Month: June 2005

Some defenses of Karl Rove’s rolling out of the “stab-in-the-back” ploy to cover for possible future failure in Iraq have made an important semantic point. They say that the people I cited – Christopher Hitchens, Tom Friedman, Paul Berman, Joe Lieberman, The New Republic, and so on – are not “liberals”. They’re centrists or mavericks or oddballs like yours truly. What Rove was doing, they say, is citing hard-left types like Michael Moore and Moveon.org and Kucinich and the like. He doesn’t mean all mainstream liberals. But this is too clever by half. The rubric Rove used was the “conservative-liberal” rubric, in which the entire polity is bifurcated into one type or the other. All non-liberals are, in Rove’s rubric, conservatives; and all non-conservatives are liberals. This is in keeping with the very familiar electoral tactic of describing even moderate or centrist Democrats as “liberals” with as broad a brush as possible. Rove, in other words, cannot have it both ways. He cannot both use the word liberal to describe everyone who is not a Republican and then, in other contexts, say he means it only for the hard left. Rove is a smart guy. He picked his words carefully. A simple addition of the word “some” would have rendered his comments completely inoffensive. But he left that qualifier out. For a reason. I see no difference between his generalizations and Howard Dean’s unhinged rants about Republicans. Except that Rove is running an administration that is running a vital war. With that kind of power should come a tiny bit more responsibility.

A U.N. source has claimed that the Bush administration has acknowledged the use of torture at Guantanamo Bay, as well as in Afghanistan and Iraq:

The acknowledgement was made in a report submitted to the UN Committee against Torture, said a member of the ten-person panel, speaking on condition of anonymity. “They are no longer trying to duck this, and have respected their obligation to inform the UN,” the Committee member told AFP. “They they will have to explain themselves (to the Committee). Nothing should be kept in the dark.”
UN sources said it was the first time the world body has received such a frank statement on torture from US authorities. The Committee, which monitors respect for the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, is gathering information from the US ahead of hearings in May 2006.
Signatories of the convention are expected to submit to scrutiny of their implementation of the 1984 convention and to provide information to the Committee. The document from Washington will not be formally made public until the hearings. “They haven’t avoided anything in their answers, whether concerning prisoners in Iraq, in Afghanistan or Guantanamo, and other accusations of mistreatment and of torture,” the Committee member said. “They said it was a question of isolated cases, that there was nothing systematic and that the guilty were in the process of being punished.”

Again, the notion that the administration did nothing to encourage or allow such practices. Then why did the CIA demand memos providing legal cover for their violation of US law? And why did the president create a loop-hole for “military necessity”? I have no way of independently confirming this U.N. source, so the news story has to be treated with some skepticism. But the evidence for serious violations of basic moral codes and U.S. law is mounting.

Bull Moose figured out the Bush administration sooner than the rest of us.

“Yes, Karl Rove is an ass. But you didn’t need me to tell you that. This liberal wasn’t calling for therapy. This liberal was calling for bombs.” – Jeff Jarvis, another pro-war liberal this administration just pissed off for a quick political fix. What a way to win a war.

EMAIL OF THE MORNING: Last night I stumbled across something intriguing. I was reading a fairly obscure Kant essay called “Misperceptions of Morals and Politics” (appended to Towards a Perpetual Peace.) In it, Kant distinguishes between the “clever” but ultimately immoral politician who views everything in terms of political expedience and manipulates a superficial or false morality for political gain and that rarest of creatures, the moral politician, who recognizes the ultimate harmony between morality and good government.
Kant then cites the three tests which can be applied to discern the immoral from the moral politician. Under three Latin rubrics, as follows: (1) Fac et excusa – does he use thin pretexts to seize power in his own country, or, after coming to power, to invade and conquer another nation? (2) Si fecisti, nega. When his policies bring about ruin or failure, does he blame his own subjects for the failures, or place the blame on other nations? Or does he admit mistakes and change course to reflect this recognition? (3) Divide et impera. Does he maintain his position of power by sowing domestic hatred and discord; through the demonization of a portion of his own citizenry? (Immanuel Kant, “Sämtliche Werke vol. 5, pp. 695-97.”) I’m scoring the Bush administration a perfect 3 for 3 on Kant’s test. One can accept or reject the war, but it seems clear (increasingly after the Downing Street memo documents) that the label of “thin pretexts” is fair. The president’s refusal to assume responsibility is legendary. And Rove’s remarks on which you reflect is a perfect example of the “divide et impera” approach.”

