The Dish

Rather than defend Mitt Romney’s inexplicable u-turn on gay rights (because he can’t), David Frum tries to make the issue about me. Power Line piles on. Surprise! Whenever neocons have to defend the indefensible, they attack the enemy as a form of distraction. But they’re both factually wrong and need to issue a correction. Frum cites my own long-held opposition to employment discrimination laws, as reiterated in Virtually Normal and more recently in the Advocate, a position that does not exactly endear me to the gay establishment. Then he claims I have recanted this. But I have never recanted this as such (and didn’t today), although I have given up fighting actively against ENDA, because the principle of non-discrimination is so widespread, exempting only gays from it seems a somewhat quixotic crusade. Meanwhile, the priorities I have long argued for – marriage and military service – have indeed become central to the struggle for gay equality, and so, in many ways, the central argument in Virtually Normal won out. I wanted to focus on the way the government discriminates against gay citizens, not the private sector. And that should hardly surprise anyone given my libertarian leanings.

But, to repeat: I haven’t recanted anything on ENDA. I was never for it. I’m still not. Mine is a lost cause, as a huge majority of Americans support it, every other minority has employment non-discrimination rights, and only a handful of gays agree with me. So I have reconciled myself to its inevitability, but won’t support it. If I were in Congress, I’d vote against it. No flip-flop here. But both Frum and Mirengoff ignore the central question. My point is that Romney specifically cited ENDA as federal legislation he once supported and now doesn’t. The question is: why? Frum is uninterested in Rommey’s answer. Another surprise.

How dare Michael Crichton insult Michael Crowley’s manhood? By heterosexual standards, Crowley can swing with the best of ’em.

James Wood is brilliant. And it shows.

"I think we’ll see less of him than ever. Iraq is now Bush’s baby, and Cheney doesn’t want to be tarred with it in the eyes of historians," – an anonymous former associate who worked closely with Cheney for years, in U.S. News.

A well-endowed nerd writes:

Of course I am pleased by this result but the statistical part of my brain is more skeptical. One concern is that the sample sizes for homosexuals and heterosexuals are quite different. If the distributions are positively skewed (fewer observations on the positive end of the distribution, sigh) then it’s possible that the higher mean in the smaller sample is an artifact of the distribution. It would be nice to know if this result holds when equating for sample size, or when calculating medians. I didn’t see any note of this in the manuscript. Can your readers help?

I have long been mesmerized by Michel Gondry’s astonishingly elaborate and imaginative music videos for Bjork, Chemical Brothers, Kylie, et al. Their astonishing complexity and choreography – without CGI, for the most part – suggest a mind capable of almost autistic genius. Well, here’s some more proof. Gondry solves a Rubiks cube in this video in two minutes. With his feet. Enjoy:

(Hat tip: Jump Cuts.)

It’s an interesting concept and this reader thought of it reading this post yesterday on blogging:

The main components of ‘Lost Intimacy’ are ‘Forced Intimacy’ and ‘False Intimacy’.  This phenomenon is something relatively new to our society and it’s a result of such things as the internet, instant information, blogs, tabloid and tabloid journalism and the culture of celebrity among other things. 

Something about your post reminded me of this idea and it’s one of the reasons I can’t really bring myself to become a blogger – even though I find them fascinating. The fact of the matter is, I don’t want to become that "intimate" with people I don‚Äôt really know. And I take your comment that you DO feel very close to your readers, and that is very commendable, but my question to you is: Isn’t it a false intimacy? Granted, one can become ‘intimate’ with a person through a series of letters while never actually ‘meeting’ that person physically ‚Äì history is filled with such literary dalliances ‚Äì but even those relationships I would call a ‘false intimacy’.

I posted on a blog site once and challenged everyone as to why they were being so insulting and calling each other names and told them they would never use such language if they were in the physical presence of that person. To a man they pretty much agreed. They were, in my opinion, caught in a ‘false intimacy’ with each other.

The internet has allowed rampant ‘false intimacy’ and it is slowly being taken for ‘true intimacy’, that coupled with the ‘forced intimacy’ of all the other media and cell phones and blackberrys that hail down on us endlessly, I believe, has beget ‘lost intimacy’ and may in the long run become ‘the death of intimacy’.

I wouldn’t call the intimacy that a blog creates between a blogger and readers "false". There are about a dozen readers whom I have really gotten to know over the years and correspond with often. I feel I know them. I rarely meet them, but when I did recently in L.A., it was a delight. The physical meeting merely solidified a virtual friendship that was real.

But then there’s the geniune false intimacy in which I think I know someone like Glenn Reynolds and even call him by his first name, but I’ve only ever met him once. In that sense, I’d say my sense of intimacy isn’t false. Rather, I am genuinely intimate with a persona – "Instapundit" – rather than a person – "Glenn Reynolds." That’s why I really don’t take blog-flames and personal insults personally. Because they are directed at the blogger me, not the full me. The flamers are intimate with the mask all writing demands. Occasionally, I realize how false the mask can be. Some people I’ve met who only know me from the blog are surprised that I come off rather differently in person. The intimacy they felt from the blog was merely with the persona, not the person.

As for forced intimacy, I couldn’t agree more. I routinely remove phones from their jacks and rarely answer my own cell-phone. I use it almost entirely for out-calls and meeting up at airports and the like. I’m amazed by how many people have become slaves to their devices and to the needs and demands of strangers and friends. These are just my impressions. I’m sure readers have other ones.

The Bush administration is doing a good job of rendering its detained terror suspects mentally ill:

After five years of detention at Guantanamo Bay without trial or sentence, Australian Taliban fighter David Hicks may be too traumatised to take a family phone call before Christmas.

With Hicks’ case against the Federal Government listed for a preliminary hearing today in Sydney, his family has learnt that he may refuse the call because he was too psychologically fragile…

In the most recent call in July, Mr Hicks said his son was incoherent and struggling to speak for the first 30 minutes of the call. He also recently sat without speaking during a visit from the Australian consul and had refused to answer questions.

Mission Accomplished.

Cairo, Egypt, 3 pm.

Everything he said in the 1990s is now to be dismissed. He was once for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act; now he’s against it. He was once for domestic partnerships for gays; now he’s against them. He was once for ending the ban on gays in the military; now he’s for keeping it. In the same interview with theocon Kathryn-Jean Lopez, he says that he opposes "unjust discrimination against anyone, for racial or religious reasons, or for sexual preference," while he favors allowing gay people to be fired from their jobs for being gay without any sanction. He was once spoke clearly of sexual orientation; now he calls it sexual "preference."

What has caused this transformation? The need to pander to Christianists has nothing to do with it. "My experience over the past several years as governor" has caused him to doubt the efficacy of a proposed federal law. Does he mean he would now repeal the Massachusetts law on employment discrimination? That’s a follow-up question Lopez somehow forgot to ask. Notice also a new qualifier in his opposition to "discrimination." That qualifier is "unjust". He does not mind "just discrimination" against gays and lesbians – merekly the unjust type. Is there any unjust discrimination currently deployed against gay people? Not from what he has said. The formulation – "unjust discrimination" – is an invention of the Vatican, by the way.

Well: at least that’s clear. Romney was for gay equality before he was against it. He was for abortion rights before he was against them. He was for ending the gay ban in the military before he was against it. He was for employment non-discrimination before he was against it. And he was for domestic partnerships before he was against them. We learn two things: he’s running. And he really is John Kerry’s successor as a candidate from Massachusetts. He’ll say anything and everything to get elected.

(Photo: Paul Sancya/AP.)