Month: April 2001

His name is Scott Evertz, and the appointment, I’m reliably told, will be made today (Monday). Evertz was one of the “Austin 12” gay Republicans who met Bush during the campaign, and was active in Log Cabin Republicans in Wisconsin. His background is in fund development at religious institutions – Catholic and Lutheran – but he was also an activist in the Wisconsin HIV/AIDS Care Coalition. He’ll have point people at HHS and the State Department, and be in attendance at National Security Council meetings. A couple of thoughts: this is the beginning, I bet, of Bush’s tack to the center, having shored up his conservative base in the last couple of months. It’s not the first gay appointee: there are already several in the Bush administration but so far they have all sadly been closet cases. Not Evertz. Come to think of it, I can’t recall any openly gay person higher up in the White House hierarchy ever (and I’m not counting J. Edgar Hoover or Janet Reno). It’s also a pleasingly non-p.c. appointment. Evertz isn’t part of AIDS Inc, with all the baloney that entails, and it’s actually quite radical to have a gay guy looking after AIDS these days. Most AIDS organizations are now downplaying gay men, even though they remain a central part of America’s HIV pandemic. Clinton’s AIDS “czars” (a title Evertz is renouncing) were non-gay. And one final thumb in the eye to the religious right: Evertz is an “ex-straight,” so to speak. He is divorced from a woman, but has been in a committed relationship with another man since 1993. All in all, this isn’t a revolution, but it does strike me as a watershed. An openly gay Republican with real administrative clout on AIDS issues. The world changed a tiny bit this morning – and all the right people, on the right and the left, will be annoyed.

JOURNALISTS FOR THE THOUGHT POLICE: Why David Plotz decided that now is the time to come to the defense of the Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman is beyond me. Plotz all but exonerates Foxman for lobbying for the Marc Rich pardon because he was honest about his mistake. But surely, it would have come out eventually – and Foxman was just getting ahead of the story to save his own butt. Foxman is also Exhibit A in how pernicious the cult of victimology is in our culture. The ADL goes around America looking for any signs it can find that people still hate Jews, despite the fact that anti-Semitism has all but disappeared in this country. Foxman, like all thought police, is also viscerally leery of free expression. He has urged that the government should be able to monitor “hate” groups, just because of what they preach, even if there’s no evidence that they want to commit any sort of crime. Plotz writes that, “When anyone criticizes Foxman for hand-wringing over minor insults, he answers that “the crematoriums of Auschwitz did not begin with bricks. They began with words.” Foxman always refers to anti-Semitism as “the disease of anti-Semitism.”” People who speak like that are not friends of the First Amendment. Does Foxman believe that anti-Semites should be hospitalized for their sickness? Does he believe that the United States should have free speech laws like they have in Germany where the expression of anti-Semitism is illegal? The answer to both these questions is no, but it’s telling that they can even be asked.

JEWS AND VICTIMS: Besides, it’s one of the ironies of our culture that so many critics of victimology are Jewish, but one of the chief purveyors of victimology is also Jewish – the ADL. Worse, the ADL has a direct financial interest in fomenting the idea that Jews are permanent victims. The more Jews who feel that way, the more cash Foxman gets. The ADL does some good things, and anti-Semitism is worth exposing and excoriating. But in many respects, the ADL, like other organizations like the Gay Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, the NAACP, or the Catholic League, is a racket. It hypes whatever shred of bigotry is out there, ratchets up general paranoia, and makes a small fortune as a result. I’d have hoped that a skeptical outlet like Slate would have raised this issue. But victimology and group-loyalty seem also to have claimed the otherwise incorruptible Plotz. He takes it as a given, for example, that the only reason anti-Semitism has abated in this country is because of people like Foxman. Hooey. It has abated because Jews have come out more aggressively in civic life, have assimilated more thoroughly, and their very presence in our national life has dispelled the ugly bias of the old world. If anything, Foxman, in his paranoid bossiness, holds Jews back. Now is the time to use the Rich incident to illustrate the broader problem of paranoia-mongers like the ADL. Instead, we come to their defense. What gives?

