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.

Peggy Noonan, the Tea Party and the Establishment

I suspect that Peggy Noonan is being over-optimistic in her praise of the Tea Party in today's Wall Street Journal:

The tea party did something the Republican establishment was incapable of doing: It got the party out from under George W. Bush. The tea party rejected his administration's spending, overreach and immigration proposals, among other items, and has become only too willing to say so. In doing this, the tea party allowed the Republican establishment itself to get out from under Mr. Bush: "We had to, boss, it was a political necessity!" They released the GOP establishment from its shame cringe.

Sounds nice -- the Tea Party has helped the GOP see the error of its ways! -- but who will the Tea Party actually push to power in Congress next month? In all likelihood, um, John Boehner. He voted, of course, for the Bush Administration's unfunded Medicare drug plan -- probably the best example of the GOP's shamelessness about deficit spending -- and he shows every sign of being a servant of big business and other special interests that Tea Partiers supposedly disdain. And he's using that power to co-opt the supposedly pure Tea Party candidates before they even face election:

One tea-party-backed candidate to get Boehner's help is Steve Stivers, a former state legislator and lobbyist for Ohio's Bank One who has accused his Democratic opponent of supporting "taxpayer-funded bonuses given to failed Wall Street executives." Stivers's spokesman, John Damschroder, said he thinks the $14,000 was given - mostly before the state primary election - because "speaker-to-be Boehner knows how critical Ohio is to control of the House."

Boehner also has given $14,000 to Ohio candidate James Renacci, a former mayor, car dealer and nursing home operator who has attacked his Democratic opponent for having "lobbyist friends" and for attracting support from "special interests." Renacci spokesman James Slepian called the money "a vote of confidence" and a reflection of the importance that Boehner attaches to the race as a step toward Republican control of the House.

So it's difficult to buy the Tea Party of a vanguard of ideologically-cleansing purity within the GOP. It's returning to power the exact same people who ran Congress during the 1990s and most of the last decade. This revolution feels awfully stale.

Time To Slash Defense Spending?

As politicians promise to start cutting spending in Washington after this fall's elections, there's growing talk -- even among some Republicans -- that it's perhaps time to cut defense spending. That has, predictably, generated a backlash within the GOP. Ben and I tackle the topic in our column for Scripps Howard this week. Here's my take:

Yes, America can and should significantly cut its military budget.

Our military isn't built just to defend America and its interests, but to bestride the world like a colossus: There are significant deployments of U.S. troops and personnel in Europe and Asia, and commands charged with readiness to project American military power on the remaining inhabited continents. This has had benefits -- we've helped keep the peace in Europe, by and large, for more than 60 years, which is an extraordinary accomplishment.

But American taxpayers continue to pay dearly for the privilege of maintaining the most awesome military in world history: the base defense budget for 2010 is $533.8 billion -- and that's before costs for "overseas contingency operations" in Iraq and Afghanistan are added to the bottom line.

The result? The United States on its own spends about half the world's total defense budget -- 46.5 percent of the planetary total. The next closest competitor, China, spends 6.6 percent. We're overdoing it.

This moment of history -- a "unipolar" moment with a single dominant military power in the world -- is an aberration. It is already passing, with the rise of China. We cannot afford to sustain it, which is what defense hawks would have us do.

And it hasn't necessarily made us safer: Osama bin Laden went to war against the United States in part because of U.S. troop deployments to Saudi Arabia in the 1990s. Sometimes being the biggest just makes you the biggest target.

Even Republicans -- some of them, anyway -- are starting to recognize the dangers. We should not bankrupt this and future generations in pursuit of unsustainable world dominance. If it is time to start cutting government spending, the Pentagon's budget should be on the chopping block along with everybody else's.

