The Dish

“Correction: July 27, 2003, Sunday. An article last Sunday about the author Ann Coulter and her emergence as a major conservative voice in television, radio and newspaper interviews misstated her age. She is 41, not 39.”- New York Times. Meow.

He pulls off a Dr. Evil number very well.

I’m befuddled by what the president has just said about equal marriage rights. The AP says the following:

“Yes, I am mindful that we’re all sinners. And I caution those who may try to take the speck out of the neighbor’s eye when they’ve got a log in their own. I think it’s very important for our society to respect each individual, to welcome those with good hearts, to be a welcoming country. On the other hand, that does not mean that somebody like me needs to compromise on an issue such as marriage. And that’s really where the issue is headed here in Washington, and that is the definition of marriage. I believe in the sanctity of marriage. I believe a marriage is between a man and a woman. And I think we ought to codify that one way or the other. And we’ve got lawyers looking at the best way to do that.”

I have no idea what he’s talking about. We already have a Defense of Marriage Act. “Codifying” marriage as a federal matter? Huh? Is this an endorsement of the Federal Marriage Amendment? Or is it an ingenious way to mollify the far right without the FMA? No clue here.

A reader pens a long evisceration of Paula Fredriksen’s evisceration of Mel Gibson’s new movie about the death of Jesus. Worth a read. Money quote:

The bane of political correctness has always been its unconscious predilection to zealously overreach, eventually attempting to replace pesky facts with more helpful, albeit fabricated, ones and simultaneously condemning all who refuse to succumb to this indoctrination as bigots or racists, just as guilty of nefarious intent as those who are actively racist or misogynistic or religiously intolerant. Thus, if I agree with the evangelists and with Mel Gibson’s and my own intellectual interpretation of the scriptures, I am, in Fredriksen’s world, an anti-Semite (a revelation that would certainly startle my Jewish wife). The fact that Mr. Gibson has employed lawyers to protect his right to portray the truth as he (and many other Catholics) perceives it is not, as she would have us believe, some sort of admission of wrongdoing on his part. On the contrary, it is a perfectly intelligent and justified measure by which to resist the extortion of secular pietists. Thus, Fredriksen’s melodramatic comment, “Lawyers were in the saddle; reason was dying” (aside from delivering the second part of the 1-2 insult to this Catholic lawyer) demonstrates yet again her unwillingness to make her peace with reality: reason never lived in her efforts at extortion… The reason Catholics and other Christians like me are so anxious to see this film is for precisely the reason that she cannot grasp: because it is not being made to pander to the mood of the day or to any special interests. It is intended to be a depiction of the excruciating agony suffered by a loving God who did not need to do this, but, out of love for His miserable and undeserving creation, suffered so that we might recognize Him. What Mr. Gibson intends with this film is to demonstrate that love, and one who truly recognizes that love is incapable of the horrible acts of anti-Semitic violence that Fredriksen so fears.

Nicely put.

Another letter from a soldier who witnessed the Iraqi response to the deaths of Uday and Qusay:

