New York Times Fact-Checkers Drop the Ball on Lieberman

The New York Times featured a profile of Senator Joe Lieberman on Monday, in which, predictably, a bunch of unnamed political hacks huff and puff and vent their rage at the Connecticut Senator and the Vice Presidential nominee of the Democratic Party eight years ago. Midway through is this little attempt at revisionist history:

Mr. Curry had lunch with Mr. Lieberman in December 2005 and warned about the antiwar sentiment sweeping Connecticut. “This is not an argument over the capital gains tax,” Mr. Curry recalled telling him. “This is the biggest foreign policy mistake in the history of the country.” Mr. Lieberman, who often praised the defense secretary at the time, Donald Rumsfeld, shrugged off this advice. He saw the war as an epic struggle against Islamic terrorism; bombing Iran might not be a bad idea, either.

Actually, in October of 2003--a mere six months after the successful overthrow of Saddam Hussein--Lieberman called for Rumsfeld's resignation, long before it was fashionable. Here's what he said rather plainly on CBS News:

The uniform military feel deeply that he doesn't respect them, doesn't listen to them. The judgment about whether he stays or not is up to President Bush, but if I were president, I'd get a new Secretary of Defense.

Then there's the snarky, throw-away line stating that Lieberman came around to the belief, circa 2005, that "bombing Iran might not be a bad idea, either." Never mind the sneering tone: does Michael Powell have Lieberman on record (or even off) uttering anything along lines indicating support for "bombing Iran?" Lieberman has never called for the bombing of Iran. In fact, he delivered a speech at the Munich Security Conference last week in which he called for tougher sanctions so as to prevent military action. The assertion that Joe Lieberman thinks attacking Iran is "not a bad idea" is an outright lie. And it raises a question: why is establishment media now so keen on attacking anyone with views on military intervention to the right of Barack Obama's?

Related: The whole premise of this article is a factual error.

On September 11, 2001, the world champion chess player Bobby Fischer had this to say:

This is all wonderful news...I applaud the act. The U.S. and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians, just slaughtering them for years. Robbing them and slaughtering them. Nobody gave a shit. Now it's coming back to the U.S. Fuck the U.S. I want to see the U.S. wiped out.

In addition to accusing Gary Kasparov of being a former KGB agent and a "crook," Fischer also had these delightful observations about Jews:

The Jews are a "filthy, lying bastard people" bent on world domination through such insidious schemes as the Holocaust ("a money-making invention"), the mass murder of Christian children ("their blood is used for black-magic ceremonies"), and junk food (William Rosenberg, the founder of Dunkin' Donuts, is singled out as a culprit).

Fischer died last week at the age of 64, and he'll probably be remembered for his radical views as much as his prowess as a chess champion. His ravings about Jews came to mind as I had just published excerpts from Ron Paul's newsletters on The New Republic website in which Fischer was praised as an "American hero." A cursory investigation reveals who might have been responsible for such passages.

The historian Ronald Radosh sent me the following email last week, recounting his experiences with Murray Rothbard, one of the leading lights of American libertarianism and an intellectual guru to Ron Paul:

You probably know that at one point I co-authored a book with Murray Rothbard that the Von Mises institute has now scanned and put on the web. I had been good friends with him and used to see him a lot during the so-called "left-right" alliance he forged in the 60's. At that point the concentration was on the Vietnam war. I broke with him and indeed never saw him again a few years later. He started to publish a mimeographed newsletter (oh those days before xerox copiers, blogs and the web) that had a very limited circulation. He would give me copies. I wished I had saved them. They were viciously anti-Semitic (even though he was born Jewish he converted and became a Baptist) and anti-Israel. That had never come through when I was associated with him, and I was stunned. He had some crazy analogy that I can't quite remember that put Cambodia and the slaughter there with Israel. I think he took a Chomsky like attitude towards Pol Pot and argued in print that those attacking Pol Pot and the Cambodian slaughter were doing so in order to gain sympathy with Israel through the back door.

For more on Rothbard's extreme anti-statism -- so extreme that it is indistinguishable from far-left anti-Americanism -- check out the CATO Institute's Tom Palmer, who has been tracking the "fever swamps" of the libertarian movement for years.

