Month: October 2004

The corporate ransacking of the tax code – aided and betted by this president – continues apace. Both parties are responsible. But Republicans control the Congress and Bush has been more than an enabler.

Hard to interpret this news any other way, is it?

CANADIAN FREE SPEECH: Let me add my two cents of outrage to the way in which homophobes in Canada are denied freedom of speech. It’s horrifying. I’ve long believed and argued that the central aim of the gay rights movement should be to expand freedom – for everyone. Speech codes and “hate crime” laws restrict freedom – and gays should have nothing to do with them. We should be defending the right of the Boy Scouts to discriminate if they so wish, while making the argument that they shouldn’t. We should be defending the right of bigots to exclude gays from their St Patrick’s Day parade if they so wish – because their freedoms are our freedoms also. This is particularly true in First Amendment matters. For centuries, free speech was the only real freedom gays ever had. The idea that we should now be curtailing it for others – whatever their views – is a betrayal of our past, our integrity and our freedom.

EUROPE AND THE JEWS: A horrifying first-person account of anti-American and anti-Semitic vitriol in London.

BUSH AS A LIBERAL: Sky-high spending at home, utopian interventionism abroad. Paul Campos makes the case.

DIVORCE IS NEXT: Kudos for one evangelical for conceding that the battle to keep civil marriage an exclusively heterosexual privilege in the name of traditional values is hard to sustain given the high rate of straight divorce. So … tighten up divorce! Why not combine state constitutional amendments “defending” marriage with bans on no-fault divorce? Well, you know the answer.

Here’s a blogger who says he’s voting for Bush but rooting for Kerry. I understand his “riptide of conflicts.” I share them.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “This is in response to your recent ’email of the day.’ (‘Your posts on Kerry make me feel like I’m watching a bad Woody Allen movie, where some neurotic, forty-something Manhattanite is trying to convince herself that she really is in love with the off-putting proctologist who just proposed to her. For the love of God, please come to your senses.’) I would say that the writer only got it half right. As a twice-married woman who may be slightly neurotic (but no more than most people), I must admit that I would choose a stable, cautious, steady “proctologist” any day if I had just gone through a marriage with a husband who was verbally abusive, intolerant of criticism, had a hair-trigger temper, and spent like a drunken sailor. And I don’t think I’m alone on this one.”

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Glenn Reynolds thinks that the attempt to prevent the Sinclair TV network from airing an anti-Kerry propaganda movie is a worrying encroachment on free speech. Fritz Schrank compares it to the anti-Bush propaganda movie, “Fahrenheit 9/11.” I’m not so sure. There is surely a distinction between a movie shown in theaters and a movie shown over the publicly regulated broadcast airwaves. Owners of TV stations do have some public obligations in the way that movie theater owners and distributors do not – especially in an election campaign. Here’s FCC commissioner, Michael Copps:

“This is an abuse of the public trust. And it is proof positive of media consolidation run amok when one owner can use the public airwaves to blanket the country with its political ideology — whether liberal or conservative.-Some will undoubtedly question if this is appropriate stewardship of the public airwaves. This is the same corporation that refused to air Nightline’s reading of our war dead in Iraq.-It is the same corporation that short-shrifts local communities and local jobs by distance-casting news and weather from hundreds of miles away.- It is a sad fact that the explicit public interest protections we once had to ensure balance continue to be weakened by the Federal Communications Commission while it allows media conglomerates to get even bigger.-Sinclair, and the FCC, are taking us down a dangerous road.”

As I’ve said, it’s a free country, and my instincts are against any attempt to regulate this kind of thing. But the blatantly partisan nature of this move – and its dissemination of rank smears into millions of homes – is still troubling. If CBS announced they were pulling regular programming to air “Fahrenheit 9/11” a week before the election, do you think no conservatives would protest?

“If you use that logic and reasoning, that means every car bomb in Iraq would be an in-kind contribution to John Kerry.” – Mark Hyman, vice president the Sinclair Broadcast Group, defending himself against the charge that the broadcasting of an anti-Kerry propaganda movie amounts to an in-kind contribution to the Bush campaign. Hyman also referred to critics of the anti-Kerry Swift Boat Vets as “acting like Holocaust deniers, pretending these men don’t exist.”

Maybe it’s worth a second link – but this story about Bush policy toward Iran strikes me as important. Essentially, Bush has flip-flopped into agreeing to offer incentives to the mullahs to restrain their nuclear ambition. He’s following the lead of the … French! So far, he’s avoiding direct endorsement. But we all know why. Money quote:

European diplomats said that the administration was very squeamish about even discussing incentives, in part because it would represent a policy reversal that would provoke a vigorous internal debate, and in part because of the presidential campaign.

