Category: Old Dish

“I have religiously read the Tribune daily for nearly 41 years. I have enjoyed most of the op-ed columns because they made me think, sometimes because I disagreed with them. I look forward to arriving at the editorial and op-ed pages each day, but I may have to do something else with my time if a particular writer continues to appear. The first time she appeared, I tossed it off that the editor had a lapse of judgment. When it happened again March 8, I had to write you. Even the Sun-Times does not consistently have such poor writing with no redeeming value as the tripe that I have found in the two articles by Molly Ivins… In 41 years of reading your paper I have never commented on a single writer, but Ivins is just blather that I once mouthed when I did not know any better. Some of the more liberal writers come dangerously close to my just ignoring them, but I usually read them anyway. Please, no more of this excuse of a writer.” – today’s Chicago Tribune.

BEGALA AWARD NOMINATIONS: Two new entries for excessive, overblown and often untrue blather from the left.
“If you had a recount today, Al Gore would get 90 percent of the vote and Bush would get 10 percent, and Bill Clinton would be the honorary Treasury secretary and we wouldn’t have this economic crisis, because the way the stock market was going we’re all going to be wiped out.” – Harvey Weinstein, Miramax macher. (Memo to Weinstein: Bush’s approval ratings are at 60 percent.)
“Today, the AIDS czar was axed; by the time you read this, more serious damage will undoubtedly be done. So just as the AIDS community battles with demon downsizing, a more dangerous foe – the People With Aids-hating right wing – has seized power.” – Walter Armstrong, editor of POZ magazine, for people with HIV and AIDS. (Memo to Armstrong: the AIDS office hasn’t been axed.)

PILL-POPPERS: Some fashionable delusions about curing AIDS in Africa examined opposite in my latest TRB. Check it out.

Smart piece by Charles Krauthammer in the Post. He picks up on the demand by Ted and Caroline Kennedy that a private group stop broadcasting an ad that uses clips of JFK in defense of Bush’s tax cut. The Kennedys argue that JFK would never have backed Bush’s cut. (Full disclosure: I am good friends with the younger generation, and godfather to one of the youngest). Charles, however, points out that JFK’s view of George W Bush’s tax cut is unknowable and, besides, Kennedy cut the top rate by a third and W cuts it by a sixth. But the more important point is that John F Kennedy’s actions as president are not owned by his family. They are public domain – and belong to all of us, to interpret, rebut, praise, or use as we see fit. To use the term “indecent” as Ted Kennedy did to describe citizens using a former president’s words to defend a current president is too much. One can understand the family’s unique and special relationship with JFK – as brother, father, uncle and so on. But his words and actions belong to all of us. That’s the difference between monarchies and democracies. It was a difference JFK understood perfectly well. Pity, it seems, Teddy doesn’t.

IN DENIAL: Allegedly scientific evidence in the New York Times today that Freud was right and we can indeed repress memories that we find unpleasant – to the degree that we forget them altogether. It was Homer Simpson who once advised Bart that the way to deal with unpleasant reality is to mentally roll it up into a little ball, push it down as far as you can go, until it goes away and then you feel better! Or was that Bruce Lindsey advising Bill?

MGM: Two addenda to my circumcision item. No, I wouldn’t favor a ban on the procedure, just an end to its routine implementation. Obviously, Jews and Muslims perform this mutilation for religious reasons. However inexplicable the procedure is today, the right to do this to their baby boys should be upheld. And I concede my use of the term “child abuse” was excessive. I don’t want to minimize the existence of real child abuse, just to insist that this is a minor form of violence against a child’s body for which there is no good reason.

