The Dish

“Putin’s government had warned the Clinton administration about bin Laden last June, saying the Saudi dissident’s camps in Afghanistan were supplying Islamic militants to fight in the breakaway republic of Chechnya. But Russian officials said the Americans showed little interest in the warning. ‘We certainly were counting on a more active cooperation in combating international terrorism,’ Putin told Walters.” – from ABC News’ interview with the Russian president.

“Hypocrisy is the only word to describe people who live in British freedom, yet support systems of thought which deny that freedom, or Britain, must be defended. Liberalism is betrayed by other people who put the comfort of immigrant minorities before the insistence on an irreducible list of British civic values: democracy, mutual tolerance, equality of liberty, the rule of law.” – Hugo Young, in yesterday’s Guardian.

Another encouraging sign is that in four out of five initiatives in which gay equality was on the table, voters came out in favor of inclusion. In three votes in Michigan, an American Family Association bid to exclude gays permanently from any civil rights recognition in Traverse City, Kalamazoo, and Huntington Woods, was soundly beaten. In Miami Beach, once home to Anita Bryant’s crusade, another initiative to give partnership benefits to city employees succeeded. Only in Houston was a partnership measure defeated – but by a very close call in a very conservative city. More evidence that Republicans need to look at these results and think about where their party is headed. Among the more promising signs, of course, is the nascent candidacy for California’s governorship of Dick Riordan. If the Californian Republican Party, long destroyed by far rightists, cannot get behind Riordan, then they fully deserve the ignominy and failure they have been courting for years.

I’m glad that Bret Schundler, whom I once admired, and Mark Earley, whom I never had much time for, went down to defeat yesterday. Both used the ancient, divisive tactics of bigotry, especially gay-baiting, to score political points against their opponents. Schundler’s campaign spread unofficial smears about McGreevey’s private life, favored banning abortion even in cases of rape and incest, and tried hard to pander to the fundamentalist right. Earley campaigned hard early on for “Virginia values” rather than “Vermont values,” hoping to ride homophobia to victory. Both Schundler and Earley were hurt by internal GOP bickering, also fostered by right-wing purists in the party. Schundler’s early acquiescence to the religious right and his idiotic attacks on rescue workers in the wake of September 11 swamped his otherwise appealing low-tax message. Both got what they deserved against centrist candidates. Mark Warner’s campaign was particularly effective. He found a way to reassure conservative Virginians that his own entrepreneurial background insulated him from traditional liberalism, while rallying suburbanites and some rural voters to an inclusive message. I hope the national Republican party understands the message from these failed campaigns. Negativism, divisiveness, hard-right social conservatism, and reflexive hostility to all government are themes that don’t work any more. Give ’em up – or keep losing.

ORTEGA TROUNCED: In what is now a footnote in world history, Daniel Ortega failed for the third time to win a democratic election in Nicaragua last Sunday. The margin of victory for his opponent, Enrique Bolanos, was much wider than expected, proving once again that Communists rarely if ever win actual democratic elections. Bolanos is no saint and has his work cut out – but his victory is yet another sign that Nicaraguans, unlike the Western left, have no illusions about the Sandinista experiment in tyranny. Speaking of illusions, check out this piece from last week’s Guardian, predicting an Ortega win. It was written by one Isobel Hilton, who is also an analyst for the BBC, a once-great news organization now increasingly in the grip of left-wing propagandists.

OSAMA’S MESSAGE: Here’s the BBC’s translation of Osama bin Laden’s latest screed, which I haven’t seen anywhere in the American press. Nothing that remarkable except the attempt to exploit president Bush’s unfortunate gaffe with the word “crusade,” and a breath-taking attempt to portray the West’s intervention in the Balkans as somehow anti-Muslim. I’m glad bin Laden smeared Kofi Annan. It can only help harden world opinion against the pious multi-millionaire. I have to say, though, that bin Laden’s reflexive hatred of the U.N. makes him sound at times like one of the black helicopter crowd in the U.S. More ironies, I suppose.

UNDERSTANDING ECSTASY: I’ve long been a believer that the recreational drug, Ecstasy, may well have therapeutic qualities for all sorts of disorders, from Parkinson’s to depression. There have been many anecdotal examples of exactly such effects. It’s very good news, then, that the FDA has finally given the go-ahead for a tiny trial to explore the drug’s potential for alleviating post-traumatic stress. One of the many paternalist insanities of our prohibition on recreational soft drug-use is that it has barred important medical research avenues from being pursued. It has also barred further private and public research to refine the drug for recreational use – to rid it of some side-effects, to hone it to more nuanced and specific results, and generally to employ it for what the Founders of this country once called “the pursuit of happiness.” I don’t buy the argument that research into Ecstasy must only be restricted to medicinal purposes. Just because some forms of subjective happiness might come in a tube, a pill, or a bud, doesn’t mean that the government has a right to prohibit them. So let the research for cures begin. And let the research for better, cleaner, safer highs not be so far behind.

