Category: Old Dish

There’s a new liberal spin out there. The left has always been in favor of the war. My friend Jake Weisberg makes the point in Slate: “Those policing the debate are dropping the rhetorical equivalent of daisy cutters on a few malnourished left-wing stragglers. Of course those opposed to the United States defending itself against terrorism are wrong. They also happen to be totally irrelevant.” My friend, the always charming Rick Hertzberg, did the same pirouette in the New Yorker last week: “[T]here is no anti-war movement to speak of… Apart from traditional pacifists, and a tiny handful of reflexive Rip Van Winkles, almost no-one objects, in broad outline, to the aims and methods of the anti-terrorism campaign.” This week Hertzberg blithely goes on to object to virtually every domestic security measure the administration has pursued and calls for Attorney General Ashcroft to resign. Never mind.

SOME CONTEXT: What neither Rick nor Jake points out is context. Neither can deny that a battery of left-wing intellectuals – from the Nation to the New Yorker to Slate – had immediate knee-jerk anti-American responses to September 11. They did. Some of us documented it. Neither Rick nor Jake can deny that 5 percent of the country still opposes the war. Neither can deny that much of the left-wing professoriate blamed America first – again, it is documented, thanks in part to invidious “debate-policers” like me. (And by the way, I started the Sontag Awards. The Weekly Standard ripped the idea off.) Nor can they deny that anti-war protestors organized, rallied and mobilized in the immediate aftermath of the massacre. Did Rick or Jake go to Union Square or see the anti-war protestors in Washington calling George W. Bush the “real terrorist”? Now it’s also true that these people are a tiny fringe. They exist in “enclaves.” But it’s equally true that the main reason for their current retreat is not because they didn’t exist in the first place – but because even in their reality-free minds, the sheer success of the war completely pulled the rug from beneath them. After all, it’s hard to rally against a war when it seems on the verge of being won. Do Hertzberg and Weisberg doubt for a minute that if the Taliban were still in power and if the Northern Alliance and U.S. troops were still bottled up in Northern Afghanistan that the airwaves wouldn’t be crammed with naysayers and anti-war protestors? Do they listen to NPR’s incessant anti-war commentary? Another reason, methinks, why the Nation, Sontag, et al have changed their tune somewhat is precisely because some of us refused to give them a pass. I think many leftists were shocked by the vehemence of the reaction to their nihilism and stupidity. Our intellectual daisy-cutters, like the real thing, had an effect. Most of these intellectuals are slaves to public opinion and they tacked to the prevailing winds at the first opportunity. But they haven’t disappeared. At every step of the way, they have tried to undermine the war effort. They have done what they can to slant the media; they have opposed much of the domestic anti-terrorism effort; people like Barbara Kingsolver still subject us to glib sermons about American cultural inferiority. I can see why moderate lefties might want to retroactively cover up the knee-jerk attitudes of their more extreme allies in the wake of a mass-murder of American civilians. But some of us noticed at the time. And some of us won’t forget.

If you like catty web-commentary – and I have no idea whether you do – then check out Mickey Kaus’s first two items today. He skewers Salon; then he skewers Bob Kuttner, the oleaginous socialist who runs the mind-numbingly earnest American Prospect. (Kuttner’s intellectual acumen can be gleaned from a cover-piece he wrote for The New Republic at the beginning of the 1990s predicting an economic “abyss” for the entire decade. Oh, well.) My favorite quote from Kuttner’s snooty letter is when he refers to the always-readable kausfiles.com as a “vanity webletter.” I love it when these tired old poobahs refer to weblogs as “vanity” publications. Eric Alterman described andrewsullivan.com as such in a previous column. Kuttner and Alterman are just jealous because weblogs are new and interesting and free and subversive, while they are pouring out the same old schlock for media conglomerates and lefty philanthropists, with nothing better to do with their money. And people actually read us.

This from NBC News correspondent Keith Miller talking to Tom Brokaw last night.

