The Dish

I’m unabashed in my fondness for Ronald Reagan. He was way smarter than most people give him credit for; and subtler too. It doesn’t surprise me that he wrote letters as eloquent and funny and wise as the newly released ones can be. But I was struck by his candor about how damaging sexual shame and guilt can be. This passage is particularly embarrassing to the scolds who have come to monopolize much of the discussion of sex in conservative circles:

I have learned painfully that some “idealism” is in effect a flight from reality… To show you how “over idealistic” my training was – I awoke to the realization (almost too late) that even in marriage I had a little guilty feeling about sex, as though the whole thing was tinged with evil.
A very fine old gentleman started me out on the right track by interesting me in the practices of, or I should say, moral standards of, the primitive peoples never exposed to our civilization – such as the Polynesians. These peoples who are truly children of nature and thus of God, accept physical desire as a natural, normal appetite to be satisfied honestly and fearlessly with no surrounding aura of sin and sly whispers in the darkness . . .
I guess what I am trying to say is that I oppose the dogmas of some organized religions who accept marital relationship only as a “tolerated” sin for the purpose of conceiving children and who believe all children to be born in sin. My personal belief is that God couldn’t create evil so the desires he planted in us are good and the physical relationship between a man and woman is the highest form of companionship …

Notice how he embraces sex and pleasure within a semi-traditional framework of a second marriage. He’s a Californian Republican, not a Southern one. He is specifically challenging the doctrines of Saint Paul, daring to challenge the Bible itself. And he’s an antidote to the cramped, fearful and narrow notions of someone like Senator Santorum who has said that love has nothing to do with marriage. He reminds me of what I once found so attractive about a certain kind of open-hearted Republicanism, something that has gotten so lost among the paranoids and puritans that now sadly dominate the party. In the words of Neil Tennant: happiness is an option.

WHO IS ARAFAT?: A useful reminder.

More amusements from the web animation department.

HOW LOOPY IS CLARK? The answer, I fear, is that he’s Ross Perot without the emotional stability. So now his 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. Or maybe he called Rove on a cell-phone or an email. Will he respond to these discrepancies? He also got oddly chummy with a genocidal war criminal. But, hey, diplomacy is good. Still, he’s strong in the polls, whatever that means at this point, even to the point of besting Bush. If a wacky, unknown, fill-in-the-blanks general is running ahead of the president, you get a pretty good idea of how adrift the White House’s political operation now is.

I noticed this little nugget from the CNN poll results:

In May, soon after Bush announced that major combat operations had ended in Iraq, 41 percent of Americans said they thought the war was over. But now only one in 10 feel that way.

I’d say that this has a lot to do with the disillusionment. I don’t think most Americans feel the president lied his way into war. He didn’t. But his post-war strategy both in Iraq and at home has been dismal. Rummy’s intransigence over the need for real troop support after the war created a security vacuum from which Iraq is still reeling. Rove’s strategy of egregiously milking military victory for short-term political gain gave the impression that everything was over, done with, finished. So when conflict continued – as anyone who noticed the melting away of the Republican Guards would have predicted – it looked as if Bush was not in control. Subsequently, there hasn’t been a clear and positive account from the president of why Iraq is so vital. He needs to tell the country that we have accomplished two hugely important things: we have removed Saddam from power, liberating millions and ending a continuing threat to the West; and we have begun the difficult process of trying to turn the entire region around by attempting a democratic revolution in Iraq. This broader, positive goal of the war on terror has never been as front-and-center as it needs to be. It’s far more ambitious than anything the opposition favors; and it appeals to Americans’ sense of their own destiny and to the deeper security matters that are involved. Why hasn’t he trumpeted the Marshall Plan, rather than seem sheepishly apologetic about it? There is only one way we can lose this war now. And that is if the American people lose faith in it. That’s what many in the media are trying to accomplish. Many loathe the idea of fighting back aggressively, especially if it means offending the poohbahs at the U.N., the E.U. and so on. This is where the war gets tough. It’s time Bush got going on the hard domestic job of promoting it more persuasively.

BY THE WAY: Do most national polls have 48 percent Democrats, like the CNN/USA Today poll? It seems pretty loaded in that direction to me. Where are all the Independents?

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “I read Wiliam Safire’s piece, and while his assesments are solid in general I think he assumes to much complexity in Clintonian tactics. I don’t think that the Clinton machine is planning to muddy the waters for Hillary’s entry. They know that elections are too unpredictable to time multiple candidates entries and exits. One bad news cycle and your Byzantine plan goes to hell.
I think they have seen what others see: Dean won’t win against Bush, unless everything goes his way. The Clintons know that this rarely happens, and they are intimately familiar with the Whitehouse’s ability to control the news cycle. Clark can win if only some things go his way. He needs bad news in Iraq, something that can be counted on no matter how well things go there. If the economy is the issue, all they will say is that they are running a good teacher against a poor student. Few understand economics well enough to delve further.
Bill Clinton knows that his power is on the line. If Dean runs and the Dems lose, Clinton will be remembered for his history of personal success amidst party disaster. If Clark wins, he’s the Man from Hope who delivered the party from Bush and Ashcroft.-Hillary knows the wife of the Man from Hope is the heir apparent, so the whole family is on board.” – more reader insight on the Letters Page.

