Week of December 3, 2001
[Note: Some now-dead links have been removed from archived items.]

MORE JOBS FOR GHOSTS: U.S. News reports that Bill Bennett, ever alert for a good business opportunity, is "creating the Committee on Terrorism in American Culture, which aims to buck up American youth, especially college students whose patriotism is being met with snickers and sneers on some campuses....His idea: Use TV and radio ads, special conferences, and a patriot SWAT team to shush anti-patriots."

Shushing the opposition used to be something the right said was bad about the left. But that was just opportunistic rhetoric, apparently. (The left, especially the stupid left, is still using the technique, however, as witness this report on how Christina Hoff Sommers was silenced for suggesting that social science be used to evaluate whether government programs to keep kids off drugs really work. On TechCentralStation, Sally Satel offers a good report on the appalling background of the agency in question.)

No doubt Bennett's new venture will create more job opportunities for recent college grads who want to write books and articles under the name "William Bennett." I'm still wondering why only non-journalist readers, and not my friends in the media, give a damn that "Bennett" doesn't write his own stuff. [Posted 12/7.]

SAUDI DISCRIMINATION: That same U.S. News column reports that Air Force Lt. Col. Martha McSally, the service's highest-ranking female fighter pilot, is suing the Pentagon for sex and religious discrimination. The cause: the rule that requires American servicewomen to wear the abaya, a full-length robe, and sit in the backseat of cars when they go off base in Saudi Arabia. McSally, an active Christian, objects not just to the sex discrimination but to being forced to wear a garment that is a mark of Muslim faith. According to the suit, she "objects to wearing the abaya because it requires her to communicate the coerced message that she has adopted Islam as her religion, particularly including the Islamic tent that women are subservient to men." An attorney affiliated with the Rutherford Institute, which often litigates free exercise cases, represents McSally.

I'm wary of dress-code suits, particularly in a military context, but this one strikes me as a good "don't throw me in the briarpatch" case. The regulations exceed even restrictive Saudi laws, don't apply to non-military personnel, and are basically designed to kiss up to the Saudis. The suit could give the administration a good excuse for ending the obsequiousness. Alternatively, we could require Muslim women visiting this country to wear crucifixes or dress like Britney Spears.

This is all very relevant to my book chapter in progress, titled "Meaningful Looks." Time to stop posting and go back to working on it. [Posted 12/7.]

SILICON VALLEY REPS VS. TRADE: Jim Puzzanghera of the San Jose Mercury News reports that Silicon Valley businesses are celebrating yesterday's "trade promotion authority" vote and vowing to remember that their own reps voted against them. Writes Puzzanghera:

The loss of such reliable high-tech backers as Reps. Anna Eshoo, D-Palo Alto, and Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, left supporters of the bill scrambling for votes in the face of strong opposition from organized labor and environmental groups. None of the Bay Area's representatives—all Democrats—voted for the "trade promotion authority" legislation....

"About 70 percent of our business is exports, so the participation of the U.S. in the development of the global economy through trade is critical to our success and the jobs of all our people in Silicon Valley," said Jim Morgan, chairman and chief executive officer of Applied Materials, the Santa Clara-based maker of semiconductor manufacturing equipment.

Morgan expressed disappointment in Eshoo and Lofgren, who represent much of Silicon Valley. Their votes could cost them support from the industry in the future, said Ralph Hellmann, a lobbyist for the Information Technology Industry Council.

"Clearly everyone is going to remember that on the most important vote of the year, they weren't there," he said. The group produces a biannual guide to how members of Congress vote on high-tech issues, and anticipates counting Thursday's vote twice because of its importance to the industry. Many companies use the guide to decide who gets campaign contributions.

But those Democrats said they hoped the high-tech industry would not judge them on a single vote that had become complicated by other issues.

"This isn't easy for us to do," Eshoo lamented. "I have something very heavy stuck in my throat over this."

