Month: November 2002

The final move in Al Gore’s shift to the left came last week, according to ABCNews.com’s The Note. He has now formally abandoned his earlier centrist position on healthcare and plumped for a Canadian single-payer system of the kind specifically avoided by Clinton. It’s good to know that this is the new Gore: statist, populist, and the most left-wing member of the current group of Democratic contenders. Maybe he should take a look at yet another story from Britain’s vaunted National Health Service. Here’s a testimony from a man who is still attached to the idea of collectivist healthcare, but who saw what it means when it mattered most. He needed urgent radiotherapy for a brain tumor. Nuh-huh:

[T]he best estimate I could get from the NHS was a six week wait. I have medical insurance through my employer and I am lucky enough to now have started privately arranged treatment on Wednesday, less than two weeks after my diagnosis. There are thousands of cases like mine every year in this country and most will not have that option.

Notice that in Britain, if you actually need good care, you have to both pay higher taxes and get private insurance – for healthcare inferior to much that is available here. This is what Al Gore wants to bring to America. At least now we know.

BUSH VS. ROBERTSON?: Colin Powell takes on the Christian Right. Bush paved the way.

THE MILITARY’S GIFT TO TERRORISTS: A case study in how anti-gay prejudice is undermining the war on terror. Meanwhile, an email from a younger generation shows how dated this bigotry is:

An anecdote from a service academy. A majority of the upperclassmen that I’ve talked to here at the Naval Academy have no problem with openly gay service members. (Many of the freshmen, or plebes, who’ve just been through a full summer of intense physical training and indoctrination, are not yet so open to the idea.) This being my first semester here, the sample of my students is statistically meaningless, of course, but it still surprised the hell out of me. These kids seem to understand a few things that their superiors don’t.

And that’s without any guidance as to integrating gay soldiers. The real question is: how much more damage will we do to our national defense by hanging on to what Dick Cheney called an “old chestnut” a long decade ago?

UH-OH: Slate’s Chris Suellentrop on Nancy Pelosi: “While it’s true that Pelosi’s views, particularly on war and foreign policy, are out of step with much of the American public’s, they’re right in the mainstream of what House Democrats believe.” Okay. I feel better now.

LOSERS’ HALL OF FAME: Time’s Matt Cooper emails to point out that George McGovern briefly ran for president in 1984 and lost in the Massachusetts Democratic primary. He’d already lost the 49 other states in 1972. I’m not sure primaries count. So Mondale gets an edge. But it’s close!

AN ONION CLASSIC: This is roughly how I feel when the p.c. police tell us not to jump to any rash conclusions about anti-American Islamic converts who shoot up innocents in suburbs. Who’s to say they’re terrorists, after all?

MORE BUTS: A reader notices some other lacunae in Saddam’s deranged letter to the U.N.:

I think you’ve missed another key indication in the letter of Saddam’s true intentions. Many times when the letter mentions allowing the inspectors into Iraq it includes language referring to international law. For example: “We are eager to see them perform their duties in accordance with the international law,” and “let the inspectors come to Baghdad to carry out their duties in accordance with the law.” The key to understanding these references, I think, is in the last substantive paragraph of the letter, in which the writer promises “to forward another letter to you on a later date, in which I shall state our observations the measures and procedures, contained in SCR 1441 that are contrary to international law . . . .” It seems clear to me that the letter is designed to build into the “acceptance” of the inspectors an escape hatch, whereby if the inspectors actually demand the access that the U.N. Resolution requires, Iraq can refuse on the ground that the demands are inconsistent with “international law.” All in all, the letter looks like another in a long line of Iraq’s pattern of loudly proclaiming “yes” while quietly adding conditions that make it really a “no.”

Poor Saddam. He’s getting nervous, isn’t he?

