The Dish

Something is rotten in the heart of Washington; and it lies in the vice-president’s office. The salience of this case is obvious. What it is really about – what it has always been about – is whether this administration deliberately misled the American people about WMD intelligence before the war. The risks Cheney took to attack Wilson, the insane over-reaction that otherwise very smart men in this administration engaged in to rebut a relatively trivial issue: all this strongly implies the fact they were terrified that the full details of their pre-war WMD knowledge would come out. Fitzgerald could smell this. He was right to pursue it, and to prove that a brilliant, intelligent, sane man like Libby would risk jail to protect his bosses. What was he really trying to hide? We now need a Congressional investigation to find out more, to subpoena Cheney and, if he won’t cooperate, consider impeaching him.

(Photo: Win McNamee/Getty.)

I watched Ann Coulter last night in the gayest way I could. I was on a stairmaster at a gym, slack-jawed at her proud defense of calling someone a "faggot" on the same stage as presidential candidates and as an icon of today’s conservative movement. The way in which Fox News and Sean Hannity and, even more repulsively, Pat Cadell, shilled for her was a new low for Fox, I think – and for what remains of decent conservatism. "We’re all friends here," Hannity chuckled at the end. Yes, they were. And no faggots were on the show to defend themselves. That’s fair and balanced.

I’m not going to breathe more oxygen into this story except to say a couple of things that need saying. Coulter has an actual argument in self-defense and it’s worth addressing. Her argument is that it was a joke and that since it was directed at a straight man, it wasn’t homophobic. It was, in her words, a "school-yard taunt," directed at a straight man, meaning a "wuss" and a "sissy". Why would gays care? She is "pro-gay," after all. Apart from backing a party that wants to strip gay couples of all legal rights by amending the federal constitution, kick them out of the military where they are putting their lives on the line, put them into "reparative therapy" to "cure" them, keep it legal to fire them in many states, and refusing to include them in hate crime laws, Coulter is very pro-gay. As evidence of how pro-gay she is, check out all the gay men and women in America now defending her.

Her defense, however, is that she was making a joke, not speaking a slur. Her logic suggests that the two are mutually exclusive. They’re not. And when you unpack Coulter’s joke, you see she does both. Her joke was that the world is so absurd that someone like Isaiah Washington is forced to go into rehab for calling someone a "faggot." She’s absolutely right that this is absurd and funny and an example of p.c. insanity. She could have made a joke about that – a better one, to be sure – but a joke. But she didn’t just do that. She added to the joke a slur: "John Edwards is a faggot." That’s why people gasped and then laughed and clapped so heartily. I was in the room, so I felt the atmosphere personally. It was an ugly atmosphere, designed to make any gay man or woman in the room feel marginalized and despised. To put it simply, either conservatism is happy to be associated with that atmosphere, or it isn’t. I think the response so far suggests that the conservative elites don’t want to go there, but the base has already been there for a very long time. (That’s why this affair is so revealing, because it is showing which elites want to pander to bigots, and which do not.)

Coulter’s defense of the slur is that it was directed at an obviously straight man and so could not be a real slur. The premise of this argument is that the word faggot is only used to describe gay men and is only effective and derogatory when used against a gay man. But it isn’t. In fact, in the schoolyard she cites, the primary targets of the f-word are straight boys or teens or men. The word "faggot" is used for two reasons: to identify and demonize a gay man; and to threaten a straight man with being reduced to the social pariah status of a gay man. Coulter chose the latter use of the slur, its most potent and common form. She knew why Edwards qualified. He’s pretty, he has flowing locks, he’s young-looking. He is exactly the kind of straight guy who is targeted as a "faggot" by his straight peers. This, Ms Coulter, is real social policing by speech. And that’s what she was doing: trying to delegitimize and feminize a man by calling him a faggot. It happens every day. It’s how insecure or bigoted straight men police their world to keep the homos out.

