11:11 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Kerry's 2002 Speech: Finally, a selection from Kerry's speech before voting to authorize the Iraq war in 2002. The whole thing is very long, but I think this is the most important passage. (Analysis of the three speeches below will follow once I have time.)

Let me be clear, the vote I will give to the President is for one reason and one reason only: To disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, if we cannot accomplish that objective through new, tough weapons inspections in joint concert with our allies.

In giving the President this authority, I expect him to fulfill the commitments he has made to the American people in recent days--to work with the United Nations Security Council to adopt a new resolution setting out tough and immediate inspection requirements, and to act with our allies at our side if we have to disarm Saddam Hussein by force. If he fails to do so, I will be among the first to speak out.

If we do wind up going to war with Iraq, it is imperative that we do so with others in the international community, unless there is a showing of a grave, imminent--and I emphasize "imminent"--threat to this country which requires the President to respond in a way that protects our immediate national security needs.

Prime Minister Tony Blair has recognized a similar need to distinguish how we approach this. He has said that he believes we should move in concert with allies, and he has promised his own party that he will not do so otherwise. The administration may not be in the habit of building coalitions, but that is what they need to do. And it is what can be done. If we go it alone without reason, we risk inflaming an entire region, breeding a new generation of terrorists, a new cadre of anti-American zealots, and we will be less secure, not more secure, at the end of the day, even with Saddam Hussein disarmed.

Let there be no doubt or confusion about where we stand on this. I will support a multilateral effort to disarm him by force, if we ever exhaust those other options, as the President has promised, but I will not support a unilateral U.S. war against Iraq unless that threat is imminent and the multilateral effort has not proven possible under any circumstances.

In voting to grant the President the authority, I am not giving him carte blanche to run roughshod over every country that poses or may pose some kind of potential threat to the United States. Every nation has the right to act preemptively, if it faces an imminent and grave threat, for its self-defense under the standards of law. The threat we face today with Iraq does not meet that test yet. I emphasize "yet." Yes, it is grave because of the deadliness of Saddam Hussein's arsenal and the very high probability that he might use these weapons one day if not disarmed. But it is not imminent, and no one in the CIA, no intelligence briefing we have had suggests it is imminent. None of our intelligence reports suggest that he is about to launch an attack.

The argument for going to war against Iraq is rooted in enforcement of the international community's demand that he disarm. It is not rooted in the doctrine of preemption. Nor is the grant of authority in this resolution an acknowledgment that Congress accepts or agrees with the President's new strategic doctrine of preemption. Just the opposite. This resolution clearly limits the authority given to the President to use force in Iraq, and Iraq only, and for the specific purpose of defending the United States against the threat posed by Iraq and enforcing relevant Security Council resolutions.

 

10:50 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Kerry's 1997 Speech: Regarding unilateral and multilateral action; it's long, but worth reading. (No permalink, unfortunately.)

WE MUST BE FIRM WITH SADDAM HUSSEIN (Senate - November 09, 1997)

[105th Congress, Pages S12254-56]

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I will speak tomorrow on the subject of fast track. I wish to talk this evening about another subject that has not received as much conversation on the floor of the Senate as it merits--because, while we have been focused on fast track and on a lot of loose ends which must be tied up before this first session of the 105th Congress can be brought to a close, a very troubling situation has developed in the Middle East that has ominous implications, not just for our national security but literally for the security of all civilized and law-abiding areas of the world.

Even after the overwhelming defeat that the coalition forces visited upon Iraq in and near Kuwait in the Desert Storm conflict, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's truculence has continued unabated. In the final days of that conflict, a fateful decision was made not to utterly vanquish the Iraqi Government and armed forces, on the grounds that to do so would leave a risky vacuum, as some then referred to it, in the Middle East which Iran or Syria or other destabilizing elements might move to fill.

