Month: October 2005

Some more nuances from National Journal’s Murray Waas:

Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources…

[A]dministration officials said in interviews that they cannot recall another instance in which Cheney and Libby played such direct personal roles in denying foreign policy papers to a congressional committee, and that in doing so they overruled White House staff and lawyers who advised that the materials should be turned over to the Senate panel.

I’m not sure what the salience of this new information is. But if Libby is indicted Friday, a critical question will be the role of the vice-president in the actions of his chief-of-staff. This may be a political rather than legal question. How credible is it that Libby would have done what he did without Cheney’s knowledge? They were joined at the hip in what was, to my mind, an understandable post-9/11 attempt to make sure that the CIA wasn’t being complacent about Saddam’s WMD program. But what if they over-reached in the process? Or unwittingly or wittingly set Colin Powell up at the U.N.? Or stupidly broke the law and lied about it? I don’t see Cheney escaping without damage.

“I’m an avid reader of your blog, but today I was a little upset that you gave a Moore award to Cole for pointing out what so many war supporters simply ignore, that we unleashed more violence in Iraq than was there previously, especially if you just consider the past 10 years of Saddam’s rule. That is obvious and proven. In a moral world, a nation and its leaders take responsibility for that. If Saddam were still in power, thousand upon thousands would still be alive who probably weren’t interested in dying for Saddam facing trial and a thrown together constitution. I’m fine with people arguing that things will be eventually better for the people of Iraq (even if I think that is wishful thinking) but you could at least have the decency to recognize the deaths of the Iraqis and the fact that our action has led to an increase in their collective suffering.”

“You are very civil and I read your blog a lot. I am not so civil but I am a fast learner and you’re a good teacher.
Take the discussion about gay marriage, for example. I love the Milton quote, the debate with the Blankenhorn dude, all the power of reason pointing towards a civil discussion with bright, but bigoted opponents. While I tore up the streets with the rest of them in the late ’80s in the most urgent days of gay/AIDS activism, I have a strong predilection for your approach in this matter. It was all about life and death then, now it’s about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
My only quibble is, actually, with Milton, who elevates companionship above the rest in his analysis of marriage. This is where my experience of gay civil union departs from his ideal and I suspect that it holds true for many gay men. My thoughts on this matter were formed at an impressionable age by reading crazy ass Paglia’s book ‘Sexual Personae’, wherein she identifies hardcore gay male sexuality as being primarily defined by libido unhindered by social constraint (marriage, female ‘civilizing’ influence). Of course, that presupposes that all gay men are hung, horny, masculine types like myself and my partner.
There are, of course, all shades of masculinity and femininity in all gay men, so the principle suffers in translation to the more various aspects of our identities. But I have spent 5 years with the same guy, no cheating on my part and I doubt on his, and staunchly believe that the solid core of our union is the intense fucking. Sorry, we do other things as well like travel, cooking, affection, music and AA meetings. If the sex was not fulfilling, I doubt we would be monogamous, which I define as a requirement for proper marriage.”

Not the best source, I’m afraid. A few academic readers take me to task:

Your use of Milton here is absurd. Milton was practically burned at the stake for his stance on marriage. The obvious corollary to what you quote, which Milton seemed to endorse – that when the ‘conversation’ wasn’t going so well, divorce was a legitimate option – was regarded by almost everyone at the time as radical to the point of heresy. Milton’s views were not ordinary ’17th century Christian’ views. Even in the 19th century, they would have been radical.

I stand corrected. Milton also had a strange personal history:

He marginalized the importance of sex in marriage partially because he felt it to be especially sinful – he was a Puritan early. He was a virgin at the time of his marriage – at 36, when he married a girl twenty years his junior, who left him within a month. While she eventually returned to him, and they had children, his writings on marriage and divorce predate that event.

Milton: way ahead of his time.

“The thing that impresses me most about our editors is that they understand that it’s not all about the book. It’s about the money you can make from that book.” – the publisher of a new book company. A new blogger laments here.

