Month: June 2003

Again, it’s fascinating to see Clarence Thomas, a man I admire, take the trouble to point out that even though he voted with the minority on constitutional grounds, he is personally opposed to the law on political grounds:

If I were a member of the Texas Legislature, I would vote to repeal. Punishing someone for expressing his sexual preference through noncommercial consensual conduct with another adult does not appear to be a worthy way to expend valuable law enforcement resources.

This is the point Senator Santorum still won’t address. The reason for his silence is that he actually believes that the government’s policing of private sexual behavior is a good and important thing. Now we know how far out there he really is.

So the Supreme Court uses specifically the privacy argument to over-turn Bowers v Hardwick in a larger than expected 6 – 3 decision. It would be hard to find a more emphatic statement that gay men and women are a) human beings whose private lives deserve privacy and b) citizens who deserve the same treatment as everyone else under the law. A Reagan appointee, Anthony Kennedy, wrote the decision. I haven’t read it all yet so this is a preliminary take. But each day now, I can feel freedom dawning in this land again. The struggle of so many for so long is beginning to come true. What a privilege, what a joy, to be alive to witness it.

I didn’t see what many are calling a disastrous performance by Howard Dean on “Meet The Press,” but I know from observing him and debating him once that he’s an intemperate, arrogant bully. Will Saletan is onto something here. It’s a trait bad doctors have. They are used to being in such controlling positions vis-a-vis their patients that it goes to their heads. Good doctors resist such an obvious temptation. And then there’s Dean’s looseness with the truth. I’d say Fred Barnes scores a few hits with this column. Here’s one Dean quote Fred exposes: “Karl Rove and others have talked about going back to the McKinley era before there was any kind of social safety net in this country.” Now Karl Rove has talked about McKinley – but only, so far as I know, in respect to electoral campaign politics, not policy matters. Maybe one of the Dean blogs can put me right on this. Defend Dean’s statement; or somehow persuade me this isn’t an obvious deceptive smear. Email me, Deanies. Stand by your man. Or keep him honest.

WHERE ARE THEY – CTD: Josh Marshall responds to my recent arguments about the administration’s pre-war WMD rhetoric and arguments. He makes a decent point:

If the ‘better safe than sorry’ doctrine is what we’re now operating under, there shouldn’t be any need for exaggeration. The president might just have said, “They had chemical and biological weapons in the past. It’s a brutal regime that’s used these weapons in the past. They probably have them now. They might even be trying to develop nuclear weapons or strike up ties with al Qaida. We don’t have much evidence on these latter points. But the possibility is just too dire to chance. Better safe than sorry.”

Yet the administration seems to have understood that this wouldn’t quite cut it. So they tried something different. At best, they kept the ‘better safe than sorry’ reasoning to themselves. They decided it was better to be safe than sorry in their arguments to the American people. And, to make sure, they stripped all the ambiguity out of the evidence and removed it from the public debate.

Not quite. I absolutely support an investigation into whether anything was actually deliberately faked or egregiously spun. The reason is that I want us to be credible the next time we have to make such an argument. But so far, the evidence for blatant deception is extremely thin. Blair’s chief spin-meister denies any impropriety apart from one screw-up. And each day we hear of new clues as to the extent of Saddam’s WMD program. Another Watergate? I think that says more about the desperation of the Democrats and bitterness of the anti-war crowd than anything about this administration. But we’ll see, won’t we?

THE BEST COLUMN: On Sandra Day O’Connor’s logic is Mike Kinsley’s. If you haven’t already ready it, you should.

RELATED ADVERTIZING LINKS: You know opponents of equal marriage rights are in trouble when an editorial against them is followed by ads touting “Casual Civil Unions in Vermont” and “In Depth: Homophobia.” And in the Washington Times no less! The market trumps ideology every time.

