The Dish

After humiliating myself a few times over, I thought it only fitting to link to this definitive explanation of why Norway awards the Peace Prize. Sorry again.

Stanley Kurtz answers Maureen Dowd’s call. Once again, Stanley unconsciously endorses the gay agenda. Hey, Stanley, we pansexual subversives been dating down for decades! No wonder we sometimes resemble bonobos. (Stray thought: are upper middle class down-daters better described as bobo-bonobos? Sorry. Couldn’t resist.)

MICKEY VERSUS REICH: My favorite long-running spat – the Benedick-Beatrice of the liberal intellectual world – is between Mickey Kaus and Bob Reich. I’m a Mickster-fan, but even his detractors will appreciate his latest dismemberment of the diminutive political hustler from Massachusetts.

I caved too soon. It turns out that in the early 1900s, the Nobel Peace prize was moved from Sweden to Norway. I was right the first time. Do I get flamed by Spinsanity for being overly concerned with correcting myself?

You want to know why, on some days in some ways, British journalism simply surpasses by a measure of light-years most of what you read in the American press? Read this wonderful obit in the Daily Telegraph of a largely failed journalist who drunk himself slowly to death in Soho. Here’s a classic passage:

His speciality was the extreme. In one drinking binge he went for nine days without food. At the height of his consumption, before he was frightened by epileptic fits into cutting back, he was managing two bottles of vodka a day. His face became in his own description that of a “rotten choirboy”. At lunchtime he would walk through the door of the Coach and Horses still trembling with hangover, his nose and ears blue whatever the weather. On one cold day he complained of the noise that the snow made as it landed on his bald head.

Jack Shafer pointed this out to me, for which I’m grateful. Graham Mason’s only real claim to fame was that he was Graham Mason. And some people obviously loved him. One anonymous person loved him enough to write an obit as inspired as this one.

BIBI IN D.C. Helpful blogger account of Binyamin Netanyahu’s talk last night at the American Enterprise Institute. He talks a lot of sense, it seems to me.

WAS MONTAIGNE A KINDA BLOGGER? Reflections on putting personal details into general commentary; a complaint about writers with diseases; the genius of Shakespeare; and the Bush family’s problem with oil. All this in the latest installment on the Letters Page.

SITE DU JOUR: andrewsullivan.com was named the left-wing French paper Liberation’s site of the day yesterday. Merci.

TAXCUTSFORTHERICH: That phrase, inserted almost automatically in much media coverage of the Bush tax cut, avoids one obvious fact. The wealthy now pay an astonishing proportion of this country’s tax take, and that proportion is growing at an alarming pace. In 1989, the top 5 percent paid 44 percent of federal taxes. Today, they pay 55 percent. Al Gore’s favorite “top one percent” now pay one third of all taxes, while accounting for only 19 percent of national taxable income. Bush’s tax cut – which will, in my mind, be remembered as second only to the war against terror as his greatest legacy – only arrests the pace at which this skewed and democratically dangerous imbalance accelerates. Yes, I know it partly reflects growing income inequality. But please don’t describe our current system as regressive. It’s the opposite. It’s downright punitive of success.

WOODWARD OR RICH? Who do you believe about the Bush administration’s openness to the press? The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward or the New York Times’ Frank Rich? Woodward gushed recently about the president’s handling of his job. Here’s a description of his take:

Prior to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Woodward planned to write a book about Mr. Bush’s first year in office. He had spoken to senior advisers but had not met the president until one day at a Connecticut university where Mr. Bush was speaking. Woodward was waiting offstage when Mr. Bush bounded toward him, filled with enthusiasm and adrenaline. When Woodward extended his hand and introduced himself, the president said: “Duhh! I know who you are.” A moment later, Mr. Bush squeezed Woodward’s head and called him “Woody.” “Nobody gives me the nickname, ‘Woody,’ ” Woodward said yesterday, as the audience chuckled. Later, after the terrorist attacks, Woodward and another reporter interviewed Mr. Bush in the Oval Office. The reporters had an hour to ask their questions. But Woodward said the president gave them 90 minutes, often speaking candidly about classified information and explaining the reasons behind some of his actions. “Certainly Richard Nixon would not have allowed reporters to question him like that. Bush’s father [former President George Bush] wouldn’t allow it. Clinton wouldn’t allow it. “As a journalist I like somebody who is straight and direct,” Woodward said.

