Month: January 2005

“Andrew, re: Lincoln. I think the problem is that heterosexuals still don’t understand that “gay” isn’t only about sex. They think of homosexuals as defective straight people with uncontrollable sexual urges, and I guess a flair for drama. They don’t understand our emotional orientation towards members of our own sex. They can’t identify with this, or else they are scared of it (I’m not sure which). This is the source of the whole problem, I think.” I tend to agree. Of course, many heterosexuals have begun to understand. And, as I’ve said many times, homosexuality is very easy to understand. It is exactly the same as heterosexuality, with the gender reversed. Gays, however, cannot expect straights to understand this all by themselves. It’s up to us to explain, and keep explaining. One reason I have written sometimes painful accounts of my own life is not that I enjoy losing privacy, but that I feel it’s the only way to get people to understand what I’m actually talking about. Straights who don’t understand are not necessarily prejudiced. They’re just under-informed. Gay people should spend the bulk of their efforts in the difficult process of informing. And the most integral part of that informing is coming out.

This time, it’s the right that’s doing the distorting. Steve Clemons explains.

My piece on C.A. Tripp’s Lincoln book, is now up at TNR. Having read the book closely, I’m struck by how obtuse some of the reviews have been. Gay journalist, Paul Varnell, in an email, put the process of assessment now unfolding thus:

1. It is simply not true at all, Tripp is all wrong.

2. It is almost surely wrong and the evidence is strained.

3. It could be true, but the evidence is insufficient.

4.There is something to Tripp’s case, but we can never know for sure.

5. It is probably true, but we must await further evaluation of the evidence. Meanwhile we should suspend judgment.

6. Tripp is, of course, right, but everyone knew this already this and it doesn’t change anything we think about his public career.

We are hovering now somewhere between 4 and 5. Read it yourself to find out. The data it collects are arresting to anyone not deeply resistant to the idea of Lincoln’s primarily homosexual orientation. And yes, of course it matters. If America’s greatest president was gay, it must play a part in the current discussion of gay equality in America. That’s why the Weekly Standard has pulled out all the stops to kill off the book. One thing none of the reviews says: the book is complemented by several essays at the end by leading Lincoln scholars, two of whom specifically differ from Tripp’s conclusions. It’s a very fair document: about as far from a “hoax” and a “fraud” as the Weekly Standard is from treating the open-ended question of Lincoln’s sexuality honestly.

He has to go now, doesn’t he? When all the people directly associated with this debacle have quit or been fired, on what basis does he stay? He fronted the report. He stood by it. He took responsibility for it. On his watch, CBS News became a laughing stock. Is he really going to let everyone else take the hit? Has he lost all sense of self-respect as well as loyalty? For goodness’ sake, Dan. Go. Even Howell did eventually. People will remember the rest of your legacy. But if you hang on to your job as long as you hung on to that “story,” all you will prove is your pride.

GENE THERAPY: My own view is that gene therapy will turn out to be far more important in arresting HIV than the futile pursuit of an elusive vaccine. And we have just had a break-through. (Hat tip: Pacopond.)

TIME FOR HEALING WATCH: Red America, as seen by a Village Voice cartoonist.

THE LIMBAUGH DEFENSE: Rush Limbaugh saw nothing wrong with Abu Ghraib. Now we hear the sickening psychopath, Charles Graner, push the same vile arguments in defending himself from the charge of torture. “You’re keeping control of them. A tether is a valid control to be used in corrections,” Graner’s lawyer said. “In Texas we’d lasso them and drag them out of there.” Ah, the Texas defense. Let’s review just one incident, reported by the ICRC, in which Graner featured:

One of those days the guards tortured the prisoners. Those guards are Grainer [sic], Davis and another man. First they tortured the man whose name is Amjid Iraqi. They stripped him of his clothes and beat him till he passed out and they cursed him and when they took off of his head I saw blood running from his head. They took him to solitary confinement and were beating him every night… After they brought six people and beat them up until they dropped on the floor and one of them his nose was cut and the blood was running from his nose and he was screaming but no one was responding and all this beating from Grainer and Davis and another man… And after that they beat up the rest of the group until they fall to the ground. Every time one of them fell to the ground they drag them up to stand on his feet. Grainer beat up a man whose name is Ali the Syrian and he was beating him until he gotten almost crazy … They hanged him and he was screaming but no one helped him.

