Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Even the media’s bien pensants can make the connection between the dead on Turkey’s shore and President Feckless. Here’s Edward Luce of the Financial Times.

When historians weigh President Barack Obama’s record, the word Syria looks set to be a negative. It is four years since Mr Obama called for Bashar al-Assad’s ejection from power. The US president did almost nothing to follow through on it — and the little he tried arguably tightened Mr Assad’s grip.

More than 200,000 deaths and 4m refugees later, it is hard to distinguish America’s response from that of other western democracies. With the notable exceptions of Germany and Sweden, the west has denied succour to Syria’s fleeing masses.

Mr Obama should be wary. Syria is not some footnote to a respectable diplomatic legacy. It is an indictment. …

… Second, America’s brand in the Middle East is as tarnished under Mr Obama as it was under George W Bush. It may be unfair to compare them. Mr Bush’s were errors of commission — chiefly in his Iraq invasion. Mr Obama’s are errors of omission in how he has handled Mr Bush’s legacy. But their costs are real.

From imprisoned democrats in Egypt, to Libyans fleeing their country’s disintegration, the US is no beacon under Mr Obama. The feeling — once articulated by the president himself — that the US could disentangle itself is mocked every day by the hordes escaping Syria and elsewhere. The spillover does not stop at Europe. In today’s world no region is an island, let alone the Middle East. …

And a Foreign Policy Magazine op-ed destroys the latest administration excuses.

“Stop them damn pictures. I don’t care what the papers write about me. My constituents can’t read. But, damn it, they can see the pictures.”

Change “can’t” to “don’t” or “rarely,” and the plaintive words of the corrupt William Magear “Boss” Tweed in reaction to the scathing cartoons of Thomas Nast in 1870s New York City might just as easily be placed on the lips of President Barack Obama, as images of dead Syrian children washing up on Turkish beaches awaken a dormant American public to a humanitarian abomination and policy catastrophe. For an administration relying on public indifference to sustain a policy rich in rhetoric and devoid of action, the pictures are a damnable inconvenience. 

Faced by reporters suddenly jolted out of Syria fatigue, White House spokesman Josh Earnest recently followed his boss’s formula in defending the indefensible. Yes, Earnest admitted, there may have been alternatives to doing nothing as Iran and Russia helped Syrian President Bashar al-Assad do his worst to 23 million Syrians. But, according to Earnest, they “would have subjected the United States to a whole host of more significant risks, including more significant outlays of funds to fund essentially a war in Syria. It certainly would have put tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of American troops in harm’s way on the ground in [Syria].”

Is it possible that anyone in this administration really believes that invasion would have been the inevitable consequence of accepting the 2012 recommendation of Leon Panetta, Hillary Clinton, David Petraeus, and Martin Dempsey — then the defense secretary, secretary of state, CIA director, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, respectively — that the United States take the lead in training and equipping Syrian nationalists capable of fighting both Bashar al-Assad and a growing al Qaeda presence in Syria? 

Does any administration official — including the president — think that if the United States had destroyed the Assad regime’s instruments of mass murder two years ago, after the Syrian regime had crossed Obama’s chemical red line for the 14th time, that U.S. ground forces would have been obliged to occupy Syria? …

Garry Kasparov, Russian Grandmaster, is in the WSJ with an essay on the “Rewards of the Obama Doctrine.” Since he is a chess player, Kasparov can entertain many thoughts at once. Our president can only handle two; spend more and borrow more. 

A quick glance at the latest headlines suggests a jarring disconnect from the stream of foreign-policy successes touted by the Obama White House and its allies. President Obama has been hailed by many as a peacemaker for eschewing the use of military force and for signing accords with several of America’s worst enemies. The idea that things will work out better if the U.S. declines to act in the world also obeys Mr. Obama’s keen political instincts. A perpetual campaigner in office, he realizes that it is much harder to criticize an act not taken.

But what is good for Mr. Obama’s media coverage is not necessarily good for America or the world. From the unceasing violence in eastern Ukraine to the thousands of Syrian refugees streaming into Europe, it is clear that inaction can also have terrible consequences. The nuclear agreement with Iran is also likely to have disastrous and far-reaching effects. But in every case of Mr. Obama’s timidity and procrastination, the response to criticism amounts to this: It could have been worse.

Looking at the wreckage of the Middle East, including the flourishing of Islamic State, it takes great imagination to see how things would be worse today if the U.S. had acted on Mr. Obama’s “red line” threat in 2013 and moved against Syria’s Bashar Assad after he defied the U.S. president and used chemical weapons. …

… Power abhors a vacuum, and as the U.S. retreats the space is being filled. After years of the White House leading from behind, Secretary of State John Kerry’s timid warning to the Kremlin this week to stay out of Syria will be as effective as Mr. Obama’s “red line.” Soon Iran—flush with billions of dollars liberated by the nuclear deal—will add even more heft to its support for Mr. Assad.

Dead refugee children are on the shores of Europe, bringing home the Syrian crisis that has been in full bloom for years. There could be no more tragic symbol that it is time to stop being paralyzed by the Obama-era mantra that things could be worse—and to start acting instead to make things better.

A blog called The Wilderness has a long Jeremiad on the subject. We’ll have the normal pull quotes and then an abridgement. Follow the link if you want to read it all.

Flash back to 2011, and far as presidencies are concerned, it feels like a millennium ago. Barack Obama was basking in the fullness of the Arab Spring, posing as the personal midwife to a New Birth of Freedom as he polished his Peace Prize in front of the world. Truly this was a man who could not lose: it seemed like all he had to do was demand some former ally steeped in domestic conflict bow to his diplomatic omnipotence and boom: Instant Democracy. The media tactfully aided Obama by moving on from covering these international hotspots almost immediately after President Santa had finished gifting them with new regimes, so we wouldn’t have to trouble ourselves with any messy details about their aftermaths (until Ambassador Stevens found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time a year later, that is). The afterglow was unfaded. Barack Obama was still the fresh-faced President Hope and Change. Oprah was still crying.  But as it all fell to pieces, Obama received a brutal education in the truth that community organizing on the South Side of Chicago is light years away from an attempt to community organize the Middle East.

Which brings us to Bashar al-Assad, of course.

