Playing "gotcha" with the Grey Lady

A much-blogged article at the American Thinker website accuses The New York Times, and the mainstream media in general, of blatant hypocrisy and political bias in its approach to domestic spying.

The article by William Tate, headlined, "Under Clinton, NY Times called surveillance 'a necessity,'" says:

The controversy following revelations that U.S. intelligence agencies have monitored suspected terrorist related communications since 9/11 reflects a severe case of selective amnesia by the New York Times and other media opponents of President Bush. They certainly didn’t show the same outrage when a much more invasive and indiscriminate domestic surveillance program came to light during the Clinton administration in the 1990’s. At that time, the Times called the surveillance “a necessity.”

That would be a pretty striking example of bias, indeed. The problem is that Tate's article is a tangle of distortions and contradictions.

The surveillance he's is talking about is the Echelon electronic monitoring program that came to light in 1999:

Tellingly, the existence of the program was confirmed not by the New York Times or the Washington Post or by any other American media outlet – these were the Clinton years, after all, and the American media generally treats Democrat administrations far more gently than Republican administrations – but by an Australian government official in a statement made to an Australian television news show.

Of course, this presumes that American media outlets were aware of the program and did not disclose it, but never mind.

The Times actually defended the existence of Echelon when it reported on the program following the Australians’ revelations.

“Few dispute the necessity of a system like Echelon to apprehend foreign spies, drug traffickers and terrorists….”

And the Times article quoted an N.S.A. official in assuring readers

“...that all Agency activities are conducted in accordance with the highest constitutional, legal and ethical standards.”

Of course, that was on May 27, 1999 and Bill Clinton, not George W. Bush, was president.

"The Times defended" seems to imply an editorial stance. But in fact, the article Tate links ran in the science and technology section, hardly a place where people would look for defense or criticism of administration policies. And that's not all. See how that first quotation ends in an ellipsis? Well, here's the full sentence:

While few dispute the necessity of a system like Echelon to apprehend foreign spies, drug traffickers and terrorists, many are concerned that the system could be abused to collect economic and political information.

Reads rather differently, doesn't it? Actually, there should have been an ellipsis at the start of Tate's quotation as well, because he snips off the word "while" -- which would have given away the fact that the statement about the "necessity" of monitoring spies, drug traffickers and terrorists is balanced by a counterpoint.

Tate does, to be fair, eventually get to the second half of that sentence:

Even so, the article did admit that

“...many are concerned that the system could be abused to collect economic and political information.”

The wording here clearly implies that the article on the whole is a defense of the program, with a reluctant admission that it is open to abuses. (I'm reminded of articles in the old-time Soviet press which used to gleefully note that "even the bourgeois press was forced to admit" such-and-such.) But actually, most of the Times article focuses precisely on worries that the Echelon program could be abused -- as one might glean from its title, "Lawmakers Raise Questions About International Spy Network."

Despite the Times’ reluctance to emphasize those concerns, one of the sources used in that same article, Patrick Poole, a lecturer in government and economics at Bannock Burn College in Franklin, Tenn., had already concluded in a study cited by the Times story that the program had been abused in both ways.

“ECHELON is also being used for purposes well outside its original mission. The regular discovery of domestic surveillance targeted at American civilians for reasons of ‘unpopular’ political affiliation or for no probable cause at all… What was once designed to target a select list of communist countries and terrorist states is now indiscriminately directed against virtually every citizen in the world,” Poole concluded.

The Times article also referenced a European Union report on Echelon. The report was conducted after E.U. members became concerned that their citizens’ rights may have been violated. One of the revelations of that study was that the N.S.A. used partner countries’ intelligence agencies to routinely circumvent legal restrictions against domestic spying.

This is where Tate gets a tad confused. The Times is reluctant to emphasize concerns about Echelon's abuses, yet it quotes two different reports that emphasize exactly such concerns? Tate also neglects to mention that Poole's position is identical to the Times' alleged defense of Echelon:

"The recent revelations about China's spying activities in the U.S. demonstrates that there is a clear need for electronic monitoring capabilities," said Patrick Poole, a lecturer in government and economics at Bannock Burn College in Franklin, Tenn., who compiled a report on Echelon for the Free Congress Foundation. "But those capabilities can be abused for political or economic purposes so we need to ensure that there is some sort of legislative control over these systems."

It gets better. Tate writes:

In the February, 2000 60 Minutes story, former spy Mike Frost made clear that Echelon monitored practically every conversation – no matter how seemingly innocent – during the Clinton years.

“A lady had been to a school play the night before, and her son was in the school play and she thought he did a-a lousy job. Next morning, she was talking on the telephone to her friend, and she said to her friend something like this, ‘Oh, Danny really bombed last night,’ just like that. The computer spit that conversation out. The analyst that was looking at it was not too sure about what the conversation w-was referring to, so erring on the side of caution, he listed that lady and her phone number in the database as a possible terrorist.”

“This is not urban legend you’re talking about. This actually happened?” Kroft asked.

“Factual. Absolutely fact. No legend here.”

During the Clinton years? That's a good one. Mike Frost, you see, is Canadian, and he was discussing his work for the CSE, the Canadian equivalent of the NSA. (Edited to add: Since Echelon was a collaboration between the intelligence agencies of several countries under the aegis of the NSA, and included the CSE, it's possible that this alleged incident happened in the U.S. However, considering that Frost retired in 1990, it's pretty certain that he wasn't talking about the Clinton years.)

Undaunted, Tate sums up:

So, during the Clinton Administration, evidence existed (all of the information used in this article was available at the time) that:

-an invasive, extensive domestic eavesdropping program was aimed at every U.S. citizen;

-intelligence agencies were using allies to circumvent constitutional restrictions;

(Actually, the European Union report that is presumably Tate's source for the latter assertion says that this was done "between 1967 and 1975" and also "following the introduction of legislation to limit NSA's domestic intelligence activities in 1978"; it says nothing about the Clinton era specifically.)

-and the administration was selling at least some secret intelligence for political donations.

(That refers to a report in Insight magazine, based on anonymous intelligence sources -- and not confirmed or pursued anywhere else, as far as I can tell -- that intelligence officials bugged a 1993 conference of Asian and Pacific leaders hosted by the Clinton Administration and that the surveillance data were then sold to corporate Democratic Party donors for use against their competitors.)

Says Tate:

These revelations were met by the New York Times and others in the mainstream media by the sound of one hand clapping. Now, reports that the Bush Administration approved electronic eavesdropping, strictly limited to international communications, of a relative handful of suspected terrorists have created a media frenzy in the Times and elsewhere.

The Times has historically been referred to as “the Grey Lady.” That grey is beginning to look just plain grimy, and many of us can no longer consider her a lady.

Tate's indictment of the pro-Clinton liberal media is somewhat odd in view of the fact that his piece relies heavily on a story aired by that well-known bastion of conservatism, CBS News' 60 Minutes. In fact, the revelations about Echelon were followed by a good deal of criticism in the mainstream media. A December 5, 1999 story in the Times' Week in Review section, by James Risen, bore the sarcastic title, "Don't Read This; If You Do, They May Have to Kill You." Another fairly critical article, by Elizabeth Becker, ran on February 23, 2000 (among other things, it quoted vigorous Echelon critic Bob Barr, then Republican Congressman from Georgia). A July 16, 2000 article titled "Cloak, Dagger, Echelon" opened with the words:

What else but the shadow of Big Brother could provoke equal anger from the American Civil Liberties Union, thousands of Internet enthusiasts and the French government?

Meanwhile, The Washington Post weighed in on November 13, 1999, with a long article titled, "Critics Questioning NSA Reading Habits; Politicians Ask if Agency Sweeps In Private Data," followed the next day by a nearly 2,000-word essay in Outlook, "Loud and Clear; The most secret of secret agencies operates under outdated laws." And The New Yorker published an investigative report on Echelon by Seymour Hersch.

There was also a major difference between the Echelon story and the Bush surveillance story. While it's quite possible that intelligence services under Clinton were abused for domestic spying and surveillance, no one was ever able to prove it. Many of the reports at the time emphasized Echelon's elusiveness. On February 24, 2000, the Times reported:

Representative Bob Barr, Republican of Georgia, who called for the hearings into the project, conceded that he was uncertain what Echelon actually does. "The charges are serious that the government indiscriminately scoops up millions upon millions of conversations daily over the Internet and the telephone," he said in an interview. "But the first question I have is what is being collected on Echelon and how is it being used. I don't know."

And according to the November 13, 1999 Washington Post story:

Without confirming or denying Echelon's existence, senior U.S. officials familiar with the NSA's operations deny that the agency violates the civil rights of U.S. citizens. They say the NSA strictly adheres to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which resulted from the Church committee's revelations.

FISA prohibits the NSA from deliberately eavesdropping on Americans either in the United States or overseas, unless the agency can establish probable cause to believe that they are agents of a foreign government committing espionage or other crimes.

....

Unlike foreign operations, all domestic NSA surveillance requires prior court approval. But even in such cases, the law calls for "minimization procedures"--such as deleting the names of third parties--to limit the infringement on privacy.

....

"I can say categorically that NSA is as careful as any civil libertarian would want it to be in adhering to the rules," said Stewart A. Baker, the NSA's former general counsel, now a private communications lawyer in Washington. "There is an ingrained discipline about that, right down to the lowest levels of the agency."

Indeed, the NSA's troubles in Congress began this spring when Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, asked the agency for internal documents about its compliance with FISA because he thought NSA lawyers were too cautious in approving new surveillance programs.