Well, as long as they weren’t actually torturing anyone, eh, Bybee?

“Engrish can be simply defined as the humorous English mistakes that appear in Japanese advertising and product design.” Enjoy. Come croser, Mr Brix. A rittle croser.

THE LEFT AND IRAQ: The betrayal continues.

CAMPUS CONSERVATIVES: City Journal surveys the scene among young Republicans. They show remarkably strong support for many conservative ideals – lower taxes, strong families, fighting terrorism aggressively. The one exception: marriage rights for gays. They can’t see the problem with allowing everyone to have family values. Just don’t tell their elders.

MISSING IN ACTION: Nat Hentoff asks where the Congress is in exposing the use of torture by the U.S. military under the Bush administration.

THE STANDARD’S NEW LOW: Check out the cover-image on the new Weekly Standard: a text-book example of homophobia. We gays are always invited to reach out and have sane conversations with conservatives at places like the Weekly Standard. But how can you converse with people whose attitude is one of pure contempt?

Yep, that’s the page in the CBS report where they declare that blog criticism of Rather’s lies was driven by a “conservative agenda.” All of it? How do they know? Meanwhile, the blatant partisanship of Mapes and Rather have that weasel expression “appearance of bias” attached to it. Grrrr. Rather should have been fired. But Bush-supporters in particular have some double-standards in this regard. Isn’t CBS actually being tougher on its miscreants than the Bush administration ever is?

Armstrong Williams says he wasn’t the only conservative “journalist” on the government’s payroll. Hmmm. Who else? Williams should name names or shut up. I haven’t written anything about his pathetic role as a propagandist for the Bush administration, because it’s so self-evidently unethical it doesn’t need me to spell it out. But it says something about the cluelessness of someone in the Bush administration. I mean: why pay for propaganda when you can get it quite easily for free?

SPEAKING OF WHICH: I’m sorry, but I can’t help laughing at this paragraph from professional hysteric, Brent Bozell:

Loser: “South Park.” The producers of this curdled, malodorous black hole of Comedy Central vomit want to elicit only one sentence from viewers: “Did I just see that on television?” For anyone who thinks television today is not as offensive — and downright stupid as those “prudes” say it is, we suggest a look at the Dec. 1 episode. At the South Park “Whore-Off” competition, Paris Hilton inserts an entire pineapple into her vagina. A gay man in a biker vest then takes off his pants and puts the entire body of Paris Hilton up his rectum. Remember this episode the next time some TV critic raves about the “talent” behind “South Park.”

Actually, of course, the show is far smarter than that, as Tom Monster explains. South Park is the only show I know smart enough to defend being a total slut while wanting to keep it from being broadcast to children. Bad slut: Ms Hilton. Good slut: Mr Slave. You’d be surprised how many men in harnesses would never dream of broadcasting their sexual amusement beyond the tight confines of their own subculture. They’re subtler conservatives than Mr Bozell.

A STRAIGHT CONSERVATIVE: Who sees the real case for equal marriage rights.

It’s pretty damning stuff. Not a whole lot of news in it, though, from my summary reading. Terminating Mapes is serious accountability. Here’s the real money quote:

The panel finds that once serious questions were raised, the defense of the segment became more rigid and emphatic, and that virtually no attempt was made to determine whether the questions raised had merit.

No attempt to ask questions? Wasn’t Rather part of this defense? And wasn’t it relevant that critics were accused of partisanship? Why the knee-jerk partisan response? What interests me about the summary is that all sorts of sins can be attributed to journalists – rushing a story to print, not following rudimentary fact-checking rules, refusing to re-check after questions were raised, etc, etc. But the one thing the report is clear about is that no political bias ever influenced the process. Even when you have Mapes calling Lockhart, the report insists that this created “the appearance of political bias.” (My italics.) Others will parse the report more carefully, I’m sure. But the refusal to acknowledge this blind spot is not encouraging.

