Category: Old Dish

How else to interpret the U.S.’s judgment that the Iraq arms dossier is incomplete? The only reason not to say so explicitly today is because we need more time before we attack. I can see no other rationale for delay. It’s a good sign Colin Powell is the front man for this assessment. It carries more weight coming from one of the more conciliatory members of the administration. But the truth is, Saddam has given no possible lee-way for conciliation. The blizzard of obfuscatory documents hasn’t worked. The administration was right to take its time. The more patient we are, the tighter the noose around Saddam gets. And then it starts in earnest. I’d put the odds of war early next year as close to 80 percent now.

HOOKED ON THE ’80S: The boyfriend and I can’t stop watching. This week, VH1 has been running a two-hour special each night on two years from the 1980s. Last night was 1984 and 85. Maybe it’s because it’s my generation’s first stab at nostalgia, but I’ve found it wonderfully mindless recreational pleasure. From PacMan to “Fast Times At Ridgemont High” (recommended if Sean Penn’s recent visit to Baghdad got on your nerves) to the Go Go Girls and Flashdance, it’s been a warm bath in pop-cultural reminiscence. I’d forgotten that there was once a sitcom, “Small Wonder,” where the star was a young girl who was actually a robot. I forgot that pale blue jacket I wore in 1985, how racy “Porky’s” was, how cool Chevy Chase used to be, and how some of my first erotic fantasies were built around the “Dukes of Hazzard” (don’t ask). Oh and leg-warmers. Yes, leg-warmers.

JUST A FLESH WOUND! Finally I realized who Trent Lott reminds me of. Remember the knight in Monty Python’s “Holy Grail” who gets both arms and then both legs cut off by a fellow combatant, but still refuses to give in. “It’s only a flesh-wound!” he keeps bragging as blood gushes out from his arm and leg stumps. Only this time, we can’t cut to the next scene.

THE RESULTS: Like some election night drama, the counting of checks and PayPal receipts kept the suspense going. But in the interests of full disclosure, we can now let you know that our one-week pledge drive garnered payments from 3,339 people for a grand total of $79,020 – enough to pay for our burgeoning band-width, an intern/assistant, and a salary for yours truly. It’s not exactly venture-capitalism but it’s a great start. We’ve proved, I think, that the web has the potential to deliver truly independent, reader-supported journalism. Well, in fact, you proved it. Thanks so much again.

Check out this repulsive cartoon in the New York Post. It follows George Pataki’s successful steering of a gay rights bill through the New York State legislature. The cartoonist doesn’t even getn his facts right. Every character in the cartoon is a cross-dresser. Yet the bill that passed didn’t include cross-dressers or transgendered people. And notice the small picture of a gerbil on the wall. How terribly funny. Just a reminder that the kind of bigoted attitudes now rightly bemoaned in the early years of Trent Lott are still perfectly acceptable where homosexuals are concerned.

“Democracies expand individual rights past the barriers of race, class and gender precisely by encouraging imaginative identification with difference–by asking men to put themselves in the shoes of women, whites in the shoes of blacks, and so on. And minorities are always asking others to put themselves in their place because they know this is how equality will be experienced and become undeniable. Minorities also know that racism and bigotry are always a failure of this kind of imagination. In the face of difference, imagination is the only way to common humanity. Thus minorities also know that racism and bigotry are the perfect collapse of imagination.” – Shelby Steele in today’s Wall Street Journal. Beautifully put. Read the whole piece. It’s clarifying and uplifting. And those who see in Lott’s gaffe merely a gaffe are as bereft of that imagination as Lott.

A blistering – and completely persuasive – piece by a Republican appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Abigail Thernstrom. As long as Lott remains as SML, the Republican chance to move the country forward in new directions on race will be squandered. He’s now more than embarrassment. He’s an obstacle to the Republican future.

