Welcome to The Confab, I'm Eric Felton. This is where the editors and writers of The Weekly Standard get together to talk about what's in the magazine, what's in the news, and whatever else may be on our minds. Michael Warren is here to talk about a dilemma for the White House. Do they stick with the nuclear deal negotiated with Iran by the Obama administration, or tear it up and try to work out another way of restraining Iran's nuclear ambitions?
Alice Lloyd is coming by to tell us about a summit this week at the Department of Education. Interpretations of Title IX in the last few years have forced colleges to take a hard line in investigating accusations of sexual misconduct and in punishing students found guilty. Is there a growing consensus that the rights of the accused need to be protected too? And Andy Ferguson has reviewed a new collection of newspaper writing by the great comic author of the teens and twenties, Ring Lardner.
He'll be coming by to tell us why Lardner is still well worth reading. All that coming up on The Confab. Now we get the Confab going in earnest with Mr. Michael Warren, White House correspondent senior writer for The Weekly Standard, Michael Howaria.
I'm great, Eric. Thanks for having me. As hard as it is to believe in the midst of the whole Donald Trump Jr. controversy, there's actually matters of significance going on on Capitol Hill and in the White House actual policy is being made or perhaps not made.
And in particular, the administration has had to deal with the question of whether to certify that Iran is keeping its word in implementing the big Iran deal. Where do things stand on that? So you're right, Eric. There are things of substance going on in discussions and debates and sometimes intense debates within the administration even about what exactly to do.
There's a deadline coming up. It's on July 17th. It is a deadline that's imposed by Congress, Congress essentially passed a law when the Iran deal was made back in 2015 that requires the administration, whether it's the Obama administration, when they were in power or now the Trump administration, to certify that Iran is, as you say, it's incorrect to say to certify that Iran is complying with the deal. It's rather that they are, it's very kind of a weirdly specific as congressional legal language off it is, fully implementing the agreement and not in material breach of the agreement.
So this is kind of lawyerly language. And it's something that the Trump administration and President Trump himself don't like, but not like Trump campaigned on tearing up the deal with Iran. That's right. He called it his number one priority.
And back in April when the, and I should say it, if I didn't say already, the administration is required to certify this every every 90 days, it's sort of a 90 day window. So the first sort of every week. Exactly. I don't know why it's essentially to sort of a stopgap, okay, a benchmark rather I should say, in sort of monitoring Iran's actions and behavior.
So the first came in in April, the middle of April, the first for the Trump presidency, and sort of reluctantly, but with some reason, the Trump administration and Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State, re-certified the administration was still sort of getting everything to re-certify is to say, Iran, you're okay for now. The economic sanctions that we've lifted will keep them in place. You're, yes, you are strictly in the strict guidelines of what the Iran deal says. You're doing okay.
So as Tillerson said, we still want to point out that Iran is a state sponsor of terror and there are some questions and problems. So this was back in April. And meanwhile, and this is still ongoing, but meanwhile, the administration had just started reviewing its Iran policy, sort of interagency review, what is our Iran policy. And that was sort of a given as an explanation for why the Trump administration needed to certify in April, is we're trying to figure this out.
By little time. By little time. And this is in some ways sort of a made up deadline by Congress, of course that's not to be flip about it, but it sort of doesn't necessarily track with where the administration is in sort of figuring out their foreign policy. So now it's fast forward to July, July 17 is the next 90 day deadline.
And so there is this question. And what we're able to report at the weekly standard is that there was this debate within the administration and his foreign policy national security team about whether to re-certify it again. The president doesn't want to do it. And in fact, there are Republican hawks senators who are who wrote a letter to him saying, please, Mr.
President, don't, or Secretary Tillerson, don't re-certify this. Iran is in violation of these various aspects of the deal in a sense the wrong message. But as we understand it, at the moment, at least you can never be too sure what this president, there is a plan. They are going to re-certify this.
And the question at this point is why and how does that fit in with both Trump's campaign rhetoric about the Iran deal and also the Trump foreign policy on Iran. So as part of it that they don't have lined up yet, European allies for re-imposing sanctions on Iran? Well, that's right. The Iran deal was brokered with the European Union, the P5 plus one, basically all the UN Security Council permanent members.
The European allies are the important part of this, the European Union. Now, the idea that the Europeans are eager to renegotiate this deal is kind of, I think, is kind of crazy. They've got a lot of business now in the new open Iran, open from economic sanctions that have been placed on them by the international community. And so they're not necessarily eager to renegotiate.
