The Dish

Jonah Goldberg argues that worrying about Bush’s fiscal record when he’s fighting the war on terror may be legitimate but shouldn’t bar anyone from supporting Bush. He goes on, referring to yours truly:

A blog which soared with high-minded rhetoric about how the war on terror is the test for this generation and that Bush was the right man to lead that struggle, now day-after-day tries to whittle away at reasons to support Bush in the fall as if the war on terror were merely another issue which can be trumped by any other issue you happen to feel more passionate about. Maybe “fiscal conservatives” aren’t defined by their fiscal conservatism? Or maybe they think this election isn’t a choice about a single issue be it the deficit or, say, gay marriage? Maybe the election is about a choice between George W. Bush and the people he would appoint to staff his administration and the judicial branch and John F. Kerry and the people he would appoint and how those respective administrations would govern across a wide array of issues including first and foremost the war on terror? And maybe most conservatives find that a cost-benefit analysis on that question yields a fairly obvious answer.

Fairly obvious? But Jonah himself recently pondered the following observation: “While I still think it would be bad for America if Bush lost the election to Kerry – and terrible for Republicans – it’s less clear it would be bad for the conservative movement.” Hmmm. And why would he say something like that? Could it be that Bush has not governed as a conservative in critical ways – and hasn’t even governed competently in others? Let’s list a few: the WMD intelligence debacle – the worst blow to the credibility of the U.S. in a generation; Abu Ghraib – a devastating wound to to America’s moral standing in the world; the post-war chaos and incompetence in Iraq; an explosion in federal spending with no end in sight; no entitlement reform; a huge addition to fiscal insolvency with the Medicare drug entitlement; support for a constitutional amendment, shredding states’ rights; crusades against victimless crimes, like smoking pot and watching porn; the creeping fusion of religion and politics; the erosion of some critical civil liberties in the Patriot Act. I could go on. Is there any point at which a conservative might consider not voting for Bush? For the editor of National Review Online, the answer is indeed “fairly obvious.” But for people not institutionally related to the G.O.P., the only question is: where would that line be?

THE BEST RESPONSE: Here’s an email that says more eloquently than most why some fiscal conservatives might stay with Bush’s big government conservatism:

1) Kerry will probably be only slightly more fiscally conservative, and then only because the (presumably) Republican Congress will become seasonal budget hawks when a Dem. is in the White House.
2) Fiscal Conservatism pales in comparison to Getting The One Big Issue Right. In my opinion, Kerry will not take the fight to the enemy. It goes against the grain of his entire career. He learned at the knee of a Realist, and he is a Realist in his soul. And I think it’s a way of looking at the world that is inimical to security in a post 9/11 world.

That makes some sense. But I think there are enough Rubinites around Kerry to move him in a fiscally responsible direction even without the prodding of a Republican Congress. And, yes, the war. Obviously. But am I the only one who is far less enthusiastic about Bush’s war leadership now than I was a year ago? I supported the war in Afghanistan and Iraq; I support pre-emption as a policy; I believe in taking the fight to the Jihadists at every possible opportunity. But hasn’t the last year changed things somewhat? From the fall of Baghdad on, we have seen little but setbacks. Our goals in Iraq now are limited to making the place less dangerous and oppressive than it was under Saddam. If a Democrat had this record, do you think National Review would let it pass? Look, I am far from being persuaded that Kerry can do any better in the war. But I cannot support this president on the war as enthusiastically as I once did – because the mounting evidence suggests a much more mixed record.

THE MARRIAGE THING: And yes, of course, the president’s support for the FMA has colored this. How could it not? If you had spent much of your life arguing a) that gay people deserve civil equality and b) that civil marriage is the fundamental mark of that equality, it would require Herculean masochism to endorse a president who wants to enshrine the denial of marriage to gays in the very Constitution itself. I could live with disagreement on the issue of marriage – but not the amendment. Pace Jonah, I have been quite clear in this blog that, in my judgment, no self-respecting gay person could vote for Bush; and I consider myself a self-respecting gay person. In my first response to the FMA, I wrote that “[t]his president has now made the Republican party an emblem of exclusion and division and intolerance. Gay people will now regard it as their enemy for generations – and rightly so.” I wrote in a fit of hyperbole on March 3 that Kerry “will get every gay vote and every vote from their families and friends.” Get the drift? No that doesn’t mean I cannot praise or respect other things the administration does. But it does mean I would lack integrity if I were to endorse the guy. Jonah says that “over the last year,” you wouldn’t get the impression that I had made up my mind against Bush. He’s right. My public piece wasn’t published till May 2004 – which leaves ten months for “thinking out loud.” And it’s still possible to think out loud about the candidates, even if you have ruled one out for support this fall (in my Advocate piece, I insisted I still supported the president’s war on terror). So it’s hardly an “extremely significant silence.” I’ve said as much to every interviewer who has asked – on television and radio – and many other people who have asked me privately. And besides, I wrote it for the Advocate – to the readership to whom I most owed an explanation for my endorsement of Bush in 2000. I don’t post my Advocate pieces as a rule on the website because I get enough emails decrying my discussion of gay issues, and the pieces are written for a specific audience. Besides, the arguments in the piece have been expressed before on this site many times (too many times for most people’s tastes). But it’s public; there’s no mystery; and the notion that if you write something for the gay press, you haven’t really written it is, as usual, insulting to gay people. Has this caused me heart-ache? No end. I do indeed feel betrayed, as do many other gay people who trusted this president and paid a price in many ways for supporting him. (I’ve certainly paid more of a price in my own social world for backing this president than Jonah ever has in his.) My only dilemma now is whether to support Kerry or sit this one out. It still is.

