Month: September 2004

“Andrew, there is nothing wrong with life as a media whore, and, in fact, I applaud it. After seeing you pop up on a few programs recently, my girlfriend – who is not one to frequently compliment men as to live up to the stereotype of the man-hating lesbian – asked, “Is that the Andrew who you read online? I like him. He’s smart. And cute.” In five years together, I can’t say that I’ve ever heard her say that about a guy before.
Just a couple of quick things –
First, I don’t think for a second that you’re not supporting Bush strictly on ‘the gay thing.’ As you correctly pointed out, you’ve had no shortage of criticism of the guy on a number of issues, not the least of which have been the war and the economy.
But I don’t think that your record can beat the real problem. There’s a perception that we – by nature of being gay – must not like the Republican candidate because Republicans are always bad for gays. This is what makes so many gays single-issue voters (a concept completely devoid of logic since I’d be hard-pressed to find any presidential candidate who has done anything for us as gays). When people encounter a gay who votes for the Republican, they just can’t resolve it. We’re in denial, or full of self-hatred, or just dumb.
Now that you’ve come out against Bush, I don’t think that people can help themselves but assume that your reason is – despite what you say – because of The Gay Thing. We need to fit into people’s happily constructed assumptions of what gays should do when it comes to politics. Like you, there are lots of people calling me and rejoicing in the fact that I can’t support Bush this time around just so they can say, ‘I told you so – you can’t be gay and vote Republican.’
They need us to live up to their expectations, even if what we say, do, and think is the opposite.
Sad, but true. And if anyone else calls me and gleefully suggests that I’ve finally comes to my senses by voting for the Democrat, I might be sick. But trust me – the sickness is precipitated by the fact that it’s nauseating that Bush is the best that the GOP can do.” More not-so-lesbian feedback on the Letters Page.

Yep, the RNC did it. I might add that blogs broke this story, although David Kirkpatrick refers only to a liberal religious group. Still: it’s enlightening to see how the RNC peddles hysteria and homophobia to win votes. And not an apology in sight.

Here are two striking but different takes on Iraq’s current situation. Cheery Chrenkoff notes the extraordinary devastation that the Saddam mafia wrought on that poor country. Juan Cole asks what America would be like if it had the same level of violence and instability as Iraq now has.

I’m on CNBC’s Capital Report today on blogging – at 7 pm EDT. Guests include Jeff Jarvis, John Hinderaker and Mike Isikoff. A new edition of the Sully and Hitch show, hosted by Tim Russert, will also be on CNBC over the weekend. It airs on Saturday at 7 pm and 10 pm, and Sunday at 1 am EDT. The chat lasts an hour, covers everything from the election to Iraq to faith and secularism. Hitch is voting for Bush, but he shares much of my concern about the incompetence of the war effort in Iraq. Tune in.

I’m going to wait till after next week’s national security debate to make a final assessment of John Kerry on the war, but this statement by Joe Lockhart about Ayad Allawi is just vile:

“The last thing you want to be seen as is a puppet of the United States, and you can almost see the hand underneath the shirt today moving the lips.”

This is the same Joe Lockhart who calls nutjobs in Texas at the behest of CBS. Look, Bush’s war-management deserves ferocious criticism, but the notion that Kerry is fit to wage this war is getting more and more untenable as the days go by. He has sent signals that he wants to withdraw troops soon; he disses our allies; he shows contempt for a man risking his life to bring democracy to Iraq. We’re in a war, senator. Fight the enemy, not our friends.

My take – from my latest Sunday Times column.

WHY KERRY’S LOSING II: More off-message, paranoid ramblings from Teresa Heinz-Kerry. She really is an embarrassment: a stereotype of the arrogant, mega-rich liberal, who has long forgotten that the only reason anyone is interested in what she has to say is her inherited money. My own theory is that she also has something to do with the new gender gap, where women are no longer as Democratic as they once were. Women look at Kerry’s marriage and do not relate. They see a man who has married mega-wealthy heiresses twice, and they then look at the Bush marriage and see something simple and calming and traditional. I’m not saying that Kerry’s marriage is any less admirable than Bush’s; or that this kind of criticism is in any way fair. It isn’t. I’m just saying that many people, especially in the heartland, are uncomfortable with it. I’m therefore simply amazed that the Kerry team are still allowing THK to mouthe off at events. Maybe she has too much leverage to be silenced. But someone needs to silence her, if Kerry is to have a chance. And soon.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Let’s say you tried to have an election and you could have it in three-quarters or four-fifths of the country. But in some places you couldn’t because the violence was too great. Well, so be it. Nothing’s perfect in life, so you have an election that’s not quite perfect. Is it better than not having an election? You bet,” – Donald “Get a life” Rumsfeld, yesterday. Hey, why not a civil war, while we’re at it? Nothing’s perfect.

