Year: 2003

Another superb speech from the British leader. He’s right to worry about U.S. isolation – although it’s not clear exactly how it can be overcome quickly. He’s right to emphasize that our vital action in Iraq must be followed by real engagement in the Israeli-Palestinian torment. Above all he’s right about the irresponsibility of some anti-war hustlers:

I would never commit British troops to a war I thought was wrong or unnecessary. But the price of influence is that we do not leave the US to face the tricky issues alone. By tricky, I mean the ones which people wish weren’t there, don’t want to deal with and, if I can put it a little perjoratively, know the US should confront, but want the luxury of criticising them for it.

Ouch.

DIDIOCY: Speaking of anti-war posturing, here’s my response to Joan Didion’s recent musings in the New York Review of Books.

LETTERS: They’re back (Reihan has been sick). And thanks to your money, Reihan has a small raise and guarantees at least three letters a day. So check out the Letters Page regularly, for reader backlash, wit and wisdom.

WHO’S YOUR DADDY?: I found James Q. Wilson’s paean to the family to be very persuasive. I was particularly glad he saw how family structure can change over time in ways that are good and inclusive – especially with regard to the status of women. Fatherhood is indeed vital, as this touching piece about Eminem also shows (Stanley Kurtz alerted me to it). I might add one thing: fatherhood is especially important for gay kids. So many, when they come to realize their sexual orientation, withdraw from their father out of fear of his rejection; and some fathers withdraw after discovering or somehow sensing their child’s difference. This is terribly destructive to both, may take decades to heal properly, and is, I think, a key reason for some of the psychological problems gay men and women deal with. Notice here how being pro-family and being gay-friendly are not exclusive categories. Far from it. Gay people are an intrinsic part of families, even very traditional ones; and one of the goals of the fight for equal marriage rights is to find a way to bring gay people more fully and deeply into the bonds of family life. How sad that some conservatives don’t seem to see this, and in fact compound the psychological damage done to families with gay members by perpetuating fear and panic about homosexuals. Compassionate conservatism must find a way to bring the virtues of family life to everyone. Yes, leave no child behind. But that includes the gay ones.

NORTH KOREA AGAIN: Fred Kaplan has a pretty sensible piece in Slate about why we are going into Iraq but not North Korea. He gets the most simple case (made here and elsewhere):

Of course, the argument could be made that North Korea shows what could happen if Saddam is not toppled and proceeds to build these weapons himself. We are essentially being deterred by Kim Jong-Il. Do we want to sit around for a few years so Saddam Hussein can also deter us and use his own arsenal as a protective cover for aggression? One reason Bush can’t make this argument is that the rationale for going to war, at least under the terms of the U.N. resolution, is the false statements and omissions that Saddam Hussein has made about his nuclear-, biological-, and chemical-weapons programs-in other words, the possibility that he has such weapons. You can say we’re going to war because Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. You can say we’re going to war to keep him from developing weapons of mass destruction. You can’t really say both at the same time.

Well, you can if you make a distinction between chemical/biological weapons, which Saddam almost certainly has, and nukes, which he doesn’t (yet). He’s got the dangerous but not blackmailable stuff (which is our technical reason for war) but he could get the big one (which is one of our major actual reasons for war). As to North Korea, I take the point that I’m being Didionesque in not proposing a solution. I just don’t think there is one. Some mixture of firmness from the U.S. and incentives from North Korea’s neighbors might work. But I have an awful feeling we’re stuck with this nightmare for a very long time. Let me clarify: I think the 1994 Carter-Clinton deal was dumb because of the trust it vested in Pyongyang. But I acknowledge we were in a difficult situation then, one not easily remedied by the use of military force. But its failure as a policy should surely guard us against trying yet another love-in with Kim Jong-Il. The deeper problem, I should also say, is neither Clintonian appeasement nor Bushie toughnesss. It’s the hideous regime in North Korea, one of the most evil on the planet.

WHY INTELLECTUALS LOVE THE LEFT: It’s long puzzled me. A reader points out that Robert Nozick had a pretty good explanation:

It is not surprising that those successful by the norms of a school system should resent a society, adhering to different norms, which does not grant them the same success. Nor, when those are the very ones who go on to shape a society’s self-image, its evaluation of itself, is it surprising when the society’s verbally responsive portion turns against it.

The piece is a little verbose, but makes some interesting points.

Yep, it’s perfectly possible that the former president could run for election as Chancellor of Oxford University. The Times is hyping the possibility and the job is available after Roy Jenkins snuffed it. It’s a titular post, if you’ll pardon the expression, so perfect for a major blowhard with major fund-raising potential. I wonder if Oxford would accept a huge donation from Marc Rich.

