Category: Old Dish

Funny, isn’t it, that the New York Times would run a piece about how weblogs can lead to friction between bloggers and their mainstream media outlets, without mentioning yours truly. Since I’m the blogger who was canned by Howell Raines for stuff on my website, and since that story was picked up all over the place, shouldn’t there have been some reference to it somewhere? Oh, never mind.

Dave Barry is funny as hell but he’s also one of the best political commentators around. He completely gets the speciousness of the war on tobacco. Here’s his latest. I can’t think of a better summary of what we’re dealing with:

Before we get to the latest wacky hijinks, let’s review how the War On Tobacco works. The underlying principle, of course, is: Tobacco Is Bad. It kills many people, and it causes many others to smell like ashtrays in a poorly janitored bus station.
So a while ago, politicians from a bunch of states were scratching their heads, trying to figure out what to do about the tobacco problem. One option, of course, was to say: ”Hey, if people want to be stupid, it’s none of our business.” But of course that was out of the question. Politicians believe EVERYTHING is their business, which is why – to pick one of many examples – most states have elaborate regulations governing who may, and who may not, give manicures.
Another option was to simply make selling cigarettes illegal, just like other evil activities, such as selling heroin, or giving unlicensed manicures, or operating lotteries (except, of course, for lotteries operated by states). But the politicians immediately saw a major flaw with this approach: It did not provide any way for money to be funneled to politicians.
And so they went with option three, which was to file lawsuits against the tobacco companies. The underlying moral principle of these lawsuits was: “You are knowingly selling a product that kills tens of thousands of our citizens each year. We want a piece of that action!”

Does anyone do this better?

COME AND GET US: One reader writes to say that the New York Times Magazine’s gentle treatment of left-wing, terrorist-supporting Lynne Stewart reminded him of this Onion story.

MORE ON JENKINS: The more I read about the guy in charge of NPR’s foreign coverage, the worse it gets. I’d forgotten that the man who found no evidence to link Osama bin Laden to terrorism also vowed last October to “smoke out” any American troops in Afghanistan, regardless of the implications for their security. Here’s what Jenkins said, according to NPR’s review of the comment:

“The game of reporting is to smoke ’em out,” Jenkins says. Asked whether his team would report the presence of an American commando unit it found in, say, a northern Pakistan village, he doesn’t exhibit any of the hesitation of his news-business colleagues, who stress they try to factor security issues into their coverage decisions. “You report it,” Jenkins says. “I don’t represent the government. I represent history, information, what happened.”

Jenkins is also close to Robert Fisk (surprise!) who penned this account of arriving at the scene of the Sabra and Chatilla massacre:

And as I walked through the carnage on 18 September – the last day of the three-day massacre – with Loren Jenkins of The Washington Post, a fierce, tough, Colorado reporter, I remember how he stopped in shock and disgust. And then, with as much energy as his lungs could summon in the sweet, foul air, he shouted, “SHARON!” so loudly that the name echoed off the crumpled walls above the bodies. “He’s responsible for this fucking mess,” Jenkins roared. And that, just over four months later – in more diplomatic words and in a report in which the murderers were called “soldiers” – was what the Israeli commission of enquiry decided. Sharon, who was minister of defence, bore “personal responsibility”, the Kahan commission stated, and recommended his removal from office. Sharon resigned.

Now the responsibility for those awful three days in Lebanon should indeed weigh heavily on Ariel Sharon. But Jenkin’s visceral hatred for the man – before any serious attempt to investigate the matter – is indicative, I think, of where he’s coming from. Now I know I’ll be accused of being a McCarthyite for pointing any of this out. But when a journalist on the public payroll is so evidently biased against Israel and the United States and has made flimsy excuses for Osama bin Laden, isn’t it worth subjecting NPR’s alleged objectivity to scrutiny? Do they really think we can’t see through this stuff?

My take on Bush and Blair.

Yes, I wrote that. God, I’m sorry.

