On March 19, 2010, The New York Times published an article entitled: “In Texas Curriculum Fight, Identity Politics Leans Right,” a reproduction of which was sent to me by Albert Nekimken of Vienna, Virginia. I sent it back with my comments interjected in bold text. I set forth below the article with my interjections, but urge you to read the full article first.
Frankly, my reaction to the article was that it was a presentation cheering for the Right, thinly disguised as neutral, and my comments reflect that. However, in preparing this for posting on my blog I belatedly decided to find out more about the author, Sam Tanenhaus. It turns out that he is “the editor of The New York Times Book Review and the paper's ‘Week in Review’ section.” I refer you to Newsweek here for more on the author, who it appears recently wrote “a new, short book, entitled “The Death of Conservatism." In any case I reproduce the article below with my interjections and would welcome the readers reactions.
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The social studies curriculum recently approved by the Texas Board of Education, which will put a conservative stamp on textbooks, was received less as a pedagogical document than as the latest provocation in America’s seemingly endless culture wars.
“Why Is Texas Afraid of Thomas Jefferson?” the History News Network asked, referring to the board’s recommendation that Jefferson, who coined the expression “separation of church and state,” be struck from the list of world thinkers who inspired 18th- and 19th-century revolutions.
Other critics were more direct: “Dear Texas: Please shut up. Sincerely, History,” was the headline of an online column for The San Francisco Chronicle.
This reaction wasn’t altogether surprising. The board’s wrangling over the curriculum had been a spectacle for months, not least because its disputes mirrored those taking place across the nation. In mid-September, citizens showed up with firearms at tumultuous town hall meetings on health care reform, and the Tea Party movement emerged as the vehicle of conservative insurgents. While this appears to be a national phenomenon, I believe it is primarily inspired by what is generally referred to as "rednecks" and is driven by such unreconstructed Southerners.
The majority on the Texas board, who are also conservatives, seemed to be filtering these protests into their deliberations — in the proposal, for instance, that students be instructed in “the individual right to keep and bear arms; and an individual’s protection of private property from government takings.”
Liberals — on the Texas board and beyond — detected an attempt to force-feed children conservative dogma, whether it was the putative religiosity of the nation’s founders, the historic contribution of the Moral Majority and Rush Limbaugh, or the elevation of John Wayne into the pantheon of patriotic heroes.
In reality, this controversy is the latest version of a debate that reaches back many decades and is perhaps essential in a heterogeneous democracy whose identity has long been in flux.
More than many decades and is most definitely not essential. I think it finds its roots in the pre-civil war South and reflects the views of the unreconstructed South, or as this group is sometimes referred to "rednecks". It was certainly empowered in the 60s as a result of the Civil Rights era, which embittered these groups and promoted them to hate the federal government, which was destroying their beloved feudal society - their essentially continuing slave society of sharecroppers.
It was very evident a while ago when the controversy over honoring pre-civil war symbols erupted. I find it outrageous that this would be permitted. They claim it is part of their heritage and indeed it is. To me it is like the heritage of the Nazis in Germany. Can anybody envision Germany allowing honoring the Nazis because it is part of their heritage?
In the 18th century, the American writer Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, himself an immigrant from France, catalogued the continent’s bewildering mix of “English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans and Swedes.” He wondered, “What then is the American, this new man?”
He concluded that in America, “individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.”
This of course is the mythical melting pot which Moynihan & Glazer debunked in their book "Beyond the Melting Pot" published in 1963 and again debunked by the Washington Post in a series of articles in 1998.
That idea was later fortified by Alexis de Tocqueville’s concept of American exceptionalism, which suggested that the country was exempt from the bitter conflicts — class, religion, imperial ambition — that had convulsed Europe. This was wishful thinking and a misreading. De Tocqueville died on the eve of the Civil War. To be sure the US was for most of its existence less class stratified than Europe but in recent years the US has moved to a more class society with income being re-distributed upward, while Europe has moved in the opposite direction.
