Month: March 2004

It struck me as a strong one on domestic issues. On energy independence, and protecting the Constitution, it was a winner. He looks like a potential president. But it was deeply worrying in one respect. The war on terror was barely mentioned. This on a day of appalling carnage in Iraq. I fear this man simply doesn’t get it. No one should support him for the highest office in the land until he proves he understands our enemy; and demonstrates that he will get up every day in the Oval Office to see how he can take the fight to the Islamists. I don’t see that fire right now. In fact, I don’t even see a flicker. It’s a deal-breaker for me. (Just as attacking civil rights and playing politics with the Constitution is a deal-breaker as far as Bush is concerned.) Kerry has several months to prove otherwise. But it wasn’t an auspicious start.

A LEGEND RETIRES: I grew up listening to Alistair Cooke’s peerless “Letter from America.” I had a ritual. On Friday nights after I got back from school (I had an hour and a half commute on public transportation every day), I’d have dinner and then slink upstairs to take a long bath. Cooke’s letter lasted the length of my bath: fifteen minutes. By then, the water was getting cold and my siblings were banging on the door. It was an oasis of calm, fascination, and piercing intelligence. How he sustained that quality for so long is awe-inspiring. He was still at it in his 90s, until he retired this week. He gave me my first understanding of America – that great, mysterious giant that loomed across an ocean. And I will always be grateful. He is irreplaceable. But his example of translating this wonderful and completely baffling place to the British has been an inspiration for me as I write each week for the Sunday Times in London. He made me understand what a privilege it is to convey something of this country’s diversity, paradox and exhilarating energy. And how impossible it is to come close to his wit, erudition and extraordinarily good judgment.

It was a fascinating CNN interview, in which the vice-president pointedly didn’t renounce his previous beliefs about letting civil marriage be dealt with by the states. When asked if he supported the president’s decision to ban gays from equal rights in the constitution itself, Cheney didn’t say he supported the amendment. He said he supported the president. It struck me as a very careful use of words. And after all, which father would want to explicitly consign his own daughter to second class citizenship? One thing that’s an unnoticed factor in this debate: the many Republicans who have gay kids or gay family members. There are many more of them than you might think – and I know plenty of them. But that’s what the religious right demands: that parents reject their own gay children by writing discrimination against them into the Constitution itself. And they call themselves “pro-family.”

EMAIL OF THE DAY: From the younger generation:

“So I’m doing my usual morning-shower think-time routine, and what’s occurred to me a thousand times before rises again out of the precaffeinated fog: the gay-marriage issue, the host of gay issues, will register as a blip on the historical radar in thirty years, maybe less. Then I think, I should bother Andrew Sullivan with this. Not that you haven’t considered it before – obviously you have, as it was right there on your blog this morning. But people my age (I’m way under forty), especially people younger than I (not so under thirty) are learning to cope with, and learn from, difference in a way our parents never did. It’s a simple fact of life in a relatively diverse, democratic culture and it was born out by my own college experience. Raised Catholic. Went to Catholic grade school. All-boys Catholic high school. Never knew – to my naxefve little mind – a gay person. Arrived at college (Catholic, no less), and suddenly there they were. Out. And, soon I realized, people. By the end of four years, more students came out. Homosexuality became an openly discussed issue on the campus. Old Jesuits wrote cranky, natural-law-ridden letters to the school paper (I sometimes rebutted them). A gay student group formed, and made noise about a lack of funding and space. The administration quivered and stayed put. And suddenly it seemed, well, like a mini-movement. Nothing on the order of what many early-middle-aged gay people experienced in their own situations, but for these kids, a lot of them Catholic, it was a seismic shift of self-understanding. And their friends, people like me, were taken along for the ride. We heteros learned with them, and from them. This isn’t relativism. It’s sociology.”

I couldn’t agree more, and was talking about this with Hitch yesterday in what turned into a five-hour lunch. When you visit college campuses as I do all the time, you realize that the gay issue is basically over for the younger generation. They take the presence of openly gay people for granted; it seems obvious that gays should have the right to marry. That’s another reason why this constitutional amendment is so toxic an idea. Within a few years, it will seem absurd that we even thought about it.

THE MAINE EVENTS: I’m doing a world tour of Maine today and tomorrow, speaking on marriage rights. I’ll be speaking at the Page Commons at Cotter Union at Colby College, Waterville, tonight at 8 pm, and at Chase Hall, Bates College, Lewiston, at 7.30 pm Thursday night. All are welcome.

