Newsweek’s choice of cover art for its Sarah Palin issue has managed to generate controversy for three days now, finally prompting a response from the editors.  The salient passage:

To note that choosing that particular photograph has ruffled a few feathers is perhaps an understatement. Palin denounced it—and us—to her million-strong Facebook following last night. “The choice of photo for the cover of this week’s Newsweek is unfortunate. When it comes to Sarah Palin, this ‘news’ magazine has relished focusing on the irrelevant rather than the relevant,” she wrote on her fan page, adding, “The out-of-context Newsweek approach is sexist and oh-so-expected by now.” She also told ABC’s Barbara Walters that she found the cover “a wee bit degrading.” Others, like CBN’s David Brody, said our cover was a new low: “biased and sexist at the same time.”

Today, Newsweek’s Editor Jon Meacham has responded to critics. “We chose the most interesting image available to us to illustrate the theme of the cover, which is what we always try to do,” Meacham said. “We apply the same test to photographs of any public figure, male or female: does the image convey what we are saying? That is a gender-neutral standard.”

As with June’s controversy over Sarah Palin’s toenails, the issue here isn’t so much sexism as it is contempt for the erstwhile vice presidential nominee as a serious public figure.  Indeed, the “theme of the cover” could not be more clear:  Palin’s a buffoon.  Why, it’s right there in bold text:  “Sarah” (not “Governor Palin” or even “Palin” but “Sarah”) is a “Problem” one must “solve.”  Lest one miss that not-so-subtle message, the subhead goes on to inform us that “She’s bad news for the GOP — and for everybody else, too.”

Now, as regular readers are painfully aware, I’m not a big fan of Palin.  I thought she was a disastrous choice for the nomination from the instant it was announced and hope very much that her brand of silly populism isn’t the future of the Republican Party.

Then again, OTB is a journal of opinion, not a news magazine.  You come here to read the signed analysis of our writers whereas, presumably, you read Newsweek for detached roundups of the week’s most important events.

It’s odd enough for Newsweek to have two opinion pieces on Palin, an out-of-office politician who’s peddling a book she almost certainly didn’t write, in the issue.  Let alone that they’re both negative.  (”Palin’s Base Appeal” by Christopher Hitchens and “Gone Rogue – How Sarah Palin Hurts the GOP and the Country” by Evan Thomas.)  But to add insult to injury by choosing to portray Palin on the cover in a way that they would never use for any other former governor or vice presidential nominee — male or female — is beyond the boundaries of objective journalism.

Yes, Palin posed for those photos.  For Runner’s World.  What she was thinking when she agreed to pose for the cheesy ones with the flags — which have very little to do with running or fitness — I don’t know.  At the time, I wrote that “Palin has crossed the line from politician to pop culture celebrity,”  an assertion of which I’m even more confident today.  But, again, that’s a fair point for political commentary, not for an outlet purporting to be covering the news.

UPDATE:  Until seeing some traffic to it in my referral logs, I’d completely forgotten about the “Newsweek Sarah Palin Cover Outrage!” from October 2008.  That one featured a non-airbrushed close-up of Palin’s face and a Jon Meacham cover story titled “She’s One of the Folks (And that’s the problem).” I sense a trend.

While I’m a huge fan of Christopher Hitchens as a writer, let’s face it, the man can be a jackass. And while I largely share his views on organized religion, I find his condescension rather mean-spirited. So when he penned a column for Slate articulating “What I’ve learned from debating religious people around the world,” I was expecting the worst. And was thus pleasantly surprised.

I haven’t yet run into an argument that has made me want to change my mind. After all, a believing religious person, however brilliant or however good in debate, is compelled to stick fairly closely to a “script” that is known in advance, and known to me, too. However, I have discovered that the so-called Christian right is much less monolithic, and very much more polite and hospitable, than I would once have thought, or than most liberals believe. I haven’t been asked to Bob Jones University yet, but I have been invited to Jerry Falwell’s old Liberty University campus in Virginia, even though we haven’t yet agreed on the terms.

[...]

Usually, when I ask some Calvinist whether he is really a Calvinist (in the sense, say, of believing that I will end up in hell), there is a slight reluctance to say yes, and a slight wince from his congregation. I have come to the conclusion that this has something to do with the justly famed tradition of Southern hospitality: You can’t very easily invite somebody to your church and then to supper and inform him that he’s marked for perdition. More to the point, though, you soon discover that many of those attending are not so sure about all the doctrines, either, just as you very swiftly find out that a vast number of Catholics don’t truly believe more than about half of what their church instructs them to think. Every now and then I read reports of polls that tell me that more Americans believe in the virgin birth or the devil than believe in Darwinism: I’d be pretty sure that at least some of these are unwilling to confess their doubts to someone who calls them up on their kitchen phone.

