Author: Andrew Sullivan

I just read the Washington Post interview with the president. Go read it. Tell me when you’ve read it if you still think, as many of you tell me in emails, that he’s a bumbling fool who doesn’t have a clue what’s really going on in his administration. I was also gratified to see that he backed my own interpretation of his absence in Washington State for the return of Hainan detainees and his decision not to speak out on the Cincinnati riots. “I’m a person that believes – I believe in sharing credit, and I do not believe in stepping on somebody else’s story,” Bush says. “I believe if somebody is in charge of the situation and is doing a fine job, that person ought to deserve the credit. And your question is more than just, obviously, race relations. It’s how I’m going to handle myself for the next four years in terms of when I show up. And the answer’s going to be if I think it’s appropriate. And I may think it’s less appropriate than other presidents, frankly. It’s the same question that came up about why if I’m so strong on the military, why didn’t I show up when the troops came back from China. You can make the same exact connection between the issue and my appearance.” Two other points: he doesn’t back down in drilling in the ANWR and he makes a lot of sense. Ditto on Kyoto. There’s also a refreshing candor about his remarks and a clear confidence in his own judgment. I hope I’ve not been completely suckered – and I may be basking in post-Clinton euphoria – but this guy is impressive. Impressive in his delegation, in his humor, in his grasp of what he is trying to do. So sue me for saying so. At the eve of his first hundred days, I’m glad I endorsed him – and gladder still he’s president.

GAY PRIDE AND GAY RIGHTS: A few of us have taken some hits for urging the end of gay pride parades. They’re dated, pointless and often hugely embarrassing. But no-one has yet put the case better than the Onion. Check it out.

I don’t see why Paul Weyrich had to go out of his way to say that “Christ was crucified by the Jews.” Read the piece from which it is taken and see what you think. I think it was a poke in the eye at people like me who find the Church’s history of anti-Semitism shameful and horrifying. But I don’t think it’s a serious piece of anti-Semitism in itself. It is, after all, a simple and faithful reiteration of what is in the (often anti-Semitic) Gospels. You cannot attend a Good Friday service without this commonplace being uttered, and, as yet, not even the Pope has edited the New Testament to make it less offensive on these grounds. So I think the notion that Weyrich should be hounded for this sentence – in the midst of a longer, theological piece – as Evan Gahr did in the American Spectator and as Joe Conason echoed on Salon. Still, it’s unpleasant and gratuitous. But is it more gratuitous than an almost identical piece of rhetoric which appeared in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine? Eric Konigsberg – an ex-intern at TNR I hired – has a terrific piece on the New York Knicks, in which the conversation at one point turned to Judaism and Christianity. Here’s the relevant passage:

“Then Ward said, “Jews are stubborn, E. But tell me, why did they persecute Jesus unless he knew something they didn’t want to accept?”
“What?”
“They had his blood on their hands.”
Working quickly, Houston indexed a passage on his Palm Pilot. “Matthew 26, verse 67,” he said. “Then they spit in Jesus’s face and hit him with their fists.”‘
“It say anything about who wanted Jesus dead?” Ward asked. “There are Christians getting persecuted by Jews every day. There’s been books written about this — people who are raised Jewish and find Christ, and then their parents stop talking to them.”
“You know, there’s Jews for Jesus, man,” Thomas offered me, running a hand over his cornrows.”

I think in a pinch I’d absolve both the Knicks and Weyrich of outright bigotry, and I guess Weyrich should know better than a professional basketball player. But I have yet to see Joe Conason have a cow about this one. Or even a calf.

I won’t repeat John Leo’s excellent column this week on how the elite media simply ignored what was essentially racist violence by young black youths against random white people during the Cincinnati riots. Both Leo and SmarterTimes.com are devastating about how the New York Times and other outlets just won’t report the facts if they seem to be prejudicial to a favored minority (Jesse Dirkhising, anyone?). But it is surely a pivotal moment in our culture when the first hate crime charge is brought from the Cincinnati brouhaha against … a white guy!. Apparently hate crime prosecutions will shortly be brought against some black guys as well – but not until the politically correct prosecution has been announced and instigated. No news yet on whether the thought police have interrogated the 837 other people arrested for what the New York Times politely referred to as “alarming” whites.

“Whatever explanations are forthcoming for this terrible incident [the downing of a missionary plane in Peru], Americans are entitled to ask whether this example of so-called ”collateral damage” in the militarized war on drugs is representative of a more generalized US-inspired propensity for pointless violence against innocent people.” – Boston Globe editorial today.

