Category: Old Dish

Have any liberals wondered what will happen if they fail to kill the Ashcroft nomination? They’ll have thrown everything they have at him and he’ll still survive. So what if he’s then nominated for the Supreme Court? Won’t there be over 50 Senate votes on the record in his favor for A.G.? Won’t it be a little hard for them to reverse themselves on a Court appointment? Personally, I think far less deference is owed the president in Supreme Court appointments than in Cabinet ones, and I’d vote against Ashcroft for the Court in a heart-beat. But Senators might be somewhat more constrained. I have a feeling that some liberals are setting themselves up for a fall with their blanket opposition. It’s important to kill the king, not just wound him. Their current campaign could be a dangerously half-assed measure. That Bush guy. He gets shrewder all the time.

Interesting snippet from the Palm Beach Post survey of Miami-Dade County ballots. When all the 10,000 odd ballots with no vote for president were examined, using the most liberal standards imaginable – Bush actually gained votes. The point here is not to say we’ll ever know for sure who really won Florida beyond a shadow of a doubt. The point is rather to quash the notion, gaining ground among elites, that Al Gore obviously won the election and was denied victory because, as President Clinton put it, they stopped counting. Some Democrats need to believe this, because they need to believe that their candidate didn’t completely blow what should have been a landslide, and because they need to distract attention from the unprecedented way in which Gore and his trial-lawyers tried to overturn the result of a presidential election through legal maneuvering. But the truth is almost certainly more complicated; and almost certainly confirms Bush’s legal, constitutional, electoral victory. Of course, this rather important piece of news went completely unreported in the Washington Post and the New York Times. I guess they already know the truth and don’t need any new facts to get in the way.

I’ve long believed that just because our government won’t enforce gay people’s constitutional right to marriage, that doesn’t mean we should act as if we are second-class citizens. If Rosa Parks could resist being moved up the bus, and if civil rights activists could sit still at a segregated lunch counter, then gay men and women can simply get married in a church or civil ceremony and be damned. Be the change you want to see in the world, as Gandhi put it. In Canada, they’ve done just that. A church recently posted marriage banns for three weeks for some gay couples, and after no public objections, the couples were duly married in a religious ceremony. Usually, that means that the state must legally recognize the marriage. So far, the relevant public officials have said they won’t, but any refusal may lead to a court case and ultimately judicial review. Canada’s constitution has a pretty tough Human Rights provision, like the European Union’s, that may well invalidate the blatant discrimination against gay couples under the current law. So equal marriage rights may well come to Canada through an unconventional route. My favorite part of this story is that a church initiated the challenge. This is how it should be with a moral struggle. When homosexual equality comes to this country, I firmly believe it will be because the churches finally realize that it is a betrayal of their religious inheritance to perpetuate discrimination against gay people. It’s happening already. Look at the Reform Jews’ moral stand against the Boy Scouts. Several other denominations are moving fast in the same direction. Now how about the bann strategy being used here?

I’ve been subjected to my fair share of bashing in my time, and some of it even justified, but I’ve never actually read a published letter directed to my boss, Marty Peretz, imploring him to fire me. In a Slate.com Breakfast Table email dialog today, Margo Howard asks Marty, ‘Oh, and do you think you could muzzle Andrew Sullivan? He has obviously been overcome with disdain for Clinton’s personal weaknesses to the point of becoming a Bush booster. I mean, how does an intellectual, Catholic, gay man come to wave his pompoms for that callow kid?’ Howard’s writing is an almost perfect representation of someone so stuck in East Coast intellectual and social snobbery that she can’t even begin to conceive of why an intelligent person might have preferred Bush’s modest conservatism to Gore’s phony populism. After all, Gore is ‘one of us.’ Bush is ‘one of them.’ And notice too how she thinks someone’s political views HAVE to be related to their personal identity. Can a gay man not prefer small government to big government? Can an intellectual not prefer a modest executive type to a micro-managing pseudo-intellectual like Gore? Can a Catholic not support someone who opposes partial birth abortion over someone so funded by NARAL that he’s close to backing infanticide? And by the way, I have never decried Clinton’s personal weaknesses – only his public lies, perjury and obstruction of justice. Small points, I suppose, when Clinton is ‘one of us.’ But notice the left’s instinctive response to someone not towing the party-line: muzzle him. C’mon, Margo. Try.

Yep. It’s nearly over.

Worthwhile piece by Michael Novak in National Review Online about Pentecostalism and the Church-State divide. Novak points out, intelligently, that John Ashcroft’s dissenting forefathers were among the most adamant of those who wanted government to have no role in religious life. The speaking-in-tongues holy rollers of Ashcroft’s faith had the most to fear from more mainline Protestants using the state to enforce orthodoxy. Novak’s point is well-taken. But the fear about Ashcroft is not that he will use his office to mandate ritual anointings with the Holy Spirit, but that he will use his religious faith to make unyielding political decisions which brook little dissent or pluralistic opposition. The problem is not that he will impose religion, but that he will impose a sectarian and often incoherent morality upon a pluralist country. Novak says these fears are unfounded, and I hope he’s right. At the least, I think Ashcroft and Bush should be given the benefit of the doubt, especially since the role of the attorney-general is not to legislate but to enforce existing laws. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t worry.

