Short News and Commentary
By Desmond Lachman, Brandon Bosworth, Jennifer Roback Morse, Alan Dowd, Ray Wisher, Iain Murray, Kenneth Lee

HATING AMERICA AS USUAL

 

I don't normally attend presentations by radical anti-American leftists for the same reason I don't go in for unnecessary dental work: I'm not a masochist.

 

Yet when pseudo-Indian quasi-professor Ward Churchill spoke at the University of Hawaii's Manoa campus on February 22, it seemed like something to attend. After all, most of Churchill's speaking engagements had been canceled when his comparison of America's 9/11 victims to profit-obsessed Nazis--"little Eichmanns," he called them--became widely known. Yet the University of Hawaii went out of its way to provide him with a paid vacation to the Aloha State after the firestorm ignited over Churchill's saying that the September 11 victims got what they deserved.

 

What did Ward Churchill have to say that was worth bringing him all the way out to the middle of the Pacific? Everything is America's fault. There are no innocent Americans. I am a poster boy for academic freedom. And I am being targeted because the Right wants to eliminate "ethnic studies, women's studies, and queer studies"--not because of his revoltingly offensive statements about those slaughtered on 9/11.

 

"Americans have a big streak of Nazism in them," explained Churchill. This Nazi streak, he insisted, is the same thing that almost brought down Harry Truman. No, I don't get it either.

 

There was whooping and hollering from the sympathetic crowd. The main age groups were 18-24 and 45 plus. Most people were either white or Japanese American, the two groups that make up most of the power structure in Hawaii's multicultural milieu. There were quite a few lesbians.

 

Most of the men were either balding or longhaired--or balding and trying to grow long hair. One actually wore a beret. Muscle tone was in short supply.

 

Many appeared to be aging radicals happy for the chance to come out and relive the good old days. One elderly, chain-smoking Asian woman hawked copies of Revolutionary Worker. Lots of folks wore message T-shirts, such as "No Hate--No War--No Republicans!" or one that showed Red State America with a caption reading "Weapons of Mass Destruction." The most common tee showed an old sepia picture of some American Indians with guns, above the words "Original Homeland Security."

 

There were about a dozen conservative protesters. One of their signs had a picture of a little girl and the words "Littlest Eichmann." One man simply held up magazines with pictures of the devastation at the World Trade Center. A protesting girl was jostled by one of the longhairs while campus security watched. A French woman harassed a blue collar protester, telling him to go back to America, and looked perplexed when told that Hawaii is part of America. At one point there were shouts of "Kill the fat kid!" directed at a chunky fellow who is one of UH's Young Republicans.

 

Conversations in the crowd were interesting. One fellow tried to explain that justifying terror attacks is not the same as approving them (a bit irrelevant since Ward Churchill has called for more 9/11s). Some professorial-looking types described the Twin Towers as legitimate targets, since they were a "source of U.S. empire." A grubby man told all who would listen that the Towers were really brought down by the CIA and Big Business as part of an insurance scam. I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard the word "Halliburton."

 

Several groups sponsored Churchill's Hawaiian Hate Fest, including UH's American studies, English, history, political science, women's studies, and Hawaiian studies departments, various "peace organizations," and the anarchist thug group Refuse and Resist. Most visible were the folks from the communist front organization Not in Our Name. NION had a booth selling Churchillana that was a joint effort with the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, a Maoist group that encourages violent revolution within the U.S. 

 

Churchill's speech lasted about an hour, and left his acolytes gushing. As I walked to my car, I noticed a flyer for the next big UH political event: Some sort of film and presentation with the theme "The Corporation as Psycho."

 

Too bad. I have some unnecessary dental work scheduled for that day.

 

--TAE associate editor Brandon Bosworth lives in Hawaii.

 

SEX FICTION

 

Both the February PBS documentary about "sex researcher" Alfred Kinsey and the November theatrical movie about the same man (a bomb, with a bit more than $10 million in revenue) presented fawning portraits. Neither set of filmmakers bothered to let ordinary viewers know what professionals have known for a long time: most of Kinsey's findings are hopelessly flawed.