When Boston Globe token conservative Jeff Jacoby pilfered a few items from the Internet for a column, re-wrote them and acknowledged elsewhere that he had borrowed from an email, he was suspendedfor four months. When New Republic star, Ruth Shalit, was discovered to have copied a handful of generic boilerplate sentences in a few long, well-reported, well-written pieces, I suspended her, and saw her suffer professional humiliation. When Larry King rips off almost an entire column directly from the Internet, he finds it funny. “I never pilfered anything. I’m 67 years old,” King said. “This is taking journalism to its nth idiocy. This is berserk. The more I think about it, the funnier it gets. If you find out who was the originator of ‘Maine is a one syllable state,’ I’ll print his picture and apologize on CNN.” King’s column was called “Things I learned while looking up other things.” The list began: “Dreamt is the only English word that ends in the letters ‘mt.’ . . . Almonds are a member of the peach family. . . . Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur. . . . All clocks in the movie ‘Pulp Fiction’ are stuck on 4:20. . . . Two-thirds of the world’s eggplants are grown in New Jersey.” Virtually everything in it can be found on those awful chain emails. Caught red-handed? Facing punishment? USAToday told the San Francisco Chronicle’s Dan Fost that “we have no plans right now to discontinue the column.” Look, I think some of this journalism policing is overdone. But if you’re going to do it, it shouldn’t always be to pummel minor right-of-center writers instead of major talk-show hosts. No wonder King can’t stop laughing.

Interesting anonymous tip. Could the reason for the extreme modesty of the Harvard professor who provided the Washington Post with data showing the wealthy paying more than their fair share be pretty simple? Could he have been the economist who actually provided the Gore campaign with their demagogic “wealthy one percent” rhetoric last fall? Just asking, as they say.

CRAZY COHEN: Richard Cohen gets in a couple of cracks and decent points in his column today. Looked at alone, the Rich pardon was, in Cohen’s words, an “abomination,” but not evidence of psychological problems. But my point was that when you look at the pardons as a whole, and then the Clinton presidency as a whole, and you add up all the bizarre risk-taking, unnecessary lying, constant sleaze, chronic disorganization, and desperation to be liked, I think you can see something else. I didn’t say Clinton was “crazy” or a “lunatic.” I said he had major psychological problems. I stand by that. (Does Cohen think that everyone who needs a shrink is “crazy”?) The trouble with Cohen is that he was a shill for Clinton for so long, one of the classic anti-anti-Clinton pundits, and he cannot now acknowledge his own responsibility in keeping this reckless guy in power. I definitely plead guilty to liking Clinton at first, and hoping for the best. But I supported Dole in 1996 entirely because of Clinton’s by-then glaring character flaws. Cohen, along with almost every other now-apologetic Clinton supporter, stuck with his guy whenever it really mattered, while covering his posterior along the way. It behooves him to throw us off the scent now by accusing me of intemperance. But the real issue is Cohen’s blindness to the reality of the last eight years – and his refusal to come to terms with it, even now.

OH AND: What’s that weird stuff at the end about Clinton being our first black president and that’s the reason for our disdain? Is that some kind of strange implication that opposing Clinton is the same thing as racism? What piffle. If I were black, I’d be insulted by the comparison. I guess it says something about the level of self-esteem among some leading African-Americans that they are actually thrilled to call a lying, philandering, irresponsible, corrupt and pathologically self-destructive person one of their own. Victimology lives and thrives.

Interesting piece today in the Washington Post, pointing out that the richest 400 tax payers pay as much to the feds as the poorest 40 million in taxes. It kind of puts into perspective the constant refrain that Bush’s tax cut mainly benefits the rich. In today’s lopsided economy, any reduction in all tax rates will inevitably benefit the rich. I guess Al Gore wasn’t smart enough to figure that out. The real worry is the danger in a system where increasing numbers of people are consumers of government goodies, and a smaller and smaller number of people pay for more and more of it. This is a recipe for majoritarian tyranny. If we have one-person-one-vote and you can always vote for higher taxes and spending, knowing you won’t ever have to pay for it, why not do so? There’s a reason public spending increased by 8 percent last year under a Republican Congress. And there’s a reason some Republicans are quietly insouciant about possible future deficits under their tax plan. They figure there’s no legitimate way to stop the dependent class voting for more and more, except throwing the government into periodic fits of bankruptcy. There really ought to be a better way.

