Month: October 2003

Lightning hits Mel Gibson’s movie about the Passion – again. Hmmm.

THE SEARCH FOR THE LEAKER: It’s getting serious, according to the Onion.

AN ANSWER: Here’s a genuine response to the question I asked in my Wall Street Journal piece. A leading Catholic bishop endorses some civil benefits to protect the children of gay couples. Not enough, in my view, but a humane and civil alternative. So David Frum is now more anti-gay than a Catholic bishop.

GALLOWAY EXPELLED: The traitor and dictator-lover finally gets the boot from the Labour Party.

Two Tory takes on the centenary of Evelyn Waugh. One from Geoffrey Wheatcroft and one from Bill Deedes.

FEMALE HELL: The awful and apparently growing phenomenon of gang-rape in France’s immigrant enclaves.

KRUGMAN RE-GROUPS: You can tell he’s worried that the economy is picking up and that his predictions of complete catastrophe might seem a little extreme in retrospect. So he’s spinning the future. I guess it’s better than distorting the past.

Slate’s Fred Kaplan has sadly become the Krugman of the anti-war brigade. His weirdest claim is that Rummy’s memo puts the lie to the notion of progress in Iraq. Huh? The memo was designed to look as critically as possible at general progress in the war on terror. In no way does it deny progress in Iraq toward stabilization and democratization. In classic Rummy fashion, it simply tries to prod his bureaucracy out of complacency. That’s his style. You only have to spend a few minutes debating him to see that. To argue that the memo

reads eerily like some internal mid-’60s document from The Pentagon Papers that spelled out how badly things were going in Vietnam (just as President Lyndon B. Johnson and his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, were publicly proclaiming tunnel light and victories).

gets it exactly the wrong way round. It’s this kind of tough self-questioning that makes this unlike Vietnam. And the notion that this is the first time that Rumsfeld has asked such questions strikes me as fantasy. Rumsfeld has been asking questions from the day he became secretary of defense. And his assessment, after invading two countries, that “we have not yet made truly bold moves” against terrorism is extremely encouraging. He knows we have to find many, many more of these thugs and kill them. In Iraq, we’re finally getting a chance. (There’s a great email on the Letters Page making a similar point today. Don’t miss it.)

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “At Cambridge University, where I attended law school in England, the Jews exist in a state of perpetual vigilance and, often, fear of personal harm. As an American Jew I was used to wearing a kipa (yarmulke, beanie, skullcap, bowl-o’-soup, whatever) walking around town. Wearing a kipa in public anywhere is mentally exhausting; one is always conscious of people watching you, treating you like a stranger, making jokes as soon as they think you are out of earshot. Even in New York, where Jews of all kinds are everywhere, you feel people look at you and treating you differently than, for instance, if you wear a baseball hat.
But in Cambridge it was like I had a bullseye on my head. Not a week went by that something didn’t happen – curses from a group of Middle-Eastern looking “blokes” on the street, laughing references about the “cross you have to bear” from other students, white hot abuse about being a “Zionist Nazi” from a middle-aged white woman boycotting Sainsbury’s. Once, memorably, I got hit with a piece of raw potato and turned just in time to hear the sniggers of “shalom!” as the window of a restaurant kitchen banged shut.
At first I thought it must just be the townies, local “yobs” who resent the privileged, snooty University students and would often try to make themselves as unpleasant as possible. But, as more and more of these little happenings piled up, it became clear that Jew harrassment was one of the few entertainments in Cambridge that was not defined by class or educational background. When I discussed this with my friends in the Jewish Society (JSOC), they were completely nonchalant. I was stunned to hear that every single one had, at one time or another in their youth, been chased, threatened or beaten for being Jewish in the towns where they grew up. In one memorable case, a kid had been stabbed with a butcher knife, when he was 15 years old, by a man on a bus in Manchester.” Can you imagine what they have to deal with in France? More feedback on the Letters Page.

This one-liner from her Washington Post online chat:

Brooklyn, N.Y.: Tina: Could you please explain the difference between “hot” and “v-hot?” Do you think that in this current phase of your career you’re v-hot or hot, or are you always v-hot?
Tina Brown: Steaming, darling.