It seems to me that Karl Rove’s sickening generalization about “liberals” in the war on terror is revealing in ways not obviously apparent. Sure, there were some on the hard left who really did jump to blame America for the evil perpetrated by the monsters of 9/11. I took names at the time. But all “liberals”? The New Republic? Joe Lieberman? Hitch? Paul Berman? The Washington Post editorial page? Tom Friedman? Almost every Democrat in the Congress who endorsed the war in Afghanistan? You expect that kind of moronic extremism from a Michelle Malkin, but from the most influential figure in an administration leading a country in wartime? Ok, ok, I’m not surprised. Rove is a brutal operator. But to my mind, the hysterical attacks on Durbin and now this outburst (and the White House’s subsequent endorsement of it) are an indication of some level of panic. We face at least three more grueling years of warfare in Iraq with our current troop level, and it’s not at all clear that the public is prepared to go along with it, given the incremental progress we are making. Rove knows this. He also knows that the haphazard way in which the White House prepared for the war, its chronic under-manning of the occupation, its failure, as Abizaid conceded yesterday, to make any progress against the insurgency over the past six months despite the enormous psychological boost of the January election: all these have made the administration unable to really shift the blame. Rove’s strategic decision to make social security reform the center-piece of the second term has also, shall we say, not gone according to plan. So what to do? You do what you always do. You create a scenario in which you cannot be out-demagogued. You deflect from the awful fall-out from the decision to exempt terror suspects from bans on cruel and inhumane treatment to a senator’s analogy to the Gulag. And instead of leveling with the country about the real difficulty of the war we’re in, acknowledging error and sketching a unifying vision for winning, you divide the country into good folk and “liberals” and hope it works as well as it always has. If you want to know how well the administration really believes the war is going, listen to their rhetoric. And start worrying.

The Onion has the scoop.

Today happens to be my twelfth anniversary of being diagnosed with HIV. I guess it’s as good a time as any to stir up another shit-storm with an article that responds to one of the more breath-taking comments from those in the AIDS establishment. I refer to one Michael Weinstein, who told the New York Times recently, “People are in such denial about how serious HIV is. Unfortunately, the best prevention is seeing people die.” The usual suspects have said the usual outraged things about my celebration of survival with HIV and, of course, my apology for staying alive is meant only partly tongue-in-cheek. But the truth is: it’s a good thing that many more of us are thriving and living well with this disease. The problem that this creates for HIV prevention is a real one, as I’ve written many times on this blog, but it’s what my many dead friends would call a good problem to have. Money quote, once you get past my sarcasm:

We could always be thrilled that so many people are living longer and better lives with HIV. We could celebrate our reclaiming of sexuality after years of terror. We could even try new strategies for risk reduction among gay men – strategies that emphasize positive ways to care for our health rather than negative ways to scare the bejeezus out of everyone. But then we’d have no more people to scapegoat and blame, would we?

No, it’s not a good thing to have HIV. I went through hell and many others are going through awful things. But gay men are not in denial about how serious this disease is. The AIDS establishment is. It’s much less serious than it was. From being an automatic death sentence, it’s now in the diabetes spectrum, if you get tested early and treated effectively. The question is how we devise better prevention methods that acknowledge that fact rather than deny it.

EMAIL OF THE EVENING: “I just wanted to say that I read your article in The Advocate “Still here – So sorry!” and I agree with everything you say 1000%. I have been HIV+ for 23 years and have been in very good health the whole time, but like you and am about to restart a combo after being on nothing for three and a half years. There were some pretty bleak years in the late 80s and early 90s when I felt like people kept expecting me to disappear – and they were almost disappointed that I just kept rising up the corporate ladder and refused to let HIV defeat me. Of course the meds made a big difference later.
Back in 1988, the people in my support group who were busy writing wills and going on long term disability died very quickly. People like me who insisted on living a normal life – seemed to keep on trucking. But it seems like now all the powers that be care about is painting HIV as being so hopeless and horrible that it is supposed to scare people from doing naughty things and of course it all feeds into the anti-sexual morality play we seem to be seeing more and more of. No one seems to care about the feelings of people with HIV themselves who have good reason to feel hopeful. It’s almost like our existence is inconvenient.”

You can’t beat Instapundit for blog reactions.

If you grow pot in your attic solely to help you survive chemotherapy, you can be prosecuted by the feds under the “inter-state commerce” rationale. Now you can have your property stolen by Walmart and be unable to get any recompense either, as long as your local representatives, financed by the real estate lobby, go along. Is this an unfree country or what? And, of course, none of this breaks new ground. That’s the really depressing part. It seems to me that the most inspired pick for the Supreme Court would be a thoroughgoing economic and social libertarian. The freedom-loving part of the Republican coalition has already been alienated in so many ways by this administration. A libertarian SCOTUS pick would go some way to winning them back.
UPDATE: I’m also guilty of hyperbole. As one reader reminds me: “I’m with the dissent. Nevertheless, ‘unable to get any recompense’ is flat out wrong. They still have to compensate the owners for their property.” Point taken. It’s just a lot easier for the government now than it was.

“Turing might be known primarily as a mathematician and the founder of computer science, but he was truly a full-fledged scientist of incredible insight. A decade ago, as an undergraduate student, I stumbled across some articles on “Turing structures,” which were Turing’s theory as to how certain complex biological patterns (zebra stripes, cow spots, etc) could arise from relatively simple (and well-understood) chemical equations. Some 40 years after his theory, scientists discovered that his hypothesis had real-world application. Looking at his original paper, I was amazed at how clearly and concisely he wrote, with an obvious concern for the lay reader who lacked his mathematical brilliance.
For a long but entertaining read, I recommend Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon,” which includes some highly enjoyable historical speculations on the breaking of Enigma.”