Month: October 2002

It seems to me that the critical part of President Bush’s elegantly constructed speech last night was his rebuttal of the only credible and responsible line of criticism from the Democrats:

Some have argued that confronting the threat from Iraq could detract from the war against terror. To the contrary, confronting the threat posed by Iraq is crucial to winning the war on terror … Terror cells and outlaw regimes building weapons of mass destruction are different faces of the same evil. Our security requires that we confront both. And the United States military is capable of confronting both.

As brief as this discussion is, it’s persuasive. When anti-war Democrats argue that we cannot “focus” on both Al Qaeda and Iraq, they make no sense at all. Philosophically, pre-empting terrorists from getting weapons of mass destruction must logically include preventing the allies of terrorists from harboring such weapons. And practically, I’ve yet to read a single, credible military account of why we cannot both disarm and remove Saddam and keep up the pressure on Al Qaeda at home and abroad. The whole “focus” issue is as fake as the whole “delay” issue, as Charles Krauthammer deftly pointed out yesterday. If Saddam has weapons, if he won’t give them up, and if such weapons are a threat to the region and to the U.S., what possible reason is there for delaying? These “arguments” aren’t really arguments, of course; they’re desperate rhetorical roadblocks thrown up by some Democrats terrified to face their responsibilities in a time of war. The last phony anti-war argument was that President Bush had yet to “make the case” for war against Iraq, as if grown-ups didn’t have the capacity to make their own minds up on the issue without constant guidance from the commander-in-chief. But that surely must now be in tatters as a point, since the president has made speech after speech in the last year clearly laying out the rationale for the war on terror, a rationale that has always included defanging Saddam. And now he’s gone and laid it out in full, at length and in detail in prime time. And what did the networks do, the same networks that routinely feature talking heads bravely pronouncing that the president hasn’t made his case? They ignored him. Of course they did. What losers and sophists.

SULLIVAN, HITCHENS AND ORWELL: Well, in the end we couldn’t resist. I’ve just finished reading Christopher Hitchens’ lively, witty and oddly moving defense of the life and work of George Orwell: “Why Orwell Matters.” If you’ve read all of Orwell (and I’m getting close) or have barely read him at all, the book is both a wonderful introduction to the man’s work and a stimulating overview of all the issues he raises. Orwell’s ability to confound both right and left, his tenacious honesty, his pellucid prose, his power of moral reasoning, his ability to distinguish between an argument and a feeling – all these come through loud and clear in this little book. Buy it and read it and then join Hitch and me for a weeklong conversation at the end of the month about what Orwell means, and why his example still shines, perhaps more brightly than ever, in an era of war and ideological conflict. Buying the book through this site also helps support us financially, so enrich your mind and support this blog by getting the book today. Click here to purchase.

AIDS SCAM, CTD: We’ve already seen how the attack on the pharmaceutical companies’ intellectual property rights has led to a stark deceleration in HIV research. Now comes news of yet another unintended consequence of well-meant anti-AIDS measures. When you give large numbers of anti-HIV meds to Africa, where most cannot be dispensed effectively in the first place, it’s not surprising that others might find a better use for the pills. Why not re-export them to Europe for a tidy profit? That’s what’s happening now, as this story indicates. So we’ve hurt AIDS research, barely helped any significant numbers of Africans, and now given criminals a whole new career in drug trafficking. Good work, no?

McDERMOTT WATCH: Here he is, marching in front of a poster that has the word “terrorist” plastered over President Bush’s face. Nice to know that his kowtowing to Baghdad’s tyranny is also reflected in a complete moral equivalence about the difference between Saddam and Bush. This is one face of the anti-war left. And it’s depraved.

A BLUE-PRINT: One of the clearest plans for post-Saddam Iraq I’ve yet read.

MORE ISLAMIST DEATH-THREATS: Yet another person daring to criticize the backwardness of Islamism with regard to women, gays and individual freedom in general has received a death-threat. This time it’s a Somali immigrant woman in Holland, and she has just had to go into hiding to protect herself. “This is nothing new – just think of Salman Rushdie,” Secil Arda, the head of a Turkish women’s group, told Radio Netherlands. “Some people have the courage to say something, to give their opinion. I consider our fight a milestone in the process of emancipation. Without this quest we would never have change.” After Fortuyn’s murder and Delanoe’s stabbing, this takes courage. Why aren’t these brave liberals more firmly defended by the Western left? I guess we know the answer to that, don’t we?