Now here’s Rich, echoing the anti-Bush line sustained through even the most mundane of the Times’ news stories:

[T]here is still scant evidence to suggest that he condones the idea of a free press. Not since the Nixon years has an administration done as much to stymie reporters who specialize in the genre of investigative inquiry Mr. Pearl was pursuing when he was ambushed. Now as then, the administration is equally determined to thwart journalists whether they’re looking into a war abroad or into possible White House favors for a lavish campaign contributor who has fallen into legal peril (Ken Lay now, Robert Vesco then).

Maybe Frank Bruni could negotiate some via media between these two interpretations. But it certainly helps explain why the Times’ access to the Bush administration seems so constrained these days. Perhaps, it’s just projection.

BRAIN FART: Sorry, of course it’s Sweden that gives out the Nobel Prizes, not Norway. It’s just that some of the judges are from Norway and it was the Norwegian ones who have been recently regretting the Shimon Peres award.

It looks very much like it. Salon and Spinsanity have the goods. Here’s the relevant extract:

A list of 48 dubious achievements of President Bush appears in Michael Moore’s bestselling “Stupid White Men,” without footnotes or citations of any kind. A reader might assume that they are accumulated nuggets from Moore’s own research. But a San Francisco activist says she came up with the list, and she’s not too happy about the way Moore is using it. Kirsten Selberg contacted Spinsanity following a piece detailing the numerous errors and factual distortions in “Stupid White Men” to say she compiled that list for a wall that was displayed at the “Voters March West” that took place nearly a year ago in San Francisco, on May 19. Still posted on the Voters March Web site, Selberg’s list contains 47 of the 48 facts about Bush mentioned in Moore’s book — in the exactly the same order and with very similar wording. The only difference is that, unlike Moore, Selberg provides sources for almost all of her facts. Representatives for Moore did not respond to requests for comment.

Recall that the Boston Globe suspended conservative columnist Jeff Jacoby for similar Internet copying. Any chance that the media will apply the same standards to a liberal?

SPINSTER SPIN: Could someone – anyone? – get Maureen Dowd a date? And no gay guys, please. She has enough of them.

Norway’s parliament wouldn’t let a visitor wear a Star of David on his jacket out of solidarity with Israelis under siege. Bruce Bawer has the details:

Dagbladet reporter Cato Vogt-Kielland writes that “Tveitt went into the Parliament building dressed in a thin summer jacket with the Star of David on the chest pocket. But after he had talked in the Parliament restaurant with Parliament members from the Progress, Conservative, and Labor parties, he was sought out by two security guards who asked him to come with them ‘because they had received reactions’ to Tveitt’s flag symbol. ‘I asked who had reacted, and what they had reacted to, but got no answer,’ said Tveitt. ‘I didn’t think that showing solidarity with Israel would create reactions in Parliament – especially not in Parliament.’ The two guards escorted him to the wardrobe. After he had hung up his jacket, they followed him back to his table. As Tveitt points out, “People walk around [in Parliament] with Palestinian scarves and other pro-Palestinian symbols without any reaction.”

If you can read Norwegian, here’s the original story. This from the same country that gives out Nobel prizes, in which some judges claim they now regret giving Shimon Peres such a prize. They have no regrets, as Bruce points out, about giving one to Arafat. Figures.

THE TRANSCRIPT: If some of you missed my online Washington Post chat session yesterday, and are interested in reading it, the transcript is now available here.

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: This time a Guardian cartoon.

POOPED: Spent all day in meetings, and all evening in rehearsals. Normal service will resume later today after a good solid eight hours of unconsciousness.

