Category: Old Dish

Could Bush have been clearer in his selection of Elaine Chao as his new nominee for Labor secretary? She’s married to Mitch McConnell, arch-foe of John McCain and of any attempts to rein in campaign finance abuses. Sure, she’s only married to the guy. But this is an administration that believes in loyalty from the beneficiaries of nepotism. By that I don’t mean Chao is unqualified – any more than Michael Powell is unqualified for FCC commissioner. But her connections can’t hurt, can they? And Bush’s choice is a signal all right. Bush is still eager for Asian-American support; and he’s not eager for campaign finance reform. Shrewd again. And swift.

Yes, Ashcroft is a terrible choice for attorney-general. But he should be confirmed anyway. Huh? See my latest TRB, posted opposite.

‘Senator Ashcroft played the race card. He played it by acting in the most racist way to deny a qualified African-American his rightful position on the federal bench. I know a racist when I see one. Senator Ashcroft acts like a racist, walks like a racist and talks like a racist.’ – Congresswoman Mazine Waters, October 21, 1999, after Ashcroft blocked Judge Ronnie White’s nomination. Ashcroft supported the vast majority of black judges that came before him while U.S. Senator or Missouri attorney-general.

In the situation of the Confederacy, ‘we certainly had bad facts in that case where we were defending state sovereignty by defending slavery. But we lost too much. We lost the idea that the states were to stand against the federal government gaining too much power over our lives.’ – Gale Norton, in a 1996 speech. This is the new smoking gun against a Bush appointee. Huh? She’s for federalism, states’ rights and a rollback of federal power. She explicitly distances herself from any idea that she supports or would have supported slavery. But she regrets in some part the federalization of the American polity that occurred after the Civil War. Does this make her the moral equivalent of David Duke? Apparently it does. ‘Her deeply divisive remarks suggest she lacks a vital instinct to protect what needs protecting, whether it’s wilderness or the rights of people of color,’ says Kenneth A. Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, an activist environmental research organization. I don’t know where to begin in dissecting that statement. Any remark staking out a political position is inevitably divisive, since it splits listeners into supporters and opponents. And how on earth does a support for states’ rights in an environmental context mean either neglect of the environment or thinly veiled racism? The illogic is as remarkable as the moral posturing. At this rate, any candidate for office is going in future to have to be a tee-totaling, amnesiac virgin with the rhetorical flair of Jim Lehrer. I think I just became a fervent supporter of Gale Norton.

Breaking scandal in today’s Los Angeles Times about a bunch of marines earning extra money by appearing in porn videos and magazines, catering mainly to gay men. Posing naked is a criminal offense under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Top brass are hyper-ventilating. Not a huge scandal to my mind. Soldiers have always misbehaved. But what’s interesting to me is the light it sheds on the military’s alleged fear of homosexuals. These guys are happy to pose naked in front of cameras for anonymous gay guys’ pleasure but are freaked if someone openly gay is in the same unit. Can we say: cognitive dissonance? The truth is most servicemembers are not scared of other servicemembers’ sexual attraction, as long as it doesn’t get expressed on duty. These guys aren’t afraid of Saddam Hussein. You think they can’t function because a gay guy is in the bunk below? Not in a million years. The military gay ban, abandoned in every other NATO country bar Turkey without the slightest effect on morale or competence, is hanging by the thread of its own incoherence in the U.S. military. Pity it takes marines posing in gay porn to make this more than obvious.

I should say again: I think John Ashcroft is a terrible choice for attorney-general, but I’m not the president. If Ashcroft does a terrible job and starts speaking in tongues at press conferences or enforcing chastity on federal employees, then Bush will be accountable. It’s not up to Kate Michelman to protect the president-elect from his own bad judgment. That won’t stop the liberal interest groups, of course, for whom Ashcroft is a godsend. And the boost it will give to their direct mail efforts is nothing compared to the boost it will give to their rhetoric. My current favorite examples of anti-Ashcroft excess are a) from Mike Barnes of Handgun Control: ‘Mr. Ashcroft apparently believes in the so-called insurrectionist interpretation of the Second Amendment. This is the same extremist theory subscribed to by Timothy McVeigh and so-called militia groups;’ and b) James Ridgeway’s Village Voice assertion of Ashcroft’s ‘serial objection to women judges nominated for the federal bench – a years-long performance that might provide a preview of how, as AG, he would handle recommendations for the court.’ The evidence? Ashcroft opposed six women candidates and was unsuccessful in almost all of them. Ridgeway doesn’t tell us how many female judges in total came before Ashcroft and how many he approved; and he doesn’t tell us why Ashcroft might have disliked them (my bet is they were all liberal judicial activists). But in the eyes of the Old New Left, it is only necessary to oppose some women judges to be deemed sexist, just as it is only necessary to oppose a handful of black judges to be a racist. The sheer desperation of these arguments speaks to the degeneration of liberalism into a congeries of racial, sexual and ethnic smears. Readers are invited to send in the worst arguments against Ashcroft. Within a few days, we’ll be rivaling Salon.

