Category: The Dish

[Ross] If you read Jane Kramer on the French elections (and then Christopher Hitchens on what she left out), you won’t just have a good sense of the state of political play in la belle France, you’ll also have a pointed reminder of the gulf between French and American attitudes toward sex and marriage, particularly where public figures are concerned. America isn’t nearly as puritanical as people like to claim: Rudy Giuliani is taken seriously as a Presidential candidate in spite of being twice-divorced and having publicly cheated on the second Mrs. Giuliani, Bill Clinton was President in spite of frequently cheating on his wife, and even social conservatives have been known to fall in love with divorcees and flagrant philanderers from time to time. And while we expect our politicians to actually be married, rather than raising their kids in a pacte civil de solidarité, the weird political-personal relationship between Ségolène Royal and François Hollande isn’t that different from the Bill-and-Hillary union, as Kramer notes.

But then there’s this:

[Sarkozy] has been known to threaten the press over articles he didn’t like (Libération) or to exact revenge when he has been embarrassed. When his wife, Cécilia, had a serious fling in New York last year, and the paparazzi caught up with her and her boyfriend, he called his friend Arnaud Lagardère, the owner of Paris Match, and Lagardère obligingly fired the editor-in-chief who had signed off on publishing the pictures. (Both men deny there was any pressure.) Cécilia came back, after which Sarkozy added a notably un-French confession to his campaign autobiography, saying that whatever problems they’d had were all his fault—that he loved her and she loved him, but that his passion for France had made him inattentive. He promised her the stars and the moon forever, and since then she has played a strong role in his campaign. When I saw Sarkozy last month at the ministry and asked about the two men who would be sitting in on our interview, I was told, “One comes from Cécilia, the other from Nicolas.”

Pause for a moment and try to imagine what would happen to, say, the Presidential campaign of John McCain if his wife were carrying on a public affair.

[Ross] Robert Frank versus Greg Mankiw versus Robert Frank, debating "trickle-down" economics.

[Andrew] "Common conception of what is right and decent, a marked regard for fair play, especially to the weak and poor, a stern sentiment of impartial justice and above all a love of personal freedom … these are the common conceptions upon both sides of the ocean among English-speaking peoples," – Winston Churchill, 1943, quoted by John O’Sullivan in a recent review in National Review.

Is there a single principle on that list that Bush and Cheney and Rove have not undermined?

[Ross] Eugene Volokh wonders how soon is too soon to start the inevitable post-Virginia Tech dialogue about gun control, and Joshua Claybourn chimes in. Obviously, this kind of meta-debate is somewhat academic, since nobody – from the New York Times editorial page to Michelle Malkin – seems interested in waiting even a day before trotting out their hobby-horses. I’m extremely skeptical, though, that there’s actually anything significant to learn about gun policy from yesterday’s violence: Extreme, unpredictable events like this one seem like precisely the kind of thing that shouldn’t dictate lawmaking decisions (though of course they inevitably do). If there’s a case for gun control, it’s in the daily run of shooting deaths that don’t make the front page; if there’s a case against gun control, it’s in the daily run of crimes deterred by an armed citizenry (and in more abstract questions of personal liberty), not in the faint chance that a kid with a conceal-and-carry permit might have taken the Virginia killer down.

Garance Franke-Ruta, to her credit, has a somewhat novel take on What We Should Learn from the tragedy – namely, that we need to take domestic violence more seriously:

Because the first victim was a woman, and possible had a romantic connection to the killer, the police did not see her murder as a threat to the community. Now the police are pretty plainly telling the public that they failed to warn the campus there was a killer on the loose because they failed to understand that men who kill their partners are also threats to society. And they are saying this by way of exculpating their actions . . .  Murder is murder is murder. I realize that events unfolded rapidly, and that two hours is a very, very short time in the life of a police investigation, and that the police may just be casting around for a post-hoc defense against the castigation that is sure to come, but the idea that you don’t warn people that a killer is on the loose just because you think he killed his girlfriend seems like 1950s thinking.

Well, maybe. But "intimate killings" of one sort or another are very common: Roughly half of all murders in the United States are committed by someone known to the victim, and roughly one-third of all women murdered in the U.S. are killed by a lover, at least according to this study of crimes of passion across the 1980s and 1990s. The same study finds that 97 percent of the latter subset were "one-victim, one-perpetrator incidents." I don’t know what fraction of the remaining 3 percent involved the wanton murder of strangers (rather than, say, killing a romantic rival as well, or another relative, or someone who happened to get in the way), but I bet it was vanishingly small. So while maybe there’s a case to be made for shutting down a campus or a neighborhood in any situation in which a killer is on the loose, it’s hard to see why intimate homicides in particular should be taken as warning signs that a killing spree is about to begin, and easy to see why police investigating a crime of passion would take the risk of random violence less seriously than when, say, there’s a murderous convict on the loose.

