Category: The Dish

You can buy that ethnic delicacy I mentioned yesterday online. And you might not want to eat too casually in China either.

They’re both almost past comment. Here’s the "Big Man" from Brooklyn, giving his views on gay marriage; and here’s Vernon Robinson, with a campaign ad that seems to be coming straight from Michelle Malkin’s id. Here’s Robinson’s website.

Thanks for all your emails. I’m aware of one person who clearly stated before the war that he believed that Saddam had no WMDs. That was Scott Ritter. This is not the same as saying that we didn’t know for sure, or should have waited some more; or that containment could have worked for a few months or years longer. I mean: an anti-war commentator, writer or speaker who clearly said that Saddam had no WMDs before we invaded and that therefore the war was illegitimate. I remember being told by many who were against getting rid of Saddam that we shouldn’t invade precisely because he had WMDs and our invasion would be the only occasion in which he’d use them. But I don’t recall anyone saying flat out that there were no WMDs in Iraq. But I may have missed someone. I’ll happily post such pre-war statements if you send them to me.

This is a long email but it’s one of the most thoughtful of the dozens I’ve now read, so here goes:

"I write as someone who basically agrees with many of Paul Krugman’s points, but finds him intolerably self-important and smug. I also write as someone who disagrees with you much of the time, but deeply respects the way you wrestle with these issues in public.

I also believe there’s very little point, at this late date, in pointing fingers about who thought what in 2001. We are where we are, and that’s that. For that matter, I was conflicted about the government’s policy in 2001 and I remain so today.

I can’t stand George Bush ‚Äî never could, from the get-go. The minute I saw him, it was clear to me that he was a smug, self-satisfied, prep-school product trying to pass himself off as a representative of a heartland male. A phony, through and through. I would have taken Gore or Kerry over Bush, in a New York minute.

But 9/11 happened and I supported Bush in Afghanistan. What else was there to do? He was the president, and we had been attacked. I took a lot of crap from my friends, but I thought Bush was right; I even thought that, in the early days, he prosecuted the war with vigor and competence.

When all eyes turned to Iraq, I saw no reason to doubt the WMD issue ‚Äî but other doubts crept in. I deeply regretted the Bush administration’s lack of interest in bringing the rest of the world on board ‚Äî and this, I’m sorry to say, is where I feel you were culpable. You were only too eager to attack any European who opposed direct military action. You signed on to Rumsfeld‚Äôs ‘Old Europe’ trope and some of your comments were beneath you. You didn’t allow for the possibility that people might have very real doubts about Bush’s agenda; it was his way or the highway.

At the same time, I worried about Bush’s character. His complete lack of interest in dealing with anyone else’s point of view was deeply worrying. Think about it ‚Äî did Roosevelt publicly trash anyone who opposed him? Did Churchill? Did they send their associates to attack them in the press? Did they demonize those who thought differently? Or did they try to bring them together in an alliance?

Again, you were culpable here. You idealized Bush ‚Äî largely, I guess because you needed to. And you didn’t listen to any opposing point of view; the debater in you took over from the thinker. You endowed Bush with qualities of strength and vision that plainly were not there. At the very least, his ongoing pandering to the religious right was an indicator of a moral laxity that you didn’t want to hear about.

These are not indictable offenses. It was a difficult, upsetting time. You chose wrong ‚Äî but you chose. So what? That’s better than not choosing at all.

Here’s the fundamental problem with Bush: he’s not evil, he’s certainly not corrupt in the Jack Abramoff sense of the word. I’m sure he lives a life of rectitude compared to many. But he’s an incurious man, he’s intellectually lazy, and, in the White House, that amounts to moral laziness, which, frankly, amounts to evil. Once Bush makes a decision about something, he never revisits it, because if it was right then, surely it must always be so. Look how he has fostered a culture of torture; clearly, he believes that the ends justify the means ‚Äî surely a very strange idea for a Christian to hold.

The real problem was, we needed a man of extraordinary abilities and vision after 9/11 and we had George Bush. If you supported him and the invasion of Iraq‚Äîwell, that’s  understandable. But if people balked ‚Äî well that’s understandable, too. The mistake you made was thinking that, if the cause was just, the leader must be so, too. But in George Bush, we sent a boy to a man’s job, and now we’re all paying for that mistake."