 

The most definitive debunking of Kinsey's work was done in a dispassionate University of Chicago study by Edward Laumann, John Gagnon, Robert  Michael, and Stuart Michaels published in the 1990s. You wouldn't think a book about sex would be sleep-inducing, but leave it to academics with a big fat research grant--this study is so dull it can produce academic coma. It is careful in its science, however, and has harsh words for Kinsey's "pioneering" investigations. Kinsey's pool of study subjects, for instance, "failed to meet even the most elementary requirements for drawing a truly representative sample of the population at large." It turns out the professor drew his interview subjects from groups of people especially likely to have had deviant sexual experiences. He recruited from prisons and reform schools, including men locked up for sex offenses, and homosexual bars and acquaintance networks, thus inflating the prevalence of exotic sexual practices far above levels prevailing in a more representative population.

 

Kinsey's method of collecting his data did not follow social science standards. He did not, for instance, ask a fixed set of questions of all the participants in his survey. Instead, he and a small handful of colleagues took a lifetime "sex history" on each subject. They pressed people extensively not only on behavior, but also on fantasy, and often challenged respondents. In a courtroom, this would be called leading the witness.

 

Kinsey's estimated percentage of homosexuals in the population is one of many places where his methods misled. If you ask Americans what percentage of the population is homosexual, the most common answer today is around 10 percent--which comes from Kinsey. Kinsey claimed that 13 percent of men and 7 percent of women are exclusively homosexual. Gay rights advocates averaged these two numbers as part of a campaign to convince the public that "gay people are everywhere."

 

But Kinsey's sampling and interviewing techniques resulted in a serious overstatement of the extent of homosexuality in the population. No other study using a statistically representative sampling of the whole population has ever come close to Kinsey's percentages. The Chicago study finds a core group of the population who define themselves as homosexual or bisexual, have same-gender partners, and express same-sex desires. The size of this group is a very modest 2.4 percent of men and 1.3 percent of women. Nowhere near Kinsey's claims.

 

Kinsey's message was received enthusiastically by many influential parts of our national elite. (The many bubbling reviews for the two recent Kinsey films demonstrate that his claims continue to be embraced in important quarters, despite having been demolished as social science.) For this reason, Kinsey's work has had an enormous influence.

 

But the public deserves to know that his writing (one should hesitate to call it research) is fatally flawed. What a shame that this tendentious and manipulative man set the tone for much of today's understanding of human sexual experience.

 

--Jennifer Roback Morse is a fellow at the Hoover Institution.

 

WE STAND ON GUARD FOR THEE?

 

Canadian prime minister Paul Martin has announced that his country will not contribute resources to the nascent U.S. missile defense system. Critics wonder if Canada's decision will hinder Washington's efforts to deploy a viable missile shield. It will not. Although Canadian participation would be welcomed in Washington, missile defense marches on. Even as Ottawa sits on the sidelines, President Bush is forging an international coalition of backers that includes Australia, Britain, Denmark, Israel, and Japan, with Poland, the Czech Republic, and India all wanting in. Even Russia has acquiesced to the U.S. system.

 

And although Martin said "no" to direct participation in missile defense, Ottawa authorized the system's use of NORAD's tracking radars back in 2004. As Canadian Ambassador Frank McKenna observed, that effectively means Canada is part of missile defense, whether it says so or not.

 

Some have asked if Martin's decision means that Canada will be a free rider under America's anti-missile umbrella. The short answer is yes. If North Korea lobs a missile at North America, the U.S. system will seek to destroy it--with or without Ottawa's approval, regardless of where the missile is heading. The anti-missile assets the U.S. is deploying in the Pacific stand on guard for Canada as well as America.

 

Historically, Canada has contributed honorably to its own security. More than 100,000 Canadian troops died in World Wars I and II. Historian Derek Leebaert recalls how Canadians, "whose GDP was about a tenth of the United States," shouldered a third of the cost of deploying the radar stations that guarded North America during the Cold War. But those were different times, perhaps a different Canada. Ottawa's decision on missile defense is a sober reminder that America's nearest ally is no longer its closest.

 

--Alan Dowd is a columnist for TAEmag.com and a senior fellow at the Sagamore Institute.

