Month: October 2003

My dream tickets for 2004, explored opposite.

WHAT ARE THEY FOR? Conservatives and homosexuality, my Wall Street Journal piece, is now posted.

LOSING A CHURCH: But keeping the faith. My anguished attempt to remain a Catholic is articulated opposite.

Here’s the full text of Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad’s recent anti-Semitic diatribe. The quotes in the media don’t do full justice to its bile. Thanks to Meryl Yourish for posting it in full.

BEHIND THE BBC: A fascinating story that shows the pressure the BBC is now under. In a radio interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury, there was a prior agreement that the question of the Iraq war would not be raised. But John Humphrys, a major opponent of the Iraq war, was the interviewer and broke the deal. The BBC then agreed not to broadcast the relevant section. Not a huge deal, but I do think the excised exchange is revealing:

John Humphrys: Can I turn this conversation to Iraq? Before you were enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury, you said, you signed a statement published in the Tablet, that said the war was immoral. Is that still your view?

Rowan Williams: At the time of course when I signed that statement there was no war. We were considering what might happen. Since that time I have commented on the possible risks of going to war before war broke out.

I have attempted during the period of the war to respect what’s going on and not to make idle or armchair pontifications about it. Since the war has drawn to a close of military operations, I have been reflecting on where we are now, and my view is still that there are major questions about that enterprise.

JH: Was it immoral?

(A 12-second pause)

RW: It seems to me that the action in Iraq was one around which there were so many questions about long-term results, about legal justification that I would find it very hard to give unqualified support to the rightness of that decision.

JH: You hesitated a very long time before you answered that, Archbishop.

RW: Immoral is a short word for a very, very long discussion.

JH: As Archbishop, do you not have an absolute responsibility as spiritual leader of this country to say very clearly, if we go to war, whether you believe that war is moral or not, and do you not have the sense that you are hedging a little here?

RW: No I don’t, because I don’t believe that the moral contribution that can be made by any spiritual leader is ever a matter of simply handing down something like the 10 commandments.

It’s a matter of trying to understand more deeply what sort of moral choices others are having to face, assisting with all the resource that I can bring to that and of course trying to live with the decisions that they make.

You can see what’s going on. The BBC interviewer wants another anti-war headline from the archbishop, who doesn’t want to go there. So he persists. The campaign by the leading media to distort and denigrate the liberation of Iraq continues. Even non-stories are now getting massive play to keep the pressure up.

MORE REASON: For Wesley Clark to become Howard Dean’s running-mate. It would be a great, centrist Democrat-Republican ticket.

PLUS CA CHANGE: Check out this post-war report. Grim news:

A tour of the beaten-up cities of Europe six months after victory is a mighty sobering experience for anyone. Europeans. Friend and foe alike, look you accusingly in the face and tell you how bitterly they are disappointed in you as an American. They cite the evolution of the word “liberation.” Before the Normandy landings it meant to be freed from the tyranny of the Nazis. Now it stands in the minds of the civilians for one thing, looting. You try to explain to these Europeans that they expected too much. They answer that they had a right to, that after the last was America was the hope of the world. They talk about the Hoover relief, the work of the Quakers, the speeches of Woodrow Wilson. They don’t blame us for the fading of that hope. But they blame us now. Never has American prestige in Europe been lower.

Except now, of course.

Easterbrook has now been fired from ESPN. His comments, which his colleague Leon Wieseltier has now described as “objectively anti-Semitic,” were not written for ESPN; he has never written anything but superb commentary for ESPN; and yet he’s now without a job. Slate should pick his football column up again. You can tell ESPN what you think here.

The site went down earlier today. Don’t know why yet.

He actually criticizes NPR darling, Terry Gross. Money quote:

