Peter King McCarthy

The New Neo Posted on by

Ten years ago, shortly after 9/11, I would have been surprised at the furor over Rep. Peter King’s daring to suggest a House hearing on homegrown terrorism that focuses mostly on Islamicist terrorist groups in this country. But not any more.

Here’s a sampler of the way it goes:

This committee cannot live in denial,” King said, accusing critics of trying to “dilute” the focus by turning attention to groups other than Al Qaeda.

“Only Al Qaeda and its Islamist affiliates in this country are part of an international threat to our nation,” King said.

He said the hearings “must go forward, and they will.” He said backing down would amount to a “craven surrender to political correctness.”

But Ellison warned that they could unfairly increase suspicion of Muslim Americans by lumping them together with violent extremists.

“When you assign their violent action to the entire community, you assign collective blame to a whole group,” Ellison said. “This is the very heart of stereotyping and scapegoating.”

But from the time of the immediate aftermath of 9/11, nearly everyone has bent over backwards to make sure the Muslim community as a whole is not targeted. Even the evil George Bush hardly ever used the word “Muslim” or “Islamic” when he spoke of the terrorists, in hopes of holding off the PC crowd, although he had fat chance of ever doing that.

But that hasn’t stopped the allegations from liberals and the left. Just Google “Peter King McCarthy” and you’ll get tons of links making that comparison.

Lost in the fray, of course, is the fact that the abrasive McCarthy was often correct: there were a great many Communists in the government who were seeking to undermine this country, and almost all of McCarthy’s accusations turned out to be true when the Soviet files were opened and confirmed them. His name has become a synonym for “witch hunt,” but witches of the Salem sort are imaginary (pace, Wiccans) and Communists are most assuredly not (see this).

Speaking of those Communists and the nefarious Joe McCarthy, one of the first articles that comes up in a “Peter King McCarthy” search is this piece by Joanna Molloy, which appeared in the NY Daily News back in December of 2010, when the King hearings were already being discussed. Its headline, not atypical of the genre, is “Pete King’s plan to grill Muslims is flashback to Joe McCarthy’s Hollywood witch hunt for Communists.”

Okay, what’s wrong with this picture? I’ll give you a bit more of the article:

Rep. Pete King’s proposal to hold hearings on the “radicalization” of American Muslims is something straight out of the Bad Ideas Department.

Make that the Worst Ideas Department.

Just substitute the word “movie” for “Muslim” and you’ve got McCarthyism. As in Sen. Joe, who called in actors from Lucille Ball to Judy Holliday simply because they had had naughty liberal thoughts.

McCarthy found nothing on Holliday, but ruined her life and scores of others in Hollywood.

Molloy may write for the Daily News and I may be just a lowly blogger, but even I know that Molloy (and, presumably, the entire editorial staff of the Daily News, which not only did not catch her error but highlighted it in the headline) is confusing McCarthy’s investigations with the work of the House Un-American Activities Committee, with which McCarthy was completely uninvolved.

It’s a common misconception among the uninformed, and a common assertion among the propagandists on the left who would make use of their ignorance. What’s more, to be a little bit nitpicky here, was Judy Holliday’s life actually “ruined” afterward? As a child of the 50s, I seem to recall her being in a ton of shows and movies afterward. And in fact that’s correct:

In 1950, Holliday was the subject of an FBI investigation looking into allegations that she was a Communist. The investigation “did not reveal positive evidence of membership in the Communist Party” and was concluded after three months. Unlike many others tainted by the Communist scandal, she was not blacklisted from movies, but she was blacklisted from performing on radio and television for almost three years.

In 1952, she was called to testify before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee to “explain” why her name had been linked to Communist front organizations…

In November 1956 she returned to Broadway starring in the musical Bells Are Ringing with book and lyrics by her Revuers friends, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and directed by Jerome Robbins, for which she won the 1957 Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical. In 1960 she starred in the film version of Bells Are Ringing…

Holliday went on to a few more movie and Broadway roles before she unfortunately died of breast cancer in 1965, at the age of 43. No doubt Joe McCarthy was responsible for that, as well.