Long afterward, amid America’s own convulsions in the 1960s and ’70s, the concept of a single “race of men” looked outmoded. Didn’t race mean “white race”? And didn’t “men” exclude women? American exceptionalism might really be a form of cultural insularity. Of course this is true!!!
So, universities and colleges devised new programs that prompted objections as fierce as those now being made to the Texas curriculum. These objections were a movement to preserve the status quo and the Texas case is a movement to achieve the status quo-ante.
In 1968, when Harvard students demanded a black studies program, “Faculty hawks warned of the fall of Harvard, and even civilization, as they knew it,” as Morton Keller and Phyllis Keller note in “Making Harvard Modern.”
Soon an ever widening range of subjects, from gay studies to feminist legal theory and anthropology, were added, in keeping with the dictates of identity politics. Some of this thinking eventually filtered to grade schools, with children now celebrating Kwanzaa and composing essays, year after year, on the “I Have a Dream” speech.
Many of the changes were liberating, but some were narrowing and erroneous — for instance the theories espoused by Leonard Jeffries Jr., who, as head of City College’s black studies department in the 1980s, lectured on the differences between African “sun people” and European “ice people.” It is unfortunate but every movement will breed its own excesses, and even reverse racism, as was the case with Jeffries.
Meanwhile, conservatives like William Bennett and Lynne Cheney defended syllabuses limited to the Western classics, and the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. warned that attacks on the “Eurocentric curriculum,” as some called it, were giving rise to “the notion that history and literature should be taught not as disciplines but as therapies whose function is to raise minority self-esteem.” With all due respect to Schlesinger it was time to recognize that there was history and culture in other parts of the world besides the West. Of course in some respects the balance went too far in the other direction, but that is inevitable in any new movement.
In fact, Mr. Schlesinger maintained, these new courses of study might actually disserve minority students. “If a Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan wanted to use the schools to disable and handicap black Americans, he could hardly come up with anything more effective than the ‘Afrocentric’ curriculum,” Mr. Schlesinger wrote. I don't understand the logic!
Though its authors say the Texas curriculum reinforces American traditions, It does - the unreconstructed South!! it may instead reflect the conservative variant of identity politics, and this could invite a similar backlash.
To be fair, some of the board’s recommendations aren’t controversial. Most scholars of the cold war, left and right, think that the Venona documents — communications that record the activities of Americans who secretly spied for the Soviet Union — illuminate the anti-Communist investigations of the McCarthy period. This is a very disturbing comment!! The Venoma documents have been used primarily to defend and justify the outrages of McCarthy and the House UN-AMERICAN committee, which not only ruined countless American lives, but did untold damage to American security. See "The Best and the Brightest" pp. 115-120 of 1992 edition. And historians of the conservative movement will agree that Rush Limbaugh and Phyllis Schlafly are worth learning about, as are the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association. That depends on the grade and how it is taught. If they are held up as role models it is right wing propaganda. If they are denounced, it is liberal propaganda. If they are discussed as a phenomenon, it may be all right, but it is very difficult to do this in an unbiased way, and not likely too succeed.
Even the Texas curriculum’s most disputed item — its assertion that the Founders envisioned America as a divinely inspired Christian nation — is not as radical as it sounds. I don't know whether it is radical, but it is not accurate. Most of the founders did not consider themselves Christians. They thought of themselves as deists and rejected revealed truths. In the Declaration of Independence, the reference is to "Nature's God.” That is definitely not a Christian God, and the Constitution makes no reference to God.
In 1964, in a series of lectures on America’s founding documents, starting with the Mayflower Compact, the political scientist Willmoore Kendall theorized that “the nascent society that interprets itself in the Compact is in some sense a religious, more specifically a Christian, society, which calls God in as witness to its act of founding.” If you go back to 1620, the date of the Compact, that is undoubtedly true. The early settlers were mostly devout Christians and very intolerant of deviation. They wanted religious liberty for themselves but not for others. But by the late 18th century the thinking in vogue was the enlightenment, and that inspired the founding fathers.
Mr. Kendall teased out the implications through close readings of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Federalist Papers. But his analysis stressed the “symbolic” aspects of those texts, and his nuanced discussion drew on counterarguments by other scholars. I don't understand what this means.
