Category: Old Dish

Priceless Drudge link to a story about Janet Reno’s butch return to Florida. She’s got a used red pick-up truck; she’s walking barefoot through the grass; she’s got Patsy Cline on the tape player; she’s looking to go kayaking soon in the Everglades. Good on yer, Janet. Just don’t forget your Birkenstocks.

“Since 1997, for example, the rate of HIV infections in San Francisco’s gay male population has more than doubled, a trend scientists fear is duplicating itself in other cities.” – Jessica Reaves, Time magazine this week. For why the statistics simply don’t bear this out, see, ‘The HIV NON-SURGE,” archived in the Dish in the link at the bottom of this column. But did she even read the report? I emailed to ask her. Watch this space.

To say that I was taken aback by the response to my little column on Ronald Reagan is an understatement. I wrote it quickly, on deadline, when another idea fell through. In fact, I didn’t realize how strongly I felt until I wrote it. So thank you for the hundreds of emails and thousands of visitors to this site – and to Rush Limbaugh who read it all out loud and got a lump in his throat at the end. I’m told it was even read aloud in the Congress today. Who knew? Anyway, I can’t think of any better way to celebrate Reagan’s 90th birthday than to reprint here some of the emails I received. They all form different perspectives on the greatest president of my lifetime. Their very diversity is a tribute to his extraordinary reach. Here they are.

NEW YORK CITY: “My family came to the U.S. from a communist country, and I will be eternally grateful to President Reagan for what he did. He changed the world. I’m not a sentimental person, but reading your piece made me cry. How does one thank President Reagan for understanding what it was like for the millions behind the Iron Curtain, and for saying it out loud, for decades, firmly and with resolve, to a cadre of mocking politicians and media.”

NORTH CAROLINA: “I served in the US Navy in the last year of Reagan’s presidency. In that year, our sense of optimism was so very high, and the world, in spite of (or perhaps due to) the Cold War, was a fairly predictable place. In my heart of hearts, I believe that it was the steady hand of Reagan on the national throttle that held the situation in check. After his departure, things were never the same. President Bush tried to keep it going, but with the notable exception of Desert Storm, the enthusiasm just wasn’t there.”

RUSSIA: “Hello, again from Russia. I just wanted to drop you a quick note on your ode to Ronald Reagan. I am freezing my ass off here, but the warmth of your tribute was as if I was reading it, seated in front of a cozy fire in a man and dog chair, covered in an afghan and sipping a hot beverage.”

ADDRESS UNKNOWN: “I saw on TV a few years ago an interview with the Secret Service agent who was with Reagan when he was shot. At first, Reagan didn’t appear to be hurt, and they started back to the White House. But then he complained to the agent (wish I could remember his name!) that, “When you jumped on me, I think you broke a rib.” The agent then decided maybe a trip to the hospital instead of going to the White House might be wise. Obviously, it was. The agent told the TV interviewer that when he was a boy, he had seen a movie about the Secret Service. He was so impressed, he saw it a few more times, and made up his mind to become an agent someday. Obviously, he did. Who starred in that movie? The subject of your marvelous Times’ piece, Ronald Reagan.”

ADDRESS UNKNOWN: “Reagan’s writing not only reflects humor but a pithy quality that evinces the care of his thought. The great problem today is that most so-called experts and pundits prefer the use of jargon which obfuscates thought to the uninitiated, but says little to anyone else. The sad fact of modern life is that very few writers are willing to put in the hard work of thought distillation required to write clearly. The most successful people are capable of explaining the basics of any idea to anyone without regard to the educational attainment of the listener or reader. Therein lay Reagan’s genius. Anyone can use jargon.”

