Month: June 2003

One of the more remarkable features of the Iraq war was the way in which American and British soldiers cooperated and allied to great effect. In fact, that very triumph points up an obvious fact: there is no practical disadvantage to having a handful of openly gay servicemembers in combat or anywhere else in the armed forces. The Brits did away with the ban a couple years ago; it was a huge non-event; no one even remembers the drama that existed beforehand; and the military is not losing good soldiers (and translators and technicians) because of dumb policy. There are signs that the military leadership itself is beginning to recognize this. Take a look at one of the studies making inroads in military thinking on this matter by one Aaron Belkin. I find it persuasive, and I say that as someone who would not support lifting the ban if I believed for one minute it would harm military efficacy or morale. More and more, I’m reliably told, the military leadership agrees – which may be one reason why under Bush, the number of gay discharges has started to decline.

THE POWER OF BLOGS: Hugh Hewitt says a handful of blogs could have a real impact on the coming election season. I hope so. I have plans to blog from campaigns and from the conventions. And I have a feeling that this election cycle will be the moment that blogs really hit the big time.

STILL ON THE PARK BENCH: Verizon hasn’t managed to fix my phone line so I’m still WiFi-ing from the park bench. Kinda fun, actually. Except the sea-mist can’t be good for the laptop.

Check out their even more grotesque distortion of his words. Look, I’m supportive of a real inquiry into our intelligence on this matter, but so far, there’s no solid proof that any of the Bush and Clinton administration’s claims about Saddam’s WMD program has been debunked. The hysteria about this strikes me as fueled by pent-up frustration by those who were happy to see Saddam’s murderous tyranny continue and were humiliated by the liberation. Their mania is in direct proportion to their humiliation. Hence its intensity.

In the Roanaoke Times and the Sacramento Bee. Even Alterman regrets trusting her ethics. No word yet from the Gray Lady. But then her standards have slipped below these smaller papers.

Slate’s Jack Shafer has been doggedly defending Howell Raines now for months. And part of me admires Jack’s willingness to see things from Raines’ point of view; and, to some extent, he’s right about the current piling on. (Hey, I was piling on before most of the others!) He’s also right not to despise the concept of a rough-and-ready tyrant as editor of a great newspaper. But Shafer now concedes that much of his argument is now moot, given how the NYT staff has simply lost confidence in the executive editor and that the new battery of committees amounts to a kind of suspended abdication at the top. Raines, Shafer argues, is now the NYT’s Nixon in July 1974. There’s really no way forward but out:

Having surrendered his “fear and favor” management tools, how long can Raines lead the newspaper effectively? Imagine the empty joy of running the newspaper holed up like Richard Nixon during the impeachment summer of 1974. Raines might quit next week-like a Roman-to stave off a crisis. Or he might even quit so somebody else can lead the paper back to normalcy where people can do their work instead of attend committee meetings.

Tick, tock, Arthur. Tick, tock.

THE HOUSE OF LORDS ON SPAM: Yes, some of the august members of the British Upper House got a little confused:

Lord Renton asked: “Will the Minister explain how it is that an inedible tinned food can become an unsolicited email, bearing in mind that some of us wish to be protected from having an email?”

No, that wasn’t Monty Python.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “There is left but one simple rule for the new upper crust: by all means prefer victims to oppressors, but always prefer oppressors to true liberators… True liberators, as we can now see, would deprive the world of victims, and thus dry up the supply of peons that constitute the new class’s constituency. This is why, even though the new class disliked Saddam Hussein, they hate Bush infinitely more. Just as Palestinian refugee camps justify the failures and secure the tenure of Arab despots, so the poor and downtrodden of the world justify the ascendancy of the new upper crust. At home, school vouchers are opposed in the teeth of the urban poor that want them, because decent education might help put an end to the urban poor who vote for upper crust leaders. The same goes for the inclusion of privatization in the Social Security portfolio, and any form of tax relief that might result in turning the majority of Americans into owners, and into people too proud to consider themselves victims. And without victims, where would Lady Bountiful be then?” – Frederick Turner, TechCentral Station.

