The Dish

Anthony Lane writes like a dream and reviews intelligently. I point out this last paragraph of his latest review merely to observe the heterosexism of many alleged opponents of pedophilia. Lane is reviewing the hot new movie, “Tadpole,” in which a fifteen-year old boy is molested by older women. The law describes this as criminal conduct on the part of the women involved – one of them even, in Lane’s words, “pimps” the youth to her friends. But the New Yorker regards this not only as unremarkable, but a hugely lucky break for the kid. The end of the movie suggests that the teenager eventually settles for sex partners roughly his own age, after going trhough a pedophile phase. Lane complains:

The implication is that when [Bebe] Neuwirth, wearing a leather skirt and a fur coat, guides you back to her apartment, gives you a massage, and spirits you into her bed, the whole thing is just a phase, something you have to go through and grow out of, when it is, of course, as good as Oscar’s life will ever get. Honestly, kids today: no respect.

Now I think a commonsensical view of pedophilia will make a distinction between a horny fifteen year old boy and a mature women and other abusive relationships. But then I’m not Mary Eberstadt or Rod Dreher. Here is pedophilia chic in an almost classic formulation in a movie with big stars in it, reviewed in the New Yorker. And the social conservatives are utterly mute. Do you think they would be quiet if this were a same-sex relationship? Tells you something about their real agenda, doesn’t it?

“A LEGACY OF MISERY”: That’s how the New York Times describes the results of the war to liberate Afghanistan. I keep thinking it can’t get any worse, and then it does.

MURDERING FREE WOMEN: I finally read Sarah Lyall’s moving account in the Times of the disgusting murder of a young Kurdish immigrant to Sweden by her own father. Talk about a clash of civilizations. The young woman simply wanted to choose whom she married. Her father and brother regarded her as “a whore” for doing so, and repeatedly beat her, stalked her and eventually murdered her. In a classic act of appeasement, a Kurdish member of parliament had tried to broker a deal between this young woman and her father, in which the woman would stay out of the national media in return for her father’s leaving her alone. Like most attempts to appease thugs, this one failed. I notice that religion is unmentioned in Lyall’s account, and the story sadly bends over backwards to be p.c. Is not the fact that this woman was killed by a strict Muslim relevant? Or is that basic fact deemed to inflammatory for the Times’ readers? I love this summary of the issues involved:

[I]t was this very desire for independence that provoked her father into a rage so great that he killed her in January, turning her into the tragic emblem of a European society’s failure to bridge the gap in attitudes between its own culture and those of its newer arrivals.

This strikes me as a euphemism. The fundamentalist Islamic attitude toward women is barbaric. Pim Fortuyn was right that immigrants who treat women like dirt should indeed have no place in a Western country. If they cannot treat women, gays and other religious groups with tolerance, they should stay in the cultural backwaters where they belong.

IT’S WORSE IN NORWAY: Check out Bruce Bawer’s sobering account of unassimilable Islamic fundamentalism in Europe. Here’s a paragraph that stopped me in my tracks:

In September 2001 (only five days, in fact, before the destruction of the World Trade Center), the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet reported that 65 percent of rapes of Norwegian women were performed by “non-Western” immigrants-a category that, in Norway, consists mostly of Muslims. The article quoted a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo (who was described as having “lived for many years in Muslim countries”) as saying that “Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes” because Muslim men found their manner of dress provocative. One reason for the high number of rapes by Muslims, explained the professor, was that in their native countries “rape is scarcely punished,” since Muslims “believe that it is women who are responsible for rape.” The professor’s conclusion was not that Muslim men living in the West needed to adjust to Western norms, but the exact opposite: “Norwegian women must realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.”

And the only people, according to our media, who dissent from this are extreme right-wingers. Why not call them what they really are: liberals?

POSTMODERNISM MAKES YOU HUNGRY: A new angle from the Onion.

THE DEMS AND THE HANGOVER: As usual, Mike Crowley delivers the goods on Congressional maneuverings on the market.

THE GREENSPAN BUBBLE?: This short piece detailing how the Fed badly handled interest rates in 1998 and 1999 helped me get a better handle on our current hang-over. Worth a look.

BACKLASH CENTRAL: I thought awarding Bill McGowan a National Press Award for tackling the tough issue of “diversity” in the newsroom would prompt a protest from the usual suspects. Lo and behold, it has.

