Judy Bachrach: O Contraire

What exactly, we all have a right to ask, is the NAACP fighting for? The organization was founded in 1909 after a race riot in Springfield, Illinois. By 1954, its special counsel, the young and skillful Thurgood Marshall, had won the country’s most impressive legal victory with Brown v. Board of Education: a Supreme Court decision that gave African-American children the right to enter segregated schools of the lighter-skinned and more privileged.

Now, more than half a century later, it has a lot less to show both its members and the nation it long ago helped reform and improve.  Obviously there was a time when the organization had its uses. But we now live in a country led by the once unimaginable: an African-American president. There are currently 42 African-Americans in Congress. As the New York Times recently reported, there are at least 32 African-Americans running for Congress as Republicans — the largest number since Reconstruction.

And what is the NAACP doing these days? Well, among its ranks (among its speakers, in fact) is one Shirley Sherrod — yes, the very Department of Agriculture official the organization’s president, Ben Jealous, promptly threw to the wolves the moment some amoral blogger edited Sherrod’s words out of context so as to make her appear racist. Where had Sherrod delivered her speech? That is correct: before guests at an NAACP banquet. When had she spoken? Just four months ago.

How hard do you think it would have been for anyone at the NAACP to do due diligence and actually review a tape of Sherrod’s speech before releasing the statement in which Jealous declared, “According to her remarks, she mistreated a white farmer in need of assistance because of his race. … Her actions were shameful.”  How much digging do you think anyone at the organization had to do before announcing: “We concur with US Agriculture Secretary Vilsack in accepting the resignation of Shirley Sherrod”?

And how smart was it of Jealous, once he actually bothered to view the tape of her speech, to declare himself “snookered by Fox News and Tea Party Activist Andrew Beitbart”? Or to suggest that thanks to his dumb remarks, “activists and journalists” were experiencing “a teachable moment.” Activist leaders are supposed to deliver teachable moments, not absorb them in prime time, or, as embarrassing, blame them on journalists. Getting snookered is for schlubs who respond to e-mails promising millions in return for sums mailed to a post office box in Lagos. It’s for the doddering, delusional, and demented. An organization that promotes the rights of minorities cannot — should not — pronounce itself mentally challenged and, of all things, out-Foxed.

So all in all maybe it’s time for the NAACP to disband. There are 38 million African-Americans in the United States, and fewer than 300,000 are NAACP members: clearly demonstrating a growing distance between leaders and possible constituents. I’m not suggesting every last minority issue has dissolved. Far from it. The median income of African-American citizens is still the lowest of all in this country — 40 percent less than that of the general population — and that disparity needs to be redressed.

But is the NAACP the right organization to do the redressing? It fought some old battles, and fought them well. Now that it declares itself too feeble-minded to fight the ditzy drinkers at the Tea Party, it may be time to switch warriors and pick its battles. Different battles for different times.

I’ve been seriously remiss, not having caught up with Bristol Palin in months and months, until her (second, unengraved) wedding announcement arrived via Us Weekly. What struck me most forcefully — although possibly not the rest of America — was that she said she wanted to get married in a Carolina Herrera wedding gown: a vibrantly traditionalist choice, perhaps not wholly in keeping with the rest of her character.

A few backtracks settled that mystery, however: not one month ago, with her mother’s blessing, Bristol appeared alongside her sister Willow in a Harper’s Bazaar photo shoot. The two were standing in the family kitchen, Bristol in a crimson off-the-shoulder Herrera full-length gown, the perfect attire for baking chocolate chip cookies or, as a subsequent photo revealed, wading ankle-deep in frigid water (“Willow helps her sister in the kitchen: Carolina Herrera dresses; Bristol at Anchorage’s Cook Inlet: Carolina Herrera shrug, $6995”). I’m not saying a heavily discounted designer dress is enough to make anyone want to marry Levi Johnston, but obviously it’s a start.

During the course of those fashion spreads, which, given the lengthy lead time of glossy journalism, probably took place three months ago, a delighted Sarah Palin was heard trilling a plea to the interviewer to eat the baked goods. Meanwhile, the daughter of the wannabe president had this to say about the father of her baby: “He’s a stranger to me. I don’t want to get into it. It’s just dirty laundry.”

But oh what a difference a single romantic text message makes. Cleansed is the laundry. Vanished are Bristol’s grudges about Levi’s intemperate remarks concerning his future in-laws. Gone is her hurt over her fiancé’s desire to hook up with other girls. Did he tell Vanity Fair that Sarah couldn’t shoot straight? That her outdoorsy image is just a calculated electioneering stunt and he’s “never even seen her touch a fishing pole”?

No matter. What really freaks out this teenager, and this is evident in both her actions — quick! make the wedding announcement a done deal — and words, is Sarah Palin herself. “It’s intimidating and scary just to think about what her reaction is going to be,” she told a reporter.

