Advice to Joe Lieberman

Joe Lieberman will most likely retain his Senate seat, and so he doesn't really need any campaign advice. In the interests of propriety however, I'm going to note that it's probably a poor idea for a Jewish politician to name his youthful vanguard the LieberKidz, a bowlderized construction that's awfully similer to, well, um, how shall I put this delicately, the, uh, Hitlerjugend.

Once again, I'm just sayin' . . .

I Says to Him I Says

Jon Schwartz finds and has fun with a recent utterance by His Highness, le dauphin:

In this new kind of war, we must be willing to question the enemy when we pick them up on the battlefield. (Applause.) We have captured people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who our intelligence community thinks was the mastermind of the September the 11th attacks. When we captured him, I said to the Central Intelligence Agency, why don't we find out what he knows in order to be able to protect America from another attack. (Applause.)

I left the stage directions applause in there just because it's so fucking ridiculous.

Here's something of which I'm certain: The President of the United States (not even this President of the United States) has never walked into a roomful of CIAians and said, "Why don't we find out what he knows in order to be able to protect America from another attack." Or, if he said it, he turned toward Camera 2 for closeup for the closing in-order-to. This "I told so-and-so to do such-and-such in order to accomplish what have you to protect America" construction is the most goofily expository manner of speech this side of Bruce Willis introducing his team in Armeggedon. Or it may just be that Cheney sometimes forgets to turn him off, and he's stuck in stump-mode, appending every other sentence with a shiny "protect America" just, you know, because.

Santorum for Liberty

Jennifer Roback Morse is one of those Republicans who wears the Libertarian label just as I wore a pirate's eyepatch for a couple of weeks in the fourth grade. As it turned out, this didn't make me a pirate, and all that suffered was the depth of my perception . . . no, my depth perception . . . or . . .

What's most curious about this subspecies of the GOP is that it consists in large part of those conservatives with the least affinity for libertarian positions: social conservatives, spy-and-police-state sympathizers, drug warriors, foreign interventionists. Jim Henley said it all a couple of years back, regarding Eugene Volokh:

I’ve always considered [Volokh's] specialty to be showy moral handwringing on the way to siding with Power anyway. The further you get from standard Republican issues like guns and university speech codes, the more likely he is to arrive, with exquisite regret, at the conclusion that the State, particularly when helmed by George W. Bush, must have its way.

Volokh, of course, is much closer to a libertarian that J.R.M., but that's the sort of distinction without difference best left to Groucho Marx:

Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.

J.R.M., in any case, proposes that libertarians vote for the Republican busybody in Pennsylvania's Senate race, rather than the Democratic busybody, because, after all, think of the children!

Now I've never heard of the Children's Defense Fund, which is the liberal bogeyman digging its communistic talons into our marginal rates, or some such, but I do know of the Family Research Council, whose title anyway lives up to the old Mary McCarthy standby: every word a lie. The Council is run by one Tony Perkins, one of those gaudy Southern charismatics that roll regularly from the alluvial plains and delta of the lower Mississip, full of hoary assurances that no fancy talk or city thinkin' ought change the made-up mind of any man or wife-unit who's made up his mind to have his mind made up, and God bless y'all, by the way. The Council advocates such libertarian positions as forced pregnancies, criminalized sexualities, drug prohibition, and using public monies to teach The Children hoary old arguments-from-design.

But they do favor the permanent repeal of the ahem-death tax, which is some pap to toss to the libertarian not-mobs.

Roy, who led me to J.R.M.'s little tap-dance, is very funny on the point, so I'll make the more modest contribution that if there's any tax on wealth and income that a libertarian can support, it's the tax on inheritance. Maybe that's more Rawls than Hayek, but I can't really rouse myself to protest the taxman filling his coffers with the surplus wealth of the dead fabulously-well-to-do. Since talk of the govahmint taking the family farm and shootin' the dog out back is entirely a fiction, and since millions can still be passed unencumbered by the eye of the IRS, exempting immense inheritance from taxation only guarantees future generations of inheritor layabouts neither laboring nor thinking. I and any libertarian worth his dog-eared copy of Mill would glady trade off the Hilton girl's comfort for a chance to close Gitmo, just as we would happily let the government continue to fund abortions at military hospitals (one of J.R.M.'s examples of the Family Research Council's advocacy for fiscal restraint!) if only it'd quit spending so much goddamn money on the military itself. What I mean to say is that a libertarian should be a meritocrat at heart, unrealistic though that may be, and should support men making their own fucking way in the world, rising and falling in their own ventures, succeeding or failing in their own businesses. This world doesn't need another Bush le jeune.

