Month: May 2003

And on an aircraft carrier! I still think the Lincoln photo-op was excessive. But it certainly wasn’t unprecedented.

“I could care less if Bennett gambled, it is the response from the commentariat and blogosphere I find interesting. Every political scandal is subject to the “shoe on the other foot” test. Ask yourself: If this was a prominent liberal discovered to have lost $8 million gambling (say, Jesse Jackson), what would the folks at the Weekly Standard and National Review be writing?
Yeah, I gotta say this one fails the “shoe on the other foot” test pretty strongly.” – more feedback, including a first-hand account of the charm of Jayson Blair, on the Letters Page.

The Bennett-defending crowd at National Review have finally decided that the best defense of Bill Bennett is a defense of inconsistency. Well, it’s an argument, I suppose. But to be clear: I’m not sure Bennett is being inconsistent. I just want him to provide a good argument for why he isn’t. Is that too much to ask? And there’s one inconsistency that strikes me as worrisome: when consistent rules apply to everyone else but you. Here’s one other inconsistency I’d like Stanley Kurtz to address: why is it okay to allow sodomy for straight people but not for gays? Or why are hate crime laws okay for every group except gays – the current Republican position. Or why do pro-marriage types largely ignore legislative attempts to tighten heterosexual divorce laws but want a federal constitutional amendment to bar gays from marriage? Some inconsistencies aren’t really inconsistencies. They’re masks for prejudice and ignorance and selfishness. (On the bright side, John Derbyshire says he’s to the left of Rick Santorum and doesn’t want to lock up homosexuals. But he’s quite happy to let some rural types jail a few if it’s good for the culture as a whole. Hey, those homos can always leave for Manhattan, can’t they?)

At long last, we hope to be emailing out our weekly newsletter this weekend. We’re calling it the “INSIDE DISH.” It’s my way of saying thank you to those donors who have supported this site so passionately for so long. It will have extra Dish items not seen on the blog, a private weekly round-up, access to new articles a day or so before they appear on the blog itself, archive downloads, and, coming soon, early access to a goodies store of coffee mugs, t-shirts, etc. If you donated money by Paypal or credit card or other electronic means, we’ll be sending it to the email address we received at the time, i.e. to about 4500 people. (And, of course, you can unsubscribe at any time.) But if you sent money by check and didn’t include your email address, we won’t be able to email it to you, for obvious reasons. So if this is you and you want to receive the “Inside Dish,” please send your email address with the name on your check to Robert at webmaster@andrewsullivan.com. Robert set up a master-list of all contributors so it should be relatively easy to cross-check and make sure we have a complete list. And, of course, if you have never sent any donations to the site and are feeling a little guilty about that, this is a great time to make amends. If you donate $20 or more, you’ll help keep this blog running, and we’ll put you on the list and send you the Inside Dish pronto. With the huge increase in traffic in the last year, our bandwidth expenses have doubled, and every donation helps to keep this site solvent. Here’s a link to the “Tipping Point” page telling you how to do this. If you have a credit card, it couldn’t be simpler. Thanks a million again.

Yes, I’d defend the right of these students to have a private whites-only prom. But it sickens and depresses me nonetheless. When people say racism is largely dead in this country, maybe they should take a trip to rural Georgia. This isn’t the old generation. It’s the next one.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world. I can hardly bear to see the faces of Bush and Rumsfeld, or to watch their posturing body language, or to hear their self-satisfied and incoherent platitudes. The liberal press here has done its best to make them appear ridiculous, but these two men are not funny. I was tipped into uncontainable rage by a report on Channel 4 News about “friendly fire”, which included footage of what must have been one of the most horrific bombardments ever filmed. But what struck home hardest was the subsequent image, of a row of American warplanes, with grinning cartoon faces painted on their noses. Cartoon faces, with big sharp teeth. It is grotesque. It is hideous. This great and powerful nation bombs foreign cities and the people in those cities from Disneyland cartoon planes out of comic strips. This is simply not possible. And yet, there they were.” – Margaret Drabble, mistaking a newspaper column for a therapist’s couch, in the Daily Telegraph.

