The Dish

I’m amazed that more people haven’t been asking this question. It seems to me that it’s extremely important that Saddam be found and arrested – more important than whether we find some chemical missiles that Saddam would have been able to remanufacture swiftly if he’d survived the past few months with his regime intact. If he’s still in Iraq, as Ahmed Chalabi argues, then he truly is a menace. If he’s offering rewards for the murder of American soldiers, as Chalabi also claims, then his capture should surely be a priority. What are we doing about it? I wish I knew.

WHEN IN DOUBT: Offend. The hip British artist, Damien Hirst, has given up drugs and drink, but not the cheap attacks on others’ faith:

In a series of sculptures inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, which will be seen in London this autumn, Hirst will depict Jesus and the apostles as 13 pingpong balls bobbing on spurting fountains of red wine. A washing bowl to bathe Christ’s feet will sit beneath their Formica table. Hirst had wanted the balls to bob on blood but opted for wine, with all its symbolic echoes of the mass, in which Catholics believe wine is turned into the blood of Christ. If that were not strong enough meat for many Christians, it will sit alongside a cow with six legs called In His Infinite Wisdom. The fourth major piece in his next show at the White Cube gallery in London in September will be The Death of the Saints and the Ascension of Jesus, a sequence of “metaphorical” cabinets showing how Christ and the disciples met their ends. A pickled bull’s head will sit in front of each cabinet.

Charming.

Yes, the Ontario Court ruling really is a big deal. And yes, it really does represent the first actual, living, breathing gay marriage. Holland and Denmark have legal gay partnerships almost indistinguishable from marriage. But the Canadian precedent is the actual thing; marriage; the same thing as hetersoexuals take for granted. It isn’t separate but equal; it isn’t separate and unequal; it’s equality. Here’s the Court decision. No esoteric arguments about why this means bestiality and legal child abuse are just around the corner. Just a simple reading of what a civil state means when it grants all its citizens equal rights. Pathetically, the far right are now arguing that granting equal rights to a tiny minority will “oppress” them. That’s hooey. No one of any religious faith will ever have to acknowledge such civil marriages, just as Catholics don’t recognize civil divorce. But are Catholics “oppressed” because the state doesn’t follow their own religious interpretation of marriage laws? Of course not. What this means for America is that the Massachusetts Court decision – which is imminent – will now no longer be the first time marriage rights as such are granted equally. I particularly liked the following quote from a Canadian rabbi:

But not all religious leaders are opposed to the concept, the court was told. Ed Morgan, a lawyer representing the Canadian Coalition of Liberal Rabbis for Same-Sex Marriage, said his clients already perform same-sex marriage ceremonies and ‘would like to be able to do it with state sanction.’ Jewish religious life, even orthodox Jewish life, can “co-exist” in a society that allows same-sex marriage, said Morgan, whose clients intervened in the case. ‘We manage to live in a society that allows the sale of pork,’ he told the court.

Exactly. It really isn’t either-or. Gay marriage strengthens straight marriage; and marriage will help integrate gays into society and the family more effectively than anything else could.

“My two cents’ worth – and I think it is the two cents’ worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994 – is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. Heading up health-care reform was the only major administrative job she has ever tried to do. And she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasn’t smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly.
So when senior members of the economic team said that key senators like Daniel Patrick Moynihan would have this-and-that objection, she told them they were disloyal. When junior members of the economic team told her that the Congressional Budget Office would say such-and-such, she told them (wrongly) that her conversations with CBO head Robert Reischauer had already fixed that. When long-time senior hill staffers told her that she was making a dreadful mistake by fighting with rather than reaching out to John Breaux and Jim Cooper, she told them that they did not understand the wave of popular political support the bill would generate. And when substantive objections were raised to the plan by analysts calculating the moral hazard and adverse selection pressures it would put on the nation’s health-care system…
Hillary Rodham Clinton has already flopped as a senior administrative official in the executive branch–the equivalent of an Undersecretary. Perhaps she will make a good senator. But there is no reason to think that she would be anything but an abysmal president.” – liberal economist, Brad Delong, who contributed to Hillarycare, on his own blog.

