The Dish

I think we’ve now located the first blogger to express skepticism about the Iraq National Museum looting. Here’s the archived entry. Prescient, no? And far smarter than the mainstream media. But you knew that already, didn’t you?

HILLARY SUCK-UP WATCH: “Which brings us to the question of Hillary Clinton’s status and stature as a woman, certainly the most prominent and influential American woman of our time, perhaps of any time; only Eleanor Roosevelt, to whom Clinton insistently compares herself, reached similar heights.” – Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post. (Full disclosure: this unfortunate sentence is the exception to the rule in Yardley’s writing, which is almost always, in my opinion, superb.)

IS BUSH A LIAR? Byron York takes on an emerging meme.

PLEDGE WEEK UPDATE: Because Amex takes some time to report, and many checks may still be in the mail, the results are still preliminary. But it looks as if we now have close to 1700 new supporting members for the site, which brings our full total to somewhere over 6000 members. We hoped for 7000, but Robert and I are delighted to have all of you on board, however many you are. Thanks to all of you and to Robert for coordinating it all (he has manually assembled a master-list of contributors and keeps track of everything for free). What we now have is a real, workable budget for the year; and the site is financially secure for the foreseeable future. I’m finally going to break down and give myself a salary. You made it possible. I’m immeasurably grateful. Thanks again.

Voices from the Iranian uprising.

The constitution for the anti-American super-state has been unveiled. An excellent philosophical treatment – of the Habermasian or Hayekian dimensions of the EU – can be read here. Tim Garton Ash’s optimistic defense of a free multi-national Europe can be found here. Ash even has something of a scoop. He recalls an incident in Germany recently:

In the Cafe Orange on the Oranienburgerstrasse, in the now trendy heart of what used to be East Berlin, I talk to a guy dressed in T-shirt, sandals and designer sunglasses. An old ’68er, he is sharply critical of the current policies of the Bush administration. At one point he leans forward and says, teasingly: “Don’t you think we need a new Boston tea party?” Surely, he jokes, the Boston tea party was good for relations between Britain and America – in the long term. When he gets up to leave, I notice that he puts on a black baseball cap advertising “American Eagle”. “Ja,” he says, “das habe ich in Boston gekauft.” (“I bought it in Boston.”)

WHo was the German? German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer. Isn’t it a little, er, undiplomatic for a foreign minister of a putative ally to be speaking of the need to overthrow the current American constitution? Or is it a clue to what he really believes?

ROMENESKO WATCH: In the past few weeks, blogger Jim Romenesko, a supporter of the gay left, has won some well-deserved plaudits for his coverage of the New York Times meltdown. Lost in this torrent of praise is the fact that Romenesko is far from an objective or neutral observer. He’s a hard-line liberal who routinely refuses to link to any conservative media criticism. Blogger Ombudsgod notices how selective Romenesko can be in covering certain stories: no mention of a widely quoted piece about p.c. editing at the NYT, nor of the fact that the head of al Jazeera turned out to have been in the pay of Saddam, and on and on. Romenesko, ever since I complained about his role in violating my private life a couple of years ago, also refuses to link to any articles of mine anywhere. That’s his prerogative. But the notion that he’s somehow above the ideological fray is preposterous.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “For a meal so thick with fat, salt and starch, it is oddly bland. It slides down my throat like a wino’s tongue, leaving several tablespoons of brown grease in a puddle at the end of the plate (at which point, maybe, the spoon is supposed to come into play). It is not so much disgusting as depressing.” – a food review from the Guardian. The Brits even beat Johnny Apple at this kind of thing.

It’s a celebrity death-match. Did Dick knock Joe to the ground? Did Joe cock his arm at Dick? It’s all at Salon.

Herewith a spectacularly stupid piece in Salon, arguing that president Bush has no right to appoint any Supreme Court Justices because he didn’t win the popular vote. Money quote:

To be absolutely clear, my point is not that President Bush can’t make a Supreme Court nomination in this term. It’s that he shouldn’t have to, or failing that, that he just shouldn’t. President Bush holds his office in spite of the democratically expressed will of the national electorate, not because of it. It is not a repudiation of his legitimacy as president to observe that simple point of fact. Whether or not you consider the Electoral College to be a pointless anachronism, in the 2000 presidential election it indisputably led to an undemocratic result: The holder of the nation’s highest office is not the person who got the most votes.

To say that a president is illegitimate is not to repudiate his legitimacy?

CANADIANS SUPPORT MARRIAGE: By significant margins, Canadians support bringing the institution of marriage to all citizens (and non-citizens, for that matter). The Court decision actually reflects popular sentiment. Stanley Kurtz’s notion that the Canadian public is evenly split isn’t true. In only two provinces is there a majority opposed. In most, the margins of support range from 62 percent in Nova Scotia, 58 percent in Quebec, to 52 percent in Ontario (where opposition runs at 44 percent). The trend in the U.S. is exactly in the same direction, as the polls in Massachusetts also show.

This is the last day I’ll bug you until December. So far, we’ve had a good response this Pledge Week, but we’re still short of our target. The only financing for this site is you. If you read it regularly, here’s your chance to contribute back. Here’s how to help. Don’t put it off any longer.

