Elena Kagan and the undergraduate gotcha game

When I was 21, it's fair to say that I was to the left of my evangelical Mennonite college campus on the question of homosexuality. It's not that I didn't think homosexuality was sinful -- I did, and thought the Bible fairly clear on that point; I just felt that my fellow Christians were making too big a deal about it.

I've ... changed quite a bit since then. I've left the church, so "sin" doesn't really enter the equation for me; I've been -- for the past few years -- as vocal a proponent of marriage rights for gays as I know how to be. The person I was at 21 was aiming at the person I am at 37, to be certain, but the distance between here and there is considerable.

All of which brings me to this: You'll be hearing a lot over the next few days about Elena Kagan's undergraduate thesis on the "sad" demise of socialism in early 20th century New York City, a kind of knowing "proof" of her (and by extention, President Obama's) radical leanings. And it's silly. Kagan was no older than 21 when she wrote that piece; she's had an entire adult lifetime since then to evolve in her views -- a lifetime in which she's been a person more of the left than the right, to be certain, but without anything in the way of reported socialist leanings since then. Maybe she is a socialist, but the fact that she was sympathetic to socialism at the age of 21 isn't proof of much.

We spend way too much time analyzing the adolescent selves of our leaders when we evaluate their fitness for service. So Bill Clinton's marijuana smoking was seen as troubling, as was George W. Bush's service (or lack thereof) in the Air National Guard. And while perhaps those incidents could tell you something about the way those young men were aimed, they couldn't tell us that much about how they'd govern some 30 years later. We'd be better off judging our leaders by their adult lives and their record of public service. Trying to play "gotcha" with somebody's undergrad writings is a loser's game.

Christopher Hitchens is wrong about the French burqa ban -- but maybe for the right reasons

Christopher Hitchens almost makes sense with his defense of the French burqa ban:

The French legislators who seek to repudiate the wearing of the veil or the burqa—whether the garment covers "only" the face or the entire female body—are often described as seeking to impose a "ban." To the contrary, they are attempting to lift a ban: a ban on the right of women to choose their own dress, a ban on the right of women to disagree with male and clerical authority, and a ban on the right of all citizens to look one another in the face. The proposed law is in the best traditions of the French republic, which declares all citizens equal before the law and—no less important—equal in the face of one another.

Hitchens appeals to my humanist-slash-libertarian side here, briefly, by casting the proposed burqa ban as a blow for women, letting them cast off their subjugation by forcing them to remove the veil from their faces. But that's not what the proposal does -- at least, not entirely.

Instead, the proposed burqa ban substitutes one set of restrictive authority -- you will always hide your face! -- for another -- you will never hide your face! Women who are forced by husbands or male family members (or, more or less indirectly, by their co-religionists) to cover their faces are given no more choice in how they express themselves through dress than women who are forced by the state to make a precisely opposite decision. Either way, women are treated almost like playthings in the broader Culture Wars/Clash of Civilizations/War on Terror or what have you. It's not about letting them make their own choices; it's about deciding their choices for them in advance.

That's still not any kind of meaningful freedom.

Indeed, the New York Times story that serves as the basis of Hitchens' column hints at this a little bit:

Fewer than 2,000 women in France wear a version of the full veil, and many of them are French women who have converted to Islam. The full veil is seen here as a sign of a more fundamentalist Islam, known as Salafism, which the government is trying to undercut.

It is impossible to know the story of every French woman who converted to Islam and started wearing the veil, but it certainly seems as though many of those women freely made their choices. It's not a choice I would've made, nor would I have made it for them -- but that's not really the point point, isn't it?

There are, of course, separate questions about the veil and the public's right to safety in public places -- and that is a debate that deserves to be hashed out: It's certainly not a debate contained to France. But the feminist argument advanced by Hitchens -- and French President Nicholas Sarkozy -- rings hollow. You don't free women by making choices for them.

Our victory in Iraq (an ongoing series)

Via Matt Yglesias, the Center for American Progress offers an "Iraq War Ledger" tallying up the financial, human and other costs of the Iraq War. Bottom line: Not good.

But a couple of data points interested me more than the others:

Empowered Iran in Iraq and region. The Islamic Republic of Iran is the primary strategic beneficiary of the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq. The end of Saddam Hussein’s regime removed Iran’s most-hated enemy (with whom it fought a hugely destructive war in the 1980s) and removed the most significant check on Iran’s regional hegemonic aspirations. Many of Iraq’s key Iraqi Shia Islamist and Kurdish leaders enjoy close ties to Iran, facilitating considerable influence for Iran in the new Iraq.

Stifled democracy reform. A recent RAND study concluded that, rather than becoming a beacon of democracy, the Iraq war has hobbled the cause of political reform in the Middle East. The report stated that “Iraq’s instability has become a convenient scarecrow neighboring regimes can use to delay political reform by asserting that democratization inevitably leads to insecurity.”

In the absence of WMD, of course, creating US-friendly democracies in the Middle East became the backup rationale for the American invasion. Turns out there were no WMDs ... and that our invasion might've throttled whatever nascent democratic spirit existed in that region. The Iraq War, simply put, is never not going to be a disaster for us.

Typo nearly wipes out your retirement savings

That 1,000-point drop on Wall Street today? Guess how it happened?

