BILL CLINTON INTENTIONALLY SET A MASS MURDERER FREE,
SCIENTISTS DON'T REALLY CARE ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING,
AND OTHER FACTS
by Douglas Sczygelski
Copyright 2012 Douglas Sczygelski
Smashwords Edition
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this ebook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
MONEY!! I'm letting you have this book free of charge, but if you find it interesting and think I deserve compensation for my time and effort, send a check or cash to Douglas Sczygelski, 1508 South 14th St., #12, Grand Forks, ND 58201, or else pay me thru PayPal. My email address is Hijk5558@yahoo.com. Even one dollar would be nice.
PREFACE
CHAPTER 2: RALPH NADER DOESN'T REALLY CARE ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING AND MOST SCIENTISTS DON'T EITHER
CHAPTER 3: WILLIAM J. BENNETT'S LIES ABOUT THE LEWINSKY SCANDAL
CHAPTER 4: WILLIAM J. BENNETT TELLS LIES IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
CHAPTER 5: THE LIES OF RONALD REAGAN
PREFACE
In this book I will sometimes refer to “New Republic magazine.” I know perfectly well that it is customary to call that magazine “the New Republic,” but I have learned over the years that most Americans have no idea what “the New Republic” is, and when you refer to it that way, they tend to think you are talking about some obscure foreign country. They get a confused look on their faces and ask where this Noo Republic is. Near the Czech Republic, perhaps? So I will refer to “New Republic magazine.”
For similar reasons, I will follow the same policy with several other magazine titles.
CHAPTER 1: BILL CLINTON INTENTIONALLY SET A MASS MURDERER FREE AND NEITHER THE REPUBLICANS NOR THE MASS MEDIA NOR RALPH NADER CARED
Emmanuel Constant was, allegedly, a death squad leader in Haiti in the early 1990s. Officials of the human rights organization Human Rights Watch have declared that there is more than enough evidence to justify putting him on trial for mass murder. (See a letter by Jose Miguel Vivanco on page A20 of the March 5, 1999 issue of the New York Times, and a letter by Reed Brody on page A26 of the Nov. 11, 1999 issue of the New York Times, and an article by Paul Lewis on page A3 of the June 22, 1999 issue of the New York Times.)
Constant admits he was the leader of FRAPH, the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti. It was not a secret organization. There were public rallies where Constant would address FRAPH members. Constant denies that he ever killed anyone or ordered anyone to be killed, but refugees who fled Haiti have no doubt that FRAPH was a gang of killers, and neither did the investigators sent to Haiti by the Organization of American States and the United Nations. (See pages 61 and 62 of an article about Constant by David Grann in the June 2001 issue of the Atlantic Monthly.) In the spring of 1994, a U.S. diplomat in Haiti reported to his superiors that FRAPH was “evolving into a sort of Mafia” made up of “crazies” who “use violence against all who oppose it.” (See page 62 of David Grann's article in the June 2001 issue of the Atlantic Monthly.)
After the American military intervention in Haiti in 1994, Constant fled to the United States. He was arrested by American authorities in 1995. The Haitian government requested his extradition, but the Clinton administration refused the request. Instead, in 1996, Constant was released on condition that he check in at an Immigration and Naturalization Service office in New York City every week. (See page 74 of David Grann's article in the June 2001 issue of the Atlantic Monthly.) In a New York Times article that said Constant is blamed for the “death, rape or torture” of “thousands” of leftists, a Clinton administration spokesman was quoted as saying that sending Constant back to Haiti would put an “undue burden on Haiti's judicial and penal system,” and would create “a potential source of instability.” (See an article by Larry Rohter on page 5 of the June 22, 1996 issue of the New York Times.)
If that was the problem, why not try him at an international tribunal, such as the one that tried Slobodan Milosevic? Either no journalist asked that question at the time, or else the administration spokesman refused to answer it. David Grann, the author of a long article about Constant that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in June 2001, sought an explanation from Warren Christopher, who was secretary of state at the time of Constant's release, but Grann says Christopher refused to discuss it. (See page 68 of Grann's article.) President Clinton, in his autobiography, says nothing about it either. As far as I could determine, Clinton has never explained this decision.
One often hears that the press is obsessed with sensationalism at the expense of serious issues, so one would think the press would pay a great deal of attention to such a shocking crime story, but that is not what happened. The New York Times and Washington Post mentioned that Constant had been released, but neither of them put the story on the front page. (See page A3 of the June 18, 1996 issue of the Washington Post, and page A4 of the June 18, 1996 issue of the New York Times.) In fact, in all the years Constant has been in the United States, neither newspaper has ever put anything about him on the front page, though both have printed articles about him. The Post has never editorialized about Constant. The Times did so twice, both times in 1996, saying he ought to be put on trial, either in Haiti or in the United States, and admitting that a trial “could raise embarrassing questions about the CIA's role in Haiti,” (See the New York Times editorials, “Bring Emmanuel Constant to Trial,” on page A18 of the June 26, 1996 issue, and “Danger Signs in Haiti,” on page A16 of the Sept. 9, 1996 issue) but in the years that followed, until Constant was arrested in 2006 on charges of committing mortgage fraud, the editors of the Times payed little attention to him.
The Los Angeles Times also editorialized, on June 30, 1996, that Constant ought to be put on trial either in the United States or in Haiti, but after that payed little attention to him. Nothing about Constant ever appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Times.
The Wall Street Journal and the Chicago Tribune both completely ignored the story.
