The Dish

A reader writes:

You’re falling down on the Lewis Libby conviction. The reaction from the right to Libby’s conviction is like something from the Colbert Report. From the bizarre ranting of Ann Coulter to the demand for an immediate pardon, it’s unseemly. At least the actual readers of the WSJ (which, I suspect, is on the whole a fairly conservative bunch) are somewhat grounded in reality. From a letter today: 

"Let’s get this straight.  A jury of 11 people unanimously agrees, in a trial no serious observer suggests was unfair, that Mr. Libby lied to a grand jury under oath.  How in the world does this mean the prosecutor criminalized a policy difference?" 

Indeed. Curiously, proving that they are not serious observers of anything, the WSJ (which often rails against "junk science" and fake experts when it suits their purposes) today prints an op-ed that concludes the trial was fatally unfair because (get this) the judge refused to allow the defense to trot out a "memory expert."  This guy, we’re told, would have explained to the jury that contrary to their own experience and the experience of human beings over the last, oh, five thousand years or so, they have it all wrong and that the way memory somehow really works is "diametrically opposed to the popular understanding of how memory and the mind work."  Really?  I mean, come on: you do have to laugh at the straws that are being grasped at, don’t you?

To date, I have not seen a single conservative commentator acknowledge that perhaps, just perhaps, Scooter should have told the damn truth when he raised his hand and swore to do so and that only he is to blame to choosing not to.

Well: O’Reilly did. And Buchanan. The Irish get it.

It’s somewhat excruciating to watch Mickey Kaus’s latest bloggingheads encounter with Bob Wright. This is a journalist who is a stickler for others’ perceived or minor conflicts of interest, even when fully disclosed. (Ask Howie Kurtz.) And yet only now does he concede of Ann Coulter that "I’m a friend of hers. I know her." Only now does he tell us that their friendship goes back to before the time "Ann Coulter became Ann Coulter". He still will not admit that he reprinted an email from Coulter because he got it from her, passing it along to readers as if he were not an interested party. His defense of Coulter’s slur with respect to Edwards and the word "faggot" is as follows:

"Edwards being flighty, dancing around like a little elf and being wussy on foreign policy."

Hence "faggot". Those pejoratives have never been used to stigmatize homosexuals, have they? If Coulter wanted to call Edwards a wuss, she could have. She chose to call him a "faggot" because she is pandering to bigotry. She has every right to do so; and I would defend her right to it with my last faggoty breath. If her defense is that she is actually not a a bigot – "some of my best friends are closeted gays" – then it is even worse. She simply uses bigotry to earn money, applause and attention. I just don’t buy the argument that she had no idea what the word ‘faggot" implied. But if she was genuinely that clueless (some mega-rich Republicans have no idea what homophobia actually is), she could always explain that, apologize for being completely out of it, and move on. But she didn’t.

Mickey also says on bloggingheads that

"Andrew made exactly Coulter’s argument in 2001 … He defended the use of the f-word specifically in the schoolyard context."

Go read the full post here. I assume Mickey did. He’s lying – obviously lying. As for his new acknowledgment that he did indeed support and frequent a bar that had the notice "No Fagots" pinned to the bar and "No Fagots" on its matchbooks, and was furious that they were forced to take those signs down, he now says he regrets the piece. He doesn’t explain now why he thinks he was wrong then. The owner of TNR expressed his disapproval, apparently. But everything Kaus now says and writes is completely of a piece with the view in that piece: that gay men are repulsive, that he is viscerally creeped out by us, that he wants to be able to live and relax in spaces that are reliably homo-free. If someone said that about Jews or blacks, would they still be a blogger at Slate?

He also says he has used the f-word in conversation, and once used it routinely. When asked by Bob why so many applauded and cheered the use of the term "faggot" at CPAC, Mickey actually said:

"Half of them were probably gay."

He really has morphed into Coulter, hasn’t he? Kaus has no evidence to support his 1983 claim that gay bars exclude "breeders like me". In response, he throws out the wild red herring that some gay bars in the past may have excluded women. I wasn’t living in L.A. in 1983, but I have been in many, many gay bars in my life and I have never been to one that excluded women. Still, that isn’t what he wrote and it isn’t what I asked. Can Mickey name a single gay bar in America that refuses to serve straight men or women? If he can’t, would he withdraw his absurd claim of victimization?

I know this blog can sometimes be an embarrassing series of recognitions of my own naivete, but I used to think, and often said, that, for all his quirks, Mickey Kaus isn’t now and never has been a bigot. So let’s stipulate that Mickey isn’t a bigot. But from now on, inspired by South Park, on those few occasions when his name comes up, he will have a new appellation on this blog. He’s the Faggot-Guy now. How does it feel, Faggot-Guy?

Michael Barone’s blog item was not written by some lone hacker, who broke into US News’ website. It was written by another US News writer, Bonnie Erbe, and the editors at USNews published it on Michael’s blog by mistake. Memo to Michael: post your own posts. This is the blogosphere. As soon as MSM editors get their hands on your copy, the mistakes creep in.

The corruption in Gonzales’ Justice Department has now forced me to link to Paul Krugman’s column this morning (TimesDelete), because the information it provides, and I have no reason to believe it’s false, is about as shocking as it gets. Money quote:

Donald Shields and John Cragan, two professors of communication, have compiled a database of investigations and/or indictments of candidates and elected officials by U.S. attorneys since the Bush administration came to power. Of the 375 cases they identified, 10 involved independents, 67 involved Republicans, and 298 involved Democrats. The main source of this partisan tilt was a huge disparity in investigations of local politicians, in which Democrats were seven times as likely as Republicans to face Justice Department scrutiny.