THE HOOTERS DEFENSE: And I thought this tactic would only work in a gay bar.

JUDIS’ PRESCIENCE: “When people say Bill Clinton will go down as a great president because of his record on the economy, they mean two different things. First, they mean that Clinton’s economic policies have contributed to an unusually prosperous eight years. By and large, that’s true. Second, they mean that his economic team – including Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, and Alan Greenspan – developed an enduring formula for successful economic management. By and large, that’s nonsense. In fiscal policy, international economic policy, and monetary policy, the principles with which the Clinton administration has become identified can’t solve the challenges faced by the next administration. In fact, they didn’t even solve the challenges faced by this one.” – John B. Judis, The New Republic, January 2001.

How do you write a piece about a shady deal with Enron at Citigroup without mentioning Robert Rubin? The same Rubin who placed calls to protect Enron to the Bush administration? The same Rubin who has the gall to demand a change of course in the current administration, while he presided over the bubble we’re now recovering from? We all know the Times is tight with Rubin, but this lacuna screams for further investigation. Rubin joined Citigroup in the fall of 1999. The deal was cemented orally that year, before Rubin was ensconced. But it was controversial even within the bank throughout that year, and keeping the loan off the official books would surely have required a decision at some point after the fact. Was Rubin apprised of this? Did he know about it when he contacted Treasury to ask for even more kid-glove treatment of Enron the following year? Isn’t this a no-brainer phone-call from a Times reporter? According to the Washington Post, today, “Enron would have increased its debt by $4 billion, a 40 percent hike, in 2000 alone had the company accounted for its prepaid debt, according to a congressional analysis released today.” So Rubin might have been instrumental in the Enron con? And the Times isn’t interested? Figures. But if the Times won’t tackle this, others might. Here’s a great new test for the new editor at Slate, Jake Weisberg. Jake has a fat-cat book deal with Rubin detailing Rubin’s allegedly glorious record as Treasury secretary. Let’s see if Slate will take on the architect of the bubble. Why doesn’t Jake commission a story pronto? I’m sure he can pass along the relevant phone numbers to an enterprising muck-raker.

Don’t miss my friend Ian Buruma’s typically astute piece dissecting the British Left’s new litmus test of being anti-Israel. Good for the Guardian for printing it. Ian’s main point is debunking the notion that boycotting Israel today is morally equivalent to boycotting apartheid South Africa. Here’s the money paragraph:

A more apt comparison with Israeli policies would be India’s war in Kashmir. There, too, the victims are mostly Muslims. There is a long history of oppression, bad faith and stupid decisions. And the scale of the violence is much worse. Far more Muslims have been killed or tortured by the Indian army than by the Israeli defence forces. Dozens of Kashmiri victims – the number of people killed in Jenin – would not even reach the news. And if you think Kashmir is brutal, what about Chechnya? But India and Russia are not litmus tests. Moral outrage against their governments is not a badge of being progressive. No one is proposing a boycott of universities in Delhi or St Petersburg. I can think of one or two reasons for these double standards, but whatever they are, I believe that they tell us more about the boycotters than about the subjects of their rage.

Aw, come on, Ian. Stop being so polite. You know what these people really are.

I made it through the Newsweek cover-story. Nothing new, except for Robert Rubin’s schadenfreude and a Begala-like quote from pseudo-populist Bob Shrum. But it does strike me that there is a real story of comparison here. What both Bushes have in common is an undemonstrative determination to correct the abuses they inherited. 41 had to deal with the soaring deficits left by Reagan. He did so calmly, bravely, suicidally. His budget deal was the foundation stone of the 1990s boom. He managed the collapse of the Soviet Union without any blood being spilled. Yes, he misjudged Gorbachev. Yes, he bungled the Iraq war end-game. But in my view, the first Bush administration is one of the most seriously under-rated of modern times: it got its biggest challenge right. The parallel with his son’s administration is obvious. 43 inherited a seriously delinquent anti-terrorism policy, in which his predecessor’s feckless national security apparatus had left the United States vulnerable to the worst slaughter of American citizens in history. W didn’t do enough immediately to reectify this, but he has performed superbly since on the matter. But 43 also inherited what I think we should start calling the Rubin Bubble. It was bursting before W took office and has continued ever since. It may take more time to recover from it, and Bush, like his father, may well suffer politically from the consequences. But 43’s caution in not grasping immediate Gephardt-style measures will be judged more favorably by history than by instapundits; as will the tax cut, the one firewall against a massive new expansion of government. If this winter’s war against Iraq succeeds, 43 will enter a re-election cycle with a growing economy and a safer world as his legacy. That wasn’t enough for his dad, but this time the timing’s better. More to the point, if W runs again with a Democratic Congress, he may be paradoxically harder to beat. Triangulation and all that.

