The Dish

“I’m really glad you and your beagle got to take a walk in the non-event of wherever it was you were that got brushed by Isabel, but I have a tree on my car, water in my living room, the neighbors got four feet of water in their place, my brother’s roof leaks, my parent’s car was completely smashed and the ceiling is bowed in the kitchen from accumulated rain, I have to boil my water, I just got my power back on a couple of hours ago, and half the rest of the state is still out of power. Yes, Virginia, there was a hurricane.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

BUSHITLER WATCH: “Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief (director of communications, in the current parlance), once said that if you are going to lie, you should tell a big lie. That may be good advice, but the question remains: What happens when people begin to doubt the big lie? Herr Goebbels never lived to find out. Some members of the Bush administration may be in the process of discovering that, given time, the big lie turns on itself.” – Andrew Greeley, Chicago Sun-Times.

California brings gay couples closer to equality with straight ones. But why the state income tax exception? More evidence, to my mind, that civil unions are no alternative to marriage and actually perpetuate cultural balkanization and civic inequality. In another fascinating development, every single Democratic candidate has now come out formally in opposition to the proposed constitutional amendment to bar any benefits or rights to gay couples. Such an amendment would effectively repeal Vermont’s and California’s civil unions, domestic partnerships and any benefits to gay couples under the law anywhere in the U.S. When a radical amendment of this kind is opposed by one of the two major parties, what chance does it have of garnering the overwhelming support needed?

BLAIR VERSUS THE DEMS: A revealing column by a good Blair observer, Andrew Rawnsley, suggests that the pilloried British Prime Minister is not going to change course, domestically or on Iraq in the near or even distant future. Particularly apposite to the debate among the Democrats, Blair will not countenance a tax hike for the wealthy – those earning over $160,000 a year. Why? Here’s why:

Blair disdains the notion, popular with quite a lot of his colleagues and not so long ago openly propounded by Peter Hain, that a new 50 per cent rate on those earning more than $100,000 a year would raise some useful revenue from an affluent but small slice of the voters. Would the electoral penalty really be that high? Blair is as emphatic as he has ever been that the penalty would be huge, and for the same reason as always: those earning less would believe that Labour was coming after them next. On this, at least, Downing Street insiders say that he and Gordon Brown are in complete agreement.

In Britain, at least, the DLC still has clout.

This is getting dizzying. See from this FAIR report, how many positions Wesley Clark has had on the Iraq war over the last twelve months. He changes his mind every five minutes. How can an anti-war candidate have been so pro-war at times? How can a man running against president Bush on the war have said so many laudatory things about the way Bush coordinated the conflict? To my mind, the most important thing about Clark is that he was a Rhodes Scholar. Almost to a man and woman, they are mega-losers, curriculum-vitae fetishists, with huge ambition and no concept of what to do with it. Hat-tip to Porphyrogenitus.

The Club for Growth is a fiscally conservative organization with links to all sorts of Republicans. Its president, Stephen Moore, is not a homophobe, by all accounts. But like many tolerant conservatives, he has to work and cooperate with people who cannot abide homosexuals and will not tolerate them in any positions of authority. So he fires a gay man in charge of a state chapter, after complaints from “pro-family” (i.e. anti-gay) groups and leaders. This isn’t a huge story in and of itself. But I think it does show how hard it is for any openly gay person to work or cooperate with much of the Republican apparatus. If you’re closeted, you can rise to the very, very top. If you’re honest and principled, you’re finished. These people insist they’re not prejudiced. They just support people who are.

Salon’s Joan Walsh sounds somewhat despairing; millionaire socialist Katrina Vanden Heuvel puts the boot in for the Left; and this quote on ABC’s The Note (from a senior Democratic operative) is priceless:

I have read the accounts of the Clark interviews and my reaction is despair and anger. Why did my party’s best operatives think it would be a good idea to subject their neophyte candidate to the country’s savviest reporters for over an hour? Why have my party’s elders rallied around a candidate who is so shockingly uninformed about core issues and his own positions? I am not a Dean supporter – but I am angry that our party’s leaders have anointed an alternative to him who seems even more ignorant and unprepared – and that this supposed ‘anti-war’ candidate turns out to have been in favor of both the war resolution and Richard Nixon!! And let’s not even talk about the Clintons. Today I am embarrassed to be a Democrat.

The flip-flop on perhaps the most important political question for the Democratic field – where he would have stood on the Iraq War resolution – was and is pathetic. More pathetic, however, is the notion that the Dems really did think of this guy as their savior. Are they that weak on national security issues that a general – even as hapless as this one – is their only chance? What does that say about their own self-image? I’m beginning to think that Dean and Gephardt could be the real survivors here. But Dean has just had the worst of the Republican judgments about his electability confirmed by his own party establishment. That must hurt a little, no?

