Will Saletan tries to argue that Bush’s tacking on Iraq is actually a brilliant strategy to get what he wants: a real war. Man, I hope Will is right (and he often is). Then again Will declared in the last election campaign that Bush was toast. What’s interesting to me is that this liberal mag, edited by my friend, Jake Weisberg, who also published “Bushisms”, is publishing pieces that make Bush seem like a master chess player. I have a feeling that the truth is somewhere in between.
PRIVACY CONTINUED: Eugene Volokh has an excellent legal follow-up to the story of pro-life activists taking photos of women seeking abortions. It looks like it’s constitutional – as most invasions of privacy already are.
THE NEW AFGHANISTAN?: Islamo-fascist strikes against soft Western targets; a safe harbor for al Qaeda refugees; nuclear brinksmanship with India. It seems to me Pakistan is slowly moving toward the axis of evil. And we’re neutral between them and the Indians? Safire usefully helps you figure it all out today. I think he’s too soft on Musharraf.
THAT BRITISH GIFT: Great dinner tonight with old Oxford pals – now all Economist machers. But the highlight was a classic understatement from a fellow Brit diner. “What I want to know,” she asked, “is whether anyone had ever heard or written about Pim Fortuyn before his recent difficulties.” Ah yes. Getting shot in the head can be frightfully awkward at times.
DANCING QUEEN: Okay, so I couldn’t resist. I won’t say who forwarded this to me. But you’d be surprised.
POSEUR ALERT: “And anyway I am a very old-fashioned kind of homosexual, or rather sexual minoritarian, I am the kind of homosexual sexual minoritarian who believes that sexual minoritarian liberation is inextricable from the grand project of advancing Federally protected civil rights, and cannot be separated from the liberation struggles of other oppressed populations, cannot be achieved isolated from the global struggle for the abolition of the legacy of colonialism, cannot be achieved isolated from the global resistance movement against militarism and imperialism and racism and fundamentalisms of all sorts, the global movement for the furtherance of social and economic justice, the global multiculturalist, anti-tribalist identity-based movement for pluralist democracy, I am the kind of homosexual who believes that all liberation has an inexpungeable aspect that is collective, communitarian, and also millenarian, utopian, which is to say rooted in principle, theory, dream, imagination, in the absolute non-existence of the Absolute and in the eternal existence of the Alternative, of the Other, in the insistently unceasingly mutable character of our character, I am an old-fashioned sort of homosexual/sexual minoritarian and I think if you wanted a gay commencement speaker in this dark day and age you might have chosen one of those newfangled neo-con gay people with their own website and no day job.” – socialist playwright Tony Kushner, Vassar Commencement address. Ouch.
The Dish 