John Cassidy's Blog, page 72

Why America Still Needs Affirmative Action

Later this week, or next week, the Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling greatly restricting, or even ending, affirmative action in admissions to public colleges. If this happens, it will be a great pity.

Set aside, for a moment, the explosive issue of black or brown versus white, which underpins much of the discussion about affirmative action. There are compelling reasons to make it easier for young people of all races from disadvantaged backgrounds to attend college. The University of Texas program at the center of this case did just that. Far from being ruled illegal, it should be embraced and promoted as a practical, merit-based model for other states to copy. Unfortunately, that seems unlikely.

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An Englishman Wins the U.S. Open

You will forgive me for not dwelling on the suggestion, raised by some blithering idiot last week, that Tiger Woods and his fellow-competitors would tear apart Merion Golf Club, a course often described as “venerable,” “vulnerable,” and “outdated.” The important thing is that, for the first time in more than thirty years, an Englishman—Justin Rose—has won the U.S. Open. From Northumberland to Cornwall, a nation rejoices.

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Is Edward Snowden a Hero? A Follow-Up

Yesterday, Jeffrey Toobin and I taped a segment about the Edward Snowden leaks with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, for his “GPS” show, which will be broadcast this weekend. You—and Jeff Zucker, CNN’s ratings-conscious president—may be disappointed to hear it didn’t come to fisticuffs; it was all very polite. Jeffrey reiterated his objections to Snowden’s behavior—he broke the law, he compromised national security, he fled to Hong Kong—and I repeated my argument that he has performed an invaluable public service.

Clearly, there are two sides to this issue. But, in light of the questions that have been raised about Snowden’s conduct—and not just by Jeffrey but by other liberal writers who might have been expected to be supportive, such as Josh Marshall, of T.P.M., and Kevin Drum, of Mother Jones—it’s worth expanding upon a few points.

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The Murdoch Divorce: A Few Details

If you think the biggest story in media land today was Hillary Clinton’s comeback speech or the continuing fallout from the N.S.A. leaks scandal, you are living on Planet Zog. From New York to Los Angeles to Washington to London, virtually the only topic of conversation was the news that Rupert Murdoch is divorcing his third wife, Wendi Deng Murdoch.

As a former employee of News Corp.’s newspapers—earlier in my career, I spent seven years at the Sunday Times of London and two years at the New York Post—and as a longtime observer of the Murdoch empire, I’m as fascinated as anyone. But getting a read on what’s really going on, and what lies behind the divorce filing, is tough. After making a few calls and sending out a few e-mails, here is what I know.

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Will the Bombers Obliterate Merion? Let’s Hope So

Over at Daily Comment, I’ve got another post up about the N.S.A.’s leaks scandal, but here let’s move on to a more important matter: the U.S. Open, which starts Thursday at the venerable East Course at the Merion Golf Club outside Philadelphia.

As the rain has poured down on the East Coast over the past week, softening the fairways and greens at Merion, players, golf traditionalists, and casual observers alike have been raising a dire question: Could the bombers who dominate the P.G.A. Tour these days obliterate the historic course, which opened in 1910 and holds a prominent place in golfing folklore?

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Why Edward Snowden Is a Hero

Is Edward Snowden, the twenty-nine-year-old N.S.A. whistle-blower who was last said to be hiding in Hong Kong awaiting his fate, a hero or a traitor? He is a hero. (My colleague Jeffrey Toobin disagrees.) In revealing the colossal scale of the U.S. government’s eavesdropping on Americans and other people around the world, he has performed a great public service that more than outweighs any breach of trust he may have committed. Like Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department official who released the Pentagon Papers, and Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear technician who revealed the existence of Israel’s weapons program, before him, Snowden has brought to light important information that deserved to be in the public domain, while doing no lasting harm to the national security of his country.

Doubtless, many people inside the U.S. power structure—President Obama included—and some of its apologists in the media will see things differently. When Snowden told the Guardian that “nothing good” was going to happen to him, he was almost certainly right. In fleeing to Hong Kong, he may have overlooked the existence of its extradition pact with the United States, which the U.S. authorities will most certainly seek to invoke. The National Security Agency has already referred the case to the Justice Department, and James Clapper, Obama’s director of National Intelligence, has said that Snowden’s leaks have done “huge, grave damage” to “our intelligence capabilities.”

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From 9/11 to Prism: A Nation Gone Dotty

Here’s one of the things I want to know about the government’s electronic-spying programs, which evidently give it the power to find out intimate details about virtually anybody. Who designed the spooky red-and-black logo for the National Security Agency’s Prism program? My colleague Amy Davidson correctly points out that it owes something to Storm Thorgerson’s album cover for Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon,” a ponderous recording that back in the nineteen-seventies drove me and many others to punk rock. But it’s also reminiscent of the logos featured in the cinematic version of “1984,” featuring John Hurt and Richard Burton, which came out in 1984. In the film, for example, the logo for IngSoc, the all-powerful ruling party of Oceania, the dystopian land of the future, is a red-and-black capital “V.”

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China Can’t Be Contained; It Has to Be Accommodated

At the start of the twentieth century, Britain, the superpower of the time, was faced with a strategic dilemma: what to do about a newly unified and nationalist Germany, which was rising fast economically and building up its military. One school of thought held that Germany could be accommodated within the existing international system; the other argument was that it needed to be confronted and contained. The hawks won out. During the Boer War, London threatened to blockade the German coast if Berlin intervened in favor of the Dutch settlers in South Africa. There followed a big arms race, as Germany, which had already been strengthening its marine capabilities, rushed to catch up with the Royal Navy, and Britain responded by constructing the dreadnoughts, a deadly family of steam-powered battleships. In 1907, Britain joined France and Russia in an alliance—the Triple Entente—against Germany and Austria-Hungary.

We all know how the story ended: a devastating, continent-wide conflict that lasted more than four years, killed over nine million combatants, and facilitated the rise of Communism and Fascism. And one of the worst things about the First World War was that it could quite possibly have been avoided. Although the rise of Wilhelmine Germany represented a dangerous challenge to the balance of power in Europe, neither side wanted a full-scale confrontation. In 1914, following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo, the European powers blundered into war because of decisions they had made, and commitments they had taken on, during the years of heightening rivalry.

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Will the Feds Try to Kill SAC Capital?

A couple of months ago, I asked if Steve Cohen, the billionaire hedge-fund manager, had bought off the U.S. government by agreeing to pay the Securities and Exchange Commission more than six hundred million dollars to settle an insider-trading case. It appears that the answer is no. With many on Wall Street waiting on tenterhooks for the dénouement of the SAC Capital story, the big question is whether Cohen will succeed in radically downsizing the firm, currently one of the world’s biggest hedge funds, on his own terms, or whether the Justice Department will issue it a death warrant.

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Chris Christie’s Risky Gambit

Has the (erstwhile) Fat Man made his first big political error?

In announcing a special election in October to find a permanent replacement for Senator Frank Lautenberg, who died on Monday, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie runs the risk of appearing to be trying to have it both ways. He has reserved the right to appoint a Republican to serve in the Senate until October, which should theoretically please his colleagues in the G.O.P. But in scheduling the special election for October rather than November, when he himself is up for reëlection, he has opened himself up to the accusation that he is putting his own interests before those of his party, and of his taxpaying constituents.

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