MARK, PROPHET: “Correction, Sept. 17, 2003: This article originally stated that Mark’s Gospel was written around 70 B.C.E. It was written around A.D. 70.” – Slate.

I’ll be defending the war on terror on the Chris Matthews show this weekend. It’s on NBC. And I’m in a suit! Hey. I’m forty now. I gotta look grown-up.

BETTER THAN EGGPLANTS: This made me laugh. For about 15 minutes.

The anti-war propaganda continues at the BBC, financed by tax-payers. Check out this array of opinions on the reasons for war against Iraq. Try and find a single pro-war voice out of dozens.

“The real threat isn’t some terrorists who can kill a few people now and then but are not fundamentally a threat to the continuation of America as I know it, but the internal challenge from very powerful domestic political forces who want to do away with America as I know it.” – Paul Krugman, NPR. (Thanks to Apostablog.)

And beagle went for a walk at the height of the storm. No rain; barely any wind. The boyfriend and I went over and back to a friend’s to watch bad TV. No rain; barely any wind. This was a hurricane? I guess I was really lucky.

CLARK ON THE WAR: Reading this essay by Wesley Clark, I have to say I’m not reassured that he has what it takes to wage a war on terror. If he had been president, the war in Afghanistan would probably not have taken place, let alone the war against Saddam. His first instinct after the deadliest act of war against the American heartland in history was to help the United Nations set up an International Criminal Tribunal on International Terrorism. I’m not even making that up. Maybe Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia could head up the committee. If I were to imagine a parody of what a Rhodes Scholar would come up with in such a moment, I’d be hard pressed to come up with something more perfect. His insistence throughout the piece is on process, process, process. Everything is seen through the prism of NATO’s Kosovo campaign, his one claim to military glory. Can you imagine having to get every special ops target in Afghanistan approved by 19 different countries, including those who opposed any action against the Taliban? Can you even begin to imagine constructing a case for any action in Iraq under similar auspices? It simply wouldn’t have happened. Which is the point. It’s important to remember that under the last administration, almost nothing happened to address the genocide in the Balkans until the genocide had taken place. Why? Because we needed a consensus from all the Europeans to even wipe our collective ass. And the Europeans couldn’t agree on anything in the 1990s. Have you noticed greater unanimity since? There’s also no sense in Clark’s essay about other agendas from our allies. It’s all very well to achieve maximum international consensus on every international action. But what if you cannot get it? What if you cannot get the U.N. even to live up to its own resolutions, let alone American priorities? What if a critical “ally”, like France, has a firm policy of thwarting American power – wherever and whenever it is waged? The notion that Bush created such a French policy is a fantasy. Clark’s foreign policy strikes me as an abdication of foreign policy. That was dangerous in the 1990s. It would be fatal now.

More details on Andrew Gilligan’s “reporting.” It’s looking worse – we could be headed for Jayson Blair territory here. On a broader note, an insider in London I trust tells me I’ve misjudged why this story has been such a big deal in Britain, and could still damage Blair. In Britain, the tradition has always been an extremely bright line between politics and intelligence agencies. Whereas in the U.S.. there’s competition and rivalry among various spy agencies, and an understanding that presidents and Congress may use different pieces of evidence to make their case, in Britain, this has historically not been the case. Intelligence is generally presented to the public straight from the agencies themselves or never presented at all. Blair’s “dossier” was therefore unique and unusual in British history. It didn’t doctor intelligence reports, but it sure did spin them to make the strongest case for war possible. In the U.S., that’s not exactly news. In Britain, it was and is, and has come to symbolize for many the obsessive concern with news management that has been a hallmark of the Blair premiership. That – and the fact that they didn’t experience 9/11 directly – helps explain why Blair has had to endure far worse Monday morning quarterbacking than Bush.

AND THE BATTLE BEGINS: A married Canadian couple have been refused entry to the United States because they refused to fill out immigration forms as separate, single people. Good for them. As marriage spreads throughout the West, this is going to become an even bigger problem. The U.S. is already a country that bans any foreigner with HIV from entering the country. We’re spending $15 billion on AIDS in Africa out of “compassionate conservatism” but won’t alloow a single African with HIV to visit here. Now the U.S. is going to keep gay people out, HIV or no HIV, – but only those who have decided to take responsibility for each other in marriage. (Thanks to DiscountBlogger).