Month: February 2004

Whom I’d support if I were a Democrat.

BLAIR, HUTTON, US: I cannot recommend this piece by Martyn Kettle in the Guardian too highly. There’s a phrase in it that rings in my ears – and not always too comfortingly. He quotes a former collague’s reminiscence about one Rod Liddle, the man who hired the infamous Andrew Gilligan at the BBC:

“Rob didn’t want conventional stories. He wanted sexy exclusives … I remember Rod once at a programme meeting saying ‘Andrew gets great stories and some of them are even true’ … He was bored by standard BBC reporting.”

I must say I’ve had my own Brit-glib moments in journalism, when I’ve too easily disparaged worthy, accurate but “boring” reporting or commentary. Being boring in journalism is not a good thing; but not being boring isn’t always a good thing either. The need to be fresh can lead to cheap shots or sloppy research. These are forgivable. But what isn’t forgivable is the slow and insidious slide into media arrogance and cynicism. London’s media can at times represent the worst of this. In this country, we’re not much better. It is hard, for example, to make the case that the Bush administration made honest but real mistakes about intelligence from Saddam’s Iraq. One side adamantly wants to believe that the Bushies lied; the other side wants to believe that there were no mistakes. In a completely cynical, polarized culture, it’s hard to break out of this cycle. I’m particularly concerned about the use of the term “lying.” I cannot claim total innocence in this, and every now and again, it may even be an accusation that’s merited. But these days, every mistake people make is immediately denounced as a matter of bad faith. When that happens routinely, political discourse simply cannot operate civilly. Gilligan accused Blair of lying. That’s different than claiming Blair was wrong. When we have lost that distinction, democratic debate is over. Which is why I get this horrible feeling that debate in this country has morphed into a kind of cultural warfare that will at some point devour us all.

“Someone has to change his mind. Someone has to say, now and then, My heavens, I voted for the wrong man; I am sorry that I did.
The team player cannot change his mind, because his mind is the collective mind of the team, and he obeys it. He obeys it the way a good football player obeys his coach — because this is what he must do in order to be a member in good standing of his team. You cannot remain on the team, and cheer for your team’s opponents.
That is why God, in carefully weighing out the proper amount of conservatives and the proportionate amount of liberals, also factored in a not insignificant dose of independents. They are a necessary ingredient in the complex American civil ecology, just as a nauseatingly repulsive form of algae may turn out to be an indispensable agent in the harmonious ecology of a beautiful forest pond.
In short, I have a right to exist – but not to set a trend.” – Lee Harris, on the joys of being an independent voter.

CLEAR SKIES HUMBUG: Why has the media ignored a new study by the National Research Council on how to reduce air pollution? Because it supports the Bush administration’s Clear Skies initiative. Easterblogg has details.

NANNY WATCH: “In his bloated budget for 2005, the president seeks funds to keep marriages intact, to prevent overeating, to encourage teenagers not to have sex, and to help give Americans the willpower to stop smoking. Should it bother us that both parties have bought into the belief that government now needs a federal program, bureau, agency, or grant contract to deal with every conceivable human need? An indoor rainforest in Iowa? Arts festivals in Alaska? Swimming pools in New York? What’s next, my teenager’s right cheek gets a relief from acne?” – Stephen Moore, National Review Online.

Two new polls – Quinnipiac and CNN – support the much-derided Newsweek numbers. Somehow I don’t think people have grown disillusioned with the president because of gay marriage.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “Have spent many years in the elite environs of higher ed and can tell you that whatever you think you know about admissions, it’s tens time worse. The ‘minority’ admissions rarely graduate and few even get to be sophs.
All the administration wants is to meet their quota of freshman accepted for admission.
What it does to those poor kids is criminal. They’re so disoriented, totally fish out of water. They don’t have a clue how to behave, how to dress, how to talk, how to read and write at the level of the freshmen accepted at the competitive northeast institutions. It’s truly pathetic. Their classmates spend vacations skiing, going to their cottages at the beach, traveling, they have their own cars, their own plastic, etc. As far as the quota kids are concerned, they may as well be from outer space.
The reaction is to act up and act tough further alienating themselves. It’s an awful system.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

