The Dish

The power of you guys – Hitch’s book just went from # 1,074 to # 8. In less than 15 hours.
UPDATE: The book has now reached # 3 on Amazon.

Ipsos-Reid finds the Congressional race a dead heat.

Dick Morris also weighs in this morning on the Times poll. In his words: “The phrasing of the questions is so slanted and biased that it amounts to journalistic “push polling” – the use of polling to generate pre-determined answers to vindicate a specific point of view. It was just such polling that led the Democratic Party astray over the summer and played an important role in catalyzing their criticism of Bush over Iraq.”

OVERNIGHT: The Hitchens book on Orwell, which is our current Book Club pick, just leaped from 1,074 on Amazon to 76 overnight. Don’t forget to get the book, “Why Orwell Matters“, and join the conversation later this month.
UPDATE: The book has now reached # 9 on Amazon.

Check out David Tell’s devastating review of the New York Times’ Sunday poll, purporting to argue that most Americans believe the economy should be a more urgent priority than Iraq. Tell points out that there is simply no evidence for this in the Times’ own poll. Polls are always the most direct measurement of Howell Raines’ disinformation campaign against the Bush administration, because he can rig the questions, spin the analysis and bury the data, in the hopes that no one will bother checking. The result, this time, in Tell’s words, is “an outright fraud, a falsehood, a work of fiction.” He’s right. Check it out.

RAINES WATCH II: Why didn’t the networks carry president Bush’s critical speech last night? Because the White House didn’t ask them politely enough! That’s this morning’s spin from the Times. I guess Fox was just sucking up. Herewith an almost classic insight into how, whatever happens, in the mind of the New York Times, it’s always Bush’s fault.

It seems to me that the critical part of President Bush’s elegantly constructed speech last night was his rebuttal of the only credible and responsible line of criticism from the Democrats:

Some have argued that confronting the threat from Iraq could detract from the war against terror. To the contrary, confronting the threat posed by Iraq is crucial to winning the war on terror … Terror cells and outlaw regimes building weapons of mass destruction are different faces of the same evil. Our security requires that we confront both. And the United States military is capable of confronting both.

As brief as this discussion is, it’s persuasive. When anti-war Democrats argue that we cannot “focus” on both Al Qaeda and Iraq, they make no sense at all. Philosophically, pre-empting terrorists from getting weapons of mass destruction must logically include preventing the allies of terrorists from harboring such weapons. And practically, I’ve yet to read a single, credible military account of why we cannot both disarm and remove Saddam and keep up the pressure on Al Qaeda at home and abroad. The whole “focus” issue is as fake as the whole “delay” issue, as Charles Krauthammer deftly pointed out yesterday. If Saddam has weapons, if he won’t give them up, and if such weapons are a threat to the region and to the U.S., what possible reason is there for delaying? These “arguments” aren’t really arguments, of course; they’re desperate rhetorical roadblocks thrown up by some Democrats terrified to face their responsibilities in a time of war. The last phony anti-war argument was that President Bush had yet to “make the case” for war against Iraq, as if grown-ups didn’t have the capacity to make their own minds up on the issue without constant guidance from the commander-in-chief. But that surely must now be in tatters as a point, since the president has made speech after speech in the last year clearly laying out the rationale for the war on terror, a rationale that has always included defanging Saddam. And now he’s gone and laid it out in full, at length and in detail in prime time. And what did the networks do, the same networks that routinely feature talking heads bravely pronouncing that the president hasn’t made his case? They ignored him. Of course they did. What losers and sophists.

SULLIVAN, HITCHENS AND ORWELL: Well, in the end we couldn’t resist. I’ve just finished reading Christopher Hitchens’ lively, witty and oddly moving defense of the life and work of George Orwell: “Why Orwell Matters.” If you’ve read all of Orwell (and I’m getting close) or have barely read him at all, the book is both a wonderful introduction to the man’s work and a stimulating overview of all the issues he raises. Orwell’s ability to confound both right and left, his tenacious honesty, his pellucid prose, his power of moral reasoning, his ability to distinguish between an argument and a feeling – all these come through loud and clear in this little book. Buy it and read it and then join Hitch and me for a weeklong conversation at the end of the month about what Orwell means, and why his example still shines, perhaps more brightly than ever, in an era of war and ideological conflict. Buying the book through this site also helps support us financially, so enrich your mind and support this blog by getting the book today. Click here to purchase.

AIDS SCAM, CTD: We’ve already seen how the attack on the pharmaceutical companies’ intellectual property rights has led to a stark deceleration in HIV research. Now comes news of yet another unintended consequence of well-meant anti-AIDS measures. When you give large numbers of anti-HIV meds to Africa, where most cannot be dispensed effectively in the first place, it’s not surprising that others might find a better use for the pills. Why not re-export them to Europe for a tidy profit? That’s what’s happening now, as this story indicates. So we’ve hurt AIDS research, barely helped any significant numbers of Africans, and now given criminals a whole new career in drug trafficking. Good work, no?