And for the slur to work, it must logically accept the premise that gay men are weak, effeminate, wusses, sissies, and the rest. A sane gay man has two responses to this, I think. The first is that there is nothing wrong with effeminacy or effeminate gay men – and certainly nothing weak about many of them. In the plague years, I saw countless nelly sissies face HIV and AIDS with as much courage and steel as any warrior on earth. You want to meet someone with balls? Find a drag queen. The courage of many gay men every day in facing down hatred and scorn and derision to live lives of dignity and integrity is not a sign of being a wuss or somehow weak. We have as much and maybe more courage than many – because we have had to acquire it to survive. And that is especially true of gay men whose effeminacy may not make them able to pass as straight – the very people Coulter seeks to demonize. The conflation of effeminacy with weakness, and of gayness with weakness, is what Coulter calculatedly asserted. This was not a joke. It was an attack.

Secondly, gay men are not all effeminate. In the last couple of weeks, we have seen a leading NBA player and a Marine come out to tell their stories. I’d like to hear Coulter tell Amaechi and Alva that they are sissies and wusses. A man in uniform who just lost a leg for his country is a sissy? The first American serviceman to be wounded in Iraq is a wuss? What Coulter did, in her callow, empty way, was to accuse John Edwards of not being a real man. To do so, she asserted that gay men are not real men either. The emasculation of men in minority groups is an ancient trope of the vilest bigotry. Why was it wrong, after all, for white men to call African-American men "boys"? Because it robbed them of the dignity of their masculinity. And that’s what Coulter did last Friday to gays. She said – and conservatives applauded – that I and so many others are not men. We are men, Ann.

As members of other minorities have been forced to say in the past: I am not a faggot. I am a man.

(Photo: Former US Marine Staff Sergeant Eric Alva (R) speaks as Rep. Marty Meehan (L), D-MA, listens 28 February 2007 during a press conference in which Rep. Meehan said he will re-introduce legislation to repeal the US Military "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy. Alva was the first US soldier wounded in Iraq, and has said he is gay. By Luke Frazza/AFP/Getty Images)

I have no doubt Petraeus is doing his best and we should all wish him well. Maliki has managed to talk the Shiites into chilling for a while as well, which is a temporarily good thing. But the last two days reveal the evil of the Sunni and al Qaeda forces in Iraq as starkly as ever. We have news of an attack on a Shiite mosque in Hillah, with possibly 90 dead. Yesterday, they targeted the book market, providing this heart-wrenching quote from a local poet:

"There are no Americans or Iraqi politicians here — there are only Iraqi intellectuals who represent themselves and their homeland, plus stationery and book dealers. Those who did this are like savage machines intent on harvesting souls and killing all bright minds."

Yes, they are: they target mosques where another religious tradition worships; and a market where free people can have free thoughts. This is theocratic terrorism at its purest. In our absolutely justified anger at the incompetence of Bush, it remains a necessity to remind ourselves that he is not the cause of this evil; he has just allowed it to flourish because he is out of his depth and because his advisers never understood the central importance of order as the sine qua non of any occupation. The evil is the same evil that killed so many on 9/11. It is religious violence, driven by fundamentalist certainty.

The carnage forces us to answer the question of what to do. The surge cannot and will not stop this evil – unless it is a surge five times the size of the one we have and in a climate that existed three years ago, not now. You have to be clinically deluded, i.e. the president, to believe that this hasn’t gone past the point of no return. Policing these regions while these massacres occur under our noses will only delay the reckoning and implicate the U.S. more fully in the carnage. A withdrawal to less wracked regions and the borders, allowing the Shiite militias to do their grisly job of counter-attacking, and maintaining an active U.S. presence to intervene against al Qaeda in Anbar and Waziristan seems to me the most effective use of our resources right now. It’s not perfect or morally admirable. But it is, in my judgment, less imperfect and more morally defensible than our current band-aid.

(Photo: An Iraqi boy mounts a pile of burnt books, 06 March 2007 amid the rubble of Baghdad’s oldest book market, ripped by a car bomb attack the day before, killing 30 people, setting shops ablaze and leaving body parts scattered across the symbolic heart of Iraq’s intellectual life. At least 65 people were also wounded in the powerful blast on Mutanabi Street, an ancient center of learning and culture and a rare pleasure for the capital’s war-weary citizens. By Sabah Arar/AFP/Getty.)

