Month: July 2003

My analysis of the current campaign to impugn the war against Saddam on the WMD issue is that it will fizzle out fast. My prediction is that it will boomerang against those who are busiest hyping it. Check out NBC’s interview last night with David Kay, the man in charge of the WMD search:

Mr. KAY: We’re finding progress reports. They also got financial rewards from Saddam Hussein by breakthroughs, indicating breakthroughs. They actually took–went to Saddam and said ‘We have made this progress.’ There are records, there are audiotapes of those interviews which give us that. So at this end you had the compressor.
BROKAW: Kay, a cautious professional who is well aware of the political pressure, is confident he can make the case against Saddam Hussein on WMD.
Mr. KAY: I’ve already seen enough to convince me, but that’s not the standard. I’ve got to have enough to convince everyone of that. What worries me is I know if we can’t explain the WMD program of Iraq we lose credibility with regard to other states like Iran, Syria and North Korea.
BROKAW: How long is that going to take?
Mr. KAY: No longer than it takes.
BROKAW: Six months?
Mr. KAY: I think we will have a substantial body of evidence before six months.
BROKAW: Kay could have his first report on the search for weapons of mass destruction by early this fall.

Tom Friedman is absolutely right. All that really matters right now is that we do all we can to bring about a new, representative government in Iraq. The rest is petty politics from people who are still pissed they lost the war over the war.

SHARPTON ON GAY EQUALITY: Debating marriage rights for gay people assumes “that gays and lesbians are not human beings that can make decisions like any other human being. We must stop this separation of gays and lesbians from other Americans… Even with those that are liberal on the issue, there is an understanding that there is something that is different and less than human about you… If people respect you, it is not about gays and lesbians having the right to marry, it is about human beings having the right to marry who they choose. It’s like saying, we give black, or whites, or Latinos the right to shack up but not marry.” -from the Democratic candidates’ debate, hosted by the Human Rights Campaign.

The debt that we will hand over to the next generation is now growing at a fantastic rate. Even the Bush administration’s own rosy estimates predict that this president will have landed the country with almost $2 trillion of accumulated new debt in the next five years. I think you can forgive some extra spending to avoid a depression and to pay for two vital wars and homeland defense. But the sheer scale of damage the administration is doing to our future economic and military strength is still deeply worrying. Non-military, non-homeland defense domestic spending increased by 6 percent in Bush’s first year and close to 5 percent the following year (far beyond the rate of inflation). He is now adding a huge new entitlement to Medicare, tied to one of the commodities with the fastest rate of price increases in the economy: prescription drugs. The defenses of Bush higlight how much of the new spending was vital of our security (a good point), how much more profligate the Democrats would be (not a good enough point) and how the tax cuts will eventually increase revenues (but enough to counterbalance all that spending?). All I’d say is that no conservative can be happy to observe the phenomenal growth of government under this president. The sheer fact of moving from long-term surplus to fast-mounting debt and structural deficits in a mere two years will be a damning election argument. Right now, the president doesn’t seem even to acknowledge that there’s a problem. But it’s a far bigger one than some phony hysteria about a minor CIA goof. He needs to figure out how to reverse this trend and address it in the looming campaign.

Bob Graham tries to woo the red states by sponsoring a NASCAR driver. Hey, why not the WWF? John Edwards tries to emulate (yes, I know it’s a parody).

BUSH AND AIDS: Is he back-tracking on his Africa commitment?

THE RACISM OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: Another little glimpse into how the left-liberal mind can work:

The Blair scandal led to criticism that Raines had protected Blair despite a poor record because Blair is African-American and Raines was trying to improve diversity in the newsroom. [Lynette] Halloway’s problems could lead to similar questions, since she is also African-American. Like Blair, she had caught the attention of Raines, who put her in the media section of the paper, insiders said. “She was a Howell appointment,” said one insider. “He wanted to increase coverage of hip-hop music.”

I guess I’m lucky I didn’t work for Raines. He’d have had me covering hairdressers and musical comedy. And he’d have expected me to be grateful.

“I often feel the natural place for a gay person is on the right. Conservatives should be all about an individual’s right to his or her own life, his or her own business, without the interference of hypersensitive, offended others. And it follows that true conservatives ought to support gay marriage, particularly those partial to family values. It’s difficult to argue that society doesn’t benefit from stable relationships. And what better way to encourage stable relationships than to support gay marriage? It is hard not to snicker at the idea that same-sex marriages would threaten straight ones. We straight people in Canada and the US have done a good job of bringing the divorce rate close to 50 percent all on our own.” – Rondi Adamson, Christian Science Monitor.