“You may read many things about the recent deaths of Salaam’s two sons here in Iraq.- Let me tell you, as an eye witness, what occurred here in Baghdad.
About 2130 hours (9:30 p.m. for you civilians) last night, about six of us were huddled around a DVD player watching a movie.- Sustained, small arms gun fire was heard outside.- We all put on our flak vests and helmets, grabbed our weapons, and headed outside.- What we saw was amazing.
The entire down town Baghdad area skies was full of red and yellow tracer gun fire.- It looked like the 4th of July celebration we had all missed a few weeks ago.-
The use of weapons in this manner, for the Iraqis, is an expression of celebration.-
The level of this celebration was obviously intense for they had just heard the news that the two sons were dead and their reign of terror was over, for good.- The celebration lasted well into the night.
As mayor of this installation near the Baghdad International Airport, I employ about 18 local nationals to work on our electricity, plumbing and to do manual labor.- This morning, they were obviously tired from no sleep, but very happy, they had been celebrating all night.- They offered their supervisors extra locally made bread and several kinds of fruit, their way of saying thank you from them and their families.
In one short day, the atmosphere and attitude of those locals around us has changed, for the positive.
For those of you or your colleagues who still question why we are here, they should have the opportunity, like I have, to look into the eyes of a people who were truly repressed and now sense that their liberation is really at hand.-
In the last war, the U.S. let them down by not ousting the dictator. In this war, they did not trust us because their tormenters were still at large and they were not sure that the military would close the deal. Yesterday, the military proved that this liberation is for real.”
If you are asked why we are still here, yesterday’s action is the reason. We are still here because the mission that we started is not over, but it will be soon.- If you think our presence here is not warranted, you have the misfortune of not being able to see the faces of a liberated people. I have complained about our presence here, I am going to stop doing that now because last night gave me renewed hope that our actions are having a tangible affect on the lives the Iraqi people.- I am not naive enough to believe that the violence is over and that the resistance is dead. Instead, every American fighting in this country has seen with their own eyes the fruits of their sacrifice.- And for that, I am proud to be here.

And I’m proud to reprint the letter. The full text of the previous letter, blogged yesterday, can be found here.

LETTER FROM IRAQ II: Chief Wiggles lets another soldier in intelligence share his blog. It’s a fascinating cri de coeur, mainly against Western journalists and their attempt to undermine the liberation of Iraq:

I would recommend that the journalists who so perversely attempt to conceal and eradicate the knowledge of the good we have done examine their purposes for doing so, and weigh once again the awesome responsibility they have in crafting perceived reality for millions. Reality is often not what we wish it to be, and frequently contains elements we wish it did not, but where is the value in embracing a world of falsehood, however we prefer the lie? Now that the sword has done its job, it is time for the pen to convey, in brilliant ink unspoiled by the tainting hues of ignorance or malice, the ongoing work in its most objective truth, so that the deeds of history, good and ill, may be more fully judged, and the world we and our children shape be founded on pillars of truth.

He’s particularly incensed by a piece in the Times of London, decrying allied treatment of Iraqi prisoners:

His account of living conditions for prisoners was almost laughable. He attempted to paint a picture of misery and abuse through his description. You know what? He may have been right . . . but there are several hundred thousand Americans and allied soldiers living in the same conditions or worse that he cares absolutely nothing about. Spoken of are prisoners who are held in tents with temperatures reaching “up to 122 degrees” with no relief. There’s a reason why it’s 122 degrees inside the tent, and that’s because the outside ambient temperature is 131, and there are precisely the same temperatures in my tent, and every soldier’s tent in this country. I know well what it is to wake up in the morning lying in a pool of sweat that the taut material of my cot cannot absorb. There are soldiers even now who don’t have tents to provide shade, who are rationed two MREs a day, who preciously horde their allotment of water, trying to figure out how keep enough water in their bodies when anything they drink immediately sweats out. For well over two months at the camp here, latrines consisted of ditches with wooden planks and tubes half-buried in the sand for urinals.

Read the whole thing.

A new Zogby poll shows a clear majority in favor of equal marriage rights. If valid, that’s another big jump in support. Essentially, in ten years, we’ve managed to shift about twenty percent of the population from one side to the other. That’s an astonishing pace of change – and one reason the far right wants to stop the debate and enshrine their position in the constitution itself. Why? Because if they don’t shut down the debate now, they’re going to lose as soon as the next generation grows up. Why the sea-change in public opinion? Maybe it has something to do with this:

When New Jerseyans were asked whether they personally know someone who is gay, lesbian or bisexual, 77 percent said yes and 23 percent said no. Four years ago, 57 percent responded yes in a similar Star-Ledger/Eagleton-Rutgers poll.

Once gays are seen for who we actually are, the opposition melts. A poll in Massachusetts found a similar result. Younger voters show even higher degrees of toleration. What’s interesting to me is that the level of support among independent voters is as high as 60 percent. Bush should be wary of endorsing a Federal Marriage Amendment that will signal to independents that he is a captive of the far right. Catholics are particularly supportive (next, as always, to Jews); and blacks remain the group most hostile to gay equality. No surprise there, either.

