Year: 2003

Don’t believe the New York Times. My take on Reagan’s extraordinary letters, posted opposite.

“WACKERS”: The urbanites parodying white-trash couture are nothing new. As one correspondent opines:

First of all, every child of the boondocks knows it’s a ‘gimme cap’, not a ‘trucker hat’. They were free gifts from seed corn companies and implement dealers, not $60 accessories from the Von Dutch boutique. Second, although it may come as some shock to the uberhipsteroids of Williamsburg, college kids in Iowa were wearing them as purely ironic fashion statements TWENTY YEARS AGO. Interesting to see that trends eventually make it to the hinterlands of Brooklyn.

Here’s a good New York Press piece on the phenom that appeared almost a year before the NYT.

THE WEST AND ISLAM: At last, an example of resistance to murderous cultural misogyny in the West.

THE REAL AMERICA: A Brit realizes the foolishness of stereotypes.

“$87 billion for Iraq for 24 million people in a middle-income country filled with oil and $1 billion – that’s 1/87th of that – for 600 million impoverished and dying people in Africa. What kind of foreign policy is that? It is racist – of course it is … I’ve been at the White House for three years saying ‘How are you letting millions of people die – thousands every day – and you’re giving 1/400th of what you’re doing for Iraq for the global fund to fight AIDS, TB and malaria. This is so shocking for us as a country that we can’t have any balance at all. And then we’re dumping this money down the drain. But why? Of course, fundamentally why is we want that oil under the sand. That’s fundamentally why. We’re not going to get it anyway. But they want to privatize it no doubt because, where’s the first couple of billion going no doubt? Halliburton and Bechtel. Let’s have a Congressional investigation of that, to start. Let’s have a Congressional investigation of the Saudi-Bush family linkages which go back 20 years — which have enriched this president, enriched his father, enriched their family, enriched their friends. And brought us into this so-called special relationship with a country that truly was involved in the September 11 attack and we don’t hear anything about that. So let’s have an investigation of that. And if we get out of Iraq, then we’ll have tens of billions of dollars not for Bechtel and Halliburton, but we’ll have tens of billions of dollars for our needs and we’ll have the billions of dollars for Africa.” – Jeffrey Sachs, formerly sane Columbia University professor, joining the Krugman wing of the Democrats, at a Congressional Black Caucus meeting on Iraq last Friday (transcribed by a reader from C-SPAN).

SO WHAT DOES THE FMA SAY? Ramesh Ponnuru, like other intellectually honest souls, is having a hard time understanding the proposed religious right amendment to the constitution, barring any benefits to gay couples. At first he thought my worries about the text were “ridiculous.” Now he sees a little of what I’m getting at. His latest interpretation is as follows:

The FMA does, however, bar governmental benefits to unmarried persons premised on a sexual relationship between (or among) them. It would not bar legislatively enacted civil unions that, say, opened various benefits to any two people living together–whether they were two brothers, two guys who sleep together, widows who had set up house, or whatever. It would bar civil unions that were limited to gay couples.

I’m not sure how he gleans this from the text which is as follows:

Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.

That seems pretty broad to me. Where does he get the gays-only clause? I think they need to be more specific and a lot clearer. My suggestion:

Neither this constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any homosexual couples for whatever reason.

What would be wrong with that? It’s clear, at least. Why would the editors of National Review disagree? They oppose any benefits to gay couples whatever.

I haven’t posted on this subject yet because Karl Rove has told me not to. When he gets back to me and tells me the party line, I’ll write something. Seriously, I have two questions that I don’t fully understand the answer to. What was the motive of the two “administration officials” who allegedly leaked the name of Wilson’s wife? The Washington Post suggests revenge for the trouble Wilson caused Bush. But how is this revenge? Were they hoping to get her killed? That strikes me as far-fetched. Or fired? Why would leaking her name lead to her firing? But was she actually under-cover anyway? And wouldn’t Wilson’s uxorial connections with the CIA actually buttress his credibility, rather than undermine it? Or am I missing something? My other question is: who is the White House official telling the Washington Post these things? Since the information is damning, what’s his/her motive? To get the damaging stuff out there soon? To pre-empt an independent investigation? Hmmm. Bottom line: if some idiot or crook at the White House did this for petty reasons, he/she should be fired and be subject to prosecution. But the details are so murky and so anonymous at this point that I don’t think I can say anything more coherent than that. As with the Gilligan-Kelly affair, what we know at the beginning may be unrelated to the full scope of what we find out by the end. But I’m not ignoring it. Oh, hold on … Karl’s on the line …

Finally a country of which Rick Santorum would approve: Indonesia, where they’re contemplating making oral sex illegal.

