Adam Serwer's take on the cowardice of the American press differs from mine:
I think it’s actually the conventions of journalism that are at fault here. As soon as Republicans started quibbling over the definition of torture, traditional media outlets felt compelled to treat the issue as a “controversial” matter, and in order to appear as though they weren’t taking a side, media outlets treated the issue as unsettled, rather than confronting a blatant falsehood.
But this doesn't work because the NYT had already decided, as the entire world did, that waterboarding was torture. It actually changed its own established rubric to placate Cheney. And yes, it would mean that the president and vice-president – who have publicly admitted to waterboarding – are war criminals not just in a rhetorical sense, but in a legal sense. To suggest otherwise is to knowingly publish untruths – and to take a position against one's own paper. This is not fairness; it is incoherence and cowardice in the face of power. Joyner actually thinks this is a defense of the NYT:
To have insisted that the U.S. Government was engaged in torture when the leaders of said Government adamantly denied that what they were doing constituted torture and most citizens supported the “enhanced interrogation techniques” and dismissed as buffoons those worried about poor widdle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would have not only been taking sides in an ongoing debate but taking a very unpopular stand.
Well, no newspaper should ever take a "very unpopular stand," should it?What the fuck happened to the notion of newspapers telling the truth in plain English, regardless of public or political pressure? That's what the press is supposed to do; it's why it exists in a democracy; and it is especially important that it do this when confronting the truth would indeed be unpopular. That's when we need the press the most. And it's when the NYT and much of the MSM simply ran for cover.
I share Gail Dines' concern that pornography is the only sex education material available to teens who aren't yet able to distinguish between fantasy and reality. But isn't the obvious answer to this problem that children deserve sex education that clarifies the physical and emotional realities of sex? Teens are caught in the crossfire of abstinence-only "education" from adults and relentless social pressure from their peers; eliminating porn does nothing to solve this problem.
The same goes for Dines' concerns over economic exploitation.
"The majority of women in pornography…are usually working class women who are who are [otherwise] looking at minimum-wage jobs." So Dines would like to eliminate pornography and force them back into said jobs? "Pornography is an industrial product." Actually, the vast majority of pornography on the internet is amatuer porn that users produce and distribute for free. Sites like Cam4 are built around video chat rooms where the exhibitionists and the voyeurs talk for surprisingly long periods of time (often more than an hour) before the sexy stuff happens. The "stars" have individual personalities they express, loyal followers who address them respectfully, and total control of when and how they perform. Which is a way of saying that there are many more kinds of porn on the internet than gonzo.
Dines also laments the lack of intimacy and love in porno sex, which strikes me as willfully naive. The kind of utopian porn that she desires already exists: steamy romance novels. If Dines would like to see more cinematic porn along these lines, then she should really complain that romantic comedies always cut away from the sex act! Because outside of amateur films – where real-life couples will often perform in ways that appear genuinely tender and loving – how can pornos convincingly convey deep emotional trust between actors?
As for the exploitation of women, this is the most complicated issue. That Dines speaks exclusively of heterosexual porn in the interview is telling. There is a lot of gay hardcore on the market that involves dominance/submission, extra large endowments and rough-and-tumble fantasies, so why doesn't she identify "bottoms" as an exploited group? Judging by the volume of posts on Craigslist's M4M sections, there are as many bottoms looking for hardcore action as there are "tops"; perhaps this is statistically specific to gay male culture and doesn't represent the desires of women (I wouldn't know), but Dines doesn't drop any statistics herself.
But here's the more eternal problem: the sex act itself may be the one arena where total equality of the sexes can never fully prevail, for the simple fact that men can penetrate women but women cannot penetrate men. Gay hardcore seems unproblematic to the extent that both partners (unless indicated otherwise) are social equals and could easily "flip" roles, if not with each other then with other partners. But straight actors cannot; men will always be the "tops" and women always the "bottoms" and this has nothing do with socialized values. To see hardcore exclusively as an expression of misogyny is a way of avoiding the more difficult, intractable problems imposed by the sex organs themselves.
I think Christopher would like it pointed out that he certainly doesn't believe "God" poisons everything. As he would say, "that would be absurd."
I was trying to make a joke/tease. Not very well, it appears. Another reader:
I'm sorry about your friend. But he's a tough cookie and if nothing else, I believe he could send those cancer cells packing by simply telling them where they are being oh so unreasonable. and frankly stupid. If I were a cancer cell I'd be afraid of Christopher Hitchens.
