Year: 2003

The hard left is always complaining about having their feelings hurt, I mean their views allegedly “censored.” Among the more preposterous aspects of Wesley Clark’s campaign slogan of a “new patriotism” is his pledge to create America where people are not afraid to voice dissent. Give me a break. This spring, I was almost deafened by the chants of the pro-Saddam or anti-war left. Walking the beagle tonight in my neighborhood in DC I saw three posters portraying vicious hatred of the United States. And that’s fine by me. Furthermore, I have yet to see a single example of government censorship in this country since 9/11. (The worrying exception is the way in which the Secret Service seems to be quarantining legitimate demonstrations against the president. But this blog – and many others written by non-lefties – have been foremost in complaining about that). So where are the real blacklists, the real attempts to police thought, censor opposing views and ruthlessly promoote people on the basis of ideology, not merit? On campus, of course, one of the few places in America where the hard left still exercizes as much control as it can. David Brooks’ column yesterday, when you think about it, is shocking. And its shock comes primarily from the fact that we all know it already.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “The Church has got it wrong in the past – there’s no doubt about it. For most of Christian history, for instance, it was assumed that Jews had no place in the providence of God. I think you can take the view that, just as the Church eventually abolished slavery, so they ended up in favour of votes for women, so they voted for the ordination of women, and this is just one more issue where the Church has got it wrong,” – Anglican bishop, the Rt Rev Richard Harries, on the question of how Christianity will eventually see gay and lesbian human beings.

“During my first months in office, when day after day there were decisions that had to be made, I had an almost irresistible urge – really a physical urge – to look over my shoulder for someone I could pass the problem on to. Then without my quite knowing how it happened, I realized I was looking in the wrong direction. I started looking up instead and have been doing so for quite a while now.” – from Ronald Reagan’s remarkable letters. I’ll be posting a review of them on this site early next week. (If you’re a subscriber, you’ll have it in your mailbox sooner.)

HITCH ON SAID: An appropriately kind obit in Slate. Best paragraph:

But it can be admirable in a way to go through life with one skin too few, to be easily agonized and upset and offended. Too many people survive, or imagine that they do, by coarsening themselves and by protectively dulling their sensitivity to the point of acceptance. This would never be Edward’s way. His emotional strength – one has to resort to cliché sometimes – was nonetheless also a weakness.

I do think Hitch’s writing has become even better since it has become more of a repository of internal tension and debate. It has humanized him, taken off the sometimes overly-arch distance which used to characterize his prose.

THE FMA’S TRUE AGENDA: Freudian slip, I’d say, in this recent piece about the Federal Marriage Amendment. My reading is that the FMA would ban all types of domestic partnerships, civil unions, or any arrangements that can strengthen gay relationhips far short of marriage rights – even if they are the democratic consensus of a state, and reached through legislative means. The spin from most of the best FMA advocates (such as Stanley Kurtz) is that it would narrowly affect only court-imposed benefits and if a state wanted to create civil unions through its legislature, fine. Here’s the money sentence in the Washington Times op-ed:

Most experts believe the amendment would invalidate Vermont and California laws that are virtually equivalent of marriage.

Now remember that California’s law is not court-imposed but passed by a duly elected legislature. The point of the FMA is clear: to prevent individual states passing any benefits to gay couples by whatever means. It’s time the supporters of the FMA came clean about this.

A REMINDER: Every week, I get emails from people who find the white on navy color scheme on this site hard to read. We have long had a fix for that, and it’s a little button up there called “Black and White.” Click on it and the colors will be reversed.

If you’re not a little alarmed about the prospect of a president Clark after reading this, then I don’t know what to say. What on earth is he talking about? How can he say so much and so little at the same time? The Wall Street Journal says he sounds like a Republican. I’d say that’s a bit insulting to Republicans. There are a lot of passages in there that make him sound stoned.

Paul Johnson provides some hard truths.

