Extremism, hate speech, and moral equivalency

My post on "unhinged" political behavior on the right and the left (on Dave Neiwert's critique of Michelle Malkin's book Unhinged) has generated a rather heated discussion in the comments, as well as a thoughtful response here.

The main thrust of a lot of the responses from the left is that is that I am drawing a false moral equivalency between extremist rhetoric on the left and the right when the right is demonstrably worse. (Some posters from the right make the same criticism in reverse.)

Most of the criticism focuses on what Neiwert calls "eliminationist rhetoric" -- talk of getting rid of political opponents "either through violence or through mass roundups and incarceration." Ann Coulter provides some grist ("My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building"; "We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too"). There's also a 1995 quote from Rush Limbaugh ("I tell people don’t kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus -- living fossils -- so we will never forget what these people stood for"), and another one from 2005 where Rush muses aloud that if it's a good idea for us to learn from the laws of other nations, we ought to borrow the new British law allowing the deportation of hate-preaching extremists: "Wouldn't it be great if anybody who speaks out against this country, to kick them out of the country? Anybody that threatens this country, kick 'em out. We'd get rid of Michael Moore, we'd get rid of half the Democratic Party if we would just import that law. That would be fabulous." There is also Bill O'Reilly's suggestion that the staff of Air America be locked up for "undermining" the country, and his comment about not protecting San Francisco from terrorist attacks in retaliation from the city barring military recruiters from schools.

All this is, of course, vile stuff, and there is no excuse for it (including "humor"). And I'll concede that it has no precise equivalent on the left (Ward Churchill is too negligible to count -- his only fame comes from the right). I'll show interpretive charity to Michael Moore and assume that when he lamented that if the 9/11 terrorists wanted to get back at Bush, they struck at cities where most people didn't vote for him, he meant only that the attack made no sense from that angle, not that it would have been better if they had struck in, say, Dallas. And I'll stipulate that when Garrison Keillor -- who has an audience of nearly 4 million on National Public Radio -- joked about taking the vote away from born-again Christians, it wasn't quite so bad as joking about killing them off.

But is it that qualitatively different? Dave Neiwert, after all, cites as one of his examples of Ann Coulter's out-of-bounds rhetoric her suggestion that women shouldn't vote (because they tend to vote the "wrong" way).

No one really thinks (I hope) that Limbaugh, Coulter, and O'Reilly are seriously advocating the murder and incarceration of millions of liberals. What makes their rhetoric so poisonous is that (a) as Neiwert points out, it amounts to "a declaration of enmity" rather than a desire to debate, and (b) certain ideas, such as killing or rounding up one's political opponents, are too vile to be broached even as a "joke."

Viewed that way, there isn't that much distance between urging deportation and urging secession. Laudably, Neiwert points to the "Fuck the South" post-election screed, which calls for the expulsion of the Southern states from the Union and ends with "Fuck off," as a lamentable example of hateful speech on the left: "[I]n the end, it's an argument for writing off your fellow Americans." But there are other, more mainstream examples of this mindset; two prominent Democratic pundits, Lawrence O'Donnell and Bob Beckel, made post-election comments about Southern secession.

The issue is hate as a dominant mode of relating to people on the other side of the political divide. It can be expressed in "liberal hunting license" bumper stickers as documented by Neiwert. Or it can be expressed in this Democratic Underground thread, where a poster writes that she didn't stop to help a stranded motorist with a small child in sweltering heat after she saw a "W" bumper sticker on the woman's car, and most of the other posters not only reassure her that she shouldn't feel bad but congratulate her. (One poster writes, "[E]verytime I see one of those stickers, the hate that fills my mind is almost embarrassing. People I don't even know, and I see that sticker and all of a sudden I hate their guts.")

And in some cases, of course, there are pretty close parallels. Here's Rush Limbaugh (once again documented by Dave Neiwert) on the four Christian peace activists taken hostage in Iraq the other day:

I like any time a bunch of leftist feel-good hand-wringers are shown reality. ... I'm telling you, folks, there's a part of me that likes this. Probably, even with this, though, you know, they're not going to see the light of day.

And here's Markos Moulitsas (Daily Kos) on the four U.S. contractors murdered in Fallujah in 2004:

I feel nothing over the death of merceneries (sic). They aren't in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.

As for extreme rhetoric migrating into the mainstream: in an earlier post, Dave cites Karl Rove's liberal-bashing remarks to a Republican audience in June ("Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers") as an example. Yes, I agree, that was a nasty, divisive, unfair comment. Some liberals seem to think no high-ranking Democrats have made equivalent conservative-bashing comments. Really? Well, here's Howard Dean:

"This is a struggle between good and evil and we're the good."

"I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for."

And here's more Howard Dean:

Speaking about election reform, he said it is unconscionable for voters to have to stand in lengthy lines at polling places given the demands of work and family. "Republicans," he said, "I guess can do that because a lot of them have never made an honest living in their lives."

In terms of actual violence toward political opponents: As Dave Neiwert says, it obviously exists on both sides, and I'm not going to try to figure out who's done it more. Ideologically, there are trends at the extremes on both sides that lend themselves to condoning political violence: on the right, the flirtation with vigilantism; on the left, the flirtation with revolutionary violence. (The tendency to romanticize such violence exists even among mainstream liberals: check out, for instance, this analysis of a 2002 New York Times piece about Chesa Boudin, the devoted son of two Weather Underground terrorists who are serving time for the 1981 murder of two police officers and a security guard in a Brinks armored car robbery.)

Now, another important point. Dave argues that extremist elements have gained too much influence in the Republican Party; and, especially after the Terri Schiavo fiasco, I'm inclined to agree. I have been appalled, for a long time, by the fact that a shrill hatemonger like Ann Coulter was being treated as a legitimate pundit on the right. (I was also pretty disgusted by the right's anti-Clinton vendetta.) However, Dave also adds:

The only left-wing extremist movements of any note in 2005 -- the animal rights/eco-terrorist extremists particularly, though the anarchists and anti-globalists who helped make the WTO demonstrations a fiasco also fit the bill -- do not have any kinds of significant footholds or influence within the Democratic Party.

Note that here, Dave defines extremist movements very specifically as ones that engage in lawlessness and violence. In that case, I'm not sure who those extremist elements in the GOP are. Dave has cited the embrace of Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry by mainstream conservatives during the Terri Schiavo battle, and I'll be the first to say that Terry is odious. But if we're going to look for counterparts on the left, let's ask who has more influence: Randall Terry in the Republican Party, or Al Sharpton in the Democratic Party? (For Sharpton's long record of extremism, including his role in fanning the flames of racial violence in several cases, see this column by Jeff Jacoby.)

If we define extremism to include people and movements that engage in violent and, well ... unhinged rhetoric, then I would point to at least two extremist elements that do have influence with the Democratic Party mainstream.

(1) The Congressional Black Caucus has endorsed the "Millions More Movement" led by the Rev. Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam (characterized as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center as well as the Anti-Defamation League). On July 20, 2005, most of the CBC's 43 memers attended a strategy session with Farrakhan. (See this page for some of Farrakhan's more interesting comments over the years.)

(2) While being opposed to the war in Iraq is certainly not an extreme position, the antiwar movement, unfortunately, has been heavily enmeshed with extremist elements such as the hardcore communist group A.N.S.W.E.R. (see this critique in the liberal magazine Salon.com).

The issue of the anti-war movement and extremism also brings me to the rather painful issue of Cindy Sheehan. Yes, I know that some people on the right have crossed the bounds of decency in attacking Sheehan (for instance, Rush Limbaugh when he bizarrely suggested that her story was the equivalent of Bill Burkett's "forged documents"). But Sheehan's very real grief does not excuse her very extreme rhetoric ("The biggest terrorist in the world is George W. Bush"), of which many examples can be found here. See also here, and here, and here. (The last link is to a transcript posted on David Horowitz's website, not the most reputable source in the world, but I haven't see any suggestiong that the transcript is inaccurate.) Among other things, Sheehan has hailed as a hero Lynn Stewart, the attorney who was convicted of aiding and abetting a terrorist conspiracy for serving as a liaison between her incarcerated client, terrorist mastermind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, and his network outside. Stewart is known for openly sympathizing with radical Islamic terrorism (which she sees is as a part of the anti-imperialist struggle). It is also worth noting that Sheehan's writings are carried by the far-right website LewRockwell.com.

Back in August, a poster on Daily Kos mused:

Last night, occurred to me: Cindy Sheehan, Terry Schiavo reincarnated?

I'm not quite sure what she meant, but she was right: if the Terry Schiavo fiasco was the triumph, and nadir, of "unhinged" politics on the right, Cindy Sheehan's protest has been the same for the left. (And, in both cases, those responsible are somewhat insulated from criticism by personal tragedy.)

Finally: if we're going to talk about a left-wing counterpart to Ann Coulter, I would say that Michael Moore definitely qualifies. And how.

