Month: June 2003

“I could hardly breathe. Gulping for air, I started crying and yelling at Donald and Dick and Condoleezza: ‘What are you saying? Why did you lie to me? What do you mean, there were no weapons of mass destruction?'” – president George W. Bush, as imagined by Francine Prose.

HILLARY SUCK-UP WATCH: “The woman [HRC] is stronger than Queen Elizabeth I of England, a greater strategist than Catherine the Great of Russia, braver than Boadicea or the Amazons of old. And yet the demands of fame in America are such that she has to grovel to the appalling level of reality TV to get our undivided attention. The fault, dear readers, is not in Hillary, but in our ghastly mass media, which only applauds brainy women when we are reduced to tears.” – Erica Jong, the New York Observer.

THE DEMS AND SADDAM’S WMDs: They were once as unequivocal as the Bush administration. And right.

Check out the extraordinary work of one David Nishimura on the Iraq museum question. He owned this story from the beginning and completely out-foxed all the major media. Check out this array of stories: an astonishing indication of how blogs are beginning to be among the most reliable forms of news out there.

ONE HACK STILL GETS IT WRONG: I missed this recent column of Frank Rich’s on the alleged ransacking of the National Museum in Baghdad. He repeats almost the same non-facts as his previous column, makes no attempt to correct the record and goes on:

[O]ur government is now trying to cover up its culpability in the desecration of the Baghdad museum with smoke bombs of spin. On May 7, Lt. Gen. William Wallace told reporters that “as few as 17 items” in the National Museum were unaccounted for – a figure that then allowed administration apologists to minimize the tragedy. But this and other low-ball American estimates of loss are, as one Unesco fact-finder told The International Herald Tribune last week, “a distortion of reality.” The U.N.’s team of experts estimates that at least 2,000 to 3,000 pieces are missing from the museum and that the entire two million volumes in the National Library and Archives are ash.

Will Rich correct? Should he read more blogs? Or will he pull a Dowd?

REGIONS OF MIND: The wonderful blog by Geitner Simmons now has a new address. Check it out. While I’m at it, here’s a promising newcomer as well.

Walter Duranty’s New York Times Pulitzer – for lying for a mass-murderer – is again under review. The Pulitzer in general is a rigged palaver, of course – the establishment patting its own back. Even so, this particular excrescence should obviously be revoked. Would they still be honoring a fascist-sympathizer who minimized Hitler’s massacre of the Jews?

MORE HILLARYISMS: Byron York has the goods on her lies about her role in Travelgate.

CORRECTION: I’m sad to say I goofed on the issue of same-sex marriage rights in Holland and Belgium. Holland expanded its legal partnerships for gay couples into full marriage rights on 21 December 2000, and they became legal in April 2001. Belgium did the same earlier this year. The Canadian marriages were among the first – because they have been back-dated to 2001. But the decision is not the first in the West. One correspondent who pointed this out to me added:

Whoa! While it’s true that the Danes have only gone so far, the Dutch do, in fact, have true marriage for gay and lesbian couples, indistinguishable from marriage for straight folks. “Gay” marriage is not covered by a separate law; the old marriage law has simple been enlarged to cover us as well. And that’s why this American boy moved to Amsterdam. – Gary Penn, married to Stefan Oppers since September 15, 2000.

Congrats, Gary and Stefan. You’re among the first foreign married couples not to be recognized in the United States.

The BBC World anchor, Nik Gowing, goes in for a paranoid rant about how governments – meaning Western governments – are trying to murder journalists who are doing their job in the Middle East. All this at the World Association of Newspapers Congress in Dublin. He cites the now disproved story of an alleged massacre in Jenin, as if he still believes it took place. Blog Irish is on the case.

Here’s why I still love the New York Times. The combination of writer Johnny Apple and the subject of English clotted cream is an inspired one. And this is one assignment I’m quite sure Apple executed without even the thought of using a stringer.

Yesterday was as strong as Monday in new memberships for the site – roughly 1,000 total so far, well along the way to our Pledge Week goal of 3,000. Thanks so much for helping – especially all the newcomers in the last few months. If you want to join, the process couldn’t be easier: check out how here. I’m also immensely grateful for long-time readers who have donated a second time. If we keep up this pace this week, we’ll truly establish this site financially, with a future we can start planning for with confidence. If you read this page regularly please help us keep it going by chipping in.

