The Dish

So my sources were right. When that unprecedented question was asked, my jaw dropped open. Just when you think American television journalism cannot go any lower, a trap-door opens and you find yourself falling down into another sewer. The Chung interview was the single most disgusting hour I have ever witnessed on television. Question after question of simply outrageous inquiry into a man’s private life, into affairs that have no relevance whatsoever to any crime, questions that are put out there purely for titillation and money, and nothing else. And in between this obscenity – ads, ads, ads. Chung’s persistent inquiry into the exact sexual nature of Condit’s relationship with Levy was a particular outrage. Does she have no shame? He told us this in so many words, as he told the police in his first formal interview (see “What Lies?” below). This was an extra-legal inquisition based on exactly what such inquisitions are always based on. Condit was required to prove a negative on live television. He was required to prove his innocence against a barrage of questions based on the assumption of guilt. It was a travesty of any minimal American notions of fairness or justice. Even if he murdered Levy with his bare hands, this interview was out of bounds. No-one knows what happened. The man isn’t even a suspect. And those few questions which weren’t merely prurient were based on an implicit allegation of murder for which there is simply not a shred of credible evidence. The teasing segments about an affair with, in Chung’s phrase, “yet another woman,” made me nauseated. And that pompous pontificator, Charles Gibson, pretending to be some sort of reporter. Jeez. This wasn’t journalism. It was prostitution. And Condit wasn’t the whore.

WHAT LIES?: Here’s a classic piece of anti-Condit spin that doesn’t bear scrutiny. James Taranto of OpinionJournal.com writes the following sentence: “Condit doesn’t apologize for, or even acknowledge, lying to police about his relationship with his vanished paramour, Chandra Levy.” Hey, wait a minute. How does Taranto know that Condit lied to the police? That’s a crime. The police themselves have never said as much. No-one has access to the transcripts of the interviews between Condit and the cops. Has Taranto been talking to a psychic? Here’s what we know, taken from an excellent examination by the Daily Howler about a month ago: “Condit’s initial police interview occurred in mid-May. On June 7, the Washington Post published a story about it, citing unnamed police sources. Here’s how the story, by Allan Lengel, began: “Calif. Rep. Gary A. Condit told D.C. police that Chandra Levy has spent the night at his Adams Morgan apartment, according to law enforcement sources.” The headline: “Intern Spent Night, Condit Told Police.” Lengel gave a bit more detail: “The law enforcement sources said that although Condit told police that Levy had spent the night at his apartment, he did not say whether the two were romantically involved. He also did not specify when she had been at his apartment.” By July 7, Lengel and Petula Dvorak, probed further: “Law enforcement sources said that in his first interview, Condit said Levy had spent the night at his apartment in Adams Morgan but stopped short of discussing the relationship. One law enforcement source said that Condit told investigators to read into the relationship what they wished.”” That’s a lie? It seems to me to be an awkward attempt by someone to do all he could to help the cops while squirming under the scrutiny of an adulterous affair. Not pretty but not criminal. Maybe there’s some more information out there I don’t know of that will prove Condit’s deception. Happy if someone else has any better information. But to say on the basis of what we actually know that Condit lied to the cops is simply, er, a lie.

We don’t know the details of Congressman Gary Condit’s interviews with police, so no-one can say with any certainty whether he was evasive or untrue or uncooperative. The entire case against him seems to me based on the notion that it took three interviews for him to confess to a sexual relationship with Chandra Levy. The implication is that this sexual nature of the relationship dramatically helps the police to find the missing woman and that withholding this fact (which the cops must surely have suspected anyway) was damaging to the case. Sorry, I don’t get it. All that matters, it seems to me, is that Condit knew the woman, was a ‘good friend,’ and that he could give the cops any information about her on that basis to help with the investigation. If having sex with Chandra is such a critical piece of information, then why haven’t the media targeted every other lover Levy had, some of whom haven’t even cooperated with the cops? I’m not saying Condit shouldn’t have told the police of his sex life in this case (except, in a sane world, the cops wouldn’t divulge that information to the public, but in this nutball media circus, it’s obvious they would). I am saying I don’t see the specific relevance of this to finding Chandra. Of course, I can see the relevance of sex to boost cable show ratings and sell papers. But are we really doing all this to help Fox News or Chandra Levy?