When the agency declined his request on grounds of attorney-client privilege, Goss erupted, saying the committee had never been stonewalled in such fashion. Barr immediately joined the dispute from the opposite flank, suggesting that the NSA had refused Goss's request because it was violating Americans' privacy by indiscriminately vacuuming up communications.

Again, there may well have been Clinton-era violations of the ban on domestic surveillance without special authorization. The situation today, however, is markedly different. The Bush administration has openly admitted and defended conducting surveillance of communications between people in the United States and people abroad in circumvention of FISA warrants, on the grounds that it was supposedly given such authority by Congress when it authorized the use of force in response to the September 11 attacks.

It's true that liberals who accuse Bush of ushering in a police state forget that it was the Clinton administration that first pushed for a rather dramatic expansion of surveillance and other government powers in order to combat the threat of terrorism. (Conservatives are prone to forget it as well.) But that's a far cry from the blatant double standard Tate claims to have detected. So the bloggers might want to hold off on the gloating about hypocrisy and media bias; all that's exposed here is a very shoddy attempt at an exposé. Sometimes it helps to check the links before trumpeting a story.

More: See Taylor Barnes's post in the comments for more analysis of the "American Thinker" piece. Among other things, Barnes points out that the alleged bugging of the Asian and Pacific leaders' summit had nothing to with Echelon or with surveillane of Americans.

Meanwhile, Solomon at the Solomonia blog, who linked to the "American Thinker" story, replies to this post.

According to Solomon:

While Cathy Young does a good job in showing that the Tate piece is at least a bit sloppy and a tad unfair to the Gray Lady, I think that the overall point remains -- MSM reaction and interest to similar revelations in previous administrations has been far more muted compared to the obsessive focus we're witnessing today. As part of her proof of media interest in the story, Young puts her Lexus/Nexus skills to work to list some of the major publications where Echelon revelations and concerns appeared, but frankly, this comes off more as a case of "lying with statistics" (not to imply that Young is lying, but you take the point...) than as reflecting the true degree of media interest in the case. Do you remember anything about this story from years back? I don't, not that I probably would have been overly concerned then, either, but I do not recall anything like the scandal du jour treatment current events are generating. ...

While less was known about the details of Echelon at the time, that does not explain, given what was known and the concerns that were voiced (and reported on), why answers were not demanded and more pressure placed if they really believed the issue was an important one -- we've seen the MSM's ability to do this when they deem an issue important enough. Clinton Administration silence was met with movement on to the next issue, while Bush Administration candor has lead to scare and scandal-mongering. The fact that the New York Times piece in question appears in the Science and Technology section and was not bumped to the front page demonstrates how much attention the editors thought the Civil Liberties concerns voiced in the article were worth -- not much. We don't have to speculate where in the paper such revelations printed today would appear.

Let me clarify the major difference between the two stories.

Under Clinton, it's not simply that there was no proof that the NSA was engaging in illegal domestic surveillance; there weren't even any specific allegations that it was doing so. There were only assertions that it had the capability to spy on Americans' private communications, and speculations that it could be doing that -- all strenuously denied by NSA officials. There were no charges to investigate.

By contrast, the New York Times story about the eavesdropping program authorized by the Bush administration was based on fairly specific information about actual NSA operations of questionable legality, provided by about a dozen officials. I'm not sure there was any candor on the part of the Bush administration, considering that the White House asked the Times to squelch the story; I assume that the Times simply had enough information that the White House was in no position to deny or stonewall.

And by the way, I certainly did hear about Echelon. No, the story wasn't nearly as "big" as the NSA snooping story today, but again, there wasn't much to the story. And while the article discussed in "The American Thinker" ran in the Science and Technology section, the Times did (as I mentioned) run other stories on the subject in the news section and in Sunday's "Week in Review."

Not to be snarky, but assertions that the American Thinker story may be factually sloppy but still basically on the mark as far as the big picture goes strike me as amusingly close to that infamous New York Times headline: "Memos on Bush Are Fake but Accurate, Typist Says."

And speaking of the Supreme Court...

Yesterday's New York Times recounts a disturbing case now before the Supreme Court. Paul G. House, a Tennessee man who is on death row for the rape and murder of a neighbor, Carolyn Muncey, is appealing his conviction on the grounds of new DNA evidence. While the evidence does not conclusively exonerate him, it negates a key piece of the prosecution's case at his 1986 trial.

Chemical analysis presented at the trial suggested that Mr. House's semen was found on Ms. Muncey's clothing, while DNA testing later showed it to be her husband's. ... The defense theory was that the husband, Hubert Muncey, was the killer. The new legal team that represented Mr. House in his habeas corpus petition produced witnesses who testified that they had heard Mr. Muncey make a drunken confession, but the federal district court discounted the evidence in rejecting the petition in 1997.

And who would be against a retrial in such a case? The state of Tennessee, for one. And Justice Antonin Scalia.

Addressing Mr. House's lawyer on Wednesday, Justice Scalia said he agreed that the case now looks "much closer" than it must have appeared to the jury in 1986. But that was not the issue, he continued. "Once the case has been tried, we have a much different task," Justice Scalia said, namely to determine "whether any reasonable jury could have found guilt."

Only if the answer was no could a federal court proceed to hear a petition for a writ of habeas corpus and consider whether constitutional errors that had not previously been identified had occurred at the trial. The Supreme Court's leading precedent on this question, a case from 1995 called Schlup v. Delo, refers to this hurdle as a "gateway" through which an inmate must pass. It is, Justice Scalia said, "a very heavy burden" for the defense to meet.

Mr. House's lawyer, Stephen M. Kissinger, replied, "It is a high burden, and we don't shrink from it."

...

Mr. Kissinger, an assistant federal defender from Knoxville, Tenn., challenged Justice Scalia's description of the gateway. "It comes down to the 'could' and 'would' distinction," he said. "We don't deny that there is evidence that 'could' support conviction, but that's not the test. What 'would' a reasonable juror conclude? Proof of innocence does not have to be absolute."

So the difference between a man's life and death hinges on the difference between "could" and "would." It sounds like something out of a very black comedy satirizing the courts.

I don't object to the death penalty on principle; however, I think that the possibility of executing an innocent person poses an extremely serious challenge to the capital punishment. If we are going to maintain this institution, we should at least take every step humanly possible to ensure that we are certain beyond any reasonable doubt of the guilt of the condemned. Here, the new evidence clearly could have (and, in all probability, would have) made a major difference in the trial -- even if it's possible that the jurors would have still come to the same conclusion.

This shouldn't be a conservative-vs.-liberal issue. If conservatives are still the champions of limited government, surely they should be concerned with limiting the government's ability to take a man's life without every conceivable safeguard.

According to the Times, it is likely that at least five justices will back House and he will get a new trial. It should have been 9-0.

Update: My friend Eugene Volokh writes:

But wouldn't the same argument operate as to life imprisonment? Perhaps it's not quite as wrong to keep someone locked up for life (or even 30 years) if there's strong evidence that he's innocent as to execute him then, but it still seems pretty wrong.

Also, I take it that Justice Scalia's response in either case is that "wrong" doesn't mean "unconstitutional." States are free to provide post-conviction review of newly discovered claims of actual innocence; some do this through special procedures, and others through clemecy decisions by the governor. But there's no constitutional requirement of this extra procedure, once a fair trial has taken place.

I agree on the first point, of course; it would be a monstrous injustice to continue to hold someone in prison, without a new trial, despite this kind of potentially exculpatory evidence. One big difference, though, is that at least if the person remains in prison, the fight for his release can continue. Execution is irreversible.

As for the second point: perhaps I'm being non-lawyerly here, but to me, the notion that the courts should allow an execution of a clearly innocent person to proceed as long as there were no procedural violations at the trial shocks the conscience as well as common sense. (It's the other extreme from the idea that the perpetrator of a heinous crime should go free on a procedural technicality.) I realize that appellate judges are not supposed to be triers of fact. But the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution says that no one can "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"; and it seems to me that denying a new trial after the discovery of significant new evidence is a flagrant violation of "due process."

Scalia's proposed standard seems to be that if there is any reasonable possibility that the jury would have found the defendant guilty even with the new evidence, the conviction should stand. I would not go so far as to say that a reversal is warranted if there is the slightest chance that the new evidence would have resulted in an acquittal. But a "preponderance of the evidence" standard seems reasonable in such a situation, and in this case -- if the Times report is accurate -- it seems more likely than not that the new DNA evidence would have altered the outcome of the trial. (The claim that House's semen was found on the victim's clothing provided not only physical evidence against him but also the motive, since the prosecution argued that House killed Muncey in the course of a sexual assault.)

Finally, what troubles me about Scalia's position (again, as outlined in the article) is that, aside from the issue of constitutionality, he does not seem particularly bothered by the wrongness of executing House. It was the same thing that troubled me about Scalia's dissent in Lawrence: unlike Clarence Thomas, he did not simply believe that anti-sodomy laws were constitutionally permissible, but clearly didn't see anything particularly wrong with such laws.

I am reminded of Scalia's 2002 speech in which he observed that opposition to the death penalty is correlated with the growth of secularism:

I attribute that to the fact that, for the believing Christian, death is no big deal. Intentionally killing an innocent person is a big deal: it is a grave sin, which causes one to lose his soul. But losing this life, in exchange for the next? The Christian attitude is reflected in the words Robert Bolt’s play has Thomas More saying to the headsman: “Friend, be not afraid of your office. You send me to God.” ... For the nonbeliever, on the other hand, to deprive a man of his life is to end his existence. What a horrible act!

Does Scalia, perhaps, believe that for the believing Christian, it is "no big deal" to send an innocent person to his death (as long as it's not done "intentionally"), because God will fix it all by rewarding the sufferer in the next life? If so, that's a rather scary interpretation of the role of religion in public life.

