Month: December 2003

In a dramatic gesture, Bill Moyers has refused the prestigious Begala Award prize. Despite the fact that the Nation reported Moyers making the statement attributed to him, Moyers writes to say he didn’t say exactly that. It’s a mystery how the Nation reporter misheard it. Here’s Moyers’ email clarifying what he said:

During a long life in journalism I have made my share of errors, most often when I pass on a second-hand report that I have not myself checked out. I trust that is what happened in your “Weekly Dish” of December 26 which also appeared as an op ed piece in the Washington Times. You quote me as saying something that I did not say. In bestowing on me the Begala Award [for excessive left-wing rhetoric], you have me saying “I think this [ the Bush administration] is a deliberate, intentional destruction of the United States of America.” But I didn’t say that or anything close to it. If you or your nominator had bothered to check, you would have discovered that that quote was incorrectly attributed to me by a journalist covering a speech that I made in Washington on June 4. Check it out yourself: “As a citizen, I don’t like the consequences of this crusade, but I respect the conservatives for their successful strategy in gaining control of the national agenda. Their stated and open aim is to strip from government all its functions except those that reward their rich and privileged benefactors. They are quite candid about it. Their leading strategist in Washington, Grover Norquist, in commenting on the fiscal crisis in the states and its effect on schools and poor people, said,’I hope one of them’ – one of the states – ‘goes bankrupt.’ So much for compassionate conservatism. But at least Norquist says what he means and means what he says. The White House pursues the same homicidal dream without saying so. Instead of shrinking the government, they’re filling the bathtub with so much debt that it floods the house, waterlogs the economy, and washes away services that for decades have lifted millions of Americans out of destitution and into the middle class. And what happens once the public’s property has been flooded? Privatize it. Sell it at a discounted rate to their corporate cronies. It is the most radical assault on the notion of one nation, indivisible, that has occurred in our lifetime. I simply don’t understand it — or the malice in which it is steeped…” As I say, I have made such mistakes in failing to confirm some second-hand reports that I did not myself substantiate; I have tried to the best of my ability to acknowledge them in the same venue where I made them, including on the air. I trust you will find a way in this instance to acknowledge that you erred, too.

On second thought, let’s give Moyers the prize anyway. I wasn’t at the speech, so I’ll take Moyers word against a reporter’s. But the notion that the administration is deliberately and maliciously destroying the the public good for private interests is still juicy enough. It’s new year – time to be compassionate toward the rhetorically-challenged. Moyers can keep the award. But next year, Bill, try a little harder. No help from the Nation, ok?

We’ve never done it before but next week, we’ll have a guest blogger dishing daily, while I take a brief break. He’s Dan Drezner, one of the smartest, sanest, freshest bloggers around. You can check his site out here, as I do on a daily basis. I’ll be back Monday January 5. Meanwhile, here are the remaining award winners of 2003. Thanks for the hundreds of nominations sent in over the year. The finalists are, I’m sure you’ll agree, particularly distinguished in their various categories this year.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD WINNER 2003: “Eminem may be the ‘people’s choice,’ but he is as harmful to America as any al Qaeda fanatic.” – Bill O’Reilly.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD RUNNER UP: “Our original Constitution divided the powers of the government and put restrictions on those powers, in a Bill of Rights, and in the retention by the states of much of their sovereign power. Lincoln’s War overthrew that Constitution. When 11 “free and independent states” sought peacefully to depart from the Union, they were dragged back in, by invasion and war. By 1884, Woodrow Wilson was writing in his “Congressional Government,” “we are really living under a constitution essentially different from that which we have been so long worshiping as our own peculiar and incomparable possession.” – Pat Buchanan, yearning for the Confederacy.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD HONORABLE MENTION: “Even the Tony show’s host, married Australian actor Hugh Jackman, has a gay connection. He’ll debut on Broadway this fall in “The Boy From Oz,” a musical based on the life of the late bisexual Australian songwriter and performer Peter Allen. The entire show seemed to announce that the powers that be in the theater community are steering the industry from mass culture to subculture. Broadway is no longer a stage. It’s a sewer.” – Brent Bozell.

