The Dish

I thought I’d be going out of my mind here at the end of the Cape in the dead of winter. The boyfriend has returned to academic duties; the tourists are non-existent; there are only a handful of restaurants open; and the cold is bitter. But walking the beagle tonight, it was hard not to hear the stillness. Not a car in earshot; no-one on the streets; most of the stores boarded up; the same handful of people at the gym each evening. In most places, you never hear silence like this, let alone live in it day after day. Some days, I must speak to a mere five or six people. And at night, this old house I’m subletting groans with the expanding water-pipes, its shutters banging against shingles in the wind. One room, I’m convinced, is haunted. Even the beagle won’t sleep there – and she’ll happily sleep almost anywhere. Only a block away, a couple of nor-easters have had their way with the beach; the tides have been huge, sweeping completely underneath my summer wharf-home, carving new little valleys around the wooden pilings in the sand. The beagle won’t even venture out of the dunegrass in the wind in this weather, with the sand blasting her little face, and the wind blowing her ears out like sails. But it’s a great break from urban routine. The blog makes me feel as if I’m in the middle of things – the hundreds of emails chatter back at me each day as if I were still in D.C. But the rest of the day is formless – reading books, working on an essay, throwing myself into intense work-outs, eating microwave popcorn and re-heated frozen food in front of a wood fire each night, occasionally visiting a friend for supper. The solitude, in other words, has yet to become loneliness. And the quiet slowly becomes a narcotic, wrapping itself around you until you can’t imagine hearing anything more. This is the way we all used to live long ago, isn’t it? Maybe when we could hear ourselves think.

This piece about our policy toward North Korea is extremely helpful. (Via Instapundit.)

You know, this guy thinks he’s being real clever.

THE MEDIA ON BUSH’S PLAN: Forget the hilarious average New York Times couple (liberal activists who can’t add) bemoaning “trickle down economics.” Forget the relentless negative coverage. Isn’t the Times’ latest statement that social security and payroll taxes “account for almost as much money as federal income tax revenue, but they hit middle-income and lower-income workers much more heavily than the rich,” wildly misleading?

No surprise that Hans Blix wants more time; that January 27 is now seen as the “beginning” of the arms inspection; or that other countries are quite happy to see the process drawn out indefinitely. This was always the danger of the U.N. route. The administration, as is its wont, seems to be saying almost nothing about its plans, which worries people like me. We can only hope that its a way to out-psyche Saddam. But it’s beginning to look like Saddam is out-psyching Bush. The question will therefore soon arise: can we wait until the autumn? My own view is that this would be a disaster. There is absolutely no guarantee that any weapons of mass destruction will be found by Blix’s merry men by then; and the long summer and fall will be a golden opportunity for other rogue states to take advantage of the U.S.’s preoccupation in the Gulf. Those who oppose the war now will oppose it then. And there will be further opportunities for terrorist attacks on the West. Moreover, nothing would galvanize our enemies more than to see how timorous Washington is when dealing with a murderous dictator who has violated the terms of the 1991 truce and continues to thumb his nose at the world. Our perceived weakness toward Saddam has already emboldened the North Koreans (whom it appears we are now willing to appease as well). It will embolden others – from the meddlesome French to the American left. What Bush is in danger of drifting into is Clintonism – dragged along by events, rather than determining them, acquiescing in evil rather than confronting it, and coming ever so close to appearing easily knocked off course. That hasn’t happened yet. But the danger signs are there. Saddam was right. Time is on his side. As we wait and wait for a conclusion we cannot even know will come, the anti-war lobby in this country will gain strength; and the remarkable success we have so far enjoyed in preventing another catastrophic terrorist attack will merely serve to lull Americans into another false sense of security. I’m not panicking – yet. But a question keeps nagging: Are we at war or not? If we are, when on earth are we going to get serious?

