I’m off to a family reunionâthe Bradley sideâso the posts will be erratic for the next couple of days, and if I seem traumatized when I return, you’ll understand why. I have a wonderful family, but reunions are a risky business….
Perhaps I should ask the Re-Ethicist about this….
You can’t help but wonder if the two were related; if the murderers in London weren’t trying to send a particularly horrific message to England that, so soon after its great joy, they could bring great terror.
If so, you have to also think that they’ve terribly miscalculated. They haven’t just attacked London now; they’ve attacked an Olympic city, and in that sense they have attacked the world.
Sometimes, as with 9/11, you think, These bastards combine deep cunning with total nihilism, and what a terrifying combination that is.
Other times….
Yesterday’s attack is tragic and appalling, of course. But if the terrorists were trying to achieve some strategic objective, the bombings were just stupid. They accomplish only one thing: to drive home just how isolated and out of touch with the world these terrorists are.
We in the U.S. feel a special kinship with England, certainly. But London is now playing host to the world. I have a feeling that even from the terrorists’ warped point of view, this bombing is going to be a serious mistake…..
| 08/07/2024 |
| London Bombs |
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| People trapped in the Tube after one of the several explosions hit commuters at morning rush hour |
| 08/07/2024 |
| London bombs |
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| Passengers are evacuated from an Tube train in a tunnel near Kings Cross station (Alexander Chadwick/AP) |
| 08/07/2024 | |||
| London bombs | |||
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| An injured woman is escorted away from Edgware Road Tube station after the third of the four blasts (Andre Camara/The Times) | |||
| 08/07/2024 |
| London bombs |
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| A woman is rushed into the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel after being injured by the explosions at Aldgate East underground (Anna Branthwaite/The Times) |
| 08/07/2024 |
| London bombs |
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| A helicopter lands at the Royal London Hospital carrying seriously injured commuters from the explosions (Anna Branthwaite/The Times) |
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| London bombs | |||
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| Going home: commuters surge towards Liverpool Street mainline station as it re-opens after the morning terror attack (Gareth Fuller/PA) | |||
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I was out at the Stadium last night to watch as the Yankees obliterated the Indians, 7-2. It was a little eerie: there were lots more police cars than usual, or so it seemed, and I was reminded of going to Yankee Stadium not long after September 11th… The game was preceded by a moment of silence in honor of the British dead and wounded. Unlike the rote playing of “God Bless America” that now takes place every game, this had the feel of authenticity. Somehow the idea of London being attacked particularly wounds the heart…and riles the spirit.
The game itself was terrific. Mike Mussina held the Indians to two runs in seven innings; A-Rod, Jason Giambi, and Derek Jeter all homered; and the Yankees started a rookie, Melky Cabrera, in centerfield. When Cabrera singled his second time up, the crowd of 52,000 gave him a standing ovation. Sweet.
The Yankees now have three promoted minor-leaguers playing regularly on the team: Cabrera, second baseman Robinson Cano, and pitcher Chien Mien-Wang. (Someone check my spelling on that.) I love it. Somehow it’s so much easier to root for these young athletes when expectations are low and you know they’re just learning the game…and when they’re not getting paid $15 million a year.
Consider the Yankees’ pitching staff at the start of the season: Randy Johnson, Jaret Wright, Mike Mussina, Kevin Brown, and Carl Pavano. Free-agent signings all. While Mussina’s been solid, if not great, Johnson has been inconsistent and generally not very impressive. Wright, Pavano, and Brown are all on the disabled list. After last year’s ALCS Game Seven, Kevin Brown may be the most hated Yankee ever; you might as well have taken $30 million and set it on fire….
Who knows whether the rookies will be good enough to spark this team? That’s okay. I’d rather watch Melky Cabrera play his heart out and struggle than watch Kevin Brown mail it in and cash his checks….
Oh, and by the way, Dan Shaughnessy: it’s 3 1/2 games now….
Lord knows, it’s easy to fault Judith Miller’s reporting during the lead-up to the war in Iraq, as Harry Shearer does so passionately. As Michael Massing showed in the New York Review of Books, of all the bad reporting during that time, Miller’s was probably the worstâand, unfortunately, it was as influential as it was bad.
But does that mean progressives and First Amendment advocates should now abandon her as she sits in jail for refusing to disclose her source? Is it really fair to ask, as Shearer does, “Is there such a thing as karma? If so, Judith Miller is in the pokey as punishment for helping to get over 1700 Americans and thousands of Iraqis killed for a reason yet to be determined.”
These are tough times for journalists. The media’s credibility is lower than at any point since perhaps the turn of the last century, and not because it’s doing a worse job than usual, but because it’s the target of sustained political attacks from both sides of the ideological spectrum…and because any press exposed to the blogosphere, at any time in history, would have its failings glaringly exposed. It’s just that never before have so many media critics been able to disseminate their criticisms, and predictably, the media’s image has suffered.
In that context, it’s inspiring to see a journalist remind the public of how seriously we take our craft. There’s lots of discussion now about what constitutes a journalist: Are bloggers journalists? Are talking heads? Is Bill O’Reilly a journalist? What about Armstrong Williams?
That discussion is fostered by the fact that, unlike law and medicineâor even, in my state, hairdressersâAmerican journalism has never been a licensed guild, but an open profession. I think that’s one of the great things about the free press in this country, but it does lead to frequent confusion about just exactly what a journalist is.
Well, Judith Miller is currently suggesting one definition: journalists are people who play by the longstanding rules of the profession and live with the consequences.
(Bob Woodward, in protecting Deep Throat’s identity for decades, serves up the same lesson.)
