The Dish

A smart, thorough and brutal profile of the chief weasel.

9/11 AND ALBRIGHT: Yes, it seems that September 11 changed everything for our former secretary of state, Madeleine Albright. According to Punditwatch, she

claimed that the battle against al Qaeda and resolving the “crisis” in North Korea was more pressing than Iraq, accusing the Administration of a “unidimensional foreign policy.” When host Tim Russert showed her bellicose comments she and President Clinton made against Iraq in 1998, Albright responded, “Things are different after 9-11.”

For Albright, the lesson of 9/11 was that we should be less concerned now about weapons of mass destruction in the most anti-American region on earth getting into the hands of terrorists. Don’t worry about Saddam. Do what we did after 1998: nothing. Look how well that turned out.

No, I don’t mean Madonna. I mean a group called “Glamericans”. These are drag queens, performance artists, and sundry others who form “a non-partisan group of funky Americans committed to non-violence and its promotion through glamorous, media-savvy, cultural events. We believe in America’s potential to be a peaceful and powerful force in the world. We believe that war is bad for our country, bad for our environment and bad for our travel plans.” Dammit. Let Saddam test nerve gas on political prisoners strapped down in hospital beds. Let him gas the Kurds. Let him protect terrorist groups. The important thing is to look good in Tribeca. In some ways, I admire this stuff. It’s more honest than Dave Matthews.

TAPPER ON STONE: It had to happen: a fawning, worshipping Oliver Stone documentary about Fidel Castro. Kim Jong Il was unavailable? Saddam couldn’t commit?

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “Just as some Arab governments fuel anti-American sentiment among people to divert them from problems at home, so a distinct minority of Western European leaders appears to engage in America-bashing to rally their people and other European elites to the call of European unity. Some European politicians speak of pressure from their “street” for peaceful solutions to international conflict and for resisting American power regardless of its purpose. But statements emanating from Europe that seem to endorse pacifism in the face of evil, and anti-Semitic recidivism in some quarters, provoke an equal and opposite reaction in America. There is an American “street,” too, and it strongly supports disarming Iraq, accepts the necessity of an expansive American role in the world to ensure we never wake up to another September 11th, is perplexed that nations with whom we have long enjoyed common cause do not share our urgency and sense of threat in time of war, and that considers reflexive hostility toward Israel as the root of all problems in the Middle East as irrational as it is morally offensive.” -from Senator John McCain’s speech to European defense chiefs in Munich on Saturday.

“You don’t beat terrorists by bombing them. All you do is act as a very good recruiting agent for them because more young people then turn towards the terrorists, and you alienate the complete civil population because you bomb them. Do you expect them to like us any more than they do now, which is not very much. You beat terrorists by talking to them. It’s the only way you can do it.” – Mo Mowlam, former Blair cabinet member, urging a seminar with Osama bin Laden in response to mass murder.

Charming item on a San Francisco lefty internet site this weekend:

Good News:CIA Officer Killed in Afghanistan Grenade Accident by :) Friday February 07, 2003 at 03:26 AM Ok, only two CIA agents dead, but its something. With so much bad news in the headlines its nice to read some good news like this every once and awhile. “WASHINGTON, Feb 6 (Reuters) – A CIA counterterrorism officer has been killed in a grenade accident during a live fire exercise in Afghanistan as he prepared for an intelligence operation, the spy agency said on Thursday.” “Boes was the second CIA fatality in Afghanistan since the United States launched a war”

Yep, this is how a few of them actually think.

FRIEDMAN ON THE NYT: Sorry, I mean the French, but sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between M. Chirac’s position and Ms. Collins’:

The French position is utterly incoherent. The inspections have not worked yet, says Mr. de Villepin, because Saddam has not fully cooperated, and, therefore, we should triple the number of inspectors. But the inspections have failed not because of a shortage of inspectors. They have failed because of a shortage of compliance on Saddam’s part, as the French know. The way you get that compliance out of a thug like Saddam is not by tripling the inspectors, but by tripling the threat that if he does not comply he will be faced with a U.N.-approved war.

Tell it, Tom. Meanwhile, more common sense has slipped through Howell’s editorial net:

So, however thin the evidence, experts on intelligence tend not to dismiss the possibility that as a last resort the Iraqi leader just might equip terrorists with chemical and biological weapons to be used against their common enemies: the United States, Israel and the West generally.
Mr. Schweitzer said: “Saddam Hussein can offer his substances to them, and they would not hesitate to accept it, even if they intended to use it in a way the Iraqis hadn’t told them to. This is the greatest danger.”

Eventually, the stronger arguments will have to prevail, won’t they?

SPOKE TOO SOON: Guardian readers have rallied to dismiss Colin Powell’s evidence. I hope my optimism didn’t provoke a counter-blast.

A reader urges us to get our Tom Lehrer song-book open again. Here’s a goodie:

We are the Folk Song Army.
Everyone of us cares.
We all hate poverty, war, and injustice,
Unlike the rest of you squares.

That just about sums it up, doesn’t it?

