From http://OpinionJournal.com

Best of the Web Today - January 21, 2002
By JAMES TARANTO
Left-Wing Rag or Right-Wing Gag?

On Friday, acting on a tip from reader Gregory Brunt, we noted that The Nation had published an article on its Web site by  Matt Bivens  http://opinionjournal.com/best/?id=95001749#matt , the very first sentence of which contained a major factual error:

*** QUOTE ***

When George W. Bush co-owned the Houston Astros and construction began on a new stadium, Kenneth Lay agreed to spend $100 million over thirty years for rights to name the park after Enron.

*** END QUOTE ***

Bush, of course, was part-owner of the Texas Rangers, not the Astros. Almost immediately after we published Friday's column, The Nation fixed the error. Or at least it tried. As  The Weekly Standard  http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/000/804gwezk.asp  notes, here's how the modified sentence read:

*** QUOTE ***

When George W. Bush co-owned the Texas Rangers and construction began on a new stadium, Kenneth Lay agreed to spend $100 million over thirty years for rights to name the park after Enron.

*** END QUOTE ***

Alas for The Nation, this was no more accurate.  Enron Field  http://www.ballparks.com/baseball/national/bpkaus.htm  is where the Astros play; the Rangers' home is the  Ballpark in Arlington  http://www.ballparks.com/baseball/american/bpkarl.htm , which has no corporate sponsor. Bivens also screwed up the chronology. Bush sold his interest in the Rangers in 1998; Enron bought naming rights to the Astros' new stadium in 1999. So an accurate version of Bivens's lead would have read:

*** QUOTE ***

A year after George W. Bush sold his interest in the Texas Rangers, construction began on a new stadium for the Houston Astros, and Kenneth Lay agreed to spend $100 million over thirty years for rights to name the latter team's park after Enron.

*** END QUOTE ***

That, of course, does not reflect badly--or indeed, in any way at all--on President Bush, though the incident reflects terribly on the bush-league journalism they practice at The Nation. Apparently the magazine's editors agree; by Saturday afternoon the Bivens piece had disappeared from their Web site (though the  modified version  http://www.thenation.com/cgi-bin/htsearch?config=&restrict=&exclude=&method=and&format=builtin-long&sort=score&words=houston+astros  still shows up in The Nation's search engine).

We all make mistakes, but this is only the latest in a string of staggeringly stupid stumbles by Nation editors and writers that we've chronicled in recent months:
- Katrina vanden Heuvel  http://opinionjournal.com/best/?id=95000919#katrina , editor-in-chief of this political magazine, appeared on national television and could not name her own congressman.
-Columnist  Eric Alterman  http://opinionjournal.com/best/?id=95000740#eric  apparently borrowed a phrase from George Will in 1989--then, 12 years later, accused Will of plagiarizing him.
-Just two weeks after Sept. 11, columnist  Katha Pollitt  http://opinionjournal.com/best/?id=95001214#katha  wrote a piece in which she boasted of her contempt for the American flag.

How could anyone be this dumb? Well, remember David Brock? Back in the early '90s he was the star reporter for The American Spectator, a conservative magazine. He turned out to be a liberal saboteur, and, as erstwhile Spectatorian  Byron York  http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/11/york.htm  reported recently in The Atlantic Monthly, he ended up all but destroying the Spectator. Is it possible that The Nation, that venerable left-wing magazine, has been infiltrated by right-wing moles who are acting like idiots in an effort to discredit the left?

We'd like to go on the record opposing this kind of deception. If vanden Heuvel, Alterman, Pollitt, et al. really are right-wingers, they should come clean and engage their ideological opponents in an honest debate. This sort of deception is juvenile and contemptible, and it's especially inappropriate now. After all, there's a war on.

noted Thursday  http://opinionjournal.com/best/?id=95001739#krugman  a curious report in the New York Times that Times columnist Paul Krugman had once received $50,000 for serving on an Enron "advisory board."  Andrew Sullivan  http://andrewsullivan.com/  smells scandal. But he's overreacting. Based on what we know so far, Krugman's conduct looks foolish but not unethical.