Terrific and obviously true piece by my colleague, Jonathan Chait, in The New Republic. He points out that since the current offensive started, suicide bombings have indeed declined. He argues that the use of female suicide bombers, far from being some grotesque extension of the vocation, may be due to the fact that male suicide bombers keep getting intercepted by the Israeli security forces. Perhaps, you know, killing and detaining terrorists might actually help lower rates of terrorism. That’s why I hope the Israelis get out of the West Bank unilaterally, but take their time to root out as many of these thugs and murderers as they can while they do. In time, we may come to thank Sharon for doing the unpopular but necessary thing. He may be performing the equivalent of the Osirak bombing – taking out terrorist threats now that could one day threaten more than Israelis.

EPIPHANY WATCH I: A fascinating little interview with Christopher Hitchens is a good insight into how a man of the left deals with the pressures of orthodoxy, loyalty and the whole idea of what an intellectual actually is. I’m impressed by his candor, as always:

[S]ome of the best known of the American public intellectuals have, I think, failed the test of September 11th. And somewhere in there is the difference between having an oppositional stance-an “engaged” position-and possessing some elementary, I’m sorry to make it sound so banal, some elementary morals. Or sense of moral proportion.

I think that gets it just about right. And reminding people of a sense of moral proportion is not, pace Mr. Alterman, an exercise in McCarthyism. It is an exercise in conscience. But you can see the wheels turning in Hitch’s head, away from the easy oppositionism that afflicted – and still afflicts – so many in his intellectual generation:

I think it’s now quite possible, and I think this is what September 11th may have clarified, that, the Russian Revolution having been-I would say, in spite of many things, but, nonetheless-a historical failure, to put it mildly … the model revolution for this, I should think, will be increasingly that of 1776. In other words, the real question in front of us is, will the American experiment succeed or not? That being defined as: a multicultural, secular, multiethnic, pluralist democracy.

Quite. The threat to that pluralism today comes primarily from terrorists. But, more benignly, this pluralist order is also threatened by the ideological policemen of right and left, who insist on corralling writers into one camp or another, who cannot understand a thinker or writer who insists upon independence, or complexity, or even, when it’s warranted, a certain honest dose of human contradiction. As Hitch writes,

[A]t the moment, my mailbox is full of people effectively accusing me of that, of being a propagandist for George Bush, let’s say. It doesn’t worry me particularly for myself; but it worries me that so many people have been so poorly educated that they can think that was a good point, or a good method of reasoning, when it’s not really a method of reasoning at all.

Amen, Hitch. Ditto all those emails telling me either to join the right and condemn homosexuality or multiculturalism or married priests or drug legalization or whatever; or those insisting that a gay man has no right or standing to dissociate from the left, or must somehow support liberal ideas in toto or be accused of aiding and abetting the ‘enemy.’ Isn’t the real task of a writer to think for himself – and to resist the temptation to tidy everything into one ideological rubric? I’m glad Hitch is around. It makes the intellectual world a less lonely and more invigorating place.

EPIPHANY WATCH II: Here’s another rather sharp and honest discussion of how 9/11 accelerated in one academic’s life her sense that her profession had become horribly estranged from the real life and real questions that intellectuals should never lose sight of. But in some ways this brilliant essay by professor Lisa Ruddick at the University of Chicago is an epiphanal rebellion against the aridity of much that passes for thought in today’s English departments. She puts it well here:

When colleagues and graduate students who are teaching this term get together, the conversation often turns to the question how to bridge the chasm between the syllabus–whatever it contains–and the students who are looking for help in figuring out how to sustain a humane connection to a world that’s overwhelming them. I listen to these conversations, then I look at recent issues of scholarly journals in my field, and I feel as if I’m in two different worlds.

Is this the voice of a recovering post-structuralist? I’ve long believed the sheer philosophical, spiritual and intellectual hollowness of this fad would eventually break down. So it’s wonderful to read a first-hand account of how this can happen:

When I was writing my first book I was so concerned about getting tenure that I adhered to the theoretical norms of the moment. It was alienating at times, but I did it. After that, though, I became paralyzed, because I couldn’t make myself observe certain omnipresent intellectual taboos that came under the heading of poststructuralism-taboos that I thought were oppressive but that I couldn’t challenge without courting disgrace. I felt I had to hide or smuggle in my humanist convictions about “what sustains people”-my faith for example in some quality of shared humanity that makes literary experience meaningful. And my anger and sadness about this feeling of constraint were preventing me from writing with conviction at all.

