Every now and then the congressional habit of naming federal programs and structures—buildings, aircraft carriers, courthouses, grants and scholarships, military installations—after members of Congress is not such a good idea. The Scrapbook remembers with fondness, for example, the 1977 bribery case against former Rep. Edward A. Garmatz, D‑Md., which was prosecuted in the Edward A. Garmatz Federal Courthouse in Baltimore. (The charges were eventually dropped when a witness proved unreliable.) Now the Navy might be about to perpetrate a similar embarrassment.
That’s because Secretary Ray Mabus, a former Democratic congressman and governor of Mississippi, has decided to name a new San Antonio-class warship after Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., who died in February. This proposal has caused something of a sensation on the Internet, and especially among -Marines. Not because Murtha was himself a Marine—as he was, serving as an officer in Vietnam and in the reserves while a member of Congress—but because, after he turned against the Iraq war in 2005, he declared publicly that Marines accused of killing civilians in Haditha had done so “in cold blood.” At the time of Murtha’s outburst, no formal investigation of the incident, much less trial, had taken place; and as it happens, charges against six Marines were eventually dropped, one was acquitted, and one more awaits trial on reduced charges in the case.
A fair number of Marines, along with people who have never been Marines, find the prospect of honoring Murtha by naming a naval vessel—that would, among other things, transport Marines in and out of combat—after him to be especially disheartening. The Scrapbook agrees. We acknowledge Murtha’s honorable record of military service—but there are dozens, even hundreds, of veterans (including onetime members of Congress) more deserving of the honor than a famously disagreeable politician who used his considerable powers as a congressman to publicly slander fighting Marines in Iraq.
There is another reason to think twice before naming an American warship for John Murtha: He was not honest. Routinely cited by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and various news organizations, as one of the most corrupt members of Congress, he was notorious for his hostility to ethics legislation and famous for the hundreds of millions of dollars in earmarks he shunted toward his district—including defense appropriations for companies that employed his brother and a former staffer. You can also watch a 1980 video of Murtha on YouTube expressing interest in a $50,000 bribe proffered by an undercover FBI agent in the Abscam sting.
In the end, prosecutors decided not to indict Murtha in Abscam, and he testified against two fellow Democrats who had been indicted. But to watch and listen to the late congressman in action on that video—with his customary combination of profanity and boastfulness—is to make the idea of a USS Murtha especially grotesque.
‘South Park’ Goes South
Some, not all, Muslims object to depictions of the Prophet Muhammad on religious grounds. Among those who do object there is a smaller element whose fanaticism and violence cast a harsh light not only on Islam but on the moral courage of the non-Muslim world.
This was dramatically demonstrated five years ago when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a series of satirical cartoons depicting the prophet, which resulted in mayhem and killings in the Middle East by radical Muslims. That, in turn, was followed by a book on the controversy, The Cartoons that Shook the World by Jytte Klausen, which appeared last year. Unfortunately, the publisher, Yale University Press, declined to print the actual cartoons in the book out of fear that they might inspire the wrath of Islamicists. This craven action by Yale, one of the world’s leading academic publishers, was taken on the advice of a panel of experts (including Fareed Zakaria, ’86, of Newsweek) assembled by the press. This past January an axe-wielding Somali Muslim attempted to murder one of the cartoonists, Kurt Westgaard, at his home in Denmark.
Alas, The Scrapbook is not especially surprised that institutions such as Newsweek and Yale—longtime beneficiaries of the Western tradition of academic freedom and enlightenment—should be so easily intimidated by the enemies of human liberty. But we were genuinely surprised—and in a melancholy way, amused—by the surrender of Comedy Central, the cable TV network, two weeks ago when its freedom of speech was challenged by an Islamicist website.
South Park, the popular and all-purposely offensive animated series, recently featured the Prophet Muhammad in one scene dressed in a bear suit, which was censored by Comedy Central, followed by a speech on intimidation and fear, which was heavily edited. Comedy Central’s action was taken in response to threats from one Abu Talhal al Amrikee, a Muslim convert/blogger whose real name is Zachary Chesser, who had vowed to kill South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, and emphasized his threat by posting photographs of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch film director stabbed to death by a radical Muslim in the Netherlands.
Comedy Central, it need hardly be said, is the self-described “edgy” network that is home to Jon Stewart and The Daily Show and is not famous for its gentle treatment of satirical targets. But one threat from an Internet psychotic, on behalf of religious bigotry, and Comedy Central revealed the spine of an overripe banana.
No, The Scrapbook is not disappointed in Comedy Central under the circumstances, since The Scrapbook had no expectation that Comedy Central would do the right thing. But even the purveyors of The Colbert Report must surely understand that the freedom they enjoy to say and do what they want—and make truckloads of money in the process—comes at a price, and the cost goes up for everyone when Abu Talhal al Amrikee runs Comedy Central.
