Joseph Ellis is creeping back from his "Why Wasn't I in Vietnam" scandal using his obviously excellent connections in the high-middlebrow press. It is rather sick to see him doing his oracle of the Founders number again in this week's "New York Times Book Review." Reviewing a book that he himself might have written on the rivalry between Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall, Ellis might be writing about his own work when he praises James F. Simon's ''What Kind of Nation'' as "a major contribution not because it breaks new scholarly ground, but rather because it moves across familiar ground with such clarity and grace." Ellis also shows some craftiness and grace himself by directing a bon mot at the press while invoking one of their favorite concepts regarding the academic world of which Ellis was once, and I believe still is, a card-carrying member. According to Ellis, the author "has the storytelling skills of a former journalist accustomed to writing for an audience that lives outside the groves of academe." The obvious joke about Ellis's own "storytelling skills" will now be omitted.

THE OH-SO-LIBERAL PRESS STRIKES AGAIN
In a story about a commission report critical of Amtrak (Advisory Panel Tells Congress That Amtrak Should Be Split) , the New York Times extensively quotes commission members who want to break up the railroad. Several versions of the thought that Amtrak should be "run like a business" were included, as well as arguments that passenger rail service should be privatized. Nowhere is it mentioned that Amtrak exists because privately-owned railroads abandoned passenger rail service in the 1970s, nor does the author of the story mention that Great Britain's railroad privatisation scheme, Railtrack, has been fraught with controversy and marred by declining safety and quality of service. Then the pro-privatization quotations are balanced only by the following half sentence: "Norman Y. Mineta, the Secretary of Transportation, who is a member of the commission, abstained, and a labor representative, Charles Moneypenny, issued a sharp dissent."

POP HISTORIANS IN CRISIS: Chapter XVIII
While it has not been as widely reported as his World War II borrowings, Stephen Ambrose was caught three years ago (by a Washington University student named Lara Marks) employing similar tactics in his blockbuster Lewis and Clark book, Undaunted Courage. The story appears in yesterday's St. Louis Post-Dispatch. No news report on the pop-history plagiarism scandal would be complete without a dig at us evil academics: "Unlike some professional historians, Marks doesn't fault Ambrose for being a popularizer. 'It's really important to bring history to the people,' she said." Usually, we are just accused of being boring; now we're snobs as well. All I have read professional historians saying is that yes, this sure looks like plagiarism and that students would be severely penalized for doing anything similar. (It has been said that any historian who popularizes as often as Ambrose might be tempted to take shortcuts.) On what television show did reporter Susan Thomson see some John Houseman-esque history perfesser haughtily condemning Ambrose or McCullough for daring to reach out to the popular audience? I get the distinct impression that many people in the media have some sort of complex about their college teachers. Was someone spending too much time working on the school newspaper when they should have been studying for their history midterm?

The J. Clifford Baxter suicide story will make an interesting contrast with the Vince Foster suicide story. While I imagine that both men really did kill themselves, Vince Foster was subject of years of right-wing conspiracy theorizing, much of it from relatively respectable sources despite the fact that the whole scenario was drawn from a Hollywood thriller and the lack of damaging information that Foster could have been hiding. Now we have the largest bankruptcy in American history, involving a company with heavy political connections and a record of destroying evidence. Moreover, unlike the Foster case, we have family and friends who actually do suspect foul play.
(from Amityville Buries a Native Son (washingtonpost.com)) "The people who know him closely doubt [that] it [was a suicide]," said Kretz [a family friend]. "The family doesn't buy it." It will be the ultimate proof of Hillary Clinton's "vast conspiracy" argument if, as I suspect, we hear nothing more about the Baxter suicide from the ostensible truth-seekers of the right or from a media establishment that increasingly seems to take its cues from that quarter.

The Enron Story That Waited To Be Told (washingtonpost.com) "It's fair to say the press did not do a great job in covering Enron," says Steve Shepard, editor-in-chief of Business Week magazine, which ran only briefs on the company's financial problems until a cover story in November. "Enron was really a systemic failure of all the checks and balances we have on corporate governance: integrity of management, board of directors, audit committee of the board, outside accounting firm, Wall Street analysts and ultimately the press. And all of us failed."

UNDERSTANDING THE ENRON OUTRAGE
The first thing we need to do is remember Michael Kinsley's Reagan era mantra, the scandal is not what illegal actions were taken, the scandal is the obvious wrongdoing that was perfectly legal. (I paraphrase.) The media and congressional investigators (with the Shrubbers' encouragement) will focus on what did the administration or the accountants know and when did they know it, when the real scandal is the degree of power this one company was able to amass -- getting whole new markets created through favorable government action -- and how little there was to stop or even impede them from raiding the company and raping their employees, investors, and the general public in the process. The scandal is how few people in politics or business, now or while it was happening, are even willing to criticize these injustices or do anything to prevent them.