A British documentary gets to the nub of the issue. The Guardian’s David Aaronovitch explains further:

Cruikshank also tackled George directly on events leading up to the looting. The Americans had said that the museum was a substantial point of Iraqi resistance, and this explained their reticence in occupying it. Not true, said George, a few militia-men had fired from the grounds and that was all. This, as Cruikshank heavily implied, was a lie. Not only were there firing positions in the grounds, but at the back of the museum there was a room that seemed to have been used as a military command post. And it was hardly credible that senior staff at the museum would not have known that. Cruikshank’s closing thought was to wonder whether the museum’s senior staff – all Ba’ath party appointees – could safely be left in post.
Furious, I conclude two things from all this. The first is the credulousness of many western academics and others who cannot conceive that a plausible and intelligent fellow-professional might have been an apparatchiks of a fascist regime and a propagandist for his own past. The second is that – these days – you cannot say anything too bad about the Yanks and not be believed.

Yep. And Wolfowitz said we did it for oil, didn’t he?

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “Hillary said that when she first set eyes on Bill Clinton back in college he had a beard and he reminded her of a Viking – which is perfect because she reminded him of Iceland,” – Jay Leno, the Tonight Show.

THE BBC AND RADIOHEAD: How did Radiohead’s Thom Yorke come up with the title for their new CD, “Hail To The Thief”? By listening to our old favorite, the BBC, of course:

Rolling Stone: When did you first hear the phrase “hail to the thief,” and what made it appealing as an album title?
Thom Yorke: It was a formative moment – one evening on the radio, way before we were doing the record. The BBC was running stories about how the Florida vote had been rigged and how Bush was being called a thief. That line threw a switch in my head. I couldn’t get away from it. And the light – I was driving that evening with the radio on – was particularly weird. I had this tremendous feeling of foreboding, quite indescribable, really. To me, all the feelings on the record stem from that moment.

The BBC was running stories about how the Florida vote had been rigged. Well of course they were, weren’t they?

Rightwing news has provided the first real ratings chart for blogs. No measurement is perfect; and Alexa.com rankings have their flaws. But it’s interesting nonetheless. And equally interesting is that these top blogs are now easily in the same ballpark, according to Alexa, as most of the political opinion magazines online. (NRO is the blockbuster exception.)

A final tally on the alleged looting of the National Museum on Baghdad. Another embarrassment for the New York Times. Here’s Frank Rich in full Krugmanian cry:

“Is it merely the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years, as Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist, put it? Or should we listen to Eleanor Robson, of All Souls College, Oxford, who said, ‘You’d have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale’?”

Ahem. My take on this now completely debunked hysteria can be found in Salon.

Another court backs equal marriage rights in Canada. Ontario, after British Columbia and Quebec, is the third Canadian province to guarantee equal rights to gays and lesbians. It’s also the most populous of all the Canadian provinces. More significantly, there will be no stay until the federal government figures out what to do. That means that in the next twenty-four hours, the first real, legal same-sex marriages in Western history will take place. They will be irreversible – facts on the ground. Opponents will have to base their arguments in future on actually tearing existing marriages apart. What a conservative idea!

Dick Morris thinks Al Sharpton might run as an independent when the Dems don’t nominate him:

It is only by demonstrating to the Democratic Party establishment that they cannot take the black vote for granted – and being the bearer of that message by an independent run in ’04 – that Sharpton can acquire the national stature he craves and the power he seeks. It doesn’t take a genius to see that the Democrats don’t have much chance anyway in 2004. Now would be the perfect time for Sharpton to demonstrate how badly they need him. Once Al runs as an independent, he’ll never have to do it again. He can name his price for not jumping ship a second time and not torpedoing Democratic chances of victory.

Intriguing idea. If Dick Morris had a better track record of predicting politics, I’d even be convinced.

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