Month: March 2002

U.S. gaining ground in Afghanistan battle; Bush resists taking Saudi-Egyptian bait; Riordan, Condit, Pickering look doomed; Bush abandons free trade principles, risks rift with Europe; Communist-supporting, homophobic minister dies.

NIGHTMARE TIME: For the first time since September 11, I’ve been having nightmares. I can’t get out of my head the knowledge that Islamo-fascists and their allies may well have the wherewithal to detonate a dirty nuclear bomb in a major city in the near future. I live blocks away from one likely target. So do hundreds of thousands of others. If the terrorists succeed, they could render Washington or Manhattan uninhabitable for decades. They could make the White House and the Capitol off-limits to human beings for a century. And our defense against this? Extremely limited. I’m taken to task sometimes for being impatient with those who keep questioning the need for this war, the necessity to move against the axis of evil that wants to destroy us. What I don’t understand is how they can be so complacent. Don’t they see the greatest danger this republic has ever faced is now in front of us? Don’t they understand that neutralizing Iraq is not some kind of interesting proposal in an unnecessary war – but the bare minimum to prevent a holocaust in the very heart of this country’s democracy? I’m not given to panic, but I can see nowhere any hard evidence that debunks the possibility of this scenario. In fact, the more you think about the amount of nuclear material out there that’s unaccounted for, the inevitable limits of prevention in an open society, and the evil fanaticism of our enemy, the more terrifying our predicament really is. I think this is 1940. I think this is just beginning. I share James Lileks’ superb commentary yesterday on his wonderful blog:

I had that feeling all day – felt like October. Made you realize that it’s been October every day since October. And it’s going to be October for some time, right up until the day it’s September again.

Are you ready?

THE VATICAN’S ROT: I bumped into another gay Catholic tonight – Notre Dame graduate, weekly church-goer, concerned and dedicated layman. He told me he couldn’t go to church any more. The way in which the Vatican’s chief spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, tried to pin the Church’s pedophile corruption on good gay priests last Sunday was just too much for him. “They’ve declared war on us. All of us,” he said to me. “If we stay, we simply condone the bigotry and ingratitude. I don’t know where to go, but I cannot stay any more.” I’m beginning to believe he’s right – this is a watershed moment. For a quarter of a century, gay Catholics and gay priests have clung to the reed of the 1976 doctrine that homosexuality as a condition is not sinful, and that homosexuals are persons with dignity who belong in the Church. Now Navarro-Valls, a member of the Opus Dei sect that now dominates the Church hierarchy while the pope declines into aged irrelevance, has abandoned that doctrine. Gays cannot be ordained, he says. Worse, their ordinations are invalid. He’s almost daring gay priests to quit. You know how many American priests would be left? Perhaps half of the current number. And a hierarchy that subjected children in its care to serial molestation now tries to change the subject by impugning its own innocent gay priests. This gambit by the hierarchy shows the “objective disorder” at the heart of their ideology. As Margery Eagan puts it in Tuesday’s Boston Herald,

While church leadership dumped from Boston parishes Catholic gays who refused to renounce their “sin,” as we all know now it has not even acknowledged what scholars and parishioners – and their children – have noticed for years: that scores of Catholic priests – many of its very, very finest priests, in fact – are gay. But the big gay elephant sits there in the middle of the rectory table. We pretend we don’t see it. The culture of silence prevails.

Eagen is no anti-Catholic liberal and neither is her paper. And nor am I. She just sees corruption and bigotry when it stares her in the face. She also shows how the Vatican’s stupendous hypocrisy over its own gay priests is connected with the pedophile corruption. Good gay priests may have been afraid to name pedophiles for fear they would be smeared as well. It turns out their fears were justified. It seems to me that after the Vatican’s declaration of war on its gay clergy last weekend that gay priests have a simple duty. They need to come out in large numbers to their parishioners and to the press. They need to dare the Vatican to fire them. They need to stop the defensiveness of the past, stand up for their moral integrity, and expose the rot at the heart of the Church. And lay Catholics need to support them against the hierarchy every inch of the way. How dare the Church impugn innocents while it shelters the guilty? And how can decent American Catholics not rise up against the hierarchy for it?