FOR SHAME: I can't say it any better than Matt Welch, so I'll just quote him:

Shame on you, John Ashcroft: Here's what the Attorney General said today, about people who have criticized and/or worried about the way his post-Sept. 11 policies have affected civil and constitutional rights:

To those who pit Americans against immigrants, citizens against non-citizens, to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve....They give ammunition to America's enemies and pause to America's friends. They encourage people of good will to remain silent in the face of evil.

Bullshit. (Pardon my recent French...it's hard to write nicely when your stomach is filled with poison milk.) It is perfectly fine for Ashcroft to point out those instances when Chicken-Little civil libertarians exaggerate and distort, and maybe it's even permissible in those instances to observe that such talk is counter-productive, and perhaps gives ammunition to rococo anti-Americanism or whatever. But to say, in a prepared statement, that those who believe our Constitution requires eternal vigilance from an active & skeptical citizenry, are somehow only a shade better than traitors...this is a vile, vile slur, and is more divisive (coming, as it does, from a member of the Administration) than anything Anthony Lewis has written since Sept. 11. Where's Rudy Giuliani when you need him?

Actually, I can add something to this. Rudy Giuliani, while the hero of the moment and a valiant defender of immigrants, is not in the eternal vigilance school when it comes to protecting those accused of crime. If they're accused, he generally figures they're guilty. Some of us remember when he was persecuting Mike Milken and dragging Kidder Peabody executives (later acquitted) out of their offices in handcuffs, all the while convicting his targets in the court of public opinion. In my dictionary, he'll always have his picture next to the entry for "overzealous prosecutor." (Matt was in Eastern Europe at the time.)

Ashcroft's statement was despicable. There is every reason to voice concern that we not set precedents, however justified they may seem at the moment, that could give the government broad power to "disappear" anyone who isn't an American citizen (like Matt's wife, for instance). There's also every reason to preserve the constitutional system that divides power between the executive, legislative, and judiciary system, not to let the executive arrogate all those powers to itself. Powers granted to the most benign of governments can be used by the most ill-intended. Defending the Constitution does not make you a traitor. It does not even make you "counterproductive." [Posted 12/7.]

WHAT WERE THEY THINKING? American Airlines just sent me a promotional email with my latest frequent flyer mileage statement. It included an ad with a photo of a Swiss Army knife and the following headline:

EARN 5 AADVANTAGE MILES FOR EVERY DOLLAR SPENT
AND BE SWISS-ARMY EQUIPPED FOR EVERY JOURNEY

Yeah. Right. [Posted 12/7.]

EXPELLING JOURNALISTS: Joanne Jacobs points to an Editor & Publisher report that Pakistan is refusing to renew the visa for fellow Stanford Daily alum Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who has been covering Afghanistan for The Washington Post. Chandrasekaran, a U.S. citizen and 1994 Stanford grad, hasn't done anything to offend the Pakistanis. But he's of Indian descent. That's reason enough for our good friends the Pakistanis. [Posted 12/7.]

ONION CLONES: The Onion's person-in-the-street feature takes on reproductive cloning and gets the level of the discussion just about right. [Posted 12/7.]

TRADE VICTORY: The good news is that the House passed, by a single vote, a bill giving the president "fast track" authorization to negotiate trade treaties, subject to an up-or-down vote without amendments. (Washington Post story here. Roll call vote here.) As Michael Barone notes, opening international trade is one of the issues that most definitively divides dynamists from stasists.

The bad news is the vote's composition. California Democrats, including Silicon Valley's Anna Eshoo, put their party's union-boss interests ahead of their constituents and their alleged principles. And the swing vote, South Carolina Republican Jim DeMint voted for the bill only after extracting an agreement that, as I understand the Post account, bills liberalizing trade with the Carribbean and Andes would protect the domestic textile industry. DeMint's district, which includes my parents, has been booming for decades, in large part because of foreign investment. (For background, see my 1996 article here.) It's also heavily Republican. No Upstate Republican would lose his seat just because he didn't pander to the protectionists. But it's a hard habit to break. [Posted 12/7.]