I’ll accept much of that and take my lumps, with some caveats. I did favor going to the U.N. from the get-go. The international opposition was, however, far from principled. If you think Chirac and Putin and Schroder were soberly considering the drawbacks of occupation, you’re deluding yourself. The sanctions regime, moreover, we now know, was both brutal and corrupt. I also remember much of the anti-war rhetoric and it wasn’t the sober calculation of options that some are now recalling. Some of that was there. But I went to the antiwar marches, and they were not about prudence or WMD intelligence or sanctions or containment. They were anti-Bush and often anti-American hate rallies. Similarly, the anti-war commentariat were, by and large, not Scowcroftians. A few were partisan Democrats, polarized by the 2000 election, who would have attacked Bush whatever his position. That’s certainly true of Krugman, who would have ferociously bashed Bush if he hadn’t gone to war as well.

A reader writes on the Krugman attack and my defense:

"I’m speaking from my own standpoint here, and there are a whole lot of folks out there just like me–after 9/11 we were not partisan. I didn’t vote for George Bush in 2000, but I supported what began after 9/11. It felt GOOD to support him and feel the unity of the country. I loved it.

And then it all started to come apart. Not, as you accuse, because of partisanship–and you’re saying specifically it was Democrats (and Krugman, and "leftists" on college campuses–oh gawd I gotta yawn) who were the partisan troublemakers. But it came apart because the unity and support began to be abused and misued, and some of us did not allow our love of that unity and support of our leader during a crisis to obscure our ability to reason.

It was in the run up to Iraq that you and others actually put on rose colored glasses and drank the koolaid while I was saying, whoa wait let’s think about this. I had no love for Saddam, but the facts were not present in the case the administration was making. I hate being lied to, and I knew that was happening. And I didn’t have access to even half the info others do. My position was, Why are we rushing in here? We can take Saddam down on OUR timetable, and in doing so we have to wrap up Afghanistan and ensure that we have the forces and the money to do it. This wasn’t any feat of prognostication on my part. It was simple common sense, with a dash of knowledge of history and an understanding how these things play out in the hands of breathless humans.

Krugman may be clairvoyant; probably not. But a dumb guy like me whose support swings back and forth between Republicans and Democrats based on who’s doing a good job, saw this was a bad deal from the get-go. I’m a little resentful that my conscientious and throughtful objections are viewed as partisan hooey by the now-chagrined who think we all should have been hoodwinked, and we would have been, too, had we just been good Americans.

Feh."

I’m now overwhelmed by how many people say they now opposed the war all along because they could see that the WMD issue was invalid. It’s amazing so few made the case at the time.

Truly heart-breaking news. The Vatican hierarchy refuses to budge in its demonization of gay couples and famillies. And so Catholic Charities in Boston stop placing needy children in adoption altogether. I would have reluctantly acquiesced in the discrimination, just to help the majority of kids. But I respect the integrity of the lay Catholic board in refusing to give in to an invidious piece of discrimination; and Massachusetts for insisting that the only criterion for adoption be the safety and love in adoptive households, regardless of sexual orientation. The whole thing is sad. But that’s what bigotry does. Cruelty begets cruelty. And all in the name of love. All Catholics who do not share the bigotry of the hierarchy simply have to pray that one day, their hearts will open.

A friend who just landed in Baghdad gives a first-person account of the scene:

"Getting here was far less complicated than I had imagined, but with 48 hours of life on the Tigris under my belt, I feel blessed with the marvelous array of experiences this city offers.  Multiple encounters with white Toyota Landcruisers filled with black outfitted AK-47 totting Interior Ministry irregulars (a/k/a death squads), even more encounters with US and South African security contractors, which are even more threatening – each of these is enough to stop your heart. According to some here, the US contractors are the dumbest and the South Africans the meanest – what a hierarchy.

Today I witnessed – from a safe distance – my first car-bomb. Then went back to read reports of 13 judicially sanctioned executions, 32 extrajudicial killings discovered, 50 bodyguards taken hostage … Westerners talk about their hotels not in terms of spa amenities and availability of Starbucks, but based on the number of blast walls between the building and the street. So imagine where on earth people would think the arrival of a massive sandstorm was a blessing. I was amused to see Condi and Rumsfeld on TV – carried live on a local TV feed.  I watched it in a crowded lobby.  I’ll just say the reaction of those around me was derisive – no difference in that between the locals and the Americans, all of whom (except me and the journos) seem to be DOD contractors.  Possibly they’re even right about the use of the term "civil war."  If that evokes memories of Spain in the 30’s or America in the 1860’s it would be misleading.  What’s going on here is something very different from that.  It’s more a communal disintegration.  But 48 hours doesn’t turn one into an expert."

Nope. But sometimes, fresh eyes can see things other cannot.