ANTI-SEMITISM WATCH: A truly ugly incident in a Congressional primary in Illinois. I’d find it hard to vote for Rahm Emanuel under most circumstances but given the bigotry unleashed by an ally of his opponent, I’d do so in a heart-beat. Ugly.

HOPING FOR RECESSION: Another pundit praying for higher unemployment, lower growth, and collapsing demand is Robert “Crazy Bob” Kuttner. He only likes booms when Democrats are in power. Here’s a classic of the genre. I should remind readers that Kuttner wrote the epic version of this type of piece back at the dawn of the 1990s, when he wrote a forecast of the coming decade’s economic fortunes for The New Republic. The piece was entitled, “The Abyss.”

ASHCROFT UNPLUGGED: Now his underlings have to sing for their supper?

LIBERAL MEDIA BIAS WATCH: Frank Rich recently described the notion of liberal media bias, as documented by Bernie Goldberg, as “ludicrous.” That’s the kind of remark one simply cannot find an adequate response to. So I defer to a young and fearless blogger, Patrick Ruffini. He did a quick statistical analysis of the use of the term “right-wing” in a couple of major papers. He concludes:

Since 1996, the Washington Post has used this loaded term more than twice as frequently as “left-wing.” References to “right-wing” increased in even-numbered election years when the political stakes were higher – 73.2% of the “-wing” references compared to 67.5% in non-electio
n years. This disparity was even more palpable at the New York Times, where 80.2% of the left-right mentions on the national news pages since 1996 have spotlighted the right. The research also found that the more loaded and derogatory the phrase, the more likely it was to be associated with the political right. The term “conservative” outpolled “liberal” by 66-34% in New York Times news page mentions, while the aforementioned “right-wing” clocked in at 80% in a similar measure. However, the term “right-wing extremist” was used at least six times as frequently than “left-wing extremist” (at 87.4% since ’96 in the Times).

These are not mild discrepancies. They’re huge discrepancies. Ruffini then tries another experiment. How do these papers characterize famous conservative, Jesse Helms, and famous liberal, Ted Kennedy? Drum-roll, please:

At the New York Times, 28.1% of the stories mentioning Jesse Helms also mentioned the word “conservative” while only 11.3% of the stories with Ted Kennedy in them mentioned the word “liberal.” At the politically savvier WaPo, both figures were higher, but there was still a disparity: 30.6% for Helms, 18.8% for Kennedy.

Liberal bias? Ludicrous!

UN SUCCESS-STORY D’UN BLOGGEUR: Le Monde puffs yours truly, among others. Oh the ignominy.

SCORE ONE FOR BRIT: Nice catch by Brit Hume today. All that Congressional whining about a “secret government,” about not being informed, and so on turns out to be so much hooey. That old pork-pig, Robert Byrd, even turned down a briefing on the issue last fall. And it was flagged in the papers at the time as well. Of course the real story is: when we’re under such a threat that the government sets up an underground bunker, don’t you think our representatives could think of something better to say than that they’re miffed they weren’t in on it?

This mantra, propagated by the anti-war left, turns out to be true. Not true in the sense that the anti-war voices are silenced. They are, if anything, grossly over-represented in the current media, compared to the culture as a whole. True in the sense that the left is using whatever power it has to keep dissident voices silenced. In Britain, left-wing journalists are in the forefront of this, although they clearly have less skill and subtlety than their American peers. The New Statesman has run anti-Semitic images on its covers and this week has a columnist offering money for someone to assassinate president Bush. But when a former editor of the magazine, John Lloyd, wrote a letter to the editor criticizing knee-jerking anti-Americanism, the letter was rejected. The London Review of Books also turned down a pro-Blair essay by David Marquand, because the far-left editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, couldn’t in good conscience run any praise of Tony Blair’s conduct of the war. Marquand and Lloyd are not minor figures. They are leading lions of the sensible left in Britain. And they are not even allowed to praise a Labour prime minister! Censorship rules. And the left, as usual, is the most expert at it.

“EXCORIATING DISH”: Canada’s Globe and Mail has one of the best recent pieces on blogging and what it means for journalism. This site’s a favorite.

U.S. says it’s prepared to fight harder for victory against terrorists; Sharon ups the ante against Palestinian terror; Cheney takes on Daschle; chastity hip again in L.A.; London’s emailers meanest in Britain.

