Category: Old Dish

Tom Edsall pens a gloomy piece about the impact of the war on the Democrats. Hardcore Democratic donors – Streisand et al – are demoralized by the party leadership’s final acquiescence to the Bush administration. So funding is down; and the anti-Bush base may not show up in November. So far, very few Dems have pandered to this base mercilessly: Gore and Kennedy are the obvious exceptions to the rule. The broader implication is an interesting one: the more successful Bush is as a war president, the more generally popular he will be, but the more reviled he will become among the hard-core Dems. So the Dems lose money and votes. I’m not predicting anything. I still think this Congressional election is way too close to call. But the dynamics Edsall illustrates would have me very depressed for the medium term if I were a Dem.

ROMENESKO’S BLINDERS: A reader points out:

[Romenesko’s] boycott of “conservative” sites is so complete that it causes him to miss stories he’d otherwise be all over. Like The Weekly Standard yanking a small story about what exactly happened at a Buzzcocks concert, a story that turned out to be made up, as far as anyone can tell. Wednesday’s Opinionjournal, having linked to the story the day before, noted the apparent retraction. No sign on media”news” though.

To be fair to Romenesko, “boycott” strikes me as too strong a word. He links occasionally to the Journal and has my site up as one of many media links. It’s just that he has blind spots and tends to believe that non-liberal journalists aren’t real ones. And he loves the new hyper-lib Times.

Delivered to Ptown today completely fixed. A wonderful Machead friend, who saved my hard drive, reinstalled all my data. I feel restored. Great service: a few days, urgent delivery and all seems well.

THOUGHT POLICE IN BRITAIN: A man has been convicted of “hate speech” and may face jail time because he got into an argument with some Muslims in which he said things he probably shouldn’t have. Notice that the Muslims, who opined, in the argument, that September 11’s victims “deserved to die” face no such state-enforced sanctions. After all, they weren’t insulting anyone’s religion! Britain is now a country where free speech doesn’t really exist. With no First Amendment, the anti-hate do-gooders have complete license to intimidate and jail people whose views they find objectionable. The same characters are doing all they can to achieve the same result here. In Provincetown, for example, people are being encouraged by the cops to report not just hate crimes, but “hate incidents” in which politically incorrect speech can be monitored by the authorities. Chilling – especially in a place where free speech has traditionally been upheld.

THOUGHT POLICE IN FRANCE: Writers are not immune either. Oriana Fallaci is now facing criminal charges for speaking her mind against extreme Islamism. Her lawyer is the exquisitely named Christophe Bigot.

MORE CATHOLIC CORRUPTION: Jimmy Breslin has a great, tabloid column on a very spoilt New York bishop. Hey, but at least he’s not gay!

FRENCH ANTI-AMERICANISM: Really interesting review of some recent books in France analysing the role anti-Americanism plays in French culture and politics. It’s from the Herald Tribune and includes this quote from Philippe Roger’s “L’ennemi americain“:

At the highest point of discord in a divided France (in 1898), anti-Americanism is the only ‘French passion’ that calms the other passions, effaces antagonisms and reconciles the harshest adversaries. Patching things up at the expense of the United States or, at the least, halting hostilities between French factions in the face of a supposed common enemy will remain a constant of political and intellectual life.

In other words, the tide may be turning a little, at least among some self-aware elites.

ROMENESKO WATCH: Jim Romenesko’s MediaNews blog is probably the most-read journalism blog on the web. He covers every minor story out there on the media and most major ones. So why won’t he link to stories criticizing the new slant of the New York Times? This week, for example, major pieces in the Weekly Standard and the New York Post, not to mention Kausfiles and this site, all alerted readers to what seems like extraordinary bias in the presentation (yet again) of a New York Times poll. Romenesko won’t touch the story. Previous mentions of criticism of the Times get filed in small print as a the whinings of a bunch of right-wing loonies. Romenesko is free to link to whatever he wants. But he has an agenda for the left and pretends he doesn’t. Of course, that’s precisely what endears him to the New York Times.

NO WONDER HE’S SO OUT OF IT: Leftist brontosaurus Lewis Lapham of Harpers’ doesn’t have a computer. Figures.

CLINTON’S LOOT: No it’s not a huge scandal. And they’ve donated their loot to the Presidential Library. But what’s amazing about the gifts showered on the Clintons by criminals, influence peddlars and occasional statesmen is that the givers obviously thought they could try it on. In Denise Rich’s case, it was a gift that kept on giving.

