The Dish

Elegantly, simply done, I thought. Thatcher’s eulogy was the finest – and most interesting. The sheer beauty of the honor guard’s ritual took my breath away: this, I thought, really is a civil religion. Bush’s eulogy was good, but not quite as good as I’d hoped for. Maybe it’s because Reagan’s rhetorical skills were so fine that everyone else comes up short. Mulroney was a bit of a bore, but every funeral should have one. And tell me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t Bill Clinton asleep while W was speaking? Or at least with his eyes closed?

In honor of president Reagan’s funeral, here’s a useful corrective to the notion that his legacy was always celebrated. Today, almost everyone concedes his historical significance. But that wasn’t what was said at the time. Here’s a smattering of commentary from the 1980s.

“A few years from now, I believe, Reaganism will seem a weird and improbable memory, a strange interlude of national hallucination, rather as the McCarthyism of the early 1950s and the youth rebellion of the late 1960s appear to us today.” – Arthur “Always Wrong” Schlesinger, Washington Post, May 1, 1988.

“I wonder how many people, reading about the [Evil Empire’] speech or seeing bits on television, really noticed its outrageous character… Primitive: that is the only word for it. … What is the world to think when the greatest of powers is led by a man who applies to the most difficult human problem a simplistic theology – one in fact rejected by most theologians?… What must the leaders of Western Europe think of such a speech? They look to the head of the alliance for rhetoric that can persuade them and their constituents. What they get from Ronald Reagan is a mirror image of crude Soviet rhetoric. And it is more than rhetoric: everyone must sense that. The real Ronald Reagan was speaking in Orlando. The exaggeration and the simplicities are there not only in the rhetoric but in the process by which he makes decisions.” – Anthony Lewis, New York Times, March 10, 1983

“Something like the speech to the evangelicals is not presidential, it’s not something a president should say. If the Russians are infinitely evil and we are infinitely good, then the logical first step is a nuclear first strike. Words like that frighten the American public and antagonize the Soviets. What good is that?” – Rick Hertzberg, New Yorker macher, quoted in the Washington Post, March 29, 1983.

“President Reagan has substituted a mindless militarism for a foreign policy, rattling arms from El Salvador to Saudi Arabia, frightening our friends from Japan to West Germany. He proposes a 50 percent increase in ‘defense expenditures.’ Much of it will be dissipated in the self-defeating spiral of an open-ended nuclear-arms race that poses a greater threat to our own internal and external security than all the Communist propaganda that ever emanated from Moscow. Already, the cost of Reagan policies is devastating to our country in economic strength, in diplomatic influence, in national security, in moral stature.” — John B. Oakes, former senior editor, New York Times, November 1, 1981.

“All evidence indicates that the Reagan administration has abandoned both containment and détente for a very different objective: destroying the Soviet Union as a world power and possibly even its Communist system. [This is a] potentially fatal form of Sovietphobia… a pathological rather than a healthy response to the Soviet Union.” – Princeton Professor Stephen Cohen, 1983.

“‘We’ve really got to start talking,’ says George Ball, undersecretary of state in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. ‘The fact is we’ve let these fellows get away with murder, and the situation now is much too serious for that.’ To ideological men like Ronald Reagan, new information is only useful if it confirms old prejudices. Though he is shrewd enough to bend and budge under pressure (hence, for example, his abandonment of old positions on Taiwan), in his heart Reagan knows he has always been right about the nature of the world, of communism, of America’s proper role.” – Robert Kaiser, Washington Post, October 30, 1983.

“Are we rushing headlong into the next step of those 40 years of progressions by which we do something then they do something, by which we pretend that we’re going to build this and it will somehow strengthen our deterrent then they do it, and low and behold, the next thing we know is, the President of the United States is addressing the nation saying, ‘My fellow Americans, I hate to tell you this, but the Soviet Union is deploying more of these, and we have to respond, and I’m asking the Congress for more money in order to respond.’ Star Wars is guaranteed to do that, and it’s guaranteed to threaten the heavens — the one line we haven’t yet crossed with weaponry: the heavens.” – Senator John Kerry, on SDI, the program that brought the evil empire to its knees, August 5, 1986.