My death-match with Stanley Kurtz on the question of equal marriage rights in Scandinavia is beginning to remind me of Frodo and Gollum battling on the edge of Mordor with a marriage ring in their hands. Readers can make their own minds up. On one simple point: Kurtz now argues that I’m having it both ways, since I once called registered partnerships in Scandinavia “de facto marriage” and now claim that there is a small distinction – in what they are called, adoption rights, and how they would be perceived in the U.S. We’re into very fine distinctions here, as I have said before. But my previous piece was in part designed to argue that, despite predictions that gays cannot hack marriage, the evidence fron Scandinavia was that same-sex partnerships had a far lower divorce rate than heterosexual marriages. That strikes me as an interesting fact – and it stands on its own. (I’d love to know what the latest stats are – and whether this finding still holds up.) In fact, if such relationships last longer than straight ones, even while being consigned to second-class status, why wouldn’t they be even stronger if included within marriage? So my point is strengthened, not weakened. As to Stanley’s further arguments, they still amount to correlations, not causes. He does, however, come up with one new piece of evidence: there are higher rates of out-of-wedlock births in Norwegian counties where homosexual relationships are celebrated. Quod erat demonstrandum. So let’s do the same thing in America. Take two states with very different cultural attitides toward gay equality, Massachusetts and Texas. In anti-gay Texas, the divorce rate is 4.1 per thousand people; and the percent of people unmarried is 32.4 percent. In pro-gay Massachusetts, the divorce rate is 2.4 per thousand and the percent unmarried is 26.8 percent. By Kurtz’s Norwegian logic, if you want to save marriage, adopt Massachusetts values, not Texan ones. I think it’s more complicated than that.

THE FAIRNESS PRINCIPLE: But there is a substantive point: Kurtz argues that civil marriage is still for procreation, not coupling. As an aspiration, that’s defensible. As an empirical matter, it’s false. According to the Census, 52.1 percent of married couples are in households with no children present. Now many of these may be because the kids have grown up. Many are also because the couple has decided not to have children; or are re-married with no kids; or are infertile; or any other range of possibilities. (I haven’t been able to find any stats on how many marriages – second, third or first – never have kids. Can anyone help?) But that’s a lot of non-procreative marriages and married couples with no kids in the house. If coupling isn’t the de facto meaning of that relationship, what else is? That’s the living, breathing reality of civil marriage in America. Given that reality, how can civil marriage be denied gay couples? You could argue (and I think this is the crux of Kurtz’s case) that allowing marriage to gay couples makes this fact more explicit. But is it fair to deny one tiny group these benefits, simply as a means to promote an ideal that most heterosexuals don’t live up to anyway? Do you open the barn door and let out 98 percent of people, but close it back for 2 percent? Are gays, in other words, to be used instrumentally in this schema of social engineering? I’d say that that fails a very basic level of fairness and respect for the individual homosexual or gay couple. How can it not?

Must-read Stu Taylor column on college admissions. Senator Kennedy is proposing that all public institutions be required to disclose racial and income data on all their “legacy” or alumni admissions – exposing the unfair use of privilege to allow people into college. I’m all for it. But Taylor proposes a more extensive disclosure program, requiring all public colleges and universities also to provide data on their minority students – exactly how many GPA points you can get, for example, by being black or brown, how wealthy the successful minority students are, and what the real racial differentials are in academic achievement. It strikes me that all of this should be public knowledge, as it includes important data necessary to assess the various impact of both legacy and affirmative action admissions. But do you think colleges will agree? Of course not. The awful secret of university anti-racist racism would be exposed:

Most Americans don’t realize that the racial preferences at the University of Michigan Law School, upheld by the Supreme Court last June in Grutter v. Bollinger, are worth more than 1 full point of college GPA — catapulting black and Hispanic applicants with just-below-B averages over otherwise similar whites and Asians with straight A’s. Or that the average SAT scores of the preferentially admitted black students at most elite colleges are 150 to 200 points below the average white and Asian scores. Or that this SAT gap understates the academic gap, because black students do less well in college, on average, than do white and Asian classmates with the same SAT scores. Or that most recipients of racial preferences, unlike most legacies, end up in the bottom third of their classes and have far higher dropout rates than other groups. Or that, according to a study of 28 highly selective colleges by two leading supporters of preferences, some 85 percent of preferentially admitted minorities are from middle- and upper-class families.

