Month: January 2004

“We’re in an emergency situation. The United States has become an absolutely terrifying country, and I would hope that I could participate in some way in stopping the horror and the brutality.” – playwright, Wallace Shawn, New York Times Magazine, tomorrow.

BLISTER GAS FOUND? Danish troops make a discovery in Southern Iraq. Of course, we’ve had stories like this one before and they haven’t panned out. But this one is worth keeping an eye on.

THE BEEB IMPROVES: How’s this for a shocker? Here’s how the BBC described the recent Carnegie Endowment criticism of the liberation of Iraq:

The left-leaning Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said US officials misrepresented the threat from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Just giving credit where it’s due.

THE ESSENTIALS OF MARRIAGE: Every now and again, the facade drops. Here’s how John Derbyshire joked yesterday about marriage:

ZSA ZSA’S GRASP OF MARRIAGE ESSENTIALS [John Derbyshire]:
A reader reminds me of Zsa Zsa Gabor’s most inspired comment about her nine (?) marriages: “I’m a good housekeeper, darlink. I ALWAYS keep the house.”

It’s funny, of course. But notice the sub-text. Nine marriages? What a hoot. But while Derb yuks it up about straight people’s abuse of the institution, he still finds inclusion of gay couples an abomination. How does he justify this double-standard? The other money-quote:

The short answer is that if a customary social institution is trashed and trivialized by irresponsible buffoons, we ought to exert more control over it – to tighten access, not loosen it. If it turns out that there has been chicanery in the counting of votes, that is an argument for making supervision of the voting rules stricter, not for opening the voting booths to felons, foreigners, lunatics, and minors. Things are for whom they are for.

So how does Derbyshire propose to “tighten access” to marriage, as currently conceived? He offers nothing. Would he crack down on Las Vegas marriage laws? Would he lobby for a constitutional amendment banning no-fault divorce? Would he require waiting periods before marriage is legal? No word yet. Methinks he’s blowing smoke. When those in favor of traditional marriage start proposing measures that would infringe on heterosexual abuse of marital privileges, I’ll take them seriously. Until then …

FEELING BETTER: The night-sweats are gone. All I need now are my lungs back. Thanks for the emails.

From those wanting to ban gay marriages, civil unions, and domestic partnerships. The so-called “Coalition for Marriage” had to concede yesterday that it had grotesquely misrepresented the results of a Zogby poll it commissioned. Massachusetts is pretty evenly split on a state constitutional amendment, and a tiny majority thinks the legislature should do nothing to prevent gay marriage. The anti-gay coalition skewed the results to make the opposite point. But of course they had to. They are confronting the religious right’s nightmare. When gay marriage gets an actual popular majority, as it soon will in Massachusetts, they won’t be able to hide behind their argument about “judicial activism” and will have to be candid that their real, anti-gay goal. I used to give the anti-gay marriage forces some benefit of the doubt. I believed they were genuinely worried about marriage, not merely interested in stigmatizing gays. (Some, I’m sure, still are; and I don’t mean to impugn their motives.) But look at the National Review’s editorial this week. NR editors want to trash traditional marriage by creating a civil unions structure open to absolutely anyone – gay couples, straight couples, aunts and nephews, college room-mates, bridge partners, whoever. So if you’re a young straight couple considering marriage but unwilling to embrace all the responsibilities, National Review will provide you with an easy alternative. That measure would do more to undermine marriage than anything the pro-gay marriage advocates are supporting, or have ever supported. (My original case for gay marriage was designed specifically to avoid the anti-marriage civil unions option that NR is now endorsing.) In their convoluted amendment, they argue that these other relationships would not undermine marriage because they could not include sex. But how on earth could this be enforced? Videocams in bedrooms? The whole idea is preposterous. NR’s open-ended anyone-can-apply civil unions proposal would be the biggest assault on marriage since no-fault divorce. If they really were concerned about marriage and marriage alone, they’d support a simple, one-sentence amendment restricting marriage to straights, period. But that wouldn’t be enough for the gay-baiters. What’s telling about National Review is that when it comes to two competing principles – protecting marriage and keeping gays marginalized – they pick the latter. not to glean from this that they are animated not by a concern for marriage but by loathing of homosexuality. This is not conservatism. It’s discrimination.

