The Dish

Is it entirely coincidence that the day after Trent Lott lamented the end of legal racial segregation in this country that some Southern blacks turned out in unusually high numbers to deny Lott another Senate seat to add to his majority? I doubt it. Kudos to Jonah Goldberg and David Frum for seeing how damaging and vile Lott’s comments were. I’d add one more comment. We may be about to ask thousands of young African-Americans to risk their lives for this country. And the leader of the Senate publicly wishes they were still living under Jim Crow. It’s repulsive. And, so far, Lott hasn’t even had the decency to repudiate his own comments. Jonah says that “I don’t think Lott’s a racist, pro-lynching segregationist.” I don’t know Lott personally and have never met him. But one thing is clear: what he said could easily have been said by a racist, pro-lynching segregationist. And the burden of proof is now on Lott to say otherwise.

Robert tells me that the response to the pledge drive has been great so far. The site will be back to regular scheduled blogging tomorrow with reminders all week. I’m particularly grateful for your emails of support. And I apologize for this interruption. But please keep it coming and I won’t have to write anything like this till next May. You can chip in $20 to keep this site on the web for the coming year by clicking here. C’mon. Make Howell Raines’ day.

This isn’t an easy post to write, since I’m not used to begging. But as old-timers at the site know, we’ve been trying to find a way to make this site economically sustainable for a long time. It hasn’t been easy. I’ve now written this blog for over two years for free and I don’t regret a minute of it. We’ve paid most of our expenses with your help and are still (just) in the black. But I and my tech/business partner, Robert Cameron, still work part-time for free. I’ve been happy to do so, but in the last month or so, it’s become almost impossible to keep the show on the road and meet my other paid commitments. The sheer volume of emails (400 or so a day and climbing), the amount of web-surfing to keep the site competitive with others, the demands of the Book Club (which is in suspension for lack of time), and the Letters Page (which can sometimes go days without updates because of the task of sifting and editing) have gone beyond the bounds of what I can do part-time for free. Either I give the blog up or I have to give up my other paid work. I’ve tried to re-cycle the blog for columns and that’s helped. But in the end, the work keeps increasing rather than decreasing and I’m afraid of the quality dropping because I’m stretched too thin.

So here’s my plea. You’re the reason I’m writing this blog, and I’m turning to you for help. We’re working hard for ad dollars, but the landscape is still bleak. Many of you have been real generous in the past, for which I’m eternally grateful. But a fraction of 1 percent of our regular readers send us donations, and I hate interrupting the site all the time to beg. So we came up with the idea of a pledge week – like reader-supported public radio and television. All this week, we’re going to nag you to donate something. Then we promise we’ll leave you alone for 6 months. What’s a fair request? I figure that our regular readers, who visit us a few times a week or more, could completely transform the prospects of the site if they gave us $20 a year – a few cents a visit for some. If only one or two percent of you did that, we’d be completely financially secure. I could get a salary and focus on the blog more; I could hire an assistant to help with email, editing, the Letters Page and the Book Club (currently our interns get a piddling stipend and I get nothing); we could add more features to the site; and we could plan for the future securely. If you think of the $20 as retroactive payment for two years of daily work as well as the upcoming year, it’s a bargain.

You know why you like the site, if you do. To me, what started as a whim has become a real journalistic adventure. My interaction with you on a daily basis has been an enormous privilege and a learning experience. And as far as media and political influence are concerned, this little blog is certainly punching above its weight. My plea is: keep us on the road. If we succeed this week in providing a financial basis for the next year, I’ll keep on bloggin’. If we don’t, I’ll have to rethink. I simply can’t do what’s becoming a full time job for nothing any more. And I really want to avoid making people pay for the site, through a toll-booth or paid-only access. After two years of voluntary work, it’s time to move forward.

