Why NPR Matters

Jim Fallows: "To hear the Fox/DeMint attack machine over the past week, NPR is simply a liberal counterpart to Fox -- a politically minded and opinion-driven organization that is only secondarily interested in gathering news. I believe that the mischaracterization is deliberate, and I know it is destructive and wrong."

The Great Bailout Backlash - NYTimes.com

Shorter Ross Douthat: We must punish our politicians for doing the right thing.

The Glorious Invasion of Grenada!

Today is the 27th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Grenada, which is apparently a holy day for those who worship at the Shrine of Reagan. I'm not sure if the Grenada triumphalism has always been part of the conservative victory parade, or if that's a relatively recent development, but it's embarrassing either way. The story of Grenada is this: Our big military defeated Grenada's tiny military to control an island of no strategic importance on a flimsy pretext. It wasn't difficult, it wasn't necessary, and it didn't deserve the Clint Eastwood treatment. It was a way for Ronald Reagan to look tough without the dangers of quagmire. Pride in that "victory" is a bully's pride, hollow and a little bit shameful.

Queer Eye for the G.I.?

It's a measure of how far the gay rights movement has come that many (if not most) in the opposition feel the need to cloak that opposition in sober, relatively unbigoted language. Fred Phelps and his "God Hates Fags" signs are shocking to the conscience, in part, because lots of people who broadly share that idea refuse to share that language.

Luckily, there's the Washington Times and today's "Queer eye for the GI" editorial to give us a peek into the anti-gay id. Here's a small selection:

The destructive force unleashed by the Pentagon's collaboration with the leftist agenda is apparent from the circus created when homosexual activists like Dan Choi sashayed over to the Times Square recruiting center to make a political point in the short period in which the Phillips order was effective.

"Sashayed"? Sure, if you mean "strode purposefully into the recruiting station." It's a little different from mincing over in a feather boa, which is what the Times conveys.I suppose we should be grateful the Times decided not to use the slurs normally found on Fred Phelps' signs.

Aside from the transparent gay baiting (as Adam Serwer rightly called it), there's also this issue:

Pentagon officials have been pretending that they have not already made up their minds on this issue. Generals have issued blanket denials that the conclusions for the forthcoming working group report on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" have already been decided. It appears that as the White House rams its radical homosexual agenda through the military, too many generals and admirals are willing to sell their brothers in arms down the river if it means they can keep a shiny set of stars on their epaulets.

I'm not sure how this is substantively different from the "General Betray Us" ad that outraged conservative activists a couple of years ago. The Times is accusing the military's uniformed leadership of treason, basically, because they're not acting in accordance with the Times' agenda. It's ugly, ugly stuff.

Wall Street Journal: Black People Should Pay Attention to Black People Things Instead of Worrying Their Silly Little Heads About the Tea Party

SOURCE: Jason Riley: The NAACP's Unhealthy Tea Party Obsession - WSJ.com

There are few things more patronizing than telling black people what they really should be worried about, and the Wall Street Journal's Jason Riley demonstrates this with uncommon clarity today:

The nation's unemployment rate is 9.6%, but it is 16.1% for blacks and an unconscionable 41% for black teens. Politicians continue to promote minimum-wage hikes that harm the job prospects of younger and less-skilled individuals, a disproportionate number of whom are black. Wal-Mart's attempts to open a store that would bring jobs and low-price goods to a depressed neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., have been thwarted repeatedly by labor unions. And the NAACP is issuing studies on the tea party movement?

I'd buy Riley's argument a bit more if he simply argued or even presented evidence that the NAACP is wrong to be concerned, as it is, that the movement gives a "platform to anti-Semites, racists and bigots." Instead Riley dismisses the NAACP's report on the movement as a "smear" and moves to telling the organization what it should really be concerned about.

I know: Jason Riley is black, so of course this whole line of argument can't be patronizing, right? Maybe. But Riley's real purposes seem to be given away in his final paragraph.

It's hard to understand how an organization that says it's devoted to "end[ing] racial disparities" finds the time to rail against tea-party populism until you grasp that the NAACP is, first and foremost, a Democratic Party organ. The NAACP is pretending that the tea party threatens the interests of blacks because the tea party in fact threatens the interests of the Democratic left.

Remember, though, this critique is coming on the Wall Street Journal editorial page -- which is, first and foremost, a Republican Party organ. Kind of like the Tea Party movement itself. Which maybe is why it doesn't try to refute the NAACP's concerns about Tea Party racism and devotes its pages, instead, to what African-American organization should really be concerned about.

Gabriel Schoenfeld and Wikileaks

Gabe Schoenfeld's gangster motto.