“Do You Approve Or Disapprove Of The Way Dick Cheney Is Handling His Job As President?” – the first question in the Washington Post’s new poll.

HUSTLED INTO CAMPS: For the record, National Review’s John Derbyshire supports in principle the forcible internment of Chinese-Americans in the event a conflict with China, defends the internment of Japanese-American citizens in World War II and even posits that, in the event of a war with an African country (go figure), black Americans would support the African country. My favorite quote: “I guarantee that when the first U.S. carrier is sunk by Chinese action, or the first American city is erased by a Chinese ICBM, Chinese nationals, including those who are U.S. Citizens, will be hustled into camps faster than you can say “executive order” and will stay there for the duration, whatever the ACLU– or even the Supreme Court– thinks about it. I hope the camps will not be very uncomfortable, for I shall be there too– the Derbyshires travel as a family. I also hope that I shall be able to maintain sufficient detachment to understand that a responsible U.S. government really has no choice in the matter.” And this is someone William F Buckley is comfortable publishing twice a week?

The Harvard establishment has finally roused itself to respond to Harvey C. Mansfield’s assertion that grade inflation is an evil and took off in the late 1960s partly because of affirmative action. The dean of the college, one Harry R. Lewis, penned an op-ed in the Harvard Crimson yesterday making the case that grade inflation has been going on for decades and that there’s no correlation between its take-off in the late 1960s and affirmative action. Since Lewis has all the data, and there’s no way to break it down racially, he doesn’t exactly clinch the argument. There’s also a pesky change in the way Harvard grades were computed and averaged in 1967. Nevertheless, the graph Lewis presents does indeed show a general rise from 1920 to 2000, but it is punctuated by what comes close to a vertical line upward in exactly the time period Mansfield suggested: 1966 – 1974. Lewis responds to the racial point by saying that “black students did not appear in significant numbers on the Harvard campus until 1970, and the period from 1970 through 1985 was the only 15-year period in the past 80 years in which there was no increase in grades at Harvard (his emphasis).” Hmmm. I’d like to see the actual numbers of black students at Harvard at that time, and I’d like to see when affirmative action was actually instituted. As to the fact that grades do indeed seem to stabilize after the mid 1970s, it would be hard for them to continue what looks like hyperinflation during the period from 1967 – 1973 (where the average grade increased by some 40 percent). Anyway, check it out for yourself. My view: if this is the best Harvard can do to rebut Mansfield’s charge, they get a B-, which these days is tantamount to an F.

PINK PISTOLS: A few years ago, Jonathan Rauch and I talked about writing a piece arguing that gays should eschew hate crime laws in favor of self-defense. It was almost a jeu d’esprit, but Jonathan took the ball and ran with it. Presto, just a few months later, and there are several “Pink Pistol” groups around the country, training homosexuals and lesbians (and all sorts of others) how to defend themselves with legal handguns. Of course, the gay left establishment is mortified – but finally a real story has been written in, of all places, the Washington Blade, the usually p.c. crib-sheet for leftist activists. It’s a fascinating and uplifting story of people finding a niche for themselves and fighting back victimology with imagination and flair. It’s also an insight into the surprising open-mindedness of some gun-toting rednecks. Check it out.

BIGOTS, ETC: I may have been premature to accept Ian Buruma’s assertion in the New Yorker that David Irving, the Holocaust “minimizer,” referred to the judge in his libel trial as “mein Fuhrer.” A reader sent me the transcript. Here’s the relevant part of Irving’s testimony: “When the off-screen chanting of slogans begins at 18:18:59 I am clearly seen to interrupt my speech, shake my head at them and gesticulate with my left hand to them to stop, and I am clearly heard to say, “You must not”, because they are shouting the “Siegheil” slogans, Mein Fuhrer, and things like, “you must not always be thinking of the past”. I am heard clearly to say: “You must always be thinking of the past. You must not keep coming out with the slogans of the past. We are thinking of the future [voice emphasized] of Germany. We are thinking of the future of the German people. As an Englishman I have to say …”, and so on. So I am quite clearly expressing extreme anger at these people who have come along with their Nazi slogans.” Although the transcript keeps “Mein Fuhrer” out of quotation marks, it seems to me more plausible that Irving was describing the shouts of the crowd, rather than actually addressing the judge. Not as funny – but more accurate. This is not to exculpate Irving’s work or views, but it is to be as scrupulous when discussing him as he is sometimes unscrupulous when addressing others.

