Month: July 2005

An emailer puts it as well as I could:

Two points, briefly:
1. People need to stop hiding behind Clintonian semantics here and understand that even if no actual technical violation of the law is found in the Rove/Plame case it will still be true, based on what we know now from the Time emails, that White House actions compromised a CIA asset during a time of war. What would Hannity, Limbaugh, Scarborough and all the cable loudmouths be saying if it had been Sidney Blumenthal?

2. Scott McClellan once told the American people that Karl Rove was not involved in any way, and that the President would remove anyone found to be involved. During the Lewinsky scandal many people insisted that it was not the sex that bothered them, but it was the lying, spinning, parsing, and direct misleading of the American people that offended them, and that came to define the Clinton White House. What would the cable loudmouths be saying if instead of McClellan it had been McCurry?

This isn’t about technical violations or a game of gotcha. It’s about character, and George Bush needs to show some.

I’m leery of saying anything yet about a case that is still so murky. But it does seem to me that doing what Rove seems to have done would, in peace-time, be sleazy. In wartime, it shows a contempt for our national security – or a willingness to put petty partisan sniping ahead of national security. No, I’m not shocked. But I’m also struck by one detail in Matt Cooper’s email to his editors:

“Spoke to Rove on double super secret background for about two mins before he went on vacation …”

“Double super secret background” for just some guidance about a developing story? That sounds a little excessive to me. Why would Rove have insisted on such a super-tight confidentiality standard if he was not aware that he was divulging something he truly shouldn’t divulge? Again, I don’t know enough to say anything that definitive right now. But it seems clear to me that Rove leaked the CIA role of Wilson’s wife (whether he named her or knew that she was under-cover is another matter). The president has said he would fire anyone who did such a thing. Ergo: the president must fire Rove or break his word. It’s going to be an interesting few weeks.

Ready to hear it? Here’s the murderer of Theo van Gogh:

[T]ranscripts of recorded statements allegedly made by Mr. Bouyeri and introduced in the trial offered a window into his way of thinking. “I knew what I was doing,” Mr. Bouyeri told his brother in a phone conversation shortly after the killing, according to the transcript. “I slaughtered him.” Then Mr. Bouyeri laughed, said Judge Udo Willem Bentinck, who was reading the transcript aloud.

Then there’s this, Bouyeri’s address to van Gogh’s mother in court:

He argued that he did not kill her son, “but I have chopped off his head according to the law that orders me to do so to everyone who offends Allah. I do not not feel your pain as I do not know what it is to suffer the loss of a child.”

Can anyone seriously believe that not invading Iraq would have changed the mindset of this fanatic? Or leaving Afghanistan alone? What we’re learning, especially from the home-grown bombings in London, is that our fundamental enemy is a medievalist theological fascism, buried in the recesses of a legitimate religious faith. It would be nice if we could talk these people out of it, or hand them concessions to buy them off, or hug them till they saw the joys of the New Age. Until then, we have to bring them to justice – on the battlefield or court-room. And the people who are most able to bring them to justice are Western Muslims; and the democratically-inclined Muslims in Iraq.

In a word: condescension.

“Where are the country singers threatening to put boots up peoples’ asses? … Who grieves this privately? This American likes his sorrow in t-shirt form” – Rob Corddry, from the Daily Show, in reference to London. We don’t have TV up here on the beach. It’s good to detoxify for a couple of months. But I sure miss Jon Stewart.

Yes, there are some good posts on Huffington Post. In my cranky diss of the place, I cited one such by Irshad Manji. Anywhere Eugene Volokh contributes has something worthwhile in it. But even Rich B. has to concede that the place is dominated by paranoid Hollywood liberalism; and maybe it was reading guff like this, and this, and this on the day terrorists murdered dozens of Londoners that made me cranky. My claim that the blog is full of people in favor of “withdrawing from Iraq, and generally laying the blame for the mass murder of innocents on George Bush and Tony Blair” is fully documented by those posts. As for negotiating with al Qaeda operatives, I concede hyperbole. Deepak Chopra just wants us to give them a hug.

A pretty devastating expose by Tom Gross. The Orwellian fixing of language – by going in and changing online wordage after the fact – is particularly amusing:

Early on Friday morning another BBC webpage headlined “Testing the underground mood,” spoke of “the worst terrorist atrocity Britain has seen.” But at 12:08 GMT, while the rest of the article was left untouched, those words were replaced by “the worst peacetime bomb attacks Britain has seen.”… In its round-up of world reactions, BBC online was also quick to highlight the views of conspiracy theorists. The very first article listed by the BBC started by quoting Iranian cleric Ayatollah Mohammad Emami-Kashani saying Israel was behind the London attacks. It was followed by a commentary on Iranian state radio explicitly blaming the Mossad.

I guess we should be grateful that for around 24 hours, the BBC saw reality, called it terrorism, and reported it accurately. Then the p.c. police took over.