 

IRAQIS SHOO THE VULTURES

 

My partner called me Saturday and said, "Let's get in to the station early Sunday and watch the returns."  I was a little surprised, as he's just a typical police officer, not a political nut like me. Then I thought about it and realized that many of my fellow cops were talking about the upcoming election in Iraq. Those of us who stand on the line between good and evil hate bullies, and we know what happens when liberty, and decency, and choices disappear from life.

 

Many of us also have a personal stake. Plenty of our coworkers have been called up as reserves. They disappear for a year, then come back a little older and grayer--and more jaded about the major media. They've seen the things in Iraq that the big networks refuse to show: the graves, the crippled people and long-broken society, the progress, the hope in the eyes of Iraqis.  

 

So I sat at my desk that morning watching FOX. I saw Iraqis walking miles to vote, to ink their fingers, possibly marking themselves for murder. I saw them dancing, crying, singing, and praying. I had to wipe my own eyes. 

 

Then I flipped channels and saw John Kerry's sour reaction on NBC. Later I tuned in to Chris Matthews and the MSNBC crew doing stories from Iraq. They managed to miss the 8 million screaming, crying voters, and found instead a couple of voting centers that were empty.

 

They complained, they showed the bombings, all nine of them in a country of 25 million. They whined and searched for failure. Matthews looked like a man in physical pain, groping for something to say that would stop the events that were disproving everything he has carped about for a year. It was shameful. I was suddenly aware that I was in pain, too, and turned the box off. 

 

The left-wing critics and their many allies in the media are like vultures hovering over Iraq, waiting for something to die. Sadly, they have their chances to swoop in and grab a bite. But this vote told me that America's efforts are bringing a hard end to a lot of terrorists, dictators, and cruel mullahs. Thank God a part of the free world pushed back.  

 

--Ray Wisher is a Florida detective.

 

READ IT AND WEEP FOR CONTEMPORARY CHILDREN

 

The infiltration (with encouragement from librarians) of harsh libertine themes into books marketed to teenagers was the subject of a February 23 New York Times profile, excerpted here:

 

Weetzie Bat...has a boyfriend she calls "My Secret Agent Lover Man." They live with Dirk, Weetzie's gay best friend, his lover, Duck, and Weetzie's daughter, Cherokee, possibly conceived during group sex with Dirk and Duck.... The family works in the movie business. And they become involved with seamier elements of Los Angeles: rough sex, pimps and drugs.

 

This may not seem like a conventional young-adult book or something to be promoted by your local library. But in January, the Young Adult Library Services Association of the American Library Association announced that [the author of these stories sold to teenagers, Francesca] Block, was being given the Margaret Edwards Award for lifetime achievement....

 

"Hers is a voice so unique that nobody will ever be able to imitate it," said Cindy Dobrez, a public school librarian and chairwoman of the award committee.

 

Not everyone has been happy with Ms. Block's explicit subject matter, however. In 2003, Parents Against Bad Books in Schools, a group in Fairfax County, Va., tried to have several of Ms. Block's books removed from school libraries, because of what it called "profanity and descriptions of drug abuse, sexually explicit conduct and torture."

 

....Describing the death of Weetzie's father from a drug overdose, Block writes: "Charlie was dreaming of a city where palm trees turned into tropical birds, the cars were the color of candied mints and filled with lovers making love as they drove down the streets...."

 

Ms. Block helped pave the way for the explicit young-adult books of today, including Laurie Anderson's Speak, about date rape, and Melvin Burgess's Smack, about London street kids using heroin. This spring, Simon & Schuster is bringing out Rainbow Party by Paul Ruditis, a young-adult novel about oral sex....

 

Ms. Block [wrote] two novels about incest, in 1994 The Hanged Man, about a father and daughter, and in 2003 Wasteland, about a brother and sister....

 

"Young adult used to mean 12 to 18," [notes Michael Cart, a columnist for Booklist]. "Now it's for readers as old as 25."

