Category: Old Dish

“TACTICAL DECEPTION”

The Pentagon has clarified the meaning and intent of its new Office of Strategic Influence. It will not lie to the American public or even to the foreign public, but may spread misinformation ahead of military action to help keep the enemy off-guard. I see absolutely no problem with that. Those kinds of lies are often necessary to ensure the success of military strikes, and pose no threat to the credibility of the American government or the domestic press.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE

“I love this country and I love the people in it. And I think that we’ve been through a very difficult time. And we’re going to identify where the real evil is, root it out, and make the country a better place.” – Michael Moore, describing the Bush administration, not terrorism, as the real evil, in an interview with Aaron Brown, CNN last night.

ROMANCE BLOSSOMS:“The newspaper column is pretty close to dead as a medium. There’s no newspaper columnist who can set the agenda the way that Walter Lippmann did or [James] Reston did. There’s only one destination columnist now, one whose column you look for, and that’s [New York Times columnist] Maureen Dowd. And she doesn’t write an agenda-setting column, delivering orders to the powers that be.” – Mike Kinsley, Chicago Tribune today.
“Calling Ari Fleischer ‘a great evasive bore,’ Michael Kinsley wrote: ‘Fleischer speaks a sort of imperial court English, in which any question, no matter how specific, is parried with general assurances that the emperor is keenly aware and deeply concerned and firmly resolved and infallibly right and the people are fully supportive and further information should be sought elsewhere.'” – Maureen Dowd, New York Times today.

FINALLY, ROSIE

Stop the presses: she’s a lesbian. But of course, this isn’t the point. The question of Rosie O’Donnell’s sexual orientation has not been open for quite some time, as any tabloid reader, or vaguely conscious being could tell you. The point is that she seems no longer ashamed or afraid of it, and in defense of the right of lesbian mothers to have custody over their own flesh and blood, she has finally summoned the personal courage of her political convictions. Good for her. But I must say I’m saddened that she had to wait for the end of her extremely successful talk-show to get to this point. Wouldn’t her statement have had more clout if she had been able to take a real financial and career risk for the sake of her own personal integrity? That’s the kind of statement that really impresses people. Then again, perhaps by establishing herself as someone in her own right before she came out, she will be able to change more minds and hearts. I certainly hope so. But I, for one, am relieved that the charade of “sorta ask, kinda tell” has in this case finally been brought to a close. Having to choose between a career and personal honesty is an intolerable choice. But there’s only one way our culture will free the next generation from such a burden: and that’s by more and more of us doing what we do while not hiding who we are. Welcome, Rosie, to the future.

A BODYGUARD OF LIES: “Our cause is just. So why not just tell the truth?” Maureen Dowd asks today, with all the military expertise of a journalist who only recently was calling Senators to calm her down about anthrax. I wonder what Dowd would have thought of FDR’s calculated public lying during the Second World War and before it. Or what she would have made of Churchill’s misinformation and propaganda efforts against the Nazis. Perhaps we should have told Hitler when we were planning to invade Normandy. Hey, our cause was just, wasn’t it? So why fib? No doubt Maureen would have found reason to ridicule both Churchill and Roosevelt. But they understood what war actually is. She still hasn’t got a clue.

FUND VERSUS RIORDAN: There’s no other Republican in California who stands a chance of either beating Gray Davis or dragging the G.O.P. back from the suicide of the last ten years than Dick Riordan. So why is the conservative line that Riordan must be undermined at every turn with the hope of destroying his candidacy? That’s the import of John Fund’s piece in the Wall Street Journal – yet another veiled attack on a Republican who doesn’t toe the hard-right line on abortion, gays, or immigrants. All the code-words are in Fund’s piece – the notion that Riordan is an “establishment” candidate, whispers about his commitment to low taxes, a sly reference to his age, and scarcely a word about his success as L.A. mayor or the complete disaster movement conservatives have foisted upon their party in the most populous state. Fund’s piece shows how parts of the right have become what the left now is: a movement dedicated to ideological purity even at the expense of electoral suicide. Riordan is part of the solution; not part of the problem.

I THINK THIS IS A JOKE: But it’s doing better than any of my three books on Amazon.