It’s getting to be pretty clear now what some people believe is the upshot of the razor-thin election result: George W. Bush may get to take the oath of office, but he doesn’t actually get to be president. Two liberal polemics highlight the trend. In today’s New York Times, Harvard professor Michael Sandel simply comes out and says it: ‘Even setting aside the dispute over Florida, the fact that Mr. Bush lost the popular vote means he cannot claim a mandate for a conservative agenda, or for the appointment of ideological proponents who would carry it out.’ In the New Yorker, Rick Hertzberg previews this argument. He says that Gore not only won the national vote but the Florida vote and that Dick Cheney only has the deciding vote in the Senate because of the ‘judicial fiat’ of the U.S. Supreme Court handing the election to Bush. (I wonder how many times Rick has used the term ‘judicial fiat’ when it has advanced an agenda he agrees with?) So having tried to use the popular vote argument to rig a vote recount to hand Florida to Gore, some liberals now want to use the same argument to strip the president of his rightful, constitutional prerogatives in picking whom he wants in his cabinet. Yes, the Senate has a say. But the Senate doesn’t have the right to de facto staff a president’s administration without violating separation of powers. And the point of presidential prerogative is not to undermine electoral legitimacy but to deepen it. A president, after all, is accountable to the electorate in four years’ time. So are his party’s congressional representatives in a mere two years’ time. Maybe it’s inadvisable for a president to appoint a fire-breather to Justice after such a close election. But that’s his call. Besides, if you don’t give the president the freedom to pick his own people, how can he be held accountable for their performance? How, indeed, can we have any real democratic accountability? This is what is at stake here and if Bush doesn’t knock this down now, only more trouble will ensue. Part of W’s agenda, in my view, should be to end the notion of a permanent campaign in which electoral politics infects everything in government, and in which special interest groups dominate how that electoral politics is pursued. There needs to be time and space for the man to govern in his own way with his own judgement. Then there will be space and time for the rest of us to judge. That space and time are critical elements in the proper functioning of a republic. More than W’s success is at stake if we let the sore losers extinguish them.

A staple of lazy magazine editors this time of year, especially with a new administration, are those ‘What’s Hot, What’s Not’ lists detailing the feel of the new era. Most of the time, these eras are fictions. But this year, things genuinely do feel a little different. With that in mind, I offer a brief, lazy list of ins and outs and invite y’all to submit other suggestions. What’s out is the first item, what’s in is the second:

Big Government / Big Hair
Tony Blair / Vicente Fox
CNN / Fox News
Bisexuals / Bifocals
Ellen Degeneres / Mary Cheney
Algore / Alcoa
Bimbo Eruptions / Missile Defense
Fat, ugly, gay guys in ‘Survivor’ / Hot, slim, straight chicks on ‘Survivor’
I Feel Your Pain / Se Habla Espanol
Salon.com / OpinionJournal.com
Ranch Dressing / Ranches
Distinguishing Characteristics / Distinguished Guests
Hitch / Hatch
Big Creep / Big Sleep
New York City / New York City.

One small irony of John Ashcroft’s speech at Bob Jones University is the fact that the Fundamentalists at B.J.U. are as hostile to Pentecostalism as they are to Catholicism. Why would they honor someone who, in their view, upholds near-Satanic practices such as speaking in tongues? Perhaps for the same reason they honored Patrick Buchanan, a fervent disciple of the ‘Whore of Babylon,’ as the BJU-ers charmingly call the Catholic Church. Perhaps BJU a) doesn’t really believe all that crazy stuff on its website or b) thinks the political benefits of advancing people like Ashcroft and Buchanan outweigh the danger of consorting with the devil. If a) I’m relieved. If b) I’m disturbed. What’s the use of crazy Fundamentalists if they’re not consistent and unrelenting? Have they succumbed to post-modern doubt like the rest of us? Say it ain’t so, Bob! I’m a traditional kind of guy in this respect. To paraphrase Homer Simpson, I like my beer cold, my homosexuals flaming and my bigots crazed and consistent. Is that too much to ask?

Two obits in the New York Times today: the wonderfully fickle philosopher, G.E.M. Anscombe, and Denys Lasdun, who designed, among other things, Britain’s National Theater complex on London’s South Bank. I came across both through their work when I was a college student. Anscombe’s tenacious interest in Thomism was a thrilling rebuttal to the secular language games of her peers, and persuaded me, in the same way that the idiosyncratic liberalism of Michael Oakeshott persuaded me, that thinking was not trapped in history and that absolute truth, while ineffable, was not inconceivable in modernity. At the same time, I was commuting regularly from Oxford to London to go stand-by for anything at the National Theater and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Student stand-by theater-goers tend to get to know the building well, since we camped out there for hours often for standing room only, and Lasdun’s achievement with what looks like an ugly concrete bunker from the outside was to create a wonderfully open, unintimidating, uplifting space from the inside. I got to know each of the three theaters in the complex intimately, and in a few years, had seen most of Shakespeare’s best work. It became a kind of home to me – a public affirmation of the importance of drama, an escape from the suburbia I grew up in, a thrilling reminder of the possibilities of writing. Lasdun’s building subtly emphasized these themes, while never stepping on them: An under-stated and English achievement, which didn’t deserve the scorn it came to receive. May both philosopher and architect rest in English peace.