The Dish

A reader writes:

I may be giving the Idaho senator more credit than he deserves, but the man was pretty instrumental in my decision to very recently come out as a young, gay Republican. I’m 22, a college student studying journalism in Miami and a reporter at a major South Florida daily. I’ve been both gay and Republican for a very, very long time, and like many people happy to be Republican, I was not happy to be gay.

Though I’ve come to accept who I am, I never really thought about telling my friends for the main reason many gay men stay closeted: fear. Until I started following the Craig case.

I was at work two weeks ago when I saw a clip of the senator adamantly stating he was not gay in front of the world press. I stopped what I was doing and just looked at the man on the TV.

‘Could that be me some day at 62?,’ I thought to myself. ‘Angry, still afraid, paranoid, confused, living an unhealthy and dangerous double life – is that my future? And what kind of future is that?’

Something inside of me snapped. I immediately e-mailed a gay friend of mine and told him what I had always considered my "dark secret." A week later, I published an article in my college paper about life as a closeted man, pretty much outing myself to everyone I know in the process. The article came out Monday and I’m still getting phone calls, all of them positive and encouraging.

It’s been a long time since a politician has inspired me like this. I hope many other young conservatives will decide to take charge of their own lives after this incident and come out, not just to others, but to themselves as well.

I hope so too. Churchill was right.

The Cunning Realist sees a grim future if the Democrats wait to inherit Bush’s Iraq:

Democrats have a basic, important choice to make here. They can bask lazily in the waning days of an unpopular administration and allow Iraq to play out to their continued advantage, or they can get to work and at least try to put limits on the White House. The former will probably lead to victory in 2008, but it carries huge longer term risk for the party. For Dems, the worst-case scenario might be to inherit a failed, unpopular occupation upon which Congress has placed no tactical or funding limits, then having to put limits on themselves. Ultimately this might allow Bush to escape sole accountability for Iraq and empower the usual suspects to infect political and social discourse with the Weimar meme for the next new decades. Imagine the scenario of a cautious, vacillating Hillary clinging to an updated version of "peace with honor" while fighting off an alliance of Congressional Democrats and some Republicans who, after November ’08, will no doubt rediscover their vestigial anti-interventionist instincts. How’s that as a prescription for party and national disaster?

Jalalabad, Afghanistan, 5.23 am.

A stray thought about the Bush "strategy" in Iraq. Isn’t it slowly becoming the same gambit that Reagan used in the 1980s: back Sunni forces against Shia Iran for regional balance? As the US moves ineluctably to take the Sunni side in Iraq, and tilts increasingly against the Maliki government, aren’t we reprising the logic of the Iran-Iraq war – with this time the faultline being in the middle of Iraq rather than the border with Iran? And all to keep our oil interest alive?

This is all in Dutch; and it’s completely filthy in phonetic translation. So don’t click if you’re squeamish. But I’ve always found foreign languages – especially Dutch and Scandinavian languages – rather funny. “Fart In The Duck” is no exception.

One of the unintended benefits of Larry Craig’s unfortunate entrapment is the revival of interest in Laud Humphreys’ ground-breaking – and ethically controversial 1970 study – "The Tearoom Trade." It was a milestone in the development of review boards for social studies. But it was followed by an unfinished work by Humphreys (he died prematurely of alcohol and cigarettes) on the perhaps strange fact that many of the men he discovered visiting restrooms for anonymous sex were very conservative in their views of social order and legality. That’s why the "hypocrisy label" is such an uninteresting and uninformative one when it comes to people like Craig. Social conservatives who try to have extremely discreet and anonymous sex or drugs or whatever are not, perhaps, hypocrites as such. They recognize vice, do not deny it, see it in themselves, understand that some of it is simply irrepressible, and do not see their public moralizing as in conflict with it. Think Bill Bennett or Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly or David Vitter: all involved in various personal vices (often compulsively) – and arguably more socially conservative because of them. Here’s an excellent overview of Laud Humpreys’ work that gets at some of these nuances:

His biographers give a detailed account of the manuscript Humphreys worked on during his final years but never finished. It was to be a book revisiting one of the themes in Tearoom Trade – the idea he called “the breastplate of righteousness.” That phrase was borrowed from an epistle by St. Paul, while the argument owed a lot to the Frankfurt School’s analysis in The Authoritarian Personality.

