The Dish

A B grade, I’d say. He’s still awful at these stand-ups in front of the camera. The phrases were a little wooden; and no president should start talking about how federal agencies interact. On the bright side, Bush didn’t seem defensive or political (although he’s being both those things, of course); the plan seems a no-brainer to your average guy; he’s still likable and real. But this is the last Karen Hughes guided speech. If Andy Card’s deranged mutterings to Esquire are any guide to his political skills, it’s all downhill from here.

IS SHE KIDDING US? Sorry, but I found this ABC News interview mind-blowing. Mohammed Atta might as well have worn a sandwich board saying “I AM A TERRORIST WITH WILD STARING EYES AND WANT TO RENT AN AIRPLANE!!!” I guess hindsight is easy – but sometimes it’s also obvious.

RAVELSTEIN AS SEEN BY THE FRENCH: Look at this cover-jacket to Saul Bellow’s recent little gem. And, president Chirac assures us, there is no anti-Semitism in France.

ROONEY BACKS BERNIE: The first CBS major figure to confirm the obvious truth that Bernie Goldberg may be impolitic but he’s right:

LARRY KING: A couple of other things. What did you make of Bernard Goldberg’s book, critical of television liberal bias, and especially harsh on some of your folks at CBS.
ROONEY: I thought he made some very good points. There is just no question that I, among others, have a liberal bias. I mean, I’m consistently liberal in my opinions. And I think some of the — I think Dan is transparently liberal. Now, he may not like to hear me say that. I always agree with him, too. But I think he should be more careful.

Did you know Andy Rooney was a liberal?

THE WASHINGTON POST’S LIGHT TOUCH: Another sign that this paper is now a must-read – this wonderfully tart description of a certain Palestininan leader, in a news story lede no less:

Yasser Arafat, fresh from a morning nap, surveyed the wreckage of the presidential apartment in his ruined West Bank headquarters with a well-practiced look of concern.

When bias is conveyed with that deftness, you almost want more of it.

THREE CHEERS FOR LOU: More truth blurted out on CNN. I loved this comment from Lou Dobbs, who seems to have been reading the burly beer buddy, Jonah:

“The government and media for the past nine months have called this a war against terror. So have we here. But terror is not the enemy. It is what the enemy wants to achieve. So on this broadcast, we are making a change… in the interests of clarity and honesty. The enemies in this war are radical Islamists who argue all non-believers in their faith must be killed. They are called Islamists. That’s why we are abandoning the phrase, “War Against Terror”. Let us be clear. This is not a war against Muslims or Islam. It is a war against Islamists and all who support them. If ever there were a time for clarity, it is now. We hope our new policy is a step in that direction.”

Perfectly put. If we cannot name the enemy, how can we properly fight it?

OFF TO PTOWN: Headed up today with beagle to join the boyfriend on the Cape. andrewsullivan.com corporate headquarters will be relocating there for the summer as well.

I guess Mickey won’t be writing for the New York Times any time soon either. His piece today, following up on my short take on the New York Times’ left-liberal parody version of the Census story yesterday, is extremely smart, as usual. Check it out.

TAP’S “TRAFFIC”: There’s a site on the web that does rough and ready traffic rankings for sites. It’s not representative of all Internet users, doesn’t count anyone on a Mac and has lots of other biases (like weighting pageviews which discriminates against personal home-pages). So I’m skeptical of its accuracy. Nevertheless, it ranks the American Prospect at 23,581, a little lower than The New Republic at 22,840. Now, TNR claims 275,000 monthly unique visitors; while TAP claims 450,000. Fishy, no? I believe TNR. Readers, however, have come to TAP’s defense. One writes:

I, for one, find the Prospect’s claims quite plausible. Not the part about 14,000 unique visitors a day, the part about the vast majority of people who go there not wanting to go back for at least a month.

TAP has yet to respond to these questions in detail. I wonder why. Yesterday they were complaining that they couldn’t think of anything to blog about. Well, guys, here’s a suggestion.

