Category: Old Dish

Every time my partner Robert Cameron and I get close to getting a sponsor to make this site a going concern, we get asked about our readers. I relate the fact that you are among the smartest readers on the planet and yet for some reason a condescending smile comes over the marketing guy’s face. So here’s a request: click on this link and answer the handful of questions we’ve put together. It’s the usual male/female/income/location stuff and we hope it’ll give us the extra oomph to get a sponsor (we can’t promise though). Just out of curiosity, we’ve added a question about politics to find out where on the scale of right to left andrewsulllivan.com readers are. To make things more interesting, we’ll post the full results on the site by the end of next week. You’ll find out who your fellows are, mean income, geography, marital status, and so on. It should also be a pretty good test of who the people are who read blogs in general, something we know extremely little about. Don’t worry: no one will ask your email address, it’s totally confidential, and we’ll do nothing with the info but post it for your curiosity and use it to lure potential sponsors/advertizers. If you haven’t managed to contribute to the site and feel guilty, here’s a great way to be absolved while spending not a cent. Contributors, please take part as well. For anyone, it’s a completely free way to help support the site. So give it a go. Results to follow …

THE SPEECH: The key passage:

Today, Palestinian authorities are encouraging, not opposing terrorism. This is unacceptable. And the United States will not support the establishment of a Palestinian state until its leaders engage in a sustained fight against the terrorists and dismantle their infrastructure.

And the key message is that Israel must have a viable partner, a democratic partner, if peace is to be secured. It cannot be secured while today’s psychotic Palestinian culture and chaotic polity remains in place. And the 1967 borders – give or take a little – are the obvious future contours of the Jewish state. The president was right to appeal to innocent Palestinians over the heads of their corrupt leaders; and he is right to stress hope. I’m sorry to say, however, that seasoned hands will see precious little reason for any.

THE LEFT DISCOVERS ANTI-SEMITISM: A wonderfully clarifying piece by Todd Gitlin in Mother Jones. Better late then never. “The German socialist August Bebel once said that anti-Semitism was ‘the socialism of fools,'” Gitlin writes. “What we witness now is the progressivism of fools. It is a recrudescence of everything that costs the left its moral edge.” Maybe Gitlin hasn’t noticed, but thaht moral edge is looking mighty blunt these days.

LIBERALS DISCOVER I.Q.: Good point noted by UPI’s Steve Sailer. It’s an article of faith among many liberals that I.Q. has no meaning, it’s culturally constructed, and should never be used to judge people’s intellectual ability. But suddenly, when I.Q. is the means by which to rescue retarded criminals on death row, I.Q. is just fine, thank you very much. For the record, I agree with forbidding executions of the mentally retarded. But then I believe in I.Q. as an important and often reliable guage of intelligence. By the way: did anyone think to call former president Bill Clinton up to get his comments on the Supreme Court decision? He signed the execution warrant of a retarded man – as a critical part of his election campaign. Any second thoughts on that one, Bill?

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “On Sept. 11, Americans were confronted by people ready to die as an expression of their profound moral commitments. Their willingness to die stands in stark contrast to a politics that asks of its members in response to Sept. 11 to shop.” – Stanley Hauerwas, Duke University theologian, as quoted in a fawning profile in the National Catholic Reporter. The piece also notes: “Americans are, for the most part, good, decent and hardworking people, Hauerwas says, but ‘so were the people that supported the Nazis.'”

Hard to believe I’m reading this Washington Post editorial. Harder to believe I agree with every word. No wonder Americans are pondering the endtimes.

WHAT CIVIL RIGHTS NOW MEAN: My jaw dropped reading this piece on Saturday from the Boston Globe. The Boston Police Department has for a while now been administering random drug tests to their officers. They use a sensitive state-of-the-art test using hair. The tests have follow-ups and the threshhold for detection is high. The Globe quotes a police department attorney thus: “The way our hair testing is done, there is an amount of cocaine that has to be present, and it has to be over a certain level.” To reach that level requires “repeated use of cocaine over a period of time. You cannot consume enough cocaine in one sitting to test positive. You would die of a heart attack first.” The problem is that black cops have a higher rate of testing positive than white cops. There are some quibbles about whether black hair absorbs more drug than blond hair (only experiments on rats bear this out), but the threshhold is so high there can be little questions that the positives are not false ones. Nevertheless, the NAACP sees bias. Here’s my quote of the week from the head of Boston’s NAACP: “It just does not make sense that black people have more of a drug problem than white people.” Notice that he doesn’t point out that 96 percent of minority cops passed the test; and notice that the mere existence of any imbalance inevitably means prejudice. This is what the civil rights movement now means in large part: if minority success exists, ignore it; if minority failure exists, blame it on someone else.