Burglar/intruder calls 9/11 on homeowner

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve seen a lot of those “stupid criminal” things. But this one is in a class by itself.

It’s not really clear what this guy’s intent was; that’s why I wrote “burglar/intruder.” He does seem a bit unbalanced—or, as the homeowner succinctly says, nuts.

NPR’s Vivian Schiller: two strikes and she’s out

The New Neo Posted on by

We last heard of NPR’s Vivian Schiller (not to be confused with NPR’s Ron Schiller) in connection with the network’s Juan Williams firing. She survived that controversy. But in one of those hubris/nemesis moments, she’s been asked to leave by NPR as a result of the recent James O’Keefe’s sting.

In this case, Vivian Schiller doesn’t seem to have been directly involved; she may be the fall guy. However, it’s not that she’s not guilty of maintaining the climate there in which Ron Schiller’s remarks found a comfy home. But note I wrote “maintaining;” she certainly did not create it, nor do I think that climate will change once she’s gone, although I applaud her departure.

No, the only thing that might change at NPR is how free employees and executives might feel to express those views—even in private, because now they know they might be speaking to impostors rigged with recording devices.

One of the reasons this is happening at present is quite simple: it is part of a battle being mounted by the right against funding for NPR. The right has long maintained that NPR has a strong leftist ideology, and the Ron Schilling tapes offer excellent evidence for that charge to those who might somehow have still remained unconvinced. NPR can hardly afford (literally) to allow such a perception to go unchallenged, and thus Vivian Schiller must go in a vain attempt to give the appearance of outrage and change.

In other but related news, Ron Schiller isn’t going to the Aspen Institute after all. He’s toxic at the moment, and rightly so.

Ohio matters, and other news

The New Neo Posted on by

This is good news if true, because Obama has not been so very popular in Ohio lately. Ohio does seem to be a vital state in presidential elections, especially close ones: remember 2004? Here’s a 2009 article that discusses the importance Ohio has played historically in presidential elections.

And here’s some bad news on a different (although not utterly unrelated) topic.

And remember this event that occurred forty years ago (completely unrelated, I might add)? I do. You might have noticed that I’ve never written an article about boxing. That’s no accident; it’s a sport I can’t stand. Your mileage may differ.

Political pranking: now its NPR’s Schiller

The New Neo Posted on by

In a sort of tit-for-tat for the recent Governor Walker-Koch Brothers phone prank, NPR executive Ron Schiller was caught on tape saying some interesting things to people posing as Muslim donors but who were really in cahoots with James O’Keefe.

The moral of the story is (a) if you’re in public life, beware of even private conversations, unless you know for certain the people you’re speaking to are exactly who they say they are and politically aligned with you; and (b) people tend to say outrageous things (or acquiesce to them) in order to please those they think might be potential donors.

That said, don’t think I’m absolving Schiller of blame. Not at all. It’s just that nothing he says is the least bit shocking. This is NPR, after all. Anyone who listens to it even for a moment (as long as it’s not Car Talk, which I find both amusing and apolitical, despite its Cambridge origins) ought to know its biases.

Here’s my favorite part of the exchange:

At their lunch, the man posing as Kasaam told Schiller that MEAC contributes to a number of Muslim schools across the U.S. “Our organization was originally founded by a few members of the Muslim Brotherhood in America actually,” he says.

Schiller doesn’t blink. Instead, he assumes the role of fan. “I think what we all believe is if we don’t have Muslim voices in our schools, on the air,” Schiller says, “it’s the same thing we faced as a nation when we didn’t have female voices.”

If you wanted an encapsulation of the perniciously defective reasoning that passes for thought among some of our liberal “elite” (and I use that last phrase only because it’s a favorite of Schiller’s, who is “most disappointed…that the educated, so-called elite in this country is too small a percentage of the population, so that you have this very large un-educated part of the population…”), you could hardly do better than that. The irony of the Muslim attitude towards those “female voices” is rather lost on Schiller, I’m afraid.