Absorbing the Iraqi letter to the U.N. is a surreal experience. It reads a little like those notes from the Washington snipers. No eighth grader would be proud of its syntax or even its spelling. Whatever else it is, it surely isn’t the product of a serious government with actual policies and actual members. It’s the note that might be wriiten by a psychopath – full of inane self-grandeur, stupid threats, excessive Unabomber-style rhetoric and any number of Nazi-like references to the “Zionist entity.” If you got a letter like this in the mail, you’d call the cops. My favorite piece of rhetorical weirdness: “We shall see when remorse will not do any good for those who bite on their fingers.” Ohhhhh-kay. I point this out because some people insist on arguing that we are dealing with an actual state, a legitimate government, or an erratic but familiar kind of leader. We’re not. We’re dealing with a psychopathic megalomaniac. Which is why we have to assume that everything he says is a lie; and yet we also have to assume that amid these pathological lies there might by a smidgen of truth. We need criminal psychologists, not diplomats.

THE BOTTOM LINE: I count three essential “buts” in the “letter.” Here’s the first:

But we will not forget, nor should others do, that safeguarding our people’s dignity, security, independence, and protecting our country, its sovereignty and sublime values, is as a sacred duty in our leadership’s and government’s agenda.

This is not encouraging. The U.N. is demanding any access any time anywhere in Iraq. Essentially, the resolution demands that Iraq give up its sovereignty and independence to the inspectors. The rant argues that Saddam shouldn’t and won’t do any of these things. Then there’s this big old but:

But if the whims of the American administration, the Zionist desires, their followers, intelligence services, threats, and foul temptation, were given the chance to play and tamper with the inspection teams or some of their members, the colors would be then confused and the resulting commotion will distort the facts and push the situation into dangerous directions which is something fair-minded people do not wish for, as well as the people who, including my government, want to bring forward the facts as they are.

Translation: don’t push it. Correct response: screw you. Likely scenario: war. (Notice by the way the continual obsession with the “Zionist entity” and “Zionist desires.” Goebbels anyone? Elsewhere in the deranged document, Saddam argues that the U.N. should also enforce a new resolution “to put an end to the Zionist occupation of Palestine.” I think that means the abolition of Israel. Don’t expect the media to play this one up. Virulently anti-Semitic documents like the one submitted to Kofi Annan are routinely downplayed.) The final but is at the end of the diatribe:

Therefore, we hope, that you will, Mr. Secretary General, advise the ignorants not to push things to the precipice, in the implementation, because the people of Iraq will not choose to live at the price of their dignity, country, freedom or sanctities, and they would rather make their lives the price if that was the only way before them to safeguard what they must safeguard.

What they must safeguard. Now what do you think he can mean by that?

WAR IS NOW MORE LIKELY: My inference from this letter is therefore a simple one: Saddam has no intention of alowing U.N. inspectors to find, detect or destroy any of his weapons of mass destruction. He has already declared in this letter that he has none, although we are now forced to wait 30 days while he formally decides to say the same thing. (Simple question: why can’t we now declare those 30 days over and move the schedule up? His declaration to the U.N. is surely a formal statement that he has no WMDs. And time now is of the essence.) Saddam has clearly decided that his main hope is in allowing the inspectors in and being ingenious enough to keep hidden from view any WMDs until such time as the spring comes. Then he has another year to play footsie and get his hands on the key materials for nuclear invulnerability. He will press his p.r. advantage any way he can, and his allies in the West, especially in the “anti-war” movement, can be relied on to spin Saddam’s line mercilessly. This means we need to give Blix more resources. We need to quadruple the number of inspectors and send them everywhere we can. Otherwise, we have as much chance of finding what Saddam “must safeguard” as DC cops did of finding Chandra Levy’s body. And it also means that “zero tolerance” of any Saddamite shenanigans must mean “zero tolerance.” At this point, I find myself oscillating between hoping for a peaceful outcome while knowing that any peaceful but phony outcome now will only make a future war bloodier and more terrifying. So I’m hoping – yes, hoping – for war soon. And I think we can see from this deranged letter why we have no essential choice.

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “And the reptilism trickles down further, to the weaker minds listening to talk radio or silly enough to spend too much time watching cable television news — people who buy the lies, who are simply suckered into forking over their own political best interests to the con artists who attempt to pick their pockets at the same moment they are pointing out others who, they say, are the real trouble makers. About 25 percent of our people are susceptible to this kind of con, and they then give us problems by standing against any reasonable reforms. They have been spiritually twisted by the cheap poison of a hundred Rush Limbaughs into the angry, unthinking agents of the superrich.” – Doris Haddock, Alternet. If you want to see what some leftists really believe about the American people, you can’t get a much better example than this article. On the other hand, I’m prepared to forgive someone called Doris Haddock almost anything.

