ever have worked in. (It's no surprise,
and it says nothing bad about the people, as everyone but the
saints simply adapted to get along. How do you respond to a
woman who says she hates Yeltsin because she has to break
herself again? She did it to fit in the Soviet Union, and now has
to do it again.)
Lots of Americans, in the U.S. government and out of it, have
encountered and dealt with this phenomenon of the atomized
population since 1991, and it was first noted after World War II.
No one with any historical memory or experience should have
expected anything other than this unreadiness to cope with the
world from the Iraqi population—nor should anyone have been
surprised that shaking it off requires generations. Lots of things
weren't thought through in the rush to a "short victorious war" in
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Iraq, but in my humble opinion this is one of the most important
omissions.
Kanan Makiya: I agree with much of what you say. But was it
really possible to "know" in advance something like how Iraqis
would react? Their whole world was in flux; everything and
everybody was on the move. Ideas were palpably changing by
the day. I experienced that personally for nearly 4 years.
Everything looked like it was possible, and yet it wasn't. Leaders
said one thing one day, and another the next. Iraqis were
learning what it meant to be political. In the beginning they were
like infants in swaddling clothes learning how to walk.
Remember how they v=braved the bullets in 2005 to vote.
_______________________
Laurel, Md.: How much of the administrative failure was
because of de-Baathificaiton? Were a lot of reasonable,
functionable individuals kept out of jobs they should have had
just because they had joined the party out of employment
convenience?
Kanan Makiya: The effects if De-Ba'thiification were for the
most part psychological. They led Sunnis to feel, understandably
so, that they were being targeted. One must, after a experience
like Iraq's, hold people accountable. But one also must have
structures of forgiveness in place. After all everyone had been
implicated in the violenece of the regime after 30 years.
_______________________
Trebuchet:"I underestimated the self-centeredness and
sectarianism of the ruling elite and the social impact of 30 years
of extreme dictatorship," When you are referring to the ruling
elite, are you talking about little George and Dick Cheney? Yes,
it is hard to overestimate the self-centeredness and sectarianism
of that ruling elite, but thankfully, their regime has ended sooner
than planned...
Kanan Makiya: No. I was not referring to the Bush
adminsitration.
_______________________
Helena, Mont.: I knew there were atrocities going on in Iraq
long before 1990; the U.S. was complicit with Saddam on some
things—like giving him chemical weapons. But it is not up to
the U.S. to right wrongs in other countries—it is up to the people
of those countries. The problem with Iraq is that those against
Saddam could not cooperate with each other—the Shia could not
cooperate with the Kurds, nor with disaffected Sunni. I hope and
pray that we get out of Iraq as soon as possible and don't stay
another five or 10 years.
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Kanan Makiya: There are no obligations. But we live in a
world that since WWII has increasingly felt itself connected with
the fate of other peoples in far away lands. No one would have
dreamed of intervening to stop gross abuses in the 19th century.
Since then however the Red Cross, Amnesty, Human Rights
Watch have appeared on the scenen, indicating that we are
expanding our previsoly very narrow definitions of who we are
and who the other is.
_______________________
Princeton, N.J.: You keep going on about Saddam's atrocities,
but there were equally bad acts occurring in Rwanda, Congo,
Darfur, etc. What about Saudi Arabia, where torture and
beheadings are commonplace and woman are in virtual slavery?
Surely even the acts of Saddam do not justify what we have
done to the country of Iraq.
Kanan Makiya: The U.S. has not committed atrocities in Iraq
that are even remotely comparable to what Saddam did.
_______________________
Ottawa, Canada : Would you have supported the overthrow of
Saddam and his government if he was replaced by another
dictator more friendly to the U.S.? Do you think that if this had
happened, the situation in Iraq today would be better than it is
today?
Kanan Makiya: The U.S. did think of replacing Saddam with
some army officers. At the time (2002-03) I bristled with anger
at the idea. I still would not accept it. And yet I cannot deny that
it just might have led to a situation that was better than the one
we face at the present. The point however is that one can never
know such a thing. One can only work with what one thinks is
right, morally speaking, at the time. Consider also the fact that
the army was in all likelihood incapable of assuming power in
2003. We did not know this at the time. But the way it just fell
apart suggests that its erosion as an institution long preceded the
war of 2003
_______________________
_______________________
chamsticks: The only good thing to come from this war should
be the realization that one nation can't do it by itself. I don't
remember when the U.S. became the sheriff of the U.N. or we
voted to spend our tax dollars on upholding U.N. resolutions. So
many dictatorships, so much misrule. Only an international body
of some sort can hope to deal with it; when one nation goes it
alone it becomes so obscenely expensive in so many ways that
the nation itself will become its own dictatorship, as we seem to
be lurching toward. Saddam the torturer being fought by a nation
newly won over to the virtues of torture ... I'll know it's well on
the way if not already here if the Republicans are re-elected.
Kanan Makiya: In general I agree with you. But surely it is
better that one nation tries to do good—even if it fails—than that
we wait for this international body to come into existence.
Unfortunately the U.N. let the people of Iraq down, repeatedly.
_______________________
Peaks Island, Maine: Do you believe that the benefits of the
war will ultimately outweigh its costs?
Kanan Makiya: I honestly don't know at this point in time. It
also all depends on how long "ultimately" is. I think of Iraq as a
kind of Pandora's box, the lid of which the U.S. knocked open.
The hope was that politicians could artfully manage the furies
that were bound to emerge. That proved unfounded. The furies
are now out there doing their terrible work. Eventually they will
be tamed. The whole of history is evidence of that. But how long
is "eventually"?
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Richmond, Va.: Couldn't Iraq , pre-invasion, have been
compared to Yugoslavia when Tito was in power, with a strong
man holding three separate factions together? As soon as Tito
was gone, Yugoslavia broke down into civil war, the same as
Iraq did as soon as Saddam was gone. I remember hearing
commentators before the war mention this as a possible scenario,
so it was predictable. Thoughts?
Kanan Makiya: Yes it was a possible scenario. But it was not
inevitable. Artful politics could have avoided it, as it could have
avoided it in Yugoslavia. To change the course of a polity that
has been 3o years in the making, is never a knowable enterprise.
It is all about different possibilities that the behavior of
individuals—Iraqis and Americans—effect one way or the other.
_______________________
New York: Thank you for chatting today. Tom Ricks, in a
recent chat, said that he had come to the conclusion that more
troops would not have helped at the outset of the Iraq war. He
contends that U.S. troops' heavy-handed treatment of Iraqi
citizens only drove them to the insurgency. More troops would
have compounded the problem. Your thoughts?
Kanan Makiya: I don't agree. The U.S. lost control of security
on day one, with the outbreak of looting. Iraqis are a people that
had known nothing but a surplus of security. To suddenly take
all that away and say, in effect, you are on your own, was
unforgivable. They felt that no one was in control. And when
your whole world is being turned upside down, the feeling that
no one is in control is terrifying, and consequently it is
conducive of the most irrational forms of behavior.
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_______________________
Austin, Texas: You focus, understandably, on the consequences
of the invasion for the people of Iraq. Certainly that's
enormously important. But from a U.S. perspective, it's also
necessary to ask whether the U.S. is better off now than it would
have been with Saddam in power. Given the cost in U.S. lives,
money and international standing, it seems clear to me that the
answer is no. What do you think?
Kanan Makiya: Sadly, viewed in the very short run, I think you
may be right. But what happens after an overly hasty US
withdrawal leads the whole region into turmoil. The US entered
Iraq, but the whole region has been affected and is today in a
state of upheaval—not because of the US action in Iraq alone,
but because there is a deep malaise in Arab politics that has been
in the making since 1967. That malaise has already spread out
and affected the West in 9/11, and it will no doubt continue to
affect Europe especially in the years to come. For better or
worse we live in a deeply interconnected world.
_______________________
Princeton, N.J.: I never said we committed atrocities—I meant
we wrecked the country. Look at pictures of Basra before the
invasion and compare them with today's. How many Iraqis have
died in just five years because of our acts? One in five have been
forced out of their homes. Are they better off now than under
Saddam?
Kanan Makiya: You—i.e., the U.S.—didn't wreck Iraq a
fraction as much as we—i.e., Iraqis—did. The looting for
instance destroyed orders of magnitude more infrastructure than
the war ever did.
_______________________
Dorchester, Mass.: Saddam Hussein was not a good leader. Did
the people of Iraq ever get close to removing him themselves? If
so, did our interference cause that homegrown rebels to cease to
exist?
Kanan Makiya: The nature of Saddam's system of government
was such as to render his removal from inside an impossibility.
The only opposition inside Iraq was a dead opposition. How
such an admittedly bizarre state of affairs came into being is
something I have written a great deal about (Republic of Fear).
Doesn't this raise the chances of a regional war in the Mddle
East as the Sunni Arabs seek to tamp down Iran's growing
strength? Is this what George Bush meant by fighting them over
there—hoping to cause a regional conflict so that both sides
would be too busy killing one another to plan attacks on the
U.S.?
Kanan Makiya: Islam itself is you could say undergoing its
own civil war, its own wars of reformation (think of Europe in
the 16th and 17th centuries) and Iraq is at the moment one of the
prime battlefields. I don't think that this has anything to do with
George Bush
_______________________
New York: What is your opinion of the "surge"?
Kanan Makiya: It is a short term strategy that is working, but
only in the short term.
_______________________
Bethesda, Md.:"The U.S. has not committed atrocities in Iraq
that are even remotely comparable to what Saddam did." Wow.
Way to twist Princeton's point to avoid giving a real response.
How about you try to answer the question he or she actually
posed?
Kanan Makiya: Iraq was far more dangerous to the region—the
Middle East—than the reprehensible Saudi regime is or ever will
become. It had after all launched two deeply destructive wars,
and was intent on becoming hegemonic in the region.
_______________________
Kanan Makiya: Thank you all for participating. I must say
good-bye now.
the dismal science
Going Down Swinging
What if three-strikes laws make criminals less likely to repeat offend—but
more violent when they do?
By Ray Fisman
Thursday, March 20, 2008, at 6:53 AM ET
_______________________
Anonymous: Prior to the US invasion, Iraq was somewhat of a
buffer state between Shia Iran and the Sunni Middle East. Iraq
had Sunni/Shia intermarriage, dating and shared neighborhoods.
This buffer is now broken and Iran seems to be the better for it.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
On Oct. 1, 1993, a man named Richard Allen Davis kidnapped
12-year-old Polly Klaas during a slumber party at her home in
Petaluma, Calif. At the time, Davis was on parole after serving
half of a 16-year sentence for a prior kidnapping and had
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accumulated a 25-year rap sheet with charges ranging from
burglary to auto theft to public intoxication. Polly was found
raped and murdered a couple of months later, and the public
outcry that ensued led to the passage of a California law that
mandated stiff prison sentences for convicted felons on their
third offense. Davis had more than a dozen convictions when he
abducted Polly Klaas.
"Three-strikes" laws have now been enacted in 26 states, often
with the stated purpose of keeping society safe from violent
criminals like Richard Davis. But a new study released by the
National Bureau of Economic Research finds that three-strikes
laws like California's, while discouraging criminals from doing
things like smoking pot or shoplifting, may push those who do
continue in a life of crime to commit more violent offenses. The
study's author, Radha Iyengar, argues that this is because under
such laws, felons with a pair of strikes against them have little to
lose (and often much to gain) by committing serious crimes
rather than minor offenses.