[NOTE: Schiller is leaving NPR for the Aspen Institute, a change apparently made before the video surfaced. NPR is “appalled” at his comments on the tape. Perhaps they are appalled–that it surfaced at all.]

Opera and kids

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I went to a performance of a highly condensed (one hour long) English-langauge version of the opera “Hansel and Gretel” at Boston’s Wheelock Family Theater.

I was one of the only people in the crowd without a child or two in tow. The entire theater was alive with squirmy little ones, but I was happy to see that so many parents remain willing to take their kids to such old-fashioned dinosaur-type entertainment, and for the most part the kids were able to concentrate on it and seemed to enjoy it.

Why did I go? I’ve long had a fondness for that particular opera. Despite its childish orientation, its music is very beautiful. When I was little we learned some of the songs in first or second grade, although I had no idea of their operatic origins and didn’t become aware of them till years later when I happened to take my own child to a production and was surprised and delighted to hear the familiar tunes.

I loved the songs so much as a child that every time we had music class I was hoping they’d have us sing them again. But alas, it was rare that they ever came up, and I never thought to make a request.

Now I can listen whenever I want, courtesy of YouTube. It’s a peculiarity of the opera that the roles of the children are not only sung by two adults but by two women, with a mezzo soprano dressed as Hansel. It’s a bit weird, but once you accept the convention it works.

Here’s a beautiful concert version sans costumes, in which Kathleen Battle seems to have been overwhelmed by her own voluminous sleeves. They are singing the Prayer Song, one of those I learned so long ago, except that they are singing in the original German rather than English:

Although the opera’s composer Englebert Humperdinck created a lot of other music, it’s “Hansel and Gretel” that made his name (which, by the way, was stolen in the 60s by this strange guy). The opera was popular from the start, and incorporates lovely folk tunes into a powerful almost-Wagnerian orchestration. The libretto was written, appropriately enough, by Humperdinck’s sister:

In the 1890s, [Englebert Humperdinck’s] sister, Adelheid Wette, had written a libretto based on the Grimm fairy tale, and asked her brother to set it to music as a Christmas entertainment for her children. Later, Engelbert and Adelheid decided to turn this modest home project into a full-scale opera. Hansel and Gretel premiered on December 23, 1893 at Weimar. It was an instant hit and remains an everlasting masterpiece. The composer Richard Strauss, who was the assistant conductor for the premiere, called it “a masterwork of the first rank.”

If it’s good enough for Richard Strauss, it’s good enough for me.

The Wisonsin fleebaggers: will they or won’t they?

The New Neo Posted on by

Return to work, that is?

Only their hairdressers know for sure.

Wisconsin is an important front in a battle currently going on across the country in many states, and in many to come. The unions know it and Tea Partiers know it, although I’m not sure how many others are paying a lot of attention. It’s been stalemated for quite some time, and no one is sure how it will turn out.

[NOTE: The hairdresser reference above was just an attempt at levity (and changing the subject). For those not old enough to remember, it comes from a famous 50s Clairol ad campaign featuring the lines, “Does she or doesn’t she? Only her hairdresser knows for sure.” Apparently it was taken from the original Yiddish spoken by its originator’s mother-in-law to be, “Fahrbt zi der huer? Oder fahrbt zi nisht?,” which translates roughly as, “Does she colour her hair? Or doesn’t she?”]

Quitting motherhood

The New Neo Posted on by

This article about Rahna Reiko Rizzuto—mother of two who gave up her rights to be their custodial parent when she divorced about ten years ago, and then decided to write a book about it— has gathered over 9,000 comments as of this writing, and the comments keep coming.

From what I can see, nearly all those who took the time to write a message in response to the story think that Rizzuto’s act was selfish, and condemn her for it. It’s also probably true that she did her kids a favor by absenting herself and letting their father take over, if she was that resentful of parenthood and that self-centered.