“It probably still takes a country like America two years to recognize, fully, that we are in a war–even given the attacks on our own soil, in two of our greatest cities. If CNN’s reporters run out of ways to introduce context for the war America has undertaken, they can always air tape of the New York City memorial Mr. Isaacson spoke of.
There they would find, after the crowd had nearly all departed, the stony-eyed boy of 17 or so, still holding his father’s picture up to be seen–a sword in the air. They would find the moment recorded by one of CNN’s own reporters, who talked to one of the bereaved families wandering dazed around the ruins, and, like a lot of others here, clutching face masks they hardly bothered to wear. Why had she come here today to this difficult place, correspondent Gary Tuchman asked the woman whose husband was one of the Aon employees killed September 11.
She had to be here, came the swift, agonized answer. “I had to breathe the air–I had to fill my lungs up with him,” she told the reporter in that wasteland filled with mourners. In this place a news director could find enough context for several decades.” – Dorothy Rabinowitz’s beautiful rebuke to the David Westins and Wolf Blitzers of this world.

Here’s that Swedish Osama pic – in color. Check out the pink car – a Chrysler imperial, I think. The web is great, innit?

Here’s a good one from the BBC. It’s Osama at Oxford, again in 1970s mode. Notice how awkward he is next to the babe. She has her arm around him, he has twisted his body to avoid any physical contact. Everyone keeps asking me: do you think he’s gay? The answer is surely irrelevant: gay or straight, he has clear issues with women. Wouldn’t you if your mother was a concubine?

Here’s a teenage pic of Osama with his huge family on vacation in Sweden. Look how normal it all looks, how bourgeois, how American. Osama is standing, the last but one on the right. It’s hard to see from this link, but he’s actually wearing flaired blue jeans and a rather fetching powder-green rib-sweater. I guess the 1970s wrought their own form of fashion terror on all of us. Then there’s this Mary Anne Weaver gem, unaccountably buried in the New Yorker web-archives. Enjoy.

“And British commandos are there now and they’re trying to work out a different way of operating. The British want to go in big. Set up a firebase in the middle of Taliban territory and saying, hey, we’re here, come and get us.” – Sy Hersh on CNN last night.

One of the oddities of the saturation coverage of the last few weeks has been a remarkable lack of real data on what kind of person Osama bin Laden actually is. He has become a cipher rather than a human being. I want to know more about his family, how he was brought up, how he came to be such a borderline personality, what’s with his silly outfits, and so on. I’ve seen almost no pictures of him as a child, yet he called his mommy to warn her of his upcoming massacre. (Which reminds me: why hasn’t she been arrested for advance knowledge of a mass murder without warning the authorities and the world? Wasn’t she in Paris at the time? Can we extradite her?) The only recent piece I found interesting was a humor column by Giles Coren, where he likens Osama to upper-class British ne’er-do-wells who compensate for their massive privilege by smoking pot and going left-wing at college. In Britain they’re known as trust-fund Rastafarians, or “trustafarians.” I remember at Oxford how revolting I thought these people were. Isn’t this a good propaganda point in our campaign to win over world opinion – that this man is wealthy and privileged beyond most people’s imaginings and is about as authentic a man of the downtrodden masses as Donald Trump? But my main point is that we need to understand Osama, stripped of his murderous pieties. We’ve been subjected to endless pointless profiles of dumb-ass movie actors for years. Can’t we drum up one to bring bin Laden down to earth?

STEM CELLS WITHOUT BABIES?: A head-spinning piece in today’s New York Times about the possibility of chemically “tricking” a human egg into believing it has been fertilized, in order to create stem-cells in embryos that could not become developed human life. I’m not sure I understand the full science of this, but it’s certainly intriguing. It’s definitely another reason to be circumspect toward the argument that traditional stem-cell research, which inevitably involves the destruction of potential human life, is the only way to go. The term for this still-experimental process is “parthenogenesis,” based on the Greek for virgin birth. The article, alas, is a little confusing because it both says that these embryos cannot become new life, and yet later argues that in the future, difficulties might be overcome to pioneer whole new avenues of human reproduction through parthenogenesis. Go figure. Some feminists might be intrigued to find that, “Stem cells derived from male parthenotes tend to turn into muscle cells, while stem cells from female parthenotes turned more often into brain and nerve cells.” Brawn and brains again.

LETTERS: Grover Norquist blows a gasket.

CHOMSKY LIES AGAIN: A devastating take-down of Noam Chomsky’s latest anti-American screed can be found on the highly useful website, Spinsanity. Chomsky’s use of the term “silent genocide” to refer to the allies’ war methods is typically depraved.

CONTRA HOWARD: Last week, I pixeled my own dissection of Michael Howard’s (I don’t respect peerage and refuse to call people Sir Anything) view that the U.S. should never have declared a “war” against al Qaeda and the Taliban. Here are two very cogent responses as well – from the estimable Robert Harris and my friend Anne McElvoy, a beleaguered woman of sense at the Independent in London. I particularly enjoyed Anne’s description of Howard’s “pre-emptive, multi-purpose defeatism.” Here’s an extract: “The historian Michael Howard argues that we are in a no-win situation towards Mr. Bin Laden, who would have either a platform for global propaganda if he is brought to justice, or be a martyr if killed. I cannot share this pre-emptive, multi-purpose defeatism. A martyred bin Laden or a bin Laden incanting his message from the dock somewhere is infinitely preferable to a Mr. bin Laden still in charge of an organisation training suicide bombers to fly into tall buildings.”