Brown and steaming? Darling? I liked this exchange as well:

New York, N.Y.: Hi Tina: Congratulations and best of luck with the new endeavours. Q: In a recent interview President Bush said something like he doesn’t read newspapers or watch TV news because he has people do that and report to him. Do you think it’s a little dangerous to have the man in charge having his news put through the only-good-news-for-the-president filter?
Tina Brown: Maybe he spends his day reading bloggs

And maybe he doesn’t.

Guess what? I just got an email from Priceline! Here it is:

Dear ANDREW SULLIVAN,
A refund has been placed on the credit card you provided to us upon submitting your request.
Your refund for a total of 4 out of 5 night(s) will be posted by your credit card company within the next 15 business days.
Please remember, this refund has been a one-time exception and priceline reservations cannot be cancelled, changed or refunded in the future.
Thank you,
priceline.com Customer Service

To all of you who may have written about this or sent an email or generally kicked up a fuss, I’m most grateful. And Priceline gets points as well.

A sharp little piece by Katie Roiphe in Slate both skewers Susan Estrich and praises her. The journey from the Anita Hill hearings to the Schwarzenegger election is indeed a revealing one for feminism in America. During that period, and especially during the Clinton wars, I gradually realized that my early support for sexual harassment laws was too crude, and that the consequences of such laws – the legal asault on privacy – were far worse than the evil they were trying to prevent or ameliorate. By that time, of course, I loathed Clinton, but I realized a limited defense of his sexual privacy (if not his perjury) was actually a truly conservative position. We all learned something in that decade, I think. Roiphe’s best point, however, is her last:

What the evolution of Estrich’s views does tell us though, is that the kind of burning melodrama that surrounds sexual issues vanishes as quickly as it appears; that a woman who can write passionately about “women’s silence” one minute can later take a man’s side. It is precisely the opinions that seem the most rigid, absolute, and emotional that are subject to the whims of fashion.

Ah, yes. But only if they haven’t been thought through. Sometimes, absolute and emotional responses are legitimate and right, as long as they are also intelligent. If they’re not, they’re just a secular form of fundamentalism.

THE RUMMY MEMO: It’s the most reassuring statement on the terror war I’ve yet read. The important thing about any administration in its third year is that it not be complacent, that it not be in denial, and that it ask tough questions of itself. Rumsfeld sure is no McNamara. And if I were a terrorist, I’d be alarmed at how earnest the U.S. government now is about tackling the threat. Of course, a MoDo column ridiculing this is now inevitable. Which is more indication that it’s an encouraging sign.

ANTI-SEMITISM WATCH: Right here, in the U.S. This story alarmed me, I have to say:

One of my friends is a guy I met in grad school a few years ago. He’s a lawyer that practices IP law and was pursuing a MS in Computer Science to further his knowledge of programming. He is brilliant. Went to U of Chicago undergrad, then Northwestern University Law. He works for one of the biggest law firms in the world…

And, according to this blog, at least, he has Mahathir-like views. For the rest of the story, click here.

Claudia Rossett outlines the horrors of Kim Jong Il’s totalitarian concentration camps:

The report presents the grim individual stories of 30 defectors interviewed by Mr. Hawk in-depth, and culled from these, to further clarify the customs of the camps, is a long list of the tortures described. “Worst of all,” as the report puts it, is a roster of stories detailing the routine murder of babies born to prisoners, as told by eight separate eyewitnesses. One common denominator is that when pregnant women are forcibly repatriated after fleeing to China, it is policy to murder their newborns, because they might have been fathered by Chinese men. One account describes babies tossed on the ground to die, with their mothers forced to watch. In another interview, a former prisoner, a 66-year-old grandmother, identified as “Detainee #24” to protect relatives still perhaps alive in North Korea, describes being assigned to help in the delivery of babies who were thrown immediately into a plastic-lined box to die in bulk lots. The report notes: “The interviewer had difficulty finding words to describe the sadness in this grandmother’s eyes and the anguish on her face as she recounted her experience as a midwife at the detention center in South Sinuiju”–one of the sites shown in detail in the accompanying satellite photos.