[img caption="Michael Ramirez" float="left" width="452" height="640" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]1698[/img]
Spilt Oil
The news Friday that the Obama administration is halting new offshore oil drilling in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon platform disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is unsurprising given the media’s DefCon1 level of hysteria. But the paradox is that it is precisely the rarity of offshore drilling disasters of this kind that skews our perception of risk.
The Scrapbook’s go-to energy adviser, Steven F. Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute, emails: “If we were truly concerned about minimizing risks of oil spills in the ocean, we’d cut back on shipping oil by tanker. The amount of oil spilled in tanker accidents dwarfs the amount spilled from drilling rig accidents. (The long-term global trend of oil spills from all sources is down, despite the increase in both offshore drilling and oil shipped by tanker.)
“The Deepwater Horizon spill,” Hayward tells us, “is on course to match or exceed the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989. But the Exxon Valdez spill was only the 35th largest tanker-related spill over the last 40 years. Since the Exxon Valdez, there have been seven larger tanker spills; the ABT Summer disaster off the Angolan coast in 1991 spilled seven times as much oil as the Exxon Valdez, but received hardly any media coverage in the United States. And while it is too early to know how extensive will be the damage to Gulf Coast shoreline ecosystems, it is not too early to expect that many dire predictions will be proven wrong.
“This has been the pattern since the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969. A hastily assembled White House panel of experts concluded that it might take 10 to 20 years to stop the still-seeping oil in the Santa Barbara Channel. It took only a few weeks. Another group of experts forecast that with the number of rigs operating in the channel, a similar blowout could be expected to occur on average once a decade. There hasn’t been another one in the channel since. Dire predictions of the permanent loss of wildlife and damage to the channel’s ecosystem became a daily refrain. But as Time magazine reported five months after the spill, ‘dire predictions seem to have been overstated. . . . Now, four months later, the channel’s ecology seems to have been restored to virtually its natural state.’ A multi-volume study by the University of Southern California two years later concluded that ‘damage to the biota was not widespread.’
“No energy source is risk-free or environmentally benign; just ask West Virginia coal miners, or check up on the avian mortality of wind power, or the potential disruption of desert ecosystems from proposed large solar power projects, or, indeed, the additional pollution of the Gulf coast from ethanol production. The greatest risk of all is the inability to weigh trade-offs.”
In Fairness to Fab
The Scrapbook preached a little sermon last week to Goldman Sachs trader Fabrice Tourre about the virtues of being discreet in one’s emails. The SEC had made him an international symbol of reckless financial manipulation by releasing excerpts from a 2007 email he had written to a girlfriend in London, where they both worked. As it happens, the day after we went to press, the Senate released a few dozen Goldman emails, among which was the full text of the infamous “fabulous Fab” email. It may or may not surprise you to learn that the SEC excerpts were highly tendentious. Here is the full text, with the SEC’s selections in bold. All the ellipses are in the original:
Darling you should take a look at this article . . . Very insightful . . . More and more leverage in the system, l’edifice entier risque de s’effondrer a tout moment . . . Seul survivant potentiel, the fabulous Fab (as Mitch would kindly call me, even though there is nothing fabulous abt me, just kindness, altruism and deep love for some gorgeous and super-smart French girl in London), standing in the middle of all these complex, highly levered, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all the implications of those monstruosities!!! Anyway, not feeling too guilty about this, the real purpose of my job is to make capital markets more efficient and ultimately provide the US consumer with more efficient ways to leverage and finance himself, so there is a humble, noble and ethical reason for my job ;) amazing how good I am in convincing myself!!! Sweetheart, I am now going to try to get away from ABX and other ethical questions, and immediately plunge into Freakonomics . . . I feel blessed to be with you, to be able to learn and share special things with you. I love when you advise me on books I should be reading. I feel like we share a lot of things in common, a lot of values, topics we are interested in and intrigued by . . . I just love you!!!
Okay, not The Scrapbook’s idea of how to woo a young woman, but that aside, it’s worth pointing out that the bit about “more and more leverage” in the system, and how “the whole building is about to collapse” is, as Courtney Comstock of Business Insider pointed out, a synopsis of a Financial Times article he had attached to the email. The “fabulous Fab” moniker, in context, seems a little more of an inside joke and a little less self-aggrandizing. In short, the SEC set out to make Tourre look like a malicious Master of the Universe, rather than the callow, somewhat boastful, out-to-impress-his-girlfriend young man revealed in the full email. Shame on them.
Sentences We Didn’t Finish
"After all the work that has gone into knitting together this bipartisan [climate/energy] bill, which has the support of key industry players, it would be insane to let this effort fail. Fortunately, on Tuesday, Reid was hinting about a compromise. But, ultimately, the issue isn’t just about introducing a bill. It’s about getting it passed. And there we are going to need the president’s sustained leadership. President Obama has done a superb job in securing stimulus money for green-technology and in using his regulatory powers to compel the auto industry . . . ” (Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, April 28).