The Dish

The story that George Stephanopoulos was barring reporters from a talk at the University of Wisconsin is a non-story. His speaking agent put that clause in, and it’s perfectly plausible that George hadn’t read it. (I never read mine). Reporters will now be permitted. And Hillary Rodham Clinton’s extravagant New York office, at $500,000 a year in rent, isn’t quite as bad as it seems either. Her predecessor’s office, according to the Washington Post, now rents for $627,000. And she’ll have her hands full. So give her a pass on this one. If it’s not worth the price, her constituents will surely find a way to let her know.

Nice Mr Tony Blair, British prime minister, has just unveiled a new ad campaign in time for the general election. Aimed at party loyalists, it features his opponent (and my friend) William Hague, Tory leader, as … the son of Satan! The election ad starts with a video of Margaret Thatcher and a condemnation of her economic policies as verging on Satanic. Although she has now departed, the ad warns: “They forgot one thing – there was a son.” Cut to video of a 16-year-old William Hague addressing the 1977 Conservative party conference. Background music is supplied by the soundtrack of “Damien.” If I were William, I’d hit back with another movie reference, designed to get at Blair’s handling of the foot and mouth epidemic. Call it: “Silence of the Lambs.”

I’m a bit of a self-hating Irishman here, but I had a good time on St Paddy’s Day this year thanks to a party given by a Jewish friend of mine. It was a fundraiser for a local gay-straight rugby team (very post-gay) and featured the usual bevy of plaid-shirted Washington types, but also a bunch of thick-necked, buzz-cutted rugger enthusiasts. I had to play rugby for five years or so at my English high school (hence, in part, my 19 inch neck), and my father treats rugby as something only a mite bit less important than life and death, so I can talk rugby positions with the best of them. Of course, rugby, properly understood, is only one half sport. The other half is drinking. Well, we did admirably by the latter. It was the first party since high school where people peed into the drain outside rather than wait in line for the john. It’s civilizing sport is rugby. For years in England, I’d heard people refer disparagingly to rugby fanatics as “rugger-buggers.” Finally, I get to hang out with the literal thing.

I was called last week by Bill O’Reilly’s staff to see if I would go on the air to defend the murderer-rapists of 13 year-old Jesse Dirkhising, or at least to defend the idea that this was just as horrific a crime as that perpetrated against Matthew Shepard. The underlying point O’Reilly wanted to make is that the liberal media hyped the Shepard murder but has all but ignored the Dirkhising rape-murder out of deference to gay sensibilities. I said I didn’t see much point in making these distinctions, and that I believed that both crimes were evil and, if convicted, Dirkhising’s assailants should get the full punishment of the law. Those kinds of nuances don’t always work well on O’Reilly so I guess I won’t be on the show. But one of the worst aspects of hate-crimes laws seems to me to be illustrated by this case. Instead of looking at crimes criminally and punishing them, hate crime laws force us to see crimes politically. They give preference to one type of crime over another, one group over another, for political reasons. And this can prompt a political response. Why should straight criminals be vilified and doubly punished while gay ones are ignored? To be sure, Dirkhising’s murder was not a ‘hate-crime’ in the way that the Shepard murder was. The gay lovers who subjected a boy they knew to a sex game that quickly became an assault were not trying to target straight boys as a group. But that doesn’t make their assault any the less heinous. Sure, the lurid details of this murder would always be great material for true gay-haters, people who want to tar all gay people with the same brush (in the same way that some activists wanted to tar all residents of Laramie with the same brush as the thugs who murdered Shepard). But without the double-standards evoked by hate crime laws, this kind of reasoning would not have much of an audience or a rationale. Yes, the true gay-haters would endure; but they wouldn’t be given the shred of a point hate crimes laws give them. And the battered bodies of Jesse Dirkhising and Matthew Shepard could finally rest in peace – along with what’s left of a fair criminal justice system.

