Month: November 2002

Mr Raines had a heyday. Two full stories about a Washington Post scoop? Well, it’s forgivable. I’ll say it here loud and proud: Fox News is obviously biased toward the right. It’s simply loopy to pretend otherwise. Ailes’ attempt to deny the bleeding obvious is just pathetic. It’s like listening to O’Reilly pretend he’s in a no-spin zone. It’s embarrassing, and undermines their credibility on everything else. But I see no difference between Fox’s bias and, say, the New York Times’. And if you want evidence for that, then today’s two-story gloat is Exhibit A. (Good Raines suck-up, by the way, Alessandra. But to get MoDo’s op-ed space, we need more conspiracy theories.) In fact, I think the Times is marginally more skewed toward the left – to the extent of literally censoring the news, ignoring or rigging polls, making errors based on ideological bias, and generally turning the paper into a crib-sheet for Democratic activists – than Fox is to the right. But it’s a close call. Why doesn’t Fox just admit this and make a virtue out of it? “The Antidote to Liberal Bias” would be a good slogan. Then we’d all be able to stop laughing when the Foxies pretend to be neutral.

I’d say a camel, if he were lucky. Wouldn’t you?

One indication might be her position on abortion. But a perusal of her record shows her to have voted for any type of abortion anywhere any time for anyone. She even supports partial birth abortion. Conservative Catholic? If you have any data supporting this assertion of hers, please let me know. I’ve put a call in to her office asking for details. When I get any, I’ll report back.

WAS IT WORTH IT? Are you kidding? Here’s an account from the Guardian – yes, the Guardian – hailing American intervention in Afghanistan as a signal achievement against the forces of human darkness. Good for liberal Polly Toynbee for seeing what we eagles have long argued: that American military power is overwhelmingly a force for moral good in the world, and we should stop pretending otherwise. Here’s a typical paragraph:

At the Woman to Woman centre, 20 women of all ages were sitting on the floor, all them with burkas left hanging on pegs by the door. Despite the absence of outward change, were things getting better for them now that the Taliban had gone? There was a spontanteous chorus of cries, hands raised in the air, laughter, sighing, exclamations – my translator could not keep up with their energetic assertions that life had changed beyond recognition. This relative liberation – freedom to walk outside for many who had never left their one room in years – was hard to imagine. “I never saw the light of day in five years!” one widow said.

We need to remember one important thing: much of the anti-war left wanted to do nothing in Afghanistan. They were rightly ignored then. The same people need to be treated with extreme skepticism now.

THEOCONS VERSUS THE CHURCH: I tend to agree with this essay by George Weigel, defending war against Iraq within the Catholic Church’s just war tradition. He even argues that some clerics may not be the best candidates for figuring out questions of public morality:

There is a charism or gift of political discernment unique to the vocation of public service. That charism is not shared by bishops, moderators, rabbis, imams or inter-religious agencies. Moral clarity in a time of war demands moral seriousness from public officials. It also demands a measure of political modesty from religious leaders and public intellectuals, in the give-and-take of democratic deliberation.

Couldn’t agree more. But isn’t this a pretty flagrant dissent from Church teaching? And isn’t Weigel one of the key intellectual supporters of enforcing Church orthodoxy on everyone, especially in the academy, who dare to question official Church teachings? That’s one of my beefs with the theocons. They want strict orthodoxy on practical issues that have no deep moral meaning, like a celibate priesthood, but feel free to dissent openly on war, economics and social justice. Am I the only one to find their position just a little bit too easy?

WHY GAYS SHOULD STAY SILENT: An email from a rank and file soldier on the military gay ban. It speaks for itself. I’m sure the guy’s being honest; and I’m equally sure that antipathy toward gay men and a pathological fear of being “looked at” by them is common among military recruits. Here’s his email:

I’m afraid I must disagree with the separated gay officer. When he said that “the rank-and-file” had no problem with gay personnel, he was exercising in some wishful thinking. Perhaps, as an officer, he had blinders on. It is a definite truth that our officers are in many ways unaware of aspects of the enlisted culture.
I am the Navy “rank-and-file”, an E-5 with nine years of service. And, just so you don’t think I’m some kind of troublemaker, I also outrank my peers on ALL of my performance evaluations since I entered service.
I’m not saying it’s right, but most of my peers have a definite and obvious dislike of male homosexuals. Openly gay personnel would have a negative effect on good order and discipline and some of them would get HURT.
Most personnel I have met and worked with seem generally satisfied with current Navy policy (though some would surely like to see a return to openly violent attitudes against gays). Many people say that gays are “alright”, AS LONG AS THEY KEEP IT TO THEMSELVES. Then the discussions degenerate into descriptions of the retaliation they would visit on any gay member who dared to make overtures or even look at them crossways.
I have a gay friend who was outed by a drunken boyfriend two years ago. We decided to just keep it amongst our “clique.” But you would not believe the sense of crisis it created when it first came out. There were arguments, recriminations … total chaos in our circle of friends. Sadly, two of my other friends simply refused to continue any relationship with our gay friend. If he came to my home or one of our hangouts, they made a big show of leaving. The only reason things did not become far worse is because this is a guy we FOUGHT beside. When I was behind on rent, he was there with his checkbook. When I got jumped in a foreign port, he was wading into the fray. Had he been a little less close or a little less brave and generous, he would probably be out of friends.
I am not gay. I do not want to serve with the openly gay, since it would cause a great disruption of accusations, harassment, and possible violence. And let me make this clear … I am not projecting my own opinions onto my fellows. We have been discussing this since I walked onboard my first ship. We may put a PC face on things, but when all the masks finally come off, the consensus is…DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL.

A couple of comments. How is this different from racial hatred once common, now clearly forbidden in the military? Notice the problem is not gay conduct, but merely the fact that someone is gay. So the behavior issue of gays doesn’t really come into play. And you can strongly forbid sexual behavior among the ranks, and I’d have no problem throwing anyone out who disobeyed this rule. Nope. This is pure hatred of the other; and it’s so prevalent that the military has decided that hating homosexuals is a critical cohesive element in America’s armed services. That’s the reality; and we might as well face it. The military actually endorses this kind of hate; and certainly wouldn’t protect gay soldiers from the vengeance of their violent peers. That’s why soldiers have actually been killed on base. By American soldiers.

IN THE SHOWERS: But the issue that genuinely perplexes me is the fear and panic that many straight men display when they think another man might find them attractive. I can understand why they might find this awkward or unwelcome – but I don’t understand the violent emotions this kind of thing triggers. When a woman finds me attractive, I’m flattered, even though there’s always a little discomfort. But I don’t want to beat her up or kill her. So why is that so often the reaction among straight men toward gay men? Is it because they’re afraid of being raped? C’mon. Assuming all gay men – or even any – are potential rapists is completely loopy. (And the same people who make this bizarre argument would scoff at a woman who screamed rape if a man looked at her in a sexually interested way.) Nevertheless, big, brawny straight guys – in the military no less! – scream like six year olds the minute they suspect a gay guy might find them sexy. I don’t understand it. Are straight guys that insecure? Again, it doesn’t strike me as an aversion to intimate contact between men as
such. That happens all the time. Some football crazies just shoved a Sharpie pen up one of their team-member’s butt. What straight guys do on submarines on long trips makes Provincetown look positively repressed. No, it’s something deeper than that. These guys are not afraid of Saddam Hussein; they fight terrible wars; they’ve gone through rigorous training. But they’re terrified of fags. Could someone please tell me why this isn’t absurd.

THOSE CRUDE BRITS: A reader sends me a Lionel Trilling quote about the impolite English, as an early observation of what I was writing about here. It’s from Trilling’s introduction to Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia:

Whatever the the legend to the contrary, the English character is more strongly marked than ours, less reserved, less ironic, more open in its expression of willfulness and eccentricity and cantakerousness. Its manners are cruder and bolder. It is a demonstrative character – it shows itself, even shows off. Santayana, when he visisted England, quite gave up the common notion that Dickens’ characters are caricatures. One can still meet an English snob so thunderingly shameless in his worship of the aristocracy, so explicit and demonstrative in his adoration, that a careful, modest ironic American snob would be quite bewildered by him.

Even crass in their snobbery. What rubes and provincials the British often are.

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “It’s a rhetorical question with no response required … Suppose there was such a thing as a time machine. Suppose all the bad-guy Germans of the 1930s and 1940s – the Gestapo, the Brownshirts, the Blackshirts – were fed into the time machine and emerged as modern-day Americans. Suppose they all still held the beliefs they had when they died. So my question is, Which political party would they support now, Democratic or Republican? Just wondering.” – Harley Sorenson, San Francisco liberal.

Finally, National Review sees the light. By maintaining Bill Clinton’s failed ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, president Bush is directly weakening our war on terror.

This brightened my day.

ANOTHER NYT CORRECTION: This time, a thoroughly dishonest one.

SAN FRANCISCO DEMOCRATS: A reader nails it:

All you need to know about the reason people hate San Francisco values is hanging from the roof at The City Lights Book Store on Broadway and Columbus. A series of huge banners each with a picture and a word. The old banner “Dissent is not un-American” apparently lost its appeal. The new one “Resist War and War Makers” has the burning World Trade Centers photo on the banner with the word War and Bush’s photo on the one with the word “Makers”. Moral equivalency at its most sickening.

