The Dish

Just in case you weren’t aware, I’m described today by Salon as a “conservative” and by National Review Online as a “neoliberal.” Guess there’s a reason for everyone to pick a bone with me. The latter adds that I seem to be wearing “the same plaid shirt [I was wearing] throughout the Clinton era.” Actually, they’re different shirts that look alike and can all go into the same wash-cycle and not be ironed. So I’m a conservative, neo-liberal slob, ok? Sue me.

I was mentioning to some liberal friends the other day that the Palm Beach Post had counted the 10,000 “uncounted votes” in Miami-Dade and given Bush a bigger lead. No-one was fazed. The under-votes are yesterday’s news, they countered. We’re now into over-votes, after Lake County found several hundred Gore votes previously discounted because of extra write-ins that spoiled the ballots. Oh, never mind, then. But do you remember the hue and cry over the uncounted under-votes in Miami-Dade as well as I do? Do you remember that this was the essence of the Gore campaign’s argument at the time? We know now that if Gore had had his way, and if he had gotten the recounts he wanted in his own hand-picked counties, Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach, he would still have lost. That ‘mob’ in Dade County actually cost Bush votes! If that news had emerged in November, it would have dealt a crushing blow to Gore’s attempt to over-turn his opponent’s victory. The response to this news by Goreites? Any hand-wringing or second thoughts or even – God forbid – retraction of their now constant claims that Gore obviously won? Fat chance. Their response to this devastating piece of news is still: Ignore it (try find the news of the Palm Beach Post anywhere prominent in the New York Times or the Washington Post) and change the subject. What’s relevant now is a state-wide full recount of under-votes, over-votes, dimples and whatever conducted by left-liberal media organizations. All that matters to these people is that they get to rig the counting to get the result they want – even if they have to include spoiled ballots, dimples and constantly changing parameters. If the full rigged recount even then doesn’t show a Gore victory, don’t expect any front page news. But if Gore gets as much as one write-in, watch the banner headlines fly. The shamelessness continues.

A couple of small improvements on the site. Thanks to a new content management system, there’s now an archive of dishes, retrievable at the bottom of the current dish. Think of it as the lowest shelf in the fridge – mouldy but tasty. The dish will continue to be served al dente on a daily and nightly basis. I’ll also be able to include links in the text as well, so you can see what on earth I’m going on about. The other aspect is that you’ll be able to see exactly when I post items. The post-times you’ve been reading so far have had as much relationship to the truth as the average Clinton press conference. So in keeping with the new era, the fibs are over. Yes, I am up at 3 am. And no, I don’t have a life.

It’s a given among a certain coterie of Washington journalists that, whatever else you do, you must never criticize Charlie Peters, editor-in-chief and founder of the Washington Monthly. (Another rule of thumb among these types, most of whom are Monthly alums, is that you must never criticize another Monthly alum. A prize to anyone who can cite a criticism by one Monthly alum of another, which isn’t wrapped in an encomium. They make the Freemasons seem open.) That said, I found Charlie Peters’ recent comments on gay scoutmasters to be odd. Peters’ position is that gays and straights should be allowed to be scoutmasters, but only after screening for pedophiliac tendencies. He frames this in equal opportunity terms, and is careful not to accuse gays as such of being pedophiles or tolerant of pedophilia. He’s not Bill Kristol. But then he goes on: “I have to acknowledge that I have known a number of open gays whom I wouldn’t have wanted anywhere near my 12-year-old son. The same, of course, is true, of a number of my heterosexual friends, if I had had a daughter, which I didn’t.” To put this bluntly, I think he’s fibbing. I don’t think it would ever have occurred to him to have restricted his imaginary 12-year-old daughter from access to any of his grown-up straight friends. Can one really be friends with people you think might abuse your child if left alone with her? Similarly, I think the same is true of his openly gay friends. (By the way, who are his openly gay friends who he thinks might have molested his 12-year-old son? I’m sure they’d be interested to hear their names.) All this is simply to say that certain habits of thought – the automatic association of homosexuality with child-abuse – are deeply ingrained even among alleged liberals, however hard they try to dance around it. And I point this out simply because no-one else in Washington will.

