Politicians and Sex
When New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer was caught using a prostitution service, the irony was that he was a tough-on-prostitution politician.
He took pride in locking up the same kind of people he is said to have done $80,000 worth of business with. He supported “tougher laws” to imprison customers like him.
In his statement to the news media, Spitzer called the scandal a “private matter.”
Good point. Adults’ paying for sex ought to be a private matter, but when Spitzer was attorney general, he didn’t consider paid sex private. He’s one of many politicians who were eager to punish others for doing what he did.
What’s going on here? Maybe these men want to punish others for acting on the same forbidden impulses they know they can’t control themselves?
Rep. Mark Foley of Florida was a big advocate of punishing any adult who had sex with minors. “They’re sick people; they need mental health counseling,” he shouted.
But then ABC News caught Foley sending sexual instant messages to minors.
Politicians should cut back on their grandstanding, says Arizona public defender Chris Phillis, because while it’s bad enough to call what consenting adults do “sex crimes,” it’s even worse to criminalize kids who do what kids have always done.
Phillis, who defends teens accused of sex crimes, says common sexual experimentation is now prosecuted. “If a 15-year-old touches a 13-year-old, touches their breasts, they are now guilty of a felony crime. And I would love to tell you that 13-year-olds aren’t engaging in this conduct. I have a 13-year-old. But telling you that isn’t going to change the fact.”
The Centers for Disease Control reports that 25 percent of America’s 15-year-olds say they’ve have had sex. Nearly 40 percent of 16-year-olds and almost half the 17-year-olds say they have.
All are under Arizona’s age of consent, which prompted Senate committee chairwoman Karen Johnson to try to change Arizona’s sex-offender laws. She wanted to give kids a break.
But the political winds are not on her side. Few politicians want to spend political capital weakening sex-crime laws — even when such laws have horrendous unintended consequences.
Arizona’s Speaker of the House Jim Weiers defends Arizona’s tough laws, saying that if you are a sex offender, “Arizona is becoming very quickly known as a state you don’t want to stay in.” But Weiers acknowledges that Arizona’s sex-offender registry has 15,000 names on it.
I asked him how putting young people who engaged in noncoercive sex play on Arizona’s registry protects the public. “I don’t know if it does. ... You can’t take each and every individual...”
But it is individuals whose lives are wrecked by these laws. When Garrett Daley was 14, his 9-year-old adopted sister, Devon, said he molested her. Their mom called the police.
It turned out Devon had lied. It was she who initiated sex with Garrett. She later told the police, but they didn’t believe her. Today, seven years later, prosecutors still won’t let her change her testimony.
To avoid a jail sentence, Garrett plea-bargained to “attempted molestation of a child.” What choice do these kids have?
“They’re told they’ll go to jail for 90 years or 50 years or something, unless they accept this plea, and the plea almost always requires lifetime sex-offender registry,” Sen. Johnson says.
Garrett didn’t realize his plea bargain would put him in a different kind of jail. Once you’re on the sex offender registry or on probation, your life is wrecked, public defender Phillis told “20/20.”
“They can’t go anywhere children frequent. So that’s McDonald’s, that’s Jack in the Box ... Children have actually been told if you go to a movie and another child walks in, even if it’s a rated R movie, then you’re to get up and leave.”
I told Weiers about the public defender’s comments. “The public defenders say all laws go too far,” Weirs replied.
Give me a break. State sex-offender registries could separate consensual teen sex from pedophiles who prey on 5-year-olds. Minnesota does that.
Too often, American criminal law is a blunt instrument designed to make it look as if politicians are protecting us. I think the politicians usually protect themselves, at our expense.
Our World: America's coalition confusion
A core question arises from last weekend's Arab League summit in Damascus. Boycotted by half the league's members, the conference demonstrated the depth of Egyptian and Saudi opposition to Iran's rise to prominence in the Arab world. So too, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki's ostentatious participation at the summit showed the strength of Iran's strategic ties with Syria.
In this photo released by the Palestinian Authority, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice shakes hands with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, right, in Amman, Sunday.
Photo: AP
The question that arises from the summit is if Egypt and Saudi Arabia are willing to discard even the semblance of Arab unity in order to make clear their opposition to Iran, why do they support Hamas?
Hamas is an Iranian proxy. It receives its arms, training and orders from Teheran. Its leaders reside in Syria. Given their open opposition to Iran, and their increasingly open opposition to Syria as Iran's client, wouldn't it make more sense - from their perspective - to boycott Hamas?
The reason that Egypt and Saudi Arabia support Hamas in spite of its client relationship with Teheran is that for Egypt and Saudi Arabia, support for Palestinian terrorists trumps opposition to Iran. If they are forced to choose between fighting Iran and collaborating with Iran in support of Palestinian terrorists, they will always choose the latter. This is why they are spearheading negotiations between Fatah and Hamas towards the reestablishment of a Fatah-Hamas unity government. This is why Egypt enables Hamas and Iran to use its territory as their weapons supply route.
Egypt and Saudi Arabia think supporting the Palestinians is more important than fighting Iran because the Palestinians fight Israel. As the heads of the so-called "moderate Arab" camp, Egypt and Saudi Arabia hate the Jews more than they fear the Iranians.