But instead of reforming his behavior after he was handed an historic defeat, Saddam Hussein has continued to push international patience to the very edge. The United Nations, even with many member nations which strongly favor commerce over conflict, has established and maintained sanctions designed to isolate Iraq, keep it too weak to threaten other nations, and push Saddam Hussein to abide by accepted norms of national behavior. These sanctions have cost Iraq over $100 billion and have significantly restrained his economy. They unavoidably also have exacted a very high price from the Iraqi people, but this has not appeared to bother Saddam Hussein in the least. Nor have the sanctions succeeded in obtaining acceptable behavior from Saddam.

Now, during the past 2 weeks, Saddam again has raised his obstinately uncooperative profile. We all know of his announcement that he will no longer permit United States citizens to participate in the U.N. inspection team searching Iraq for violations of the U.N. requirement that Iraq not build or store weapons of mass destruction. And he has made good on his announcement. The UNSCOM inspection team, that is, the United Nations Special Commission team, has been refused access to its inspection targets throughout the week and once again today because it has Americans as team members. While it is not certain, it is not unreasonable to assume that Saddam's action may have been precipitated by the fear that the U.N. inspectors were getting uncomfortably close to discovering some caches of reprehensible weapons of mass destruction, or facilities to manufacture them, that many have long feared he is doing everything in his power to build, hide, and hoard.

Another reason may be that Saddam Hussein, who unquestionably has demonstrated a kind of perverse personal resiliency, may be looking at the international landscape and concluding that, just perhaps, support may be waning for the United States's determination to keep him on a short leash via multilateral sanctions and weapons inspections. This latest action may, indeed, be his warped idea of an acid test of that conclusion.

We should all be encouraged by the reactions of many of our allies, who are evincing the same objections to Iraq's course that are prevalent here in the United States. There is an inescapable reality that, after all of the effort of recent years, Saddam Hussein remains the international outlaw he was when he invaded Kuwait. For most of a decade he has set himself outside international law, and he has sought to avoid the efforts of the international community to insist that his nation comport itself with reasonable standards of behavior and, specifically, not equip itself with implements of mass destruction which it has shown the willingness to use in previous conflicts.

Plainly and simply, Saddam Hussein cannot be permitted to get away with his antics, or with this latest excuse for avoidance of international responsibility.

This is especially true when only days earlier, after months of negotiations, the administration extracted some very serious commitments from China, during President Jiang Zemin's state visit to Washington, to halt several types of proliferation activities. It is unthinkable that we and our allies would stand by and permit a renegade such as Saddam Hussein, who has demonstrated a willingness to engage in warfare and ignore the sovereignty of neighboring nations, to engage in activities that we insist be halted by China, Russia, and other nations.

Let me say that I agree with the determination by the administration, at the outset of this development, to take a measured and multilateral approach to this latest provocation. It is of vital importance to let the United Nations first respond to Saddam's actions. After all, those actions are first and foremost an affront to the United Nations and all its membership which has, in a too-rare example of unity in the face of belligerent threats from a rogue State, managed to maintain its determination to keep Iraq isolated via a regime of sanctions and inspections.

I think we should commend the resolve of the Chief U.N. Inspector, UNSCOM head Richard Butler, who has refused to bend or budge in the face of Saddam's intransigence. Again and again he has assembled the inspection team, including the U.S. citizens who are part of it, and presented it to do its work, despite being refused access by Iraq.

He rejected taking the easy way out by asking the U.S. participants simply to step aside until the problem is resolved so that the inspections could go forward. He has painstakingly documented what is occurring, and has filed regular reports to the Security Council. He clearly recognizes this situation to be the matter of vital principle that we believe it to be.

The Security Council correctly wants to resolve this matter if it is possible to do so without plunging into armed conflict, be it great or small. So it sent a negotiating team to Baghdad to try to resolve the dispute and secure appropriate access for UNSCOM's inspection team. To remove a point of possible contention as the negotiators sought to accomplish their mission, the United Nations asked that the U.S. temporarily suspend reconnaissance flights over Iraq that are conducted with our U-2 aircraft under U.N. auspices, and we complied. At that time, in my judgment this was the appropriate and responsible course.

