Category: Old Dish

No brainer, I guess. But Charlie Cook has the evidence.

AIDS AND MORALITY: I’m glad, in a way, the Sunday Times asked me to write about AIDS as a whole last week. It forced me to confront something deeply troubling. I’m completely convinced by the evidence that the free market has done more to cure illness, develop drugs, and improve medicine than any socialistic enterprise. I know I’m alive today because of this. And so are countless others. I’m also aware that profits for drug companies are essential to keep the drug innovation going. So confiscating these profits, or showering complex drug regimens in regions unable to use them effectively (if at all) are in effect non-solutions to the global plague. And yet I completely see the opposite imperative. Millions are dying. The technology exists to save them. Screw the expense and the consequences and the enormous difficulties – we have to turn the developing world into a first world medical success story. Perhaps we’ll find some middle way in which a real commitment to the developing world will be allied with an understanding of how markets work, how research is funded, and which methods work best in desperately poor regions. But that still leaves a pragmatic question: when to emphasize skepticism about easy solutions, and when to fight for ambitious ends? The difficulty, of course, is that AIDS simply reflects the broader, global context: that millions live far worse lives than we do in the West and far simpler means – clean drinking water, for example – might do more to save lives than elaborate HIV regimens. So why aren’t we doing that? When does our obligation to these others begin? And does a health crisis like this one change the entire equation and demand that we simply throw skepticism to the winds and do whatever we can? To be perfectly honest, my column last Sunday, though heartfelt, has been troubling my conscience. Perhaps this is one of those instances where prudence needs to be set aside. But judging whether that is appropriate demands a particular kind of prudence as well.

THOSE POST-NATIONALIST EUROS: Next time some annoying Belgian lectures you about why the U.S. is an old-fashioned nationalist power, unable to cede sovereignty to such enlightened bodies as the EU and the ICC, remind him of this.

HOW ANTI-GAY CONSERVATIVES WRECKED MARRIAGE: A sharp piece from Canada’s National Post, making the Rauchian point that social conservatives, in their desperate attempt to prevent gay marriage, have actually contributed to marriage’s collapse:

Rather than put gays on an equal footing with straights, in other words — in marriage as in other areas — the legislation equated marriage with shacking up. Had the government chosen to legalize gay marriage, it could have easily justified maintaining a separate legal status for married couples, as opposed to common-law: There is, after all, a world of difference between a formal commitment to live as one “till death do us part” and the mere fact of having shared a bed for 12 months. Instead, it sacrificed the supremacy of marriage to preserve a specious equality, even as it left a flagrant insult to gays on the books.

And now even this vandalism will be for naught, as the government must have known it eventually would be: It will have to change the definition of marriage anyway. Good. Maybe with the issue of discrimination against gays out of the way, we can get back to discriminating in favour of married people.

So, thanks to conservatives, Canadians have wrought havoc with marriage (30 percent of young couples now simply live together because they’re guaranteed the same benefits as marriage). And now that jurisprudence has recognized (as any rational analysis would) that denying 2 percent of the population a basic civil right is discriminatory, the Canadians will shortly have same-sex marriage anyway. Only now, it won’t mean or help as much. Well, done, guys. And American conservatives are doing all they can to get the worst of both worlds here as well.

THE THIRD WAY ENDETH: In perhaps the most important decision of its six years in office, the Blair government in Britain has reverted to the old socialist past. It has raised taxes and now it’s going to pour billions into public services. No real reforms needed. In a way, it’s clarifying. Labour cannot reform public services, cannot privatize them but cannot afford the political cost of their deterioration. So they’re back to tax and spend – big time. The danger, of course, is that the services don’t improve even then. Then the backlash will be intense and the Tories given another chance. My prediction: the British welfare state will barely exist in its current form in a decade’s time.

MAJOR LEAGUE BIAS: The New York Times conceded Friday another interesting error from Bush-hater Adam Clymer. Here’s the correction, picked up by an alert reader:

A Washington Talk article on July 1 about the political issues surrounding business corruption referred incorrectly to votes on House bills dealing with pensions and accounting reform. Many Democrats and almost all Republicans voted for final passage of both bills; the votes were not along party lines, or close to them.

