PolitiFact Earns Its Own "Pants on Fire"

There was a time not long ago that PolitiFact, the fact-checking project initiated by the St. Petersburg Times, was widely and universally acclaimed. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009, and might well have deserved it. But that was back in those halcyon days when politicians of both parties at least pretended to care about the truth.

Since then, three things have happened. I suspect they’re not unrelated, although teasing out the causal links is a little more than my feeble brain can handle, at least at present.

• 1. News sources have become increasingly polarized—not partisan, necessarily, but locked into a narrative that is seldom shaken even with facts. The corollary to this point is that an increasing number of Americans get their news from sources that make only token attempts at objectivity (cough… FoxNews… cough).

• 2. Largely because of the Tea Party—the largest ever assemblage of misinformed knuckle-draggers—the lunatic fringe of the Right has become mainstream in the GOP. This isn’t to say that the left is devoid of loonies, but they still tend to be thought of as outsiders. There is no liberal counterpart to Glenn Beck, to Michele Bachmann, to Louis Gohmert. Are there progressives that stupid and that crazy? Sure. But they don’t get the platforms of their right-wing brethren.

• 3. It’s become Amateur Hour at PolitiFact. Despite great bluster and pseudo-solemnity from the PF muckety-mucks, it is certainly true that they apply different standards to different claims. I talked about this phenomenon in June, wondering “when PolitiFact got into the implications business. They sometimes consider a statement based on its literal truth, sometimes (apparently) on what someone might think it implies. Sometimes they give a speaker the benefit of the doubt as to what s/he might have meant….”

In April, I somewhat presciently called attention to what I called a “particularly inept” analysis of claims that the Paul Ryan budget plan would “eliminate Medicare.”

Why “prescient,” you ask? Well, the incompetent, misleading, illogical pronouncement that Democratic claims about the Ryan plan merited a “Pants on Fire” rating (to be fair, the ads weren’t exactly above reproach) served as the foundation for declaring those Democratic assertions the “Lie of the Year” for 2011. I call Bullshit.

There are several parts to this story. Let’s start with the original analysis itself. PolitiFact “rulings” (yes, that’s their term for it—they take themselves, if not their work, very seriously) tend to be anonymous. This one is. The author, whoever he or she may be, grants that the Ryan plan would be “a huge change” and “a dramatic change of course,” and that “seniors would have to pay more for their health plans if it becomes law.” But s/he takes issue with the characterization of “ending” Medicare, calling it “a major exaggeration.” This is interesting terminology, by the way, because even if true this wouldn’t qualify for “Pants on Fire” status, let alone “Lie of the Year.”

The PF Pundit (let’s call him/her something non-gender specific, like “Moe,” which could be short for Maurice or Maureen, and has the advantage of identifying the writer as a Stooge… no offense to my friend Mo—no “e”—who is anything but stupid) sniffs that “Democrats, including Obama, have said the plan would end Medicare ‘as we know it,’ a critical qualifier. But the 30-second ad from the DCCC makes a sweeping claim without that important qualifier.” So we’re basing the decision for Lie of the Year not on an actual lie repeated ad nauseum (e.g., “The economic stimulus created ‘zero jobs.’”).

No, Moe—and Moe’s masters—decided that a single, arguably accurate, statement in a single web ad ought to be the centerpiece for our collective indignation. (Be it noted, other Democrats have echoed the claim, but nowhere near to the extent of all the “failed stimulus” crap that passes for objective analysis in the corporate media. And the original article takes issue only with a single web ad.) Let’s face it, if the concession that Democrats in general aren’t really making the “exaggerated” claim isn’t enough, then the fact that under the Ryan plan Medicare would pay for only 32% of seniors’ health-care costs by 2030 (and get worse from there) isn’t going to matter to ol’ Moe. By the way, the link I provided here isn’t to some commie pinko website; it’s to the official report of the Congressional Budget Office.

Moe then whinges that the DCCC ad in question “claims that participants would have to find $12,500 to pay for Medicare.” Two points. First, Moe, if you’re going to get all pissy about minor details of accuracy, you might notice that the ad says “health care,” not Medicare. The Dems are saying the GOP is ending Medicare, remember? Really, Moe, try to keep up. Secondly, the claim is absolutely, unequivocally, factually true. Nowhere in the ad is there any claim that seniors will have to spend $12,500 more. If I’m contemplating buying a new house and tell my friend that I’m worried about finding $1700 a month in mortgage payments, I shouldn’t have to footnote my remarks by saying that I’m already paying half of that. Moe’s argument is unadulterated bovine feces.

Ah, but Moe isn’t done: “Still another problem with the ad involves who’s immediately affected by the Republican proposal. In one scene, the ad shows a senior citizen pushing a walker behind a lawn mower. A teenager looking on eats an apple and says, ‘You missed a spot.’ In reality, people 55 and older won’t see changes under the Ryan plan.” Seriously, Moe? That’s what you’ve got? Perhaps, just perhaps, the scene in the ad is intended to take place in a (thank God) fictional future… when people a couple of years younger than I (my wife, for example) are trying to figure out how to stay alive because Paul Ryan won’t tax his fatcat friends at the rate they paid under the sainted Reagan. Indeed, the entire ad can be taken as representing a “what would happen if…” scenario. No one believes the spot represents a literal representation of the present. I understand, Moe, that you can’t comprehend that line of reasoning. It requires the barest sliver of imagination, a quality that you and your masters evidently lack. Sorry, hallucinations don’t count.

Finally, there’s the utterly ridiculous claim that when the Republicans voted to end Medicare (as we know it), they didn’t really vote to end Medicare because it was a non-binding resolution. Moe, you crack me up. Seriously, that one idiot pseudo-journalist can go through this many contortions to justify an utterly absurd conclusion is really amusing. Or at least it would be if your organization didn’t have a little residual credibility: enough so that someone somewhere might think you have the integrity of snake-oil salesmen and/or intellectual superiority to a watermelon. We get it, they didn’t end Medicare. But that little dog and pony show they staged sure as hell included a vote on “a budget” (your description, Moe, not mine), and they sure as hell did vote as pretty little lockstep drones to radically reduce medical coverage for people who have been paying taxes for years.

Had it been a “real vote,” and been shot down in the Senate or vetoed by a President who’s pretty inept but not that brain-meltingly stupid, the pragmatic effect would have been precisely the same. Not sure if that would have satisfied Moe, however. And this, of course, is only the first salvo in the Republicans’ attacks on everyone not rich enough, scared enough, or stupid enough to sign on to their greed- and paranoia-induced assault on every social program that doesn’t benefit primarily those who don’t need the help.

Fast forward a few months. PolitiFact, as usual, announces its “Lie of the Year” voting. For at least two years in a row, the site’s viewers and editors/staff selected the same contender. In 2009, it was “Death panels,” capturing an impressive 61% of the vote against some pretty good competition (the birthers, for example). Last year, the readers and editors alike selected “A government takeover of health care,” with 44% of the readers’ votes, again against some pretty good whoppers (my personal favorite, that “94 percent of small businesses will face higher taxes under the Democrats' plan”—the actual number is under 3%—came in fourth).

This year’s finalists, in addition to the eventual winner:

• “President Obama ‘went around the world and apologized for America.’”

• “The Obama administration's review of obsolete regulations was ‘unprecedented.’”

• “The vaccine to prevent HPV can cause mental retardation.”

• “Abortion services are ‘well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.’” [this absurd claim by Jon Kyl was the actual subject of my April piece, linked above; this one, by the way, got my vote]

• “Because of more restrictive voting laws, Republicans ‘want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws.’”

• “Scientists are ‘questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change. … (It is) more and more being put into question.’”

• “Congressional Republicans have introduced dozens of bills on social issues and other topics, but ‘zero on job creation.’”

• “The economic stimulus created ‘zero jobs.’” [You didn’t think I’d pulled that example I used earlier out of thin air, did you, Gentle Reader?]

• “I didn't raise taxes once.” (President Obama)

A decent enough list, although some are merely poor choices of phrasing, others are pretty much insignificant, and others are so preposterous that no rational person would believe them (which after all, is what keeps Michele Bachmann at least marginally amusing instead of terrifying).