Sullivan has done a manful job of trying to come up with an ethical transgression, unearthing an article Krugman wrote for  Fortune  http://www.wws.princeton.edu/%7Epkrugman/eman.html  while still on the Enron payroll in 1999. It's a puff piece on Enron, and it stands in sharp contrast with Krugman's current views on the subject, most notably  his column of last Friday  http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/18/opinion/18KRUG.html  (Times links require registration), in which he rails against the company as a symbol of the corruption of American capitalism.

But whatever the merits of Krugman's views, before or after the turn of the century, he does seem to have complied with the rules of journalistic ethics. He disclosed his relationship with Enron in the Fortune piece and again in a  January 2001 Times column  http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/24/opinion/24KRUG.html . When he joined the Times as a columnist in 1999, he gave up the Enron gig, as the Times' conflict-of-interest policy requires.

Sullivan thinks Krugman should also have disclosed the amount of his fee, for "being on an advisory board need not be a source of payment." This seems an exceedingly picayune point, especially for someone who styles himself the scourge of " gotcha journalism  http://thenewrepublic.com/070901/trb070901.html ." Does anyone serve on an advisory board for a for-profit company without compensation? In any case, Sullivan's beef here ought to be not with Krugman but with his editors at Fortune and the Times, who surely knew enough to ask about the fee and insist on disclosure if they thought it necessary.

Krugman's own defense  http://www.wws.princeton.edu/%7Epkrugman/enron.html  is awfully, well, defensive, though at least his self-esteem seems healthy:

*** QUOTE ***

I was not an unknown college professor. On the contrary, I was a hot property, very much in demand as a speaker to business audiences: I was routinely offered as much as $50,000 to speak to investment banks and consulting firms. They thought I might tell them something useful. For what it's worth, Citibank officials said--you can check it out with a Nexis search--that a heads-up I gave them in 1996 about the risks of an Asian currency crisis saved them hundreds of millions of dollars.

*** END QUOTE ***

"Hot property" or not, Krugman does look quite silly thumping his chest about " crony capitalism  http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/15/opinion/15KRUG.html " when he himself has benefited from it and was cheering for today's villains less than three years ago. But being silly has never, as far as we know, disqualified anyone from writing a column for the New York Times.

Medal of Dishonor for America West  http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020119-79003878.htm

Joseph Foss got hassled by security guards at Phoenix's Sky Harbor International Airport last week. These days that's nothing unusual, but Foss is 86. He is a former governor of South Dakota and a retired Marine general. And what made the crack security staff for  America West  http://www.americawest.com/  suspicious was the Medal of Honor he earned in 1943 for his service in the Pacific theater.

"I was held up for 45 minutes, while they decided what to do about the medal," Foss tells the Washington Times. "I almost missed my flight, as they went back and forth." Foss earned the medal for shooting down 26 enemy planes. Good thing he didn't tell the guards that, or they'd never have let him fly.

Yasser, That's the Ticket--III  http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=119598

Secretary of State Colin Powell "made a renewed demand on Sunday that Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat explain the arms shipment intercepted by the [Israeli Defense Force] in the Red Sea on January 3," the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reports. Pretty tough talk, there, Colin. What'll he do next, threaten to hold his breath until Yasser fesses up?

Actually, Arafat has an explanation: "The Karine A was operated by an Israeli company importing building materials from Romania," Arafat told Egyptian television, according to the  Jerusalem Post  http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2002/01/20/LatestNews/LatestNews.41965.html . In the Saudi daily  Arab News  http://www.arabnews.com/Article.asp?ID=12130 , meanwhile, Abdul Rahman Al-Rashid offers this advice for the Palestinian Arab strongman:

*** QUOTE ***

Arafat should have handled the issue as the former American President Bill Clinton did regarding his involvement with Monica Levinsky [sic]. While admitting that he had some kind of relationship with the girl, Clinton denied having had illicit relations with her. Thus he brought half the issue under control. He did not deny all the charges but neither did he tell the whole truth.

