Daily Digest |  |
- There’s no excuse for dismissals of GOP claims about covid’s origin
- “We are all Jews here”
- America’s honor
- Does Marty Walsh have Alex Acosta’s problem?
- Princeton drops Greek and Latin requirement for Classics majors
| There’s no excuse for dismissals of GOP claims about covid’s origin Posted: 31 May 2021 04:58 PM PDT (Paul Mirengoff) The Democrats and the mainstream media have a lot of explaining to do when it comes to their dismissal as a “conspiracy theory” of questions as to whether the Wuhan coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab. It was clear all along that the questions were legitimate, and now, finally, the media and the Dems are asking them too. In doing so, they recognize the need to explain their earlier dismissal of the subject. And you’ll never guess the explanation they have come up with. Just kidding. You know exactly where they place they blame. It’s Donald Trump’s fault. Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s fact checker, started the ball rolling in that direction. He wrote that “the Trump administration's messaging [on the origin of the virus] was often accompanied by anti-Chinese rhetoric that made it easier for skeptics to ignore its claims.” Three Post writers pick up the ball and carry it with a vengeance. Anne Linksey, Shane Harris, and David Willman quote Democrats as saying that “the departure of Donald Trump, who often talked about the pandemic in racially charged terms, makes it easier to consider the theory [that the virus came from a lab]. . . .” (Emphasis added) Kessler was honest enough to characterize Trump’s rhetoric as anti-Chinese (which it was, but why was that a problem?). His three colleagues peddle the Democrats’ talking point that Trump’s rhetoric was “racially charged.” They cite no such rhetoric, and there was none. China is a country, not a race. It is no more racist to use anti-China rhetoric than, say, to use the anti-Cuba or anti-Venezuela kind. For that matter, it’s no more racist for a white politician to criticize China harshly than it is for a black politician to blast America for what occurred here when the country was overwhelmingly White. If scrutinized at all, what the Democrat/media excuse really amounts to is an admission against interest. They are confessing to the rankest kind of partisanship — the dismissal of important and legitimate questions based on the political orientation of their source. Democrats hate Donald Trump and Tom Cotton so much that they refused to entertain the possibility that what the two were saying about an important subject that is (or should be) non-partisan — where did a virus originate — might be true. Talk about Trump derangement syndrome. Jamie Raskin is the hyper-partisan Democrat who represents my congressional district. He says, “like everything else it [the question of where the virus started] became politicized very early on.” Raskin speaks misleadingly in the passive. Tom Cotton didn’t politicize the issue early on (or later). Saying that a virus might well have come from a Chinese lab isn’t a partisan statement — not unless Raskin accepts the view that Democrats are apologists for China. It was Democrats who politicized the matter by mindlessly rejecting a theory simply because Republicans presented it. I agree that Trump didn’t help matters. Characteristically, his statements were less careful than Cotton’s and might have gone further than the intelligence at the time warranted. We’ll see. But that’s no excuse for falsely claiming that Cotton’s concerns had been “debunked.” It’s no excuse for accepting China’s claims about the origin of the virus and ripping Americans who didn’t buy them. The explanation for this sorry behavior must be either a pro-China mindset or blatant partisanship. I’m going with the latter. And I’m keeping it in mind the next time the Washington Post or some other tool of the Democratic Party talks about bipartisanship. The Democrats and their media allies act in bad faith. Always. Even when we’re trying to get to the bottom of the source of a pandemic.     |
| Posted: 31 May 2021 11:12 AM PDT (Scott Johnson) Last week Tablet published Professor Patrick Henry’s remembrance of Roddie Edmonds, the former Army master sergeant who saved the Jews in his ranks from plans the Nazis had in store for them as prisoners of war. Professor Henry takes the title of his column from Edmonds’s memorable assertion to the unhappy Nazi commandant of the prison camp: “We are all Jews here.” It is a moving and inspirational story. In anticipation of the holiday today, Professor Henry writes: “On Memorial Day 2021, 76 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, let's remember the heroics of Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds, the fifth American Righteous Gentile and the only one to have saved the lives of American Jews.” Edmonds never got around to telling his own story:
Please read the whole thing, and don’t miss the excellent Vimeo video below (also posted here, via reader C.M.). Chris Edmonds tells the story as he pieced it together in the 2019 book No Surrender: A Father, a Son, and an Extraordinary Act of Heroism That Continues to Live on Today.   |
