Article by Bennett and Dershowitz

Found this article this morning:

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San Diego Union-TribuneFebruary 24, 2006

This Time, The Press Failed The Public
By William J. Bennett and Alan M. Dershowitz

There was a time when the press was the strongest guardian of free expression in this democracy. Stories and celebrations of intrepid and courageous reporters are many within the press corps. Cases such as New York Times v. Sullivan in the 1960s were litigated so that the press could report on and examine public officials with the unfettered reporting a free people deserved. In the 1970s the Pentagon Papers case reaffirmed the proposition that issues of public importance were fully protected by the First Amendment.

The mass media that backed the plaintiffs in these cases understood that not only did a free press have a right to report on critical issues and people of the day but that citizens had a right to know about those issues and people. The mass media understood another thing: They had more than a right; they had a duty to report.

We two come from different political and philosophical perspectives, but on this we agree: Over the past few weeks, the press has betrayed not only its duties but its responsibilities. To our knowledge, only three print newspapers have followed their true calling: The Austin American-Statesman, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Sun. What have they done? They simply printed cartoons that were at the center of widespread turmoil among Muslims over depictions of the prophet Muhammad. These newspapers did their duty.

Since the war on terrorism began, the mainstream press has had no problem printing stories and pictures that challenged the administration and, in the view of some, compromised our war and peace efforts. The manifold images of abuse at Abu Ghraib come to mind – images that struck at our effort to win support from Arab governments and peoples and that pierced the heart of the Muslim world as well as the U.S. military.

The press has had no problem with breaking a story using classified information on detention centers for captured terrorists and suspects – stories that could harm our allies. And it disclosed a surveillance program so highly classified that most members of Congress were unaware of it.

In its zeal to publish stories critical of our nation's efforts – and clearly upsetting to enemies and allies alike – the press has printed some articles that turned out to be inaccurate. The Guantanamo Bay flushing of the Koran comes to mind.

But for the past month, the Islamist street has been on an intifada over cartoons depicting Muhammad that were first published months ago in a Danish newspaper. Protests in London – never mind Jordan, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Iran and other countries not noted for their commitment to democratic principles – included signs that read, “Behead those who insult Islam.” The mainstream U.S. media have covered this worldwide uprising; it is, after all, a glimpse into the sentiments of our enemy and its allies. And yet it has refused, with but a few exceptions, to show the cartoons that purportedly caused all the outrage.

What has happened? To put it simply, radical Islamists have won a war of intimidation. They have cowed the major news media from showing these cartoons. The mainstream press has capitulated to the Islamists – their threats more than their sensibilities. One did not see Catholics claiming the right to mayhem in the wake of the republished depiction of the Virgin Mary covered in cow dung, any more than one saw a rejuvenated Jewish Defense League take to the street or blow up an office when Ariel Sharon was depicted as Hitler or when the Israeli army was depicted as murdering the baby Jesus.

So far as we can tell, a new, twin policy from the mainstream media has been promulgated: (a) If a group is strong enough in its reaction to a story or caricature, the press will refrain from printing that story or caricature, and (b) if the group is pandered to by the mainstream media, the media then will go through elaborate contortions and defenses to justify its abdication of duty. At bottom, this is an unacceptable form of not-so-benign bigotry, representing a higher expectation from Christians and Jews than from Muslims.

While we may disagree among ourselves about whether and when the public interest justifies the disclosure of classified wartime information, our general agreement and understanding of the First Amendment and a free press is informed by the fact – not opinion but fact – that without broad freedom, without responsibility for the right to know carried out by courageous writers, editors, political cartoonists and publishers, our democracy would be weaker, if not nonexistent. There should be no group or mob veto of a story that is in the public interest.

When we were attacked on Sept. 11, we knew the main reason for the attack was that Islamists hated our way of life, our virtues, our freedoms. What we never imagined was that the free press – an institution at the heart of those virtues and freedoms – would be among the first to surrender.

