Category: Old Dish

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EMAIL OF THE DAY: “I’ve been a devoted reader of your blog since its inception five or six years ago. I’m a stalwart Democrat, and I disagreed with you for quite a bit of time – particularly the years immediately after 9/11 – yet I continued reading. I was studying in Cairo for 9/11, and the sentiments you called upon seemed completely alien to me, as your assessment of Bush seemed ridiculous; when you declared that you couldn’t have imagined a competent Gore response to 9/11, I couldn’t have disagreed more.

However, I suddenly feel a similar sentiment. I’m currently in Damascus, and I’ve been following the events in neighboring Lebanon quite closely. And all I see are Bush administration successes, from Ukraine to Iraq to Lebanon to Egypt. The transitions to democracy in all of these countries is hardly a fait accompli – both Iraq and Lebanon could still descend into sectarian civil war, and Egypt has hardly begun – but they are immensely heartening. And it’s hard not to credit Bush. More worryingly (for me at least), it’s hard to imagine a Kerry responding to Hariri’s assassination as perfectly. This may be unfair – I’m a big fan of Joe Biden – but I have to confess that Bush’s radical liberalism feels quite justified by current events. I’m waiting for a Democratic foreign policy that’s not only competent – and I’m still convinced that the Democratic foreign policy establishment has many more competent than, say, Rumsfeld – but also idealistic. Idealism is powerful, and this is something Bush realized and I didn’t. But the people of the Middle East certainly do understand this, and hopefully the Democratic foreign policy establishment will follow suit.”

The joys of spending the afternoons immersed back in political theory (yes, I’m a nerd at heart) somehow diverted me from linking to two recent pieces. Here’s my Sunday Times column on Hillary – she’s the one to beat in 2008. Here’s my tangentially-related Time essay on the Democrats and abortion.

Yes, the Blair government will keep the mandatory television tax to fund Britain’s institutionally leftist and compulsory state broadcasting system. For another decade. This is a huge victory for Britain’s left.

“One of the things that none of us have fully appreciated is that below the surface in Lebanon, there was always frustration. But obviously, something has been percolating from below. And the most profound things that we’re seeing is a loss of fear. In Syria, everything is governed by fear. And the Syrians use coercion and intimidation to get their way within Lebanon. And what we’ve seen in Lebanon looks an awful lot like what we saw in Kiev. In the end, people were not prepared to accept this kind of a process any longer. And they saw it in their numbers in a kind of collective approach. They saw strength. And the more they saw strength, the more they gained confidence. They’ve gotten confidence from others as well.” – Dennis Ross, on Brit Hume last night.

GETTING AWAY WITH IT: The Senate Republicans cover for the administration on torture.