“MILLER: Today’s violence continues a battle between two men that goes back more than 30 years: Arafat, the freedom fighter, intent on winning a homeland for Palestinians; and Sharon, the tank commander, defending the state of Israel. Today, both men are in their seventies, losing patience and running out of time.”

Freedom fighter versus tank commander? Who’d you pick?

RACIAL POLITICS AT THE NEW YORK TIMES: Yes, I’m biased because the New York Times today was referring to my former teacher, Harvey C. Mansfield, a lone voice decrying grade inflation. But was it really necessary for the Times to report the following in this way:

“[Mansfield] has also injected a racial component into the discussion by contending that white professors tend to avoid giving bad grades to black students, perhaps because they worry that such students might then be inclined to flee Harvard.
“There’s a feeling that you shouldn’t pass judgment in a way that might hurt someone’s self-esteem,” said Mr. Mansfield, who is white.”

Notice the subtle pejorative here. Mansfield didn’t raise a touchy subject worth exploring. He “injected a racial component” into the debate. And his motives are suspect because “he is white.” This from a paper which will go out of its way in all sorts of cases to avoid citing the race of someone who is black, for fear of stirring racial stereotypes. Simply put, it is irrelevant what race Mansfield is. Either his point has merit, or it does not. In this case, I’m not sure I completely agree with Harvey. But that doesn’t mean his point should be summarily dismissed. This man has been right about this issue before the New York Times even reported it. They need to give him some r-e-s-p-e-c-t.

Since September 11, Tom Friedman has been almost unrecognizably good. Today’s column is a burst of clear-eyed sanity. Here’s a sentence that’s still ringing in my ears: “[I]f it is impossible anymore for Arab-Muslim leaders to distinguish between Palestinian resistance directed at military targets and tied to a specific peace proposal, and terrorism designed to kill kids, without regard to a peace plan or political alternatives, then over time no moral discourse will be possible between America and the Arabs.” There you have it. But will the Arabs understand this before it gets too late?

Michael Wolff and Al Gore; Jesus and hippies; conservatives and New York City. Check ’em out.

There I was reading Interview magazine on the can this afternoon (well, looking at it, anyway) when who should pop up but Camille Paglia! It’s not her best but the interview with Ingrid Sischy has some nice moments. For all you Pagliari here are some extracts. I don’t think it’s online, but it’s the Dec/Jan 2002 issue if you want to read the whole thing.

On the Taliban destruction of the Buddhas:

“Yes, that was chilling. Ironically, the idea of the West as destroyer has been pushed down the throats of students at elite universities – yet we’re the only ones in history who have gone to such lengths to recover the past, reassemble the jigsaw puzzle, reconstruct past cultures. Those great stone Buddhas, smashed by cannon fire, were on trade routes dating from the period of the wandering hordes that attacked Rome. History will say that the destruction of those images was an early warning sign of something that was about to happen to us. Those falling monuments were a prefiguration of the collapse of the Twin Towers.”

On the new frontier post September 11:

“It’s almost as if there is no frontier, because by definition a frontier is the point where civilization is pushing us out into the unknown. What we’re facing now is the void or heart of darkness created by a fanatical hatred of progress, of history, of science. The way the terrorists used our technology against us – that’s another horror. To turn those tremendous jetliners against the Twin Towers: It’s like reversing the whole 20th Century – the history of flight and the great skyscrapers, the apex of architecture. To create this giant void where nothing is recognizable – even I, with my catastrophic imagination, never envisioned that civilization would do that to civilization.”

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “While different kinds of Americans live in strictly segregated monochromatic cities and neighborhoods and can’t even stand to hear each other’s music, Afghans of all ethnic stripes live side by side in a truly blended nation. This partly explains why yesterday’s Taliban can shave, trade his turban for a Hindustani cap, and become Northern Alliance — to jump from a Pashtun- to a Tajik-dominant culture isn’t that hard. Afghans make war all the time — it’s what they do best — but they fight out of loyalty to a commander or a warlord. They don’t shoot each other merely because of the color of their skin. We Americans, who most assuredly know better, do.” – Ted Rall, finding more reasons to hate America.