*** END QUOTE ***

OK, guys, these are improving--but  our readers' explanations  http://opinionjournal.com/columnists/jtaranto/?id=95001721  are still funnier.

Where's Churchill When You Need Him?  http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=11553940&method=full

It's just sad to see what's happened to the British. The orgy of vulgar sentimentality after Princess Diana's death a few years back made us suspect that the land of the stiff upper lip had somehow turned into a nation of hysterical ninnies. Now we're sure of it, notwithstanding even Tony Blair's resolute support in the terror war.

The U.S. military released some photos of terrorist captives at Guamtanamo Bay--a group that apparently includes three British citizens--and the sob sisters in the British press went into a frenzy of outrage. The Mirror, a London-based tabloid, shrieks that the "barbaric treatment" of the prisoners "is no more than a sick attempt to appeal to the worst red-neck prejudices." That must be why they're getting bagels and cream cheese.

The folks at the  BBC  http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_1771000/1771687.stm  were more restrained, but the message was the same. In a dispatch last night titled "Prison Camp Pictures Spark Protests," the network reports: "The US Government has released photographs of the Taleban and al-Qaeda suspects held at its prison camp in Cuba which show them being subjected to sensory deprivation. . . . The chief medical officer of the human rights group, Amnesty International, Jim West, said the photographs were reminiscent of torture methods used in eastern Europe in the 1970s."

A  BBC report  http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk_politics/newsid_1773000/1773143.stm  from this afternoon, however, tells a different story:

*** QUOTE ***

The three British al-Qaeda suspects being held at Camp X-Ray in Cuba have "no complaints" about their treatment, according to British officials who have seen them.

The three are in "good physical health" and are being treated well, they reported.

*** END QUOTE ***

Oh well, never mind.

Big Man on Campus  http://www.miami.com/herald/content/news/national/digdocs/106181.htm

The Miami Herald reports from Gitmo that "a beefy, one-legged inmate tried to use Muslim prayer time to unite his fellow al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners." Military police "observed the prisoner facing the wrong way during Muslim prayer and chanting in Arabic what a linguist translated as, 'Be strong. Allah will save us.' " Army Capt. Luis Hernandez "described the one-legged prisoner as 'fat and strong' while 'the little kids are coming very skinny.' "

Onward? Not This Christian Soldier.  http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk_politics/newsid_1771000/1771086.stm

Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Wales, is denouncing the war on terrorism as "tainted." In an essay reprinted in today's  Guardian  http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,636690,00.html , he suggests that the American campaign in Afghanistan is morally equivalent to the attack on the World Trade Center:

*** QUOTE ***

It is just possible to deplore civilian casualties and retain moral credibility when an action is clearly focused and its goals are on the way to evident achievement. It is not possible when the strategy appears confused and political leaders talk about a "war" that may last years. And there is a fine line between, for example, the crippling of military and aircraft installations and the devastating of an infrastructure with a half-formed aim of destroying morale. Combine that with the use of anti-personnel weapons such as cluster bombs, which ought to raise some serious questions (they have been described as aerial landmines in terms of their randomly lethal character), and the whole enterprise is tainted.

Tainted, because as soon as assaults on public morale by allowing random killing as a matter of calculated policy become part of a military strategy, we are at once vulnerable to the charge that there is no moral difference in kind between our military action and the terror that it attacks.

*** END QUOTE ***

Williams is not so much turning the other cheek as being two-faced. He tells the  Telegraph  http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/01/21/narch21.xml  that he didn't really mean that America is guilty of terrorism:

*** QUOTE ***

The 51-year-old Primate of Wales agreed that terrorism was an evil that had to be rooted out, but said: "I don't think you root out terrorism by reproducing its methods. And that's always the danger if we respond in some ways hastily.