ONE MORE THING: A reader points out a weird detail in the Post story. The data was “calculated by a Harvard University professor who asked not to be identified.” Why anonymous? Is Harvard so intolerant a place that a professor who points out that the rich pay more than their fair share would suffer ostracism if it were known? The other alternative is modesty. Well, I spent several years at that great university and modesty was to be found purely on the football team.

BY THE WAY: If there’s anyone with time on their hands, and access to Nexis, I’d love to see whether the phrase “president Bush’s tax cut” ever appears in the New York Times without some appendage reiterating how it helps the rich. My bet is that a good 80 percent of the time, the qualifier is surgically attached.

MORE NEWS FROM THE SOVIET UNION: Newsday’s AIDS reporter, Laurie Garrett, has been arguing for years that medications for HIV are next-to-useless poisons promoted by evil capitalists. Now she is reporting about San Francisco’s latest foray into p.c. hell. The city is apparently considering a ban on ads for HIV drugs, on the grounds that most of the ads depict healthy, robust, energetic people making the most of their lives. This is a terribly dangerous development, various nannies worry. The image of healthy people with HIV actually diminishes fear of the disease and may foster more sexual activity. Well we can’t have that, can we? Don’t these people with HIV know they’re supposed to be victims? This proposed ban is the almost perfect expression of a certain kind of leftism. The condescension is part of it – do they not think that gay men can think for themselves? The hatred of the private sector is another. The ability of people with HIV to look after ourselves, combat the disease, take care of our health and, with the help of the pharmaceutical industry, lead better, healthier lives is almost a rebuke to these activists’ entire worldview. They can’t stop people with HIV and AIDS looking good, or working out, so they do the next best thing. They can simply erase any public images of healthy HIV-positive people so as to insist, against all the evidence, that the meds aren’t working.

I guess lots of people will chuckle at the news that one William Stowell is now suing the hospital that circumcized him as a new-born. He claims that he enjoys less sexual pleasure as a result. Actually, I think he has half a point, so to speak. I don’t think he should sue. And I don’t think the issue is sexual pleasure. (A lot of men seem to experience enough sexual pleasure to be finished in five minutes. With foreskin, they could be done in five seconds. Straight women and gay men have a good reason to worry about this.) It’s much simpler. In the absence of a pressing medical problem, it seems to me unconscionable to mutilate infants before they are able to give their consent. When they do this to baby girls, it’s called Female Genital Mutilation, and rightly abhorred. Slicing off your foreskin is nowhere near as damaging as removing the clitoris, of course, but it’s still damage. And damage should only be inflicted, it seems to me, with a person’s consent. I doubt if any grown man with an unmutilated penis would agree to the unnecessary pain and disfigurement unless he really had no better option. So why should we be doing this to children? The situation is even grimmer when you consider that all medical procedures have an error rate. The awful story recounted by John Colapinto about a boy brought up as a girl began with a botched circumcision resulting in the complete destruction of the baby’s genitals. Mercifully, the American Academy of Pediatrics just altered their guidelines to doctors and hospitals against routine circumcision of new-borns, after several generations of medically-enforced child abuse. How about amending it still further to recommend no mutilation unless there is a pressing medical need?

Bill O’Reilly points out something I’d over-looked. Karin Stanford, Jesse’s lover, was given moving expenses after she’d quit her job. She gave two days’ notice and upped and left – prompting Jackson’s Citizenship Education Fund to offer to pay her to move to L.A. As O’Reilly puts it, with his inimitable style, “I’m sure millions of Americans have gotten moving expenses after quitting their jobs – I just can’t think of any right at this moment.”

A reader provides new evidence of our multi-cultural present and future. Driving to work this morning through one of Philly’s historically Italian neighborhoods, he saw a sign in the window: “It’s a boy – Grandchild #15 – Isaac Brendan Panzia!” I think the pot just melted.

