The Best Of The Dish Today

A couple of items. First up, I have to confess I’ve been a little obsessed with the unfolding horrors of the life of one of Britain’s biggest celebrities in the last few decades, Jimmy Savile. I only covered it on the Dish once (see “When Celebrities Rape Children And Molest the Dead“, because the context is all, and if you didn’t grow up in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, it’s hard to get why his biography is so deeply disturbing. But for those still curious, here’s a review by David Hare of a new biography of Savile, In Plain Sight, that, apart from some throat-clearing at the start, really sets the scene. Money quote:

In normal circumstances, anyone who declared that the five days they spent alone with their mother’s coffin were the happiest of their life – “Once upon a time I had to share her with other people … But when she was dead, she was all mine” – would be subject to some public scrutiny. So would somebody whose first reaction after quadruple bypass surgery was to grope the attendant nurse’s breast. But by then Savile had pulled off the brilliant trick of seeming to make his surface weirdness part of what he called his “charismatic package”. “Nobody can be frightened of me. It would be beneath anyone’s dignity to be frightened of someone dressed like this.”

This was a pop-cultural icon who turns out to have assaulted, abused or raped hundreds – and was never caught.

Second, a response to Pascal Emanuel Gobry’s response to my post on “reform conservatism.” He says it does too have a grand and unifying theme – a populist and decentralizing politics aimed squarely at the needs of the working and middle classes, with an equally potent critique of cultural libertarianism. But my point was not that this wasn’t a coherent argument – just that it doesn’t really fit easily into an existing American conservative tradition (indeed runs counter to a great deal of it), and has as yet no political leader able to express it simply.

Gobry also argues that my cultural disaffection for cultural and social conservatism says absolutely nothing about the future of reform conservatism. A prosperous gay individualist like me is not exactly their target demographic – which is apparently “the fecund, the married and the lower-middle.” Fair enough. But there’s a class element here that seems a little off to me:

The Democratic Party already has the upper-middle class locked up, precisely because it panders very well at their cultural prejudices (which we hear very little about, as if America in 2014 was the only place in recorded history where only one side engages in demonization of the other side). A Republican Party that tried to go after its slice while dumping its base, which happens to be a plurality of voters in America, would, ipso facto, become a rump.

I prefer the kind of movement that lays out its concerns and seeks to get the widest and broadest public support for it, in all classes and all regions. But perhaps in this polarized age, that is no longer possible.

Today was a day for contraceptives and cup-cakes. We try to mix it up. We also tracked the Palin-Boehner impeachment fight; Khamenei’s depressingly public red line on the P5+1 negotiations; and the bias against black dogs. And I defended a religious exemption in ENDA, as most gay rights groups bailed on the idea, and HRC with it. And some clips from a recent podcast with Matthew Vines, the pioneering gay evangelical.

The most popular post of the day was yesterday’s Best of the Dish on Sarah Palin; followed by Monday’s The Tears of an Elephant.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here.  You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 15 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month.

See you in the morning.