Checking back through time, you find the following “news” from Clymer that the House had passed a pair of bills to protect worker pensions and improve corporate accountability on votes that were “nearly party line.” The votes were, in fact, wildly bipartisan, predominantly Republican-supported and the bills are now languishing in the Democratic-controlled Senate. Now how hard is it to report on votes in the House, which are publicly available, easily checked, and bleeding obvious? It isn’t hard at all. But Clymer got it wrong. This is not an innocent error: it’s an error of manifest ideological bias. The correction doesn’t quite capture this, as most don’t. So here’s a challenge to my readers. If you see a suspicious-seeming “correction” in the New York Times (or elsewhere), and find it to be not a simple mistake but an obvious function of ideological blinkers, check out the original article, and let me know.

CORRECTION: Pat Tillman isn’t the only NFL player to have gone to war instead of playing in the league. Here’s the dope on the handful of others.

GOLDSTEIN’S LATEST EXCUSE: In the gay Boston paper, Bay Windows, Richard Goldstein explains how he used a quote from my last book so out of context that its original meaning was actually reversed:

“That quote has been floating around for years,” Goldstein says. “I first came upon it more than a year ago and found it in several sources. There was no way that I could have known its actual derivation, especially since Sullivan never bothered to reveal it until now. He never corrected it. The first thing you learn as a public figure is to correct a misquote right away. I think it is very revealing that he chose the publication of my book to spring t
his trap. If you read the book you’ll see why.”

So his mistake is my fault? I’m supposed to track all the deliberate smears and lies from the far left all the time? And don’t you love the assertion: “There was no way that I could have known its actual derivation.” Has Goldstein thought of reading the actual book of the guy he’s lambasting?

La Paglia just wrote a letter to the Guardian in response to Richard Goldstein’s recent campaign against non-leftist homosexuals. Here it is:

Richard Goldstein has waged a tedious, defamatory campaign against Andrew Sullivan for years (Rightwing gays are a new force in US politics, July 8) Sullivan has won an enormous following in the US because of the high quality and wide range of his writing, as well as his strong presence on television. He is witty, incisive, and erudite – everything Goldstein, a bilious mediocrity, is not.

To attribute Sullivan’s national prominence to his having pandered to conservative prejudice against gays is rank nonsense.

Similarly, Norah Vincent, a rising star among syndicated columnists, is an independent who follows no party line. Like me, she is a libertarian.

Goldstein’s attacks against me are laughable since he borrows so freely from my ideas. My championing of pornographers, prostitutes and drag queens is also well known. As for my politics, I am a member of the Democratic party who voted twice for Bill Clinton and, in 2000, for the far left Ralph Nader.

Man, I miss her.

You can have all sorts of abstract debates about the meaning of masculinity. Or you can ponder the example of Pat Tillman. 25 years’ old, he decided to enlist in the Army rather than get a three-year $3.6 million NFL contract with the Arizona Cardinals. He’d shown class before – turning down a $9 million offer to play for St. Louis because of loyalty to his home team. But this move – the first NFL player to go to war rather than play ball since World War II – is in a class of its own. Better still, he won’t even give an interview about his decision. Real men don’t gab to the press. They don’t spin, they act. In an age when we read of CEO’s robbing their own shareholders for obscene pay-offs, when the last president of the United States declared as ethical only what you could get away with, and when large swathes of the intelligentsia can find reasons to undermine a war to protect a free people from weapons of mass destruction, Tillman is a hero. And a man.