Given the breathless advance notice of Stanley Kurtz’s magnum opus on gay marriage (all the advance blurbs were penned by, er, Stanley Kurtz), I have to say that his cover-story in the Weekly Standard is notably thin. Kurtz wants to argue that advocates of gay marriage are really trying to destroy the institution, rather than join it, and that this is fueled by a far left agenda in the gay community. What Kurtz doesn’t acknowledge is that there has been a long debate among gays about marriage rights and those of us who took the conservative position, despite enormous pressure and vitriol from our peers, have largely won the argument. Bypassing our achievement in nudging the gay community toward the center and right, he then dredges up fringe activists on the left as representative of the same-sex marriage movement. Some of them, such as Ettelbrick and Polikoff, were the fiercest critics of gay marriage (and gay conservatives) in the past; now Kurtz enlists them as the meaning of our cause for marriage equality. This is like using Al Sharpton to criticize the agenda of the DLC. It’s guilt by absurd association.

MONOGAMY: Then he brings up again the polygamy argument. This is a slippery slope case, the only one you’ve got if the substantive case won’t hold up. Why would same-sex marriage lead to polygamy? Kurtz argues that both undermine monogamy as the marital norm. Huh? Surely polygamy – by allowing men lots of wives within marriage – makes fidelity a moot question. By removing the very structure of a two-person marriage, it makes the sacrifice of monogamy close to meaningless. Not so for two lesbians committed to each other for life. Nor – even more intensely – for two men. So polygamy defines monogamy down. But same-sex marriage brings a culture of monogamy to a previously marginalized population. Aren’t these two phenomena actually going in opposite directions? Kurtz’s answer is that gay men simply cannot be monogamous in marriage. The evidence? Well, we don’t have hard evidence for this because we don’t have gay marriages yet. I’d go further and say we won’t know the future impact of marriage on gay people until a full generation has grown up in the knowledge that such future relationships are possible. But can we make a guess? Kurtz locates a study by a “queer theorist” to make the case that gay men are beneath marriage. (Isn’t it strange how the far right and far left love to use each other?) What does the study find? That 82 percent of lesbians – indistinguishable from straight women and morethan straight men – believe in the monogamy-marriage link. (Remember that two-thirds of Vermont civil unions have been lesbian). What does the study say about men? It finds that “among married heterosexual men, 79 percent felt that marriage demanded monogamy, 50 percent of men in gay civil unions insisted on monogamy, while only 34 percent of gay men outside of civil unions affirmed monogamy.” (The missing category is what single straight men feel about monogamy. I bet it isn’t that different from single gay men.) But the inference here is obvious: getting into a civil union ratcheted up the monogamy quotient among gay men from 34 percent to 50 percent. Cause or effect? Hard to tell. But is it unreasonable to think that real marriage – with its far deeper social ramifications – would ratchet it up some more? Surely it would. Look, I think there’s a genuine worry about men and marriage, and I don’t think it’s crazy to believe that on average male-male marriages may have more adultery than straight marriages (and straight marriages may have more adultery than lesbian marriages). It’s fair to worry about that. But the shake-out of equal marriage rights would in all likelihood be a slight increase in monogamy in marriage as a whole (the impact of all those lesbians) and a strong trend toward fidelity among gay men, where none existed before. Why isn’t that a reasonable social gain for all of us? What Kurtz wants you to believe is that one percent of marriages will have more of an impact on the remaining 99 percent than the 99 percent will have on the one percent. Sorry, but it just doesn’t make sense.