The central question then for policymakers in Washington who are trying to deploy a successful strategy for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and asserting regional predominance is how can the Palestinian war with Israel be defused so that the 'moderate' Arab states will be forced to join them in confronting Iran?
THE CONSENSUS answer that the US has come up with is to pressure Israel to make massive concessions to the Palestinians. It is argued that such concessions will appease not just the Palestinians, but more importantly, they will appease the US's "moderate" Arab supporters in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. As this thinking goes, if Israel can be forced to cough up big enough concessions quickly enough, then the Palestinians will quiet down and the Egyptians and Saudis will be sufficiently satisfied with the "progress" being made to direct their attentions to confronting Iran.
This argument was elucidated this week by Democratic Senator and presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton in an interview with the Jewish Exponent. Clinton claimed that the Oslo negotiating process between the PLO and Israel which her husband embraced as his central Middle East policy from 1993 through 2000 brought levels of violence down between Israel and the Palestinians and so engendered regional stability.
In her words, "I think what we did in the '90s was beneficial in a strategic way and led to a period where, at times, there were no attacks being made, no suicide bombings and no deaths." She then went on to criticize the Bush administration which during its first term in office did not pressure Israel to restart negotiations towards Palestinian statehood with the PLO. Clinton added that she would consider opening negotiations with Hamas if she is elected president.
Clinton's argument is notable for two reasons. First, it accurately reflects not only her view, but the view now being pushed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in her bimonthly visits to Israel. As she made apparent in her visit to Israel this week, Rice believes that the only way to reach an agreement is for Israel to empower Fatah and give Hamas a pass. So too, in her clear support for Egypt's negotiations with Hamas, Rice shows that the Bush administration is already holding indirect negotiations with Hamas.
THE SECOND reason that Clinton's argument is notable is because it has been so obviously disproven by reality. During the years that her husband was applying massive pressure on Israel to appease the Palestinians, terror levels against Israel eclipsed anything Israel had seen since the 1950s. In the 15 years which preceded the 1993 Oslo accord, 216 Israelis were murdered in terrorist attacks. In the seven years of the Oslo peace process, 286 Israelis were killed. Indeed, it was only in 1994, when Israel was first transferring territory to PLO control and the Palestinian Authority was building its armies that Israel suffered its first suicide bombing.
During the six years of the Palestinian uprising from 1987-1993, 172 Israelis were killed. During the first six years of the Palestinian terror war against Israel which Oslo produced, more than 1,100 Israelis were killed. Violence levels dropped not because of peace talks, but because of Israeli offensive operations against the Palestinians.
As Yasser Arafat told Palestinian audiences throughout the 1990s, his goal in the Oslo process was to gain the military and political means to continue his war against Israel. Arafat's confidante Faisal Husseini made this Palestinian perspective explicit with the outbreak of the Palestinian terror war in September 2000. Speaking to the Arab media, Husseini said that for the Palestinians, the Oslo process was a "Trojan horse" against Israel. They came to Israel bearing the promise of peace with the premeditated aim of using Israel's willingness to make peace as a means of launching a new round of war whose aim was the political and military destruction of the Jewish state.
THE OSLO process which Clinton praises and Rice apes with her Annapolis process brought the Palestinian issue, which had been buried throughout much of the 1980s to the forefront of the pan-Arab social consciousness and political agenda. This it did to the detriment of other salient issues like Iran's steps towards regional hegemony, Egyptian and Saudi repression of liberal forces in their countries, and, during the 1990s, Saddam Hussein's systematic breach of UN Security Council sanctions.
Here it is worth noting that the pinnacle of US success in building an Arab coalition against a rogue state came in 1990. The Gulf War against Saddam Hussein, which saw the entire Arab world united with the US against a fellow-Arab regime, came not in the midst of a Palestinian-Israeli peace process. It came when there were no diplomatic negotiations whatsoever between Israel and the Palestinians or between Israel and any state.
In this photo released by the Palestinian Authority, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice shakes hands with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, right, in Amman, Sunday.
Photo: AP
THERE ARE two principal reasons that the advent of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations weakened pan-Arab interest in working with the US against common threats. First, because the Oslo process empowered terrorists, terror attacks increased. Each terror attack received massive, supportive coverage in the Arab media.
Second, since the Oslo process placed terrorists in charge of Gaza, Judea and Samaria, the Palestinians found themselves ruled by murderers who had no interest in economic development and opposed liberalization and democracy. As a consequence, the Palestinian economic situation went from one of sustained growth to one of massive depredation. The footage of Palestinian terror attacks and Palestinian economic privation shown daily in the pan-Arab media eclipsed coverage of every other issue. And since the US is viewed as Israel's ally, it engendered unprecedented levels of anti-Americanism in the Arab world.
So if the Palestinian-centric model embraced by the US to build an Arab coalition against Iran works precisely to undermine such a coalition by bringing to the forefront the one issue that the Arabs and the Iranians agree on, what would an alternative model of policymaking look like?