In contrast, the Texas board’s description of America as a “Judeo-Christian” nation treats ideas and events that have been under continual reinterpretation and revision for decades as literal and settled truth. I don't understand what this means.
It is telling, too, that it is secondary-school children — not, as in the past, college students — whose minds are being fought over today on such a scale. This suggests that after so many years of increasingly bitter polarization, Americans stand on the brink of a collective identity crisis and no longer share a set of common ideas about the true character of the country and the true meaning of democracy. No longer? We haven't since the founding of the Republic. That is why the Civil War was fought and it wasn't just about secession. In fact secession showed the deep division. As did all that followed and the progressive eras of Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and Johnson did not put things to rest.
In “The American Political Tradition,” published in 1948, the historian Richard Hofstadter suggested that the fad for popular history at the time was evidence of “national nostalgia” — an effort not to understand the past, but rather to evade the present. “This quest for the American past is carried on in a spirit of sentimental appreciation rather than of critical analysis,” he surmised. This I can agree with.
As it happens, a good deal of contemporary popular history is more critical than in Mr. Hofstadter’s day. But it is presented through an ever-narrowing aperture.
The late Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States,” depicts the United States as an epic of oppression in which the privileged abuse the downtrodden. Conversely, “A Patriot’s History of the United States,” by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, describes the New Deal as a calamity that wreaked havoc on the American economy. Both views are exaggerations, but to me the first is closer to the truth than the second.
The two books seem to have captured the spirit of the moment; both are on The New York Times best-seller list. Both are also, in effect, counternarratives. They seek not to revise but to displace more familiar histories and are utterly different in tone from older popular histories like the Daniel Boorstin trilogy “The Americans,” and William Manchester’s two-volume work, “The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America.” Yes, it shows that extremes are ascendant, but they have been ascendant over and over again throughout history. On the Right stands the whole Republican Party with Beck, O'Reilly, Limbaugh and Palin and the Tea-Partiers - on the left we have had the large following of Naom Chomsky. Clearly, the extreme Right is larger and more powerful than the extreme left.
For all their dissimilarities, Mr. Boorstin and Mr. Manchester convey the impression that America, despite its diversity, is a nation whose citizens share the same essential values, at once democratic and aspirational. But to read these newer books is to inhabit two utterly different Americas that have almost nothing to say to each other. Both are conceived in a spirit of protest, and this explains their appeal at a time when protest seems the most dynamic force in politics. Just as in the 50's with McCarthy & the Dixiecrats, and the 60’s, which upset the status quo, the clash becomes inevitable.
Half a century ago, in his essay, “The Search for Southern Identity,” the historian C. Vann Woodward explored a parallel phenomenon, the confusion that overtook the South after the Supreme Court had invalidated segregation and the region become more urban and industrial, losing its distinctive agrarian flavor. This is where the unrest is the greatest and where the Republican party draws its greatest strength. It is interesting to note that Gingrich said: "They will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years" with the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s. True, but were they wrong to do it? Besides it doesn't follow- they are very different issues. But the country is changing as the right wing columnist George Will recognized, saying, "Almost half of House and Senate Republicans are from those 13 states, a higher proportion than ever before. Ronald Brownstein of National Journal notes that it was in 1992 that GOP fortunes in the South and the rest of the nation began to diverge. Since then, those 13 states have provided from 59 to 69 percent of all Republican electoral votes. Obama beat McCain by 14 points in the other 37 states, the third-largest margin ever, after LBJ's and FDR's victories in 1964 and 1936, respectively. McCain actually got more Southern votes than Bush did—but Obama got 2.3 million more votes than Kerry did in states McCain carried."
Republican problems outside the South are compounded by and related to the increasing proportion of minorities in the electorate.
What Southerners should do, Mr. Woodward urged, is subordinate their regional attachment to the country’s “national myths,” for instance the American “success story” that had inspired so many others, like the European immigrants who had “sought and found identity in them.”
Southerners might do this, too, if they gave up “the romantic dreams of the South’s past.” Yes, indeed!!
