The Dish

No longer an oxymoron, after, ahem, a certain occurrence in a nearby state. All that war did was make things worse, didn’t it?

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “I think one of the big problems in France is that we are anti-American without knowing why. It’s just kind of a natural thing. I mean so many people I meet are anti-war, and they’ll just say that Bush is stupid and the Americans are awful imperialists. It’s just their typical answer, and they never think of why. That’s crazy. I think it’s because we’re all being brought up like that, especially at school. It’s incredible how we’re taught about America — they’re always explaining, for example in geography or history courses, how Americans are imperialistic.” – Sabine Herold, 22-year-old French dissident, in Reason.

THE CONSERVATIVE CLOSET: “With respect to your comment, ‘imagine being a right-of-center student at his school’: well, imagine working there, or at any other academic institution in the Bay area. I teach at Stanford, which is supposed to be more conservative – when I accepted a position here I was razzed by my liberal friends for my new proximity to that vortex of neocon evil, the Hoover Institution – but here, as everywhere else in the Bay (and academia in general), there is a hegemony of leftist ideology that permits no dissent.
I keep my opinions to myself (I do have an instinct for self-preservation) and can ‘pass for liberal,’ which means that I get to hear how academics really feel about the role they think conservative ideas ought to play in public discourse (none). Their public line is that they are committed to untrammeled free expression and don’t know what all this fuss about ‘political correctness’ is about — it’s all a plot of Fox News to delegitimize public dissent. Their private stance is that, since the Bush administration is ‘evil’ (I have heard this exact characterization many times) it doesn’t matter how one treats the enemy and his ideas; it’s a battle of good against evil, after all. It is taken for granted that any sign of conservative politics will ruin a professor’s career. If you get an interview, you will not get hired; if you are hired, you will not get tenure. My colleagues will casually allude to this fact, but it does not trouble them unduly. After all, no-one they know is a conservative.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

Some of you have wondered whether Ed Asner was joking when he said he wanted to play Stalin, and regarded the mass-murderer and tyrant as misunderstood. Nuh-huh. The guy really does have a soft spot for Stalinism.

UNIONS VERSUS KIDS: It’s an old story, but this new twist is truly depressing.

FRC RESPONDS: The Family Research Council, a lobby group for the religious right, has answered the questions I posed in my WSJ piece last week. I’m grateful for their candor. The bottom line is that they oppose any civil benefits for gay couples of any kind. That’s why their FMA not only bans same-sex marriage but also bans any benefits for gay couples, whether through legislative or judicial means, whether in the form of “domestic partnerships” or “civil unions.” Their positive policy on homosexual citizens is that gays should simply stop being homosexual. That’s it – straight out of the 1950s. The question is whether there are any social conservatives prepared to take a less absolutist position. Still silence from almost all of them. No enemies to the right, as usual.

A worthwhile piece in the Boston Globe yesterday on how gay Catholics are struggling with a Church hierarchy that has declared war on gay lives and, especially, gay loves and relationships. Since the summer, I haven’t written about this much, because it felt increasingly inappropriate to bring such deeply private issues into the public arena. But like many others, this past year has been a watershed for me. The combination of the cover-up of sexual abuse and the extremity of the language used against gay people by the Vatican has made it impossible for me to go back inside a church. I do believe that something is rotten in the heart of the hierarchy, that it is bound up in sexual panic and a conflicted homosexual subculture that is a deep part of the Catholic Church. Until that is dealt with, until a new dynamic of hope and honesty replaces denial and authoritarianism, I cannot go on. Am I still a Catholic? I don’t think I can call myself such publicly any more. Privately, I think I always will be in some place in my heart. But I cannot enable the vicious cycle of failure and scapegoating that now animates what amounts to the leadership. And I do not believe, as David Brooks seems to, that the legacy of this pope can be fairly judged without taking into acccount the devastation to Catholicism that has occurred in the West under his watch. He has presided over a collapse in the Church’s home-base in Europe, and, I believe, has precipitated the death-throes of the Church in America. No doubt many believe that this is the price for fidelity to the Church’s medieval sexual ethics. I beg to differ.

