Great piece by Isikoff in the new Newsweek on the Clinton-Barak phone-calls about the Rich pardon. Remember all those apparatchiks who popped up on talk shows to defend Clinton’s pardon of Rich by saying the president was obviously over-worked, exhausted, trying to do a friend a favor, didn’t appreciate the consequences, and so on? The phone transcripts show what any sensible person would have assumed anyway. Clinton knew full well what he was doing. He knew how unprecedented the pardon was. And he knew the pay-off for him and his allies could be huge. So he rolled the dice one last time, and figured he’d just tough out the chorus of criticism. I wonder cont mpt Clinton must feel for those poor souls still going out there to defend his honor. Does he sit back and laugh his head off as Paul Begala goes on television one more time to defend the indefensible? I stand by my assessment of the pardons at the time. They were the final sign that we had a seriously dangerous man in the White House for eight years. By the end of his term, he was convinced he could get away with anything. And you know what? He was right. Thank God for the 22d Amendment.
DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME: A British doctor neuters himself. Was the National Health Service waiting list that long?
BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “The House vote against all human cloning, in its abruptness and its finality and in the magnitude of its penalties for those who dare oppose it, made me think of the Taliban and their draconian edicts: very little sorting out of details, few distinctions, meaningful debate drowned out by fundamentalist rhetoric and then an a priori proclamation of what society needs, followed by the order — destroy the Buddhas.” – Abraham Verghese, New York Times Magazine. And they stone the researchers as well?
ALONE AGAIN, NATURALLY: Have you noticed the torrent of news stories and hysterical op-eds in the New York Times against Bush’s stem-cell decision? Every cockamamie theory has been advanced to discredit what was a tough but defensible choice. Bush was purely cynical, Frank Rich argued; by being a centrist, Alan Wolfe tried to argue, Bush merely helps the extremes; and so on. But the most telling has been the notion that America is uniquely squeamish about this subject (subtext: we’re the only country with religious nuts calling the shots). A front-page piece detailed the scale of the research in Britain as proof of how far behind the U.S. is getting. But as David Murray spells out on the Letters page today, it turns out that Britain is the only major scientific power pioneering state-funded human cloning and stem-cell research. You think Germany is going full-speed ahead? (I’d love to read the Times editorial the day the German government decides to set up factories for human embryo experimentation. Of course, they already have some of the overhead built.) France, Italy, Australia, Canada: none of these countries have sanctioned open-ended government-funded human embryo experimentation. There is considerable debate in Britain about the way in which the Blair government has essentially contracted out its ethical responsibilities to panels of “experts” who act like God (because the general public cannot be entrusted with complicated decisions like these). So spare us from yet another jeremiad. Besides, on moral issues like these, it surely matters not a jot if someone else is doing it. Either it’s right or it’s wrong. In this case, in my view, largely wrong.
ANOTHER BURIED LEDE: All in all, I thought Erica Goode did a fine job of writing up some of the challenges for those of us with HIV or surrounded by people with HIV in the Times yesterday. There were a few strained attempts at political correctness but the issues she raised are all important. Anyway, here’s my mini-beef. She mercifully avoids repeating all the AIDS-is-exploding stuff from the usual sources. But here’s a survey she leaves woefully unexamined: “[O]ne survey by the Stop AIDS Project, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco, found that the number of men who reported using a condom “every time” during anal sex dropped to 49.7 percent in 2000 from 69.6 percent in 1994. In that same time, the survey found, the number of men having such unprotected sex with more than one partner increased to 48.8 percent from 23.4 percent. One-third of those men said that they either did not know their partners’ H.I.V. status or that they knew it was different from their own (my italics).” The corollary of this statistic is surely that two-thirds did know the status of their partner and had condom-free sex anyway. Isn’t this important? What the survey is picking up on is that more and more men with HIV are having old-fashioned sex with other people who are HIV-positive. Goode assumes this is as risky from the point of view of the epidemic as other “unprotected sex.” But of course it isn’t. Perhaps this practice will help spawn a new strain of the virus. Perhaps it won’t. But it certainly won’t spread the virus any further. I think this may help explain the apparent discrepancy between existing surveys showing an increase in “unsafe sex” and yet relatively stable, even declining, rates of HIV infection. The “unsafe sex” is between people with HIV, whose numbers grow daily. So why isn’t that the real story here? Is it because it’s still not ok to defend old-fashioned sex among those with HIV? If so, why?
AND ANOTHER THING: Another assumption of Goode’s piece is that gay men who break down and do have sex that puts them at risk of contracting HIV are clearly delusional or in need of help or acting out impulses, and so on. All that may be true, although they could just be horny and drunk as well. But isn’t it also true that people are less scared of HIV today because it’s, er, less scary? This is not some psychological trick. It’s a highly rational response. If the risks associated with a highly enjoyable behavior decline, wouldn’t you expect rational people to do more of it? Let’s say new brands of cigarettes dramatically reduced the likelihood of lung cancer. Let’s say that the media was full of stories proclaiming that death-rates from lung-cancer had plummeted by over 70 percent. Wouldn’t you expect cigarette smoking to increase? Of course you would. One of the assumptions behind the notion that it’s somehow a function of dysfunction or delusion or stupidity that lies behind a possible uptick in HIV transmission is that gay men are dysfunctional in the first place. We define them pathologically and then look for signs of their pathology. But what if they’re perfectly sane people taking sane risks with their own bodies and lives? How revealing that this scenario doesn’t seem to have occurred to anybody yet. In print, at least.
LETTERS: In defense of Gore Vidal and Harold Pinter, an ex-feminist lament; etc.
The Dish 