The Michael Moore Award

Following my recent post on Andrew Sullivan, commenter Disenchanted Dave noted that after her death, Andrew Sullivan retired his "Sontag Award" in favor of the "Moore Award," defined:

The Moore Award--named after film-maker, Michael Moore--is for divisive, bitter and intemperate anti-war rhetoric. Special recognition goes to those hoping for failure in the war on terror.

A war has killed tens of thousands, at least, and he mocks intemperance! By way of bastardizing a paraphrase: temperance in opposition to evil is vice. Where has temperate, conciliatory criticism gotten anyone so far in the fight to end this act of hubris? And if nowhere, then . . . ?

But that's a thought too far for the likes of Sullivan.

As for "those hoping for failure in the war on terror," there are no such people. There are only two camps: those who accept the premise that there is and can be a "war on terror," who uniformly hope for victory of some sort or other, and those who do not accept the premise that there is or can be a "war on terror," who hope for neither victory nor defeat because neither eventuality has any bearing on the impossible conclusion to a nonexistent conflict.

That also is a thought too far for the likes of Sullivan, whose essential premises include the premise that his premises are essential.

The larger point is this: Michael Moore is no Susan Sontag, clearly, but he was still more right than Andrew Sullivan, and sooner. He's a maker of agitprop, a populist, and a pretty shallow thinker, if that word even applies, but he nonetheless identified, at least partially, the error, crime, and folly of the Iraq War back when Andrew Sullivan was still ejaculating whole paragraphs of praise for the so-called liberation of Iraq and casting cheap aspersions on the person and character of his imagined domestic enemies, who had the temerity in a moment when the war was still popular in the American imagination to question it.

Michael Moore is one of the least perceptive of antiwar voices, and he nevertheless perceived long before Andrew Sullivan the two basic features of the Iraq War: it is wrong, and it can't be won.

So rather than mitigating the tawdry insult he hurled at Sontag with his "award," Sullivan compounds it, because he refuses to consider that his mistake wasn't just nomenclature but category, no less absurd than the dauphin's interlocuters telling us that they aren't "staying the course," but "adapting to win." Transferring the same shit from toilet to toilet only darkens the stains on his dirty hands.

What Keeps Me Awake

Well before the second Iraq war started, I warned in a piece in The American Conservative that the structure of our position in Iraq could lead to that greatest of military disasters, encirclement. That is precisely the danger if we go to war with Iran.

-William Lind-

William Lind, Pat Lang, and Billmon opine that unless on fout le camp, le camp sera foutu: get out, or get fucked.

Lind (aiming at my own heart) says of our dauphin, "Like the French Bourbons, [the Bush Administration] forgets nothing and it learns nothing."

Billmon, also taking aim at my Godwin-hating heart, says, "There is an extremely Godwin-unfriendly precedent for this sort of behavior"--the failure, he means, to consider contingency or to accept even the possibility of defeat. He speaks of the disastrous German offensives on the Eastern Front in 1942/43, particularly Hitler's willful, deluded sacrifice of his entire 6th Army.

In Oliver Hirschbiegel's extraordinary film, Downfall (Der Untergang), which recreates the final days of the Third Reich in the Führerbunker, Hitler (played by Bruno Ganz) harangues his ministers and generals, even as Berlin falls to Allied bombs and an unstoppable Allied advance. He declares that it is all part of his long-planned strategy, to lure the Allies into the false complacency of victory and then crush them "with a giant pincer maneuver" executed (are you ready) by the 6th Army. The generals choke, then tell him that army has long been lost. Ganz is one of the great living actors, and he brings worlds to the face and shoulders of his Adolph Hitler facing, finally, the downfall of the title.

Worries about supply lines are below Bush the Decider and Rumsfeld the Tranformer. That much is clear. It's often said that Mein Kampf was a "blueprint" for Hitler's eventual plans, but as Richard J. Evans notes, that contention is an insult to blueprints everywhere: you can't build a house from the lovely elevations you show to a client. So too is it evident that the civilian leadership in the White House and Pentagon is simply not adept at warmaking, having long-since internalized the popular rhetoric of Superpower and its attendant omnipotence. Like the lame technogeeks in abundance on the internet, our technocrats don't actually know much about the technology they fetishize. That the American military is "incredibly fuel-thirsty" in a nation that "has vast oil reserves [but] is short of refined oil products," occurs to them, if it occurs to them at all, only in the most abstract way, and leads them to the inevitable conclusion: someone smart will fix it.

