The Dish

Lots of you have written to say I’ve gone “left.” If being left means balancing the budget, winning a well-planned war in Iraq, fighting Islamo-fascism, cutting spending, reforming entitlements, keeping taxes low, defending states’ rights, defending the drug companies, increasing military strength and bringing marriage into the gay community, then I guess I’m a lefty. On the Cheney thing, as on all these issues, my position is the same now as it was four years ago. You want proof? Here’s some.

It’s too soon to make huge conclusions from this – but Bush is up in the Zogby poll. It may be, as I wrote after the debate, that Bush’s newfound charm outweighs Kerry’s forensic superiority. But the Kerry mo has been stopped, I’d say. And the Mary Cheney thing is a brilliant maneuver by the Republicans. Rove knows that most people do find mentioning someone’s daughter’s lesbianism to be distasteful and gratuitous. So he can work it to great effect, exploiting homophobia while claiming to be defending gays. Again: masterful jujitsu. I tip my hat to the guy. Poisonous, but effective.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “As the former legislative director of the Christian Coalition, I find it hilarious, ironic and shameless that those who have long employed gay bashing as a political tool are feigning their outrage over Kerry’s sensitive notation of Cheney’s daughter’s sexual orientation. This is truly a moment of desperation for the Bushies. On the one hand they are sending out gay bashing mail and on the other hand they are sounding like charter members of the Human Rights Campaign. You’ve got to laugh!” – from Marshall Wittmann. Yes, I’m laughing, when I’m not crying.

Gary Bauer has long denied he’s anti-gay, or catering to anti-gay prejudice. But this morning he came clean, in referring to Kerry’s mentioning Mary Cheney’s lesbianism:

“I think it is part of a strategy to suppress traditional-values voters, to knock 1 or 2 percent off in some rural areas by causing people to turn on the president.”

Think about that for a minute. Bauer believes that his core supporters would be likely to “turn” on the president just because the vice-president’s daughter is a lesbian. Notice that there’s no indication of homosexual “acts”, just a revulsion at Mary Cheney’s simple identity as a lesbian. This is their base. This is why they’re worried. Some of the subtler arguments I’ve heard overnight say the following: it’s not that homosexuality is wrong; it’s just that many people believe that and Kerry therefore exploited their homophobia to gain a point. I don’t buy it, but let’s assume the worst in Kerry’s motives for the sake of argument. What these emailers are saying is that Kerry should hedge what he says in order to cater to the homophobia of Bush’s base. Why on earth should he? The truth here is obvious: Bush and Cheney are closet tolerants. They have no problem with gay people personally; but they use hostility to gay people for political purposes, even if it means attacking members of their own families. What they are currently objecting to is the fact that their hypocrisy has been exposed. To which the only answer is: if you don’t want to be exposed as a hypocrite, don’t be one.

“It is a good thing Bush has an idealistic streak that informs his vision of the world. That idealism leads him to a belief that ‘freedom is not America’s gift to the world; freedom is the Almighty God’s gift to each man and woman in this world.’ But, without demanding accountability from his administration, that messianic zeal is being corrupted, and his policies are lurching out of control. Without a defined, limited overall vision of the war on terrorism and a corresponding commitment to government accountability, Bush can hardly claim to be the champion of ‘conservative values.'”– Robert A. George, explaining why he, as a conservative, cannot vote for George Bush. I understand entirely.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “One of the most refreshing things on the campaign trail last year was seeing stodgy old Dick Gephardt talk about how he loved his lesbian daughter Chrissy. He did it at almost every campaign stop. He did it so much it got boring, like everything Gephardt does. But it was from the heart.
Can you imagine Gephardt’s reaction if he were a candidate and Bush had said something like Kerry said last night? Simple: Warmth and gratitude. Gephardt never implied there was anything unseemly about his daughter or her partner – they were both on his family’s Christmas card! Bush wouldn’t have had to mention her. Gephardt surely would have beaten him to it.
The only damn difference is that Bush & Cheney’s base is anti-gay. That’s why Mary Cheney’s off-limits, not privacy or anything else. If their base were pro-gay, she would have had a prime-time convention speaking slot. But because they’re homophobes, Kerry is supposed to shut up and act accordingly.
Andrew, I hope to God we’re just 18 days away from having leadership that doesn’t feel it has to whisper about a loved one’s existence.” Don’t miss a huge dollop of feedback on the Letters Page – huge because of 150,000 visits yesterday.