BAATHIST BROADCASTING CORPORATION: Fine story on the separation of conjoined twins. Even more successful attempt at not mentioning where these Muslim children were saved. (Hint: in the bowels of the Great Satan.)

“Just now I am reading ‘The Constitution of the United States; Its Sources and Application’ by Thomas James Norton, first published in 1922, this edition from the early 50s. The author takes the Constitution virtually line by line and explains what is in it, why it’s there, and how its provisions have been interpreted by the courts. About the Full Faith and Credit clause, he notes this (p. 156):

Full faith and credit was held by the Supreme Court of the United States (1903) not to have been denied by the courts of Massachusetts in permitting the first wife of a man, rather than the second, to administer his estate upon his death, as the law of Massachusetts made invalid in the State a divorce which he went to South Dakota to procure. Full faith and credit did not require that a decree of divorce granted in South Dakota should be respected and made operative against the public policy of Massachusetts.

In other words, for a full century the law has held that in such intimate matters as family, marriage, and divorce, in contrast to, for example, business debts or public contracts, no state may use full faith and credit to impose its beliefs and policies on another. Those who promote the FMA should be asked to explain themselves in light of this fact.” Actually, divorces might in some circumstances be held to be binding across state borders. But marriages? Never. The whole premise of the Federal Marriage Amendment – that the Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution mandates that marriage in one state be applicable in every other state – is a lie. But they keep on telling it.

An emailer lays it out:

You wrote: ” Even when 45 percent of California’s voters didn’t pick a replacement candidate (because they voted “no” on the recall), Arnold Schwarzenegger’s votes this time were 3.7 million from the remaining 55 percent, compared to Davis’ 3.5 million from 100 percent of the electorate last year. In a conventional race, Schwarzenegger would have buried Davis.”
This is incorrect. Those who voted no on recall could still pick a replacement candidate. Indeed, this was the entire rationale of Cruz Bustamante’s candidacy. For evidence that this was the case, here are the vote totals on Question 1 and Question 2.
Note that the number of voters who voted on Question 2 is approx. 90%-95% (tough to tell precisely w/o adding up all the minor candidates) of the number of voters who voted on Question 1.

My bad. I really need to avoid all math questions. I keep screwing them up.

Matthew Hoy has the goods on Senator Jay Rockefeller’s amazing incoherence on the “imminent threat.” We may just have turned this lying meme around.

One interesting thing to note in the New York Times’ editorial yesterday on WMDs in Iraq. They didn’t re-use the “imminent threat” meme. It’s gone. Instead, they described the threat described by the White House as “extraordinary.” That’s a stretch too. But at least it isn’t a complete fabrication. Tony Snow also helped by grilling Jay Rockefeller yesterday and got him to concede that Bush specifically disavowed the notion that the threat from Saddam was “imminent.” A reader’s comb-through of the entire White House archives for speeches, press releases and so on doesn’t come up with a single administration use of the term “imminent”. That’s not proof that the White House never used the term, but it’s pretty good evidence that it wasn’t the administration boilerplate that the press is now trying to imply. I have found one use of the term “imminent” from Richard Perle. But he’s not a formal administrtaion official; and he has been a hothead at times.

THE REAL ISSUE: Am I being ridiculously semantic here? I don’t think so. Here’s why: If the administration had genuinely described the threat as “imminent”, then there wouldn’t have even been much of a debate. Of course we are entitled to defend ourselves against imminent attack. The debate rather was over what kind of threat could justify a war. The White House argued that it was a grave and growing threat, that it was unknowable, that we’d under-estimated Saddam before and that after 9/11, the balance of judgment had to shift to greater vigilance. Technically speaking, none of this was necessary because of Saddam’s flagrant violation of U.N. Resolution 1441 (which, by the way, also did not describe Saddam’s threat as “imminent”). The point was less that we knew the threat was imminent, but that we couldn’t know for sure that it wasn’t. I’d argue that this complex argument is completely upheld by what the Kay report has found so far: a clear, underground system for a biological and chemical weapons capacity, with the possibility of actual weapons yet to be discovered. It may be that the threat turns out to be less than feared. The question then becomes: given that we could not have known for sure at the time, should the president have risked waiting or tolerating Saddam? Would another delay have removed the doubt? Hindsight is easy. But real decisions have to be made without it. If the Democratic candidates want to argue that they would have taken the risk and allowed Saddam to stay in power, then they need to say so clearly. Howard Dean already has. He would have left Saddam in place and hoped that the nightmare of terrorists with Saddam-provided WMDS wouldn’t take place. After 9/11, I consider that an act of gross irresponsibility. But some do not. Let’s debate that, shall we? It’s still the critical question in the coming campaign: whom do you to trust to protect us?