When Barack Obama demanded Assad step down in 2011, he took immediate ownership of any consequences to follow. Assad — not being much more than a photo-op for Nancy Pelosi or a dinner date for John Kerry, and owing us utterly nothing (unlike Mubarak or Khaddafi) — told Obama to get bent around a tree, …

… A foreign policy based on hoping that no one will call your bluff is dangerous and disastrous. As it turns out, not only was Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against civilians not a true “red line,” ISIS’s use of them now multiple times doesn’t seem to be either . ISIS’s use of chemical weapons has been barely reported or acknowledged for the same reasons that much of ISIS’s activity overall never makes it to our own media shores — because it’s ugly, it’s inconvenient, and thanks to Obama’s “flexibility” it’s now an unsolvable Problem from Hell.

That’s always been this President’s problem: his complete inability to deal with the world at hand, as it exists right in front of his face. When the world forces Barack Obama off his script, he simply retreats to a golf course, ESPN, or most recently the remote wilds of Alaska.

Nowhere was this more evident than when his habit of diplomatic detachment inconveniently washed up on the shores of the Greek island of Kos last week when a boat carrying Syrian refugees capsized. While President Jor-El embarked on a magical mystery end-of-summer climate cruise to call attention to Alaskan glacier-melt in summer, the world was suddenly captivated by the lifeless body of Aylan Kurdi lying face down in front of rescue workers. …

… Once again world events inconsiderately  interrupted Obama’s semi-retirement and he was left holding a fish and taking selfies for an audience of himself and a business-as-usual press corps just happy to be along for the sights.

It’s fitting in a way: it is the photograph of a young boy washed up on a Turkish beach that encapsulates the consequences of what happens when a coddled President, content to do as little as possible before turning over a world spinning off its axis to his successor, is allowed to distract himself with selfies in Alaska.  Barack Obama’s successor will almost certainly bear most of the brunt and the blame of his inaction. In Hillary Clinton’s case it would be most deservedly so. …

… It wasn’t “the United States” that let Obama get away with declaring “I didn’t set that red line, the world did” only to have him to walk out the door like a dejected child needing an afternoon snack and media-induced nap. No, that was our media: rather than hold him accountable for his own declarations of removing Assad and setting a “red line,” they simply shrugged, muttered a word or two about how war Totally Sucks Anyway, and went back to writing think pieces on the cultural impact of the President’s NCAA tournament bracket.

Because of DC media’s nerd-prom infatuation at the thought of being a part, any part, of this socially cool West Wing Presidency, we have to turn to other sources in calling out this ridiculous clipboard hashtag foreign policy. …

Max Boot posts on the charge the white house has been cooking the books on ISIS intelligence.

Is the U.S. winning the war against ISIS? To listen to administration spokesmen, you would think so. Never mind that the terror group controls an area the size of the United Kingdom or that its hold on Mosul, Fallujah, and Ramadi remains unshaken. Never mind that ISIS continues to draw large  numbers of foreign recruits, that it continues to destroy antiquities, enslave women, and commit numerous other atrocities. “ISIS is losing,” John Allen, the retired marine general who coordinates the anti-ISIS campaign, proclaimed in July.

So strong is the spin coming from the White House that now some 50 intelligence analysts who work for U.S. Central Command are alleging that their superiors have twisted their findings to put lipstick on the pig that is Operation Inherent Resolve. As Shane Harris and Nancy Youssef report at The Daily Beast, the Pentagon’s inspector general has opened an investigation into complaints of “alleged manipulation of intelligence.” The complaint describes a “Stalinist” climate within CENTCOM in which bad news is no news.

Of course, a full investigation will be required to assess the validity of these charges, but I find the complaint eminently reasonable for two reasons. …

Investor’s Business Daily editors get a laugh from the Dem presidential campaigners’ digs on obama’s economy.

… Every single one of those scathing attacks came from Labor Day remarks by Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Vice President Joe Biden.

Their prognosis is dead-on. As we’ve pointed out repeatedly, the recovery that started a few months after Obama took office has been the worst since the Great Depression, with GDP and employment growth far below the average post-World War II recoveries.

Median family incomes have declined, millions are working part-time jobs because there isn’t full-time work, 13 million have dropped out of the labor force entirely. Millions more are poor and on food stamps. And the latest IBD/TIPP poll shows 46% think we’re still in a recession and 52% say it’s not improving.

Naturally, neither Biden, Clinton nor Sanders mentioned Obama, much less blamed him for the current state of affairs. But lest they forget, it was Obama who presided over the largest Keynesian stimulus in history and signed the job-killing ObamaCare law.

And it was Obama who succeeded in getting multiple tax hikes on the “rich.” And it was his administration that has imposed massive regulations on banking, health care, energy suppliers, employers and just about every other corner of the private economy. …

Turning our attention to other elected left wing fools, Noah Rothman says liberals do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.

… Amid a refugee crisis, the American left will give no credit to European conservatives like Angela Merkel and David Cameron, who have committed to taking in the displaced from North Africa and the Middle East. Those same liberals will point to a handful of Republican presidential candidates who have opted to burnish their anti-illegal immigrant credibility by opposing calls to absorb some of these refugees into the United States. Their self-indulgent back patting is undeserved. Truly mitigating this crisis means making hard choices about war and peace. Truly saving the future means stemming the flow of migrants into a continent that can scarcely employ or provide services for its own citizens. The left congratulates itself for evincing an abundance of empathy. It’s a poor substitute for embracing policies that end crises. In power, the left presides over triage, mitigates the harshest effects of their shortsighted policies, and is congratulated by fellow travelers in the press for their courage.

The left scarcely deserves the benefit of the doubt they receive from the public. Their hearts may be in the right place, but their hearts are distinctly poor governors. It is time for liberals to take stock of their disastrous records, and that can only happen when the public and the press stops excusing the left’s abject failures because they believe their intentions are noble.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Streetwise Professor posts on the Bergdahl indictment. Says the Pentagon has flipped a well deserved bird to the president.

The Bowe Bergdahl case largely disappeared from view, likely because it was overtaken by so many other foreign policy foulups. The Isis explosion. The Syria implosion. The Iran capitulation.

But the story re-emerged yesterday. Well, sort of re-emerged: the coverage has been muted, at best, despite the fact that the charges are sensational.

Not only did the Pentagon charge Bergdahl with desertion: they charged him with “misbehavior before the enemy,” which could result in his incarceration for life. This is about the most serious charge that can be brought. …

… The White House fought tooth and nail to stop the Pentagon from charging Bergdahl: bad optics, dontcha know, to have embraced a deserter’s family in the Rose Garden, and to have traded 5 hard core terrorists for him.

