Michael Ledeen‘s right. Hitch gleefully inters the “Arab street” here.
EMAIL OF THE DAY: “You wrote today that:
I think even the fiercest critics of president Bush’s handling of the post-liberation phase in Iraq will still be thrilled at what appears to me to be glacial but important shifts in the right direction in the region.”
I so wish you were right, but I’m afraid you probably aren’t. I had lunch today with a friend – a really smart, knowledgeable, accomplished guy, who also happens to be very liberal and is active in state Democratic politics. I mentioned to him that Lebanon’s government had just fallen. You would have thought I told him his dog had died. He chewed his sandwich slowly, thought for a while, and finally said,”You know, Assad’s a bastard, but he was right when he said the problems in Iraq are the fault of America, not Syria.”
There wasn’t any happiness that Lebanon is marching toward freedom. This kind of sulky non-sequitur, to me, exemplifies well why the Democratic Party cannot be trusted right now with our national security. Though some in the party, like Biden and Lieberman, are serious about protecting us, there are just way too many others so filled with hatred for Bush that they are incapable of understanding what is happening in the Middle East, and what the stakes are for all of us. And that’s why I stand by my intense disagreement with your decision last fall to endorse John Kerry – even if the man could have been trusted, his party, as a whole, could not have been.” How depressing.
GENDER DIFFERENCE: As many of you know, I don’t think there’s any real doubt that gender difference – including subtle differences in the wiring of male and female brains – is a fact. I’ve also long wondered why more study hasn’t been done on gay men and lesbians to see how their experiences and behaviors reflect that. Here’s an article that raises some interesting questions:
Gay men employ the same strategies for navigating as women – using landmarks to find their way around – a new study suggests.
But they also use the strategies typically used by straight men, such as using compass directions and distances. In contrast, gay women read maps just like straight women, reveals the study of 80 heterosexual and homosexual men and women.
“Gay men adopt male and female strategies. Therefore their brains are a sexual mosaic,” explains Qazi Rahman, a psychobiologist who led the study at the University of East London, UK. “It’s not simply that lesbians have men’s brains and gay men have women’s brains.”
Notice the assumption about innate difference in the first place. No serious scientist disputes this. Only Harvard humanities professors.
The Dish 