Eugene Volokh ruminates on what makes someone sexy. He quotes a female friend of his remarking on how women make much more of an effort to be attractive than men do:

I think it’s particularly true that most men can learn to be sexy, since women are more forgiving about looks, which are less changeable … Maybe it’s easier for women to cultivate appeal, since we’re sort of more raised with the idea of adapting ourselves, rather than just “being,” but men can do it.
But most men don’t really want to be sexy; they want sexy to be them. I don’t mean to man-bash, men are one of my favorite genders, but it’s such a waste of resources. Like you, I know tons of great women. They’re (list of all the good adjectives), and people want to be around them.
And I know a fair number of (good adjectives) single men, but [it’s generally] also clear why they’re single. They don’t listen, and won’t; they won’t get a real job; they’re boring but don’t want to acknowlege it or do anything about it. Hey, if that shirt was “in” when they were in high school, no need to see if any ads/mannequins/humans under 60 wear it today.

Much of this is true – but only for straight men. And that reveals the real source of male slovenliness: women. If women weren’t so damn forgiving of slobbiness, if they weren’t prepared to look for the diamond buried in the rough of a man’s beer-belly, men might have to shape up a little. The only reason gay men are – on the whole – better turned out than straight men is because they have to appeal to other shallow, beauty-obsessed males to get laid, find a mate, etc. The corollary, of course, are lesbians. Now there are many glamorous lesbiterians, but even the most enthusiastic Sapphic-lover will have to concede that many are not exactly, shall we say, stylish. The reason? They don’t have to be to attract other women; and since women find monogamy easier, they also slide into the I’m-married-so-what-the-hell-have-another-pretzel syndrome. When straight women really do insist on only dating hot guys, men will shape up. Until then, it’s hopeless.

Sadr folds up his tent; industrial production surges at a faster pace than anything in six years. Bush has coopted Kerry’s position on Iraq; and is busy swapping recipes with Jacques Chirac. (Yes, I got the nautical metaphor wrong first time.)

AEI – hardly a liberal institution – knocks down any notion that George W. Bush is comparable to Ronald Reagan on fiscal matters:

Ronald Reagan sought – and won – more spending cuts than any other modern president. He is the only president in the last forty years to cut inflation-adjusted nondefense outlays, which fell by 9.7 percent during his first term. George W. Bush, in contrast, increased real nondefense spending by at least 25.3 percent during his first term.
Moreover, President Reagan believed that the federal government had usurped private, state, and local responsibilities and consequently thought the budgets of most departments and agencies should be cut. Following are comparisons of budget cuts during each presidential term going back to the Johnson administration:
*tPresident Reagan cut the budget of 8 agencies out of 15 during his first term and the budget of 10 out of 15 during his second term.
*tPresident Clinton cut the budget of 9 out of 15 agencies during his first term but cut none during his second term.
*tPresident George W. Bush has cut none of the agencies’ budgets during his first term.

No president since Johnson has been so supportive of big government as George W. Bush. Why are fiscal conservatives still supporting him?

He’s a top 500 reviewer. What a nerd.

“The United States is committed to the worldwide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example. I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment.'” – president George W. Bush, June 27, 2003.

“If you don’t violate someone’s human rights some of the time, you probably aren’t doing your job. I don’t think we want to be promoting a view of zero tolerance on this,” – an “official who supervised the capture of accused terrorists”, from the same story. The worst examples of mistreatment cited at the time were the use of truth-serum, threats to deport prisoners to other countries where torture is common, and sleep-deprivation.

This is from the Washington Post this morning:

In December 2002, Mr. Rumsfeld approved a series of harsh questioning methods for use at the Guantanamo Bay base. According to the Wall Street Journal, these included the removal of clothing, the use of “stress positions,” hooding, “fear of dogs,” and “mild non-injurious physical contact.” Even before that, the Journal reported, interrogators at Guantanamo forced prisoners to wear women’s underwear on their heads. A year later, when some of the same treatment was publicized through the Abu Ghraib photographs, Mr. Rumsfeld described it as “grievous and brutal abuse and cruelty.”

