The Dish

Almost two years ago, I wondered if there was something about monotheism that lent itself to a fringe of its adherents pursuing the demands of godly truth to the ultimate conclusion: terror. Religion, of course, is not the sole motivator of terror. The secular religions of Marxism and Nazism did just as well. But the politicized zeal of the saved is still deeply dangerous – and not just when it is expressed non-violently and seeks merely to marginalize and disenfranchise those who do not share certain tenets of the faith. Eric Rudolph was just such a figure. He was a warped Christian fundamentalist who murdered for his cause. He bombed symbols of individual freedom, constitutional rights and minority intransigence. He is our Osama. In his refuge, he had, like other terrorists, the implicit support of a population who shared his beliefs, if not the extremism that sanctioned his killings. If we are to call John Muhammed a religiously inspired terrorist (and I think we should) then we have to call Rudolph a Christian terrorist. I propose a new term for those on the fringes of the religious right who have used the Gospels to perpetuate their own aspirations for power, control and oppression: Christianists. They are as anathema to true Christians as the Islamists are to true Islam. And they have to be fought just as vigilantly.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “Try to imagine at least once a day that you are not an American.” – Susan Sontag, in a recent commencement address.

My take on the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction question is now posted. It includes an assessment of our policy toward Iran, an urgent discussion the administration seems to be shelving for another day. On that subject, Reuel Marc Gerecht’s cover-story in the current Weekly Standard is a must-read. My own (not completely settled) view is that an Osirak-like military attack on the mullah’s Manhattan Project may be the least worst option we now have.

BELL CURVE LIBERALS: My old friend, Jeff Rosen, had a typically fresh and smart piece in yesterday’s NYT Magazine (still able to avoid the worst of Howell Raines’ meddling). Jeff is viscerally against affirmative action, but he has come to endorse it. Why? Because if it’s abolished, universities will only opt for more egalitarian methods to achieve racial diversity and could trash academic standards even more thoroughly than the current system. It’s an argument of elegant surrender. The assumption of his case – indeed of the entire debate – is that minorities will simply as a matter of fact always score lower in test scores. That’s a given for the foreseeable future, if not for ever. Mickey Kaus once described those liberals who simply assume the permanent neediness of minorities as “Bell Curve Liberals,” people who would never admit it but have internalized the notion that minorities are simply dumber than the majority. They either believing that such inferiority is in part genetic and in part environmental or entirely environmental. But the upshot is always the same: these people are helpless; and all we can do is rig the system to disguise it as much as possible and minimize social resentment and division. The only way we can have racial integration in universities is therefore by destroying academic standards. I’m sorry, but I can’t go there. If the alternative to quotas is the evisceration of standards, then we truly have lost our faith in the power of meritocracy and the equality of the races. Jeff’s argument, while compelling, is a counsel of despair. We should resist it. Keep the standards. Drop the quotas.

Excellent piece by Peter Beinart on the Bush administration’s double standards on agricultural subsidies. Bush has been rightly lecturing the Europeans on their vast subsidies for agricultural products, which do as much as anything to kill off the fledgling development of poorer countries and benefit only a few, wealthy agri-businesses. But Bush, being the big government big spender he is, has signed a bill shoveling even more tax-payers’ cash to farmers. Beinart moves in for the kill, noting:

… the subsidy on cotton, which the 2002 law more than doubled, from 35 to 72 cents per pound. The United States is a highly inefficient cotton producer; in fact, America’s production costs are roughly three times those in the West African nation of Burkina Faso. Yet Burkina Faso is losing market share because the United States subsidizes its cotton industry by roughly $2 billion per year (three times as much as the U.S. Agency for International Development spends annually on Africa). According to Oxfam, the United States actually spends more subsidizing the production of cotton than it earns selling it-making the industry a net loss to the U.S. economy. Those subsidies go to America’s 25,000 cotton farmers, who boast an average net worth of $800,000; by contrast, the average yearly wage in Burkina Faso is roughly $200.

If Bush were actually an economic conservative, this would be a scandal. But, alas, he isn’t. I don’t mind tax cuts for the wealthy to encourage investment and growth. It’s the vast government subsidies to the wealthy – paid for by everyone – that stick in my throat. I’d hoped Bush might restrain those subsidies. In fact, in this case, he’s doubled them. It just gets depressing after a while, doesn’t it?

