Shots in the Dark

How’s this for a misleading headline?

Today the Times runs a story about a poll on global warming.

Americans in large bipartisan numbers say the heating of the earth’s atmosphere is having serious effects on the environment now or will soon and think that it is necessary to take immediate steps to reduce its effects, the latest New York Times/CBS News poll finds.

Ninety percent of Democrats, 80 percent of independents and 60 percent of Republicans said immediate action was required to curb the warming of the atmosphere and deal with its effects on the global climate. Nineteen percent said it was not necessary to act now, and 1 percent said no steps were needed.

Ninety percent of Dems, 80% of independents, and—and this surprises me somewhat—60% of Republicans think immediate action is required.

If you polled the question, Is the sky blue?, you might not get such a level of consensus.

So what is the Times’ headline?

Public Remains Split on Response to Warming

This is absurd. If you read the entire story, what you see is evidence of a landmark shift: the ascension of environmentalism to the forefront of the public consciousness.

I’ve been writing about the environment for years, and in my experience, politicians—even well-meaning ones—have all had the same mantra: “We want to do good things for the environment, but the public just doesn’t care; when you ask people what issues are important to them at election time, the environment is always way down the list.”

And for many years that was true.

This poll is evidence that, at last, there is a broad public consensus that the nation must act as a steward of the world’s environment. Of course, people will always be split on how best to act. That’s as it should be.

But this near-unanimity on the need to act? That’s the story—and that’s what the Times’ headline should reflect.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscriber only), David Oxtoby, president of Pomona College—who struck me as one of the more intriguing candidates for the Harvard presidency (relatively young, Harvard degree, scientist, current college president, successful fundraiser)—warns that students’ obsession with Advanced Placement courses is spinning out of control.

Advanced Placement tests have become such a popular tool for students (and parents) desperate to increase their chances in the competitive admissions lottery — and for high-school administrators eager to raise their schools’ academic profiles — that the phenomenon has taken on a life of its own. The arms race leading to more and more AP courses and exams is not likely to slow without a concerted effort on the part of American colleges and universities to rein it in. …

It’s an interesting piece from an interesting president.

In the Washington Post, Joe Lieberman argues against withdrawal from Iraq:

The suicide bombings we see now in Iraq are an attempt to reverse these [American] gains: a deliberate, calculated counteroffensive led foremost by al-Qaeda, the same network of Islamist extremists that perpetrated catastrophic attacks in Kenya, Indonesia, Turkey and, yes, New York and Washington.

Indeed, to the extent that last week’s bloodshed clarified anything, it is that the battle of Baghdad is increasingly a battle against al-Qaeda. Whether we like it or not, al-Qaeda views the Iraqi capital as a central front of its war against us.

Does Lieberman, who has been for the war since before it started, remember that Al Qaeda wasn’t actually in Iraq until after we invaded that nation?

The current wave of suicide bombings in Iraq is also aimed at us here in the United States — to obscure the recent gains we have made and to convince the American public that our efforts in Iraq are futile and that we should retreat.

This logic leads one to a terrifying conclusion: The more “gains” we make in Iraq, the more bombings result. Therefore, every bombing is actually a sign of progress.

In other words, if there are no bombings, we’re winning. And if there are lots of bombings, we’re also winning.

Where is Joseph Heller when you need him?

And here’s another dangerous piece of rhetoric:

Al-Qaeda, after all, isn’t carrying out mass murder against civilians in the streets of Baghdad because it wants a more equitable distribution of oil revenue. Its aim in Iraq isn’t to get a seat at the political table; it wants to blow up the table — along with everyone seated at it.

So Al Qaeda is a nihilist organization that simply wants to blow up everything and everyone?

I’m no Al Qaeda expert, but this is not a serious argument. What would Al Qaeda do if the U.S. pulled out of the country? Lieberman would have us believe that the answer is bombing until Iraq is just one big pile of carnage. But even from my layman’s perspective, Al Qaeda seems a terrorist organization with distinct political goals—getting the US out of lands it considers Muslim and holy.

I have no idea what Al Qaeda would do in Iraq if we pulled out. But it doesn’t sound like Lieberman does either. And his construction—Al Qaeda wants “to blow up the table—along with everyone seated at it” is nothing but fear-mongering. If we’re really going to fight Al Qaeda, we need a more sophisticated understanding of the organization than that.

But then, that’s Joe Lieberman for you….

Was that actually paint on his sock back in 2004, not blood? On his own blog, Schilling isn’t saying a word….

The sock itself is in the Hall of Fame. If Schilling really wants to put this matter to rest, he should advocate that an independent body test the red substance….

What if Larry Summers were receiving an award from a men’s group about what a great role model he is for young men, and during a question-and-answer session, he referred to all the female undergraduates as “girls”?

People would be pissed off, right? Letters to the Crimson…dark mumblings…shaking of heads at the Faculty Club.

But that’s exactly what Drew Faust did yesterday, with the genders reversed.

Yesterday the Harvard College Women’s Center gave Faust an award for “professional achievement.” As the Crimson reports, in a subsequent q-and-a,

Faust shied away from talking business, declining to answer questions about her role in undergraduate life, and at one point asking Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 to answer a question about whether the recent focus on equal opportunity for young women had left undergraduate men neglected.

“It’s not a strategy on my part* to deflect these questions to someone else,” she said, “but Dick, is there a concern about boys?”

Boys?****

I wonder how Drew Faust would have felt, back when she was in college in the late 1960s, if an incoming male president referred to her as a “girl.”