I get countless emails from mostly conservatives arguing that the only reason that I have become disanchanted with Bush is that I’m gay, obsessed with gay marriage, and nothing else matters to me. They even accuse me of betraying the war because of it. On the left, some agree. These kinds of charges, because they are really about my motives and integrity as a writer, are impossible to disprove, and so I have largely ignored them. They’re an unanswerable smear. To say that, for example, my opposition to Bush’s spending profligacy only began after his decision to back the FMA is both factually wrong (I criticized this long before he endorsed the FMA) and also ignores my long record of being a fiscal conservative, which led to my only real criticism of Reagan. Ditto Iraq. Some are saying that my anger at the administration’s incompetence and arrogance in Iraq is somehow related to the FMA. In fact, it’s related to my enthusiasm and belief in the Iraq war and its importance in the war on terror. It’s precisely because I am so pro-war that I am so enraged that this administration went into Iraq on a wing and a prayer, when so much was at stake. I’m not alone in this among many neoconservatives; I’m just alone in being so vocal about it. I still hope we win; and I will support any president, including this one, who is serious about fighting it. But, unlike others, I cannot ignore the evidence of incompetence in front of me for short-term political reasons.

FREEDOM MATTERS: I also have a strong libertarian streak, and so the gradual accretion of socially conservative meddling under this administration has disappointed me in ways far more manifold than the gay issue. I’m for legal pot, see nothing wrong with porn, and am reluctantly pro-choice. You think I need to be gay to worry about John Ashcroft? My dislike of the brutal campaigning methods of Rove was also something I wrote about four years ago. Remember: I wanted McCain in 2000. I’d add one more thing. I endorsed Bush in 2000 knowing full well his position on marriage rights for gays and his anti-gay past. I am happy to live with people who disagree with me on this, even to the point of supporting them in elections. And if anyone thinks it was easy for a very public gay man to endorse Bush four years ago and support him on so many issues, then they should think again. To accuse someone like me of caving in to peer pressure, when I have the scars of bucking such peer pressure for years, and have been targeted by the gay left for as long as I have been writing, is preposterous. But Bush’s support for the appalling FMA – with nary an attempt to explain it to gay people, reach out to them, or even listen to them – was a kind of kick in the gut to all of us who went out so far on a limb to support him. You think you’d feel the same way about a president after that? But feelings are not the same as arguments. And the broader arguments I have made against this president’s policies – on fiscal matters, war-management, entitlement expansion, protectionism, social intolerance, the blurring of church-state distinctions – are absolutely consistent with views I have held for years and years. I might add that reducing someone’s political philosophy to the crude template of sexual orientation is itself a form of subtle prejudice. I expect this, sadly, from some (but not all) on the right; but it is also present on the left.

A LETTER TO YGLESIAS: I was prompted to write this self-defense because someone actually did it better. Here’s an email from a reader to Matt Yglesias:

If you go back into Sullivan’s archives and read his writings about Bush prior to September 11, or even once the post-Sept 11 national devotion to Bush had died down, you will see that he is wary of Bush’s profligate spending and Bush’s dismissal of the concept of deficit from the very beginning, even when he was a fervent supporter of Bush in most other areas. And the disagreements that many of us have with the religious agenda of this administration are not limited to the question of homosexuals. There are Ashcroft’s occasional wars on free speech, or the whole concept of the government supporting religious organizations. That Andrew Card “we need to treat the American people like a bunch of ten year olds” line was telling. And as far as the war goes, some of us found Abu Ghraib a bit embarrassing and found the president’s seeming lack of embarrassment a problem. And aren’t those of us who supported the war from the beginning and agonize at this administration’s colossal hubris-directed incompetence possibly upset with Bush for reasons unconnected to homosexual rights? And perhaps, isn’t the mud slinging by Swift Boat Veterans allowed to offend some of us even if we believe in lower taxes? I turned on Bush earlier than Sullivan did, I honestly never really liked him to begin with because of what he did to McCain in South Carolina. But please, as an open-minded guy (and one of the few bloggers I’m still reading regularly now that the football season has taken over my life) step back and reconsider this “Sullivan only turned on Bush because he’s gay” thing. Many of us agree with Andrew in our reasons for believing that Bush is a bad president and essentially unconservative, and the fact that Andrew sleeps with a dude is not the reason that we feel this way. It may be one of the reason he does, but it isn’t the only one, so don’t just simplify him to “the gay guy.”

