Month: December 2004

What Thatcher could teach Bush on governing from the right. Jon Rauch explains why the Democrats shouldn’t despair. All they need is a Blair.

“The Millau. Its pillars poke the clouds and its design inspires the spirit and it will surely be a major tourist attraction for decades to come — a fact that, of course, means little to most Americans, because most red-blooded patriots never venture past the Wal-Mart on the outskirts of their home state. But still.” – Mark Morford, SFGate.com. You know, no one is as anti-American as some Americans.

CORRECTIONS: The album “Nobody Walks in L.A.” was made by Missing Persons, not Mission Persons. And there have been 130 soldiers charged with abuse and torture, not convicted. Apologies.

STEROID SING-ALONG: Hey, it’s Friday afternoon.

HEADS UP: I’m on the Chris Matthews’ show this weekend. Chris gets all verklemt over Christmas. Is that how you spell verklemt? It’s his birthday today.

Wow. Thanks for all the emails on “what a waste.” In general, I’m in favor of not taking offense unless you really have to. Life’s too short. And y’all tend to agree. Here’s a representative email, from the belly of the beast, Manhattan:

As a reasonably attractive straight male living in New York, I’ve been surrounded by gay men all my life. Many’s the time I’ve been told it’s a shame I’m not gay, often in highly ribald terms. Once, as a teenager, when I offered one of my mother’s friends a bite of my roast beef sandwich, he replied with heavy sarcasm, “I’ll take a bite of your ‘sandwich’ any time.” A gay colleague of hers asked if I was interested in men; she said, “He’s yours if you can get him.” In 1979, I worked at the Strand Bookstore, whose staff would be decimated by AIDS in the 80s; gay colleagues followed me around and spied on me through the bookshelves. Far from being offended by this kind of attention, I’ve always accepted it as a genuine compliment, though it sometimes verged on sexual harrassment. But it’s the kind of thing that women put up with all the time, and though it can always be a problem if it goes too far, men, like women, generally like to be flirted with and made to feel attractive. In the age of ‘Will and Grace,’ in my opinion, any straight man who is offended by a little gay flirtation has a problem he’s not dealing with.

That’s grown-up, although, frankly, I wince when gay men sexualize straight men inappropriately. A little mutual respect is more seemly. But context is everything.

SPEAKING OF CONTEXT: Art Buchwald’s words of wisdom obviously have a couple of exceptions:

Your quote of the day from the always amusing Art Buchwald “if a man doesn’t drive, they think there must be something wrong with him” has one major exception (at least): the city of New York. As a New Yorker who only got his license this year at the age of 30 (!) I can attest to this: “As many as 3 million New York City voters do not have a driver’s license. Indeed, 1990 census data showed that less than 50 percent of New York City’s voting age residents had a driver’s license compared with 91 percent of the state’s residents overall.” I suspect, but cannot say for certain, that other large cities share comparable stats. In major cities, people walk or take mass transit. Which leads to the Mission Persons’ lyrics “Nobody walks in L.A.”, but again with their new system I suspect that this is not quite as true anymore.

I’ve lived in Oxford, Boston, Provincetown and D.C. in my adult life. In all those places, cars can be more hindrance than help for a man with no kids. Just try parking.

A cheering tale of real compassion from Jacksonville, Florida.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Americans will accept the fact that a person can be an alcoholic or a dope fiend, but if a man doesn’t drive, they think there must be something wrong with him” – Art Buchwald.

STEALING HELSINKI: Tom Palmer has the goods on a “human rights” group in Britain that actually backs dictators.

AFRICA AND ISLAM: Dan Drezner makes a case for why Mali matters in the war on terror.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “Your argument states that the sentences for the two Marines convicted of using shock treatment allowed them to remain in uniform. While technically correct, this is disingenuous. Both Marines will serve their terms in a military prison at hard labor. Both Marines have been reduced in rank to E-1, the lowest rank in the military. They receive no pay while in prison. There is no parole from military prison. Upon their release they will be awarded Bad Conduct Discharges making them convicted felons, unable to vote, ineligible for any future government employment, and virtually unhirable in the private sector as many corporations refuse to employ former military personnel with BCDs.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

Slate’s often diverting advice columnist answers a gay correspondent who’s offended when someone finds out he’s gay and says: “What a waste.” Here’s Prudence’s reply:

Prudie believes you are misinterpreting the remark. Rather than implying that the gay person has “no sort of life of their own,” Prudie finds it to mean, “You are GORGEOUS.” (And it’s the straight person’s loss that you bat for the other team.) It is meant both as a compliment and a lighthearted statement. As you may have divined, Prudie has made this comment, herself, and always to a big smile in response.

Well, almost. The key way to figure this out is to reverse roles. If it emerges in conversation that a man is married to a woman, would he be offended if a gay guy were to say, “What a waste”? I think he would. Or am I wrong?

BLOCK THAT METAPHOR: “America’s Mayor having to eat a little crow after three years of galloping hagiography is a classic case of karma coming due.” – Tina Brown, Washington Post.

THE GAY CASE FOR BUSH: Here’s Abner Mason, making the best case he can. I wonder what Bush really meant when he said he wasn’t against civil unions, even though his party platform opposes any legal protections for gay couples. Karl Rove said he meant nothing but some ad hoc legal arrangements, made by private contract, and unenforceable in court if challenged by other family members. I suspect it was merely politics. But I don’t know. Why doesn’t someone ask the president or McClellan what rights the president believes a civil union should contain. That might move the ball forward. But somehow I doubt we’d get a real answer.

Yes, it’s the pundit equivalent of the Iraq-Iran war. David Brock calls out Bill O’Reilly. Brock is surely right on one thing: O’Reilly should have him on his show. Please.

