The Dish

A stimulating little essay. Money quote:

Christie’s ouevre up until, say, ‘Cat Amongst the Pigeons’ in the late 1950s is an intriguing – if conventional – study in Burkean philosophy. What makes her more than that – what pushes her work into a higher realm – is that she was a clever enough woman to realise that the Burkean order she loved was becoming less and less tenable as social change accelerated. Often, the novels she wrote as an old woman from the 1960s until her death in 1974 are dismissed as inferior to the more famous early works, and it is undoubtedly the case that the plots are less sharp and imaginative. But I have always believed that they are the most intriguing: they chart the nervous breakdown of Burke’s England, and the intellectual bankruptcy of a conservatism derived from Disraeli and Baldwin, better than any other writer I know.

More sanity from Johann Hari.

THE MEDIA VERSUS THE WAR: Bret Stephens goes for the jugular about the domestic enemies of success in Iraq.

BORN GAY? More evidence for something I have long suspected.

FINALLY, SEXUAL PARITY: Why did it take so long for this to be developed?

A reader sums up one way in which the anti-war left is still fighting the war – by trying to create a new narrative of the pre-war. Of course, the analogy is from the Simpsons. The argument about the war is a little like Apu’s citizenship exam (my reader paraphrases from memory):

Exam Giver: “What was the cause of the Civil War?”
Apu: “The split between abolitionists and secessionists had come to a head in in The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 when…”
Exam Giver: “Just say slavery.”
Apu: “Slavery it is, sir!”

“What was the reason given for the war against Saddam?”
“Well, the previous Gulf War’s truce required Saddam to give up all WMD research and development and weapons, and U.N. Resolutions … ”
“Just say we said he was on the brink of killing us with nukes!”
“Weapons it is, sir!”

So we get the baldfaced untruth that the war was because Iraq posed an “imminent” threat. It wasn’t. Or that it was about a causal link between Saddam and 9/11. It wasn’t. Or that it was based in intellgience from Niger. It wasn’t. Technically, the war was a continuation of the last one, and was fully supported by umpteen U.N. resolutions, including a 15-0 Security Council vote to force Saddam to comply. 9/11 made a war far more conceivable because it revealed the U.S.’s vulnerability to fanatical terrorists who might get hold of WMDs from Saddam. The casus belli was not proof of Saddam’s existing weapons, but proof of his refusal to cooperate fully with U.N. inspectors or account fully for his WMD research. Nothing we have discovered after the war has debunked or undermined any of these reasons. And the moral reason for getting rid of an unconscionably evil regime has actually gotten stronger now we see the full extent of his terror-state. But the anti-war left sees a real advantage in stripping down the claims in people’s receding memories to ones that were not made but which can now be debunked. It’s propaganda, to which the media in particular seems alarmingly prone to parroting. We have tor esist it at every stop – because this war has not yet been won, and the really crucial battle, now as before, is at home.

THE “IMMINENT” LIE: Two AP stories that keep up the “imminent threat” lie: one from John Lumpkin on October 2; and one by Jim Abrams on October 4. Please send in any new post-October 6 versions of the lie. The Associated Press is particularly important, since it is so widely disseminated in local papers.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “I have e-mailed you and disagreed with you many times, but please do me one favor: STOP WRITING ABOUT THE CUBS!!!!!! YOU ARE GOING TO JINX IT!!! DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA OF WHAT YOU ARE MESSING WITH????!!! THIS IS 95 YEARS OF PAIN YOU’RE F***ING WITH!!! I PROMISE TO NEVER DISAGREE WITH ANYTHING YOU SAY AGAIN, JUST PLEASE STOP WRITING ABOUT THEM UNTIL THEY……… gulp.”