WHAT CIVIL RIGHTS SHOULD MEAN: Score one for Bob Reich. He’s one of the first national politicians to say what needs to be said about equal marriage rights: this is a classic civil rights issue and it’s time to stop the mealy-mouthed talk about civil unions as some sort of option for homosexual citizens. There are things on which I disagree with Reich, but not this one. Notice that marriage rights cost no-one anything; they urge responsibility from a minority group; they come in a completely separate category from many of the other “special treatment” laws that the current civil rights debate focuses on. For this reason alone, it seems to me voters in Massachusetts should vote for Reich. And it’s telling that it was a 20 year-old openly gay football player who talked him into it. This is an issue which the younger generation sees as a no-brainer. Good for Reich for seeing this too.

PRE-COG AMERICA: I wonder what historians will one day say about the American mood in the summer of 2002. It’s a weird, strained, emotionally unstable time. The war is not over, but it seems in a lull. Americans have victories but no victory. Al Qaeda lives. Saddam’s race for weapons of mass destruction continues. The shock of September 11 has become a kind of intermittent anxiety rather than emotional catharsis. And it hasn’t been supplanted in the public consciousness by anything else… Continued here.

HOW EMBARRASSING IS BOB HERBERT? He’s now made a whole column out of Timothy Egan’s tendentious story last week about rising temperatures in Alaska. Guess what? Herbert’s against global warming! Something must be done. And can we please stop racism as well while we’re at it? Why oh why doesn’t the Bush administration do something about these things? Meanwhile the following uncharitable thought flickers unbidden into consciousness. When was the last time Herbert actually encountered an opposing argument and reasoned against it?

PADILLA AND HABEAS CORPUS: “It is not being stressed enough that Padilla not only has the right to a habeas review, he should also have the right to speak freely to a (possibly court-specified) attorney. No American citizen, even an alleged enemy combatant, ought to be held incommunicado, but I have heard reports that Padilla is being so held. If he cannot talk to his lawyer to provide appropriate information, any habeas petition will be fatally handicapped. Finally, when does this “war” end? What is to stop a President from detaining someone he doesn’t like indefinitely? Nixon might have used the kind of power Bush and Ashcroft are asserting to lock up anti-Vietnam-War political dissidents who had visited communist countries, by declaring them enemy combatants and not having to prove it. In the case of Vietnam they would have been released by 1974 or 1975, but today, Padilla’s attorney could NEVER make a case that “the war is over” so he is left to rot forever. I am very wary of giving a power to Bush, who won’t abuse it, that will accrue to a successor who might. Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton would have had few scruples about abusing this kind of power.” This, the case against “Islamikazes,” the gay left and Al Sharpton, all on the Letters Page, edited by Reihan Salam.

ISLAMIKAZES AND VIRTUE: Following up from Susan Sontag, Matthew Parris has an article in Saturday’s Times of London that gives you a sense of where even mainstream conservative commentary now is in Europe. His column is about sacrifice, and he argues that the suicide bombers in Israel and the West Bank are the inheritors of Samson, Vietnamese Buddhist monks and other mythological types willing to endure death for the sake of their cause. He concedes that murdering others changes the moral balance somewhat; but he basically sides with Cherie Blair in believing that all Israelis are somehow legitimate targets because of their country’s occupation of the West Bank:

I do not think that in his heart an Israeli would deny that, if your enemy has taken land that is rightfully yours and occupied it, then not just your enems army but his wife and son and daughter and servants and all who, under his protection, come to live and make their living on the stolen land, are aggressors. By their presence they aid and abet the occupation.

As with most European discussions of this issue, there is no historical analysis of how the West Bank came to be occupied, no account of the attempts of the Israelis to come to some sort of peace under Rabin and Barak, in fact, no historical understanding at all of how we come to be where we are. In fact, there’s almost an equation of non-violent acts of passive resistance with the murderous fanatics of 9/11 and a subtle implication that Israel itself is actually land that is “rightfully theirs.” Parris even evokes Christ in his litany of precedents for the Islamikazes! That’s how far we’ve come from the days of last September, when moral clarity about terrorism was sharpest. It seems to me that his argument has only a shred of credibility if it is assumed that the Palestinian people have had no opportunities to win large amounts of territory through negotiation, if their suicides are not in fact primarily means to murder disproportionate numbers of civilians, and if their purpose was to express desperation rather than to affirm a death-cult imbued with Nazi-like anti-Semitism. But you won’t hear these caveats in Western Europe – or indeed throughout much of the rest of the world. There seems to me little doubt that Israel and, by implication, America is losing this battle of ideas. Since it is the most important battle since the Cold War, we need to think far more ambitiously about how to wage it.

