The Dish

“Belgium’s highest court dismissed war crimes complaints Wednesday against former U.S. President George W. Bush, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, ruling the country no longer has a legal basis to charge them.” – Associated Press, reprinted on CNN earlier today. Former U.S. President George W. Bush? Only in CNN’s dreams.

WORSE THAN CLINTON?: “Relentlessness is Clark’s greatest virtue, also his greatest flaw. Speaking to a NEWSWEEK reporter on the night he announced his candidacy, Clark did not want to let go until he was sure the reporter understood him – not just understood him, but respected him, believed him, appreciated him, liked him. Clark quivered with a desire to please. He tapped his feet, jiggled his knee, leaned forward, his bright eyes searching imploringly. “Am I being too theoretical?” he asked. “I want to make sure I answer all your questions,” he insisted, two hours into an interview into which he had touched on Plato, the higher calling of the soldier-statesman, the art of persistent diplomacy and, in Clark’s view, the many failings of the Bush presidency.” – from Evan Thomas’ somewhat brutal account of the character and career of Wesley Clark.

“I’ve known Wes for a long time. I will tell you the reason he came out of Europe early had to do with integrity and character issues, things that are very near and dear to my heart. I’m not going to say whether I’m a Republican or a Democrat. I’ll just say Wes won’t get my vote.” – General Hugh Shelton, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the maverick soldier now running for the presidency.

A useful round-up from the AP. Money quote:

Clark also was cautious about plunging into battle after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when many Americans were out for vengeance. Three days after the attacks, he counseled this response: “It’s fundamentally a police effort against individuals. It’s not a military effort directed against factories and airfields. You may still need to use military force, but you have to use it in a very precise way.” It became a huge military effort to uproot the government of Afghanistan and the terrorist network it harbored. Clark seemed to swing behind the strategy once it was set, and he voiced confidence in the outcome.

It seems to me that this gets to a very important issue in the debate. Is our fight against terrorism a “police operation” or a war? Clark wants the former, although he waxed lyrical about the conduct of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq at the time. Now, of course, he is full of criticism. If Clark’s candidacy can help us focus on this critical question – policing or war – then it will be a good thing.

Which real Californian wouldn’t vote for someone with a body as good as that?

CLARK/KERRY’S CASE: Let’s put the best gloss on Wesley Clark’s ever-shifting position on the Iraq war and glean a coherent case within it. He would have voted for the Congressional Resolution – but only as a way to increase pressure for a diplomatic solution through the U.N. But wasn’t that Tony Blair’s position? Blair had all along preferred the U.N. route. He and Bush won an amazingly unanimous vote on the first resolution. He almost burst every blood vessel trying to get the Security Council to agree to the second. He wanted unanimous U.N. support precisely for the reasons Clark says he did as well – so as to avoid war. So what happened? He was double-crossed. The French declared that they would veto a second U.N. resolution promising war, regardless of what Saddam did. I’ve been reading the excellent inside account of the Blair government’s attempt to forge this middle way in the winter and early spring of this year. It’s revealing – not only about the good intentions of Blair but about the treachery and intransigence of Paris. The question for Clark and Kerry is therefore: where do you disagree with Blair? If Blair came to the conclusion that there was no way that the French were prepared to sign on to serious enforcement of 1441, why does Clark think otherwise? Is he simply saying that he would have had superior diplomatic skills and talked Chirac around? Superior to Blair’s and Powell’s? I think history will judge that there was no way on earth that France would ever have acceded to serious enforcement of 1441 by Western arms, under any circumstances. If that’s true, would Clark and Kerry have acceded to Paris and called the war off? If so, they should say so. But it would have been a huge blow to American credibility, deterrence and the war on terror. And since they favored the process whereby the French were given a veto, what exactly did the Bush administration do wrong? I wish I knew. I suspect these people are playing cheap rhetorical games in the midst of a dark and dangerous conflict. That alone casts doubt on their fitness to be president.

This one isn’t ironic. Promise. This mega-meta-posting by Mickey (“‘Free Weintraub’ update, updated:”) strikes me as an early classic of blog lit. It’s funny, on-the-money, locked in a web world of its own, making waves, and endless in a call-waiting, can’t-stop-reading kind of way. When someone does a dissertation on blog-writing, they need to use this as an ur-post. (Of course if Mickey’s post is meta, this post is meta-meta. But not so mega. I should go to bed now, shouldn’t I?))

