He’s far more hostile to pre-marital sex than I am but, hey, he’s more of a conservative than I am. The difference between his conservatism and others is a profound sense of the full humanity of homosexual persons. He doesn’t see us as inferiors, merely as fellow human beings with the same needs and aspirations as others. And so he sees what this issue is really about. It’s hard not to be impressed by David Brooks. But with this column, he leaves me awed.
REALITY STRIKES: Who’d have thunk it?
US President George Bush is “totally at odds” with his media image, Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Menzies Campbell said today.
Mr Campbell, an opponent of the war with Iraq, spoke out on the ePolitix website about his discussions with the President during the state visit.
He said that they discussed directly issues such as Iraq, the Middle East, Guantanamo Bay, Kyoto and trade sanctions.
“He is personally extremely engaging. He has a well-developed sense of humour, is self-deprecating and when he engages in a discussion with you he is warm and concentrates directly on you.
“He looks you straight in the eye and tells you exactly what he thinks.”
Mr Campbell, stressing that the President was “totally at odds” with his media image, went on: “I was not persuaded by what he said, but I was most certainly surprised at the extent to which the caricature of him was inaccurate.”
What did they think he is, a chimp? Oh, hold on …
MAILER ON THE FIRST GULF WAR: Here’s a discussion of the first Gulf War by Norman Mailer, a man who is now hell-bent on declaring the second president Bush anathema for daring to finish what his father started:
George Bush blew that war. I think he’d had only 300 Americans killed and I think he felt at the end of the war that day, it would be a great record. So he didn’t want to go on one more day. If he’d gone on one more day there might not have been 100,000 Iraqi killed. But in any event, war is merely one of the horrors that face us. If you’re going to take an absolute liberal position, as for instance Victor did, and said let’s do it through the UN, the fact of the matter is the UN is not competent to find out where all the nuclear things are buried. We’re going to miss the KGB before it’s all over because they were good at that. The CIA is probably pretty good at that. You need that kind of information.
We’re entering an extraordinary world where all the old signals are off. It used to be that Third World countries were wonderful little places that were terribly exploited. Now they’re ugly places that are run by maniacs very often. We have to face that fact. If you keep using liberal jargon forever you will finally die in your own platitudes.
So you get damned if you leave Saddam in place; and you get damned if you don’t. If Mailer was prescient enough to realize as early as 1992 that “we’re entering an extraordinary world where all the old signals are off,” didn’t 9/11 seal the case? It’s the MoDo principle: attack ’em whatever they do, and hope no one will actually pore through your paper-trail.
HEADS UP: I will be on ABC’s This Week tomorrow morning debating the marriage issue.
The Dish 