The Dish

As Hitch wrote in the last month’s Vanity Fair, what if it works? The one scenario that we may be discounting right now is the possibility that the worst is over in Iraq, that momentum toward self-government is building and that the financial commitment the U.S. has made could provide the tipping point toward greater self-confidence on the part of the good guys in Iraq. Safire is right that decent momentum (and $20 billion is a huge push) would lead to better intelligence could lead to … who knows? Even the media is beginning to show more perspective in their accounts of what’s wrong and what’s right. Bush’s recent passivity – silence, almost – may be less defenisveness (athough there’s surely some of that) but a quiet expectation that things will improve and that his political fortunes will only look up if they do.

HANGING IN THERE II: Tony Blair wins a first round in surviving his annual party conference with as little damage as possible. The lefties won’t be voting on Iraq. And he’s not caving in on DLC-style public sector reforms either. Unlike most of the Democratic candidates.

This one really defies belief:

North Korea has called for economic aid and a non-aggression pact with America in return for surrendering its nuclear ambitions, but Washington has consistently refused.

This in an article that makes no mention either of the appalling human rights record of North Korea or of its duplicity with successive world bodies and American administrations. But, hey, they get to run a headline calling Rumsfeld a psychopath. Who cares if they sympathize with one of the vilest regimes in history?

ON THE OTHER HAND: Here’s something I’d gladly pay a license fee for.

DOWD DEGENERATES: Yes, it’s possible. One – perhaps the only – theme of Maureen Dowd’s columns is her man-hatred. You know she’s really out for someone when she mentions their testosterone. Imagine a male columnist writing about female politicians constantly mentioning PMS. But I digress. Here’s her “analysis” of Donald Rumsfeld’s role in the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq: “I would describe him as the man who trashed two countries…” Now no-one can claim that everything is hunk-dory in Afghanistan and Iraq. But, compared to their existence under Saddam and the Taliban … they’re “trashed”? After two of the most target-precise wars ever conducted, with billions of reconstruction money going to Iraq, with levels of human freedom in both countries unprecedented in their history? Trashed? Dowd thinks that it was American intervention and not Saddam and sanctions that “trashed” Iraq? Is she serious? Stupid question.

Another classic. Shimon Peres and …

CLARK IN HIS OWN WORDS: An amusing litany.

BLUE-COLLAR CHIC: Well, you could see this coming:

“For middle-class kids just out of university and living in Williamsburg, the closest thing right now to bad-ass culture is blue-collar culture, so you have hipsters play-acting blue collar. Instead of saying, `I’m a PlayStation-reared, e-mailing-all-the-time Friendster loser,’ they’re getting lots of tattoos and drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and listening to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.”

I went to my first white-trash theme party three years ago. I felt cool because John Bartlett was throwing it. We had corn-dogs and twinkies and malt liquor and wore half-mesh ball-caps. Maybe the “bear” trend is also a throw-back to ’70s white trash culture. Ditto South Park Republicans, where the politics of the Red Zone has become the politics of the Blue-Red Set. Is all this hopelessly condescending? Maybe. But part of the refreshing nature of these trends is exactly their unconcern with whether they’re forms of condescension or not, or even whether they’re ironic or not. They’re just cool and insensitive. It took only one generation of political correctness to fuse the two. As Rolling Stone editor, Joe Levy, puts it, “If you have a bohemian neighborhood full of people drinking bad beer and wearing ugly T-shirts and trucker hats and dressing the exact same way as Justin Timberlake, it’s real and it’s ironic, and it’s cool and it’s uncool at the same time.” Exactly.

Mark Steyn offers another Said obit.

CUBS WIN! CUBS WIN! The boyfriend has entered what appears to be some sort of agitated trance. Or maybe he’s just hung over.

