The Dish

It’s really helpful to read Senator Rick Santorum’s full remarks to the AP reporter Lara Jakes Jordan. (My piece for Salon, posted opposite, was based on the truncated version released two days ago.) It turns out that once again, an important quote has been bungled by a journalist. Here’s the critical quote:

[I]f the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.

Santorum did not say, as the AP had it, “the right to (gay) consensual sex within your home,” and it’s clear he didn’t mean it either. (In a good piece, the New York Times’ Sheryl Gay Stolberg, gets the quote right). Santorum meant any sex outside heterosexual, married, procreative sex. And he’s insistent in opposing any tolerance by the government of sexual desires or wants that the government deems a threat to society:

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.

Wow. I’ve long heard of people talking about individual rights against the government. I have rarely heard about the government’s rights against the individual. And from a Republican! Notice how Santorum uses the pronoun “we” when referring to the state. He’s been in power too long. Has Santorum heard of limited government? It was once a conservative idea, you know, Senator.

CRIMINALIZING SEX: Now there are two issues here: there’s a Constitutional issue about whether the Constitution enshrines an absolute right to privacy, which is a matter of genuine scholarly and legal debate. Then there’s a political issue about whether as a political matter, voters should support laws that criminalize private adult consensual sexual activity. Santorum is clear in his remarks that he neither believes that the Constitution protects such privacy; and that he would support laws that would criminalize many private consensual sexual acts. He backs sodomy laws. (“If New York doesn’t want sodomy laws, if the people of New York want abortion, fine. I mean, I wouldn’t agree with it, but that’s their right.” [emphasis added]) He therefore believes that if I were to have sex with my boyfriend in my own bedroom, I should be liable to cops’ raiding my apartment and throwing me in jail. (At the same time, he says he has “absolutely nothing” against homosexuals. Nada.) His subsequent comments also strongly imply that he would allow the cops to come into private homes to police heterosexual adultery as well. Or, in Santorum’s world, the cops could enter someone’s house to see whether a man was having sex with two women or more than two women on a continuous basis (that would be private “bigamy” or “polygamy”). In fact, any activity that could be construed by Santorum as “antithetical to strong, healthy families” could theoretically be outlawed. I don’t know about you, but this vision of what should constitute government power in a free society worries the bejeezus out of me. In fact, it’s one of the most extremist, big-government comments I’ve ever heard from a sitting U.S. Senator. And he’s not even a liberal.

NOT ABOUT GAYS: The response to Santorum has been primarily that his remarks were bigoted about gays. Santorum claims they weren’t. I disagree but, as with Trent Lott, I can’t look into a person’s heart and know whether he is animated by hate or not. But homosexuality isn’t the real point here. The point is that Santorum is proposing a politics that would essentially abolish domestic sexual privacy – for all of us, if we deviate from “correct” sexual practice. Many social conservatives, I think, may oppose same-sex marriage or gays in the military, but most don’t want to send the cops into bedrooms across America to jail gay citizens. They may disapprove of adultery, but still not want the police investigating. They see the difference between what is publicly normative and what is privately permitted. They adhere, like the vast majority of fair-minded people, to the very American notion of live-and-let-live. Even Bill Kristol has publicly said he opposes anti-sodomy laws. But Santorum, in these remarks, clearly doesn’t. What he disapproves of mustn’t only be denied public recognition; it must be criminalized. If you think I’m exaggerating, read his full comments. They are not a relic of a bigoted past, as Trent Lott’s were. But they are an expression of a bleak future, in which tolerance and privacy are subject to the approval of “moral” majorities and enforced by the police. If that truly is his view, he needs to explain it further. And the Republican party has to ask itself if it wants an unconservative extremist as one of its leaders.

Kinda. Meanwhile, a “French official” tells the International Herald Trib that Chirac is about engage in a period of “rhetorical adjustment.” Heh.

HITCH IN TROUBLE: He’s been haranguing the missus again.

NOT SANTORUM: These Republicans are, well, psychedelic.

