The Dish

An interesting take from a blogger on the politics of inconsistency. He really goes for Jonah and argues that Burke would be on my side asking, at least, for some kind of practical reason why gambling is much less socially destructive than, say, private gay sex or (another Bennett bugaboo) watching “The Simpsons”:

Goldberg’s Burkean argufying is wrong-footed. Burke objects to mysterious, metaphysical crashlandings from outer space into the organic lives of peoples. For example, ABSOLUTE RIGHTS. His point: just look how these huge, rigid things will fit in, or, rather, will not. I think this Burkean impulse to reject such things can be construed as a serious (if not decisive) objection to, say, Dworkinesque ‘taking rights seriously’. But this has nothing whatsoever to do with the case at hand. In the case at hand, there are certain primary attitudes – ABSOLUTE WRONGS, which amount to metaphysical principles at best; biases at worst – against homosexuality, but not gambling, so forth. And you have folk like Andrew Sullivan taking, in effect, the Burkean line. They are saying: look at how all this fits in with the lives of people. Why should that guy, gambling, be worse than me, having sex with other guys. Just think about it; by which he means, not, ‘become a completely barking mad metaphysician’ but, ‘put these forms of life in the context of “the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence.”‘ You will see that it makes no sense to maintain these harsh, humanly hurtful exclusionary principles. And the answer comes back: but we must. These absolute differences came from outer space and crashlanded on our planet long ago. There is no earthly reason to accept them but here they are. So if Burke supports anyone in this dust-up, it’s Andrew Sullivan against those inhabiting a cloud cuckooland of metaphysical pieties about which things are OK to put into which slots, which cranks are OK to pull, which not.

Quite. Burke, of course, was extremely consistent in many ways – and fought hard against the conservative grain in his own culture, on independence for Americans, for example. (Can you imagine what an eighteenth century John Derbyshire would have said about that?) But then, as some American conservatives seem to have forgotten, Burke was a Whig, not a Tory. I like to think that if were around today, Burke would be an “eagle.” And certainly not a theocon.

How’s this for a classified ad: “”Hyperactive kid for sale, good at vacuuming, not great at washing dishes because he’s too short. Guaranteed to annoy. $5 or nearest offer.” Yep, the police investigated.

Peter Beinart should have the last word on Bill Bennett. (Oh, and I’ll be defending the empowered gambler on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” this weekend. I gave up being a talking head a while back for my mental health. But I figure if I can defend Bill Bennett’s privacy on cable, I should get a few days off Purgatory.)

THE ORIGINAL: Of course, the tradition of war-leaders in military garb isn’t just restricted to Bill Clinton, Hillary or Dubya. Here’s one for the ages.

THE FRENCH START TO PANIC: My trusty correspondent reports on the latest front page headlines in yesterday’s Le Monde:

“Iraq: a stabilization force is studied.”- It’s not clear exactly who the attendees at the London conference on post-war Iraq are, but the “unique certitude” is that France, Russia and Germany are not there.
“The UN Fears its Marginalization.”- Well, the title of this one says it all.
“The end of the experience.”- What’s ended is the “internationalism” of the 20th century and all that goes with it, including the UN.
“Powell’s last chance.”- Powell is portrayed as conducting a last-ditch stand to save diplomacy from a regime that “respects only war.”-On Iraq, says the article, Powell was able to “hang tough right up until the moment where he was dropped by France, whose foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, declared on January 20 at the UN that ‘nothing’ could justify a war against Saddam Hussein.”
“The US’s poisoned present to Poland.”- Poland has a zone in Iraq; now let us see if they can handle it, says the article.- Left unsaid:- how can little Poland be in the game when France is not?
“A turn to (economic) rigor” is today’s lead editorial, and it’s all the US’s fault for beating France on Iraq.- Really:- “So now, after a year of laxness, France goes on a diet of stale bread.- Why this new Chirac zigzag?-It does not result from a long period of reflection on the economy but rather from the war in Iraq.-The Anglo-American campaign against Saddam Hussein exploded Europe, shattering hopes of building anytime soon a common EU foreign policy.-The victory of the coalition has not erased the divisions between the war camp and the peace camp – a division where France was the pivot.-Paris cannot take the risk of provoking another rift, this time on the economic front [by unilaterally breaching EU-imposed deficit limits].”

They truly are screwed, aren’t they? Couldn’t happen to a nicer country.

