Category: Old Dish

“There is nothing that me and you or the British services or the Government can do about stopping an attack in this country. There is nothing Tony Blair, this liar, can do to stop al Qaeda. There is nothing that MI5 or MI6 can do to stop al Qaeda from bombing London. That is the reality and the only person to blame is Tony Blair himself. They warned him in Madrid – pull your troops out and we will not bomb you. They did not listen. They gave them bloodshed in Madrid. They warned them in New York – stop the terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq. They did not listen. They gave them bloodshed in New York. Now Tony Blair has been warned.” – a British Muslim extremist. Radical Muslims burned the British flag in London yesterday and called to resist the notiont that mainstream Muslims should prevent or criticize terrorism.

On the jobless figures.

HOW APPEASEMENT WORKS: On Spain’s railway system.

“Despite the best efforts of war reporters to shape our view of the battlefield, it seems clear that leaders on both sides are motivated by the same set of beliefs. They apparently believe that if they kill enough of us, we’ll pack up and go home. Isn’t that what we believe, too? Like them, we believe force is the only way to accomplish anything in this battle, and that we need only kill enough people in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere to dissuade the terrorists from messing with us.” – Reggie Rivers, Denver Post.

HEADS UP: I’ll be on the Chris Matthews Show this weekend.

Get cowboy hats and sun-glasses. Very Neil Tennant. Circa 2002.

Well, you proved my point. No one agrees. Except, wait, who’s this … arguing for a gas tax hike and an income tax drop as a great way to reform taxation? Drum roll, please … Greg Mankiw, Bush’s economic adviser. Two arguments count against it: no tax is good. I agree. But if we’re not going to cut spending and we have a war to fight, the question is which taxes do we use? A gas tax for the war would be a great idea: it would mean a real general sacrifice, it would help wean us off the oil that is one reason we’re mired in the politics of the Middle East, and it would cut down on those ghastly, unsightly, fuel-wasting armored tanks that now pass for cars throughout America. Yes, I mean SUVs. Then there’s the cultural argument. This is America, goddammit. Here’s a typical email:

I am baffled by your bafflement. I urge you to reread your entry about Alistair Cooke and your sojourn from Miami to L.A.. to Seattle to Boston, and points between. Can you imagine trying to do the same via Amtrak?
Mass transit is precisely that — mass. America is not the land of the mass; it is the land of the individual, the entrepeneur, the explorer. It is the land that does not want to wait for the governmentally-scheduled transport. It is where Henry Ford invented the assembly line to produce cars and transformed the global economy. It is the land where the car allowed for the creation of the suburb, the ranch house, the white picket fence. It is the land of manifest destiny; we drove to California, where we had Fun, Fun, Fun once her daddy took the T-Bird away. [Indeed, Rumsfeld might agree that the East Coast is Old America and the West Coast is New America, less tethered to our Euro-roots.] Before the Interstate, it was the land that got its kicks on Route 66, all the way from Chicago to L.A. It is a culture in which generations of teenagers have received their driver’s licenses as rites of passage — to adventure and romance, away from the watchful eyes of the parental units.
Still don’t get it? Rent Cameron Crowe’s “Singles.” Or “American Graffiti.” Or “Animal House” (“ROAD TRIP!”). Or “Swingers” (We’re going to VEGAS, BABY!”). Or even, from the opposite perspective, “The Magnificent Ambersons.”
There’s a reason why it’s funny when Rush Limbaugh says that the engine of freedom runs on oil; it’s true! If cars had existed in the 1770s, it would have been gasoline we threw in Boston Harbor.

Okay, I give up.

THE WHITE HOUSE VS BLOCH: The Bush appointed head of the Office of Special Counsel, Scott Bloch, recently declared that gay federal employees can be fired for being gay. That’s where the religious right stands. But it isn’t what Bloch promised in his Senate hearings, and it isn’t, apparently, White House policy. At least, that’s according to the Federal Times. Hmm. Who really represents the administration?

AIR AMERICA AND NADER: For a column, I forced myself to listen to liberal talk radio this week. (Subscribers will get the column over the weekend. The rest of you freeloaders can wait.) It was mainly dreary. But I did enjoy Randi Rhodes losing it with Ralph Nader. You can listen to the exchange at the Daily Kos.

“The killers were not mistaken in their target: today’s Madrid represents precisely the negation of the radical inhumanity of the obtuse, exclusive tribal spirit of fundamentalism, religious or political, which hates mixture, diversity and tolerance and, above all, liberty. This is the first European battle in a savage war that began exactly two years ago with the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York, and whose inroads will probably fill with blood and horror a good part of this new century. It is a war to the death, of course, and owing to the present fantastic development of the technology of destruction and the fanatic, suicidal zeal that inspires the international movement of terror, it is perhaps a trial even more difficult than those represented by fascism and communism for the culture of liberty.” – Mario Vargas Llosa, getting it right, in the Guardian. (Hat tip: Virginia.)

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “For more than 40 years, the homosexual activist movement has sought to implement a master plan that has had as its centerpiece the utter destruction of the family. The institution of marriage, along with an often weakened and impotent Church, is all that stands in the way of its achievement of every coveted aspiration. Those goals include universal acceptance of the gay lifestyle, discrediting of Scriptures that condemn homosexuality, muzzling of the clergy and Christian media, granting of special privileges and rights in the law, overturning laws prohibiting pedophilia, indoctrinating children and future generations through public education, and securing all the legal benefits of marriage for any two or more people who claim to have homosexual tendencies. These objectives that seemed unthinkable just a few years ago have largely been achieved or are now within reach.” – James Dobson, of Focus on the Family, in his newsletter.

WONKETTE UNPLUGGED: A fun interview with the newest, funnest blogger on the block.