Michael Barone gets it right, as usual.

“Maybe I am just getting older and don’t get it or it could be the fact that I grew up in a small Midwestern burg and understand how hopeless my friends and family are who stayed there. Either way these people are jerk-offs. Two things came to mind when I read this. The first is these people would get their asses kicked if they threw a half-full can of beer at someone at a party. Not just because of the action, but because it is a waste of beer. Secondly, these “hipsters” would not last five minutes in any of the number of small towns in this country where this kind of culture really thrives. Any real goat roper who grew up drinking Pabst will tell you it is skunk beer and small town people know this. The only way to make it better is to add salt to it, I mean how wrong is that? My point is rural Americans don’t need condescending pricks in New York to tell them they are cool. We already knew it and embraced it years ago.”

As Hitch wrote in the last month’s Vanity Fair, what if it works? The one scenario that we may be discounting right now is the possibility that the worst is over in Iraq, that momentum toward self-government is building and that the financial commitment the U.S. has made could provide the tipping point toward greater self-confidence on the part of the good guys in Iraq. Safire is right that decent momentum (and $20 billion is a huge push) would lead to better intelligence could lead to … who knows? Even the media is beginning to show more perspective in their accounts of what’s wrong and what’s right. Bush’s recent passivity – silence, almost – may be less defenisveness (athough there’s surely some of that) but a quiet expectation that things will improve and that his political fortunes will only look up if they do.

HANGING IN THERE II: Tony Blair wins a first round in surviving his annual party conference with as little damage as possible. The lefties won’t be voting on Iraq. And he’s not caving in on DLC-style public sector reforms either. Unlike most of the Democratic candidates.

This one really defies belief:

North Korea has called for economic aid and a non-aggression pact with America in return for surrendering its nuclear ambitions, but Washington has consistently refused.

This in an article that makes no mention either of the appalling human rights record of North Korea or of its duplicity with successive world bodies and American administrations. But, hey, they get to run a headline calling Rumsfeld a psychopath. Who cares if they sympathize with one of the vilest regimes in history?

ON THE OTHER HAND: Here’s something I’d gladly pay a license fee for.

DOWD DEGENERATES: Yes, it’s possible. One – perhaps the only – theme of Maureen Dowd’s columns is her man-hatred. You know she’s really out for someone when she mentions their testosterone. Imagine a male columnist writing about female politicians constantly mentioning PMS. But I digress. Here’s her “analysis” of Donald Rumsfeld’s role in the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq: “I would describe him as the man who trashed two countries…” Now no-one can claim that everything is hunk-dory in Afghanistan and Iraq. But, compared to their existence under Saddam and the Taliban … they’re “trashed”? After two of the most target-precise wars ever conducted, with billions of reconstruction money going to Iraq, with levels of human freedom in both countries unprecedented in their history? Trashed? Dowd thinks that it was American intervention and not Saddam and sanctions that “trashed” Iraq? Is she serious? Stupid question.

Another classic. Shimon Peres and …

CLARK IN HIS OWN WORDS: An amusing litany.

BLUE-COLLAR CHIC: Well, you could see this coming:

“For middle-class kids just out of university and living in Williamsburg, the closest thing right now to bad-ass culture is blue-collar culture, so you have hipsters play-acting blue collar. Instead of saying, `I’m a PlayStation-reared, e-mailing-all-the-time Friendster loser,’ they’re getting lots of tattoos and drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and listening to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.”

I went to my first white-trash theme party three years ago. I felt cool because John Bartlett was throwing it. We had corn-dogs and twinkies and malt liquor and wore half-mesh ball-caps. Maybe the “bear” trend is also a throw-back to ’70s white trash culture. Ditto South Park Republicans, where the politics of the Red Zone has become the politics of the Blue-Red Set. Is all this hopelessly condescending? Maybe. But part of the refreshing nature of these trends is exactly their unconcern with whether they’re forms of condescension or not, or even whether they’re ironic or not. They’re just cool and insensitive. It took only one generation of political correctness to fuse the two. As Rolling Stone editor, Joe Levy, puts it, “If you have a bohemian neighborhood full of people drinking bad beer and wearing ugly T-shirts and trucker hats and dressing the exact same way as Justin Timberlake, it’s real and it’s ironic, and it’s cool and it’s uncool at the same time.” Exactly.

Mark Steyn offers another Said obit.

CUBS WIN! CUBS WIN! The boyfriend has entered what appears to be some sort of agitated trance. Or maybe he’s just hung over.