The Dish

The National Research Council, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, has issued a report pointing out that we have almost no reliable statistics on whether the ‘war against drugs’ is actually working. The report also points out one extraordinary fact: the $30 billion spent in 1999 by federal, state and local governments in the drug war was twice the U.S. cost of the Gulf war of 1991. The number of people arrested in 1998 for drug offenses was triple the number in 1980 and the number of people in jail in 1998 for drug offences was a staggering 12 times greater than 1980. But at least we know we got Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.

Had a minor epiphany watching the smooth young Southern forelocks of North Carolina trial lawyer Senator John Edwards on Hardball today. He looks uncannily like Tony Blair! He even has the concerned sincerity down right, as well as the moderate liberalism and awkward smile. Uh-oh.

Paul Gigot has an excellent column today, as usual, on Lincoln Chafee, the persnickety Rhode Island Republican who could single-handedly kill Bush’s budget in the Senate. Gigot tries to corner him into why he wouldn’t vote for the current package – due for consideration by the Senate next week – and gets nothing but incoherent cantankerousness. John McCain is another danger, of course. But an all-or-nothing approach is not the best way to proceed right now. People often over-estimate the damage to a president of being upstaged by Congress. They key is to co-opt and adjust, as Clinton showed. In that respect, I’m amazed by Dick Cheney’s alleged comment to Republican Senators this week that losing the budget resolution would mean “handing the keys” to the Senate to Tom Daschle. A slightly more modest tax cut wouldn’t be the end of the world. Neither is McCain-Feingold as long as Bush manages to co-opt it when it hits his desk. The president is always relevant – and in these nineteenth century days, is often going to be reactive to the dominant Congress. So sit back and enjoy. As long as Bush doesn’t become completely reactive, it’s a structure suited to Bush’s passive-aggressive character.

Impressive press conference from W today. Articulate, crisp, and generally persuasive. But why did it take him so long to explain the links between his decisions on carbon dioxide, arsenic and Kyoto? The art of communication is explaining what you’re doing before and during the process. Bush should not have waited till now to put all this together, allowing his critics to paint him as a mere tool of energy interests or a polluting conservative. I fear one aspect of Bush’s business-style approach to government, and one he shares with his father, is that he tends to act first, explain later. That may work in business. But it’s a lousy communications strategy in politics.

When Safire is hot, he’s smokin’. Today’s column is a beaut, revealing that Anti-Defamation League head Abraham Foxman not only accepted $250,000 from March Rich on behalf of the ADL but actually hatched the idea of Denise Rich being used as an interlocutor for her ex-husband’s pardon. It took Foxman several weeks after the first Rich revelations to cough up this amazing fact, more grist for “The Jews Made Me Do It” defense of the pardons. Safire lets his old buddy off lightly, in my opinion. Foxman should quit over this, surely.

I knew that as soon as I penned my paean to sleep, I wouldn’t get any. And so it was. Last night, in the middle of my dish duties, my tax person called for a scheduled briefing which I’d almost forgotten. I seem to have lost several vital pieces of paper, making me only slightly less incompetent than the D.C. Office of Tax and Revenue. So, after frantic and fruitless searching through the mounds of assorted papers on my desk, I didn’t get to bed till 1 or so. I then had to get up at 7 am to drop the beagle off at doggie day-care (yes, a three word argument for a recession) and hop on a plane to Boston. After a power-nap in a hastily acquired hotel room, I attended the annual conference of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council. Essentially, I tried to give them a lunch-time pep-talk. These fledgling investors, scientists, researchers and businessmen have saved my life and those of countless others, for which they are rewarded by being deemed worse than the Soviet Union by John Le Carre. No fair, in my opinion. But I didn’t expect to get completely choked up as I started my talk by saying, “Thank you.” I guess I suddenly remembered all the people I knew and loved who never made it till now, and saw in front of me some of the people who nearly saved them. Amazing how quickly and easily you can forget, and how swiftly the emotions and loss can return.

BIG TOBACCO II: In an afternoon panel, there was a lively chit-chat about the politics of pharmaceuticals. Governor Howard Dean of Vermont was there – a personal hero of mine for standing up for homosexual equality. Still, he’s dead wrong on prescription drugs. He kept complaining about the price differential between drugs in Vermont and drugs over the border in Canada. This, to him, was evidence of price-gouging. Huh? It’s only evidence that the drug companies can make a little more gravy from selling their products to Canada at rigged prices than by not selling them abroad at all. If we were to allow mass reimportation of those drugs, we’d simply cripple the market-pricing structure of pharmaceuticals in America, torpedo pharmaceutical profits and kill off research. Dean says he doesn’t want to do this and opposes price controls – but he all but threatened that, unless the drug companies paid for politicians’ pandering out of their own profits, they were going to be turned into Big Tobacco II. Most depressing. Chatting with attendees all day, I was dismayed to hear that investment in new HIV research is all but vanishing under these kinds of political pressures. Completely predictable, and only just beginning.