I can't believe I was wasting time surfing your site during a break from studying congenital adrenal hyperplasia for my MD boards *at the exact moment* you brought up CAH. I share your moral disturbance that parents may try to find an in utero cure for CAH (more specifically 21-?-hydroxylase deficiency – there are two other enzymatic varieties of CAH). In fairness, however, it is important to note that ambiguous genitalia, virilization and (maybe!) lesbianism are not the biggest health risks from living without 21-?-hydroxylase.
Another writes:
CAH has vast, wide reaching health side effects, far beyond the slight virilization effects that increase incidence of "nontypical" feminine behavior. It is not the gay "gene"; it is a legitimate pathological condition that upsets the natural balance of hormones in the patient that can cause massive electrolyte imbalances, arrhythmias, hypertension, and appearance issues. Attempts to cure/prevent it should most definitely not be considered a "final solution."
Think about it this way: If you had a weird lethal tumor, and a side effect of it was to increase the likelihood that you were gay, would fixing that be a "final solution?"
I'm devastated by the news. We need Christopher around for a long, long time. I do not know the details and understand his need for privacy. But he seems in good spirits if this classically British understatement is symptomatic of his mood:
"I have been advised by my physician that I must undergo a course of chemotherapy on my esophagus. This advice seems persuasive to me."
May the God he believes poisons everything be with him. And a simple word of encouragement: surviving a potentially fatal disease can be a form of liberation. I look forward to an even more liberated Hitch.
Yesterday I noticed the rather alarming spectacle of a journalist offering $100,000 to procure emails of other journalists on a list-serv in order to expose and embarrass them by publishing comments that they assumed were off-the-record. If private emails are now grist for ideological warfare, it seems to me we are in over-drive in the partisan warfare that gets Breitbart up in the morning.
I seem to have touched a nerve, since Breitbart exploded with a charge of hypocrisy. When you read the charge, it is obviously not hypocrisy (a word that has apparently lost whatever meaning it once had). I have never offered anyone any money to procure and then publish anyone’s private emails, and then gone on to criticize someone else for so doing. Moreover, I have never published a private email that might have come my way that might advance my own political arguments or interests. To give a rather fresh example, I was forwarded a rather staggering private email from an AIPAC official recently that said a huge amount, in my view, about what they’re about. I did not publish it. All reader emails on the Dish, as Breitbart knows, are anonymous, in order to facilitate the widest airing of views. I have never violated that trust, and never will.
Breitbart then pivots – as did Hot Air – to my relentless examination of the lies, deceptions and shenanigans of a farcical vice-presidential candidate who is currently one of a handful of leaders in the radical Poujadist movement that once went by the name of conservative. The first thing to say is that, in my view, a public official who has held public office, who has come close to being vice-president of the US and who is now running for the highest office in the land should be subject to greater press accountability than, say, a blogger for the Washington Post. Call me crazy, but my view is that the fundamental role of the press is to hold those in public office accountable.
Should other institutions also be accountable? Sure – and this blog constantly criticizes the media as well. But the confidential emails between journalists venting and kibbitzing about the issues and their jobs seems to me pretty low down the totem poll of priorities and bordering on malice, blackmail and intimidation. Even if one were to receive such emails unsolicited – as I did that AIPAC email – I would not publish them. But to offer a $100,000 reward for such a thing? No wonder Breitbart is touchy. He has crossed yet another line of dubious ethics, and his only goal, as is evident from his post, is political war against his paranoid notion of a liberal conspiracy.
Now to the emails Breitbart claims I referred to – as evidence of my “hypocrisy.” Hot Air’s “Slublog” provided chapter and verse here, here, here and here. In the first case,
The e-mails were shown to The Washington Post by a former public safety commissioner, Walter Monegan, who was fired by Palin in July. Monegan has given copies of the e-mails to state ethics investigators to support his contention that he was dismissed for failing to fire Trooper Mike Wooten, who at the time was feuding with Palin’s family.