THE NYT AGAIN: Yes, it’s better, although its coverage of the affirmative action decision bordered on the triumphal. But how about this headline: “Blair Offers More Troops for Iraq Despite Killing of 6 Britons.” Huh? Why the “despite.” Why not “because”? (It reminds me of the headline a while back that reported a decline in crime despite record numbers in prison. It simply didn’t occur to the Times’ editors that the relationship might be the reverse.) The answer is that the Times now has a rubric for the post-war Iraq situation. And it’s the same one as pre-war and during the war.In fact, it’s the same one forevery foreign engagement the United States ever gets involved in. Yes, it’s Vietnam! That’s the assumption of many of the liberal editors and reporters at the NYT: if we couldn’t make the war look like Vietnam, we’ll make the peace look like it. Expect more of the same.

HEADS UP: I’ll be on NPR’s Talk Of The Nation around 2pm EST to discuss the SCOTUS sodomy ruling.

Two leading libertarians take on the neo-cons.

THE NEW BLOGGER: Of course, it sucks. For a week now, after an overhaul, every other post ends up being given some weird future date and cannot be published. The time zones appear to be random; and the publishing is completely erratic. C’mon, Google. Surely you can do better than make a decent thing impossible to use.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “When life hands you lemons, head down the hall, hide in the closet of your enemy, wait until they get a papercut, then leap out shouting BANZAI and crush the lemon in your hand right over the papercut. Save the peel. Go downstairs to the bar. Order a vodka. Use the peel. Yum!” – James Lileks today. He’s saying dark and gloomy things about some mysterious person who hates “The Bleat.” Just give us a name, James.

It would be hard to find a more appalling example of racial animus than in Maureen Dowd’s column this morning. For some reason I guess I do understand, Clarence Thomas isn’t just opposed by many on the Left; he is hated. He is hated because he is, in Dowd’s extraordinary formulation, guilty of “a great historical ingratitude.” The good negroes, in Dowd’s liberal-racist world, are those grateful to their massas in the liberal hierarchy: they are grateful to Howell and Gerald and Arthur; and they know their place. For them to express the psychological torment of being advanced for racist reasons, to explain in graphic, brave and bold terms the complexity of emotions many African-Americans feel as ‘beneficiaries’ of racial preferences, is unacceptable. To describe such a person who has been courageous enough to put these feelings into a powerful dissent as “barking mad” is nothing short of disgusting. Yes, there are all sorts of psychological inconsistencies in Thomas’ journey. But that, in part, is the point! If Dowd supports “diversity” as a good thing in elite institutions, why isn’t it a good thing for one black Justice to contribute his own experience as part of a landmark judicial ruling? Of course I don’t know whether Dowd supports diversity in this sense. That would require her to argue something – of which she is apparently incapable. And then Dowd, of all people, complains that Thomas is more interested in his own personal dramas than “bigger issues of morality and justice.” When was the last time you read a Dowd column that grappled with “bigger issues of morality and justice”?

Another little coup for the big drug companies who, more than any other industry, have improved and saved the lives of countless people. You can now stop baldness and reduce your risk of prostate cancer. I gave up on Propecia a while back – I’ve gotten to like being bald – but now I’m thinking of taking it up again. What I particularly like about this new finding is that it conflates drugs for vanity and drugs for health. The distinction is not a scientific one; it’s cultural (like the distinction between medical and recreational marijuana). And one reason we discovered this therapeutic effect was because large numbers of men started taking finasteride in small doses for cosmetic reasons. In pharmaceuticals, all sorts of unexpected effects like this are discovered all the time (like the way in which Ecstasy has been found to help people with Parkinsons). The more we chip away at the puritanical stigma of taking pharmaceuticals for anything other than basic health, the happier and healthier a lot of people will be.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “The other day Bush said, ‘I would urge the Iranian administration to treat [the protesters] with the utmost of respect.’ Okay, but how about treating your own dissidents with some respect, Mr. President?” – Katrina Vanden Heuvel, the editor of the Nation, equating dissent in a democracy with dissidence in a theocracy.

THE G-WORD: The president finally says it.

THE DISSIDENTS: Pejman tells you more about Iran’s equivalent of the founding fathers.

RELIGIOUS SANITY: I loved this email posted by Jonah G. at NRO.