IN PRAISE OF UNNATURAL MEDICINE: Writing in The New Republic, Hope Roberts mounts a vigorous defense of cesarean sections against the likes of Naomi Wolf:

According to Wolf, women would be better off if delivery were supervised by midwives with a more "natural" approach. "Midwives birthed pregnant women by waiting for nature to take its course; high paid doctors saw the time in the birthing room differently." But her blind admiration of nature is bizarre. After all, it is nature that required the invention of medicine. What is natural? Pain, death, and disease. What is unnatural? The sciences, the arts, the trades: just about everything that we call civilization. In a past issue of TNR, Cass R. Sunstein quoted John Stuart Mill: "That a thing is unnatural ... is no argument for its being blamable." The belief that if women in labor were allowed to stroll around and squat a few times then healthy babies would blissfully pop out is ridiculous. If my doctor had let "nature take its course," my baby would have died. As it was, he was born blue with no respiratory function, and barely a heartbeat.

According to Dr. Michael Greene of Harvard Medical School, not all C-sections are necessary. The problem is that there is no way for a doctor to know with certainty if a woman and her child need a C-section, if the baby is in trouble or not in trouble, if the woman or her child will live or die. What woman wants to take that chance? I don't know any woman who would go back and elect not to have a C-section at the risk of her health and the health of her child.

When I was pregnant with my second child last spring, I gladly scheduled a C-section. I did not care about my authenticity; I cared about my baby. The only "right way" to give birth is successfully. I chose to put my faith not in nature but in my ob-gyn, who knows all about nature's lack of concern for our happiness.

Naomi Wolf, meet Leon Kass and friends. (If you missed it on Wednesday, my WSJ piece on therapeutic cloning is here.) [Posted 12/6.]

MOVIE PITCH: The CIA inserts an agent into the Osama bin Laden's jihad-fighting forces in Afghanistan. He pretends to be a Muslim convert from California. When he's captured along with his comrades, the agency plans to spirit him away after a brief "interrogation." But then a prison riot breaks out, and the plan is blown. Journalists in the area expose the guy as an American traitor, leading to a trial on capital charges the United States. Anyone who wants to buy my script pitch should contact Andrew Wiley at The Wiley Agency in New York. [Posted 12/6.]

KITCHEN VISIT: Charles Oliver calls my attention to this moving Salon article on President Bush's visit to the kitchen staff after a state dinner in New York for Pervez Musharraf. Writes Cullen Thomas, who worked the dinner as a waiter:

Suddenly there was a commotion in the kitchen. I walked in and there was President Bush in his trim blue suit standing in the middle of the small room, dirty glasses and plates all around him, surrounded by the waiters and kitchen staff—nine of us in all.

He must have walked his guests of honor out, then doubled back by himself to come into the kitchen. Agents stood in the doorway.

It was as though helium had been released into the room, something that changed the actual composition of the air and suffused it with a rarefied, electric buzz. I've met and spoken to a number of famous people, but this was different, this was being a kid again, before we learned doubt and cynicism and cold reason. Political convictions, if you had any, fell away; judgment, bias, opinion—these were not on the guest list.

It was the heart responding, not the head.

Bush's personal qualities are necessary but not sufficient for this reaction. Showing more than telling, the article gives some sense of the mix of how much is character, how much circumstances. It does suggest that Bush is the right guy for the moment. (Warning: The first page of the article is pretty dull, but it picks up a lot after that.) [Posted 12/6.]

PALESTINIAN NON-STATE: Suppose there were a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Wouldn't the normal procedure be for Israel to request extradition of people involved in blowing up Israeli civilians in Israel? That such extradition is inconceivable for Palestinian authorities who want to stay alive and in power suggests the depth of the problem. It's one thing to grudgingly arrest the usual suspects, quite another to acknowledge the legitmacy of the Israeli state. [Posted 12/6.]

EVIL SUVs: John Ellis notes a trend in movie semiotics:

I enjoy B movies, but I'm getting real tired of one particular Hollywood cliche: large black SUVs. Large black SUVs have replaced helicopters as the favorite device of lazy second-rate directors to telegraph sinister evil, whether it's evil corporate suits or evil Serbian war lords. For at least a decade after Apocalypse Now, it was helicopters; now it's large black SUVs. A few examples off the top of my head:

- In Twister (1996), evil, rich corporate researchers chase tornados in large black SUVs, while the poor good academics drive around in a beat-up pickup.