Here’s an interview with an Israeli woman who lost both her mother and her infant daughter in a recent terrorist attack. I found the interview via the American Kaiser blog. I cannot begin to imagine the emotional impact of such an experience, but her analysis is cool and clear enough:

CNN: How do you see the future? How do you see this unfold?
Chen: I’ll tell you how I see the future: I think Israel is like the canary in the coal mine, and that’s what the Europeans – and I am sorry, I know this goes to Europe, and I said different [more positive] things to America [on CNN-USA] – but we in Israel are dying now. We are slaughtered on a daily basis, but – you’re next! You’re next, buddies. I understand that you have a lot of Muslim minorities. That’s OK, everybody should live where he wants – but you are appeasing terrorism! And you hope that if you tolerate it, and try to understand its motives, and you give it reasons, whatever they are… I ask the Europeans: Do not tolerate murder! I don’t want to use the word terrorism, because it’s banal. Do not tolerate murder, do not appease the terrorists! Not for oil, and not because you’re scared – because the more fear you show, the faster it’s going to be on your doorstep – and then, G-d help you, because you gave it legitimacy. And my baby’s blood is just as precious as any French blood — G-d help these hypocritical people…”

Doesn’t that say it all?

THE SIMPSONS ON SOCCER: A reader kindly sent me the following Simpsons transcript on soccer. More eloquent than I:

TV Announcer: The Continental Soccer Association is coming to Springfield! It’s all here–fast-kicking, low scoring, and ties? You bet!
Bart: Hey, Homer, how come you’ve never taken us to see a soccer game?
Homer: I…don’t know.
TV Announcer: You’ll see all your favorite soccer stars. Like Ariaga! Ariaga II! Bariaga! Aruglia! And Pizzoza!
Homer: Oh, I never heard of those people.
TV Announcer: And they’ll all be signing autographs!
Homer: Woo-hoo!
TV Announcer: This match will determine once and for all which nation is the greatest on earth: Mexico or Portugal!

Well, maybe not Portugal any more. They just got their asses kicked.

SIMPLY NO CIRCUMSTANCES: A terrific piece from Larry Grafstein in TNR, reminding us of the moral basics of youthful suicide bombings. They are depraved in any context. Amazing it’s necessary to write that. That’s another reason why the Israelis are right to hold Arafat responsible for the latest such slaughter of innocents. If Arafat cannot stop this violence, then he is simply irrelevant to any peaceful solution to the conflict. If he can stop this violence and won’t, ditto. All of which means that there can be no progress until Arafat is removed. His very irrelevance on the ground combined with his relevance in diplomacy guarantees that the stalemate will continue.

EUCLID UPDATE: An email from her new owners:

She is doing well. I took her to the vet for shots and they performed some routine tests and found that she had heartworms. She was treated this week and came through the treatment with no problems. The vet said that she had very hearty appetite, and told us to feed her as much as she wants to each, and to change her to a mix of canned and dry food. (I wish my doctor told me I could eat as much as I wanted.)
She has only barked twice more since you last saw her, once when she got stepped on, (sorry, Euclid) and the other in excitement to ‘Does Euclid want to go for a walk?’
She has learned a number of things: how to find the most comfortable spot on the living room couch; how to jump up on the bed from a very slippery hardwood floor; how to signal us that she wants to go outside to go potty; how to eat all the canned food from around the dry; and how to wrap two middle-aged men around her little paw.

You see. Another argument for gay adoption.

THOSE WEB STATS: Curious about the American Prospect’s alleged web supremacy, touted by none other than the Columbia Journalism Review and Eric Alterman, I emailed the estimable Nick Confessore for more details. I asked, for example, what the daily unique visitors number was for the American Prospect. He told me it varied between 10,000 and 26,000. Let’s split the difference and make it 18,000. For TAP to get 450,000 unique visitors a month, as they claim, of the 18,000 they get daily, around 14,000 of those would have to be completely new to the site each day, and not log on again in the month. That’s a simply phenomenal turn-over, and, frankly, unbelievable. My suspicion is that they are simply adding up their daily unique visitor totals for the whole month – as if none of these visitors are repeats. To give you a comparison. I get somewhere between 19,000 to 25,000 daily unique visitors on weekdays. But my monthly unique visitor total is around 240,000 – because many of those daily visitors are repeats and not “unique” for the month. A long time ago, I made a mistake and added up my dailies, which would give me a monthly total of around 650,000 – nearly three times the correct total. Some of you remember that I quickly corrected my error and apologized. Maybe The American Prospect really does attract up to 14,000 brand new visitors a day. Nick says he will ask someone with more expertise in this department than he has. Watch this space …

“To call [president Bush] a fascist is to flatter him,” – literary critic, Harold Bloom, New York Times.