The appalling brutality in the Sunni Triangle yesterday was designed to have one simple effect: to encourage the West to abandon Iraq to the very people who perpetrated this atrocity. The methods are the same as Somalia. The response will be different. But it’s equally hard not to be worried by John Burns’ analysis in today’s NYT:

On Tuesday, before the Falluja attacks, General Kimmitt, the American military spokesman, appeared to back off at least somewhat from the emphasis on Islamic militants as the principal enemy. At a briefing, he offered an overview of the war in which he suggested that what has occurred, in effect, is a merging of the Saddamist insurgents and the Islamic terrorists into a common terrorist threat, and that, either way, “we just call them targets.”
Several Iraqis interviewed on Wednesday, including middle-class professionals, merchants and former members of Mr. Hussein’s army, suggested that that the United States might be facing a war in which the common bonds of Iraqi nationalism and Arab sensibility have transcended other differences, fostering a war of national resistance that could pose still greater challenges to the Americans in the months, and perhaps years, ahead.

All the more reason to maintain the deadline for the transition to self-rule, and to keep a close military and police alliance with the incoming government. I’m still an optimist – in the medium term. But the next two or three years could be brutal. We just got a taste of how brutal they could be.

PRE-9/11: The undelivered Condi Rice speech, leaked to the Washington Post, reaffirms what we already knew. The Bush administration – like the administration before it – did not adequately understand or guard against, let alone deal with, the threat of Islamist terrorism. Why is this such a scandal? The failure before 9/11 was a failure of intelligence but more deeply a failure to comprehend the full measure of the evil we face. Democracies tend to do that. It’s hard enough to grapple with the idea that we could soon be facing a nuclear, chemical or biological catastrophe in the next few months or years now, let alone before the 9/11 massacre. What matters is what we’re doing in the present, what our strategy is, how best to defeat the enemy. I don’t get the political controversy, I really don’t (although I appreciate the need to get to the bottom of what failed). Who believed the Bush administration was fully on the case in its first eight months? Of course they weren’t. The fundamental issue in this election is: which candidate would best protect us in the future? Fighting partisan wars over the past is at best a distraction, at worst a dangerous one.

Just when you think this campaign couldn’t get more depressing, you have this moronic exchange on gas prices. They’re Bush’s fault; they’d be worse under Kerry. Etc. Now I know I just came out as a non-driver, and so full disclosure is unnecessary. But the low taxes on gas in this country surely are a bad idea. Here’s an easy way to help ease the budget deficit, increase our fuel efficiency, wean us a little off Middle East petroleum and generally help the U.S. economically and in foreign policy. Yet the very idea of raising taxes on gasoline is regarded as so completely anathema you might as well propose nominating Osama bin Laden for president. Matt Miller explains in his syndicated column:

In France and Germany, a gallon of gas costs around $4; in Japan, about $3.50. Thanks in part to their policy of high-priced gas, our industrial competitors have made stunning strides in energy efficiency and independence. France now gets more than 70 percent of its electrical energy from nuclear power. In Japan, oil imports in 1980 were 5.5 percent of GDP; by decade’s end, they’d fallen to 1 percent. The industrial restructuring that enabled this drop left Japan producing two and a half times its 1975 output with, in effect, the same tank of gas.
It’s not that the United States has made no progress. Economy-wide energy efficiency is up by more than 40 percent since 1975. Average auto fuel efficiency has risen from 16 to 20.4 miles per gallon over the same period. Still, the average fuel economy of the new car fleet has fallen every year since 1986, from a high of 25.9 miles per gallon to about 23.8 today. And American drivers still consume about two times more gasoline per capita than people in other advanced countries.
At roughly a billion dollars per penny in annual revenue, a 50-cent gas tax would help fund needed programs or needed deficit reduction. It would also substitute a market-based approach to auto efficiency for today’s mixed signals, through which low prices urge consumers to buy SUVs, while mileage-minded regulators tell the big three to build compacts.

So why not? Beats me. But this irrational embrace of cheap gas is about as close to a national consensus as you’ll ever get in this polarized country. Go figure.

If you didn’t see South Park last night, my commiserations. Watching a cartoon Mel Gibson in his tighty-whiteys jumping onto his own sado-masochism machine was one of the more sublime sights of the year. Yes, he is clearly bonkers. And yes, Stone and Parker are geniuses.

EMAIL OF THE DAY I: “You DO know why you don’t drive! If people could see you riding your bike on the sidewalk around D.C., they’d know too. You lean over the handlebar with such a menacing look (Get out of the way — or else!) and people almost run out into the street — just so loved ones will think they were killed by a crazy motorist rather than by a crazed cyclist. I, myself, have rushed out of your path but luck has been with me. You seem to be a fine — also brilliant — fellow. I love your blog. So this thing about not driving is another of your gifts to the world. Otherwise you’d be fine and brilliant and a MASS KILLER.” Busted. More feedback on the Letters Page.

ANOTHER BAD ARGUMENT: Against civil marriage rights for gay couples. Noam Scheiber crunches the numbers on social security survivor benefits.

EMAIL OF THE DAY II: “Great response to Shelby Steele. A related historical note: in the mid 19th century, one of the leading arguments of the abolitionists was that slavery was immoral because it denied the freedom to marry. Indeed, marriage was seen as such a fundamental human right that the denial of marriage to the slaves inspired the highest moral outrage. During Reconstruction, one of the primary missions of the federal agency charged with aiding newly freed slaves was to encourage them to marry. Marriage was seen as the quintessential way to take up the rights and responsibilities of a free citizen. Nancy Cott, in her book “Public Vows,” provides some fascinating insight into the history of marriage as an American institution.”