POSEUR OF THE YEAR 2003: “Lee Siegel, Lee Siegel, Lee Siegel, Lee Siegel, Lee Siegel, Lee Siegel … Oh! There you are. This “Diary” creeps up on you in the most unguarded moments. I recently improved my condition from self-intoxication to self-obsession, and I was just doing some lunchtime exercises-I ate lunch around 1:30 today; my cat Maya poached some salmon from Citarella-meant to bring me to the next stage, which is self-absorption. Dr. von Hoffenshtoffen, whom I mentioned yesterday, devised these “identity calisthenics,” as he calls them. I think they’re helping, but this Diary, with its emphasis on “I,” gave me a “soul hernia” (another Hoffenshtoffenian phrase)… So who is this person staring back at me from the mirror in my bathroom? My lips are small and thin; Maya likes the way the upper lip protrudes slightly over the lower one. Carmencita likes the lower lip-but she also wants me to wear cologne. A certain roundness and softness to my face always bothered me. I wanted to look hard and lean and chiseled, just as I wanted to have that invincible steel will of Central European intellectuals like Arthur Koestler, and not all that moist, tremulous high (and low) feeling I’ve inherited from my Russian-Jewish forebears. Everyone in my family is vibrato; there is not a note blanche to be found in our entire genetic pool. Weeping was a form of communication. One sob meant hello, two sobs meant good-bye, three sobs meant “There’s a call for you,” and so forth. Hoffenshtoffen, who gets bored by lachrymosity, says that I was born with a silver violin in my mouth.” – Lee Siegel, in Slate.

POSEUR AWARD RUNNER UP 2003: “This eulogy owes nothing to artifice or chance. It has ripened inside me since childhood. From the bottom of my pockets, stuck to the back of my smock, hidden in the corner of abacuses, poetry gushed out-…” – Dominique de Villepin, from the preface of his new book, “In Praise Of Those Who Stole The Fire.”

“My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world. I can hardly bear to see the faces of Bush and Rumsfeld, or to watch their posturing body language, or to hear their self-satisfied and incoherent platitudes. The liberal press here has done its best to make them appear ridiculous, but these two men are not funny. I was tipped into uncontainable rage by a report on Channel 4 News about “friendly fire”, which included footage of what must have been one of the most horrific bombardments ever filmed. But what struck home hardest was the subsequent image, of a row of American warplanes, with grinning cartoon faces painted on their noses. Cartoon faces, with big sharp teeth. It is grotesque. It is hideous. This great and powerful nation bombs foreign cities and the people in those cities from Disneyland cartoon planes out of comic strips. This is simply not possible. And yet, there they were.” – Margaret Drabble, mistaking a newspaper column for a therapist’s couch, in the Daily Telegraph.

SONTAG AWARD RUNNER UP 2003: “Unelected in 2000, the Washington regime of George W Bush is now totalitarian, captured by a clique whose fanaticism and ambitions of “endless war” and “full spectrum dominance” are a matter of record. All the world knows their names: Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Cheney and Perle, and Powell, the false liberal. Bush’s State of the Union speech last night was reminiscent of that other great moment in 1938 when Hitler called his generals together and told them: “I must have war.” He then had it.” – John Pilger, the Daily Mirror.

Each year, dozens of eager contestants vie to win the prestigious andrewsullivan.com awards for left-wing, right-wing, Sontagian, pretentious and generally clueless utterances throughout the previous year. Our distinguished panel has now reviewed all the entries this year and come up with some winners. They’ll be announced in two stages, to allow the judges to, er, celebrate the Christmas season with all appropriate loving kindness and spiritual ecstasy. Here they are …

VON HOFFMAN AWARD WINNER 2003 (for egregiously bad predictions): “In Baghdad the coalition forces confront a city apparently determined on resistance. They should remember Napoleon in Moscow, Hitler in Stalingrad, the Americans in Mogadishu and the Russians at Grozny. Hostile cities have ways of making life ghastly for aggressors. They are not like countryside. They seldom capitulate, least of all when their backs are to the wall. It took two years after the American withdrawal from Vietnam for Saigon to fall to the Vietcong. Kabul was ceded to the warlords only when the Taleban drove out of town. In the desert, armies fight armies. In cities, armies fight cities. The Iraqis were not stupid. They listened to Western strategists musing about how a desert battle would be a pushover. Things would get ‘difficult’ only if Saddam played the cad and drew the Americans into Baghdad. Why should he do otherwise?” – Simon Jenkins, the Times of London, in an article called – yes! – “Baghdad Will Be Near Impossible to Conquer,” March 28.

