The Dish

I now realize that my own position on ballot-counting – that only the cleanly punched hole should count – was the only position that would have given Gore a wafer-thin victory. When I wrote that in The New Republic, my Gore-supporting colleagues couldn’t have disagreed more. Part of my argument was that such a clean rule would have been consonant with Gore’s traditional position defending civic responsibility rather than the leftist claptrap he spewed during the campaign. In other words, if Gore had stuck to his centrist principles, he might have won. In fact, the only way he could have won was by sticking to his principles. For all the posturing on all sides, it turns out I was a better friend to Gore than his acolytes were.

It’s great that W doesn’t seem to have a spin operation going on. But the latest news that he’s relaxing salmonella standards for beef in schools should have set some alarm bells off. Whether it’s carbon dioxide or arsenic, each of these decisions makes some sort of sense, but taken together, the impact is unmistakable. Bush to Country: Go drink some arsenic, get salmonella poisoning, and bake till you burn. It’s the kind of stuff Bob Herbert stays up at night dreaming about. Hey, there, Karen Hughes! You got a job? Do it!

LISTEN TO GEORGE: “The bottom line is that this undercuts the Democrats’ argument that the Republicans stole the election by having the Supreme Court stop the count. Democrats will still be able to say somehow that they were robbed because of unfair ballots . . . but they can’t say that the Supreme Court took away their rights and would have cost them the election.” – George Stephanopoulos on ABC News. Good for George, who’s a decent person, finally shedding his Clintonian sludge. How long before Terry McAuliffe coughs this one up? Oh, never mind.

But my old professor Harvey C. Mansfield has written a pellucid piece defending his war on grade inflation – which he now conducts with the only weapon at his disposal, irony – in, of all places, the Chronicle of Higher Education. I remember his stern admonitions and sometimes opaque utterances that he encouraged his students to unravel. That’s why, of all my teachers, I remember him most vividly. He had – how can I put this? – authority. Students and children love authority. And they love to be challenged. Harvey rightly says that “there is something inappropriate — almost sick — in the spectacle of mature adults showering young people with unbelievable praise.” And making a full 50 percent of Harvard grades A or A- is, indeed, sick. Why would anyone bother to strive for excellence – real excellence – when its symbol, a Harvard A, is all but guaranteed? Reading this piece, I realized for the first time what a true scandal this is; and why a great deal of our cultural rot is related to it.

Hilarious example of over-spin from Britain. Last Sunday, Prime Minister Tony Blair arrived back early from his country retreat to grapple manfully with the foot-and-mouth crisis. The trouble was, he got back too early and entered Number 10, Downing Street, by the back entrance. Realizing he’d missed a great photo-op, the PM subsequently emerged from the front door, got into his car, went for a ride around the block for fifteen minutes and then came back to enter through the front door again and get all the usual photographs of the great leader getting back to work. This story is recounted in the Daily Telegraph. When was it James Carville and Stanley Greenberg went over to give advice?

A reader points out the odd opening sentence of Barbra Streisand’s memo to the Democratic leadership. It says: “This is a key moment in our history. We cannot let the right wing roll back thirty years of social progress.” Thirty years, huh? So social progress began in 1971 under Richard Nixon, that great old liberal. And of those thirty years, eighteen were under Republican presidents. Maybe the impending catastrophe won’t be so terrible after all.

Dan Rather was the guest speaker at a Democratic Party fundraiser. And Sam Donaldson wears a toupee and Peter Jennings is a Canadian. Who knew? The only hilarious part of this is that CBS still thinks we might be surprised.

What does the USATodayMiamiHeraldKnightRidder ballot review tell us? Nothing we didn’t already know. We always knew that the margin of victory in Florida was smaller than the margin of error. That’s why the only rational, sane, fair thing to do was to accept the result of the mandatory machine recount and let it go. That’s also why Gore’s attempt to upend that recount in order to finagle a way to a technical victory was so outrageous. He knew there was no possibility of finality here. But his Clintonian win-at-all-costs mentality led him to believe that if he could rig the re-re-recount and finesse the public relations, he still had a chance. When that failed, he could always sit back and preen that he was robbed, stolen, etc. The only good news from this is that it means that Gore will never be able to say that again with any credibility. Nor will Barbra Streisand. Nor will all the other partisans who still insist their election was “stolen.” They will now, of course, rest their hopes on another media recount of “over-votes.” If that fails, they’ll try something else. Gore and his acolytes still cannot acknowledge that, according to the rules of the game, they lost. Period. Their dragging of the country through weeks of turmoil and constitutional crisis was an act of extraordinary hubris and recklessness – in my view, the final, lawless act of eight lawless years. It’s over now, and this is a deeply satisfying exclamation point. The current president is now and has been since November 7 the only legitimate 43rd president of the United States. Get over it.

THE MEANING OF REFORM: There are plenty of people now second-guessing McCain-Feingold. It sure isn’t perfect. The restrictions on independent advertising sixty days before an election is so clearly unconstitutional we can only hope the Supreme Court will knock it down soon. And the money will find a way, of course, to express itself. But the true meaning of reform isn’t and never has been the ‘solution’ of some sort of ‘problem.’ It’s a process of tinkering, correcting, adjusting. All in all, I think this reform makes our system a little less susceptible to moneyed interests than before – and that’s all to the good. The best reforms can only ever achieve that much – and they will need replacement in time. I’m reminded of the paradoxes of this process by a new and superb translation of Constantine Cavafy‘s poetry, which I’ve been devouring in bed getting over a stomach bug. Cavafy, for those who haven’t heard of him, is probably one of the great modern poets – up there with Auden and Eliot and Larkin, in my opinion. In one of his poems, “The Windows,” he shows — damnit: here’s the full poem:

“In these dark rooms, where I go
Through weary days, I wander back and forth,
Looking for the windows. – When it opens,
A window will be consolation. –
But the windows aren’t there to be found, or I’m unable
To find them. And perhaps it’s better for me not to find them.
Perhaps the light will be some novel tyranny.
Who knows what new things it will show.”

Here’s hoping McCain-Feingold isn’t some novel tyranny after all.

So the media media mag Brill’s Content has now merged with the media media mag, Inside.com. You can read all about it on the media media media site, MediaNews. Or here at andrewsullivan.com, a media site devoted in part to reading media sites about media sites. I think they should scrap the rather corporate moniker, Brill’s Inside Content, though. Why not just call it “Navel?” Somehow I think we’ll get the reference.

Readers will know I’m no global warming Pollyanna. Nevertheless, I think Bush has gotten a bum rap over his decision on Kyoto. The decision had already been made for him. For why, check out “Bush and Hot Air,” posted opposite.

In his otherwise diverting column on sex with animals (how’s that for an opener?), I think Tim Noah thinks the singular of homo sapiens is homo sapien. Or maybe it’s a typo. Speaking of bestiality, I recall a story told me by my friend, Dan Savage, who writes a spectacularly good sex advice column called “Savage Love.” He was doing a radio call-in when a man phoned to say he believed that his relationship with a horse was fully consensual. The horse, the man explained, could easily kick him out of the way while he was expressing his deep and abiding love for the beast. The fact that the horse didn’t should be taken as a signal of consent, he insisted. Temporarily stymied, Dan asked, “Is this horse a male or a female?” “A female!” the man replied. “What do you think I am – a pervert?”