“If Dean’s going to actually win he’ll have to do both–move to the center and start acting more normal. He’s certainly comfortable as a moderate–check out his old pundit tapes. His dilemma–the real Dean Dilemma, it seems to me–is that unless he keeps popping off, unless he maintains the mischievous posture of slightly irresponsible anger, when he moves to the center he threatens to bore everyone to death.” – Mickey Kaus on great form.

OFFENSIVE CLARK: I think there’s a strong case to be made that Wesley Clark has popped off more offensive and outrageous slurs than Howard Dean has. Jay Nordlinger has some doozies.

Matt Miller homes in on the precise issue at the heart of the 2004 campaign, whoever is the nominee:

In his big foreign policy address a few weeks ago, Dean called for a “global alliance to defeat terror;” he spoke of the “struggle,” the “effort,” and our “defense” against terror. He urged us to muster courage for the “fight” ahead.
Dean’s omission of the phrase “war” in this lengthy speech was no more accidental than Karl Rove’s choice of it. If the indefinite struggle against terror is a “war,” it de-legitimizes an entire universe of questions about White House priorities and behavior as petty distractions.

I agree with Matt that this is the central issue in the election, but disagree strongly that this is not a war. Above all, I want to see that debate occur – and Dean as the Dem nominee will make that happen.

A MILESTONE: The Dow is now where it was when president Bush took office. I don’t think that’s unrelated to his 61 percent approval numbers.

DEAN, GOD, GAYS: To me, the most telling features of Howard Dean are his contradictions. He’s a blue-blood, running as a populist; He’s belligerently anti-war; he’s both refreshingly candid and then also equivocating. His most appealing characteristic, in my eyes, is his now-lamented propensity to pop off unfiltered observations, to mouth off without consulting focus groups first, to express what many in Blue America feel, as they find themselves culturally and politically cornered by religious Republicanism. Yesterday was a good moment. Far from doing what most politicians do – and steering away from the subject of homosexuality as far as possible – Dean weighed in. He explained his support for gay equality as a function of his religious convictions: “From a religious point of view, if God had thought homosexuality is a sin, he would not have created gay people.” He didn’t offer a careful, non-controversial mealy-mouthed defense of civil unions. He took a stand in defense of a small minority group – and he refused to cede the grounds of faith to the religious right. Maybe, as some predict, this candor will sink him. But that doesn’t make it any the less admirable. As someone whose commitment to gay equality is also deeply motivated by my reading of the Gospels, I felt a little less lonely yesterday.

PLANET FLU: Man, this is brutal. I can’t remember a worse bout. Now I know what everyone was going on about earlier this winter. I had one of those day-nights when you don’t seem to be sleeping but you also don’t seem to be awake. In bed, I get drenched every two hours. Out of bed, I get the chills. Thanks for your many emails. Is this a new genre: flu-blogging?

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “The ultra-polarized and vicious campaign you are wishing on us will obscure at least as much as it clarifies. I recall the scene in Corigliano’s Ghosts of Versailles in which Marie Antoinette is trying to defend herself at her trial while being hooted down by a jeering mob. I thought I was your kind of Democrat: a pro-war-on-terrorism, anti-communist, classic liberal. But now it’s to hell with us, because you’ve decided it will be good for the country to have Bush’s opponent be as atrocious as possible.
Why not wish the same on the GOP — that is, for a total capitulation to the radical Christian right, instead of the selective nods and hedging that Bush has done? A far right vs. far left race would be no more illuminating or beneficial than the shouting fests we get on TV. Yet a sober, informed, thoughtful man like Broder gets a dismissal. You don’t even bother specifying how he is wrong. The substance doesn’t matter — he’s establishment, and the Dean crowd is about tearing down the building. I’m sorry, but I’d rather be a fuddy duddy than twist myself into intellectual knots to celebrate the rise of a nasty, dishonest, unscrupulous, and reckless man like Dean. Even a revolutionary like Beaumarchais (at least the operatic one) had to sympathize with “Antonia” in the face of the Parisian mob. Encouraging Dean is encouraging a very nasty mob. Be careful what you wish for.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

Yep, this is it. (Got the shot but it doesn’t seem to matter this year.) Will try to post but not capable of doing much right now but sweat through another t-shirt.

