The Dish

It’s hard not to feel dread when Saddam seems to be moving toward “compliance” with the latest U.N. resolution. I don’t mean, of course, that we should dread actually disarming him; merely that we should dread his trapping the U.S. and the rest of the world in yet another sandpit of confusion and obfuscation. That’s why it seems to me that we should be publicly mobilizing for war right away. There are some signs that this is happening already. I was reassured by Colin Powell’s statement on CNN yesterday that, “I can assure you if he doesn’t comply this time we are going to ask the UN to give authorisation for all necessary means, and if the UN isn’t willing to do that, the United States with like-minded nations will go and disarm him forcefully.” Powell is the right man to m ake such a statement. Yesterday, Tom Friedman called on the secretary of state to keep undermining the hawks in the Bush administration. It seems to me that Friedman has it exactly the wrong way round. The next few weeks are the ones in which Powell has to prove himself. If the U.N. route becomes yet another way to keep Saddam’s tyranny and weapons of mass destruction intact, then Powell has some explaining to do. Equally, if Hans Blix wants to go home a hero for peace after ineffective inspections, then Powell will have effectively made matters far worse for the U.S. and the civilized world. I’m a skeptic about whether inspections can ever truly work. But if they do, it will only because of a massive invasion force poised to attack immediately after the first violation. Hence: mobilize. The display of military might and readiness makes peace and compliance more likely – whether the weaponry is used or not.

WELFARE REFORM AGAIN: What else explains the sudden jump in teen marriages in the 1990s? And for some reason, the arrival of gay marriage as an issue, and the establishment of civil unions in one state, doesn’t seem to have deterred straight teens from getting hitched. Who would have thought it? Bill Bennett, call your office.

CAMPUS ANTI-SEMITISM WATCH: When the Egyptian paper, al Ahram, asked for British poet Tom Paulin’s opinions on the Middle East, they knew what they were looking for. His remarks even shocked a Guardian columnist:

Among other things, he opined that the US-born Jewish settlers should be shot dead. “They are Nazis, racists,” he said, adding – unnecessarily, you might argue – “I feel nothing but hatred for them.” He also pronounced that the state of Israel had no right to exist, that Tony Blair’s government was “Zionist”, and that the suicide bombers were an expression of “deep injustice and tragedy”.

Typical leftist anti-Semitism. So why is Harvard laying out the red carpet for a man who feels “nothing but hatred” for American Jewish settlers in Israel and the West Bank? Didn’t president Summers warn about a new anti-Semitism on campus?

THE OTHER TERRORISTS: Be afraid. Be very afraid.

GLOATIN’ GOIN’ DOWN: “My other POV is that the surge was a metaphor of starting a fire with lots of pine needles. Little tiny incidents of dry leaves kept piling one atop the other: Wellstone, the hate Jeb and George W campaign, the Clintons, Leahy stopping the judges, the trashing of the cars outside the rally in Mass, the appearances every night of Begala and Carville as Dem spokesmen (ugly guys are as bad as ugly women), Belafonte trashing Powell, Barbra blaming Republicans for the Wellstone plane crash, the voter fraud around the country, and hundres of other little things created the fuel for a fire under the Republican base and lots of Independents. GWB came along with his blow torch campaigning and set that fuel off. And the press media didn’t hurt either. So how do all those smart Dems like getting trashed by a moron?” – from the Letters Page, on the election.

“CANCER ON HUMANITY”: Check out this placard from the Florence pro-Saddam march. This is one face of the “anti-war” movement. And it’s ugly in a very old-fashioned way. (Via James Morrow.)

MORE LEFTWING SMEARS: No one should expect Garrison Keillor to like Norm Coleman. Keillor only supports left-liberal Democrats and was brutal toward Jesse Ventura. But his column in Salon went further. Check out this paragraph:

Norm got a free ride from the press. St. Paul is a small town and anybody who hangs around the St. Paul Grill knows about Norm’s habits. Everyone knows that his family situation is, shall we say, very interesting, but nobody bothered to ask about it, least of all the religious people in the Republican Party. They made their peace with hypocrisy long ago. So this false knight made his way as an all-purpose feel-good candidate, standing for vaguely Republican values, supporting the president.

There’s a word for this: it’s a smear. Keillor won’t give evidence; he parlays underhand gossip; he is exploiting someone’s private life to hurt him politically. Every aspect of this paragraph stinks to high heaven. But that in itself is instructive. This kind of bile helped the Dems lose the last election. And yet they keep on hating.

ROSENBAUM FISKS VIDAL: Worth every word.

MAJOR LEAGUE MISTAKE: Adam Clymer wrote yesterday about “the undistinguished terms of Benjamin Harrison and his grandson William Henry Harrison.” As any high-school textbook (or Google) will tell you, Benjamin was William Henry’s grandson. Then there’s this simple statement of fact: “Edward M. Kennedy’s durable liberalism has changed the nation more than his brothers did.” There you have it: decades of adding entitlements to the national budget and pursuing every agenda item of the current liberal conventional wisdom has changed the nation more than JFK and RFK combined. If you want to know why the Times got almost everything about the last election embarrassingly wrong, peer through the blinkers of a man like Clymer.

