Friday, September 26, 2008 - Posts
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I suppose the eternal mystery of this campaign remains that the same Barack Obama who is one of the most gifted speakers and writers of our lifetimes can manage to be such a bland, wonky, tentative debater. My own sense is that after watching John McCain careening around the country all week on the express train to Crazyville, bland and wonky seems kind of reassuring. I could wish that Obama would stop agreeing with McCain and praising his great leadership, especially after the ninth time McCain implied he wasn’t quite ready to trade in his pull-ups for the Batman underpants.
Still. Big props to McCain for stating that we “must never torture a prisoner ever again.” It shows that McCain—unlike Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Mukasey, Feith. et al—is sufficiently honest to admit that yes we have been torturing prisoners and yes it’s shocking. McCain has said this before although he also disappointed a lot of us when he declined to vote last winter to force the CIA to conform their interrogation techniques to the Army Field Manual (enabling the United States to officially ban torture while still retaining the ability to say, “I know a guy”). If both candidates for president can say aloud that the United States has permitted torture, and understand the significance of that for the rest of the world, it gives me some cause for hope. Not for war crimes prosecutions. I didn’t say I’m drunk here. But at least for some kind of moral reckoning when all this insanity comes to an end.
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It looks like the Sarah Palin rape-kit myth is still alive and flourishing. A reader sent along this editorial in the New York Times today by Dorothy Samuels decrying the policy and asking Palin to give voters an explanation.
Unfortunately, all this piece does is help perpetuate the myth. Thankfully, in addition to the blog posts I linked to in my first post about this, Jim Geraghty at the National Review Online has done his own thorough debunking, which I quote from below.
Samuels writes: "[W]hen news of Wasilla's practice of billing rape victims got around, Alaska's State Legislature approved a bill in 2000 to stop it." However, the Alaska state legislature did NOT pass the bill in response to Wasilla's policy of charging rape victims. As Geraghty points out, the bill came about because hospitals were charging victims.
Lauree Hugonin, director of the Alaska Network on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault, spoke at several committee meetings. She noted in response to Smith's comment that while he had not found an instance where law enforcement has forwarded a bill, "hospitals have. It has happened in the Mat-Su Valley, on the Kenai Peninsula, and in Southeast, and that is why the bill is being brought forward."
Further evidence that the law was not targeted at Wasilla:
Yet in six committee meetings, Wasilla was never mentioned, even when the discussion turned to the specific topic of where victims were being charged. (The Matanuska-Susitna Valley, the surrounding region—the most densely populated region of the state, and roughly the size of West Virginia—is mentioned in passing.)
Samuels also quotes from an article in the local Wasilla paper that police chief Charlie Fallon didn't want to pass the burden along to taxpayers. That is an undeniably boneheaded and offensive statement. What she leaves out is his statement that he was TRYING to bill INSURANCE COMPANIES, not victims. "In the past we've charged the cost of exams to the victims insurance company when possible," is what he said. The story is old and incomplete. It doesn't say what Fallon would do if the insurance company rejected the claim. But the current mayor of Wasilla says there is no record of a victim being charged for a rape kit.
Lastly, Samuels claims that the Palin campaign has not addressed the issue and has released a statement saying only that "Prevention of domestic violence and sexual assault is a priority for Gov. Palin." However, Palin addressed this matter two weeks ago: "Palin spokeswoman Maria Comella told USA Today in an e-mail that the governor ‘does not believe, nor has she ever believed, that rape victims should have to pay for an evidence-gathering test.' "
I did make a small error of my own in my first post about this matter. I wrote that a quote from a Democratic legislator in Alaska that Palin likely didn't know about the policy brought me little comfort. I misread his quote. In fact, that legislator, Eric Croft, said he believed that Palin DID know what was going on, and he's helped smear Palin by saying that the legislation came about because of Wasilla.
I think we can all agree that victims should not have to pay for their rape kits. And billing insurance companies is a far from ideal solution. Reimbursing a victim with state money after she's already had to pay out of pocket is even worse. But it's a problem that's hardly been exclusive to Wasilla or Alaska. Fortunately, states have been quick to pass laws against such practices once word gets out.
But the fact remains that this is a nasty and untrue rumor about Sarah Palin that's been circulating for weeks. If you're an Obama supporter who gets frustrated that people still believe he's Muslim or won't put his hand on his heart for the Pledge of Allegiance, you should understand the frustration that Palin supporters feel when this slime is taken at face value.
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Because of the economic and political news, not much attention was paid to the speech by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the United Nations. The representatives of the United States and Israel left the room, but Ahmadinejad was embraced and applauded by other member nations for an anti-Semitic rant right out of Der Sturmer. This Holocaust denier who weekly predicts a second Holocaust for the state of Israel, warned the assembled delegates of the powers of sly, manipulative Jews: “The dignity, integrity and rights of the American and European people are being played with by a small but deceitful number of people called Zionists. Although they are a minuscule minority, they have been dominating an important portion of the financial and monetary centers as well as the political decision-making centers of some European countries and the U.S. in a deceitful, complex and furtive manner.”
There is much, much more. Here are three good pieces by Bret Stephens, Eve Epstein, and Anne Bayefsky on how such Nazi-style speech has become terrifyingly acceptable. I looked for a liberal commentator who might mention how chilling it is that a leader of a country seeking to become a nuclear power would so boldly speak of his desires for the elimination of a sovereign state and a people, but couldn’t find one. I did, however, see a defense of Ahmadinejad in Salon by Juan Cole, whose only critical words were for Barack Obama for condemning the speech. Cole finds the Iranian leader to be “quirky” and “colorful,” and says, by way of illustrating Ahmadinejad’s benign intentions, that if he really had genocidal fantasies, the Iranian regime would already have murdered the Jews still living in that country. In case that leaves you with any doubt about the regime’s desires, here’s an article about a march today in Iran in which tens of thousands chanted “Death to Israel” and a book was released mocking the Holocaust with illustrations of hook-nosed Jews.
(Photo of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images)
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E.J. and Marjorie: agreed. Palin is so bad in the Couric interviews that I'm embarrassed for her. I'm also struck by how tight she sounds. Her throat seems constricted, and her voice is pitched higher, as often happens when women get nervous. When Hillary Clinton let herself show emotion and said she'd found her true voice back in January, Meghan pointed out that Hillary suddenly sounded natural. The timber of her speech deepened with her rising sense of comfort. It's like the opposite is happening with Palin. And in terms of women's presence on the national political scene, it's not a good thing.
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