Do Oreos fly?

Perhaps not. A key point in Jeff Jacoby’s column on “liberal hate speech” is his assertion — based on a Washington Times account — that Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, a conservative Republican who’s African-American, was once pelted with Oreo cookies. (You know, black on the outside, white on the inside.)

But did it happen? Here’s what the Baltimore Sun reported on Nov. 15:

Various versions have been given over the past three years, but some Democrats question whether cookies were actually tossed….

News reports from the night of the Sept. 26 debate make no mention of cookies. The first reference came five days later in an article in The Sun in which [Paul] Schurick, then a spokesman for the Ehrlich campaign, said cookies were distributed in the audience….

Several audience members who attended the debate have told The Sun that they saw no cookies.

“It didn’t happen here,” said Vander Harris, operations manager of the Morgan fine arts center. “I was in on the cleanup, and we found no cookies or anything else abnormal.”

Thanks to Lis Riba, who picked this up from — yes — Steve Gilliard.

Trivial pursuit

Maybe I don’t get out enough — actually, maybe I get out too much — but I was struck this morning by the fact that Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby led his annual roundup of liberal “hate speech” with an example from a blog I’d never heard of.

The offending blog is something called the News Blog, although its URL — stevegilliard.blogspot.com — suggests something less grandiose than that. The editors are listed simply as “Steve and Jen,” an indication that the News Blog doesn’t quite have the muscle to be part of the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy. And though Jacoby describes it as a “popular website,” it has not managed to crack Technorati’s Top 100.

If this is the best Jacoby can do, then liberal hate speech can’t be all that pervasive.

By the way, Gilliard has responded to Jacoby.

Little red faces

Jonathan Saltzman reports in today’s Boston Globe that the story about the kid who ended up on a government watch list for going to the library and asking for a copy of “The Communist Manifesto” — er, make that Mao’s “Little Red Book” — was a hoax.

Earlier this week, the story made its way into a Globe op-ed submitted by Sen. Ted Kennedy’s office. (I’m not letting the senator himself off the hook — after all, he let it go out with his name on it. I’m simply acknowledging the fact that he had only slightly more to do with that piece than you or I did.) Saltzman writes:

Laura Capps, a Kennedy spokeswoman, said last night that the senator cited “public reports” in his opinion piece. Even if the assertion was a hoax, she said, it did not detract from Kennedy’s broader point that the Bush administration has gone too far in engaging in surveillance.

Accurate but not true, in other words — a fine standard for the Globe op-ed page.

Needless to say, when a newspaper chooses to publish an op-ed piece by an outside contributor, its editors have an obligation to edit and fact-check that piece just as rigorously as they would if it were written by a staff writer — maybe more so.

I don’t think the Globe did anything particularly wrong in publishing Kennedy’s op-ed as it was written. After all, the “Little Red Book” story had been broken the previous Saturday by a well-regarded newspaper, the New Bedford Standard-Times.

But by Thursday, when Kennedy’s piece appeared in the Globe, the story was already the subject of widespread speculation that it was a hoax, an urban legend or both. Ideally, someone at the Globe should have flagged it before publication.

Going down with the ship

If the Bush administration won’t even embrace the legal defense offered by its most ardent supporters, then you can be reasonably sure those supporters are wrong.

An example: On Wednesday, the Weekly Standard published a commentary by Edward Morrissey, of the conservative blog Captain’s Quarters, arguing that the no-warrant wiretaps by the National Security Agency are fully legal under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Morrissey quotes extensively from FISA in an attempt to make the case that “FISA authorizes warrantless surveillance in its opening chapter.” Much of this has to do with the question of whether or not the wiretaps were used to spy on “U.S. persons” as defined under the law. Morrissey argues that they were not. He also writes:

Moreover, the NSA’s efforts did not take place in darkness. The FISA court did get informed of the issue, and the leaders of the oversight committees in both houses of Congress from both parties took part in the decision. It does not appear that the Bush administration sought to hide this from the other two branches of government, but sought to include them in the oversight of the new process as much as possible within the secrecy needed to conduct the program during wartime.

If one reads further into the Times‘s long and detailed article, the Bush administration received precedential decisions from courts that acknowledged the executive authority to wage war included a broader authority to set the parameters of espionage in order to guarantee security. Clearly, the administration has sought to comply with the letter of the law while getting the best possible information as quickly as it could to prevent another devastating terrorist attack.