A GOOD SIGN: This letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association is both reassuring and a little unnerving. A patient treated with radioactive iodine was picked up and strip-searched twice by the cops in the New York subway. Translation: they’re monitoring New York City for radioactivity. I’ve long believed a dirty bomb of some sort is just a matter of time. So it’s good to see the authorities have made some preparation.

IS GRAHAM A GO? The latest report suggests he might be. He could be a really strong candidate – especially as veep.

UNDER-ESTIMATING INTEGRATION?: Fascinating story in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that suggests our old stereotypes about profound racial residential segregation – especially in the MidWest, Northeast and South – may be based on a fallacy. By analyzing racial integration block by block rather than by census tract, a new study finds far more racial mixing than previously thought. Encouraging, no? Or is there a catch here?

THE ACCIDENT OF EMPIRE: Nice review of my old friend Niall Ferguson’s latest TV series on the British empire by William Rees Mogg in the Times (London). The key to imperial power? Luck and happenstance:

Empires come into existence, or grow, largely in response to threats or problems. All empires, in the benefits they provide and the damage they do, reflect the culture of the whole nation. The French were unlucky in that their early empire was pre-revolutionary, before France had developed democracy or freedom of trade or speech. The English were luckier that their empire was substantially post-revolutionary; almost all of it was acquired after the Civil War, and most of it after the revolution of 1688. The Americans have been luckiest of all, in that their empire came after the War of Independence and the Civil War. The US empire really started in 1898, with the war in Cuba against Spain. The new American empire is global and powerful, but technologically advanced, liberal and democratic. As the British Empire dwindled and disappeared, an essentially benign American empire has helped to secure the stability of a very vulnerable world.

Yes – worth remembering that in the face of the usual far-left blather: “essentially benign.”

“Every single day, I am faced with information as to how these weapons are proliferating. It is a matter of time, if we do not act, before terrorism and weapons of mass destruction come together.” The British PM, facing a chorus of hyenas, is sticking with his resolution on the threat from Saddam. Significantly he refused to rule out a war without U.N. authorization.

It’s bad enough in this country, where aging nostalgics for 1968 still dominate the universities and the media. But in Germany, their influence is even more profound:

The consequences of their subsequent Long March through the institutions have gone far to define the country ever since … In varying degrees, the universities were collectivized and stripped of their traditions … The worst was in the city-state of Bremen, where students demanded full equality with instructors and insisted on collective, rather than individual, examinations. Twenty would produce one joint thesis. It became so bad that local industries would not take interns from that university because they lacked both knowledge and the will to work … Since the early 1970s, they [the 68ers] have from that perch become vigorous culture-brokers and image-makers, running public radio and television and glossy magazines such as Der Stern and Der Spiegel – all of them with a sharp left-wing bias. Of course, they are to some extent balanced by newspapers such as the venerable Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung … But these cannot fully offset the constant barrage of anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Christian and anti-traditional innuendoes, sniggers and assertions to which the German television viewers have been subjected for decades.

And we wonder why Germany is imploding in a miasma of anti-Western resentment and socio-economic stagnation? Geitner Simmons has the details on a new piece in the National Interest.

SIGNORILE MAKES SENSE: Yes, it can happen. He makes some decent points in this piece about the AIDS death of Herb Ritts and the new silence surrounding the epidemic.

It’s Tony Blair’s fixation; and Tom Friedman’s as well. At least Friedman, in an excellent and honest column, grapples with the paradox here. What if the Israeli-Palestinian crisis isn’t really the main problem in the Middle East, but since that’s what everyone there and elsewhere believes, we’d be crazy not to take it into account? Clearly, for the Arab world, this is the psychological issue of the first order. Humiliated by their backward economies and societies, ashamed in some inchoate way that their biggest exports in recent years have been Western-produced oil and mass murdering religious fanatics, they now have to watch as yet another despised Arab despot gets his comeuppance. How can we expect them to deal with that if we don’t throw them a bone over the West Bank? I take the point. It extends beyond the Middle East to Europe, where we need allies, and where Israel is regarded as the source of almost all the problems in international affairs. But the real question is: do we continue to enable or even promote this delusion or do we confront it? I know it’s a high stakes gamble, but it seems to me that by not entertaining this fantasy we might actually do more good than if we do. In war, clarity matters. In that war, our enemy is Islamist terrorism and its state sponsors. When we’ve dealt with them – and we’ve barely started – we can return to the Israeli-Palestinian situation. In fact, it’s only after we have dealt with Saddam and the Iranian Mullahs that we will get Palestinian interlocutors who know they have nowhere else to turn. Then we can talk, and get tough on Israel with regard to its destabilizing settlements as well. Meantime, set up a diplomatic diversion. Let Blair have his conference. Say all the conciliatory things. And depose Saddam – soon.

