Saturday, April 7, 2007

Secular-Progressives Take Over Disney

I think I know what O’Reilly will be screaming about next. The New York Times reports that Disneyland, Disney World, and its affiliated cruise lines will now be swinging both ways:

The Walt Disney Co. had limited its Fairy Tale Wedding program to couples with valid marriage licenses, but it is now making ceremonies at its parks available to gay couples as well.

''We believe this change is consistent with Disney's long-standing policy of welcoming every guest in an inclusive environment,'' Disney Parks and Resorts spokesman Donn Walker said Friday. ''We want everyone who comes to celebrate a special occasion at Disney to feel welcome and respected.''

The times, they are a-changin’. The saving grace of capitalism is that it can change right along with us.

Olbermann Reaches Across the Network Aisle

Keith and Geraldo have had their differences, but this Easter season, everyone can come together to celebrate a good skewering of Bill O'Reilly:



Andrew Sullivan on the exchange:
I never thought I would be on Geraldo's side. But what you see in O'Reilly's near-violent hatred of "the other" is exactly what Geraldo says it is: a distraction and in its emotional force, a disgrace.

Friday, April 6, 2007

Judge On, If Ye Be Judged

If Free Speech Friday is no longer an appropriate day for laying judgment upon the hypocrisies, cruelties, and failures of a society – anyone’s society – then we’re in for a rather bland opinion sheet 30-odd times a year, aren’t we? It’s ironic that Brooke McKean’s editorial on multicultural propriety should be printed on Good Friday, the supposed pseudo-anniversary of the day that a supposed carpenter/prophet from Nazareth was supposedly tortured and executed by a supposed viceroy of the Roman Empire for no crime save that of thought and speech – and, yes, judgment of a corrupt and tyrannical social order.

McKean is one of the wiser commentators, and certainly one of the better writers, that the Daily features in its Opinion section. Something tells me that length and content constraints are partially responsible for the unsettling verdict that she arrives at, namely that she doesn’t believe she has any right to judge the appalling misogyny of the conservative subcultures of North Africa and the Pashtun regions of Central Asia. Au contraire, she does.

“As a woman who believes in equal rights across genders,” she grits her teeth at the exchange of young girls as chattel and the practice of clitoral mutilation, but remains “internally conflicted”:

Do I have a right…to impose my Western standards on another culture? I think not. Although I am strongly opposed to these practices, I don’t believe any Western influence could change the situation.

I’m confused by this paragraph. If she accepts the fundamental principle of equality between genders, mustn’t she also accept that that principle transcends the place where one was born and the culture in which one was raised? Does she believe this is a “Western” standard merely because it’s practiced in the “West”? The principle of gender equality is either universal or idiosyncratic; if it’s idiosyncratic, as she suggests, on what basis is she “strongly opposed” to the abuse of women in these cultures?

Gender equality is, of course, a universal truth, and one that has taken the “West” far too long to discover and which we have been far too slow to institutionalize. Consider this assertion:

Undoubtedly, our culture is diametrically opposed to the Pashtuns’, but there exists a structure in every culture, and to force it to change is to threaten the society itself.

I respect McKean’s regard for cultures that are distant and vulnerable and difficult to understand. However, I take exception to the assumption that culture has the power to constitutionally alter the nature and essential dignity of a human being, such that she may be treated as any less worthy a creature than her father, brother, or husband. The cultural “structure” that says she is less worthy – that she may be traded or mutilated or worse – is grounded in tradition (usually, I might add, a traditional interpretation of revelation), but tradition is not its own justification. It must defend its claims to legitimacy by responding to criticism of its ideas and practices, if only so that we know precisely why traditionalists believe what they believe.

If Brooke McKean feels the urge, as I suspect she does, to denounce involuntary clitoral circumcision as irredeemably cruel and utterly ridiculous, she has that right – and, I would say, that responsibility. By the same token, if the Pashtun believe American consumerism is spiritually shallow and exploitative, or that western feminism is blasphemous and hypocritical, they too have the right to say so and we who believe in such things have the responsibility to defend them.

There’s a concrete component to McKean’s article that is relevant to the U.S. government’s Afghanistan policy. Her basis for opposing the “imposition” of western values, presumably through the barely-functioning Karzai government in Kabul, is unclear. Its seems partially a matter of practicality; after all, she says, the Pashtun have a history of defending their “honor” against outsiders, and indeed there’s a great deal of merit in the contention that trying to transform the entire value system of Afghanistan is a massive exercise in futility. Fair enough, but the crux of her argument is her principled stand against cross-cultural critique. Yes, her “cultural preconditions register certain activities as wrong” – culture, because it’s inculcated in youth, is exclusive in nature.