To be sure, he gets in a barb here and there.  But what he’s discovered is that people of faith are often, if not usually, decent, intelligent folks with minds of their own.

Hitchens interprets this as a sign that religious faith is losing out to secularism, which he and I both consider “a wholly good development” and “part of the pluralism and polycentrism that distinguish the sort of society that we have to defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”  But I differ with him a bit in assessing the degree to which religiosity is withering versus simply evolving.   For a variety of cultural and psychological reasons, most Americans continue to be religious believers.  But they’re also children (or, perhaps more accurately, great-great grandchildren) of the Enlightenment and the Reformation.  So they hold onto the parts they believe or find comfort in and adapt the rest to fit the world they live in.

Dan Gilgoff passes on word of a new survey projecting that a quarter of Americans will be atheists or non-believers twenty years from now.

If current trends continue, a quarter of Americans are likely to claim “no religion” in 20 years, according to a survey out today by Trinity College. Americans who identify with no religious tradition currently comprise 15 percent of the country, representing the fastest growing segment of the national religious landscape.

While the numbers portend a dramatic change for the American religious scene—”religious nones” accounted for just 8 percent of the population in 1990—the United States is not poised adopt the anti-religious posture of much of secularized Europe. That’s because American religious nones tend to be religious skeptics as opposed to outright atheists. Fewer than ten percent of those identifying with no religious tradition call themselves atheists or hold atheistic beliefs, according to the new study. “American nones are kind of agnostic and deistic, so it’s a very American kind of skepticism,” says Barry Kosmin, director of Trinity’s Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture. “It’s a kind of religious indifference that’s not hostile to religion the way they are in France. Franklin and Jefferson would have recognized these people.”

The new study found that, in addition to seeing relatively strong retention numbers, American nones are quickly gaining new members. “Twenty-two percent of the youngest cohort of adults self-identify as nones and they will become tomorrow’s parents,” according to the report. “If current trends continue and cohorts of non-religious young people replace older religious people, the likely outcome is that in two decades the nones could account for around one-quarter of the American population.”

Not surprisingly, Andrew Sullivan attributes the rise of the nones partly to “the intellectual collapse of Christianity under the leadership of Protestant fundamentalists and Catholic theocons.” He adds, “The well-deserved inability of literalists to win many converts among educated people is also surely salient. The emergence of the politicized Christianist right – and its assault on Christianity as a freely chosen spiritual process – will surely lead to a continued and accelerating flight from organized religion.”

While I know many highly educated believers, they do indeed seem to be less than literal in their theology.  But Andrew believes this could lead to a renaissance of faith: “61 percent of Nones find evolution convincing, compared with 38 percent of all Americans. And yet they do not dismiss the possibility of a God they do not understand; and refuse to call themselves atheists. This is the fertile ground on which a new Christianity will at some point grow.”

Color me skeptical.  Religion without wild leaps of faith strikes me as almost pointless.  And I’m not sure the reluctance to jump from “none” to “atheist” is a pining for a more intellectual theology so much as wanting to avoid the cultural stigma that comes with the latter.

This is the view of PZ Myers who, naturally, is “disappointed” and contemptuous.  “I will not be content until the number is 100%. (OK, 95%. It’s not fair to demand rationality from people who are brain damaged or locked up in asylums.)”

Every article I see on this subject makes this desperate rush to reassure their readers that this growing cohort of Americans aren’t really those goddamned atheists — they’re nice people, unlike those cold-hearted, soulless beasts called atheists, and they aren’t planning to storm your churches and rape the choir boys and boil babies in the baptismal fonts, unlike the scary atheistic monsters. They’re special. And most of all, they aren’t French.

[...]

Oh, please. All the low frequency of self-reported atheists in the survey tells you is that the long-running campaign in American culture to stigmatize atheism has been highly successful — and it’s an attitude that we still see expressed in reports like this. The most important news they try to transmit is not the increase in unbelievers, it’s “Thank God they aren’t atheists! They’re just rational skeptics, instead!”

I suspect part of the reason that people are reluctant to call themselves “atheists” is a fear of being lumped in with the likes of Myers, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins.  Not satisfied to use their considerable brainpower to argue for scientific explanations over supernatural ones, they instead show utter disdain for the overwhelming majority of their fellow citizens who were brought up in a religious tradition and cling to parts of it.  “Atheism” in this sense isn’t a mere belief that there is no supernatural overlord controlling our universe but a quasi-religion of its own, with many of the worst traits of organized religion.

