Category: Old Dish

I guess we should thank Al Gore for making his position clear on the war against Iraq. He says he’s for it, except he’s against it. The timing is wrong. The European allies are not on board. We need to debate it more. He’s for delaying it, but he’s against saying we will take on Iraq unless we do so soon. “I think the principle of ‘first things first’ does apply and has to be followed if we are to have any chance of success,” he expounded, arguing that we have to make Afghanistan a perfectly functioning democracy before we protect the homeland. Does he have any sense that Americans are under threat now, that we have already lost over 3,000 civilians to mass destruction, that the enemy is vowing to do more, and that Iraq is easily the most significant source of weapons of mass destruction? Yes, first things first. The first thing is ensuring the security of the citizens of the United States. Isn’t it clear what the strategy of Gore and perhaps some other Democrats now is? You use the corporate scandals to bring down Bush’s approval ratings and regain the Congress. You start making the case that a war against Iraq will be diplomatically inflammatory and militarily risky. You never actually have the balls to oppose the war outright, but you nitpick and cavil and undermine until you hope the president or the public blinks. If a hideous terrorist attack occurs, it’s Bush’s responsibility. If it doesn’t, you can claim he’s war-mongering unnecessarily. Win-win. Except for the security of the United States, in which it’s lose-lose. I used to be pro-Gore. Then I thought he was narrowly the worse choice for president. Now I think I’d rather have almost any Democrat in office than him.

WHY I CAN’T GET NO RESPECT: You’d be amazed how many liberals I meet who seem genuinely amazed I don’t actually have cloven hoofs. Charles Krauthammer charmingly exposes the reason why. A classic.

CLINTON ON FINANCIAL CRIMES: Jack Shafer has a point here. The man who pardoned Marc Rich is lecturing the president on corporate corruption? The worst that could be said about Bush is that he hasn’t been tough enough. At least he didn’t actively reward it, like the former president.

GAY MARRIAGE INEVITABLE? The polls in Canada show a narrow majority for equal civil rights for gay people in marriage – 48 to 43 percent. But in the 25 – 34 age group, the majority is 65 percent. Inevitable? Nah. But it’s clear which side is winning the debate, isn’t it?

A CLINTON FANTASY: “Under Clinton I believe there would have been no September 11, no Enron, no telecommunication meltdown, no collapse of the stock market, no deficits. Do you see what a little vision provides to this Great Country of Ours. Reagan had it, Clinton had it – and it showed. So do I pin this on this Administration, you bet I do.” This, a defense of Robert Rubin, a first-hand account of inter-racial marriage and much more on the Letters Page, edited by Reihan Salam.

What does Krugman mean by rhinoceri? Are they people with thicker skin than he has?

ALASKA CALLING: The best piece yet on Alaska’s warming is now up on TechCentral Station. Here’s the money section:

Twenty-two of the thirty individual locations defining Alaska’s temperature history show either no warming trend or a significant cooling trend after 1977. Nor does the USNA’s Alaska record show a meaningful man-made warming trend in the period beyond the Great Pacific Climate Shift of 1976 – 1977. Those facts contradict the predictions from the climate simulations. As for the future, University of Washington researchers find that the northern Pacific Ocean temperatures dropped back to a state of cold around 1998 – 1999. That should mean sharply colder temperatures in Alaska for the next twenty to thirty years.

The rise in temperature is largely a function of a big rise in 1977, caused most probably by a shift in Pacific ocean patterns. TCS even has a whizz-bang interactive map of thirty different measuring stations over the last thirty years. Surprise! Despite growing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, Alaska is getting cooler. Tim Egan should probably find an igloo somewhere and stay very quiet for a while.

WHY POWELL NOW? The MinuteMan suggests an obvious motive. The Times doesn’t want war with Iraq. This is an early puff-piece to justify later support for Powell’s alleged ambivalence about taking out Saddam.

THEY’RE USED TO IT: The Hill reports that gay and lesbian candidates are encountering less and less prejudice out there. Shhhh. Don’t tell Richard Goldstein. It’ll ruin his day.

THANKS: 41,000 visits yesterday. And it’s July.

