Houses of the Holier-Than-Thou
Here is one of those quotations that explains why the rest of the word finds us so annoying.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch (from an AP report) Bush insists that Pakistan squash attacks in Kashmir Bush said after a Cabinet meeting: "We are making it very clear to both Pakistan and India that war will not serve their interests."

Obviously, we do not want another India-Pakistan war, but where does Bush (who doubtless knew Kashimir only as a Led Zeppelin tune before 9/11) get off telling these two longtime rival nations what their interests are? How we react to such a statement coming from the Russians or the French or the Indonesians? Or, hell, from omnipotent space aliens? "Nuts," I believe that hero general said at the Battle of the Bulge.

Just when I thought I could not be shocked by the Bush administration anymore, the German press (not ours) reports the following:

Bushs Allgemeinbildung: Gibt es Schwarze in Brasilien? - Panorama - SPIEGEL ONLINE Washington - It was Condoleezza Rice, national security advisor, who helped her boss out of the embarassing situation. During a conversation between the two presidents, George W. Bush, 55, (USA) and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, 71, (Brazil), Bush bewildered his colleague with the question "Do you have blacks, too?"
Rice, 47, noticing how astonished the Brazilian was, saved the day by telling Bush "Mr. President, Brazil probably has more blacks than the USA. Some say it's the Country with the most blacks outside Africa." Later, the Brazilian president Cardoso said: regarding Latin America, Bush was still in his "learning phase".

And remember, kids, Latin America was supposed to Shrub's lone area of foreign policy interest. But I guess that was based on liking tacos or something.

TRANSPARENCY IN ACTION
President Bush recently included a lack of transparency as one evil feature of the Iraqi government. True enough, though it seemed a bit hypocritical at the time given the Bush administration's tendency to keep secrets and angrily dismiss all questions and criticisms. But perhaps Bush was touting a different kind of transparency, the political kind where your administration's every action is determined solely by the imperative to help your friends and hurt your enemies. Has there ever been a policy decision no nakedly political as this most anti-environmentalist of presidents, whose administration has trashed regulations and pushed for more logging and drilling everywhere imaginable, whose Grand Vizier regards energy conservation as no more than a symbolic gesture, suddenly deciding to protect the environment in the one state where his up-for-reelection brother is governor? (Bush's foreign policy is done this way, too: He would be fast-tracking trade deals with Fidel today if the Miami Cuban emigre community was not such a huge constituency for Jeb's Florida Republican party.)

Sadly, the Bushes and the media seem to regard this as perfectly normal and natural, and even rather shrewd: Bush Wades Into Everglades (washingtonpost.com) "The Bush administration has been pushing to expand oil and gas exploration nationwide, but today's agreements should burnish the president's environmental credentials in the swing state that decided the 2000 election." The contempt in which both this writer and the president hold we the voters and readers is truly astonishing. One of the saddest things about modern political journalism is the way it always takes, and encourages the reader to take, the cynical political calculator's view of every question. This is called objective journalism because it avoids taking any ideological viewpoint. Karl Rove must be very pleased.

MY FRIEND SHRAK
One hopes that the president wasn't thinking about that movie where the ogre was in love with Cameron Diaz: The Independent: "On the environment. . the French President said all countries should learn to reduce pollution and the consumption of "resources that cannot be renewed".
Repeated at a joint press conference, this assertion brought a blank stare from the US president, who spent almost his entire career before politics in the oil industry."

"Mr Bush went out of his way, however, to respond to the frequent European complaint that the US – and his own administration in particular – makes constant demands on its allies without consulting them."

"'I appreciate this good man's advice,' he said, nodding towards Mr Chirac. 'I listen carefully. And I am proud to call him a friend.'
Mr Bush seemed, however, to be in a rather skittish and unfocused mood after a demanding five day tour to Germany and Russia. He referred twice to Mr Chirac as 'President Jacques' and pronounced the French President's second name throughout as 'Shrak'."

I'm back. Blogging during the last part of the semester is tough for those of us who actually teach!

Having once gotten sucked into a witless e-learning initiative at a certain Deep South university where I was once employed, I was gratified to read in the "New York Times" that online universities are mostly flopping badly. I always said that colleges where you could not drink beer, meet girls (or boys!), and bullshit sophomorically into the wee hours with your friends would be of little interest.

And yet, how the media that flogged all things Webbed for so long continues not to get it. The lone success, we read, is the University of Phoenix, which excels at "branding" we are told in Lessons Learned at Dot-Com U. "The trick now is finding a way for universities like Columbia, steeped in academic tradition, to make it work.
'In a way, that is the crux of the matter,' said Ms. Kirschner of Fathom [Columbia University's e-venture]. 'Are universities going to grow smaller and marginalized in a world teeming with sources of information, or are they more important than ever, as people seek to separate fact from fiction, knowledge from data?' Ms. Kirschner said she hoped the answer would be the latter."

There's little evidence for this growing smaller and marginalized jazz at all; state legislatures may be eviscerating budgets this year but there is no time to be in school like a recession. The "Times" is just allowing a diehard to recycle the same deluded rhetoric that buffaloed nearly every school in the country to throw money at distance learning in the 1990s. The real way for universities to find themselves marginalized would be to continue the behavior that led to these debacles in the first place: acting like corporations whose main mission is to compete in the marketplace and create profit centers. As many real corporations have found, losing focus on your "core business" -- in this case, expanding knowledge and educating students -- usually leads to disaster.

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."