‘Conviction,’ as Ruddick puts it. ‘A sense of moral proportion,’ as Hitchens has it. And in both, much hope for a more open and more truly liberal intellectual future.

THE THEOCON VISION FOR THE CHURCH – AND AMERICA: I wrote yesterday that I could forsee a schism between the American Catholic church and Rome, if major reform didn;t come soon. A reader sent me a link to someone else who clearly looks forward to the opposite scenario: the number of American Catholics falling by perhaps a third, but becoming solidified around an Opus Dei-inspired rump. This piece is by one Father McCloskey, an Opus Dei prelate who apparently converted Bob Novak and Larry Kudlow to a highly conservative form of Catholicism. The conceit of this “letter” is that it’s written in 2030, looking back on the crisis of the post-conciliar church and seeing how pruning it back to its hardcore led to a new “springtime” for vocations. McCloskey writes to his imaginary future correspondent:

As you may have learned, there were approximately 60 million nominal Catholics at the beginning of the Great Jubilee at the turn of the century. You might ask how we went from that number down to our current 40 million. I guess the answer could be, to put it delicately, consolidation. It is not as bad as it looks. In retrospect it can be seen that only approximately 10% of the sixty or so were “with the program.”

That “program” is, I think, the Opus Dei agenda for reversing the liberalization that has taken root since the Second Vatican Council. I think this piece is worth reading to see what a conservative vision of the future of the American church looks like, one in which every Catholic is either married and reproducing throughout their lives, in religious orders, or celibate. But then there’s this passage. McCloskey, w
ho is already a prominent contributor to the current debate about the church, and was one of five leading Catholics interviewed ten days ago on “Meet The Press,” sees American constitutional democracy as it now is as a real threat to the church, and envisages a second civil war that will lead to the secession from the Union of the more God-fearing states. No, I’m not kidding. Here’s the salient passage:

In retrospect, the great battles over the last 30 years over the fundamental issues of the sanctity of marriage, the rights of parents, and the sacredness of human life have been of enormous help in renewing the Church and to some extent, society. We finally received as a gift from God what had been missing from our ecclesial experience these 250 years in North America— a strong persecution that was a true purification for our “sick society.” The tens of thousands of martyrs and confessors for the Faith in North America were indeed the “seed of the Church” as they were in pre-Edict of Milan Christianity. The final short and relatively bloodless conflict produced our Regional States of North America. The outcome was by no means an ideal solution but it does allow Christians to live in states that recognize the natural law and divine Revelation, the right of free practice of religion, and laws on marriage, family, and life that reflect the primacy of our Faith. With time and the reality of the ever-decreasing population of the states that worship at the altar of “the culture of death,” perhaps we will be able to reunite and fulfill the Founding Fathers of the old United States dream to be “a shining city on a hill.”

This is the Catholic, Francoite version of the Christian Reconstructionists – and it lurks behind the purgers on the Catholic Right. This visceral disdain for modern America found expression not so long ago in Richard Neuhaus’s journal ‘First Things’ which toyed with the idea of armed rebellion against the American constitutional order because of the Godlessness and faithlessness of this country’s judiciary. This agenda, of course, has about as much chance of happening in this country as the current pope’s ending the celibacy requirement for priests. But it’s certainly helpful to see where some of these people are coming from. The fight for the soul of American Catholicism – against the Francoite reactionaries who see the current crisis as an opportunity for a benign take-over of the Church – could end up being a fight for American democracy as well.