"I didn't say that the American campaign was morally equivalent to terrorism, just that there were certain possible tactics in that campaign which would leave them open to that charge."

*** END QUOTE ***

Williams also writes (in a passage quoted by the Telegraph but not reprinted in the Guardian) that he was near ground zero on Sept. 11, and "I know just a little of what it is like for so many human beings--Israelis and Palestinians now, and Iraqis a few years ago." How about Americans?

Anthrax Breakthrough?  http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/01/21/anthrax.probe/index.html

"Investigators appear to be on the verge of cracking the genetic sequencing of the anthrax strain that has killed five Americans since the fall," CNN reports. "Discovering the genetic sequencing could reveal the age of the deadly strain sent in the letters and may lead investigators to the laboratory or laboratories where it was produced, sources said."
 
The  Hartford Courant  http://www.ctnow.com/news/specials/hc-detrick0120.artjan20.story?coll=hc-headlines-home  reports that anthrax specimens disappeared from the Army's biological- warfare research facility at Fort Detrick, Md., in the early 1990s, "during a turbulent period of labor complaints and recriminations among rival scientists there." A 1992 Army inquiry "found evidence that someone was secretly entering a lab late at night to conduct unauthorized research, apparently involving anthrax. A numerical counter on a piece of lab equipment had been rolled back to hide work done by the mystery researcher, who left the misspelled label 'antrax' in the machine's electronic memory, according to the documents obtained by The Courant."

The Courant adds that "Fort Detrick is believed to be the original source of the Ames strain of anthrax used in the mail attacks last fall."

Huh?  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9869-2002Jan20.html

Bill Clinton was in Saudi Arabia over the weekend, and the Washington Post reports he weighed in against withdrawing U.S. troops from the corrupt and repressive kingdom. The Post's report contains three quotes from the peripatetic past prez:

*** QUOTE ***

"There are not so many [U.S. military] people here as to constitute a sort of occupation or anything like that. That's not the purpose of it."

"It is correct to say it is not just in this region. We have systems in the military. We review everything every four years and then they [the Saudis] have systems within every four-year period to review other things."

"Look at our forces in Asia and even in Latin America. It is a function of what we might be asked to do and being able to do it by having some people there physically present."

*** END QUOTE ***

These quotes are remarkable, of course, for the absence of first-person singular pronouns. But can anyone figure out what the heck Clinton is saying?

Somali Folly  http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20020118/en/black_hawk_down_boycott_1.html

Somali-American "community leaders" in Minneapolis--home of America's biggest concentration of Somali immigrants--are calling for a boycott of " Black Hawk Down  http://www.spe.sony.com/movies/blackhawkdown/ ," "charging the new movie depicts their African homeland's people as savages and could create a backlash against refugees who fled to the United States," the Associated Press reports.

"The Somali people are depicted as very savage beasts without any human element," Omar Jamal of the St. Paul-based Somali Justice Advocacy Center, tells the AP. "I's just people shooting each other.''

People shooting each other? In a war movie? This is shocking! It's not totally unheard of, though. A few years ago, we went to see "Saving Private Ryan," and it, too, featured people shooting each other. How come German-Americans didn't boycott?

Stupidity Watch  http://www.industryclick.com/magazinearticle.asp?magazineid=17&releaseid=9774&magazinearticleid=138367&siteid=5

National Hog Farmer ("The Pork Business Authority") reports that RFK's son has gone off the deep end:

*** QUOTE ***

In the mind of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., corporate pork production is a greater threat to American life and liberty than terrorist Osama bin Laden.

"This threat is greater than that in Afghanistan," says Kennedy. "This is not only a threat to the environment, it is a threat to the American economy and democracy."

*** END QUOTE ***

Kennedy told a crowd of "anti-agriculture activists and college students" that "closing the last family farm is like tearing out the last pages of the last Bible, Torah or Talmud." Why, we wonder, didn't he mention the Koran?