BJORN COMES THROUGH: After several weeks of bugging him, Bjorn Lomborg has finally responded to the final questions posed to him by Book Club members. The questions and answers can be found on the Book Club Page. Here’s a sample from one of them:

Question: Lomborg puts his main emphasis on human prosperity and human well-being and seems to share with Julian Simon the view that humans are a resource rather than a burden. He explains why, and much of his argumentation throughout the book is built upon this principle. But many environmentalists do not share that perspective (which no doubt they would call “humanocentric”). How does he respond to those who reject the premise upon which he built much of his case?

Lomborg: I actually deal with this in the first chapter. Basically, I am focusing on the needs and desires of humankind. This does not mean that plants and animals do not also have rights but that the focus will always be on the human evaluation. This describes both my ethical conception of the world – and on that account the reader can naturally disagree with me – but also a realistic conception of the world: people debate and participate in decision-making processes, whereas penguins and pine trees do not. So the extent to which penguins and pine trees are considered depends in the final instance on some (in democracies more than half of all) individuals being prepared to act on their behalf. When we are to evaluate a project, therefore, it depends on the assessment by people. And while some of these people will definitely choose to value animals and plants very highly, these plants and animals cannot to any great extent be given particular rights.

This is naturally an approach that is basically selfish on the part of human beings. But in addition to being the most realistic description of the present form of decision-making it seems to me to be the only defensible one. Because what alternative do we have? Should penguins have the right to vote? If not, who should be allowed to speak on their behalf? (And how should these representatives be selected?)

Check out the remaining dialogue here. Because of this last entry from the last book, we’ll kick off your emails about “My Dog Tulip” next week. Send in your reflections, dog stories, whatever.

GAY RIGHTS AND CAPITALISM: For Richard Goldstein and other lingering Marxists, homosexuality is indelibly associated with leftist bohemianism, communism, and socialism. Like many American leftists, he ignores the hideous Soviet and Cuban policies toward gays; and the suppression of free speech in socialist countries that penalized gays as much as anyone. With that in mind, a friend forwards me an email from someone in Russia today, about a recent cultural event. His correspondent writes:

The Russian musical duet “Guests from the Future” is now a classical duet of a gay man and a lesbian, a so-called family that represents “capitalistic tomorrow”, where man loves men, woman loves women and both live happily together as a family. Eva, the woman who sings solo in the group, appears alone or with girlfriends in movies. The audience likes it very much.

Quite. Capitalism, as the economic system most conducive to actual liberty, is intrinsically connected to gay liberation. Russians get this. Why can’t tired old Western socialists?

MEMORIAL DAY: A letter responds to my recent post on my HIV anniversary:

Straight, 2 kids, happy and remembering. My great friend David was diagnosed four years, more or less to the day, earlier than you. He’s been gone, no longer holding down a chair at the corner of a bar waiting to talk about the little theatre company we had somehow begun. A year or two later he might have been celebrating his own anniversary. We do go on. But we are diminished, sometimes lost, always bereft.

Tomorrow is my anniversary. Funny how it sneaks up on me. I mean the anniversary of testing HIV-positive. It’s been nine years now, and on the surface I should be jubilant. I remember thinking way back then that I’d probably start to get really sick by the millennium, and that I’d be on disability by now. Instead, here I am, in a beautiful place with a great beagle and boyfriend, running a website, writing furiously, feeling great. My bloodwork just came back again from the doc and showed that my CD4 cell count (the rough measure of the health of my immune system) is actually higher than it was nine years ago. And I’ve been off medications for a whole year! It seems as if my own immune system is managing to keep the virus at bay on its own. It probably won’t last for ever, but it’s a huge blessing not to be on those debilitating, disfiguring drugs. At times it feels as if that whole era is a strange part of near history. The last friend who died was seven years ago. Here in Provincetown, once a war zone, you can feel life returning in full. And yet I always succumb to depression at this time. It’s totally unconscious. I have no conscious reason to feel blue. It’s as if my body remembers the impact of that awful news received at a time when it really felt like a death sentence, and today shudders at the memory. But perhaps my depression is about the guilt of surviving when so many didn’t, and in other parts of the world, aren’t. I can close my eyes now and see the faces of my young friends who died – forever young and hopeful. Their ghosts hover in this town – on the beach at sunset, in corners of bars, as the sunlight rises on shingles. My close friend, Patrick, died at 31. What conceivable justice is there in my having eight more years than he ever had? Man, I still miss him so much. And so, in some ways, I’m proud of my unconscious remembering. I might have careened on obliviously without that psychic, physical memory, sending me into melancholy, withdrawal, sleep. And it serves to remind me why the struggle for the dignity for gay men and women is in large part fueled by the bequest of these lost ones. They urge us forward as we look wistfully back. And then I realize this isn’t depression I feel. It’s just sadness. Sadness that they are not here any more, edged only by the faith that one day I will be with them once more. Until then,

Day draws near.
Another one.
Do what you can.