Two things out of the ordinary happened when the finalists were announced. First, the leftie blogosphere lit up about the stupidity of including a “100% True” statement as a contender for “Lie of the Year.” CrooksandLiars’ Susie Madrak wrote, “Capping costs to beneficiaries, closing the traditional fee-for-service program, and forcing seniors to enroll in new private coverage, ends Medicare by eliminating everything that has defined the program for the last 46 years.” In other words, “ending Medicare” isn’t far off the mark. At the very least, it falls under the category of unexceptional political hyperbole which, for example, declares the current President a socialist.

Secondly, Paul Ryan started soliciting supporters to stuff the ballot box, as it were, encouraging them to “Help me fight the lies, falsehoods, and attacks of the Left by casting a vote to show the Democrat’s lie that Republicans voted to ‘end Medicare’ is the worst political lie of 2011.”

Despite this anti-democratic (and anti-Democratic) maneuver, however, the actual readers of PolitiFact prevailed, and the “killing Medicare” claim came in only third, behind the “zero jobs” claim and the ridiculous distortion of Planned Parenthood’s priorities. So far, so good.

But, as you know, the editors over-rode the readers. This is troubling for a variety of reasons, not least because Bill Adair and Angie Drobnic Holan (they have names!) admit that even conservative think-tankers like Norman Ornstein agree that a slight tweak to the language of a handful of progressives would satisfy even him. Adair and Holan proceed to note that

At times, Democrats and liberal groups were careful to characterize the Republican plan more accurately. Another claim in the ad from the Agenda Project said the plan would “privatize” Medicare, which received a Mostly True rating from PolitiFact. President Barack Obama was also more precise with his words, saying the Medicare proposal “would voucherize the program and you potentially have senior citizens paying $6,000 more.”

In other words, even though more incendiary language has been employed, the de facto leader of Democrats wasn’t the one to do so.

Ah, but, quoth the PF morons, “more often, Democrats and liberals overreached.” More often? Evidence, please. You’re supposed to be freaking journalists. If your claim is true, back it up. If it isn’t, then, to steal a line I saw posted on Facebook today, off is the general direction in which I wish you would fuck. Adair and Holan then proceed to run through the same tired and unconvincing litany employed by our friend Moe in the original post. Oh, and they point out that other self-appointed incompetents “fact checkers” agree with them. Trouble is, they’re still wrong.

Steve Benen sums up the argument this way:

I’ve been trying to think of the best analogy for this. How about this one: imagine someone owns a Ferrari. It’s expensive and drives beautifully, and the owner desperately wants to keep his car intact. Now imagine I took the car away, removed the metallic badge off the trunk that says “Ferrari,” I stuck it on a golf cart, and I handed the owner the keys.

“Where’s my Ferrari?” the owner would ask.

“It’s right here,” I’d respond. “This has four wheels, a steering wheel, and pedals, and it says ‘Ferrari’ right there on the back.”

By PolitiFact’s reasoning, I haven’t actually replaced the car — and if you disagree, you’re a pants-on-fire liar.

Not bad. Medicare is more of a Toyota, and the Ryan plan a Yugo for the price of a Cadillac, but the point is still pretty clear.

Interestingly, Mark Hemingway at The Weekly Standard agrees:

Truthfully, the notion that Paul Ryan's plan will “end Medicare as we know it” is a fair assessment. The idea it flatly “ends Medicare” might be a bit too reductive, as there will still obviously be a federal program to help seniors get medical coverage and those currently over a certain age will be guaranteed to get Medicare as we know it. But broadly, I don't think it's a lie. In fact, “ending Medicare as we know it” is a good thing. The program is over $30 trillion in debt. Any politician who tells you that that they can preserve the program as it is and still get costs under control is probably lying to you. And I think Paul Ryan has basically been open about the fact that the status quo in Medicare must change.

See what he did, there? He calls the Dems’ claim “a bit too reductive,” then argues why Medicare as we know it should end. We can agree or disagree with his opinion (I personally think there should be some tightening of the belt in Medicare, but it is hardly the first place I’d go to reduce the federal deficit), but it is honest and thoughtful: two things PolitiFact is not.

The howling on the left, therefore, may be a trifle overwrought, but it is not without legitimacy. Paul Krugman, who I venture to say knows more about economic structures than Adair, Holan, Moe and me combined, agrees. He also writes that:

... the people at Politifact are terrified of being considered partisan if they acknowledge the clear fact that there’s a lot more lying on one side of the political divide than on the other. So they’ve bent over backwards to appear ‘balanced’—and in the process made themselves useless and irrelevant.

I’m not as ready as Mr. Krugman to ascribe motives to PolitiFact’s inane choice. There’s nothing inherently political about their decision—utterly unjustified, yes, but not necessarily political. Fact is, they’re just inept. An earlier piece by Hemingway, written just before instead of just after PolitiFact’s big announcement, demonstrates pretty clearly that they’re just as inept at criticizing the right as they are the left.

PolitiFact’s problem is that they started to believe their own press clippings. They got lazy, smug, and arrogant. They substituted sloth for research, acquiescence for skepticism, petulant defensiveness for argumentation. They aren’t fact-checkers at all—fact-checkers would understand that the denotative and connotative accuracy of a statement are often radically different. They would understand that an argument can be literally true but ultimately irrelevant: but that doesn’t make it anything less than true. They would understand that there’s a continuum between fact and opinion, and that the latter is almost always going to come into play: and the way to deal with that is to acknowledge it rather than pretend to a fallacious pseudo-objectivity. They would, in short, not be PolitiFact.

Did PolitiFact render themselves “useless and irrelevant”? Yes. But that, of course, is only my opinion.

NDAA, Take 2. What's Really In It?

The day after I posted my most recent piece, on the National Defense Authorization Act, I received a Facebook message from a reader who also happens to be a personal friend. He didn’t want to get into a public debate, he said, but he encouraged me to check out this article by Adam Serwer in Mother Jones. My friend continued, “And it's not as if Mother Jones is some right-wing outlet, either. If this was a Constitutional tragedy, MJ would be howling about it.” As it happened, I’d seen it, and, shortly thereafter, a similar essay by Wendy Gittleson on AddictingInfo and a rant by Milt Shook on AngryBlackLady.

Minor point first: I’m not convinced. Given a choice between Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian on the one hand and a couple of bloggers I’ve never heard of on the other, I find it difficult to come down hard on the side of the latter.

More importantly, as I fancy myself more interested in the ideas than in their proponents, even those who aren’t as appalled by the NDAA as I am are hardly enthusiastic. Serwer writes that the language of the bill “allows people who think the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force against the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks gives the president the authority to detain US citizens without charge or trial to say that.” Later he adds that “Codifying indefinite detention on American soil is a very dangerous step, and politicians who believe the military should have an even larger domestic counterterrorism role simply aren't going to be satisfied with this.” Gittleson calls the legislation “a stab to basic civil liberties, and possibly unconstitutional.” On PoliticsUSA, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, arguing that the legislation does not apply to Americans, nonetheless write, “Yes, NDAA was poorly written originally and even after the changes is a crappy bill.” These are the people, mind you, who argue that it isn’t as bad as some of us worry.

Moreover, whatever else may or may not be true, Serwer’s argument that the bill is more or less benign because “A last minute compromise amendment adopted in the Senate, whose language was retained in the final bill, leaves it up to the courts to decide if the president has that power [to indefinitely detain without trial an American citizen suspected of terrorism who is captured in the US], should a future president try to exercise it” is flat-out inane. The courts will always decide on the constitutionality of a law, but 1). to argue, as Serwer does, that this bill won’t provide current or future Presidents cover to over-reach is naïve to the point of absurdity, and 2). do you really want to entrust your civil rights to the Roberts court?