ANTI-CATHOLICISM WATCH:“Sexual abuse is disgusting, but it’s not as harmful as the grievous mental harm of bringing children up Catholic in the first place.” – Richard Dawkins, as transcribed in the Dubliner.

ROTH AND NARCISSISM: A reader nails it:

“I finally stayed several months in New York, where I kept a studio. For me New York had become interesting again because it was a town in crisis, particularly in the weeks that followed when everyone was expecting another attack. It was a strange time and the first time for years that New York interested me.” – Philip Roth. Who is this guy to accuse ANYONE of narcissism? I just plowed through “The Human Stain”, which was a piece of crap. This windbag can’t stomach people singing “God Bless America” in honor of firemen and cops who gave their lives in the 9/11 attack (which, mercifully, didn’t interrupt Roth’s swim time), but he’ll devote an entire novel to justifying Clinton’s tryst with Monica Lewinsky?

Ah, yes. Roth reminds me of all those New Yorkers who spent the summer of 2001 lamenting that the city had
lost its “edge” under Giuliani. Well, I’m just sorry 3,000 people had to die for Roth to find the city “interesting” again.

AH, THOSE STEREOTYPES: At the Eagle in New York City on Saturday night, I bumped into a man I’d previously met in Provincetown and came to ask him what he’s doing these days. He laughed. “Well, actually, I’m producing a new series for PBS on the history of the Broadway musical.?Can anyone beat that?

MEA MAXIMA CULPA: For the record, there have been three, not two, presidents elected without a plurality of the popular vote in American history: John Quincy Adams, with a mere 31 percent of the popular vote in 1824, Hayes with 48 percent in 1876 and Harrison’s 1888 squeaker with 47.8 percent. Thanks for your relentless and voluminous capacity for fact-checking my ass.

Mea culpa on the sentence in my latest column for the Sunday Times that reads as follows: “[Bush is] the first president who never had a majority of the popular vote.” A lot of presidents have not had a majority. What I meant was that he didn’t win a “plurality,” something that has happened twice before in America. I’m sure most of you know what I meant, but for the rest, my apologies.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think I coined that phrase. Good to see the meme is beginning to propagate:

South Park Republicans are true Republicans, though they do not look or act like Pat Robertson. They believe in liberty, not conformity. They can enjoy watching The Sopranos even if they are New Jersey Italians. They can appreciate the tight abs of Britney Spears or Brad Pitt without worrying about the nation’s decaying moral fiber. They strongly believe in liberty, personal responsibility, limited government, and free markets. However, they do not live by the edicts of political correctness.

This kid is onto something.

RIGHT-WING ENVY WATCH: Methinks Tom Tomorrow is jealous.

They won’t hear the New Jersey case and they won’t say why. Great call. Now the Republicans need to get on with the real task of persuading the voters to back Forrester. Not too hard a task.

KRUGMAN’S SECOND SCREW-UP: Having published an email as proof that Army secretary Thomas White was a “corporate evildoer,” without any firm evidence that the email was genuine, Paul Krugman has now gone one step further. He has violated the confidentiality of his source:

[A]lthough Leopold provided the e-mail on condition that his source, the former Enron executive, not be named, the Times published the name Friday after Krugman passed a copy to a colleague with the name only partially scratched out. “I am sick to my stomach … I have screwed up very seriously,” Krugman told Leopold by e-mail. Says Leopold: “The Times broke its promise to me… I felt like the Times news division sold me out.”

How many basic rules of journalism can you break in one story?

The Times does its best to spin their poll this morning. But the critical number is the 67 percent support for war against Iraq, despite the intense and relentless campaign by the elites at the Times and elsewhere to turn that number around. They have failed. Now they will try to change the subject.

EDWARDS VS. GORE: A smarter tack from the smarter candidate. Edwards’ criticism of Bush’s foreign policy strikes me as fatuous stuff. But by supporting the Iraq war so intently, Edwards has carved out a position of a far more credibility than the increasingly bitter Gore. And so his speech today should be seen less as a serious attack on Bush than as a statement that he is the true inheritor of Gore’s previous centrism in the Democratic Party. He’s wily, this guy. And flagging the speech to the Washington Post beforehand is worthy of Blair.

The mayor of Paris was the target of a murder attempt over the weekend. His assailant was a disgruntled young man, who was also a Muslim who objected to homosexuality. After the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, it seems that Europe’s gay leaders are becoming highly vulnerable to public violence. Fortuyn, of course, was murdered by a far leftist; mayor Delanoe was targeted by an anti-gay Muslim. But I wonder if these events will in any way cause the gay rights movement in Europe and here to re-think its proximity to the left and to multi-culturalism. It’s still almost taboo for gay people to publicly criticize Islamic hostility to homosexuals; in fact, it’s far more common to hear critics of Islamism being decried as racists among gay activists than to hear Islamic bigots being criticized for homophobia. Perhaps that will now begin to change, as it should. Can you imagine the fuss if an evangelical or fundamentalist Christian had tried to kill an openly gay politician? So why the double standard for the other religious right – among Muslims?