The Pentagon not only defied Obama on this: they doubled down and charged Bergdahl with cowardice before the enemy. A charge almost never used. So the Pentagon is saying: Mr. President, you embraced the family of an utterly dishonorable coward in the Rose Garden, and traded five terrorists for him.

FU, in other words. …

Nice essay on unintended consequences by Kevin Williamson.

News item: There is a new cholesterol-control drug on the market, Repatha, which is enormously beneficial to people who suffer serious side effects from the statins commonly used to control cholesterol or who derive no benefit from statins. Some 17 million Britons are potential beneficiaries of the drug, but they will not be able to use it, because the United Kingdom’s version of Sarah Palin’s death panel — which bears the pleasingly Orwellian name NICE, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence — says it is too expensive. The United Kingdom’s single-payer health-care system is effectively a monopoly, and not an especially effective one: Cardiovascular-disease mortality rates in the United Kingdom are nearly 40 percent higher than in the United States. That’s not nice. And it isn’t what was supposed to happen. … 

… In the social sciences, the term of art for these developments is “unintended consequences.” Some unintended consequences are unforeseeable, but many are not. They are at least partly foreseeable, even if unintended, and our good intentions do not entitle us to blind ourselves to reality. Demand curves slope downward: When you raise the price of something — a ton of coal, an hour of labor — then the quantity demanded will be lower than it would have been at a lower price. …

… Some outcomes are positively perverse. In the 1960s, the federal and state governments began imposing more demanding liability standards on businesses in the belief that if a firm faces greater liability, then it will be more responsible when it comes to risky activities. The result wasn’t more corporate responsibility, but more widely dispersed corporate responsibility, as the economists Al H. Ringleb and Steven N. Wiggins showed. Instead of higher corporate safety standards, there was a proliferation of small corporations, the number of which, they calculated, was about 20 percent higher than it would have been with different liability rules. Why? Because businesses outsourced high-risk tasks to small, specialized firms with relatively little in the way of assets, meaning that they could simply declare bankruptcy and liquidate when faced with a large judgment. …

… When Paul Krugman welcomed the inflation of a housing bubble to offset a collapsing stock-market bubble in 2002, he didn’t understand that he was urging a policy that eventually would kneecap the world’s economy. But he’s only a Nobel laureate in economics and so cannot be expected to think very much about the big picture. …

David Harsanyi says environmentalists will lose and that is good for the human race.

… If there were any chance environmentalists could “win,” as Chait claims, rolling back hundreds of years of progress rather than waiting for the technological breakthroughs that will organically allow us to “transition” away from fossil fuels, the world would be in trouble. Thankfully, they can’t win. Not because Republicans hate science or because anyone Democrats disagree with is bought off by shady oil men, but because, in the end, neither they nor I nor you are giving up our lifestyles in any meaningful way.

For us, the Chinese, Indians, Nigerians, and everyone else, that’s great news.  The environmentalist is free to embrace  fantasy and then fatalism, or they can start figuring out ways to acclimate to this new reality.

Hillary says she’s sorry. Ron Fournier asks, “Sorry for what?” And then he says there are nineteen questions she should answer. 

“I’m sorry about that,” Hil­lary Rod­ham Clin­ton said six years after seiz­ing con­trol of gov­ern­ment email and after six months of deny­ing wrong­do­ing. Just this week, it took three dif­fer­ent in­ter­views in four days for her to beg the puni­est of par­dons: “I do think I could have and should have done a bet­ter job an­swer­ing ques­tions earli­er.”

You think? By any ob­ject­ive meas­ure, the Demo­crat­ic pres­id­en­tial front-run­ner has re­spon­ded to her email scan­dal with de­flec­tion and de­cep­tion, shred­ding her cred­ib­il­ity while giv­ing a skep­tic­al pub­lic an­oth­er reas­on not to trust the in­sti­tu­tions of polit­ics and gov­ern­ment.

An apo­logy doesn’t fix that. An apo­logy also doesn’t an­swer the scan­dal’s most im­port­ant ques­tions. 

1. While apo­lo­giz­ing in an ABC in­ter­view on Tues­day, you said, “What I had done was al­lowed, it was above board.” You must know by now that while the State De­part­ment al­lowed the use of home com­puters in 2009, agency rules re­quired that email be se­cured. Yours was not. Just nine months in­to your term, new reg­u­la­tions re­quired that your emails be cap­tured on de­part­ment serv­ers. You stashed yours on a home-brewed sys­tem un­til Con­gress found out. Why not ad­mit you vi­ol­ated policy? Why do you keep mis­lead­ing people? 

2. If what you did was “above board,” then you wouldn’t ob­ject to all ex­ec­ut­ive branch of­fi­cials at every level of gov­ern­ment and from both parties stor­ing their email on private serv­ers – out of the pub­lic’s reach. Tell me how that wouldn’t sub­vert the fed­er­al Free­dom of In­form­a­tion Act and “sun­shine laws” in every state? …

Shannen Coffin in National Review says there have been a lot of thing for Hillary not to think about.

Hillary Clinton told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell in an interview last week that she just didn’t think about things when she set up her private server to use exclusively as her official e-mail while secretary of state. She “was not thinking a lot when [she] got in. There was so much work to be done. We had so many problems around the world.” Understandably, she “didn’t really stop and think what kind of e-mail system will there be.”

So she didn’t think when she paid a former campaign staffer to build the server and set up “Clinton.com” e-mail addresses for herself and close State Department aides, including her deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin.

She didn’t think when she hired that campaign staffer at the State Department, but continued to pay him off the federal books for his services in maintaining her secret server.

She didn’t think when she neglected to report her server to the Department of Homeland Security, as required by law, so DHS could audit the security of her system as part of its mission to protect the government’s Internet security.

She didn’t think, when she …

Hillary’s gonna get a new image. Jonah Goldberg reacts.

What if this is as good as it gets?

You have to wonder if that’s what Hillary Clinton’s handlers are saying to each other right about now.

Of course, that’s not what they’re saying in public — or on background to the press.

The New York Times reported this week that Clinton plans to be spontaneous from now on:

“There will be no rope lines to wall off crowds, which added to an impression of aloofness. And there will be new efforts to bring spontaneity to a candidacy that sometimes seems wooden and overly cautious.”

