Month: February 2004

One more reason to be worried about the U.S.’s increasingly perilous fiscal future is that it could well jeopardize the war on terror – which will need real resources for the foreseeable future. I like Bush’s new spending on defense and homeland security (which is not to say that all of it wisely used). But that’s precisely why I think we need to cut back elsewhere. My agenda: means-test social security, scale back Medicare, abolish agricultural subsidies and corporate welfare and move toward a flat tax that the super-rich cannot evade. That’s one good answer to the Dems’ itching to raise taxes again. We can do it all – if only we stop wasting so much on people and special interests (of left and right) who do not need the help. Fareed Zakaria gets the idea. The one thing you learn from history is that inattention to national finances is the surest sign of decay in global power. No one can be for long-term deficits and the war on terror. They negate each other. When people tell me to forget the debt because the war on terror trumps everything else, they are missing the fact that the deficit will kill this war sooner than any Baathist insurgent. The struggle abroad desperately requires reform and sacrifice at home. I just hope this president (and future ones) understand this. I fear he doesn’t.

This time between a U.S. soldier and an Iraqi doctor. Ignore the Guardian’s anti-war spin. This is a real Valentine’s Day story:

“It was kind of funny, I kind of flustered her,” says Blackwell, at home outside Pensacola, Florida. “She was telling me [a story], like: ‘They want to kidnap me’ [referring to the fundamentalists in Qud] and I just kind of smiled and said, ‘Well, I can’t blame them.’ She said: ‘What?’ and I said, ‘I’d kidnap you.’ I was just flirting with her. She got a little flustered and forgot how to speak English, and started talking to my interpreter in Arabic and he was translating for her, and then she started speaking English again. She was a little embarrassed. Open flirtation like that… well, it’s a big no-no actually over there. But… it happened to work. That was basically it about how we met, and she just continued to visit every two to three days for the next four months.”

He’s out of the military and she’ll soon be out of Iraq, headed for a wedding in Florida.

BETTER DEAD THAN GAY: Even corpses can marry in France, it seems.

EUROPE VERSUS AMERICA: Why isn’t there more attention to the fact that the split is far from simply caused by the U.S.? A good Euro-blog notes one German finding her compatriots culpable.

“Mr. Bush said repeatedly that he went to the United Nations seeking a diplomatic alternative to war. In fact, the United States rejected all diplomatic alternatives at the time, severely damaging relations with some of its most important and loyal allies.” – New York Times editorial. February 9 2004.

“Yesterday’s unanimous vote at the United Nations Security Council sends the strongest possible message to Baghdad…This is a well-deserved triumph for President Bush, a tribute to eight weeks of patient but determined and coercive American diplomacy…Only if the council fails to approve the serious consequences it now invokes — generally understood to be military measures — should Washington consider acting alone.” – New York Times editorial, November 9, 2002.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “I’m a 17 year-old high school student. I just want to let you know that your recent article in the TIME Magazine really changed how I thought of myself and my “situation.” Your lines, addressed to a ‘young kid’ – “I want to let him know that he doesn’t have to choose between himself and his family anymore…I want him to know that his love has dignity, that he does indeed have a future as a full and equal part of the human race…” – truly opened my eyes. I live in a Protestant home. I have NOT told my family that I am gay … I feel like it will crush them. My older brother is an evangelical Christian, and when the news about the Massachusetts Court Ruling came out, my brother talked of how homosexuality is unnatural and is an abomination of God. He said that homosexuals were generally perverts and did not have a genuine attraction to the same sex, but simply desired “to feel good.” My brother is intelligent, but his views and the views of my parents make it difficult for me to “come out.” I have become depressed because of this … I am terrified that my family will find out my secret and denounce me. After reading your article, I felt a sense of hope. You’re right … I no longer have to choose between myself and my family anymore. Anyways, I just wanted to let you know that your article did make a difference in one ‘young kid’s life.” If people want to know why I will never stop writing about this, this email is the answer. More feedback on the Letters Page.