FULLY COVERED: As someone who grew up in a country with socialized medicine, I’m more than aware of what it really means: the rationing of bad healthcare. Here’s a story from Canada that shows where that can lead
you.

OUR WAR TOO: An independent gay writer and activist fights back against the left on Iraq.

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: Bush’s “mandate”

includes using the taxing power to transfer wealth from working people to the rich. It includes giving corporations a free hand to eviscerate the environment and control the regulatory agencies meant to hold them accountable. And it includes secrecy on a scale you cannot imagine. Above all, it means judges with a political agenda appointed for life. If you liked the Supreme Court that put George W. Bush in the White House, you will swoon over what’s coming. And if you like God in government, get ready for the Rapture. These folks don’t even mind you referring to the GOP as the party of God. Why else would the new House Majority Leader say that the Almighty is using him to promote ‘a Biblical worldview’ in American politics? So it is a heady time in Washington – a heady time for piety, profits, and military power, all joined at the hip by ideology and money.

– Bill Moyers, paid for in part by your tax dollars, on PBS.

MODO GROWS UP: A brief interaction with Saudi Arabia’s vice police and Maureen Dowd misses John Ashcroft:

After the men argued for 15 minutes, I fretted that I was in one of those movies where an American makes one mistake in a repressive country and ends up rotting in a dungeon. I missed John Ashcroft desperately.

Can we now send Molly Ivins and Mary McGrory?

Michael Barone develops a thesis I first floated three years ago. Is W a re-run of JFK? Money graf:

Kennedy in 1962 and Mr. Bush in 2002 marginally increased their parties’ share of the vote–very much against precedent–and greatly strengthened their parties’ leverage in a closely divided Congress. Within two years, Kennedy’s Democrats won by huge majorities, often wrongly attributed to Lyndon Johnson’s appeal to voters who would never have voted for Kennedy Democrats. But if you look at the regional breakdowns in the September and October 1963 Gallup polls, taken just before Kennedy was assassinated, it is clear that he was heading to a victory very much like Johnson’s in 1964. He was winning the East and Midwest and much of the West by margins far larger than Franklin Roosevelt’s; his job rating fell in 1963 only among white Southerners after he supported what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Here’s my take from November of 1999.

THE POLLS WERE RIGHT: A reader pollster rebuts the notion that this year, the polls failed to predict what was going on. They predicted it well, but people like the editors of the New York Times refused to believe them. He also rebuts the notion that polls are getting less reliable, because of cellphones, caller i.d. and so on. Over to my correspondent:

I counted up the margin of victory for all Senate elections from 1992 to 1996, and then looked at how far off the polls were in projecting those margins. Then I looked at this year. (I used the polls listed in Hotline in both instances and only looked at polls conducted the final three weeks of the campaign.) Here’s what I found: from 1992-1996, 21 percent of polls missed the margin of victory by 10 points or more. In 2002, 16 percent of polls missed the margin of victory by 10 points or more. From 1992-1996, 55 percent of polls missed the margin of victory by five points or more. In 2002, 43 percent of polls missed the margin of victory by five points or more.

So the polls this year were actually more accurate than in the past.

THE WIN WAS BIG: And in case you’re impressed by an apparent 53-47 split, check out the UPI tally of votes cast for either Dems or Republicans. Of those votes, the GOP won by 4.4 points in all Senate races and by 5.6 points in gubernatorial races. Of all votes cast, the GOP won 51.6 percent, compared to 45 percent for the Democrats – a 6.6 percent lead. That’s bigger than Clinton’s margin in 1992 and bigger than the Democrats’ victory in the House in 1992 (which netted them a majority of 82). Take out the gerrymandering, have competitive districts across the country, and the real sweep would have been huge – only a smidgen less than the Gingrich revolution in 1994.

This one has to be read to be believed. The military, which is having severe shortages of personnel who speak Arabic, is actually firing Arabic speakers because they’re gay. The New Republic will have a story online soon about this scandal. I’ll link as soon as it’s up. Geitner Simmons provides the crucial and damning background to this insanity. The anti-gay policy makes no sense anyway. No other civilized country engages in such bigotry. No other country at war would put discrimination against its own people above the need to fight a deadly enemy. This targeting of Arabic speakers is, of course, only the tiniest part of it. Each year, the military throws away hundreds of good servicemembers, wastes millions of dollars, to pursue a policy that is not only unconscionable as a moral issue, but dumb as a practical matter. And now they’re jeopardizing the war on terror as well. When will what Dick Cheney once described as an “old chestnut” of a policy finally be abolished? UPDATE: Here’s a link to the TNR story. It’s superb. Read it and weep about our misplaced priorities.

LEFTWING DEPRAVITY WATCH: Check out Steve Bell’s vile cartoon in the Guardian yesterday. It says everything you need to know about why the Left has become so rancid and bitter.