Let’s just hope the driver is white.

GORE AND RACE: Richard Cohen deserves much praise for pointing out Al Gore’s disgraceful acquiescence in race-baiting in the last campaign. It was one reason I went from feeling queasy about Gore to being outright hostile. This card works both ways, but rarely as crudely as in 2000 by the Dems.

I haven’t written much about the most recent events because I don’t have anything new to say. The current crisis – and it clearly is one – is, in my view, a consequence of the Carter-Clinton appeasement deal in 1994. I don’t envy the Bush administration for having to deal with it, especially now. But the dumbest argument, parlayed throughout the media, especially abroad, is that the North Korean crisis somehow displays an inconsistency in the Bush foreign policy. Shouldn’t we be threatening North Korea with war rather than Iraq, they ask? Er, no. The reason we’re about to go to war with Saddam is precisely to avoid the possibility of Saddam becoming Kim Jong Il. Once Saddam gets a nuke for sure, we’re completely screwed. We’d have to allow him to bask in the glory of being the only Arab leader with this capacity, using his impregnable territory to foment terrorism, more weapons of mass destruction, and the like. When he uses this power to set off chemical or biological weapons in America, we will have to initiate a nuclear war to defend ourselves. This, of course, is exactly the scenario the so-called peace agenda will make inevitable. Which is why it isn’t in any meaningful sense about peace. As to North Korea, I don’t believe negotiating in good faith with murderous thugs is an option. We have to contain, credibly threaten consequences if Pyongyang does anything to further destabilize the region, and try to achieve regime change slowly. This won’t be easy, and it’s full of risks. Watching the gruesome situation unfold makes me more anxious to see the demise of Saddam’s regime. We’ve already waited too long – and thugs like Kim jong Il and Yasser Arafat have taken advantage of the lull. We cannot afford to wait much longer.

RAINES VERSUS BLOGS?: No surprise that Howell Raines might despise the blogosphere. It’s done more to expose his trashing of the Times’ reputation for accuracy, honesty and balance than many others. But is he planning a hit-job on the blog world’s Pied Piper, Glenn Reynolds? This posting suggests the Times might be sniffing around for dirt.

THE TAO OF WOY: A charming reminiscence by Robert Harris of Roy Jenkins, the British politician and man of letters (author of the most recent biography of Churchill), who died a few days ago. Check it out.

WHY NOT GRAHAM? Florida’s Bob Graham is taking the Kennedy tack against Nixon: he’s accusing Bush of being too soft on international terror and Iraq. He’s from a pivotal state and, more than any other Dem apart from Joe Lieberman, has foreign policy credibility. So why is he being ignored? The New Republic’s indispensable Michael Crowley provides a useful curtain-raiser. I say: let Graham run. It’ll be good for the Dems and good for the country.

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “So now the U.S. senate is going to be led by the cat world’s answer to Dr. Mengele! A man who can do that is capable of any infamy. Can’t you just picture this oily Tennessean cooing and clucking over the tabbies and tortoiseshells at the shelter, solemnly wagging his head as the shelter staff counseled him on proper cat procedures, then dragging the poor creatures into his lab and torturing them to death?” – Alexander Cockburn on Bill Frist, at workingforchange.com.

THOSE IMPARTIAL ECONOMISTS: Weird that the Washington Post should make the views of two economists about president Bush’s economic plan a big headline story. Especially when one of the economists, Andrew Brimmer, is an actual donor to the DNC. Wouldn’t it have been a fairer story if the reader knew the partisanship of the economists involved?

Peggy Noonan has a great column this morning. She has one flash of brilliance – that president Bush’s heavy drinking as a father may have made him actually slightly afraid of his children – and one important point:

I have a theory that liberals and leftists prefer their leaders complicated, and conservatives prefer their leaders uncomplicated. I think the left expects a good leader to have an exotic or intricate personality or character. (A whole generation of liberal journalists grew up reading Jack Newfield and Pete Hamill on Bobby Kennedy’s sense of tragedy, Murray Kempton on the bizarreness that was LBJ, and a host of books with names like “Nixon Agonistes” and “RFK at Forty,” and went into journalism waiting for the complicated politicians of their era to emerge. They are, that is, pro-complication because their ambition to do great work like the great journalists of the 1960s seems to demand the presence of complicated political figures.) Liberals like their leaders interesting. I always think this may be because some of them have not been able to fully engage the idea of a God, and tend to fill that hole in themselves with politics and its concerns. If the world of government and politics becomes your god, and yields a supergod called a president, you want that god to be interesting.

