A UN Hero; Conrad Black Attack; Hunt the Clinton-Lovers; Mark Green's Latest Affront
A bill based on a hodgepodge of biased data, spurious inferences and feminist humbuggery?sorry?based, as the bill has it, on "a growing body of anecdotal evidence," has now become law in New York City. Thanks to the efforts of Public Advocate Mark Green, the city is now the first jurisdiction in the country that prohibits employers from firing or refusing to hire those who are or may be victims of domestic violence. Or as the mayoral hopeful put it, "This law will not only protect the economic security of tens of thousands of women, but will also help break down the wall of silence and shame by fostering workplaces that are safe and supportive environments."
But not only does the new law protect "actual or perceived victims," domestic violence is not even limited to acts that "constitute violations of the penal law." In other words, there does not have to be any actual assault, battery or physical contact for domestic violence to occur.
This nifty legerdemain nicely codifies the theories battered women's advocates have been flogging for years: men don't just batter women with fists, they abuse them by being mean, critical, vulgar, inattentive and by myriad typically male deeds. You may have been beaten to a pulp by an unknown assailant on the streets of New York City, but hey, that's life. The city cares more about those who have been offended by the behavior of their "partners," even if there has been nothing criminal about that behavior.
In NYC, if you feel you are a victim of domestic violence, you are. Actually, even if you don't feel you are but say you are, that's fine too. Your pain and suffering will still be taken more seriously than those of other crimes victims. No proof is necessary. How dare anyone require cold hard facts when faced with a woman who says she is suffering?
One person who thought that the rule of evidence should apply to all victims of crimes equally was the chairwoman of the Human Rights Commission, Marta Varela. Calling the bill "problematic" and "arguably discriminatory," she testified that this "exceedingly broad definition [of domestic violence]?in the absence of a requirement that the employee provide a police report, a court order, or documentation from a health care provider, domestic violence counselor or advocate?will make it extremely difficult for both an employer and the Commission to determine who is entitled to the protections afforded by the legislation."
Or, in the words of Public Advocate Green, the law will "encourage victims to tell their employers about their concerns...[and foster] workplaces that are safe and supportive environments." What the law will do, obviously, is to mandate that every citizen subordinate himself to the will of the state and join in the struggle to promote group chauvinism and group rights. Damage awards against any employer not sensitive enough or, more importantly, not seen to be sensitive enough to the demands of identity politics will surely follow.
Freedom of speech includes the right to say things that are inane or dead wrong. If the feminists want to believe that every male is a potential wife-beater, that would be their business, were it not for the fact that their canards have become part of the conventional orthodoxy of domestic violence. Studies indicate, however, that domestic violence has less to do with patriarchal attitudes and more with alcohol and drug abuse and what psychiatrists call borderline personality disorders. Surveys also show that half of such violence is reciprocal (couples engaging in mutual fighting) while the other half is evenly divided between male and female aggressors.
Criminal law must and does protect all victims of violence. Sadly, many battered women's advocates are more interested in scoring ideological points about the pervasiveness of male violence than they are in solving any problems women may face.
Whether or not local politicians really believe in the political agenda of those who claim that violence against women is symptomatic of the ongoing war against women, they are doing nothing to challenge that premise and everything to give it the city's seal of approval. But that's what political discourse is all about: striking the right emotional chord, saying what's fashionable, embracing a sentimental agenda and proudly basing legislation on anecdotes telling of the anguish and suffering of a few carefully chosen victim groups. Private employers will be well advised to shape up or ship out.
Come to think of it, they probably have corporate forms covering those very contingencies already: "We unequivocally and in the strongest terms possible condemn all bigotry and discrimination against (here list the groups protected in your jurisdiction) and pledge our total commitment to equality and to full civil rights of (repeat the list from above) and solemnly pledge to provide a diverse and supportive work environment for..."
The law protecting the actual or perceived victims of domestic violence from employment discrimination is only the first step in the eternal quest for a socialist utopia. Advocate Green is already proposing a bill that would allow public employees who claim to be victims of domestic violence to take unpaid leave. Stay tuned.