ONE MORE CLINTON LEGACY: Another nugget provided by a brilliant researcher, Frank Lichtenberg, at the conference looked at research and development expenditures over the last fifteen years. Growth rates were around 12 percent for most years, with minor fluctuations. But there was an exception: 1993 and 1994, when Hillary Clinton’s attempted healthcare takeover decimated investor confidence and sent R&D growth rates plummeting to half their previous level. There’s no question that this delayed research at a critical time and may well have cost lives – maybe some of the lives I suddenly found myself remembering.

PSYCHO UPDATE: I wish I had a buck for every shrink who has privately said to me in the past few weeks that they completely agree that Clinton was and is sociopathic. And another buck for every one who swore me to secrecy over it. But at least actor James Woods isn’t scared. According to the Daily News, Woods recently opined that, in Pardonscam, the Clintons “acted absolutely true to form. … They are the most sociopathic, destructive people who have ever set foot in the White House. We will look back on these eight years as the most corrupt and debilitating abuse of power in the history of the presidency.” Amen, brother. Proof that not all actors are as dimwitted as Barbra Streisand – just most of them.

AND NOW THE WASHINGTON POST: Yes, on Tuesday, they caved and admitted that Jesse Jackson has some ethical issues in his fundraising. Er, the Chicago papers have been running with this for months, guys! A certain New Republic columnist broadcast this well over a month ago. Even the Times beat the Post. Why have they all been so squeamish? Over to you, John Kass of the Chicago Tribune: “For years, Jackson has been treated kindly. Here’s my explanation. In the media, we’re white people, mostly, and mostly suburban born, mostly Democrats, terrified of being called racists, even if the charge comes from a hustler. Black reporters don’t want to become targets, either. So news organizations skip timidly around Jackson’s finances, though we’ve known his race baiting has carried a price tag. Perhaps it’s because we in the media, particularly TV news, have also used him for decades, installing Jackson as chief black translator of the black American experience. Through this condescending bargain, this queasy media pact laced with white liberal guilt and white liberal racism, the crafty Jackson has prospered. His profile increased, while other black voices, those with legitimate yet differing views, were diminished. We didn’t want true diversity. We wanted it easy. We used him. And he used us.” The truth hurts, doesn’t it?

THOSE EVIL MEN: A reader sends in a story from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel about a rape self-defense course at Florida Atlantic University, a publicly funded college. I’m all for these courses, just as I’m in favor of more gay men learning how to use self-defense against possible attackers, including the right to bear a deadly weapon in self-defense. All well and good for FAU, except that men, apart from the instructors, are barred from the classroom. “We don’t want the potential rapist learning what [the women] learn to defend themselves,” Sgt. Trenton Taylor, one of the instructors, told the paper. Excuse me? Could a public university defend such discrimination based on such stereotypes against any other group except for men? Don’t kid yourself. What shall we call this phenomenon? I suggest ‘androphobia’ – the irrational fear and bigoted demeaning of males. Think it will catch on?

How much sleep did you get last night? Not enough, I bet. The National Sleep Foundation just issued its annual poll-report. Americans sleep less than 7 hours a night on average, and a full third sleep less than six and a half hours. Most of them say they’d happily do without sleep to work more or get ahead. Over half say that they’ve had an insomnia problem in the last year. I know it sounds trivial, but I think this is a really huge issue. My own rough calculation is that health is 1/3 food, 1/3 exercise and 1/3 sleep. Most people think the last one is trivial. I try and sleep 9 hours a night, which may sound like a waste of time. In fact, if I sleep much less than that, I get far less done. Others may be able to do more with less, but most people are so sleep-deprived they have no idea what it feels like to be healthy. Of course, some have always understood this. There’s a wonderful anecdote in a new book on Ronald Reagan’s management techniques, by James Strock. It’s a Mike Deaver story about the morning of Reagan’s first inaugural, from Deaver’s book, “Behind The Scenes.” At nine o’clock that morning, Deaver came to find Reagan: “I opened the door to the bedroom. It was pitch-dark, the curtains still drawn, and I could barely make out a heap of blankets in the middle of the bed. I said, “Governor?” “Yeah?” “It’s nine o’clock.” “Yeah?” “Well, you’re going to be inaugurated in two hours.” “Does that mean I have to get up?”” Priceless.

Another blow to HIV research today from a Nader-esque consumer group trying to use an obscure law to sell generic versions of patented drugs. The Consumer Project on Technology has set up a non-profit company and plans to sell Zerit, one arm of an anti-HIV cocktail for ten percent of the price that Bristol-Myers now charges. According to the New York Times, “a provision in the [1980] Bayh-Dole Act allows the government to require a company selling a drug developed with government-sponsored research to grant a license to another party if it is shown that the drug company is not making the invention available to the public on “reasonable terms.”” Love that phrase “reasonable terms.” Presumably it means as long as the company doesn’t make enough profit to invest in future research. ACT-UP, of course, are behind this bid to cripple the incentives for future HIV research. Much of what’s left of AIDS activism is dominated by Luddite leftists, who haven’t seen a drug company they don’t want to scream at. Well, they’ll soon have their way. Which means that the next generation of people with HIV will have nothing to fall back on when they really need it.

