Category: Old Dish

Here’s the money quote:

The Post: Do you plan to expend any political capital to aggressively lobby senators for a gay marriage amendment?

THE PRESIDENT: You know, I think that the situation in the last session — well, first of all, I do believe it’s necessary; many in the Senate didn’t, because they believe DOMA [the Defense of Marriage Act] will — is in place, but — they know DOMA is in place, and they’re waiting to see whether or not DOMA will withstand a constitutional challenge.

The Post: Do you plan on trying to — using the White House, using the bully pulpit, and trying to —

THE PRESIDENT: The point is, is that senators have made it clear that so long as DOMA is deemed constitutional, nothing will happen. I’d take their admonition seriously.

The Post: But until that changes, you want it?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, until that changes, nothing will happen in the Senate. Do you see what I’m saying?

The Post: Right.

THE PRESIDENT: The logic.

The Senate is right, of course. There is no need for the FMA in any conceivable sense while DOMA is in place; and DOMA itself merely underlines the existing reality that no state is obliged by law or the constitution to recognize the civil marriages in any other state. I’m extremely relieved. The FMA has gone unmentioned by Bush since the election – and it appears more and more like a pre-election ploy rather than a principled stand. (Of course, that’s a relief but it’s also an indication of how bald-faced a political maneuver this was in the first place). But this piece of sanity from the President deserves praise and reciprocation from those of us who support equality in marriage. We should refrain from any constitutional or legal challenge to DOMA for the foreseeable future (something I’ve urged for a long time now). We should also refrain from any attempt to force any state to recognize a gay marriage from another state (of course that’s different from a state voluntarily recognizing such marriages). We should practise moderation, just as the Senate is practising moderation. We already have civil marriage rights in one state. Massachusetts. Very soon, it will be clear that Massachusetts’ judicial decision will be endorsed by its own legislature, making this case a matter not simply of judicial activity but democratic legitimacy. And then we should bide our time and let the example of Massachusetts set in. I’m convinced that once the reality of this reform sinks in, fears will recede. The president has given us this opportunity. It would be crazy not to reciprocate. But for the record: thanks, Mr president.

First off: I agree with Hugh Hewitt about both Armstrong Williams and DailyKos. But there’s a big distinction. Kos clearly disclosed his payola from the Dean campaign. Williams never told anyone he was on the take from the Education Department. That makes a huge difference. Maybe Kos should have made more of a deal about it, but that’s a quibble, not a major concern. (I’m leaving out any conflicts of interest that we don’t yet know about. Maybe Kos is worse – but we can’t know that right now. And we know that Kos, like Hewitt, is a rabid partisan.) Hewitt defends himself against this obvious point by writing that “defenders of Kos are glossing over the fact that I brought up the Kos disclosure on O’Reilly and then deemed it inadequate.” But this is what Hewitt actually said on O’Reilly: “Now Daily Kos says, this is one of the bloggers from the left, says he disclosed it, but not to the satisfaction of anyone who watches him. I didn’t know.” But Kos doesn’t just say he disclosed it; he did. “Not to the satisfaction of anyone who watches him?” So whence his defenders? I put this glitch down to Hewitt’s partisan blinders. When you treat politics as religion, this is what happens to you.

A NEW IRAQ BLOG: Some great observations here. One of the most striking: how amazing most of the U.S. soldiers are there. We really owe them a huge amount of gratitude and support. Of course, it’s precisely because these guys deserve the highest of praise that we shouldn’t stint in punishing the few bad apples and insane policy directives.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “[W]atching the Williams case unfold makes it feel like someone finally shined a light on a murky old swamp. Media figures have been ‘selling’ themselves to people in government for years. But the pay the toadies traditionally get in return for their supportive opinions isn’t actual money. It’s access, invitations to fancy parties, phone calls from movers and shakers — the feeling of power.” – Bill Powers, National Journal.

IN THE WILL: Annie Leibovitz is second in line only to Susan Sontag’s son, according to the New York Daily News. In Virginia, Leibovitz would, of course, have to fight for this in court. In all those states with bans on civil marriage and civil unions, Sontag’s bequest could be challenged by Sontag’s relatives as well, if they so chose. Still, since Leibovitz and Sontag were just good friends, why should anyone worry?

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “Long time reader, sometime responder, frequent tipper, left-coast lesbian. I don’t read Malkin because I don’t agree with her opinions on a personal and political basis. I read your blog this morning and clicked onto the link and was quite disturbed at the abuse and the scope of the VENOM that is directed toward her. I’m not a gifted writer so what I’m trying to express may not be well worded. The content of the abuse … the sexual objectification of her as a minority/Asian/Phillipina in order to diminish her opinion … the threat of sexual dominance over her in order to silence her opinion…it’s outrageous and disgusting. And, reading it again, I don’t know that this garbage comes from the right. I think my liberal brothers and sisters are letting me down.” I think so too. These kinds of smears are beyond left or right. More feedback on the Letters Page.

