Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

A Meaner, Rougher Times Editorial

In Mr. T., Mr. G. and Mr. H., Bill Keller has provided us with a down-and-dirty anti-eulogy. I'm a little surprised to see a sub-warblog level takedown of Senators Gramm, Thurmond and Helms on the top column of the NYT Op-Ed page:

I'd like to begin the new year by bidding farewell to three men whose departure will raise the median decency of the United States Senate....They will leave behind an institution they have helped appreciably to debase.

OK. I'm all for being direct, and at least two of these three are worthy of ridicule. But Keller doesn't start well:

Senators Helms, Gramm and Thurmond have in common the fact that they harnessed their collective century of seniority to the Taliban wing of the American right. Point to an act of cultural division, bullying unilateralism or anti-government populism committed in the Senate during their decades there and you will usually find these three men among the sponsors.

Ad Talibanum isn't enough, apparently. Towards the end of the argument he commits what I'll call Ad Sopranum:

As the senior Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for the past 15 years, and as the mentor of a right-wing mafia within the Republican Party, he (Helms) has been an author of much of what makes the world resentful of America..

Keller's problems with Thurmond are his age and that he's a leering groper who "made congress ridiculous". According to Keller, he's a kind of Sensei of the Packwood/Clinton/Condit school of..er.."swordsmen".

..Senator Thurmond did not invent the role of Washington lecher, but he helped cultivate the men's-club chauvinism in which Bob Packwood and Bill Clinton and Gary Condit operated.

I'll go along with the "ridiculous" part, but I hold the others responsible for their own actions. I didn't see Clinton studying under Thurmond. I did see Thurmond beg a hug from Hilary, which would bother any husband, but that was long after Clinton joined the club.

Keller saves his most dubious accusations for Gramm, pinning the Enron scandal on him before we have any evidence distinguishing Gramm from the rest of the congress.

One of Senator Gramm's most generous benefactors was Enron, which lavished money on his campaigns and paid his wife handsomely as a corporate director. Senator Gramm, in turn, had a hand in legislation that exempted Enron's explosive energy derivatives business from government regulation and oversight. How big a hand, and whether that legislation enabled the secret funny business that led to the company's collapse, may emerge in one of the many investigations under way. Enron's business was built on the premise that just about anything could be turned into a commodity and bought and sold. The beleaguered little taxpayers who lost their jobs and pensions in the Enron fiasco will be interested to know whether that included their senator.

Well, they'd also be interested to know if Bill Keller was involved, but don't you think it's a bit premature? For that matter, does deregulating an industry automatically convey approval of fraud? That's a bit of a stretch Bill, don't you think?

Oh, right, I forgot. It's the private sector. They're all criminals by definition. So every financial company starts scheming to rob us blind the minute the government stops warehousing a brand new set of "examiners" in their offices for a month every year and then sending them the bill. (Yes folks, that's how it works, ask an insurance executive).

Whatever the Times paid Keller for that article, it was too much. A shame, too, because Thurmond and Helms provide pretty rich material. Get yourself a Blogger account, Bill, and try to compete.

Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at January 12, 2002 09:35 AM | Technorati inbound links