An editorial and a news story in today's New York Times both take Republicans to task for, as the editorial puts it, "keeping black nominees off the federal bench." The news story refers to the fact that President-elect Bush's nominee for the position of attorney general, Senator Ashcroft, "led the successful fight to block a black nominee for a federal appeals court seat."
It's just strange the way the Times constantly brands opponents of the appointment of liberal judical activists as racists. Or reports on the appointments as though the skin color of the candidates is the most noteworthy thing about them. The Times editorials and news stories at the time of the fight over the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court never referred to the controversy matter-of-factly as an effort "to block a black nominee" to the Supreme Court. If the Times has some evidence that Senator Ashcroft is a racist, it should come forward with it. But if the new definition of the term is having ever opposed a judicial nominee who happens to be black, all those liberal senators who voted against putting Mr. Thomas on the high court should beware.
Potato Chips: A front-page news article in today's New York Times reports that "A supermarket-size sack of Lay's potato chips has lost an ounce in the last month, or about 7.5 percent of its previous weight, but still costs $2.99." This is weird phrasing. No sack of potato chips that Smartertimes.com has ever seen -- and Smartertimes.com has been on the factory tour at Cape Cod Potato Chips -- is the size of a supermarket. The supermarket frequented by Smartertimes.com stocks plenty of bags of potato chips in the 99 cent to $1.79 range, with about 6 or 7 ounces of chips. The notion that you have to look at how much food is in the package rather than simply the price of the package is one of those basic consumer concepts that it seems that most Times readers would have already been aware of even before reading today's front-page dispatch alerting the world to that stunning news development.
Friedman: New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman declares today that "Jewish colonialism was no different than any other. It involved the brutal suppression of another people and the stealing of their land." Stealing? The Arabs closed the Straits of Tiran to all Israeli ships and announced plans to enter into a "battle of annihilation" against Israel. In the ensuing war, Israel retook land, such as Jerusalem and Hebron, in which there had been a continuous Jewish presence for thousands of years. This is "stealing"? It's just bizarre to use the language of colonialism to condemn Israel. The West Bank is not a far-off colony that Israel is somehow exploiting for mercantile purposes; it is a buffer zone that provides Israel's narrow coastal strip with some strategic depth against the hostile Arab armies, such as that of Iraq, that could attack from the East. With his rant against "Jewish colonialism," Mr. Friedman sounds like some Marxist campus radical from the 1970s. And it's funny how Mr. Friedman seems to pay a lot less attention to the "brutal suppression of another people" when it is, say, genuine, as in Saddam Hussein suppressing the Iraqi Shiites or Kurds, or the Chinese Communists oppressing their minorities.