If you’re feeling blue about Iraq, check this story out in the Washington Post. Made my lunch-hour. The elections are vital. The very fact of their occurrence could help transform the situation. Remember that 80 percent of Iraqis want them to succeed. “It’s one of my wishes to die at the gate of the polling station. I want to be a martyr for the ballot box,” says one Iraqi. A martyr in the Muslim world – for democracy! That’s new. And deeply hopeful.

My own issues with Michelle Malkin have to do with her occasional rhetorical excesses and her hard-right politics. But she’s often a brave writer, even when I disagree with her (which is a lot of the time). And I have to say the kind of abuse she has received for being a minority conservative is truly vile and upsetting. It is, however, to be expected. It comes from right and left. The web seems to empower it. My favorite email this week:

Sodomite, Tom Delay isn’t doing anything the Democrats haven’t done in Texas since the Civil War. You being a Lymie non citizen of this country so consumed with the fact that you have an disease that you will die of from taking it in the ass too many times. Andy Sullivan, the laughing stock of the blogosphere, even Jonah Goldberg and Glen Reynolds are sick of you. Excitable Andy Sullivan. HIV.

I like that last almost desperate acronym. It’s like the guys who hang out on my block who sometimes yell “faggot” when I walk by. Duh.

Of course, the non “Judeo-Christian” cultures that have sustained democracy include the first ever democracy, in Athens. And, in recent times, Japan. And South Korea. We also have plenty of examples of “Christian” cultures supporting dictatorship.

Another must-read from Marty Lederman on the pirouettes Scott McClellan now has to perform to prevent the obvious conclusion that the administration supports the use of torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of some detainees. McClellan’s point is that the administration resisted the idea of a Congressional ban on cruel, inhumane and degrading practices for the CIA outside U.S. territory because it was already banned and the legislation was superfluous. Yet Condi Rice’s letter at the time stated that she opposed the new restrictions because they would “provide legal protections to foreign prisoners to which they are not now entitled under applicable law and policy.” So it would change things but was also redundant? I don’t get it. Poor Mclellan. It’s only going to get worse.

NRO’s Denis Bowles says that the entire substance of the hundreds of cases of abuse and torture can be summarized thus:

Is there any substance to [Human Rights Watch’s] complaints? Well, yes – you should not make terrorists stay up late listening to Ratt and you should not make Iraqi convicts get naked and then laugh at them. If you’re an American soldier doing these kinds of things, you’ll be punished, even as others also try to punish your fellow soldiers and your country.

The only word for this is denial. Please, Denis, read the reports. At least thirty inmates have died after “coercive techniques” in U.S. custody. The government itself has conceded that the U.S. has tortured five inmates to death. Hundreds more have been hospitalized or permanently physically scarred. Even if you radically restrict your analysis to the night shift in Abu Ghraib, the abuses far outstrip forcing people to listen to music or laughing at nakedness. What has happened to American conservatism when it is reduced to ridiculing genuine and important issues of human rights?

Jon Rauch has, as always, a very perceptive piece on the president’s social security reform plans. Money quote:

The 2004 exit polls suggested, to many conservatives, that “moral values” won the election for Bush. It may seem odd, then, that his boldest post-election priority is not abortion or gay marriage or schools, but Social Security. The key to the paradox is that Social Security reform is not, at bottom, an economic issue with moral overtones. It is a moral issue with economic overtones.

It’s about transforming a culture of dependency into one of self-reliance. That’s partly why I support it. But this impending fiscal crisis stuff with regard to social security is not plausible. I wish they’d talk that way about Medicare. But they’ve made that real crisis far worse.

Peter Beinart seconds Schwarzenegger’s idea that redistricting should be taken out of the grimy hands of people like Tom DeLay. Amen.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “It’s time to ask, bluntly, whether self-government can work for people not operating within a Judeo-Christian worldview.” – Joseph Farah, WorldNet Daily, a far right website. One word: India.

QUOTE OF THE DAY I: “Freedom of thought, community and faith, civil equality, and the rights of due process, are meaningless unless they are universally valid. They are also non-negotiable. As Salman Rushdie himself said shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, the things that the jihadists are against — ‘freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women’s rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex … even the short skirts and dancing … are worth dying for.’ Rushdie’s maxim holds true all the more in light of Theo van Gogh’s murder. The viciousness of our enemies — and they are our enemies — remains undiminished. We liberals had better find the courage not to be intimidated.” – Daniel Koffler, a junior at Yale.

QUOTE OF THE DAY II: “Normally you can’t shut her up but she went very silent and I just heard this little voice say ‘Dad, I think I’ve glued my eyes shut’,” – the husband of a somewhat foolish grandmother.

AN OPEN LETTER: To my mother. What happens when you write a racy, sexy blog … and your mom reads it. Just make sure she’s not on BigMuscle.com that’s all. I liked this entry too.

