Category: Old Dish

TOMASKY AND THE RIGHT

Of course, he’s correct in general about the healthiness of recent conservative intellectual debate over Bush’s often unconservative presidency. Money quote:

Unlike the boy who cried wolf too many times, today’s Republicans — and conservative commentators — are the boys who never cried wolf. On the size of government and the size of the deficit, for example, the Bush administration has been as anti-conservative as an administration can possibly be — and has faced only scattered criticisms from most conservatives.

Ahem. Some of us were criticizing him on conservative grounds for the past two and a half years. Not everyone was silent. Cato and Heritage yelled about big government conservatism. George Will has been consistently skeptical about this administration. Bill Kristol has been after Rumsfeld for quite some time. Some of us even endorsed Kerry because of Bush’s record. I know we’re a tiny minority, but do none of us principled conservatives count?

EMAIL OF THE DAY

“Arnold did not capitulate on gay rights. From his response after the veto of the bill:

“California Family Code Section 308.5 was enacted by an initiative statute passed by the voters as Proposition 22 in 2000. Article II, section 10 of the California Constitution prohibits the Legislature from amending this initiative statute without a vote of the people. This bill does not provide for such a vote.
The ultimate issue regarding the constitutionality of section 308.5 and its prohibition against same-sex marriage is currently before the Court of Appeal in San Francisco and will likely be decided by the Supreme Court.
This bill simply adds confusion to a constitutional issue. If the ban of same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, this bill is not necessary. If the ban is constitutional, this bill is ineffective.”

This is not a capitulation. It is an adherence to the laws of the State and it makes perfect sense.”

APPLY NOW

The Bush administration is hiring. An application form can be found here.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Judging by a torrent of email over the last week, I am supposed to take seriously the accusation that my fellow NROers and I are troubled by Miers solely because we’re fair-weather supporters of the President and the GOP who get the vapors the moment Bush is in trouble. We want to impress the liberal and left wing media. We are elitists. We are sexists. But most of all, we’re just not tough enough to take the heat. I find this particularly funny as I’m currently getting spammed by scores of readers of Media Matters calling me a Klansmen and a Nazi for defending Bill Bennett’s comments. Even funnier is the idea that, say, John Podhoretz — author of Bush Country: How George W. Bush Became the First Great Leader of the 21st Century—While Driving Liberals Insane — isn’t willing to give the president the benefit of the doubt.” – Jonah Goldberg, NRO. All I can say is that Jonah’s email in-tray is probably mild compared to what I received last year, when criticizing the president might have actually made a difference. The unanimous judgment – echoed on endless right-wing blogs – was that I was only concerned about run-away spending, incompetent war-management, intelligence fiascoes, drug-war excesses, the fusion of religion and politics, legalizing torture, and so on … because I was gay, and the president backed the FMA. Happy to find so many conservatives now echoing some of my concerns. Funny thing is: not many of them are gay.

MOORE AWARD NOMINEE

“Gary Kamiya writes, ‘In a just world, Bush, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Feith and their underlings would be standing before a Senate committee investigating their catastrophic failures, and Packer’s book would be Exhibit A.’ No. In a just world, these people would be taken out and shot.” – Jane Smiley, far-left author. What I find revealing about this remark is how it exposes what Orwell saw in the fanatical part of the left. Notice that, for Smiley, there is no concern for, say, Bush, Wolfowitz et al, being given a fair trial in a “just world.” Her leftwing vision of justice is that they should “be taken out and shot.” No wonder she wanted to keep Saddam in power. The two think uncannily alike.

(The Moore Award, if you’re a new reader, is for particularly moronic, extremist or deliberately fallacious examples of left-wing rhetoric. You know who it’s named after.)

THE END OF JAZZ

I have an essay in the next New Republic, soothingly titled, “The End of Gay Culture.” And like most writers, ideas that I have read elsewhere but have now integrated themselves into my way of thinking are sometimes hard to pin down. That’s why I asked if any reader knew the precise origin of my half-baked notion that the British poet, Philip Larkin, had once complained that the civil rights movement was ruining Jazz. My readers are among the smartest on the web so I knew someone could find the precise reference – I rummaged through the brilliant collection, “All What Jazz,” to no avail. Anyway, a reader came through and here’s the money quote from an essay in that collection called “The End of Jazz”:

“The American Negro is trying to take a step forward that can be compared only with the ending of slavery in the nineteenth century. And despite the dogs, the hosepipes and the burnings, advances have already been made towards giving the Negro his civil rights under the constitution that would have been inconceivable when Louis Armstrong was a young man. These advances will doubtless continue. They will end only when the Negro is as well housed, educated and medically cared-for as the white man.

There are two possible consequences in this for jazz. One is that if in the course of desegregation the enclosed, strongly-characterized pattern of Negro life is broken up, its traditional cultures such as jazz will be diluted. The Negro did not have the blues because he was naturally melancholy. He had them because he was cheated and bullied and starved. End this, and the blues may end too.

Secondly, the contemporary Negro jazz musician is caught up by two impulses: the desire to disclaim the old entertainment, down-home, give-the-folks-a-great-big-smile side of his profession that seems today to have humiliating associations with slavery’s Congo Square; and the desire for the status of musical literacy, for sophistication, for the techniques and instrumentation of straight music. I should say that Mingus’s remark [“jazz means discrimination”] was prompted by the first of these, and much of his music by the second. The Negro is in a paradoxical position: he is looking for the jazz that isn’t jazz. Either he will find it, or – and I say this in all seriousness – jazz will become an extinct form of music as the ballad is an extinct form of literature, because the society that produced it is gone.”

I think something similar is now happening to gay culture as we have known it these past thirty years or so. I’ll link to the essay when it’s posted, if TNR allows me to.

A ‘DEFENDER’ OF MARRIAGE: The head of the Christian Coalition in Portland, Oregon, has had a busy few years, trying to prevent gay couples from getting even civil unions, let alone marriage rights. He’s now also accused of molesting three females in his own family.