Month: October 2010

We discuss the tenth anniversary of the Dish and much more here. From last night.

Democrat Joe Manchin, running for Senate in West Virginia, ups the ante:

Weigel jeers:

[H]ow does [Republican opponent] John Raese answer this? Diving at a copy of the Affordable Care Act with a flamethrower in his hand and a knife in his teeth?

Dave Roberts gives more context:

Manchin's been a popular governor, but lately he's gotten caught up in the conservative backlash and fallen behind his Republican opponent, John Raese. That's why he's flailing to the right. Dem leadership says this is a must-win race to keep control of the Senate, so they're stumping for him, but as Nate Silver says, Manchin is refudiating virtually every policy position associated with Democrats, so it's not clear what exactly they win if he wins.

PPP has a new poll out finding Manchin with a narrow lead. 

Tim Cavanaugh is awarding it to pols who take stances or make promises utterly disconnected from what they'll actually be empowered to do if elected. This installment goes to a California gubernatorial candidate who touts her support for Israel.

Harry Joe Enten gives a lesson:

"GOP Romps to Victory; Captures Majority in both House & Senate" is a possible November 3rd headline that is starting to look like a real possibility. In the case of the House, a majority looks more like a probably. The Democratic argument against such an outcome goes something like "our campaigns are just kicking into high gear, and we will bring the argument to the people." If the headline holds true, Republicans are likely to echo this platitude after Election Day "we ran good campaigns, people heard our arguments, and we won!" The truth is that both of these generic statements are mostly false. While some campaigns have made a difference (e.g. Dick Blumenthal's large military record exaggerations, and the emergence of Christine O'Donnell as the Republican nominee in Delaware), the overall nature of the upcoming Republican romp was determined long ago.

Shhhh. It's a tough enough job market for pundits and journalists anyway.

I don't know what to say about yesterday's many tributes except thank you. I'm peuce with chuffedness. I am also happy to be reminded of the infamous prime time butt-rub. One reader, however, makes a serious point I should address, about that infamous sentence in a piece I wrote a few days after 9/11. The piece was a vast one, but the sentence I wrote was both sloppy and disgraceful. I did address the issue at the time.

Here's the offending sentence:

"The middle part of the country–the great red zone that voted for Bush–is clearly ready for war. The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead–and may well mount a fifth column."

Here's my first attempt at self-defense:

Note what I didn't say. I didn't say that the vast majority of Gore voters aren't patriots or that they don't support this war as much as anyone else. Later in the piece, I pay particular tribute to New Yorkers, mostly Gore voters, who have shown the world their humanity and courage this past week. The paragraph follwing that sentence continues:

"But by striking at the heart of New York City, the terrorists ensured that at least one deep segment of the country ill-disposed toward a new president is now the most passionate in his defense. Anyone who has ever tried to get one over on a New Yorker knows what I mean. The demons who started this have no idea about the kind of people they have taken on."

I'm sorry but it's completely clear I am not damning an entire section of the country because of the way they voted.

Elsewhere in the same piece I say,

"[Giuliani's] combination of chutzpah, practicality and deep, deep compassion is the essence of New York City. His troops – the firefighters and cops and medics and volunteers of the city – would make the Londoners of 1940 proud. If New York alone were a nation – and it has almost twice the population of Israel – then this war would already be well under way, and its outcome in no doubt."

So much for damning the blue zone. What I was clearly saying is that some decadent leftists in "enclaves" – not regions – on the coasts are indeed more concerned with what they see as the evil of American power than the evil of terrorism, that their first response was to blame America, and that their second response was to disavow any serious military action.

I really was thinking of far left academics. But even then, I quickly realized this was a step too far and apologized:

I have absolutely nothing against the countless patriots in the blue zone, as my tribute to New Yorkers and the rest of the essay shows. I was talking about a few intellectuals and their cohorts who clearly do feel ambivalence about America fighting and winning this war. But these broad categories of "blue" and "red zones" can be misleading and unhelpful. I won't use this shorthand again. Ditto the shorthand of "fifth column." I have no reason to believe that even those sharp critics of this war would actually aid and abet the enemy in any more tangible ways than they have done already. And that dissent is part of what we're fighting for.