Why would stiffer penalties increase violent crime? To
understand this seeming paradox, you first need to understand
the nature of California's three-strikes law. Not just any offense
gets you a first strike. It must be a so-called "recordaggravating" offense, which includes violent crimes like assault
and rape as well as serious nonviolent crimes such as burglary or
drug sales to minors. But after strike one, strikes two and three
can come from any felony, including minor offenses like
possession of marijuana or even stealing golf clubs or
videotapes. A third strike carries with it a mandatory sentence of
at least 25 years in prison.
Now, put yourself in the shoes of a two-strike criminal. The
prospect of 25 years behind bars for a third offense is likely to
give even a hardened criminal pause before he or she crosses the
street against the lights. So we'd expect two-strike felons to
commit fewer crimes. But suppose you've already decided to
break the law—maybe you need to make a quick buck. Are you
going to lift a few golf clubs from the local pro shop? Or are you
going to hold up a bank? The potential haul from a bank robbery
is obviously much greater, and the penalty is the same: Bank
robbery will get you decades in the slammer, but if it's your third
offense, so will shoplifting.
Even if you don't quite have the chutzpah to pull off a bank job,
you still might end up committing a more violent crime if you're
in a 0-2 hole. Let's say you opt for the golf club caper, but as
you're making your getaway, you're cornered by a store security
guard. Do you surrender quietly or pull out a gun? If strike three
is looming, it's all the same to you whether you end up on trial
for shoplifting or armed assault, so why not try to shoot your
way out of an arrest?
Proponents of three-strikes laws point to declines across the
board in crime rates in California during the 1990s, following
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
the passage of the three-strikes law—including rates of violent
crime. But crime was dropping around the country during that
period, with explanations ranging from new policing tactics to
the legalization of abortion. With so much going on, it's hard to
know how much, if any, of the decline comes from fear of a
third strike. Instead of analyzing aggregate crime data, Iyengar
looks at the lawbreaking choices of individual criminals. She
examines how their lawbreaking activities change when the
three-strikes law is on the books and also how their lawbreaking
activities change depending on how many strikes they have
against them.
Using data from all criminal convictions during 1990 through
1999 in California's three biggest cities—Los Angeles, San
Francisco, and San Diego—Iyengar finds that the three-strikes
law did indeed have a large effect on the likelihood of
recidivating (committing a crime after release from prison) in the
two years following a prior offense. For those with one strike,
the law reduced recidivism by 14 percent; this doubled to a 28
percent reduction for two-strikers, whose next crime would
trigger the minimum 25-year prison term.
But that's where the good news ends. Three-strike-eligible
criminals who actually do get arrested for a third offense commit
more serious crimes. Burglars, for example, become robbers—
these are both offenses that involve stealing, but robbery has the
added element of force. Similarly, while thefts decline overall,
assaults during thefts go up under three strikes, suggesting that
an increasing number of thieves may, in desperation, be trying to
muscle their way out of a third arrest (as in our golf club
example). In general, arrests of three-strike-eligible felons are 20
percent more likely to be violent crimes (relative to no-strike
criminals).
(A Californian burglar on the verge of a third strike has an even
safer option for his next act—take his activities out of state. Just
across the border in Arizona, there's no three-strikes law at all,
and in neighboring Nevada, the law is rarely invoked. So rather
than breaking and entering in Los Angeles, why not take a road
trip to Las Vegas or Phoenix instead? It seems that many
criminals do. Iyengar finds that a larger fraction of repeat
offenders recidivate out of state after the three-strikes law's
passage.)
Overall, the three-strikes law did have the desired effect of
deterring repeat offenders from striking again. But the law's
original intent—motivated as it was by Polly Klaas' tragic
story—was to avert further violent tragedies by putting habitual
criminals away for a good, long time. It's putting away violent
criminals, but Iyengar's study suggests it's also making criminals
more violent. It's tempting to invoke the law of unintended
consequences in thinking about what was perhaps a wellintentioned but flawed piece of legislation. But these
consequences could have been entirely anticipated if legislators
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recognized that criminals, like all of us, often make decisions by
rationally weighing the costs and benefits of their actions.
sidebar
Return to article
To make sure she's making apple-to-apple comparisons among
felons, Iyengar compares the actions of criminals whose rap
sheets are identical except for the order in which they committed
their crimes. Since you don't start counting strikes until the first
record-activating offense, order is crucial. For example,
someone who is convicted for armed robbery—a recordactivating offense—followed by shoplifting will have strike
three looming; if he had reversed the order of his offenses, he'd
have only one strike. So if the two-striker commits fewer crimes
(but more violent ones) relative to the one-striker, we know it's
the effect of the three-strikes incentives and not something about
the different offense records of the two criminals.
the green lantern
Tank vs. Hybrid
Is it possible that a Hummer's better for the environment than a Prius is?
By Brendan I. Koerner
Tuesday, March 18, 2008, at 7:39 AM ET
I'm shopping for new wheels and was considering a Prius.
But one of my co-workers insists that the Prius isn't nearly
as green as Toyota boasts, due to the energy required to
manufacture the car's battery. The guy also claims that
scientific studies have shown that a Prius is more
environmentally harmful than a Hummer is. Really?
Like those old chestnuts about poisoned ATM deposit envelopes
and the dangers of flashing your headlights, the bizarre antiPrius meme cited by your colleague refuses to die. It keeps
making the e-mail rounds every few months, with multiple
versions landing in the Lantern's inbox. There's a minuscule
grain of truth to the allegation, since the Prius' nickel-metal
hydride battery is a more complicated beast than your typical
EverStart. But the rest of the case against the best-selling
hybrid? Malarkey.
The Hummer-beats-the-Prius talking point began with this report
(PDF) from CNW Marketing Research. The report, titled "Dust
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
to Dust," was cited in a March 2007 editorial in the Recorder, a
student newspaper at Central Connecticut State University. That
editorial, in turn, was praised by Rush Limbaugh, thereby
guaranteeing its eternal life in blog comments, online forums,
and the musings of George Will.
The skeptics' basic argument is that the Prius' battery is
irredeemably un-green, mostly because of its high nickel content
and complex manufacturing process. As a result, "Dust to Dust"
contends that a Prius will consume $3.25 worth of energy per
mile over its cradle-to-grave lifetime. A Hummer H2, by
contrast, will use $3.03 per mile and the Hummer H3 just $1.95.
Such a contrarian conclusion is manna to those who sneer at
Prius owners as effete or snobbish. It's also unsubstantiated
bunk. As numerous learned folks have pointed out, the 458-page
"Dust to Dust" makes zero sense, and not just because it betrays
its scientific shortcomings early on by referring to "gigajeulles"
of energy. For starters, the report automatically penalizes the
Prius by prorating all of Toyota's hybrid research-anddevelopment costs across the relatively small number of Priuses
on the road. New technologies obviously require massive
upfront investment, so this puts the Prius deep in the energy hole
right off the bat. (CNW Marketing defends this decision here.)
Second, "Dust to Dust" makes a gaggle of inexplicable
assumptions, such as claiming that a Prius will last only 109,000
miles, well below the stated "industry straight average" of
178,739 miles—not to mention the whopping 379,000 miles
ascribed to the Hummer H1. CNW says that Prius owners simply
drive less than their peers, but it's impossible to tell where that
data (as well as virtually everything else in the report) come
from. In at least seven states, Toyota offers a 150,000-mile
warranty on the Prius' hybrid components, including the
battery—it's tough to fathom the company's actuaries agreeing to
such a warranty if that 109,000-mile figure was correct. (More
nutty assumptions are highlighted here.)
"Dust to Dust" also posits that the vast majority of a car's cradleto-grave energy gets expended during production. That assertion
runs contrary to virtually every other analysis of vehicular life
cycles, including those conducted by MIT (PDF) and Argonne
National Laboratory. The authors of "Dust to Dust" try to
explain this discrepancy on pages 277 and 278 of the report, by
invoking a truly weird analogy to coffee production. (How
weird? CNW proposes factoring a consumer's post-coffee
"bathroom run" into the commodity's life-cycle equation.) The
Lantern is, to say the least, unconvinced, especially since CNW
refuses to reveal its methodology—about as bright a red flag as
you could ever hope to see. CNW's science is so feeble, in fact,
that the Central Connecticut student who first cited it went on to
publish a partial recantation, admitting that "Dust to Dust" is
"dubious at best." (The writer says he's still no fan of gas-electric
hybrids, claiming they've been embraced to the exclusion of
more promising technologies.)
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Another major part of the anti-Prius meme is that the car's
battery uses 32 pounds of nickel, mined in Sudbury, Ontario.
The skeptical e-mails often state that Sudbury is an
environmental wasteland that resembles "a surrealistic scene
from the depths of hell." That assertion might have been true
about three decades ago, long before the Prius. Nickel mining is
by no means a clean endeavor, but Sudbury's conditions have
improved in recent years. On top of that, all cars contain nickel
in their frames—the Hummer's frame, for example, has twice as
much nickel as the Prius'. Also, nickel is 80 percent to 95
percent recoverable during the recycling process. (Future
hybrids may use lithium batteries instead of NiMH, though the
next-generation Prius does not.)
All that said, Toyota acknowledges that manufacturing a Prius is
more energy intensive than making a nonhybrid car. Argonne's
scientists estimate that producing a pound's worth of a hybrid car
requires 38,650 British thermal units, 23 percent more than that
required to build a pound of a traditional car. But the Prius' fuel
savings can make up that difference rather quickly, at least
compared with the average car, which gets a measly 22.9 miles
per gallon. (The EPA estimates the Prius' fuel efficiency at 48
miles per gallon in the city, 45 on the highway—estimates that
Prius owners typically claim are far too low.)
Sadly, the Lantern fully expects to continue receiving the same
anti-Prius e-mails, citing the same flimsy evidence. Perhaps
because of its association with the glitterati, the Prius attracts a
large amount of venom, mostly from critics who specialize in
knocking the stuffing out of straw men. These naysayers
gleefully point out the hypocrisy of stars who drive Priuses
while jetting around the globe in private planes or lambaste
Toyota for milking the car for publicity.
None of these critiques should obscure that fact that the Prius
represents a step in the right direction—innovation designed to
increase fuel efficiency and reduce emissions and that the market
(abetted by tax breaks) seems to be rewarding. Will the car slow
climate change all by its lonesome? Of course not, but no one
has ever suggested as much. Will it soon be eclipsed by newer
technologies? Quite likely, and quite hopefully. But attacking
the Prius for not being perfect—especially with lame scuttlebutt
masquerading as science—strikes the Lantern as dangerously
inane.
Is there an environmental quandary that's been keeping you up at
night? Send it to ask.the.lantern@gmail.com, and check this
space every Tuesday.
the undercover economist
Smallpox or Facebook?
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Which better explains how ideas move through society: diseases or social
networks?
By Tim Harford
Saturday, March 15, 2008, at 7:09 AM ET
The three most familiar economic statistics are all measures of
change: inflation, the growth of gross domestic product, and the
daily rise or fall in the price of shares. Even so, they do not
begin to capture the mad churn of the economy: the growth and
bankruptcy of firms; the millions of firings and hirings, which
unemployment statistics barely summarize; the movement of
goods and services around the world; and the ebb and flow of
consumer fads. Under the circumstances, it is strange that
economists do not have a satisfactory way of talking about
change, yet we do not.
As any undergraduate student of economics knows, both
microeconomists and macroeconomists tend to describe change
in the same way that an advertisement for dishwashing detergent
does: "before" and "after." When oil cost $20 a barrel, the
economy looked like this; now that oil costs $100 a barrel, the
economy looks like that. Quite how the process of change
occurred—or how quickly—is a problem glossed over in the
textbooks and most journals.