The story about the female Muslim driver who wanted her license photo to be taken with a veil on provoked some wonderful blather from Hitch in Slate. But he can’t out-do reality. Here’s a full faced picture of the same woman, arrested for child battery. No wonder she wants to stay incognito.

THE NYT IN CARTOONS: Hard to beat this one, I’d guess. And, yes, it appeared in the Washington Post.

CORRECTION OF THE WEEK: “In an article on Sidney Blumenthal’s “The Clinton Wars,” Michael Isikoff referred to James Bennet as a friend of Sidney Blumenthal’s. Bennet is not a friend of Blumenthal’s.” – Slate, May 30. Ouch.

More evidence of spin. Here’s a section from the transcript of May 20 Congressional testimony given by Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh on how the Justice Department has contacted libraries in the course of its duties:

REP. CHABOT: Can you tell us how many times, if at all, library records have been accessed under the new FISA standards in the USA PATRIOT Act? And if they have been so accessed, have the requests been confined to the library records of a specified person?
AAG DINH: Mr. Chairman, Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, requires the Department of Justice to submit semi-annual reports to this committee and also to the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate counterparts on the number of times and the manner in which that section was used in total. We have made those reports. Unfortunately, because they occur in the context of national security investigation, that information is classified.
We have made, in light of the recent public information concerning visits to the library, we have conducted an informal survey of the field offices, relating to its visits to libraries. And I think the results from this informal survey is that libraries have been contacted approximately 50 times, based on articulatable suspicion or voluntary calls from libraries regarding suspicious activities. Most, if not all of these contacts that we have identified were made in the context of a criminal investigation and pursuant to voluntary disclosure or a grand jury subpoena, in that context.

{The italics are mine.] Here is how the New York Times reported this testimony the next day:

In the most detailed public accounting of how it had used its expanded powers to fight terrorism, the Justice Department released information today showing that federal agents had conducted hundreds of bugging and surveillance operations and visited numerous libraries and mosques using new law enforcement tools … Such a mingling of intelligence and criminal investigations was largely banned under internal Justice Department procedures that were in place before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 … And agents have contacted about 50 libraries nationwide in the course of terrorism investigations, often at the invitation of librarians who saw something suspicious, said Viet Dinh, an assistant attorney general who briefed members of the House Judiciary Committee on the findings at a hearing today.

Notice the critical distinction here. Dinh specifically said that the library contacts had nothing to do with national security or terrorism. The Times reported that that was precisely the context in which those contacts were made. The question is not whether you believe DOJ or not. I’m as queasy about some of these investigations as anyone. The question is what was actually said at the hearing. The Times, it seems to me, simply and critically misrepresented what Viet Dinh said, to make a point opposite to that in his testimony. The DOJ has subsequently protested the Times’ account. As well they might.

ANOTHER COUNTRY: “I think you may be a little hasty in poo-pooing the Sontag line about imagining you’re not an American. (Hell, for you it’s not even too difficult, is it?) A certain sort of person takes the position that one should not criticize others unless one’s own house is perfectly in order. When thinking about one’s own country this line of thought inevitably leads to a double standard: Judging your own country but reserving judgment on others.
To take my own case, in principle I am an anarchist and in practice I am a mild social democrat. One thing I found when I started thinking of myself as an anarchist (largely to distance myself from socialists) was that I came to view the United States as just another country, and when you put them all on a level playing field with the others it comes off rather well.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

So I get back to Provincetown today, beagle in tow, boyfriend imminent, my newly renovated, reconstructed, whatever, beach-shack looking awesome. I now have – yes – two actual rooms. For the first time, I have a separate space for the toilet. (Yes, for two years, you had to ask everyone to leave the room and wait outside if you wanted to do number twos. That’s why my friends have long described my beach shack as Andrew’s Bathroom By The Sea. But no longer! Ha!) Only one problem: what Verizon calls a “cable failure” means no phone service. It could be out for days. So here I am tapping into cyberspace from a WiFi connection in Whaler’s Wharf, thanks to my friends at Cybercove, a little Internet cafe off Commercial Street. They close at 7 pm but the signal is 24 hours, so tonight, I’ll try and dish from a park bench located nearby. The blog must go on. But it might be briefer tonight. I’m wiped.