SURVIVOR GUILT: “Why not simply rip off the formulae of existing anti-HIV drugs and provide them to the developing world for free? One answer is that theft is theft. Another is that such an approach could actually lead to a resurgence of HIV. Whether we like it or not, developing highly sophisticated drug regimens is an extremely expensive and risky process. Although governments have a big part to play in financing basic scientific research, the biggest player in AIDS treatment is the private pharmaceutical industry. And these companies need profits to counter-balance the large research and development costs of such drugs. They also need big profits from their successful drugs to counter-balance the big losses incurred on the vast majority of drugs that never make it to market. If you simply confiscate these companies’ profits when they come up with a successful anti-HIV drug, you may have a short-term gain in getting a new drug to people who need it. But you also destroy the financial incentive to come up with new drugs, kill off the investment capital that keeps HIV research going, and leave the next generation of people with HIV with next to nothing in the pipeline. With many diseases, this is a disastrous policy direction. With HIV, a virus that’s always mutating and needs constant vigilance to keep up with it, such a policy could be catastrophic.” – More reflections on the AIDS epidemic today in my latest column.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “Having swept the Palestinians into the arms of the supreme terrorist Ariel Sharon, the Christian Right fundamentalists running the plutocracy in Washington, now replenish their arsenal in preparation for an attack on the 22 million suffering people of Iraq. Should anyone need reminding, Iraq is a nation held hostage to an American-led embargo every bit as barbaric as the dictatorship over which Iraqis have no control. Contrary to propaganda orchestrated from Washington and London, the coming attack has nothing to do with Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’, if these exist at all. The reason is that America wants a more compliant thug to run the world’s second greatest source of oil.” – John Pilger, The Observer.

SAFIRE’S IRE: Can’t disagree with a word in his latest column. A smart friend, however, counsels that the Dow is headed for 7,000 on the heels of global deflation. Gedowdaheah.

THE TIMES’ INCORRECT CORRECTION: Back in Ptown, I’ve had a chance to read closely the report cited by the Times as showing a 5.4 degree Fahrenheit increase in mean annual temperatures in Alaska over the past thirty years. No such figure is in that report. Anywhere. A reader even did a word search through all the PDF files in the report and couldn’t find the alleged 5.4 degree increase. The head researcher of the Alaska Climate Research Center emailed me to say:

The new value is still incorrect if we speak of the last 30 years. It might be that they refer to an earlier time period (1961-1990). I also looked up the web site and could not find the 5.4 F, however a paper (Chapman and Walsh 1993) which they quote, refers to an earlier time period. Further, the selection of the stations to calculate the mean increase will have some influence on it, but cannot explain the difference. While there has been a strong temperature increase in the sixties and seventies, the temperature in the last 20 years has not changed much in Alaska, hence, the selection of the time period is important. We stand by our analyses of the time period 1971-2000, as published on our web site. The values do not change much if the time period 1972-2001 is considered. We find about half the increase as the “corrected” quote by the NYT.

So the only solid number for an annual average temperature in Alaska is still 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, the bulk of which happened in the 1960s, far, far less than the Times’ original “astonishing” (their word) revelation. To recap: the Times got it wrong on the front page; wrong on their editorial page; wrong in an op-ed column; and wrong in the Corrections column. Is it too much to ask that they eventually put it right? Or would that be too humiliating for what was once a paper of record?

TAKING LIBERTIES: With apologies to Maureen Dowd’s latest column:

Howell and MoDo are in the jacuzzi at 43d Street.

The two masters of the Sulzberger universe have had a great week. And now with wrinkles almost prune-like on MoDo’s cellulite, they just had to swig back the Jack Daniels and the Cipro-laced bonbons MoDo loves so much, and review the high-points.

They always keep one eye on the Kid, who’s been jogging circles around Punch’s Upstate retreat for the past nine hours.

Junior is supposed to be inside practicing how to say “corporate synergy” without his eyes glazing over. But he doesn’t want to. “How many African-Americans do I have to hire this year, Howell?” he just kept asking.

“As many as we used to down south,” Howell slurred back, after his sixth Jack on the rocks, small little bubbles rising slowly between his thighs. “Jus’ treat ’em well, Pinchy-boy, and you can write a story about yo’ loyal help later on in life. Heck, I got a Pulitzer writing about mah mammy. Just write somethin’ about that Bobbie Herbert, and you’ll make it good, some day, sir.”

“Righty-O, Howell,” said Pinch. “Is Bobbie the chap who brings the Fedex in the mornin’?”