GOOD NEWS WATCH: A simple story of amazing generosity from the New York Times. And they didn’t even need a “faith-based” grant from the government.

MORE ON BRAME: An interesting quote from Robert Brame III appears on a website called “Christian Statesman.” The quote argues that “…[law that] is not rooted in explicit commands of Scripture would be at best abstract, vague, and esoteric. It could neither guide legislation and adjudication nor check abuses by government, and could be rapidly captured and perverted by an elite.” Sounds like mainstream Christian Reconstructionism to me. We’ve been told that Brame has severed all links to these groups as well. So why is he still listed on page 2 of the November 2001 “Biblical Worldview” magazine, put out by American Vision, as a still-active member of the AV board? Just asking. Sources tell me, however, that Brame has just withdrawn his name from consideration for reappointment to the NLRB. Great.

NPR CHANNELS AL JAZEERA: Suddenly it all makes sense. Boston’s NPR station WBUR will provide daily updates on the war on terrorism direct from the mouthpiece of anti-Western Muslim fundamentalism, Al Jazeera. No reason is given as to why NPR won’t provide daily coverage from, say, the Israeli media as well. But then it’s NPR. We know the reason already.

Here’s an interesting point made by a reader. We were told for ages that one reason we had no intelligence on the Taliban or Muslim terrorists in general was that they were basically impenetrable. An American spy couldn’t effectively go under cover, we were told: they would be spotted and expelled immediately. So how come a red-diaper baby from the Bay Area managed to infiltrate Taliban ranks and find himself on the front-lines in Northern Afghanistan? In retrospect, all that hooey about the impossibility of human intelligence in these groups seems like defensive CIA spin. Has George Tenet been fired yet?

Michael Wolff, about as good an indicator of the snide new York left as you’ll find outside the New York Times op-ed page, vents revealingly about the ascendancy of George W. Bush. Like much that Wolff writes, this is pure onanism. It has no relationship to actual reporting, research or honest examination of something called policy. It’s just how he feels. Well, he feels bad. He wants a return to the days when Bush was ridiculed. He fears, in the way that a substratum of provincial Manhattanites often fears, that any popular Republican is a harbinger of the Fourth Reich (he even uses the Nazi analogy.) Anyway, this is all to say that his column cheered me up no end. If this is how Wolff feels right now, a lot of things must be right in the world.

MOVE OVER, SEGWAY: Here’s an invention that really changes our lives.

AIDS NOW: An interesting piece in the Washington Post today about research into the possibility of ‘cycling’ anti-HIV drugs. It seems that in many cases, taking constant ‘holidays’ from the relentless drug regimen doesn’t adversely affect your immune system, can halve the cost of treatment, and reduces side effects. This is big news – both for healthcare costs and also for HIV patients. For what it’s worth, my own experience bears it out. Last June, on the eighth anniversary of my becoming HIV-positive, my blood results came back. They showed an undetectable viral load – i.e. there were fewer than 50 viral particles in a milligram of my blood. And my T-cell count (CD4 cells), an indicator of the strength of the immune system, was a solid 495. (People’s immune systems vary – but the range of normal CD4 counts is between 500 and 1500, with most people in the middle. You only risk illness if the count goes below 200. Viral loads also vary. They can go as high as several million in people with AIDS and vary from a few hundred to hundreds of thousands in other people with HIV). I decided, with my doctors’ blessing, to take a break from my meds. The fatigue, diarrhea, and nausea were getting to me. I found myself forgetting doses. I had begun to develop weird fat deposits around my waist and between my shoulder blades. So I tried an experiment.

