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last I looked, the Constitution doesn’t require you to be at
sea on the Arab-Israeli conflict to be secretary of state —
in fact, the Constitution doesn’t mention cabinet departments
at all — but it apparently helps. Colin Powell seems no different
from Madeleine Albright from Warren Christopher from James A. Baker
III. Inside, they’re all Dennis Ross, all Abba Eban, all the
Washington Post editorial page (but not as bad as the New
York Times’s).
Powell spanked
the Sharon government the other day, saying, “If you declare
war on the Palestinians and think you can solve the problem by seeing
how many Palestinians can be killed, I don’t know [whether]
that leads us anywhere.”
This reminded
me of discussions I had long, long ago. When I was growing up, learning
about the Middle East, people would condemn Israeli military actions
in the most categorical terms. And then, when Palestinians committed
some atrocity, they’d say — or shrug — “Well,
there’s a war on. This is what happens in war.”
That’s
the way it was. When Israelis acted: senseless brutalization of
women and children. When the Palestinians did their thing: war,
what do you expect?
Sharon acknowledged
the other day the obvious fact, which is, “We are in a war”
— a war not of Israel’s choosing, but of its enemies’.
Israel did not “declare war”; war has been declared on
it, with civilians being blown to bits pretty much every day. An
American secretary of state should understand that. And an American
secretary of state who has been a general should doubly understand
it.
Another thing
I would wish banished, as regards the Middle East, is “cycle
of violence,” which is on everyone’s lips, including President
Bush’s. Terrorists kill, a government reacts: Is that a “cycle
of violence”? In a sense, yes. But when Bush and others use
that phrase, they make the Middle East sound as random and illogical
as the crime between the Bloods and the Crips in Los Angeles.
Part of what
prompts this is the urge to “evenhandedness,” of course
— the instinct (peculiarly American, I feel, and often admirable)
to apportion blame to both sides, or to chalk up that which is ugly
to a gross misunderstanding. This is what Solzhenitsyn calls “the
50-50 fallacy,” I believe — and it is indeed fallacious.
I will end
this little note by quoting an excellent New York Post editorial
on the subject: “Surely, anyone criticizing Israel for its
defensive policies has an obligation to suggest a meaningful alternative
to rein in the Palestinians’ bloody offensive ones. As the
Israeli writer Hillel Halkin wrote last fall in The Wall Street
Journal: ‘If you have better advice for Israel, feel free
to give it. Just don’t tell us it’s our duty to die.’”
A friend pushed me to say a little more about my position on the
Letterman-Koppel affair (or the Koppel-Letterman affair, as I imagine
Ted would want it). I have said that Koppel doesn’t have a
right, divine or otherwise, to a half-hour on network television.
I said that the republic, and world, could get along just fine without
him, despite what he may think.
But doesn’t
Koppel add something? my friend pressed. Don’t we lose something
by losing him? I’m not so sure. We have 24-hour TV news, 24-hour
radio news, a zillion print outlets, including on the Internet.
There are almost as many talking heads as heads themselves.
And I think
that Nightline is largely redundant. Ted Koppel is a perfectly
typical Big Media personality, with a marked liberal bias —
except that he is smoother and maybe a tad brighter than the average
bear. He pushes, in a thousand different ways, the same worldview
as the main ABC newscast, as the newscasts of the other two networks,
as the New York Times, as NPR, as the bulk of the PBS programs.
Nightline is simply not needed — it doesn’t
contribute much of anything. It’s like a televised half-hour
of Flora Lewis, Tony Lewis, Sinclair Lewis, Al Lewis (okay, you
can scratch those last two — certainly the last one).
Ted Koppel’s
idea of a big political split is David Gergen and George Stephanopoulos
(both of whom worked in the Clinton PR department). It’s not
necessarily that I wish Koppel ill and David Letterman well; I just
think that Ted Koppel’s idea of his own importance is mistaken.
Remember how we said not long ago that Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts
plays the veteran card repeatedly, and shamelessly? Well, how right
“we” are.