I don’t blame Times reporter Amy Chozick for being so passive in her writing. But just for the record, there was no “impression” of aloofness. There was — and always has been — aloofness. Nor did the candidacy “seem” wooden and overly cautious. It is wooden and overly cautious, because Clinton is wooden and overly cautious.

And that won’t change.

Consider what you just read. The Clinton team is responding to the fact that Clinton is inauthentic and scripted by floating a trial balloon to the New York Times about her plan to be spontaneous.

The Clinton campaign is officially only five months old. But the real campaign is closer to 20 years old. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Following on the theme of the last Pickings, Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of WaPo, writes on the president’s Syrian legacy.

This may be the most surprising of President Obama’s foreign-policy legacies: not just that he presided over a humanitarian and cultural disaster of epochal proportions, but that he soothed the American people into feeling no responsibility for the tragedy.

Starvation in Biafra a generation ago sparked a movement. Synagogues and churches a decade ago mobilized to relieve misery in Darfur. When the Taliban in 2001 destroyed ancient statues of Buddha at Bamiyan, the world was appalled at the lost heritage.

Today the Islamic State is blowing up precious cultural monuments in Palmyra, and half of all Syrians have been displaced — as if, on a proportional basis, 160 million Americans had been made homeless. More than a quarter-million have been killed. Yet the “Save Darfur” signs have not given way to “Save Syria.”

One reason is that Obama — who ran for president on the promise of restoring the United States’ moral stature — has constantly reassured Americans that doing nothing is the smart and moral policy. He has argued, at times, that there was nothing the United States could do, belittling the Syrian opposition as “former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth.” …

Jennifer Rubin carries the thought along. 

There is nothing like the spectacle of thousands of refugees pouring into Europe to awaken American politicians and media to the Syrian civil war that has killed more than 200,000 and created millions of refugees, who flooded into Syria’s neighbors before they came to Europe.

As many have pointed out, President Obama bears primary responsibility for refusing to match deeds with his declaration that Bashar al-Assad “must go.” Had Obama acted more than four years ago as critics and his own national security team urged, in all likelihood thousands would still be alive, millions of refugees would not have fled Syria, jihadists would not have found a base of operations (from whence they swarmed into Iraq, resulting in more deaths and refugees) and Russian troops would not know be established in Syria, a sign of how much influence disagreeable powers have and how little we do.

Now, it’s not often that a president gets a second bite at the apple — the perfect opportunity to self-correct a horrible decision. Obama, however, got his when Assad used chemical weapons on multiple occasions. The president could have built a multi-national force, bombed Assad’s military assets and tipped the balance of power away from the Syrian leader. But Obama in 2013 managed to flub that as well, and in the meantime convinced the Iranians and the Russians he was feckless. (One wonders if Vladimir Putin would have invaded Ukraine had Obama exercised muscle in Syria rather than looking for Russian help to bail him out of a conflict he never had any intention of taking on.) …

Matthew Continetti writes more on foreign policy.

… the result of Obama’s foreign policy is to empower America’s adversaries. This has been, in its conduct and consequences, an anti-American White House.

I am not saying that the president or the Democratic Party is anti-American in ideology or rhetoric or intent. What I am saying is that the net effect of President Obama’s actions has been to legitimize, strengthen, and embolden nations whose anti-Americanism is public and vicious and all too serious.

Iran is an obvious example. The anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism of the regime is inescapable. Not even Obama, who has gone out of his way to defend the Iranians as rational actors, can ignore it. How has Iran’s “power position” been affected by this White House? In 2009, when the regime faced its most serious challenge in years, the president was silent. In 2011 and 2013, when urged to act against the regime’s closest ally in Syria, the president did nothing.

Why? To speak out in favor of protesting students, to support the Syrian rebels, to punish Bashar al-Assad for violating red lines the president himself had drawn—these acts would have jeopardized the nuclear negotiations with Iran.

The outcome of those negotiations was a deal in which the Iranians agree to suspend some elements of their nuclear research for about a decade in exchange for billions of dollars in sanctions relief. So a fundamentalist theocracy whose leaders chant “Death to America” and whose self-identity is based on a revolutionary challenge to the United States and Israel has been endorsed as a quasi-member of the “international community,” and will receive an infusion of much needed cash. …

… Experience has taught Obama nothing. The next administration won’t be “building” on his foundation. It will be attempting to reclaim the ground that this anti-American White House has lost.

Rick Richman says Kerry tops Neville Chamberlin.

In his speech yesterday on the Iran deal, Secretary of State Kerry mentioned “Israel” or “Israeli” 26 times – protesting a bit too much about his concern for the ally put at existential risk by the Obama administration’s cascade of concessions. Even eerier was the similarity of Kerry’s words to those of Neville Chamberlain in the British parliamentary debate on the Munich agreement in 1938. … 

… Chamberlain proceeded with a 369-150 vote in Parliament, while the Iran deal will proceed against bipartisan opposition in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, both the Senate and the House as a whole, and the majority of the American people, as expressed in multiple polls. President Obama will use a partisan minority to make an end run around the Constitutional requirement for treaties – a provision the Founders intended to insure that any significant multi-year foreign commitment would not proceed without a national consensus reflected in a two-thirds Senate vote – as his secretary of state employs rhetoric, in prepared remarks, that would have embarrassed Neville Chamberlain. …

Noah Rothman posts on Hurricane Katrina’s most enduring legacy.

For a city as infatuated with its old-world charm as New Orleans, institutional change arrives slowly – if ever. Often, it takes a catalyst, sometimes a horrible one, to create the impetus for shifts and adaptations that appear in retrospect utterly transformative. The disastrous physical and psychological impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans had this catalyzing effect. For all the shocks and displacements that arose from that tragedy, its destabilizing effects also resulted in sweeping progress. The reforms to the city’s education system, which has risen like the phoenix out of the disaster, is the miracle that the left dares not acknowledge. For the nation’s entrenched public education unions, its implications are too terrible to contemplate.

The city of New Orleans did not embark on the most radical education reform experiment in generations out of a sense of altruism or adventure. In the wake of the devastation that followed the flooding of nearly 80 percent of the city, education reform was a project of necessity. After the floods, much of New Orleans’ educational infrastructure had been damaged beyond repair. The city’s tax base had fled. The Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) was reluctantly compelled to ask some 7,000 teachers and staff – many of them displaced themselves — to find new work. In November of 2005, with flood waters still lingering in disadvantaged parts of the city, the OPSB acquiesced to the surrender of four-fifths of the entire New Orleans public school system to the all-charter Recovery School District (RSD). …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

The Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Interview is with Thomas Sowell.