James Bennet’s horrifying story on the banalization of Islamikaze murderers in Israel contains the following quote: “The bottleneck on the Palestinian side is not the suicide attacker,” said a senior Israeli security official. “It’s the bomb.” We are on the verge of having an entire society acting psychotically. And they’re coming here next. That’s why our emphasis on the weapons supply – Iran and Iraq – is exactly the right one. And that’s also why we don’t have all the time in the world.

KINSLEY ON MEDIA BIAS: I think he’s completely right (as he often is). Honest bias can be a form of fairness. Bias dressed up as objectivity – Rainesism – is just irritating beyond belief. The following paragraph is a classic of good sense:

Fox News is a brilliant experiment in overt, honest bias – the broadcast equivalent of its owner Rupert Murdoch’s flagship right-wing tabloid newspaper, the New York Post. It has stripped a whole layer of artifice from TV news. What almost ruins everything is the network’s comically dishonest insistence that it is not what it obviously is. I would love to know what Hume is thinking when he repeats with apparent sincerity the Fox News mantra, “Fair and balanced as always.” Fox is usually fair but rarely balanced. In fact it is a good example of how you can be the one without the other.

LOWRY ON PADILLA: Excellent skewering of civil liberties hysteria in the case of Jose Padilla by Rich Lowry in NRO. Much of this debate rests, methinks, on the deeper question of whether we really are at war. If we are, then detaining enemy combatants, even American citizens, is constitutional. If not, what on earth is that big hole in the ground in Manhattan?

THE IRISH PRECEDENT: When a sexual abuse scandal hit Ireland’s church a decade ago, many thought the Church’s attempt simply to reform its abuse procedures would resolve the issue. Nuh-huh. The church’s credibility suffered so great a blow that it never recovered. These days, the moral authority of the Church in that deeply Catholic country is a shadow of its former self, its pews are emptier and emptier, its faithful far more likely to rely upon their own conscience rather than pulpit pronouncements. Here’s a devastating account of what happened. I think it will happen here – unless the Church changes its doctrines on sexual morality.

THE ENGLISH FLAG: You may have noticed it in the World Cup. Here’s a pic. It’s not the Union Jack, but a cleaner, purer red cross on a simple white background. St George’s flag – resurrected by the disintegration of Britain as a single sovereign unit is now the emblem the English rally behind. Even the Guardian has something thoughtful to say about it. As I write this, England is about to face Brazil in the World Cup. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go.

THE MAINSTREAM ADVANCES: According to Richard Goldstein and other members of the reactionary left, most gays are radical “queers,” they have no interest in joining the mainstream, and the “homocons,” i.e. those gay writers who dissent from leftist orthodoxy, only have an audience because they are propped up by a homophobic liberal media establishment. I wonder what Goldstein would make of the story in yesterday’s New York Times about the decline of gay bookstores. More and more, gay men and women do not identify themselves solely as gay, let alone interpret being gay as pure marginalization, and see themselves as part of the broader culture. So they want to see gay-themed books in mainstream bookstores, they want to be included in the family, in marriage, in professional life, in mainstream media. This is not some fantasy concocted by gay conservatives; it’s the reality of the last ten years. This integration will accelerate. In some ways, the disappearance of gay bookstores is a huge achievement for the gay movement. It certainly signifies no collapse of gay-themed or gay-authored novels, polemics, poems, or journalism. Yes, I hope some gay bookstores survive. They can be a real resource. But the goal of the gay movement, as I’ve said before, is to make itself extinct. When full civil equality is gained -in marriage and military service – we can get back to our real lives: not being gay but being human, not being “queer” but being equal citizens.

COUNTER-ATTACK OF THE HOMOCONS: Check out this brilliant and moving email on Matt Welch’s site from a gay guy who does not follow the far gay left line either. He nails it: the breath-taking condescension of people like Goldstein, Kushner, and the like toward other gay men and women who have the temerity to think for themselves, make up their own minds about politics, religion, culture and so on, who do not see why being emotionally and sexually attracted to other men entails buying an entire political agenda from “queer socialists.” Here’s my favorite bit:

When I first self-identified as being gay and joining the “gay movement” (whatever that is), there was a clear unified message to the rest of America, that “We are everywhere” — this was post-Stonewall, pre-Anita Bryant. When did that message change to “We are everywhere, except there, cuz if’n you’re there, you must be a self-loathing hypocrite”?… And besides, if you’re of the opinion (I’m not) that there’s something noble in defining yourself as not mainstream — reveling in finding community in being ex-cepted rather than ac-cepted, then wouldn’t Sullivan’s exceptionalisticness make him even nobler in your eyes, and therefore a welcome member of that excluded, but inclusive-seeking community, who wants to exclude him?