I agree with the listeners who complained about the tone of the interview: Her questions were pointed from the beginning. She went after O’Reilly using critical quotes from the Franken book and a New York Times book review. That put O’Reilly at his most prickly and defensive mode, and Gross was never able to get him back into the interview in an effective way. This was surprising because Terry Gross is, in my opinion, one of the best interviewers anywhere in American journalism.
Although O’Reilly frequently resorts to bluster and bullying on his own show, he seemed unable to take her tough questions. He became angrier as the interview went along. But by coming across as a pro-Franken partisan rather than a neutral and curious journalist, Gross did almost nothing that might have allowed the interview to develop.
By the time the interview was about halfway through, it felt as though Terry Gross was indeed “carrying Al Franken’s water,” as some listeners say. It was not about O’Reilly’s ideas, or his attitudes or even about his book. It was about O’Reilly as political media phenomenon. That’s a legitimate subject for discussion, but in this case, it was an interview that was, in the end, unfair to O’Reilly.
Finally, an aspect of the interview that I found particularly disturbing: It happened when Terry Gross was about to read a criticism of Bill O’Reilly’s book from People magazine. Before Gross could read it to him for his reaction, O’Reilly ended the interview and walked out of the studio. She read the quote anyway.
That was wrong. O’Reilly was not there to respond. It’s known in broadcasting as the “empty chair” interview, and it is considered an unethical technique and should not be used on NPR.
I believe the listeners were not well served by this interview. It may have illustrated the “cultural wars” that seem to be flaring in the country. Unfortunately, the interview only served to confirm the belief, held by some, in NPR’s liberal media bias.

Held by some?

The New Republic’s Gregg Easterbrook is now being slimed. He wrote a couple of sentences that, taken out of context, might sound anti-Semitic. In context, they are an appeal to leading Jewish citizens to take their faith seriously, as Gregg has also written, in an identical context, about Christians. He is an extremely decent fellow; and a superb writer and thinker. He has worked for many years at The New Republic, testimony in itself that he is hardly anything even close to anti-Semitic. Yet it seems as if some are now out to destroy his reputation and his career. Here’s part of Gregg’s apology:

I’m ready to defend all the thoughts in that paragraph. But how could I have done such a poor job of expressing them? Maybe this is an object lesson in the new blog reality. I worked on this alone and posted the piece–what you see above comes at the end of a 1,017-word column that’s otherwise about why movies should not glorify violence. Twenty minutes after I pressed “send,” the entire world had read it. When I reread my own words and beheld how I’d written things that could be misunderstood, I felt awful. To anyone who was offended I offer my apology, because offense was not my intent. But it was 20 minutes later, and already the whole world had seen it.
Looking back I did a terrible job through poor wording. It was terrible that I implied that the Jewishness of studio executives has anything whatsoever to do with awful movies like Kill Bill.

I fully understand. And I see the deeper point about personal responsibility – Christian, Jewish or other – he was obviously trying to make. Blogging is, indeed, a high-wire act. Looking back, I write about a quarter of a million words a year. The notion that I will not write something dumb, offensive or simply foolish from time to time is absurd. Of course I will. Writing is about being human. And blogging is perhaps one of the least protected, most human forms of writing we have yet discovered. It’s like speaking on air, live. Yes, bloggers should take criticism. But they should be judged on the totality of their work, not their occasional screw-ups. Gregg has been attacked enough.

A READER ON FRUM: This just about sums up the case:

Marriage-lite breaks down the institution, but it is the political conservatives who force marriage-lite instead of the real thing. So the story goes: same sex marriage mught be a social good if it were a real marriage, but since it won’t be, and we won’t let it be, it is bad.

Yep. That’s the nub of it. The other part of it is: please go away. We like our society without you in it. If you can’t disappear, at least shut up. More feedback on the Letters Page.

From NPR’s Morning Edition. The following is the intro. Can anyone – anyone – deny that this is straight from the left-liberal playbook, under the guise of objectivity:

Bob Edwards: This is Morning Edition from NPR news. I’m Bob Edwards. Increasingly it seems the Bush Administration’s foreign policy is running into trouble. The post-war picture in Iraq and Afghanistan is highly unstable. The road map to peace in the Middle East is in tatters. There’s growing unease over the possibility that North Korea and Iran are pursuing nuclear weapons. Friends of the United States are not supportive. Overall, the policies of the United States are still very unpopular around the world. The Bush Doctrine, a preference for unilateral military action and a disdain for multinational diplomacy, is under scrutiny more than ever. NPR’s Mike Shuster reports.

It carries on in the same vein.

Soctland’s new cardinal-designate is a liberal on some matters like contraception, women priests, celibacy and homosexuality. Well, he was. After making statements like “What I would ask for in the Church at every level, including the cardinals and the Pope, is to be able to have full and open discussion about these issues and where we stand,” he was threatened with having his new job taken away from him. He then had to put out a statement:

“I accept and intend to defend the law on ecclesiastical celibacy as it is proposed by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church; I accept and promise to defend the ecclesiastical teaching about the immorality of the homosexual act; I accept and promise to promulgate always and everywhere what the Church’s Magisterium teaches on contraception.” Some elements within the Church claimed the statement had been made under pressure from the Vatican, a claim denied by a spokesman for the Catholic Church in Scotland and the cardinal-designate himself, who added today: “Having recently restated my loyalty to the Church, its teachings and the Pope, I would hope that Catholics everywhere would join with me in respecting the decisions of the Pope and demonstrate their own loyalty by not questioning them.”
An anonymous fax sent to news organisations and Catholic groups said: “O’Brien was told by the Vatican if he did not correct what he said at a mass on October 1 he would not be allowed to become a cardinal.”