LIFE AFTER WARTIME: More evidence of the abatement of the culture war in a piece in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. After all the huffing and puffing over partial birth abortion, it turns out that the Republicans don’t actually plan to pass anything very soon. It seems they’re stymied by a Supreme Court ruling that allows the killing of all-but-born babies, if the mother’s health is threatened. The definition of ‘health’ includes “”all factors — physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age.” Why not just add: and if she damn well feels like it? Mickey Kaus has a level-headed analysis, but what strikes me is the lassitude of the Bush administration in the face of this. I guess they’re hemmed in by SCOTUS, but I would have expected something more urgent on the table by now. This is surely the real U-turn of this young administration, not carbon dioxide emissions.

Been peppered with emails goading me to accuse George W. Bush of a breath-taking U-turn on carbon dioxide emissions. I liked his campaign policy best. But, to be honest, I hadn’t even been aware of it till he reversed it, which must also be the case for almost the entire press corps. The Wall Street Journal points out today that the single sentence about CO2 in a September 29 speech went unreported anywhere, except the Dow Jones Energy Report and an AP item making fun of Bush’s pronunciation of “dioxide.” The Journal also points out that, in his reversal, Bush probably won back his core supporters, rather than betraying them. It’s also true that Bush’s CO2 position was even more ambitious than Gore’s. In policy terms, this is a real story. I think the evidence for global warming is extremely impressive, and some painful shifts in our energy policy are probably required to minimize the damage. But in political terms, this is a huge non-event. Sorry, but no cigar here for Salon writers. I’m hoping that the first real U-turn will be on the estate tax.

WISDOM OF HOMER: I referred recently to Homer Simpson’s endorsement of the theory of repressed memory. A reader sent in the exact quote, addressed to Lisa: “Take your anger and squeeze it into a tight little ball, and then release it at an inappropriate time. Remember when daddy hit that referee with the whiskey bottle? Hmm? Yeah…”

“I have religiously read the Tribune daily for nearly 41 years. I have enjoyed most of the op-ed columns because they made me think, sometimes because I disagreed with them. I look forward to arriving at the editorial and op-ed pages each day, but I may have to do something else with my time if a particular writer continues to appear. The first time she appeared, I tossed it off that the editor had a lapse of judgment. When it happened again March 8, I had to write you. Even the Sun-Times does not consistently have such poor writing with no redeeming value as the tripe that I have found in the two articles by Molly Ivins… In 41 years of reading your paper I have never commented on a single writer, but Ivins is just blather that I once mouthed when I did not know any better. Some of the more liberal writers come dangerously close to my just ignoring them, but I usually read them anyway. Please, no more of this excuse of a writer.” – today’s Chicago Tribune.

BEGALA AWARD NOMINATIONS: Two new entries for excessive, overblown and often untrue blather from the left.
“If you had a recount today, Al Gore would get 90 percent of the vote and Bush would get 10 percent, and Bill Clinton would be the honorary Treasury secretary and we wouldn’t have this economic crisis, because the way the stock market was going we’re all going to be wiped out.” – Harvey Weinstein, Miramax macher. (Memo to Weinstein: Bush’s approval ratings are at 60 percent.)
“Today, the AIDS czar was axed; by the time you read this, more serious damage will undoubtedly be done. So just as the AIDS community battles with demon downsizing, a more dangerous foe – the People With Aids-hating right wing – has seized power.” – Walter Armstrong, editor of POZ magazine, for people with HIV and AIDS. (Memo to Armstrong: the AIDS office hasn’t been axed.)

PILL-POPPERS: Some fashionable delusions about curing AIDS in Africa examined opposite in my latest TRB. Check it out.

