“Don’t Cry For Condi!”: Why Students Were Right To Scuttle Her Commencement Address
As sincerely as I wish everyone involved with the George W. Bush administration would just go away — or at least agree to only appear in the public eye in brief, tweet-size increments — I must admit that I think the recent kerfuffle over former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Rutgers University has been valuable, if only for the way it’s laid bare some of American society’s ugliest hypocrisies and quirks. I’m thinking of two in particular: the contradictory demands we make of our college students, and the intellectual ravages of our toxic cult of American exceptionalism.
For those who don’t know, here’s a quick recap of the incident: After a vocal student outcry at her selection, Rice decided she would not accept the university’s offer to speak at this year’s commencement, walking away from $35,000 and an honorary doctorate. “Commencement should be a time of joyous celebration for the graduates and their families,” Rice wrote in a Facebook note explaining her decision. Describing her invitation as “a distraction for the university community at this very special time,” Rice took the high road and swiftly put the controversy to rest by bowing out.
Because hers was just one of a recent handful of commencement reversals — the International Monetary Fund’s Christine Lagarde withdrew from a Smith College engagement, as did Robert Birgeneau from one at Haverford College — some pundits have since argued that Rice’s concession is proof that “liberal intolerance” is ascendant, threatening academic freedom and free speech all across our nation’s campuses. (To her credit, Rice disagreed, writing in her Facebook note that while she has “defended America’s belief in free speech and the exchange of ideas” these values are “not what is at issue here.”) Other, smarter pundits have instead claimed that her story is an example of college kids being intellectual hothouse flowers, incapable of gracefully listening to opinions they don’t like without throwing a fit.
Olivia Nuzzi of the Daily Beast, for example, wrote with obvious frustration that the class of 2014 needs to “calm the hell down” and recognize that “oftentimes you find great wisdom in shitty people.” Before declaring that young people “are the worst” (which, considering Nuzzi’s own young age, was almost certainly written with tongue slightly in cheek) Nuzzi writes that the “entire point of college is to be exposed to different things,” a truism that 2014 graduates of Rutgers and Smith shamefully forgot. “[M]aybe some of those people will hail from organizations that negatively impacted poor countries, or maybe they were partly responsible for a war that ate up the country’s resources and resulted in human rights abuses and lots of needless death,” Nuzzi grants. But still.
At the Week, meanwhile, Damon Linker took Nuzzi’s attack one step further, arguing that not only did these students fail to understand the point of college but that they were perpetuating “the tyranny of right-thinking moralism” that is ruining America’s institutions of higher learning. Noting that he, too, opposed the war of choice that will forever be Rice’s chief legacy, Linker writes that “[t]he world is an imperfect and morally complicated place, filled with people who regularly do things I consider wrong, stupid, misguided, foolish, and unethical” but that such people should still not be “excommunicated, ignored, or banished from public life.” Besides, Linker writes, what good does protesting Rice serve “beyond convincing the protesters of their own moral superiority?”
Two thoughts. First (and less important) is that bashing college kids — especially ones who are defined by their idealism and hunger for change — remains one of our most widely accepted and least logically defensible pastimes. Despite telling ourselves that we in America value youth, education and self-expression, there are few cultural archetypes more universally loathed than the campus activist. We say we want our kids to be independent, informed, fearless and disruptive, but then we attack, patronize and demean them as soon as they decide they’d like to be more than seen and not heard. (This dynamic is especially unfortunate when played out among the press. As my friend Ned Resnikoff snarked on Twitter, “What made you guys all want to be journalists? For me it was the thrill and fulfillment that comes with mocking college activists.”)
Moreover, there’s something particularly nonsensical about thwacking a bunch of students for supposedly ignoring the right to free speech when all they’ve done is exercise that right for themselves by peacefully organizing and expressing their disapproval.
