Year: 2003

I figured some of this might go on at CPAC. Demonizing the religion of Islam, making no distinction between the vast majority of its believers and the few fanatics, actually helps the enemy. Yes, we should call Muslims to account for the extremism and violence in their midst. Yes, we shouldn’t be blind to some of the violent imagery and and rhetoric in Islam. Yes, we shouldn’t buy the white-washing of dangerous trends in contemporary Islam that some peddle. Yes, we need to challenge the fusion of politics and religion in much of contemporary Islamic thought. But sheer religious bigotry needs to be condemned by those of us in favor of the war just as extremism needs to be condemned by those in the opposite camp.

“I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka ‘Christians,’ and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or ‘PPs.'” – Kurt Vonnegut, In These Times. Via Bookslut.

THE SENTENCING OF RICHARD REID: Worth an honorary mention:

This is the sentence that is provided for by our statutes. It is a fair and a just sentence. It is a righteous sentence. Let me explain this to you. We are not afraid of any of your terrorist co-conspirators, Mr. Reid. We are Americans. We have been through the fire before. There is all too much war talk here. And I say that to everyone with the utmost respect. Here in this court where we deal with individuals as individuals, and care for individuals as individuals, as human beings we reach out for justice. You are not an enemy combatant. You are a terrorist. You are not a soldier in any war. You are a terrorist. To give you that reference, to call you a soldier gives you far too much stature. Whether it is the officers of government who do it or your attorney who does it, or that happens to be your view, you are a terrorist. And we do not negotiate with terrorists. We do not treat with terrorists. We do not sign documents with terrorists. We hunt them down one by one and bring them to justice… See that flag, Mr. Reid? That’s the flag of the United States of America. That flag will fly there long after this is all forgotten. That flag still stands for freedom. You know it always will. Custody, Mr. Officer. Stand him down.

National Review’s Rod Dreher is upset that a Catholic judge in the District of Columbia sympathized with some non-violent activists from the gay religious group, Soulforce. The three campaigners performed an act of civil disobedience at a recent gathering of Catholic bishops in a downtown hotel, by kneeling and asking for communion. The day before, all three had been denied communion at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception because the priests mistakenly believed they were members of the Sash movement, a group dedicated to the inclusion of gay people within the Catholic Church. The judge convicted the protestors of unlawful entry into the hotel but decided not to sentence them. In fact, as a Catholic, she sympathized with the protestors: “Tremendous violence was done to you … when the Body of Christ was denied to you,” she opined from the bench. “As a member of your church, I ask you to forgive the church.” For these reasons, Rod calls the judge “bigoted” and the decision “judicial Catholic-bashing.” I beg to differ. We’ve found in recent years that when the Church hierarchy covers up abuse, it is sometimes necessary for the laity to peacefully protest. And when the Church propagates doctrines that are cruel and discriminatory – such as the denial of communion to gay Catholics merely because they are openly gay – then it is also permissible for lay Catholics to express their sympathy for the victims of the Church’s actions. This is not bigotry. According to the Church itself, openly gay people are not to be denied communion. They are part of the body of Christ. And no-one is questioning the right of the Catholic hierarchy to enforce whatever doctrines they want. What the judge said merely amounted to bearing witness to what many perceive to be injustice. You may disagree and support the exclusion of openly gay Catholics from the sacraments, but it’s an over-reach to describe this conscientious objection as a form of bigotry.

I defer to a Wharton professor of statistics, who’s done the math on Bush’s poll ratings.

“Caught up in the frenzy of noise and excitement, I didn’t run for cover. Instead, I kept shouting along with the others, “Down with Saddam!” Years of anger within me came pouring out. Even with its guns, the army was no match for us that day. The angry crowds surged toward the soldiers’ trucks and jeeps despite the rain of bullets. They swarmed en masse all over the military’s vehicles and forced the troops out of their cars so that the soldiers could not possibly shoot at all the waves of rebels. Many soldiers threw down their weapons and ran off down the street, chased by the crowd. Many were caught and some were beaten; most who were captured were taken to the Imam Hussein shrine, which became a makeshift headquarters for the rebels and a detention center for army troops. I saw one older soldier who escaped the crowds banging on my neighbor’s door, crying. He asked to be hidden or at least given some civilian clothes that might save him.” – from a riveting account of the last time Iraq’s tormented people had a few days of hope, before the last president Bush abandoned them to Saddam once again. Do the Iraqis want us to invade? It’s a stupid question. They’re human beings, aren’t they? All that stands between them and their freedom is our ambivalence.

