THE JEFFORDS AUCTION Last week, the Washington Times’s John McCaslin brought us the heartwarming tale of John McClaughry, president of the free-market Ethan Allen Institute in Concord, Vermont. Vermont, you’ll recall, is the land of civil unionists, Chubby Hubby ice-cream manufacturers, and Republican turncoat Jim Jeffords, who handed control of the Senate to Tom Daschle and his fellow Democrats a year ago. According to the Times, McClaughry, one of the few Vermonters who doesn’t believe that Jeffords’s drama-queen defection was as heroic an act as Paul Revere’s midnight ride, was horrified when a relative “maliciously” presented him with an autographed copy of Jeffords’s slim autobiography, “My Declaration of Independence.” McClaughry told McCaslin that he immediately put it up for sale on eBay, stating in the product description, “I want to get it out of the house before anybody sees it and thinks I actually spent money on it.” Additionally, McClaughry included a copy of one of his own Wall Street Journal commentaries “explaining how Jeffords betrayed his party repeatedly over 30 years and why the Republican party is better off with him gone.” Though the publisher’s price was $14.95, McClaughry asked for a minimum bid of $5. After an entire week, the winning bidder (there was only one–for $5) turned out to be a Centreville, Virginia, man by the name of Ralph D. Jeffords. As one of the few who has actually read Jeffords’s book, The Scrapbook’s first reaction was that Ralph had overpaid by about $5. Our second reaction was that we smelled a rat–could Ralph Jeffords be a relative of Jim’s, trying to spare his kin the kind of embarrassment the latter suffered when the nation learned his nickname was “Jeezum”? After reaching Ralph, a computer scientist with the Naval Research Lab, we learned that he has no idea if he’s related to the senator. Ralph, it turns out, has been trying to find a family link by combing through Mormon genealogies. “I assume if I go back far enough,” he says, “there will be a connection one way or another.” (Dare to dream!) Consequently, Ralph likes to collect all things Jeffords (he’s also a big aficionado of Tom Jeffords–the Indian scout who was one of the dearest friends of Cochise, the Apache chief). Ralph says he hasn’t read the book yet: “I’ll probably look at it eventually.” But in the meantime, he keeps an eye on eBay for Jeffords memorabilia steals. There’s been quite a few of them, everything from commemorative Jeezum Jim beer bottles and glass sets to “Benedict Jeffords” pins. For his critics at least, it’s nice to see something of Jeffords’s for sale–besides his vote. MASSACRE? WHAT MASSACRE? The Scrapbook became rather suspicious when it heard Hasan Abdel Rahman, the chief Palestinian representative to the United States, tell Fox’s “Hannity & Colmes” last week that, with regard to the fighting in Jenin, “I never said it was a massacre.” As everyone by now probably knows, the initial Palestinian claims of thousands of innocents missing and killed at Israeli hands turned out to be 56 Palestinian deaths, mainly combatants, and 23 Israeli soldiers. And we had the distinct feeling that Rahman’s earlier demands for Ariel Sharon to be tried for war crimes and broad condemnations of Israel just had to have included the word “massacre.” To be fair, Rahman did tell the media that he would not “get involved in semantics, whether that is a massacre or not because I don’t know what makes a massacre.” Too bad he didn’t heed his own advice on April 14, when he did in fact tell CNN that “I still believe that there is–was–a massacre committed by Israel in Jenin and in other areas, and that those practices of Israel are continuing.” To paraphrase the old saying: Better to keep your mouth shut and have people suspect you of lying than open it and remove all doubt. THE POETRY OF TERROR Imagine a college course description including this warning: “Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections.” Okay, stop imagining. According to a report in the Daily Californian, that language comes directly from a course-catalogue description of “The Politics and Poetics of the Palestinian Resistance,” brought to you by the English department at UC Berkeley next fall. The course, taught by grad student and campus radical Snehal Shingavi, “takes as its starting point the right of Palestinians to fight for their own self-determination. . . . The brutal Israeli military occupation of Palestine, an occupation that has been ongoing since 1948, has systematically displaced, killed and maimed millions of Palestinian people. And yet from under the brutal weight of the occupation, Palestinians have produced their own culture and poetry of resistance.” Shingavi knows a thing or two about a culture of resistance. The university last month suspended Shingavi’s group, “Students for Justice in Palestine,” for what the campus daily described as its “five-hour siege of a campus building.” It has since been reinstated. Chancellor Robert Berdahl says the school will review the course to make sure anyone who wants to take the class can do so–a policy that doesn’t sit well with Shingavi. “If you can’t accept that Palestinians have the right to self-determination, it is impossible to read resistance poetry. Instructors should have the right to teach the material that they want and should have control over the discussion.” Right. Coming next spring: “The Politics and Poetics of Bombmaking. Jews are encouraged to seek other sections.” THE HEALTH OF TAIWAN In the category of too-absurd-to-believe, the World Health Organization meets on Monday, May 13, in Geneva, Switzerland, and for the fifth year in a row, Taiwan’s efforts to gain observer status will have come to naught. The WHO, which is dedicated to ensuring that all people of the world have access to the highest attainable level of health care, apparently doesn’t have room for Taiwan’s democracy. (In contrast, the WHO does have room for the Palestinian Authority.) To its credit, Congress passed legislation requiring the secretary of state to come up with a plan for obtaining observer status for Taiwan at this year’s World Health Assembly. But the secretary and the department ignored the hint, and State will be once again sitting on its hands on Monday. Maybe they should wash them after the assembly finishes. FAITH-BASED, AT LAST? On May 2, 600 people from 25 states came to Washington, D.C., to lobby for the president’s CARE Act, the Senate version of his faith-based initiative. The rally was organized by Mike Joyce’s Americans for Community and Faith-Centered Enterprise and by the Charitable Giving Coalition. Representatives from over 150 groups attended, ranging, in the words of Joe Lieberman, from “Agudath Israel to Wal-Mart.” Why a rally? After all, though the faith-based measure was once a political lightning rod, the bill now has broad institutional and political support, and almost no organized opposition. It has been endorsed by Tom Daschle. It was introduced by Lieberman and the GOP’s Rick Santorum, and counts Hillary Clinton among its cosponsors. What’s more, the bill was altered to respond to the needs of charitable organizations in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Yet like much of the president’s agenda, it remains stalled in the Senate, with conflicting stories about whether it will be marked up in the next few weeks. The fate of this bill will demonstrate if there is even a modicum of reality left to the claim of renewed bipartisanship.
