Month: June 2004

Isn’t it telling that the Bush administration wants McCain, Arnold and Giuliani as prime-timers for the convention? They’re the three Republicans least in sync with the Bush administration. McCain is as close to a dissident as you can find. And Arnold keeps Bush at arm’s length. A more representative selection would be: Santorum, DeLay, Ashcroft. And then you see why the Bushies won’t let them hog the limelight. Too much honesty could wreck the campaign.

NO THIRD WAY: Britain’s experiment in keeping marijuana illegal but refusing to police it is making life impossible for the police. How are they supposed to respond when stoners blow smoke in their faces? The answer, of course, is full legalization of what is a far less harmful drug than alcohol.

BORING UPWARD: Kerry’s stealth strategy: to win by default. Again.

FEDERALISM AND MARRIAGE: How can I believe that marriage is a fundamental civil right and yet allow for each state to decide for itself? It’s not an easy balance. But here’s my best shot at explaining the conflict.

BOOKS FOR SUMMER: I’ve been reading two great books these past couple weeks. I’m a little biased because they’re both written by old friends from Oxford days but that doesn’t mean they’re not worth checking out. John Micklethwait’s and Adrian Wooldridge’s “The Right Nation” is a really helpful, crisp, smart look at the conservative movement in America. I have a feeling that the phenomenon is past its peak but the past few decades are still worth remembering in lucid Economist-style prose. Then there’s Niall Ferguson’s latest, “Colossus,” an examination of the necessity and impossibility of American empire. Challenging, smart and essential. Everything Niall writes is.

Socially liberal and fiscally conservative? Then same-sex marriage is a two-fer. According to an authoritative CBO report, allowing for marriage rights for gay couples would affect outlays “by less than $50 million a year in either direction through 2009 and reduce them by about $100 million to $200 million annually from 2010 through 2014.” Cut spending and advance civil rights. No wonder today’s Republicans are so opposed.

NYT VERSUS NYT: “Stretching across four columns of the front page, the June 17 headline “Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie; Describes a Wider Plot for 9/11” caused some readers, including Vice President Dick Cheney, to accuse The Times of “outrageous” (Cheney’s word) distortion of the 9/11 commission’s staff report. I don’t buy “outrageous,” but “distortion” works for me – specifically, the common newspaper crime of distortion by abbreviation. The staff report was largely concerned with attacks on United States soil, whereas the headline bore no such qualification. The headline also leaned on two of those words whose brevity makes them dear to all newsrooms: the resolute “no,” and the imprecise “tie.” Assistant managing editor Craig Whitney, who oversees the front page, argues that “tie” in the headline is “a correct shorthand summary” of the report’s conclusion that there appeared to be no “collaborative relationship” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. … Willful distortion? I don’t see it. Misstep? Sure. Is an apology needed, as Internet columnist Bob Kohn, one of the paper’s most forceful (and, often, most incisive) critics on the right, demanded by e-mail? No. Good reporting and careful presentation are what’s needed.” – Dan Okrent, New York Times obudsman, yesterday.

“First Vice chewed out The Times for accurately reporting that the 9/11 commission said there was no collaborative relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda.” – Maureen Dowd, defending inaccuracy – quelle surprise! – yesterday.

KRISTOL ON THE NYT: A gently devastating analysis.

“But there is an added technique for weakening a nation at its very roots … The method is simple. It is first, a dissemination of discord. A group – not too large – a group that may be sectional or racial or political – is encouraged to exploit its prejudices through false slogans and emotional appeals. The aim of those who deliberately egg on these groups is to create confusion of counsel, public indecision, political paralysis and, eventually, a state of panic. Sound national policies come to be viewed with a new and unreasoning skepticism … As a result of these techniques, armament programs may be dangerously delayed. Singleness of national purpose may be undermined. . . . The unity of the state can be so sapped that its strength is destroyed. All this is no idle dream. It has happened time after time, in nation after nation, during the last two years.” – FDR, May 26, 1940. I wonder what Roosevelt would have made of Michael Moore, don’t you?

THE NYT ON THE SADR CAMPAIGN: They follow up on the Washington Times story. Telling, no?

CAUGHT IN THE ACT: More flim-flam from the liberal press.

Some tough questions to which our very own Leni Riefenstahl has no good answers.