The other (and more important) thing that comes to mind when surveying the backlash to the Rice backlash is the corrosive effect American exceptionalism can have on even the smartest and most skeptical among us. In both Nuzzi and Linker’s pieces — as well as a similar one from GOP pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson — opposition to Rice is framed in partisan or ideological terms. Students don’t like Rice, we’re led to assume, because she’s a Republican, full stop. But while I’m sure that’s the case for at least some of the kids at Rutgers — who must be disappointed to hear that Rice’s replacement will be Tom Kean, another GOPer — it’s also a real misrepresentation of the fundamental problem with Rice and other top-tier members of the second Bush presidency. The implication is that the mistakes made by the last GOP president are more or less within the normal bounds of American politics, as if initiating an arguably illegal war and systematically flouting the Geneva Conventions is the same thing as cutting the estate tax or privatizing Social Security.
It shouldn’t be necessary to say this, but: They’re not. And it’s only in a political world where the lives of non-Americans are unconsciously considered less valuable that such thinking could survive. To be clear, I’m not accusing Nuzzi or Linker of knowingly devaluing human life — Nuzzi describes the Iraq War in strongly negative terms, and Linker so hated Bush’s decision to invade Iraq that he left the Republican Party. Instead, what I’m arguing is that our mainstream political debate is so saturated with unstated assumptions about our inherent goodness, our natural righteousness, and our basic decency that serious war crimes, when committed by American politicians, are sanitized as matters of differing opinion. (And in Rice’s case, it’s not as if we can pretend that she was somehow only tangentially related to the administration’s worst crimes — here she is, back in 2009, defending torture with the Nixonian logic that nothing a president commands in service of national security can possibly be illegal.)
As if to make my point for me, the New York Times recently ran an Op-Ed from Timothy Egan in which Rice’s failures and mistakes — which, remember, cost perhaps as many as 500,000 human lives while wrecking millions more — are dismissed with a chilling breeziness. “Near as I can tell, the forces of intolerance objected to her role in the Iraq war,” Egan writes (apparently unaware that the magic of Google allows him to find the protesters explaining their objections in their own words). “The foreign policy that Rice guided for George W. Bush,” Egan continues, “was clearly a debacle … But if every speaker has to pass a test for benign mediocrity and politically correct sensitivity, commencement stages will be home to nothing but milquetoasts.” Taking the already grotesque line that non-American life is less important than entertainment to an even more hideous extreme, Egan continues, “You want torture? Try listening to the Stanford speech of 2009, when Justice Anthony M. Kennedy gave an interminable address on the intricacies of international law, under a broiling sun, with almost no mention of the graduates.”
So there you have it: Torture, when sanctioned by Americans, is basically a joking matter, an experience that’s comparable to being bored while sitting in the sun. And it’s the students at Rutgers who are the problem?
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, May 17, 2014
“Republicans’ Political Theater On Benghazi”: Nakedly Political Goal To Rouse The GOP Base For The Fall Election
Before asking a question at the coming show trial, each self-righteous congressional inquisitor should be required to correctly locate Benghazi on an unlabeled map.
That would shorten the farce. My guess is that some of the House Republicans screaming loudest in faux outrage would be hard-pressed to find Libya, much less pinpoint the city where four Americans were tragically killed.
No, Congressman, that’s Liberia you’re pointing to. Whole different country.
It’s impossible to take seriously a House select committee investigation designed not to unearth relevant new facts but to achieve nakedly political goals: rousing the GOP base for the fall election and sullying Hillary Clinton’s record in case she runs for president.
It is disgusting that the Sept. 11, 2012, attack, which claimed the life of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, would be used in this manner. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call this a new low, and the fact that the ploy will probably backfire on Republicans is scant consolation.
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), the chair of the select committee, tried Sunday to back away from his earlier reference to the proceedings as a “trial.” But his intent to prosecute rather than investigate remains clear.
“Why were we still in Benghazi?” he asked on “Fox News Sunday.” “The British ambassador was almost assassinated. Our facility was attacked twice. There were multiple episodes of violence. We were the last flag flying in Benghazi, and I would like to know why.”
