Too Soon To Gloat About Howard Dean

Here's Howard Dean's acceptance speech as chair of the Democratic National Committee.

The Dems have enormous problems, but righties who gloat, thinking the Dems have chosen an extremist maniac, are gloating too soon. The guy's bright, articulate, and although combative and occasionally careless with his words, the other side of that is he's interesting.

Dean's not going to solve the ultimate conundrums facing the Dems, but I'll bet he's not the disaster some think and hope he will be.

Stay tuned.

HT: Armed Liberal at Winds of Change.

University Presidents and Verboten Research

Three university presidents have issued a statement about the Larry Summers foofaraw:

Speculation that “innate differences” may be a significant cause of under-representation by women in science and engineering may rejuvenate old myths and reinforce negative stereotypes and biases.

The rest of the piece is about how we need women in science, Marie Curie proved women can do science, yadda yadda. Significantly, the piece contradicts itself on the "innateness" issue with the following:

For example, recent research shows that different teaching methods can lead to comparable performance for males and females in high school mathematics.

Now I suppose nimble casuistry could lead to the argument that they're not talking about any innate differences here, but purely environmental reasons why different teaching methods are effective, so they're not indulging in the verboten speculation about innate differences. But that's a strained interpretation.

Suppose one is a stone feminist and wants to educate more woman mathematicians and physicists. Wouldn't it help to know if there are innate differences -- even just statistical differences -- between women and men's cognitive styles?

Sorry, this research is forbidden because it might reinforce stereotypes.

Our whole university system is smelling more and more like the Augean stables.

HT: Bitch, Ph.D.

Guess Whose Birthday It Is

Pharyngula reports that Feb. 12 is Charles Darwin's birthday.

Talk among yourselves.

On The Death of Arthur Miller: Against Anti-Anti-Communism

Arthur Miller, American playwright, died last night at 89. Having seen a magnificent production of his play The Crucible at Laguna Beach High School a few years back, and read Death of a Salesman years ago, I can attest to his skills as a playwright.

Miller was famous, of course, not only for his plays but for his marriage to movie star Marilyn Monroe.

NPR, in covering Miller's death, voiced the familiar theme that The Crucible was an attack by indirection on "McCarthyism," and simply assumed that McCarthyism was a dark stain upon American history, and those who resisted the investigations of American Communism in the later '40s and '50s were heroes, while the investigators were bumpkin Inquisitors. The era gave rise to such titles as Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, by Richard Hofstadter, and periodically public TV, Sundance, and the like treat us to sympathetic evocations of the likes of Paul Robeson, the Hollywood Ten, and Owen Lattimore.

(For the younger set, Robeson was a black actor and singer who was also a devoted adherent of the Communist Party ("CP"). The Hollywood Ten were movie folk, mostly writers, who refused to name their communist and pro-communist associates, and suffered for it, among other things, found themselves unable to find work under their own names. Lattimore was a scholar of Central Asia who was accused of Communist sympathies.)

What Was the American Communist Party?

The unspoken assumption of the center-left Conventional Wisdom is that while communism today is discredited and quaintly obsolete, folks who joined or collaborated with the American Communist Party were just socially conscious people, only more so. The party itself, although seen as a bit boring, was a league of good-hearted people who were looking for a way out of the depression, opposed racial discrimination, and wanted to to fight fascism before it was fashionable (so-called "premature anti-fascists").

A look at the history of the CP itself shows this to be a false picture. The party was a centrally-controlled, partly Soviet-financed organization that rigidly followed the dictates of Stalin's Russia, supported Stalin's every move, and recruited members to act as Soviet agents in the United States.

Moreover, by 1948, when the Soviet takeover of Central Europe was largely complete, and the Cold War (which was sometimes hot) began in earnest, affiliation, past or present, of an individual with the CP gave reason for concern about that individual's loyalty to this country. It was in this period that one wing of liberalism undertook to purge its unions and organizations of communists, because they recognized who and what Stalin was.

Membership in the CP, moreover, raised moral questions. The CP uncritically supported Stalin. Stalin, mouthing revolutionary rhetoric, from the '20s on, murdered millions, deliberately starving the peasants of the Ukraine, for example, and deporting millions to the Gulags or forced-labor camps, most of whom never returned. Stalin staged show-trials of his former associates, most of whom were subsequently executed. Although such mouthpieces as Walter Duranty of the New York Times tried to disguise the carnage, it was not unknown.

Nor was there any secret about the shift of the CP from a strong anti-fascist line to a pro-peace line when the Soviet Union signed a pact with Germany to invade Poland, back to a pro-war line when Hitler attacked Russia.

Support of the CP, then, was an example of either terminal and possibly deliberate ignorance, or colossal moral blindness.

