The Dish

Well if Rush Limbaugh can read it out loud on his show, y’all should get a look at it yourself. I’m sorry it’s a little sentimental, but I loved the guy, ok? My mash-note to Reagan on his 90th birthday is printed opposite.

The Clintons, I mean. Today’s Washington Post scoop of their absconding with gifts solicited for and accepted by the White House as part of a renovation project is simply jaw-dropping. Hilarious, as well. Cheesier? The Bonnie and Clyde of the 90s stole some of the White House furniture! I guess I can stop feeling guilty for that time I purloined some toilet paper from Buckingham Palace.

“George Bush says he’s for election reform. Reform this: I say, park the state police cars, take down the roadblocks, stop asking people of color for multiple forms of ID, print readable ballots, open the polling places, count all the votes, and start practicing democracy in America again. President Bush, will you join me in calling for those reforms? … If Katherine Harris, Jeb Bush, Jim Baker and the Supreme Court hadn’t tampered with the results, Al Gore would be president, George Bush would be back in Austin and John Ashcroft would be home reading Southern Partisan magazine.” – Terry McAuliffe, new DNC chairman, and FOB. As a quotation, it’s almost a perfect example of what’s wrong with some Democrats right now. First off, it’s malicious. Rather than talking about the need to reform bad voting machinery and improving access to polls, McAuliffe subtly implies that George W. Bush was deliberately behind a campaign to disenfranchise black voters in Florida. There’s simply no evidence for it. It’s worth remembering that black turn-out in Florida was up 70 percent on 1996, and went 93 percent for Gore, and that no Republican candidate ever tried so hard for black votes than W. In a perfect world, with no confusing ballots (designed by a Democrat), no misleading instructions, like ‘vote on every page’ (given by Democrats), or bad machinery (in precincts controlled mainly by Democrats) that would have been a 72 percent increase, and probably enough to hand Gore the election. But the world wasn’t perfect – a regrettable fact, and one that could not be fairly rectified after the election without severe risk of fraud, distortion and chaos. So what do the Dems do? Insinuate that it was all a plot, play up racial paranoia and resentment, and use words like “tamper” to suggest illegal ballot-stuffing or fraud, for which there is no evidence. The truth is we have never stopped practicing democracy. It’s just that democracy isn’t perfect. And it sure isn’t improved by vicious, ad hominem, pandering rhetoric like McAuliffe’s.

Saw a beautiful painting of a movie last night – a sprawling, vivid, sensual, lung-filling account of the life of Reinaldo Arenas, the Cuban writer. The movie, directed by Julian Schnabel, is a delirious evocation of life before, during, and after the Cuban “revolution.” I have rarely seen a more searing anti-Communist statement. One of the most glaring ironies of the Left’s continuing soft spot for Castro’s dictatorship is Cuba’s own merciless persecution of homosexuals. Arenas was hounded, slandered, imprisoned, shoved in a cell so tiny he couldn’t stand up, raped, and sent to a concentration camp. What I admired about Arenas was not just his devotion to his writing, epitomized by the brilliant memoir, Before Night Falls, but his conviction that political freedom included the freedom to seek pleasure. We are so used in this culture to seeing the right as puritanical, we do not often see how adamant the far left has often been against sex, love, irreverence, rebellion of all kinds. Arenas was an unapologetic pursuer of sexual freedom. Even when he was essentially crushed, he never capitulated to the soulless, lifeless order that Communism imposed. It says something, doesn’t it, that the anti-communist right has barely mentioned this movie, and the cultural left has barely celebrated it. In the New York Times review, Stephen Holden put Arenas’ dissident witness this way: “When the Communist revolution on which he had pinned his inchoate boyhood hopes clamped down on Cuba’s free-for-all sexual climate and threw homosexuals in prison camps, Arenas began to throw a lifelong tantrum.” Tantrum? It’s a tantrum to protect your writing from censorship and your friends from concentration camps? Go see the movie. The truth is out there.