NOW, THE POETS: The “anti-war” brigades in Europe have a new ally: the British poet laureate. To be fair, Andrew Motion is not against war against Saddam as such. He simply believes that there has to be irrefutable evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Saddam’s Iraq before we take any action. A few hundred inspectors have to find definitive proof of easily concealed stockpiles of nerve gas, botulism, and so on, before any war is permissible. A truly weak but at least vaguely defensible position. But then he goes further. It’s conceivable that someone would hold this view while still acknowledging the good faith of the opposing argument: that the burden of proof lies on Saddam – not the West – and that, given his record, Saddam’s inadequate declaration of WMDs is a good enough casus belli. But no. Motion – a poet officially sanctioned by the Queen – has to go the whole hog. Here’s his little poem in full:

They read good books, and quote, but never learn
a language other than the scream of rocket-burn.
Our straighter talk is drowned but ironclad:
elections, money, empire, oil and Dad.

Huh? Well I guess he’s aware that those who are pro-war can be educated, something that Susan Sontag and Joan Didion seem oblivious to. But elections? We just had them. Dad? Puhlease. Money? It’s going to cost a small fortune. Empire? Well, leave it to a British poet laureate to defend that one.

THE GAMBLER: “A year ago, there was a real question if the West would do anything about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. Now, the only issue is whether we rely on more thorough inspections or war. The only person responsible for this transformation is Bush (with credit also to Tony Blair). Even if you are opposed to war, you have to concede that Saddam is a threat and that Bush has almost singlehandedly forced the world to deal with it seriously. That’s a gain for international security, by any measure. Domestically in America, the shift is just as profound. In the 2000 campaign, the choice was between a revived left-wing populism under Al Gore or a cautious conservatism under George Bush. By 2003, the choice is between around $90 billion in tax cuts (and some new spending) from the Democrats and almost $700 billion tax cut from Bush.” – from my latest column, posted here.

HOWELL’S SELF-INTEREST: It’s not easy for a non-lefty to get on the New York Times op-ed page, so it was good to see David Brooks there yesterday, writing what was, as usual, a thoughtful and persuasive piece. But its premise is ideologically loaded to the left. The question asked by David is summed up in his opening paragraph:

Why don’t people vote their own self-interest? Every few years the Republicans propose a tax cut, and every few years the Democrats pull out their income distribution charts to show that much of the benefits of the Republican plan go to the richest 1 percent of Americans or thereabouts. And yet every few years a Republican plan wends its way through the legislative process and, with some trims and amendments, passes.

There then follow a series of sociological and psychological explanations for this. But the more obvious answer – to anyone not on the left – is surely simpler. Maybe people believe that their real self-interest is not simply in getting more directly back from the government. A good tax policy that doesn’t broadly punish the successful might actually help an economy grow and therefore be in everyone’s real economic self-interest – even those at the very bottom of the ladder. Certainly a quick look at the more “progressive”, i.e. punitive, tax regimes in Europe shows that the average person does far better over here, and is certainly more likely to have a job. A better first sentence would therefore be: “Why don’t people vote their own narrow and immediate self-interest?” But that wouldn’t get past the Howellburo, would it?