So, all in all, I stand by my earlier point. There is nastiness and ugliness aplenty on both sides, regardless of the exact forms it takes. To some extent, of course, perceptions of "ugliness," "nastiness" and "unhingedness" (so to speak) are subjective. To me, saying that Bush didn't lift a finger to help the victims of Katrina because he doesn't give a damn about blacks is obviously unhinged. To someone to the left of me, that might not be so obvious. Likewise, to me, saying that any mainstream Democrats are sympathetic to America's enemies is obviously unhinged. Others may differ. So, in the end, when approaching this issue, we are all to some extent captives of our own biases and perceptions; and I do not exempt myself from this general rule, as someone more "right" than "left" but deeply disenchanted, and troubled by, many aspects of conservative politics.

Trying to figure out who started it is fruitless, as well. Each side regards its own nastiness as reactive, and has examples to point to. And, for each side, "they started it" and "they're worse" serves as an excuse to condone or even encourage nastiness in its own ranks. (A liberal friend of mine who had always despised Michael Moore, and prided himself on the fact that mainstream liberalism has not embraced Moore the way mainstream conservatism has embraced Coulter, concluded upon the release of Fahrenheit 9/11 that if this movie helps defeat Bush, then maybe Moore is exactly what we need in today's political climate.)

Remember the proverb, "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind"? That's what's happening here. Eye-for-an-eye political debate is leaving us blind.

In 1946, George Orwell wrote in his essay, "The Prevention of Literature" (quoted with apologies to Catholics, though not to Communists):

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent. Each of them tacitly claims that ‘the truth’ has already been revealed, and that the heretic, if he is not simply a fool, is secretly aware of ‘the truth’ and merely resists it out of selfish motives.

Today, this mindset has become rampant on the left and the right, and not just on the fringes but in the mainstream as well.

In my earlier thread, one poster asked if I would suggest any remedies for this problem. I wish I could. The only solution I can think of is to rebuke political hate speech and to ostracize its perpetrators -- starting with those in one's own camp. It should be up to politicians to take the initiative. Imagine if the next Republican or Democratic presidential contender gave a "Sister Souljah" speech denouncing the political hatemongers in his or her party. Is this really an impossible dream?

The morals police comes to New Orleans

Congress has found a fine time to legislate morality. And a fine place: New Orleans, still reeling from the effects of Hurricane Katrina and getting far too little help.

Now, here's a kind of government assistance everyone should be able to get behind: tax breaks for businesses rebuilding in flood-devastated areas. Not handouts, but letting people keep more of their money so they can do more for themselves.

And what has Congress done?

From the Associated Press, December 7 (Hat tip: To the People, via Radley Balko):

The House approved a multibillion-dollar package of tax breaks on Wednesday that are intended to revive Gulf Coast businesses destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

So far, so good.

But the tax relief excludes the casinos and country clubs that underpin the area’s leisure economy.

Oh.

The incentives for Gulf Coast commerce include tax credits for low-income housing and rehabilitating commercial structures and historic buildings. Businesses could claim an additional 50 percent depreciation deduction for software, equipment and other expenses, and small businesses could write off more of their new investments.

Other tax breaks would help businesses recoup cleanup and demolition costs and aid small timber operations with reforestation.

...

The tax breaks would not extend to leisure industries, including country clubs, casinos, hot tub facilities, liquor stores, massage parlors, golf courses, racetracks and tanning parlors.

Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., led the effort to carve those businesses out of the bill. He said Congress should not allow “our constituents’ hard-earned tax dollars, in these kinds of record deficits, to subsidize the rebuilding of a massage parlor, a liquor store or a casino.”

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said she was “astounded” and “angry” that Wolf won on gambling establishments, an industry “that employs thousands of people in the region and generates millions of dollars in tax revenue.”

Well, what's a few thousand jobs when we've got morality to enforce.

Note that while this moralism on the backs of hurricane survivors is driven by the GOP, its targets include not only "sin" as traditionally defined by cultural conservatives (massage parlors, liquor stores, casinos) but also the luxuries that commonly draw the moralistic ire of egalitarian liberals (country clubs and golf courses).

Conservatives and liberals, united against the selfish pleasures of humankind, and bravely prepared to screw over thousands of jobless, homeless people in the process. All's right with the world.

Andrew Sullivan on torture, and more

Andrew Sullivan responds to Charles Krauthammer's article on torture, here. Definitely worth reading.

Some highlights:

What you see in the relationship between torturer and tortured is the absolute darkness of totalitarianism. You see one individual granted the most complete power he can ever hold over another. Not just confinement of his mobility--the abolition of his very agency. Torture uses a person's body to remove from his own control his conscience, his thoughts, his faith, his selfhood.

...

This is a radical and daring idea: that we must extinguish human freedom in a few cases in order to maintain it for everyone else. It goes beyond even the Bush administration's own formal position, which states that the United States will not endorse torture but merely "coercive interrogation techniques." (Such techniques, in the administration's elaborate definition, are those that employ physical force short of threatening immediate death or major organ failure.) And it is based on a premise that deserves further examination: that our enemies actually deserve torture; that some human beings are so depraved that, in Krauthammer's words, they "are entitled to no humane treatment."

Let me state for the record that I am second to none in decrying, loathing, and desiring to defeat those who wish to replace freedom with religious tyranny of the most brutal kind--and who have murdered countless innocent civilians in cold blood. Their acts are monstrous and barbaric. But I differ from Krauthammer by believing that monsters remain human beings. In fact, to reduce them to a subhuman level is to exonerate them of their acts of terrorism and mass murder--just as animals are not deemed morally responsible for killing. Insisting on the humanity of terrorists is, in fact, critical to maintaining their profound responsibility for the evil they commit.

And, if they are human, then they must necessarily not be treated in an inhuman fashion. You cannot lower the moral baseline of a terrorist to the subhuman without betraying a fundamental value.

These two crucial points bear repeating.

(1) One of the great dangers of sanctioning torture in any form is the risk of developing the mentality that "they deserve it" -- which means that torture may be used even when it's not necessary to extract vital information, and may become an occasion for morally sanctioned sadistic enjoyment.

(2) However horrendous the terrorists' deeds may be, to regard them as subhuman is a betrayal not only of our own humanity, but of the need to hold them accountable for their evil acts.

Sullivan also addresses Krauthammer's question about what is to be done in a "ticking timb bomb" when we have in our custody a terrorist possessing information that could prevent, say, the nuclear annihilation of New York in the next 24 hours.

It is possible to concede that, in an extremely rare circumstance, torture may be used without conceding that it should be legalized. One imperfect but instructive analogy is civil disobedience. In that case, laws are indeed broken, but that does not establish that the laws should be broken. In fact, civil disobedience implies precisely that laws should not be broken, and protesters who engage in it present themselves promptly for imprisonment and legal sanction on exactly those grounds. They do so for demonstrative reasons. They are not saying that laws don't matter. They are saying that laws do matter, that they should be enforced, but that their conscience in this instance demands that they disobey them.

In extremis, a rough parallel can be drawn for a president faced with the kind of horrendous decision on which Krauthammer rests his entire case. What should a president do? The answer is simple: He may have to break the law. In the Krauthammer scenario, a president might well decide that, if the survival of the nation is at stake, he must make an exception. At the same time, he must subject himself--and so must those assigned to conduct the torture--to the consequences of an illegal act. Those guilty of torturing another human being must be punished -- or pardoned ex-post-facto. If the torture is revealed to be useless, if the tortured man is shown to have been innocent or ignorant of the information he was tortured to reveal, then those responsible must face the full brunt of the law for, in Krauthammer's words, such a "terrible and monstrous thing." In Michael Walzer's formulation, if we are to have dirty hands, it is essential that we show them to be dirty.

What Krauthammer is proposing, however, is not this compromise, which allows us to retain our soul as a free republic while protecting us from catastrophe in an extremely rare case. He is proposing something very different: that our "dirty hands" be wiped legally clean before and after the fact. That is a Rubicon we should not cross, because it marks the boundary between a free country and an unfree one.

Krauthammer, moreover, misses a key lesson learned these past few years. What the hundreds of abuse and torture incidents have shown is that, once you permit torture for someone somewhere, it has a habit of spreading.

Precisely.

Sullivan also offers a helpful historical analogy:

In World War II, American soldiers were often tortured by the Japanese when captured. But FDR refused to reciprocate. Why? Because he knew that the goal of the war was not just Japan's defeat but Japan's transformation into a democracy. He knew that, if the beacon of democracy--the United States of America--had succumbed to the hallmark of totalitarianism, then the chance for democratization would be deeply compromised in the wake of victory.

No one should ever underestimate the profound impact that the conduct of American troops in World War II had on the citizens of the eventually defeated Axis powers. Germans saw the difference between being liberated by the Anglo-Americans and being liberated by the Red Army. If you saw an American or British uniform, you were safe. If you didn't, the terror would continue in different ways. Ask any German or Japanese of the generation that built democracy in those countries, and they will remind you of American values--not trumpeted by presidents in front of handpicked audiences, but demonstrated by the conduct of the U.S. military during occupation. ...