BUT THE DEMS MAY STILL LOSE: The Ipsos/Reid-Cook Report on voters finds only marginal change in voting intentions after the last few weeks of bad market news. College-educated women and non-college edcuated men have moved toward the Democrats, making it a statistical tie in voting intentions in the fall. But among likely voters, Republicans still lead 48 – 40 percent. That’s striking.

TIPTOEING THROUGH “TULIP”: “I know much of this is probably projection on my part. At the same time, what Dusty has taught me in our three and a half years together is that the relationship between humans and animals is a real and sacred one. And the reason I’m such a champion of this little dog book is because of the sheer delicacy and subtlety with which Ackerley understands and expresses this. What he achieves is not an anthropomorphic sentimentality. He combines an admirable refusal to condescend to dogs or to engage in facile sentiment about pets with a deep attempt to see the world from their point of view. What he sees is what my mother has always shown with regard to children: he sees their dignity.” – The Book Club discussion of “My Dog Tulip,” continues on the Book Club page.

RACIALISM IN LEFTIST HELL: a look at this website detailing the Rent Board Commission in San Francisco. Everyone not only has a name but a race. One guy who’s “Caucasian” also gets the “Gay” label. I guess to these leftist-racialists, that other identifier makes him more palatable. Do these people realize how all this racial identifiers and categories make them look more and more like apartheid South Africa?

RAINES WATCH: Amazing one-two punch against the Times’ much vaunted cover-story on Sunday claiming vast numbers of civilian casualties in Afghanistan. It turns out they’re relying on a notorious leftist and dubious numbers. James Taranto and Michael Moynihan’s Politburo nail it. How many more ideologically-driven, factually challenged headlines do we have to read in the paper of record?

THE CASE FOR GLOOM: Steven Roach writes a depressing but interesting case for the imminence of a double-dip recession. He blames much of the current crash on Greenspan:

In my opinion, the Fed squandered the opportunity to pop the equity bubble in late 1996 and early 1997. Back then, an “irrationally exuberant” equity bubble was suddenly rationalized by a Fed that embraced the New Economy with open arms. Today’s script seems hauntingly familiar. An overly extended housing cycle is now being legitimized as a sustainable source of economic expansion. From bubble to bubble — there seems to be no stopping the follies and perils of asset- and debt-driven economic growth.

Maybe we should call it the Rubin-Greenspan Bubble. For more bearish assessments, check out this site. I don’t buy a lot of it, but I was far too sanguine about this market in years gone by, so give the bears their say.

“What is so unthinkable about the UN, major aid-giving countries, or NGOs negotiating bulk purchases with the drug companies? Why are the only choices paying current market rates where prices are based on relatively small quantities (compared to, say, Lipitor or Zoloft), or confiscation? Surely a long-term commitment to millions of doses, plus the opportunity for good PR, would lead drug makers to review their pricing and sharpen their pencils. And, what about favorable tax treatment such as allowing accelerated depreciation or even expensing for the R&D costs of drugs that are developed/approved for treatment of HIV? And marrying tax preference to price negotiations?” This, a defense of Katie Couric and the Economist, a comparison between Bill Clinton and Calvin Coolidge, and a first-hand report from liberalized British pot laws – all on the best Letters Page on the web, edited by Reihan Salam.

TALKIN’ ‘BOUT MISCEGENATION: Why sex is the answer to America’s racial problems.

TULIP AND CAMILLE: I should apologize for delaying the discussion of “My Dog Tulip.” We’ll start tomorrow. Also among coming attractions: next Monday, we’ll be starting a new, irregular feature. I’m calling it an IMterview. Every now and again, I’ll interview a figure from the arts, literature, politics or whatever who just strikes me as interesting. I’ll do so electronically by instant messaging or emailing over a period of a week. Then I’ll post the interview in a couple of sections. Our first interviewee will be Camille Paglia, with whom I’ll be chatting privately online all week. If you have an oddball question – not what she’s been up to, but perhaps a subject you’d like her to expand upon or talk about, let me know, and I’ll finish the interview with five reader questions. Put the words ‘Camille Interview” in the subject line of the email. And check in next Monday for the first installment.

