Category: Old Dish

“… Sontag’s elitism has an exclusionary malevolence that goes well beyond the notion of a priestly caste of artists and thinkers. As early as 1964, she attributed the cinema’s relative security from hordes of interpreters in part to ‘the happy accident that films for such a long time were just movies; in other words, that they were understood to be part of mass, as opposed to high, culture, and were left alone by most people with minds.’ That use of ‘people with minds’ as a synonym for literary intellectuals has always ruffled me, since the unavoidable corollary is that people who aren’t literary intellectuals don’t have minds. And that’s offensive… Sontag is noticeably reticent on the subject of her own family, and the few spots where she does refer to it give off a whiff of contempt… but then, Sontag has always had a low opinion of her fellow citizens, predicated on the embarrassing robustness of American bad taste. For her, vulgarity is a mortal sin rather than a venial one. ‘Today’s America,’ she scowled in 1966, ‘with Ronald Reagan the new daddy of California and John Wayne chawing spareribs in the White House,’ (as a Southerner, I resent that), ‘is pretty much the same Yahooland that Mencken was describing.’ Then she got really high-handed: ‘After America was won, it was filled up by new generations of the poor and built up according to the tawdry fantasy of the good life that culturally deprived, uprooted people might have had at the beginning of the industrial era. And the country looks it.’ That’s some fairly supercilious class bias to be issuing from the granddaughter of immigrant Jews, not to mention from a radical (at that point) leftist.” – Craig Seligman, from his new book, “Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me,” thanks to a diligent reader.

It’s going global – not in the sense that child abuse is prevalent across the world in the Catholic Church (we knew that already), but in the sense that the Vatican and other parts of the Church hierarchy can use their international status to move criminal priests from one country to another to avoid prosecution or discovery:

INSKEEP: When priest sex abuse becomes an international issue, when people are being moved from country to country, whose job is it to police it?

Mr. EGERTON: It’s a really great question. International flight is the ultimate challenge for law enforcement. And it often becomes unclear whose job it is. Police, we have found, though, in many cases, haven’t availed themselves of all that they could to pursue these folks.

INSKEEP: Yo! u mean haven’t taken advantage of extradition treaties and that sort o f thing?

Mr. EGERTON: Right. In some cases, they’ve failed to pursue extradition. In other cases where extradition treaties aren’t present, they haven’t made other inquiries to see if something else can be arranged. In some cases, they haven’t even gotten to the point of doing anything but filing a warrant in their home country and just filing it away and walking off.

INSKEEP: Were there American priests who were shipped overseas?

Mr. EGERTON: Absolutely. Frequently, what we’ve seen are priests who worked for a long time in America but remained citizens of another country. They came here and, when trouble arose, there was an easy escape hatch, and that was to go back to their native lands.

INSKEEP: You’ve already told us of one case where someone outside the United States got in trouble and was shipped to the United States for a while.

Mr. EGERTON: That’s right. It…

INSKEEP: Did that happen more than once?

Mr. EGE! RTON: Oh, yes, absolutely. Yeah, we found some folks who are still here, still here.

I’ve long believed that this scandal goes right to the heart of the current hierarchy in Rome. Good for the Dallas Morning News for pursuing this. (Hat tip: Glenn.)

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “People out there are learning the exact wrong lesson from the shortfalls of intelligence about Iraq. The failure of our intelligence organizations to correctly assess the status of Saddam’s WMD programs is actually a powerful argument IN FAVOR of preemptive – or even preventive – national security doctrine.
Sure, it’s fair to hold the CIA accountable for this “intelligence failure,” and I don’t argue that the intel community could have done better. But think about it this way: The question of Iraqi WMD was one of the most critical national security issues for the United States for over a decade, and the US, our allies, and the UN directed vast intelligence collection and analysis resources against it. Regardless of what particular mistakes were made, the degree to which the CIA came up short reveals a larger truth: This type of intelligence problem is fundamentally impossible to solve with the precision necessary to support a security policy based on traditional “imminent threat” criteria. Whether Saddam’s WMD capabilties were overestimated or underestimated is a peripheral issue. What is essential is that we didn’t – and probably couldn’t – know for sure what those capabilities were.
Contrary to the assertions of many who opposed war in Iraq, this epistemological limitation does not argue for the abandonment of a preemptive doctrine. In fact, it argues for yet greater urgency in the preventive (yes, preventive) elimination of regimes that have the potential to use WMD or supply them to other actors. The definitive intelligence issue for this doctrine is not what specific weapons programs, terrorist links, or ill intentions a certain state might possess, but rather the nature of that state. That is a question that is readily answerable and is therefore a more valid guide to ethical decision-making on issues of war and peace.
Just war doctrine has long rejected this line of reasoning, as it could provide pretexts for endless wars of agression. But times have changed. The civilized world can no longer safely permit governments like Saddam’s to exist. The precise status of WMD programs (especially bio and chem) in countries like Iraq, Iran, and North Korea are practically insurmountable intelligence problems. The solution lies not in trying to improve the intelligence, but in getting rid of the problems.” More feedback on the Letters Page.

Words, of course, fail. But it is important to look at our enemy squarely. Will the networks show these images? They absolutely should.

… gets whacked by the dittoheads for actually thinking.