If American conduct was important in Japan and Germany, how much more important is it in Iraq and Afghanistan. ... In Iraq, we had a chance not just to tell but to show the Iraqi people how a democracy acts. And, tragically, in one critical respect, we failed. That failure undoubtedly contributed to the increased legitimacy of the insurgency and illegitimacy of the occupation, and it made collaboration between informed Sunnis and U.S. forces far less likely. What minuscule intelligence we might have plausibly gained from torturing and abusing detainees is vastly outweighed by the intelligence we have forfeited by alienating many otherwise sympathetic Iraqis and Afghans, by deepening the divide between the democracies, and by sullying the West's reputation in the Middle East.

And that's an excellent point, too. In response to my recent column on torture in The Boston Globe, I received an email with the saracstic subject line, "The horror. The horror," whose author wrote:

You write: "If we start with the premise that torture is sometimes acceptable, there's no telling how low we're going to go on that slippery slope."

But if we declare torture is never acceptable and broadcast it to the world, the next time we capture a couple of terrorists they can comfort one another with this gentle reminder, "Don't worry; all they can do is mess with your head."

But is there any appreciable benefit for us from terrorists, including rank-and-file insurgents in Iraq, knowing that they may be tortured if captured? Will such knowledge lead some to commit suicide or fight to the death rather than surrender, thus preventing us from obtaining useful infomation? And is it possible that the rank-and-file insurgents are people whose hearts and minds could still be won -- something that will be much less likely if we gain a reputation as torturers?

Update: A question that has come up in the comments, and has also been raised by Jonah Goldberg at The Corner: Why is it so much worse to torture someone than to kill or imprison them, since loss of freedom and especially death also amount to drastic violations of human rights? It seems to me that one of Andrew Sullivan's points -- that torture uses what is animal in us to defeat what is human -- is very salient here. Unlike imprisonment, torture robs the individual of all control of his or her body and mind. It's quite possible to maintain one's human dignity and selfhood while imprisoned; not so under torture, which reduces one's entire being to animal sensation. Death does not do that; it simply ends the individual's existence, in this world or altogether (depending on what your beliefs are). Of course, there are many examples of people choosing death over severe pain -- not only because of the suffering involved, I suspect, but also because of the loss of dignity.

Update 2: Jonah replies, arguing, in essence, that Andrew Sullivan and I (and other anti-torture absolutists) are merely expressing a subjective viewpoint that torture is worse than death or punishment. He makes an argument that I think has showed up in my comments as well:

I would take fifty lashes and some waterboarding over the death penalty any day of the week. Indeed, I'd take fifty lashes and waterboarding over fifty years in jail.

Well, so would I, probably. But I think that's neither here nor there. If I had a choice between being gang-raped and being accidentally run over by a car and killed, I'd choose the gang rape, but that doesn't make the rapist morally superior to the reckless driver. A lot of criminals here in the U.S. might choose having a hand chopped off over serving 25 years in prison. Yet we, quite rightly I think, regard societies that chop off people's hands and ears as punishment as far more barbaric than ours.

Jonah also writes:

Young and Sullivan are imposing their aesthetic standards of their consciences, for want of a better term, to the torture debate and elevating them above everyone else's.

Not to sound overly melodramatic here, but I find it rather frightening that Jonah is reducing a basic principle of post-Enlightenment Western culture -- the bodily inviolability of the individual as a cardinal principle -- to mere aesthetic preference.

Christmas wars update: Blame Bush!

This is too funny (hat tip: John Cole).

This month, as in every December since he took office, President Bush sent out cards with a generic end-of-the-year message, wishing 1.4 million of his close friends and supporters a happy “holiday season.”

Many people are thrilled to get a White House Christmas card, no matter what the greeting inside. But some conservative Christians are reacting as if Bush stuck coal in their stockings.

“This clearly demonstrates that the Bush administration has suffered a loss of will and that they have capitulated to the worst elements in our culture,” said William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

Bush “claims to be a born-again, evangelical Christian. But he sure doesn’t act like one,” said Joseph Farah, editor of the conservative Web site WorldNetDaily.com. “I threw out my White House card as soon as I got it.”

In other news, Robert George wonders if Bill O'Reilly will boycott Bush.

By the way, last night Bill was fulminating about a Los Angeles Times column which claimed that he was calling for a boycott of stores which use the "Happy holidays" greeting instead of "Merry Christmas." Oh no, of course he hasn't. He has merely written that if stores don't use the word "Christmas," "I'm shopping elsewhere." Oh, and his website has a helpful list of various companies' Christmas policies. So that viewers and readers can decide for themselves, you know.

That's right. No calls for a boycott at all.

Update: Here's Foamy the Squirrel on the Christmas controversy, weighing in on the O'Reilly/Gibson side, more or less. (Warning: language.) Yes, it's funny, but I think it misrepresents the issue. Right now, it's not the secularists with objections to Baby Jesus figurines who are whining, bitching and making a fuss over imagined slights; it's the Christmas warriors who somehow discern evil intent in the innocuous phrase "happy holidays."

Unhinged, left and right

I have been meaning for days to comment on Dave Neiwert's though-provoking six-part series (the last post has the links to the first five) critiquing Michelle Malkin's book Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild, but I wanted to wait until I got a copy of the book.

Having read it, I certainly agree with the main thrust of Neiwert's criticism: Unhinged is egregiously unbalanced.

Malkin sets out to prove that while conservatives are commonly stereotyped as intolerant, extreme, rabid, etc., it's really liberals who are all of the above. And she collects some good examples of left-wing nuttiness and nastiness, from conspiracy theories on the "stolen" 2004 election to kill-Bush fantasies to Cameron Diaz suggesting that voting for Bush meant voting for legalized rape to her own (Malkin's) racist and misogynist hate mail. But it's absurd for her to suggest that there is no similar nuttiness and nastiness on the right, or that conservatives "conservatives zealously police their own ranks " against extremists and conspiracy wackos. I don't recall anyone anyone "policing" unhinged right-wingers like Dan Burton, the Indiana Congressman who called Bill Clinton a "scumbag" and shot pumpkins in his back yard to prove Vince Foster was murdered. Ann Coulter, the very model of the unhinged right-winger (and assassination-joke maven), is featured in Malkin's screed only as a victim of the nasty left. Malkin has only words of praise for Rush Limbaugh, who (among other things) has compared then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to "the devil" and "Satan." The Terri Schiavo case was an appalling example of the unhinged right, but the only bad behavior Malkin notices is liberals criticizing the Randall Terry freak show outside the hospice.

So Dave Neiwert's critique, on those grounds, is entirely justified. As he says, it is deeply disingenous for Malkin to pretend that the kind of ugliness she documents on the left has no counterparts on the right, or to reduce "unhinged" right-wing behavior to a few negligible acts by a few "nutballs." And Malkin's lack of response to Neiwert's criticism is, well, telling. (I should note, by the way, that I am not a Michelle Malkin fan. I used to like some of her columns, and we met for lunch when I was in Seattle in 1999; but later on, I began to find a lot of her rhetoric increasingly ... well, unhinged, and I was particularly appalled by her defense of the Japanese-American internment.)

The problem is, while Neiwert clearly strives to be fair-minded and acknowledges that there is a lot of ugly behavior on the left, he can't resist the partisan temptation to argue that right-wing nastiness is a lot worse.

For instance, he discusses what he calls "eliminationist" rhetoric on the right -- talk, a lot of it ostensibly "humorous" but with a genuinely nasty undertone, about deporting, arresting, or killing liberals and leftists. Neiwert writes:

This is really only found on the left in the form of the "jokes" about assassinating Bush, which are indeed grotesque and worthy of real condemnation. But the left doesn't appear to harbor fantasies about wiping out all conservatives -- as the right does for liberals, commonly, frequently, and loudly.

Well, I'm not so sure about "commonly, frequently and loudly," though Neiwert does cite some pretty egregious examples from Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly (who was "joking," not so long ago, about how if SanFrancisco wants to bar military recruiters from its high schools, we should tell Al Qaeda that "every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco"). But some of the left-wing examples Malkin cites are pretty bad as well.

Thus, Garrison Keillor, of Prairie Home Companion fan, has "joked" about amending the Constitution to deny evangelical Christians the right to vote. Eric Alterman, in an Esquire interview, remarked that he wished Rush Limbaugh had gone deaf and that "the country would be better without Rush and his 20 million listeners." Arguably, "humor" about cutting off the "red states" has an "eliminationist" streak to it, as well. And Malkin documents a lot of left-wing nastiness wishing death and suffering on individual conservatives, such as Laura Ingraham when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Let's not forget the admittedly marginal Ward Churchill asserting that the capitalist pigs who died on 9/11 deserved it, and a professor at a Columbia University anti-war teach-in wishing for "a million Mogadishus" (i.e. mass slaughter of U.S. soldiers) in Iraq. And let's not forget Michael Moore's 9/11 comment: "Many families have been devastated tonight. This just is not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes' destination of California -- these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!" Okay, this is not quite the same as saying that people who voted for Bush deserved to die in a fiery conflagration (in the next line, Moore says, "Why kill them? Why kill anyone?"), but the suggestion, you have to admit, is there.