Thomas Sowell turned 85 years old this summer, which means he has been teaching economics to Americans through his books and articles for some four decades. So it seems like a natural question: Have we learned anything? Has the level of economic thinking in political debate gone up at all?

“No—in fact, I’m tempted to think it’s gone down,” Mr. Sowell says, without much hesitation. “At one time you had a lot of people who hadn’t had any economics saying foolish things. Now you have well-known economists saying foolish things.” …

… Why do we never seem to learn these economic lessons? “I think there’s a market for foolish things,” Mr. Sowell says—and vested interests, too. Once an organization such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is created to find discrimination, no one should be startled when it finds discrimination. “There’s never going to be a time when the EEOC will file a report saying, ‘All right folks, there’s really not enough discrimination around to be spending all this money,’ ” he says. “You’re going to have ever-more-elaborate definitions of discrimination. So now, if you don’t want to hire an ax murderer who has somehow gotten paroled, then that’s discrimination.” …

While our economy has a vacation from common sense, President Dilettante leads us in a vacation from history; all to the cheers of the Washington media claque.

We have some photographs, the juxtaposition of which illustrates the disconnect. Last week the president was on Alaska’s Arctic shore enjoying a photo-op while a world away the body of a small boy washes up on Turkey’s shore.

The event in Turkey comes about because our president has no courage, and stands for nothing save spending and borrowing our way to oblivion.

Noah Rothman posts on the boy.

His was one of twelve bodies collected on a Turkish beach on Wednesday. It has become a tragically common site to see the corpses of refugees fleeing the proliferating conflicts in the Middle East wash up on Mediterranean shores. This latest was perhaps the most heartbreaking. A Syrian boy, maybe two or three-years-old lay motionless in the surf. He had only ever known war; a horrible war characterized by intense violence, the use of chemical weapons, the Islamic State and al-Nusra, Bashar al-Assad’s thugs, and the various international actors who give these barbarians succor. He was, perhaps for the first time in his short and cruel life, at peace. Of all the appalling images to emerge from the Syrian conflict, this might have been the most soul crushing. … 

… It was President Barack Obama who declared the use of chemical weapons on civilians in Syria a “red line” for action, and it was President Barack Obama who flinched when it became clear that the regime in Damascus had ignored him. Soon, images began to filter into the Western press revealing the horrors wrought by these WMDs. Rooms full of bodies; people seizing, foaming at the mouth; children contorted and writhing as they met their horrible, terrifying end. The West had to act, but it did not. … 

… In the years that followed Obama’s shortsighted decision to abandon Syria (and the entire region, it would turn out) to violence, Europe would find itself in the midst of a refugee crisis. A great human tide has descended upon the continent as teeming masses of Middle Easterners and North Africans displaced by warfare take flight into Europe. … 

… Our Syrian boy was among those refugees who desperately sought to flee the horrors that prevailed at home. He was among the thousands who never made it to European shores. But the pressures that compelled his family to take to a violent sea will not abate. As a result of more Western cowardice, those pressures will likely intensify. …

Michael Gerson in the Washington Post has more.

One little boy in a red T-shirt, lying face down, drowned, on a Turkish beach, is a tragedy. More than 200,000 dead in Syria, 4 million fleeing refugees and 7.6 million displaced from their homes are statistics. But they represent a collective failure of massive proportions.

For four years, the Obama administration has engaged in what Frederic Hof, former special adviser for transition in Syria, calls a “pantomime of outrage.” Four years of strongly worded protests, and urgent meetings and calls for negotiation — the whole drama a sickening substitute for useful action. People talking and talking to drown out the voice of their own conscience. And blaming. In 2013, President Obama lectured the U.N. Security Council for having “demonstrated no inclination to act at all.” Psychological projection on a global stage.

Always there is Obama’s weary realism. “It’s not the job of the president of the United States to solve every problem in the Middle East.” We must be “modest in our belief that we can remedy every evil.”

But we are not dealing here with every problem or every evil; rather a discrete and unique set of circumstances: The largest humanitarian failure of the Obama era is also its largest strategic failure. …

As does Terry Glavin in Canada’s National Post. 

“The worst part of it is the feeling that we don’t have any allies,” Montreal’s Faisal Alazem, the tireless 32-year-old campaigner for the Syrian-Canadian Council, told me the other day. “That is what people in the Syrian community are feeling.”

There are feelings of deep gratitude for having been welcomed into Canada, Alazem said. But with their homeland being reduced to an apocalyptic nightmare — the barrel-bombing of Aleppo and Homs, the beheadings of university professors, the demolition of Palmyra’s ancient temples — among Syrian-Canadians, there is also an unquenchable sorrow.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s genocidal regime clings to power in Damascus and the jihadist psychopaths of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) are ascendant almost everywhere else. The one thing the democratic opposition wanted from the world was a no-fly zone and air-patrolled humanitarian corridors. Even that was too much to ask. There is no going home now.

But among Syrian-Canadians, the worst thing of all, Alazem said, is a suffocating feeling of solitude and betrayal. “In the Western countries, the civil society groups — it’s not just their inaction, they fight you as well,” he said. “They are crying crocodile tears about refugees now, but they have played the biggest role in throwing lifelines to the regime. And so I have to say to them, this is the reality, this is the result of all your anti-war activism, and now the people are drowning in the sea.” …

… But what we are all doing — Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats, Americans, Canadians, and all the dominant elites of the United Nations and the NATO countries that cleave to that sophisticated indifference known in polite company as anti-interventionism — is a very straightforward thing. We are watching Syria die. We are allowing it to happen. …

Andrew Malcolm notes the discouraging misplaced priorities.

Striving to maintain some political relevance as the nation’s focus shifts to choosing his successor, Barack Obama is using a brief visit to Alaska to portray America — indeed, the entire planet — in imminent, disastrous danger from global warming.

The Democrat has long touted global warming as a serious threat. In May, he told military academy graduates that climate change is the greatest threat to U.S. national security. The president’s analysis differs drastically from military leaders, who list Russia, North Korea, China and ISIS as the worst security threats facing the U.S. as Obama draws down its military forces.