The Achilles heel of the US's current strategy is its reliance on Egyptian and Saudi support. Since Egypt and Saudi Arabia prefer fighting Israel to confronting Iran, a better policy for confronting Iran would be to base a US coalition on states that prefer fighting Iran to fighting Israel. Regionally, Israel, Lebanon and Iraq fit this model.
IF THE US were to shore up these allies and stiffen their resolve to confront Iran rather than divert its attention to a policy which simply serves to galvanize Arab attention and energies against Israel and away from Iran, the US would pose a more imposing threat to Iran. It would also push the Iranian threat to the forefront of political discourse in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Such a revised policy would involve not only shoring up Israeli, Iraqi and Lebanese willingness to confront Iran and Syria. It would also involve scaling back US involvement in the Palestinian conflict with Israel. Such a scaling back could only be successful if at the same time as it disengaged from the negotiations process between Israel and Fatah, Washington also gave Israel a green light to defeat Hamas in Gaza. Such an Israeli operation would both end the specter of an Iranian takeover of Judea and Samaria and remove Iran's ability to reignite the Palestinian conflict at will.
Obviously, to advance such a policy option, the US would have to confront an Israeli government that has embraced the incorrect logic of the current failed strategy of winning Arab support for confronting Iran by forcing Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians. So too, it would have to confront an Iraqi government that is afraid to confront Iran, and a UN that seems to have abandoned its previous willingness to acknowledge Syria's culpability for the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.
It would also have to ensure that Israel's military defeat at the hands of Iran and Hizbullah in 2006 will not repeat itself. That defeat enabled Hizbullah to reassert its control over south Lebanon and acquire an even more sophisticated arsenal than it had two years ago.
Replacing the current failed strategy of squeezing Israel in the hopes of winning the support of unreliable Arab allies for confronting Iran will no doubt be a controversial move. It will win the Bush administration no fast friends in Europe or on American university campuses. It will even anger the Israeli Left which now sues for peace with Syria.
The only advantage to be had from basing America's strategy towards Iran on building a US-led anti-Iranian coalition comprised of states that prefer to fight Iran than to fight Israel is that such a policy has the potential of actually ending Iran's increased domination of the Middle East and of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Irony on the Street
A lesson in Economics 101.
By Thomas Sowell
There was a real irony in the recent intervention by the Federal Reserve System to provide the money that enabled the firm of JPMorgan Chase to buy Bear Stearns before it went bankrupt. The point was to try to prevent a domino effect of panic in the financial markets that could lead to a downturn in the economy.
The irony is that it was almost exactly 100 years ago — 1907, to be exact — that the original J. P. Morgan arranged a bailout of a troubled financial institution for the same purpose of preventing a panic that could end up with the whole economy declining.
The difference is that J. P. Morgan and his fellow bankers used their own money, while the Federal Reserve System used their power to create money.
What that means is that the value of your money and my money — all Federal Reserve Notes — goes down when more Federal Reserve Notes are issued to subsidize the purchase of Bear Stearns by JPMorgan Chase.
It wasn’t really a bailout because the stockholders of Bear Stearns lost their shirts. But the firm of JPMorgan Chase got money from the government to seal the deal.
In other words, we all paid to keep Bear Stearns out of bankruptcy, whether we all realize it or not. Whether that was better than the alternative is a separate question — and one whose answer may never be known.
But the big difference between this year’s rescue to stabilize the financial markets and that 101 years ago is that this year’s government rescue leads to demands that still more rescues — including real bailouts — should be extended to homeowners and others.
Back in 1907, nobody could demand that the original J. P. Morgan bail out more people with his own money. But whatever the government does sets a precedent and causes more special interests to demand that they get the same treatment.
There is another irony in this situation. There was no Federal Reserve System in 1907. That is why Wall Street bankers like J. P. Morgan had to do their own heavy lifting with their own money.
Somehow that did not sit right with the Progressives of that era who, like today’s liberals, seemed to think that things should not be left to the market when the government can step in and make everything right.
Such thinking led in 1914 to the creation of the Federal Reserve System.
Unlike other countries, the United States had gotten along for generations without a central government bank. But President Woodrow Wilson thought that the monetary system of the country was too important to let private bankers play such a large role as J. P. Morgan had played in 1907.
Describing the Federal Reserve System created during his administration, Woodrow Wilson said: “It provides a currency which expands as it is needed and contracts when it is not needed.”
The power to expand and contract the currency was “put into the hands of a public board of disinterested officers of the Government itself.”
Their task was to prevent financial panics, bank failures, and a catastrophic contraction of demand. It sounded wonderful — and such sounds count for a lot in politics.
In reality, however, the biggest financial panic in American history occurred under the Federal Reserve System in 1929, followed by thousands of bank failures and an unprecedented contraction of the money supply by one-third during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
There is no question that the people who run the Federal Reserve System today are a lot more knowledgeable about economics than those who ran it back in the days of the Great Depression. Indeed, the average student who has passed Economics 101 today is probably more knowledgeable than those who ran the Federal Reserve System back during the Great Depression.
Being a disinterested government official does not mean that you know what you are doing. That fact gets left out of the equation in a lot of proposals for new government programs.
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