Here's a few tidbits from this week's news magazines.
1. Newsweek's predictably liberal "Conventional Wisdom Watch" box is clearly unhappy with the good-news-for-Bushies trend. Bush and Rove each get an up arrow. Each also get incredibly whiny blurbs. Bush: "Surprise Baghdad trip boosts troops' morale -- and his own. But he still had to sneak in, three years after invasion." Rove: "Being cleared in CIA leak probe clears his to go back to attacking Democrats as pansies. To the well once too often?"
Answer: No, not when you're pushing withdrawal from Iraq by the end of the year.
2. Newsweek columnist Anna Quindlen inveighs against the death penalty for murderers again. She inveighs against the 1998 execution of Karla Faye Tucker and cites a 1994 Supreme Court opinion by Justice Harry Blackmun. How can we be sure this isn't a seven-year-old editorial? At least this time, she doesn't ask a president to spare a mass murderer like Timothy McVeigh to show his talent for "empathy."
3. Time movie critic Richard Corliss proves once again the skewed morality in Liberal Land. In reviewing the documentary "The Road to Guantanamo," arguing against American imprisonment of terror suspects without trial, Corliss composes this sentence:
"If the movie's remorseless depiction of this nightmare doesn't shock audiences into numbness -- 'United 93' is a Hallmark card compared with this horror show -- they may be inspired by the stubborn bravery of Iqbal and his friends."
Put aside the question of whether Asif Iqbal, Corliss's hero, was wrongly detained. He is alive. How can the reality of United 93 crashing and killing everyone aboard be a "Hallmark card" compared to a man who is alive? If Corliss is stating that since one is brutally non-fictional and the other is an attempt at a cinematic reenactment that's somehow less brutal, is he blind to the contradiction in the "awful realities" contained in his trivializing Hallmark contrast?
Liz Halloran also promotes that documentary in a Guantanamo story for U.S. News.
4. On their gossipy "People" page, Time reflects on "Cause Celebs," with some predictable names like Bono and Angelina Jolie, and also Daryl Hannah squatting for days in a walnut tree. The name that's a stranger fit is the rapper Jay-Z:
After a Cristal exec said he views the high-end champagne's popularity with hip-hop stars as a "curiosity," Jay-Z felt dissed and decided to boycott, neither drinking it nor serving it in his chain of lounges.
Make light of Angelina Jolie, aspiring Secretary of State, if you will, but most Hollywood causes, from debt relief to AIDS and refugees, are more serious than boycotts over feeling "dissed" with harsh words like "curiosity" and switching to a different $500 bottle of champagne. There is a dismissal in there, but the words are rather weak, as an AP report explains further:
In a special summer issue of The Economist magazine, Frederic Rouzaud, managing director of Louis Roederer, said the company viewed the affection for his company's champagne from rappers and their fans with "curiosity and serenity."
Asked by the magazine if the association between Cristal and the "bling lifestyle" could be detrimental, Rouzaud replied:
"That's a good question, but what can we do? We can't forbid people from buying it. I'm sure Dom Perignon or Krug would be delighted to have their business."
This quote sounds like a caricature of the French to me -- resigned, snobbish, but somehow non-committal. Jay-Z says it's "racist." But hasn't Jay-Z ever considered that the rappers are disreputable for what they say, how they act -- how they suggest they acquire the Cristal -- gang-banging or "big pimpin'?" Maybe the French don't object to that. But many people do.