THE RESULTS: Since the experiment started, I’ve had three blood tests. Off my medications, my immune system actually strengthened a little, going from 495 CD4 cells to three measurements over 600. My viral load came back, however. From being undetectable, it went to 2500 in two months, then leaped to 48,000 in the wake of 9/11, but now it has declined back again to 6800. No one knows quite what’s going on, but it appears my own immune system is fighting HIV quite effectively on its own. With a low viral load and high CD4 cells, my docs recommend staying off my meds for the time being. I’ll monitor it carefully, and go back on medications if my health worsens. But in general, this is great news for the quality of my own life, as well as for my health-insurer. If further research confirms these findings, then the cost structure of HIV care could also be transformed – especially for those who do not have insurance. We don’t know for sure yet – and everyone’s body is different – but this strikes me as really good news, and worth a little cheer. The only downside is that people like me who were once undetectable and barely infectious are now more liable to transmit the disease, because of our modestly higher viral loads. If there’s a shift in the number of similarly more infectious people in the population, transmission could tick upward. All the more reason to practice safer sex, or to keep sexual contact within the HIV-positive population.

The lead Washington Post story by Woodward and Kaiser is a useful, if terrifying, wake-up call. The administration clearly believes that there is a small chance that al Qaeda has the wherewithal for a dirty nuclear bomb. The following sentence is priceless: “U.S. officials are very concerned that any nuclear detonation by al Qaeda would be a calamitous psychological setback to the war on terrorism.” Er, yes. You can say that again – especially if it happens in an American city. I got the same sinking feeling reading this paragraph: “On at least one occasion, the White House cited the increased concern that al Qaeda might have a radiological bomb as a key reason that Vice President Cheney was not available for a face-to-face meeting with visiting senior foreign officials. The meeting usually would have allowed for informal personal contact, but took place via secure video conference because Cheney was at a secure location outside Washington.” I’m grateful to the Post for this story not least because I notice in myself – and all around me – an unnerving sense that the war is somehow over. People aren’t talking about it in the same earnest and desperate way they were before. I guess we knew this would happen – but it’s surely a mistake. We’re barely three months away from the massacre, and growing psychologically complacent. I’m not say we should stay afraid indefinitely – just that it’s good to have a reminder that we still have something to be very afraid of.

MEDIA BIAS WATCH I: “According to the sources, the planning is being undertaken under the auspices of a the US Central Command at McDill air force base in Tampa, Florida, commanded by General Tommy Franks, who is leading the war against Afghanistan.” – The Observer, London, December 2. War against Afghanistan?

MEDIA BIAS WATCH II: Am I overly-sensitive or is this Elizabeth Bumiller piece in the New York Times beyond snide? The story itself could have been assigned by Terry McAuliffe – the premise being that if the White House cannot be open for tours by the general public, no press Christmas parties should take place either. (Notice the nasty stage whisper high up in the piece that Bush is related to a former president, a detail designed to paint the president as an aristocrat elitist.) Bumiller insinuates, under the guise of news, that the Bushes are a) like the Clintons, selling access to the highest bidder, and b) elitists for accepting secret service recommendations about opening the White House for public access. In fact, these parties have nothing to do with fundraising, they’re dumb schmooze-fests designed to charm the press. And the numbers invited, as the Times concedes, are under half the peak for the Clinton years. And the security distinction makes sense: it’s far easier to vet individuals whom you have personally invited and whose guests are also assigned in advance, than vetting people who line up for Christmas tours on Pennsylvania Avenue. (To all those readers about to accuse me of elitism, I should say, I guess, that although I’ve been invited many times, I’ve never gone to the White House Christmas press parties. My only invites were from the Clintons.) Besides, surely Bumiller has been made aware by now that there is a war on. Security isn’t a matter of elitism; it’s a matter of life and death.