Why Aren't Communists Pariahs Like Nazis?

One of the mysteries of our time is why, when any hint of sympathy with Hitler or Mussolini generates cries of outrage, and when it involves intellectuals such as Paul de Man, long articles in the New York Review of Books, an affiliation with communism is treated by intellectual and liberal circles as, at worst, an eccentricity.

It is clear from what we know now that the anticommunists of the '40s and '50s were right on the essential points:

• The CP was entirely under the control of the Soviet Union.


• The Soviet régime was a danger to its neighbors and the world, including the United States.


• Soviet agents, some affiliated with the communist party, were present throughout the Roosevelt administration, carrying over into Truman's, as well is in many corners of American life, especially the intellectual world, leftist movements of various kinds, and the labor unions in particular.


• Membership in the CP by anyone who was not brain-dead, for any length of time, was morally reprehensible,

The Roosevelt Administration recognized none of this. As the Cold War began and a section of American liberalism realized the dangers of communism, that movement split, and battles raged for control of groups such as the CIO, the grouping of industrial labor unions.

Various individuals and groups on the center-right also seized upon this issue, partly as a club to attack the Democrats, but also out of religious conviction (the CP was atheist in principle) and a genuine recognition that there was a serious unrecognized danger.

Investigating Communist Infiltration Was a Legitimate Enterprise

All of this is a preface to my conclusion that opposition to communism and concern about communist infiltration of American government and institutions were legitimate. The anti-communist position was right, and the anti-anti-communist position was wrong.

It doesn't follow that all the politicians who mounted the anti-communist bandwagon were paragons, or that abuses and unfairness did not occur. The purpose of this piece is not to dissect McCarthy's investigations, or the activities of his staffers, such as Roy Cohn and David Schine, but to argue that on the fundamental issue, the "McCarthyites" were right.

For example:

• The Rosenbergs, who were executed for espionage, were in fact Communists and spies.


• Alger Hiss, a high official who was active in the formation of the United Nations, was a communist spy.


• Paul Robeson was a Stalinist, and deserves condemnation for it.


• The Hollywood Ten were communists or ex-communists, whatever their cinematic talents, and as the much-greater domination of Hollywood today by leftist ideas shows, communist infiltration of Hollywood was a legitimate concern, and their conduct (refusing cooperation with investigations) was not heroic, but reprehensible.

So getting back to Arthur Miller and The Crucible, if he intended an analogy from the anti-communist investigations of the '40s and '50s to the 'witch hunts' of colonial Salem, Massachusetts, the analogy was false. It's still a good play, but if its lesson was intended to be specific to anti-communism in its time, the lesson was as false as the play was well-written. It was the Russian KGB and its Eastern European counterparts that were the true witch hunters.

A Mini-History of Easongate

Michelle Malkin, who got Sen. Dodd, David Gergen and Barney Frank (not a conservative wingnut among them) to report on what Eason Jordan said at Davos, well summarizes the history of Easongate coverage.

A couple of observations:

• Jordan resigned even though the story was practically buried in the MSM. They neither stonewalled à la CBS nor pulled a Tylenol (tell the whole truth and if necessary, apologize). They just punted. Some MBA or mole could tell us what about the Kremlinology of CNN led to this.


• The MSM monopoly is broken. If a significant portion of the blogosphere fixes on a story, and the story has merit, it will out, and the MSM can't control it. My impression is that the political spectrum of the blogosphere is quite wide, and its right is stronger than its left.

An interesting spectacle with a quick dénouement.

More kudos for Hugh Hewitt, who is now the Godfather of the conservative blogosphere. He can whack you.

Eason Jordan Quits

The Los Angeles Times reports that Eason Jordan has resigned from CNN.

One small step for CNN, a giant step for the blogosphere. Considering the virtual MSM blackout of the story, it's clear we do have an information reformation, as Hugh Hewitt has contended.

If he said what they say he said, added to his censorship to keep Saddam happy, he deserved to go. Presumably he said it, or they'd release the videotape.

Shanley Update

It's no surprise, but he was convicted.

He no doubt deserves what he gets, but I'm still a skeptic on recovered memory. Shanley's nefarious reputation no doubt will make what might otherwise be a good appeal issue not a likely winner. Massachusetts has a nasty history on child abuse convictions based on questionable evidence.

As they say, hard cases make bad law.

Duty -- to the Heart? Or What?

Kate Marie at What's the Rumpus? questions Disneyan orthodoxy in Mulan II. She questions whether one's duty is really to one's heart.

There are God, country, family, as well as one's own private heart, as she points out. My mother's ghost, sitting on my right shoulder, is nodding sagely, except for the God part.