The new campaign is shutting down its grass-roots web-operations. They’re not easily controlled enough:

Two pro-Clark sites, ClarkRecruits.com and DigitalClark.com, have already been shut down, and a third, DraftWesleyClark.com, is slated to be disbanded within the month, according to its founder. ClarkRecruits.com had helped would-be volunteers link up with other Clark supporters in their areas; now volunteers have to fill out a form on the candidate’s official site (Clark04.com) and wait for the main campaign to figure out what to do with them … “They are destroying the parts of the draft movement that worked really well and they are transforming the draft movement into people who want to lick envelopes,” says one worried member of the movement. “They are rebuilding the Kerry campaign with a better candidate.”

Clark spokesmen disagree. Check out this interesting piece in the American Prospect for full context.

I mis-wrote on some of the Clark quotes on Drudge and made it seem as if they referred to Bush, Cheney et al. after 9/11. But he said them in May 2001. My bad. I don’t think it changes the point, however. Clark was right to praise them. I still agree with him. And he was lauding their abilities not anything they’d actually done. Did they suddenly change character after 9/11? Nah. Their character came through. So how to explain Clark’s exuberant praise so soon? The Rhodes Scholar key: he wanted a job. He still does. And maybe he’ll say anything to get one.

Even some of the French are getting it.

If you haven’t already, you gotta read Krauthammer this morning on Ted Kennedy’s derangement. Money quote:

You can say [Bush] made a misjudgment. You can say he picked the wrong enemy. You can say almost anything about this war, but to say that he fought it for political advantage is absurd. The possibilities for disaster were real and many: house-to-house combat in Baghdad, thousands of possible casualties, a chemical attack on our troops (which is why they were ordered into those dangerously bulky and hot protective suits on the road to Baghdad). We were expecting oil fires, terrorist attacks and all manner of calamities. This is a way to boost political ratings?
Whatever your (and history’s) verdict on the war, it is undeniable that it was an act of singular presidential leadership. And more than that, it was an act of political courage. George Bush wagered his presidency on a war he thought necessary for national security — a war that could very obviously and very easily have been his political undoing. And it might yet be.

Amen.

THIRD THOUGHTS ON CLARK: Thanks for the emails. Gee. I guess the point of blogs is to write things as they occur to you, to raise points, to argue with yourself and others, etc. This morning a number of people have contacted me to tell me all sorts of things about Clark. The most interesting came from liberals who have spoken with him and heard his private pitch. What he tells wealthy liberals is that he loathes Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al. He thinks terrorism has to be fought as a police operation. He believes the Iraq war was not just a misjudgment but a cynical political semi-coup. Then there’s this email:

You pose that “if” Clark is not coopted by the Clintons and McAuliffe, he might have a real shot at the nomination. He already has been so coopted, at least if the Safire line of commentary is to be believed. As for Clark’s debate appearance, and saying the right things on the deficit, etc., that’s what Rhodes Scholars, like Bill C., do the best! It’s part of the suck up technique that got them to the top. My qualms about Clark are that he, like Bill Clinton, doesn’t really believe in anything other than his own personal advancement. Clark, like Clinton, will say anything that the focus groups suggest is the flavor du jour in order to secure favorable media coverage, and eventually votes, to get them to that next higher rung on the advancement ladder. I suspect that this lack of real values may be what Gen. Shelton was referring to in his lack of character and integrity reference when Shelton predicted that Clark won’t get his vote.

I don’t know yet. But these are surely the issues about Clark we have to figure out. I was wowed by Clinton in 1991 for similar reasons. It took six weeks of him in office for me to realize my mistake. (Oh and by the way, the gay issue has nothing to do with my semi-open mind about Clark. I don’t trust Clark to do anything substantive for gay equality, just enough to keep the money coming in and a supplicant interest group at his disposal. That was Clinton’s mojo. And Clark has said nothing to separate himself from that kind of politics.)