THE ALLEGED TRAITOR: Intelligence experts say the documents apparently incriminating anti-war campaigner George Galloway check out. Was he paid off by Saddam? The British government starts to investigate his “charity” and its funding. The Labour Party starts an investigation into what it calls “extremely serious” allegations. FYI: The Treason Act 1351 is still active, making it a crime, punishable by life in prison to “be adherent to the king’s [now queen’s] enemies in his realm or elsewhere”. If he’s guilty, send him to the Tower!

The Labour deputy has now redoubled his denials and is threatening to sue the Daily Telegraph. I can’t say his statement settles the matter. It sure doesn’t convince me. The reporter explains to the Guardian:

“Nobody steered me in that direction at all. We just went and purely by chance we stumbled across this room which had these files in it, and again purely by chance we came across these files which carried the label Britain. And it was two days before we had actually gone through the contents and found this document. I find it very hard to believe that this document is not authentic. I think it would require an enormous amount of imagination to believe that someone went to the trouble of composing a forged document in Arabic and then planting it in a file of patently authentic documents and burying it in a darkened room on the off-chance that a British journalist might happen upon it and might bother to translate it. That strikes me as so wildly improbable as to be virtually inconceivable.”

The story is now leading every major British news source, so we’ll find out soon enough. But the full implications of this story for the anti-war movement are epic.

DEAN, THE E-CANDIDATE: ABC News asks an interesting question: how come outsider, purist know-it-all candidate Howard Dean has amassed $2.6 million already? The answer is partly the internet. I smell a McCain-like campaign.

THE FAR RIGHT’S ANGER: One sign of the domestic moderation of the Bush administration is that some elements of the religious right are furious. Not so long ago, RNC chair Marc Racicot visited the Human Rights Campaign, the major gay rights group. The Family Research Council has gone nuts about this. FRC’s head, Kenneth Connor, claims that the party chair shouldn’t meet with groups who disagree with official party platform policy. Does that mean that no Republican president should ever address the NAACP, I wonder? Or Hispanic or Jewish groups who don’t agree with everything in the GOP platform? Connor further says that the GOP believes that homosexuality is incompatible with military service. But even the Pentagon doesn’t believe that, and allows closeted homosexuals (and increasingly some not-so-closeted ones) to serve their country. Rcaicot was right to reach out to gays and lesbians. He’s right to implicitly deny that being gay-inclusive and pro-family is somehow an incoherent or un conservative position. Gays are members of families;they always have been and always will be. The question is whther they will be pushed out of family life or included in it. In his private email, Connor calls HRC “a radical organization working to advance an extremist agenda.” This is baloney. I know the gay left; and HRC is the gay center. They increasingly understand thay many gays are conservative and moderate and have intelligently reached out to conservative thinkers, writers and politicians. Heck, Jonah Goldberg and David Brooks addressed the same conference as Racicot. The Bush administration needs to know that its impulse for inclusion is the right one; in fact, it’s the only one that will give the GOP a healthy and moral future.

BBC WATCH: They also tend to get their basic science reporting wrong.

If this turns out to be true, it’s a bombshell. The chief left-wing anti-war campaigner in Britain’s parliament, Labour Party MP George Galloway, has his name on several documents discovered in Baghdad by the Daily Telegraph. The documents allegedly show a huge pay-off scheme from Saddam’s oil profits to the anti-war activist – worth up to $500,000 a year – in return for his political work in defense of Saddam. Here are the relevant documents. Here are details of the alleged Jordanian go-between. Galloway has denied the allegations thus:

Asked to explain the document, he said yesterday: “Maybe it is the product of the same forgers who forged so many other things in this whole Iraq picture. Maybe The Daily Telegraph forged it. Who knows?” When the letter from the head of the Iraqi intelligence service was read to him, he said: “The truth is I have never met, to the best of my knowledge, any member of Iraqi intelligence. I have never in my life seen a barrel of oil, let alone owned, bought or sold one.”

Not exactly a clear denial, I’d say. Notice the Clintonian “maybes” and “to the best of my knowledge.” Notice that Galloway doesn’t clearly deny receiving laundered oil money either. I imagine the Telegraph must be pretty confident of its source materials, but I cannot independently verify them, of course. And I haven’t seen the story picked up yet by anyone else. But this is the lead story in the largest-selling quality newspaper in Britain. If confirmed, it couldn’t be more damaging to a man synonymous in Britain with the anti-war movement. It will be fascinating to see how that movement responds in the coming days to the notion that one of its key figures may actually have been on the dictator’s pay-roll. It will be even more fascinating if any other such documents turn up.