How’s this for a quick round-up of untruths: Time (for whom I write a column); the Christian Science Monitor; CNN; the Associated Press; and the Financial Times. I should tip my hat to lefty-blogger, Bob Somerby, for pioneering this point in a far more precarous spot than I am. (But we agreed about Gary Condit as well, way back when.) Somerby gets to the pint quickly enough:

As everyone on earth surely knows, Bush didn’t say, in his SOTU, “that Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger.” He referred to alleged attempts to buy uranium from “Africa,” of which Niger is one tiny part. What was the context for Bush’s remark? The October 2002 NIE referred to attempts in Congo and Somalia as well as Niger, and when the Brits released their intel in September 2002-the intel to which Bush’s speech explicitly referred-the British press focussed on Congo, not Niger. Meanwhile, Wilson only said that a sale couldn’t likely be completed in Niger (due to extensive oversight). He didn’t prove that Saddam had never tried to make such a purchase. In short, Wilson’s report, on its face, does not shoot down what Bush said in his speech.

The point is: the media has in fact made this untruth true by constant repetition. And they have done this in an effort to show that Bush was being untruthful. That’s projection, not journalism.

“Rich or poor, straight or gay, black or white. Whatever you are, wherever you’re from, the Conservative party is for you,” – the British Conservative Party chairwoman, Theresa May, earlier today at the Conservative Party Conference. Why can’t a leading Republican say the same thing? Why has president Bush not been able even to say the word “gay” in three years in office? The excuses are wearing thin.

Of course, this is from veteran Bush-hater, Elisabeth Bumiller:

In the summer, the conflict broke into the open when Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said that Mr. Tenet had been primarily responsible for not stripping from the president’s State of the Union address an insupportable claim that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from Niger. Mr. Tenet and his allies were enraged, and Stephen J. Hadley, Ms. Rice’s deputy, eventually took the blame.

Untrue: the claim was about Africa, not Niger, for the umpteenth frigging time. And, of course, the claim was not insupportable. It was, in fact, supported by British intelligence agencies, who still stand by their work. Correction? Don’t bet on it.

From Newsweek:

Wilson’s report seems to have vanished into the bureaucratic maw. In his January ’03 State of the Union address, President Bush, citing British intelligence reports, repeated the charge that the Iraqis were trying to buy uranium from Niger.

Not true. He said Africa. There’s an important difference. The writers of this story are excellent journalists. If they cannot get this right, what hope for the rest of the crew? The truth is: they have internalized this stuff. They don’t even see their own biases any more. Please keep sending me media mentions of Bush’s citation of Niger in his 2003 SOTU. If we can’t stop them spreading untruths, we can at least monitor them.

Some disturbing details about some of Arnold’s enemies.

Worth watching what the BBC does on its website. It often dramatically alters copy after it’s posted – and not for legitimate reasons, like typos or minor amendments. In an earlier draft of this piece, for example, the following sentence appeared: “Syria is, of course, Israel’s enemy. The two countries are still in an official state of war, caused by Israel’s occupation and illegal annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights.” Now it reads:

Syria is, of course, Israel’s enemy. The two countries have been in a state of war since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The Israelis have long charged that Damascus uses the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah as a proxy army to launch attacks along Israel’s border with Lebanon. And since the beginning of the Palestinian uprising, Israel has increasingly focused on the Palestinian opposition groups hosted by Syria. It accuses the exiled leaderships of planning attacks carried out by their military wings in the occupied territories, and accuses Syria (as well as Iran) of backing them.

An improvement, no? But still no mention of the 1967 or Yom Kippur wars. What you see in the first draft, I think, is what the BBC really believes: that the Jews are responsible for all the ills in the Middle East. But even they feel obliged to respond to public pressure. Which is good news, after all. If we can’t get rid of them, we can at least moderate their extremism. Keep sending me BBC lies and propaganda. Exposure works.

“While the players and their bats had a lot to say about the Cubs 5-1 victory, the fans, their love and positive vibes, deserve at least a bit of credit. Not to mention the array of superstitions. Take Marianne Scott of Tinley Park, for example. In the left field bleachers of Turner Field in Atlanta, she gripped her good luck charm, a hollowed-out baseball that holds her mother’s ashes.” – from the Chicago Tribune.

Hugh Hewitt on the Los Angeles Times and the recall.