Similarly, AllahPundit likes the trend but is baffled by the non-believers who have a “personal god” or otherwise quasi-religious beliefs.   But that strikes me as a cultural phenomenon rather than a purely religious one.  America is steeped in religious traditions that are followed even by non-believers.  Pretty much everyone celebrates Christmas, for example, and even Easter — a more purely religious occasion that doesn’t even result in an extra day off work — has a huge secular buy-in, what with Easter bunnies and the various fun traditions for kids.  Not only does Big Business glom onto these occasions but they’re also massive public rituals, as well.  The President lights the national Christmas tree.  He hosts an Easter egg roll.   We reflexively say “Bless you” when people sneeze and take the Lord’s name in vain when we’re angry, regardless whether we believe in said Lord’s existence.

A sizable number of America’s self-described “religious,” even those who attend church with some regularity, aren’t religious in the sense that their 16th Century forebears were.  They pick and choose from the teachings of their chosen faith at will, occasionally even choosing a new faith altogether for reasons of “comfort” and convenience.  It’s a communal experience from which many draw inspiration and comfort.

Image: SoulPancake

Christopher Hitchens is an iconoclast’s iconoclast, famously willing to piss on anyone’s grave, whether it be Mother Tereasa, Bob Hope, or Teddy Kennedy. Interestingly, this time he smacks down with one hand whilst patting on the back with the other:

Sure, the “tragedy” of Chappaquiddick had its necessary moment, but even in those days Barbara Walters was doing her damage control, and it was amazing to see a clip of Walter Cronkite referring deadpan to the “driving accident” that had kept Kennedy away from the Senate. It must take some ingenuity at the networks, even so, to simply airbrush the fascist sympathies and bootlegging background of Joseph Kennedy Sr., his sons’ murder campaigns in Cuba, the recruitment of the mafia for same, the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam, the increasingly frantic and pathetic narco-addictions of JFK, the exploitation of unstable broads like Marilyn Monroe, and so much else besides.

In some ways, this banana-republic coverage was a disservice even to the recently departed. After all, it was in part the case that the youngest brother had lived down the criminal and narcissistic and power-mad background of his family. His best biographer, Adam Clymer, wrote, on the morning after he died, that it was arguably wrong to see a discontinuity in Kennedy’s career and that he had actually been a decent-enough legislator before abandoning any yearning for the White House after 1980. This may be true as far as it goes, but the obituaries would still have had to be somewhat different in tone, even given the servility of the journalistic profession, if Kennedy had died at the time of the Au Bar episode in Palm Beach, for instance, and had not decided to take some kind of a pull on himself and become a citizen again instead of a drone.

A former Senate staffer of his stopped by for a drink last week and told me that, without fanfare, the socialist president of Chile had come in person to the Kennedy home a few months ago to bestow one of her nation’s highest human rights awards on him. His work on that subject alone was a part atonement for his siblings’ deployment of what Lyndon Johnson himself called “a goddam Murder Incorporated” in the Southern Hemisphere. So, of course, was his labor on health care (where Richard Nixon had a better political track record than the Kennedy administration) and his last decision to keep looking life in the face for as long as he had breath. In those waning months, after being disgusted by malicious anti-Obama propaganda being spread in the Democratic primaries—later picked up and used by the right in the general election—he withdrew his support from a candidate whose victory would have meant the continuation of the dynastic politics represented by the family names Bush, Gore, and Clinton. What a favor he did us all by that repudiation! And how fitting that it should have been a Kennedy who did it. The political rhetoric of Obamaism, alas, is even more bloviating at times than Camelot was, but you can’t have everything.

A fitting roundup, really.  The story of the youngest of the Kennedy brothers was of wretched excess and abuse of privilege followed by genuine and rather remarkable redemption.   As Hitch puts it in the close, “Kennedy’s very last year was quite possibly his best, and how many men or women will be able to say that?”

Russell Jacoby laments that it has become almost impossible for intellectuals to sustain themselves without institutional backing:

Yes, a few souls manage to hustle and do quite nicely, for instance, Christopher Hitchens. Yes, a few magazines like the “New Yorker” pay a living wage, but for most to survive, if not flourish, requires a working (and willing) spouse, family money or an academic position (or its equivalent such as a slot in a think tank or policy outfit). Yes, Scialabba has a chair at Harvard, but his sits behind a desk on the ground floor of the building which he superintends. Only the most resolute can juggle for years a day job and night time of writing. For almost everyone else, the choice is to join an institution or die on the vine.

In the wake of government harassment of professors in the 1950s, Albert Einstein was asked about the situation of scientists and famously replied, “If I would be a young man again and had to decide how to make my living, I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler in the hope to find that modest degree of independence still available under present circumstances.” Even for the 1950s the reference to a peddler is dated, yet the point remains salient. What are the costs of the institutionalization of intelligence?

[...]

The Internet allows new voices , but it also undercuts the traditional magazines and newspapers that at least pretended to pay. The Web forces more people to join in the rat-race to earn a living or find an academic or neo-academic position – or vanish.