THE TEST FOR DASCHLE: Several of you have emailed to say that my suspicion of Tom Daschle’s anti-war murmurings is unfounded. Bryan Keefer has a similar argument in Salon. It goes roughly like this: Daschle is simply voicing loyal criticism designed to ensure that this war is conducted effectively. He should be defended, not quashed. Effective questioning of the war is essential to its success. In theory, I agree with the emailers. As a matter of principle, it seems to me that constructive war-criticism is not only defensible but vital. It’s one advantage a democracy has against a tyranny in any war. Such questions are how Churchill replaced Chamberlain months after the war against Hitler was initiated. But Daschle’s statements, when you peruse them, simply don’t add up to that. Upon close inspection, he has nothing substantive to say. If he said, say, that we need to go easy on Iraq, or that North Korea is a side-show, or that Iran should be engaged not confronted, then I might disagree with him strongly, but I certainly wouldn’t question the appropriateness of his comments. But he didn’t say anything that specific. He made no positive proposals. He simply whined about the vagueness of war aims (which are anything but vague), complained of the lack of exit strategies (Guess what? In a war on terrorism, there are no exit strategies) and generally tested the anti-war waters. I respect a good opposition raising important, concrete questions about tactics and strategy in a war. But I suspect whiners who are angling for political advantage at the possible expense of this country’s security, and our troops’ safety. That’s what Daschle now is. He should make real arguments, advance substantive criticisms, or shut up. But he’s too cowardly to do the former and too opportunistic to do the latter.

DASCHLE AND VIETNAM: “The point people miss when talking about Daschle’s comments isn’t what he said (which was a pretty timid opposition to the anti-terrorism policies of the Bush administration) but what he will say if we let him get away with it. Remember, the original anti-Vietnam voices were just as timid as Daschle is now.” For more of this debate, see the letters page.

FUMBLING IRAN AND TORA BORA: So you want real criticism of the conduct of the war? Try Michael Ledeen’s bracing concern that the state of the union speech is in danger of sounding hollow if we don’t back it up with real action on Iran. Also try reading this useful account of how Osama bin Laden got away from Tora Bora in the Christian Science Monitor. We need more of this and less of Daschle.

CIVILIAN CASUALTIES: A useful round-up of the sad truth that there have probably been around 1000 civilian casualties in the Afghanistan war so far. That’s one quarter of the number cited by some anti-war activists. But obviously a grim reminder that no war spares the innocent and an important spur to attempting to keep those numbers as low as possible.

BOOK CLUB UPDATE: A bumper start to the new book club discussion – and a couple of points. Some of you are dismayed that I’ve picked a book critical of president Bush by a New York Times reporter. But this is not Oprah. Picking a book to read and argue about is not an endorsement or a promotional love-fest. It’s an opportunity for debate. And Frank Bruni has agreed to answer your questions and join in the fun. Give him your worst! I know he can take it. It’s also not a book of theory, like the last one. That’s deliberate. We’ll have future books that are more intellectual, but this one opens up real questions about presidential character and history as well as the role of the press. For what it’s worth, it’s also highly readable and I’m enjoying it immensely so far. We’ll also be doubling the number of reader contributions this time, and I’ll be taking a more aggressive role in steering the debate. So join the experiment. And support the site at the same time. For basic info on how the club works, click here.

IT’S TWUE! IT’S TWUE!: Does Slate’s usually sassy ad reviewer Rob Walker really have to ask why a black actor is featured in a sketch where he pulls down his pants to make a “big impression?” I’m beginning to think we should start a clueless white straight guy award in his honor.

MY KIND OF REPUBLICAN: Dude, this guy deserves an award. It’s a free country.

THE CHURCH’S PRIORITIES: “Last week there was an editorial cartoon in the Times-Picayune that depicted a priest going to confession. He said “Bless me father, I like to touch little boys.” The confessor said “Oh thank God, I thought you were going to say you wanted to ordain women!” It would have been funny had it not been so close to the truth.” More of this debate on the letters page.