The reverse of this point is just as telling: why does a philosophy that celebrates marginalization and exclusion want acceptance from the broader society at all? If being queer and oppressed is such a fabulous experience, why would the gay left want to do anything to combat it? Why don’t they actually oppose equal marriage rights, oppose workplace discrimination, oppose military access? Wouldn’t that help keep “queer culture” more pure and intact? Their internal contradictions are legion, which is why they are largely irrelevant to the debate about gay equality in this country. Writers like Goldstein do nothing but keep this irrelevance alive.

How’s that for a new name for suicide bombers? A reader suggested it. Meanwhile, in the Toronto Star, a gripping piece explaining why the Islamikaze is a coward. In most Islamikaze massacres, the perpetrator is instantly vaporized – a painless death before he greets his beloved Allah. For his victims, the following:

A person sitting nearby would feel, momentarily, a shock wave slamming into his or her body, with an “overpressure” of 300,000 pounds. Such a blast would crush the chest, rupture liver, spleen, heart and lungs, melt eyes, pull organs away from surrounding tissue, separate hands from arms and feet from legs. Bodies would fly through the air or be impaled on the jagged edges of crumpled metal and broken glass.

What I fear is that the sheer number of these atrocities is numbing us to their evil. These young Islamikazes and their disgusting mob bosses are evil personified. There is nothing noble, despairing or admirable about them. Somehow we have to resist the insidious way in which they are normalizing barbarism.

SELF-PARODY DEPT: A new survey says Canadians prefer politics to sex. Only one percent say that sex is their favorite activity.

ISRAEL’S “RETALIATION”: Good catch from a reader about the New York Times’ coverage of Israel’s latest wounds today:

Like a piano note played in the wrong key, a single word in a New York Times story today made me gnash my teeth. The story starts out: “Israel’s forces moved into four Palestinian areas of the West Bank today as part of its policy of taking back land in retaliation for terror attacks.” What’s with this “retaliation”? I had assumed the operation’s military purpose was self-defense not retaliation; Israel obviously wants to foreclose the bombings by clamping down on the towns that are the source of the bombings. Indeed, the article later states, [t]he Israeli Army said troops were carrying out searches and making arrests, with curfews in effect. ‘Forces will stay in the cities until they achieve their operational aims,’ it said in a statement, which did not mention a time frame.” Are we to disbelieve the Israeli Army then? Because when I hear the word retaliation, I think of an act of violence for its own sake: you punch me, I punch you back, as opposed to: you punch me, I handcuff you so that you can’t punch me anymore. The choice of the word “retaliation” seems meant to reinforce the NY Times’ position — its editorial opinion –that Israeli self-defense is merely part of a meaningless “cycle of violence.” Errgg (that’s teeth gnashing). At least they didn’t say Israeli tanks cause global warming.

“No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes deserves to be called a scholar.” – Professor Donald Foster, recanting a previous argument of his own research in the New York Times today. What an uplifting sentiment.

THIS IS A RELIGIOUS WAR: I’m going to re-read Stanley Fish’s critique of my essay last fall in the new Harper’s before responding in detail. But it sure was refreshing to read an honest, open and careful argument (unlike the Goldstein screed). One of Fish’s points is that there can be no rational dialogue along universal, objective lines with Islamists. Therefore we cannot say we are right and they are wrong in any absolute sense. Here’s a quote from the mother of a “suicide murderer”. What Fish is arguing is that we cannot say that her sentiments are simply wrong:

“I am a compassionate mother to my children, and they are compassionate towards me and take care of me. Because I love my son, I encouraged him to die a martyr’s death for the sake of Allah… Jihad is a religious obligation incumbent upon us, and we must carry it out. I sacrificed Muhammad as part of my obligation. This is an easy thing. There is no disagreement [among scholars] on such matters. The happiness in this world is an incomplete happiness; eternal happiness is life in the world to come, through martyrdom. Allah be praised, my son has attained this happiness… I prayed from the depths of my heart that Allah would cause the success of his operation. I asked Allah to give me 10 [Israelis] for Muhammad, and Allah granted my request and Muhammad made his dream come true, killing 10 Israeli settlers and soldiers. Our God honored him even more, in that there were many Israelis wounded. When the operation was over, the media broadcast the news. Then Muhammad’s brother came to me and informed me of his martyrdom. I began to cry, ‘Allah is the greatest,’ and prayed and thanked Allah for the success of the operation. I began to utter cries of joy and we declared that we were happy. The young people began to fire into the air out of joy over the success of the operation, as this is what we had hoped for him.”

“This is an easy thing.” In this, perhaps, Fish is onto something. How can we understand the logic of this deepest form of religious faith? On the other hand, if we cannot say that this is wrong, what useful thing can we say?

BLAIR TAIL-SPINS: The British prime minister better hope England beats Brazil on Friday. He’s now suffering from Clintonitis – a sense among voters that he simply cannot be trusted, that he is more concerned with spin than substance, that rhetoric matters more than delivery. Blair is not immune to the general European impatience with the center-left in power. Alas, the Tories still seem unable to provide a cogent opposition.

