Month: January 2006

An interesting 2001 column.

Many of you keep asking me questions. I have never discussed Charles’ handicap with him, which, I would think, is the norm. But he tells part of the story here. It’s inspiring in many ways.

I’m surprised by Senator Clinton’s new Alito position. The only explanation I can think of is that the harsh criticism she’s been receiving from her hard-left base has made her antsy. A vote for a filibuster that won’t happen is therefore an easy red-meat snack for the Kossites. Still, the end-result will surely be the equally damaging impression that Clinton is like her husband: mellifluous, hard to pin down, opportunistic and a political chameleon. But then he did win two presidential elections, didn’t he?

Huge majorities now favor ending the ban on openly gay servicemembers. There is no longer a shred of an argument in its favor. More interesting, opinion within the military has changed a great deal since the issue first exploded over a decade ago. Many servicemembers, especially younger ones, are fine with gay colleagues. Here’s an email from a cadet in the Military Academy. I double-checked its veracity. It tells an important story:

"You had focused a while ago on what it meant to ‘come out’ in America today.  Well ‚ I have done it now, in one of the most unlikely places to find a good reception for doing so (at least that’s what I thought). I am a cadet at the United States Military Academy. I knew what it meant to be in the Army when I chose to accept a commission here. The way the Corps is organized, we stay with the same group of about thirty to forty people within our class year for the four years. That being the case, we grow very close spending our summers and academic years together. After the first two years, I had to make a decision to stay at West Point or leave the Academy because if you attend classes on the first day of your Junior (or Cow) year, you can no longer resign with no penalty‚Äîyou must, after that day, pay back the entire tuition for the first two years.

I made the decision that I would tell my friends at the Academy within my company and let them decide if I should stay or go. If they reacted as I hoped, I would be able to spend my last two years at the Academy without having to lie or otherwise hide myself from them. I am still here. Almost a year later and the only thing that has changed is we are closer and work better together than ever before. The other guys (and girls) in my company had worked with me and knew my value to the team.

One of the strangest reactions I got was a majority of the guys in my company apologizing to me for the first two years. Quite a few have told me how truly sorry they were if they ever said anything offensive or otherwise even gave me the impression that they would have been anything but accepting of me. I guess that is one of the blessings of the military ‚ it is one of the few realms of society where a person’s value is directly related to his (or increasingly, her) job performance and dependability. Because of that, the people I live and work with care nothing about my sexual orientation, but instead focus on the working relationships we‚Äôve built over the last two and a half years.

This is how the world changes: one act of courage at a time.

Even the genius behind Leviathan was skeptical about the practice. Money quote from Chapter 14:

"Also accusations upon torture are not to be reputed as testimonies. For torture is to be used but as means of conjecture, and light, in the further examination  and search of truth: and what is in that case confessed tendeth to the ease of him that is tortured, not to the informing of the torturers, and therefore ought not to have the credit of a sufficient testimony: for whether he deliver himself by true or false accusation, he does it by the right of preserving his own life."

Dick Cheney knows better, of course. He always does.

I just want to second every one of Jonah’s points. The idea that government corruption and lobbying will somehow be cured by a ban on earmarks or even a real war on pork is delusional. The fundamental issue is that of entitlements, and the general role of government. Once Republicanism became comfortable with wielding big government for its own pro-corporate or pro-religious ends, once it embraced the idea of Washington shaping people’s souls and businesses, once it became concerned with out-Democrating the Democrats in the welfare state, then the parasite culture of D.C. could take off. There’s nothing to restrain it now. Abramoff is the symptom, not the disease. What Karl Rove and George W. Bush have done to conservatism is the disease.

"Love — caritas — will always prove necessary, even in the most just society. There is no ordering of the State so just that it can eliminate the need for a service of love. Whoever wants to eliminate love is preparing to eliminate man as such. There will always be suffering which cries out for consolation and help. There will always be loneliness. There will always be situations of material need where help in the form of concrete love of neighbour is indispensable. The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person — every person — needs: namely, loving personal concern." РPope Benedict XVI.

A reader writes:

"I’ve long loved the writings of Charles Krauthammer. Without your reference to his disability, I don’t know how long I would have gone on looking forward to his next editorial or television appearance blissfully ignorant of the fact that he is paraplegic. Remarkable."

Yes, truly remarkable. And he’d probably prefer that I hadn’t mentioned it at all.

You may have heard of the tactic. As a way to leverage information or capture an enemy, terrorists sometimes kidnap innocent women and children in order to put pressure on their husbands or relatives. It’s called kidnapping and blackmail. Except that in Rumsfeld’s military, the United States now uses the tactic. Sure, it’s against the Geneva Conventions. Sure, those Conventions are supposed to apply in Iraq. But this is the Bush administration. King George doesn’t have to obey the law; and his military can do anything they want. The Pentagon has gotten used to denying hard evidence of abuse – and no one, of course, has been disciplined for following the instructions given ultimately in Washington. "It’s very hard, obviously, from some of these documents to determine what, if anything, actually happened," says the Pentagon spokesman. No, it isn’t. And so we slowly descend toward the level of the enemy. Because King George can.

I guess I’m not the only disgruntled one.