Category: Old Dish

Yes, I’m sure many on the far left don’t hate America. But Ted Rall sure does.

CLINTON LEGACY WATCH: Dick Morris adds even more details to the former president’s negligence with regard to terrorism.

THIS IS WHAT SANCTIMONY MEANS: A dumb-as-a-post, theologically inane, self-righteous screed from San Francisco. Don’t you think a right-wing Christian invoking God in this political fashion would be decried as extreme and self-serving?

The war has been great for the news magazines. Time’s Person of the Year issue was particularly good. Great call on Giuliani. The first credible insider reporting from the White House on the war as well. I learned – or relearned – one thing from both features. Rudy and Dubya are the same men they have always been. There has been no ‘transformation’ from within. Rudy hasn’t suddenly found a heart. Bush hasn’t suddenly found a brain. This isn’t the Wizard of Oz. Both were highly capable managers with skill and compassion before and after September 11. All that day did was reveal these qualities under immense scrutiny and enormous pressure. I was particularly interested to see the war’s time-line in Time. There was no sudden U-turn in the middle of the campaign. The war-plan was the same from the beginning to the end, with merely tactical adjustments. Bush wasn’t dilly-dallying until he read the editorials in the Weekly Standard and the New Republic. He was executing a shrewd war-plan and never lost his nerve. The public gets this. That’s why he’s riding not just a poll high but a deep bonding between him and the people of this country. Eventually, the press will see this. Time’s reporting suggests some are seeing it already.

CHRISTMAS BREAK: The dish will be light and al dente this week. I’m recuperating from excessive socializing in New York, and struggling through my usual Christmas alienation. Man, I get so blue this time of year. I’m not taking a planned vacation next week, and will be chilling out at home instead. Normal service will resume January 3, when we hope to launch the redesign for the New Year. Until then, do check in, because I’ll post when the feeling strikes.

A quarter of a million visits in the last week alone, from over 150,000 unique hosts. Thanks.

OFF TO NEW YORK CITY: Maybe it was growing up in England, but I’ve long been a bit of a Christmas-phobe. As a kid, it meant two weeks in a small house in the gloomy English mid-winter with no relief from, er, family. (No, seriously, love you, guys!) Since I came to America, I’ve been home for Christmas maybe a couple of times. I try and go places where the festivities impinge the least – usually Miami, where you can almost forget it’s happening altogether. This year, we’re going to New York out of a) solidarity, b) a desire to party. Why my Christmas phobia? I think it’s a freedom thing. I’m not referring to the religious aspect. I’m planning on going to midnight mass in Harlem this year and love the Advent and Christmas ritual. What tyrannizes is the hermetically-sealed universal secular imperative to be happy. It’s like a universal Disneyland for a few days. It seems to me that a critical freedom is the right to your own mood. If you feel lousy, there’s nothing more irritating than some cheery boob telling you to cheer up, it’s Christmas. Screw that. Have a great Christmas. And be miserable if you feel like it.

This weekend, I’m on NPR’s Saturday Weekend Edition with Scott Simon and PBS’ Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg. My fellow chatterers on PBS are David Brooks and Juan Williams.

Why has the Osama trail gone cold? Why is the al Qaeda network suddenly silent? I don’t know why but I find this kind of quiescence ominous.

IS BLAIR READING THE DISH?: The British PM publishes a dossier marking a hundred days of war and slams Sontag, Fisk, Bunting and Pilger for their crass errors of judgment and morality. Didn’t Blair get the memo telling him the anti-war left doesn’t exist? Never mind. We are making progress on all fronts.

The man just can’t let go. My favorite Clintonista quote from Rick Berke’s piece: “He does not want to appear to be upstaging Bush.” Don’t worry, Bill. You won’t.

NOT SO BEAUTIFUL MIND: A.O.Scott puts the boot in this morning: “Of course any movie that traffics in biography must edit, foreshorten, emphasize and condense, but “A Beautiful Mind” goes further, becoming a piece of historical revisionism on the order of “J. F. K.” or “Forrest Gump,” and manifesting a depressing lack of faith in the intelligence of the audience.”

You think “Europe” is ready to take a lead in world affairs? Robert Kagan gets it just about right.