Like many other smart analysts, the pro-war Stratfor military experts have concluded that the war to control the Iraq insurgency or to erect democratic institutions in Iraq has been lost (subscription required). I think it’s time to start truly absorbing this possibility. Why lost? Because we blew the opportunity to control the terrain with insufficient troops and terrible intelligence; because all the institutions required to build democracy in Iraq have already been infiltrated by insurgents; because at key moments – they mention the fall of 2003 or spring of 2004 – we simply failed to crush the insurgency when we might have had a chance of success. Short version: we had a brief window of opportunity to turn our armed intervention into democratic liberation and we blew it. Money quote:

The issue facing the Bush administration is simple. It can continue to fight the war as it has, hoping that a miracle will bring successes in 2005 that didn’t happen in 2004. Alternatively, it can accept the reality that the guerrilla force is now self-sustaining and sufficiently large not to flicker out and face the fact that a U.S. conventional force of less than 150,000 is not likely to suppress the guerrillas. More to the point, it can recognize these facts: 1. The United States cannot re-engineer Iraq because the guerrillas will infiltrate every institution it creates. 2. That the United States by itself lacks the intelligence capabilities to fight an effective counterinsurgency. 3. That exposing U.S. forces to security responsibilities in this environment generates casualties without bringing the United States closer to the goal. 4. That the strain on the U.S. force is undermining its ability to react to opportunities and threats in the rest of the region. And that, therefore, this phase of the Iraq campaign must be halted as soon as possible.

They recommend withdrawing U.S. forces to the periphery of Iraq and letting the inevitable civil war take place in the center.

DARKNESS BEFORE DAWN? The war has not been a complete loss, Stratfor argues, because it has engineered a slight shift in the behavior of neighboring regimes, and has allowed us to have a new base in the Middle East. The conclusion:

Certainly, it would have been nice for the United States if it had been able to dominate Iraq thoroughly. Somewhere between “the U.S. blew it” and “there was never a chance” that possibility is gone. It would have been nice if the United States had never tried to control the situation, because now the United States is going to have to accept a defeat, which will destabilize the region psychologically for a while. But what is is, and the facts speak for themselves. We are not Walter Cronkite, and we are not saying that the war is lost. The war is with the jihadists around the world; Iraq was just one campaign, and the occupation of the Sunnis was just one phase of that campaign. That phase has been lost. The administration has allowed that phase to become the war as a whole in the public mind. That was a very bad move, but the administration is just going to have to bite the bullet and do the hard, painful and embarrassing work of cutting losses and getting on with the war. If Bush has trouble doing this, he should conjure up Lyndon Johnson’s ghost, wandering restlessly in the White House, and imagine how Johnson would have been remembered if he had told Robert McNamara to get lost in 1966.

I hope they’re wrong but I fear they’re right. For the immediate term, it makes no difference. We have to hope and pray that a democratic miracle really will emerge. There have been darknesses before dawn in history before. And then there have just been darknesses.

THE ZBIG AND SCOWCROFT SHOW: Here’s a transcript of their discussion at the New America Foundation.

Yes, I broke one of my rules by awarding Ann Coulter a Malkin Award. Even though it was technically a headline, written by someone else. I’m sorry. I couldn’t resist.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Now, if you know the tradition of the United States Army, one thing has been consistent and that is that we are aggressive and tough on the field of battle, but when you take prisoners they are treated humanely and with respect. That’s the rule that was set by George Washington in the battle of Trenton on Dec. 25, 1776. The soldiers of the continental army took the Hessians and said these soldiers are mercenaries and we should take retribution on them. They wanted the Hessians to run the gauntlet and they would beat them with sticks. General Washington said we will not do this. He said these people will be treated with respect and dignity and they will suffer no abuse or torture, because to do otherwise would bring dishonor upon our sacred cause. That’s one of the first orders given to the continental army and that antedates the United States. It has been military tradition for 240 years, and it was stopped by Donald Rumsfeld.” – former lawyer for Andrei Sakharov, Scott Horton. (Hat tip: Amba.)

THE GOODS ON SLEEP: Fascinating. Fascinating Fascinatingzzzzzzzzz.