In other words, she’s so terrified of her own mother she’d rather reveal her wedding to the world. So fearful and discomfited that she is planning to flee the parental home at age 19 in order to fall into the embrace of … a Playgirl centerfold.

Now obviously, Mrs. Grizzly has cornered the market on honey. The proven ability, as the past year has shown, to rake in $2.1 million in fundraising (second only to Mitt Romney) for starters. Her adventurous endorsements of certain women candidates: California’s Carly Fiorina, who is running for the Senate; the gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley, who, despite some early setbacks and charges of adultery, won the South Carolina primary; and Georgia’s would-be governor, Karen Handel. All of these ambitious women owe a lot to Sarah: votes, great publicity, exciting prospects.

But one can’t help wondering. How, exactly, has Sarah benefited her own daughter? Reinforced the teen’s self-esteem? Bolstered her prospects?

Soon, too soon, we’re more than likely going to be asked to vote for a pro-lifer whose own daughter finds her daunting and “scary.” There’s definitely something about Sarah. And it’s peculiar. It is relative strangers who love her. She is at her best when seen from a distance.

It speaks volumes that reports of the latest failed attempt to bring the rapist and sodomizer Roman Polanski to justice found their way this week into the Style section of the Washington Post (page 3). In other words, the news that a famous director remains at large despite his crimes wasn’t quite serious enough to make it to the actual … news sections. More in the gossip line of spicy tidbits, like the personal problems of, say, Lindsay Lohan, who drinks too much. Or Alec Baldwin’s big bad mouth.

But Polanski, unlike Lohan (who never raped anyone), is not about to go to jail. Swiss officials, who refused this week to extradite him to Los Angeles, scene of the long-ago crime, made certain of that. Gone is the inelegant ankle bracelet that was supposed to track the director’s every move. Finished is Polanski’s chalet-arrest. France, Polanski’s delightful haven and enabler, will welcome him back.

The pretext of Swiss justice officials for this remarkable decision? They didn’t have enough information on what transpired between the director and a 13-year-old more than three decades ago; and they weren’t given the full details about what occurred subsequently. The Swiss justice minister, the unfortunately named Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, decided the extradition warrant was meager in its details: how, she wondered, was she to determine the merits of the case?

By reading the same documents available to the rest of the universe, perhaps?

Years and years ago, before Widmer-Schlumpf climbed to the top of the Swiss justice system, Polanski talked frankly and openly to LA probation officers about exactly what he had done at the home of the actor Jack Nicholson after he drugged a young girl who was modeling for him. Sex with the child, he said blandly, “was very spontaneous.” In a court hearing, he admitted knowing the actual age of his victim at the time of the rape. In 1978 — right before sentencing and the prospect of doing time instead of little girls — he fled the country. He had been sentenced to a total of 90 days, by the way, the same amount as Lohan for failing to attend her alcohol rehab sessions.

In France, a nation famous for forgiveness when it comes to talented directors and their fondness for teenage girls (cf. Woody Allen), the general tendency is to harp on the antiquity of the crime: the interesting legal concept being that the passage of years somehow legitimizes rape. The nation’s culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand, observed that Polanski was being “thrown to the lions for an old story that doesn’t really make any sense.”

And when the American lions were thwarted of their prey by the Swiss cheeses, the intellectual French writer and activist Bernard-Henri Lévy declared himself “crazy with joy” over the outcome.

Well, the first part of that remark is patently true. The second part — the question of joy over Polanski release — I think you have to be French and unraped to feel it.

Long before last week’s latest gaffe, I was contemplating a blog with the provisional title “IS MICHAEL STEELE AN IDIOT?” And not because he called the ugly and incendiary Rush Limbaugh “ugly and incendiary.”

No, the reason Steele might be worthy of that epithet is because after hurling these perfectly accurate adjectives at Limbaugh and receiving predictable blowback from the blowhard (“Michael Steele you are the head of the Republican National Committee. You are not the head of the Republican Party! Tens of millions of conservatives and Republican have nothing to do with the Republican National Committee … and when you call them asking for money, they hang up on you!”), Steele scampered away like a scalded cat.

He said: “I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh.” Yes, he did. And he also said, “I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. … I realized what I said wasn’t maybe what I was thinking.”

Well there aren’t many of us as dexterous and supple in the thinking-versus-talking department as the supreme head of the RNC. But you know how it is: sometimes you say Rush is ugly and incendiary, when what you really mean is he’s a soothing softie. Sometimes you tell the Washington Times that the Republican Party needs to appeal to “everyone including one-armed midgets” by relocating “to urban-suburban hip-hop settings,” and if anyone disputes such an imaginative strategy they can “stuff it.” When what you really meant to say is the Republican Party, even devoid of limbless midgets, is divine just the way it is.