Neiwert also asserts that the left-wing ugliness documented by Malkin is something new, and primarily "reactive" to years of liberal-bashing by El Rushbo and his ilk. That's true if you want to talk about "kill Bush" rhetoric, or in-your-face, "lies and the lying liars who tell them"-type conservative-bashing.

But I think Neiwert is overlooking a lot of nastiness of a more genteel variety -- the "Republicans are evil people who want to poison the air and water, starve kids, throw Grandma out on the streets, enslave black people and kick puppies" variety. Remember the "If you elect Republicans, black churches will burn" campaign ad? Or the one in the 2000 presidential campaign in which the daughter of James Byrd Jr., the black Texas man who was deliberately dragged to his death behind a car, said she felt as if her father was killed all over again when Gov. Bush refused to sign the state’s hate crimes law? Or the "Uncle Tom" slurs directed at black affirmative action opponent Ward Connerly? Or the charge that Robert Bork would take us back to segregated lunch counters? (I am not at all a Robert Bork fan, but that was disgraceful.) There's been a lot of that stuff; I remember a 2001 a cartoon in the New York Daily News which showed Bush Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton (accused of being too friendly to polluters) mouthing the slogan, "Leave no child alive."

Here's another example where I think Dave Neiwert overlooks extremism on the left while going after (and, I think, somewhat exaggerating in this case) the right-wing variety:

Meanwhile, let's not forget the American right's newfound infatuation with Joe McCarthy. First it was Jonah Goldberg, then Ann Coulter, and now this. Pretty soon we'll hear it coming out of Sean Hannity's mouth too: "Joe McCarthy was not so hot in the way he went about doing things, but he was right."

First of all, I think Neiwert is being a bit unfair to Jonah Goldberg, who was talking about the rampant use and abuse of the term "McCarthyism" (and who called McCarthy "a lout, generally speaking"). Ann Coulter did pen an apologia for McCarthyism in her book Treason (see more on the subject here), which was widely criticized by conservatives (even David Horowitz thought she'd gone too far). As for the latest example cited by Neiwert -- well, that's kind of an interesting story (via Steve Benen at WashingtonMonthly.com).

About two months ago, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) wanted to name a post office in Berkeley after a 94-year-old former city councilwoman. Rep. Steve King of Iowa accused the woman, Maudelle Shirek, of having communist ties and he led a fight to defeat Lee's measure. Accused of engaging in blatant McCarthyism, King said, "If [Lee] studied her history, she'd recognize Joe McCarthy was a great American hero."

All right, so Steve King is a jerk and an apologist for an authoritarian bully who deserves his ill repute (and who did more damage to anti-communism than he ever did to communism). But who's Maudelle Shirek? This complimentary feature on her from the San Francisco Chronicle includes this tidbit:

Her ideals have found expression not only in Berkeley but also all over the world -- in Africa, Moscow, Prague, Nicaragua and Cuba, where she dined with Fidel Castro.

So it's extremist to praise TailGunner Joe, but not extremist to hobnob with Fidel? I would suggest to Dave Neiwert that Maudelle Shirek's choice of heroes is at least as bad as Steve King's. Maybe even worse.

So what's the bottom line? There's a lot of ugliness, extremism, and "unhinged" behavior across the spectrum of American politics right now. And there is a regrettable tendency, across the spectrum, to ignore, downplay or excuse it when coming from one's own side. Michelle Malkin doesn't even try to rise above this partisanship. Dave Neiwert tries, but doesn't, in my opinion, quite succeed.


Addendum: Not to plug my old articles in every blogpost, but here's a relevant Reason column from 2003: "Bipartisan Coulterism: Who's meaner, conservatives or liberals?"

Update: For a follow-up to this post, see: Extremism, hate speech, and moral equivalency.

Anita Hill's legacy

For a while, we were hearing a lot of stories about how the crusade against sexual harassment had gone a bit over the top. A first-grader got disciplined for "sexual harassment" in school for kissing a girl on the cheek. A manager got fired over an office discussion of the previous night's Seinfeld episode featuring some risqué humor. A guy got in trouble for bringing to work Esquire's annual "Women We Love" issue with a cover shot of some actress in lingerie. Etc., etc. Well, those stories have largely faded from view, but if you think they've gone away, think again.

Via Overlawyered today, with an excerpt from the Press of Atlantic City:

Two secretaries will share a settlement of around $450,000 from the Atlantic City, N.J. school district and its insurer after filing sexual-harassment charges. Carol Lee and Jennifer Torres sued following

a comment Assistant Superintendent Thomas J. Kirschling made to them and two others in July 2002. At some point mid-month, Kirschling said "I ride them hard and put them away wet."

The two secretaries sent him a memo saying they were outraged. He later explained and apologized, according to a subsequent memo.

Kirschling was apparently using a rural idiom that means someone is tired or worked hard. The phrase is taken from the need to cool down a horse after strenuous exercise. Only a mistreated horse is stabled while it is still sweating.

After the women complained, the district assigned an outside attorney to investigate, but that probe inadvertently lapsed....

The school board approved the settlement at a meeting last month, although some members considered the amount excessive. "Board member John Devlin said 'It's nuts, though, just for that comment.'"

Harassment hysteria: still crazy after all these years.

As with many other things, feminists identified a real problem when they spoke up about sexual harassment. Of course it's good that women -- and men -- now have a legal recourse if they face a "sleep with me or you're fired" situation, or an intolerable atmosphere of sexual insults at work. But in the wake of the Anita Hill episode (a turning point, by the way, in my alienation from "mainstream" feminism), the War on Sexual Harassment turned into a ridiculous hysteria preoccupied with petty or imagined slights and hostile, in strangely neo-Victorian fashion, to any sexual expression -- even sexual humor -- in the workplace.

The damage is still with us. Damage to human interaction in the workplace, of course, and to companies and institutions that have to field these absurd complaints -- but also to women's equality. Because if you ask me, the image of women promoted by such stories is not a very flattering one.

By the way, the best book ever written on sexual harassment is Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism by Daphne Patai. See my review here. And my own 1998 article on sexual harassment, politics and culture here.

Darwin, religion and politics

Interesting article in Sunday's New York Times pointing out that despite some political victories, "intelligent design" has made few if any scientific inroads -- even at religious colleges.

The Templeton Foundation, a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that after providing a few grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, they asked proponents to submit proposals for actual research.

"They never came in," said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned.

"From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don't come out very well in our world of scientific review," he said.

While intelligent design has hit obstacles among scientists, it has also failed to find a warm embrace at many evangelical Christian colleges. Even at conservative schools, scholars and theologians who were initially excited about intelligent design say they have come to find its arguments unconvincing. They, too, have been greatly swayed by the scientists at their own institutions and elsewhere who have examined intelligent design and found it insufficiently substantiated in comparison to evolution.

"It can function as one of those ambiguous signs in the world that point to an intelligent creator and help support the faith of the faithful, but it just doesn't have the compelling or explanatory power to have much of an impact on the academy," said Frank D. Macchia, a professor of Christian theology at Vanguard University, in Costa Mesa, Calif., which is affiliated with the Assemblies of God, the nation's largest Pentecostal denomination.

At Wheaton College, a prominent evangelical university in Illinois, intelligent design surfaces in the curriculum only as part of an interdisciplinary elective on the origins of life, in which students study evolution and competing theories from theological, scientific and historical perspectives, according to a college spokesperson.

The only university where intelligent design has gained a major institutional foothold is a seminary. Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., created a Center for Science and Theology for William A. Dembski, a leading proponent of intelligent design, after he left Baylor, a Baptist university in Texas, amid protests by faculty members opposed to teaching it.

Intelligent design and Mr. Dembski, a philosopher and mathematician, should have been a good fit for Baylor, which says its mission is "advancing the frontiers of knowledge while cultivating a Christian world view." But Baylor, like many evangelical universities, has many scholars who see no contradiction in believing in God and evolution.

Now can we finally dispose of silly arguments that people who oppose the teaching of ID in science classrooms are simply driven by anti-God prejudice, or that "Darwinism" is the fundamentalist religion of the secular left? Alas, I doubt it.

Unfortunately, the pro-ID side is not the only one to play politics with science. Last week's New York magazine has a generally interesting item about the new Darwin exhibition at the New York Museum of Natural History, done in Q & A form, which ends with this quip:

You think this’ll change anybody’s mind?

Not anybody who really likes Samuel Alito. But, hell, it can’t hurt to try.

So, political conservatives are knuckle-dragging, ignorant anti-Darwin obscurantists. Never mind that some of the most scathing assaults on the "intelligent design" movement have come from conservatives like Charles Krauthammer, George Will and John Derbyshire.

I know it's supposed to be a joke, but this kind of humor is all too indicative of a certain type of "liberal" mindset which assumes that no educated, intellectually sophisticated person can be right of center politically. It's smug. It's obnoxious. It's wrong. And I've run into it a lot.

