Category: The Dish

The NYT fleshes out the story today. Larry Sabato adds his credible voice to the chorus. One source is a reminiscence by a highly credible first-hand witness:

I met him twice actaully [sic]. I did two modelling [sic] jobs with his then wife and she told me about some puppies they were trying to give away. I told her I’d like to take one. So one evening I went out to their place in the country near [Charlottesville] somewhere. There was a pond quite close by. I asked if they had any waterfowl landing there. George told me about the ducks and geese that sometimes landed there and about the ducks who tried to raise their young but who would have them all devoured by the big turtles in the pond. Well, why doesn’t someone kill the turtles and eat them? I asked. George said ‘only the niggers around here eat em.’

You tend to remember moments like this. I’m used to anti-white and homophobic slurs around my neighborhood. But the bigotry of some inner-city African-Americans is something I’m so accustomed to it’s just background noise. It doesn’t excuse it: I’m just saying I’m used to dealing with it. As long as they don’t touch me, they’re welcome to their hate.

But when I hear an educated white person use the "n-word" without irony, it’s hard to forget it. The last time was a few years ago when someone I barely knew complained about the poor service from a cable guy. "Worthless n***ers," he said. I was dumbfounded, told him so, found a way to excuse myself, and left. I never spoke to that guy again. I have met Allen a few times and he seems like a jovial fellow. But he has never seen a piece of anti-gay legislation he doesn’t like. His support for the anti-gay constitutional amendment in Virginia – an amendment so extreme and so unnecessary it is indistinguishable from bigotry – is itself proof to me of a bigoted mind. The amendment doesn’t just ban civil marriage for gays – that’s been done in Virginia law and underlined with a few thousand sharpies. It’s to amend the state constitution to bar any rights for gay couples at all:

"This Commonwealth and its political subdivisions shall not create or recognize a legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance, or effects of marriage. Nor shall this Commonwealth or its political subdivisions create or recognize another union, partnership, or other legal status to which is assigned the rights, benefits, obligations, qualities, or effects of marriage."

That goes for gays and straights. It guts any domestic partnership, civil union, or even potentially private contracts trying to keep couples together. We don’t need the n-word to know that Allen is a bigot. We don’t need to know what "macaca" means. We don’t need to know that he is embarrassed to be discovered as partly Jewish. Judge him by his policy positions. The bigotry is in plain sight.

(Photo: from Washington’s National Zoo, the word that popped out of Allen’s mouth when he saw a person of color at a campaign rally.)

It’s a new term, coined in Denmark, about an inability to confront the threat that radical Islam presents to the West. It’s now being used by liberals and centrists finally waking up to the danger that Islamism poses. I’m glad the left is waking up from its own delusions. Now how about the right?

The editor of National Review is thrilled that torture will now continue with Congressional backing. What can I add? Notice how he uses C. S. Lewis’ brilliant euphemism for what he favors: "coercive interrogation." By the way, I’ve been very clear from the beginning what I’m against: "no severe mental or physical pain or suffering," the clear legal definition of torture as proscribed by the Geneva Conventions, and followed by the U.S. for generations. Therefore: no "waterboarding", no "hypothermia", no "stress positions", no "long-time-standing." Nothing but actually good interrogation; and an intelligence effort that is the real thing: careful, long-term infiltration of terror networks, human intelligence, the NSA program (with court oversight). Torture is the lazy, brutal man’s way of getting intelligence. And we have had few presidents as lazy or as callous as this one.

Lowry, of course, doesn’t believe that what Stalin’s thugs did to Solzhenitsyn in the Gulags was "torture". It was just one of many ‘alternative methods". He doesn’t believe that what the Japanese did to Americans in Singapore was "torture". It was all just "coercive interrogation." And fine by him. Isn’t it amazing that that the most prominent moral relativists of our time are on what’s left of the right?

If I have any message for the students of today, it is this: you cannot trust the word of this president or anyone in this administration. They have either lied or told you things that turned out not to be true. Finally, someone says it on the floor of the House – Democrat Tim Ryan. He’s wrong, alas. Bush will never impose a draft, even if we needed one. It would mean admitting he was wrong. He will torture and lie but he will not concede error.

A conservative challenges the theocons.

Commonweal magazine asks someone who knows the Pope – president of the Institute for the Study of Religions and Cultures at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome – what on earth Benedict was driving at in his address on Islam.

A November 2004 Atlantic article shows that Frank Rich still can’t get his facts right. Money quote:

Everyone knows about the looting of Iraq’s museums during last year’s war. What almost no one knows is that most of the museums’ holdings had been stolen and sold years before ‚Äî and not by mobs of Iraqis off the street.

For the record, I tracked down my initial comments on the looting of the Iraq museum. Frank Rich claimed the following:

Sullivan damned Mr. Rumsfeld’s critics as fatuous aesthetes exploiting a passing incident to denigrate the liberation of Iraq.

My post of April 22, 2003, says:

I remain an optimist about the Iraqi future – and America’s critical role in it. Yes, there have been some obvious screw-ups – the failure to protect Baghdad’s museums strikes me as damn-near indefensible. But the direction is clear.

It seems to me that a blogger who wrote about the looting of the museum as "damn-near indefensible," does not deserve the moniker "cheerleader" of Rumsfeld’s acquiescence to looting. I got a lot of things wrong. But it’s not fair to blame me for saying something I didn’t.

"As we face the issues that we are facing today, I don’t think there’s anything more important out there than the marriage issue," – Marilyn Musgrave, seeking re-election in Colorado.

Fairmont, West Virginia, 1 pm.

Not so much, it seems.