The Dish

Caught your attention? Two new pieces posted today. One is a profile of William Hague, old friend and apparently doomed Tory leader; the other is about the trend toward “soft” stories in news magazines. I’m for both.

Terrific cartoon from Tom Tomorrow shows alarming evidence that some on the left are intelligent and even … funny. It’s about arsenic, and captures the idiocy of the Democrats’ p.r. war on the issue in the first hundred days. Check it out.

THE LEFT AND AIDS: More signs of intelligent life – this time from Anthony Lewis, the columnist who only recently blamed most of the AIDS crisis on greedy multinational pharmaceutical companies. It seems like he’s been doing some reading, lately. How else to explain the following sentence: “Giving up a legal battle in South Africa, the major international drug companies have agreed to make drugs available at very low prices. But there are still daunting obstacles to the use of those drugs on the scale needed, including the lack of adequate health infrastructures to administer complex dosages.” Thanks, Tony, for a belated recognition of reality. Now get to work pointing out how the South African government is still offically skeptical of the HIV and AIDS connection, and has no intention of distributing anti-HIV drugs of any kind. Is that Merck’s fault as well?

Gray Davis has finally found an answer to his own state’s energy crunch: hire some Clinton-Gore attack-dogs. Noticed how he’s been ratcheting up the rhetoric to divert blame from his own disastrous energy policies? John Fund explains how it’s only going to get worse now that Davis has hired Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani, Clinton-Gore hatchetmen. And we thought the tone was changing …

There has been a sharp decline in cases of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain – none reported lately – but the morally horrifying slaughter continues. At the peak of the epidemic, around 33,000 animals were being slaughtered daily. That figure has now increased to a daily kill-rate of 79,000. Slaughter on this scale has meant the predictable cruelties. Among the allegations of inhumanity, according to the Sunday Times, are: “Animals being buried alive after suffering hours of pain from bolts fired into their skulls. The slaughter of piglets and kids with soft-nosed dumdum bullets that explode on impact, shattering bone and shredding flesh. New-born piglets and calves being beaten to death with spades and iron staves.” Cheaper than vaccination apparently.

FIRST ARIANNA, NOW KRISTOL?: Frank Foer has a typically stimulating essay in the new New Republic. He limns Bill Kristol’s slide away from conservative orthodoxy toward what Kristol calls “national greatness conservatism.” Foer argues that Kristol’s flirtation with John McCain’s primary candidacy was not just another piece of political opportunism (remember Kristol’s momentary crush on Colin Powell?) but a recasting of the conservative movement. How would it be recast? Kristol’s conservatism would have fewer reservations about a sizable welfare state; it would run foreign policy on moral interventionist lines, rather than rely on classical conservative realism; it would increase its skepticism of corporate America; it would fill the empty public square of liberalism with a sinewy patriotism. Call it New Republic Republicanism. The money-quote of the piece is this from Kristol, whining about his somewhat cramped social life under the Bushies: “Why are conservatives so upset? It isn’t that we supported McCain; it’s that we haven’t apologized for supporting him. There’s something sick about a movement like that.” I’m not convinced that Frank is entirely right. Although Kristol’s urban neocon roots make for an uneasy alliance with the Bush-Cheney axis, there’s plenty of time for Kristol to tack rightward again if the opportunity arises. He’s no Arianna. In fact, I’d put his chances of ending up an Independent or a Democrat as the same as John McCain’s, i.e. close to zero. It would be far more interesting if either broke ranks for good, but both must remember Pat Buchanan. Or the Republican aftermath of Teddy Roosevelt for that matter.

TESTOSTERONE STRIKES AGAIN: You know the pomo left line that there are no real psychological or biological differences between men and women? Since I got mauled by the usual suspects when I posited the bleeding obvious about testosterone in the New York Times Magazine last year, I’ve kept my eyes peeled on the subject. Interesting new study along these lines on pilot error from Johns Hopkins University. Comparing plane crashes between 1983 and 1997 in the U.S., and analyzing the types of error responsible, researchers found that men are more likely to screw up “because they run out of fuel, take risks with the weather and faulty aircraft, or forget to lower their landing gear. Women on the other hand are more likely to mishandle the controls or stall during take-off or landing.” According to the Daily Telegraph, male mistakes were far more likely to be related to risk-taking, flying planes with known problems, or misjudging the weather. Women were more cautious. The study included 144 women pilots and 287 men. Like most of these studies on nature-nurture, this one doesn’t prove anything. But like so many other studies on these lines, it’s mighty suggestive.

