Year: 2003

They’re selling these on the streets of Ramallah. What part of that message do we not understand?

WHAT THE BRITS REALLY CARE ABOUT: Forget Bush. England won the World Cup … in rugby. I was brought up in a rugby-dominated high-school, forced to get beaten up in the grinding rain and endless mud each week until my joints turned blue and blood was constantly trickling out my nose. “It builds character, Sullivan,” they would insist. And, now, as my body still reflects the early bruising, I have an 18 inch neck, and cracked rear teeth. I was hooker most of time, dead in the middle of scrum (no giggles in the back, please). You need a strong necy to prevent your head from snapping off. Every now and again, you’d hear that had happened to some poor schmo somewhere. But you pressed on and prayed for the feel of a warmish shower. It was hell. But I still like it when England wins. Congrats, Dad. My dad was captain of the local town team in Rugby. He figured early on that I was hardly going to live up to his dreams of a son scoring the winning try for England, but he seems to have gotten over it. He told me yesterday that an estimated 42 million pints of beer were consumed in England during the two hours or so of the final (including extra time). And the game started at 9 am in Britain. That’s what you call a weekend.

BUSH’S PROTECTIONISM: Dan Drezner is right to worry.

Terry Gross had Triumph the Insult Dog on her Fresh Air program the other day. Here’s an extract:

Triumph: I can’t believe the government is paying for this interview. That’s what I can’t believe. My money that could be going to Pekinese hookers is instead going to this, you know, public radio that is obviously more slanted than my [dooda] after I [shagged] a St. Bernard.

Move over, Bill O’Reilly.

POLLING ON THE AMENDMENT: The most recent poll was taken before the Goodridge decision, so it should not be held completely solid for today. But its finding are striking. 55 percent said that civil marriage should not be legally extended to homosexuals, while 37 percent favored it. But of that 55 percent, only 36 percent supported a Constitutional Amendment. What that means is that only 19.8 percent supported a federal Constitutional Amendment to make civil marriage illegal for gays. How do you pass a Constitutional Amendment with 80 percent of the country opposed? I guess you really do have to gin up the hysteria and fear. The decision this president must make is: is he a uniter in favor of states’ rights or a divider who wants to federalize a deeply divisive issue?

WHO BUSH REALLY IS: “While I was in architecture school at the University of Texas at Austin, one of my professors was the actual architect for George W. Bush’s new ranch at Crawford. He showed photograph of its construction on a weekly basis during his lectures and had declared that the “governor” (as Bush was at the time) and his wife were the most pleasant and thoughtful clients he had ever had. He would recount stories of how Bush would form friendly and close rapports with him and other associated designers, in spite of their opposite political (and sexual) persuasions. George and Laura would host intimate dinners for my professor and he came away convinced of their capacity for warmth and understanding. My professor credits his ability to employ ‘green’ building techniques on the ranch to the Bush’s willingness to listen. He was distinctly fond of Laura, who would call him every time he drove back from his site visits to see if he was okay. He admitted to his students that he came into the project as a skeptic, but came away as a grateful friend.” – more feedback on the Letters Page. For a view of non-leftist British condescension toward Bush (which helps explain the huge blindspot many Brits seem to have toward him, check out Stephen Pollard in the Telegraph.

THEO-FASCISTS IN IRAN: A useful site detailing the appalling abuses of the dictators in Tehran.

The EU suppresses a report on rising anti-Semitism, because its depiction of Muslim Jew-hatred might be regarded as “inflammatory” and because it believes hatred of Israel is not bound up with anti-Semitism. No, this is not 1935. It just feels like it.

He’s far more hostile to pre-marital sex than I am but, hey, he’s more of a conservative than I am. The difference between his conservatism and others is a profound sense of the full humanity of homosexual persons. He doesn’t see us as inferiors, merely as fellow human beings with the same needs and aspirations as others. And so he sees what this issue is really about. It’s hard not to be impressed by David Brooks. But with this column, he leaves me awed.

REALITY STRIKES: Who’d have thunk it?

US President George Bush is “totally at odds” with his media image, Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Menzies Campbell said today.
Mr Campbell, an opponent of the war with Iraq, spoke out on the ePolitix website about his discussions with the President during the state visit.
He said that they discussed directly issues such as Iraq, the Middle East, Guantanamo Bay, Kyoto and trade sanctions.
“He is personally extremely engaging. He has a well-developed sense of humour, is self-deprecating and when he engages in a discussion with you he is warm and concentrates directly on you.
“He looks you straight in the eye and tells you exactly what he thinks.”
Mr Campbell, stressing that the President was “totally at odds” with his media image, went on: “I was not persuaded by what he said, but I was most certainly surprised at the extent to which the caricature of him was inaccurate.”

