The Dish

Isikoff’s latest report shows how close Patrick Fitzgerald is getting to the heart of the Plame outing. He seems to have nailed down Cheney’s hand-written notes on Wilson’s op-ed in the NYT – "Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?" – as well as hard evidence that Libby knew full well that Plame’s identity was classified before he leaked it. Who knows what he’s got on Rove? The court notice on Cheney’s hand-written notes as evidence can be read here.

I have a feeling that Fitzgerald isn’t even close to finishing his work. And if I were Karl Rove, I’d be having a rough weekend.

(Photo: Shawn Thew/AFP/Getty.)

"There is a very fine line between national security and personal oppression. The public is prepared to accept a degree of intelligence intervention but this may have crossed the line. I think a majority of Americans will be opposed to this," – Frank Luntz on popular response to the NSA data-gathering operation. (Hat tip: Joe.)

A reader points out the following irony. Jonah Goldberg, harrumphing about yours truly at NRO, writes the following:

The Party of Andrew released a sharply partisan attack today, insuating [sic] that John Derbyshire is a Nazi.

Actually, I think Derbyshire is much more like a nineteenth century Prussian. But I guess when Jonah sees the word "Herr", he immediately thinks of Nazis. In fact, he has such insinuations on the brain. His next book happens to be called "Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton." No word yet on whether Jonah, like Ramesh, will get Ann Coulter to blurb the cover, the design of which can be seen below.

Clive Davis counts the ways.

A reader writes:

It is comforting to find that I can count on certain things remaining consistent, and thereby confirming my convictions. I picked up a complimentary copy of Time recently. I haven’t read it for a long time. There is typically nothing new, or at least nothing intellectually honest in it. You confirmed that for me again. Your article, "My Problem with Christianism" was predictable. A shame. A believer who lives without reference to absolute truth provided by a Sovereign God in His revealed Word is pitiably controlled by a culture-generated moral relativism, and personal deception. He has forgotten, or never understood that the Christian faith is not about the believer, but about the Creator and Redeemer. I might excuse your pedantic understanding of the faith you claim, if you were not so obviously promoting a left wing political agenda – welcome to the very "political polution" you "abhor." The "Christianity" you promote tastes like tepid bath water (Rev. 3:14-16.) What a disingenuous essay! Got anything better?

He asks whether being against Bush makes him a liberal. His answer? No. Take the test!

A CNN poll finds a slim majority believing Bill Clinton was more honest as president than George W. Bush is. And that was the best news for Bush in the poll.

The speech is, to give my first impression, a truly inspired piece of work. It’s funny at times, sharp, moving, sincere, self-deprecating. What it manages to do is something that, sadly, Bush has been unable to do. It manages to argue forcefully for the moral cause of the war against Islamist terrorism and yet to defend the dignity and value of our strong and impassioned debates about it. It’s about reconciliation – and not just within Republican circles. It’s about reconciliation at a national level, a way to get beyond the polarization of the last few years, without descending into hazy delusions about the core and real disagreements that still divide us:

Americans deserve more than tolerance from one another, we deserve each other‚Äôs respect, whether we think each other right or wrong in our views, as long as our character and our sincerity merit respect, and as long as we share, for all our differences, for all the noisy debates that enliven our politics, a mutual devotion to the sublime idea that this nation was conceived in ‚Äì that freedom is the inalienable right of mankind, and in accord with the laws of nature and nature’s Creator.
We have so much more that unites us than divides us. We need only to look to the enemy who now confronts us, and the benighted ideals to which Islamic extremists pledge allegiance – their disdain for the rights of Man, their contempt for innocent human life – to appreciate how much unites us.

The tone is one in which McCain uses his advanced age – which will surely be a factor in the coming election – as an advantage. He provides a narrative of his life that portrays him as a former hot-head who has learned his lessons. He’s trying to defuse two potential liabilities with a single story. It’s artfully done:

Let us exercise our responsibilities as free people. But let us remember, we are not enemies. We are compatriots defending ourselves from a real enemy. We have nothing to fear from each other. We are arguing over the means to better secure our freedom, promote the general welfare and defend our ideals. It should remain an argument among friends; each of us struggling to hear our conscience, and heed its demands; each of us, despite our differences, united in our great cause, and respectful of the goodness in each other. I have not always heeded this injunction myself, and I regret it very much.

McCain is telling us – showing us – that he is ready to bind up the wounds and lead America. That’s what this speech suggests – and it may well become the theme of his presidential run. And, although I am less of a believer in government than McCain is, it may be what this country desperately needs, in a very perilous time. I know I’m a sap for McCain. Always have been. But he may soon be America’s indispensable leader. And a critical part of that leadership will be undoing the divisions that have been allowed to deepen and calcify in the last five years. If he runs against Hillary, it will be as a healer against a figure who, fairly or unfairly, represents salt in America’s ideological wounds. It’s a winning message; and a necessary one.

(Photo: Ben Baker/Redux.)

The text is here.

A reader makes an interesting sociological point:

I wonder how much influence the rise of "companionship" marriage has had (and will have) on the acceptance of gay marriage. People like Maggie Gallagher and Ramesh Panunu have argued (correctly) that the principal function of marriage has always been child rearing. That may no longer be true. As life-spans climb into the 80’s, married couples are likely to spend more of their lives as "empty-nesters" than as child-rearers.  And while seniors are hardly sexually inactive, there is no doubt but that sexual activity decreases with age. Yet the divorce rate among seniors is significantly less than the rate among couples of child-rearing age. Moreover, the re-marriage rate among seniors who lose their spouses is fairly high, even though there is no chance that the "second marriage" will produce children.

All of this suggests that society is gaining considerable experience with living arrangements where sexual and child-rearing considerations are secondary. And such arrangements appear to work at least as well as child-rearing marriages.  As society becomes accustomed to the idea of people living together for the sake of companionship, with sex as a real, but secondary, consideration, the idea of gays living together in committed relationships is likely to seem similar to relationships between older heterosexual couples. Indeed, I suspect that if gay marriage ever becomes widespread, it will be most widespread between couples over 40.

The point of all this is that the nature of an institution, such as marriage, can change through forces having nothing to do with the debates over that institution – in this case, the "graying" of America. And these forces can have unanticipated "side-effects" which can prove far more important than the reasons consciously advanced for and against changes in such an institution.

Absolutely. This, I would argue, is the true conservative position. It’s something Hayek and Burke and Oakeshott would have immediately grasped. A conservative starts not from some a priori doctrine – i.e. that "marriage" is for procreation and child-rearing only. He starts from the society he lives in. What does marriage mean now? How has organic social change – the new equality of women, the emergence of openly gay people, the graying of the population, the availability of contraception – made our current arrangements anachronistic? The conservative will then set about – carefully and conservatively – reforming social institutions so that they adapt and coopt the new social realities.

This is the central theme of Burke (along with a deep distrust of power). It’s the essential teaching of Oakeshott. And when you ponder this, you realize that our recent adaptations of the institution of civil marriage – including mixed race couples, gay people, allowing for second marriages as people live longer, seeing marriage as primarily companionate rather than reproductive – are not a means to the destruction or "abolition" of civil marriage, but to its survival in an always-changing society. The theocons are not conservatives in this sense; they are reactionaries. They follow a model of the family that is fixed a priori by theology, and that is oblivious to society as it now is – in fact actively hostile to society as it now is. This mindset was the object of Burke’s scorn; and it was Oakeshott’s primary foe. Yet it now defines a core part of American conservatism. Therein lies the problem.