President Clinton probably couldn't pick the New York City cops acquitted in the Amadou Diallo case out of a lineup, but he does claim to know what's in their hearts. "I know most people in America of all races believe that if it had been a young white man in an all-white neighborhood, it probably wouldn't have happened," he said at a San Francisco fundraiser on Saturday — right after proclaiming, absurdly, "I
don't pretend for a moment to second-guess the jury."
Since Clinton's Justice Department is investigating whether to press federal charges against the police officers, plain prudence might have suggested that the chief executive keep his mouth shut until the review is complete. But perhaps Clinton felt he had to raise the ante on Vice
President Gore, who had performed his own bit of shameless racial pandering one day earlier.
Appearing at what the Washington Post described as "a soul food restaurant" in Atlanta, Gore posed for a photo with a group of black students. "These students are from Morehouse and Spelman," he said, "the greatest colleges in the world." That's where Gore's kids went, right? ("Barron's Profiles of American Colleges," 1999 edition, reports that the average combined SAT score of Spelman freshman is 1070; for Morehouse it's 1056, and for the University of Tennessee, it's 1100.)
Clinton returned obliquely to the Diallo theme at Selma on Sunday, where he momentarily struck a nice balance between concern for law enforcement and police abuse: "As long as African Americans and Latinos anywhere in America believe they are unfairly targeted by police because of the color of their skin, and police believe they are unfairly judged by their communities because of the color of their uniforms, we have another bridge to cross."
It didn't last long. Clinton couldn't resist the temptation to make a political point about the Confederate flag in his very next sentence: "As long as the waving symbol of one American's pride is the shameful symbol of another American's pain, we have another bridge to cross." (Later, he compared the modern gay-rights movement to Selma's protestors in 1965.)
NR has editorialized in favor of lowering the Confederate flag now flying over the South Carolina statehouse. But it also seems to us that Clinton really ought to aim his fire at Arkansas, whose flag is derived from the Stars-and-Bars, before he starts lambasting other states.
Often one has to read all the way to the third paragraph of a
Washington Post story to start catching its tendentious drift. Today's front page, though, has a story, by Eric Pianin and Charles Babington, whose first paragraph tells you everything you need to know about what's to follow: "In January 1996, President Clinton tapped federal District Judge Richard A. Paez for a seat on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. A onetime poverty lawyer and Los Angeles municipal court jurist with a gold-plated American Bar Association rating, Paez seemed a good fit for one of the most prestigious judicial assignments in the country."
"But for the past four years," Pianin and Babington continue, "Paez has been trapped in a kind of twilight zone, unable to get the Senate to confirm or reject his nomination and forced repeatedly to defend himself against conservative allegations that he is a judicial activist unfit for the post." Can you imagine? A public official, "forced" to defend his record — how positively un-American!
The rest of the article seeks to explain the deep mystery of how anyone could oppose so obviously qualified a nominee. In the process, Pianin and Babington buy the administration's spin that the Ninth Circuit is not, as conservatives argue, already well to the left of mainstream jurisprudence. Sure, the line goes, the Supreme Court reverses the circuit's decisions frequently, but other circuits have a higher reversal rate since 1994.
"Rate" is the key word here. What the Post is saying is that even if the Ninth Circuit gets reversed in 27 of 28 cases, as happened in 1996-97, that's still a better rate than a circuit that had one decision reversed and the rest not even reviewed. For the term so far, by the way, the circuit has been reversed in 6 of 6 cases — an unbeatable 100 percent rate.