RUBIN AND THE SEC: I published a letter from a financial analyst reader that claimed that Robert Rubin had cut the SEC’s budget by 60 percent. Other readers queried this notion. Here’s the letter-writer’s response:

I goofed. I have made a classic Washington D.C. error, by examining cuts in the rate of growth in the funding of the SEC funding, and calling them a real cut. Mea culpa. However, I have checked with the New York SEC office, which tells me that staffing levels in the New York SEC office have fallen by 60% and this is where I got the figure from. In fairness, this cannot be blamed on Rubin; likely that a private sector salary during a huge boom was too attractive for many securities lawyers. But the drop in staffing levels helps to explain why so many accounting abuses went undetected for so long.

This poem in praise of Colin Powell – he’s brilliant, such a great guy, a traditional conservative (as opposed to knuckle-dragging right-wing loonies), widely loved, adored even, a rock star abroad, a civil rights icon, and on and on and on – must surely be self-parody. There’s nothing new in it. The Times even almost gives Richard Holbrooke a joint by-line. I know it’s July, but this piece of Powell-spin truly ranks as one of the all-time greats of vapid media puffery. Every paragraph has a cliche. Count ’em. Then there is this weird locution:

As one of the world’s most admired celebrities for more than a decade, with approval ratings that rival President Bush’s, Secretary Powell has special status – and singular political value – in a Republican administration supposedly eager to demonstrate its commitment to compassionate conservatism.

So is Todd Purdum saying that the administration doesn’t even want to appear to be eager to be seen as compassionately conservative? Or is Powell part of this fraud? But how can it be fraud if the administration isn’t actually eager to perpetrate it? Dizzying. One other thing to note: there is not a single negative thing in this piece – not one. No dissenting quote; no ritual “to-be-sure” paragraph; not a single qualification to what, even for Powell, must be an embarrassingly fellatial profile. What next: formal beatification?

NOAH PILES ON: Tim Noah – no knee-jerk conservative, to say the least – chimes in on the need to subject Robert Rubin’s record at Citigroup to further scrutiny. Score one for Jake Weisberg’s editorship.

KRUGMAN VS. KAUS: The paleo-liberal boot goes in. Krugman calls Mickey a conformist. Conformist? Mickey is one of the most independent writers I know. He couldn’t conform if he tried to. Meanwhile Krugman has morphed from an independent thinker into one more hack churning out Rainesian propaganda.

KRUGMAN EXTRA!: Here’s a direct factual rebuttal of his recent column smearing the president for his role in the University of Texas Investment Management Co. (Utimco). It speaks for itself.

CENSORING RAPES: … If they’re committed by immigrants from Lebanon, and if those immigrants are Muslim, and if they regard Australian women and teenagers as “sluts.” That’s what some liberals have descended to, according to this recent editorial from the Sydney Morning-Herald.

HATING ASHCROFT? The New York Times would have you believe there’s a groundswell of conservative opposition to attorney-general John Ashcroft. I read that story too and found it unconvincing. So would anyone with a rudimentary awareness of that political constituency, like Jonathan Last. This is one aspect of liberal bias that is sometimes over-looked. It’s not a deliberate attempt to skew the news; it’s a level of such ignorance of the people who disagree with you that you make honest but fatal misjudgments. That’s what happens when nine out of ten reporters in the national press are liberal Democrats – however hard they try to stay neutral.

POSEUR ALERT: “3) Subway commercial for Dijon Horseradish Melt (Fox Sports Net, July 13)
One “Jim” (“a Dennis Miller-type of guy who tells it like it is,” says Subway publicist Les Winograd) pulls up to a burger joint in a car full of buddies. He’s about 40, tall, well-exercised: “Turkey breast, ham, bacon, melted cheese, Dijon horseradish sauce,” he says in the drive-through, exuding an aura of Supermanship all out of proportion to the situation. “That’s, like, not on our menu,” says the young, pudgy, confused person taking orders. “It’s not only not on your menu,” Jim says, “it’s not on your radar screen!” “Do we have a radar screen?” the clerk asks a supervisor as Jim peels out. “Think I made that burger kid cry?” Jim says to his pals, all of them now ensconced in a Subway with the new Select specials in front of them.
It seems plain that, finally, George W. Bush is making himself felt in culture. The commercial takes Bush’s sense of entitlement — which derives from his lifelong insulation from anything most people eat, talk about, want or fear, and which is acted out by treating whatever does not conform to his insulation as an irritant — and makes it into a story that tries to be ordinary. But the story as the commercial tells it is too cruel, its dramatization of the class divisions Bush has made into law too apparent. The man smugly laughing over embarrassing a kid is precisely Bush in Paris attempting to embarrass a French-speaking American reporter for having the temerity to demonstrate that he knew something Bush didn’t. (Real Americans don’t speak French.) Even someone responsible for putting this talisman on the air may have flinched at the thing once it was out there in the world at large, functioning as public discourse, as politics — the last time I saw the spot, the final punchline had been dropped.” – from a list of Greil Marcus’ “Real Life Rock Top Ten,” Salon.