Repulsive comments such as the ones above, according to Rothbard -- in an essay published in a collection entitled, "The Irrepressible Rothbard" -- are at worst, "not Politically Correct." Rothbard had immense admiration for Fischer, a strange person to admire. But the two men had one thing in common; they were both Jews who had tried to erase any sense of their heritage, a severing that manifested itself in the form of self-hating anti-Semitism.

Slate has republished a 2005 essay by Melonyce McAfee in praise of Kwanzaa. Acknowledging that the holiday is "made-up" (without really getting into what this means), McAfee nonetheless concludes that her mother's decision to celebrate it was a positive one because "it brought my family together." That's all well and good -- but there are certainly ways of bringing the family together that don't involve paeans to Marxism, black nationalism and hating whitey.

McAfee makes only passing mention of the man who founded Kwanzaa, Dr. Maulana Karenga, né Ronald Everett. In her family-focused narrative, the man who created the holiday and his reasons for doing so are of negligible importance. She suspects, however, that readers are at least somewhat familiar with the radical origins of Kwanzaa, but dispatches this criticism with mockery, criticizing those "the naysayers who mock Kwanzaa as a pseudo holiday, created to annoy white people and kept alive to peddle cards and kente cloth."

In a serious discussion of Kwanzaa, however, the holiday's founder--and his ideology--deserve a little more than mere passing mention. Karenga came to prominence in the 1960's when he founded the United Slaves Organization (US), a group more radical than the Black Panthers, on the UCLA campus. The outfit was little more than a political cult and Karenga possessed all the traits of a political cult leader: megalomania, paranoia, and an inclination to lash out violently against his opponents, a black nationalist Joseph Smith if you will. All these traits were on display during a May 9, 1970 incident in which Karenga ordered the torture of two women he believed to have been an informant (Karenga himself allegedly beat the woman with an electrical cord). Here is a newspaper account:

According to a Los Angeles Times account of testimony published at the time of the trial, Karenga and the other men forced the women to remove their clothes, and beat them with an electrical cord and a karate baton. The men put a hot soldering iron in one woman's mouth and against her face, and they squeezed one woman's big toe in a vise, the Times reported. Karenga's former wife, Brenda Lorraine Karenga, testified he sat on one woman's stomach while another man forced water into her mouth through a hose, according to the Times.

"Vietnamese torture is nothing compared to what I know," Karenga allegedly told the women, the Times reported Oct. 7, 1970, shortly after Karenga's arrest.

Jones said during the trial that Karenga initiated the attacks because he suspected her and Davis of trying to poison him with "crystals."

But it's not just the violence which renders Kwanzaa a dubious "holiday;" many traditional Judeo-Christian celebrations are rooted in acts of violence, Chanukkah being an example (though that violence was arguably righteous, as opposed to Karenga's attempt to re-enact Hostel). It is Kwanzaa's separatist, Marxist ideology which ought to give African-Americans pause before embracing it. Here are the 7 principles celebrated during Kwanzaa:umoja, or unity; kujichagulia, or self-determination; ujima, or collective work and responsibility; ujamaa, or cooperative economics; kuumba, or creativity; and imani, or faith. "Creativity" and "faith" are wonderful things to celebrate, "cooperative economics" not so much. They haven't worked so well in Africa, to be sure.

Rick Rosendall explains how Kwanzaa opposes the American creed here, working in arguments by one of the greatest, yet under-appreciated, 20th century figures, Bayard Rustin:

Our destinies are inextricably intertwined by our shared history. Whether they like it or not, the heritage of white Americans contains African threads; and whether they like it or not, the heritage of black Americans contains European ones. You do not shed the European portion of your heritage merely because you take an Afrocentric name, nor do you give up your stake in the greater society of which you remain a part. In addition to colonialism (which existed in Africa before the white man came), Western heritage includes free markets and individual liberties, as well as the idea that all men are created equal.