All that said, I might well be wrong; I certainly hope I am. And that, more than the specifics of the case, is what I want to talk about this time around: the fact that we’re about to get another piece of legislation about which intelligent people disagree. That contention, however, is not so much about whether the policies are appropriate: I’ve yet to see any positive commentary about the NDAA that isn’t either bellicose blathering or a milquetoast assertion that it isn’t as bad as it might have been (“the version the President is going to sign is better than the version he was going to veto,” in Gittleson’s words).

No, the question here isn’t whether this is a good bill—it isn’t—but, rather, what it actually says. Serwer is right that the provision to exempt American citizens, that “Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities,” is “cop-out language.” It allows itself, presumably intentionally, to be a Rorschach test for policy-makers: megalomanical Presidents (apologies for the redundancy) can see what they want; those capable in both intellectual and ethical terms of reading the Constitution will see it differently. All bets are off when the goobers that gave us Citizens United are making the call.

But it seems clear that at some level the legislators themselves can’t agree on what the legislation means. I’m not talking here about some purely active and 100% volitional misreading (cf. “death panels”). Nor am I talking about the all-too-common practice of voting on a bill without actually having, you know, read it. (Rep. John Conyers took a lot of heat a while back for admitting he didn’t actually read 1000-page documents crammed full of legalese. Neither do his colleagues, of course, presenting us with the dilemma of whether to condemn Conyers for his lack of shame at not doing his damned job or to grudgingly admire him for confessing to a sin we’re pretty damned certain he shares with literally every other member of Congress on either side of the aisle.)

Rather, in this case, the debate isn’t about whether it’s a good idea to allow potentially dangerous American citizens arrested in this country to be detained indefinitely without trial based on suspicion of terroristic affiliations: it’s whether this bill does that or not. Senators Franken and Paul think so; Senators Feinstein and Kirk don’t.

Senator Carl Levin, who co-authored the bill and therefore ought to know what was intended, said that although some changes were not made to the bill’s language after consultation with the Administration, these discrepancies are “relatively modest because the provision already excludes all U.S. citizens. It also excludes all lawful residents of the United States, except to the extent permitted by the Constitution.” But that, of course, isn’t necessarily what the bill says. And to say that Sen. Levin is pretty much a buffoon (just not quite as scary as his GOP counterpart, John McCain) is to engage in understatement rather than hyperbole.

Moreover, that same session in the Senate produced this exchange:

Senator Durbin: Section 1031, as I understand it, would be a departure from current law and would say that those who are American citizens can be detained indefinitely if they are suspected of certain terrorist conduct. I ask the Senator from Colorado: Is that the point the Senator made in his statement?

Senator Udall: The Senator from Illinois is correct. Mr. President, 1031 would do just that, and it would come directly at a piece of law, posse comitatus, which dates back to the Civil War, that is held dear by all of us in America because it distinguishes between the military used to protect us against foreign foes and how we manage our own civil affairs here at home. Also, as the Senator alludes to, it causes questions to be raised about something that is very sacred in our system of law, which is the writ of habeas corpus. You have to prove why you hold someone. You cannot detain an American citizen indefinitely in any other circumstance.

So where does that leave us? Damned if I know.

The media, useless as always, have generally avoided the issue altogether. Here’s the entirety of Charlie Savage’s discussion of the subject in the New York Times about President Obama’s decision to remove the veto threat:

…the bill includes a narrower provision, drafted by the Senate, authorizing the government to detain, without trial, suspected members of Al Qaeda or its allies—or those who “substantially supported” them—bolstering the authorization it enacted a decade ago against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Notice anything missing? Like any mention of a). the temporal parameters of this detention, b). who determines (without a trial) what constitutes “substantial support,” c). whether this provision does or does not pertain to U.S. citizens (not the same thing as whether it changes existing law with respect to citizens), or d). whether the location of the arrest is relevant.

There’s a difference between arresting a Saudi national in Cairo and shipping him off to Gitmo for indefinite detention (not that I approve of that, either) and picking up an American citizen in Peoria based on the pretense of terroristic sympathies. The possibilities for abuse in the latter case are manifold. Seriously, if Newt Gingrich wants to arrest judges who don’t rule the way he wants them to, can you imagine what he or some like-minded lunatic might do to someone named Abdul Mohammed (or Bob Smith, for that matter, if ol’ Bob pissed him off enough), evidence or no evidence?

If you’re reading this blog, chances are pretty good you’re not a fan of the civil liberties implications that might be at play here. But are they at play? Neither the United States Senate nor the press seems to know. Perhaps, just perhaps, that’s not such a good thing.

We Won't Get Fooled Again... except this time

That the US Senate would pass a bill I consider an abomination is not really that shocking. But that my allies would be the likes of Rand Paul, Jim DeMint, and Tom Coburn, or that my opposition would include Amy Klobuchar, Sherrod Brown, and Patrick Leahy… that is seriously weird. Of course, I’m also on the same side as Al Franken, Tom Harkin, and Bernie Sanders, and opposed by Jon Kyl, Marco Rubio and Mitch McConnell… and now everything makes sense again. Sort of.

I’m talking, of course, about the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, with its controversial provision which allows the military to indefinitely detain without trial American terrorism suspects arrested on US soil who could then be shipped to Guantánamo Bay. When this frankly scandalous piece of legislation got the White House imprimatur yesterday—President Obama had been threatening to veto it, but now says he’ll sign it tomorrow—I linked to this article and wrote on the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page, “WHAT??? Is there really a difference between being actively evil and merely capitulating to evil at every opportunity?”

That was unfair. I apologize to the legitimately craven, those who would like to stand up to the Dark Side, but just can’t muster the gumption to do so. On this issue, at least, they have nothing in common with Barack Obama, who is indeed actively evil… or, at the very least, whose vaunted knowledge of constitutional law seems to have a blind spot on that whole habeus corpus thing that has only been the hallmark of English and subsequently American jurisprudence since the 13th century. (I mean, really, you can’t expect the poor lad to keep up with all the new developments, right?)

Okay, before we go any further, it’s time to reiterate that I’m neither a lawyer nor a constitutional scholar, and to concede that we’re not really talking about habeus corpus, per se, but rather a first cousin of it. Habeus corpus, after all, is a means of securing the release of those illegally detained. This bill provides a means by which an obviously unethical and unconstitutional practice that runs counter to centuries’ worth of legal precedent is rendered “legal.”

My mistake was in believing, perhaps more on faith than on evidence, that the President’s early objections to this legislation were based on civil libertarian concerns. They weren’t. They were, apparently, all about turf wars, making sure that it was the President and not (gasp!) Congress who had the prerogative to violate the civil rights of American citizens. Glenn Greenwald’s piece on Salon.com is more comprehensive than I could be, and includes valuable links to statements by the likes of the ACLU and Human Rights Watch. Here’s a little of HRW executive director Kenneth Roth’s commentary:

By signing this defense spending bill, President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law. In the past, Obama has lauded the importance of being on the right side of history, but today he is definitely on the wrong side….

It is a sad moment when a president who has prided himself on his knowledge of and belief in constitutional principles succumbs to the politics of the moment to sign a bill that poses so great a threat to basic constitutional rights….

President Obama cannot even justify this serious threat to basic rights on the basis of security. The law replaces an effective system of civilian-court prosecutions with a system that has generated the kind of global outrage that would delight recruiters of terrorists.

It’s not often that I quote Rand Paul with approbation, but I can’t find anything to argue with here:

… detaining citizens without a court trial is not American… [if the law passes] the terrorists have won.

We're talking about American citizens who can be taken from the United States and sent to a camp at Guantánamo Bay and held indefinitely. It puts every single citizen American at risk. Really, what security does this indefinite detention of Americans give us? The first and flawed premise, both here and in the badly named Patriot Act, is that our pre-9/11 police powers were insufficient to stop terrorism. This is simply not borne out by the facts.

Of course, there’s also Mark Kirk:

We as Americans have a right to a speedy trial, not indefinite detention. We as Americans have a right to a jury of our peers, which I would argue is ... not enlisted or military personnel sitting in a jury. You cannot search our businesses or place of business or our homes without probable cause under the Bill of Rights. You cannot be deprived of your freedom or your property without due process of law, and that, I would say, is not indefinite detention. I would actually argue that no statute and no Senate and no House can take these rights away from you.

