The Dish

My former – and much loved – professor stirs it up again at Harvard as only he can.

The Bush administration’s fiscal profligacy is beginning to prompt real divisions in Republican ranks. It should.

KRUGMAN CRITICIZES DEMOCRATS: Yes, it’s a “to-be-sure”-ism. But it’s the first time in memory that the unhinged columnist has made even the smallest gesture of equal treatment. What got into him?

MORE ON ROBESON: I’ve been reading more about Paul Robeson. I hope my criticism of his support for Stalin is seen in the context of my deep admiration for his standing up against the monstrous crimes of Jim Crow and segregation. I think he deserves honor for this alone. He was almost wilfully blind to the evils of Soviet Communism, but perhaps the brutalizing experience of many African-Americans in his lifetime provides some exculpatory context. (It makes Bayard Rustin’s liberal integrity even more striking.) I also note this:

In March, 1956, after Khrushchev outlines Stalin’s crimes against humanity, Robeson suffers an emotional collapse. Over a two-month period, he swings from a manic state to a severe depression.

He had a powerful conscience and enormous courage. But he was desperately wrong about Stalin. Pity it took Kruschev to tell him what had been obvious for decades.

Here’s a viewpoint with which I wholeheartedly agree. It’s a defense of Donald Rumsfeld’s use of the English language. He was given an award for mangling the language by the Plain English Campaign. But there are very, very few politicians who speak as plainly and simply and strongly as Rumsfeld. His directness about the awful nature of war was a high-point in recent government speech. You may not like what he has to say, but it’s rare that you don’t understand what he’s saying.

DERBYSHIRE WATCH: Defenders of John Derbyshire at National Review argue that he simply holds arguments against homosexual relationships or sex and is not “anti-gay” or prejudiced. This despite the fact that he has in the past simply avowed that he doesn’t “like” homosexuality. Look, it’s a free country. Derbyshire should be free to like or dislike whatever he wants. But these are not arguments. They’re, well, prejudices. Then he writes something like this: “The goatee is an abomination, and engenders a cloud of suspicion about the wearer’s sexual orientation.” I’m not defending the goatee. And I understand he’s trying to make a jocular comment. But, even in the context of jest, this is a simple, bald declaration that someone’s orientation alone – their involuntary identity, not anything they might or might not do – is “suspicious.” Again, imagine if someone had written that he despised beards because they “engender a cloud of suspicion about the wearer’s possible Jewishness.” Would anyone pass this off as simply humor? Would any serious person publish it? Is National Review endorsing this? And they wonder why “social conservatives have been losing the political debate over gay marriage.”

CLEARING THINGS UP: I was disturbed by the idea that Dan Bartlett had seemingly invented out of thin, atmospheric air the notion that Air Force One had had some contact with a BA airplane en route to Afghanistan. It seemed to confirm for a while the notion that this White House is as stupidly and trivially as duplicitous as the last one. So it’s a relief to hear that’s not the case. When Dana Milbank concedes the issue, I think it’s basically over.

“I am a longtime subscriber to Vanity Fair, and have defended it to those who believe it is merely a glossy mag dedicated to celebrities. I know that it has wonderful reporting on a variety of issues, ranging from the truly fluffy to the truly serious. Since Carter has gone off his rocker, I skip his little diatribes and move straight into the articles. I’ve found that Carter’s venom has filtered into the content of the magazine. In the middle of an article on teen stars, there was a snide aside about these teens ruling the country, or whatever country there is left after the current administration is done with it. It was quite jarring. I’ve debated canceling my subscription. Does Carter know that not all his readers tear off the plastic, dying to see what Carter’s little mind has come up with this month? Is he worried that his readers find that reading his magazine has become tiresome because of all the anti-Bush harangues? I’m guessing that it’s a big, fat no.” – more reader feedback and opinioin on the Letters Page.

Here’s a highly stimulating essay that argues the following:

[I]f the problem with Islam is that it seems constantly to give rise to sects violently hostile to secular institutions, to reason, and to cultured sentiment; that the countries in which it predominates have a chronic tendency toward theocratic despotism; and that as a religion it exhibits no institutional structure that might finally impose some discipline on the chaotic and lawless spiritual impulses that it generates – if all that is the problem (which it surely is), then it is absurd to hold that the solution is for Islam to find its Martin Luther. It has already had its Luther, not to mention its Calvin and its Henry VIII, all rolled into one: his name was Muhammad. What Islam needs is a Pope.

On first reading, I’m not entirely what to make of this argument – except that it deserves a second reading. (Memo to the Washington Monthly: if Tech Central Station is just a tool of corporate power, what is it doing publishing serious, philosophical essays like this?)