Weird piece by David Klinghoffer in National Review. He blurts out the possibility that under-age boys who have sex with their female teachers probably don’t suffer much harm: “No indications yet as to whether these boys are getting their work done or bugging people any more than they might otherwise. Actually I’m not too worried about the minors themselves, who will enjoy dining out on hot-for-teacher stories with their buddies for years to come.” Now, isn’t this casual acceptance of pedophilia exactly what conservatives like Mary Eberstadt have been screaming from the rooftops about? In the Weekly Standard a few months ago, she laid most of the blame for an alleged outbreak of ‘pedophilia chic’ on a handful of passages she gleaned from a few obscure gay literary journals. But here’s a man from a conservative Jewish background, writing in National Review Online, saying essentially the same thing as the American Psychological Association study Dr Laura went bats over a couple of years back. Let’s see what kind of reaction there is to this piece. Then we’ll see if what’s really behind the campaign is concern for kids or simply a useful tool to further demonize gays. Specifically, Eberstadt and the Weekly Standard surely have to come out and condemn this piece. Or their credibility on this matter will be over.

MORE BREAKFAST TABLE: An all-you-can-read buffet, featuring Heidegger, Clinton administration drag-queens and – yes! – Gary Condit.

DON’T DO IT, AL!: Why Gore should never run for president again.

Now that it appears this man is going to retire, I’m afraid we’re going to get a bunch of creepy encomiums to the old bigot. Yes, I have no doubt in my mind that, in Helms’ case, that over-used word is not a smidgen too harsh. His nasty racial politics might have helped the GOP gain ascendancy for a while in the South, but it tarred Republicans for a long, long time with the stench of racism – and deservedly so. If you want to know why our politics is so racially polarized, and why Republicans still can’t get much more than ten percent of the black vote, then take a look at the career of Jesse Helms. Yes, contemporary black leadership has a large share of the blame as well. But how can you blame many African-Americans for their suspicion of Republicans when an old segregationist like Helms still held sway in the party? The way in which he routinely held up all sorts of legislation, executive appointments, and on and on, in pursuit of his own idiosyncratic and often barmy crusades also came back to haunt his party as Democrats learned obstructionism from the master. His pioneering of direct-mail campaigning poisoned politics even further, polarizing our discourse by inflammatory rhetoric. And his aloofness from open debate showed a contempt for the democratic process. See David Plotz’s excellent summary of the old man’s legacy, recycled in the current Slate, for details. Helms’s hatred of gay people was particularly acute. He never missed an opportunity to demonize them, spread vicious lies about them, de-humanize their relationships, and undermine their civil rights and human dignity. Yes, he occasionally stood up for the right thing – in his crusade against Communism and his skepticism of the United Nations. But whatever good he did, and however ‘courtly’ he was, he left this country and the world with more poison in its bloodstream than before. That is his legacy and it is almost all despicable. It is too much to hope that he would use his retirement to reflect a little on the pain he has caused and the division he has sown. But it is not too much to feel more than a little relief that this man will soon be gone.

LETTERS: A fattie writes back; straight unsafe sex; couch potatoes; etc.

THAT SYPHILIS SURGE AGAIN: Those of you who think I’m wacko to be skeptical of the Centers for Disease Control should take a look at the recent statements of one Dr. Jim Buehler, associate director of science at the CDC’s Center for HIV, STD & TB Prevention. In the August 2 issue of Southern Voice, the best gay paper in the country, Buehler is quoted as saying the following: “Syphilis is coming back in the U.S. … There’s been an increase, especially in urban areas, particularly among men who have sex with men.” Today’s CDC press release on syphilis shows, according to the Associated Press, that “the reported rate of syphilis is at the lowest level since reporting began in 1941. The CDC says the unprecedented low rate of syphilis overall has created a “unique but narrow window of opportunity” for eliminating the disease in the United States.” So which is it? Is syphilis resurgent or at an historic low? The dogged AIDS trouble-maker, Michael Petrelis, found that in one city, New York, there was indeed a big jump in syphilis over the past year – but to a grand total of 155. Indianapolis seems to have had an outbreak, but in a prison population. There was a study in Seattle which also claimed such an increase among men who have sex with men, but the outbreak was restricted to a small pool of the same clients of a particular bath-house. So where’s the evidence that “syphilis is coming back in the U.S.”? It’s down by over 22 percent since 1997! You’d think Buehler would know. He’s an expert in “HIV, STC and TB Prevention.” It seems to me that his statement is one of the most incompetent from a public official I’ve ever heard. It flies in the face of his own agency’s statistics, available to anyone who wants to check them. Shouldn’t such a person simply resign for such inaccuracy? Or is there some secret log of syphilis statistics that only he has access to?