In his most recent column, Paul Krugman wrote the following sentence: “Mr. Bush’s approval ratings have plunged over the last two months.” Krugman’s an economist; he knows numbers. Is this statement true? Here’s a collection of recent polls of Bush’s job approval rating, cited by Krugman himself on his own website (the one where he admits to errors in order to avoid fessing up to them in the Times itself.) The data? In the last two months, Bush’s approval rating has declined from 66 – 62 percent (ABC News, margin of error 3.5 percent); from 63 to 57 percent (Zogby, no margin of error cited); from 64 to 60 percent (Gallup); from 60 to 55 percent (Newsweek, margin of error 3 percent) … well, you get the picture. Some polls show a steeper decline – NBC News’ poll shows a slip from 62 to 54. But if you average it all out, the drop is probably around 3 – 4 percent from low 60s to high 50s – still in the region of an electoral landslide, and in line with the months before. The dictionary definition of a “plunge” is “to descend steeply; fall precipitously; to move forward and downward violently; to become suddenly lower; decrease dramatically.” The column headline? “Credibility Problems.” Yep. He got that right. (With thanks to Don Luskin.)

“Unless Hussein … suddenly unzips his skin to reveal he is actually Bin Laden, we are likely to march to war with the support of an ‘international coalition’ that amounts to a fig leaf named Tony Blair and a motley collection of nations one can buy on EBay.” – Robert Scheer, the Nation. Italy? Spain? Poland? Ebay? Isn’t it amazing how quickly these alleged liberal internationalists turn into ugly and arrogant xenophobes as long as it can be used against Bush?

LEFT PERVERSITY II: “If and when US and British occupation forces march down Baghdad’s Rashid Street, we will doubtless be treated to footage of spontaneous celebrations and GIs being embraced as they hand out sweets. There will be no shortage of people keen to collaborate with the new power; relief among many Iraqis, not least because occupation will mean an end to the misery of sanctions; there will be revelations of atrocities and war crimes trials. All this will be used to justify what is about to take place. But a foreign invasion which is endorsed by only a small minority of Iraqis and which seems certain to lead to long-term occupation, loss of independence and effective foreign control of the country’s oil can scarcely be regarded as national liberation. It is also difficult to imagine the US accepting anything but the most “managed” democracy, given the kind of government genuine elections might well throw up.” – Seumas Milne, the Guardian, yesterday. Well, we’ll see, won’t we? But it’s interesting how some on the left are beginning to worry what the future portends.

Rarely have we seen a more pathetic display of incoherence, shifting arguments, issue-avoidance and flim-flam than in the New York Times’ editorials on Iraq. I can see only one connective thread: naked partisanship. If everything were the same and this were a Democratic president, the Times would be gung-ho. At least that’s the unavoidable conclusion of their previous arguments. Instead, we have a series of editorials placing obstacle afater obstacle in the path of a serious attempt to disarm Saddam. Each time the administration’s policy accords with the Times (on the U.N. route, for example), the Times subsequently moves the goal-posts. Here’s my fisking of a recent, spectacularly incoherent editorial. I’m not the only one who has seen this. The New Republic’s latest editorial contains an icy blast at the shallowness of the Times’ reasoning. I’ve come reluctantly to believe that in the mindset of the Times editorialists, wounding this presidency has become a far greater objective than dealing honestly or consistently with issues of national security. In this, they incarnate the problem at the heart of many (but mercifully not all) of today’s Democrats.

“Meanwhile,GW was expected to become manager of the local K-Mart. Suddenly GW is not only President, but he really does become a great one, not in his own mind, but in the hearts and minds of a large majority of Americans.This is some sort of horrible alternate universe for the in-crowd. Why, the man is stupid! Too stupid to know how to lie! He’s religious! He doesn’t even cheat on his wife! How can this be? To the in-crowd, GW is an affront to their view of the world. Only his total failure will vindicate the in-crowd’s value system. Meanwhile, GW, the sweet guy who’s too decent to hate anyone, ignores the in-crowd and gets on with his job (“I’m a loving man, but I’ve got a job to do”). The joke is that the more the in-crowd hates him, the more they destroy themselves (they have ignored Dick Nixon’s advice). Will the New York Times ever be trusted again? Will Enron Paul be read by anyone? Will any of the current crop of Democrats amount to anything? Not in a lifetime…” Check out more reader response on the Letters Page.

Great to see Josh Marshall doing a blog interview. I should do more myself. Even better to see an interview with Kenneth Pollack, the man who’s done more work actually persuading people of the Saddamite threat than anyone. To my mind, here’s the key part, on whether Saddam has nukes or is moving toward nukes. I’ve been relieved to see a widespread skepticism about Baghdad’s nuclear capacity. But here’s Pollack:

But in 1994 we really thought the IAEA had eradicated their nuclear program. And the IAEA really thought that they’d eradicated their nuclear program. And they were telling us they’d eradicated their nuclear program. And Khidhir Hamza comes out and says ‘No, the nuclear program in 1994 was bigger than it had ever been before.’ In point of fact the Iraqis had found all kinds of ways to hide what they were doing. It introduced inefficiencies in what they were doing. For example, they talk about these short track cascades. Normally the cascade is enormous. The way we do it it’s three football fields long. That’s the most efficient way to do it. The Iraqis figured out ways to do short cascades, which didn’t require as much energy, which weren’t as big and therefore were much more easily concealed. They were more inefficient. They didn’t produce the enriched uranium nearly as well. But nevertheless they were able to do it.

Telling, no?