PRAYING FOR RECESSION: In Chicago last weekend, it was amusing to watch the weather anchors prepare for a major snow-storm. They’ve mastered a very difficult maneuver – which is saying that they’re dreading the storm, that it could be terrible, that everyone should stay inside, that it could get really brutal, while they’re obviously enjoying every minute of it. 18 inches of snow! Woohoo! Or at least that’s what their facial expressions say. The reverse syndrome can be observed among liberal economists and pundits writing about the recession ending. They’re obliged to sound cheerful, but, deep inside, they’re clearly hating it. Paul Krugman’s recent column was a classic of the genre. It will kill him to see people getting jobs, earning money, buying stocks, while Bush is president. Similarly, the New York Times buried the big news last week of revised GDP numbers in the fourth quarter on the second page of the business section. Yes, I know this recovery could well be anemic. But there’s still something wonderful about the way some people just can’t bear to hear the good news. If you find any other great examples of lib
eral pundits failing to sound cheerful about the recovery, please send them my way.

RALL’S NEW LOW: Just when you thought this America-hating sicko couldn’t sink any lower, he goes and produces a cartoon like this.

LABOUR VERSUS BLAIR AND THE WAR: Some 86 percent of Labour Party members of parliament oppose extending the war to Iraq. Tony Blair deserves even more credit for getting off the fence on this one and taking a stand. Maybe if some of those MPs could read the intelligence briefings Blair reads, they might just change their minds.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “A lifetime of politics was coming to an end; yet a newspaper strike made it certain that Churchill’s resignation would receive little public coverage. On April 4 he and his wife gave a farewell dinner at No. 10 to the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. At noon on the following day he held his last Cabinet meeting, wishing his colleagues ‘all good fortune in the difficult, but hopeful, situation which they had to face.’ He next saw the Ministers not in the Cabinet telling them. ‘Man is spirit’, and leaving them with one piece of advice, ‘Never be separated from the Americans.'” -from Martin Gilbert’s “Churchill: A Life.”

Number 8. Join the book club by buying the book here.

Was Daschle’s snipe at the war an opening salvo? Or a minor gripe? My take posted opposite.

Number 10.

Since we posted Frank Bruni’s still-unreleased Ambling Into History as our March Book Club choice late last night, it has zoomed to number 1 on Amazon.com’s “Movers and Shakers” list, up 2900% today. At 7am yesterday the title was ranked number 516 overall. As of 3pm today, it’s jumped to number 15. Not bad for a little website and its readers. Stay tuned.

Al Qaeda fights on in Afghanistan; New York Times – Saudi Arabia “peace plan” suddenly not in spotlight; Riordan up Walnut Creek; Blair pledges to take war to Baghdad.

REALITY CHECK: Terrifying news from Time magazine and the Washington Post about the possibility – I’d say probability – that al Qaeda terrorists may soon have the capability of detonating a nuclear or dirty nuclear bomb in a major American city. In the words of the Post,

The consensus government view is now that al Qaeda probably has acquired the lower-level radionuclides strontium 90 and cesium 137, many thefts of which have been documented in recent years. These materials cannot produce a nuclear detonation, but they are radioactive contaminants. Conventional explosives could scatter them in what is known as a radiological dispersion device, colloquially called a “dirty bomb.” The number of deaths that might result is hard to predict but probably would be modest. One senior government specialist said “its impact as a weapon of psychological terror” would be far greater.

This war is not over. It has barely begun. That’s why I took umbrage last week at the usual Democratic Party gripes about the direction of the war. Tom Daschle has argued that we don’t know what the exact goals are, or why the war is being expanded. What planet is Daschle on? The state of the union address was quite explicit. The aim of this war is now what it always has been – to defend the United States and other free countries from massive acts of war threatened against us, including the use of weapons of mass destruction. How is that unclear?

CHARACTER AND THE PRESIDENCY: “Ambling Into History,” released from embargo tomorrow, is our next book club pick. It’s the new campaign book from the New York Times’ Frank Bruni, about the nature of candidate Bush before he was allegedly transformed by September 11. The book is already the buzz of Washington, criticized by Bushies, defended by some journalists, revealing heretofore unknown details of the president’s rambunctious frat-boy persona on the campaign trail. (Don’t worry that it’s only released tomorrow. If you order today, it will be shipped from tomorrow onward.) Why pick it? I think the conundrum of Bush – of who he really is – is still one of the most disputed questions in our public life, and one we need to debate further. Bruni was Bush’s favorite campaign journalist and easily the least anti-Bush reporter of the liberal press. He has credibility. And the questions he raises are good ones. Is Bush’s wild past reconcilable with his sober present? Can a jokester lead a war? More broadly, how do character and the presidency interact?