Amen, if you’ll pardon the expression. I prefer the alternative locution: I’m a conservative in politics so I might be a radical in every other human activity. The point is: what is appropriate for presiding over a republic of laws? Modesty, simplicity, prudence. Anything more “interesting” can screw things up badly. And yes, that’s why my favorite presidents are Eisenhower, Truman and Bush. (Every now and again, of course, the times demand much more. If we’re lucky we get a Reagan. If we’re not, we get a Carter. But even in those circumstances, better for the leader to be uncomplicated and unconflicted.)

The one important and thoroughly welcome part of Michael Ignatieff’s essay in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine is its realism. Sure, I think he’s being excessive in describing American global influence as an “empire.” Empires, as I understand them, actually control territory, exploit it, and exercize sovereignty over it. The United States, with a few tiny exceptions, doesn’t do that. It protects its allies; it trades; it polices the seas and skies. It’s far more like the eighteenth century British Empire than the nineteenth, and even then, without actual colonies of any substance. But Ignatieff is surely right to frame the real question as: do we actually have a choice any more? American trade alone makes some sort of international police work essential. The rise of weapons of mass destruction together with lethal terrorism and porous international borders all turn isolationism into a non-starter. The military abdication of most of the other Western countries also makes the United States the enforcer of last resort (remember Bosnia and Kosovo?). Allowing a genocidal nutcase access to nuclear weapons in the most oil-rich part of the globe is simply not something any responsible hegemon can allow – not only for its own security, but for that of the entire world. The question then becomes one between an Empire Lite or an Empire Heavy. I’m more skeptical than some neoconservatives about the feasibility of having troops and civil servants all over the globe, ushering in a new era of democracy. But I’m even more skeptical of the left conservatives and reactionary leftists who believe inaction and retreat is a viable option. We have to find a way between both temptations – case by case, region by region, year by year. This is where the real debate should be: not in hysterical leftwing cries of imperial dictatorship or in paleocon nostalgia for withdrawal, but in the hard, day by day assessment of risks and benefits of specific actions.

EURO-ANTI-SEMITISM WATCH: “Hitler’s Nazi regime occupied Europe for four years only. Palestine and the West Bank have been occupied for 40 years.” Thus a minor Labour Party official in Wales. This stuff is getting more and more poisonous.

THE NUNS AS WELL: Forty percent of women religious have experienced some kind of sexual abuse – many at the hands of the Church? Now how will the hierarchy manage to blame this on the homosexuals? No doubt they’ll give it their best shot.

DERBYSHIRE AND RACE: Many of you have taken me to task for being disconcerted by John Derbyshire’s recent comment on National Review that the New Year’s babies born to a lesbian couple in DC and a single black mother in New York should prompt one to “despair.” Let’s leave aside the assumption that a child born into a loving, middle class same-sex couple home is a matter for despair. Derbyshire’s aversion to gay people, freely confessed, celebrated and condoned in National Review, and other venues, is a matter of public record. Was his despair at the black single mother a genuine worry about the state of the black family rather than a simple expression of disdain? I can’t know what’s in Derb’s heart. But I do know that he is extremely frank about what he believes about race. Here’s a recent post-Lott statement of his in National Review:

All American politicians are liars and hypocrites about race, from Democrats like Hillary Clinton posing as champions of the downtrodden black masses while buying a house in the whitest town they can find, to Republicans pretending not to know that (a) many millions of nonblack Americans seriously dislike black people, (b) well-nigh every one of those people votes Republican, and (c) without those votes no Republican would ever win any election above the county level. (Am I being beeped out yet?)

Now what does he really mean by this? I think he means that he agrees with the NAACP and others that the Republican Party is at root a party based on racial hatred. But he doesn’t seem to have a problem with it! His only problem is with those who deny this, and he hints in the piece that his own views about race are too explosive for polite company. Then there’s this odd detail. In National Review again, Derbyshire recently described looking for a place to live in the New York suburbs:

One time we got off the train in a town that was pretty solidly black. It took us about five minutes to figure this out. Then we went back to the railroad station and sat half an hour waiting for the next train.

He justifies this by citing a range of statistics about why black neighborhoods tend to be worse off than others. “Are we racists?” he asks of himself and his wife. “Depends what you mean,” he answers. Then there are the weirdnesses that creep into his writing about race. What does one make of the following statement, for example, also published in National Review:

You understand, I am sure, that when I talk about race, I am talking about blacks and nonblacks, the two races that inhabit the United States.

Huh? Even if you agree with Derb (as I do) that race is not entirely socially constructed, why this obsession with blacks and “non-blacks”? Don’t Asians qualify? Hispanics? Native Americans? All this is simply to say that when you have a record like John Derbyshire’s on race and you voice “despair” at a new-born black child in New York City, there comes a point at which a reasonable reader may eventually cease to give you the benefit of the doubt.