“To think that I was in a play with an alleged former SLA member takes some getting used to. Even after 26 years, the Symbionese Liberation Army still strikes a certain amount of terror in people’s hearts. They were terrorist revolutionaries who were responsible for murder, kidnapping and armed bank robbery. Six of their members were massacred in a showdown with Los Angeles police on live television in 1974. To think that I am one degree of separation from that extremist organization is, well, kind of sexy.” – Vicki Cain, asking all of us to let by-gones be by-gones after the arrest of former SLA terrorist, Sara Jane Olson, alleged would-be cop-killer and bomber.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “The Utah State Republican Party has announced that it is planning to ban guns at the upcoming State Convention, which will be held on Saturday, Aug. 25 at the South Towne Exposition Center in Sandy. The stated reason for this is that Vice President Dick Cheney will be speaking at the convention, which puts the Secret Service in charge of security. As of this writing, according to party Executive Director Scott Parker, there are no plans to provide safe storage. However, in response to complaints from gun owners, he does plan to talk to the Secret Service about doing so. But as of now, people will be expected to leave their firearms home, or to leave them in their cars. And the party isn’t even planning on notifying delegates of this in advance! …Utah Gun Owners Alliance’s position is that this is completely unacceptable!” – press release from the Utah Gun Owner’s Alliance, first noted by OpinionJournal.com. OK, we’l let a few Uzis in. But no shooting! The guy has a heart condition.

Into the home-stretch in the Tory party leadership election. It seems pretty clear to me who should get it. Ken Clarke is an affable fellow but clearly about thirty years behind his party. He’s actually more enthusiastic about joining the euro and merging Britain into a larger E.U. entity than Tony Blair is. His policy proposals – which largely consist of setting up ‘commissions’ to explore new ideas – are strikingly empty of any intellectual credibility. This is either because the guy hasn’t thought very much about policy (except for his zeal for European integration) or because his actual thoughts are so statist that the party would balk at them. They’d balk anyway on his European stance. Imagine if a Republican leader took as his signature issue an increase in taxes across the board. That’s how diametrically alien to his own party Ken Clarke is – on the central question of Europe. William Hague politely came out this week in opposition. Margaret Thatcher, with her usual talent for understatement, said a Clarke victory would be a disaster. She’s right, of course. That leaves the little known Iain Duncan Smith – a man who has at least the appearance of a policy back-bone and an awareness of the party he leads. I can’t say I’m enthusiastic. Just by the clipped, tony sound of his voice, he seems a throwback to an England long since left behind. But what choice do the Tories have? It truly is a pitiful situation.

MUST-READ: A scintillating “Breakfast Table‘ on Slate. In its second riveting day.

LETTERS: How cool are Jay and Silent Bob?; the Ancient Greeks and gay marriage.

A NEW CONDIT LOW: Quite what has gotten into Deroy Murdock I don’t know. Not so long ago, he simply declared Condit guilty of murder because it was “obvious.” Now, he’s urging a campaign to force the guy to resign. His latest ugly piece has assertions like: “Ironically, merced is Spanish for “mercy,” a concept apparently utterly alien to Condit.” Huh? He asserts, without any proof, that Condit has destroyed “evidence.” Evidence of what? Then there’s: “Gary Condit is performing the impossible: making Bill Clinton look like a model of virtue and probity.” Again: huh? Murdock perorates by urging Americans to “drag this degenerate from power.” A conservative for the vigilante lynch-mob. And Murdock thinks Condit is degenerate?

“I seem to have lost my virginity again, to be known in a new way. It’s a little too exciting and sophisticated, a little too heady. I am as fragile and innocent as a ravished child. I am not ready for an affair. I should wait until I grow up, but at 43, I realize that might never happen.” – Carol Skolnick, Salon. Readers are hereby invited to send in examples of the most embarrassing, poorly written soft-porn pap from Salon they can find.

Great piece by Isikoff in the new Newsweek on the Clinton-Barak phone-calls about the Rich pardon. Remember all those apparatchiks who popped up on talk shows to defend Clinton’s pardon of Rich by saying the president was obviously over-worked, exhausted, trying to do a friend a favor, didn’t appreciate the consequences, and so on? The phone transcripts show what any sensible person would have assumed anyway. Clinton knew full well what he was doing. He knew how unprecedented the pardon was. And he knew the pay-off for him and his allies could be huge. So he rolled the dice one last time, and figured he’d just tough out the chorus of criticism. I wonder cont mpt Clinton must feel for those poor souls still going out there to defend his honor. Does he sit back and laugh his head off as Paul Begala goes on television one more time to defend the indefensible? I stand by my assessment of the pardons at the time. They were the final sign that we had a seriously dangerous man in the White House for eight years. By the end of his term, he was convinced he could get away with anything. And you know what? He was right. Thank God for the 22d Amendment.

DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME: A British doctor neuters himself. Was the National Health Service waiting list that long?

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “The House vote against all human cloning, in its abruptness and its finality and in the magnitude of its penalties for those who dare oppose it, made me think of the Taliban and their draconian edicts: very little sorting out of details, few distinctions, meaningful debate drowned out by fundamentalist rhetoric and then an a priori proclamation of what society needs, followed by the order — destroy the Buddhas.” – Abraham Verghese, New York Times Magazine. And they stone the researchers as well?

