Shots in the Dark

David McClintick’s investigation of Larry Summers and the Harvard-Russia scandal may have helped effect the downfall of Larry Summers, but it wasn’t the only important investigation of a Summers -related international scandal.

Now John Wolfson’s Boston magazine piece about the Harvard AIDS scandal has been nominated for a City and Regional Magazine Award in Reporting…which is, in the magazine biz, a pretty prestigious thing. That piece didn’t get quite the play at Harvard that it deserved, so it’s nice to see it being acknowledged elsewere.

Oddly, but sort of interestingly, Richard Cohen in the Washington Post compares Hillary Clinton to Marie Antoinette.

According to Cohen, “Just as Marie came to personify all that was wrong with the aristocracy, so Hillary has come to personify all that is wrong with Bill, the Democrats, liberals, working women, independent women and women of a certain kind….”

I’ll let you be the judge of that, and instead take this opportunity to make a point about image and identity in our modern world, and instead compare Hillary Clinton to Larry Summers.

Hillary Clinton has become a Rorschach test; one’s opinion of her is invariably dominated by the prejudices and attitudes one brings to her consideration. She means a hundred different things to a hundred different people.

Which is to say that she has lost control of her public identity; she has lost control of her message; and, in my opinion, public people who are not clearly and solidly identified with a particular and positive image have enormous difficulty leading.

This was one problem Larry Summers had: he represented something different to every possible constituency of the university and the world outside it. Economists, conservatives, Washingtonians, Jews, alumni, internationalists, practitioners of the liberal arts, just plain liberals—every one of them saw Larry Summers differently. There was no consistent, unified image that Summers himself had largely shaped. Whereas if you asked all those people about, say, Derek Bok, they’d probably all say pretty much the same thing.

I’m not quite sure why this happened, but I think it was fatal to Summers. When everyone is imposing their own interpretation of who you are on what you do, your attempts to lead become bogged down in debates over identity and intention. It’s an oddity: for a public man, Summers really is not well-known.

Cuban singer-songwriter Pio Leyva has passed away at the age of 88.

Like a number of prominent Cuban musicians, Leyva was really first noticed in this country following the release of the documentary, “Buena Vista Social Club.” What a debt of thanks we owe Ry Cooder and Wim Wenders for making that film….and to Pio Leyva for the decades of music he gave the world.

A conservative blogger just hired by the Washington Post—who once wrote that Coretta Scott King was a communist—has just been fired by the Post after he was discovered to have committed plagiarism. Ben Domenech, a founder of the conservative blog RedState.com who modestly writes under the nom de plume “Augustine,” lasted all of three days.

Domenech is not only a plagiarist, he’s also a liar. He tells the Times that he used material from P.J. O’Rourke with O’Rourke’s permission. O’Rourke, it turns out, has no memory of ever meeting or talking to Domenech.

Couple points. Well, three.

First, it’s always a pleasure to see smug, self-satisfied, obnoxious, Coretta Scott King-insulting conservatives take a fall.

Second, I’ve increasingly felt that the MSM is making a mistake by hiring extremely young people to write for them online when they’d never consider those people experienced enough to write for their dead-tree newspaper. It’s a bad idea for a host of reasons, not least of which is that online writing is increasingly becoming more important than what appears in print. Certainly more widely read. So why treat it as a kind of minor-league apprenticeship for writers? Because the people doing the hiring just don’t get the importance of the web.

Third, the MSM has double-standards for conservatives. The Post would never hire someone who’d written that Pat Robertson was a dickhead, which he is, but never mind. In their haste to appear balanced, the Post and other media hire people who make a name for themselves with vituperative rhetoric, and in that sense actually encourage the generation of such bile.

Over at RedState.com, Domenech’s defenders have this to say: “He’ll take the time to wander in the wilderness as he rightly should. He’ll walk that road. The least the rest of us can do is be waiting for him at its end.”

Gag me.

The Times today runs seven letters responding to Jennifer Delahunty Britz’s op-ed about how many more girls than boys are going to college, most of which fall into the what-the-hell? category.

Brintz’s essay has hit a nerve: It’s been the #1 e-mailed article on the Times site for the past couple of days.

A theme from female letter writers is that while they once deserved affirmative action, boys do not, because they can not plausibly claim that they have suffered from discrimination.

Probably, but seems to me we just don’t know—I haven’t yet read a good explanation of just why boys are having such trouble getting into college.

Meanwhile, John Tierney weighs in on the subject with one of his typically pointless columns. Forcefully addressing the question of affirmative action for boys, Tierney writes, “After consulting with the federal Education Department, I can confidently report that this discrimination may violate the law — or then again, it may not.”

Thanks, John. Appreciate that.