HT: Instapundit

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An Interesting Tory View

John Derbyshire wants to put the brakes on Wilsonian idealism in Iraq. Thinks it's time to get out.

I like Derb, and I share his skepticism about Wilsonianism. I think our withdrawal has to be slower, and give a reasonable chance of a decent outcome. But he's thoughtful and no ideologue. Worth a read, as always.

A Variant on Children's Allowances

David Brooks (free subscription) doesn't think private Social Security accounts will pass. (Dick Morris does.)

Brooks suggests that the government subsidize private accounts for the poor, on the analogy of the Homestead Act.

The French, long worried about their population decline, subsidize reproduction by providing small monthly payments to parents. Why not, instead, an annual payment, to be invested, for education or retirement? For a high-school graduate with poor parents, a few thousand dollars in an education account could make all the difference.

If you're going to redistribute wealth, do it. I'm not ready to sign on to this, but it's worth thinking about.

Of course, the more society invests, the greater the risk the rate of return will decline. And this won't sit well with small-government folks (like me, most of the time), or reactionary welfare-staters like Krugman, who says that the GOP wants to destroy Social Security by limiting it to the poor so it becomes politically possible to cut it -- and then (with no supporting evidence) says Medicare is next.

I'll leave Paul to the Krugman Truth Squad at National Review.

Jordan Story Hits MSM: Mickey Fisks Howie, But Good!

Power Line reports that Howie Kurtz of the WaPo has broken media silence on the Eason Jordan charges against U.S. forces. He did, here.

Can't go so far as to say "whitewash," but Howie does give Jordan the benefit of the doubt.

Even the weak version of Jordan's charges, though, are pretty serious, and he apparently can't, or won't, back them up.

If Jordan is serious and has evidence, let''s have an investigation. But if Jordan was lying or making unfounded charges, he should pay the price for his irresponsibility.

One lesson: media silence cannot be maintained in the face of determined pressure from the blogosphere. The monopoly really is broken to that extent. Good to know.

Update: But then Mickey Kaus, God bless him, brutally fisks Kurtz's piece.

Witness Protection: Kurtz has Barney Frank recalling Jordan--after he "modified" his shocking remarks--still saying shocking things at Davos about U.S. forces "maybe knowing they were killing journalists, out of anger." Kurtz then has Jordan denying this, admitting he "wasn't as clear as I should have been" but saying he "never once in my life thought anyone from the U.S. military tried to kill a journalist" and "[n]ever meant to suggest that." It's Frank vs. Jordan! Then Kurtz says portentously--opening a new paragraph-- "Two other panelists backed Jordan's account."

But one of those panelists, moderator David Gergen, doesn't agree with Jordan. Gergen says Jordan went "too far" and then "walked it back." (Jordan doesn't admit to backtracking, only lack of clarity.)

Kaus points out that there's a videotape of the whole thing, a big public meeting with many dignitaries (honchos) present, and the gnomes ain't sharing:

But forget the witnesses. There's a video of this event, initially promised to a blogger but now being kept under wraps by the Davos people. Downplayed eyewitness Abovitz says Jordan "is much better off if the tape (in classic "1984" style) just disappears." Kurtz merely notes in passing that "a videotape of the event has not been made public," but he doesn't put even routine journalistic pressure on the World Economic Forum to release it. If it were a tape of, say, Karl Rove making a remark about future Supreme Court justices, wouldn't a Woodsteinian WaPo reporter raise at least a cynical eyebrow or two about the need for secrecy--asking the Davos officials for an explanation of why they weren't releasing it, or asking Jordan if he'd give his permission to have the video made public? If you wanted to kill the controversy dead, though, you'd do what Kurtz did.

Kaus concludes that Kurtz's piece is a whitewash, and Kurtz has a conflict because CNN gave him a show. Kaus also allows there might be some truth buried in what Jordan said. If so, let it come out.

And release the videotape! With a tape, as Nixon learned, "plausible deniability" ain't an option.

Not a Cabal of Right-Wingers

Michelle Malkin has the story. She's been able to confirm that Sen. Chris Dodd, Rep. Barney Frank, and former Clinton aide David Gergen all heard Eason Jordan charge American troops with deliberately targeting journalists, in short, deliberately violating the laws of war.

By some accounts, Jordan backed off a smidgen, suggesting it was individual GIs, not the brass, who were responsible. It's still a stunning charge, and dynamite if plausible.

Given the lack of MSM coverage, the refusal to release the tape, and the deafening silence from CNN, we have to conclude the statement is scurrilous BS directed at our soldiers and marines.

Kudos to Dodd, Frank, and Gergen, none of them right-wing conspirators, but all apparently honest and honorable on what was said, and unwilling to join in military-bashing. And kudos to Michelle, who is following up on the facts.

Reporting. What a concept!