ANOTHER LEFTY DROPS THE “BUSH-IS-DUMB” LINE: “The left got rolled for years by Ronald Reagan’s dumb act, and I fear “W” is no dummy either – appearances, quite obviously, to the contrary.” – Eric Alterman, The Nation. Who says they never learn?

GAYS FOR BUSH’S TAX CUTS: Interesting data from Frank Luntz in a poll for the Center for the Study of Taxation. 82 percent of gay voters want to see the estate tax repealed; 72 percent called it discriminatory. That follows up on a Gill Foundation study that found earlier this year that gays and lesbians put taxes on the same level as same-sex unions as their highest priority issue – higher than the “civil rights” agenda favored by many gay rights organizations. Memo to Rove: if you blow this opportunity to make an historic bridge to gays and lesbians, you’ve only got yourself to blame. (Of course, it also means that once again, I’m out of step with my fellow homos. Sorry, guys.)

Why do the Feds ban marijuana but keep its active ingredient, THC, legal in pill form? Because they want to ban enjoyment, that’s why. Check out TRB opposite.

HOME NEWS: We should have a RealVideo tape of my Stanford speech posted today. It’ll be a link to the C-SPAN site, posted underneath the articles on the right. To all of you who asked where they could find a copy or download one, this is one option. Thanks too for Tipping Jar contributions. We just went past 500 individual contributions – over $12,000. You’ll see the results soon – promise. Plus: another jump in traffic. We’re on course for 175,000 unique visitors this month – up from 80,000 in January. Thanks – and spread the word.

Went to see the premiere of the new Anne Frank mini-series at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. How do you admit you got bored by a story so morally significant? The film lasted three and a half hours, which was about two longer than I could really deal with. It wasn’t bad as such. With actors like Ben Kingsley and Brenda Blethyn doing their best to breathe life into two-dimensional roles, it had its diversions. But the rest of the time it was like a cross between Billy Elliott and Schindler’s List. It was too cutesy to be moving; and too serious to be entertaining. I’m beginning to come around to the idea that the Holocaust is probably unrepresentable. The reason Anne Frank’s diary is so unforgettable is that it isn’t a representation – it’s real. Perhaps we need popular renditions of the Holocaust to keep it alive in the minds of more people than can visit a Holocaust Museum. At the same time, I can’t help feeling that some of this pop-production cannot help but diminish the ineffable evil of the Final Solution. Even with this subject, less is sometimes more.

SCHOOL CHOICE II: Some readers have reminded me that public high schools are obliged to give equal access to different groups, and that denial of any one group’s request to use school property or funds is a punishment for that group’s First Amendment rights to self-expression. Hmmm. Is it really true that a school board could have no discretion in allowing many groups but saying no to, say, a youth chapter of the Ku Klux Klan? No, I’m not saying the Scouts are the equivalent of the Klan, but the Scouts do sadly practice discrimination against some members for simply being honest about their sexual orientation. And lets not get into the Scout-master issue here. What about the Scouts themselves? Would a group that banned black kids from being in their organization have a right to equal access to school property? I doubt it. Sorry, guys, but this is the fall-out of a perfectly Constitutional decision by the Scouts to impose discrimination on kids. It’s a crying shame, but when all is said and done, they asked for it.

“Stop nodding your fat head – sit down and shut up!” These were Christopher Hitchens’ words to Philip Nobile, a lefty journalist who hijacked Hitch’s Barnes and Noble book-reading for a rant about Vanity Fair’s lack of affirmative action. You gotta love Hitch. He smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish, and is one of the last remnants of a culture that knows how to fight back against cant. Now that John Prescott has decked a protestor and Hitch has called one a fat-ass, is the tide turning against loopy protesters?