But the administration and President Trump have sort of do have the position that they are not, Iran is not in compliance with the spirit of the deal. And then, in fact, the deal itself is broken because of this phrase, it's called the sunset provisions, which essentially in the deal allows for all the restrictions on Iran's nuclear program to be lifted after a certain period of time. So the whole point of the Iran deal, right, is that Iran curbs its nuclear program and curbs its nuclear ambitions in exchange for the United States and the Europeans lifting these economic sanctions and helping out the Iran economy. But if the sunset provisions remain in effect, essentially the Iranians, what they do, is kind of follow the letter to the letter of the deal, as best they can, while doing some violations that maybe the Obama administration doesn't really care about, the Trump administration is trying to be more stringent in enforcing that, and then sort of wait things out until these sunset provisions go into effect or rather sort of fall out of effect 10 years down the road, depends on what the particular element of the nuclear program is.
That's something that really, really worries the Trump administration. What do the hawks say, though, to the argument one might make that, hey, look, when it comes to nuclear development, 10 years is kind of a lifetime if you can buy 10 years by 10 years. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the argument, I think certainly the State Department bureaucrats believe you're all essentially supporting Iran as well, exactly, that there are some fears that Tillerson, the Secretary of State, is sort of falling prey to, has gone native in fog bottom. But look, the real fact of the matter is that Iran wants a nuclear weapon and they'll do whatever it takes to do that.
They're doing things, they're trying surreptitiously to purchase uranium or other nuclear weapons, material, German intelligence has found this out. And so what the hawks argue back to that is that Iran is not acting in good faith in this. They're a bad actor. The deal essentially gives them a timeline for when the international community is going to look the other way and then they'll pursue what they are always wanting to pursue.
Now Donald Trump has talked about renegotiating a deal. Is there really any prospect that Iran would go into a whole new round of negotiation if this deal were taken away? It would be very, very difficult for the reasons that we mentioned, right, the European allies aren't interested in it. Iran would have another opportunity to say the Americans are acting about faith here.
I guess there's a viewpoint within the administration that by re-certifying this, by sort of kicking the can a little bit down the road that can help finish up this, around policy review. And according to Bob Corker, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair, Rex Tillerson has told him, I think the quote is, his goal is to have a different agreement over time that prevents them from ever-enriching. That suggests that the administration is thinking about whether it's a follow-on deal, sort of a Iran deal part two that is stronger and stricter and adds on more sanctions, whether that's a completely newly negotiated deal. It's kind of vague, and of course State Department is not really commenting on it.
But most experts think it'll be extremely difficult. This is a very tough position that the Trump administration finds themselves in. The whole Iran deal is sort of designed to be very difficult to get out of. That's something I would say the White House is very cognizant of.
The president is very cognizant of. I'm told that he's very angry. He sides with the hawks in Congress. He just wants to scrap the deal.
So even he kind of realizes that it's not so easy to do that. There's a lot of moving parts here that is sort of a Rube Goldberg experiment, a Rube Goldberg device. And if you sort of mess up one part of it, it all is going to fall apart. Who knows what happens after that?
It's a good thing with all of this complicated negotiation and statecraft and to be done that there aren't any distractions going on at the White House. That's right. It's all Iran and nothing but Iran from here on out, so we're fully concentrated. Michael Warren, White House Correspondent for the Weekly Standard.
Thanks for joining us on the ConFAB. Thanks, Eric. Now we welcome to the ConFAB, Alice Lloyd, reporter for the Weekly Standard, Alice. Welcome.
On Thursday, you went to a summit at the Department of Education having to do with Title IX. Title IX is one of those weird things where it was originally intended to ensure that women had equal opportunities to education and now has become embroiled in the politics of how sexual assault cases get litigated on campus. How did it get that far? Well, interestingly, at the time that it was enacted, there were people, you know, sort of Equal Rights Amendment feminist advocates in the early 70s who knew that it was more powerful than Congress realized.
And so when Title IX came to, for instance, require that men and women's sports teams got equal funding on college campuses, there was some head scratching, it's gone a lot further since then. So the original statute says that no person shall on the basis of sex be excluded from participation in benefits of yada yada any education program that gets federal funding. Under the Obama administration, this came to mean a couple of stretchy things. Now in particular, there seems to have been much debate in the last couple of years over the expectation that colleges become courts of assort for sexual assault charges, but courts in which there are not the kinds of protections that an actual court has for the accused.