Amazing prosperity. Yes, he wasn’t the only person responsible, and the Republican Congress from 1994 on helped maintain growth, but the statistics on income just released by the Census really do seem impressive. To wit:

The census numbers do indicate, however, that the prosperity of the 1990s had a broad, positive effect. Lower-income counties posted greater gains than richer ones, and the proportion of households at the low end, with less than $15,000 a year, shrunk as those people brought in more money. The nation’s 34 million people in poverty represented 12 percent of the population, a slightly smaller share than in 1990. The greatest declines were among people 65 and older, but poverty also declined for children. The poverty line for a family of four in 1999, the year measured by the census, was $16,895.

Perhaps welfare reform helped; perhaps expanding the EITC helped; doubtless declining deficits and lower interest rates and freer trade worked. But these numbers should undermine the notion that free markets and free people cannot generate wealth without immiserating the poorest. Wealth really does trickle down and up – even when a country is absorbing unprecedented numbers of poor immigrants. And Bill Clinton helped make it happen. For a look at how leftists can still spin this as failure, check out – surprise! – the New York Times version of the story. They even quote Marian Wright Edelman, trying to spin a decline in poverty as a rise.

LONG TO REIGN OVER US: When even the Guardian has to concede that on yet another day, a million patriotic Brits showed up to celebrate the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in London, then you know the monarchy’s obituary is a long, long way off. Look at this photograph in the Telegraph. When I was in London a few months back, all the chattering classes were abuzz with the notion that the Jubilee would be a huge flop. One more reason not to buy the spin of the BBC, the Guardian and the rest. Tony Blair got the national mood right, as he did when Diana died, proving once again that he is the master of the political surface: “We know that you are, without falter or hesitation, totally committed to serving us, the British people,” he said. “Whatever the vicissitudes of your own life, whatever dramas or crises are played out around you, no one ever doubts that commitment to serving Britain.” I think the British people understand that about their odd, but indispensable institution. And I’m glad for it.

RAINES WATCH: Looks like I was right about Bush and global warming. Mickey Kaus adds some persuasive nuances. This, indeed, looks like a set-up. Some enviro groups figure out a way to embarrass the president, by finding minuscule discrepancies between presidential statements last year and a bureaucratic report this year, feed it to their friends at the Times, who then run an editorial and a cover-story on the phony “news.” Rush and Drudge fall right for it. Is Raines a left-liberal ideologue, Mickey asks? I don’t think so. He’s just a big-footing Democratic partisan, who wants the Times to wound the president and wage populist or liberal campaigns. Remember the Enron poll that said the public was blaming Bush? Exactly the same scenario. There’s a theme here, surely.

SELF-PARODY WATCH: “Special Report: Zambian Copper,” – a headline from this week’s Economist.

SOCCER AND AMERICA: Yet another view about this country’s aversion to football:

It’s true – most American’s don’t like soccer. The reason? Possession. We Americans like our things….we like our possessions. And in soccer possession is fluid. It drives us crazy. Look at your basic American sports. In baseball, football, and basketball possession is so important that ‘turnovers’ (i.e. loss of possession) are considered nothing short of disastrous. They are counted by statisticians, and those deemed responsible are taken to the woodshed after the game. This reaches its most extreme in baseball. It is perhaps the only team sport where possession is fixed: a turnover in baseball is IMPOSSIBLE. Is it any wonder it’s known as the ‘American pastime’? Possession is fluid in hockey (not, mind you, an American sport), but since it’s fast and they beat the crap out of each other, speed and violence provide adequate compensation.

That would help explain the aversion to rugby as well, although they also beat the crap out of each other on rugby pitches (I have nightmares from my schooldays to prove it). Then there was this notion proferred by another red-blooded Yank:

As I strolled by a local park the other evening, I watched a group of young boys trying to keep a large ball in the air using only their feet. I asked one of the adult supervisors what was going on, and he informed me that they were having “soccer practice”. Observing this exercise a while longer, something jogged my memory. I said to myself , “Soccer practice, my ass. They’re learning how to goose step.” Did Adolf and Uncle Joe have their young socialists playing real football? Hell no!! They were teaching them how to crush freedom in Eastern Europe under the guise of soccer… Wake up America!!! First, they take away real football in Ann Arbor or Tuscaloosa and make you play games without using your hands. Next, they’ll come to confiscate your guns. And before you know it, there’s no more free press, religion or speech and you’re being marched off to the nearest feminist sports collective to get estrogen shots. Remember, it starts with soccer.

