Month: October 2005

An emailer responds to my previous post:

“You are right, Bush should clean house (I would say, because this nation has no means to do that otherwise until 2008, e.g. call for elections).

But your post is pie-in-the-sky for two reasons: 1) He will never do it. He has never backtracked on anything significant, for better or worse (usually worse). You are asking him to admit wholesale failure. What in his history suggests that he would ever do what you are asking? In fact, his stay-the-course simplicity has been a major cause for the current problems.

2) The country has had a “reeling vacancy” in the Oval Office since 2001. All of the failures, the poor choices, the misguided appointments, lack of foresight and diplomatic grace etc. have been there for years. Put another way, he is not reeling now just because he has been caught at being wrong in so many ways on Iraq, North Korea, the deficit, torture, cronyism, et al. He is reeling now because he has always been reeling.

There is a distinction physicians make between an acute illness and the acute diagnosis of a chronic illness. We as a nation are dealing with the latter.”

That’s what I fear and why I reluctantly backed Kerry last year. But I’m trying to be constructive. And Bush has been capable of radical moves in the past. If it weren’t for the war, this would be an opportunity for schadenfreude, but far too much is at stake for that kind of response. I can hope, can’t I?

The president is reeling. Tomorrow may mean a raft of indictments, or none at all. Either way, there is obviously something awry with the structure of the current White House, the small group of people who have dominated foreign policy and seem unable to rectify clear mistakes, and the inner clique who came up with the brilliant idea of nominating Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. Bush will have two options in the coming days: a) retain as much of his staff as he can, while ceding the indicted to the history books and struggling on or b) clean house for real. I think he’d be smart to do b). By that, I mean firing Cheney as veep and replacing him with Condi Rice, regardless of what Fitzgerald discloses. Cheney’s role in the Plamegate mess is just the latest in a long string of screw-ups and misjudgments. If Bush cannot see that now, he is fooling himself. I also mean getting rid of Rumsfeld, replacing Card, withdrawing the Miers nomination, and shaking his cabinet to its roots. He needs to show the world that he gets it; and that he will not merely limp along in damage control mode for the next three years. In every crisis, there is an opportunity. The future of Bush’s presidency will pivot on whether he seizes this moment, surprises all of us, and regains momentum. He can; and he should. We have a war to win. We cannot afford to have a reeling vacancy in the Oval Office.

THE READERS VENT: Byron Calame provides an online forum for NYT readers to tear Bill Keller and Arthur Sulzberger Jr to shreds. I’m not sure whether I am more shocked or impressed. (Hat tip: Petrelis.)

An MIT economist thinks so.

HOW TO BECOME A REPUBLICAN: One jaundiced but funny Democrat’s cartoon version.

At this point, we should simply wait for the facts, no?

THE DEMS AND MIERS: It takes a conservative to give them an obviously shrewd, if cynical strategy.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “Andrew, isn’t it obvious? The social right wants sodomy laws reinstated and homosexuality defined as a mental illness. Of course they’re not going to come out and say it (at least not most of them–some of them are quite upfront about it) but the bottom line is that gay people don’t deserve civil rights or protections of any kind because gay people shouldn’t exist in the first place. What part of that don’t you understand? You really need to get out in the trenches some more, on various websites and discussion lists where ordinary people are not only homophobic but open and unapologetic about it.”

I am aware of much of the homophobia in the trenches of the religious right and the GOP. But I’m referring to people who would publicly strongly deny such a thing, i.e. people like Bill Bennett or Stanley Kurtz or Maggie Gallagher. David Blankenhorn does not strike me in any way as homophobic, for example. In fact, he went out of his way in our debate to say he worries about associating with such bigots. So whence the silence about social policy toward gays? And when does complete indifference to gay lives become indistinguishable from bigotry? There are shades and nuances of prejudice here. There’s another explanation, of course. The people I have mentioned have as key allies those who believe that homosexuality is a moral blight that demands legal suppression or psychiatric or religious “cures.” Some are political operators as much as they are intellectuals, and so their silence is simple politics, nothing else. But at what point does allying with bigots and not calling them on it make you a bigot yourself?

This post speaks for itself. (Hat tip: Robert George.)

The Schadenfreude deepens. This time, it’s fully justified.

My debate with David Blankenhorn on the matter of marriage rights is now posted. In many ways, I think the most telling part of the conversation was at the very end. Blankenhorn was asked a simple question by a member of the audience: since you oppose marriage rights for gay couples, what do you support for them? What’s amazing is that after decades of thinking about marriage and several years mulling the issue of marriage for gays, David still had no answer. Frum has no answer. Gallagher has no answer. Kurtz has no answer. I have to say I find this quite extraordinary. It is as extraordinary as the social right’s complete indifference to the revolution in gay culture and society these past two decades. I just read Rick Santorum’s book about conservatism and the “common good.” It’s better than I expected and has many pages devoted to excluding gay couples from civil marriage. But again: I could find no practical, constructive suggestion from Santorum on what he believes should be our civil policy toward gay couples. Should they be deterred from settling down? Should they be encouraged to make faithful commitments? Should their households, when they include offspring, be legally protected? Silence. Nada. Zip. The “common good” does not include gay people or their kids. For much of the social right, homosexuals simply do not exist. Our reality is so threatening to them that they cannot even begin to construct a viable social policy toward us. And that’s why they’re losing this debate. In many ways, they haven’t even joined it.

I’m pretty close to persuaded that Miers should not be confirmed because of her lack of basic competence or even interest in the field. Virginia makes a very strong case. I still think Miers deserves a hearing before final judgment, though. But two things: I see no reason why president Bush should have some “face-saving” option. He should withdraw the nomination or let the Senate decide. And if the Senate does get to decide, they need to address the recusal issue. Miers has been so intimately involved in certain issues – the legalization of torture, for example – that she must be asked if she will recuse herself from any related case. We have a right to know what topics she dealt with, even though we may forgo an attempt to find out details. We need a clear list of areas where she will recuse herself in the future. That list may help explain why she was nominated in the first place.

How it abused the innocent; covered up its crimes; and suddenly collapsed. Anyone who believes that the sexual abuse crisis was restricted to the U.S. needs to read more.

What Cheney believes in. I had dinner with an old friend last night and he made a good point about the Bush administration and torture. In every war, the executive tends to over-reach. In this one, they have over-reached to the point of subverting the very meaning of America and its honor. But the task of correcting such an over-reach is ultimately the Congress’s. We have seen the ramifications of an improvised, ill-advised, poorly executed policy of allowing abuse of detainees for purposes of “military necessity” as defined by the executive. What we need are laws to create a clear standard both for Geneva-protected combatants and non-Geneva-protected terrorists. That’s the Congress’s job, not the president’s. It’s staggering that the McCain Amendment is the first attempt to do that. We have known of these abuses for a long time now. John Kerry wouldn’t touch them in the campaign. The feckless Democrats in Congress are too scared of being labeled soft on terror to defend American and Western values; and the corrupt Republicans couldn’t give a damn, for the most part, or are too scared to stand up to a president of their own party. The legacy of torture is firstly this president’s. But it is also this Congress’s.