Today it is not regional or ethnic identity, but ideological commitment that threatens to submerge larger “national myths.” But one thing remains unchanged from 50 or 60 years ago. As Americans struggle to see where they are going, they continue to gaze fondly at the past — and to see in it what they like. Yes, but fortunately, not all!!
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Friday, March 19, 2010
The Vanishing Middle in America
I am increasingly disturbed by what I perceive as the vanishing middle in America. Of course, many will differ as to what constitutes the middle. The media, that institution so vital to our Democracy, increasingly caters to popular opinion, and too often fails in its responsibility to inform. Too often they seek to reinforce what might be called “the conventional wisdom” without questioning its validity or even its basis in fact.
Thus the conventional wisdom on the “middle” might be those many, who proudly claim to be independents, affiliate with no party and claim they vote on the merits of individual candidates, but when we examine their philosophical orientation we find they have none, and that too often they vote on the basis of the candidates charisma, charm, or whether they once met him and found him a “fellow well met”. It was this kind of thinking that brought many voters into the camp of George W. Bush because as was said at the time of his first election, by Chris Mathews of MSNBC among others, that he was a person one would feel more comfortable drinking beer with. Is this a sound criterion for choosing our President?
As can be seen from the positions of the political parties in the Congress they are now so far apart that the filibuster has become a matter of Republican Party policy and compromise has become a dirty word. The “conventional wisdom” is that the filibuster has always been used and that it protects the rights of the minority. But like so many concepts falling into the category of conventional wisdom it is a myth. To be sure the filibuster was at one time used by devoted segregationists and defenders of the right of states to in effect legalize lynching, but it was never used by any political party as a tool of party policy. Thus in 1957 Senator Strom Thurmond, at that time a segregationist Southern Democrat (later the candidate for President on the Dixiecrat slate and finally a Republican) conducted a one man filibuster, talking against a 1957 civil rights bill for 24 hours and 18 minutes.
But while that was dramatic it was also unusual, and Thurmond was unsuccessful. It was so unusual that there was only an average of one filibuster per Congress during the 1950s. But when the Republicans lost control of the Senate in the 110th Congress of 2007-2008, and even though they still had a Republican President who could veto legislation, they used a record 112 filibusters, and so far in this Congress they have already used this tactic over 40 times and we still have eight months to go.
See also this article in US News & World Report.
Republican voters are so unforgiving of compromise that George H.W. Bush was defeated for agreeing to a compromise with Democrats in order to reduce a looming budget deficit which called for both spending cuts and tax increases, thus violating the party’s commitment to never increasing taxes.
Thus with no middle ground between the parties those who claim to straddle between two irreconcilable philosophies can only be compared to a person with one foot on land and the other in a boat well away from the shore and moving further away. They can only drown. They may swing elections, but they will never bring about a positive legislative agenda for they lack a political philosophy.
There is a great misunderstanding about how much things have changed. I keep hearing about how President Lyndon Johnson was able to get Medicare passed with 68 votes, but bills that have the votes to pass attract more votes than they would otherwise get. That is still true today as can be seen from the passage of the jobs bill where only five Republican Senators voted to end the filibuster but eleven voted for the bill on final passage, the idea being to stop the bill if possible, but record a positive vote for a popular bill if it is going to pass anyway.
The fact is that Johnson only had 55 votes for Medicare that he could count on or to quote from a letter written at the time “Thus if all our supporters are present and voting we would win by a vote of 55 to 45.”
At that time it would have taken 67 votes to stop a filibuster, but the Republican Party never contemplated using that unsavory device. How times have changed!
And how has the media and this so called middle greeted this outrage. They have accepted Republican claims that it is the intent of the founders that it should take 60 votes to pass anything, or even to confirm a Presidential appointment, and that attempts to circumvent such obstructionism, whether by reconciliation, or any other means is in some way unsavory.
And some are even trying to pass of the Tea Partiers as a grass roots movement. Thus Dick Armey, a former Republican majority leader, who more than anyone else founded and is leading the movement tries to pass them off as, “These are folks who don't care about politics and don't like politics and don't like politicians. They're skeptical and cynical about all of them…” but ignores that these are the same people, or at least the political heirs to the John Birch Society or as one article described them, they are “white, male, older, less educated, Southern and religious…”.
