Category: Old Dish

In New York this week, I want the president to tell us where we are in the war, how he will tackle the looming nuclear threat of Iran, and how he can pull together the centrifugal forces in chaotic Iraq. The Republicans are right: Kerry did waste some time at his convention by focusing on biography rather than his plans for the future. He had to, in some ways, after the character assassination attempts by the Bush campaign for months on end. But that leaves Bush an opening: can he offer a truly conservative domestic agenda? I mean: reform of entitlements, a U-turn on public spending, staying the course on education reform, reforming the military, simplifying the tax code. He deserves a chance to repudiate the big-government, nanny-state, sectarian legacy of his first few years and show us where his second term would leave us (and no, I don’t mean Mars). Will he expand freedom at home or continue to curtail it? Will he reveal a strategy in the war that shows he has learned the dangers of waging war unprepared and on the fly? Can he show an ability to grow into more than a deeply polarizing president, more than a man who has clearly failed to win over fully half the country at a time when unity against Jihadist terror is essential? The party of McCain and Giuliani and Schwarzenegger could do that. The party of Santorum and Dobson and DeLay obviously cannot. I fear the battle is already lost, since Bush has caved to the Santorum wing on almost every single domestic issue. But I can still hope, can’t I?

Sometimes, when you do the Euro thing and take August off, you half-miss the tussle of an election campaign, the twists and turns of blogging, the daily adrenaline shots of getting hammered by various critics. But not this August. Every time I checked out the blogosphere or the cable news or the papers, I felt relieved to be absent with leave. The low point was obviously the Swift Boat vets, jumping like bait on the end of Karl Rove’s line. For a president who never served in Vietnam to get his cronies to lambaste an opponent who actually put his life in danger was, well, breathtakingly bold. And you really have to hand it to Bush. He knows how to campaign hard, to deploy smears of opponents indirectly, to stoke fears of minorities to rally votes, and every other hardball tactic. I wish I could get all huffy about this, but it’s always been Bush’s campaign mojo: divide, smear and beam. Kerry should have seen it coming. The only thing that can deflect from it is a more effective smear in the other direction. But the Bush-haters have now so debased that currency Bush is essentially in the clear. Advantage: Rove.

P.S.: I loved Bush’s comment yesterday about the smear-ad: “I can understand why Senator Kerry is upset with us. I wasn’t so pleased with the ads that were run about me. And my call is get rid of them all, now.” “Us“?? I thought Bush had nothing to do with it.

THE WAR: The attempt to put Iraq back together again seemed to lose ground last month as well. The awful slaughter in Najaf led to … exactly the same situation as before. Sadr is still at large. Many hundreds of his soldiers have been killed, but there are more where they came from (Iran, in many cases). Sadr’s legitimacy has increased in the population at large. The coalition is in danger of becoming an instrument in a civil war. Sistani has become a de facto ruler. Jim Hoagland had the right worries yesterday: “For a quasi-occupying power, as the United States is in Iraq today, the worst of all worlds is to have put in place a local regime that the outside power must support at all costs but does not control.” That sums it up nicely. Falluja and Ramadi seem worse than Najaf. I guess we’re left to hope that some kind of Allawi-led transition to some kind of democracy is still possible. But these kinds of clashes – when they do not end in clear victory – seem to me to increase bitterness, unrest, unease and resolve little. At best, we are back where we were. At worst, the mess has deepened. Does anyone believe that the administration has a clear idea of how to rescue the situation? I see few signs of candor or clarity.

Then there were the predictable surprises. A closeted gay man trying to pretend he’s straight eventually breaks down and reveals the truth under threat of blackmail from a lover. How many times has that happened? Worse, NcGreevey tried to spin it as an advance for gay rights. Nope. What the gay rights movement is trying to achieve is an end to these kinds of decptions and lies and phony marriages. Then a prominent moralist, a man who has aggressively denied any distinction between private morals and public lives, a theocon much beloved by the National Review crowd, turns out to have had a checkered past. Again: big surprise. And then that left-wing maniac, Dick Cheney, refuses to give up his federalist principles, his love of family and freedom, or his basic humanity, by signing on to the president’s anti-gay constitutional amendment. Good for the veep, and the entire Cheney family. Too bad his own president has put them in such an awful position. And the GOP platform dispenses with any nuance and comes out not just against marriage rights for gays, but any kind of legal protections for their relationships whatever. That, of course, is what the FMA is designed to do, whatever lies its sponsors tell. No wonder Zell Miller is now the keynoter for the Republicans. Here’s a man who once proudly condemned LBJ for backing civil rights for African-Americans, while Bush’s Republican grandfather stood up for decency. History has come full circle, hasn’t it? The Dixiecrats meet again in New York. Now they’re called Republicans.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “I am openminded about the possibility that some longstanding population groups just might not be capable of rational self-government,” – John Derbyshire, refuting – yes, refuting! – the notion that he is a racist. A simple question: what does he mean by “longstanding population groups”? Except, of course, we know the answer.