What did they think he is, a chimp? Oh, hold on …

MAILER ON THE FIRST GULF WAR: Here’s a discussion of the first Gulf War by Norman Mailer, a man who is now hell-bent on declaring the second president Bush anathema for daring to finish what his father started:

George Bush blew that war. I think he’d had only 300 Americans killed and I think he felt at the end of the war that day, it would be a great record. So he didn’t want to go on one more day. If he’d gone on one more day there might not have been 100,000 Iraqi killed. But in any event, war is merely one of the horrors that face us. If you’re going to take an absolute liberal position, as for instance Victor did, and said let’s do it through the UN, the fact of the matter is the UN is not competent to find out where all the nuclear things are buried. We’re going to miss the KGB before it’s all over because they were good at that. The CIA is probably pretty good at that. You need that kind of information.
We’re entering an extraordinary world where all the old signals are off. It used to be that Third World countries were wonderful little places that were terribly exploited. Now they’re ugly places that are run by maniacs very often. We have to face that fact. If you keep using liberal jargon forever you will finally die in your own platitudes.

So you get damned if you leave Saddam in place; and you get damned if you don’t. If Mailer was prescient enough to realize as early as 1992 that “we’re entering an extraordinary world where all the old signals are off,” didn’t 9/11 seal the case? It’s the MoDo principle: attack ’em whatever they do, and hope no one will actually pore through your paper-trail.

HEADS UP: I will be on ABC’s This Week tomorrow morning debating the marriage issue.

The second Menendez brother gets married in prison. No conjugal visits. Just a recognition that even parent-killers are human beings under the law. Menendez just got more rights in his relationship than all of the following:

Gloria Bailey, sixty years old, and Linda Davies, fifty-five years old, had been in a committed relationship for thirty years; Maureen Brodoff, forty-nine years old, and Ellen Wade, fifty-two years old, had been in a committed relationship for twenty years and lived with their twelve year old daughter; Hillary Goodridge, forty-four years old, and Julie Goodridge, forty-three years old, had been in a committed relationship for thirteen years and lived with their five year old daughter; Gary Chalmers, thirty-five years old, and Richard Linnell, thirty-seven years old, had been in a committed relationship for thirteen years and lived with their eight year old daughter and Richard’s mother; Heidi Norton, thirty-six years old, and Gina Smith, thirty-six years old, had been in a committed relationship for eleven years and lived with their two sons, ages five years and one year.

And millions more.

The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes sees how fiscal issues can hurt Bush:

Normally, a liberal Democrat who claims to be a fiscal conservative would pose no danger to a conservative Republican. But Bush’s spending record is so awful (non-military expenditures up 8.7 percent in 2003) that Dean, for one, might make headway on the issue. After all, his fiscal record as Vermont governor wasn’t all that bad. At the least, he could use the spending issue to take the edge off his liberalism and embarrass Bush. And no doubt former Treasury secretary Robert Rubin, his new book in hand, will travel the country, arguing that deficit reduction spawned the late 1990s boom.

I think we’ll see a newly centrist Dean by the spring. If Bush goes hard to the right on social issues, it could get very close.

“He is a very nice man and I don’t know why they are saying he is the world’s number one terrorist.” – Stuart Percivil, a pupil at Sedgefield Community College high school. Beats me, Stuart.

A British reader writes:

Just some notes from the UK
– Thur 6 pm news BBC, only about a minute’s coverage on the demonstration!!
– Wed 7 pm news Ch 4, a postive headline about Bushs speech!!
– General, lots of people in the media condemning the demonstrations!!
– Dinner party at mine Wed night, room fell silent when Bush spoke followed by applause!
I think the visit has gone down pretty well!

What a difference al Qaeda makes.

ARE BLOGS OVER? Reading this particularly bitter-sounding piece, I’d say not. John Dvorak’s argument that many blogs don’t pan out and people can’t keep it up is obvious. When you have 4 million blogs, of course you’re going to have people fade out. It’s tough. And then Dvorak concedes: ” Luckily for the blogging community, there is still evidence that the growth rate is faster than the abandonment rate. But growth eventually stops.” What can that mean? That eventually we’ll reach a stable number of blogs, as the market is finally saturated? And that’s failure … why? Then Dvorak claims that blogs by professional writers are somehow “scams.” Here’s his brilliant insight:

They have essentially suckered thousands of newbies, mavens, and just plain folk into blogging, solely to get return links in the form of the blogrolls and citations. This is, in fact, a remarkably slick grassroots marketing scheme that is in many ways awesome, albeit insincere.
Unfortunately, at some point, people will realize they’ve been used. This will happen sooner rather than later, since many mainstream publishers now see the opportunity for exploitation. Thus you find professionally written and edited faux blogs appearing on MSNBC’s site, the Washington Post site, and elsewhere. This seems to be where blogging is headed-Big Media. So much for the independent thinking and reporting that are supposed to earmark blog journalism.