Of all the dumb questions, that may be the dumbest. U.S. diplomats and intelligence agents were in Benghazi because, as Clinton testified before a House committee last year, “we have become accustomed to operating in dangerous places.” It is in these chaotic, violent places where threats to our national interests take shape. Brave public servants volunteer to go into conflict zones to make it safe for partisans at home to question their valor.
Here are the answers to the only questions about Benghazi that matter:
Did the State Department provide adequate security for the consulate? Obviously not. The facility was overrun, sacked and burned; therefore, security was inadequate. It should be noted that Stevens, who was based in Tripoli, thought he could safely visit Benghazi. But ultimately the buck stops with Clinton, who has taken responsibility.
Could reinforcements have arrived in time to save lives? No, according to the Pentagon. The nearest fighter jets and other assets were too far away. They could not have made it to Benghazi in time to make a difference.
That’s it. You’ll notice that I did not mention the question on which Gowdy and his GOP colleagues will probably spend the most time, energy and hot air: “Who edited the talking points?”
Yes, talking points. Incredibly, unbelievably, disgracefully, Republicans are trying to make a full-blown scandal out of who did or did not change the wording in an internal memo — a memo meant to give the administration’s first, vaguest, most cautious, least definitive assessment of what had just happened in Benghazi.
We know, from all the investigations thus far, that CIA officials initially believed the attack was related to a rash of violent anti-American demonstrations in other cities, such as Cairo, over an anti-Islam video. We also know that U.S. personnel on the ground saw a much more organized, well-planned terrorist assault. This disconnect is commonly called the “fog of war.”
U.S. diplomatic, defense and intelligence officials spent the days following the attack in a scramble to make sure our people and facilities in other danger zones were secure. Even if they had focused on the issue of demonstration vs. planned attack, could they have determined the truth in time for Susan Rice’s appearances on the Sunday talk shows? Of course not. If you don’t believe me, ask anyone who has ever tried to reconstruct the blow-by-blow of a combat engagement.
And furthermore, as Clinton memorably asked Congress in exasperation, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
What’s the point, exactly, that Republicans are trying to prove? That there are still Islamic terrorists who want to kill Americans? I think this is common knowledge. That deadly violence by a homicidal mob is somehow more benign than deadly violence by an organized group? Honestly, I fail to see the distinction.
The way to honor the Americans who died in Benghazi is to try to make sure nothing like this happens again. The way to dishonor them is to make their deaths the subject of partisan political theater.
Ladies and gentlemen, the curtain is about to rise.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 12, 2014
“It’s Now The Canadian Dream”: It’s Time To Bring The American Dream Home From Exile
It was in 1931 that the historian James Truslow Adams coined the phrase “the American dream.”
The American dream is not just a yearning for affluence, Adams said, but also for the chance to overcome barriers and social class, to become the best that we can be. Adams acknowledged that the United States didn’t fully live up to that ideal, but he argued that America came closer than anywhere else.
Adams was right at the time, and for decades. When my father, an eastern European refugee, reached France after World War II, he was determined to continue to the United States because it was less class bound, more meritocratic and offered more opportunity.
Yet today the American dream has derailed, partly because of growing inequality. Or maybe the American dream has just swapped citizenship, for now it is more likely to be found in Canada or Europe — and a central issue in this year’s political campaigns should be how to repatriate it.
A report last month in The Times by David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy noted that the American middle class is no longer the richest in the world, with Canada apparently pulling ahead in median after-tax income. Other countries in Europe are poised to overtake us as well.
In fact, the discrepancy is arguably even greater. Canadians receive essentially free health care, while Americans pay for part of their health care costs with after-tax dollars. Meanwhile, the American worker toils, on average, 4.6 percent more hours than a Canadian worker, 21 percent more hours than a French worker and an astonishing 28 percent more hours than a German worker, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Canadians and Europeans also live longer, on average, than Americans do. Their children are less likely to die than ours. American women are twice as likely to die as a result of pregnancy or childbirth as Canadian women. And, while our universities are still the best in the world, children in other industrialized countries, on average, get a better education than ours. Most sobering of all: A recent O.E.C.D. report found that for people aged 16 to 24, Americans ranked last among rich countries in numeracy and technological proficiency.