So what is it? Defensible interrogation techniques or something for which the Defense secretary has to apologize? Maybe it took seeing the actual abuse for Rumsfeld to realize how vile it is. But he approved many of the methods nonetheless. If people see nothing wrong with doing what was done at Abu Ghraib, then we need to have that debate. And that debate should be public, in front of the world. If the Bush administration wants to defend torture in an election campaign, it can go right ahead. But it has no right to change the rules of U.S. military conduct in secret, through a series of memos and improvisation, and then, when the evidence emerges, pretend it was all concocted by a handful of thugs. I keep remembering, as Anne Applebaum notes this morning, the look on the faces of those creeps humiliating inmates, and the grin on the face of Graner as he posed next to a murdered inmate. They are the faces of people who know they are doing what they are supposed to do. They fear no retribution. 37 inmates have died – died – in U.S. custody. Do we think they all caught pneumonia? Mercifully, some in the military upheld their own honor and disseminated the pictures. But what would have happened if we had not seen those pictures? Would torture still be going on? How would we have found out? This comes down to a fundamental compact between a government and the people. From all the evidence we see so far, the Bush administration has violated that compact, allowed America’s hard-won reputation for decency and fairness to be tarnished, and compromised the moral integrity of the war on terror. What is their explanation?

The latest poll of Iraqis – skewed because it doesn’t include the Kurds – is nonetheless bleak news. Paul Bremer will have spent over a year losing legitimacy completely. The Iraqis still have trust in the Iraqi security forces, while they have little or no trust in the CPA (it has an approval rating of 11 percent). (On the other hand, they also distrust the U.N., giving it only slightly higher grades than the loathed Americans.) 81 percent of Iraqis now think better of Moqtadr al Sadr than they did three months ago (but only 2 percent would elect him president). Allawi scores 24 percent support; al Sadr gets 67 percent. A staggering 92 percent view the Coalition forces as “occupiers” as opposed to 2 percent who consider them “liberators;” and 55 percent say they would feel more safe if the Coalition forces left (that number was 11 percent last November). It doesn’t get more decisive a judgment than that.

SILVER LININGS? Hard to find – but they do exist. 63 percent are happy to have an interim Iraqi government after June 30; 51 percent feel “very safe” in their neighborhoods; 64 percent say that the conflicts in Fallujah and Karbala have made Iraq more unified; 51 percent are now more interested in joining the Iraqi security forces than they were three months ago; 87 percent believe that the Iraqi security forces will be capable of keeping order without the help of the coalition forces. Abu Ghraib didn’t have much of an impact. Most Iraqis say that the abuses are what they expect from Americans (54 percent believe all Americans are like Lynndie England). But the fundamental reason that U.S. forces are opposed is because they are viewed as an occupation, not because of their conduct. Most believe that the violence is a function of a collapse in respect for the Coalition forces and a function of external meddling (which gets it roughly right). The obvious conclusion is that we have lost the window of opportunity to use the good will gained from the ouster of Saddam to leverage a pro-American democracy in non-Kurdish Iraq. But a democracy is still possible, and it’s hard to think of a more rational way forward than the one now proposed. The task now is to achieve some kind of workable pluralist, non-Islamist government that will not be a major anti-American force in the region. That’s much better than leaving Saddam in power; but it’s far less than we might once have hoped for. Maybe in a decade or so, we’ll see the real fruits of this noble, flawed experiment. I’m still hoping.

It appears Senator Rick Santorum will try and get a vote on the Federal Marriage Amendment in the Senate just before the Democratic Convention. The limited goal now is to use this issue against Democratic Senators especially in the South. That, of course, was always part of the game-plan. You will recall that, completely coincidentally, the Defense of Marriage Act was also introduced in the summer before a presidential election in 1996. On the bright side, I don’t know many who believe that this can get the necessary 67 votes; and one reason some in the House want the Senate vote is to declare the FMA dead and so avoid ever having to vote on it. But for Santorum, Rove and Dobson, this will now become a bi-ennial ritual – a means to gin up social conservative votes and energy before elections. They’re foolish, I think. By introducing the FMA, the Santorumites have changed the topic from gay marriage as such to the topic of amending the Constitution. John Kerry’s position – against gay marriage but against the FMA – is not an electoral loser. It’s closer to the American center on this subject than George W. Bush is.

“Slave-holding agro-phile Jefferson was not too sophisticated in his understanding of economics. He drove himself into debt for one thing; his friends held a lottery at one point late in his life to raise money for him. Turning to him for a quote on debt is like turning to Larry King for an analysis of hip hop music. How about quoting instead our first Secretary of the Treasury, who said ‘a national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing?'” Ouch. More ouches on the Letters Page.

UKIP’S STAR: Here’s a useful profile of Robert Kilroy-Silk, the suave British version of Phil Donahue who led the UK Independence Party to 17 percent of the vote in last week’s European elections. One thing worth recalling about him. He was fired by the BBC for making allegedly Islamophobic remarks. I wonder if his public support comes somewhat from that. He’s a mix of Bill O’Reilly and Pim Fortuyn. Dick Morris advised the UKIP and brags about it (justifiably, I guess) here.

BROOKHISER ON DERBYSHIRE: Just two elegant and kindly put-downs – here and here of National Review’s out-and-proud bigot, John Derbyshire.