- In the Jurassic Park sequel (The Lost World, 1997), evil corporate managers drive around the island in large black SUVs, wreaking environmental havoc.

- In Domestic Disturbance, the evil wealthy local businessman who marries John Tavolta's ex-wife drives a large black SUV. John Travolta drives a beat-up pickup.

- In Behind Enemy Lines, the evil Serbian war lord drives a shiny new large black SUV. The good-guy local Muslims drive a beat-up pickup.

I'm sure other movie nuts could generate a dozen more examples. Why SUVs? Hollywood thinks they convey arrogance and power. Why black? Corporate limousines, the CIA, evil... And every American driver has been cut off on the highway by a large SUV.

[Posted 12/6.]

FUEL NONSENSE: What do Bill O'Reilly and Robert Kennedy Jr. have in common? They are making stupid assertions about the patriotic imperative to raise federal fuel-efficiency standards for cars. That program makes no economic sense, as I explain in my latest New York Times column. Even Paul Krugman, who lets his Bush hatred interfere with his professional judgment, only managed to endorse an abolition of the lower mileage standards for SUVs. Michael Lynch took apart Krugman's argument in this column. If we're going to have a stupid program like CAFE, it shouldn't have distortionary loopholes, but that doesn't mean getting rid of the loophole would do anything to help U.S. foreign policy—or save significant amounts of gas. [Posted 12/5.]

GOOD REPORTING: Bill Powers, National Journal's media critic, rightly lauds USA Today's war coverage—right down to the Strunk-and-White-approved action verbs. I've been praising the paper since August 11, when Jack Kelley's eyewitness account of the pizza parlor bombing appeared.

One USAT strength Powers doesn't mention is Kelley's excellent sourcing. He seems to be plugged into Israeli intelligence, among other sources. On August 22, I wrote about, and linked to, his detailed look at how Israeli intelligence operates to identify and kill Palestinians suspected of terrorism. You don't produce work like Kelley's by boning up for a couple of days and shipping out to the front (or, Glenn, by sitting in your living room and writing for free). [Posted 12/5.]

WILL WORK FOR MONEY: My good friend Glenn Reynolds, the well-known hyperblogger, is dissing Salon for losing $74 million and not providing content for free. He holds up blogs as the future of online journalism:

Look at most of the pages under "recommended" on the left and you'll see people doing just as well, for peanuts.

What they don't have, of course, is a CEO who makes around 250K a year, or a 36-person sales-and-marketing staff, etc., etc. This is classic corporate flab.

The blogging explosion is making me wonder if the Web isn't best off as a noncommercial or hobbyist space. Hmm. That doesn't sound catch enough. Ah, here we go: as the abode of sturdy, Jeffersonian cyber-yeomanry! Yeah, that's it.

Sorry, Glenn, but I have to disagree. Some of us have to get paid for our writing—and all bloggers depend on the paid journalism of other sites. That paid journalism includes the big, ad-supported publications like The New York Times. But it also includes money-losing, nonprofit Reason (tax-deductible contributions gratefully accepted) and money-losing, "for-profit" titles like National Review Online and The Atlantic Monthly. One way or another, you have to make a living. (None of the print magazines in Salon's general-interest niche make money. Why should an online version?) And those Amazon and Pay Pal tip jars, as nice as they are, are doing well to cover the server fees. (I'm leaving Reason at the end of the year, so these financial issues aren't just theoretical.)

The alternative to Samuel Johnson's world of bourgeois professional writers is "Jeffersonian," only in the sense of "aristocratic." (Plus Jefferson lived off other people's money, running up huge debts he didn't pay. And, of course, there were those slaves...) Journalists can't live on air, and most of us aren't heirs to family fortunes. Either online journalism finds a way to pay people for their work, the way print journalism developed advertising, or it goes away. [Posted 12/5.]

