Category: Old Dish

Jonathan Rauch goes to bat for a deeply powerful argument. It’s a home-run – in defense of federalism and humane, conservative social policy. How any conservatives with intellectual integrity can support the proposed constitutional amendment on marriage is simply beyond me.

An Oakeshottian take on George W. Bush’s political style. See my new TRB opposite.

CORRECTION: Several readers have pointed out to me that the study forwarded to me by another reader (see “EMBRYO STEM CELLS AND PARKINSON’S” below) isn’t quite as I presented it. It’s about the implantation of neurons from fetal tissue – not from embryonic stem cells – into adults with Parkinson’s. Closely related but not identical. And it was indeed reported by the New York Times on March 8. My apologies. Nevertheless, it seems to me its impact on the debate should be stronger than it has been. The experiment was a disaster. The Times reported that “Dr Paul E. Greene, a neurologist at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and a researcher in the study, said the uncontrollable movements some patients suffered were ‘absolutely devastating … They chew constantly, their fingers go up and down, their wrists flex and distend.’ And the patients writhe and twist, jerk their heads, fling their arms about. ‘It was tragic, catastrophic,’ he said. ‘It’s a real nightmare. And we can’t selectively turn it off.'” Despite this, an AP report today says the following: “Freed and Dr. Evan Y. Snyder of Harvard Medical School led a team of researchers who developed a way to treat Parkinson’s disease in adults by injecting into their brains fetal neural cells that make dopamine, a brain chemical that is deficit in Parkinson’s. Although the researchers used stem cells from an aborted fetus, Freed said further research may show that repairing the brain could best be done using neural stem cells that are grown from embryonic stem cells.” Aren’t some important facts missing here? And yes, my own opposition to such research does not hinge on its effectiveness or otherwise. But I don’t see why this data shouldn’t be as much a part of this debate as, say, a failed test should be part of the debate about missile defense.

LINKS: Some of you regularly tell me that some links to articles aren’t working. Alas, this is because of AOL’s lazy-ass policy of caching sites only twice a day, which means that if you’re using AOL, you are always getting a slightly delayed site, and the links are a few hours behind the content. There’s nothing we can do about this. But you can. Avoid this problem by using a non-AOL browser.

I guess I was prepared to dislike Cary Tennis’ essay on President Bush as a recovered alcoholic, but in the end he won me over. We’ve all learned that the inner lives of presidents make a difference to their outer performance – and no-one showed this better than our sociopathic ex-president. What Tennis does is a really superb job at showing how recovered alcoholism really does shine a light on who Bush is. Tennis keeps credentializing himself as a lefty who can’t stomach Bush’s views – but his underlying respect for the guy comes through. I think recovery helps explain Bush’s compassion for others as well as his belief that only the individual, with God’s help, can lift himself out of what might seem a dead end. Ditto Bush’s ability to delegate; to listen; to let go of things he cannot control; to take things a day at a time. I have to say that some of the people I most admire are in recovery. Two good friends of mine have dragged themselves out of a real pit of addictive despair into productive, strong, even beautiful lives. It’s odd to say that I feel comforted that someone who has had that experience is president. He rose above a crippling and human compulsion. What an irony that he succeeded a man who couldn’t lift himself out of his own.

EMBRYO STEM CELLS AND PARKINSON’S: A medical reader points out the following article in the March issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. Alas, only the abstract is online. But the gist of the study is that implantation of embryonic stem cells to treat Parkinson’s Disease was shown to be completely ineffective in those over 60 and only very mildly effective in those under 60 – an effect which was only discernible for some reason in the morning. Moreover, the treatment caused “dystonia and dyskenesis,” i.e. uncontrollable spasms and tremors, in 15 percent of the patients. The Journal editorialized against the use of such stem cells in such a treatment because of this study. Adult stem cells are apparently more beneficial: “Although some symptoms did improve with the transplantation procedure in the younger patients, the development of dyskinesia is worrisome. The results do not support the use of this procedure as it was performed in this study.” Why has this study been all but ignored by the U.S. press? Doesn’t it seem directly relevant to the debate we are now having?