It’s the big question. The weirdness of the current economic situation, however, makes it tough to answer. As Alan Blinder pointed out in the New York Times yesterday – in a rare moment of fair commentary on that page – the market may be crashing but the economy is doing fine. When the economy could be growing by around 3 percent this year, real estate booming and unemployment falling, it’s hard to see a huge political backlash in the wings. And yet the stock market crash inevitably freaks out many ordinary investors, especially those approaching retirement. Whom will they blame? It seems to me the logical object of blame are those executives who engaged in real corruption. The other justified blame-objects are those people who hyped the bubble, or presided over it (Greenspan, Clinton). My liberal friends think that the public will nevertheless blame Bush and the GOP. But why? It doesn’t matter, they claim. Bush is guilty by association – he’s a classic example of the crony capitalism that this burst bubble has helped expose. Besides, any business scandal will hurt the Republicans, almost by definition. Even David Brooks says the dearth of Republican domestic policy initiatives gives a key edge to the Democrats this fall. I guess all these people may be right. Maybe people are that irrational. It’s about as unfair a rap as the first Bush got, but look what happened to him. The alternative scenario goes something like this: the worst is probably over. The market may endure some more losses but is over-sold and will recover somewhat this fall. Consumers haven’t been spooked so far and they’ll hang in there. Bush will sign a tough, probably overly-tough, law to counter some of the abuses. Another terrorist strike will focus people again on the real menace. Democrats may overplay their hand by whipping up a dumb anti-business populism that will undo some of the good things Clinton achieved by aligning his party with wealth-creation in the 1990s. There’s the wild card of some unknown scandal, such as the one Chris Caldwell is worried about. But barring that, I’m not sure which scenario is more plausible. I’d put it at 50-50, which means the difference will be made by the political skill of both sides. Gephardt or Bush? Who would you pick?

IS OSAMA DEAD? This somewhat stunning essay from an Arab News staffer says so. The reasons given for the death of Islamism in the Arab world are also eye-opening. Could we be winning this propaganda war?

TWO NEARLY-PRIESTS: We’ve heard so much hyper-ventilation on the matter of gay and straight priests that I found Hanna Rosin’s account of two seminarians extremely insightful. It’s complicated. But what seems to me essential in the current Church is a frank and open discussion of homosexuality – in the priesthood and outside of it. But that discussion is what the older generation now running the hierarchy – dominated by heterosexual bishops who are digusted by homosexuality and closeted gay bishops who are terrified of it – canot entertain. This generation cannot muster even the vocabulary to discuss one of the gravest issues in the Church today. And if they can’t even talk about it, how can they resolve it? I think we just have to wait for this generation to die off. And pray that, by that time, the Church won’t be dead as well.

OKAY, I LIED: I can’t resist citing this piece by Donald Luskin from SmartMoney.com. Alas, it’s only available to subscribers, but someone sent me the full text. It compares this editorial from the New York Times about Coke’s laudable decision to count stock options as expenses in its income statement with the Times’ own practices. The Times huffed editorially:

With President Bush digging in his heels in defense of accounting tricks that hide the true cost of stock options, and Congress equivocating under intense corporate lobbying… [i]t is a bold commitment to reform, and one that, particularly given the meltdown in the stock market in recent days, the White House and Congress should take to heart.

There was no mention that the Times is, allegedly like president Bush, “digging in its heels” to avoid doing what it praises Coke for doing. But the impact on the Times’ bottom line is bigger than that on Coke’s. As Luskin shows,

Based on the pro forma disclosures buried reported deep in the footnotes to their financial statements, we see that reporting options expenses would have reduced reported net [New York Times Company] income by 7.6% on average from 1995 through 2001. By way of comparison, things go better with Coke. The Coca Cola Company’s reported net income would only have been reduced by 6.3% on average over the same period.

