The Dish

Can you imagine the fuss if an art exhibit removed a controversial work because it offended Christians? But if it might offend Muslims, they pull the plug. The threat of violence works, you see. And some liberal art-curators are only too keen to buckle under.

ANOTHER BLOGGER GETS THE BOOT: Awful news from England’s Sword, Iain Murray. He just got fired from his day job for blogging. And that’s his sole source of income. (All I got was an entry on the Raines blacklist.) You can give him moral or other support here.

“ANTI-CHOICE”: “You complain about the “constant use of the term ‘anti-choice'” by the pro-choice left. Well, you are anti-choice when you take choice away from people, that’s just basic English. That you have a moral (or legal) basis for taking those choices away doesn’t get you out from under that basic description; that’s part of where the rhetorical power of the term comes from, i.e., truth. In contrast, the left is correct to chafe against the term “pro-abortion” assigned to them by the right, because the left’s efforts do not have an increasing abortion rate as their goal, but rather the widest possible protection of an person’s autonomy as embodied in law. We can all disagree about how broad those protections should be, but the pro-choice movement is quite improperly labeled “pro-abortion.” – more dissent on the Letters Page.

“Our Constitution makes it clear that people of all races must be treated equally under the law. Yet we know that our society has not fully achieved that ideal. Racial prejudice is a reality in America. It hurts many of our citizens. As a nation, as a government, as individuals, we must be vigilant in responding to prejudice wherever we find it. Yet, as we work to address the wrong of racial prejudice, we must not use means that create another wrong, and thus perpetuate our divisions.” – president Bush today. Another defining moment separating his conservatism from his father’s. Now to find a way to improve high-school education to make real diversity, based on true merit, a possibility.

A terrific pro-war liberal blog.

FROM THE ID OF THE LEFT: Just a selection from the dozens of emails I’ve gotten outraged at my criticism of Sheryl Crow. Here’s one:

Who the hell are you? NOBODY!!!!! Never heard of you. And I am sure the only way you can get any attention is by insulting someone who stands up for what she believes in. She, on the other hand, has everything on the line by speaking up for what she believes. I admire her so much for her courage and was a fan before, but now I am an enormous fan and you can go back to the rock you crawled out from, probably never to be heard from again (hopefully) and look for someone else to attack. Bye Bye!!! – A Proud Democrat who is Ashamed of the United States of America.

There you have it. Ashamed of the U.S.A. And proudly a Democrat! Then there’s:

Stop using your paleolithic brain dead labels to attempt a smear job on everybody who doesn’t adhere to your own knee jerk, fascist, fanatical vision of a Jew World Order.

Jew World Order. From the progressive movement, no less. And it’s a meme:

The people you are supporting don’t fight for the American way. Your republican party has been hijacked by extreme Zionists and Oil murderers. If your writing copy for murders then you have no soul. Have fun in hell.

Proof that homophobia is also alive and well on the left is one of my daily lessons (you should read the intray on a regular basis). But here are a couple of missives in the last few hours:

You sound like an elitist old queen gossiping in a tea circle.

And my favorite:

Keep up the good work, you are disgracing and discrediting yourself, no need for anyone else to, it’s as obvious as the stretchmarks on your anus as you’re bent over in a bathhouse, dumbass.

And then, of course:

AIDS dementia striking again??

Yep, the internet is full of nutcases and hatemongers. And I’m not saying these emails tell you anything that significant about the left in general. But its pretense at being morally superior – while it harbors anti-Semites, homophobes and hate-mongers who would be just as at home on the far right – is wearing a little thin, don’t you think?

From Berkeley no less:

Here’s how some liberals reason: The US has no right to defend itself, because the Republicans, and most Americans, are just so tacky and vulgar, not at all like us. I got news for Joan Didion. In politics irony is the first principle. Those tacky middle Americans are right on subjects like welfare and education and national defense, and the hip and the chic and the stylish are utterly clueless. For years I, like the Didiot, assumed that being a liberal just comes with being a cultured and educated person. It took the deaths of 4 thousand Americans for me to see just how wrong that assumption was. Liberals? Hello? Those bastards are trying to kill us! Andrew, the whole dance of white guilt and victimologist whining that dominates liberal politics just makes me physically ill. I live in the world capital of that syndrome and I grow more angry and disgusted every day.

Don’t worry, bud. They’re sinking.

To Pete Townshend’s pre-arrest anguish over pedophilia. Or this one.

Tony Blair’s defiant and inspiring refusal to appease Saddam or to minimize the risk of terrorists with weapons of mass destruction is beginning to have an effect. Check out this classic Guardian piece by Martin Kettle. It basically concedes the argument:

Most serious people will probably accept, separately, these three grim propositions: first, that we face an undefeated terrorist force which will take any opportunity to kill as many of us as possible at any time; second, that Saddam’s Iraq will develop any lethal weapons that it can and will use, or threaten to use, them if it possesses them; and, third, that our future security depends, among other things, on doing everything we sensibly can to prevent terrorists from acquiring lethal weapons of the kind which Iraq and others possess or would like to possess.

