TOWARDS A MORE PICTURESQUE HATE SPEECH PROOF THAT THE SPEECH POLICE in America are almost all on the left: the amazingly forgiving reaction of the press to California attorney general Bill Lockyer’s attack on Enron chairman Kenneth Lay. Lockyer is running the price-fixing investigation in which California’s political establishment attempts to shift blame for the state’s power blackouts to Texas energy companies like Enron. By smearing energy traders (though no wrongdoing on their part has been credibly charged), Lockyer can divert attention from California legislators (like himself) whose partial deregulation of the state’s electricity grid turned out to be amazingly boneheaded. In late May, Lockyer came up with a new demagogic sound bite. He was so pleased with himself that he tried it out on a Wall Street Journal reporter. “I would love,” said the attorney general of California, “to personally escort Lay to an 8-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, ‘Hi, my name is Spike, honey.’” There is no evidence, by the way, that Lay and Enron have done anything illegal or even wrong in their dealings with California utilities. The reaction to Lockyer’s threat has been surprisingly muted. Texas papers got exercised, naturally, over the insult to one of their own. A sprinkling of columnists arched their eyebrows. But Lockyer’s office itself has been brazenly unrepentant over what really was an astonishing breach of decorum by a high public official. “Those focusing on the colorful language,” said a spokesman, “are missing the point—that we’re not afraid of energy companies and we are serious about going after them for any wrongdoing.” Actually, what they call “colorful language” is the point, as Tom Palmer of the Cato Institute argued quite forcefully in a June 6 op-ed for the Los Angeles Times. Lockyer, Palmer points out, has not only “admitted that rape is a regular feature of the state’s prison system, but also that he considers rape a part of the punishment he can inflict on others….He has publicly stated that he would like to personally arrange the rape of a Texas businessman who has not even been charged with any illegal behavior….His remarks reveal him to be an authoritarian thug, someone wholly unsuited to holding an office of public trust.” Should it matter, Palmer asks rhetorically, “that Lay is a businessman? Imagine the outcry if the head of Enron were female. What would Lockyer’s fellow Democrats have said to that?” Well, actually we can guess what they would have said. If it had looked politically advantageous to posture about sexual violence, they would have bayed at the moon and ripped him from limb to limb for hate speech. Otherwise, they would simply have snickered into their sleeves and asked, “What’s wrong with a little colorful language among friends?” SATELLITE REVERSAL A FOOLISH CONSISTENCY is rarely the hobgoblin of congressional minds, especially when there’s money at stake. Still, even THE SCRAPBOOK is shocked on occasion. Consider the case of Dana Rohrbacher, normally one of the House’s most vigilant hawks. During the Clinton years, the effusive Californian led the fight to tighten export controls to prevent the transfer of militarily sensitive high technologies, especially to China. Then, extremism in the defense of liberty was no vice to Rohrbacher: “There’s no way you can overreact to American businessmen intentionally betraying their country in a way that leaves Americans vulnerable,” he said. Now, however, Rohrbacher is sponsoring a bill—along with ultraliberal Democrat Howard Berman—to reverse the very export controls he fought to put in place a few years ago, especially since they make life tougher for California satellite-makers. “I wasn’t out to destroy the satellite industry,” he told Jim Mann of the Los Angeles Times. “If we can trade with Communist China in a way that doesn’t put our country and our national security at risk, that’s fine.” THE SCRAPBOOK’s surprise at this acrobatic flip-flop is exceeded only by the delight of satellite industry spokesmen themselves. “If you’d talked to me a month ago, I’d have said there was no way this was going to happen,” one told the Times. GEM OF AN IDEA LAST NOVEMBER, THE SCRAPBOOK reported on an amazing feature story from the health section of the Washington Post: The Department of Housing and Urban Development had approved an “alternative wellness” therapy program for public housing residents who were ailing from, among other things, glandular imbalances and drug addiction. The program, contracted out to the National Institute for Medical Options, involved treatment of an ethereal nature: gemstones, incantations, and “goddess” typing—are you Aphrodite or are you Minerva? As the New York Post recently detailed, the program’s expenses included $3,174 for incense packs, $6,255 for aroma kits, $624 for nutrition kits that included candy and Jim Beam whiskey, and $6,270 for gem bags. Gem bags? In total, all of this was costing taxpayers $860,000 over a three-year period—until now. Lest you think this page never has good news to report, the Bush administration has decided to axe the program. Taxpayers will want to raise a glass of that nutritious Jim Beam. THE FEDERALIST PAPERS FOR DUMMIES! A PUBLISHING BREAKTHROUGH is being heralded at the WorldNetDaily online store—The Federalist Papers in Modern Language. In case you weren’t aware, a breathless publicist wants you to know, “The Federalist Papers are among the most important Founding Documents in the birth of the United States of America. But most Americans have never read them. Why? Because they were written in the florid and complex language of 18th Century politics. Now the Federalist Papers have been translated into modern American English. If you can read a newspaper, you can now read the Federalist Papers.” Thanks, but we’ll take our Hamilton, Madison, and Jay neat. If you have a problem with “florid and complex” political language, you might as well stick to the newspaper. THE CLINTON LEGACY, CONT. AS MICKEY KAUS AND DEBRA J. SAUNDERS, among others, have noted, it looks like one of Bill Clinton’s last minute pardons cost former assembly speaker Antonio Villaraigosa the mayor’s race in Los Angeles. Villaraigosa had weighed in on behalf of clemency for cocaine smuggler Carlos Vignali, whom Clinton released after half of his 14-year sentence. Villaraigosa at first said he had done no such thing. Then his 1996 letter to Clinton surfaced, exposing the lie. L.A. city attorney James Hahn, also a liberal Democrat but not a political ally of a drug smuggler, ran some tough ads on the issue and pulled out the victory. “How ironic,” concludes Saunders. “The man known as the first black president may have helped elect L.A.’s last white mayor.” THE REAL STAHL IN A REVIEW TWO WEEKS AGO in these pages (“Television Journalism as Oxymoron,” June 4), we referred, en passant, to Lesley Stahl’s “ghostwritten” memoir. Stahl has since informed us that Reporting Live was not ghostwritten.