It’s a simple argument and it goes as follows. One reason to vote for Kerry this time is that, whatever his record, he will, as president, be forced by reality and by public opinion to be tough in this war. He has no other option. You think he wants to be tarred as a wimp every night by Fox News? Moreover, he would remove from the Europeans and others the Bush alibi for their relative absence in the war on terror. More important, his presidency would weaken the Michael Moore wing of the Democrats, by forcing them to take responsibility for a war that is theirs’ as much a anyone’s. As Bob Kagan put it recently,

There are many reasons why, in theory, the US would benefit from a Democratic victory. It is important for the Democrats to own the war on terrorism and not simply be the opposition. Also, we would have a fresh start with the Europeans and other allies, though they would quickly be disillusioned to learn that Kerry wouldn’t be that different from Bush in some respects.”

Max Boot, another neoconservative, echoes the theme:

I am not at all averse to giving a Democrat a shot. In fact, a Democrat might be better able to sell skeptics abroad and at home on the need for toughness. It also would be good for the Democrats to buy into this long-term struggle, just as Republicans bought into the containment policy with Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1952 election.

I’m not saying this is obvious. I am saying it is perfectly possible to be pro-war and pro-Kerry. Especially after the mishandling of the last year in Iraq, our frayed relations with important allies, and the president’s fiscal undermining of our future military capacity.

MORE ON IRAQ NUKE SITES: This story continues to gain ground:

The mysterious removal of Iraq’s mothballed nuclear facilities continued long after the U.S.-led invasion and was carried out by people with access to heavy machinery and demolition equipment, diplomats said on Thursday… Several diplomats close to the IAEA said the disappearance of the nuclear items was not the result of haphazard looting. They said the removal of the dual-use equipment — which before the war was tagged and closely monitored by the IAEA to ensure it was not being used in a weapons program — was planned and executed by people who knew what they were doing. “We’re talking about dozens of sites being dismantled,” a diplomat said on condition of anonymity. “Large numbers of buildings taken down, warehouses were emptied and removed. This would require heavy machinery, demolition equipment. This is not something that you’d do overnight.”

Why were these sites not guarded? Not enough troops. We launched an invasion to prevent dangerous materials from being exported to terror groups or enemy regimes. And yet we stood by as exactly this happened – on our watch. Unbelievable. Unforgivable.

A CONSERVATIVE GAFFE: Here’s an amazing admission:

While the Democrats have been hurling specious and unsubstantiated charges about Republicans suppressing the African-American vote, Kerry and Edwards are leading their party’s effort – on national television no less – to discourage religious and social conservatives from going to the ballot box for President Bush.

How? By mentioning the fact that Dick Cheney’s daughter is openly lesbian. Now why on earth would that fact make one less likely to vote for Bush-Cheney? The only possible reason is that these voters are bigots, and it is partly on that basis that the GOP is appealing to them. If that weren’t the case, Cesar Conda’s argument wouldn’t hold up at all. Well, at least he’s honest. So too is NRO for running the piece: we’re catering to homophobes and don’t mess with that! Just please don’t tell me that the GOP is a tolerant or inclusive party. If you depend on bigots to win elections, and you pander to them, and rev them up by demonizing minorities, don’t expect the rest of us to sympathize when you’re caught red-handed.

Nightline did an excellent reporting job on Vietnamese memories of the incidents under dispute from the Swift Boat anti-Kerry vets. No big surprise that the evidence there comports with the bulk of the evidence here: that the Swiftees are simply wrong. Check out the whole story. Money quote:

According to the citation for Kerry’s Silver Star, when the boats approached the hamlet, “a B-40 rocket exploded close aboard PCF 94” – Kerry’s boat. He “personally led a landing party ashore in pursuit of the enemy,” the citation says, before commending Kerry’s “extraordinary daring and personal courage” for “attacking a numerically superior force in the face of intense fire.”
That account is disputed by Swift boat veteran John O’Neill, author of “Unfit for Command,” who maintains in his book that the statement “is simply false. There was little or no fire.”
Villagers say this is what they saw: “Firing from over here. Firing from over there. Firing from the boat,” Vo Thi Vi told Nightline.
She was only a couple hundred yards away when a Swift boat turned and approached the shore, she said, adding that the boat was unleashing a barrage of gunfire as it approached.
“I ran,” she recalled, “Running fast. … And the Americans came from down there, yelling ‘Attack, Attack!’ And we ran.”
Her husband Tam said the man who fired the B-40 rocket was hit in this barrage of gunfire. Then, he said, “he ran about 18 meters before he died, falling dead.”

Little or no fire, eh?