2000 FOR EVER?: With a knife-edge election, appeals to the Supreme Court, and Al Gore in yet more costume changes, has the 2000 election ever really stopped? Here’s my take.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “Language is always a lie; above all, public language. McCarthy used a certain language to hunt communists. That which was used against Clinton is a bit more sophisticated. As for Bush, it’s ventriloquists who make him speak.” – Philip Roth, speaking to the Daily Telegraph.

USEFUL IDIOT WATCH: “I left the lunch impressed with Fidel. He seems to me like a kind man who is more amiable and friendly than most politicians.” Yep, this twelve year-old could one day grow up to be another Nick Kristof.

THE UNECONOMIC BLOGOSPHERE: This little piece struck me as extremely persuasive – in fact, so persuasive I wish I hadn’t read it. It’s about how the Internet, for all its joys, has yet to show how it can possibly make money:

This destruction of value is what makes weblogs so important. We want a world where global publishing is effortless. We want a world where you don’t have to ask for help or permission to write out loud. However, when we get that world we face the paradox of oxygen and gold. Oxygen is more vital to human life than gold, but because air is abundant, oxygen is free. Weblogs make writing as abundant as air, with the same effect on price. Prior to the web, people paid for most of the words they read. Now, for a large and growing number of us, most of the words we read cost us nothing.

Read the entire article – at no cost.

MRS DUISENBERG, CTD: The wife of the European Central Bank president, Wim Duisenberg, and a passionate defender of the Palestinians, made a “six million” joke on radio. I noted her explosion last week. She’s now being sued for it. More evidence of what is wrong with Europe: a society in which anti-Semitism is increasingly common and an illiberal polity that makes its expression illegal.

THE MULLAHS’ NIGHTMARE: A report from the other Iran:

Down in the basement, a man with an uncanny resemblance to the Sgt Pepper period John Lennon is recording a CD. With him, in the hot, stuffy studio, is a bassist dressed in black, a drummer and a 10-year-old Afghan boy playing small tambour drums. Behind the glass, a sound engineer is flicking switches and twiddling knobs. A girl in jeans, T-shirt and trainers is slouched on a sofa with a young man. Two other girls are watching the session. Not having visited the underground before, I am taken aback. The girls are not wearing the full, officially decreed women’s dress code. This includes covering one’s hair for fear of “stimulating” any man who might see it.

And how much sooner will this revolution happen if we remove Saddam’s tyranny first.

THE SHIFTING CONSENSUS: One reason, I think, that president Bush hasn’t been blamed as badly as he might for the faltering economy is that most people don’t think his administration caused the recession; and that few Democrats have really offered a major alternative to his current policy. That’s the catch with Paul Krugman’s constant complaint about the tax cut: wouldn’t revoking it hurt weakened demand even further? The Washington Post’s editorial on Al Gore’s latest piece of opportunism is a straw in the wind, I think. Here’s the key section:

But President Bush’s main economic policy — the large tax cut of last year — was not responsible for any of the current damage. Indeed, given the twin shocks of 9/11 and the post-Enron stock market decline, the short-term stimulus created by the tax cuts has turned out to be fortuitously well timed. To be sure, parts of the tax cut that have yet to be implemented, especially the repeal of the estate tax, are unaffordable and ought to be repealed. It’s also true that the administration’s response to Latin America’s financial woes has been confused. But to blame the weak American economy on Mr. Bush is nonsense.

Seems irrefutable to me. And I agree with the Post about the estate tax.

A reader sends in the following mea culpa from former New York Times editorial muckety-muck Max Frankel about the Times’ Osirak editorial. It’s from Frankel’s memoir, “The Times of My Life and My Life with the Times:”

Among my major mistakes I also list a 1981 editorial denouncing Israel for its ‘surgical’ air strike against an Iraqi laboratory working on nuclear weapons. I have never felt comfortable about the effort of the so-called major powers — meaning China, Russia, France, Britain, and the United States — to monopolize the world’s supply of nuclear arms; if they have behaved more responsibly than some lesser powers, it is precisely because they possess those weapons and have good reason to fear their use. When Israel, an unacknowledged nuclear power, staged a surprise attack on Iraq to disrupt Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program, it seemed to me to be invoking an impermissibly aggressive right of ‘self-defense.’ Should a Pakistani attack on India have been similarly tolerated and celebrated? My principle was sound but also piously unrealistic, as Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and unprovoked missile attacks against Israel demonstrated ten years later. As I should have remembered from reading E. B. White in high school, it is folly to hold nations to a standard of ‘law’ in an anarchic world. Better to acknowledge the jungle until we reach a higher stage of civilization, or at least a world government.