 

DERAILED

 

Amtrak, as usual, is in crisis. As it does every year, America's passenger rail monopoly requests more money from Congress than Congress is willing to give. Meanwhile, the Department of Transportation's Inspector General

 

Kenneth Mead has harshly criticized the organization's asset management. He says there are "interlockings, bridges, and tunnels that are well beyond their economic life." Amtrak has been deferring capital expenditure on these items for years. "Continued deferral brings Amtrak closer to a major point of failure on the system," writes Mead,

 

"but no one knows where or when such a failure will occur." If Amtrak collapses, it may be in the literal sense rather than the economic.

 

There are some people not only willing to point out the problems with Amtrak, but to suggest practical solutions to the current mess. One of these is Joseph Vranich, who helped create Amtrak and later served as president of the High Speed Rail Association. His new book End of the Line: The Failure of Amtrak Reform and the Future of America's Passenger Trains (AEI Press) serves as a manifesto for those who want to see railroad passenger travel freed of the choking grasp of America's nationalized agency.

 

The economic case for Amtrak's privatization is simple. Despite repeated demands from Congress that it get its act together, Amtrak has consistently failed to meet its own targets. In 1992, the Amtrak chairman claimed that, "Amtrak continues to reduce its need for federal operating support, and hopes to eliminate it altogether by the end of the decade." Of course, the losses increased. In 1998, Amtrak issued a plan that foresaw self-sufficiency by 2002. As Vranich says, "since then, Amtrak has never come closer than $521 million to self-sufficiency, and that only after heavy borrowing." On top of its overt subsidies, Amtrak lives on hidden tax exemptions and loans. For all this, it provides only 1 percent of all intercity passenger-miles traveled on commercial carriers.

 

Vranich demolishes the arguments advanced by Amtrak apologists, such as that the corporation is still not as heavily subsidized as air travel, or that cutting fares will increase ridership. Amtrak is simply an economic disaster with deeply ingrained institutional flaws.

 

Vranich says there are companies in America and abroad with the capacity to run a more efficient passenger railroad. Route franchising--the most successful part of Britain's rail privatization--is the core of the privatization plans proposed for Amtrak. But the U.K.'s example showed the importance of keeping the government from interfering too much. Congressmen win cheap political points by insisting on train services in their district, even when they are uneconomical.

 

Vranich says the grossly overdue reform of Amtrak will happen only when political leaders with courage stand up for real reform.

 

--TAE associate editor Iain Murray was part of the team that privatized Britain's rail system.

 

ILLEGALS VS. LEGALS

 

Just before his inauguration, President Bush announced he would renew his push for a program that would turn millions of illegal immigrants into "temporary workers." While pro-immigration politicians and pundits have hailed the proposal, it could actually increase legal-immigration restrictions in the future.

 

"We see millions of hard-working men and women condemned to fear and insecurity in a massive, undocumented economy," said the President when he first unveiled his proposal to normalize illegals. "The search for a better life is one of the most basic desires of humans beings. Many undocumented workers have walked mile after mile, through the heat of the day and the cold of the night. Some have risked their lives in dangerous desert border crossings, or entrusted their lives to the brutal rings of heartless human smugglers."

 

Never before has a prominent U.S. politician, let alone a President, rationalized illegal immigration that baldly. Bush's remarks place illegal aliens on the same plane with legal immigrants as seekers of opportunity. By describing illegal immigrants as "hard-working men and women" who are pursuing "better lives," he blurs the distinction between illegals and those who come to America following the rules. Perhaps inspired by President Bush's approach, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg recently signed an executive order forbidding the NYPD from providing information on immigration violations to the Immigration Service, except in limited circumstances.

 

This tack, however, may backfire and increase public frustration toward all immigration. Opinion polls since the 1960s have shown that the American public wants to reduce the current level of immigration. One way supporters of continued inflows have deflected such opposition is by channelling it against illegal immigration. By talking tough on illegals, politicians have been able to defend high levels of legal immigration.

 

Most recently, in 1996, Congress was on the verge of making the first significant reduction in legal immigration since the 1920s. A national commission chaired by a Democratic former congresswoman recommended reducing human inflows by a third. Both President Clinton and Republican Presidential nominee Bob Dole endorsed the idea.