And yes, having essentially articulated the manifold reasons this legislation is unconstitutional, misrepresented and downright scary, Senator Kirk proceeded to vote for it, anyway.

Kirk wasn’t alone. Here’s Dianne Feinstein: “Congress is essentially authorising the indefinite imprisonment of American citizens, without charge. We are not a nation that locks up its citizens without charge.” Then she voted for the bill, too.

OK, could we have one big chorus of “W.T.F.”?

Supporters of this bill claim that it merely codifies existing practice (in which case, why do we need it?), and doesn’t extend the tentacles of governmental power. There may, unfortunately, be some truth to this allegation (if so, I assure you that it’s purely coincidental). The notion of constitutional rights became distorted beyond recognition in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, with the desperate passage of the PATRIOT Act, which managed somehow to be frighteningly repressive and downright silly at the same time. Similar, and further, invasions of personal privacy became central to the legacy of a power-hungry President named Dick Cheney George W. Bush.

Those of us who voted for Mr. Obama in part because of Mr. Bush’s cynical and indeed Machiavellian assertions of executive power to do essentially whatever the hell the President wants have been, are, to say the least, bitterly disappointed. The Obama administration has extended chronologically and in some cases substantively about every Bush-Cheney over-reach. Rep. Jerry Nadler sums this up nicely in his response to the assertion that this bill doesn’t really make substantive changes to civil liberties:

It doesn't codify existing law. It codifies claims of power by the last two administrations that have not been confirmed by [the Supreme Court]—rather terrifying claims of power, claims of the right to put Americans in jail indefinitely without a trial, even in the United States.

Nadler makes an important distinction: what is existing law and what a pair of megalomanical administrations claim it to be are hardly interchangeable concepts.

Tellingly, if Obama had any real principles, he could have asserted them on this issue. In political terms, there was an opportunity here: some 40 Republicans in the House voted against this bill, and another half-dozen in the Senate joined them. On one of the few occasions GOP legislators haven’t been in lock-step, the Obama administration characteristically fumbled the ball. But, as noted above (and with striking clarity by Greenwald), no one in the executive branch seems to have had the slightest inclination to follow the path of civil liberties… not when there is power to be consolidated, at any rate.

Ultimately, it all boils down to the lyrics of the great Who song, “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Three years ago, we were all thinking, “Change it had to come. We knew it all along.” Trouble is, the more salient part of the song comes later: “Meet the New Boss. Same as the old boss.” Don’t you hate it when Pete Townshend is right?

The Blaze: Sanity Is Not Always on the Menu

I actually remember citing Glenn Beck’s website, The Blaze, a while back because, curiously enough, they had the best analysis of one of Andrew Breitbart’s scams (unfortunately, the links to video evidence no longer work). Ah, but it is Glenn Beck’s website, after all, so we can’t expect the tin-foil hat brigade to be entirely silent.

This week, you may recall, was the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. It got less hype than I would have expected—it wasn’t until I was chatting with one of my students before my 11:00 a.m. class that I even realized what day it was. Curious, really… as Americans, we’re good at remembering our defeats (Alamo, anyone?). Anyway, apparently I wasn’t the only one who sort of forgot that Wednesday wasn’t just Wednesday.

At Sidwell Friends School, the chichi private school attended by Sasha and Malia Obama, the lunch menu that day included the following:

Asian Mushroom Soup

Oriental Noodle Salad

Classic Spinach Salad

Teriyaki Marinated Chicken Strips [the virulently un-American repast pictured above]

Szechuan Tofu & Veggies

Garlic Roasted Edamame

Vegetable Fried Rice

Fortune Cookies

O.M.G. It’s Arma-freaking-geddon. Or so our friends at The Blaze would have us believe. Some pseudo-journalist named Eddie Scarry sniffs, “It’s obviously not Sasha and Malia Obama‘s fault but Sidwell Friends School, the private school they attend in Washington, is serving Japanese food on Wednesday–Pearl Harbor Day.” After listing the menu, he pulls out the big guns for his big boffo conclusion, which reads, in its entirety, “Up until 9/11, the attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by the Japanese in 1941 was the bloodiest day in U.S history.”

Anyone else find something a little flawed in this story? I mean, apart from the fact that Antietam was nearly ten times worse than Pearl Harbor in terms of casualties? Like the fact that the “Japanese” cuisine that’s so horrible to serve is mostly Chinese, for example? Most of the items on that menu are either generically Asian or specifically not Japanese. The exceptions would be the edamame and the teriyaki: but neither of them is Japanese-specific. Edamame is more Japanese than anything else, but is also used in Chinese and indeed in Hawaiian cooking. To call teriyaki intrinsically Japanese at this point is the equivalent of insisting that hot dogs are German.

Even if we grant the edamame and teriyaki as Japanese, however, that leaves the tofu (Sezchuan: inherently Chinese) and the fried rice and fortune cookie (both Chinese-American). Most “Oriental” salads have more in common with Chinese (or Thai or Vietnamese) rather than Japanese traditions. I do know it requires a 6th-grade education to know this, but perhaps someone might mention to the crack staff at the Blaze that the Chinese were the good guys during WWII. Not all Asians are the same, Eddie.

The leftie-leaning blogosphere (here are Gawker, DeathandTaxesMag and DCJunkies, for example) has been having a good time with this (ahem!) story, largely because it demonstrates so clearly that the Blazes of the world will say anything to try to denigrate Mr. Obama. Well, of course, they’re actually too chicken shit coy to say something offensive; rather, in their craven smarminess, they insinuate it. The ploy is transparently stupid, complete with the snarky admission that the girls aren’t really responsible for the menu at the school they attend. (Curiously enough, the parent of a student at the school does appear to be culpable in their eyes.)

It will come as no surprise that the intellectual giants who read the Blaze rose quickly to the bait. Duffer319 opines, “this is sad. leave it up to Obama” [I kept the original capitalization just for you, Gentle Reader.] ReaganThatcherChurchill (could I make this shit up?) proclaims “This is Meechelle’s Childhood Obesity Program. She wants kids starving while trying to use chopsticks.” PhilipZhao chimes in, “Under Obama, Americans will have to forget Alamo, forget Pearl Harbor and forget 9/11.” But it’s some cretinous yahoo who goes by SeeJaneMom who really gets to the point, calling Sasha and Malia “smugly a$s-ed First Rug Rats.” How dare those girls… um… whatever they did?

Not everyone who commented is a moron, however. There’s some sage commentary by FidelCashFlo44: “Pearl Harbor was almost a century ago. The Japanese are our allies. The menu is mostly Chinese food. You’re upset about.. a lunch menu. How insecure about your patriotism could you possibly be?” Charlots adds, “How is eating asian food going to somehow dissolve our identity as Americans. Do you eat Chinese or Japanese food? You sound like an idiot.”

The clincher, however, comes from WarrenFl:

Oh, Please.

Glancing at the school lunch calendar for the local Hillsborough County elementary schools, I see our students were served Teriyaki Chicken Rice Bowl, Stir Fry Vegetables, and Pineapple Tidbits. (Secondary students had Orange Pineapple Fruit Slushi instead of the Tidbits.)

There was no public outcry here in Tampa, Florida–and I don’t recall seeing any public outcry in years past. In fact, there was no public outcry anywhere in the country this year.

Sure enough, here’s the evidence. But gloriosky, that would mean there really isn’t a story there.

Let’s review the bidding, shall we?

• The Sidwell Friends School contracts out its meal services, and, by unhappy coincidence, that service scheduled Asian food on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor.

• A different contractor printed the menus to say “Pearl Harbor Day.”

• Most of the food in question is either generically Asian or specifically Chinese.

• None of the food is inherently Japanese.

• The Chinese were our allies in World War II; the Japanese are among our staunchest allies now.

• No parent, including the POTUS, has any say over the menu at Sidwell Friends.

• Other school systems served essentially the same thing without as much as a murmur.

• Speaking of menus, some people seriously need a little more bran in their diet.

