The Dish

Jonah Goldberg approvingly quotes an email from a reader at NRO. Here’s what the reader thinks of mentioning that someone’s openly gay:

Everybody in the room may know that someone present has a family member who is profoundly retarded, or–less innocently–a drunken gambling addict cheating on a spouse.

So an openly gay person in a ten-year faithful relationship is akin to a heterosexual adulterous alcoholic gambler. And the outrage at Kerry’s benign statement of fact has nothing to do with anti-gay prejudice, does it?

“I was stationed at a base (Al Taqqadum) South-West of Fallujah that we took over from the 82nd Airborne. Your writing about the Abu Graib prompted me write this. It is an explanation of why so many in the military favor Bush, even though we are the ones suffering the most because of his mistakes:

It is an old military maxim that blunders can be forgiven, but a lack of boldness cannot. There will always be blunders. The simple becomes difficult in war. Take for example the following question: what is 2+2 equal too? An easy question right? Now imagine I gave you 15 such questions and you had 2 seconds to answer them. Most likely you would answer some and leave the rest. Looking at those questions you missed in isolation I might say, “What kind of blathering idiot are you? You can’t even answer simple questions like 2+2=4”. That is why Armchair Generals are so annoying. They look at one thing in isolation with all the time in the world to think about it and say confidently “the answers obvious”. But when you are out in the fight everything looks different. Nothing is ever seen in isolation. You never have enough time. You never know more than 1/10 what you need to know. There will always be blunders.

But the job has to get done anyway. And to get this kind of job done boldness is essential. A leader who never blunders, but who doesn’t take the fight to the enemy is worthless. A leader who sets about to win – win ugly if needs be – is priceless.

One thing the Marine Corps taught me is that a 70% solution acted on immediately and violently is better than a perfect solution acted on later. My experience has proven this true time and again. The sad fact is however, that a 70% solution is a 30% mistake. And those mistakes can be hard to take. In WWII for example, 700 soldiers drowned in a training accident in preparation for D-Day (that is about how many combat deaths we’ve experienced so far in Iraq).

There is a scene in the movie “We were Soldiers” that says it better than I can. In the scene a young soldier on the ground is giving directions on enemy positions to aircraft flying overhead. The aircraft then dropped Napalm on the enemy. At one point the soldier gets the directions wrong and stares horrified as the Napalm is dropped on his own unit. The soldier is shaken beyond belief. He sat there doing nothing – paralyzed by his mistake. Then his Commanding Officer gave him the confidence to carry on. The CO told him to “forget about that last one” and “you’re keeping us alive here”. And so the soldier swallowed his guilt and kept doing his job and thereby saved the unit. That is what a 70% solution looks like in real life. And those are the 70% solutions that win wars.

Most people and events are beyond your control. Most questions you don’t have time to answer. Most facts you will never know. But you have to press the attack anyway. No matter how ugly it gets, you keep going until you win.

Kerry doesn’t understand that. Everything he did during the Cold War and everything he says about this one states as much. He represents those who would never blunder, but who would not take the fight to the enemy. He would just sit there – like the soldier in the movie – paralyzed by America’s mistakes.”

Don’t miss the batch of other excellent retorts to the Dish on the Letters Page.

High Times picks its man, man. Missouri will no doubt be swayed.

Why did Bill Safire make stuff up in his recent column on Mary Cheney? And why does he think being gay is such a horrifying thing? My take on Safire’s homosexual panic can be read here. Money quote:

The question raised was whether homosexual orientation is a choice. The most obvious argument that it isn’t a choice is that many gay people would obviously be better off if they were straight. Why would they choose something that difficult if they didn’t have to? This is particularly the case with people in the current Republican Party. If homosexuality is a choice, why would gay Republicans exist? Since the party is now institutionally anti-gay, it would make sense for all those who have “chosen” to be gay to “choose” to be straight. But they can’t. Why? Because it isn’t a choice.
And, whether she likes it or not, the most prominent gay Republican in the entire country is Mary Cheney. In fact, she’s particularly poignant proof that homosexuality is not a choice. Her lesbianism is a source of acute embarrassment for the Republican Party. That’s why she was pointedly absent from the family tableau at the Republican Convention. And yet she endures. And her family embraces her and her partner, Heather. What data could be more relevant in response to the question asked?

Only if you believe lesbianism is a “problem” can you believe that what Kerry said is off the mark. And it’s been truly revelatory to find out how many ostensibly tolerant people really do, in fact, believe that being a lesbian is a problem.