And sometimes you say, “I’m very introspective about things.” And that if by chance some remark looks or sounds like a gaffe, “There’s a rationale, a logic behind it.”

And guess what? He’s right! When Steele said, as he did the other day, that Barack Obama was the real author of the war in Afghanistan, there was a rationale behind it. He didn’t want to blame a disastrous conflict on W. Bush, now did he? That’s rational. When Steele compounded his party’s distress by arguing “that’s the one thing you don’t do, engage in a land war in Afghanistan … because everyone who’s tried over a thousand years of history has failed” — that too was logical.

Because it so happens that “everyone who’s tried” in Afghanistan has failed (cf. the Soviet Union). In fact, the United States has quite a history of adopting failed wars from other imperialists (cf: France, a country that had a time of it in Vietnam); of aiding hopeless monarchs in tandem with other imperialists (cf: the Shah of Iran, bolstered by Britain). And maybe we should after all this time and all this failure start taking our cues from the defeated.

And that’s the problem with Steele. Sometimes, invariably the first time around, he gets it right. Michael Kinsley famously wrote that “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.” That makes Steele a truth-teller. And within the Republican Party, I’m afraid, his non-hip-hop home, that also makes him an idiot.

Oleg Kalugin, the onetime KGB head of operations in the United States, is, he says, “amused” and even “amazed.” So many suburban spies arrested right here in the US — 11, counting the guy found in Cyprus who promptly fled after being let out on bail (Bail!! What were they thinking?) — so expensive to maintain and so dubious their alleged value. “It is a sign of the decadence of the Russian intelligence services,” Kalugin added. “Why do they need to use so many people to get information that is openly available?”

In the good old days, Kalugin insists, the Soviet Union deployed far fewer “illegals,” as spies who live here more or less permanently are known.

And he should know. After rigorous KGB training as a young man, Kalugin wrangled a Fulbright and ended up at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism: my alma mater as it happens, although apparently he absorbed a wholly different set of skills than was generally taught. Post graduation, he continued to live in the United States, often posing as a journalist, returning to Moscow only after seven years. Along the way, he courted and deployed a number of American assets, among them, as he told me, the revered left-wing journalist I. F Stone. Kalugin eventually became head of the KGB’s First Directorate: in other words, chief of counterintelligence.

Consider the parallels: a decade ago, one “Donald Heathfield” of the freshly captured Russian spy ring attended Harvard’s prestigious Kennedy School of Government. There he always told classmates that he was the son of a Canadian diplomat who had attended an international school in the Czech Republic — and was actually believed. “It seemed plausible,” one of his Vancouver-born classmates told the New York Times on Thursday. (Plausible that a Canadian who attends an international school speaks like Putin? What do they put in the water in Vancouver?)

Heathfield’s wife, “Tracey Lee Ann Foley,” claimed on her Web site to be a Montreal native with a Swiss education. It’s all too reminiscent of SNL’s old schtick, “The Coneheads,” in which a family of extraterrestials informs neighbors bewildered by their robotic accents that they hail from “Remulak, a small town in France…”

But let’s leave credulity aside — for the moment — and move on to the “amused and amazed” sector that mocks the Russian ring. Mark Lowenthal, a former CIA official, told the Daily Telegraph that the spy operations was “feckless” because “So many things they seemed to be after you can find out by listening to the right radio station or reading the right newspaper. It doesn’t say a lot about the smarts of the SVR [Russia’s foreign intelligence service].”

Mikhail Lyubimov, a former SVR member, claimed the unwonted vastness of the suburban espionage operation amounted to “a comedy.” While Fred Hitz, a former inspector general of the CIA, described the spy ring operation as “nutty” because “it wasn’t clear what the immediate goals of these people were.”

One British tech Web site observes that the delectable spy “Anna Chapman” (aka Anya Kuschenko) and her handler foolishly communicated “by using the same laptops with the same MAC addresses every time” — meaning the FBI could see what they were up to “whenever the pair were in contact.”

The gang that couldn’t spy straight, goes the consensus.

All of which makes me wonder: What do we actually know about the efficacy of the Russian spy ring, other than what the FBI’s criminal complaints and orchestrated leaks have allowed the media to discover? What if you were part of the FBI? Would you want the press to know what you spent a decade working to discover? Or Medvedev? 

The undercover operatives of staid suburbia ploughed and toiled, and the FBI claims it was quietly feasting on whatever it was they harvested. And yet, the only prize they seem to have come up with was a vague acquaintance with the financier and Clinton friend Alan Patricof? The only interesting moment, when one “Richard Murphy” griped about his Russian bosses, “They don’t understand what we go through over here”? The only exciting times when “Anna Chapman” attended “elite charity balls” in London?

You know somehow I think there’s a lot more to this story than meets the spy.