But even now the movement is already the subject of a power struggle between Armey, who resists its nativists impulses as led by Tom Tancredo, or in Armey’s words, “… bungling the issue in a way that would alienate much of the electorate, by failing to keep a lid on such anti-immigrant crusaders as Tom Tancredo, a former Colorado congressman.” And Armey has good reason to be concerned about this for as George Will, one of the so-called intellectual spokesmen of the Right has pointed out, “Demography often is political destiny, and 47 percent of children under 5 are minorities. Hispanics are the largest and fastest-growing minority.”
So where do we find the true middle?
It may or may not surprise the reader to hear that I put a claim on that designation. For if the middle is to be found somewhere between FOX and MSNBC, I fit that description. But in order not to burden the reader with too much verbiage in one post, I will defer an exposition on this claim for a few days. In the meantime I hope the readers will take the time to read at least some of my source material.
Thus the conventional wisdom on the “middle” might be those many, who proudly claim to be independents, affiliate with no party and claim they vote on the merits of individual candidates, but when we examine their philosophical orientation we find they have none, and that too often they vote on the basis of the candidates charisma, charm, or whether they once met him and found him a “fellow well met”. It was this kind of thinking that brought many voters into the camp of George W. Bush because as was said at the time of his first election, by Chris Mathews of MSNBC among others, that he was a person one would feel more comfortable drinking beer with. Is this a sound criterion for choosing our President?
As can be seen from the positions of the political parties in the Congress they are now so far apart that the filibuster has become a matter of Republican Party policy and compromise has become a dirty word. The “conventional wisdom” is that the filibuster has always been used and that it protects the rights of the minority. But like so many concepts falling into the category of conventional wisdom it is a myth. To be sure the filibuster was at one time used by devoted segregationists and defenders of the right of states to in effect legalize lynching, but it was never used by any political party as a tool of party policy. Thus in 1957 Senator Strom Thurmond, at that time a segregationist Southern Democrat (later the candidate for President on the Dixiecrat slate and finally a Republican) conducted a one man filibuster, talking against a 1957 civil rights bill for 24 hours and 18 minutes.
But while that was dramatic it was also unusual, and Thurmond was unsuccessful. It was so unusual that there was only an average of one filibuster per Congress during the 1950s. But when the Republicans lost control of the Senate in the 110th Congress of 2007-2008, and even though they still had a Republican President who could veto legislation, they used a record 112 filibusters, and so far in this Congress they have already used this tactic over 40 times and we still have eight months to go.
See also this article in US News & World Report.
Republican voters are so unforgiving of compromise that George H.W. Bush was defeated for agreeing to a compromise with Democrats in order to reduce a looming budget deficit which called for both spending cuts and tax increases, thus violating the party’s commitment to never increasing taxes.
Thus with no middle ground between the parties those who claim to straddle between two irreconcilable philosophies can only be compared to a person with one foot on land and the other in a boat well away from the shore and moving further away. They can only drown. They may swing elections, but they will never bring about a positive legislative agenda for they lack a political philosophy.
There is a great misunderstanding about how much things have changed. I keep hearing about how President Lyndon Johnson was able to get Medicare passed with 68 votes, but bills that have the votes to pass attract more votes than they would otherwise get. That is still true today as can be seen from the passage of the jobs bill where only five Republican Senators voted to end the filibuster but eleven voted for the bill on final passage, the idea being to stop the bill if possible, but record a positive vote for a popular bill if it is going to pass anyway.
The fact is that Johnson only had 55 votes for Medicare that he could count on or to quote from a letter written at the time “Thus if all our supporters are present and voting we would win by a vote of 55 to 45.”
At that time it would have taken 67 votes to stop a filibuster, but the Republican Party never contemplated using that unsavory device. How times have changed!
And how has the media and this so called middle greeted this outrage. They have accepted Republican claims that it is the intent of the founders that it should take 60 votes to pass anything, or even to confirm a Presidential appointment, and that attempts to circumvent such obstructionism, whether by reconciliation, or any other means is in some way unsavory.
