Category: The Dish

I forced myself. It was excruciating. Beyond embarrassing. Extraordinarily painful – especially for his wife. Why on earth they decided to subject themselves to prolonging this agony is a question worth asking. And the answer, I think, is: they have to. At this point in their lives, to allow the possibility that Craig is indeed homosexual, that he has sustained, lived, internalized a fundamental lie for his entire life, and involved his wife and children in that lie, would be to destroy themselves. I am not going to exonerate the man from hypocrisy because it is impossible. But I do think his problem is far deeper. He grew up in a different time, and a different place, where even the possibility of being gay was inconceivable. I don’t think he even thinks of himself as gay, or has any idea what being gay might actually mean. I think he thinks of his sexual orientation as a "lifestyle" (to use that hideous term Lauer kept referring to) that can be overcome the way one overcomes smoking or poor eating or sexual compulsion. And he constructed an identity in opposition to this "lifestyle" early, out of pain and defensiveness and terrible fear. He is now wedded to this life he created – more than to his wife, which is why she was kept in the dark for two months after the arrest, as he went through the terror of feeling caught finally in his own contradiction. He cannot break free of it at this point without psychic collapse. And so, even though it becomes absurd to everyone around them, the Craigs keep going. They have no choice, apart from total breakdown.

If you want an argument for why the cause for gay visibility, dignity and equality is necessary and indeed noble, just watch that interview again.

Craig was seeking in that toilet stall a connection, a shard of intimacy, that the world would not give him, or that he could not give himself. No one should have to live without that intimacy and dignity – no one. Living a life like that – a deeply lonely, compromised, painful interior existence – is a very sophisticated form of hell. No human can keep it up for ever. No human should have to keep it up for ever.

He is a hypocrite; and he made his choices. I am not going to dispute that. His voting record helped sustain the misery for others that he lived with himself. He is for ever responsible for that.

But he is also a victim. And to see such a victim’s pain exposed brutally in a public restroom pains me. He needs help. So do millions of others. It is just a tragedy that the party that Craig belongs to is committed to prolonging the pain and the denial of so many people – in order to appease the casual fears of the insecure, and to use those fears to sustain political power. In that sense, Craig has long been a hapless tool of those who have made him so miserable and so alone for so long. One day, if we keep working, that misery will recede for some. If it recedes for one person, it will be worth it.

(Photo: Win McNamee/Getty.)

Grist’s Amanda Griscom Little asks the question with a certain amount of trepidation. I loved this preamble:

Some of [Paul’s] ideas arguably have environmental merit. Paul is known for his zealous opposition to the Iraq war, which he duly notes causes pollution and the "burning of fuel for no good purpose." He wants to yank all subsidies and R&D funding from the energy sector, which many believe would benefit the growth of renewables. A cyclist himself, he has cosponsored bills that would offer tax breaks to Americans who commute by bicycle and use public transportation. Still, his libertarian presidency would, among other things, allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, boost the use of coal, and embrace nuclear power. Moreover, it wouldn’t do diddly about global warming because, Paul reasons, "we’re not going to be very good at regulating the weather."

Then onto the interview on energy, where my favorite passage is his goal of removing subsidies from energy companies (take that, Cheney!):

If we’re running out of hydrocarbon, the price will go up. If we had a crisis tomorrow [that cut our oil supply in half], people would drive half as much — something would happen immediately. Somebody would come up with alternative fuels rather quickly.

Today, the government decides and they misdirect the investment to their friends in the corn industry or the food industry. Think how many taxpayer dollars have been spent on corn [for ethanol], and there’s nobody now really defending that as an efficient way to create diesel fuel or ethanol. The money is spent for political reasons and not for economic reasons. It’s the worst way in the world to try to develop an alternative fuel.

Amen to that last point.  It’s one reason we have an ethanol glut. I should add that I’m not as libertarian as he is on the environment. But, as always, listening to him is a far more invigorating experience – even when you disagree – than listening to all the others in the GOP. 