I’ve been living the so-called “life of the mind” since at least the early 1990s, sometimes with institutional backing (a university or a think tank) and sometimes without (blogging and freelance writing in conjunction with other jobs or as a full-time job).  And, yes, plumbers make more per hour.

Then again, I knew that going in.  And I had no interest in fixing clogged toilets for a living.

There is more terrific intellectual discourse out there on the Web than I can possibly keep up with.  That it pays nothing or little is, I suppose, a pity.  But that it nonetheless gets produced would seem evidence of a non-problem.  The public gets the benefit of the work and the producers of the work get enough reward — even if it’s psychic rather than monetary — to continue producing it.   And they still manage to feed themselves, somehow.

And, frankly, discounting institutions seems rather silly.  Saying that one can’t make a living thinking unless one works for a university, think tank, or magazine is rather like the old Monty Python sketch about how the Romans never did anything for the people “apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order.”  After all, those places employ tens of thousands of people.

Image: Defense Tech

In response to a commenter’s assertion in my Police Taser Deaf, Retarded Man post that “officers are killed in the line of duty are the time,” Jim Henley retorts, “Define line of duty and all the time.”

Kelley Vlahos does just that in a piece for The American Conservative.  The numbers are surprising:

According to federal statistics, the number of police officers shot and killed in the line of duty is at an historic low. The nationwide number actually dropped 40 percent — from 68 in 2007 to 41 in 2008. The numbers have been on a downward trajectory for years, and Tasers are in part, credited. But there are other reasons, too, like the fact that overall violent crime is down, police wear super high-tech bullet-proof vests today and some 2.3 million Americans are incarcerated and off the streets.

Meanwhile, the stats on the number of American citizens police have killed in that timespan are much more elusive. According to this 2007 report (unverified), 9,500 people were killed by cops from 1980 through 2003, an average of 380 a year, one a day. These recent DOJ numbers jibe, with 1,540 killed by police from 2003-2006. Amnesty International says 351 people have died from police Tasers since 2001.

Now, frankly, if those 351 people were all violent criminals who posed a real danger to the police officers or civilians, I could live with that.  But that’s not the case.

[A] quick Google News search of the last month alone reveals a barrage of police tasing incidents across the country one more barbaric than the other: grandmas, grandpas, the mentally ill, teens and even children. Some of these taser victims died. One (ok, in Australia) burst into flames, another was left with burns in his anus, and yet another, a 14-year-old girl, got it in the head — running away after a dispute with her mother over a cell phone (caution, graphic).

All — in varying degrees — needed to be “subdued” by police, and were. It is, after all, a most effective tool in that regard, especially when dealing with  pregnant women, 16-year-olds with broken backs and 6-year-old boys. After reading news reports dating back to 2004 about the hyper-use of these 50,000-volt zap guns, it’s not difficult to imagine what might have happened if Gates were say, in Boise, and had hurled one more insult, used a few expletives, raised a hand or moved toward Officer James Crowley in a “threatening manner,” much like this guy, who was irate and scary, but nonetheless handcuffed and shackled, when he was Tasered in a Kentucky court on July 22.

When Reason wrote about Tasers in 2005, there were 6,000 law enforcement agencies employing Taser guns. The high-voltage weapons, according to the Amnesty International statistics in the report, “are used on unarmed suspects in 80 percent of the cases, for verbal non-compliance in 36 percent, and for cases involving ‘deadly assault’ only 3 percent of the time.”

Officers do what they’re trained to do and, sadly, that often means bullying citizens and escalating to violent confrontation quite rapidly.  Accordingly, if  they’re prudent, honest citizens accosted by boorish cops will behave more like Colin Powell than Christopher Hitchens.   But we should change the culture so that we don’t have to.

Related:  A rather off-color public service announcement from Chris Rock:

UPDATE:  Radley Balko points to this positively frightening post by a pseudonymous LAPD officer at NRO.

So, since the president is keen on offering instruction, here is what I would advise he teach his Ivy League pals, and anyone else who may find himself unexpectedly confronted by a police officer: You may be as pure as the driven snow itself, but you have no idea what horrible crime that police officer might suspect you of committing. You may be tooling along on a Sunday drive in your 1932 Hupmobile when, quite unknown to you, someone else in a 1932 Hupmobile knocks off the nearby Piggly Wiggly. A passing police officer sees you and, asking himself how many 1932 Hupmobiles can there be around here, pulls you over. At that moment I can assure you the officer is not all that concerned with trying not to offend you. He is instead concerned with protecting his mortal hide from having holes placed in it where God did not intend. And you, if in asserting your constitutional right to be free from unlawful search and seizure fail to do as the officer asks, run the risk of having such holes placed in your own.

