The Dish

I think we’ve all learned by now not to credit early reports from Iraq. But there seems little doubt that we’re closing in on Saddam. The possible consequences? An immeasurable piece of military closure for Bush-Blair. A new lease of life for reconstruction in Iraq. More encouragement to the democrats in Iran. Not bad, huh? On the other hand, if we haven’t gotten him: another post-war downer, that could add to the Saddam myth. Here’s hoping.

BITTER, PARTY OF ONE: David Brooks homes in on the Democratic trap – letting their current powerlessness fuel their anger rather than increase their discipline. One crucial disadvantage of the opposition today is that they seem, well, merely against everything. Some of this is inevitable when you’re out of power. But if you do not balance it with a proactive agenda, it can turn into Michael Moore-ism pretty quickly. Specifically: cavilling constantly about the war on terror without proposing a coherent alternative. David is also right to notice how unconservative this White House can be: spending at a rate not seen since LBJ, creating a new bank-breaking drug-entitlement, slapping tariffs on favored industries, subsidizing big agriculture, and on and on. But the Dems don’t see this. And so their critique – crude and Krugmanian – doesn’t convince as many as it could.

EMERSON AND BLOGGERS: Chris Lydon, who won legions of fans with his Boston-based NPR talk-show, now has a blog. And he has an idea: that the blogosphere is an essentially Emersonian enterprise:

Melancholy and enthusiasm are contrasting strands through all Emerson, but there is no summing up this man who disagreed with himself and both perplexed and dazzled his friends.- Walt Whitman loved it that nobody could tag Emerson’s thinking: “no province, no clique, no church.”- Whitman felt “a flood of light” about Emerson, an impression of pure being.- Hawthorne said Emerson “wore a sunbeam in his face.”
In the booming energy of blog world, we are glimpsing the fulfillment of an Emersonian vision: this democracy of outspoken individuals.-
“Trust thyself,” was Emerson’s refrain.-“Every heart vibrates to that string.”-
Speak your own convictions, and your own contradictions, he urged. Claim your own ideas before someone else does.-“I hate quotations,” begins another of the famous aphorisms.-“Tell me what you know.” Which is what the great bloggers keep doing.

Yes, Chris is onto something. Read the whole thing.

BARRY ON JOURNALISTS: “I think the public is genuinely unhappy with us. Lately, when I tell people I work for a newspaper, I’ve detected the subtle signs of disapproval – the dirty looks; the snide remarks; the severed animal heads in my bed. How did we get into this situation? Without pointing the finger of blame at any one institution, I would say it is entirely the fault of The New York Times.” – Dave Barry, hilarious as usual, Miami Herald.

ASHCROFT WATCH: My worries about the way in which the Justice Department is using secret service regulations to suppress anti-Bush protestors is shared by the Economist.

NYT AND GEOGRAPHY: No prizes for catching this howler in the NYT yesterday. It’s about the Pope’s visit to Bosnia:

But it was the pope’s presence here that spoke volumes. His arrival comes as the broken pieces of the Baltic states are desperately trying to prove that they have made progress toward unity and deserve a first step toward admission into the European Union.

Balkans. Baltics. Whatever.

WHY ISRAEL IS DIFFERENT: This wouldn’t be allowed in any Arab state.

Here’s the latest from the New York Times. Why buried on page three? And even more hard to find on the website? Mercifully, blogs are taking up the slack – because we actually want democracy in Iran. Here’s a good round-up of the good work of the blogosphere so far. Have I plugged Hoder.com enough lately?

SHAMELESS PLUG: Same-sex marriage is a hot topic again. I wrote a book-length defense of it in 1995, “Virtually Normal,” and edited one of the definitive guides to the subject – pro and con – a couple years later. If you’re interested, you can buy them.

