Month: October 2005

“Arnold did not capitulate on gay rights. From his response after the veto of the bill:

“California Family Code Section 308.5 was enacted by an initiative statute passed by the voters as Proposition 22 in 2000. Article II, section 10 of the California Constitution prohibits the Legislature from amending this initiative statute without a vote of the people. This bill does not provide for such a vote.
The ultimate issue regarding the constitutionality of section 308.5 and its prohibition against same-sex marriage is currently before the Court of Appeal in San Francisco and will likely be decided by the Supreme Court.
This bill simply adds confusion to a constitutional issue. If the ban of same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, this bill is not necessary. If the ban is constitutional, this bill is ineffective.”

This is not a capitulation. It is an adherence to the laws of the State and it makes perfect sense.”

Add me to the consolation caucus.

The Bush administration is hiring. An application form can be found here.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Judging by a torrent of email over the last week, I am supposed to take seriously the accusation that my fellow NROers and I are troubled by Miers solely because we’re fair-weather supporters of the President and the GOP who get the vapors the moment Bush is in trouble. We want to impress the liberal and left wing media. We are elitists. We are sexists. But most of all, we’re just not tough enough to take the heat. I find this particularly funny as I’m currently getting spammed by scores of readers of Media Matters calling me a Klansmen and a Nazi for defending Bill Bennett’s comments. Even funnier is the idea that, say, John Podhoretz — author of Bush Country: How George W. Bush Became the First Great Leader of the 21st Century—While Driving Liberals Insane — isn’t willing to give the president the benefit of the doubt.” – Jonah Goldberg, NRO. All I can say is that Jonah’s email in-tray is probably mild compared to what I received last year, when criticizing the president might have actually made a difference. The unanimous judgment – echoed on endless right-wing blogs – was that I was only concerned about run-away spending, incompetent war-management, intelligence fiascoes, drug-war excesses, the fusion of religion and politics, legalizing torture, and so on … because I was gay, and the president backed the FMA. Happy to find so many conservatives now echoing some of my concerns. Funny thing is: not many of them are gay.

“Gary Kamiya writes, ‘In a just world, Bush, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Feith and their underlings would be standing before a Senate committee investigating their catastrophic failures, and Packer’s book would be Exhibit A.’ No. In a just world, these people would be taken out and shot.” – Jane Smiley, far-left author. What I find revealing about this remark is how it exposes what Orwell saw in the fanatical part of the left. Notice that, for Smiley, there is no concern for, say, Bush, Wolfowitz et al, being given a fair trial in a “just world.” Her leftwing vision of justice is that they should “be taken out and shot.” No wonder she wanted to keep Saddam in power. The two think uncannily alike.

(The Moore Award, if you’re a new reader, is for particularly moronic, extremist or deliberately fallacious examples of left-wing rhetoric. You know who it’s named after.)

I have an essay in the next New Republic, soothingly titled, “The End of Gay Culture.” And like most writers, ideas that I have read elsewhere but have now integrated themselves into my way of thinking are sometimes hard to pin down. That’s why I asked if any reader knew the precise origin of my half-baked notion that the British poet, Philip Larkin, had once complained that the civil rights movement was ruining Jazz. My readers are among the smartest on the web so I knew someone could find the precise reference – I rummaged through the brilliant collection, “All What Jazz,” to no avail. Anyway, a reader came through and here’s the money quote from an essay in that collection called “The End of Jazz”:

“The American Negro is trying to take a step forward that can be compared only with the ending of slavery in the nineteenth century. And despite the dogs, the hosepipes and the burnings, advances have already been made towards giving the Negro his civil rights under the constitution that would have been inconceivable when Louis Armstrong was a young man. These advances will doubtless continue. They will end only when the Negro is as well housed, educated and medically cared-for as the white man.

There are two possible consequences in this for jazz. One is that if in the course of desegregation the enclosed, strongly-characterized pattern of Negro life is broken up, its traditional cultures such as jazz will be diluted. The Negro did not have the blues because he was naturally melancholy. He had them because he was cheated and bullied and starved. End this, and the blues may end too.

Secondly, the contemporary Negro jazz musician is caught up by two impulses: the desire to disclaim the old entertainment, down-home, give-the-folks-a-great-big-smile side of his profession that seems today to have humiliating associations with slavery’s Congo Square; and the desire for the status of musical literacy, for sophistication, for the techniques and instrumentation of straight music. I should say that Mingus’s remark [“jazz means discrimination”] was prompted by the first of these, and much of his music by the second. The Negro is in a paradoxical position: he is looking for the jazz that isn’t jazz. Either he will find it, or – and I say this in all seriousness – jazz will become an extinct form of music as the ballad is an extinct form of literature, because the society that produced it is gone.”

I think something similar is now happening to gay culture as we have known it these past thirty years or so. I’ll link to the essay when it’s posted, if TNR allows me to.

