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The Weblog at The View from the Core - Tuesday, March 01, 2005
   
   

Hollywood & Terri Schindler Schiavo

You don't suppose this is all merely coincidental, do you?

A press release, yesterday, from Not Yet Dead.

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At last night's [Sun. Feb. 27] Academy Awards ceremonies, Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby swept the awards, winning for Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Director and, finally, Best Picture. Alejandro Amenabar's The Sea Inside was voted Best Foreign Film. The message from the Motion Picture Academy voters? the best "cripple" is a dead "cripple." Both films centered on sympathetic portrayals of the killing of quadriplegics.

"This is a clear statement on the Hollywood industry's opinion of people with disabilities," says Diane Coleman, president of Not Dead Yet, a national disability rights group opposed to legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia. "They grudgingly made accessibility changes when Chris Reeve complained about accessibility at the Kodak Theater, where the Oscar event is held. They love us if we're begging for a cure or begging to die. Once we start talking about our rights, we see their interest and sympathy disappear."

Fortunately, the American public itself might not be as enthralled with the "kill the cripple" theme as members of the Hollywood industry. According to a Harris poll released on February 23, respondents had The Aviator and Ray in a close race for their top choices, with Million Dollar Baby a distant third.

"It's clear the Hollywood industry loves nothing more than a story about a disabled person begging to die and having a nondisabled 'friend' do it," says Stephen Drake, research analyst for Not Dead Yet. "There are many films with great acting, better scripts and better direction. They don't get awards. The reason Sea Inside and Million Dollar Baby end up winners is that obviously the theme hits a deep emotional cord, at least with Hollywood industry members and movie critics."

Drake also credits critics and commentators for helping to build the film's popularity. They did, that, he says, by marginalizing or eliminating mention of concerns about the movie coming from the disability community. Commentators on the right and left portrayed the controversy as one of conservatives vs. Hollywood. Such politically diverse figures such as Roger Ebert, Michael Medved, Frank Rich, Rush Limbaugh, Maureen Dowd, Pat Buchanan and Gary Thomson all found one thing they have in common: Their willingness to ignore and marginalize the disability community to bolster their own volleys in their "culture wars."

"I guess we should be grateful for one thing," says Drake. "At least there wasn't an animated feature about killing a disabled person. We'd be looking at a clean sweep then."

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Wow.

(Thanks, Amy.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 03/01/05 06:50:28 PM
Categorized as Media & Social/Cultural.


   
   

Uli Derickson, RIP

Thanks to Leslie for sending this inspirational blog by Monica Crowley over at MSNBC's Connect, Feb. 25:

Last week [Fri. Feb. 18], we lost a true heroine. I’m not talking about a movie star, or a rock star, or a sports star. I’m talking about a woman you’ve probably never heard of, but who was one of the first people to stand up to terrorism — face to face.
Her name was Uli Derickson, and on June 14, 1985, she was a flight attendant aboard a TWA flight from Athens to Rome when it was hijacked by Lebanese terrorists. Of the 152 terrified passengers and crew, it was Ms. Derickson who took courageous control. The two hijackers spoke no English, but Ms. Derickson spoke to them in German, even calming them by singing a German ballad they requested. When they threatened one passenger, she intervened by explaining that his daughter had been delivered by a Lebanese doctor. She also put herself in harm’s way, commanding the terrorists, “Don’t you hit that person!” ....

P.S. And thanks to Paul for writing to say that Monica Crowley's transfer from FNC is the only reason to watch MSNBC. ;-)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 03/01/05 05:55:02 PM
Categorized as Historical.


   
   

"The Making Of A 9/11 Republican"

A remarkable column by Cinammon Stillwell at SFC, Feb. 24:

.... I was raised in liberal Marin County, and my first name (which garners more comments than anything else) is a direct product of the hippie generation. Growing up, I bought into the prevailing liberal wisdom of my surroundings because I didn't know anything else. I wrote off all Republicans as ignorant, intolerant yahoos. It didn't matter that I knew none personally; it was simply de rigueur to look down on such people. The fact that I was being a bigot never occurred to me, because I was certain that I inhabited the moral high ground.
Having been indoctrinated in the postcolonialist, self-loathing school of multiculturalism, I thought America was the root of all evil in the world. Its democratic form of government and capitalist economic system was nothing more than a machine in which citizens were forced to be cogs. I put aside the nagging question of why so many people all over the world risk their lives to come to the United States. Freedom of speech, religious freedom, women's rights, gay rights (yes, even without same-sex marriage), social and economic mobility, relative racial harmony and democracy itself were all taken for granted in my narrow, insulated world view.
So, what happened to change all that? In a nutshell, 9/11. The terrorist attacks on this country were not only an act of war but also a crime against humanity. It seemed glaringly obvious to me at the time, and it still does today. But the reaction of my former comrades on the left bespoke a different perspective. The day after the attacks, I dragged myself into work, still in a state of shock, and the first thing I heard was one of my co-workers bellowing triumphantly, "Bush got his war!" There was little sympathy for the victims of this horrific attack, only an irrational hatred for their own country....