Even as Russia annexes Crimea, foments rebellion in Ukraine, sells arms to Iran and aggressively develops Arctic commerce and energy, Obama sees no developing confrontation. Obama did note in Alaska that Russia in recent years has built a fleet of 40 heavy icebreakers. The United States has one in service. Obama suggests building another.

The president said addressing climate change is urgent and dismissed fears that more environmental controls and regulations would hurt the stumbling economy and jobs.

The pattern of talking up a crisis as a means to control the nation’s political agenda and provide a distraction from other news has been very familiar during these interminable 2,416 days of Obama’s White House occupancy. Even if, in the end, little useful action ever ensues on such issues. …

Pickerhead will have a vacation too. Next post will be in a few days.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

To close the week we have an unintended consequences edition. Starting us off, the Wall Street Journal Editors write on the economic problems caused by this president’s explosion of student loan debt. 

For years we’ve warned readers about the burgeoning calamity known as student loans, and the latest news is that the debt bomb is hurting the economy as well as the federal fisc. New evidence from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia illustrates how subsidized student loans sap small business creation.

Student loans have ballooned tenfold since 1999 to more than $1 trillion, the authors note in a July report. Other consumer debt—mortgages, car loans, credit cards—dipped during the 2008 financial crisis, but student debt doubled from $547 billion in 2007, nearly all of it on Education Department books. The Philly Fed is the first to examine how mortgaging an education influences entrepreneurship.

Here’s the connection: Entrepreneurs borrow money to get rolling. But the average student-loan customer owes $28,000 and so some enterprising adults are loaded up with debt, even decades after graduation. Nascent business (with no employees) report capital of about $44,000, according to a recent survey; half comes from loans and lines of credit. Debt-financing, the Fed points out, is critical for expanding a business in the years following its founding.

Yet graduates have sunk too far into the red to amass more liabilities, and not even bankruptcy can liberate them. The Fed found that new firms with roughly five employees dropped 17% on average between 2000 and 2010 in counties where relative student debt grew by 2.7%. …

Ed Driscoll posts in Instapundit about a restaurant in San Francisco that is using iPads for patrons to place orders. So, idiot liberals pass a $15 minimum wage and jobs are lost. Just another example of unintended consequences or is it a new chapter in the left’s war on the poor.

Eatsa in the city’s financial district offers iPad-based ordering, with meals prepared by people whom customers never have to see: …

… Riley Thomas, a San Francisco resident who works near Eatsa, was one of the few patrons who questioned the concept at a time when more and more families are struggling to survive in the city. “I like the food and love the price,” he said. “Still, it worries me that people will begin to think that this is how all restaurants should be run and it could really hurt jobs that are needed right now.”

Co-founder Scott Drummond said: “There is a fast food business model that we need to hit and we’re looking at ways that technology can increase efficiency … That way we can get the price down.” …

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit with another example of left/liberal foolishness. This time from France where the government mandated 35 hour work week is creating problems. Go figure!

French Minister: Hey, that 35-hour work week isn’t working out so well.

His comments, which echoed similar sentiments from an interview almost exactly a year ago – made a splash across front pages of French newspapers on Friday.

‘ “The left was wrong to think that France would improve if people worked less. It was a false idea,” he said during his closing statement at the conference.

He added that “one shouldn’t ask what your country can do for you, rather what you can do for your country’s economy”.

Supporters say the flagship policy of the French left creates jobs by limiting the amount of time employees are allowed to work, thereby encouraging companies to take on more staff.

But critics at home and abroad say it is an inflexible law that hampers business and creates a bloated workforce. ‘

Yeah, I’m going with #2 here.

And our betters in the bien pensant class have begun to notice that college is not always a good deal. As an example we have a recent article by John Cassidy who writes on business for The New Yorker; one of the left/liberal house organs. In a hyperbolic mood Pickerhead once called the education establishment “a vast criminal conspiracy.” More to the point, there is no other part of our economy that does a poorer job serving its customers while charging higher and higher fees. And what do you know? Even the slow people who set government policy are beginning to figure it out. Of course, this is from the New Yorker so, Cassidy can’t seem to figure out these problems are typical unintended consequences of left/liberal messing with our economy.

… The “message from the media, from the business community, and even from many parts of the government has been that a college degree is more important than ever in order to have a good career,” Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at Wharton, notes in his informative and refreshingly skeptical new book, “Will College Pay Off?” (PublicAffairs). “As a result, families feel even more pressure to send their kids to college. This is at a time when more families find those costs to be a serious burden.” During recent decades, tuition and other charges have risen sharply—many colleges charge more than fifty thousand dollars a year in tuition and fees. Even if you factor in the expansion of financial aid, Cappelli reports, “students in the United States pay about four times more than their peers in countries elsewhere.”

Despite the increasing costs—and the claims about a shortage of college graduates—the number of people attending and graduating from four-year educational institutions keeps going up. In the 2000-01 academic year, American colleges awarded almost 1.3 million bachelor’s degrees. A decade later, the figure had jumped nearly forty per cent, to more than 1.7 million. About seventy per cent of all high-school graduates now go on to college, and half of all Americans between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four have a college degree. That’s a big change. In 1980, only one in six Americans twenty-five and older were college graduates. Fifty years ago, it was fewer than one in ten. To cater to all the new students, colleges keep expanding and adding courses, many of them vocationally inclined. At KansasState, undergraduates can major in Bakery Science and Management or Wildlife and Outdoor Enterprise Management. They can minor in Unmanned Aircraft Systems or Pet Food Science. OklahomaState offers a degree in Fire Protection and Safety Engineering and Technology. At UticaCollege, you can major in Economic Crime Detection. …

… “It is certainly true that college has been life changing for most people and a tremendous financial investment for many of them,” Cappelli writes. “It is also true that for some people, it has been financially crippling. . . .The world of college education is different now than it was a generation ago, when many of the people driving policy decisions on education went to college, and the theoretical ideas about why college should pay off do not comport well with the reality.” …

… If almost everybody has a college degree, getting one doesn’t differentiate you from the pack. To get the job you want, you might have to go to a fancy (and expensive) college, or get a higher degree. Education turns into an arms race, which primarily benefits the arms manufacturers—in this case, colleges and universities. …

