Month: April 2006

A reader writes:

A fairly obvious point you didn’t make in your post: I don’t think the comparison can ever be made about marriage rates for gay couples in Massachusetts (or any other state that grants gays the right to marry) unless there is full recognition of such marriages on the federal level. Even if I could marry under state law – the lack of federal recognition means the institution for me is still a second class affair. Important tax and other federal benefits are missing.

In my own case, my partner and I are selling my house here in California – and I will have more than $600,000 in gains. We’ve been together 4 years. If I gifted him half the house – he would be taxed. A couple who could have married however, would get a $500,000 flat excusion for gains under the tax code. As a single, unmarried man I get only a $250,000 exclusion – meaning that I am paying in just this one instance more than $100,000 penalty in taxes that a married couple would not have.

Very painful to think about. Less rights than any straight person – and a heavier tax burden. So much for the guarantee of equal protection under the law.

The law as it now stands in fact discourages marriage and stability among many gay couples. It sounds strange to think of politicians actually devising laws to undermine social stability and deter responsibility (especially in a population with high rates of HIV). But they do – as long as the population involved is gay. How really conservative is that?

John Hinderaker responds to my recent post about troubling data in Iraq. Hinderaker writes:

The fact that half of all deaths caused by terrorists last year were in Iraq is consistent with what the terrorists themselves often tell us: Iraq is the central front in the global war against Islamic terrorism. The old Andrew Sullivan would have understood that this means we should fight to win in Iraq, not cut and run.
To the extent that people are being murdered by home-grown terrorists in Iraq, as opposed to Zarqawi, et al, the perpetrators are the very same Baathist thugs who, until we overthrew Saddam, controlled Iraq’s government. For thirty years, they ruled Iraq through a ruthless campaign of violence that killed many thousands of Iraqis (300,000 is a number that is commonly cited) and terrorized the rest. It is obvious to the Iraqis themselves that it is a good thing that these people are now out of power rather than in power. Why isn’t it obvious to Andrew?

Well, if John has been reading this blog, he will know that I do not in any way favor a cut-and-run strategy in Iraq. He will also know that I have shed no tears, except of joy, about Saddam’s demise, and only recently linked to a report showing how Saddam’s sons were preparing "martyrdom operations" in London before they were deposed. I’m just concerned, as any sentient being at this point would be, that our occupation strategy never created the stability essential for the good things Powerline and I both want for Iraq. I think it’s unfair to describe me in this sense as a defeatist. I want victory. I link to any reasonable glimmer of hope I can find; and I still have not given up on a decent outcome. I’m just a realist about how far away from victory the Bush administration’s war-management has taken us.

On the plus side, Hinderaker links to a fascinating website that provides statistics for casualties and fatalities in Iraq. They have no graph for Iraqi civilian casualties. But just look at April.

The Boston Globe today has a new, exhaustive story on how this president is pushing forward the boundaries of executive power – declaring his ability to break or ignore several hundred laws passed during his term of office. Money quote:

Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, "whistle-blower" protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research.

This may be a corrolary to his remarkable record of never vetoing any bills. Since he doesn’t believe he has to execute so many of them, why should he bother vetoing?

"I believe that the government that governs best is a government that governs least, and by these standards we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq," – Stephen Colbert, last night. I escaped before the dinner, but I did get to meet Mary Cheney and her partner, Heather Poe, a committed gay couple and thereby targeted by her father’s administration and party leadership. Cheney’s book is due out soon. I’m looking forward to reading it.

The gossip at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last night was along the lines reported by David Shuster:

"While his supporters continue to put a good face on his lengthy grand jury testimony, other sources close to Karl Rove say the presidential adviser is now more worried, not less, that he’s going to get indicted. The sources say Rove was surprised by some of the questions he was asked, and by the fact the session stretched on for three and a half hours … By all accounts, volunteering to testify to a grand jury is a risky proposition. Lawyers say it is usually done when there is nothing else that may stop an indictment."

The coming week my be the critical one for Karl Rove. Most of the other dominoes have toppled. Could this one be about to go?

The old country – at least its capital – is hard to distinguish from an American blue state any more. And its most american characteristic is is anti-Americanism. My take on a week in England can be read here.