EAGLES SOARING: Just a couple emails reflecting the tidal wave I got today from nascent “eagles”:

Thank you! This describes my political ideology perfectly, especially the fear of the Republican’s alignment with the Christian right and what that means for the future of gays and lesbians (especially with the new shift in the political paradigm). Democrats have dropped the ball, and Republicans are still very scary. I’m a fiscally conservative, socially liberal, Christian right fearing independent (former Democrat), and I don’t think I’m alone.

And this one:

I’m 34 and have voted in every election since I was 18. I’ve never voted Republican for a major political office, but found myself voting for Bill Simon out of utter contempt for Davis and the Democratic party.

I think we’re onto something here. One reader argued that eagles were simply libertarians. But most libertarians are strictly isolationist in foreign policy. Brink Lindsay is one who isn’t. Here’s an Eagle Manifesto of a sort. Geitner Simmons concurs. There you have it, eagles. You may be politically homeless, but on this site, you’re certainly not alone. And one reason the blogosphere is doing so well is that it’s also full of eagles’ nests.

I’m tired of this hawk-dove paradigm. And we all know how tired left and right are as useful labels. (Yes, I know I use them, but sometimes, you gotta.) More revealing, perhaps, is the fiscal-conservative-social-liberal category, in which I think I’d probably be counted. (The roster of categories is therefore: social and fiscal libs; social and fiscal conservatives; socially liberal but fiscally conservative independents; and socially conservative and fiscally liberal independents.) But the war changes the matrix again, I think. There’s a new group of people out there who are socially liberal but also foreign policy realists, especially among those who have been awakened to political engagement by September 11. Some of these used to be Scoop Jackson Democrats, but today’s breed doesn’t buy into the big government liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s either. Some are neocons who don’t love the social right. Others are just Generation X and Y, who simply accept the social diversity of modern culture and want to see it defended against theocratic barbarians. These people are not comfortable with the Republicans’ flirtation with the religious right, or their prosecution of the drug war or mixing of church and state; and they’re not impressed by the Democrats’ lack of seriousness in foreign policy or enmeshment with public sector interest groups. They’re politically homeless, these people – but were probably key swing voters in the last election. Instead of hawks and doves, call these people “eagles.” I think they’ll play a key part in shaping the politics and culture of the next few years. Are you one?

FORGET THE DEMOGRAPHICS: The Judis-Teixera thesis about the future strength of the Democrats makes a simple error. What if the Republicans succeed in winning over exactly those groups that until now have been trending Democrat? Or rather: what if the Democrats lose them? David Broder today sees the short-term future of the Dems – and it’s clearly leftward. Who, after all, is going to pull the party to the center? The general loathing of Bush, Gore’s disavowal of Clintonian centrism, Edwards’ reliance on Bob Shrum, Pelosi’s ascension to House leadership – all these play into Republicans’ hands. (How, I wonder, can the Democrats elect a House leader who voted against war against Iraq? Are they serious?) The liberal intelligentsia – epitomized by the New York Times editorial page – shows no sign of rethinking and is actually urging more strenuous leftism, not accommodation or new directions. If the war goes well, and if the economy revives, it’s therefore hard to see anything but Democratic collapse under this new leadership. (And it’s never good for a political party to be pinning its hopes on military failure or recession.) I guess I’d vote for Harold Ford.

NEPOTISM WATCH: More evidence that America is as much an aristocracy as a democracy. Forget the Bush dynasty. Both candidates for the Democratic House Minority leadership post are essentially scions of well-established political dynasties. A reader points out:

Pelosi’s father was a Congressman for a decade, then mayor of Baltimore for a dozen years while she was growing up. Her brother later was elected mayor of Baltimore. She graduated from Trinity College in Washington, DC, which was established as a finishing school for Catholic girls. Ford’s father, Harold Ford, Sr., was elected to Congress from Memphis in 1974 and the youngster spent most of his time in Washington. He attended the tony St. Albans prep school on the grounds of the Episcopal National Cathedral, then went on to the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan Law School. He took over his father’s seat when the elder decided not to seek reelection.

