Month: January 2006

Fred on Bush

I just read Fred Barnes’ new bio of the president. It’s worth a read, if only to look into what a full-bored defense of everything Bush has done, thought, believed or even sneezed amounts to. A couple of points. Fred writes about the Washington establishment in exactly the same terms he was writing about it in the 1980s – as a liberal monopoly. This from someone on the biggest cable news channel, surrounded by the vast K-Street-GOP nexus, with Republicans controlling House, Senate, White House and a majority on the Supreme Court. Hey, Fred, you are the establishment now. Second, Fred breezily dismisses any dissension on the right. In this book, "there’s no paramount national issue that splits Republican ranks." Immigration, abortion, spending, states’ rights, civil liberties, torture, pork, executive power, debt, Medicare expansion: these don’t count. Fred can even quote the president as follows with not a trace of irony:

"America will always stand firm for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity, the rule of law, limits on the power of the state …"

This from a president who has authorized the torture of military detainees, retains the right to disobey laws he signs, and orders warrantless wire-tapping of American citizens. There may be a defense of these actions, but Fred doesn’t even acknowledge that some conservatives are queasy about them.

The “Town Square” Test

But the best quote in the book comes from Condi Rice. She said these words in her Senate confirmation hearing for secretary of state:

"The world should apply what Natan Sharansky calls the ‘town square test’: if a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm, then that person is living in a fear society, not a free society."

By that measure, alas, Iraq is still a fear society, interspersed by anarchy and terror, with merely the promise of freedom. I still feel that liberation from Saddam was a necessary, noble, important act. But, as Hobbes fully understood, there can be no freedom if there is no order. And Bush ensured that order would never be imposed in Iraq, because he persistently refused to send sufficient troops to provide it. That’s the tragedy we now face; and the past mistake we have now somehow to rectify.

Mickey Digs Deeper

Brokeback Mountain’s Golden Globes success is as good a time as any to get the following out the way: my old friend Mickey Kaus obviously has some issues around gay men. His first instinct in December, before even seeing "Brokeback Mountain," was to predict its doom at the box office; he then valiantly kept hoping the movie would fail. Then he saw the movie and you can hear his view here. Here’s a mini-fisk of Mickey’s argument that Brokeback is in fact a great date movie (by which, of course, he means a straight date movie):

MK: The relationship between Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal is so unconvincing…

AS: Stop right there. This is a highly subjective judgment, so I can’t really say Mickey’s wrong. But I found the relationship entirely convincing and I haven’t found someone yet who didn’t. The awards showered on Ledger, and the unanimous consent of every reviewer that Ledger’s performance is extraordinary, would be meaningless if the relationship he is conducting were completely unconvincing. Mickey is the odd one out here – not that there’s anything wrong with that. I wonder if he’d find any relationship between two gay men convincing. But he’s not done yet. Here’s Mickey’s take on why Brokeback is still a good, straight date movie, despite its being about those people …

MK: You can go on a date with a member of the opposite sex and you can say two things. You can say, Gee, what we’ve got going is better than what those guys got going …

AS: Excuse me? The reason for the tragedy of the Ennis-Jack love affair is not that it’s obviously inherently inferior to any straight relationship. It’s because society at the time made it impossible to be fully expressed – in a world where gay men could be murdered if their orientation were known. Take this analogy: imagine a movie that told the tragedy of an inter-racial love affair in the days of miscegenation laws. The love affair was made impossible by law and society and the black partner was subsequently lynched for dating a white girl. Would Mickey’s response be that it’s a good date movie for white couples because they can reassure themselves that "what we’ve got going is better than what those guys got going …"?

MK: And you can breathe a joint sigh of relief that if you’re a heterosexual and you’re heterosexual, I’m not going to screw up your life the way Heath Ledger screwed up the life for his wife.

AS: Sigh of relief? What was Mickey so scared about that ‘relief’ is his response to the movie? Again, his point is logical enough, but the obtuseness! Ennis does screw up his marriage – but the reason is the lying that society imposed as a condition of his survival. Not to see this context is to be blind to the deeper tragedy of the story, especially as regards the women in it.