THE OPPORTUNITY MISSED: I’m one of those people less enthusiastic about social security reform now than I was a month ago. The main reason for me is that I don’t trust this administration to achieve something fiscally neutral or even beneficial. I’m terrified of the massive borrowing private accounts will require. But this returns me to a theme I wrote about a couple of months ago. The president could have punted on social security reform and focused on a flat tax as his major second term agenda. If the result were simply flatter taxes, it would be better than no social security reform. Bruce Bartlett has a useful piece on this. My own view is that progressive taxation is immoral. The government should treat all its citizens as equally as it can. Punishing people for being successful is morally wrong and counter-productive. We should at least treat hard work neutrally, rather than punitively. (Inherited wealth is another matter, which is why I favor keeping the estate tax.) It’s really the same principle behind ending affirmative action and allowing gay marriage: government neutrality in a diverse society, where our differences cannot and should not be micro-managed, and where people can enJoy the benefits of their own responsibliity. I have a feeling that Bush’s decision to back social security reform over a flat tax will go down as a miscalculation on the scale of Clinton’s decision to do universal healthcare before welfare reform.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “He is not Peter Pan. He is a full-grown freak. And he must pay.” – Andrea Peyser, New York Post. Let’s wait for the verdict, shall we? Being a freak is not a crime.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “Respectfully, Andrew, I beg to differ on the alleged churlishness of Democrats on progress in the Middle East.
Let me explain what’s maddening to Democrats: no matter what happens that is progressive in the Middle East, Republicans and the Bush regime not only claims credit for it, but also claim that the war in Iraq is the reason for the progress. Libya doing a deal on weapons and Lockerbie so it can back into the international oil market? Must be because Bush invaded Iraq! Lebanese reacting with revulsion to Hariri’s assassination, probably by Syrian agents, and demanding Syria’s exit from their country? Must be because Bush invaded Iraq! Progress in the Palestinian-Israeli peace effort as a result of Arafat’s death? Must be because Bush invaded Iraq! Who’s really peddling nonsequitors here?
In short, what drives Democrats batty the tendency to take partisan political credit for anything progressive, and to blame anything retrograde on political enemies (both foreign and domestic) who “just don’t get it.” Never is there any recognition that Bush’s international strategy even MIGHT be responsible for the negative radicalization we’re seeing in places like Iran, North Korea, and maybe even Venezuela — not to mention alienating essential partners in nation-building.
And what really kills Democrats is the way that Bush not only takes credit for everything that is going well, and denies any responsibility for things that are going badly (and, when we’re honest, how many people really feel that the world is, on balance, headed in the right direction?) — it’s that he then claims these false credit as the basis for “political capital” to spend on what Democrats feel are retrograde domestic policies.
The result is that the first reaction any Democrat has to good news in the Middle East (or anywhere else) is to think, “How can Bush be denied political credit for this, since you know he’s going to claim it.” And the important thing to emphasize is that it is Bush’s own political habits that have created this dynamic, and it started right after 9-11.”

Michael Ledeen‘s right. Hitch gleefully inters the “Arab street” here.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “You wrote today that:

I think even the fiercest critics of president Bush’s handling of the post-liberation phase in Iraq will still be thrilled at what appears to me to be glacial but important shifts in the right direction in the region.”

I so wish you were right, but I’m afraid you probably aren’t. I had lunch today with a friend – a really smart, knowledgeable, accomplished guy, who also happens to be very liberal and is active in state Democratic politics. I mentioned to him that Lebanon’s government had just fallen. You would have thought I told him his dog had died. He chewed his sandwich slowly, thought for a while, and finally said,”You know, Assad’s a bastard, but he was right when he said the problems in Iraq are the fault of America, not Syria.”
There wasn’t any happiness that Lebanon is marching toward freedom. This kind of sulky non-sequitur, to me, exemplifies well why the Democratic Party cannot be trusted right now with our national security. Though some in the party, like Biden and Lieberman, are serious about protecting us, there are just way too many others so filled with hatred for Bush that they are incapable of understanding what is happening in the Middle East, and what the stakes are for all of us. And that’s why I stand by my intense disagreement with your decision last fall to endorse John Kerry – even if the man could have been trusted, his party, as a whole, could not have been.” How depressing.

GENDER DIFFERENCE: As many of you know, I don’t think there’s any real doubt that gender difference – including subtle differences in the wiring of male and female brains – is a fact. I’ve also long wondered why more study hasn’t been done on gay men and lesbians to see how their experiences and behaviors reflect that. Here’s an article that raises some interesting questions:

Gay men employ the same strategies for navigating as women – using landmarks to find their way around – a new study suggests.
But they also use the strategies typically used by straight men, such as using compass directions and distances. In contrast, gay women read maps just like straight women, reveals the study of 80 heterosexual and homosexual men and women.
“Gay men adopt male and female strategies. Therefore their brains are a sexual mosaic,” explains Qazi Rahman, a psychobiologist who led the study at the University of East London, UK. “It’s not simply that lesbians have men’s brains and gay men have women’s brains.”

Notice the assumption about innate difference in the first place. No serious scientist disputes this. Only Harvard humanities professors.