ANOTHER PROFILE IN COURAGE: Hillary Rodham Clinton has a reputation as a principled liberal – at least that’s what her base and her enemies seem to think. In practice, of course, she has always been a Clinton – a waffler, prevaricator, straddler. So it’s no surprise to hear her complete non-answer on the question of same-sex marriage. Here’s a transcript of a June 18 interview with Senator Clinton on the Brian Lehrer WNYC show in New York City:

Lehrer: The lead story in the New York Times today is about Canada’s decision to fully legalize gay marriage. do you think the United States should do that?

Clinton: Well, obviously in our system it is unlikely ever to be a national decision. It is a state-by-state decision because of the way our federal system operates, where states define what the conditions for marriage, or domestic partnership, or civil union might be, so I don’t think that we will ever face it. In fact there is a law on the books, passed before I was in the congress, the Defense of Marriage Act, which goes so far as to say that even if one state does it, other states under our full faith and credit clause of the constitution don’t have to recognize it.

Lehrer: But is Canada setting a good example, on that you’d like to see spread through the states here?

Clinton: Well, I have long advocated domestic partnership laws and civil unions, to me…

Lehrer: That’s different from marriage.

Clinton: Well, marriage means something different. you know, marriage has a meaning that I… I think should be kept as it historically has been, but I see no reason whatsoever why people in committed relationships can’t have, you know, many of the same rights and the same, you know, respect for their unions that they are seeking and I would like to see that be more accepted than it is.

Lehrer: But not with the context of marriage.

Clinton: Yeah, I, I think that is, you know… First of all, I think that it is unlikely, if not impossible, to be something nationally accepted in our country, but I also think that we can realize the same results for may committed couples by urging that states and localities adopt civil union and domestic partnership laws.

So there you have it. The Senator from New York State is opposed to equal rights for gays and lesbians. And that’s one thing both the right and left will be reluctant to broadcast.

Jeff Jarvis has an excellent and multi-sourced round-up.

Sorry. I got the link wrong yesterday. But here’s one to Jonah’s grown-up column. Money quote:

Earlier this month, Attorney General John Ashcroft reportedly tried to cancel a scheduled Gay Pride Month celebration at the Department of Justice for lesbian and gay employees. He failed. Despite pressure from social conservative activists, DOJ reversed course in the face of protests from gay groups and a sympathetic media (and, probably, pressure from the White House). When the most famous and powerful member of the Religious Right in the U.S. government can’t stop a gay pride event in his own office building, held by his own employees, you know that social conservatives are losing this fight.

He calls for magnanimity in victory from the gay side. I agree. But victory still isn’t here in the sense of formal legal equality. It’s approaching, I think. And certainly the generational trends suggest that the future belongs to gay integration. But until marriage rights are achieved, and military service is allowed, full citizenship will still be elusive for gay Americans. But here’s a promise: once that equality is achieved, I’ll shut up. No, I won’t go silent on my sexual orientation when it seems appropriate. But I can’t wait to take yes for an answer, to make sexual orientation a non-issue, to move on to other issues, and get on with our lives. I want to shut the gay civil rights movement down. Just not before equality. But the second afterwards. Deal?

This commercial is stunning. The key thing to remember is that no special effects were used. They actually set this thing up manually and filmed it hundreds of times before they got it exactly right. And some think capitalism isn’t creative.

What will the political consequences be if a) Saddam is captured and b) we get real new intelligence and data on the Iraqi WMD program? I think that’s when president Bush gets out his saw and cuts off that big, high branch his Democrat opponents are now sitting on.

