Month: January 2002

He’s at it again. On January 2’s 700 Club broadcast, fundamentalist Pat Robertson weighs in against the moral state of America today:

“America will survive what is coming but it won’t survive in its present form. The proud will be humbled and then the time will come that they will turn to the Lord… And, there’s one last thing that the Lord led me to in Isaiah. And this is Isaiah, the fifth chapter and it’s the eleventh verse following, and it comes out of the living Bible and I want to read this to you because I think it’s very- this is the living Bible, ‘Destruction is certain for you who get up early to begin long drinking bouts that last late into the night’ – the big carousing and the parties. The second is, ‘Destruction is certain for those who drag their sins behind them tied with cords of falsehood.’ There’s all kinds of sin going on and people lying about it and covering it up, but this next one is more significant than any. Now this is Isaiah speaking. This isn’t Pat Robertson. This is Isaiah the prophet, ‘Destruction is certain for those who say evil is good and good is evil that dark is light and light is dark, that bitter is sweet and sweet is bitter.’ Those who say evil is good and good is evil, and that’s what’s happening in this country. Certain perversions, sexual perversions for an example, are being touted as a privileged activity, and those who oppose it are being called evil.”

Now what could he mean by that? It means that the next terrorist targets will be San Francisco and Detroit. Here’s the zinger:

“Take this for no more than it’s worth and no more than that, but I do believe that San Francisco is going to be a target of these people [al Qaeda terrorists], and I think that Detroit is going to be a target. We had one person at a prayer meeting say that he had a dream so vivid about Dallas, that he woke up and turned the TV on because he thought he was seeing a newscast. But, I think something through ship is going to be the one. But this is what I think the Lord told me.”

I’m sorry, but this guy is nuts. God is channeling al Qaeda’s future attacks through Pat Robertson? And it just so happens that God is targeting a city identified with homosexuals and one identified with racial minorities. Surely this is proof even to those most sympathetic to their cause that these fundamentalist fanatics have somehow experienced the attacks on America as vindication of their world-view. Robertson wriggled out of his concurrence when Jerry Falwell blurted this out immediately after September 11. But these are his own words today. He means what he says.

Even the dog?

THE KEY TO THE ENGLISH ARISTOCRACY’S T.E. LAWRENCE FETISH: “A backward culture that loves dressing up and places no value on professional activity will always appeal to a segment of the English elite.” Thus Mark Steyn in a delicious skewering of fashionable European hostility to Israel. Steyn is also dead-on about the autocratic nature of the E.U. For some reason, American liberal journalists – stern believers in democracy to a person – never comment on how EU decisions are reached. How many Germans voted to abolish their own currency? None. How many Spanish? Italians? None and none. And people wonder why European elites couldn’t give a damn about Israel. It’s democracy, stupid.

WHAT ANTI-WAR LEFT?: There was never any dissent. No-one protested the war. The Left always supported it. The spin continues. Kinsley then makes the following point: “In a country such as Great Britain, the legal protections for free speech are weaker than ours, but the social protections are stronger. They lack a First Amendment, but they have thicker skin and a greater acceptance of eccentricity of all sorts.” But there’s an obvious reason why Brits are less exercised by speech that might weaken resolve against global terror. It barely matters what they think. Americans are in a completely different position. Whether we like it or not, America is the sole responsible power in the world. No wonder Americans worry more when far-lefties and far-righties try to undermine a vital war. These extremists might actually affect things. Americans are no more naturally earnest than Brits, in my opinion. They just temper their rhetorical excesses to reflect their responsibility. The same less care-free atmosphere of public debate existed in Britain in the nineteenth century, when what the Brits thought and believed really did matter to the world. Rambunctious irrelevance might be more entertaining; but it’s not an option Americans really have right now.

SWIFT DECISION: It just so happens I know Patrick Guerriero, the 33 year-old former mayor of Melrose, three-term state rep, and now Massachusetts Governor Jane Swift’s pick for running mate. I don’t know him that well, but have bumped into him a few times in Boston and Provincetown, and he seems a smart, capable, charming chap. The most important thing about his appointment is how far it shows the GOP has come. The Republican candidate for lieutenant governor in a major state is not only openly gay, but in favor of equal marriage rights. Take that, Mr Derbyshire! He will face a tough primary, but just being on this playing field is a huge achievement for gay visibility in Republican and Massachusetts politics. He’ll be campaigning on small government and better education. His governing theme in Melrose was civility. He’s not all about gay issues – far from it. But he’s not running from them either. And in all this, you see the great legacy of Bill Weld, a solid Republican governor who cut taxes and embraced inclusion as a central Republican theme. The tent broadens.

INCOMING: My sources tell me the Sunday Times of London is about to unload stunning new evidence of Bill Clinton’s negligence toward al Qaeda. Stay tuned.