None of this is to excuse a screw-up: the teriyaki could have waited another day, methinks. But this sort of mountains-out-of-molehills mentality is—consummation devoutly to be wished—going to be perceived eventually as the desperate, despicable, and often racist crap it truly is. May that day come sooner rather than later.

The Raised Fist and the Flying Flag

There’s a high school football story that’s getting a lot of attention of late. Facing Blue Hills in the 4A state championship game in Massachusetts (I refuse to call it the “Super Bowl”) this week, Cathedral High quarterback Matt Owens made what appeared to be a game-winning, or at least lead-changing, 56-yard run. But just inside the Blue Hills 25-yardline, with the ball tucked under his right arm, he raised his left hand over his head, taking two strides that way before finishing his jaunt into the endzone.

His little mini-demonstration, however, was enough to draw a penalty for taunting, nullifying the touchdown. The ball was placed at the spot of the foul; Owens threw an interception on the next play, and Cathedral never scored again, losing 16-12. Owens’s coach and father all-too-predictably whined.

Here’s the coach, Duane Sigsbury:

In the game being played, we won the game. Give Blue Hills a lot of credit. They are a great football team, but we deserve better. The game got taken away from us. If you’re going to take a game away from a kid being excited because he just made the play of his life, shame on you.

And here’s the father, Kenneth Owens:

He raised his hand because he knew was going to the pinnacle. There was nothing dishonorable about the play. There was no doubt it was a touchdown. He gets 20 yards in—and he's not thinking about the rule—and he just raised his hand. He handed the ball to the referee. He didn't spike it. He goes to a Catholic school where they are taught that their God is in the sky. So I know when he raised his hand, he was thanking his Lord for what happened to him today. Football is a team sport. There's lot of kids that are hurting today.

Assigner of officials Joe Cacciatore insisted that:

It’s tough, but the official absolutely made the right call according to the letter of the law. It says it right there in the rules that any attempt to draw attention to yourself, whether it is pointing the finger, raising a fist or anything like that, is a penalty. We’ve been instructed to call it when it happens, it’s zero tolerance now.

Don’t come to me looking for support for zero tolerance policies in general. But you know what? Sometimes they’re appropriate. Don’t tell that to sniveling sportswriters, like MSNBC’s Rick Chandler, however:

File this along with the first graders suspended for bringing a plastic knife to school to spread butter. Where’s our zero tolerance for blundering idiots? Taking common sense and individual judgement [sic.] out of the equation is never a good idea. And besides, if the player was actually praising God as his father claimed, he wasn’t calling attention to himself, now was he?

Where to begin? Let’s start here: it doesn’t matter whether the young man intended anything “dishonorable”; it matters what he did. Was he taunting? Not literally, perhaps, but the rule is pretty specific and pretty clear; it has been a point of emphasis among officiating crews all year, and players were specifically reminded of the rule immediately before the game. Moreover, while I’m not a mind-reader, I do make my living in part by relating gestural patterns to intentions. Young Owens may not have been intentionally taunting, but he sure as hell wasn’t praising God. One looks skyward to do that; Owens didn’t. One points with one’s index finger to God; Owens had a clenched fist. (One might also hope that there are more important things on God’s agenda than intervening in interscholastic athletic competitions.) Matt Owens was celebrating; end of discussion. Is that the same as taunting? It is according to the rulebook if it happens while the play is still underway. (Predictably, of course, only 14% of those responding to an online poll on the Boston Herald site agree with the call.)

Is it a stupid rule? Probably. I do understand the desire to curtail the narcissistic displays that have filtered down from the pros to the high school game. All that’s needed to cut that crap out, of course, is for television networks to cut away from the prima donna moments the way they used to do… and the way they agreed, for example, not to show the idiots who run onto a baseball field. Once pros don’t get airtime for being egocentric buffoons, the emphasis on maturity will find its way into the college and prep games, just as the puerile posturing has done for the past generation. Of course, that won’t happen, because television executives have the minds of 12-year-old boys. Still, there’s a difference between a spontaneous exuberance on the one hand and calculated, vainglorious indulgence on the other. Whereas the recent rule change helps referees in the sense that they no longer need to determine intent (just as a player accidentally grabbing a facemask will still get a personal foul call), it does allow a little less discretion.

Would I have called the penalty had I been that referee? Yes, although not making the call would also be defensible. Rules are rules, and this one doesn’t go away because some kid just made a great run. Indeed, it’s more important then than ever. But there’s a more significant point here.

A long time ago, I went to a Little League baseball game. My cousin Dick, two years older than I, was coaching, and his young son was on the team. The players were probably eight or nine years old. One of Dick’s young charges was called out on strikes. Returning to the bench, the boy complained that the pitch was really a ball. He was right: the pitch was outside and probably high, as well. Dick said, simply, “if you’ve got two strikes on you, and a pitch is close enough that the umpire might call it a strike, swing. We’ve talked about this.” And he patted the kid on the back and sent him out to play defense.

Dick’s wisdom in that moment has stuck with me for over 20 years. If you don’t want the officials to decide the game, don’t let them. Swing at close pitches with two strikes. Keep your stupid arm down when you’re about to score the go-ahead touchdown in the state championship game. Don’t let the referee make a judgment call against you when there’s no reason in the world not to obey the rules. Score the touchdown, then celebrate. Eight-year-old kids can wrap their heads around this concept. So can 18-year-olds, if we insist on it.

The referee, as far as I’m concerned, is blameless. Owens the younger did something dumb, but he’s a kid. I’m perfectly willing to believe he intended no disrespect to his opponents, but that of course doesn’t really change anything. Owens the elder, on the other hand, is an ignoramus. Your kid made a mistake. Stand by him. But don’t give us this line of crap about praising God. The penalty against your son was reasonable if not right. Shut up.

The biggest jackass, of course, is the coach. You’ve still got a chance to win this game if you keep your head. So, what are you going to call? Hint: maybe you don’t have your “visibly upset” quarterback throw the ball on a 1st down play when your line just opened a hole I could have run through for good yardage. You’re not only a petulant, unsportsmanlike ass, you’re also a moron. Shut up.

As for Rick Chandler: he, no doubt, gets paid to say snarky things on the internet. He is uncritical, unthinking, and unable to separate real justice from B-movie plots. He wants to know where is the zero tolerance policy for “blundering idiots.” Right here. Bye, Rick.

More Incompetence in SAT-Land, But This One's Not All on Them

As an educator at the post-secondary level, I have deeply ambivalent feelings about standardized testing. The teach-to-the-test mentality engendered by high-stakes exams like the fetishistic stupidity propagated in my adopted state of Texas, for example, is as antithetical to real education as it is possible to be. There also are, or at least have been, serious concerns about cultural bias. Still, I won’t pretend that I don’t look pretty carefully at ACT and SAT scores when evaluating prospective students for admission into our program or scholarships.

This is a function of two things. First, there is the wide disparity between schools and their populations—being at the top of a weak class might be better or worse than being in the middle of a strong one. It’s useful to have some means of comparing such students.

Second, most recommendations written by high school teachers and administrators are utterly useless. I do understand that writing an effective, accurate recommendation takes time; I’ve written a fair number of them, after all. But in my time as coordinator of Theatre Day (that’s our tri-annual on-campus recruitment event) I’ve read recs that are a single sentence long, that are incoherent and/or ungrammatical, that praise a student in the bottom 20% of her class for excelling in the classroom (without any explanation why the little darling consistently gets C’s and D’s, including in that teacher’s classes), that talk more about the student’s parents than about him. One teacher in Dallas obviously has a template singing the praises of some generic student; she just swaps out one student name for another and sends it along. (We once had two students at the same Theatre Day with recs from her. The letters were identical except for the students’ names and the gender-specific pronouns.)

Standardized test scores aren’t the only criterion by which to measure a student’s academic skills, of course. Grades (and class rank relative to class size) count a lot; if we happen to get a well-crafted, individualized, recommendation that actually gives us insight into the student, that’s incredibly helpful. The résumé counts: both how it’s structured and what it contains. If you want to be a designer and your layout is cluttered, unimaginative, and unattractive, you’ve got some work to do. If you want to be an actor, your teacher can talk about how wonderful you are all she wants, but if you’ve never played anything but Chorus in a musical or Third Spear-Carrier from the Left, she’s really not all that impressed with your work.