So I became what's now commonly known as a "9/11 Republican." Living in a time of war, disenchanted with the left and disappointed with the obstructionism and lack of vision of the Democratic Party, I threw in my hat with the only party that seemed to be offering solutions, rather than simply tearing away at our country. I went from voting for Ralph Nader in 2000 to proudly casting my ballot for George W. Bush in 2004. This doesn't necessarily mean that I agree with Bush on every issue, but there is enough common ground to support his party overall. In the wake of this political transformation, I discovered that I was not alone. It turned out that there are other 9/11 Republicans out there, both in the Bay Area and beyond, and they have been coming out of the woodwork.
Like many a political convert, I took it on myself to openly oppose the politics of those with which I once shared world views. Beyond writing, I put myself on the front lines of this ideological battle by taking part in counterprotests at the antiwar rallies leading up to the war in Iraq. This turned out to be a further wake-up call, because it was there that I encountered more intolerance than ever before in my life. Holding pro-Iraq-liberation signs and American flags, I was spat on, called names, intimidated, threatened, attacked, cursed and, on a good day, simply argued with. It was clear that any deviation from the prevailing leftist groupthink of the Bay Area was considered a threat to be eliminated as quickly as possible....
The war on terrorism is nothing more than the great struggle of our time, and, like the earlier ones against fascism and totalitarianism, we ignore it at our peril. Whether or not one accepts that we are engaged in a war, our enemies have declared it so. It took the horrors of 9/11 to awaken me to this reality, but for others, such lessons remain unlearned. For me, it was self-evident that in Islamic terrorism, America had found a nihilistic threat that sought to wipe out not only Western civilization but also civilization itself.
The Islamists have been clear all along about their plans to form an Islamic caliphate and inhabit the entire world with burqas, stonings, amputations, honor killings and a lack of religious and political freedom. Whether or not to oppose such a movement should have been a no-brainer, especially for self-proclaimed "progressives." Instead, they have extended their misguided sympathies to tyrants and terrorists.
In the end, history will be the judge, and each of us will have to think about what legacy we wish to leave to future generations. If there's one thing I've learned since 9/11, it's that it's never too late to alter one's place in the great scheme of things.

See also Dear Stoopid Haitians.

(Thanks, Charles.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 03/01/05 05:39:13 PM
Categorized as Political.


   
   

NYT Catching Up With Reality?

I haven't paid much attention recently to the Plame Affair. James Taranto takes a close look, yesterday, at NYT's tortuous relationship with the foolish attempt to smear the Bush White House incident (brackets and emphasis in original).

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The Times' Turnabout

This column last weighed in on the Valerie Plame kerfuffle back in July, when Joe Wilson, having been cast out of the Kerry campaign after a Senate report impeached his credibility, was fulminating that The Wall Street Journal, which was arguing that the special prosecutor's investigation into the "leaking" of his wife's identity as a CIA "operative" should be shut down, was part of a criminal conspiracy.

Since then, the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, has subpoenaed several reporters, two of whom, Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matt Cooper of Time, have refused to testify before a grand jury and are now threatened with jail. Fitzgerald also demanded that Miller and another Times reporter, Philip Shenon, turn over their phone records, but last week a federal judge quashed that request, which prompted a Times editorial Saturday that contained a stunning turnabout:

Meanwhile, an even more basic issue has been raised in recent articles in The Washington Post and elsewhere: the real possibility that the disclosure of Ms. Plame's identity, while an abuse of power, may not have violated any law. Before any reporters are jailed, searching court review is needed to determine whether the facts indeed support a criminal prosecution under existing provisions of the law protecting the identities of covert operatives.

The "disclosure" may not have been a crime? Wow, that's a shocker! Well, actually, it's not a shocker to anyone who's been reading this column. In a pair of items in 2003, on Oct. 2 and Oct. 6, we laid out extensive evidence — based on information that was publicly available at the time and on the text of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act — that there almost certainly was no crime at the center of the Plame kerfuffle. The Times' editorialists and columnists, however, were singing quite a different tune, and it's worth reviewing their record of pronouncements on the subject.