A ‘DEFENDER’ OF MARRIAGE: The head of the Christian Coalition in Portland, Oregon, has had a busy few years, trying to prevent gay couples from getting even civil unions, let alone marriage rights. He’s now also accused of molesting three females in his own family.

How to survive the inevitable future wreckage of Bush’s fiscal lunacy. Jim Cramer has some tips. I’ve been buying oil stocks. But I think I may need to get some gold.

Michael Barone finds some new polling momentum behind Arnold’s important initiatives attempting to break the back of Democratic Party special interests and gerrymandering in California. I’m with Arnold on this, even if he has capitulated on equality for gay couples.

Call this fascinating piece a hastily improvised variation on the “fly-trap” theory. I’m not saying internal Muslim division has ever been an intentional policy of the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, but it might be a fortunate by-product of failure to pacify the country. By allowing chaos and disorder to engulf many Iraqi lives, the coalition may have undermined Jihadist appeal by exposing their willingness to slaughter other Muslims in their bid for a new Caliphate. Al Qaeda is as splintered today as it is brutal as it is dumb. We may have unintentionally given these murderous fanatics enough rope to hang themselves in Arab and Muslim opinion. It’s not that we’re safer because we’re engaging them there rather than here, as the Bush soundbite goes. It’s that by forcing the battle into the heart of the Middle East, rather than in the West, the coalition is exposing internal rifts and dividing the Muslim world into its sane and insane camps. If the sane camp wins, we all win. The risk, of course, is a widening conflagration between Sunni and Shiite – especially if Iraq degenerates into complete civil war, and Iran backs the Shia and the remaining Sunni autocracies, like Syria, keep funding the Sunni-Jihadist forces. But if we can keep the fldegling Iraqi state somewhat stable, the potential benefit is that by using schismatic divisions in Islam, we can help isolate and undermine al Qaeda and Jihadism in general. If Iraq is the place where moderate Islam finally rebels decisively against the mass-murderers, we will have achieved something very significant. It may take a long time, and the odds are still against us, I’d say. But the strategy is not a crazy one, even if it has emerged from the wreckage of incompetence. Indeed, it may be the best hope we now have.

THE SEXISM CARD: Laura plays it in defense of her close friend, Harriet Miers. I’ve read a lot of the criticism of Miers and I have yet to see a shred of sexism in it. Her legal qualifications have been questioned; and her ideological fervor. Other female candidates have been proposed, with far stronger credentials than Miers’. If the president had appointed Gonzales and there had been similar questions, would we now be hearing charges of racism? I suspect we might. When you really are devoid of argument, play the race or the gender card. It’s pretty pathetic. And another reminder of how the administration is happy to coopt left-liberal rhetoric to suit their own dynastic purposes.

“After years of being told by people of faith (almost exclusively Christians) that my lack of same must be due to some horrible event in my life, some trauma that convinced me there couldn’t possible be a benevolent controlling intelligence behind the universe, I now read from your e-mail correspondent that “people who have never found themselves in a situation that they could not possibly comprehend or conquer through their own wills and resources (or resources they’ve been given by others) are the quickest to say that there is no God.”

So now my lack of faith is apparently down to the absence of trauma, rather than an over-abudnance of it. (Could it possibly be that faith or the lack of it is more about the individual and how he or she deals with trauma than it is about traumatic events themselves? Perhaps different people just deal differently.)

I’m not sure why people feel the need to come up with some abberational explanation for my failure to share their beliefs, but this gratuitous insult — supplemented by the expressed (and rather un-Christian) wish that I one day experience such horror — spoiled what would otherwise have been an affecting account of one person finding a way to deal with the trouble in her life.”

Every single major Texas paper has come out in favor of the McCain amendment barring torture and abuse of detainees and clarifying rules for their treatment. From the Houston Chronicle:

[N]o president should have the authority or flexibility to order the torture or abuse of prisoners. It doesn’t produce usable intelligence, it endangers the safety of captured U.S. troops and it’s wrong on its face. The similarity of the alleged mistreatment at Guantanamo Bay to the documented prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan suggests a pattern of official encouragement or indifference.

The San Antonio Express-News:

The White House has threatened a presidential veto. During nearly five years in the Oval Office, Bush has yet to veto a bill. This is not the place to start.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

What the president and others who might oppose this legislation must understand is that this country can never own the moral high ground — in war or peace — if it is willing to do what it condemns others for doing.

And the Austin American-Statesman. This is, of course, a no-brainer – as long as you assume that this president isn’t committed to torture and abuse as a policy. But he is and long has been. Moreover, reversing what has been going on completely strips him of his defense that none of it happened, or that only a few incidents occurred, or that no one higher up knew, or whatever his latest spin is. He may have to veto to maintain the fallacious facade of the last three years. With any luck, the House will vote by a non-vetoable margin, just as the Senate has. But if Bush is forced to veto, so be it. Let him be forced to embrace publicly what he has enforced privately: the corruption of the moral integrity of the armed services of the United States. And let him finally be held to account.