But now we know that Saddam Hussein has chosen to blow off the negotiating team entirely. It has returned emptyhanded to report to the Security Council tomorrow. That is why I have come to the floor this evening to speak about this matter, to express what I think is the feeling of many Senators and other Americans as the Security Council convenes tomorrow.

We must recognize that there is no indication that Saddam Hussein has any intention of relenting. So we have an obligation of enormous consequence, an obligation to guarantee that Saddam Hussein cannot ignore the United Nations. He cannot be permitted to go unobserved and unimpeded toward his horrific objective of amassing a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. This is not a matter about which there should be any debate whatsoever in the Security Council, or, certainly, in this Nation. If he remains obdurate, I believe that the United Nations must take, and should authorize immediately, whatever steps are necessary to force him to relent--and that the United States should support and participate in those steps.

The suspended reconnaissance flights should be resumed beginning tomorrow, and it is my understanding they will be. Should Saddam be so foolish as to take any action intended to endanger those aircraft or interrupt their mission, then we should, and I am confident we will, be prepared to take the necessary actions to either eliminate that threat before it can be realized, or take actions of retribution.

When it meets tomorrow to receive the negotiators' report and to determine its future course of action, it is vital that the Security Council treat this situation as seriously as it warrants.

In my judgment, the Security Council should authorize a strong U.N. military response that will materially damage, if not totally destroy, as much as possible of the suspected infrastructure for developing and manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, as well as key military command and control nodes. Saddam Hussein should pay a grave price, in a currency that he understands and values, for his unacceptable behavior.

This should not be a strike consisting only of a handful of cruise missiles hitting isolated targets primarily of presumed symbolic value. But how long this military action might continue and how it may escalate should Saddam remain intransigent and how extensive would be its reach are for the Security Council and our allies to know and for Saddam Hussein ultimately to find out.

Of course, Mr. President, the greatest care must be taken to reduce collateral damage to the maximum extent possible, despite the fact that Saddam Hussein cynically and cold-heartedly has made that a difficult challenge by ringing most high-value military targets with civilians.

As the Security Council confronts this, I believe it is important for it to keep prominently in mind the main objective we all should have, which is maintaining an effective, thorough, competent inspection process that will locate and unveil any covert prohibited weapons activity underway in Iraq . If an inspection process acceptable to the United States and the rest of the Security Council can be rapidly reinstituted, it might be possible to vitiate military action.

Should the resolve of our allies wane to pursue this matter until an acceptable inspection process has been reinstituted--which I hope will not occur and which I am pleased to say at this moment does not seem to have even begun--the United States must not lose its resolve to take action. But I think there is strong reason to believe that the multilateral resolve will persist.

To date, there have been nine material breaches by Iraq of U.N. requirements. The United Nations has directed some form of responsive action in five of those nine cases, and I believe it will do so in this case.

The job of the administration in the next 24 hours and in the days to follow is to effectively present the case that this is not just an insidious challenge to U.N. authority. It is a threat to peace and to long-term stability in the tinder-dry atmosphere of the Middle East, and it is an unaffordable affront to international norms of decent and acceptable national behavior.

We must not presume that these conclusions automatically will be accepted by every one of our allies, some of which have different interests both in the region and elsewhere, or will be of the same degree of concern to them that they are to the U.S. But it is my belief that we have the ability to persuade them of how serious this is and that the U.N. must not be diverted or bullied.

The reality, Mr. President, is that Saddam Hussein has intentionally or inadvertently set up a test which the entire world will be watching, and if he gets away with this arrogant ploy, he will have terminated a most important multilateral effort to defuse a legitimate threat to global security--to defuse it by tying the hands of a rogue who thinks nothing of ordering widespread, indiscriminate death and destruction in pursuit of power.

If he succeeds, he also will have overwhelmed the willingness of the world's leading nations to enforce a principle on which all agree: that a nation should not be permitted to grossly violate even rudimentary standards of national behavior in ways that threaten the sovereignty and well-being of other nations and their people.