“I hate to be a pill, to piss on smoldering embers, no matter how warming, but the facts are these: it was neither Larry Kramer’s hysterics, the courageous reporting of the New York Native, Everett Koop’s blinding-hot moral flash or anything else that turned the tide of AIDS recognition in America and of AIDS research funding by the American government. It was nothing less or other than Ronald Reagan’s sentimental – goddamnit – feelings for a fellow guy he just happened to like a whole hell of a lot from their Hollywood days, a guy called Rock Hudson who came down with the goddamn thing. And if you don’t think them’s the facts, go look them up. As our story winds down to a close, darlings, in the year 1985, rather than cut AIDS funding by ten million, Ronald Reagan – or more probably Nancy, as Ronnie was already, courtesy of Alzheimer’s, more and more lunching out, though not in public – was upped to one hundred million, and, get this right please, a 270 percent increase in AIDS funding. You see, darlings, all that heaven allows written on the wind by tarnished angels is an imitation of life.” – dialogue from James McCourt’s “Queer Street: Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947 – 1985.”

“When my eyes fell upon the rare copy of this dangerous book, I decided immediately to place it next to the Torah. Although it is not a monotheistic holy book, it has become one of the sacred [tenets] of the Jews, next to their first constitution, their religious law, [and] their way of life. In other words, it is not merely an ideological or theoretical book. Perhaps this book of the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ is more important to the Zionist Jews of the world than the Torah, because they conduct Zionist life according to it… It is only natural to place the book in the framework of an exhibit of Torah [scrolls].” – Dr. Yousef Ziedan, museum director of the new Alexandria Library, on why the anti-Semitic forgery is now prominently displayed next to the Torah in the manuscript museum. UNESCO funds helped build it.

Here’s a refreshingly candid take on exactly what we’re up against in fundamentalist Islam. It’s from an interview with Syed Munawar Hasan, the leader of Pakistan’s largest Islamist political party in Asia Times Online:

ATO: “You reckon that there are so many contradictions between the West and the Muslim world, is there any chance of reconciliation and dialogue between the two civilizations?”
Munawar: “There is none. The basic concepts of both civilizations are in total contrast with each other. When I say this I do not address Western civilization as Christianity. I speak of a man-made system completely devoid of divine guidance. Our concepts of God, human beings, the universe, are totally in contrast with the concepts of the Western world. We cannot segregate human lives into private and public, our lives are ruled by divine guidance, not by man-made rules based on his own prejudices and specific mindset characterized by its own dilemmas and shortcomings. Our concept of the universe is not materialistic, and the result of an ‘accident’. Instead, it was a very well thought out process envisaged by the creator of the universe with a plan. So these basic concepts have made the difference between ours and Western approaches.”

At some point, people in the West will actually listen to what the Islamists are saying. Their problem is not Christianity as such. It is constitutional liberalism. Pity so many liberals (and some religious conservatives) cannot see this.

A SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP: Here’s a tiny but inspiring example of what I hope will be a long and durable relationship between the people of Iraq and the people of the U.S. The Iraqi boxing team is now preparing for the Olympics. Instead of threats of torture from Uday Hussein, they are getting salaries and new equipment from the Americans. Hearts and minds … and left hooks.

We’re in the middle of a propaganda blitz designed to persuade people that Ronald Reagan deliberately foisted HIV onto the population of the United States, by a mixture of negligence and malevolence. The publicity surrounding Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” will center on depicting closeted McCarthyite Roy Cohn as the true soul of modern conservatism. (I wonder why they don’t cite uncloseted McCarthyite Bobby Kennedy, but never mind.) Meanwhile, the myth that there was somehow a magic wand in the early 1980s to cure AIDS – a wand that Reagan deliberately refused to wave – is now almost conventional wisdom. Into this blizzard of misinformation, Deroy Murdock provides some truly important evidence. Reagan could have done more. He shouldn’t be left off the hook. But he shouldn’t be subjected to disinformation either. Meanwhile, as Natalie Solent points out, the real threat to containing and treating HIV has come from widespread efforts from the left to persecute the pharmaceutical companies. Her money quote:

Why the decline [in HIV research]? Because the drugs companies no longer believe that they are going to get rich out of AIDS research. In fact they begin to doubt they will get any compensation at all. They read the newspapers, they study the speeches of politicians, and they sense that the popular wind is blowing against them. They think, probably rightly, that governments will either force them to sell at a loss drugs that were developed at huge expense or will bypass them and the law entirely by buying generic copies of patent drugs. Governments, after all, are the ones who can change the law when it is inconvenient. One minute the authorities will come down like a ton of bricks on pirate music or pirate videos. The next minute they will say that it is ‘unacceptable greed’ for companies to actually want to profit from patents on medical discoveries. I accept that there are subtleties and genuine conflicts of principle in the field of intellectual property – but the bottom line is that if pharma companies get nothing but abuse for the work they put in they bloody well won’t put in much more of it. Just as for the slaves, it’s no surprise that if people are forced to work for nothing then they don’t bust a gut.

Tuesday night, at Colgate University, the one point I made that truly shocked the audience was a defense of the drug companies. It has been imprinted on an entire generation that Big Pharma is the source of all evil. But the only reason I’m writing this blog at all is because of Big Pharma. They’re not angels in America. They’re capitalists. But the profit motive has been the most progressive force in pioneering specific medical breakthroughs that we have yet found. Why cannot the left see this? Why are they – more than Ronald Reagan – pursuing policies that will consign many people with HIV to earlier deaths? And why do so few people call them on it?