According to the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature and the EBSCO Megafile database, the record of Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report is dismal. None of them printed anything about Constant from the date of his release to the day he was arrested in 2006 in connection with a mortgage fraud scheme.
But what is really surprising is the silence from political magazines. Prior to Constant's release, the Nation, America's foremost left-wing magazine, printed four articles about him, but there was no report in the Nation about his release and not one word about him thereafter through 2006, when Constant was arrested for mortgage fraud. For the ten years between Constant's release and his arrest for mortgage fraud, the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature and the EBSCO Megafile database show exactly two magazine articles about him. One was the article by David Grann in the June 2001 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, which I mentioned above. The other was on page 19 of the March 2005 issue of the Progressive. It was only eight sentences long, and it failed to point out that the United States government was letting Constant stay in the United States. But the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, the New Yorker, the National Review, Commentary, Tikkun, the Weekly Standard, Rolling Stone, the Washington Monthly, Commonweal, Harper's, the New York Times Magazine, Ms., Mother Jones and the Humanist were silent.
It is impossible to think of a good reason for this silence. If a president freed a Nazi who killed hundreds of Jews, or a maniac who murdered hundreds of people in England or in Italy or in some other western European country, does anyone believe there would not be an outcry? Does anyone doubt it would have been a front page story? If a president freed someone who was accused of killing even one American, and refused to give some sort of reasonable explanation for doing it, surely the media would not have shrugged that story off so easily. All one has to do is compare the silence concerning Constant with the outcry that erupted when President Clinton pardoned Marc Rich in 2001. Why did the media express no amazement that Congress was ignoring the Constant matter? Why did journalists not ask prominent politicians whether they thought Clinton should be impeached for this, and if not, why not? Did the people who run the news media seriously believe there was nothing alarming about the fact that Clinton had decided to release a man into society who had already proven that he was willing to kill to get what he wanted? Did they seriously think the public would not be shocked to hear that such a man was free to walk the streets? If Charles Manson was released from prison, that would surely be a huge news story. How was Constant's case different?
Benedict Ferro was the district director of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in Baltimore at the time Constant was released. He himself had the duty of informing Constant that he was free to leave. His opinion of what happened is clear: “This guy was believed to have murdered and assassinated all these people, and we released him into our society. It was outrageous.” (See page 68 of David Grann's article in the June 2001 Atlantic Monthly.) A human rights lawyer named Brian Concannon concurs. “The presence of such a horrible killer in the U.S. shows that the U.S. supports those activities,” he said. “There is, unfortunately, no other credible explanation.” (See page 75 of David Grann's article in the June 2001 Atlantic Monthly.)
When George W. Bush became president, American government policy toward Constant did not change.
So why did Clinton and Bush treat Constant this way? Some believe Constant worked for the CIA, and perhaps Clinton and Bush feared that if he was put on trial, he would reveal CIA secrets. (See pages 66-67 of David Grann's article in the June 2001 issue of the Atlantic Monthly and a book review by Murray Kempton on page 63 of the January 11, 1996 issue of the New York Review of Books.) But what legitimate secrets could the CIA possibly have in Haiti? It has to be one of the most unimportant countries in the world, except to the people who live there. It has a small population and almost no natural resources. After the Soviet Union collapsed, why would anyone in the CIA care about it?
Of course, if there are no legitimate secrets, perhaps there are illegitimate ones. Perhaps some CIA agents were involved in drug smuggling on the side, and perhaps Constant knew about this. Perhaps Clinton and Bush thought it would be embarrassing if that became public. Everyone knows drug smuggling was a big business in Haiti in the years when Constant was leading FRAPH. (See, for example, an article by Howard W. French on page A15 of the June 8, 1994, issue of the New York Times.)
But no matter how long we ponder this mess, it is impossible to see any good reason why almost every pundit and journalist in the United States ignored this story. In his book, The Death of Outrage, William J. Bennett gave a multitude of reasons why he thought Clinton should be impeached, but he said nothing about Constant. William Safire of the New York Times never got tired of talking about how awful he thought Clinton was, but he never complained about the way Clinton treated Constant. Look at Ralph Nader's book Crashing the Party, in which he discusses his 2000 campaign for president. He talks at great length about all the reasons why he considers Clinton a disappointment, but he says nothing about Constant. Surely Nader heard of Constant. Surely Nader is the kind of guy who reads the New York Times editorial page every day, so he can keep track of what is going on in the world. So how could he not know about Constant? Senator Joseph Lieberman, one day in 1998, spent twenty-three minutes on the floor of the Senate deploring Clinton's “immoral” behavior in the Lewinsky scandal, but never did he complain about Constant. (See the article by Richard L. Berke on page A1 of the September 4, 1998, issue of the New York Times.) If Clinton had had sex with Constant and then lied about it during a deposition, Lieberman presumably would have been horrified, but because Constant was merely a cold-blooded killer whom Clinton had turned loose upon the American people, Lieberman was not concerned.
Then there is Michael Moore, who is in a class by himself. In three bestselling books, Downsize This, Stupid White Men, and Dude, Where's My Country? he writes nothing about Constant. That is strange, because Stupid White Men and Dude, Where's My Country? were published after David Grann's Atlantic Monthly article. The Atlantic Monthly is a well-known magazine. Is it possible that Moore never read that article, and also that none of his friends read it and told him about it? Whatever Moore's reason is, it cannot be reluctance to criticize Democrats. Anyone who reads his books knows that he frequently insults them. On page 211 of Stupid White Men, he sarcastically calls Clinton “one of the best Republican Presidents (sic) we've ever had.” So why does he treat Constant like a sacred cow?