“We want more freedom. For 25 years we have lived without any freedom. We want social freedom, economic freedom and political freedom” – an Iranian protestor speaking to the New York Times. The news from Tehran is exhilarating. Why it isn’t on the front pages of the papers I don’t know. Here we have the possibility of a full-scale revolt against the Islamo-fascist dictatorship in Tehran, one brewing for a long time and given m omentum by the liberation of Iraq. If the revolution can happen before the regime acquires nuclear weapons, we have a chance to avert a catastrophe for the West and the people of the Middle East. We need now to keep the pressure on, send money and support to the protestors, fund aggressive Persian-language media, and generally let the people of Iran know whose side we’re on. The president has said the right things so far, but needs to do more. As Michael Ledeen would say: Faster, please.

WHY CANADA MATTERS: I’m a little stunned by how little coverage there has been of the Ontario decision to grant equal marriage rights immediately. Gay marriage is now a reality a few miles away from the United States. More to the point, unlike Holland and Belgium, there is no nationality requirement for these Canadian marriages. Two Americans or a Canadian-American couple or two Chinese for that matter can now get legally married in Canada. The United States routinely accepts foreign marriages as valid; and Canada’s ties to the United States couldn’t be closer. Will the U.S. refuse to acknowledge a legally married Canadian couple? Will the U.S. refuse to acknowledge an American’s marriage if she is married to a Canadian? There are all sorts of permutations to come. I’d love to read a good legal analysis of the implications.

In some ways, it’s almost obscene for us to get so upset about the lies and fabrications of one Jayson Blair when the lies and fabrications of the New York Times’ Walter Duranty covered up the massacre of millions. And Duranty got a Pulitzer the Times still holds! Arnold Beichman has the goods on Duranty’s appalling record.

THE ONION: Takes on partial birth abortion. I guess I shouldn’t find this funny.

HIV IN SAN FRANCISCO: You may recall the hysterical headlines of a couple of years ago about a surge in new HIV infections among gay men in San Francisco. Here’s a reminder of the rhetoric used from the San Francisco Chronicle:

San Francisco’s long-feared and often predicted new wave of HIV infection is here. After years of stability – wrought by strong prevention programs, a safer-sex ethic and powerful drugs – city health experts now estimate that the number of new infections by the virus that causes AIDS nearly doubled, to 900, in the past year. “This is a harbinger of what is going to happen all over the country,” warned Tom Coates, director of the University of California at San Francisco AIDS Research Institute. “What happens in the HIV epidemic usually happens here first.”

I was skeptical of the data and was pilloried by the usual suspects for being so. So was veteran AIDS activist Michael Petrelis. So it’s worth taking another look at what the stats now show. In April of this year, there wasn’t a single case of recent HIV infection found in city HIV testing sites, out of 843 tests. That was also true in February, March and June 2002. Total HIV infections seem completely stable from the data. There is, in fact, no evidence whatsoever of a surge in HIV infection rates among gay men in San Francisco. None. Rates of gonorrhea have actually fallen. Rectal gonorrhea, a key correlate of HIV infection, is also stable. The stories were bogus. But they haven’t been refuted.
(CORRECTION: In April of this year, there wasn’t a single case of recent HIV infection found in city HIV testing sites, out of 183 – not 843 – tests. 843 tests refers to the total number of tests from January to April. My bad. But the point holds.)

Ramesh Ponnuru praises me for changing my mind about the EU since a review I wrote for the New Republic back in 1996. I’m not sure I’ve changed my mind that much, although watching an independent Britain support the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq certainly made me appreciate better how the U.K. can still effectively exercize its sovereignty. Back in 1996, I saw nothing in principle against a common currency, but in practice it’s clear to me now that it would be a mistake for Britain, given how the euro has evolved in the past few years. What I was trying to do in the review was to distinguish between those aspects of the EU that truly do violate sovereignty in profound ways and those aspects that are, properly speaking, liberal and unobjectionable, like free trade or an independent European court. Here’s the money graf:

Institutions which can directly regulate, legislate and tax citizens of member countries should be resisted. Powers to determine the ends of national policies should be blocked or opposed. There should be no strengthening of the European parliament, the European commission, or a weakening of any nation-state’s veto power over communal decisions.

For those reasons, I still find the proposed U.S.E. Constitution abhorrent. But I tried to posit a way in which Britain could improve the structure of the EU, without withdrawing from it:

At the same time, however, those measures that merely determine the means by which Europeans interact–rules of trade, the rights of the citizen against the state or, indeed, the currency in which individuals trade- -are a different matter. They create an atmosphere of cooperation. They determine the rules of play, but they do not determine who wins the game. They are the mechanisms of procedure, not results.

I still believe Britain should stay in the EU as it is, help reform it in more classically liberal directions and refuse to be coopted into a more ambitious anti-American project.

AN APOLOGY: I linked to a photograph yesterday of Palestinians retrieving body parts from a bombed car. I thought it was horrifying because I thought that the body parts were of murdered Jews. They weren’t. I should have read the caption that the AP ran with it (it wasn’t on the site I linked to) and double-checked the context. I deeply regret the posting, and apologize for the link. I deleted the item.