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “Give the Republicans credit. They know what they stand for. Tax cuts. Guns. Bombs. Oil. Big business. Old boy networks. Privatization. Plundering the earth. Pillorying and padlocking the poor. Party-line votes.” – Derrick Jackson, the Boston Globe.

THE PRODUCTIVITY NEWS: “For the 12-month period ending in September, productivity grew at a rate of 5.3 percent, the strongest gain since the third quarter of 1983.” – the New York Times today. This must be a good sign for the long-term health of the economy.

NEWSWEEK ON THE WAR: At Yale, senior editor Michael Hirsh gives an insight into the way Newsweek is covering world events. “The war policy is a crock,” Hirsh opined. “This is a hugely risky operation for potential gains that probably won’t justify the risk.” Just passing on information about the views of those who control the mainstream news.

Early to bed so the Dish will appear later today. I have to get up roughly at the time I usually go to bed for C-SPAN. Don’t blame me if I look like death. Check in later for the usual.

SLUM CLEARANCE: More solid liberal arguments for ridding the world of Saddam.

The president has played the post-election game extremely well too. Bush was wise to stay low-key yesterday and give a press conference today that focussed on Iraq and Homeland Security. As I argued this morning, his main priority is the war on terror, which must include the disarmament of Iraq. I couldn’t think opf a smarter message than: “The election may be over but the terrorist threat is still real.” It’s not just good politics; it’s right. It looks as if we may have a workable U.N. resolution by Monday at the latest. Then we need to mobilize for war, ready for action within days of any Iraqi quibbles about inspection. I’m still leery of sending inspectors, but U.N. support is helpful in our campaign for greater international security. Bush gets this. And he gets the need for caution and prudence in the wake of this victory. My heart sinks at the thought of Trent Lott’s political instincts guiding the new majority. But so far, at least, it looks as if this result will give Bush essential control. And his instincts remain sound. Phew.

HEADS UP AGAIN: Tomorrow, from 8 am till 10 am EST, Hitchens and I will be taking calls on C-SPAN.

The totals are in. I think we can finally say that the election of 2000 is now over.

I’ve been reading with some disbelief all sorts of proposals for president Bush’s next two years. Here’s the only one that matters: win the war. If we can rid the world of Saddam Hussein and see Iran’s dictators pushed to the brink, then an entirely new set of circumstances prevails in the world. What the president needs to focus on now is disarming Saddam. This election wasn’t a mandate for tax simplification or welfare reform (however important those two things are). It was a vote of support for victory. If Bush lets Saddam wriggle through the gaping U.N. net, and lets al Qaeda off the hook, then he will deserve to be defeated in 2004. Getting the war right is paramount. Everything else will follow. Nothing else, in comparison, matters.

CNN’S “COUP D’ETAT”: “Around 1:30 a.m., White House spokesman Ari Fleischer announced that for the first time in U.S. history the president’s party gained seats in the House during the administration’s first midterm elections. He also noted that the same Republican coup d’etat was accomplished in the Senate.” – John King, CNN. But Saddam Hussein was elected.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “Even as the bullets ricochet, it should be said there are some problems with this approach to international peacekeeping. For a start, it is illegal. The Yemen attack violates basic rules of sovereignty. It is an act of war where no war has been declared.” – the Guardian on the U.S.’s successful attack on al Qaeda leadership in the Yemen. No war has been declared? Were they alive on September 11, 2001?

THEY EVEN SPIN THE MAPS: Check out this New York Times map of the Governor’s races. It looks pretty good for the Democrats. But, as a liberal reader regrets to point out, there are five – count them – five errors. Georgia is simply left white, as if there had been no gubernatorial election. And Vermont, Maryland, New Hampshire and Minnesota are all colored as “wins” for the GOP, when they should be colored as “gains.” Now most of this is obviously just sloppy, as you’d expect from the Times these days. But it’s also true that every single error makes the Democrats look as if they did better than they did. Somehow, I’m not surprised. (I’ve got a saved copy of the map if they fix it by the time you read this.)

BOB SOLDIERS ON: Poor Bob Herbert. His column degenerates today into a final whimsical lament for the days of Lyndon Johnson. Before that, he argued that the Democrats need to be less timid, more full of hell-fire, less careful, or they face more losses. Then his first example of excessive timidity is the Wellstone rally. Huh?

As an after-note, I didn’t do too badly in the predictions stakes. I got 11 out of 13 right. I was too optimistic about Bowles and Shaheen.

THE BEST LEFT POST-MORTEM: For honesty, clarity and smarts, the award goes to the Nation’s David Corn.

Can anyone doubt that now? Bush would have a friendly governor in California in 2004 if the California Republican party hadn’t allowed itself to become captive to the hard right. The Dems are not the only people to learn lessons from last night. The Republicans need to internalize the fact that religious right conservatism, especially in places like California, is poison.

“Only the filibuster now stands between the nation and the unchecked rule of the most rightwing, xenophobic and belligerent administration in the nation’s history.” – Harold Meyerson, the American Prospect. They still don’t get it, do they?