It's the same story in Christopher Hitchens's book, No One Left to Lie To. The book is one long diatribe against Clinton, and a famous journalist such as Hitchens surely reads the New York Times every day to keep track of what is going on in the world, but you will search that book in vain for a word about Constant.
In the whole world of book publishing, one sees little interest in the Constant case. It is not mentioned in John F. Harris's book, The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House, nor in Hillary Rodham Clinton's book, Living History, nor in Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America, by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose, nor in On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency, by Elizabeth Drew, nor in The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years, by Haynes Johnson, nor in The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media that Love Them, by Amy Goodman and David Goodman, nor in Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, by Al Franken, nor in What Liberal Media? The Truth about Bias and the News, by Eric Alterman.
As I said above, the Nation actually did print four articles about Constant before he was released from that federal detention center in 1996, but printed nothing about him afterward. Shortly after the 2004 election, Katha Pollitt, a columnist for the Nation and a prominent feminist, declared that nobody should blame John Kerry for his defeat. He was a good candidate, she wrote. He made only the normal number of mistakes in the campaign that one must expect from any fallible human being. He did everything one could reasonably expect of him. Bush won because most voters like his views, and we have to accept that fact. (See page 10 of the November 22, 2004, issue of the Nation.)
Reading that makes one want to ask Pollitt why Kerry didn't pick up some votes by pointing out in a television ad that Bush was coddling a terrorist who murdered hundreds of people. After all, Bush could've easily had Constant arrested and sent to Haiti or to an international tribunal to stand trial. Surely the average American would've been horrified and disgusted by Bush's behavior, if Kerry had run such ads. What normal American wants a mass murderer, who has proven that he is perfectly willing to kill to get what he wants, walking the streets? If the conservatives could make an extremely effective ad out of Willie Horton, who murdered only one person, surely it would be possible to make an effective ad out of Constant.
But Katha Pollitt never thought of that. One feels amazed by her ignorance. Did she never read the Nation's articles about Constant, nor the article about him in the Atlantic Monthly, nor the articles and editorials about him in the New York Times?
In addition, I was unable to find any evidence that Bernard Goldberg, Jim Hoagland, David Broder, Thomas L. Friedman, E.J. Dionne, Gloria Steinem, Bob Herbert, Lewis Lapham, Ellis Cose, Steve Forbes, William F. Buckley, Martin Peretz, Norman Podhoretz, Leon Wieseltier, Hendrik Hertzberg, Charles Krauthammer, Victor Navasky, or George F. Will ever wrote anything about Constant.
The Nation, shortly after Kerry's defeat in 2004, printed short essays from twenty-five famous and not-so-famous liberals and leftists on the topic of what went wrong in Kerry's campaign and what needs to be done next. Among the writers were intellectuals such as Eric Foner, Noam Chomsky, Michael Lind, Richard Rorty, Jonathan Kozol, and Medea Benjamin. None of them said anything about Constant. None of them pointed out the obvious fact that a television ad about this outrageous scandal would've helped Kerry pick up some votes. (See pages 11-27 of the Dec. 20, 2004, issue of the Nation.)
Look at David Halberstam, a millionaire author of bestsellers, a man so rich he was free to write about anything that interested him. He never said a word about the fact that the president had turned a mass murderer loose in America. He eventually wrote a book called War in a Time of Peace that actually discusses Clinton's policy toward Haiti in some detail. (See pages 267-273, 278-282, 324-325.) It even mentions Constant twice, on pages 270 and 271, but it doesn't say a single word about how he fled to the United States and was allowed to live in New York. Did Halberstam's journalistic instincts grow so dull in his old age that he did not recognize a shocking story when he saw one?
What can one say when one is confronted by such weird behavior? Are the journalists and pundits total idiots? Are they racists who think Haitians are pigs whose lives don't matter? Or do they sincerely believe that if a man works for the CIA for a few years, he deserves to get away with mass murder?
RETURN TO THE TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER 2: RALPH NADER DOESN'T REALLY CARE ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING, AND MOST SCIENTISTS DON'T EITHER
Some famous scientist, some Nobel Prize-winner, ought to run for president in 2012 or 2016 and sound the alarm about global warming. Unfortunately, I see no reason to believe this will happen. I believe global warming is the biggest problem facing the human race, and as near as I can tell, most scientists agree with that assessment. (For proof, see the special section on food production in the February 26, 2011 issue of The Economist magazine.) The question then is why scientists and logical people in general are doing so little about it. After atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard and other prominent scientists became alarmed by the possibility of civilization being destroyed by the new weapon, so they took action. They formed the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists and began to raise money for an advertising campaign to convince people that this was a serious problem, that something needed to be done, that atomic bombs were such a revolutionary new weapon that we were now living in a drastically different world where the old ideas about war and international politics no longer made sense. Einstein himself gave a speech on television in 1950, warning viewers that if current trends continued, “radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere and, hence, annihilation of all life on earth, will have been brought within the range of what is technically possible.” (See pages 724 and 737 of the book Albert Einstein by Albrecht Folsing, and see page 501 of the book Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson.) Similarly, in 1953, Einstein became concerned when nine Jewish doctors in the Soviet Union were put on trial, accused of plotting to murder Soviet leaders. He believed the evidence against them was paltry but feared they were being railroaded to the gallows, so he wrote an appeal for their release and signed it along with several other prominent scientists. (See page 526 of the book Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson.) (The doctors were eventually freed. Whether Einstein's actions