"Terrible News for the U.N."
Well, the New York Times has been vindicated. The arrival of John Bolton, the new U.S. ambassador to the U.N., is indeed "terrible news for the United Nations," as the Times editorialized on August 2. Of course, they thought this was a bad thing. It's been the position of the Times for years that the U.S. ambassador should have a high opinion of the United Nations. As we've said before, Bolton's critics seem to think his job is to be the U.N.'s ambassador to the United States and not the other way around.
But in fact, the U.N. cries out for adult supervision, and only gets it from U.S. ambassadors, as Bolton is already turning out to be. Item:The Times's own James Bennet, reporting on the Israeli pullout from the Gaza Strip on August 15, noted the peculiar provenance of some Palestinian propaganda on display:"Around the corner was a banner from the Palestinian Authority, which is dominated by a more secular faction, Fatah. 'Gaza today,' it read, 'the West Bank and Jerusalem Tomorrow.' A tag line said the banner was paid for by the United Nations Development Program." Because that's just the sort of development Palestinians need:fancier banners to taunt Israel with, paid for by Western taxpayers.
Enter Ambassador Bolton. As the New York Sun reported on August 18, in a development the Times has so far neglected to let its readers in on, "America's newly installed ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, labeled 'inappropriate and unacceptable' the United Nations Development Program financing of materials bearing the slogan 'Today Gaza, Tomorrow the West Bank and Jerusalem.'
"Mr. Bolton said yesterday that the UNDP had failed to explain why it funneled money to the Palestinian Authority to back the production of banners, bumper stickers, mugs, and T-shirts bearing the provocative slogan as well as UNDP logos."
And as night follows day, a UNDP administrator, Kemal Dervis, has admitted that it was "not at all acceptable" that the agency's logo had been placed on the propaganda. "We cannot be involved in political messaging," he said.
Yes, indeed. This is terrible news for the U.N., no doubt a source of heartburn for officials of the Palestinian Authority and editors of the New York Times, but reason, we think, to extend a hearty welcome to Ambassador Bolton, the latest cop on the East River beat.
Mr. Roberts's Neighborhood
"Robert's Indiana Hometown Draws Scrutiny," read the ominous headline on a dispatch sent out last Wednesday by the Associated Press. Oddly enough, at no point in the lengthy story that followed was there identified so much as a single human being from whom Long Beach, Indiana, actually is drawing any scrutiny at the moment--AP correspondents Tom Coyne and Ashley M. Heher themselves excepted, of course.
But never mind about that. More people ought to be scrutinizing the place, that much is clear. Because it now devolves, as AP's blockbuster investigative report went on to explain, that "the exclusive lakefront community where Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. grew up during the racially turbulent 1960s and '70s once banned the sale of homes to nonwhites and Jews." Worse yet, in July 1970, "just three miles" from this cesspool of bigotry, "two days of looting and vandalism erupted," leading to the eventual arrest of several employees at the same Bethlehem Steel job-training program where Roberts "worked summers to help pay for Harvard."
The obvious question arising: Could "Roberts's upbringing in this Northern Indiana community"--with its secret history of anti-Semitism and violent white supremacy--have materially "influenced his views" about the law?
"It is hard to know," Coyne and Heher cautiously conclude. Maybe. On the one hand, there's all that ugly stuff in Roberts' past, as described above.
On the other hand, however, there's the fact--which they are careful to obscure, though not quite dishonest enough to leave out altogether--that it isn't really Roberts's past at all.
"The Roberts property did not include a racially restrictive covenant," the AP story's ninth paragraph reveals. Those 1970 riots, its seventeenth paragraph adds for good measure, took place not in Long Beach but in Michigan City, an entirely separate jurisdiction. And Roberts was still in high school at the time; his summer jobs at that Bethlehem Steel plant were still several years off in the future. Whatever.
Notes from the Underground
"Theorists have posited," the American Political Science Association mordantly observes, "that under the proper conditions democratic decision-making will produce fair and just social outcomes." But, hey, theory is for nerds. Bottom line is, it's "clearer today than it has been for decades that the struggle for democracy" is incomplete and fraught with risk, even--perhaps especially--in "established democracies" like you-know-where, whose "basic institutions" face "encroachment and decline." And are America's political scientists going to take this George W. Bush stuff lying down? They most definitely are not.
Instead, a brave and defiant APSA, marching under the theme of "Mobilizing Democracy," will convene its 101st annual meeting here in Washington September 1, and will urge its 6,000 conventioneering professors--and the rest of us--to "connect with the discipline" by attending a series of extremely important roundtable discussions. Like, for example, Panel 3 of the Conference Group on Theory, Policy, and Society, which will investigate the question, "Is It Time to Call It Fascism?"
The issue is both "substantive" and "strategic/tactical," panel chair Dvora Yanow of Cal State, Hayward, explains: "Is there a theoretical-definitional grounding to make a claim for the present U.S. administration as fascist, and is it useful, critically, to use that language at this point in time?" Answers from Ms. Yanow and her eight co-panelists will be forthcoming Saturday, September 3, at 10:15 a.m. in the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel. Unless, of course, the answer is "yes," in which case the secret police will probably long since have rounded them all up.
Nothing to See Here
The Air America scandal continues to metastasize. The national board of directors for Boys and Girls Clubs of America is considering a formal staff recommendation that the organization expel its Bronx, New York, affiliate, the Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club, for apparent involvement in--and concealment of--a scheme by which nearly $900,000 was improperly diverted to the liberal radio network from bank accounts intended to fund social service programs for disadvantaged children and the elderly. "It's a very, very serious matter," Boys and Girls Clubs spokesman Evan McElroy told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week.
And he's not the only one who thinks so. At least two law enforcement agencies, the New York City Department of Investigation and the New York State attorney general's office, have confirmed an active interest in the matter. And, tangentially at least, the courts are already involved, as well. Bloggers Michelle Malkin and Brian Maloney, who've together done more than anyone else to advance the story, now report that Air America is being sued by an unpaid creditor who alleges, among other things, that the network's current parent company, Piquant LLC, is merely a sham reincorporation of the "predecessor" outfit that filched the Boys and Girls Club money.
Meanwhile, Byron Calame, "public editor" of the New York Times, has quietly filed a post to his "web journal" acknowledging that his colleagues "showed up late" to the Air America story and thus "poorly served" their readers.
Only after "weeks of articles by other newspapers" did the Times finally get around to noticing the scandal in its own backyard. And this oversight was especially regrettable, Calame allowed, in light of the "flurry of articles" the paper had run during the happy-face PR blitz surrounding Air America's debut in the spring of 2004. It's inconsistencies like these, he pointed out, that typically give rise to "a perception of liberal bias" at the Times, and before you know it, certain of the paper's right-wingier subscribers are writing in to complain.
Calame does have some good news to report, however. In this particular case, at least, any perception of liberal bias at the Times is one "for which I haven't found any evidence after checking with editors at the paper."