BELLY OF THE BEAST: Had my interview with Howie Kurtz today. I kind of wish I could do this real time profile-of-a-profile experiment with someone else. Howie’s pretty much a gent, and he works hard. I gave him some names of friends whom he has already called. One of my closest, whom I referred to as my “virtual husband,” had to assure Howie that we weren’t actually lovers. That’s a relief. I think Howie is trying to figure out how I fit into Washington. With pleasant difficulty, I’d say. He came to a lunch panel at Cato, where I joined Debra Dickerson, a friend who now writes for the Washington Post, and Terry Teachout, a sharp cultural critic from the right. An interesting and cordial debate on whether America is now two nations, although I could feel some hardliners in the audience bristle at my notion that the culture war paradigm is shifting. Then we had a late lunch at a local trendy faux-diner (you can buy a Chardonnay with your meatloaf) and chatted pleasantly enough over a chicken pot-pie that somehow lost its pot. I promised Howie I wouldn’t give away any anecdotes but I predict he’ll use an early, steamy encounter with actress Elizabeth Shue, my gym obsession, my confession that I was a terrible manager at TNR, and my post-English love affair with America. Unlike Michael Wolff, Kurtz actually reads and thinks a lot. He also makes me feel unproductive. So I feel sure there’ll be plenty of fair criticism and analysis in the piece among other things. Oh, and I brought him back to my apartment at his request, and showed him how I update the site and stuff like that. He may mention the chapel I set up for periodic 5 minute prayer-retreats. But at least he didn’t snoop in my bathroom like Marjorie Williams did for her hatchet-job in Vanity Fair a few years ago.

Now it turns out that the Anti-Defamation League’s head, Abraham Foxman, accepted $250,000 from Marc Rich for the ADL and subsequently wrote a letter lobbying for his pardon. Apart from Leon Wieseltier’s piece, I haven’t seen more analysis of the implications of Rich’s broad and deep buying of influential American Jews. Is the media afraid of writing about this for fear of fueling stereotypes? Safire rightly calls for Foxman to resign. Why not resign and return the money?

PILL-POPPERS UPDATE: You thought my take on AIDS treatments in Africa was depressing? Take a look at Michael Ledeen’s sobering anaysis in National Review Online. The most salient point to me was how weak many African bodies are – already assailed by any number of viruses and very limited vaccinations, poor nutrition, STDs, and on and on. It takes enormous stamina to fight against HIV. I have seen some truly ox-like young American men, with all our medical support structure, turn into skeletons in months. What hope for Namibians?

DIRHISING: Thanks for all the mail on this. A couple of new points. Some say that “hate” has broader social implications than killing minors, and therefore deserves more coverage. I simply disagree. I think one of our problems right now is that we have elevated petty bigotry to the level of one of the gravest sins, when it really isn’t. It’s ugly and demeaning to everyone involved, but I don’t think it competes with the abuse of people prompted by greed, jealousy, rivalry, pride, and so on. Why not decide to have a “pride-crime” law, for example, where if a crime is committed with withering, haughty contempt for the victim, the sentence is greater? Or what about a “cruelty-crime” law, where a murderer who dispatches his victim with real callousness can be more fully punished? Don’t callousness and pride hurt our society as much as bigotry? Yes – but the meek and the merciful don’t have a special interest group in Washington. The second point is that this was a local story – bizarre and lurid, but unworthy of massive media attention without some over-arching political or social peg. I have a two-word answer for that: Jon-Benet Ramsey. No broader message: just an evil crime involving the possibility of a taboo (parental murder) and sex (Jon-Benet’s bizarre pedophilic subculture of child pageants). The Jon-Benet story, of course, had the drama of an unsolved mystery. But the Dirkhising case is just as gripping and lurid. I think, alas, that our culture is still so unsure about homosexuality that one half of the country wanted to broadcast this murder to slander gays; and the other half wanted to bury it to protect gays. Both got their way. And a sane discussion of homosexuality and a humane horror at the killing of anyone by anyone regardless if identity got lost.

Interesting data compiled by a group called Polidata, affiliated on its web page with the Republican Party. Still, the numbers look credible and unbiased. What they did was work out who would win the presidency if we had a British-style, district-by-district, parliamentary system, with winner-takes all. In 1996, Clinton crushed Dole by 280 districts to 155. In 2000, Bush won narrowly but clearly, by 228 districts to Gore’s 207. Bush won 46 districts which elected a Democratic Congressman; Gore won slightly fewer Republican districts: only 40. None of this matters, of course. Only the Electoral College matters. But if people can raise the popular vote tallies as legitimate background material for the election, then I don’t see why this isn’t relevant as well. It’s a good compromise between the Electoral College’s tilt toward states, and the popular vote’s lack of connnection with geographical diversity. Anwyay, worth checking out.