THE DIFFERENCE: I’ve long believed that science will at some point render many of our current policy arguments moot. I think we’ll find that genes play far more of a role in our lives than most of us would ever want to believe. But the news yesterday about gender difference in our genes dwarves the debate about the role of testosterone in gender difference. Here are the money grafs:

The finding of 78 active genes on the Y contradicts an earlier impression of the chromosome as being a genetic wasteland apart from its male-determining gene. But if the Y is not a wasteland, important consequences ensue for the differences between men and women. As often noted, the genomes of humans and chimpanzees are 98.5 percent identical, when each of their three billion DNA units are compared. But what of men and women, who have different chromosomes? Until now, biologists have said that makes no difference, because there are almost no genes on the Y, and in women one of the two X chromosomes is inactivated, so that both men and women have one working X chromosome.
But researchers have recently found that several hundred genes on the X escape inactivation. Taking those genes into account along with the new tally of Y genes gives this result: Men and women differ by 1 to 2 percent of their genomes, Dr. Page said, which is the same as the difference between a man and a male chimpanzee or between a woman and a female chimpanzee …
“We all recite the mantra that we are 99 percent identical and take political comfort in it,” Dr. Page said. “But the reality is that the genetic difference between males and females absolutely dwarfs all other differences in the human genome.”

By far the biggest difference in the human genome is gender. Blank Slaters take another hit.

The latest piece of racial obsession from the far Left enters the academy.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: Finally, it goes to Fidel Castro, who shares John Derbyshire’s loathing of “bastardy” and “buggery.” When Fidel was punk’d by a Miami radio station, his first recourse was to swear at his radio hosts by using expletives accusing them of being illegitimate and gay.

They go at it over Whitewater.

THEY WERE GUILTY: Radosh on the Rosenbergs.

REYNOLDS ON GAY MARRIAGE: As usual, he takes a sensible position. One reason his blog is so popular is his ability to reason calmly and reliably. I know my own passions are involved in this subject; so it’s always good to see my own view echoed by someone as disinterested and as sane as Instapundit. The arguments of the opponents, in contrast, seem to be getting more far-fetched and hysterical. David Frum’s notion that this will destroy motherhood makes absolutely no sense to me. The gender of a parent has already been subject to all sorts of permutations under the increasingly diverse realm of heterosexual marital arrangements. Stanley Kurtz’s view that this will mean closeto an end to religious freedom and the First Amendment seems just as strained. Jonah Goldberg makes the obvious point that anti-gay-marriage conservatives would be more persuasive – and less suspected of simple anti-gay animus – if they came up with some alternative to gay marriage. But the far right’s resistance to any civil acknowledgment of gay citizens and gay relationships has actually made fully-fledged gay marriage more likely. Hoist by their own prejudice, I’d say.

Not Leo Strauss. Not Norman Podhoretz. Not Irving Kristol. Can you guess?

NEWS FROM IRAN: Jeff Jarvis has an excellent round-up.

The one thing that knowledgeable people have told me about John Kerry is that he doesn’t know when to stop. He has no controlling mechanism when he goes on the attack. To accuse this president of deliberately lying to get this country into war is therefore a typical piece of Kerry excess. I think Kerry will pay dearly for it in the long run – and maybe even sooner. Yesterday, for example, we received news that the fourth most wanted Saddam apparatchik had been captured. Does Kerry honestly believe that we have all the information about WMDs or Saddam already? Here’s what the Daily Telegraph is reporting:

No details of Abid Hamid’s capture were released by the Pentagon. But yesterday a huge operation was launched. American troops raided two farmhouses and found $5.3 million in US dollars, up to $250 million in Iraqi dinars, quantities of British pounds and euros and $600,000 in gems. Up to 50 people believed to be part of Saddam’s security or intelligence apparatus or members of paramilitary groups were taken prisoner. “I believe over the next three to four days, you will hear much more about the number of senior Iraqi individuals we have detained here over the last couple of days,” said Maj Gen Ray Odierno, commander of the US 4th Infantry Division. He said it was believed that part of the money was intended for funding bounties to be paid for killing American soldiers.

My bet is that we soon have a breakthrough in WMD evidence in Iraq – and that we are getting closer by the day to discovering Saddam himself. Bush and Blair will be vindicated more clearly than before; and this president will – once again – out-fox his mewling critics on the war. I have a feeling Kerry has just inflicted on himself a massive unforced error. Gephardt looks more promising by the day.