But she also possesses the faculty of reason, which is common to all human beings regardless of location or values, and which, importantly, must always guide the selective preservation of traditional practices and interpretation of holy books. This is the common denominator that permits us, for instance, to determine that gender is an arbitrary distinction when we’re talking about rights.

You do have the right to judge, Ms. McKean. Shout it from the rooftops.

In Which I Praise Nixon and Pelosi

Matthew Yglesias responds to the media's Pelosi-in-Syria uproar here and here. Rarely has it been more important to remind everyone that the "politics stops at waters edge" myth is, well, a myth. Copperhead Democrats annoyed Lincoln by visiting Great Britain and France while those countries were considering intervening on the behalf of the Confederates - though Lincoln never isolated himself by making a refusal to talk to potential enemies a platform plank. Henry Kissinger was negotiating with the Vietnamese Communists on Nixon's behalf while Johnson was still in office, and (running the risk of offending my lefty friends) probably shortened our stay in southeast Asia by demonstrating that while the president may have been unyielding and unreasonable, other powerful Americans were not.

And now Pelosi is talking to Assad. If Bush hadn't displayed such childish intransigence, it wouldn't matter. But since he has, someone needs to be the grown-up.

War Personality

Tyler sent me this video of Bill O’Reilly’s latest, and perhaps greatest, exercise in rage, prejudice, and paranoia. I hate to say it, but Geraldo deserves credit for brushing the bullying aside and standing up to this demagogue:


Does O’Reilly know that he’s on television? Isn’t he ashamed of building an arbitrary strawman and passing it off as a valuable point? Does he not mind losing control on the air? Of course not – he’s fighting a culture war.

That's not facetious. One major influence on my thinking recently is Robert C. Tucker’s excellent essay “The Dictator and Totalitarianism,” which was published as a chapter in his 1972 book The Soviet Political Mind. He argues that certain kinds of populist movements require a “war personality” to lead them, an individual whose psychology is uniquely oriented toward political combat – fomenting division, identifying and sometimes inventing secret enemies, and projecting onto those enemies motives so vile that they begin to look more like demonic caricatures than human beings. Such a person is prone to brandishing his finger in the face of his opponent and, seething through his teeth, accusing him of wanting anarchy.

Bill O’Reilly is an exceedingly wealthy, famous and influential man. That he has been so successful in selling this rhetorical poison for so long is frightening – it’s a testament to the volatility of our current political climate that he’s able to muster such a huge audience of malcontents.

Thursday, April 5, 2007

U.S. Attorneys… [Sigh…]

Spencer advances two arguments, and I’m skeptical of both of them:

  • Comm. scholars make useful discoveries.
  • That one such discovery is outlined in this study, which is partially responsible for the outcry over the Bush/Gonzales Justice Department’s game of musical chairs.

The basic contention is this:

Data indicate that the offices of the U.S. Attorneys across the nation investigate seven (7) times as many Democratic officials as they investigate Republican officials, a number that exceeds even the racial profiling of African Americans in traffic stops.

To drive the point home, the study’s authors coin the fatuous term “political profiling.” They decry the fact that an overwhelming number of these investigations were conducted against local officials – supposedly so that the national media wouldn’t pick up on the trend – and lament the prospect that insinuations of corruption could unfairly weaken the Democratic Party’s grassroots. I have a number of issues with the study, and a somewhat broader objection to the way the Democrats are milking the scandal.

The study has several weak points, and I’m indebted to this Economist blog post for bringing a few of them to my attention. The first and glibbest one is that, as the Hillary juggernaut continues to demonstrate, grassroots activism is no longer crucial to the Democratic Party and is certainly not the “essence of its personality”. Parties are top-down, center-outward colonial operations in the United States. Second, cities are far more likely to experience corruption scandals, precisely because the media and investigatory spotlight is normally absent from the equation. Third, a disproportionately high number of local officials are members of the Democratic Party, especially in the major urban centers most likely to invite corruption.

That being said, seven times as many investigations…obviously, that’s a big number. But the Justice Department can and should investigate anyone it sees fit, and I’m willing to bet that most of its employees are fair and committed professionals. The scandal concerns the extent to which presidential advisors and the Attorney General pressured the U.S. Attorney corps to abandon its professionalism and target Democrats. We’ve heard some eyebrow raising stories, certainly.

It is, however, impossible to draw a principled line between a legitimate “politicization of the Justice Department” and an illegitimate one – for good or ill, the nation elects a politician to lead the executive. All that we’ve really learned is that Karl Rove, Harriet Miers, and Alberto Gonzales are sleazy and cronyistic, a truth most of us had a pretty good grasp on already.

