After The Ink Dries

John Darkow / Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune. February 10, 2006

Brandeis professor Jytte Klausen was not happy to find that Yale University Press, the outlet that was publishing her book, refused to print those provocative Danish cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad. Yale told the CBC:

"All [advisers] confirmed that the republication of the cartoons by the Yale University Press ran a serious risk of instigating violence, and nearly all advised that publishing other illustrations of the Prophet Muhammad in the context of this book about the Danish cartoon controversy raised similar risk," said a statement released by the university.

You read correctly—the book is itself about the Danish cartoons that sparked so much outrage and violence around the world in 2005, but YUP won’t allow illustrations of any kind in the book.

The book’s author explains that her work is about how "the violent protests were not a result of a cultural misunderstanding but rather of political rabble rousing," according to the CBC. Oh the irony. But it’s probably the correct opinion in a scholarly book to be published by the printing house at one of America’s leading schools from what seems to be a serious-minded academic at a prestigious university. But Yale, after "consulting with Islamic, diplomatic and counterterrorism experts," came to the conclusion that printing the cartoons in a book about the cartoons didn’t make sense, despite ostensibly making no complaints about the quality of the book itself and agreeing to print it.

Klausen is right: The whole episode involving the cartoons was a study of how craven political operatives can fire up extremists and rouse the masses to inchoate rage. That of course goes for both the radical nuts who burned things and killed people all around the Islamic world (and, notably, not in the developed world) and the angry, racist, cynical assholes who stoked the nativist Right here in the West.

It didn’t matter that Yale, whose motto is "Light and truth" in Hebrew, is one of the world’s leading centers for all kinds of open, cutting-edge scholarship, much of which is bound to piss off someone like all good ideas. Seems like YUP was frightened by the possibility of reaction—who knows how mild, years after the uproar?—and gave in to its limbic system. At least one academic thinks so:

Cary Nelson, head of the American Association of University Professors, lambasted the decision, and sent out an open letter to the association’s members.

"They are not responding to protests against the book; they and a number of their consultants are anticipating them and making or recommending concessions beforehand … What is to stop publishers from suppressing an author’s words if it appears they may offend religious fundamentalists or groups threatening violence?" wrote Nelson.

Fakin’ The Punk

Really, Bruce Bartlett? You spent decades as a Republican hack boosting supply-side (read: voodoo) economics, as part of a roster of fake scholars at right-wing outlets like the Heritage Foundation, Cato and AEI, and as a regular part of the conservative commentariat.

When things start to look like they’re going to shit under Dubya (and when you started to realize how lucrative it might be to become a liberal hack, or even every liberal’s favourite conservative), you joined a long list of yes-men and arch-conservative stalwarts who wrote books blaming Bush for scuttling the Reagan legacy or something to that effect. Yours is called “Impostor.”

And now, in the Obama era, you, the author of “Reaganism” is putting out “The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward” and promoting it with an essay in The Daily Beast blaming the current recession on George W. Bush’s monetary policy. In the same article, you even said that Bush’s tax cuts, because they were in rebate form, went against supply-side economics, and that—<gasp!> Obama should be applauded because tax revenues went down during his time in office (because, you doesn’t mention, of the massive recession he inherited). "If conservatives really believe their own rhetoric," you write, "they should be congratulating Obama for being one of the greatest tax cutters in history."

If that’s not cynicism, I don’t know what is.

Hey, Bruce: Weren’t your ideas about the unfettered free market back in the 80s as much to blame as anyone’s for the economic collapse? Weren’t you on Congress’s Joint Economic Committee when the Reagan administration passed the deregulatory bonanza of the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act, which Paul Krugman, one of those real economist, cites as one of the causes of the Great Recession? And wasn’t it you who got it wrong about the housing bubble, even when you were trying to hint that you had gotten it right?

Canadian Arrogance

Wondeful big government came and went, says Craig Oliver in the Toronto Star, and my god—financial regulations, health care, bailouts—when will those stupid, stupid Americans learn?

There’s little to be gained looking to the U.S. for inspiration.

Unlike the other weavers of our social safety net, medicare pioneer Tommy Douglas – voted "the greatest Canadian" in that poll awhile back – followed his own star.

Canada already is on the right side of history. Anyone here waiting on America to lead us to a better place is deluded.

Because the United States, with the largest, most innovative economy in the world and the planet’s most dynamic, influential culture, can do no good. They’re on the wrong side of history, after all.