No brainer, I guess. But Charlie Cook has the evidence.
AIDS AND MORALITY: I’m glad, in a way, the Sunday Times asked me to write about AIDS as a whole last week. It forced me to confront something deeply troubling. I’m completely convinced by the evidence that the free market has done more to cure illness, develop drugs, and improve medicine than any socialistic enterprise. I know I’m alive today because of this. And so are countless others. I’m also aware that profits for drug companies are essential to keep the drug innovation going. So confiscating these profits, or showering complex drug regimens in regions unable to use them effectively (if at all) are in effect non-solutions to the global plague. And yet I completely see the opposite imperative. Millions are dying. The technology exists to save them. Screw the expense and the consequences and the enormous difficulties – we have to turn the developing world into a first world medical success story. Perhaps we’ll find some middle way in which a real commitment to the developing world will be allied with an understanding of how markets work, how research is funded, and which methods work best in desperately poor regions. But that still leaves a pragmatic question: when to emphasize skepticism about easy solutions, and when to fight for ambitious ends? The difficulty, of course, is that AIDS simply reflects the broader, global context: that millions live far worse lives than we do in the West and far simpler means – clean drinking water, for example – might do more to save lives than elaborate HIV regimens. So why aren’t we doing that? When does our obligation to these others begin? And does a health crisis like this one change the entire equation and demand that we simply throw skepticism to the winds and do whatever we can? To be perfectly honest, my column last Sunday, though heartfelt, has been troubling my conscience. Perhaps this is one of those instances where prudence needs to be set aside. But judging whether that is appropriate demands a particular kind of prudence as well.
THOSE POST-NATIONALIST EUROS: Next time some annoying Belgian lectures you about why the U.S. is an old-fashioned nationalist power, unable to cede sovereignty to such enlightened bodies as the EU and the ICC, remind him of this.
HOW ANTI-GAY CONSERVATIVES WRECKED MARRIAGE: A sharp piece from Canada’s National Post, making the Rauchian point that social conservatives, in their desperate attempt to prevent gay marriage, have actually contributed to marriage’s collapse:
Rather than put gays on an equal footing with straights, in other words — in marriage as in other areas — the legislation equated marriage with shacking up. Had the government chosen to legalize gay marriage, it could have easily justified maintaining a separate legal status for married couples, as opposed to common-law: There is, after all, a world of difference between a formal commitment to live as one “till death do us part” and the mere fact of having shared a bed for 12 months. Instead, it sacrificed the supremacy of marriage to preserve a specious equality, even as it left a flagrant insult to gays on the books.
And now even this vandalism will be for naught, as the government must have known it eventually would be: It will have to change the definition of marriage anyway. Good. Maybe with the issue of discrimination against gays out of the way, we can get back to discriminating in favour of married people.
So, thanks to conservatives, Canadians have wrought havoc with marriage (30 percent of young couples now simply live together because they’re guaranteed the same benefits as marriage). And now that jurisprudence has recognized (as any rational analysis would) that denying 2 percent of the population a basic civil right is discriminatory, the Canadians will shortly have same-sex marriage anyway. Only now, it won’t mean or help as much. Well, done, guys. And American conservatives are doing all they can to get the worst of both worlds here as well.
THE THIRD WAY ENDETH: In perhaps the most important decision of its six years in office, the Blair government in Britain has reverted to the old socialist past. It has raised taxes and now it’s going to pour billions into public services. No real reforms needed. In a way, it’s clarifying. Labour cannot reform public services, cannot privatize them but cannot afford the political cost of their deterioration. So they’re back to tax and spend – big time. The danger, of course, is that the services don’t improve even then. Then the backlash will be intense and the Tories given another chance. My prediction: the British welfare state will barely exist in its current form in a decade’s time.
MAJOR LEAGUE BIAS: The New York Times conceded Friday another interesting error from Bush-hater Adam Clymer. Here’s the correction, picked up by an alert reader:
A Washington Talk article on July 1 about the political issues surrounding business corruption referred incorrectly to votes on House bills dealing with pensions and accounting reform. Many Democrats and almost all Republicans voted for final passage of both bills; the votes were not along party lines, or close to them.
Checking back through time, you find the following “news” from Clymer that the House had passed a pair of bills to protect worker pensions and improve corporate accountability on votes that were “nearly party line.” The votes were, in fact, wildly bipartisan, predominantly Republican-supported and the bills are now languishing in the Democratic-controlled Senate. Now how hard is it to report on votes in the House, which are publicly available, easily checked, and bleeding obvious? It isn’t hard at all. But Clymer got it wrong. This is not an innocent error: it’s an error of manifest ideological bias. The correction doesn’t quite capture this, as most don’t. So here’s a challenge to my readers. If you see a suspicious-seeming “correction” in the New York Times (or elsewhere), and find it to be not a simple mistake but an obvious function of ideological blinkers, check out the original article, and let me know.
CORRECTION: Pat Tillman isn’t the only NFL player to have gone to war instead of playing in the league. Here’s the dope on the handful of others.
GOLDSTEIN’S LATEST EXCUSE: In the gay Boston paper, Bay Windows, Richard Goldstein explains how he used a quote from my last book so out of context that its original meaning was actually reversed:
“That quote has been floating around for years,” Goldstein says. “I first came upon it more than a year ago and found it in several sources. There was no way that I could have known its actual derivation, especially since Sullivan never bothered to reveal it until now. He never corrected it. The first thing you learn as a public figure is to correct a misquote right away. I think it is very revealing that he chose the publication of my book to spring t
his trap. If you read the book you’ll see why.”
So his mistake is my fault? I’m supposed to track all the deliberate smears and lies from the far left all the time? And don’t you love the assertion: “There was no way that I could have known its actual derivation.” Has Goldstein thought of reading the actual book of the guy he’s lambasting?
The Dish 