Judge Alito: Abortion, alumni, and authority

So, the Samuel Alito confirmation hearings are wrapping up, and so far we've learned mostly that Alito may or may not overturn Roe v. Wade, and that he may or may not have been a member of the controversial Concerned Alumni of Princeton. At least the fixation on abortion did not completely crowd out questions about Judge Alito's views on the question of executive powers.

Unfortunately, in the current political environment, any pointed questions on the subject coming from inevitably look partisan (and, coming from Republicans, would look disloyal). But in fact, while I'm sure that Alito is a highly qualified jurist and an intelligent and decent man, I think that concerns about his attitudes toward individual rights, civil liberties and state power are justified. George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, no one's idea of a liberal Democrat, thinks so too. (Edit: Corrected link) Here's what Turley has to say in a USA Today op-ed:

Despite my agreement with Alito on many issues, I believe that he would be a dangerous addition to the court in already dangerous times for our constitutional system. Alito's cases reveal an almost reflexive vote in favor of government, a preference based not on some overriding principle but an overriding party.

In my years as an academic and a litigator, I have rarely seen the equal of Alito's bias in favor of the government. To put it bluntly, when it comes to reviewing government abuse, Samuel Alito is an empty robe.

Turley adds that Alito's view on the subject have been "repeatedly rejected not only by his appellate colleagues but also by the U.S. Supreme Court." Many of the appellate judge who have rebuked Alito for his reluctance to curb government powers are conservatives -- including current Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, who in one opinion wrote that Alito would "transform the judicial officer into little more than the cliché 'rubber stamp.' "

Turley concludes:

An independent judiciary means little if our judges are not independently minded. In criminal, immigration and other cases, Alito is one of the government's most predictable votes on the federal bench. Though his supporters have attempted to portray this as merely a principle of judicial deference, it is a raw form of judicial bias.

The Alito vote might prove to be the single most important decision on the future of our constitutional system for decades to come. While I generally defer to presidents in their choices for the court, Samuel Alito is the wrong nominee at the wrong time for this country.

Is Turley overreacting? Maybe. Or maybe not. Either way, it's too bad that such questions are very unlikely to get serious and thoughtful consideration from either side. In any case, the concerns he raises are far more substantial and serious than this babble from Kate Michelman, formerly of NARAL Pro-Choice America, in The Boston Globe. Michelman asserts that Alito is stuck in a Pleasantville-like fantasy world of happy housewives and authoritative husbands. And we know this how? Because he backed the legality of spousal notification for abortion, something supported by about 70% of Americans?

Astonishingly, Michelman writes:

He sought to uphold abortion restrictions that would have treated a grown married woman no differently from a child, forcing her to notify her husband in all circumstances, including abuse and rape, before obtaining an abortion.

This is (to put it politely) untrue. As summarized by the Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Pennsylvania statute that Alito voted to uphold

provides, except in cases of medical emergency, that no physician shall perform an abortion on a married woman without receiving a signed statement from the woman that she has notified her spouse that she is about to undergo an abortion. The woman has the option of providing an alternative signed statement certifying that her husband is not the man who impregnated her; that her husband could not be located; that the pregnancy is the result of spousal sexual assault which she has reported; or that the woman believes that notifying her husband will cause him or someone else to inflict bodily injury upon her.

Michelman also writes that Alito "seems not to have believed women and minorities deserved equal access to his own educational institution, Princeton University." That's a reference to Alito's much-disputed involvement with Concerned Alumni of Princeton, which sparked a major squabble at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings.

Ted Kennedy's bombshell -- the supposedly incriminating CAP records -- turned out to be a dud when it was revealed that none of the papers contained any mention of Alito. There is still the fact that he mentioned his CAP membership (along with the Federalist Society) in the letter applying for a high-level job in the Reagan Justice Department years after his graduation. Some commenters here and here suggest that he made it up in order to bolster his credentials as a true conservative.

Let's make one thing clear: CAP is not being unfairly maligned. It was not a mainstream conservative group but a radical reactionary one, with a strong streak of bigotry. (Some Alito defenders, such as Human Events'Terry Jeffrey in a CNN appearance, have tried to suggest that the group was tarred as racist simply it opposed preferential treatment in university admissions; but in fact, CAP opposed merit-based admissions and wanted quotas favoring males.) The real issue, of course, is whether Alito knew that.

Law professor Eric Muller, who personally knows and likes Samuel Alito, poses this question at IsThatLegal.org: how likely is it that a Princeton alumnus would not have known much about the group's doings? From my own experience, I can say that I was very aware of some flaps that occurred at my alma mater, Rutgers University, after my graduation, and barely aware of others. Perhaps Alito vaguely heard about the group being accused of racism and sexism but chalked it off to political correctness. If he did mention a non-existent membership in a conservative group (not on a résumé but in an application letter) to impress a prospective employer, it does not reflect well on his character, but I would be inclined to see it as a venial sin. It certainly doesn't make him a bigot; there is no evidence of bigotry in his career or his life, and trying to imply that he was one was a low blow that misfired badly for the Democrats.

More: Over at The Reality-Based Community, Mark Kleiman writes:

Alito, as a thirty-something lawyer bucking for a job with the Reagan Administration, boasted about his CAP membership as a way of displaying his paleo credentials to what was an extremely paleo ruling clique. ... Both Alito's eagerness to flash his credentials as a bigot in 1985 and his modified, limited veracity about the topic today are perfectly legitimate issues in considering him for the Supreme Bench.

First of all, the "boasting" consists of a single line in this letter (scroll down to page 16):

I am a member of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy and a regular participant at its luncheon meetings and a member of the Concerned Alumni of Princeton University, a conservative alumni group.

The letter, about 500 words long, was intended to prove Alito's bona fides as a conservative. Flashing his credentials as a bigot? Please. That presumes that not only Alito but the intended readers of his letter in the Reagan DOJ were extensively familiar with CAP's activities. In fact, CAP was clearly so little-known that Alito felt the need to identify it (unlike the Federalist Society) as "a conservative alumni group."

More: At Reason.com, Jeff Taylor writes:

A Justice Alito on the Court may force the body politic to confront this new reality, where abortion does not play a central role on the socio-political scene. The left will have failed to stop a nominee that, in their construction, threatens to reverse one of the singular civil rights advancements of 20th century America. Moreover, the American public did not pay much attention to their failure.

But the right will creep closer to its long-sought 5-4 court certain—absolutely certain—to revisit and overturn Roe. Except that Alito may never vote that way. Both sides may have to live with the alternative: An armistice in the battle over Roe.

Floods, dams, and environmentalists

The latest Weekly Standard has an interesting article (subscriber only) by John Berlau of the Competitive Enterprise Institute pointing out that, while everyone loves levees in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, "for years now, the left has been deeply ambivalent about the most logical and time-tested mitigator against the threat of city-wide and regional floods: dams."

Berlau has some affection for the old-style liberalism of Franklin D. Roosevelt, at least for its "no-nonsense views on dealing with nature":

At the 1935 dedication of Hoover Dam, FDR hailed the taming of a "turbulent, dangerous river" and the "completion of the greatest dam in the world." He proudly noted that the dam on the Colorado River was "altering the geography of a whole region," calling what had existed before "cactus-covered waste" and "an unpeopled, forbidding desert." ... About the river he said bluntly that "the Colorado added little of value to the region this dam serves." In the spring, he said, farmers "awaited with dread the coming of a flood, and at the end of nearly every summer they feared a shortage of water that would destroy their crops."

By contrast, the modern environmentalist left is represented by veteran journalist Jacques Leslie, author of the recently published book, In Deep Water: The Epic Struggle over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment, who criticizes the "Rooseveltian vision, arising out of the New Deal, built into the Hoover Dam and the Tennessee Valley Authority, enthralled with its seeming capacity to foster prosperity by subjugating nature." In Berlau's words,

to Leslie, damming the Colorado River was a damn shame, and he pushes for returning it "to its virgin state: tempestuous, fickle, and in some stretches astonishing." He acknowledges that if you took away the dams and the hydroelectric power they provide, you would also "take away modern Los Angeles, San Diego, and Phoenix" as well as the nearby former desert outpost known as Las Vegas. But in exchange for this major subtraction from civilization as we know it, Americans would be able to marvel at a "free-flowing river" and "an unparalleled depository of marine life."

This change in vision has also had practical consequences:

Support for dam removal and opposition to new dams have become a staple among modern environmentalists, giving rise to organizations whose only agenda is to stop dams. American Rivers, for example, brags about how many dams have been decommissioned and has as its slogan "Rivers Unplugged." The Berkeley-based International Rivers Network does similar work in Third World countries, where dams are even more crucial for power and flood control. This sea change on dams illustrates a larger shift of the left concerning technology and the nature of man.

Berlau also notes that "one of the main obstacles, before Katrina, to building and fortifying levees, as well as creating more innovative flood barriers, was put up by environmentalists":

In 1977, the group Save Our Wetlands successfully sued the Army Corps of Engineers to halt the construction of large floodgates intended to prevent Gulf of Mexico storms from overwhelming Lake Pontchartrain and flooding New Orleans. The gates, the environmentalists said, would have hurt wetlands and marine life, although the Corps had already done an environmental assessment to the satisfaction of environmental regulators. Many experts believe the gates could have greatly reduced the impact of Katrina. "It probably would have given [the people of New Orleans] a better shot," says Daniel Canfield, a renowned professor of aquatic sciences at the University of Florida.

