JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS

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Friday, December 13, 2002
 
Swing and a miss
I just watched Trent Lott's press conference, and my reaction is: pretty lame. It would have been an acceptable speech by Lott, had it been given the day this story broke. As a first apology, it might have seemed sincere. But now? Come on. He's learning as he gets older? What's that? He's sixty years old.

It was extremely reminiscent of Bob Torricelli's farewell speech, minus the farewell. When you're admitting you screwed up, and are begging for forgiveness, it's not the appropriate time to demand credit for good things you've done in the past. "I'm sorry I forgot our anniversary, honey. For the fifth year in a row. But, you know, I've worked hard to make sure I take out the trash every week and clean out the gutters."

And he's still "apologizing to those who got that impression," and apologizing for his "word choice," instead of admitting that he actually said something wrong. Now, I don't expect him to say, "I'm racist," whether he is or isn't. But couldn't he acknowledge that the words themselves were? He started off strong, condemning segregation, but then he acted as if he were just a poor, misunderstood individual.


What I find amusing is that Tom Daschle, Paul Simon (the former senator, not the singer), and James Jeffords, liberals, have come out in support of Lott. It seems that the Old Boy's Club is stronger than any ideology. Most Republican/conservative commentators that I've read, particularly online, including but not limited to James Taranto, Andrew Sullivan, Jonah Goldberg, Charles Krauthammer, David Frum, and Bill Kristol, have come out against Lott, but his buddies are standing by him.

 
Two out of three ain't bad
Just heard on the news: Henry Kissinger has just resigned as head of the independent commission set up to investigate 9/11. Earlier today, Cardinal Law resigned his post as archbishop of the Boston Archdiocese, and the Pope accepted his resignation. And in a few minutes, Trent Lott is scheduled to hold a press conference over his outrageous comments, but CNN is reporting that he won't step down.

(Actually, I don't necessarily have an opinion on the Kissinger resignation yet, but I couldn't resist the headline.)

Thursday, December 12, 2002
 
Didn't see that one coming
Exhibit A in Why Trent Lott Needs To Go: Bob Herbert's column in today's New York Times. It's entirely predictable, entirely dangerous, and very simple: Republicans are all racist. Trent Lott proves it.
But Mr. Lott is not the only culprit here. The Republican Party has become a haven for white racist attitudes and anti-black policies. The party of Lincoln is now a safe house for bigotry. It's the party of the Southern strategies and the Willie Horton campaigns and Bob Jones University and the relentless and unconscionable efforts to disenfranchise black voters. For those who now think the Democratic Party is not racist enough, the answer is the G.O.P. And there are precious few voices anywhere in the G.O.P. willing to step up and say that this is wrong.

[...]

There are calls now for the ouster of Trent Lott as the Senate Republican leader. I say let him stay. He's a direct descendant of the Dixiecrats and a first-rate example of what much of his party has become.

Keep him in plain sight. His presence is instructive. As long as we keep in mind that it isn't only him.
Okay, I misspoke earlier. Republicans aren't all racist. Just most of them. "Much" of the Republican party wants to return to segregated schools, in Bob Herbert's mind.

And why should those of us who aren't Republicans care? Because Herbert also says this:
Much of the current success of the Republican Party was built on the deliberate exploitation of very similar sentiments. One of the things I remember about Mr. Reagan's 1980 presidential run was that his first major appearance in the general election campaign was in Philadelphia, Miss., which just happened to be the place where three civil rights workers — Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney — were murdered in 1964.

During that appearance, Mr. Reagan told his audience, "I believe in states' rights."

Enough said.
Yes, enough said. As long as people like Trent Lott are spewing their idiocies, perfectly legitimate principles such as federalism will be tarred with the racism brush, either by demagogues like Al Gore or by people like Bob Herbert who are too dumb to know better. Republicans are never going to win over black voters on issues like affirmative action, but there is common ground -- school vouchers, the elimination of the death tax -- on which they could work. But not as long as Trent Lott is one of the major faces of the Republican party. It's not like he's some sort of genius; if he were, he wouldn't be in this mess. He's replaceable. And Republicans need to replace him, yesterday.

Tuesday, December 10, 2002
 
Like a kid in a candy store
You're walking along the street. Suddenly, a bag filled with hundred dollar bills falls from the sky at your feet. Whoopee! Paul Krugman is acting as if he's that lottery winner right now. For a couple of years, he has been bashing Republicans as evil liars who are out to destroy the country. Now, thanks to Trent Lott's idiocy, Krugman gets to call all Republicans racist. He's been chomping at the bit for years to claim that opposition to excessive government was the equivalent of joining the KKK, and Trent Lott handed him his own head on a silver platter.

And even so, Krugman couldn't resist overreaching in a desperate attempt to smear all Republicans:
Indeed, this year efforts to suppress nonwhite votes were remarkably blatant. There were those leaflets distributed in black areas of Maryland, telling people they couldn't vote unless they paid back rent; there was the fuss over alleged ballot fraud in South Dakota, clearly aimed at suppressing Native American votes. Topping it off was last Saturday's election in Louisiana, in which the Republican Party hired black youths to hold signs urging their neighbors not to vote for Mary Landrieu.
Say what? Accusing people who commit fraud of fraud is "an effort to suppress nonwhite votes?" Asking people not to vote for one's opponent is "an effort to suppress nonwhite votes?" Next Krugman will complain that Republicans have to all stop buying campaign ads, because these ads are insidious attempts to get people to vote against the Democrats.