CONTRA MARSHALL: I’m with Glenn Reynolds in his recent and unusual spanking of Josh Marshall. It’s not illegitimate to cite a Democratic Congressman’s view that the relentlessly negative media spin on Iraq is making our job over there far harder than it might otherwise be. That’s the truth. The only hope the Baathists have is that we will give up and do a Somalia. Moreover, disunity at home gives the Saddamites and other terrorists hope and prolongs the conflict. I can’t see how anyone can seriously want that – not even Howard Dean. In fact, one of the good things about Dean’s campaign has been his clear statement that we need the Iraqi liberation to work. But sadly it’s no surprise that many in this country and abroad want the liberation to fail. They think it’s more important for the U.S. to get a bloody nose than that the Iraqi people get a successful transition to democracy. I can see no other rationale behind the French arguments to hand over power immediately to an interim government that is not capable of running the place. And the obscene “Bring The Troops Home” rhetoric of A.N.S.W.E.R. revals again that their major motivating factor is opposition to U.S. power rather than concern for Iraqi democracy or human rights. We have to do better than this. What troubles me about the Democrats’ current rhetoric is not that there shouldn’t be good criticisms of what we’re doing over there; but that those criticisms should be aimed at getting the process to succeed. Right now, it seems designed purely for domestic political points: the domestic politics of Vietnam without Vietnam. So what is new? For what it’s worth, I was equally disgusted by the oportunism of many Republicans when the Clinton administration needed support for the effort against totalitarian genocide in the Balkans. It was cheap then. With far higher stakes, it’s even cheaper now.

Yesterday, I wrote: “Clark’s previous remark that he’d be a Republican if Karl Rove had returned his calls is just a metaphor, or a fabrication, or a dream, or something.” Well, Clark claimed that “something” was a joke; and that he was misinterpreted. I take the point and should have mentioned this interpretation at the time. I was a little flip. But don’t get me wrong: I don’t believe Clark for a minute about this incident. One thing we know about him is that he’s phenomenally ambitious and extremely prickly. It doesn’t surprise me a bit that he might have wanted to join the Bush team and was pissed when they didn’t want him. Howard Fineman’s sources, moreover, didn’t just make their point by citing the “joke.” They say Clark went on at length about his sense of grievance with the Republican establishment. The point about Clark’s flakiness stands. And it’s not improbable. He’s not exactly a partisan Dem, is he? He voted for Reagan and Nixon. And he was dissed by the Clinton administration. What better revenge than returning in glory to help run a war? Look, he was a Rhodes Scholar. They suck upwards and kick downwards. The hilarious thing about all this is how eager otherwise sane people are to defend Clark. His record in public life is spotty and maverick. His campaign so far has been a complete mess. Maybe he’ll recover. Maybe under all this wild-eyed ego-centrism, there’s a future leader waiting to be born. I’m not going to write him off yet. But he strikes me as an obviously inferior candidate to several of the others. I’d go for Edwards, Kerry, Lieberman or Dean before this nut.

NIT-PICKING ARNOLD: Okay, so here’s a pathetic example of irrelevant gotcha journalism designed to infuriate all those public interest types who want us to focus on the ishoos. How tall is Arnold? Gregg Easterbrook joins the debate, following the Chicago Reader. The official website says AS is 6’2″. Others differ. Most think he’s much smaller. So do I. I met him once (it was at an event where a lot of young men were wearing make-up and dresses) and he was, if memory serves, shorter than me and I’m around 5’9″ in the mornings. But I don’t entirely trust my memory about all that. The other reason for thinking he’s shorter is that it’s very hard for someone at 6’2″ to have gotten as huge as the big guy back when he was lifting serious weights. It helps to be a little on the short, boxy side for bodybuilding. So is he fibbing? And if it’s kosher, by some luminaries, for women to euphemize their age, can men lie about their height?

My email server was having a cow for a few weeks and none of my outgoing emails was delivered. D’oh! But they were all sent this morning. So if you get a crazy email from yours truly out of the blue, it’s delayed. Sorry. Better late than never.

MATH AND ME: Blooper on the FMA post. A reader sets me, er, straight:

I enjoy reading your column (even though I usually disagree with you), but I think you may have gotten this line wrong:

“And Republicans oppose the FMA by a 58 to 38 percent margin.”
Reading the original article, it looks to me like the FMA is opposed 58 to 38 percent among Republicans who think same-sex marriage should be illegal. If you read the paragraphs above the second table (from which you pulled the 58/38 number), it says things like “only 23 percent of older Americans who oppose such marriages say it’s worth amending the Constitution to do so” (emphasis added). Twenty-three percent in favor of FMA among older Americans matches up numerically with the second table. Also, the second table is titled “The Constitution: Amended if Same Sex Marriage Banned” (emphasis added), which also suggests the second table only represents anti-gay marriage folks.