“No, sir,” sighed Howell, while MoDo smeared on her fourth face-pack of the day. “He’s that guy we hired a few years back to give the op-ed page some di-vers-ity. Good man, that Bobbie. Always cheerful, ain’t that right, sweets?” His eyes crinkled into that knowing grin MoDo knew so well. She smiled back but her face-pack cracked all the way across her face and two small cucumber slices fell from her eyes into the water.

“Damn,” she spluttered. “That’s almost an entire cucumber down there somewhere.”

“You bet, baby,” joked Howell. “No shrinkage here.”

Junior jogged over to the jacuzzi and tried to get the exec’s attention.

“Mr Raines? Sir? Can’t we do more nasty stories about Bush?” Pinch (or “O2” as they called him) asked, plaintively. “What does he know about anything anyway? He just got his job ’cause his daddy had it. How come he gets th
e 70 percent approval rating and all I get are private tutorials with Russ?”

“No shweat,” Howell slurred, the Jacks beginning to have their usual impact. “We’re on the case. We already got him for global warming – it’s twenty degrees warmer in this hot tub than yesterday and goddammit, we all know what the real story is here! Same with the terrorists. Does he really think he can win a war out there?” Howell was off now and even MoDo knew better than to stop him. “Quagmire! That’sh what it is. We’ve gotta stop this war before it gets even worse. All those body-bags. Doeshn’t he realize the gooks are gonna turn on us?” He slowly began to slip beneath the surface, MoDo’s gas-mask and boiled cucumber fragments bobbing perilously near his jowls.

S tried again to get the exec’s attention. “Mr Raines, sir?”

Mr Raines was too far-gone to notice. “Is it getting even warmer in here? Goddammit, Mo, do you have to have your personal trainer in the tub as well?”

“Don’t worry, honey,” MoDo replied. “He won’t touch you. He’s gay.”

“Diversiteeee!” O2 squealed and jumped headlong into the jacuzzi. Sloshing over to MoDo, his tousled mop all mussed up in the steam, he asked plaintively, “Where’s Joe?”

Check out this editorial in the Washington Blade by editor Chris Crain. It’s smart, fair and convincing. It simply says that those gay activists who predicted a Kulturkampf under George W. Bush were over-playing their hand. Bush compares relatively well with Clinton on gay rights issues – and certainly better than Chicken Little Democrats were predicting two years ago. I hope the Bushies see that the center of the gay community – not its loony left – is amenable to persuasion by Republicans. If the president signs the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, he’ll be close to a dramatic realignment in this voting bloc. Someone please tell Karl.

THE TIMES’ ALASKA NUMBERS: I’ve done a quick perusal of the report cited by the New York Times in defense of a thirty year alleged annual mean temperature rise in Alaska of 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit. I can’t find the number anywhere. The best I can do is the report’s claim that “warming has been up to 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit per decade over the last three decades in the annual mean, with the largest warming occurring in the interior and arctic regions… Some Alaskan records show that a very large warming, of about 3 degrees Fahrenheit occurred suddenly around 1977 and has persisted since then.” Alaska is enormous and the “up to” phrase refers to maximum variations in different regions – not average annual temperature for the whole region, as the Times slyly implies. But even taking the biggest number in the report – which is still not the average annual temperature – the maximum annual mean temperature increase in any region would still be 4.5 degrees – not 5.4. Did the Times get a case of dyslexia? The report is also quite clear that factors other than global warming are probably responsible for large amounts of the variation, whereas the Times has implied that all of the variation is due to global warming. The only temperature chart I can find in the report shows permafrost warming since 1970 to be at most 1 degree Fahrenheit (although the mean annual permafrost temperature in 1950 is the same as today, and was followed by a severe drop in temperatures in the 1950s as a whole). Then look at these far clearer numbers and you can see the obvious conclusion: the New York Times is still lying about climate change in Alaska. They can’t even get their correction right. (If any of you want to take a closer look at the report – I have to travel again today – and see anything else worth noting or anything I might have missed, please let me know).