You probably can’t read the article, because it’s behind the Times’ firewall. But then again, you don’t really need to.

Hal the coyote is resting comfortably and apparently eating quite well….and meantime, seals have come to New York harbor. Meanwhile, Lola and Pale Male are expecting.

Sometimes, ain’t life grand?

In today’s Boston Globe, Janine R. Wedel, professor of public policy at George Mason University, argues that “when [Larry] Summers’s legacy is examined, he should be held to account for his role in a scandal with which he was intimately involved, both as a Treasury official and at Harvard.”

We think of the Shleifer scandal as the story of Andrei Shleifer’s double-dealings in Russia and Larry Summers’ attempts to protect Shleifer from any punishment, either from the federal government or from Harvard.

But Wedel, who has been writing about this scandal since at least 1998, makes another accusation that I hadn’t heard before [italics added]: As Treasury secretary, “Summers helped Shleifer and Harvard gain noncompetitive government awards through arrangements that were highly unusual in foreign aid contracting at the time, according to US officials. Summers helped Shleifer and Harvard gain noncompetitive government awards through arrangements that were highly unusual in foreign aid contracting at the time, according to US officials…. The endowment funds of both Harvard and Yale gained access to valuable investments through networks inhabited by Shleifer and/or his currency-trading wife. His investments in Russia, which he does not deny, included securities, equities, oil and aluminum companies, real estate, and mutual funds — many of the same areas in which he was being paid to provide impartial advice.”

As excellent as David McClintick’s article in Institutional Investor was, it sounds like the Shleifer scandal goes even deeper that McClintick portrayed it. (Which just goes to show how much timing has to do with the impact of an article; perhaps Wedel should have written something just after Bill Kirby was fired.)

I don’t know how much of this Wedel covers in her book, “Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe…”

Anyone?

My cousin Lucy, who’s a marine biologist, just sent me this photo of a 16-foot python found a few days ago in the Everglades.

Unlike coyotes, this animal probably does not belong in Central Park.

In the New York Sun, Dershowitz accuses Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, author of the controversial paper discussed below, of lifting quotations from neo-Nazi hate sites.

“The wrenching [of quotes] out of context is done by the hate sites, and then [the authors] cite them to the original sources, in order to disguise the fact that they’ve gotten them from hate sites,” Dershowitz claims.

Dershowitz cites this example (and I quote from the Sun):

Under the section “Manipulating the Media,” on pages 19 and 20 of the paper, Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer write: “In his memoirs, for example, former Times executive editor Max Frankel acknowledged the impact his own pro-Israel attitude had on his editorial choices. In his words: ‘I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I dared to assert.’ He goes on: ‘Fortified by my knowledge of Israel and my friendships there, I myself wrote most of our Middle East commentaries. As more Arab than Jewish readers recognized, I wrote them from a pro-Israel perspective.'” The footnote cites Mr. Frankel’s 560-page book, “The Times of My Life and My Life with the Times,” published in 1999.

Yet the Frankel quote used by Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt, Mr. Dershowitz said, is nearly identical to the quote used by a neo-Nazi Web site in its own take on Jewish press influence, “Jewish Influence in the Mass Media.”

Dershowitz’s argument is logically fallacious and intellectually indefensible.

Let us say that this quote appears in three places: the original source, the Neo-Nazi site, and Mearsheimer and Walt’s paper. Dershowitz assumes that W & M must have taken the quote from the web…because, apparently, two writers writing about how Israel is covered in the media would never conceive of reading a memoir by the Jewish former executive editor of the most important newspaper in the world.

“I promise you they did not read Max Frankel’s whole book,” the law professor said of the paper’s authors. “How do I know that? We found the same exact quote on various hate sites.”

That argument is so dumb, it would be laughable if it weren’t wrapped in the context of a very serious accusation.

In any event, it’s a safe bet that this quote has appeared in numerous places other than the memoir and neo-Nazi websites. It is, after all, a pretty provocative line—”I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I cared to assert.” It is entirely plausible that W & M would have come across this line during their research in places other than neo-Nazi websites. (I’d bet that the neo-Nazis themselves didn’t read the memoir, but got the quote from other sources.)

Let us acknowledge what Dershowitz is really saying: W & M troll neo-Nazi websites. That is a hideous accusation, and if this is all the “evidence” that Dershowitz has—evidence that would surely never be allowed in a courtroom—he shouldn’t make it. Because it is a short skip and a jump from saying that W & M read neo-Nazi websites to saying that they are neo-Nazis. And Dershowitz is well on the way to implying that.

I will leave it to people smarter than I to evaluate the level of scholarship in W & M’s paper. But you don’t have to be a legal genius to see that Alan Dershowitz’s intellectual standards do not impress.