Like many others, I can’t quite let go of the Bill Bennett story. It’s not because I don’t know what I think about the essentials. Bennett’s privacy has been unfairly violated, he has not been shown to be a hypocrite in any direct sense, and this is a non-story. If Bennett believes gambling does not hurt the broader society but consensual gay sex and pot-smoking do, he’s entitled to that opinion, and entitled to engage in his own private “vices” if he so wants. My minor disappointment, in fact, is that he caved into the puritanical pressure and agreed to give gambling up. But my major disappointment is that I haven’t found anywhere in Bennett’s enormous oeuvre any articulated defense of this crucial distinction between the societal effects of gambling and those of other private, consensual behaviors, like living with another man, or smoking weed, or watching porn. (Don’t give me the lame “weed’s illegal” argument. So is gambling in many states. I want to see an argument about why it should be illegal in the first place.) I see nothing wrong with any of these activities, and indeed would defend anyone’s right to seek such pleasures (and, boy, are they pleasures) in their own time and their own homes. That’s why it’s right to defend Bennett’s privacy in this case. But when, of course, was the last time Bill Bennett defended anyone’s privacy? Hasn’t he spent a career arguing that privacy should be foregone for the public good? Doesn’t he believe that all private activities are dependent for their morality and legality on their effects on society as a whole? (Radley Balko nails this point home.) Hasn’t Bennett even defended the public shaming and stigmatization of “sinners”? (He has certainly argued that gay people should be stigmatized, while promoting untruths about them to boot.)

THE SANTORUM GULF: Let me remind you in this respect of Senator Santorum’s broader political philosophy, a philosophy endorsed by Bennett:

The idea is that the state doesn’t have rights to limit individuals’ wants and passions. I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire. And we’re seeing it in our society.

Now let me remind you of Bill Bennett’s initial response to the gambling question: “If you can’t handle it, don’t do it.” Isn’t there a vast, gaping discrepancy there? Bennett doesn’t have to defend his private conduct. It’s none of our business. But he really does have to explain why gambling doesn’t hurt the broader society, while porn movies, pot-smoking, or gay sex somehow do. Until he does, then he won’t get out from under this cloud.

One Brit gets it.

THE RIGHT TO PROTEST: John Leo follows up on this blog’s concerns about over-kill in protest management by the police and the secret service.

PSYCHEDELIA’S POWER: Wonderful and cogent little essay in Slate defending LSD and other pharmaceutical methods of enlightenment and diversion.

I think he’s absolutely right to do so. We need more engagement with our ideological opponents, not less. I hope he talks to them about the importance of inter-racial relationships and the dignity of gay ones, unlike then-governor George W. Bush, who went to pander. And I hope he does so in Christian terms.

The Mickster claims I have reversed myself on the are-there-enough-troops question. Nuh-huh. It seems clear to me that Mickey lost Round One of this debate. There clearly were enough troops to win the war. It’s a separate question whether we now have sufficient troops to keep the peace. Two different issues. Two different views. Are they related? Somewhat. But we’ve had almost a month to get more troops in place – plenty of time. My criticism is directed at the post-war order, not the war-plan.

The ramifications of the Jayson Blair affair at the New York Times continue to mount. This piece in the Washington City Paper suggests that the Times’ entire coverage of the Washington sniper case may be compromised. There’s also the news that the Times has seen a big slide in readership – a 5.3 percent drop in the last six months. The Times spokesperson attributes this to an unusual peak in the wake of 9/11. But it would seem to me that the period of the buildup and then execution of the Iraq war would have been just as busy for a newspaper like the Times. Other media outlets – cable news, blogs like this one – boomed in the last six months. The general figures for all newspapers as a whole held steady. The New York Post saw a huge gain of over 10 percent – in the same city as the Times. The only paper to do worse than the Times was the Boston Globe, which coincidentally, has been recently taken over by 43d Street, and has seen its previously pious liberal bias become a left-wing anti-war screech. What’s going on here? There was a price increase, which might have made a difference. But surely the downward lurch of the Times’ editorial standards and its sharp turn leftward may well have something to do with the circulation decline. At some point, I presume, Arthur Sulzberger will see what Raines is achieving.