And they wonder why they lost the election.

I can see why Bill Safire is a little pissed. There’s no question now that president John F. Kennedy was an extremely sick man when he was president. The sheer mood swings that are inevitably accompanied by massive amphetamine addiction, testosterone injections, sleeping pills, and any number of other painkillers would render most of us difficult to live with (I have my moments on HIV medication), let alone give someone the steady judgment required for being president of the United States. I guess we won’t know for a while just how incapacitated President Kennedy was. Much of the telling archive material is still protected by a phalanx of Kennedy stalwarts who make the Vatican and the old Soviet Politburo look forthcoming. But it matters. The full extent of Kennedy’s physical impairment and the deception, lies and diversions it required are surely an important part of the historical record. I just don’t buy the idea that this level of medication had no effect on the government of the country. It must have. The question now for historians is: how much? And what difference did it specifically make?

POWELL’S BURDEN OF PROOF: The secretary of state clearly has a responsibility now. He must ensure that the U.N. inspections regime is a real one; that it isn’t just another exercise in the world’s pretending to do something while actually doing nothing to defang Saddam. The signs are not good. I think I have as much confidence in Hans Blix as I do in Jimmy Carter. At the same time, I can see why the administration has decided to go the U.N. route. It helps legitimize the police action; and calls the bluff of those who profess to believe in international security but have no intention of enforcing it. But if we find no weapons of mass destruction by February, if sanctions are then lifted, and another terrorist strike occurs with Iraqi-purloined weapons, Colin Powell will bear some of the responsibility for letting it happen. He must know this. Which is why he has to exercise maximum pressure on the inspectors for their work to be real and tough and genuine. This is not, in Tom Friedman’s fatuous phrase, a “war of choice.” It’s a war of necessity – to protect Western citizens from weapons of mass destruction wielded by religious fanatics and their governmental enablers. That’s why avoiding it without solving the underlying problem of Saddam’s weapons will actually make war more likely in the long run, and far, far more dangerous.

PELOSI A CONSERVATIVE CATHOLIC? That’s what she’s claiming. Can someone ask her exactly how conservative she is? Does she oppose women priests? Does she oppose married priests? Does she favor allowing gay priests to serve openly and chastely? These are all good questions – and I’m befuddled why no one has asked them. Unless, of course, this is transparent spin and she’s fibbing. But Democratic leaders don’t do that, do they?

SAN FRANCISCO DEMOCRAT: Several liberal commentators have voiced concern that the phrase “San Francisco Democrat” is a not-too-subtle piece of anti-gay smearing. Here’s my take: they have a smidgen of a point. There’s no question that if you use the words “San Francisco Anything,” some people will immediately think of homosexuals. But the phrase and the city also surely have connotations far beyond that. I find “San Francisco Democrats” as a phrase truly horrifying, for example, and I’m not thinking of gay equality. In my mind, the phrase conjures up all the illiberalism, puritanism, groupthink, and humor-free incompetence that has made San Francisco unlivable for many people. And I don’t think I’m anti-gay. (Richard Goldstein obviously disagrees.) Plenty of gay residents of San Francisco feel the same way about their hyper-liberal metropolis. Others, like this reader, see the issue more broadly:

I was born (in 1956) and raised in San Francisco and my family still lives there. I still commute to work there daily. The term “San Francisco Democrat” refers to the Burton Machine and what it has done to the City. Once Burton, Brown, Feinstein, Boxer, Pelosi are through, perhaps Shelley, Newsom and other native sons and daughters, from the Castro and the other districts, will make the City great again.

Not much homophobia there. To me, Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s use of the phrase was also primarily about foreign policy and the Democratic Party Convention there. And it’s the isolationist, blame-America-first attitude of the parts of the Left that mainly gives the phrase its meaning. That’s why Nancy Pelosi deserves the label. She is simply not someone you can trust with the national security of this country. I’m grateful for some of my colleagues’ squeamishness about this. But I think they’re protesting a mite too much.

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “That is why the cheerleaders of the new imperialism – The Weekly Standard, The Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal editorial page – are uneasy. They worry that Mr. Bush has been Blixed. They may be right. But is that such a bad thing?” – Bill Keller, New York Times. Keller knows better than this. He wrote a great Times magazine cover-story on the danger posed by weapons of mass destruction. Removing the threat of their getting into the hands of terrorists is not a function of a “new imperialism,” it’s a function of an old idea, namely self-defense. You may disagree with it and think that we have nothing to worry about from a future (or currrent) al Qaeda-Saddam alliance, but equating Baghdad regime change with imperialism is a cheap shot, a sop to the Raines orthodoxy and below Keller’s usual high standards. (By the way, have you noticed how MoDo hasn’t mentioned the “Boy Emperor” since the election? Instead, we’ve been treated to silly digressions about royal butlers and Saudi drivers. She’s not waving, she’s drowning.)