(That is, after all, the attitude toward the civilizational supply lines that feed the rapacious energy appetites of America: that some lab geek will invent a new fuel cell, Ford'll slap it into its cars, and away we'll go, running on water, with everything else otherwise exactly the same.)

I've long been an opponent of the excuse by incompetence that excuses adventurism and condemns Bush simply for choosing the wrong adventure and embarking on it without a plan. Still, I fear the encirclement that Lind fears and worry about the supply lines that worry Pat Lang. I'm very afraid of what my terrified, blinkered, violent country will do if these things come to pass.

Andrew Sullivan's Soul

Though billed as "one of today's most provocative social and political commentators" on his book jacket, Sullivan's substantive views are almost frighteningly banal.

-Matthew Yglesias

I can't recall the title, but I recently picked up a new novel by precisely the sort of young, so-called postmodern writer that Andrew Sullivan would surely despise without reading, and the dust jacket copy began:

Did you know that most authors write their own jacket copy?

So there is that.

There is also the fact that Andrew Sullivan writes for Time, a publication of almost magisterial banality.

But mostly there is the fact that Andrew Sullivan is a world-class, self-obsessed, bien-pensant twit writing a blog that, par contre Yglesias' praise, offers no substance other than a skein of narcissistic reflections, a strung strand of popcorn, a candy necklace. Yglesias says that Sullivan offers a sensibility, which is rather like saying that some poor, homely girl has a winning personality, a pretty laugh, or a great smile. Sullivan, to hear Yglesias tell it, is widely but not deeply read, occasionally funny, always self-involved, and never terribly original. He is, in other words, every other gay man with a bachelor's degree.

The problem with Sullivan isn't, as Yglesias says, that he doesn't actually know what on earth he's talking about, but that as the living avatar of banality, he is immensely popular, since there is nothing Just Folks like more than hearing what they already believe, but said purdier. Sullivan gets credit for somehow turning against Republicans, and if you operate from the assumption that the division that matters in America is between the Donkle and the Oliphant, then that credit is due. If, on the other hand, you find yourself in the ever-declining minority that asks into the substance of beliefs, here is what you find in Andrew Sullivan: a man whose Church irrationally condemns him and consigns him to damnation who is churched nonetheless; a man who believes in a modest bellicosity even though it always fails; a man who invariably condemns in the harshest terms the avant, until he drags his dawdling arrière up the the very line that reasonable forward-thinkers long-ago laid down, and then from that vantage again condemns the swifter thinkers. He calls this "skepticism." Perhaps you can think of another term.

Sullivan calls himself a conservative, which in his writing, if not his mind, means a defender of his own habitudes against the depredations of those "fundamentalists" (Yglesias is good on his use of that word) whom he sees seeking some radical alteration of Andrew Sullivan's quotidian existence. In the universe of his writing, Andrew Sullivan is the immovable object. The Church drifts from him. The War drifts from him. The Party drifts from him. But poor Andy, wherever he goes, there he is.

He claims to enjoy Montaigne and seems to believe that Je suis moi-même la matière de mon livre means that Essais is a collection of autobiographical sketches to amuse, enlighten, and entertain--as if Montaigne, were he alive today, might be hawking copies during NPR pledge drives and letting Terri Gross ask him what it was like to discover that his grandmother had been a Jew, and how did that affect his career as a writer?

Here is a part of what Susan Sontag wrote on September 24, 2001:

Our leaders are bent on convincing us that everything is O.K. America is not afraid. Our spirit is unbroken, although this was a day that will live in infamy and America is now at war. But everything is not O.K. And this was not Pearl Harbor. We have a robotic president who assures us that America stands tall. A wide spectrum of public figures, in and out of office, who are strongly opposed to the policies being pursued abroad by this Administration apparently feel free to say nothing more than that they stand united behind President Bush. A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere, about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counter-intelligence, about options available to American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a smart program of military defense. But the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality. The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.

Sullivan called her a traitor and fifth columnist and said that she "waits in a welter of metaphor until they murder us again."

Now, of course, Sullivan feels that he and others fell too easily into step behind an out-of-depth (at least!) president. He believes that a lot of thinking needs to be done about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counterintelligence, as well as a a smart program of military defense. He knows that the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality. He is sure that the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric of our officials is contemptible.