| Posted: 31 May 2021 06:10 AM PDT (Scott Johnson) In observance of Memorial Day 2007 the Wall Street Journal published a brilliant column by the late Peter Collier to mark the occasion. The column remains timely and is accessible online here. I don’t think we’ll read or hear anything more thoughtful or appropriate to the occasion today. With the kind permission of Peter himself, here it is: Once we knew who and what to honor on Memorial Day: those who had given all their tomorrows, as was said of the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy, for our todays. But in a world saturated with selfhood, where every death is by definition a death in vain, the notion of sacrifice today provokes puzzlement more often than admiration. We support the troops, of course, but we also believe that war, being hell, can easily touch them with an evil no cause for engagement can wash away. And in any case we are more comfortable supporting them as victims than as warriors. Former football star Pat Tillman and Marine Cpl. Jason Dunham were killed on the same day: April 22, 2004. But as details of his death fitfully emerged from Afghanistan, Tillman has become a metaphor for the current conflict–a victim of fratricide, disillusionment, coverup and possibly conspiracy. By comparison, Dunham, who saved several of his comrades in Iraq by falling on an insurgent’s grenade, is the unknown soldier. The New York Times, which featured Abu Ghraib on its front page for 32 consecutive days, put the story of Dunham’s Medal of Honor on the third page of section B. Not long ago I was asked to write the biographical sketches for a book featuring formal photographs of all our living Medal of Honor recipients. As I talked with them, I was, of course, chilled by the primal power of their stories. But I also felt pathos: They had become strangers–honored strangers, but strangers nonetheless–in our midst. *** In my own boyhood, figures such as Jimmy Doolittle, Audie Murphy and John Basilone were household names. And it was assumed that what they had done defined us as well as them, telling us what kind of nation we were. But the 110 Medal recipients alive today are virtually unknown except for a niche audience of warfare buffs. Their heroism has become the military equivalent of genre painting. There’s something wrong with that. What they did in battle was extraordinary. Jose Lopez, a diminutive Mexican-American from the barrio of San Antonio, was in the Ardennes forest when the Germans began the counteroffensive that became the Battle of the Bulge. As 10 enemy soldiers approached his position, he grabbed a machine gun and opened fire, killing them all. He killed two dozen more who rushed him. Knocked down by the concussion of German shells, he picked himself up, packed his weapon on his back and ran toward a group of Americans about to be surrounded. He began firing and didn’t stop until all his ammunition and all that he could scrounge from other guns was gone. By then he had killed over 100 of the enemy and bought his comrades time to establish a defensive line. Yet their stories were not only about killing. Several Medal of Honor recipients told me that the first thing they did after the battle was to find a church or some other secluded spot where they could pray, not only for those comrades they’d lost but also the enemy they’d killed. Desmond Doss, for instance, was a conscientious objector who entered the army in 1942 and became a medic. Because of his religious convictions and refusal to carry a weapon, the men in his unit intimidated and threatened him, trying to get him to transfer out. He refused and they grudgingly accepted him. Late in 1945 he was with them in Okinawa when they got cut to pieces assaulting a Japanese stronghold. Everyone but Mr. Doss retreated from the rocky plateau where dozens of wounded remained. Under fire, he treated them and then began moving them one by one to a steep escarpment where he roped them down to safety. Each time he succeeded, he prayed, “Dear God, please let me get just one more man.” By the end of the day, he had single-handedly saved 75 GIs. Why did they do it? Some talked of entering a zone of slow-motion invulnerability, where they were spectators at their own heroism. But for most, the answer was simpler and more straightforward: They couldn’t let their buddies down. Big for his age at 14, Jack Lucas begged his mother to help him enlist after Pearl Harbor. She collaborated in lying about his age in return for his promise to someday finish school. After training at Parris Island, he was sent to Honolulu. When his unit boarded a troop ship for Iwo Jima, Mr. Lucas was ordered to remain behind for guard duty. He stowed away to be with his friends and, discovered two days out at sea, convinced his commanding officer to put him in a combat unit rather than the brig. He had just turned 17 when he hit the beach, and a day later he was fighting in a Japanese trench when he saw two grenades land near his comrades. He threw himself onto the grenades and absorbed the explosion. Later a medic, assuming he was dead, was about to take his dog tag when he saw Mr. Lucas’s finger twitch. After months of treatment and recovery, he returned to school as he’d promised his mother, a ninth-grader wearing a Medal of Honor around his neck. *** The men in World War II always knew, although news coverage was sometimes scant, that they were in some sense performing for the people at home. The audience dwindled during Korea. By the Vietnam War, the journalists were omnipresent, but the men were performing primarily for each other. One story that