contributed to that outcome is hard to say.) Similarly, Jane Goodall these days spends very little time in Africa studying chimps. Instead she spends three hundred days per year on the road, giving lectures, speeches, and interviews, meeting with politicians and philanthropists, doing everything she can think of to save chimps from extinction. (See National Geographic magazine, October 2010, page 129.) That's what you do when you really care about a subject. Look at Winston Churchill. As Hitler's power grew during the 1930s, Churchill constantly warned that civilization was in danger, that Britain had to start spending more on its military, that appeasing Hitler would lead to disaster. Though he was widely scorned, he never stopped sounding the alarm. In the global warming crisis, we see nothing like this happening. Obviously environmental groups and some obscure scientists talk about it, but the world's most prestigious scientists just sit there. You hardly hear a peep out of them, while the problem gets worse every day. The problem, of course, is that dealing with global warming would require asking people to make serious sacrifices, and in democratic countries, voters are reluctant to vote for sacrifices. Therefore, no politician wants to make realistic proposals to fight global warming, and so the public rarely hears any politician telling the truth about it. Because the politicians aren't talking about it, American journalists also rarely talk about it, because American journalists tend to think their job is to simply report what the politicians are saying, and to also do the occasional human-interest story. (If global warming caused a 2-year-old girl to fall down a well and get stuck, we would definitely hear about it. If you are too young to understand that joke, go to wikipedia and look up “Jessica McClure.”) The voters will surely not believe the truth about global warming if they never hear it. As near as I can tell, many Americans never hear about global warming, except when some politician denounces it as a hoax. (And it sure didn't help when the TV show South Park ran an episode in which one of the boys accidentally caused a flood in Beaverton, and a group of hysterical scientists jumped to the conclusion that the flood was caused by global warming.) A vicious circle sets in. People think that if global warming was really a major problem, the politicians would be talking about it a lot, when the truth is that the only reason why politicians aren't talking about it is because they think the voters will punish them if they do. It reminds one of how Franklin Roosevelt, before December 7, 1941, did not dare to call for the United States to declare war on Germany, even though he knew doing so was crucial for the defense of civilization, because he knew the majority of voters were against the idea. Consider this: jewelry is, of course, useless, and manufacturing it consumes a large amount of energy that makes global warming worse. Obama could use one of his Saturday radio addresses to advise people to stop buying jewelry. He could point out that nothing in the Bible says married people need to have wedding rings, and that a little ring made of polished wood or of some textile would do just as well. Can you imagine how furious jewelry store owners all over the country would be if he did that? So he will never do it. Theodore Roosevelt said the presidency was a “bully pulpit” (by which he meant a good position from which to preach to people) but that is clearly not true in the case of global warming. That is why some prestigious scientist, some Nobel Prize winner, ought to run for president in 2012 or 2016 and sound the alarm. He or she would lose, of course, but presidential campaigns are when the voters pay the most attention to issues, so if one wants to raise public awareness of a problem, running for president is the best way to do it. Of course, we don't want to hurt Mr. Obama's chances of re-election in November 2012, so a scientist who ran as an independent candidate in 2012 should try to get on the ballot only in states where the election is not going to be close. It would be good for the people of Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, South Carolina, Utah, and other such places to have a truth squad visit them and tell them about global warming, or hear ads about it on the radio now and then. One has to wonder why no scientist, nor even any logical person, did this in 1996, or 2000, or 2004, or 2008. What can explain it except apathy? And don't try to argue that Ralph Nader was doing it in some of those years. Look at Crashing the Party, the book Nader wrote about his 2000 campaign. He makes some perfunctory statements about global warming, but it clearly is not his main concern, nor even close to being his main concern. In fact, during the 2000 campaign he gave a major speech in which he listed his three main concerns, and no environmental problems made the list. (Prominent journalist Jonathan Chait mentioned this in a statement in the “Correspondence” section of the August 21, 2000 issue of New Republic magazine.) When Nader was interviewed on the PBS News Hour show on June 30, 2000, that may well have been the largest TV audience he had all year, but he didn't say one single word about global warming. Wouldn't he have talked about it there if he had really cared about it? In 2004, it was the same story. He was interviewed on the PBS News Hour on February 23, 2004, and said nothing about global warming, though near the end of the interview he said he favored “renewable energy.” In 2008, he ran for president again, and was interviewed on the PBS News Hour on October 14, 2008, and again he said nothing about global warming. Nader likes to say he is telling the truth to the American people when he is running for president. That is a lie. Telling the truth would entail telling Americans that fighting global warming is essential, and that it will require significant sacrifices by just about every American. Nader is no more willing to say that than George W. Bush was. Nader also admitted in Crashing the Party, on page 164, that a New York Times reporter advised him in 2000 that he would get more attention from the media if he set up some debates with Patrick Buchanan, a conservative who was also running for president as a third-party candidate. Such debates surely would've attracted some attention from the public and would've given Nader an opportunity to talk about global warming. Who knows, maybe some PBS stations would have even carried the debates live. Maybe some cable channels would've too. So why didn't Nader do it? Nowhere in the book does he explain that. Is he such a coward that he was afraid he would lose a debate with Buchanan? (I suspect the answer to that question is yes. Buchanan is a top-notch public speaker, and I suspect Nader was afraid Buchanan would clean his clock in a debate.) In 2002, when it was obvious that George W. Bush wasn't going to do anything about global warming, why didn't the Nobel Prize-winning scientists of the United States sign a petition stating the blunt truth, that global warming was a crisis, and that Bush was ignoring it out of contempt for the human race and love for money? And yes, that kind of blunt language is exactly what is necessary. Saying polite things such as “we urge President Bush to take steps to deal with this problem” will never wake up the American people. To wake up the American people and make them see the urgency of this issue, you must scream as though you are tied to a railroad track and you can see the train coming. You must say things such as “George W. Bush is a disgusting piece of garbage who doesn't care who gets killed as long as he gets his money.” That is nothing but the plain truth. If just one Nobel Prize winner said that, of course, he or she would be dismissed as a crackpot, but if dozens of them did it, at least some people in America would surely be shocked into seeing what's going on. What do we see instead from the scientific world? Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, wrote a book called Lake Views: This World and the Universe, that was published in 2010. It sold poorly. The New York Times Book Review considered it so trivial that it didn't even bother to review it, and most of the other intellectual and political magazines also ignored it. The major newspapers in the United States and Great Britain did too, as near as I can tell from examining the Proquest Newspaper database on the Internet. If Weinberg cared about global warming, he would've written a book called Global Warming Will Kill Millions and the Republicans Couldn't Care Less, or something like that. A book with a title like that surely would've attracted a lot more attention than Lake Views did, would've sold better, and might've actually accomplished something useful in this world. But apparently Weinberg wasn't interested in those things. In Lake Views, he mentions global warming only once, in passing. (Weinberg writes at some length in Lake Views about the problem of nuclear weapons. That, obviously, is a serious problem, but if you want to write a book to wake up the public about the danger of nuclear weapons, why give the book such a boring title? It sounds like the name of a real estate catalog.) Look at Murray Gell-Mann, another Nobel prize-winner in physics and one of the mostly highly esteemed scientists in the United States today. I checked the Proquest newspaper database on the Internet and found no evidence that he has gotten involved in the global warming issue in any way. The same is true for Neil DeGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist who has become semi-famous as the host of a science show on PBS. Tyson has written some books, but he sure never wrote one with a title like Global Warming Will Kill Millions and the Republicans Couldn't Care Less. Look at Stephen Hawking. He's probably the most famous scientist alive on Earth today. (Not the best, necessarily, but certainly the most famous.) In 2010, he and his friend Leonard Mlodinow produced a book called The Grand Design, about quantum mechanics and the origin of the universe. There is not one word in it about global warming. Why doesn't Hawking write a book about the most important problem that the human race is facing? Why doesn't he tell the truth about the damage being done by the jewelry industry and announce that he's starting a movement to get people to vow to not buy wedding rings or other jewelry? Why doesn't he talk about the horrendous amounts of fuel burned by travelers and tell people it is evil to travel all the way to Italy just to look at the art, or all the way to the United States just to go on vacation? Why doesn't he say we need a big increase in the gasoline tax to induce people to burn less carbon? If some obscure environmentalist did that, the press wouldn't care, but if the world's most famous scientist did it, the press would sit up and take notice. Look at Edward O. Wilson, the famous Harvard biologist, author of several books and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In 2006, he published a short book called The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth. In it, he laments that many species have become extinct in the last few decades, and says in the next several decades, if we don't change our ways, we will lose many more. He talks about global warming a bit, but not very much. He doesn't denounce the Bush administration, nor any of the businesspeople who are doing so much to ruin the planet. He doesn't name any politicians whom we should vote for or against. He doesn't urge us to change our lifestyles to burn less carbon. He certainly doesn't advocate an increase in the gasoline tax. All in all, he says very little about what needs to be done. On pages 98-99 he says we could do a lot to protect endangered species with just a few billion dollars per year, but he doesn't say how exactly he would go about it. Obviously, this kind of vague talk is far from being a rousing call to arms. Wilson was 71 years old in 2000, which is not too old to do a little campaigning. Why didn't he run for president in a few Democratic primaries and talk about the danger of global warming? Why couldn't he see that that is what you have to do to get the press to pay attention? Look at Richard Dawkins, bestselling author and one of the most famous scientists in the English-speaking world. What has he done about global warming? Little or nothing. I checked the Proquest Newspaper database, which includes many British newspapers, and I couldn't find any evidence that Dawkins has gotten involved in the global warming issue in any way. In 2009 he authored a 445-page book called The Greatest Show on Earth, about evolution. The book is a long discussion of animal anatomy, and, therefore, is of little interest to normal people or even to most well-educated people. It is full of talk about the polydactylic horse, the pill woodlouse, the Taung Child, the similarities between hippos and whales, and other such matters. Why can't Dawkins see that writing about global warming would be far more important than grinding out yet another tome about evolution? At least he could've ended the book with a chapter about the problems global warming will create for endangered species, but he didn't even do that much. Every public library in the United States, except maybe in the smallest towns, already has plenty of books about evolution. Dawkins himself has written a few. His arch-enemy Stephen Jay Gould cranked out plenty of them too. Nowhere in the book was Dawkins able to persuasively explain why another book about evolution was needed. So why did he write it when there are so many more important things that need to be done? One gets the feeling he is obsessed with the subject, the same way Van Gogh was obsessed with painting, the same way Bill Gates is obsessed with making money, the same way some 12-year-old girls are obsessed with Justin Bieber. It's as if Dawkins is in a sinking ship, and instead of doing