I was heartened to read Kanan Makiya’s latest missive in the New Republic. There are some memes in the liberal media I just don’t buy – i.e. all exiles are bad; Islam will destroy Iraqi democracy; we’ll be hated soon; we’re hated already, etc., etc. Kristof has absorbed, as usual, all the defeatist talking points, but at least he has conceded he got almost everything wrong last year. In contrast, here’s the money Makiya quote:

Garner was an enormous hit with the Iraqis present at the meeting. He wisely stayed very much in the background, judging that the key task at hand was having Iraqis speak to one another, rather than having them hear speeches from representatives of the U.S.-led coalition. When Garner did finally speak, it was to make a direct, honest, straight-from-the-heart appeal to the participants that won them over instantly. He said, simply, that his role was to support Iraqis in the reconstruction of their country, and that he plans on leaving as soon as Iraqis themselves find it appropriate. “He really means it,” a businessman from Mosul said to me after the conference. “This man is the genuine article.”

I remain an optimist about the Iraqi future – and America’s critical role in it. Yes, there have been some obvious screw-ups – the failure to protect Baghdad’s museums strikes me as damn-near indefensible. But the direction is clear. And if the U.N. is successfully kept at the margins, we can work this out.

SO BLAIR WAS RIGHT? Remember the furore over whether prime minister Tony Blair was lying when he claimed that two British POW’s had been executed by the Saddam regime? New evidence – in shallow graves – looks like it supports Blair. No proof yet – but this is a depressing find.

It appears that the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations no less is still repeating the lie. The Times of London reports that among the listed future quotations from the Iraq war, one is

from Lieutenant-General William Wallace, Commander of the US Army Fifth Corps: “The enemy we are fighting is different from the one we’d war-gamed.”

Aaaarghhh.

NUTS ON CIRCUMCISION? A reader makes his case against mine. We only cut a few lines.

HOT DATE: Drudge and Camille. Philly. V. hot.

CHIRAC WARNED: From L’Express in Paris: “If Jacques Chirac persists in making the UN the field of his next battle, he has been duly warned by Washington.-It will be worthy, glorious and solitary, perhaps even moving.-But irrelevant.” Some of the French are beginning to understand their predicament. Alas, Le Figaro has just made Johny Apple look on the ball.

I was walking through my neighborhood the other day – in D.C.’s hyper-p.c. Adams Morgan – and I swear I’ve been seeing a few more anti-war posters since the war ended. The signs are perhaps expressions of some kind of rage at reality, especially a reality that has surely undermined some of the anti-Bush left’s cherished nostrums – that American military intervention is always evil, that nothing good can come from any Bush policy, that Iraqis will loathe being liberated, and so on. Some people on the left whom I respect have also gone off what can only be called the deep end. Michael Lind is sadly one. Paul Krugman is another. And now Harold Meyerson, the newish executive editor of the American Prospect joins the frothing fray. Meyerson has often been a thoughtful, lively writer of the left, and I was proud to run his often-provocative pieces at The New Republic. But his latest cover-story for his own magazine is just, well, er, you read it. It’s titled, “The Most Dangerous President Ever.” Ever. Worse than Nixon. Worse than the left’s previous nemesis, Reagan. Worse than Hoover. In fact, Meyerson can think of only one precedent as horrifying:

He, too, had a relentlessly regional perspective, and a clear sense of estrangement from that part of America that did not support him. He was not much impressed with the claims of wage labor. His values were militaristic. He had dreams of building an empire at gunpoint. And he was willing to tear up the larger political order, which had worked reasonably well for about 60 years, to advance his factional cause. The American president – though not of the United States – whom George W. Bush most nearly resembles is the Confederacy’s Jefferson Davis.

Yes, we’ve now sunk to another level of demonization, as Bush seems to be doing to the left what Clinton did to parts of the right: make them so nuts they cannot even think straight.