A recent Rasmussen poll of 1000 likely voters found the following:

[O]nly 60 percent of Republicans say their party leader is better at controlling government spending than the Democratic contender. Democrats and unaffiliated voters say that Kerry is better. Fifty-three percent (53%) of conservative voters say Bush is better on controlling spending while 21% name Kerry. Among moderates, 20% think the President is better while 54% name Kerry. Self-identified liberal voters overwhelmingly say Kerry is better.

21 percent of conservative voters back Kerry over Bush on this. That’s amazing to me. But it’s the moderates that should have Bush worried.

Interesting nugget from a new poll that is similar to many others, and shows a national majority (49 – 42 percent) against the FMA. Has any amendment ever passed without even a narrow majority in its favor? But this poll also breaks things down geographically:

The Annenberg survey found that support for an amendment to the Constitution barring states from legalizing same sex marriages was highest in the South, where 50 percent were in favor and 42 percent opposed. It was lowest in the Midwest where 37 percent were in favor and 56 percent opposed.

No wonder Bush is leery. And when the truth comes out that the amendment doesn’t just bar marriage, but any benefits for gay couples under any name, the opposition will swell. (For some reason, the results are not yet on their website. I was forwarded the press release.)

At Duke, one professor, responding to criticism of the overwhelmingly leftist cast of the faculty, proffered this explanation:

“We try to hire the best, smartest people available,” Brandon said of his philosophy hires. “If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire. Mill’s analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia. Players in the NBA tend to be taller than average. There is a good reason for this. Members of academia tend to be a bit smarter than average. There is a good reason for this too.”

Quod erat demonstrandum. Not all the faculty are this, er, stupid.

There was a moment during my time on Bill Maher’s Real Time (I had a blast) that, in retrospect, struck me as revealing. At one point, when Maher was going through a list of what he believed were firable offenses at the CIA, in the White House, and so on, during the war on terror, he blurted something out. I paraphrase: “Why was it that the only person who got fired from his job during the war on terror was me?” It was a joke. But it came back to me reading Al Gore’s deranged rant in Tennessee (the state that voted for Bush in 2000). Gore felt humiliated not only by the election result, but also by the soaring popularity of Bush after 9/11. Just like Maher’s anger at being out of it during those months, Gore’s rage and resentment must have been bubbling underneath for a while. So the legitimate WMD issue has finally enabled them to vent more freely, to come out of the shell of restraint that patriotism and unpopularity once imposed upon them. That may also be true for many of us who were alarmed by the fiscal situation during the war but kept mum for similar reasons (although I was on the case for much of last year). We’re venting now. But what that might also mean is that the anger might soon dissipate. Rage at Bush might subside. And the real criticisms of his administration – on spending, debt, WMD intelligence – might be more soberly addressed. Gore is always a very good indicator of where the country isn’t. Bush-hatred, in other words, may have peaked. Bush-skepticism may be rising. Dean didn’t win. Kerry did. And the skepticism may be more deadly.

SELF-PARODY ALERT: “Martha Stewart’s secretary broke down in sobs on the witness stand Monday as she described thanking the homemaking mogul for a gift of plum pudding just before relaying a broker’s prediction that ImClone Systems stock would drop.” – from an AP story on the Stewart drama.

Lovely, tart little piece by Gerard Baker on the troubles at the Beeb. Money quote:

The Hutton Report was, to read the British media, the Night of the Long Knives, the bonfire of the vanities, and the Cultural Revolution all rolled into one hideous assault on cherished press liberty.
If you live in the fantasy world of self-adulation and preening pomposity of high-powered liberal journalists, I suppose the aftermath of the Hutton Report might seem like that. But for those who have to toil in the less sensational world of reality, the unassuming 72-year-old peer may just have done the world one of the greatest services in the history of journalism and public broadcasting.

Yeah. They may have to get back to objective reporting.