FIGHTING THE BBC: The beginnings of a protest movement against the BBC seems to be in the air. This week, the BBC released their own annual report. It was full of the usual self-serving pabulum and ignored the massive criticism that the BBC has endured for its pro-Saddam coverage of the Iraq war. It was widely savaged, and the critics included an influential Labor MP:

Committee chairman Gerald Kaufman MP accused the governors of being “utterly gushing” in their assessment of the last year. He questioned how long the BBC could go on arguing that it should be funded by “a tax” as it “goes on shrinking, as it is shrinking and will shrink”. The corporation has also been under political scrutiny following its public row with 10 Downing Street over a BBC story that claimed the prime minister’s office “sexed up” a dossier on Iraqi weapons. Mr Kaufman said the BBC should sack Andrew Gilligan, the reporter who prompted the Iraq weapons row. He added that Mr Gilligan and other journalists should be sacked for writing what he called “contentious” articles for the newspapers.

Meanwhile another Brit has gone to court to resist having to pay the BBC tax.

“I am an admirer of your writing and (generally) good common sense. I contributed to your original fund drive, as yours was a voice I wanted to hear. Even when I disagree with you, as I do on the issue of gay marriage (good Catholics can disagree, right?), I take your arguments seriously enough to consider them as those of a thoughtful human, not the spawn of Satan. Thus I was particularly annoyed to read the snippet today on “the social right’s darling, Pat Robertson.” As you can tell, I’m a social conservative, but I also consider Robertson an ignorant bigot and fast talker who is an embarrassment to me (and many of my friends on the social right). -I refrain from associating you with nutbar leftist homosexuals; I’d appreciate it if you would refrain from associating-me and other-social conservatives with Robertson (whom I loathe).” I take the point. But there was a time when Robertson was regarded as a pillar of the consrvative establishment, defended by the likes of Norman Podhoretz, etc.

An attendee describes the goings on at the political blogathon.

“I have developed a habit when confronted by letters to the editor in support of the Israeli government to look at the signature to see if the writer has a Jewish name. If so, I tend not to read it.” – famously enlightened British editor, Richard Ingrams, in the Observer. He goes on to argue that Jewish contributors to British op-ed pages should be identified as such if they write about Israel.

“No stars. Oh well, it’s a small thing, it doesn’t matter. I am happy, we all are. The general sentiment is: “Yes, of course we know it is not a real government, but it is a start.” The mix is right; they just have to work more on the choice of characters, and they need a massive PR campaign. People just don’t know who they are, especially the women.” – Salam Pax describes a reality ignored by the mainstream media.

Strikes me as the right choice. Sulzberger is to be congratulated for inviting the obvious criticism that he made a mistake two years ago, and yet picking the right man anyway. Arthur – unlike Pablo Picasso – seems open to change and renewal.

ROBERTSON: Fresh from defending the despot in Liberia, the social right’s darling, Pat Robertson, is now praying for health concerns to prompt three Supreme Court Justices to retire. You can’t make this stuff up, really, can you?

Bloggers descend on the British parliament for a blogathon. One deputy already has a blog and he’s btter known for it:

James Crabtree, the organiser of the seminar and head of the Voxpolitics project, says the idea of the evening is not to evangelise the case for weblogs – a form of online diary and comment site with links – but to ask what they can do well, and what they are not useful for. He points out that as recently as 1995 only one MP had a website, and now they are universal, and predicts the same uptake for blogging. “If you look at Tom Watson, six months ago nobody had heard of him. Now, if you type ‘Labour MP’ into Google, you get Tom Watson, not Tony Blair.”

So the tectonic plates of media and political power slowly shift.

KERRY AND GAY MARRIAGE: Maybe I was too harsh. Yes, his position is better than many on the right. But I don’t see why liberals should be given a pass on this issue. They need to explain why they support inequality for gays, without a facile resort to broad platitudes – monogamy, child-rearing, etc. – that collapse upon inspection. In Kerry’s case, as I argued yesterday, his second marriage to a divorcee does not exactly conform to a traditionalist notion of civil marriage in which it is for life and for children. But Kerry is also an example of another piece of heterosexual privilege: the zero estate tax on married couples. As a reader explains:

You missed the biggest Kerry hypocrisy. While Kerry moans about the Republican goal of eliminating the estate tax, he says nothing about the unlimited marital exclusion to the estate tax.- Talk about a loophole!
Over a half billion passed to his present wife from her first husband’s estate, free of estate taxes.-The same unlimited marital exclusion will allow that same accreted fortune to pass to Kerry in the event his wife dies first, again free of estate taxes.

Why should a gay couple be denied this benefit? Or put it another way: why does Kerry believe that he is worthy of inheriting a fortune tax-free, but a gay spouse who has lived with her partner for sixty years isn’t? Shouldn’t someone ask him this question?

NYT TWELVE STEPS: A guide to overcoming an addiction.