something to help keep the darn thing afloat, he's in the kitchen, trying to invent the perfect gazpacho. Look at page 14 of the April 2011 issue of Scientific American magazine. You will see an opinion piece by Lawrence Krauss, a physicist who is the director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University. Krauss says we should spend billions of dollars to send astronauts to Mars, even though he admits there is “almost no scientific justification” for doing so. But it would be an adventure, he says, and adventure is good. He also claims that if the human race is to survive, “our future will probably require outposts beyond our planet,” but he never explains what evidence makes him think that. It seems to me that if we want to survive, the first thing we need to do is take the money that people such as him wish to squander on Mars and spend it on saving our home planet instead. Look at Carl Sagan. He died in 1996, of course, but it was already known back then, by anyone who was paying attention, that global warming was a serious problem. I remember Al Gore making an issue of it when he ran for president in 1988, and Sagan himself talked a little about it now and then. So why didn't Sagan write a book to sound the alarm? Instead, in the 1988 to 1996 time period, his big projects included a book about animal behavior called Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, a book about space exploration called Pale Blue Dot, and a book called The Demon-Haunted World in which he rants about just about everything in the world that annoys him, although he barely mentions global warming. Mother Earth is on her death bed, and Sagan is writing about animal behavior and trips to Mars. How could he have been stupid enough to think that was a good use of his time? (During the 1988 to 1996 time period, he also wrote, with a friend, a book about nuclear disarmament called A Path Where No Man Thought. That, obviously, is an important subject, but Sagan made no interesting new proposals, nor did he explain what provisions a fair treaty between China, the United States and the Soviet Union should have, nor did he explain how much verification would be necessary. If his goal was to present the material in a fresh way that would grab the interest of the average American, he failed. The book sold poorly (see page 386 of the book Carl Sagan: A Life by Keay Davidson), the New York Times Book Review gave it a ho-hum review, and the liberal magazines, except for The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, refused to review it. Why devote space in your magazine to reviewing a book that merely re-hashes commonplace ideas?) Of course, a guy as famous as Sagan could've also attracted a lot of attention to global warming just by going on a lecture tour, but he didn't do that either. St. Paul wandered around the Mediterranean for years, talking to anyone who would listen to him, to spread the Gospel, because he thought that was important. Neither shipwrecks, nor floggings, nor years of absence from his friends and family deterred him. Why wasn't Sagan a little bit like that? You will be amazed if you look at page 136 of the book Conversations with Carl Sagan, edited by Tom Head. That page is part of a transcript in which Sagan is being interviewed by Ira Flatow of National Public Radio in 1996. Flatow asks why there are so few scientists who are also “social and political activists.” He mentions Linus Pauling and Paul Ehrlich as examples. This would've been a perfect opportunity for Sagan to say that the public needs to wake up and pay attention to the global warming problem, but instead, Sagan hems and haws a bit, and then says Pauling and Ehrlich were talking about “critical issues of public health and life and death,” and so they received lots of attention from journalists. He implies that no such issues exist anymore. In the entire interview, he mentions global warming only once, in passing. He talks more about UFOs than about global warming. You will be even more amazed if you look at pages 326-327 of Sagan's book The Demon-Haunted World, where he complains that American public schools spend too much time teaching students about energy conservation. Was Sagan really so dimwitted that he didn't understand that if you want to fight global warming, teaching people about energy conservation is essential? Even Al Gore himself has been negligent. He produced a documentary about global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, and that was a fine thing to do, but it isn't enough. If you want to win the battle of public opinion these days, it isn't enough to tell the truth in one movie. You have to do it repeatedly, and you also have to bash the liars. What I said above scientists applies equally to Gore: in 2002, when it became clear that George W. Bush wasn't going to do anything to fight global warming, why didn't Gore publicly challenge the Bush administration to have someone debate him on the issue? If Bush refused to have any of his people do it, Gore could've called Bush a coward who was afraid to address a crucial issue. (That would've hurt Bush's popularity, because there is nothing blue-collar American men hate more than a coward.) So why didn't Gore do this? Did it never occur to him that a debate might get the attention of the American people? Was he worried that calling Bush a coward would've been impolite? Is he the kind of guy who thinks it is more important to be polite than to save the world? Gore also could've written a book called George W. Bush Loves Money and Hates the Human Race. Of course, morons in the press corps, such as David Broder, would've whined that a title like that shows a lack of civility, but those morons deserve nothing but contempt. Such people never understand that politeness is not the most important thing in the world, that sometimes the blunt truth must be told. And of course, Gore could've run for president in 2004 and 2008 as the candidate who wants to fight global warming. He could've, for example, advocated a big increase in the gasoline tax. Surely he would not have won the nomination in either year, but at least he could've participated in all the debates and attracted some attention to the biggest problem facing the human race today. It is amazing to see that Gore wrote a book called The Assault on Reason, published in 2007, in which, among other things, he complains about the lies spread by Rush Limbaugh and other conservative propagandists. If the lies of Limbaugh really are such a terrible problem, why didn't Gore challenge Limbaugh to a debate? If Limbaugh really is wrong about everything, why not debate him on TV and expose that fact to the whole world? Surely one of the cable channels would've been willing to broadcast a debate between two such famous people. And if Limbaugh refused to debate, Gore could've called him a coward a hundred times a day and thereby reduced his popularity. He could've traveled around the country giving lectures on global warming and calling Limbaugh a