“America is engaged in two wars for the survival of its civilization. The war over same-sex marriage and the war against Islamic totalitarianism are actually two fronts in the same war – a war for the preservation of the unique American creation known as Judeo-Christian civilization.
One enemy is religious extremism. The other is secular extremism.
One enemy is led from abroad. The other is directed from home.
The first war is against the Islamic attempt to crush whoever stands in the way of the spread of violent Islamic theocracies, such as al Qaeda, the Taliban, the Iranian mullahs and Hamas. The other war is against the secular nihilism that manifests itself in much of Western Europe, in parts of America such as San Francisco and in many of our universities… All this explains why the passions are so intense regarding same-sex marriage. Most of the activists in the movement to redefine marriage wish to overthrow the predominance of Judeo-Christian values in American life. Those who oppose same-sex marriage understand that redefining the central human institution marks the beginning of the end of Judeo-Christian civilization.” – Dennis Prager, TownHall.com. So now gay people – many of whom are conservative and people of faith and are fighting simply to commit to one another under the law – are the moral equivalent of Osama bin Laden. This is Jerry Falwell territory.

It seems clearer and clearer that the religious right amendment to ban civil marriage rights for gays is not really intended to pass any time soon. The point is to use the issue electorally – threaten the civil rights of some Americans to get a few percentage points in a few Senate races and possibly against Kerry. And now, it seems, the Republicans are disinterring another ancient wedge issue – the flag burning constitutional amendment! Here’s the Washington Post today:

Republicans also plan a series of votes on judicial appointments and tax cuts this year that could put Kerry in tough political spots, according to a senior GOP leadership aide. Another possible wedge issue, aides in both parties say, is a long-standing proposed constitutional amendment to outlaw burning the American flag.

Flag-burning, fag-burning. Anything for a few votes. And what’s really amazing is how cynically these alleged conservatives use the Constitution itself for their partisan ends. One word: sickening.

“Although the rest of the government is running huge deficits – and never did run much of a surplus – the Social Security system is currently taking in much more money than it spends. Thanks to those surpluses, the program is fully financed at least through 2042. The cost of securing the program’s future for many decades after that would be modest – a small fraction of the revenue that will be lost if the Bush tax cuts are made permanent.” – Paul Krugman, New York Times, today.

“When Alan Greenspan urged Congress last week to cut future benefits in Social Security and Medicare, sending elected officials to the barricades, he was if anything understating the magnitude of the problems ahead. Today’s budget deficits are measured in the hundreds of billions, but the looming shortfalls for the two retirement programs are projected to be in the tens of trillions of dollars.” – Edmund L. Andrews, New York Times today.

A lot of what you need to know about Islamist terror was revealed today as suicide bombers killed scores in Shiite shrines. They do not represent Islam; they do not represent Iraqis; they represent nihilist murder and aspirations to totalitarianism. Maybe these explosions will help Iraqis realize that our enemies are their enemies. It is certainly hard not to be sickened by the sacrilegious nature of their atrocities.

Mickey unloads:

I admit, I’m allergic to Kerry. Something in the vibration of that deep, pompous tone he adopts–the lugubrious, narcissistic fake gravity–grates on me. Others, bizarrely, say they don’t have this problem. But few would argue that Kerry has formed a special bond with any large group of voters other than veterans. If he wins it’s likely to be because voters see him as an acceptable alternative to an unacceptable incumbent, not because he’s inspired them.

I tend to agree. Kaus’s analysis is much better and more substantive than this quote, so read it all. I don’t feel Mickey’s conflict on this one (I’m not a Democrat and don’t think I ever could be). But it’s obvious to me at least that Kerry is an extremely weak candidate. I’m beginning to believe that the most interesting question about this coming election is not who will win it, but who will manage to lose it. So far, with Kerry’s limitations and Bush’s pandering to the far right, it’s neck and neck.

Small blog this morning. I spent all last evening at an AEI lecture and dinner in honor of my old college friend, the historian Niall Ferguson. He gave a challenging talk – essentially about the implosion of Europe. Perhaps the most striking statistic he provided (and there were many) is that, on current demographic trends, there will only be 67 million Germans in 2050 – down from over 80 today and slightly more in Hitler’s day. And their average age will be close to 50. More significantly, the economic stresses on Germany, Niall argues, will make it unlikely that German subsidies can keep the EU afloat indefinitely. And that’s always been the central reality of the EU: German largess toward other member states in return for political legitimacy and economic union. He doesn’t argue that the EU will collapse (although he wonders whether the euro will survive long term as a currency). Like many other exhausted institutions, it may simply wither. The big question therefore is when and if German voters will balk at being further milked dry by their poorer neighbors. Who knows? But if their economy continues to sink into inactivity, it may be sooner rather than later.

AEI: I have to say that the American Enterprise Institute is an amazing place. There are plenty of people there with whom I’d disagree on many issues, but it’s wonderful to be in a place where ideas actually seem to matter. It confirms in my mind that Washington really is becoming an intellectual capital as well as a political one. I’ve been to many events, dinners and lunches there and never fail to be stimulated. At dinner this time I got to meet and chat with Jeane Kirkpatrick, a woman I’d never met before; as well as listening to Michael Barone, Mark Falcoff, Chris DeMuth, Geoffrey Smith, Radek Sikorski, Steve Hayward and several others. We chatted at one point about Allan Bloom. How I wish I’d had the chance to meet him – the ultimate Nietzschean conservative. The novel, Ravelstein, by Bloom’s friend, Saul Bellow, made me long to have been at some point within Bloom’s world. But hearing Kirkpatrick reminisce made it worse.

