Month: March 2006

"Iraq The Model’s" Mohammed has some thoughts.

Marvin Olasky coined the term "compassionate conservatism" and was once regarded as a guru for Bush’s presidency. It’s therefore interesting to see his review of Bruce Bartlett’s new book, "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy." Money quote:

"Players of the venerable board game Clue know the moment when the party’s over. A contestant may say, "Colonel Mustard in the dining room with the revolver," and be shown surreptitiously a card that kills that theory. But when the next participant says, "Mr. Bush in the conservatory with the lead pipe," and other players say, "I can’t refute that," it’s time to give in.

That’s how I felt when reading Bruce Bartlett’s Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy (Doubleday, 2006). The desire for alliteration sometimes leads to over-the-top titles, and words like bankrupt and betrayed are too strong. And yet, when Mr. Bartlett lambasts the Bush record on education, drug legislation, pork barrel spending, and other expand-the-government programs‚Äîwell, I can’t refute that.

The metamorphosis of "compassionate conservatism" is particularly sad. I never thought that a switch from 70 years of increasing Washington-centrism would come easily, but I hoped some decentralization was possible. There’s still hope‚Äîwatch movement toward the use of social service vouchers‚Äîbut I can’t refute the charge that this concept has become a rationale for patronage."

The jig really is up, isn’t it? Hey, don’t blame me. I endorsed the other guy last time around for all the same reasons other conservatives are finally voicing in public.

A Canadian reader writes:

"I totally agree with you on this one. Comedy Central should air the South Park rerun and let the Scientologists fall on their faces and try to sue Matt Stone and Trey Parker – or the network.
It’s worth pointing out that they showed the rerun on Canada’s Comedy Network a few weeks ago despite pressure from the Church of Scientology not to air it again. I got the chance to see it during my ‘lunch’ at work, and I can tell you, the TV lounge was packed with many of my co-workers who, like me, didn’t see it the first airing during the fall. I usually don’t watch South Park, but I wanted to see what the fuss was all about ‚Äì and what’s the big deal? Nicole Kidman begging her ex to ‘come out of the closet?’ The Scientology operatives who laid out what their religion believes ‚Äì then threatened to sue the poor kid when he repeated, verbatim, something else they said?
We all got a huge laugh out of it.
Your point about the Catholic League managing to stop another episode of South Park is well taken. This was like the Simpsons episode a few years ago, the one about the Super Bowl and the commercial parody of ZZ Top sponsored by ‘the Catholic Church: We’ve made a few … changes.’ I remember the League went ballistic over it. As a Catholic, however, I totally got the point and couldn’t stop laughing. I still do when it’s in reruns.
Sometimes, I just wish these guys would just get a sense of humour.
As for seeing MI: 3, rest assured I won’t. Seeing him in ‘The Firm’ gave me more than enough of Cruise to last a lifetime."

It strikes me that people with a secure sense of their own faith are often the least liable to get upset by parodies or comedies about it. Religions may deal in divine truths, but they are run by human beings. And the combination is often funny. True believers know that; and don’t care when they’re made fun of. Insecure believers – and they often need fundamentalism to keep their own souls untroubled by doubt – are the touchiest.

I’ll be on the Chris Matthews Show on Sunday morning, discussing, among other things, the role of the blogosphere in politics. Chris remains unimpressed.

He makes James Dobson look enlightened. The great moderating force in Islam in Iraq has this view of what should befall homosexuals:

"The people involved should be killed in the worst, most severe way of killing."

Er, thanks for letting us know more about this great religion of peace and tolerance.

Tom Cruise is denying that he put any pressure on Viacom to pull the re-run of the "Trapped in the Closet" episode. But it’s important to remember that the show never aired at all in Britain, where the media is more vulnerable to libel claims. Ever wonder why? Comedy Central’s official explanation – that it aired another show to salute Isaac Hayes – also strikes me as absurd. Hayes just called the show bigoted, and you choose that moment to honor him? The only way Comedy Central can show that they are not lying about this is to broadcast "Trapped in the Closet" again. Next week. Or at least, to put it in rotation again (as of now, it isn’t scheduled). This seems on the face of it to be yet another example of a big media company kow-towing to religious sensitivities. Comedy Central has already yanked one South Park episode, under pressure from the Catholic League. Now they’re caving in to the Scientologists. Can you see them allowing another South Park episode which includes Muhammad? South Park has portrayed Muhammad before, but that was before the Islamist bullies took to the streets. You think Viacom cares about freedom of expression?

So here’s what we can do. Email Viacom to protest their submission to Tom Cruise. The main email address I can find on their site is press@viacom.com. Email Comedy Central to demand the airing of "Trapped in the Closet"; use this page to send an email and put "Support Freedom of Speech" in the contents line; and add your own personal message beneath. If you’re a blogger, encourage your readers to do the same, and advertize these email addresses on your site. Let’s see if we can harness the blogosphere against the censors. Finally, make sure you don’t go see Paramount’s "Mission Impossible: 3," Cruise’s upcoming movie. I know you weren’t going to see it anyway. But now any money you spend on this movie is a blow against freedom of speech. Boycott it. Tell your friends to boycott it.

"Where all your rights have become only an accumulated wrong, where men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land, to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to gather the fruits of their own labors, and, even while they beg, to see things inexorably withdrawn from them – then, surely, it is a braver, a saner and a truer thing to be a rebel, in act and deed, against such circumstances as these, than to tamely accept it, as the natural lot of men." РRoger Casement, Irishman, (1864-1916).

