Category: Old Dish

Polly Toynbee, a kind of British Molly Ivins without the humor. I just caught up with her recent screed against America in the Guardian of London, but it’s a classic all right – a primal scream from the id of the European left. Entitled, “America The Horrible,” the piece contains this juicy morsel: “The rest of the world draws instinctively together in its repudiation of the Bush Jnr White House. Through this strange global vandalism, the leader of the free world has become the rogue. Ungracious in victory, absolute power corrupting absolutely, the only super-power is morphing into an evil empire of its own.” America as the evil empire. How soon they forget …

There are so many emails in my mailbox from Free Republic posters disavowing the anti-gay emailer I posted that I cannot answer them all. But they seem to me to be a pretty good refutation of the guy’s position. It occurs to me that when a red-blooded conservative website can generate so many tolerant and open-minded responses, things are not too wrong with the world. I didn’t post the email to garner sympathy – I just thought it revealing after the other rant I had just read. I posted it for balance mainly. But I’m really taken aback by the generosity and support of other Freepers. Thanks. It confirms my suspicion that there are now more open minds on the right than the left.

HOME NEWS: A few things to report. We’re now well past $8,000 in donations, although they’ve slowed to a trickle. We’ve put the money into a redesign that should see the light of day by the end of the month. We’ll soon have a separate letters page; better copying and email options; and a book review section – an archive of every book review I’ve ever written, with recommendations. In a while, I want to start a book club. We’ll assign one book a month, and in the third week of the month, I’ll post my review, and post your responses and reviews as well. Whaddya think? Next week, we’re also becoming a kind of satellite site for Slate. Don’t worry. Bill Gates isn’t taking over. Slate is just going to post a small excerpt every day from the Dish and provide a link to as.com. Literally millions of Tim Noah fans are going to be storming the barricades soon. Or something like that. Slate gets to be more of a portal for web-stuff. We get more traffic. We stay completely independent. I don’t get a cent, but I thought it was a good deal. Salon already posts a link regularly, if they think there’s something worth reading. In other news, we had a sliver under 120,000 readers for March. That’s enough for serious advertising dollars. We’ll keep you posted. Meanwhile: THANKS for coming back so often.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the Senate whittles W’s tax cut down to $1.2 trillion. Let’s also say some of the balance of the cuts are shifted to take place sooner and further down the income scale. Will that be a terrible defeat for Bush? I don’t think so. By the summer, he will have cut taxes by a hefty amount and signed a campaign finance reform bill – not bad for his first six months. Large amounts of this will not have been his personal agenda, but so what? Very, very few presidents get to dictate the agenda. Remember Clinton’s first budget? His defeat on the BTU tax and the “stimulus package” left him raging about becoming “Eisenhower Republicans,” and had Democrats fretting about his irrelevance. But the 1993 budget was the corner-stone of his future economic success. Ditto W. Bush’s big selling points are still a) he’s not a sleaze like, er, you know who; b) he can get along with both sides; c) he’s a moderate conservative like most Americans. A more modest tax cut will be fine. If the economy recovers later this year or next, there will be time for another tax cut soon enough. As long as he keeps spending under control, there’s no reason to panic. Most of the cards are still in his hands. Of course, he will go down fighting so as to avoid the appearance of ditching his hard-core conservative allies like his daddy did. But that’s part of the game-plan too, isn’t it, Karl? Moderation with deniability. Almost as good as triangulation as a political strategy.

TAXED ONCE: Michael Kinsley does a far far better job than I could showing why for most wealthy people, the money they have accumulated for their estate was never taxed as income in the first place. The “taxed-twice” argument against the estate tax is baloney. The column effectively ends this particular sub-debate. Good to see Kinsley back on riveting form.

NUTS, AND OTHER MOVIES: I didn’t think it was possible to parody Barbra – but Chris Buckley has.

“As a proud freeper and conservative, it embarrasses me that a homosexual like you is allowed to post to the [Free Republic] site. You homosexuals are perverts and have no place in a conservative forum. Your gay agenda will NEVER be accepted in the conservative movement.” – an email received today from the other side of the fence. (By the way, I didn’t post anything. Someone else must have.)

DERBYSHIRE AWARD CONTENDER: “Chinese President Jiang Zemin says, “The U.S. side should apologize to the Chinese people.” Well, I will be in favor of apologizing the moment they apologize for all of those menus they keep leaving outside my front door… In fact, I’ve got considerable sympathy for the Red Chinese – despite the fact that if my dog were a member of the American crew Jiang Zemin would have eaten him by now.” – Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online. Crikey, Jonah. Can’t you find someone else to make jokes about? Like victims of the Bangladeshi earthquake or something?

Runaway favorite this week is Al Sharpton. According to the Jerusalem Post, Sharpton compared the Florida vote-count to, yes, Hitler’s Final Solution. “The reality is that Hitler in his wickedness and evil burned millions of Jews and the only reason he didn’t burn millions of blacks is because there were no blacks,” in Europe, said Sharpton in a debate with Rabbi Shmuley Boateach. “Conservatives fighting to turn back the clock would do the same thing to us,” he added in a reference to the Florida recount.

