Category: Old Dish

“I try not to use multiple punctuation marks, and keep it temperate, but ‘Bush Gets It’?!?! That’s the headline you choose when the President of the United States finally, lamely, far, far too late actually deigns to speak directly to the American people with the details of how he will try to salvage some honor out of what is becoming a world-historical debacle?
It must be nice to be a president for whom expectations of seriousness, policy grasp, and communicative ability are so low that when he offers a press conference or actually takes time to describe his policies to the people he “leads”, this is news, for which we are meant to be grateful.
If by ‘Bush Gets It’ you mean ‘Bush realizes he is in serious danger of actually losing to a lackluster central-casting Democrat who can barely be bothered to campaign, and this after winning two wars and giving half the treasury back to the people in pandering tax cuts, and he knows it’s high time he actually be the president and stop just saying ‘freedom’ and ‘stay the course”, you’re right. I guess, maybe, three and a half years into his job, he finally gets it.” More new feedback on the Letters Page.

ANOTHER WRINKLE: Here’s another fascinating little nugget that proves nothing – except that the hysteria of some on the social right is misplaced. To hear some social conservatives, you’d think that all sorts of bad social phenomena are related to tolerance of gays – from illegitimacy rates to divorce and even abortion. But none of this pans out. In fact, we know that divorce and abortion rates are often higher in those regions where the religious right is strongest. But I was not aware of the following:

The Netherlands – which are also very gay-friendly – has the lowest abortion rate of any country in the world (6.5 per 1,000) – much, much lower than in the USA. Belgium has extremely pro-gay laws and an abortion rate nearly as low as The Netherlands (6.8 per 1,000). The other countries in the world with gay-marriage or marriage-lite laws – Germany (7.6), Denmark (16.1), Norway (15.6), France (12.4), and Canada (15.5) – all have significantly lower abortion rates than the USA (and also lower than most countries in the world).
Meanwhile, Eastern Europe – the least gay-friendly place in the developed world – has an incredibly high abortion rate: 90 abortions per 1,000 women age 15-44. Overall, it’s clear that gay-friendly countries have fewer abortions.

No, that doesn’t mean they’re linked. I don’t share the social science methods of Stanley Kurtz. But it’s interesting nonetheless.

A reader comes across an old essay by Susan Sontag, whose latest indictment of America will be published this weekend in the New York Times Magazine:

I came across the December 1968 Esquire. Its cover flap touts the big story: “Exclusive: Trip to Hanoi 28,000 Word Report by Susan Sontag.”

Much of the article is little more than a travelogue with discussions of how she got there, what the airport was like, how well-mannered the Vietnamese are, the fact that their babies don’t cry, what they serve for snacks (“overripe green bananas, Vietnamese cigarettes, damp cookies….”), how much they like individual Americans.

However, it quickly becomes clear that she is more than just a Communist sympathizer: She is herself a Communist who not only advocates U.S. defeat in Vietnam but also Communist revolution here.

Here is the money quote:

“And the revolution that remains to be made in this country [the United States] must be made in American terms, not those of an Asian peasant society … Life here [in America] looks both uglier and more promising … Increasing numbers of [Americans] do realize that we must have a more generous, more humane way of being with each other; and great, probably convulsive, social changes are needed to create these psychic changes … The wide prevalence of unfocused unhappiness in modern Western culture could be the beginning of real knowledge – by which I mean the knowing that leads simultaneously to action and to self-transcendence, the knowing that would lead to a new versions of human nature in this part of the world … Just possibly, the process of recasting the particular historical form of our human nature prevalent in Europe and American can be hurried a little, by more people becoming aware of capacies for sentiments and behavior that this culture’s values have obscured and slandered.

Sontag is urging on America “convulsive” social change to produce “new versions of human nature.” Lenin, anyone? No wonder she has found members of al Qaeda to be more moral than American soldiers.

CONTRA COLE: Juan Cole, stung by criticism that he directy equated Paul Wolfowitz with Saddam Hussein, tears me a new one on his blog. I should repeat for the record that Cole’s blog is well worth reading and a font of information and analysis. But it is also beset by a hatred of the Bush administration that mars its credibility. Cole lambastes me for a column I wrote before the war complaining about Howell Raines’ explicit camaigning against the war in the NYT. I would think by now that the question of Raines’ abuse of the NYT is largely settled. But Cole understandably loved Raines’ polemicizing in the guise of journalism. Then he attacks my column on several grounds. Firstly, that I dismissed predictions that the war would wreck the American economy. But I was right. If anything, war spending has juiced the economy, now predicted to grow at around 4.7 percent this year. Then he argues that paranoia and skepticism about the Bush administration’s motives, as exemplified by Raiunes, were rational. I beg to differ. I still see no evidence that the Bush administration’s motives were insincere. You can criticize them, as I have, for all sorts of things. But the insistence of the far left that it is an administration of deliberate lies and deception seems to me overblown and shrill. And even if such paranoia were defensible, the man running the most authoritative paper on the planet should try and rein his biases in, not give them full expression through news reporting. That was my point. Cole subsequently describes my description of possible motives for opposing war in 2002 as “character assassination.” Again, he exaggerates. It is perfectly fair to notice that Brent Scowcroft might be seeking to defend his past in opposing a new Iraq war. When your policy of keeping Saddam in power led to the massacre of hundreds of thousands, you have a good reason to make the case that you were nonetheless right. Cole then says my description of some military brass as “gun-shy” implies I am impugning their courage. Please. I’m merely describing the U.S. military’s long-held aversion to difficult conflicts.

