Author: Andrew Sullivan

“For a simple and compelling reason, traditional marriage has been the norm in every political community for 5,000 years.” – Senator Orrin Hatch, National Review. Hatch is a Mormon.

IF YOU LIVE IN VIRGINIA: Give Senator Warner a call. He hasn’t made his mind up on the religious right amendment to the Constitution. He’s a good conservative and so should be able to see the trashing of federalism and stripping of civil rights that this amendment entails. 202 224 2023.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “It is not just foreigners who now endure indignities at the US border, it is also native born US citizens. My partner and I just returned from a trip to South Africa and Zambia. We had no trouble entering either country and were met with friendly faces at all borders. Our passports were all we needed to show overseas (and they are not even biometric). There was no assumption of guilt that we were there to cause problems. That is until we got back to Atlanta. Upon returning to Atlanta, it took almost 45 minutes to get through immigration (separately of course since we are not a family). I can’t imagine how long actual foreigners had to wait, their lines were much worse.
Additionally, our anti-terrorist measures are something of a joke overseas. We were on a 17 hour plane ride in which we were not supposed to hang out in the aisles or near the bathrooms. I guess we should all stay in our seats and get deep-vein thrombosis instead. In fact, when the pilot announced the rules the FAA had in place, you could feel the derision and sarcasm dripping in his voice. The US has lost almost all respect overseas.” More feedback on the Letters Page.

If there’s one thing the U.S. could be doing right now, it’s thinking about how it can improve the country’s image abroad. So what does the Bush administration do? It imposes a new immigration rule that will make life extremely difficult for foreign journalists to cover this country adequately, forcing them out of the country for long periods (up to four months) in order to renew their visas. It’s already a nightmare to enter this country, because of the new security regulations. British journalists have been jailed, humiliated and deported for the most minor of details, immigration officials at the borders now have powers that defy judicial review and act accordingly. Many of my European friends tell me that they simply won’t visit the U.S. any more because of the experience of entering what appears to be a police state at the border – and the risk of summary arrest for no good reason. This is bad enough when it affects millions of ordinary people – tourists, business-people (I’ve noticed a big decline in European tourists on the Cape this summer). But when you target the group that is responsible for conveying what the United States is to the rest of the world, you are only hurting yourself.

Orrin Hatch’s piece in National Review Online is a depressing read. Hatch was once skeptical of the Musgrave amendment – its sweeping removal from states any ability to determine who can get married, its denial of any legally enforceable benefits of any kind for gay couples anywhere in America. But Santorum has obviously gotten to him. It is becoming clear, as I predicted, that the anti-gay part of the Rove campaign is now in full force, as a means of galvanizing the fundamentalist base. Hatch also now adheres to the Republican establishment doctrine that there can never be a public mention of “gays, lesbians or homosexuals”. To give us that sliver of dignity – the right to be named in describing an amendment designed to strip us of basic civil rights for ever – would outrage the Dobsons and Falwells and Reeds. For them it is important to remember, gay people are just sick heterosexuals. For them, homosexuality is a mental illness, not a dignified part of a human being’s identity. It is so dispiriting to see one political party – as a minority comes of age – reverting to the attitudes of the 1950s. But that is what Bush has done. They’re pulling out all the stops on this one – and those who believe that this FMA is somehow dead or doomed are being culpably naive.

The most effective and often hilarious critic of John Kerry now says he’ll vote for him. The rationale? Here it is:

[W]e survived Carter and we’d survive Kerry (though it will be a long, hard slog!). I plan to vote for him because I think a) we need to take a time out from Bush’s strident public global terror war in order to prevent it from becoming a damaging, lifelong West vs. Islam clash–in order to “rebrand” America and digest the hard-won gains we’ve made in Iraq and Afghanistan (if they even remain gains by next January). Plus, b) it would be nice to make some progress on national health care, even if it’s only dialectical “try a solution and find out it doesn’t work” progress. I could change my mind–if, for example, I thought Kerry would actually sell out an incipient Iraqi democracy in a fit of “realistic” Scowcroftian stability-seeking (an issue Josh Marshall’s recent Atlantic piece doesn’t resolve). But I don’t intend to agonize like last time.”

Good for Mickey, I guess. I think it’s sign of real intelligence that someone can both essentially loathe a candidate and still, for various reasons, vote for him.

“To affirm … that [“Fahrenheit 9/11] was crowned (in Cannes) for its cinemagraphic qualities is either proof of incompetence, a pure lie or a cynical joke.” – Le Monde, today. I’d opt for “pure lie.”

A useful summary of five years of revived repression from the Jihadist religious right in Tehran. Check out Hippercritical’s posts as well.

