KYOTO IN PERSPECTIVE

“The most arresting statistic that Lomborg produces is this. It is well known that meeting the Kyoto treaty on carbon-dioxide reduction will delay global warming by six years at most by 2100. Yet the annual cost of that treaty, in each year of the century, will be the same as the cost – once – of installing clean drinking water and sanitation for every human being on the planet. Priorities, anyone?” – Matt Ridley, in an excellent summary of the environmental movement’s over-reaction to Bjorn Lomborg’s book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist.”

WHY BUSH SHOULD SIGN CFR

I don’t take the red-blooded conservative line on campaign finance reform – that it’s a terrible attack on free speech, party politics, apple pie, and so on. In fact, the more hysterical editorials like this one from National Review I read, the less worried I am. What anti-reform conservatives need to understand is that the current system – so beloved of their nemesis Bill Clinton – has led to a profound cynicism about government. People understandably believe – and the legislative process lends credence to the notion – that their representatives are bought and paid for. Not literally, in every case. I don’t buy the idea that every corporate donation corrupts everyone who receives it. But structurally, the corruption is clear, and loaded against ordinary citizens and in favor of unions and corporations. This cannot be good for the polity. I’m not exactly thrilled by the bill. I don’t like the ban on independent advertising in the last 60 days of a campaign. The prospect of more independent or free-lance campaigns funded from dubious sources is equally unlikely to elevate the republic. It could be God’s gift to groups like the NAACP, as this piece from The Hill points out. But I second Mickey Kaus’s belief that change itself is good thing – it disorients settled patterns of corruption; it blocks fixed channels of sleaze; it will make our political parties less like extensions of corporate lobbying budgets; it will make a Denise Rich or a David Geffen less influential in national party politics. It also makes complete political sense for Bush. The unconstitutional parts of the bill will almost certainly be voided by the Court; Bush himself is adept at raising hard-money; and his move to the center will be solidified. He should hold firm, ignore Rush and NRO, and sign a bill if one reaches him.

WEIRDNESS IN BEIJING: “Bush will stay in a hotel, and administration officials plan to follow measures similar to those they used at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Shanghai during the president’s trip in October, setting up tents in the hotel rooms to keep paperwork out of the range of cameras and playing country music during sensitive conversations.” – Washington Post today. Tents and country music? What is this – a jamboree?

TYSON IN D.C.: Yes, Mike Tyson is a clearly unhinged individual. And yes, in my view, boxing is simply unwatchable – a barbaric and almost indefensible phenomenon. But it’s a free country; and there’s no good reason why the D.C. city government should attempt to stop an event lots of people clearly enjoy and that the local boxing commission has approved. Besides, as the Washington Post shrewdly points out, Mayor Anthony Williams has a great deal to gain by supporting the brawl. It shores up his cred in the black male electorate, and it may bring badly needed revenue into the city. I’m bullish on D.C. generally these days. The huge increases in defense spending and continuing buoyancy of NIH funding will doubtless spill over in the coming years into a booming Washington economy. And before too long, the Tyson embarrassment will recede from memory.

SLOBO’S FANS: Guess who’s on the committee to defend Slobodan Milosevic? Just that old Ramsey Clark and Harold Pinter. So clarifying, isn’t it?

BOOK CLUB:Bob Kaplan defends undemocratic regimes and his record on the Balkans; you weigh in again.

HE’S BACK! The Germans see another Rambo on the horizon.

LETTERS: A grandmother grapples with Rosie; in defense of Scalia; a pro-choice NRA member writes in; and the trouble with Dick Riordan.

BOOK CLUB UPDATE

As of today, I’ll be changing the format slightly for the Book Club. Until now, I’ve been posting my thoughts and your thoughts and Bob Kaplan’s responses as they come in – just like the Dish – in reverse chronological order. If you’re following closely, it all makes sense, but if you’re just dropping by, it can seem a little confusing. So from now on, each day’s postings will be posted in chronological order – with the first posts of the morning staying at the top of the day’s page and the responses following below. It makes more sense for this kind of discussion. Sorry it took a couple of days to realize this, but, hey, we’re making it up as we go along. And thanks for the remarkable emails. At this level of debate, both Bob and I have our hands full. Keep reading, and keep ’em coming.