On not being a bigot

Honestly, I'm not cyber-stalking Ampersand, but here's a post/thread that I simply have to respond to. It's called "How Not To Be Insane When Accused Of Racism (A Guide For White People)".

1) Breathe. Stay calm. Stay civil. Don't burn bridges. If someone has just said "I think that sounds a bit racist," don't mistake it for them saying "you're Klu Klux Klan racist scum" (which is a mistake an amazing number of white people make). For the first ten or twenty seconds any response you make will probably come from your defensiveness, not from your brain, so probably you shouldn't say whatever first comes to your mind.

2) Take the criticism seriously - do not dismiss it without thinking about it. Especially if the criticism comes from a person of color - people of color in our society tend by necessity to be more aware of racism than most Whites are, and pick up on things most Whites overlook. (On the other hand, don't put the people of color in the room in the position of being your advocate or judge.)

3) Don't make it about you. Usually the thing to do is apologize for what you said and move on. Especially if you're in a meeting or something, resist your desire to turn the meeting into a seminar on How Against Racism You Are. The subject of the conversation is probably not "your many close Black friends, and your sincere longstanding and deep abhorrence of racism."

Think of it as if someone points out that you need to wipe your nose because you've got a big glob of snot hanging out. The thing to do is say "oh, excuse me," wipe your nose, and move on. Insisting that everyone pat you on the back and reassure you that they realize you don't always have snot hanging from your nose, before the conversation can be allowed to move forward, is not productive.

4) Let Occasional Unfair Accusations Roll Off Your Back. Sometimes, even after you've given it serious thought, you'll come to the conclusion that a criticism was unfair. Great! Now please let it go. Don't insist that everyone agree with you. Don't enlist the people of color in the room to certify you as Officially Non-Racist. Don't bring it up again and again, weeks or months after everyone else has forgotten about the original discussion. In other words, see point #3.

Shorter Ampersand: Don't make it a whacking huge deal if you say something racist, or something others perceive as racist. Apologize, move on, and consider the criticism seriously so that you can improve your thinking, if need be.

This is one of those moments of truth that make me realize that no matter how much I may dislike today's right, nothing could induce me to go over to the left. Because to me, this kind of reads like "How to roll over when someone plays the race card." (Or the gender card, or any other oppression card.)

First, take the premise that only minorities are legitimate judges of racism (and only women are legitimate judges of sexism, and so forth), and that if a "person of color" sees racism where a white person does not, we should presume that the "person of color" is right because people of color are the targets of racism in our society and understandably have a greater awareness of racism. [See update at the bottom of this post.] Can’t we, while recognizing the reality of racism and sexism, also recognize that for some "people of color" and women, this extra awareness may turn into hypersensitivity and, well, paranoia -- both because of their own experiences with bias and because they’ve been primed by identity-politics ideologues to see bigotry even where it doesn't exist? (There are, unfortunately, some very real examples of paranoia in the black community in particular, including AIDS conspiracy theories that undermine HIV prevention efforts.)

And besides: let’s say that in a college class that includes ten black students, the professor makes a remark that one black student finds racist while the other nine do not. Is there any reason to privilege the perception of the one person who sees the remark as racist? Doesn’t that demean the other nine by implying that they are blind to their own oppression?

Furthermore, what happens when anti-racism and anti-sexism (or anti-homophobia) collide? Some black activists claimed that it was racist to deplore the acquittal of O.J. Simpson or to applaud the rape conviction of Mike Tyson. When I was a student at Rutgers University in the mid-1980s, a so-called civil rights attorney, C. Vernon Mason (one of Tawana Brawley's rape hoax enablers, subsequently disbarred), spoke on our campus and urged battered black women not to collaborate with the oppressor by reporting their abusers to the police. When campus feminists (and others) expressed outrage at this, they were accused of racism.

Another question: what other groups, besides blacks, are to be given near-automatic credence for their complaints of bias? Other racial minorities, obviously, as well as women and gays. But what about Jews? One of Ampersand's own commenters is alarmed by the implication that, by this logic, liberals must apologize to conservative Jews who see a streak of anti-Semitism in Israel-bashing and attacks on "neocons." Evangelical Christians who complain of anti-Christian bigotry presumably need not apply since they're not "disadvantaged" (despite being, in many ways, culturally marginalized). And what about charges of racism made by minorities who insist on being politically incorrect -- for instance, pro-life blacks who call the pro-choice movement racist for disregarding the fact that abortion rates are disproportionately high in the black community?

I'm certainly not denying that racism exists. I'm not even going to argue that I myself am completely free from racial prejudice; I have, at times, caught myself making race-based assumptions that I've felt embarrassed about (once, when meeting with an editor to whom I had spoken on the phone several times, I registered a moment of surprise when I realized she was black). But I also know of too many instances of frivolous, and sometimes very damaging, charges of racism to find Ampersand's advice helpful or benign.

For instance: A friend of mine who teaches English (and who, incidentally, was once arrested when he intervened to stop some white policemen from beating a black teenager) experienced no small amount of trouble when a student brought a complaint of racism against him. His offense? She told him that she couldn't write a term paper on The Sun Also Rises because it had no black characters and she couldn't relate to it; he refused to let her write about a different book and, in her opinion, was insufficiently sympathetic to her plight.

Of course, the "racism" charge is also commonly used as a weapon to shut down ideas and opinions -- be it opposition to affirmative action or criticism of pseudo-scholarship like the notion that the ancient Greeks stole their culture from the black Egyptians.

The approach endorsed by Ampersand and his supportive commenters -- some of whom explicitly say that even if you have concluded your comment was in no way racist, you would still do well to apologize for creating the perception of racism -- has several problems. It enshrines the culture of victimhood and resentment that a number of African-American writers such as John McWhorter have eloquently criticized. It can silence debate and stifle "incorrect" ideas. It also enshrines a blatant double standard, proclaiming that one person's perception of a situtation is more valid and more worthy of respect than another's solely on the basis of race. And it seems to me that humoring people's hypersensitivity and even groundless perceptions of offense has a strong element of condescension, however unintentional. I think that to treat another person as an adult human being is to show them enough respect to challenge them when you think they're wrong -- whether you think they're being racist, or you think they're playing the race card. Mutual respect demands no less.

Update: Ampersand replies in the comments, charging that I am misrepresenting his post. Jack Roy also points out that Ampersand never took the position that minorities are the only legitimate judges of racism, and that in No. 4 he explicitly acknowledges that an accusation of racism can occasionally be unfair.

Having re-read Ampersand's post and mine, I have to conclude that I did in fact overstate Ampersand's position, and for that I apologize. (I did include Ampersand's post in the body of my own, so that readers certainly didn't have to rely on my summary/interpretation.) While his argument clearly implies that minorities should be heavily favored as judges of racism, he does not say that they should be its only judges.

Ampersand's suggestion is that every charge of racism should be, at the very least, given serious weight especially if it comes from a "person of color." (Even if it's self-evidently absurd -- for instance, that the word "niggardly" is a racist slur?) He also states that "usually, the thing to do is apologize and move on." In other words, while he does not say that a charge of racism should be seen as automatically justified, he does seem to regard it as presumptively justified.

I summed up Ampersand's position as, "if a 'person of color' sees racism where a white person does not, we should presume that the 'person of color' is right." I should have said, " ... we should presume that the 'person of color' is probably right." It's difficult to read Ampersand's position in any other way, particularly in view of his advice about what to do if an accusation is unfair.

The advice seems to be that even if you, the white person accused of saying or doing something racist, have concluded upon serious reflection that you said/did nothing wrong, you shouldn't proclaim it too loudly or insist on it too strenuously, let alone demand that the accuser apologize for the unfair accusation (or "improve his or her thinking"). What's more, the shorter version of Ampersand's advice rather strongly suggests that you should apologize if you've said "something others perceive as racist" whether the perception is accurate or not.

This, in my opinion, is very bad advice. Not only because it forces you to swallow a serious slur (and contrary to what Ampersand says, I think racism is a big deal), but also for all the reasons I listed above: such an approach encourages the victim mentality, panders to chip-on-the-shoulder hypersensitivity, and ultimately -- howevere unintentionally -- condescends to minorities, instead of holding them fully accountable for their words and actions. No, it's not just about you; it's also about poisoning race relations.

Prosecuting rape allegations

This story has been causing quite a blog buzz: a 19-year-old Oregon woman has been convicted of filing a false police report after accusing her former boyfriend and two other young men of rape.

The standard take on the story is summarized in the headline at Seeing the Forest: Rape Victim Found Guilty. (This post also has a list of other blogs reporting on the story.) The standard reaction is outrage:

The Heretik: "We ignore women when they are raped, then we rape them again with 'the law' when the law lets them down."

Bitch Ph. D.: "Gross."

Shakespeare's Sister: "I’ve spent the entire day burning up from the inside out about the Oregon case in which a rape victim was found guilty of filing false charges after prosecutors decided not to purse a case against her attackers. I feel like the sun itself has settled in my gut and any moment I’ll just explode into a puff of smoke and ash."