BIGOTS, ETC II: For those of you still holding out hope that John Derbyshire is just a nice old English gent with some unpopular but important views, check out his link to a website known as vdare.com. Vdare is an anti-immigration group founded by Peter Brimelow and dedicated to keeping America as white and anglo as possible. It’s named after Virginia Dare, the first white English child born in America. Derbyshire’s main contributions appear to be dark warnings about “Sino-Fascism,” Chinese-American Gore voters, and other versions of the Yellow Peril in our midst. All this is made even weirder by the fact that Derbyshire himself says he has a Chinese wife and two half-Chinese children. I’m beginning to think he’s just plain kooky.

“Okay, I’ll admit it, I spent the inaugural weekend in denial. (He’s not my president. Most of us didn’t actually vote for the guy… ) Ignored the smarmy front-page photos of parades and balls, skipped straight to Section B to look for coverage of the protests. But the fact is, we now have a new administration that’s hostile to the things I love most: human kindness, the dignity of diversity, and the wild glory of life on earth… Looking out my window right now I can see my two girls outside under the mesquite trees in this precious riparian woodland where we live, and my heart starts to break for all the beautiful things they’ll never see if I allow unchecked Bushwhacking in the next four years. Civil rights and reproductive choice I suppose we could win back in time (though not the lives lost along the way), but the waters and wild lands devastated will never come back.” – Barbara Kingsolver, MSNBC.com. They let her build a house in “precious riparian woodland”?

I made that one up, but it captures some of the Anglo-Saxon zaniness of pub names in England. Now, it seems, Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia is set to clean up these weirdly British soubriquets for the local pisser – on p.c. grounds. “The Old Nag’s Head” is verboten for misogeny. The Philanderer and the Firkin is history. Ditto The Silent Woman. Next up: The Blind Beggar and The Black Boy Inn. These hideously insensitive monikers will probably be construed as hate-crimes before too long. But the English are a peaceful lot. I doubt they will rise up in violence until Mr Blair and his European friends insist the Brits drink their beer in liters rather than pints. Happy St George’s Day and Shakespeare’s Birthday.

HARDBALL: I’m on tonight, if you have nothing better to do.

“I think that President Bush is also very committed in drug addiction,” – President Andres Pastrana, of Columbia, quoted in the Washington Post.

TOUGH CELL: The Washington Post rightly excoriates Peter Angelos for yet another insidious class action lawsuit against cell-phone manufacturers, despite the fact that there’s no evidence that they do any harm to anyone. Angelos absurdly argues that his lawsuit is designed to raise awareness of the possibility of danger to consumers. With that standard, what’s safe? Of course, my own preference would be a lawsuit against cell-phone users, but that’s another matter.

Here’s an issue NARAL won’t touch. What happens when the sacrosanct right to kill a fetus at any stage of development for any reason gets to be politically incorrect? A fascinating piece in Sunday’s New York Times reports on what has been happening in India. Over the last decade or so, with ultra-sound technology becoming more and more available, women are aborting increasing numbers of fetuses found to be female. The resulting imbalance is getting extreme. In Punjab, India’s most fertile agricultural region, there are now only 8 girls born for every 10 boys. There’s a word for this: eugenics. The grimmer fact is that nothing seems to be able to stop it. A law was passed in 1994 outlawing ultrasound tests for gender, but it is basically impossible to enforce. Sexist eugenics is only one possibility, of course. Before too long, we’ll find all sorts of reasons to abort fetuses – wrong gender, genetic predispositions to certain diseases, wrong sexual orientation, and on and on. It seems to me that it will be impossible to stop this without the kind of intervention in abortion rights that pro-choicers refuse to countenance. At which point, pro-choicers will have to accept that eugenics are indistinguishable from their crusade or reverse or nuance their position on abortion. Hmmm. Over to you, Ms Michelman.