Thanks to all of you who listened to it and wrote me your responses. I was struck by two points. A reader makes one:

I enjoyed listening to your debate with David Blankenhorn. However, I was jarred by one, what appeared to me large, flaw in David’s logic. If marriage is “translegal” and exists as a social institution despite the governng law, how can changing the law to include more married couples have the catastrophic effect on marriage that David and his coterie suggest it will? I know you alluded to the fact briefly during a rebuttal, but it would appear to me a paradox that David will need to think long and hard about before engaging in similar debates in the future.

This is indeed a critical issue. It’s clear that opponents of marriage rights for gay couples have been frustrated in trying to show why those couples do not meet the current standard of what civil marriage is. If the legal standard is that Britney Spears gets to exercize a civil right for 55 hours but a committed 55-year long lesbian couple do not, then you have a hell of a case to make, without appearing to be, well, just prejudiced against the lesbians. So they switch to a “translegal” standard, which, of course, can mean anything they want it to mean. But if it’s trans-legal, why would changing the law, as in Massachusetts, affect it in any way?

THE SHIFTING DEFINITION: At the same time, the opponents of marriage rights for gay couples now argue that child-rearing is the central purpose of civil marriage, that such child-rearing must include a father and a mother, and that therefore the current exclusion of even committed gay couples with children is justified. (They do not fully explain why childless heterosexual marriages nevertheless qualify, except that they “symbolize” the ideal and so get a pass. In fact, of course, childless heterosexual marriages represent the exact opposite of the ideal. They represent a heterosexual couple fully capable of the ideal – but choosing to go against it. Gay couples have no such choice.) But as this blogger points out, making procreation and child-rearing the sine qua non of civil marriage has not, as Blankenhorn would have it, always been the main argument of the gay marriage foes. A few weeks ago, Blankenhorn argued that

Talking about heterosexual intercourse, child bearing, and child well-being is not something that some of us just thought up five minutes ago in response to a political controversy. Instead, you simply can’t talk accurately about marriage without talking about these very things …

Hmmm. Blankenhorn’s own Institute put out a “Statement of Principles,” only five years ago on what marriage is. It has “six important dimensions.” Five of them do not mention children at all. The one dimension in which children do appear – the sixth and last dimension listed – says the following:

Marriage takes two biological strangers and turns them into each other’s next-of-kin. As a procreative bond, marriage also includes a commitment to care for any children produced by the married couple.

Notice how children are optional, not essential. In the statement, the first definition is that “marriage is a legal contract.” Five years later, Blankenhorn is insisting that it is a “trans-legal” institution. Maybe this new argument is a product of five years of deeper thinking. Or maybe it is indeed “something that some of us just thought up five minutes ago in response to a political controversy.”

THE MEANING OF MARRIAGE: Blankenhorn was, of course, right in the first place. The notion that marriage isn’t marriage without procreation and children is far from being the traditional view. Here, for example, is John Milton, hardly a milque-toast Christian, on what marriage is fundamentally about. A reader sent me the passage from Milton’s “Doctrines and Disciplines of Divorce”:

“And what his [God’s] chiefe end was of creating woman to be joynd with man, his own instituting words declare, and are infallible to informe us what is mariage, and what is no mariage, unlesse we can think them set there to no purpose: It is not good, saith he, that man should be alone; I will make him a help meet for him. From which words so plain, lesse cannot be concluded, nor is by any learned Interpreter, then that in Gods intention a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and the noblest end of mariage: for we find here no expression so necessarily implying carnall knowledge, as this prevention of lonelines to the mind and spirit of man.”

Here, in the seventeenth century, is a Christian arguing that the divine, “trans-legal” meaning of marriage, its central meaning, is companionship. Sex is peripheral, let alone procreation. And Blankenhorn and Gallagher would have you believe that the idea of marriage as a form of lasting faithful friendship built out of romantic love, in which children are optional, is something invented in modern times. Hooey.

This is an interesting tidbit from Byron York, who has great sources in the White House:

According to informed sources, this is how the last day of the Miers nomination played out. Yesterday morning, President Bush met with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and Majority Whip Mitch McConnell, and others at the White House, where they discussed the problems facing the nomination. There were staff conversations between the majority leader’s office and the White House throughout the day. There was a meeting in Dick Cheney’s office in the afternoon, with the vice president and nomination strategists taking part, in which the fading support for the nomination was discussed. And then in the early evening, Frist had a phone conversation with White House Chief of Staff Andy Card in which Frist gave what’s being called a frank assessment of the nomination’s prospects. Not long afterward, a final decision was made, and Miers called the president at 8:30 p.m. to say she would withdraw, and the formal announcement was set for this morning.