You see? People do live and learn. It’s just powerful institutions like the Times that don’t.

HOW CLEAN IS KRUGMAN? You guys are tougher on him than I am. But this email makes some solid points:

To have truly “come clean” Krugman would have had to admit that the gist of his September 17 column was almost entirely lacking factual support. When he concedes ONLY that he “erred by citing” a spurious email, Krugman admits ONLY that a single piece of evidence supporting his allegations against White was dubious, and he leaves the implication that his allegations are sufficiently supported by other evidence. But the nonexistent email was, in fact, THE crucial piece of evidence underlying every one of the several damning charges he made against White in the September 17 column. Therefore, Krugman’s acknowledging the unreliability of that crucial piece of evidence – while leaving the allegations themselves unretracted – is actually WORSE than Krugman’s original error, for which he could at least claim to have relied upon evidence he honestly believed at the time to be credible. Now that Krugman knows that the crucial evidence his charges relied upon was not credible, if he had any journalistic integrity, he would have retracted all those charges including the allegation that White, “fully aware of what his division was up to,” was “intimately involved” in the “biggest of several deals that allowed Mr. White to ‘hide the loss'” and the allegation that by “maintaining the illusion of success,” White was “able to sell [his] stock at good prices to naxefve victims.” These allegations hinged on the validity of the infamous email.

“CHERISHED ABSTRACT PRINCIPLE”: The New Republic takes a stand:

All of which is to say, you can argue that it’s not fair to allow Democrats to sub in Frank Lautenberg at this late date. You can argue that it violates some cherished abstract principle like rule of law. But, please, spare us the gloom-and-doom talk about what future elections holds if this precedent stands. The answer is nothing appreciably different from the present.

Noam responds to the critics here.

Michael Ledeen’s final response to his critics and fans is now up on the Book Club page.

The invaluable Jeffrey Goldberg presents what is to my mind an unarguable case for removing Saddam from power in Slate. But his real discovery is a New York Times editorial of June 9, 1981. It concerned the Israelis’ pre-emptive strike against Saddam’s Osirak nuclear plant. Under the headline, “Israel’s Illusion,” the Times declared:

Israel’s sneak attack on a French-built nuclear reactor near Baghdad was an act of inexcusable and short-sighted aggression. Even assuming that Iraq was hellbent to divert enriched uranium for the manufacture of nuclear weapons, it would have been working toward a capacity that Israel itself acquired long ago.

There you have it: the moral equivalence, the short-sightedness, the moral preening, all disguising a fantastic error of judgment. If Saddam had had that nuclear capacity, there would have been no Gulf War, or one with disastrous consequences. The Times, of course, never learns. But this time, the security of the United States is at stake. We cannot let ourselves be led by the deluded and the defeatist any more.

Okay, so my beloved Powerbook crashed for the second time today. After backing up all my files, I took it down to the Apple store in Soho, New York City. Actually, “store” doesn’t capture what that place is like. It’s a church. The clean, spare lines, the vaulted glass ceiling, the large posters of Martin Luther King Jr and John Lennon, the illuminated perspex stairs that ascend toward the tabernacle … and the reverent hush of the trendoids who bustle there. I almost found myself reflexively genuflecting. I took my frayed laptop – not even a year old – to the “Genius” desk and had a very helpful guy review my case. It’s hopeless. The hard drive seems completely screwed and it has to be replaced entirely. It makes strange whirring and clicking sounds all the time. I won’t see it again for ten days. There’s nothing I can do in the meantime but use my friends’ computers to update the Dish and do all the work I usually do on a Thursday, my busiest day of the week, on the hotel p.c. Am I complaining as a relatively public switcher from p.c.s to a Mac? Not entirely. I’m sure all sorts of computers break down like this (although I never had a p.c. that did). Maybe it was the dank air in Provincetown that did it in; or my ceaseless use of iTunes. But it’s a little embarrassing for Apple to have such a high-profile “switch” ad campaign going on and have one of their most enthusiastic switchers see his computer collapse from mechanical problems within a few months.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “With regimes like the Iraqi one, there will be no peace in the Middle East. You cannot contain a regime like Saddam Hussein’s. That was a mistake of the West. So the question is: Is America ready to face up to the mistakes it made in ’91 and in the ’80s? Are the Americans ready to support democracy? Because people like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden grew out of the Middle East. They are not products of Afghanistan.” – Thomas von der Osten-Sacken, a leading German expert and activist on Iraq. This interview is persuasive and riveting, and also puts the lie to the notion that there is a single, unified “German” view on Iraq. It also highlights, I think, one of the weirdnesses of the current debate. That weirdness is that the anti-war Left’s partly justified argument that the U.S. has been implicated in the past in Saddam’s disgusting regime leads them nevertheless to argue that we should do nothing today to rectify that. Why not? Aren’t we, in particular, responsible? Shouldn’t we, in particular, set it right? It’s a telling feature of the anti-war left that they never use their criticism of American foreign policy in the past to advocate a more aggressive and progressive American foreign policy for today. Which leads to the question of whether their horror of tyranny and evil abroad is what really motivates them – or whether hatred of America and what it stands for is their unifying thread.