THE MARKET VERSUS SEX: Sean Gallagher notes how television shows featuring lots of sex tend to lead to viewers not noticing the commercials. Here’s the Washington Post story on the same phenom. For the first time, I see evidence that freer markets don’t lead to more sexual material being available to more people. Now if only I’d stop getting spammed by “teenage Japanese girl sluts.”

JEWS IN FRANCE: This report made my hair curl. Could it get any worse? I guess I don’t want to know the answer to that question.

ANTI-ANTI-STEROIDS: Testosterone therapy saved my life. But there’s no doubt that excessive steroid use can be deeply damaging to people’s bodies in the long run. The problem is that steroids work – amazingly well. And they will only get more sophisticated and less onerous in the future. So what to do about steroid use in sports? The always interesting Steve Chapman argues – persuasively in my view – that there’s nothing we can practically do. The financial incentives for football players, for example, to get bigger than 300lbs are exponential, which is why we have more and more of these monster athletes. One option – in football – is simply to create a maximum weight for players, and allow them to pump whatever chemicals they want into their bodies, as long as they stay below that weight. It would be more honest than the current sham.

GOLDSTEIN RETRACTS: An email from Richard Goldstein:

I just read your posting and wanted to respond. I certainly had no intention of twisting your words. The quote I attributed to you has been in wide circulation for some time. When I first used it, in a piece last year, I found it in several other writers’ pieces–in precisely the context I described. Still, repeating an error is an error, and I’m sorry to have done that. I would much rather contest your statements as they are.

Well, he deserves points for conceding he completely distorted the meaning of my words in the Nation – and relied on third hand smear artists for his research. Alas, in his book, he does it again and again. In one section, he details how I am “appalled by camping, prancing, or any expression of effeminacy.” Elsewhere, he claims that my ideal society would be “a singularly muscular place, where anyone who didn’t fit the mold can be medicated to enhance his masculinity.” He claims that I have “contempt for those who deviate,” and that I have said that drag queens and androgynes are “at war with their nature.” His source for this last quote is a lecture he attended last year under the auspices of the New York Times. Happily, I have a recording of that lecture and tracked down the actual quote and its context. It was part of a question and answer session. See what you think:

YOURS TRULY: I have no objection to people wanting to be queer or being queer. I have no objection to that. That’s a choice and, in some respects, it’s a wonderful choice.
Q: But it’s unnatural?
AS: Well, it’s at war with their basic nature.
Q: People who aren’t butch enough or androgynous: they’re at war with their nature?
A: No. I wouldn’t go as far as saying that. That’s not true for everybody. There are some people’s natures that are naturally, biologically androgynous, or more geared to being queer or effeminate or masculine or up-ending certain social roles, because that’s how they feel their nature is. And, my God, do I defend their right and would I defend their right to be who they want to be; and nothing I say about the importance of encouraging most gay men and most gay women to embrace their own gender means that we should therefore exclude people who do not feel that way. There is an absolute central part in our community for the drag queen as well as the leather bar. And my own commitment to the First Amendment and to true diversity means I will defend them too… It doesn’t have to be either-or. It does not. Just because the vast majority of gay men think of themselves as men doesn’t mean they have to punish or exclude those who don’t feel that way… We can bring everybody along. Leave no drag queen behind.

My point is obviously a subtle on
e, an attempt to find a way both to bring gay people into the center of our society without oppressing those whose difference may result in hostility or alienation. But Goldstein – even though he heard all those words of inclusion – takes five words I did not say in order to argue that I mean something far cruder. This is not intellectual debate. It’s conscious deception.

Why does reading this story make my saying anything about this editorial seem somewhat superfluous?

WHY I HATE BILL GATES: I just downloaded Internet Explorer 5.2. He swiped my homepage and replaced it with MSN. I wonder how many hits Slate just got. Does Microsoft know how incredibly irritating this is? Every other bookmark is retained – but my homepage. And Mr Gates has to muscle in and change that. It feels like e-burglary. Grrr.

WHAT CHERIE REALLY THINKS: Cherie Blair, Tony’s wife, is a devoted Guardian reader. Like Hillary Clinton, she is to the left of her husband and shares with our Hillary the notion that those people to the right of her are simply tacky, malevolent or stupid. So her remarks yesterday about the latest suicide bombing did indeed represent the classic political gaffe. Cherie said what she believes, which is that the crisis in the Middle East is largely caused by Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians. Actually, this is what she said: “As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up you are never going to make progress.” She later apologized for her remarks, but she really should not have done. The pretense that European elites think of Israel as a fellow democracy besieged by terrorism should be abandoned. These elites believe that Israel is to blame for the violence, and that Israel must be prevailed upon to make more concessions before any terrorist activity should cease. Suicide bombers are understandable. Israel’s self-defense isn’t. Thanks, Cherie, for clearing the air.