I wonder if in the next national security debate, there may not be some on the left who favor a harder line against Iran than some on the right. Iran, after all, is the ultimate exemplar of fundamentalist religious right government. Its regime is brutal toward women and gays and Jews. If you distrust American Christian fundamentalists, who do not condone violence or terrorism, and who are restrained by something called the Constititution, how can you not be horrified by Tehran? Rod Liddle has been a Guardian columnist, and editor of the highly influential BCC Radio Four Today program for several years. He shouldn’t be pigeonholed ideologically; but he sure isn’t a conservative. He hired Andrew Gilligan, of "dodgy dossier" fame. And he’s hawkish on nuclear mullahs:

Never mind such niceties as verifying Iran’s nuclear aims: there is still a large tranche of the western world that believes with bovine obduracy that because we and the Americans and the French and the Israelis have nukes, why shouldn’t poor old Third World Iran? Fair play to the burka boys, don’t you think? The answer is simple and yet — in some quarters — quite unsayable: because it is Iran.

I think we have more time to exhaust every other option against Tehran; and I suspect that Ahmadinejad is deliberately trying to provoke reaction right now for domestic reasons. But in the end, I agree with Liddle. Giving eschatological, anti-Semitic religious fanatics a nuclear capacity is not an option. It cannot be allowed to happen.

Another astonishing piece of contempt for democracy from vice president Dick Cheney:

A standing executive order, strengthened by President Bush in 2003, requires all agencies and "any other entity within the executive branch" to provide an annual accounting of their classification of documents. More than 80 agencies have collectively reported to the National Archives that they made 15.6 million decisions in 2004 to classify information, nearly double the number in 2001, but Cheney continues to insist he is exempt.
Explaining why the vice president has withheld even a tally of his office’s secrecy when such offices as the National Security Council routinely report theirs, a spokeswoman said Cheney is "not under any duty" to provide it.

Is this veep not only above the law but also above obeying presidential executive orders? Just when you think the hubris of this crew couldn’t intensify, you see more evidence. I think Richard Cheney needs a new middle name. Milhous.

Frank Rich’s opposition to anything George W. Bush has ever done or might ever do led him to be much more prescient about the failures in Iraq than many were (including me). Today, he writes (TimesDelete) about the attempt to hold Donald Rumsfeld accountable for his persistent botching of the war:

Mr. Rumsfeld is merely a useful, even essential, scapegoat for the hawks in politics and punditland who are now embarrassed to have signed on to this fiasco. For conservative hawks, he’s a convenient way to deflect blame from where it most belongs: with the commander in chief. For liberal hawks, attacking Mr. Rumsfeld for his poor execution of the war means never having to say you’re sorry for leaping on (and abetting) the blatant propaganda bandwagon that took us there.

This is a little glib. I don’t know of many conservative hawks critical of the war who don’t hold Bush accountable for keeping a defense secretary of such manifest failures of judgment. It’s just that in a presidential system, short of the extreme option of impeachment, we’re stuck with the president we have. We’re even stuck with his veep. But we’re not necessarily stuck with a SecDef. Hence the focus. As for liberal hawks, many have said they’re sorry for their own past mistakes, but, unlike Rich, don’t want to throw in the towel, for the sake of the Iraqi people and America’s longterm interests. Out of genuine concern for the security of thwe West and genuine revulsion at the evil of Saddam’s regime, we believed WMD intelligence before the war; and, after 9/11, felt it reckless not to assume the worst. That is not the same as "abetting propaganda". And if it was, it was certainly unwitting.

Rich was right about the character and judgment of some of these people in the White House; and he was certainly right when I was wrong. I genuinely didn’t think they’d be this incompetent or doctrinaire. I genuinely didn’t think one of the most experienced foreign policy teams in high office would throw out the Geneva Conventions almost off-handedly; or dismiss serious military concerns about troop levels, when evidence of crisis was staring them in the face. So my and other criticism of Rumsfeld is driven not as a way to distract from our past misjudgments, which we’ve acknowledged, but to do as good a job as we can to help rectify and atone for them. After all, this is not about us or Rich; it’s about Iraqis, the sacrifice of so many to bring a better future to that region and the world, and doing all we can to salvage what’s left.

Yep, they have to wear headscarves in order to play. And that goes for Western visiting teams as well.