That was the subject of the summit on Thursday at the Department of Education only because lawyers who represent students who report these instances of sexual assault and students who are accused of them have come to agree, lawyers that is, not activists, not politicians, legal advocates, lawyers have come to agree that the reinterpretation of Title IX by the Obama administration was damaging and unfair and deprived everyone of the fairness they are due, which is a really powerful thing to have happen. So I spoke Wednesday before the summit with a victim's rights advocate, which means that she runs an organization, she found it and runs an organization, she herself is a lawyer, her name is Laura Dunn, an organization that defends, protects young women who claim to have been sexually assaulted, and she says that their claims are legitimate far more often than they are not, and she says that due process protections for accused students need to be improved so that these cases, for instance, aren't remanded in the civil court, and so that her clients don't need to be forced to go through the process again, which so often happens because the adjudication that campuses were required to perform by a guidance document that could come from the White House infamous dear colleague letter that passed down this guidance on campus sexual assault, it was issued in April 2011 right around the time that re-election was beginning, and so it was kind of like throwing a bone to the progressive constituent, to the progressive voter I should say, and now that's practically just part of the mythical legacy of injustice that we just run through when we talk about this issue, but it's really pretty shameful and people on both sides recognize that it's damaging, and that's what Secretary DeVos heard on Thursday when she met with advocates for victims, advocates for the falsely accused, and administrators, experts, and sort of, I mean, there's a campus sex bureaucracy that's built up around how to legislate these things really, so she met with... And do those bureaucracies want to protect their own existences? Is there a pushback from universities that have built up these bureaucracies that they want to maintain them, or do universities want to find a way of getting out of the business of being sexual assault courts?
That's what's so interesting, because honestly just a couple of weeks ago I would have said that it's in there interesting to keep doing things the way they're doing them, just because of the way that the campus culture tends to fall in these situations, but now I don't think that anymore, so the tide is turning, and it's no longer really seems to be as much of a partisan issue, except when somebody makes a gaff. And there was a gaff this week? There was. What was the gaff?
So, one of the, I mean, one of the all-time best hires of this administration, the acting head of the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Education, who oversees this particularly controversial area, made an off the cuff, and she apologized, she called it a flip-in characterization, made it seemingly off the cuff, comments the New York Times, saying that the vast majority of these cases are, you know, of a certain type, and are, you know, he said she said cases, or drunken hookups gone wrong, are therefore really hard to adjudicate, and if you spend any time on a college campus, I mean, of course they are. That only makes sense, but it's also not something that someone in her position, and she recognized this ought to have said to a New York Times reporter, is she going to survive in her position? I hope so, if only because I heard from people this week, lawyers, who worked on an American Bar Association task force, people who are, you know, as I keep repeating, I feel like, victims' rights advocates, people who are advocates for accused students, and these are lawyers who represent those different types of students, came to agree on a set of recommendations for OCR. That's the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education.
Yeah, and it's OCR that was infamously responsible for the Title IX guidance that kicked off all this mess, and it's OCR now, OCR in a new era under Candace Jackson recently disgraced by her own candidate comment, it's OCR who's responsible for fixing it, and anyway, it's this newly disgraced head of OCR who I've heard is very responsive to the recommendations from the American Bar Association, the recommendations that are, it represent a very meaningful compromise that could help restore, you know, inalienable rights to a lot of college students. All right, we'll follow how it goes and have you back to tell us what the outcome is. I will. Alice Lloyd, reporter for the Weekly Standard.
Thanks for joining us on the confab. Thank you for having me. Now, we're joined on the confab by Mr. Andrew Ferguson, senior editor of the Weekly Standard Andy.
How are you doing? I'm doing great, Eric. How are you? Well, thank you for joining us on the confab by Mr.
Ferguson this week about the great writer, Ring Lardner. It got me thinking, I have a friend, Liza McGraw, who recently wrote a book about Edna Ferber, and it's, you know, someone who is considered a great writer in the early 20th century, huge literary celebrity who has, that most people you'd say, hey, how about Edna Ferber? And people will say, who these days? And you were writing about Ring Lardner, who's another, one of these writers from the teens and 20s, who loomed large, but has now been kind of largely forgotten.