“In his distaste for bilateral efforts to manage the superpower rivalry and his instinctive predilection for unilateral ones, Reagan is counting on American technological and economic predominance to prevail in the end. The most striking, and questionable, theme in his star wars speech was his apparent belief that the U.S. could mobilize its scientific community and its economic resources in quest of an impenetrable antiballistic-missile shield over the entire nation without triggering perilously destabilizing countermeasures, both offensive and defensive, on the part of the U.S.S.R. Reagan’s views notwithstanding, there is little reason to hope that the many handicaps of the Soviet economy will be decisively advantageous to the U.S. in the long run, allowing the U.S. to ‘beat’ the U.S.S.R. in an arms race.” — Strobe Talbott, Time, April 18, 1983.

“Ronald Reagan came to Europe to persuade people that he is not the shallow, nuclear cowboy of certain unkind assessments. Said White House spokesman David Gergen, on the eve of departure, ‘Some in Europe do not know or understand him.’ But now that the president has been among them for over a week, Europeans may think they got him right the first time. In Rome, he made a stab at identifying himself as a ‘pilgrim for peace.’ But by the time he got to London he had reverted to type as a cold warrior. And yesterday in Bonn, he reiterated his commitment to ‘peace through strength’ – which is fancy talk for continuing the nuclear arms race.” – Mary McGrory, Washington Post, June 10, 1982.

Rest in peace, Mr President. And know that after all these years, you were right – and all these people were clearly, emphatically, embarrassingly, wrong.

“Perhaps I’m something of an anomaly, but I’m a progressive liberal–no lover of Bush–who wholeheartedly supports our efforts in Iraq. Indeed, one of the reasons I’m so opposed to a second Bush term is that I believe his administration can’t be trusted to continue to manage the Iraq mission.
I have been awfully upset by the Abu Ghraib revelations, the White House’s response to them, and now the memo scandal. (I heard Ashcroft on NPR yesterday–it was shameful.) And I didn’t even know about Sean Baker until I read your blog this morning.” Richard Cohen also makes some good points this morning.

FRED ON REAGAN: I’ve long admired Fred Barnes for his honesty as a reporter (and his general menschness as a human being). He loved Reagan, as I did, but he wasn’t above criticizing him (which for some reason now seems to be regarded as the equivalent of disrespecting him). Here’s a useful passage from a piece Fred wrote at the end of Reagan’s presidency:

[H]is presidency would have been a lot more successful had Reagan not been so lazy–he said he’d been assured hard work wasn’t fatal, but why take a chance?–and risk-averse. What if Reagan had concerned himself with personnel? I don’t mean he should have fussed over every political job in the administration, all 6,000 or so. But what about treasury secretary and White House chief of staff? Reagan swallowed without a moment’s reflection the job swap that sent James Baker to Treasury and Regan to the White House. Regan lacked the political skills to be an effective chief of staff, which might have occurred to Reagan if he’d taken the time to think about it. Regan also let the president take the one big risk of his second term, the arms sale to Iran, and it was a dumb one. Baker wouldn’t have allowed it. Reagan didn’t pay much attention to his national security advisers either. Had he, he’d have noticed that Bud McFarlane was cracking under the pressure and that John Poindexter, a fellow who blithely lied to the press about the Grenada invasion, was singularly unsuited for the post. Reagan couldn’t be bothered.

All true. Jon Rauch also made the point that Reagan got the big things right – the economy and the Soviet Union – but was uninterested in much else. Hence the S&L debacle, the Iran-Contra fiasco, and so on. I think that gets it right. He was a great man, a generous spirit, and a brave leader. But he was also human and made mistakes. It isn’t disloyal to remember that.