The Gordon piece bears re-reading. It addresses a major issue in the debate we’re having over the election. Sarah Baxter, Greg Dejerejian and others rightly point out the superior worldview of the Bush administration in response to terror. But that really isn’t the issue this time around. The issue is: even if they see the world the right way, are they capable of pursuing their policies competently? I cannot believe that anyone fairly reviewing the shambles that is the Iraq occupation can have any real confidence in this administration’s ability to meet logistical means to ideological ends. It hurts me to say it, but Rumsfeld is clearly the main man responsible for ignoring early advice, refusing to heed the military, creating an intimidatory atmosphere in which important criticism cannot be heard, and for sticking to theories when cruel, hard experience has debunked them. Here’s Garner again:

“John Abizaid was the only one who really had his head in the postwar game. The Bush administration did not. Condi Rice did not. Doug Feith didn’t. You could go brief them, but you never saw any initiative come of them. You just kind of got a north and south nod. And so it ends with so many tragic things.”

Do you really trust these people to protect us in the months and years ahead? Do you trust them to make the right decisions? Do you trust them to subject their own beliefs to scrutiny? That’s the first issue in this election, before we get to the question of Kerry. I say this as someone who did once trust them, and who found himself unable to marry the reality on the ground with the words coming from the White House. I trusted but couldn’t verify. And the stakes are too high for me to trust again.

THE POLLS ARE UNCHANGED: Since last week, that is. That’s the view of MysteryPollster, who has done the best analysis I’ve read so far of what’s going on.

JESUS FOR BUSH: Yep, a divine endorsement. And why not?

Mr. Brinson persuaded Mr. Caviezel, the actor who portrayed Jesus in Mel Gibson’s hit film, to appear in a Webcast imploring Christians to vote. Although Mr. Caviezel never explicitly endorses the president, his message is designed to remind Christians that Mr. Bush shares their opposition to abortion, judicial activism and homosexual marriage. “In this election year, Americans are faced with some of the most important issues in the history of our country,” he said. “In order to preserve the God-given freedoms we each hold dear, it’s important that we let our voices be heard.”

We’re still waiting, of course, for an endorsement from the Virgin Mary. But I’m sure Richard Neuhaus has that one lined up.

WHEN GLENN IS PISSED OFF: He can be really funny. I wish he’d be more abusive at times – of the people who deserve a little slapping around. And I haven’t heard the term “sod off” since I left England. Good for him. But it’s also true that he doesn’t really defend his own pro-Bush sentiments at any length, and he routinely avoids any news that could reflect badly on the president. I’m sure Glenn is aware of the many mistakes in Iraq, but he doesn’t link to them, and seems content merely to link to positive news. That’s his prerogative, of course. And given the bad news emphasis of MSM, defensible. But it is a cocoon of a sort. And his assumptions would be more persuasive with a bit more substantiation at times.

That’s the approval rating for the president in the new NYT/CBS poll. And the wrong-track number is now at 59 percent. Yes, the poll shows a tie for president. But these underlying numbers must be very worrying for the White House. On the other hand, if the public thinks things are this bad and still aren’t breaking decisively for Kerry, what does that say about the challenger? I think we’d all prefer different choices, wouldn’t we? But this is the one we’ve got.

“Things were stirred up far more than they should have been. We did not seal the borders because we did not have enough troops to do that, and that brought in terrorists.” – Jay Garner, the Bush administration’s first civilian administrator in Iraq. So both Garner and Bremer have now publicly faulted what was obvious very early on. The rest of the Michael Gordon piece makes you want to weep: because of the promise in Iraq that was lost, because of a noble, vital war undermined by arrogance and incompetence.