THE BRIGHT SIDE OF THE MARKET COLLAPSE: Michael Lewis gets it right. The system is working! This point strikes me as particularly pertinent:

In the future, a healthy new suspicion shall arise whenever any CEO pays himself tens of millions of dollars. The old rule of CEO pay was: the more you pay yourself, the more valuable you must be to the company. The new rule of CEO pay is: the more you pay yourself, the more you will be watched. After all, any CEO who is actually worth $25 million a year should be responsible enough, and decent enough, not to take it.

Amen. And buy.

DON’T FORGET: The gay debate will be broadcast on C-SPAN this weekend Saturday, July 13th at 3:50 P.M. and Sunday, July 14th at 1:35 A.M.

WHAT BUSH ISN’T: Buchananism is attempting a new bi-weekly magazine, called The American Conservative, due out this fall. Someone should sue him for expropriating a perfectly decent political tradition for his nativist, reactionary myopia. But Frankie Foer gets to the deeper point, which is that Buchanan’s agenda only highlights how far George W. Bush has taken his own party – especially since 9/11, when a nativist, isolationist spirit might have taken hold. The money quote, again:

[O]ver time it has become clear that on this side of the Atlantic, 9/11 hasn’t boosted the isolationist right; it has extinguished it. Instead of America Firstism, September 11 has produced a war on terrorism that has virtually ended conservative qualms about expending blood and treasure abroad. And as a corollary, it has produced an unprecedented eruption of conservative and evangelical support for Israel. The conservative establishment has co-opted post-9/11 fears of Muslim immigration, and Bush has covered his protectionist flank on trade. In short, Buchanan and his rich friends couldn’t have chosen a worse time to start a journal of the isolationist right.

It’s usually good form to express hope that any new publication succeeds. Sorry. No can do.

THE ECONOMIST’S DEFENSE: Here’s their self-defense in the Jerusalem Post. I’m not convinced. But make your own mind up.

I’ve spent the last couple days traveling to and attending a funeral. It was for a World War II veteran. The interment, in a rural cemetery, was an intimate affair, which allowed me to see close-up the honor guard ceremony the military still puts on for its vets. It was intensely moving. Two soldiers took the flag off the coffin and like Japanese Kabuki artists folded it with meticulous care. The way they handled the cloth reminded me of the way in which priests would touch the sacraments in the sacristy before and after mass. With almost painful slowness, the flag was folded into consecutive triangles before being handed to the man’s eldest son. (His youngest is my boyfriend.) Their salutes were almost slow-motion, like a Robert Wilson production. They performed the ceremony with such quiet precision for a man they never personally knew that you got a sudden, instant glimpse of what military service is really about. It’s not just a bond between a person and his or her country. It’s a bond between him and every other soldier who has ever been there – past, present and future. It’s a ritual of transcendence, symbolized by a flag, conjuring a nation. I had understood this before but never felt it. Now I have.

ANDREWSULLIVAN.COM GETS RESULTS! Not long after the American Prospect conceded that it had exaggerated its online traffic by almost 300 percent, the New York Times admits its Tim Egan Alaska story – hyped in editorials and by Bob “Suffer The Children” Herbert – contained a big fib. Here’s the correction printed yesterday:

A front-page article on June 16 about climate change in Alaska misstated the rise in temperatures there in the last 30 years. (The error was repeated in an editorial on Monday and in the Bob Herbert column on the Op-Ed page of June 24.) According to an assessment by the University of Alaska’s Center for Global Change and Arctic System Research, the annual mean temperature has risen 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit over 30 years, not 7 degrees.

Notice how long it took before this front-page fib was corrected – weeks. Notice also no admission that the Alaska Climate Research Center puts the rise as far less than that. I’m traveling and haven’t had time to dig into the Alaska University citation. If anyone out there could subject it to scrutiny, I’d be grateful. Like the American Prospect’s revised numbers, I still don’t buy it, and would like to see the basis of that 5.4 degree claim. But it’s gratifying to see that even the New York Times has to concede a whopper when it’s pointed out in daylight. Score one for the blogosphere. Here in cyber-space, we also correct our errors promptly.

