Scrapbook
Scrapbook Cue Violins Poor Kira Peikoff. According to the June 16 Washington Post, the 21-year-old NYU student was thrilled to land a summer internship at the D.C. bureau of a California...
...The unanswered questions all pertained to ongoing investigations or cases proceeding to trial...
...No employer is obliged to confer wealth or jobs on this individual...
...under Bush and Blair it's democracy...
...We'll look elsewhere for analysis, thanks very much...
...As Friedrich recounted to the senators, in advance of coming to Capitol Hill the Justice Department had informed the committee staff that, in line with longstanding policy, he would be unable to comment on specific cases...
...What followed was an article recounting how Arlen Specter and members of the Senate Judiciary Committee took turns lambasting a Justice Department official for "refusing" to reveal whether the Bush administration had ever contemplated bringing charges against journalists for publishing classified government secrets...
...The senators thus knew in advance the limits under which Friedrich would be operating...
...Perhaps because it made the Bush administration look bad, perhaps because its reporter, Walter Pincus, was feeling lazy, perhaps for reasons that cannot be readily discerned, the Washington Post was an eager and willing participant in this charade...
...The senators, we learned, "bristled" further when the official, Matthew W. Friedrich, the principal deputy attorney general in the Justice Department's criminal division, refused to answer questions about the FBI's recent attempts to gain access to an archive of the papers of the late columnist Jack Anderson...
...But like many others, she's frustrated by Washington's cost of living...
...Appearing especially vociferous in the story told by the Post was Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who told Friedrich: "You're basically taking what would be called a testifying Fifth Amendment...
...bureau of a California newspaper...
...As he reported in the Washington Times in 1996, "Afghanistan's Islamist Taliban rebels swiftly overran Kabul and now surge north from the capital with unexpected speed...
...Her bedroom may be 70 square feet, but it's part of a larger apartment she shares with roommates...
...There's no denying Washington internships can impose financial hardships, but by our calculations, Kira is not one of the victims...
...Why...
...This was not naivete on his part, either, as Masty, to his credit, did years of relief work in Kabul at a time when most Reaganites had washed their hands of the civil war there...
...Not only did the Post fail to find a plausible internship poster child, though, they left out the best fact about her father: He's Leonard Peikoff, the foremost academic authority on that libertarian superwoman and apostle of selfishness, Ayn Rand...
...it is not an indication that he has been coerced...
...Here is what actually happened at the hearing, but which the Post neglected to tell readers...
...But is it an accident, in light of what it reveals, that Congress and the mainstream media are two institutions increasingly in disrepute...
...What Business Did They Think They Were In...
...She should make about $5,000 for the summer...
...In one of his many books explicating and defending Rand's philosophy of objectivism, the elder Peikoff delivers what might even be read as a homily to interns: A man may be disappointed by others...
...But disappointment does not attack his body or negate his mind...
...But he made the monumental misjudgment of sizing up the Taliban as less unsavory than other Afghans...
...But the Post story is nonetheless deceptive from beginning to end...
...A June 14 headline at Ledger-Enquir-er.com, website of the Columbus, Ga., paper of the same name: "Birmingham abortion clinic surrenders license after baby's death...
...Rightly or wrongly, he may be unable to persuade them to agree with his ideas or to satisfy his desires...
...A man cannot properly say: "Since no one will pay me a larger salary, my boss forces me to take this job at five thousand dollars per year...
...Most observers find all this surprising and sinister— but it may be Afghanistan's best break in many years...
...That is, until you read the fine print...
...Masty is one of the latter and is an odd one to be sitting in judgment on the progress of the Afghan war, in particular, as he holds the rare distinction of having once been an apologist for the Taliban...
...In their wake, they impose a new religious severity...
...Oh, and "her father, a retired professor, wrote the rent check...
...Her salary, $1,640 a month before taxes, barely covers this...
...But he put forward excellent reasons for his silence, which the Post chose not to fully explain...
...And it worked...
...A Washington Post headline June 7 old of a sharp conflict on Capitol Hill between a powerful congressional committee and a government witness: "Silence Angers Judiciary Panel...
...You should be ashamed of yourself...
...Objectivism obviously isn't what it used to be...
...Friedrich did indeed decline to answer many of the questions put to him...
...no one owes him a living...
...Her 7-by-10 foot bedroom costs $1,250 a month, paid upfront for three months...
...Iowa's Charles Grassley acidly complained that the refusal to respond to questions signaled a lack of "any respect for this committee whatsoever...
...A transcript of the hearing reveals that all these words were spoken and the Post recorded every one of them accurately...
...Sullivan has apparently yet to learn that the woods are full of former "Rea-ganites...
...Details, details...
...Some are savory and some are poisonous...
...After taxes, that should leave $300 a week or so in pin money—more than enough for a premium beer after work every day...
...Masty argues that "by the standards of Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, our neoconservatives are not conservative, they are neosoviet...
...Ex-Reaganites Easy-to-impress Time magazine blog-ger Andrew Sullivan was enthusiastically promoting an op-ed last week by a "Reaganite conservative" named S.J...
...So were quite a few other newspapers across the country that published similar stories...
...A tear-jerking story...
...All told, it is no doubt a trifling incident...
...Masty whose "analysis of our mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan" seemed "very persuasive" to Sullivan...
...The senatorial display of fury at the allegedly recalcitrant government witness was thus nothing more than a well choreographed ambush...
...Well, Bush and Blair "sound like Leonid Brezhnev," and America is now the "cruel superpower willing to torture, kidnap, slaughter and invade in order to install an ideologically driven, one-size-fits-all system claiming historical inevitability...
...Under Brezhnev, of course, the "system" was Communist tyranny...
...Justice Official Mum on Possible Prosecution of Journalists...
...The senators pounded away until they got the desired result—which was not enlightenment about the various cases under dispute, but headlines in newspapers like the Post, reporting that the Justice Department is stonewalling and that the Senate is bravely taking it to task...
...True Story or False...
Vol. 11 • June 2006 • No. 39