One of the lessons I drew from Iraq is that, when push comes to shove, there are some regimes that, regardless of any other factors, should be destroyed, if we can, purely because of their unmitigated evil. North Korea is one of them. Yes, I know that its ambiguous nuclear capacity makes military action all but impossible. But the horrors of its system beggar belief. I’m suspicious of any and all attempts to placate Pyongyang. But I don’t have any brighter ideas either. You can download the report on NoKo’s gulag here. I found reading it to be a horrifying and shaming experience.

FRUM ON GAYS: You can judge for yourself whether his response to my response adds up. But let me puzzle the final point he makes. I asked why he seems to offer no positive measures for gay people in their relationships, why he is opposed to civil unions and marriage, and why the needs of gay citizens seem irrelevant to him. He replied:

3. This call for ‘asides’ to ‘nod toward’ gay concerns surprises me. It would seem to me impertinent and improper to start administering pats on the head to people who have their own lives to lead and their own choices to make. My vision of a good society is that of the Prophet Micah: “But they shall sit every man under his vine and fig tree, and none shall make them afraid.” Every man – and woman too.

What does he mean? No one is asking him to provide marital advice to gay people. I was asking why a social conservative – defined as someone who believes that laws and morals shape behavior and that the state has a role in encouraging socially beneficial behavior and discouraging bad – should have no public policy toward a group of its citizens. If Frum is genuinely saying he doesn’t believe government should be doing such a thing, then fine. But why is he encouraging civil marriage for straights? Indeed, why have civil marriage at all? But here’s one thing Frum has now done: established that he will never criticize gay culture in the future. That would surely be “impertinent.”

“I just want to repeat something somebody said earlier, which I thought was brilliant, which is what they do in Hollywood is they soften up their subject like Ronald Reagan. They show some nice pictures. They say some nice things about them that they can’t deny saying nice about them. They do it to soften them up, and they’ll put the dagger in. And this is what they did in the movie “Nixon.” They softened him up in a sentimental way and then stuck the knife right in: he’s a drunk; he’s a bum; he’s a bad guy, a crook. That’s what they always do out there. There is a prejudice that they don’t know out there in Hollywood. And I think in this kind of case it’s too bad you can’t sue the bastards. Because what is happening here is clearly, these are late hits.” – Chris Matthews, Hardball, October 21. The notion that Reagan was homophobic – peddled in the biopic – is not substantiated by any historians or contemporary sources. As Martin Anderson said on the same show:

What Lou says is absolutely correct. I remember once in early 1980 on the campaign plane with the issue about what do we do about gay groups that want to see him and demanding things. And he sat us down and he said, “Now, look. First of all,” he said, “I know a lot of gays. I was in Hollywood.” And then he reminded us, “You know how many of them there are?” And then he said, “Look, leave them alone.” And that was his policy.

Yes, he should have said more about AIDS. He shouldn’t be let off the hook. But to cast him as a homophobe lets real homophobes off the hook.

THE PALESTINIANS: A new poll suggests that a majority wants to keep fighting Israel even if there’s a political settlement and a Palestinian state. Just as discouraging:

Ninety-six percent of Israeli Jews say the people who piloted the planes on September 11 were terrorists, while 37 percent of Palestinians share that view. Slightly more than one in four – 26 percent – of Palestinians believe Israelis planned the 9-11 attacks.
Forty-two percent of Palestinians and 61 percent of Israeli-Arabs stated that they support the people who are attacking Americans in Iraq. Zero percent of Israeli Jews said they did.

More grist for Sharon, I’d say. And, of course, Arafat.

An interesting study on how long people read blogs. The average length of time anyone spends on a blog is around 96 seconds. I’m not included in the list because I’m not on the site-meter. But my own stats monitor shows my readers hang out for on average 2 – 3 minutes. Maybe I write more. Or maybe they read more slowly.

Adam Kushner skewers Wesley Clark for the following outburst:

How do you think I could have succeeded in the military if everybody didn’t like me? It’s impossible… Do you realize I was the first person promoted to full colonel in my entire year group of 2,000 officers? I was the only one selected. Do you realize that? … Do you realize I was the only one of my West Point class picked to command a brigade when I was picked? … I was the first person picked for brigadier general. You have to balance this out. … A lot of people love me.

Sally Field, anyone? Before the Oscar.