Helen of “Oy!,” recess time, “Is there a ‘Dr.’ in the house?,” &c.

January 15, 2002 9:30 a.m.

could tell from the response to a recent Impromptus that there are a lot of Helen Thomas fans out there — well, not really fans (although there are many of those, too, no doubt), but connoisseurs of various episodes in her long and glorious career.

I thought I’d reprint, for the amusement of the gallery, an exchange between La Helen (Hélène?) and Ari Fleischer, from Nov. 26. It’s classic Thomas:

Helen Thomas: Does the president feel the United States has the right to bomb or invade any country harboring terrorists? Is he going to invade Spain?

Ari Fleischer: Helen, the president, as I mentioned, is focused on Phase One . . .

HT: Eight suspected terrorists . . .

AF: The president is focused on Phase One of the war against terrorism. But the president has made it plain to the American people that this a long-term war.

HT: Answer the question. What right do we have to invade any country?

AF: I’m not aware that we are invading Spain.

Ah, another tragi-comical moment in the White House briefing room. Thing is, while Helen Thomas, Sarah McClendon, and other curiosities are doing their acts, there are real reporters waiting to ask real questions.

When it comes to Thomases, give me Dave, give me Isiah (yes, that’s the correct spelling — talk to his mother), give me Danny, but . . . oh, Helen!

I have written copiously about Otto Reich, both in this column and in the pages of NR itself (see, for example, “Dirty Wars,” June 25, 2001). He is President Bush’s choice to be assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere (formerly known as assistant secretary of state for Latin America — and the Canadians, I’m told, hate it when you revert to the old title. Certain Caribbean people aren’t too happy about it either). Suffice it to say that Reich is superbly qualified, that he is utterly despised by the Left, and that, until recently, his nomination was blocked by Sen. Chris Dodd on the Foreign Relations Committee — Dodd, who has such power, wouldn’t allow him a hearing.

Which led Bush to put him in office by recess appointment (along with Eugene Scalia, his nominee for solicitor at the Labor Department, who was opposed by a cadre of Senate Democrats). I’m delighted that Bush “recessed” him, and am unsurprised, by now, that he had the cojones to do it. Bush has proven a president of Reaganite guts in many respects. I can’t think of a better man than Reich to serve in that job, for reasons of biography, philosophy, and sheer ability.

But I, like others, I’m sure, am sorry it came down to that — the recess appointment. The Left threw a lot of junk charges against Reich, and if Reich had had a hearing, he would have knocked them out of the park. The country would have seen a very impressive and inspiring man, and his leftist opponents would have looked like total fools. And now Reich — and we — have been deprived of that. Also, a recess appointment brings with it just a bit of a taint: He had to go in backdoor, not being able to go in by the usual channels.

But that’s solely Dodd’s fault, of course, which brings me to an additional point I wish to make on this matter: Apparently, Dodd is influenced by his chief Latin America staffer, a woman named Janice O’Connell who is a fierce leftist from way back, a veteran of the Central America wars of the 1980s, in which her side lost badly, and was proven fallacious and wrong. I, for one, shrink — both in my writing on this subject and in my conversation about it — from calling attention to her. Dodd, and Dodd alone, is responsible for what he does. He’s a smart boy, we’re told (not least by his admirers). And if he decides he’s going to hamper and slander a good and admirable man, that’s his problem — and only his.

Speaking of annoying Connecticut Democrats, I wonder if you saw the latest item about Joe Lieberman in Bob Novak’s column: The senator is telling people, according to this report, that he’s changed his mind about 2004: He’s going to run for the presidential nomination whether Al Gore gets in or not.

Now, a man’s allowed to change his mind, of course (though we sometimes call this “reneging” ). But Lieberman seemed pretty stand-up when he said, earlier on, that he couldn’t, in good conscience, run against Gore, because he owed so much to Gore. No matter how badly he wanted to be president, he couldn’t find it in him to cross and frustrate the man who had given him a national stage. These sentiments now seem to be out the window.

Which is not the worst thing in the world: Politicians break promises or near promises all the time. We don’t fall over in shock. But wouldn’t a less biased press be cluck-clucking over this reversal? Or is that too Bernard Goldbergesque a question?

As I mentioned recently, Pat Trueman — formerly of the Justice Department, now with the American Family Association — is a warrior against porn, particularly against child porn. He and his organization and allies have been fighting a war against Yahoo, which harbors within its mighty breast a good many child-porn sites, which are — need it be said? — illegal. Trueman has now written about another (yes, another) kidnapping case having to do with such sites. Rather than describe it here, I invite you to take a look at his press release. As I’ve said before, this is a subject most of us would like to turn away from; but, of course, this revulsion, this turning away, is exactly what the malefactors count on. Thank God for the Pat Truemans.

Thank God, too, for the Family Research Council, which does noble work in this connection, as in others. The FRC’s Miriam Moore provides a tip about pornography pouring in through e-mail (or evident anywhere else), when it involves children and child abuse: You can always use www.cybertipline.com, which polices such material. Also, the following Justice Department address is useful: www.usdoj.gov/criminal/ceos/report.htm.

