Month: April 2001

I think the China episode says a lot about our new administration. It says that we will have very few emotionally satisfying episodes in the next four years. This is a principled but pragmatic government. The end-game they negotiated was neither a clear victory for the U.S. nor a clear win for Beijing. A clear win for us would have been the return of the aircraft and an apology from them for bringing it down. A clear win for them would have been an apology from us for flying in international airspace and for causing the accident. As it is, I see no problem with the etymological hair-splitting that settled the issue. Etymological hair-splitting is what diplomacy is all about, which is why it was once conducted in the language most conducive to subtle deception, French. The revanchist Right will have a cow about this; and Bill Kristol and Bob Kagan will blow a gasket. Who cares? China is not the Soviet Union; it is enmeshed into the international trading system in ways the Soviets never were; it has no intention of global hegemony, merely regional power, which it has every right to. It’s a tyranny, though, and an unstable one, which will require a firm but delicate touch in the next few decades – a combination of free trade and firm military deterrence. I don’t believe the Chinese will interpret this as weakness. I think they will interpret this as the forbearance that comes from strength. And that’s exactly what Bush provided. The polls have given him a six point boost from this so far. I bet they’ll see a further boost now. This, in my view, was the kind of grown-up leadership we lacked for eight years. I’m glad it’s back.

Marjorie Williams comes out bravely against women smoking in today’s Washington Post. Or, more accurately, she berates feminist organizations for not joining the war against tobacco companies. But why on earth should they? No-one alive today is unaware of the risks of smoking. If women want to smoke, why should feminist organizations try to stop them? Isn’t feminism about choice and isn’t smoking a choice? Williams even berates the cigarette companies for helping finance a whole array of feminist groups and mocks Philip Morris for funding programs to help battered women. That’ll teach them to do something that actually, tangibly benefits women. As usual with nanny-liberals (and some nanny-conservatives), Williams’ main worry is that women cannot resist the lures of advertizing. But this argument infantilizes women and teenage girls even further. They’re not pawns of ads. They’re women deciding to take their own risks and live their own lives. It says something about what has happened to feminism that this is something we’re now supposed to regret rather than celebrate.

If you thought the Waco incident is over and done with, download and read this report from the Cato Institute’s Thomas Lynch. It’s bracing reading. I’m not a member of the black helicopter crowd, but, from the beginning, I had deep qualms about the Waco raid. Lynch carefully undermines Jack Danforth’s official inquiry without engaging in conspiracy theories or paranoid fantasies. Official crimes were clearly committed at Waco, and many of these law-enforcement criminals never faced justice. Cato is to be congratulated for not forgetting this tragedy – one that ranks up there with the seizure of Elian Gonzales in authoritarian over-kills orchestrated by former attorney-general Janet Reno.

THE JOYS OF SOCIALIZED MEDICINE: The British National Health Service, the last remnant of the Soviet Union still alive and funded by British taxpayers, recently announced a bid to clean up Britain’s bacteria-crammed hospitals. A staggering 100,000 infections take place in Britain’s hospitals each year, leading to 5,000 deaths. To put it another way: the NHS actually kills 5,000 people a year – the equivalent of 25,000 Americans. And this is the system many single-payer Democrats want to replicate here?

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: Who else, but John Derbyshire? In a weird essay in National Review devoted to why he likes Jews (in which he spends muchs time explaining why he can’t stand many of them), he unloads himself of his views of Marcel Proust, one of the most sublime stylists in any language: “Martin [Kellerman, a neighbor of Derbyshire’s as a child] was a man of much learning and strong opinions. Some of his pronouncements were made with such force and conviction that I have not, even to this day, ventured to gainsay them. When, one evening, someone asked him for an opinion on Proust, he shook his head and gave a firm “No!” Why? we asked. Replied Martin, in his heavy German accent salted with British slang: “Because I do not like poofs. Und I especially do not like Chewish poofs. It is against nature, und against my religion.” I have never since felt the slightest urge to read Proust.” Does National Review actually pay this hoary old bigot for stuff like this? Was Joe Sobran not available?

Tonight, I’m told, ABC’s World News Tonight will have a segment on the controversy around the Jesse Dirkhising case. Yours truly was interviewed for it. Check it out. While you’re at it, also take a look at the Washington Post’s gut-wrenching series on animal cruelty in many slaughterhouses across America. They have evidence of unconscionable brutality – even without foot-and-mouth disease.

As I speak, a charming lady is playing with my beagle and taking photos for the Washington Post profile. Incoming … as Drudge would say. Howie called yesterday to confirm a few details – including my friendship with Barry Diller. Uh-oh. On another front, I’ve got several emails asking for details about how to support the site. Click on the “Tipping Point” button down there on the right and you’ll get details. The re-design is going ahead full-steam and, although I haven’t seen it yet, Robert Cameron (my guardian angel at Fantascope) says it’s ground-breaking. Should be up by the end of the month.