NYT CRAPOLA: An insider reader writes:

You should take a look at the Boldface Names column on Page 2 of The New York Times of Tuesday, May 27. Although it says in the Boldface Names/Joyce Wadler headline that the column was written by Joyce Wadler, in fact it was written in its entirety by Campbell Robertson, a clerk in Metro. Joyce Wadler was off on holiday. The column at one point mentions “our young Boldface Names reporter.” But, of course, the reader would naturally assume that since Wadler’s name is over the whole column, she wrote all or at least most of it. This deception occurred with the approval of Jon Landman, Jayson Blair’s old boss, and shows that lots of people in control at The Times still don’t get it, even after all that has gone on lately.

So who did write the column? And what rules apply to this kind of thing? Last week, I emailed this question to retrace@nytimes.com. No response, natch. I have no idea whether this is true or not. Maybe posting this item will prompt a reply.

Reading the late and not too-informative NYT piece on gay Republicans, I stopped in my tracks at this piece of news:

As president, Mr. Bush has appointed several openly gay people, including James C. Hormel, the ambassador to Romania, to high-level jobs…

Huh? Hormel is a Democratic party fundraiser and was appointed by president Clinton to be ambassador to Luxemburg, a position that some Republican homophobes opposed. In fact, it was a pretty famous cause celebre at the time. How the Times’ reporter on gay issues could have gotten this wrong is simply beyond me. How fact-checking didn’t correct it is also unbelievable. You know, it really is that bad at the “paper of record.”

“Brain studies reinforce what recovering alcoholics and their counselors have been saying for years: Long-term alcohol and other drug use changes the chemistry of the brain. These anomalies in brain patterns are associated with a rigidity in thinking; both harm reduction and Alcoholics Anonymous treatment approaches focus on helping people in recovery work on their destructive thought processes. ‘Dry drunk’ is a slang term used to describe the recovering alcoholic who is no longer drinking, but whose thinking is clouded. Such an individual is said to be dry but not truly sober; such an individual tends to go to extremes. It was when I started noticing the extreme language that colored President Bush’s speeches that I began to wonder. First there were the terms — “crusade,’ ‘infinite justice’ — that were later withdrawn. Next came ‘evildoers,’ ‘axis of evil,’ ‘regime change” — terms that have almost become cliches. Something about the polarized thinking and the obsessive repetition reminded me of many of the recovering alcoholics and addicts I had treated.” – Katherine van Wormer, San Francisco Chronicle.

INSTA-COMMENT!: I sent the quote above out on the Inside Dish this week (to get a weekly newsletter from the site with advance access to articles and extra goodies, click here). Here’s one of the best emails I got in response, from someone who actually is an addict:

I’m a newly-recovering methamphetamine addict. I am part of the growing wave of meth/sex dual addicts in the gay community, but working hard on living healthy. Being HIV positive demands it, really, and with a viral load now at 75 I have a shot at living a long time. As you can well imagine this issue is extremely important to me. I have just under 60 days of good sobriety after 3 years of increasing use, so I can’t claim to be an expert on recovery issues … yet. But I’ll tell you this: the only rigidity in my thinking is related to the tunnel vision of extreme attachment to my drugs of choice. In all other areas, my intelligence, perceptions, and feelings are quite fine (now), thank you. To use the language of recovery to make a political attack is not just Begala-esque, it is putrid and insulting. Oh wait, is there any difference?
Bush, unlike our previous addict, I mean, president, all but admitted his addiction in this year’s State of the Union address. Thus his compassion. Seriously, when he made his comment about how addiction reduces one’s life focus into a single destructive compulsion – as an active addict at the time, I almost burst into tears.
For Bush, outright admission would not have been proper, as it would have given a bit too much encouragement to those of us still wallowing in the self-pity of our addictions. Bush’s eloquent allusion to his past drug use was a far cry from Cleopatra “Queen of Denial” Clinton’s “I lit it, put my mouth on it, sucked it, but I’m sure no THC made it into my bloodstream” denial.
I don’t know about you, but in my experience, an addict working on his problem is far more honest and trustworthy than someone who may or may not have been an addict, depending on what the definition of addict is, but is in denial about that or something, or in Clinton’s case, everything else.

Amen. I also found that section of Bush’s State of the Union profoundly moving. And his record on AIDS, in comparison to Clinton’s talk-talk, is equally impressive. Yes, I know I have my issues with his record in other areas and some of his allies, but I trust him in ways I never trusted his predecessor – even on issues where Clinton seems on the surface to be superior.