To be clear - this is an unprecedented politicization of the Justice Department, it is a disgrace, and the Administration should bear some awful criticism for it. In a different time, this could be the legacy-imperiling scandal for which the Attorney General would be forced to resign – but we live in a uniquely dark political time. Gonzales should resign, but we should be calling for his resignation on the basis of his absurd defenses of torture and his mind-boggling assertion that the Constitution guarantees no right of habeas corpus.

We’re always engaged in a zero-sum struggle for the attention of the public. Yes, there was a series of slimy (though probably inevitable) machinations in the bureaucracy. But we also have a bloody, cruel, unnecessary war on our hands. We also have terrorist enemies the Administration has neglected to fight. We also have an illegal suspension of our most basic protection against state tyranny. All I’m saying is, let’s just bring the big guns and leave the hackneyed sleaziness to one side for now.

Some Snarky Fun

A priceless picture.

"Was the Sun taken over by the Onion?"

Nietzsche once quipped that if you gaze long enough into a deep, dark abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

The New York Sun ruminates on why Dick Cheney should throw his hat in the ring. Apparently they believe that nothing brightens the eyes of primary voters like staring down a man who has substituted a menacing black hole for his soul:

This year, the leading Republican candidates include Senator McCain, who was Mr. Bush’s rival in a bitter 2000 primary contest and who voted against some of Mr. Bush's tax cuts, and Mayor Giuliani, who is going around proclaiming, in what seems a rebuke of George W. Bush, "it's time now that we have a president that knows how to get things done." Were Mr. Cheney in the race, it's hard to imagine that the president's approval ratings would not be five or 10 points higher. The reason is that the administration would have a defender on the campaign trail as part of the public debate.

Well, I don’t want to quibble over P.R. here – public image, despite the best efforts of our most unscrupulous salesmen, remains quite securely in the eye of the beholder. But it seems to me that Cheney’s image as a creepy Machiavellian has been carefully manufactured in order to make him a lightning rod for the mistakes and the overweening of the Administration as a whole. Nobody trusts him, and nobody was ever meant to.

But then, I’m no good with sarcasm. Will somebody tell me if the Sun editors are…serious?

Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Jobs Sane People Don’t Want

Today’s Edition: Superintendent of Seattle Public Schools. The P-I reports that the school board has narrowed the field down to two candidates with experience in tough urban districts back east – Philadelphia and Charleston County. This school district is like a big blind elephant on ice skates and it needs a perspective untainted by the community's deep-seated factionalism, and both candidates look resilient and smart to me. And really, we should all just be glad that Norm Dicks backed off, no?

Next step – elect a new school board? Don’t hold your breath, but it’s not like we couldn’t benefit:

The district's consultants, Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based Ray & Associates, had encouraged the district to keep the candidates under wraps until now to avoid a repeat of the district's last superintendent search, in 2003.

That search, which cost about $60,000, imploded when all four finalists withdrew their names after facing intense public scrutiny and mounting criticism from parents, politicians and education advocates. The major complaint was that candidates weren't properly vetted -- leading to some unsettling revelations late in the hiring process. […]

Unlike the last superintendent search, there will be no public forums with the finalists. The two will meet with members of community groups at invitation-only sessions Thursday and Friday evenings, which will be broadcast on Channel 21.

Just one more reason why I detest most local governments. Hmm, I love the smell of incompetence and opacity in the morning.

The President’s Advantage

He may have alienated 66 percent of the country, but he’s still a hero among the remaining one-third.

It’s a truism now: When President Bush says he doesn’t care what the polls say, he means precisely that. The truth is that between ignoring Congress and plundering the budget and alienating the public, he’s always acted like a lame-duck president – it’s because he believes in what he’s doing, and the law gives him enough power to do it. By contrast, Pelosi and Reid have to bribe the Congress with $20 billion to try to get the war stopped, or at least slowed, by sometime (we don’t really know when) next year. This is not a man you can play chicken with.

I have no idea what the Dems going to do. I doubt they do either.

A Fairly Pleasant Surprise from the Daily

I suppose I’ll clear the air – I’m no great fan of the Daily’s Opinion section. In fact, I was confused by the Monday iDaily, because I had thought that Celeste Flint’s revision of American history in last Friday’s issue was the big April Fool's surprise.

But I like to think that I give credit where credit is due, and today Hanady Kader gave us an interesting and reasonably well-composed background of Iraqi-Iranian maritime territorial disputes. I shy away from her implication that the media hasn’t given the Iranian perspective on the (former) hostage crisis a balanced hearing – sometimes balance is simply incompatible with accuracy – but this is the kind of article I like to see in the official newspaper of a school as renowned as UW.

