The Dish

Out of 716 cabinet nominations submitted to the Senate since the beginning of the republic, how many were voted down? Nine. How many within sixty days of a new president taking office? One. How many were denied to a new president for purely political reasons? None. Zippo. Except now. All statistics courtesy of the Senate Historical Office.

‘Senator Ashcroft has often taken aggressively activist positions on a number of issues that deeply divide the American people. He had a right to take these activist positions. We have a right to evaluate how those positions would affect his conduct as attorney general.’ – Senator Patrick Leahy. Well let’s take two areas fraught with controversy: abortion and the death penalty. Ashcroft wants to save every fetus and kill every criminal convicted of a capital offense. Both positions are certainly controversial and divisive. But the current attorney-general has similarly divisive views – just diametrically opposed. She supports abortion at any time and any place for any reason, including that of partially-born infants. She has said that she thinks the only purpose of the death penalty is ‘vengeance.’ Both positions are also controversial. What was the Senate vote on Reno’s confirmation? National Review Online reminds me that it was 98 – 0. Leahy is full of it.

So it’s okay to appoint your McCarthy-alum brother to the Justice Department, but not a former governor, senator and state attorney-general? Maybe W should have appointed Jeb and be done with it.

Political columns making lame-ass analogies with reality television / Reality television
Pentecostals / Jews
Business School / Law School.

To be continued.

Has been real and vile. For more, read my Times Book Review posted opposite, ‘Sins of the Fathers.’

Have any liberals wondered what will happen if they fail to kill the Ashcroft nomination? They’ll have thrown everything they have at him and he’ll still survive. So what if he’s then nominated for the Supreme Court? Won’t there be over 50 Senate votes on the record in his favor for A.G.? Won’t it be a little hard for them to reverse themselves on a Court appointment? Personally, I think far less deference is owed the president in Supreme Court appointments than in Cabinet ones, and I’d vote against Ashcroft for the Court in a heart-beat. But Senators might be somewhat more constrained. I have a feeling that some liberals are setting themselves up for a fall with their blanket opposition. It’s important to kill the king, not just wound him. Their current campaign could be a dangerously half-assed measure. That Bush guy. He gets shrewder all the time.

Interesting snippet from the Palm Beach Post survey of Miami-Dade County ballots. When all the 10,000 odd ballots with no vote for president were examined, using the most liberal standards imaginable – Bush actually gained votes. The point here is not to say we’ll ever know for sure who really won Florida beyond a shadow of a doubt. The point is rather to quash the notion, gaining ground among elites, that Al Gore obviously won the election and was denied victory because, as President Clinton put it, they stopped counting. Some Democrats need to believe this, because they need to believe that their candidate didn’t completely blow what should have been a landslide, and because they need to distract attention from the unprecedented way in which Gore and his trial-lawyers tried to overturn the result of a presidential election through legal maneuvering. But the truth is almost certainly more complicated; and almost certainly confirms Bush’s legal, constitutional, electoral victory. Of course, this rather important piece of news went completely unreported in the Washington Post and the New York Times. I guess they already know the truth and don’t need any new facts to get in the way.

I’ve long believed that just because our government won’t enforce gay people’s constitutional right to marriage, that doesn’t mean we should act as if we are second-class citizens. If Rosa Parks could resist being moved up the bus, and if civil rights activists could sit still at a segregated lunch counter, then gay men and women can simply get married in a church or civil ceremony and be damned. Be the change you want to see in the world, as Gandhi put it. In Canada, they’ve done just that. A church recently posted marriage banns for three weeks for some gay couples, and after no public objections, the couples were duly married in a religious ceremony. Usually, that means that the state must legally recognize the marriage. So far, the relevant public officials have said they won’t, but any refusal may lead to a court case and ultimately judicial review. Canada’s constitution has a pretty tough Human Rights provision, like the European Union’s, that may well invalidate the blatant discrimination against gay couples under the current law. So equal marriage rights may well come to Canada through an unconventional route. My favorite part of this story is that a church initiated the challenge. This is how it should be with a moral struggle. When homosexual equality comes to this country, I firmly believe it will be because the churches finally realize that it is a betrayal of their religious inheritance to perpetuate discrimination against gay people. It’s happening already. Look at the Reform Jews’ moral stand against the Boy Scouts. Several other denominations are moving fast in the same direction. Now how about the bann strategy being used here?

I’ve been subjected to my fair share of bashing in my time, and some of it even justified, but I’ve never actually read a published letter directed to my boss, Marty Peretz, imploring him to fire me. In a Slate.com Breakfast Table email dialog today, Margo Howard asks Marty, ‘Oh, and do you think you could muzzle Andrew Sullivan? He has obviously been overcome with disdain for Clinton’s personal weaknesses to the point of becoming a Bush booster. I mean, how does an intellectual, Catholic, gay man come to wave his pompoms for that callow kid?’ Howard’s writing is an almost perfect representation of someone so stuck in East Coast intellectual and social snobbery that she can’t even begin to conceive of why an intelligent person might have preferred Bush’s modest conservatism to Gore’s phony populism. After all, Gore is ‘one of us.’ Bush is ‘one of them.’ And notice too how she thinks someone’s political views HAVE to be related to their personal identity. Can a gay man not prefer small government to big government? Can an intellectual not prefer a modest executive type to a micro-managing pseudo-intellectual like Gore? Can a Catholic not support someone who opposes partial birth abortion over someone so funded by NARAL that he’s close to backing infanticide? And by the way, I have never decried Clinton’s personal weaknesses – only his public lies, perjury and obstruction of justice. Small points, I suppose, when Clinton is ‘one of us.’ But notice the left’s instinctive response to someone not towing the party-line: muzzle him. C’mon, Margo. Try.

Yep. It’s nearly over.