The question here is not whether Rome has the right to do what it just has. The question is whether matters at the heart of controversy and dissent within the Church can even be discussed and debated. They cannot. The Cardinal sounds like a Soviet apparatchik, parroting official propaganda he doesn’t believe in, not a man of the church answering to his own conscience and asking questions that the faithful are also asking. But those are the kind of leaders the current hierarchy wants. And the chilling of all debate is now heading for the deep freeze.

After the Malaysian prime minister’s Nazi-like outburst, Jacques Chirac makes sure that the EU’s condemnation isn’t too strong:

At their own summit in Brussels, Belgium, European Union leaders had drafted a harshly worded statement condemning Mahathir’s remarks, but French President Jacques Chirac blocked the wording from becoming a part of a final declaration.
The text had said Mahathir’s “unacceptable comments hinder all our efforts to further interethnic and religious harmony, and have no place in a decent world. Such false and anti-Semitic remarks are as offensive to Muslims as they are to others.”
Chirac, however, said there was no place in an EU declaration for such a text. EU leaders compromised by having Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi criticize Mahathir at his closing news conference. Officials said the draft text also would be issued as a separate statement and would be posted on the EU presidency Web site.

The French anti-Semitic? Where did anyone get that idea from?

Not many items this morning. Been traveling and the endless game.

FRUM RESPONDS: The answer to all the questions I asked a week or so ago in the Wall Street Journal was provided by David Frum today. Well, I think it was. Here are some of my questions:

On what grounds do conservatives believe that discouraging responsibility is a good thing for one group in society? What other legal minority do they or would they treat this way? … What is the social conservative position on civil unions? What aspects of them can conservatives get behind? What details are they less convinced by?

Now see if you can find an answer to a single one of these questions in Frum’s piece. All you get is the argument that domestic partnerships, by creating “marriage-lite,” undermine the social status of marriage, and are therefore a bad idea. But that was the point I first made back in 1989! The answer is to give gay people marriage rights! But that, for reasons David doesn’t elaborate, is off the table. In fact, one of the main reasons we have all these marriage-lites at all is because conservatives refused to offer the real deal; and so others tried to create piece-meal efforts at reform. So we have, I think, an answer of sorts: no marriage rights and no domestic partnership rights. Better to keep a proportion of the population outside of all civil relationship norms than to integrate them in any way. One thing you notice right away: Frum seems uninterested in the fate of gay people, unconcerned about their plight, and doesn’t even try to address it. I agree that society as a whole has interests that are rightly part of this debate. But to accord the lives of gay citizens no standing in this debate – to dismiss them as irrelevant as a premise – is really stretching it, I think. Is it really not worth even an aside to nod toward their concerns? Or do we matter that little?

PRICELINE HELL: Strictly speaking, it’s my fault. I booked a five-day hotel room stay in New York City for a bunch of commitments, one of which fell through. So having paid over $1000 in advance through Priceline.com, I delayed my trip by a day. But I didn’t call the hotel to let them know I’d be a day late, assuming I’d have to absorb the extra day’s cost, but still had a booking for four days. (No, free-lance bloggers do not have secretaries and we can be absent-minded.) So I called up yesterday morning to confirm the room for the remaining nights. They were sold out. My no-show allowed them to cancel the entire reservation. Would they refund the remainder? Nope. If my flight had been canceled, I might have had a chance, but I couldn’t keep that pretense up. The hotel told me I should call Priceline. I did. They said that my no-show invalidated everything; that, since it was my fault, they had no obligation to find me any other rooms; and I should have read the fine print. So they get over $1000 for nothing; and they have no obligation to help out at all. The woman on the phone, I swear, was almost smirking. “Sucker!” was the tone. My trip has been as jinxed as a Cubs game so far, so I took the turn of events with a certain magnanimity. The BF and I are on some good friends’ couch tonight. It’s not been a great week for him. One lesson: if you use a service like Priceline, remember to be vigilant. It’s a great idea but the profit margin is obviously highly correlated with suckers and incompetents like me.