Then, in the 1990s, the Army Corps of Engineers tried to upgrade 303 miles of levees along the Mississippi River, telling the Baton Rouge Advocate in 1996 that a levee "failure could wreak catastrophic consequences on Louisiana and Mississippi." But the anti-dam American Rivers, along with eco-groups such as the Sierra Club and state chapters of the National Wildlife Federation, sued, alleging harm to "bottomland hardwood wetlands." This resulted in the Corps doing another environmental impact study and holding off some work for two years.

The Corps compromised with the anti-dam activists in other ways. As Ron Utt notes in a Heritage Foundation study, the Corps began spending hundreds of millions of dollars on environmentally correct projects like "aquatic ecosystems" instead of flood control. The distraction from the Corps's mission continued from the Clinton to the Bush administration and is something Bush can legitimately be blamed for.

Interestingly, Berlau's model is Western Europe -- which, as he notes, is "usually a favorite reference point for liberal activists and the media," and which in this case is not exactly a model of "progressive" attitudes (unless we mean "progressive" in the old-fashioned sense of being dedicated to human welfare).

After a North Sea storm in 1953, the Netherlands, half of which is below sea level, set out to dam every last major body of water. The last of these were ultramodern dams built in the 1980s. In the United States, The Weekly Standard was virtually alone in suggesting that Lake Pontchartrain could be dammed along Dutch lines. (See James R. Stoner Jr., "Love in the Ruins," September 26, 2005.) London, which sits below the high tide of the Atlantic waterways, has also had severe problems with the flooding of the Thames River. So, in the '80s, gates were built that can rise as high as five stories. The Dutch and the British are sensitive to the environment, but only to a point. They try to regulate water levels to accommodate the native fish. But neither country is undertaking massive projects to restore swamps or, in the eco parlance, "wetlands."

The environmentalist crusade against dams is curious for other reasons. The same activists who campaign for hydrogen-powered cars, for example, rail against the hydroelectricity produced by dams. As environmental journalist Gregg Easterbrook pointed out in his 1995 book A Moment on the Earth, a dam "burns no fossil fuel and emits no greenhouse gases, smog or toxic or solid wastes." Take away dams, and folks will have to rely on other energy sources such as coal ...

Quoting Canfield, Berlau asserts that "the anti-dam movement is not mainly about science, but rather philosophy, or even theology" -- the ideal of nature in a pristine state.

Having looked at some passages from Deep Waters, and at the feature on it and the interview with Leslie at Salon.com, I'm not sure Berlau's representation of the book is entirely fair. I don't think he's actually calling for the Colorado river dams to be dismantled, and he acknowledges the benefits of the dams in the 20th Century (even crediting the Hoover dam and the power it produced as a factor in winning World War II). He believes that the big dams will outlive their usefulness some day, but places this date500 to 1,000 years into the future. His discussion of the dam's negative consequences stresses soil damage and erosion, not just the value of a "free-flowing river," and he notes that the depletion of groundwater in China due to damming may bring China's agricultural successes to "a grinding halt." In the Salon interview, at least, Leslie does not seem to lack regard for human well-being: While he says that we will need to reduce our energy consumption eventually, he says that this may be done in "relatively painless" ways and emphasizes new technologies. At the end of the interview he says:

The needs that call a dam into being may be so big as to be hard to ignore. It's hard to say that people of developing nations should be deprived of water, particularly when one in five people on the planet lack enough for their basic needs. But I think if we applied the standards of the World Commission on Dams -- if we examined every cheaper alternative and priced dams according to their true value -- we would build far fewer of them. And I'm willing to live with that standard. Building dams willy-nilly on every river is insanity.

However, Leslie does regard the preservation of indigenous tribal cultures as a worthy end in itself (even if those cultures are characterized by oppressiveness and brutal sexism?), and he does suggest that the "aesthetic value of a flowing river" may be a good reason to take down the dam that ensures San Francisco's water supply. So maybe he's more of a zealot than his moderate presentation lets on. And, when he talks about the logic of market-based water pricing, not all of his ideas seem to be well thought out. For instance, he says:

I'm certainly no economist, but there's no question that a pricing system that took into account the true cost of constructing a dam and of having to dismantle it years later, as well as the many environmental impacts, would have a good effect. ... I think the only way people are going to value water the way they should is to have to pay a substantial amount for it. We would need to subsidize the poor so that they're not paying the full price for water, but there's no question in my mind that farmers have got to start paying fairly for irrigation.

Yet charging farmers more for irrigation is inevitably going to affect food prices -- hurting the poor the most, of course.

My correspondent Mark B., a frequent poster on this blog who has a background in the geosciences (and is very critical of radical environmentalism, to the point of believing that the Clinton administration leaned too far in that direction), has this to say:

I think that [Berlau] greatly overstates the ability of dams to prevent a Katrina-type catastrophe, but I do think he has a point about the anti-dam mania. [Leslie] definitely has a valid point as well -- there was a dam-building frenzy from the 1920's through the 50's in this country, and a lot of poorly-thought-out dam projects were constructed. The early Colorado River dams, built at the turn of the 20th Century, were fairly small and on the whole beneficial; the Hoover Dam project, on the other hand, represented the 30's fascination with heavy industry and concrete (witness Stalin's 5-Year Plans). Glen Canyon Dam was the turning point - there was no real need to dam that part of the Colorado, save to provide Los Angeles with cheap power, and the sedimentation rates in Lake Powell are appalling. The end of the dam binge came with the collapse of the extremely poorly-designed and -constructed Teton Dam in 1972 -- after that, it became virtually impossible to permit a new dam project, and in fact a major movement to remove dams took root.

At this point, I'm one who believes that the pendulum has swung too far the other way. I don't favor extravagant new dam projects, but I think that small dams are still very valuable in local flood control, and there's no question that hydropower is the cleanest, cheapest energy source we have.

What do I (with my admittedly modest background of a single course in environmental biology I took at Rutgers University to fulfil a science requirement) think about all this? There seems to be strong evidence that many dams have caused environmental damage that poses hazards to human beings, not just to some quasi-religious idea of Nature's Temple. To that extent, surely, caution is in order. I also wonder if this has to be an either/or question: plow full speed ahead with Rooseveltian hubris or bow humbly before nature's magnificence. Surely, for instance, modern technology can find some ways to mitigate the environmental degradation associated with big dams; surely, when building new dams, we can and should take into account lessons from the past. Surely it's not a question of either damming up every river or standing in the way of every dam yelling "Stop!"

Finally, it's interesting to ponder the ironies of this debate. Free-market champions admire grandiose, quasi-socialist, big-government construction projects. Progressives put esthetics over the livelihood of the poor. What a tangled web.

Safety and liberty: libertarians, the Bush administration, and the war on terror

Somewhat belatedly, I want to take note of an interesting, rather acerbic article by Matt Welch at Reason.com, "The Pro-war Libertarian Quiz: How far are you willing to go to win the War on Terror?" Matt asks pro-War on Terror libertarians and libertarian/conservatives who have defended controversial measures such as coercive interrogations, the use of Iraqi newspapers for U.S. propaganda, or extrajudicial surveillance of some Americans' communications just what measures expanding state powers they would not support. Here is his checklist:

1) Should the National Security Agency or CIA have the ability to monitor domestic phone calls or e-mails without obtaining judicial approval?

2) Should the government have the ability to hold an American citizen without charge, indefinitely, without access to a lawyer, if he is believed to be part of a terrorist cell?

3) Can you imagine a situation in which the government would be justified in waterboarding an American citizen?

4) Are there American journalists who should be investigated for possible treason? Should Sedition laws be re-introduced?

5) Should the CIA be able to legally assassinate people in countries with which the U.S. is not at war?

6) Should anti-terrorism cops be given every single law-enforcement tool available in non-terrorist cases?

7) Should law enforcement be able to seize the property of a suspected (though not charged) American terrorist, and then sell it?

8) Should the U.S. military be tasked with enforcing domestic crime?

9) Should there be a national I.D. card, and should it be made available to law enforcement on demand?

10) Should a higher percentage of national security-related activities and documents be made classified, and kept from the eyes of the Congress, the courts, and the public?

Matt, who is definitely not a "more libertarian than thou" type, would answer no on all of the above. I'm wavering on (5) and (6). One (1), I have to confess that the idea of a computer program scanning emails in order to pick out certain suspect words (as long as those emails are not read by any individuals) does not particularly horrify me even if such scans do not require a warrant. I could be wrong, of course, but I just don't see the massive threat to liberty here.

Agree or disagree on some of those specifics, I think Matt raises a very important issue. There are self-identified libertarians and small-government conservatives who have justified illiberal, unlibertarian, big-government measures on the grounds that "we're at war." The danger of these justifications is compounded by the fact that this war has no clear definition of victory, no specific goal, no geographic limitations -- no discernible end. A war that could go on indefinitely and that can serve as a justification for curtailing civil liberties: a greater internal danger to freedom is hard to imagine.

On the other hand, for an example of how not to argue against the threat to freedom posed by the War on Terror, check out this op-ed by Silicone Valley entrepreneur T.J. Rodgers, blogged at Reason's Hit & Run under the heading, "Rodgers Gets It Right."

Rodgers correctly discusses the disturbing implications of some actions undertaken in the name of the War on Terror, including the recently revealed unauthorized NSA surveillance of U.S. citizens. (My own take on that, by the way, is closest to the one stated here by former New York Mayor Ed Koch.) But then he gets to his conclusion:

What's the worst thing that Al-Qaida can do to America? We have probably already seen it. Of course, the government can talk about bigger things, like the use of weapons of mass destruction, to justify its use of totalitarian tactics.

I would much rather live as a free man under the highly improbable threat of another significant Al-Qaida attack than I would as a serf, spied on by an oppressive government that can jail me secretly, without charges. If the Patriot Act defines the term "patriot,'' then I am certainly not one.

