Year: 2005

It’s time to come clean. I tried to cut down on blogging, and I have indeed changed my hours and patterns. But my name is Andrew and I am a blogoholic.

In general, I think blogging has been a boon to Mickey Kaus, because it suits his personality. His mind is so quick and smart that when faced with longer projects, it tends to get jammed by an endless loop of self-criticism. But he is indeed one of contemporary liberalism’s deepest and smartest thinkers, and if you haven’t read his masterpiece, “The End of Equality,” you really should. It was prophetic and brilliant and its construction nearly drove him and everyone else at The New Republic into a loony bin. For a refresher on just how good he is as a policy journalist, check out this piece on social security reform. It even woke the beagle up. The first point I most agreed with is that means-testing social security doesn’t turn it into a welfare program because it’s still related to work: if you don’t work, you don’t get retirement benefits. The second point is his eye-opening reference to the Australian system, where

the top quarter of recipients gets no benefits at all. Zero. The bottom half gets full benefits. The people in between get in between. Now that’s a means test! Not coincidentally, after means-testing was introduced in the 1980s, Australia’s pension system cost a little more than half what ours costs, in terms of GDP.

Mickey urges inaction by the Dems for all sorts of Kaus-like reasons (so clever they give you a head-ache). What I like is the fact that an Aussie-style scheme really does save us real money – at a time when Bush is bankrupting the country. To my mind – regardless of FDR’s own rationale – the point of social security is security. If you really need to be supported in your dotage (I have a feeling I’ll be checking out much sooner), you can feel secure. But if you’ve done well, and don’t need the benefits, why not let others have them? Isn’t that the entire principle of insurance? Think of payroll taxes as premiums. Mickey wants to save up the money for universal healthcare. I’d prefer keeping taxes low. Politically, I think it would be a master-stroke for today’s GOP to out-progressive the Democrats on this, and combine lower, flatter taxes with a strongly progressive pension system. Bush’s endorsement of Pozen is a start. But he should be more radical and more “compassionate:” out-flank the Dems on the left and shrink the state for the right.

A must-read from Reuel Marc Gerecht.

My friend Bruce Bawer, conservative literary critic and astute commentator, now lives in Norway and knows northern Europe well. His emails about the growth of Islamo-fascism get more and more worrying. He gave me permission to reproduce his latest. Here it is, prompted by a gang of Moroccan youths who gay-bashed a friend of mine and a leading gay journalist, Chris Crain, last week, for holding hands with his boyfriend on the street:

I would encourage all responsible-minded people, to get up to speed on what’s going on in the Netherlands, and in Western Europe generally. The country I cherished a few years ago as the most liberal in the world has an increasingly large – and increasingly alienated – population of extreme reactionaries who despise, and seek to destroy, its liberalism. It is frankly stunning that Crain, in his posting, doesn’t even mention Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, who were murdered for daring to take on this intolerance, or Dutch Parliament members Hirsi Ali and Geert Wilders, who have also spoken out and as a result are forced to live (respectively) on a Marine base and in a prison in order to avoid being murdered.
One night in December 1998, T. and I were walking along the Singel canal in central Amsterdam when a Moroccan teenager pulled a knife and demanded money. (T. saw the knife, but the kid held it so low and so close to me that I didn’t see it.) A half dozen of his friends hovered nearby, at the edge of the canal, looking threatening. I told him angrily to hit the road. He hesitated, looked back at his friends, and then they all ran off. We were lucky. Year by year, it’s only got worse. The assaults are more frequent now, and more likely to be violent. They’re less about money now and more about contempt – not just toward gays but toward all infidels.
We still visit Amsterdam, but we keep our eyes open. It’s a great city – you just can’t be naxefve about what’s going on. We spent a weekend there in March. We checked into our hotel, went to our room, and I turned on the TV. The news had just come on (AT5 news, March 24, 8:30 PM). The lead story was about how Muslim intolerance of homosexuality was making life much worse for gays in Amsterdam.
But what are the authorities doing about it? What can they do? Half of Amsterdam’s population is of non-Dutch origin. It was recently reported that 40% of Moroccan youths in Amersfoort between ages 15 and 17 were suspected by the police of criminal activity. The Amersfoort police have files on 21% of Moroccan youths and 27% of Somali youths. A criminologist said this was probably representative of the situation nationwide.
As for the cops finding the guys who beat up Chris Crain: I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they haven’t lifted a finger. They probably thought he was nuts for confronting the guys. The authorities’ traditional policy is: keep your head down and don’t provoke anybody. In January, two schoolboys in IJsselstein were ordered to remove Dutch flag patches from their backpacks because Moroccan students might consider them provocative. It turned out this flag ban is officially in force at many schools. Meanwhile Muslim kids have pictures of van Gogh’s murderer on their lunchboxes because they consider him a hero, and nobody dares tell them to remove those pictures. In a recent article, a teacher at a school in Amsterdam said that a decade ago, ten-year-old Muslim kids were saying, ‘We Moroccans are going to take over the Netherlands’; now five-year-olds who can hardly write are scrawling ‘Fuck you Netherlands’ on scraps of paper.
Crain quotes Queen Beatrix on intolerance. I’m sure she meant that ethnic Dutch people are growing more intolerant of Muslims. Some are. My fear has long been that the Dutch liberal establishment’s unwillingness to confront Muslim bigotry would feed the rise of anti-Muslim neo-fascism, resulting in a society split between two extreme rights – one Muslim and one non-Muslim. In any case Beatrix’s handling of these matters has been (shall we say) dismaying. After van Gogh’s murder she refused to attend his funeral or meet with Hirsi Ali; instead, she went to a Moroccan youth center and made friendly chitchat. Compare this to Queen Margrethe of Denmark, who in a new authorized biography addresses these issues head-on, saying ‘there are certain things of which one should not be too tolerant.’ Precisely. Tolerating gays: good. Tolerating intolerance of gays: not good. It ain’t brain surgery.

This is how the new brownshirts are making progress. First they take over the streets with thuggery. Then they kill politicians. And Europe is – surprise! – appeasing them. And then I see the president of the United States holding hands with the Arab dictator whose oil money is financing the propagation of this fascism. We have been here before. What part of “Never Again” does Europe not understand?

Another wonderful stay in Los Angeles. The first night I spent glued to C-SPAN’s coverage of the Brit elections. I wrote my impressions up here. I’m always stunned by the cultural richness of this city. We saw “A Play Without Words,” a kind of Twyla-Tharp-meets-Austin Powers reverie, at the Ahmanson theater, and spent a beautful afternoon at the Huntington Gardens. The British watercolor exhibit there was an array of technical masterpieces, but everything was obliterated for me by the collection’s original hand-written copy of Locke’s “Letter Concerning Toleration.” You can actually see on the fragile pages the man crossing words out and re-writing the masterpiece of modern liberalism, phrase by phrase. I guess I’m a bit of a nerd, but when you have studied Locke and revered him and argued about him and dissected him, it’s another thing entirely to see the man’s work close-up, as a human work in progress, as a repository of error and correction. Bill Maher was his usual hospitable self (his young bevy of writers are some of the smartest, most charming people I have met); and my mandatory pilgrimage to Venice was, as always, a boho delight. The glass work! Dinner with South Park/Team America’s Matt Stone rounded off the weekend. And I didn’t forget to bring a towel! Back late tonight via United. The plane-ride over here, by the way, was one of the worst I can remember. No wonder they’re going bankrupt.

I think I’ve got something to say to you. Maggie Gallagher’s latest fusillade on same-sex marriage polls omitted the most recent national poll that showed virtually no change in attitudes over the last year – and even a small rise in support for legal protections for gay couples. She also ignored another poll (although, to be fair, she was only citing national ones). That poll was in the one state where marriages have been legal for almost a year now: Massachusetts. Here we have a classic test-tube experiment in one state, where people can examine the impact of the reform close-up. What do the polls now show? In less than a year, support for equality in marriage has risen a full 18 points, a massive increase in support to a clear majority of all Massachusetts residents. As I’ve pointed out many times before, civil marriage is also much more popular among lesbians than gay men (just as it is more popular among straight women than among straight men). It’s gender, stupid. On the monogamy and social stability front, you therefore actually have a net increase in monogamy in civil marriage (women are more monogamous than men), you have more stability for the children of same-sex couples, and you have social support for those gay men who want the responsibility and status of marriage to cement their relationships. Notice also, in this excellent article, why civil unions are no substitute for civil marriage. The piece cites on lesbian couple: “Neither woman had been in a serious relationship before they came together three and a half years ago, and neither had been particularly interested in a commitment ceremony or civil union, arrangements they say lack marriage’s emotional core.” For a real conservative, what’s not to like?