That is worrying. Perhaps it does not even make sense to
compare two static "before" and "after" states; perhaps "during"
is everything. In fairness, economists are not blind to this
problem. Back in 1923, John Maynard Keynes warned that
"[e]conomists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in
tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is
long past the ocean is flat again." He was not the only one with
reservations. Yet identifying the problem is easier than solving
it, at least using the mathematical tools with which economists
are familiar.
Several popular books have argued that economists could learn
about dynamics from approaches developed in the sciences.
Malcolm Gladwell, a journalist, wrote an entire book, The
Tipping Point, devoted to the idea that innovations, fashions, and
other ideas spread through society in much the same way as a
disease does. Read his New Yorker article that helped inspire the
book here. Philip Ball, a science writer, attacked economics
more directly in his book, Critical Mass, arguing that economists
should learn from physicists' understanding of dynamic
processes, such as phase transitions. (An example of a phase
transition is when cold water suddenly turns to ice. It turns out
that, for example, traffic flows can exhibit phase transitions.)
Still others advise economists to look to models of evolutionary
dynamics.
This is all sage advice, but the details matter. Duncan Watts,
who studies dynamic processes on networks, has discovered that
neither Ball nor Gladwell has the whole story. Ideas can spread
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through an economy like a disease or like a phase transition—it
all depends on how the social networks along which the ideas
flow are connected.
The Tipping Point focused much attention on highly connected
individuals—the "connectors" or the "influencers"—who were
able to spread anything from a fashion trend to a new software
release. Gladwell concentrated on them because epidemiologists
knew that diseases often spread through such "connectors."
But while that is a sensible way of thinking about the spread of a
physically contagious disease, Watts points out that ideas can
flow along many more connections than do diseases. Perhaps a
very complex and difficult idea—a new school of philosophy,
perhaps, or a radical approach to software coding—might indeed
spread from one expert to another, and live or die depending on
whether the "connectors" get involved.
But if the ideas we are talking about are what MP3 to download
or what cut of jeans to wear, the epidemiological model does not
apply. Everyone is connected to everyone else, and a new trend
will either ripple through the economy like a near-instantaneous
phase transition or it will ripple nowhere at all because it never
gets started. And in either case, the "connectors" will be
irrelevant, because we're all so interconnected anyway.
My guess is that it is just a matter of time before economists
embrace methods from other disciplines in an effort to
understand dynamic processes better than we do. But it would be
a shame if we looked only to physicists, chemists, and biologists
for advice; something would be missing if we did. Duncan
Watts, after all, is a sociologist.
today's blogs
Bin Laden Speaks. Or Does He?
By Michael Weiss
Thursday, March 20, 2008, at 7:27 PM ET
Bin Laden speaks. Or does he? A new audiotape featuring
Osama Bin Laden's voice has surfaced with yet another series of
warnings and rebukes from He Who Shall Not Be Found. In this
one, Bin Laden accuses the publishers of the Danish Mohammed
cartoons—and the pope! —of advancing a "New Crusade"
against Islam. Kind sirs of Christendom, he doth protest, "You
went overboard in your unbelief and freed yourselves of the
etiquettes of dispute and fighting and went to the extent of
publishing these insulting drawings." Also, the toons were a
greater offense to this newfangled Emily Post of mass murder
than the West's killing of Muslim women and children.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Small Dead Animals shows that al-Qaida evidently stole one
screen capture in a recent propaganda video from the film 300:
"The Al-Qaeda media braintrust's latest production incorporates
images of Spartan spears drenched in the blood of Persians."
At Commentary's contentions, Emanuele Ottolenghi writes:
"Bin Laden has just officially applied the doctrine of taqfir
against Europe because of the Danish cartoons. Taqfir, it should
be recounted, means the permission to punishment unbelievers
by death: unbelief, more than any other sin, dooms souls to hell
in Islamic thinking. What Bin Laden said is short for 'Europeans,
as a body politic, are apostates. And they deserve to die.' "
"People like OBL are incapable of seeing and understanding
irony, aren't they?" says Michael van der Galien at PoliGazette.
"Sure, it's perfectly fine to blow yourself up in the middle of a
market, in an attempt to kill as many innocent 'non-believers'
(and believers) as you can, but publishing a cartoon about the
Prophet Muhammed is considered to be 'uncivil' and in breach
with 'the etiquettes of dispute and fighting.' "
Steve Skojec says bring it on: "If you want a new crusade, Bin
Laden, go ahead and go after the pope. Ever hear of the Battle of
Lepanto? How about Granada? Vienna? The Catholic armies of
the past broke the back of the Ottoman Empire and scattered the
warriors of jihad so badly they had to nurse their wounds for
centuries."
The Jawa Report thinks Bin Laden's dead: "The Muhammad
cartoons were first published in September of 2005! There is
literally no doubt in my mind now. This is an old audio,
probably from 2006, of bin Laden. As Sahab must have been
embarrassed that they had nothing to offer the world on this the
anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, so they hurriedly released an
old audio they had lying around. The fact that there was no
accompanying banner is evidence that they threw this together
last minute." Pretty much, adds Report on Arrakis: "Why is
Bin Laden harping on news from 2 years ago? No mention of
Geert Wilders' upcoming movie? No one's even seen the movie
and already you have some muslims foaming at the mouth. But
Bin Laden only talks about the motoons, because he doesn't
know about Fitna, because in most likelyhood he is dead."
Read more about Bin Laden's message.
Misspoke? Many news outlets have reported John McCain's
"gaffe" in Jordan (later repeated elsewhere) when he said it was
"common knowledge and has been reported in the media that alQaida is going back into Iran and receiving training and are
coming back into Iraq from Iran." Joe Lieberman thereafter
whispered in McCain's ear that he should have said "extremists,"
not al-Qaida. The online left, as well as Barack Obama, have
jumped all over this item, pointing to it as proof that McCain
doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to national
security. But conservatives defend the senator, arguing that there
is ample evidence to support his original, retracted claim.
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At MyDD, Jonathan Singer asks: "Even considering McCain's
apparent strength in polling, are Americans really going to elect
someone who is fudging the facts about a purported relationship
between Iran and Al Qaeda in Iraq in the immediate wake of a
presidency in which the administration went to great lengths to
allege a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda in
order to get the country behind a war in Iraq?"
Blogs for John McCain retorts that the candidate was in fact
right about an al-Qaida-Iran nexus running through Iraq: "It
would seem that both the AP and the liberal bloggers jumping on
McCain need to educate themselves a bit more. It's pretty
obvious that they had no desire to look around to see if there was
any evidence that McCain was actually right. All they were
interested in was playing 'gotcha' and exploiting it for political
gain."
And Thomas Jocelyn at the Weekly Standard's Blog says
McCain was wrong to apologize for the statement. Among
Jocelyn's assertions is that "the theological differences between
Iran and al Qaeda have never been a serious impediment to
cooperation. For example, I wrote a lengthy essay on the topic of
Iran's cooperation with al Qaeda going back to the early 1990's.
And in a recent piece, I detailed the evidence cooperation
between Iran's chief terrorist, the late Imad Mugniyah, and al
Qaeda."
Your Right Hand Thief worries: "the 'McCain is "confused"
meme' feeds into voters' fears that he is too old to be President.
So every time he makes a gaffe, the 'confused' description can be
used by the Dems, and—most importantly—can be repeated
over and over again with plausible deniability."
today's blogs
Iraq Flak
By Noreen Malone
Wednesday, March 19, 2008, at 6:12 PM ET
Bloggers are marking the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war and
dueling over gun rights.
Iraq flak: Today marks the fifth anniversary of the U.S.'s
engagement in Iraq. While President Bush defended the decision
to go to war, bloggers took the opportunity to asses the merits
(and, largely, the failures) of Operation Iraqi Freedom—and the
president's role.
Former hawk Andrew Sullivan notes with cynicism that Iraq is
"all so old news" and goes on to explain, "One of the more
appalling aspects of the president's current cheery, goofy
demeanor is that he has clearly sealed off from any
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
psychological absorption that he is and will always be the
president who authorized and enforced a new torture regime."
Liberal Matthew Yglesias spreads the blame around: "I often
wonder what public opinion might have looked like had the war
met with more vigorous opposition. Certainly to me the fact that
Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, etc.
were supporting the war was an important consideration. If Bush
was lying about the intelligence, I figured that those people, who
had access to classified data, would be exposing the lies not
going along with them. Obviously that doesn't look like very
smart reasoning in retrospect, but I can't have been the only one
who was swayed, in part, by the very fact of bipartisan support
for the war."
On Tapped, Dana Goldstein evaluates the impact of war
protests, arguing that they are worthwhile even when they fail to
affect policy, for "it is powerful that hundreds of city councils
nationwide have passed resolutions against the Iraq war. If
nothing else, those local statements provide a counter-narrative
to the pro-war-at-all-costs stance taken by the administration,
and let people around the world see the diversity of American
opinion."
There's a different tune at the Weekly Standard's blog, where
John Noonan notes happily, "It's intensely satisfying to hear that
Iraq has become an unrelenting hellhole. ... for insurgents,"
citing evidence that the U.S. situation on the ground has
dramatically improved there. His colleague Stephen Hayes
revisits the arguments of 2003, insisting that the Bush
administration never actually claimed there was an "operational
relationship" between al-Qaida and Iraq, and that, besides, "A
relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda need not have been
'operational' to have warranted military action to eliminate it."
Military blogger BlackFive adds that Americans need to begin
looking at Iraq as an ally, rather than enemy, in the years ahead.
He says, "The proper context is our relationships with Germany
and Japan post WWII. We fought a vicious, bloody war against
both and even made the only use of nuclear weapons in history
against Japan. Yet today we have troops in both countries and
they have been allies ever since." However, he admits, "The
situation in Iraq is more difficult because the Iraqi Army and
state were never actually defeated in combat."
Iraqi blogger neurotic Iraqi wife writes that March 2003 was
apocryphal for Iraqis and that "[j]ust like 9/11, everyone knows
where they were at that particular moment." She goes on to say,
"Its one thing to want freedom for Iraqis, its another thing to
want people to die in the name of the so called freedom. Saddam
was evil, But I never imagined that there were people as evil as
he was. I guess I was wrong!" At Last of the Iraqis, Baghdad
dentist Mohammed offers a riveting account of what the past
five years have been like for Iraqis. He expresses anger at the
United States and those who looted, and he pauses to remember
the day the shrines in Samarra were bombed: "From that day on
the sectarian violence escalated in a frightening way it was like
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cancer taking over Iraq's body, harvesting innocent souls,
feeding from fear and hatred, making life even more difficult,
leaving more than 1,400 widow women without a supporter,
forcing millions to leave their houses and their neighborhoods
and forcing more millions to flee the country and tolerating the
humiliation they get in the countries they escaped to just to be
alive."
Read more about the fifth anniversary of the war and see what
former hawks are saying now on Slate.
Duel arguments: The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in
Heller v. District of Columbia and appeared poised to end
Washington, D.C.'s ban on handguns. Such a decision in the
case, the first of its kind to be heard since 1939, bolsters the
rights of individual gun owners and is a de facto affirmation of
an "originalist" interpretation of the Constitution.
Jack Balkin at Balkinization, a self-professed "bleeding-heart
liberal," writes that "the question of whether the 2nd
Amendment protects an individual right, including a right to self
defense, is not that difficult, at least to me. The framers of the
14th amendment assumed that it was one of the privileges or
immunities of citizens of the United States. And if a right is a
privilege or immunity of citizens of the United States, it hard for
me to conclude that it does not bind the United States as well as
the individual states."