By far, our own government is a bigger threat to our freedom than any possible menace posed by Al-Qaida.

Rodgers cites no evidence that another significant Al-Qaeda attack (including one using biological weapons) is "highly improbable." I don't think that either his optimistic estimate of such a probability or his rather cavalier dismissal of it is likely to impress a lot of Americans who are not hardcore libertarians. I don't think we need to sacrifice civil liberties or the Constitution to avoid another 9/11 or an even greater calamity; but "better a major terror strike in America than warrantless wiretapping of suspected terrorists" is not an argument that will carry the day.

Economic growth, morality, and obnoxious terror analogies

Yesterday, I attended a discussion at the American Enterprise Institute on a new book by Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. The book, which I have yet to read, is rather provocative, as the Publishers' Weekly review makes clear:

This probing study argues that, far from fostering rapacious materialism, economic growth is a prerequisite for the creation of a liberal, open society. Harvard economist Friedman, author of Day of Reckoning: The Consequences of American Economic Policy in the 1980s, contends that periods of robust economic growth, in which most people see their circumstances palpably improving, foster tolerance, democracy and generous public support for the disadvantaged. Economic stagnation and insecurity, by contrast, usher in distrust, retrenchment and reaction, as well as a tightfisted callousness toward the poor and—from the nativism of 19th-century Populists to the white supremacist movement of the 1980s—a scapegoating of immigrants and minorities. Exploring two centuries of historical evidence, from income and unemployment data to period novels, Friedman elucidates connections between economic conditions, social attitudes and public policy throughout the world. He offers a nuanced defense of globalization against claims that it promotes inequality and, less convincingly, remains optimistic that technology will resolve the conflicts between continual growth and environmental degradation. Friedman's progressive attitude doesn't extend to his cautious approach to promoting growth in America; a critic of Bush's tax cuts and deficits, he advocates fiscal discipline to free savings for investment, along with educational initiatives, including "school choice," to boost worker productivity.

There's something here for everyone, or rather something to annoy everyone. Friedman's celebration of prosperity and consumerism is bound to upset many leftists; his view that economic growth is best fostered by government policies encouraging investment and not by a laissez-faire approach to the market will not sit well with libertarians and conservatives; and his definition of moral progress solely in terms of tolerance, fairness, and ohter liberal is sure to ruffle conservative and communitarian feathers.

There weren't many leftists in evidence at the AEI symposium, but libertarian, conservative and communitarian objects were indeed offered, both by audience members and by discussants Chris DeMuth and Amitai Etzioni. DeMuth, among other things, chided Friedman for a rather simplistic equation of the Reagan and Bush 41/Bush 43 periods with stagnation and moral regression, and the Clinton years with growth and moral progress. Etzioni was particularly concerned about the effects of economic growth on human relationships and families, and about the fact that a lot of growth in recent years has been achieved by more people working longer hours. I don't think Friedman had a response to the former; on the latter, he gave assurances that his book pays due attention to moral and religious values, and to the importance of human relationships -- particularly marriage -- in creating happiness.

I won't comment further until I've read Friedman's book (which I want to do); I wonder, among other things, if he deals with the relationship between economic growth and moral growth -- as he defines it -- in countries other than the U.S., including non-Western cultures. And while I'm not a conservative or communitarian, I was somewhat troubled by the fact that he seems to define moral progress exclusively in terms of liberal social values rather than, say, the health of families. (Conversely, however, I think that conservatives who talk about moral decline often act as if the waning and stigmatization of racism were not a substantial moral achievement.)

One somewhat off-topic observation. One of the questioners during the Q & A was Michael McManus of Marriage Savers, who faulted Friedman for omitting marriage, divorce, and out-of-wedlock birth rates from his measurements of moral progress. McManus opened his question thusly:

"Three thousand people died on 9/11, but since 9/11 we have had six million divorces in this country ..."

McManus may have an entirely legitimate concern, but did he have to tie it to 9/11 and suggest that somehow, the toll of divorce is equivalent to that of terrorism? One post-9/11 blight has been the proliferation of terrorism metaphors in discussions of domestic policies and issues -- metaphors promiscuously used by both left and right to indict everything from hog farming to teachers' unions. Enough is enough. I believe it was Midge Decter who once called for a moratorium on the Nazi metaphors in debates of domestic American issues. Maybe it's time for such a moratorium on terrorism and 9/11 metaphors.

More on the new VAWA

My Boston Globe column on the new Violence Against Women act can be found here.

As you may notice, I take a somewhat more positive view of the new VAWA in the column than in my blogpost last week. This is because, on reflection, I think the new text in VAWA -- particularly the section directing the GAO to conduct a study evaluating not only the extent to which men as well as women are victims of family violence, but also the availability of services to them -- is more of an opportunity than I initially realized. If such a study is conducted fairly, and if its findings result in some action being taken, it could strike a serious blow against anti-male bias in the domestic violence "industry." Now, activists whose goal is gender equity in domestic violence policies should focus their efforts on ensuring that the study doesn't end up being a formality or a whitewash.

Pat may be a loon, but he's our loon

Yesterday, after Pat Robertson's inspired remarks about Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's stroke as divine retribution for giving up the Israeli settlements in Gaza, I asked if we can all finally agree that Robertson is beyond the pale. A lot of us, apparently, can: the White House has condemned Pat's remarks as "wholly inappropriate and offensive," and Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's ethics and religious liberty commission, says he is "stunned and appalled that Pat Robertson would claim to know the mind of God concerning whether particular tragic events ... were the judgments of God." But tonight, I was pretty stunned myself when former Congressman-turned-Fox News talk show host John Kasich, subbing for Bill O'Reilly on "The O'Reilly Factor," offered a sort-of defense of Robertson, whom he judged to be guilty only of poor timing.

After offering some mild criticism of Robertson while questioning Christian radio talk show host Janet Folger, Kasich inquired of his other guest, Fordham University media studies chairman Paul Levinson:

John Kasich: Your feelings about this, Mr. Levinson? I mean --- is the media sort of grabbing onto everything Pat says and tries to blow it up? I mean, you saw his statement, right? It wasn't a statement out of some mean guy -- he claims that he was quoting the book of Joel, and if you read the Book of Joel and what it says here -- he's basically saying, it wasn't him, it was something he quoted out of the scripture.

Paul Levinson: I have an enormous amount of respect for the scripture, but when people in our modern age try to apply it literally in a fanatical way, it leads to graceless, absurd statements such as Pat Robertson made. If you think about the fact -- the only other public figure who' commented about Sharon's dying being appropriate in any way is the President of Iran, who's a fundamentalist Islamic nutcase.

John Kasich: (chuckles) You're not trying to compare Pat Robertson to the--this lunatic over in Iran, are you?

Janet Folger: I hope not.

Paul Levinson: I'm comparing two people who are fundamentalists and who don't seem to have a modern view of the world -- who don't seem to understand that the Prime Minister shouldn't be judged according to scripture when he's on his deathbed.

John Kasich: So let me ask you this, then. I mean -- are you saying that what is written in the Bible cannot be applied today? You said that, you know, what we're doing is trying to apply things too literally -- don't you think that in America today, we don’t apply it at all, too much of the time?

Paul Levinson: No, I think we apply it just fine in the United States.

John Kasich: Yeah, but when we look at --

Paul Levinson: We have a diversified --

John Kasich : Yeah, but when we look at problems of character, integrity -- whether it's professional athletes, pop culture, whatever -- aren't you basically saying that, you know, let's modernize the whole book? And I think what Pat Robertson is saying, rightly or wrongly, is -- that book shouldn't be modernized. It ought to reflect what that Old Testament says.

Paul Levinson: I'm not saying that the Old Testament is wrong. I'm saying that the literal application of it to a Prime Minister who is trying to bring peace to his region when he is on his deathbed is a very inappropriate statement.

John Kasich: Fair point. Now, Janet, what I need to know from you is, when Pat does things like this or says things like this -- and I think you would agree, it wasn't the appropriate time. Agree with that? It was just not the right time to be talking about this.

Janet Folger: Look, the time you make statements like that is when you can do something about it -- don't divide the land.

John Kasich: So, inappropriate time. The question is, does Pat sort of undermine the movement when he makes a statement like this -- that he might -- which he says was taken out of context or whatever -- does it undermine the movement, the Christian movement? People say, I’m not gonna listen to that.

Janet Folger: You know - again, I'm not gonna be another voice to bully up or beat up on PR. He's free to defend himself and he's very capable of it --

John Kasich: Yeah, but I want to know what you think.

Janet Folger: -- but I don't think we should blame him for reading from the bible. And I'll be honest with you -- the way I read the Bible, it talks about -- nations that bless Israel are gonna be blessed, nations that curse Israel are gonna be cursed -- and I'll be honest with you, where I worry about the judgment being cast is that I think we need to look in the mirror -- because we're one of the groups, the nations that actually strong-armed the prime minister into giving up land, making Israel less secure. And --

John Kasich: I got you. Now -- People for the American Way, professor -- you know -- against flag desecration -- they're not like some mainstream group, you know -- they're way out there. It's like they grab everything that Pat says, they monitor everything he says. You're in communications -- have we gotten to the point now in America where, with the blogs and the 24-hour news cycle, you can't say anything? It's going to be analyzed, overanalyzed, taken out of context? Don't you think that's fair?