Perhaps the best sign of how Bush is cleaning the opposition’s clock is the incoherence of the left-liberal intelligentsia. They have no clue what to say now. For the longest time, they portrayed Bush as simply a moron. Then he won the election, the post-election, the p.r. war of the transition and now the first two weeks in office. How smart can a moron be? Then they decided to describe him as a tool of the far right, symbolized by the Ashcroft nomination. D’oh! Wrong again. He spent his first week proposing a centrist education program that even his critics deem a step toward federalization of education standards. He spent the next week, touring faith ministries for the disadvantaged, touting his new, and broadly popular, plan to support private religious agencies with federal money. Next week comes his tax cut proposal, derided in the campaign as a give-away to the rich (despite the fact that its cuts for the poor are proportionally equal to its cuts for the successful). Greenspan is now in favor if it; the public is in favor of it; the Dems are in favor of it. Meanwhile the big news for Democrats is the continuing Clinton sleaze, the McAuliffe take-over of the DNC, and Jesse Jackson’s use of tax exempt funds to bankroll his mistress. Way to go, guys! So what to do? The left hasn’t been this befuddled since Clinton screwed them five years ago. So they revert to form. Frank Rich ridicules the Washington press corps for falling for W and says his punctuality is reminiscent of Mussolini! Tony Lewis changes the subject. The rest wring their hands over Ashcroft, despite the fact that the most anti-abortion American politician is now required to enforce Roe vs. Wade, a huge liberal victory, which they insist on seeing as a defeat. The real problem is that they have yet to take W seriously. Their own snobbery is preventing them from a real strategy to engage and defeat him. Sounds like Reagan all over again.

Not exactly. For my take on how Bush can reach out to gays, and how gays can reach out to the president, check out my new TRB, “All In The Family,” posted opposite.

It’s spreading. Now even Dominick Dunne has decamped. He tells Frank Digiacomo of the New York Observer, “I’m a big Clintonite; I have always been, through thick and thin. But I’ve got to tell you that I am disappointed beyond disappointment. Giving a pardon to a crook who gave up his citizenship-the whole thing stinks and smells.” Another “prominent Democrat and Clinton supporter who requested anonymity” says, “I have yet to find one person who can defend, explain or support what they’ve done … [The anger is] really quite extraordinary, actually. I’ve never seen a reaction this unanimous.” Who could be next? Al Hunt?

The sometimes crazy but often accurate AIDS activist Michael Petrelis emails to let me know that the one dark lining in my analysis of the San Francisco Health Dept HIV report may actually be a little lighter. I reported that the data shows a doubling of rectal gonorrhea among gay men in San Francisco in five years – a deeply worrying trend. The report didn’t show the size of the testing samples so I took it as a stable and reliable indicator. It turns out it isn’t. In their 1999 report, the San Francisco Department of Public Health explained the sampling background for gonorrhea testing: “In response to the city-wide increases seen in 1995, we began testing more MSM [men who have sex with men] seen at City Clinic for rectal gonorrhea (since infections may be asymptomatic): the number of tests increased from 542 in 1995 to 1285 in 1999 while the number of male visits per year remained approximately 11,000. This increase in screening could be expected to increase the number of reported cases. The number of cases with symptoms did not change between 1996 and 1999, which indicates that the increase in cases may be due to the increased number of tests.” So the doubling of gonorrhea cases, by any reasonable assessment, is completely explained by the more than doubling of the number of tests. Quite why that wasn’t made clear in the current report is beyond me.

Check out Warren Hoge’s hilarious obit of Betty Kenward, the crusty old snob who wrote “Jennifer’s Diary,” in Harper’s and Queen, a British socialite magazine. Almost made me miss the place.

Told you. This Marc Rich pardon has legs. Fighting words from Safire this morning – investigate!, subpoena!, prosecute! – and classic Richard Cohen, pointing out that Clinton’s final act of shamelessness made his defenders for the past eight years look simply stupid. (By the way, I counted over 35 ‘I’s, ‘me’s, or ‘we’s in this column supposedly about a presidential scandal. Good going for Cohen. He makes me look outer-directed). Maybe when Sidney Blumenthal publishes his $650,000 book, we’ll find out that Rich was in fact a saint who helped win the war in Bosnia, but until that time, suspicions will be justified. And the relative boredom and punctuality of the Bush era are already forcing hacks to reach back in time to examine the Clinton mess. My fearless prediction: the outrage that half the country felt for years will soon become mild nausea in the other half. Hillary is clearly in trouble. Jack Quinn is now a dark shade of brown on both sides.