Year: 2005

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.

A Mormon conservative absorbs some personal news.

We have to resist two temptations, I think. The first is not to absorb the human cost of war. Every dead – and maimed – soldier has a story, a narrative, a family, a life and a soul. Their young deaths – so young in so many cases – are worthy of the deepest mourning; and their service of the deepest respect. I don’t think it inappropriate for the news media to show them in full, or to mark an anniversary like the one we just observed. It is an important part of our moral calculus.

But the second temptation is to move the goalposts on this war and to expect the impossible. If someone had told me three years ago that by October 2005, Saddam Hussein’s murderous tyranny would be over for ever, that Iraq would have a new constitution that emerged from a democratic process and that it will soon have a democratically elected parliament and government, I would have been thrilled. If I were further told that the inevitably embittered Sunni Arab minority had decided to throw itself into democratic politics to amend the constitution and protect its interests in a future Iraq, I would be amazed by how swiftly democratic habits can take root in a post-totalitarian country. If I had been told that, despite extraordinary provocation from Jihadist and Sunni Arab terrorists, the country had not dissolved into civil war, and that unemployment was dropping, I’d be heartened. If I had also been told that the United States had not suffered another major terror attack since the fall of 2001, I would have refused to believe it. The fact that the administration has made countless, terrible errors in the aftermath of the invasion and miscalculated badly on how the Baathists and Jihadists would fight back, should not distract us from these underlying realities. In 2002, I feared U.S. casualties approaching 10,000 in a brutal, urban war for Baghdad. The enemy gave us a simmering insurgency instead, shrewdly calculating that that was their best defense. They were right in the short term. But that makes it all the more imperative to prove them wrong in the long term. For the sake of the 2,000 who have already died; and the countless, innocent civilian Iraqis who have borne an even greater burden, let’s do all we can to make this work.

“[W]hen science cannot determine the facts and decisions vary based upon religious belief, then government should not act.” – Harriet Miers, 1993. Maybe she really is a conservative after all – just not the theocon the hard right wants on the court. Wouldn’t it be marvelous to have an avowedly conservative justice on SCOTUS who supports the separation of church and state? Unfortunately, this is just one statement from her. Many others give an impression of political and philosophical, er, confusion.

THE KKK VS GAYS: They know whose side they’re on: the side they’ve always been on.

IF YOU THINK YOU’RE A LOSER: And waste your days doing pointless but occasionally satisfying things, then know this and know it well: You are not alone.

Two thirds of Americans now disapprove of president Bush’s handling of the Iraq war. But there appears to be a stabilizing in discontent: the numbers aren’t that much worse now than they were a few months back. Americans are mature enough both to grieve for the U.S. and Iraqi casualties while understanding that wars always mean casualties. As to the future, the public is now evenly split on whether things are going in the right or wrong direction. Count me among the 24 percent who don’t know for sure. I certainly hope that the political process will work in the end.

“I speak Italian and while Josh Marshall is waiting for a “professional translation” of the Repubblica series, I can confirm that Rozen’s summary is accurate, and that the original with its full detail sounds even more damaging. The Italian article mixes clearly-sourced reportage with common-sense speculation on what it must mean more freely than American journalistic practice would condone. But it keeps the two distinct; it is always clear what details are sourced, and (by local standards) relatively few of the sources are even anonymous.” Developing …