ROMENESKO VERSUS BLOGS:Medianews’ Romenesko does what he can to trash andrewsullivan.com again – by linking to a blog! John Scalzi’s piece all but accuses this site and others of fibbing about our numbers. (Scalzi, it should be remembered is Ted Rall’s good friend.) Scalzi uses Norah Vincent’s equation of “hits” with “visits” to suggest that my daily visit numbers are perhaps one fifth of what I’ve reported. Here’s what my not fantastically sophisticated server tells me: last week, this site got 220,000 visits from 76,000 unique visitors. Our best day was Wednesday when we got 40,000 visits from 23,000 unique visitors. On a monthly basis, we’re now over 800,000 visits from over 200,000 unique visitors. Are we bigger than the New York Times? Of course not. But that’s not the right comparison. Better to compare a news service like Drudge with a news service like the Times. Scalzi says the Times gets 2.2 million visitors a week. According to his site, Drudge gets 4 million visits a day. Let’s be very conservative and say that amounts to 1 million unique visitors a day. I’d say Drudge beats the New York Times website hands down. Of course, he provides only a tiny fraction of their original reporting. But if you’re looking for news stories, his web-page clearly out-performs the Times, and on the web, a page is a page is a page. It seems to me the right comparison for opinion bloggers like Instapundit or yours truly would be either visits to individual columnists online or visits to opinion magazines. I’m pretty sure National Review Online beats us all. But I’d be interested to know if the online versions of the Nation or The New Republic beat individual bloggers by a large amount. And remember that our pages are staffed by one, rather than around a dozen or so. When you look at it that way, bloggers’ contribution to the debate – in a matter of months, really – is pretty astounding. But the broader point is: this is not a zero-sum game. The old media won’t disappear, nor should they. The Times, for all its flaws, is an absolutely indispensable institution, and I hope to God it stays that way. What bloggers do is break up smug monopolies, disperse editorial power and give unheard voices a chance to get a megaphone. It seems to me only the truly insecure or untalented have anything to worry about. (Which may account for Eric Alterman’s panic.)

A good corrective to my post of last night on “How Churches Die.” It’s from a priest who’s been a reader of the site since almost Day One, and a great e-friend. Here’s his email:

Just read your post on how church’s die. To a certain extent, I believe youare right on target. On the other hand, however, I don’t see it. There will have to be some major changes– major changes. Change is the only certain thing right now. But on Easter weekend we had our largest crowds ever and our largest collection (no one seems to be holding back contributions.) I sense that the majority of Catholics are fed up with the hierarchy and are genuinely frustrated by the current news. However, if their local community is healthy– if it is a home, a place of safety and joy, then they seem to be able to make a distinction between that and the larger picture. No one in my parish has looked askance at me. Instead, I have experienced an outpouring of love and support from the people who are genuinely concerned about my own well-being in this environment. That has been truly affirming. However, as a citizen of a mostly non-Catholic “red state,” I can’t say the same when I go out in public.
For what it is worth, I think that so long as the people are being fed spiritually, they will still identify closely with their parish community. And, all modesty aside, if they love their pastor, he is more important than their bishop or pope. After all, I am there for their baby’s baptism and their mother’s funeral. The real test will be to see how this sort of new identification– against the whole idea of a Catholic Church and more of a sort of Particular Church, will pan out in the years to come.

Okay, I fail basic English. But here’s the poet who wrote “The Curse,” explaining what he meant:

The poem is a curse on those who flew into the World Trade Towers. When I wrote it I didn’t imagine that it could be read in any other way. The poem springs from the ancient moral idea (the idea of Dante’s Divine Comedy) that what you suffer for your actions should correspond to the nature of your actions. Shelley in his Defense of Poetry says that “the great secret of morals is love”-and by love he means not affection or erotic feeling, but sympathetic identification, identification with others. If you perceive the world as perceived by another, if you enter into his skin, there are certain terrible things that you cannot do to him. The poem condemns the high-jackers to enact again and again precisely what they lacked in life: identification with what their victims experienced. The poem imagines that this would burn away the “bubble of rectitude” that allowed them to think their action “moral.” Identification is here called down as punishment, the great secret of morals reduced to a curse. The reader who responded to you with the statement that begins “In fact, there’s more evidence to suggest that the curse is directed at the high-jackers” explores the poem’s intentions more eloquently than I can do myself.

Another credit to my amazingly smart readers. But also a credit to this new medium, huh? You don’t only get corrections at lightning speed, you even get line readings from poets! I feel like Woody Allen introducing Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall. Only I’m the one humiliated.

Tomorrow at 1pm, I’ll be online at the Washington Post answering questions, etc, etc. Here’s the link. See you then.