Category: Old Dish

“In fact, Fonda was neither wrong nor unconscionable in what she said and did in North Vietnam. She told the New York Times in 1973, “I’m quite sure that there were incidents of torture…but the pilots who were saying it was the policy of the Vietnamese and that it was systematic, I believe that’s a lie.” Research by John Hubbell, as well as 1973 interviews with POWs, shows that Vietnamese behavior meeting any recognized definition of torture had ceased by 1969, three years before the Fonda visit. James Stockdale, the POW who emerged as Ross Perot’s running mate in 1992, wrote that no more than 10 percent of the US pilots received at least 90 percent of the Vietnamese punishment, often for deliberate acts of resistance. Yet the legends of widespread, sinister Oriental torture have been accepted as fact by millions of Americans.” – Tom Hayden, still finding excuses for totalitarianism, the Nation. (My italics.)

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “My brother, Sean, debated Kerry back in 1970-71. Sean was a leader in Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. He and a colleague lunching with Kerry one time, before or after a debate, believe it or not.
Discussing some moral point or other, Kerry came out with: ‘You just have to understand the higher modalities of the situation.’
This has been a catchphrase in our family ever since.”

SANCTIFYING THE EU: The current Pope has been producing saints at roughly the rate that Nokia produces cell-phones, so it is unsurprising that some candidates shock. But the latest one is particularly odd: Robert Schuman, one of the founders of the European Union. The trivialization of sanctity by this pontiff is only matched by the politicization.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “The people in Iraq are learning that…a democracy is also about protecting minority rights.” – Jerry Bremer. Now if only he could persuade the president to feel the same way about America.

BUSH’S FLIP-FLOPS: Kerry’s not the only one. Here’s a list.

WHY CIVIL UNIONS SUCK: An army wife details how practically impossible it is to get equal treatment as a married couple – even with a big fat power of attorney. Money quote:

After dating for two years, my then-boyfriend was deployed to South Korea with the U.S. Army. We made all the necessary preparations so that I could handle his affairs while he was away. I had everything from bank account numbers to a fully inclusive power of attorney notarized by the judge advocate general.
During his deployment, we discovered what many other couples in similar situations (including civil unions) have also discovered: The power of attorney was respected, or rejected, on a whim by banks, insurance agencies, etc. I simply wanted to pay his bills, and was refused. Some companies even refused to take payment from my own accounts!

They subsequently got married. He was severely injured in Afghanistan. It was then that she realized that without civil marriage, she wouldn’t even have been notified of his accident! When I think of all the gay men and women now serving their country in Iraq and elsewhere, it boggles the mind how they must feel now that their commander in chief has turned on their civil rights.

CORRECTION: I was guilty of sloppy terminology Saturday. Martha Stewart wasn’t convicted of perjury, but of lying to federal prosecutors in the course of an investigation. My point about the importance of telling the truth in such a situation stands.

However mad I am at Bush, just a few minutes reading John Kerry’s foreign policy and cultural perspective makes me want to … well, it just spoiled my breakfast. Read this foreign policy discussion. Now imagine 9/11 had never happened. It isn’t hard. Al Qaeda is mentioned once. I repeat: al Qaeda is mentioned once. My stomach lurches at the thought of another terror attack while Kerry is president. What would be his first response: reach for a dog-eared copy of the early Sartre? Look, Eliot is a spectacular poet. I’ve read him year after year after year. I dramatized the “Four Quartets” at Harvard. But that’s not a qualification for the presidency. Then there’s this classic line of pretentiousness and self-regard: “I remember flying once; I was looking out at the desert and I wrote a poem about the barren desolation of the desert. I wrote a poem once about a great encounter I had with a deer early in the morning that was very moving.” Oh God. Four years of this?

Jonathan Rauch takes on president Bush’s awful arguments on marriage rights.

There is something unseemly about the Marthafreude now breaking out all over. But there is nothing unseemly about the verdict. It wasn’t about insider trading. It was about perjury. Perjury matters. If it is allowed to prosper, it will destroy our legal system. All the other comments about this case seem to me to pale beside this obvious fact. Yesterday was therefore an extremely good day for the republic. It was, as Martha would say, “a good thing.”

