Mr. Multilateral
Much has been made in recent days of John Kerry’s boasting about support for his candidacy from undisclosed foreign leaders. After former Malaysian prime minister and noted eugenics theorist Mahathir Mohamad offered his backing on the record, the Kerry campaign moved quickly to put an end to the endorsement talk. “It is simply not appropriate for any foreign leader to endorse a candidate in America’s presidential election,” said Kerry foreign policy adviser Rand Beers. “John Kerry does not seek, and will not accept, any such endorsements.”
The whole flap was good for a few laughs–something THE SCRAPBOOK predicts will be in short supply in this campaign.
But the controversy also obscured a more serious problem with Kerry’s attempt to position himself as Mr. Multilateral. In his eagerness to please our would-be foreign friends, he insults the allies we have. This basic truth was among the points Vice President Dick Cheney made in an excellent speech last week.
Many questions come to mind, but the first is this: How would Senator Kerry describe Great Britain–coerced, or bribed? Or Italy–which recently lost 19 citizens, killed by terrorists in Najaf. Was Italy’s contribution just window dressing? If such dismissive terms are the vernacular of the golden age of diplomacy Senator Kerry promises, we are left to wonder which nations would care to join any future coalition. He speaks as if only those who openly oppose America’s objectives have a chance of earning his respect. Senator Kerry’s characterization of our good allies is ungrateful to nations that have withstood danger, hardship, and insult for standing with America in the cause of freedom.
As for THE SCRAPBOOK, we’ll take John Howard or Tony Blair over Mahathir Mohamad any day.
Happy Birthday, C-SPAN
Twenty-five years ago, on March 19, 1979, C-SPAN began its live broadcasts from the floor of the House of Representatives. There were fears that the sozzled, dyspeptic solons then populating the House would as a result be supplanted by blow-dried, stuffed-shirt camera hogs. And–well–those fears proved prophetic.
But, on balance, there is a lot to celebrate in the C-SPAN culture. David Brooks put it well in these pages five years ago:
“When you step back far enough you begin to appreciate that C-SPAN is so far out of tune with the times that it has become an intellectual counterculture. Especially on the weekends, the people who fill its screens seem quaintly and bravely out of step: the historian who has devoted her career to researching Pickett’s Charge, the auctioneer who specializes in rare 18th-century books, the biographer who has spent years describing John Adams.
“C-SPAN is factual in a world grown theoretical. It is slow in a world growing more hyper. It is word-oriented in an era that is visually sophisticated. With its open phone lines, it is genuinely populist in a culture that preaches populism more than it practices it. And occupying its unique niche–C-SPAN is funded by the cable industry to cover Congress and public events–it has managed to perform feats of civic education that are unmatched by better-funded institutions, such as the History Channel, PBS, the Smithsonian, or the multibillion-dollar foundations.”
How to Stage a Controversy (cont.)
A woman named Sue Niederer is fast becoming one of the most quoted critics of the war in Iraq. Niederer is from Pennington, New Jersey. Last February, her 24-year-old son, U.S. Army Lt. Seth Dvorin, was killed in Iskandariyah, a city outside of Baghdad. Before he died, caught in the blast from a roadside bomb, Lt. Dvorin saved the lives of 18 soldiers in his platoon. Over 400 people showed up for his funeral in New Jersey.
His mother believes Dvorin died a pointless death. “It’s not a declared war so what did my son die for?” Niederer told the New Jersey Home News Tribune. Two weeks after burying her son, she took her message to Princeton, where she was one of several protesters outside a lecture hall in which Colin Powell was delivering a speech. A little over three weeks after that, she joined a protest outside the Dover Air Force base in Dover, Delaware, which grimly doubles as our largest military mortuary. The protesters, she told AP, are “telling the truth about what’s going on.”
By contrast, she explained to ABC News that day, the U.S. government in general–and the military in particular–is deceiving the public: “They don’t want you to see the body. They don’t want you to see anything.” The next day, March 15, she traveled to Walter Reed Army Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, where she told the Toronto Star: “Anyone who has been killed over there has died in vain.”
Last Wednesday, March 17, Niederer showed up at the Capitol, where she again took part in an antiwar protest, this time as members of the House of Representatives were debating a resolution in support of Coalition troops as well as the Iraqis, who signed a provisional constitution on March 8. (The resolution passed 327-93.) Niederer made it into the Associated Press’s account, headlined, “House Iraq Resolution Turns into Partisan Debate”:
A truth that the Associated Press did not see fit to mention is that Niederer was at the Capitol as a member of Military Families Speak Out, a group of relatives of U.S. soldiers who advocate the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Military Families Speak Out, in turn, had come to the Capitol at the behest of Win Without War, a coalition of leftist antiwar groups, to advocate that Congress censure President Bush.
The AP account not only omitted Niederer’s political affiliation, which was made clear in the press release put out by Win Without War and MoveOn.org. It also left out the second half of her quote, which spells out the Win Without War agenda: “Our message to Congress today is clear,” she says in the press release. “Spare us the platitudes, the pious rhetoric, the empty slogans. Give us the truth. Do your job and hold those accountable who have denied us the truth. Censure President Bush for the deceptions and manipulations that led our nation to war.”
Matthew Continetti detailed in last week’s issue (“How to Stage a Controversy”) the press’s increasing penchant for relying on left-wing public relations hounds when writing anti-Bush stories–without identifying their sources’ affiliations. Sanitizing the quotations they lift from press releases may be a new low.