One of the enduring images of the Clinton administration is the picture of the Draft Dodger chatting with his brother-in-law, Hugh Rodham, on a golf course. The latter is wearing shorts, his enormous beer-belly hanging over his belt, a large cigar protruding from his mouth. Talk about slob culture. Or slob ethics, for that matter. Self-importance, crudeness, bossiness, the desire to improve other people?these are the very qualities I loathe in others, and which the Clintons and their gang of thieves display in such grotesque plenitude. Instead of lording it over us for eight long years, these clowns belong in a circus. Hillary looks like a knife-thrower's assistant, shimmering in gold lamé, nostrils flaring in pious concern, her protruding fish eyes hooded with empathy. Clinton is perfect as a human cannonball. His ability to play things sorrowful makes other hams who specialize in hired grief look like amateurs. His mouth drawn and quivering, he would give one last wave and enter the cannon's barrel. No other circus act could ever come near such drama.
And what about Hugh Rodham? If ever there was a person who'd be perfect as the one who runs after the elephants with a shovel and pail, that's our Hugh. Roger Clinton, too, would be exemplary as a clown, as would everyone related by blood or marriage to the Clintons and Rodhams. The ideal bareback rider, naturally, is bare Monica Lewinsky, although I don't know many ponies who could lift such a load. Just think of it, circus fans. The Clinton-Rodham circus comes into your town and things are never the same. Drug dealers are let out of the pokey, fugitives are welcomed back and given a ticker-tape parade, a few nurses are raped, the local high school prom queen is hired and ends up blowing the human cannonball... You get the message.
Last week I wrote about Marc Rich in The Spectator, the British weekly in which my column has appeared for 24 years. I said that the last time Rich had called off a party it was in Spain, about five or six years ago. The feds had decided to force his private plane down and bring him back to America to face the music. This was widely reported at the time. Needless to say, they didn't get their man. Rich was tipped off at the last moment and called off the trip.
Now here's where I speculated. I wrote that his Mossad-trained bodyguards had tipped him off, or the signal not to fly came from Israel. It is no secret that top Israeli politicians, including Ehud Barak, begged Clinton for the pardon. Well, as they say in Brooklyn, or used to, I shoulda stood in bed. My own benevolent proprietor, Conrad Black, went ballistic, so Orlando Furioso, in fact, he wrote an article in The Spectator denouncing me as a Goebbels and my article as a blood libel against the Jewish people. "He wrote that the United States had intended to invade French air space to force down fugitive financier Marc Rich's aeroplane (on orders ultimately from the same commander in chief who has now pardoned Rich); that Israeli intelligence knew more of US Air Force activities than the Pentagon did and shared this information with Rich because Israel's favour had been bought by Rich. For Taki, the United States was not yet 'Israel-occupied territory'; that is, occupied by those nice guys who attack rock-throwing youth with armour-piercing missiles."
Given the fact that I did write this, and that I did go on to say that the way to Uncle Sam's heart runs through Tel Aviv, my benevolent proprietor, as I always refer to him, did have a point. The trouble was that he went over the top. OTT, as they say in merry old England. Black called it a venomous diatribe, a farrago of lies worthy of Goebbels "or the authors of Protocols of the Elders of Zion." I will not bore you with the rest. He accused me of claiming that the Jews have suborned the U.S. government, that they direct the country's military like a docile attack dog and glory in the murder of innocent children.
So, there was only one thing left to do, something so horrible I'm still having nightmares. I quoted The New York Times, The Washington Post and Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. (All extremely anti-Semitic.) "We have undermined our community's moral fabric, jeopardized our political standing, disillusioned our youth and compromised the sacred values of our tradition. In short, the moral stain of this sordid affair has begun to engulf us," the rabbi wrote.
Let's face it. In his unusually frank piece, Rabbi Yoffie says Jewish leaders were bought by Marc Rich. I wrote, just as the pardon became known, that Rich was an unusually successful briber in these here pages. The fact that Israeli leaders allowed themselves to be bribed is obvious. But pointing that out does not constitute anti-Semitic ravings on my part. To the contrary. They did a disservice to Israel, and when people who point this out are rubbished and accused of anti-Semitism it makes it much worse as far as Israel is concerned. Everyone looks out for their own, but Israelis have to be extra careful. Israel enjoys a special relationship with America because it's a democracy and because of the Holocaust. Marc Rich is a crook who knows the value of nothing and the price of everyone. Clinton is a political Marc Rich, and unscrupulous Jews like Larry Lawrence took full advantage in reverse. Barak was snookered. Conrad Black has been snookered by his love for an embattled country.
The trouble is that I haven't. I have chosen to remain a Spectator columnist because if you dish it out the way I do, you should be able to take it. What I can't take is not seeing the human cannonball, the knife-thrower's assistant, the clowns, the bareback rider...