NOT JUST 1982: Some of you have made the fair point that in October 1982, not many people knew what AIDS was, and so some of Larry Speakes’ cruel jokes at the expense of the sick might be understandable. It’s also true that his interlocutor was Lester Kinsolving, a crack-pot of the far right. But here we are in another transcript two years later on December 11, 1984, with the same questioner:

Q: An estimated 300,000 people have been exposed to AIDS, which can be transmitted through saliva. Will the President, as Commander-in-Chief, take steps to protect Armed Forces food and medical services from AIDS patients or those who run the risk of spreading AIDS in the same manner that they forbid typhoid fever people from being involved in the health or food services?
MR. SPEAKES: I don’t know.
Q: Could you — Is the President concerned about this subject, Larry —
MR. SPEAKES: I haven’t heard him express–
Q: –that seems to have evoked so much jocular–
MR. SPEAKES: –concern.
Q: –reaction here? I — you know —
Q: It isn’t only the jocks, Lester.
Q: Has he sworn off water faucets–
Q: No, but, I mean, is he going to do anything, Larry?
MR. SPEAKES: Lester, I have not heard him express anything on it. Sorry.
Q: You mean he has no — expressed no opinion about this epidemic?
MR. SPEAKES: No, but I must confess I haven’t asked him about it. (Laughter.)
Q: Would you ask him Larry?
MR. SPEAKES: Have you been checked? (Laughter.)

Someone should ask Speakes about this. He’s been on some TV shows.

“Terrorists are not POWs by ANY international legal precedent. ALL of the prisoners at Gitmo AND Abu Ghraib fail the test. They are not uniformed members of organized State-sponsored regular military units with an established recognizable chain of command. In World War II and Korea such free lancers were routinely treated to summary execution as saboteurs, spies and provocateurs. And what you think you see in those photos from Abu Ghraib are MOSTLY humiliation techniques — albeit done gleefully by oafish ghouls who are being punished. You seem to mistake this for a law enforcement endeavor like most Democrats. Containment did not end the Cold War and has not served us well in the War on Terror. Preemption is the only viable strategy for success. Humiliating a few cutthroats in order to preempt the death of another Westerner does not bother me in the least. The enemy repeatedly refers to this as a jihad. You need to understand what that means for your kith and kin. You can’t be a hawk on the war and then selectively shrink from the bloodshed inflicted by our side, and from the non-violent coercive means of extracting useful information from TERRORISTS. You are not in a position to critique the proceedings from any base of personal experience; and your knowledge of military history is apparently nil. But there you go trying to hamstring the experts. Makes you a chicken hawk from where I sit.” My favorite phrase from this email is “non-violent coercive means.” Like what happened to Sean Baker in an exercise? And even “unlawful combatants” are supposed to be treated humanely. Murdering them doesn’t fall into that category, in my book. But what do I know? And yes, I can support a war but criticize illegal torture – which ultimately undermines that war. And no, it’s difficult to be a “chicken-hawk” when the military bars any gay patriots from serving in the first place.

You can’t sum up Gallic indifference to reform in the Arab world better than this:

“There is no ready-made formula for democracy readily transposable from one country to another. Democracy is not a method, it is a culture. For democracy to take root solidly and durably in the Arab world, it must be an Arab democracy before all else.”

And where would the model for that be? Of course, the model for Arab democracy has to be imported to some extent. I think Chirac is getting worried that Iraq might blaze a trail. And what would that say about France’s historic support for tyranny and colonialism in the region?

The lame responses by John Ashcroft to the evidence in leaked memos that the Bush administration condoned torture with the personal approval of the president are damning. It’s even more damning that Ashcroft will not release a critical memo, prepared by his department, making the point that some forms of torture, if approved by the president, would not be illegal. I’m hoping to write at length about this, but let me say one thing. I should have spoken up earlier. The signs were there – including the decision to ignore the Geneva Conventions with regard to al Qaeda in Guantanamo. In a very small number of cases, this might have been a debatable question. But what we have clearly seen is a green light from the very top condoning at best mistreatment and abuse of prisoners of war in a whole slew of cases. We’ll see as more facts emerge what the truth is. But the brutality of U.S. forces against prisoners in their care and custody is now public record – and a permanent mark of shame for the United States.