I can’t do better than reprint this email from highly astute reader and financial analyst:

You’re right. Rubin’s nefarious role in Enron and his overall responsibility in helping to create the bubble (along with Greenspan) has not received proper attention. In my opinion, Rubin is even worse than Greenspan. If you recall, he was the one who initially dismissed Greenspan’s “irrational exuberance” comments, and I believe he virtually created government for and by Goldman Sachs during his tenure in office. He frustrated the development of legislation to make the derivatives market more transparent (along with Phil Gramm), which could have prevented the Enron bankruptcy, and managed to get Brooksley Borne of the CFTC sacked when she pressed for such derivatives to be regulated by the Comex. He also cut the SEC’s budget by 60% when he was in office, which frustrated the fine work of Arthur Levitt and enabled many of the unsavoury practices now coming to light to be perpetuated. He was the architect of the strong dollar policy which helped to create such huge imbalances in the US current account in order to attract more money into the US capital markets and thereby create a hugely destabilising bubble. I suspect that Rubin will ultimately undergo a historical revision in reputation comparable to Andrew Mellon (who in 1928 was viewed as the greatest Treasury Secretary since Alexander Hamilton and left office in disgrace in 1932). Rubin was smart enough to get out before things got really messy, but he is even more culpable than Mellon.

I think we’re due for a major re-evaluation of the Clinton-Rubin-Greenspan legacy, don’t you?

There’s an epidemic breaking out! Take this from the New York Observer:

Listen up, fellows: Rich, bored teenage girls in New York City are on the prowl for twentysomething (and in some cases, thirtysomething) men. And this time, they’re not just arming themselves with fake ID’s. Young women barely past puberty-and before, ahem, the age of consent-are sashaying onto the Internet, researching adult life, and constructing elaborate alter egos designed to dupe men all too willing to believe their lies.

Consider Alexis. By 14, she was fed up with the dopey guys in her age group. This 5-foot-9 private-school student and class treasurer likes them older-much older.

At first, Alexis employed a simple alias: She would tell the older men she met that she was a junior majoring in communications at the University of Pennsylvania. Everyone bought the lie. It went well until a 24-year-old man asked her out, and mentioned that he, too, went to U. Penn.

“I, like, totally bugged out,” Alexis said.

Hilarious, huh? Of course, there is an honest and coherent philosophy behind the social conservative blind eye to straight pedophilia and obsession with gay pedophilia. An email expresses it simply:

There is a difference too, according to biblical Christian principles. A boy seduced by an older woman is sinning, but a boy seduced by a man is seduced contrary to nature. The B-W relationship is a model of what he should end up doing (having sex inside of a relationship of sexual complementarity in marriage), a B-M relationship is not what he ever should be doing.

I disagree with this strongly. But don’t you think that if this really is the belief of Eberstadt et al, they should simply say so and make their hostility to homosexuality as such more explicit, instead of attacking it under the veil of being opposed to child abuse?

Anthony Lane writes like a dream and reviews intelligently. I point out this last paragraph of his latest review merely to observe the heterosexism of many alleged opponents of pedophilia. Lane is reviewing the hot new movie, “Tadpole,” in which a fifteen-year old boy is molested by older women. The law describes this as criminal conduct on the part of the women involved – one of them even, in Lane’s words, “pimps” the youth to her friends. But the New Yorker regards this not only as unremarkable, but a hugely lucky break for the kid. The end of the movie suggests that the teenager eventually settles for sex partners roughly his own age, after going trhough a pedophile phase. Lane complains:

The implication is that when [Bebe] Neuwirth, wearing a leather skirt and a fur coat, guides you back to her apartment, gives you a massage, and spirits you into her bed, the whole thing is just a phase, something you have to go through and grow out of, when it is, of course, as good as Oscar’s life will ever get. Honestly, kids today: no respect.