Thanks for that.

A Scottish reader informs me: “Numptie is a most useful term. It’s originally Scottish but seems to have spread south in recent years. It means a fool, a dolt, a cloddish moron. You’ll often find it used thus: “The problem with the Scottish parliament is that it is full of numpties.” (Surely the title for a novel: ‘A Confederacy of Numpties’?)”

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “You write: ‘I wonder why Bush-haters haven’t thought of this: that the way to punish Bush is to force him to live through the consequences of his own policies.’ Andrew, we ALL have to live with the consequences of Bush’s policies. And so do the Iraqi people. And so will future generations, if we don’t get spending under control.
I don’t ‘hate’ Bush (though I DO hate the way he’s mangled our fiscal and foreign policies), and as much as I’d love to see him squirm in a second term, I love America more. I’m voting Kerry. And if Kerry’s a disaster and the GOP nominates a grown-up in four years, I’ll vote to oust him too.” Don’t forget the Letters Page, where the smartest readers on the web take me on.

Allawi’s address was moving, inspiring and almost persuasive. Obviously, he’s under-playing the grip that terrorists now have on a swathe of Iraq, and he’s over-stating, if polls are any indicator, the support for the coalition forces among Iraqis. But what choice do we now have? And this is Bush’s essential response to Kerry. Yes, we’ve screwed up; yes, we’ve under-manned the liberation; yes, we haven’t been able to spend more than a fraction of the reconstruction funds; yes, we haven’t sealed the borders; yes, insurgent attacks are growing fiercer and more frequent than ever before; yes, we’re unlikely to get even one international ally in future wars; yes, we’re even losing the Brits; yes, we’re up shit creek if another world crisis blows up, because we don’t have enough troops to cope. But because we’ve screwed up so badly, it would compound things if Kerry were elected, and we gave some kind of mixed message to our enemy. Re-elect me, because I’ve made such a mess of things! Only a Bush re-election would inject the occupation with the necessary conviction to give us a chance of seeing this through. And conceding our failure – or even admitting that we have made mistakes – will only demoralize the troops. Tada! Heads, Kerry loses. Tails, I win.

BUSH-HATERS FOR BUSH: Once you’ve absorbed the chutzpah, it’s a pretty powerful argument. It’s a bit like Bush saying, after bankrupting our fiscal future in three short years, that we cannot afford Kerry’s big spending instincts. No shit, brother. So we’re torn between holding Bush accountable and re-electing him. But here’s another brilliant Bush counter-argument: wouldn’t we actually be holding him accountable by re-electing him? For the first time in his entire life, Bush may actually be forced to take responsibility for his own actions if he is re-elected and becomes the LBJ of the Iraq war. I wonder why Bush-haters haven’t thought of this: that the way to punish Bush is to force him to live through the consequences of his own policies. Why, after all, should Kerry take the fall? If he gets elected, can you imagine what Fox News and NRO are going to do to him the minute he brushes his teeth in January? He’ll be destroyed by the chaos in Iraq, whatever he does. The right will give him no lee-way at all. Maybe this is simply another version of the notion that we shouldn’t change horses in the middle of a cliche. But there’s an upside: if Bush fails in Iraq, at least he will be punished for his own failures; if he succeeds (and, of course I hope he does), we all win. Am I persuading myself to endorse Bush? Or am I finding some kind of silver lining in the increasingly likely event of his re-election? I blog. You decide.

An emailer from Blighty writes the following:

Bush doesn’t deserve to win, because his errors – Iraq, deficits – outweigh his merits – Afghanistan, not being Al Gore.
Kerry doesn’t deserve to win either, being, as we’d say in Britain, a plonker, a prat, a numptie.
Who’d prefer a frivolous result e.g. Bush wins the popular vote but Kerry wins the Electoral College?

Okay, I haven’t lived there for twenty years. What on earth is a “numptie”?