Must-reads – and not just because I agree with them. The Economist’s sober devastation of much of what this president has done domestically (along with sober praise of some of the big and important decisions Bush has gotten right) is very well done. So is my old friend Niall Ferguson’s piece in the Wall Street Journal. I think it’s close to unarguable that a Bush second term, regrdless of whether you believe it would be good for the country, would be terrible for conservatism as a coherent political philosophy. You can only admire David Brooks for trying to find a sliver of coherence here, but the reality of what Bush has done and what he is likely to do has already made a mockery of conservatism as a governing ideology. It will take a period in opposition to put it back together.

OLASKY’S BIGOTRY: What to make of the following sentences in Marvin Olasky’s latest column about John Kerry’s, George W. Bush’s and Marvin Olasky’s Vietnam experiences:

“The other thing both [Bush and I] can and do say is that we did not save ourselves: God alone saves sinners (and I can surely add, of whom I was the worst). Being born again, we don’t have to justify ourselves. Being saved, we don’t have to be saviors. John Kerry, once-born, has no such spiritual support, nor do most of his top admirers in the heavily secularized Democratic Party.”

You will note the term “once-born.” That means that the moral authority achieved by “born-again” evangelicals is unavailable to Catholics like Kerry, or indeed anyone outside the boundaries of fundamentalist Christianity. Hence Bush’s extraordinary ability to draw a line behind all his wasted, irresponsible years, and his current piety. Hence, according to Olasky, Kerry’s inability to question himself or his past. This is an almost seventeenth century piece of public sectarianism and anti-Catholic bigotry. But it’s now the Republican mainstream. (Hat tip: Josh.)

I’ll be back to regular blogging Monday but before I return to Shiites and Swift Boats, I just want to write some kind of note of gratitude to the Cape this summer. This past week reached new levels of beauty. Sometimes at the end of August or, more likely, in September, the air here gets drier and the sun clearer, and the light – ever changing – permeates everything. Colors become more themselves; the sunsets and sunrises dance with absurdly extreme tones of red and yellow and blue; the tides under the waxing moon become all the more alive with freckled, reflected light. There’s a place toward the end of the coil of sand that sends Cape Cod back in on itself that never gets old. The marshland is so shallow and the tides are so dramatic, they fill a mile-wide basin and empty it twice a day. When the ocean first starts pouring into the inlet, it looks as if the sky has suddenly leaked into the earth. And then the earth slowly becomes the sky, except for vistas of green – now reddening – dune grass, separating earth from above. To see this in the late afternoon as the sun begins to decline, to allow yourself to drift with the tide toward more sudden lagoons of sea-water, is about as close to heaven as I’ll ever get. Only the occasional horse fly reminds you that you are still on earth. People have asked me in the past what I understand by prayer. In my own life, it has meant all sorts of things: from recitation of the Rosary, to singing at Mass, to whispers before sleep, to holding a sick friend in silence. But it also must mean days like last week, where every day, if you let it, is a prayer, where the beauty of God’s creation demands your attention, and your love, and your awe.

With last week being the most trafficked in the history of this blog, it’s a good time to take my annual month of August off. Thanks for being there for the past school year – eleven of some of the most politically intense months I’ve seen. Thanks to all of you who donated last week, giving us enough funds to stay on the air easily past the election. I’ll be back the Monday of the GOP convention, blogging from LA, where I’ll be visiting for another Bill Maher show. Have a great August. See you again soon enough. Blogging off …

My good friend Lawrence rightly decries the assertion by the Kerry campaign that somehow having been in combat makes you better suited to be a war-president:

To Kerry supporters who argue otherwise, is it really necessary to point out that Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt never saw combat before going on to become America’s greatest wartime strategists? Or that the very men who dispatched Kerry to Vietnam were themselves decorated veterans? To be sure, politicians who have served in war have an essential understanding of the horrors of war. But what does it tell us about their strategic wisdom or their fitness to be commander-in-chief? In truth, very little. None other than George McGovern boasted, accurately, that he was “a decorated combat pilot in World War II,” while his opponent “was stationed far from battle.” Did this make McGovern “stronger” than Nixon on national security?

The truth is: Biden and Lieberman and Edwards and even Obama were more ressuring on the war than Kerry was. Given how important it is for Kerry to burnish his war credentials and how deeply resistant he was to embrace the war in his acceptance speech, I think the candidate has told us roughly where he stands.