Bennett is the Washington fellow of the Claremont Institute and a former secretary of education. Dershowitz is a professor of law at Harvard University.
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So far as I can see, the only thing Bennett and Dershowitz got wrong is the last sentence. Is anyone really surprised that the left-leaning media would surrender to Muslim intimidation? The leftists are falling all over themselves to debase themselves before the Islamofascists in the name of appeasement. The Jews have been victimized for thousands of years, and Christians are clearly out of favor with the left because Christians generally have a problem with immoral behavor. (Never mind that all three religions proscribe drug abuse, casual sex and abortion.) If the dung-covered Mary in Boston and the crucifix dipped in urine (photo by a student at USC) aren’t blashphemous, I don’t know what is. Maybe if, as others have suggested, the Christians and Jews threw temper tantrums and made threats for a month, the mainstream media would stop publicizing these images (which are orders of magnitude more offensive than the Jyllands-Posten cartoons) as well.

This about sums it up...

Over the past several weeks we've been treated to spectacle of the mindless outrage of a multinational bunch of ignorant muslim peasants over some not-really-all-that-offensive cartoons in an obscure Danish newspaper. The extremist muftis went into overdrive fanning the flames with their own bogus (and crudely done) profanities against Islam. Sweetness & Light posted some interesting responses from Islamic clerics on the question of Islamic tolerance for other faiths and for freedom of expression (as if the idiots over there hadn't had their real levels of tolerance and peaceful intent on parade already).

As much as I bag on the leftists, I tend to side with my more-liberal-than-commie journalist friends on the necessary response to these Islamofascist drones, and it can be summed up in four words (and one website):

Mohammed Dance & Buy Danish!!!!

Pseudoscience and Politics

Seems the Intelligent Design crowd has some competition in the "pseudoscience for the cause" department. First, witness this stunning piece of pseudoscience from the moonbats at the People's Republic of Berkeleystan, then enjoy my paraphrase below. The names have been changed to protect - well, me. Enjoy!

NASHVILLE – Politically liberal agendas may range from opposing the Iraq War to upending traditional moral and religious values to universalizing welfare. But are there consistent underlying motivations?

Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of liberalism report that at the core of political liberalism is narcissism and a fear of responsibility, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political liberalism include:

• Negativism/fear and psychological immaturity
• Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
• Uncertainty avoidance/advancement of mediocrity
• Need for cognitive closure
• Terror identification/Appeasement

"From our perspective, these psychological factors are capable of contributing to the adoption of liberal ideological contents, either independently or in combination," the researchers wrote in an article, "Political Liberalism as Experiential Social Cognition," recently published in the American Psychobabble Association's Psychobabble Bulletin.

Assistant Professor Jack Daniels of the University of Tennessee and Visiting Professor Julio Gallo of the University of California joined lead author, Associate Professor Jim Beam of the University of Kentucky, and Professor Arie Dareyett of the School of Hardnox, to analyze the literature on liberalism.
The psychologists sought patterns among 88 samples, involving 22,818 participants, taken from journal articles, books and conference papers. The material originating from 12 countries included speeches and interviews given by politicians, opinions and verdicts rendered by judges, as well as experimental, field and survey studies.

Ten meta-analytic calculations performed on the material - which included various types of literature and approaches from different countries and groups - yielded consistent, common threads, Daniels said.
The avoidance of uncertainty, for example, as well as the striving for certainty, are particularly tied to one key dimension of liberal thought - the resistance to differing points of view that results when their basic narcissistic view of the world is challenged, they said.

The terror identification feature of liberalism can be seen in post-Sept. 11 America, where many liberals openly offer ideological or material support to America’s enemies in an attempt to deflect hostility and potential violence away from themselves, they wrote. This behavior is also widely known as the “Stockholm” or “Patty Hurst” effect in which the victim identifies with their tormentor(s).