I read the Nation every other year or so, so I’m grateful for the reader who pointed out to me their latest endeavor. In a desperate attempt to make the magazine lose less money, they’ve launched a proposal for Nation readers to donate their tax rebate checks to the magazine! Hold on a minute. Isn’t that just a little bit hypocritical? Last time I checked, the Nation never saw a tax it didn’t like, and never saw a government program (except for Defense) that it didn’t want to see expanded. So shouldn’t the Nation endorse sending the checks back to Uncle Sam? This is especially true for those trust-fund socialists who still keep the mag afloat. Couldn’t all this be better spent by the government, endowing, say, an Alger Hiss Peace Studies Department at NYU or something? Or have these old lefties finally seen the capitalist light?

IS POST-FEMINIST ANOTHER TERM FOR SNOB?: “Look at Bill Clinton’s mother, as opposed to George W’s mother. Is your mother a barfly who gets used by men? Or is your mother a strong woman who demanded respect for her ideas and always received it?” – Barbara Olson, out-doing Roger Ebert in trash-bashing, in the Daily Telegraph.

SPINNING THE POPE: Typically shrewd piece by Will Saletan in Slate, dissecting the Pope’s recent statement on embryo stem-cell research. The Pope’s statement seemed (to me at least) completely self-explanatory, but Will has great fun pointing out the ludicrous extent to which some hacks and spinners distorted it for their own ends. My favorite: Mort Kondracke’s view that the Pope’s statement “looks like a change of position on the part of the church.” I guess I’m grateful he didn’t rank it on a scale of one to ten.

THE NEW YORK TIMES VERSUS GAY MARRIAGE: No, you weren’t hallucinating. The paper that has, to its immense credit, pioneered gay equality in its editorials and inclusion of gay issues in its general coverage, won’t allow gay married couples to announce their unions in the Times’ Weddings announcement pages. And this despite the fact that the weddings section on Sunday is published in the gayest section of the paper – the Sunday Styles section. The New York Observer reports on a correspondence between one half of a gay couple planning to marry this August 30 in Vermont and the paper. Bottom-line: gay couples, even those married under a law that the Times itself endorsed, are personae non gratae in the Times’ pages. As a Times spokesman put it, “the editors have concluded that the civil unions in Vermont fall short of equivalency to marriage in significant respects, and our wedding pages are still confined to marriages.” Would it be too much to ask of the Times’ editors what exactly those “significant respects” are? The law in Vermont states that civil unions will have exactly the same legal rights and responsibilities as heterosexual marriages. Does the Times concur with the Wall Street Journal that gay marriage isn’t as good as the straight version?

“If Condit were Republican, he should resign. But as a Democrat? Never! Remember, Republicans are supposed to stand for honor, integrity, God, Mom, the flag, apple pie. That’s what makes us Republicans. Democrats stand for lying under oath, cheating, molesting women, selling military secrets and taking bribes from foreign governments. That’s what makes them Democrats.” – Tom Adkins, executive publisher, commonconservative.com.

The peerless Michael Barone makes a classic, conservative case for a Mexican illegal immigrant amnesty in the Journal today. No quibbles here. UPI’s Steve Sailer, however, cautions against this as a purely ethnic political move. Mexican-Americans only made up 3 percent of the voting population in 2000 – and most were concentrated in Texas and California, two states that are largely out of electoral play for the foreseeable future. But Sailer misses, I think, the broader political point. Such an amnesty wouldn’t just please Latino voters. It would be a bold statement of a compassionate conservatism that would resonate with centrists and suburbanites. Even Paul Berman in Slate describes the move as “immense” and rightly thinks that “on this one very important question, Bush has gone a lot further than Gore would ever have gone.” In short, it’s a master-stroke, playing to Bush’s strengths. I hope the administration doesn’t get spooked by its paleo wing and sticks with this one.

“It is not uncommon for American students to visit Europe with three clothing items jammed in a backpack, but then again, they mostly dine at McDonald’s. In a similar situation, invited to lunch with the queen, every woman I have ever met in my entire life would have cried: ”I don’t have anything to wear!” But perhaps denims are Barbara [Bush]’s native garb. It is perfectly appropriate for a Japanese woman to wear a kimono to the palace, or an Indian a sari. Perhaps Texans wear jeans as their traditional costume. Using the same loophole, she could have added a Dale Earnhardt T-shirt.” – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times.