Not exactly a populist alternative, eh?

A PALESTINIAN AGAINST BIGOTRY: An Arab resident of Ramallah bemoans the Arab satellite television mini-series based on the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Hope springs eternal.

THE NEXT ‘DIVERSITY’ PUSH: It’s no longer enough to admit students on the basis of their skin color to American colleges and universities. The students now have to socialize with other individuals of different races. The New York Times, in breathlessly uncritical tones, hails the move. One quote truly gave me the creeps:

Theodore R. Mitchell, president of Occidental College in Los Angeles, said, “It is our job as educators to construct conscious communities in which students and others spend time, work and play with people unlike themselves – ethnically, ideologically, politically.”

“Conscious communities”? Blech. How about letting people get into college on the basis of their academic achievements? How about letting students interact privately with whomever they want in a free society? And how about some real diversity – i.e. intellectual diversity – among college faculty? Yeah, I know the chances are next to zero. But every now and again, you have to ask the bleeding obvious, don’t you?

BLACK AND WHITE: It’s a good sign when I get loads of emails complaining about the website colors. (It often means new readers.) If you hate the white on dark blue, you can change it. There’s a button at the top of the Dish that says: “Black and White.” Click on it and the colors are reversed. And if you click on the “INFO” button on the top left, you’ll also get a rundown of what the various awards mean. Cheers.

AS.COM GETS RESULTS: Well, I wasn’t the only one to complain. But that Tom Paulin lecture at Harvard has apparently been canceled. Inviting a man who wished American Jewish settlers in Israel and the West Bank would be shot dead caused “widespread consternation.” I wonder why.

ANTI-WAR ANTI-SEMITISM WATCH: Read what happened when a pro-Israel group on its weekly demo on a Los Angeles street had to share the street with an anti-war rally. Some highlights:

When they saw us they started cursing. Without first saying hello, or anything, a young Latino man told us to “f– off.” He began yelling at one of our older Russian Jewish supporters, Isaac, “You are Zionist Nazi pigs. You are Nazis!” It was surreal… One woman who videotaped me yelled that she could do what she wanted to because she had First Amendment rights. I told her that she lacked grace. She turned around and said, “Well you lacked grace when you slaughtered my people.” She was referring to Native Americans. Again, I thought this was about President Bush and Iraq.

Well, it is about President Bush and Iraq. But it’s about a lot of other things as well.

A QUESTION FOR THE AGES: In losing the Minnesota Senate race, Walter Mondale succeeded in losing an election in every single state in the country. I wonder: is he really the first? Has anyone else been such a stellar loser?

AMENDMENT: I wrote in “Boy Emperor Wins!” that “No sitting Republican governor lost.” I should have said “No sitting elected Republican governor lost.” Scott McCallum, the Republican governor of Wisconsin, lost to D
emocrat Jim Doyle. McCallum was not elected governor; rather, he was lieutenant governor when Tommy Thompson became HHS Secretary.

Great and simple response from a reader: “It’ll be over when every last al Qaeda recruit is dead.” Amen.

HUBRIS WATCH: I said last week that I found Trent Lott’s immediate offensive in the culture wars – on partial birth abortion – to be dumb. Glad to see the White House agrees with me. And that’s not because I’m against the measure. It’s because the White House can see a truly stupid piece of politics and Trent Lott never has.

MORE CLYMER ERRORS: Tim Noah emails yet another error in Adam Clymer’s recent piece on the Bush dynasty:

“Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, whose loss in the race for governor of Maryland on Tuesday was the family’s first general election defeat since John F. (Honey Fitz) Fitzgerald, her great-grandfather, was beaten in a race for governor of Massachusetts in 1922.” Wrong. Townsend herself suffered a general election defeat in 1986, when she ran for Congress. (I was her issues director.) She lost in the general to the Republican incumbent, Helen Delich Bentley.

I think Clymer may be setting a record here.