By fifth column, I meant simply their ambivalence about the outcome of a war on which I believe the future of liberty hangs. Again, I retract nothing. But I am sorry that one sentence was not written more clearly to dispel any and all such doubts about its meaning. Writing 6,000 words under deadline in the heat of war can lead to occasional sentences whose meaning is open to misinterpretation.

Let me take one more chance nine years later to apologize again, and to say that, in retrospect, my vitriol for the academic left should not have veered into that territory, and I am ashamed I went there. But also to clarify some myths about it: I was not describing half the country (really, truly), and I was not describing opponents of the Iraq war (that was way in the future).

My better angel at the time wrote this piece, "This Is A Religious War." It represents my real thinking more accurately than that disgraceful, sloppy sentence, and I hope it helps balance out the offense.

A reader writes:

Your reader clearly knows much more than I do about marijuana use as it relates to child psychology.  I'm not questioning those assertions. But this struck me as a little odd: "But let's not kid ourselves; more kids will have more access to weed, and this is a problem for which we need to prepare."  How is your reader so certain? 

Survey data reliably shows us that children today can more easily access illicit cannabis than either alcohol or tobacco.  California has seen no increase in teen use after the medical marijuana industry in that state exploded.  Usage numbers among Dutch teenagers are even lower than they are here.  There's simply no evidence that more liberal cannabis policies lead to higher use among kids.

Another writes:

Those who distribute marijuana are already violating the law and operate in a black market, where there is no incentive to follow any rules like age limits. However, legitimate establishments that sell alcohol have many incentives to follow the rules, including the possibility of losing their license to operate.

Of course we still have underage drinking (though I think that has more to do with America's schizophrenic attitudes towards alcohol and a legal drinking age so high as to be unenforceable), but there is no reason to believe that legalized marijuana will lead to an increase in access. Though it sounds counter-intuitive, legalization, if done correctly, would decrease the access children have to marijuana. While the arguments about individual liberty and decreasing violence are indeed compelling, it is this argument that I believe most likely to win the day over those skeptical of the idea.

Another:

Most of that child psychiatrist's fears are quite justified. I started smoking pot at 14 and wish I had waited.

The teenage brain truly is still developing and, just as important, life habits are settling into place. I was lucky that my motivation and energy doesn't seem to be sapped by weed, and life is now good, but it's still critically important that kids be educated about the genuine dangers of marijuana. (As opposed to the scare-tactics of our current D.A.R.E. regime.)

What the shrink is wrong about, however, is the idea that legalization will create greater access for kids. I started smoking pot at 14 because it was significantly easier to get than alcohol. Buying booze always involved either an illegal fake ID handed over to a stranger, or approaching a homeless person and negotiating with them. Neither of these were things I wanted to do at 14.

On the other hand, my friend's older brother sold pot and I had known the guy for years. And since what he was doing was illegal anyway, he didn't give a shit how old we were.  Kids can get pot. Period.

The point is that by giving someone an opportunity to start a legitimate business selling something, you make them a stakeholder in the process. Many bars and clubs really are conscientious about checking ID because they don't want to lose their license by getting caught serving underage kids. I can assure you that there are not many drug dealers who have a moral qualm about selling drugs to teens, especially marijuana. But licensing them to sell gives them a commercial incentive not to sell to kids.

If cannabis is legalized, will there be people who buy it for kids? Of course, just like I sometimes bought booze for my younger cousins when I turned 21. But at least when I was doing that, I felt a responsibility to take care of them, watch them, and not give them enough to really hurt themselves.

Another:

I think the child psychologist is quite wrong about legalization making access to weed easier for teens.  When I was in high school, 11 years ago in the backwoods of Missouri, it was much easier to get get marijuana than it was to get alcohol.  You had to find someone's older brother or older friend to get alcohol; getting ditch weed was just a matter of knowing the right classmate (and everyone knew who the right classmate was).  Drug dealers don't check ID. 

I don't imagine that it's gotten any harder to get weed in the past 11 years, especially in California. So legalization will probably make it harder for teens to get weed than it is today. It will be a different story for college kids, since they know a lot more 21 year olds who will buy it legally, but at least they won't have to deal with shady drug dealers to score a bit of weed.