“TACTICAL DECEPTION”

The Pentagon has clarified the meaning and intent of its new Office of Strategic Influence. It will not lie to the American public or even to the foreign public, but may spread misinformation ahead of military action to help keep the enemy off-guard. I see absolutely no problem with that. Those kinds of lies are often necessary to ensure the success of military strikes, and pose no threat to the credibility of the American government or the domestic press.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE

“I love this country and I love the people in it. And I think that we’ve been through a very difficult time. And we’re going to identify where the real evil is, root it out, and make the country a better place.” – Michael Moore, describing the Bush administration, not terrorism, as the real evil, in an interview with Aaron Brown, CNN last night.

ROMANCE BLOSSOMS:“The newspaper column is pretty close to dead as a medium. There’s no newspaper columnist who can set the agenda the way that Walter Lippmann did or [James] Reston did. There’s only one destination columnist now, one whose column you look for, and that’s [New York Times columnist] Maureen Dowd. And she doesn’t write an agenda-setting column, delivering orders to the powers that be.” – Mike Kinsley, Chicago Tribune today.
“Calling Ari Fleischer ‘a great evasive bore,’ Michael Kinsley wrote: ‘Fleischer speaks a sort of imperial court English, in which any question, no matter how specific, is parried with general assurances that the emperor is keenly aware and deeply concerned and firmly resolved and infallibly right and the people are fully supportive and further information should be sought elsewhere.'” – Maureen Dowd, New York Times today.

FINALLY, ROSIE

Stop the presses: she’s a lesbian. But of course, this isn’t the point. The question of Rosie O’Donnell’s sexual orientation has not been open for quite some time, as any tabloid reader, or vaguely conscious being could tell you. The point is that she seems no longer ashamed or afraid of it, and in defense of the right of lesbian mothers to have custody over their own flesh and blood, she has finally summoned the personal courage of her political convictions. Good for her. But I must say I’m saddened that she had to wait for the end of her extremely successful talk-show to get to this point. Wouldn’t her statement have had more clout if she had been able to take a real financial and career risk for the sake of her own personal integrity? That’s the kind of statement that really impresses people. Then again, perhaps by establishing herself as someone in her own right before she came out, she will be able to change more minds and hearts. I certainly hope so. But I, for one, am relieved that the charade of “sorta ask, kinda tell” has in this case finally been brought to a close. Having to choose between a career and personal honesty is an intolerable choice. But there’s only one way our culture will free the next generation from such a burden: and that’s by more and more of us doing what we do while not hiding who we are. Welcome, Rosie, to the future.

A BODYGUARD OF LIES: “Our cause is just. So why not just tell the truth?” Maureen Dowd asks today, with all the military expertise of a journalist who only recently was calling Senators to calm her down about anthrax. I wonder what Dowd would have thought of FDR’s calculated public lying during the Second World War and before it. Or what she would have made of Churchill’s misinformation and propaganda efforts against the Nazis. Perhaps we should have told Hitler when we were planning to invade Normandy. Hey, our cause was just, wasn’t it? So why fib? No doubt Maureen would have found reason to ridicule both Churchill and Roosevelt. But they understood what war actually is. She still hasn’t got a clue.

FUND VERSUS RIORDAN: There’s no other Republican in California who stands a chance of either beating Gray Davis or dragging the G.O.P. back from the suicide of the last ten years than Dick Riordan. So why is the conservative line that Riordan must be undermined at every turn with the hope of destroying his candidacy? That’s the import of John Fund’s piece in the Wall Street Journal – yet another veiled attack on a Republican who doesn’t toe the hard-right line on abortion, gays, or immigrants. All the code-words are in Fund’s piece – the notion that Riordan is an “establishment” candidate, whispers about his commitment to low taxes, a sly reference to his age, and scarcely a word about his success as L.A. mayor or the complete disaster movement conservatives have foisted upon their party in the most populous state. Fund’s piece shows how parts of the right have become what the left now is: a movement dedicated to ideological purity even at the expense of electoral suicide. Riordan is part of the solution; not part of the problem.

