Year: 2003

No, we don’t have any chemical weapons. Who would ever claim such a thing? But if you invade, we’ll use them against you. I guess it will take a French foreign minister to see the logic in that.

I noted it in my weekly dish for the New York Sun and Washington Times today but it behooves me to note it here as well. I linked recently to a Time piece claiming that president Bush reinstituted a practice of laying a wreath at the Confederate Monument in Alrlington. I asked why the administration would do such a thing. Well, they didn’t. Sorry to link to something that wasn’t true. Now let’s all wait to see if Maureen Dowd will retract a more serious error – actually claiming it was true. Or are we supposed to treat Modo’s pieces as fiction anyway?

CARTOON TIME: About “bug-chasing.” I’d like to reiterate the point I made in Salon: I’m not saying that this issue shouldn’t be looked into thoroughly. And I’m not saying we shouldn’t be concerned about rates of HIV infection among gay men. I’m just saying we need to do so factually and responsibly.

“Iraq’s weapons of mass terror, and the terror networks to which the Iraqi regime are linked, are not two separate threats; they are part of the same threat. Disarming Iraq and the war on terror are not merely related. Disarming Iraq of its chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction and dismantling its program to develop nuclear weapons is a crucial part of winning the war on terror.” – Paul Wolfowitz yesterday. I’m impressed by the intellectual caliber and unified message coming from Washington in the last couple of days. (Although a brief perusal of the television coverage makes me wonder if some in the media are even interested in listening.) It was important to disabuse anyone that the passive games being played by Saddam right now amount to anything other than his usual and customary obstructionism. Wolfowitz’s argument that Iraqi scientists are being threatened with death if they cooperate is particularly stunning. If that’s not a material breach, what is?

ARE “BUG-CHASERS” “MONKEY-FISHERS”? Now that’s a headline I never thought I’d write. The Rolling Stone story about 25 percent of new gay male HIV infections being due to a deliberate attempt to get the virus – dubious to begin with – has now fallen apart. The only basis for that bizarre and inflammatory statistic was one doctor, with no evidence. And he now denies ever having made the comment. Check out my new piece in Salon for details. Or Seth Mnookin’s excellent work in Newsweek. Or this new piece in the Washington Times. It seems to me that whoever is responsible for this piece has a lot of explaining to do.

LILEKS ON ED HARRIS: If you missed it yesterday, don’t miss it today. I always save up Lileks for the evening, before a little, er, relaxation.

TOUJOURS LA FRANCE: Is there a murderous thug the French do not want to do business with? The day after an E.U. ban on travel by Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe, Chirac invites him to a summit. You can’t make this stuff up. Meanwhile blogger Collin May gets what the French have essentially achieved:

By taking a hard line against war, the French have more or less increased its likelihood. The previous French position was far more flexible and diplomatically intelligent. It allowed them to take a more conciliatory role while still holding open the possibility of military action. Between outright war and complete appeasement there are various levels of pressure that can be applied. These levels can only be effective, however, when the threat of military force remains in place. France was playing a useful role to this point, but with their latest action, they’ve undermined any degree of flexibility and opted for an either/or solution. There will either be complete appeasement on the Franco-German model or there will be war waged by a divided west.

War, then. And soon.

THE DEMS’ PANDERTHON: Great reporting from the Democrats’ love-in with NARAL. Maybe Howard Dean could become a partial-birth abortionist before New Hampshire. It could vault him to the front of the field.

HOW THE GERMANS EDIT: Great catch by new blogger Amiland on how Der Spiegel grotesquely distorted the meaning of a recent Tom Friedman column. Tom, if you’re out there, give ’em hell.

NUMBER 27: That’s the traffic ranking of the Daily Dish among political websites according to Alexa (a highly imperfect but not completely useless ratings tool). Whatever the real rankings, it’s good to see a few one-man shows easily rivaling and beating big news organizations and magazines in terms of readership.