Seeing the Forest: "This one is beyond belief. A judge decides that since he doesn't know who to believe he'll convict the woman for filing the charges in the first place."

This last summary, by the way, is really "beyond belief," because it makes it sound like the judge was hearing the woman's rape complaint, concluded that she wasn't telling the truth, and then turned around and sent her to jail. Of course, it doesn't work that way. The District Attorney's Office prosecuted the case after dismissing the charges against the men.

Here's what The Oregonian says:

The Washington County District Attorney's Office declined to prosecute the case against the men. Robert Hermann, the county's district attorney, said prosecutors reviewed all the information and statements but didn't think they could prove a rape allegation.

Ted Naemura, the assistant city attorney who prosecuted the case, said the woman's false accusations were serious enough to lead to charges. The young men faced prison sentences of at least 7 years and a lifetime labeled as sex offenders. In addition, police spent considerable resources investigating the accusations.

Beaverton has no policy about prosecuting such cases, but reviews each one on its merits, Naemura said. The city prosecuted a similar case a year ago in which a judge ordered the woman to pay $1,100 in restitution for the city's investigation costs, said Officer Paul Wandell, a Beaverton Police Department spokesman.

The bottom line, Naemura said, is that people can't use the criminal justice system to further their own ends.

Now, if a woman who has brought a rape complaint was convicted of making a false charge simply because her allegations couldn't be proven, that is bizarre and outrageous. However, given how uncommon it is for false reporting charges to be pressed against rape complainants, it's very likely that the prosecutors had some grounds to believe the charges were actually false, not just hard to prove. The judge evidently agreed.

We know very little about the facts of the case or the trial. From The Oregonian, we know that the woman, who was 17 at the time of the incident, said she was sexually assaulted in her 18-year-old boyfriend's home by the boyfriend and his two friends while getting dressed for a party. The three young men said that the sexual acts were consensual and initiated by the young woman.

After a day-and-a-half trial, Municipal Judge Peter A. Ackerman on Friday convicted the woman of filing a false police report, a class-C misdemeanor. Ackerman explained his decision, saying there were many inconsistencies in the stories of the four, but that he found the young men to be more credible. He also said he relied on the testimony of a Beaverton police detective and the woman's friends who said she did not act traumatized in the days following the incident.

On the basis of this account, a lot of bloggers have concluded that the judge simply chose to believe the men over the woman, and that he was influenced by a lot of stereotypes about rape victims. Maybe. Again, we don't really have enough information to decide. Bloggers are also relying on the account of Kevin Hayden at American Street, who was present at the trial, but Kevin himself notes at the end of his post:

(My report cannot be truly objective as I’ve known the victim since she was a baby. I was sufficiently upset at the proceedings that, in the hallway outside the courtroom, I told the prosecutor and lead detective that they were “miserable pricks” and “a disgrace to their profession.”)

Let's put the shoe on the other foot here. Suppose a man in a he said/she said case had been convicted of rape, and the judge explained that despite many inconsistencies in the stories he simply found the woman to be more credible and besides, a detective confirmed that right after the incident she acted like a typical rape victim. Suppose a strongly critical, pro-defendant account of the trial came from someone who freely admitted that he was not objective due to being a close friend of the defendant's.

Would anyone be furious about this?

By the way, the bloggers who are writing about this (with one exception) seem to take it absolutely for granted that the young woman in this case is indeed a rape victim, and that the young men are guilty. Why the presumption of guilt? Because "women don't lie about rape"? Well, sometimes they do, and the trouble is that no one really know how often. The Oregonian article refers to a Portland Police Bureau study which "found that 1.6 percent of sexual assault cases were falsely reported, compared with 2.6 percent of auto theft reports"; the source it cites is Heather Huhtanen, Sexual Assault Training Institute director for the Attorney General's Sexual Assault Task Force. I tried to trace this figure and found two citations, one to the Nebraska Domestic Violence & Sexual Assault Coalition newsletter, the other to a law review article (the study was apparently done in 1990). I don't know how the study was done. FBI statistics show that nationally, 8 to 15% of rape charges annually are classified as "unfounded," though not all these charges are necessarily false. Some studies, including one by the pioneering date rape researcher Eugene Kanin, have shown an even higher rate of false rape allegations; for more discussion, see here and here.

Yes, if the young woman in this case was indeed sexually assaulted, what happened to her was terrible. But I think, for instance, that what happened to this man was also terrible:

The New York Times

March 1, 1997

Rape Charge in Internet Case Dismissed at Prosecutor's Request

By JOHN SULLIVAN

Charges against a businessman accused of raping a woman he met over the Internet were dismissed yesterday at the request of the Manhattan District Attorney's office.

Paul K., the defendant, was allowed to go free after a brief hearing in Criminal Court in lower Manhattan. Mr. K. had been free on bail before the hearing.

Prosecutors said they requested the dismissal after investigating the claims of the accuser and reviewing evidence in police custody, including extensive records of computer communications.

Martha Bashford, the assistant district attorney handling the case, said the matter was complicated by "lack of candor" on the part of the accuser, whose name was not released. Ms. Bashford said that after Mr. K.'s arrest on Sunday, prosecutors were able to review computer communications between the suspect and the accuser and a message the woman left on Mr. K.'s answering machine.

Prosecutors said that there is currently no plan to bring criminal charges against Mr. K.'s accuser.

After the hearing before Judge Paul G. Feinman, Mr. K. simply said: "I'm relieved it is finally over."

However, his lawyer, Paul Goldberg, had harsh words for the police officers who investigated the case. Mr. Goldberg said officers had evidence from the outset "that Mr. K. was not guilty of any crime."

"She left a message on his answering machine about how much she enjoyed his company," Mr. Goldberg said.

Mr. K., the owner of a company that installs expensive home theaters, was charged with rape on Sunday after his accuser collapsed in Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan and told police officers that she had been attacked the night before.

The woman, who is a graduate assistant from Syracuse, met Mr. K. over the Internet and traveled to Manhattan to meet him. She said that, after having dinner at Mr. K.'s West Village apartment, she was imprisoned and sexually assaulted.

By the way, while I am not naming the victim in this case (the victim, mostly likely, being Paul K.), but the Times did. Not only that, but when he was arrested, the Times also published a photo of him being led away in handcuffs.

And what happened to this man, who was apparently false accused of rape by two women, neither of whom was punished, was pretty terrible too.

And there are other cases in which men have spent time behind bars on charges that later proved to be false (not cases of mistaken identity, but actual false charges).

There is a notion that it's almost unthinkable that a woman would make a false accusation of rape because bringing a rape complaint to the justice system is not anyone's idea of fun. But first of all, it's not exactly unheard of for people to do irrational things, often for stupid and petty reasons. We don't find it implausible that someone would commit murder to avenge a trivial wrong or avoid the exposure of an embarrassing personal secret; and yet somehow, we draw the line at a false accusation of rape? And furthermore: has anyone considered the possibility that things that may be excruciating to a real rape victim (e.g., having to face her attacker, to repeatedly and publicly recount the facts of her rape) may not be all that traumatic to a fake victim?

Feminism has accomplished a great deal in challenging once-dominant rape myths (it was only 30 years ago that juries in rape caes, in many jurisdictions, were explicitly instructed that evidence of the accuser's "unchaste character" could be used to impeach her credibility). But it won't do to replace them with the "women don't lie" myth. This idea, for one, runs counter to a basic principle of American justice: the presumption of innocence and the obligation to acquit if there is any reasonable doubt of guilt. Back in 1977, when feminist-initiated rape law reforms were in their early stages, Columbia University law professor Vivian Berger -- generally a supporter of these reforms -- cautioned against "sacrificing legitimate rights of the accused person on the altar of Women's Liberation." And that's something to keep in mind.

In this case, of course, the young woman was the accused, not the accuser (at least in the case that has just ended). The presumption of innocence should have been on her side, and she should have gotten the benefit of the doubt. I don't know whether that happened at trial or not. There will be an appeal, and we'll see what happens. But in the meantime, I think we ought to tone down the rhetoric and try to find out more about the facts.

I don't buy the overheated rhetoric of some men's rights activists that these days, all it takes to send a man away to the penitentiary is a woman's accusation. (Only 45% of rape arrests result in conviction -- though, conversely, people who see this relatively low figure as evidence of sexism against women should pause to ponder that conviction rates for robbery are similar, and conviction rates for aggravated assault are far lower.) But sometimes the pendulum has swung too far. When researching my book, Ceasefire, I came across a number of cases in which men were convicted of rape or sexual assault on the testimony of an accuser with serious credibility problems, and on evidence that seemed to leave plenty of room for reasonable doubt (and in some instances, because relevant evidence was suppressed under a very broad application of rape shield laws). And yes, there are other cases in which women who were clearly victims failed to obtain justice because of sexist prejudice. It's a big country and a complicated legal system; opposite trends can coexist.