The German Booksellers’ Association have their own Sontag Award. And it’s just gone to Susan Sontag! The Association views Sontag as a lone dissident in an “arrogant super-power.” The writer who described the mass murderers of 9/11 as braver than allied pilots is hailed by the German literary elites as having an “exceptional sense of morality and immorality.” Her main triumph: standing up to the “hegemonic response” to 9/11. 9/11? Who remembers that any more? Surely not the Germans. (Hat-tip: Eamonn.)

LEFTIES AND TYRANTS: “I think Joe Stalin was a guy that was hugely misunderstood. And to this day, I don’t think I have ever seen an adequate job done of telling the story of Joe Stalin, so I guess my answer would have to be Joe Stalin.” – actor, Ed Asner, responding to the question, “If you had the chance to play the biographical story of a historical figure you respected most over your lifetime, who would it be?”

Money quote from Chuck Muth, Arizona Republican:

FMA is a solution in search of a problem. No state court has yet to rule in favor of recognizing “gay marriages.” But even if one or more states do recognize gay marriages, federal law already defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman. And while FMA proponents say the Full Faith & Credit clause of the Constitution would force states to recognize gay marriages from other states, other legal scholars contend it won’t. Shouldn’t we at least wait to see if something is broken before trying to fix it?

Meanwhile, there’s more evidence that the argument for at least some kind of civil union for gay citizens is gaining ground.

MARTIN SMITH, LEFTIST: Interesting background on Martin Smith, producer of the Frontline attack on the Iraq War. Well, actually not that interesting. He’s another baby-boom lefty “child of the 1960s” who went into public television and documentaries to advance his liberal ideas:

“I was a Conscientious Objector during the war years. I did alternative service work, and when I came back to school, I went back to New York University Film School. I didn’t think that I was going to be making documentaries, but I gravitated toward documentaries immediately, because there was an immediacy to them. You didn’t wait around for people to get their make-up right or for the set to get built, and you just went out and shot things… Yes, I was a child of the sixties, and I was at half of the demonstrations, and all the concerts.”

Good for him. But please don’t try and persuade us he’s only interested in the truth. He’s an anti-war propagandist of the classic kind. I just wish I didn’t have to pay any part of his salary.

The way in which what was once a joyful mix of all sorts of lifestyles in San Francisco has curdled into a leftist, Puritan sect is perhaps best represented by that bastion of political correctness, Berkeley. Here’s a little insight into how these people think. It’s from Orville Schell, dean of the J-School:

“It strikes me that the better educated people are, more often than not, they tend to be more liberal, and I think this is a very well-educated area … When you live in a beautiful place, which the whole Bay Area is, you draw people for whom that is important and the idea of preservation, moderation, of walking a little more softly, is important. And I think that creates a kind of liberal mind-set in an environmental sense and in a larger political sense.”

Imagine being a right-of-center student at his school! You immediately know that your own dean thinks your political views might be a function of your lower intelligence. And the notion that only statists care about the environment, or about beauty, is so insulting it hardly bears comment. But there you have it.

THE PLAME LEAK: It may have been disgraceful, but probably legal. Here’s why. I largely agree with Nick Kristof on this – both sides come out looking terrible, but the administration leaker is a truly odious character. Josh Marshall, however, surely goes a little over the top with his claim that because Plame’s cover had already been blown by Aldrich Ames, the White House official deserves to be seen in exactly the same light. He’s vile, but not on the Ames level.