In the latest issue of
World magazine, Marvin Olasky — who describes
himself, modestly, as having had a "minor Bush advising role last year" — promotes California congressman Chris Cox as a vice-presidential nominee. Cox, Olasky writes, is "bright, articulate, and photogenic" and "a devout Catholic from the most crucial electoral state." Olasky notes in his column that he has "not talked about Chris Cox with any Bush folks."
The Clinton administration has finally apologized for an intern scandal. "We deeply regret any role that the Census Bureau played" in helping the
military intern Japanese Americans during the Second World War, said Martina Hone of the Commerce Department. The statement came following the work of Margo Anderson of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and
William Seltzer of Fordham University, who claim in a new research paper that the Census Bureau provided demographic data on Japanese Americans. For decades the Census Bureau had denied aiding internment.
Hone added: "We want to reassure the community it's not going to happen again." There is one surefire way to guarantee it won't ever happen again: Stop collecting information on race and ethnicity. The census short form contains six questions; two of them cover race and ethnicity.
For longtime readers of the
New Republic, the latest issue's contents will not come as a surprise: Leon Wieseltier, in his piece on the Pope's supposed apology, proves once again that he's not a Catholic; and John Judis demonstrates that he still hasn't reconciled himself to the existence of conservatives. (Judis summarizes the argument of his new
book: Back in the good old days before conservatives came to Washington,
American elites were disinterested and enlightened; now they're narrow-minded and venal. And to think, some people say conservatives suffer from nostalgia.)
A third regular feature of TNR, of course, is the suck-up to Al Gore by publisher Martin Peretz. It's not here, alas. Readers will have to settle for pro-Gore spin from associate editor Franklin Foer. He reports that Republicans are likely to attack Gore over his 1992 book Earth in the Balance. This perplexes Foer. Why would anyone consider the book a liability?
A couple of words that do not appear in Foer's account might clear up the confusion. Kristallnacht: In the book, Gore compares environmental
despoliation to the destruction of Jewish businesses and synagogues and the killing of nearly 100 Jews in 1938. Dysfunctional: Gore's term for our civilization, and for Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, Mao's China, and Stalin's Russia. ("It is not merely in the service of analogy that I have
referred so often to the struggles against Nazi and communist totalitarianism, because I believe that the emerging effort to save the environment is a continuation of these struggles. . .") Resistance
fighters: Gore's term for environmental activists. The internal-combustion engine: In the book (and on the stump), Gore wants to get rid of it.
At one point, Foer mentions a 1992 memo in which a staffer for the Democratic National Committee ran through the attacks the book would
likely generate. Among them was that Gore "has no sense of proportion: He equates the failure to recycle aluminum cans with the Holocaust — an equation that parodies the former and dishonors the latter." This quote didn't make it into Foer's piece. But the lack of proportion to which it refers is not a Republican invention — and is surely a legitimate campaign issue.