As far as we know, the first "mainstream" media appearance of the Plame kerfuffle was a column by former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, which appeared on July 22, 2003. Krugman waxed McCarthyite as he leveled criminal accusations:

And while we're on the subject of patriotism, let's talk about the affair of Joseph Wilson's wife. Mr. Wilson is the former ambassador who was sent to Niger by the C.I.A. to investigate reports of attempted Iraqi uranium purchases and who recently went public with his findings. Since then administration allies have sought to discredit him — it's unpleasant stuff. But here's the kicker: both the columnist Robert Novak and Time magazine say that administration officials told them that they believed that Mr. Wilson had been chosen through the influence of his wife, whom they identified as a C.I.A. operative.

Think about that: if their characterization of Mr. Wilson's wife is true (he refuses to confirm or deny it), Bush administration officials have exposed the identity of a covert operative. That happens to be a criminal act; it's also definitely unpatriotic.

Gail Collins & Co. weighed in with an Oct. 2, 2003, editorial, in which they called for then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to recuse himself from the case and asserted that Plame was indeed a "covert" agent for the purposes of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act:

The law under which the Justice Department is operating prohibits the naming of an undercover intelligence operative — in this case, the wife of Joseph Wilson IV, a retired career diplomat.

The Times urged that "the Bush administration should not use the serious purpose of this inquiry to turn it into an investigation of [Robert] Novak or any other journalist, or to attempt to compel any journalists to reveal their sources" and said "we oppose 'leak investigations' in principle." But it also likened the "leaking" of Plame's identity to "the disclosure of troop movements in wartime" and called it "an egregious abuse of power."

Times columnists went even more over the top:

  • Maureen Dowd, Oct. 2: "For Bush officials, who have wielded patriotism as a bludgeon on critics, you'd think that doing something as unpatriotic as outing Mr. Wilson's wife and endangering the lives of her C.I.A. contacts would be enough. Nah. The group that fights so ferally to keep everything secret, from the cronies who met with Dick Cheney to the identities of the people it has tossed into the brig at Gitmo, had no problem spilling the beans on its own spy when self-preservation was at stake."

  • Paul Krugman, Oct. 3: "In any case, Mr. Wilson's views and character are irrelevant. Someone high in the administration committed a felony and, in the view of the elder Mr. Bush, treason. End of story."

  • Bob Herbert, Oct. 3: "The vicious release to news organizations of the identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer could serve as a case study of the character of this administration. The Bush II crowd is arrogant, venal, mean-spirited and contemptuous of law and custom. The problem it faces now is not just the criminal investigation into who outed Valerie Plame, but also the fact that the public understands this story only too well. Deliberately blowing the cover of an intelligence or law enforcement official for no good reason is considered by nearly all Americans, regardless of their political affiliations, to be a despicable act."

  • Nicholas Kristof, Oct. 11: "We in journalism are also wrong, I think, to extend professional courtesy to Robert Novak, by looking beyond him to the leaker. True, he says he didn't think anyone would be endangered. Working abroad in ugly corners of the world, American journalists often learn the identities of American C.I.A. officers, but we never publish their names. I find Mr. Novak's decision to do so just as inexcusable as the decision of administration officials to leak it."

Eventually Ashcroft relented and gave the Times what it wanted: a special prosecutor. A Dec. 31, 2003, editorial applauded the decision and flatly stated that someone had committed a crime:

Mr. Fitzgerald is charged with finding out who violated federal law by giving the name of the undercover intelligence operative to Mr. Novak for publication in his column.

The Times never wavered from its view that Fitzgerald should not force journalists, including Novak, to testify, but on Feb. 6, 2004, it published an op-ed by Geneva Overholser, a journalism prof and former Times editorialist, in which she laid out what The Wall Street Journal would call "the Novak exception":

As a piece of journalism, the Novak column raises disturbing ethical questions. He apparently turned a time-honored use of confidentiality — protecting a whistleblower from government retribution — on its head, delivering government retribution to the whistleblower instead. Worse, he enabled his sources to illegally divulge intelligence information.

The Times has now dispensed with the certainty that a crime was committed here, but the idea that Wilson was a "whistleblower" and a victim of the administration persists; that presumably is what the Times means in its Saturday editorial when it describes the "leak" as "an abuse of power." We think even this goes too far. To see why, let's go back to Novak's original column of July 14, 2003:

Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. "I will not answer any question about my wife," Wilson told me.

Wilson's response to this had three elements:

(a) He denied that has wife had recommended him for the trip.

(b) He accused administration officials of "outing" his wife in retaliation for his "whistleblowing."

