Category: Old Dish

“There are three things I know about John Kerry. First, that he speaks three or four languages, and one of them is French. Second, that he’s married to an ex-senator’s wife who’s worth a billion dollars. And third, he is supposedly a Vietnam vet.” – Randal Vinson, Tennessee resident, as quoted in Slate.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY II: “Before leaving the question of divorce, I should like to distinguish two things which are very often confused. The Christian conception of marriage is one: the other is the quite different question – how far Christians, if they are voters or Members of Parliament, ought to try to force their views of marriage on the rest of the community by embodying them in the divorce laws. A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognize that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not.” – C.S. Lewis, “Mere Christianity.” I’ve cited this passage before, but it’s worth citing again in the days before the Federal Marriage Amendment vote. It comes from a Christianity that sees a critical distinction between church and state, that respects the rights of unbelievers, cares about minorities, and seeks to keep faith free from politicization. What a contrast with the religious right of this new millennium. My anger at them is not simply because of their contempt for gay people, but because of their corruption of Christianity.

This struck me as a particularly sharp George Will column.

A LILEKS CLASSIC: Forgive me for not linking sooner. Money quote:

[Michael Moore]: Are you proud that the rest of the world, which poured out its heart to us after Sept. 11, now looks at us with disdain and disgust?

[Lileks]: Let me see if I can find the right way to put this:

No.

Again, the high-school-level thinking: “the rest of the world.” It’s simplistic to identify Iran, Iraq and North Korea as evil. It’s simplistic to state in the immediate wake of 9/11 that nations are either with the terrorists, or the United States. But it’s a sign of complex nuanced thinking to say that “the rest of the world . . . looks at us with disdain and disgust.” Yes, the world poured out its heart; it cost them nothing. Hearts are easily tipped and just as easily refilled. When the French newspaper said “We are all Americans now” it sounded nice, and I suppose it was, but in retrospect it looks as if there was an undercurrent of appeasement and surrender: we are all Americans because we are all victims in a sense, non? We ceased to earn the precious coin of French approval when we fired the chief procurer for their favorite customer, Iraq. C’est dommage. We can live with it.

Wait until France gets a hard shot in the nose. Wait until France reacts with some nasty work. They’ll get a golf-clap from the chattering class over here and a you-go-girl from Red America. France could nuke an Algerian terrorist camp and the rest of the world would tut-tut for a day, then ask if the missiles France used were for sale. And of course the answer would be oui.

Damn, I love James in a temper.

BLACK AND WHITE: I’ve been getting mor emails than usual complaining about the color scheme of the blog. I know it’s hard on some eyes. But that’s why we have a little button at the top of the Dish titled “Black and White.” Click on it if you want to change the color scheme, m-kay?

Now the war continues in the House. This is the July Rove strategy I predicted – to gay-bait to rally the right-wing base, and to purge the Republican leadership of any tolerance of gay relationships. They don’t believe the FMA will pass, they know that it’s unnecessary, but they need to use it now to blunt the Kerry advance. Meanwhile, another low blow from Maggie Gallagher, whose latest column takes a single anecdote of one child of a gay couple and argues that the debate is therefore over. Money quote:

Cassidy’s story is not science. It’s just her own feelings. Many researchers say most kids do just fine in these alternative family forms. Cassidy doesn’t buy that research, though. “I don’t think a fair study could be conducted because children currently in that family wouldn’t necessarily be open to speaking their true feelings about it.”

Oh, so that settles it. You don’t need science or research, you just need one anecdote! Don’t you think, for example, that you could find a child of a mixed race couple who feels and felt socially isolated in childhood or the object of peer pressure as a kid? Would that make a mixed-race marriage a “selfish” proposition for two adults in love? Yes, that was exactly the argument used in the 1950s and 1960s against inter-racial marriage: think of what it does to the kids. Blogger KipEsquire also weighs in.

Here’s the full Le Monde review of “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

“For a simple and compelling reason, traditional marriage has been the norm in every political community for 5,000 years.” – Senator Orrin Hatch, National Review. Hatch is a Mormon.