… It is well established that students who go to élite colleges tend to earn more than graduates of less selective institutions. But is this because Harvard and Princeton do a better job of teaching valuable skills than other places, or because employers believe that they get more talented students to begin with? An exercise carried out by Lauren Rivera, of the Kellogg School of Management, at Northwestern, strongly suggests that it’s the latter. Rivera interviewed more than a hundred recruiters from investment banks, law firms, and management consulting firms, and she found that they recruited almost exclusively from the very top-ranked schools, and simply ignored most other applicants. The recruiters didn’t pay much attention to things like grades and majors. “It was not the content of education that elite employers valued but rather its prestige,” Rivera concluded. …

… Increasingly, the competition for jobs is taking place in areas of the labor market where college graduates didn’t previously tend to compete. As Beaudry, Green, and Sand put it, “having a B.A. is less about obtaining access to high paying managerial and technology jobs and more about beating out less educated workers for the Barista or clerical job.” Even many graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—the so-called STEM subjects, which receive so much official encouragement—are having a tough time getting the jobs they’d like. Cappelli reports that only about a fifth of recent graduates with STEM degrees got jobs that made use of that training. “The evidence for recent grads suggests clearly that there is no overall shortage of STEM grads,” he writes. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

To continue to try to take our minds off the fools in DC we have a few interesting items. The first is from a blog named PulpTastic. It is 20 quotes from children’s books that every adult should know.

Some of life’s greatest lessons can be found in children’s literature, and ironically, most of us only realize this once we are no longer kids. The following quotes are some of our favorites from books we used to read, and they may very well send you down a trip to memory lane. …

“A person’s a person no matter how small.” – Dr. Seuss.

“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard” – A A Milne; Winnie the Pooh.

Then Five Thirty Eight has a Nerds Guide to the 2229 Paintings at the Museum of Modern Art. This is a large enough file so that many of the images had to be deleted. Follow the link if you want to see all of those in the article.

Through the lobby thronged with tourists, the line for tickets, the line for the cloakroom, and the line for the ticket taker, up the narrow escalators, past the cafe and bookshop on the second floor, the photographs and drawings on the third, and the installations in progress on the fourth, we finally arrive at the fifth floor of The Museum of Modern Art.

This is where they keep the really good stuff — the paintings reproduced in framed prints and on postcards in the gift shop — giants of impressionism, post-impressionism, abstract expressionism, Fauvism, cubism and color field.

Step off the escalator, and we’re greeted by our first painting: Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Glenn.” Press on. To the right is Balthus’s “The Street.” Hang one more left, and we’ve really arrived: Gallery 1. Staring at you or, more accurately, staring at the floor right in front of you, is Paul Cézanne’s “The Bather.” And just feet away, somewhere through that knot of cell-phone-camera-wielding museumgoers and just to the side of that hyper-vigilant security guard, is an image you’ll surely recognize: Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night.”

The picture, of the view from van Gogh’s room in a French asylum to which he’d committed himself after mutilating his own ear, may well be van Gogh’s highest achievement. But “The Starry Night” — that instantly recognizable image, pulsating with the energy of nature — also goes by another, icier name: ObjectID 79802.

On GitHub, an online data and code hosting service, sits the entire MoMA collection: 123,919 pieces, including 1,656 sculptures, 28,411 photographs, 11,420 drawings, 1,936 films and — most important for our tour today — 2,229 paintings. One of the rows in this giant spreadsheet: ObjectID 79802. …

… At the museum today, we’re armed not only with our love of art, but also with this big pile of data. We’ll appreciate the beauty, to be sure. But if you have questions, I’ll also turn to the hard numbers for answers.

The technical hallmark of “The Starry Night,” as you’ve surely noticed, is its exaggerated brushwork — “a thick, emphatic plasma of paint,” wrote the late, great art critic Robert Hughes. The painting is, emphatically, oil on canvas.

And our data can shed some light on this painting’s most striking feature. “Is this combination of materials typical in modern art?” you ask. Great question — we’re going to have fun! Indeed, oil on canvas is the dominant medium for MoMA’s paintings; nearly half of them use those materials. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas is a distant second. Oil painting, around for some 900 years, still dominates in the modern era. …

Written records of commerce and trade from 4,000 years ago are reported by the NY Times Magazine. This is a fascinating example of the instincts for trade and commerce that are in our genes.

One morning, just before dawn, an old man named Assur-idi loaded up two black donkeys. Their burden was 147 pounds of tin, along with 30 textiles, known as kutanum, that were of such rare value that a single garment cost as much as a slave. Assur-idi had spent his life’s savings on the items, because he knew that if he could convey them over the Taurus Mountains to Kanesh, 600 miles away, he could sell them for twice what he paid.

At the city gate, Assur-idi ran into a younger acquaintance, Sharrum-Adad, who said he was heading on the same journey. He offered to take the older man’s donkeys with him and ship the profits back. The two struck a hurried agreement and wrote it up, though they forgot to record some details. Later, Sharrum-­Adad claimed he never knew how many textiles he had been given. Assur-idi spent the subsequent weeks sending increasingly panicked letters to his sons in Kanesh, demanding they track down Sharrum-Adad and claim his profits.

These letters survive as part of a stunning, nearly miraculous window into ancient economics. In general, we know few details about economic life before roughly 1000 A.D. But during one 30-year period — between 1890 and 1860 B.C. — for one community in the town of Kanesh, we know a great deal. Through a series of incredibly unlikely events, archaeologists have uncovered the comprehensive written archive of a few hundred traders who left their hometown Assur, in what is now Iraq, to set up importing businesses in Kanesh, which sat roughly at the center of present-day Turkey and functioned as the hub of a massive global trading system that stretched from Central Asia to Europe. Kanesh’s traders sent letters back and forth with their business partners, carefully written on clay tablets and stored at home in special vaults. Tens of thousands of these records remain. One economist recently told me that he would love to have as much candid information about businesses today as we have about the dealings — and in particular, about the trading practices — of this 4,000-year-old community. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Roger Simon on who shot the sheriff and perhaps why. 

“Investigators were trying to determine Sunday what may have motivated a 30-year-old man [Shannon Miles, black] accused of ambushing a uniformed suburban Houston sheriff’s deputy [Darren Goforth, white] filling his patrol car with gas in what authorities believe was a targeted killing,” saith the AP in the newspeak of our time.

