In January 2001, Jed Babbin didn't feel like skiing one day during his vacation in Lake Placid. Something in that morning's paper had ticked him off. He can't remember what the issue was, but it made him mad. He fired off an opinion piece to the American Spectator Online. They liked what he wrote, published it, and asked for more. Babbin, who had been working to improve his writing skills, kept at it and soon found himself with a weekly column. Babbin's columns grew, and soon he was writing opinion pieces for the National Review and getting spots on talk radio. He started filling in on his friend Oliver North's radio show. This summer his book Inside the Asylum, Why the United Nations and Old Europe are Worse than You Think, made the New York Times extended best seller list (it was number 21 for two weeks). Babbin is perhaps best known for his pithy one-liner that ''going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion'' on the political talk show Hardball. Babbin, 54, says he always knew he wanted to write, but he just didn't know where to begin. He'd had many careers already: Air Force attorney, private practice, lobbyist for the Lockheed Corporation, Undersecretary of Defense under Dick Cheney during the first Bush administration. Babbin wanted to add writer to his resume and realized he needed to ''unlearn pretty much everything'' he'd been taught about writing in law school. ''It's just ghastly the way lawyers write. It's just ghastly the way we are taught to write,'' he said. He started reading books about learning to write and finally one clicked: The Writer's Art, by columnist James J. Kilpatrick. ''It just all clicked and I started writing enthusiastically,'' he said. ''I started changing my legal writing, and, quite frankly, we started getting much more pleasant reactions from judges.'' Babbin said his legal briefs improved as soon as he started writing from a non-legal perspective in simple, clear language. He wrote a novel, Legacy of Valor, but says he didn't really find his voice until he started writing non-fiction op-ed columns. His second book, Inside the Asylum, is an attack on the United Nations, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and the U.S. leaders who believe in working with the United Nations. Babbin became a lawyer because he failed the eye exam for Air Force pilot training. When he was being commissioned in the Air Force in 1970, he says he tried to squint and beg his way into the cockpit. The doctors said no way, and he was offered a choice: become a fuel supply officer, ''which I understood to mean a gas station attendant,'' or become a lawyer. Babbin decided to become a lawyer, and Uncle Sam sent him to Cumberland School of Law in Birmingham, AL, ''which is where you go when Uncle says in February of your senior year you need to start applying to law school.'' By 1975, he was in the Air Force Litigation Division, which he says is the best job a young attorney can possibly have. ''We were trying cases in U.S. District Courts all over the country. It was great, it was unbelievably good experience,'' he said. JAG attorneys are thrown in the deep end and forced to learn fast, because no one wants to tell their commanding officer they lost a case, he says. The worst job he ever had was in the Pentagon as undersecretary of defense, which he did for one year under the first President Bush. ''My job really came down to taking phone calls from angry Senators and Congressmen who wanted to talk to someone with a fancy title and who the big guys didn't really want to talk to,'' he said, adding that the phone calls generally involved trying to get deals for constituents. ''I got to work with some really neat people, but if somebody wanted me to do that job again I'd say 'no thanks.''' When he started writing seriously, he began thinking about the United Nations as a target ''because it's something that nobody else has really looked at—I don't think anybody has taken a really hard, critical look at the United Nations for many, many years.'' He figured the United Nations—which he considers broken beyond repair—would be a hot issue before the upcoming presidential elections in November. Babbin concedes that the United Nations does a good job vaccinating millions of people around the world, but he says it lacks credibility for allowing countries like Sudan to sit on the human-rights commission. ''What I try to explain in Inside the Asylum is I don't like the idea that is posed by a lot of the right-wing whackos in this country that we should just walk out of the UN and slam the door behind us,'' he said. ''America cannot divorce itself from the rest of the world.'' Babbin proposes creating ''a political climate where the democracies of the world,'' like Britain, Turkey and Australia, for example, can follow the United States out of the United Nations ''without their political leaders committing political suicide.'' He advocates gradually withdrawing from the United Nations ''and creating a new organization in its place that would simply include the good nations of the world, the democracies.'' Babbin's new organization would include Japan, but ditch China, for example. And countries like Singapore, which are major trading partners but not democracies, would be given temporary membership. ''Everybody's under this delusion that we have to have UN membership and that we have to have a UN in order to have good relations with anybody,'' he says when asked if it would be a mistake to disengage with countries like China. ''The UN does not provide that.'' Babbin, who lives in Washington, DC, says the secret to a successful, happy career is trying many different things. ''I think the best advice a young attorney can get is, number one, make sure you get hands-on experience in as many things as you can, because that's the only way to really decide what you want to do,'' he said. ''Two, don't be afraid of making a mistake in choosing a job. For someone at 23 or 24 or 30, it's really not the end of the world if you end up working someplace where you don't like it or you work with people you don't like. Fine.Change it. Do it.''

Rate This Article 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Select    View top rated articles

Printable Version    PDF Version    Email to a Friend    Post A Comment    View Comment    Discuss

	Popular Tags
	Uncle Sam  conservative  National Review  prose  Oliver North  Dick Cheney  opinions  January 2001  JAG  first Bush administration

Featured Testimonials

A well-managed web site, LawCrossing is a pleasure to visit. It definitely has me hooked on. Michael

Facts

LawCrossing Fact #161: Our giant database and numerous staff members sift through many jobs and only bring you the ones that are available and relevant!

"We want to hear your thoughts. Please comment on this article (below)!" Comments

Article ID: 365     Article Title: Jed Babbin, attorney, column writer and author of Inside the Asylum, Why the United Nations and Old Europe are Worse than You Think Comment not found for this article. Comment

Facebook comments:

Enjoyed reading this article? Click here to sign up for News Wire, our weekly newsletter, and you'll receive articles just like this right in your inbox.

Enter your email address and start getting breaking law firm and legal news right now! Every Alert Alert once a day