How can this have been happening without a national uproar? The authors explain: "We believe that this tremendous disparity is politically motivated and it occurs because the local (non-statewide and non-Congressional) investigations occur under the radar of a diligent national press. Each instance is treated by a local beat reporter as an isolated case that is only of local interest."

And let’s not forget that Karl Rove’s candidates have a history of benefiting from conveniently timed federal investigations. Last year Molly Ivins reminded her readers of a curious pattern during Mr. Rove’s time in Texas: ‘In election years, there always seemed to be an F.B.I. investigation of some sitting Democrat either announced or leaked to the press. After the election was over, the allegations often vanished.’

I suspect Rove has been at it again, quietly using the system of justice to advance partisan political power. Gonzales has now agreed to relinquish all hiring decisions of interim U.S. Attorneys – an astonishing concession to the gravity of the charges. If all this pans out, Gonzales should be forced to resign very soon.

(Photo: Win McNamee/Getty.)

Scott Horton provides an over-arching schema for the troubling constitutional developments of the last few years. I’m still absorbing the post. On torture and the corruption of the justice system, Alberto Gonzales’s role in allowing the justice system to be polluted by political interests is central. The U.S. attorneys scandal is very troubling, but it is just a small part of a much larger pattern of infringement on the constitutional limits on executive power and against factional abuse. The damage is not irreparable; but it is too dangerous to be complacent about. Soon, I believe, Gonzales will be forced out, and rightly so. But what worries me is not so much where we are, and what damage has already been done, but how the existing damage has weakened the entire system of democratic governance. How confident can we be that the organs of government really are neutral with respect to party and person any more? And how comfortable do you feel living in a country where the president has the right to detain any one indefinitely without trial, and subject them to torture if he deems to appropriate?

What worries me even more is where this administration or a future one might take the country after another terror attack on the scale of 9/11. That’s why I worry about Giuliani. I may prefer him on social issues, but he would be a dangerous executive, given the presidency’s expanded powers under Bush and Cheney. The levees of the justice system have proven weak so far, and this administration has corroded them badly. Money quote from Horton:

[George] Washington made clear that he felt partisanship should not be a factor in the selection of officers of the Justice Department or judges, and that the executive should likewise avoid other displays of favoritism based on family or other association, keeping only to merit. Of course, Washington’s approach did not last long, and it would be unrealistic to imagine America in the twenty-first century returning to a standard in which involvement with political parties and their agendas is excluded. However, it is time to recognize that the pendulum has swung too far, and it is urgent that it be brought back to the center.

In the Bush presidency, we have witnessed a severe systems test of foundational principles, indeed, an effort to transform the system. At this point, the outcome remains uncertain. A few scattered newspapers and Congressional hearings will not be enough to check the sea change that Bush’s legal team has launched.

(Photo: Win McNamee/Getty.)

Edgewater, New Jersey, 10 am.

Ryan Sager runs some numbers.

"Europe cannot defeat the far-right poison of Islamic fundamentalism by turning to a parallel far-right mythology of its own. Once before we logged the race of babies. Once before we invented conspiracies like the Protocols of the Elders of Mohammed peddled by Steyn. It is a startling indictment of the intellectual standards of the American right that they have welcomed this Eurabian fiction with anything other than cheap, repulsed laughter," – Johann Hari, on Mark Steyn’s book, "America Alone." Read the whole thing. If Hari – and Tony Blankley – are correct on Europe’s demographic data, then the entire thesis of Steyn’s book evaporates into thin air.

Ask a neocon New Yorker:

The first serious problem is structural and political: A man who fought the inherent limits of his mayoral office as fanatically as Giuliani would construe presidential prerogatives so broadly he’d make George Bush’s notions of ‘unitary’ executive power seem soft.

Even in the 1980s, as an assistant attorney general in the Reagan Justice Department and U.S. Attorney in New York, Giuliani was imperious and overreaching, He made the troubled daughter of a state judge, Hortense Gabel, testify against her mother and former Miss America Bess Meyerson in a failed prosecution charging, among other things, that Meyerson had hired the judge’s daughter to bribe help ‘expedite’ a messy divorce case. The jury was so put off by Giuliani’s tactics that it acquitted all concerned, as the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus recalled ten years later in assessing Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s subpoena of Monica Lewinsky’s mother to testify against her daughter.

At least, as U.S. Attorney, Giuliani served at the pleasure of the President and had to defer to federal judges. Were he the President, U.S. Attorneys would serve at his pleasure — a dangerous arrangement in the wrong hands, we’ve learned — and he’d pick the judges to whom prosecutors defer.

There are many reasons to like Giuliani, but his personal intolerance of any hint of disloyalty, his  contempt for dissent, his corner-cutting executive excesses and long history of cronyism must and surely will be weighed in the equation. Jim Sleeper is no lefty. His concerns are serious ones in a period when the constitution has already been strained to near-breaking point.

Lowry notes of a new WSJ poll:

Fully three of four Republicans—including a majority of those backing the former New York City mayor—say they would have reservations if they learned Mr. Giuliani supports abortion rights and supports civil unions for gay and lesbians couples.