CLASSIC WASHINGTON: D.C., for most of us, is not the city others might imagine. I live in a semi-hip ethnic enclave called Adams Morgan and tend to hang at the Duplex Diner, a young, mixed and highly popular restaurant. Now and again, big machers pass by, but the star-studded action right now is in Mclean and the usual suburbs. Still, one of my favorite aspects of Washington is spotting people who were once big shots (or still are), just popping into the 7-11, or sipping at Starbucks, or whatever. On my way to lunch today, I biked past Kitty Kelley, Bob Strauss and Jack Germond, all on the same block. I know. I know. It’s not exactly Hollywood. But I get a kick out of it anyway.

REDESIGN: It’s a cardinal rule that everyone hates redesigns. I like that impulse, since familiarity breeds content. But I hope you like it. Jonathan Keller did the lion’s share of the work, for which I am deeply grateful. We tried to keep the look of the old one, while expanding the Dish, adding important features like ’email-to-a-friend,’ inserting new departments like ‘Interviews’ and ‘Book Reviews,’ and giving those of you who find light-on-dark hard to read an option to reverse the colors. (You can revert them as well.) In the next month, the interview and books section will begin to have new content. Watch this space. We’ll continue to make fixes, so do tell me or webmaster@andrewsullivan.com if you have a constructive suggestion (no big whines, please). All this work is a result of your donations, which are also helping to defray the costs of our fast-increasing bandwidth. The ads are not really ads, alas. We get no money for running them. They’re ‘affiliate’ ads. But if you visit the sites they advertise and buy anything having linked to them from our site, we’ll get a small cut. If you want to support us, please do keep tipping, and use the ad sites if you’re planning to purchase something. We’re hoping these little revenue trickles will eventually become a stream. Meanwhile, we’re still working hard on getting a corporate sponsor, which the site now has space for. As to our current financial state, let’s say we’re surviving. At some point this year, I may even get paid something.

Oh, please, let him go to Princeton. Here’s a tour de force taking Cornel West apart which appeared in The New Republic, while I was editor, six years ago. It’s by Leon Wieseltier. And it’s devastating. Enjoy.

The new design has arrived!

“This is the first war in which polls have shown American women to be as supportive of the hostilities as men.” That’s according to liberal pollster Celinda Lake in this razor-sharp piece in today’s Washington Post. Most people have seen this war as a testosterone affair, as it surely is, in part. But the liberation of women living under Islamo-fascism, as well as the president’s poignant embrace of women missionaries taken hostage by the Taliban, have made inroads in the gender gap. Bush’s clear defense of innocent American Muslims, his humanitarian efforts in Afghanistan, his wife’s public support for Afghan women – all these have helped erase the president’s biggest political liability. This is big news. And the economy may be perking up as well. If I were a Democrat, I’d be worried right now.

THE CASE FOR MILITARY TRIBUNALS: You only have to look at the preliminary hearing yesterday for Zacarias Moussaoui to see why military tribunals are a good idea. How many times do we have to point out that these undeclared war-makers are not criminals. They are prisoners of war. Giving them a public platform to mouth off their religious fanaticism after they have plotted and executed acts of war is an outrage. I agree with Joe Lieberman in Wednesday’s Washington Post, when he argued that Moussaoui should never have been brought before a civilian court. Lieberman is right to argue that by doing so, the Bush administration has stupidly muddled the criteria for using such tribunals, implying they might be used arbitrarily, depending on the evidence, rather than categorically, depending on the type of offense. I fear the administration caved under pressure from the civil liberties’ activists, who are sadly misguided in their efforts to treat warriors as mere criminals. There’s no chance now to retroactively deal with Moussaoui as he should have been treated. But the Moussaoui case surely should stiffen Bush’s spine to make no more compromises with these fanatics who defile even the name of war.

THE COMING ICE AGE: Yes, global freezing is back. Check out Elizabeth Kolbert’s fascinating piece in the current New Yorker. She reports from research in Greenland, where analysis of ice particles hundreds of thousands of years old beneath glaciers is revealing far greater climate volatility than we ever imagined. One expert describes the process like this:

“Dozens of rapid changes litter the record of the last hundred thousand years. If you can possibly imagine the spectacle of some really stupid person (or, better, a mannequin) bungee jumping off the side of a moving roller-coaster car, you can begin to picture the climate.”

What does that mean for us? It turns out we could well be due for a major freezing, a climate change so dramatic it makes global warming seem like a pipe-dream. Does that mean that global warming could actually be a good thing, an ameliorating trend against the Big Chill? No one seems to know. It might be, or it could trigger the Ice Age. The only conclusion I can draw from this piece is that we really don’t know how the climate works, but we do know it changes rapidly. To believe we can control or harness it is simply hubris.