coward in each lecture. He could've financed the lecture tour by passing the hat at each lecture. If he couldn't afford living in hotels, surely every college campus in America has professors who would've been glad to let Al Gore spend the night in their homes. (At least, they would've before Gore's wife divorced him and a massage therapist accused him of nasty behavior.) It's not like Gore needs to earn a living. He inherited a lot of money and he has a vice-presidential pension too. But apparently Gore never thought of traveling around the country and sounding the alarm, and no other famous liberal did either. Or did they think of it, but decide not to do it out of laziness, or out of fear that they would lose a debate with Limbaugh if he accepted the challenge? A long list of people can be blamed for not trying hard enough to raise public awareness of global warming. Gary Hart could've run for president in 2004 and, a hundred times a day, called Bush a disgusting piece of garbage who doesn't care if global warming causes floods and droughts that kill millions. Didn't he enjoy the thought the getting out there and telling the truth? I know politicians have to compromise and be diplomatic, but has a lifetime of doing this so severely warped Hart's soul that he no longer even feels the desire to be honest? The same goes for Walter Mondale, Bill Moyers, Michael Dukakis, Ted Kennedy, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Jimmy Carter, Amy Carter, Geraldine Ferraro, Jesse Jackson, Hubert Humphrey III, Joseph Lieberman, Maxine Waters, Mario Cuomo, Andrew Cuomo, Andrew Young, Rosie O'Donnell, Meryl Steep, Matt Groening, Jerry Brown, Dick Gephardt, Bill Moyers, Douglas Brinkley, David Halberstam, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Alan Alda, Paul Simon, and Art Garfunkel. All of those people are famous enough to attract the attention of the media. If a moderately successful actor named Reagan can become president, then there is nothing odd about the thought of Matt Groening or Alan Alda starting a campaign to fight global warming. Look at people like Madonna, Stephen King, Oprah Winfrey, Jerry Seinfeld, and Bill Gates. They sure don't have to worry about earning a living. They could work full time on this, if they wanted to. Thousands of science professors all over the country could sign a petition saying, “We are willing to take a ten percent pay cut if the money is used to subsidized clean energy instead.” Maybe then the jerks who claim global warming is a hoax concocted by scientists just so they can get funding to study a non-existent problem would have to eat their words. But as near as I can tell, scientists aren't willing to make that kind of sacrifice. That seems to be the motto of America today: “I refuse to make any sacrifices. Make other people do it.” Maybe we should translate that into Latin and put it on the twenty-dollar bill. Arnold Toynbee, the famous historian, said civilizations survive because they respond effectively to crises, but when they stop responding, they collapse. One has to wonder if we have reached that moment. Global warming is a monster looming on the horizon, but nobody seems to want to respond. Everybody seems to think that somebody else should do it. Aside from Gore, the only people who really seem to care are obscure, and they phrase their concerns in the kind of polite language that is guaranteed to bore the public. By the same token, one wonders why European leaders didn't do it. Nothing was stopping some European leader, during a photo opportunity with Bush at a NATO summit or G-8 summit, from sticking a finger in Bush's face and saying, while the journalists stood there gasping, “That man is a disgusting piece of filth! Global warming will kill millions and he doesn't care!” You can bet your life that that would've been a big news story. What would Bush have done to punish a European leader who did that? Nothing. What could he do? Cut off foreign aid to that leader's country? Few countries in Europe get any foreign aid from the United States. Cut off trade? That would've hurt the American economy too, and it would've made Bush look petty and hurt his popularity in the United States. I once called a radio talk show and asked a foreign policy expert what Bush did to punish France for refusing to help with the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The expert laughed and said, “Nothing!” He explained that there was nothing the United States could've done to hurt France that wouldn't have hurt the United States too, so the Bush administration's talk about punishing France had never been anything but empty bluster. So why didn't the European leaders get tough with Bush about global warming? Probably because, while they pay lip service to it, they really don't care about it any more than Bush does. But somebody better start doing something soon. The laws of physics cannot be changed by wishful thinking. If you want to get involved, one way to start is by going to one of these websites: www.350.org, www.nrdc.org, www.edf.org. RETURN TO THE TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 3: WILLIAM J. BENNETT'S LIES ABOUT THE LEWINSKY SCANDAL William J. Bennett, former secretary of education for President Reagan, former “drug czar” for President George H.W. Bush, and editor of The Book of Virtues, which spent fifty-seven weeks on the Publishers Weekly hardcover nonfiction bestseller list (see the list on page 88 in the July 17, 1995 issue of Publishers Weekly) wrote a book in 1998 about President Clinton called The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals. It was published after the first allegations in the Lewinsky scandal became public, but a few months before the House of Representatives voted to impeach Clinton. It spent ten weeks on the Publishers Weekly hardcover nonfiction bestsellers list. (See the list on page 88 of the November 16, 1998 issue of Publishers Weekly.) Even today, it is worthwhile to take a look at this book, because, unfortunately, Clinton's impeachment crisis will probably not be the last one in American history. A. WHERE DO WE DRAW THE LINE? Anyone who thinks about the Lewinsky scandal soon realizes that it boils down to a question of what behavior is bad enough to warrant impeachment. Surely we do not impeach the president for catching more fish than he is legally allowed, as Eisenhower did, even though that does seem like a sleazy thing to do and probably would reduce the public's respect for the president. (See page 27 of Stephen E. Ambrose's book, Eisenhower: The President.) Neither do we impeach the president for riding a motorcycle without a helmet, or having a few parking tickets. And surely we impeach a president for taking bribes, or for ordering his henchmen to burglarize somebody's office. So how do we draw the line? We look into our hearts and use our gut instincts, and we accept the fact that we cannot objectively prove that we are right. It is, in the end, just a matter of opinion. But Bennett does not think that way. On