RACE MATTERS: Fascinating science story in the Times Monday, which a reader alerted me to. It tells a disturbing story of the possible distortion of science to ensure that racial differences be understood entirely in terms of environment, rather than having anything to do with genes.To those of us who have witnessed first hand the brutal intolerance displayed by some social constructionists on the matter of racial and ethnic differences, the pressure for this kind of scientific sleight of hand is no surprise. But the latest discovery of earlier fudging shows how deep this politicization of science has gone:

The new report raises the issue of whether an earlier generation’s efforts to play down the role of genetics in fields like behavior and racial variation may not have been carried to extremes. Dr. Steven Pinker, who assigns a larger role to genetics in shaping behavior in his new book, “The Blank Slate,” said it was not Boas but his disciples, including the anthropologists Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead and Ashley Montagu, who “helped establish the blank-slate, social-constructionist, antibiology mindset of the social sciences.” Dr. Thomas said that “once we anthropologists said race doesn’t exist, we have ignored it since then.” In that context, the reanalysis of Boas’s data “really does have far-reaching ramifications,” he said.

In some ways, I pity these researchers. Disturbing the doctrines of the left means payback, big time. I hope they’re ready for the backlash.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “Foremost among the attitudes which affect the making of our policy is American empiricism and its quest for certainty: nothing is ‘true’ unless it is ‘objective,’ and it is not ‘objective’ unless it is part of experience. This makes for the absence of dogmatism and for the ease of social relations. But it has pernicious consequences in the conduct of policy. Policy is the art of weighing probabilities; mastery of it lies in grasping the nuances of possibilities. To attempt to conduct it as a science must lead to rigidity. For only the risks are certain; the opportunities are conjectural. One cannot be ‘sure’ about the implications of events until they have happened and when they have occurred it is too late to do anything about them. Empricism in foreign policy leads to a penchant for ad hoc solutions. The rejection of dogmatism inclines our policy-makers to postpone committing themselves until thee facts are in; but by the time the facts are in, a crisis has usually developed or an opportunitiy has passed. Our policy is, therefore, geared to dealing with emergencies; it finds difficulty in developing the long-range program that might forestall them.” – Henry Kissinger, “The Need for Doctrine,” from the book “Nuclear Weapons And Foreign Policy” (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), pg. 424.

ONE IN FIVE? Gallup has just released a poll that finds that Americans believe that one out of five people is homosexual. What to make of this bizarre finding? Even the most desperate boosters of gay rights place the upper limit at around 10 percent; for what it’s worth, I incline more to the 2 – 3 percent fig
ure, but no one knows for sure. So why the exaggeration? I think it’s part of the phenomenon whereby straight people say that gay people keep talking about the subject. We don’t. It’s just that straights are still uncomfortable and notice very clearly when the subject comes up. When I was editing The New Republic, for example, we made an effort to include gay stories the same way we’d include any newsworthy or controversial subjects. But some readers thought that by mere inclusion of gays at all, we’d become a gay magazine. I remember being told by another journalist that TNR had run four gay cover-stories in a year. We’d run one. The exaggeration of the size and power of tiny minorities – mainly gays and Jews – is, in fact, a common feature of social and psychological fear of the other. That’s what we’re picking up in this poll. And it’s as disturbing as it’s out of touch.

Maybe it was seeing Red Dragon last night, but I was struck by the similarity between the D.C. sniper’s note “Dear policeman, I am God” and dialogue from the movie where Hannibal Lecter describes the serial killer as someone motivated by the desire to become God. Is there a possible clue here? Just asking … (By the way, the movie was fun but formulaic. And the script was beyond awful.)

“The point is, all empires commit crimes; in the past century, ours were by far the lesser of evils. But this sedulous denial of even the possibility of misjudgment in the hierarchy of evils protects and insulates this wing of the Left from an inconvenient reconsideration of whether America actually is the worst force on the planet. This blind spot, this stunning lack of historical perspective, robs much of the American Left of intellectual credibility. And makes it easy for idiocies large and small to be uttered reflexively. ” –Ron Rosenbaum, in a wonderfully purgative essay in the New York Observer.

The Vatican acts glacially, but it seems clear to me the direction that it may well now go. This story in the Catholic News Service is a sign of the coming purge of gay people from the priesthood and the Church itself. First, a subtle change was introduced into the Catechism. As CNS notes,

[t]he wording in the catechism that describes the homosexual inclination as “objectively disordered” was added when the definitive Latin text of the catechism was released in 1997. Earlier editions of the catechism said homosexual acts were intrinsically disordered and said homosexual tendencies represented a trial for most people.