Having spent many of my adult years in political movements that disdain the United Nations (Cold War neoconservatism and Buchananism), I'm occasionally bemused by the fact that I have married happily into what can only be described as a UN family.
Both of my wife's parents were UN professionals. Her father, F.T. Liu, who died last month in his 80s, was an assistant secretary-general, a high post in the world body. He and his wife Joan made a curious multicultural pair: she a bright blonde girl from working-class England, who won a scholarship to become the first in her family to go to college, in a society that hardly encouraged upward mobility; he the son of an eminent Chinese painter, sent away as a boy to Paris to escape China's turmoil.
They both spent the war in Europe. Joan was evacuated to the countryside to escape the bombing; F.T. led an impoverished student life in Paris. After the war, they found their way into United Nations employ, pushed along by the widespread current of thought that mankind must find a way to rein in aggressive nationalism or perish. After postings from Paris to Geneva to the chaotic territories ("trusteeships") left behind by Europe's melting empires, they met in New York, married in the 1950s, moved to the suburbs and raised two American children.
At his memorial service in Bronxville, F.T.'s son Michael told of how his father fought to hold on to the memory of his mother who deposited him, age 10, in a French boarding school?it was the last time he would see her. Perhaps it was in those lonely years that he learned to master, even to suppress, his emotions. In his career he was the very definition of unflappable. His job was to coordinate UN peacekeeping forces, dealing with the member states on the cusp of war, the troops and officers of various countries who contributed to the "Blue Helmets"?those soldiers who generally achieved notice often only when they failed in their missions or were killed. The job could require long stays away from home; during the Congo crisis of the early 1960s, F.T. was away for nearly two years.
His talents, exercised with modesty and an utter lack of flamboyance, were vast. The UN colleagues who paid respects to him at his memorial service spoke of his unusual drafting skills. He could be counted on to produce in short order, in the chaos of a diplomatic crisis, documents?drafted in English or French, it didn't matter?that were the model of clarity and dry objectivity, acceptable to all factions.
I thought of him as almost a stateless figure; if you probed him about an international affairs issue you would receive a lucid, nearly encyclopedic account of the balance of forces?military, legal, economic, plus the history and politics of any relevant United Nations resolutions?that always left you in the dark about F.T's actual view of the matter.
One opinion did emerge a week or so before his death. Long an agnostic, he had, he told Joan one morning, been speaking to God. About what? Replied F.T., I told him he had been unjust to the Palestinians. (Having come of age in wartime Europe, he knew well that God had been unjust to the Jews.)
After his retirement, he became an American citizen, voting for Clinton and Gore, a mild surprise to me. He always felt great fondness toward France?whose language he spoke better than his mother tongue. His feelings toward China were more complex: his father had been abused during the Cultural Revolution, forced by the Red Guards to watch when they burned much of his artwork, but rehabilitated and honored after the fall of Madam Mao. Several Chinese diplomats attended his memorial service. So did a coterie of old family friends, daughters of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist establishment, now in their 80s, spry and active with translation and editing projects.
He passed on to me his great love for golf, his main respite from his job's burdens. His game, with its almost painfully slow swing, was short and straight, a pitch and putt to make par, and when you played with him and hit it well, he praised you like you were Jack Nicklaus.
Neither Joan nor F.T. Liu would think of the UN as a world government in embryo. But a world order that transcends the nation-state remains implicit in much of the UN's work, as it is in the emergence of NAFTA and the European Union. Viewed from the inside, such a world can appear orderly and benign, genteel even: a hive of educated and multilingual diplomats and idealistic civil servants.
Lacking its own armed forces and taxing powers, the UN remains subordinate to the powerful nations. But like the medieval papacy it stocks a good deal of moral force, which rises proportionately as America's own policies appear shortsighted and capricious. One can imagine, perhaps in a distant future, that moral force giving rise to an actual increase in the world body's power. Like any American patriot, I favor American sovereignty "forever." But through the Lius, I know better how America's hubris can be perceived in the worlds beyond the New York-Washington corridor.
And now it's "Clinton fatigue"?too much bad news about the political pickpocket has wearied us. Apparently we can't take anymore. We want to move on, look to the future, bury the whole thing.
Who comes up with these sly antidotes to truth-telling? No, it won't do. This is the time to ululate loudly and rout the reptilian army of Geraldos, Joe Conasons, wives and colleagues who foisted the smiling alien and his empress on us for a decade. I do urge this literally: identify his apologists, start with your neighbor, and engage in hostilities. Demand an explanation. And make it painful. Are they ashamed of their Clinton-mongering years? What will they say to their kids? "Mother, what made you consistently support the most corrupt president of the century?" They didn't realize? Half the country told them. The Clinton who raffled off nights in the Lincoln bedroom, took election money from the Chinese and used FBI files to intimidate opponents is the inevitable Clinton of the Marc Rich/Hugh Rodham pardon scandals. Who's surprised?