Well, I can help them with that.  Let’s start with the obvious.  Shannon Miles (a black man) is a crazy guy, just as Dylann Roof (the white man from the Charleston church shootings) is a crazy guy and Vester Lee Flanagan (the black man who killed his white co-workers at a Virginia TV station the other day) was a crazy guy.  The latter two claimed they wanted to start a race war.  No word yet on Miles, but if we believe in what our grandmothers told us — that actions speak louder than words — he’s already more than half way there.

(You will note that I am not using the neologism African-American, which I think is part of the problem, not part of the solution.)

Also obvious, Barack Obama and Eric Holder (and now Loretta Lynch) are to blame for encouraging an atmosphere of racial divisiveness and, yes, hatred in our society. Anyone honest can see — and the polls have reported — a serious increase in racial tension and violence (Baltimore, Ferguson, etc.) since the beginning of the Obama administration.  The racist-to-the-core “Black Lives Matter” movement is quite simply their evil spawn. …

… But all is not ill. Maybe we don’t deserve it, maybe it’s a sign of divine intervention (who knows?), but America is getting a second chance.  A man is running for president who is a true healer like we haven’t seen since Dr. King.  And he’s resonating with the public because I suspect many of us realize he is just what our country needs at this moment (with or without Donald Trump by his side).  You know who I mean — Dr. Ben Carson.

Streetwise Professor has found someone dumber than Trump and O’Reilly when it comes to economics.

Yesterday I said Trump and O’Reilly were in a cage match to determine the world champion of economic ignorance. There is another contender of course, the current occupant of the office to which Trump aspires. Actually, I would say that Obama is the undefeated reigning world champ, and that the O’Reilly-Trump set-to was merely to see who might contend for the title in the future.

Obama’s gobsmacking ignorance-served up with a heaping side of superciliousness-was on full display at the “Clean Energy Summit” in Las Vegas on Monday. Time is finite, and my energy is only intermittently renewable, so I can’t possibly deconstruct these vaporings in detail. So I will limit myself to a few high-level comments:

Obama’s claims that his policies on renewable energy and carbon will make a meaningful impact on climate is a massive fraud that would land you or me in jail. Obama’s own EPA acknowledges that the policy will reduce global mean temperatures by an imperceptible and irrelevant .02 degrees by 2100. Farenheit? Celsius? Who cares? It matters not. It is rounding error on any scale.

Obama’s ignorance is on full display when he claims that conventional electricity generation was not characterized by “a lot of innovation.” This is just a crock. Compare heat rates of plants 20 years ago to those of today: in California, for instance, thermal efficiency has improved by 17 percent over the last 13 years. Heard of combined cycle, Barry? There has been considerable innovation in electricity generation. Well, not at the light switch plate, which is probably the extent of Barry’s familiarity with the electricity value chain.

Obama mistakes opposing subsidies with being anti-free market. Welcome to bizarro world. And, as is his wont, he did so in an Alinskyite fashion, demonizing his opponents (the always handy Koch Brothers) in a very personal way. …

Richard Epstein writes on a new NLRB decision that will hamper labor markets. Yet another example of the problems caused by the current occupant that we will have to deal with for a long time.

… the new joint employer rules will likely batter today’s already grim labor market, as they will not only disrupt the traditional workplace but will completely wreck the well established franchise model for restaurants and hotels. As the majority conceded, the so-called joint employer does not even know so much as the social security number of its ostensible employees. It has no direct control over the way in which the current employer treats its workers, and yet could be hauled into court for its alleged unfair labor practices. That second firm knows little or nothing about the conditions on the ground in the many businesses with which it has forged these alliances, which eases the operations for both. Those advantages will be lost if the joint employer rule holds up in court. At the very least, the majority’s decision would require each and every one of these contracts and business relationships to be reworked to handle the huge new burden that will come as a matter of course, leaving everyone but the union worse off than before.

It would be one thing, perhaps, if the majority saw the light at the end of the tunnel. But over and over again it disclaims any grand pronouncements, making the legal question of who counts as an employer a work in progress that will be finished no time soon. Against this background it is irresponsible to undo the current relationships by a party-line vote. That point should also be clear to the courts and to Congress. The quicker this unfortunate decision is scrubbed from the law books, the better.

Financial Times editors call for Hillary to come clean.

… What, at this point, can she do about it? The answer is very little. Several probes are under way. Yet even at this stage, with months of potentially embarrassing revelations in front of her, Mrs Clinton has yet to acknowledge her mistakes. Last week she downplayed the gravity of the situation by making a joke about having opened an account at Snapchat, where messages disappear “all by themselves”. This will not do. Unless Mrs Clinton comes clean and makes amends, voters will rightly doubt her suitability to be commander-in-chief.

Glenn Reynolds writes on Katrina lessons. 

It’s been a decade since Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. What were the lessons? Here are a few:

1. The press did a lousy job.  Forget Brian Williams’ “huge lies.” Though the press patted itself on the back afterwards, in fact, as American University Journalism Professor W. Joseph Campbell writes, “it’s instructive to recall how extreme and over the top the reporting was from New Orleans in Katrina’s aftermath.” Reports of wandering bands of rapists, a 10-year-old girl raped in the New Orleans Convention Center, claims that people were shooting at rescue helicopters, sharks haunting the floodwaters, bodies stacked like cordwood — all were false.

Though the extremism generated ratings, and satisfied the anti-American urges of the foreign press, it did real harm. New Orleans, a city battered by disaster, was portrayed as, in Maureen Dowd’s words, “a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning.” Dowd used this portrayal to take shots at then-President George W. Bush, and I suspect a lot of the media pile-on was similarly motivated, but it had the effect of stigmatizing victims and, by playing up anarchy and danger, may even have delayed the arrival of aid, as rescuers feared to go in without armed escort. Overall, a horrible media performance. …

Paul Mirengoff posts on the type of reporter hired by the Washington Post.

Yesterday, Jimmy Carter taught Sunday school in Plains, Georgia. It was Carter’s second lesson since he announced that he has brain cancer.

The Washington Post sent Dave Weigel to cover the event. He reports that (in the words of the Post’s sub-headline, print edition) “pilgrims pour[ed] into Plains Ga.” for the event with “an outpouring of good wishes.” When it rains, it pours.

It’s to Carter’s credit that he teaches Sunday school and that he perseveres in his present condition. But the Post uses the occasion to lionize the former president and attack Republicans who dare criticize his presidency.

In Dave Weigel, the Post has identified the perfect man for the job. I can think of no reporter more capable of unctuousness and viciousness, depending on what the politics of the occasion and his personal interests require. …