Today, July 8, is a day of protest against the Jihadist dictators in Tehran. Here’s a useful list of planned demonstrations, if that’s your bag. This is also a day for checking out some pro-democracy websites/blogs. Here’s one. And another. Send me more and I’ll keep linking throughout the day.

Kate O’Beirne has an interesting follow-up to her previous complaint about the lack of “Bush Republicans” in the New York Convention line-up. But what is a “Bush Republican”? I think it has to be a combination of the social policy of the religious right (the FMA, bans on embryo research, government support for religious charities, etc), the fiscal policy of the Keynesian left (massive new domestic spending combined with “deficits don’t matter”), and the foreign policy of liberal moralism (democratization as a policy in the Middle East). So it’s not surprising, is it, that there aren’t many principled “Bush Republicans.” Again, the GOP crib sheet on Edwards is interesting in this respect. He gets zinged, for example, for opposing the new Medicare entitlement. So how many Republicans positively believe in creating a new and fantastically expensive entitlement for the wealthiest segment in American society? I don’t mean defensively explain it as unavoidable. I mean positively endorse it as an element in their conservative philosophy. The sad truth is that if Bush Republicanism exists, it’s one of the most ramshackle distillations of political expediency ever tarted up as an “ism”. The only compelling conservative message that Bush can use to appeal to the country as a whole is that he stands between us and a new wave of terror. So his campaign will have to be based in fear. I’m not sure that, in America, that works very well. But we’ll see.

Mickey Kaus opines that Peggy Noonan “has done the Democrats a big favor by coming up with [a winning message for Kerry]. The message is that America wants a respite from all the headstrong history-making of the past four years.” Noonan argues in her recent WSJ column that

The American people may come to feel that George W. Bush did the job history sent him to do. He handled 9/11, turned the economy around, went into Afghanistan, captured and removed Saddam Hussein. And now let’s hire someone who’ll just by his presence function as an emollient. A big greasy one but an emollient nonetheless. I just have a feeling this sort of thing may have some impact this year. “A return to normalcy,” with Mr. Kerry as the normal guy.

I agree – but then I wrote something almost identical last February in Time:

Here’s what a really smart Democratic contender could say to the president this fall: “Thank you, Mr president, for your leadership in difficult times. You took some tough decisions and we are safer as a result. But the very qualities that made you a perfect pick for the war so far are the very ones that make you less effective from now on. You are too polarizing a figure to bring real peace to Iraq. You are too unpopular to allow European governments to cooperate fully in the attempt to hunt down terrorists. And your deep unpopularity in half the country makes it impossible for you to make the necessary compromises that the country needs domestically. Thanks for all you’ve done, but bye-bye.”

And two weeks ago, I wrote in the Sunday Times in London:

Americans, moreover, are somewhat drained. War is a terrifying and enervating thing. The fear of annihilation at any moment at the hands of terrorists with WMDs is a difficult thing to live with – and, fairly or unfairly, they associate this fear with the Bush administration. The soothing dullness of a Boston Brahmin can appear somewhat attractive in contrast.

No I’m not saying anyone is copying anyone else – these ideas are common enough, framed differently, etc. But it seems to me that Noonan didn’t “come up with” this scenario for the Dems. I saw it coming months ago. Kerry, of course, is far too politically stupid to play this card, even passively.

THE RACISM OF RALL: I guess he needs more attention. But Ted Rall’s latest cartoon depicts his revenge fantasy on Condi Rice. She defends herself thus: “I was Bush’s beard! I was his House Nigga!” Her prison guard (in the fantasy, various members of the Bush administration are treated the way Saddam now is) then tells her: “You’re not white, stupid. Now hand over your hair straightener.” And she is sent to “Inner City Racial Re-education Camp.” If a white right-winger ever said such things about a black woman, do you think he would still be syndicated? And celebrated?

Wouldn’t it be helpful to read the Langston Hughes poem? Here it is in full. It is indeed beautiful and lyrical if a little trite at times. But it is also clearly a call to Communist revolution, as Tim Noah first observed and Bill Buckley noticed. The poem is rooted in the notion that the ideal of American freedom was a lie from the beginning for many people, and that public ownership of private property was the only hope:

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

Then there’s this:

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain–
All, all the stretch of these great green states–
And make America again!

Now I know Kerry is a liberal, but does he really want to cite a man who wanted to abolish private property and loved Stalin? Again, the right-left double standard. If a fascist poet in 1938 had called to remake a pure racial America on the lines of Hitler’s Germany, would he now be quoted by any leading politician? But the communists get a pass. Again. And again. And again.