I remember a conversation with Phil Weiss, the New York Observer columnist, at a glam literary party uptown perhaps two years ago. We sat on a couch eyeing the human glitter and whispering shiftily. A Times spy might overhear us. We'd never work in this town again. They'd out us as Clinton-haters, a synonym for irrational bigot, aka anti-Semite, racist, antiwomen and minorities, hetero-supremacist, Sinophobe and gun-lover. Such was the briny atmosphere of the Clinton era. Ironically, Phil Weiss himself had written the famous Clinton-haters article in the Times Magazine, even as he'd begun to grow horns and become one himself. "How is it," he asked, "that we can see through him, but we feel so alone? It looks so glaring to us, but not to anyone else." Were we unconsciously part of the right-wing conspiracy, undergoing some creeping psycho malady without knowing it?
Yes, we were mentally homeless hate criminals. Clinton, on television, acted on me like a visual emetic. His deep horizon-filled gazes during speeches, his pauses, aargh those ruminative pauses, when he nodded and smiled sadly. I needed help. But no treatment existed. Strange that Clinton's media doctors didn't dream up a self-flagellating public reconciliation program, "I hated him but now I'm free at last."
So we were sane all along. I feel like the French Maquis after the war, with a terrible thirst to find the collaborators and shave them. Are you stammering now, Joe Conason? What happened to the grand conspiracy theory? (Conason's book Hunting of the President outlined a purported web of coordinated Clinton destroyers.) Joe, he was a giant, salivating spirochete, and you fostered him. The "conspirators" were right. Here's a three-step atonement program for you. First call them and apologize. Then write a book about the Clinton coverup operations. Finally, go back and uncover all the other scams that no one has publicized.
There are plenty such scandals lying dormant and still being suppressed. He might look into the Zaire/Congo/Rwanda mineral deal. When Kabila took power after the post-genocide Hutu exodus from Rwanda, he transferred the lucrative state mineral contracts to an obscure Little Rock company, one hitherto utterly ignorant of mining or Rwanda. I won't tell you any more. Let it be Joe's party.
Then there's so much more about Marc Rich. Joe might look into reports of the covert U.S. plan to hoist Rich off his estate in Spain and bring him to justice. It appears that a kidnap was in the making, but Clinton pardoned him preemptively. Rich's estate abuts that of a grand Mafia don on the island of Marbella, and both properties face the beach. Marbella is a paradise island for exiled pirates, and the two pirates were fast friends. Rich would stroll along the sand, without bodyguards, to visit his neighbor. During one such stroll he was to be hoisted to a waiting speedboat, taken across territorial waters to Morocco and flown to the U.S. The story goes that Clinton had to act, because time was running out for Rich. You might remember that Clinton excused his pardon by saying that top Israeli statesmen had asked him to do it. One of Rich's chief protectors in Israel was Ehud Barak's Cabinet secretary Yitzhak Herzog, whose wife headed the Marc Rich foundation there. With an election in the offing, one that Barak might well lose, it appears Herzog organized the final pardon push through Barak, and also informed Clinton of the covert hijack plan.
Clinton has betrayed his own employees so often that he probably didn't blink this time. In this case, you'll recall that the Justice Dept. has complained that Clinton didn't follow procedure on the pardons. He is supposed to consult them first. Now we know why he didn't. They would have told him about the covert operation and stayed his hand. After all, they had just successfully prevented him from pardoning Milken. So he simply dodged them. Now why would he go to such lengths to help so controversial a figure? Was it just profound horizon-gazing altruism? Once a president returns to private life, we cannot legally monitor his offshore bank balances or track a pattern of deposits from good friends without suspicion of criminal activity. And as he has said on so many occasions down the years, he did nothing illegal.
As for Hillary's brother Hugh Rodham and his pardon-brokering services for which he received less than half a million, does anyone really believe she knew nothing about the deal? Or that he really settled for such a paltry sum? The pardon market is surely more robust than that?so when will the rest be paid down and to whom? But perhaps you're all so exquisitely fatigued by these tawdry revelations that you'd rather not know. Especially if you voted for them, serially. If so, sleep not soundly in your pits. We will hunt you down and out you.