The Dish

Some readers have told me that the banning of Mother’s Day in a private New York school isn’t really about gays. It’s also about straights. The school spokesperson suggests it’s about unconventional families of all kinds. Fair enough. I hope I didn’t fall for homophobic spin. But motherhood and fatherhood can obviously be celebrated even by those without either parent. A more salient point, perhaps, is why these Hallmark-inspired events are in the curriculum in the first place.

Ewwww. Our favorite nutball writes about … beating the bottoms of little boys with canes. It’s a classic. I’ve decided to drop my attempt to shame him into not writing about socialist blacks and disgusting gays and just sit back and enjoy him. It doesn’t get much better than this.

MOTHER’S DAY BANNED: All I can say is that this is the kind of thing that makes me want to crawl into a little ball and give up. When will these gay activists and their well-meaning but clueless sympathizers get a grip? They are to the argument for gay equality and inclusion what Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps is to the other side. Man, I’m embarrassed.

“First I’m against the death penalty, second I’m against Timothy McVeigh blowing up people in Oklahoma City, but I’m even more against Attorney General Janet Reno,” – Gore Vidal, on ABC News this morning. Now, I’m no Janet Reno fan. But she’s worse than someone who kills hundreds of innocent civilians in cold blood? Keep digging, Gore. It’s only getting deeper.

37-year-old Eugene Scalia, Nino’s son, gets the top legal job at the Labor Department. Maybe 37-year-old Michael Powell, Colin’s son at the FCC, can throw a party for him.

A neutral study of the soaring costs of prescription drugs finds that … the problem is not price-gouging. The report from the National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation, reported in the New York Times, said “that 42 percent [of the rise in costs] was attributable to an increase in the number of prescriptions written by doctors and filled by pharmacies. At the same time, it said, a shift toward the use of more expensive drugs accounted for 36 percent of the overall increase in spending, while price increases accounted for the remaining 22 percent.” Simply put, this means that most of the cost pressure comes from demand for the newest and best treatments available, which inevitably cost more than older, generic or post-patent medications. The lesson of the study? If we fund a prescription drug benefit for seniors under Medicare, we may as well kiss our fiscal future goodbye. The Bush administration is trying to handle this simply by under-funding this new entitlement. That won’t work. What we need is a full-scale political effort to derail the entitlement altogether. Link the biggest generation in history with the fastest rising cost in our society right now – and you’ve got a fiscal calamity waiting to happen.

THE POST CREAMS THE TIMES: Wanna read a smart, balanced, serious editorial on the U.N. Human Rights Commission mess? Try the Washington Post, increasingly leaving the tired boilerplate of the New York Times’ editorials in the dust.

“I swear that if this current bunch of supposed White House reporters were covering Adolf Hitler back in the early days of his administration, they’d be writing glowing accounts of how successful the German chancellor was in achieving his goals. “There was some concern that he’d have a difficult time convincing the country that it needed to do away with the Jews,” they’d write. “But it’s apparent that he has been able to control the agenda. It’s a crowning accomplishment of his first days in office.” – Dave Zweifel, The Capital Times, Wisconsin. Zweifel concedes his reference might be hyperbolic. He doesn’t seem to grasp that it’s obscene.

BEFORE NIGHT FALLS: Predictably, this wonderful movie about a gay man persecuted by Communist thugs has now run afoul of the European left. A simply astonishing piece in Monday’s Guardian in London includes this quote from a leftist pro-Castro academic, Steve Williamson of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign: “If Arenas even did one third of what he claims to have done in his book, he would have been locked up for life in any other country. The man was outrageous. His prison sentence was basically for having sex with young boys.” So having all-but excused the Castro regime for putting gays in concentration camps (yes, he has the obligatory caveats but now says – absurdly – that Cuba has one of the best gay rights records in Latin America), the man throws in the smear that Arenas was a pedophile. Who said that bigotry was only found on the right?

“Even the best news outlets [in Guatemala] tend to be openly ideological and there is no American- style separation of news and opinion, so the owners’ views can permeate reporting. Many publications offer only news designed to further the owners’ personal or political agenda.” – Tina Rosenberg, New York Times today.

Trying to figure out exactly why Gore Vidal has such a crush on Timothy McVeigh, I had a bit of a eureka moment with the following quote. Vidal has long been motivated in part by a slightly loopy romanticization of America as a republic, of America never really being involved in wars (Vidal is queasy about the Second World War, let alone Vietnam or Desert Storm), and maintaining her pre-imperial virginity. Along with McVeigh’s paranoid fantasies about American power at home, he is also, it turns out, an anti-interventionist abroad. “[W]hat occurred in Oklahoma City was no different than what Americans rain on the heads of others all the time,” McVeigh explained in the London Observer, “and subsequently, my mindset was and is one of clinical detachment. (The bombing of the Murrah building was not personal, no more than when Air Force, Army, Navy or Marine personnel bomb or launch cruise missiles against government installations and their personnel). I hope that this clarification amply addresses all questions.” It certainly addresses the question of why Vidal loves McVeigh so much.

So Gore Vidal will be one of five guests invited to personally witness the death of Timothy McVeigh. Why? Because they’re chums. He and McVeigh “share many ideas in common.” McVeigh was not a callous mass murderer but someone “with an exaggerated sense of justice.” I guess you have to remember that, in Vidal’s view, only Harry Truman was a mass-murderer who deserves condemnation. McVeigh is “very, very bright,” and he’s a “junkie of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.” The fact that many, many others can say the same but Vidal is only interested in becoming friends with one who also killed scores without remorse speaks volumes about Vidal’s moral compass. In contrast, Attorney-General Ashcroft is a “nobody” and his decision against face-to-face interviews for McVeigh (Vidal will be forced to conduct his love-in by fax) is worthy of the “Third Reich.” Vidal will publish his ruminations – where else? – but in the most sickening magazine published today, Vanity Fair. In the long run, people reveal their inner selves. Could anyone trash Gore Vidal more successfully than he has now done himself?

NEW KERRY DATA: Apparently, according to Senator John Kerry, quoted in Bill Safire’s solid column today, the United States was replaced by Sudan on the U.N. Human Rights Commission because the world finds “a lack of a sense of honesty” in the new administration. As compared to what, for example? Bill Clinton?

NEW KERREY DATA: I’m not sure what to make of the latest piece of reporting on Bob Kerrey’s night in Thanh Phong. But it’s worth reading closely. What the Washington Post piece demonstrates, however, is one possibility: that there was a genuine reason for Kerrey’s unit to target the village (there were Viet Cong soldiers there) and that this is compatible with civilian atrocities. A young and barely tested leader could easily have panicked under such circumstances before he came across the enemy – or indeed some other soldier might have done the damage before Kerrey even arrived on the scene. At least this version provides some understanding of the strange grouping of civilians in the middle of the village where they were shot dead. We’ll probably never know the full truth – but these details suggest that a real investigation might dig up something important. All the more reason to get on with it.

But today’s New York Times editorial on the U.N. Commission on Human Rights has to be read to be believed. I really thought this “blame America first” syndrome had died with the 1970s. But it’s alive and well at the Times. The only good news from the U.S. being kicked off the commission is that its loony left politics will be exposed more clearly for everyone to see. We’ll see if the Times will tolerate Sudan lecturing the rest of us on human rights. Maybe even they draw the line somewhere.