Rejecting that idea four decades ago as a sham, Karenga and other radicals adopted a revolutionary posture and an Afrocentric program. In doing so they repudiated integrationists like civil rights strategist Bayard Rustin, who pointed out that Black Studies "will hardly improve [black students'] intellectual competence or their economic power." In the campaigns by Karenga and his comrades to "Buy Black" and create autonomous communities, the language of liberation was a poor substitute for development capital. As Rustin wrote in his 1970 essay "The Failure of Black Separatism," "The call for community control in fact represents an adjustment to inequality rather than a protest against it."

Karenga is your garden variety racial-nationalist thug, a mix between Louis Farrakhan and Amiri Baraka. But this doesn't matter to McAfee, who simply wants people to understand that Kwanzaa was "a way to bring our ragtag family together and nudge us away from the false idols and commercial trickery of the holiday season." Yes, the principle of "cooperative economics" may disavow the obsession with merchandise that have come to mark the holiday season, but Kwanzaa is not lacking in the "false idols" department, black nationalism and Marxism being two pretty major gods that failed. McAfee should at least have the honesty to reconcile the actual reasons the holiday was created -- and, I imagine, the reasons why whatever few actual adherents it has celebrate it today -- with whatever beneficent characteristics she imputes to it and lay off implying that its critics are somehow crypto-racists.

Last, and least, is the faux-holiday's obvious ripoff of Chanukah that makes Kwanzaa just plane lame: 7 days instead of 8, but the candelabra is still there.

Just a few weeks ago, I criticized Desmond Tutu for one of his chronically outrageous statements about the Middle East. Of more interest to me, however, was that many use the "he's Desmond Tutu" line as if it that were in and of itself sufficient to defend him against charges that his rantings about the Jews and Israel are borderline anti-Semitic (not to mention how self-defeating and historically ignorant it is for him to compare the South African freedom struggle -- which never had serious elements worshipping a cult of death or calling for the wholesale genocide of its enemies -- to the Palestinian cause). I wrote:

Desmond Tutu is indeed a man of great stature; his criticism of the African National Congress for its unforgivable policies in support of Robert Mugabe and its AIDS denialism, as well as his calls for African Christians to be more accepting of homosexuality, have been exemplary and courageous. But he's not perfect, and happens to have rather odious views about the Middle East. I feel no amount of intellectual inconsistency embracing him for his honesty on Zimbabwe, AIDS and gays, while simultaneoulsy finding his words about Israel and Jews outrageous.

Lest my interlocutors at the time felt this avowal was a cop-out, I'll take this moment to praise Tutu for his latest moral declaration: lashing out at the Anglican Church for its "obsession" with gays. The years-long rift and coming split in the Church between its liberal, Western wings and the culturally conservative global south has not been lost on Tutu:

"Our world is facing problems -- poverty, HIV and Aids -- a devastating pandemic, and conflict," Tutu said.

"God must be weeping looking at some of the atrocities that we commit against one another.

"In the face of all of that, our church, especially the Anglican church, at this time is almost obsessed with questions of human sexuality."

"If God as they say is homophobic I wouldn't worship that God."

Dem's fighting words. Contrast Tutu with Peter Akinola, the Archbishop of Nigeria, who has to compete with Muslims for African converts (which is not to suggest that he doesn't believe the homophobic hatred he regularly spews) and has called homosexuality a "chronic aberration." No word yet on whether African Anglicans plan on matching the head of the Ugandan Muslim community's plan for a gay island.

With boy pundit Matthew Yglesias, it's difficult to discern where the attempt at serious political analysis ends and sheer buffoonery begins. Or, perhaps I mean where the sheer buffoonery ends and the attempt at serious political analysis begins. The dilemma is on full display in this post from yesterday.

First read the post, which is thankfully brief. Yglesias's premise is that the Clinton administration was doing a fine job tackling international terrorism until the Bush administration came into power. This contention -- while debatable -- is significant only insofar as Yglesias wishes to cast doubts on his own sanguine assumptions about the competency of the Clinton administration (perhaps this will this merit him an "Yglesias Award" nomination, inexplicably doled out by Andrew Sullivan for those writers daring to express views at odds with their own political constituencies). Yglesias links to a 6-year-old news story about Clinton's then-outgoing United Nations Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who, in final statements to the world body before the inauguration of George W. Bush stated that containment of Hussein, "while it is far from satisfactory," was nonetheless necessary, expressed frustration with Hussein's refusal to allow weapons inspectors into the country, and promised that the administration of George W. Bush, like that of his father, would also have to deal with the lingering problem of the Ba'athist regime in Baghdad. There's really nothing here that's in the least controversial or was ever disputed by knowledgeable observers, except, perhaps, by the likes of Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Ron Paul, and, it now seems, Matthew Yglesias.

