For Thursday, April 25, The American Prospect Online taps the following Web content:
GO WEST. Tapped colleague and Princeton alum Richard Just defends prima donna Cornel West in TAP Online. He says West is an incredible teacher and, if only for that reason alone, is a good hire for Princeton. (He also calls Tapped "glib." You betcha! But that's not the same as "wrong.") Since this Tapped contributor is also a Princeton alum , we feel qualified to respond. Stimulating undergraduate life is nice. Stimulating undergraduate life whilst justifying one's salary and tenure as an academic -- as Peter Singer, who Just cites approvingly, has indeed done at Princeton -- is even better. We still wonder whether West-the-exciting-lecturer is worth the price: West-the-showboat-provacteur. Our friend Just wants Princeton to have "sustained, honest, intellectual conversation among its undergraduates about issues of race" and hopes West can "help to spur such a discussion...advancing it beyond platitudes and engaging those on all ends of the political spectrum." So does Tapped. We're just not sure how race-baiting Larry Summers, casting him as "the Ariel Sharon of American higher education," and getting Al Sharpton to attack the man as anti-affirmative-action really proves West will advance that conversation beyond platitudes. In fact, it seems to prove the opposite. [posted 5:00 pm]
TOLD YOU SO. And we're off! Andrew Sullivan is first out of the gate
resurrecting
the Al Gore-as-pathological-liar theme. Way to go Andrew! [posted 4:00 pm]
AL TELLING STRETCHERS IN HIS DEBUT? Spinsanity says Al Gore's recent speech spun the arsenic issue, and that this deserved more scrutiny. Tapped thinks they're probably right, although it seems to us that this is less factual inaccuracy than the kind of small-bore spin that characterizes everyday politics. (Of course, that's the whole point of Spinsanity.) But who wants to predict that conservatives will seize on this speech to trot out the old "Al Gore has a problem with the truth" line that was deployed so effectively during the 2000 campaign? [posted 2:30 pm]
HOW THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION LIES. The New Republic's Noam Scheiber has an excellent piece in next week's issue about the Bush Administration's politicization of the Council of Economic Advisers. It's a little complicated, as most good investigative stories are, but worth reading through. Essentially, Bush's National Economic Council, headed by political appointee and supply-sider Larry Lindsey, has been trying to take over the CEA, traditionally an independent body whose sole purpose is to provide hard, accurate economic data on which to base policy decisions. Naturally, such data is politically damaging to an administration steeped in supply-side mythology. So Lindsey has been keeping tight reign on CEA's work and installed an American Enterprise Institute hack, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, as the council's chief of staff. Tapped thinks Scheiber's piece is a great example of how the Bush Administration lies, particularly on economic issues. The Bushies don't bother with half-assed wordplay or clever spin. They simply begin from dishonest premises and create an alternate universe in which everything else they say is true. That is, it's impossible to have a cogent argument with the Bushies about Social Security privatization or the benefits of the tax cut because, knowing they can't make a tenable political argument in favor of cutting Social Security benefits or sending gobs of unstimulatory tax rebates to rich people, they refuse to use honest numbers and statistics. (Or, in the case of the CEA's bizarre mid-February press release headlined "president Bush's 2001 tax relief softens the recession" that Scheiber cites in his lede, no real numbers at all.) [posted 12:40 pm]
RIP VAN DEMOCRATS II. Watching the House Democrats sleep through a right-wing legislative juggernaut is going to have to become one of Tapped's regular features, we fear. Sailing through the House yesterday were accounting industry "reforms." But as we reported yesterday, this bill should be labeled Oxley's Outrage. We hope all the House lawmakers will get a wake up call in November. [posted 12:14 pm]
TAPPED IS STUPID. Or at least, that's the take from the blogger Max Power, who writes, "HEY! The American Prospect has a blog, though they don't call it a blog, and they don't have the common sense to keep it on a single URL that doesn't change every day so that other people can consistently link to it." But little does Max Power know that this problem has already occurred to Tapped, that we have been thinking about it closely, and that even as we blog, plans are being put into place to deal with it once and for all. (Evil laugh.) [posted 12:10 pm]
LIGHTS OUT. And speaking of the Senate energy bill, the Associated Press reports that a requirement designed to encourage power companies to use more renewable power sources -- such as wind and solar -- was weakened yesterday. Tapped can't wait to see a detailed analysis of this bill so we can figure out whether there's anything in it at all that will make a difference to the nation (as opposed to the energy companies). [posted 11:03 am]
TAPPED IS CONFUSED. We thought that Republicans believed in the free market, but here we learn that the energy bill now contains unprecedented price guarantees to big corporations to build a pipeline to carry natural gas from Alaska's Prudhoe Bay to U.S. markets. Without the guarantees, the companies will not take the risks of pipeline construction. Seems like it wasn't very long ago that environmentalists had a pitched battle about building a pipeline across the then-pristine Alaskan wilderness. Now this new $20 billion effort has raised hardly a peep from them. Tapped wonders what the caribou will think. [posted 10:59 am]
OH, VANITY. A Washington Post editorial skewers the Darth Varder of campaign finance reform -- Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) -- for demanding that he be the lead plaintiff in suing over the McCain-Feingold bill. Even the NRA, it seems, was willing to lay down its rightful claim to that distinction in deference to McConnell. [posted 10:55 am]
THE REALLY IMPORTANT ISSUES. We'd like to think we have real debates over issues that matter to the American public here in Washington, but the most vehement argument in recent days seems to be over slogans. The New York Times reports that Rep. Dick Armey (R-TX) charges the Democrats with a "rhetorical hijacking" because they're now talking about "securing America's future" too. Come on, guys. Can't we leave rhetorical analysis to self-obsessed journalists? [posted 10:53 am]
STRANGEST OF BEDFELLOWS. What do you get when liberal Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), conservative Rep. Bob Barr (R-GA), the NRA, The ACLU, and the Eagle Forum stand behind a single initiative? A push for legislation that would require federal agencies to assess the impact of new regulations on individuals' privacy rights. We're relieved that someone is concerned. [posted 10:50 am]
EVOLUTIONIST CONSPIRACY, COURTESY OF MACINTOSH. Tapped still isn't 100 percent certain that this site is a parody, but we're pretty sure that's the case. And if it is, that makes it even funnier. The site advances the viewpoint of one Dr. Richard Paley, a supposed conspiratorial Creationist who believes that the "The real operating system hiding under the newest version of the Macintosh operating system (MacOS X) is called...Darwin! That's right, new Macs are based on Darwinism! While they currently don't advertise this fact to consumers, it is well known among the computer elite, who are mostly Atheists and Pagans. An absolute must-read.