Susan Sontag is dead, of course, and Sullivan still gives out an award named in her dishonor to those whose positions deviate too greatly from his own, even as he has come to agree with that far greater, better, kinder, more decent, more intelligent, and more humane human being five years after the fact.

Update: Corrected the gender travesty in the French. Note--avoid second language when pissed off.

To Boldly Go . . .

Americans have by no means escaped diversity's oppressions and violence, but we have reined them in.

I do not know what Thomas Sowell is saying here, but he appears to contend that the only good state is a monoethnic state. His prose isn't very rousing, though. Blood and Fatherland roils the blood more effectively.

Sowell calls nation-building folly, a sentiment with which I wholeheartedly agree, but then he says that we must nevertheless build a nation in Iraq, which has the unfortunate ring of a fellow who follows a friend over a cliff and then turns to him to say world-wearily, "My brother, man cannot fly, but flap our arms we must." Meanwhile the canyon floor rushes to meet them.

"Giving the terrorists an epoch-making victory in Iraq would only shift the location where we must face them or succumb to them," Sowell says. Succumb to them how, precisely? It was one thing for Ridely Scott to imagine an America full of neon Kanji and noodle vendors; it was one thing for a generation of speculative fiction writers to imagine a Soviet States of America; but really, are we headed down the path to a 24th century when Sheikh al-Kirk pilots the starship U.S.S. al-Andalus on a mission of exploration and dhimmitude for the United Caliphate of Planets?

And if not, then what?

Other Interpretations.

The Ordinary American is remarkably innumerate, by and large. My mother, who directs a business school with a large body of former blue-collar workers seeking better opportunities in a white-collar world (itself increasingly bereft of opportunity, but so it goes), remains shocked a dozen years after she began as an instructor there: "I still can't believe that you can get through life without understanding fractions and percentages. How do they follow their banking? How can they use their credit cards?" Cluelessly is the obvious answer. Numbers remain as mysterious to the Americano as science does.

Here is Mark Noonan on the "bit of hyperbole" that paints America as one train-schedule away from the camps. He cites a poll that shows a majority of Americans who believe that, as regards civil rights and liberties, the porridge is either a bit too cool or just about right, then cavils: "Given that it is a poll of 1,013 adults, it probably underestimates the pro-Bush position by about 10 percentage points." There's no explanation for why that particular number of respondents indicates a 10-point positive discrepancy toward the author's own position, so we're left to presume that it's one of those eternal mathematical and physical truths, like the value of pi or Planck's constant. Noonan, like most conservatives--hell, like most Americans--doesn't really know what a poll actually is, and probably prefers it that way, leaving the secrets of the temple to the priests, such as they are.

In any case, I'm not certain why a majority saying that Bush is doing all right or not enough when it comes to curtailing rights in pursuit of a new course to be stayed in the Forever War indicates that we're not on the verge of dictatorship. Isn't it more likely the case that dictatorship, more or less, is exactly what the people want, operating, as the people usually do, on the bland assumption that the rolling heads won't be their own?

Update: Links fixed.

I Have Anal Sex. I Lick Assholes. I Suck Cock. Sometimes I Swallow.

Arthur points to the thing I hate most about Democrats: their indefatigable ability to drag out the lowliest fags-are-gross pandering while hiding lamely behind the old Clinton-era Republican canard that "it's not the sex, it's the lying." The watchword is "hypocrisy," a favorite of the Donkle, but the subtext is "icky," to use Arthur's well-chosen playgroundism.

Josh Marshall notes that RNC head Ken Mehlman, himself the butt-end, so to speak, of a lot of queer whispering, has taken money from a "gay porn king." He links unobjectionably to some industry-journal/trade-sheet documentation of the identity of The Porn King, and he also links unobjectionably to the corporate website for his company, Marina Pacific, "The Leader in Adult Video Distribution," which gives a perfectly adequate sampling of the adult videos in distribution.

But that doesn't quite drive home the point, so to speak, so Marshall links to several specific titles, which I can only presume he finds particularly chuckle-worthy or gross--or both.

From Harold Ford, Jr. to John Kerry to Jim Webb to Bill and Hillary Clinton to Bob Casey to Howard Dean--bref, every nationally important Democrat--we hear the same tale: We are the party of equality for homosexuals; but don't worry, because we believe that marriage is between a man and a woman, and only a man and a woman. We object to "enshrining discrimination" in the Constitution, but we don't have a problem legislating it at a federal level and leaving the "activist judges" to the sorry task of taking the brunt of rightwing criticism for letting faggots kiss in churches.