I’ve been a little busy but Wally Olson at his superb blog, Overlawyered.com, dissects the inaccuracies in David Frum’s recent posting about a Vermont child-custody case. David also implies that my support for federalism is purely tactical. It isn’t. I’ve long been a believer that important policy decisions should be made as close to the local level as possible; I don’t believe the Full Faith and Credit Clause can or should be applied to civil marriage. I support the utterly superfluous part of DOMA that allows states to refuse to recognize other states’ marriages. I do believe that the right to marry is covered under equal protection guarantees under Loving, but that’s a separate matter than the federalist issue, and would require a sea-change in public attitudes toward gay relationships (a sea-change I’ve been doing my bit to advance). Still, we’re nowhere near there yet – and may never be. I see no possibility in the foreseeable future of SCOTUS applying equal protection to marriage for gays.

“We are all happy when U.S. soldiers are killed [in Iraq] week in and week out. The killing of U.S. soldiers in Iraq is legitimate and obligatory.” – Walid Jumblatt, Head of the Progressive Socialist Party in Lebanon. Jumblatt just enjoyed a lavish state visit to France. More on his views here.

“We are in a war with people WHO WANT US DEAD. These same people have no qualms about beheading civilian contractors or using religious shrines as cover – they do not abide by the laws of war or the Geneva Convention. We cannot win this war with one hand tied behind our back. We are not always going to be perfect, but interrogation methods consisting of “pretty please with sugar on top” are not going to work.
Soldiers should do whatever is necessary to save the lives of their comrades and ensure a successful completion to their mission. If that means a few jihadis get roughed up, too friggin’ bad. They should put on uniforms and swear allegiance to a sovereign nation if they want to be treated like POW’s. Other wise, I have no qualms with treating them like they are – barbarian scum.
If they do not follow the laws of war I see no reason why we should treat them as if the rules apply to them. I’m glad many in our government do not as well. Please stop acting as if this is a conventional war where all the old rules apply – you’re smarter than that.”

This is a common and honest argument. It misses two things. First: there is little evidence to suggest that the torture used by U.S. forces has in any way helped our intelligence efforts. In fact, it may well have proven counter-productive, as experience has shown. Tortured inmates tell you whatever can get them out of torture. They don’t often give you really helpful intelligence. Secondly, this is indeed a different kind of war. The critical element in defeating an inurgency is winning over the civilan population that can give insurgents cover and support. But stories of brutality – in Saddam’s own slaughter-house no less – and the use of mass round-ups of innocent civilians, the taking hostage of relatives of suspected insurgents and everyday brutality actually hurts your cause and undermines the war. That’s why armies try to rein it in. The case against abuse and torture is not just a moral case; it’s a practical case. It’s helping the enemy. And it is destroying the moral high-ground which we are fighting to defend.

Let’s review. We have the horrors of Abu Ghraib; we have several murders and rapes of inmates in Iraq and in Afghanistan; we have separate abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib after the scandal broke; we have the use of electric shocks, beating to unconsciousness, scarring chemicals, one instance of “water-boarding,” using dogs to terrorize and sometimes bite inmates, forced sodomy, and any number of bizarre pieces of sexual humiliation, designed specifically to abuse Arabs. Got all that? We have at least 130 convictions. Now we have this:

In Karbala in May 2003, one Marine held a 9mm pistol to the back of a bound detainee’s head while another took a photograph. Two months later, in Diwaniyah, four Marines ordered teenage Iraqi looters to kneel alongside holes and then fired a pistol “to conduct a mock execution.” In April of this year, shortly before the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal shook the U.S. military, three Marines in Mahmudiya shocked a detainee with an electric transformer, forcing him to “dance” as the electricity hit him, according to a witness, one document states.

The ACLU also discovered a document containing

a statement taken in October by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service in which a Navy corpsman who had been attached to the Marines in Iraq stated that it was routine to take a prisoner to an empty swimming pool, place cuffs on his hands and legs, put a burlap bag over his head, and then “the EPW [enemy prisoner of war] would remain in the kneeling position for no longer than 24 hours while the EPW was awaiting interrogation.”

It’s also increasingly clear that these kinds of abuses – the use of nakedness, exposure to extreme heat and cold, hooding, sexual abuse, real and faked electric torture – are themes across these disparate acts. In other words, there seems to be an informal methodology for the abuse and humiliation of prisoners. Do we really believe that these common practices are the result of completely spontaneous imagination by soldiers with no idea of what they were doing and no culture of acceptance from their superiors? These were not just some untrained grunts, coping with Rumsfeld-engineered chaos. These were elite Navy SEALs and Special Forces. And we have no idea how many incidents have gone unreported or have been covered up.

WHAT WE DON’T KNOW: We don’t know – and may never know – the full extent of the torture. But we do now know that this wasn’t just “abuse”; it was torture, used as part of the interrogation process or just randomly. We do know it wasn’t a handful of hoodlums on the night shift in one prison. We do know that it followed a clear directive from the president that in this war, the enemy has the protection of the Geneva Conventions solely at his personal discretion, and that the “enemy” can include thousands of people rounded up in the middle of the night who are and were guilty of absolutely nothing. We also know that this president only rewards loyalty, not competence. We do know that the pattern of abuse affects the Special Forces, the Military Police, the Army, the Navy SEALs, reservists, and the Marine corps. We also know that no one in the higher commands has been found guilty of anything. And check this out: the marines who used electric shock torture against an inmate were found guilty. Their sentence? One got one year in confinement. The other eight months. The lesson? No big deal. They’re still in the uniform.

STUPIDITY INSURANCE: Another take on social security – and its critics.

NEWS FROM AFRICA: An event the U.N. is proud to endorse.