The Week

National Review, Sept 25, 2000

Well, we've been saying that about New York Times reporters for years, and no one ever made a fuss.

Hey, how about Rick Berke?!

Dick Cheney agreed to forfeit the nonvested Halliburton stock options that had been presented to him in his retirement package. Cheney's public-relations tangle, like Newt Gingrich's over his book advance, had reached the point where he had to cut his losses. But Americans should get used to the fact that most of their most prominent politicians have been prosperous, indeed wealthy, men; the historian Edward Pessen wrote a book (The Log Cabin Myth) that showed that only three presidents came from the lower middle class, and only one (Andrew Johnson) from poverty. The trouble with myths of this kind is that they are erratically invoked. No one asked Al Gore to give up his Occidental Petroleum stock trust when he ran for vice president.

New evidence is confirming two conservative ideas about education: that immersion in English is the best way to teach immigrant children, and that vouchers work. California mandated the former policy in a ballot initiative two years ago, and rising test scores suggest that it is working. And a new study of poor kids awarded private scholarships shows them scoring six points higher on math and reading tests after two years than their peers left behind in public schools. Yet George W. Bush persists in supporting bilingual education, and his support for school choice is tepid. His recent "education week" on the campaign trail spent more time promising federal grants to various interest groups than promoting either idea. Bush likes to call himself "a reformer with results." He should start paying attention to reforms that are actually showing some.

Hillary Clinton intervened to prevent Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard from being transferred to a more dangerous wing of the federal prison in which he is serving his life sentence. Desperate to boost her numbers with New York's Jewish voters, the busser of Suha Arafat has finally found a way that is appropriate to her character and her campaign: She does a favor for a convicted spy, which stops short of any substantive help (such as urging his release). Her positions on Middle Eastern politics are rash; her attention to Pollard is grotesque; her actions were weaselly. A threefer.

The distribution of medical marijuana in California is forbidden once again, as the Supreme Court voided a lower court's order allowing a cannabis buyers' club in Oakland to operate until the legality of California's Proposition 215 has been determined. Complicated? No more than the politics of medical marijuana. Polls consistently show substantial public support for legal medical pot-results confirmed by referendums in seven states and the District of Columbia. Yet so far only in Hawaii, where the legislature passed and the governor signed a medical-marijuana bill, has the political class heeded popular sentiment. To say nothing of medical necessity, and common sense.

When Congress banned federal funding for destructive human-embryo research four years ago, pro-lifers thought they had ensured tax dollars would not pay for this killing of innocent human life, no matter how young or small. They failed to count on the Clinton administration's too-clever lawyers, who have just written guidelines saying federal researchers may not destroy embryos with government money-but that they may make use of embryos destroyed with non-government money. This interpretation perhaps hews, just barely, to the letter of the law. But it treats human life as a commodity that can be made and destroyed in a lab, and makes the government a customer for the leftover parts.

The corrections page of the New York Times has lately been more reliable reading than the front page. First, the Times had to retract a sensationalistic report about the North Pole melting. Then it ran a lengthy correction taking back most of what it had reported in a story about how cities were, in reaction to the Boy Scouts' policy on gays, banning the Scouts from from parks, schools, and other sites (see editorial below). Not so. Our own Melissa Seckora, writing in National Review Online, was the first to blow the journalistic whistle, reporting that the cities cited by the Times hadn't banned the Scouts, and also showing that the paper's story was as wrong in its thrust as in its particulars: There is no great public backlash against the Scouts. The organization continues to enjoy high ratings in opinion polls-but there clearly exists a backlash in the newsroom of the Times.

Remember the HUD pamphlet printed in "English-based Jamaican Creole" and called "Rezedents Rights and Rispansabilities" (and signed by "Sekretary Andrew M. Cuomo fella")? Get ready for more of this. One of President Clinton's latest executive orders says that any institution receiving federal funds must provide services in languages other than English; otherwise, it may be guilty of national-origin discrimination. The order specifically says that "a federally assisted zoo or theater . . . [must] take reasonable steps to provide meaningful opportunities for access" by people who don't speak English. (Somebody should call the government and ask for a copy of the order in Esperanto, just for fun.) Unless Congress challenges this mischievous conflation of language and national-origin status-a linkage that does not exist in civil-rights law-don't be surprised if this policy turns into another Americans with Disabilities Act.