With his usual accuracy and fairness, Paul Krugman smears yours truly today. Since he’s too important to have his columns available to non-subscribers, I can’t link. He has one decent point: yes, I lionized George W. Bush for a while after 9/11, and, in retrospect, my attempt to place trust in him at a time of national peril was a misjudgment. But then, in times of peril, some of us feel that supporting the president, whoever he is, and hoping he gets things right, are not contemptible impulses. I should have been more skeptical. In less dire circumstances, I might have been. But some of us, in the days after 9/11, did not immediately go into partisan mode, put aside some of our other objections (like the fiscal mess and the anti-gay policies), and rallied behind a president at war.

And yes, I criticized many whose knee-jerk response immediately after 9/11 was to blame America, and whose partisanship, like Krugman’s, was so intense they had already deemed Bush a failure before he even had a chance. But it is a gross exaggeration to say, as Krugman sweepingly does, that "I used to specialize in denouncing the patriotism and character of anyone who dared to criticize president Bush." Five days after 9/11, in an aside in a long essay, I predicted that a small cadre of decadent leftists in enclaves in coastal universities would instinctively side with America’s enemies. They did. Some still do. (Go read the piece to see whether you think the accusations against me are fair.) And yes, I should have been more attuned to the pragmatic arguments of those who opposed the Iraq war for prudential, not partisan, reasons: people like Scowcroft, not Krugman (who would have opposed anything this president did, regardless of its merits). But Krugman’s sweeping charge against me is unfair. Long-time readers will know this. And the record is out there.

He is also grossly distorting the historical record in my criticism of the president. I am not a "born-again" Bush-basher, suddenly seeing the light. My criticisms of the Bush fiscal policy began very early and were very strong, although I supported the tax cuts (still do) and my focus was entirely on spending. My worries about war conduct began almost immediately after the Iraq invasion; my opposition to the federal marriage amendment was instant and scathing; my horror at Abu Ghraib and what it revealed was also contemporaneous with the available information, and I have kept the administration to account ever since. I opposed entitlement expansion. I supported a gas tax; and defended the estate tax. And, as Krugman somehow fails to point out, I endorsed John Kerry last time around. To accuse me of silence until now is absurd. To say that he expects no "statements of remorse" is also a little off. Does this count:

"We have learned a tough lesson, and it has been a lot tougher for those tens of thousands of dead, innocent Iraqis and several thousand killed and injured American soldiers than for a few humiliated pundits. The correct response to that is not more spin but a real sense of shame and sorrow that so many have died because of errors made by their superiors, and by writers like me."

Sometimes, you can’t win.

But this much is also true: I want to win the war, and we have this president for the next three years. If he does good things, he still deserves our support; and so do the people of Iraq. He has made some constructive changes these past few months in Iraq, and I’m not going to give up hope now. Maybe I should have appreciated that the Bush administration’s "mendacity was obvious from the beginning." We can’t all be as clairvoyant as Krugman. But I gave them a chance. When America was attacked, I rallied behind them and hoped for the best. If a similar thing happened again, regardless of who was president, Democrat or Republican, I hope I would do exactly the same. My principle was "trust but verify." Maybe I was wrong to trust. But no one can fairly accuse me of not verifying.

We may be seeing the beginnings of a real backlash against religious fundamentalism. In the last few years, we have seen the actual agenda of the religious right revealed in America: a constitutional ban on any legal protection for gay couples, re-criminalization of all abortions, including rape and incest, opposition even to vaccines to prevent cancer, and so on. The situation is far more dire in many Muslim countries, where the conflation of politics and religion is far more complete and the violent methods of religious fundamentalists different in kind. But the essential goal is similar: the subjection of free people to religious doctrines they do not necessarily hold. In Indonesia, a beacon for hope in the Muslim world, the moderates may be fighting back:

"Indonesia’s parliament, which contains a large bloc of Islamic-based MPs, is debating whether to amend the criminal code to outlaw anything that could offend decency or "arouse lust" in children.

That includes husbands and wives kissing in public, unmarried couples living together and homosexual sex, along with any flash of thighs, navels, bottoms or breasts, punishable by up to 10 years in jail and fines of more than $A100,000.

Other provinces like Aceh have moved to implement sharia laws, often without the wide support of ordinary people."

The gradual revolt against these policies may take time to formulate, because for many, the threat seems vague for a while. But then you see it up close. And it isn’t pretty. I have a feeling we may be about to see a similar push-back in this country as well.

Well, they’ve set an absurd precedent; now they’ll have to live with it. The Pentagon has another major contract with another Dubai-owned company, Inchcape Shipping Services (ISS). Money quote:

"ISS has more than 200 offices around the world and provides services to clients ranging from cruise ship operators to oil tankers to commercial cargo vessels. In the U.S., the company operates out of more than a dozen port cities, including Houston, Miami and New Orleans, arranging pilots, tugs, linesmen and stevedores, among other things."

Michelle Malkin, it’s time for another conniption.