Meanwhile, at Concurring Opinions, Bruce Boyden says
historical context ought to have played a larger role in Heller
and contends that Lexington and Concord (and their the
Revolutionary War militias) ought to have been the
"paradigmatic case" of reference. Had the District's lawyers and
historians followed this tack, they "could have made it into a
strong point that the Second Amendment is all about militia
protection, not urban crime prevention. But they didn't, so Heller
has really the only word on the subject."
At the Volokh Conspiracy, Randy Barnett warns that even a
favorable decision might not end up being entirely a boon for
gun-rights advocates in the long run: "[It] could also allow
legislators to shift responsibility for assessing constitutionality to
the courts. And supporters of the gun rights groups that have so
effectively protected the right to arms might become apathetic
thinking the courts would protect them."
Read more on Heller v. District of Columbia here or at Slate's
new legal blog, Convictions. Also in Slate, Dahlia Lithwick
reports from oral arguments.
today's blogs
The Speech
By Michael Weiss
Tuesday, March 18, 2008, at 5:09 PM ET
The speech: Responding to criticism over the toxic sermons his
pastor, Jeremiah Wright, has delivered, Barack Obama delivered
his much anticipated speech Tuesday on race in America. He
tried to explain how Wright's views were in many ways
reflective of those of the African-American community, still
reeling from the permanent wounds of slavery and Jim Crow and
given to anger and frustration that often belies the kind of
boundless optimism the candidate has made a hallmark of his
campaign. Bloggers largely found the speech stirring and
eloquent to an almost unprecedented degree. As for what it will
do to help Obama's slightly damaged campaign, they are less
sure.
Paul Mirengoff at conservative Power Line writes, "It will not
do to say that Wright is 'part of America.' Lots of deplorable
people are part of America, including white racists. Political
candidates are not required to embody every strand of America,
much less the most noxious hate-filled ones. Political candidates
embrace the strands that speak to them, and we should embrace
the political candidates whose strands of thinking speak to us.
No other candidate for president contains Wright's thinking as
'part of them.' " Ann Althouse sees the speech as a failure: "I'd
say he did not do very much — other than to resist condemning
Wright and to model his socially acceptable attitudes and
generate a feeling — I'm sure you didn't all feel it — that we
need unite behind this man if the terrible divisions over race are
going to end."
Marc Ambinder was more impressed: "In no uncertain terms
did Obama renounce -- morally condemn -- the hateful, antiSemitic, anti-American and just plain bizarre rants of his pastor - 'former pastor,' as Obama now calls him. But he did not reject
him. He refused to reject him. He is daring, in essence, his white
liberal supporters to accept what Wright's anger represents -- a
legacy of oppression -- and daring the rest of white supporters to
take a leap of faith." So was Kyle E. Moore at Comments From
Left Field: "What he did do was recognize that while Wright
was out of line, his inappropriate comments were fueled by a
racial tension from a different generation that still feels the
wounds of segregation and oppression, wounds that have been
passed down to future generations as a result of the fact that
Americans continue to fail to deal with race relations in this
country in an open and honest matter."
Will Bunch at Attytood says, "I honestly can't predict how the
American heartland will react, but I do think America will be
talking about this morning's speech -- like JFK in 1960 -- for
generations to come. What happens in the next hour may cost
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
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Barack Obama the presidency -- or it may hand him the keys to
the White House."
At the New Republic's Plank, Jonathan Chait finds the speech
intelligent and subtle—almost too subtle for a politician:
"[Obama] may be liberated to operate at a high intellectual level
in public because he's black. I'm not trying to be Gerry Ferraro
here; let me explain. Candidates like John Kerry and (even
moreso) Al Gore were also very smart, but constantly forced to
dumb it down lest they be tagged as out-of-touch elitists. Since
the egghead image is so at odds with the prevailing stereotypes
about African-Americans, he has much less to fear by speaking
at a high intellectual level." And John McWhorter guest posts,
"For a light-skinned half-white Ivy League-educated black man
to repudiate, in clear language and repeatedly, the take on race of
people like Julian Bond and Nikki Giovanni is not only honest
but truly bold."
Steve Benan at the Carpetbagger Report concludes, "[I]f
Obama's address is judged on its merits, it'll be considered one
of the high points of the campaign. In this sense, the Wright
controversy may ultimately prove to be a blessing in disguise —
it prompted Obama to deliver one of the great modern speeches
on race in America."
Read more reactions to Obama's speech.
today's blogs
Lhasa Trouble
By Susan Daniels
Monday, March 17, 2008, at 4:48 PM ET
Bloggers are worried about the Chinese crackdown on protests
in Tibet and making fun of both saggy pants and the ordinances
outlawing them.
Lhasa trouble: Renewed violence broke out in Tibet's capital
city of Lhasa Monday as police began arresting hundreds of
Tibetans for participating in protests against Chinese rule last
weekend. Tibet's governor acknowledged 16 deaths in the riots,
while other sources put the figure at 80 or more. The Dalai
Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, has called China's response
to the protests "cultural genocide." The crackdown came just
days after the Bush administration removed China from a list of
the world's worst human rights violators. All this, with the 2008
Summer Olympics in Beijing only months away ...
Obama supporter Andrew Sullivan was, unsurprisingly,
impressed: "searing, nuanced, gut-wrenching, loyal, and deeply,
deeply Christian speech is the most honest speech on race in
America in my adult lifetime. It is a speech we have all been
waiting for for a generation. Its ability to embrace both the
legitimate fears and resentments of whites and the
understandable anger and dashed hopes of many blacks was, in
my view, unique in recent American history."
Shanghaiist presents a handy list of "recommended reads" while
organizations like the International Campaign for Tibet and
Students for a Free Tibet offer frequent updates. Kadfly, a
tourist who happened to arrive in Lhasa just in time for the
uprising, posted photos and compelling firsthand descriptions of
events on the street. (His reports have been reproduced and
widely circulated on other blogs.)
But Bull Dog Pundit at Ankle Biting Pundits thinks the speech
reads like a "lecture" and spots the following contradiction:
"[H]e tries to say that blacks who feel victimized by racism
should bind together with others who feel victimized by
prejudice (i.e. women, the John Edwards 'millworker' type, and
'immigrants' (does he mean legal or illegal?)) to make things
better. But he also discusses the need people who feel this way
not to be trapped by their victimhood status and to make their
own destiny through hard work."
A quiet morning stroll down Beijing Street
turned into running away with a crowd of
Tibetans as an empty PLA convoy pulled
through. Maybe 100 meters further there was a
massive crowd of Tibetans surrounding a
narrow alleyway. As it turned out, they were
throwing stones and abuse at PLA soldiers
who were blockading the passage to a
monastery. After a minute or two, everyone
rushed the PLA blockade and burst through …
Finally, Michael Dawson at The Root worries that it's too little,
too late: "[The speech] restored hope among his supporters, and
convinced many whom had been skeptical that there was more
to the man than just hollow rhetoric. If the racialized anti-Obama
campaign is effective, however, and one news source suggests
that it already has been (while increasing the net likelihood that
blacks will vote for Obama, 56 percent of voters are reported to
say that his ties to Wright decrease their likelihood of voting for
the Senator), it appears that only a candidate that is politically
whiter than Senator Obama can win high national office."
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Up until this point the entire situation was
almost jovial: there was no sign of danger
whatsoever (unless you were a PLA soldier).
Then things started getting out of control.
Shops were taken apart, buses filled with
passengers were attacked, motorcyclists were
stoned. We fled into the relative safety of a
nearby hotel as attention began to be drawn to
us and from there we saw the street and nearby
stores get ripped apart and more violence.
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On BoingBoing, Xeni Jardin has posted camera-phone photos
and videos of the Tibet protests and reports that China is
blocking its citizens' access to YouTube and other Web sites,
"likely because of content related to the flood of pro-Tibetansovereignty protests in Tibet and elsewhere." Dan Kennedy at
Media Nation predicts, "If this keeps building, we're going to
see whether the Age of the Internet is more powerful than the
Age of Fax. In 1989, the Chinese democracy movement—fueled
in part by mass-circulated faxes—came to a horrifying end in
Tiananmen Square. … [N]ow, even more than in 1989, the
whole world is watching."
Black and White Cat points Chinese readers to proxies through
which they can access blocked Web sites, but doesn't stop there.
The accounts of the rioting from the perspective of Han Chinese
living in Lhasa might come as a shock to Americans accustomed
to viewing the conflict in simple terms of Buddhist monks vs.
Communist soldiers: "[S]o far the killing and violence seems to
have been carried out by the rioters, not the police or military."
An angry post at Chinese in Vancouver asks, "Were the rioters,
stoning and killing Han Chinese, not violating human rights of
another people? To the westerners, letting the Tibetan rioters
free-killing Han Chinese on the streets is 'respect for human
rights'? I deduce that the West just plainly don't believe Han
Chinese are humans."
So, with tensions running high, is discussion on this subject
possible? asks former CNN Beijing correspondent Rebecca
MacKinnon at RConversation. She references a Reuters
roundup on the topic that begins, "A look at Chinese blogs
reveals a vitriolic outpouring of anger and nationalism directed
against Tibetans and the West." Commenter Clarence Chen
illustrates the difficulty of having that conversation: "What is
there to discuss? These riots are obviously orchestrated by the
Dalai Lama. He is an opportunist who took the same tack in
1959 and 1989." Fellow commenter Tom Daai Tou Laam
concludes, "The question is really how can you have a
discussion under strict censorship. Perhaps a 'guided
conversation,' but there is no way to have a two way discussion."
state senate passed a bill that would suspend students who show
their unmentionables. Earlier in the week, voters in Riviera
Beach, Fla., approved a law that punishes anyone wearing
droopy drawers in public, with penalties ranging from
community service to 60 days in jail for repeat offenders. The
"pull up your pants" initiative has even caught on in Trenton,
N.J. Opinion in the blogosphere varies on which is stupider: the
style or the legislation.
"Yes, wearing jeans that hang down to your ass crack looks not
only completely IDIOTIC, it is juvenile," says Jingo at
HarshOpinion. "And if you think about it in a gangsta*
mentality it still doesn't make sense because you cannot run from
the cops properly if your pantscrotch is at your knees. That being
said, our government does NOT need to be in the business of
telling idiots how to dress in school."
At Of Ignorance, "L" challenges the justification offered by the
Florida bill's sponsor, Democratic state Sen. Gary Siplin: "If
Siplin can prove that something as simple as pulling one's pants
up could result in a degree and employment, then by golly, give
this man a medal! Amend his law into the Constitution! Grant
him his own honorary day! But until he can do so, I suggest he
loosens his own belt a bit, and loosens up."
"Let's paraphrase 'Rizzo' in Grease," suggests Reasonable
Citizen: "Keep your filthy laws off my silky drawers." But
commenting at Look Back in Anger, martink strikes a
thoughtful tone: "First they came for the wearers of droopy
pants, and I didn't speak up because I don't wear droopy pants
..."
Read more about baggy britches.
today's papers
Warning: Hard Times Ahead
But Dave at Tenement Palm keeps hope alive and urges
concerned "netizens" to converse directly with their Chinese
counterparts via Web 2.0 tools like Twitter and Fanfou; he even
provides a visual tutorial so readers can sign up for the services.
"Instead of dismissing each other as fools, how about we try to
talk? … [I]ts time to start trying some things instead of just
throwing our hands in the air and dismissing the other side as
brainwashed, indoctrinated or oppressed."
Read more about the Tibet protests.