Nor do minor differences in scores matter. A 550 and a 560 in Critical Reading are, for our purposes, identical. A 440 and a 650 aren’t. If you’re smart and can really handle the language, it doesn’t matter if your acting skills are marginal: a). you’re teachable and b). there are plenty of non-acting jobs in theatre (mine, for instance). On the other hand, you may audition well with carefully-chosen pieces, but if we’re not reasonably certain you can handle the work of a freshman-level Play Analysis course, we’re not going to invest our limited scholarship money on you.

Good scores matter, in other words. And whereas a fair number of high school seniors don’t seem to comprehend much else, they do get that much. All of which means there’s a lot of pressure to perform well. For those with more money than brains or morality, that means an increased temptation to cheat: specifically, to hire a similarly immoral, but intelligent, surrogate to take the test in your stead. And that is what happened, repeatedly, in an upscale suburban area of Long Island over at least a three-year period.

The New York Times reports that some 20 people have been arrested over the past two months for being at one or the other end of such transactions: either paying someone to take the exam or accepting payment to impersonate someone else in order to take the test. The group faces felony charges of scheming to defraud, as well as misdemeanor charges of falsifying business records and criminal impersonation.

The victims here are of two kinds: the middling but honest students whose chances of getting entrance to the university of their choice or receive a scholarship to do so have been compromised by a competition that cheats, and (now) every honest and gifted kid in the area, whose own good scores, the product of native intelligence and hard work, are now (alas, quite reasonably) viewed as suspect.

There are two problems here. One is that the College Board/Educational Testing Service folks (who administer the SAT), in particular, have been more than somewhat less than diligent in preventing or prosecuting cheating. An earlier NYT article quotes Bernard Kaplan, principal of Great Neck North High School, lambasting the administrators of the SAT: “The procedures E.T.S. uses to give the test are grossly inadequate in terms of security. Furthermore, E.T.S.’s response when the inevitable cheating occurs is grossly inadequate. Very simply, E.T.S. has made it very easy to cheat, very difficult to get caught.” Mr. Kaplan adds:

It is ridiculously easy to take the test for someone else. That’s why when E.T.S. says this kind of impersonation is a rare occurrence, you just have to laugh. How would they know? All they can say is they are unaware of a large number of impersonations. I’m sure, that’s true. They are most assuredly unaware.

OK, you know how this blog consistently reams high school principals and school superintendents? Credit where it’s due: Mr. Kaplan seems to be the exception that proves the rule. It was his initial investigation that led to the arrests: “I think it’s [cheating] widespread across the country,” he said Tuesday. “We were the school that stood up to it.” And to say that the security has been lax with respect to ensuring that test-takers are who they claim to be is sort of like saying that NBA power forwards tend to be large men. [Side note: sign off on the damned agreement and play ball!]

After all, Samuel Eshaghoff is accused of impersonating six different students, including a girl to take the SAT for them at $3500 a pop, earning scores up to the 97th percentile. (I guess it wouldn’t have been worth it for me to hire him, as I did better than that on my own.) And, write the Times’s Jenny Anderson and Winnie Hu, “Currently, if a score is suspect, E.T.S. investigates. If cheating is uncovered, the score is canceled and the student is permitted to get a refund and take the test again. Neither the student’s high school nor any college is notified.” Seriously? No penalty at all?

Here’s the College Board’s attitude:

You got sick and couldn’t make the test? Sorry, no refund. Need to change the date of your test more than two weeks in advance? Well, OK, but it’ll cost you $25. Oh, you’re an immoral, self-entitled little weasel who thinks rules are for other people? Sorry, sir/madam, we thought you might be an honest kid with a legitimate excuse. Of course you can have a refund. Of course we won’t notify anyone who might be interested in whether you’ve already proven that you have no intention of actually learning anything at their academic institution. Would you like us to give you the names of a few really smart, dishonest people whom we’re far too stupid to catch if they impersonate you next time?

Not being a lawyer, I don’t know whether this qualifies as “criminal negligence” according to our legal system. But in a just universe, the cretinous yahoos at the CB/ETS who decided on this policy would lose their jobs, have “unethical moron” branded into their foreheads, and be publicly pilloried. Preferably literally.

Still, the fact that everyone in the ETS hierarchy seems to be terminally incompetent does not absolve the little urchins from taking responsibility for their actions. The recent economic meltdown may have been facilitated by de-regulation, but it was caused by specific immoral, greedy wheeler-dealers. Whether what these students did was criminal may be up for debate (I can’t imagine that there’s a legitimate legal argument there, but Dickens’s Mr. Bumble is, alas, too often correct in his assertion that “the law is an ass”). If not, every college that admitted one of these lying little bastards based on false information should immediately expel those students and sue the ETS. Actually, they should do that, anyway.

The defendants’ lawyers are paid to defend their clients, and they should do so as vigorously as they can. They are not, however, entitled to spew forth such rubbish as this from Gerald McCloskey: “My feeling is that it should be handled administratively by the College Board and the school board, not criminally, especially when the county is experiencing budget issues and resources are limited to begin with.” How noble of him to be so concerned with the county’s fiscal restraints. Translation: “My client is guilty as sin. Obfuscate!” Or Melvin Roth: “I think this is overkill for this kind of thing.” Yes, stealing is only stealing when someone other than Mr. Roth’s client does it. These guys are why there are lawyer jokes.

I strongly suspect that the ETS’s estimate of perhaps 150 cases of cheating a year is off by a factor of 100 or so. So it’s up to people like me to make sure no one gets a college diploma without earning one. Time to go to work…

Walter Vance and the Expansiveness of Culpability

Want to know what’s wrong with America? Two words: Walter Vance. No, not the man himself, who was apparently a lovely person. No, it was the manner of Mr. Vance’s death in the early hours of Friday morning that ought to send shivers up our collective spines.

Mr. Vance, a pharmacist in Logan County, WV, was shopping for some Christmas decorations for his drug store shortly after midnight, i.e. at the very beginning of “Black Friday,” when he collapsed onto the floor of a Target store in South Charleston. And then… nothing.

Multiple reports suggest that shoppers and employees alike paid no attention, even stepping over him as he struggled for his life. Finally, a nurse and a paramedic who happened to be shopping in the store came to his aid. 911 was called, but Mr. Vance died at the hospital. Frankly, he may not have made it, anyway. He had a history of heart trouble, and, in his widow’s words, “I think it was time for him to go. The Lord called him home.”

But here’s the point: It doesn’t matter. A man needed help, and the overwhelming majority of people who were in position to offer it, even to the extent of comforting a dying man, did precisely bupkes. There was a sale on, after all. Gotta get that crappy over-priced toy or the tacky outfit for a couple bucks less than normal. “Sorry, old man. Geez, would you get the hell out of the way. You’re dying? You think that’s an excuse? Get out of the damned aisle!”

With the exception of the two professionals who did what they could (another report suggests as many as six nurses offered aid), and the woman who apparently fished Vance’s cell phone out of his pocket to call his wife, everyone else in that building deserves coal in their stocking this year: not enough to heat their home with, however. Seriously, how many people don’t have cell phones with which to call 911? How many of the phoneless don’t have a voice with which to demand that someone else make that call? How many of us are really so important that we can’t spare a few words of comfort for a fellow traveler in distress?

There are, apparently, lots of eye-witness reports about other people’s inhumanity. But… uh… if you were there to see it, what did you do to help? Not much, I’d be willing to bet. True, once there’s someone who knows what s/he’s doing on the scene, it’s better to stay out of the way. But stepping over a prostrate body to get to the great mark-downs on Chia Pets doesn’t qualify as ethical behavior.

Target employees told television station WSAZ that “company policy” forbids them from offering physical assistance. (Interestingly, that detail is omitted from the updated written story on the station’s website, but the broadcast story includes it.) This leaves us with two alternatives: either the employees are lying to cover up their own inadequacies as human beings, or there really is such a policy.