The real reason Brokeback is a good date movie, of course, is simply that it’s a classic tale of star-crossed lovers. Many, many straight men can make the imaginative leap to seeing how universal love and longing and loss are. All I can say is that, sadly, Mickey isn’t one of them.

TONIGHT’S THE NIGHT

At midnight, this blog moves to Time.com. Don’t worry about finding us. Just type in the usual URL – http://www.andrewsullivan.com – and you should be automatically redirected to the new site. The same applies to bookmarks: no need to change them. Of course, I’m nervous. There will surely be early glitches so please bear with us if there are. I’m also headed to NYC, despite this horrible bronchial bug that seems to be going around. I’m scheduled on The Colbert Report Tuesday night. And happy MLK Day.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY

“We could also restore Dr. King’s role in the continuing story of freedom to its rightful prominence, emphasizing that the best way to safeguard democracy is to practice it. And we must recognize that the accepted tradeoff between freedom and security is misguided, because our values are the essence of our strength. If dungeons, brute force and arbitrary rule were the keys to real power, Saudi Arabia would be a model for the future instead of the past.” – Taylor Branch, peerless historian of the African-American civil rights movement, NYT, today.

MLK DAY: Aaron McGruder has, as usual, a less serious take here. I love Boondocks’ grand-dad. I wish there were more of him.

WHAT TO DO ABOUT IRAN

Hoder has a suggestion.

KING GEORGE?: It was partly Sam Alito’s idea back in 1986 to take the rarely and sporadically used device of presidential signing statements and use them as a battering ram to increase executive power. For a couple of centuries barely two dozen were appended to laws. During Reagan, they became more popular, and were continued under the first Bush and Clinton. But under W, their use has exploded. By some estimates, this president has used them five times as often as any predecessor and has vastly increased their scope. When it comes to passing laws that affect any executive branch, including the military, this president has all but declared himself an independent body. My own take on this can be found here. The NYT has a story here. Not much has been written on this but there’s an excellent summary by Philip J. Cooper and original documents to back up his analysis here (click on the link that says “Public Law, Policy, and Public Administration”). This can be esoteric stuff, but it matters. If it means this president will continue to break the law and authorize torture, it matters a lot.

ALITO AND CAP

A Princeton grad thinks I’m missing something:

I graduated from Princeton in the mid-1980s and remember CAP and Prospect well. While that particular article may have been satire (and ask yourself, what exactly were they satirizing? Who is laughing at whom here?) the viciousness of CAP’s language throughout its existence was apparent to everyone who saw it. That is why the organization had no support on campus, even from conservatives. CAP didn’t oppose affirmative action, it opposed the admission of women, people of color, gay men and (doubly) lesbians, to Princeton. As far as I can recall, CAP existed solely for the purposes of spreading this ugly rhetoric. They did nothing aside from publishing Prospect, nothing except for finding various ways to express their bigotry.
Why does this matter for Judge Alito? Of course there is no reason to think he is personally a bigot. But in order to get a job he was willing to say “yeah, I’m with those bigots over there.” Should someone like that have a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court? This is not guilt by association – Alito is the person who chose to do the associating. He volunteered a connection to an extremist organization and it is reasonable and appropriate to ask him about why he threw his lot in with these people. While Judge Alito may not have signed off on each and every word, he did sign off on the group as a whole at a time when very few Princeton alumni did. And it really is shameful.

Duly noted.

THE MISSING CENTER

An emailer concurs:

“I think for a lot of people in the center, what party loyalty they have is based on which extreme they fear or dislike more: The religious right or the radical left.
Personally, I often disagree with the religious right — I’m a social and cultural libertarian — but I’ve never considered them to be anathema. For me it’s the radical left personified by Dean, Kennedy, Cindy Sheehan, Moveon.org, etc. that I find so repellent to keep me supporting GOP candidates.
However, give me a viable center party that believes in defending the nation and practicing social tolerance and I’ll be there supporting it. Problem is, the key word is “viable.” Until then, I remain a reliable Republican voter, if only to keep the Deans and Ted Kennedys of the nation out of power.”

Yes, there’s nothing so valuable to George W. Bush and the religious right than Daily Kos, Moveon.org and Ted Kennedy. What would he do without them?