Smart piece by Charles Krauthammer in the Post. He picks up on the demand by Ted and Caroline Kennedy that a private group stop broadcasting an ad that uses clips of JFK in defense of Bush’s tax cut. The Kennedys argue that JFK would never have backed Bush’s cut. (Full disclosure: I am good friends with the younger generation, and godfather to one of the youngest). Charles, however, points out that JFK’s view of George W Bush’s tax cut is unknowable and, besides, Kennedy cut the top rate by a third and W cuts it by a sixth. But the more important point is that John F Kennedy’s actions as president are not owned by his family. They are public domain – and belong to all of us, to interpret, rebut, praise, or use as we see fit. To use the term “indecent” as Ted Kennedy did to describe citizens using a former president’s words to defend a current president is too much. One can understand the family’s unique and special relationship with JFK – as brother, father, uncle and so on. But his words and actions belong to all of us. That’s the difference between monarchies and democracies. It was a difference JFK understood perfectly well. Pity, it seems, Teddy doesn’t.

IN DENIAL: Allegedly scientific evidence in the New York Times today that Freud was right and we can indeed repress memories that we find unpleasant – to the degree that we forget them altogether. It was Homer Simpson who once advised Bart that the way to deal with unpleasant reality is to mentally roll it up into a little ball, push it down as far as you can go, until it goes away and then you feel better! Or was that Bruce Lindsey advising Bill?

MGM: Two addenda to my circumcision item. No, I wouldn’t favor a ban on the procedure, just an end to its routine implementation. Obviously, Jews and Muslims perform this mutilation for religious reasons. However inexplicable the procedure is today, the right to do this to their baby boys should be upheld. And I concede my use of the term “child abuse” was excessive. I don’t want to minimize the existence of real child abuse, just to insist that this is a minor form of violence against a child’s body for which there is no good reason.

When Boston Globe token conservative Jeff Jacoby pilfered a few items from the Internet for a column, re-wrote them and acknowledged elsewhere that he had borrowed from an email, he was suspendedfor four months. When New Republic star, Ruth Shalit, was discovered to have copied a handful of generic boilerplate sentences in a few long, well-reported, well-written pieces, I suspended her, and saw her suffer professional humiliation. When Larry King rips off almost an entire column directly from the Internet, he finds it funny. “I never pilfered anything. I’m 67 years old,” King said. “This is taking journalism to its nth idiocy. This is berserk. The more I think about it, the funnier it gets. If you find out who was the originator of ‘Maine is a one syllable state,’ I’ll print his picture and apologize on CNN.” King’s column was called “Things I learned while looking up other things.” The list began: “Dreamt is the only English word that ends in the letters ‘mt.’ . . . Almonds are a member of the peach family. . . . Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur. . . . All clocks in the movie ‘Pulp Fiction’ are stuck on 4:20. . . . Two-thirds of the world’s eggplants are grown in New Jersey.” Virtually everything in it can be found on those awful chain emails. Caught red-handed? Facing punishment? USAToday told the San Francisco Chronicle’s Dan Fost that “we have no plans right now to discontinue the column.” Look, I think some of this journalism policing is overdone. But if you’re going to do it, it shouldn’t always be to pummel minor right-of-center writers instead of major talk-show hosts. No wonder King can’t stop laughing.

Interesting anonymous tip. Could the reason for the extreme modesty of the Harvard professor who provided the Washington Post with data showing the wealthy paying more than their fair share be pretty simple? Could he have been the economist who actually provided the Gore campaign with their demagogic “wealthy one percent” rhetoric last fall? Just asking, as they say.