And some are even trying to pass of the Tea Partiers as a grass roots movement. Thus Dick Armey, a former Republican majority leader, who more than anyone else founded and is leading the movement tries to pass them off as, “These are folks who don't care about politics and don't like politics and don't like politicians. They're skeptical and cynical about all of them…” but ignores that these are the same people, or at least the political heirs to the John Birch Society or as one article described them, they are “white, male, older, less educated, Southern and religious…”.
But even now the movement is already the subject of a power struggle between Armey, who resists its nativists impulses as led by Tom Tancredo, or in Armey’s words, “… bungling the issue in a way that would alienate much of the electorate, by failing to keep a lid on such anti-immigrant crusaders as Tom Tancredo, a former Colorado congressman.” And Armey has good reason to be concerned about this for as George Will, one of the so-called intellectual spokesmen of the Right has pointed out, “Demography often is political destiny, and 47 percent of children under 5 are minorities. Hispanics are the largest and fastest-growing minority.”
So where do we find the true middle?
It may or may not surprise the reader to hear that I put a claim on that designation. For if the middle is to be found somewhere between FOX and MSNBC, I fit that description. But in order not to burden the reader with too much verbiage in one post, I will defer an exposition on this claim for a few days. In the meantime I hope the readers will take the time to read at least some of my source material.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Potpourri
I have entitled this commentary potpourri from the musical term for medley because there are so many things I want to touch upon that I decided that I would, on this occasion, cover many subjects, rather than covering one in depth.
First of all at the risk of once again touching on that third rail of American politics the Middle East, and doing something I have never done before, I want to recommend a play to my readers. The play is Palestine. It is playing at The Fourth Street Theater until April 3rd.
It is a one person play, written and acted by Najla Said, who the New York Times described as a Palestinian-Lebanese-American Christian, and the daughter of Edward Said, the Columbia Professor, who along with Daniel Barenboim, the renowned Israeli pianist and conductor, founded the “the award-winning West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, made up of children from Israel, Palestine, and surrounding Arab nations.
The play in my view is non-political, (some may differ) but it gives an insight into the tragedy of the Middle East in a human dimension. I believe that all, regardless of their view on the complex issues of that area can benefit from these insights.
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Those of you who have been following my commentary must be aware that while I have been denouncing in angry terms the lies, distortions and calumnies of The Right in general and Republicans in particular, I have also increasingly been critical of the Left for their doctrinaire approach, which allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good. See, e.g. “Doesn't Anybody Really Care?” and I have continued to take exception to some of the positions of organizations that I have long supported. Thus on March 9th I sent an e-mail to the ACLU, which I quote below:
I also continue to take exception to the writings of Bob Herbert of the New York Times who, e.g. on March 8th wrote a column entitled: “The Source of Obama’s Trouble,” where Herbert continues to berate the President for pushing Health Care Reform when so many people are unemployed, as though reform in that area had no bearing on the needs of the underprivileged and unemployed. If Herbert at least offered some constructive suggestions that were economically and politically viable, he might be forgiven, but he offers nothing of the kind. Only negativity. Now when Herbert tackles specific problems such as in his “Cops vs. Kids” or in "Watching Certain People," where he pinpoints problems and offers solutions, I applaud him, but his carping and negativism does neither him nor his causes credit.
On the other hand Paul Krugman, who I have criticized in the past for unfair criticism, finally gets it right in “Senator Bunning’s Universe” when he writes: “What I want to focus on right now, however, is the incredible gap that has opened up between the parties. Today, Democrats and Republicans live in different universes, both intellectually and morally.”
Finally when WQXR was sold by the NY Times to NPR and continued to air the Lutheran Hour, I dispatched letters to both the ACLU and WQXR pointing out that since WQXR now receives public financing they have no right to air religious programs, since it violated the separation of church and state doctrine of the Constitution. It took many months before either responded but finally I received an answer from both assuring me that the practice had ceased as of the 1st of the year. They didn’t explain why the Constitution only worked by the calendar year.