USEFUL IDIOT WATCH: No, this is not a parody of West Marin country. Or San Francisco Democrats.

THE CLYMER CORRECTION: “An article last Sunday about the Bush family’s political successes reversed the relationship between Presidents William Henry Harrison and Benjamin Harrison. Benjamin Harrison was William Henry Harrison’s grandson. The article also referred incorrectly to the political failures of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s sons. While two of them – Franklin Jr. and James – indeed lost statewide elections, both served in Congress.” – the New York Times, Sunday.

THE JANOVSKY CORRECTION: “An article on Thursday about comments on the midterm elections made at a political forum by Karl Rove, the Bush administration’s chief political strategist, misstated the question to which he responded, “I’m more concerned about the 3,000 who died on 9/11.” The questioner had asked whether he was concerned about 200,000 people who she said marched in Washington against a war with Iraq – not about concerns that 200,000 innocent Iraqis might die in an American-led invasion.” – the New York Times, Saturday. Here’s the original: “The audience included several dozen protesters who held signs critical of various issues, including war against Iraq. But they were largely quiet and respectful. In the question-and-answer session, a woman politely asked Mr. Rove if the administration was concerned over the possibility that 200,000 innocent Iraqis might die in an American-led invasion. Mr. Rove responded, ‘I’m more concerned about the 3,000 who died on 9/11.'” Now this was simple notebook reporting. Was reporter Michael Janovsky there? If he was, how on earth did he hear something that simply wasn’t asked? Some of these Times liberals don’t just have blinders on, they wear ear-plugs.

ANOTHER VICTORY FOR PREJUDICE: An email from a gay former serviceman:

I served in the Navy as a surface warfare officer and nuclear engineer for almost 8 years. As a gay man, I left the Navy once my obligation was complete since I was not personally comfortable with the military policy nor would I – as a Naval officer – feel that I could enforce that policy towards my subordinates without sacrificing my personal integrity. The rank and file and young officer leadership did not have issue with gay servicemembers, even in the close confines of shipboard and submarine life. It seems that the anti-gay policies and enforcement thereof reside within the senior military and civilian leadership, even among so-called “liberal” officers. Within some smaller communities of the military, being openly gay is perfectly acceptable at first glance, then with an unfortunate chain of events a crackdown occurs – just like what happened at the Defense Language Institute.
The bottom line is that the military is losing some of its best and brightest. In my case, most of my superiors requested that I remain in the service, having been consistently ranked above my peers, and that I had the command of a ship and perhaps flag rank in my future.
But I left, and of course I could not tell them the real reason why.
Don’t ask, don’t tell….

It’s about Eminem and it’s up at Salon.

FIRING WHITES: A British R & B atrist is being pressured to drop his white guitarist in order to placate black fans in the U.S. Can you imagine this even being considered, let alone aired this way, if the races were reversed? Good for the singer for resisting.

IS THE TIMES GETTING FAIRER? Blogger Tacitus notes new balance in a story today. Here’s the sentence:

Paul C. Light, an expert on the federal bureaucracy at New York University and the Brookings Institution, the liberal-leaning research group, called the administration’s policy “an aggressive and a dramatic extension” of the effort by both parties at all levels of government to save money and improve the quality of public services.

Credit where it’s due. Is the blogosphere making a difference?

“[Bush’s] selection as President by the Supreme Court in 2000 was a presidential and judicial coup. Progressives may believe this coup stains his Administration as illegitimate, but apparently he and his inner group take it as leave to cast aside the Bill of Rights and international law. Now the President is out of control and threatens American democracy and the peace of the world. At home, there is mounting evidence that we are living in a land ruled by a crypto-fascist government: The FBI spies on law-abiding political organizations and churches, citizens are deputized to spy and inform on one another, an underground parallel executive government has been activated, lawyer-client consultations are bugged, the government keeps citizens locked up without lawyers or hearings and talks of using the military to police the United States, and the Pentagon is making a vast database of the American people. We are being cudgeled into agreeing to wars of aggression, to make first use of nuclear weapons and to put weapons in outer space.” – Ronnie Dugger, the Nation.

The Onion’s people-on-the-street respond. i especially like speech pathologist Elaine Dorner’s answer.

“Someone has to fight back to relieve the consumer as the one-armed economist holding up GDP. The Fed’s pushing on an interest-rate string may be able to keep households buying new cars with zero financing and redoing their kitchens with home equity loans. But business spending won’t get off the dime so long as Washington keeps giving business good reasons for lying down and not getting up.” – Wall Street Journal, today.