Hitch has what I think is an important piece in Slate. The news that several weapons sites in Iraq were plundered immediately before and after the allied invasion is deeply worrying. There is a real possibility that serious weaponry was purloined by other Arab dictators or by very organized terrorist entities or some combination of the two. What this says about the competence of the invasion is once again unnerving. It means that the war may actually have ensured the occurrence of the one thing it was designed to prevent. Hitch counters that if Saddam could bring this off in wartime, he could have done it in peacetime, which makes the invasion just as necessary. Agreed. But it seems to me more confirmation of my essential position: that the war was right, but that the execution came close to undermining it. But it’s also true that you cannot both lament the plundering of al Qaqaa and other sites and insist that there were no WMDs in Iraq before the war. Both sides have some reckoning to do.
THE BIG GOVERNMENT BINGE: Yes, it’s continuing. The three lasting Bush domestic legacies will, I think, be the Medicare drug entitlement, the huge tax increases that will be enacted as soon as he leaves office (if not before), and the huge new bureaucracy called the Department of Homeland Security. The invaluable Veronique de Rugy has just completed a study of how the DHS is spending its vast sums of your and my money. To say the least, it’s not encouraging. What is encouraging is that AEI is supporting this work. Fiscal conservatism is not quite dead, however hard Bush and Rove are trying to kill it off. Hey, there are even some sane conservatives still in the Senate.
AN IRAQ BLOG: From a soldier who quotes Niebuhr.
QUOTE OF THE DAY: “In this context, the existence of marriage-like rights without marriage actually cuts against the existence of a rational government interest for denying marriage to same-sex couples. California’s enactment of rights for same-sex couples belies any argument that the State would have a legitimate interest in denying marriage in order to preclude same-sex couples from acquiring some marital right that might somehow be inappropriate for them to have. No party has argued the existence of such an inappropriate right, and the court cannot think of one. Thus, the state’s position that California has granted marriage-like rights to same-sex couples points to the conclusion that there is no rational state interest in denying them the rites of marriage as well.” – San Francisco County Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer, in a ruling yesterday. I should reiterate that in principle, I’d like the courts to be more restrained. But in practice, the logic of equality is so over-powering, and the arguments against it so fragile, that judges have little choice but to state the obvious. Like many other judges in these cases, Kramer is not a radical. He’s a Catholic Republican appointed by a former Republican governor. But his intellectual honesty simply compels him to state that equality means equality. And when state constitutions insist upon it, you have to have a much stronger argument to keep a minority disenfranchised than the current anti-marriage forces have been able to marshall. Tradition? So was the ban on inter-racial marriage. Procreation? Non-procreative straight couples can get civil licenses. The potential collapse of civilization? Impossible to prove or even argue convincingly. Once you have accepted that there is no moral difference between homosexuality and heterosexuality, the arguments against same-sex marriage collapse. And since the only coherent moral difference is the likelihood of non-procreative sex, and that is now the norm in traditional heterosexual civil marriage, there is no moral case against allowing gay couples to have civil marriage. The rest is fear and prejudice and religious conviction. None should have a place as a legal argument in the courts.
The Dish 