CHARACTER AND THE PRESS: The book is also about the press and how it covers, invents, distorts and condescends to politics. This is a constant theme of this site and this book is as good a way as any to investigate it. How did the press under-estimate Bush before September 11? How close to reality is the current practice of campaign coverage? And of course, the advantage of this book club format is that you get to talk back. Turn the tables on the author. If the book enrages or amuses you, you get a chance to grill Bruni directly on his methods and arguments and facts. If you think he’s biased, here’s your chance to expose it. Of course, you may well decide to direct the debate in another direction altogether. Go ahead. Make my month. On a practical note, this time round we’ll be increasing levels of reader participation and structuring the discussion around themes, rather than chapters. And don’t worry about getting the book in time. Amazon has been warned – and the discussion starts March 20, to give everyone a chance to read it before the debate begins. I’ve already started – and it’s a very lively, even gripping, read so far. So join in. Click here to buy the book and thereby join the club. (British readers click here.) See you for the discussion in a couple of weeks.

THE CHURCH’S NEW LOW: I got a distressing email yesterday from a priest friend of mine. Recently ordained, he no longer wears his clerical clothes on the street because of routine abuse. A fellow priest he knows recently got spat on in New York City; another was asked, “What are you up to, father? Trawling for little boys?” This kind of story breaks my heart. What the child-abusing priests have done is not simply commit a heinous crime; they have smeared by association many, many other good priests. That is Cardinal Law’s legacy – and it is the present pope’s as well. Anyone who believes that this policy of defending and sheltering child-molesters was a local or limited phenomenon has no idea how the Church works. This was a policy organized in detail, and approved at every level of the church hierarchy. Rome knew. Of course they knew. And they knew that what they were doing was evil.

IT GETS WORSE: And what is Rome’s reaction? So far, if this New York Times article is accurate, the conservative cabal at the heart of the Vatican intends to find a scapegoat. That scapegoat is the gay clergy. Here’s the relevant passage from the Times:

The conservatives shift the focus elsewhere, saying that sexual abuse cases in the church mainly involve teenage boys, not young children, and for that reason they say the priesthood should become less welcoming to gays. Priests who said this made clear they were not suggesting that gays were any more likely to be pedophiles. But they said most of the sex cases being investigated did not fit the classic definition of pedophilia. With this in mind, Pope John Paul II’s spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, questioned whether ordinations of gays were even valid. “People with these inclinations just cannot be ordained,” Dr. Navarro-Valls said in an interview, citing canon law but wading into what he knew was sensitive territory. “That does not imply a final judgment on people with homosexuality,” added Dr. Navarro-Valls, a Spanish layman who is a psychiatrist by training. “But you cannot be in this field.”

Charming, huh? Rather than tackle its own culpability for protecting child-molesters, the Vatican decides to use the ancient slur of associating pedophiles with homosexuals to deflect blame, at the same time smearing the many excellent, holy and dedicated gay priests. This is simply disgusting and enraging. And the fomenting of this bigotry – the deployment of it as a weapon to protect its own sordid record – is yet another sign that something is clearly rotten at the heart of the contemporary church. Its offense is rank. It smells to heaven. After reading this smear, I couldn’t go to mass today. How can I worship at a church which propagates hate and bigotry to defend itself from moral responsibility? How can anyon
e?

MORE VATICAN SPIN: Another pernicious trope from the reactionaries is the notion that the pedophile explosion was a function of liberalizing attitudes in the Church after the Second Vatican Council. Reliable Vatican-defender Richard John Neuhaus tells the Boston Herald that “(The) counterculture had made significant inroads in the lives of the churches, including the Catholic Church,” in the 1960s, and that’s the origin of the pedophile crisis. This will be part of the Vatican’s defensive conservative crouch on this issue. It’s nonsense. As the Herald piece points out, the majority of pedophiles in a Boston seminary were enrolled before liberalizing attitudes prevailed and in a very conservative environment. The proportion of convicted pedophiles peaks in 1960 – before Vatican II – and in 1968 (from a far smaller population) – not exactly proof of Neuhaus’s case. As far back as 1960, the proportion of pedophiles in that seminary was seven times the average for the general population. Blame that on liberalization, if you can. But the problem goes far further back and far deeper than an easy ideological assertion.

