Category: Old Dish

Here’s the first email that actually does provide an argument about Mary Cheney and Kerry’s aside that does not hinge on hostility toward or embarrassment about homosexuals:

You choose who you marry (straight or gay, sanctioned or not). You don’t choose who your kids are with respect to items of their personality they can’t control (and this is your position on homo/hetero-sexuality). The problem with Kerry mentioning Mary Cheney’s sexual preference is that he is trying to score a political point against the father (and Bush) about a predisposition that the Veep’s child has, one over which Cheney has no control. You don’t use a child’s status/talents/mental acquity/etc against a parent. That simple proposition is something all parents recognize and this is why the reaction against Kerry is so strong on this point and so bi-partisanly strong.
This is the same lesson you learn as a parent (straight or gay) standing on a little league baseball field watching kids (some talented, some not) learning to play baseball. You don’t then turn on the parent and use the talent (good or bad) of the kid to score points in some argument you may be having with the parent.
And if you do, you will be shunned by all the other parents. Which is just what is happening to Kerry.

My only quibble here is that in the actual context of the question, Kerry wasn’t scoring a direct political point against Bush. He was responding to an open-ended question about whether being gay is a choice. Now that has consequences, of course. But if you live in a world where mentioning someone’s lesbianism is no big deal (and Kerry does), I can see why he wouldn’t see it that way. And that’s why almost no gay people have complained about this. Very few had any reaction to the comment. I didn’t even notice it till the emails started coming in – all from straight people. That’s because I live in a world where homosexuality is a non-issue. But many others – especially Republican parents – still do. And their worst nightmare, sadly, is a gay child. That’s why they leaped to Cheney’s defense. Their sympathies are with him. Mine are also with him – but with the millions of gay kids and citizens out there as well, people who are the target of his administration.

Are the Kerry people still allowing the loopy Teresa to give uncontrolled interviews? Are they out of their minds? Or does she have that much control over her husband and the campaign? She’s a walking gaffe.

Here are the ads for marriage equality on MTV. I’m pretty sure they will make zero difference in the campaign to protect gay couples from the onslaught they’re now facing. As I find on college campuses, the debate is largely over among the young. But I enjoyed them. And they’re hipper than almost anything else I’ve seen in this political season.

Gregg Easterbrook passes on an imaginary post-modern football encounter:

Coach: How could you throw that crazy pass? Didn’t you see the safety?

Quarterback: I did see the safety, but then I thought, how do I know the safety really exists? My eyes perceive a safety and he seems to be covering the receiver, but this might only be from my frame of reference. Someone in the stands might perceive the safety to be covering another receiver, or no one at all. Who am I to say that my perception is correct and theirs is wrong? Then I thought, maybe the safety does exist! But the taboo against throwing into double coverage is just an oppressive ideology used by the dominant hegemony to maintain the imperialist power structure. So you see, I had to make the throw in order to liberate myself.

Philosophy, courtesy of NFL.com.

WHOPPER OF THE WEEK: This from Howie Kurtz’s “Reliable Sources”:

KURTZ: But you’re a reporter, do you want Kerry to win?

DANA MILBANK: In one sense only, and that is his vacation spot is in Nantucket and in Idaho, and it’s not in Waco. So in that sense, absolutely.

As a reporter, Milbank can insist he’s unbiased. But as a human being, he’s full of it.

INSTA-BIAS?: Now, even Howie Kurtz is writing about Glenn Reynolds’ bias. Glenn is perfectly entitled to be as opinionated as he wants. He doesn’t claim to be a news service. Yes, if you read him, you wouldn’t be able to understand why there is even a debate about the management of the war in Iraq. But you can read me if you want to do that (and not many Bush-supporters want to hear a word about it). The only issue here is two-fold. Glenn is such a huge clearing house for blogs that he has become, willy-nilly, a kind of blog-service, and so people complain when he only links to pro-Bush sites or opinions. But since Glenn regularly tells people not to rely on him alone, he’s completely in the clear. But secondly, I do think there is an issue of intellectual transparency here. I was a strong backer of the war in Iraq and still am. But precisely because of that, I feel compelled to grapple with the obvious difficulties that have ensued. I feel I missed certain important things, was deluded on a couple of important points (WMDs, for example, and Bush’s competence in general), and now I’m making amends, of a sort. It’s not pretty and I’ve been slammed and ridiculed for this. I’ve lost thousands of readers. But I cannot see I have much of a choice. Bush’s failures are so glaring you have to put blinders on to ignore them. But Glenn carries on as if nothing that major has gone awry, and sometimes as if the only reason there are problems in Iraq is that the media is biased. When he does mention Bush’s failings, he rarely elaborates. That’s disappointing, although, it’s still his prerogative. And he has managed to retain a far more even keel than my sometimes overly-emotional posts have been able to. I envy that. But that’s him; and this is me; and the blogosphere has plenty of space for all of us.