No, I don’t think Al Gore has lost his marbles. He’s as sane as he always was – just proving why he lost the last election, despite massive advantages. Tim Perry compares Gore’s latest statements with what he has said before. Two beauts:

“They dare not admit the truth lest they look like complete fools for launching our country into a reckless, discretionary war against a nation that posed no immediate threat to us whatsoever.” Al Gore – June 24, 2004

“Even if we give first priority to the destruction of terrorist networks, and even if we succeed, there are still governments that could bring us great harm. And there is a clear case that one of these governments in particular represents a virulent threat in a class by itself: Iraq. As far as I am concerned, a final reckoning with that government should be on the table.” – Al Gore, Remarks To The U.S. Council On Foreign Relations, Washington, DC, February 12, 2002.

Tim has more.

It was a “male enhancement pump” under the black robes. The judge insists: “That’s not mine. That’s not my bag, baby.”

KEEPING DC VOTERS UNREPRESENTED: Michael Barone, himself a DC resident, has this to say:

Here’s my argument for maintaining the District clause of the Constitution which gives the federal government control of the District of Columbia.

You said you knew the historical reasons for the District clause, but I think they’re worth restating. As I understand it, the Framers were concerned about mob control of the capital city and hence, potentially, the federal government. They had seen mobs in American cities in the Revolutionary period, and they had watched from afar as the anti-Catholic mob in London’s Gordon Riots of 1780 took control of the city and destroyed the house of the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. They would see in the 1790s the mob in action in Paris.

How is this relevant today? My answer can be summed up in two words: Marion Barry. At one point in Barry’s reign the Metropolitan Police stopped checking criminal records and hired a fair number of convicted felons. The federal government should not have to stand idly by when this sort of thing happens. You complain that the District is ruled, ultimately, by voters from outside. But this is true of all American cities. Cities are legally creatures of the state, and city governments can be abolished or altered by state governments. Thus in the 1970s New York state government stepped in and asserted control when the New York City government spent itself into near-bankruptcy. In practical terms, this was done with the agreement of city government officials–but they had virtually no bargaining leverage against the state government and the bond market.

Having said that, I believe that Congress should use the power of the District clause with great restraint. I entirely agree with you that Congress should not bar same-sex marriage in a jurisdiction where most voters and council members might very well be in favor of it (though not for sure: some black ministers and black politicians are strongly in opposition). But Congress did step in during the 1990s when the District, like New York in the 1970s, spent its way to near-bankruptcy. The lead Republican on this issue in the House, Tom Davis of Northern Virginia, did take care to consult District officials and acted in tandem with District Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, who in turn deserves great credit for acting responsibly and with no hint of demagoguery. But someone needed to step in, and only Congress could.

On representation in Congress. I support Tom Davis’s bill to provide the District with full voting representation in Congress (though the District’s population is now below that of the average congressional district). Davis’s bill is ingenious: he would add, until the next Census, two members to the House, one from the District and one from the state entitled to the 436th member according to the apportionment formula established by statute. Happily, the 436th state under the 2000 Census is Utah, which means that supporters of Davis’s bill can be almost 100 percent certain that it would result in the election of one new Democrat and one new Republican.

As for representation in the Senate, I think it’s a little absurd to give two senators to a city whose population is only one-fifth of a single metropolitan area. Would we create Delaware anew if it did not already exist? I say that as one who has lived and voted in the District for 29 years. If I wanted congressional representation, I could move to Maryland or Virginia. (Or even West Virginia, from which some of my U.S. News colleagues commute, which means they have Senator Byrd pumping money into their communities.) No one is forced to live in the District. You could have argued in the 1950s and 1960s that many people were, since black people then found it very difficult to buy or rent houses in most parts of suburban Maryland and Virginia. But that is no longer the case: the Census shows numerous black people in every Census tract in the metropolitan area. Most blacks in metropolitan Washington now live outside the District.

I repeat: I don’t want Congress legislating for the District except in the most egregious cases. But I don’t want it to lose the superintending control that every state government has over every incorporated city in the United States.

As always, Michael makes some good points against full representation. I’d be happy with one real Congressman and one real Senator. Or transferral to another state. But the original reasons for keeping the capital under control strike me as extremely weak. Marion Barry? That strikes me as an extreme case. But voters have an absolute right to elect fools and crooks if they want, without Big Daddy coming to their rescue. It’s also impossible, I think to understand the history of this without appreciating the power of racism. If DC had always been a predominantly white city, this disenfranchisement would have ended long, long ago. Sad but true. In any case, using DC as an experiment, merely to advance a legislative strategy on marriage is obviously outrageous. But, from the leadership of the social right, completely predictable.