An End to the Crisis

By Chris Kaasa, BW Washington Correspondent

OCTOBER 31, 1962 – White House officials have reported that the Soviet Union has agreed to a U.S. demand for the unconditional removal of their short- and medium-range nuclear arsenal from the island of Cuba. By all accounts, this represents an end to the 16-day standoff that brought the two superpowers to the brink of nuclear war. According to one senior aide to President Kennedy, speaking anonymously due to the diplomatic sensitivity of the information, the State Department received a teletype message from Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev early this morning, explaining that the whole ordeal had been conceived by the Kremlin as an elaborate Halloween “trick”.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” the aide said. “There was a ‘treat’ too – he promised to remove all Soviet troops from Hungary and Poland by next June. Frankly, we’re all at a loss over here…”

Ahmadinejad released his British hostages this morning, offering them up as an Easter gift to the people of the United Kingdom. Yes, yes, I know that this is not really part of an inexplicable Easter celebration from the leader of an Islamic theocracy, just an extraordinarily amateurish cover story for an extraordinarily crazy rabble-rouser. Blair, for all his faults, is a careful, smart and skilled natural statesman. I shudder to think how much worse our current global situation would be if President Bush had plunged headlong into Iraq and the war on terror without the Prime Minister at his side.

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

A Double-Take Moment

Nancy Pelosi takes a short trip to Syria…evidently without the president’s permission. Yes, it bothers me, and not just because it’s the most depressing demonstration yet of the disastrous polarization of our government and isolation of our president. The truly repellent ingredient of this whole episode will be the image plastered all over the blogosphere tomorrow: Our San Francisco liberal, the first female Speaker of the House – and one of our finest emblems of the opportunity, equality, pluralism, and liberty that make America the flare of hope that it is – shaking hands with Bashar Assad, the Middle East’s answer to Baby Doc, symbol the exploitation, chauvinism, and thuggery that stultifies his country and his region.

The near-unbearable truth is that someone has to do this job, filthy as it is. The Baker-Hamilton commission has counseled it. The most experienced members of Congress, of both parties now, have demanded it. Our top commanders say there’s no purely military solution to the morass in Iraq. When President George W. Bush tells us that he can’t negotiate with an evil world, he’s telling us that he can’t fulfill the responsibilities of his office. He abdicates his right to represent us, and someone has to pick up the pieces. Frisco lefty that she is, Pelosi understands that someone has to lead.

"Boys Beware!"

Never trust a bald man with a mustache:



Good lord, why were the fifties so creepy? It takes generations to shed the burden of lies like these. To think I hadn't heard about the latest lynching until last week.

Monday, April 2, 2007

Look What You've Wrought, Kaplan!


Actors, athletes, writers, WORKERS. But at least they don't have to pay for prom dresses.

You Know Something's Up...



…when the Bush Administration doesn’t think it needs quite so much power. The EPA under President Bush has done its damnedest to become vestigial. Justice John Paul Stevens for the 5-4 majority:

Even if postenactment legislative history could shed light on the meaning of an otherwise unambiguous statute, EPA identifies nothing suggesting the Congress meant to curtail EPA’s power to treat greenhouse gases as air pollutants…. EPA’s alternative basis for its decision – that even if it has statutory authority to regulate greenhouse gases, it would be unwise to do so at the time – rests on reasoning divorced from statutory text.

My emphasis, of course. You were saying something about men in black robes legislating from the bench?

It's Not a New Metaphor

Soft power is the grease that keeps the iron machinery of military and economic power not just running smoothly, but running at all. In an anarchic world, military power must be the heart of national security – and in the post-Cold War world, American military power is the best guarantor of a global balance of power that won’t collapse into a whole new world war. But some minimal level of trust and partnership is absolutely necessary for the United States to remain safe in the world, and it always has been absolutely necessary.

Victor Davis Hanson makes some good points, particularly regarding the illusions that many Europeans indulged in during the first decade of the post-Soviet era. But how do his realist assumptions about human nature square up with his description of a continent of puny Bohemians, and his assertion that the European response to a major terrorist attack would be simply to roll over and play dead? I promise, the Europeans still know how to fight – shouldn’t we be glad that they’ve let us take, virtually unchallenged, the hegemonic steering wheel for awhile?

Andrew Sullivan has a much smarter response than I’m able to come up with:

[T]he collapse in hard power is even steeper. It's the crumpled paper tiger of the US military in Iraq that is fueling Iranian aggression. The grind of the under-manned and under-planned Iraq occupation has destroyed the U.S.'s credible hard power in the Middle East. With this deft, disgusting game with British sailors, Iran's regime is reminding us of two things: that we have no real soft power left among our allies, and that our hard power is being slowly degraded and humiliated in Iraq.

