Why the Daily News Is An Essential Philadelphia Institution

It tackles the dearth of public potties in the Italian Market. You won't find that in the Inquirer!

About American Exceptionalism, and Footnotes

I'm a couple of chapters into Dominic Tierney's "How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War" when I stumble onto this factoid:

"But since the nineteenth century, no country has engaged in the mass killing of civilians on as many separate occasions as the United States."

Yikes! Luckily, there's an explanatory footnote:

"Between 1816 and 2003, the United States was responsible for five out of the eighteen cases in which one country intentionally or indiscriminately killed more than fifty thousand enemy civiliansin interstate war. Prussia/Germany was responsible for three episodes of mass killing, and Britain and Russia were responsible for two each. Data from Downes, Targeting Civilians in War, 44-47."

I don't have Downes' book at the ready, but the numbers indicate to me that such incidents were in the United States' "big wars," and there's pretty much universal agreement that the country was justified in entering most of those wars. (World War I being a possible exception, and we won't even get into the debates over the Civil War.)

Which brings me back around to yesterday's discussion of Jonah Goldberg and American exceptionalism. I suspect that American exceptionalism blinds us to these kinds of facts, frankly, so that we see ourselves as likely to be "greeted as liberators" instead of as a force that brought (or unleashed) bombs and death into a country. It's possible to be both, actually, but we don't think hard enough about the second part of the equation. A little less of the exceptionalist attitude would be helpful in such cases, actually.

A Cure For Bullying?

There are probably limits to this approach, because some people are just jerks. Still, this approach to reducing bullying is intriguing:

"Here’s how it works: Roots arranges monthly class visits by a mother and her baby (who must be between two and four months old at the beginning of the school year). Each month, for nine months, a trained instructor guides a classroom using a standard curriculum that involves three 40-minute visits – a pre-visit, a baby visit, and a post-visit. The program runs from kindergarten to seventh grade. During the baby visits, the children sit around the baby and mother (sometimes it’s a father) on a green blanket (which represents new life and nature) and they try to understand the baby’s feelings. The instructor helps by labeling them. “It’s a launch pad for them to understand their own feelings and the feelings of others,” explains Gordon. “It carries over to the rest of class.”"

Larry Mendte: Ed Rendell for President?

I don't know what to make of a disgraced newsman who goes from committing felonies a felonny against co-workers to making stuff up. But will Ed Rendell mount a primary challenge against Obama? No. Ed Rendell likes to win. He plays the odds carefully. And the odds against a successful primary challenge to an incumbent president -- well, those are pretty steep. No reason not to speculate, though!

Does Philly's Stop-and-Frisk Policy Actually Fight Crime?

Elmer Smith at the Daily News gets to the heart of the matter:

"The city keeps records on the number of people who are stopped in what it calls pedestrian investigations. But nobody at the Police Department could tell me how many of those stops included pat-downs or how many, if any, gun or drug confiscations to credit to the practice."

There are a couple of reasons you might not keep records on how much crime a crime-fighting practice actually fights. One is that you don't want to know the results. The other is that you're too lazy to care. Which is why Mayor Nutter's defense of the program seems suspect:

"This is part of a larger crime-fighting strategy. We've put more officers on the street; we have taken away about 4,000 to 5,000 guns every year for the last three years. Homicides and [serious] crimes are down."

But, what, if anything, does stop-and-frisk have to do with that? If the practice is not being monitored, how can we be sure how fair or effective it has been?

Philly is now defending a lawsuit from the ACLU because the practice disparately targets minorities. The city might be in a better position to defend itself if it could demonstrate the practice mitigates crime -- that is, after all, the best defense available for constitutionally suspect practices. But City Hall can't make that demonstration; why should we believe it's worth the cost?

UPDATE: It's stop-and-frisk day! The Daily News editorial is here; the Inky editorial is here.

Jonah Goldberg and American Exceptionalism

There's something about Jonah Goldberg's column about lefties who bash American exceptionalism that seems to be missing the point, almost deliberately so. Goldberg seems to think that liberals who are reluctant to join the chest-pounding parade wish for America to become a little more European, a little more socialist:

The notion that America has its own way of doing things separate and distinct from Europe has been one of the greatest impediments to Europeanizing America's political and economic institutions.

Ultimately, it's not that liberals don't believe in American exceptionalism so much as they believe it is holding America back, which might explain why they're lashing out at the people who want to keep it exceptional. But that too is nothing new. 'The Coolidge myth has been created by amazingly skillful propaganda,' editorialized the Nation in 1924 about the unfathomable popularity of Calvin Coolidge. 'The American people dearly love to be fooled.'

I don't buy this, at least not totally. Certainly, the two columns that Goldberg cites -- Michael Kinsley in Politico and Peter Beinart in the Daily Beast -- don't try to make that case. (Hell, the point of Beinart's column is that Keynesianism is now dead in the United States.) I think Kinsley gets closer to the root of my own problem with the idea of American exceptionalism with this paragraph:

The notion that America and Americans are special, among all the peoples of the earth, is sometimes called “American exceptionalism.” Because of our long history of democracy and freedom, or because we have a special mission to spread these values (or at least to remain a shining example of them), or because of our wealth, or because of our military strength, our nuclear arsenal, our wide-open spaces, our pragmatism, our idealism, or just because, the rules don’t apply to us. There are man-made rules like, “You can’t start a war without the permission of the United Nations Security Council.” We’ve gotten away with quite a bit of bending or breaking of that kind of rule. This may have given us the impression that we could ignore the other kind of rules —the ones that are imposed by reality and therefore are self-enforcing. These are rules such as, “You can’t have good ice cream without fat” or “You can’t borrow increasing amounts of money indefinitely and never pay it back, because people will eventually stop lending it to you.” No country is special enough to escape these rules.

Right. In keeping with Kinsley, my problem with the notion of American exceptionalism, as frequently practiced, isn't (despite Goldberg's allegation) that it holds America back -- but that it doesn't hold America back enough. Beinart's recent book, "The Icarus Syndrome," and Fred Kaplan's "Daydream Believers" both document how American leaders, particularly hawks, have tended to believe that America is so exceptional that the rules of warfighting don't apply to us. The results of that way of thinking, embodied in folks like Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld, have been disastrous for the United States.

There are other ways that the embrace of American exceptionalism hurts our society, I think, but we can get into that later. The problem with Goldberg's column, of course, is that it responds to arguments that weren't made, all so that he can conclude by sniffing at "the sophisticates who chortle at the idea that there's anything especially good about America." It is -- like the attitude of American exceptionalism often is -- lazy, easy, and fails to address the real arguments and real problems that we face.

Barbara Bush's Miscarriage

Salon:

"In the weirdest news item of the day, the New York Post reveals that when George W. Bush was a teenager, his mother, Barbara, showed him her miscarried fetus in a jar. 'There's no question that affected me, a philosophy that we should respect life,' he tells Matt Lauer in an interview that will air tonight. This bizarre anecdote may make Barbara sound like a pro-life extremist who used scare tactics to sway her son's views of abortion, but what the Post doesn't mention is that the former first lady eventually became pro-choice."

You know, I think it's probably wrong to frame this in terms of the abortion politics when what this story is is really, really freakin' weird. A miscarriage, after all, isn't a choice -- but keeping the fetus afterward surely is. So much of the George W. Bush biography has been written as an Oedipal need to show up his accomplished father. But is it possible we're missing out on the real story here? What if Barbara Bush is really closer to being Angela Lansbury in "The Manchurian Candidate" -- and the key to understanding everything, in a really weird and dark and twisted way? Somewhere, an aspiring political novelist is writing an outline....