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “W has the vocabulary of a 12-year-old, though most 12-year-olds have an infinitely stronger grasp of world affairs. Our spaniel press makes Herculean efforts to pass over the fact in tactful silence, but the truth is that George W. Bush is the laughingstock of the world, by dint of the obvious fact that his maximum level of competence was that of greeter at the ballpark in Arlington, which, as the blues piano player Dave Vest recently remarked, is the only real job he ever had before he met Ken Lay. Nixon had policies, strategies. Bush has notes (often contradictory) from his staff, which he bears no sign of comprehending for longer than the brief moments in which he lurches his way through them in some public forum.” – Alexander Cockburn, New York Press.

THE LEFT AND PATRIOTISM: Anne Applebaum kicks the soccer debate a little further down the field in a stirring little essay in Slate. Her best point is how in Europe, football is increasingly the only venue in which patriotism can be legitimately expressed, and therefore it takes on somewhat fraught forms. She makes an Orwell-like point about the trouble the left still has with simple patriotism, a problem that remains one of the biggest obstacles to a vibrant popular liberalism on both sides of the Atlantic:

Britain, even what Americans would consider to be ordinary patriotism is often suspect. When Tony Blair first entered the prime minister’s residence in Downing Street, in 1997, he staged a little parade of well-wishers, all of whom were waving the British flag, the Union Jack. The British chattering classes howled their disapproval of this unsightly show of nationalism-one friend told me that the Union Jack always made him think of right-wing extremists-just as they had earlier howled their disapproval of the Blair campaign’s brief (and quickly withdrawn) use of the traditional British bulldog. This summer’s Jubilee, the 50th anniversary celebration of the queen’s reign, has been accompanied by some flag-waving-but some opposition, too. One Independent columnist wrote that her friends are “studiously ignoring the event,” since national symbols such as the queen and the flag “bear uncomfortable overtones of racism and colonialism.” Patriotism, she went on, is seen as “profoundly down-market, like doilies and bad diets.”

Or to translate this into American: Love of country? So white trash.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “Aren’t the Israelis and the Palestinians both terrorising each other? The Palestinians are fighting with human suicide bombers, that’s all they have. The Israelis … they’ve got one of the most powerful military machines in the world. The Palestinians have nothing. So who are the terrorists? I would make a case that both sides are involved in terrorism.” – Ted Turner, vice-chairman, AOLTimeWarner, the Guardian.

ALASKA RAINES: Thanks for the emails from Alaska. One reader writes:

I did not even bother to read the NYT piece I knew that they would leave out the simple fact that the Van Allen Radiation belts that protect the earth from solar storms are weakest towards the poles and that the sun has been blasting out some of the biggest Coronal Mass ejections ever recorded. The Solar Max period of sun spots and other activity is lasting longer and is more intense than ever. Check out the new book “Storms from the Sun.” The NYT is never to be trusted on any issue where science could get in the way of their politics.

Another Alaskan has nothing but good things to say about the recent warming trend:

Look, if you ask any Alaskan about global warming, the response will be “BRING IT ON!” If it is getting so damn warm these days, why did Anchorage have record snowfall for March? Who does it still get no warmer than 25 in the winter? Look, if it is warmer by a few degrees… it is still freakin’ cold all the live long day!!! It is so easy for New Yorkers to tell us Alaskans what is good for us, heck they have have had a ton of practice with regard to ANWR. My response to the article was whatever!! But don’t get me started about the Spruce bark beatle. The number of dead trees on the Kenai is staggering, and it is truly horrific. But, thanks to stupid Forest Service managers, this is disaster that was permitted to happen. When we could have done something about it (such as spraying, or cutting a swath of forest as a break, or even clearing the dead logs) we were not allowed. No, the policy was completely hands off. I mean, some squirrel or a herd of moose might get bummed out in the process. Quick action was needed about ten years ago. Now, it is just a big fire waiting to happen. And when it does, blame the USFS. There are millions of trees that are waiting to blow up, literally, and burn the entire peninsula. And when it happens, then the healing will begin and the forest will start to grow back. But look to pay around half a billion dollars in the process, because it will not be pretty.