I believe that we should aspire to higher standards of international behavior than Saddam Hussein has offered us, and the enforcement action of the United Nations pursues such a higher standard.

We know from our largely unsuccessful attempts to enlist the cooperation of other nations, especially industrialized trading nations, in efforts to impose and enforce somewhat more ambitious standards on nations such as Iran, China, Burma, and Syria that the willingness of most other nations--including a number who are joined in the sanctions to isolate Iraq--is neither wide nor deep to join in imposing sanctions on a sovereign nation to spur it to `clean up its act' and comport its actions with accepted international norms. It would be a monumental tragedy to see such willingness evaporate in one place where so far it has survived and arguably succeeded to date, especially at a time when it is being subjected to such a critical test as that which Iraq presents.

In a more practical vein, Mr. President, I submit that the old adage `pay now or pay later' applies perfectly in this situation. If Saddam Hussein is permitted to go about his effort to build weapons of mass destruction and to avoid the accountability of the United Nations, we will surely reap a confrontation of greater consequence in the future. The Security Council and the United States obviously have to think seriously and soberly about the plausible scenarios that could play out if he were permitted to continue his weapons development work after shutting out U.N. inspectors.

There can be little or no question that Saddam has no compunctions about using the most reprehensible weapons--on civilians as readily as on military forces. He has used poison gas against Iranian troops and civilians in the Iran-Iraq border conflict. He has launched Scud missiles against Israel and against coalition troops based in Saudi Arabia during the gulf war.

It is not possible to overstate the ominous implications for the Middle East if Saddam were to develop and successfully militarize and deploy potent biological weapons. We can all imagine the consequences. Extremely small quantities of several known biological weapons have the capability to exterminate the entire population of cities the size of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. These could be delivered by ballistic missile, but they also could be delivered by much more pedestrian means; aerosol applicators on commercial trucks easily could suffice. If Saddam were to develop and then deploy usable atomic weapons, the same holds true.

Were he to do either, much less both, the entire balance of power in the Middle East changes fundamentally, raising geometrically the already sky-high risk of conflagration in the region. His ability to bluff and bully would soar. The willingness of those nations which participated in the gulf war coalition to confront him again if he takes a course of expansionism or adventurism may be greatly diminished if they believe that their own citizens would be threatened directly by such weapons of mass destruction.

The posture of Saudi Arabia, in particular, could be dramatically altered in such a situation. Saudi Arabia, of course, was absolutely indispensable as a staging and basing area for Desert Storm which dislodged Saddam's troops from Kuwait, and it remains one of the two or three most important locations of U.S. bases in the Middle East.

Were its willingness to serve in these respects to diminish or vanish because of the ability of Saddam to brandish these weapons, then the ability of the United Nations or remnants of the gulf war coalition, or even the United States acting alone, to confront and halt Iraqi aggression would be gravely damaged.

Were Israel to find itself under constant threat of potent biological or nuclear attack, the current low threshold for armed conflict in the Middle East that easily could escalate into a world-threatening inferno would become even more of a hair trigger.

Indeed, one can easily anticipate that Israel would find even the prospect of such a situation entirely untenable and unacceptable and would take preemptive military action. Such action would, at the very least, totally derail the Middle East peace process which is already at risk. It could draw new geopolitical lines in the sand, with the possibility of Arab nations which have been willing to oppose Saddam's extreme actions either moving into a pan-Arab column supporting him against Israel and its allies or, at least, becoming neutral.

Either course would significantly alter the region's balance of power and make the preservation and advancement of U.S. national security objectives in the region unattainable--and would tremendously increase the risk that our Nation, our young people, ultimately would be sucked into yet another military conflict, this time without the warning time and the staging area that enabled Desert Storm to have such little cost in U.S. and other allied troop casualties.

