Month: October 2003

Great to see I’m not the only one who sees the genius of this mix.

THE TORIES PUT THE BOOT IN: It looks increasingly likely that the British Conservative Party is about to switch leaders. This is a good thing. Blair needs a real opposition and his domestic policies are reverting to the left’s mean: more taxes and more spending. But look at the reasons for the leader’s decline:

The Times says plans are under way for a “lightning contest” to replace Mr Duncan Smith and thus minimise the damage to the party, if, as expected, he fails to secure the 83 votes required to win this afternoon’s vote of confidence in him by Tory MPs. The paper’s Michael Gove identifies three major defects that sealed Mr Duncan Smith’s fate: his inability to manage his team, as evinced by his harsh treatment of now-rival David Davis; his poor communication skills, as revealed during lack-lustre performances at PMQs and party conference; and his poor judgment, displayed over issues such as his opposition to gay adoption.

Yep. Opposition to gay adoption has helped sink a conservative leader. There lies the future.

“What a phony! What a bunch of crap this Clark boom is. Clark reminds me of Keir Dullea in “2001: A Space Odyssey” — a blank, vacant expression, detached and affectless. There’s something sexually neutered about Dullea in that film — a physical passivity necessitated by cramped space travel — that I also find in Clark. And the astronaut Dullea plays is sometimes indistinguishable from the crazed computer, HAL — which I find in Clark’s smug, computerized vocal delivery… Doesn’t anyone know how to “read” TV? The guy’s an android! He gives me the creeps. And don’t they realize how short he is? He’s a slick, boudoir, salon military type who rubbed plenty of colleagues the wrong way. Clark is not a natural man’s man. And he’s no Eisenhower, who was a genial, charismatic leader with a genius for collaboration and organization.” Her take on the war seems wrong to me – she seems more concerned about educating the public about the glories of Middle Eastern culture (not a bad idea in itself) than tackling the frightening rise of Islamism. And she doesn’t get Washington. She seems to think that State Department-Pentagon infighting is somehow Rumsfeld’s doing! But when she’s good, she’s great. This was how she felt about Rush Limbaugh’s woes:

For me, it was almost like when Diana had her accident or when Natalie Wood was found drowned off Santa Catalina. That’s the level of deep emotional upset that admirers of Rush had — not because his private life contradicted his public code but because of the revelation of the desperate, agonizing subterfuges to which he had been driven by his addiction.

Paglia is the only person on the planet who could go on to compare Rush Limbaugh with Judy Garland. For that alone, she deserves to be celebrated. Oh, and she’s dead right about the genius of Drudge. Incomparable.

Another mosque linked to defenders of murder and terror. And it will be built in Boston.

TORY DAY OF TRUTH: The lack-luster British Tories, finally united on policy, will meet today to decide whether to dump their uninspired leader, Iain Duncan-Smith. One way of figuring out what could happen is reading the editorial in today’s Daily Telegraph, the bastion of Toryism. There was no ringing endorsement of IDS, and a subtle argument that the process of replacing him could be swifter and more decisive than some believe. Others are urging a coup. I’d say he’s finished. The Tories are a ruthless party; and another massive election defeat could cripple them. Survival is what matters now; and my guess is they’ll seize the chance.

MICKEY ON PVS: Kaus makes a decent point here:

How does a) the number of innocent people who will be executed under death penalty procedures compare with b) the number of innocent, live patients who will be killed under a tendentious diagnosis of PVS? I’d guess the ratio is probably one to 100, maybe 1 to 1,000. But the American left makes a huge (and legitimate) fuss about the former while it actually promotes the latter.

But couldn’t the same thing be said about many on the religious right in reverse? They are going doolally over this case; but many support the death penalty with glee. For my part, I would favor keeping poor Terri Schiavo alive and oppose the death penalty in all cases. But I don’t think the Schiavo case is an easy call. And I don’t believe maintaining someone in that nightmare forever is an unmixed blessing. And one qualm I have about the case is the fanaticism of the people supporting her. Speaking of which …

Amy Welborn is mightily ticked off that I dared to quote the Catechism about Terri Schiavo. Since I am now in her mind not a Catholic, how can I refer to such a text? One of her Catholic readers goes even further: “Reading Andrew Sullivan making arguments from the catechism is like hearing Adolf Hitler give an exegesis on a passage from the Talmud.” Now that’s the voice of Christian dialogue. Mark Shea, a man who also claims to represent Catholicism in its orthodox form, emotes:

T’aint complicated. Everything–I mean *everything*–in Andrew’s world is ordered toward the defense, protection and promotion of One Little Thing. This was just one more opportunity to take a swipe at the thing that poses the biggest threat to that. His task here is not to teach Catholic ethics, but to obfuscate, confuse, blur and denigrate. A day or two ago he was trying to somehow construe the defense of Terri’s life in support of gay marriage. It’s all about l’il willie for Andrew.