This is the difference between saying that some people can do immoral things and saying that some people, because of whom they love, are morally sick in themselves. It’s a subtle move but a critical one as part of the process of undoing the progressive stand of the Church in the 1970s and 1980s in defending the dignity of homosexual persons. A while ago, surveying the tensions in Catholic teaching between an abhorrence of any gay sexuality and a defense of gay people as human beings, I posited two directions the Church could take. It could reverse itself away from a respect for homosexual persons, call them irredeemably sick, and purge them from the priesthood and the pews, or it could go further and integrate gay Catholics and their sexuality into Church teaching. The latter was always a very long shot; but the recent scandals in the Church has given some the opportunity to take the more obvious route. If and when this new policy is formalized, many of us Catholics will therefore face an excruciating choice: do we stay or do we leave? Can we actually attend a Church that has gone from tentative outreach to gay people to a formal theological position that describes them as sick? Can we in good conscience attend a church that blithely ignored the abuse of children, but cannot tolerate even a chaste and holy priest who also happens to be gay, a Church that keeps Cardinal Law in office but would have prevented someone like Father Mychal Judge from being the priest he was? Some will dismiss this as a minor issue. I don’t think so. When a church scapegoats a group of people for its own moral lapses, when it describes, as totalitarian regimes do, a person’s love as a sickness, when it purges priests regardless of their abilities, then it seems to me the entire moral credibility of the institution is at stake.

CHICKENING IN: I think in his heart of hearts that Tom Friedman has a grudging respect for the Bush administration. Apart from Bill Safire, he’s the only Times columnist who doesn’t actively hate the president. But perhaps because of his audience or bosses or habit, Friedman’s always veering just this side of agreeing with the White House. This morning’s argument is a classic. Friedman gets the game of chicken that Bush is playing with Saddam. It rests on a very basic principle: only if Saddam actually believes that an invasion is imminent will he agree to disarm; and only if an invasion is imminent will he believe the threat. This bluff requires that Saddam truly believes Bush will invade Iraq, if he absolutely, positively can, and that this isn’t some elaborate game in order for the U.S. to avoid war. That’s where Friedman doesn’t get it. It’s precisely Bush’s cowboy image – the perception that he may just invade anyway – that alone can bring about a peaceful solution. And it’s because part of that image is actually genuine that the gambit can work. (That’s why Clinton never stood a chance of disarming Iraq or deposing Saddam. Everyone knew Clinton wasn’t a cowboy or could be talked out of any military course of action if needs be.) Bush is different, and the more his opponents portray him as a reckless, terroristic Caesar-wanna-be, the more they will be strengthening his hand. Like Reagan versus the Soviets, it often helps to have the enemy afraid of the president. The sterling consistency of Bush, and the tough talk of his aides, is therefore paradoxically our best insurance against war. So far, with a new sheriff behaving firmly but also aggressively, we’ve had more movement from Saddam than in years. Now let’s ratchet the pressure up some more, shall we? How about it, Mr Daschle?

PAGING ORWELL I: Delegates at an anti-racism conference in Barbados have just decided to expel all non-blacks from certain discussions. (I mentioned they were considering it last week.) It is a fact that many organizations now devoted to “anti-racism” are themselves racist. But it’s rare you get such a clear-cut case. Enjoy.

PAGING ORWELL II: As I write, the Hitch book on Orwell is ranked # 3 on Amazon. I’m really glad that so many of you are going to get a read of this book. And I hope you’ll be following the discussion and taking part later this month. If you still haven’t ordered the book, click here. Thanks again.

SELF-ESTEEM: The case against, posted opposite.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE:“It’s an election year. Turn the bums out. Stir the pot. Make political history. Cause a revolution. Don’t do it because the Republicans represent a great alternative – because they don’t. Do it because the Democrats – far too many of them – are evil, pure and simple. They have no redeeming social value. They are outright traitors themselves or apologists for treasonous behavior. They are enemies of the American people and the American way of life.” – Joseph Farah, WorldNetDaily. (For a brief explanation of our various awards, click here.)

DASCHLE’S OPPORTUNISM: I’m grateful to a reader for directing me to Tim Russert’s dissection of Tom Daschle last weekend. What Russert did was confront Daschle with his rationale for supporting the threat of military force against Saddam in 1998:

SEN. DASCHLE: Well, I think that we often cite the ’98 resolution as our precedent for this action. That’s exactly what we did in the ’98 resolution. We tied it down to the use of force. We weren’t as broad as this resolution now implies, and so I think that it’s appropriate to go back to that precedent and to work with the administration to ensure that that’s their understanding, as well as ours.