HOLY LAND MEMO: The Dallas Morning News, which has been following the investigation of the Holy Land Foundation since well before 9/11, reports on an FBI "action memorandum" documenting why investigators believe the charity is a Hamas front. Steve McGonigle's story should be read in its entirety, and the DMN page includes links to related reports, not only from today's paper but over the past two years. A sample from today's piece:

The FBI memo shows that federal agents had been monitoring the foundation as early as 1993, the same year that a Chicago-area car dealer told Israeli investigators that the Holy Land Foundation was a Hamas front.

Later that year, the FBI used electronic surveillance to listen to a conversation in a Philadelphia hotel room involving two foundation officers and several other men identified as Hamas activists.

"The overall goal of the meeting was to develop a strategy to defeat the Israeli/Palestinian peace accord, and to continue and improve their fund-raising and political activities in the United States," the memo said.

Participants in the meeting decided that the United States was a valuable place to raise money for Hamas, the memo stated.

"In the United States," the memo said, "they could raise funds, propagate their political goals, affect public opinion and influence decision-making of the U.S. government."

The foundation, which raised $13 million last year, sent the money to its own offices in Gaza and the West Bank run by Hamas activists and other committees controlled by Hamas, the memo said.

Some of the money went to what Mr. Baker called "families of the martyrs," which the memo called crucial to the support for Hamas.

The "families of the martyrs," who egg on suicide bombers and make a good living from their deaths, are the key to ending the killing sprees. Cutting off their money is the place to start. In a country with a decent justice system, which the Palestinian Authority is not, they could and should be prosecuted as accessories to murder. [Posted 12/5.]

NOW AVAILABLE: My WSJ op-ed on "therapeutic cloning" is now available. For the contrary piece from Bill Kristol and Eric Cohen you'll have to get the paper. [Posted 12/5.]

GETTING MAD: An L.A. Times article titled, "Letting the Anger Seep Out" and discussing emotions after 9/11 may not sound promising. But writer Benedict Carey delivers, providing both psychological insight and great anecdotes. Americans are angry, in a focused and life-transforming way. The attacks weren't just a misunderstanding among well-intended people. They were vicious and evil.

"The sight of those people jumping from the towers because they'd rather fall than be burned . . . I just can't get it out of my head," said Jack Copas, 47, a Methodist minister and lifelong pacifist in Totowa, N.J. He said that since Sept. 11 he has been more furious than ever before in his life. "I keep asking: Why didn't they attack at night—when the buildings weren't full?"

Copas' anger has prompted him to reassess friendships. One longtime friend, a Christian fundamentalist, recently remarked that the attacks were a great wake-up call from God. "He said, 'We need to get right with Jesus.' When he said that to me, I became incensed. I said: 'This is God? God did this?' "

Copas broke off the relationship. His differences with his friend probably were there all along, he suspects, but the response to the attack brought them to the surface.

[Marian] Gaston, the public defender, has put her anger to practical use. She has been exploring the CIA's Internet site to see if there is some way she can help in the war on terrorism.

"It makes me laugh," she said. "I don't speak any foreign languages; I certainly wouldn't blend in, and all along I'm thinking, 'What on Earth am I doing looking at a [Web] site of people I've been opposed to all my life?' "

For [Joyce] Glenn, the Catholic peace activist in Nebraska, the turmoil of recent months has prompted a rethinking of the principles that have defined her life.

"When it's a matter of self-preservation, I think we need to ask ourselves when it's OK to harm others," she said. While Glenn has not abandoned her commitment to peace, she says she won't march in local demonstrations against the operation in Afghanistan.

"If I'm going to stand somewhere with a sign that says, 'peace now,' I want it to say: 'stop using planes as weapons; stop using anthrax—peace now.' If there's a madman shooting people in McDonald's, do we have a rally outside saying, 'peace now'?"