Now, they’re after Internet pills. Yes, there are some addiction issues (but, then, there always are). But why cannot the state treat citizens and doctors as grown-ups? What business is it of the government to decide whether someone cannot use a prescription medication for pleasure or relief if she decides it’s something she wants to do and a doctor is prepared to prescribe it? Ditto steroids. Frankly, the way in which the internet has broken down some of our puritanical attitudes toward the pharmaceutical revolution has been a great step forward for human freedom and medical or recreational choice. I guess the possibility that someone out there may be experiencing actual pleasure is enough to send the government into a full-scale panic. We’re used to the insane war on illegal drugs. Now they want a war on the legal ones as well. Can’t Rush Limbaugh protest this incursion of over-weening government? Oh, wait …

THE NYT AND HALLIBURTON: Oxblog is on the case of a weirdly missing quote from the NYT online. Can’t give too much credit to Halliburton for turning around Iraq’s oil production, can we? They also do a useful round-up of the surprisingly good news from Iraq.

THE THREAT OF SAMISH-SEX MARRIAGE: A new amendment proposal from the New Yorker.

PRAGER ON THE PASSION: A sage and balanced analysis.

MOORE ON MARRIAGE: The fundamentalist judge takes a stand against the religious right amendment. Yes, I just wrote that sentence.

RIGGING THE BIOETHICS COUNCIL: More evidence of the Bush administration’s catering to the anti-technological views of some on the far right. More reason for Independent voters to reconsider their support.

GENERATIONAL CLASH: Baylor University’s president lashes out at a student newspaper editorial supporting – shock – equal protection under the law. The editorial board will get a talking to. When the kids at a place like Baylor don’t get the older generation’s hostility to equal marriage rights, the culture really is changing. Nationally, the generation gap is really striking. The under-40s see the issue completely differently than the over 60s. Does it make sense to pass a constitutional amendment when the younger generation opposes it by a large margin?

Maybe I was too detailed in my response. Here’s a reader’s reply:

“David Frum’s list of hypothetical situations where one state recognizes a gay marriage, another doesn’t, reminds me of the ‘Conflict of Laws’ course I took many years ago in law school (2 credits). Despite its seemingly recondite subject matter it turned out to be useful on almost a daily basis to a practicing business lawyer, because conflicts of laws between states in fact pop up all the time on everything from property ownership to inheritance to tort liability to insurance contracts — and no field is less uniform even now than ‘family law’ governing marriage, divorce, parenthood and children. In fact courts already have “choice of law” rules to answer every question Mr. Frum poses.”

But that wouldn’t whip up enough hysteria to pass a Constitutional amendment, dummy!

EMAIL OF THE DAY II: Here’s a good point:

“You claim in your blog that ‘It looks increasingly as if anyone who cares about fiscal sanity is going to have to sit this election out.’ However, isn’t it obvious that the only way to impose some sort of fiscal sanity is to vote Kerry — resulting in a split government that can’t reach any sort of agreement as to how to spend money?
Additionally, if we are going to spend money like drunken sailors wouldn’t we rather have Kerry, who will at least tax the baby-boomer generation that is benefitting from all this spending, instead of Bush who wants to run up huge deficits and force these problems on future generations… people like ME?
As an uncatered to libertarian in my twenties, I think the answers to both of these questions are ‘yes’ and ‘yes’. I intend to vote Republican except for President, where I intend to vote a big fat ‘D’. Then I’ll sit back and pray for government gridlock.”

I think this guy is right. If you take seriously the fact that this country is headed toward fiscal catastrophe in the next decade, then restraining spending and raising some taxes in the next four years is almost as essential as tackling the entitlement crunch. Neither Bush nor Kerry wants to help. They’re both cowards (although Kerry seems to have a better grip on fiscal reality than Bush does). So gridlock is the best option. The combination of Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress was great for the country’s fiscal standing. Independents and anyone under 40 concerned with the deficit don’t need a Perot. They just need to vote for Kerry and hope the GOP retains control of at least one half of Congress.

GOD HATES SHRIMP: A new campaign for the religious right to join. Leviticus 11: 9 – 12 cannot be wrong. Boycott Long John Silver’s!

NOTICING EVIL: David Frum parses Mel Gibson’s verbal non-committal on whether the Holocaust really took place as we know it did. Bill Safire is unnerved as well. Gradually, conservatives are cottoning on to the real agenda behind “The Passion of the Christ.”