VON HOFFMAN AWARD RUNNER UP 2003: “Every so often in life you have to go out on a limb. So here goes: Arnold Schwarzenegger will not be the next governor of California. What’s more, his loss will represent an important moment in a shift in American politics that has been in gestation for some time now — toward a politics in which voters make decisions more on the basis of their cultural affinities than in response to a candidate’s charisma or fame… And in the week he’s been a candidate, Schwarzenegger’s numbers sure haven’t gone up. His first round of morning talk-show appearances was judged pretty awful. More recently, as the Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday, there’s been enough grumpiness in the Arnold camp that a fairly major shake-up has already taken place, with people like George Gorton, Schwarzenegger’s chief adviser over the last couple of years, relegated to the second tier. When campaigns do that, leaks to the press from the disgruntled faction are the inevitable byproduct. And once a campaign gets a reputation as disorganized or divided, that becomes the scent the media decide to track, and the reputation becomes a difficult one to shake.” – Michael Tomasky, August 13, relying on the L.A. Times for news, in the American Prospect.

BEGALA AWARD WINNER 2003 (for extreme liberal hyperbole): “I think this is a deliberate, intentional destruction of the United States of America,” – Bill Moyers on the Bush administration, as quoted in the Nation.

BEGALA AWARD RUNNER UP 2003: “I feel far more vulnerable and frightened than I ever have in my 50 years on the planet. It is the United States government I am afraid of. Meanwhile, here in our great democracy, Americans go along with the program or remain silent, too afraid of the Muslim bogeymen thousands of miles away to recognize the Christian ones in our midst. Fearful that we will be verbally attacked, or shunned, or lose our livelihoods if we dare question the meanness that characterizes our government and, increasingly, defines our national character. I do not feel safer now than I did six, or 12, or 24 months ago. In fact, I feel far more vulnerable and frightened than I ever have in my 50 years on the planet. It is the United States government I am af raid of. In less than two years the Bush administration has used the attacks of 9/11 to manipulate our fear of terrorism and desire for revenge into a blank check to blatantly pursue imperialist objectives internationally and to begin the rollback of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and most of the advances of the 20th century.” – Jill Nelson, MSNBC.

Why not the anglicism? Now that Christmas is at our throats again, let me extend my sincere hope that my readers can survive the nightmare of the next few days with as little psychic, gastro-intestinal, and familial anxiety as possible. Yes, I might as well confess that I cannot stand this time of year. (I’m with Blitzen.) But the BF and the beagle and I have both LOTR DVDs and are planning a nine-hour Tolkien marathon with cigars and Jagermeister shots and a pig ear. I guess diversity is everything. Hang in there. Don’t despair. It will all be over soon enough. Back Friday with the annual award ceremony for the Begala, Von Hoffman, Sontag, Derbyshire and Poseur finalists and winners for 2003. Special guest stars: Bill Moyers, Robert Fisk, Bill O’Reilly and all your favorites. Don’t miss it!

DEAN ON TORT REFORM: Not so long ago, he was for it.

GAYS WILL STAY: The Park Service won’t airbrush gays out of the Lincoln Memorial educational video after all.

