The Dish

The American Prospect’s Joshua Micah Marshall, a rising star on the intellectual Left, emails to say he doesn’t find the use of presidential pardons as political pay-back/fund-raising tool to be beyond the pale. Just dumb – not disgusting. Dumb, presumably, because the Clintons didn’t get away with it! And this is the face of the idealistic Left these days. I emailed Josh to ask him what exactly would evoke disgust in him. He said, cryptically, “something disgusting.” Welfare reform? Prayer in schools? A tax cut?

Mickey Kaus, never one to shill for paleo-libs or Democratic hacks, backs my personal view of Paul Offner’s credibility: He says on Kausfiles.com, “Who is Paul Offner, the man who accuses John Ashcroft of asking about “sexual preference” in a job interview? It so happens that the editor of kausfiles knows Offner, having worked with him on welfare reform and various pieces he wrote for The New Republic in the 1990s. He’s smart, allergic to liberal b.s., public-interested, and, in my experience, totally honest. If he says Ashcroft asked that question, it’s safe to say Ashcroft asked that question.” So who you gonna believe? Your saintly correspondent, the unimpeachable Kaus, or the RNC? All right, don’t answer that one. It’s too depressing.

Sorry to bring him up again, but something interesting is definitely going on in Washington. For the first time, Clinton disgust is now universal. I have yet to meet a single Democrat who isn’t sickened to his stomach by the excrescence of Clinton’s pardons, and by the puerile vandalism of the White House in the last hours of the old regime. Maybe they finally, finally get what some of us have been banging on about for years. Two thoughts: this will hurt Hillary. The Hassidic pardons will haunt her. Marc Rich will be her Marley’s Ghost. The sheer stench of Clinton’s final hours has already dented her career hopes. And the liberal wing of the party, Hillary’s, has come to the conclusion that Clinton cost Gore the election. (They still can’t bring themselves to accept that Gore’s own lurch to the left did the most damage.) Put those two together and she’s toast. I know that’s a premature judgment, but I can’t even imagine many people going over to her place for dinner at this point. When the Washington Post is running editorials headlined, “Count The Spoons,” you know we’ve reached a watershed. God, I’m happy.

How did Colin Powell’s son get to be FCC Commisssioner? Check out “Daddy Dearest” opposite for the answer.

Odd piece by Kathryn Jean Lopez (who she? – ed.) in the current National Review Online. She starts by asking why anyone should even care what James Hormel thinks of the Ashcroft nomination, and then proceeds to unpack the background of why Ashcroft and Helms opposed the Hormel nomination on the ‘totality of [Hormel’s] record.’ It turns out that John “Bob-Jones” Ashcroft opposed Hormel because he thought Hormel was anti-Catholic! Ashcroft’s evidence for this is that Hormel once commented on a gay pride parade and merely laughed at a group of drag queens called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. These drag queens are mildly offensive, I’ll grant you. I’m on record criticizing them myself. But they’re drag queens, for goodness’ sake! Excess, hyperbole, and stupidity are part of the genre. Calling Hormel “vehemently anti-Catholic” (in NRO’s words) merely because he laughed at some silly drag queens is downright grasping at straws. (And it’s a little odd that a man like Ashcroft, who has an honorary degree from a college that calls the Catholic Church the “whore of Babylon,” should be casting stones in that particular direction in the first place.) The second accusation is that Hormel “donated a book” to a new gay and lesbian library in San Francisco that was a coloring book of female genitalia. This one is really hilarious. The idea that mega-bucks Spam mogul Hormel was singling out a vaginal coloring book as his one gift to a library as some sort of statement is absurd. The man bankrolled the entire library. Like most big libraries, this one is jammed full of material, most of it worthwhile and serious. But like most big libraries, especially one which is devoted to gay and lesbian topics, this library has its share of lewd material. So? Can we be grown-ups here? In the hoo-ha that was raised about the library a couple of years ago, it was revealed that every single questionable book in that library was also to be found in the Library of Congress. If Hormel can be held responsible for every single book bought with his millions, then John Ashcroft can be held responsible for the Penthouse collection lovingly stored at the Library of Congress. Lets face it: Ashcroft nixed Hormel because he was gay. My one question for the Kathryn Jean Lopez’s of the world is: why don’t they defend that on its merits?

I count myself as a fiscal conservative. I don’t see why any government should ever take more than a third of anyone’s livelihood under any circumstances, except war. I’ve rarely seen a tax cut I didn’t like or support, as long as spending was restrained as well. But there’s one argument for tax cuts that makes no sense and that’s George W. Bush’s. We do not need a tax cut to reboot the economy. Man, I thought we’d left demand-inflating Keynesianism back in the 1970s. If you argue for tax cuts when the economy is slowing, what’s to stop you from arguing for tax hikes if the economy is over-heating? Besides, tax-cuts are the clumsiest, slowest, and weakest way to stimulate an economy. Leave that to Greenspan and monetary policy. What conservatives need to do is make the case for lower taxes as part of a seamless case for greater personal freedom, as a way to devolve decisions about spending away from government officials to countless individuals who are best able to discern what would most benefit them at any given moment. The cuts should always be accomplished with an eye to the broader economic environment – but not as a way to change it. The last time anyone made these kinds of arguments persuasively was in the 1980s. But we need them now as much as ever.