Concerns with fear and threat, likewise, can be linked to a second key dimension of liberalism - an endorsement of absolute equality and mediocrity, a view reflected in Marxist-Leninist ideology, Chinese agrarian reforms and the liberal, failure-coddling politics of Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA).

Disparate liberals share a certain narcissism and fear of responsibility, the authors said. Mao, Castro, and former President Bill Clinton were individuals, but all were left-wing liberals because they preached or demonstrated an opposition to standards of ethical conduct and personal responsibility, and condemned individual merit in some form. Movie-maker Michael Moore can be described the same way, the authors commented in a published reply to the article.

This research marks the first critical synthesis of a vast amount of information about liberalism, and the result is an "elegant and unifying explanation" for political liberalism under the rubric of experiential social cognition, said Gallo. That entails the tendency of people's attitudinal preferences on policy matters to be explained by individual traits based on personality, interests and life experience.

The researchers' analytical methods allowed them to determine the effects for each class of factors and revealed "more pluralistic and nuanced understanding of the source of liberalism," Gallo said.
While most people resist change, but eventually adapt to their social environment, liberals (as narcissists) are more likely to attempt to force others to adapt to them or adopt their views, than conservatives are.
As for liberals' penchant for enforcing mediocrity, he said, one contemporary example is liberals' general endorsement of relaxing standards and eliminating any measures of individual merit in education, and the push to reinforce existing social divisions by extending special “compensatory” rights and privileges to minority groups whom liberals have traditionally defined as “disadvantaged victims,” despite the basic fairness of civil rights laws already on the books.

The researchers said that liberal ideologies, like virtually all belief systems, develop in part because they satisfy some psychological needs, but that "does not mean (Mr. Savage) that liberalism is pathological or that liberal beliefs are necessarily false, irrational, or unprincipled."

They also stressed that their findings are not judgmental.

"In many cases, including mass politics, 'conservative' traits may be liabilities, and being intolerant of ambiguity, high on the need for closure, or low in cognitive complexity might be associated with such generally valued characteristics as personal commitment and unwavering loyalty," the researchers wrote.

This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic clichés and stereotypes, the researchers advised.

The latest debate about liberals’ accusation that the Bush administration ignored intelligence information that discounted reports of Iraq buying nuclear material from Africa may be linked to the liberal fear of responsibility (blame assignment) and/or need for closure, said Daniels.

"For a variety of psychological reasons, then, left-wing populism may have more consistent appeal than reasoned debate, probity, and intellectual rigor, especially in times of potential crisis and instability," he said.

Daniels acknowledged that the team's exclusive assessment of the psychological motivations of political liberalism might be viewed as a partisan exercise. However, he said, there is a host of information available about liberalism, but very little that is seriously critical or skeptical; probably a function of the high incidence or liberal academicians (those who can’t or won’t do, teach).

The researchers also highlighted cases of left-wing ideologues, such as Stalin, Khrushchev or Castro, who, once in power, steadfastly resisted change, allegedly in the name of egalitarianism.

They noted that some researchers might consider these figures politically conservative in the context of the systems that they defended. For example, some researchers might claim that Stalin was concerned about defending and preserving the existing Soviet system; however, Stalin was actually a megalomaniac bent on preserving his personal power as a means to compensate for his deeply buried feelings of inadequacy and self loathing that resulted from abuse at the hands of his father.

Although they concluded that liberals often pride themselves on being more "integratively complex" than others are, Daniels said, "it doesn't actually bear out in reality."

Liberals don't feel the need to jump through complex, intellectual hoops in order to understand or justify some of their positions, he said. "They are more comfortable seeing and stating things in black and white in ways that would make truly rigorous minds squirm, and then operating on the assumption that everyone naturally agrees with them," Daniels said.

He pointed as an example to congressional hearings in 1999, when then-President Bill Clinton was asked to explain himself. The Democratic president told assembled legislators and the media, "I did not have sex with that woman." And a few months later, Clinton told the American people, "I lied."