THE BEIJING GAMES PEOPLE PLAY LATE LAST WEEK, as expected, the world’s largest dictatorship was awarded the honor of hosting the 2008 summer Olympic games. Friday in Moscow, the International Olympic Committee made quick work of bids from Toronto, Istanbul, Paris, and Osaka, and voted instead to hold the event in Beijing. Sure, there’d been some concern about China’s plan to stage the beach volleyball competition in Tiananmen Square, right where the bodies fell during 1989’s massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators. But—see how reasonable they are?—the Beijing organizing committee agreed to relocate the artificial sand pit. True, too, there remain a few health nuts among Olympic track and field athletes who worry that Beijing’s notorious air pollution—more days than not, you can hardly see a hundred yards in the smog—might, oh, collapse a lung or two during the marathon, for example. And IOC aides acknowledge in private that China’s housing and transportation problems make the 2008 Games a potential disaster. And some people continue to fuss about that, you know, human rights stuff. But that’s all small potatoes. To have lost the games, Canadian Olympic official Paul Henderson explained, “Beijing [would’ve] had to make a major mistake.” Like antagonizing the United States into actively opposing its Olympic bid? Would that such a thing were possible. Amnesty International reports that China has summarily executed nearly 2,000 “undesirables” in the past three months. Falun Gong representatives report that China has recently murdered several dozen of their colleagues. And Beijing itself announced that it will try several falsely accused Americans for the capital crime of espionage. None of this caused anyone in Washington to blink. There was Clinton administration national security adviser Sandy Berger on the op-ed page of the Washington Post, for example, urging us to understand that the “world looks different from China.” A “bifurcated policy of economic engagement and political hostility is unsustainable,” Berger concluded. So we should never be hostile, in other words. No matter what the Chinese do. Incidentally, the author of this little appeasement essay, besides his government service, is a high-dollar adviser to corporations doing business in China, just back from a trip to Beijing. Republican leaders of the House of Representatives, who last week blocked a vote on a non-binding resolution condemning Beijing’s Olympic bid, do not get paid by the China lobby, of course. So THE SCRAPBOOK wonders, What’s their excuse? ARE YOU NOW, OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN, FROM MILWAUKEE? LAST WEEK, THE CITY that’s home to some of America’s greatest symbols of capitalism and freedom (Miller beer, Harley-Davidson) hosted the annual convention of the Communist Party, USA. The commies were pumped as they kicked things off with a spirited rendition of “Solidarity Forever.” The excitement peaked when Daisy Cubais, an aide to Milwaukee mayor John Norquist, read to the gathering a welcome letter from Norquist. Wisconsinites, Norquist writes, are “widely known for our socialist traditions.” And, he continues, “in that sense, we share many things in common with the long history of the Communist Party and all those engaged in the fight for a decent life for working families.” What’s more, “if we, the people, work together, we can win the struggle to better the lives of ordinary working people. The Communist Party, USA has shown its dedication to this goal in its efforts to strengthen the labor movement, combat the critical situation of poverty, hunger, unemployment and racial discrimination as well as its efforts to save our environment.” Yeah, right. The crowd of nearly 500 gave a standing ovation. Steve Filmanowicz, Norquist’s spokesman, is eager to clarify. The welcome, he says, was written by an overenthusiastic staffer, and Norquist “wasn’t around to sign off on the letter.” Norquist is often to the right of most Democrats on issues, Filmanowicz continues, and the letter was basically sent to recognize “work that some members of the party have done on labor issues.” Besides, he says, Norquist can’t be a commie-sympathizer because he wrote a book in which “he quotes Milton Friedman four times and Karl Marx not once.” STEM CELL DEMAGOGUES THE JUVENILE DIABETES FOUNDATION has just produced a beautiful, moving television ad. It’s about a pretty, lively little girl named Samantha—and the evil people who want her to keep suffering from diabetes. You might wonder who, exactly, is in favor of juvenile diabetes. Well, the ad makes it clear: The people who oppose the use of stem cells. And even though “stem cell research has broad support…across the country,” these people are using “politics”—politics, mind you—to “prevent a breakthrough in medical science.” So we had all better telephone President Bush this minute to record our support for stem cell research. THE SCRAPBOOK could make that phone call. So could everybody else in America, because there isn’t anyone involved in the debate who opposes stem cell research. Adult and other non-embryonic stem cell research has shown potential for treating diabetes, and everybody is glad. But that’s not what the Samantha ad is really about. What the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation wants you to do is phone the president to register your support for embryonic stem cell research, a word that never appears in the ad. This is what disingenuousness looks like in the debate over embryonic stem cells. If you’d prefer that stem cells were obtained non-destructively from adults, if you think that there’s something creepy about creating human embryos for the purpose of destroying them to extract their stem cells (the kind of research, according to the Wall Street Journal, that the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation has already given $650,000 to support in Spain), why, then, you must want little Samantha to suffer forever. Funny, the usual watchdogs of political advertising haven’t barked on this one. NIGHTMARE ON PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE IN THE MOST RECENT IMPARTIAL CONTRIBUTION to human knowledge to emerge from Berkeley, California, a new study has found that Republicans have more nightmares. Noted dream researcher Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D., presented his findings on July 11 to the 18th Annual International Conference of the Association for the Study of Dreams. His study, based on a poll of visitors to his website, found that half of the self-reported dreams of Republicans were classified as nightmares, while just 18 percent of liberals’ dreams were. As UPI reports, Bulkeley, whose previous work includes “Political Dreaming: Dreams of the 1992 Presidential Election,” claimed that “Democratic nightmares are tempered by the very principles Democrats claim to espouse—hope, power, and positive action.” Republicans, on the other hand, “inhabit scarier dreamlands” characterized by “aggression, misfortune, and physical threats.” We eagerly await further findings, in which Republicans tend, on average, to display an unusual degree of loathing for bunnies and fuzzy kittens.