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In the latest issue of Newsweek, John Meecham, one of its editors, and under consideration for a position as a host on a new PBS program, wrote an article entitled: “Democracy Is a Pesky Thing” in which he equated Fox News with the New York Times as examples of a Right leaning and Left leaning news source. I find such inappropriate comparisons deeply offensive. Fox News is a propaganda organ worthy of the communist newspaper Pravda, while the NY Times is one of the most respected newspapers in the world. In fact I find it hard to find a Left leaning publication that lies and distorts the way Fox does. Certainly, MSNBC, which might be considered the counter to Fox, has never indulged in the kind of demagoguery that Fox indulges in, and even such leftist publications as Mother Jones do not indulge in this practice.
To be sure the Times has a liberal editorial policy, periodically has articles that point to liberal solutions, and has more liberal columnists than conservative ones, but that is not the same as the use of lies and inflammatory messages that Fox indulges in. In fact in so far as the Times has been caught in falsehoods it has been in slandering liberals, see e.g. "The Media! (Watergate/Clinton)", "The Media II - Falsehoods about Gore" and "The Media III - Falsehoods about Kerry" and Judith Miller writing for the NY Times has become notorious for giving support to the fabrications that the Bush Whitehouse fed her about Iraq’s WMDs.
David Brooks in the NY Times tries to do something similar to Meecham, equating Left and Right. See: The Wal-Mart Hippies.
The frequent media attempt to show even handedness by equating outright lies with minor misstatements, instead of serving the greater end of truth, wherever it might lead, serves neither the media nor the American public.
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On the bright side the minions of the Right and the Republican Party in general, who very recently showed their lack of principle or even patriotism, when they turned the fight against terrorists into a political football, see: “Liberals Charged As Condescending!” have finally shown a commitment to principle and the rule of law for the first time in years when they criticized a video released by Lyn Cheney that questioned the loyalty of Justice Department lawyers who worked in the past on behalf of detained terrorism suspects. According to the New York Times, “many conservatives, including members of the Federalist Society, the quarter-century-old policy group devoted to conservative and libertarian legal ideals, have vehemently criticized Ms. Cheney’s video, and say it violates the American legal principle that even unpopular defendants deserve a lawyer.”
Hurray, its been along time coming to see a principled position from that notorious quarter. Let’s hope we see it more often.
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And the Washington Post reports that: “House Democrats ban earmarks for private contractors”. This is still another item of good news.
First of all at the risk of once again touching on that third rail of American politics the Middle East, and doing something I have never done before, I want to recommend a play to my readers. The play is Palestine. It is playing at The Fourth Street Theater until April 3rd.
It is a one person play, written and acted by Najla Said, who the New York Times described as a Palestinian-Lebanese-American Christian, and the daughter of Edward Said, the Columbia Professor, who along with Daniel Barenboim, the renowned Israeli pianist and conductor, founded the “the award-winning West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, made up of children from Israel, Palestine, and surrounding Arab nations.
The play in my view is non-political, (some may differ) but it gives an insight into the tragedy of the Middle East in a human dimension. I believe that all, regardless of their view on the complex issues of that area can benefit from these insights.
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Those of you who have been following my commentary must be aware that while I have been denouncing in angry terms the lies, distortions and calumnies of The Right in general and Republicans in particular, I have also increasingly been critical of the Left for their doctrinaire approach, which allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good. See, e.g. “Doesn't Anybody Really Care?” and I have continued to take exception to some of the positions of organizations that I have long supported. Thus on March 9th I sent an e-mail to the ACLU, which I quote below:
“I am increasingly disappointed in the ACLU. I have been a member for many decades and have always been proud of that fact. I supported the ACLU when it was under attack for defending the right of Nazis to march and during other controversial decisions. Lately, however I have become ashamed and have considered resigning. The Unions decision to support corporation as having almost unlimited 1st amendment rights is repugnant to me. I do not believe that corporations should have any rights under the first amendment and that designating them as "persons,” even though long enshrined in the law, is fundamentally wrong. They are not like associations or partnerships and to pretend otherwise is dishonest.
