Year: 2003

From NPR’s Morning Edition. The following is the intro. Can anyone – anyone – deny that this is straight from the left-liberal playbook, under the guise of objectivity:

Bob Edwards: This is Morning Edition from NPR news. I’m Bob Edwards. Increasingly it seems the Bush Administration’s foreign policy is running into trouble. The post-war picture in Iraq and Afghanistan is highly unstable. The road map to peace in the Middle East is in tatters. There’s growing unease over the possibility that North Korea and Iran are pursuing nuclear weapons. Friends of the United States are not supportive. Overall, the policies of the United States are still very unpopular around the world. The Bush Doctrine, a preference for unilateral military action and a disdain for multinational diplomacy, is under scrutiny more than ever. NPR’s Mike Shuster reports.

It carries on in the same vein.

Soctland’s new cardinal-designate is a liberal on some matters like contraception, women priests, celibacy and homosexuality. Well, he was. After making statements like “What I would ask for in the Church at every level, including the cardinals and the Pope, is to be able to have full and open discussion about these issues and where we stand,” he was threatened with having his new job taken away from him. He then had to put out a statement:

“I accept and intend to defend the law on ecclesiastical celibacy as it is proposed by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church; I accept and promise to defend the ecclesiastical teaching about the immorality of the homosexual act; I accept and promise to promulgate always and everywhere what the Church’s Magisterium teaches on contraception.” Some elements within the Church claimed the statement had been made under pressure from the Vatican, a claim denied by a spokesman for the Catholic Church in Scotland and the cardinal-designate himself, who added today: “Having recently restated my loyalty to the Church, its teachings and the Pope, I would hope that Catholics everywhere would join with me in respecting the decisions of the Pope and demonstrate their own loyalty by not questioning them.”
An anonymous fax sent to news organisations and Catholic groups said: “O’Brien was told by the Vatican if he did not correct what he said at a mass on October 1 he would not be allowed to become a cardinal.”

The question here is not whether Rome has the right to do what it just has. The question is whether matters at the heart of controversy and dissent within the Church can even be discussed and debated. They cannot. The Cardinal sounds like a Soviet apparatchik, parroting official propaganda he doesn’t believe in, not a man of the church answering to his own conscience and asking questions that the faithful are also asking. But those are the kind of leaders the current hierarchy wants. And the chilling of all debate is now heading for the deep freeze.

After the Malaysian prime minister’s Nazi-like outburst, Jacques Chirac makes sure that the EU’s condemnation isn’t too strong:

At their own summit in Brussels, Belgium, European Union leaders had drafted a harshly worded statement condemning Mahathir’s remarks, but French President Jacques Chirac blocked the wording from becoming a part of a final declaration.
The text had said Mahathir’s “unacceptable comments hinder all our efforts to further interethnic and religious harmony, and have no place in a decent world. Such false and anti-Semitic remarks are as offensive to Muslims as they are to others.”
Chirac, however, said there was no place in an EU declaration for such a text. EU leaders compromised by having Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi criticize Mahathir at his closing news conference. Officials said the draft text also would be issued as a separate statement and would be posted on the EU presidency Web site.

The French anti-Semitic? Where did anyone get that idea from?

Not many items this morning. Been traveling and the endless game.

FRUM RESPONDS: The answer to all the questions I asked a week or so ago in the Wall Street Journal was provided by David Frum today. Well, I think it was. Here are some of my questions:

On what grounds do conservatives believe that discouraging responsibility is a good thing for one group in society? What other legal minority do they or would they treat this way? … What is the social conservative position on civil unions? What aspects of them can conservatives get behind? What details are they less convinced by?

Now see if you can find an answer to a single one of these questions in Frum’s piece. All you get is the argument that domestic partnerships, by creating “marriage-lite,” undermine the social status of marriage, and are therefore a bad idea. But that was the point I first made back in 1989! The answer is to give gay people marriage rights! But that, for reasons David doesn’t elaborate, is off the table. In fact, one of the main reasons we have all these marriage-lites at all is because conservatives refused to offer the real deal; and so others tried to create piece-meal efforts at reform. So we have, I think, an answer of sorts: no marriage rights and no domestic partnership rights. Better to keep a proportion of the population outside of all civil relationship norms than to integrate them in any way. One thing you notice right away: Frum seems uninterested in the fate of gay people, unconcerned about their plight, and doesn’t even try to address it. I agree that society as a whole has interests that are rightly part of this debate. But to accord the lives of gay citizens no standing in this debate – to dismiss them as irrelevant as a premise – is really stretching it, I think. Is it really not worth even an aside to nod toward their concerns? Or do we matter that little?