NOW THEY TELL US: The South Africa health minister announced this week that her government has no intention whatsoever of buying any anti-retroviral drugs for use against HIV. Didn’t notice the story? It was barely reported. The South African government wants to spend money on health infrastructure first. Okay, so where are the howls of complaint from Tina Rosenberg, John Le Carre, Anthony Lewis, and on and on? Are they only protesting against capitalism or are they serious about their campaign against AIDS? Their silence is eloquent.

My nomination for this is the repulsive English historian David Irving, the Holocaust “minimizer” and loony rightist, who, like Vidal, is a brilliant man whose mind has warped into bile. Like Vidal’s hatred for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Irving’s loathing for Winston Churchill is simply perverse. Irving has just produced the epic second volume of his biography of Churchill, a book he claims to have spent 27 years researching. According to this early review, the book is a mish-mash of tired old myths and sinister paranoia. Irving at one point says that Churchill “invariably put the interests of the United States above those of his own country and its empire,” as if, in the battle against Hitler, such conflicts were anything but distant irrelevances. He thinks it pertinent to write that Churchill was of “partly Jewish blood, although safely diluted.” He also asserts that Churchill “was ambivalent about why he was really fighting this ruinous war.” As Andrew Roberts puts it, in this ludicrous statement, Irving “is deliberately ignoring the evidence of dozens of the finest speeches ever delivered in the English tongue, which explained to Britain and the world between 1939 and 1945 in utterly uncompromising language precisely why Nazism had to be extirpated for human civilization to survive and prosper.” Amen.

THIS JUST IN: “PROPOSAL IS LATEST U.S. REACTION TO CONCERNS THAT WAX AND WANE.” – The New York Times, today.

OLD LABOUR STRIKES BACK: Here’s something even Tony Blair can’t spin. His deputy prime minister, John Prescott, punched a protestor on the face yesterday, attacking him for throwing an egg. Or did he? Most pictures of the punch show a clear swipe by the old working class lefty turned modern centrist. But the government-run BBC, which is dubbed by some in London the Blair Broadcasting Company, quickly substituted a photo in its online edition that made Prescott look the victim. Bystanders insist Prescott threw the first punch. Who you going to believe? Tony Blair’s pet media organ or your own lying eyes?

Just for the record, the history of the Nazis’ sustained and unprecedented war on tobacco is recounted in “The Nazi War on Cancer” by Robert Proctor. Check it out. I found it riveting and chillingly familiar.

Jesse Helms, whom the Wall Street Journal laughably calls the ‘conscience of the Senate,’ is trying to pass an amendment that would withhold federal funds from schools which bar the Boy Scouts because of their discrimination against honest gay scouts and scout-masters. Now, let’s get a few things straight here, so to speak. Helms claims that the schools are violating the Scouts’ First Amendment rights. Huh? The Scouts’ First Amendment rights were upheld by the Supreme Court as they should have been. But that doesn’t mean that publicly-funded high-schools are required to give this discriminatory organization any funds or favors. On the contrary, the point of the First Amendment is that it protects the speech of private associations. It does not mandate that the public fund them. I would think this is a pretty basic distinction that conservatives of all people should grasp. Is Jesse Helms now agreeing, for example, that defunding lurid NEA-sponsored public art is a violation of the First Amendment? Secondly: aren’t conservatives supposed to support school independence, choice and autonomy? What on earth is the federal government doing intervening in the decisions of high schools, using money to dictate school policy and practice in a disputed area? Helms is explicit about this: according to Fox News, the point of the amendment is “to force [schools] to change their policy of undercutting the high court’s decision.” I have to say that this legislative initiative is a classic case of what’s wrong with some conservatives today. They are in favor of the First Amendment when the p.c. police are on the march. But they are against the First Amendment when it comes to flag burning or public schools freely deciding not to tolerate discrimination. They are in favor of school independence and choice, and local control of the curricula. But they are against it when they don’t like the results of such autonomy. This is what happens when prejudice clouds the mind. It also poisons the deepest principles of what real conservatism should be about.