Month: April 2007

A reader writes:

On the day the charges against the Duke lacrosse players were dropped, one of the biggest most sensational legal stories of the year, I eagerly awaited Nancy Grace’s comments (though not expecting much in the way of introspection or humility). Instead she didn’t even show up for her nightly TV show, sending in a guest host instead. The next night Nancy was back, but made not a single mention of the Duke case, much less any sort of mea culpa. What a coward.

This is not, I’d say, a surprise.

They’re both punting on a simple question: whether they support South Carolina’s ultrasound-before-abortion bill. This is not about Roe. It’s a simple policy question for various states. Where do they stand?

A review of the book cited here.

National Review’s Corner has yet to mention the bombing yesterday of the Iraqi parliament or the destruction of a landmark bridge in Baghdad connecting Sunni and Shiite districts. Off-message, I guess. Like the entire war.

I’m not the first conservative to be cast out as a "liberal" by the National Review crowd. Clive Davis remembers another from Sam Tanenhaus’s bio.

[Whittaker] Chambers was sounding precariously like a liberal. So be it. He had wearied of ideological battles. "I have scarcely an interest in invective tags." His prevailing interest was simply to "grope for reality".

Another gay man, of course. And so doubly suspect.

"Does Krauthammer really expect people to buy this crap?" – Matt Yglesias.

To which the answer, I’m afraid, is: yes. The one thing that truly bugged me about Charles’s column today is that he approvingly cites McCain’s speech which contained the following sentence:

For the first time in four years, we have a strategy that deals with how things really are in Iraq and not how we wish them to be.

Has Charles ever written a sentence as honest as that about the people and strategy he has been supporting for the past six years? Maybe I missed something. But if you really are trying to persuade people that the surge really is succeeding – the day after the Parliament and a key bridge are blown up in the heart of Baghdad – then you’d be more credible if you copped to your own errors of judgment in the past – and explained why now is different.

Same post – with subsequently added, bonus spin:

Howie Carr condemned Imus? If memory serves, Howie Carr’s radio show was the most offensive radio program I’d ever heard when I listened to it during the 2000 New Hampshire primary–more offensive, in terms of ethnic insensitivity and general sneering inhumanity than anything I’ve seen attributed to Imus’s broadcast.

**–In 2004, I appear to have blogged that when I tuned in again that year, "Carr’s show wasn’t vile anymore." I defer to my 2004 self on that issue. Still. …

Look: Mickey is not guilty of anything here but blogging in real time – and of having blogged in real time for years. Some minor inconsistencies over the years are inevitable – in fact proof that you’re a human being and not a robot. I just wish he were a little more tolerant of others, ahem, in the same boat.

Johann Hari has a profile of Andrew Roberts in TNR. Money quote:

Yet, beyond this surface sycophancy, there is something darker and more fetid. Bush, Cheney, and – in a recent, glowing cover story – National Review, have, in fact, embraced a man with links to white supremacism, whose book is not a history but an ahistorical catalogue of apologies and justifications for mass murder that even blames the victims of concentration camps for their own deaths. The decision to laud Roberts provides a bleak insight into the thinking of the Bush White House as his presidential clock nears midnight.

Matt has a cow here. The piece is pretty stunning. Roberts makes Imus look like Oprah. And he’s advising Bush!

I couldn’t help thinking about both last night. This week’s South Park was its usual sharp, subversive self. And the visual games they play with race and gender and sexual orientation, and the language they use, leaves Imus in the dust. And yet South Park is not in the slightest bit offensive to me at all. This week, they had a hilarious parody of 300, including a battle between a phalanx of determined lesbians defending a gay bar called "Les Bos" and a group of Eurotrash Persian club owners threatening to take over the club and fill it with velvet blue carpet, gold curtain rods and white statues. They also threw in some Latino immigrant stereotypes for good measure. How do they pull it off?

Three reasons, I think. The first is that they’re a cartoon. No actual person has to take responsibility for saying any of the naughty words and stereotypes involved. When Eric Cartman tells Kyle that he should go back to San Francisco with the rest of the Jews, it’s the character voicing the collective bigoted id – not an actual human being. It may be that in a multicultural society, cartoons will become the primary medium for speaking honestly and humorously about our differences. The same goes in a way for Sacha Baron Cohen who has created a character, Borat, to voice these things. It’s not him. The distance matters, and enables comedy based on bigotry not actually to be bigotry. The creators can legitimately say they’re not actual haters; they’re just exploring and making fun of prejudice, and invoke the First Amendment to defend themselves. Without this distancing device, Ricky Gervais, Dave Chapelle and Sarah Silverman would be in deep trouble. But even they sometimes balk, as Chapelle recently did, because it’s a morally precarious path to travel at times.

Second, South Park’s creators actually get and love the subcultures they lampoon. The amazing thing about this week’s South Park is how detailed the observation was. The lesbian bar was a classic – it was clearly created by people with actual and acute knowledge of what lesbian bars are like – and there were many hilarious shades of recognizable dykiness in the cartoon figures. In fact, this week’s episode was a landmark in mainstream depiction of lesbianism. It didn’t rely on any hoary stereotypes that spring from ignorance and fear; it created stereotypes based on knowledge and fondness.

Lastly, anyone watching the show can tell very very quickly that its creators are not actually bigots. You don’t need to know these guys personally to see that. In general, I think the American public is pretty shrewd about this. Mel Gibson got roasted because he is, in fact, a self-aware, vicious anti-Semite. Michael Richards? Confused guy who didn’t even realize his own repressed bigotry, until it came pouring out. Don Imus? I think most people think he actually is a bigot – and that’s why he got fired. It wasn’t just a shtick. Ann Coulter? A strange case. I can’t tell if she’s a bigot; she’s just decided to deploy hate in order to make money. Her "persona," however, is not removed enough from her person to get her a pass. And her support for political forces that would demonize and marginalize gay couples deprives her of the South Park defense, however many closet-cases she befriends. Besides, she beat up on "faggots." As Harvey Fierstein points out, we’re still fair game. Imus targeted all blacks and all women. That’s a majority of the population. Coulter picked on three percent. She’s smarter. And viler.

The romantic drawbacks of some anti-depressants. Can’t say I’ve felt any myself.