When the officer has satisfied himself that it was not you and your Hupmobile that were involved in the Piggly Wiggly heist, he owes you an explanation for the stop and an apology for the inconvenience, but if you’re running your mouth about your rights and your history of oppression and what have you, you’re likely to get neither.

It’s thinking like that that gives “police state” a bad name.  See Radley’s take-down.

Photo by Flickr user hradcanska under Creative Commons license.

Hugh Hewitt has come up with a brilliant meme:

“LKM” stands for Larry King Minutes –the number of broadcast minutes that Larry King would devote to your death if it occurred today.  Michael Jackson has set a very high standard, swamping all other coverage from Larry’s show and triggering hours and hours of extra programming from Larry.

Conor Friedersdorf and Andrew Sullivan have already pointed to this, with the latter quipping, “I suspect that neither Hugh nor I would make it past a few seconds. Which is, in so many ways, a relief.” I can easily top that, in that King wouldn’t notice at all.

I’m reminded of a superbly entertaining piece by Matt Labash that I noted in the very earliest days at OTB wherein he was on assignment in Iraq and met two somewhat more famous companions.

When I came back out, [Christopher] Hitchens was having a smoke, and [P.J.] O’Rourke had rejoined him. Watching the two of them, I suddenly had a sinking feeling. If our convoy went up in flames, I wouldn’t even rank in the group obituary. It would read something like, “Found next to Hitchens and O’Rourke was an unidentified crispy critter from the British newspaper, the Evening Standard.”

Heh.

“Christopher Hitchens says that martinis are like breasts: One is one too few, while three is one too many.”  – via Andrew Exum, who recommends doubling that recommendation to ward off the swine flu.

I’m not so sure about Exum’s medical advice — although he is a doctor (of philosophy) — but Hitchens’ advice is both sound and a superb mnemonic device.

Photo via Flickr user MLHS under Creative Commons license.

Timothy Sandefur is embarrassed:

So I was watching this insane video of Christopher Hitchens and Salman Rushdie discussing the War on Terrorism with Mos Def. And it’s amusing to laugh at the utterly hapless ignorance of “Mr. Def,” as he is repeatedly called—until you stop and wonder. Why is the black community not outraged by this? Bill Maher hosts a talk show to discuss the threat of Islamic terrorism and the Middle East, and he invites two world-renowned white male intellectuals and Mos Def? If this show had been choreographed by the Ku Klux Klan it could not have been more infuriating. Did Maher not have the phone number of a black intellectual? Were Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Orlando Patterson, Julian Bond, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, John McWhorter all busy?

Here’s the video:

While I agree entirely that this is an absurd pairing, it’s most definitely not a racist one.  Sandefur has apparently never seen “Real Time with Bill Maher.”  The premise of the show, from its inception more than six years ago, has been to pair politicos and pop culture figures in discussion.  (Whether the point of the exercise was to demonstrate that the latter are morons or that their opinions are equally valid, I could never determine.)

Here are the seven season openers.

February 21, 2003. Guests: Author Ann Coulter, actor Larry Miller, writer, radio host and professor Michael Eric Dyson, comedian Sarah Silverman, comedian Chris Rock.  Topics: The UN, Affirmative Action.

January 16, 2004. Guests: Ret. Gen. Wesley Clark, artist Moby, Rev. Al Sharpton, actor Ron Silver, Rep. Darrell Issa. Topics: American values, Iraq, MoveOn.org, environment.

February 18, 2005. Guests: Correspondent Lesley Stahl, actor Robin Williams, former H&HS Sec. Tommy Thompson, Sen. Joe Biden, and actor Don Cheadle. Topics: On protecting sources, Jeff Gannon, on Interrogating prisoners, Iraq elections, Darfur.

February 17, 2006. Guests: Sen. Russ Feingold, commentator Fred Barnes, actor Eddie Griffin, reporter Helen Thomas, Iraq advisor Dan Senor. Topics: Cheney shooting, on the Patriot Act, Bush, Mohammad cartoons.

February 16, 2007. Guests: Fmr Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, fmr Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, TV host Craig Ferguson; via satellite, fmr Sen. John Edwards and basketball player John Amaechi. Topics: Developments in North Korea, Iran, and Iraq; global warming; Mitt Romney and Mormonism; Al Franken Senate campaign.

January 11, 2008. Guests: Entrepreneur Mark Cuban, fmr Court TV anchor Catherine Crier, fmr Bush Press Secy Tony Snow, Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi (election correspondent); via satellite, humorist P.J. O’Rourke. Topics: New Hampshire primary, electronic voting machines, Iraq troop surge, subprime lending and prospects for economic recession.

February 20, 2009. Guests: Financial Times editor Chrystia Freeland, journalist Tina Brown, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA); via satellite, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), journalist Brigitte Gabriel The economy, President Obama’s first month in office.