[Ross] If you read only one comic book this year, make it this one. (hat tip: Jonathan Last)

[Ross] So it turns out that abstinence-based education doesn’t really have any effect on teen sexual habits, according to a preliminary study of the programs in question. This has prompted a fair amount of snark around the social-liberal parts of the blogosphere, which is fair enough – but it’s worth pointing out that there’s very little evidence that any other kind of sex education has much of an effect on teen sexual habits either. (That’s the general conclusion of Kristin Luker’s book-length treatment of the issue, and Megan McArdle’s  epic blog series on the topic.) Which would seem, in turn, like a good case for having our public schools waste as little of their time on sex ed as possible. My own somewhat fuzzy view of the issue (developed at greater length here and here and here) is that except in areas where pervasive family breakdown requires educators to act in loco parentis more than one would like them to, public schools should take an, ah, stripped-down an approach to teaching sex, and mainly leave the whole "condoms or abstinence" issue to parents and kids to sort out on their own. Given the way the current battle lines are drawn, I suppose I’m on the side of the abstinence educators, since I’d much rather have my (hypothetical) sixth-grade kid’s school telling him or her to hold off on sex than handing out Trojans after class. But I’d rather see those battle lines go away entirely, and take a lot of local culture-war sturm und drang with them.

This was the right’s original idea, of course, and one of the various pillars of Grover Norquist’s whole "leave us alone" coalition: Social conservatives didn’t like sex ed’s sexy side, and libertarians didn’t like its nanny-statish side. This alliance succeeded in freezing funding for sex ed at 1970s levels – which were much higher than ever before, needless to say – throughout the 1980s, but not in cutting it; meanwhile, the whole "virginity pledge" movement gathered steam, and Bill Clinton, ever attuned to the political winds, embraced funding for abstinence-based education as a small part of his famous triangulation strategy, even as he ramped up sex-ed funding in general. Since then, social conservatives have tried to exploit his concession, expending most of their energy trying to change sex ed programs into abstinence promotion vehicles rather than phasing them out entirely. It’s an understandable strategy but perhaps a misguided one: I’m not usually one for siding with libertarians on culture-war debates, but sex ed is a case where privatization seems to make more sense than any of the alternatives.

[Ross] He’s opened a significant lead over Hillary in South Carolina, The Nation‘s John Nichols reports, which suggests that the rumors of black voters giving Obama the cold shoulder may turn out to be greatly exaggerated. Meanwhile, Mickey Kaus flags a Rasmussen poll showing a Hillary-Obama dead heat nationwide, and Chris Bowers speculates about why Rasmussen might be more accurate than the competing polls that still show an edge for Clinton. (And this nifty fund-raising map lets you see where all the candidates are getting their money from.)

Then again, wasn’t it just two weeks ago that Nichols was highlighting a slew of polls showing Hillary pulling away? I think it was. I suppose the lesson here could be that we shouldn’t be reading so much into polling fluctuations, given that the primaries are still eight months away and all. But that wouldn’t be very much fun, would it?

Houston, Texas, 9.55 am.

[Ross] Commentary feels superfluous, as Andrew says. For all the talk about how the "YouTube-Facebook-instant messaging generation" has revolutionized journalism during tragedies like this, it’s been twenty-four hours since the shootings and nobody’s managed to weave together a coherent narrative of what happened inside Norris Hall. I’m still trying to find firsthand accounts from people who were there when the shooting started. Here’s one from the Virginia Tech student newspaper. Here’s another from the Baltimore Sun. Here are some from a community newspaper in Blacksburg.

Meanwhile, Scientology stays as classy as ever.

Perhaps fortuitously, I’m taking a few days off for a pre-scheduled breather from the blog. I’m extremely lucky to have persuaded three of the best young writers and thinkers out there to blog in this space while I’m off-duty. Ross Douthat is an Atlantic colleague, who shares a blog with the inimitable Reihan Salam, an actual Dish alum (he used to edit the Letters Page). Megan McArdle blogs for the Economist and as Jane Galt. Welcome back, Reihan and Ross. Welcome, Megan. This is also a good opportunity for me to mention the interns who have helped me immeasurably in keeping the Dish al dente these past few months at the Atlantic: Jessie Roberts, Eric Siegel, Whitney Kassel, Zoe Pollock, and Brooke Nevils. They’ve gone where no Atlantic intern has gone before; and they’ve taught me much more about the blogosphere. I also owe Shaun Raviv a great deal on the design front. As for the guest bloggers, your emails are more than welcome as always. But be nice. They are our guests.