THOSE DEVIOUS REPUBLICANS: Do they stop at nothing? Alicia Montgomery in Salon uncovers the latest excrescence of GOP dirty tricks: they keep questioning nominees after tea! “When Leahy finally started asking questions about Olson’s role in the Arkansas Project, it was after 4 p.m. and the hearing room was nearly empty,” Montgomery breathlessly reports. “Most of the audience and reporters had long since left. That, according to a source close to the Democrats on the panel, was part of a Republican plan to slip Olson into his solicitor general post with the minimum of attention.” So daily journalists can’t stay past 4pm? Even with daylight savings?

MORONS VS MAVERICKS: Nice little profile of Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont in the New York Times on Friday. The Times likes Jeffords because he’s a thorn in the side of W. But there are other reasons too: “In Vermont, where his [Jeffords’] independence is admired, this [criticism by both Democrats and Republican Senators] has not much mattered. Nor has the tendency of this Yale graduate and holder of a Harvard law degree to mangle sentences, which plays with folksy charm back home. He won re-election last year by 3 to 1. ‘He is sort of the Jimmy Stewart of Vermont politics,’ said Garrison Nelson, a political science professor at Tufts University and the University of Vermont. “‘Here is a guy who is a graduate from Yale and Harvard, and you would never know it listening to him. He’s got a real down-home style and is really accessible.” Hmmm. Isn’t there another Yale graduate with folksy charm who mangles his words and won re-election in a landslide? Oh, that would be the village idiot.

Polly Toynbee, a kind of British Molly Ivins without the humor. I just caught up with her recent screed against America in the Guardian of London, but it’s a classic all right – a primal scream from the id of the European left. Entitled, “America The Horrible,” the piece contains this juicy morsel: “The rest of the world draws instinctively together in its repudiation of the Bush Jnr White House. Through this strange global vandalism, the leader of the free world has become the rogue. Ungracious in victory, absolute power corrupting absolutely, the only super-power is morphing into an evil empire of its own.” America as the evil empire. How soon they forget …

There are so many emails in my mailbox from Free Republic posters disavowing the anti-gay emailer I posted that I cannot answer them all. But they seem to me to be a pretty good refutation of the guy’s position. It occurs to me that when a red-blooded conservative website can generate so many tolerant and open-minded responses, things are not too wrong with the world. I didn’t post the email to garner sympathy – I just thought it revealing after the other rant I had just read. I posted it for balance mainly. But I’m really taken aback by the generosity and support of other Freepers. Thanks. It confirms my suspicion that there are now more open minds on the right than the left.

HOME NEWS: A few things to report. We’re now well past $8,000 in donations, although they’ve slowed to a trickle. We’ve put the money into a redesign that should see the light of day by the end of the month. We’ll soon have a separate letters page; better copying and email options; and a book review section – an archive of every book review I’ve ever written, with recommendations. In a while, I want to start a book club. We’ll assign one book a month, and in the third week of the month, I’ll post my review, and post your responses and reviews as well. Whaddya think? Next week, we’re also becoming a kind of satellite site for Slate. Don’t worry. Bill Gates isn’t taking over. Slate is just going to post a small excerpt every day from the Dish and provide a link to as.com. Literally millions of Tim Noah fans are going to be storming the barricades soon. Or something like that. Slate gets to be more of a portal for web-stuff. We get more traffic. We stay completely independent. I don’t get a cent, but I thought it was a good deal. Salon already posts a link regularly, if they think there’s something worth reading. In other news, we had a sliver under 120,000 readers for March. That’s enough for serious advertising dollars. We’ll keep you posted. Meanwhile: THANKS for coming back so often.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the Senate whittles W’s tax cut down to $1.2 trillion. Let’s also say some of the balance of the cuts are shifted to take place sooner and further down the income scale. Will that be a terrible defeat for Bush? I don’t think so. By the summer, he will have cut taxes by a hefty amount and signed a campaign finance reform bill – not bad for his first six months. Large amounts of this will not have been his personal agenda, but so what? Very, very few presidents get to dictate the agenda. Remember Clinton’s first budget? His defeat on the BTU tax and the “stimulus package” left him raging about becoming “Eisenhower Republicans,” and had Democrats fretting about his irrelevance. But the 1993 budget was the corner-stone of his future economic success. Ditto W. Bush’s big selling points are still a) he’s not a sleaze like, er, you know who; b) he can get along with both sides; c) he’s a moderate conservative like most Americans. A more modest tax cut will be fine. If the economy recovers later this year or next, there will be time for another tax cut soon enough. As long as he keeps spending under control, there’s no reason to panic. Most of the cards are still in his hands. Of course, he will go down fighting so as to avoid the appearance of ditching his hard-core conservative allies like his daddy did. But that’s part of the game-plan too, isn’t it, Karl? Moderation with deniability. Almost as good as triangulation as a political strategy.