This is beginning to remind me of the internal strife of the British Conservative Party. Trent Lott’s voiced nostalgia for segregation is not even close to a forgivable mistake. It was morally wrong and politically suicidal. But if he refuses to leave, the damage could get even worse. Now there are signs that the paleo wing of the Republicans, characters who deep down believe that even a Republican with ties to the racist right is preferable to a Democrat, might rally to his defense. The Novaks and Buchanans and Weyrichs see an ally under threat. They will not accept Lott’s departure easily. Nor will some Senators who view themselves as members of a club that rarely turns on its own. And the way in which some Democrats are gleefully using this to advance the notion that the GOP is synonymous with bigotry will only provoke the Republican Party’s instinctual self-defense. And so the paleos could acquire partisan support and the split could deepen. Maybe this is all part of Sid Blumenthal’s master-plan. If so, then Ann Coulter is dancing to Sid’s tune perfectly.

THE REAL ISSUE: But Lott’s baldly racist past and his bitter and unworldly intransigence are the main culprits. In pursuit of his own narrow ambition, he seems willing to inflict even more damage on his party, president and country. In this climate, Republicans need above all to refuse the Democratic bait, not circle the wagons, and keep insisting on Lott’s departure. In retrospect, the president should have clearly said last week that Lott should step aside as SML, which would have sped events up. I can see why he didn’t. He doesn’t want to interfere with the Senate’s business, he said the right thing about the underlying issue, and anything more might have seemed over-kill. But with a vain and self-deluded man like Lott, there’s a real danger of wounding him politically but not finishing the job off. And if the party tears itself apart while Bush stays aloof, he risks becoming the John Major of the Republicans, appearing unable to prevent his own party from tearing itself apart. Waiting till January 6 will only perpetuate the damage. The Republican Senators need to act swiftly to demote Lott before this incident becomes a real crisis. And if they fail, the president has to step in and end this. Lott must go. And the way in which he has behaved – without principles, without intellectual coherence, without regard for his party or country and without even the slightest political grace – only reinforces why.

RACISM AND AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: Here’s a telling email taking me to task for describing affirmative action as the “new racism”:

You wrote, “The equation of opposition to affirmative action or hate-crime laws or any other number of leftist policies with racism strikes me as a massively cheap shot.” As a moderate liberal who supports affirmative action but sympathizes with the argument against it, I completely agree with you. But in another post, you claim that affirmative action is the “new racism.” Now, let’s assume that liberals and conservatives both want a society in which blacks and whites are judged equally. “Color-blindness,” after all, is the rationale that affirmative action opponents use to defend their stance. But if that is true, the real difference is that supporters believe equal opportunity is impossible given the nation’s racial history and level of current prejudice, while opponents believe that color-blindness is a realistic ideal. Thus the question is more empirical than ideological. We may be wrong about our approach, but we’re not bigots.

I take that point. But it seems to me that the writer is essentially saying that because his heart is in the right place, his support for public racial discrimination is not racist. My position is that we should assume that everyone’s heart is in the right place but still see racial discrimination for what it is. Jim Crow was a disgusting attempt to segregate and define people by race. It was unquestionably worse than affirmative action. But affirmative action is also an attempt by government to define people by race. In practice it often means denying someone a job or a place at a college solely because of their race. I think that’s an almost text-book definition of racism. Just because the racism is directed at a majority doesn’t make it any less discriminatory on an individual basis. And just because it’s aimed at eventually creating a color-blind society doesn’t make it color-blind. My view is that we should try and get beyond these racial categories altogether, and I don’t think enforcing them even more rigorously is a good way of doing that. Yes, my words were provocative, and deliberately so. But racial discrimination is racial discrimination is racial discrimination. And the person who is subjected to it couldn’t care less if the perpetrator is an old bigot or an well-meaning liberal.

EMINEM A REPUBLICAN? Not so big a stretch in some ways. Gerry Marzorati makes the case well:

So, does Eminem get to do the Super Bowl halftime show? I mean, what’s left besides a White House drop-by? Which might not be all that far-fetched, given the warmth of the mainstream’s embrace of Mr. Mathers. There are precedents: Gun-toting Elvis’ visit with Nixon, Michael Jackson’s photo op with Reagan. And the Eminem story – or the movie version that unfolded in 8 Mile – is an echt Republican story, one about pulling yourself up and overcoming your circumstances while your pathetic single mom waits around for a handout.

