Dissing the Koran
While Islamist fanatics and ignorant Westerners sow panic over the alleged desecration of a Koran at Guantanamo Bay, no one mentions a startling fact: When it comes to destruction of the Koran, there's no question who the world champion is--the government of Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi state religion is the primitive and austere Wahhabi version of Islam, which defines many traditional Islamic practices as idolatrous. Notably, the state bans the importation of Korans published elsewhere. When foreign pilgrims arrive at the Saudi border by the millions for the annual journey to Mecca, what happens to the non-Saudi Korans they are carrying? The border guards confiscate them, to be shredded, pulped, or burned. Beautiful bindings and fine paper are viewed as a particular provocation--all are destroyed. (This on top of the spiritual vandalism the Saudis perpetrate, by inserting anti-Jewish and anti-Christian squibs into the Korans they publish in foreign languages, as Stephen Schwartz documented in our issue of September 27, 2004.)
This behavior isn't a recent innovation, by the way. Here's an account of how the Saudis carried on when they seized the city of Taif in 1802. It's taken from an unimpeachable Islamic source, the compilation Advice for the Muslim, edited by the Turkish scholar Hilmi Isik and published by Hakikat Kitabevi in Istanbul:
The Wahhabis tore up the copies of the Koran . . . and other Islamic books they took from libraries, mosques and houses, and threw them down on the ground. They made sandals from the gold-gilded leather covers of the Koran and other books and wore them on their filthy feet. There were verses of the Koran and other sacred writings on those leather covers. The pages of those valuable books thrown around were so numerous that there was no space to step in the streets of Taif. . . . The Wahhabi bandits, who were gathered from the deserts for looting and who did not know the Koran, tore up all the copies they found and stamped on them. Only three copies of the Koran were saved from the plunder of a major town, Taif.
No wonder anti-Wahhabi Muslims say "the Saudis print the Koran to destroy it." They print it and they destroy it in a daily desecration that makes Newsweek's retracted Guantanamo allegation look trivial by comparison.
Claims of Cohen
W ashington Post columnist Richard Cohen has once again chastised Vice President Dick Cheney for claiming that Saddam had "reconstituted" Iraq's nuclear weapons program. The occasion was a column on " Newsweek's Mistakes." The first mistake was its Koran-flushed-down-the-toilet-at-Guantanamo item that sparked deadly riots in Afghanistan. The second came when "the magazine failed to issue a full-throated retraction and grovel in the manner expected from any institution that gets something wrong, especially the media." Remember that admonition.
Cohen's point, so far as The Scrapbook can determine, is that while everyone makes mistakes, the U.S. military and the Bush White House make mistakes and lie, too: "Suffice it to say that for the White House and the Pentagon to come down on Newsweek for making a mistake is the height of hypocrisy." If the White House is going to demand retractions from Newsweek, Cohen wants one from the White House. "Where, just for starters, is the retraction from Dick Cheney, who said that Iraq had 'reconstituted' its nuclear weapons program?"
Here's where. The vice president retracted that March 16, 2003, statement on September 14, 2003, in an appearance on Meet the Press, the same show on which he screwed up a few months before. Tim Russert replayed video from the earlier appearance and sought a clarification. "Reconstituted nuclear weapons," Russert repeated. "You misspoke." Cheney: "Yeah. I did misspeak."
Including his latest, Cohen has now written six columns whining about the "reconstituted" quote since September 2003, never once mentioning Cheney's retraction. The Scrapbook eagerly awaits Cohen's "full-throated retraction" in the manner expected from the institution that he is.
Bush's Jobs Record
Remember the favorite talking point of Democratic presidential candidates? How President Bush was worse than Herbert Hoover in the number of jobs created on his watch? After John Kerry made this point in the second presidential debate last fall, CNN "Fact Check" asserted: "Kerry is correct. . . . Bush is on track to become the first president in 72 years (since Herbert Hoover) to oversee a net loss in jobs." Kerry went on to make the same point in the third debate, and Bush let it slide. Maybe the president was tired of making excuses, though it was certainly fair to cite the recession, 9/11, the corporate scandals, and the bursting of the stock bubble as causes of the poor jobs performance. Maybe he was just embarrassed.
He needn't have been. As it turns out, there wasn't a jobless recovery after all. The first Bush term finished with a gain of 119,000 jobs. This is easily determined by comparing the number of jobs in January 2001 (132,454,000) with the number in January 2005 (132,573,000). Few in the press have done the math, Bloomberg being one of the exceptions. Democrats, of course, couldn't be expected to disclose they'd been wrong. And since 119,000 new jobs is not impressive, the White House hasn't touted it.
Kerry and other Democrats also claimed that 3 million jobs had been lost during the Bush administration. If so, they were partially offset every year by new jobs, a fact the Democrats didn't mention. The big year for the Bush jobs recovery was 2004, when job growth was a robust 2,201,000. In truth, it was clear by the time of the presidential debates that Bush stood a good chance of averting a net loss during his four-year term. That didn't stop Kerry from making the job loss charge, nor did it encourage Bush to predict he'd wind up with a positive number.
With the race over, the mainstream press didn't seek to find out if the Hoover comparisons were true or not. It may have been bias. It may have been indifference. Now at least we know what really occurred: a small, but real, gain.
Lloyd Cutler, R.I.P.
Lloyd Cutler, the Washington lawyer-insider and onetime White House counsel to Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, died earlier this month at the age of 87. Mr. Cutler was the archetypal "wise man," as opposed to wise guy, moving in and out of government service with ease. He wore his partisanship lightly and considered any summons from the White House a public duty. A Democrat, he served presidents of both parties, and was rightly hailed by George W. Bush as a "devoted public servant," one who "served our nation with dedication and distinction."
Mr. Cutler was not just influential, however; he was prescient. In the late summer of 1987, when Judge Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court set loose an unprecedented firestorm of public invective and personal abuse, Cutler went before the Senate Judiciary Committee to endorse Bork and warn left-wing activists and fellow Democrats about the wind they were sowing. Addressing complaints that Bork might have opposed some of the rulings of the Warren Court, Cutler warned, "I would submit that those who prefer the status quo . . . ought not to convert this preference into a rigid orthodoxy that bars the confirmation of any nominee who has at some times been critical of one or more prevailing majority views."
And then, in words that resonate 18 years later, he added: "The time is going to come--and it can't come too soon for me--when there is going to be a Democratic president. . . . It's necessary for Democrats who would vote against a moderate conservative nominee to the Court to recall or remember that they are giving a hostage to the time when a Democratic president will be appointing a moderate liberal, or perhaps a very liberal member of the Court, who will be judged by the same standard in reverse that you would be applying, in my view, if you rejected Judge Bork today."
We know what happened, and can't help but wonder what the state of judicial nominations might be in Congress these days if Democrats had taken the advice of one of their finest lawyers.