Finally, we must consider the ultimate nightmare. Surely, if Saddam's efforts are permitted to continue unabated, we will eventually face more aggression by Saddam, quite conceivably including an attack on Israel, or on other nations in the region as he seeks predominance within the Arab community. If he has such weapons, his attack is likely to employ weapons of unspeakable and indiscriminate destructiveness and torturous effects on civilians and military alike. What that would unleash is simply too horrendous to contemplate, but the United States inevitably would be drawn into that conflict.

Mr. President, I could explore other possible ominous consequences of letting Saddam Hussein proceed unchecked. The possible scenarios I have referenced really are only the most obvious possibilities. What is vital is that Americans understand, and that the Security Council understand, that there is no good outcome possible if he is permitted to do anything other than acquiesce to continuation of U.N. inspections.

As the world's only current superpower, we have the enormous responsibility not to exhibit arrogance, not to take any unwitting or unnecessary risks, and not to employ armed force casually. But at the same time it is our responsibility not to shy away from those confrontations that really matter in the long run. And this matters in the long run.

While our actions should be thoughtfully and carefully determined and structured, while we should always seek to use peaceful and diplomatic means to resolve serious problems before resorting to force, and while we should always seek to take significant international actions on a multilateral rather than a unilateral basis whenever that is possible, if in the final analysis we face what we truly believe to be a grave threat to the well-being of our Nation or the entire world and it cannot be removed peacefully, we must have the courage to do what we believe is right and wise.

I believe this is such a situation, Mr. President. It is a time for resolve. Tomorrow we must make that clear to the Security Council and to the world.

I yield back the balance of my time.

 

10:40 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Kerry's 1991 Speech: Taking a break from thesis-editing, I decided to look up a few of Kerry's actual statements. Here's his speech from 1991 on the Persian Gulf War. I couldn't get a permalink from THOMAS, but here's the text, highlighting certain passages of note.

AUTHORIZING USE OF U.S. ARMED FORCES PURSUANT TO U.N. SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTION (Senate - January 12, 1991)

[102nd Congress, Page S396]

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I do not believe our Nation is prepared for war. But I am absolutely convinced our Nation does not believe that war is necessary. Nevertheless, this body may vote momentarily to permit it.

When I returned from Vietnam, I wrote then I was willing personally, in the future, to fight and possibly die for my country. But I said then it must be when the Nation as a whole has decided that there is a real threat and that the Nation as a whole has decided that we all must go.

I do not believe this test has been met. There is no consensus in America for war and, therefore, the Congress should not vote to authorize war.

If we go to war in the next few days, it will not be because our immediate vital interests are so threatened and we have no other choice. It is not because of nuclear, chemical, biological weapons when, after all, Saddam Hussein had all those abilities or was working toward them for years--even while we armed him and refused to hold him accountable for using some of them. It will be because we set an artificial deadline. As we know, those who have been in war, there is no artificial wound, no artificial consequence of war.

Most important, we must balance that against the fact that we have an alternative, an alternative that would allow us to kick Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, an accomplishment that we all want to achieve.

I still believe that notwithstanding the outcome of this vote, we can have a peaceful resolution. I think it most likely. If we do, for a long time, people will argue in America about whether this vote made it possible.

Many of us will always remain convinced that a similar result could have come about without such a high-risk high-stakes throw away of our constitutional power.

If not, if we do go to war, for years people will ask why Congress gave in. They will ask why there was such a rush to so much death and destruction when it did not have to happen.

It does not have to happen if we do our job.

So I ask my colleagues if we are really once again so willing to have our young and our innocent bear the price of our impatience.

I personally believe, and I have heard countless of my colleagues say, that they think the President made a mistake to unilaterally increase troops, set a date and make war so probable. I ask my colleagues if we are once again so willing to risk people dying from a mistake.

 

10:38 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Thoughts on the RNC: Picking up where Josh left off, I concur on the admiration of McCain's speech and the dislike of Giuliani's. The statements of the 9/11 relatives were incredibly powerful, reminding us of the preciousness of those lives that were lost. And then Rudy followed with a poorly-organized collection of red meat and laugh lines.

