The Dish

They still don’t get it, do they? The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page depicts the 49 Senate votes against federal intervention in the affairs of local schools to be a sign of the power of the gay lobby. Huh? Has it occurred to the Journal that it is a conservative notion that local schools and school boards should be allowed to devise policies that they believe are good for their children? Since when do conservatives think Washington knows best about what a local school can or cannot do in Kansas or Oregon or Texas? No-one here is saying the Scouts shouldn’t be allowed to practise discrimination against openly gay scouts and scout-masters. As I have argued, that’s their constitutional right. But since when is public accommodation for such groups also a constitutional right? This vote has nothing to do with the power of the gay lobby. If it’s so powerful, why can’t it get a federal employment non-discrimination bill passed when over 80 percent of the public supports it? The sad lesson of this vote is that some Republicans are happy to betray their most basic principles of federalism to vent their disdain for honest gay people. The next time some liberal points out to me that the Republicans are just hypocrites, that they have no principles, that they gleefully trample on federalism when it suits their own purposes, I’ll have a hard time coming up with a good retort. I’ll bet the Wall Street Journal editorial page will have a hard time as well.

John Derbyshire’s uncategorizable advice to his timid son is now up on National Review Online. Who else would encourage his offspring to fight back against a bully by bribing him with ice-cream and the words: “But I want to see the blood. Ice cream for blood.” The piece ends with the injunction that anyone who advocates single motherhood as a lifestyle option should be “sewn into a heavy leather sack with lots of broken glass and rolled down a l-o-n-g slope.” Leather? Have I created a monster? Derb has also just written what must be one of the weirdest discourses on fellatio I have ever read in New York Press. It begins: “I have been thinking about fellatio. No, no, don’t hit the back button. This is serious stuff. I have issues.” On that last sentence, I think we can all agree. A colleague of mine – I can’t remember who, maybe they’ll email me to remind me – once coined the term “hathos” for the compulsive need to read something you find horrifying, yet irresistible. Read these pieces and you’ll know what I mean.

Bill Buckley discovers the homoerotic pornography of the Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue. Oh joy. Suddenly, all my different worlds come together.

Spent a lovely dusk with a friend in the Congressional Cemetery tonight on the far side of Capitol Hill. The fireflies were out, twinkling in the near-dark over and around the gravestones, adding an hallucinogenic edge to the evening. We stopped by John Quincy Adams, J. Edgar Hoover, and the grave of a gay veteran. Graveyards are the most wonderful places. You’re surrounded by people, but they leave you alone. You can imagine their lives and see where we’ll all end up. My high school was surrounded by a cemetery going back centuries, and I loved to find a big old tomb-stone, as ancient as possible, grab a book, and read for hours. These places feel comfortable to me, like a platform in a train station full of people all different, and silent, and all headed for the same place. My friend chain-smoked through it all – appropriately enough.

On Hardball tonight on MSNBC – with Margaret Carlson. It’s my last Hardball appearance until September as I head off for Cape Cod on Friday to escape Washington’s steam bath. Also thanks for yesterday: one of our best ever days with well over 8,000 visitors. Keep coming back.

THEY ALSO SERVED: Check out my piece from last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine on what we do – and do not do – for gay veterans. It’s posted opposite.

AMENDMENT: The Gray Davis bumper sticker ideas I linked to from the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday were actually pilfered by the Chronicle from radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt’s website. No way I could have known that from the piece, but I’m grateful to readers for correcting my unintentional error. Check out HughHewitt.com for details.

