Month: October 2003

Why is it that both the left and the right have it in for Arnold Schwarzenegger? (I’m not referring to the last-minute dirt-dump by the L.A. Times/Gray Davis/CodePink brigades. The alleged behavior strikes me as boorish, gross and wrong. But that’s not unknown in the heterosexual lifestyle, no one has sued, no one was actually screwed, he has apologized, and I’m a tolerant, inclusive kind of guy.) AS’s candidacy, however, is far more than a classic political event. It’s a cultural event. What he represents is best displayed, to my mind, in the classic movie, “Pumping Iron.” That movie is about cunning, wit and irony – as incarnated in the larger-than-life figure of an Austrian super-star who is more American than millions of native-borns. But it is also about the 1970s – an era of sexual freedom, bravado, excess and pleasure, especially pleasure. Arnold is far, far more in touch with that ethos – and with the culture of the generations that came after it and have been permanently altered by it – than most contemporary politicians. Check out this account of an AS rally by Weintraub:

Arnold Schwarzenegger plays guitar while Twisted Sister singer Dee Snider sings the campaign anthem, “We’re not gonna take it.” The rally at the state Capitol drew about 10,000 supporters and was a rainbow of ages, races and social status. No wonder the Democrats fear Schwarzenegger.

And no wonder some uptight Republicans do as well.

CULTURE VERSUS POLITICS: This color, this cultural sympathy, this comfort with pleasure and irony and laughter, is made even more dramatic in contrast with the dry, political paste represented by Governor Davis – a spectacularly bland and corrupt hack who seems to come from some political factory. That Arnold should represent this and the Republican Party is threatening to all sorts of people: to the joyless, paranoid scolds who run the Dixie-fied GOP; to the professional political class (although AS will likely coopt and manipulate them to no end); and to the new left that likes to believe it has a monopoly on politicians who aren’t horrified by sex, drugs and rock and roll. There’s no one else in today’s Republican or Democratic parties who comes close to this. Who else could enrage both Rick Santorum and Katha Pollitt? Clinton is and was a schlubby, sexually guilt-ridden Rhodes Scholar who desperately associates with Hollywood dreck in order to get some smidgen of cool rubbed off on him. Hillary’s even more frumpily puritan. Dubya is relaxed but in a post-recovery, Bible-class kind of way. McCain came close to being real and genuinely cool, but has nothing like Arnold’s pop-cultural draw. In this universe – where your options are drones like Kerry or Lieberman – Arnold is a cultural revolution. I don’t know whether he’s going to be a decent governor but he’s said a few of the right things and it’s hard to think of anyone being worse than Davis. What I do know is that his election would do an enormous amount to ameliorate the disconnect between culture and politics in this country. His election would be a sign of a tectonic plate shifting in the culture. About time. I hope he wins – not least to warm up the frigid soul of the Republican party.

It seems to me that a good blogger or pundit may legitimately stay above the fray for an election campaign, leaving whom he’ll support till the last minute. Well, it’s election eve as I write this and Mickey Kaus, who has devoted his entire blog to the California recall, still won’t say who he’s supporting. I can understand neutered blogger, Daniel Weintraub, staying mum. The Sacbee might fire him for endorsing a candidate. But what’s Mickey’s excuse? Is it that he either has to say he’d vote for AS and have all those neolibs and Dems screaming at him for being a neocon, Republican stooge? Or is it because he’ll reveal that, like most neolibs, he’s a partisan Democrat who just thinks his party is often wrong but can’t bring himself to pull the GOP lever? C’mon, Mickster. Don’t be a wuss.

A stimulating little essay. Money quote:

Christie’s ouevre up until, say, ‘Cat Amongst the Pigeons’ in the late 1950s is an intriguing – if conventional – study in Burkean philosophy. What makes her more than that – what pushes her work into a higher realm – is that she was a clever enough woman to realise that the Burkean order she loved was becoming less and less tenable as social change accelerated. Often, the novels she wrote as an old woman from the 1960s until her death in 1974 are dismissed as inferior to the more famous early works, and it is undoubtedly the case that the plots are less sharp and imaginative. But I have always believed that they are the most intriguing: they chart the nervous breakdown of Burke’s England, and the intellectual bankruptcy of a conservatism derived from Disraeli and Baldwin, better than any other writer I know.

More sanity from Johann Hari.

THE MEDIA VERSUS THE WAR: Bret Stephens goes for the jugular about the domestic enemies of success in Iraq.

BORN GAY? More evidence for something I have long suspected.

FINALLY, SEXUAL PARITY: Why did it take so long for this to be developed?

A reader sums up one way in which the anti-war left is still fighting the war – by trying to create a new narrative of the pre-war. Of course, the analogy is from the Simpsons. The argument about the war is a little like Apu’s citizenship exam (my reader paraphrases from memory):

Exam Giver: “What was the cause of the Civil War?”
Apu: “The split between abolitionists and secessionists had come to a head in in The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 when…”
Exam Giver: “Just say slavery.”
Apu: “Slavery it is, sir!”

“What was the reason given for the war against Saddam?”
“Well, the previous Gulf War’s truce required Saddam to give up all WMD research and development and weapons, and U.N. Resolutions … ”
“Just say we said he was on the brink of killing us with nukes!”
“Weapons it is, sir!”