YOU AND DERB: Thanks for all the letters. It seems from some of them that I’m always talking about what I do in the “bedroom.” I bet I’d get more hits if I did. Why is it that for some people heterosexuality is all about your spouse, girlfriend, family, kids, etc. but homosexuality is only and ever about ‘disgusting’ anal sex? When a movie has a sweet ballet-dancer kid who turns out gay, it’s propaganda. When movies have been produced for decades as if gay people simply didn’t exist, that’s entertainment. I give up. If you start from the premise that someone is defined by ‘disgusting’ sex, even if they have no more and no less disgusting sex than anyone else (you think heteros only use the missionary position?), then there’s simply no way to argue back. When someone like me comes along and mentions my boyfriend coming to Thanksgiving or something harmless like that, I’m shoving it in your face. When Jonah Goldberg casually mentions that his wife leaves in the morning and comes home at night in his column, he’s just humanizing his prose. Man, I’d love it if homosexuality were a non-issue. But when I write and behave as if it is, some of you have a cow. I think that’s called a no-win situation. I just have to believe there are some straight people out there who get it. Mercifully, many of my straight readers do. I’m grateful for your open minds.

A resident confesses: we’ll tolerate anything but Republicans.

David Geffen has always known how to keep gay guys in their place. While coddling Bill Clinton for eight long years, telling the president he needn’t worry about gays in the military, advising him that no gays really want marriage rights, refusing to support the campaign for marriage, he was always there for us. Now his studio is producing a movie, “A Beautiful Mind,” that actively removes any reference to the lead character’s homosexuality. The book on which the movie is based is completely frank about such themes, and helps contextualize the life of a great mind. Still, it’s important to ensure that straight movie-goers don’t associate intelligence – let alone, Russell Crowe – with homosexuality. That would be “shoving it in their face,” wouldn’t it? This is what gets me about some Hollywood liberals. Throw a benefit for gay rights and they’ll be there, red ribbons and all. Ask them to take a financial risk to deal honestly with the lives of gay people in a major mainstream movie, and they run a mile.

UPDATE: It turns out that the actor who played Billy Elliott’s gay friend in the movie of that name has just signed up for the British Army. For John Derbyshire’s screed against gays, read the current National Review. Derb has clearly come to terms with being a proud bigot. Every single piece of anti-gay propaganda is shoehorned into the piece – even the myth of our alleged recruitment of children. Our loves and relationships are reduced to “weird things” we do in our bedrooms. His view is that gay people are lucky not to be actively persecuted for our disgusting behavior and should be grateful for it. He doesn’t address the only criticism I made of him, but then how could he? Then he preposterously claims to wish us a loving Christmas. I once had some respect for this man. How can anyone now?

THE DIALECTICIZER: The latest entries from the amazing web dialect machine are below. I think that’s enough, don’t you?

ELMER IVINS: “Haiw and faweweww, O Enwon! What a fwameout. De Estabwishment media, sucking its cowwective thumb wif unwonted sowemnity, is tweating us to meditations on two themes: “How the mighty have fawwen” and “Who wouwd have thunk it?” Pawdon me whiwe I snowt, in wieu of wudew noises, and offew two themes of my own: “What took so wong?” and “Anyone wif an ounce of common sense.”

REDNECK SULLIVAN: “Ah knows whut Cohen means. Ah was talkin’ t’a friend in th’ gym today, a man who is mild-mannered t’a fault, an’ he said thet he wanted t’shoot bin Laden hisse’f. Varmintally, I’d like t’pummel bin Laden’s haid in fo’ a while fust. But th’ truth is, ah’s ashamed of this hyar impulse. ah was a li’l ashamed when gabbin’ wif friends t’other day, ah was axed whut I thunk we sh’d does wif th’ Taliban stragglers. Ah said, “Three wo’ds: kill them all, ah reckon.” Mah faif tells me thet these impulses is not simply wrong but sinful, ah reckon. We kin fo’give but we kinnot excuse them, dawgone it. Fo’ years, ah have tried t’channel whut is pow’ful a profoun’ rage at th’ way society has treated gay varmints fo’ so long into sumpin mo’e cornstruckive an’ reasonable.”

THE FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT: “I dun did not gots sexual relashuns wid dat honky chick, Miss Lewinsky. Slap mah fro!” – president Clinton in “Jive.”

Wrap your head around that one. Ken Starr who thought it necessary to detail every second of president Clinton’s sex with Monica Lewinsky manages to sympathize with a traitor. His initial reaction to Mr. Walker was one of “empathy and sympathy.” According to today’s New York Times, Starr saw Walker “as ‘a young kid with misplaced idealism’ who appeared to have gone off with the intention of learning more about Islam, not joining Al Qaeda. While he saw Mr. Walker’s actions now as ‘troubling,’ Mr. Starr added, ‘He doesn’t seem like a Benedict Arnold.'” And Mr Starr doesn’t seem to have his priorities straight.