Bash the Messenger

Hatred in Tibet

 Bash the Messenger, Hate  No Responses »
Mar 152008
 

In light of Russia’s recent use of “hate crimes” to prosecute an anti-government blogger, is it ominous that The Sunday Times would use the word “hate” to describe the situation in Tibet?

Headline: “Fears of another Tiananmen as Tibet explodes in hatred”

So that’s what it’s called when oppressed people rebel against their oppressors? I wonder who or what put it into their head to call it that. Why hatred? Why not, say, anger?

The article itself says the initial emotion among the Tibetians was “almost a spirit of liberation and joy.” So why would the reaction to the “predictable and harsh” response by the Chinese (as the Times calls it) be “hatred”? And don’t we have equal reason to refer to what the Chinese government is doing as “hatred”?

And why apply that word “predictable” to what the Chinese government is going? Wouldn’t what the Tibetians are doing also be called “predictable”?

Spitzer’s carefully crafted image

 Abuse of power, Bash the Messenger  No Responses »
Mar 122008
 

This latest Spitzer scandal had me wondering if the world had gone mad. I heard people on radio programs talk about how they were shocked that someone who was such a moral crusader could do such a thing. Even the Wall Street Journal’s lead article on Tuesday talked about a “jarring contrast to the governor’s carefully crafted image.”

Don’t these people remember the real scandal from just last year, the one that should have got him booted from office for abuse of power? The prostitution scandal is certainly worth noting. But even if he was using government money to pay for prostitutes (and I haven’t heard that he was) it’s not nearly as serious a violation of public trust as to what he was doing when he was using the power of his office to wage a personal vendetta against Joe Bruno.

But nobody was talking about that. The print edition of the above WSJ article has a timeline about the Rise and Fall of Elliot Spitzer which doesn’t even mention the 2007 scandal involving the state police and Joe Bruno. All it has for 2007 is “Inaugurated New York’s 54th governor.”

New York is not the center of my universe, so I was starting to wonder if I was mistaken and had the players and events all mixed up in my mind. But I see that at least John Fund at the WSJ hasn’t forgotten the real scandal:

As the political career of Eliot Spitzer melts down, many will lament that what the governor on Monday called his “progressive politics” fell victim to his personal foibles. If only he hadn’t made mistakes in his private life, they will moan, New York could have been redeemed from its squalid, special-interest dominated stagnation.

That’s nonsense. More is at issue here than a mere private mistake. The governor’s frequent use of a prostitution ring was of public concern — because, notes Henry Stern, head of the watchdog group New York Civic, “people could easily have blackmailed him, you can’t have that if you’re governor.”

True enough, New York’s dysfunctional and secretive state government desperately needs fumigation, with both political parties sharing in the blame. But Mr. Spitzer’s head-butting approach to redemption — involving the arbitrary use of power and bully-boy tactics — was no improvement. …

Mr. Spitzer seemed to excel only in the zeal with which he would go after perceived adversaries. Last summer, his staff infamously used the state police to track the movements of Joe Bruno, the Republican president of the state senate, in an effort to destroy his career. Mr. Spitzer then ferociously fought investigators who wanted to examine his office’s email traffic for evidence the governor himself may have been involved.

Carefully crafted image, indeed.

WFB, the original Ann Coulter

 Bash the Messenger  No Responses »
Feb 292008
 

Ann Coulter explains how William F. Buckley was the original Ann Coulter. What she actually says is that he was the original “enfant terrible”, but it’s not hard to get her point.

She explains the reception Buckley got with his first book:

Buckley’s first book, “God and Man at Yale,” was met with the usual thoughtful critiques of anyone who challenges the liberal establishment. Frank Ashburn wrote in the Saturday Review: “The book is one which has the glow and appeal of a fiery cross on a hillside at night. There will undoubtedly be robed figures who gather to it, but the hoods will not be academic. They will cover the face.”

And she reminds us of Buckley’s style:

In a famous exchange with Gore Vidal in 1968, Vidal said to Buckley: “As far as I am concerned, the only crypto Nazi I can think of is yourself.”

Buckley replied: “Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto Nazi, or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”

But will Ann Coulter someday get the same eulogies that Buckley is now getting?

Don’t think about Ezra Levant

 Bash the Messenger, First Amendment, Human rights  No Responses »
Feb 072008
 

An article by Lee Harris in The Weekly Standard got me to checking for the latest news on the Ezra Levant case in Canada.

Ezra Levant has a blog which he tells us is getting a lot of hits:

in the past month, I’ve had 152,000 “unique visitors” of whom 49,000 are “returning visitors”. According to Haloscan.com, I’ve had more than
1,500 comments. And then there’s the YouTube videos, 471,000 views amongst them.”

(That happens to be more hits than this blog gets.)

And a liberal MP (Keith Martin) has submitted a motion to remove the section of the Human Rights Code that allows the sort of inquisitions undergone by Levant and Mark Steyn. But it sounds as though his party has been pressuring him to withdraw it, though there are the usual denials, etc. News item about it here.