Bag O' Books: Paul Auster's "City of Glass"

Three thoughts about Paul Auster's "City of Glass":

* This is the first novel - a novella, really - in the so-called "New York Trilogy," and that name is apt. It's a cliche to say that "the city is a character" in the book; it's also, perhaps, imprecise. Instead, it's fair to say this book cannot exist apart from the city. Specific streets and neighborhoods and even Mookie Wilson's early reign with the Mets are all integral to the story.

* Though ostensibly a detective story, "City of Glass" is a meditation on language itself. And Auster brings a nice sense of play to the proceedings -- not just in the meta sense of placing a writer named "Paul Auster" near the center of the action, but in his use of names ("Max Work," "Peter Stillman") and in considering the many ways that individual words can take on multiple meanings. This sounds like heavy, sloglike reading but it's not: It is a pleasure.

* That makes it sound too hoity-toity. What is lovely, also, about Auster's writing is its rootedness in the physical world: Not just New York, but in the smaller crevices of life -- the reality of notebooks and pens and apartments and tables and plastic phones and more. You can almost hold Auster's world in your hands; you can certainly hold it in your mind. And that's a pretty fair accomplishment.

Finally: You should never judge a book by its cover, but the Art Spiegelman cover to my paperback copy of the book -- bound together with the other volumes in the trilogy -- is astounding, and conveys the art and play to be found within.

Football is Dying. Maybe It Deserves To.

The NFL has spent this week being shocked -- shocked! -- that the violent game it promotes is, well, violent. The league has spent this week levying fines against particularly egregious hits from last weekend's games, but as Pittsburgh Steeler lineback James Harrison and Miami Dolphins linebacker Channing Crowder have pointed out, in their various ways, football is game of hitting, and hitting hard: You're supposed to hit the ball-carrier as hard as you can to bring him down; the carrier tries to hit you as hard as he can so that he can stay on his feet and keep going. It's rough business, and there's growing evidence that it destroys the bodies and minds of the people who play the game.

I don't really watch games anymore -- it makes me a bit queasy to cheer on people in the process of hurting themselves and each other -- though I still check in from time to time on the progress of the Kansas City Chiefs: a lifetime of fandom is hard to put away. But today -- October 21 -- feels like it might be a quiet watershed day in the demise of football.

Today's New York Times:

Helmets both new and used are not — and have never been — formally tested against the forces believed to cause concussions. The industry, which receives no governmental or other independent oversight, requires helmets for players of all ages to withstand only the extremely high-level force that would otherwise fracture skulls.

Moreover, used helmets worn by the vast majority of young players encountered stark lapses in the industry’s few safety procedures. Some of the businesses that recondition helmets ignored testing rules, performed the tests incorrectly or returned helmets that were still in poor condition. More than 100,000 children are wearing helmets too old to provide adequate protection — and perhaps half a million more are wearing potentially unsafe helmets that require critical examination, according to interviews with experts and industry data.

Today's Philadelphia Inquirer:

The risk of playing football at all levels was driven home over the weekend when a Rutgers University player was paralyzed from the neck down in a game Saturday. It's become clear the way the game is played and officiated must be altered. The unacceptable alternative is to be resigned to more and more players joining the casualty lists.

A recent Harris Interactive poll shows most Americans don't enjoy seeing football players get hurt. They want changes to helmets and other equipment to be made, and they believe players who cause head injuries should be hit with penalties, up to and including suspension.

Blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Samori (his son) didn't play football this year. He wants to go back. We can't, in any good conscience, send him back.

It is, simply, becoming less reputable to cheer on the sport that's literally killing and crippling players before their time. And parents like Coates are taking their kids out of the game. We've already determined that our son will never get our permission to play tackle football. Support for the game is slowly beginning to dry up, because it will never be possible to make the game safe enough without fundamentally altering its character.

That's not to say it will ever completely die. People love sports, and many people love violent sports. But it seems possible to me that the NFL and college football will begin to recede in popularity, something equivalent to the moneymaking-but-still-backwater provinces of pay-per-view (like boxing and ultimate fighting) or minor cable channels (like hockey). And that's fine by me.