I think he’s kidding.

LADS AND SOCCER: By the way, a reader alerted me to a truly hilarious piece in the new issue of “Gear,” Bob Guccione’s lad magazine, on the subject of footer (that’s what they call it in the English north). I particularly liked the sidebar on tips for staying awake while trying to watch the World Cup:

“1) Almost all of the players have extremely hot wives… bald French goalkeeper Fabien BNarthez was married, until last year, to rainbow-haired supermodel Linda Evangelista. Think about that as you watch him flap his textured gloves and bark inaudible instructions at a teammate 500 yards away. 2) Remember that Colombian guy who scored the own-goal in the 1994 World Cup? Dude, they killed him. That’s how much this matters. It’s life or death, baby. Seriously. 3) Barthez included, every national-team goal-keeper is completely insane and liable to start dribbling the ball suicidally towards the enemy goal at any moment. 4) Someone might score.”

Gear is the first men’s magazine in a long, long time that I found positively hilarious and intelligent. It got me all the way to Philly on the Metroliner this afternoon. (In comparison, I’m sorry to say, the New York Sun was positively soporific.) Gear has a writer called Bruno Maddox who’s a real star. They even had the most honest Moby review I’ve yet read (“18 is exactly the kind of thing you want from an artist whose last album, Play, was a masterpiece: more of the same,”) and alerted me to the existence of http://www.derekandclive.com. (If you’re in any way of a sensitive dispensation, don’t go there. But it’s the best thing Dudley Moore ever did.)

BROKEN WHEELCHAIRS: A sad, but somehow instructive, tale of Western aid gone awry in the developing world.

THE ALABAMA FOOTBALL TEAM ABUSE CASE: “Thank you for providing the link to the ESPN Magazine Article about the football players at UAB. But I have one serious problem with your summary: it is clear from the article that the University did not look the other way. No, they may not have put four, full-time bodyguards around the poor girl or explicitly told the football players to stay the hell away, but the administration did warn the athletes and they tried to intervene with the girl. She chose to lie to them and said nothing was going on. Tell me, where was the impetus for them to investigate further? Speaking as a woman who was sexually assaulted while at college, I can say without a doubt that UAB did more for her than my university did for me…” This letter continued, a defense of Lord Kimberley and Tony Kushner, and the American Prospect’s odd web statistics – all on the Letters Page.

I’M ABNORMAL: Stop the presses! But are you?

I know I’ll be excoriated as a Bush toady for saying this, but I don’t actually get the notion that the Bush administration has done a palpable U-turn on global warming. Check out this story. “Last year, the White House described climate change as a serious issue after seeking opinions of the National Academy of Sciences but was undecided about how much of the problem should be blamed on human activities,” the Associated Press reports. This year, in a report to the U.N. no less, the administration argues that “The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability.” Wow. What a change. And no one is claiming that the Bush administration has shifted actual policy. It’s also a grotesque distortion to say that most conservatives completely rebut the notion of some human effect on global warming. Certainly Bjorn Lomborg acknowledges it. My own view of this weird little summer story is that it’s a major Howell Raines coup. A reporter finds some tiny and insignificant change in the wording of administration policy, and Raines puts it on his front page. Drudge takes the bait and Rush follows. Chill, guys. It seems to me that the Bush administration has long held the sensible skeptical position (which does not preclude taking human impact on global warming seriously). The difference between them and Al Gore is that they don’t take this as a certainty or buy the notion you have to throw the economy into reverse to prevent it.