I was worried at the appearance of nepotism in the appointment of Michael Powell to run the FCC, but I had no doubts about his abilities. Everyone I spoke to about him at the time – and everything I read about him – showed him to be a competent, smart guy. Now he’s been unfairly savaged by the press, I feel even more supportive of him. His most recent sin was the following quote, printed in several papers, about the so-called “digital divide” in which only the wealthy and white are allegedly on the Internet: “I think there’s a Mercedes divide. I’d like one, but I can’t afford it.” A good line – and true, which is why, in Washington terms, it was a gaffe. But then look at the context. Here’s the full quote, reprinted in the Washington Post yesterday: “”I also think the term [“digital divide”] sometimes is dangerous in the sense that it suggests that the minute a new and innovative technology is introduced in the market, there is a divide unless it is equitably distributed among every part of the society, and that is just an unreal understanding of an American capitalistic system … [Mercedes Quote here] … I’m not meaning to be completely flip about this — I think it’s an important social issue — but it shouldn’t be used to justify the notion of, essentially, the socialization of deployment of the infrastructure.” Amen. A serious and good point, leavened with a gripping illustration. All unforgivable in D.C. Depressed yet?

I guess it had to happen, but UCLA has initiated separate victim group graduation ceremonies. There are now individual ceremonies for gays (sorry, members of the “LGBT community”), Iranians, Asian Pacific Islanders, Latinos and, of course, blacks. At the All African People’s graduation, they have dropped “Pomp and Circumstance” in favor of the theme from the “Panther” movie soundtrack. They also sing the Black National Anthem and have a libation ceremony for their racial ancestors. Yes, they can all go to the main graduation ceremony as well – and these do not replace the big one. But this is a sad development – a version of separate lunch-tables taken to a logical conclusion. No word yet on whether white students want their own ceremony as well. But I see no reason why not. They’ll be a minority soon in California. Come to think of it, if you’re going to have separate graduations, why not just have separate colleges altogether? Or separate high schools? Didn’t they once have that in this country? Oh, never mind.

AIDS IN SOUTH AFRICA: Guess what the opposition groups in South Africa are now campaigning for? They want the Pretoria government to abolish taxes on HIV medications. First you’ve heard of such taxes? Well, the Western media would rather demonize the manufacturers and inventors of such medications than criticize African governments. It turns out, in fact, that in some cases, taxes amount to 60 percent of the shelf price of medication, according to Kobus Gous of the opposition Democratic Alliance. Of course, this would be relevant if the government had actually allowed the medications even to be distributed – but Pretoria is remaining firm in its emphasis on HIV prevention rather than expensive treatment. Don’t expect to read much about that either. It would be off-message in the war on the life-saving pharmaceutical companies.

“I think we launder our views through our “objective critics” and certainly the press is pretty green, the press is pretty pro-environment. And I don’t think there’s any question that they, as a body, feel that Bush is wrong on the environment, with varying degrees of willingness to give him credit, and I’m excluding the conservative press, “The Weekly Standard” and so forth. But, generally, the rank and file press is pretty green and they’re going to use the Europeans to take the Bush’s to task.” – Evan Thomas, Washington Bureau Chief of Newsweek, admirably telling the truth, on CNN’s Reliable Sources Saturday.

The op-ed printed by the Washington Post on Sunday was an eye-opener. It was about the influx of black people into a traditionally white neighborhood, and the views of some whites employed by the Post about it. “We damn sure are not about to let black folks buy up all the property,” wrote the Post’s employee, Natalie Hopkinson. “There is a real sense among white friends that the city is slipping away from us. A few months ago … a gentleman passed me a flyer. It invited me to a community meeting where residents planned to debate the question, “Is our White City turning Chocolate?” I pocketed the flyer, but didn’t bother going to the meeting. I already knew the answer: Not if I have anything to say about it.” Now, would you or would you not regard those statements as blatantly racist? I ask because I have changed them a little: the piece was actually written by a black middle-class woman bemoaning white people moving into Washington D.C. But all I have changed are the racial identifiers in those statements. For the full context, check out the entire story. It brings to mind a recent public meeting in my own neighborhood when some local residents objected to renovation of neighboring buildings because, “we don’t want any more white people living here.” The Post clearly believes it is fine to publish a baldly racist piece condemning racial integration, by one of their own employees no less, and merely because she is black. If you doubt me, can you imagine for a second the Post allowing a white employee to write an identical piece in reverse? And people wonder why some of us are disenchanted with what passes for the civil rights movement. In many cases, that movement is now little more than a vehicle for bigotry and racism. And it’s aided and abetted by newspapers that surely should know better.