BAKER AND ASHCROFT: Take the case of Specialist Sean Baker. He was permanently wounded by other U.S. soldiers in a simulated exercize where his fellow soldiers assumed he was an Iraqi or a terrorist. Here’s what happened:

“They grabbed my arms, my legs, twisted me up and unfortunately one of the individuals got up on my back from behind and put pressure down on me while I was face down. Then he – the same individual – reached around and began to choke me and press my head down against the steel floor. After several seconds, 20 to 30 seconds, it seemed like an eternity because I couldn’t breathe. When I couldn’t breathe, I began to panic and I gave the code word I was supposed to give to stop the exercise, which was ‘red.’ … That individual slammed my head against the floor and continued to choke me. Somehow I got enough air. I muttered out: ‘I’m a U.S. soldier. I’m a U.S. soldier.'”

Baker went on to have seizures and permanent brain injury. The military, after lying, now concedes that his injuries were a result of intentional physical violence. Now ask yourself: what if he were not a U.S. soldier? Would he be dead like several other prisoners under U.S. supervision? The evidence of American-sanctioned torture and abuse of prisoners is mounting. It seems to me that those of us who support this war should be most outraged. This administration has violated the Geneva Conventions – not just in a few cases, but across the board. It has erased some of the distinction between who we are and what the enemy is, a distinction central to the moral case for this war. It has done so secretly and with no public debate, resting on the notion that presidents are somehow above the law (or can get legal advice from a pliant Justice Department telling them that the law doesn’t count). Ashcroft still won’t release unclassified documents pertinent to the matter. Why not? What is he hiding?

KERRY’S LEAD WIDENS: I don’t think this has anything to do with Kerry. It has to do with a collapse of confidence in the president’s competence. I’m unsurprised.

Sorry to continue about this, but I just got sent the following transcript of a press conference by Larry Speakes, presidential spokesman, on October 15, 1982. It speaks for itself:

Q: Larry, does the President have any reaction to the announcement from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, that AIDS is now an epidemic and have over 600 cases?
MR. SPEAKES: What’s AIDS?
Q: Over a third of them have died. It’s known as “gay plague.” (Laughter.) No, it is. I mean it’s a pretty serious thing that one in every three people that get this have died. And I wondered if the President is aware of it?
MR. SPEAKES: I don’t have it. Do you? (Laughter.)
Q: No, I don’t.
MR. SPEAKES: You didn’t answer my question.
Q: Well, I just wondered, does the President …
MR. SPEAKES: How do you know? (Laughter.)
Q: In other words, the White House looks on this as a great joke?
MR. SPEAKES: No, I don’t know anything about it, Lester.
Q: Does the President, does anyone in the White House know about this epidemic, Larry?
MR. SPEAKES: I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s been any …
Q: Nobody knows?
MR. SPEAKES: There has been no personal experience here, Lester.
Q: No, I mean, I thought you were keeping …
MR. SPEAKES: I checked thoroughly with Dr. Ruge this morning and he’s had no – (laughter) – no patients suffering from AIDS or whatever it is.
Q: The President doesn’t have gay plague, is that what you’re saying or what?
MR. SPEAKES: No, I didn’t say that.
Q: Didn’t say that?
MR. SPEAKES: I thought I heard you on the State Department over there. Why didn’t you stay there? (Laughter.)
Q: Because I love you Larry, that’s why (Laughter.)
MR. SPEAKES: Oh I see. Just don’t put it in those terms, Lester. (Laughter.)
Q: Oh, I retract that.
MR. SPEAKES: I hope so.
Q: It’s too late.

Nothing I could write could be more damning than this, could it?

WILL SAUDI ARABIA SURVIVE? A useful analysis from the indispensable Belmont Club.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “The rhetoric is principally used by political and religious leaders to galvanize resistance to what Palestinian Arabs consider to be the patent persecution of their people by Jewish immigrants to the Middle East… As unquestionably hate-filled and thus morally reprehensible as such language is, when Palestinians refer to Jews as ‘descended from apes and swine’ or encourage support for those who ‘kill Jews,’ they do so with the reasonably justifiable self-image of victim and persecuted, not of victimizer and persecutor.” – Scott Alexander, a Chicago researcher in Mideast studies, in expert testimony in the trial of Fawaz Mohammed Damra, a Muslim cleric in Cleveland.

P.J. hits some homers in his latest Atlantic piece. Money quote:

[Ann] Coulter begins her book thus:

“Liberals have a preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason. You could be talking about Scrabble and they would instantly leap to the anti-American position. Everyone says liberals love America, too. No they don’t. Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy.”