THE HUMORLESS LEFT: Why won’t Naomi Wolf allow HBO to run an Ali G. interview with her? C’mon, Naomi. I know you have a sense of humor. And there’s no better sense of humor than one directed at oneself. (Thanks to Jonah).

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “The Left wants a world where there are no rules, no morality, and no personal responsibility.” – Meghan Keane, National Review Online.

POLLITT 1, HITCH 0: Katha Pollitt’s screeds win her a National Magazine Award. Hitchens gets nominated for three but gets nothing. These media elites aren’t biased, are they?

TINA’S MUM: A charming – and, I’d say, revealing – tribute from Ms Brown to her mother.

FRUM ON THE BRITS: Don’t miss this insightful little piece by David Frum about the differences between Americans and Brits (scroll down to the bottom to find it). I like to think of myself as an American by now, at least culturally and psychologically. But I may be more British than I’d like to admit. Here’s how David sees the difference:

Don’t misunderstand: I love Britain and I love the British – and I love them just the way they are: blunt, expressive, emotional, highly sexed, indifferent to rules and protocol. I love their informality of dress and their preoccupation with good food and fine wine. I only wish the British would overcome their prejudices and learn to value Americans as they are: polite, formal, stiff upper-lipped, sexually restrained, and imbued with the idealistic spirit of reform.

How about some kind of middle ground between the two?

STILL SPINNING: You have to hand it to the Nation. One of the biggest embarrassments for the Saddam-appeasers on the left was that a Labour prime minister, Tony Blair, was one of its leading proponents. They kept quiet for a while. But now they’re gloating about poor election results in Britain for Blair’s Labour Party:

The parliamentary elections in Scotland formed one part of the first political test for a member of Bush’s “coalition of the willing.” Blair’s Labour party also battled on May 1 to maintain its control over local governments across Britain. There too, Labour suffered serious setbacks. The party’s percentage of the vote fell from 41 percent in the 2001 general election to just 30 percent in the May 1 voting. Labour lost more than 800 seats on the local councils that govern British cities and regions. Most of those seats went to the traditional opposition party, the Conservatives, but a substantial number went to the Liberal Democrats, a third party that was highly critical of Blair’s alliance with Bush before the war.

Don’t you love that qualification: “most of those seats went to the traditional opposition party, the Conservatives”? And what, pray, was the Tory position on the war? Even more positive than Tony Blair. Yes, Labour did poorly. Most governing parties do in mid-terms. But to describe this as payback for the war is truly stretching it.

And on an aircraft carrier! I still think the Lincoln photo-op was excessive. But it certainly wasn’t unprecedented.

“I could care less if Bennett gambled, it is the response from the commentariat and blogosphere I find interesting. Every political scandal is subject to the “shoe on the other foot” test. Ask yourself: If this was a prominent liberal discovered to have lost $8 million gambling (say, Jesse Jackson), what would the folks at the Weekly Standard and National Review be writing?
Yeah, I gotta say this one fails the “shoe on the other foot” test pretty strongly.” – more feedback, including a first-hand account of the charm of Jayson Blair, on the Letters Page.

The Bennett-defending crowd at National Review have finally decided that the best defense of Bill Bennett is a defense of inconsistency. Well, it’s an argument, I suppose. But to be clear: I’m not sure Bennett is being inconsistent. I just want him to provide a good argument for why he isn’t. Is that too much to ask? And there’s one inconsistency that strikes me as worrisome: when consistent rules apply to everyone else but you. Here’s one other inconsistency I’d like Stanley Kurtz to address: why is it okay to allow sodomy for straight people but not for gays? Or why are hate crime laws okay for every group except gays – the current Republican position. Or why do pro-marriage types largely ignore legislative attempts to tighten heterosexual divorce laws but want a federal constitutional amendment to bar gays from marriage? Some inconsistencies aren’t really inconsistencies. They’re masks for prejudice and ignorance and selfishness. (On the bright side, John Derbyshire says he’s to the left of Rick Santorum and doesn’t want to lock up homosexuals. But he’s quite happy to let some rural types jail a few if it’s good for the culture as a whole. Hey, those homos can always leave for Manhattan, can’t they?)