Here’s Rizzuto:

Ten years ago, when her sons were 5 and 3, Rizzuto received a fellowship to spend six months in Japan, researching a book about the survivors of Hiroshima. Four months in, when her children came to visit, she had an epiphany: She didn’t want to be a full-time mother anymore. When she returned to New York, she ended her 20-year marriage and chose not to be her kids’ custodial parent.

Now, Rizzuto is an author and a faculty member at Goddard College in Vermont, where she teaches in creative writing. Her boys are teenagers””and, she says, they’re fine. In fact, their relationship not only survived her leaving, but “has improved.”

“I had to leave my children to find them,” she writes in an essay at Salon.com. “In my part-time motherhood, I get concentrated blocks of time when I can be that 1950s mother we idealize who was waiting in an apron with fresh cookies when we got off the school bus and wasn’t too busy for anything we needed until we went to bed. I go to every parent-teacher conference; I am there for performances and baseball games.”

“I had to leave my children to find them” sounds like something out of the movies, or the apocryphal (perhaps fake) Vietnam war quote, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” Rizzuto’s self-serving justification of her act, and her contention that her kids are unscarred, seem to ignore the reality of what she did when she chose her career over them.

Some women and some men are just not cut out for parenthood. It would be best if they find that out before becoming parents rather than after, unlike Rizutto. People should be aware that parenthood is both a rewarding activity and an arduous marathon. Fortunately, love for their children and the joy experienced in watching them grow, coupled with a sense of duty and responsibility, usually see people through the hard times and the sheer work of it all to the pleasure and satisfaction of parenthood.

What’s collective bargaining, and why are they saying those things about it?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve written recently about a bunch of polls where Americans were asked what they think about the “right” to collective bargaining for public service union workers. Yesterday I wrote, “I’d also love to have seen a quiz accompanying the poll with some questions on what respondents think collective bargaining is,” because I doubt very many know at all.

Well, as though in response, the WSJ has this article [hat tip: commenter “csimon”] attempting to educate us. Here’s an excerpt:

Labor unions like to portray collective bargaining as a basic civil liberty, akin to the freedoms of speech, press, assembly and religion. For a teachers union, collective bargaining means that suppliers of teacher services to all public school systems in a state””or even across states””can collude with regard to acceptable wages, benefits and working conditions. An analogy for business would be for all providers of airline transportation to assemble to fix ticket prices, capacity and so on. From this perspective, collective bargaining on a broad scale is more similar to an antitrust violation than to a civil liberty.

In fact, labor unions were subject to U.S. antitrust laws in the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which was first applied in 1894 to the American Railway Union. However, organized labor managed to obtain exemption from federal antitrust laws in subsequent legislation, notably the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.

Remarkably, labor unions are not only immune from antitrust laws but can also negotiate a “union shop,” which requires nonunion employees to join the union or pay nearly equivalent dues. Somehow, despite many attempts, organized labor has lacked the political power to repeal the key portion of the 1947 Taft Hartley Act that allowed states to pass right-to-work laws, which now prohibit the union shop in 22 states. From the standpoint of civil liberties, the individual right to work””without being forced to join a union or pay dues””has a much better claim than collective bargaining.

Here’s more:

This “compromise” [reducing wages but allowing collective bargaining for public employees to stand unchanged] leaves intact the structure of strong public-employee unions that helped to create the unsustainable fiscal situation; after all, the next governor may have less fiscal discipline. A long-run solution requires a change in structure, for example, by restricting collective bargaining for public employees and, to go further, by introducing a right-to-work law.

My guess is that, if most Americans knew what this was all about, they would be standing with the Governor of Wisconsin. But they don’t, and most of the MSM is probably dedicated to the proposition that they remain ignorant.

In fact, come to think of it, I wonder how many members of the press who write about collective bargaining have a clue themselves what it actually is?

[NOTE: The WSJ piece is written by Robert Barro, who is an economics professor at Harvard. Interesting, no?]