RAINES OF TERROR: Did you get through that New Yorker Ken Fellata piece on the New York Times under Howell Raines? Okay, I did. But I share Tim Noah’s skepticism about the caveats in the piece about the Times’ doing well under Raines. Pulitzers are establishment prizes given to establishment friends (with occasional credentializing outreach). And as Tim points out, “Chatterbox would argue that a major newspaper that can’t sweep the Pulitzers in a year when a gigantic disaster befalls its hometown is a very poor newspaper indeed. The awards are as much for the disaster as they are for the coverage.” I’m not just saying this because Mr Raines banished me, but I used to feel I was missing something when my Times didn’t get delivered and I read the Washington Post instead. Now I don’t. What I got from Auletta’s piece was that Raines is a left-liberal populist ideologue, who likes to big foot his reporters and editors. Not that there’s anything wrong with it! There are plenty of great editors who have been from a similar mold, and having a crusading, left-liberal paper, with more pop-culture and vivid writing could be a great addition to the reading world. But one thing it isn’t: the paper of record. It has excised almost all non-left commentary from its op-ed and editorial columns. It is skewing news coverage in ways that will please Nation-readers – like the hysterical Enron coverage, the bogus poll designed to argue that the public blamed Bush for Enron, or the burying of politically incorrect studies about the validity of racial profiling in speeding tickets. And it’s increasingly happy assuming its readers agree with it. So it explains less and hectors and preens more. Again, this is fine. But let’s acknowledge what it is. Raines is on a crusade for the populist left. And Raines is now the New York Times.

BOOK CLUB: Here’s another Amazon review of this month’s book club selection, “My Dog Tulip,” by J.R. Ackerley:

My Dog Tulip is the ultimate bitch session–in the canine sense of the phrase, of course. In 1947, J.R. Ackerley rescued an 18-month-old German shepherd, and from the start her every look and move were to undo him. “Tulip never let me down. She is nothing if not consistent. She knows where to draw the line, and it is always in the same place, a circle around us both. Indeed, she is a good girl, but–and this is the point–she would not care for it to be generally known.” As he anatomizes her from head to toe with the awe-struck precision of a medieval courtier, Ackerley instantly turns us into Tulipomanes. Alas, many of the mere mortals she encounters feel differently, for there are indeed two Tulips. One is highly strung but heroic, flirtatious but true. The other is a four-legged rejoinder to authority: a biter, a barker, and a dab hand at defecating her way around London. Not that any of these are her fault. “You’re the trouble,” Tulip’s one good vet tells Ackerley as she banishes him from the surgery. “She’s in love with you, that’s obvious. And so life’s full of worries for her.”

Get this book for a great summer read and join fellow andrewsullivan.com readers for a canine conversation in the last week of the month. One sign of your market power: Tulip soared from #52,000 on Amazon’s best-seller list to #50 in just a few hours. Not bad for a book published in 1956.

I THOUGHT IT WAS FUNNY TOO: Was there any follow-up to the story that the Israeli Embassy in Paris just happened to burn down by accident? Larry Miller shares my disbelief.

SOCCER AND AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM: Okay, okay, for some reason I mistranscribed Clint Mathis’s name as Clint Davis. Fixed now. I’m not sure I share the view of many soccer-fan readers who believe that this typo eviscerates any credibility I have as an opiner about football. But for those of you interested in the topic, here’s a book recommended to me on the subject. It’s called “Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism.” Apparently it makes several of the points I tried to. With fewer typos. Robert Samuelson chimes in this morning with an upbeat column, arguing that the U.S. will win the World Cup one day soon. I don’t buy it. Here’s one reader who supports me:

I would rather pluck my eyes out with a cocktail fork than watch a soccer game. Soccer is boring; that’s why Americans don’t watch it. One of the key reasons the rest of the world plays soccer is that it is the most inexpensive game there is: you need a round ball and a flat field. A good baseball glove costs over $40, not to mention bats and balls. Even a high school football player wears over $100 worth of equipment. Soccer’s low costs make it egalitarian; perfect for Europeans and third worlders.

Chauvinism worthy of the English.

GOODBYE, GOOD LOGIC: Here’s an email that I thought worth sharing with the Dish. It takes up a central – and overlooked – point in the current Church crisis. Most of the pedophile and abuse cases now coming to light concern an older generation and events that happened some time ago. How does that square with the theocon argument that the 1960s started the rot? Or the main point of Michael Rose’s hysterical book, “Goodbye, Good Men.” Here’s the point:

There is a thus far unstated irony in Rose’s thesis and, indeed, in conservatives’ take on the current crisis in the church. If Rose’s thesis is correct, it actually exculpates gays and suggests that the good old ways we
re the source of the pedophile problem in the Church. Rose’s thesis as I understand it (I have not read the book) is that “orthodox” priests have been systematically selected out of the priesthood in the past few decades by progressives and homosexuals promoting reform within the Church. And, equally important, this represents a change in seminary training from previous decades.
If Rose’s thesis is correct, priests ordained since the 1970s should be disproportionately more progressive and homosexual and less orthodox than priests ordained before the 1970s. Based on all media reports I have seen, it would seem that most of the cases of pedophile priests are from
the pre-1970s orthodox pool. Very, very few cases appear to involve priests ordained in the past three decades, the presumably progressive and homosexual pool. It would seem then, that if Rose is correct, it isn’t progressives and gays who have brought corruption into the Catholic Church, but rather, a previous generation of conservative, Orthodox priests.

That confirms my impression. It’s the repression, conflict and poor training of the pre-1970s generation that led to disaster once the 1970s happened. Merely going back to that model would only make things worse not better.

If you’ve spent much time around the newly graduated, you’ll find something striking about this younger generation. They have a new religion. It’s called “sensitivity.” There are plenty of things wrong in human conduct, but by far the greatest sin is “insensitivity.” Anything that could faintly unsettle, upset, disturb, unnerve or discombobulate another person according to the Litany of offenses – ethnic, religious, sexual, etc. – must be excised from speech and thought. The reductio ad absurdum of this new creed is to be found in New York States Regents’ Exams for graduating high school students. In the New York Times yesterday, we found out that even Isaac Bashevis Singer and Anton Chekhov have been bowdlerized to conform to the new faith. Their writing has been gutted of any conflict, ethnic references, sexual innuendo, and even hedonistic mentions of wine. It’s so clarifying when all the fusty puritanisms of new left and old right combine. According to the bureaucrat defending this violation of literature, “The changes are made to satisfy the sensitivity guidelines the department uses, so no student will be ‘uncomfortable in a testing situation.'” Doesn’t she understand that making students uncomfortable is the point of education? It’s precisely when we read something offensive or strange or alien that we start to think, to put ourselves and our myopic lives into a broader context. What our education system is now attempting to do is therefore literally instill incuriosity into children, a stultifying, inoffensive, comfortable state in which all the difficult conflicts of the modern world are conflated into anodyne pabulum. Thank God there are some feisty people with brains ready to expose and fight this. Thank God also for Cathy Popkin, Lionel Trilling professor in the humanities at Columbia. She wrote the Regents: “I implore you to put a stop to the scandalous practice of censoring literary texts, ostensibly in the interest of our students. It is dishonest. It is dangerous. It is an embarrassment. It is the practice of fools.” But the fools are now running a large part of the educational asylum.

WOOF WOOF: Here’s what the dust jacket says about “My Dog Tulip,” June’s Book Club Selection:

“J.R. Ackerley’s German shepherd Tulip was skittish, possessive, and wild, but he loved her deeply. This clear-eyed and wondering, humorous and moving book, described by Christopher Isherwood as one of the “great masterpieces of animal literature,” is her biography, a work of faultless and respectful observation that transcends the seeming modesty of its subject. In telling the story of his beloved Tulip, Ackerley has written a book that is a profound and subtle meditation on the strangeness abiding at the heart of all relationships.”

Ackerley was, in his day, one of the most celebrated literary impresarios in London. As editor of the Listener, he published some of the finest prose and poetry of his time. But arguably his greatest achievement was this small classic, arguably the greatest book about a dog ever written. Why pick it? I needed a break from carbon dioxide. And I have to say that this modest little story gave me as much pleasure as any book I have ever read. It’s a book I always recommend to friends, and have never been disappointed in their response. It’s about a dog, but as all dog-owners know, that hardly limits its purview. It’s about love and its mysterious, weird forms. It’s about a real relationship between man and beast that somehow transcends every other relationship this particular man has ever had. It’s about the indignities of being mortal, about fluids and solids, about mating and fighting, about devotion and sexuality. It’s also screamingly funny. I’ve rarely laughed out loud uncontrollably in public spaces by myself, but this book had me sputtering coffee, choking on french fries, and alarming fellow passengers on airplanes. In a strange way, I also found this book a beautiful meditation on freedom; and how such freedom might even be thought of as applying to lesser creatures than men. It brought up a lot of experiences I have had with my own beagle and helped deepen my respect for the lessons she has taught me. What will we discuss? The relationship between animals and humans, the forms of love, the wonder of dogs. Add your own dog experiences and meditations to the mix. If you’ve found the more recent books a little hard to get through, this one you won’t. So join up now. We’ll start discussing it in a couple of weeks.