IF YOU LIVE IN VIRGINIA: Give Senator Warner a call. He hasn’t made his mind up on the religious right amendment to the Constitution. He’s a good conservative and so should be able to see the trashing of federalism and stripping of civil rights that this amendment entails. 202 224 2023.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “It is not just foreigners who now endure indignities at the US border, it is also native born US citizens. My partner and I just returned from a trip to South Africa and Zambia. We had no trouble entering either country and were met with friendly faces at all borders. Our passports were all we needed to show overseas (and they are not even biometric). There was no assumption of guilt that we were there to cause problems. That is until we got back to Atlanta. Upon returning to Atlanta, it took almost 45 minutes to get through immigration (separately of course since we are not a family). I can’t imagine how long actual foreigners had to wait, their lines were much worse.
Additionally, our anti-terrorist measures are something of a joke overseas. We were on a 17 hour plane ride in which we were not supposed to hang out in the aisles or near the bathrooms. I guess we should all stay in our seats and get deep-vein thrombosis instead. In fact, when the pilot announced the rules the FAA had in place, you could feel the derision and sarcasm dripping in his voice. The US has lost almost all respect overseas.” More feedback on the Letters Page.

If there’s one thing the U.S. could be doing right now, it’s thinking about how it can improve the country’s image abroad. So what does the Bush administration do? It imposes a new immigration rule that will make life extremely difficult for foreign journalists to cover this country adequately, forcing them out of the country for long periods (up to four months) in order to renew their visas. It’s already a nightmare to enter this country, because of the new security regulations. British journalists have been jailed, humiliated and deported for the most minor of details, immigration officials at the borders now have powers that defy judicial review and act accordingly. Many of my European friends tell me that they simply won’t visit the U.S. any more because of the experience of entering what appears to be a police state at the border – and the risk of summary arrest for no good reason. This is bad enough when it affects millions of ordinary people – tourists, business-people (I’ve noticed a big decline in European tourists on the Cape this summer). But when you target the group that is responsible for conveying what the United States is to the rest of the world, you are only hurting yourself.

Orrin Hatch’s piece in National Review Online is a depressing read. Hatch was once skeptical of the Musgrave amendment – its sweeping removal from states any ability to determine who can get married, its denial of any legally enforceable benefits of any kind for gay couples anywhere in America. But Santorum has obviously gotten to him. It is becoming clear, as I predicted, that the anti-gay part of the Rove campaign is now in full force, as a means of galvanizing the fundamentalist base. Hatch also now adheres to the Republican establishment doctrine that there can never be a public mention of “gays, lesbians or homosexuals”. To give us that sliver of dignity – the right to be named in describing an amendment designed to strip us of basic civil rights for ever – would outrage the Dobsons and Falwells and Reeds. For them it is important to remember, gay people are just sick heterosexuals. For them, homosexuality is a mental illness, not a dignified part of a human being’s identity. It is so dispiriting to see one political party – as a minority comes of age – reverting to the attitudes of the 1950s. But that is what Bush has done. They’re pulling out all the stops on this one – and those who believe that this FMA is somehow dead or doomed are being culpably naive.

The most effective and often hilarious critic of John Kerry now says he’ll vote for him. The rationale? Here it is:

[W]e survived Carter and we’d survive Kerry (though it will be a long, hard slog!). I plan to vote for him because I think a) we need to take a time out from Bush’s strident public global terror war in order to prevent it from becoming a damaging, lifelong West vs. Islam clash–in order to “rebrand” America and digest the hard-won gains we’ve made in Iraq and Afghanistan (if they even remain gains by next January). Plus, b) it would be nice to make some progress on national health care, even if it’s only dialectical “try a solution and find out it doesn’t work” progress. I could change my mind–if, for example, I thought Kerry would actually sell out an incipient Iraqi democracy in a fit of “realistic” Scowcroftian stability-seeking (an issue Josh Marshall’s recent Atlantic piece doesn’t resolve). But I don’t intend to agonize like last time.”

Good for Mickey, I guess. I think it’s sign of real intelligence that someone can both essentially loathe a candidate and still, for various reasons, vote for him.

“To affirm … that [“Fahrenheit 9/11] was crowned (in Cannes) for its cinemagraphic qualities is either proof of incompetence, a pure lie or a cynical joke.” – Le Monde, today. I’d opt for “pure lie.”

A useful summary of five years of revived repression from the Jihadist religious right in Tehran. Check out Hippercritical’s posts as well.