After September 11 and the president’s speech to Congress in which he laid out a clear doctrine of zero tolerance for terrorism, it seems to me our foreign policy is clear. Both Israel and India – at either ends of the Islamic Middle East – must be unequivocally supported in their struggles against Islamo-fascism. Both are democracies; both allow freedom of religion; both have enemies who are friendly with the perpetrators of the WTC massacre. To play footsie with either country now, to do anything but provide extremely clear public support, would deeply undermine the integrity of our own struggle against this destabilizing evil. I see no evidence that the administration has done anything but back both countries – but for a while there, I had real worries that the same kind of moral equivalence that we falsely ascribe to Israel and the PLOHamasHizbollah was one we were beginning to apply to India and Pakistani-sponsored terrorist groups. I’m with India on this one, and am glad they pushed this principle to the brink of warfare to get their message across.
LETTERS: Straight readers sympathize with the double standards applied to gay lives and relationships.
FOXY LOGIC: I pretty much agree with the Wall Street Journal editorial today, giving an unneeded fillip to Bernie Goldberg expose of hyper-liberal CBS. But I do have a problem with part of it. The Journal praises Fox News as “an organization that delivers news straight, without tilting left or right.” Oh, come on. Now, Fox News does some great stuff. They’re fresher, smarter and often more balanced than the network news. But obviously, they tilt right, often helpfully so. So why give us this guff about “we report, you decide,” etc, etc. It’s great p.r., I guess, if lies are good p.r. But it’s not even vaguely true. What bugs me about CBS and ABC and NBC News is not that they are left-leaning, which is completely fair enough, but that they refuse to admit it. I don’t begrudge Peter Jennings his left-liberalism. I begrudge him his pomposity and pretense to objectivity. It seems to me that as long as Fox plays the same Jennings game, tacking right while refusing to acknowledge its own bias, it’s going to be hard for conservative cultural critics to gain much high ground in this debate.
The Dish 