Month: December 2003

In Britain, a six-month pregnancy is ended because the unborn child had a cleft palate. An abortion-provider defends the decision. So, I bet, would NARAL.

“Exercise is as addictive as booze and fags, say scientists” – from a headline in today’s Guardian.

Vanity Fair’s editor, Graydon Carter, will be writing a book about the evil and iniquity of George W. Bush. Carter is not exactly a man seized by ideology (although he is a Castro-lover), so his venture into polemics is more interesting as a sign that the social elite – especially the Manhattan upper crust – now regards it as an indispensable attribute to hate the president. Carter wrote an anti-Bush editorial recently in which he mistook trillions of dollars for quadrillions. Funny enough – but a trivial cognitive error, compared to being unable to distinsguish between a liberation and an occupation.

I don’t know, but this is surely good news. I was also interested to read this:

Here is what you have yet to hear reported in the mainstream media. In the few weeks since Coalition forces began to launch major counter-insurgency attacks, beginning with Operation Iron Hammer, over 1100 Iraqi Guerrillas have been captured or killed. This represents one-fifth of the entire strength of the Ba’athist and Islamist forces in the country. These figures, presented to President Bush in a secret briefing during his Thanksgiving trip to Baghdad, do not include the forty-six terrorists killed in a battle on November 30th. In other words, the US armed forces are killing and capturing fifteen of the enemy for each loss of their own: and this figure is distorted by the high number of US personnel killed in aircraft shoot-downs in November, a figure which is not likely to be repeated. In individual combat, the results look more and more like those of the last Sunday in November: forty-six of the enemy killed and eight captured with no losses among our forces. At the present rate, the entire force possessed by the enemy will be destroyed, and the country pacified, in a matter of months.

This reads like excessive optimism to me, but I hope he’s right. The best analysis, as usual, came from John F Burns in yesterday’s NYT. He uses a simple conversation to unpeel the layers of deception, self-interest, self-deception and fear that now envelop Iraqi society. It seems to me obvious that in this war, unlike the war against al Qaeda, capturing or killing the central figure, Saddam, is the sine qua non of continuing progress.

… against the FMA. And another! Money quote:

Amending the Constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman would be unwise for two reasons. Constitutionalizing social policy is generally a misuse of fundamental law. And it would be especially imprudent to end state responsibility for marriage law at a moment when we require evidence of the sort that can be generated by allowing the states to be laboratories of social policy.

This is the Cheney position. And it’s the right one. I’m struck by how so many of the truly excellent conservative writers – Will, Goldberg, Brooks, Horowitz spring to mind – oppose this amendment. Some endorse same-sex marriage; others don’t. But they all see how dangerous the proposed amendment is to sane constitutionalism and robust federalism. Let the states decide.

HEY, BIG SPENDER: The fiscal conservative critique of the Bush administration continues to gain ground. Here’s another tough critique called “The Bush Betrayal.” Why the emerging consensus? It’s true. The current deficits are nothing in comparison with what’s coming. I’ve said it before but if I were a Democrat running for president (hold the giggles) I’d outflank Bush on the right in Iraq and on the deficits. I’d argue for more resources for democratizing Iraq and a war on corporate and agricultural welfare. No, I wouldn’t touch the tax cuts. I love tax cuts. I’m just of the old-fashioned school that you shouldn’t send domestic spending through the stratosphere at the same time. I guess I’d get about three votes in Iowa.

A reader sends in a lovely little extract from the 1790 edition of the Falconer Dictionary of the Marine, a British reference work. Here’s the definition of “retreat”:

“RETREAT, the order or disposition in which a fleet of French men of war decline engagement, or fly from a pursuing enemy. The reader, who wishes to be expert in this manoeuvre, will find it copiously described by several ingenious French writers, particularly L’Hôte, Saverien, Morogues, Bourdé, and Ozane; who have given accurate instructions, deduced from experience, for putting it in practice when occasion requires. As it is not properly a term of the British marine, a more circumstantial account of it might be considered foreign to our plan. It has been observed in another part of this work (see the article HEAD) that the French have generally exhibited greater proofs of taste and judgment in the sculpture, with which their ships are decorated, than the English; the same candour and impartiality obliges us to confess their superior dexterity in this movement.”

A useful definition for the coalition soldiers in Iraq.

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT: Julie Burchill says goodbye to the Guardian. One of the things she will miss the least is the polite anti-Semitism that now seems such a growing feature of the Western left:

If you take into account the theory that Jews are responsible for everything nasty in the history of the world, and also the recent EU survey that found 60% of Europeans believe Israel is the biggest threat to peace in the world today (hmm, I must have missed all those rabbis telling their flocks to go out with bombs strapped to their bodies and blow up the nearest mosque), it’s a short jump to reckoning that it was obviously a bloody good thing that the Nazis got rid of six million of the buggers. Perhaps this is why sales of Mein Kampf are so buoyant, from the Middle Eastern bazaars unto the Edgware Road, and why The Protocols of The Elders of Zion could be found for sale at the recent Anti-racism Congress in Durban.

I like the term “Judeophobia.” It’s the common thread between old-style anti-Semitism and new-style “anti-Zionism” that somehow manages to find excuses for murderers of civilians – as long as the civilians are Jews.

One of the sad aspects of the current Catholic hierarchy’s obsession with sex is that they give short shrift to friendship. I noted David Hume’s more balanced view of marriage over the weekend, but Hume isn’t the only thinker who sees how important friendship is in marital or non-marital life. One of my favorite authors is the tenth century Northumbrian monk, Aelred of Rievaulx. His little book on friendship is a classic and plays a central role in my own essay on the subject, “If Love Were All” in “Love Undetectable.” What Aelred also understood was how passionate deep friendship can be. Here he is writing about friendship. Tell me if you can find anything in here that woul;dn’t also apply to a deep and beautiful marriage:

“It is in fact a great consolation in this life to have someone to whom you can be united in the intimate embrace of the most sacred love;
in whom your spirit can rest;
to whom you can pour out your soul;
in whose delightful company, as in a sweet consoling song, you can take comfort in the midst of sadness;
in whose most welcome, friendly bosom you can find peace in so many worldly setbacks;
to whose loving heart you can open, as freely as you would to yourself, your innermost thoughts;
through whose spiritual kisses – as by some medicine – you are cured of the sickness of care and worry;
who weeps with you in sorrow, rejoices with you in joy, and wonders with you in doubt;
whom you draw by the fetters of love into that inner room of your soul,
so that though the body is absent, the spirit is there,
and you can confer all alone, the two of you,
in the sleep of peace away from the noise of the world,
in the embrace of love, in the kiss of unity,
with the Holy Spirit flowing over you;
to whom you so join and unite yourself that you mix soul with soul,
and two become one.”

All of that applies to gay couples as well as straight ones. Aelred did not share the vicious homophobia that entered the church in the twelfth century. Maybe soon Catholicism will recover some of its lost appreciation of same-sex love.