JEW, JEW: Woody Allen and Ed Koch go at it over the French and anti-Semitism. This is a normal media cycle. After a while, Leon Wieseltier will write a diarist, and everything will be clear.

PRE-EMPTION: This is the new doctrine for American foreign policy. It needs to be. No responsible American administration can simply sit and wait until a rogue terrorist or terrorist state prepares to use weapons of mass destruction, or just weapons of destruction against citizens of the United States. Perhaps president Bush realizes that many of us need reassurance that he hasn’t gone soft or lost focus. Or perhaps it’s part of a concerted campaign to prepare the public for war. Whatever, it’s a highly impressive speech – yet another one. Still, and I never thought I’d say this about a Bush administration, eloquence is one thing. What we need to see now is action – reform of the agencies that have been too passive in the past, and preparation for taking out the biggest single threat to our security, Saddam.

MODO AWOL?: Maureen Dowd gets the blogger treatment from the Judd Brothers.

DID THEY USE BOX-CUTTERS? The often invaluable Edward Jay Epstein lays out the case for skepticism.

FRIEDMAN GETS IT: He’s quietly something of a heretic at the Times op-ed page. Now, he’s another voice understanding the importance of Pim Fortuyn. It’s time we started challenging Muslims about the unreconstructed hostility to liberal institutions in their religion. And those who do shouldn’t be intimidated by phony accusations of bias. These questions must be asked. Good for Tom for broaching the subject.

FISK AND PEARL: Weird detail in Robert “Please Beat Me Up” Fisk’s recent piece complaining about death threats from John Malkovich. (Yes, it’s a funny old world, isn’t it?) Here’s something a reader caught in the text:

But the e-mails that poured into The Independent over the next few days bordered on the inflammatory. The attacks on America were caused by “hate itself, of precisely the obsessive and dehumanising kind that Fisk and Bin Laden have been spreading,” said a letter from a Professor Judea Pearl of UCLA. I was, he claimed, “droolin
g venom” and a professional “hate peddler”.

Is Fisk aware that Daniel Pearl’s father is called Judea and works at UCLA? And that when he hears people like Fisk supporting the hatred and anti-Semitic violence of Islamist terrorists, he might have good reason to be outraged?

GOODBYE! GOOD BOOK: Another fair – and devastating – review of the theocons’ favorite book, “Goodbye! Good Men,” which blames the Church’s current crisis on a conspiracy of ‘liberals and homosexuals.’

A MOSQUE AT GROUND ZERO: A rabbi proposes.

Here’s what The American Prospect is trying to tell us about their traffic in yet another snide post. In the last month, the online magazine had 450,000 unique visitors. In the same period, the most popular part of that site, TAPPED, the blog, got 70,000 hits. “Hits” are not the same as visitors (you could have twenty little gidgets on one page and one visit would give you 20 hits) and a good rule of thumb is to divide the number of hits by 10 to get the visitors. So let’s say TAPPED got 7,000 unique visitors in May. Does it make sense to you that the rest of the site would get 64 times as much traffic as the blog? I’m just confused, guys. So is Jonah. Maybe one of the numbers is right and the other isn’t. But both numbers together make no sense, if you believe, as I do, that TAPPED is obviously more interesting than the rest of the unreadable magazine. Hey, guys, that’s a compliment! Why get all snarky instead of running a simple correction or explain the weird discrepancy? This is the web, guys. No-one will get upset if you made an honest and easy mistake.