Moreover, the Times, in sharp contrast with its Rainesian populism, restricts these options to 900 elite managers out of over 12,000 employees. The Times’ defense is that its editorial and business departments are entirely separate and that hypocrisy is therefore not a valid charge. But doesn’t this smack of unbelievable media arrogance? Does the Times really believe that its writers and editors are so morally and ethically pristine that they are actually immune to any criticism based on the discrepancies between what the Times says and what it does? Actually, I think the Times does think that. And this arrogance is a major reason behind their accumulating lies, distortions and propaganda.

OKAY, I LIED II: John Ellis says he’d short the New York Times. The worst part of it is: The Times-gurus think their “ceaseless and moronic Bush-bashing” is brilliant journalism. And they cite their hand-picked Pulitzer judges as proof! The Mickster sees that front page double-barrelled piece on AOL-Time-Warner on Saturday as more Raines willy-waving. Weirdly, some of the gazillion emails telling me not to give up on the Times-bashing came from within the paper. Hmmmm.

MARY EBERSTADT, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Funny how a movie celebrating a 15-year old’s affairs with older women hasn’t yet evinced a squeak from the usual hysterics. The trouble for the social conservatives at the Weekly Standard and National Review is that the movie doesn’t really relate to their real agenda. If you can’t use pedophilia to resurrect ancient smears about gay people, why worry?

Very interesting post on Josh Marshall’s site from Josh Green. Are the Democrats already blowing their attempt to pin market collapse on Enron-connected Bushies? Green says – disappointedly – yes.

“We all knew the poll was coming. At regular intervals since he took over the New York Times, hyper-liberal new executive editor Howell Raines has tried to get traction on a president he despises. Usually, this is done by crude front-page editorializing – most memorably R.W. Apple’s front-page prediction of the Afghan campaign as a “quagmire,” or the saturation Enron-coverage a few months back. But polls are particularly tempting methods for advancing naked political agendas under the guise of objective journalism. They work well because a poll gives a patina of empiricism to the prejudices of its architects …” See the rest of my latest piece, this time for the New York Sun, here. And yes, I know. I’m gonna lay off the Times for a while. Enough’s enough.

I knew there was some solution to the competing claims about Alaskan temperatures. How could one body say that annual average temperatures had risen 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the last thirty years and another say it’s merely 2.7 degrees? The answer lies in this chart. The number used by the Times and now the Washington Post is not the last thirty years. It’s based on a period between 1966 and 1995. By picking 1966 as the base-point, you can get that result. But 1966 is a freak year. It’s one of the four coldest years in Alaska this century. And 1995 was one of the hottest. The Times cherry-picked two data points and argued an average trend between the two of them – about as dishonest a piece of statistical fiddling as you’ll find. Perhaps the original 7 degree number was from an even more strained attempt to skew the data. If you pick 1956 and 1981, for example, you could argue an annual average temperature rise of 11 degrees Fahrenheit! But if you’re an honest statistician, you’ll look at a seasonally corrected average. From that, you’ll find that the temperature has risen only about 1 degree Fahrenheit in the period cited by the Times. Notice the slyness of their correction:

A front-page article on June 16 about climate change in Alaska misstated the rise in temperatures there in the last 30 years. (The error was repeated in an editorial on Monday and in the Bob Herbert column on the Op-Ed page of June 24.) According to an assessment by the University of Alaska’s Center for Global Change and Arctic System Research, the annual mean temperature has risen 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit over 30 years, not 7 degrees [my italics].

When you first read that, you tend to infer that they’re talking about the same time period. But they’re not! They’ve switched from “the last 30 years” to just “30 years.” They moved the goalposts. This is not impugn their sources, who have gone out of their way not to make the kind of sweeping claims the Times has done. In fact, the researchers the Times cite have just told the Anchorage Daily News that “the strongest warming trend has shifted from Alaska into Northern Canada and the warming trend for most of Alaska … is now about half of the 1966-1995 value, or about 2-3 degrees F.” Say after me: all the news that’s easy to distort.

POSEUR ALERT: “If there’s anything that confounds the British more than American optimism, it’s baseball, which brings together on one bright pastoral greensward those twin nineteenth-century American deliriums: industrialization and individualism. Baseball turns into fun the oppressions of industry-management, productivity, accounting, specialization, even stealing-and yet the pageant of winners and losers in this proto-corporate world also allows for goodness to be measured, made immutable, and, thanks to the eternal vigilance of statistics, kept alive. Baseball is a game-some would say a ritual-of hope.” – John Lahr, The New Yorker.

And how.