 

Pro-immigration legislators then started to draw sharp contrasts between illegal and legal immigration. "Illegal immigrants are lawbreakers. And no country can exist unless it enforces its laws," stated one senator. "Legal immigrants, on the other hand, are by and large great citizens." This strategy worked. By ratcheting up the rhetoric against those sneaking into the country, the pro-immigration camp gave itself political cover for its defense of legal arrivals. In close votes, the House and Senate turned down reductions on legal migrants.

 

There is no doubt that President Bush feels compassion for people who have come to this country illegally. But if he is successful in convincing Americans that illegal aliens are no different than legal immigrants, he may harm those who follow the law and wait their turn. That would do no favors for the cause of continuing U.S. immigration.

 

--Kenneth Lee is author of Huddled Masses, Muddled Laws.

 

BAD POLITICS = POOR ECONOMICS

 

There is no region more in need of fundamental economic reform than the Middle East. According to the U.N., one out of five residents lives on less than $2 a day. Yet the past 30 years have brought only a stagnation of living standards for the 500 million inhabitants. This despite huge local oil resources.

 

The dismal fact is that living standards in the oil producing countries of the Middle East declined over the last generation--by 1.25 percent per year. Rather than generating growth, the abundance of oil revenues only bloated the public sectors in these countries. That depressed development of the non-oil private sector, the primary engine of healthy economic growth.

 

Mix the economic weakness of the Middle East with the rapid population growth taking place in these countries, and you get mounting unemployment and social pressures. The population of the Arab world is expected to increase by more than 50 percent by 2020. On current economic growth, that would imply a rise in the region's unemployment from 15 million today to more than 50 million people in 15 years.

 

The poor economic performance of Muslim countries is a predictable result of bad economic policies. A recent IMF report lays particular emphasis on costly public sectors, inefficient and inequitable educational systems, underdeveloped financial markets, high trade restrictiveness, and inappropriate exchange rate policies. And there is no part of the world where political and institutional reforms have lagged more. The U.N. finds that 65 million adults in the Middle East are illiterate, almost two thirds of them women.

 

The Middle East desperately needs broad economic reform. Trade liberal- ization aimed at inserting the region more fully into the global economy would be a good start. Reformed financial and labor markets, and more honest governance are also urgently wanted.

 

A main precondition to improved economics in the Middle East is better governance and politics. Faced as it now is with a veritable demographic time bomb, the Middle East can not afford to repeat its poor performance of the past three decades--in either politics or economics.

 

--Desmond Lachman is a fellow at AEI.

 

*****

 

A German zoo has scrapped plans to break up male penguin couples following protests from homosexuals. The Bremerhaven Zoo had flown in four female Humboldt penguins in an attempt to encourage three male couples to start reproducing. Gay groups called this "organized and forced harassment through female seductresses." No, we're not kidding.

 

The zoo initially defended its attempt to ram heterosexism down the gullets of their dapper little guy penguins--pointing out that the birds are an endangered species that needs to be propagated. But after stiff objections from gays, director Heike Kueck announced the zoo was abandoning the plan. "Everyone can live here as they please," she said.

 

*****

 

It is "the same people who wanted the United States to let communism triumph...who object to U.S. efforts right now in the Middle East. You hear the schadenfreude in their voices--you read it in their words--at our troubles in Iraq. For months, liberals have been peddling one disaster scenario after another, one contradictory fact somehow reinforcing another, hoping now against hope that their gloomy visions will come true."

 

--Martin Peretz, The New Republic, February 28, 2005.

 

*****

 

Al-Absurda

 

After the February assassination of Rafiq Hariri (the Lebanese politician pressing Syria to stop manipulating his country's politics), good old al-Jazeera--Osama bin Laden's pet television network--conducted a poll asking Middle Easterners who they thought was responsible for the murder. The five choices offered by al-Jazeera:

• Israeli agents
• U.S. agents
• Lebanese rebels
• Syrian rebels
• Others

Suggesting the U.S. or Israelis would kill a man fighting on their side is vintage al-Jazeera propagandizing against its dual Satans: Americans and Jews. The other two choices, however, are even funnier. Hariri was himself a "Lebanese rebel." And why would "Syrian rebels"--by definition resisters of Syria's strong-arm government--kill one of that government's boldest critics?

 

You can begin to see why even many Arabs (including most Iraqis) consider al-Jazeera ridiculous.