I hope this experiment isn’t entirely for this site either. If we can prove with this pledge week that there’s a place for reader-supported Internet journalism, then we’ll also help nudge the blogosphere one step further to financial stability. We’ll show that this medium can not only spawn new forms of journalism, but also provide a direct revenue stream from readers themselves – without ads, without big sponsors, without any intermediaries. Other blogs could follow – putting the next big dent in the monopoly of big media. So please pledge today.

Click here to get to a simple page where you can chip in $20 in several easy, secure ways. If you want to give more, please, please do. If you’ve given in the last six months, then no sweat. We’ll hit you up again in May. If $20 is too much for your budget right now, then no sweat either. I’m aware that things are tight right now. But if you’re a regular reader who wants to keep this blog alive, and can afford it, please contribute. One small bonus to donating: If you give us your email address with your donation, we’ll also send you an email newsletter each week starting in the New Year, filling you in on the latest site news, up-coming topics and exclusive pieces.

So please make blogging history, and give this site a financial and journalistic future. Click here for more details.

The Washington Post had it exactly right yesterday. The blizzard of data that Saddam has just unloaded on the U.N. should not be a means for him to buy time. If it amounts to a declaration that he has no weapons of mass destruction, then the administration must determine that as soon as possible and then provide the U.N. with documentation of Saddam’s lies. Then we go to war. This document dump should not be an occasion for more inspections. A false declaration is in itself a casus belli. And any other interpretation will be a sign that Washington has blinked. For the security of all of us, the White House must not go wobbly now.

After his disgusting remarks at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party, it seems to me that the Republican Party has a simple choice. Either they get rid of Lott as majority leader; or they should come out formally as a party that regrets desegregation and civil rights for African-Americans. Why are the Republican commentators so silent about this? And the liberals? (Josh Marshall, to his credit, states the obvious. And Bill Kristol, to his great credit, expressed disbelief.) And where’s the New York Times? Howell Raines is so intent on finding Bull Connor in a tony golf club that when Bull Connor emerges as the soul of the Republican Senate Majority Leader, he doesn’t notice it. And where’s the president? It seems to me an explicit repudiation of Lott’s bigotry is a no-brainer for a “compassionate conservative.” Or simply a decent person, for that matter. This isn’t the first piece of evidence that Lott is an unreconstructed racist. He has spoken before gussied-up white supremacist groups before. So here’s a simple test for Republicans and conservative pundits. Will they call Lott on this excrescence? Or are they exactly what some on the Left accuse them of?

Taking me to task on my disapproval of Tim Noah and my confidence that one state’s legal gay marriage will not inevitably (or even probably) lead to national gay marriage. There’s also a devastating critique of Howell Raines’ attack on the integrity of the New York Times. Check them out. No squeamishness about intra-mural criticism here.

The MSNBC commentator, Jill Nelson, has just responded to my criticism of her statement that “As far as I’m concerned it’s equally disrespectful and abusive to have women prancing around a stage in bathing suits for cash or walking the streets shrouded in burkas in order to survive.” Here’s her letter, and my response:

Andrew Sullivan’s quote from my MSNBC.com column is taken out of context and serves to distort my position in order to further his own. This is both a cheap shot and bad journalism.

How “out of context”? The quote was consonant with the entire article’s equation of Western treatment of women and extreme Islam’s social and cultural enslavement of them. And what context would in any way affect the fatuousness of Nelson’s statement? Nelson doesn’t say. In any case, when you provide a link to the original article, you can hardly be accused of disguising the context.

It’s also inaccurate, manipulative and, in the current political and judicial climate in America, dangerous to say there is a “weird overlap” between my beliefs and those of violent radical Muslims. As for characterizing this 50-year-old African-American woman as among those who “hate free societies,” that simply shows Sullivan’s ignorance and arrogance, characteristics typical of those who feed daily at the trough of white male privilege.

