Dept. of Excuses: Arguing for a lighter sentence for his client, Martha Shoffner's veteran attorney described her as "very naive and gullible," an attitude that led our happily former state treasurer to a "terrible mistake in judgment" as she accepted one bribe after another from a bond dealer. But the same description would apply to any crook who believes crime pays--till it doesn't.
Let's hear it for our president, who when he plays, plays--and leaves politics behind him when he takes to the links. Considering the quality of the deal he's made with Teheran's mullahs, and keeps defending, here's hoping he plays more golf and less politics.
The good news gets better: After refiguring the economic statistics, it turns out the American economy did even better last quarter than first estimated. It seems our Gross Domestic Product, the total value of an economy's goods and services, grew 3.7 percent, which is more than a percentage point higher than first reported. Compare that performance to Japan's, the world's third largest economy, which shrank 1.6 percent, while still Communist China's was foundering, spreading worldwide concern. ("Who's going to buy our stuff if the Chinese can't afford to?") Remember when Japan, Inc., was the Wave of the Future? It now has joined all those other Waves of the Past--bolshevik Russia, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany--that didn't pan out.
After last week's dramatic plunge in this country's stock market and then rebound, what's the moral of this story? Never bet against America, which has a way of coming back despite all the odds. Why is that? Could it be because freedom has a way of outlasting, and outperforming, the utopian dreams of statist economies? And when this government does intervene, it's to strengthen the rule of law, not override it. And save the American system, not overturn it.
Suffer Little Children: Who says it's hard to fire the kind of incompetent teachers protected by their union contracts, tenure, and various other technicalities? It's not. It can be nigh impossible. Consider the case of a teacher in New Brunswick, N.J., named Arnold Anderson: According to the indispensable In the News column on the front page, Mr. Anderson is being allowed to keep his job even after being late for work a grand total of 111 times over a two-year period. Why? Because the arbitrator in his case ruled that the school district hadn't given him sufficient notice that his behavior was unacceptable--plus 90 days' notice to correct it. As if a schoolteacher--or any grown-up--should need to be told to get to work on time. As for the kids stuck with such a teacher, they're the real losers in such cases.
A note on the quality of American journalism today: The best piece in the current New Republic is a reprint of a November 4, 1940, article by the redoubtable Mary McCarthy, who reports from Paris: "One feels that with a few exceptions the American papers have been serviced by a mass of amateur armchair political philosophers." Sound familiar? "Since the war has begun," she continues, "the political philosophy has vaporized into mere sympathy or a sense of outrage, and the only thing that remains is the armchair." A few months later, all hell would break loose as France fell and the war was no longer in abeyance. Once the mullahs in Teheran get their own Bomb, how long before that possibility becomes not a philosophical question but an existential one?
Let Freedom Ring: According to the same indispensable In the News column on the front page every day, the president of Romania has signed into law a statute that makes denying the Holocaust a crime punishable by up to three years in prison. But the best response to bad ideas is a better one, the best remedy when freedom of speech is abused is more speech, not less.
To quote Thomas Jefferson, "If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it."
The founding fathers of this republic recognized the same principle when they made the First Amendment part of the Constitution--"Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . ." That's no law. No exceptions. No matter how offensive some may find the political opinion expressed--or the symbol displayed. Those determined to outlaw the swastika in Europe, or the Confederate flag in this country, would do well to remember the wisdom of the Founders, who did not confuse a convincing argument with a gag order.
Editorial on 09/02/2015