IT’S THE COURT, STUPID: Several emailers tell me that the Miami Herald/USA Today recount proves that the real culprits were in the U.S. Supreme Court. By stopping the final recount, they denied Bush a real victory and besmirched themselves. I agree that that ruling was a terrible one. But think about it for a second. This careful media recount took four months. The final, haphazard Florida recount would have had less than four days to come to conclusion. Do you think that any count under those conditions would have resolved every doubt? In some ways, I have come to believe that SCOTUS should be perversely admired for what they did. They did indeed wreck their credibility. But they were all that stood between us and near electoral anarchy. Thanks, Nino.

HATE-MAIL: The Boston gay paper, Bay Windows, has just run a screed on the Dirkhising case. Well, actually, it’s largely a personal screed against me. Here’s a section I reproduce not for masochistic reasons, but simply as an example of the hatred that motivates some on the left, a hatred that leads them to demonize their opponents. Privately, the writer has also emailed me, threatening to expose my sex life, and using four-letter words in every other sentence to express his anger. For the record, I have never ever made fun of Matthew Shepard’s death. I have simply mocked some politicians’ attempts to use it for political gain. And for the record, I took pains to criticize the anti-gay motives behind some of the coverage of the Dirkhising case. Here’s the passage: “Assisting [the religious right] has been the ever helpful gay neo-con Andrew Sullivan, who has now become a parody of himself. (Motto: “I love gay sex, but hate gay people.”) Sullivan, who makes fun of Matthew Shepard’s death, and who uses that death to tout his opposition to hate-crimes laws, points out in The New Republic that, yes indeed, Shepard’s death did garner far more coverage than Dirkhising’s death — as if that alone is proof that the Right’s charges about Dirkhising are true. Give that Brit an “F” in statistical analysis! I will never understand why people still listen to Sullivan. Perhaps it’s the British accent. Perhaps it’s the Harvard and Oxford lineage. But Sullivan’s creepily self-serving Dirkhising piece in TNR alone should be proof enough finally that he’s lost it on gay civil rights issues – and that there is no depth to which he will not sink to prove his I’m-really-one-of-you credentials to the lying, conniving right wing in this country.” Charming, huh? The voice of modern liberalism in all its open-minded glory.

I now realize that my own position on ballot-counting – that only the cleanly punched hole should count – was the only position that would have given Gore a wafer-thin victory. When I wrote that in The New Republic, my Gore-supporting colleagues couldn’t have disagreed more. Part of my argument was that such a clean rule would have been consonant with Gore’s traditional position defending civic responsibility rather than the leftist claptrap he spewed during the campaign. In other words, if Gore had stuck to his centrist principles, he might have won. In fact, the only way he could have won was by sticking to his principles. For all the posturing on all sides, it turns out I was a better friend to Gore than his acolytes were.

It’s great that W doesn’t seem to have a spin operation going on. But the latest news that he’s relaxing salmonella standards for beef in schools should have set some alarm bells off. Whether it’s carbon dioxide or arsenic, each of these decisions makes some sort of sense, but taken together, the impact is unmistakable. Bush to Country: Go drink some arsenic, get salmonella poisoning, and bake till you burn. It’s the kind of stuff Bob Herbert stays up at night dreaming about. Hey, there, Karen Hughes! You got a job? Do it!

LISTEN TO GEORGE: “The bottom line is that this undercuts the Democrats’ argument that the Republicans stole the election by having the Supreme Court stop the count. Democrats will still be able to say somehow that they were robbed because of unfair ballots . . . but they can’t say that the Supreme Court took away their rights and would have cost them the election.” – George Stephanopoulos on ABC News. Good for George, who’s a decent person, finally shedding his Clintonian sludge. How long before Terry McAuliffe coughs this one up? Oh, never mind.

But my old professor Harvey C. Mansfield has written a pellucid piece defending his war on grade inflation – which he now conducts with the only weapon at his disposal, irony – in, of all places, the Chronicle of Higher Education. I remember his stern admonitions and sometimes opaque utterances that he encouraged his students to unravel. That’s why, of all my teachers, I remember him most vividly. He had – how can I put this? – authority. Students and children love authority. And they love to be challenged. Harvey rightly says that “there is something inappropriate — almost sick — in the spectacle of mature adults showering young people with unbelievable praise.” And making a full 50 percent of Harvard grades A or A- is, indeed, sick. Why would anyone bother to strive for excellence – real excellence – when its symbol, a Harvard A, is all but guaranteed? Reading this piece, I realized for the first time what a true scandal this is; and why a great deal of our cultural rot is related to it.

Hilarious example of over-spin from Britain. Last Sunday, Prime Minister Tony Blair arrived back early from his country retreat to grapple manfully with the foot-and-mouth crisis. The trouble was, he got back too early and entered Number 10, Downing Street, by the back entrance. Realizing he’d missed a great photo-op, the PM subsequently emerged from the front door, got into his car, went for a ride around the block for fifteen minutes and then came back to enter through the front door again and get all the usual photographs of the great leader getting back to work. This story is recounted in the Daily Telegraph. When was it James Carville and Stanley Greenberg went over to give advice?

A reader points out the odd opening sentence of Barbra Streisand’s memo to the Democratic leadership. It says: “This is a key moment in our history. We cannot let the right wing roll back thirty years of social progress.” Thirty years, huh? So social progress began in 1971 under Richard Nixon, that great old liberal. And of those thirty years, eighteen were under Republican presidents. Maybe the impending catastrophe won’t be so terrible after all.