At long last, we hope to be emailing out our weekly newsletter this weekend. We’re calling it the “INSIDE DISH.” It’s my way of saying thank you to those donors who have supported this site so passionately for so long. It will have extra Dish items not seen on the blog, a private weekly round-up, access to new articles a day or so before they appear on the blog itself, archive downloads, and, coming soon, early access to a goodies store of coffee mugs, t-shirts, etc. If you donated money by Paypal or credit card or other electronic means, we’ll be sending it to the email address we received at the time, i.e. to about 4500 people. (And, of course, you can unsubscribe at any time.) But if you sent money by check and didn’t include your email address, we won’t be able to email it to you, for obvious reasons. So if this is you and you want to receive the “Inside Dish,” please send your email address with the name on your check to Robert at webmaster@andrewsullivan.com. Robert set up a master-list of all contributors so it should be relatively easy to cross-check and make sure we have a complete list. And, of course, if you have never sent any donations to the site and are feeling a little guilty about that, this is a great time to make amends. If you donate $20 or more, you’ll help keep this blog running, and we’ll put you on the list and send you the Inside Dish pronto. With the huge increase in traffic in the last year, our bandwidth expenses have doubled, and every donation helps to keep this site solvent. Here’s a link to the “Tipping Point” page telling you how to do this. If you have a credit card, it couldn’t be simpler. Thanks a million again.

Yes, I’d defend the right of these students to have a private whites-only prom. But it sickens and depresses me nonetheless. When people say racism is largely dead in this country, maybe they should take a trip to rural Georgia. This isn’t the old generation. It’s the next one.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world. I can hardly bear to see the faces of Bush and Rumsfeld, or to watch their posturing body language, or to hear their self-satisfied and incoherent platitudes. The liberal press here has done its best to make them appear ridiculous, but these two men are not funny. I was tipped into uncontainable rage by a report on Channel 4 News about “friendly fire”, which included footage of what must have been one of the most horrific bombardments ever filmed. But what struck home hardest was the subsequent image, of a row of American warplanes, with grinning cartoon faces painted on their noses. Cartoon faces, with big sharp teeth. It is grotesque. It is hideous. This great and powerful nation bombs foreign cities and the people in those cities from Disneyland cartoon planes out of comic strips. This is simply not possible. And yet, there they were.” – Margaret Drabble, mistaking a newspaper column for a therapist’s couch, in the Daily Telegraph.

Like many others, I can’t quite let go of the Bill Bennett story. It’s not because I don’t know what I think about the essentials. Bennett’s privacy has been unfairly violated, he has not been shown to be a hypocrite in any direct sense, and this is a non-story. If Bennett believes gambling does not hurt the broader society but consensual gay sex and pot-smoking do, he’s entitled to that opinion, and entitled to engage in his own private “vices” if he so wants. My minor disappointment, in fact, is that he caved into the puritanical pressure and agreed to give gambling up. But my major disappointment is that I haven’t found anywhere in Bennett’s enormous oeuvre any articulated defense of this crucial distinction between the societal effects of gambling and those of other private, consensual behaviors, like living with another man, or smoking weed, or watching porn. (Don’t give me the lame “weed’s illegal” argument. So is gambling in many states. I want to see an argument about why it should be illegal in the first place.) I see nothing wrong with any of these activities, and indeed would defend anyone’s right to seek such pleasures (and, boy, are they pleasures) in their own time and their own homes. That’s why it’s right to defend Bennett’s privacy in this case. But when, of course, was the last time Bill Bennett defended anyone’s privacy? Hasn’t he spent a career arguing that privacy should be foregone for the public good? Doesn’t he believe that all private activities are dependent for their morality and legality on their effects on society as a whole? (Radley Balko nails this point home.) Hasn’t Bennett even defended the public shaming and stigmatization of “sinners”? (He has certainly argued that gay people should be stigmatized, while promoting untruths about them to boot.)

THE SANTORUM GULF: Let me remind you in this respect of Senator Santorum’s broader political philosophy, a philosophy endorsed by Bennett:

The idea is that the state doesn’t have rights to limit individuals’ wants and passions. I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire. And we’re seeing it in our society.

Now let me remind you of Bill Bennett’s initial response to the gambling question: “If you can’t handle it, don’t do it.” Isn’t there a vast, gaping discrepancy there? Bennett doesn’t have to defend his private conduct. It’s none of our business. But he really does have to explain why gambling doesn’t hurt the broader society, while porn movies, pot-smoking, or gay sex somehow do. Until he does, then he won’t get out from under this cloud.