Interesting poll in USA Today: 70 percent think things are going moderately well or very well in Iraq; and 67 percent believe that the administration did not deliberately deceive anyone about the WMD threat from Saddam. If I were to poll my own brain, I’d come up with similar results. Sorry, Paul. Try harder.

No one who’s been a sentient human being could have missed the campaign that the entire political left (which includes the New York Times) has been waging against pharmaceutical companies. I’ve no doubt that some of these companies deserve tough scrutiny. But I also have no doubt that when the history of this period is written, one of the biggest stories will be the revolution in pharmaceutical research that has transformed the lives of millions from sickness to health. In that light, check out the latest NYT screed, by the usually reliable (if reflexibly leftist) Robert Pear. Pear’s story was about internal documents, discussing the industry’s lobbying plans for the next year. What’s striking is that nowhere in the piece is there a quote from the drug lobby explaining, defending or simply “no commenting” on the affair. None. Steve Brill summed up this lacuna eloquently enough in an email to Jim Romenesko’s website:

In (Sunday’s) Times we have a clear indication that the paper may now be so beset by internal strife that it has fallen off its basic game… if the explanation is that someone at the Times thinks quoting from the internal memos is allowing the group to speak for itself, that is not only absurd but also dangerous in the sense that nowhere in the story are we even told that Pear confirmed with the group that the internal documents are real – ie., that they aren’t fake or aren’t superceded by later drafts… How could anyone, let alone the Times, publish this story with no comment from the group that is the target?

Brill, it appears, still assumes that the NYT is about presenting both sides of the story in old-style journalistic fashion. Where has he been these past two years? For more details on how the NYT has pursued its ideological crusade against drug companies – even making up “studies” that don’t exist – check out Bob Goldberg’s latest piece in National Review.

POLICING THE BEEB: The BBC’s governors have decided they now need to monitor the national radio and television service each quarter to detect and keep an eye on bias. That may well be a result of the protests that this blog and many, many others helped frame and coordinate. Three cheers for the “second superpower” of the web. Now how do we get in touch with the NYT board?

One of my guilty pleasures is Lucianne Goldberg’s “Short Cuts” column. One of her short takes yesterday was about the imminent release of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s memoir, which, God help me, I have already agreed to review. Over to Lucianne:

The book will be launched with one of the slickest publicity campaigns in publishing history. Of course, one news cycle after it is published any possible juice will be squeezed into a one page AP story. Newsday seems to have spent the weekend calling prominent women and getting them to speculate on the contents of “Living History.” The only gal who had anything fun to say was the redoubtable Camile Paglia who never, ever pulls a punch: “Anyone who stays married to an infantile, drooling, serial groper deserves what she gets.” Camile, we miss you.

Yes, indeed, we do.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “What you identify as “Christo-fascism” was something Samuel Butler observed more than three hundred years ago in ‘Hudibras’:

‘… errant saints, whom all men grant
To be the true Church Militant;
Such as do build their faith upon
The holy text of pike and gun;
Decide all controversies by
Infallible artillery;
And prove their doctrines orthodox
By apostolick blows and knocks;
Call fire and sword and devastation,
A godly-thorough reformation…’

It was of course the dictatorship of Cromwell that Butler satirized. It is no coincidence that the radical and violent people who today profess to be acting in Christian causes are almost all “dispensationalist” Christians deriving their spiritual tradition from the Calvinist or Anabaptist strains of Protestantism.” You can say that again. More feedback on the Letters Page.