Modern Humorist dismembers Barbra. Heaven.

CULTURE WARRIORS: Never disappoint, so it was good to see the National Gay Lesbian Task Force take a swipe at the new openly gay head of the White House AIDS Office. “We are ready, willing and able to meet with Evertz to discuss how we can work together to increase funding for HIV/AIDS and to pursue policies that will strengthen our fight against the disease,” said NGLTF Executive Director Elizabeth Toledo in a press release. Note that the main effort must be to increase funding – on the day the Bush budget showed Ryan White spending will be stable from this year to next. A more significant challenge to Evertz is to rid Ryan White of widespread corruption and waste. A superb piece in the current Washington Monthly, a good-government liberal magazine, gives a devastating account of how much Ryan White money is being siphoned away from patients to fat-cat AIDS organizations and their lobbyists. Meanwhile the Fundamentalist Right are quietly apoplectic. Check out Jake Tapper’s latest in Salon. My favorite quote is from Heather Cirmo, head of the Family research Council: “The question is, how is the Bush administration going to act on the homosexual agenda? So far it seems to be going on a different road from the road that we’re taking.” And how’s this from an anonymous “conservative lobbyist: “I certainly don’t approve of the homosexual agenda, but I know the president has a different view. He’s pretty comfortable with these guys as long as they’re on board with the rest of his agenda.” I guess I didn’t screw up endorsing W after all.

Here comes Patrick Buchanan to the defense of his Orthodox Christian brethren. In one of the weirdest op-eds I’ve read in a while, Pat argues that in order to fight a war with the Chinese, we’re dumb to antagonize Russia. Forget the premise for a minute – the rationale is what matters. “By 2025, Iran will have as much people [as Russia]. Russians today are outnumbered by Chinese 9 to 1. east of the Aral Sea, the ratio is closer to 50 to 1,” Buchanan argues. His point? Defend the white people! “Bolshevik Russia was an enemy, but Orthodox Russia is a part of the West, a natural ally,” he goes on. The real enemy is the yellow peril, closely followed by those nasty Persians and Arabs. I’m actually sympathetic to his underlying point. I see no reason to antagonize Russia either. But Buchanan’s ethnic prejudices infect everything he writes. Not so long ago, Buchanan wasn’t too keen on the Serbs, because he backed the Croats. The Croats were white, Catholic, and even more like Buchanan than the Serbs. But now it’s the Serbs and the Russians against the Chinese – so here’s to Belgrade and Moscow! No-one should accuse him of inflexibility in his ethnic solidarity. But no-one should accuse him of insight either.

THE BUDGET FINE PRINT: I took the big budget book to bed with me tonight and found … just kidding. Happily, the Wall Street Journal editors beat me to it. They pull out a handful of interesting statistics today. Individual income tax now amounts to 10.4 percent of U.S. income – higher than in the last year of Jimmy Carter. Individual income tax now accounts for over 50 percent of all federal receipts, up from 44 percent when Bill Clinton became president. As a percentage of GDP, federal taxes now make up 20.7 percent, only a smidgen less than the level achieved in 1944 at the peak of wartime expenditures and far higher than anything since. Federal debt, in contrast, is now a mere 30 percent of GDP, scheduled to drop to 14 percent by 2006, even if Bush wins his complete $1.6 trillion tax cut. But Paul Krugman adamantly argues day after day that we cannot afford a tax cut. The New York Times editorializes today that Bush’s proposed spending “cuts,” which will still allow the government to grow by 4 percent a year, are “harsh” and his tax cuts “outsized.” One wonders when the Times thinks a tax cut would be possible. I suspect the answer is never.

WHAT THEY REALLY WANT: A revealing piece in the Nation by Rick Perlstein. I sometimes wonder what the real left now wants. Most of what passes for radicalism these days is a kind of adolescent whining – the kind of politics that gave us the Seattle riots and the Nader campaign concerts. But Perlstein, finding inspiration in Barry Goldwater’s failed radicalism in 1964, contemplates another scenario: “Imagine a senator who by some miracle of backroom organizing won the Democratic presidential nomination in the year 2004 with a platform as equally unfathomable to the conventional wisdom of the age as Barry Goldwater’s in 1964: say, halving the military budget, socializing the medical system, reregulating the communications and electrical industries, establishing a guaranteed minimum income, promising to fire Alan Greenspan, counseling withdrawal from the World Trade Organization and, for good measure, speaking warmly about adolescent sexual experimentation. Not a Ralph Nader third-party run or a Jesse Jackson left-flank run at the Democrats, but the Democratic nominee.” Sure, this is a self-conscious fantasy on Perlstein’s part and not a serious agenda for the present. But the fantasy is still revealing. My favorite part is the encouragement of adolescent sexual experimentation. The left now believes that even horny thirteen year olds need political encouragement. The other thrill is the vagueness of it all. “Reregulating the communications industries?” And what would that mean? A government take-over of the press or the networks? Withdrawal from the WTO? Ah, that would be great news for the economy. It’s always helpful to check in on the fringes from time to time to see what mischief they may be up to. This one doesn’t even pass the laugh test.