Now I think a commonsensical view of pedophilia will make a distinction between a horny fifteen year old boy and a mature women and other abusive relationships. But then I’m not Mary Eberstadt or Rod Dreher. Here is pedophilia chic in an almost classic formulation in a movie with big stars in it, reviewed in the New Yorker. And the social conservatives are utterly mute. Do you think they would be quiet if this were a same-sex relationship? Tells you something about their real agenda, doesn’t it?

“A LEGACY OF MISERY”: That’s how the New York Times describes the results of the war to liberate Afghanistan. I keep thinking it can’t get any worse, and then it does.

MURDERING FREE WOMEN: I finally read Sarah Lyall’s moving account in the Times of the disgusting murder of a young Kurdish immigrant to Sweden by her own father. Talk about a clash of civilizations. The young woman simply wanted to choose whom she married. Her father and brother regarded her as “a whore” for doing so, and repeatedly beat her, stalked her and eventually murdered her. In a classic act of appeasement, a Kurdish member of parliament had tried to broker a deal between this young woman and her father, in which the woman would stay out of the national media in return for her father’s leaving her alone. Like most attempts to appease thugs, this one failed. I notice that religion is unmentioned in Lyall’s account, and the story sadly bends over backwards to be p.c. Is not the fact that this woman was killed by a strict Muslim relevant? Or is that basic fact deemed to inflammatory for the Times’ readers? I love this summary of the issues involved:

[I]t was this very desire for independence that provoked her father into a rage so great that he killed her in January, turning her into the tragic emblem of a European society’s failure to bridge the gap in attitudes between its own culture and those of its newer arrivals.

This strikes me as a euphemism. The fundamentalist Islamic attitude toward women is barbaric. Pim Fortuyn was right that immigrants who treat women like dirt should indeed have no place in a Western country. If they cannot treat women, gays and other religious groups with tolerance, they should stay in the cultural backwaters where they belong.

IT’S WORSE IN NORWAY: Check out Bruce Bawer’s sobering account of unassimilable Islamic fundamentalism in Europe. Here’s a paragraph that stopped me in my tracks:

In September 2001 (only five days, in fact, before the destruction of the World Trade Center), the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet reported that 65 percent of rapes of Norwegian women were performed by “non-Western” immigrants-a category that, in Norway, consists mostly of Muslims. The article quoted a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo (who was described as having “lived for many years in Muslim countries”) as saying that “Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes” because Muslim men found their manner of dress provocative. One reason for the high number of rapes by Muslims, explained the professor, was that in their native countries “rape is scarcely punished,” since Muslims “believe that it is women who are responsible for rape.” The professor’s conclusion was not that Muslim men living in the West needed to adjust to Western norms, but the exact opposite: “Norwegian women must realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.”

And the only people, according to our media, who dissent from this are extreme right-wingers. Why not call them what they really are: liberals?

POSTMODERNISM MAKES YOU HUNGRY: A new angle from the Onion.

THE DEMS AND THE HANGOVER: As usual, Mike Crowley delivers the goods on Congressional maneuverings on the market.

THE GREENSPAN BUBBLE?: This short piece detailing how the Fed badly handled interest rates in 1998 and 1999 helped me get a better handle on our current hang-over. Worth a look.

BACKLASH CENTRAL: I thought awarding Bill McGowan a National Press Award for tackling the tough issue of “diversity” in the newsroom would prompt a protest from the usual suspects. Lo and behold, it has.

THE HOOTERS DEFENSE: And I thought this tactic would only work in a gay bar.

JUDIS’ PRESCIENCE: “When people say Bill Clinton will go down as a great president because of his record on the economy, they mean two different things. First, they mean that Clinton’s economic policies have contributed to an unusually prosperous eight years. By and large, that’s true. Second, they mean that his economic team – including Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, and Alan Greenspan – developed an enduring formula for successful economic management. By and large, that’s nonsense. In fiscal policy, international economic policy, and monetary policy, the principles with which the Clinton administration has become identified can’t solve the challenges faced by the next administration. In fact, they didn’t even solve the challenges faced by this one.” – John B. Judis, The New Republic, January 2001.