PRICELINE HELL: Strictly speaking, it’s my fault. I booked a five-day hotel room stay in New York City for a bunch of commitments, one of which fell through. So having paid over $1000 in advance through Priceline.com, I delayed my trip by a day. But I didn’t call the hotel to let them know I’d be a day late, assuming I’d have to absorb the extra day’s cost, but still had a booking for four days. (No, free-lance bloggers do not have secretaries and we can be absent-minded.) So I called up yesterday morning to confirm the room for the remaining nights. They were sold out. My no-show allowed them to cancel the entire reservation. Would they refund the remainder? Nope. If my flight had been canceled, I might have had a chance, but I couldn’t keep that pretense up. The hotel told me I should call Priceline. I did. They said that my no-show invalidated everything; that, since it was my fault, they had no obligation to find me any other rooms; and I should have read the fine print. So they get over $1000 for nothing; and they have no obligation to help out at all. The woman on the phone, I swear, was almost smirking. “Sucker!” was the tone. My trip has been as jinxed as a Cubs game so far, so I took the turn of events with a certain magnanimity. The BF and I are on some good friends’ couch tonight. It’s not been a great week for him. One lesson: if you use a service like Priceline, remember to be vigilant. It’s a great idea but the profit margin is obviously highly correlated with suckers and incompetents like me.

We know there are no fact-checkers for MoDo’s columns. But I just want to put in a pitch for the following to be corrected:

The president has tried to shake off the curse with a P.R. push to circumvent the national media and get smaller news outlets to do sunny stories about Iraq. The P.R. campaign shamelessly included bogus cheerful form letters sent to newspapers, supposedly written by soldiers in Iraq. It also entailed sweetening up the official Web site of the United States Central Command. Until recently, the site offered a mix of upbeat stories and accounts of casualties and setbacks. Now it’s a litany of smiley postings, like “Soldiers host orphans in Mosul” and “Ninevah Province schools benefit from seized Iraqi assets.” You have to go to a different page for casualty reports.

The assertion here is that the president himself coordinated the mass-mailings from troops. From everything I have read and seen, this was a one-off idea from a commander in the field and there is no evidence that the White House had anything to do with it. Yet from the full context of the quote, Dowd is specifically making that assertion. It’s untrue. She or the New York Times must surely correct. Or will they let her off yet one more time?

“You’ve reported that your boyfriend is a Cubs fan, and while I don’t expect this to comfort him, I thought I’d share how I have dealth with the identical malady. From the time I was six or seven in the late ’40s and on through the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, I rooted for the Cubs. My Chicago buddies adopted other teams – an easier, softer way that I found unseemly. Of course, the reward for my die-hard loyalty was zip. Year after year after year after year of dismal disappointment. “Why are you doing this,” I asked myself one day. “Why are you going to “beautiful” Wrigley Field, buying their beer, scarfing their peanuts and wearing their logo? If the Cubs are pathetic losers, what does that make you?”

So I quit the Cubs and I quit baseball. I stopped reading box scores and checking the standings. I didn’t have the heart to cheer for another team, so I quit the whole thing. This year, I didn’t watch a single regular or playoff game. When conversations turned to the Cubs, I absented myself, which in the last couple of months has added up to solitude aplenty.

Did I want the Cubs to win? Sure I did. But I couldn’t avoid the certainty that once again they would find a way to lose.

Your boyfriend needs to know that my strategy, while helpful, does not mean the pain will end. I feel it. I always will. But as with a bad tooth, the agony is less when I don’t fiddle with it.”

Actually, the boyfriend reports under the influence of some beverages late last night that he finally believes he has become a true Cubs fan. Now he knows the true calling, the fundamental identity of the followers of the Cubs. He has been initiated into the fellowship. He has been baptized.

Senator Kennedy kicks the troops in the teeth and betrays the Iraqi people by voting against any aid to Iraq. For what? Pure partisanship. Whatever you feel about this war, leaving the innocent people of Iraq to fight terror on their own is morally unconscionable. Kennedy is a disgrace. He believes we should pay no price, shirk any burden to defend liberty around the world.

More people are getting jobs.

Don’t miss this mini-fisk. (Hat-tip: Glenn.)