Saturday, January 12, 2002

Mr. T., Mr. G. and Mr. H. Senators Helms, Gramm and Thurmond have in common the fact that they harnessed their collective century of seniority to the Taliban wing of the American right. Point to an act of cultural division, bullying unilateralism or anti-government populism committed in the Senate during their decades there and you will usually find these three men among the sponsors. But there are others in the Senate who have voted for egregious causes, right and left, and still others who have never stood for much of anything. What sets these three apart is that each has made his own special contribution to the cynicism of our public life. It is tempting to excuse them, in their twilight, for at least having made the place more colorful. Mr. Helms affected a theatrically courtly demeanor, sirring and ma'aming witnesses he regarded as infidels. (His manners were selective; it was the courtly Mr. Helms who once remarked that if President Clinton visited North Carolina he'd "better have a bodyguard.") Mr. Gramm pokes witty fun at his own orneriness. "People say I don't have a heart," he once joked. "I do. I keep it in a quart jar on my desk." As David Plotz wrote in Slate, Senator Gramm is a mean, bitter pessimist, but "he has benefited from one of the strangest prejudices of politics: that meanness is a synonym for integrity." Mr. Thurmond benefits from another prejudice, our instinctive American admiration for those who correct themselves. He abandoned his ardent segregationist views when the demographics of his state made that expedient, and even hired actual black people to work on his Senate staff, a fact sometimes reported with such awe that you'd think he'd marched with Dr. King in Selma. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/12/opinion/12KELL.html

Tuesday, January 08, 2002

The Quiet Man � The Bush administration operates on the principle of "no enemies on the right"; it also operates on the principle that Mr. Bush is infallible. Whatever policies he may have proposed in the past, his aides always insist that they are perfectly suited to the present � indeed, were devised with the present situation in mind. It's actually quite funny, though nobody dares say so. Last month, for example, Karl Rove explained that the tax cut, although originally proposed amid an economic boom, was designed to cope with the current recession. "All the signs were there in the second, if not the second, the third quarter of 2000," Mr. Rove said. When a questioner gently pointed out that Mr. Bush had laid out his tax plan way back in 1999, Mr. Rove brushed him aside. And since Mr. Bush is infallible, why should he ever reconsider his decisions? http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/08/opinion/08KRUG.html