Anyway, even if Krugman thinks the media isn't playing up the Trent Lott story enough, that will probably change tomorrow, now that Al Gore has weighed in. He thinks the Senate needs to censure Trent Lott for his racist statement. (Incidentally, I didn't hear Gore suggesting that the Congress censure David Bonior, Jim McDermott, or Mike Thompson for their pro-Saddam Hussein comments in Baghdad. Which is worse: supporting a murderous dictator, or supporting a guy for segregationist views when he himself abandoned those views decades ago?)

I don't know whether Trent Lott is a racist. But if he's not, he's a jackass who's doing a damn good job of faking it. And if he is, well, that speaks for itself. Apologizing isn't enough; he has singlehandedly driven a stake through the "compassionate" side of "compassionate conservatism." I don't know that he needs to leave the Senate, but I don't think the Republican party can afford to keep him in a leadership role anymore. Sorry, Trent, but as Ari Fleischer tried to warn you last year, "Americans need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that; there never is."

 
I'll drink to that
In an article attempting to lightheartedly portray the prevalence of alcohol in Iraq, the New York Times slips in these comments about how things have changed:
After his defeat in the Persian Gulf war in 1991, he was an isolated figure, no longer credible as a pretender to the leadership of the Arab world. His 1996 "iman" campaign — the word means faith in Arabic — was one response. He began showing up more regularly at mosques and suffusing his speeches with Koranic references, and in the late 1990's he ordered the construction of two new Baghdad mosques that are to be the biggest in the Islamic world, one to be named after himself.

Deviations from Islamic social norms also caught his eye. According to Western human rights reports, one result of the faith campaign that has gained increasing momentum in the last year has involved the arrest and summary execution of prostitutes, some of them by sword.

The 1996 ban on drinking in public places was another result. Iraqis say its most obvious effect, apart from the closure of bars and pubs, has been the proliferation of speakeasies and a sharp rise in drinking at home.
Hmm. Remember all the anti-war types who insist that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda couldn't possibly have any dealings because Hussein is secular and Al Qaeda is religious?

 
Garbage in, garbage out
Great article by Joshua Kurlantzick in The New Republic arguing that the Chinese economic boom is a myth, and that the real conditions of the economy are very different than those reported in the media. The article focuses on the implications for American businesses and American foreign policy if the hype turns out to be false, but the part that caught my eye was the explanation:
How could Rawski's numbers differ so much from Beijing's? The primary explanation is that China's national economic statistics, which are compiled from provincial data, have no safeguards against political meddling. When the central government declares its growth targets early in a year-- in 1998, for example, Beijing announced that 8 percent annual growth was "a political responsibility"--provincial officials simply make up numbers to substantiate them. "China's statistics are based on a Soviet-type system where each town and province reports figures, rather than having a national organization do the reports, and many local officials I have met feel intense pressure to meet targets," says Joe Studwell, editor of the China Economic Quarterly. In 2001 alone, according to the government's own State Statistical Bureau, there were over 60,000 reported falsifications of provincial data.

Other prominent economists share Rawski's doubts about China's reported growth rates. Leading Chinese economist and writer He Qinglian told me that, in 2000 and 2001, she traveled around southern China, stopping into provincial officials' offices. When she asked them for their provincial GDP statistics and their methodologies, many were unable to provide either; when they did provide them, the numbers almost never added up.

In private, and when speaking to certain domestic reporters, even China's leaders admit the fix is in. When Rawski and other leading economists chat with official statisticians in Beijing, they often hear that no one in the government believes recent GDP numbers.
It's good news if that's true in Beijing, but many people outside the Chinese government swallow these sorts of numbers credulously.

This points out a larger problem: people tend to believe statistics, no matter how flimsily those statistics are supported, if the statistics coincide with their world view. I was watching Phil Donahue yesterday -- yes, one of the four or five people who did -- in yet another of his endless series of programs attempting to prove how supporting Saddam Hussein is the moral thing to do, and one of his guests trotted out the old sanctions-killing-billions-of-Iraqi-babies canard. Phil Donahue echoed his approval, pointing out that these were U.N. numbers, so they had to be believed. Now, Matt Welch has already thoroughly debunked this statistic, but that's not the point. The point is the total willingness of the speaker, the host, and the audience to believe these numbers, just because some organization published them, with no investigation of how the numbers were calculated. In my own experience, I can't count the number of defenders of Fidel Castro I've run into who cite his great successes with literacy, infant mortality, and universal health care as "proof" of the superiority of socialism to the American system. I always wonder exactly how these people become so convinced of these numbers. Saddam Hussein claims a 100% re-election rate, and nobody takes him seriously. But Fidel Castro claims a 99% literacy rate, and people proclaim him a genius. So now people are doing the same with China.