IT ALL DEPENDS ON WHAT THE MEANING OF 'KID' IS. Pope John Paul II and his American cardinals don't seem to like the word "pedophilia" much. In a document released yesterday following their intensive deliberations in Rome, the holy convocation included this passage: "Even if the cases of true pedophilia on the part of priests and religious are few, all the participants recognized the gravity of the problem Attention was drawn to the fact that almost all the cases involved adolescents and therefore were not cases of true pedophilia." Tapped imagines most American Catholics will be greatly reassured by the fact that predatory priests are at least waiting for their victims to hit puberty.
HAMMERING KRAUTHAMMER. As Ramesh Ponnuru just noted in National Review Online, the latest New Republic cover story by Charles Krauthammer, arguing against research or "therapeutic" cloning, makes little sense. Krauthammer purports to make a "secular" argument against research cloning, one that notably doesn't involve pronouncing embryos -- which are created and destroyed in the process -- the moral equivalent of persons. Yet unless you're prone to be swayed by extreme Kantian moralistic language -- with lots of hurly-burly about "means" and "ends" but little talk of actual consequences -- Krauthammer manages not to make any case at all. Here's how Ponnuru limns his argument:
Krauthammer believes that there is a middle ground between treating something as a person and treating it as a mere thing. Because an embryo is not a person, it can be destroyed if our reasons are good enough. Because it is not a mere thing, it cannot be created for the sole purpose of using it in a way that destroys it. If it's already been created for some other purpose, though, as the leftover embryos in IVF clinics have been, it can be destroyed. If there's a point of principle that underlies this set of positions, I can't see it.
Though Ponnuru is an anti-cloning conservative -- which makes his latest piece all the more honest and impressive -- serious liberal ethicists would of course agree with this reading. As Ronald Green observes in his book The Human Embryo Research Debates, our culture clearly seems to believe for all practical purposes that early human embryos have no particular moral standing:
[Our indifference] to the loss of early embryos is reflected in the near universal neglect of the fact that the large majority of embryos never actually implant in the womb. Medical specialists have known about this high rate of early embryo loss for years, but no one has ever lamented it as one of the great tragedies facing humanity. No one has ever proposed a "National Institute for the Prevention of Early Embryo Mortality." No "pro-life" spokesperson has every denounced this medical neglect of a whole class of human beings. Behind these attitudes lies a sense that the very beginnings of life are too precarious and too lacking in the qualities we care about (like feeling and consciousness) to elicit much concern on our part.
BLAMING GAYS FOR PRIEST PEDOPHILIA. Slate's debunker-in-chief William Saletan does a great job taking on defensive Catholics who are blaming homosexuality for the church's pedophilia scandal. Our only objection is that he let conservative columnist Joel Mowbray, who has repeatedly been pushing this nonsense, completely off the hook.
WHAT, YOU NEED A TEST? An amazing sentence from the Washington Post's Brook A. Masters: "Zacarias Moussaoui's court-appointed lawyers asked a judge yesterday to determine that the alleged terrorist is mentally incompetent or to allow them out of the case because he believes they are part of a conspiracy to kill him." We would have changed just one word: "or" to "and."
VOTE FOR THE CROOK, REDUX. One of Tapped's mysterious compilers hails from New Orleans, Louisiana. That's why, when reading this story on how European Parliament members taunted and mocked France's rising fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen yesterday, he experienced a flashback. Leftists have been calling for a vote in favor of France's Jacques Chirac in the country's upcoming election, reports Keith B. Richburg, saying "the vote is not in favor of Chirac, whom many call dishonest, but against Le Pen. A slogan seen at rallies translates as: 'Vote for the crook, not the fascist!'" Hmm, does anyone remember the 1991 Louisiana Governor's race between the filthily corrupt (and now jailed) Edwin Edwards and former Klan leader David Duke? There, Edwin supporters prevailed on the slogan, "Vote for the Crook. It's Important." Some things never change -- and some political strategies are just foolproof.
-- compiled by Prospect staff