expresses this isolation and comradeship involves a SEAL team ambushed on a beach after an aborted mission near North Vietnam’s Cua Viet river base. After a five-hour gunfight, Cmdr. Tom Norris, already a legend thanks to his part in a harrowing rescue mission for a downed pilot (later dramatized in the film BAT-21), stayed behind to provide covering fire while the three others headed to rendezvous with the boat sent to extract them. At the water’s edge, one of the men, Mike Thornton, looked back and saw Tom Norris get hit. As the enemy moved in, he ran back through heavy fire and killed two North Vietnamese standing over Norris’s body. He lifted the officer, barely alive with a shattered skull, and carried him to the water and then swam out to sea where they were picked up two hours later. The two men have been inseparable in the 30 years since. The POWs of Vietnam configured a mini-America in prison that upheld the values beginning to wilt at home as a result of protest and dissension. John McCain tells of Lance Sijan, an airman who ejected over North Vietnam and survived for six weeks crawling (because of his wounds) through the jungle before being captured. Close to death when he reached Hanoi, Sijan told his captors that he would give them no information because it was against the code of conduct. When not delirious, he quizzed his cellmates about camp security and made plans to escape. The North Vietnamese were obsessed with breaking him, but never did. When he died after long sessions of torture Sijan was, in Sen. McCain’s words, “a free man from a free country.” Leo Thorsness was also at the Hanoi Hilton. The Air Force pilot had taken on four MiGs trying to strafe his wingman who had parachuted out of his damaged aircraft; Mr. Thorsness destroyed two and drove off the other two. He was shot down himself soon after this engagement and found out by tap code that his name had been submitted for the Medal. One of Mr. Thorsness’s most vivid memories from seven years of imprisonment involved a fellow prisoner named Mike Christian, who one day found a grimy piece of cloth, perhaps a former handkerchief, during a visit to the nasty concrete tank where the POWs were occasionally allowed a quick sponge bath. Christian picked up the scrap of fabric and hid it. Back in his cell he convinced prisoners to give him precious crumbs of soap so he could clean the cloth. He stole a small piece of roof tile which he laboriously ground into a powder, mixed with a bit of water and used to make horizontal stripes. He used one of the blue pills of unknown provenance the prisoners were given for all ailments to color a square in the upper left of the cloth. With a needle made from bamboo wood and thread unraveled from the cell’s one blanket, Christian stitched little stars on the blue field. “It took Mike a couple weeks to finish, working at night under his mosquito net so the guards couldn’t see him,” Mr. Thorsness told me. “Early one morning, he got up before the guards were active and held up the little flag, waving it as if in a breeze. We turned to him and saw it coming to attention and automatically saluted, some of us with tears running down our cheeks. Of course, the Vietnamese found it during a strip search, took Mike to the torture cell and beat him unmercifully. Sometime after midnight they pushed him into our cell, so bad off that even his voice was gone. But when he recovered in a couple weeks he immediately started looking for another piece of cloth.” *** We impoverish ourselves by shunting these heroes and their experiences to the back pages of our national consciousness. Their stories are not just boys’ adventure tales writ large. They are a kind of moral instruction. They remind of something we’ve heard many times before but is worth repeating on a wartime Memorial Day when we’re uncertain about what we celebrate. We’re the land of the free for one reason only: We’re also the home of the brave. Peter died in November 2019. I paid my respects here on Power Line. Peter’s book on the living Medal of Honor recipients is Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty, now republished in a third edition. Peter’s book Political Woman, a biography of Jeane Kirkpatrick, was published in 2012 by Encounter Books. Peter’s JFK novel, Things in Glocca Mora, was published posthumously by Encounter late last year. Encounter keeps Peter’s flame alive with this page devoted to his books that it has kept in print. The 2016 film Hacksaw Ridge, directed by Mel Gibson, tells Desmond Doss’s story. Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Phillips first told Jason Dunham’s story in the Journal and then in the book The Gift of Valor. The story that Peter relates from Senator McCain is included in McCain’s classic memoir (written with Mark Salter) Faith of My Fathers. The story that Peter relates from Leo Thorsness is included in Col. Thorsness’s moving memoir of his service and captivity, Surviving Hell, to which I contributed an introduction for Encounter’s paperback edition.   |