page 29 of The Death of Outrage, he gives his answer: do not draw the line. Every single illegal act is sufficient grounds for impeachment. In the entire book he never admits that any illegal act is too trivial. The only other place in the book where he even mentions the issue is page 109, where he criticizes people who think “criminal conduct, in some circumstances, is excusable” in a president. Let me give an example. Suppose a president likes to play poker for money with his buddies, and sometimes does so in states where it is illegal. Suppose the president is rich and his friends are too, so they play for high stakes. Would Bennett want a president impeached for this? If not, why not? Surely the anti-gambling laws are not a joke. But Harry Truman frequently played poker for money with his friends when he was president, and I have never heard anyone say that was a serious enough problem to warrant impeachment. (See page 335 of Robert J. Donovan's book, Tumultuous Years: The Presidency of Harry S Truman, 1949-1953.) Bennett himself praises Truman on page 131 of the book, calling him “decent and trustworthy.” Imagine this: a president and his adult daughter are at a fundraiser, shaking hands with people, when someone slaps the daughter’s face and shouts some vile obscenities at her. Secret Service agents hustle the guy away, but the president runs over, shouts “You sonuvabitch!” and punches him in the face, breaking his nose. The president has just committed a felony. You are not allowed to punch someone just because he is rude to your daughter, especially when the Secret Service already has the guy under arrest. But no normal American would want the president impeached for this. Something like that actually happened once. Someone spat in the face of Vice President Richard Nixon while he was visiting Peru. After some law enforcement officers grabbed the guy and had him under control, Nixon kicked the guy in the shin. (See page 469 of Stephen E. Ambrose's book, Nixon: The Education of a Politician, 1913-1962.) Nobody in the United States said that warranted impeachment. Some people might say Nixon was provoked in Peru. Well, was Clinton not provoked too? Is it surprising that he was angry at Paula Jones for telling lies about him? B. WERE CLINTON'S MISDEEDS TRIVIAL? Clinton’s misbehavior was trivial because Paula Jones’s lawsuit was bogus. This is proven by the fact that the judge in the Paula Jones case, a Republican appointed by George H.W. Bush, eventually dismissed the lawsuit because even if everything Jones said was true, there was no credible evidence Jones had been harmed by Clinton in any way. (See Richard L. Berke's article, “Capitol Hill is Quiet, but Outside Washington, Conservatives Express Outrage,” New York Times, April 2, 1998, page A17, and see Francis X. Clines's article, “Paula Jones Case is Dismissed; Judge Says Even if Tale is True, Incident was not Harassment,” New York Times, April 2, 1998, pages A1 and A16.) There was no evidence that Jones was punished at work for rejecting Clinton’s alleged advances, nor that the alleged incident had been significantly stressful to Jones, nor that she had filed a complaint about Clinton’s alleged behavior with her supervisor, and what she described did not meet the definition of a hostile work environment nor the definition of intentional infliction of emotional distress. We must remember that state trooper Danny Ferguson, whose description of the alleged incident in American Spectator magazine started the controversy, said Jones was not the least bit upset when she emerged from Clinton’s hotel room. Ferguson even testified that Jones said she would be glad to be Clinton’s “regular girlfriend.” (See page 6 of Michael Isikoff's book, Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter’s Story.) Further casting doubt on Jones’s integrity is the fact that she said she sued Clinton because that article made her look like a slut. (See pages 5 and 6 of Isikoff's book.) That is a strange reason, because the lawsuit attracted far more attention to her than the article did. American Spectator did not have a large number of readers. It was an obscure political magazine, and the article did not even mention Jones’s last name. (See page 6 of Isikoff's book.) Naturally, one suspects her real reason for filing the lawsuit was the simple desire to grab some money. That would explain why she didn't sue him when he was the relatively low-paid governor of Arkansas. If she had done that, he probably would've never become president, but she waited until he had more money. Here is the first rule of every plaintiff's attorney: never sue poor people. Also, one must remember that when Jones first made her accusations, she said nothing about Clinton exposing his penis to her. (See pages 6 and 7 of Isikoff's book.) Later, she came up with that detail. Why did she not mention it right away? One suspects she fabricated that datum because she eventually decided she needed to make her story more lurid. The thought of making a lot of money from a lawsuit probably seemed very tempting to Jones. In fact, her sister, Charlotte Brown, has said Jones told her, “There could be big money in this story,” weeks before she filed the lawsuit. (See page 44 of Isikoff's book.) Let me also point out that Bennett never said in this book, nor anywhere else as far as I can tell, that he believes Jones. (If he did, people would ask why he believes her when he did not believe Anita Hill, and of course, he would be unable to come up with a logical answer.) If Jones’s lawsuit was phony, it is not surprising that Clinton thought her lawyers did not deserve honest answers to their questions. One must also remember that Clinton, in the impeachment trial, was accused of two crimes: perjury and obstruction of justice. Prominent law professor Jeffrey Rosen wrote a long article in the February 8, 1999, issue of New Republic magazine in which he analyzed all the legal angles and concluded that Clinton did not commit those crimes. Lying under oath is not a crime if you are lying about things that aren't relevant to the case in which you are involved, and that seems to have been the case in Paula Jones's lawsuit. Were Clinton's shenanigans with Lewinsky relevant to the question of whether or not Clinton sexually harassed Paula Jones? Of course not. Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones were two separate people, and Clinton's activities with them constitute two separate stories that occurred years apart and have no relationship to each other. As for obstruction of justice, Rosen points out that under federal law, it isn't a crime to ask a friend to lie for you, purely out of friendship, and that, at worst, is what Clinton did. If Clinton had bribed people to lie for him, or threatened them with dire consequences if they did not, that would've been illegal, but there is no good reason to believe he did that. C. WERE CLINTON'S LIES WORSE THAN REAGAN'S OR BUSH'S?Download this book for your ebook reader.
(Pages 1-25 show above.)