THE SOUND OF SILENCE: David Broder complained yesterday of President George Bush’s silence over the home-coming of the Hainan detainees, race riots in Cincinnati, and other sundry events. Jake Tapper’s rather excellent piece (yes, he can be fair sometimes) about W’s visit to the Holocaust Memorial Museum is the most effective rebuke. Silence is sometimes golden. But I think Jake misses something deeper about Bush’s reticence. Yes, I know some of you think he keeps quiet because he can’t open his mouth without a malapropism falling out, but he has excellent speech-writers who have shown he can excel if he wants. The real reason, I suspect, is something deeper. What Bush is signaling is a message about the place of politics in our national life. That place should be restricted, limned, demarcated. Part of the damage Bill Clinton did to our culture and our politics was to fuse the two seamlessly, the glue being his incessant blather and emotional incontinence. The politicization of culture was a horrible thing to watch; but the complete absorption of politics by entertainment was even worse. By his silence, Bush is actually saying something extremely important: these two fields of human life, though often connected, are categorically separate. If only the pundits and press would stop a minute and l-i-s-t-e-n.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: Goes this week, in an early showing, to Robert Rector, Heritage Foundation paleocon, for his interview in National Review Online. Paleocons are deeply dismayed by the news that teen births are at a 30-year low and that illegitimacy rates seem to have slowed, and even slightly declined, recently. How did that happen in – gasp – the Clinton years? Well, one response is simply to deny that it happened at all. Rector was asked, “What do the latest illegitimacy numbers mean? Is this good news, as the press is reporting – fewer births to teens?” Rectors answered: “Those numbers are absolute nonsense and they are deliberate distortions. The fact of the matter is that illegitimacy rose rather substantially in this period. One way to understand the distortion here is to understand that only about 14 percent of out-of-wedlock births occur to girls under age 18.” Fair enough. Fewer teen births are surely a good thing, but they aren’t as important as illegitimacy rates. But did they rise “rather substantially?” The actual rise is 1 percent, according to the CDC, and that is “due to the continued increase in the number of unmarried women of childbearing age.” So no real increase in the rate of illegitimacy. And among blacks, as Mickey Kaus has pointed out, the percentage born to unmarried mothers actually declined by a tiny amount, 0.3 percent, and since 1994, the percentage of black children born to married women has risen by about 5 percent. However you look at it, it’s pretty good news – at least stable or in the right direction. “Absolute nonsense?” “Deliberate distortion?” Please. These are splutters of someone losing a debate. Well, actually this is the coup de grace worthy of Derbyshire: “There are only four governors in the entire country who even speak favorably of marriage. The rest keep silent on the issue.” What country is Robert Rector living in?

REALITY BITES: Fresh from their victory over the evil pharmaceutical companies, African countries, now freed from the burden of colonial pillage, are gearing up to do … very, very little. You won’t read this in the New York Times but the Washington Post has a smart piece today by Karen DeYoung (I’d expect no less from her) which provides a reality check. There are squabbles between international aid agencies as to who gets to distribute the goodies, fights over whether to provide drugs subsidized by patent-owning companies or by thieves in India, and resentment by the kleptocratic governments in sub-Saharan Africa that they are being pushed around by Western do-gooders. The biggest worry is that there aren’t enough funds to both finance the drug distribution and prevention efforts – or worse, that the treatments themselves will undermine the idea that prevention is still vital. The brutal truth is, as we have found in the U.S., that the availability of good treatment lessens the fear of the virus and therefore precautions taken to prevent it. If that happens in educated alert populations in the West, won’t it be even worse in Africa? This quote is priceless: “The exclusive focus on the issue of patent rights and prices of drugs really has overridden the much more fundamental question of how you actually get these services out and how you blunt the epidemic itself,” said one international health official who asked not to be identified… “It’s so politically incorrect to say, but we may have to sit by and just see these millions of [already infected] people die. Very few public health professionals are willing to take on the wrath of AIDS activists by saying that. But a whole lot of them talk about this in private.” I wonder why that guy asked not to be identified. The awful truth is not exactly popular among the grandstanders who are exploiting the AIDS crisis for their own ideological purposes. But it should be the starting block for a real effort to halt or slow this awful epidemic.

THE TIMES VERSUS MEDICAL PROGRESS II: Check out Robert Pear’s piece in today’s New York Times on state programs to subsidize prescription drugs for the elderly, or to squeeze price discounts from drug companies. A couple of things are interesting about this article. The first is that nowhere is there any statement as to the actual costs of these programs – current or projected. The second is that nowhere is there any account of how cutting pharmaceutical profits could impede future drug research. For the Times, a huge new entitlement apparently costs nothing and can never do any harm. No wonder the writer is befuddled at why the Congress might actually be leery of jumping in to create a potentially budget
-breaking new entitlement to supplement or replace the state ones. When every program is easily affordable and carries no problematic consequences, why not be in favor of it?