I too was struck by the ferocious individualism of the movie, “8 Mile.” Yes, his friends were crucial. But the message of the story was that you have to escape from hell by yourself. Any other way is somehow inauthentic. And that rough independence is another reason why I find Eminem so appealing and intoxicating: post-racial Americanism, if you will. You only have to see the movie to see why someone like Trent Lott is just hopelessly lost in contemporary culture. Jesse Jackson too.

SHAFER ON NPR: Loved this paragraph from Jack Shafer’s excellent adventure:

Why visit the cloud forest the day before our Galápagos foray? In part, I’m avoiding the recommended day trip to one of the local Indian markets. Every time I visit an ethnic market, the unwanted noise of an old NPR All Things Considered segment unspools in my head. “At the mercado, the campesinos bring their maize to sell”-cue the ticky-ticky ethnic music and crowd noises – “but drought has withered the crops and buyers turn away.” I can’t stand it.

Perfectly caught, don’t you think?

THE DUTCH GOVT VERSUS FORTUYN? Did his political rivals in the Dutch government refuse to give him adequate protection? That’s the implication from the damning official report into Pim Fortuyn’s assassination at the hands of a far left fanatic.

GIVE US A LITTLE MORE TIME: To calculate the final tally from last week. With thousands of payments and hundreds of checks and only one person with a calculator (the saintly Robert), this isn’t an easy task. But each day this week, we’ve had to increase our guesstimate.

And the critical sign is, as Josh Marshall notes, he just “absolutely” endorsed affirmative action. He is the worst of all possible worlds: once a devotee of the old racism; now an enthusiast for the new racism.

Some of the sanctimony is now beginning to bug me. I’m second to few in believing that Trent Lott should step down as SML. But that doesn’t mean I like the racial politics of the current Democratic Party. In fact, the way some far-left Democrats use race is no less repulsive than the way some far-right Republicans do. The equation of opposition to affirmative action or hate-crime laws or any other number of leftist policies with racism strikes me as a massively cheap shot. (I was on WBUR last night and paleo-lib Jack Beatty went straight to that knee-jerk point. Grrrr.) And the blithe assumption of moral superiority is equally galling. None of my criticism of Lott should therefore be read as in any way an endorsement of the Democratic alternative. In fact, getting rid of Lott is a critical step in defeating the Democratic strategy on race. The Dems take black votes for granted, which is bad for them and worse for blacks; they too easily acquiesce to the biggest race-baiters in the business; they treat blacks too often as a group rather than as individuals. And the monolithic black support for the Democrats is one of the primary impediments to black progress in this country. But the point is Lott keeps this system alive. I agree with Mona Charen that “the day Democrats fail to secure 80 percent or 90 percent of the black vote, they cease to exist as a major party. Or at least, they would be forced significantly to remake themselves as a party.” If that happened, we’d make real racial progress in this country. Lott, whether he likes it or not, is a huge impediment to that progress. That’s why he’s got to go. And why Bill Frist, rather than Don Nickles, should replace him.

LOTT’S BLACK VOTE: So what is it? I’ve read anything from 5 percent to Dick Morris’s alleged 30 percent. I emailed Michael Barone, who knows everything. Here’s what his Almanac of American politics says:

The 2000 VNS exit poll shows Lott carrying whites 88%-9% and losing blacks 88%-10%, but the latter figure seems dubious. He carried Hinds County, which is 61% black, with 51% of the vote, and ran even in the black-majority Delta; his efforts to win black Mississippians’ votes seem to have borne some fruit.