This all sounds fairly reasonable — until you realize that the Bush administration itself isn’t buying it. Barton Gellman reports in today’s Washington Post that the White House is continuing to advance the argument that the no-warrant searches were authorized by Congress’ near-declaration of war, passed in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Gellman adds that the latest iteration of this justification — in the form of a letter to Congress written by Assistant Attorney General William Moschella — acknowledges that President Bush’s October 2001 wiretapping order did not comply with the “procedures” of FISA, a law passed in 1978.

Sorry, Captain Morrissey, but it looks like you don’t know what you’re talking about. Moschella’s argument is that the White House is violating FISA, but that it’s all right because FISA was overridden by the war resolution. That is pretty much the opposite of what Morrissey wants us to believe.

As for the administration’s attempts to hang its legal hat on the war-resolution coat rack, former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle has an op-ed piece in today’s Post revealing that, at the time, the Bush administration actually did seek broad authority that would probably have legalized warrantless wiretaps — and that it was shot down. Daschle writes:

On the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, the White House proposed that Congress authorize the use of military force to “deter and pre-empt any future acts of terrorism or aggression against the United States.” Believing the scope of this language was too broad and ill defined, Congress chose instead, on Sept. 14, to authorize “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed or aided” the attacks of Sept. 11. With this language, Congress denied the president the more expansive authority he sought and insisted that his authority be used specifically against Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.

Just before the Senate acted on this compromise resolution, the White House sought one last change. Literally minutes before the Senate cast its vote, the administration sought to add the words “in the United States and” after “appropriate force” in the agreed-upon text. This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas — where we all understood he wanted authority to act — but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens. I could see no justification for Congress to accede to this extraordinary request for additional authority. I refused.

It’s becoming almost impossible to reach any conclusion other than this: Bush didn’t get what he wanted, so he broke the law.

Aye, aye, Captain?

The politics of Holocaust-denial

The Boston Globe’s op-ed page today runs a piece by Karim Sadjadpour and Ray Takeyh that argues, among other things, that the vicious anti-Semitism of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is an anomaly. They write:

Iran’s belligerent foreign policy toward Israel is among the more puzzling issues in international relations. At a time when most Arab governments, including the elected Palestinian leadership, have come to accept Israel’s existence as an unalterable fact, non-Arab Iran continues to call for eradication of the Jewish state. Over the course of the last several weeks President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran attacked Israel as a “tumor” that should be “wiped off the map of the world” and asserted that the holocaust was a “myth.”

So I guess Israel no longer has to worry about Arab countries — just non-Arab Iran. That’s a relief. But wait. Elsewhere today, the Globe publishes an Associated Press article that begins thusly:

CAIRO — The leader of Egypt’s main Islamic opposition group said yesterday the Holocaust was a “myth,” and he slammed Western governments for criticizing disclaimers of the Jewish genocide.

The comments by Muslim Brotherhood chief Mohammed Mahdi Akef — made on the heels of his group’s strong showing in Egyptian parliamentary elections — echoed remarks made recently by Iran’s hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which sparked international outrage.

“Western democracies have slammed all those who don’t see eye to eye with the Zionists regarding the myth of the Holocaust,” Akef wrote in a weekly article meant as a directive to the group’s followers on its official website.

Isn’t Egypt, you know, Arab? Isn’t the Muslim Brotherhood the single biggest threat to the Mubarak regime? Isn’t Osama bin Laden’s number-two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, connected with the Muslim Brotherhood? (The answer to that would be yes.)

So much for Holocaust-denial having fallen out of fashion in the Arab world.

Murphy’s lawyer speaks

Mark Jurkowitz covered a news conference called earlier today by Howard Cooper, the lawyer for Superior Court Judge Ernest Murphy. Among other things, Cooper called the Boston Herald’s decision to release letters that Murphy sent to Herald publisher Pat Purcell “a publicity stunt in an apparent attempt to continue the paper’s campaign of libel against Judge Murphy.” Think about that.

Did Ted Kennedy fall for a hoax?

Ted Kennedy — or, to be more accurate, Ted Kennedy’s office — has an op-ed piece in the Globe today about the Bush administration’s war on civil liberties. It includes this:

Just this past week there were public reports that a college student in Massachusetts had two government agents show up at his house because he had gone to the library and asked for the official Chinese version of Mao Tse-tung’s Communist Manifesto. Following his professor’s instructions to use original source material, this young man discovered that he, too, was on the government’s watch list.

Think of the chilling effect on free speech and academic freedom when a government agent shows up at your home — after you request a book from the library.

Leaving aside my apparent misapprehension that “The Communist Manifesto” was written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (or maybe I’m right), there is a slight problem: the story about the college student appears to be an urban legend. Gary McGath has details here, noting that a variant of the story recently popped up in California. (Via Universal Hub.)