The hard left is always complaining about having their feelings hurt, I mean their views allegedly “censored.” Among the more preposterous aspects of Wesley Clark’s campaign slogan of a “new patriotism” is his pledge to create America where people are not afraid to voice dissent. Give me a break. This spring, I was almost deafened by the chants of the pro-Saddam or anti-war left. Walking the beagle tonight in my neighborhood in DC I saw three posters portraying vicious hatred of the United States. And that’s fine by me. Furthermore, I have yet to see a single example of government censorship in this country since 9/11. (The worrying exception is the way in which the Secret Service seems to be quarantining legitimate demonstrations against the president. But this blog – and many others written by non-lefties – have been foremost in complaining about that). So where are the real blacklists, the real attempts to police thought, censor opposing views and ruthlessly promoote people on the basis of ideology, not merit? On campus, of course, one of the few places in America where the hard left still exercizes as much control as it can. David Brooks’ column yesterday, when you think about it, is shocking. And its shock comes primarily from the fact that we all know it already.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “The Church has got it wrong in the past – there’s no doubt about it. For most of Christian history, for instance, it was assumed that Jews had no place in the providence of God. I think you can take the view that, just as the Church eventually abolished slavery, so they ended up in favour of votes for women, so they voted for the ordination of women, and this is just one more issue where the Church has got it wrong,” – Anglican bishop, the Rt Rev Richard Harries, on the question of how Christianity will eventually see gay and lesbian human beings.

“During my first months in office, when day after day there were decisions that had to be made, I had an almost irresistible urge – really a physical urge – to look over my shoulder for someone I could pass the problem on to. Then without my quite knowing how it happened, I realized I was looking in the wrong direction. I started looking up instead and have been doing so for quite a while now.” – from Ronald Reagan’s remarkable letters. I’ll be posting a review of them on this site early next week. (If you’re a subscriber, you’ll have it in your mailbox sooner.)

HITCH ON SAID: An appropriately kind obit in Slate. Best paragraph:

But it can be admirable in a way to go through life with one skin too few, to be easily agonized and upset and offended. Too many people survive, or imagine that they do, by coarsening themselves and by protectively dulling their sensitivity to the point of acceptance. This would never be Edward’s way. His emotional strength – one has to resort to cliché sometimes – was nonetheless also a weakness.

I do think Hitch’s writing has become even better since it has become more of a repository of internal tension and debate. It has humanized him, taken off the sometimes overly-arch distance which used to characterize his prose.

THE FMA’S TRUE AGENDA: Freudian slip, I’d say, in this recent piece about the Federal Marriage Amendment. My reading is that the FMA would ban all types of domestic partnerships, civil unions, or any arrangements that can strengthen gay relationhips far short of marriage rights – even if they are the democratic consensus of a state, and reached through legislative means. The spin from most of the best FMA advocates (such as Stanley Kurtz) is that it would narrowly affect only court-imposed benefits and if a state wanted to create civil unions through its legislature, fine. Here’s the money sentence in the Washington Times op-ed:

Most experts believe the amendment would invalidate Vermont and California laws that are virtually equivalent of marriage.

Now remember that California’s law is not court-imposed but passed by a duly elected legislature. The point of the FMA is clear: to prevent individual states passing any benefits to gay couples by whatever means. It’s time the supporters of the FMA came clean about this.

A REMINDER: Every week, I get emails from people who find the white on navy color scheme on this site hard to read. We have long had a fix for that, and it’s a little button up there called “Black and White.” Click on it and the colors will be reversed.

If you’re not a little alarmed about the prospect of a president Clark after reading this, then I don’t know what to say. What on earth is he talking about? How can he say so much and so little at the same time? The Wall Street Journal says he sounds like a Republican. I’d say that’s a bit insulting to Republicans. There are a lot of passages in there that make him sound stoned.

Paul Johnson provides some hard truths.

The new campaign is shutting down its grass-roots web-operations. They’re not easily controlled enough:

Two pro-Clark sites, ClarkRecruits.com and DigitalClark.com, have already been shut down, and a third, DraftWesleyClark.com, is slated to be disbanded within the month, according to its founder. ClarkRecruits.com had helped would-be volunteers link up with other Clark supporters in their areas; now volunteers have to fill out a form on the candidate’s official site (Clark04.com) and wait for the main campaign to figure out what to do with them … “They are destroying the parts of the draft movement that worked really well and they are transforming the draft movement into people who want to lick envelopes,” says one worried member of the movement. “They are rebuilding the Kerry campaign with a better candidate.”

Clark spokesmen disagree. Check out this interesting piece in the American Prospect for full context.

I mis-wrote on some of the Clark quotes on Drudge and made it seem as if they referred to Bush, Cheney et al. after 9/11. But he said them in May 2001. My bad. I don’t think it changes the point, however. Clark was right to praise them. I still agree with him. And he was lauding their abilities not anything they’d actually done. Did they suddenly change character after 9/11? Nah. Their character came through. So how to explain Clark’s exuberant praise so soon? The Rhodes Scholar key: he wanted a job. He still does. And maybe he’ll say anything to get one.