Paul Levinson: No. Criticism of what public figures say is a crucial part of dialogue in a democratic society, which we have. We don't live in a totalitarian state where religious or political leaders can say whatever they please and they're beyond criticism. Pat Robertson chose to say this in a public forum and I think that he's fair game for criticism. It's not the end of the world that he said it -- I don't think he should be executed, I'm not a fanatic myself --

John Kasich: Yeah, and I wouldn't compare him --

Paul Levinson: Well, it's an indication of what happens you apply in a fanatical, fundamentalist way --

John Kasich: Look, I don't think it's a fanatical way -- it's a reading of the Old Testament -- he has his view, to label it somehow, you know, off the deep end, I don't think is fair. Janet, what I'll say to you is, I know Pat, I like him very much, he's been a great leader. He's got to be a little more careful with how he says things and when he says things.

(The complete transcript of the segment can be found here.)

So, let me see if I'm getting this straight. What Pat Robertson says cannot be labeled as fanatical or "off the deep end," because his views are rooted in his reading of the Old Testament. And, of course, you can't possibly compare him to "this lunatic over in Iran," whose views are rooted in his reading of the Koran.

And no, I'm not saying that there's no difference between Pat Robertson and fundamentalist Islamic fanatics. Pat isn't urging people to strap on explosives and go blow up the infidels, nor is he calling for unchaste women to be stoned to death. But, just out of curiosity, if Pat did call for the stoning of adulteresses, would Kasich consider that "fanatical" and "off the deep end," or not? After all, that's based on a very literal reading of the Old Testament.

There's been a lot of talk in recent years about how religiously based opinions have the same right to be heard in the public square as opinions rooted in secular ideas. That's all good and fine; I certainly don't think that someone's position on any given issue is illegitimate because it's influenced by religion, and I think that a lot of the time, secular liberals have been dismissive of certain conservative views for no other reason. But if religiously based ideas should have equal access to the public square, they should not be off-limits to harsh criticism and even ridicule, any more than secular ideologies. If you can spout vicious nonsense and then have it excused on the grounds that it's your interpretation of the Bible, then maybe you don't belong in a public forum.

And how pathetic that, instead of firmly repudiating the odious Pat Robertson, Kasich should try to shoot the messenger and bizarrely suggest that it's unfair for the statements of public leaders to be analyzed too much.

More: Some of my commenters have suggested that Pat Robertson is not that important a political figure, and that his comments are being blown out of proportion. Robertson was the founder of the Christian Coalition, which played a leading role in organizing the conservative Christian base as a voting bloc in the 1990s. It's true that he stepped down as head of the Christian Coalition in 2001, and that the Coalition's political influence has waned. It is also quite true that, as this Washington Post article published last October points out, Robertson's own influence in the GOP is not at all what it used to be. Nonetheless, he is important enough that his endorsement of Bush Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers (remember her?) was treated as news by conservative media. Robertson has also met with Bush and Karl Rove; we're hardly talking about a minor figure.

Everything you knew about Hurricane Katrina was wrong

We've heard it over and over again: Hurricane Katrina was not just a natural disaster, and not just a tragic case of government bungling, but a searing indictment of American racism and social injustice.

Apparently, this conventional wisdom is completely wrong.

Knight Ridder reports:

Four months after Hurricane Katrina, analyses of data suggest that some widely reported assumptions about the storm's victims were incorrect.

For example, a comparison of locations where 874 bodies were recovered with U.S. census tract data indicates that the victims weren't disproportionately poor. Another database of 486 Katrina victims from Orleans and St. Bernard parishes, compiled by Knight Ridder, suggests they also weren't disproportionately African American.

Both sets of data are incomplete; Louisiana state officials have released no comprehensive list of the dead. Still, they provide the most comprehensive information available to date about who paid the ultimate price in the storm.

The one group that was disproportionately affected by the storm appears to have been older adults. People 60 and older account for only about 15 percent of the population in the New Orleans area, but the Knight Ridder database found that 74 percent of the dead were 60 or older. Nearly half were older than 75. Many of those were at nursing homes and hospitals, where nearly 20 percent of the victims were recovered.

Lack of transportation was assumed to be a key reason that many people stayed behind and died, but at many addresses where the dead were found, their cars remained in their driveways, flood-ruined symbols of fatal miscalculation.

The addresses where bodies were recovered were compiled by Louisiana state officials and released earlier this month. Knight Ridder charted the locations on a map of Orleans and St. Bernard parishes, then compared them with census data on income in those neighborhoods. The analysis excluded 216 bodies that were recovered from hospitals and nursing homes, as well as 63 recovered at collection points where people had dropped off bodies in the days after the storm ...

The comparison showed that 42 percent of the bodies found in Orleans and St. Bernard parishes were recovered in neighborhoods with poverty rates higher than 30 percent. That's only slightly higher than the 39 percent of residents who lived in such neighborhoods, according to the census data.

Similarly, 31 percent of the bodies turned up in areas with poverty rates below 15 percent, where 30 percent of the population lived.

The median household income in neighborhoods where Katrina victims were recovered was about $27,000 a year, just under the $29,000 median for the overall area.

One-fourth of Katrina deaths fell in census tracts with median incomes above $35,300. One-fourth of the area's pre-storm population lived in tracts with median incomes above $37,000.

About 67 percent of the mapped deaths fell in the central and western portion of New Orleans, an area thought to have flooded primarily because of the failure of man-made structures.

The separate Knight Ridder database of 486 Katrina victims was compiled from official information released by state and federal authorities and interviews with survivors of the dead. It catalogued deaths according to location, race, age, name and cause of death.

In that database, African Americans outnumbered whites 51 percent to 44 percent. In the area overall, African Americans outnumber whites 61 percent to 36 percent.

In Orleans Parish, 62 percent of known Katrina victims were African American, compared with 66 percent for the total parish population.

In St. Bernard Parish, 92 percent of the identified victims were white. Census figures show that 88 percent of parish residents identified themselves as white.

Among hurricane victims on the Knight Ridder list, men outnumbered women 51 percent to 49 percent, about the same as in the overall area before the storm.

(Hat tip: Eric at Classical Values.)

Of course, deaths are not the only measure of Katrina's impact. It may well be, for instance, that the people left dispossessed by the hurricane are disproportionately poor and/or black; it is very likely that people with few resources will find recovery more diffcult. But Katrina's dead were certainly the starkest evidence of the hurricane's devastating impact; and we were told that those dead had been killed by racism and economic injustice, by societal and political indifference to the plight of black people and poor people. So the Knight Ridder investigation does, in fact, seem to knock down Katrina's central myth.

Eric inquires:

Is it reasonable to expect apologies from the people who claimed that the deaths were a form of "genocide" caused by Bush racism?

Reasonable, yes; realistic, no.

Meanwhile, GayPatriot.com suggests one obvious conclusion: "George Bush hates old people!"

On a more serious note: the paucity of coverage this story has received is disappointing, and rather remarkable. The article was released by Knight Ridder on December 30 and picked up by 22 Knight-Ridder newspaper, but few featured it very prominently. Only three -- The Charlotte Observer, The Akron Beacon Journal, and The Bradenton Herald (Florida) -- ran it on the front page; most buried it well inside. The analysis has received no mention in The New York Times, The Washington Post, or USA Today; there has not been a single editorial commenting on it, from any of the papers that told us all about how Katrina has exposed the inequities of race and class in America.

No wonder a lot of people think there really is a "liberal media."

Rather surprisingly, the blogosphere has also paid little attention to this debunking of Katrina myths. Yet this is an important story which says a great deal about the knee-jerk acceptance of claims that support conventional wisdom about America's social ills. It should be reported more widely, and there should be more apologies.

Unhinged, revisited

Dave Neiwert responds to my posts responding to his critique of Michelle Malkin's book, Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild.

Neiwert believes I'm wrong to equate political nastiness on the right and the left when the right is clearly so much worse. (Of course, a lot of my conservative commenters think I'm wrong to equate political nastiness on the right and the left when the left is clearly so much worse.) It may well be that I'm wrong. I'm not a believer in balance for the sake of balance, an approach which Dave summarizes with this acid quote: "If two groups are locked in argument, one maintaining that 2+2=4, and the other claiming that 2+2=6, sure enough, an Englishman will walk in and settle on 2+2=5, denouncing both groups as extremists." There are certainly many instances ("intelligent design" vs. Darwinian evolution, communism vs. anticommunism) where I don't think that each side has its good points.

But what about Dave Neiwert's specific rebuttal?

Look at the examples Young proffers:

-- Some Democratic Underground commenters who intentionally chose not to stop and help a Bush supporter with auto trouble by the roadside.

-- Markos' "screw them" comment regarding the four contractors killed at Fallujah.

-- Some Manichean "us and them" rhetoric from Howard Dean.

-- Some remarks from Michael Moore and Garrison Keillor that even Young admits are not really all that ugly.

Notice something missing? How about the fact that none of these people on the left come even close to having the kind of mass audience that Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh enjoy?

Time out. Michael Moore and Howard Dean don't have a mass audience comparable to O'Reilly & Co.? All right, neither of them broadcasts daily, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily less influential. (Dean routinely adresses and fires up Democratic audiences around the country.) Markos Moulitsas -- the Daily Kos -- has a huge Internet following. Garrison Keillor has an audience of about 4 million on National Public Radio. (I should clarify, by the way, that my example of Markos' "Screw them" remark was cited as a specific parallel to Rush Limbaugh saying that the peace activists who were taken hostage in Iraq were asking for it.)

Neiwert goes on:

But the main element lacking in these examples is pretty self-evident: None of these remarks are eliminationist. None of them describes a desire to simply eliminate a significant bloc of one's opposition, let alone its entirety (though Keillor's, which wishes for the disenfranchisement of born-again Christians, comes close).

In particular, Neiewert takes exception with this comment from my second blogpost:

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.