See the Wikipedia episode guide if you fear the season openers are not representative.

The pairings are, in most if not all cases, patently absurd. They include plenty of famous white guys who would, on the face of things, seem to be woefully out of their elements and plenty of black guys who would seemingly mop of the floor with the competition.

For what it’s worth, Mr. Def was really good in this week’s “House.”

Christopher Hitchens at Beiteddine (Photo by Michael J. Totten)

A story that I’ve ignored thus far in this space is Christopher Hitchens managing to get himself beat up in Beirut by confronting some thugs. Michael Totten, who was a participant in the encounter, has the definitive account.

Scott Payne is an admirer of Hitchens’ boldness:

I spend a lot of time on this site talking about how we need to respect one another and that we ought to develop an ability for cross-ideological communication, all of which I do sincerely believe and will continue to argue. But there are times… there are times that call for the confidence, gusto, and stupidity to get yourself into situations like the one described in this story. Perhaps not against armed militants in Beruit, but there are times when in your face denouncement is the only acceptable response to some sets of beliefs.

Andrew Exum, however, captures my thoughts on the matter succinctly: “There is a thin line between badass and dumbass.”

Totten, choosing to jump in to defend his friend at the risk of his own life, was decidedly on the good side of that line.  Hitchens, provoking a gang of thugs by an action that merely made him feel good but was likely to have no consequence in advancing liberty, was well on the wrong side.

Hitchens’ life is too valuable to put at risk in a childish stunt.  He has both the talent and the platforms to fight the Syrian Social Nationalist Party and their ilk by more effective means than scribbling dirty words on a poster.

Christopher Hitchens has started a campaign to call Mumbai Bombay again,  generating responses from Ezra Klein , Tim Fernholz, Isaac Chotiner, DJW and others.  The debate surrounds the history of colonialism and religious intolerance prompting Jim Henley to note, via a Google Reader comment, “Fellow doesn’t get that the imperialism part is where he assume it’s his business one way or the other.”

There is that.

Good line, purportedly from Jon Stewart:

Obama is not upset about the cartoon that calls him a Muslim extremist. Who gets upset about cartoons? Muslim extremists.

via Steve Garfield.

See “New Yorker Obama Terrorist Cover” for background and commentary on the story.

UPDATE:  Amusingly, I see via Memeorandum, the hubbub goes on.  Obama is continuing to beat this dead horse:

Democrat Barack Obama said Tuesday that the New Yorker magazine’s satirical cover depicting him and his wife as flag-burning, fist-bumping radicals doesn’t bother him but that it was an insult to Muslim Americans.

“You know, there are wonderful Muslim Americans all across the country who are doing wonderful things,” the presidential candidate told CNN’s Larry King. “And for this to be used as sort of an insult, or to raise suspicions about me, I think is unfortunate. And it’s not what America’s all about.”

Obama blamed himself for not being forceful enough in challenging some of the rumors about him, including that he is Muslim. Obama is Christian.

This is bizarre on so many levels.  First, Obama clearly knows that the cover was a satire and one which is helping him.  Second, he seems to be implying — while touting all the fine things Muslims do — that “Muslim” is some sort of slur.

Meanwhile, even those on the Left are defending the New Yorker.  Editor Katrina vanden Heuvel and others at The Nation :

[A]s comedian Bill Maher observed, “If you can’t do irony on the cover of The New Yorker, where can you?” I tend to agree.

[...]

It’s interesting how through time, especially in these last years, images seem more powerful, troubling, provocative and threatening than words. Why is that? Hard to fully fathom. Perhaps the speed with which images, unmoored from their original home and context, zip around the 36/7 Internet? Whatever the full range of reasons, it seems to me that one fact is that a caricature is almost by definition provocative, often offensive. It’s a misrepresentation, an exaggeration for effect, a parody.

While I understand why many object to this cartoon–and to images which they believe reinforce stereotypes (and there are many at The Nation who found the New Yorker cartoon offensive), I believe satire–even if it flops or offends –has a place in our culture and politics.

She then has some of the magazine’s cartoonists weigh in. Steve Brodner’s take is especially keen:

So basically we have the Wolf Blitzers pretending not to get this to rev up ratings which rely, largely, on the “outrage of the day.” However, in that process a dialogue is forced, satire is discussed, the truth about Obama is put on the table. And so, even if it’s taking the long way to get there, Barry Blitt’s strong image does what we need it to do: put these issues up for discussion and in a very real way, educate America.

Christopher Hitchens has a withering piece for The Mirror. Some excerpts:

Satire, according to Jonathan Swift, is “a mirror wherein every man will commonly discern every face but his own”.

[...]