ALONE AGAIN, NATURALLY: Have you noticed the torrent of news stories and hysterical op-eds in the New York Times against Bush’s stem-cell decision? Every cockamamie theory has been advanced to discredit what was a tough but defensible choice. Bush was purely cynical, Frank Rich argued; by being a centrist, Alan Wolfe tried to argue, Bush merely helps the extremes; and so on. But the most telling has been the notion that America is uniquely squeamish about this subject (subtext: we’re the only country with religious nuts calling the shots). A front-page piece detailed the scale of the research in Britain as proof of how far behind the U.S. is getting. But as David Murray spells out on the Letters page today, it turns out that Britain is the only major scientific power pioneering state-funded human cloning and stem-cell research. You think Germany is going full-speed ahead? (I’d love to read the Times editorial the day the German government decides to set up factories for human embryo experimentation. Of course, they already have some of the overhead built.) France, Italy, Australia, Canada: none of these countries have sanctioned open-ended government-funded human embryo experimentation. There is considerable debate in Britain about the way in which the Blair government has essentially contracted out its ethical responsibilities to panels of “experts” who act like God (because the general public cannot be entrusted with complicated decisions like these). So spare us from yet another jeremiad. Besides, on moral issues like these, it surely matters not a jot if someone else is doing it. Either it’s right or it’s wrong. In this case, in my view, largely wrong.

ANOTHER BURIED LEDE: All in all, I thought Erica Goode did a fine job of writing up some of the challenges for those of us with HIV or surrounded by people with HIV in the Times yesterday. There were a few strained attempts at political correctness but the issues she raised are all important. Anyway, here’s my mini-beef. She mercifully avoids repeating all the AIDS-is-exploding stuff from the usual sources. But here’s a survey she leaves woefully unexamined: “[O]ne survey by the Stop AIDS Project, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco, found that the number of men who reported using a condom “every time” during anal sex dropped to 49.7 percent in 2000 from 69.6 percent in 1994. In that same time, the survey found, the number of men having such unprotected sex with more than one partner increased to 48.8 percent from 23.4 percent. One-third of those men said that they either did not know their partners’ H.I.V. status or that they knew it was different from their own (my italics).” The corollary of this statistic is surely that two-thirds did know the status of their partner and had condom-free sex anyway. Isn’t this important? What the survey is picking up on is that more and more men with HIV are having old-fashioned sex with other people who are HIV-positive. Goode assumes this is as risky from the point of view of the epidemic as other “unprotected sex.” But of course it isn’t. Perhaps this practice will help spawn a new strain of the virus. Perhaps it won’t. But it certainly won’t spread the virus any further. I think this may help explain the apparent discrepancy between existing surveys showing an increase in “unsafe sex” and yet relatively stable, even declining, rates of HIV infection. The “unsafe sex” is between people with HIV, whose numbers grow daily. So why isn’t that the real story here? Is it because it’s still not ok to defend old-fashioned sex among those with HIV? If so, why?

AND ANOTHER THING: Another assumption of Goode’s piece is that gay men who break down and do have sex that puts them at risk of contracting HIV are clearly delusional or in need of help or acting out impulses, and so on. All that may be true, although they could just be horny and drunk as well. But isn’t it also true that people are less scared of HIV today because it’s, er, less scary? This is not some psychological trick. It’s a highly rational response. If the risks associated with a highly enjoyable behavior decline, wouldn’t you expect rational people to do more of it? Let’s say new brands of cigarettes dramatically reduced the likelihood of lung cancer. Let’s say that the media was full of stories proclaiming that death-rates from lung-cancer had plummeted by over 70 percent. Wouldn’t you expect cigarette smoking to increase? Of course you would. One of the assumptions behind the notion that it’s somehow a function of dysfunction or delusion or stupidity that lies behind a possible uptick in HIV transmission is that gay men are dysfunctional in the first place. We define them pathologically and then look for signs of their pathology. But what if they’re perfectly sane people taking sane risks with their own bodies and lives? How revealing that this scenario doesn’t seem to have occurred to anybody yet. In print, at least.

LETTERS: In defense of Gore Vidal and Harold Pinter, an ex-feminist lament; etc.

From today’s OpinionJournal, a smorgasbord of delights in the Wall Street Journal today:

“Kim Strassel is in pig heaven.
Evan Gahr hangs out with the heavy set.
Meghan Cox Gurdon on Canada’s war against spanking.
Tony & Tacky: San Francisco’s happy hookers.”

And people think Salon is pushing the envelope?