WHY? Yes, I can see why the left will disagree with Bush on certain issues: judicial restraint, tax cuts, a pro-active, rather than defensive, war on terror. I share concern about rising deficits, a weakening of the church-state divide, and fraying civil liberties. But the domestic record of Bush doesn’t begin to justify the hysterical opprobrium thrown at him. Some of it is the system working: the man has gotten precious few judges through the Senate (and some of his picks have been dreadful); his tax cuts have been mercifully restrained by more fiscally prudent Republicans; his (good) proposals to shore up social security are on hold; there will be no drilling in protected Alaska; his faith-based initiative has been watered down to almost nothing. Other signs of moderation come from choice: there has been a consolidation – not a reversal – of gay rights; in contrast to Bill Clinton, Bush has proposed a serious effort to fight AIDS globally; the repudiation of Trent Lott solidified the inclusive message of the Bush-led GOP; some of his environmental proposals have been downright green; and the two wars that this president has fought have been remarkable military successes, whose consequences are yet to be fully known. Moreover, Bush has had to cope with the gravest threat to this country’s security in its history and, since 9/11, has not seen another serious terrorist attack on American soil. He also inherited a post-bubble slump. And yet this is “the most dangerous president ever.” Again, I’m not saying that there isn’t a liberal case against this president. What I’m saying is that the level of animosity has now gone to truly unhinged levels. This, of course, is good news for Bush, who is busy turning his opponents into shriller versions of Ann Richards. But it’s bad news for Democrats and worse news for anyone who believes, as I do, that an intelligent opposition helps good government, rather than hinders it.

“France is like someone who’s been given a glimpse of the future, sees himself committing suicide, and resolves to spend his remaining days making it look like murder.” – Lileks, of course.

SARS is obviously a huge worry. But it still makes sense to recall that many more people have died of the flu recently than of SARS – and almost certainly will do in the coming months. But what does worry me is the possibility of a combined SARS and HIV epidemic across the developing world. People with weaker immune systems, as Luc Montagnier has just pointed out, are far more vulnerable to viruses like SARS. Healthy HIV-positive people in the West might do okay (fingers crossed), but the death-rates in Africa or Southeast Asia could surely soar from the double-whammy.

RAINES AWARD NOMINEE: This time for the headline writer for the Sydney Morning Herald. Their summary of Iraqi Christian sermons yesterday: “US occupation like crucifixion, Easter mass told.” Then, when you read the story you find something a little different:

“I told the faithful that Iraq lived through its passion in recent weeks with the American invasion,” said Father Butros Haddad, priest at the Church of the Virgin Mary in central Baghdad. “But it will be reborn like Christ was resurrected,” the cleric told hundreds of Chaldean Catholic faithful. “The resurrection comes always after the passion, joy comes back always after the pain.”

So the pain of war was necessary for the rebirth of a nation. Slightly different gloss, don’t you think?

THE WAR IN BRITISH JOURNALISM: The pro-war papers stood still in circulation. The tabloid anti-war paper, the Daily Mirror, went into free-fall. Even Robert Fisk’s former promoter concedes Fisk had a “pretty dreadful war.”

There seems to be a real power struggle among the Palestinians. The golden rule is that if Arafat opposes any change, it’s worth supporting the change. Without Bush’s firm stand, no change – and therefore no prospect for a real peace – would have happened. Ditto Syria, which seems to be getting the message of the Three Week War. There’s a dynamic here, and one that surely should challenge conventional views of what a “just war” is. Would a peaceful ouster of Saddam have been possible? I think we now know that war was the only way. Was the war fought with an attempt to minimize civilian casualties and damage to infrastructure? Yes, on an historic scale. Is the outcome in Iraq more just than what preceded it? Without a doubt. Will the war prod the rest of the region toward more positive change? It certainly looks possible. Yes, war is awful. But 21st century warfare has now demonstrated its capacity to flummox centuries of “just war” theologians and philosophers. We need a new debate – because the terms of the last one have just become extinct.

UNBOUND: What the war means for America’s future. Empire? Not in the DNA. But something much more promising beckons. My take – now a week old – posted opposite.