It’s an open question, apparently.

Cliff Kincaid says what needs to be said:

The political equivalent of Britney Spears shaving the  hair off her head, Ann Coulter made headlines at this year’s Conservative  Political Action Conference (CPAC) by calling Democrat John Edwards a  faggot. Wearing a leather dress and a Christian cross around her neck, Coulter must be a liberal infiltrator whose purpose is to give  conservatism a bad name.

I really felt sorry for those Republican  presidential candidates who attended CPAC and were forced by the liberal media to respond to Coulter’s remarks. It’s guilt-by-association, but Coulter had to know that making such a remark would put those candidates in an uncomfortable, even embarrassing, position. As a former staffer and contributing editor of Human Events, I can’t understand why this  conservative weekly publication continues to feature her on the masthead  as a "legal affairs correspondent" and puts her columns on page one. Jed  Babbin, the new editor, must be sick to his stomach. Coulter’s columns are  anything but legal analysis.

The Insider’s Alex Adrianson is more succinct:

Ann Coulter the Barbi Doll seems smarter than Ann Coulter the person.

She’s a person?

We tend to think of bloggers in the Middle East as liberal voices, individuals, quirky, free-thinking types who could one day liberalize the region. Not so fast. This is the Middle East, after all. The Muslim Brotherhood has discovered the medium, this Guardian writer explains. The writer almost seems to welcome it. One the more vexing problems in the Middle East, of course, is that some of the groups most adamantly fighting for democracy are Islamists – because they are eager to topple the autocracies and install a new reign of God. They want elections precisely once. And they want freedom for themselves solely to stifle the future freedoms of others.

Noemie Emery says that social conservatives will live with Giuliani. I don’t know whether she’s right, but conservatives and Republicans are often more serious about power than liberals and Democrats. They’re not crazy, and they can compromise if needs be. But check this out on the "litmus test" right:

Some day their prince may come – the conservative who hits all the bases – pro-life, pro-supply side, pro-tax cuts, pro-deregulation, and hawkish in foreign policy – but this day is not it, and that day may never arrive.

Er: who was George W. Bush? Didn’t he pass every litmus test she mentions? Or is he now being erased from conservative history? Then there’s this passage about why disenchanted Bush supporters are open to Rudy:

They see him as a more ruthless version of George W. Bush, someone who would not have consented to less-than-aggressive rules of engagement; who would have taken Falluja the first time, and not have had to come back later; who would not have let Sadr escape when he had him; who would not have been fazed by whining over Abu Ghraib and Club Gitmo, and would have treated critics of the armed forces and of the mission with the same impatience he showed critics of the police in New York. As nothing else, the terror war sits at a nexus of issues dear to the heart of the base: the need to use force when one’s country is threatened; the need to make judgments between good and evil; the need to protect and assert the moral codes of the Judeo-Christian tradition; the need to defend the ideals of the West.

Whining about Abu Ghraib?

Steven Schwartz takes on revisionism of the Spanish Civil War. Money quote:

The Anglo-German ‘historian’ Eric Hobsbawm, an unrepentant defender of the political and pseudo-intellectual legacy of Stalinism, committed to print, in The Guardian of February 17, a banal but repellent rehash of long-discredited clichés about the Spanish civil war of 1936-39. The chief intent of this arrant falsification was to undermine the reputation of George Orwell and his classic Homage to Catalonia, and thus to rehabilitate the Soviet purge machine that contributed so dreadfully to the defeat of the embattled Spanish Republic.

Hobsbawm represents, at once, a reprehensible genre of poseurs on Spain and, in his inimitable fashion, a special case.

On a minor note, it’s close to genius to have a blog on Jewcy called "The Daily Schvitz."

"We can’t assume what we don’t believe," – McGeorge Bundy, 1965. The Cunning Realist sees some contemporary parallels.

Specialist Jeremy Duncan testifies during a hearing before the House Subcommittee of Government Reform and Oversight Committee March 5, 2007 at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC. The hearing was held to examine the treatment and living conditions at the medical center. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)