RAINES WATCH: What do you do when a sensible proposal to arm pilots gains traction in the Congress? Do you commission a poll to find out what the public thinks? Nope. You send out a reporter to a state where the headlines have been full of America West pilots arrested for being drunk in the cockpit. Then you find some people who object to the idea and run this opposition as a “news-story.” Even then, the Times couldn’t get anything but a narrow plurality against arming pilots. But that was good enough for the lede and the headline. Doesn’t Howell know we’re wise to this propaganda?

REALITY CHECK: A useful corrective to market gloom from Clintonite Brad Delong. Here’s the money quote:

Out in the real world, moreover, the economy is doing just fine. Inflation-adjusted wages are up 13% over the past seven years–the best jump in three decades and a boon for most Americans. Inflation, outside of food and energy, is only 2.5%, down from 2.9% in 1995. And productivity growth over the past three years is still running at a 3.1% rate–far faster than the 1.5% seen in the first half of the 1990s and the entire 1980s. Indeed, productivity growth has been so strong that it can withstand even expected downward revisions in the economic data. At the end of July, the Commerce Dept. will issue revised estimates for the past couple of years that could reduce 2000’s reported gross domestic product and productivity growth by as much as a percentage point. But even if that happens, the three-year productivity growth rate will still be a very solid 2.7%.

I don’t know about you, but I’m buying.

You couldn’t parody his paleo-liberal column today. All government spending is good. But deficits are always bad! Tax cuts hurt – wait for it – children. Republicans – even if they try to reach out to black voters – are always evil. Marian Wright Edelman is such an unimpeachable figure, you just have to cite her to make your point. And then the moronic headline: “Suffer The Children.” This piece of hate was particularly noticeable:

The Bush men, father and son, are seldom more cynical than when they get it into their mischievous heads to rev up some support among black people. George the First could hardly contain a devilish smile as he gave us Clarence Thomas, a gruesome acolyte of Antonin Scalia who has spent much of his time on the Supreme Court taking a pickax to black interests.

Note the utter absence of any understanding of judicial reasoning. Note the monolithic notion of “black interests,” as if every black person has the same interests, dictated by people like Bob Herbert and the NAACP. Notice that appointing the first black secretary state and relying on a black woman as the critical figure in foreign policy is mere mischief and cynicism. As if deploying Bob Herbert to keep black voters in line with warmed-over propaganda weren’t as cynical a move as one could possibly get.

I still don’t know what Mike Kinsley really thinks about our future war with Iraq. (I don’t know what he thought about the last one either, come to think of it.) In his latest column, he just thinks we should have a real debate about it. Man, that’s a column I never thought I’d see with a Kinsley by-line. Wouldn’t it behoove a columnist to actually join that debate by saying what he thinks we should do? This is Kinsley’s brave call: Bush may go to war because of “the simple possibility that he sincerely believes Saddam poses a danger big enough to justify risking massive bloodshed and his own political ruin. And maybe he’s right.” Maybe he’s right? C’mon, Mike. Have you turned into David Gergen? Here’s a simple test for the best liberal columnist in the country: if he were president and he were responsible for the security of American citizens, and if he had had a wake-up call like 9/11, how long would he sit around before he acted to prevent something far, far worse? And if that meant a difficult but necessary war against Saddam, on what grounds should a responsible president punt?

I’ve been asked why I haven’t blogged much on the current attempt to inflict political damage on president Bush because of the accounting and business scandals of the last few months. I haven’t written anything because I don’t think I have anything interesting to say. (Yeah, I know that’s no excuse for a hack. But hey, I wrote a column about it.) The truth is: I’m really not qualified to make a judgment about what technically-speaking would be the best solution for punishing the guilty and preventing further abuse. The president’s balance seemed fair to my instinctively anti-regulatory impulses. But I’m open to other arguments. But I do think there’s something strained about the attempt to hold Bush personally accountable. The Harken stuff seems trivial to me. Almost all the worst corruption happened on (surprise!) Bill Clinton’s watch. Much of it can be attributed to the ethical temptations of a bubble economy and the root causes aren’t as salient today. I’m repulsed by the greed and dishonesty of some of the characters, but I don’t actually enjoy the thrill of class-warfare. That’s one thing that separates me from, say, Paul Krugman and Howell Raines. So let hem have their story. I’ll take a pass on their agenda.