Schroder, alas, clinged on to power last night, but only by a whisker. His razor-thin victory is still a victory, but might, with any luck, temper his posturing on Iraq in the coming months. Maybe he’ll recall the following recent quotes from leading German figures about the danger of a re-armed Saddam. Rantingscreeds blogger has tracked them down. Here’s former defense minister, Rudolf Scharping:

I would like to state the central issues once again. First, there is only one individual who bears the responsibility for the current confrontation with the United Nations, and that is Saddam Hussein. Second, he has to see to it that Iraq satisfies all the UN resolutions. Third, every possible political effort has to be made to arrive at a peaceful solution. Fourth, the danger posed by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction is a matter that no one can view with indifference, and that is the case for all the other states in the region, especially Israel, as well as for the Europeans and the Americans. That is why Iraq should stop refusing to cooperate, and if all the political efforts that are being made do not result in success, a military operation cannot and should not be ruled out in this case. The United States and Great Britain can absolutely count on German solidarity.

And then there’s former foreign minister, Klaus Kinkel, of the Free Democrats:

Incidentally, I believe that we Germans in particular have good reason to work toward preventing a dictator from causing something terrible yet again. There was one dictator who was stopped too late. This one has to be stopped in good time… We are maintaining intensive contact with the United States and with our partners and friends in the EU. However, our experience of Saddam Hussein to date, and I believe that this is also of key importance, shows that, unfortunately, he is only prepared to observe UN Security Council resolution when he is under pressure. The international community cannot simply accept always being made a fool of. That is why the military option must remain available. He who wants a peaceful solution in particular cannot waver in this regard.

Those quotes are from February 1998. Four and a half years later, the SPD and the German government are refusing to support military action against Saddam, even if the U.N. mandates it.

WHO SAYS THE ARAB WORLD CAN’T BE FEMINIST? I loved this woman-fights-back story from, of all places, Jordan.

BRODER ON THE DEMS: It’s rare that this genteel op-ed uniter sticks the boot in. His simple argument is that the Democrats have no principled position on the the two most important issues to the president: the war and the tax-cut. They won’t actually oppose either, because they fear the political consequences. Yet they carp and obstruct and criticize – without offering any serious credible alternative. Until they tell us why Saddam is not a threat meriting war or that they will repeal the Bush tax cut, they should be treated with the contempt Broder says they deserve.

EVEN THE GUARDIAN: Well, actually, its sister Sunday paper, the Observer, concedes that the evidence is overwhelming that Saddam is desperately trying to build weapons of mass destruction. Here’s the money quote:

‘You can say many things about what Iraq is up to,’ said one diplomat familiar with the material. ‘You can argue about what weapons he has, if any, how many, and if they will ever work. You can argue about whether he will takes two months or 10 years to build or acquire a nuclear bomb. But what you cannot argue with is the evidence that that Saddam has set up his secret weapons procurement network once again. That is the real worry.’

Yep, sure is.

OSAMA’S SPIN-DOCTOR: A reader sends in the following story archived in Salon, a magazine which has its fair share of embarrassing Osama-bin-Laden-is-harmless stories from before September 11. But this one is a beaut. The author pours scorn on the notion that there was any evidence linking bin Laden to terrorism against the United States in the 1990s:

So far, for all of the accusations, no government, not even that of the United States, has established enough credible evidence against bin Laden to conclusively prove his direct participation in, much less leadership of, any of the ugly plots and acts he stands accused of. To date no formal request for his extradition has ever been made, either to the Sudanese government that once housed him or to his current hosts, Afghanistan’s Taliban leaders.

The piece reads like an exercise in spin-control for bin Laden and al Qaeda. The lame excuses for the Islamofascist go on and on:

When a car bomb exploded at a Saudi National Guard office in Riyadh in 1995, killing five Americans, and another blew up at the Khobar Towers Barracks in Dhahran a year later, killing another 19, bin Laden seemed the most likely suspect. But neither the FBI, the CIA nor the Saudi intelligence services has ever been able to establish bin Laden’s links to those crimes after years of trying. What evidence that has emerged from those ongoing investigations points the finger at dissident Saudi Shiites, perhaps with the logistic support of the Lebanese Hezbollah organization, or even Iran … Bin Laden may be a dangerous anti-American zealot with a mouth as big as his bankroll. But the evidence so far does not support him being a cerebral Islamic Dr. No moving an army of terrorist troops on a vast world chessboard to checkmate the United States.

Who wrote this? One Loren Jenkins. What does he do now? He’s NPR’s Senior Supervising Editor for foreign news, paid in part by you and me. And NPR is biased in its coverage of the Middle East? Naaah.

WRIGHT ONLINE: That awesome New Yorker profile of al Qaeda’s number 2 is now online. Endless, but unmissable.