Economic mobility is tricky to measure, but several studies show that a child born in the bottom 20 percent economically is less likely to rise to the top in America than in Europe. A Danish child is twice as likely to rise as an American child.
When our futures are determined to a significant extent at birth, we’ve reverted to the feudalism that our ancestors fled.
“Equality of opportunity — the ‘American dream’ — has always been a cherished American ideal,” Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-winning economist at Columbia University, noted in a recent speech. “But data now show that this is a myth: America has become the advanced country not only with the highest level of inequality, but one of those with the least equality of opportunity.”
Consider that the American economy has, over all, grown more quickly than France’s. But so much of the growth has gone to the top 1 percent that the bottom 99 percent of French people have done better than the bottom 99 percent of Americans.
Three data points:
• The top 1 percent in America now own assets worth more than those held by the entire bottom 90 percent.
• The six Walmart heirs are worth as much as the bottom 41 percent of American households put together.
• The top six hedge fund managers and traders averaged more than $2 billion each in earnings last year, partly because of the egregious “carried interest” tax break. President Obama has been unable to get financing for universal prekindergarten; this year’s proposed federal budget for pre-K for all, so important to our nation’s future, would be a bit more than a single month’s earnings for those six tycoons.
Inequality has become a hot topic, propelling Bill de Blasio to become mayor of New York City, turning Senator Elizabeth Warren into a star, and elevating the economist Thomas Piketty into such a demigod that my teenage daughter asked me the other day for his 696-page tome. All this growing awareness is a hopeful sign, because there are policy steps that we could take that would create opportunity and dampen inequality.
We could stop subsidizing private jets and too-big-to-fail banks, and direct those funds to early education programs that help break the cycle of poverty. We can invest less in prisons and more in schools.
We can impose a financial transactions tax and use the proceeds to broaden jobs programs like the earned-income tax credit and career academies. And, as Alan S. Blinder of Princeton University has outlined, we can give companies tax credits for creating new jobs.
It’s time to bring the American dream home from exile.
By: Nicholas Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, May 14, 2014
“No Break In The War On Voting”: Republican Hostility To Voting Rights Is The Problem
In case you were wondering if Rand Paul’s three-day revolt against the War on Voting his party is waging was either stimulating or might reflect a moment of glasnost on the subject, MSNBC’s Zachary Roth has some cold, cold water for you:
Paul’s walk-back is the inevitable result of some much larger trends. It’s not just that polls show voter ID remains popular—though that’s undoubtedly affecting the picture. More important is the GOP’s strategy for winning elections. For all the talk about the need to court Hispanics, the reality is that the easiest short-term path to victory for Republicans is to double-down on their advantage white voters, and work to make the electorate as white as possible. That means restrictions on voting—which hit blacks and Hispanics hardest—are likely to be a page in the party’s playbook for a while.
It’s no coincidence that some of the most important presidential swing states—Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, and North Carolina—have been the sites of the fiercest voting rights battles. Republicans know that without most of those states, they could be shut out of the White House for decades.
Nor is it a surprise that the list of Paul’s potential rivals for the nomination includes Republicans, like Rick Perry, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich, who have led the way in blocking access to the ballot. Not a single GOPer in the 2016 conversation has opposed voter ID—including Paul.
The Republican National Lawyers Association—the closest thing there is to an official GOP position on voting issues—is certainly showing no signs of retreating. Not only does the group defend voter ID as zealously as ever—it even opposes a recent recommendation from a bipartisan presidential commission to expand early voting.
The GOP’s approach to the Voting Rights Act is even more revealing about the direction it’s heading. In 2006, the overwhelming majority of Republican lawmakers joined with Democrats to reauthorize the landmark civil rights law. But Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, a Republican, has so far failed to get party leaders to sign on to legislation to fix the law after it was weakened by the Supreme Court last year—even though it contains a special carve-out for voter ID, designed to win GOP support.