In one of the most dizzying half-hours in stock market history, the Dow plunged nearly 1,000 points before paring those losses in what possibly could have been a trader error. According to multiple sources, a trader entered a “b” for billion instead of an “m” for million in a trade possibly involving Procter & Gamble [PG 60.75 -1.41 (-2.27%) ], a component in the Dow.

That set off a chain-reaction panic on trading floors. As Daniel Foster at National Review noted:

P&G's 37 percent nosedive was only responsible for 172 points of the 992.60 the Dow lost in the slump. The rest was market reaction — and part of that was computerized and automated.

You know, capitalism and free trade generally make a lot of sense. But our current method of allocating capital -- Wall Street being the big mover in that process -- keeps finding new ways to make itself look dangerously insane. Terminator was about how computers and robots set off an apocalyptic attack on humanity; turns out they don't need nuclear weapons to do that, just mindless programming instructions to start selling if somebody else is selling -- even if that sale is the result of a "fat finger" typographical error. Holy crap.

The right to trial? Optional. The right to bear arms? Inviolable. (Or: Why Lindsey Graham is indefensible.)

A friend points me to this Huffington Post article, where Sen. Lindsey Graham defends allowing people on terror watch lists to buy guns -- but doesn't want American citizens accused of terrorism to be given their criminal defense rights:

New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's appeal to what he called "common sense" at a congressional hearing Wednesday morning failed to sway two Republican senators who said that giving the government the ability to block the purchase of guns by suspected terrorists would undermine the Second Amendment's right to bear arms.

Graham described the bill as an instrument of those who would ban guns altogether. "We're talking about a constitutional right here," he said, explaining that he could not support a bill that would force "innocent Americans" to "pay the cost of going to court to get their gun rights back."

Graham wasn't nearly as concerned about rights when he launched into a disquisition on the treatment of American citizens accused of terrorism. "I am all into national security," he said. "I want them to stop reading these guys Miranda rights."

Like many of his fellow Republicans, Graham assailed the administration for respecting the constitutional rights of suspected terrorists, suggesting instead that they should be treated like enemies on the battlefield.

"Even if you're an American citizen helping the enemy, you should be seen as a potential enemy," he said, "not as someone who committed a crime in New York."

I'm trying to find a way to make this intellectually coherent, but it involves too much reaching for plausibility. Being suspected of terrorism is enough to forfeit your right to trial -- but being suspected of terrorism isn't enough to forfeit your right to buy weaponry?

Really? The Second Amendment is inviolable but the Sixth Amendment is optional? Isn't Lindsey Graham a lawyer? One who is on the Judiciary Committee and thus lectures judicial appointments about fidelity to the Constitution? It's an embarrassment to the country and the Republican Party.

Are head injuries the reason Ben Roethlisberger is such a colossal jerk?

That's the theory floated by Sports Illustrated writer David Epstein, in an interview with neuropsychologist Dr. Jordan Grafman -- Roethlisberger, after all, has suffered four concussions on the football field during his NFL career.

According to Grafman, two particular behaviors are endemic to people with moderate or severe frontal lobe injury, or to people with more mild but repetitive injury: 1) violating social rules by saying inappropriate things, and 2) saying appropriate or typical things in an inappropriate context.

"If you're married and you're flirting with another woman in an elevator with your wife next to you," Grafman says, "that's the kind of clearly inappropriate behavior." Roethlisberger is not married, but one man told me that Roethlisberger had asked out his wife while the man was present.

Granted, as Grafman notes, "we all say inappropriate things sometimes," but "it's the frequency with which it happens, and the unawareness. When you have a frontal lobe injury in particular, you often become unaware of your inappropriate behaviors. The observations usually come from wives or children." A typical situation in my reporting last week was something like this: I would hear that Roethlisberger had, for example, said inappropriate things to waitresses at a restaurant or walked out on a bill, so I would call the establishment. "I don't know if he walked out on a tab here," would be a typical response from whoever picked up the phone, "but he was really rude to my friend after he invited her over to his table." Tales of indecorous acts abounded.

Or it's possible that Roethlisberger is, you know, a colossal jerk. He wouldn't be the first multimillionaire athlete with dangerous delusions of entitlement, would he? Didn't we all kind of hate the jocks in high school?

And yet: If Epstein's onto something here, the morality of the NFL itself gets trickier and trickier to defend. There's already substantial evidence that playing professional football destroys the bodies and minds of the men who play it. If also it transforms them into moral monsters -- as a natural, organic byproduct of the game -- how could you possibly watch another game in good conscience? What redeeming value is left?

Podcast: Joyce Lee Malcolm and the Second Amendment

Ben and Joel are joined by Joyce Lee Malcolm to discuss McDonald v. Chicago, a Second Amendment case before the Supreme Court, and the history of the right to bear arms.

Malcolm is a professor of law at George Mason University School of Law. She is a historian and constitutional scholar. She is the author of seven books including To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right and Guns and Violence: The English Experience. Her work on the Second Amendment and the right to be armed has been widely cited in court opinions and legal literature including the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2008 opinion, District of Columbia v. Heller

This coming week -- on May 5 -- she'll appear in Philadelphia at theNational Constitution Center for a discussion about "RETHINKING THE SECOND AMENDMENT: THE CHICAGO GUN CASE AND THE FUTURE OF GUN RIGHTS." The event is 6:30 p.m. Wednesday and is free, but reservations required. Check constitutioncenter.org for details.

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