My italics. Who made the decision? Cheney? Bush? Doesn’t this strongly imply that the president or vice-president decided to pull the plug on Miers and then had Miers “decide on her own” to withdraw? Face-saving can be so elaborate sometimes, can’t it? Especially if you’re constitutively unable to concede error. This was probably a necessary move – in order to consolidate the base in response to the looming possibility of indictments. The fight is on. And whom Bush picks to replace Miers will be a very interesting insight into how he sees the remainder of his presidency.

An impeccable source informs me that Charles Krauthammer is indeed brilliant and clairvoyant and was never nudged by anyone in the White House to come up with a face-saving formula for the Miers’ withdrawal. He came up with it on his own in the shower. Who says you don’t get solid, breaking news from a blog?

RACIST LEFT UPDATE: Robert George has the latest on the fall-out from this.

Jonah is terrified it might be Gonzales. I doubt it will be. Another fight with his base, while he’s losing key aides? Bush will be politically tempted to pick the most nationally divisive candidate he can find – one that gives the far right goosebumps of joy and the center and left a shiver up the spine. Bush may believe he needs to polarize the country to win back his base, especially if he’s reeling from indictments and a major staff turn-over. He has done it before; and he may do it again. For my part, I think the Rovians are misguided in this prescription. A socially conservative fire-breather is not what the country needs right now – and, although it may shore up the base, it will further rattle the middle. What we need is someone of Roberts’ ilk: impeccably qualified, intellectually serious, and concerned more with judicial process than results. The fundamental concern the public now has about this administration is its competence. The Roberts and Bernanke picks are reassuring. The Miers pick, er, wasn’t. Excellence and judicial restraint should be the criteria: not ideology. They are the criteria upon which the right and center can converge. Here’s hoping.

MOORE AWARD NOMINEE: “Iraq Body Count, Reuters says, estimates that 38 Iraqis die in violence every day. Over thirty-five years, that would amount to nearly 500,000 dead. In fact, it is estimated that the Baath party killed 300,000 Iraqis, so the current rate seems to be greater than the Baath rate. (The number of civilians killed by the Baath is probably in fact exaggerated. Only a few thousand bodies have been recovered from mass graves so far.)” – Juan Cole, on his blog. (Hat tip: Striding Lion.)

In the end, the Bush team decided to deploy what seems to me a transparently phony argument that executive privilege over confidential papers forced them to withdraw Miers. The Bush statement is particularly lame:

“It is clear that senators would not be satisfied until they gained access to internal documents concerning advice provided during her tenure at the White House _ disclosures that would undermine a president’s ability to receive candid counsel. Harriet Miers’ decision demonstrates her deep respect for this essential aspect of the constitutional separation of powers – and confirms my deep respect and admiration for her.”

All of this was scripted in advance in Charles Krauthammer’s latest column. Either he’s brilliant and clairvoyant – and he is, of course – or he was nudged to air the strategy in advance. Or both.

REAX: A couple of thoughts. This is a big coup for the Washington conservative intellectual establishment and the counter-intelligentsia that has been deliberately built to tackle the left’s academic monopoly these last couple of decades. They wanted one of their own on the Court, and they’ll get one. At the very least, they have shown they have a veto against anyone too patently unqualified. Given Miers’ credentials and post-nomination performance, we may have reason to be grateful for their clout. Score one for Frum! Second, it’s again amazing how unable this president is to take full responsibility for his decisions and choices. Face-saving is not an unusual thing in politics. But equally it is never a sign of real strength. A strong president takes responsibility for his own choices, even if he feels misunderstood or misled. Reagan’s Iran-Contra confession was an example of someone strong enough to admit a failure. This president is not internally strong enough to do something similar. His strength is a form of brittleness. Like all brittleness, it is prone to cracking suddenly and without warning. It just did.