TAINTED BY EXTREMISM: Cole then concedes that his posting was prompted by my criticism of his moral equation of Paul Wolfowitz with Saddam Hussein. Here is what he wrote:

“Paul Wolfowitz kept crowing last summer about how the US saved the Marsh Arabs from Saddam, but now that many of them have joined the Sadrists in Kut and Amara, Wolfowitz is having the Marsh Arabs killed just as Saddam did, and for the same reasons.”

Cole defends this obscenity by saying the following:

There is an enormous difference in scale between what Saddam did to them and what the Coalition has done since the beginning of April. But it is early days, after all. And in issues of ethics and hypocrisy, scale is less important than principle… “Saving” the Iraqi Shiites was maybe the last rationale for their war that hadn’t been discredited. Since April 2 they haven’t been saving them any more. They have been killing them.

Notice that Cole has accused me of character assassination because I criticized an editor for being biased. But I haven’t accused anyone of deliberately following the genocidal policies of Saddam Hussein. Cole now steps back a bit and concedes that the Marsh Arab casualties in the insurgency cannot be compared to Saddam’s attempted wholesale destruction of an entire people. But he’s still vicious with regard to Wolfowitz. “Crowing” about the liberation of an entire sub-population? How about “celebrating”? And does Cole honestly believe that the Shiites now freed from Saddam haven’t really been saved? Notice also what Cole doesn’t take back: his vilest assertion that Wolfowitz, a decent and honorable man, is deliberately killing Shiites for the same reasons as Saddam Hussein. Does Cole really believe that Wolfowitz wants to commit genocide to entrench his own vile police state? Cole strikes me as a text-book case in the virtues and merits of today’s academic elite. They can marshall great scholarship and knowledge; but their ideological extremism taints it all.

A British innovation in warfare. Very British.

Here’s a new site: www.johnkerryisadouchebagbutimvotingforhimanyway.com. Honest, at least.

I was hoping to write this morning about Iraq but I’m too tired now after talking half the night chez Hitch. I’ll check in later today to explain why a) I’m more encouraged than I have been and b) why I’m now persuaded that that wedding party story was and is bullshit.

Yes – and on video as well. The chef is French, naturellement.

CONSERVATIVES ON IRAQ: The best guide I’ve read so far is from my trusty aide, Reihan Salam, in the New Republic.

INTEGRATION DAY, CONTINUED: Noam Scheiber profiles Barack Obama, the Illinois Senate candidate.

BACKLASH FIZZLES: A new Gallup poll shows an historic high for support for marriage rights for gay couples. To the question: “Do You Think Marriages Between Homosexuals Should or Should Not Be Recognized by the Law as Valid?” 55 percent said no and 42 percent said yes. That 42 percent is the highest number ever recorded. It was 27 percent in 1996, and had been 31 percent as recently as last December. The public remains equally divided on the matter of a constitutional amendment, even when it is framed in a positive formula, and is split down the middle on civil unions. All in all, the shift in public opinion is clearly in favor of those supporting marriage rights. We are slowly winning this debate. Two leading conservatives recognize this: Cal Thomas, who says this debate is over, and Max Boot, who represents the younger conservative generation’s attitude. Meanwhile, pro marriage-equality politicians in Oregon, including those in Multnomah County who were targeted by the religious right, just won re-election handily.

CONTRA KURTZ: Stanley Kurtz’s argument that marriage rights for gays in Scandinavia somehow led to a decline in marriage rates for heterosexuals or an increase in children born out of wedlock is thoroughly rebutted by M. V. Lee Badget in the current Slate. The evidence, to put it mildly, simply doesn’t exist. In fact, heterosexual marriage rates have stabilized and even increased after gays were allowed to marry. Money quote:

In Denmark, for example, the marriage rate had been declining for a half-century but turned around in the early 1980s. After the 1989 passage of the registered-partner law, the marriage rate continued to climb; Danish heterosexual marriage rates are now the highest they’ve been since the early 1970’s. And the most recent marriage rates in Sweden, Norway, and Iceland are all higher than the rates for the years before the partner laws were passed. Furthermore, in the 1990s, divorce rates in Scandinavia remained basically unchanged.

Badget then demolishes Kurtz’s bizarre assertions that giving gays the right to marry somehow causes straights to have children out of wedlock:

Parenthood within marriage is still the norm – most cohabitating couples marry after they start having children. In Sweden, for instance, 70 percent of cohabiters wed after their first child is born. Indeed, in Scandinavia the majority of families with children are headed by married parents. In Denmark and Norway, roughly four out of five couples with children were married in 2003. In the Netherlands, a bit south of Scandinavia, 90 percent of heterosexual couples with kids are married.