THE LEFT-WING WAR AGAINST HIV RESEARCH: They’re succeeding. Some leftist AIDS activists and Naderites have been waging a war against the evil drug companies, especially for retaining patents and actually making profits on life-saving HIV medications. By chipping away at patents, by forcing much lower prices for HIV meds, these activists hope to make some medications more affordable. They haven’t succeeded for the most part. But what they have managed to do is to reduce incentives for drug companies to research into HIV. Who among drug execs needs the grief of these protestors when there are many other lucrative diseases to focus on? According to a research study cited by a useful little piece on TechCentralStation.com, “the number of anti-retrovirals in development rose steadily from 1990 to 1998. Since then, however, development has fallen back to 1990 levels.” Thanks, guys. Meanwhile Africa is dying not because of drug companies but because of a long post-colonial legacy of terrible governance.

The toilet’s fixed. Now where are my back issues of the American Prospect?

“The federal government was badly shocked after Sept. 11. The elites thought they had to get the American people focused on something else. And so we’re bombing the hell out of Afghanistan. I’m sorry to say this, but I think that’s what this whole war on terrorism is all about: It’s about maintaining urban property values. It is necessary to do whatever they can to keep people willing to pay exorbitant prices for a small apartment in Manhattan or San Francisco or Los Angeles.” – Harvard professor (who else?) John Stilgoe, San Francisco Chronicle, explaining why capturing Mullah Omar will push up property values in Marin County.

“So did we have such a good time in 1971 by seeing how wretched we were and what a failure our world was? Well, yes, I think so, and, yes, I miss the angry critical intelligence in young people – no matter that it was often too extreme in 1971. It is a marvel, now that a crisis has persuaded so many of us to think that we are at war and to give up the critical scrutiny of decisions about our freedoms and our economy that are far more damaging in the long run than the attack on the World Trade Center.” – David Thomson, New York Times.

THE GENIUS OF THE MARKETPLACE: Alan Dershowitz’s attack on the Bush vs Gore decision is now remaindered at 70 percent off. Still not worth $7.50 though.

Imagine, for a moment, that Al Gore was now president. Now stop shaking for a minute and think hard. If Gore had built a presidential ranch that was one storey high, got all its electricity from the sun, and was described by the New York Times as a “model of the yuppie modern ranch,” don’t you think it would become an emblem of his presidency? So why hasn’t it happened to Bush? Here’s the Times: “The first lady, Laura Bush, has overseen the planting of native Texas grasses. The house is environmentally correct, with a passive solar design, geothermal cooling and heating, a cistern to catch rainwater and purification tanks and filters so that water from the house can be recycled for use in irrigation.” Does Bush get any credit for this? Do his environmental critics – who have yet to find a substantive difference between Bush’s and Clinton’s environmental policies – acknowledge that Bush is an actual, living, breathing environmentalist? While Gore talked a good game, does he know anything about tending to thousands of acres of actual brush land the way W does? I point this out just to show how lazy the press is. You start with a picture of Bush as a gas-guzzling, arsenic-pushing tool of Big Oil, and you sure as heck try and avoid anything that might complicate this picture. Of course, Bush is partly to blame. Unlike most modern yuppie pols, he doesn’t see his private life as just another propaganda tool. But that doesn’t mean the press shouldn’t notice more. Memo to Rove: how about Bush inviting a couple of environmental journalists to his ranch to show off his energy conservation? How about linking it to a speech that stresses such values in order to help wean us off foreign sources of energy? There’s no need to do a Tom Friedman, but you really do need to tackle this anti-environmental smear that has so far stuck to you.

EURO-INDIFFERENCE: My take on the new currency, posted opposite.

KRISTOF CLEAR: I’ve known Nick Kristof for twenty years or so, since we were at Magdalen, Oxford, together. He’s one of the nicest, smartest guys you can find. He’s also dead wrong about the war. It’s probably good luck that he only started writing his war column for the Times in the last month, because he is one of very few Times’ columnists who weren’t publicly getting things wrong in the beginning. But he’s making up for his absence since. In his last two columns, he has urged the U.S. to let Mullah Omar go and to leave Somalia’s terrorist cells alone. He has the classic Times view that poor countries and foreign peoples need to be treated like peasants by a benevolent overlord. Poor little Omar. He’s blind, you know. He didn’t really mean to sponsor terrorism aimed at murdering thousands of innocents. Can’t we relocate him to Palm Springs? As for Somalia, what’s really needed is lots and lots of aid to help these poor people. Bombing them is only useful for leveraging the international focus into such aid. Huh? Who’s proposing a bombing raid anyway? And isn’t Somalia a prime location for Qaeda refugees? Coming up: why Osama bin Laden should be allowed to go free as long as he promises us that he won’t be naughty any more; and why Iraq just needs more American aid to get it to behave more nicely. Well, at least he isn’t Anthony Lewis. Kristof isn’t a bore as well as naxefve. He’s just naxefve.