In it I criticize this editorial for getting some facts very wrong regarding the UN's Human Rights Council report (the UPR or "Universal Periodic Review") and for not disclosing the tightly wound financial connections that exist between the Tribune-Review's owner, Richard Mellon Scaife and the Heritage Foundation, the think tank the editorial was using for its "information".
Guess what? The circle is complete, old man.
Today there's an op-ed by Ed Feulner, president of that same Heritage Foundation (it's his weekly column, by the way), that gets the same facts wrong and still fails to disclose the tens of millions of dollars in support that the various Scaife foundations have given to Heritage.
But this is nothing new.
But there is something that needs to be said about Feulner's column. The sloppy filler. Take a look at the two paragraphs it quotes from the UPR:
A recent Arizona law, S.B. 1070, has generated significant attention and debate at home and around the world. The issue is being addressed in a court action that argues that the federal government has the authority to set and enforce immigration law. That action is ongoing; parts of the law are currently enjoined.Looking at them, you'd think they were somehow connected.
President Obama remains firmly committed to fixing our broken immigration system, because he recognizes that our ability to innovate, our ties to the world, and our economic prosperity depend on our capacity to welcome and assimilate immigrants. The Administration will continue its efforts to work with the U.S. Congress and affected communities toward this end.
You'd be wrong.
Take a look at the report. The two paragraphs are found in a section titled:
V.2 Values and Immigrationand are two of five separate numbered paragraphs within that section. The second paragraph is not a commentary on the first - it's just filler.
So the column's a rehash of parts of editorials already published in the Tribune-Review. And it's not even well researched or written.
You'd think for $24 million, Richard Mellon Scaife would get better homework from Ed Feulner.
The circle-jerk continues.
Actually, the layout of the op-ed piece is fairly interesting. Mr Feulner is trying to distort the US submission to the HRC, by not indicating (as you say) that his two paragraphs are parts four and five (or 95 and 96) of a larger section, and indeed the second paragraph is a summation of a subsection.
ReplyDeleteBut Feulner suggests the paragraph concerning Arizona is slanted and very insulting, and that the combination of the two paragraphs is doubly so. Personally I don't see it, the two paragraphs strike me as a bland and cautious recitation of fact and mild intent.
Feulner goes on to to complain that China and Cube are allowed to claim their societies are free, while the US is confessing sins he thinks we have not committed to the rest of the world. But that's the whole point, isn't it? The US continually holds itself up as a superior example of freedom and democracy to the rest of the world. Yet we were born a slave-holding nation, we dragged our feet on granting women the vote, and we have had very public battles and continuing problems with racial, gender and sexual choice discrimination.
If we want to be able to criticize other countries about their records on human rights and democracy, we need to come clean on our own record to have any legitimacy. We have certainly never done anything like genocide, but enslaving a whole race in the past, currently having that racial group disproportionately suffer economically and continuing to discriminate against gays in the military? It is not a beam, but it is maybe a bit more than a mote in our (collective) eye, one we should acknowledge before commenting on the ocular status of other countries.