McDERMOTT WATCH: Here he is, marching in front of a poster that has the word “terrorist” plastered over President Bush’s face. Nice to know that his kowtowing to Baghdad’s tyranny is also reflected in a complete moral equivalence about the difference between Saddam and Bush. This is one face of the anti-war left. And it’s depraved.

A BLUE-PRINT: One of the clearest plans for post-Saddam Iraq I’ve yet read.

MORE ISLAMIST DEATH-THREATS: Yet another person daring to criticize the backwardness of Islamism with regard to women, gays and individual freedom in general has received a death-threat. This time it’s a Somali immigrant woman in Holland, and she has just had to go into hiding to protect herself. “This is nothing new – just think of Salman Rushdie,” Secil Arda, the head of a Turkish women’s group, told Radio Netherlands. “Some people have the courage to say something, to give their opinion. I consider our fight a milestone in the process of emancipation. Without this quest we would never have change.” After Fortuyn’s murder and Delanoe’s stabbing, this takes courage. Why aren’t these brave liberals more firmly defended by the Western left? I guess we know the answer to that, don’t we?

ANTI-CATHOLICISM WATCH:“Sexual abuse is disgusting, but it’s not as harmful as the grievous mental harm of bringing children up Catholic in the first place.” – Richard Dawkins, as transcribed in the Dubliner.

ROTH AND NARCISSISM: A reader nails it:

“I finally stayed several months in New York, where I kept a studio. For me New York had become interesting again because it was a town in crisis, particularly in the weeks that followed when everyone was expecting another attack. It was a strange time and the first time for years that New York interested me.” – Philip Roth. Who is this guy to accuse ANYONE of narcissism? I just plowed through “The Human Stain”, which was a piece of crap. This windbag can’t stomach people singing “God Bless America” in honor of firemen and cops who gave their lives in the 9/11 attack (which, mercifully, didn’t interrupt Roth’s swim time), but he’ll devote an entire novel to justifying Clinton’s tryst with Monica Lewinsky?

Ah, yes. Roth reminds me of all those New Yorkers who spent the summer of 2001 lamenting that the city had
lost its “edge” under Giuliani. Well, I’m just sorry 3,000 people had to die for Roth to find the city “interesting” again.

AH, THOSE STEREOTYPES: At the Eagle in New York City on Saturday night, I bumped into a man I’d previously met in Provincetown and came to ask him what he’s doing these days. He laughed. “Well, actually, I’m producing a new series for PBS on the history of the Broadway musical.?Can anyone beat that?

MEA MAXIMA CULPA: For the record, there have been three, not two, presidents elected without a plurality of the popular vote in American history: John Quincy Adams, with a mere 31 percent of the popular vote in 1824, Hayes with 48 percent in 1876 and Harrison’s 1888 squeaker with 47.8 percent. Thanks for your relentless and voluminous capacity for fact-checking my ass.

Mea culpa on the sentence in my latest column for the Sunday Times that reads as follows: “[Bush is] the first president who never had a majority of the popular vote.” A lot of presidents have not had a majority. What I meant was that he didn’t win a “plurality,” something that has happened twice before in America. I’m sure most of you know what I meant, but for the rest, my apologies.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think I coined that phrase. Good to see the meme is beginning to propagate:

South Park Republicans are true Republicans, though they do not look or act like Pat Robertson. They believe in liberty, not conformity. They can enjoy watching The Sopranos even if they are New Jersey Italians. They can appreciate the tight abs of Britney Spears or Brad Pitt without worrying about the nation’s decaying moral fiber. They strongly believe in liberty, personal responsibility, limited government, and free markets. However, they do not live by the edicts of political correctness.

This kid is onto something.

RIGHT-WING ENVY WATCH: Methinks Tom Tomorrow is jealous.

They won’t hear the New Jersey case and they won’t say why. Great call. Now the Republicans need to get on with the real task of persuading the voters to back Forrester. Not too hard a task.

KRUGMAN’S SECOND SCREW-UP: Having published an email as proof that Army secretary Thomas White was a “corporate evildoer,” without any firm evidence that the email was genuine, Paul Krugman has now gone one step further. He has violated the confidentiality of his source:

[A]lthough Leopold provided the e-mail on condition that his source, the former Enron executive, not be named, the Times published the name Friday after Krugman passed a copy to a colleague with the name only partially scratched out. “I am sick to my stomach … I have screwed up very seriously,” Krugman told Leopold by e-mail. Says Leopold: “The Times broke its promise to me… I felt like the Times news division sold me out.”

How many basic rules of journalism can you break in one story?

The Times does its best to spin their poll this morning. But the critical number is the 67 percent support for war against Iraq, despite the intense and relentless campaign by the elites at the Times and elsewhere to turn that number around. They have failed. Now they will try to change the subject.