How low can you go? A rash of local ordinances outlawing the
ubiquitous street style of "sagging"—pants riding below the
waist far enough to expose the wearers' boxers, briefs, or
naughty bits—gained momentum last week when the Florida
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
By Daniel Politi
Friday, March 21, 2008, at 6:11 AM ET
The New York Times leads with a look at how economic hard
times are slowly reaching parts of the country that some
previously thought would be able to survive the credit crisis
without much more than a scratch. As the crisis spreads and now
affects confidence in practically all levels of the economy, many
are worried this recession will last longer and be more painful
than the last two. The Washington Post leads with a look at the
depressing prospect that 20 years after scientists first started
searching for an AIDS vaccine, they may be no closer now than
when they first started. Some are worried that future efforts
could be doomed after it became clear that "the most promising
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contender" for a vaccine was not only useless but potentially
increased the risk of infection.
money currently being spent on human trials should instead be
devoted to basic research.
The Wall Street Journal leads its world-wide newsbox with the
failure of Michigan lawmakers to agree on holding a new
Democratic primary. It marked another blow to Sen. Hillary
Clinton, who was counting on do-over votes in Michigan and
Florida to narrow Sen. Barack Obama's lead. USA Today leads
with the National Weather Service's warning that the floods in
the Midwest that led to the deaths of at least 15 people this week
could be just the beginning. Record rainfalls coupled with
melting snow could lead to floods in many areas of the country
this spring. The Los Angeles Times leads locally with news that
officials in Southern California are beginning to reassess the
values of homes after the recent downturn in the housing market.
This could save homeowners hundreds of dollars in taxes, but it
also means less money for counties that are already low on
funds.
Now that it seems pretty certain that neither Michigan nor
Florida will be holding do-over primaries, the question of what
to do about the delegates from the two states is still open. Obama
and Clinton can't seem to agree on a plan, and, as the NYT points
out, "the Democratic National Committee and its chairman,
Howard Dean, have not offered any guidance." Clinton's camp
blamed Obama for failing to agree on a plan and warned that
disenfranchising voters in Michigan and Florida will hurt the
party in November.
The NYT makes sure to note that some segments of the economy
are still doing well, particularly those that rely on exports for
much of their business. But, as many have been saying in the
past few days, most no longer believe the idea that markets
abroad will be able to sustain a falling domestic economy.
Backed up by widely reported figures that show "the economy is
deteriorating at an accelerating rate," much of what the NYT is
talking about is based on anecdotal evidence of reduced sales
here, job losses there. "There's a general sense of caution," a
manager at a Seattle store said.
The Post sheds some light on one of the reasons why this
caution is so prevalent by off-leading a look at a factor that
should be no mystery to anyone who has visited a supermarket
in the past year: Prices are increasing. Prices for basic
necessities—groceries, health care, gasoline—have increased 9.2
percent since 2006, while the prices for luxuries—such as
clothes and new cars—have increased at a much slower pace. It
doesn't take an economics degree to figure out that if wages
aren't keeping up with the rising prices in basic goods, people
will automatically cut back on the nonessential parts of their
household budget. This "helps explain why American workers
felt squeezed even before the recent economic distress began,"
says the Post.
Two trials of the potential AIDS vaccine were stopped in
September, and since then seven others have also been put on
hold and could be canceled. These recent developments are
leading many experts to question the strategy behind the $500
million that the U.S. government spends annually in AIDS
vaccine research. Some believe the vaccine made volunteers
more vulnerable to the virus, which, short of actually causing
HIV, is pretty much the worst thing that could happen and is
bound to have a profound effect on testing for future vaccines.
At the very least, it helps underscore how much is still not
known about HIV, which has led some to suggest that the public
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
The LAT fronts a look at how both Democratic contenders are
receiving lots of money from Wall Street. Clinton has received
at least $6.29 million and Obama $6.03 million, two figures that
are much higher than the $2.59 million that has gone to Sen.
John McCain. Some are worried the money will mean either
candidate would be less willing to regulate the financial-services
industry. In other campaign news, everyone goes inside with
word that the State Department fired two employees and
disciplined another for improperly accessing information from
Obama's passport file. The department is still investigating, but
its spokesman said the employees were motivated by "imprudent
curiosity."
The WP fronts word that the United Nations presented donors
with a supplemental request for almost $1.1 billion over the next
two years. The move would increase U.N. expenses by 25
percent and lead to the largest administrative budget in the
history of the organization. But here's the rub: The Bush
administration is to blame for much of this increase. Even
though the United States has long sought to decrease U.N.
spending, the Bush administration has been pushing the
organization to take on a variety of new and complex tasks that
are proving to be quite expensive. But, of course, U.S. officials
suggest the United Nations should find savings in other
programs that the Bush administration doesn't think are as
important.
The NYT fronts, and USAT goes inside with, a look at how the
recent unrest in Tibet could have an effect in tomorrow's
elections in Taiwan. The violence that broke out this week in
Tibet has threatened what was once thought to be a sure
landslide by the pro-China candidate. But now there seems to be
a chance that he might lose, as many Taiwanese fear that what is
happening in Tibet foreshadows what will happen in Taiwan if
they don't take a stand against China.
Now that all the initial hoopla has passed, the NYT takes a look
at some nagging questions that remain about the investigation of
former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer. Officials justify the highly
aggressive tactics, which are rare for prostitution cases, by
saying that they had to follow the evidence since Spitzer was a
public figure. But there's also an interesting question of why
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there were so many juicy details about Spitzer's encounter in the
affidavit, which several experts say "went far beyond what was
necessary."
If you feel like starting out your Friday confused, be sure to
check out the WSJ's look at how companies are explaining
executive compensation in proxy statements. The Securities and
Exchange Commission told hundreds of companies last year that
they needed to be more specific, and many have responded with
a slew of formulas and explanations that would challenge even
the most hardened Wall Street expert. For example, this is how
Adobe explains it: "Target Bonus x Unit Multiplier x Individual
Results." That seems simple enough, but then goes the definition
of what "unit multiplier" means: "Derived from aggregating the
target bonus of all participants in the Executive Bonus Plan
multiplied by the funding level determined under the funding
matrix …" And after all that, Adobe's five top executives got the
exact same unit multiplier, which (shockingly!) was the
maximum number possible.
today's papers
Long Road Home
By Daniel Politi
Thursday, March 20, 2008, at 6:20 AM ET
The New York Times leads with a look at how the fifth
anniversary of the invasion of Iraq provided a stark contrast in
the different opinions about the war between Republicans and
Democrats in Washington. In a speech at the Pentagon, President
Bush acknowledged that the conflict has been "longer and harder
and more costly than we anticipated" but insisted that "this is a
fight America can and must win." While Bush emphasized that
the "surge" in troops is working and has "opened the door to a
major strategic victory," Democratic leaders countered that the
administration still lacks a clear strategy to get U.S. troops back
home. The Los Angeles Times leads locally but off-leads a look
at the increasing tensions at the Pentagon over how quickly
troops should be withdrawn from Iraq. The commanders on the
ground want to keep troop levels steady for the foreseeable
future, while members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are speaking
up in favor of a faster withdrawal.
The Washington Post leads with the release of 11,000 pages of
Sen. Hillary Clinton's schedules as first lady, which once again
served to put a spotlight on the candidate's claims of experience
during her years in the White House. USA Today leads with new
census data that show domestic migration in the United States
has slowed during a time when the housing market has been on a
downward spiral. This trend holds true even for the Sun Belt
metropolitan areas, which had been experiencing huge growth.
"People are becoming much more risk-averse, much more
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
conservative about moving," one expert said. The Wall Street
Journal leads its world-wide newsbox with Tibet officials
announcing that 24 people have been arrested and charged with
endangering state security and other "grave crimes." In a Page
One story, the paper describes how many young Tibetan
activists are openly favoring confrontation with China,
regardless of the Dalai Lama's opinion. Although they still
revere the Dalai Lama, these young activists say they're willing
to use violence to gain independence.
The most startling statement from an administration official—
not surprisingly—came from Vice President Cheney, who, with
what the WP's Dana Milbank calls his "trademark ingenuity,"
compared the administration's task in Iraq to that of Abraham
Lincoln during the Civil War. "He was willing to withstand the
slings and arrows of the political wars in order to get there,"
Cheney said. When an interviewer told him that two-thirds of
Americans oppose the Iraq war, Cheney's answer was succinct:
"So?" He then added that "you cannot be blown off course by
the fluctuations in the public opinion polls."
Most Americans may think the war was not worth fighting, but
yesterday provided a clear illustration of just how far the conflict
has fallen in the list of concerns for regular people. Although at
least 160 people were arrested in protests across the country, the
crowds were relatively small. But at least for one day, the war
was back at the center of the national political debate as
Democrats in Congress used the opportunity to criticize the
administration, and the presidential candidates traded barbs over
the conflict.
Sen. Barack Obama, of course, criticized the two other
presidential contenders for voting in favor of the war and also
pointed to Sen. John McCain's highly publicized mistake when
he declared several times Tuesday that Iran was providing
support for al-Qaida in Iraq. "Maybe that is why he completely
fails to understand that the war in Iraq has done more to
embolden America's enemies than any strategic choice that we
have made in decades," Obama said. Meanwhile, Clinton vowed
to begin withdrawing troops quickly, and McCain released a
statement saying that "America and our allies stand on the
precipice of winning a major victory."
The fact that there's disagreement within the Pentagon on the
pace of withdrawal from Iraq is hardly new, but the LAT does
manage to shed some light on why the tensions have flared up
once again. Gen. David Petraeus and the Joint Chiefs had agreed
to put off discussions about troops cuts until this spring. But then
Petraeus suggested publicly that there should be a pause in
withdrawals, which many saw as an attempt by the ground
commanders to circumvent the process, "effectively cutting the
Joint Chiefs out of this spring's debate," says the LAT. It is also
revealing to note that the Joint Chiefs are still skeptical about the
"surge," noting that it hasn't led to much political progress on the
ground.
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In an interesting Page One piece, the WP takes a look at how
even though it's been 10 years since al-Qaida declared war
against the United States, intelligence agencies haven't had much
luck getting high-placed informants inside the terrorist network.
Key opportunities were missed earlier, and now many think that
penetrating the network is practically impossible due to its heavy
security. For a long time, intelligence agencies were stuck in a
Cold War mentality that led them to believe informants could be
bought with lots of cash, a tactic that hasn't really worked since
members of al-Qaida are mostly motivated by religion. "This is a
much more difficult target than the Soviets were," says a former
CIA official. "These people are true believers. They're living
according to their beliefs, not in the lap of luxury."
In writing about Clinton's records, the Post chooses to lead with
a look at how the former first lady was sidelined after the failure
of her health-care initiative, which has already been written
about extensively. Still, it mustn't have been easy to choose
something to focus on in records that the NYT describes as
carrying "all the emotional punch of a factory-worker's
timecard." Despite the Clinton campaign's assertion that the
schedules illustrate how she was involved in key issues, a
(redacted) list of events and times can't really shed light on what
she was thinking or any influence she might have had behind the
scenes. Still, they offered some interesting tidbits, such as the
fact that Clinton was involved in the effort to approve NAFTA,
which she now says she opposed. Ultimately, though, the
schedules show she was involved in many typical activities for a
first lady, which leads the WSJ to say that "she may have had a
front seat to history, but was often removed from the action."
In the LAT's op-ed page, Michael Meyers, the executive director
of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, says he was
disappointed by Obama's much-heralded speech about race in
America. He talked about the differences between the races
when "he should have presented us a pathway out of our racial
boxes and a road map for new thinking about race." Meyers
hoped Obama would "speak the simple truth that there is no such
thing as 'race,' that we all belong to the same race—the human
race." Instead of looking forward, Obama looked backward and
even brought slavery into the discussion. "We can't be united as
a nation if we continue to think racially and give credence to
racial experiences and differences based on ethnicity, past victim
status and stereotypical categories."
today's papers
Rally 'Round the Fed
By Daniel Politi
Wednesday, March 19, 2008, at 6:15 AM ET
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Fed week continues, and all the papers lead with the latest
efforts by the central bank to prevent a long-lasting recession.
