The Dish

Gerhard Schroder went down to a staggering defeat in the European elections yesterday. The SPD won a mere 22 percent of the vote to the Christian Democrats’ 45 percent. In Britain’s local elections, Blair’s Labour Party came in a humiliating third – the worst performance for a governing party in British political history. Just as interesting was the surge in support for the new UK Independence Party, a group that, on the latest results, robbed both Labour and the Conservatives of significant backing. It may end up with around 15 percent of the vote. The UKIP wants withdrawal from the EU. The consequences? The UKIP won’t amount to much, but its success guarantees that Britain won’t join the Euro any time soon, and that the Tories may be drawn further to the right on the European issue. It’s no longer inconceivable that the Conservatives could win the next election – and provoke a real crisis in the EU. Some of this anti-Blair voting was doubtless due to Iraq. But there’s also the beginning of an understanding that Blair’s approach to public services – lots more money, minimal reform – won’t and can’t work. A future Tory government could get away with a more radical reform of the welfare state, some tax cuts, and a confrontation with Brussels. Goody.

THE MEMO: The Justice Department formally decided last year that torture could be justified in Guantanamo. Now we can have a debate. John Ashcroft and Don Rumsfeld need to explain why this was decided, what torture techniques are now approved, and when and how and where they have been used. I’ve been inundated with emails all enthusiastically supporting such torture. I beg to differ, but I certainly think it’s worth debating. What is not acceptable is for the government to decide for itself what is now legal or illegal, to keep it secret, to use abuse and torture in the name of the American people, and then, when horrors are revealed, place the blame on a few underlings. For his part, the president issued a Clintonian answer to the torture question last week:

Q Returning to the question of torture, if you knew a person was in U.S. custody and had specific information about an imminent terrorist attack that could kill hundreds or even thousands of Americans, would you authorize the use of any means necessary to get that information and to save those lives?
THE PRESIDENT: Jonathan, what I’ve authorized is that we stay within U.S. law.

But what if his own Justice Department wrote a memo arguing that, because of the war on terror, torture now is within the law, since the commander-in-chief can determine that law in wartime? That’s very close to Nixon’s statement that if the president does something, that makes it lawful. Look, I don’t think we should treat these prisoners as if they had a parking offense. Some are truly depraved individuals. I appreciate the difficult task any president would have fighting an unnamed enemy capable of terrible atrocities. But neither do I believe it is acceptable to do what we have apparently been doing – while keeping it out of the public domain.

I found this David Gelernter essay in the Weekly Standard to be really insightful. He saw Reagan as a “mystic nationalist,” someone truly in love with his own country, and unapologetic about it:

Reagan was a realist, but a “mystic nationalist” also. He did in fact call himself a “mystic,” according to Peter Schweizer; and he was certainly a patriot and a nationalist. But mystic nationalism is more than the sum of parts. It is a religion–but one that translucently overlays (without obscuring or superceding) Judaism or Christianity.
Mystic nationalism is a tradition nobly represented in the 20th century by such statesmen as Winston Churchill and David Ben-Gurion. Reagan would have recognized himself in a passage by the poet Rupert Brooke, killed at age 28 in the First World War. “He was immensely surprised,” Brooke wrote in 1914 about an unnamed friend, “to perceive that the actual earth of England held for him…a quality which, if he’d ever been sentimental enough to use the word, he’d have called ‘holiness.’ His astonishment grew as the full flood of ‘England’ swept him on from thought to thought. He felt the triumphant helplessness of a lover.”
“There are a few favorite windows I have up there that I like to stand and look out of early in the morning,” Reagan said in his farewell speech, referring to the White House. “The view is over the grounds here to the Washington Monument, and then the Mall and the Jefferson Memorial. But on mornings when the humidity is low, you can see past the Jefferson to the river, the Potomac, and the Virginia shore. Someone said that’s the view Lincoln had when he saw the smoke rising from the Battle of Bull Run. I see more prosaic things: the grass on the banks, the morning traffic as people make their way to work, now and then a sailboat on the river.”

This love of the physical aspects of one’s own country is a very Tory sentiment and Reagan’s least remarked ability was to summon up these feelings until they became a “civil religion” of sorts. His week-long funeral was, in some ways, a beautiful ritual of that civil religion – binding us together, setting us apart, lifting us up.

