The Dish

The biggest hike in government spending in two decades – brought to you by Republicans. It’s becoming official: if you want a smaller government, then voting Republican is a completely self-defeating proposition.

How deeply divided is America these days? My take opposite.

DROP THE TARIFFS: There are two huge problems with Bush’s economic record. The first is the massive hike in domestic spending he has signed on to. One quarter of good economic growth will do nothing to address the enormous fiscal wreckage that Bush has already created and has no current plans to reverse. Long-run structural debt is not a conservative position. It’s a reckless position – especially when you’re adding a huge new federal entitlement and doing nothing – nothing – to reform entitlements. Ditto the Rove Tariffs on steel. Not even the White House can defend this attack on free trade in anything but the crudest political terms. The EU and the WTO are absolutely right to demand a reversal. If Bush sticks to his protectionist guns, he really should be pummeled by real economic conservatives.

THE BRAILLETTES!: Blog readers have now submitted another round of worst-ever music album covers. Marc Cenedella is on a roll.

IMMINENCE, ETC: I’m sure you’re all bored by this meme and fight now. But I should link to Spinsanity for another treatment that doesn’t quite side with any of us. Helpful.

KERRY’S MESS: He’s gone through more top staffers in a brief campaign than president Bush has in his entire presidency. I think that’s telling. By the way, he served in Vietnam.

For some reason, Ramesh Ponnuru’s full account of the morass of the proposed “Federal Marriage Amendment” isn’t online yet. It’s in the coming issue of National Review. I’ve read it several times now and even someone like me who has studied this in some depth finds it hard going at times. (That’s not Ramesh’s fault. It’s the amendment’s.) The bottom line is that my and others’ criticisms of the proposed amendment – that it would go further than banning gay marriage and would deny gay citizens any benefits whatever – seem to have struck home. The far right knows that its attempt to disenfranchise gay citizens for ever and to trample states’ rights in the process is an extremist non-starter. So this is what they have apparently done. They’ve added a third clause to the FMA. Here’s how Ramesh describes the new far right consensus:

It fell to Chuck Colson, the leader of Prison Fellowship and perhaps the most unifying figure among social conservatives today, to find a solution. On October 15, he succeeded in getting more than 20 groups to come up with a common position. They agreed that the amendment would prohibit gay marriage. It would also prohibit the states and the federal government, including both the courts and the legislatures, from providing any benefits to people that were contingent on their being involved in a sexual relationship outside of marriage. The amendment would, however, allow state legislators to extend the particular privileges of marriage to gay couples — just not as gay couples. People not in gay relationships would also have to be eligible.

Re-read the penultimate sentence: “The amendment would, however, allow state legislators to extend the particular privileges of marriage to gay couples — just not as gay couples.” Huh? I think this means that the social right is now offering semi-marital benefits to anyone – gay or straight – so long as they’re celibate in the relationship or pretend they’re straight or act as if they’re as intimate as most law partners. I don’t know how any sane person could conclude that this isn’t ridiculous. How could the government tell who’s celibate and who’s not, or who’s gay and who’s straight, or who’s doing unmentionable things in their own bedrooms? Is a gay couple supposed to put on some act like they’re bachelor buddies in some 1950s movie and the minute they’re “presumed” gay, all their rights disappear? Or are we going to have federal videocams in the bedroom?Beats me. And this exquisite piece of precious social maneuvring belongs in the Constitution! So once you’ve trashed states’ rights, deconstructed marriage and alienated gays and their families, what else does the religious right want to accomplish? Except give everyone else in the country a long, hard burst of the giggles?

THE RIGHT VERSUS MARRIAGE: Ramesh elaborates:

Whether the amendment agreed upon by the groups at Colson’s meeting would ban “civil unions,” then, is not a yes-no question. It would allow civil unions so long as eligibility for them is not based, even in part, on the fact, supposition, or presumption that the people involved are having sex. The amendment would thus make it theoretically possible for gay couples — and cohabiting straight couples — to have any of the benefits of marriage, except for governmental recognition of their relationships as equivalent to those of married people.

Huh? This is dizzyingly confusing. And the way in which it empowers government to arbiter the minutiae of people’s sex lives should be abhorrent to anyone to the left of the Taliban. What’s more, it’s a far more direct attack on marriage than anything that has yet been invented by the social right’s opponents. The real problem with civil unions or domestic partnerships is that they provide an easy way-station for straight couples other than marriage. They don’t demand the same kind of responsibility and commitment that marriage entails, and thus they weaken the important role of marriage in contributing to social stability. That’s why I’ve long proposed cutting through the entire domestic partnership racket (I’d happily abolish all of it) and including gays in marriage, period – as the most conservative measure available. It still is. But the far right’s loathing of gay people has forced them to adopt the most radical of the left’s proposals – the deconstruction of marriage altogether into a meaningless French-style array of benefits for anyone and anything. Except they’ve added a new unenforceable twist – that these new benefits are conditioned on celibacy! And that celibacy applies to straights as well as gays. So this amendment will actually now threaten any straight couple in a domestic partnership or civil union – and demand that they stop having sex or have their benefits removed! If I had to come up with an Onion-style parody of the religious right, I couldn’t do better than this. I’ll leave you with the new improved amendment as it now stands. It is more eloquent than anything I could say about it:

Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups. Neither the federal government nor any state shall predicate benefits, privileges, rights, or immunities on the existence, recognition, or presumption of sexual conduct or relationships.

This is graffiti on a sacred document. The founders of this country would be horrified.

Yep, we’ve made the oldest of old media, the Encyclopedia Britannica Almanac 2004. (Hat tip: the Elder.)