Since September 11, this blog has been galvanized by the need to fight the battle of ideas over the war against Islamo-fascism. That means exposing the vacuous nihilism of the academic left, the poisonous isolationism of the anti-war right, the thinly veiled anti-Semitism of some parts of the anti-war movement, the incoherence of the Democrats, and the p.c. delusions of much of the media. That’s also what has propelled the blogosphere into stardom – voicing what most people really think, sentiments and arguments that are routinely absent in many mainstream media outlets. But after last week, things have changed, haven’t they? A reader makes the following points:

I have been a very avid reader of your column in the Sunday Times for a number of years now, and for the past few months I have also read your Website daily. I am a huge fan, and applaud your hard work and diligent presentation. However, since last Wednesday, I have lost a bit of interest. The reason for this is nothing to do with your efforts, which have not diminished at all. Rather, the situation has changed dramatically, and I think you need to take account of this. WE HAVE WON. We won the mid-term elections … and we even won in the UN (quite how, I cannot imagine). We are now the majority, in control, and no longer victims of a left/liberal conspiracy to suppress the will of the American people through the imposition of an establishment elite’s left of centre viewpoint. Yes, the media is genarally biased, but in a nation where the Right is generally in control this is less of a worry than before – indeed it may even be a good thing. I am reminded of the last time I actually enjoyed reading the Village Voice. This was the early 1980’s, when Reagan was in power (because I along with so many others voted for him) and the conservative agenda dominated. Now the liberals are useful as gadflys – and you need to think about redefining your role.

I agree with this reader to some extent. It’s certainly clear to me that those of us who have been consistently anti-terror and anti-Saddam have scored a huge victory. I’d say the academic left and the left-liberal consensus in the media and Washington have been largely routed by events. But that doesn’t mean that many of these misguided individuals have genuinely seen the light. If and when war comes, they will still try to turn it against the West, spin every military victory as a defeat, and do all they can to undermine the Bush administration’s difficult job in this war. If another terrorist attack occurs, they will blame it on Bush and the West. There is a lull now, while the anti-war camp regroups. That’s predictable and understandable. Not only have they seen the American people vote decisively against them, they’ve even had to watch while Syria backs the U.S.’s new U.N. resolution. That must hurt. But they’ll be back. I don’t intend to go away.

RAINESPEAK: “The Parliament speaker, Saadoun Hammadi, also concluded that the assembly would leave it up to Mr. Hussein what to do.” – Neil MacFarquar, New York Times. Translation: “The appointed head of Saddam Hussein’s appointed rubber-stamp body of cronies, Saadoun Hammadi, confirmed that anything Saddam Hussein decided about anything would be fine by him, especially since he’d be shot dead and his family tortured and killed if he said anything else.” Readers are invited to contribute to a new and irregular feature, translating sentences in the New York Times into non-Orwellian English.

CLYMER WATCH: A reader points out even more elementary errors of fact in Adam Clymer’s piece on the Bush dynasty:

He’s even more ignorant than you make out. He claims that none of FDR’s sons attained even state office. In fact, two of them served in Congress–FDR Jr. for three terms from New York, James for five terms from California. And FDR was a fourth cousin once removed of TR, not a fifth cousin. And since WH Harrison died a month after taking office, the mot juste for his term is probably not “undistinguished” but “brief.”

Let’s just see how long it takes for the Times to post several corrections.

THE CHESHIRE SNIPER: A nightmare finally ends in violence. Time now to take on the real threat: ferrets.

KILLER SQUIRREL WATCH: This ad looks prescient now.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “You are a disgrace to this country and I am furious you would even think I would support you and your aggressive baby-killing tactics of collateral damage. Help you recruit. Who, top guns to reign [sic] death and destruction upon nonwhite peoples throughout the world? Are you serious sir? Resign your commission and serve your country with honour. No war, no air force cowards who bomb countries with AAA, without possibility of retaliation. You are worse than the snipers. You are imperialists who are turning the whole damn world against us. September 11 can be blamed in part for what you and your cohorts have done to Palestinians, the VC, the Serbs, a retreating army at Basra. You are unworthy of my support.” – Peter Kirstein, professor at Saint Xavier University, in response to an email from a cadet asking for help advertizing a political science assembly.