How many bloggers would do the same? How many pundits? As Lawrence O’Donnell himself admitted, he didn’t write his big scoop about Karl Rove’s alleged role in the leak of Valerie Plame’s name because he didn’t want to get “dragged” before a grand jury. This despite the fact that he’d had his information “for months.”
In an eloquent editorial this morning, the Times reminds us why this fight is so important. And in a refreshing bit of honesty, the paper notes:
“To be frank, this is far from an ideal case. We would not have wanted our reporter to give up her liberty over a situation whose details are so complicated and muddy. But history is very seldom kind enough to provide the ideal venue for a principled stand. Ms. Miller is going to jail over an article that she never wrote, yet she has been unwavering in her determination to protect the people with whom she had spoken on the promise of confidentiality.”
Another thing that makes this far from an ideal case, of course, is that the reporter involved is one whose work is hotly contested.
No matter. As the Times concludes, “What is at stake is nothing less than our society’s perpetual bottom line: the citizens control the government in a democracy. We stand with Ms. Miller and thank her for taking on that fight for the rest of us.”
Indeed. Judith Miller may be an imperfect hero, but in this fight, she’s still a hero.
Readers of Harvard Rules will note that one of the book’s themes is that, although ostensibly a university committed to open minds, free speech, and veritas, Harvard often prefers secrecy. Try to find out what its Corporation discusses…where its grant money comes from…how its grant money gets spent…try to get an honest answer from its press office, or from one of the countless press secretaries scattered around the university. You won’t. At least, not without a hell of a lot of digging.
Now David Burdick, a columnist for the Daily Pennsylvanian, points out that this penchant for secrecy isn’t limited to Harvard, but crops up elsewhere in the Ivy League, particularly the Council of Ivy League Presidents.
In a very smart column, Burdick writes about the council’s annual meeting, and the fact that the eight presidents involved refuse to say a word about what was discussed. He’s particularly concerned about athletic policy, where there are a number of pressing issues (that I’m not very familiar with).
My favorite section:
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It’s a classic story: thinkers who promote openness until they actually come to power, when they decide that the free flow of information is, well, a pain in the ass….
The Yanks whomped the O’s, 12-3, last night, in a game that contained all sorts of good omens. My favorite underdog, Jason Giambi, hit his third homer in the past two days, and struggling pitcher Randy Johnson pitched great on three days rest. The Yanks are 1/2 a game behind the Orioles, four behind the Sox.
In the classic football film, The Replacements, Gene Hackman is asked by a TV reporter what his team needs to come back from a halftime deficit. “Heart,” he says. “We gotta have heart.” (Whereupon Keanu Reeves suits up for the second half and wins the game.)
The Yanks have enough talent to win it all. They just need to show some heart. Finally, it looks like they are.
And wouldn’t it be great if the Yankees came back to win the division after Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy flat-out declared that that the Sox would win it going away? “Come late September, this is going to look like Secretariat at the Belmont in 1973,” Shaughnessy wrote about four days ago.
”We’re going to the Series, boys!” shouted Kevin Millar in the locker room after the Sox beat the Phillies the other day. “The fucking Sox are on a roll!”
Getting a little ahead of yourselves, aren’t you, boys?
How incredibly great would it be the Sox pulled a catastrophic fold and didn’t even make the playoffs? Oh pleaseGodpleaseGodpleaseGod let it happen….
Over at the Huffington Post, Lawrence O’Donnell is pretty convinced that Karl Rove’s lawyer, Robert Luskin, is full of it. He thinks that Luskin is using lawyerly language to suggest that Rove had nothing to do with the disclosure of Valerie Plame’s identityâsaying, for example, that Rove never “knowingly disclosed classified information.”
Couple of things…
One, I’m enjoying watching O’Donnell keep the heat on, but where has he been for the past year or so? O’Donnell says he’s only now going public with his information that it was Rove because he didn’t want to “dragged” before a grand jury. So, in other words, after other journalists have taken all the heat, O’Donnell gets to enjoy his scoop.
That’s not exactly a textbook definition of courage.
Second, how does O’Donnell respond to the Washington Post story discussed below in which Luskin flat-out denies that Rove disclosed Plame’s identity? On the HuffPo, he ignores it…..
Oh, one final thing: Why are conservatives so silent on this matter? You know that if it were the Clinton White House involved, they’d be screaming bloody murder. But outing a CIA agent is a scandal regardless of which political party does it. At the very least, it appears to be against the law, and in a larger sense, it may be treasonous.
I’m sure that conservatives are patriots too, and therefore deeply disturbed by the idea that a White House operative may have been responsible. Right? Anyone there?
A couple of days ago, a New York teenager was murdered when he resisted a pack of young thugs who wanted to steal his iPod. In the ensuing scuffle, he was stabbed twice in the chest and died.
Yesterday, the boy’s father received a telephone call from Steve Jobs, the head of Apple, who wanted to offer his sympathies.
In part because a good friend of mine was just mugged on the subway in Times Square, I’m fascinated and a little moved by this episode. Apple’s lawyers and PR people couldn’t have recommended that Jobs call the grieving parent; no point in further associating your company with a horrific crime.
So Jobs could only have called because…well, because he has a heart. (If you need anything at all, Jobs reportedly told the boy’s father, call me.) That’s something we don’t expect from our chief executivesâand often, in our macho business culture, something we don’t even value.
There are, of course, plenty of stories to the effect that Jobs is a megalomaniac and a jerk, at least when it comes to business. But as far as I’m concerned, the man just showed a lot of class.
