I know I’ll be excoriated as a Bush toady for saying this, but I don’t actually get the notion that the Bush administration has done a palpable U-turn on global warming. Check out this story. “Last year, the White House described climate change as a serious issue after seeking opinions of the National Academy of Sciences but was undecided about how much of the problem should be blamed on human activities,” the Associated Press reports. This year, in a report to the U.N. no less, the administration argues that “The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability.” Wow. What a change. And no one is claiming that the Bush administration has shifted actual policy. It’s also a grotesque distortion to say that most conservatives completely rebut the notion of some human effect on global warming. Certainly Bjorn Lomborg acknowledges it. My own view of this weird little summer story is that it’s a major Howell Raines coup. A reporter finds some tiny and insignificant change in the wording of administration policy, and Raines puts it on his front page. Drudge takes the bait and Rush follows. Chill, guys. It seems to me that the Bush administration has long held the sensible skeptical position (which does not preclude taking human impact on global warming seriously). The difference between them and Al Gore is that they don’t take this as a certainty or buy the notion you have to throw the economy into reverse to prevent it.
RAINES OF TERROR: Did you get through that New Yorker Ken Fellata piece on the New York Times under Howell Raines? Okay, I did. But I share Tim Noah’s skepticism about the caveats in the piece about the Times’ doing well under Raines. Pulitzers are establishment prizes given to establishment friends (with occasional credentializing outreach). And as Tim points out, “Chatterbox would argue that a major newspaper that can’t sweep the Pulitzers in a year when a gigantic disaster befalls its hometown is a very poor newspaper indeed. The awards are as much for the disaster as they are for the coverage.” I’m not just saying this because Mr Raines banished me, but I used to feel I was missing something when my Times didn’t get delivered and I read the Washington Post instead. Now I don’t. What I got from Auletta’s piece was that Raines is a left-liberal populist ideologue, who likes to big foot his reporters and editors. Not that there’s anything wrong with it! There are plenty of great editors who have been from a similar mold, and having a crusading, left-liberal paper, with more pop-culture and vivid writing could be a great addition to the reading world. But one thing it isn’t: the paper of record. It has excised almost all non-left commentary from its op-ed and editorial columns. It is skewing news coverage in ways that will please Nation-readers – like the hysterical Enron coverage, the bogus poll designed to argue that the public blamed Bush for Enron, or the burying of politically incorrect studies about the validity of racial profiling in speeding tickets. And it’s increasingly happy assuming its readers agree with it. So it explains less and hectors and preens more. Again, this is fine. But let’s acknowledge what it is. Raines is on a crusade for the populist left. And Raines is now the New York Times.
BOOK CLUB: Here’s another Amazon review of this month’s book club selection, “My Dog Tulip,” by J.R. Ackerley:
My Dog Tulip is the ultimate bitch session–in the canine sense of the phrase, of course. In 1947, J.R. Ackerley rescued an 18-month-old German shepherd, and from the start her every look and move were to undo him. “Tulip never let me down. She is nothing if not consistent. She knows where to draw the line, and it is always in the same place, a circle around us both. Indeed, she is a good girl, but–and this is the point–she would not care for it to be generally known.” As he anatomizes her from head to toe with the awe-struck precision of a medieval courtier, Ackerley instantly turns us into Tulipomanes. Alas, many of the mere mortals she encounters feel differently, for there are indeed two Tulips. One is highly strung but heroic, flirtatious but true. The other is a four-legged rejoinder to authority: a biter, a barker, and a dab hand at defecating her way around London. Not that any of these are her fault. “You’re the trouble,” Tulip’s one good vet tells Ackerley as she banishes him from the surgery. “She’s in love with you, that’s obvious. And so life’s full of worries for her.”
Get this book for a great summer read and join fellow andrewsullivan.com readers for a canine conversation in the last week of the month. One sign of your market power: Tulip soared from #52,000 on Amazon’s best-seller list to #50 in just a few hours. Not bad for a book published in 1956.
I THOUGHT IT WAS FUNNY TOO: Was there any follow-up to the story that the Israeli Embassy in Paris just happened to burn down by accident? Larry Miller shares my disbelief.
SOCCER AND AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM: Okay, okay, for some reason I mistranscribed Clint Mathis’s name as Clint Davis. Fixed now. I’m not sure I share the view of many soccer-fan readers who believe that this typo eviscerates any credibility I have as an opiner about football. But for those of you interested in the topic, here’s a book recommended to me on the subject. It’s called “Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism.” Apparently it makes several of the points I tried to. With fewer typos. Robert Samuelson chimes in this morning with an upbeat column, arguing that the U.S. will win the World Cup one day soon. I don’t buy it. Here’s one reader who supports me:
I would rather pluck my eyes out with a cocktail fork than watch a soccer game. Soccer is boring; that’s why Americans don’t watch it. One of the key reasons the rest of the world plays soccer is that it is the most inexpensive game there is: you need a round ball and a flat field. A good baseball glove costs over $40, not to mention bats and balls. Even a high school football player wears over $100 worth of equipment. Soccer’s low costs make it egalitarian; perfect for Europeans and third worlders.
Chauvinism worthy of the English.
GOODBYE, GOOD LOGIC: Here’s an email that I thought worth sharing with the Dish. It takes up a central – and overlooked – point in the current Church crisis. Most of the pedophile and abuse cases now coming to light concern an older generation and events that happened some time ago. How does that square with the theocon argument that the 1960s started the rot? Or the main point of Michael Rose’s hysterical book, “Goodbye, Good Men.” Here’s the point:
There is a thus far unstated irony in Rose’s thesis and, indeed, in conservatives’ take on the current crisis in the church. If Rose’s thesis is correct, it actually exculpates gays and suggests that the good old ways we
re the source of the pedophile problem in the Church. Rose’s thesis as I understand it (I have not read the book) is that “orthodox” priests have been systematically selected out of the priesthood in the past few decades by progressives and homosexuals promoting reform within the Church. And, equally important, this represents a change in seminary training from previous decades.
If Rose’s thesis is correct, priests ordained since the 1970s should be disproportionately more progressive and homosexual and less orthodox than priests ordained before the 1970s. Based on all media reports I have seen, it would seem that most of the cases of pedophile priests are from
the pre-1970s orthodox pool. Very, very few cases appear to involve priests ordained in the past three decades, the presumably progressive and homosexual pool. It would seem then, that if Rose is correct, it isn’t progressives and gays who have brought corruption into the Catholic Church, but rather, a previous generation of conservative, Orthodox priests.
That confirms my impression. It’s the repression, conflict and poor training of the pre-1970s generation that led to disaster once the 1970s happened. Merely going back to that model would only make things worse not better.
The Dish 