So we get the baldfaced untruth that the war was because Iraq posed an “imminent” threat. It wasn’t. Or that it was about a causal link between Saddam and 9/11. It wasn’t. Or that it was based in intellgience from Niger. It wasn’t. Technically, the war was a continuation of the last one, and was fully supported by umpteen U.N. resolutions, including a 15-0 Security Council vote to force Saddam to comply. 9/11 made a war far more conceivable because it revealed the U.S.’s vulnerability to fanatical terrorists who might get hold of WMDs from Saddam. The casus belli was not proof of Saddam’s existing weapons, but proof of his refusal to cooperate fully with U.N. inspectors or account fully for his WMD research. Nothing we have discovered after the war has debunked or undermined any of these reasons. And the moral reason for getting rid of an unconscionably evil regime has actually gotten stronger now we see the full extent of his terror-state. But the anti-war left sees a real advantage in stripping down the claims in people’s receding memories to ones that were not made but which can now be debunked. It’s propaganda, to which the media in particular seems alarmingly prone to parroting. We have tor esist it at every stop – because this war has not yet been won, and the really crucial battle, now as before, is at home.

THE “IMMINENT” LIE: Two AP stories that keep up the “imminent threat” lie: one from John Lumpkin on October 2; and one by Jim Abrams on October 4. Please send in any new post-October 6 versions of the lie. The Associated Press is particularly important, since it is so widely disseminated in local papers.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “I have e-mailed you and disagreed with you many times, but please do me one favor: STOP WRITING ABOUT THE CUBS!!!!!! YOU ARE GOING TO JINX IT!!! DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA OF WHAT YOU ARE MESSING WITH????!!! THIS IS 95 YEARS OF PAIN YOU’RE F***ING WITH!!! I PROMISE TO NEVER DISAGREE WITH ANYTHING YOU SAY AGAIN, JUST PLEASE STOP WRITING ABOUT THEM UNTIL THEY……… gulp.”

How’s this for a quick round-up of untruths: Time (for whom I write a column); the Christian Science Monitor; CNN; the Associated Press; and the Financial Times. I should tip my hat to lefty-blogger, Bob Somerby, for pioneering this point in a far more precarous spot than I am. (But we agreed about Gary Condit as well, way back when.) Somerby gets to the pint quickly enough:

As everyone on earth surely knows, Bush didn’t say, in his SOTU, “that Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger.” He referred to alleged attempts to buy uranium from “Africa,” of which Niger is one tiny part. What was the context for Bush’s remark? The October 2002 NIE referred to attempts in Congo and Somalia as well as Niger, and when the Brits released their intel in September 2002-the intel to which Bush’s speech explicitly referred-the British press focussed on Congo, not Niger. Meanwhile, Wilson only said that a sale couldn’t likely be completed in Niger (due to extensive oversight). He didn’t prove that Saddam had never tried to make such a purchase. In short, Wilson’s report, on its face, does not shoot down what Bush said in his speech.

The point is: the media has in fact made this untruth true by constant repetition. And they have done this in an effort to show that Bush was being untruthful. That’s projection, not journalism.

“Rich or poor, straight or gay, black or white. Whatever you are, wherever you’re from, the Conservative party is for you,” – the British Conservative Party chairwoman, Theresa May, earlier today at the Conservative Party Conference. Why can’t a leading Republican say the same thing? Why has president Bush not been able even to say the word “gay” in three years in office? The excuses are wearing thin.

Of course, this is from veteran Bush-hater, Elisabeth Bumiller:

In the summer, the conflict broke into the open when Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said that Mr. Tenet had been primarily responsible for not stripping from the president’s State of the Union address an insupportable claim that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from Niger. Mr. Tenet and his allies were enraged, and Stephen J. Hadley, Ms. Rice’s deputy, eventually took the blame.

Untrue: the claim was about Africa, not Niger, for the umpteenth frigging time. And, of course, the claim was not insupportable. It was, in fact, supported by British intelligence agencies, who still stand by their work. Correction? Don’t bet on it.

From Newsweek:

Wilson’s report seems to have vanished into the bureaucratic maw. In his January ’03 State of the Union address, President Bush, citing British intelligence reports, repeated the charge that the Iraqis were trying to buy uranium from Niger.

Not true. He said Africa. There’s an important difference. The writers of this story are excellent journalists. If they cannot get this right, what hope for the rest of the crew? The truth is: they have internalized this stuff. They don’t even see their own biases any more. Please keep sending me media mentions of Bush’s citation of Niger in his 2003 SOTU. If we can’t stop them spreading untruths, we can at least monitor them.

Some disturbing details about some of Arnold’s enemies.

Worth watching what the BBC does on its website. It often dramatically alters copy after it’s posted – and not for legitimate reasons, like typos or minor amendments. In an earlier draft of this piece, for example, the following sentence appeared: “Syria is, of course, Israel’s enemy. The two countries are still in an official state of war, caused by Israel’s occupation and illegal annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights.” Now it reads:

Syria is, of course, Israel’s enemy. The two countries have been in a state of war since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The Israelis have long charged that Damascus uses the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah as a proxy army to launch attacks along Israel’s border with Lebanon. And since the beginning of the Palestinian uprising, Israel has increasingly focused on the Palestinian opposition groups hosted by Syria. It accuses the exiled leaderships of planning attacks carried out by their military wings in the occupied territories, and accuses Syria (as well as Iran) of backing them.

An improvement, no? But still no mention of the 1967 or Yom Kippur wars. What you see in the first draft, I think, is what the BBC really believes: that the Jews are responsible for all the ills in the Middle East. But even they feel obliged to respond to public pressure. Which is good news, after all. If we can’t get rid of them, we can at least moderate their extremism. Keep sending me BBC lies and propaganda. Exposure works.