| Does Marty Walsh have Alex Acosta’s problem? Posted: 30 May 2021 09:15 PM PDT (Paul Mirengoff) Marty Walsh is Joe Biden’s Secretary of Labor. Alex Acosta was Donald Trump’s for a few years. Acosta lost his job after reports showed that he gave a sweetheart deal to Jeffrey Epstein, a pedophile. The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal suggests that Walsh might have a somewhat similar problem. The alleged pedophile in question is the former chief of the Boston police union, Patrick Rose. He was arrested last summer on 33 counts of sexually abusing children. Walsh’s problem is that he may have known about Rose’s criminal behavior. At a minimum, Walsh was not forthcoming in turning over records relevant to Rose’s case. According to the Wall Street Journal’s editors:
(Emphasis added) Walsh appears to have gone to great lengths to withhold files relevant to Rose’s case. The Journal’s editors state:
(Emphasis added) The Journal’s editors note the connection between Walsh and Rose. Walsh was the president of a Laborers' Union local, as well as the head of the Boston Building Trades, until he ran for mayor in 2013. And “as mayor he showered unions with taxpayer money, including a contract with Mr. Rose's police union in 2017 that resulted in a pay increase of 16% over four years.” Not surprisingly, “city employees in unions donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to his campaign.” As the Journal says, it’s not clear what Walsh knew about Rose’s case or whether he knew anything about it at all. However, Walsh might have been in a position to know, and his administration’s foot dragging in turning over files raises questions. As Secretary of Labor, one of Walsh’s duties is to combat union corruption. Yet, Walsh’s tenure as union chief produced charges of questionable dealings and unethical behavior. Walsh isn’t the man to fight union corruption. That’s why Biden appointed him at the behest of union leaders like AFL-CIO president Richard Trumpka. Walsh is their man. (Biden satisfied woke leftists through his selections for jobs just below the Secretary level.) As things stand, we’re stuck with Walsh. But if evidence emerges that he covered for a child molester, Walsh might well go the way of Alex Acosta, whose actions regarding Jeffrey Epstein were less culpable than that.   |
| Princeton drops Greek and Latin requirement for Classics majors Posted: 30 May 2021 06:17 PM PDT (Paul Mirengoff) Using race-based preferences to admit students with qualifications vastly inferior to those admitted without the need for such preferences creates all sorts of problems and dislocations. One of them is the erosion of standards within various departments, especially ones that teach hard stuff. I wrote about one example — eliminating econometrics as a required course for graduating from a major school of public policy — here. Now comes word, via Brittany Bernstein at NRO, that Classics majors at Princeton University will no longer be required to learn Greek or Latin. An intermediate proficiency in Greek or Latin won’t be required to enter the concentration and the requirement that students to take Greek or Latin will also be dropped. At least Princeton’s French majors will still be required to know French and its Math majors to know calculus. For now, at least. Josh Billings, director of undergraduate studies and professor of classics, claims that having students who don’t know Latin and Greek in the department “will make it a more vibrant intellectual community.” It will do so, allegedly, by “ensur[ing] that a broad range of perspectives and experiences inform our study of the ancient Greek and Roman past.” What is the Black perspective, if any, on ancient Greece and Rome? That the Greeks and Romans were white supremacists? I doubt that this perspective is (1) relevant to studying the classics and (2) absent from the department as currently constituted. Indeed, as discussed below, Princeton’s classics department is already obsessed with “systemic racism.” It’s fair to ask why Blacks who view ancient Greece and Rome as bastions of white supremacy would want to major in Classics. Why study the scribblings of a bunch of racists? How much passion can one muster for that enterprise? And what will these students do with their major? It’s unlikely they will be able to teach Greek or Latin. Even if they choose belatedly to study it, they will be far behind. It seems unlikely that, lacking strong proficiency in the languages, these students will be able to continue their study of Classics in graduate schools worth their salt. I suspect that to the extent Princeton’s relaxation of requirements attracts new students who don’t know Greek or Latin, these students won’t find it fulfilling to be in a department populated with actual scholars of Greek and Latin. They will probably take their “vibrancy” elsewhere. It seems clear from Bernstein’s account that Princeton’s decision isn’t about vibrancy and fresh perspectives. It’s about feelings of guilt and the desire for atonement. The Department states:
Okay. But how is it racist to require Classics majors to know Greek and Latin? It isn’t. If anything, it seems racist to assume that Blacks need to be excused from learning Latin and Greek. If they are serious about Classics, why wouldn’t they learn the languages? The Department completes its virtue signaling by stating:
In reality, the actions the department takes will reinforce racial stereotypes and diminish the value of completing the Classics major at Princeton, while probably having a negligible effect on minority completion of the major. But this doesn’t seem to matter to Princeton, where it’s all about making the right gestures and reciting woke pieties.   |
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