But not much. Michael adds: “Hinds County includes Jackson, the state’s largest city. It’s interesting that the white vote was (admittedly by a statistically insignificant 1%) more one-sided than the black vote. That probably hasn’t happened often anywhere since 1972 or so.” What’s interesting here in other words is how huge Lott’s white majority is. The black vote is probably a little over 10 percent. Given Lott’s seniority and shameless pork-barrel politicking, this doesn’t add up to a very convincing defense. And Dick Morris’s 30 percent is about as persuasive as the rest of his column.

IT’S GOT BEAGLE IN THERE SOMEWHERE: An Islamic dog-story. Couldn’t resist.

THOSE CHRISTMAS BLUES: My little nephew is making a theatrical debut this week. (He’s eight). In his nativity play, he’ll be playing the back end of a camel. I sent word that it’s best to start modestly. “I’m the hump too!” he insists.

THE IRAQ-AL QAEDA LINK: You all know what I think of the Guardian’s reflexive anti-Americanism. But this piece by Brian Whitaker makes a good point. Last week, the Washington Post ran a big page one story on administration leaks that there was a “credible report” of a nerve gas delivery from Iraq to al Qaeda. The piece was surrounded by as many hedges as an English meadow, but it was the lead story for a while. The next day, the Post followed up with a page 50 story in which Iraqi denials were accompanied by this administration statement:

A senior Bush administration official, commenting on The Post report, said U.S. intelligence had uncorroborated information that Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda may have received a poisonous substance. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the United States did not know whether the material was nerve gas or whether the extremists were linked to the government of Saddam Hussein.

Credible report or uncorroborated information? Are we to assume it wasn’t true? It’s not as if this isn’t huge news, if valid. Or is the administration deliberately leaking false or unreliable information for political purposes? I know the al Qaeda-Saddam link may well be true but I don’t think it serves the White House’s purposes to cry wolf too often. Credibility is everything in this difficult pre-war period. And the administration’s just deteriorated.

YOU THOUGHT I WAS HARSH: Read Hitch go off on Kissinger, Lott and Law. Hitch, of course, can’t resist the old anti-Catholic smear of the pope as a “foreign potentate.” Honestly, Christopher. Where do you think you are, Belfast?

GAY ACTIVIST TO PRIEST: Yes, it happens. But not for much longer, I fear.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “Trivial as it may seem after a week of comedy-drama chez Blair, I thought I should probably mention that the United States might be dropping a nuclear bomb or two sometime soon. Nothing serious, you understand — neither the Prime Minister’s wife nor the Daily Mail have been informed — but America’s aperitif to war on Iraq runs something like this: if Saddam happens to think of deploying one of the chemical weapons he might (or might not) happen to possess, the Pentagon promises faithfully to respond with one of the dinky new nukes it is dying, by pure coincidence, to test.” – Ian Bell, in Scotland’s Sunday Herald.

David Frum laments he didn’t see the Gore decision coming. I wrote a piece that came out yesterday saying it looked likely. Check it out.

That would be a better headline for Dick Morris’s column this morning. It has nothing new, except an embarrassing attempt to argue that Lott is indistinguishable from John Lewis on the matter of civil rights. Oh, Dick, come off it. Then there’s this:

Let’s start with the fact that I have known Lott for 15 years and have had, perhaps, a hundred or more meetings with him. I got to know him better than any American politician other than Bill Clinton. He is no racist. There is not a racist bone in his body.

Translation: Lott has paid me an awful lot over the years to figure out how to use race and other issues effectively as an electoral tool while not getting caught. If he’s a racist, what does that say about me?

THE OTHER PARALLEL: John Scalzi makes an interesting point today:

Do I think Lott is a racist? Well, at the very least, I do suspect that Lott thinks of black people the way that conservative Republicans my age and slightly older think of gays and lesbians – that whole “why, this person seems agreeable enough, and look, I’m not even thinking about the fact he’s gay at all” sort of thing. The folks in this situation deal with gays by concentrating on the trivial matters at hand in front of them and desperately not thinking of that gay person in any other context – say, at home with their partners, slicing tomatoes for a salad or watching HBO or talking on the phone or having red-hot oral sex on the stairwell.- Replace “gay” with black” and you get an idea of where Lott is coming from. It’s sort of like being told not to think about a white elephant, and so of course that’s exactly what you do. “White Elephant,” of course, being oddly appropriate here.