THE MINNESOTA RACE: Here’s the best retrospective you’ll find, with some wonderful new details. In retrospect, a political classic. It’s particularly telling that the Mondale campaign didn’t immediately grasp what a debacle the Wellstone memorial service was:

Mondale was merely a spectator Tuesday night, they reason. How can people blame him? Before they adjourn the press conference rehearsal, Ted asks what his father should say if he’s asked about Tuesday night. The sentiment in the room is that with Blodgett making a public apology and taking responsibility earlier in the day, that should take most of the heat off Mondale. As they meet, DFL pollster Paul Harstad is completing an overnight survey. Harstad finds that 73 percent of those interviewed agree that the memorial service went overboard — and 52 percent agree strongly. Furthermore, they are taking it out on Mondale. Mondale, who led Coleman by 52-39 percent in Harstad’s Sunday night poll, is tied 43-43 on Wednesday night. The percentage who feel positively toward Mondale has dropped 10 points, to 51 percent. And the percentage who say they feel positively toward Coleman has risen six points, to 50.

It really was that memorial rally that killed Mondale’s candidacy.

The AP surely knows better than running a headline like this. What laws? What makers? These guys are captives and stooges.

THIS PRETTY MUCH SUMS IT UP: What the New York Times really thinks.

It’s hard not to feel dread when Saddam seems to be moving toward “compliance” with the latest U.N. resolution. I don’t mean, of course, that we should dread actually disarming him; merely that we should dread his trapping the U.S. and the rest of the world in yet another sandpit of confusion and obfuscation. That’s why it seems to me that we should be publicly mobilizing for war right away. There are some signs that this is happening already. I was reassured by Colin Powell’s statement on CNN yesterday that, “I can assure you if he doesn’t comply this time we are going to ask the UN to give authorisation for all necessary means, and if the UN isn’t willing to do that, the United States with like-minded nations will go and disarm him forcefully.” Powell is the right man to m ake such a statement. Yesterday, Tom Friedman called on the secretary of state to keep undermining the hawks in the Bush administration. It seems to me that Friedman has it exactly the wrong way round. The next few weeks are the ones in which Powell has to prove himself. If the U.N. route becomes yet another way to keep Saddam’s tyranny and weapons of mass destruction intact, then Powell has some explaining to do. Equally, if Hans Blix wants to go home a hero for peace after ineffective inspections, then Powell will have effectively made matters far worse for the U.S. and the civilized world. I’m a skeptic about whether inspections can ever truly work. But if they do, it will only because of a massive invasion force poised to attack immediately after the first violation. Hence: mobilize. The display of military might and readiness makes peace and compliance more likely – whether the weaponry is used or not.

WELFARE REFORM AGAIN: What else explains the sudden jump in teen marriages in the 1990s? And for some reason, the arrival of gay marriage as an issue, and the establishment of civil unions in one state, doesn’t seem to have deterred straight teens from getting hitched. Who would have thought it? Bill Bennett, call your office.

CAMPUS ANTI-SEMITISM WATCH: When the Egyptian paper, al Ahram, asked for British poet Tom Paulin’s opinions on the Middle East, they knew what they were looking for. His remarks even shocked a Guardian columnist:

Among other things, he opined that the US-born Jewish settlers should be shot dead. “They are Nazis, racists,” he said, adding – unnecessarily, you might argue – “I feel nothing but hatred for them.” He also pronounced that the state of Israel had no right to exist, that Tony Blair’s government was “Zionist”, and that the suicide bombers were an expression of “deep injustice and tragedy”.

Typical leftist anti-Semitism. So why is Harvard laying out the red carpet for a man who feels “nothing but hatred” for American Jewish settlers in Israel and the West Bank? Didn’t president Summers warn about a new anti-Semitism on campus?

THE OTHER TERRORISTS: Be afraid. Be very afraid.