Now, there’s a certain truth in what she says. But it’s what’s called a “poetic truth.” And it’s the kind of poetic truth best conveyed late in the evening after six or eight drinks while pounding the bar. I wasn’t in a bar. I was in my office. It was the middle of the day. And I was getting a headache.

Ah, yes. Modern populist conservatism. O’Reilly is another case. When I listen to him blather on, I’m reminded of a drunk Irish uncle at Christmas, who can’t shut up and cannot be argued with. Switch him off.

WRITERS’ BLOCK: A lovely Joan Acocella essay in the current New Yorker. I certainly think “writer’s block” is essentially b.s. But then I have written a quarter of a million words on this blog this year alone. I’m sure there are plenty of you out there who wish I had a bit of writers’ block. Sorry, guys.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “The email you got about mini bottles in South Carolina was absolutely incorrect. I lived in SC, too, and can tell you that, ironically, the use mini bottles there originated with the intent to limit free pours. It was the temperance crowd that wanted them. The great irony now is that the same folks want to get rid off them because, as the emailer pointed out, mixed drinks are so strong in SC since entire mini bottles are used in them, effectively meaning much more alcohol than usual in, say, your black russian. You can find this history easily with a quick search, but here’s one source.
Anyway, the laws were NOT designed to protect the drinker, but to limit consumption. Why the bother over the details? Well, I went to Bob Jones University and the attending the school practically drove me away from Christianity. I know how much the religious right affects things there, having lived there for a good 15 years.
I lived in Greenville, SC, which I believe is still the only city in the United States which denies its county employees the right to celebrate MLK day.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

The last couple of words. Here’s an email from Bob Roehr, one of the best gay journalists who has long covered HIV:

To my mind, the important questions concern whether the role that the President plays or doesn’t play has a long-term impact on the course of the epidemic. I think that in most cases it does not.
In the 1980s activists made the case that Presidential leadership, a greater sense of urgency, and the spending of more money could have a dramatic impact on the course of the epidemic. Their arguments were focused on “a cure” for those already infected, with prevention being a decidedly secondary note. From the perspective of time, and with different leadership and the expenditure of vast sums of money, it has become clear, at least to me, that the crucial issues with regard to a cure and an all-important vaccine are scientific ones that still have not been resolved despite applying all of that time, effort, and resources to them. I have little reason to believe that a different course of action by Reagan would have significantly altered the scientific state of knowledge. And those who continue to throw those charges against him only do that, they build no plausible scientific case.
The one area where leadership has made a difference in selected countries is in prevention activities, and the Reagan administration can be faulted there. BUT that was not the core of the activists’ case against Reagan, it was the “cure.” Furthermore, knowledge of HIV and how to avoid contracting it has been widespread within American society for a very long time, dating at least from the mass mailing by Reagan Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, yet people still continue to become infected. We all know that there is a very large element of personal responsibility in the transmission of new infections, a fact that too many activists continue to downplay.
If the activist case against Reagan were valid, then it would be equally valid to lay medical successes at the feet of the sitting President. When was the last time that Eisenhower got credit for the miraculous polio vaccine? The fact is, we give credit to those who actually do the work or significantly impede it. With the benefit of a longer course of history, it is clear that Reagan did little of either. I feel that the news coverage is largely justified.

I tend to agree. For the record: Reagan didn’t give me HIV. Another gay man did, with my unwitting consent. I did practise safer sex, but it obviously failed. That is my responsibility and bad luck – no one else’s. But it is equally true that Reagan’s silence for so long was inexcusable. He was silent because he and Bill Bennett and Gary Bauer believed that gay lives were not worth as much as straight ones. There is no other explanation. If an epidemic had broken out affecting, say, elderly women, is it conceivable Reagan would have said nothing for four and a half years? Nope. In my practical defense of the Reagan administration, I do not mean to provide a moral defense. As even Jesse Helms came to realize, there is none.

A mystery deepens. “Got To Get You Into My Life” was about pot?

IN DEFENSE OF GLUTTONY: A truly wonderful little gem of moral reasoning – buried in the New York Times Magazine.