Michael Novak has, as usual, an intelligent take on the Dallas conference in National Review. (Although I’m a little bemused by his description of “smarmy homosexual sex.” Smarmy? Is that a sexual position? Can one have unsmarmy homosexual sex?) He homes in on the question of dissent and rightly tracks the Church’s current decline to 1968 and Pope Paul VI’s decision to go against the growing Catholic consensus in favor of birth control. Novak himself once dissented from the Church on this (although it’s not clear from the article what his current position is). But his conclusion is that the sincerely dissenting priests and laity should simply have knuckled under, ignored their doubts and attempted to defend the Church’s increasingly strained teaching about the evil of any non-procreative sex. But what if that teaching is wrong? Should Galileo have shut up? Should John Courtney Murray, who challenged the Vatican’s once-firm views against religious toleration, have never written? Should Novak have never criticized the Vatican’s socialistic economics? Novak is right about one important thing: 1968 is the lynchpin. It’s silly to talk about contraception and homosexuality, for example, as separate issues. At root, they’re the same: the refusal to engage the notion that not all sex should be procreative. Wouldn’t it be great to have a real debate about this – for millions of Catholics who use contraception to share their experiences, for gay couples who practice love and fidelity to give their testimony, for the entire wealth of human experience that needs to be brought to bear on this subject to be aired? That includes, of course, those straight couples who have always upheld the Church’s position (and their multiple offspring). Perhaps we could also hear from those infertile Catholics who are allowed to have non-procreative sex without having their marriages termed a “lifestyle.” But of course, this is the debate we cannot have. Debate itself is anathema to the Church hierarchy. But without reasoned debate, there can be no reasoned assent. What the current papcy is ensuring is the permanence of dissent in the American church and the inevitability of decline. What a legacy.

RAINES WATCH: When I read the New York Times account of rising temperatures in Alaska, I felt more than a twinge of skepticism. The numbers struck me as wildly unconvincing. I put it down to more Raines malfeasance. Sentences like these – “While President Bush was dismissive of a report the government recently released on how global warming will affect the nation, the leading Republican in this state, Senator Ted Stevens, says that no place is experiencing more startling change from rising temperatures than Alaska,” – signaled that this was yet another political hit-piece rather than a serious article. But the stats still surprised: “Climate models predict that Alaska temperatures will continue to rise over this century, by up to 18 degrees.” That’s a bigger rise than anything I’ve seen in even the most alarmist enviro tracts. (That tell-tale “by up to” might be an escape clause.) Of course, you can’t disprove predictions. But the past warming trend also seemed excessive: “To live in Alaska when the average temperature has risen about seven degrees over the last 30 years means learning to cope with a landscape that can sink, catch fire or break apart in the turn of a season,” the Times opined. Seven degrees in thirty years? Here’s the data from the Alaska Climate Research Center. They show that mean temperatures at four distinct measuring sites in Alaska over the last thirty years show increases of between 1 and 4 degrees, with a mean of a little over 2 degrees Fahrenheit. This chart of the last century is even more striking. It shows an average temperature rise of 2 degrees in Fairbanks over the entire last century. So who are you going to believe – Howell Raines or the Alaska Climate Research Center?

“But the trouble with this is that the same arguments can be applied to Israel, though there are no US plans to bomb Tel Aviv or depose Ariel Sharon. Israel actually has nuclear weapons, whereas Iraq – so far as anyone knows – is still trying to acquire them. In terms of flouting UN resolutions and international law, many would argue that Israel’s behaviour is a more serious threat to international stability, at the present time, than that of Iraq.” – Brian Whitaker, the Guardian, first noticed by Jason Rylander.

BUCHANAN AS DEEP THROAT? Josh Marshall thinks it could be.

BLOCK THAT METAPHOR: “While we are a long way from a ‘Tiger Woods market,’ we don’t always have to be in the rough,” said Larry Wachtel, market strategist at Prudential Securities. “But we have been through too many failed flurries to suddenly remove the batting helmet.” – Wall Street Journal.

SCOTT SHUGER: I’m a little stunned to hear of the untimely death of journalist Scott Shuger. Everything Mike Kinsley says about him is true. When I edited Scott at The New Republic, he was a total prince – a straight guy who wrote some of the first and best material about the persecution of gay men and women in the U.S. military. His “Today’s papers” for Slate was superb. He died in a scuba diving accident at the age of 50. May he rest in peace.

MARGARET THATCHER AND A BIG BUNNY:This website is very silly. But pretty cool, too.

Finally, some candor from the American Prospect. The Kuttner claim that they had 500,000 subscribers to their magazine has been reduced to 50,000. This discrepancy has been blamed on a reporter for the Boston Business Journal. They have also conceded that their claims of 450,000 unique visitors a month may be a function of counting unique visits as unique visitors, as I suspected. They promise to come up with a new number soon. But their server company advises that the new methodology (i.e. accurate counting) may “reduce the visit count quite a bit, but it is a much better representation of reality.” I can’t wait for the new numbers. Score one for blogging pressure: without me and Mickey on their asses, do you think they would have ever conceded error? Remember that when I first raised the question, they accused me of being a “creationist” because I couldn’t care less for empirical data. I’m too hardened to expect an apology, but if they haven’t reported real new numbers within a week, I’ll keep at ’em.