Just when you think he cannot surprise you any more, he does. His outreach to undocumented aliens is a political coup de main. As an immigrant, I do not share others’ view that Bush’s expansion of temporary work visas for illegals is somehow anathema. On purely pragmatic grounds, it makes a lot of sense. They’re here; they’re working; they deserve basic legal protection; immigration is America’s glory and demographic and fiscal savior. The immigrants will not be given preference over others aiming for citizenship. But citizenship can be eventually theirs’ through the regular – elaborate and frustrating – channels. I guess this doesn’t make me much of an old-style conservative – but I think it makes sense to integrate people already in the country rather than maintain a kind of surreal fiction that they aren’t here, or to hold over their heads the constant and debilitating risk of deportation or destitution. The status of such people is also terribly destructive to their sense of well-being, dignity and welfare. Bush’s money quote:

This new system will be more compassionate. Decent, hard-working people will now be protected by labor laws, with the right to change jobs, earn fair wages, and enjoy the same working conditions that the law requires for American workers. Temporary workers will be able to establish their identities by obtaining the legal documents we all take for granted. And they will be able to talk openly to authorities, to report crimes when they are harmed, without the fear of being deported.

But the real impact of the news is, of course, political. Bush has decided he can tick off the conservative forces in his own coalition and reach out to a huge new consistency. Even if he fails to pass the legislation, his very advocacy of it will send an extremely powerful signal to Latino voters: you’re welcome in the GOP realignment. Watching some of the reactions on television last night – Bill O’Reilly was literally screaming in his apoplexy, Pat Buchanan was talking about “an illegal invasion” (not Iraq, this time) – you can see the price Bush is prepared to pay politically. Or just look at the flecks of foam on John Derbyshire’s lips. It’s well worth it. The battle for the center – and for a real Republican realignment – is under way.

Howard Dean has now formally reneged on his December 15 pledge to premise U.S. foreign policy on U.N. permission. Now he’s saying: “We are not going to give the United Nations veto power over our foreign policy.” Better. He’s also clearly maneuvring to reverse himself on raising taxes on the middle class. Better still. I wonder if he believes he can really get away with this kind of trimming and positioning. Perhaps he has his base so sewn up he can afford to slither rightward. But at this rate, by November, he’ll be a supply-side unilateralist. And if he’s so web-savvy, why hasn’t he realized that the blogosphere has a memory? You can’t get away with anything any more.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Dean and his supporters identify viscerally with the foreign governments that resent being bullied by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Yet they identify barely at all with the largely voiceless people – in countries like Syria and Iran – who might consider a democracy’s projection of power into the heart of a region defined by tyranny to be progressive, even inspiring.” – from TNR’s endorsement of Joe Lieberman. The editorial is a strong one, and if I thought Lieberman was even faintly electable, Id’ say much the same. But the editorial’s main theme – about the decline of sensible moderation in Democratic ranks in the last three years – has a lacuna. The one man more responsible for destroying the Democratic centrist revival, for throwing away the Clinton legacy, and for suicidally pitching his party to the populist left was Al Gore, the man TNR endorsed last time around. Dean is merely picking up and re-energizing the pieces. Lieberman, alas, is one of those pieces.

ANOTHER CASE FOR DEAN: Jonathan Cohn tries to make sense of Dean’s apparent inconsistencies in a personal endorsement in The New Republic. It’s the sanest case for Dean I’ve yet read. If Dean can pivot rightward in the spring, and keep his base fired up, I still think he’s the most formidable candidate for the Dems.

This time to the Guardian, for an egregious piece of anti-American slander.

STICKING IT TO THE JEWS: The EU lives up to its reputation.

PASSPORT CHAOS: Meanwhile, some of the elements of anti-terror legislation are going to kill off a huge amount of tourism. By the end of this year, all foreign passport holders will need a new biometric passport to get through immigration – or they’ll need an interview and a specific visa. But none of the countries affected have processed or manufactured the new passports – which means that the embassies abroad are going to face massive lines, huge waits and enormous hassle for visa applications to allow even tourists in. If the tourists go through all that, they’ll face finger-printing and photographing at airports. Welcome to the U.S.. I’m sure a large number will decide to vacation or visit someplace else. One of the things I despise Osama bin Laden for is how he has destroyed the old tradition of free travel across the globe. If I were in the tourist industry, I’d be terrified of the impact. Surely the Congress can adjust the time-table to make it vaguely enforceable without huge upheaval.

Jonah signs on for Dean. He’s not as high-minded as Bill Kristol and yours truly, but probably therefore more convincing.

ANOTHER BLOODY HEAD-COLD: I’ve been kinda sick for weeks. Just venting. Well, I would vent if I could breathe.

Risen star Noam Scheiber defends free trade against some moronic criticism.