A second thought: both McCain and Giuliani described the remaining mission in Iraq in terms of democracy promotion. Even the ineloquent woman from Iowa interviewed by Ray Suarez on PBS emphasized "freedom" as the message of the GOP, at home and abroad. Have the neocons succeeded at capturing the heart and soul of the party (I hope so), or, as Josh suggested, is their rhetoric just better?

The pool game and convention-watching followed a long discussion that evening about Kerry, who thus far has been maddeningly vague about what his foreign policy intentions are. I write this as someone who agrees with many of Bush's foreign policy goals, but is very frustrated with the administration's record in implementing them. (To my mind, some of the most dangerous consequences of failure in Iraq are that it would (1) equate democracy with chaos in the minds of millions in the Middle East; (2) discredit the cause of humanitarian intervention elsewhere, creating a sense that "nobody wants to do this again"; (3) destroy the credibility of our intelligence, so that no one will believe us when someone actually has WMD; and (4) make it impossible, while we're tied down, to pose any real threat to adversaries like Iran or North Korea.)

The war is very important to me, and I'd feel happier voting for Kerry if I thought he'd conduct it better. I'm glad that someone on Kerry's team worries a lot about suitcase nukes; I'm glad that they're at least trying to outflank Bush on the right. In fact, that's what the military-friendly convention was designed to show -- that "we want the same things Bush wants, but we'll do it better."

But frankly, I don't know whether to believe him. Since 9/11, Kerry has tried to have it both ways on some very important questions. I think the line that "he voted against the $87 billion" is in some ways unfair; people vote for amended bills and against the final versions all the time. But his vote came at a time when a lot of people just didn't want to spend the extra money, and when it actually wasn't clear whether Bush would have enough support to get the aid package through. Other candidates, such as Gephardt, took the political risk, and paid the price. And Kerry's "firehouses in Baghdad" line, which Christopher Hitchens rightly excoriates, doesn't give me much confidence.

In some ways, I agree with Andrew Sullivan's description of the Democrats as a war party with the wrong general. Joe Lieberman--who, as far as I know, never went to Vietnam--could make the arguments Kerry's making and be believed; he's been out in front on democratizing the Middle East for a long time. He would have been able to focus the debate on the administration's competence, and not its goals, which are far easier to defend. But Lieberman, in the Bizarro World in which he gets elected, would also have had a mandate to finish the job in Iraq, to stay the course until we can build a stable and democratic government. It's hard to know just what Kerry's mandate would look like, or what the political pressures on his administration would be, especially now that he's expressed a desire to bring some troops home after six months. (Which is, incidentally, one of the worst things he could have said before the election. How committed to the mission will our troops be, if they know they're only marking time? How many terrorist groups will step up their attacks in month five, knowing that they don't have long to wait? It's like Sonny Corleone spilling the beans in front of Sollozzo -- "Never let anyone outside the family know what you're thinking again!")

The main pressure on a President Kerry would come from the left, especially if his unrealistic expectations on allied help aren't met. (There won't be a single French soldier stationed in Falluja anytime soon, regardless of who's in the White House.) And the reactive, rather than proactive, tone of his convention speech--as well as his explicit endorsement of stability over democracy in Iraq--makes me worry that he might be ready to cut things short.

Maybe this is the wrong way to look at things; maybe a more restrained foreign policy would be more achievable, and better serve American interests. Perhaps George Will is right to say that some things are beyond our power, and we just aren't strong enough to remake the Middle East. Perhaps we can, as so many European commentators have urged us to, just accept living in a world with a little less security.

But then I read about two more busloads of murder victims in Israel, and I'm not ready to "accept" that yet. If we're too weak to remake the Middle East, let's at least find out by trying. I wish I knew if Kerry feels the same way.