An astute but overly jovial Miami Herald column (Miami Herald: Enron falls -- with a whimper) asks: "Where have all the conspiracy theorists gone?" The columnist seems to get (just barely) the basically reactionary nature of modern conspiracism, something that gets obscured in the Hollywood image of the left-leaning post-hippie conspiracy buster, a la Oliver Stone and "The Lone Gunmen" of X-Files fame. In the real world (as opposed to the Hollywood imagination), most of the paranoid flack we got to know so well in the 90s was thrown out by the right wing, much of it quite cynically. Did Rush, Jerry et al ever really believe that Vince Foster was murdered and such, or did that just fit the silly thriller plot they were trying to spin out for their gullible audience of angry white guys and Christian fundamentalists? You be the judge. We should also not be surprised that something really massive like Enron does not get them going, any more than the election by Supreme Court did in 2000. These particular conspiracy theorists were never interested in exposing the hidden power centers in our society -- heck, they have lunch there every other day; they are interested in using the conspiracy trope to demonize anyone who might stand in the way of their reactionary political agenda. They are about promoting corporate power, not fighting it.

Why can't reporters ever seem to make distinctions? A piece in today's "Times" retails the idea that the Enron mess should be understood as the "reawakening" of the Washington scandal machinery, and then tries to proceed on the assumption that the current situation is somehow analogous to the various Clinton accusations:
A Familiar Capital Script . "The capital may once again face months, if not years, of yet another investigation of the White House featuring the volatile mix of money, influence, access and politics."
"Elements of a classic political scandal are here: A Texas corporation, led by Mr. Bush's most generous campaign contributor, files the largest bankruptcy petition in American history. A handful of executives are able to sell $1 billion worth of the company's stock before its collapse, but thousands of employees are barred from selling, losing their life's savings and retirement accounts."
Does anyone at the paper check over these stories for logic? How is there any equivalency between destroying the lives of thousands and anything Clinton was ever to supposed to have done? How can inviting contributors to White House parties and sleepovers be compared to contributors be allowed full access to and granted tremendous influence over policy-making? Frankly, it all looks makes a night in the Lincoln Bedroom look like a fairly innocuous perk for contributors, the illusion of access and influence, rather than the very real thing that Enron had for years wherever Bush was in control.

ENRON: When partisanship becomes a dutyWhite House Moves to Contain Political Damage From Enron Turmoil "'It's appropriate to take a look at what led to the bankruptcy of Enron,' " Mr. Fleischer said. He expressed the hope that any Congressional inquiry would be even-handled, not a 'partisan, politically charged investigation' of the kind that he said had so soured many Americans on Washington." It is going to be a stern test of the country's democratic instincts to see whether or not the Republicans are going to be allowed to get away with arguments like this. Certainly it is true that that scandal-driven politics turns the public off -- that's Bill Clinton got re-elected and stayed popular despite the most sustained campaign of scandal politics ever mounted against any administration. But those scandals were so different, involving personal morality and personal finances, on a very petty level. How will we respond to something as massive, and as steeped in systemic corruption, as Enron? In which the executives of one corporation used its close political ties to the state and national Bush administrations to get major government policies redone for its benefit, and then walked off with millions of their stockholders' money while in effect taking billions more from their stockholders, employees, and taxpayers who will inevitably have to pay to repair some of the damage? It is not mere partisanship but the democratic duty of the administration's political opponents to see that such a crime is full investigated and that justice is done -- partisanhip in the best sense of applying the kind of outside pressure and criticism that only can keep the powerful relatively truthful and honest.

P.S. I am guessing that the Republicans are now thanking their lucky stars that the Indepedent Counsel law has lapsed. If Ken Starr could keep busy on the slim pickings he had all those years, Enron could keep a firmament of Starrs busy for decades.

Books for Political Conservatives Top Best-Seller Lists "Can best-seller lists indicate the country's political leaning?" A New York Times writer thumbsucks a bit over the fact that the Times best-seller list is currently dominated by overtly right-wing books. One can only marvel at the way that the media, and especially the Times these days, fail to grasp the implications of basic demographic facts. Who has the money to throw at brand-new hardcover books, especially during a recession? The wealthier segments of the population, perhaps, especially those who have not been hurt much by the recent economic travails, or maybe even benefitted from upper-income skewed tax cuts and such? What segments of the population have always voted Republican (and usually conservative)? The same, and we may add here two other conservative-leaning groups that have the best access to the mega-bookstores and airport shops where NYTimes best-sellers are sold: suburbanites and businesspeople. I am going to look up how often (or how long ago) liberal or radical books have made the best-seller charts, if they have at all. I am guessing that nonfiction best-sellers have always skewed conservative, only more typically in the form of get-right-with-capitalism business and self-help books. And best-sellers say nothing about public opinion if that term is to be given even a moderately democratic definition. The article linked above says that the number one best-seller this week, Bernard Goldberg's "Bias," has 225,000 copies in print, but a tiny drop in a nation of 285 million people.