The good thing about this misreading is that it strengthens your point. Since 73 percent of Republicans oppose gay marriage and 38 percent of them are in favor of FMA, this means that only 27 percent of all Republicans support FMA. It’s still higher than the 20 percent support from the general populace, but even I, a diehard Democrat, will admit that it’s impressive that so many Republicans are against FMA. What’s especially impressive is how many are willing to put the integrity of our Constitution over their own objections to gay marriage.

Sorry for the miscalculation.

A new poll from ABC News is the first to measure Americans’ support for amending the Constitution to ban gay marriage. Instead of asking a single question that conflates whether you are for or against equal marriage rights and the amendment issue, the ABC poll asked two separate questions: 1) Do you think it should be legal or illegal for homosexual couples to get married? and 2) Is it worth amending the U.S. Constitution to make it illegal for homosexual couples to get married, or not worth it? The results are that 55 percent want to keep gay marriage illegal, but of those, a majority (60 percent) oppose a constitutional amendment. If you add up those who think gay marriage should be legal (and therefore presumably oppose the FMA) and those who think it should be illegal but still oppose the FMA, you get 70 percent opposition to the FMA. When you count out the “don’t knows”, you get a paltry 20 percent who want to amend the Constitution to ban gays from the responsibilities of marriage. 20 percent for a Constitutional Amendment. That means no amendment. Even if the numbers were reversed – and 70 percent were in favor of the FMA – that would still be a thin reed on which to make such a drastic change. Other interesting aspects of the poll: the generation gap is massive. And Republicans oppose the FMA by a 58 to 38 percent margin. (Independents and Democrats are pretty much indistinguishable on the issue, another interesting find.) There’s also little difference between civil unions and marriages, in most people’s eyes. The only way the religious right will succeed with this radical step is by a hysterical and polarizing campaign. Even then, the odds are surely against them.

Hats off to Glenn for helping bring critical mass to the obvious truth that the reports coming out of Iraq are too one-sided, too patently political, and far too gloomy. Others are catching on. It’s impossible to know for sure from this distance, but the emails I’ve printed from soldiers, as well as despatches from some pro-war journalists, like Hitch in the current Vanity Fair, have kept me from panic. That’s not to say we shouldn’t hear the bad news. It’s just that it needs perspective. Tom Friedman has been splendid, I think, in getting exactly the right mix of optimism and concern. I noticed this aside in Danielle Pletka’s op-ed in the NYT today:

[T]he number of engagements in Iraq have declined from roughly 25 a day in July to about 15 a day today – and each lasts for an average of two or three minutes.

Finally some perspective on those almost daily troop deaths which every media outlet plasters on the front-page. Things are slowly improving! All the more reason to keep a steady course, perhaps move more quickly to devolve power in some areas, and remind Iraqis of the critical fact that we are not going to abandon them again. Not this time. And the French? Ignore them.

“Please tell me, Andrew: why are you keeping track of Bush hatred?-Are you on the administration’s payroll? Do you report those who are critical, make sure they don’t work in this town (America) ever again? There’s nothing lower than a lapdog anyway, but a lapdog for the moral cretins that are the Bushies is a gutter-level low. Disgusting and pathetic. Yes, many of us “hate” Bush and company, and for precisely the reasons Susan Lenfesty mentions. We are on a metaphorical flight into a metaphorical building – and yes, somebody besides Bush can analogize 9/11 (although Bush doesn’t analogize 9/11, he explicitly cites it, and for political gain).
It’s absolutely repulsive the way people like you lay curled at the feet of this wanna-be dictator (his own words, bespeaking dreams) and bark at the ones who question him and his policies. Don’t even begin to think that American casualties in Iraq keep any of them up at night. For these monsters, it’s a harvest of souls…or, monster food.”

ALRIGHTY THEN: This email is not atypical of many I get about Bush. (And, of course, I’ve been plenty critical of some aspects of this administration, especially on fiscal and cultural matters). I just don’t think Bush is maliciously intent on destroying the fabric of the country. In fact, I think the president has done a pretty good job of responding boldly to some of the gravest crises the country has ever faced. But the intensity of the desire to see him defeated – by whatever means and whoever benefits – is a real phenomenon. It’s stronger and more widespread than the antipathy to Clinton in, say, 1996. It will propel the coming electoral cycle. All the frustration that so many felt at the cultural realignment in the wake of 9/11 is going to come to a head. It was bad enough for some that this “moron” was elected. But that he presided over a real shift in the country’s mood – against apologizing for American power, against appeasement of Islamo-extremism – is still too much to contemplate with equanimity. This is payback time. Check out this Boston Herald story for some price quotes from the angry base.The worldview of some has been shaken. And they are determined to see it restored.