One of Carey's sources, a therapist-turned-Episcopal-minister, notes that much of the public "grief" may in fact be hiding anger. "It's much more acceptable in our society to be sad than to be really mad," he says. I've always found the opposite to be true; both can get me in trouble, but mad works better as a muse. Either way, Glenn Reynolds' readers aren't the only bellicose women. [Posted 12/5.]

YOU KNOW WHO: By now, lots of people have commented on Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah's reported complaints about "the unjust attack being waged these days by the foreign media against the Saudi kingdom. I mean foreign papers, and you know who is behind them..." But there are a few points still worth noting.

First, the "you know who" version is from the MEMRI site (special report 304; scroll down), and it is translated from a Palestinian newspaper. The Saudi-run Arab News has a different version: "He reiterated that such campaigns are from states 'you know very well ... But, God willing, they will be defeated, and Islam will remain strong, by the grace of God, and the help of dedicated Muslims.'" States or newspapers? If the problem is "states," is America the enemy?

The Arab News account goes on to imply that the problem really is the You Know Whos. After all, the NYT isn't a state-owned newspaper:

Since the Sept. 11 terror attacks, Saudi Arabia has been accused by sections of the Western media, notably The New York Times, of being soft on terrorism and of encouraging extremism.

Riyadh has strongly refuted the accusations and underlines its commitment to combating terrorism.

Riyadh apparently didn't want to underline any opposition to extremism. That might require letting women drive or no longer spreading Wahhabi fundamentalism.

Here's a news flash, courtesy of my Thanksgiving visit to South Carolina. Even without allowing a single You Know Who to enter their kingdom, the Saudis have spent decades convincing Americans they're oppressive fanatics. They hired American construction companies to build their infrastructure. That brought American expats, who brought their families—including their wives. The wives spent their time in Saudi Arabia as virtual prisoners. Bad will ensued. The expats returned home and spread the word.

In other words, you don't need The New York Times to find out the Saudi regime is awful. Bible Belt word of mouth is enough. And people are talking more than they used to. [Posted 12/5.]

BENNETT'S GHOST: From the homepage, Michael Lynch's latest Reason Online column looks like a routine argument about drug policy. It is, and a fine one. But the real news is that Michael has exposed a secret just about everyone inside the Beltway seems to know: Articles by "William Bennett" are often written by anonymous twentysomethings. The ghost on "Bennett's" latest WSJ polemic 'fessed up under questioning: "'I wrote that,' said a proud Kevin Cherry of Empower America when I called and asked who was writing Bennett's thoughts these days."

Needless to say, the folks at Empower America were none too pleased with the revelation. But it's about time this dirty little secret hit the light of day. People outside the Beltway deserve to know.

Is it wrong to put your name on someone else's articles, providing you pay the someone else? That depends, I think, on whether you present yourself to the public as a writer and thinker as opposed, for example, to a politician or corporate executive. The former are supposed to do their own work; it comes with the job description. Bennett is, in my opinion, lying to his readers in an important way. At the very least, the Virtue Czar should give his ghosts a joint byline. [Posted 12/4.]

NO POWERPOINT: In a piece that gives a whole new meaning to the "law of large numbers," Jonathan Rauch examines "How Radical Islamists Will Take Over the World. Not." [Posted 12/4.]

CLONES, CLONES, CLONES: I'd hoped to link to my Wall Street Journal op-ed arguing against making "therapeutic cloning" a criminal offense. Alas, Opinion Journal has opted not to offer it. So if you don't want to wait until I post it myself, read the paper version (in Wednesday's edition).

Meanwhile, this Los Angeles Times article takes an interesting look at Advanced Cell Technology chief Michael West's race "to persuade Congress, before it outlaws much of his work, that cloning might one day help doctors replace the failing tissues that cause disease." The story also reports on Advanced Cell Technology's work in cloning muscle and skeletal tissue and tiny kidneys in cows.

The story concludes on a disturbing note, suggesting that scientists and disease groups still don't understand the threat of declaring basic cell research a criminal act. Aaron Zitner writes:

This summer, groups representing people with juvenile diabetes, Parkinson's disease and other ailments were key in persuading lawmakers to support federal funding for stem cell research, a controversial matter in its own right. But some of those same groups say they do not plan to lobby aggressively in favor of cloning as a medical tool because its promise has not yet been proved.