Men he had observed having anonymous sex in a public place often turned out to be ardent champions of law and order. Unable to control themselves in that part of their lives, they put on the defensive “breastplate,” redoubling their efforts elsewhere: “Motivated largely by his own awareness of the discreditable nature of his secret behavior,” wrote Humphreys in his dissertation, “the covert deviant develops a presentation of self that is respectable to a fault. His whole lifestyle becomes an incarnation of what is proper and orthodox.”

Revising this argument in his later years, Humphreys wrote about how hypocrisy, self-loathing, and aggression fueled one another. The work-in-progress, which he wanted to call “Immoral Crusaders,” sounds like a real mess. His biographers call the manuscript “rambling” and of “far from publishable quality, at least by any scholarly journal or university press.” The report Humphreys received from an editor for a major trade publisher was equally dismissive.

So a lost masterpiece it is not. But it sounds like an attempt to understand the force that drove and tortured him – not desire, but self-hatred.

And then one thinks of so many Catholic priests of the past. Some righteousness; some breastplate.

(Photo: David Vitter, by Chip Somodevilla.)

At our current rate of progress, we will have eliminated every AQI fighter by the end of next month. Will we be able to leave then?

"But war, taking away the affluence of daily necessaries, is a most violent master and conformeth most men’s passions to the present occasion … The received value of names imposed for signification of things was changed into arbitrary. For inconsiderate boldness was counted true-hearted manliness; provident deliberation, a handsome fear; modesty, the cloak of cowardice; to be wise in everything, to be lazy in everything. A furious suddenness was reputed a point of valour.

To re-advise for the better security was held a fair pretext of tergiversation. He that was fierce was always trusted, and he that contraried such a one was suspected," – Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, translated by Thomas Hobbes.

(Photo: Win McNamee/Getty.)

Together again:

"I had no interest whatever in Gen. David Petraeus’ predictable report this week of the success of the troop surge in Iraq. Words and more words — what’s new? Just get our troops the hell out of there — now! A phased withdrawal, requiring the removal of massive amounts of supplies and equipment, will take months. But there isn’t the sketchiest plan because Bush is dug in to the bitter end and will toss this hot potato to the incoming president — who (no matter which party wins) won’t dare to act. And of course Iraq needs to remain neutralized when American or Israeli bombs start dropping on Iran, which I have little doubt they will do by next year. Bush-Cheney, lacking a clear record of achievement, want to go out with a bang," – from Salon.

No doubt the president has had a good week (although his short-term success may lead to an abyss for the GOP next year). Despite the explicit failure of the surge on the terms that Bush laid out in January – political reconciliation at the center – it will continue until its natural, cyclical death next spring. Somehow, with the help of his propaganda outlets, the president has managed to get enough headlines out there about a "drawdown" of troops that the Republican revolt is stilled. His imperviousness to empirical reality allows him to gamble the country’s military, reputation and vast amounts of money yet one more time – at an untold cost in lives. And yet he has won again – the system unable to resist a president in wartime whose goal now is ensuring that he can pin defeat and chaos in Iraq on his successor or the opposition party, or, if failure in Iraq deepens further, widen the war to Iran in order to scramble the debate one more time.

So where’s the catch? The catch is tonight. The usual suspects – Kaus, Krauthammer, Goldberg – are nervous that the president’s own imprimatur on the now-indefinite occupation of the Middle East may hurt public opinion. I can see how. I’ll have to watch tonight; but it will be painful. No sane person can trust the guy’s judgment any more, or listen to his excruciating recitation of the terror war creed. His credibility on Iraq is negligible at this point. Could he snatch a temporary pr defeat from temporary pr victory? On the day it became apparent that the latest attempt at an oil law in Iraq has collapsed? On the day when the leader of the sole success story in Iraq is assassinated by an al Qaeda whose ass has apparently been kicked? We’ll see; and I’ll blog it.