HATE CRIME UPDATE: Perhaps goaded by this blog, the Los Angeles Times has now covered the Muslim anti-Jewish attack in West Hollywood last week. Here’s the piece.

HEY, ALTERMAN: I wonder if the story of Lynne Stewart worries him in any way. Here’s a former left-wing radical who has seamlessly shifted toward support of Islamist terror. She even allowed an attorney-client prison meeting to be turned into a means for terrorist Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric who is a key figure in world-wide Islamist terror, to broadcast a message to his murderous supporters. I wonder if many on the far-left who have been at pains to deny that they could ever support terror will find it possible to defend this woman. It will be revealing who backs her and why.

ANGRY YOUNG MALE FOR B
USH: Here’s a letter worth passing on, helping explain why the Republicans have such lopsided majorities among young men (a demographic, I might add, that closely matches this website’s readership):

I’m a male under 44, and while I’ve been a Republican since I was 20, I didn’t support Bush until after the 2000 convention, and then only because I had to.
That has changed, and I support him completely today. It’s not lack of life experience, and I’ve known that the Democrats are an institutionalized Ponzi scheme for twenty years now. No, here’s why I support Bush: I grew up in the Middle of North Dakota, amid the missile silos, during the Cold War. The threat of senseless oblivion was all around me. My most fervent prayer was that my own kids wouldn’t have to grow up with that over their heads. I considered it a near-miracle that the Cold War, and that threat, ended right when my daughter was born, in 1991. The missile silos I grew up among have been decomissioned and blown up. I relaxed for a bit.
That ended September 11. Not only is oblivion from the blue a possibility again – it happened. And can happen again. And I know that Bush is the one who’s going to not only contain that threat, but uproot and burn it away. Yeesh, what if Gore had won? I’d expect to see a speech asking us all to learn how to co-exist with terror and come to terms with our own accountability for it. The reasons may be different – but I suspect a lot of us young (angry? white?) males have a similar feeling.

HITLER AND SADDAM:

“In targeting Iraq, the United States administration is acting on behalf of Zionism, which has been killing the heroic people of Palestine, destroying their property, murdering their children and seeking to impose their domination on the whole world, not only militarily, but also economically and politically.” – Saddam Hussein, in his letter last week to the U.N.

“…For while the Zionists try to make the rest of the world believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim … all they want is a central organization for their international world swindle…”
– Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf.

I guess, according to some, Hitler was just an anti-Zionist.

From the Times of London today:

The popular crusade against confrontation with Iraq, which has galvanised support for the Social Democrats, has taken on an anti-American dimension, earning Herr Schröder some unwanted support. The latest issue of the Iraqi weekly al-Iqtisadi, said to express the views of President Saddam Hussein’s son Uday, called the Chancellor’s attitude “more honourable than that of the Arab countries”. In addition, German neo-Nazis, including the former head of the far-Right Republican Party, Franz Schönhuber, are coming out in support of the Chancellor for having adopted “the German way” in defying the United States.

Recall that the head of Germany’s intelligence told the New Yorker earlier this year that he believed Saddam was on the brink of nuclear capacity. Look forward to arguments saying that allowing the nuclear devastation of Israel is not anti-Semitic, just anti-Zionist.

WAS TIME WRONG? Sandy Berger says the Clinton administration did not hand over an al Qaeda document to the new Bush administration, as claimed in Time’s recent cover-story. Was Mike Elliott wrong? Will Time address this discrepancy?

DUBYA AND THE YOUNG: I’m struck by the generational dynamics in the latest Ipsos-Reid poll. The GOP has a huge lead among the young, especially men under 44. I wonder why. Could it be that September 11 was a more potent event for those with less life experience under their belts? Or is it that the young recognize that the Democrats are essentially a political operation designed to take money from the young and productive and give it to the old and rich and retired? Both possibilities are encouraging.

SUMMERS TAKES ON ANTI-SEMITISM: Good for him. How long before Harper’s Lee Siegel accuses him of being a closet anti-Semite?

I’m mystified why more hasn’t been made of Saddam’s assertion in his letter to the United Nations of the global threat of world Jewry. Here’s the key passage:

In targeting Iraq, the United States administration is acting on behalf of Zionism, which has been killing the heroic people of Palestine, destroying their property, murdering their children and seeking to impose their domination on the whole world, not only militarily, but also economically and politically.