Er, yes. The new policy would differ from Kerry’s because … er … Take it away, Michael Ledeen!

“I laugh when I read your posts, because it could be me writing them! I said to my wife just last night “I may just opt out entirely and vote for the Libertarian”. Like you, I am still undecided, and I’m tortured about how to cast my precious vote.
I had been ready to vote for Kerry for a number of weeks now. Time for a “break from Bush’s history making” and time for the whole country to know that we’re in this war on terror together, that it isn’t “Bush’s war”. Being hip-deep in Iraq, we can’t make any big dramatic moves regardless of what happens over the next four years, regardless of who is president.
Of course, the big development we should expect is Iran going nuclear. Once we discover that the current talks are found to have only bought the mullahs time in their weapons building, the best case scenario would be for us to launch airstrikes and call for sanctions. A few weeks ago I would have said, “well Kerry would do that, and would be in a better position to get sanctions by far”. But would he even take any military action if necessary to stave off Iran getting nukes? He talked about how he would “engage” the mullahs (as if Bush hasn’t done so via European and IAEC proxy) and go one step further: give them the nuclear fuel they needed for their “energy program” so that we all knew that they were using it for energy and not weapons.
Of course Kerry will wimp out! There is not one moment in his life that he has shown an ounce of political courage. Not one. Even his railing against the Vietnam War after he served was the smart and easy thing for a young man of his generation with an eye towards a political career to do. He will be Jimmy Carter at a time in our history which couldn’t be worse for a Jimmy Carter.
I’m afraid we have a choice between Bush, a man who shoots first and asks questions later (or doesn’t ask them at all) and Kerry, a man who will ask questions forever and never shoot (he couldn’t even find circumstances in which he could support the ’91 Gulf War!). We have a man, Buhs, who apparently never even considered the lessons of Vietnam, and a man, Kerry, who is paralyzed by them.
It is simply too early to hand over the reins to a weak Democrat, no matter how much I would like to believe it’s time.” I’m very sympathetic to this point of view. But we just found out that the Bush administration itself has now reversed itself and is offering incentives to the mullahs in Tehran. Again: what’s the difference?

THE NYT ON AUSTRALIA: It’s amazing what a few days can mean. Before John Howard’s victory, it was clear that Iraq was an important issue in the election campaign. Here’s Ray Bonner’s headline: “War in Iraq Plays a Role in Elections in Australia.” We learned that

On Iraq, the differences are stark. Mr. Howard has defended his decision to go to war and has said the 800 Australian troops in the Persian Gulf region will stay there as long as needed. Mr. Latham has said that he will have the troops home by Christmas. Opponents of the Iraq war got a lift in August when 43 retired senior military commanders and senior diplomats issued a public statement saying that Australia went to war “on the basis of false assumptions and the deception of the Australian people.” The signers included a former chief of the navy, a former chief of the air force and a former secretary of defense. Australia’s “unquestioning support for the Bush administration” has harmed Australia, they wrote. “Terrorist activity, instead of being contained, has increased.”

We also learned that it was surprising, given the economic boom, that there was a close race at all – with the implication that Iraq was the reason. But after the election, we discover:

Iraq loomed in the background during the campaign, but Australian political analysts cautioned that the voting was not a referendum on the war. The main issue was the economy, and that is booming.

Same reporter. Same paper. Same spin.

Another cheap all-but-racist shot at the National Security Adviser. Bigotry knows no party.

You can agree or disagree with his analysis, but Kevin Drum at least puts out there the varying inaccuracies of Bush and Kerry in last Friday’s debate, and grades them. It seems to me that Mark Halperin is correct. The distortions coming from Bush are markedly worse than those coming from Kerry. But decide for yourself.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “[A]bortion is in our day what slavery was in Lincoln’s. To vote for John Kerry in 2004 would be far worse, however, than to have voted against Lincoln and for his Democratic opponent in 1860. Stephen Douglas at least supported allowing states that opposed slavery to ban it. And he did not favor federal funding or subsidies for slavery. John Kerry takes the opposite view on both points when it comes to abortion. On the great evil of his own day, Senator Douglas was merely John Kerry-lite.” – Robert George and Gerald Bradley, co-authors of the FMA, in NRO. Now I get the Dred Scott reference.