It terrifies me that I believe the latter. That sounds exactly like the kind of inanity cooked up by the litigation-shy and utterly amoral jackals that run all too many corporations. Still, that doesn’t let the employees off the hook. A man is dying and you don’t help because you might lose your barely-above-minimum-wage (if that) job at a store that insists you work the graveyard shift on Black Friday because they’ve got to unload their stock of crap that will actually be cheaper in a couple of weeks? Really? That’s what you’re going to tell St. Peter at the Pearly Gates?

Mr. Vance’s friend and colleague Sue Compton sums the whole business up pretty well: “Where is the good Samaritan side of people? How could you not notice someone was in trouble? I just don’t understand if people didn’t help, what their reason was, other than greed because of a sale.”

Christmas in America. Bah, humbug.

Flying While Islamic Is the New Driving While Black

One of the sadder legacies of 9/11 is the legitimization of cowardice in the name of prudence. True, both political parties are trying to out-macho each other with respect to foreign policy, but when it comes down to real, day-to-day existence, Americans behave like the schoolyard bully confronted with an antagonist who doesn’t just meekly hand over his lunch money.

We’ll drive way too fast for the conditions, even after having one beer too many. We’ll eat crappy “food” with levels of saturated fat, sodium, and sugar so high that just talking about them can cause heart attacks. We’ll swagger around talking about how tough we are because “we” managed to capture or kill the likes of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden.

But ask us to get on a plane that might also be carrying someone named Mohammed or Abdul, and we’ll cheerfully relinquish all our Constitutional rights and meekly slink into the corner with our proverbial tail between our legs while some idiot with a TSA (which, contrary to popular opinion, does not, in fact, stand for “Terminally Stupid and Arrogant”) badge ostentatiously goes through the motions of “protecting the public.” The agency does this by invading our privacy, fondling us, proclaiming our toothpaste a potential weapon, and generally doing everything possible to instill a feeling of Exceeding Great Trepidation.

Trouble is, it’s all a charade. The system itself acknowledges that all the shoelessness and shampoo confiscations don’t mean anything: what else is a no-fly list, or a random (or not-so-random) search at the gate if not a tacit admission that any serious terrorist with an IQ above room temperature can get past the security screening without breaking a sweat? I’ve been saying this for years, of course. Here’s me in 2005:

The idea that someone who can pass through security can still remain a threat is in fact an admission that the security screenings don't work except as a cosmetic deterrent. It is difficult to go a month without the news that some test of security at some airport has demonstrated conclusively that the average TSA screener lacks the training, the intelligence, or the vigilance to actually thwart a real threat. We'd be better off hiring out of Central Casting: at least they'd look like they might be able to stop a terrorist. Of course, news reports that yet another fake bomb made it through security at a major American airport are slowly gravitating towards the back of the newspaper, because it no longer shocks us that airport security is intrusive and demeaning, but completely ineffective.

But we continue, as a nation, to pretend that the false security offered by TSA is “worth it” somehow. It is not.

Of course, our collective cravenness is really a manifestation of xenophobia more than anything else. Homeland Security and all its various permutations exist for the sole reason of feeding the populace’s quaking terror at The Other. Oh, sure, they’ll annoy the rest of us—virtually anyone who has travelled very much at all will have been subjected to some form of humiliation to distract the agents from what a pathetic job they have re-affirm the security of the nation. But it’s the spectre of actually sharing an airplane with (gasp!) a Muslim that can be counted on to legitimize the most outrageous over-reach of authority.

I remember flying home from a conference in New York several years ago. As it happened, I was seated immediately behind two men who clearly fit the profile of a “terrorist,” at least as conjured up in the fevered imaginings of a TSA agent: young, obviously middle-Eastern, male. One was bearded; the other had a thick mustache. I don’t recall their names, but they were stereotypically Arab: Ali and Farooq, or something like that. They were laughing about the difficulties they’d had in passing through security, based solely on the way they look. And, hearing them speak, I can assure you that the fear and trembling of the security folks was entirely visual: two more readily identifiable New York accents would be difficult to imagine.

But the latest victims of TSA over-reaction weren’t New Yorkers. They were students from the United Arab Emirates who were removed from a Charlotte-to-Washington flight and questioned for nearly five hours, embarrassing them (despite the fact that they had clearly not done anything to deserve this treatment) and—of course—inconveniencing every other passenger on that flight, not to mention the family, friends, and business associates of everyone who should have been in DC in time for dinner but didn’t arrive until close to midnight. And for what?

Well, according to WSOC-TV, U.S. Airways is calling it simply a “security issue” that led to the students’ being led from the plane and all their bags being re-screened. (Again, how about we screen them right the first time?) The story says that “passengers reported they heard the group talking about airplanes and the military while on board. Sources said that's when some passengers reported them.” It’s unclear exactly who initiated the process of removing the UAE students, but it appears to have been the airline, whose employees are perfectly well trained to distribute tiny packets of pretzels, but perhaps not to judge the severity or likelihood of a potential terrorist threat. Forgive me if I don’t choose to live my life based on the prognostications of the most wild-eyed, xenophobic paranoid in the room.

I do understand that a student named Yaqoob Al-Shamsi is probably a higher risk than a grandmother named Cindy Robinson would be. But there are literally hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world who pose precisely zero threat. A little acknowledgment of that would not come amiss. What is troubling here is that the Islamophobia of the more ignorant members of society will eventually create a self-fulfilling prophecy. This seems to be the lesson of Guantánamo, which has apparently more than once transformed petty nuisances into card-carrying Bad Guys. And if we keep down the present path, the next Hadef Al-Dhaheri won’t simply be upset that “they treated us different than the others”; he’ll want to do something about it. It’s a delicate balancing act, and we need someone with a little more sophistication in charge of the operation.

Teenager Reveals Brownback's Real (Lack of) Character

It has become something of a specialty of this blog to highlight stories involving controversies with no good guys. This is another one. Almost.

Attending a Kansas Youth in Government event in Topeka this week, registered Democrat Emma Sullivan (pictured here), a senior at Shawnee Mission East High School, tweeted “Just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot.”

Had she actually engaged in the conduct she describes, one could reasonably criticize her for vulgarity but, considering what a disaster Governor Sam Brownback is for the citizens of my former state, not for inaccuracy. He does indeed suck. She hadn’t actually made those comments, of course, but she’s 18. There are two types of people who claim to have never engaged in a little adolescent braggadocio: those who aren’t yet adolescent, and liars.

Moreover, her Twitter account has (well, had) only a few dozen followers. So what’s the problem, right? Ah, Gentle Reader, you’re forgetting the Twin Towers of contemporary GOP politics: paranoia and hubris. What happened, you ask? Well, according to the Wichita Eagle,

... Brownback’s office watches Twitter for comments about him. Brownback spokeswoman Sherriene Jones-Sontag told the event organizers about the comment, “so that they were aware what their students were saying in regards to the governor’s appearance…. We monitor social media so we can see what Kansans are thinking and saying about the governor and his policies…. We just felt it was appropriate for the organizers to be aware … because of what was said in the tweet.”

OK, so it’s perfectly reasonable that the governor’s staff monitors the ‘Net for commentary on his performance. But to call up event organizers to complain about what a high school kid says to a few friends on Twitter suggests a level of perceived entitlement that is staggering even by the lofty standards of Republican politicians. One might have hoped that the governor’s staff might have something more constructive to do. Engaging in this kind of petty strutting might, after all, suggest to those of a cynical disposition that Gov. Brownback is more interested in throwing his weight around than in actually listening to his constituents. Oh, yeah, that’s right: he is more concerned with suppressing dissent than with responding to Kansans’ concerns. Sorry.

Still, the pomposity and arrogance of the terminally officious Ms. Jones-Sontag would have had no real-world effects had not those event organizers capitulated rather than, as they should have done, telling the pushy politico to take a long walk on a short pier. But they’re craven idiots, so they contacted the principal at Shawnee Mission East. They needn’t have bothered, of course. Turns out another Brownback minion, scheduling secretary Niomi Burget, had already e-mailed a screenshot of Sullivan’s tweet to the SME Youth in Government sponsor, sniveling, “I don’t know if this was someone with your group, but thought if it was, you might want it brought to your attention.” Really? Why? And while we’re on the subject, what the hell business is it of the scheduling secretary? And does it really take two different staffers to whinge that a post-adolescent has the audacity to say something unkind about your sorry-ass boss?