KRUGMAN WINS AGAIN!: The website, “Lying in Ponds,” does an annual survey of who, among the major newspaper columnists, is the most reflexively, viscerally partisan. Paul Krugman’s columns – “a lonely voice of truth in a sea of corruption” – win first prize for the second year in a row. Here’s the summary:

After evaluating all 2,129 columns written by our 37 pundits in 2002, it’s time to draw some conclusions. I’ve stressed all along that Lying in Ponds is attempting to make a distinction between ordinary party preference (there’s nothing wrong with being opinionated or having a political ideology) and excessive partisanship (“blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning allegiance”). While it’s obviously difficult to draw a definitive line, the top three pundits in the rankings clearly revealed excessive partisanship by the remarkable consistency of their extremely one-sided commentary throughout the year. The New York Times’ Paul Krugman took the partisanship lead early and lapped the field. In a year in which Mr. Krugman generated lots of buzz and won an award, his 18:1 ratio of negative to positive Republican references and 99 columns without a single substantive deviation from the party line were unmatched in the Lying in Ponds portion of the punditocracy.

The details are fascinating as well. Among the most relentlessly partisan: Mike Kinsley. The most one-sided columns in a newspaper: the Wall Street Journal. The most diverse: the Washington Post.

Jonah nails it again in his new review of “The Two Towers,” where he saves us from any more lugubrious commentary in favor of making fun of others, especially those who see, say, Orcs as a disturbingly racist fantasy:

One is tempted to ask who is the real racist here? On the one hand we have people – like me – who see horrific, flesh-eating, dull-witted creatures with jagged feral teeth, venomous mouths, pointed devilish ears, and reptilian skin, and say, “Cool, Orcs!” On the other hand we have people, like Mr. Yatt, who see the same repugnant creatures and righteously exclaim “black people!”

I must say whenever I think of Jonah in future, the phrase, “Cool, Orcs!”, will hover genially in my frontal lobe. Read the whole piece.

“[T]he South African archbishop added that, while al-Qaeda was a terrorist organisation, many of its followers were ‘not lunatic fringe, many of them are quite intelligent’, and that leaders had to ask why such people ‘should be willing to pilot a plane and go to their deaths’.” – Archbishop Desmond Tutu, quoted in today’s Guardian.

“[Art Spiegelman] described his current endeavor as ‘recollections of Sept. 11, 2001, and the feeling of imminent death that it brought with it seen from further and further spiraling distances as we move towards a present where we’re equally threatened by Al Qaeda and my President.'” – from the New York Observer.

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “Populated by such real-life characters as William Marcy “Boss” Tweed (Jim Broadbent), the venal Tammany Hall politico and vote buyer, and set against the backdrop of a Civil War that no one seems to want to fight, “Gangs” has the look, feel and sound of authentic history. Still, it makes it clear that the past is ever prologue to a today that is only superficially less wicked. “Remember the first rule of politics,” says Tweed after an underling informs him that the polls have run out of ballots. “The ballots don’t make the votes. The counters make the votes. Keep counting.” To be sure, former Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris never threw a meat cleaver into anyone’s back (one of Bill the Butcher’s milder political “fixes”), but if images of Florida and hanging chads don’t come to mind, then you’re not paying attention.” – Michael O’Sullivan, the Washington Post.

Paul Krugman just gave an interview to Der Spiegel. It’s a festival of German-pleasing anti-Americanism and Bush-bashing. Here are a couple of choice quotes, worthy of Michael Moore:

No one expects the President to be a saint. … But it is pretty amazing the distance that this administration will go in trying to fool the public. Sometimes I have the feeling that I no longer live in one of the world’s oldest democracies, but in the Philippines under a new Marcos.

Useful to know that a columnist at the New York Times believes that president Bush is indistinguishable from an unelected tyrant. Then there’s this piece of naked pandering to European prejudice against America:

Instead [of writing a column about the New Economy], I now find myself once again as the lonely voice of truth in a sea of corruption. Sometimes I think that one of these days I’ll end up in one of those cages on Guantanamo Bay (laughs). But I can still seek asylum in Germany. I hope you’d accept me in an emergency.

The poor beleaguered martyr for truth. So persecuted by the government he gets to write twice weekly for the New York Times and have the media establishment gush constantly about him. So pure you’d never know he once served on Enron’s Advisory Board and still hasn’t returned his $50,000 sinecure. Asylum? Lonely voice of truth? The vanity is almost as gob-smacking as the self-righteousness.