"There needs to be proof that this technology could indeed provide a therapy," said Peter Van Etten, president of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International. If there were proof, "then you might well see stronger support" for cloning among patient groups.

Van Etten said he was intrigued by the Advanced Cell Technology work in cows. But he said the company should have published those results before making its announcement last week that it had created four- and six-cell human embryos through cloning, work that was led by company scientist Jose Cibelli.

"I think that hurt the cause" of cloning, Van Etten said, "because it pumped the issue up to a fanfare but didn't prove there would be any benefits to patients."

ACT may well have made a political misstep. But not reporting their research would have drawn charges that they were hiding something scary.

Naive cynics think ACT hyped its results to generate funds. They cite West's statement to the NYT's Gina Kolata: "We're going to require hundreds of millions in investments before we become profitable." Translation: Investing in ACT is charity, not business. Whatever the company's motives—and I think they're a combination of political calculation and scientific ego—fundraising is not one of them. These people are not that stupid.

Besides, why is a disease-group advocate asking for guarantees that research will deliver treatments? They don't apply that standard to requests for federal funds. [Posted 12/4.]

REICH RESEARCH: Mickey Kaus reports—and Robert Kuttner confirms in a nasty note to Mickey—that Robert Reich is considering a run for governor of Massachusetts. Mickey calls Reich a "glib, slick, publicity-addicted popularizer of ideas (many his own) who doesn't worry too much about the contradictions." What he doesn't tell us is that Reich also makes stuff up. Jim DeLong suspected as much when he reviewed Reich's memoirs in Reason. But Jonathan Rauch found the proof. He began his Slate article on the hardback version this way:

Locked in the Cabinet, Robert Reich's new memoir of his years as labor secretary in the Clinton administration, is an engaging policy memoir: insightful, often witty and, what's most unusual for wonk kiss and tells, easy to read, partly because it's told in long stretches of well-written dialogue that add up to scores of novelistic scenes of Washington at work. The book reads like good fiction. Unfortunately, some of it is.

Jonathan recounts several specific examples, backed by professional transcripts or C-SPAN tapes. Here's one:

On Feb. 22, 1995, Reich testified on the minimum wage before the Joint Economic Committee. That much his memoir gets right. "The Republican attack machine is gearing up," Reich writes, "and I'm one of the targets." Then he paints a scene in which committee chairman Jim Saxton, R-N.J., interrupts Reich's initial testimony and lights into him savagely, starting with, "Where did you learn economics, Mr. Secretary?" and then jumping up and down in his chair and crying, "Evidence! Evidence!" while pointing to a chart. "There was a time not long ago when congressional hearings were designed to elicit information for members in order to help them draft legislation," recalls Reich ruefully. "Now they're attack ads."

When I checked the transcript, I was flabbergasted; so I checked the C-SPAN tapes, and they leave no doubt. Reich appears to have fabricated much of this episode for dramatic effect. Saxton was, in fact, decorous and polite. He did not jump up and down; he did not impugn Reich's education; he did not shout "Evidence! Evidence!" The chart to which Reich refers was actually presented during Saxton's opening statement, hours before Reich testified, and did not look as Reich claims it did. Worst of all, most of the lines that Reich attributes to Saxton—starting with "where did you learn economics, Mr. Secretary?"—appear never to have been said at all. Reich has replaced a dull, earnestly wonkish hearing with a Hollywood script in which a mean Republican hammers a decent Democrat.

After these revelations, Reich revised the book for its paperback edition. Jonathan analyzed the changes in a follow-up piece. [Posted 12/4.]

LAYNE'S LINKS: Ken Layne has added a great group of links to his excellent weblog. Highly recommended. (And I notice that neither Ken nor his good friend Matt Welch pointed out that the Layne slot on my list to the left had been inadvertently occupied by a Welch duplicate.) [Posted 12/4.]

Buy Virginia Postrel's The Future and Its Enemies in hardback or paperback.