How do you write a piece about a shady deal with Enron at Citigroup without mentioning Robert Rubin? The same Rubin who placed calls to protect Enron to the Bush administration? The same Rubin who has the gall to demand a change of course in the current administration, while he presided over the bubble we’re now recovering from? We all know the Times is tight with Rubin, but this lacuna screams for further investigation. Rubin joined Citigroup in the fall of 1999. The deal was cemented orally that year, before Rubin was ensconced. But it was controversial even within the bank throughout that year, and keeping the loan off the official books would surely have required a decision at some point after the fact. Was Rubin apprised of this? Did he know about it when he contacted Treasury to ask for even more kid-glove treatment of Enron the following year? Isn’t this a no-brainer phone-call from a Times reporter? According to the Washington Post, today, “Enron would have increased its debt by $4 billion, a 40 percent hike, in 2000 alone had the company accounted for its prepaid debt, according to a congressional analysis released today.” So Rubin might have been instrumental in the Enron con? And the Times isn’t interested? Figures. But if the Times won’t tackle this, others might. Here’s a great new test for the new editor at Slate, Jake Weisberg. Jake has a fat-cat book deal with Rubin detailing Rubin’s allegedly glorious record as Treasury secretary. Let’s see if Slate will take on the architect of the bubble. Why doesn’t Jake commission a story pronto? I’m sure he can pass along the relevant phone numbers to an enterprising muck-raker.

Don’t miss my friend Ian Buruma’s typically astute piece dissecting the British Left’s new litmus test of being anti-Israel. Good for the Guardian for printing it. Ian’s main point is debunking the notion that boycotting Israel today is morally equivalent to boycotting apartheid South Africa. Here’s the money paragraph:

A more apt comparison with Israeli policies would be India’s war in Kashmir. There, too, the victims are mostly Muslims. There is a long history of oppression, bad faith and stupid decisions. And the scale of the violence is much worse. Far more Muslims have been killed or tortured by the Indian army than by the Israeli defence forces. Dozens of Kashmiri victims – the number of people killed in Jenin – would not even reach the news. And if you think Kashmir is brutal, what about Chechnya? But India and Russia are not litmus tests. Moral outrage against their governments is not a badge of being progressive. No one is proposing a boycott of universities in Delhi or St Petersburg. I can think of one or two reasons for these double standards, but whatever they are, I believe that they tell us more about the boycotters than about the subjects of their rage.

Aw, come on, Ian. Stop being so polite. You know what these people really are.

I made it through the Newsweek cover-story. Nothing new, except for Robert Rubin’s schadenfreude and a Begala-like quote from pseudo-populist Bob Shrum. But it does strike me that there is a real story of comparison here. What both Bushes have in common is an undemonstrative determination to correct the abuses they inherited. 41 had to deal with the soaring deficits left by Reagan. He did so calmly, bravely, suicidally. His budget deal was the foundation stone of the 1990s boom. He managed the collapse of the Soviet Union without any blood being spilled. Yes, he misjudged Gorbachev. Yes, he bungled the Iraq war end-game. But in my view, the first Bush administration is one of the most seriously under-rated of modern times: it got its biggest challenge right. The parallel with his son’s administration is obvious. 43 inherited a seriously delinquent anti-terrorism policy, in which his predecessor’s feckless national security apparatus had left the United States vulnerable to the worst slaughter of American citizens in history. W didn’t do enough immediately to reectify this, but he has performed superbly since on the matter. But 43 also inherited what I think we should start calling the Rubin Bubble. It was bursting before W took office and has continued ever since. It may take more time to recover from it, and Bush, like his father, may well suffer politically from the consequences. But 43’s caution in not grasping immediate Gephardt-style measures will be judged more favorably by history than by instapundits; as will the tax cut, the one firewall against a massive new expansion of government. If this winter’s war against Iraq succeeds, 43 will enter a re-election cycle with a growing economy and a safer world as his legacy. That wasn’t enough for his dad, but this time the timing’s better. More to the point, if W runs again with a Democratic Congress, he may be paradoxically harder to beat. Triangulation and all that.

