Go buy the Atlantic this month.
There are two great articles in it; the first is a long review of Arafat’s damage to the Palestinian people.
“No doubt Arafat was a great man,” al-Masri says. “No doubt he had vision. Most of the people that you see now being very important, I see them wanting the grace of Yasir Arafat. They want to be in his grace. Ah, he thought money was power,” al-Masri adds, with a wistful glance around his study. The money he spent to buy the loyalty of his court, al-Masri gently suggests, could easily have paid for a functioning Palestinian state instead.
“With three hundred, four hundred million dollars we could have built Palestine in ten years. Waste, waste, waste. I flew over the West Bank in a helicopter with Arafat at the beginning of Oslo, and I told him how easy we could make five, six, seven towns here; we could absorb a lot of people here; and have the right of return for the refugees. If you have good intentions and you say you want to reach a solution, we could do it. I said, if you have money and water, it could be comparable to Israel, this piece of land.”
Read the rest, as they say.The other is an editorial about the Supreme Court.
I’ve been working on some questions in case the makers of Trivial Pursuit ever decide to put forth a Supreme Court edition: Now that Sandra Day O’Connor has announced her retirement, how many remaining justices have ever held elected office? How many have previously served at the highest levels of the executive branch of government? How many have argued big-time commercial lawsuits within the past thirty-five years? How many have ever been either criminal defense lawyers or trial prosecutors? How many have presided over even a single criminal or civil trial? The answers are zero, zero, zero, one, and one, respectively. (David Souter was a New Hampshire prosecutor once upon a time.)
The answers would have been starkly different fifty years ago. Five of the nine justices who decided Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, had once worked as trial prosecutors, and several had substantial hands-on experience in commercial litigation. More famously, that Court included a former governor, three former senators, two former attorneys general, two former solicitors general, and a former SEC chairman.
I’m working on a long post on “experts” and how the rise of a class of clean-hands thinkers with little experience in the messy world outside academia, the executive branch, and think tanks are screwing things up. This fact adds a little fillip to that point.
Neither of those links seems to work…
Fixed. If folks let Word insert “smart quotes” in their text, it creates “dumb links” that won’t function.
OK, fixed the first link, too. RE: the Supreme Court, these passages are very illustrative (though there’s lots, lots more). I’ll quote them here because the Atlantic article will disappear soon:
bq.. “The Court’s slow disengagement from practicality was visible by the 1970s, when, for example, in a well-intentioned effort to protect students from unwarranted suspension and tenured public school teachers from arbitrary dismissal, the Court issued a series of decisions requiring hearings before such action. The justices presumably imagined simple, cursory hearings to guard against egregious abuses of power. Predictably, that’s not what happened. Hearings quickly became clogged with lawyers, witnesses, trial-type formalities, multiple administrative and judicial appeals, and years of delay. To avoid such ordeals, many principals and administrators have simply stopped trying to remove thuggish students and inept teachers from our schools.
Over time the justices have failed ever more conspicuously to understand what messes their decisions might make. In 1997, while forcing Bill Clinton to give a sworn deposition in the Paula Jones sexual-harassment lawsuit, the Court stunned litigators and trial judges by predicting that this was “highly unlikely to occupy any substantial amount of [President Clinton’s] time.”
p. In both cases, you have to wonder what these people were smoking.
“This Link has the full article about Arafat (may his name be blooted out)”:http://www.ocnus.net/artman/publish/article_19372.shtml
The question is: If Hillary wins the Presidency, should she name Bill to the Supreme Court?
I think if you were to ply through the history of SCOTUS noniminations, you will find pre-Watergate, that a lot of the diversity can be attributed to political cronyism.
Also, in ’54 (same year as Brown), the ABA started rating the qualifications of nominees and Presidents found that they could stiffle criticism of their picks (such as Rehnquist) by pointing to their professional endorsements.
Fifty years ago it would have been imaginable for Bill Clinton to become a justice. Its unthinkable today.
Arafat; if he’d had a tenth the moral leadership of Ghandi the Palestinians would have a state right now.
If he’d had one tenth the moral _fiber_ of Ghandi, the Palestinians would have a state right now.
And that state would be called lebanon.
Problem with Arafat was that he had to deal with the Israeli’s and their love of stealing land. If you look at the situation it is still surprising how much he has accomplised
I am beginning to lean toward the Winds comments section theory that a. is a Dutch Islamist…
Those not of that mindset are encouraged to read the Atlantic article – which a. obviusly hasn’t, given that he hasn’t addressed it at all.
Dutch Islamist, Dutch leftist… It really can be hard to see the light of day between the two.
It’s too bad about a; there are real debates to have about these issues, and I’d love to have them here.
I wish he’d bring some arguments instead of just attitude.
A.L.