IRAQ OR TERROR?: I thought I’d heard it all, but there are some ingenious characters in London who are now arguing that attacking Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein would actually harm the war on terror. The argument? Here’s Euro-fanatic Hugo Young in the Guardian: “Parts of London, maybe including himself, see an Iraqi invasion as a fearful distraction from the defeat of global terror networks, a task that requires, above all, intelligence collaboration from many Islamic states that would be far more opposed than Europe to an invasion plan.” Does Young mean Pakistan, the only really useful source of intelligence for the war? Or perhaps he means those oh-so-helpful Islamic states like Saudi Arabia? More ominously, Young urges a British-Russian alliance to kill off the American attempt to foil Iraq’s and Iran’s attempt to acquire weapons of mass destruction. What’s in it for the Brits and Russians? Trade, I suppose. And perhaps Russia would also suffer if Iraq’s oil production came back on the world markets. Blair almost certainly won’t take his advice. He won’t cheer-lead an assault on Iraq, but he won’t oppose it either. All this is one more reason why the campaign against Saddam should be launched sooner rather than later. Sure, we need to get it absolutely right. But we don’t want to announce action, as the president has basically done, and then dither for months, while critics and enemies have a chance to organize. Is the president really that unimpressed by the Iraqi opposition? Or is there something else behind the apparent vacillation?

SCALIA’S CAFETERIA CATHOLICISM: I’m often accused of being a cafeteria Catholic because I oppose the Church’s position on homosexual relationships, and its irrational hostility to all non-procreative sex, gay or straight. Fair enough, I guess. Still, I don’t believe a reasoning Catholic has to take every single doctrine of his Church on moral matters without criticism or engagement and occasional disagreement. What, then, should we make of Antonin Scalia’s recently voiced opinion that the Church is simply wrong about the death penalty and that Catholic judges who take the Church’s position on the matter should resign? Has he finally gone nuts? Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick gives a clear account of his reasoning, but still comes up short. Isn’t Scalia just as big a cafeteria Catholic as many liberals? In fact, you could argue he’s more so. After all, sexual morality, while important, is nothing like as grave as matters of life and death. Yet not a squeak of protest from the usual defenders of Catholic orthodoxy. There’s also something more than a little disturbing about Scalia’s resuscitation of the view that Catholics somehow have dual loyalty in the conduct of public office – and it’s no less disturbing because a Catholic is making the argument. The silence of the right on this is particularly stunning. Imagine if a pro-choice liberal had made such a statement about, say, abortion – that all Catholic pro-life judges should resign. National Review would be producing a special issue on the scandal. So where’s the outrage about Scalia? More double standards. It seems to me that at the very least, Scalia is far more vulnerable to the charge of cafeteria Catholicism than many liberals, and, at most, he has helped set back the place of Catholics in public life by a considerable margin. Take it away, Rod Dreher!

POSEUR ALERT:“The Greek idea of hubris is on everyone’s lips – as if Oedipus-like, after ridding the neighborhood of the murderous Sphinx, our conceit is now leading us to a predestined rendezvous with Nemesis. The conventional wisdom of our Theban chorus of critics is that we are now blood-drunk on our victories and thus seeking a self-righteous and perpetual war against inequity – cynically either to guarantee large defense budgets at home or to expand American hegemony abroad. ” – Victor Davis Hanson, National Review Online, in
an otherwise fine piece, proving once again that there is nothing more boring than a fully extended metaphor.

NADER’S NADIR

Thanks to Matt Welch for spotting this monstrosity in an interview in the Chicago Tribune with Ralph Nader:

Q. Would you have made an effective wartime president?
A. This war would never have happened had I been president, because for 30 years we have had an aviation safety group, and we have been urging the airlines to toughen cockpit doors and improve the strength of the locks, and they have been resisting for 30 years.

I would add that Nader seems to have become completely unhinged. But that would imply that he has ever been hinged.

A CZECH GAFFE

The Czech Republic’s prime minister, Milos Zeman, walked into a firestorm today after an interview with Ha’aretz in which he compared negotiating with Yasir Arafat to negotiating with Hitler. Here’s the BBC’s account. Notice the outrage among Arab countries, whose virulent anti-Semitism is certainly on a par with Hitler’s. Notice also the E.U.’s visceral hostility to any truth-speaking about the uncompromising hatred of Israel and Jews so prevalent in the Arab Middle East. The French government described any such comparison as “totally irresponsible.” But notice more the Palestinian Authority’s “culture” spokesman, who blithely comments, “The severity of the Israeli occupation matches only that of Nazi Germany, one of the victims of which was Czechoslovakia itself.” No word from the French on whether that comment is “totally irresponsible” as well.

KAPLAN ON BUSH

“As for President Bush, my limited encounter with him indicates that from the beginning of his presidency he was intensely curious and concerned with the problems of the most seemingly-obscure countries. People may forget that months before September 11th he stood before thousands in Warsaw proclaiming the need to embrace into the West all the countries of Eastern Europe from, as he put it, the Baltics to the Black Sea.” This comment is from his first response to my first posting on his book, “Warrior Politics,” now being discussed on the Book Club page. More postings – from me and you – will follow this afternoon.