Dangerous? What is Nelson suggesting? That any criticism of her moral equivalence amounts to inciting violence against her? If that’s the case, we’d barely have free speech at all. And the fact that I use the term “weird overlap” and later “bizarre moral equivalence” is precisely because I hold out hope that feminists of most kinds would resist this kind of moral idiocy. Then we have the first of several personal insults. I am arrogant and ignorant. I feed daily at “the trough of white male privilege.” There is no response to this, any more than there can be a response to any simple insult. But it’s telling how swiftly Nelson stoops to this gambit. I never personally insulted her. I just attacked her opinions.

Sullivan’s suggestion that I playa-hate Western societies where women “choose how they want to present themselves,” demonstrates no understanding of women’s roles in Western culture, contempt for feminists, and, possibly worst of all, that he has no women friends. If he had any, he’d know how difficult it is to find one woman in America who actually believes that the way she chooses to “present” herself is determined absent historical, cultural and political conditioning, expectations and constraints.

What world does Nelson live in? I count myself a feminist; and there are legions of feminists who don’t believe that a woman who chooses to enter a beauty contest is as oppressed as one who is forced to wear a burka from head to foot just to leave the house. “Difficult to find one woman in America” who would agree with me? Is she kidding? I’d say a huge majority of American women would agree with me. My point, after all, is not that Western women don’t live under some cultural and social constraints. My point is that this cannot be equated with the way they are treated in, say, Saudi Arabia.

As I made clear in my column, religious zealots make the world a terrifying place for all of us, particularly women, even as they profess to protect us, whether they’re Muslims fighting Christians in Nigeria or antiabortion Christians attacking women and bombing clinics in America. The simplistic “You’re either for me or agin me” calculations of an Andrew Sullivan or a George W. Bush — or an Osama bin Laden, come to think of it — only serve to make the world a more dangerous place than it already is. Now that’s saying something.

So now I’m as bad as Osama bin Laden. Because I distinguish between his view of women and the views governing the Miss World contest! And this is an argument? Nelson is also presumably unaware of my many, long-standing battles with Christian fundamentalists on a whole battery of questions. But when all you’re trying to do is insult someone, listening to their arguments is superfluous.

Finally, I’m offended and bored by Sullivan and all the other willfully oblivious white guys who thought they were immune from the world’s terrors – and worse, believe they had a divine right to be – until Sept. 11. Now, having experienced the terror that much of the world lives with every day, they respond by swinging their dicks around and threatening – with bombs or bombast – those who do not view the world as they do. Talk about cultural relativism, p.c. journalism, and decadent machismo! But then, what’s new? In spite of all the rhetoric about how the terrorist attacks “changed us,” the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Threatening? Whom have I threatened? All I’ve done is make an argument in a liberal publication. But this is too much for her victimized sensibility. Notice the racism again – “willfully oblivious white guys.” Notice also the sexism: “swinging their dicks around.” Can you imagine the fuss if some right-wing nut started complaining about women waving their privates around? Notice the thinly veiled homophobia: “he has no women friends.” If you want proof of the idea that the bile of the far left has become in some respects indistinguishable from that of the far right, just read this letter again. And notice also how little she has to say and how diligently she has learned to hate.

Why not appoint an ombusman from outside the New York Times to respond on a weekly basis on the editorial page to criticisms of the Times’ coverage? It’s what the Washington Post does. My suggestion: ask Jack Shafer. He’s sympathetic to Raines but no fool. The Times has got to stop acting like the Vatican and open itself up to scrutiny and debate. Hey, Pinch. Shut me and all the other critics up, for Pete’s sake. And do your paper a favor as well.

Is she a babe or what? And I say that from a position of complete disinterest.

The New York Times is going to run the previously censored columns on the Augusta controversy. A great victory for freedom of debate and good journalism. Unanswered questions: who made the call? Where does this leave Gerald Boyd’s memo? Is Raines secure?
P.S. Hilarious blooper in Newsweek’s headline: “Anderson and Arafat pieces on Augusta will be published this weekend.” Arafat?? I think they mean Araton. If it had been Arafat, Raines would have run the piece in an heartbeat.