So these emails were directly connected to abuse of power by a governor who is currently the GOP leader. They were part of an ethics investigation – and were already in the public domain. And Palin deliberately used a private email account to keep her use of public office to pursue family vendettas out of the public sphere. It seems to me that commenting on emails that have become part of an ethics investigation of a governor is not the same as offering $100,000 to get some embarrassing off-the-record kibbitzing from a blogger on a list-serv. The second “gotcha” was about emails conducted under state business retrieved from a FOIA request and already in the public domain. Again: no comparison. The third was an email exchange published in the Anchorage Daily News in which the editor was trying to get some minimal documentation for Palin’s fifth pregnancy-to-term. It revealed Palin’s continued refusal to provide any evidence. Again, I broke no news and published nothing that wasn’t already in the public domain. The fourth alleged violation of Palin’s “privacy” is an email she published in full in her own memoir.
When all else fails, as all else plainly has, the rightist crazies simply assert that questioning Palin’s bizarre account of her fifth child is “ransacking” her privacy. Really? As I said the other day,
If she had had a child under odd circumstances and insisted that it was private and kept the child away from cameras and ensured that he had all the care and privacy that such a child obviously needs, no one, including me, would have inquired further. But when you advance a political campaign using a child, it is imperative that the media investigate and probe the story.
Palin held her new-born infant up at the RNC Convention like some scene from the Lion King; she told the crazy story of her wild ride to the Anchorage Daily News long before she was picked by a Google search to be the back up for the leader of the free world. She has written a book full of extremely private details – the nature of her contractions, for example – and made a fortune off it. She is the one who first mentioned “amniotic fluid leaking” and “water-breaking”, not me. She has made speech after speech citing her infant son – just as her teenage daughter has been pushed into every public arena imaginable. There is nothing private about Palin’s story about her child with Down Syndrome. Nothing. To examine the details of a story already told in such detail in the public sphere as a core campaign platform is violating no one’s privacy. It is asking relevant questions of a narrative plainly and publicly provided by Palin herself. I have used no facts except those already in the public domain. I have learned a lot from of-the-record chats and none of it – none – has appeared in this blog.
So there is neither a shred of hypocrisy nor an iota of inconsistency in my record on this. But for Breitbart, merely asking questions of farcical public figures like Palin is out of bounds, while offering money to publish private emails from journalists he wants fired is fine and dandy. Yes, he’s that dedicated to the cause. Even a libertarian like Weigel loses his job for insufficient private conformity to the madness that is now the American “right.” And yes, Breitbart appears to have no ethics that might compete with the advancement of the war he feels he must wage. Maybe he is simply embarrassed to defend a farce like Palin, since he is an intelligent man and having to defend the delusions and derangement of the Tea Party might test anyone’s nerves. But really, he should calm down before he launches fact-free tirades like his most recent one.
Oh, and by the way, that “no-man’s land” in which many former members of the center right now find themselves: it’s called independent judgment and sanity. You may indeed disagree. But to me, what matters is not how big my “tribe” is, or who is on my “side” or any of the other sad things that Breitbart cares about. It is about integrity and honesty. One day, Breitbart might see that there are other values in this world apart from power and money and resentment and rage.
Did you really just argue that raising marginal tax rates by 12.4% on anyone making over $106,800 is merely "the closing of a silly loophole"? Wow. I'm all for closing tax loopholes, but across-the-board marginal rate increases are only loophole-closers in a world where you assume all money belongs to the government.
This type of revenue raiser has serious detrimental consequences for labor supply and therefore for economic growth. And you also call it "basically a big new tax on the rich." You live in a high cost-of-living area. Someone earning $156,800 would have a tax increase of $6,200 under this proposal. If that person supports a family of four in the DC metro area on that salary, are they rich? Certainly not. Would a $6,200 tax increase on that person make it materially more difficult to support a family of four in the DC metro area? Certainly yes. It's hard to understand how someone who still claims the mantle of "conservative" could so cavalierly insist on adopting such a proposal. And from past writings, it seems you also want to raise that person's marginal income tax rate from 25% to 28%. Do you ever stop to think through the cumulative consequences of some of the left-wing policy proposals you endorse?
You could solve the Social Security problem by raising the retirement age, adopting progressive price indexing, and changing the measure of inflation used to calculate COLAs. Three spending-side changes and no tax increases. By the way, John Boehner endorsed those ideas yesterday and I didn't notice you giving him any credit for Republicans finally offering up real entitlement reforms. Why the silence?
I didn't see it till this morning and my post defending him is here.
The Dish 