I have tried to answer David Frum’s questions about states’ rights and civil marriage, but he has not answered mine. Yesterday, he claimed that Eliot Spitzer’s decision that, under current law, New York state would happily recognize same-sex marriages from another state, vindicated his argument. That argument is as follows:

In other words, the promise that states will not have same-sex marriage forced upon them against their will will soon be falsified in New York – and soon in many other states as well.

Sorry, but unproven. Nothing is being forced on New York State. If New Yorkers wanted to pass a law, like 38 other states, that would refuse to recognize Massachusetts’ marriages, they could easily do so. But they haven’t. State autonomy means that states not only can refuse to recognize another state’s marriages, but that they can agree to recognize them as well. Liberal states might well decide to recognize Massachusetts’ marriages. That’s not a violation of the principle I laid out at all. Frum doesn’t seem to have the faintest grasp of the legal principles involved here. He also refuses to answer my simple question: which of the 1,049 civil and legal protections that he enjoys with his wife would he deign to grant me and my partner? Does he even support civil unions? We know exactly what he is against: civil marriages for people unlike him. But what, exactly, is he for? I ask a second time.

We were all told that fighting the Iraq war would destroy global alliances, wreck our ability to work with allies and generally render the U.S. a pariah. So how are France and the U.S. cooperating so easily in Haiti? Hmmm.

DON’T BLAME BUSH: For the dismal job situation. It’s far more complicated than Kerry would have you believe. Noam Scheiber is on the case.

44,000 POUNDS: That’s how much mustard gas Libya had accumulated.

THANK GOD FOR KRAUTHAMMER: Charles Krauthammer has never written a dumb column, to my knowledge. Even on emotional subjects such as civil marriage, he brings to the debate a calm reasoning that wins the respect of his opponents as well as his supporters. And that is also why his searing criticism of Mel Gibson’s inflammatory and idiosyncratic version of the Passion is so helpful. I’m tired of people believing that Gibson is representing Catholicism. He isn’t. He is a rebel against Catholicism, specifically the reformed, open, repentant Catholicism of the Second Vatican Council. Gibson doesn’t recognize the authority of the current Pope; he doesn’t recognize the current mass – the central ritual of Catholics across the world. People are mistaken in believing that he merely prefers the Latin mass; he doesn’t. He favors the Tridentine mass, a relic. He believes that all non-Catholics are going to hell, another heresy. He is clearly and palpably anti-Semitic. His movie is an act of aggression against Jews, and, as such, is an act of aggression against Catholicism and the current Pope’s heroic efforts to confront the shameful history of the Church with regard to the Jewish people. Charles notes how Satan walks and lives and breathes among the Jews in the movie. He doesn’t mention that young Jewish children actually turn into demons at one point in the movie, a device that only students of medieval anti-Semitism would notice. In fact, one reason that today’s viewers do not notice the hatred of Jews in the movie is because, mercifuly, they are not familiar with the medieval tropes that signal evil and that Gibson trafficks in. Gibson knows. And he knows how his movie will play in those parts of the world where anti-Semitic tropes are still recognized. Notice I am not accusing people of good faith who have found inspiration in the story portraayed in this movie of being anti-Semitic. I’m sure that many if not almost all of that devition is genuine and not motivated by anything but spiritual hope and reflection. But that cannot disguise the malice that lies beneath. And that Gibson would use the message of Christ to advance it is what makes it doubly unforgivable.

THE YOUNGEST METROSEXUALS: Capitalism strikes again.

Suddenly, the real reason for Moscow’s resistance to toppling Saddam Hussein seems clearer. And the Bush administration’s coddling of Putin more baffling. I guess the damage Putin can still do is greater than the damage Russia has already done. Like Pakistan.