CRAZY COHEN: Richard Cohen gets in a couple of cracks and decent points in his column today. Looked at alone, the Rich pardon was, in Cohen’s words, an “abomination,” but not evidence of psychological problems. But my point was that when you look at the pardons as a whole, and then the Clinton presidency as a whole, and you add up all the bizarre risk-taking, unnecessary lying, constant sleaze, chronic disorganization, and desperation to be liked, I think you can see something else. I didn’t say Clinton was “crazy” or a “lunatic.” I said he had major psychological problems. I stand by that. (Does Cohen think that everyone who needs a shrink is “crazy”?) The trouble with Cohen is that he was a shill for Clinton for so long, one of the classic anti-anti-Clinton pundits, and he cannot now acknowledge his own responsibility in keeping this reckless guy in power. I definitely plead guilty to liking Clinton at first, and hoping for the best. But I supported Dole in 1996 entirely because of Clinton’s by-then glaring character flaws. Cohen, along with almost every other now-apologetic Clinton supporter, stuck with his guy whenever it really mattered, while covering his posterior along the way. It behooves him to throw us off the scent now by accusing me of intemperance. But the real issue is Cohen’s blindness to the reality of the last eight years – and his refusal to come to terms with it, even now.

OH AND: What’s that weird stuff at the end about Clinton being our first black president and that’s the reason for our disdain? Is that some kind of strange implication that opposing Clinton is the same thing as racism? What piffle. If I were black, I’d be insulted by the comparison. I guess it says something about the level of self-esteem among some leading African-Americans that they are actually thrilled to call a lying, philandering, irresponsible, corrupt and pathologically self-destructive person one of their own. Victimology lives and thrives.

Interesting piece today in the Washington Post, pointing out that the richest 400 tax payers pay as much to the feds as the poorest 40 million in taxes. It kind of puts into perspective the constant refrain that Bush’s tax cut mainly benefits the rich. In today’s lopsided economy, any reduction in all tax rates will inevitably benefit the rich. I guess Al Gore wasn’t smart enough to figure that out. The real worry is the danger in a system where increasing numbers of people are consumers of government goodies, and a smaller and smaller number of people pay for more and more of it. This is a recipe for majoritarian tyranny. If we have one-person-one-vote and you can always vote for higher taxes and spending, knowing you won’t ever have to pay for it, why not do so? There’s a reason public spending increased by 8 percent last year under a Republican Congress. And there’s a reason some Republicans are quietly insouciant about possible future deficits under their tax plan. They figure there’s no legitimate way to stop the dependent class voting for more and more, except throwing the government into periodic fits of bankruptcy. There really ought to be a better way.

ONE MORE THING: A reader points out a weird detail in the Post story. The data was “calculated by a Harvard University professor who asked not to be identified.” Why anonymous? Is Harvard so intolerant a place that a professor who points out that the rich pay more than their fair share would suffer ostracism if it were known? The other alternative is modesty. Well, I spent several years at that great university and modesty was to be found purely on the football team.

BY THE WAY: If there’s anyone with time on their hands, and access to Nexis, I’d love to see whether the phrase “president Bush’s tax cut” ever appears in the New York Times without some appendage reiterating how it helps the rich. My bet is that a good 80 percent of the time, the qualifier is surgically attached.

MORE NEWS FROM THE SOVIET UNION: Newsday’s AIDS reporter, Laurie Garrett, has been arguing for years that medications for HIV are next-to-useless poisons promoted by evil capitalists. Now she is reporting about San Francisco’s latest foray into p.c. hell. The city is apparently considering a ban on ads for HIV drugs, on the grounds that most of the ads depict healthy, robust, energetic people making the most of their lives. This is a terribly dangerous development, various nannies worry. The image of healthy people with HIV actually diminishes fear of the disease and may foster more sexual activity. Well we can’t have that, can we? Don’t these people with HIV know they’re supposed to be victims? This proposed ban is the almost perfect expression of a certain kind of leftism. The condescension is part of it – do they not think that gay men can think for themselves? The hatred of the private sector is another. The ability of people with HIV to look after ourselves, combat the disease, take care of our health and, with the help of the pharmaceutical industry, lead better, healthier lives is almost a rebuke to these activists’ entire worldview. They can’t stop people with HIV and AIDS looking good, or working out, so they do the next best thing. They can simply erase any public images of healthy HIV-positive people so as to insist, against all the evidence, that the meds aren’t working.