I wonder if, in twenty years or so, another politician is going to come acropper because of blatant scorn for gay citizens, uttered in, say, the 1990s. Don Nickles, anyone?

I can’t help pondering their similarities. Essentially, they got left behind by history and by democracy. Law grew up in a church that was never challenged, that existed beyond serious criticism, that could get away with almost anything behind closed doors, its sins and peccadilloes hidden, above all, by loyal and deferent Catholics. Lott grew up in a culture in which segregation was eagerly embraced and rose through the Republican ranks without ever having to explicitly break with his past and its gentle blurring of cruel bigotry. Both men gained enormous power without much accountability. And they liked the club. They enjoyed its privileges. They came to feel affronted by the need even to explain.

THE WORLD MOVES ON: And then events conspired to tear the veil of civility and privilege from them and they found that no words, no apologies, no euphemisms could disguise what they had once believed and done. Law once believed that molesting children was no big deal. It could be covered up, hidden, its perpetrators treated as victims, its real victims treated as nuisances. Lott once believed that blacks could be kept legally separated from whites; he later saw this as a debatable proposition; he subsequently believed that he could somehow maintain this ancient conviction, wrap it in the gauze of collective amnesia, and refer to it obliquely in friendly contexts as a political signal to his base. But by the time Law and Lott had reached the heights of ecclesiastical and political power, the world had changed. The Church could not withstand the revelation that it had acquiesced in the rape of minors. It was too hideous a crime, too awful a betrayal of the Gospel for the hierarchy to deploy its now-tattered authority to deflect the criticism. Law couldn’t get around this simple, obvious unavoidable fact: that he was indirectly responsible for allowing the lives of countless children to be destroyed. Nothing could. Similarly, Lott couldn’t spin or finesse himself out of the stunningly obvious fact that he had once believed that blacks were simply inferior to whites, that they owed their rights to white forbearance, that they should be forever second-class citizens. He may, in his heart of hearts, have come to disbelieve this, as Law must surely now understand the horror of child abuse. Yet somehow their psyches and souls couldn’t move fast enough. They could say the right words, but their records showed something else. Soon, they became symbols of something deeply wrong with two institutions – the Catholic Church and the Republican Party. And their removal became essential for both institutions to recover. But both didn’t go easily. Law clung to power until he was the leader of no-one, and the servant of an ailing pontiff alone. Lott is still clinging. But he is politically dead. This is therefore not the time for gloating or personal condemnation. We cannot judge the heart of either man. But we can hope that the causes they represented – the body of Christ and the party of Lincoln – will be the stronger for their departure.

GORE MAKES THE RIGHT CALL: What a relief. Sometimes I’ve felt that, throughout Al Gore’s career, he found politics a duty rather than a love. And then ambition brought its own demands. His decision to get out now is not just personally sane, it’s politically smart. We all know he would have lost. Now he’s spared us the agony of watching it happen all over again. John Ellis reviews the future prospects for the Democratic field here. By the way, Adam Nagourney of the Times completely owned this scoop. When left alone by Raines, he always produces great stuff.

THE BEST TIMES CORRECTION YET: I’m sorry, but this one is straight out of Monty Python. I found it via the blogger, Powerline. Here it is:

An article on Nov. 10 about animal rights referred erroneously to an island in the Indian Ocean and to events there involving goats and endangered giant sea sparrows that could possibly lead to the killing of goats by environmental groups. Wrightson Island does not exist; both the island and the events are hypothetical figments from a book (also mentioned in the article), ”Beginning Again,” by David Ehrenfeld. No giant sea sparrow is known to be endangered by the eating habits of goats.

Well, that’s a relief.

PLEDGE WEEK UPDATE: Robert tells me it’s been a huge success, but it will take till mid-week to arrive at a final accounting. As soon as we have it nailed down, I’ll let you know exactly how much we raised.