From the “issues” page on his website.

Here’s how the British newspaper, the Independent, reported the arrest of the Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo Bay on suspicion of espionage. In this age of terrorism, everyone is innocent except the U.S. government. Notice especially the invocation of Lynne Stewart.

“The recent 9/11 anniversary, with its replays of those devil-driven jets, careening at top speed into the World Trade Towers, made me think again of what those passengers must have endured. It is such a heart-searing image that the mind cannot linger on it for long.
But at times I feel a similar helplessness, as if our whole country is hurtling toward disaster, the cockpit commandeered by a proud and zealous crew that won’t listen and won’t change course.
Like the passengers in three of those four jets, we’re frozen in our seats, obeying the unwritten protocols of captivity.
But then I remember the passengers in the fourth jet, the one thought to have been headed for Washington, D.C. They didn’t stay strapped in their seats. They had the onerous advantage of learning by cell phone what had happened to the towers and to the Pentagon, and they had the time — and the courage — to act. They stormed the cockpit and lost their lives, but undoubtedly saved hundreds of others, and probably the symbolic heart of the nation.” – Susan Lenfesty, comparing the Bush administration to the mass murderers of 9/11.

This one is revealing. It’s from Eric Schmitt’s account of Paul Wolfowitz’s appearance at the New School. Here’s the passage:

When pressed by Mr. Goldberg and audience members, some of these justifications seemed less certain. “Iraq did have contacts with Al Qaeda,” Mr. Wolfowitz insisted, momentarily silencing the audience with an accusation even President Bush now says is unsubstantiated. He added, “We don’t know how clear they were.”

Notice the condescension. Now notice the inaccuracy. President Bush has never said that Saddam had no ties to al Qaeda. This is the new anti-war shibboleth, loyally parroted by Schmitt as if it were true. (It’s the same as the notion that the president once claimed that the threat from Iraq was imminent. He didn’t. But in the anti-war mind, he must have.) All the president conceded was that there was no hard evidence of Saddam’s connection to 9/11. (There is, of course, much hard evidence that Saddam was involved in the first WTC attack.) Even the BBC has conceded as much. Nothing Wolfowitz is reported to have said conflicted with this. Now: an interesting test of Keller’s New York Times. Will they run a correction of their reporter’s egregious anti-war bias? (Belgravia Despatch beat me to the punch on this one.)

I bumped into a few of my many lefty friends this weekend, who were almost all enthusiastic about Wesley Clark. I was particularly amused by the far-left counter-cultural National Gay Lesbian Task Force getting solidly behind a general who almost started World War III with the Russians. None of them cared much about Clark’s actual positions, however. All they cared about is his perceived ability to win. One explained that the white-hot rage at Bush had now tippled over into a cold determination to beat him, by whatever means necessary. I have to say I respect this kind of political argument. But it also strikes me that the left really cannot criticize Bush as a cipher for other forces aligned behind him, when they are doing exactly the same with a general they view as a purely Potemkin figure. “Look, if it means we get Gene Sperling and Robert Rubin running the country again, I don’t much care who they put up as a front-man,” one partisan gleefully explained. All of this reminds me of Bill Kristol’s flirtation with Colin Powell as a Republican candidate a few years back. Why the Powell boomlet? He was black and could win. Er, that was it. Powell was a cipher to innoculate the Republicans from seeming too white-bread. Similarly, Clark is a perceived winner and a cipher to innoculate the Democrats from seeming … what, exactly? Unpatriotic? Weak on defense? Out of the cultural mainstream? Who knows? It all smacks of phoniness and opportunism to me. And it’s a clear sign that those who control big Democratic money are worried (I’m with Safire on that). If I were a Dem, it would make me want to vote for Dean even more. After all, what would be healthiest for the future of the Democrats – a party still run by principle-free sleazeballs like McAuliffe and the Clintons or one built up from the grass roots by people with passion and ideas?

CORRECTION: The person whom I quoted from memory above says he never used the term “front-man” to describe Wesley Clark. He says a more accurate rendition of his blind quote would be: “”If it means getting Robert Rubin and Gene Sperling back into power, who cares who gets them there?” He also denies he’s partisan. No, it wasn’t Sid Blumenthal.

UNSTEPFORD WIVES: Can America cope with Judith Steinberg and Teresa Heinz?

Geez, do we have an exit strategy yet? Four years later – four years later, president Clinton is telling the world we’ll stay there as long as it take to finish the job. The U.N. agrees. As a reader points out today, it’s just as well Clinton got U.N. Security Council backing for the war … oh, wait. Never mind.

MAKES ARNOLD LOOK LIKE A WONK: “Among the issues [Wesley Clark] told voters he was not ready to discuss in detail were health care, education, employment, AIDS in Africa, the USA Patriot Act and medical marijuana.” – from Saturday’s New York Times. At least he has had time to develop at least three different positions on the war.

“There was no imminent threat. This was made up in Texas,” – Senator Edward Kennedy, describing the Bush administration’s case for war.

“The president has never said that Saddam has the capability of striking the United States with atomic or biological weapons any time in the immediate future.” – Howard Dean, Face the Nation, September 29, 2002.

“Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.” – president George Bush, State of the Union, 2003, clearly conceding that the threat from Saddam was not imminent.