A president whose rise to power was predicated on her predecessor’s gender-insensitive remarks ought to be more careful with her language. After all, men aren’t the only ones who can be sexist.
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Incidentally, this* is an interesting piece of rhetoric. As anyone who has followed Drew Faust over the past several months knows, it is exactly her strategy to deflect these questions to someone else.

There’s nothing wrong with that. If Faust doesn’t feel that it’s appropriate for her to discuss substantive matters in public, that’s her prerogative.

But when the double-speak begins—”it’s not a strategy on my part,” when clearly it is—that’s when a leader’s credibility starts slipping away. The erosion happens so subtly at first, you don’t even realize it. But remarks like that start the process.
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****A poster writes the following: Here’s a classic case of: you had to be there. Faust was responding to a question about “boys.” The person who asked the question used the term “boys” repeatedly, and when Faust referred the question to Dean Gross, she was asking him about research in that particular area of developmental psychology.

If that’s correct, then I am wrong in faulting Drew Faust for using the term “boys,” and I withdraw the criticism with apologies.

The Crimson reports that Ryan Peterson, the president of Harvard’s Undergraduate Council, has made a move that is sending shock waves through the Harvard world: He has asked to meet with the Corporation.

Consternation! Gnashing of teeth! Beating of breasts!

Peterson wants to talk to the governing board about calendar reform. Harvard students want the college to be more like Yale, which holds its undergraduate exams before Christmas, allowing students a little time off. As things stand, Harvard has its exams in January, and basically winds up blowing off the whole month.

Peterson puts the Corporation in an interesting position. It will either have to—gasp!—meet with someone other than its own seven members. Or it will suggest contempt for the reasonable petition of a student leader.

Which way will the Corporation go—in the direction of openness and transparency, or just more elitism and non-accountability?

Peterson’s request exposes an interesting dilemma at Harvard right now: With Derek Bok wrapping up his interim presidency and Drew Faust declining to speak her mind, as well as a temporary FAS dean, there’s a real power vacuum at the university…..

Is the university without a leader?

When American soldiers decided that they wanted to take occupancy of an abandoned spaghetti factory in Baghdad to use as an outpost, they ran into one unexpected problem: In a hole in the courtyard outside the factory, they discovered a corpse floating in several feet of shit.

The body, floating, was in a billowing, once-white shirt. The toes were gone. The fingers were gone. The head, separated and floating next to the body, had a gunshot hole in the face.

To their credit, the soldiers decided that they needed to do something for the victim, whom they dubbed “Bob,” as in, bobbing up and down. (You can understand the need for a little dark humor.)

The body, it was quickly decided, would have to be removed before the 120 soldiers could move in. “It’s a morale issue. Who wants to live over a dead body?” [Army Major Brent] Cummings said. “And part of it is a moral issue, too. I mean he was somebody’s son, and maybe husband, and for dignity’s sake, well, it cheapens us to leave him there. I mean even calling him Bob is disrespectful. I don’t know. It’s the world we live in.”

He paused.

“I’d like to put him in a final resting place,” he said, “as opposed to a final floating place.“

This is the kind of story Kurt Vonnegut, RIP, would understand. It’s horrible almost beyond belief, but there is also beauty and courage in it.

And, sadly, it is, of course, an apt metaphor for the war and America’s involvement in Iraq.

Read the full story by David Finkel in the Washington Post—it will reinforce your admiration for our soldiers even as it breaks your heart over what has happened in Iraq.

We all know that Pat Tillman, the former Arizona Cardinal who volunteered for the military, was killed by friendly fire, and that the Bush Administration tried to cover up that news.

Nonetheless, the details of the cover-up are truly disheartening. Yesterday, a former comrade of Tillman’s described how he suspected at once that Tillman was killed by U.S. soldiers, but was forbidden to tell Tillman’s own brother, who was in uniform and fighting nearby.

If the Administration lied about something so high-profile, imagine how many lies it has told about people and subjects less likely to attract the attention of the press?

Jessica Lynch also testified at yesterday’s Congressional hearing, reiterating that she was not the hero the Pentagon made her out to be. (Some of us have believed this all along.)

The thing is that Pat Tillman, his brother, Jessica Lynch—they are heroes, and not just for their wartime service.

Kevin Tillman and Jessica Lynch are heroic for their determination to see the truth come out. They are heroes in in a way that this White House could not understand and certainly does not deserve.

I’ve just realized that my posts today are a bit, well, cranky. (Also, for some reason, blue.)

Apparently I need an infusion of Tuesday Afternoon Zen.

Tampico, Mexico, by Claudia Zamorro

At the White House Correspondents Dinner*, Eric Alterman, the most unpleasant and unpopular man in journalism, and Anna Marie Cox, the worst journalist ever hired as a columnist for Time (and that’s saying a lot)—who boldly announced that she was giving up her Imus-addiction after his “nappy-headed ho’s” comment—got into a catfight.

Here’s the transcript!

Various websites would have you side with Alterman or Cox, depending on whether you’re middle aged and stodgy or young and self-consciously obnoxious.

Me? As the names roll off the tongues—Michael Kinsley! Peter Beinart! Jim Kelly! John Huey! Rick Stengel!—I just wish we could drop them all into a lifeboat in the middle of some ocean and then wave buh-bye.

These people have convinced massive corporations to give them huge salaries to write for media that no one reads anymore. Several of them are supposed to be liberal, but they are all within such a narrow range of conventional opinion, their liberalism is about as threatening as throwing a Wiffle ball against the Washington Monument. (Although I do like Wiffle balls.)

When it comes to politics, the MSM truly does not realize how irrelevant its pundits have become…and the very idea of anyone arguing about the columnists in Time magazine as if it could possibly matter is enough to make you….well…not read Time magazine!
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*Actually, at a brunch before the dinner.