Don’t miss the results of Mickey’s Krugmania contest, picking the worst prediction of the gloomiest economist around, Paul “Enron” Krugman. Yes, I know this is getting a little petty. We all make mistakes. But Krugman is so wonderfully easy to tease – and you can get such a kick out of it – that it’s irresistible.

Here at the downtown Chicago Starbucks, all is well, thanks to T-Mobile. I’m here to see the boyfriend, but also for two talks. I’ll be speaking tomorrow evening at the University of Illinois, Chicago, at 7 pm, on the battle to end discrimination in marriage. It’s at the Chicago Illinois Union Rooms, A, B, and C. Then I’ll be at the Omni Orrington, Evanston, for the Online News Association conference, giving a 12 pm talk on Saturday. Next Monday evening, I’ll be speaking at Williams College, Massachusetts, on the fight for marriage rights, again. Come say hi. Blogging may be a little sporadic during my travels. But not too bad, I hope.

I scrutinize his New Yorker comments on Iraq and Kosovo. Check it out at the New Republic Online.

REFORM AT THE BEEB? A piece of extremely good news from London. The Israeli government’s refusal to cooperate with the BBC probably played the most important part. But pressure from the blogs, and from the mainstream media (which followed the blogs in this), undoubtedly helped. Your support for this site and others gets results! Thanks, and congrats.

SHATTERING GLASS: The Washington Post’s Marc Fisher reports on the Stephen Glass spin-machine.

GAY CATHOLICS GET RADICAL: A report from Patrick Giles in the Village Voice.

I guess I don’t need to stress my support for gay legal equality. So I hope I won’t be misconstrued when I say that the notion that someone can actually be prosecuted for offensive ideas about gays is truly noxious. There’s no real free speech in Britain, alas, so this case can happen there. A recent U.S. case that forbade a parent from indoctrinating a child with homophobia also struck me as a hideous precedent. There can and must be legal equality for gay citizens. But there can and must also be space for those who dissent to have their say. That’s the classically liberal message of my book, “Virtually Normal.” A free society will have space for both fundamentalists and homosexuals. An unfree society is one in which either group suffers from legal, criminal or civil restrictions. Our freedom is their freedom, which is why I’m also against hate crimes laws and attempts to coerce the Boy Scouts into doing the right thing by not discriminating against gays. It’s also vital for people of good will to understand that civil rights for gay people in no way should affect the rights of others, especially in religious denominations of all kinds, to loathe, disdain, pity or malign homosexuality. These people couldn’t be more wrong, but in a free society, you have the right to be wrong. That goes for religious groups hiring gays as well, in my book. They shouldn’t have to. There has to be space for all of us. Now, if only fundamentalists would live up to the same civic principles, this debate would be over.

Here’s Microsoft in 1978. No, I wouldn’t have invested either.

THE THREAT OF FREEDOM: It’s not just the right to free speech and free association that the left is now worried about in Iraq. It’s the possibility of capitalism breaking out. At this rate, some in the Arab world might be rich as well as free. Deeply, deeply worrying.

THOSE WMDS: Since everyone who opposed the war, we’re now told, didn’t believe that Saddam had WMDs, why did they use preposterous arguments like the following:

If Saddam’s regime and survival are threatened [by invasion], he will have nothing to lose, and may use everything at his disposal… If weapons of mass destruction land on Israeli soil, killing innocent civilians, the experts I have consulted believe Israel will retaliate, and possibly with nuclear weapons… Nor can we rule out the possibility that Saddam would assault American forces with chemical or biological weapons.

That was Ted Kennedy. It’s worth recalling, as those with 20/20 hindsight lambaste the administration for taking intelligence threats seriously, that even opponents of the war believed that Saddam had the capacity to use WMDs at a moment’s notice against American troops.

A NEW RESOURCE: The web provides a tool for reading and researching some of the most important speeches in history – and some of the more contentious ones today. Enjoy.

An interesting post from a blogger who just heard Bernard Lewis speak. Money point:

I was struck with the matter-of-fact way Dr. Lewis referred to the Al Queda, and Wahabi, assumption that, of the two great super-powers, they had defeated the more menacing of the two. The Islamists not only have taken credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union, they have also assumed that the soft-Americans would be much easier to defeat. According to Bernard Lewis, the September 11 attacks were to have been the final, devastating blow to America. Twenty years of seeing American casualties at the hands of Islamist Jihadists followed by American retreat and withdrawal, gave them the impression that the same would happen when the fight was finally brought to American soil. The Arabs have been shocked at America’s reaction.
Surprisingly, Dr. Lewis attributes that shock to keeping the Jihadists from making any further attacks on American interests around the world since 9/11. By no means does he see it as assurance that future attacks won’t happen, certainly our vigilance is required. Instead he would have us look at the way the Islamists have responded.
To continue centuries of experience in playing two enemies off against each other, the Arabs needed to find a counter to America. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Arabs have increasingly looked to Europe and to factions within America to act as the counter force for them. Adding to Islam’s crisis is the practical inability of Europe to counter America’s power. Although they may have the will, they do not have the means. Predicting the Arabs’ response to that is one of our tasks.

Yes, the Islamist-European alliance is absolutely predictable. And doomed. We get so used to self-criticism we don’t yet see how much of the anger now directed at the U.S. is a function of this country’s extraordinary success in the war on terror so far. We have destroyed two evil regimes; and are busily rebuilding an entire country in the teeth of limited guerrilla warfare. Every casualty is awful – but the casualty rate in these wars (on both sides) is an historic low. Everyone knows this. And the enemy, knowing this, is actually afraid. We have to keep them that way.