Ludicrous as it might seem to have John McCain enlisted as an art critic, and obvious as it should be that the New Yorker would never do anything deliberately to hurt the Democratic nominee, it remains the case that a Newsweek poll has just found 12 per cent of voters believing that Obama is a practicing Muslim and another 12 per cent (possibly the same 12 per cent) convinced that he used a Koran for his swearing-in ceremony at the United States Senate. These are of course exactly the sort of people who do not read the New Yorker, or go in very much for the ironic and the satirical, so that as usual the aesthetic effort is somewhat lost on what ought to be its target audience.

[...]

If reassurance is what was wanted, it would have been nice to hear Barack Obama agreeing with the New Yorker’s people that the cover was (a) a joke and (b) a pro-Obama joke and then adding (c) that he and his wife “got” the said joke. No such luck. A statement of extreme lugubriousness from Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton announced that “most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive – and we agree”. So in other words, the Obama team disagrees strongly with those readers who don’t see it as tasteless and inoffensive, as well as those who interpret it as an attempt to draw the sting from a whispering campaign against Obama. Take that, you broad-minded and humorous rabble! Satire can do no more.

Finally, Salon’s Gary Kamiya makes the unkindest cut of all:

It’s official: The Bush era has made liberals so terrified of right-wing smears it has caused them to completely lose their sense of humor. Much as I hate to repeat one of Rush Limbaugh’s flat, stale and unprofitable applause lines, that’s the only conclusion I can draw after witnessing the left-wing blogosphere’s bizarre reaction to the New Yorker cover. . ..

[...]

I don’t know what lugubrious planet these people are on, but I definitely don’t want any of them writing material for Jon Stewart.

[...]

If you satirically depict Obama as an Islamist terrorist, in this view, you are only reinforcing and giving broader currency to right-wing smears. Since the essence of satire is exaggerating negative stereotypes, this means that satire itself is off limits. Or, at least, all satire except that which the cowering — but oh so semiotically sophisticated — left-wing commentariat deems to be sufficiently broad-brush and polemical to pass its funny test.

If nothing else, this controversy has apparently revived the word “lugubrious.”

Christopher Hitchens joins the legions dancing on Jesse Helms’ grave.   Rather than piling on about the racism of a Southern politician whose career began sixty-odd years ago, he instead focuses on Helms’ foreign policy:

His chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was a period of national embarrassment and, sometimes, disgrace. The Helms-Burton Act of 1996, imposing additional economic sanctions on Cuba, multiplied the misery and beggary of Cuba’s luckless inhabitants while doing nothing whatever to weaken its military dictatorship. Helms’ amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act in 1973, forbidding American aid to any family-planning groups that even mentioned the option of abortion, also greatly added to the woes and miseries of millions of Africans. (Fairness obliges me to say that in his last year in the Senate he did somewhat relax his equally stubborn and reactionary opposition to measures designed to combat AIDS in Africa. But this was only because it had by then become obvious that the disease was heterosexually transmitted. In general, his attitude to the AIDS plague was determined by a Bible-based bigotry that saw it as divine retribution for perversion.)

I make no apology for calling him a provincial redneck, because that, to be fair to him once more, was how he thought of himself and even described himself. It was a scandal that a man with so little knowledge of the outside world should have had such a stranglehold on American foreign policy for so long. He once introduced Benazir Bhutto as the prime minister of India. All right, that could have happened to anybody. But what about the hearings on North Korea in which he made repeated references to “Kim Jong the Second”? In order to prevent any repetition of this idiotic gaffe, Helms’ staff propped up a piece of card on which was clearly written the pronunciation “Kim Jong ILL.” The senator from North Carolina duly made the adjustment, referring thenceforth to the North Korean despot as “Kim Jong the Third.”

That’s pretty funny right there. (And shouldn’t it have been “Kim Jong the 99th”?)

UPDATE: Marc Theissen, the chief White House speechwriter and spokesman for Helms from 1995 to 2001, presents the opposing view:

As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Helms led the successful effort to bring Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into the NATO alliance. He secured passage of bipartisan legislation to protect our men and women in uniform from the International Criminal Court. He won overwhelming approval for his legislation to support the Cuban people in their struggle against a tyrant. He won majority support in the Senate for his opposition to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. He helped secure passage of the National Missile Defense Act and stopped the Clinton administration from concluding a new anti-ballistic missile agreement in its final months in office — paving the way for today’s deployment of America’s first defenses against ballistic missile attack. He helped secure passage of the Iraq Liberation Act, which expressed strong bipartisan support for regime change in Baghdad. He secured broad, bipartisan support to reorganize the State Department and bring much-needed reform to the United Nations, and he became the first legislator from any nation to address the U.N. Security Council — a speech few in that chamber will forget.