Suckered? No one who writes a blog has been suckered into it. They do it because it’s fun and if it ceases to be fun, they might stop. What’s so hard to understand about that? And there is a distinction between writing blogs and reading them. Many more will read than write – and that’s where much of the growth is, which is why Big Media will of course want to shift its strategy online to bring blogging to the mainstream. And this is … failure? Mickey Kaus, for example, is paid by Microsoft. Does that mean his blog is somehow less valid than mine, because mine is directly supported by readers? None of this rant makes any sense to me. Except some guy who’s bitter that plenty of amateurs now have the kind of access to readers he used to have as a monopoly. Three words: get over it.

What exactly is the strategy behind going after Turkey and Saudi Arabia? We know the motivation – they despise Turkey’s secular form of government and they loathe Saudi Arabia’s connections to the West. But doesn’t this strike you as spectacularly dumb from a strategic point of view? They have only helped make the West’s case to the Saudis – that they cannot ignore this threat and certainly cannot buy it off. They may well alienate Turkey’s Muslim population. And by murdering Brits, they have hopelessly undercut the anti-Western demonstrations in London. Your average Brit, after all, may be a little queasy about American military power. But when al Qaeda starts murdering British subjects abroad, the sympathy for Arab terrorists (which is a clear under-current of the far left in Britain) begins to look to waverers as sickening as it genuinely is. We may have made errors in Iraq – disbanding the army in May seems in retrospect an obvious screw-up. But the enemy is not without flaws itself. Perhaps al Qaeda is now so disorganized that it is practically incapable of any intelligent strategy. Either way, these terrible murders are indicators of something worth noting: the enemy may be falling apart. This may make it more dangerous in the short term. But it bodes well for eventual victory.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “What people have got to remember is that Sept. 11 happened in 2001 and not in 2003. It was planned under the presidency of Bill Clinton.” – British foreign secretary, Jack Straw. The point, of course, is not to blame Clinton for 9/11, but to show that al Qaeda terrorism is not some kind of response to the Bush administration. It predated it, and will probably outlast it.

LOOK, IT’S COMPLICATED: You’ve got to feel for the poor guy:

The queen gave her toast, noting that, unlike presidents, she was not term-limited. The president smiled, Prince Charles did not. When the queen finished, the president raised his glass, but Her Majesty did not return the gesture, instead waiting for the American national anthem to begin. Hearing the music, Bush put down his glass and placed his hand on his heart, then took it off, then put it on again. “The Star-Spangled Banner” over, he clinked glasses with the queen, then turned to clink glasses with Princess Anne, who was already sipping from hers.
The awkwardness continued after Bush’s toast, when he again picked up his glass to clink with the queen, who stood motionless, waiting for her own national anthem. Bush put his glass back down and, as the orchestra played “God Save the Queen,” winked at somebody in the audience. Finally, the anthem finished, president and queen consummated their clinks.

“The Chief Rabbi of France, Rabbi Joseph Sitruk, called on that country’s Jewish community to wear baseball caps instead of skullcaps while not in their homes, in order ‘to prevent being attacked in the street.’ Daily newspaper Le Parisien reported in its Wednesday edition that Sitruk made the comments Tuesday in an interview on Radio Shalom, a Jewish community radio station.” It gets worse, doesn’t it?

BURKE AND MARRIAGE: Along with Hayek, let me suggest that Burke might also have been in favor of including gays in marriage rights, if he were alive today. He was a conservative but he was also a Whig. Unlike many of the Tories of his day, Burke favored American independence and had an independent streak. He believed that society changes and that laws and institutions should be open to accommodating such changes – not resisting them to the bitter end. And when you look at, say, civil society in Massachusetts today, you see that gay relationships are widely accepted. Many such couples have children. The state already provides all sorts of legal protections for these people and even the dissents in the Goodridge case had nothing against accepting the reality and dignity of gay relationships. Polls have shown a small majority of Massachusetts residents favor same-sex marriage. The legislature has considered granting them many of the benefits of marriage already. The court’s nudge of what is already a pretty wide consensus is not abject tyranny. Compared to what most Virginians thought of inter-racial marriage in 1967, the residents of Massachusetts are crazy homophiles. Gay marriage is already, in most substantive respects, a reality in that state. The question is whether the laws should now reflect that reality, and provide real protection for families that already exist. That’s why this move is far less radical than some are suggesting – and why it wasn’t crazy for the court to find no rational reason to maintain the exclusion. Sure, it would be a radical move in parts of the South, where gay families also exist, but do so in a climate of fear and hatred and widespread hostility. But that’s the point of federalism, isn’t it? It can be tried out in one state before it is tried out in another. The flip-side of leaving Mississippi alone is that we should also leave Massachusetts alone. Deal?