To Yglesias, Holbrooke -- now a senior foreign policy advisor to Senator Hillary Clinton and a sure bet for Secretary of State should she become president -- is damaged goods because, like nearly everyone else at the time (including, one should note, Yglesias himself), he believed that Saddam's "willingness to be cruel internally is not unique in the world, but the combination of that and his willingness to export his problems makes him a clear and present danger at all times." This statement does not at all indicate support for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent occupation of Iraq (again, which Yglesias supported). It's merely a boilerplate expression of the policy of the Clinton administration (under whose watch the Iraq Liberation Act, making "regime change" United States policy, passed overwhelmingly in the House, unanimously in the Senate, and was enacted into law).

Though he doesn't come out and say it, this is a not-so-subtle attempt on Yglesias's part to retroactively group Holbrooke in with the evil-doers, the neo-cons, admission into whose fold today requires little more than "frequently call[ing] attention to the unprovoked aggression of despotic regimes (e.g. Iran and Syria), the violation of human rights in other countries, and advocates the moral superiority of democratic countries in international affairs." (Holbrooke, at least in the excerpts cited by Yglesias, is only guilty of the first two offenses). The word "neo-con" is now used by the net-left to describe anyone to their immediate right who doesn't agree with them. Yglesias's entire schtick is that the entire Beltway "foreign policy community" is a corrupt lot whose supposedly consensus opinions have proven a disaster for the country; his simplistic, uninformed, and self-aggrandizing view of how American foreign policy is formed groups people like Richard Holbrooke and Frank Gaffney into the same boat and assumes that nothing less than a Jacobin, intellectual purge and the subsequent elevation of Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, LaRouchite Robert Dreyfuss and their ilk to prominent positions in the liberal punditocracy and the return of Zbigniew Brzezniski into the State Department will cure Washington's poisoned think-tank and diplomatic cultures and bring American foreign policy back on track.

For too long, journalists (myself included) have taken Yglesias seriously; we've treated him as someone whose writings actually merit measured and contemplative responses. Perhaps this due consideration is given to the fact that Yglesias has a perch at The Atlantic. But even bloggers (as opposed to actual journalists, who, you know, actually do things like travel abroad or pick up the phone before opining about international affairs) ought to have an elementary understanding of history and logic. The proper way to treat Yglesias is demonstrated by the indefatigable New York Sun national security reporter Eli Lake, who does not suffer fools lightly, in a comment to said post:

Matt,

How can this be? Everyone knows the neocons pressured the CIA and lied to the American public to start a needless war for Israel. Everyone knows that the State Department and the CIA knew, just knew, that Iraq was no threat whatsoever. I mean the only explanation is that Holbrooke must have been a neocon. But if he's a neocon, well what was he doing in the Clinton administration that was paying so much attention to the real threats to America? Maybe you and Matthew Duss could explain all this to[o].

Eli

By Yglesias's reasoning, anyone who expressed views similar to those of Richard Holbrooke in 2001 (meaning almost the entire Democratic Party foreign policy establishment and many liberal journalists, including Yglesias), is not "prescient" and their views on foreign policy ought be discounted. This is obvious nonsense, and I'm not sure if Yglesias is even aware that he's writing himself out of the bounds of respectable debate with such ruthlessly unforgiving historical revisionism. But this is what the vaunted "Reality Based Community" has become; a band of useful idiots better known as what Lake calls "The Credulosphere," whose collected writings, if they were a film, would be anthologized as "Say Anything."

Whatever his intent, Yglesias's logic demands that we stop listening to him. Maybe he'll just follow his own advice, make our lives easier, and stop pontificating.