The problem is that when there's injustice toward a female victim, there often follows (rightly) an outcry. (Like when a brain-dead jury acquitted a guy who had broken into a woman's home and raped her at knifepoint because she talked him into wearing a condom, and they somehow concluded that this signified consent.) When there's an injustice toward an accused male, the only outcry is from men's rights activists who are widely seen as a bunch of kooks.

The bottom line: we should be able to care about female victims of rape, and male victims of false accusations. To quote my own article on the subject:

To recognize that some women wrongly accuse men of rape is no more anti-female than it is anti-male to recognize that some men rape women. Is it so unreasonable to think that a uniquely damaging and stigmatizing charge will be used by some people as a weapon, just as others will use their muscle as a weapon? Do we really believe that when women have power -- and surely there is power in an accusation of rape -- they are less likely to abuse it than men?

Two more of my articles on related topics:

Kobe's rights: Rape, justice and double standards (Reason)

How much should we know about the sex life of Kobe Bryant's accuser? (Salon.com)

Side note: The Oregonian article on the case also contains the assertion from the above-cited Heather Huhtanen (Sexual Assault Training Institute director for the Attorney General's Sexual Assault Task Force) as saying that "about 10 percent of Oregon victims of sex crimes file reports with police."

Yet according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, nationwide in 2003, nearly 40% of female victims of sexual assault in the National Crime Victimization Survey had reported the crime to the police. This is lower than for all violent crimes (the overall violent crime reporting rate was 49.9% for women and 45.7% for men), but a far cry from 10%.

Alito, Roe, conservative politics

I'm not sure how much significance should be attached to the fact that in 1985, Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, then a Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration, penned a memo outlining a legal strategy to chip away at Roe v. Wade by asking the Supreme Court to uphold a Pennsylvania law imposing some restrictions on abortion (rather than launching a frontal assault on Roe itself) while making it clear in the brief that the administration opposed Roe. (What a surprise, that.) Alito was working for an administration opposed to abortion; as the Washington Post article makes clear, the Reagan Justice Department ended up going further than Alito had advised and explicitly asking the Supreme Court to strike down Roe. It's pretty clear that Alito has right-to-life sympathies, but that doesn't necessarily mean he's a zealot out to overturn Roe. Overall, his record suggests someone of a pragmatic rather than ideological disposition. The latest report is that he told Arlen Specter he regards the ruling that legalized abortion as "embedded in the culture" and therefore deserving of considerable respect as precdent.

But then there's the other Alito story making the rounds of the blogosphere: the one about his association with a group called Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP). According to The New York Times:

In an application for a promotion in the Reagan administration in the fall of 1985, Judge Alito was asked to provide information about his "philosophical commitment" to administration policies and listed his membership in Concerned Alumni.

According to Obsidian Wings:

CAP is generally described as 'a conservative group'. But this is as misleading as calling the John Birch Society a 'conservative group' would be. There are lots of conservatives who are thoughtful and intelligent, and who have real intellectual integrity. Conservatives like this did not tend to join CAP. CAP was dedicated to finding outrages that it took to be caused by the horrible fact that women and minorities were being admitted to Princeton. The need to find outrages generally came first; any encounter with facts came later. For this reason, CAP tended to attract not conservatives per se, but the sort of conservative who is forever getting deeply hysterical about some perceived threat to a supposed previous golden age, who sees such threats everywhere, and who is willing to completely distort the truth in order to feed his (and it generally was 'his') obsessions.

The post extensively documents the fact that CAP was not simply opposed to affirmative action, courses driven by left-wing politics, attempts to purge Dead White Males from the curriculum, and all the other things that came to be known as "political correctness in the academy." It really did support white male privilege, and Princeton's status as a bastion of such privilege. Its founders lamented the days when Princeton alumni could attend "homogeneous" reunions made impossible by "an undergraduate student population of approximately 40% women and minorities." It opposed sex-blind admission policies and favored quotas:

Asa Bushnell, then chairman of CAP, told the New York Times in 1974 that “Many Princeton graduates are unhappy over the fact that the administration has seen fit to abrogate the virtual guarantee that 800 [out of roughly 1,100] would continue to be the number of males in each freshman class.”

In 1983, CAP's magazine, Prospect, was taken over by Dartmouth Review alum Dinesh D'Souza, whereupon it got embroiled in a rather ugly incident which prompted a group of students to petition the administration (unsuccessfully) to block delivery of the magazine to the dorms. And no, this was not a case of PC hysteria over a critique of Afrocentrist courses. The offense was a cover story called "In Loco Parentis," telling the story of a Hispanic first-year student whose mother wanted to take her out of the school after learning that she was in a sexual relationship with a male student. After the mother refused to continue paying for the girl's education, the university allegedly extended extra financial aid to enable her to stay on campus -- an action Prospect found scandalous. While the magazine used a pseudonym, an accompanying article identified the student by her actual name, which D'Souza described as "an honest-to-goodness goof." The 1984 New York Times article on the imbroglio can found here (copy posted by Eric Muller).

How damaging is this to Alito? Well, the Times story says that, by all accounts, he was not actively involved in the group (formed shortly after his graduation from Princeton in 1972) and was not among its financial backers. Perhaps he simply cited it to shore up his conservative credentials when applying for the job. I don't know to what extent it was possible for a Princeton alumnus to have some contacts with CAP and not know what the group is about.

But I think that, Alito aside, this story does tell shed the spotlight on the ugly side of campus conservatism; and that's an important thing to remember for those of us who have fought battles against left-wing "political correctness" in the academy.

Yes, the academic left has engaged in some pretty bad behavior, and has often gratuitously and viciously branded anyone who questions left-wing dogma on race and gender as "sexist" and "racist." But the campus right hasn't always been a collection of noble souls, either. And the charges of sexism and racism haven't always come out of thin air.

O'Reilly on the Christmas warpath

The "save Christmas" hysteria this year seems to be worse than ever (though that's what I thought last year, too). I mean, okay, some of the ACLU-type handwringing over creches on public grounds gets ridiculous, but John Gibson carrying on about "the plot to ban the sacred Christian holiday"? Bill O'Reilly urging a boycott of stores that use "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas," and pursuing investigative reports on various stores' Christmas policies with a zeal he normally reserves for criminal-coddling judges? O'Reilly has become truly unhinged on the subject. One of his latest rants is analyzed by Michael Stickings at The Moderate Voice: O'Reilly carries on about a "very secret plan," funded by his bogeyman George Soros, to "diminish Christian philosophy in the U.S.A." by attacking Christmas. (Stickings also picks up on one of O'Reilly's favorite rhetorical tricks: to get around that pesky "establishment of religion" problem, he'll argue that things like Ten Commandment displays in government buildings are not about "religion" but about "Judeo-Christian philosophy.")

And then John Cole offers us this O'Reilly Christmas gem (via Think Progress):

Every company in America should be on its knees thanking Jesus for being born. Without Christmas, most American businesses would be far less profitable. More than enough reason for business to be screaming “Merry Christmas.”

Well, for one thing, this is pretty stupid. Without Christmas, we might all have been exchanging gifts for Solstice (in which, it's widely agreed, modern-day Christmas celebrations are rooted; let's not forget that until well into the 19th Century, Christian America frowned upon Christmas as a pagan-style holiday). But leaving that aside: here's O'Reilly fulminating against the assault on religion and, in the same breath, peddling the most secular, commercial, materialistic view of Christmas imaginable. (I mean, from a truly Christian perspective, America's business leaders should be thanking Jesus for being born because he offers them a chance at salvation and life everlasting, and his impact on profit margins should be a decidedly secondary matter.) The irony is dripping right off the TV screen.

Tonight, I tuned in to The O'Reilly Factor near the end to see an interview with the Rev. Tim Bumgardner, a pastor in Wellington, Florida, who is fighting to have a nativity scene included in his town's holiday display (which currently has a Christmas tree and a menorah). Okay, I'm all for having the nativity scene in there, though my sympathy for Rev. Bumgardner waned quickly when he suggested that people who have issues with Christmas displays on government property are un-American. Luckily, I kept watching, because the segment had a truly jaw-dropping conclusion. When O'Reilly gave the Reverend the last word, the following exchange occurred (transcribed by yours truly from the taped rerun):

Rev. Tim Bumgardner: I think they should put a Nativity scene -- be American! Hey, celebrate Christmas -- people spend more money! Jesus makes people want to spend money!

O'Reilly: I agree. I'm with you.

So there's the Christmas spirit according to O'Reilly and his guest: shopping for Jesus.

As a non-Christian, I don't presume to tell Christians how they ought to feel, but really ... shouldn't this be a lot more offensive to Christians than a "Happy Holidays" sign at Macy's?

Update: This is hilarious. On November 30, Media Matters reported that in apparent defiance of the O'Reilly/Gibson anti-"Happy Holidays" crusade, the Fox News online store was using the phrases "holiday ornaments" and "holiday tree." One day later, the Fox website changed "holiday" to "Christmas." See the "before" and "after" pictures here.