Like the rest of the letter, this part is barely literate but its meaning is clear. Saddam is claiming that the U.S. is a tool of Zionist forces that are trying to take over the whole world! This isn’t like Hitler. It is Hitler. When a figure like this simply echoes Nazi language, why isn’t there universal shock and derision? Why isn’t that the headline? Or have we become completely inured to the fact that the 1930s are alive and well and centered in Baghdad and the West Bank?

41, 43 AND UNILATERALISM: Much is currently made of the contrast between the first Bush’s instinctive multilateralism and his son’s alleged go-it-alone recklessness. So I’m glad Jon Rauch tracked down this passage in George H.W. Bush’s memoir, “A World Transformed,” co-written with Brent Scowcroft. The passage begins with news reaching the president of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait:

A few minutes later, I was on the phone with Tom Pickering, our U.N. ambassador. While I was prepared to deal with this crisis unilaterally if necessary, I wanted the United Nations involved as part of our first response, starting with a strong condemnation of Iraq’s attack on a fellow member. Decisive U.N. action would be important in rallying international opposition to the invasion and reversing it.

My italics. Methinks the contrast between 41 and 43 is overblown.

Dana Milbank comes to appreciate Bush’s under-rated political skills.

UNI-MULTI-LATERALISM: The Financial Times’ Gerard Baker elaborates on the point I was trying to make yesterday. And does it better.

WHAT WONDERFUL ROADS!: A reader sent me this priceless Robert Fisk piece in 1993 – on Osama bin Laden. Puff piece doesn’t begin to describe it. There are breathless paeans to Osama’s construction business! Read every word, and get a clue where this “reporter” is coming from.

THE LEFT AND POWELL: I’ve never been of the view that Powell is some lone ranger in this administration, fighting its policies from day to day. That line, of course, is part of his (and Bush’s) spin, but Powell has always been a team player and the administration’s war strategy is a lot stronger for being a Cheney-Powell combo than either man (or merely the president) alone. I wondered when the left might catch on to this. Maybe they have. Here’s a rant in the San Fancisco Bay Guardian:

Now, journalists tell us that the latest manifestation of Powell’s “moderate” resolve is his stance on Iraq. But the Powell rhetoric about the need for allied support and U.N. Security Council backing can be understood as a fervent desire to line up as many ducks as possible before the shooting starts. Under Powell’s direction, U.S. diplomats – diligently laying down groundwork for war – are brandishing carrots and sticks at numerous countries.

Wow. Intelligence among the San Francisco left. I’m getting worried.

AIDS ACTIVISTS VERSUS RESEARCH: They’re finally having an impact on HIV research. By demonizing drug companies, gutting intellectual property rights, and forcing down drug prices, AIDS activists have now succeeded in dramatically slowing HIV research. Way to go, guys! Here’s a troubling but predictable piece in the Jerusalem Post about this phenomenon. One passage:

One of the rare industry executives who would actually discuss the topic, but did not wish to be identified, agreed that although he didn’t like to admit it, “we have lost the battle with the activists, and now the market is less profitable. The result is that we are spending less R&D time on anti-retrovirals. Why bother to innovate these products when any advance will not be profitable?” he said.

What’s interesting here is that there is a collusion of interests between the leftist campaigners and the publicity-shy drug companies. The lefties want to insist there’s no trade-off in the hounding of pharmaceutical companies; the companies don’t want to admit that their research is fueled by such gross motives as making money. Meanwhile, progress against a fast-mutating virus slows.

THE TIMES CORRECTS: The New York Times is just alerting its syndicated clients of the following correction:

“Newspapers that used the William Safire Op-Ed column sent Sept. 11 for publication Sept. 12 may wish to use the following corrective. A column by William Safire, discussing the royal family of Saudi Arabia, gave an incorrect age for Abdullah al-Aziz bin Fahd, a son of King Fahd. He is 32 years old, not 60.”

To be fair to Safire, he did write “about 60.”

“KILL THE JEWS”: What are the odds that if two Muslim Americans were attacked outside a bar in Los Angeles by a bunch of white ethnics, that we would have heard of it by now? But the equivalent allegedly happened to two Jewish guys in West Hollywood, who were set upon by a gang of Middle Eastern youths last Sunday night:

John Griffith, a resident of Sierra Towers, says he saw more than 20 men surrounding the two victims and witnessed five kicking and beating the victims, repeatedly chanting “Kill the Jews!” When the victims fled to seek safety with Sierra Towers’ security guards, Griffith says, two suspects followed the men and threatened the guards with a metal pipe taken from a nearby sprinkler system and with fists, before the guards fought them off. “It was the worst thing I have ever observed,” Griffith says. “I kept screaming at them, but they were yelling so loudly they couldn’t hear me. I kept yelling, ‘I’ve called the cops.’ “They didn’t budge, they just kept attacking these guys,” he adds.

