#47 | September 10 - 24, 1998  

Greetings, pundits and policymakers! Welcome to yet another episode of Career Jeopardy, the show where you win can win book deals, cabinet seats and other fantastic prizes by skillfully abandoning your convictions before history proves you wrong!

HOST: Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen. My name is Alex Trebek, and I'll be your host tonight as we record Career Jeopardy in front of a frankly sallow-looking studio audience here in Moscow, Russia. For those of you who haven't been watching the news, Moscow this month is currently home to the world's most exciting political crisis, one featuring a collapse of the banking system, hyperinflation, and and actual bona fide panic buying (claps)!

HOST: Thank you, thank you. You're so wonderful to applaud when you could be saving your strength for the winter. We've got a great show for you tonight, folks. Each of our contestants in tonight's round of Career Jeopardy was actually complicit somehow in the financial crisis which has left you all looking so peaked, yet tonight, these skills pundits and wordsmiths will deny everything in a high-stakes battle for tenure, book deals and continued access to the President!

HOST: Let's meet our contestants. On the left, he was a former member of Ronald Reagan's security council who has since become one of the most extensively published Russia commentators in the Western world. His hobbies include hawkish posturing, Red baiting, and squelching dissent of all kinds. Let's meet Polish-born Harvard University professor Richard Pipes!

HOST: Glad to have you on, Richard.

PIPES: My pleasure.

HOST: Moving on, our next contestant wears a ponytail to look countercultural while at the same time remaining one of print journalism's most voluble champions of the status quo. His hobbies include remaining in his office all day long, not picking up the telephone, and quoting unnamed sources at length. Dami i gospoda, would you please give a round of applause to last year's Slate press Hackathion champion and former Moscow Bureau chief for the New York Times, the linguine-eating Rome-based correspondent Michael Specter!

HOST: Thank you, thank you. Welcome aboard, Michael-you've got some sauce on your shirt. No, not there, there...got it! Okay, moving right along now, our final contestant in tonight's game is as likely to kick you in the shins in a basketball game and hope to get away with it as he is to call a foul on you for breathing on him the wrong way. This contestant in his spare time enjoys character assassination, the censoring of alternative publications, and being quoted in newspapers without being identified as an advisor to the U.S. government. Ladies and gentlemen, will you please welcome back last week's champion, Carnegie Endowment analyst, Stanford University professor and Danny Ainge lookalike Michael McFaul!

HOST: Thank you, thank you. Good to have you back, Michael.

McFAUL: Good to be back, Alex.

HOST: The Hoover Institute, the Carnegie Endowment, USAID, Oxford University, National Democratic Party...You've won a lot of lucrative board memberships and associations on this show, Michael. Are you ready for more?

McFAUL: You betchya, Alex.

HOST: Great. I know you know the rules, and I'm sure the other contestants do, too. When it is your turn you are to look up at the screen, pick a category and an amount to wager, and then I will read aloud a public statement you personally made earlier in your career in support of policies which led to the current financial crisis our studio audience is back there whining about. You, in turn, must then in the space of five seconds make a public reversal of that statement in question form. Are we clear on that? Good. The categories tonight are: Yeltsin Apologists, Doom and Gloomers, Reducti Ad Absurdum.. Specious Statements, and Mystery Quotes.

That's it, that's the five. Are we ready? Good. Mr. McFaul, as last week's winner, you have the option of starting. Which category do you prefer?

McFAUL: I'm going to have to go with Doom and Gloomers for $500, Alex.

HOST: Okay, here goes. On May 23, 1998-this year-you wrote in an article entitled 'Russia's Image Problem' for the Washington Post the following passage:
'During the past month, when Russian politicians were consumed with selecting a new prime minister, analysts both in Russia and the West made dire predictions about the impending chaos that would follow Yeltsin's decision to dismiss his prime minister. Yet, as with so many other alleged crises of the past few years in Russia, the sky did not fall.'

This was one of three articles you wrote earlier this year decrying 'doom and gloomers' who, you reasoned, would create problems out of thin air simply by reporting too much bad news about Russia.

Now, please pay attention; you must provide the question which goes with the following answer. For $500, this was the public statement you made on August 14, once it became clear that the 'Doom and Gloomers' were right.
[cue music]

HOST: Okay, out of time. Mr. McFaul?

McFAUL: Alex, what is 'By this time, Russia very well may be in the throes of a major market meltdown, which in turn might trigger political upheaval on a scale similar to Indonesia.!'

HOST: Absolutely correct! Okay, you've got $500. What's next?

McFAUL: I'll go with Reducti Ad Absurdum for $300, Alex.

HOST: Okay. In this skillful November 21, 1997 use of your favorite rhetorical technique of reducing all arguments to their absurd extremes, you used the following analogy to argue that Boris Yeltsin is not the head of an authoritarian government.
[cue music]

HOST: Time up! Mr. McFaul?

McFAUL: I don't remember. I can't imagine why I would bother arguing something like that.

HOST: I'm sorry, Michael, that question was, "What is, 'Kremlin court politics is only part of the story. Such constraints on political authority only occur in democracies, not dictatorships. Stalin could remove any regional head he wanted; former Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet did not have his pension reform plan blocked by parliament; and no muckraking journalist has ever toppled senior officials in Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's government... While by no means a consolidated, liberal democracy, Russia's political system is also not an authoritarian regime.'

