Category: Old Dish

In the hammock. Back Wednesday.

Clarence Page criticizes his paper’s editors for their witch-hunt against Jack Ryan. It won’t stop them from doing it again, alas. Money quote:

Excuse me, folks, but when candidates don’t even have to have sex to be brought down by a sex scandal, we should be asking ourselves whether we are beginning to ratchet the bar up too high for mere mortals who might have an interest in public service.

Nicely put.

I’m not as complacent as some about the prospects of the Federal Marriage Amendment. The Republican leadership has swept away all obstacles to a speedy vote on the matter in an election year, pressuring moderate Senators to the brink. Please take a minute of you believe in stopping this kind of use of the Constitution for social policy and email your senator. Here’s one site that helps. Here’s another. Do what you can.

AND IF YOU’RE TILL PONDERING: From Plato to Ann Landers, from George W. Bush to John Kerry, from Loving vs Virginia to the Goodridge decision, my new book, “Same-Sex Marriage, Pro and Con: A Reader,” is the most comprehensive resource available. If you’re a student, a journalist, or just a citizen, and want to make up your own mind about the battle over civil marriage for gays, take a look.

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The fusion of the Republican party with evangelical Christian churches is now well-entrenched, as this latest NYT story reveals. Ralph Reed, of course, was unrepentant in his courting of the Southern Baptists for the Republican party last month. And the president addressed the SBC conference by satellite, while Richard Land launched the voter registration drive called “I Vote Values.” “I, for one, believe people of faith have the same rights to participate in the political process as any other citizens,” Reed said. “Christians should not be treated as second-class citizens.” Of course they shouldn’t. Still, it’s worth checking out the IVoteValues.com website to see exactly which values the president is endorsing. In the section on homosexuality, the Southern Baptists remind us of what the founding fathers thought of gays:

During the American Revolution, when the Continental Army Lieutenant Enslin was found “attempting to commit sodomy,” Commander George Washington issued an order “with abhorrence and detestation.” Enslin was to be “drummed out of the camp … never to return.” Thomas Jefferson authorized legislation to penalize sodomy with castration. At the time the Constitution was ratified, the states of New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Connecticut, Virginia, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New Jersey each implemented the death penalty fo those who committed sodomy.”

Why is the SBC reporting this? There are other sections on the dreaded homos, entitled: “Targeting You … And Your Children.” And: ‘Homosexuality Costs You Plenty!” This is what Bush Republicanism is now about – beneath the surface. Worth considering in this campaign. (Hat tip: Roger Abramson).

DIRTY REPUBLICAN TRICKS: A Republican-financed outfit jammed the Democratic phone lines in the New Hampshire primary.

RYAN FIGHTS BACK: And he’s absolutely right to. Money quote:

“What benefit has the public now derived from knowing this information? There is no allegation, as you know, of breaking any laws, no allegation of infidelity, no allegation of breaking any marriage vows,” he said. He said this sort of intrusion into candidates’ personal lives will prevent qualified candidates from entering politics, and said it is “not good for American Democracy.” “I can’t tell you how many calls I got in the last two weeks from people who said, ‘I always thought about maybe going into public service. But not now, not, not after I’ve seen what’s happened to you.’ And so this cannot be the right standard now for entering into American politics,” he told Stosssel.

I really think the only solution to this is to threaten investigations into the private lives of the editors of the papers who peddle such stuff. Every editor who breaks a story like this should be asked in public exactly the kind of intimate questions Ryan was faced with. What do you like to do in bed? What’s the wildest sexual fantasy you have? When did you last have sex with your spouse? Let’s see if they like it when the witch-hunt is turned on them.

FIFTEEN POINTS: That’s the margin a Kerry-McCain ticket would beat Bush-Cheney. Won’t happen, of course. But you can see the huge gulf in American politics by the support for it.

MADONNA: I’m in awe. She’s 45 years old. The two hours of astonishingly athletic choreography, dazzling video effects, and crowd-pleasing music would have taxed an 18 year-old. She truly is one of the great performers of our time. Yes, she had some fatuous anti-war and Kabbalist moments. But I’ll forgive her anything.

Blogging will be light tonight and tomorrow – I’m off to a Madonna concert in Worcester, Mass.

The latest initiative from the theoconservative right: suing Kerry for heresy! You just can’t make this stuff up.

Fascinating new details from C. Everett Koop on the Reagan administration and AIDS. He believes Reagan’s heart was in the right place – but his advisers were the guilty ones. Money quote:

“Conservatives around him didn’t want him to get involved because of the people who had [AIDS],” Koop remembered. “They said, ‘Homosexuals, intravenous drug abusers, heterosexuals who are sexually promiscuous, prostitutes — don’t they deserve what they got?’ I’ve always resented that. I think I could have saved a lot more people.”