I've laid out my own objections to gay marriage, and they remain. But calling them objections to "gay marriage" is inaccurate insofar as it is not gay marriage that I object to, but the entire institution of civil marriage, which establishes a needless class of special citizens who reap great benefits while the many other households, from extended, multigenerational families to working-class roommates, are inelgible for the same benefits even though they share relationships of commensurate mutual love, trust, or care.

That caveat aside, it remains the case that the establishment of a household in this country requires a civil marriage, and that when your lover is in critical care in the hospital and you seek access to his bedside, or you seek permission to make medical decisions for him, or perhaps you seek to end his suffering over the objections of his estranged, religious parents, there's no substitute in our society as currently constructed for holding up the left hand, pointing to the ring, and saying, "That is my husband." Democrats know this, and unlike me, Democrats aren't advocating for the abolition of civil marriage in favor of a more universal right to a recognized household.

But because they seek the votes of religious morons, and because they believe that even among the non-faithful, right-thinking people will abide fag hairdressers but not fag husbands kissing on the steps of city hall, when someone asks John Kerry or John Edwards or Joe Biden or Howard Dean or Hillary Clinton, the answer is the same: We support equal rights for gays, but we don't believe in gay marriage. Then, on a good day, they'll talk about so-called civil unions.

The Democratic Party: The Party of Plessy v. Ferguson.

In the primary season before the 2000 elections, poor Dennis Kucinich, an honest and articulate leftist granted nothing but cruel mockery by a coporate media and political establishment that considered him a stupid, funny little man, principally because he advocated for actual changes in American policies, was one of only two Democratic candidates (the other was the equally "unelectable" Carol Mosely-Braun) to answer the question, "Do you believe in gay marriage?" with a straightforward, uncaveated, unequivocal, unembarrassed "Yes."

I emphasize that last adjective because gay questions elicit nothing from mainstream Democratic candidates so much as embarrassment and discomfort. They hem and haw. They to and fro. They dither. They avoid. Every queer knows that embarrassment intimately. We have felt it from our parents or our teachers or our friends. We feel it when we show up with a date at the office party and introduce him to coworkers. We feel it when we cease to be gay in the abstract and become actually, physically, really gay.

I'm sure Josh Marshall has plenty of gay friends, coworkers, and colleagues. I'm also sure that he thinks there's something very tawdry about Fire in the Hole and Flesh and Boners. I'm sure he never much considers that his gay male friends do those things. The nice young men in Washington-suit attire take off their ties and strip naked together. They press their hard cocks together. Someone gets on his hands and knees on the bed and someone massages his ass, spreads it, leans in, and licks around his asshole. Then he flips him over and feeds him his cock. Then he flips him back over and slips in a finger or two, or three, or four. Then he puts on the condom, squirts lube on his cock, rubs more into the waiting ass, lines up his hard dick and slides it in. They fuck. They come on each other.

That's what we do. And that's not a very graphic description. That's what Barney Frank does. That's what I do. That's what James McGreevey does. If Ken Mehlman is gay, that's what Ken Mehlman does.

It's not gross. It's sex.

The standard Democratic line is that they have to "frame" their policies on queers in rhetoric that obscures gross gayness from a disquieted Ordinary America, in order to win elections, in order to get power, in order to . . . The last is the great unaswerable, though lately it seems to be "in order to be marginally less objectionable than Republicans." But when Democrats acquire a congressional majority, queers will still get the short end of the stick, so to speak; marriage will still be "between a man and a woman." Ken Mehlman will still be not just a queer, but an icky queer who watches porn. Mark Foley will still be a "pedophile" who preys on "young boys," even though neither term is true or accurate. We will all still talk about something called the "sanctity of marriage." Pornography will still be an evil to be combatted.

In a healthy country, anyone can own Flesh and Boners. No one will talk about it because there's nothing to talk about. If it happens to come up, no one will care.

UPDATE: It appears that a number of younz have reached this post not because you're bowled by da rhymes I bust, but rather because you've been wasting precious billable hours googling "anal." Take it from me, your wife will not let you fuck her in the ass, no matter how many times you ask. In honor of your searching, in any event, here is a picture of the Brewer Twins.