THE HIGH GROUND: No, we shouldn’t take seriously everything that Human Rights Watch says. But it is simply fact that the revelations of widespread use of torture by the U.S., which extend far beyond Abu Ghraib, have made the defense of the U.S. far harder in the rest of the world. I know that when I get into fights with my European friends about U.S. policy (and I have broken up many a London dinner party with my pro-Americanism), this will get thrown back in my face. And I will have little substantive to rebut it. Yes, I still think we clearly have the moral edge over our enemies. But less now. Much less. Speaking of which …

On the City Journal website, Heather Mac Donald responds to my and Marty Lederman’s dissent from her anti-anti-torture article. She writes:

The Fay and Schlesinger reports provide no evidence for the proposition that the CIA’s very aggressive secret methods allegedly used against Khalid Sheikh Mohammad influenced either the interrogation rules at Iraq or the prisoner abuse.

Huh? That’s the entire central point of both reports. Reading her piece, it’s not obvious she has read the reports at all. She frames her argument by asserting that the “narrative” of the migration of torture techniques from Gitmo to Iraq is an invention of the press and liberals. In fact, that entire narrative is that of the offical government reports themselves. The very word “migrate” is Schlesinger’s coinage. She writes: “The decision on the Geneva conventions was irrelevant to interrogation practices in Iraq.” Every single report on the abuses says the exact opposite.

THE TRUTH: Here’s Lederman’s useful summary of what the reports actually say:

The reports explain in detail that the interrogators at Guantanamo, and the conflicting and confusing set of directives from the Pentagon for GTMO, ‘circulated’ freely to Afghanistan and then to Iraq (Schlesinger 9). Lieutenant General Sanchez, the commander of the Combined Joint Task Force in Iraq, approved techniques going beyond those approved for GTMO, ‘using reasoning’ from the President’s February 7, 2002 directive on unlawful combatants (id. at 10). The ‘existence of confusing and inconsistent interrogation technique policies,’ including a ‘proliferation of guidance and information from other theatres of operation,’ and the fact that personnel involved in interrogation in GTMO and Afghanistan ‘were called upon to establish and conduct interrogation operations in Abu Ghraib,’ all contributed ‘to the belief that additional interrogation techniques were condoned in order to gain intelligence’ (Jones 15-16; Fay 8, 10, 22). ‘The lines of authority and the prior legal opinions blurred’ (Fay 10), and ‘DoD’s development of multiple policies on interrogation operations for use in different theatres or operations confused Army and civilian Interrogators at Abu Ghraib’ (Fay Finding No. 7).

The point is that the category of “unlawful combatant” “migrated” from Guantanamo and the CIA to Iraq and the general military, as did the non-Geneva methods of interrogating them. Was this the intention? We simply don’t know.

HAS SHE READ THE REPORTS? What we do know is that all the reports specifically say that the relaxation of existing CIA rules, ostensibly for very few cases, had a huge impact on the general conflict. The hundreds of incidents of torture that we know about (and we don’t know everything because much of the CIA’s operations were off-limits even to the official investigators) are inexplicable without this. We know that the Pentagon distributed the new rules widely – and that brutality occurred across the theater of war thereafter. The only way Mac Donald can avoid the obvious question as to how all these torture incidents then occurred is simply by pretending that none of them happened at all. Mac Donald further says of Abu Ghraib: “Though [the photos] showed the sadism of a prison out of control, they showed nothing about interrogation.” In the first paragraph of the Schlesinger report, we read: “We do know that some of the egregious abuses at Abu Ghraib which were not photographed did occur during interrogation sessions and that abuses during interrogation sessions occurred elsewhere.” Mac Donald also argues that “For the record, I explicitly reject torture in my article.” That’s true. But it’s only true because, for Mac Donald, even “water-boarding,” the technique that Condi Rice has explicitly insisted on retaining for the CIA, is not obviously “torture”:

Later, the CIA is said to have used ‘water-boarding’ – temporarily submerging a detainee in water to induce the sensation of drowning – on Khalid Sheik Mohammad, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Water-boarding is the most extreme method the CIA has applied, according to a former Justice Department attorney, and arguably it crosses the line into torture.)

“Arguably crosses the line?” Mac Donald makes Jay Bybee look like the Dalai Lama.

THE BOTTOM LINE: What’s my bottom line, she demands? It is, I repeat, to stick to non-coercive techniques, as laid out in Geneva and U.S. law. Imagine that: obeying the law of the land. (And I know of no solid cases where the use of torture has led to actionable and useful intelligence in any case.) By the way, that’s Bush’s official position as well. More important, my bottom line is to send a very strong signal that anything else will not be tolerated. Bush should have fired Sanchez and Abizaid and Rumsfeld and Miller immediately after getting the first reports from Abu Ghraib. He didn’t. Even when the photos surfaced, he refused to discipline anyone truly responsible. When more and more reports of torture emerged, he had another chance to fire the generals and officials responsible for conflicting messages and winking at abuse. Why didn’t he? Or do we really want to know the answer to that question?