I would add that despite all the talk (abating lately) of Republicans needing to change positions, strategy and tactics to look less hostile to minority voters, you almost never hear Republicans admitting that hostility to voting rights is part of their problem. That may have been Rand Paul’s most important heresy: even bringing the subject up. Bet that won’t happen again.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 15, 2014
“No Matter Your Politics”: The Gross Hypocrisy Of Conservative Media’s Attack On ‘Hashtag Bring Back Our Girls’
With apparently little more to talk about this week—and stuck for an actual solution to bringing home the girls kidnapped in Nigeria by a terrorist group—the conservative media has decided to go with a campaign to denigrate those who posted photographs on Twitter, holding up signs reading “#BringBackOurGirls”.
The heart of the narrative being pushed is that those participating in the twitterverse effort are, somehow, formulating our national security policy through their participation.
Really?
When 2nd Amendment advocates mounted social media campaigns and legally rallied in front of government buildings holding their weapons high in the air, were they dictating domestic policy or seeking to influence domestic policy?
When the Tea Party began its protest of American tax policies by huge numbers of sympathizers taking to Twitter to express their feelings with the hashtag, “Don’t Tread On Me”, were these folks dictating domestic policy or seeking to influence domestic policy?
I think the answer if crystal clear to any thinking human being.
In both these instances, these were Americans exercising their critical right to express themselves in any legitimate and legal avenue available to them and to use that right of free expression to bring their feelings to the attention of the federal government in the hopes that they could have some influence over their government’s actions and policies.
I may not agree with all the thoughts the 2nd Amendment and Tea Party advocates and supporters have expressed through the same social media sites being utilized by those trying to impact on how we react to the heinous act of violence in Nigeria, but not for one second would I have considered making fun of these people for doing what is one of the most important things an American can do—express themselves to their government.
If you don’t believe this, I challenge anyone to find so much as one column, one television appearance or one radio interview where I belittled 2nd amendment or Tea Party advocates, members and sympathizers for taking to social media, rallies or any other legal means of protest and influence to make their feelings known. I may criticize their ideas but it simply would not occur to me to denigrate these people for speaking out and taking advantage of what our freedoms permit.
Indeed, the only time you will find that I criticized the actual gathering of such a group was when an armed group of 2nd Amendment supporters in Texas posted themselves outside a restaurant where a group of gun control advocates were meeting inside, unnecessarily intimidating and scaring the hell out of these folks.
Can anyone tell me how the situation of people tweeting their support, or participating in a rally, to influence their government on the subject of these horrendous kidnappings is any different than the examples I have given above?
You may not agree with their position, although it is difficult to imagine why anyone would be against asking our government and the governments of the world to try and do something to help the kidnapped girls and their families; you may think that such a mass expression is waste of time on the part of those who are participating because you believe it won’t help bring the girls home; you may not like those who are participating because it involves a few celebrities that you enjoy picking on because their political beliefs may be different than your own; but how can you possibly argue that this effort is, in any way whatsoever, different from 2nd Amendment protesters or folks participating in a Tea Party rally and posting their support for their point of view via social media?
I truly do not understand how those who have made a living this week from making fun of Americans who choose to express themselves in a good cause can turn around and play their theme music recounting how wonderful America is when they clearly do not understand what it is that makes this nation wonderful. I truly do not understand how these people can participate in social media or make appearances at rallies designed to bring home their particular point of view but then make fun of others for doing precisely the same thing simply because they don’t like these people or don’t believe their expressions will have an effect.
No matter what your politics, how is this anything but spectacular hypocrisy?
And to imagine that the fact that Hillary Clinton or the First Lady chose to participate in the Twitter event somehow turns this into a foreign policy initiative of the U.S. government is so foolish as to offend the very listeners and viewers who take the conservative media so very seriously. Sorry, guys, but you’re audience is way smarter than that.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, May 15, 2014
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