Hmmm. Are the French beginning to acknowledge reality? Today’s editorial in Le Monde is called “L’Apres Guerre,” and contains the following sentences:

All smiles, defense secretary Rumsfeld predicted a brief war: “Six days? Six weeks?” Let’s accept that assessment. What then? What about the after-war? … To ask these questions is not to defend the indefensible status quo, the Saddam dictatorship.

The indefensible status quo. But wasn’t that exactly what the French supported only recently, covered by the fig-leaf that somehow more inspectors would make a blind bit of difference? I think Colin Powell was more effective than some gave him credit for.

THE PRICE OF SUPPORT: Bill Keller is a sensible fellow. But his piece this morning gives an insight into how otherwise sensible liberals can come to support this war: only by simultaneously deriding and condescending to the president who made it possible. Is peer pressure that great? I guess so.

Yep, they’re organizing, as Len Garment notes in this morning’s Times. The dreaded march of stanzas, caesuras and iambic pentameters has begun. If you feel like a dose of acute nausea, take a look at the website called “Poetsagainstthewar.org.” It contains the usual anti-Bush hysteria. Here’s a Sontag Award nominee from W.S. Merwin: “[I]f the reasons for war were many times greater than they have been said to be I would oppose any thing of the kind under such ‘leadership’. To arrange a war in order to be re-elected outdoes even the means employed in the last presidential election. Mr. Bush and his plans are a greater danger to the United States than Saddam Hussein.” Well at least we know where he’s coming from. But my favorite is a poem from one Marilyn Hacker. It contains verses such as the following:

“(‘God Bless America’ would be blasphemy
if there were a god concerned with humanity.)”

Charming, huh? Or this:

“Jews who learned their comportment from storm-troopers
act out the nightmares that woke their grandmothers;
Jews sit, black-clad, claim peace: their vigil’s
not on the whistlestop pol’s agenda.

‘Our’ loss is grave: American, sacralized.
We are dismayed that dead Palestinians,
Kashmiris, Chechens, Guatemalans,
also are mourned with demands for vengeance.

‘Our’ loss is grave, that is, till a president
in spanking-new non-combatant uniform
mandates a war: then, men and women
dying for oil will be needed heroes.

I’d rather live in France (or live anywhere
there’s literate debate in the newspapers).
The English language is my mother
tongue, but it travels. Asylum, exile?”

Asylum, please.

My old friend and colleague Mickey Kaus has been having great fun at the expense of the New York Times’ desperate, and increasingly incoherent editorial shifts on Iraq. He’s right to. But doesn’t he also have an obligation to tell us what he actually thinks? Mickey has given almost no actual analysis of the most important question we are currently facing, despite running a 24-hour, Microsoft-funded blog. What’s up with that? Mr Raines may have declining credibility on this matter, but at least he’s saying something. Shouldn’t Mickey refrain from criticizing others for saying nothing until he has the good graces to take a stand? And I don’t mean how an Iraq war could impact welfare reform or the latest designs from Toyota.

BRENT BOZELL’S GAY PROBLEM: I’m not exactly one to come to Eric Alterman’s defense, but with the figure of Brent Bozell, you really do have an example of someone who appears woefully ignorant about the political diversity among homosexuals. For Bozell, along with, I might add, left-wing ideologues like Richard Goldstein, any openly gay person is ipso facto a liberal. Bozell simply assumes in this column that Rick Berke and Frank Bruni of the New York Times are left-liberals solely because they’re gay. Now Rick is a flaming liberal, as well as a master of New York Times internal politics. But Frank Bruni clearly isn’t in any ideological sense. Anyone who read his last book on George Bush would have a hard time saying that Bruni is ideologically blinded to Bush’s strengths (and weaknesses) as a president. But Bozell simply asserts that Bruni is a liberal because he is gay. That’s dumb and demeaning. He also asserts that the only reason that the Bush administration is not avowedly homophobic is because it’s intimidated by openly gay people in the media. Isn’t that a bit presumptive? An alternative theory might be that Bush and Cheney know enough gay people to realize that they cannot be generalized about politically; and decent enough not to reduce someone’s politics to their sexual identity. Maybe Dick Cheney has a better understanding of homosexuality than Bozell because his own daughter is gay, and he respects and loves her. For the record, I think that most of the big media are indeed pro-gay, compared to the center of gravity in the rest of the country. But that doesn’t justify the out-dated generalizations and assumptions of Brent Bozell.

Gay left supporter James Romenesko runs a blog linking to liberal stories and opinion in the media. If Eric Alterman sneezes, there’s an item. But if someone right-of-center has anything to say about the media, it’s ignored. A good example today: Jonah Goldberg’s excellent and provocative piece about media overkill on the Columbia disaster. It’s a big piece in a big paper, the Wall Street Journal. Look at what else Romenesko links to today – an end to the Miami Herald spelling bee! a college meat-eating contest! – and ask yourself the reasons for the lacuna. In fact, see if you can find any stories in the past week that deviate even slightly from left-liberal politics. Romenesko has every right to run a left-liberal blog on the media, of course. But he should be candid about his biases. He’s a propagandist. And a very good one.

It looks like he did.