TAXED ONCE: Michael Kinsley does a far far better job than I could showing why for most wealthy people, the money they have accumulated for their estate was never taxed as income in the first place. The “taxed-twice” argument against the estate tax is baloney. The column effectively ends this particular sub-debate. Good to see Kinsley back on riveting form.

NUTS, AND OTHER MOVIES: I didn’t think it was possible to parody Barbra – but Chris Buckley has.

“As a proud freeper and conservative, it embarrasses me that a homosexual like you is allowed to post to the [Free Republic] site. You homosexuals are perverts and have no place in a conservative forum. Your gay agenda will NEVER be accepted in the conservative movement.” – an email received today from the other side of the fence. (By the way, I didn’t post anything. Someone else must have.)

DERBYSHIRE AWARD CONTENDER: “Chinese President Jiang Zemin says, “The U.S. side should apologize to the Chinese people.” Well, I will be in favor of apologizing the moment they apologize for all of those menus they keep leaving outside my front door… In fact, I’ve got considerable sympathy for the Red Chinese – despite the fact that if my dog were a member of the American crew Jiang Zemin would have eaten him by now.” – Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online. Crikey, Jonah. Can’t you find someone else to make jokes about? Like victims of the Bangladeshi earthquake or something?

Runaway favorite this week is Al Sharpton. According to the Jerusalem Post, Sharpton compared the Florida vote-count to, yes, Hitler’s Final Solution. “The reality is that Hitler in his wickedness and evil burned millions of Jews and the only reason he didn’t burn millions of blacks is because there were no blacks,” in Europe, said Sharpton in a debate with Rabbi Shmuley Boateach. “Conservatives fighting to turn back the clock would do the same thing to us,” he added in a reference to the Florida recount.

IT’S THE COURT, STUPID: Several emailers tell me that the Miami Herald/USA Today recount proves that the real culprits were in the U.S. Supreme Court. By stopping the final recount, they denied Bush a real victory and besmirched themselves. I agree that that ruling was a terrible one. But think about it for a second. This careful media recount took four months. The final, haphazard Florida recount would have had less than four days to come to conclusion. Do you think that any count under those conditions would have resolved every doubt? In some ways, I have come to believe that SCOTUS should be perversely admired for what they did. They did indeed wreck their credibility. But they were all that stood between us and near electoral anarchy. Thanks, Nino.