This mini-debate, at least, is now over.

“Paul Wolfowitz kept crowing last summer about how the US saved the Marsh Arabs from Saddam, but now that many of them have joined the Sadrists in Kut and Amara, Wolfowitz is having the Marsh Arabs killed just as Saddam did, and for the same reasons.” – Juan Cole, equating Paul Wolfowitz with Saddam Hussein, in an email to Mickey Kaus. Mickey finds this kind of rhetoric unsettling. I read Cole, because he obviously knows a lot. But his biases are so acute I don’t trust him an inch. Anyone who can write that sentence has lost whatever moral bearings he once had.

My favorite correction from the New York Times in a long time. Almost makes me nostalgic for the Captain Queeg era:

An article on Monday about the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling that ended school segregation misstated a word in a paraphrase from President Bush, who attended a ceremony in Topeka, Kan. He called for a continuing battle to end racial inequality – not equality.

You couldn’t make this up. Speaking of which the cover story in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine is a Susan Sontag essay. Yes, she’s going to write about Abu Ghraib. And – yes! – the headline is: “The Photographs Are Us.”

It appears he will talk to the American people next week, laying out a detailed strategy for the transfer of sovereignty in Iraq. That’s good news – exactly what I was hoping for earlier this week. I hope he also explains what military strategy is in Falluja and Karbala and the south. Many of us are committed to winning this war, whatever it takes. But the endless stream of mistakes and setbacks, when placed in the context of no effective presidential communication, is no recipe for victory. There are three battles right now: the military campaign against the insurgency, the fight for political legitimacy in Iraq itself, and the opinion war in America itself. We have won much of the first, have largely lost the second, and are fast losing the third. We can still turn this around. But Bush has to lead the way.

FORTY FUNERALS AND A WEDDING: Thanks for all your furious emails about the wedding party. No, I’m not buying enemy propaganda. I wrote that the details were murky. But no one has disputed the fact of dead women and children. For skepticism about this story, check out the Belmont Club. I’ll do my best to stay on the case of what really happened.

It’s very hard to know the facts about the carnage on the Iraq-Syria border, but whatever the occasion, it appears that the U.S. military was responsible for the deaths of several Iraqi women and children. It was almost certainly a mistake – either of target or of provocation. But it’s another blow to the prestige of the U.S. military and their ability to avoid the kind of action which will, in fact, make their mission harder rather than easier. There are now many reports of U.S. soldiers feeling so beleaguered and jumpy that their first instinct is to fire, capture or mistreat captives. And so the cycle of distrust in some areas appears to deepen. As to the Iraqi custom of firing into the air in celebration, Zeyad has an interesting post on its history and meaning.

MASSACRE IN GAZA: Another blow to the anti-terror war: Israel’s military killed more civilian children in the Gaza Strip. Again, the details are murky, but this post (especially the map) is helpful in understanding the situation.

TAXING GAS: Tony Blair insists on increasing gas taxes, even in the current climate. In Britain, 74 percent of the price of gas is due to taxes. Just a reminder of how anomalous America’s cheap, cheap gas is.

EMAIL OF THE DAY I: “I’m a United Church of Christ minister in . . . well, maybe I shouldn’t mention the town . . . and that Onion story reminds me of some of the fine ladies in my church. Yes, I have had some of them come to me after a funeral and want to know ‘why did the family want THAT music/THOSE flowers/choose THAT casket?’ After one of my members died, a woman who had one son, another member made this remark after viewing the open casket: ‘If she had a daughter, she’d have some jewelry on. But you can’t rely on a man to think of something like that.’ Name it, I’ve probably heard some whining about it.
In my experience as a clergyperson, there is no limit to the verbal sniping human beings can level at one another. And, in the interest of full disclosure, funeral directors and clergy are just as capable of it as anyone else.”

EMAIL OF THE DAY II: “Hitch’s quote from the “Scarborough Country” show must have been unconsciously plagiarized from a wonderful scene in the novel Auntie Mame (not the movie or the musical) where Mame confronts the vicious anti-semitism of Claude Upson, the would-be father-in-law to her nephew and narrator of the novel, Patrick Dennis: ‘Claude,’ she said, ‘I’ve known dozens of Jews in my life and it has also been my sorry experience to have heard quite a few gentiles who have talked about Jews as you do. I know the adjectives–all of them. Jews, you will tell me, are Mean, Pushy, Avaricious, Possessive, Loud, Vulgar, Garish, Bossy people. But I’ve yet to meet one, from the poorest pushcart vendor on First Avenue to the richest philanthropist on Fifth Avenue, who could ever hold a candle to you when it comes to displaying all of those qualities.'”

SLIPPERY, SLIPPERY SLOPE: A helpful piece by Dahlia Lithwick, dissecting some of the most hysterical arguments against marriage rights for gay citizens.