GLOATIN’ GOIN’ DOWN: “My other POV is that the surge was a metaphor of starting a fire with lots of pine needles. Little tiny incidents of dry leaves kept piling one atop the other: Wellstone, the hate Jeb and George W campaign, the Clintons, Leahy stopping the judges, the trashing of the cars outside the rally in Mass, the appearances every night of Begala and Carville as Dem spokesmen (ugly guys are as bad as ugly women), Belafonte trashing Powell, Barbra blaming Republicans for the Wellstone plane crash, the voter fraud around the country, and hundres of other little things created the fuel for a fire under the Republican base and lots of Independents. GWB came along with his blow torch campaigning and set that fuel off. And the press media didn’t hurt either. So how do all those smart Dems like getting trashed by a moron?” – from the Letters Page, on the election.

“CANCER ON HUMANITY”: Check out this placard from the Florence pro-Saddam march. This is one face of the “anti-war” movement. And it’s ugly in a very old-fashioned way. (Via James Morrow.)

MORE LEFTWING SMEARS: No one should expect Garrison Keillor to like Norm Coleman. Keillor only supports left-liberal Democrats and was brutal toward Jesse Ventura. But his column in Salon went further. Check out this paragraph:

Norm got a free ride from the press. St. Paul is a small town and anybody who hangs around the St. Paul Grill knows about Norm’s habits. Everyone knows that his family situation is, shall we say, very interesting, but nobody bothered to ask about it, least of all the religious people in the Republican Party. They made their peace with hypocrisy long ago. So this false knight made his way as an all-purpose feel-good candidate, standing for vaguely Republican values, supporting the president.

There’s a word for this: it’s a smear. Keillor won’t give evidence; he parlays underhand gossip; he is exploiting someone’s private life to hurt him politically. Every aspect of this paragraph stinks to high heaven. But that in itself is instructive. This kind of bile helped the Dems lose the last election. And yet they keep on hating.

ROSENBAUM FISKS VIDAL: Worth every word.

MAJOR LEAGUE MISTAKE: Adam Clymer wrote yesterday about “the undistinguished terms of Benjamin Harrison and his grandson William Henry Harrison.” As any high-school textbook (or Google) will tell you, Benjamin was William Henry’s grandson. Then there’s this simple statement of fact: “Edward M. Kennedy’s durable liberalism has changed the nation more than his brothers did.” There you have it: decades of adding entitlements to the national budget and pursuing every agenda item of the current liberal conventional wisdom has changed the nation more than JFK and RFK combined. If you want to know why the Times got almost everything about the last election embarrassingly wrong, peer through the blinkers of a man like Clymer.

FULLY COVERED: As someone who grew up in a country with socialized medicine, I’m more than aware of what it really means: the rationing of bad healthcare. Here’s a story from Canada that shows where that can lead
you.

OUR WAR TOO: An independent gay writer and activist fights back against the left on Iraq.

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: Bush’s “mandate”

includes using the taxing power to transfer wealth from working people to the rich. It includes giving corporations a free hand to eviscerate the environment and control the regulatory agencies meant to hold them accountable. And it includes secrecy on a scale you cannot imagine. Above all, it means judges with a political agenda appointed for life. If you liked the Supreme Court that put George W. Bush in the White House, you will swoon over what’s coming. And if you like God in government, get ready for the Rapture. These folks don’t even mind you referring to the GOP as the party of God. Why else would the new House Majority Leader say that the Almighty is using him to promote ‘a Biblical worldview’ in American politics? So it is a heady time in Washington – a heady time for piety, profits, and military power, all joined at the hip by ideology and money.

– Bill Moyers, paid for in part by your tax dollars, on PBS.

MODO GROWS UP: A brief interaction with Saudi Arabia’s vice police and Maureen Dowd misses John Ashcroft:

After the men argued for 15 minutes, I fretted that I was in one of those movies where an American makes one mistake in a repressive country and ends up rotting in a dungeon. I missed John Ashcroft desperately.

Can we now send Molly Ivins and Mary McGrory?