I’m not going to get up on a high horse about Jesse Jackson’s personal woes. ‘Let he who is without sin …’ But I can’t help wondering just how long it will take before he or a supporter describes the National Enquirer as the modern equivalent of Bull Connor, and the expose as racially motivated. A day, maybe? A news cycle?

The two real Marys in the Republican Party – Matalin and Cheney – have obviously been working hard. First was Dick Cheney’s astonishingly enlightened defense of gay relationships in the vice-presidential debate. Now, it’s Lynne’s turn to dent the image she gained of being unsupportive of her lesbian daughter in the wake of Cheney’s nomination. In an interview in yesterday’s Washington Times, Cheney is asked whether she will continue to speak out against inappropriate and hateful products from the popular culture: ‘Q: Any people you’re thinking of speaking out on? A: I haven’t really focused on anything except for the amazing prospect of a man like Eminem, who is so full of hate and so outspoken in his hatred of women and gay people – that’s just really got my attention focused right now. That he’d not only win not just a Grammy [award] but, apparently, the biggest Grammy.’ A defense of gay people from wanton hate-speech. What next? After Eminem, will Lynne finally take on the Weekly Standard?

The control freak Tony Blair has finally gotten his way and abolished fox hunting. I have no fondness for what Oscar Wilde called the ‘unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable,’ but I dislike the illiberal sentiment behind banning an ancient past-time in a free country. My beagle, Dusty, is particularly dismayed and has slipped into what appears to be a coma shortly after the news broke. But my favorite snippet from the news stories is from the report commissioned by Blair to examine the practice. The report details how poor foxes are hunted until they drop from exhaustion, at which point they are torn by hounds limb from limb. This experience, the Brits concluded ‘seriously compromises the welfare of the fox.’ Death usually does. Tea, anyone?

A reader sends in a passage from John Lukacs’ ‘Confessions of an Original Sinner’ which brought to mind the kind of people now making jokes about W and looking down their Harvard-Cambridge noses at someone from another planet. It’s a perfect Blue Zone moment: ‘I remember, too, how about 1948 at an upper-class liberal dinner party in Philadelphia I ventured to say that Roosevelt’s view of Stalin had not been very realistic, and that I was harrumphed down by a high-powered social medico who, as I had gathered from his conversation, was a local snob of great assiduity and precision, qualities that I hope also marked his practice with his patients. Going home I was racking my brains as to what kind of man this American doctor reminded me of. Then it came to me: of the kind of self-satisfied bourgeois patron of the arts who in a fashionable seat at a fashionable concert or opera asserts himself amidst the applause by shouting a Bravo!’ Yep, he sure did vote for Gore.

Yes, I nearly fell out of my chair. When Senator Feingold asked John Ashcroft whether he will continue a non-discrimination policy for gays in the Justice Department, Ashcroft said yes! Not only that, he would retain DOJ’s gay pride organization. My point about how important it is to bring these evangelicals into the business of governing the actual country, gays included, is stronger than I anticipated. Of course, this could all be another example of the brilliant passive-aggressive strategy Bush has so far used to maneuver his way through the recount and the transition, but surely this is a promise that Ashcroft will have to keep. Not only single matron attorneys general can be gay-friendly, it seems. (I’m referring to the famously sexually ambiguous Janet Reno. Well, she wasn’t all that ambiguous, but whatever). Next thing we know, Johnny Ashcroft will be hanging a disco ball from the ceiling. Go, Log Cabin!

Among the lugubrious Senatorial fawning over Colin Powell, whose mystique continues to escape me, was an interesting interchange between Powell and Jesse Helms. Helms, the old segregationist, was on good form. He never says something you can’t understand, once you’ve mastered the drool and the accent. I listened for a while, intermittently chuckling, until something occurred to me. Here was a man who had built a career on racial fears in the South respectfully questioning a black nominee for secretary of state. If W does nothing else, this was a milestone. And it was all the more a milestone for being unspoken, unelaborated and unforced. While the Democrats continue to foster racial resentment and hatred in order to shore up their base, George W has quietly trumped them. It took me until today to appreciate the importance of this. But I’m now allowing myself a small dose of racial optimism for the country.