Not all of those policy outcomes were good ones and most of  represent the provincialism Hitchens accuses him of.  But it’s true that Helms was a powerful leader, not merely an obstructionist, in foreign affairs.

Shaun Mullen wonders “Why Are Right-of-Center Bloggers So Silent On Torture?”

He searched high and low and could find no right-of-center bloggers who made any mention at all, for example, of yesterday’s NYT story “China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo.”  I’d note that Andrew Sullivan wrote roughly 600 posts on the subject yesterday, including this one, which pretty well covered our bases.  Some conservatives have disowned him, though, so perhaps he no longer counts.

A quick search of my RSS feed showed plenty of non-Sullivan forays into the subject, although not that article in particular.

Amusingly, John Cole, who’s in Sully’s boat of being a conservative disgusted with the GOP and thus on the outs with much of the Right Blogosphere, calls the gang at Red State “hacks” for not having written about the story despite not having done so himself aside from noting the hackery of the Red Staters for not having written about it.

Otherwise, Mullen’s right:  I’m not finding discussion on the conservative blogs about the NYT/China story.

Plenty do, however, weigh in on the other torture story yesterday, Christopher Hitchens’ Vanity Fair piece explaining that, yes, waterboarding is torture.   Cole, incidentally, is among them.

Ace contends Hitch is “whining” and approvingly passes on the observation that, “Torture is any experience so horrible that no-one would consider trying it out simply for the purpose of writing a Vanity Fair article about what it’s like.”  Glenn Reynolds and Ann Althouse concur.  Stephen Green is mostly amused.

Bruce McQuain responds to yet another torture piece, a  column by Chris Satullo in the Philadelphia Inquirer arguing we should cancel the Fourth of July celebrations out of shame at our torture policy.  Bruce retorts that Satullo is a “nimrod.”

Anyone who reads this blog knows where I stand on torture. I don’t support its use and find it to be both morally wrong and morally repugnant. But for goodness sake, a little perspective would be nice – we actually have a process which reviews such things and acts to curtail such activities if we feel that to be necessary. That is precisely what we did.

Pat Lang, who I figure gets at least honorary conservative cred on the basis of being a retired colonel and Senior Intelligence Service officer, observes,

Clearly, some sadist or group of sadists with a vivid imagination took advantage of the national trauma of 9/11 to use the old communist enemies’ methods as a model.

Whoever did that inflicted a grave injury and disgrace on the United States.  The culprits should be punished as an example to future generations of sadists.

So, why so little attention on the conservative blogs? Two explanations come readily to mind:

1. Quite a few on the Right actually support the use of coercive interrogation techniques, considering them a reasonable tool in protecting the country from the Islamofascist hordes and preventing another 9/11. Alternatively, even if they opposed “torture,” they believe waterboarding and other techniques which don’t cause permanent damage are acceptable.

2. They, like most of their counterparts on the Left, mostly highlight stories advantageous to their candidate or party and downplay those which are potentially harmful to the Cause.

3. They’re bored with the story, considering it largely “old news” and variations on a theme.

The third of those explains why I didn’t bother with the story yesterday. I’ve written perhaps dozens of posts over the years condemning torture, both on moral and practical grounds, and don’t frankly see why the fact that the Chicoms used the same techniques makes any difference or adds any legitimate persuasive power to the argument.

Christopher Hitchens draws attention to a proposal by John McCain that received scant attention when announced last week:

“I will ask Congress,” said the presumptive Republican nominee, “to grant me the privilege of coming before both houses to take questions, and address criticism, much the same as the prime minister of Great Britain appears regularly before the House of Commons.”

Hitchens is enthusiastic and recounts the history of such proposals in the past, lamenting that executive branch caution or arrogance always stopped the idea from getting too far. He fails to note, however, the obvious objection: The United States does not have a parliamentary system but rather, as every schoolboy knows, a system of separation of powers.

It is true, I suppose, that something like Question Time could be established as part of the process of checks and balances. But the rationale for it in the UK and Canada is that the Prime Minister is, in theory at least, merely the designated representative of the majority in the Commons and is therefore accountable to them. By contrast, the American president is separately elected by the people (via the device of the Electoral College) and answers only to them.

As a practical matter, it wouldn’t function here for another reason: We don’t have the equivalent of the Oxbridge System. Every prime minister was educated via a method that strongly emphasized debating skills and, came up through the ranks of the parliamentary machinery and demonstrated that they were particularly good at that sort of give-and-take. That’s not the case here, as the current occupant of the White House demonstrates on a regular basis.

McCain would, I think, hold his own nicely at Question Time. Obama, too, has the intellectual skill set, although he’s not yet as adept at going on the offense. But most American presidents, including some pretty good ones, simply weren’t good at thinking on their feet and issuing sardonic one liners.