As the Boston
Globe put it the other day, Kerry “waved his Vietnam War
credentials like a flag.” Speaking to a Democratic-party fundraiser,
Kerry said, “Let me be clear tonight to Senator Lott and to
Tom DeLay: One of the lessons that I learned in Vietnam, a war they
did not have to endure . . .” The crowd gave Kerry a standing
ovation for that crack.
Given almost
any other circumstances, the Democratic party and the media would
decry such rhetoric. They would shout “McCarthy!” among
other things. I would wager that many more Republican officeholders
served in Vietnam than Democratic officeholders. Say that one of
those officeholders — Duke Cunningham, for example — had
said to a GOP mob, “Let me be clear tonight to [Liberal Democrat
X] and [Liberal Democrat Y]: One of the lessons that I learned in
Vietnam, a war they did not have to endure . . .” The media,
and the entire world, would be going nuts, nuts, nuts, and that
politician would be condemned on every editorial page in the country.
John Kerry
is a soldier when he needs to be, for political reasons; and he’s
a peacenik when he needs to be, for political reasons. He shouldn’t
be allowed to get away with his act. But he will, of course. And
he’ll perform his act repeatedly as he runs for president in
2004.
(Word to the
wise: Every time I write about John Kerry, I get a lot of mail about
Bob Kerrey, the Nebraskan who lost a leg in the war and dated Debra
Winger. Please bear that in mind before you hit the Send button.)
On the subject of senators: I was distressed to see that Fred Thompson
of Tennessee finally decided to retire — retire from the Senate,
that is; I’m sure he will do many more interesting things.
He is one of my favorite politicians, a few policy disagreements
aside. He’s straight-shootin’ and levelheaded. Has a lot
of common sense, a lot of knowledge, a lot of character.
I had with
him one of my most interesting and enjoyable interviews ever. He
said something I’ll probably always remember, and quote. I
asked him why he wasn’t running for president — he said
the times weren’t right, he wasn’t really needed, etc.
He said — and this is what I love — “I don’t
want to spend my time running around trying to convince people they’re
not as well off as they think they are.”
I’m missing
“ol’ Fred” already.
I know everyone’s supposed to be sick of Clinton — move
on, move on, move on — but I will exercise what is still a
constitutional right to make a few further comments. When Ray released
his final report, the Democratic National Committee issued a statement,
to wit, “It’s not clear what the purpose of the report
is other than to promote Robert Ray’s Senate campaign and Monica
Lewinsky’s HBO special. The release of the report is a nonevent.
This investigation started as a political process and it ends as
a political process.”
That’s
the Democratic party for you. Note that curious word “nonevent.”
The DNC declares an event a “nonevent” — sort of
like declaring an inconvenient person a “nonperson” —
and, lo, it is! And the DNC’s entire understanding of the Lewinsky
affair is, “This investigation started as a political process
and it ends as a political process.” This is a party that long
ago ceased to think — ceased even to be asked, by anyone, to
think.
You could understand
why the DNC would be slavish about Clinton when Clinton was in office;
but now he’s out — you would think that the DNC would
be relatively free. But they’re not. The entire Democratic
party cooperated in Clinton’s lies and lines. There was no
breaking of ranks — except, possibly, for Joe Lieberman, good
for about three minutes of grandstanding (and then it was back to
lockstep). Every so often, I’m asked — and I ask myself
— why I think so little of the Democratic party; why my opposition
to it is so vehement. There are many reasons, which I chronicle,
in one way or another, endlessly — but one is that party’s
total circling of the wagons around Clinton, without a breath of
dissent, a breath of concern, a breath of, “Hang on, guys,
this isn’t right: Are we sure we want this sort of thing to
lead our party? Are we sure we want to cooperate in it?”
The New
York Times quoted Columbia professor Alan Brinkley as saying
the other day: “I think this report is a tinny echo of a happily
lost era. There are certainly people who cannot get enough of any
charge against Clinton. That group aside, though, I doubt anyone
wants to think about this anymore.”