MR. RUSSERT: You raised the ’98 resolution. There was a resolution back in January of ’98, which you know well and I’ll put it on the screen. These were the words: “Resolved by the Senate…That Congress…urges the President to take all necessary and appropriate actions to respond to the threat posed by Iraq’s refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs…” And you’ll see that’s one Tom Daschle from January 28. But you also went on, Senator-and this is quite striking. These are words you uttered in February of 1998
. And let me show you and our viewers. You were talking about the Clinton administration: “The administration has said, ‘Look, we have exhausted virtually our diplomatic effort to get the Iraqis to comply with their own agreements and with international law. Given that, what other option is there but to force them to do so?’ That’s what they’re saying. This is the key question. And the answer is we don’t have another option. We have got to force them to comply, and we are doing so militarily.” The Bush White House will suggest that you were trying to give President Clinton more support when he was taking on Saddam Hussein in 1998 than you’re willing to give a Republican president in the year 2002.

Nice work, Tim. Daschle had no credible response to this. He still doesn’t have one. So he’ll give in, once it seems in his direct political interest to do so. Trust these guys with national security? You’ve got to be kidding.

The power of you guys – Hitch’s book just went from # 1,074 to # 8. In less than 15 hours.
UPDATE: The book has now reached # 3 on Amazon.

Ipsos-Reid finds the Congressional race a dead heat.

Dick Morris also weighs in this morning on the Times poll. In his words: “The phrasing of the questions is so slanted and biased that it amounts to journalistic “push polling” – the use of polling to generate pre-determined answers to vindicate a specific point of view. It was just such polling that led the Democratic Party astray over the summer and played an important role in catalyzing their criticism of Bush over Iraq.”

OVERNIGHT: The Hitchens book on Orwell, which is our current Book Club pick, just leaped from 1,074 on Amazon to 76 overnight. Don’t forget to get the book, “Why Orwell Matters“, and join the conversation later this month.
UPDATE: The book has now reached # 9 on Amazon.

Check out David Tell’s devastating review of the New York Times’ Sunday poll, purporting to argue that most Americans believe the economy should be a more urgent priority than Iraq. Tell points out that there is simply no evidence for this in the Times’ own poll. Polls are always the most direct measurement of Howell Raines’ disinformation campaign against the Bush administration, because he can rig the questions, spin the analysis and bury the data, in the hopes that no one will bother checking. The result, this time, in Tell’s words, is “an outright fraud, a falsehood, a work of fiction.” He’s right. Check it out.

RAINES WATCH II: Why didn’t the networks carry president Bush’s critical speech last night? Because the White House didn’t ask them politely enough! That’s this morning’s spin from the Times. I guess Fox was just sucking up. Herewith an almost classic insight into how, whatever happens, in the mind of the New York Times, it’s always Bush’s fault.

It seems to me that the critical part of President Bush’s elegantly constructed speech last night was his rebuttal of the only credible and responsible line of criticism from the Democrats:

Some have argued that confronting the threat from Iraq could detract from the war against terror. To the contrary, confronting the threat posed by Iraq is crucial to winning the war on terror … Terror cells and outlaw regimes building weapons of mass destruction are different faces of the same evil. Our security requires that we confront both. And the United States military is capable of confronting both.

As brief as this discussion is, it’s persuasive. When anti-war Democrats argue that we cannot “focus” on both Al Qaeda and Iraq, they make no sense at all. Philosophically, pre-empting terrorists from getting weapons of mass destruction must logically include preventing the allies of terrorists from harboring such weapons. And practically, I’ve yet to read a single, credible military account of why we cannot both disarm and remove Saddam and keep up the pressure on Al Qaeda at home and abroad. The whole “focus” issue is as fake as the whole “delay” issue, as Charles Krauthammer deftly pointed out yesterday. If Saddam has weapons, if he won’t give them up, and if such weapons are a threat to the region and to the U.S., what possible reason is there for delaying? These “arguments” aren’t really arguments, of course; they’re desperate rhetorical roadblocks thrown up by some Democrats terrified to face their responsibilities in a time of war. The last phony anti-war argument was that President Bush had yet to “make the case” for war against Iraq, as if grown-ups didn’t have the capacity to make their own minds up on the issue without constant guidance from the commander-in-chief. But that surely must now be in tatters as a point, since the president has made speech after speech in the last year clearly laying out the rationale for the war on terror, a rationale that has always included defanging Saddam. And now he’s gone and laid it out in full, at length and in detail in prime time. And what did the networks do, the same networks that routinely feature talking heads bravely pronouncing that the president hasn’t made his case? They ignored him. Of course they did. What losers and sophists.