KRUGMAN COMES CLEAN: On the Thomas White email. And good for him. Maybe he’ll temper his anti-Bush dyspepsia in future. Yeah, right. By the way, I agree with almost all his column today. What I don’t understand is why an argument advocating boosting government spending and reflating the economy in a dangerously deflationary time should include reversing planned tax cuts. Isn’t that self-negating? I’d be in favor of more government rebates for lower income people today, as Krugman recommends, but I see no reason, in a period where deflation is a potential problem, why we shouldn’t have tax cuts as well. Perhaps Krugman’s hatred of Bush’s tax cut has blinded him to the fact that so far, it has clearly helped us avoid a deeper recession and, if expanded, could head off deflation as well.

WHAT THE ARABS REALLY THINK: “It is no secret that Washington’s Arab allies have assured it in private that, as long as a diplomatic fig leaf is provided by the United Nations, they would do nothing to oppose military action against Saddam Hussein. Jordan has adopted its own version of diplomatic duplicity. It has issued appeals to Washington not to attack Iraq but is playing host to American troops in the context of military exercises clearly related to any future action against Saddam Hussein. Prince Hassan, King Abdallah’s uncle, has emerged as an active supporter of the Iraqi exile opposition groups, and even attended their conference in London last July.” – from another must-read, clear-eyed assessment of Arab political culture by Amir Taheri.

USEFUL IDIOT WATCH: Nick Kristof goes to Baghdad and finds people ready to attack the U.S. Quelle surprise! In a police state where the tiniest dissent on the tiniest matter can have you disappeared and tortured, Kristof deduces no support for a U.S. invasion. Let’s check in and see what happens if we do invade, shall we? We have long memories in the blogosphere, Nick. And little pity.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “I think Muhammed was a terrorist” – Jerry Falwell, dumb and crass as ever.

HEADLINE OF THE WEEK: “Some at racism conference urge reversal of decision to exclude non-blacks.” No, as Dave Barry might say, I’m not making this up.

AS.COM GETS RESULTS: Uh oh. Remember that military blog I referred you to? After I mentioned it, they got so swamped with emails of support they had to shut the site down. Sorry, guys. But you can still send them emails.

GORE’S LIES, CONTINUED: A devastating little dissection of his recent opportunism and deception from the centrist writers at Spinsanity.

JEB BUSH’S SENSE OF HUMOR: What to make of this story:

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush told a delegation of lawmakers that he had “some juicy details” about the sexual orientation of a missing Miami girl’s caretakers. During a meeting Wednesday, Bush implied that the two women, who had just been charged with fraud stemming from the investigation into Rilya Wilson’s disappearance, were lesbians. “As (Pamela Graham) was being arrested, she told her co-workers, ‘Tell my wife I’ve been arrested.’ The wife is the grandmother, and the aunt is the husband,” Bush explained, using his fingers to indicate quotation marks to emphasize the word “grandmother.” “Bet you don’t get that in Pensacola,” Bush told his guests, a group of lawmakers from Florida’s Panhandle.

Here’s what I make of it. Bush is pandering to a bunch of good ol’ boys whom he assumes are homophobes. I don’t believe Bush is a homophobe himself – but that only makes the pandering worse. I’d love to see him crack the same joke in the same room as Mary Cheney, the vice-president’s daughter. Maybe that would help him realize what a know-nothing bigot he sounds like. He still doe
sn’t get it, does he?