Here’s the thing. For the past seven years, I administered a One-Act Play Festival which brought as many as 400 or more high school students to our campus each year. During that time, I contacted teachers about student behavior exactly twice: once when a group of students were disruptive during another school’s production, once when a school pretty well vandalized one of our dressing rooms. I didn’t call the principal; I talked to the responsible teacher directly. More to the point, I’m willing to bet that some kid tweeted something unkind about our facility, our people, whatever. But you know what? I don’t care. I’m a grown-up. I have more important things to worry about. Apparently the Governor of Kansas isn’t thus encumbered with actual responsibilities, however.

Once again, of course, we’re at another crossroads. All that had to happen for this not to be an embarrassment for all concerned would be for the high school officials to respond to the political interference with a politer version of the following: “We’ll handle it. Fuck off.” But that would pre-suppose a high school principal somewhere in the country who isn’t a gutless moron. Karl Krawitz is not such an exception to the rule: far from it, in fact. He complained that he was expected to do his damned job he had to do damage control, and insisted that Sullivan write apologetic letters to everyone this side of the Easter Bunny. “Censorship” isn’t quite the right word, but “repressive self-importance” sure seems apt.

Ultimately, it’s difficult to portray Sullivan as a hero: her tweet was inappropriate, after all, although I do give her credit for not bowing to pressure to remove it from her account, and she appears to be considering not writing those apologies. Still, she’s not guilty of anything in particular, either. She’s 18, and sometimes she acts it. Stop the presses!

On the other hand, the adults in this story—Jones-Sontag, Burget, Krawitz—all come off as boorish, self-entitled, authoritarian jackasses. It’s unclear whether Gov. Brownback didn't know what his staff was up to (one set of problems) or if he endorsed their pretentious meddling (a different set of problems). Any way you slice it, though, the lesson learned by Ms. Sullivan and all the other high school students in the state had a lot more to do with the way the political system really works than anything the Youth in Government folks ever offered.

[By the way, I just found a good post on the subject on that noted left-wing rag, Forbes. Not bad, Alex Knapp!]

UPDATE (11/27 @ 8:15 pm): Ms. Sullivan has decided not to apologize, saying that she in fact isn't sorry, and that any letter suggesting that she was would be insincere. Now she's a hero.

Sorry: Patriotism Is Not Welcome Here

It has been too long since I posted here, and much has happened in the interim. I do want to talk about the #Occupy movement, both in theory and in practice, but that post will require more time than I have tonight, and I want to get something posted (among other things, I promised someone who included me on their blogroll that I’d post at least once a month… a promise I technically didn’t quite keep, as it is).

Anyway, one of the stories that attracted little attention amidst the horrific actions of police across the country and the antics of whoever happens to be the current GOP Flavor of the Month, is the follow-up to an incident I outlined a year and a half ago. Here was my take at the time:

In Morgan Hill, CA, a group of five boys wore American flag clothing—bandanas, shirts, shorts—and were told that such apparel was inappropriate. So far, it sounds like something from my youth: in those halcyon days, clothing featuring a flag motif was often worn by protesters against the Vietnam War, and, because such designs tended to be found on the seats of jeans, or in other places where the symbol might touch the ground or otherwise be defaced, we were forbidden to wear anything with an American flag. Now, of course, such apparel is considered patriotic.

Anyway, these guys show up at school wearing this stuff and the Head Moron Assistant Principal tells them they’ve got to take it off, go home, or face suspension. You see, it was Cinco de Mayo, and expressions of American patriotism were deemed insensitive to Hispanic students. OK, I’ll say this once: Give me a damned break.

A month or so later, the boys’ parents filed suit: their lawyer spelled out what they wanted: “‘We’re not seeking money damages, we are asking the court for an order that the school acted unconstitutionally by restricting the students first amendment rights. And we are also asking the court for an injunctive relief, indicating the school is forbidden from practicing those policies in the future,’ said Attorney William Becker.”

All things considered, that was a pretty reasonable demand, given the state of the American judicial system, in which suing people for the most insignificant of slights has become de rigeur.

Now comes word that the suit was dismissed by federal judge James Ware (yes, that would be the James Ware whose nomination to the Court of Appeals in 1997-98 was derailed by evidence that he is a serial liar. For the record, he was appointed to his current post by Bush I and subsequently nominated to the Court of Appeals by Clinton: he is, then, a non-partisan incompetent). The defendants—the school district and the (now former) Principal and (still, apparently) Assistant Principal—argued:

• that the claim against the district was banned by the 11th amendment

• that free speech rights don’t apply in this case because the school officials suspected the potential for “disruption”

• that the plaintiffs offered no evidence they were discriminated against

• that the school’s dress code provides “adequate notice of what attire is prohibited”

OK, I’m not a lawyer, so I look at what makes sense, not what legal precedent might be. The fact that “the Ninth Circuit has consistently held in California, because of the manner in which funds are dispersed to school districts by the state, school districts are agencies of the state for sovereign immunity purposes” tells me only that the Ninth Circuit may well have been home to some rather dim bulbs over the years.

More importantly, the whole “potential for disruption” argument is now, and frankly always has been, little more than an excuse for intellectual cowardice. It’s what gets controversial speakers uninvited from college campuses. It’s what justifies the worst excesses of “political correctness.” It’s what craven administrators, mayors, and police chiefs hide behind when they really, really, really want to censor speech (cf. the #Occupy folks) but know they have to circumvent that pesky First Amendment somehow.

Which brings us to the most colossally, stupendously, mind-meltingly inane part of Judge Ware’s cretinous decision:

Defendants have provided a non-discriminatory basis for asking Plaintiffs to remove their American flag attire. Defendants have put forth significant evidence demonstrating that Plaintiffs were asked to change clothes in order to protect their own safety. Plaintiffs have not offered any evidence demonstrating that students wearing the colors of the Mexican flag were targeted for violence. To the contrary, the undisputed evidence shows that Plaintiffs were the only students on campus whose safety was threatened that day, at least to the knowledge of Defendants. In addition, Defendant Rodriguez [the Assistant Principal] has testified that he did not see any students wearing the Mexican flag on their clothing during the day. He also testified that he did not see any students with Mexican flags displayed on their person until he saw photos in the newspaper in the days following Cinco de Mayo.

Ware therefore dismissed the “equal protection” argument. Please, someone, tell me that Ware is indeed the stupidest federal judge in the country, because if he isn’t, then all is lost. Let’s parse out what passes for argument here. Basically, it boils down to this:

“You have freedom of speech unless you do something completely inoffensive—as evidenced by the statement at the time that the students are free to wear American flag clothing any other day of the school year—that some over-sensitive jackass who disagrees with you might use as a pretense for violence. In that case, of course, it is not that student’s right to commit a felony that ought to be curtailed, but your 1st Amendment rights to free expression. Moreover, since the Assistant Principal can’t be expected to do his damned job and know what’s going on in the school, he can claim that your self-evident claim to unequal treatment doesn’t really hold because he didn’t see what everyone else in the school saw... and what appeared in the local media.” [I think he’s bucking for a job in the UC-Davis administration.]

Seriously, what would happen if the roles were reversed: if it were the Hispanic students who were prevented from expressing their ethnic pride on this trumped-up holiday little celebrated in their ancestral homeland because of the threat of violence from a gang of Anglo punks? How condescending would the “for your own protection” pabulum sound? How stupid would suppressing the inoffensive in order to pander to the potentially violent seem? How outraged would the left-leaning punditry (other than moi, bien sûr) be?

I have little doubt that the plaintiffs in this case are right little assholes, and quite possibly racists. But anyone who thinks Judge Ware would have ruled the same way had it been the “minority” students whose rights were being infringed is stupider than he is. And that’s saying rather a lot.