I respect Charles Krauthammer too much not to offer a small rejoinder to his thoughtful column today. He fairly represents my side of a debate we already had a few years’ back. I stick with my position. I believe that someone’s sexual orientation is a deeper issue than the number of people they want to express that orientation with. Polygamy is a choice, in other words; homosexuality isn’t. The proof of this can be seen in the fact that straight people and gay people can equally choose polyandry or polygamy or polyamory, or whatever you want to call it. But no polygamist or heterosexual can choose to be gay. If you’re not, you’re not.

To put it another way: If polygamy and sexual orientation are interchangeable in human identity and psychology, there is no slippery slope. You’re already there. Once you’ve allowed heterosexuals to have legal marriage, and you see no distinction between sexual orientation and polygamy, there’s no logical reason to prevent polygamy. And it’s straight people – and mainly straight men – who are the prime movers behind polygamy as an ideal anyway.

I think legalizing such arrangements is a bad idea for a society in general for all the usual reasons (abuse of women, the dangers of leaving a pool of unmarried straight men in the population at large, etc.). I also think it’s reasonable for society to say to a heterosexual polygamist: we won’t let you legally marry more than one person, but we encourage you to marry one. Now, look at it from the gay point of view. We tell the gay polyandrist: we won’t let you marry more than one person, but we won’t let you marry one person either. In fact, we will give you no legal outlet for your relationship, and no social support, and do all we can to stigmatize and marginalize it. Is the difference not obvious?

Gay people are not asking for the right to marry anybody. We’re asking for the right to marry somebody. Right now, heterosexual polygamists have an option: marry someone. And gay people are told: you can marry no one at all. That cannot be just. It cannot be fair. And it cannot be conservative to refuse to give 9 million people an incentive to settle down and take care of one another.

Read this fascinating and revealing interview with Kanan Makiya, who saw the decision-making process of the war against Saddam close up. His view of the Bush administration is that, while many in it had good intentions, the president never reconciled the warring parties within his own government, and Condi Rice at the NSC never forced a unified policy between the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon or the CIA. The result was the "unbelievable mess" we are still struggling to recover from. Money quote:

"You either do an occupation and you do it well, or you don’t do it in the first place. But you don’t do it in a half-assed way, with inadequate troop levels to boot!
The United States government never deployed enough troops. It opted for an occupation but didn’t provide the wherewithal to do the job properly. Here again is this tension between the Pentagon and the Department of State. State wants an occupation, but Rumsfeld ‚Äî who has theories about how to conduct warfare in the modern age with less and less troops ‚Äî never wanted an occupation. In fact, he may never even have been for Iraqi democratisation. He was just an in-and-out kind of a guy. It was the other people within the defence department, in particularly the really extraordinary figure of Paul Wolfowitz, who argued the political case for democracy."

But Rumsfeld trumped Wolfowitz. My own view is that Cheney and Rumsfeld had and still have no interest in democratization, and have been "to-hell-with-them hawks" from Day One. But the real responsibility lies with the president who, as Makiya points out, seemed unable to lead decisively. Makiya is admirably frank about his own mistakes as well – particularly his misreading of the state of the Iraqi army in the last days of Saddam, which, by the time of invasion, had already basically disintegrated. But that new insight leads us to a better understanding of the last three years, and where we are now:

"When the war came the army did not fight. There was no Iraqi defeat in 2003 in the sense there was a defeat of the Nazis or the Japanese armies in World War Two. The army just disintegrated. There was no war of liberation in that sense. Our liberation and our civil war are occurring now, simultaneously, so to speak."

There is still hope. Illusions have been shattered by reality, but that in itself is a ground for renewal. I think we’re doing about as well now as we can be, thanks to Khalilzad, peace be upon him. I believe we need to stay longer and not withdraw in any significant degree until we have given the nascent Iraqi state a chance to live and breathe. Iraqis will have to do the rest. And Makiya has exactly the right message for them:

"A great deal of politics, not only in Iraq but the Middle East as a whole, and across the left for that matter, is about elevating victimhood. This is a legacy we have to overcome.
Think of the Palestinians. They have done this to excess, to the point of self-destruction, so many times. Their rhetoric rests on the fact that they were victimised. It is a fact they were victimised, but it isn’t enough to be political on that basis. You have to go beyond victimhood. People cannot bow and genuflect before you solely because you are a victim. You have to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps and not be a victim. Don’t think like a victim even if you are one."

And so we await the Iraqi Mandela. And pray.

(Photo: Lyle Grose/101st Brigade/Getty.)

"Mr. President: Did you ever hold conservative notions and assumptions on the issue of spending? If so, did you abandon them after the trauma of 9/11? For what reasons, exactly? Did you intend to revert to conservative thinking on spending at some point? Do you still? Were you always a liberal on spending? Were you, or are you, frankly baffled that conservatives assumed you were a conservative on spending? Did you feel they misunderstood you? Did you allow or encourage them to misunderstand you?" – Peggy Noonan, yesterday, in a column called "Hey, Big Spender."

"In three short years, this President has so ramped up government spending that he has turned a fiscal surplus into a huge and mounting debt. Far from taking responsibility for the nation’s finances, the President has shirked basic housekeeping and foisted crippling debt on the next generation. If a President is in some sense the father of an extended family, Bush is fast becoming a deadbeat dad, living it up for short-term gain while abandoning his children to a life of insecurity and debt." – yours truly, September 15, 2003, in a Time essay called "Come On, Big Spender."