You learn something new every day:

[T]he Taoists laid great store in the ability to urinate effectively, not only as a major tool for detoxifying the body but also as a way of stimulating energy flow to the kidneys and sexual glands. Men, for instance, when urinating in the standing position, should, except while drunk – when operating dual systems of balance and aim is obviously trickier – stand on tiptoes to urinate. This stimulates the energy of the bladder meridian, which runs through the vital organs and down the back of each leg, and is said not only to increase kidney energy production and thus stimulate libido levels but also to help prevent or manage prostate cancer. Obviously this method is inadvisable for women, who should simply lift their heels off the ground as high as possible in the sitting position for a slightly milder but equivalent effect.

Let me know if it works. Actually, on second thoughts, don’t.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “What is it with gays? Somehow you all believe you deserve special attention. AIDS is a disease whose origin is immoral and unnatural sex. Why should such deviancy be rewarded in any way? The cost of this disease to society is huge and yet, gays believe society owes them something. Get over it and do the right thing. We have had enough of your constant selfishness. Gays are the root cause of the death of millions and now are on a pilgrimage to ruin the sanctity of marriage. Your contributions to the welfare of society are well known and it is time you apologized for the havoc you and your friends have caused.” More feedback on the Letters Page.

POLICING THE NANNY-STATE: A wonderful newish blog dedicated to covering the way in which our rulers – here and abroad – want to prevent us from experiencing pleasure. If you drink, smoke, gamble, have sex, enjoy porn, or smoke weed, this blog’s looking out for you.

The attempt by this White House to court devoutly religious voters is getting more and more direct. John Allen is a great reporter so I doubt he’s wrong that president Bush lobbied the Vatican to support the Constitutional Amendment to strip gay couples of any rights under the law. The Rove strategy is to use hostility to marriage rights for gays to unite a hoped-for “Popular Front” of conservative Catholics, evangelicals and fundamentalists. Call it the Mel Gibson strategy, or The Last Temptation of Dubya. The president’s problem is that the grass roots aren’t exactly playing their part. They don’t seem to believe that fusing politics and religion is what evangelicalism is all about; and Catholics – even highly traditional ones – are leery of seeing their Church turned into a branch of the Republican party. So, whatever their views on marriage rights, they have been luke-warm about the president’s attempt to write gay couples out of the Constitution. Even the president has conceded this. “I will tell you the prairie fire necessary to get an amendment passed is simmering at best,” he told Christianity Today. “I think it’s an accurate way of describing it.” So he’s trying to start a brush-fire from above. But how weird that a president of the US would try to persuade the Roman pontiff to take a position on an American constitutional amendment. Sometimes, he is a strict multilateralist, after all.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “[Bush] is not another Hitler. Yet there is a certain parallelism. They have in common a demagogic appeal to the worst side of a country’s heritage in a crisis. Bush is doubtless sincere in his vision of what is best for America. So too was Hitler. The crew around the president — Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Karl Rove, the ‘neo-cons’ like Paul Wolfowitz — are not as crazy perhaps as Himmler and Goering and Goebbels. Yet like them, they are practitioners of the Big Lie — weapons of mass destruction, Iraq democracy, only a few ‘bad apples’.” – Andrew Greeley, Chicago Tribune, as cited by Arthur Chrenkoff.

How much higher will the abuse scandal go? Surely Rumsfeld was aware of the new relaxed interrogation methods. He approved of using dogs at Guantanamo:

In January 2002, for example, Rumsfeld approved the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners there; although officials have said dogs were never used at Guantanamo, they were used at Abu Ghraib.
Then, in April 2003, Rumsfeld approved the use in Guantanamo of at least five other high-pressure techniques also listed on the Oct. 9 Abu Ghraib memo, none of which was among the Army’s standard interrogation methods. This overlap existed even though detainees in Iraq were covered, according to the administration’s policy, by Geneva Convention protections that did not apply to the detainees in Cuba.

But didn’t Rumsfeld deny under oath that he had any knowledge of such techniques in Iraq?

You’ve got to love this town. While contractors were trying to build a new driveway last week, they came upon some human remains:

Two human femur bones found by sewer excavators in Provincetown last Wednesday ignited rumors that made their way to Shop Therapy owner Ronny Hazel while he was in New York.
The juiciest details placed Hazel at the center of the skeletal discovery, where it was said teen-agers from the 1970s had unearthed a body and delivered a skull to him for drugs or money and then buried the remains nearby.
This week Hazel joked about receiving at least 50 phone calls about the rumor, with as many variations, some involving a Mafia burial ground.
Hazel said he has sold Tibetan monk heads, imported from Nepal, for at least 20 years. He also acknowledged having a shop in the neighborhood where the bones were discovered. After thinking about it a bit on Tuesday, though, Hazel said any connection to last week’s discovery was “highly unlikely.”