FIRST TIPPING POINT BONUS: Flush with a little cash, we’ve rejigged the site a little. From now on the default site will be the lite site. We’ve scrapped the intro page. You can still access the heavy site from the lite site, via a button near the Tipping Point. We found that 80 percent of you were using the lite site, so we decided to give you what you want. More improvements to come.

I’m not an advocate of polls about tax cuts. People have been indoctrinated for so long into thinking that they have no right to keep their own money that they feel guilty admitting it. Nonetheless, today’s New York Times poll has one interesting nugget. In an admirably rare piece of a fair questioning, the poll gave a summary of both the president’s and the Democrats’ budget plans, and asked which was preferable. It said Bush’s would devote a third of the surplus to tax cuts, a third to debt reduction and a third to spending; it then said that the Democrats would use half for debt reduction, and divide the rest between tax cuts and new spending. 57 percent backed Bush’s priorities; while only 49 percent backed the Democrats. That seems significant to me. Why the small majority for Bush? The most persuasive reason given is that 56 percent are afraid of what Congress would do with the money if it were left in Washington. If I were Bush, this is the main theme I would strike. I’d say that the Congress can’t help itself. What did Reagan compare Congress to? A baby: a huge appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other. Why doesn’t W use that line again? The public knows it’s true; all they need is a president who can remind them.

INK, INK, INK: Some flattering pieces about this site you might be interested in. Inside.com reviews the Amazon honor system. Apparently, we’re doing a lot better than others, which, to my mind, is just a sign of how great you guys are. Cruising past $6,000 by the way, which is $6,000 more than Inside.com has yet to make in profit. THANKS AGAIN. The American Spectator Online also just called us “perhaps the single most famous personalized Website in American journalism.” Thanks, Wlady. Logrolling extra: the new Spectator is refreshing and slick as well. And I’ll forgive the Cosmos Club for insisting I wear my Puff Daddy overcoat in the bar next time. Fun having a drink with Bob Tyrell there the other evening. Tyrell has a smile on his face these days that announces VINDICATION everywhere he goes. And he deserves every inch of it.

IS TIM NOAH DUMBER THAN DUBYA?: A new low for Noah in Slate, which is saying something. He waxes on and on and on about how president Bush is stupid – a far worse accusation among Noah’s coterie than, say, adulterer or perjurer. The evidence for W’s dumbness is his obvious lack of knowledge about things Bill Clinton could recite at will at 4 am in the morning, while on the phone to some criminal donor with Monica under the desk. But is that dumb? Or, rather, does that make W “functionally dumber,” to use Noah’s phrase, than Clinton? Intelligence is a multi-faceted thing. There is, for example, a pretty old distinction between theoretical and practical wisdom. (Re-read your Aristotle, Tim.) No-one has ever claimed that W is an intellectual. But he’s clearly canny, shrewd, good with people, efficient and a good manager. These are good qualities and they surely count as functional intelligence – especially in someone supposed to run the government. It also remains indisputable that W pummeled Gore in the three debates last year – in large part because he wasn’t as smart as Gore but a hell of a lot wiser and nicer and more intelligible. I have nothing against eggheads, I should add. I am one, after all. But I am a terrible manager of people, useless at organizing much, bad at schmoozing, good at pissing people off, and not always good at judging character. I’m proud of my work editing The New Republic, but, man, could I have benefited from some of the basic managerial techniques W seems to have mastered. Or to put it another way: I’m probably smarter in some respects than W, but he’s way smarter than me – and most hacks for that matter – in the area he’s working in. And that includes Noah, who is Exhibit A in why most people find clever-dick journalists to be even less appealing than tongue-tied politicians.

I had no idea that the Justice Department actually has funds to help schools combat bullying. Among their recent bequests was a cool $123,000 to, er, Santana High School, site of the recent shooting incident. Just goes to show how effective our government usually is at tackling social problems. Actually, given a couple of incidents I went through at high school, maybe I should apply for reparations.