John Ashcroft has pledged that he will “not make sexual orientation a matter to be considered in hiring or firing” at the Department of Justice. (In case you’re wondering, I’d still vote to confirm him, because I think more is to be gained by holding him to his current promises than rehashing the ugly past.) But what does he mean by ‘sexual orientation’? I bet he means someone who may be gay but would never admit it. An openly gay person would qualify as someone pushing the “gay lifestyle,” whatever that’s supposed to mean, not someone who simply has a sexual orientation. This distinction is probably what Ashcroft was referring to in talking about his opposition to James Hormel’s ambassadorship – it wasn’t Hormel’s orientation he objected to, it was his honesty about it! And maybe Ashcroft’s Senate testimony wasn’t therefore perjury, since even Paul Offner said he was asked about ‘sexual preference,’ not ‘sexual orientation,’ implying a choice to pursue an openly gay life rather than merely being gay. All this would give Ashcroft some leeway on the question of perjury. But I cannot help but be reminded of another person who escaped conviction on charges of perjury because of his clever use of language. Altogether now: Bill Clinton. What a legacy the man has. We’ve gone from a man who carefully parsed the words ‘sexual relations’ to one who can play havoc with the words ‘sexual orientation.’ The question is: has John Ashcroft simply chosen the ‘Clinton lifestyle’ or is he just an unusually good dissembler from birth?

Man, I’m no good at this. My gaydar is bad enough; but my Jewdar is terrible. Roland Betts is not a Jew. He’s 100 percent Wasp. Thanks to all of you keeping tabs on these vital questions of ethnic identity. I’ve finally come to the conclusion that I couldn’t care less.

Several readers have asked why I believe Paul Offner. I should have said so, but I regularly ran pieces by him on the mid 1990s on health-care reform in The New Republic. He worked for Pat Moynihan back then, and was a reliably sane, moderate, and clear-thinking neo-liberal on all those tangled areas. I came to trust his judgment. I see no reason why he would make this up. To answer some other points: a) Why have no others come forward? Well, few straight guys are exactly happy to enter the national media circus on the grounds that they were once asked if they were gay or not, and I don’t blame them. Many potential Ashcroft hires were probably conservative enough not to have been offended by the gay question and may not even remember it today. Closet-cases who were asked equally don’t want to come out now to say so; so no big surprise Offner is the only one; b) Is there a way in which Offner can be right and yet Ashcroft didn’t commit perjury? First off, if Ashcroft had said he couldn’t remember whether he had ever asked that question, it would be one thing. But he said he couldn’t imagine ever asking such a question. I think that’s hooey on the face of it. Ashcroft has a long history of deep animus against homosexuality, and has never been reluctant to say so. If I were being charitable, I’d say that Ashcroft doesn’t mind gay people as long as they never bring it up, are prepared to deny it publicly and are prepared to support policies which would criminalize their own relationships. Since Ashcroft believes homosexual sex is a sin, then association with open homosexuals might violate his sense of purity. Some evangelicals take seriously the injunction to avoid even the appearance of consorting with sinners. (How they get that attitude from the example of Jesus is a mystery I will leave to the theologians.) So maybe Ashcroft feels pity for homosexuals, but doesn’t want to be associated with publicly identified ones. But if that’s the case, he should say so, instead of lying to the Judiciary Committee. I don’t think I’m on a witch-hunt here. I’ve tried hard to give Ashcroft and Bush the benefit of every doubt; and I still support Bush’s right to pick whichever Cabinet members he wants. But it would be a dereliction of judgment for me not to say that the evidence is very strong that Ashcroft perjured himself last week. If that no longer matters to some conservatives, then they have some hard rethinking to do about their conduct in the Clinton years.

Some readers have asked me why, in defending President Bush’s right to pick John Ashcroft for attorney-general, I still persisted in describing him as unsavory and someone I would never personally have chosen. The answer is in today’s Washington Post. Paul Offner, a health-care expert, has testified that in an interview for a job under Ashcroft, he was directly asked by Ashcroft if he was gay or not; and then asked if he had ever taken an illegal substance. Offner, who is straight, was shocked by the questions as well he might be, and was sure that if he had answered yes to being gay, it would have barred him from the job. I believe Offner. He’s not an ideologue; or a culture warrior; and plenty of people have confirmed his claim. Besides, there is no doubt in my mind that, given his record, Ashcroft would never knowingly hire an openly gay person and that he nixed James Hormel for that reason and that reason alone. There is also no doubt in my mind at this point that Ashcroft lied under oath about these matters before the Judiciary Committee when he said that “sexual orientation has never been something I have used in hiring in any of the jobs, in any of the offices I’ve held,” and when he said that he voted against Hormel for other (unspecified) reasons. Where does that leave us? It leaves us with the knowledge that our next attorney-general is a discriminator who has lied under oath. The consolation is that he has pledged not to allow such bigotry to infect his judgment as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. And if he is true to his word, then that will surely be a gain. But since he has lied under oath already, how do we believe this particular assurance or any other? After eight years of Clinton, do we really want a perjurer running the Justice Department? This revelation troubles me – and not because it reveals an ideology with which I disagree, and not simply because, as a gay man, I am obviously troubled by someone who would bar me from a job purely for my sexual orientation. It troubles me because it gets to the heart of a man’s character. This is a man who voted to impeach a president for lying under oath. How does he expect the rest of us to support his nomination if he has done the same thing himself?