This isn’t a fair fight. Michael Wolff is one of the least pleasant charlatans ever to slither up the liberal New York media ladder. I’ve only met the Gollum of Gotham once, for an interview. The column that resulted was one of the laziest, least ethical piece of tripe ever written about me (and included a quote Wolff subsequently admitted he had deliberately distorted). Anyone who accuses Jack Shafer of being humorless is by definition someone who has never read Jack Shafer. But then Wolff does write for Vanity Fair. It doesn’t get much lower than that. (I might add that New York magazine has become infinitely better since Wolff stopped driveling on in it.)

My “America” interview was with Thomas Stahel, not Thomas Reese. Apologies. It was over a decade ago and I got my Jesuit Toms mixed up. But it was the same magazine Reese went on to edit. And it was then and still is a model of balanced argument and reasoned debate. It was and is by no means a radical magazine. And that reinforces the key point about Ratzinger. It isn’t just error he wants to stamp out in the Church; it is reasoned and faithful and moderate discussion of issues that are not subject to infallible direction. I look forward to Michael Novak’s defense of this appalling act of censorship and control.

David Brooks gets all huffy today about how deficit worriers – “sober chin-pullers” he calls us – haven’t said a word in defense of the president’s decision to means-test social security benefits. He may have a point about the Democrats. But he must know he’s fibbing about others. Here’s his point:

What about the sober chin-pullers – the fiscally prudent worriers and deficit-fearing editorialists? Have they come out and applauded Bush for his courage? Are they mobilizing to take advantage of this moment? No, their silence is deafening.

Some high-ponts of the “deafening silence.” First up: Michael Kinsley, a writer Brooks must surely have read:

Bush … went from implicitly suggesting that his privatization scheme is a pain-free solution to implicitly endorsing a plan for serious benefit cuts. For a politician, that’s an admirable difference. Even more to Bush’s credit, the plan he’s backing is highly progressive. Benefits for low-income workers would keep rising with average wages, as now, but benefits for middle- and high-income people would be geared more toward merely keeping up with inflation. This allows Bush to say that no one’s benefits will be cut, although some people will be getting as much as 40 percent less than they are currently promised. But in the swamp of Social Security politics, that is really minimal protection from the alligators.
So Democrats now face a choice: Are they going to be alligators on this one? Why Bush has taken this on remains a mystery. There is no short-term political advantage, and there are other real long-term problems that are more pressing. But he has done it, to his credit.

I’d say Mike is about as perfect example of a partisan Democrat deficit chin-puller. Second up: moi. Money quote:

For what it’s worth, I thoroughly support the idea of means-testing social security benefits (the crude description of the president’s proposal). It’s an honest way of addressing the looming insolvency of the system, while protecting the neediest. It’s nutty to send big entitlement checks to people already financially secure in their retirement. The patent weakness of Paul Krugman’s spluttering opposition today is evidence enough of the merit of the president’s plan. If Bush can do this, nudge the retirement age up and include add-on personal accounts, he can declare victory at some point. The Democrats’ current complacency is, in my view, unwarranted.

I said the same thing on the Chris Matthews’ show – but even more enthusiastically. How much chin-pulling can you do before David Brooks takes off his blinders and notices?

FUNDAMENTALISM WATCH: Another spiritual development among some evangelical leaders:

East Waynesville Baptist asked nine members to leave. Now 40 more have left the church in protest. Former members say Pastor Chan Chandler gave them the ultimatum, saying if they didn’t support George Bush, they should resign or repent. The minister declined an interview with News 13. But he did say “the actions were not politically motivated.” There are questions about whether the bi-laws were followed when the members were thrown out.

Not politically motivated? I’m unaware that one of the Ten Commandments was to support George W. Bush. But I do recall one of them being against lying.