Here’s a useful guide to where the Independents are leaning. Surprising to me is the fact that in Florida, Kerry has a minuscule lead but has a 19 point lead among independents. That must worry Bush. North Carolina and Colorado seem close too, as Kerry hater/voter Mickey Kaus has noticed, with strong independent support for Kerry. There are no Kerry-leaning states where the undecideds are leaning Bush.

We don’t get many real personal insights into the way George W. Bush thinks or was thinking during the Iraq war, but Pat Robertson’s remarks on the Paula Zahn show are extraordinary:

Pat Robertson, an ardent Bush supporter, said he had that conversation with the president in Nashville, Tennessee, before the March 2003 invasion. He described Bush in the meeting as “the most self-assured man I’ve ever met in my life.”
“You remember Mark Twain said, ‘He looks like a contented Christian with four aces.’ I mean he was just sitting there like, ‘I’m on top of the world,’ ” Robertson said on the CNN show, “Paula Zahn Now.”
“And I warned him about this war. I had deep misgivings about this war, deep misgivings. And I was trying to say, ‘Mr. President, you had better prepare the American people for casualties.’ “
Robertson said the president then told him, “Oh, no, we’re not going to have any casualties.”

Did anyone believe that outside the presidential cocoon? The problem with this president is not that he doesn’t have the will to win. It’s that he seems to suffer from an inability to see reality. Any president who believed that there would be no casualties in the Iraq liberation is unqualified to be commander-in-chief. The same goes for a president who believes there will be casualties and tells a loyal supporter that there won’t be. The only way this isn’t damning about Bush is if Robertson is lying. But why would he?

Protesting the broadcasting of “Stolen Honor” on the public airwaves is one thing. Using threats to shut down a public screening of it is another. The Kerry people are being thuggish and illiberal in this. They should stop it.

He’s trying to warn his base that Bush might lose. Well, it’s a theory. And it has something to do with Samuel and Saul.

OHIO AND BUSH: The polls all show the same consistent finding: Bush is stuck at 47 percent. He’s around 48 percent nationally. Mystery Pollster applies the incumbent rule. Not good news for Bush.

A first-person account of his recent summary of the U.S. election.

Her reason? “In the hope that he will restore our alliances and reduce rabid anti-Americanism in this era of terrorism when international good will and cooperation are crucial.” That’s one good reason. One of my intellectual idols, Steven Pinker, is also for Kerry. His case? “The reason is reason: Bush uses too little of it. In the war on terror, his administration stints on loose-nuke surveillance while confiscating nail clippers and issuing color-coded duct tape advisories. His restrictions on stem cell research are incoherent, his dismissal of possible climate change inexcusable.”

WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO SAFIRE? I’ve never thought of him as a purely partisan attack-dog, and his criticism of Kerry’s fear-mongering on social security and the draft is well-taken. But how is it possible to call the Kerry campaign the principal fear-mongers in this election? The entire premise of the Bush campaign has been that if Kerry is elected, the country will be blown to smithereens. I have lost count of the emails telling me that I have to back Bush because if I don’t, I won’t be alive to observe any elections or gay weddings. Cheney walked right up to the line earlier this year of saying that a catastrophe will occur if Kerry wins. Yesterday, he said:

“The biggest threat we face now as a nation is the possibility of terrorists ending up in the middle of one of our cities with deadlier weapons than have ever before been used against us – biological agents or a nuclear weapon or a chemical weapon of some kind to be able to threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans.”

And Cheney subsquently argued that “I don’t think there’s any evidence to support the proposition that [Kerry] would, in fact” be the same type of aggressive counter-terror president as Bush. Isn’t the implication obvious? Vote for Kerry and get nuked. But, hey, it works in other areas. The candidate who avoided Vietnam has surrogates who impugn his opponent’s war medals. The candidate who favors stripping gay couples of all legal protections gets to call the other guy a gay-baiter. And the candidate who tells people he’s the only thing between them and Armageddon gets pundits targeting his opponent as the fear-monger.