Many readers have said to me, “I feel helpless: Is there anything I can do, besides hit the delete key?” Well, the aforementioned is something we can do. It’s better than nothing.

I smiled a little the other day when The New York Times Sunday Magazine did a fawning profile of José Bove, the French “anti-globalization activist” whose specialty is attacking McDonald’s franchises. (People have been killed in such attacks, by the way, although Bove has disassociated himself from the killings. Others might say that “he helps create the environment in which . . .” — you know the line.) This reminded me of the two fawning profiles the Times did of Billy Ayres, the Weather Underground terrorist, the first of which appeared on — what was that date? — oh yeah, Sept. 11, and the second of which appeared the next Sunday, the 16th, in the Magazine. The Times just can’t keep away from these guys. Are they never embarrassed (I’m talking about the Timesmen)?

I offer the following letter from an Impromptus reader:

“I finally made it to Ground Zero last weekend (I live in the Chicago area), and cannot begin to express what I felt. The memorials that have sprouted up around the devastation are amazing. One item in particular left me literally gasping for breath. A little boy had written a birthday card to his father, in which he wished his father a happy birthday and hoped he was happy ‘even though you are dead.’ There was a picture of the boy in his baseball uniform. It still brings tears to my eyes as I think about it.

“My point is not to bring up the obvious realities of what happened, but to contrast this with another event happening in Evanston, Ill. (don’t you just love college towns?). The Barnes & Noble store there sent me an e-mail encouraging me to come to the store for the Bill Ayers book signing. I’ve let them know that I will never shop at any Barnes & Noble store again (including their Internet site). What the hell are these people thinking?”

I saw something a few days ago that amused me greatly. There was an AP article — on the Internet — about the Israeli seizure of that Palestinian/Iranian ship, loaded with 50 tons of matériel with which to kill Israelis. Accompanying the article was a photo of . . . well, I’ll let the caption say it all: “Palestinian Haroon Al-Rabaa, right, and his son Ander bake bread in a makeshift oven in their house, where cooking gas is not available due to the Israeli army closure of the West Bank village of Salem, near Nablus.”

Ahh. Those damn Israelis. This is the great victory the Palestinians have achieved in the propaganda field. A friend of mine said the following recently: “You know the most amazing change that has taken place over the last quarter of a century or so? The reversal, in propaganda terms, of the David-and-Goliath situation in the Middle East. It used to be that everyone recognized who the real David was, Israel: It was a tiny nation, a tiny sliver, against which 22 Arabs nations were arrayed, a whole world, vowing to destroy that tiny nation, struggling for its life, after the European Holocaust. And then, the Arab propagandists, with heaps of help from the West, made it the Palestinian wretches against the Israeli brutes, changing the equation. And they’ve been cackling ever since — not that any of the 22 Arab nations will ever offer the Palestinian wretches any real aid.”

I believe I mentioned in a recent column — at least I meant to — the extraordinary practice of the New York Times in its articles about the Cornel West controversy at Harvard. Now, the Times doesn’t do “Dr.” for Ph.D.’s; they do “Mr.” or “Ms.” (or just maybe “Mrs.” — although that’s a little antediluvian). It’s a pretty strict thing. For example, Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield is always “Mr. Mansfield.” And so on.

Yet, in its articles about the university’s Afro-American Studies department, the Times had “Dr. West,” “Dr. Gates” (for Henry Louis Gates, Jr.), etc. For Harvard’s president, Larry Summers, it was “Mr.” — and Summers, of course, is as Ph.D.’ed as anyone.

What’s going on? I noticed that Al Hunt did the same thing in his recent Wall Street Journal column: It was “Dr. West” and “Mr. Summers.” This is just possibly an amazing and gross act of racial condescension. Roger Kimball makes the same point in his article on the Harvard controversy in the current NR (titled — what else? — “Dr. West and Mr. Summers”).

Let me keep going on the Times: On Saturday, they had an obituary for W. A. Criswell, the old leader of the Southern Baptists. Criswell had a Ph.D. in theology. To the Times, however, he was “Mr. Criswell,” all the way through, in accordance with the paper’s (apparent) policy. When a fellow southerner was quoted, that man said “Dr. Criswell,” in very much the southern habit. (I have a friend who is a professor of music at a southern college, and, when I visited him, I was surprised and amused that people referred to him as “Dr.” ) (Memo to Chip: I still call you “Chip.” )

I wonder if the Times would care to declare a policy: Is it “Dr.” for black Ph.D.-holders, “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” or “Ms.” for non-black Ph.D.-holders? Or what? I don’t believe the Times is accidental about style. In fact, I think it takes it very seriously.

A final word — lightish (although not light): A reader wrote, “The other morning I glanced at the headline in my local paper, and it said, ‘Troops headed to Cuba.’ I got all excited: The military was finally going to do the Lord’s work and remove that cancerous regime, which has killed, tortured, impoverished, and exiled so many. Only after I rubbed my eyes was I disappointed to read it was just some MP work at Guantanamo.”