Bret Stephens, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, recently had a disturbing encounter with a senior member of the staff at the German consulate in New York.

But the diplomat had no patience for my small talk. Apropos of nothing, he said he had recently made a study of U.S. tax laws and concluded that practices here were inferior to those in Germany. Given recent rates of German economic growth, I found this comment odd. But I offered no rejoinder. I was, after all, a guest in his home.

The diplomat, however, was just getting started. Bad as U.S. economic policy was, it was as nothing next to our human-rights record. Had I read the recent Amnesty International report on Guantanamo? "You mean the one that compared it to the Soviet gulag?" Yes, that one. My host disagreed with it: The gulag was better than Gitmo, since at least the Stalinist system offered its victims a trial of sorts.

Nor was that all. Civil rights in the U.S., he said, were on a par with those of North Korea and rather behind what they had been in Europe in the Middle Ages. When I offered that, as a journalist, I had encountered no restrictions on press freedom, he cut me off. "That's because The Wall Street Journal takes its orders from the government."

By then we had sat down at the formal dining table, with our backs to Ground Zero a half-mile away and our eyes on the boats on the river below us. My wife and I made abortive attempts at ordinary conversation. We were met with non sequiturs: "The only people who appreciate American foreign policy are poodles." After further bizarre pronouncements, including a lecture on the illegality of the Holocaust under Nazi law, my wife said that she felt unwell. We gathered our things and left.

Stephens, unfortunately, does not identify the cretin in question. Having remained mute and failed to adequately defend his own country in the course of the conversation -- lest he appear impolite, one would presume -- he now feels that to identify him would be a breach of ethics.

I disagree.

Mr. Stephens, your host crossed the bounds of decency, as well as of diplomacy. He is clearly a public figure, and a representative of his government. What expectation of privacy, of confidentiality, does he really have? You've disclosed the substance of the conversation, which did not occur in a professional capacity. How is disclosing the identity of the speaker a greater violation?

Posted by: Greg at 04:45 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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