(Bold added by Dave Neiwert.)

Neiwert comments:

Perhaps Young finds this distance so short because her description elides the most significant component of this: the desire to inflict harm. If you go back and read the post that Young cites, you'll see that I describe the problem with eliminationism thus: "It's simply a declaration of enmity and the intent to cause harm."

Viewed this way -- that is, as reality -- there is a significant distance between deportation and secession. The former indeed wishes serious harm upon its victims, including deprivation of their rights, their livelihoods, and their property; while the latter wishes not to be politically obligated or connected to their opponents any longer -- it merely severs the relationship, instead of inflicting actual harm.

As reality? Does Dave Neiwert think that Bill O'Reilly really thinks it would be okay for the Al Qaeda to blow up San Francisco, or that Rush Limbaugh really thinks that it would be a good idea to kill all the liberals except for a couple who should be preserved as living relics? I don't. As much as I loathe Ann Coulter, I don't think even she really wishes that Timothy McVeigh had driven his explosives-laden truck into the New York Times building.

Neiwert cites his earlier post discussing "eliminationism" in which he says:

And yes, it's often voiced as crude "jokes", the humor of which, when analyzed, is inevitably predicated on a venomous hatred.

But what we also know about this rhetoric is that, as surely as night follows day, this kind of talk eventually begets action, with inevitably tragic results.

As surely as night follows day? Examples?

I think the liberal-bashing rhetoric Neiwert rightly finds appalling is bad because it's poisonous and hateful, because it treats the opposition as the enemy, and because it precludes dialogue or engagement or any search for common ground -- not because it is an actual declaration of intent to harm. I guess we simply disagree on that one. I will note that in his examples of the hatefulness of this rhetoric, Neiwert quite rightly cites not only comments threatening liberals with harm, but also things like this Coulterism: "They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America’s self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant. Fifty years of treason hasn’t slowed them down."

Neiwert also points out that in the 1990s, extremist conservative speech -- specifically the wild rhetoric about Clinton -- had no real counterpart on the left, and that the rise of left-wing nastiness was simply a reaction. I think it's quite true that in the 1990s, right-wing talk radio vitriol had no counterpart on the left in terms of crudeness, name-calling, overt polemical vitriol, conspiracy-mongering, etc. But as I noted in my first "unhinged" post, there definitely was a lot of nastiness (and demonization) of a more genteel sort -- 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, the portrayal of Republicans and conservatives (not only in overtly political speech, but also in movies and on television) as cloddish, bigoted, selfish, greedy, dumb, etc. etc. And I do think that many conservatives' hostility to liberals was driven by this sort of contempt -- just as, for many conservatives, the politics of demonization began with the attacks on Robert Bork (who, for all his manifold sins, certainly did not deserve to be accused of wanting a return to "segregated lunch counters") and Clarence Thomas.

Neiwert asks:

Indeed, one has to wonder where Young was during most of the 1990s, when the right was frothing over with hatred of Bill Clinton and the mainstream left. Much of the eliminationist right-wing rhetoric that flourishes today, as well as the utter lack of civility and decorum on both sides, originated in those years.

For the record, I was writing a column for The Detroit News (no longer available online thanks to the Supreme Court decision protecting free-lance writers like me from having their work electronically reproduced without their permission, and to my own negligence in returning the permission form), in which I criticized, more than once, the Republicans' Clinton obsession. But I also remember other things from the 1990s. There was, for instance, the rhetoric suggesting that conservative critiques of big government had helped set the stage for the Oklahoma City bombing, or that Timothy McVeigh was driven by the same kind of ideas that led to the 1994 Republican victory in Congress. There was Al Gore's 1998 speech to the NAACP, in which he said that opponents of race-based affirmative action "use their colorblind the way duck hunters use a duck blind -- they hide behind it and hope the ducks won't notice," and went on to implicitly link them to hate crimes against blacks.

Finally, about solutions to the problem: Dave Neiwert says that if the left makes a conscious effort to stigmatize political hate speech in its ranks, it won't do much to promote civility or dialogue because the right will only get nastier. I think that, in the current climate, unilateral disarmanent is unlikely to work, on either side. That's why my suggestion from the start was a liberal/conservative coalition against hate (so to speak). I was thinking of a joint initiative by politicians, but in the meantime, why not us bloggers right here on the Internet? We already have a "Porkbusters" initiative; how about "Hatebusters"?

Nutty Pat strikes again

Today, a prominent religious leader has declared that Israeli Prime Minster Ariel Sharon's stroke was divine retribution.

Was it some fanatical jihadist mullah?

Nope.

Here's a hint: his initials are Pat Robertson.

"God considers this land to be his," Robertson said on his TV program "The 700 Club." "You read the Bible and he says `This is my land,' and for any prime minister of Israel who decides he is going to carve it up and give it away, God says, `No, this is mine.'"

Sharon, who ordered Israel's withdrawal from Gaza last year, suffered a severe stroke on Wednesday.

In Robertson's broadcast from his Christian Broadcasting Network in Virginia Beach, the evangelist said he had personally prayed about a year ago with Sharon, whom he called "a very tender-hearted man and a good friend." He said he was sad to see Sharon in this condition.

He also said, however, that in the Bible, the prophet Joel "makes it very clear that God has enmity against those who 'divide my land.'"

Sharon "was dividing God's land and I would say woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the EU (European Union), the United Nations, or the United States of America," Robertson said.

In discussing what he said was God's insistence that Israel not be divided, Robertson also referred to the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who had sought to achieve peace by giving land to the Palestinians. "It was a terrible thing that happened, but nevertheless he was dead," he said.

This is a guy who has been a fairly regular guest on Fox News' Hannity & Colmes as a spokesman for religious conservatives.

Recently, Pat Robertson has called for the assassination of Venezuela president Hugo Chavez and threatened the citizens of Dover, Pennsylvania with God's wrath for voting out anti-Darwin school board members. And now, this.

Can we all finally agree that Pat Robertson is beyond the pale?

Gender and job risk

In this comment on my thread on careers, marriage, and the gender imbalance in college education AprilPNW writes:

Just curious, since we've been discussing gender issues and work.

Has anyone come across any feminists/bloggers etc. decrying the gender imbalance of the 12 miners recently killed in the mining accident? After all - not a woman to found among them.

I'm not going to hold my breath, but I do frequently find that the holy grail of a 50/50, perfect gender balance in the workplace doesn't look so appealing when dirty and dangerous jobs are considered.

If anyone knows anything about affirmative action in the mining industry, I'd love to hear about it. After all, are these not some of the highest paid jobs in the area?

Actually, I was going to post something about this, though I was a little hesitant to use a horrible tragedy as fodder for gender politics. But I do think that it serves as a grim reminder that being killed on the job is primarily a male risk. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, women now make up 46% of the workforce but account for only 8% of on-the-job fatalities. (The non-fatal injury rate for men is 76% higher than for women, and 90% higher for reportable injuries.)

This is one area that men's rights advocates such as Warren Farrell often cite as evidence of hidden male disadvantage, and I think they have a point, even if they often cross the line into a male version of the victim mentality. The mine where the explosion took place reportedly had a deplorable record of safety violations and on-the-job injuries, and was still allowed to operate. If, in such circumstances, the tragedy had involved female-only casualties, it's likely that there would have been an outcry about our society's low regard for women's lives. While Farrell's claims that our society treats men as "disposable" are, in my view, greatly exaggerated, the attitude that it's more acceptable to put men's life and limb at risk certainly does exist.

And there is also a tendency to downplay or disregard the gender aspect of this problem facing men. The most egregious example I've ever seen was an October 3, 1993 New York Times story about a Department of Labor report on workplace fatalities. The story ran under the title, "High Murder Rate for Women on the Job: 40% of women killed at work are murdered, but figure for men is only 15%." This woman-as-victim spin disguised the fact that, according to the data cited within the article, 93% of the 6,083 people who were killed on the job in 1992 were men. 848 men and 170 women were murdered at work. In fact, male victims of homicide on the job outnumbered all female on-the-job fatalities nearly two to one. And this translated into "High Murder Rate for Women on the Job."

(Incidentally, in a critique of Warren Farrell on his blog, Thomas Volscho, a Ph. D. student in sociology at the University of Connecticut, uses a similar, more recent set of figures to make this assertion:

They [women] are also likely to be victims of violence, not only in their own homes, but in the workplace. A recent CDC report documents that homicides account for 11% of all occupational injury deaths among male workers, but for 42% of all occupational injury deaths among female workers. Men face a greater risk of violence in the workplace, but women are more likely to die from violence in the workplace.

Maybe the graduate sociology program at UConn ought to do a better job of teaching Ph.D. students how to count.)

Does the disproportionate presence of men in hazardous jobs partly account, as Farrell claims, for higher male earnings? Ampersand says no, citing a study that found no correlation between earnings and risk of fatal injury on the job; but apparently, these results change if agriculture is taken out of the equation, and agriculture is an industry that generally employs people with very few other options (including illegal immigrants). But that's not my main point here.

It's quite true that women who have gone into mining generally haven't found a very welcoming reception from men, and have faced a lot of discrimination. Ironically, the first woman miner to be killed on the job, Marilyn McCusker, who perished in an accident in 1979, had gotten the job due to a sex discrimination suit she had filed in federal court.

But it's also true that not a whole lot of women have been beating down the doors to take hazardous, dirty, physically arduous jobs, even when those job offer fairly high pay levels.

More: Today's New York Times has a poignant story about the victims' families that offers some insights into the miners' culture.