THE VATICAN ON GENOCIDE: Are they talking about Saddam’s record? Nuh-huh. At a Vatican news conference, a Jesuit priest accuses Western drug companies of “genocidal action” because of disparities in treatment between Africa and the West. Memo to Rome: people who create life-saving medicines should not be compared to people who murder millions.

MORE ON SPENDING: Check out Spinsanity’s take on the president’s defense of his massive increase in discretionary spending. It’s not encouraging. Broadly speaking, the records of Bush and Clinton are starkly different. Clinton was the fiscal conservative (thanks, partly to an ornery Republican Congress). Bush is clearly a fiscal liberal (aided and abetted by a pork-loving Republican Congress). This graph tells you a lot. I don’t think it’s disputable that what the president said on “Meet The Press” was therefore untrue both in letter and spirit. He said:

If you look at the appropriations bills that were passed under my watch, in the last year of President Clinton, discretionary spending was up 15 percent, and ours have steadily declined.

Here is the truth. The rates of growth of all discretionary spending are as follows: 2000: 7.5 percent; 2001: 5.6 percent; 2002 (Bush’s first real year): 13.1 percent; 2003: 12.4 percent. Now I think the president meant discretionary spending apart from defense and homeland security. There, the administration deserves credit for what appears to be a slow decline in the rate of growth, from its 2002 height. So where does the 15 percent of Clinton’s last year come from? There you can see that Bush is repeating the Josh Bolten spin about what the administration intended to spend, but not what it actually spent. Lie is too strong a word for this. But no honest person could describe those figures as Bush’s or Clinton’s actual record. Spinsanity calls it: “misleading.” I’d simply call it “culpable negligence.” Bush is also ignoring the looming social security crisis, his own Medicare bill, and the Alternative Minimum Tax chimera. Tim Noah is right to point out that this level of deception is aimed primarily at fiscal conservatives. When an administration starts spinning untruths to its own supporters, it’s in trouble.

There’s a similar shell-game going on with the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment. The line from social conservatives is that this is a “moderate” measure designed only to prevent courts from imposing equal marriage rights on unwilling populations. It is nothing of the kind. There are two pieces worth reading on this – so you can make up your own mind. One is Ramesh Ponnuru’s attempt to parse the language of the amendment to make it seem as if barring “the incidents of marriage” from civil unions would not gut civil unions. Why? Because such “incidents” – like the right to inherit a spouse’s property or visit him in hospital – somehow cease to be “incidents” of marriage as soon as they are included in civil unions. Huh? Eugene Volokh, who has no dog in this hunt, demolishes that case.

THE REAL DEAL: And you have to ask yourself: if Ramesh were right about the amendment, why would the religious right support it? If the FMA merely bars the name “marriage” from substantively identical cvil unions, why wouldn’t the first simple sentence restricting the word ‘marriage’ to heterosexuals, be enough? The FMA, to recap, stipulates that courts may not construe either a state constitution or any state law to confer marital “incidents”. Notice the state “law.” So take California’s civil unions – passed as a law. As soon as this FMA is passed, say there’s a fight somewhere over whether a spouse has a right to visit his husband in hospital. Anti-gay or simply hostile parents sue to bar access for the spouse. A court adjudicates. Under the FMA, the court is bound not to construe the civil union law as giving any “incidents of marriage” to the civil union spouse, as it would to a married spouse. Game over. Civil union gutted. Ramesh, who seems like a decent fellow, may simply be unable to credit the motives of his anti-gay allies. But they are very clear. They want to ban gay marriage and any civil recognition of gay couples under any name. These “Christian” activists are lying about their amendment. And the press, so far, is swallowing their lie. (Meanwhile, the British Tory leader, Michael Howard, adopts John Kerry’s position and embraces “civil partnerships” for gays.)

Yesterday, I decided to skip MTP in live time in order to go to Laguna Beach with some friends for the day. Rough week and all that. To all of my readers still freezing their behinds off: sorry for the big smile. To all my Texas readers: sorry for defiling your iconography.