The Federal Reserve slashed short-term interest rates by threequarters of a percentage point yesterday, which was less than the
full percentage point Wall Street was expecting, but investors
still cheered the news. The Dow Jones industrial average was up
3.51 percent when the markets closed. The Washington Post and
USA Today note it was the biggest rally in more than five years.
The Los Angeles Times does the best job of explaining clearly
that the Fed cut two key rates yesterday. The federal funds rate,
which is the rate banks charge each other for overnight loans,
was cut to 2.25 percent, while the discount rate, which is what
the Fed charges banks for loans, was reduced to 2.5 percent.
After the Fed's announcement, banks cut the prime rate, which
means many consumers are likely to see a direct benefit on their
credit card bills over the next few months.
The New York Times and Wall Street Journal point out that
investors flocked to raise the prices of financial stocks yesterday
after two investment firms reported earnings that were better
than expected. Lehman Brothers, which many had targeted as
the next Bear Stearns, saw its shares rise more than 46 percent.
The WSJ leads its world-wide newsbox with Sen. Barack
Obama's speech on race in America. Obama distanced himself
from the more controversial remarks made by his pastor, the
Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., and used the opportunity to urge
Americans to "move beyond our old racial wounds" to deal with
problems that affect everyone.
When it announced the sixth cut in as many months, the Fed
recognized that the future looks bleak for the U.S. economy.
"The outlook for economic activity has weakened further," the
Fed said in a statement. The LAT points out that "about the most
hopeful thing" the central bank had to say yesterday was that the
prices of energy and other commodities are likely to level out
this year, but even that is hardly good news because it seems to
be based on the assumption that a recession will lead to a drop in
demand. And although everyone says the Fed made clear it
stands ready to keep cutting, the WP highlights that "more huge
rate cuts" seem unlikely. This is partly due to the fact that the
Fed can't go much lower and also because of growing inflation
fears. The WSJ points out that many in Wall Street are now
betting that the federal-funds rate will be somewhere between
1.5 percent and 1.75 percent by the end of the year.
The increasing concern about inflation was evident in
yesterday's announcement, as two members of the Fed's main
policy-setting committee voted against the interest-rate cuts. The
NYT says some analysts interpreted the dissenting votes along
with the strong warnings about inflation as a sign that the Fed's
committee struggled to reach a decision on how much to cut.
Wall Street may cheer the rate cuts, but, of course, lower interest
rates mean bad news for savers and those on fixed incomes,
particularly retirees. "Savers are taking it on the chin," an analyst
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tells USAT. The LAT points out that's exactly what the Fed
wants. By making saving less attractive, the central bank hopes
more money will pour into the stock market. But there's so much
fear surrounding the economy lately that many are willing to
take the lower returns in exchange for safety.
Meanwhile, the NYT's David Leonhardt says readers shouldn't be
embarrassed if they still don't fully understand the reasons
behind the current financial crisis. "Your confusion is shared by
many people who are in the middle of the crisis," he writes.
Throughout most of his candidacy, Obama has largely stayed
away from talking about race, but yesterday he decided to tackle
the issue after receiving lots of negative publicity in recent days
due to controversial sermons given by his longtime spiritual
mentor. In a speech delivered at the National Constitution Center
in Philadelphia, Obama said, "Wright's comments were not only
wrong but divisive," but he went further and explained that
Wright's statements reflect the anger and frustration many black
Americans feel due to the country's racist past. "To condemn it
without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm
of misunderstanding that exists between the races." Obama also
said he understood the anger of some whites over affirmativeaction policies. "This is where we are right now. It's a racial
stalemate we've been stuck in for years," he said.
"standard-issue populist straw men of Wall Street and the GOP"
for much of what is wrong in the country, he "also revealed the
extent to which his ideas are neither new nor transcendent."
The NYT and WP front a look at how the Supreme Court appears
ready to declare that the Second Amendment grants an
individual right to own a gun. A majority of justices seemed
ready to strike down Washington, D.C.'s handgun ban as
unconstitutional, but everyone notes it's unclear how they will
decide what kind of gun regulations could still be imposed by
the government.
In the NYT's op-ed page, Gov. Philip Bredesen of Tennessee puts
forward an interesting proposal to help the Democrats avoid "a
long summer of brutal and unnecessary warfare." If there's no
clear Democratic nominee by the end of the primary season, he
suggests that the party should "schedule a superdelegate
primary," where they would all get together in a public caucus so
a decision can be made before the convention. "In addition to the
practical political benefits, such a plan is also a chance to show
America that we are a modern political party focused on results."
today's papers
Many describe yesterday's speech as the most important in
Obama's career, and a historian tells USAT that it was the most
extensive discussion about race ever given by a presidential
candidate. The NYT notes historians "described the speech's
candidness on race as almost without precedent," and many
agree that it will go down in history, regardless of who wins the
nomination. The official word from the Obama campaign is that
the senator insisted on giving the speech, and he wrote it himself
over the past few days. Many quickly praised the speech, but all
the papers note it's still not clear how it will play politically. The
WSJ talks to some Republicans who say Obama's alliance with
Wright can still be used against him because he only spoke up
against the statements once they became a political liability.
Even some Obama supporters aren't sure this was the best
strategy to deal with the controversy. "The more he has to talk
about race, the blacker he becomes in the public imagination," a
professor tells the paper.
Knocking on Lehman's Door
Most of the papers' editorial boards swoon over Obama's address
and heap praise on the senator for turning a damage-control
speech into what the WP calls "a teachable moment." The NYT
says that "it is hard to imagine how he could have handled it
better." Regardless of whether it ends the controversy over
Wright's statements, the LAT says that the speech "redefines our
national conversation about race and politics." USAT agrees,
noting that "if it does nothing more than promote needed
conversations … it will have served a valuable function." For its
part, the WSJ says the speech "was an instructive moment,
though not always in the way the Senator intended." By blaming
The Los Angeles Times leads with a look at how many are
wondering whether the Fed is taking on too much risk and for
how long it can keep pumping money into the economy in its
attempt to save the country from a deep recession without
hurting the nation's overall finances. Over the past few days,
many economists have said that the key question now is not
whether the country will enter into a recession, but rather how
long it will last. Ordinary Americans seem to agree. USA Today
leads with a poll that shows 76 percent of Americans think the
country is in a recession. In addition, 79 percent said they're
worried about the possibility of a depression that could last
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
By Daniel Politi
Tuesday, March 18, 2008, at 6:12 AM ET
Financial news continues to get top billing as all the papers try to
digest the latest news from the Federal Reserve and the markets
to figure out how far the current crisis will spread. The New York
Times' lead story notes that although the stock market didn't
plunge as was widely expected, there were several ups and
downs as uncertainty ruled the day on Wall Street. The Dow
Jones Industrial Average closed Monday with a 0.2 percent
increase, largely because of the strength of J.P. Morgan, which
rose because of the widely held belief that it was able to acquire
Bear Stearns at a veritable bargain. The Washington Post leads
locally, but off-leads news that shares of many of the largest
banks and investment firms plummeted yesterday.
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several years. The Wall Street Journal leads its world-wide
newsbox with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao saying at a news
conference that the Dalai Lama is to blame for the recent
violence that has broken out in Tibet. As the protests spread to
other parts of China, Jiabao accused the Dalai Lama of trying to
get publicity and gain influence in the run-up to the Olympics.
Both the NYT and the WSJ, which devotes a separate Page One
story to the subject, point out that as investors desperately tried
to figure out which company could be the next to follow in Bear
Stearns' footsteps they seem to have agreed on a likely
candidate: Lehman Brothers. Investors see similarities between
the two companies since they're smaller than their main rivals
and highly dependent on the mortgage business. But, as the WSJ
reports in detail, Lehman isn't willing to go quietly into the
night, and its executives are desperately carrying out an
offensive operation to quickly dispel any rumors that might crop
up about the company's financial situation. How much that will
help is anyone's guess, particularly considering that it was less
than a week ago that the chief executive of Bear Stearns was on
CNBC talking about how the company's "balance sheet has not
weakened at all."
Even if what Lehman's executives say is true and the company's
finances are solid, there's good reason for them to worry if there
are persistent rumors that the firm is in trouble. The WP notes
that if there's one central lesson from the fall of Bear Stearns it's
that "investment firms live and die on confidence." And as
confidence in the markets continues to decrease, the LAT notes
there are many who fear that the Fed's latest moves could turn
the central bank into "the nation's chief financier, a role that it
was not designed to play and its leaders dearly hope to avoid."
Everyone points out the Fed is likely to cut its benchmark shortterm interest rate today by as much as one percentage point to 2
percent. But the WSJ says the cut may actually be smaller
because of persistent inflation concerns.
Meanwhile, talk on Wall Street yesterday centered around the
demise of Bear Stearns and the way the Fed put its own money
forward to facilitate the acquisition by JP Morgan. Some
expressed concern that the Fed has set a dangerous precedent
and wonder whether the central bank will continue to offer up
public money in order to save private institutions. In fact, as both
the WP and WSJ note, it's actually possible that the Fed will be
able to make money out of selling the $30 billion worth of assets
from Bear Stearns, but that all depends on the markets. The LAT
also points out that although many are wondering how much
money the Fed has available, the truth is that it "has the capacity
to create a near-infinite amount of credit," and even in the worst
case scenario "taxpayers should not get stuck with the bill."
Under the headline "The Week That Shook Wall Street," the
WSJ fronts an interesting and extremely detailed account of the
events that led to the fall of Bear Stearns. But if you're still
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
scratching your head over the latest financial news and why it's
important, USAT has a good Q&A that starts with the very basic
before getting into the details: "What is an investment bank, and
why should I care what happens to one?"
The LAT notes that President Bush tried to express some
optimism on the economy but was immediately criticized for
words that "struck many as discordant and disengaged" when he
thanked Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson "for working over the
weekend." Many said that by focusing on Paulson's schedule, he
immediately revealed that he "has no idea what's going on," as
Rep. Barney Frank put it. Meanwhile, many Democrats were
also quick to point out that the administration seems perfectly
willing to back the bailout of a big investment bank while it
ignores the plight of regular people who are being kicked out of
their homes.
"Never do I want to hear again from my conservative friends
about how brilliant capitalists are, how much they deserve their
seven-figure salaries and how government should keep its hands
off the private economy," writes the Post's E.J. Dionne Jr.
As could be expected, the topic quickly spilled into the
presidential campaign, which, as the NYT points out, shows how
much the economy has taken over as the main issue of the day,
even as the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq draws near. The
Democratic candidates were quick to criticize the Bush
administration for failing to do more to prevent the crisis from
unraveling, but the LAT points out that "none of the candidates
offered specific economic policy proposals beyond their past
statements addressing the months-old housing mortgage crunch."
Even their schedules illustrate how the contenders have been
caught off-guard by the situation. Sen. Hillary Clinton was
supposed to focus on Iraq this week, and Sen. Barack Obama
will give what is being billed as a major speech on race today.
In the WP's op-ed page, Eugene Robinson writes that criticizing
Bush is "not the same as charting a path out of this mess" and
implores the candidates to start paying attention to the crisis in
the economy.
In other campaign news, everyone notes that Florida Democrats
appear to have given up on plans to redo the state's presidential
primary. This means the decision on whether to seat the state's
delegates at the convention once again falls on the Democratic
National Committee. Meanwhile, officials in Michigan
continued to debate whether to hold a new vote.