"The key distinction in my mind between political theology and modern political philosophy concerns whether human beings legitimately govern themselves. I think this is deeply engrained in the American psyche, even among those who think vaguely that this is a Christian nation, rather than a nation full of many Christians. I avoid the word secular for just this reason, because it is usually taken in a wide sociological sense rather than a narrowly political one. I just don’t see many people who think, as Damon suggests, that we have "a Christian form of government," though there are many who think we are, as Lincoln said, "almost chosen."

How do Americans put these two ideas together: self-rule and chosenness? I’m not sure they do, intellectually," – Mark Lilla, in the latest installment of Cato’s discussion of his superb new book, "The Stillborn God."

Jersey City, New Jersey, 8.44 pm.

Eh: not so much.

Ross tipped me off to a great treat of a blog-post by Alex Massie, who once guest-blogged for me (and exceedingly well). The gist is the following:

None of this is meant to suggest that I think the British media a wholly admirable beast. It may too often sacrifice rigour for colour or facts for wit. It’s played a part – collectively at least – in the coarsening of British life and it’s frequently absurd, foolish or downright hysterical. But it does have life and perhaps it has the merits of reflecting us as we are rather than as we might like to consider ourselves.

The same may perhaps be said of the netroots and the blogosphere.

Alex defends the vulgarity of some blogs, the extremism of their passions and dislikes, and the free-wheeling, post-and-be-damned element of blogospheric discourse. He sees it as the US equivalent of Fleet Street:

Atrios (Duncan Black) for instance, is a tabloid columnist manque. He has exactly the right combination of spite, sneering and bullying for the job. It’s ferociously partisan and bracingly, gratuitously unfair, mean-spirited, sexist, wearisome, entertaining, etc etc. That’s why his blog is gripping. In other words: it works. If you were to put a British tabloid in Washington, Atrios would be right at home on its op-ed pages (and his presence would add greatly to the gaiety of the nation). His "Wanker of the Day" feature is a stylistic flourish that would be right at home on the pages of Britain’s best-selling newspapers. It’s also easy to imagine the Firedoglake collective on the pages of a British mid-market tabloid.

The obvious parallel is Drudge, the most British of all American bloggers. This blog’s evolution was definitely inspired in part by Fleet Street, Private Eye, the Spectator, Kinsley’s TNR and the general comfort of many British hacks in laying it on thick. I try and keep things civil, and I also try and air viewpoints that don’t quite match my own. If I make a hideous error, I make sure to make amends. But I do not apologize for having some fun, and the occasional eye-brow-raising hyperbole. We’re waaay too deferent in the Washington press corps. (Arianna gets this too, because she’s a closet-Brit.) But I also think that, in some ways, the US media has one up on London. We have our "serious papers" and our "serious columnists" and then we have the bloggers. You know where you are. Vive la difference. Now where was I on She Who Must Be The Front-Runner?

Jonah Goldberg says it’s why he’s pro-life. To which comes the rather obvious reply:

Why is it seemingly only in the context of abortion that Jonah believes uncertainty militates in the direction of governmental activism on behalf of those whose lives could be at risk?

The counter-examples cited include:

bans on smoking in public places, stricter gun control, motorcycle-helmet laws, and even spending on social programs like S-CHIP.

The equally obvious rejoinder is that non-fetal humans can look after themselves. Life is indeed a principle worth defending, when there’s doubt as to whether a recognizable human person exists at all. Better safe than murderous, right? But the sheer fragility of early pregnancy, and the ubiquity of zygote death in the womb suggests that nature’s standards are somewhat more lax than today’s conservatives’ when it comes to life in the first trimester (it’s all there in The Conservative Soul, if you’re interested in a doubt-based conservatism on the question of abortion). What’s lacking among today’s conservatives on the question is a sense of prudence and restraint that stems from doubt. And a general refusal to allow government to boss human beings around in their most intimate and difficult decisions. Aquinas was more persuasive. And he knew far less.

Or how to get your employees out of a slump:

If someone sees their time as having a financial worth, then it follows that any time they don’t spend earning money is essentially lost revenue. DeVoe and Pfeffer found that of over 10,000 employees, those who were paid by the hour were significantly more likely to say that, given the choice, they would choose to work more hours for more money, rather than fewer hours for less money.

Er, yes: and they are becoming one of science’s prime objects for understanding sleep disorders.

Who says they are incompatible?