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “[T]here is still scant evidence to suggest that [president Bush] condones the idea of a free press.” – Frank Rich, New York Times, suggesting the president disagrees with the First Amendment.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “[P]olitico-literary intellectuals are not usually frightened of mass opinion. What they are frightened of is the prevailing opinion within their own group. At any given moment there is always an orthodoxy, a parrot-cry which must be repeated, and in the more active section of the Left the orthodoxy of the moment is anti-Americanism. I believe part of the reason … is the idea that if we can cut our links with the United States we might succeed in staying neutral in the case of Russia and America going to war … There is also the rather mean consideration that the Americans are not really our enemies, that they are unlikely to start dropping atomic bombs on us or even to let us starve to death, and therefore we can safely take liberties with them if it pays to do so.” – George Orwell, prophetic again, from his review, “In Defence of Comrade Zilliacus”.

BUCKLEY ON BROCK: A nice riff on liberal piety.

A bumper crop of almost unrelenting criticism.

Pakistani Islamo-fascists fight back; recession could be mildest ever; ABC disses Ted Koppel; the Queen breeds a tri-color corgi.

THE DEMOCRATS TAKE ON THE WAR: Now, it’s official. I don’t think it’s an accident that the Democrats have launched an attack on the war’s direction the day it becomes clear that the recession, even if it existed in the first place, is now history. Enron didn’t stick; no one cares about the GAO vs. Cheney; Bush has neutralized the education issue. Daschle figures he has no choice but to risk everything to undermine the war in order to gain some political traction against the president. So far, it’s been under-stated – the usual Daschle-like mealy-mouthed worries about future conflicts. But the shift in tactics is real. Liberal opinion leaders are egging the Dems on. Take a look at this piece in the Washington Monthly, or this piece by Anna Quindlen, or this piece from “Crazy Bob” Kuttner. Get the picture? The anti-war left is back with a vengeance. And the battle to protect this country has only just begun.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “Who wouldn’t have handled things the way he handled them after September 11? I mean come on. It’s pretty cut and dry. Any president would have handled it the same way. I think he’s a treacherous motherfucker, frankly, and not to be trusted. … I don’t care for him, and certainly the gay community – or anyone who cares about human rights – shouldn’t care for him. He shouldn’t be there, he wasn’t elected by us – they stole the election. That’s the seed level of this administration. They shouldn’t have been there from the beginning.” – Sandra Bernhard, “comedian,” in Metro Weekly, D.C. (The magazine is not online.)

A NEW LOW IN MEDIA BIAS: A new documentary on the Clinton scandals – brought to you by Joe Conason, and funded by Harry Thomason. All that’s needed is for CBS to broadcast it.

STEYN NAILS IT: “In Saturday’s Independent, [Robert] Fisk reflected on the death of the man [Daniel Pearl] described as his friend: “But why was he killed? Because he was a Westerner, a ‘Kaffir’? Because he was an American? Or because he was a journalist?” Anyone spot the missing category? It’s the one Omar Sheikh used, and the one acknowledged by Daniel Pearl in his last words: “Yes, I am a Jew …” Fisk can’t bring himself to use the word in the entire column.” – from Mark Steyn’s latest column. Steyn is onto something here. When I was in England, I listened to the BBC a lot to hear how they were reporting the war. In every case I heard when the story obviously required recognition that pathological anti-Semitism was behind some action in the Muslim world – Iran’s refusal to accept a new British ambassador because he was a Jew, Daniel Pearl’s capture and murder because he was a Jew – the BBC either ignored it, or buried it. Of course well-meaning journalists did exactly the same thing in the 1930s. But we know better now, don’t we?

DUBYA IN DRAG: Well, Giuliani did it. But he didn’t look half as good as this.

I LOVE MY iPOD: But I never realized they were God’s gift to thieves.

THE NEXT BOOK CLUB SELECTION IS …: Don’t forget to check in on Monday to find out. It’ll be quite a change of pace.