Worst career move ever? The WP, like many of the other
papers, goes to the Bear Stearns headquarters in Manhattan—
where someone taped a $2 bill to one of the building's doors—to
do the requisite story about how the firm's employees are
worried about their future. "Would you believe I've been here
five days?" asked one employee who was outside smoking a
cigarette. "Do you know where I came from? J.P. Morgan."
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today's papers
The Fed Goes Deep
By Daniel Politi
Monday, March 17, 2008, at 7:06 AM ET
The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and
USA Today all lead with, while the Wall Street Journal devotes
much of its Page One to, the Federal Reserve announcing a
series of moves to try to bring some stability to the increasingly
shaky financial markets. Lest these be confused as just one more
of the series of measures the Fed has taken in recent months, the
papers make clear that this latest action is "dramatic" (WP),
"extraordinary" (LAT), and "apparently unprecedented" (NYT).
The Fed opened up its lending practices to make more money
available to the biggest investment firms on Wall Street, and cut
a key interest rate (the so-called discount window) for financial
institutions by one-quarter of a percentage point. The central
bank also announced it would extend a $30 billion credit line to
help J.P. Morgan Chase complete the purchase of Bear Stearns
for what the WSJ calls "the fire-sale price" of $2 a share.
The WSJ leads its world-wide newsbox with the Tibetan
protests, which have spread to other parts of western China. The
paper says the protests are unlikely to end soon, and they're
being "fueled by rapid communications among the monasteries
that serve as centers of Tibetan cultural and spiritual life."
Although calm was restored in Lhasa, the provincial capital of
Tibet, protests continued to break out in other areas. "Just as
soon as the troops stamp out one protest, another pops up," says
the LAT.
The fall of Bear Stearns marks a spectacular collapse for a titan
of Wall Street that at the beginning of last year was worth $20
billion. After a few days of intense negotiations, yesterday the
firm was valued at a mere $236 million, or $2 a share, even
though its stock had closed at $30 on Friday. The WSJ makes
clear that Bear Stearns executives had little choice in the matter
as they had to either agree to sell at any price or file for
bankruptcy. The Fed took away much of the risk involved in J.P.
Morgan's purchase by agreeing to fund up to $30 billion of Bear
Stearns' riskier assets, which the WSJ says "is believed to be the
largest Fed advance on record to a single company." This is all a
bit complicated, and the Fed didn't give many details about the
assets involved, but the bottom line is that, as the WSJ makes
clear, "if the assets decline in value, the Fed—and thus, the U.S.
taxpayer—will bear the cost."
The LAT notes that the fact that such a large firm fell so quickly
"underscored the depth of a crisis that threatens the financial
system" as more investors begin to fear that companies won't be
able to pay back loans. "It's amazing that a firm with a storied
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
history that has been respected for all these years has within two
weeks literally gone from solvent to insolvent," the head of a
financial consulting firm said. "It's scary and it's horrible." The
WP notes that there may still be trouble ahead for Bear Stearns
because shareholders could file lawsuits if there's suspicion that
the executives of the company knew on Friday that the company
had lost most of its value but decided to keep that information
from investors. The WSJ says some Bear Stearns employees
were already complaining yesterday about the low price of the
sale, which could raise problems since they own about one-third
of the company's shares.
Meanwhile, the Fed's other major move of the day was no less
dramatic or important, and the WSJ characterizes it as "one of
the broadest expansions of its lending authority since the 1930s"
because for at least the next six months securities dealers will be
able to borrow from the central bank much like traditional banks.
By making it possible for the investment firms to borrow money
from the central bank as long as they put up collateral, "the Fed
in effect is offering to be a lender of last resort for 20 major Wall
Street firms, a role it has previously played only for commercial
banks," explains the WP. And by lowering the discount rate,
borrowing this money will be cheaper for both banks and the big
investment firms. Although Fed officials insist that these
changes are only recognition of the way the modern financial
system operates, the WSJ makes clear that they "also take the
central bank into uncharted territory with new and potentially
troublesome risks."
Asian and European markets fell today, and the dollar hit record
lows as investors reacted to the latest news from Wall Street and
Washington. U.S. stocks are largely expected to follow the same
downward trend once the markets open for the day.
Aides to the Dalai Lama said more than 80 people had been
killed in the Tibetan clashes, but the LAT notes that information
relating to the violence has been difficult to verify as China has
made it hard for journalists to reach the protest sites. In a news
conference, the Dalai Lama called for an independent
investigation into the suppression of the protests and said that
"some kind of cultural genocide is taking place." He also said he
doesn't have any power to stop the protests. "It's a people's
movement, so it's up to them. Whatever they do, I have to act
accordingly," he said.
As the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq approaches,
the NYT fronts a look at the much-talked-about decision to
dissolve the Iraqi army. The paper talks to some key people
involved in the administration at the time and concludes that L.
Paul Bremer's decree to disband the army went against an earlier
plan to build upon the existing military and led to bitter
disagreements within the administration. Bush approved the
plan, but he did so without consulting many in his
administration, including the secretary of state and top military
leaders on the ground. Colin Powell, who was secretary of state
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at the time, said he asked Condoleezza Rice, who was national
security adviser, for an explanation, but she said she was
surprised as well. Although it was always part of the plan to get
rid of the Republican Guard units because they were seen as
loyal to the old regime, the rest of the army was supposed to stay
in place. Significantly, a PowerPoint presentation that outlined
the initial plan warned of the inherent risks of dismantling the
entire army and putting so many people out on the street in a
country with high unemployment.
In an interesting Page One piece, the LAT takes a look at the
tactics that the Chinese government is taking to spin the Tibetan
protests to its own people. They may not need much prodding
since many Chinese don't have a positive view of Tibet anyway,
but the government is employing sophisticated PR tactics and
emphasizing the attacks of Tibetans against Han Chinese in
order to stir an us-vs.-them mentality that seems to be working.
"The government is showing more confidence and learning more
about spin," said Michael Anti, a well-known Chinese blogger.
"They've learned more PR tactics from Western people. They
see the way the White House and the Pentagon do it."
today's papers
Those Poor Superdelegates
By Roger McShane
Sunday, March 16, 2008, at 6:08 AM ET
The New York Times leads with uncommitted superdelegates
fearing a prolonged battle for the Democratic presidential
nomination. The Times says the Democratic heavies are
"uncertain about who, if anyone, would step in to fill a
leadership vacuum and help guide the contest to a conclusion
that would not weaken the Democratic ticket in the general
election." The Los Angeles Times leads with the "surprising
diversity" of positions John McCain has taken on foreign-policy
issues during his time in Congress. "Taken as a whole, they seem
quirky and a la carte, rather than developed from a single
philosophy," says the LAT. The Washington Post leads with the
upcoming Supreme Court review of the District of Columbia's
32-year-old ban on handguns.
Most of the superdelegates interviewed by the Times want the
nomination battle decided before the Democratic convention, but
they don't know how to resolve the conflict. Lucky for them, TP
has a solution: Pick a candidate. As the Times says, "[I]t is a
virtual certainty that neither candidate will win enough pledged
delegates to clinch the nomination," so the decision will come
down to the votes of the superdelegates. But many of them are
"hoping they will be relieved of making an excruciating decision
that could lose them friends and supporters at home." A true
profile in courage.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
The NYT adds that while many superdelegates intend to keep
their options open, they also said that "in deciding whom to
support, they would adopt what Mr. Obama's campaign has
advocated as the essential principle: reflecting the will of the
voters." If this is the case, and with Obama holding nearly
insurmountable (and growing) leads in the popular vote and
delegate count, what are they waiting for?
One last note on the NYT's lead: As far as TP can tell, none of
the superdelegates interviewed for the story suggested ending
the system that gives them a vote.
The Republicans have their nominee, and the LAT says he's
sending mixed signals on foreign policy, allowing him to court
both realists and neoconservatives. But the argument for John
McCain the realist is based on congressional votes that are at
least a decade old, while his current catalog of positions screams
"neocon." Nevertheless, McCain's realist supporters believe
some of his more hawkish views are just for show. If McCain is
elected president, "there's going to be a lot of disappointment on
the neoconservative side," said Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, a
former top intelligence official and McCain supporter.
Whoever the next president is, he or she will receive plenty of
late-night phone calls, as suggested in a campaign ad for Hillary
Clinton. But the next commander in chief is unlikely to lose
much sleep as a result. Former White House advisers tell the WP
that presidents are rarely asked to make major decisions in the
middle of the night.
In other election news, the NYT notes that nearly one out of three
vice presidents have gone on to become president, yet, according
to Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center, "just 1 percent of
voters say the vice presidential candidate influences their
decision in a presidential race." In a separate piece, the NYT
suggests, citing no evidence, that Hillary Clinton floated Barack
Obama as a possible running mate because Mark Penn found
that the idea polled well.
When the Supreme Court takes up the case against Washington's
gun ban this week, it will have the opportunity to decide once
and for all whether the Second Amendment "provides an
individual right to gun ownership or simply pertains to militia
service." But while the WP notes that "an endorsement of an
individual right would be a monumental change in federal
jurisprudence," it doesn't explain how it is likely to affect
existing federal gun-control legislation.
From a local point of view, the Post says that the stakes of the
case "are obviously high for the District." But are they? There is
no conclusive evidence that the handgun ban has reduced crime
in a meaningful way.
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Each of the papers notes the upcoming five-year anniversary of
the war in Iraq. The NYT fronts a familiar-sounding story on
how the insurgency "runs on stolen oil profits." The WP,
meanwhile, publishes an "Outlook" piece that connects
America's decision to invade to its thirst for oil, with references
to conspiracy theories thrown in for good measure.
Elsewhere, the NYT reports that thousands of Tibetans, including
Buddhist monks, clashed with riot police in the Chinese city of
Xiahe on Saturday. But the Tibetan capital of Lhasa was
generally quiet a day after violence erupted in the city.
Back in America, the NYT says Ben Bernanke is "inventing
policy on the fly" in response to the meltdown in the credit
markets. On Tuesday the Fed is expected to lower interest rates
for the sixth time since September. Most forecasters think a
recession (sorry) is inevitable, if not already under way. But,
hey, look on the bright side.
What rhymes with fellatio? … The NYT reviews David
Lehman's anthology The Best American Erotic Poems. The
reviewer laments the fact that many of the poems in the book
similarly "make raunchy metaphors out of unlikely foods, weird
animals and western topography." To be original, he counsels all
those young aspiring erotic poets out there, "write something
really filthy," like W.H. Auden's "The Platonic Blow."
today's papers
Bear Down
By Arthur Delaney
Saturday, March 15, 2008, at 5:48 AM ET
The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles
Times, and the Wall Street Journal all lead with bad financial
news: A big Wall Street investment firm ran out of money to pay
off its lenders before being bailed out by the Federal Reserve.
The Fed's fix, hatched out in midnight meetings, is temporary;
Bear Stearns has 28 days to clean up its act or find a buyer. Wall
Street is rattled and stocks are sinking despite the save. The WSJ
tops its world-wide newsbox with, and the other papers front,
word of violent protests against Chinese rule in Tibet.
The cause of the financial turmoil is … the credit mess! The
NYT notes highest-up of the papers that Bear suffered big time in
the recent credit crisis because of its many mortgage-linked
investments. The WP is the most apocalyptic, reporting that had
the Fed not intervened, Bear's failure "could have sent
multibillion-dollar losses cascading across the world financial
system … threatening to choke off global economic growth." (In
a separate analysis piece, the NYT explains the "Wall St. Domino
Theory.") Near the beginning of its story, the Post paraphrases
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
critics who say the Fed has inappropriately involved itself in the
free market and set a precedent that will encourage other firms to
be reckless.