Michael Barone develops a thesis I first floated three years ago. Is W a re-run of JFK? Money graf:

Kennedy in 1962 and Mr. Bush in 2002 marginally increased their parties’ share of the vote–very much against precedent–and greatly strengthened their parties’ leverage in a closely divided Congress. Within two years, Kennedy’s Democrats won by huge majorities, often wrongly attributed to Lyndon Johnson’s appeal to voters who would never have voted for Kennedy Democrats. But if you look at the regional breakdowns in the September and October 1963 Gallup polls, taken just before Kennedy was assassinated, it is clear that he was heading to a victory very much like Johnson’s in 1964. He was winning the East and Midwest and much of the West by margins far larger than Franklin Roosevelt’s; his job rating fell in 1963 only among white Southerners after he supported what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Here’s my take from November of 1999.

THE POLLS WERE RIGHT: A reader pollster rebuts the notion that this year, the polls failed to predict what was going on. They predicted it well, but people like the editors of the New York Times refused to believe them. He also rebuts the notion that polls are getting less reliable, because of cellphones, caller i.d. and so on. Over to my correspondent:

I counted up the margin of victory for all Senate elections from 1992 to 1996, and then looked at how far off the polls were in projecting those margins. Then I looked at this year. (I used the polls listed in Hotline in both instances and only looked at polls conducted the final three weeks of the campaign.) Here’s what I found: from 1992-1996, 21 percent of polls missed the margin of victory by 10 points or more. In 2002, 16 percent of polls missed the margin of victory by 10 points or more. From 1992-1996, 55 percent of polls missed the margin of victory by five points or more. In 2002, 43 percent of polls missed the margin of victory by five points or more.

So the polls this year were actually more accurate than in the past.

THE WIN WAS BIG: And in case you’re impressed by an apparent 53-47 split, check out the UPI tally of votes cast for either Dems or Republicans. Of those votes, the GOP won by 4.4 points in all Senate races and by 5.6 points in gubernatorial races. Of all votes cast, the GOP won 51.6 percent, compared to 45 percent for the Democrats – a 6.6 percent lead. That’s bigger than Clinton’s margin in 1992 and bigger than the Democrats’ victory in the House in 1992 (which netted them a majority of 82). Take out the gerrymandering, have competitive districts across the country, and the real sweep would have been huge – only a smidgen less than the Gingrich revolution in 1994.

This one has to be read to be believed. The military, which is having severe shortages of personnel who speak Arabic, is actually firing Arabic speakers because they’re gay. The New Republic will have a story online soon about this scandal. I’ll link as soon as it’s up. Geitner Simmons provides the crucial and damning background to this insanity. The anti-gay policy makes no sense anyway. No other civilized country engages in such bigotry. No other country at war would put discrimination against its own people above the need to fight a deadly enemy. This targeting of Arabic speakers is, of course, only the tiniest part of it. Each year, the military throws away hundreds of good servicemembers, wastes millions of dollars, to pursue a policy that is not only unconscionable as a moral issue, but dumb as a practical matter. And now they’re jeopardizing the war on terror as well. When will what Dick Cheney once described as an “old chestnut” of a policy finally be abolished? UPDATE: Here’s a link to the TNR story. It’s superb. Read it and weep about our misplaced priorities.

LEFTWING DEPRAVITY WATCH: Check out Steve Bell’s vile cartoon in the Guardian yesterday. It says everything you need to know about why the Left has become so rancid and bitter.

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “Give the Republicans credit. They know what they stand for. Tax cuts. Guns. Bombs. Oil. Big business. Old boy networks. Privatization. Plundering the earth. Pillorying and padlocking the poor. Party-line votes.” – Derrick Jackson, the Boston Globe.

THE PRODUCTIVITY NEWS: “For the 12-month period ending in September, productivity grew at a rate of 5.3 percent, the strongest gain since the third quarter of 1983.” – the New York Times today. This must be a good sign for the long-term health of the economy.

NEWSWEEK ON THE WAR: At Yale, senior editor Michael Hirsh gives an insight into the way Newsweek is covering world events. “The war policy is a crock,” Hirsh opined. “This is a hugely risky operation for potential gains that probably won’t justify the risk.” Just passing on information about the views of those who control the mainstream news.

Early to bed so the Dish will appear later today. I have to get up roughly at the time I usually go to bed for C-SPAN. Don’t blame me if I look like death. Check in later for the usual.

SLUM CLEARANCE: More solid liberal arguments for ridding the world of Saddam.