June 29, 2006
I’m Smiling Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:10 AM EST Let me take up Mr. Zeitz’s points one by one. 1) I’m afraid we’re just going to have to disagree on Ed Markey. I think he’s at least as far off into the bulrushes of the left as, say, Rep. Tom Tancredo is on the right. I think Mr. Zeitz has Chuck Schumer’s sense of political geography. Senator Schumer loves to describe conservatives, but never liberals, as being “out of the mainstream.” Fine, but Senator Schumer’s idea of the mainstream is a river that is wide and deep on his left, with enough room for the Queen Mary to sail majestically by. But on his right, the mainstream does not have room for a canoe to pass. Be two inches to the right of Senator Schumer and you are out of the mainstream. 2) He writes, “To recap, my statement—that the program was a ‘sweeping, warrantless probe of private bank accounts in the United States’—is entirely accurate.” Mr. Zeitz must have studied truth under Bill it-depends-on-what-the-meaning-of-is-is Clinton. Monitoring international bank transactions is not the same as probing bank accounts in the United States. SWIFT is located in Belgium, which was not one of the fifty states the last time I checked. As for “warrantless,” please. The very use of the word makes the reader wonder why no warrants were obtained. Let me illustrate: If I were to write “The unindicted Joshua Zeitz . . . .,” would not the reader wonder what nefarious deed Mr. Zeitz had been up to but had somehow escaped the clutches of the law? Calling Mr. Zeitz unindicted is (I presume!) entirely “accurate,” but hardly truthful. Calling this program “warrantless” gives the inescapable impression that warrants should have been obtained. The Supreme Court has said no warrants are needs to examine bank records. I guess that’s not good enough for Mr. Zeitz. 3) Mr. Zeitz’s third point is almost too weak to bother with. Of course people discussed whether it was legal. And, as Mr. Zeitz admits, herds of lawyers in both Justice and Treasury decided that it was. The fact that somebody somewhere somehow decided that it wasn’t should be filed in the who-cares? pile. I’m sure a paper with the vast resources of The New York Times could find someone who has doubts about whether it is legal to get out of bed in the morning on the right side. 4) He writes that I “defended—on this website—the leaking of the identity of a covert CIA operative, Valerie Plame. That leak jeopardized the lives of Plame’s contacts.” Bullfeathers. First, Ms Plame was not a covert agent at all under the definition of the law (not too many covert CIA agents sit for photo spreads in Vanity Fair, obviously lapping up every drop of publicity). Second, it is unlikely that her contacts who might be at risk could be identified because the name of someone who was driving a desk in Langley, Virginia, became public. Did they have autographed pictures of her in their apartments? Third, despite nearly three years of work, millions of dollars, unlimited resources, and one reporter tossed in the hoosegow, no one has been indicted for any crime committed before the Fitzgerald investigation began. That probably is because no crimes were committed. 5) He objects to my phrase “his fellow travelers at The New York Times,” comparing it to the use of “fascist,” an epithet hurled around by the left with gay abandon. To me, both of these terms have long lost all substantive meaning because both fascism and communism are, thankfully, on the ash heap of history. Nowadays liberals call anyone who has the lèse-majesté to disagree with them “fascist.” It is no more to be taken literally than calling someone an SOB implies that his mother has a wet nose and wags her tail. Frankly, I would bet that 99% of the American population could not now tell you what a “fellow traveler” used to mean fifty, sixty, and seventy years ago. In this case I meant no more than “those of the same opinion.” If Mr. Zeitz thought I was calling him a commie sympathizer, I wasn’t. If he was offended, I apologize, for I didn’t mean to offend him. I promise that were I to decide to insult him, I would be quite direct about it, no fancy historical allusions. Finally, he writes, “Mr. Gordon is very conservative.” I beg to differ. (See above about the “mainstream.”) For one thing, American political nomenclature these days is inverted. Those who call themselves liberal are, in fact, deeply conservative in that they want to conserve the status quo and even revert to some earlier way of doing things. Oh, for the glory days of the New Deal, when men were men and government was the solution! The people now called conservatives are mostly those who would like to change things, sometimes radically. You may not agree with the changes they want to make, but it is the right half of the political spectrum that wants change. The left half wants, at most, to change things back to the way they were (if Barbra Striesand will forgive me). That just might have something to do with why the American left can’t get itself elected dogcatcher these days: it is the greatest obstacle standing between the country and the future. I would like to change many things: the tax system, education, the armed forces, the legal system, the health care system, etc. etc. etc. I have seen many interesting and promising ideas about how to do so. Not a single one of them has come out of the left half of American politics in the last forty years. Personally, I’ve always liked the late Stewart Alsop’s description of his politics. He called himself “a man of the extreme center.” That’s where I’d put myself.
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