RAMADAN SCHMAMADAN: Remember all that hooey about how we shouldn’t fight terrorism during Ramadan because it violated some religious propriety. I love this sentence from the Washington Post today: “In the past, al Qaeda terrorists have tried to launch attacks during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, which this year began Nov. 16. The first bombings of the World Trade Center, which killed six people and injured more than 1,000, came on Feb. 26, 1993, three days after Ramadan began that year. During the Ramadan observance from Dec. 9, 1999, to Jan. 7, 2000, the United States and other nations stopped a series of attacks that were keyed to the millennium celebration.” Not only do the terrorists allow terror during Ramadan, they positively encourage it. I say: let’s be sensitive to these sensibilities and follow their example.

THE AMERICAN TALIBAN: Several of you have pointed out to me that Robert Brame III was appointed to the NLRB four years ago by president Clinton. I’ve been trying to find out if Brame’s radical Christian Reconstructionist views were known then or have only subsequently been exposed. I wish I’d known when I wrote the first item to provide the context. But it doesn’t change my point. The man has no place in appointed public office. And no, it’s not some new McCarthyism to nix someone for a position like this because of his views or the views of his colleagues on unrelated matters. It’s a political decision for any president to make. And which president would want to advance or condone such views? There are plenty of candidates who aren’t in the pocket of organized labor who could do the job. Why pick someone who has been part of a movement that even the religious right regards as extremist?

THE JEWS DID IT, PART DEUX: “When the Israelis killed a senior Hamas figure just as the US peace envoy, General Anthony Zinni, began his work, they made it almost certain that there would be a response from Hamas. It may well be that Hamas would have staged suicide operations, at this time or later, whether or not a leader had been killed by the Israelis. But there must be a suspicion that some Israelis wanted General Zinni to have a first hand view of terrorism, which might then shift the view of Mr Arafat in Washington.” – The Guardian, in its editorial today. This is a carefully parsed sentence. It doesn’t actually blame the Israelis for the massacre of their own citizens, but it comes extremely close. The European Left’s loathing of Israel never ceases to amaze, and it’s not restricted to the Left. Thanks in part to the BBC, anti-Zionism is now endemic in Britain. I’ve barely talked to a Brit recently who doesn’t essentially blame Israelis for all the violence in their own country. Oh well, they couldn’t quite keep up the moral equivalence with al Qaeda, so Hamas will have to do.

“NO-ONE CAN CONTROL OR CHANGE ME”: E.J. Dionne gets Arafat exactly right, methinks.

Yes, many people have woefully abused this term as a way to tar all sorts of characters with a demagogic brush. But in some cases, it actually is fair. I refer to a fringe group known as Christian Reconstructionists, far right Christians who believe that the Constitution should be replaced by Biblical law, that women have no place in public life, that homosexuals should be executed, that non-Christians should be forcibly converted, and so on. Now, you’d think these extremists would be personae non gratae in the Taliban-fighting Bush White House, wouldn’t you? So why on earth has the administration considered nominating one Robert Brame III to the National Labor Relations Board? Until recently, Brame was on the board of American Vision, a Christian Reconstructionist body, and was an adviser to the Plymouth Rock Foundation, a group with similar views. Here’s a recent quote from an AV representative in their magazine: “We’ve been told that Christians cannot impose their religious beliefs on others. Since heaven is at stake, we have no choice. There is no hope outside of Jesus Christ.” Remind you of anyone? A June 1999 edition of the group’s magazine described democracy as “the first step toward fascism.” I’m sorry but something is seriously wrong when people associated with views such as these are deemed worthy of appointment by any administration. The president has a chance to save himself from this embarrassment. He ought to – and fast.

HOME NEWS: The good news is that Entertainment Weekly’s “Shaw Report,” which catalogues the ups and downs of pop-cultural fashion has designated andrewsullivan.com as the “in” website of the moment. We replace mcsweeneys.net (“five minutes ago”) and thedrudgereport.com (“out”). Well, if Drudge is so “out,” why does he keep giving me almost half my referrals? (Drudge, like diamonds, is forever.) But the bad news is that the other “in” things of this moment are boiled wool, shrinky dinks, and chocolate martinis. Eeewww, EW. But thanks!