The Opinionator

June 29, 2007, 4:47 pm
Let’s Play the Blame Game
By Chris Suellentrop
Tags: worth a click

Don’t like Bush? Blame Reagan. It’s 40’s fault that 41 and 43 became presidents, says Michael Barone on his U.S. News blog. Barone writes:

The way we pick vice presidents is crazy. We spend lots of time and money and psychic energy on picking our presidents, with millions of people in one way or the other involved. But we let one man (or, quite possibly this time, one woman) select the vice presidential nominee. And this is considered by just about everyone as the way it should be. Yet, as [Times of London columnist Gerard] Baker points out, vice presidents have a tremendous advantage when it comes to running for president. So the decision of Ronald Reagan at something like 3 in the morning in a Detroit hotel room to pick George H.W. Bush as his running mate leads directly to Bush’s election as president in 1988 and his son’s election as president in 2000 and 2004. Had Reagan picked someone else, it is extremely unlikely that either Bush would have been president.”

Don’t like Alberto Gonzales? Blame Cheney — and more important, “Cheney’s Cheney,” David Addington. The Washington Post recently reported that Addington was the real author of a memo that Gonzales signed and that called the Geneva Conventions “quaint.”

Laura Rozen writes at her blog, War and Piece: “Without any apparent opinion or conviction on these matters that out of some circumstance ended up in his inbox, Gonzales lightly signed off on these grave issues of killing, torture and subverting the Constitution, perhaps out of no greater motivation than to please his bosses and advance his career.”

As a closed platform, the iPhone is antithetical to the nature of the Internet and personal computing, writes Columbia law professor Tim Wu in Slate:

Unlike your Macintosh computer, which can run whatever software developers write for it, the iPhone will, in native mode, run only whatever Apple (and AT&T) approve of. While there are some technical and security reasons to do things this way, there’s an ideological point here, too. The closed iPhone stands in contrast to the open-platform design that has been the bedrock of both the personal computer and Internet revolutions. By design, the iPhone embodies the opposite of what made the Apple II so successful.

----

June 29, 2007, 9:31 am
Fear of a ‘Non-White’ School District
By Chris Suellentrop
Tags: Race, Supreme Court

Writing on his blog, Is That Legal?, North Carolina law professor Eric Muller explains why he thinks Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s concurrence in the Supreme Court decision about the Seattle and Louisville school systems isn’t as impenetrable as some find it. Kennedy wrote that Seattle “failed to explain why, in a district composed of a diversity of races, with fewer than half of the students categorized as ‘white,’ it has employed the crude categories of ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ as the basis for its assignment decisions.”

“Under Seattle’s plan, a school that was 40 percent white and 60 percent Asian would be just as ‘diverse’ as a school that was 40 percent white and 60 percent African-American. That’s nonsense,” Muller writes. “It appears that what Seattle was really after was not ‘diversity,’ but ensuring that no school would be excessively non-white.” Muller also writes:

A very significant percentage of the enrollment in Seattle’s high schools is neither white nor black. (Think about it: Seattle is a major city on the Pacific Rim; lots of folks in the Seattle schools are of Asian ancestry.) So it is very hard for me to take seriously the claim that the Seattle school district was seeking to achieve genuine “diversity” by making school assignment decisions with a “white/non-white” system of categorizing students.

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne isn’t so sanguine about the decision. Dionne wants the Democratic majority in the Senate to block any future judicial nominees — for the Supreme Court or for lower courts — unless President Bush engages in “serious consultation” with the Senate. Dionne writes:

And if conservatives claim to believe the president is owed deference on his court appointees, they will be — I choose this word deliberately — lying. In 2005 conservatives had no problem blocking Bush’s appointment of Harriet Miers because they could not count on her to be a strong voice for their legal causes. They revealed that their view of judicial battles is not about principle but power. When they went after Miers, conservatives lost the deference argument.