But not impossible.

A DOLE CLASSIC: A great come-back to D’Amato at the Reagan funeral:

It was in this vein that Mr. Dole and Mr. D’Amato teased each other, and it was just a matter of time before Mr. D’Amato brought up Viagra, the potency drug for which Mr. Dole is a noted pitchman. Mr. D’Amato told him there was now something even better on the market, called Levitra.
“Does it give you hair?” Mr. Dole asked.

No one does the barbed response better than Dole.

I should have added yesterday that I thought the best performance of the Reagan funeral service was president George Herbert Walker Bush. He wasn’t very coherent at times – he can mangle syntax even when it’s written in front of him. But he was so classy. The early focusing attention on the bereaved family – the man was brought up right. Then the concrete and revealing anecdotes:

And then I learned decency; the whole world did. Days after being shot, weak from wounds, he spilled water from a sink, and entering the hospital room aides saw him on his hands and knees wiping water from the floor. He worried that his nurse would get in trouble.
The good book says humility goes before honor, and our friend had both, and who could not cherish such a man?
And perhaps as important as anything, I learned a lot about humor, a lot about laughter. And, oh, how President Reagan loved a good story. When asked, “How did your visit go with Bishop Tutu?” he replied, “So-so.”

Perfect. And the choking up: that blorting of WASP emotionality. He made me choke up then as well.

The use of unmuzzled dogs to terrify prisoners was approved military practice in Abu Ghraib:

Smith said military intelligence personnel asked him to instill fear in detainees. He said that he would bring his dog, a black Belgian shepherd named Marco, to the tier specifically to scare prisoners after they were pulled out of their cells. At the behest of interrogators, he said, in some cases he would bring the barking dog to within six inches of the prisoners. “Is using the dog in this manner an allowable tool by the MI interrogators?” an investigator asked Smith. “Yes,” he replied. The dog handlers arrived at Abu Ghraib in late November, sometime after the abuse of detainees had been captured in photographs, including the images of the naked human pyramid and forced masturbation.

It seems to me to be getting clearer and clearer that Abu Ghraib was not the work of a few rogue soldiers. The dogs are among the least troubling tactics, of course. But when you also consider that up to 80 percent of the inmates at Abu Ghraib were guilty of nothing, you have to wonder who thought this was a good way to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis. Some soldiers are saying that Colonel Pppas, the Military Intelligence officer in charge of Abu Ghraib, directly approved the inhumane treatment. How inhumane?

On Jan. 13, Spec. John Harold Ketzer, a military intelligence interrogator, saw a dog team corner two male prisoners against a wall, one prisoner hiding behind the other and screaming, he later told investigators. “When I asked what was going on in the cell, the handler stated that he was just scaring them, and that he and another of the handlers was having a contest to see how many detainees they could get to urinate on themselves,” Ketzer said.

That’s what some parts of the U.S. military have been reduced to. I have a sense we’re only at the beginning of this story. Check out the Houston Chronicle earlier this week.

AIDS IN CHINA: We can be retrospectively critical of Reagan, but no one in America ever sent AIDS activists to forcible psychiatric treatment. But that’s what just happened in Communist China:

When a fellow activist attempted to deliver some AIDS materials to Hu Jia on the evening of June 1, police refused to allow them to meet, and gave Hu Jia a brutal thrashing that resulted in injuries to his head and left arm. On June 3, four police officers forced their way into Hu Jia’s home and said they would be staying there to monitor his activities. When Hu Jia objected, they struck him in the presence of his father and mother, then took him away and detained him in a cold, damp basement for three days and three nights. Since releasing Hu Jia on June 6, police have continued their surveillance on his home, cutting off all of the family’s telephone access and refusing to allow Hu Jia to leave the house.
The more recent order for psychiatric evaluation is causing considerable distress to Hu Jia and his parents. Hu Jia’s parents see absolutely no sign of mental abnormality in Hu Jia, and are well aware that “psychiatric treatment” has been forced upon a number of dissidents and religious practitioners, sometimes resulting in them actually becoming mentally unstable. A source passed HRIC a message from Hu Jia’s family and friends calling on the international community to take note of Hu Jia’s desperate situation. The message states, “If the police forcibly commit Hu Jia to a mental hospital against the wishes of himself and his family, this constitutes using psychiatric treatment as a form of torture and political persecution.”

Yes, a form of torture. But how can the U.S. now take a stand against this, when the president has memos drawn up explaining why torture is sometimes okay?

In local and European elections, the Labour party has been pushed into a humiliating third place.