He continues:

As one example, Koop cited his failed attempt to add an AIDS awareness spin to First Lady Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No to Drugs” campaign. Koop saw the First Lady’s campaign as a perfect opportunity for President Reagan to address the AIDS crisis. “I contacted him [Reagan] through personal friends and suggested he could accomplish more if he appeared with her and for him to say something like, ‘That includes IV drugs like heroin. You’re not just saying no to drugs, you’re saying no to AIDS,'” Koop said.
After asking Koop several well-informed questions regarding AIDS, Reagan took the idea to his domestic policy council the next morning.
“It caused an uproar,” Koop said. “They said, ‘That’s lose-lose, you want win-win.’ He listened to those who he thought were acting on his best behalf.”

Reagan is responsible for not over-ruling these advisors. But whoever those people were in his domestic policy council, I hope they are proud of themselves.

A very sensible editorial – a nice balance to the witch-hunt of the Chicago Tribune. I should add, in self-flagellatory mode, that my quick post yesterday implying some kind of link between the Trib’s actions and the fact that a relative of a Tribune board member lost in the primary was, in retrospect, stupid. There’s no reason to believe the Trib was influenced in that way – they endorsed another candidate. If I criticize Michael Moore for innuendo, I should make sure I don’t stray into the same thing myself.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “Sen. Murphy seems totally oblivious to the implications. “Will you deny them their rights?” she asks. With some 3 percent of the population, gay couples already seem to enjoy a marked advantage over straight ones in the allocation of supposedly superfluous children.
But whose rights are being denied depends on how deeply we probe and what questions we ask. Granting gay couples the “right” to have children by definition means giving them the right to have someone else’s children, and the question arises whether the original parent or parents ever agreed to part with them.
Not necessarily. Governments that kind-heartedly bestow other people’s children on homosexual couples also have both the power and the motivation to confiscate those children from their original parents, even when the parents have done nothing to warrant losing them.” – Stephen Baskerville, in an article entitled, “Could your kids be given to ‘gay’ parents?” It would be hard to come up with a more inflammatory title or a more despicable attempt to conflate gay marriage rights with the abuse of children.

“May god keep Bush and Allawi, because Bush threw out Saddam and Allawi will give us safety and security.” – Kathem Moula Asim, 75, retired but working as a local guard in the market. The BBC found several Iraqis and asked for their opinions about the new government. They were all positive. If the BBC reports this – they must have scoured Baghdad for hostile quotes – things may be looking up in Iraq.

THE LOOMING REPUBLICAN WAR: The current tussle in the Congress over the budget is just a precursor to what I think will be outright Republican civil war after this election. If Bush wins, it will cripple his ability to get anything done. If he loses, the recriminations will get vicious. The fiscal conservatives will be fighting the “deficits-don’t-matter” crowd. The realists will be out to topple the neocons. The Santorum-Ashcroft axis will continue to wage war on any Republicans not interested in legislating either the Old Testament or the dictates of the Vatican. (The FMA battle now looks more and more like an attempt by Santorum to identify Republican social moderates so he can use primary hardliners to challenge them in the future.) The battle lines are deep and sharp – and the future of American conservatism is at stake. Bush has proven himself unable to unite a party that includes Tom DeLay as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger, John McCain and Bill Frist. Whether the coming civil war is about who lost the election, or who will exploit the victory, it’s going to be nasty and enduring. No single party can be both for individual liberty and for theologically-based social policy; both for fiscal balance and drunken-sailor spending; both for interventionism abroad and against moralism in foreign policy. The incoherence is just too deep, the tensions too strained. And with the war on terror itself a point of contention among conservatives, geo-politics will not be able to keep the coalition in one piece.

SPONSORED BY NATIONAL REVIEW: The latest monument to Ronald Reagan is unveiled.

“Small point, because I think Serra’s drawing is important and was happy he bought the back page of The Nation, but the pleasevote.com site is registered to Richard’s operation and the contact information referring to me is erroneously attributed. Acting on my own, I helped one of his assistants find the site name months ago, and only discovered yesterday when I started getting angry e-mails about the drawing that he had experienced difficulty with the registration process and had left my e-mail in the contact sections.
The Bush Administration is openly stonewalling the torture investigation, the press as usual is asleep, all the while American values abroad are facing their biggest test since My Lai. When a great American artist and patriot expresses his rage via his medium and tries to shake people into realizing what is at stake, I am grateful.” All I have to say is that outrage at Abu Ghraib is something I share. I just don’t think portraying the president as eating the heads of live babies is a decent way of expressing it.

THE LIES OF FAHRENHEIT I: Just one Dowdified quote from Condi Rice.

THE LIES OF FAHRENHEIT II: This one on the Unocal “conspiracy.”

THE LIES OF FAHRENHEIT III: On the Carlyle Group and how the Saudis allegedly bought the Bushes.