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA: “There is one thing you forgot to mention about him. There was something else he did for us, something I’ve always thought was very special. I’ve never known a time in my short 47 years that I’ve seen the American people doubt themselves, but in the mid- to late-1970s they came close. I can remember the insane, 10-year debacle of Vietnam, dissolution with America’s institutions (that had as much to do with the arrogant, wicked Vietnam war as it did with arrogant wicked Nixon), and the rusting of America’s industries (This last one seems incredible now, but I can remember Donald Peterson of Ford taking a question from a reporter, asking what would happen if Ford had to stop making automobiles. He answered the question seriously.). Everything we knew was wrong, everything we did was in question, and it seemed for all the world that after 200 years of spectacular success, there wasn’t a thing in the world that we could do right. Ronald Reagan’s gift to us was that, while we may have doubted America, he never did. Even better, he was there for us at just the time that we needed him. On his watch, we exported American culture: our music, our way of life, and our form of democracy. America was exporting the light of Liberty and that meant that Communism didn’t stand a chance. We were back. We became the world’s “shining city on a hill,” or whatever term he used. In short, Ronald Reagan did nothing less than restore us as a nation. The restoration was so complete that not even the last eight years of abuse could diminish its luster. The only other political figures I can name from the last century that can compare with Reagan are Roosevelt and Churchill. I think that’s pretty damn heady company for somebody who co-starred in a lousy movie with a chimpanzee.”

ADDRESS UNKNOWN: “I didn’t really like Reagan until 1980 – his portrayal in the media was that of a washed up right wing actor dunce. I remember in boarding school in 1976 a teacher asked everyone at lunch who they wanted for president. One brave soul said “Ronald Reagan” and the teacher (a boob) led others in derisive and riotous laughter. The very notion!”

ADDRESS UNKNOWN: “I first saw Ronald Reagan and shook his hand when I was in Junior High School, but I had no idea how he would shape the lives of everybody in this country. How would anyone have known? He seemed to always bring an air of formality and strength to the presidency. I don’t think anyone after him has been able to match it. When Ronald Reagan spoke it seemed like everybody wanted to see what he had to say, unlike the Clinton crowd. I think meeting him was one of my fondest memories of growing up and when I think back that is usually one of the first things that pops into my mind. I can remember today just as clearly as the day it happened.”

Yeah, right. Look at the percentage cuts in Bush’s plan. The poorest earners get a 33 percent cut in their income taxes; the lower middle class gets a 46 percent cut; the upper middle class gets a 30 percent cut; the most successful get a 17 percent cut. That’s regressive? Why hasn’t this point been put across more clearly?

“There must have been a lot of gay men in Cuba who didn’t make their lives as impossible as Arenas did. Consider the character of Diego in “Strawberry and Chocolate,” the 1995 movie by the great Cuban director Tomas Gutierrez Alea. The movie is set in 1979, Diego is clearly gay, and yet he lives more or less as he wants to, because he is clever and discreet. There is a little something of the spoiled masochist about Arenas. One would not say he seeks misery, but he wears it like a badge of honor, and we can see his mistakes approaching before he does. This is not a weakness in the film but one of its intriguing strengths: Arenas is not presented as a cliche, as the heroic gay artist crushed by totalitarian straightness, but as a man who might have been approximately as unhappy no matter where he was born.” This is hyper-liberal Roger Ebert reviewing “Before Night Falls.” Maybe he thinks there was a bit of a spoiled masochist in Solzhenitsen as well. And maybe Ebert thinks being locked up for being a gay writer is no big deal in Castro’s socialist paradise. You think he might enoy a tour of duty himself in one of Castro’s concentration camps? It’s all for the revolution, Roger. And only spoiled masochists complain about such things.

Well if Rush Limbaugh can read it out loud on his show, y’all should get a look at it yourself. I’m sorry it’s a little sentimental, but I loved the guy, ok? My mash-note to Reagan on his 90th birthday is printed opposite.

The Clintons, I mean. Today’s Washington Post scoop of their absconding with gifts solicited for and accepted by the White House as part of a renovation project is simply jaw-dropping. Hilarious, as well. Cheesier? The Bonnie and Clyde of the 90s stole some of the White House furniture! I guess I can stop feeling guilty for that time I purloined some toilet paper from Buckingham Palace.