THE EU THOUGHT POLICE: Now they’re trying to ban all “sexual stereotyping.” Try that in Italy.

THE PERFECT CUPPA: It’s official now: how to make a cup of tea. Do not mention tea-bags. They’re vile.

Posted opposite are my latest column on how to deal with Iran; and a replay, on the cusp of a critical Supreme Court decision, of the history, theology and politics of sodomy.

The good news for the president is that the left is still obsessing about his “lies” and his stupidity. The question of lying, however, is obviously an important one. Did, on current evidence, the president deliberately mislead the public on the imminence of the threat of WMDs under Saddam? I’ve read a lot of critiques now – and it seems obvious that a few parts of the administration’s multi-faceted and drawn-out case for deposing Saddam were, to put it kindly, hyped. But the evidence unearthed by The New Republic’s estimable John B. Judis and Spencer Ackerman ultimately amounts to an argument that the administration exaggerated the intelligence estimates on Iraq’s nuclear capacity and its ties to al Qaeda. I think we’ll soon know more about both arguments. But there’s a premise here that strikes me as off-base. The premise is that after 9/11, only rock-solid evidence of illicit weapons prgrams and proven ties to terrorists could justify a pre-emptive war to depose Saddam. But the point of 9/11 was surely the opposite: that the burden of proof now lay on people denying such a threat, not those fearing it. Would I rather we had an administration that remained Solomon-like in the face of inevitably limited and muddled intelligence and sought the kind of rock-solid consensus on everything that would satisfy Jacques Chirac or the BBC (or John Kerry)? Or would I rather we had a president who realized that post-9/11 it was prudent to be highly concerned about such weapons and connections and better, by and large, to be safe than sorry? Condi was clear about this distinction: “There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly [Saddam] can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” I don’t think that’s hype. I think it’s prudence. Do I wish in retrospect that the Bushies – and more pertinently, the Blairites – had been doubly careful in not saying things that couldn’t be proven? Yes. Does this prove them to be liars and irresponsible leaders? Nope, as even the New York Times concedes. It simply shows that they used all sorts of inevitably hazy pieces of intelligence in order to remove what was clearly a potential danger to the region and the world. They screwed up in a few small ways. They triumphed in the one big way that mattered. No historical revisionism will change that.

I’m as mystified as Eugene Volokh by this statement by Dick Gephardt about the possibility of Supreme Court decisions with which he disagrees: “When I’m president, we’ll do executive orders to overcome any wrong thing the Supreme Court does tomorrow or any other day.” Does Gephardt understand even the basics of constitutional law? Or does he think his audience is too craven to notice an obvious piece of nonsense. You expect it of Kucinich who is – let’s put this politely – not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree. But Gephardt? Fibber, dumb-ass, or panderer? I report. You decide.

Two right-of-center columnists, Stephen Chapman and Cathy Young, both back marriage for all. I have to say that the best discussion right now is being held in conservative venues – where real diversity of opinion is actually present. Stanley Kurtz’s opposition to all marriage rights to gays is now tempered at National Review, for example, by more moderate voices, which is encouraging. But then you have quotes like this one, cited by Jonah as somehow valid:

Many social conservatives in America believe there is a God and a Holy Spirit and a Bible that condemns homosexuality as an abomination, and they will not be defeated.

What this quote reveals is something important about the religious right. Many simply do not acknowledge a need to make anything but religious arguments on this matter – or any other. They pick pieces of the Bible with which they agree (you won’t find many members of the religious right decrying usury or personal wealth) and then insist that they be reflected in the civil law. They see zero distinction between religion and politics. Zero. Can you imagine Jonah quoting a fundamentalist Muslim who simply asserted that “many social conservatives in America believe there is one God who is Allah and a Koran that says that women have no right to vote.” It’s politically meaningless, except as an endorsement of theocracy. Yet that is what parts of American conservatism are now reduced to: assertions of religious authority as indistinguishable from civil law. No wonder these theocrats are losing the argument. They haven’t even joined it.