I guess I'm gossiping today. Then I take heart and remember what Mike Kinsley once said, that to be a good journalist you have to be part-gossip. And my wife says gossip is the yellow-brick-road of curiosity about, ultimately, the human condition. There, now I feel righteous…
Politico says that oft-cited legal scholar Cass Sunstein and human rights siren Samantha Power, who wed in Ireland last summer, may become a Washington power couple under Obama. Politico says that Power is being considered for National Security Adviser and Sunstein for the Supreme Court.
Obama got where he got thanks to the written word, and if the Sunstein/Power accession comes to pass, two august journals will have played a role. Here is law professor Sunstein in Dissent a few years ago, giving the Bush Administration a pass on its civil rights record during the so-called war on terror:
Taken as a whole, the record of the Bush administration isn't at all bad by historical standards. There has certainly been no serious attack on political liberty or constitutional democracy.
This is not my territory; still, I sort of doubt that statement. And wonder how much of it was written with Republican senators in mind! Though Sunstein ends on a politically-correct theme:
While constantly invoking both "liberty" and "security," the Bush
administration has failed to see that these ideals call not merely for
protection against bullets and bombs but also against hunger, disease,
illiteracy, and desperate poverty.
As for Power, I find it hard to criticize someone whose passion and values I so admire (and who's so pretty). Notwithstanding her career debt to Marty Peretz and Leon Wieseltier, she surely gets Palestine. Yet I have to raise an eyebrow over this New York Review of Books piece last August: "The Democrats & National Security." See for yourself. It doesn't really say anything. Very official. Courtly bows to Biden and Armitage. Nothing the least bit risky about the Middle East. "Pro-Israel" when it has to be. This is not why I pay for a subscription; I want to know what writers really think.
The real story, of course, is that the piece was published a few months after Power had (accurately) described Hillary Clinton as a "monster," causing Obama to let her go. You have to scrape the shit right off your shoes, as Mick Jagger said, and even great publications must play doormat now and then.
P.S. It goes without saying that former Harvard dean Stephen Walt, who thanked both Power and (another Politico pick) Lawrence Summers for their help on a recent book, is of course not on Politico's list, notwithstanding his own goldplated bona fides. His own journal entry ("The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy") in the prestige-appointment sweepstakes was somewhat more efficacious. And noble.
Related posts:
- How would Washington Post respond if soldiers came for a columnist at 2 in the morning because of his writings?
- Bomb bomb bomb Obama Iran
- Sunstein augured Obama’s strategy back in ‘04
- Aaron David Miller says Obama must ‘restore his reputation’ in Israel
- Scowcroft (the New Center-Left) Said to Be Advising Obama
{ 3 comments }
Dissent, another paradoxically named publication of Octopus Inc's. Ain't no "dissent" to be found. Just more finely nuanced lick-spittlery with a literary sheen: "these ideals call not…" You'd think he was another Milton.
"Taken as a whole, the record of the Bush administration isn't at all bad by historical standards. There has certainly been no serious attack on political liberty or constitutional democracy."
Phil, I'm no expert either, but the experts I've read who've weighed in on this the past few years would find this statement terrifying coming from any lawyer, let alone one who might be up for the Supreme Court.
It is thought that Nixon violated three laws (statutes). Prominent Constitutional Law Professor Jonathon Turley and his associates believe Bush/Cheney have violated many dozens of laws (statutes).
They fuguratively (if not literally) trashed the U.S. Constitution. At times the Congress has been complicit.
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