It does strike me as astounding that in four debates lasting six hours, the horrors of Abu Ghraib were never mentioned. Remember when we were reeling from the images? They remain the most spectacular public relations debacle for this country at war since Vietnam. And we know the underlying reasons for the abuse and torture: the prison was drastically under-manned and incompetently managed, the Pentagon had given mixed signals on what constituted torture, the CPA had no idea that it might be dealing with an insurgency and was dragging in all sorts of innocents to extract intelligence in a ham-handed manner. Although the administration has clearly done all it can to stymie Congressional investigations, it has become clear that responsibility for the chaos ultimately stops at Rumsfeld’s desk. No, it wasn’t a systematic policy. It was a function of what wasn’t done, rather than what was done – and, in that, it remains a symbol of everything that has gone so wrong in Iraq. Bush, of course, barely mentioned it at the time. He has no ability to stare harsh reality in the face – especially if it means reflection on himself and his administration. As with everything else on his watch, he was not responsible. In fact, no one was responsible except for those literally caught on camera raping, murdering and abusing prisoners in the care of the United States. And so his silence in the debates is not surprising. But Kerry’s is – and reveals a worrying lack of courage. Kerry is afraid that criticizing Abu Ghraib will make him look like a war critic, or anti-American, or somehow responsible for weakening morale. Vietnam hovers over him. It shouldn’t. What happened was unforgivable negligence and evil, a horrendous blow to American moral standing – as well as simply an outrage on a human and moral level. It didn’t affect Iraqis’ views: they tragically already believed we were as bad as these images portrayed. But it was a fatal blow to domestic morale. I haven’t fully recovered from it in my pro-war heart. I couldn’t believe America could do this. I still wince at the memory. But what I still remember was Dick Cheney’s response to criticism of Rumsfeld at the time. “Get off his case,” he harrumphed. Even after such a blow to the very core of the meaning of America, Cheney was contemptuous of holding anyone in his circle accountable. It says it all, doesn’t it?

I have to say I’m worried about the lack of a flu vaccine this year. I’m one of those people with compromised immune systems who really need to get a shot and who won’t this year because … well, I’ve been trying to figure that out. It seems to me pretty obvious that the country’s response to flu should not be dependent on one company in Britain. The Bush administration, of course, denies it’s responsible. Surprise! But their defense struck me as weak:

Health and Human Services spokesman Bill Pierce pointed out that last year, Congress only appropriated $50 million of $100 million that the administration had asked for to help companies switch to better and more efficient ways of making influenza vaccine, a process that takes months and hundreds of millions of specially raised chicken eggs.

Hmmm. And which party controls Congress? They sure don’t mind spending billions on anything else they can find. There were warnings, we are told. But the administration didn’t heed them. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? And doesn’t it also increase your confidence that the Bushies are on top of our response to a terrorist-deployed viral outbreak?

DRUM ON DREZNER: Dan Drezner who is leaning toward Kerry is still worried that Kerry’s record makes him a bad bet for confronting Jihadist terror in the future. Kevin Drum has a response well worth reading. Money quote:

[O]bsessing over Kerry’s entire 30-year public history is probably unproductive. After all, before 9/11 George Bush and his advisors had little concern for terrorism and expressed frequent contempt for things like nation building and democracy promotion. Does that affect how we feel about Bush today?
It shouldn’t, because we accept that 9/11 fundamentally changed his view of the world. We judge Bush by how he’s reacted after 9/11, not by his advisors’ long records before taking office – and I’d argue that we should do the same with Kerry rather than raking over nuclear freeze minutiae and Gulf War votes from over a decade ago. Obviously Kerry’s past illuminates his character to some degree, but a lot changed on 9/11 and I suspect that ancient history is a poor guide to his view of how to react to the post-9/11 world.

Good point. Bush in 2000 was adamantly against nation-building, paid little attention to terrorism as a threat, and wanted to spend less on the military than Gore. Should he be held to account for that today? Not really. So why should Kerry?

Damned if I know. Chris Suellentrop, however, does his bit to explain the vagaries.

REPUBLICANS AGAINST GAY-BAITING: So far, no quotes at all revealing Republican commentators condemning gay-baiting before the Mary Cheney flap. Hmmm. But, hey, I’m still open to late-comers. Meanwhile, here’s another more specific challenge. Stanley Kurtz and Maggie Gallagher have long said that they’re not anti-gay, they just believe that civil marriage should be restricted to heterosexual couples. They have also said that they are not opposed to domestic partnerships or civil unions – as long as they maintain a clear second-class status and do not challenge heterosexual privilege. So what do Gallagher and Kurtz say about the various state constitutional amendments now up for the vote? What do they say about Louisiana’s recently passed amendment? These amendments go far further than keeping civil marriage exclusively heterosexual. They also ban domestic partnerships, civil unions, or indeed any civil relationship between two gay men or lesbians. Here’s Ohio’s amendment language:

This state and its political subdivisions shall not create or recognize a legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance or effect of marriage.

The campaign, as Michelle Goldberg points out, has been so viciously homophobic in its rhetoric and intent and the measure so sweeping in its gutting of gay rights that even the Republican governor has come out against it. But will Gallagher and Kurtz? I’m holding my breath.

UPDATE: Here’s Michelle Malkin complaining about the RNC flier. Her complaint, however, is not an actual criticism of gay-baiting. She focuses on the ludicrous Bible-banning tactic. Close and encouraging – but no cigar.