Donald Luskin responds to my post about deficits. Check it out. In my defense, I didn’t buy into the notion that there was some kind of scandal in the report not being included in the Bush budget. My concerns are primarily about the analysis in the report, which I haven’t seen debunked. Yes, it’s far more important to reform entitlement spending than to keep taxes stable – I’d prefer we means-tested social security and extended the retirement age rather than forgo tax cuts – but leaving the entitlement crunch intact and cutting taxes at the same time seems irresponsible to me. That’s my point.

Some of your email responses to my post about Jonah Goldberg’s baby is worth responding to in a post. My point, broadly, is that heterosexuals do not usually realize that they disclose their sexual orientation all the time. Whenever they mention a wife or husband or child or all the other quotidian aspects of being straight, they don’t think of it as a declaration of heterosexuality. They just think they’re talking about life. And they are. But with gay people, any such references to our partners or homes or joint travels is regarded as somehow bringing up sex. Here’s en email that expresses the point well:

I hope the Jonah tiff is tongue-in-cheek. The equating of the birth of a child or a father’s pride with your lust for the boyfriend is stunningly stupid.

Note that this reader can only conceive of my relationship in terms of lust. Not love or companionship or respect or shared interests or reading the paper together or taking turns to walk the dog or watching Jimmy Kimmel each night. All my relationship will ever be to this reader is sex. Here’s another email making the point more graphically:

I’m not sure you’ll get your wish. Heterosexuality is normal and it’s about life. Homosexuality is about sex. It’s normal and reasonable for heterosexuals to be repelled by implications of homosexual sex.

But homosexuality is no more about sex than heterosexuality. It’s a sexual and emotional orientation with exactly the same contours, dramas, blessings and bugbears as heterosexuality. 99 percent of a gay relationship is about life when sex isn’t happening. It’s about waking up together, getting to know each others’ friends and family, getting into a fight on vacation, or complaining about the weak coffee your boyfriend just made. That’s what I think of when I mention the boyfriend. I wouldn’t dream of talking about our sex life, which is as private as any heterosexual’s. And part of the trap gay people are in is that we don’t even have a vocabulary to describe our lives. Imagine trying to describe your relationship with your wife or husband without being able to ue the terms ‘wife’ or ‘husband.’ Would ‘girlfriend’ do? Or ‘partner’? Or some other either infantilizing or euphemized term? Without the right to marry and the vocabulary of marriage, gay people will be permanently, rhetorically and culturally marginalized, shunted to the side of families into which they are born, uniquely unable to participate in the rituals that bind families together and keep them intact. That’s why marriage is so important an issue. And that’s why the fight for equal marriage rights does not come from a place that wants to hurt the traditional family. For most of us, it comes from a desire to finally be enfranchised in the traditional family into which we were born. It’s a unifying, conservative impulse. And it has almost nothing to do with sex as such at all.

Yep, I guess they were inevitable too. I wondered why someone hadn’t had the wit to make me a Queen. Now they have.

ANTI-REPUBLICAN BIGOTS: Do they exist? Of course they do. In the gay world, I get it all the time. So does this Jewish guy.

A report commissioned by the Bush Treasury Department is left out of the budget, claims the Financial Times. Hmmm. Money quote:

The study’s analysis of future deficits dwarfs previous estimates of the financial challenge facing Washington. It is roughly equivalent to 10 times the publicly held national debt, four years of US economic output or more than 94 per cent of all US household assets. Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve chairman, last week bemoaned what he called Washington’s “deafening” silence about the future crunch.

With each Bush budget, the fiscal future of this country – including its ability to fight necessary wars – is being gutted. Why are there so few conservative voices protesting? John Scalzi throws in his two cents.

This astonishing and deeply depressing report from the civil and external wars that have ravaged the Congo deserves to be widely read. The Rwanda genocide – one of the most horrifying events of the last century – continues in a different form, laying waste to a vast territory in central Africa. “We couldn’t believe the things these people did during the genocide, until they came and started doing them to us,” says a market-woman in Bukavu to the Economist, mixing up Hutu killers and Tutsi invaders. There is reason for a sliver of hope, with the emphasis on sliver.

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “This Republic is at its greatest danger in its history because of this Administration.” – former Klan member, now Democratic Senator, Robert Byrd.

ONE PAPER DROPS DOWD: A local Texas paper has decided not to publish Maureen Dowd any more. After her doctored quote from the president, she’s no longer a trusted columnist:

Dowd violated one of the cardinal tents of the newspaper business: Don’t mislead your readers, because your credibility is your only currency. Lose it, and the reader won’t care how good a writer you are.

Amen to that. I wonder how many other papers who syndicate Dowd are reconsidering, given her propensity to deceive.