“If we’re exporting detainees for the express purpose that they be tortured under interrogation by another regime, it’s a terrible idea. Any short-term gain that might come out of it won’t be worth the long-term ill impression created by it. We’re promoting democracy across the region, and you can’t have torture by a dictatorial government. You just can’t do it. If you’re an idealist and you believe in democracy, it’s bad policy. It’s hypocritical, and it will blow up in your face.” – Victor Davis Hanson, in Salon. Why hasn’t VDH written this? And why hasn’t he written about the more presing case – torture of detainees by CIA operatives in “ghost prisons?” Why has there been such astonishing silence about torture – even sickening comments by people like Taranto and Chrenkoff? Jonah reluctantly endorses torture of detainees – even innocent ones – as a necessary evil. That saddens me.

I think even the fiercest critics of president Bush’s handling of the post-liberation phase in Iraq will still be thrilled at what appears to me to be glacial but important shifts in the right direction in the region. The Iraq elections may not be the end of the Middle East Berlin Wall, but they certainly demonstrate its crumbling. The uprising against Syria’s occupation of Lebanon is extremely encouraging; Syria’s attempt to buy off some good will by coughing up Saddam’s half-brother is also a good sign; ditto Mubarak’s attempt to make his own dictatorship look more democratic. Add all of that to the emergence of Abbas and a subtle shift in the Arab media and you are beginning to see the start of a real and fundamental change. Almost all of this was accomplished by the liberation of Iraq. Nothing else would have persuaded the thugs and mafia bosses who run so many Arab nations that the West is serious about democracy. The hard thing for liberals – and I don’t mean that term in a pejorative sense – will be to acknowledge this president’s critical role in moving this region toward democracy. In my view, 9/11 demanded nothing less. We are tackling the problem at the surface – by wiping out the institutional core of al Qaeda – and in the depths – by tackling the autocracy that makes Islamo-fascism more attractive to the younger generation. This is what we owed to the victims of 9/11. And we are keeping that trust.

FRUM ON MARRIAGE: David Frum frets that equal marriage rights spell the “overthrow” of marriage because it undermines traditional gender roles. But I think that conflates two issues. A civil marriage is between two citizens and the state should not distinguish between sexual orientations any more than it should distinguish between other immutable characteristics, like race, or even mutable ones, like religion. I believe that government should be as neutral as possible and as restrained as possible in determining divisive and private issues like how a husband relates to his wife and vice versa. Different couples, in my view, should be free to create whatever relations they want in their own marital relationships – and that goes for evangelical couples with Tammy Wynette values or arranged Muslim marriages or very modern partnership models. Let a thousand flowers bloom, I say. Marriage has always been a dynamic institution and free people will develop it in the future as in the past. May the state be neutral in this social change, except in as much as it encourages social support for relationships as such. It seems to me to be hyperbole to argue, as David does, that the state’s neutrality means that it makes “forever unthinkable the idea that husbands and wives each have special duties to one another, and that a husband’s duties to his wife – while equally binding and equally supreme – are not the same as a wife’s duties to her husband.” Unthinkable? I’m sure David will be able to think for himself in a world where everyone has the right to marry the person he or she loves. But the gender role argument against equal marriage rights has always been to my mind the most coherent of those on offer. If you believe that women should be subservient to men in marriage – and men should take proportionate responsibility to take care of and lead their wives – then indeed the idea of complete equality and interchangeability in the marriage compact is threatening. So let David and the right make that argument: we want to keep traditional gender roles in civil marriage and letting gays marry hurts that effort. Let them spell out a wife’s duties and a husband’s responsibilities. And let them make that case openly to the public. Support for same-sex marriage – especially among women – will soar. Because they will see it for what it is: a big advance for the civil equality of women.

My latest articles and reviews are now posted to your left.

I haven’t written about it because I agree completely with Glenn. The substantive case against Gannon is trivial; the irrelevant case against him (the one that’s fueled this story) is that he’s gay, has allegedly been (or still may be) a prostitute, and may not agree with everything the gay left believes (although I agree with David Corn that the evidence that Gannon has written anything even remotely “anti-gay” is laughable). The real scandal is the blatant use of homophobic rhetoric by the self-appointed Savonarolas of homo-left-wingery. It’s an Animal Farm moment: the difference between a fanatic on the gay left and a fanatic on the religious right is harder and harder to discern. Just ask yourself: if a Catholic conservative blogger had found out that a liberal-leaning pseudo-pundit/reporter was a gay sex worker, had outed the guy as gay and a “hooker,” published pictures of the guy naked, and demanded a response from a Democratic administration, do you think gay rights groups would be silent? They’d rightly be outraged. But the left can get away with anything, can’t they? Especially homophobia.