Well, at least, a respite from the terror. A hefty majority of Iraqis support the incoming government and anticipate improvement in the coming months. The legitimacy test has been passed – for the moment. All the more reason for European allies and others to hang in there and help.

THE CASE FOR EDWARDS: To my mind, the obvious choice for veep for Kerry is John Edwards. Ruy Teixeira explains partly why. Edwards would appeal to a very important consituency – the non-unionized white working class. But he’s also more comfortable among African-Americans than Kerry. And, as the primaries show, he has real appeal to independents, who are still deeply resistant to Bush, especially after the president’s slavish courting of the religious right in recent months. At a deeper level, it seems to me that Kerry is a world-class crashing bore. It’s extremely hard to keep your eyes open listening to him drone on endlessly. Part of his recent success is due to his staying out of the limelight, while Bush self-destructs. And a responsible, tedious, upper-class pandescenderer, while appealing to some voters exhausted by the revolutionary zeal of the man from Midland, needs an adrenaline fix. Edwards, whatever his faults, has plenty of zip. People like him. No one really likes Kerry. Edwards also gets the fact that a successful Democratic candidate has to have soul and passion. He’s from the South – something that won’t mean much in terms of winning over any Southern states, but helps balance out Kerry’s Brahmin Yankeeness.

He’s getting as horrified as the rest of us. What a gruesome day yesterday – all the worst because we have become numb to the carnage. The hope, of course is that the sheer insanity of these monsters – who are vying to turn Iraq into an even worse dictatorship than Saddam’s – will become apparent to ordinary Iraqis. Unless the pathologies of contemporary Islam in the Middle East have already done too much damage. That, I guess, is what we shall soon find out.

WONKETTE DOES WOLFIE: Almost as much fun as when she does Tina.

VOTING RIGHTS IN DC: Thanks for your emails about the colony in the American capital. Here’s a challenge: can anyone provide me with an actual argument for the fact that the inhabitants of the capital city have no fundamental right to govern themselves (without some strangers from other states’ vetoing or amending their decisions)? Is there even the faintest justification for residents of DC paying federal taxes when they have no senators and only one Potemkin representative in the House? Wyoming has fewer inhabitants and two senators. How does this make any sense? I know the historical reasons for this carbuncle on American democracy. I also know the self-interested reasons for preventing representation (Republicans don’t want any more Democrats in the Senate). But when you see people from elsewhere simply using DC as an experiment on a “test-vote”, the sheer contempt these people have for democracy and for the residents of their own little colony is overpowering. So I repeat: can anyone defend this? Seriously? I’ll publish the best ones.

Yes, we knew that already. But James Lileks proves it. Can you wait for Roger Ebert’s review of “Fahrenheit 9/11”?

MOVE OVER, BECKS: England’s newest football star is a hottie. The vultures are moving in.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “A recently reprinted memoir by Frederick Douglass has footnotes explaining what words like ‘arraigned,’ ‘curried’ and ‘exculpate’ meant, and explaining who Job was. In other words, this man who was born a slave and never went to school educated himself to the point where his words now have to be explained to today’s expensively under-educated generation.” – Thomas Sowell, in his latest column.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “As someone who was born and raised in the Mormon Church (though currently non-believing), I’ve always been a bit confused by the Latter Day Saints’ position on Gay Marriage. To be considered an adult in full standing in that faith, one must be married in the Mormon Temple — any other marriage is viewed as secular, without the gravity or sanctity of the sacred covenant of Mormon Temple Marriage, which is the only wedding ceremony which seals a couple for time and all eternity. Since Mitt Romney’s religious beliefs already view the marriages of non-Mormons as ‘second class, one wonders why he won’t make allowances for gays to enter into this lesser contract.” More feedback on the Letters Page.

BORK ‘N ME: The debate on marriage rights, held at the National Constitution Center a while back featured your humble blogger, Judge Bork, law professor Bill Eskridge, Matthew Spaulding and Bob Barr. It’s now online.

Will Saletan exposes some conservative flim-flam. I think the use of acrimonious divorce papers, revealing legal, consensual sex between adults, to be appalling. But, as we all know, there is no privacy in America any more. It’s no use complaining. Every aspect of everyone’s private life is now fair game. The press will print anything; and if they don’t, the Internet will; and then the press will report on the Internet. You have to be a saint or a born-again former sinner to be a public official these days. Anyone else should stay away from public life – and absolutely public office of any kind – if they care at all about their private life. That’s the reality. And there’s nothing we can do about it.