That last quote is a wonderful insight into the minds of the Ratzingerites. The legal right of a husband to determine the future of his incapacitated wife, and the difficult balance between keeping someone alive who is in a vegetative state for decades and letting them die with dignity: this is all really about my penis. Puh-lease. Again, I’d give the benefit of the doubt to keeping Schiavo alive. But the extremism and absolutism of her advocates is unnerving. All I was trying to do by quoting the Catechism is to show that even under Ratzinger, there is an understanding of a balance here. It isn’t life-at-all-costs, which is how some of these people are sounding. I also find it odd that Welborn seems to believe that someone who does not subscribe to Cardinal Ratzinger’s sexual ethics (i.e. a huge majority of American Catholics) is thereby ruled inadmissable in any debate about Catholic ethics on life and death. Here’s how she puts it:

But really, if you reject the whole of the Church’s teaching on sexuality (and he does – remember his defenses of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s past sexual outrages?) – don’t, and I mean DON’T come at me quoting the Catechism. Just don’t.

That’s how Ratzinger sees it, of course. He is the sole guardian of truth; debate is pointless; all that is required is obedience; and those who are disobedient are barred from even speaking in the Catholic conversation. But to see this rigidity echoed among some lay-people shows the extent to which anti-intellectualism truly has taken hold. (For the record, I did not defend Schwarzenegger’s alleged sexual gropings. I called them gross and wrong. I merely defended his consensual past sex life and opposed the campaign to use his sexual past to prevent his election.)

This one goes to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for deliberately mangling a quote from Congressman George Nethercutt. He’d just returned from a tour of Iraq and, like so many others, reported a much more optimistic scenario than many in the media have been reporting. He gave a talk in which he said,

“So the story is better than we might be led to believe – I’m – just – indicting the news people – but it’s a bigger and better and more important story than losing a couple of soldiers every day which, which, heaven forbid, is awful.”

The Seattle P-I chopped off the quote so that it said in its subhead: “It’s a better … story than losing a couple of soldiers every day.” They added in their own words: “He added that he did not want any more soldiers to be killed.” But that is not an accurate rendition of the full quote. It’s a device to protect themselves in what is clearly a hit-job. Nethercutt complained, “I requested that the Post-Intelligencer correct the record. They refused. And they even refused to at least run my full quote. But the P-I didn’t stop there. They then wrote an editorial condemning me, repeated the quote they had deliberately distorted, and put my ‘quote’ next to the name of one of our fallen soldiers. To do so was completely heartless.” But not unexpected. Here’s how the Seattle P-I responded:

“It’s a better and more important story than losing a couple of soldiers every day,” the would-be senator gaffed at a gathering Monday. The family of Pfc. Kerry Scott of Concrete, who buried their young hero Tuesday, likely would not share Nethercutt’s news judgment.

Charming, huh? What they implied with their first story is now explicit in their editorial: that Nethercutt doesn’t give a damn about the military casualties that have taken place. And once the quote is in the database, you can’t escape it. Guess what? Maureen Dowd ran with it! Dowd’s insinuation is particularly unfair. She wrote:

On Monday, Representative George Nethercutt Jr., a Republican from Washington State who visited Iraq, chimed in to help the White House: ‘The story of what we’ve done in the postwar period is remarkable. It is a better and more important story than losing a couple of soldiers every day.’ The congressman puts the casual back in casualty.

Well, he would have put the casual back in casualty if he hadn’t added, “which, which, heaven forbid, is awful.” Doesn’t that elision completely undermine Dowd’s cheap shot? Dowd is not personally guilty of deliberately distorting the quote; the Seattle P-I is. But it behooves Dowd and the NYT to run a correction exonerating Nethercutt from the charge of insensitivity to the troops.