The WSJ says it's "the first time since the Great Depression that
the Fed has lent in this fashion to any entity other than a bank."
The WSJ adds a human touch to the story, reporting that
yesterday some Bear employees called their spouses from work
to say they might be out of a job soon. Looking out for the West
Coast, the LAT reports that Bear's CFO says the firm will honor
its existing obligations to the state of California in managing two
state bond sales.
All the papers front ugly news from the capital of Tibet:
Hundreds of people in Lhasa are protesting Chinese rule and
clashing with Chinese troops. Ten people are reported dead in
what the WSJ calls an "uprising" (the other papers settle for
violence). The Chinese government blames the Dalai Lama, who
issued a statement calling for both sides to stop being violent.
The WP reports that some Tibetans are unleashing their longsimmering anger at Chinese domination by attacking shops
owned by ethnic Chinese. The papers agree that with Olympic
Games coming up in August, the crisis in Tibet puts the Chinese
government in a trickier-than-usual PR situation.
The NYT fronts another reminder that our system for nominating
presidential candidates isn't very good. The Democratic Party
doesn't know what to do with Michigan and Florida, states
whose delegates the Democratic National Committee refuses to
honor because local party bosses held early primaries in
violation of national party rules. Some party officials in
Michigan want a revote, and some Clinton fundraisers are
demanding the return of money they gave to the DNC if the
party refuses to seat Florida's delegates at the national
convention. Neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton
campaigned in either state.
North Korea is in big food trouble this year, according to a
below-the-fold WP story. Every spring, other countries bail out
the starving state with food aid, but crop failure in-country and
rising food prices worldwide will make this the toughest year for
the regime since the mid '90s, when millions of North Koreans
died of starvation.
The LAT reports on Barack Obama's letter to the Huffington
Post, in which the senator from Illinois repudiates controversial
statements by his church's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A.
Wright Jr. The WP does one better, reporting that the Obama
campaign has officially severed ties with Wright. The pastor no
longer serves on Obama's African-American Religious
Leadership Committee. The Times' story reminds readers that
Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain last month
received the endorsement of controversial pastor John Hagee,
who has said some mean things about Catholics.
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The WP fronts a look at a U.S.-funded program for training
Palestinian security forces, which the Post says is horribly
underresourced. U.S. and Jordanian trainers are improvising,
doing things like buying gun-shaped cigarette lighters for use in
arrest drills. The WP notes that President Bush's 2003 blueprint
for Middle East peace calls for an effective Palestinian security
force.
The LAT fronts big news that hospital workers at the UCLA
Medical Center can't stop spying on flameout pop star Britney
Spears. At least 13 have been fired for peeking at her
confidential records, at least six have been suspended, and six
actual physicians are facing disciplinary measures. One hospital
official is quoted saying she doesn't understand why Spears
attracts the snoopers when so many other celebrities are also
treated at the hospital.
Men wear girdles now. The WSJ fronts word that gutsuppressing, butt-supporting undergarments are the new big
thing in men's fashion. In case readers doubt that this is a bona
fide trend, the Journal reports that sales growth in men's
underwear has recently outpaced that of women's. Call him
insensitive, immature, or old-fashioned, but TP cannot stop
giggling at the "Flashback Butt Lifting Technology Boxer."
trillions more. Toppling Saddam will finish off
a ghastly tyranny, but it will also uncork ageold sectarian tensions. More than 100,000
Iraqis will die, a few million will be displaced,
and the best we can hope for will be a loosely
federated Islamic republic that isn't completely
in Iran's pocket. Finally, it will turn out that
Saddam had neither weapons of mass
destruction nor ties to the planners of 9/11.
Our intervention and occupation will serve as
the rallying cry for a new crop of terrorists.
It is extremely doubtful that Congress would have authorized
such a war or that the American people would have shouted,
"Bring it on!"
Some will protest that this counter-scenario is unfair. Nobody at
the time predicted all of these outcomes (though several
predicted some of them); Bush can't be blamed for the
unforeseen consequences of (let us stipulate) a well-intentioned
action.
However, toting up the war's extravagant costs against its
meager (and still-speculative) gains is a valid way to gauge the
larger question: Was the invasion worth launching? Was it a
good idea? And the war must be appraised not as some abstract
vision of an ideally waged war but rather as the actual, existing
war that the Bush administration planned and executed.
video
WARS
The first in a series of four essays revolving around a common theme.
By Magnum In Motion
Monday, March 17, 2008, at 4:08 PM ET
war stories
Five Years Gone
What, exactly, has the Iraq war achieved? A lot? A little something? Nothing
at all?
By Fred Kaplan
Tuesday, March 18, 2008, at 1:15 PM ET
Imagine it's early 2003, and President George W. Bush presents
the following case for invading Iraq:
We're about to go to war against Saddam
Hussein. Victory on the battlefield will be
swift and fairly clean. But then 100,000 U.S.
troops will have to occupy Iraq for about 10
years. On average, nearly 1,000 of them will
be killed and another 10,000 injured in each of
the first 5 years. We'll spend at least $1 trillion
on the war and occupation, and possibly
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
The disastrous consequences that have been unfolding plainly
over the past five years are not "side effects" of this war but
rather the direct, head-on results. For example, it's an evasion to
lament that, had then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
listened to the Joint Chiefs and sent twice as many troops, the
war would have gone differently. Maybe so, but Rumsfeld
wasn't interested in waging that kind of war. He saw the war not
so much as a fight about Iraq as a demonstration of a new style
of warfare—known as "military transformation" or "the
revolution in military affairs"—that signaled how America
would project power in the post-Cold War era. He saw, not
incorrectly, a turbulent world of emerging threats, some in
remote areas inaccessible from U.S. bases. The large, lumbering
armies of old were not so suitable for such conflicts. Hence his
emphasis on small, lightweight units of ground forces—fast to
mobilize, easy to sustain—and superaccurate bombs and
missiles to hit targets that only heavy artillery could destroy in
decades past. With the Iraq war (and the Afghanistan conflict
before it), he wanted to send rogue regimes and other foes a
message: Look what we can do with one hand tied behind our
back. If we can overthrow Saddam (and the Taliban) so easily,
we can overthrow you, too.
It is no surprise, then, that Rumsfeld rejected the argument,
made by several Army and Marine generals, that whatever
happens on the battlefield, we'll need a few hundred thousand
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troops to impose order and help form a new Iraq. A large,
lengthy occupation would have nullified his whole concept of
new-style warfare and its vision of 21st-century geopolitics.
In other words, it is not the case, as many critics charge, that
Rumsfeld "miscalculated" how many troops would be needed for
the mission of stabilizing post-Saddam Iraq. Rather, he wasn't
interested in that mission. In a National Security Council
meeting shortly before the invasion, he insisted that the
Pentagon, not the State Department, should take charge of
planning for postwar Iraq—because he wanted to ensure that
there would be no such planning (and, indeed, there wasn't).
A stronger case could be made that the occupation would have
gone better had L. Paul Bremer, head of the U.S.-led Coalition
Provisional Authority, not issued (on whose orders, we still don't
know) the directives that barred all Baathists from government
jobs and disbanded the Iraqi army—thus alienating all Sunnis at
a moment when reconciliation was vital and putting tens of
thousands of armed young men out on the streets, angry and
unemployed.
Still, it is unlikely that, even without the directives, a foreign
occupier could have staved off sectarian violence for long. The
majority Shiites would have naturally taken over the Baghdad
government. The Sunnis, a minority accustomed to running
things, would have rebelled. Holding early elections in the
provincial districts—forming a federal republic from the bottom
up—might have eased the factions into power more gradually,
enabled them to make adjustments at each stage. We will never
know. But again, this was not the way that Bush chose to go.
There is yet another way to assess the war: What if Saddam
Hussein had not been toppled? Would Iraq be better or worse
off? Would the Middle East be more or less stable, the United
States safer or in greater danger?
The Kurds are no doubt better off without Saddam (though, as a
result of U.S. overflight protection, put in place after the 1991
cease-fire, Saddam's mere presence didn't imperil their existence,
as it had before the earlier Gulf War). The Sunnis are no doubt
worse off. The Shiites—it's a mixed bag. Saddam and his thugs
would have continued to kill innocent people—but the victims
would have been different, and it is doubtful they would have
been as numerous as the victims of the war. Nor would 4 million
Iraqis be displaced. Nor would millions more have such severe
shortages of health care, electricity, and clean water, or be afraid
to walk their own streets. Were postwar Iraq a study in the tradeoff between democracy and security, we could discuss it
philosophically. But the Iraqis, at the moment, have neither.
Strategically, if Saddam had remained, the U.N. inspectors
would have failed to find weapons of mass destruction, and thus
pressure would have mounted to call off the sanctions. The
Duelfer report, though it found no signs of WMD programs,
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
concluded that, without sanctions, Saddam would have tried to
start up those programs once again. It is reasonable to infer that
if he'd succeeded, he could have threatened his neighbors and
deterred intervention.
But is it the case that his attempts to rebuild WMD would have
succeeded? We and other nations (Western and Arab) would
have had to mount more active measures to monitor and block
imports of contraband goods. (Even with no sanctions, the '91
cease-fire resolution's ban on WMD would have remained in
effect.) It would have been hard but not impossible. International
politics is a hard game. That's why it's important to hire skilled
diplomats, a profession that this administration, until recently,
has undervalued.
In any case, Saddam would have taken years to develop these
weapons (the Duelfer report concluded that the programs were
completely run down), and his efforts would have been detected
long before they bore fruit. A civilized nation should never
decide to go to war simply because a stable peace is hard to
maintain. Yet that is what we did in the spring of 2003.
But isn't the surge working? Well, it depends what you mean by
"working." In recent months, casualties—American and Iraqi—
dropped substantially. However, three points need to be made.
First, casualties are rising once more, though not to 2006 levels.
Second, while the surge was certainly a factor in reducing
casualties, it was far from the only factor. There were also the
alliances of convenience between U.S. forces and Sunni
tribesmen against the common foe of al-Qaida in Iraq (an
alliance that preceded the surge); the moratorium on violence
called by Muqtada Sadr and his Shiite militia (a policy that may
be suspended as the Sunni militias grow stronger); and the fact
that many areas of Iraq had already been ethnically cleansed.
More to the point, as Gen. David Petraeus has said many times,
there is no military solution to Iraq. The surge has always been a
means to an end—a device to create a "breathing space" of
security in Baghdad so that Iraq's political factions can reach an
accommodation. Without a political settlement, the surge—for
that matter, the entire U.S. military presence, the blood we have
shed, the treasure we have spent—will prove to be little more
than a pause.
Back to the hypothetical speech at the top of this column, the
one that President Bush might have given, had all the
consequences of this war been foretold. The striking thing is,
this is pretty much the caution that our military leaders are
delivering now, in talking about future wars that we are likely to
face. Gen. Petraeus made the point in the Army's field manual on
counterinsurgency that he supervised before returning last year
to Iraq. Such wars, the manual says, are by nature prolonged and
costly; they are difficult to win, easy to lose; they require
soldiers to be extremely creative and citizens to be ceaselessly
patient.
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One unstated lesson of the field manual is that our political
leaders should think very carefully before plunging into war. If
we are going to fight a war essentially by ourselves, as we have
done in Iraq, our vital interests must clearly be at stake. If we are
going to fight a war that does not involve vital interests, as has
also been the case with this war, we must form a genuine
coalition—to share the burdens but, more than that, to provide
legitimacy to the cause. And if we can't do that, we shouldn't go
to war at all.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
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Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
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