MICKEY’S SCOOP: I’ve been laying off the New York Times for a while but Mickey Kaus has a pretty good catch regarding our old friend and Enron adviser, Paul Krugman. Last summer, Krugman was dismissing any idea that Howell Raines had any input whatsoever into editorial columns. “I gather that I’m a low-maintenance columnist: normally I come in on time, on length, and without any necessary rewriting,” Krugman averred on his own pseudo-blog last May. “Did the higher-ups at the Times suggest the topic, or intervene in the process? No. In fact, I haven’t communicated with anyone in management for weeks if not months.” But then in this week’s Howie Kurtz profile, Krugman says that “Raines barred him from using the word ‘lying’ for the duration of the campaign.” So Raines actually dictates his columnists’ vocabulary. Or does he do so only during election campaigns? Or when it involves golf?

“I liked the item you ran in the Dish about Joe Millionaire, of which I have seen all extant segments. I think, though, that you and Michelle Cottle may be missing the key subtext that has made this show what it is, i.e. a reality show straight “regular” men watch.

It isn’t just that the women vying for Evan’s hand are shallow and money grubbing. Women like that are so commonplace that they are unnewsworthy. What brings the smile to our hetero-testerone laden lips is the double-standard coming from that half of the human race that whines incessantly about double-standards they’re subjected to. After all, men didn’t invent the fatuous term “inner beauty”, but everyone from Dr. Laura to Rosie O’Donnell to Oprah to Naomi Wolf expect men to see that and only that. These same folks would doubtless sneer if you told a woman to seek the “inner multi-millionaire” in the pet-store employee who, despite being nice, stable and relatively unnarcissistic would be undatable because of his income and status…” More on the Letters page.

Bob Jones preacher Jerry Thacker, who believes homosexuality is on a par with incest and bestiality, just quit the process of joining the president’s Commission on AIDS. Better still, Ari Fleischer decried the far right activist’s opinions, especially his describing AIDS as a “gay plague.” “The views that he holds are far, far removed from what the president believes,” Fleischer said. “The president has a total opposite view … The president’s view is that people with AIDS need to be treated with care, compassion.” Thanks, Ari. Was this appointment another one of Karl Rove’s brilliant ideas?

This website doesn’t get an award nomination because it makes that process seem banal. It’s a flash production presented by a left-wing organization called ‘Take Back the Media,” a group that agrees with Eric Alterman that the U.S. media is hideously biased toward the right. It’s about why George W. Bush is exactly like Hitler. It contains dozens of Hitler-Bush photographs, even giving details of the Bush family’s past, over pictures of Nazi death camps. It makes the NAACP’s 2000 ad likening Bush to a KKK lyncher seem mild. But it gives an insight into what some elements of the American left are now fixated upon.

Great idea to show us exactly what voluntary disarmament really means. Can anyone seriously refute Rice’s case here? If they can’t, what responsible choice do we really have but war?

Now that the European powers have tipped their hand and will do all they can diplomatically to forestall or derail war, we can at least reassess where we are. The participation of the French and Germans was never militarily significant. It would have been great to have gotten U.N. sanction for the war against terror, but given the disparate interests of the various great powers, it was always a long shot. So once again, it’s the English-speaking peoples versus the despots. And there’s a reason for this. Terrorism is a far greater threat to countries founded on liberty. Terror’s ability to cripple free societies, their travel and communications, their limited government, their cherished personal liberties, is felt far more keenly in the English-speaking world. That’s why the civil liberties enthusiasts on the right and left are both right and wrong. Right to defend what they defend. Wrong to think that John Ashcroft is a greater threat in this respect than al Qaeda.