EURO-REVENGE?: And you thought Polly Toynbee hated America? The Guardian of London has just published yet another anti-U.S. screed, ascribing to “right-wing ideologues” the notion that the U.S. is a sovereign nation. Columnist Larry Elliott ups the ante by arguing that the Europeans and Japanese should respond to Bush’s abandonment of the Kyoto Agreement (which the Europeans and Japanese have yet to ratify) by refusing to finance America’s trade deficit. The envy of the Americanophobes is beautifully captured by this Brit: “So, with driving cheap and the economy growing rapidly, Americans have bought more cars and bigger cars over the past decade, along with vast quantities of other consumer goods.” The very gall of it! What to do? Cut off capital supplies to bring the U.S. economy to its knees! “Will this be contemplated?” Elliott ponders. “It depends of how serious the rest of the world is about global warming and how willing it is to stand up to the US. But let nobody say that there is nothing that could be done. There is. What’s needed is a strike by European and Japanese capital. Get militant, comrades.” Love that “comrades” bit. Who needs to pick a war with China when we’ve got the British left to deal with?

Or not, as the case may be. Can you manage to defer the pleasure? Jim Holt has a typically funny and smart piece in the current Lingua Franca on the perils of procrastination. For those of you who are compulsive procrastinators (which means almost all of you reading this at work, which means almost all of you), this is worth a look. Jim argues that not being sophisticated about procrastination – in other words, being unaware that you do it all the time – is actually an advantage in maximizing your pleasure and productivity. Just what you need to read before you answer that email. Rationalization. Works for me all the time.

HOROWITZ RESPONDS: “Andrew! This is a business deal that for the moment has gone sour. These poor babies at the Prince couldn’t come up with and answer to my ten points, and didn’t have the spine to reject an ad they didn’t like and take their hits. They solved their problem by blaming me for the fact that they printed the ad and paid me back by calling me a racist — knowing that they could deny me the opportunity to answer them. I didn’t make a deal to be slandered. The decent thing for them to do was 1) reject the ad if that’s the way they felt about it and 2) explain to their readers why what I actually said justified such — what else to call it but hate speech. (If you think this doesn’t have real world consequences my friend, you are profoundly mistaken.) I decided not to take their abuse lying down. This is to be a prima donna? Is this the way business is normally conducted? Sure I’ll take your money and give you what you think you bought, but since I really don’t like you, I’m going screw you in the process. Yeah, gimme your cash and you can have the new car, but I’ll put sand in the gasoline tank as you drive away. Well, ok, but I’m not going to pay for it. There’s a bigger principle here Andrew, which I’m surprised you’ve missed. There are thousands of Princeton students and not a few faculty members who know now that they better not speak up if they think reparations are a bad idea. Doing so – whatever their reasons or good intentions – will get them called racists. I am not going to let them down, if I can help it. And neither should you.” – David.
My response: “David, I take your points. I still think you’d be better paying. No-one will mistake you for a coward or a wuss. I’m not a fan of this kind of weasely response to you. I’m one of your many admirers and fans. But if i were you, I’d let this one go. Cheers, Andrew”

I can barely believe that David Horowitz is now refusing to pay the Daily Princetonian for running his ad. His reason? The Princetonian ran a hostile editorial calling his ad racist and pledged to give the money to a local branch of the Urban League. That seems to me to be perfectly fair, if obnoxious, comment – and completely in tune with open journalism. Horowitz is upset by the editorial which he calls “slanderous.” Poor baby. I’m a fan of Horowitz’s ideological bomb-throwing, but this kind of prima donna attitude is troubling. It suggests his agenda isn’t simply to debunk racist leftism or to champion free speech, but to enforce his point of view on people by intimidation and sulking. He should pay up and chill out. Or he’ll begin to resemble the old David Horowitz – the one that once patronized the authoritarian left.

Tim Noah does a dance today around the announcement of a gay guy to head up the White House AIDS office. The dance is largely because Noah had already declared that such an office had been closed. Never mind. On the Slate watch, I’m going head to head this week with Merrill Goozner, a fully-fledged pharmaceutical industry critic. There should be fireworks. As for our full link with Slate, it’s due to debut tomorrow. On a couple of other fronts, I’ll be at Stanford this Friday for a talk on the politics of homosexuality on campus at 8pm, which will also be on C-SPAN (don’t know the timing yet, but it won’t be live). It’s part of Queer Awareness Week (groan). Also, check out a live chat on USAToday.com April 20. See you there.