“But while I agree with you on trying the 9/11 suspects in Civil Courts, I resent the inflammatory ads depicting the President as morphing into George Bush.
“I am reluctant to resign because much of what you do is needed. But I can not for long continue to support an organization that I believe is increasingly departing from my values.”
I also continue to take exception to the writings of Bob Herbert of the New York Times who, e.g. on March 8th wrote a column entitled: “The Source of Obama’s Trouble,” where Herbert continues to berate the President for pushing Health Care Reform when so many people are unemployed, as though reform in that area had no bearing on the needs of the underprivileged and unemployed. If Herbert at least offered some constructive suggestions that were economically and politically viable, he might be forgiven, but he offers nothing of the kind. Only negativity. Now when Herbert tackles specific problems such as in his “Cops vs. Kids” or in "Watching Certain People," where he pinpoints problems and offers solutions, I applaud him, but his carping and negativism does neither him nor his causes credit.
On the other hand Paul Krugman, who I have criticized in the past for unfair criticism, finally gets it right in “Senator Bunning’s Universe” when he writes: “What I want to focus on right now, however, is the incredible gap that has opened up between the parties. Today, Democrats and Republicans live in different universes, both intellectually and morally.”
Finally when WQXR was sold by the NY Times to NPR and continued to air the Lutheran Hour, I dispatched letters to both the ACLU and WQXR pointing out that since WQXR now receives public financing they have no right to air religious programs, since it violated the separation of church and state doctrine of the Constitution. It took many months before either responded but finally I received an answer from both assuring me that the practice had ceased as of the 1st of the year. They didn’t explain why the Constitution only worked by the calendar year.
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In the latest issue of Newsweek, John Meecham, one of its editors, and under consideration for a position as a host on a new PBS program, wrote an article entitled: “Democracy Is a Pesky Thing” in which he equated Fox News with the New York Times as examples of a Right leaning and Left leaning news source. I find such inappropriate comparisons deeply offensive. Fox News is a propaganda organ worthy of the communist newspaper Pravda, while the NY Times is one of the most respected newspapers in the world. In fact I find it hard to find a Left leaning publication that lies and distorts the way Fox does. Certainly, MSNBC, which might be considered the counter to Fox, has never indulged in the kind of demagoguery that Fox indulges in, and even such leftist publications as Mother Jones do not indulge in this practice.
To be sure the Times has a liberal editorial policy, periodically has articles that point to liberal solutions, and has more liberal columnists than conservative ones, but that is not the same as the use of lies and inflammatory messages that Fox indulges in. In fact in so far as the Times has been caught in falsehoods it has been in slandering liberals, see e.g. "The Media! (Watergate/Clinton)", "The Media II - Falsehoods about Gore" and "The Media III - Falsehoods about Kerry" and Judith Miller writing for the NY Times has become notorious for giving support to the fabrications that the Bush Whitehouse fed her about Iraq’s WMDs.
David Brooks in the NY Times tries to do something similar to Meecham, equating Left and Right. See: The Wal-Mart Hippies.
The frequent media attempt to show even handedness by equating outright lies with minor misstatements, instead of serving the greater end of truth, wherever it might lead, serves neither the media nor the American public.
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On the bright side the minions of the Right and the Republican Party in general, who very recently showed their lack of principle or even patriotism, when they turned the fight against terrorists into a political football, see: “Liberals Charged As Condescending!” have finally shown a commitment to principle and the rule of law for the first time in years when they criticized a video released by Lyn Cheney that questioned the loyalty of Justice Department lawyers who worked in the past on behalf of detained terrorism suspects. According to the New York Times, “many conservatives, including members of the Federalist Society, the quarter-century-old policy group devoted to conservative and libertarian legal ideals, have vehemently criticized Ms. Cheney’s video, and say it violates the American legal principle that even unpopular defendants deserve a lawyer.”
Hurray, its been along time coming to see a principled position from that notorious quarter. Let’s hope we see it more often.
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And the Washington Post reports that: “House Democrats ban earmarks for private contractors”. This is still another item of good news.
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