From a reader who understands the issue better than Amy Welborn:

On a personal note, living in Florida, this Shiavo situation is really a tough one. My mother lost her battle to Alzheimer’s just shy of her 86th. from 80 on it was obvious that she was failing little by little. First it was her memory started to get holes in it, then halting speech, wandering away from her caregivers…eventually into a nursing home where she deteriorated over a couple of years until she lost the ability to swallow. Feeding tube recommended by the doctors were refused by my sister who along with me had the final say, due, thank God to my mom’s living will. She passed peacefully, I hope, in about a week after contracting pneumonia, due in part to her weakened condition. She was a vibrant, self educated person, full of spunk all her life, and one of the first people I can remember to be a real woman’s libber, long before it was at all fashionable, a real progressive who never backed down from anyone, or anything. I know she would have pulled the plug herself if she had been able to at the end. My heart goes out to all those affected by this. I’m not sure there is a right and wrong so much as there is an inevitability that we all must live with ourselves and the decisions we make in these situations. I agree with you that I’m not so sure it is humane to not let nature take it’s course.

More feedback on the Letters Page.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “Some say let’s choose another route and give gay folks some legal rights but call it something other than marriage. We have been down that road before in this country. Separate is not equal. The rights to liberty and happiness belong to each of us and on the same terms, without regard to either skin color or sexual orientation.
Some say they are uncomfortable with the thought of gays and lesbians marrying. But our rights as Americans do not depend on the approval of others. Our rights depend on us being Americans.
Sometimes it takes courts to remind us of these basic principles.
In 1948, when I was 8 years old, 30 states had bans on interracial marriage, courts had upheld the bans many times, and 90 percent of the public disapproved of those marriages, saying they were against the definition of marriage, against God’s law. But that year, the California Supreme Court became the first court in America to strike down such a ban. Thank goodness some court finally had the courage to say that equal means equal, and others rightly followed, including the US Supreme Court 19 years later.
Some stand on the ground of religion, either demonizing gay people or suggesting that civil marriage is beyond the Constitution. But religious rites and civil rights are two separate entities. What’s at stake here is legal marriage, not the freedom of every religion to decide on its own religious views and ceremonies.” – John Lewis, civil rights giant, standing up in today’s great civil rights battle.

Where far right becomes far left: the fag-hating, America-hating offspring of Fred Phelps. More pro-Saddam posters here. (Hat tip: Glenn.)

Marriage is legalized in Taiwan for all citizens, gay and straight. (Hat tip: Michael Demmons.)

From an interview in a left-liberal arts mag in California, Newtopia:

Newtopia: As a resident of Los Angeles, how do you feel about the California recall election?
Mat: Fuck yeah. It is funny how the spin doctors tried to make what was democracy in action seem reactionary because it did not conform to their narrow ideals. Too many Democrats are shrill, hopeless, undersexed squares. It will be funny if the Republicans are hip all of a sudden and the left is suddenly me, you and our high school English teachers lecturing about the triumph of the 60s. That is what is happening here, the Republicans are hijacking culture. And the Democrats are a bunch of squares in suits saying tsk-tsk-tsk. It is funny. I lost any hope in politics after what Clinton did to Jerry Brown in the 1992 primaries. The first issue of Coagula was a pamphleteering plea to elect Jerry Brown. Clinton was a hopeless square and now that is coming home to roost. The true intellects and creative forces in the Democratic party have been marginalized in favor of Centrist conformists, and now the Republicans are saying “Hey let’s party!” and the true strengths of the Democrats are seen as fringe, risky strategies by the Democratic leaders, and the Republicans seem like visionaries, but a monkey in a fez would seem like a leader and visionary standing next to Bustamante or Davis!

Yep, Clinton was such a square. Still is. A Rhodie, remember?

HOME NEWS: 75,000 visits yesterday. Thanks.

Check out how the BBC spins the anti-Israeli bias of a British professor who refused to admit an Israeli student to his doctoral program because – as he put it himself – “I have a huge problem with the way that the Israelis take the moral high ground from their appalling treatment in the Holocaust, and then inflict gross human rights abuses on the Palestinians because they [the Palestinians] wish to live in their own country.” Here’s the BBC version:

A professor who rejected a student’s application because he had been in the Israeli army has been suspended by Oxford University. Professor Andrew Wilkie, Nuffield professor of pathology, emailed the student saying he would not enrol “someone who had served in the Israeli army”.

Yes, the Beeb offers some routine boilerplate on how the professor emoted about the plight of the Palestinians. But it seriously minimizes the real content of the professor’s animus. You could over-look this, I guess. But coming from the BBC, whose visceral hostility toward Israel teeters on the edge of anti-Semitism, it’s worrying. Besides, don’t almost all Israelis have to serve at some point in the military?