Yeah, yeah. Well, the occasion for the piece was this new collection, then by a sports writer named Ron Rappaport called the Lost Journalism of Ring Lardner, and he basically discovered a whole trench of old columns that Lardner had written. Lardner started out as a newspaper man and as a newspaper columnist before he branched into writing short stories. And at the time, as you say, he was hugely famous in the teens and the 20s, both as a journalist and as a short story writer.
His short stories, a handful of them, anyway, are just remained sublime. And this was the great era of the short story, the 20s. Yeah. And he was considered, and even now, back then he was considered sort of father to Fitzgerald and Hemingway, both of whom revered him.
Both whom did some epic drinking with him as well. Yes, absolutely. He was a tippler, as they used to say. But you can see his influence all the way down through the century.
I mean, everybody from Looney Tunes cartoons and Warner Brothers to Lil Abner, Comic Strip, to Dave Berry today, or even George Sanders or Donald Bartle, maybe, they all show the influence of Lardner. Now, as you say in your article, oftentimes, old journalism, old newspaper copy does not wear very well. Right. It's our fate.
I'm afraid the journalists' fate. That's why they call it fish wrap. And this is true, I have to say, in the book itself. Some of the pieces truly are spectacularly good, in my opinion.
But a lot of it is so inachronistic. And so all the references are dated, you know, the sort of inside jokes that wouldn't have been that inside to the average reader in 1919, you know, just totally lost on us. Rappaport is a very good editor, though, and he's got some great notes in there to help readers along. But it can be a tough slog sometimes, simply because, you know, it was written of the moment.
It was written for a particular audience at a particular time, which is the definition of journalism. And there were journalistic practices at the time that you could never get away with now or sort of anathema to the modern professional journalism, which is having things from people who are clearly fictionalized, people that, and having lots of things said that are the fantastical, fictional creation of the author, rather than something that he heard someone actually say. Right. Right.
I mean, Lardner did some reporting. I mean, fair amount of reporting. But he, I mean, we were talking about this. He, incredibly to the modern journalist, or at least I think a lot of modern journalists, he wrote a column of a thousand words length six days a week, and getting Sunday off, and then he would probably have to write a long feature for the Sunday paper as well.
Whatever you do, don't tell my boss about that pace. No, it's really quite remarkable. But what he did was he opened the column up and made it sort of like a variety show. I mean, he would put in plays, jokes, he'd write little satirical essays, he'd have gossip, he'd tell fables, all kinds of stuff, just to keep the copy flowing and keep the reader entertained.
And, you know, he was a great entertainer above all. And yet he had some impressive champions of his work who kept trying to push him to move away from not only Ephemera, but from short stories and to go for the big game, go big game hunting after the great American novel. Right. Yeah.
I mean, he was really universally revered by the literary class of his time. But there was always something sort of the class A, if that's the word about him, about just being a short story writer. So he had Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald, we mentioned earlier, was always pushing him to write a grand opus that would, you know, become the classic for the ages, and Edmond Wilson, the famous literary critic, said the same thing, he said, you know, he's now the time that Larner will give us his Huckleberry Finn, you know, Huckleberry Finn, of course, being the greatest American novel.
And Larner and his book. Oh, is that the one about the whale? But Larner understood what he was about. He was a journalist at heart, and the short story form was the way that he best displayed his talents.
And perhaps his best short story collection is the collection of his imagined letters from a baseball player home. Yes. It's called Uno Me Al. A lot of his stuff is written in dialect, which can get tiresome, but he has the, not just the language of this poor country boy who turns out to be an extremely gifted pitcher for the Chicago White Sox.
It's not just the language, it's also the way of thinking that he perfectly captures in the book itself. And that's where, you know, you start to see that this guy isn't just a journalist. He's actually an artist. He's actually creating a world and a mentality that is completely his own.
And you can see other great writers who, as you mentioned, who have copied Ring Larner. I think of John O'Hara's great novel in letters, Paul Joey, that could have happened without the owl. Right. I think that's exactly right.
And, you know, even today, I think I mentioned Dave Berry. Dave Berry actually wrote a little squib for this collection called The Lost Journalism. And, you know, it's clear that Berry is a tremendous fan. And when you read Larner, and then you read Berry, you can see where a lot of Berry's, I don't know, mannerisms were inspired.
And, you know, of course, Berry is a supremely talented journalist. We'll see how his copy holds up a hundred years later. Yeah. Well, you and I won't let somebody well.
No. Andy Ferguson, senior editor for the Weekly Standard. Thanks for joining us on the CONFAB. Thank you, Eric.
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I'm Eric Felton. Catch you next time.