BUT THE DEMS MAY STILL LOSE: The Ipsos/Reid-Cook Report on voters finds only marginal change in voting intentions after the last few weeks of bad market news. College-educated women and non-college edcuated men have moved toward the Democrats, making it a statistical tie in voting intentions in the fall. But among likely voters, Republicans still lead 48 – 40 percent. That’s striking.

TIPTOEING THROUGH “TULIP”: “I know much of this is probably projection on my part. At the same time, what Dusty has taught me in our three and a half years together is that the relationship between humans and animals is a real and sacred one. And the reason I’m such a champion of this little dog book is because of the sheer delicacy and subtlety with which Ackerley understands and expresses this. What he achieves is not an anthropomorphic sentimentality. He combines an admirable refusal to condescend to dogs or to engage in facile sentiment about pets with a deep attempt to see the world from their point of view. What he sees is what my mother has always shown with regard to children: he sees their dignity.” – The Book Club discussion of “My Dog Tulip,” continues on the Book Club page.

RACIALISM IN LEFTIST HELL: a look at this website detailing the Rent Board Commission in San Francisco. Everyone not only has a name but a race. One guy who’s “Caucasian” also gets the “Gay” label. I guess to these leftist-racialists, that other identifier makes him more palatable. Do these people realize how all this racial identifiers and categories make them look more and more like apartheid South Africa?

RAINES WATCH: Amazing one-two punch against the Times’ much vaunted cover-story on Sunday claiming vast numbers of civilian casualties in Afghanistan. It turns out they’re relying on a notorious leftist and dubious numbers. James Taranto and Michael Moynihan’s Politburo nail it. How many more ideologically-driven, factually challenged headlines do we have to read in the paper of record?

THE CASE FOR GLOOM: Steven Roach writes a depressing but interesting case for the imminence of a double-dip recession. He blames much of the current crash on Greenspan:

In my opinion, the Fed squandered the opportunity to pop the equity bubble in late 1996 and early 1997. Back then, an “irrationally exuberant” equity bubble was suddenly rationalized by a Fed that embraced the New Economy with open arms. Today’s script seems hauntingly familiar. An overly extended housing cycle is now being legitimized as a sustainable source of economic expansion. From bubble to bubble — there seems to be no stopping the follies and perils of asset- and debt-driven economic growth.

Maybe we should call it the Rubin-Greenspan Bubble. For more bearish assessments, check out this site. I don’t buy a lot of it, but I was far too sanguine about this market in years gone by, so give the bears their say.

“What is so unthinkable about the UN, major aid-giving countries, or NGOs negotiating bulk purchases with the drug companies? Why are the only choices paying current market rates where prices are based on relatively small quantities (compared to, say, Lipitor or Zoloft), or confiscation? Surely a long-term commitment to millions of doses, plus the opportunity for good PR, would lead drug makers to review their pricing and sharpen their pencils. And, what about favorable tax treatment such as allowing accelerated depreciation or even expensing for the R&D costs of drugs that are developed/approved for treatment of HIV? And marrying tax preference to price negotiations?” This, a defense of Katie Couric and the Economist, a comparison between Bill Clinton and Calvin Coolidge, and a first-hand report from liberalized British pot laws – all on the best Letters Page on the web, edited by Reihan Salam.

TALKIN’ ‘BOUT MISCEGENATION: Why sex is the answer to America’s racial problems.

TULIP AND CAMILLE: I should apologize for delaying the discussion of “My Dog Tulip.” We’ll start tomorrow. Also among coming attractions: next Monday, we’ll be starting a new, irregular feature. I’m calling it an IMterview. Every now and again, I’ll interview a figure from the arts, literature, politics or whatever who just strikes me as interesting. I’ll do so electronically by instant messaging or emailing over a period of a week. Then I’ll post the interview in a couple of sections. Our first interviewee will be Camille Paglia, with whom I’ll be chatting privately online all week. If you have an oddball question – not what she’s been up to, but perhaps a subject you’d like her to expand upon or talk about, let me know, and I’ll finish the interview with five reader questions. Put the words ‘Camille Interview” in the subject line of the email. And check in next Monday for the first installment.