Category: Old Dish

A Texan correspondent points out that, given her educational background, Molly Ivins’ hick routine is more than a little phony. He also retells a story he heard from someone in the state capitol in Austin: “Then-Governor Bush was hosting a party. Ivins, as an all too prominent journalist, was in attendance and probably a bit too inebriated. She made a point of talking loudly and obscenely in the governor’s presence, playing the gauche rustic. Without losing a beat, Bush turned to her and said, “You sure have come a long way from Smith [college], Molly.” Apparently, that shut her up. It takes a village idiot.

Catching a plane today to London. The flight will give me a chance to catch up on my correspondence – I’m 200 emails behind. I’ll be posting regularly from over there, so they might have an Anglo tinge. I’m doing a New York Times Magazine story on the newish Conservative Party leader in Britain, William Hague, who happens to be an old college friend of mine. He’ll be up against Blair in May, in all likelihood. I’ll be five hours ahead so don’t worry if I seem to be posting pieces in the middle of the night. Not that I don’t do that already. But this time, I’ll have an excuse.

So Denise Rich takes the fifth on the connections between her husband’s pardon and her own fundraising for Clinton. I know we’re not supposed to legally infer guilt from such a statement, but I’m perfectly entitled to infer guilt morally. The same Fox News story says she has given an “enormous sum of money” to the Clinton library. Enormous by Rich’s standards? She must have bankrolled half of it! It’s all beginning to make more sense now.

The mail is running overwhelmingly in favor of an honors system to keep this show on the road. We’ll set something up soon. Better than pop-up ads or other paraphernalia. I’m also very heartened by your support. Watch this space.

Great point by Virginia Postrel, one of the smartest libertarians out there. She points out on her website, vpostrel.com, that Ronald Reagan was highly educated for his class and age: “For a working class kid born in 1911 – especially for the son of a drunken ne’er-do-well – he was unusually well educated. Attention elite journalists: Ronald Reagan wasn’t a baby boomer. He did not even go to school on the G.I. Bill. Reagan graduated from college during the Depression – something precious few people of his generation, and hardly any of his social background did. According to a 1962 Census study, only 6.7 percent of American men born between 1908 and 1917 whose fathers were in “manual and service” jobs had four-year college degrees; only 9.6 percent of all U.S. men that age did. So Reagan was not only intelligent. He had more schooling than 90 percent of other American men his age.” That would make him, well, smarter than Molly Ivins.

Amazon.com has just launched a new scheme to help pay for websites just like this one. It’s a form of honors system, where you can click on a small button on the andrewsullivan.com site, and get taken to an Amazon page where you can sign up to donate a micro-payment to support this site if you feel like it. The payments start at $1. I’ve been talking to people about web alliances and advertising and sponsorship in order to keep this show on the road, but one of the joys of writing for this page is the freedom from any of those constraints. No editors to please; no proprietors to flatter; no advertisers to worry about. I’ve been lucky so far. My friends at Fantascope, the brilliant designers who created this page, have largely carried me and my server needs out of charity so far. But soon, we will have to pay a server charge and think about finding a technical and editorial assistant of some sort. This costs money. Believe it or not, I do all this myself now with help from Fantascope in posting full pieces. So here’s a question. Is this arrangement something you readers would be comfortable with? The page would be free, as usual. The donation is entirely voluntary. It doesn’t have to be made every time you visit – or ever at all. Amazon takes a 15 percent cut of the donation to pay for the credit card technology and access fees and customer support. The rest goes to our expenses – modest but growing as fast as the readership. All in all, it’s a way to support sites like this in the post-dot-com world. Let me know if it sounds cheesy or inappropriate. But if I got a buck from one in ten of you a month, we’d be financially secure.

Try, if you can, to make any sense of the latest ramblings from the Bush-hating Texan. I guess she has one micro-point – about the gag rule for abortions abroad leading to possible increases in unwanted pregnancies – but the rest sounds like a drunk falling off his stool at the bar. She lampoons Rick Berke of the New York Times for tracking continuing Democratic Party denial that they actually lost the election. Her evidence for the absurdity of Berke’s piece is that a friend of hers is still in denial about Bush’s victory. Then she claims that, “the profoundly dumb people in Washington are going around saying, “Recessions are good for you.” I love this line of argument, especially from pundits who make more than $1 million a year.” Man, I’d love to be that pundit. But which million-dollar plus pundit has said something along those lines? Where? Oh, never mind. Then there’s this odd peroration: “The working people who never got ahead at all in the ’90s are the very ones who will be losing their jobs now, and the fatuous complacency with which the prospect is being greeted is another example of a disconnect so enormous that it’s funny.” Is she unaware of the recession-busting effort to slash taxes on Capitol Hill? Does she know that Greenspan has just cut rates again? And is this Clinton-Gore supporter who spent most of last year saying that Bush would wreck the prosperity now saying no ordinary people benefited? Has she looked at any economic data to support her claim? Oh, never mind, again. Arguing with someone like Ivins is not a felicitous experience. I wouldn’t care except that Ivins’ main claim to fame is her constant invocation of W’s alleged stupidity. But if W is stupid, what does that make Ivins?

I’m waiting for Terry McAuliffe to start protests over this week’s Israeli election. With a ballot just for prime minister, and only two candidates, some 78,385 votes were deemed invalid. That means, in Gorespeak, they weren’t even counted. The invalid votes comprise 3 percent of the voters in an election where only 59 percent voted. Suspicious, huh? That invalid rate is only a mite lower than Florida’s – and the turnout is amazingly low. I think Jesse Jackson should go over and protest all those people who were clearly intimidated at the polls, confused by misleading ballots – especially any Holocaust survivors he could get in from of a camera. Or send Ron Klain. He’ll get to the bottom of this. Maybe he’d stay a while as well.

That was our old nickname for Harvey C. Mansfield, my old political philosophy professor at Harvard. The more common nickname was Harvey C-minus Mansfield, because he was such a tough grader. I remember one grading session (I taught as a teaching assistant for several of his wonderful classes) when I sheepishly brought in my stack of student grades. “Are there any of these B-minuses we could turn into C-pluses?” he mischievously asked, a twinkle in his often smiling eyes. In my two years of teaching for him, I only gave out two As. For years, he resisted the rampant grade inflation at Harvard, a process begun, as he bravely points out, when some black students first began being admitted under racial preference guidelines. (Before that, African-American students won their places on their academic merits and had no need for the condescending racism that now passes itself off as affirmative action in most of our universities.) Now, he has accepted that that’s unfair to his own students and has decided to give out two separate grades for his classes – the meaningful one, representing their actual work, and the phony one, representing the new, lowest common denominator standards of Harvard and many other universities, in which 51 percent of students get an A or A-minus. Good for Harvey. The combination of racial sensitivity, the cult of self-esteem, and the decline of serious standards in the humanities have been fatal to meaningful academic standards. And it’s typically ballsy of the man to take it on alone.

The results are in. There’s no way Bush won the popular vote. He’s almost 600,000 behind. A couple of souls made some honest mistakes in early calculations. Thanks to those of you who set the record straight.