Maybe the president was listening to the Pope. But the trial balloon of last week, offering amnesty to three million illegal Mexican immigrants, and the latest version of it (we’re down to two million now), is perhaps the boldest initiative of the Bush administration yet. It’s good policy – since many of these would-be Americans are now living under the penumbra of criminality. And it’s great politics – managing to put the Democrats on the defensive and woo an important voting bloc. Bush and Rove realize that if they win the same share of the minority vote in 2004 as they did in 2000, they’re finished. They need something big like this to make a real impression. I was glad my own magazine, The New Republic, saw this last week – and were non-partisan enough to welcome it. One other small suggestion. Immigration issues could also help woo the gay vote. Most other western countries now allow some means of immigration for foreign same-sex spouses and all of them allow unrestricted immigration for people with HIV. If the Bushies found a way to move immigration law on these matters as well, the impact on another winnable bloc could be enormous.

SO WHO NEEDS A HATE CRIME LAW?: The crazed gunman who killed one person and wounded six after opening fire in a Roanoke, Virginia, gay bar has just received four life-terms for his crime. He was prosecuted in a conservative state under existing laws, just as Matthew Shepard’s murderers were. More evidence of the complete pointlessness of hate crimes laws – except to further balkanize this country.

MURDEROUS LOGIC: Bob Herbert spluttered yesterday in what is, even for him, an unusually elevated spasm of self-righteousness. His target? The evil tobacco companies. They are guilty of “moral treachery” (who are they betraying exactly?). Their product has a “murderous aspect” to it. (Murderous? You mean Philip Morris is forcing people to smoke to death?) After the moralizing, Herbert’s real beef turns out to be a study that Philip Morris sponsored that shows that in the Czech Republic, smoking actually saves the government money, because people die at earlier ages and so do not need the expensive pensions and health-care that cost the state a fortune. Herbert doesn’t actually refute the study – in fact, he suggests it’s true. It may also be true in the United States – especially if we enact the vast drug entitlements that Herbert supports for the elderly. But this debate apparently cannot be held. In classic p.c. fashion, Herbert quotes an anti-smoking lefty to the effect that “Philip Morris’s cynical disregard for the lives of Czech citizens, using an economic argument rejected in the U.S., illustrates the need for global controls.” But who exactly has ‘rejected’ this economic argument? We don’t know. But we do know that one of the arguments used to penalize these companies for selling a legal product is that smoking costs everyone money in health-care costs. So long as this argument is wielded, it’s completely fair for it to be examined empirically. If smoking actually saves the government money, then this is something we should know. And if it’s true, then that’s one less specious argument for the trial lawyers, nanny-statists, and sanctimonious populists who now dominate this debate.

P-TOWN MOMENT: Just got back from ‘Showgirls.’ How to describe this Provincetown phenomenon? I guess at some level it’s best summed up as a pro-am drag variety show. Every Monday night, a sublime, twisted genius called Ryan Landry hosts a contest for the best drag act in town. It started modestly several years ago – I’ve now been a regular for five seasons – and has now become almost the equivalent of the town weekly mass. Everyone shows up – townies, tourists, muscle-boys, geeky young lesbians, aspiring drag queens, and local freaks. Like the Oscars, it goes on for ever, and the most compelling acts are often the worst. Tonight’s show featured Varla Jean Merman, the big-boned love child of Ethel Merman and Ernest Borgnine, singing an operatic version of “Disco Inferno,” and a post-modern Shirley Bassey singing “This is my life,” brandishing a box of Life cereal. Ryan cavorts in one ridiculous outfit after another (my favorites are a Mr. Ed horse’s head and a shapeless white thing supposed to be an egg), and sings song-parodies that take regular digs at local characters and merciless fun of gay culture – all out of love, of course. I try never to miss it. Along with impromptu garden readings and drag queens munching pizza at 1am, it’s what makes this place so captivating, and in all its freakiness, the closest I’ve ever come to feeling home.

“When a young United States would not accept anything it felt was a threat, the result was the extermination of Indians and the enslavement of Africans. The young presidency of George Bush, from forcing the carbon monoxide of American cigarettes into South Korea to forcing the rest of the planet to accept the carbon dioxide of our cars, has shown that not even the air inside and outside our lungs will stand in his way. Then again, we may not have to worry much about breathing, given how Bush also wants to break the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty …” – Derrick Z. Jackson, Boston Globe.

SPECIAL KAY AND SEX: Two new pieces posted today. I guess vacation’s over. Check them out opposite.