It was indeed a missed opportunity. But the reason the Kerry speech was so troubling is that it seems to me an indicator of what’s wrong with the candidate: arrogant, prolix, unable to discipline his own tortured nuance, and too clever by half.

To all of you who have contributed this week, a heartfelt thanks. Some of your emails of support have made my week. Your generosity is amazing. A large number of former donors have told me they won’t contribute again, because of my refusal to endorse Bush. Fair enough; it’s a free country, and I am grateful for their help in the past. But I have never written this blog to please readers, or pander to a constituency, or suck up to either party. In fact, one of the reasons I blogged in the first place was to avoid the kind of pressure from editors or publishers or advertizers or readers that most journalists inevitably feel. And in a world where Sean Hannity and Michael Moore rule the airwaves, I’m happy to write a blog supported by people who disagree with me but believe this pioneering blog is worth supporting. Thanks again. You guys are the true liberals, with a small “l”. If you’d still like to contribute, the details are here.

EMAIL OF THE DAY II: First of all, Islamic terrorists need Bush to win re-election so that they can continue the theme of their propaganda campaign: that America, led by an administration that thinks Muslims themselves are infidels, is in a war to the finish against all Muslims. A Kerry victory provides less fodder for this campaign because Kerry would be less hated in the Muslim world, even if his actions were as tough or tougher than Bush’s. The Muslim world has many problems with America, but they hate George W. Bush. They don’t hate Kerry. Thus Bush is the fuel for the Islamist fire.
As far as the writer’s point that “everyone knows what happened to Omar and Saddam”–if he means Mullah Omar, then yes, everyone does know. The man is still free and at large solely because, after locating him and putting him within our sights, the commanding general of Operation Enduring Freedom refused to give the order to take him out. So much for the Bush administration being tough and intimidating.
Let’s get real.”

EMAIL OF THE DAY III: “The Democrats’ policies towards drug companies are every bit as anti-intellectual as the Republicans’ policies on stem cell research.
I was diagnosed with an especially agressive strain of non-Hodgkins lymphoma a few months back. In fact, I was a couple of days away from death by strangulation, as the tumor had constricted my airway to something smaller than a pencil. To compound things, I don’t have insurance (I’m not eligible for insurance through my job for another five months, and I was too short-sighted to get it on my own.).
As I write this, though, I’m cancer-free. Why? Because of the amazing new drugs produced by those “greedy” drug companies, and because those same acquisitive bastards gave me the drugs free of charge. The greedy pricks at my hospital picked up my bills, and one of their rotten nurses came in on her day off to administer my first round of chemo because I needed it so badly.
We don’t know how good we have it in this country, and I’m afraid by the time we figure it out that mob I saw in Boston will have gutted our healthcare system and crippled our drug companies. It makes perfect sense to me that their chosen candidate is a career politician who married money, and his running mate is a selfless white knight who’s made tens of millions of dollars by going after besieged doctors, nearly all of whom have contributed more to mankind than he ever will, and charging his clients 30% of the take.”

EMAIL OF THE DAY IV: “You’re becoming more and more of a shill for the Democrats. Your obsession with prancing down the aisle in a frilly pink dress doesn’t excuse referring to Kerry as a patriot. Please spare us. Maybe patriot means something different in merry old England. I guess Kerry is a patriot … like Guy Fawkes and the dynamiters.” More feedback on the Letters Page.

“I’ve been thinking about Kerry’s real dilemma. What if he wins? Assume for argument’s sake that he is as committed to the war on Islamofascism as Bush. What will be the situation he finds himself in? First, his victory will be accompanied with videos of cheering islamofascist crowds – the Arab and Islamic worlds will (perhaps unfairly) interpret his victory as a defeat for America – after all, in the Arab world regimes tend to change only when the nation is defeated. Second, our enemies and friends will tend to perceive Kerry as the “weaker” candidate – the one less likely to agressively assert US interests. In high school terms, Bush is the “Crazy Motherf**cker” that nobody messes with – because everyone knows what happened to Omar and Saddam. Kerry is like a Student Council Treasurer – not a bad guy but no reputation for aggression, indeed a reputation for avoiding conflict, a guy you might be able to intimidate. Paradoxically, this puts Kerry in the position of needing to be more agressive than Bush in the next term – he needs to demonstrate his willingness to assert US interests and take out bad guys so that the benefits of intimidation that Bush achieved don’t evaporate. By contrast Bush doesn’t need to do nearly as much because everybody knows that he’s a “Crazy Motherf**cker”.
Of course this assumes that Kerry wants to aggressively fight islamofascism. If he doesn’t he faces no dilemma – we just lose.”