Energizing piece in the New York Times today about a new lay Catholic group called Voice of the Faithful. It’s an attempt by faithful Catholics to channel their frustration at a hierarchy seemingly immune to reform or responsibility. If it leads to more lay control of the Church, more lay oversight of administrative and financial matters, all to the good. But what it must do is persuade the hierarchy to open a real debate – not a phony one – about whether the decline of the Church in the last thirty years is in part a function of the current doctrines on priestly celibacy and sexual morality. I profoundly believe that this sex abuse scandal is not the real crisis. It’s a symptom of the deeper one of a Church without leadership in America, without confidence in its own doctrines, and credibility among its own people. Until that changes, nothing will stop the slide. But this is a sign that this time, we, the people of God, the real living, breathing Church, will demand that change occurs. If Erasmus is not listened to, Luther may be around the corner. For more information, check out the website, www.voiceofthefaithful.org

A BOWDLERIZED JIHAD: The Harvard senior whose class day address was entitled “American Jihad,” has finally decided to remove the word “Jihad” from the title of his talk. The text will remain unchanged. How depressing. If that is the right summary of his talk, why shouldn’t he have the cojones to use the word in the title? I wasn’t sympathetic to those wanting to silence this young man, let alone to those thugs who threatened his life. And not knowing the text, it was impossible to make a judgment about the talk. It’s probably multi-cultural uplift of the sort that now passes for wisdom at universities. (Hey, but at least he’s not Tony Kushner.) But if he’s going to talk, let him talk boldly, in the language he wants, to make the statement he desires. This urge for sensitivity – at the expense of bruising and difficult dialogue – is a sickly sign of our times. No surprise harvard has catered to it again. But sad nonetheless.

SEXUAL ABUSE AND SPORTS: A harrowing story from ESPN magazine about an isolated 15 year old child prodigy being sexually used by a college football team while police and college administrators looked the other way. It’s not just priests.

TAP DANCING: The partisan Democratic site, TAPPED, puts out some good, if to my mind shrill, stuff. But they have had an odd response to inquiries about their web stats. The Columbia Journalism Review numbers – touted by Alterman – show the American Prospect Online to have a staggering 450,000 unique visitors in May. When pressed to substantiate that, TAPPED says its own site – the only part of the American Prospect anyone seems to read – has gotten 70,000 “hits” so far this month. What do they mean by “hits”? No one really uses that terminology any more. If that means 70,000 unique visitors, it follows that the main snooze-fest TAP website gets three times as many visitors as the hot blog attached and twice as much as web-king, Instapundit (and please don’t start calling me the web-queen. I’ll cry). I guess I find that somewhat unlikely. If by hits, they mean 70,000 unique visits, then the discrepancy is even larger and weirder. I’m not saying they’re fibbing. They may be flubbing. But I don’t believe it. My burly beer-buddy Jonah has some suspicions about Slate’s endowment as well.

THE BBC’S ISRAEL PROBLEM: You have to go to Britain to really appreciate it. But the sheer viciousness and slant of the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Palestinian dispute permeate every item of news. The London editor of the Jerusalem Post finally decided to stop being interviewed by the BBC. He’s a journalist; he’s not uncritical of many Israeli policies and actions. But he knows anti-Semitism when he sees it:

Since September 11, I have refused all invitations to appear on BBC radio or television. The reason is not that I wish to avoid a debate, but rather that I believe that the BBC has crossed a dangerous threshold. In my judgement, the volume and intensity of this unchallenged diatribe has now transcended mere criticism of Israel. Hatred is in the air. Wittingly or not, I am convinced that the BBC has become the principal agent for reinfecting British society with the virus of anti-Semitism. And that is a game I am not willing to play.

Good for him. What he fails to understand is that the BBC, from its very inception, has never been about open journalistic inquiry. It began as a smothering, paternalistic effort to uphold social morals, to inculcate the right national spirit, to protect the establishment of its day. That’s still its mission. Except the current establishment is no longer the fusty, puritan condescension of Lord Reith, but the fusty, trendy condescension of the Blair generation, the former student radicals whose anti-Americanism is as ingrained as their addiction to pop-cultural ephemera. I’ve long believed that the media in Britain will only regain real vibrancy once the BBC is abolished. Like the National Health Service, it is an idea whose time is past.

ARE THE POLES MELTING? Not according to this interesting anlaysis. Climate change is definitely occurring – but much of it for the colder; and some melting ice-flows might have nothing to do with global warming. I’m no expert on this but having read Bjorn Lomborg, this stuff seems reasonable to me.

Another fantastic column from Hitchens. Is there a consensus building that we cannot win the war on terror until we have secured regime change in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan? Not before Iraq, but surely after.

BLOGGER-TIME: I’m sorry about the screwy dates on my posts. It’s a Blogger problem. No clue when it’ll get fixed.