SULLIVAN, HITCHENS AND ORWELL: Well, in the end we couldn’t resist. I’ve just finished reading Christopher Hitchens’ lively, witty and oddly moving defense of the life and work of George Orwell: “Why Orwell Matters.” If you’ve read all of Orwell (and I’m getting close) or have barely read him at all, the book is both a wonderful introduction to the man’s work and a stimulating overview of all the issues he raises. Orwell’s ability to confound both right and left, his tenacious honesty, his pellucid prose, his power of moral reasoning, his ability to distinguish between an argument and a feeling – all these come through loud and clear in this little book. Buy it and read it and then join Hitch and me for a weeklong conversation at the end of the month about what Orwell means, and why his example still shines, perhaps more brightly than ever, in an era of war and ideological conflict. Buying the book through this site also helps support us financially, so enrich your mind and support this blog by getting the book today. Click here to purchase.

AIDS SCAM, CTD: We’ve already seen how the attack on the pharmaceutical companies’ intellectual property rights has led to a stark deceleration in HIV research. Now comes news of yet another unintended consequence of well-meant anti-AIDS measures. When you give large numbers of anti-HIV meds to Africa, where most cannot be dispensed effectively in the first place, it’s not surprising that others might find a better use for the pills. Why not re-export them to Europe for a tidy profit? That’s what’s happening now, as this story indicates. So we’ve hurt AIDS research, barely helped any significant numbers of Africans, and now given criminals a whole new career in drug trafficking. Good work, no?

McDERMOTT WATCH: Here he is, marching in front of a poster that has the word “terrorist” plastered over President Bush’s face. Nice to know that his kowtowing to Baghdad’s tyranny is also reflected in a complete moral equivalence about the difference between Saddam and Bush. This is one face of the anti-war left. And it’s depraved.

A BLUE-PRINT: One of the clearest plans for post-Saddam Iraq I’ve yet read.

MORE ISLAMIST DEATH-THREATS: Yet another person daring to criticize the backwardness of Islamism with regard to women, gays and individual freedom in general has received a death-threat. This time it’s a Somali immigrant woman in Holland, and she has just had to go into hiding to protect herself. “This is nothing new – just think of Salman Rushdie,” Secil Arda, the head of a Turkish women’s group, told Radio Netherlands. “Some people have the courage to say something, to give their opinion. I consider our fight a milestone in the process of emancipation. Without this quest we would never have change.” After Fortuyn’s murder and Delanoe’s stabbing, this takes courage. Why aren’t these brave liberals more firmly defended by the Western left? I guess we know the answer to that, don’t we?

ANTI-CATHOLICISM WATCH:“Sexual abuse is disgusting, but it’s not as harmful as the grievous mental harm of bringing children up Catholic in the first place.” – Richard Dawkins, as transcribed in the Dubliner.

ROTH AND NARCISSISM: A reader nails it:

“I finally stayed several months in New York, where I kept a studio. For me New York had become interesting again because it was a town in crisis, particularly in the weeks that followed when everyone was expecting another attack. It was a strange time and the first time for years that New York interested me.” – Philip Roth. Who is this guy to accuse ANYONE of narcissism? I just plowed through “The Human Stain”, which was a piece of crap. This windbag can’t stomach people singing “God Bless America” in honor of firemen and cops who gave their lives in the 9/11 attack (which, mercifully, didn’t interrupt Roth’s swim time), but he’ll devote an entire novel to justifying Clinton’s tryst with Monica Lewinsky?

Ah, yes. Roth reminds me of all those New Yorkers who spent the summer of 2001 lamenting that the city had
lost its “edge” under Giuliani. Well, I’m just sorry 3,000 people had to die for Roth to find the city “interesting” again.

AH, THOSE STEREOTYPES: At the Eagle in New York City on Saturday night, I bumped into a man I’d previously met in Provincetown and came to ask him what he’s doing these days. He laughed. “Well, actually, I’m producing a new series for PBS on the history of the Broadway musical.?Can anyone beat that?

MEA MAXIMA CULPA: For the record, there have been three, not two, presidents elected without a plurality of the popular vote in American history: John Quincy Adams, with a mere 31 percent of the popular vote in 1824, Hayes with 48 percent in 1876 and Harrison’s 1888 squeaker with 47.8 percent. Thanks for your relentless and voluminous capacity for fact-checking my ass.