On Thu, 21 Apr 2005 09:18:22 -0700 (PDT), Gautam Mukunda wrote > Yes. Is that so hard to understand? If the American > Nazi Party had organized an antiwar event (which they > did, I think)
Reduction to the extreme again! The parallel would actually be if the American Nazi Party was associated with an organization that was trying to coordinate activies of a bunch of loosely organized coalitions, one of which sponsored an event that I went to. Indulge me while I tell a story of guilt by association. Many years ago I was working on a story about a publicly supported construction project whose investors, as it turned out, included several organized crime figures (perhaps I should note that the local branch of "Our Thing" is mostly notorious for incompetence). A while later, I found that another investor was a well-respected judge, who had failed to include the investment on his legally required annual conflict-of-interest report. It was just a small one of many investments he made, and he made them through an attorney who seemed to manage most of his activity of this sort, and the attorney had a relationship through his law firm with the organized crime people. The red flag was not the fact that he was a co-investor with these crime family people, it was that he failed to report it. As I was working on this story, the judge was nominated to a rather high court. No more time to think about it, it's time to either publish the story or not. When I called him, he assumed I was writing a story about his nomination. When I asked him if he realized he hadn't reported that investment, he said it was probably just a clerical error and he would submit a revised statement. That's really no big deal, it happens fairly often. But he was aware of his investment; it wasn't arms-length. When I asked if he realized that so-and-so were investors in the same project, he sounded like he was going to have a heart attack. He started saying he was going to withdraw his name from consideration. He told me he'd always worked very hard to keep distance from that sort because he is the son of Italian immigrants. We dropped the story. Guilt by association stinks, even in the newspaper game, where the standards are quite low in comparison to courts. I'm sure you can trace a fairly short line from some of the organizations I'm involved in, such as Veterans for Peace, to extreme leftists. I'm also sure you can trace a short line from other organizations I belong to, such as my church or the Marine Corps League, to some extreme right-wing nutjobs, too. Life is full of conflicts. Nick _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