In a post that runs through several of the ways that Pamella Gellar is an ignorant hate-monger, Jeffrey Goldberg does a particularly good job highlighting her most paranoid fear:

A Martian takeover of New Jersey is more likely than the imposition of a caliphate, or of Muslim law, on America, for any number of reasons, including: One percent of America's population is Muslim; within this one percent, a vanishingly small minority believes in the ideology of al-Qaeda, which propogates the idea of the restoration of the caliphate; a much greater percentage of American Muslims believes in interfaith dialogue (I know this from personal experience, having been invited to countless interfaith dialogue groups). Only a true paranoid could look at America as it is today and see the creeping takeover of Islamist caliphate ideology.

Amen. And no, I have not yet gotten around to addressing Jeffrey's latest pirouettes on the peace process or even his case for Israel launching World War Three, against the wishes of the US and eery other Western ally. But I will. And it won't be pretty. Civil, as befits a colleague I respect and a man I care about, but not pretty.

Drum roll, please:

 

A couple of obvious thoughts. Paladino speaks of "perverts who target our children and seek to destroy their lives." This is the gay equivalent of the medieval (and Islamist) blood-libel against Jews. To conflate gay people with child-abusers is an archaic and disgusting calumny, to portray us as a "threat to children" is as dark and as vile a smear as you will find. Many of us are children, in the first place, and although there are some gay abusers, as well as straight abusers, the overwhelming majority of gays and straights love our children and nieces and nephews, would never dream of harming any child in any way, and many gay people indeed have taught and guided and reared children over the centuries, and to levels of excellence bar none. I don't doubt that a gay teacher taught Paladino once; the odds are high. And when I think of the lives of great service so many gay people live in the worlds of education, mentorship and parenting, his demonization sickens me even more.

What's even more amazing is the context of these remarks. Paladino cannot be unaware of the recent spate of gay teen suicides, or the disgusting act of torture against two gay men in the Bronx. At a time when it is the responsibility of public figures to condemn this kind of violence, to defend gay people from the rhetoric that fuels such violence, Paladino has decided to ratchet up the bigoted language in a way that will only help legitimize anti-gay violence. That he is running for governor of New York, and has this notion of responsibility and decency at this moment in time, is a low-point for even today's gay-baiting GOP. Now watch if anyone in the national Republican leadership disowns this bigotry, and disowns him. That will tell you a lot.

Lastly, he makes a case for marriage and family. Great. But in doing so he simply assumes that gay people are not part of people's families, and he ignores the fact that many have already married across this country and the world, and brought up children, and done so magnificently. He places one segment of society outside respectability, and outside the family, implying that it is a choice, and the "gay agenda" is to corrupt children to make that choice. I might add that this is not even orthodox Catholic doctrine. Even the Pope acknowledges that gay people do not choose our orientation. Even in as dismal a document as the 1986 Letter, Ratzinger wrote:

It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the Church's pastors wherever it occurs. It reveals a kind of disregard for others which endangers the most fundamental principles of a healthy society. The intrinsic dignity of each person must always be respected in word, in action and in law.

So this is, for a Catholic like Paladino, a kind of social scapegoating and demonization whose history is well known to every student of history. The Catholic hierarchy in New York has a moral duty to condemn this "violent malice in speech" and "disregard for others". It has no place in free and tolerant society or a free and tolerant political party.

And then, finally, the assertion that none of this means he is anti-gay or holds any animus toward gay people – just that all of us are a threat to children, that we are "brainwashing" kids into thinking gayness is ok, and that the notion that we may be "proud" of our lives sticks literally in his throat. This, mind you, in New York, the bluest of blue states. And of course, to an audience of religious fundamentalists.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is what the GOP has become. In 1978, Ronald Reagan took a stand in defense of openly gay school-teachers. Today, DeMint and Paladino want to cleanse us from schools because we allegedly threaten to brainwash or rape children. How much clearer can the degeneracy be than that?

Avent furrows his brow:

Ron Brownstein pointed out, over the weekend, that the Republican party is almost unique among major political parties across the world in its overwhelming skepticism of the science of global warming. As an American living in America, I counted this as one of the pieces of knowledge I held in my possession, but not one which I tended to reflect on and fully appreciate. But one needn’t spend much time in the main offices of one of the world’s top weeklies to understand the real significance of this state of affairs. It poses an enormous problem to the leaders of the world’s other major powers, and there is almost nothing they can do about it.

… Imagine the world’s major powers sitting down in the early 20th century to negotiate a treaty on the law of the sea, only to have one of America’s major political parties vow to defeat any settlement, on the grounds that the world is in fact flat.