Given what we now know about Abu Ghraib, given the murders and rapes of several inmates in U.S. custody, given the fact that the U.S. now allows for “disappearing” prisoners in order to hide them from the Red Cross, is it not incumbent on the administration to release all memos detailing what this administration regards as permissible “coercive interrogation techniques?” (By the way, isn’t that term in and of itself chilling? Its plain meaning is the use of violence or the threat of violence against inmates. When a government resorts to this kind of euphemism, you know something fishy is going on.) We really do need to see two in particular:

[T]he documents include a memo from Mr. Rumsfeld to Gen. James T. Hill, the senior officer of the Southern Command, dated April 2003 and titled, “Coercive interrogation techniques that can be used with approval of the Defense Secretary.” Another memo dated Jan. 4, 2004, written by the top legal adviser to Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior American commander in Iraq, and sent to military intelligence and police personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison, is titled, “New plan to restrict Red Cross access to Abu Ghraib.”

In the first, we can find out what kinds of torture or abuse Rumsfeld has deemed legit. In the second, we can find out how the policy of restricting Red Cross access might have contributed to the horror of Abu Ghraib. If the administration wants to say it has never condoned torture, and that Abu Ghraib was the work of a handful of rogues, these memos could prove their case. So why won’t they release them? Hmmm.

This one, caught by Mickey, is a beaut. It’s CBS’ John Roberts on the 9/11 Commission:

It is one of President Bush’s last surviving justifications for war in Iraq, and today, it took a devastating hit when the 9-11 Commission declared there was no collaborative relationship between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. … Those repeated associations left the majority of Americans believing Saddam was involved in 9/11, but the commission today put the nail in that connection, or for that matter, any other al-Qaida acts of terror against America, declaring, ‘There is no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaida cooperated on attacks against the United States.’ The report is yet another blow to the president’s credibility as he struggles to find the exit door in Iraq and opens him up to new criticism on the wisdom of taking on Saddam with al-Qaida’s leadership still at large.

Astonishingly biased, even by CBS standards.

Talk about a water-tight defense of the Bush administration’s handling of post-war Iraq! Here’s Rich Lowry, rightly pointing out the need to be patient in bringing a turn-around in Iraq, but finding a way to excuse mistakes and failures by the Bushies:

Patience, of course, is now in short supply. By the exquisite standards of today’s media and the critics of the Iraq War, the men who rebuilt Japan and Germany were incompetents. They had to muddle their way to success through policy failures and bureaucratic infighting. Incompetence can achieve the same success in Iraq, if it’s given the chance.

One wonders under what circumstances, if this is the standard, could one criticize the Bush administration? Lowry’s convenient answer: Never! Look, I want the Iraq war to succeed with every bone in my body. But I don’t think it helps the war effort never to criticize the conduct of it. One reason democracies do well in war is that they can indeed air criticism and achieve correction more quickly than rigid dictatorships. But some on the right are now busy saying that any criticism is tantamount to treason, that torture can be justified, that disasters (such as Abu Ghraib) should be kept from the public (Jonah Goldberg’s position), that a vote for Kerry is a vote for Osama, and so on. Such reflexive, brain-dead defensiveness is not a key to success. It’s a recipe for failure.

The war continues.

The vice-president’s direct attack on the New York Times’ portrayal of the 9/11 Commission report was a zinger. On balance, i think Cheney is right. The links between al Qaeda and Saddam may not have amounted to a formal alliance, but they existed all right, as the Commission conceded. The NYT itself reported that “The report said that despite evidence of repeated contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda in the 90’s, ‘they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship.'” But if there were “repeated contacts” between al Qaeda and Iraq, how can it be true that, as the headline put it, that “Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie”? Headlines truncate things, of course. But Cheney is dead-on in describing this headline as misleading. Here’s Tom Kean, the chairman of the Commision: “What we have found is, were there contacts between al-Qaeda and Iraq? Yes. Some of them were shadowy – but they were there.” Here’s Lee Hamilton:

“I must say I have trouble understanding the flack over this. The Vice President is saying, I think, that there were connections between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s government. We don’t disagree with that. What we have said is what the governor just said, we don’t have any evidence of a cooperative, or a corroborative relationship between Saddam Hussein’s government and these al Qaeda operatives with regard to the attacks on the United States. So it seems to me the sharp differences that the press has drawn, the media has drawn, are not that apparent to me.”

The NYT had the gall to demand that Bush and Cheney apologize. In fact, it’s the NYT that needs to apologize.

THE DEEPER POINT: But it’s also true, it seems to me, that even if there were no contacts, Saddam was still a clear and present danger after 9/11 precisely because of his record with WMDs and links with terror groups. One recalls that Saddam’s official press was one of the few to openly celebrate the 9/11 attacks against the “Great Satan.” Bush made the right decision – the only decision a responsible president could have made at the time. What frustrates about Cheney, however, is his inability to concede that the intelligence he used about WMDs was embarrassingly wrong. Here’s the exchange with Gloria Borger:

BORGER: In hindsight, Mr. Vice President, are you disappointed in the quality of the intelligence that you received before launching an attack against Iraq? Vice Pres. CHENEY: I can’t say that, Gloria. I think the decision we made was exactly the right one.

He can’t say it. The vice-president would have more credibility when he’s right if he could also concede when he’s been wrong.

“I represent only my own views. As for the Republican establishment, I couldn’t be less interested. Neither party seems to take its own ideas very seriously. I’m still conservative, though, which is one of the reasons I often have trouble defending Bush. ” – Tucker Carlson, another dissident.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY II: “It’s been 29 days since the institution of marriage has supposedly been rocked and torn apart here in Massachusetts by gay people marrying and I’m happy and relieved to report that my wife and I are still married with no plans to divorce. Unfortunately, it appears that “they” got to Rush Limbaugh.” – Greg Roach, looking to see if the sky is falling in Massachusetts.