GERMANY’S IMPLOSION: A good piece on the damage Gerhard Schroder (favorability rating now 32 percent) has done both to Germany’s internal health and to its foreign influence. The beneficiary? France, now essentially the leader of the E.U. And Britain? Further away from joining the euro than ever. Meanwhile, German popular culture seems to be becomoing more and more pathologically anti-American. Take a look at this week’s cover of Der Spiegel. They even turn Old Glory into a version of the Hammer and Sickle. Truly repulsive.

THE SOCIALISM OF FOOLS: I should have linked to this terrific piece by Michael Gove in the Times of London before now. But here it is. It seems to me that some kind of anti-Americanism is inevitable, given the unprecedented power and influence of the hyper-power. But what’s worrying is the poisonous strain in this Americanophobia. Mild resentment becomes a kind of pathological suspicion. Parts of the left in this country have succumbed as well. Check out this photograph from an “anti-war” rally in Los Angeles. It says it all.

FIFTH COLUMN WATCH: One of the Lackawanna suspects cops a guilty plea. Hmm. The charge is “providing ‘funds and services’ to al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden, by attending a terrorism training camp in Afgha
nistan in the spring of 2001.”

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “I wanted to understand why the western countries were doing so well when the rest of the world seemed to be collapsing. I studied the history of European political thought from the Greeks and Romans up to the Second World War. I learned that people in the West value the autonomous individual. They understand the importance of science, knowledge. They are capable of criticising themselves and there is an ability to record history to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. It is exactly the opposite in Somalia where all the institutions of record are missing, and my grandmother’s memories of the clan wars will die with her.” – Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali immigrant to Holland, about to become a member of parliament following Pim Fortuyn’s footsteps. Her favorite thinker is John Stuart Mill. Liberalism, it seems, is not dead in Europe after all. It just takes a taste of Islamist oppression to embrace it.

What do you do with a man who has successfully evaded paying child support to kids from two different relationships? Make him head of D.C.’s child-support enforcement agency! Colbert King has the details. The kicker: D.C. collected payments in 12 percent of its child support cases in 2000. The national average is 42 percent.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “This thoughtful, searching tone is in keeping with the journal’s aspirations to objectivity. ‘The key to the journal is that it’s middle of the road,” said the editor, Dan Leab, a history professor at Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J., and a leading member of Historians of American Fascism, the organization sponsoring the journal. “It covers the waterfront but leaves the fringes out.'” – from a jovial New York Times piece on a new journal covering the history of American communism. (Yes, I changed the term to fascism to show the double standards here.) This is a great concept: a “middle-of-the-road” analysis of a monstrous totalitarianism and its sometimes treacherous allies in the United States. Of course, among the “middle-of-the-road” assessments, “an essay on the party’s activities in California during the early 1930’s that draws on newly opened Comintern archives to show how local Communist leaders often exercised considerable independence from the Soviet Union on tactics and policies” and the usual screed against informers. I knew the academy and the New York Times were soft on Stalinism, but this soft?

“Europeans Seek to Rein in American War Machine,” – headline from – where else? – Reuters.

EURO-ANTI-SEMITISM WATCH: Regular readers will remember Gretta Duisenberg, the anti-Semitic wife of the European Central Bank chairman, Wim. When asked how many signatures she would like on an anti-Israel petition, she once joked, “Six million?” and laughed. Now she’s getting more explicit. “Taking the Holocaust out of consideration, the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories is worse than the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands,” she opined this week. “The cruelty of the Israeli knows no bounds. That they, for instance, blow up Palestinian houses is not exceptional. The Nazis never did that during the occupation of the Netherlands.” For the record, 250,000 people were killed by the Nazis in Holland from 1940 – 45, 110,000 of whom were Jewish. Maybe she doesn’t count those. Her husband is not to be held responsible for her bigotry, but it’s surely getting a little difficult for one of the most powerful men in Europe to support his wife 100 percent, when she is clearly a Jew-hater.

The screed against Chuck Barris can now be found here. Don’t miss it.