 

9:45 AM :: Stephen (contact)

The Alchemy of Parental Choice: Dalia Lithwick, whose work I generally enjoy, has the following curious passage in a recent NYT guest column:

To be sure, the courts have made a hash of the First Amendment religion jurisprudence. A crèche on government property is constitutional so long as the manger includes a Malibu Barbie; and state aid to religious schools is constitutional if it's triangulated through the alchemy of parental choice.

I can't comment on crèche law, but what's so occult and mysterious about "the alchemy of parental choice"? The fact that parents do the choosing makes an enormous (and obvious) difference. The left has generally resisted attempts to micromanage the lives of the poor, arguing that recipients of public aid should be allowed the dignity of making their own decisions. Those who receive a government check could choose to spend it, in Robert Nozick's formulation, "on going to the movies, or on candy bars, or on copies of Dissent magazine, or of Monthly Review." So why not on religious education? We don't prohibit parents from using their tax cuts to pay for Sunday school, even though the state would be prohibited from paying for it directly. We don't prevent the elderly from endorsing their Social Security checks to the Salvation Army--nor, as I've mentioned before, do we stop welfare recipients from donating to religious charities, lest taxpayer dollars somehow find their way into the collection plate.

In the context of education, those parents who can't afford private school (and who would be the target of any likely voucher plan) might wish to send their children to Catholic schools or yeshivas; schools with strict discipline or hippy classes taught under trees; schools that emphasize science, the arts, or ancient Greek. So long as all of them meet basic educational standards, why should the state be concerned with which they choose? And why should the First Amendment be endangered, given that the choice is made by individuals rather than state officials?

The concern Lithwick feels, to paraphrase George Will, seems to be that the poor are insufficiently materialistic. If parents wanted to give their kids candy bars, they're free to choose; but if they want to give them religion, suddenly it's alchemy.

 

8:59 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Lapham's Clairvoyance, Part II: (See original post above.) Harper's Magazine has decided to take Eugene Volokh's advice and post a correction to its website:

Lewis Lapham responds:

As Mr. Ostrowski properly notes, the rhetorical invention was silly. The mistake, however, is a serious one, and if I'd had my wits about me as an editor, I wouldn't have let the author mix up his tenses in manuscript or allowed him in page proof to lapse into poetic license. Both of us regret the injury done to the magazine and apologize, wholeheartedly, to its readers.

Apology accepted -- but am I the only one who finds the causal explanation for this error a little thin? The issue is the poetic license, not the verb tenses, and it speaks to a certain willingness to let political preconceptions stand in for facts. (And couldn't Lapham have done without the conceit of treating the "author" and "editor" as separate persons, given that he was both?)

 

10:21 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Lapham's Clairvoyance: Josh Chafetz asks how Lewis Lapham's invented account of what he heard and thought during the Republican National Convention (which hasn't yet taken place) is different from anything Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass came up with. I agree, but I also wonder how the passage, which is obviously false to any attentive reader, could possibly have gotten through Harper's editorial process. True, Lapham may be the editor of Harper's (and thus harder to fire than Jayson Blair). But surely someone looks at his copy before it prints. Did the copy editors forget that the RNC hasn't happened yet, or did they realize it was false and let it go?

Eugene Volokh was told on the phone that the magazine recognized its error and would be printing an explanation in October. But I'm not quite sure what a reasonable explanation would be. Lapham specifically recounts thoughts he supposedly had during the convention--something that can't just be a grammar mistake. Perhaps the article wasn't actually meant to go to press? Or the readers just weren't meant to catch it?

 

10:19 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Cats! How the mighty have fallen. Steve Wu is resorting to catblogging. (The real question is, can they do the Cat Meow Boogie?)

 

10:18 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Now in New Haven: After the longest hiatus in this blog's short history, I've returned to posting, after moving from St. Louis to New Haven to start law school. After a week in a sparsely furnished apartment, I now have a desk to type on -- as well as broadband Internet access, thanks to the handily unsecured wireless network of someone in my apartment building. Posting will be light as the moving process continues, but at least there won't be total silence.