A DIFFERENT LEGACY: Statist and dirigist societies, on the other hand, with freedom less of a priority than among their liberal, English-speaking allies, cope with terrorists by ratcheting up police powers, making all sorts of concessions to the enemy, and muddling through. It’s not so big a threat to their customary way of operating. Ditto with foreign threats. For most of the last century, France responded to external pressure in classic Gallic fashion: superficial remarmament, diplomatic ballet, appeasement, and, if necessary, tactical surrender or accommodation. And since the last war, Germany has placed superficial peace above all other priorities – whether defeating terror or accommodating Communism. When you don’t have a deep tradition of internal freedom or inviolate national sovereignty, and when the external threat doesn’t appear to be imminent, this kind of society instinctually avoids war. That’s especially the case now. It’s clearly the hope of France and Germany that the English speaking powers will bear the brunt of Islamist terrorism. By ducking out of the fight, they think they can avoid trouble once again, see the U.S. and the U.K. damaged, and make what best they can of the aftermath. (Check out Safire’s shrewd assessment of Schroder’s realpolitik today for a guide to what the Germans have in mind.) Their current position is therefore their historical default position. We shouldn’t be surprised by their avoidance of conflict now. We should be surprised that they came even this far.

THE WAR CONTINUES: But for us, it’s important to remember why we’re fighting Saddam. The answer is September 11. Those who want to find some specific evidentiary link between al Qaeda and Saddam don’t begin to fathom what war is. It is not the pursuit of one distinct goal after another, depending on the exigencies of international law or diplomacy. That’s called foreign policy. War, in contrast, is the attempt to destroy an enemy. The enemy is Islamist terrorism and its state sponsors. Strategically, the overthrow of the Saddam regime is absolutely central to this objective. It will deal another psychological blow to the reactionaries who want to ratchet Islam back a few more centuries and wage war on the free societies of the West. It will remove one huge and obvious source of weapons of mass destruction potentially available to the enemy. It will provide a military base from which to continue the war against al Qaeda and its enablers across the Middle East, specifically in Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia. And it will reassert the global hegemony of the United States and its Anglosphere allies. That’s why we fight. It isn’t a pre-emptive war. It’s a reactive war – against what was done to this country throughout the 1990s, culminating on that awful September day. We are fighting to honor the memory of the dead and to defeat a brutal enemy that would inflict even more carnage if they possibly could. And we fight to defend the principles of a liberal international order, principles that the United States and the United States alone has long been responsible for upholding. Our loneliness in this struggle should not therefore be a cause for concern. It is, in fact, a sign, once again, that we are on the right path.

What on earth is a fire-breathing, Bob Jones University alum doing on the presidential commission on AIDS? Check out this man’s views here as noted in the Washington Post. AIDS is a “gay plague.” With the overwhelming number of victims worldwide being straight, and a majority of new HIV cases in America non-gay ones? “Homosexuality is not inborn biologically, just as incest and bestiality are not inborn.” Is the Bush administration equating gay citizens with people who practice incest? Is it saying that the vice-president’s daughter’s relationship is as immoral or as arbitrary as having sex with animals? Is it asserting, against every serious psychological study, that homosexuality is chosen like becoming a dentist? If it is, then please let us know and we can think and vote accordingly. If it isn’t, then what is an extremist like Jerry Thacker doing advising the president on AIDS? This isn’t a legitimate conservative voice. The man was at Bob Jones for seven years, for Heaven’s sake. They appointed him how long after the Lott affair? (Did he also endorse their ban on inter-racial dating at the time?) I’m sorry, but if he’s appointed, I can’t see how any self-respecting advocate for public health can stay on the same board. Or any self-respecting gay man or woman either.

“It is always a joy to meet an American, Mr. Moulton, for I am one of those who believes that the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a minister in far-gone years will not prevent our children from being some day citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.” – Sherlock Holmes, in “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor.”

THE ANTI-WAR LEFT: A picture speaks volumes.

MCCARTHYISM REDUX: “McCarthyism remained a potent myth in intellectual circles. In fact, it figures in many historical tests in universities as a major matter in American history – with accounts of the realities of Soviet penetration of U.S. agencies omitted. Indeed the myth remained so strong that when Angela Davis–not only an admitted Communist but actually the CPUSA’s vice presidential candidate – came to speak at Stanford University, the student paper referred to her simply as an “activist.” When queried on why they didn’t, truly and legitimately, call her a Communist, the editor said that this would be McCarthyism!” – Robert Conquest, “Reflections On a Ravaged Century.” I wonder if the editor at that student paper is now working for the New York Times.