Back in July, I critiqued a National Affairs essay by Gabriel Schoenfeld in which he suggested that big leaks of Defense Department documents -- he was, at the time, writing primarily about the Pentagon Papers from the Vietnam War -- amounted to an attack on democracy itself. Schoenfeld wrote critically of Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker in that case:

For better or worse, the American people in the Vietnam years had elected Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon; they had acted at the ballot box to make their leadership and policy preferences clear. Yet here was a mid-level bureaucrat, elected by no one and representing no one, entrusted with secrets he had pledged to the American people to protect, abusing that trust to force his own policy preferences upon a government chosen by the people.

My response then:

It's silly to argue that Ellsberg was "forcing" a policy outcome through his leaks: As Schoenfeld notes, Ellsburg wasn't an elected official -- he had no power at all to change American policy. But Ellsberg did give Americans insight into how the policy had been made, and how what they'd been told by their leaders differed from the reality of the war in Vietnam. Daniel Ellsberg, then, enabled real democratic self-governance -- he didn't short-circuit it.

Wikileaks' latest release of nearly 400,000 documents related to the Iraq War has brought forth fresh, but familiar, commentary from Schoenfeld. He writes at The Weekly Standard:

The real question is whether, in exchange for a bit of “insight, texture, and context” into the war, the breach has placed lives at risk. On this score the Pentagon statement is very grim. The leak, it says, exposes

secret information that could make our troops even more vulnerable to attack in the future. Just as with the leaked Afghan documents, we know our enemies will mine this information, looking for insights into how we operate, cultivate sources and react in combat situations, even the capability of our equipment. This security breach could very well get our troops and those they are fighting with killed. 

If this is true, much like Philip Agee, the renegade CIA officer who in the 1970s went around exposing the identities of undercover CIA agents, WikiLeaks is acting as an enemy of our democracy. Even if our laws cannot reach it, it should be treated accordingly.

This is exceedingly credulous on Schoenfeld's part. The Pentagon made similar noises back when Wikileaks released its trove of Afghanistan documents -- the problem being that there's no evidence that anybody was actually harmed by those leaks, which were (frankly) released with much less concern for the safety of parties in Afghanistan.

Schoenfeld continually invokes "democracy" in his criticism of leaks, but as Inigo Montoya once said: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." Genuine democracy requires that the citizenry have the maximum-possible information to make informed decisions about the direction of government. The 400,000 Iraq documents show Americans, in rather more detail, what we've gained from our seven years in Iraq: An Iraqi government that cuts off the fingers of its own people and an empowered Iran. Schoenfeld doesn't tell us why American citizens shouldn't have access to this information; he accepts Pentagon assertions that the leaks could lead to some lost lives as sufficient proof of badness. Blindly believing the government, as Schoenfeld urges us to do, is corrosive to democracy.

There are surely bits of information that the public is best served by not knowing. The number of those bits is far fewer than the government keeps from our eyes. Schoenfeld responds to leaks by waving the flag furiously, ignoring that "democracy" is sometimes best served by those who break the rules to help us see our government more clearly.

Netflix Queue: "The Quick and the Dead"

Three thoughts about "The Quick and the Dead":

* Sam Raimi's 1995 film is clearly a riff on the old Clint Eastwood "Man With No Name" spaghetti westerns with Sergio Leone -- encompassing everything from the credited name of Sharon Stone's character ("Lady") to the Ennio Morricone-light soundtrack. And I'm really fine with that: Hollywood westerns are basically American mythmaking, anyway, so revisiting and tweaking those myths to put (say) a woman at the center of the action is fine by me. No, it's not history. But it can be fun -- as this flick mostly is. Still, Clint Eastwood never cried in his westerns; I wish Sharon Stone hadn't cried in hers.

* Then again, Sharon Stone -- though she was a producer on the film -- may not have been quite up to the acting level of her compatriots in this film: Gene Hackman, Russell Crowe, Leonardo Dicaprio, Gary Sinise, Keith David and a bunch of other character actors whose faces you'll certainly recognize. It's a powerhouse cast, and that unfortunately makes Stone's line readings a bit more noticeably thin.

* Then again, while it's a really entertaining film -- and I'm kind of shocked nobody turned it into a "Street Fighter" video game -- there are some real howlers in the script-writing department. TQATD's final line is this: "The law has come back to town." Delivered, I believe, without any awareness of irony. But it is, unfortunately, hilarious. But Raimi directed, and he knows a thing or two about hilarity in extreme situations, so maybe I should give the benefit of the doubt. It is, however Sharon Stone, so maybe I shouldn't.

* BONUS THOUGHT: Her persona has long since overwhelmed our notions of Sharon Stone, but I sometimes forget: She really was an extraordinarily beautiful woman back in the day.