If you google for information about Ezra Levant, you will see that while this topic is getting a lot of attention in Canada, the U.S. news media are paying no attention to it. These would be the same news media types who attack Bush for his unilateralism and for ignoring world opinion. These would also be the same news media types who want us to look to Canada for lessons on how to handle health care.

I say it would be worth asking our presidential candidates about it. There are people clamoring for hate crime laws in the U.S. There are concerns about McCain’s attitude towards free speech. There are those who complained about Bush’s unilateralism, and those who threatened to move to Canada if Bush was re-elected in 2004. It would seem to be about as relevant an issue for discussion as you could find (and probably one a lot less boring than the usual gas about “change.”)

I’m going to go out on a limb here and make a prediction: The U.S. media will continue to ignore it and will NOT ask our presidential candidates about it.

Rosy assumptions

 Bash the Messenger  No Responses »
Feb 062008
 

Steven Pearlstein at the Washington Post writes:

I know what you’re thinking: “Please, not another federal budget story.” Who could blame you? It has become such a con game. The president sends Congress a budget that is immediately declared dead-on-arrival because of its rosy political and economic assumptions.

Um, no, that’s not why Congress declares these budgets dead-on-arrival.  Congresspersons may give that as a reason, but the same people are all full of rosy and political and economic assumptions for their own unrealistic ideas.  The president’s budget deserves to die for a number of reasons, but that’s no reason to believe what Bush’s opponents say.

Facts about facts

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Jan 292008
 

I can understand why the old media types dislike the internet. It’s a threat to their quasi-monopoly on utterance of news and opinion. But I’m not sure that explains this one .  Whatever it is that motivates the writer’s grumpiness, I was amused by this quote:

Information” is not the same thing as “fact”. But eventually, we forget the distinction and uncritically accept all information as truth.

We do?    We know for a fact that we do that?

Here to stay

 Bash the Messenger  No Responses »
Jan 282008
 

Kalamazoo Gazette sports writer Scott DeCamp did a piece marked “opinion” in which he wrote about what the new high school basketball schedules are doing to attendance. Girls’ basketball used to be in the fall; now it has been mandated that it should be in the winter, same as the boys’. It’s for equity’s sake, I guess.

One downside has been that attendance is down, mostly for the girls’ games and somewhat for boys’ games, too. The problem for grandparents and others is that it’s just too much basketball all at the same time, so they have to pick and choose.

The coach he interviewed for the article says the old way was working fine, so why mess with it?

Then comes the sleazy part:

My opinon–one that Kevin Langs [the coach] agrees with, by the way — is that like it or not, the new seasons are here to stay. Michigan’s way of conducting high school sports in the past may have been better than other states, but that doesn’t matter now.

Well, if it doesn’t matter, why did the writer bring it up? And after the coach gave his opinion, why did he promise to give his own, and then weasel out of it by saying “it’s here to stay”. That’s not an opinion on whether or not it’s a good thing. And why is he progosticating about the future and pretending not to be a participant in determining what that future is going to be?

We used to have a congressman who pulled that stunt whenever he was asked, “do you favor a change in X.” His response: “It’s not going to happen in this Congress.” And the media would never challenge him by pointing out that that is hardly an answer to the question.

Now we have the media doing similar ploys.

Here’s the URL for the article.

Double standard

 Bash the Messenger  No Responses »
Jan 242008
 

It makes one wonder if people are so used to saying “Double standard for women” that they’ve forgotten what it actually means.

It’s in a newspaper article (as opposed to a news article) in Wednesday’s Kalamazoo Gazette titled, “Big girls do cry.” A woman who is identified as “vice mayor of Kalamazoo and economics professor at Kalamazoo College” is quoted as saying:

I think there is a double standard for women. Women can’t be too emotional in public, and yet if they appear unemotional, then they are characterized in a very negative fashion.

Usually “double standard for women” means one standard gets applied to women and another to men. But in this particular case, how would it be any different for a man?

I suspect somebody’s brain was on autopilot.

Oh, well, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that the Gazette found an excuse to spend almost a full page puffing Hillary Clinton for president, without her having to spend a dime of her campaign dollars on it.

And I look forward to seeing the same people who spend so much time writing about Hillary’s tears the next time there is a Clinton scandal. Then they can bemoan all those distractions from the real issues facing America.

Noble savage

 Bash the Messenger, Epistemology  No Responses »
Jan 222008
 

I don’t want to admit to being a reader of Time magazine, but I saw this in the lunchroom at work, honest!

Cover story:  “What makes us Good/Evil.  Humans are the planet’s most noble creatures–and its most savage.  Science is discovering why.”    (Link to article here.)

My, oh my. Where to start?

How do they come by this idea that humans are the planet’s most noble creatures?    Sez who?   I’ll bet it’s not science that determines what is noble and what is not.  And why is noble contrasted with savage?  Why can’t someone be both?   And why is “evil” conflated with “savage”?

I think I’ll just shake my head and move on.

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