HATE-MAIL: The Boston gay paper, Bay Windows, has just run a screed on the Dirkhising case. Well, actually, it’s largely a personal screed against me. Here’s a section I reproduce not for masochistic reasons, but simply as an example of the hatred that motivates some on the left, a hatred that leads them to demonize their opponents. Privately, the writer has also emailed me, threatening to expose my sex life, and using four-letter words in every other sentence to express his anger. For the record, I have never ever made fun of Matthew Shepard’s death. I have simply mocked some politicians’ attempts to use it for political gain. And for the record, I took pains to criticize the anti-gay motives behind some of the coverage of the Dirkhising case. Here’s the passage: “Assisting [the religious right] has been the ever helpful gay neo-con Andrew Sullivan, who has now become a parody of himself. (Motto: “I love gay sex, but hate gay people.”) Sullivan, who makes fun of Matthew Shepard’s death, and who uses that death to tout his opposition to hate-crimes laws, points out in The New Republic that, yes indeed, Shepard’s death did garner far more coverage than Dirkhising’s death — as if that alone is proof that the Right’s charges about Dirkhising are true. Give that Brit an “F” in statistical analysis! I will never understand why people still listen to Sullivan. Perhaps it’s the British accent. Perhaps it’s the Harvard and Oxford lineage. But Sullivan’s creepily self-serving Dirkhising piece in TNR alone should be proof enough finally that he’s lost it on gay civil rights issues – and that there is no depth to which he will not sink to prove his I’m-really-one-of-you credentials to the lying, conniving right wing in this country.” Charming, huh? The voice of modern liberalism in all its open-minded glory.

I now realize that my own position on ballot-counting – that only the cleanly punched hole should count – was the only position that would have given Gore a wafer-thin victory. When I wrote that in The New Republic, my Gore-supporting colleagues couldn’t have disagreed more. Part of my argument was that such a clean rule would have been consonant with Gore’s traditional position defending civic responsibility rather than the leftist claptrap he spewed during the campaign. In other words, if Gore had stuck to his centrist principles, he might have won. In fact, the only way he could have won was by sticking to his principles. For all the posturing on all sides, it turns out I was a better friend to Gore than his acolytes were.

It’s great that W doesn’t seem to have a spin operation going on. But the latest news that he’s relaxing salmonella standards for beef in schools should have set some alarm bells off. Whether it’s carbon dioxide or arsenic, each of these decisions makes some sort of sense, but taken together, the impact is unmistakable. Bush to Country: Go drink some arsenic, get salmonella poisoning, and bake till you burn. It’s the kind of stuff Bob Herbert stays up at night dreaming about. Hey, there, Karen Hughes! You got a job? Do it!

LISTEN TO GEORGE: “The bottom line is that this undercuts the Democrats’ argument that the Republicans stole the election by having the Supreme Court stop the count. Democrats will still be able to say somehow that they were robbed because of unfair ballots . . . but they can’t say that the Supreme Court took away their rights and would have cost them the election.” – George Stephanopoulos on ABC News. Good for George, who’s a decent person, finally shedding his Clintonian sludge. How long before Terry McAuliffe coughs this one up? Oh, never mind.

But my old professor Harvey C. Mansfield has written a pellucid piece defending his war on grade inflation – which he now conducts with the only weapon at his disposal, irony – in, of all places, the Chronicle of Higher Education. I remember his stern admonitions and sometimes opaque utterances that he encouraged his students to unravel. That’s why, of all my teachers, I remember him most vividly. He had – how can I put this? – authority. Students and children love authority. And they love to be challenged. Harvey rightly says that “there is something inappropriate — almost sick — in the spectacle of mature adults showering young people with unbelievable praise.” And making a full 50 percent of Harvard grades A or A- is, indeed, sick. Why would anyone bother to strive for excellence – real excellence – when its symbol, a Harvard A, is all but guaranteed? Reading this piece, I realized for the first time what a true scandal this is; and why a great deal of our cultural rot is related to it.

Hilarious example of over-spin from Britain. Last Sunday, Prime Minister Tony Blair arrived back early from his country retreat to grapple manfully with the foot-and-mouth crisis. The trouble was, he got back too early and entered Number 10, Downing Street, by the back entrance. Realizing he’d missed a great photo-op, the PM subsequently emerged from the front door, got into his car, went for a ride around the block for fifteen minutes and then came back to enter through the front door again and get all the usual photographs of the great leader getting back to work. This story is recounted in the Daily Telegraph. When was it James Carville and Stanley Greenberg went over to give advice?