McFAUL: Wow. Was I serious?

HOST: 100 percent! At the time, you expected people to believe that just because Stalin never had an Alexander Minkin, Boris Yeltsin is not an autocrat. By the same logic, you might just as easily say "Since cancer is a serious disease and Heart Disease is not cancer, Heart Disease is not a serious disease!"

McFAUL: How about that!

HOST: All the same, Mr. McFaul, I'm sorry, you've lost your turn. By default, we now move to Mr. Specter. Well, Michael-how do you hipsters say this? How's it going, dude?

SPECTER: You've got it right, Alex. And in answer to your question, I'm 'chillin'.

HOST: And so you are! Your category?

SPECTER: I'm going to take Mystery Quotes for $400.

HOST: Okay, here goes. After a long career of providing consistently pro-Yeltsin coverage as Moscow bureau chief for the New York Times, you published an angry anti-Yeltsin diatribe entitled "My Boris" in the New York Times magazine earlier in this crisis-filled summer which opened with this remarkable unsourced quote.
[cue music]

HOST: Time, Mr. Specter. The question?

SPECTER: (confidently) What is, "This is how we Russians relax"!

HOST: I'm sorry, Michael, that was a mystery quote from a different article of yours, about ice fishing. The correct question would have been, "What is 'Silver paper clips. The President won't read any document unless it is held together with a gold paper clip. I used silver.'" You attributed that quote to Presidential advisor Valentin Yumashev, explaining only that he had "muttered [it] to a friend in Moscow's financial community."

SPECTER: How about that! Would I have gotten away with using such a thin source to run the same story about an American President?

HOST: Never in a million years, Mr. Specter. Your editors would have hung you by your balls first.

SPECTER: Good thing I picked on a Russian, then.

HOST: Hey, you said it. Okay, We've got McFaul with $500, Specter with $0 and now, at last, it's your turn, Mr. Pipes.

PIPES: Where were you in 1968?

HOST: What?

PIPES: What kind of name is 'Trebek'?

HOST: Um...Californian. Pacific Palisades. What does that matter?

PIPES: I like to know who I'm dealing with.

HOST: Your category?

PIPES: I'll take "Doom and Gloomers" for $160,000.

HOST: The maximum wager on the board is $500.

PIPES: Talk to my agent. I don't fart in public for less than six figures.

HOST: Mr. Pipes, the book contract round comes later. This is just to determine a winner in this round.

PIPES: Fine. I'll take the same category for $500, then.

HOST: Okay. In an early attempt to shift the blame for Russia's incipient financial/political crisis away from the Yeltsin regime, you asserted that the Western media was sabotaging the government through bad news because at heart they were these.
[cue music]

PIPES: [hitting buzzer] What are communist sympathizers?

HOST: Absolutely correct. On January 8, 1998, you wrote in Intellectual.com that "... in the case of Russia, there is the additional factor that not a few journalists and commentators in some measure sympathized with the old communist regime Ñ if not for its actual performance then for its professed ideals. The collapse of that government has upset them, and they compensate for their disappointment by stressing that ever since Russia has adopted democracy and capitalism, things in the country have been going from bad to worse."

PIPES: If they hadn't written that stuff, we wouldn't be in this mess today. I'll take Specious Statements for $500 now.

HOST: In that same article, you compared the Russian ruble to this currency.
[cue music]

PIPES: [hitting buzzer] What is the French Franc?

HOST: That's absolutely correct. You wrote in that same essay that "There are many indications that the process of recovery is underway....To begin with, there is the economy. With Western help and oversight, Russia has managed to stabilize its currency, the ruble, which, since January 1, has had a value of six to the U.S. dollar. That puts the ruble on par with the French franc." That's an interesting theory there...By that same logic, though, wouldn't that make the ruble 20 times stronger than the Japanese yen?

PIPES: The Japanese are a small, annoying people.

HOST: That they are, Mr. Pipes. It's time to take a break to hear a word from our sponsors, but before we do that, I'd like to ask our contestants how they plan to spend their time here in Moscow.

McFAUL: I'm going to go back to my hotel room and spend a few days going back over my writings. Given the current situation, I'd like to find a way to say that I've been campaigning against crony capitalism all along. I'm pretty sure I've been both for and against it in the past.

HOST: That's excellent. And you, Mr. Specter?

SPECTER: I'm going to go out and write whatever the first person I run into tells me to. I may do one of those color pieces on how sad the whole thing is.

HOST: Good idea. And you, Mr. Pipes?

PIPES: I'm going to run out and get a copy of the eXile, so I can know what kind of opinions I'll be having six months from now. Hopefully, they'll go out of business in the meantime, and no one will ever know they weren't my ideas.

HOST: Good plan! And now a word from our sponsor, a trader named Gogi who has two dozen eggs and a melon on sale a few blocks from here...Hey, wait! Where are you all going? We can't have a show without a goddamn studio audience!

That concludes our show. Tune in next week as three Western economists suddenly decide to advocate protectionism!