Bum rap on Chavez, methinks. What did her in was eliding the truth to the Bushies. They hate finding stuff out in the paper. And then her bizarre press conference, which looked like an attack and became a surrender, left everyone confused. The AFL-CIO seems pleased but they won’t do much better next time. Whoever is Bush’s Labor Secretary is going to gut unions’ abuse of member fees for political activities. And I can’t see another Bush appointee backing affirmative action either – or a big jump in the minimum wage for that matter. So it’s a meaningless victory, and yet another depressing payback in the tit-for-tat wars of this small and vicious town. I was particularly struck by the virulence of liberal pundits. They hated Chavez with a passion. Liberal hatchet-man, Tim Noah, was particularly nasty, accusing Chavez of lying and hypocrisy and you name it. Even the usually judicious Hanna Rosin in Slate voiced the following: ‘Finally, the obvious. The ‘politics of personal destruction’? ‘Search and destroy’? Those clichés didn’t exist before [Chavez’s] crowd came along.’ Hanna is too young to remember the Bork wars, which started the recent wave of personal vilification, so maybe she should be forgiven. But after what was done to Clarence Thomas? And after eight years of the war-room, of the character assassinations of every woman Clinton ever abused? Puh-lease. Both sides have become more vicious than ever – and that goes for the Clinton-haters as well. The short-term result is occasional schadenfreude when a rival goes under. The long-term effect is that no-one with any foibles or faults or sex life or back taxes is crazy enough to seek public office any more. I have no water to carry for Chavez. I never warmed to her personally or politically. But the grounds for her demise do not bode well for the future of our politics.

My buddy Jonah Goldberg, one of the funniest and smartest writers on the web, defends John Ashcroft’s interview with the neo-segregationist magazine, Southern Partisan. He says that the worst Ashcroft did was call some Confederates ‘patriots,’ and imply that their cause wasn’t exclusively slavery. Fair enough. But why give the interview in the first place? Everyone knows the kind of magazine Southern Partisan is. If I were a famously conservative Senator, I’d avoid it like the plague. No, you don’t have to agree with everything published in a magazine to give an interview. But don’t you draw the line somewhere? Do you think that if a black Senator had given an interview to the Nation of Islam’s Final Call, he wouldn’t be given a hard time? Or if a gay Senator gave an interview to a NAMBLA publication? Or a Jewish Senator to the newsletter of Rabbi Kahane’s followers? Conservatives have long been practitioners of guilt by association when it comes to their opponents. Black pols always have to distance themselves from segregationists, Arabs from Muslim fundamentalists, gays from any conceivable freak out there with a printing press. Now it’s pay-back time. I still think it doesn’t bar Ashcroft from being attorney-general, but I do think it’s evidence that he is a deeply reactionary figure who should be anathema to any administration forging compassionate conservatism.

Drudge, with his usual eye for gold, mines Vanity Fair’s profile of Keanu Reeves. I almost never read celebrity movie star profiles – who gives a damn what actors think anyway? – but I was impressed with Keanu’s defense of his drug-use. The honesty is refreshing. He says he’s `had wonderful experiences’ with drugs, adding, `I mean REALLY wonderful.’ What kind of experiences? ‘In teaching. Personal epiphanies. About life. About a different perspective.’ I don’t doubt it. Do you? The one thing that has always mystified me about most anti-drug messages is that they all assume that the drug experience is awful, unpleasant, disgusting, and so on. No-one believes this, since it’s not true. Many drug experiences are obviously pleasurable, interesting, diverting, exciting, even occasionally spiritual. That’s why people take drugs! They prefer them to reality. The problem is addiction, long-term use, self-destruction, and so on. It seems to me that the propagandists in the ‘war on drugs’ would be a lot more effective in their public education messages if they admitted as much. If an adult goes to a teenager and says, ‘Most drugs are great fun for a while, but they can get a hook in you and aren’t worth it in the long run,’ then a few more teens might actually listen. If an adult were able further to make distinctions between drugs, i.e. pot is basically harmless, ecstasy can’t kill you – but look out for addictive substances like crystal meth or cocaine or fatal concoctions like GHB – then the persuasiveness factor would increase again. I’d legalize the lot of them tomorrow. But since we won’t, a little honesty about the problem wouldn’t hurt. It certainly couldn’t be less effective than the war on drugs waged this last decade. So good on you, Keanu. Now go get some shampoo.

‘As LL Cool J looks on, Britney Spears rips off her conservative pink dress to reveal what millions of teenage boys dream about every night.’ – AOL’s description of a photo from the American Music Awards last night.