What more can I add to this extraordinary email? My stereotyping of all boomers was dumb and glib. I’m sorry. Here’s the email:

I’m a semi-conservative (?) boomer, and I don’t engage in the “boomer idiocy” you speak of. I’m a U.S. Army veteran. In 197O I was spat upon, and called the standard names, like “baby killer”, or a “brain washed dupe of the military industrial complex.” My trying to explain that I was in the medical service and 1000 miles away from the fighting made no difference. When I came home in 1971, my pre-draft friends threw a Welcome Home party for me. At one point I was backed into a corner as they jabbed their fingers into my face and made all sorts of idiotic accusations. I started to think they had the party as an excuse just to beat up a veteran. When I got my first apartment it became a place to hide for several other returning vets. At age 23, I was the old guy. I ran into a grade school pal who was known for running laps around St. Cecilia’s church in the 1950’s doing the stations of the cross. He went to Boston College , joined the SDS, and told me in 1971, that two of our childhood friends, Norm and Richie “deserved it” when they were killed in Viet Nam. I wish I had punched the hell out of him, but instead, I walked away and cried. All I’m saying is that many, many of us are not like these people in the Village bar this young lady was in. Maybe MOST of us are not like them. Guys like me, saw the idiocy of these people at its genesis, and we were the first victims. Now that our side may be slowly winning, it’s rough to think we may me lumped in with the people that abused us 30 years ago. I hold my nose and call myself “pro choice”. I agree with everything you say regarding gay citizens, and gay marriage. But I cringe over PC thinking, and I’m terrified at the thought of Islamic madmen running around the world on slaughter binges. For this, the boomers of the “idiot” persuasion call me an out and out “Right Wing Madman”. Thanks for letting me vent. Richie’s father and mine were City Firefighters. I have memories of visting my father at the firehouse as a little boy in the 1950’s. Richie was there too. Our big fathers used to hold us in their arms and slide down the poles with us, and we would all laugh. Richie was the first kid from my home town to die in Viet Nam. He died, his father’s heart broke and never healed, and then some jerk from the Boomer Left, said he “deserved it”. If you want to know who is REALLY mad at that tribe of boomers, look around for the likes of me.

Almost as good as you guys. Here are my two faves:

Calling the plan for peace in the Middle East a “road map” is ridiculous. Women will not be able to follow it and men will know a better route without referring to it. Brian Christley Daily Telegraph, May 5

And this one:

Our leading bishops demand hard evidence of Saddam Hussein’s possessions of weapons of mass destruction. If we were to demand the same level of proof from their profession, they would all be out of a job. Avril Segal Times, January 21

Fair enough.

BLUE SUEDE JEWS: A very American way to celebrate Hannukah – in Tennessee.

GETTING THEM YOUNG: Palestinian kids trade baseball cards – of their favorite terrorists.

THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT SPLITS: A rare look inside the deep divisions among the far right over a constitutional amendment to ban marriage for gays. What this reveals is something important: the amendment as it stands is designed not simply to ban marriage for gays but to strip gay couples of any benefits or rights under domestic partnerships, civil unions or any other basis. The more moderate types – such as Maggie Gallagher or Matt Daniels, who started the “Alliance for Marriage” – don’t want to launch an anti-gay crusade and are content to see gay couples have some legal protections. But the real base of the movement wants something with far more teeth. The current amendment has those teeth. And the front-men who claim it’s merely about marriage are lying.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “The country was really taken over. It was a coup. This man was not elected, he sits in the White House and he’s declaring war. That’s a coup d’état. America should be in the streets picketing. And our boys and our girls, our teenagers and 20- year-olds, are off there killing people. And war begets war.” – Rosie O’Donnell, on Sirius Satellite Radio, December 11.

MY MAD COW JOKE: Okay, so I’m not that good at jokes. I like them really stupid in a “Dumb and Dumber” kind of way. So this cow says to another cow: “I’m really freaked out about this whole mad cow disease.” “I’m not worried in the slightest,” says the other cow. “But it’s breaking out all over and they’re slaughtering hundreds and thousands in Europe. How can you not be worried?” the first cow protests. “Well, it’s not going to affect me.” says the second cow. “I’m a duck.”

ERASING GAYS: We all know that many elements of the religious right would render gay citizens invisible if they could, so it’s no surprise that they have lobbied the Park Service to remove any evidence that gay citizens have protested on the Mall in Washington D.C. What is surprising is that the Park Service is now going along – removing from the educational video at the Lincoln Memorial any footage of gay rights rallies, and restricting footage to scenes of “Promise Keepers,” and other scenes more palatable to the evangelical crowd. Michael Demmons has the goods.