BUSH VS. HELMS?: Buried in the fine print of this story in the New York Times is the fact that president George W. Bush is opposed to the Helms amendment to the Education Bill, a specious piece of unwarranted federal intervention in the autonomy of local schools and school boards. Good for Bush. Just don’t expect any gay rights organizations to give him an ounce of credit.

EASTERBROOK AGAIN: My colleague at The New Republic, Gregg Easterbrook, has long waged a lonely battle for sanity among liberal environmentalists. He’s a Democrat and pro-environment. But he also has a brain and intellectual honesty. Check out, if you missed it, his piece in yesterday’s New York Times about European attitudes to America. Here’s the best paragraph, delivered with Gregg’s usual thoroughness: “Indeed, despite European protestations, American ecological standards are far more strict than European rules, and have been for 20 years or more… Paris today has worse smog than Houston; water quality, especially of rivers, is lower in Europe than in the United States; acid rain reduction has been more rapid in the United States than in Europe; European Union nations like Greece, Italy and Portugal still discharge huge volumes of untreated municipal waste water, a practice all but banned in America. In addition, the European Union did not act against leaded gasoline till more than a decade after the United States; the forested percentage of the United States is higher than the forested percentage of most European countries, while America has fewer threatened species than Europe; and many other environmental indicators favor the United States.” The truth hurts, doesn’t it?

BUMPER STICKERS 2002: The San Francisco Chronicle debuts some slogans for Gray Davis’s re-election campaign. My favorites:
Ich bin ein Bulb-dimmer
Power to some of the people
The tunnel at the end of the blight
A thousand points of light, give or take a thousand
Ask yourself: Are you better off today than you were 438 years ago?

ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO PRINT … EVENTUALLY: Good piece in Saturday’s New York Times about AIDS in New York City. John Tierney finally points out that the epidemic was grotesquely exaggerated in the 1980s by many of the same public health authorities that are now telling us we are seeing another explosion. Tierney reports that in July 1988, health authorities reduced their estimation of people infected with HIV in New York City from 400,000 to 200,000 over night. Subsequent estimates have put the number at 120,000. In other words, the estimates were off by over 300 percent. When Stephen Josephs, the New York City health commissioner, had the courage to tell the truth, he was hounded by the usual gay thugs, had his home picketed and spray-painted, and was personally harassed. When journalist Michael Fumento dared to write the obvious in 1990, in his book, “The Myth of Heterosexual Aids,” many stores refused to order or sell it for fear of gay terrorism. Funny how this legacy is almost never mentioned in the press lauding ACT-UP, the group behind these know-nothing tactics. Fumento and Josephs, of course, were right. New evidence can be found in the latest report from the American Council on Science and Health. I recommend its sane conclusions, and its skepticism about current statistics. Maybe soon, we will find out some hard data, because HIV is now (since June 2000) a reportable condition in New York City. And if we discover there is a real upsurge, we should do all we can to counter it. But in general, I second the judgment of Elizabeth Whelan, A.C.S.H.’s president: “AIDS was a genuine crisis in the 1980’s, but today it’s no more a crisis than any other chronic disease suffered by New Yorkers. We need to put AIDS in context and give it the proportionate share of resources. It shouldn’t be getting more than its share because we’ve been brainwashed into thinking the numbers are greater than they are.” Amen, sister. Amen.

MR. POT, YOU HAVE A MR. KETTLE ON LINE TWO: Anthony Lewis says George W. Bush has a closed mind.

Does the candidacy of Michael Portillo for leader of the British Tories presage anything for conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic? Check out my new TRB opposite for the answer.

CORRECTIONS: It turns out that Michael Portillo’s father was Spanish, not Portuguese. Also the Independent Florida Alligator is officially independent of the University of Florida, though affiliated. The faculty can’t do anything to discipline it. It doesn’t mean they shouldn’t say something though.