To be secretary of state, His Koppelness, the incorrigible John Kerry, &c.

March 11, 2002 9:45 a.m.

he 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.