TARANTO’S BRILLIANT SPIN: Oh, now I get it. James Taranto is suddenly aghast and upset at gay-baiting! Better late than never, I suppose. In fact, I’m deeply heartened by so many Republicans suddenly concerned about the smearing of homosexuals for political purposes. The reason for Taranto’s assertion? He says that Kerry was pandering to the anti-gay parts of the Democratic base, by letting the last few souls on earth know, in an entirely positive way, that the vice-president’s daughter is openly gay. And the way Kerry “gay-baited” was to say that homosexuality is not a choice, that he supports equal rights for gay couples, and that Mary Cheney helps prove that being gay isn’t a choice. That’ll rile ’em up in the trenches, won’t it? Seriously, I’ve called out anti-gay statements by Democrats in the past; and have a long record of sniffing out homophobia and the use of it, wherever it’s coming from. Certainly my record is, shall we say, more substantial than Taranto’s in this regard. And I fail to see how Kerry’s remark could be understood in any conceivable way as gay-baiting. It never occurred to me when I heard it. It does not occur to me now. You know what is based in gay-baiting? Implicitly, clearly, shamelessly: the Bush-Cheney campaign. The GOP has a nutty candidate in Illinois who called Mary Cheney a “selfish hedonist” – but Dick Cheney wasn’t an “angry dad,” then. Lynne Cheney didn’t call that “tawdry.” So Bush runs the most anti-gay national campaign ever and it’s his opponent who gets tarred as a homophobe! Brilliant, even by Rove’s standards. And when it comes to gay-baiting, there are few as practised as Rove. The sheer nerve of these hypocrites never ceases to amaze.

Here’s an email that makes a point many others have. I cite it because it’s representative:

You won’t read this or reply, but that’s fine. Your support of Kerry’s bringing up Mary Cheney in the debate just lost my respect completely. The best analogy I can think of would have been Carter mentioning Betty Ford’s addiction or someone mentioning Martha Mitchell’s instability and alcoholism in a presidential debate. Just beyond the pale. The young woman, and the family, are entitled to their privacy on private matters.

Notice two things. First, the equation of gayness with some sort of embarrassing problem or, worse, some kind of affliction. For people who believe this, of course Kerry was out of line. That’s why Rove’s base is so outraged. But if you don’t believe this, it’s no different than, say, if a candidate were to mention another candidate’s son in the Marines. Or if, in a debate on immigration, a pro-immigrant candidate mentioned Kerry’s immigrant wife. You have to regard homosexuality as immoral or wrong or shameful to even get to the beginning of the case against Kerry. That’s why it’s a Rorschach test. Secondly, Mary Cheney isn’t private. She ran gay outreach for Coors, for pete’s sake. She appears in public with her partner. Her family acknowledges this. She’s running her dad’s campaign! Whatever else this has to do with – and essentially, it has to do whether you approve of homosexuality or not – privacy is irrelevant.

“Had the president, when speaking about immigration, referenced Teresa Heinz Kerry’s experience in a positive or neutral light, would that have been inappropriate? Is Mary Cheney’s homosexuality some sort of affliction? A verboten family tragedy like the death of John Edwards’ son? The only “cheap and tawdry political trick” performed Wednesday night was the one turned by the Cheney parental units. It was they who used their daughter’s sexuality as a weapon against John Kerry’s sympathetic (and very general) remark. If only Dick and Lynne were so indignant when their daughter was legitimately under attack by an administration willing to write gays and lesbians out of the nation’s founding document. Selective indignation has never been so crass …” – Kevin Arnovitz, Slate. Amen. It’s legitimate to threaten every gay couple with the removal of their basic rights, but it is not legitimate to point out that Cheney’s own daughter will be directly affected? By what twisted logic?

The usually even-keeled Instapundit says that Kerry’s “position on gay marriage is the same as the President’s.” I can’t see how that’s even remotely the case. Both Bush and Kerry oppose civil marriage for gays. True. But Kerry supports giving gays every single right that civil marriage has – on a state and federal level – and just wants to call it something different. Kerry also believes that the individual states should decide what their own policies should be. Bush opposes civil unions, and has supported a constitutional amendment that would forbid any state from granting the “incidents” of marriage to any gay couple. Kerry: 100 percent of the rights of civil marriage. Bush: none. I’d say that’s a pretty huge difference, wouldn’t you? Some say the president supports civil unions. Funny, I’ve never heard him say that in public and his FMA would ban them. If the president believes gay couples should have some limited rights – but not marriage rights – I’d love to hear him say it. But he won’t. Why? Because he’s catering to people who think gay couples are an abomination, that’s why. One last gripe about Glenn: he also writes that Kerry “dissed” Mary Cheney. How? Is calling an openly gay person gay an insult?

Kerry’s electoral college math, explained.