In Case You Haven't Heard...

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

Two people were fatally shot at Gould Hall this morning. That's here:
Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

The police say it looks like a murder-suicide. Right now, the P-I seems to have the best report on the situation, which they say will be updated throughout the day. Stay safe, comrades.

Sunday, April 1, 2007

"Stay Cool" - An Old Contrarian on Free Speech

I post this wherever I go. Christopher Hitchens at the top of his game:

Were We Talking About a War on Vice?

We should be clear. Not all “puritans” are pure. In fact, I daresay most of their leaders are demagogues, and not dangerous demagogues at that – just annoying busybodies. The Seattle Times reports on the University of Washington’s changes to the Administrative Code:

Students who receive a citation from either campus or Seattle police would get a warning letter from the UW. A second citation could require the student to attend mediation with an accuser. A third police citation — or failure to attend mediation — would allow the UW to initiate disciplinary action up to expulsion.

Students accused of breaking the law would still be subject to any legal action brought by police or prosecutors.

You see, the Hobbesian “sovereign terror” isn’t enough to deter the “rowdy” kids on Greek Row. The UW administrators have to get a piece of the action too. But wait! Didn’t the ASUW vote for this?

UW officials won a key victory in January when the UW student body voted in favor of such changes, after resisting them in previous years. The vote came after some state lawmakers threatened to impose new rules unless the UW began policing students more vigorously.

That’s Frank Chopp for you. The actual homeowners know they have electoral hegemony and they aren’t afraid to use it. And yes, the college kids don’t vote. Shame on us. But that doesn’t change the fact that this is a redundant, useless, imperious bane on our lives, does it?

Meanwhile, UW officials are proposing a second measure that would allow them to impose academic sanctions on students who are convicted of certain serious crimes — no matter where the crimes take place. Those crimes are physical abuse, sexual abuse, harassment, stalking, hazing and possession or manufacture of explosives.

“Possession or manufacture of explosives”? Seriously? Evidently, prison time for bomb-making isn't a sufficient blight on a resume – we need to shave a bit of GPA off that chemistry degree too.

Here’s a thought – PROTECT US. The maligned area north of 45th has been the scene of God knows how many shootings, stabbings, and arson attacks, NONE of which, as far as I am able to remember, were committed by Huskies. The U-District has the highest concentration of registered sex offenders in the state. We may not vote, but we all have parents who do.

How Do They Mobilize These People?

The public diplomacy of the Iranian people rather mirrors the actual diplomacy of the Iranian government, doesn’t it? Lots of belligerent shouting intended to convince westerners that you’re not dealing with devotees of classic, stately realpolitik. The Broken Watch predicts that hostage crisis redux will end with a tiny “bargain” – something like Blair issuing a promise not to violate Iranian sovereignty – which will be met with rolling eyes in the U.K. and U.S. and thronging, triumphant consecrations of Ahmadinejad’s name in Tehran.

Blair has the support of the world, and rightly so. Still, one can’t help smiling when the British emphasize the contrast with their Victorian dignity and calm:

"The responsible way forward is to continue the often unglamorous, but important and quiet diplomatic work to get our personnel home," [Transport Minister Douglas] Alexander told the British Broadcasting Corp.'s Sunday AM program.

Matthew Yglesias trusts the Blair government, both to resolve the crisis and to rein in President Nothing-To-Lose. So do I. Let's hope no one on Pennsylvania Avenue gets too excited.

Complicating the Taliban’s Spring Offensive?

The cable news chat shows are perpetually abuzz with warnings that a resurgent Taliban – supported by a combat elite of Al Qaeda operatives – will attempt a reconquista of large regions of Afghanistan very, very soon. The BBC reports that the Musharraf government has managed to turn the locals of South Waziristan against the bin Laden and Taliban proxies operating from the Pakistani frontier. But don’t go celebrating a revival of secular soft power just yet:

Our correspondent says the government is keen to show that the fighting indicates that a controversial peace deal to stop militants crossing the border into Afghanistan is working.

Under the deal the military reduced its presence on the condition that local tribesmen stopped militants from carrying out attacks across the [Afghan] border.

This “deal” carries big risks for everyone, doesn’t it? Bush once again outsources the war on terror to shady people no one much trusts. Musharraf cedes direct control over a region that he desperately needs direct control over. And suppose the tribal elders fail to completely expel the militants – when (inevitably) the Taliban campaign fails, they’re likely to face a fighting, scorched-earth retreat, aren’t they?