HOW I SOMETIMES FEEL: Yes, I’m the one in the glasses.

THE POPE’S LIFE: We have been informed that the pontiff’s current suffering and persistence against multiple illnesses and debilities is sending a message about the dignity of suffering and the importance of life. There is indeed a great truth to that. But there is also a point at which clinging to life itself becomes a little odd for a Christian, no? Isn’t the fundamental point about Christianity that our life on earth is but a blink in the eye of our real existence, which begins at death and lasts for eternity in God’s loving presence? Why is the Pope sending a signal that we should cling to life at all costs – and that this clinging represents some kind of moral achievement? Isn’t there a moment at which the proper Christian approach to death is to let it come and be glad? Or put it another way: if the Pope is this desperate to stay alive, what hope is there for the rest of us?

I’ve been following the Sager–Ponnuru debate over the balance within today’s conservatism between social conservatives, big government conservatives and freedom-lovers. Latest installment here. I’m with Ryan, purely on the grounds that I think Bush conservatism has relied far too much on sectarian religious support and on expanding the power, reach and expense of the federal government. I don’t buy the notion that Newt Gingirch killed off small-government conservatism and so Bush has no choice. Gingrich is and was one of the least appealing figures in American politics. His tactics were crude and dumb. To abandon every small government principle because he screwed up a decade ago strikes me as silly defeatism. Ponnuru argues further that he and others at National Review have indeed opposed Bush’s big government nanny-state tendencies. (The massive exception is the anti-gay federal amendment, but let’s leave that aside for the moment.) Fair enough – to a point. But try this counter-factual: If Al Gore, say, had, turned a surplus into years of mounting debt, if he’d added a huge new federal entitlement to Medicare, if he’d over-ridden the rights of states to set their own laws with regard, say, to education, if he’d put tariffs on steel, if he’d increased government spending faster than anyone since LBJ, if he’d said that government’s job was to heal hurt wherever it exists, if he’d ramped up agricultural subsidies, poured money into the Labour and Education Departments, thrown public dollars at corporate America, spent gobs of money on helping individuals in bad marriages, used the Constitution as an instrument of social policy, given government the right to detain people without trial and subject them to torture, and on and on, I don’t think National Review would have been content merely to nitpick. Do you? I think they would have mounted a ferocious attempt to remove the guy from office. The duplicitous, budget-busting Medicare entitlement alone should have caused an insurrection. It didn’t. I think that tells you a lot about where some conservative thinkers are really coming from.

A SINGLE MARRIAGE: I’ve written a lot – too much? – about marriage rights. But I have to say my views shifted deeply only once – when I actually attended a wedding. I wrote about it in my book, “Love Undetectable.” Watching a ceremony of commitment and love dissolves so much of the fear and panic that the subject in the abstract can conjure up. Here’s a similar tale. Money quote:

She was 80 years old, stoop-shouldered, her face weathered from life as a farmer’s wife in the San Luis Valley. She made her way down the aisle toward her grandson, a rosary in her trembling hands.

When she got to the altar, she nodded to the priest, who stepped aside as she turned to face the two young men who stood side-by-side in front of the church. In a soft, almost crumbling voice, she spoke.

“I was married to Jose Contreras on May 19, 1921, by a circuit priest. I remember how he took our hands and placed them together, like this … ” she said, turning to the young man on the right, her grandson, taking his hands and placing them into the other man’s open palms. “Then, he took this very rosary, and wrapped them around our wrists, saying a prayer in Latin, explaining that from this point on, we were bound to each other, that we were tied to each other in the eyes of God. We were standing in a field. There was no church nearby; there was no town hall for us to go to. We were married in the eyes of God. That’s all that counts.”

For the Pope, this act of faith and commitment is part of an “ideology of evil.” That is his tragedy. It is also the hierarchy’s. But one day, the church’s old leaders will see what this old lady saw, and enlarge the church rather than divide it.