Category: The Dish

No one was more prescient than Jim Fallows about the Iraq war and what it would entail. All the more reason to look back and see what he foresaw about U.S. policy toward Iran.

More disturbing details are emerging of how the president seems to regard the law as an optional obligation in the discharge of his duties. Please don’t confuse my concerns with a belief that the president should be hampered in fighting terrorism. He shouldn’t. We need his vigilance and energy. But there are also basic legal oversight provisions that help ensure that power is not abused; and that the public can have confidence in the president’s war-making powers. This president, alas, has systematically ignored the legal safeguards – again in signing statements. Eric Umansky has the latest goods.

I was braced, of course. But the emails are running almost ten-to-one in favor of the new site format. Still, this is the Dish, so the critics gets the first lick:

Yikes … hate the new look!  I loved your white words against that deep purple … the whole feel or your new location seems so much like all the other nondescript blogs out there … complete with the cartoon charicature! 
I know you are with TIME, (which is also kinda creepy) but I hope you alter your site back to the way it looked before, or at least make it look remotely like the old one.

Sorry, bro. We changed for a reason. But these guys may be onto something:

Decent redesign, nice caricature but man, it takes forever to load.

I’ve asked them to look into it. Let me know if problems persist. Praise last:

Congratulations on what appears to be a seamless move to your new online home.  I’m sure you will get many thanks from those who couldn’t handle the white-on-blue from your former site (I’m not one of them); that aside, the layout looks very good, and I had no problems navigating the site.  Even the cartoon is good — the face is recognizably yours, especially the eyes — but I do wonder about the little lines surrounding your left hand.  Are they supposed to indicate motion, the onset of pain, or an incipient burst of energy or magic?

Fairy dust, obviously. Now for an excerpt from Vanity Fair’s letters page:

I LOVE your new website!  I didn’t realize what I’d been missing until I saw your new one!

Thanks. But the really gratifying emails come from those of you who’ve been with me since the very beginning, five and a half years’ ago:

I just wanted to drop you a note to say that I am loving your new format. Andrewsullivan.com has been part of my daily online readings since I came across your site several years ago, and the new version is clear and easy to navigate. Thanks for keeping up the blogs.

Thanks for reading. And keep all the input coming.

Never, ever under-estimate the stupidity of people in government. In a new lawsuit designed to find out if the Bush administration has been secretly wire-tapping – without warrants – American citizens, a few NSA suspects are alleged:

Also named as plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit are the journalist Christopher Hitchens, who has written in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; Barnett R. Rubin, a scholar at New York University who works in international relations; Tara McKelvey, a senior editor at The American Prospect; the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers; Greenpeace, the environmental advocacy group; and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country’s largest Islamic advocacy group.

Hitch? Say it ain’t so, King George!

Ted Kennedy discovers he’s Samuel Alito. With better hair.

I just read Fred Barnes’ new bio of the president. It’s worth a read, if only to look into what a full-bored defense of everything Bush has done, thought, believed or even sneezed amounts to. A couple of points. Fred writes about the Washington establishment in exactly the same terms he was writing about it in the 1980s – as a liberal monopoly. This from someone on the biggest cable news channel, surrounded by the vast K-Street-GOP nexus, with Republicans controlling House, Senate, White House and a majority on the Supreme Court. Hey, Fred, you are the establishment now. Second, Fred breezily dismisses any dissension on the right. In this book, "there’s no paramount national issue that splits Republican ranks." Immigration, abortion, spending, states’ rights, civil liberties, torture, pork, executive power, debt, Medicare expansion: these don’t count. Fred can even quote the president as follows with not a trace of irony:

"America will always stand firm for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity, the rule of law, limits on the power of the state …"

This from a president who has authorized the torture of military detainees, retains the right to disobey laws he signs, and orders warrantless wire-tapping of American citizens. There may be a defense of these actions, but Fred doesn’t even acknowledge that some conservatives are queasy about them.

But the best quote in the book comes from Condi Rice. She said these words in her Senate confirmation hearing for secretary of state:

"The world should apply what Natan Sharansky calls the ‘town square test’: if a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm, then that person is living in a fear society, not a free society."

By that measure, alas, Iraq is still a fear society, interspersed by anarchy and terror, with merely the promise of freedom. I still feel that liberation from Saddam was a necessary, noble, important act. But, as Hobbes fully understood, there can be no freedom if there is no order. And Bush ensured that order would never be imposed in Iraq, because he persistently refused to send sufficient troops to provide it. That’s the tragedy we now face; and the past mistake we have now somehow to rectify.

Brokeback Mountain’s Golden Globes success is as good a time as any to get the following out the way: my old friend Mickey Kaus obviously has some issues around gay men. His first instinct in December, before even seeing "Brokeback Mountain," was to predict its doom at the box office; he then valiantly kept hoping the movie would fail. Then he saw the movie and you can hear his view here. Here’s a mini-fisk of Mickey’s argument that Brokeback is in fact a great date movie (by which, of course, he means a straight date movie):

MK: The relationship between Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal is so unconvincing…

AS: Stop right there. This is a highly subjective judgment, so I can’t really say Mickey’s wrong. But I found the relationship entirely convincing and I haven’t found someone yet who didn’t. The awards showered on Ledger, and the unanimous consent of every reviewer that Ledger’s performance is extraordinary, would be meaningless if the relationship he is conducting were completely unconvincing. Mickey is the odd one out here – not that there’s anything wrong with that. I wonder if he’d find any relationship between two gay men convincing. But he’s not done yet. Here’s Mickey’s take on why Brokeback is still a good, straight date movie, despite its being about those people …

MK: You can go on a date with a member of the opposite sex and you can say two things. You can say, Gee, what we’ve got going is better than what those guys got going …

AS: Excuse me? The reason for the tragedy of the Ennis-Jack love affair is not that it’s obviously inherently inferior to any straight relationship. It’s because society at the time made it impossible to be fully expressed – in a world where gay men could be murdered if their orientation were known. Take this analogy: imagine a movie that told the tragedy of an inter-racial love affair in the days of miscegenation laws. The love affair was made impossible by law and society and the black partner was subsequently lynched for dating a white girl. Would Mickey’s response be that it’s a good date movie for white couples because they can reassure themselves that "what we’ve got going is better than what those guys got going …"?

MK: And you can breathe a joint sigh of relief that if you’re a heterosexual and you’re heterosexual, I’m not going to screw up your life the way Heath Ledger screwed up the life for his wife.

AS: Sigh of relief? What was Mickey so scared about that ‘relief’ is his response to the movie? Again, his point is logical enough, but the obtuseness! Ennis does screw up his marriage – but the reason is the lying that society imposed as a condition of his survival. Not to see this context is to be blind to the deeper tragedy of the story, especially as regards the women in it.

The real reason Brokeback is a good date movie, of course, is simply that it’s a classic tale of star-crossed lovers. Many, many straight men can make the imaginative leap to seeing how universal love and longing and loss are. All I can say is that, sadly, Mickey isn’t one of them.

A lot has been said and written about Martin Luther King Jr. But this homily about his legacy is a timeless challenge to our own resistance to being the prophets that I believe God asks us to be. Always. Wherever we are. And whatever the color of our skin.

… But I’m not sure what other category to put this in. Patriotic kitsch? New Age Republicanism? Some ghastly fusion of the two? Or just hilarious? Oh, well. I blog. You decide.