Now, there’s
the voice of a dedicated historian of 20th-century America! Nice
going, Alan — still more a Democrat than a historian. Wonder
what he thinks of Nixon and Watergate — of “the covering
up of the wiretap of Larry O’Brien’s phone,” to put
it in the most minimalist way.
Clinton did
everything he was accused of: committed perjury, subornation of
perjury, obstruction of justice, abuse of power . . . But what he
mainly did was use a 21-year-old intern for sex in the Oval Office.
And that, by itself, is disqualifying. If America were a better
country, it would know that.
Here’s a headline from last Thursday’s Times: “New
Rules in Zimbabwe Likely to Aid Mugabe’s Side.”
You don’t
say?
I certainly have my favorite line of the year, maybe of the decade
(which is to say, the century and the millennium, too): James Charles
Evers, brother of Medgar, speaking from Mississippi, on Judge Pickering:
“The NAACP and the Klan are the only two organizations that
are against him down here right now.”
My favorite headline of the recent period? It has to do with the
Enron bankruptcy and scandal. Of course, everyone is using this
to push his own cause, no matter how unrelated (e.g., campaign-finance
reform). The headline was placed by NR’s own Bill Rusher
over a recent column of his: “Sweet Are the Uses of Enron.”
So beautifully
put.
There was an interesting article
in the Times by Alexander Stille, on scholarship concerning
Islam and the extreme difficulty of pursuing such scholarship. I
was struck — even moved — by the following: “‘Between
fear and political correctness, it’s not possible to say anything
other than sugary nonsense about Islam,’ said one scholar at
an American university who asked not to be named, referring to the
threatened violence as well as the widespread reluctance on United
States college campuses to criticize other cultures.”
This, of course,
comports completely with my own experience.
Stille also
reported, “When the Arab scholar Suliman Bashear argued that
Islam developed as a religion gradually rather than emerging fully
formed from the mouth of the Prophet, he was injured after being
thrown from a second-story window by his students at the University
of Nablus in the West Bank.”
Rough crowd.
Nice students. Bodes well for peace in the region. (Bear in mind,
these students must be the elite of the elite — not
your run-of-the-mill rabble.)
Finally, a little mail:
“I wanted
to write you about ‘Native American’ versus ‘American
Indian.’ For the record, I’m Prussian and Potawatomi Indian.
I spent 21 years on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation in north-central
South Dakota (Lakota country). The preferred term is ‘American
Indian.’ Only the liberal media and neo-Indians like the term
‘Native American.’ Russell Means went on the record as
saying that all people born in this country are native Americans,
and he wishes to be called an American Indian.
“As for
me, I’m an American first, a South Dakotan second, and Prussian-Indian
third.”
Hats off to
all patriotic and America-understanding Prussian-Indians in this
country. The next convention will be held at the Rapid City Hardee’s.
Another reader writes to say that he watched a PBS documentary and
was “fed up with references to ‘African-American spirituals.’”
What did I think?
Well, that’s
a hard one. I, of course, grew up with the phrase “Negro spirituals,”
which strikes me as perfectly natural and correct. But I shrink
from saying it. I’ve tried “black spirituals,” which
isn’t quite right. I’ve tried “slave spirituals,”
which doesn’t seem natural either. I’ve also hazarded
“southern spirituals” — kind of dumb. I usually do
just “spirituals,” but that can be less than ideal, too,
because we want to say something more complete.
This is, indeed,
a conundrum, and I will continue to dance around. I think just “spirituals”
will have to do it, mainly.
And last, my earlier comments on whether Reagan dyed his hair brought
a crush of mail — everyone seems to know, definitively —
but I would like to print only one note, which recalled a moment
from Fox’s King of the Hill, which I’m sorry I
missed: “Someone tells Hank Hill that Reagan dyed his hair.
Says Hank, ‘If President Reagan dyed his hair — and I’m
NOT saying he did — he only did it to intimidate the Communists.’
Hank then adds, ‘God, I miss voting for that man.’”
Me too. Me
too.
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