Mao's body count, communism, and stupid ideological tricks

At the Democratic Peace blog (hat tip: Ann Althouse, No Speed Bumps) political science professor R. J. Rummel admits that his earlier estimtes of Chairman Mao's "democide" was too low. After reading two new books -- Wild Swans: Two Daughters of China by Jung Chang, and Mao: the Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday -- Rummel is now convinced that the China's Great Famine in 1958-61 was indeed mass murder by starvation, not a result of misguided but well-intentioned policies. Says Rummel:

Now, I have to change all the world democide totals that populate my websites, blogs, and publications. The total for the communist democide before and after Mao took over the mainland is thus 3,446,000 + 35,226,000 + 38,000,000 = 76,692,000, or to round off, 77,000,000 murdered. This is now in line with the 65 million toll estimated for China in the Black Book of Communism, and Chang and Halliday's estimate of "well over 70 million."This exceeds the 61,911,000 murdered by the Soviet Union 1917-1987, with Hitler far behind at 20,946,000 wiped out 1933-1945.

(Someone tell John Daly.)

BizzyBlog cites these numbers to skewer The New York Times' Nicholas Kristoff, whose review of Mao: The Unknown Story in October lapsed into some half-hearted apologetics:

….. Mao emerges from these pages as another Hitler or Stalin.In that regard, I have reservations about the book’s judgments, for my own sense is that Mao, however monstrous, also brought useful changes to China. ….. I agree that Mao was a catastrophic ruler in many, many respects, and this book captures that side better than anything ever written. But Mao’s legacy is not all bad. Land reform in China, like the land reform in Japan and Taiwan, helped lay the groundwork for prosperity today. The emancipation of women and end of child marriages moved China from one of the worst places in the world to be a girl to one where women have more equality than in, say, Japan or Korea.

Kristoff also tries to minimize Mao's "legacy" of corpses.

BizzyBlog rightly concludes:

1950s and 1960s radicals who lionized Mao owe the world abject apologies. Few have been forthcoming. “Mao wasn’t so bad” revisionists like Kristof need to take the blinders off.

I think that a lot of people on the left, and even a lot of centrist liberals such as Kristoff, have not yet fully come to terms with the fact that, when it comes to communism, Ronald Reagan was right with that evil-empire thing. In 1999, writing in The Nation about The Black Book of Communism, Daniel Singer opined:

If you look at Communism as merely the story of crimes, terror and repression, to borrow the subtitle of the Black Book, you are missing the point. The Soviet Union did not rest on the gulag alone. There was also enthusiasm, construction, the spread of education and social advancement for millions ...

... Our aim--let us not be ashamed to say so--is to revive the belief in collective action and in the possibility of radical transformation of our lives. On the other hand, the ambition of many is to take advantage of the circumstances, of the terrible heritage [of Communism], to destroy the Promethean spirit of humankind. You feel it while reading their prose. In his foreword to the Black Book, Martin Malia actually proclaims that "any realistic accounting of Communist crime would effectively shut the door on Utopia." ... To call them scavengers of death would be too Stalinist in style. But it seems fair to describe them as keepers of the cult of TINA--the mindset that There Is No Alternative--preachers of human resignation. Parading as champions of freedom and questers after truth, they are in fact the obedient servants of the established order.

Singer is hardly alone. In 2003, Jonathan Rauch wrote an article for The Atlantic (subscriber-only) expressing shock at the fact that the major demonstrations against the war in Iraq were being coordinated by the pro-communist group International ANSWER; noting communism's death toll, he argued that its moral status should be comparable to that of Nazism, and that attending a rally organized by a communist group should be as unthinkable to a decent person as going to a Nazi- or Ku Klux Klan-sponsored event. The response was a spate of letters accusing Rauch of McCarthyism and making such comments as:

Millions of people suffered and died under communism, but millions of people also suffered and died under Christianity. I doubt that Rauch would condemn all those who go to mass on Sundays as being responsible for all the sins committed in the name of Christianity.

No matter how perniciously the Communists implemented their vision of the world, communist ideology—unlike racism—is intensely humanistic and premised on helping those oppressed by society.

Unlike Nazism, the communist ideal had nothing whatsoever to do with the suppression or extermination of individuals based on their differences from the "believers." Communism is a perfect system for perfectly equal individuals, whereas other isms are perfect systems for perfectly unequal individuals. True, the prosecution of the communist ideal led to incredible suppression of individuals; but the evils of communism were in the prosecution, not in the ideal.

The attempt to put Communists on the same moral level as Nazis simply doesn't fly. Whereas there was only one Nazi Party and one top Nazi, Adolf Hitler, we have encountered many kinds of communism, and many top Communists. In the good and the evil that they did, and in how history judges them, they vary. Joseph Stalin was not the same as Mao, and Mao was not the same as Ho Chi Minh. Fidel Castro is not the same as Kim Jong Il.

Whatever communism's murderousness ... the primary reason the fascists did not win World War II was the effectiveness of Stalin's Red Army as an ally of the United States and Britain. ... Like it or not, therefore, our post-World War II freedom and prosperity in the West are in part a result of the successes of communism. This is not to excuse the wrongs of communism, or to wish for its return, but we must remember our debt to this failed experiment.

"Failed experiment"? How charitable.

Shame on those for whom the reality of mass slaughter is secondary to an ideological agenda.

And, as a footnote: that includes some conservatives as well. The comments on Hummel's post on Mao's death count include two posts that try to hijack the discussion for an indictment of environmentalism:

At 10:56 AM, Robert said...
Isn't my personal favorite Rachel Carson still in the running for mass murder greatness? Her totals must be near 100,000,000 now, considering the toll malaria keeps exacting because of her work in banning DDT baselessly. Perhaps, using the root ideo-, one could call her murders "ideocides".

At 11:29 AM, Mauk said...
I think Robert may be onto something. Rachel Carson was a key player in banning DDT, which has lead to 30+ million additional deaths from malaria. Similarly, Helen Caldicott and the "green" movement have fought aginst nuclear power, leading to further use of coal and especially biomass which has lead to easily 50 million additional deaths from pulmonary diseases alone.

I'll admit that I don't know all the facts about malaria deaths and DDT, but comparing excess deaths from possibly misguided policies to deliberate murder is obscene (and all too similar to left-wing idiocy like comparing communism's death toll to excess deaths allegedly due to lack of health insurance in the U.S.). Guys, hitch your agenda to something other than genocide.

FIRE on the Daly case

FIRE, the Foundation of Individual Rights in Education, an admirable organization (co-founded by two admirable people, University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Charles Kors and civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate) that exhibits true non-partisanship in defending free expression in the academy, looks at the John Daly brouhaha at Warren Community College.

A November 22 post on the FIRE blog, The Torch, sided unequivocally with Daly, concluding that his email to conservative student Rebecca Beach was clearly protected speech. Another post, on November 29, returns to the issue, examining some of the questions that came up in my own post about the case and in the comments.

FIRE program manager Robert Shibley writes:

FIRE has received e-mails from individuals who point out that Professor Daly seems hostile to the free exchange of ideas on campus. ... As one e-mail correspondent wrote, “Daly is not the victim here. He is clearly an enemy of free speech, and his message indicates that he’s willing to abuse ‘academic freedom’ to advance his own political agenda (he’s an English professor—what business does he have telling his students to boycott a political event?).... Set aside the offensiveness of his statement about soldiers killing their superiors. He is a state employee threatening to suppress free speech on a college campus. Isn’t this what FIRE is fighting against?”

... [F]rom what I have read, Daly was not threatening to use the apparatus of state power to silence an opposing viewpoint. He was merely expressing his own political convictions in a strong way, and did not appear to be making any physical threats against the student. In fact, what his e-mail (scroll to the bottom to read) actually “threatens” is that he will argue and agitate so successfully for his own political convictions that those who oppose him will be marginalized and embarrassed because so few will agree with them. ... All in all, we have seen nothing to indicate that this was not just another vehement political disagreement between politically minded adults in our society. Is it ideal for professors to address students this way? Probably not. But respect for the principle of free speech requires one to tolerate a lot of communication that is far from ideal.

Granted, Daly’s comments don’t really appear to be those of a friend of free inquiry. Yet a principled free speech advocate must be prepared to protect the speech of even those who believe that speech should be silenced and censorship widespread.

While I find Daly's email utterly reprehensible (not to mention idiotic), I think Shibley is right, and Warren College was wrong. The right answer to Daly's speech was more speech: expose his lunatic politics until he's -- well, marginalized and embarrassed. Instead, conservatives in this case have chosen to go the censorship route. Too bad, for them and for academic freedom.

Footnote: Here's an interesting question. Suppose, instead of asking for official sanctions against Daly, Rebecca Beach and her fellow conservatives had begun to agitate for students to boycott Daly's classes.

If they succeeded to the extent that not enough people would enroll in his classes to justify continuing them, the college would presumably have a right to dismiss him (as an untenured adjunct) because his employment was no longer feasible.

Thus, a student boycott would ultimately have the same effect -- albeit a delayed one -- of penalizing Daly's speech as dismissal to punish him directly for his opinions and his manner of expressing them.

What are the implications of this for academic freedom and freedom of speech?