THIRD-WAY ON POT: The Blair government has come up with a classic Third Way approach to marijuana legalization. They’ve suspended the laws that criminalize marijuana users who smoke pot discreetly in private. But they’ll be stepping up enforcement against dealers. So something will be illegal when sold, but legal when bought. Brilliant, no? It seems to me that marijuana, which is less socially and personally damaging than alcohol, should simply be legalized, its production regulated, and its sale taxed. That way, good laws against hard and addictive drugs can have more legitimacy; and the criminal problems associated with pot prohibition can be alleviated. My fear is that this semi-legalization will discredit the entire idea. It could keep the relationship between drugs and crime intact, while increasing drug-use. That’s about as bad as it gets. Or am I missing something?

AND NOW THEY WANT OUR COFFEE: The puritanical left – having tried to take away our booze, porn, and cigarettes – is now after our lattes. Okay, guys, this is serious.

GO, CAROLYN: The rape of Gary Condit’s private life by the media had some justification. The pillage of his wife’s had no such rationale. Every shred of her intimate life – from the first pregnancy to the difficult marriage – was laid bare, and with many lies thrown in for good measure. I hope she wins her future libel suit against the Enquirer, and that other unfairly trashed spouses follow her example.

THE SAVAGE TRUTH: My buddy Dan Savage tells the West Coast left some awkward truths in his latest column in The Stranger. It starts auspiciously enough:

Shortly after the September 11 attacks, I saw something that made me wanna hurl. I still see this something almost every day because it hangs in a window I pass on my way to work, and the urge to hurl–my lunch, a rock–is as fresh today as it was back when I first laid eyes on it. And just what is this offensive something? The American flag peace symbol that appeared on the cover of Seattle Weekly on September 20. They called it their “Peace and Patriotism” symbol. So what is it about the Weekly’s, uh, “PAP” symbol that bothers me so much? Just this: Pacifism and patriotism, together, is no longer an option after September 11.

Dan is basically a lefty but he’s not a complete fool. His sex column is one of the joys of American journalism and no-one could accuse him of being a right-winger on social matters. (He famously tried to give Gary Bauer the flu.) But Dan is also living proof that an awful lot of cultural and social liberals are fully aware of the terrorist forces we are still up against, and are not wringing their hands in response. Bottom line:

[I]t depresses this Gore voter past the point of despair to write this… but… uh… the recently unveiled Bush Doctrine (rough translation: If we think you’re coming after us next Tuesday, we’ll be bombing your ass flat this Tuesday) is a necessary evil.

Not exactly an epiphany. But writing this piece for Savage’s audience required balls. Dan has them.

FREUDIAN SLIP: If you subscribe to the Democratic Leadership Council’s email newsletter, you’d have had a chortle. The latest issue has a correction:

Due to an error, some subscribers may have received a copy of today’s New Dem Daily email with a mislabled subject line reading “NEW YORK TIMES: The Era of Evading Responsibility.” It should have said, “NEW DEM DAILY: The Era of Evading Responsibility.” We regret any confusion the error may have caused.

No confusion here. Just wondering why the correction was necessary. The New York Times is a DLC newsletter. Just further to the left.

The real story behind former CAA super-agent, Mike Ovitz’s, Vanity Fair meltdown is that his outburst about a “gay mafia” was not an isolated case. He has, apparently, a long record of intense discomfort around homosexuals, constant use of the word “fag,” and aversion to gay movies and gay agents. L.A. Weekly has the goods. The social right might have to adjust their notions of a monolthic pro-gay establishment in Hollywood. For many years, the most powerful agent was apparently a homophobe. Maybe that helps explain the still-stunning absence of almost any mainstream openly gay movie actors. It’s also pertinent that Vanity Fair didn’t seek to explore this dimension. But then Graydon Carter has long found peddling cliches about homosexuals to be very good copy.

Israelis are worse than the Nazis, says the Saudi ambassador to Britain. “This is a war of occupation, far more severe than anything the Germans did when they occupied Europe in World War Two.” We still have diplomatic relations with these nut-cases?