“MICRO-AGGRESSION”: It’s a new term to me, but my conversations with college students this past couple of days have convinced me it’s real. What’s a micro-aggression? It’s when you offend somebody for the usual p.c. reasons. You need not mean to offend someone; you may even be trying to flatter them; but if they feel they’re offended or hurt in any way, it’s a “micro-aggression.” An accumulation of “micro-aggressions” can lead to actual aggression. I accidentally committed a “micro-aggression” two days ago when I used the term “Islamo-fascist” to refer to terrorists or unelected despots who use Islam as a cloak for their violence or tyranny. One poor young student was reduced to tears because I used this term. She said she felt attacked because she is a Muslim. I pointed out that the entire point of the term is to distinguish these theocratic thugs from genuine, mainstream Muslims. And she acknowledged that. Nevertheless, I had committed a micro-aggression. If I were on a campus today, I might be subject to discipline. What you have here, perhaps, is a post-modern, post-Christian attempt to resurrect different levels of sin. I committed what Catholics call a “venial sin,” a small-bore, not-too-important, micro-sin. But unlike Catholic teaching, which insists that for something to be a sin, it must be consciously intended, with “micro-aggressions,” your motives are irrelevant. In pomo heaven, the individual, after all, has no real autonomy, no independent soul, no personal conscience. He’s just reflecting the interplay of power-structures. So in the pursuit of progress, we have resurrected the imperatives of Catholic moral teaching and removed moral responsibility at the same time. They call this a step forward. It’s the opposite. One recalls Foucault’s classic book, “Discipline and Punish.” It’s all that’s left of his philosophy on American campuses.

Here’s an article you would never read in America, but it does capture something about some people’s response to Mel Gibson’s movie:

[A] group of us went to see the first showing of The Passion of the Christ. I am afraid to say that I was late, and, as I entered the foyer of the Odeon West End, a man with an earring broke off from his mobile phone call and said: “It’s all right, Mr Johnson, you’re in time for the Crucifixion.”

Yes, I intend to rent “The Life of Brian” soon. In today’s fetid culture wars, it may help me stay sane. One always has to look on the bright side of life, doesn’t one?

THE CASE AGAINST BUSH: I have to say I haven’t read a more persuasive one than Will Saletan’s.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “There’s been a lot of speculation in the news media the past few weeks about a possible Kerry/Edwards ticket, but the Dems need to put all this foolishness aside, get real, and run Kerry/Satan this year. Despite all the GOP’s pandering to the Christian right, the satanic vote has actually been trending Republican in recent years (they’re very laissez faire on economic issues you know), and putting Satan on the ticket could really help shore up this important demographic. And if the logic of picking a vp is that you choose someone with what you lack, Satan is the perfect foil for Kerry : charming, charismatic, telegenic, etc. I couldn’t imagine a better choice.” More feedback on the Letters Page.

“My days here are numbered because I dared to speak out against the Bush administration and say that the religious agenda of George W. Bush concerning stem cell research and gay marriage is wrong. And that what he is doing with the FCC is pushing this religious agenda. And also the fact that the guy takes more vacation than any President ever. It’s time for him to leave. Having said that pushed me off the air in six markets.” – Howard Stern, venting. I have no idea whether Stern is being paranoid or not. Since I don’t really function before 10 am, I don’t have much exposure to him. But I like his spirit; and I do think that Howard Stern and Howard Stern listeners are not people the president needs to alienate in an election year. And it says something about the fragility of the Republican coalition that he feels he has to. Bush is doing his damnedest to make it hard for anyone who isn’t a paid-up evangelical to support him this year. Why?

P.C. EDIT WATCH: A lovely politically correct editing slip marred an opera review in the Los Angeles Times recently. The original sentence read that Richard Strauss’ operatic epic, “Die Frau Ohne Schatten,” was “an incomparably glorious and goofy pro-life paean…” Fair enough. But you can’t have the epithet “pro-life” in the Los Angeles Times. So the sentence was changed to “an incomparably glorious and goofy anti-abortion paean…” There is no reference to abortion in the opera. The paper was therefore forced to run not one but two corrections on February 25. The writer rightly insisted that the paper exonerate him personally from the idiocy. It reminds me of the occasion when a newspaper decided to remove all usage of the word “black” from its copy, when referring to African-Americans. it was deemed too offensive a term. Everything was fine until some tired copy-editor lazily edited an economics column. Suddenly, the federal budget moved from red ink “into the African-American.” Hey, but no one was offended.

Small insight into what the issue of civil marriage for gays is finally achieving. I’ve been speaking on this subject for years and years, but this time, the crowds are enormous. At a small college last night, over 400 showed up, cramming the biggest auditorium available, to listen to the speech and ask questions. Yes, it’s a campus. Yes, it’s the younger generation. But for me at least, it’s thrilling to see the interest and overwhelming support. And the best part of it is that it was organized and sponsored by the College Republicans. It’s a new world.