No one wanted to face the loss of the men who were the linchpins of their families - the tough, wiry wage earners who awoke each day at dawn for their 6 a.m. shift. The men who died ranged in age from 28 to 61, but most were veteran miners in their 40's and 50's. They were the sons of miners, the brothers of miners, and by and large they married miners' daughters. But they knew the danger of their work; at least two forbade their sons to take it up.

Martin Toler, 50, the crew boss, was the father of two and grandfather of four. Alva Martin Bennett, 50, worked in the mines for 30 years. Jim Bennett, 61, liked to sing in church. David Lewis, 28, stood out as the 6-foot-1 son of a dairy farmer. Terry Helms, 48, was a "fire boss" who monitored gas levels. The rest were identified by family members and news reports as Tom Anderson; George Hamner Jr.; Fred Ware Jr., 59; Jack Weaver, 52; Marshall Winans, 49; Mr. Groves; and Mr. Jones. The one survivor, Mr. McCloy, known as Skinny, was the youngest, at 27. He was in critical but stable condition Wednesday with a collapsed lung and kidney damage, a spokeswoman at Ruby Memorial Hospital in Morgantown said.

They were a stoic bunch, friends and relatives said.

"He never missed work," said Terry Helms's son, Nick. "He'd be sick as a dog and go into work. He worked double shifts. The day it happened he would have worked from 1:30 in the morning to 6 at night."

...

Mr. Perry said his father, Roger Perry, was still mining despite an accident on the job when he was 16 that left him with a wooden leg. Roger Perry's eyes were injured in Monday's explosion, but he was among those who turned back to try to rescue the trapped miners, his son said. Owen Jones, too, was one of those who escaped the explosion, while his brother Jesse remained trapped inside. On a normal day, a third brother, Lyndon, would have been in the mines as well, but he was on sick leave.

"Up in this area, when we was graduating from high school, that's what it was, was coal mines," Lyndon Jones said.

Mr. Jones said the perils of mining were overstated. But his wife, Carry, disagreed. "I heard him say that," she said dryly, taking the phone after he spoke with a reporter. Families worry about miners "every day," she said.

Career women, downwardly mobile men, and ... misogyny?

John Tierney's latest column about women, men, higher education, and marriage (sadly, a prisoner of Times Select) is raising some hackles. Echidne of the Snakes, the feminist blogger who just the other day made mincemeat of a much-trumpeted new study of gender differences in Internet usage, accuses Tierney of nothing less than misogyny -- though she says this harsh judgment is also based on some earlier columns of his. She even urges readers to stop subscribing to the Times in protest against the "woman-bashing" dished out by Tierney and David Brooks, who the other day rhapsodized about the power and fulfillment enjoyed by stay-at-home moms.

At Salon.com's Broadsheet blog, Lori Leibovich is equally unimpressed.

So, what is this horrible thing John Tierney said?

Here are some excerpts from his column, titled "Male Pride and Female Prejudice":

When there are three women for every two men graduating from college, whom will the third woman marry?

This is not an academic question. Women, who were a minority on campuses a quarter-century ago, today make up 57 percent of undergraduates, and the gender gap is projected to reach a 60-40 ratio within a few years. So more women, especially black and Hispanic women, will be in a position to get better-paying, more prestigious jobs than their husbands...

Tierney notes that while some men are reluctant to marry a higher-earning woman out of masculine pride, such attitudes seem to be dwindling:

In 1996, for the first time, college men rated a potential mate's financial prospects as more important than her skills as a cook or a housekeeper.

In the National Survey of Families and Households conducted during the early 1990's, the average single man under 35 said he was quite willing to marry someone earning much more than he did. He wasn't as interested in marrying someone making much less than he did, and he was especially reluctant to marry a woman who was unlikely to hold a steady job.

Those findings jibe with what I've seen. I can't think of any friend who refused to date a woman because she made more money than he did. When friends have married women with bigger paychecks, the only financial complaints I've heard from them have come when a wife later decided to pursue a more meaningful - i.e., less lucrative - career.

Nor can I recall hearing guys insult a man, to his face or behind his back, for making less than his wife. The only snide comments I've heard have come from women talking about their friends' husbands. I've heard just a couple of hardened Manhattanites do that, but I wouldn't dismiss them as isolated reactionaries because you can see this prejudice in that national survey of singles under 35.

The women surveyed were less willing to marry down - marry someone with much lower earnings or less education - than the men were to marry up. ...

You may think that women's attitudes are changing as they get more college degrees and financial independence. A woman who's an executive can afford to marry a struggling musician. But that doesn't necessarily mean she wants to. Studies by David Buss of the University of Texas and others have shown that women with higher incomes, far from relaxing their standards, put more emphasis on a mate's financial resources.

....

"Of course, some women marry for love and find a man's resources irrelevant," Buss says. "It's just that the men women tend to fall in love with, on average, happen to have more resources."

Which means that, on average, college-educated women and high-school-educated men will have a harder time finding partners as long as educators keep ignoring the gender gap that starts long before college. Advocates for women have been so effective politically that high schools and colleges are still focusing on supposed discrimination against women: the shortage of women in science classes and on sports teams rather than the shortage of men, period. You could think of this as a victory for women's rights, but many of the victors will end up celebrating alone.

Tierney's conclusion is a bit snide and smacks of the "uppity women will end up as old maids" cliché. But is he really, as Echidne claims, warning of "the dangers that women face if they veer away from the path traditionalists hold as the ideal one for women"? Nowhere in his column is there a suggestion that men are likely to shun successful, ambitious, high-earning women -- quite the opposite! Nor is he saying that it would be a good idea for women to avoid a higher education because it might harm their marriage prospects. Rather, the main point of his column is that in celebrating female achievement, we should not disregard male underachievement. Echidne claims that Tierney is calling for "affirmative action for men in college admissions," but he's not. He specifically says that educators must tackle the male/female gap in academic proficiency long before college. (His column is a response to the recent Weekly Standard article by Melana Zyla Vickers, "Where the Boys Aren't: The gender gap on college campuses.")

What's so outrageous here? The problem of the partner shortage faced by college-educated black women due to the huge gender gap in college attendance among African-Americans (among black college graduates in recent years, women outnumber men two to one) has been a subject of a great deal of discussion, certainly not just among conservatives.

Echidne seems particularly put off by the suggestion that women marry for money. In a separate post, she writes:

One quote in Tierney's column struck me with unusual vividity. It is by an evolutionary psychologist David Buss:

"Of course, some women marry for love and find a man's resources irrelevant," Buss says.

Color me naive but I assumed that most people in the western world who marry do so at least believing that it is for love. Am I totally mistaken in this? Is it true that only "some women" marry for love and that the others, presumably, marry for money? I don't know a single case of anybody, man or woman, marrying for money amongst my acquaintances but perhaps my acquaintances are atypical?

Leibovcih, quoting Echidne, repeats the same point. But they are both quoting a truncated version of the Buss quote. The second half is:

"It's just that the men women tend to fall in love with, on average, happen to have more resources."

Or, to quote the old saw: "It's just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor man."

Now, I'm not David Buss's biggest fan. I read a lot of his articles while researching my book, Ceasefire (which has a chapter on sex differences), and I think he often tends to "spin" his findings in a way that magnifies male-female differences. But come on, folks. Is anyone going to seriously argue that a man's resources -- income, power, status -- are generally irrelevant to women's preferences in the mating game in modern-day American culture? That doesn't mean most women are calculating golddigers (as some men's rights folks like to depict them), but yes, women generally prefer not to "marry down," and not just in terms of money but also in terms of prestige, education and intelligence, for which a college degree is considered a marker. To deny this fact is, shall we say, not very reality-based. Unlike many conservatives, I'm not saying that this is the way it should be or the way it always will be. But for now, such a trend is definitely there.

Leibovich's reaction is especially puzzling because her magazine, Salon.com, has published several interesting articles by Ann Marlowe dealing with this very problem. In a passage particularly relevant to this discussion, Marlowe writes:

Yes, there are plenty of young women who decry marrying for money, but how many of them would marry a man they knew would never make as much money as they do? Money is too tied to power, and hence to our perceptions of sexiness, to be removed from the marital equation.

In another article, Marlowe notes:

We rarely examine the values implied by the kinds of remarks we let slip constantly -- "She married badly," "He's a meal ticket," "She's too high-maintenance." Very few women would react well if a man asked their price, but many will casually boast of their boyfriend's expensive presents or recent promotion, or imply that a lover's income offsets other less stellar qualities.

Marlowe, it should be noted, is a feminist who strongly believes that women can break these patterns. I personally think that she overstates her case somewhat and draws too stark a picture, and tends, not unlike the conservatives, to overgeneralize about women and men. But, in broad terms, she is certainly on to something. Another feminist who has addressed this is writer Peggy Orenstein, whose 2000 book, Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids and Life in a Half-Changed World, based on interviews with about 200 women in their twenties and thirties, makes it clear that most young women -- including ones with professed feminist values and aspirations -- place a very conscious value on a prospective husband's earning potential and ambition.

However, once again, it's not just about money. It's about status, intelligence, personal growth, if you will. A friend who teaches at a state university told me that she has noticed a pattern among female students from a working-class background: having gotten a college degree, or even some college education, they dump their boyfriends or husbands who have not continued their eudcation beyond high school, mainly because they feel that they have "outgrown" these men. I would add that, today, most college-educated men would probably not see a woman without a college degree as a suitable marriage partner -- whether or not her degree enhances her earnings.

So yes, the gender gap in college attendance is very likely to create a skewed marriage market (pardon the utilitarian terminology) in which educated, career-oriented women will face a shortage of marriageable men. It's hardly anti-feminist to acknowledge this fact.



By the way, Leibovich's post is followed by some very interesting reader comments discussing these issues.