You already know that I keep novelist Stephen Hunter’s picture in a locket, close to my heart. He proves (once again) his worthiness of such adoration in this marvelous piece in Commentary about Bonnie and Clyde–both the movie and the actual persons.
I always held pretty much this opinion. I just didn’t know enough to say it so well.
Tip: Threedonia.
The Wall Street Journal has a piece reacting to a call from U.S. News and World Report to crack down on hateful speakers who supposedly encourage murders like those of the abortionist, the security guard, and the soldier over the last several weeks.
“If [last week’s] Holocaust Museum slaying of security guard and national hero Stephen Tyrone Johns is not a clarion call for banning hate speech, I don’t know what is. . . .” writes Bonnie Erbe in U.S. News and World Report. In response, James Taranto says,
This is not Islamist Iran or communist Cuba or some tin-pot military dictatorship. Our government does not simply round people up. It cannot deprive people of their liberty without a legal basis to do so, and it has no authority to punish people merely for expressing political views, no matter how odious.
This is not even a close call: The expression of prejudice and hatred is protected by the First Amendment. In America, neo-Nazis have a constitutional right to hold a parade in a neighborhood full of Holocaust survivors (National Socialist Party v. Skokie, 1977). That’s about as hateful as you can get.
I surprised at emotional responses like Erbe’s, and I can only assume she doesn’t know the law or founding principles of our country. Of course, I’m not a legal scholar either, but what kind of philosophy leads one to advocate making hateful ideas a crime? A disjointed one, I’d think, one based in feeling, not truthful reason.
I like the way President Bush said it. Murder for any reason is hateful. There’s no need to specify punishment for some motivations over others.
Napolitano: From Dimwit to Visionary. How do neo-nazis (or Jew-haters by any other name) get labeled right-wing extremists? I’m starting to hate right and left terminology.
News Corp. may be selling the news magazine The Weekly Standard to a Denver billionare. Also this week, The National Review is asking for your support.
Theodore Dalrymple, the great English physician and social commentator, meditates on the question in this piece at FrontPage Magazine.
It is intrinsically unlikely that a man espouses a totalitarian doctrine of proved and indisputable viciousness and violence from a love of peace and a dislike of poverty.
Rick Pearcey writes about CNN’s Anderson Cooper’s reaction to the tea parties, saying his vulgar snarking was not journalism at all.
Not only is what Cooper said deserving of ethical condemnation, but it also reveals a principial breakdown between journalism and urinalism, where there no longer is a line of demarcation between facts and propaganda, between reporting and demonization, between knowledge and Goebbels.
Pearcey points to the weakness of the liberal, secular worldview as the reason for mainstream journalism’s problems. If this seems a bit over-the-top, perhaps you’re with me in not understanding the vulgarity in the first place.
Kyle-Anne Shiver of American Thinker also decries our news agencies.
Whenever close to 300,000 middle-class Americans put their productive lives on hold on a midweek workday, make original signs with their own hands, and travel miles and miles to stand with other private citizens just to demonstrate their anger with government, in more than 300 cities from coast to coast and everywhere in between, that’s NEWS. Continue reading Journalism, American People in Crisis
Obit Magazine has a piece on premature obituaries. Some of the stories are not comical, but this one on Bertrand Russell is.
Most victims of premature obituaries can blame slipshod reporting for the foul ups, but the mistakes ar at least, honest ones. Philosopher Bertrand Russell contended with more sinister behavior. In 1920, after surviving a nasty bout of pneumonia while in China, Japanese correspondents pestered Russell’s future wife, Dora Black, with requests to interview the convalescing philosopher. “At last she became a little curt with them, so they caused the Japanese newspapers to say that I was dead,” recalled Russell in his autobiography.
But the renowned pacifist exacted his revenge. When his health improved a bit, Russell stopped in Japan for a lecture. Local journalists again demanded interviews. Russell replied by having Dora pass out printed announcements: “Since Mr. Russell is dead, he cannot be interviewed.”
Bill Sammon has a remarkable report on certain Democrats desire for Bush to fail prior to 9/11. The morning of September 11, 2001, strategist James Carville and pollster Stanley Greenberg told reporters they didn’t want George Bush to succeed.
Sammon writes, “‘We rush into these focus groups with these doubts that people have about him, and I’m wanting them to turn against him,’ Greenberg admitted. The pollster added with a chuckle of disbelief: ‘They don’t want him to fail. I mean, they think it matters if the president of the United States fails.'”
It does matter, but the country, the economy, and the president are not all the same. In this case, the less Obama’s campaign policies are enacted, the better the country will be in the long run.
In related news, Democrat and culture critic Camille Paglia calls the Obama administration harsh words. She states, “The orchestrated attack on radio host Rush Limbaugh, which has made the White House look like an oafish bunch of drunken frat boys. . . . Has the administration gone mad? This entire fracas was set off by the president himself, who lowered his office by targeting a private citizen by name.”
Also, “If Rush’s presence looms too large for the political landscape, it’s because of the total vacuity of the Republican leadership, which seems to be in a dithering funk.” [via AmSpecBlog]
Two Philadelphia newspapers filed for bankruptcy today, and Frank Wilson, who used to work on the book pages for the Philadelphia Inquirer, explains why the papers and any other newspapers are in trouble. He says the front page has no news. “One of the abiding problems with contemporary journalism – most obvious in the broadcast variety,” Frank states, “is this insistence on providing commentary on what the rest of us have witnessed.”