Opinion: In today’s pages: Hockey apathy, Hilton follies, and hapless immigration bills
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The editorial board weighs in on the now-stalled immigration reform:
The shameful — and we hope temporary — shelving of an immigration reform bill by the Senate contradicts the aphorism that success has a thousand fathers but failure is an orphan. This failure has plenty of fathers: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who issued an ultimatum he couldn’t enforce; Republican senators who played to the know-nothing fringe; and the Bush administration, which blessed a ‘grand bargain’ reached by a bipartisan group of senators but didn’t follow through with enough pressure on recalcitrant members of the president’s party.
The board says that a proposed California vote on Iraq may have less to do with war and more to do with term limits. Slingbox, which lets cable and satellite subscribers watch baseball games online, is okay by the board, even if Major League Baseball isn’t a fan.
On the op-ed page, columnist Rosa Brooks explains why the phrase ‘unlawful enemy combatant’ used to be legally meaningless, and what that means for Guantanamo Bay detainee trials. James Traub wonders is the Iraq war signals the end of the ‘democracy promotion’ doctrine. Charlotte Allen says Paris Hilton might have taken a lesson from Martha Stewart on using jailtime to her advantage, and columnist Joel Stein thinks Southern California doesn’t deserve a Stanley Cup-winning hockey team.
Letter writers continue discussing the Six Day War. San Francisco’s Bill Kennedy Kedem notes that forty years later, threats of annihilation ‘continue by oil-fueled, fundamentalist-inspired Arab and Persian governments.’