Check out this terrific and eloquent blog by one Norman Geras, a Marxist who rejects the blanket anti-Western orthodoxy now prevalent on the British and American left. Read this whole post. Money quote about the Left’s current predicament:

When the war began a division of opinion was soon evident amongst its opponents, between those who wanted a speedy outcome – in other words, a victory for the coalition forces, for that is all a speedy outcome could realistically have meant – and those who did not. These latter preferred that the Coalition forces should suffer reverses, get bogged down, and you know the story: stalemate, quagmire, Stalingrad scenario in Baghdad, and so forth, leading to a US and British withdrawal. But what these critics of the war thereby wished for was a spectacular triumph for the regime in Baghdad, since that is what a withdrawal would have been. So much for solidarity with the victims of oppression, for commitment to democratic values and basic human rights.

Similarly today, with all those who seem so to relish every new difficulty, every set-back for US forces: what they align themselves with is a future of prolonged hardship and suffering for the Iraqi people, whether via an actual rather than imagined quagmire, a ruinous civil war, or the return (out of either) of some new and ghastly political tyranny; rather than a rapid stabilization and democratization of the country, promising its inhabitants an early prospect of national normalization. That is caring more to have been right than for a decent outcome for the people of this long unfortunate country.

Such impulses have displayed themselves very widely across left and liberal opinion in recent months. Why? For some, because what the US government and its allies do, whatever they do, has to be opposed – and opposed however thuggish and benighted the forces which this threatens to put your anti-war critic into close company with. For some, because of an uncontrollable animus towards George Bush and his administration. For some, because of a one-eyed perspective on international legality and its relation to issues of international justice and morality. Whatever the case or the combination, it has produced a calamitous compromise of the core values of socialism, or liberalism or both, on the part of thousands of people who claim attachment to them. You have to go back to the apologias for, and fellow-travelling with, the crimes of Stalinism to find as shameful a moral failure of liberal and left opinion as in the wrong-headed – and too often, in the circumstances, sickeningly smug – opposition to the freeing of the Iraqi people from one of the foulest regimes on the planet.

Yes. Their record is almost as bad as the Communists of the 1930s. Worse, actually. They cannot even point to another evil to justify their de facto support for tyranny.

“This time I think the Americans are serious. Bush is not like Clinton. I think this is the end.” – Uday Hussein, Saddam’s son, in early April, according to an associate.

BUSH’S EMPHASIS: A subtle change at the Urban League, unless I’m reading too much into it:

“You see, a free, democratic, peaceful Iraq will not threaten America or our friends with weapons. A free Iraq will not be a training ground for terrorists or funnel money to terrorists or provide weapons to terrorists who would willingly use them to strike our country. A free Iraq will not destabilize the Middle East. A free Iraq can set a hopeful example to the entire region and lead other nations to choose freedom.”

It seems to me that this argument should be more front and center in Bush’s rhetoric. He needs to remind people of the global context of the Iraq war, the need to go on the offensive against terrorism, and trumpet the decision of this administration to tackle the deeper Middle East issue that fuels terrorism – despotism. This positive message is a critical complement to the negative one of self-defense. More, please.

Of course he thinks the BBC is innocent of all charges. But this passage is simply wacko: “The BBC apparently has evidence, including a tape, that Dr. Kelly made the key allegations it reported. Moreover, Dr. Kelly was, in fact, in a position to know what he claimed. More information may emerge as a judicial inquiry proceeds, but at this point the BBC seems largely in the clear, while the government looks like a villain.” You read the British press and see if you get that impression. The only committee looking into the matter has backed the government. Gilligan is refusing to have his testimony to Parliament released. Kelly said to Parliament that he could not have been the source for the BBC’s allegation. Yes, some people are backing the Beeb. But the notion that the BBC isn’t severely on the ropes over this is a delusion. But this is Krugman of course. Did we expect a fair account? Then there’s this assertion: “What must worry the Bush administration, however, is a third possibility: that the American people gave Mr. Bush their trust because in the aftermath of Sept. 11, they desperately wanted to believe the best about their president. If that’s all it was, Mr. Bush will eventually face a terrible reckoning.” Or he could get re-elected in a landslide. Keep hoping for a recession, Paul. It’s your best hope.