The racial disparities are indeed shocking. But most people don’t know the facts. Let the light in, and a real debate can occur.

I fear it’s far too late to stop the Massachusetts bore from winning the nomination. But I have yet to find a single Democrat who’s actually enthusiastic about the pompous, do-nothing, faux-populist, Establishment blow-hard with the Vietnam obsession. Here’s Jack Beatty, NPR-style lefty, on having to sit through a Kerrython in New Hampshire:

Listening to him, I saw a long line of Democratic bores – Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Bradley, Gore – who lost because people could not bear listening to them. John Kerry belongs in their dreary company. I fear he could talk his way out of victory – that, excited by his résumé, his panache as a war hero, Americans from coast to coast will be disappointed in the real man; that, just as we did at Dartmouth, they will long for him to stop his answers at the one-minute mark and by minute two will have tuned out and by minute three will pine for the terse nullity of George W. Bush.

John Kerry: resume without a cause.

Then there’s Mark Steyn’s view that “Kerry is this year’s Bob Dole – the guy you make do with.” I prefer the Internet line – anyone know who coined it? – that sums up the Dems predicament: “Dated Dean, Married Kerry, Woke Up With Bush.” The most entertaining Kerry-phobe, however, is Mickey Kaus. His blog will be unmissable this year – now that Mickey doesn’t have to deal with minor issues, like whether the country is going to be blown to smithereens by Islamist terrorists, and he can focus instead on the more pressing matters of Kerry’s past fudging on welfare reform. Go, Mickster! Jon Keller, in TNR, offers another version of Kerry’s potential:

Kerry wants to reimpose outdated Vietnam Syndrome on American foreign policy, reestablish an international order that collapsed on 9/11, and return Clinton-era phoniness to the White House without any of Clinton’s redeeming brass and Third Way creativity.

That just about sums it up. I wonder if there’s any Boston political journalist who isn’t a hopeless Democratic hack who has a kind word for Kerry? All the ones I come across don’t just dislike Kerry. They loathe him. I still think Howard Dean is a far better candidate for the Dems and actually more electable than Kerry. But, hey, I’m not a Democrat. And at the rate things are going, Kerry won’t even have to win this election. He can just hang around and wait for Bush to lose it.

TOTAL FRAUD: But of course, Kerry is on a crusade against “special interests” and lobbyists and all that uplifting sludge you hear spewing out of Bob Shrum’s Blackberry. Hmmm. If you’re spending a scintilla of a second considering whether this line is genuine, read this article. Money quote, which is, surprisingly enough, the lede:

Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), who has made a fight against corporate special interests a centerpiece of his front-running campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, has raised more money from paid lobbyists than any other senator over the past 15 years, federal records show.

If you’re a lobbyist, Kerry is the Real Deal. Please, Dems, take a second look at Howard Dean. He is the only candidate – including Bush – who has any intention of doing anything to restrain the current fiscal mess.

THE CULTURE OF DEATH: A couple of hundred people are dead because they were a little too enthusiastic about stoning the Devil. This happens every year. Is it culturally insensitive to ask whether there isn’t something profoundly awry about a religion that sends so many to their deaths as part of a religious duty? The Hajj minister in Saudi Arabia comments: “All precautions were taken to prevent such an incident, but this is God’s will. Caution isn’t stronger than fate.” Excuse me? God’s will to commit hundreds to their deaths? At the same time, Islamist fanatics murder scores by killing themselves in Iraq. What we have on our hands is, in some instances, not that far from a death cult.

AXIS OF EVIL WATCH: Gas chambers in North Korea. But Bush, according to the New York Times’ book reviewers, is more morally suspect than Kim Jong Il.