I THINK THIS IS A JOKE: But it’s doing better than any of my three books on Amazon.

IRAQ OR TERROR?: I thought I’d heard it all, but there are some ingenious characters in London who are now arguing that attacking Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein would actually harm the war on terror. The argument? Here’s Euro-fanatic Hugo Young in the Guardian: “Parts of London, maybe including himself, see an Iraqi invasion as a fearful distraction from the defeat of global terror networks, a task that requires, above all, intelligence collaboration from many Islamic states that would be far more opposed than Europe to an invasion plan.” Does Young mean Pakistan, the only really useful source of intelligence for the war? Or perhaps he means those oh-so-helpful Islamic states like Saudi Arabia? More ominously, Young urges a British-Russian alliance to kill off the American attempt to foil Iraq’s and Iran’s attempt to acquire weapons of mass destruction. What’s in it for the Brits and Russians? Trade, I suppose. And perhaps Russia would also suffer if Iraq’s oil production came back on the world markets. Blair almost certainly won’t take his advice. He won’t cheer-lead an assault on Iraq, but he won’t oppose it either. All this is one more reason why the campaign against Saddam should be launched sooner rather than later. Sure, we need to get it absolutely right. But we don’t want to announce action, as the president has basically done, and then dither for months, while critics and enemies have a chance to organize. Is the president really that unimpressed by the Iraqi opposition? Or is there something else behind the apparent vacillation?

SCALIA’S CAFETERIA CATHOLICISM: I’m often accused of being a cafeteria Catholic because I oppose the Church’s position on homosexual relationships, and its irrational hostility to all non-procreative sex, gay or straight. Fair enough, I guess. Still, I don’t believe a reasoning Catholic has to take every single doctrine of his Church on moral matters without criticism or engagement and occasional disagreement. What, then, should we make of Antonin Scalia’s recently voiced opinion that the Church is simply wrong about the death penalty and that Catholic judges who take the Church’s position on the matter should resign? Has he finally gone nuts? Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick gives a clear account of his reasoning, but still comes up short. Isn’t Scalia just as big a cafeteria Catholic as many liberals? In fact, you could argue he’s more so. After all, sexual morality, while important, is nothing like as grave as matters of life and death. Yet not a squeak of protest from the usual defenders of Catholic orthodoxy. There’s also something more than a little disturbing about Scalia’s resuscitation of the view that Catholics somehow have dual loyalty in the conduct of public office – and it’s no less disturbing because a Catholic is making the argument. The silence of the right on this is particularly stunning. Imagine if a pro-choice liberal had made such a statement about, say, abortion – that all Catholic pro-life judges should resign. National Review would be producing a special issue on the scandal. So where’s the outrage about Scalia? More double standards. It seems to me that at the very least, Scalia is far more vulnerable to the charge of cafeteria Catholicism than many liberals, and, at most, he has helped set back the place of Catholics in public life by a considerable margin. Take it away, Rod Dreher!

POSEUR ALERT:“The Greek idea of hubris is on everyone’s lips – as if Oedipus-like, after ridding the neighborhood of the murderous Sphinx, our conceit is now leading us to a predestined rendezvous with Nemesis. The conventional wisdom of our Theban chorus of critics is that we are now blood-drunk on our victories and thus seeking a self-righteous and perpetual war against inequity – cynically either to guarantee large defense budgets at home or to expand American hegemony abroad. ” – Victor Davis Hanson, National Review Online, in
an otherwise fine piece, proving once again that there is nothing more boring than a fully extended metaphor.