“George Bush says he’s for election reform. Reform this: I say, park the state police cars, take down the roadblocks, stop asking people of color for multiple forms of ID, print readable ballots, open the polling places, count all the votes, and start practicing democracy in America again. President Bush, will you join me in calling for those reforms? … If Katherine Harris, Jeb Bush, Jim Baker and the Supreme Court hadn’t tampered with the results, Al Gore would be president, George Bush would be back in Austin and John Ashcroft would be home reading Southern Partisan magazine.” – Terry McAuliffe, new DNC chairman, and FOB. As a quotation, it’s almost a perfect example of what’s wrong with some Democrats right now. First off, it’s malicious. Rather than talking about the need to reform bad voting machinery and improving access to polls, McAuliffe subtly implies that George W. Bush was deliberately behind a campaign to disenfranchise black voters in Florida. There’s simply no evidence for it. It’s worth remembering that black turn-out in Florida was up 70 percent on 1996, and went 93 percent for Gore, and that no Republican candidate ever tried so hard for black votes than W. In a perfect world, with no confusing ballots (designed by a Democrat), no misleading instructions, like ‘vote on every page’ (given by Democrats), or bad machinery (in precincts controlled mainly by Democrats) that would have been a 72 percent increase, and probably enough to hand Gore the election. But the world wasn’t perfect – a regrettable fact, and one that could not be fairly rectified after the election without severe risk of fraud, distortion and chaos. So what do the Dems do? Insinuate that it was all a plot, play up racial paranoia and resentment, and use words like “tamper” to suggest illegal ballot-stuffing or fraud, for which there is no evidence. The truth is we have never stopped practicing democracy. It’s just that democracy isn’t perfect. And it sure isn’t improved by vicious, ad hominem, pandering rhetoric like McAuliffe’s.

Saw a beautiful painting of a movie last night – a sprawling, vivid, sensual, lung-filling account of the life of Reinaldo Arenas, the Cuban writer. The movie, directed by Julian Schnabel, is a delirious evocation of life before, during, and after the Cuban “revolution.” I have rarely seen a more searing anti-Communist statement. One of the most glaring ironies of the Left’s continuing soft spot for Castro’s dictatorship is Cuba’s own merciless persecution of homosexuals. Arenas was hounded, slandered, imprisoned, shoved in a cell so tiny he couldn’t stand up, raped, and sent to a concentration camp. What I admired about Arenas was not just his devotion to his writing, epitomized by the brilliant memoir, Before Night Falls, but his conviction that political freedom included the freedom to seek pleasure. We are so used in this culture to seeing the right as puritanical, we do not often see how adamant the far left has often been against sex, love, irreverence, rebellion of all kinds. Arenas was an unapologetic pursuer of sexual freedom. Even when he was essentially crushed, he never capitulated to the soulless, lifeless order that Communism imposed. It says something, doesn’t it, that the anti-communist right has barely mentioned this movie, and the cultural left has barely celebrated it. In the New York Times review, Stephen Holden put Arenas’ dissident witness this way: “When the Communist revolution on which he had pinned his inchoate boyhood hopes clamped down on Cuba’s free-for-all sexual climate and threw homosexuals in prison camps, Arenas began to throw a lifelong tantrum.” Tantrum? It’s a tantrum to protect your writing from censorship and your friends from concentration camps? Go see the movie. The truth is out there.

Perhaps the best sign of how Bush is cleaning the opposition’s clock is the incoherence of the left-liberal intelligentsia. They have no clue what to say now. For the longest time, they portrayed Bush as simply a moron. Then he won the election, the post-election, the p.r. war of the transition and now the first two weeks in office. How smart can a moron be? Then they decided to describe him as a tool of the far right, symbolized by the Ashcroft nomination. D’oh! Wrong again. He spent his first week proposing a centrist education program that even his critics deem a step toward federalization of education standards. He spent the next week, touring faith ministries for the disadvantaged, touting his new, and broadly popular, plan to support private religious agencies with federal money. Next week comes his tax cut proposal, derided in the campaign as a give-away to the rich (despite the fact that its cuts for the poor are proportionally equal to its cuts for the successful). Greenspan is now in favor if it; the public is in favor of it; the Dems are in favor of it. Meanwhile the big news for Democrats is the continuing Clinton sleaze, the McAuliffe take-over of the DNC, and Jesse Jackson’s use of tax exempt funds to bankroll his mistress. Way to go, guys! So what to do? The left hasn’t been this befuddled since Clinton screwed them five years ago. So they revert to form. Frank Rich ridicules the Washington press corps for falling for W and says his punctuality is reminiscent of Mussolini! Tony Lewis changes the subject. The rest wring their hands over Ashcroft, despite the fact that the most anti-abortion American politician is now required to enforce Roe vs. Wade, a huge liberal victory, which they insist on seeing as a defeat. The real problem is that they have yet to take W seriously. Their own snobbery is preventing them from a real strategy to engage and defeat him. Sounds like Reagan all over again.