No coverage yet in the Los Angeles Times. UPDATE: Matt Welch emails to let me know that the LA Times did cover the attacks, but the text shows no reference to their anti-Semitic nature.

TOP TORY BACKS GAY MARRIAGE: In Canada at least. The Canadian government is trying to stop equal marriage rights on the basis that gays cannot procreate. Does that mean that infertile straights won’t be able to get married? Or couples who intend never to have children? Or straight couples who do not procreate but adopt? Of all the arguments for special rights for straights, this seems to me the dumbest.

GERMANS VERSUS JEWS: In another ugly piece of campaign rhetoric, the deputy leader of the Free Democrats has tried to gin up his support by attacking the state of Israel. Until recently there was a taboo on such comments in Germany, but no longer. The leader has been criticized by elites but it’s more revealing, to my mind, that he believes he can pick up votes this way. Not only has Germany helped build Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, it is now doing all it can to ensure he keeps them, and the threat they pose to Israel. Chilling, no?

The latest CNN/USA Today poll makes for fascinating reading. The usual gender gap in war-support has evaporated, with women just as likely to back a war against Iraq as men. More interesting, on the question of who’s exploiting this for domestic reasons, the Democrats come off worse than Bush. 59 percent say the Dems are delaying a war-vote for political reasons. Only 26 percent believe Bush’s war-timing is politically motivated. As so often, the voters have sized it up pretty accurately.

SADDAM, SADDAM, SADDAM: This via Instapundit: Mike Silverman’s guide to Saddam art in Iraq. I prefer the little gay guy in the South Park movie myself. Man, could he dance.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “Actress Susannah Harker, of House of Cards and Pride and Prejudice, said supporting the anti-war campaign was a ‘moral stance’ for her. She said: ‘If this is about producing weapons of destruction I think that America is the worst culprit and they should be dealt with first.'” – BBC Entertainment news.

I’ve long been skeptical of the notion that governments in foreign affairs are either multilateralist (good) or unilateralist (bad). It seems to me that any government’s first priority in foreign policy should be the pursuit of national interest, broadly understood. For some, that’s a unilateralist position, almost by definition. But I’d argue that it’s more nuanced than that. The pursuit of national interest can (and should) lead to multilateral arrangements – NAFTA, GATT, NATO, the EU, etc – that benefit each party. Moreover, these multilateral arrangements work precisely because they do represent the sum of national interests, and aren’t merely talking shops based on high-minded but impractical ideals. These diplomatic contraptions, in other words, are means, not ends. Bush gets this, I think. And it’s a profound improvement on the muddled abdication of American leadership in the previous administration. But Bush adds a twist. It may be that some multilateral deals only really work when one of the critical parties to them threatens to abandon them and go it alone. Call it “unilateral multilateralism”. Thatcher’s relationship with the E.U., was rather like this. And Bush’s continued insistence that the U.S. reserves the right in the last resort to deal with Iraq by itself has, I think, been the single most important factor in forcing the U.N. to act. His unilateralism made multilateralism possible. And it also gave direction to the multilateralism, reminding the U.N. that it should be concerned with tangible results not just debates and resolutions. I doubt the U.N. is up to the task, but it is one of the ironies of the present moment that without Bush’s threat to walk, the U.N. wouldn’t even recognize the task in front of it. You know, he really is a lot smarter than his critics recognize. Which is, of course, fine by him.

SAFIRE AND THE GERMANS: Amazing anecdote by Bill Safire today about the former German Defense minister. Did he really explain U.S. foreign policy as being designed to placate Jews? It’s bad enough that German companies have helped arm Saddam in his attempt to finish what Hitler started, but that the German government should now be trafficking in this poison is truly disturbing. There will be payback. I don’t think some Europeans understand that part of post 9/11 America is a greater sense of who really helps the U.S., and who deserves American help in return. There is no longer much ambivalence about fair-weather friends, especially in the mind of someone as ferociously loyal as W. My feeling is that Tony Blair is actually a shrewder power-broker in this respect than Schroder. Blair knows that the rewards for him and his country as the hegemon’s closest ally far outweigh short-term domestic drawbacks. Schroder isn’t as smart. Man, I hope he loses.