They’re a pragmatic bunch, but they’re not natural appeasers. The latest YouGov poll for the Daily Telegraph finds that 72 percent blieve that Britain’s role in Iraq helped make the country more vulnerable to terrorist attacks. But that’s statistically unchanged from before 7/7. The change has been in the following question: “Do you think that Britain should retain its close alliance wth the United States in the war on terror or should it distance itself to a much greater extent from US policy?” Last March, 44 percent said stick with the US; 47 percent said: more distance. Today, 52 percent say stick with America; and only 36 percent say distancing would be a good idea. Al Qaeda’s stupidity is revealed again. You don’t bully Brits.

At some point earlier this summer, my webmaster and I were trying to figure out when we actually started this blog. Andrewsullivan.com went live in November 1999, but it wasn’t till the following spring that we brainstormed and figured out we needed live updates to keep the thing fresh. Then we found Blogger; and the first blogged posts as such began (we think) in early July 2000. We’re not sure exactly when, and maybe someone out there with more time on their hands could tell us. But I remember writing immediate responses to the conventions that year; and so, in semi-arbitrary fashion, we’ve designated this month as our fifth blogiversary. In blog years, that’s a long time. As many of you know, I tried to put you all out of your misery last February but couldn’t stop myself. And so here we are. I say “we” not simply because without Robert taking care of everything technical, financial and mind-numbing, this wouldn’t have happened; but also because, this is a group phenomenon and some of you have been with me from the very beginning. It’s you, the readers who have provided me with many of my best links, tips, ideas, facts and arguments. I’d like to say thank you again.

LOOKING BACK: In 2000, the word ‘blog’ barely existed in common discourse; and I had to beg TV producers to cite it under my name. Those were the Clinton years, believe it or not. And the last five years have contained as much news and drama as most decades. But looking back, I can honestly say I have not been taken completely by surprise by the blogosphere’s amazing success. It seemed clear to me from the very start that once you allowed publishing independently of editors or publishers, a revolution was imminent. In the early days, I played a part in pioneering some blog tropes: media micro-criticism, instant news judgment, phony awards, political mini-campaigns (against Lott, Raines or torture), money quotes, etc. These are now staples of the genre. I also hoped that one day, a lone writer could finance himself this way – and so really break the MSM monopoly. It took a while, but advertising now pays most of the bills, and the expenses themselves have come down a lot since the early days. Five years is an infinity in technology. The site now looks dated (and is way more expensive than it need be), which is why we’re in the middle of a sleaker, cheaper-to-run redesign, which we hope to unveil in September. But my main gain as a writer has been the ability to be part of pioneering a new way of writing provisionally and instantly, of thinking out loud, of changing my mind, of engaging in what amounts to a conversation rather than a monologue. That would not have been possible without you and so I consider this a joint anniversary as much as anything. We don’t rely solely on pledge drives to sustain ourselves any more (and haven’t had one in a long while), but if you feel like throwing a contribution in the tip jar at this point, feel free. After five years of daily blogging, donations from our loyal readers are still very much appreciated.

My take in Time Magazine.

“How clever of the Los Angeles Times to propose that Judy Miller debate Mike Kinsley on the subject of press freedom. Sadly, Judy is not on a fellowship at some writers’ colony. She is in JAIL. She is sleeping on a foam mattress on the floor, and her communications are, shall we say, constrained.
I have to tell you that Mike’s contrarian intellectualizing on the subject of reporters and the law was more amusing when it was all hypothetical. Back then it was just punditry. But that was before Norm Pearlstine embraced acquiescence as corporate policy, and before Judy Miller braved the real-world discomforts of the moral high ground. Of course this is an important issue, and clever minds should wrestle with it. But at the moment Kinsley and Pearlstine seem perversely remote from the world where actual reporters work.” – Bill Keller, the New York Times’ executive editor, responding to the Los Angeles’ Times’ op-ed page editor, Nick Goldberg.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY II: “I feel the appeal, believe me. You are exasperated with the manifold faults of Tony Blair and George W Bush. Fighting your government is what you know how to do and what you want to do, and when you are confronted with totalitarian forces which are far worse than your government, the easy solution is to blame your government for them.
But it’s a parochial line of reasoning to suppose that all bad, or all good, comes from the West – and a racist one to boot. The unavoidable consequence is that you must refuse to support democrats, liberals, feminists and socialists in the Arab world and Iran who are the victims of Islamism in its Sunni and Shia guises because you are too compromised to condemn their persecutors.
Islamism stops being an ideology intent on building an empire from Andalusia to Indonesia, destroying democracy and subjugating women and becomes, by the magic of parochial reasoning, a protest movement on a par with Make Poverty History or the TUC.
Again, I understand the appeal. Whether you are brown or white, Muslim, Christian, Jew or atheist, it is uncomfortable to face the fact that there is a messianic cult of death which, like European fascism and communism before it, will send you to your grave whatever you do. But I’m afraid that’s what the record shows.” – Nick Cohen, writing yesterday in London’s Observer.

THE FEVER SWAMP ON THE RIGHT: Tom Palmer’s been on the case for a while now.

CONSERVATIVES AND EVOLUTION: Want to figure out which conservative intellectuals are actually intellectuals and which ones will say anything to placate fundamentalists whose support they need to maintain political power? Here’s one useful guide.