EDWARDS VS. GORE: A smarter tack from the smarter candidate. Edwards’ criticism of Bush’s foreign policy strikes me as fatuous stuff. But by supporting the Iraq war so intently, Edwards has carved out a position of a far more credibility than the increasingly bitter Gore. And so his speech today should be seen less as a serious attack on Bush than as a statement that he is the true inheritor of Gore’s previous centrism in the Democratic Party. He’s wily, this guy. And flagging the speech to the Washington Post beforehand is worthy of Blair.

The mayor of Paris was the target of a murder attempt over the weekend. His assailant was a disgruntled young man, who was also a Muslim who objected to homosexuality. After the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, it seems that Europe’s gay leaders are becoming highly vulnerable to public violence. Fortuyn, of course, was murdered by a far leftist; mayor Delanoe was targeted by an anti-gay Muslim. But I wonder if these events will in any way cause the gay rights movement in Europe and here to re-think its proximity to the left and to multi-culturalism. It’s still almost taboo for gay people to publicly criticize Islamic hostility to homosexuals; in fact, it’s far more common to hear critics of Islamism being decried as racists among gay activists than to hear Islamic bigots being criticized for homophobia. Perhaps that will now begin to change, as it should. Can you imagine the fuss if an evangelical or fundamentalist Christian had tried to kill an openly gay politician? So why the double standard for the other religious right – among Muslims?

2000 FOR EVER?: With a knife-edge election, appeals to the Supreme Court, and Al Gore in yet more costume changes, has the 2000 election ever really stopped? Here’s my take.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “Language is always a lie; above all, public language. McCarthy used a certain language to hunt communists. That which was used against Clinton is a bit more sophisticated. As for Bush, it’s ventriloquists who make him speak.” – Philip Roth, speaking to the Daily Telegraph.

USEFUL IDIOT WATCH: “I left the lunch impressed with Fidel. He seems to me like a kind man who is more amiable and friendly than most politicians.” Yep, this twelve year-old could one day grow up to be another Nick Kristof.

THE UNECONOMIC BLOGOSPHERE: This little piece struck me as extremely persuasive – in fact, so persuasive I wish I hadn’t read it. It’s about how the Internet, for all its joys, has yet to show how it can possibly make money:

This destruction of value is what makes weblogs so important. We want a world where global publishing is effortless. We want a world where you don’t have to ask for help or permission to write out loud. However, when we get that world we face the paradox of oxygen and gold. Oxygen is more vital to human life than gold, but because air is abundant, oxygen is free. Weblogs make writing as abundant as air, with the same effect on price. Prior to the web, people paid for most of the words they read. Now, for a large and growing number of us, most of the words we read cost us nothing.

Read the entire article – at no cost.

MRS DUISENBERG, CTD: The wife of the European Central Bank president, Wim Duisenberg, and a passionate defender of the Palestinians, made a “six million” joke on radio. I noted her explosion last week. She’s now being sued for it. More evidence of what is wrong with Europe: a society in which anti-Semitism is increasingly common and an illiberal polity that makes its expression illegal.

THE MULLAHS’ NIGHTMARE: A report from the other Iran:

Down in the basement, a man with an uncanny resemblance to the Sgt Pepper period John Lennon is recording a CD. With him, in the hot, stuffy studio, is a bassist dressed in black, a drummer and a 10-year-old Afghan boy playing small tambour drums. Behind the glass, a sound engineer is flicking switches and twiddling knobs. A girl in jeans, T-shirt and trainers is slouched on a sofa with a young man. Two other girls are watching the session. Not having visited the underground before, I am taken aback. The girls are not wearing the full, officially decreed women’s dress code. This includes covering one’s hair for fear of “stimulating” any man who might see it.

And how much sooner will this revolution happen if we remove Saddam’s tyranny first.

THE SHIFTING CONSENSUS: One reason, I think, that president Bush hasn’t been blamed as badly as he might for the faltering economy is that most people don’t think his administration caused the recession; and that few Democrats have really offered a major alternative to his current policy. That’s the catch with Paul Krugman’s constant complaint about the tax cut: wouldn’t revoking it hurt weakened demand even further? The Washington Post’s editorial on Al Gore’s latest piece of opportunism is a straw in the wind, I think. Here’s the key section:

But President Bush’s main economic policy — the large tax cut of last year — was not responsible for any of the current damage. Indeed, given the twin shocks of 9/11 and the post-Enron stock market decline, the short-term stimulus created by the tax cuts has turned out to be fortuitously well timed. To be sure, parts of the tax cut that have yet to be implemented, especially the repeal of the estate tax, are unaffordable and ought to be repealed. It’s also true that the administration’s response to Latin America’s financial woes has been confused. But to blame the weak American economy on Mr. Bush is nonsense.

Seems irrefutable to me. And I agree with the Post about the estate tax.