The American Spectator

Washington Prowler

Wlady's Corner(5/5/03 - 5/15/03)

By Wlady Pleszczynski on 5.15.03 @ 1:03AM

MR. KNICK (posted 5/15/03 12:36 a.m.)
It's all too sad when a Dave DeBusschere dies at 62. Willis Reed or Walt Frazier got the glory when the New York Knicks won the NBA championship in 1970, but everyone knew DeBusschere was their franchise player. Before he joined them they were nothing. Traded from Detroit in late 1968, he immediately turned them into a strong team. Everyone remembers Jerry West's 60-foot shot to tie game three of the championship series in Los Angeles. But it was DeBusschere's outside shot that won that game in overtime.

If teammate Bill Bradley had been half as tough, maybe he'd be president today. As it is, Dollar Bill captured DeBusschere nicely in his books, including this description of visits to DeBusschere's family bar in Detroit across from a Chrysler plant. "Most of the autoworkers knew Dave, the basketball star, who played the game the same way these men approached their jobs: Work hard and get it done. Give a few blows and take a few. No complaints. Dave would consume six cans of beer to my one..."

ONE LAST HAYMAKER (posted 5/15/03 12:37 a.m.)
Bill Bennett and his gambling are no longer anyone's lead story, though no doubt he continues to feel the effects of the recent tempest set off in his name. Spiteful figures such as Michael Kinsley settled twenty odd years of frustration to viciously attack Bennett, as if he'd never repaid them a gambling debt and now suddenly they were free to collect and bludgeon him with a tire iron. One camp that seemed reliably loyal to Bennett was Washington neocondom, which was pretty much part of the same network to which Bennett belonged and even made him the great figure he became.

So it must have come as a shock to hear the stern denunciation of Bennett, if not strong distancing from him, that emerged from a leading voice of Washington neoconservatism, David Brooks, last Friday during his joint weekly appearance with Mark Shields on PBS's "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer." Asked for his "quick thoughts on Bill Bennett's problems this week," he responded:

"Well, it's a failure of character. It's something that he is surrounded by, talk of virtue. He doesn't live up to it. He doesn't show self-discipline. You know, they say that Satan is a deceiver. I'm not quite sure he's hit bottom and faced up to the addiction and the problem that he has...."

Thanks to Jayson Blair, this may be one earthquake that didn't register.

FIRING BACK (posted 5/15/03 12:37 a.m.)
According to USA Today, Howell Raines will not resign nor with the New York Times' publisher permit him to. That's the biggest piece of news to emerge from yesterday's extraordinary gathering of Times brass and staff to hack out matters.

One interesting tidbit in the USA Today report touches on a central aspect of the case: "At one point, according to one staffer, Raines acknowledged that perhaps his growing up in segregated Alabama may have prompted him in his professional life to want to right past wrongs against blacks." In so doing, Raines was merely confirming what he had publicly said all along about why he was championing Blair's career. It has left him vulnerable to charges that he held Blair to lower standards and even promoted him at times when he should have been demoting or firing him.

One effect of his forbearance is that other black journalists now feel that they've been put on the spot. One such reporter is the Washington Post's Terry Neal, who until now was known mainly as the author of the "Talking Points" column on the Post's website whose name bears a striking resemblance to Joshua Marshall's "Talking Points Memo" website. Now he feels compelled to knock down the notion that Blair's case was in any way race-related, a hard case to make given what Raines has already said about Blair. But his effort does drive home how difficult it is to escape the stigma affirmative action attaches to its targets.

Defensiveness is one characteristic -- which in turn gives way to divisiveness. In his column Neal openly criticizes his colleague Howard Kurtz for suggesting Blair's editors gave him breaks on account of his race. "'Look, this was a promising young black reporter,' he said. 'I wonder if a middle-aged hack would have gotten away with 50 mistakes and still be at that job.'"

Neal's response? To criticize the New Republic, which gave plenty of tolerance and room to two white plagiarists and fabricators in the 1990s, one of whom allegedly made at least 40 errors in a piece she did on the Washington Post for her magazine. Well, so what? We're talking about the N.Y. Times. Has it tolerated comparable shoddiness from someone not hired in the name of diversity?

Neal doesn't ask. Instead he suggests that Blair's close relationship with top brass was an aberration. "In my 14 years as a journalist, I have never heard of a young black reporter with such close ties to upper management."

And what about other inexperienced 27-year-old hot shots the Times has championed? One is Jodi Kantor, whom the paper recently hired away from Slate to become editor of its "prestigious" Arts & Letters section. "Kantor may be fabulous and do a remarkable job, but no minority has ever gotten a break like that in the history of American journalism," Neal writes. So that's what he's left with in the wake of Blair, grievance?

A writer for the Wall Street Journal yesterday would probably agree with Neal regarding different reactions to white journalist scandals and those of a Jayson Blair. The former never implicate whites in general the way the latter are more likely to in the case of diversity-labeled blacks. "Race-based policies make black achievement a white allowance and black failure a group stigma," he writes. "Which is why so many black journalists hung their heads at the revelation of Mr. Blair's race."

To Terry Neal's credit, he's not about to hang his head.

Letter to the Editor

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