Month: February 2007

"Well, it seems that the military has gone around and fired a whole bunch of people who speak foreign languages — Farsi and Arabic, etc… For some reason, the military seems more afraid of gay people than they are against terrorists, but they’re very brave with the terrorists … If the terrorists ever got a hold of this information, they’d get a platoon of lesbians to chase us out of Baghdad," – congressman Gary Ackerman, to Condi Rice yesterday.

My favorite singer from last night gets booted out of the competition – for once getting busted for possessing weed. Yep: musicians are no longer allowed to get near the stuff. Musicians …

Marty Peretz unloads on George Soros. Money quote from Sixty Minutes in 1998:

Kroft: "My understanding is that you went … went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews."

Soros: "Yes, that’s right. Yes."

Kroft: "I mean, that’s–that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?"

Soros: "Not, not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don’t … you don’t see the connection. But it was–it created no–no problem at all."

Kroft: "No feeling of guilt?"

Soros: "No."

It’s by Gregg Easterbrook, another Atlantic colleague. I like its ecumenism:

God (or Adonai or Allah), let me play well but fairly.
Let competition make me strong but never hostile.
In this and in all things, guide me to the virtuous path.
If I know victory, grant me happiness;
If I am denied, keep me from envy.
See me not when I am cheered, but when I bend to help my opponent up.
Seal it in my heart that everyone who takes the field with me becomes my brother.
Remind me that sports are just games.
Teach me something that will matter once the games are over.
And if through athletics I set an example – let it be a good one.

(Photo of Welsh rugby team before their game with Ireland last week by Stu Forster of Getty. In Wales, rugby is a religion, so this prayer seemed appropriate.)

One thing that the virulently anti-gay position of the Republican party must deal with is the next generation. I’ve been to several campuses the past few years to give talks and meet students, and one of the most striking things is not just how over it most campuses are on the gay issue, but how the younger generation reacts to the word "conservative." When I was in college, it had something to do with fighting communism, increasing individual liberty, lowering taxes, getting government off our backs, etc. Now, it is almost completely identified with religious intolerance. A key reason for that, I think, is the gay issue – and the gulf between attitudes among the young and their parents.

The next generation, by and large, doesn’t care. As this USA Today story shows, kids are now coming out all over the country in their early teens, where only a decade ago, it was college, and a decade before it was in their twenties. The accelerating pace of social acceptance, whether you like it or not, is an empirical fact. I wonder how many Republicans realize that the Rove strategy of appealing to fundamentalist faith as the critical political ideology of the right could eventually destroy the conservative movement. It might have secured a few short-term victories, but at the expense of medium-term coherence as a coalition and long-term collapse. And I have a suspicion that the collapse could come sooner than some might imagine.

Johann Hari sees some post-modern art he doesn’t like at all. I don’t blame him. The artist in question, however, had a cow:

What a cheap fat-faced ugly four-eyed shot. Cheaper still because a lazy editor saw fit to allow a journalist to sling words like "fascist" around and permit shoddy thoughtcrimes to stand as journalism? Oh yes you did!

"Thoughtcrimes"? See for yourself.

Here’s an Amnesty International ad from 1989, exposing waterboarding as torture. I don’t think they ever imagined that an American president would one day authorize it. Neither did I. Notice that there is no question as to whether this is torture. It took war criminals like Rumsfeld and far-right hacks at the WSJ editorial board to do that.

Christianists strike again in Africa.

The Libby trial has proven to be high entertainment for the Beltway, if only because (so far), the case for Libby’s perjury seems damn near impregnable. Maybe the defense will turn things around. But it has done something else, I think. Patrick Fitzgerald has been adamant about linking Libby’s actions at almost every turn to his political master, Dick Cheney. So what, you might ask? You know the talking points: this is not even about a leak any more, it’s about perjury; Libby wasn’t the real culprit anyway – Armitage and Rove were; Plame wasn’t really undercover anyway, etc etc. I tend to buy most of that but none of it explains what seems to me to be the central question of the case.

Why did Dick Cheney care so much about Joe Wilson? Wilson was, if he’ll excuse me, a two-bit, irrelevant jerk in the grand scheme of things. His Niger report was not central to the WMD case; it would almost certainly have blown over as an issue; the Brits maintained their position that the uranium outreach was for real; even the White House climbed down on the SOTU wording eventually; the public didn’t really care.

But Cheney cared. In fact, he cared terribly. He cared so much he risked outing a CIA agent, something he must have known was very dangerous – to both himself and his cronies. He is no fool and has been around Washington for a long time. He knew the risks, and he took them anyway. While the insurgency was first beginning to take off in Iraq, Cheney was far more focused on fighting a petty Beltway skirmish in the press over a petty issue in the recent past.

Why? There are only two plausible explanations I can think of for the disproportionate concern. The first is pure arrogance. Cheney thought of himself – and still does – as a sort of prince regent protecting the country from its enemies, arrogating to himself enormous and unconstitutional executive powers, assuring the world that the WMD evidence was watertight, declaring the insurgency in its "last throes", embracing the "dark side" of torture techniques for the good of all, and so on. Any querying of his position was an affront a man of his arrogance couldn’t tolerate – even if it meant risking a huge amount to squash a political bug the size of Wilson.

The alternative explanation is that Cheney was scared – so scared he took a huge risk that eventually led to the loss and public humiliation of his most trusted aide, Scooter Libby. But why would he be scared? The most plausible inference is that he knew he had deliberately rigged the WMD evidence to ensure that the war took place. He knew, even if the president was blithely convinced otherwise, that the WMD evidence was weak, and his success in distorting the evidence was threatened by Wilson. Not that Wilson had all the goods – Cheney must have known this was a minor matter. It was the danger that journalists or skeptics pulling on the thread that Wilson represented could get closer to the much bigger truth of WMD deception. This is a huge deal for one single reason: if true, it means that the White House acted in bad faith in making the case for war. There is no graver charge than that. In fact, if true, it’s impeachable. I don’t want to believe it. But I find it increasingly plausible that this is what Patrick Fitzgerald smells in the Libby case. He can’t prove it yet; he may never prove it. But he’s getting warmer; and he won’t give up.

(Photo: Alex Wong/Getty.)

Some parallels? Money quote:

OK. Take a breath. The U.S. economy is not Iraq, and today’s headlines are upbeat: The economy’s vigor is producing tax revenue that is keeping today’s deficits in check, and the unabated willingness of foreigners to lend to the U.S. is keeping interest rates down.

But look ahead, and there is an unwelcome parallel between Iraq and the budget. Current policy is unsustainable, but there is no easy way out. Extend the president’s tax cuts beyond their scheduled expiration in 2009 and 2010, and the fiscal hole is enormous. Let them expire, and the tax increases could derail the economy.