MANDELA’S PIQUE: In an interview with the Guardian, Nelson Mandela gets someone else to play the race card: “When there were white secretary generals, you didn’t find this question of the US and Britain going out of the UN. But now that you’ve had black secretary generals, such as Boutros Boutros Ghali and Kofi Annan, they do not respect the UN. This is not my view, but that is what is being said by many people.” I think this is probably lamer than playing the race card yourself. How “black” is BBG anyway? About as “black” as Iraq. And wasn’t Annan the Anglo-American pick? All this, sadly, is vicarious grand-standing. And completely blind to the reality in Iraq.

IDIOCY OF THE WEEK: “The president made the case against Saddam Hussein as an outlaw and a malign dictator who represents ‘a grave and gathering danger.’ But the particulars of his tyranny rather strikingly resemble those of Saudi Arabia, which is our ally in the war against terrorism.”
Let’s unpack this particular piece of characteristic inanity from Mary McGrory in the Washington Post last Saturday.
How is Saddam’s tyranny in Iraq strikingly similar in its particulars to Saudi Arabia?
Iraq is not a theocracy, as Saudi Arabia is. It’s an ostensibly secular military police state, run by a single despot. Saudi Arabia, in contrast, is an oil-rich, religiously conservative theocratic oligarchy. However noxious both regimes are, it’s indisputable that they are very different in their particulars.
Iraq has been developing weapons of mass destruction. Saudi Arabia hasn’t, isn’t and won’t.
Saddam has fought two disastrous wars against its neighbors – Iran and Kuwait. He invaded Kuwait and threatened to invade Saudi Arabia if the West hadn’t stopped him. Saudi Arabia has never invaded another country.
Iraq is in violation of umpteen U.N. resolutions. Saudi Arabia isn’t.
Iraq has gassed its own citizens and used chemical weapons in wartime. Saudi Arabia hasn’t.
Don’t get me wrong. Saudi Arabia’s financing of Wahhabist Islam is deeply threatening to the region, Western interests and Western values. At some point, we’ll need regime change there as well, if we are to stop Islamo-fascism’s growth and appeal. But the very religiosity of Saudi Arabia distinguishes it from Iraq in the particulars of its tyranny. And its threat is financial and ideological, not military. We even have a military base there!
Now these are simple, obvious, readily available facts, obvious to anyone with even the slightest passing knowledge of the region and its history. Yet a leading liberal columnist is able to make such a statement and have it printed in the Washington Post. And the knee-jerk left wonders why it isn’t relevant any more. (First published in Salon.)

HOW MEAN WAS THAT? Here’s an email from someone in response to the above nugget about Mary McGrory’s recent column. It’s worth responding to:

I don’t think you should have been mean to Mary Mcgrory. You could have just written a column that obviously disagreed but you really said some awfully mean things and I do wish you would not do that.

I get a few emails on those lines. But looking back on the piece, I can only see two vaguely “mean things”, which is my comment that her column this week was characteristically inane and that her knowledge of the region, if judged by this sloppy remark, is shallow. A tough judgment? Sure. A personal attack? Nope. I make a very simple distinction in how I write. I try extremely hard not to make any references to anything outside an individual’s actual work. Even though I’m sure I’ve made a few comments in my time I now wish I hadn’t, I really try hard not to mention anyone’s private life, looks, integrity, morality, or other purely ad hominem comments. But I see no reason why you can’t be as devastating as you can with someone’s arguments or style or logic or politics or public conduct. That’s not being mean; it’s being tough. Maybe it’s my being brought up in the English debating style, where really brutal repartee isn’t taken very personally outside the debating chamber. Maybe others see the line between being tough and being mean somewhere else. But that’s how I see it myself. And it’s probably worth putting on the table, if only so you can call me on it when I slip.

MODO UNHINGED: Several of you have asked me to comment on Maureen Dowd’s latest piece of desperate, random, incoherent, and loopy free association with regard to president Bush. Alas, I can’t Fisk it because there’s no argument. But then, with Dowd, there rarely is. It’s class hatred mixed with fan
tasy, made palatable by occasionally diverting turns of phrase. And wildly popular with some.