I’m amazed that more people haven’t been asking this question. It seems to me that it’s extremely important that Saddam be found and arrested – more important than whether we find some chemical missiles that Saddam would have been able to remanufacture swiftly if he’d survived the past few months with his regime intact. If he’s still in Iraq, as Ahmed Chalabi argues, then he truly is a menace. If he’s offering rewards for the murder of American soldiers, as Chalabi also claims, then his capture should surely be a priority. What are we doing about it? I wish I knew.

WHEN IN DOUBT: Offend. The hip British artist, Damien Hirst, has given up drugs and drink, but not the cheap attacks on others’ faith:

In a series of sculptures inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, which will be seen in London this autumn, Hirst will depict Jesus and the apostles as 13 pingpong balls bobbing on spurting fountains of red wine. A washing bowl to bathe Christ’s feet will sit beneath their Formica table. Hirst had wanted the balls to bob on blood but opted for wine, with all its symbolic echoes of the mass, in which Catholics believe wine is turned into the blood of Christ. If that were not strong enough meat for many Christians, it will sit alongside a cow with six legs called In His Infinite Wisdom. The fourth major piece in his next show at the White Cube gallery in London in September will be The Death of the Saints and the Ascension of Jesus, a sequence of “metaphorical” cabinets showing how Christ and the disciples met their ends. A pickled bull’s head will sit in front of each cabinet.

Charming.

Yes, the Ontario Court ruling really is a big deal. And yes, it really does represent the first actual, living, breathing gay marriage. Holland and Denmark have legal gay partnerships almost indistinguishable from marriage. But the Canadian precedent is the actual thing; marriage; the same thing as hetersoexuals take for granted. It isn’t separate but equal; it isn’t separate and unequal; it’s equality. Here’s the Court decision. No esoteric arguments about why this means bestiality and legal child abuse are just around the corner. Just a simple reading of what a civil state means when it grants all its citizens equal rights. Pathetically, the far right are now arguing that granting equal rights to a tiny minority will “oppress” them. That’s hooey. No one of any religious faith will ever have to acknowledge such civil marriages, just as Catholics don’t recognize civil divorce. But are Catholics “oppressed” because the state doesn’t follow their own religious interpretation of marriage laws? Of course not. What this means for America is that the Massachusetts Court decision – which is imminent – will now no longer be the first time marriage rights as such are granted equally. I particularly liked the following quote from a Canadian rabbi:

But not all religious leaders are opposed to the concept, the court was told. Ed Morgan, a lawyer representing the Canadian Coalition of Liberal Rabbis for Same-Sex Marriage, said his clients already perform same-sex marriage ceremonies and ‘would like to be able to do it with state sanction.’ Jewish religious life, even orthodox Jewish life, can “co-exist” in a society that allows same-sex marriage, said Morgan, whose clients intervened in the case. ‘We manage to live in a society that allows the sale of pork,’ he told the court.

Exactly. It really isn’t either-or. Gay marriage strengthens straight marriage; and marriage will help integrate gays into society and the family more effectively than anything else could.

“My two cents’ worth – and I think it is the two cents’ worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994 – is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. Heading up health-care reform was the only major administrative job she has ever tried to do. And she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasn’t smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly.
So when senior members of the economic team said that key senators like Daniel Patrick Moynihan would have this-and-that objection, she told them they were disloyal. When junior members of the economic team told her that the Congressional Budget Office would say such-and-such, she told them (wrongly) that her conversations with CBO head Robert Reischauer had already fixed that. When long-time senior hill staffers told her that she was making a dreadful mistake by fighting with rather than reaching out to John Breaux and Jim Cooper, she told them that they did not understand the wave of popular political support the bill would generate. And when substantive objections were raised to the plan by analysts calculating the moral hazard and adverse selection pressures it would put on the nation’s health-care system…
Hillary Rodham Clinton has already flopped as a senior administrative official in the executive branch–the equivalent of an Undersecretary. Perhaps she will make a good senator. But there is no reason to think that she would be anything but an abysmal president.” – liberal economist, Brad Delong, who contributed to Hillarycare, on his own blog.