(c) He charged that this disclosure violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

It subsequently emerged that Plame had recommended Wilson for the Niger junket, and now even the New York Times doubts that the "leak" was a crime. All that is left of Wilson's response to Novak is point (b), his assertion about the administration's motives. So far as we know, no evidence has ever emerged to support this claim; the Times and others continue to stand by it even though it is based solely on an accusation by Wilson, who was not in a position to know and whose credibility on other matters is in question.

On the other hand, Novak's sources asserted that Plame had recommended Wilson for the trip, which turned out to be true despite Wilson's denials. Thus it would appear that Novak's sources were the ones acting as whistleblowers, calling public attention to nepotism at the CIA.

In other words, it is increasingly likely that the entire Plame investigation — in which two journalists are being threatened with jail — is based on nothing. Yet as a Journal editorial noted last week, it may end up having a deleterious effect on press freedom. If Miller and Cooper appeal their case to the Supreme Court, the justices could "end up eliminating whatever hint of protection for sources remains" under existing law.

Such an outcome might have been avoided if journalists — notably including the Times' editorialists and columnists — had treated Wilson's accusations with responsibility and skepticism in the first place.

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See also Novak vs. Wilson, The Novak Exception, and Demomediagate.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 03/01/05 07:38:34 AM
Categorized as Media & Political.


   
   

Ultimately Committed

A press release from the Catholic League, Feb. 24:

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During the February 22 episode of the NBC-TV sitcom, Committed, two non-Catholics are mistakenly given Holy Communion at a Catholic funeral Mass. Nate, who is Jewish, and Bowie, a Protestant, don’t know what to do with the Eucharist, so they make several failed attempts to get rid of it. For example, they try slipping it into the pocket of a priest, dropping it on a tray of cheese and crackers, etc.

At one point, the priest, who is portrayed as not knowing the difference between the Host and a cracker, goes to grab the “cracker” from a tray of appetizers; he initially balks when he discovers that it is the last one. Then he changes his mind, saying, “Oh, what the hell.” By far the most offensive scene occurs when Nate and Bowie accidentally flush what they think is the Host down the toilet.

Catholic League president William Donohue commented on this today:

“It’s been quite a while since we’ve been deluged with as many complaints as this episode of ‘Committed’ fielded. To say that Catholics are angry about this show would be an understatement — the outrage is visceral and intense. The complaints have come from bishops, college chaplains, pastors and the laity, and they have come from all over the country. With good reason: NBC has made a direct frontal assault on Roman Catholicism, choosing to mock, trivialize and ridicule the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ.
“What happened was deliberate. According to a January 2 story in the Cincinnati Enquirer, the writers for the series, Eileen Heisler and DeAnn Heline, have been encouraged by NBC executives ‘to push the limits of comedy.’ For obvious reasons, the writers of ‘Roseanne,’ ‘Murphy Brown’ and ‘Ellen’ chose not to push the buttons of homosexuals (or some other protected group), so they decided to play it safe and stay in good standing with their bosses by bashing Catholics.
“More than an apology is needed. This episode should be retired for good, and that is what we will demand.”

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I'm almost past getting upset about Hollywood's latest outrage of the month, whatever it is. Once again, they show that they themselves are the small-minded, intolerant bigots they profess to both despise and rise above. Hollywood's Flaming Hypocrites are as numerous, if not more so, than the Hollywood Vacuumheads. And, of course, there must be considerable overlap between the two groups.

I trust that those who do not repent of this blasphemy will eventually receive a most just reward for their labor. For today, at the least, that is enough for me.

P.S. Confer.

P.P.S. Thanks to Margaret for calling the following to our attention today.

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Catholic League president William Donohue offered the following remarks today on NBC-TV’s response to the objections the league had with a recent episode of “Committed”:

“On February 24, I wrote a news release protesting the way the Eucharist was mocked in the February 22 episode of ‘Committed.’ I asked that NBC retire this episode for good. Alan Wurtzel, Chief Executive for NBC’s Department of Broadcast Standards and Practices, contacted me immediately and pledged to review the episode in question. He called today to inform me that this episode will not air again.
“On the two occasions that I spoke to Wurtzel, he proved to be fair and decisive. His professionalism has certainly won my admiration. Accordingly, the Catholic League considers this matter closed.”

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Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 03/01/05 07:02:10 AM
Categorized as Media & Religious.


   
   

Epiphany

A new weblog by Thomas Szyszkiewicz.

Vide.

(Thanks, Dom.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 03/01/05 06:33:25 AM
Categorized as Blogosphere Stuff.


   

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