Several readers took issue with our  Friday smiting  http://opinionjournal.com/best/?id=95001749#stupidity  of Paul Campos over his phrase tofu Taliban. We take the point, which Jeff Arnett put best:

*** QUOTE ***

While I generally concur with you when you identify the overzealous and wrongheaded among us who compare the tactics of the murderous Taliban to irritating but otherwise rather innocuous behaviors, I think a little context is sometimes in order.

You describe Paul Campos's little diatribe as "preposterously overwrought." If he were being totally serious, I'd agree. But it seems in this more tongue-in-cheek context, the humor he's injected makes this comparison no more egregious than the infamous "Soup Nazi" character from the old Seinfeld television series: a metaphor that everyone understood was never meant to be taken literally, so it was perceived as hysterically funny at the time.

Have things changed so much that we've lost our sense of humor? If so, perhaps the terrorists have won . . . heh, heh, heh!

*** END QUOTE ***

This House Isn't a Home
In a  Friday item  http://opinionjournal.com/best/?id=95001749#notnice , we got Robin Cook's title wrong. He is Britain's leader of the house, not home secretary.

This Army Isn't an Army  http://www.oaklandtribune.com/Stories/0,1002,1865%257E343418%257E82%257E,00.html

"Attorneys Seek Bail for Ex-SLA Soldiers," reads a headline in Friday's Oakland (Calif.) Tribune. Apparently the folks at the Trib think the Symbionese Liberation Army was an actual army, rather than a terrorist organization.

Homelessness Rediscovery Watch

*** QUOTE ***

"If George W. Bush becomes president, the armies of the homeless, hundreds of thousands strong, will once again be used to illustrate the opposition's arguments about welfare, the economy, and taxation."-- Mark Helprin  http://opinionjournal.com/columnists/mhelprin/?id=65000507 , Oct. 31, 2000

"The current recession comes on top of a nationwide backlash against the homeless, who, even as their numbers grow to alarming new levels, face diminished forms of public relief and a multitude of laws against panhandling and living on the streets. So it is a pleasure to announce that the homeless, who have so little else, have at least gained, in Kenneth L. Kusmer's excellent 'Down and Out, On the Road,' a history of their own."-- Barbara Ehrenreich  http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/20/books/review/20EHRENRT.html , New York Times book review (link requires registration), Jan. 20, 2002

*** END QUOTE ***

They Must've Mistaken Him for Malcolm  http://www.registerguard.com/news/20020119/1b.cr.linesonly.0119.html

A photo caption in the Eugene (Ore.) Register-Guard reads:

*** QUOTE ***

Pat Adi, a local Muslim, shows artwork of Arabic script as part of Jefferson Middle School's annual Martin Luther King celebration on Friday. The school added a Middle Eastern flavor with a question-and-answer session including a panel of Muslim-Americans, a cultural presentation from students from Turkey and Yemen, and even a Middle Eastern cooking demonstration

*** END QUOTE ***

Gee, we could've sworn Dr. King was a Christian.

(Elizabeth Crowley helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to David Merrill, Don Yoder, Gregory Taylor, Allan Toole, Roger Mason, Ed Toole, Greg Johnson, Michael Segal, Joseph Teichman, Yehuda Hilewitz, S.E. Brenner, C.E. Dobkin, George Lenz, Damian Bennett, Ed Miseta, Brian Herrick, Rick Cornfeld, Jerry Skurnik, Robert Clucas, Kevin Whited and Kenneth McKenna. If you have a tip, write us at  Review & Outlook  mailto:opinionjournal@wsj.com : Human Rights Watch slanders America, undermines its own cause (link requires registration).
- Robert Bartley  http://opinionjournal.com/columnists/rbartley/?id=95001756 : I'm OK, you're OK. Enron's OK?
- Brendan Miniter  http://opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=95001754 : America needs genuine heroes, not generic ones.
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