Heaven knows I’ve found plenty of reasons to be suspicious of Wesley Clark. But I have to say I found him one of the most credible of the Democratic candidates in the debate yesterday. The reason is that I agreed with him, to a large extent. Compared to hysterics like Kucinich or programmed bores like Kerry, he came across as sensible, fresh, and his views were sane. There was blather – “I’m pro-health,” as if the Republicans are pro-disease – but I guess it’s no more absurd than Republicans claiming to be “pro-family.” He wouldn’t drag the troops home, unlike some of the others. He moved from not-terrible to positive in my book with this answer to the question of what he’d do that would be unpopular:

We’re going to focus it on deficit reduction. We’re going to put this economy back on a sound footing so we can not only pay our bills but meet the other needs that we have in education, health care, the environment and Social Security.

Yep, I know it’s vague. But mentioning deficit reduction at all as a priority was encouraging, especially after this administration’s complete insouciance about it. I think he’s full of it on Iraq, trying to have it every which way in retrospect, when he was far more sensible at the time. And I worry about his reflexive deference to allies. So I was actually reassured by Drudge’s quotes yesterday, where Clark comes across as a gung-ho hawk, an admirer of Powell and Rice and Rumsfeld. I agree with him that “President George Bush had the courage and the vision… and we will always be grateful to President George Bush for that tremendous leadership and statesmanship.” I couldn’t second highly enough his view that he was very glad after 9/11 that “we’ve got the great team in office, men like Colin Powell, Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice… people I know very well – our president George W. Bush. We need them there.” I’m delighted he has such a high regard for Ronald Reagan. If he’s genuine – and you have to remember he’s a Rhodes Scholar and they tend to say anything to suck up to whomever they’re talking to, in this case, Republicans – he’s preferable to any of the other Dems, except Lieberman and Edwards and Dean (who came off as nastier and vainer than ever).

A WINNING GAME-PLAN?: If I were advising Clark, I’d tell him not to attack Bush’s conduct in the war on terror, or impugn his motives or sully his reputation. What I’d do is say: “Thanks, Mr President, for your wonderful leadership. But the task you set out upon is best accomplished by others who do not carry with them the baggage you do on the international scene.” Then he’d lay out a plan to bring Iraq to democracy, nation-build in Afghanistan, and get tough on Saudi Arabia. At the same time, he’d get rid of the taxcutsfortherich, and appeal to the cultural center. If his early flakiness doesn’t turn out to be a real character flaw (a big “if”), and if the Democratic base can contain its self-defeating hatred of Bush (an even bigger “if”), and if he isn’t coopted by the Clintons and McAuliffe, then Clark definitely has a credible shot. The country wants to shift tactics in foreign policy but doesn’t want to repudiate the achievements of this administration. And people are worried about debt and jobs. The question is: how does Clark run against Bush in the primaries and co-opt parts of his record in the fall? Well, we’ll soon find out. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying I’d prefer Clark to Bush under those circumstances. I’m just saying it’s an interesting scenario. And healthy for the country.

A heart-breaking suicide of another abuse victim of the Catholic Church. Pray for him.

DERRIDA EMAILS: Here’s one that provoked a chuckle:

“Re: your post on that totally incomprehensible “Philosophy in a Time of Terror” Habermas Book. That stuff is now so funny to read but it was not so funny when it was crammed down our throats in the “Communications” Dept. at university. Mein Gott in Himmel. I read your excerpt three times just to see if it was possible to grok ANY part it.
Now that I am out in the world and making good use of college-learned skills in my pro career I can look back at the madness of way bitchin 80’s college life with its omnipresent bevy of undergraduate teaching aides who conducted their earnest but indecipherable lectures by day dancing to The Cure or Violent Femmes by nite. I learned other skills in college too, such as “don’t feed marshmellows to grizzly bears” and “if you’re pulled over say the car belongs to her dad and of course she’s 18.” But I digress.”

On the other hand:

No fair giving Derrida your Poseur Alert award! He’s the uber-poseur–giving him this award would be like having an award for pretentious biblical speech and then awarding it to the Bible.

More feedback from the sharpest readers on the web can be read here.