This is progress. It also means that one liberal writer in the Guardian has come to the conclusion that vast swathes of the anti-war left are simply not serious people. He’s right. Then the catch. Washington, according to Kettle, isn’t engaged in this strategy:

Washington’s attention is not on al-Qaida, as the chairman of the joint chiefs, General Richard Myers, admitted recently. On proliferation issues, the administration’s conscious rejection of multilateral approaches on everything from nuclear missiles to handguns is a given. The Middle East peace process is parked well off the highway, and America seems incapable of rational discussion of its own relationship with Israel. The drive against Iraq now has little context other than itself.

This strikes me as a very weak argument. What evidence is there that the U.S. is no longer serious about al Qaeda? Why would it even be in Bush’s interest to ignore it? On proliferation, the administration’s intent in North Korea (even if one disagrees about methods) couldn’t be clearer. And Israel? Why is that relevant here? The good news from this piece is that finally – finally! – some people on the left seem to have grasped that the Saddam-al Qaeda combination is simply something no sane Western government can tolerate. The mere possibility of it should be enough to stir action. But the loathing of Bush and American power then clouds the judgment. But why should it? If Blair is right, shouldn’t the Brits be begging the U.S. to wage war on their and Europe’s behalf? Shouldn’t the Germans and French as well? There comes a point at which anti-Americanism is also anti-Europeanism, in as much as it threatens the security and future of all of Europe. I hope it doesn’t take a calamity before the Europeans understand this.

Here’s a piece that surely deserves wider attention. It’s by Pete Townshend (although I have no independent corroboration, it seems convincingly by him to me) and seems genuinely concerned about child porn. I’m not sure it completely exonerates Townshend, but it certainly adds support for the notion that his case may be a complex one and his self-defense may be true. It ends thus:

The subconscious mind is deeply damaged and indelibly scarred by the sight of such images. I can assure everyone reading this that if they go off in pursuit of images of paedophilic rape they will find them. I urge them not to try. I pray too that they don’t happen upon such images as did I, by accident. If they do they may like me become so enraged and disturbed that their dreams are forever haunted.

Circumstantial evidence, paranoia, denial, and as so often before with Le Carre, pathological hatred of America.

Like many people, I’ve long since given up on reading most of the editorials in the New York Times. Unlike those in the Washington Post, they don’t seem designed to persuade anyone. They posture and preen and pronounce. But they don;t seem intended to engage. Last Sunday’s, however, stood out for its shrillness. I’m not the only one to notice this, but it’s been bugging me in an inchoate way all week. Entitled “The War Against Women,” the editorial is a hysterical attempt to assert that the Bush administration harbors contempt for women as a group of people, and wants to eviscerate their rights and standing before the law. Does anyone not on the far left think the administration’s motives are as simple and malevolent as that? Almost the entire thrust of the screed, however, is directed to the subject of abortion and the Bush administration’s modest moves to tighten government support for abortion and limit some of the more extreme examples of it. With the exception of the attempt to ban partial birth abortion, a barbaric practice that appears to be on the rise, I’m actually quite sympathetic to the Times’ substantive position. It’s dismaying to see the White House sign onto the far right’s propaganda campaign against condoms, and to favor ineffective abstinence programs at the expense of sensible sex education. But after a perusal of the Times’ rhetoric, it’s hard not to leap to the administration’s defense.

“ANTI-CHOICE”: On abortion itself, any objective view would find that women themselves are conflicted about the subject, as any human being should be. To frame this debate, then, as something as violent as a “war” against all women is simply boilerplate. Worse, it seems cribbed almost verbatim from Planned Parenthood’s activist hype. The notion that Roe vs Wade is on the brink of extinction is also, by any reasonable measure, hyperbole. It’s about as settled a part of constitutional law as you can imagine. Then there’s the constant use of the term “anti-choice.” Politics is strewn on all sides by this kind of sloganeering and you can see the rhetorical pleasure it must provide. But as a tool of persuasion, it couldn’t be weaker. I’m very reluctantly in favor of legal first trimester abortion, but I still find abortion horrifying, immoral, and wrong, and would seek to limit it in other circumstances. Does that make me “anti-choice”? Or engaged in a war against women? If the pro-choice movement wants to make friends rather than enemies, it should see how its rhetoric is seriously wounding its cause rather than helping it. And the Times should start treating its readers as engaged adults rather than as feckless and brainless children.

An interesting view from the outside of the war debates now raging in D.C. and elsewhere from Ian Buruma. He captures one dimension of the debate very ably, I think:

My point is that the neo-conservatives today, as far as Iraq is concerned, are the idealists, and if their revolutionary ideals have any chance of succeeding, they will have to prevail over the realists, the oil men and the country-club Republicans, who will surely stand in their way. The irony here is that what is left of the left, on the whole, shares the views of the old right. Few believe in a democratic revolution in the Middle East, and even fewer think it is up to America to enforce it.

That is, indeed, what is left of the left: a kind of passive reactionaryism, buoyed by resentment and bitterness.

LETTERS:“If the President doesn’t move on Iraq, as looks increasingly likely, I won’t vote for him. I know many who feel the same way. And, as today’s news suggests, if Lieberman runs to the right of Bush on the war, I’ll hold my nose and vote for him. Mark my words, as I marked yours months ago: Saddam will be in Baghdad in 2004, and Lieberman will be in the White House, and still the oh-so-intelligent conservative crowd won’t have a clue.” – more on the Letters Page.